Child Psych Podcast | Episode #105

[Tammy Schamuhn] Hello everyone, welcome. Today I have with me Dr. Peter Gray. And I’m just so grateful he’s taken the time out of his busy schedule to meet with us. Dr. Peter Gray has his doctorate, he is a research professor at Boston College, and the author of the book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. I have it with me today, I have it tabbed, highlighted, and have all these questions and wonderful quotes from his book. He’s an author of several books, this is not his only book, but it’s the one that I read over the last week. He has conducted and published research in neuroendocrinology, developmental psychology, anthropology and education. He did his undergraduate study at Columbia University and earned a PhD in Biological Sciences at Rockefeller University. His research and writing is focused primarily on children’s natural ways of learning and the lifelong value of play. So welcome, Dr. Gray.

[Dr. Gray] I’m happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

[Tammy Schamuhn] Yeah, I’m a mom of three, a former teacher, a recovering teacher I call it, and now I’m a registered play therapist. This is a language that I speak quite fluently and I’m always excited when there is someone who has dived headfirst into the research behind this. And my understanding is you are an evolutionary developmental psychologist, is that correct?

[Dr. Gray] Yes.

[Tammy Schamuhn] So you look at it as play as part of our evolutionary learning process as we’ve evolved as a species. Darwinian so to speak.

[Dr. Gray] Yes, that’s exactly right that I look at play, at least in part from a biological perspective. It’s interesting to note that the young of all mammals play and so right off, you know there must be something important developmentally about play for mammals, including our little mammals.

Parent Question: Why is Play Important Without Screen Time 

[Tammy Schamuhn] We’ll touch more on some of the research there because I was fascinated with some of the studies that you cited in your book. But we’re going to start, we are doing things a little bit differently where we take questions from our followers and this one came in from a grandmother. This one was really interesting, and I was hoping to start the conversation with her question and then we can dive more into your research after that and your recommendations. But she has to say this

“I am a grandmother of two kids, and I’m really concerned about how much time they spend on screens and when they’re not on a screen they’re in organized activity after activity. I feel like when I was little, we played outside with the neighborhood kids until the streetlights came on. Can you give me some information so I can communicate with my daughter on why it’s okay for the kids to just play. The kids just seem so stressed out, and when they’re not distracted by screens, they seem to fall apart.”

[Dr. Gray] It’s interesting that the question comes from a grandmother and not a mother, and perhaps not too surprising because people of grandmother age are far more likely to remember a lot of play in their own lives than even people who are of mother age. Play has been gradually taken away from children over several decades now. Children in the 1950s and 60s and even into the 70s had far more time and opportunity to play than children, even in the 80s, when play was being gradually taken away from children and it’s been gradually taken away from children ever since. There are many forces that have worked against play. 

1) Increased fears in our society. I would argue, irrational fears that strangers are going to snatch our children away if they’re out there playing and we’re not right there guarding them. And of course, we can’t always be out there guarding them. Moreover, an adult’s presence can destroy play, especially when adults feel that it’s their job to intervene and tell the children what to do and what not to do. The whole point of play is for children to learn to do things for themselves and solve their own problems. Play needs to be something that children do without parental or other adult interference. And that becomes harder and harder to occur in our culture today for a wide variety of reasons that I can talk about if we want to talk about them as we go along. 

2) What this grandmother is describing is something that I’ve heard over and over and over again, something I’ve observed directly. It occurs in the United States. Apparently, it occurs in Canada too. And this absolutely is a problem. There’s no question in my mind, but what the deprivation of real play, independent free play, is the major cause of the high rates of anxiety and depression among children and teenagers today. This is a very serious problem. Now the grandmother pointed out that the children are often on screens, often on their computer, and they might be playing there and that is real play. Computer play is real play, it has all the advantages of other sorts of play, if it’s independent. I can talk about that, many of the computer games are very creative. Children learn a lot playing them. Many of them are social, they’re playing with other kids online. But of course, they’re not getting physical exercise through play, they’re not getting outdoor fresh air, and the other kinds of advantages of playing in person outdoors with other kids. To me, it isn’t such a terrible problem that they’re on the computer a lot. But the problem is for many children that’s the only way they’re allowed to play independently because they’re not allowed to go outdoors and play independently of adults in the real world.

[Tammy Schamuhn] It seems to me we’ve either given them screens or put them in organized activities which are adult lead, those are adult rules. And in your book, you talk about the difference between a backyard baseball game versus when you join Little League, like there’s the Sand block game versus Little League. And I always say sports can be played, but the second adults come in with these rigid rules about how it needs to be, it’s done a certain way and they’re in uniforms they have to show up in, it that takes away from true play.

[Dr. Gray] That’s right. Part of the definition of play is that it’s an activity that children create themselves, that they initiate and direct themselves. One of the major functions of play is it’s how children learn how to take charge of their own activities, to initiate and decide what to do, to negotiate with their playmates about what they’re going to do. To create the rules or modify the rules as they go along to make the play fun and interesting. So, these are some of the most important things that children learn in play. When adults take over the activity, as happens in adult organized sports, then you’re completely destroying that major function of play, which is for children to learn how to do things themselves and solve their own problems. We might call it play; we say children are going out to play baseball, football, hockey or whatever the sport might be. And it is true, I mean like a lot of words, the word play can have a lot of different meanings. But the meaning that I attribute to play and that most play researchers use, and indeed there’s research showing that children themselves define play in this way, that it’s an activity that children themselves are in charge of rather than an activity that adults are in charge of.

[Tammy Schamuhn] Yeah, I think it was Gordon Neufeld who said, and he probably adopted this from all your research, Stuart Brown’s research, and there’s so many play researchers, but that it’s psychologically, not physically because risky play is good for kids, but it’s psychologically safe. They have autonomy, freedom of choice and there’s imagination infused within what they are doing, and if we don’t have these elements, it’s not true play, it’s not free play. You describe free play in your book, I call it child centered play, but it’s the same idea that the child has that autonomy and choice and they do it because they love it, not because an adult is telling them to do it.

[Dr. Gray] Yes, I call it free play in many places just to be clear on what I mean. But in other places I just call it play because in my definition, if it isn’t free, it isn’t play.

[Tammy Schamuhn] Your frame of reference is evolution, we’ve evolved as a species with play and it’s adaptive. When kids are playing, whether they’re rough housing, playing dress up, climbing a tree or riding a bike, probably too fast for most parent’s comfort, how does this serve them in terms of adaptability? Like making those kids more resilient, better critical thinkers, or protecting them against negative mental health outcomes. How does play do that exactly?

[Dr. Gray] The first thing about play, in terms of protecting us from mental health outcomes, is that play makes kids happy. There’s nothing more than play that makes kids happy. As long as they they’ve got food, water, oxygen, and their in safety of being cared for by reasonable parents. The thing that makes them happy beyond that is play. You take play away from children and they’re not going to be happy. That should be obvious. We don’t need research to show that, you know, anybody looking at a child should know that, right? I mean, this is no mystery. Yet there are people surprised that our children are so unhappy, and they wonder why they’re so unhappy. They should be able to look and say they’re unhappy because we’re not allowing them to play. This is what children do. This is what makes them happy. So that’s number one.

[Tammy Schamuhn] I think adults, too, need play. Like adults get depressed when they don’t play. This is not unique to kids. We are supposed to play throughout our lifespan.

[Dr. Gray] It’s not unique to kids, but it is far more important for kids than for adults. We are overly adult centric in our society. And in fact, adults in many ways do have more playful experiences than kids because adults are much more able to run their own lives. They can choose their work, generally, and they can choose work that is playful to them, that has the capacity for play. Children can’t choose their work. They’re forced into schools. They can’t choose what to do, they’re being told what to do all the time. Also, from a biological perspective, most species of animals don’t play in an identifiable way of calling it play, beyond the juvenile period. Play is extraordinarily important during the juvenile period. It is how young animals, including young human beings acquire the attitudes, the skills that are essential for independent adult living as they grow up. I agree with you that play is important for adults, but play is far more important for children.

[Tammy Schamuhn] What I heard is it allows autonomy, so kids have choice. That’s a big part of it because kids are so controlled in many ways. It’s a stage where the child gets to be in the driver’s seat of their lives is what I’m hearing is a big part of that. And then play ends up being that dress rehearsal for acquiring the skills they need to be successful in adult life.

Three Important Needs in Play for Psychological Wellbeing

[Dr. Gray] Yes, exactly, that’s well put. And one way to think about this is as follows. There’s a lot of research in psychology that shows that once a person’s physical needs are met,  the three most important psychological needs that have to be met for mental well-being are: 

1) Autonomy. The sense that I can make at least some of my own choices, I can do things that I want to do. I’m not just always being controlled by other people. Whether you’re a child or an adult, you’d need that sense of autonomy. Play for children is often the only place, or one of the very few places, where they have that autonomy, where they’re making their own choices, where they’re doing what they want to do, as opposed to what some adult is telling them to do. All three of these needs are all equally important. 

2) Competence. We need to be able to feel we can choose what to do, but we also need to be able to feel that we’re capable of doing what we want to do, that we’re competent to do it. Children develop competence through play. Play is really practice in the skills that children are interested in. When children are playing at building things, they become competent at building things. When children are playing at an athletic activity, they’re becoming competent at that activity. Whenever children are playing with other children, they’re becoming competent in figuring out how to get along with other children. They’re learning all sorts of skills in play and they are skills that are important to them. The psychological need for competence is to feel competent in activities that are important to you. Not necessarily activities that are important to somebody else, but activities that are important to you. Which is why doing well in school doesn’t necessarily meet that sense of competence, because most kids feel kind of cynical about doing well in school. They just feel like “this is an assignment I have to do, and I’ll do it because I have to do it, and I’ve kind of learned the trick for getting good grades,” and so on and so forth. It has to be competence in something that the that the kid has chosen. Now for some kids that might be school if they if they have a real sense of choice, “I really want to learn this mathematics.” But if it’s being forced upon them there’s no great sense of competence for doing it. In play, you’re developing competence in the things that you care about that are important to you. 

3) The third basic need is relatedness. Having friends, having connections, we all need to have connections with peers, with people who are in our cohort. Of course, kids need connections with their parents, with other adults, but they also need connections with other kids in order to feel psychologically healthy. How do kids make connections with other kids? Through play. In fact, for a kid under 12 years old, almost by definition, a friend is somebody that you play with. This is how kids make friends, through play. This is how kids interact with one another. This is how kids feel connected with one another. When we take social play away from children, play with other children and away from adults, we are taking away these three basic needs. We’re taking away the autonomy, the sense that I can do these things that I want to do, because adults are saying “no, you can’t do that.” We’re taking away the sense of competence because we’re taking away the opportunity for them to practice the skills that are important to them, and we’re taking away the possibility of them making real friends. 

[Tammy Schamuhn] Yeah, that’s speaks hugely, and I think of anxiety as being this huge issue with kids right now. And I know Jonathan Height just put out a book on talking about screens and anxiety and play deprivation. So, it’s a really great book. And one of the biggest reasons we see anxiety in kids is because there’s a sense of learned helplessness. And there is an unpredictability and not feeling like they have any control in their lives so, it feels chaotic. What I’m hearing is that play is a place in their life, it’s a stage where they get to be the director, producer and the actor. They feel that sense of skill, competency and confidence. That is where their self-esteem is derived. And they have these choices as the director of where this is going to go. So, even if something bad happens or there’s adversity, they have somewhere to still derive feelings of control in healthy ways. To feel like I might not be in the driver’s seat at school, or if Mom and Dad got a divorce, but here is the place where I do belong, where I do feel good about myself, where I can make choices.

Risky Play in Kids

[Dr. Gray] Yes, and it’s also the case that with play, things can go wrong. You can have problems: you can get hurt; you can get lost; you can get bullied; all kinds of things can happen. And this is good. The reason that it’s good is because this is how children learn that they could solve these problems. If they are playing and there’s no adult to solve the problems for them, then they’ve got to solve them. Play is how children learn “I can solve problems; I can deal with the bumps in the road of life.” When we protect children all of the time from these things, from being out there where they are playing, where they are doing what they want to do, they might run into some problems. We are protecting them from developing the sense that they can solve problems. One way that psychologists describe this sense of “I can deal with the bumps in the road of life,” is called an internal locus of control. This is feeling like “things can happen to me, but I can take care of them.” The sense that “I’m not a victim of faith. I can do things. I’m empowered. I have agency.” This is extraordinarily important for resilience and to help protect against anxiety. If you don’t have that strong internal locus of control, as psychologists call it, then you are always afraid of the world. Anything might happen at any time, and there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s extremely important that we do not overprotect children because it’s extremely important that they do run into some adversity as they’re playing and they themselves solve the problem. The best thing is that we adults are not there. Like what that grandmother was talking about, you send the kids out and you’re not running out after them. It’s safe enough, they’re not going to die out there. There’s going to be some problems, however, and good for that. They are going to get tough as a result of learning how to solve their own problems. They’re going to get psychologically tough as well as physically tough by being out there playing.

[Tammy Schamuhn] That’s where I’m hearing that you are, and I am as well, a big advocate of risky play in kids. I think of my son and he’s a perfect example of this. This is a kid who has been to the emergency room far too many times, but he is the happiest, most well-adjusted, social kid, and I really think this came from me allowing him to climb trees probably far too high for most parents’ comfort. Keep in mind, we’re on a farm, so there’s a lot of room for risky play when you live in the country. When my son climbed, first it was the square bales on our property, then it was the round bales on our property, then he was up in the trees with his sisters and eventually he did get hurt. At one point he fell, and he broke his foot. He was okay. He was in an air cast for two weeks. But we had warned him, we said “if you don’t climb like this then there’s a fair warning that this could happen.” Since that incident where he hurt himself, he has learned how to navigate his body. He pushed it too far and that was the outcome. Sometimes kids will get hurt and there will be tears, but that’s how he’s developed competence. Physiologically he feels very strong, and he loves to be able to show off to his friends when they come to our place that he can do these things. And he feels good about himself. I always said that parents would be terrified if they saw how I parent on our farm because I think the risk is really good for their competence and like just their self-esteem.

[Dr. Gray] This is another case where I can draw a comparison with other mammals. Researchers have seen that all mammals that have been studied when they’re young play in risky ways. They do things that are deliberately putting themselves into danger as they’re playing. For example, there are monkeys that will playfully chase one another around high up in trees, leaping from branch to branch. High up enough that they could fall and get hurt. Why are they playing up there? As opposed to chasing them on lower branches or on the ground. Young Chimpanzees have been observed to climb to the top of the tree and drop and catch themselves just before they hit the ground. Imagine being a mom and watching that. All young mammals do that. Animal behaviorists have researched questions such as “why do they do that? Why wouldn’t natural selection have extinguished that kind of behavior?” Because sometimes they do get injured in serious ways and on rare occasions an animal even dies because of an accident while playing. From an evolutionary perspective, if there’s some deficit from this kind of play then that must be outweighed by a bigger advantage for it. And what is that bigger advantage? It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to think what that advantage is. And the advantage is the development of courage. When you are playing in this way, you are learning “I can do these things that are kind of dangerous. I can feel a certain amount of fear, and I can handle it. I can handle it physically and I can handle it psychologically.” The result of that is when you face a real emergency in real life, you’re far less likely to panic because you’ve experienced it. You’ve learned that “I can feel my heart rate increasing. I can feel these signs of fear and I don’t fall apart from it because I’ve learned to control that by climbing that tree as high as I could, or by skateboarding down a banister” or whatever it is that you’re doing, that’s a sort of risky play.

[Tammy Schamuhn] I call it an inoculation to stress. Kids get like this because we know based on studies that they get increased levels of cortisol, so stress hormones come up in play, but they’re manageable amounts. So I always say, they practice dealing with stress in smaller manageable amounts. It doesn’t mean they don’t get stressed; they get hurt, they get rejected by their friends, they have to modulate their behavior. But when something big happens and there’s a huge amount, they’ve had practice at dealing with this already. The body is like, I know what to do, I can handle this, but if we bubble wrap them then they never experience stress. When you bring an adversity, they fall apart.

[Dr. Gray] The other point here you make is that your son plays maybe in more risky ways than is good for him. But on the other hand, he’s only had one broken foot, you know. 

[Tammy Schamuhn] A few stitches too, definitely a few.

[Dr. Gray] I had a friend way back when I was in elementary school who lived on a farm, he would break a limb every summer. He even broke his neck, and believe it or not, he survived it, at the age of 11 he tipped the tractor over on himself. So, there’s the occasional kid who doesn’t seem to learn from experience. But he was one of those who probably needed some breaks. But that’s very, very rare. Most kids have a very good sense of what they can or cannot do. Kids are much more cautious than we give them credit for. For most kids, if they’re going to climb a tree to a certain height, they know they can do it. They know that they’ll feel some fear doing it, but they know they can do it. They have a much better understanding of what they can do than the parent has of what they can do because the parent isn’t in that person’s skin. The parent isn’t in that person’s head. Mother Nature, which is the term I often use for natural selection, endowed our children with a desire to play in risky play but also endowed our children with a good understanding of what they are and are not capable of. 

[Tammy Schamuhn] If you think about allowing children to engage in risky play they develop competence in terms of their gross motor skills. You’re creating a more intelligent body that is going to be safer the more they practice in small increments. We call that scaffolding the skill, a little higher each time. Kids will develop stronger bodies, healthier bodies, and they will learn how to fall correctly. That’s a thing I have learned riding horses. There is a difference between falling and falling correctly off a moving horse. My son knows how to do that very well at this point. We have nine horses on our property, and I would rather him learn how to navigate his body with me around, in case we have to do some first aid. Versus him never doing this and then he’s older and then he’s more likely to fall and break something. The older we get, the less our bodies bounce back.

[Dr. Gray] These are a lot of good reasons for allowing our children to do that. Some would say encouraging children, but I don’t think you really have to encourage them. What you need to do is allow them to play outdoors and play in a vigorous way. You have to provide an environment in which they’re motivated to do that. The main points of that environment are that there are other kids to play with, the main stimulus in play for children is other children to play with. Unfortunately, we live in a world today where… if you send your child out like an old fashioned parent, there may not be any other children out there to play with. The biggest challenge for parents who understand the value of play is how are we going to create a situation in today’s world where your child has other real playmates who are also free from adults and can just go out and play. If you send your child out, there are differences among children and some children are happier with solo play than other children are. But throughout the world, the great majority of children are primarily interested in playing with other children. There’s a lot of research showing that when children are together playing, they play in much more vigorous ways than when they’re alone, and they play in more creative ways. They play in ways that they learn a lot more when they’re playing with other children. This is kind of the challenge of modern-day parenting, is how to find or create situations where there will be a bunch of children out there all together on a regular basis so they can make friends and play over time consistently from day-to-day or week to week. That used to occur naturally, you would just send your kids out and other parents would send their kids out, so there would be kids out there playing. But today it doesn’t occur naturally, so it becomes a challenge on how to make that occur. 

[Tammy Schamuhn] Do you have any suggestions for parents? I live in the country, so it’s a little different out here. I have three kids, so they all play together, they have figured out that they have each other. We will bring other kids in, but because we live a little more isolated, we can’t quite do that. But my kids have adapted because they know they have each other. They will just play with their siblings and once in a while we do bring kids over as much as we can, especially in the summertime. Bring cousins over, as many kids as we can. But when you’re living in an urban setting, I’ve had friends who have found other families, like they’ll look up other families in the neighborhood saying, “let’s all get our kids together and they can play at different houses or at the park.” One parent is the home parent for that day. So, if something goes wrong, they go to that parents house. But would you have any other suggestions? I guess finding parents in your neighborhood maybe who are like minded. Any other ideas?

[Dr. Gray] Yeah, that’s one approach and it takes some initiative. If you’re interested in getting kids in your neighborhood outdoors to play, the first step is to get to know your neighbors, those neighbors who have kids. In today’s world, certainly in the United States at least, one of the changes that has occurred over time is we are far less likely to know our neighbors than was true decades ago. We are more likely to be friends with our workmates who may live in an entirely different part of the city, or today even an entirely different part of the world, because we may be working online. Adults are outdoors in their lawn much less, they’re hiring lawn services, at least in my neighborhood, they’re not even out mowing their own lawn, so they don’t run into one another. They’re not out hanging laundry on the lines. So, parents are not getting to know one another. If you’re not sending your kids out, you’re not getting to know the other adults who have kids by virtue of the kids. The first step is to get to know your neighbors who have kids and talk to them about it. Ask them “do you remember playing as a child and how important it was to you? Wouldn’t it be great if our kids could just go out and play with one another? Maybe we can do this for a certain number of hours every week, maybe every Saturday afternoon, and a couple of afternoons after school. We’ll be like old-fashioned parents, and we’ll kick our kids out of the house and tell them to leave their cell phone indoors, you got to get out without your cellphone, that’s an order.” The kid might be angry about it at the beginning, but if you do it in a good-natured and playful way, it reduces some of the anger. And you point out all these other kids are going to be out there, and my prediction is, which has been found true, is that the kids will thank you for it as time goes on. At first, maybe they’ll have a little difficulty knowing what to do, but they’ll get to know the other kids. They’ll start playing. 

If it’s in a neighbourhood where some people are afraid that it’s dangerous, maybe because of traffic or some parents might have a fear that there’s a creepy adult who will kidnap a child. Which is not likely to happen when there’s a lot of kids out there because there are a lot of witnesses around. This is an extraordinarily rare crime. In Canada somebody calculated that the chance of this happening is about one in a billion. You’d have to leave your child out in the worst city in Canada for something like 10,000 years before anybody would take your child away statistically.

[Tammy Schamuhn] And most and most child abductions are by someone the child knows, like another parent, an estranged parent or something.

[Dr. Gray] Exactly.

[Tammy Schamuhn] Like it’s not a stranger typically.

[Dr. Gray] Exactly. I mean, strangers don’t really want your kid. The people who take your kid are like your ex-spouse who believes they’re the ones who should have the kid. Sometimes even a grandparent who thinks that their children aren’t raising their grandchildren right. That’s the primary thing. And most missing children when they’ve been missing for a long time, were not snatched away, they were runaways. There was a long period of time in the United States when there was this big thing about missing children, you see them on milk cartons and so on. The assumption that people made was that these must be kids who were snatched away by strangers, but then somebody did research on this and they were almost entirely runaways. They were not kids who were snatched away by adults. But nevertheless, people have this fear. What you can do is to arrange to have one adult out there just for safety and the agreement should be that that adult is not going to intervene in the play. The adult is not going to tell the kids how to play, not going to stop them from doing things, but is only there for emergency’s sake. Ideally, in my opinion, for the same reason as we started with my response to the grandmother’s question. Ideally, I think that should be a grandparent. Grandparents are less likely to be controlling, that isn’t always true, but it’s generally true. Grandparents are a little easier going with the kids, maybe partly because they played and did a lot of independent things themselves as kids. And they know they have a sense that kids can really handle these things, that parents might not have so much. Ideally it would be a grandparent. There was one situation some years ago in Bronx, New York. There were low-income families living in a housing project, and it truly is a dangerous area. There are busy streets, there’s drug pushers on the streets. So, there are some reasons to be reluctant to send your kids out to play. So, what these parents did was they got together, and they said, “let’s all send our kids out to play at certain times.” They had the city close off the street to traffic for certain hours every week. They had grandmothers sitting out there to drive the drug pushers away. So, they created a safe place for their kids to play, but it took initiative, some parent or group of parents decided they wanted to do this. And they got other parents into it. They had the city close out the street. So, this was a very ingenious way to solve that problem in that setting.

Mixed Age Groups for Play

[Tammy Schamuhn] One of the things I am, and you are proponent to this in your book, I believe that kids are meant to play with mixed age groups. You’re not sending all 5-year-olds out together. For instance, if I invite kids to our farm, I invite all of them. If there’s a family of two or three kids, I don’t only invite the one that’s my child’s friend. I invite all of them because I want those older kids there because the older kids will keep things in order, they will be teaching. They’re going to tell me if something’s wrong, and then the little ones are learning from the older ones. The older kids will feel more competent and confident because they’re directing and keeping people safe. I believe children were meant to play in mixed age groups and that helps with safety.

[Dr. Gray] Yes, I agree completely with that. I’ve written a lot about that and that’s been the focus of some of my research is the value of mixed age play. Throughout history, play was essentially always mixed age, we never had near-age play until we had age segregated schools. Early schools were one room schoolhouses where you had all ages together and they played together. But before schools in hunter gatherer cultures, I’ve studied that by interviewing anthropologists. A typical play group might include kids from 4-13 years old or 7-18 years old. This is a huge range in ages and they’re all playing together. Just as you say, the older kids are scaffolding the younger kids at the higher levels of play. The younger kids are encouraging in some ways, more creative and imaginative play among the older kids. Since the older kids are helping take care of the younger kids and they’re practicing parenting skills in a way, they’re practicing being caretakers in the context of play. 

The other thing is sometimes people worry that older children are going to bully younger children, and I think that can happen in school settings because bullying is a big deal in school settings. But in the settings that I have studied, children including the Sudbury Valley School which never segregate children by age. So, this is an atypical school where kids are always of mixed age. I’m convinced that one of the reasons there’s essentially no bullying is because of the age mixing. There’s other research in various cultures around the world that indicates that when older children are playing with younger children, or even when they’ve had experience playing with younger children, they are less likely to bully than if they are only playing with children their own age. There’s something about younger children that brings out the nurturing instinct in all of us, including older children. Whether they are a 10-year-old playing with a five-year-old or 16 years old playing with a 10-year-old. They are inclined to be caring towards that individual. They even become more caring towards one another when younger kids are around, which is why I say that younger children bring out the caring and nurturing instinct that’s a part of everybody’s makeup.

[Tammy Schamuhn] I found it very interesting for me when we simply took screens away for a lot of the day and we’re like, go figure it out. And they do figure it out. It takes a little while to detox them from the screens, this happened to my 16-year-old too. We said “no, you’re allowed it for this long, but you got to find something else to do. You can’t just sit in your room.” When she started playing with her siblings, playing outdoors, rough housing with them, playing board games. All of a sudden, she started cooking for them on her own. She would go tend to them, put band aids on them when they were hurt. You just saw this increased sense of self in the way she carried herself, like she’s a stronger person, she’s more competent. I attribute this wholeheartedly to playing with her younger siblings. She’s not parenting them, but she nurtures them, she’s very empathic. Before she played with them, she was kind of nasty, she would get quite aggressive with them, they would fight. But since having screens removed for most of the day, it’s been more play based. They figured out a social order to things and now we start to see when her friends come over, they’ll play with my younger two, but it took some time to kind of sort that out.

[Dr. Gray] Yeah, throughout history it’s been very common that older children would be responsible for the care of younger children. Even 7-year-olds would be responsible for care of the 3- and 4-year-olds. That’s part of the natural way of growing up throughout most of human history. Again, we’ve deprived kids of a learning experience when we don’t expect the older kids to be responsible for partial care of the younger kids. I also want to make a certain comment about playing with siblings versus playing with other kids who are not siblings. Playing with siblings, of course, is great but it’s also important to find ways to make friends with non-siblings. The one way I look at it is this. When you’re playing with your siblings, there’s a certain sense in which you don’t have to earn them. They’re just there, they can’t go anyplace else, and they can’t leave you. You could bully them and get away with it because they can’t leave. They’re stuck there with you. But if you’re going to make a friend, you’ve got to be careful that you are engaging with them in a positive way. Otherwise, they’re just going to have nothing to do with you. One of the things I often say is the biggest freedom in play is the freedom to quit. And when you’re playing with friends and they quit, they go home, they’re gone. You’ve lost them. If you’ve been bullying them, you’ve been trying to insist that you get your way all the time, if you haven’t been respecting their needs, you’ve been only paying attention to your needs. The result is you’ve lost that friend. With a sibling to some degree, that could be true. You may have lost their respect for a period of time, but they can’t go home to some other home and stay away from you. There is a difference between playing with siblings and playing with other friends.

Homeschooling for Children

[Tammy Schamuhn] Now just to wrap up this talk and I feel like this could be another whole hour, so we’ll try to be succinct. I know a lot of your research is around how we have formal schools set up now which ends up being a parallel to incarceration. We have these adults taking away kids autonomy and telling them what to do, and we’re depriving them of what you call self-education. You say that this exploration of self-education through play requires enormous amounts of unscheduled time. Time to do whatever they want to do without pressure, judgment, or intrusion from authority figures. This time is needed to make friends, play with ideas and materials, experience and overcome boredom, learn from one’s own mistakes, and to develop passions. I think a lot of your followers of your work are big on home schooling. That’s a huge movement since COVID where we’re seeing many parents are moving in that direction, and realizing that formal schools are hindering, not helping their kids.

[Dr. Gray] Exactly right. We are seeing more and more homeschoolers. Certainly, that’s true in the United States. There was a huge increase in home schooling over the COVID period and many of them are staying with home schooling after COVID. I think the COVID period encouraged many people to believe “I can do this. I can home school.” Partly because, at least in the United States, we had this online schooling where parents were supposed to be sitting there watching what’s happening. I think many parents were appalled, “this is ridiculous. Why are they making my child do this?” A lot of people who thought maybe there’s some magic going on in school that they could never do at home realized, “well, wait a minute. I could do a better job than that in terms of finding things that would be interesting to my kid.” And the recognition that the parent knows the child and is in a better position than the teacher who has 30 kids in their class to help find things that the child is interested in doing. When children are doing what they’re interested in doing, they learn so much more, so much faster than when they’re doing things that they’re being forced to do. Such as being forced to do assignments. 

Also, a lot of parents during the COVID period recognized that their children are much more competent than they thought they were. You talked about your daughter taking on responsibilities and we did a study through the Let Grow Organization, that I was one of the founders of, on how families adapted to the COVID lockdown, the period of time when schools and all the all sorts of other extracurricular activities were closed. Children were more or less confined to home. Suddenly, they went from being so busy in school and all these extracurricular activities to all of that being closed. Many parents thought it was going to be a disaster, but it turned out not to be a disaster. In fact, what parents observed is that their children adapted to this very well. There are myths that they didn’t adapt well.  But in our two different studies, each one having 1600 families with kids between the age of 8-13, demographically balanced in every way. What we found by both the kids reports and the parents reports, is the kids were less anxious during that period of lockdown than they had been before when they were going to school. The parents reported having less friction with their children than before the lockdown. We asked parents about their observations of what their children were doing, and many parents said “I worried that I was going to have to amuse my children all the time because they weren’t involved in all these activities. And I discovered I didn’t have to do that.” They may have been bored at the beginning, but they figured out interesting things to do. They began reading books of their own choosing. Some of the children wanted to cook dinner. They wanted to do things in the house. There were cases where parents said, “I was amazed that my older child was very helpful in taking care of the younger child and was enjoying doing that, playing and doing things together and they both seem to be enjoying it.” And many children learned how to use zoom for the first time, so they weren’t as isolated as people were afraid they were. They connected with others and so I think many parents during that period discovered that in some sense their child was thriving better when not in school than when they were in school. I think that encouraged a lot of people to take their kids out of school.

[Tammy Schamuhn] I know as someone who has studied developmental psychology and mental health in kids, I always tell my kids that if I had a choice, I would home school them. Unfortunately for myself and many other parents, that isn’t an option. For myself, I take my kids out of school a lot for mental health days. We go hiking and swimming and they can play. The teachers hate it when they do this, but I do pull my kids out quite a bit. What else would you recommend for those parents like myself where home schooling isn’t an option? Are there certain schools you would recommend or just allowing a lot of free play after school? What do we do when our only option is sending them to a formal school.

[Dr. Gray] Yeah, of course, it depends very much on where you live and what other options are available. I’m a big advocate of democratic schooling. They’re also called schools for self-directed education where children go for the regular school day, but they are free to play and explore and pursue their own interests, and there are adults there who facilitate them pursuing their own interests. I began my career in this area. I had been previously doing an entirely different kind of research by doing a follow up study of one such school. Finding that there are kids there from age 4 on through to high school age, but they’re never segregated by age, they’re playing together. They’re learning from one another. They’re doing projects together. It’s an amazing place where the rules are made by the children, and the staff members combined each school member has one vote. Parents don’t have a vote, but the children and the staff do. So, this is the way the school runs. Entirely different from the way we conceive of school, and this school has now been in existence for something like 55 years, has hundreds of graduates, many hundreds of graduates. I did an early study of the graduates, and they were doing very, very well in the world in every way. So, of course, there’s not such a school in every area and it’s hard to start such a school because it’s hard to get enough parents who are willing to send their child to such a school. Such a school can run in a lot for a lot less expense than a typical private school because you don’t need a lot of teachers in such a scheme. The kids are learning from one another. So that’s one. But the other thing that’s happened and what’s happening kind of with COVID and I don’t know to what degree it’s still happening is that when you’ve got a bunch of homeschoolers in the same area, the homeschoolers can get together and form some kind of a learning Center. If maybe you can chip in and hire somebody, or alternate homes, or maybe there’s a grandparent who would like to help with this so you don’t have to be home every day. You don’t have to have a situation where you have to be home because you’ve got young kids who are not going to school. I realized that one of the big draws, one of the big difficulties for parents taking their kids out of school is the babysitting problem. I mean, school is the is a babysitter. And so you need to solve the babysitting problem. But there’s various ways to solve that problem. Short of sending the child to school.

Alternative Schooling for Children

[Tammy Schamuhn] Okay. I know for Canada when I was doing some research on alternatives there are charter schools that exist within Canada. For instance, we have an agriculture-based school where they garden, they goats and chickens. The school raises steers for market, and they learn about agricultural processes. There are nature schools, these schools are now in Canada, where kids are learning outdoors, unless it’s below –20 °C. They bundle up and they do all their schooling outside. Waldorf schools are another alternative. They are more play exploratory based, have more autonomy and less screen time. So, we have alternative schooling but if that’s not an option for parents, would you say focusing more on free play after school and less on homework? 

[Dr. Gray] One thing we haven’t talked about. I’ve been looking into the research in the United States, I think this is less true in Canada. Is that the mental health problem is not only that kids don’t have time to play. It’s also that schools have become increasingly toxic. Schools have taken away recess, taken away a lunch hour period, the lunch period is not even long enough to eat lunch. There are documented cases in schools where kids must gobble down their lunch. They’ve got 15 minutes to eat lunch, if you’re stuck in line to get lunch or need to use the washroom, then there is not much time to eat.  This is what’s happening in American schools. They become very stressful places. With Common Core in the United States, which is a development that began in about 2010, that is focusing on standardized testing. This has reduced the ability of teachers to be creative in the classroom so that schools have become primarily a test drill. And the more fun things have been taken away. I don’t know to what degree these things are occurring in Canada. I hear somewhat different reports. When students in the United States are asked what is the source of your anxiety? And there are many such studies now. They overwhelmingly say that it’s school pressure. The pressure to get high grades, the pressure to do well on those tests, and the lack of anything enjoyable in school. This is what they say is making them anxious, depressed and in some cases even suicidal. The suicide rate in the United States drops every summer when school closes. Drops markedly and then it goes back again every time when schools open. It also dropped during COVID, by the way, for the reasons that I just described. This has been very well documented, so school is without question the biggest cause of anxiety and depression in children, at least in the United States. And so this is something that parents need to have a better understanding of. There’s also research that shows. That if you if you divide schools up in accordance with how high pressure they are, so there are some schools that really advertise themselves, some are public schools, some are private schools that really focus on getting high test scores, getting the kids into fancy Ivy League colleges. Those are the schools where the greatest rates of anxiety, depression, drug addiction, alcoholism and suicide occur. It’s those high pressure schools. Sadly, these are the kinds of schools that many parents are trying to get their kids into. I think they should be avoiding those schools like the plague. The evidence is overwhelming. The rates of anxiety, depression, all these things are two or three times as high in that category of school than in the more typical lower pressure school. But all schools are becoming high pressure now with Common Core in the United States. So, this is something that I think not enough parents are aware of. And so. When people hear their kids complaining about school pressure, they said, Oh yeah, no. Yeah, of course nobody likes school and so on and so forth. But I think you shouldn’t just brush that off. You should really listen to your kids because I think kids really are suffering from school pressure at much higher levels than any of us adults were. When we were in school.

[Tammy Schamuhn] Another option for parents that we have in Canada, which could be helpful, and they don’t have to go to school very often to do this, is outreach. We call them outreach schools, they have a place to do homework and ask a teacher questions. Then the rest of the time is spent at home completing modules, and you can get them with other groups of kids. As a psychologist, I have had plenty of clients where I have said, “pull them out of school, this is not good for them.” Once they found outreach schools their mental health started to get better. They could learn at their own pace through modules, and they could get one-on-one help from teachers. It wasn’t the same pressure, and they weren’t being bullied. So that’s another option too. If parents are listening and you’re thinking, “I need to get my kid out of a traditional school.” In Canada, they’re called outreach. It’s a hybrid model of home schooling and traditional schooling. At least it gets them into a less toxic environment. 

[Dr. Gray] It’s good that some of these options are coming around. I think it’s important for parents to look into what the options are.

[Tammy Schamuhn] Thank you so much, Dr. Gray. This is just right up my alley. I’m a big advocate of play. This is why when kids are struggling with mental health, I almost solely recommend play therapy with a registered play therapist because it’s usually child-centered play. I always feel like “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to sit there and be with a child as they play.” But it’s amazing how their mental health shifts over time with that modality. Thank you for bringing your research to the forefront again. For everyone who’s listening, Dr. Gray has several books that you can find on Amazon. Type in Dr. Peter Gray, and you’ll see all the books he has written, especially about the education system. If you want to learn more about his research on play specifically, this is the one I really was delving into on this this episode is called Free to Learn and go to check out his TED Talk as well. It’s absolutely enlightening, and everyone will gain something from listening to you speak on stage. Thank you so much, Dr. Gray.

[Dr. Gray] Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.