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Hey, folks. Ned here. Like me, you want your kids, your students, honestly, all the young people you know, to thrive, and you know how much you can help. But like me, you probably also recognize that you fall short more than you like to, in part because we tend to revert to old ways. We hear a great suggestion, or learn a new approach, but to easily fall back into the same darn things that didn't work before. It isn't easy, which is why I'm really excited to share with you that Bill and I have a new book out this spring, the Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child, a workbook.
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Our goal is to make it easier to put into practice more of the advice from our first two books,*The Self-Driven Child* and*What Do You Say* full of reflections and exercises to do yourself, with your partner, and with your children. We want to help make the self-driven child way your way, so that you can more often than not be as effective as you want to be with your kids in ways that we know you want to be. If you get a chance, order a copy. Bill and I, and your kids, would be grateful.
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With half the families in each survey, we ask the questions of the kids, and the other half the families, we ask the questions of the parents. Some of the kids commented on this. There was now a kind of a more loving feeling within the family, like this is a difficult time worldwide, and we really care about one another. And as one kid put it, and I think was speaking for a lot of kids, for the first time that I remember, that the first time I know of, we are as a family all eating dinner together, and it feels so good.
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Oh my gosh! And
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there was one kid who said, "The best thing about this is I know my parents love me. You know, it brought tears to my eyes. Even when I think of that, it brought tears to my eyes. What is more important to a kid than the knowledge that their parents love them, and why did it take a pandemic for that knowledge to become clearer to the kid?
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Welcome to the Self-Driven Child Podcast. I'm your host Ned Johnson and co-author with Dr. William Stickstreet of the books *The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives*
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How to talk with kids to build motivation, stress tolerance, and a happy home. Maybe it wasn't all about the cell phones after all. Jonathan Haidt's book, *The Anxious Generation* lays the blame for the dramatic decline of child and teen mental health squarely on cell phones and social media use. In response to that diagnosis, school systems across the country have been banning phones in schools. Today, I speak with eminent psychologist, researcher, and author Dr. Peter Gray, who makes the case in his new book that childhood mental health has been on the decline since well before the advent of widespread smartphone and social media use, and that the well-documented upswing in mental health disorders in 2010 is simply not adequately explained by correlations with teen tech use. We will speak about what he has learned about the factors that contribute to juvenile anxiety and depression, and how we all, working together, can restore childhood.
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I'm Ned Johnson, and this is the Self-Driven Child Podcast. Well, Peter, thanks so much for joining me. Like a lot of people, thrilled about your book. I wanted to start with I was on my way to work the other day and listening to recent Meta settlement about the $17 billion settlement over allegations of Facebook and Instagram and blah blah blah, and I was intrigued by that. And at the same time, I drove past a dog hair place near where I live, and they have on the front of their storefront a sign that says, "Where dogs play to learn, and that really struck me thinking about the conversation that we're going to have. That I think a lot of people are understandably concerned about social media and its role in the lives of children and adults as well. But restoring childhood puts more singularly play at the center of that equation. Obviously, you have a lot to say in the book about Jonathan Haidt's *The Anxious Generation* What part of that do you think he gets right, and what part does he get wrong?
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Well, of course, Jonathan Haidt and I agree that children need more opportunity for outdoor play, for play in the physical world. We were both among the co-founders of the organization Let Grow, which promotes more children's freedom and more opportunities to play.
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Where we disagree as has to do with the digital. Play in general, digital activity in general. So the way I see it is, we live in a digital age. Our children are growing up in a digital age. This is not going to change. This is a new world, and our children understand that. Our children know that they're growing up in a digital world, and there's no longer even a separation between what we used to call the real world and the digital world. So to pretend that there's a separation between these worlds and we're going to deprive children of the digital world and allow them into the real world is a fantasy. It's not.
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It's not a reality in today's world, so I think that's where we differ. In my book, I show how video games are real play, and how the computer revolution actually improved children's mental health between 1990 and the early 21st century.
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I'm with you on this, and I really want to dig into this. I wanted to pick up really quickly on something that may surprise listeners, where you say that video games, and you write persuasively, the video games are real games. Can you explain that a little bit?
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Well, so play-it's real play in that, by definition, by the definition I use, and the definition that most play scholars use, is an activity that is self-chosen, self-directed, and is creative.
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And video games satisfy all of that. Children choose what game to play within the game. There's multiple ways of playing.
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There's a lot of autonomy within the games. The games are best kind of considered to be playgrounds. They're digital digital playgrounds. Different children play them in different ways, just like they would play on an outdoor playground in different ways. There's some structure provided. An outdoor playground may provide some structure, certain playthings there, and similarly with the video games, especially the video games that kids most are attracted to. There's a lot of freedom, a lot of creativity within it. People who have studied video games have shown that the games that are most attractive to kids, the games that the kids really glom onto and continue with, and get what we adults think of as obsessed with. Are the are the games that are that have the following characteristics? They have a great deal of autonomy, a great deal of choice of how you do it.
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They are challenging. They're difficult. They're mentally challenging, and third, they create friendships. The games that are multiplayer that you're playing with other people, you are bonding with the other players whom you may already know, or you may be making friends through the games.
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Psychologists, as you probably know, have shown that regardless of age, there are three basic psychological needs that have to be fulfilled for mental well-being. One is autonomy, the sense of being able to make choices about what we're doing.
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Second is competence, the feeling that we are achieving something difficult, we're we're succeeding at something difficult, and the third is relatedness-the fact that we've got friends, especially friends within our generation-and and the research has shown that video games satisfy all three of these. So it should not be surprising that beginning in the 1990s, when suddenly most families with teenagers in the United States now had home computers, and by the mid 1990s had also an internet connection, and teenagers were glomming on to video games, mental health actually improved compared to what it was prior to that, among teenagers overall,
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and one thing I really appreciate your walking us through that. Those three psychological needs, of course, are the foundation of the three pillars of self determination theory. For for people who don't know that yet, which is a the most supported model in all of psychology, motivational psychology, for intrinsic motivation. So kids not just working hard, but wanting to work hard is something to get better at FIFA or whatever the game happens to be. The other thing I wanted to point out really quickly in your definition, or the sort of the the accepted definition of play, this is the hard one for parents, is that it is not adult directed.
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That's right,
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and and I wonder how much kids gaming or kids on their phone or kids whatever drive adults crazy because they're not what adults are directing. I mean, you know, because I think we now put Chromebooks in front of kids in kindergarten or first or second or third grade when they're, from my perspective, no educational. Whatsoever for that, and we tell them what they need to do, and as soon as they have the wherewithal to be able to choose their own ways to use screens, then we start wanting to peel those things out of their hands. Is that a fair read on that? I
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think it is a fair read on that. So kids have always been strongly motivated to get away from adults when they play, and the reason is because if adults are there interfering, if adults are there telling them what to do, it's no longer play. So Mother Nature, my term for natural selection,
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yeah, yeah,
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designed children to want to play independently of adult control, they want to get away from adults at the degree that they can, because we feel the same in their in their DNA. They manifest it into their brain instincts.
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Yeah,
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they know at some level that to grow up, they have to practice doing things independently of adults, and that the primary way, especially for young children, below about age 12 or 13, especially for young children, but even for teenagers, the primary way of doing that is play away from adults, and so we have over the decades, increasingly restricted play away from adults. We have we always there are always adults around. You can't kids can't get away from adults anymore. We have rationalized this by pretending that adult-directed sports are play, but it's not play. That absolutely is not play. It is exercise, although it's not as much exercise as when kids are playing independently, because there's a lot of time sitting on the bench in adult-directed sports. But it is not play. It is not practice in running your own life. Play is practice in running your own life. When we run play, it's no longer play because it is no longer practice in running your own life. It's no longer serving this primary evolutionary purpose of play.
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But let's let's dig in a little bit deeper of what goes on during play that does not go on in organized sports.
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So let me contrast the way I played baseball as a kid in the 19. I also played varsity baseball in high school, so I played in both ways, right?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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But let me contrast the way of playing baseball that is play versus the way of playing baseball that is not play that is adult directed.
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So when it's play, you go out as I did, and I'll take this specific example, but you can generalize it however you want.
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And go out to the vacant lot.
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Yep. And there's a bunch of other kids, a motley bunch of other kids. There's big kids.
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There's little kids. There's good baseball players. There's novices. There's a weedy feel.
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You maybe have to pick up the broken glass so nobody gets hurt. There's a there's windows over off in this direction.
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There's a busy street off in that direction.
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Yeah.
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So you've got a lot to do that is way more important than playing baseball, you've got to negotiate with everybody there about the ground rules. How are we going to make up teams? How are we going to decide what's fair and foul? No, you hit it towards those those windows, automatic out. You hit it into this busy street, automatic out. You pitch softly to little Timmy, or even even even your own teammates are going to criticize you. You know they're going to make fun of you. The point of this game is to have fun and to keep everybody happy and to create rules that make the game work.
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Now the skills in doing that are lifelong skills. They are way more important than knowing how to bunt a ball or slide into second base or throw a curve, which you shouldn't be doing anyway if you're under about 14 years old. So the so contrast that to little league, great place maybe to learn how to slide into second base above the ball, but for how many people are those going to be lifelong important skills adhered to the skills that are being practiced when you are actually playing baseball as opposed to doing baseball under adult leadership, the
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other day I drove with my wife through a town where I lived when I was 1011, 12, and past the place. You know, and these spaces in my in my memory were huge, right? And of course, were quite small spaces, and to your point, probably restricted by windows and and the. And the busy street, and what flooded back to me was I was not a good baseball player for what it's worth. But I was solid at wiffle ball, and remember playing wiffle ball and football for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. And to your point about the negotiation, it was constantly this thing. Oh, my mom says I need home. It's like no one more game, right? And and and using every tool in your toolbox to browbeat a kid to stay, to bribe a kid to stay, to sweet talk them, do anything to have the game go on as long as possible. You, as you write in your book, when kids go to the playground with just kids versus with their parents, they on average play twice as long.
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Yes, that's right. Well, it's partly because parents don't have the patience to stay that long. So that's, but that's part of it. But but yeah, exactly. You're right. The and if you watch children play, whether it's little children playing a make believe dress up game or whatever it is, yeah.
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There is often more time spent negotiating the play than there actually is playing, and that negotiation that is not wasted time. That is valuable experience. The most important thing that you need to do to play socially with other kids is you need to know how to make those kids happy, how to keep those kids happy. So, because and you even need to learn how to pay attention to nonverbal indicators that they're not happy, because if they're not happy, they're going to quit.
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They're going to say, you know, they're going to say, I hear my mom call and I'm going home now, right? And or if I'm a jerk,
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take your ball, Ned. I'm done with you. That's right.
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I'm done with you. And if you're a bit of a bully, or if you try to always have it your way, you're going to very quickly lose playmates, and that is the natural consequence that teaches you.
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Hey, wait a minute! I really want to play with these kids. I better start listening to them.
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I better start compromising. I better start. I better not stop thinking that I'm the center of the universe and everything revolves around me. Your parents might consider you to be the center of the universe, but kids never do, right? And it's really important to learn that you are not the center of the universe.
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You've got to be able to compromise and go. You've got to be able to take other people's needs into account.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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I would argue that that's the most important thing that any of us needs to learn for a happy life. Because if you can't do that, if you don't know how to do that, you can't have a good marriage. You can't have real friends. You can't have real work cooperative work partners. We are fundamentally a social species.
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We absolutely depend upon being able to get along with others.
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Yeah,
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and it's in social play, away from adult control, that children learn how to get along with others.
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And one thing that's I gosh, I love that story. I love who this kid, wherever he is, I hope he's thriving. One thing that struck me was reading your book, and and pick up on this example of you mentioned like little league baseball versus you know playing the in the you know neighborhood play, is that it seems to me that when it goes from play to organized competition, at that point winning winning is everything. And the more at that point, when winning is everything, and there are adults who enforcing the rules, then I, as a young player, probably have a certain incentive not to change the rules so that we can keep the game going and everyone has fun, but to seek to break the rules to cheat, because winning is everything.
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So, what what one of the things that happens when adults take over children's activities? Not only are they removing children's opportunities to grow by making their own choices, making their own rules, and all the things I've already talked about, but they are also most often turning what was previously done just for fun into a competition. My research suggests that children, when they're playing, whether they're playing a pseudo competitive game or they're just playing in some other way, building something together, playing a fantasy game. Are not very competitive. They don't really care about winning. They care much more about making friends. They care much more about having fun. But when adults get involved, it becomes competitive.
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Yeah,
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we we kids don't particularly want to compete.
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And if you look at hunter gatherer children, for example, which I've I've studied hunter gatherer children not directly, but by surveying anthropologists who have lived in hunter gatherer. Cultures, and what they tell me is that hunter-gatherer cultures, which would be the kind of culture that we evolved in, don't have competitive games. They have games with formal rules, but they're sort of dance-like games. They're cooperative.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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And the kids simply don't play competitively.
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One one anthropologist described trying to teach the kids in the group he was studying the game of soccer, and they refused to play it in a competitive way.
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They simply wouldn't play it with any. They they turned it into a game of let's keep the ball in the air and see if we can keep it going and let's all cooperate. And you know that absolutely refused to play in some way that anybody could be seen as winning on the one hand, or as losing on the other hand.
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That I think that kids evolved in a world where competitive play was at least partly in a world. I don't want to say that all hunter gatherers in the past were that way, we don't really know, but but at least partly in a world where cooperation was far more valued in in children's activities as well as in adult activities than competition.
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And it strikes me that for every activity that children can do that has historically been play, music, arts, theater, you know, sports, of course, fishing, anything, you know, robotics, chess. We have now professionalized it, weaponized it, and monetized it.
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So rather than leaving this as the domain of children, you have Russian math camp, right? You have theater for kids at age six, where they though then go and get instructed by professional adults whom to whom you pay a great deal of money, so they can get better at this and get ahead of other people, so that somewhere down the line they can get into a college, and on and on it goes.
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There's a lot in what you've just said. Let me comment on two of them. One is so Jonathan Haidt says we've play replaced a play based world with a phone based world. I would say we've replaced a play based world with a competition based world.
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Agreed.
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And you can play on the phone. You can play on the phone is not incompatible with play, and children, by and large, are playing on the phone.
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So that's that's a false comparison. But what we have done is, when we take over children's activities, we turn them into competitions,
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right?
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And that adds now an element of achievement pressure. It adds it takes away the intrinsic motivation, which takes away the natural fun of it. And now, you know that what if you whatever thrill you get comes. I don't want to say that there that you're totally losing the joy of play, but it depends upon the kid. It depends upon their order for being in it.
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As a person who spends all my time with adolescents, I kept thinking about the mental health impact of I can't do sports because I'm not good enough, right? I'm not in theater because I can't, you know, stay on pitch. I don't get to do this because my art isn't any good, and so we reserve these extracurricular activities only for kids who can be really good at them, and by doing that, then deny kids the opportunity for them to for for them to organically connect with other kids in all the ways that we know are so important, and it's pretty heartbreaking.
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Yeah, that's that's exactly right. So we you know we select kids into the schools, you know, select kids into their sports teams. It's only for in a large school. It's only a very small fraction of the kids who make it, and the rest are supposed to go to the games and cheer them on.
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So let me slide towards another place of competition. This is really, I think, the core, if not the core of your of your book, a really important part of it that if it's not social media that has contributed to the massive increase of mental health issues of anxiety and depression, really starting in 2010, you know, building on the work of Gene Twangy, what else happened around 2010 that was so significant for the erosion of mental health in young people in America today.
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So the significant thing that happened around 2010 in the United States was the beginning of the Common Core State Standards in schools.
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So it had been many years since the No Child Left Behind bill was passed by Congress, which basically said that states had the responsibility to prove that children were quote learning, and the way to prove that would be through scores on standardized tests. So that idea had been around. For a long time, had already affected schools, made them, in my mind, worse in some ways before 2010.
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But this bill, as act that which had gone on through a couple of changes after that, really took teeth beginning in 2010, because that's when states got together.
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Most of the 50 states, the education leaders in the states got together and decided that they would develop a common way of meeting the federal requirement. They would develop a common curriculum that every student in every school, every public school, had to take, and a set of, and every state had to have a set of standard tests of that curriculum that would be evidence that children are learning. So, and schools now, whole schools as well as principals, superintendents, teachers within the schools would be now evaluated based upon student test scores. This was a dramatic change, and it's not hard to imagine why this would be a change for the worse.
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Why people didn't imagine that is beyond my understanding. But when you make a change like this, you are basically disempowering teachers. Right.
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You are telling teachers you can't use your own wisdom, your own compassion, your own knowledge of the kids in your classroom.
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Right. To
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decide what you're doing, you've got to teach the standard curriculum.
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You are going to be evaluated not on some vague understanding that kids are liking this course, they're getting intellectually involved, they're learning this or that, but on they're learning these precise things that are being tested on the test. Many of the best teachers quit. My sister had been a teacher up until that point, she quit. She said, "I cannot teach under these conditions. Absolutely not. So this disempowered teachers. The studies at that time, as was instituted, showed everybody involved with schools, the teachers, the principals, the school psychologists, as well as the kids, were saying school has become even more stressful now than it was before. So that change occurred. It began to take place in 2010. It was pretty much fully implemented in essentially all the states by 2013, and so I'm arguing that that is the change. It affected essentially all kids, unless they're going to an alternative kind of private school or homeschooled. It affected everybody.
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Yeah.
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Now, it it should not be surprising. In fact, if you see a a global change, a national change in any nation in anxiety, depression, and suicide. Your first guess should be that it's because of a change in school,
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right?
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Because first of all, children spend more time in school than any place else except home. School is a place where kids are not free; they are micromanaged in a way that none of us adults would tolerate in our workplace, they are constantly told what to do. They are constantly compared with their with their colleagues, who's better and who's worse.
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They are made to feel that their future somehow depends upon their performance of these arbitrary tasks that they're being made to do in school, why would that not be stressful, anxiety-provoking? And indeed, it is, and it always has been.
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Every single study that I've been able to find, where kids themselves are asked, "What is it that is making you anxious or depressed? Far and away, the leading response is school pressure. Nothing else comes close.
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Right. Nothing
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else comes close. The things we want to say are it, like bullying or bad families or traumatic events in childhood; those are serious problems for some kids.
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Yeah,
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but that doesn't affect the population as a whole. School affects the population as a whole. So I'm not saying that school is the biggest cause of distress for every single kid. Of course, it's not. If you're being abused at home, if you're being consistently bullied, and so on and so forth. Those are bigger stresses. If you've had some traumatic, truly traumatic experience, that that overwhelms school as a source of stress.
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But when you're looking at what is stressful to the population as a whole, our first guess should be school, among other things. One thing that actually I sort of I sort of take some pride in in in kind of bringing this I think to the attention of researchers. Some years ago, I was talking to a a psychotherapist who works with children, and she said, "You know, my my practice dries up every summer with clothes on vacation.
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Right, the
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kids aren't. The kids don't need me. My practice goes up again when the school year starts. So it led me to ask
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Is there any data showing that the rates of anxiety, depression, pediatric mental health admissions, suicides among among kids go down in summer when vacation starts and go back up when the school year starts. At that time, I could find no data, so I I looked at hospital records and I found a pediatric mental hospital in New Jersey that happened. They weren't trying to make the point I was making.
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They happened to publish their month by month pediatric mental health admissions, and lo and behold, every summer it went way down and it went back up during the school year. And I published these. I published this as a graph in my Psychology Today blog that I was doing at that time.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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I have no idea if that blog played a role, but since then there have been some studies documenting it in academic articles. There is data showing that the suicide rate among teenagers is cut roughly in half every summer and goes back up again when the school year starts. There's data showing pediatric mental health admissions, just as I found for that particular household nationwide, goes way down every summer and back up again when school starts.
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And they also fall fall on the weekend and rise during the school week, right?
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And there's also data on that. You know, goes up every Monday. It begins to go down on Friday. Yeah, stays down the week. It starts to go up a little bit Sunday evening. Yep.
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And curiously, and curiously, as you as you point in your out in your book, when kids are not in school, they have the opportunity to be on their phones even more, and so if the correlation with mental health and or in the summer for that matter, right? If the correlation were between screen use and mental health, we wouldn't see it. We wouldn't see a fall in the summer. We'd see an increase in the summer.
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That's right. So the other point of why I argue that schools are not social media or smartphones is this is by and large a United States phenomenon. This increase in anxiety, depression, and suicide that began in 2010 and peaked in 2018. This occurred in the United States. It did not occur in most of the rest of the world. Now, Jonathan Haidt has found a couple of other countries where, depending upon how you look at the data, you could say there was an increase of that time, but worldwide there was no increase that correlated in any way with the rollout of social media and smartphones. So, just to take for example, one of the things I looked up was the rate of suicide. There's clear data for rates of teen suicide in the European Union. You can you can find the data that's recorded there, just like we recorded here, for the same age group.
00:33:34.849 --> 00:33:57.220
And while the suicide rate for teens was dramatically increasing between 2010 and 2018 in the United States. It was actually decreasing a little bit in the European Union. Kids in Europe were not being deprived of smartphones and social media.
00:33:54.009 --> 00:34:14.429
They were using them just as our kids were. They were using largely the same platforms, adults were just as worried about it there as they were here, but the data do not show there any particular increase in anxiety, depression, suicide.
00:34:11.639 --> 00:34:50.349
Now, I did find a couple of countries where there was an increase. One of them is one Jonathan Haidt points out to, which is the UK, but the increase in the UK did not start in 2010 or 2012. It started in 2015. So it turns out that England, not the whole UK, but England, which accounts for about 80 percent of the UK in population-wise, instituted an educational change, a national educational change very comparable to Common Core, but theirs started in 2015, and that's when suicide rates increase there.
00:34:51.219 --> 00:34:51.280
Wow!
00:34:52.150 --> 00:35:13.139
One other country I found, Sweden, believe it or not, Sweden, the country that we think of as sort of the Eden for children, right? I mean. I've always thought of oh, if I were to bring up kids, I would want to bring them up in Sweden. Well, Sweden made a change also in 2010, around the same time we did very and education very similar to ours.
00:35:13.980 --> 00:35:17.099
All kinds of rates of mental disorder increase in Sweden.
00:35:17.280 --> 00:35:22.980
Interesting rates of diagnosis of ADHD in Sweden multiple.
00:35:23.360 --> 00:35:55.840
something like fivefold as a result of the of the changes they made. I think there's a rule here: you change schooling to make it more narrow, less choice for kids, less opportunities for teachers to use their own wisdom and compassion to modify what they're doing, and you're going to get an increase in anxiety, depression, and suicide among school-age kids. Every nation ought to understand this is a social psychological rule,
00:35:56.710 --> 00:36:47.170
right? Well, and the thing that's so interesting that the the the literature is really clear, as I understand it, that a low sense of control is really the worst thing that anyone can experience. And when we have these things, you know, top down of politicians, or you know, making accountability standards, which is really just a fancy word for saying controlling. Now we're controlling principals, we're controlling teachers, controlling you know, and students all the way down. These students is into the bottom of that pyramid or top of the funnel. It should be no surprise that if stress, if if a low sense of control and extrinsic motivators are the most stressful thing that people can experience, anytime we put more stress into a school system, nervous system, political system, we should expect every kind of bad outcome that you can imagine popping up. Right, most of all, anxiety and depression, and then school and school avoidance, and probably both by students and by teachers.
00:36:47.559 --> 00:37:15.659
Now, when I was in elementary school in 1950s, there was no homework in elementary. Once in a while, a teacher might ask us to do something that was kind of fun at home, write a story or poem, and bring it in, share it with class. But we never walked back and forth between school and home carrying books or worksheets. There was no sense that parents' job was to make sure we did homework. There simply wasn't homework to speak of in elementary school.
00:37:16.679 --> 00:37:40.929
Homework did begin in what at that time was called junior high school, which is now called middle school, but even that it was not like homework became later on. And if you were reasonably quick, even in high school, you could usually do whatever homework you were assigned during the study hall breaks that you had at school.
00:37:36.289 --> 00:37:55.510
So you were largely when you went home, you were done with school. But over time, even within that first, that second half of the 20th century, you were no longer done with school.
00:37:51.219 --> 00:38:03.119
You took school home with you, and your parents were made to feel responsible for your doing your homework. Another job parents had to take on,
00:38:03.449 --> 00:38:11.909
and and and one of the things that strikes me is that well-meaning educators tell well-meaning parents that it's their job to make sure their kids get their homework done.
00:38:12.539 --> 00:38:47.920
But as we write in our book, you know, self-taping child, how could you? If your kid refused, what are you going to do? You're going to duct tape them the chair, you're going to electric shop them, you're going to refuse to feed them and to and to compel them to do it if they said over my dead body what what are you going to do, and it becomes such a source of well another input of stress and in a perfect world when I come home from work I don't get interrogated by my wife about what did you do well and how did you get a grade on and da da da, I just get to I get to enjoy her company and ideally she she mine and and and don't we want that for for children, just for for parents to be able to have their kids at home and enjoy them when they're at home,
00:38:48.670 --> 00:38:52.269
right? Exactly.
00:38:48.670 --> 00:40:10.920
It it becomes it becomes a matter of tension between the child and parent, and it is a disruptor of the of what you would want a loving, caring, Mutual relationship between child and parent. You know, it's very interesting. During the when schools locked down because of COVID, we did a study through the Let Grow organization of how families were adapting to that situation, and we surveyed 1,600 families. Schools locked down the middle of March, and we surveyed them in the middle of April, and again in the middle of May. So one month and two months after schools locked down, and a different set of 1,600 families each time, demographically balanced, and the families had to have kids, school-age kids between the age of eight and 13. With half the families in each survey, we asked the questions of the kids, and the other half the families we asked the questions of the parents. One of the questions was to the kids. Are you more stressed or less stressed now than you were before the COVID pandemic? And the great majority said less stressed.
00:40:11.489 --> 00:40:11.550
Yeah.
00:40:11.820 --> 00:40:28.550
When we asked the parents about the kids, are they more or less? They also said less stressed. We asked one of the questions to the parents was, are you getting along better or worse with your child now than you were before? The great majority said better.
00:40:29.809 --> 00:40:29.869
Wow!
00:40:30.769 --> 00:40:35.059
So it's not hard to guess why they're getting along better.
00:40:35.659 --> 00:40:36.440
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:40:35.659 --> 00:40:36.440
They don't
00:40:36.469 --> 00:41:29.090
have to be fighting with their kids about homework. They don't have to be waking them up early in the morning and shuttling off to school. They don't have to be nagging them to go off to the adult-directed activities that the kids aren't all that enthusiastic about. But the parents want to make sure that the parents get their money's worth by sending them to these activities. And so, and in addition to that, some of the kids commented on this. There was now a kind of a more loving feeling within the family, like this was a difficult time worldwide, and we really care about one another. And as one kid put it, and I think was speaking for a lot of kids, for the first time that I remember, that the first time I know of, we are as a family all eating dinner together, and it feels so good.
00:41:30.170 --> 00:41:30.739
Oh my gosh!
00:41:30.920 --> 00:41:55.119
And there was one kid who said, "The best thing about this is I know my parents love me. You know, it brought tears to my eyes. Even when I think of that, it brought tears to my eyes. What is more important to a kid than the knowledge that their parents love them, and why did it take a pandemic for that knowledge to become clear to the kid?
00:41:56.050 --> 00:42:03.360
Yeah, and you think about will that you know it apparently didn't stick. Yeah, because we've gone back to how quickly get back to. Well,
00:42:03.630 --> 00:43:05.579
then we then the schools picked up and they had to put the pressure all the more because they were so afraid of quote learning loss during that time. I think that you know even the studies of school pressure, what they show is that a lot of the school pressure comes from parents, and when parents are not putting that pressure on and just showing I I care for you who for who you are, not for your performance. Even kids in schools that are putting pressure on the kids do much better psychologically than those kids in the same schools getting the same pressure from the school, but whose parents are adding to the pressure by acting as if they don't maybe really feel this, but acting as if their love of the child depends upon the school child's performance. That's the message many kids get, and that is a horrible message.
00:43:06.269 --> 00:43:20.630
To leave parents on a hopeful note of things that they can do, you have again terrific suggestions at the end of the book. But one of them is about how to for parents to be tasked T A S parents, not not T S A. This is important people, not T S A, but T A S parents.
00:43:17.639 --> 00:43:20.630
Tell us what that means?
00:43:21.320 --> 00:43:54.190
So it be trustful autonomy, supportive parenting. I had long been writing about trustful parenting. It's an idea I got from my looking into hunter-gatherer parents and how trusting they are of their kids' instincts and judgments. But it turns out trustful parenting is not a term in the in the literature. It's not a term others have used. The closest term that others have used is autonomy supportive parenting.
00:43:49.750 --> 00:44:39.530
The two ideas are not exactly the same. Trustful parenting says I trust my kids. I don't have to watch my kids all the time. I don't need to tell my kids what to do. All the time, autonomy supportive goes a little beyond that, and and says, not only do I trust my kids, I don't have to watch my kids all the time, but I see it as my job to, especially in this world today, to help my kids find more autonomy. I want to support their autonomy, and I think that this change in terminology made sense to me because I realize that although trustful parenting might have worked in the 1950s, you just send the kids outside and forget about them, right?
00:44:39.829 --> 00:44:39.889
Yeah,
00:44:40.610 --> 00:45:10.679
you send them outside today, and they're not going to find other kids to play with. Somebody might call 911, and you get investigated for child neglect. It's that it's not enough. If you want your kids to find opportunities to play and explore independently of you. You may have to play a role in making that possible for them, and so that's one of the things that I'm talking about.
00:45:07.949 --> 00:45:42.219
What are things that parents can do to make that possible for them? I give a lot of possibilities, you know, that you can get together with other parents on the block, and you can get together, and you say, you know, remember play when you were a kid. If they're if they're young parents, they may not. But then you know, talk to your grandparents. You know, they you remember how fun that was and what you learned from it. And wouldn't it be great if our kids had that opportunity?
00:45:37.250 --> 00:45:50.739
And let's say that every every Saturday afternoon and maybe Wednesdays after school we're gonna all be like old fashioned parents and shoo our kids out of the house and
00:45:50.949 --> 00:45:51.010
yeah
00:45:51.639 --> 00:46:04.739
we'll and here's here's where I agree that keep the damn cell phones inside set them outside without their cell phones they may not like it but they'll they'll be happy about it after they get to know the other kids and start playing.
00:46:05.099 --> 00:46:13.590
And and if if there are some parents who feel that it's unsafe, arrange for one person.
00:46:08.190 --> 00:46:36.019
In my mind, ideal a grandparent because grandparents tend to be a little more easygoing about things to be out there just for safety to watch the kids not intervene in what they're playing, but they're there just for safety. That's one of many kinds of things that parents can do. You can arrange when you go on vacation. Go on a vacation with other families that have kids. Go to a place like a campsite where the kids can run.
00:46:33.170 --> 00:46:47.079
It's safe. They can run and explore and play with the other kids, and you can socialize with the other adults. You don't have to be minding your kids all the time. That's a vacation for both you and your kids in that sense.
00:46:47.619 --> 00:47:14.039
So there's a lot of those things. the The number one thing that I would recommend to every parent of a child who's at least five years old is sit down with your child and say, "Is there anything that you would like to do independently without me there telling you how to do it or even monitoring you, monitoring it that you haven't done?
00:47:14.670 --> 00:47:14.730
Yeah,
00:47:15.659 --> 00:48:12.329
and make a list of such a thing. Maybe you, maybe it's something that you think I, as the parent wouldn't allow you to do, or maybe it's something that's a little scary and you're a little frightened of doing it, or maybe you haven't even thought about that question because it hasn't actually been a real question to you. And so think about that, make a list, and then as the parents sit down and go over that list, and think about what you, as the parent, would actually now allow your child to do. And maybe you need to negotiate. Maybe let's say the child wants to ride their bicycle by themselves to their friend's house three or four blocks away. You're not quite ready to allow them to do that, so you say, "Okay, so so let's work towards that. But the first time I'll go with you, and we'll talk about the safety and non safety along the way. The child says okay, all right, you know.
00:48:12.690 --> 00:48:59.110
So you do that, or maybe you say no, but and but how about if you just ride around the block and I'll sit on the stoop, but the point is that you're breaking into this cycle of restricting what your child is doing, and you're now entertaining the idea of things you can say yes to, and you're introducing to the child the opportunity to negotiate with you about what the child wants to do, and one of the things that we found, especially Lenore Skenesi, who's actually observed parents doing this, is that when the child does this thing, it's not just the child who's glowing with pride, but the parent is also.
00:48:59.980 --> 00:49:19.769
It changes from the parent feeling like I've got to protect my child all the time. This is a big job. I've got to prevent. To I am actually helping my child develop courage and abilities, and I'm proud of what my child can do, and I'm proud of myself as an adult for allowing my child to do these things.
00:49:20.309 --> 00:50:29.480
I wanted to end with sort of one quick point that build on a point you made before. You you start the book talking about Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, right? And how we go outside, and you know the the famous environmental book about will will pesticides, you know, basically will will there be no no birds and no insects because we've killed them all, and you make an analog of you go outside and you don't hear any children, right? And children can't play unless they have other children to play with. And to your point, how do we support that and go back to 1950 Saturdays to make that happen? And I was reflecting just this past weekend, my last time in the great outdoors upstate. New York, and listening to the insects and the birds and and all the noise going on, and thinking about what is it about birds and insects that's so soothing to the nervous system, and I recall reading an article that when you hear all that noise, it's a signal that there aren't predators nearby, that you're safe, and it strikes me that when your child can go outside and you hear the laughter of other children, it's a signal to you and to them if there's all that laughter, that it's safe.
00:50:29.989 --> 00:50:46.059
You know, I I partly referred to Rachel Carson's book to be honest, and this is going to sound grandiose. That was a book that changed the world. That was a book that had a major reform.
00:50:41.559 --> 00:50:46.059
That's my hope for this book.
00:50:46.570 --> 00:51:11.280
That's my hope that it will change the course of how we think about kids, change the course of the future, and renew childhood. This is not. This book is not meant to be just an intellectual adventure. It's a project to try to make the world a good place again for kids.
00:51:12.570 --> 00:51:54.610
I wish nothing more than that. What a wonderful message to everyone who's listening! What a wonderful motivation for you to to put all the time and care and research and reflection, I have to I have to say so often when I was reading you, I kept getting the sort of chills and vibes of of Fred Rogers. Your I mean yeah I mean obviously you're erudite and scholarly and and deeply wise, but your respect for simple enjoyment of children just it just it's absolutely palpable, and it's a great lesson to all of us to respect and enjoy children just for just for who they are, just as they are. Thank you, Dr. Peter Gray, for helping us ideally restore childhood.
00:51:54.969 --> 00:51:57.550
Thank you, Ned.
00:51:54.969 --> 00:51:57.550
This has been a great pleasure.
00:52:01.119 --> 00:52:01.150
The
00:52:01.389 --> 00:52:58.599
prevailing theory that the decline of adolescent mental health is primarily caused by phone and social media use fails to account for research demonstrating that these declines correlate more strongly with fundamental changes in schools that radically reshaped how children spend the vast majority of their time outside the home. Dr. Peter Gray's research shows that the introduction of the Common Core in the United States and similar curricula in other peer countries reduced autonomy for students and teachers and administrators, creating a culture driven by high-stakes standardized test scores and unrelenting academic pressure, diminishing opportunities for independent play across all ages of childhood are a fundamental reason for the decline of mental health in kids, disrupting the natural processes of how children have learned for as long as there have been children. Dr. Gray argues that we have replaced a play-based childhood with a competition-based childhood.
00:52:59.349 --> 00:54:37.340
Playing with neighborhood kids has been replaced with adult-driven and high-pressure organized sports and other activities, whereas neighborhoods used to be filled with the voices of kids playing independently. Our communities have grown quieter over the last 15 years. When children do gather, it is usually under the direction and supervision of a paid adult. And lastly, while structural changes are clearly needed most of all in school, one do-it-yourself remedy for restoring childhood that's available to all families is to practice task parenting, being a trusting, autonomy-supporting adult. I'm Ned Johnson, and this is the Self-Driven Child Podcast. Hey, folks! Over the past 25 years, I've talked to countless parents of high school-age students who care deeply about their kids' education and how they deal with stress and the pressure to succeed. It can help parents to work with a team they trust won't just pile on more pressure to achieve better scores and grades. That's why I founded Prep Matters in 1997 to create a different kind of experience for test preparation and academic tutoring. This podcast and my books with my friend Bill Stixrood reflect our company philosophy and approach to helping students. If you have a high school age student and would like to talk about putting a plan together, please get in touch with us. Visit our website at prepmatters.com, or while your kids may only text, you might want to actually talk with a person. If so, you can reach us at 301-951-0350.
00:00:00.599 --> 00:00:37.369
Hey, folks. Ned here. Like me, you want your kids, your students, honestly, all the young people you know, to thrive, and you know how much you can help. But like me, you probably also recognize that you fall short more than you like to, in part because we tend to revert to old ways. We hear a great suggestion, or learn a new approach, but to easily fall back into the same darn things that didn't work before. It isn't easy, which is why I'm really excited to share with you that Bill and I have a new book out this spring, the Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child, a workbook.
00:00:38.329 --> 00:01:06.810
Our goal is to make it easier to put into practice more of the advice from our first two books,*The Self-Driven Child* and*What Do You Say* full of reflections and exercises to do yourself, with your partner, and with your children. We want to help make the self-driven child way your way, so that you can more often than not be as effective as you want to be with your kids in ways that we know you want to be. If you get a chance, order a copy. Bill and I, and your kids, would be grateful.
00:01:07.680 --> 00:01:42.849
With half the families in each survey, we ask the questions of the kids, and the other half the families, we ask the questions of the parents. Some of the kids commented on this. There was now a kind of a more loving feeling within the family, like this is a difficult time worldwide, and we really care about one another. And as one kid put it, and I think was speaking for a lot of kids, for the first time that I remember, that the first time I know of, we are as a family all eating dinner together, and it feels so good.
00:01:43.659 --> 00:01:44.530
Oh my gosh! And
00:01:44.530 --> 00:02:07.319
there was one kid who said, "The best thing about this is I know my parents love me. You know, it brought tears to my eyes. Even when I think of that, it brought tears to my eyes. What is more important to a kid than the knowledge that their parents love them, and why did it take a pandemic for that knowledge to become clearer to the kid?
00:02:08.340 --> 00:02:20.250
Welcome to the Self-Driven Child Podcast. I'm your host Ned Johnson and co-author with Dr. William Stickstreet of the books *The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives*
00:02:20.819 --> 00:03:26.719
How to talk with kids to build motivation, stress tolerance, and a happy home. Maybe it wasn't all about the cell phones after all. Jonathan Haidt's book, *The Anxious Generation* lays the blame for the dramatic decline of child and teen mental health squarely on cell phones and social media use. In response to that diagnosis, school systems across the country have been banning phones in schools. Today, I speak with eminent psychologist, researcher, and author Dr. Peter Gray, who makes the case in his new book that childhood mental health has been on the decline since well before the advent of widespread smartphone and social media use, and that the well-documented upswing in mental health disorders in 2010 is simply not adequately explained by correlations with teen tech use. We will speak about what he has learned about the factors that contribute to juvenile anxiety and depression, and how we all, working together, can restore childhood.
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I'm Ned Johnson, and this is the Self-Driven Child Podcast. Well, Peter, thanks so much for joining me. Like a lot of people, thrilled about your book. I wanted to start with I was on my way to work the other day and listening to recent Meta settlement about the $17 billion settlement over allegations of Facebook and Instagram and blah blah blah, and I was intrigued by that. And at the same time, I drove past a dog hair place near where I live, and they have on the front of their storefront a sign that says, "Where dogs play to learn, and that really struck me thinking about the conversation that we're going to have. That I think a lot of people are understandably concerned about social media and its role in the lives of children and adults as well. But restoring childhood puts more singularly play at the center of that equation. Obviously, you have a lot to say in the book about Jonathan Haidt's *The Anxious Generation* What part of that do you think he gets right, and what part does he get wrong?
00:04:34.369 --> 00:04:57.819
Well, of course, Jonathan Haidt and I agree that children need more opportunity for outdoor play, for play in the physical world. We were both among the co-founders of the organization Let Grow, which promotes more children's freedom and more opportunities to play.
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Where we disagree as has to do with the digital. Play in general, digital activity in general. So the way I see it is, we live in a digital age. Our children are growing up in a digital age. This is not going to change. This is a new world, and our children understand that. Our children know that they're growing up in a digital world, and there's no longer even a separation between what we used to call the real world and the digital world. So to pretend that there's a separation between these worlds and we're going to deprive children of the digital world and allow them into the real world is a fantasy. It's not.
00:05:39.108 --> 00:05:58.478
It's not a reality in today's world, so I think that's where we differ. In my book, I show how video games are real play, and how the computer revolution actually improved children's mental health between 1990 and the early 21st century.
00:05:58.988 --> 00:06:13.889
I'm with you on this, and I really want to dig into this. I wanted to pick up really quickly on something that may surprise listeners, where you say that video games, and you write persuasively, the video games are real games. Can you explain that a little bit?
00:06:14.670 --> 00:06:34.939
Well, so play-it's real play in that, by definition, by the definition I use, and the definition that most play scholars use, is an activity that is self-chosen, self-directed, and is creative.
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And video games satisfy all of that. Children choose what game to play within the game. There's multiple ways of playing.
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There's a lot of autonomy within the games. The games are best kind of considered to be playgrounds. They're digital digital playgrounds. Different children play them in different ways, just like they would play on an outdoor playground in different ways. There's some structure provided. An outdoor playground may provide some structure, certain playthings there, and similarly with the video games, especially the video games that kids most are attracted to. There's a lot of freedom, a lot of creativity within it. People who have studied video games have shown that the games that are most attractive to kids, the games that the kids really glom onto and continue with, and get what we adults think of as obsessed with. Are the are the games that are that have the following characteristics? They have a great deal of autonomy, a great deal of choice of how you do it.
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They are challenging. They're difficult. They're mentally challenging, and third, they create friendships. The games that are multiplayer that you're playing with other people, you are bonding with the other players whom you may already know, or you may be making friends through the games.
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Psychologists, as you probably know, have shown that regardless of age, there are three basic psychological needs that have to be fulfilled for mental well-being. One is autonomy, the sense of being able to make choices about what we're doing.
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Second is competence, the feeling that we are achieving something difficult, we're we're succeeding at something difficult, and the third is relatedness-the fact that we've got friends, especially friends within our generation-and and the research has shown that video games satisfy all three of these. So it should not be surprising that beginning in the 1990s, when suddenly most families with teenagers in the United States now had home computers, and by the mid 1990s had also an internet connection, and teenagers were glomming on to video games, mental health actually improved compared to what it was prior to that, among teenagers overall,
00:09:02.970 --> 00:09:40.009
and one thing I really appreciate your walking us through that. Those three psychological needs, of course, are the foundation of the three pillars of self determination theory. For for people who don't know that yet, which is a the most supported model in all of psychology, motivational psychology, for intrinsic motivation. So kids not just working hard, but wanting to work hard is something to get better at FIFA or whatever the game happens to be. The other thing I wanted to point out really quickly in your definition, or the sort of the the accepted definition of play, this is the hard one for parents, is that it is not adult directed.
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That's right,
00:09:41.590 --> 00:10:13.529
and and I wonder how much kids gaming or kids on their phone or kids whatever drive adults crazy because they're not what adults are directing. I mean, you know, because I think we now put Chromebooks in front of kids in kindergarten or first or second or third grade when they're, from my perspective, no educational. Whatsoever for that, and we tell them what they need to do, and as soon as they have the wherewithal to be able to choose their own ways to use screens, then we start wanting to peel those things out of their hands. Is that a fair read on that? I
00:10:13.740 --> 00:10:35.000
think it is a fair read on that. So kids have always been strongly motivated to get away from adults when they play, and the reason is because if adults are there interfering, if adults are there telling them what to do, it's no longer play. So Mother Nature, my term for natural selection,
00:10:35.419 --> 00:10:35.750
yeah, yeah,
00:10:36.200 --> 00:10:52.419
designed children to want to play independently of adult control, they want to get away from adults at the degree that they can, because we feel the same in their in their DNA. They manifest it into their brain instincts.
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Yeah,
00:10:53.379 --> 00:12:15.450
they know at some level that to grow up, they have to practice doing things independently of adults, and that the primary way, especially for young children, below about age 12 or 13, especially for young children, but even for teenagers, the primary way of doing that is play away from adults, and so we have over the decades, increasingly restricted play away from adults. We have we always there are always adults around. You can't kids can't get away from adults anymore. We have rationalized this by pretending that adult-directed sports are play, but it's not play. That absolutely is not play. It is exercise, although it's not as much exercise as when kids are playing independently, because there's a lot of time sitting on the bench in adult-directed sports. But it is not play. It is not practice in running your own life. Play is practice in running your own life. When we run play, it's no longer play because it is no longer practice in running your own life. It's no longer serving this primary evolutionary purpose of play.
00:12:16.139 --> 00:12:23.570
But let's let's dig in a little bit deeper of what goes on during play that does not go on in organized sports.
00:12:24.799 --> 00:12:34.399
So let me contrast the way I played baseball as a kid in the 19. I also played varsity baseball in high school, so I played in both ways, right?
00:12:34.908 --> 00:12:35.298
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:12:35.480 --> 00:12:47.830
But let me contrast the way of playing baseball that is play versus the way of playing baseball that is not play that is adult directed.
00:12:42.820 --> 00:12:53.830
So when it's play, you go out as I did, and I'll take this specific example, but you can generalize it however you want.
00:12:51.129 --> 00:12:53.830
And go out to the vacant lot.
00:12:54.370 --> 00:13:00.330
Yep. And there's a bunch of other kids, a motley bunch of other kids. There's big kids.
00:12:57.759 --> 00:13:05.460
There's little kids. There's good baseball players. There's novices. There's a weedy feel.
00:13:05.700 --> 00:13:12.570
You maybe have to pick up the broken glass so nobody gets hurt. There's a there's windows over off in this direction.
00:13:12.600 --> 00:13:14.909
There's a busy street off in that direction.
00:13:15.360 --> 00:13:15.419
Yeah.
00:13:15.899 --> 00:14:00.220
So you've got a lot to do that is way more important than playing baseball, you've got to negotiate with everybody there about the ground rules. How are we going to make up teams? How are we going to decide what's fair and foul? No, you hit it towards those those windows, automatic out. You hit it into this busy street, automatic out. You pitch softly to little Timmy, or even even even your own teammates are going to criticize you. You know they're going to make fun of you. The point of this game is to have fun and to keep everybody happy and to create rules that make the game work.
00:14:00.850 --> 00:14:45.340
Now the skills in doing that are lifelong skills. They are way more important than knowing how to bunt a ball or slide into second base or throw a curve, which you shouldn't be doing anyway if you're under about 14 years old. So the so contrast that to little league, great place maybe to learn how to slide into second base above the ball, but for how many people are those going to be lifelong important skills adhered to the skills that are being practiced when you are actually playing baseball as opposed to doing baseball under adult leadership, the
00:14:45.549 --> 00:15:44.139
other day I drove with my wife through a town where I lived when I was 1011, 12, and past the place. You know, and these spaces in my in my memory were huge, right? And of course, were quite small spaces, and to your point, probably restricted by windows and and the. And the busy street, and what flooded back to me was I was not a good baseball player for what it's worth. But I was solid at wiffle ball, and remember playing wiffle ball and football for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. And to your point about the negotiation, it was constantly this thing. Oh, my mom says I need home. It's like no one more game, right? And and and using every tool in your toolbox to browbeat a kid to stay, to bribe a kid to stay, to sweet talk them, do anything to have the game go on as long as possible. You, as you write in your book, when kids go to the playground with just kids versus with their parents, they on average play twice as long.
00:15:44.649 --> 00:16:01.590
Yes, that's right. Well, it's partly because parents don't have the patience to stay that long. So that's, but that's part of it. But but yeah, exactly. You're right. The and if you watch children play, whether it's little children playing a make believe dress up game or whatever it is, yeah.
00:16:01.799 --> 00:16:36.559
There is often more time spent negotiating the play than there actually is playing, and that negotiation that is not wasted time. That is valuable experience. The most important thing that you need to do to play socially with other kids is you need to know how to make those kids happy, how to keep those kids happy. So, because and you even need to learn how to pay attention to nonverbal indicators that they're not happy, because if they're not happy, they're going to quit.
00:16:36.889 --> 00:16:42.850
They're going to say, you know, they're going to say, I hear my mom call and I'm going home now, right? And or if I'm a jerk,
00:16:43.090 --> 00:16:45.610
take your ball, Ned. I'm done with you. That's right.
00:16:45.879 --> 00:17:00.330
I'm done with you. And if you're a bit of a bully, or if you try to always have it your way, you're going to very quickly lose playmates, and that is the natural consequence that teaches you.
00:16:57.039 --> 00:17:03.809
Hey, wait a minute! I really want to play with these kids. I better start listening to them.
00:17:03.929 --> 00:17:23.089
I better start compromising. I better start. I better not stop thinking that I'm the center of the universe and everything revolves around me. Your parents might consider you to be the center of the universe, but kids never do, right? And it's really important to learn that you are not the center of the universe.
00:17:23.960 --> 00:17:29.750
You've got to be able to compromise and go. You've got to be able to take other people's needs into account.
00:17:29.960 --> 00:17:30.319
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:17:30.650 --> 00:17:55.509
I would argue that that's the most important thing that any of us needs to learn for a happy life. Because if you can't do that, if you don't know how to do that, you can't have a good marriage. You can't have real friends. You can't have real work cooperative work partners. We are fundamentally a social species.
00:17:50.019 --> 00:17:56.890
We absolutely depend upon being able to get along with others.
00:17:57.400 --> 00:17:57.460
Yeah,
00:17:57.789 --> 00:18:03.960
and it's in social play, away from adult control, that children learn how to get along with others.
00:18:04.319 --> 00:18:45.339
And one thing that's I gosh, I love that story. I love who this kid, wherever he is, I hope he's thriving. One thing that struck me was reading your book, and and pick up on this example of you mentioned like little league baseball versus you know playing the in the you know neighborhood play, is that it seems to me that when it goes from play to organized competition, at that point winning winning is everything. And the more at that point, when winning is everything, and there are adults who enforcing the rules, then I, as a young player, probably have a certain incentive not to change the rules so that we can keep the game going and everyone has fun, but to seek to break the rules to cheat, because winning is everything.
00:18:45.670 --> 00:19:42.430
So, what what one of the things that happens when adults take over children's activities? Not only are they removing children's opportunities to grow by making their own choices, making their own rules, and all the things I've already talked about, but they are also most often turning what was previously done just for fun into a competition. My research suggests that children, when they're playing, whether they're playing a pseudo competitive game or they're just playing in some other way, building something together, playing a fantasy game. Are not very competitive. They don't really care about winning. They care much more about making friends. They care much more about having fun. But when adults get involved, it becomes competitive.
00:19:43.750 --> 00:19:43.809
Yeah,
00:19:44.529 --> 00:19:48.970
we we kids don't particularly want to compete.
00:19:49.029 --> 00:20:15.329
And if you look at hunter gatherer children, for example, which I've I've studied hunter gatherer children not directly, but by surveying anthropologists who have lived in hunter gatherer. Cultures, and what they tell me is that hunter-gatherer cultures, which would be the kind of culture that we evolved in, don't have competitive games. They have games with formal rules, but they're sort of dance-like games. They're cooperative.
00:20:15.720 --> 00:20:16.380
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:20:16.529 --> 00:20:18.809
And the kids simply don't play competitively.
00:20:19.019 --> 00:20:30.829
One one anthropologist described trying to teach the kids in the group he was studying the game of soccer, and they refused to play it in a competitive way.
00:20:27.980 --> 00:20:52.900
They simply wouldn't play it with any. They they turned it into a game of let's keep the ball in the air and see if we can keep it going and let's all cooperate. And you know that absolutely refused to play in some way that anybody could be seen as winning on the one hand, or as losing on the other hand.
00:20:47.170 --> 00:21:16.500
That I think that kids evolved in a world where competitive play was at least partly in a world. I don't want to say that all hunter gatherers in the past were that way, we don't really know, but but at least partly in a world where cooperation was far more valued in in children's activities as well as in adult activities than competition.
00:21:17.670 --> 00:21:40.960
And it strikes me that for every activity that children can do that has historically been play, music, arts, theater, you know, sports, of course, fishing, anything, you know, robotics, chess. We have now professionalized it, weaponized it, and monetized it.
00:21:37.730 --> 00:21:59.769
So rather than leaving this as the domain of children, you have Russian math camp, right? You have theater for kids at age six, where they though then go and get instructed by professional adults whom to whom you pay a great deal of money, so they can get better at this and get ahead of other people, so that somewhere down the line they can get into a college, and on and on it goes.
00:22:00.220 --> 00:22:15.599
There's a lot in what you've just said. Let me comment on two of them. One is so Jonathan Haidt says we've play replaced a play based world with a phone based world. I would say we've replaced a play based world with a competition based world.
00:22:15.690 --> 00:22:16.019
Agreed.
00:22:16.950 --> 00:22:27.049
And you can play on the phone. You can play on the phone is not incompatible with play, and children, by and large, are playing on the phone.
00:22:23.450 --> 00:22:34.759
So that's that's a false comparison. But what we have done is, when we take over children's activities, we turn them into competitions,
00:22:35.359 --> 00:22:35.509
right?
00:22:35.869 --> 00:22:58.599
And that adds now an element of achievement pressure. It adds it takes away the intrinsic motivation, which takes away the natural fun of it. And now, you know that what if you whatever thrill you get comes. I don't want to say that there that you're totally losing the joy of play, but it depends upon the kid. It depends upon their order for being in it.
00:22:58.900 --> 00:23:32.150
As a person who spends all my time with adolescents, I kept thinking about the mental health impact of I can't do sports because I'm not good enough, right? I'm not in theater because I can't, you know, stay on pitch. I don't get to do this because my art isn't any good, and so we reserve these extracurricular activities only for kids who can be really good at them, and by doing that, then deny kids the opportunity for them to for for them to organically connect with other kids in all the ways that we know are so important, and it's pretty heartbreaking.
00:23:32.809 --> 00:23:50.559
Yeah, that's that's exactly right. So we you know we select kids into the schools, you know, select kids into their sports teams. It's only for in a large school. It's only a very small fraction of the kids who make it, and the rest are supposed to go to the games and cheer them on.
00:23:51.640 --> 00:24:23.150
So let me slide towards another place of competition. This is really, I think, the core, if not the core of your of your book, a really important part of it that if it's not social media that has contributed to the massive increase of mental health issues of anxiety and depression, really starting in 2010, you know, building on the work of Gene Twangy, what else happened around 2010 that was so significant for the erosion of mental health in young people in America today.
00:24:23.660 --> 00:24:36.950
So the significant thing that happened around 2010 in the United States was the beginning of the Common Core State Standards in schools.
00:24:30.980 --> 00:25:06.450
So it had been many years since the No Child Left Behind bill was passed by Congress, which basically said that states had the responsibility to prove that children were quote learning, and the way to prove that would be through scores on standardized tests. So that idea had been around. For a long time, had already affected schools, made them, in my mind, worse in some ways before 2010.
00:25:07.920 --> 00:25:23.599
But this bill, as act that which had gone on through a couple of changes after that, really took teeth beginning in 2010, because that's when states got together.
00:25:18.630 --> 00:26:15.420
Most of the 50 states, the education leaders in the states got together and decided that they would develop a common way of meeting the federal requirement. They would develop a common curriculum that every student in every school, every public school, had to take, and a set of, and every state had to have a set of standard tests of that curriculum that would be evidence that children are learning. So, and schools now, whole schools as well as principals, superintendents, teachers within the schools would be now evaluated based upon student test scores. This was a dramatic change, and it's not hard to imagine why this would be a change for the worse.
00:26:11.309 --> 00:26:23.839
Why people didn't imagine that is beyond my understanding. But when you make a change like this, you are basically disempowering teachers. Right.
00:26:24.230 --> 00:26:33.859
You are telling teachers you can't use your own wisdom, your own compassion, your own knowledge of the kids in your classroom.
00:26:34.369 --> 00:26:34.640
Right. To
00:26:34.819 --> 00:26:41.029
decide what you're doing, you've got to teach the standard curriculum.
00:26:36.740 --> 00:27:48.369
You are going to be evaluated not on some vague understanding that kids are liking this course, they're getting intellectually involved, they're learning this or that, but on they're learning these precise things that are being tested on the test. Many of the best teachers quit. My sister had been a teacher up until that point, she quit. She said, "I cannot teach under these conditions. Absolutely not. So this disempowered teachers. The studies at that time, as was instituted, showed everybody involved with schools, the teachers, the principals, the school psychologists, as well as the kids, were saying school has become even more stressful now than it was before. So that change occurred. It began to take place in 2010. It was pretty much fully implemented in essentially all the states by 2013, and so I'm arguing that that is the change. It affected essentially all kids, unless they're going to an alternative kind of private school or homeschooled. It affected everybody.
00:27:48.849 --> 00:27:48.910
Yeah.
00:27:49.329 --> 00:28:06.089
Now, it it should not be surprising. In fact, if you see a a global change, a national change in any nation in anxiety, depression, and suicide. Your first guess should be that it's because of a change in school,
00:28:06.779 --> 00:28:06.930
right?
00:28:07.289 --> 00:28:34.369
Because first of all, children spend more time in school than any place else except home. School is a place where kids are not free; they are micromanaged in a way that none of us adults would tolerate in our workplace, they are constantly told what to do. They are constantly compared with their with their colleagues, who's better and who's worse.
00:28:35.539 --> 00:28:55.210
They are made to feel that their future somehow depends upon their performance of these arbitrary tasks that they're being made to do in school, why would that not be stressful, anxiety-provoking? And indeed, it is, and it always has been.
00:28:56.079 --> 00:29:10.859
Every single study that I've been able to find, where kids themselves are asked, "What is it that is making you anxious or depressed? Far and away, the leading response is school pressure. Nothing else comes close.
00:29:11.430 --> 00:29:12.119
Right. Nothing
00:29:12.210 --> 00:29:24.980
else comes close. The things we want to say are it, like bullying or bad families or traumatic events in childhood; those are serious problems for some kids.
00:29:25.400 --> 00:29:25.460
Yeah,
00:29:25.819 --> 00:29:52.990
but that doesn't affect the population as a whole. School affects the population as a whole. So I'm not saying that school is the biggest cause of distress for every single kid. Of course, it's not. If you're being abused at home, if you're being consistently bullied, and so on and so forth. Those are bigger stresses. If you've had some traumatic, truly traumatic experience, that that overwhelms school as a source of stress.
00:29:50.319 --> 00:30:23.240
But when you're looking at what is stressful to the population as a whole, our first guess should be school, among other things. One thing that actually I sort of I sort of take some pride in in in kind of bringing this I think to the attention of researchers. Some years ago, I was talking to a a psychotherapist who works with children, and she said, "You know, my my practice dries up every summer with clothes on vacation.
00:30:23.599 --> 00:30:23.779
Right, the
00:30:23.990 --> 00:30:31.670
kids aren't. The kids don't need me. My practice goes up again when the school year starts. So it led me to ask
00:30:31.700 --> 00:31:05.759
Is there any data showing that the rates of anxiety, depression, pediatric mental health admissions, suicides among among kids go down in summer when vacation starts and go back up when the school year starts. At that time, I could find no data, so I I looked at hospital records and I found a pediatric mental hospital in New Jersey that happened. They weren't trying to make the point I was making.
00:31:05.819 --> 00:31:27.829
They happened to publish their month by month pediatric mental health admissions, and lo and behold, every summer it went way down and it went back up during the school year. And I published these. I published this as a graph in my Psychology Today blog that I was doing at that time.
00:31:27.920 --> 00:31:28.309
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:31:28.789 --> 00:31:57.519
I have no idea if that blog played a role, but since then there have been some studies documenting it in academic articles. There is data showing that the suicide rate among teenagers is cut roughly in half every summer and goes back up again when the school year starts. There's data showing pediatric mental health admissions, just as I found for that particular household nationwide, goes way down every summer and back up again when school starts.
00:31:57.940 --> 00:32:01.230
And they also fall fall on the weekend and rise during the school week, right?
00:32:01.319 --> 00:32:13.589
And there's also data on that. You know, goes up every Monday. It begins to go down on Friday. Yeah, stays down the week. It starts to go up a little bit Sunday evening. Yep.
00:32:14.579 --> 00:32:33.170
And curiously, and curiously, as you as you point in your out in your book, when kids are not in school, they have the opportunity to be on their phones even more, and so if the correlation with mental health and or in the summer for that matter, right? If the correlation were between screen use and mental health, we wouldn't see it. We wouldn't see a fall in the summer. We'd see an increase in the summer.
00:32:33.980 --> 00:33:40.160
That's right. So the other point of why I argue that schools are not social media or smartphones is this is by and large a United States phenomenon. This increase in anxiety, depression, and suicide that began in 2010 and peaked in 2018. This occurred in the United States. It did not occur in most of the rest of the world. Now, Jonathan Haidt has found a couple of other countries where, depending upon how you look at the data, you could say there was an increase of that time, but worldwide there was no increase that correlated in any way with the rollout of social media and smartphones. So, just to take for example, one of the things I looked up was the rate of suicide. There's clear data for rates of teen suicide in the European Union. You can you can find the data that's recorded there, just like we recorded here, for the same age group.
00:33:34.849 --> 00:33:57.220
And while the suicide rate for teens was dramatically increasing between 2010 and 2018 in the United States. It was actually decreasing a little bit in the European Union. Kids in Europe were not being deprived of smartphones and social media.
00:33:54.009 --> 00:34:14.429
They were using them just as our kids were. They were using largely the same platforms, adults were just as worried about it there as they were here, but the data do not show there any particular increase in anxiety, depression, suicide.
00:34:11.639 --> 00:34:50.349
Now, I did find a couple of countries where there was an increase. One of them is one Jonathan Haidt points out to, which is the UK, but the increase in the UK did not start in 2010 or 2012. It started in 2015. So it turns out that England, not the whole UK, but England, which accounts for about 80 percent of the UK in population-wise, instituted an educational change, a national educational change very comparable to Common Core, but theirs started in 2015, and that's when suicide rates increase there.
00:34:51.219 --> 00:34:51.280
Wow!
00:34:52.150 --> 00:35:13.139
One other country I found, Sweden, believe it or not, Sweden, the country that we think of as sort of the Eden for children, right? I mean. I've always thought of oh, if I were to bring up kids, I would want to bring them up in Sweden. Well, Sweden made a change also in 2010, around the same time we did very and education very similar to ours.
00:35:13.980 --> 00:35:17.099
All kinds of rates of mental disorder increase in Sweden.
00:35:17.280 --> 00:35:22.980
Interesting rates of diagnosis of ADHD in Sweden multiple.
00:35:23.360 --> 00:35:55.840
something like fivefold as a result of the of the changes they made. I think there's a rule here: you change schooling to make it more narrow, less choice for kids, less opportunities for teachers to use their own wisdom and compassion to modify what they're doing, and you're going to get an increase in anxiety, depression, and suicide among school-age kids. Every nation ought to understand this is a social psychological rule,
00:35:56.710 --> 00:36:47.170
right? Well, and the thing that's so interesting that the the the literature is really clear, as I understand it, that a low sense of control is really the worst thing that anyone can experience. And when we have these things, you know, top down of politicians, or you know, making accountability standards, which is really just a fancy word for saying controlling. Now we're controlling principals, we're controlling teachers, controlling you know, and students all the way down. These students is into the bottom of that pyramid or top of the funnel. It should be no surprise that if stress, if if a low sense of control and extrinsic motivators are the most stressful thing that people can experience, anytime we put more stress into a school system, nervous system, political system, we should expect every kind of bad outcome that you can imagine popping up. Right, most of all, anxiety and depression, and then school and school avoidance, and probably both by students and by teachers.
00:36:47.559 --> 00:37:15.659
Now, when I was in elementary school in 1950s, there was no homework in elementary. Once in a while, a teacher might ask us to do something that was kind of fun at home, write a story or poem, and bring it in, share it with class. But we never walked back and forth between school and home carrying books or worksheets. There was no sense that parents' job was to make sure we did homework. There simply wasn't homework to speak of in elementary school.
00:37:16.679 --> 00:37:40.929
Homework did begin in what at that time was called junior high school, which is now called middle school, but even that it was not like homework became later on. And if you were reasonably quick, even in high school, you could usually do whatever homework you were assigned during the study hall breaks that you had at school.
00:37:36.289 --> 00:37:55.510
So you were largely when you went home, you were done with school. But over time, even within that first, that second half of the 20th century, you were no longer done with school.
00:37:51.219 --> 00:38:03.119
You took school home with you, and your parents were made to feel responsible for your doing your homework. Another job parents had to take on,
00:38:03.449 --> 00:38:11.909
and and and one of the things that strikes me is that well-meaning educators tell well-meaning parents that it's their job to make sure their kids get their homework done.
00:38:12.539 --> 00:38:47.920
But as we write in our book, you know, self-taping child, how could you? If your kid refused, what are you going to do? You're going to duct tape them the chair, you're going to electric shop them, you're going to refuse to feed them and to and to compel them to do it if they said over my dead body what what are you going to do, and it becomes such a source of well another input of stress and in a perfect world when I come home from work I don't get interrogated by my wife about what did you do well and how did you get a grade on and da da da, I just get to I get to enjoy her company and ideally she she mine and and and don't we want that for for children, just for for parents to be able to have their kids at home and enjoy them when they're at home,
00:38:48.670 --> 00:38:52.269
right? Exactly.
00:38:48.670 --> 00:40:10.920
It it becomes it becomes a matter of tension between the child and parent, and it is a disruptor of the of what you would want a loving, caring, Mutual relationship between child and parent. You know, it's very interesting. During the when schools locked down because of COVID, we did a study through the Let Grow organization of how families were adapting to that situation, and we surveyed 1,600 families. Schools locked down the middle of March, and we surveyed them in the middle of April, and again in the middle of May. So one month and two months after schools locked down, and a different set of 1,600 families each time, demographically balanced, and the families had to have kids, school-age kids between the age of eight and 13. With half the families in each survey, we asked the questions of the kids, and the other half the families we asked the questions of the parents. One of the questions was to the kids. Are you more stressed or less stressed now than you were before the COVID pandemic? And the great majority said less stressed.
00:40:11.489 --> 00:40:11.550
Yeah.
00:40:11.820 --> 00:40:28.550
When we asked the parents about the kids, are they more or less? They also said less stressed. We asked one of the questions to the parents was, are you getting along better or worse with your child now than you were before? The great majority said better.
00:40:29.809 --> 00:40:29.869
Wow!
00:40:30.769 --> 00:40:35.059
So it's not hard to guess why they're getting along better.
00:40:35.659 --> 00:40:36.440
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:40:35.659 --> 00:40:36.440
They don't
00:40:36.469 --> 00:41:29.090
have to be fighting with their kids about homework. They don't have to be waking them up early in the morning and shuttling off to school. They don't have to be nagging them to go off to the adult-directed activities that the kids aren't all that enthusiastic about. But the parents want to make sure that the parents get their money's worth by sending them to these activities. And so, and in addition to that, some of the kids commented on this. There was now a kind of a more loving feeling within the family, like this was a difficult time worldwide, and we really care about one another. And as one kid put it, and I think was speaking for a lot of kids, for the first time that I remember, that the first time I know of, we are as a family all eating dinner together, and it feels so good.
00:41:30.170 --> 00:41:30.739
Oh my gosh!
00:41:30.920 --> 00:41:55.119
And there was one kid who said, "The best thing about this is I know my parents love me. You know, it brought tears to my eyes. Even when I think of that, it brought tears to my eyes. What is more important to a kid than the knowledge that their parents love them, and why did it take a pandemic for that knowledge to become clear to the kid?
00:41:56.050 --> 00:42:03.360
Yeah, and you think about will that you know it apparently didn't stick. Yeah, because we've gone back to how quickly get back to. Well,
00:42:03.630 --> 00:43:05.579
then we then the schools picked up and they had to put the pressure all the more because they were so afraid of quote learning loss during that time. I think that you know even the studies of school pressure, what they show is that a lot of the school pressure comes from parents, and when parents are not putting that pressure on and just showing I I care for you who for who you are, not for your performance. Even kids in schools that are putting pressure on the kids do much better psychologically than those kids in the same schools getting the same pressure from the school, but whose parents are adding to the pressure by acting as if they don't maybe really feel this, but acting as if their love of the child depends upon the school child's performance. That's the message many kids get, and that is a horrible message.
00:43:06.269 --> 00:43:20.630
To leave parents on a hopeful note of things that they can do, you have again terrific suggestions at the end of the book. But one of them is about how to for parents to be tasked T A S parents, not not T S A. This is important people, not T S A, but T A S parents.
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Tell us what that means?
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So it be trustful autonomy, supportive parenting. I had long been writing about trustful parenting. It's an idea I got from my looking into hunter-gatherer parents and how trusting they are of their kids' instincts and judgments. But it turns out trustful parenting is not a term in the in the literature. It's not a term others have used. The closest term that others have used is autonomy supportive parenting.
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The two ideas are not exactly the same. Trustful parenting says I trust my kids. I don't have to watch my kids all the time. I don't need to tell my kids what to do. All the time, autonomy supportive goes a little beyond that, and and says, not only do I trust my kids, I don't have to watch my kids all the time, but I see it as my job to, especially in this world today, to help my kids find more autonomy. I want to support their autonomy, and I think that this change in terminology made sense to me because I realize that although trustful parenting might have worked in the 1950s, you just send the kids outside and forget about them, right?
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Yeah,
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you send them outside today, and they're not going to find other kids to play with. Somebody might call 911, and you get investigated for child neglect. It's that it's not enough. If you want your kids to find opportunities to play and explore independently of you. You may have to play a role in making that possible for them, and so that's one of the things that I'm talking about.
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What are things that parents can do to make that possible for them? I give a lot of possibilities, you know, that you can get together with other parents on the block, and you can get together, and you say, you know, remember play when you were a kid. If they're if they're young parents, they may not. But then you know, talk to your grandparents. You know, they you remember how fun that was and what you learned from it. And wouldn't it be great if our kids had that opportunity?
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And let's say that every every Saturday afternoon and maybe Wednesdays after school we're gonna all be like old fashioned parents and shoo our kids out of the house and
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yeah
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we'll and here's here's where I agree that keep the damn cell phones inside set them outside without their cell phones they may not like it but they'll they'll be happy about it after they get to know the other kids and start playing.
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And and if if there are some parents who feel that it's unsafe, arrange for one person.
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In my mind, ideal a grandparent because grandparents tend to be a little more easygoing about things to be out there just for safety to watch the kids not intervene in what they're playing, but they're there just for safety. That's one of many kinds of things that parents can do. You can arrange when you go on vacation. Go on a vacation with other families that have kids. Go to a place like a campsite where the kids can run.
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It's safe. They can run and explore and play with the other kids, and you can socialize with the other adults. You don't have to be minding your kids all the time. That's a vacation for both you and your kids in that sense.
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So there's a lot of those things. the The number one thing that I would recommend to every parent of a child who's at least five years old is sit down with your child and say, "Is there anything that you would like to do independently without me there telling you how to do it or even monitoring you, monitoring it that you haven't done?
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Yeah,
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and make a list of such a thing. Maybe you, maybe it's something that you think I, as the parent wouldn't allow you to do, or maybe it's something that's a little scary and you're a little frightened of doing it, or maybe you haven't even thought about that question because it hasn't actually been a real question to you. And so think about that, make a list, and then as the parents sit down and go over that list, and think about what you, as the parent, would actually now allow your child to do. And maybe you need to negotiate. Maybe let's say the child wants to ride their bicycle by themselves to their friend's house three or four blocks away. You're not quite ready to allow them to do that, so you say, "Okay, so so let's work towards that. But the first time I'll go with you, and we'll talk about the safety and non safety along the way. The child says okay, all right, you know.
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So you do that, or maybe you say no, but and but how about if you just ride around the block and I'll sit on the stoop, but the point is that you're breaking into this cycle of restricting what your child is doing, and you're now entertaining the idea of things you can say yes to, and you're introducing to the child the opportunity to negotiate with you about what the child wants to do, and one of the things that we found, especially Lenore Skenesi, who's actually observed parents doing this, is that when the child does this thing, it's not just the child who's glowing with pride, but the parent is also.
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It changes from the parent feeling like I've got to protect my child all the time. This is a big job. I've got to prevent. To I am actually helping my child develop courage and abilities, and I'm proud of what my child can do, and I'm proud of myself as an adult for allowing my child to do these things.
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I wanted to end with sort of one quick point that build on a point you made before. You you start the book talking about Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, right? And how we go outside, and you know the the famous environmental book about will will pesticides, you know, basically will will there be no no birds and no insects because we've killed them all, and you make an analog of you go outside and you don't hear any children, right? And children can't play unless they have other children to play with. And to your point, how do we support that and go back to 1950 Saturdays to make that happen? And I was reflecting just this past weekend, my last time in the great outdoors upstate. New York, and listening to the insects and the birds and and all the noise going on, and thinking about what is it about birds and insects that's so soothing to the nervous system, and I recall reading an article that when you hear all that noise, it's a signal that there aren't predators nearby, that you're safe, and it strikes me that when your child can go outside and you hear the laughter of other children, it's a signal to you and to them if there's all that laughter, that it's safe.
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You know, I I partly referred to Rachel Carson's book to be honest, and this is going to sound grandiose. That was a book that changed the world. That was a book that had a major reform.
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That's my hope for this book.
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That's my hope that it will change the course of how we think about kids, change the course of the future, and renew childhood. This is not. This book is not meant to be just an intellectual adventure. It's a project to try to make the world a good place again for kids.
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I wish nothing more than that. What a wonderful message to everyone who's listening! What a wonderful motivation for you to to put all the time and care and research and reflection, I have to I have to say so often when I was reading you, I kept getting the sort of chills and vibes of of Fred Rogers. Your I mean yeah I mean obviously you're erudite and scholarly and and deeply wise, but your respect for simple enjoyment of children just it just it's absolutely palpable, and it's a great lesson to all of us to respect and enjoy children just for just for who they are, just as they are. Thank you, Dr. Peter Gray, for helping us ideally restore childhood.
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Thank you, Ned.
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This has been a great pleasure.
00:52:01.119 --> 00:52:01.150
The
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prevailing theory that the decline of adolescent mental health is primarily caused by phone and social media use fails to account for research demonstrating that these declines correlate more strongly with fundamental changes in schools that radically reshaped how children spend the vast majority of their time outside the home. Dr. Peter Gray's research shows that the introduction of the Common Core in the United States and similar curricula in other peer countries reduced autonomy for students and teachers and administrators, creating a culture driven by high-stakes standardized test scores and unrelenting academic pressure, diminishing opportunities for independent play across all ages of childhood are a fundamental reason for the decline of mental health in kids, disrupting the natural processes of how children have learned for as long as there have been children. Dr. Gray argues that we have replaced a play-based childhood with a competition-based childhood.
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Playing with neighborhood kids has been replaced with adult-driven and high-pressure organized sports and other activities, whereas neighborhoods used to be filled with the voices of kids playing independently. Our communities have grown quieter over the last 15 years. When children do gather, it is usually under the direction and supervision of a paid adult. And lastly, while structural changes are clearly needed most of all in school, one do-it-yourself remedy for restoring childhood that's available to all families is to practice task parenting, being a trusting, autonomy-supporting adult. I'm Ned Johnson, and this is the Self-Driven Child Podcast. Hey, folks! Over the past 25 years, I've talked to countless parents of high school-age students who care deeply about their kids' education and how they deal with stress and the pressure to succeed. It can help parents to work with a team they trust won't just pile on more pressure to achieve better scores and grades. That's why I founded Prep Matters in 1997 to create a different kind of experience for test preparation and academic tutoring. This podcast and my books with my friend Bill Stixrood reflect our company philosophy and approach to helping students. If you have a high school age student and would like to talk about putting a plan together, please get in touch with us. Visit our website at prepmatters.com, or while your kids may only text, you might want to actually talk with a person. If so, you can reach us at 301-951-0350.
