1KHO 499: What Have We Done to Childhood? | Dr. Peter Gray, Free to Learn

Summary

Podcast Summary: The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast | Episode 1KHO 499: What Have We Done to Childhood? | Dr. Peter Gray

Introduction

In the landmark Episode 499 of The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast, hosted by Jenny Urch of the That Sounds Fun Network, the conversation centers around the profound transformation of childhood in contemporary society. Celebrating the podcast's burgeoning success as the second most popular parenting podcast in the United States, Jenny welcomes back Dr. Peter Gray, a renowned expert in child development and author of the influential book, Free to Learn.

Dr. Peter Gray's Journey and Influence

Jenny begins by reflecting on her personal experiences with Dr. Gray’s work, highlighting how his insights have reshaped her parenting approach over the years. She shares, "...rereading it now, over a decade after its release, I'm more convinced than ever this is one of the most imperative books for parents and teachers." Dr. Gray acknowledges the longevity and growing relevance of his book, noting, "...the sales of the book seem to increase every year...a book with a long shelf life." (04:03).

Trustful Parenting vs. Domineering Approaches

A core theme of the episode delves into the contrast between trustful parenting—as practiced by hunter-gatherer societies—and the domineering, performance-based approaches that dominate modern agricultural and industrial cultures. Dr. Gray explains, "...children come into the world not as blank slates or clay that we're going to mold into a finished product...they come into the world just like that tree, knowing how to grow, knowing how to deal with the environment." (05:30).

This shift began with the advent of agriculture, which introduced land ownership, class hierarchies, and the necessity for child labor, fundamentally altering how children are raised—from beings trusted to explore and learn independently to subjects requiring obedience and discipline.

The Modern School System: A Misalignment with Real-World Needs

Jenny and Dr. Gray critique the current school-centric, performance-based education system, emphasizing its detachment from real-world skills. Dr. Gray states, "School has become more and more divorced from the real world. It's all academic in a very, very narrow sense of what we mean by academic..." (28:35). He further criticizes standardized testing and rigid curricula, pointing out that despite these measures, "there has been no improvement even on the standard tests... All we're doing is burning kids out." (28:35).

Impact on Children's Well-being: Anxiety and Depression

The discussion progresses to the mental health consequences of overprotective and controlling parenting. Dr. Gray links the rise of an external locus of control to increased anxiety and depression in children, stating, "...internal locus of control means that, I can take care of myself, I can solve problems. And there's a lot of research that shows that people of any age who don't have a strong internal locus of control are subject to anxiety and depression." (43:28).

He underscores the importance of giving children autonomy, sharing his personal childhood experience: "At 4 years old, my grandmother would send me two blocks away to run errands... This has been all this overprotection... kids are now spending all their time doing what adults are telling them to do." (44:33).

The Crucial Role of Play in Development

A significant portion of the conversation highlights play as a vital component of healthy childhood development. Dr. Gray emphasizes that through unstructured play, children develop essential social skills, creativity, and problem-solving abilities. "There is almost nothing that children want to do more than play with other children... They're constantly negotiating, they're bargaining, they're figuring things out, they're compromising." (51:13).

He contrasts this with supervised play, where adult interference stifles children's natural ability to navigate social interactions and resolve conflicts independently.

Preparing for an Uncertain Future

Jenny ties the conversation to contemporary challenges, such as the rapidly changing job market and the rise of artificial intelligence. She posits, "The best protection against unemployment in uncertain times is having precisely the qualities that people develop through self-directed experiences, not through the prodding of adults." This aligns with Dr. Gray's assertion that self-directed education fosters the adaptability, creativity, and resilience necessary for future success.

Conclusion and Future Works

Wrapping up, Dr. Gray teases his upcoming book, Restoring Childhood, which aims to address the erosion of childhood freedoms and propose strategies to reinstate them. Jenny passionately endorses Dr. Gray’s work, sharing how his philosophies have transformed her own parenting and advocating for trustful, play-centric approaches to child-rearing.

Notable Quotes

• "Children come into the world not as blank slates or clay that we're going to mold into a finished product..." — Dr. Peter Gray (05:30)
• "School has become more and more divorced from the real world..." — Dr. Peter Gray (28:35)
• "If you can't have opportunity to do things on your own, you don't develop the confidence, the understanding that, I'm capable of doing things on my own..." — Dr. Peter Gray (44:33)
• "There is almost nothing that children want to do more than play with other children..." — Dr. Peter Gray (51:13)
• "The best protection against unemployment in uncertain times is having precisely the qualities that people develop through self-directed experiences..." — Jenny Urch (28:35)

Final Thoughts

The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast episode featuring Dr. Peter Gray offers a compelling critique of modern childhood practices and education systems. It advocates for a return to trustful parenting and self-directed learning, emphasizing that such approaches not only enhance children's happiness and confidence but also equip them with the skills necessary to thrive in an ever-evolving world. This insightful dialogue serves as a crucial guide for parents seeking to reclaim the essence of childhood and foster resilient, capable future generations.

Transcript

[Unknown Host]

This is a huge week on the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. Today's episode is number 499 and tomorrow we hit 500.

[Unknown Co-Host]

What started as a quiet little podcast.

[Unknown Host]

Is now the number two parenting podcast in the entire United States and I am just blown away by what has happened here. Thank you for being a part of it. If this podcast or any of my books have helped you in any way, what a great week to take a moment and leave a review. I on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, Goodreads, wherever you have found encouragement. Your reviews help others find this message and truly they all make so much difference. And if you haven't yet, this is the perfect time to buy my new book, Homeschooling. You're doing it right just by doing it. It's not just for homeschoolers, it's for every parent who has ever wondered if they're doing enough. Now, today's episode. I can't think of a better guest for this Milestone Week than Dr. Peter Gray, one of the most influential voices in child development today. His book Free to Learn helped shape my own parenting from the very beginning and rereading it now, over a decade after its release, I'm more convinced than ever this is one of the most imperative books for parents and teachers. Today we are talking about how we got here, why school centric performance based childhoods are doing more harm than good, and what it really means to raise confident, capable kids in an uncertain world. Despite Dr. Gray is brilliant, bold and a trusted voice in a noisy world. Thank you for being here for this milestone week. Here we go.

[Unknown Sponsor]

This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. From streaming to shopping, prime helps you get more out of your passions. So whether you're a fan of true crime or prefer a nail biting novel from time to time, with services like Prime Video, Amazon Music and fast free delivery, prime makes it easy to get more out of whatever you're into or getting into. Visit Amazon.comprime to learn more.

[Jenny Urch]

Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Jenny Urch. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside and I am beyond thrilled. I've been so looking forward to this. Dr. Peter Gray is back. Welcome.

[Dr. Peter Gray]

I'm very happy to be here. Thank you.

[Jenny Urch]

So you really helped kick off this podcast, Dr. Gray. I'm not sure if you even realize that, but back on episode 11 you came and talked to us about the all of these topics that we're going to talk about today. Freedom and childhood. And then you graciously came on Two other times. Now I have your book Free to Learn. Why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier, more self reliant and better students for life. But I also have these four smaller books that you wrote that come a lot out of different things that you've written over the years. And I know it helps with your nonprofit. And so I thought, well, I probably should grab another one of these smaller books because a couple of them we haven't talked about yet. But I thought, you know, I'm going to go back through Free to Learn. I read it just for my own personal, my own personal parenting experience when our kids were young, long before I had a podcast, long before I ever even considered that I would get a chance to have a conversation with you. And I thought, well, I've looked back at my notes, but I thought I'm going to go back through cover to cover. And I cannot recommend this book more highly, especially it's gotten more and more pertinent. It is such a wonderful book. I took 12 pages of notes, even though we've already talked about it once. And I could really see Dr. Gray, the roots. The roots of how you helped to guide our parenting. So I would imagine, I guess you probably would have thought it will continue to get more and more pertinent when you wrote it.

[Dr. Peter Gray]

Well, it's interesting. It has turned out that actually the sales of the book seems to seem to increase every year. So the book has been out for a long time. But interesting. The publisher, the president of the publishing company that published it, said that he predicted this would be a book with a long shelf life. And his prediction, I'm very happy to say, seems to have come out correct.

[Jenny Urch]

So as I was going back through it, I thought, goodness, it would just change our world if every parent got a copy of this, if the teachers were reading it there. It is so robust and it is so pertinent, especially in a world where the job market is rapidly changing. So you write this book and it's got such long staying power I would love to talk about. So it was interesting to read it in the framework of really how it affected my own parenting. We have kids that are teenagers now and I can see all of that, like, oh, I remember when I read this and it was, you know, it caused me to change my thinking and open my mind. And I'm so glad that I read it. And when I went back through, there were other things that stuck out that, you know, maybe I didn't notice when our kids were really little. And so one of the things that I thought was so intriguing, I've never thought about it, I've never heard anyone else talk about it, is the fact that we kind of look at our children like farmer plants. We look at them like, you know, and I. I thought that I'm going to nurture, you know, they're going to grow on their own. But I'm going to, you know, add this to the soil and I'm going to water and I'm going to be out there every day. Sure, it's growing. And you write about how that's very different from how a hunter gatherer would have looked at the world and nature. You said in their world, all plants and animals were wild and free. I think a lot of us would think about parenting in terms of, like, I planted a sunflower seed and now I'm going to go nurture it, make sure it grows. Can you talk about those two different ways of looking at it?

[Dr. Peter Gray]

Yes. Well, you know, of course there are certain ways that of course we nurture our children, and of course they depend upon us. But I think what we forget is that human beings, just like all other living organisms, have the program for growth in their genes. They come into the world knowing how to grow, not knowing consciously, not being able to articulate it. But just like the tree knows how to grow, to move towards the sun, to send its roots where there's more water, the tree comes into the world designed to deal with the. Even with the variability in the environment around us. And we have to think about that for our children, too. Our children come into the world not as blank slates or clay that we're going to mold into a finished product. They come into the world just like that tree, knowing how to grow, knowing how to deal with the environment. And we have to trust those instincts. We have to not override those instincts. That doesn't mean that our children don't need a lot from us. They do need a lot from us. This is a characteristic of all mammals and human beings more than others. We have this long period where this long juvenile period, a longer juvenile period than other mammals have. And during that period, our children need our care. They need us to feed them, to care for us, them, and so on and so forth. But they don't need us to tell them how to grow. That's not how to grow physically or how to grow psychologically. We just need to be able to provide what their biology tells them that they need.

[Jenny Urch]

So this is a whole premise of the book, and I think this is a really hard thing in this day and age is how to become a trustful parent. So many of us have grown up steeped in an environment where the adult directs everything. And so what that communicates is that children are not to be trusted. The adult is the one who's going to tell you what to do and tell you how to grow and tell you what assignments to complete. Can you talk about the history there? Where did we lose along the way that we can trust our children?

[Dr. Peter Gray]

Well, it's interesting. So quite some years ago, I think it's actually now more than 20 years ago, I got very interested in hunter gatherer cultures in the second half of the 20th century. You know, between about 1950 and about 1980 was a big period for anthropologists to trek out into more or less uncharted areas and make contact with people who are still living a fairly pristine hunter gatherer way of life. So I got curious about what is the relationship between parents and children in hunter gatherer cultures. How do children in hunter gatherer cultures acquire the skills and knowledge that they need to become effective adults where they're raised? And so I did this study where I contacted 10 different anthropologists who among them had lived in and studied seven different hunter gatherer cultures in different parts of the world. These were all banned hunter gatherers. Those are the only kinds of hunter gatherers that survived into that period of time. They live in small bands. These people are also called by anthropologists egalitarian cultures because they're the most egalitarian groups of people that have ever been found. They don't have chiefs or big men. They make all decisions by long discussion and consensus. And as part of their egalitarian approach to life, they don't tell one another what to do. To a degree that's almost difficult for me to understand initially. To tell somebody else what to do would be to act like you are a big shot, like you are better than them. So you might help somebody do something if they ask you for help, but you wouldn't go over to them and tell them you're using that axe wrong. Let me show you how to do it. Because that would be acting like you are, you know, more than them. That would be. That would be a taboo really. Now the interesting thing to me is that they apply this to their interactions with children. Also, they don't tell children what to do. I mean, can you believe that? Can you imagine a culture in which the adults don't tell children what to do? They trust the children's will, even Little children, little children know that they need to stay around adults. They don't even try to run off, away from adults. And it's only around age 4 that children begin to feel, now it's time, you know, I need to get away from adults. I need to start doing things more on my own. And they let the children go at that age and run with other children. They trust the children. They don't have this view that, you know, part of the. In infancy, trusting the child means that if the child wants to nurse, then nurse the child. They believe that children, if the child cries when being left alone, that means don't leave the child alone. In fact, they never leave babies alone. They keep the baby with them all the time. But part of that close bonding when they're young, when they're little, means that they acquire the confidence then to become much less attached and to move on in their, their own independence by the time they're about four years old. So children in these cultures are playing and exploring pretty much all day long. There's no such thing as school. There is really almost no such thing as lessons or instruction. Adults will tell children, you know, those mushrooms are poisonous, stay away from them. You know, anything is really dangerous. But they don't give them instructions in how to hunt or gather or build dugout canoes, or do the traditional dances and art of the culture. They just expect that children are going to learn those things naturally through their observation and play. They are the most trusting of all people in terms of their child raising. They're very trustful approach. They trust children's instincts and they trust children's judgments. Once children are 4 years old and beyond, as one anthropologist said, the child's will is the child's guide. And the adults very much respect the child's will. So then what happened? How did we lose that? And I think the way we lost it is once we had agriculture. So we were hunter gatherers through basically all of our biological evolution. Biologically, we're hunter gatherers. So with agriculture, however, things changed. People began to settle down. Instead of moving around to follow the available game and vegetation, they settled down, built permanent dwellings. And agriculture really kind of requires land ownership. Initially, the earliest agriculture, some agriculture communities, it was all kind of communal agriculture. But once you and your family are raising crops or keeping livestock, you can't just let somebody. You've put a lot of work into that. You can't just let somebody else come and take it. So you kind of have to declare, this is my land, I own this, I put all the work into raising these crops. So once you had that, then you began to have a class hierarchy. So you began to have some people who own land and other people who didn't own land, who were dependent on those who owned land. And you began to have. Within the family hierarchies where typically the male, the man, the father is the boss, and he sort of rules the home. He would be in early agricultural culture and even later agricultural cultures, and the children are subordinate. You now also have a situation where there's a lot of unskilled labor that has to be done. Hunter gatherers don't have this kind of labor, that hunting and gathering are really not that laborious. They require a lot of skill. But the hunting is. Everybody likes to hunt. Even today, people hunt for vacation. Men like to hunt, and we like to go on picnics and we like to gather. We like to gather blueberries, you know, so the kinds of activities were. People were things that people evolved to really enjoy doing. And they were interesting activities and enjoyable activities, challenging activities. But now, once you've got farming, you've got a plant, you've got a hoe, you've got a weed, you've got a harvest. There's just a lot of plain old work, the kind of work we would call labor. And children can do that. And so children would be made to work. Families got bigger once you had hunter gatherer. Families have very. Are very small. Their births are spread out by at least four years because there's a kind of a natural birth control mechanism. If you are a slender, muscular hunter gatherer woman and you are nursing your baby until the baby is three years old, which they actually do, it shuts off ovulation for that period of time. And so births are spread out by four years or more. And it's also an unfortunate thing about being a hunter gatherer is not all babies survive. So the number of children is relatively small as a percentage of the adults. Once, however, you have farming cultures and you have this consistent supply of food and you have a more sedentary way of life, then women were giving birth much more frequently. And so they had many more children. Now you've got all these mouths to feed, so you need to raise crops. You need the older children to help take care of the younger children. So now you had really, for the first time, child labor within the family, child labor. Well, children don't necessarily want to do all that. They're happy to do some of it, but you kind of have to force them to do it. They Want to go out and play and play in their own way. That's the way they always did is hunter gatherer. That's what their instincts tell them to do. But now you've got the parents telling them no, you've got to spend eight hours a day weeding the field, or you've got to be watching the flock, or you've got to be babysitting your younger brother. And so for the first time in those kind of cultures, corporal punishment came about. So hunter gatherers never punish their children. Never. You know, it would be a taboo, it would be almost akin to incest, to beat a child, to hit a child. It would just be something you would never do in hunter gatherer culture. Or if somebody did, if they started to do it, other people in the band would just come right over and take the child away and calm down the parent because they would assume there's something wrong with this parent right now that they're hitting their child. So but now with farming cultures, beating the child became very common as a way of disciplining them. And as things moved as sort of agricultural, agricultural way of life. Once sort of all the land is owned in a given area, then ultimately you had kind of feudalism throughout Europe and throughout Asia. You had essentially all the land officially being owned by the king or the emperor. And everybody else is sort of subordinate to that. And there are the lords and your subordinate all the way down to the serfs who are subordinate to the lords who manage the land, that they're involved. And then the children are the least, are the most subordinates. So you now have this hierarchy. And in that kind of a culture, it's extremely important to raise your children to be obedient. Because if you're not obedient, if you defy the lord of the land, you might just be killed. You might, you know, your whole livelihood depends on obedience. And so obedience training became the method, became the goal of parenting. So that, see how opposite that was from the hunter gatherer style. Our first schools came out of that kind of a background. We'd gone through the Middle Ages, how we had the Catholic church was in power, and then we had the Protestant Reformation. And out of the Protestant Reformation came schools of the type that we have today. They need to learn how to obey. We can't trust children to do their own things. Children's play was regarded sort of as the province of the devil. So children needed to be controlled. And schools were designed. The early Protestant run schools were designed to teach obedience. Those are the schools that we have today.

[Unknown Co-Host]

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[Dr. Peter Gray]

So this kind of change led to, you know, this change in the economy of how people live led to a change in how children are raised and the attitude that people have to children. Now if you go to today to sort of continue this, we come from this background of believing that children need to be disciplined, to be obedient. But we now have a somewhat different view. We have developed the view in recent decades that children are fragile, that children are easily broken, that things can happen to children that would be very dangerous to their development. And we have an exaggerated view of the dangers to children. And we underestimate children's abilities to judge danger and and deal effectively with danger. So now we have kind of overprotective parenting where parents take charge of their children not because they believe obedience is so important, although that's still there partly in the background, but because they believe that they have to take charge of their children to protect their children. Their children can't be trusted outdoors. Their children will get into trouble. Their children won't recognize what's Dangerous or not dangerous. And they also. We have a strong belief today that children need guidance all the time. We don't trust them to make their own decisions about what they're doing. We believe that children develop better if adults are constantly telling them what they should be doing so that they're doing things that promote their development in the adult's view of what's necessary to promote their development. So sometimes the way I've described this is we moved from trustful parenting of hunter gatherers to a domineering kind of non trustful parenting among agricultural people. And even through the industrial age where children needed to be subordinated, made to work, needed to be disciplined, to obey so that they would obey their lords and masters initially, but then so they would obey the factory supervisors when they were working in factories to now that we, we no longer have child labor of that sort. But now we have a situation where parents are still dominating children, but not to promote obedience, but presumably to protect and guide the children. We see ourselves as doing this for the child's own long term developmental benefit.

[Jenny Urch]

And this is the situation that we're in. And it's why your book is so important and it teaches you that how to become a more trustful parent. And a lot of that comes with experience. You talked about with your own son. You pulled him out of the school system. It was a hard situation, a hard situation anyone would be in. You're in there with administrators and you know he's not happy, he's nine. And you say gradually as I became convinced that Scott's self directed education was going beautifully, my interest turned to children in general and you know about the human biological underpinnings of education. But part of this is that you have to do it. And so for me, by reading your book Free to Learn when our kids were young, it gave me the push and the understanding of where things had gone awry. And then once you start to do it, I think everyone's experience is like yours. You gradually become convinced that they're going to grow, just like the tree is going to grow. And you don't have to tell them that they're going to grow. But can you talk about now what's interesting about this book and why it's so pertinent is because all of a sudden the job market is changing so rapidly. It's already been changing, but now it's just even more and it's very uncertain. And so it's really imperative that we're moving back to those trustful parenting practices which you Talk about how to do that in the book. You wrote this. Now this book is at this point, it's older. I mean, you didn't write it yesterday, but it's so applicable. I mean, this is from over a decade ago, 2013. Unskilled labor has declined all the way back in 2013, replaced by machines. And people must be creative self starting charters to find ways to support themselves. And you have to have these values of the hunter gatherers. But what you talk about is how we're kind of confused, I think because of this history that you explained. Parents believe if they can get their children into the right adult directed extracurricular or volunteer activities, if they can get them to achieve high scores on their tests, if they can get them into the most prestigious schools, they can protect their children's futures. You write they are wrong. They are wrong, of course, but the perception still persists. The reality is that the best protection against unemployment in uncertain times is having precisely the qualities that people develop through self directed experiences, not through the prodding of adults. This is the most pertinent book. I was pertinent in 2013, but it's so pertinent now. So you talk about, we really have this school centric, that's the word you use. Performance based view of childhood. And you talk about, you know, I mean, we have gone down this sort of more unschooling, definitely homeschool path. But it's interesting. This isn't really a book about school in general, but school comes up a lot. It's called free to learn, like let your kids go play. But you talk about school a lot, partially because it takes up so much time.

[Dr. Peter Gray]

Yeah, exactly. School takes so much time and it is so irrelevant to what children really need to deal with the real world. Since the book was written, this has become even more true. Common Core really started almost around the same time that this book was published. And Common Core has moved school even further in the direction of restricting what children are learning to a very few number of subjects. Dictating exactly what children have to do, even dictating how teachers must teach and what they must do. And so school has become worse than it was before. If you think about it. You know, if you ask almost any teacher what it is that you're trying to accomplish, what are you trying to accomplish in kindergarten? What is the goal of kindergarten? And the kindergarten teacher will almost always say, well, my goal is to teach them what they need to know to do first grade. And you ask the first grader, well, my job is to teach them what they need to know for second grade. And you ask the elementary school teacher at any point, what's the purpose of elementary school is to train them for middle school, and middle school is to prepare them for high school, and high school is to prepare them for college. There's almost no pretense anymore that any of this has to do with preparing them for the real world out there. School has become more and more divorced from the real world. It's all academic in a very, very narrow sense of what we mean by academic, even. You know, we used to have shop classes, we had home ec. They should have been available to men as well as women, and the shop should have been available to women as well as men. But now those are generally taken away. You know, generally the focus is on a very narrow set of skills and interesting. I just. My most recent substack article, I pointed out even those narrow skills that we are focusing on because the focus has been on math and reading. The national testing shows there's been no improvement. Despite the fact that this is the whole goal of Common Core. There's been no improvement even on the standard tests on those. Over time. All we're doing is burning kids out, out. Schools become less and less interesting. So what is it that people actually need in our economy today? We don't need people who have a lot of facts stored in their head because we've all got this, you know, their facts are right in here. If we want to know the capital of Ukraine, we can thumb twitch and we can see what it is. So we don't need people who know a lot of facts. We don't need people who know the algorithms or doing various kinds of calculations. These can all be done by computer. We don't need people to be on factory lines. You know, there's no, almost no such thing as factory assembly lines with people anymore. All of this has been taken over by machines. And with AI now, more and more is going to be taken over by machines. What do we need? We need people who are creative in the way that machines are not. We need people who have social skills, who know how to get along with them. We need people maybe most of all who have moral values. We need people who can ask the right questions, ask questions that haven't been answered and figure out ways to answer them. We don't need people who know the answers to questions that have already been asked, answered. We need people who can think of the questions that need to be answered and find ways to answer them. All this is to say that we need people who are creative, who can think out of the box. We need people who are willing and eager to learn on the job because we no longer live in a world where you can learn one set of skills and that set of skills is going to be all you need to know for the rest of your life. The world keeps changing and the skills of today will be obsolete tomorrow. And you better be able to adapt to these kinds of changes. Well, these, in my experience, in my studies are precisely the abilities that are developed when children grow up in charge of their own education. They grow up facing really, kids are thrilled by change. They embrace change. They're looking. That's why kids are. Kids glom onto new technology more than adults do. They want to understand this. They're excited by it. They want to figure it out and make use of it. So when you grow up this way, you grow up thinking about new things, about how to adapt to new things, how to use new things. You. And when you're free to play and explore with other people, you learn how to get along with other people. You figure out how to make other people happy. These are the kinds of, you develop the kinds of moral values that are necessary to play with your friends, you know, without them leaving you because you're acting like a bully to them. So those are the skills we need. And I think this is why my observation, some of my studies have been studies of, of adults who grew up with self directed education. Either they went to a school designed for self directed education, like in Sudbury Valley School, or they grew up in homeschooling, where the homeschooling method was that of unschooling, which is to allow the child to follow their own interests. And the parents support the child in doing that, facilitate the child's pursuing their own interests and facilitate the child's ability to connect to the larger culture in various kinds of ways and to connect to other kids as they're growing up. So my finding is that these people are doing very well in adulthood. They're getting good jobs. They're getting jobs that they enjoy very often. A common thing that happens when children are free to grow up and have plenty of time to play and explore, learn who they are, try different kinds of activities that they, they really discover certain activities that they're really very passionate about and they, they play at those, become good at it. And my research suggests that about 50% of them go on to career directly related to whatever it was that they developed a passion and interest in as a child in play. So this is something that can't happen if you're spending all your time doing what adults are telling you to do, doing school. Almost the only career you're exposed to if you're a student in school is that of teacher. You know, you don't really know what it is to do other things. But if you're growing up exploring and free and try different things and getting to know various people, including various adults, you get a much broader sense of what's really out there. And, and most of all, through all of this, I think the biggest chore of childhood really is to learn who you are and how you fit in this world that you're growing up in. And children need lots of time to play and explore to do that. Learning things like reading, learning things like writing, learning things like the math you need. You know something, if, if you're motivated, if you find, if you have a purpose to learn it, you can learn it very, very quickly. This has been shown over and over and over again. These things are not that hard to learn. It's when you're forcing children to learn them who aren't interested in them, who don't have any reason, don't see any reason to to learn them, that's when they become hard and tedious. It takes years to training children to learn to read. And yet children who have decided, at whatever age I'm ready to read and I want to learn how to read will learn very, very quickly. Similarly, with mathematics, you know, we, we force children to go through all this mathematics, they're not even really learning it, to be honest. They're just, they're just learning in a very shallow way how to pass the test, tests on it. They're memorizing what you need to do. They don't really, the great majority don't understand it. I mean, how many people, how many. Everybody who went to high school, almost everybody went to high school, learned about quadratic equations? How many adults can tell you what a quadratic equation is or when you would ever use it? I've even asked scientists. Do you remember quadratic equations? Oh, yeah, I kind of remember them. Have you ever met one? Oh, I've never met a quadratic equation. I'm sure there are some people, some tiny fraction of people who use quadratic equations. That fraction of people, if they need to use quadratic equations, they would learn how to use quadratic equations in relation to their job. So why do we force everybody to do that? It's just a waste of time. It's waste of their time. It's not improving their intelligence because they're not even really understanding it. Even the teachers teaching it don't necessarily, necessarily understand it. That's been proven in a number of studies. So it's this kind of a ritual that we put kids through all of this.

[Jenny Urch]

Yeah, you talk about the sliver. The school of curriculum represents a tiny subset of the skills and knowledge that are important to our society in this day and age. Nobody can learn more than a sliver of all there is to know. Why force everyone to learn the same sliver? I had a book that came out just last week called Homeschooling. That's the title. And this farmer who homeschooled back in the 80s, when it was more illegal, he wrote the Forward and he was talking about how his son didn't. He came from a long line of teachers and so there was a lot of pressure. Everyone's, you know, is he learning? Can he read? And he said his kid was 6, couldn't read. 7, 8, 9, 10, can't read. You know, they're working, they've got these books. He just can't. I mean, it's not happening. And then he got some sort of a board position for the 4H elementary school age kids. You know, he's something in 4H. And he came home and he said, well, if I'm an officer in 4H, I guess I better learn to read. And they said, learn to read, you know, a couple weeks and do you hear those stories? You talked about it? I remember a long time ago when I first read Free to Learn. You were talking about in Sudbury Valley where the kids, you know, the little kids, they want to play the game. They want to play the game the older kids are playing. So they have to learn to read. It's in context and they have their own internal motivation. And so you talk in this book, you have these sentences that I think people would be sharing, shocked to read, but it's so important to consider. You write things like this. There is no need for forced lessons. No need for forced lessons, lectures, assignments, tests, grades, no need for grades, segregation by age into classrooms, or any other trappings of our standard compulsory system of schooling. All of these in fact interfere with children's natural way of learning. You talk about, you know, that type of concept comes up again, you know, that we feel like we have to control. So there's two pieces here. You read again. I'm going to read this one. We rely now primarily on a system of incessant testing, grading and ranking to motivate kids to do their schoolwork. They feel ashamed if they do worse, they feel superior if they perform better. And I think people will be like, well yeah, that's the whole point. But you talk about how this is excessive pride from shallow accomplishments. Is that really going to get them to the life that you they want? Uncertain times require personal responsibility, independence of thought, self initiation, self assertion, flexibility, creativity, imagination, the willingness to take risks. If anybody thinks critically about that, you know that you don't learn that yet in a school setting and especially when it's taking up so much of the time and there's hardly any time for recess and then you have all this homework tacked on top. So we have these two pieces of it. This adult control school centric view of childhood performance based least we're talking about. Does that really help a child be prepared for the world that they're going to be entering in? But there's another side of it that you talk about too, Dr. Gray. So it's not just about the preparation. Does it really make sense that that's going to prepare our kids for what they need?

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[Dr. Peter Gray]

To get into my body.

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[Jenny Urch]

But there's also the part about anxiety and you talk about this, you talk about how that when there is a lack of control and this has just been skyrocketing because there's so many adult directed activities that the lack of control. You wrote there is good reason to believe that the rise of the external locus of control is casually linked to the rise in anxiety and depression. And I know, you know, you talk about causation and correlation and that type of thing, but can you talk about the power of being a little bit in control? Like you were a lot in control? You were at 5 years old, your mom sends you off in your neighborhood and says go find some friends. You know, you go off and knock on everybody's door. Is there anybody here that's about my age, you know, kids had control and agency starting at pretty young ages. How does that affect mental health and well being?

[Dr. Peter Gray]

Yes. So you know, one, one thing we know is that over, really over the course of my lifetime, I, I was a kid primarily in the 1950s. So over the course of my lifetime between the the 1950s and now, there has been a continuous decline in children's opportunities to control their own experiences. More and more time in schooling, more and more homework when you're not in school, more and more adult directed activities instead of just going out and playing and making up your own games, more and more kids are in adult directed sports or other adult directed things. Less and less freedom to just go out and do things, even and even this is significant. Less expectations that children will play meaningful roles like go do the shopping for the family or this kind of thing. I was, you know, you would go.

[Jenny Urch]

Get your grandma cigarettes. That's the story you told me.

[Dr. Peter Gray]

That's right. Yeah. When I was four years old, we lived in a working class area of Minneapolis, Minnesota on a very busy street. And my grandmother, when I was four years old would send me two blocks away. I had to cross two busy streets to buy cigarettes for her. You know, the first time she taught me, she told me, she sat me down, she said so it's time for you to learn how to cross streets. And the first time she gave me a nickel, I think it was a nickel in those days to go and buy myself a Popsicle. And I did that and came back and. And she said, well, now you're ready to run errands for me. And so at 4. At 4 years old. At 4 years old, that was probably a little bit unusual even then for four, but it would not have been unusual for five. Wow. I was tall for my age. I could have passed for five or six when I was four. Otherwise, it might have been raised to my eyebrows. But certainly, I mean, by five years old, kids who had kindergarten, who were walking to kindergarten, all the kids were walking to kindergarten. Nobody drove their kids to kindergarten. Certainly if you live just two or three or four blocks away, the expectation was your kids would walk to kindergarten by themselves or with friends. This has been. This is all this overprotection, all this belief that kids can't do that has come about over time. And so there's been all this decline in the expectations of children, the children's freedom to do things on their own. Well, if you can't have opportunity to do things on your own, you don't develop the confidence, the understanding that, I'm capable of doing things on my own. I'm capable of solving problems. I'm capable. You know, something can happen to me and I can handle it. I can handle it. Somebody might say something mean to me, and I can handle. I've had this experience. I know how to handle. I could get lost and I can find my way home. It's kind of impossible to get lost now with GPSs, but back then, it was possible to get lost and you would find your way home. Things can happen to me and I can take care of them. Because you have had experience doing that out there, playing on your own and with other kids and running errands, doing. Doing things for the family. So these are things that we now, children are more or less spending all their time doing what adults are telling them to do. In a situation where something goes wrong, the adult will solve the problem. And so they're not learning how to solve problems on their own. Now, if you don't learn how to solve problems on your own, you don't develop what psychologists call an internal locus of control, which is the sense that, I can take care of myself, I can solve problems. And there's a lot of research that shows that people of any age who don't have a strong internal locus of control are subject to anxiety and depression. It makes sense that you would be. If anything can happen at any time and there's nothing I can do about it, I'm just a victim of circumstance. That's a pretty scary world and ultimately it can become a very depressing world if you just sort of give up feeling like I can control my life. Depression almost by definition is sort of a sense of helplessness, a sense there's nothing I can do for my own good. So I'm convinced one of the mechanisms by which depriving children of freedom has led to increased anxiety and depression. It's also led to it for another obvious reason. What makes kids happy? Play. Play independent activity that makes kids happy. Nobody wants to be a puppet all the time. That's. That doesn't make you happy. So there's a certain kind of no brainer here explanation for why as we sort of more or less imprison children all the time, either in school or home confinement, that they're going to be less happy, more depressed, more anxious about the world than they were when they had much more freedom.

[Jenny Urch]

I mean, there's so many critical pieces here. You wrote the lowest levels of happiness by far occur when children are at school and the highest levels occur when they're out of school and conversing or playing with friends. And I think some people would think, well, that doesn't matter. You know, you put in the time, put in the time and work and then, you know, once you're through college, it will all pay off. But it doesn't make sense if you don't learn how to be happy and enjoy life and you spend 15 years of your formative years just jumping through hoops. It doesn't. It makes sense that you would all of a sudden then learn those things when you're in your early 20s. You write, how did we come to the conclusion that the best way to educate students is to force them into a setting where they are bored, unhappy and anxious? So there's just a lot of things going on here. We're talking about preparing kids for an uncertain future. We're talking about anxiety, we're talking about depression, but also another huge component. This book is so unbelievably good. I was just floored reading back through it again, cover to cover. Like I said, I go back, I've got, you know, it's dog eared. The book is dog eared with all these notes in it. So here and there I would go back. You know, the part where I've got stars and it's all underlined. But to go back through it again, cover to cover, this is formative. I mean these are the things that every parent has to be considering. And really right off the bat, like from the time they're really little, these are the things that you have to consider. Because the other piece beyond these skills that kids learn when they have freedom, that they learn to be flexible and have grit and take risks and, and they do heart, you know, they do the scary play and that helps them to gain confidence. And also we're talking about anxiety and depression and internal locus of control, but also is the social skills. And everyone is starting to say that the competency of the future is relationships because the screens are taking over all of the other standardized parts. So what is the thing that differentiates us from AI is our, our people skills, our social skills. So can you talk about, you say that there is this insidious anti play attitude. You talked about this superintendent in Georgia who says we're not going to give kids 30 minutes to waste away as they please. You know, we're going to teach them gymnastics, we're going to teach them dancing. This anti play attitude grows more pervasive with every passing decade. I mean, and that's true. The kids are getting 20 minutes for recess. Dr. Gray, four years old, you're four year old, you get to walk to the store to buy cigarettes. The four year olds are getting 20 minutes out of an eight hour school day. You talked about how yours was six and you got all these recesses and you could leave, you could leave the school premises. So we have this anti play attitude. How is it affecting our kids social skills?

[Dr. Peter Gray]

If you think about anybody who really knows children, who's seen children under situations where they really are, are free to do what they want to do, knows that there's almost nothing that children want to do more than play with other children. They want to play, but they want especially to play with other children. Throughout most of the non western, non modern world, children are spending most of their day playing with other children. This is true in hunter gatherer cultures. It's true in other traditional cultures. Even when they're working, they're kind of commonly working with other children. Not with no adults there supervising. They're interacting with other children all the time. Why do children want to be with other children? Why do they avoid adults when they play and flock to other children? Because maybe the most important thing that children need to learn is how to get along with peers, how to get along with people who are in Your age group, rough age group, not exactly your age necessarily, because I'm a big advocate of age mixed play. And a lot of this is. But the people that you are growing up with, this is the group from which your future marriage partner will come from which your real friends, your work partners will come from. This is the group you need to get, you need to know how to get along with people who are. Your equality in status, that's very different from bonding with adults who, even the most well meaning adult, there's a status difference. You are more experienced in the world. You take a kind of, if you're the adult, you take a kind of protective attitude towards the child. Children know in their DNA, if you will, that they need to figure out how to get aligned with people who don't have authority over them, but who are kind of on an equal basis with them. How do I make friends basically? How do I, how do I deal with this person who I want to play with but who is also kind of bullying me? What am I going to do about that? What are, you know, these are the problems. How do we resolve our differences? We want to play, we want to play together. I want to play this, but you want to play that. So we end up negotiating about what we're going to play and then as we're playing, we're negotiating the rules. Children are doing this all the time. When they're playing with other children away from adults. They're constantly negotiating, they're bargaining, they're figuring things out, they're compromising. These are incredibly important human skills. They've always been very important human skills. These are, we are social beings by nature. We can't be happy as lone individuals. We can't even, we can barely survive as lone individuals. We certainly can't reproduce as lone individuals. We have to be able to get along with other people. So this is what children are learning when they're playing. Now, when there's an adult there, even if it's a well meaning adult, the adult kind of spoils that because the adult becomes the problem solver, the adult. The children even look to the adult to solve the problems rather than trying to figure out how to solve the problems themselves. And I think that because we are raising children now in such a way that there's essentially always an adult there, you know, they're never away from adults, so they're never learning to take the initiative to figure things out for themselves and solve the problems. And that's why we are, I hear constantly, there's two sources of Complaints I hear that are along the same line. One is from employers of new, oftentimes new, college graduates who say, so you know, I've hired these young people to solve problems. I've hired them to figure out how to do things, but they want me to tell them how to do it. They want me to tell them exactly what to do. They just want to follow the directions that I'm giving them. But I'm hiring them to figure this out so I don't have to solve this. So it's really hard now to find young employees who are willing to take initiative, who are willing. You know, sometimes when you try things out, you fail. And everybody's afraid of failure. So they're afraid of innovation, they're afraid of trying new things. And yet we're in a world where you've got to innovate, you've got to try new things, you've got to be willing to fail and try again, and so on and so forth. And the other group I hear from are college professors who say that students, more than in the past test, really want to be told exactly what to do. They don't want you, as the professor, to say, so I'd like you to write a term paper on something relevant to the topic of this course of your own choosing. They don't want to hear this. Kids don't want that. They want to be told exactly what they should write the paper on. They want to be told how they should write the paper. They want to be told all the details. They don't want to have to make any of their own judgments. I think part of that is they're used to a schooling system where even to get a good grade, they have to do it exactly the way the teacher is telling them to do. So this carries on to college, where things ideally are a lot looser with regard to that, because more of it should be up to the student to figure out what they want to write about, how they want to do the paper. But students are afraid of any kind of initiative on their own. There are also students are terrified of failure. And for many students, failure means getting anything less than an A. Literally. Many students feel that, and I hear that from professors all the time. One of the reasons for grade inflation, tremendous grade inflation in college, is because professors are almost afraid to give less than an A because the students might have a mental breakdown about it. It's been so drilled into them by parents and. And in their own heads that anything less than an A is a failure. The kind the kids who Go on to college, feel that way. And they feel like this is going to ruin my life. Let's say it's not going to ruin their life, but they believe it will. We've convinced them somehow, as our society has convinced them that unless they get perfect grades that their whole well being, their future depends upon that. It's simply not true that this is the case, but that's the, that's what many kids believe and they're terrified by this. This is, this is another of the sources of anxiety, one other reasons we have so many emotional breakdowns among college students these days.

[Jenny Urch]

And you call them their trappings. We don't even need them. They're unnecessary, the grades. I just read a book by a man named Sahil Bloom.

[Unknown Co-Host]

It just came out.

[Jenny Urch]

It's called the Five Types of Wealth. It was like an instant bestseller. And he said, develop a reputation for being able to fix, figure things out. He said if you can develop a reputation for being able to figure things out your whole life, you're going to get things that you don't know how to do. If you can figure it out, he said, people will fight over you that that is a skill to have. And you talk, you know, you talk so much in this book about the social play and how that is how you learn how to take control over your life and your impulses and your emotions. Playing with other children away from adults is how children learn to make their own decisions, control their emotions and impulses, see from others perspectives, negotiate differences, make friends. In short play is how kids learn how to take control of their lives. And you talk about the play with your friend. You say, the best teacher. This is near the beginning of the book. I've learned from hundreds of great teachers over the course of my life. But if I had to pick the single greatest teacher, it would be Ruby Lou. I met her the summer I was.

[Unknown Co-Host]

Five and she was six.

[Jenny Urch]

What did she teach you? You climbed trees together and so you learned that you could embrace danger. And you wrote, that confidence has served me well throughout my life. She taught you about death and how to console someone. Her grandfather passes away. You write, it was my first experience with death and my first attempt at consoling a person who had lost someone she loved. You know, she teaches you how to ride a bike and that becomes something that you love your whole life. You still think of Ruby Lou as you pedal to work or wherever you're going. You are. I wasn't the most boldest or agile kid, but all of that play, it gives you These lifelong benefits. It is a phenomenal book, especially today, even more so today. Free to Learn. Why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier, more self reliant and better students for life. You have your substack that you update frequently, all sorts of articles that parents should know about. And can you tell us real briefly you have a new book coming?

[Dr. Peter Gray]

Yes, I'm working on a new book. The working title is Restoring Childhood, but it really, it's about how over the decades, cultural changes, social changes have continuously reduced children's opportunities to really be children. So a lot of it is about what it is to be a child, how cultural changes have reduced children's abilities to do the things that their instincts tell them they need to do to grow well. And what is it that we need to do to restore childhood, to restore these kinds of freedoms to children's lives. So it, it brings it. In some sense, the thesis is not unlike Free to Learn, but it makes use of a lot that's happened since that book was published. And it makes use of a lot that I've learned since the book was published, things that new ideas that I've come across. And it also is, it's not just about play. It's about independent activities in general. It's about how children grow through the opportunities to figure things out themselves and solve problems themselves. And so it's very much kind of continues the themes that you've been talking about here as you, as you look at Free to Learn.

[Jenny Urch]

And what happens then is that you become more trustful in time. You talked about it with your own self. It happens gradually, but over time and it doesn't take very long. You know, if you give your kids time and they're able to explore, you see it, you see it pretty rapidly, that they're growing. That's how I felt. We started to go outside for these extended periods of time and I was like, oh, you know, these kids are thriving in ways that they weren't thriving yesterday or last week. And then, and then it just sort of compounds. And that was your story too. I mean, here you are, Dr. Peter Gray, just speaking all over the world with all of these influential things. And you didn't even go to kindergarten. You know, I think parents would be like, well, what? You know, we didn't do preschool. And I was freaked out about it. You know, it's like, there's such a pressure to do that. But here you didn't go to kindergarten at, at all? No kindergarten. And what a successful man you are. You know, it didn't matter. And so I just, I. This is a transformative book. It's a transformative book for parents of today. I couldn't recommend it anymore. It will change your life. It changes the whole thing. It changes the whole trajectory. And it gives you such an understanding of where things came from and why they are the way they are. And it challenges you, you know, to think we don't need any of the trappings of the compulsory education system, really. But then when you trust it even just a little bit. Dr. Gray a little. I'm going to try it. You know, over time, it just compounds and you end up with kids that you feel like can soar because they feel like they can do whatever challenges life throws at them. So I'm so grateful. Thank you for coming. This is your fourth time on the show. It's such an honor. You came on when it was nothing. Now it's. It's the second most popular parenting podcast in the United States. So I really appreciate you investing the time over the years to come and to help parents and to spend time talking about these really, really important topics.

[Dr. Peter Gray]

Well, congratulations on the success of the podcast and I'm delighted to have been part of it for some time and delighted to be on it now. I'm sure we'll talk again sometime in the future.

[Jenny Urch]

Thank you.

[Dr. Peter Gray]

Thank you.

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