Peter Gray is a psychologist and author of Free to Learn. For many years, he has been studying play. He keeps a substack here.
Gray discusses his perspective on the ideal education system, which he believes should be a bottom-up movement rather than a top-down imposition. He emphasizes the importance of self-directed education where children have the freedom to follow their curiosity and interests. Gray explains how traditional schooling stifles curiosity and playfulness, and traces the historical roots of the current education system. He also highlights the sociopolitical factors that have contributed to the decline of children's mental health, arguing against the popular notion that social media is the primary cause. Additionally, the conversation touches on the impact of economic inequality on parenting styles and child freedom. Gray shares his current projects, including initiatives aimed at encouraging more free play in schools and educating pediatricians on the importance of play, while offering practical advice for parents to support their children's independence and curiosity.
"If offered the opportunity to redesign the entire educational system as a top-down thing, me being the czar of education and telling everybody else what they should do, I would decline the offer...it really has to emerge from the bottom up."
"Education works best when the people being educated are in charge of it... Children are biologically designed to learn through exploration, through play.""Our school system suppresses curiosity and playfulness...the two primary biological educative drives in children."
"Ask your child: 'What would you like to do that you haven’t done before that might be a little bit frightening but that you’d really like to try?' It’s how children build courage and how parents build trust."
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Transcript and contents below.
Contents
00:19 Redesigning the Education System
01:41 The Role of Curiosity and Play in Learning
05:55 Historical Context of Traditional Schooling
08:26 Children's Rights and Freedom Over Time
12:11 Cultural Shifts and Parental Concerns
15:28 Impact of Economic Inequality on Parenting
18:53 Rise of Stranger Danger and Overprotectiveness
28:14 Common Core and the Mental Health Crisis
38:28 The Evolution of Reading and Technology
41:17 Balancing Screen Time and Real Life
43:12 Reflections on 'Free to Learn'
45:07 Evolutionary Psychology and Its Impact
50:28 Advice for a Fulfilling Retirement
01:00:04 Creative Processes and Inspirations
01:05:45 Current Projects and Parenting Advice
Transcript (This has been AI assisted so mistakes are possible)
Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to the psychologist Peter Gray. He is the author of Free to Learn and an inspiration to those interested in self directed education. Peter, welcome.
Peter: I'm very happy to be here.
Ben: If you could redesign the entire education system, what would it look like to you?
Peter: First of all, let me say that I would if offered the opportunity to redesign the entire educational system as a top down thing, me being the czar of education and telling everybody else what they should do, I would decline the offer. I think that, I think it has to be a bottom up movement.
No educational system is going to work. unless the families believe in it and want it. So I think that the way that the educational, I'll get to your question, to the intent of your question in a moment, but I think that the educational system, it really has to emerge from the bottom up.
My ideal would not be a single educational system. It would be the many opportunities for learning many different ways of learning, many different and where families would have options of what to do. Some families would homeschool, some families would get together with other families and create little parent co ops.
Some families would would opt for something different. But my own beliefs, of course, are that education works best. When the people being educated are in charge of it, that when the children, if we're talking about children, when children are making their own choices about what it is that they're doing and learning children are really biologically designed to learn through through exploration through play.
They're born highly curious. That curiosity leads them to want to understand the world around them. And they're born with this strong drive to play and play in many different ways and play is how children develop skills so that it's, if instead of the question, how would I design it for everybody?
What I would try to encourage everybody would be to create for their children or for the children that they would like to. draw into it opportunities for self directed education. This is what I've been involved in for a long time, where the children have many learning opportunities. There is all sorts of tools for learning available to them, where there are adults who can help them if they want help and whatever it is they're interested in, but where children are really free to follow to develop and follow their own interests.
That's really the education That I that I believe. I think that the first, that the years of life that we call sort of the school years, especially the early school years, up onto maybe the mid, up as far as maybe the mid teenage years, are really times for exploration, for discovery, figuring out who you are, what you like to do.
And what kind of life you would like to have once you're an adult we're not giving children an opportunity to do that now because we keep them busy all the time. We keep them busy with school work, which is mostly irrelevant to them and with with extracurricular activities outside of school. We don't give them much chance to really, I even asked the question, who am I and what do I like to do?
Though that's what children really need much more opportunity for.
Ben: And why do you think traditional schooling, let's call it that, stifles curiosity and motivation so much? Is it simply because we've set them this curriculum and we fill it with all You know, our ideas, which might not be their ideas, or is there some particularly strong lines of evidence that you think that why traditional schooling seems to stifle so many children in terms of this curiosity, motivation, and those kind of things?
Peter: Yes both of those are correct. The, first of all, why does it stifle? Of course it does. You can't curiosity. is disruptive in the typical school. You can't have, the child who wants to explore things is disruptive in the classroom. You can't have, you can't have 30 kids in the classroom.
You can't even have 10 in the classroom. And expect them all to be interested in the same thing at the same time. They're all curious about the same thing. Curiosity doesn't work that way. You've got to, if you're going to have a, have an educational system in which you, in which children can explore based on their curiosity, you have to expect everybody to be doing different things.
You can't expect, you can't have order in the classroom, where everybody's sitting in seats and everybody's doing, and you also can't have certain, Expectations that everybody's going to learn the same things at the same time that just can't happen. And of course, curiosity is destroyed. So is playfulness.
Because if you're playful, that's that gets you into trouble in school. That's just so so our school system. So the two primary biological educative drives in children are curiosity and playfulness. This is nature's way of educating children and schools just have to shut them off. You can't run a school in our traditional way.
It has to be an entirely different concept of a school. But a somewhat, more historical answer to this is the original purpose of schools was precisely to shut off curiosity and play. The school, the schools that we have today, the western type schools that we have today, which are now all over the world, really started in the 17th century, even somewhat before in response to the Protestant Reformation, where the belief was that we need to educate children so they can read the Bible and so they will be obedient.
And so the schools were designed primarily in Prussia the German state of Prussia, to educate them. to suppress children's spontaneous ways of learning, deliberately to suppress that, that it was believed at that time that children were born sinful, and that things that they did themselves would be sinful and harmful, and that the primary thing that children needed to learn is to is to be obedient to authority.
And so schools develop deliberately to suppress children's own endeavors and get them to obey to authority, to the school master, as they were called at that time. And so a school system developed that for that purpose and we've still got that same school system. Nobody that I know who goes into teaching says, I'm going into teaching so I can suppress curiosity and so that I can inhibit playfulness and so I can indoctrinate children.
Nobody says that. But. Every teacher who goes into the traditional school system is going into a system that was designed for that purpose. And no matter what the teachers say they're doing or want to do, they are suppressing curiosity and they are indoctrinating. They may not be indoctrinating them in the Bible anymore, but they're indoctrinating them in whatever the curriculum is.
Because it the school system is not designed for questioning, for critical thought, for for people having really different ideas. It's designed for uniformity and it's designed for learning a particular curriculum, whatever that curriculum is.
Ben: And do you think children have more rights today than or fewer rights, if you trace it back, historically children were allowed to work.
Then they were looking too long hours. We decided, Oh, that might not be such a great thing. But then rather than giving them more time to play we put them in an education system. And then there seems to be over history, talk about 50, a hundred years a kind of. tension between giving children more rights and more say in what they do and less rights or less ability to move around and go out and play or take their own transport and things.
How do you think that's evolved? What do you think we should be doing about it? And do you think children have more or less rights and should we be giving them more understanding of that?
Peter: That's a really good question. So there's some ways. And there's some ways in which children right now have more rights than they have in at least in Western history, in modern Western history, they have more rights in the home to talk back to their parents to eat what they choose to eat rather than what their parents tell them they have to eat, to dress the way they want to dress.
We're even talking about the rights of children to change their gender if they want to do that, right? These are rights that were not present when I was a child as much as they are today. Certainly not present 150 years ago as much as they are today. On the other hand children in the past certainly when I was a child and before that weren't watched all the time.
We had certain kind of restrictions in the home, but we spent a lot of time outside of the home with other kids, playing, exploring, doing things that kids have always done. And there, children were free. And now we're not allowing that nearly as much as in the past. That's been largely cut off. Children are not free, at least in the United States, to just go out and play on their own and with other children, without adults there guarding them, protecting them, telling what to do, and so on and so forth.
So in that respect, children have far fewer rights. They have, as one author who's looked at the history of this put up, children have more personal rights in the home than they did before, but far less freedom outside of the home than they ever have had before. It's also the case that the school system over time, certainly since the years when I was in school many decades ago, has become far more time consuming.
And far more restrictive of what you can do within the school than it used to be. So school has become less free than it used to be. We used to have much more time for recess. We used to have a long lunch hour. We had shorter school days. And in elementary school, we didn't have homework. So when I was a kid, school was not as oppressive.
It was not as big a deal in children's lives as it is today. So that's the in the long run, in the very long run of human history. We were probably freest, children were probably freest when, back when we were hunter gatherers. The studies that have been done of hunter gatherer cultures that have survived into the 20th century at least, and studied in the 20th century children have amazing amount of freedom compared to children in any modern day society other than the hunter gatherer culture.
Ben: Yeah, I recall when I was 12, I took my first solo plane trip and now I think about it and speak to people are amazed that a 12 year old would take a solo plane trip and it wasn't a big deal. And I think there must be multiple causes of this decline of play or the the freedom or the agency that we give children.
What do you think are the major ones around it? Do you think it's just a cultural shift, the sort of media narrative and these institutions and structures? And if it is that, is it something which is going to be really difficult to reverse?
Peter: Yeah, I think it is going to be difficult to reverse. First of all, regarding your solo plane trip, I, my son His first solo plane trip.
He, when he was 12 years old, he told his mother and me that he wanted to go to to, to England. He had been playing Dungeons and Dragons and he was really interested in castles and Neither his mother or I at that point had ever been overseas. He knew we were sticking the mud so we weren't going to go.
And so he planned, this was before the internet, this was in 1980 he planned his own trip he, and he announced to us that, and he said that he was going to go and he said, don't worry about the money. I'll earn the money, which he did. He was working, he worked in a restaurant first washing dishes, and then they put him on the line ticket.
At 12 years old and he earned his own money for this trip. He figured the whole trip out by himself at 12 years old. I believe he was 13 by the time he left. He claims he was 12. We've had a discussion about it, but I would have to look up the actual dates. But I think he had, I think he had barely turned 13 at the time.
I think he left after May 25th, which would have been his birthday. So that so that was, now that, at that time even then, that raised some eyebrows. But it wasn't, People wouldn't have regarded his mother and me as negligent. They wouldn't have put us in jail for allowing that to happen, right?
Today, they might. The airline probably wouldn't have allowed him on, unless there were guarantees he was going to be met. And on top of this, he was a child who's, Type 1 diabetes. So he, it needs to monitor his own insulin and all of this kind of stuff. No, I wouldn't do that today. Not because I wouldn't trust the child to do it, but because it would be so against the cultural grain.
So even since 1980, there has been a huge change in the way the culture looks at this kind of thing. So I think that the change in the culture has come from a variety of causes. It is interesting that In the United States, the biggest shift occurred in the 1980s. Some of this was building up gradually before, but the biggest shift in thinking about this occurred in the decade between 1980 and 1990.
And there are several things that happened in the United States that I think all contributed to this. One of them was was the election of Ronald Reagan as president and the and and a legislature that was with Reagan. And what happened beginning in the 1980s is that the economy changed dramatically in the United States.
Such that the gap between the rich and poor increased and has been increasing ever since. There's a lot of research that shows that when the gap between rich and poor is great, when you lose the kind of of safety net that occurs when government provides supports for people who are poor.
When you lose the safety of labor unions, which were more or less destroyed during the Reagan era, and when you begin to greatly decrease the taxes on the wealthy, and therefore have to cut back on safety measures for the poor. Suddenly now, parents become far more concerned about whether their children are going to make it financially or not.
Back when I was a kid, parents weren't that worried about that. I grew up in a working class family, and neither of my parents at that time had gone to college. My uncles, with one exception, were not college educated. They all had. decent jobs. They all could support a family. They could own a home.
They could even own a little cottage out in the country, and without, and it, and the ed, that this educational achievement was far less of a big deal. Then with these changes, people began to worry. And we also began, there were also other changes that occurred that, For a variety of reasons, some of those working class jobs went away.
People began to think that the way that I can make sure. that my child, or at least increase the chances that my child will succeed as an adult, is to make sure that my child is well educated, that they do all the right things in order to prepare themselves in what suddenly now is seen as a very competitive world.
We didn't see it as so competitive, and so there's actually research that shows cross culturally That in countries where the gap between rich and poor is great, parents are far more controlling of their children, far more concerned that they do the quote right thing educationally, far less likely to simply let them have leisure time and explore and all of these kinds of things.
than in countries where the gap between rich and poor is less. So for example, in the Scandinavian countries, Finland, for example, the, there the gap between rich and poor is far less than in the United States. And children are afforded much more individual freedom there than they are in the United States.
There's actually graphs showing that if you plot on one axis, the degree of economic inequality. And on another axis, parents attitudes about parenting and put it on a kind of controlling versus permissive spectrum, as you go out towards more and more economic inequality, you go towards more and more controlling, less and less permissiveness.
So I think that was part of it. In addition to that. In 1979 and then again in 1981, there were very much publicized cases of a young boy being kidnapped, in one case murdered, in the other case lost, never recovered. In both cases, if I remember correctly, there were six year old boys apparently snatched away by a stranger.
And suddenly we now had warnings about stranger danger. People were, you would hear in the United States in the 1980s, public service announcements, do you know where your child is now? And so the concern about watching your child all the time, because they might be snatched away. Now this is, was then an extraordinarily rare crime.
That's why it was so newsworthy. It's still extraordinarily rare. It almost never happens. But people began to become afraid of that. And that became a reason not to let your child out of sight. And that reason has even grown over time even for this irrational reason that, there's this tiny little probability, little chance that your child might be snatched away by a stranger.
It almost never occurs. But people think it occurs frequently because of the way it's publicized. So that, that, that played a role. And then there's one other thing that happened in the 1980s, also at the direction of Ronald Reagan, which was the a book that a federal analysis of our school system, which concluded, in fact, this was a foregone conclusion based on who was chosen to work on this study and write this book, that our school system has become too lax we are not keeping up with other countries, particularly not keeping up with the Southeast Asian countries educationally, and we're going to fall behind.
And so this book was published and that became then that initiated a new way of thinking what then was regarded as a reformation in schools, which was the opposite of the kind of reformation I would be wanting. More and more classes, more and more testing, less and less freedom of teachers to do what they wanted.
And then that ultimately became incorporated into the No Child Left Behind Act and then Common Core. Which greatly restricted what teachers could do in the classroom. So school became ever more rigid, ever more controlled by top down by a curriculum. So all of those kinds of changes, I think, are, have led to the system that is leading children to suffer so much today.
Ben: I hadn't put together the politics of it or the emphasis that Reagan had on, the individual and the ability or opportunity for jobs and that type of thing, as well as say, the stranger danger and articles on school. It's interesting because for instance, in Finland, you don't go to school until five or seven, even it would be, you could easily just go and no one would blink and in some cultures like in japan They make a big deal of the first time you could go to the shops yourself, which you might do at three four Three or four or something like that and have this you know that from the cross cultural and in the uk we had a big splash again with a missing child Maddie, I believe a daughter, which again became very salient, but to your point, the statistics of it are extremely rare, much more likely for all sorts of other incidents than that.
But I guess that brings us to the point today that parents fear that they will be bad parents, or, even there might be some legal act against them if they take their children out of school, if they feel that the school's not working for them and that type of Atmosphere or even within school just to try and give children perhaps more agency Around how they would live their lives even within the school system What would you say to parents who feel that they might be bad parents or what we can do?
Around letting children have a bit more agency in play
Peter: Yes yeah, you make a good point that, so it has now become a moral imperative that you and in some degree legal imperative, not actually written in law, but treated as if it were written in law, about always minding your child, always watching your child the One of the things that's happened is that social child protective services in most states have a requirement that if somebody calls the police or calls the hotline and says there's a child out there not being watched by an adult, that they have to investigate.
And so a lot of parents who allow their child out in the way that. All parents would have and, decades ago have had this experience of social services showing, social protected, child protective services showing up at their home. If you're white and middle class or above, you will fight it in court and almost die.
essentially always win or win even before it have to go to court. But if you are black and poor, the statistics are there's a pretty good chance that they would take your child away. So people have become vigilant for that reason, even over their children, even if they know that it would be good for their child to go out and do these things on their own.
It would be developmentally appropriate. It would be valuable. The child would enjoy the child would grow from it. So people are afraid for that reason. And then in addition to that, it has really become it has become such a norm and it's been present for so long that people begin to feel that if you're not watching your child all the time, and if you're not there to teach your child and direct your child, that you're not a good parent, you're a bad parent.
And of course nobody wants to be a bad parent and even people who intellectually understand this, it would be perfectly safe for my eight year old, nine year old child to go play in the park by themselves without me. And they're perfectly responsible, they could do that. Even they, And even if they're not so concerned that some neighbor is going to call, but most people are concerned about that.
But even despite that, they might not do it because there's something in their head that says everybody around me says this would make me a bad parent. Maybe it would make me a bad parent. You don't necessarily think it through that way. But we automatically believe if we're not doing what other people do, Is there something wrong with us?
Is there something, we're all creatures of norms. That's part of being a human being. And if we're not behaving like other people are behaving, we begin, not only are we worried that other people are going to question us and criticize us, but we begin to question ourselves and criticize ourselves about that.
So absolutely. What can we do? I try to whenever I speak to parents and when I write articles and books to him towards parents, I really try to talk about all the what are the myths here and what are the things you can do? And given the constraints, what can you do in our society today?
Without that would give your child more freedom, more opportunity to play more control over their own lives, more more possibility that they can grow up with a growing sense of independence and responsibility and therefore become competent, mentally healthy adults. So the and there are things parents can do.
Ben: So you touched on mental health. And there's a lot of concern, in the media about mental health in children, although some of that might be due to more awareness and diagnosis and the like, and some of it might be a trend. I think you've argued for this connection between the decline in free play and the rise in things like anxiety and depression amongst young people.
We've had others more recently, hate who's made a lot of a kind of social media hypothesis, although there's been some pushback from that and some articles in nature. And I think you've been a little bit skeptical about whether the evidence is around that. I guess there's also a complication as maybe if you're if you have too much screen time, you're not out playing in the park, then again screen time might be one of the times when you are able now to get together with your like minded peers and hang out because you're not allowed to hang out elsewhere.
So you might as well hang out digitally. I've seen great adventures in things like Minecraft worlds or chat groups and things like that. So I'd be interested in your view as to whether there is, how strong the phenomena are. of concern about mental health in children is and perhaps the weighting that you would put on a decline in play arguments for it versus say social media hypothesis and the like.
Peter: I think it is primarily the decline in play, the increased toxicity of school, the way we do school and and and the decline generally of opportunities for children to do things independently. It's not just play. Play, I define as an independent activity. If it's controlled by adults, it's not play.
But other independent things, like just traveling around the neighborhood by yourself, getting places by yourself, doing what you did at age 12 and what my son did at age 12 or 13. Those kinds of things. Yeah. We don't even allow kids to go, downtown by themselves at age 12 anymore, in this country.
So that's, so all of that is, of course, that is going to make kids, that's going to stunt children's mental development. Now, in terms of the, in my mind, the best measure of the decline of the, of the decline of mental health is probably suicide rate, even though that's just the tip of the iceberg of suffering.
because it's a solid number that the way that you measure anxiety and depression, you're right, could possibly be changed in terms of people's willingness to report it, to admit it and so on and so forth. But the suicide rate is by 1990 was already about five times what it was in the 1950s for teenagers.
and it peaked in the 1990s. There's actually, let me spend a couple minutes on this because it, this also gets to the difference between what Jonathan Haidt believes and what I believe about this. Between 1950 and 1990, you had an upward slope of suicide rates. To the degree that we can, we have data on Based on assessments of anxiety and depression, those also were upper sloping.
Reached a peak, interestingly, in 1990. That was the peak. That peak was as high as it is today. We're not higher today than we were in 1990 on any measure of mental problems among young people. Fight ignores that totally. So that was all before the internet. That was all before most families had computers in their homes.
We had all, we had already been changing the nature of schooling. We had already been depriving children of free play and a lot of the freedoms that they had before by 1990. Then. What's interesting, and I only began talking about this recently, I tended to ignore it as everybody else did, things got better for a while.
Between 1990 and 2000, suicide rate went down. So did depression and anxiety, to the degree that we have reasonable measures of those things, went down. Not to 1950s levels, but went down by about a third of the way down. Then leveled off between 2000 and 2010. Now, why did they go down? The only answer I can come up with is they went down because of the internet.
It went down because we had by 1990, we had pretty much prevented kids from interacting with one another, playing, exploring, but now they had a new way to do it. They had a new way of doing it. They had they figured out how to use these computers before most adults did. Once that but by the time by the mid 1950s, by the mid 1990s, most families with teenagers had computers with an Internet connection.
They were playing games with one another. They were playing multiplayer video games. They were communicating with one another. They had also some kind of expertise that many adults didn't have. You would go into department stores in the mid 1990s to the computer section, and there would be a teenager there explaining how these machines worked.
So suddenly, kids found a new way to communicate. They gained a new kind of status in a sense, because they had figured this stuff out and I think that's why it went down. It didn't go back because this didn't, this was not as good as what kids had before back in the 1950s, when you could just go out and play and explore and do all these interesting things outdoors as well.
But this was better than what you had in the 1990s. Then So then the question is, why did it start going back up again? Beginning around 2010, it started going back up again, and we're now back at 1990s levels on all of this. We're not above it, but we're back at 1990s levels. We've still got the internet.
We've still got video games. What happened to bring it back up? And it's not that suddenly we're allowing children more freedom. I, my explanation for it, and I've written some blog posts about this. I'm currently writing a book that deals with this. But the, my explanation, Is common core.
This is when this increase, by the way, despite what height says in the book, did not occur worldwide , this increase in it did not occur throughout Europe. It just did not occur. I've looked at the data, it didn't occur there, . The suicide rate has been flat there. It was flat in Canada, it was flat in the whole EU suicide rates.
And as. probably the most reliable measure, did not increase among teens between 2010 And and 2020, which is usually the decade that Haidt is looking at so why did it increase in the United States and not those other places? Those other places, they have the internet, they have social media, they're not deprived of these things.
They're on it as much as our kids are, but they're not suffering in the same rate. Why not? It's because the suffering is not because of being on the internet. It's because the suffering is because we've done too much. What we've done with our schools, their schools changed dramatically with the onset of Common Core in the United States.
There's no question about that. Every study that's been done in which teenagers themselves are asked about what is it is the source of your anxiety and depression. Every study shows that the answer they give you far and away more than any other answer is school. And beginning after 2010, beginning with Common Core, really beginning around 2013 when most states had Common Core, that answer became even more common than it was before.
So just to give you an example of the American Psychological Association did a study in 2013 called Stress in America. They do this study every year with adults, but every once in a while they include teenagers. 2013, they included teenagers. They found that teenagers, by their measure, were the most stressed out people in the country.
And when they asked what the source of stress was, 83 percent cited school. Nothing else came close. You could list more than one thing, but nothing else came close. The same study that was done four years earlier, when they asked teens that question, it was something like 50 percent said it was school. So it jumps from 50 percent to 83 percent saying school is what's stressing me out.
I think that, and that, that was the time, and there were also by, at that time, by 2013, there were many more kids who said they were feeling stressed, they were feeling anxious, and so on, that was true. So Hyatt and some others show this curve, they don't show the fact that things were going down before that, or that we were just as high before, they show this curve and they say what else could it be?
This is when cell phones came into being. And my answer is something else happened at that same time. And that's this dramatic change in school.
Ben: That's fascinating. I haven't heard that as well articulated and I look forward to reading your book on it. I wonder if there's any data then on depression rates or suicide rates in those who are at self directed places or homeschool, unschooled.
Because there's probably a large enough sample in the U. S. now. Of that, maybe even in the UK, because there's a reasonable home education part, and maybe that would provide some evidence for you. It also leads me to think that means that you're probably less worried than, say, the media would suggest on how children are using screen time.
And would you basically say that, that you could just let them be? And is that from any age, or is maybe nine or ten a little bit too young to have unrestricted screen time? Again, just let children be let them have agency. They can maybe suffer the consequences of a sleepless night. Maybe they'll learn from that.
Are you generally less worried about screen time or is there still an opportunity cost for these other kinds of play, which would be maybe similar to what hunter gatherers or others do have more outdoor play and or does it matter less as long as it's an independent child chosen activity,
Peter: So I think one thing, if we want kids to be on screens more, we have to let them be outdoors more.
We have to allow them other options. And what that means is not putting them into adult directed sports. That's not play, that's just more like school. That means really allowing them to be kids, allowing them. So in self directed learning centers, kids are allowed to be on screens as much as they want.
And they are on screens a fair amount. Why wouldn't they be? It's the biggest tool we have today. It's a bit, it's a major educational tool but they're also outdoors a lot. They're also playing outdoors. They're doing a lot of things because they can. They've got a big menu and most of them are taking use of it.
Now, there's always been some kids, even when I was a kid in the 1950s, there's some kids, we call them nerds, right? They're indoor people. Back in my day, they spent all their time reading. Why would they read? Why would they want to read instead of go out fishing with me? I couldn't figure that out.
There's still some people given a choice. They want to be on the computer all the time, so that's the but so there's their individual differences. And we've now had this round long enough to know that those who are on the computer all the time, they can learn all. They go on to find lives, they go on to a whole variety of lives.
Many of them become computer technicians or computer specialists of one sort or video game designers, but they don't all do. Some of them go on to become anything they want to be. They develop skills, they build competence. The computer, these computer games are extraordinarily complex and difficult.
They're, they build your intelligence in ways that you can apply in all sorts of ways. So I'm not that worried about it. I do think, here's what I do think, especially for young children. So back when I was a kid in the 1950s, concerning going outdoors, doing things outdoors, parents understood that there are dangers.
And they taught us about the dangers. They taught us safety rules look both ways before you cross the street. If if somebody stops in a car and offers you candy to get into the car, go away. If they try to pull you in, scream at the top of your voice. We were all, Spirits weren't naive, they were, they knew there were some dangers out there.
The risks were pretty small about the stranger thing, but the risk was there and they taught us what to do. There was also general advice, generally speaking, especially if you're going to be out late at night, be with a friend, don't go by yourself, there's safety in numbers. There were these kinds of things taught to us.
I think. We also need to teach young people about safety on the internet. There are dangers on the internet, including the danger of just getting sucked into it and spending too much time, wasting your time more than even you would really want to do. So instructions in time management, how to control your time.
I also think it's appropriate to have certain rules about, I wouldn't take, I think it would be terrible idea to take away the cell phone. It's the most powerful tool we've got, educational tool. It's also a safety tool. If you, if something happens to you, you've got that in your pocket, you can call your parents or you can call 911.
Why take that away? But, There are safety things about it, don't, just like you don't, if somebody offers you candy to get into the car, if somebody meets you on the internet and wants to meet you and you don't know them, don't do it. These are common sensing. Most kids beyond the age of about 13 understand this or about the age of 15 understand more so today than in the past.
They're pretty savvy about this kind of stuff, but there may be some who aren't. Yeah. There are also times in places where none of us adults as well as children should Should allow ourselves to get on our screens like at the dinner table. Let's all put our computers away So let's all put our cell phones away so we can be with one another at dinner don't I think it's good advice to anybody who's tempted to keep their phone on at night to just not take it into the bedroom, keep it outside of the bedroom because it might keep you awake.
You might not, you might hear it pop. You might hear a little ding and be an irresistibly wanna answer it. It's going to keep you up at night. Don't do that. So keep it out of the bedroom. Yeah. If you are involved, if you're going to a place where you're having a meeting with other people, like you or I would be very rude right now if we picked up our cell phone and started checking our email or our social media contacts.
What a rude thing to do. So don't take it to meetings where you're talking, where you're supposed to be there talking to other people. I think it's perfectly appropriate in school settings where you're going to have a discussion about something and you're all supposed to be present to say, park your I also think summer camps would be quite legitimate to say this is a camping experience where we are learning about being present in physically with one another and being outdoors.
And the smartphone is a distraction from that. So no smartphones during camping period. I think those are all legitimate things to do. To do but taking a smartphone away from a child of any age is taking away the most valuable Tool we have in our modern society.
Ben: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense give them rules and principles you know the advice that you'd want to give anyone including ourselves but don't take away don't take away the actual tool.
Your book free to learn I think it's over a decade old. I was wondering in those years or even from looking all the way back. Do you still feel the core ideas are as important now as ever? I get this feeling as yes. And has anything changed over that time when you would put more emphasis on something now than you would have done previously?
Have you changed your mind about anything?
Peter: I haven't changed my mind about any of it. The, As I've explained, if anything, the school system has become worse than what I was describing there, and I might have, if I were to do a revision of the book, I might put more emphasis on the harm of of schooling as we do it now, and especially of, especially since Common Core.
Common Core was just beginning to come into effect at that time, and so I didn't really have that data. But on all the other things things have gotten worse. I would have also, however, which I didn't do in that book, talked about the, I did in that book say that, people who are worried about about the internet and online activity, I did say this has been, if anything, the saving grace rather than the cause of the problem.
I would even emphasize that now more than I did that now that I have really looked at the data showing. That things improved, meant improved for kids during this, that decade between the time that we had, we began that most kids now had online access and the time when common core took effect, we had actually improvement in children's mental health.
I didn't talk about that at all in free to learn. That'll be a big topic in my next book. One of a number of big topics in my next book.
Ben: Yeah, I think we're all very quick to jump on risks, but not so much on the opportunities, which are more slow moving. I guess in terms of your writing as well, you wrote one of the first psychology textbooks.
I looked up, I think the first edition was maybe around 1991 and you introduced concepts of, evolutionary or evolutionary psychology of the time. And I was just thinking about the influence that had on also your work on hunter gatherer societies and learning. And I think you're still updating or maybe that textbook is being updated, but I was wondering over that period of time, what do you think has changed in core psychology ideas?
And I don't know, why were we so late to thinking about evolutionary psychology? And do you think it's still influential in our thinking today?
Peter: That's a good question. So at the time, so when I was, it would have really been in the 1980s that I was writing the first edition of the textbook.
And you're right, I think it probably came out in 1991. I subsequently revised it for six more editions over many years. And then the book was taken over by somebody else to revise who did two more editions of it. So it's currently in its eighth edition. It's been around for a long time. But at the time that I was writing it the idea of bringing an evolutionary approach to psychology, there was a lot of stigma about that idea.
There were a lot of negativity about it. I think that Nazi Germany put in everybody's minds a bad taste. about thinking about human beings from a genetic biological perspective, because in some sense that was the essential rationale of Nazism. And it was also an argument. It was an argument. There were arguments at that time based on kind of pseudo evolutionary thinking, pseudo biological thinking about racial superiority of whites over blacks, about the superiority of males over females.
There was a kind of There was a kind of general and some of the books from an evolutionary perspective at that time fed into that belief. So the kind of belief that distinctions between men and women, for example, are biologically ingrained and men are going to be dominant and women are meant to be mothers and domestic.
These kinds of. Things graded quite understandably on people. And so it gave the whole idea of looking at human behavior, talking about it in terms of evolved tendencies, gave it a bad name. And feminism was coming into its core, and the feminists at that time were adamantly opposed to biological theories about human beings, at least some of them were.
I had the advantage, and I think this was very clever on the part of the publishing company, of assigning an editor to me, who was not only a very experienced editor, but also was an ardent feminist. And I had to, in order to, in order I made it a goal. Anything that go, went into the book I had the right.
They were very clear. I could put whatever I wanted in the book. The editor was there really for, to help me. And I took that quite literally. I said to myself, if I can't, convince Phyllis, my editor, that this is real science, that this is legitimate, that this is, and that this is not something that's harming women then it's okay to go in.
And I think the book came out far better because I took that on. I didn't want to make the mistake of presenting Things that were biases that were came from a particular way of thinking. So this was also a time when really the evolutionary approach was just beginning. And so my textbook, my introductory psychology textbook was the first introductory psychology book really to bring an evolutionary perspective to bear in a real way.
Into the book and run it all the way through the book. I think it helped change psychology I think a lot of people who then became professors of psychology had learned about psychology as freshmen in with my book And I think it played a role not necessarily the major role, but it played a role in the evolution of psychology as a science to be more accepting of an evolutionary perspective about human behavior
Ben: That's brilliant.
And it helped you retire or semi retire in your in your fifties. I say semi retire because you went on to do tons of other stuff as as well. I'd be interested perhaps a couple of things is for those who might be thinking about retirement, you seem to really enjoyed it and you've been doing lots of things.
What advice do you or thoughts do you have about retirement? People using their leisure time. I think you put a survey out also on your sub stack. I very much recommend listeners to check out the sub stack. But yeah what do you think people should be doing with their leisure time? And should we be looking to retire earlier?
Perhaps not all of us have got royalties from a textbook to rely on. But this thinking about how you've enjoyed retirement and what to do with our time.
Peter: Yes. For me, it was a very wise decision. I, I did it for several reasons. I was far from typical retirement age. Professors tend to stay on forever.
Sometimes the administration wants to get rid of them and it's hard to get rid of them when you've got tenure, but some I was far from retirement age from typical retirement age, but I had already been teaching for 30 years. I had been chair of the department for a small portion of that time.
I was often involved in administrative responsibilities and I was And as much as I enjoyed some aspects of teaching, there were, as you might guess from my book, Free to Learn, there were other aspects of teaching and grading and so on that I was beginning to not enjoy and not really believe in any longer.
And I, and I certainly wasn't interested in becoming a dean or working on more administrative ways at the university. And I did, because the book made enough money I was set enough for retirement. I didn't have to worry about giving, maintaining that salary. And also, frankly, the university changed a little bit.
The the, I think people, I think that the spirit of kind of collegialism changed and this was not just at Boston College. This was everywhere. The, it became more driven by, universities wanted everybody to get grants and to get grants, you needed to publish a certain amount of research and people began to publish research just for the sake of publishing research to get grants.
And no longer were people spending, one of the great, leisure things about being a professor is just, like having long lunches with your colleagues and talking about ideas and people weren't doing that anymore. Here's the downside of the computer. They were eating their lunch in front of their computer, right?
Catching up on their email, maybe communicating with their colleagues on the other side of the world, whether rather than their colleagues down the hall. And so there was less of a kind of collegial environment that I had always enjoyed at Boston College. So that was another reason. And then finally, this is a personal thing, but my first wife died around that time.
And I began to realize life doesn't go on forever. And I really want to be sure that I'm spending every day doing what I most want to do and not wasting time doing things that I think are not. near the top of my list of what I want to do. And among other things I wanted to start writing for the general public I wanted to do.
And the research I had in mind doing didn't require that I be in an institutional setting. Although I could have continued to do it at Boston college if I needed to do it in an institutional setting. So all of that played into it. And And it was a great decision for me. What I can say, and I've told people repeatedly every day I wake up and say, whatever I do today, it's because I want to do it.
There's nothing that I have to do except like maybe wash yesterday's dishes. But the but in terms of the great bulk of my time, it's, it is in a certain definition play because it's my choice to do it. Or not to do it. I have, as a consequence, been able to do much more research much more writing than I could when I was when I was a full time, full professor at Boston College.
And I also have time for creating a great garden, for bicycling. I'm big into bicycling, kayaking, cross country skiing. I'm 80 years old and I think that the fact that I retired when I was in my 50s, which gave me time to, For leisure time and X and doing things outdoors that I enjoy doing. And I think it's been great for my health.
So it was a great decision for me. Now. I can't tell other people that it would be a great decision for them. But I can say if you're thinking of it and if you, if there are things you would like to do that, you don't have time to do it. And if you can afford to retire. Retiring early, I think, is a great idea.
That sounds excellent. There are some people who retire and they don't know what to do.
Ben: You picked up on your own thing in your life. I I followed someone called Bernie DeKoven, who was someone who was all into, I guess we call it adult play, but it isn't. Like that, it's what, what you allude to, it's about independence, it's about agency, it's about fun, it's not about competitiveness, play, which you might think about, but all this playfulness and that comes into a lot of, I think, creativity and artwork.
I was thinking then if you had anything you would have said to perhaps your younger self, I don't know, your 16 year old self or your 21 year old self, or maybe speaking to a 16 year old today with all of this life experience that you have is there anything you would have particularly Advised your younger self.
It sounds like you know retire as early as you can sounds like a good piece of advice Or make sure like you say make sure every day you're trying to do things that you really want to do is there anything you would have thought
Peter: you know, that's a really good question. I think that it's hard when somebody is fairly happy with their life which I am, it's hard to say that I would have changed something when I was younger, because if I had changed something when I was younger, I might not be who I am now.
So it's a little hard to say that. It's a little hard to say that for sure. I do think that, I do think that I do think that, like many people, throughout my younger years, I was too concerned about other people's judgments. And I think I restrained myself in a lot of ways. I think I'm not the only person who does that by any means.
We're all that way. I tend to be a little bit more that way than many other people. And I think that It was maybe too important to me that people like me all the time. And I think that was constraining on my life. I think I've gradually somewhat overcome that with time. But I think that, I think what I would say to young people today, but it's a different world today than the one I grew up in, is that is don't worry so much.
About school . Don't worry so much about that, because now I've been studying the, I've been studying now people who don't go to school who are self involved in self-directed education, either as homeschoolers following the following, the method of unschooling where they're pursuing their own interests or going to a school.
Like the school, my son went to Bury Valley. where you can follow your, and I see they're doing very well in life and they're discovering their passions. They're going into things that they enjoy. I think if I had opportunities like that, it might have, I might've gotten into what I ultimately got into quicker.
I went through a conventional school. I went to graduate school not really knowing what I wanted to do. I went to graduate school primarily as an alternative to going to Vietnam. I, and at that time you could still get a student deferment. And then by the time that was no longer case, I was married and had a child and had a deferment for that reason.
I didn't go into, I didn't go on to graduate school because I had a particular intellectual passion. I hadn't really developed an intellectual passion at that point. I was interested in a lot of things, but I wasn't passionate about them. And I ended up being a brain researcher, studying the brains of rats and mice and bindings of hormones.
And I did competent work. And I found it somewhat interesting but it wasn't passionate for me and I never was fully into it. I never felt it was really all that important. It wasn't until much later after I was already a professor at Boston College doing that kind of work that I then got interested in child development and that really was interesting to me.
Now the roots of that interest came were really present long before, but I never followed those roots of that interest. I followed what seemed to be a more conventional, safe path of brain research. I I got into a very, happened to who knows why into a fair, very selective university working with Top people who are doing brain research, and I felt boy, I really achieved that, and it was more like, because I could do it, I had to do it, with as opposed to, this is really what I want to do.
And so I think that, this is almost sounds trite because people say it at graduation speeches all the time, follow your passion. But to follow your passions, you have to discover what they are, which means you've got to have time to play and explore. And I, and although I had much more time than most kids have today, I wish I had even more time.
For that and had the opportunity To then by the time I was of college age to really know what it was I wanted in life and would have pursued it in a more direct fashion got into it earlier on
Ben: That sounds like excellent advice. Don't worry too much about school and don't worry about too much about what other people think as long as you get on with it, that's great.
Okay coming to our last. Couple of questions then You what I had is around your own creative process, you write quite prolifically on your sub stack. You used to keep a blog kind of blog posts before you've also done research. Are you a sort of have to write two or three hours?
a day? Do you write more morning or night? Does it just come to you? You obviously spend a lot of time outdoors as well so you have all of these activities I guess does your walking activity outdoors spark the thoughts that you're having and where do your ideas come from? I just, everyone seems to have different creative processes, so I'd be very interested in how yours come about and how your writing in active day is.
Peter: Yeah, I think that so because my it would be different if I were writing fiction. Sometimes I wish I were writing fiction I could just make stuff up But since I am writing I'm trying to write I'm trying to present to people What we know about? or at least what we have good reasons to believe because of research evidence.
So I spend a lot, I spend more time reading research and doing library research than I do in actual writing, sitting down and writing. So I spend a lot of time in front of my computer. I used to spend a lot of time in the library. Now, fortunately, I can sit in front of my computer and get all the information that way, download articles from the library or from the internet.
So I spend a lot of time doing library research. I spend a certain amount of time doing still empirical research, but it's empirical research that doesn't require being in a laboratory survey research and so on. And but I also do spend writing. Interestingly has never been easy for me and maybe that's why I'm attracted to it.
Who knows when I was in school, I always got A's in math. Math was simple for me, but I never really was that interested in math. Writing was more of a challenge. Reading was more of a challenge. I was a late reader, and here I am, a life of mostly reading and writing. The and it's still a challenge.
I'm writing is and I have to go over and over. I try to make it look in my blog posts and and substack posts. I try to make it look as if it's coming easy and spontaneous, but that's the result of a lot of going over and over for the most part. So the other thing that I think helps in terms of the creative aspect is taking time off from it.
So when I'm out bicycling, which I spend at least three hours on average every day outside, is that an exaggeration? I don't think so. If I were really to average it out at least two hours every day outdoors. I have a habit of going for a 15 mile bicycle ride every morning as part of my routine. When I'm on my bicycle or when I'm kayaking or doing cross country skiing whenever we have snow on the ground in the winter, these kind of rhythmic activities in my mind is very free.
I very often come up with with ideas that hadn't come to me before. I, it's like the back of my mind, even though I'm not consciously thinking about it, is working on this and suddenly this new insight. sprouts into my mind. This is not unique for me. There's actually research showing that people have these kinds of insights when they have been working on some problem to be solved, some general area, and now they take a break from it.
And then suddenly some insight comes to them about what they had been working on before. I think the brain, I think there is a sense in which the unconscious mind continues to work on the things that your conscious mind had been working on before. And it's often in those instances that you come up with what we call insights, come up with a novel way of looking at what you have just been struggling with consciously before.
And so I think that's Part of it I really I really think that it, I believe this is part of the way the human mind works, that everybody who's involved, whether you're in, whether you're a writer, whether it's a fiction writer, whether you're a scientist, if you're involved in things that involve You know, a mental process that involves some sense of creativity combined with knowledge that breaks from what you're doing are really important and the kind of break that's best, at least for me, and I would guess for other people, is the kind of break where You're taking a break.
You're doing something that's refreshing and your body is involved in it, but your mind is not focused on that new thing. Your mind is running free. You're enjoying the scenery. You're enjoying the snow. You're enjoying the physical activity, but your mind is not. consciously occupied in a focused way on some new issue so that, so for example, playing chess would not be a good break for me to come up with insights about my writing, whereas bicycle riding would be a good place for that to happen.
Ben: Yeah, that sounds excellent. I recall reading, there's a Japanese author Murakami talked about it, running and thoughts, and I remember the, probably apocryphal, but the little anecdote, I think, is it Archimedes about his eureka, eureka moment in a bath, or it does stretch back. Yes
Okay, great.
So final kind of double question, maybe for you one was, did you want to highlight any current projects that you're working on? So we have the Substack blog and your, you, seems to be some ideas writing in your book. And then maybe you want to give us any parting advice particularly I guess to parents and family about what your kind of work says for them.
So it maybe touches on your current projects, but current projects and any final parenting advice.
Peter: So one, one current project I'm working on is what I'm, what I've been calling the Pediatrics Initiative. I'm, I've I've come to the belief that if the world is going to change on the things that I think they should change on, if parents are going to come to realize that their children need more free play and.
and and freedom in general outdoor freedom, independent activities. They have to hear it from their pediatricians. Pediatric, parents listen to their kids pediatricians and they visit them, at least once a year, all the way sometimes into the teenage years. And my wife initially convinced me of this.
She's an OBGYN and and so I've been working with the, with people at the National Institute for Play, which I've become involved with on developing information for pediatricians about the value of play, which they can then, in their well child visits with, clients, they can then talk about this value of play and even prescribe play to the kids with the parents permission standing there.
And so that's something I'm working on. We've developed a nice brochure to give out. If there are any pediatricians in your, and you're listening to the podcast get in touch with the National Institute for Play and you can get some of this material. We're also sharing this with psychologists who, psychiatrists and psychologists who work with.
Parents were sharing it with schools. I've been working with for some time with the non profit organization, Let Grow, which I was one of the founders with a lot along with Lenore Skenazy and Jonathan Haidt years ago bringing more play into schools. And we're involved with that. I designed a research study looking at the effects of these interventions, where children have an hour of absolute free play at school, age mixed play, and what consequences does this have for the kids and for the school climate, and so on.
I've been, that's some, so those are a couple research projects I'm involved in. And as I mentioned, I'm working on a new book. My working title for the book is Restoring Childhood. I believe that over time we've been gradually taking what is natural childhood away from children. And we need, if we're going to have healthy children, we need to bring childhood back to them.
And so that's what the book is about primarily.
Ben: Last question would be on any parenting advice or advice for families it sounds like that's the whole theme of our podcast is essentially bringing play back to children not being not being so worried, giving them more agency but any final advice maybe as to the principles there and how we can actually put that into action.
Peter: Let me, I could go on for two hours talking about that, but let me say that if I were to make one suggestion that, that isn't exactly what I've already said, as we've talked so far, is that, If you're a parent, it would be a good idea to ask your child this. So what is it that you might like to do that you haven't done before that might be might even be a little bit frightening to you, but you would really like to do it?
And then to have a talk, discussion with that child, with your child about that. And then think about whether you would let your child do that. So maybe your child, so this is a way of counteracting our tendency to restrict our children's activities. This is a way of saying, not imposing, not telling the child to do this or that, but finding out what the child would like to do.
that the child currently isn't doing, maybe because you haven't allowed a child to do it, maybe because the child just assumes you wouldn't allow them to do it, maybe because the child has been over, so overprotected that they haven't even thought about what they really might want to do. But you're raising that question, and Maybe even make a list of things he would like to do.
Part of the and so this is actually something that we are also doing through schools, where teachers are Asking that question. And then they tell the, then they tell the child you have to negotiate with your parents about doing what it is you want to do. And then you can report back to the school class.
We call this the let grow intervention is one of our interventions in schools and it works brilliantly, but it also could work at the. parent level, doesn't have to be a teacher, the parent who says my child really maybe needs more adventures that they're not getting. Let me talk to my child about this, what they would like to do, and then let me think about whether I feel comfortable with them doing it or not.
And maybe it could be even a whole list of things. There's a lot of evidence that this is how children build courage by doing things that they might be a little afraid of and realizing they can do it. And it's also how parents build trust in their kids by realizing, seeing that their parents, that the kids do these things.
And that it makes them happier and makes them stronger to do these things. Why not? One of the things that reinforces this, we did another little research project that I was involved in during the period of lockdown during COVID was a survey of many families about how they were adapting to this lockdown period when they weren't going to school, they were shut at home, all these extracurricular activities that kids were involved in were no longer being held.
And how were, what were kids doing? And we asked both the kids and parents several thousand over the course of two months that we surveyed. And what we learned is that at first the kids were quite bored, they didn't know what to do. But they mostly learned, they mostly figured out interesting things to do.
And parents were surprised that many of the kids wanted to do things that the parent never would have believed. Cook a meal, learn how to cook because here they were at home and they, and the parents were delighted in some cases to with what the kids came up with on their own. And in, in this let grow project that I've just described, sometimes kids say, sometimes they say, I really want to be able to ride my bicycle by myself to my friend's house, those kinds of things, which I would expect they would say, but sometimes they say things like, I would like to.
Cook a meal. I would like to know how to bake a pie. I would like to, and to then be able to do it by myself. Some of these things that we almost used to take for granted, of course kids would learn to do that. We'd want them to learn to do that. Some of these are things that parents are actually not providing their kids the opportunity to do, and they may not even realize the kids want to do it.
So that question of what, At talking with your kids about what they would really like to do that is and what they would like to, maybe they would need some help at the beginning, but ultimately to be able to do it independently.
Ben: That sounds excellent advice. And what would you like to do? And it sounds to me like it should extend definitely to children, but maybe to all of us, that should be a question we should.
Peter: That's a really good point.
Ben: And maybe and that's the thing it's like actually what's relevant for children is actually normally relevant for everyone or vice versa and maybe more people will end up wanting to do solo travel perhaps as young as 12, but maybe for all of us, but that sounds excellent advice to question.
What is it? We would really like to do so. With that Peter Gray. Thank you very much.
Peter: Thank you very much. It's been fun.