Morning Wire - Independent Play Among Children | 12.26.23

Episode Date: December 26, 2023

We speak with a professor of neuroscience about why he believes increasingly structured lifestyles are depriving children, more than they are helping. Get the fact first on Morning Wire. American Home Shield: Save $50 when you join American Home Shield. Visit http://www.ahs.com/MorningWire Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A paper published earlier this fall by a professor of neuroscience at Boston College is drawing connections between anxiety and depression in teens and declining rates of independent play among children. The paper argues that our increasingly structured lifestyles and tendency towards risk aversion in child rearing is depriving our children of self-directed adventures that build resilience and confidence. In this episode of Morning Wire, we speak to the author of the review about how parents can support their children's

freedom and independence. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley. It's Tuesday, December 26th, and this is a special edition of Morning Wire. Joining me to discuss why independent play is so crucial for kids is research professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College, Peter Gray. Peter, thanks for coming on. You're welcome. Now, first off, tell us a little bit about this paper that you published that's been getting a lot of attention. So the paper is a review of many.

studies, all of which support the thesis that the rise in mental disorder, in anxiety, depression, even a suicide among young people over the past decades, because these have been rising for decades now, is largely the result of a decline in young people's opportunities for independent activity, independent play, other kinds of independent activity, the kinds of activity. The kinds of activities that bring immediate pleasure to young people and that also build the sort of character traits that allow them to face the bumps in the road of life without falling apart. My reason for publishing this in the Journal of Pediatrics is I believe that pediatricians and other practitioners, family doctors, child psychiatrists and psychologists and so on,

are not sufficiently aware of this, surprisingly to me. not sufficiently aware of the ways that young people's freedom has declined and how that might influence their anxiety and depression. Also, because I believe that these are the people that have the most possibility of creating change. When pediatricians talk with parents, they can talk not just about safety, but also about young people's needs for some degree of adventure, some degree of risk, some degree of independent activity in order to develop the kinds of character traits that are necessary to grow in a mentally healthy way. So it was deliberately oriented. I haven't previously published in a pediatrics journal, but we deliberately published the article there in order to reach

pediatricians. How do you define independent activity? What specifically do some of those activities look like. So independent activity really means activity that children engage in themselves without being in any direct way controlled or monitored by adults. So especially for younger children, children under the age of about 12, the primary form of independent activity is play, free play, play with other children away from adults. This is the way that children normally play. This is the way that children normally played throughout human history, but in recent times, we have increasingly been preventing them from playing that way for various reasons. But it also includes things like walking by yourself to school, taking public transportation, doing errands for your parents, having a part-time job,

all of these kinds of things which give children the opportunity to prove to themselves and others that they are competent to do things on their own, that they are reliable, that they can be trusted. These are the things that we have been very much depriving young people of in recent times. Now, you kind of touched on it, but what are some of the character traits that are built with independent activity that you think can't so much be built with more structured activity? So there's a lot of ways of describing this. There are various different kinds of terminologies that psychologists use. So one way to describe it has to do with the character trait called locus of control. Locus of control is a dimension that goes at one extreme from high internal locus of control,

meaning that you have the sense of I'm in control of my own life, I can solve my own problems, I am the master of my destiny. The other extreme towards external locus, of control is that I have little control over what happens to me or how things play out in my life. I'm kind of a victim of circumstance, powerful other people, luck. So, of course, most of us are somewhere in the middle on this, but it turns out to be healthy, even to the degree that it might be error, to be on the side of internal locus of control. I believe that I can control my fate. I believe I can solve problems and so on and so forth.

Now, a high internal locus of control has been shown for people of all ages, not just children, but adults as well, to be healthy in the sense that you are far less likely to suffer from anxiety or depression if you have a high internal locus of control. That makes sense, because if you believe that you can solve problems that arrive, if you believe that you can control your destiny, the world is less scary. You feel less hopeless than if you believe you're kind of a victim of whatever happens.

So it's not surprising that a high internal locuses of control is a healthy characteristic to have. But to develop a high internal locus of control, you have to have practice in exerting control. And we have been depriving children of that practice. And so, in fact, over these same decades that I've been describing, roughly between about 1960 and today, the same period of time in which anxiety and depression

has been continuously rising in young people, this measure of locus of control in research studies among young people has been continuously declining, the measure of internal locus of control, ever more external locus. So that's one kind of characteristic. By engaging in independent activities, by solving problems, you learn that you can engage in independent. You can solve problems.

You can control your fate to at least a large degree. You develop this internal sense that you can do that, and that helps you deal with the unknowns in life as they occur. So what are some of the barriers to parents allowing this kind of independent activity? What do you think are the reasons why kids are engaging in so much less of it now than in the past? I think there are a lot of changes that have occurred over the decades that I'm talking about. But the two biggest changes are an increased fear that we have, an increased belief that is dangerous for children to be out of our sight, to be on their own in any kind of way. It's an irrational belief in the sense that the truth is the dangers that people are afraid. of are no more present than they ever were. The kinds of things that most frightened parents about

letting their children out, that their children might be kidnapped or molested or even murdered by a stranger on the street almost never happens. It rarely ever happened in the past, and it rarely ever happens today. But when it does happen, it's very much played up by the media. and so people believe that it's a far more common kind of crime than actually occurs. So that's one of the events. We have a sort of general belief that it's dangerous for children, that we are negligent parents if we're not constantly watching and supervising our kids. The other change that's occurred is what I sometimes refer to as a schooling mentality of child development.

school itself has become ever more salient in children's lives. It's become ever more stressful to children, ever more time spent on school. But in addition to that, this sort of schooling mentality, as I call it, has led to the belief that children grow best when they're carefully guided and taught and mentored by adults. and that children's own activities independent of adults are kind of a waste of time. So that belief has pervaded the culture. It's pervaded the way parents think. Parents more and more believe over this period of time that their job is to teach their children,

their job is to guide their children, their job is to help their children do well in school. And as part of that, there's a focus on personal. putting children, encouraging children to go into adult-directed activities even when they're not in school. So adult-directed sports have largely replaced the old way that kids used to play of going out to the vacant lot and getting up their own game. But this is not a replacement because these kinds of activities are just more adult-directed activities. Children are not learning to create their own activities, to direct their own activities, to negotiate with other children, to solve the problems. They're not learning the same skills in these kinds of adult-directed activities

that they would be learning on their own. So it's good intentions, in a sense, that has led to this change. We want to protect our children, and we believe that the way we protect them is to watch them all the time, to not let them out where there may be dangerous. And we want our children to do well in the world, and we have come to believe that they will do well in the world. We have come to believe that they will do well in the world if they are guided and taught by adults. But this is mistaken. Of course, they do need some guidance and mentoring by adults. And of course, they do need some protection. But what we have forgotten in all of this is that they also need lots of opportunity to do their own things, to behave independently, to figure out what they themselves want to do, to pursue those

activities, and to learn how to solve the problems that are necessary when they are doing things on their own. Now, your paper briefly mentions the Let Grow organization. What is that? So Let Grow is a nonprofit organization that was founded about a decade ago. I was one of the founders, along with Lenore Skanezzi was another of the founders. She wrote the book Free Range Kids. And the purpose of Let Grow is to help change the culture in such a way that children's independent play and other independent activities becomes more possible and more acceptable than it has been.

So we work with schools, among other things, in order to bring free play into schools and also to bring other kinds of adventures into schools. And we provide a forum for parents on how they can, through their own neighborhoods and through their communities, allow more adventure and free play for their children. All right, well, Peter, we have a lot of parents in our audience,

so I really appreciate you coming on and sharing this insight. You're very welcome. That was Peter Gray, research professor of psychologist, and neuroscience at Boston College. And this has been a special edition of Morning Wire.