Rusty Keeler: Hi, Peter. Hi. Yeah, great to have you here. The Play Nature Podcast. I’ve been inspired by you for many, many years, and I’m very glad to, you know, anytime we sit down, we’re at a conference together and I get to hear you speak or get to sit down and chat with you. I’m always inspired by, you know, all the things that you bring up and kind of provoke in all of us listening.
And then also, I’m inspired by you of someone. But, uh, you’re somebody who seems to have, take delight. Take delight in your work and the things that you’ve learned, the, the research that you’ve done. And while the subjects, you know, there’s some less than delightful, you know, ramifications of things that are going on in our society still, you have this kind of contagious interest in all this.
And so I, I also thank you for that as a model of loving your
Peter Gray: work. Oh, thank you, rusty. I’ve, uh, as you know, long been an admirer of what you’re doing. It’s a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you.
Rusty Keeler: Thank you. Maybe I, I’ll read your formal bio here so people can get a little idea of the breadth of, you know, your work.
And then I, I got some questions for you. Peter Gray is a research professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College, and has conducted and published research in behavioral biology, developmental psychology, anthropology, and education. He’s author of an internationally acclaimed introductory psychology textbook.
Psychology worth publishers, which views all of psychology from an evolutionary perspective. Much of his research focuses on the role of play in human evolution and how children educate themselves through play and exploration when they are free to do so. He has expanded on these ideas in his book, free to Learn Why Unleashing The Instinct to Play will make our children happier, more self-reliant, and better Students for life, which has been translated into 18 languages.
He’s also author of a blog called Freedom to Learn for Psychology Today Magazine and a substack series entitled Play Makes Us Human. I’m a dedicated follower of that. He’s one of the founders of the nonprofit Let Grow the mission of which is to renew children’s freedom to play and explore independently of adult control.
You can follow him on Facebook and find many of his published articles on his website. So I have lots of things that I’d want to talk to you about. We’re, I’m gonna kick it off with kind of the nature of play, but I also wanna talk to, you know, I’m curious, talking to you about the shift of play or the decline of freedom, kind of psychological results of that.
I’m interested in our education system and alternative education systems, self-directed education, also interested in play or technology or technology’s effect on children or opportunities for connection. And I have thoughts, questions, even my own sons and their use of technology too that would pick your brain about, but I thought maybe we kick it off just kind of pulling it right back to play that idea of what is play the nature of play through evolution, through psychology, through your thoughts and research discoveries.
Peter Gray: So I’ve, uh, I’ve made a point of defining play. I, my most frequently search for article is titled something like the Definition of Play. I did this because years ago I kept hearing from academicians who. Who were, I thought, kind of studying play, but they weren’t calling it a play. They were calling it something else.
And, uh, I kept saying, well, why, why don’t you call it play? Or why is there so little published work on play? Actually, at least at that time, most published work on play was act actually with animals, not humans. Uh, that may still be true, but I think it’s a little less true now. So I, I got kind of frustrated with this claim.
You can’t define play. I. I think you can define play just as well as you can find just about any concept in psychology. They all have sort of loose boundaries. Almost every concept has loose boundaries, you know, like what’s a chair? You know, it’s a, there are certain things that are clearly chairs and then there’s other things that are kind of, sort of chairs, you know, like that stump you sit on in the park.
So, so here’s my definition of play and I, I hope you don’t mind, this is gonna be a little long because there are four parts to it, and with each part I’m going to say something about how this aspect of play, this defining characteristic of play contributes to play’s value in children’s development. So the first defining characteristic of play is that play is an activity that’s initiated and directed by the players themselves.
So a lot of what is called play. Like playing Little League baseball or, uh, is not play by my definition because play is something that children do. Children not only do it, but they come up with the idea of doing it. They direct the play, they’re in charge of it. So one of the functions of play, one of the primary functions of play is that it is the means by which children learn to take charge of their own behavior, their own activities.
It’s the means by which they learn to take initiative to do things, and by which they learn how to solve their own problems, negotiate with playmates, and so on and so forth. As soon as you have an adult stepping into children’s play, trying to do some of these things for them, solve their problems for them, tell them how to play better.
And so on, you are ruining that aspect of play. So that’s a, that’s maybe the number one defining characteristic. But really maybe equally to that is the second defining characteristic, which is that play is intrinsically motivated, which means that it’s something that the player is doing just because they wanna do it.
They’re not doing it for some kind of reward outside of itself to the degree that a person is doing something to get an A on a report card or a gold star or a trophy, or a praise from a parent or a teacher to that degree, it is not play. Play is something you do just because you wanna do it. So interestingly, that’s the aspect of play that I think leads a.
A lot of adults in our world, world to kind of implicitly think that play is a waste of time. Why would you do something that you’re not getting something for? Right? I mean, this, we live in this culture that, uh, you’re supposed to be working for achievements of one sort or another. You’re supposed to be out there.
You know, at least improving your resume, right? I mean, what good would it be if you’re, but play doesn’t go on your resume. You know, playing a adult directed sport might go on your resume, but just going out and messing around and playing doesn’t go on your resume. So one of my responses to people who have that objection about it, or even if they don’t state that objection, most people don’t state it, but it’s pretty implicit in the way they’re thinking, is that, you know, one of the things that is most important for children to learn is what they like to do.
You know, what, what is it that, what is it that you like to do, rusty? What are, what are the things that really make life worthwhile for you? The kinds of activities, and they’re probably different from me. There’s some overlap. They’re different from every person. How do we discover what we really like to do?
We discover it by doing what we, by trying a lot of things, and then there’s certain things we like to do. And that’s really what Play is, is all about. It’s a, a good part of it. Why kids play it? A lot of different things. There are some things that they really love to do and they play more at that and they get good at it and really develop a deep interest in this.
They develop what might be called a passion. Uh, how many commencement speeches have you heard where the commencement speaker says, follow your passion? Well, how do you ever even know what a passion is if you haven’t been playing? If all you’ve been doing is what other people tell you to do, you probably don’t have any concept even of what a passion is, let alone actually have one.
So I think that helps convince many people, Hey, wait a minute. It’s maybe not such a waste of time to play the, I have had a good fortune of being able to study a lot of, uh, young people. Who grew up in a situation where they had lots of opportunity to play as they were growing up. And what I found is in about 50% of those cases, and it’s a fairly large number of cases, taking all my studies together, I could see a very direct relationship between what they played at as a child, what they played at most as a child, and what their career is today.
These are very lucky people because they’re people who can honestly say that what I’m doing to make a, making a living is actually play for me because I would do it even if I didn’t need to make a living. This is what I love to do. So that’s the second thing about it. It’s play is how you discover what you love to do.
It is doing what you love to do just because you love to do it. But the third characteristic of play might be a little surprising to some people. Play is always structured. People talk about unstructured play. There’s no such thing as unstructured play. Okay? It’s always structured by the child themselves.
Mm-hmm. So play is not random activity. You’re not just doing stuff randomly, you’re doing a structured activity. When you’re playing, you’re playing at something that, at something defines the play. And that means you’ve got certain rules in your head about what you can do and what you can’t do within play.
And this is true for every kind of play. You’re making a sand castle, right? You’re not just randomly piling up sand, you’re making a sand castle. So I’m doing something structured. I’m making a sand castle, we’re having a play fight. We’re pretending to fight, you know, but we’re not really fighting, so we don’t actually hit one another.
So one of the implicit rules of this, uh, play fight is you hit the other person’s stick with your stick, but you don’t hit them with your stick. There’s a lot of rules about play fighting. It’s a very structured activity. It looks wild, but it’s very structured.
Mm-hmm.
So I could go through all kinds of play.
And it’s not just formal games where the structure is written out or clearly stated, but all forms of play have structure. And one way that some people say that, for example, the great, the great Russian psychologists, Le Vygotsky said, all play has rules. And what he meant was these internal rules in the head about what you can do and not do within the context of this play activity that you’re involved in.
Vygotsky believed that the primary purpose of play, uh, although he admitted all these other purpose I’m talking about, was that it’s how children learn to structure their activities. It’s how they learn to behave in accordance with mental rules or social norms. Because when you’re playing socially, you have to agree on the rules and you have to play in ways that all of your playmates, except as this is the way.
We’re playing now. So that’s that, that’s the, the third characteristic of play. And then the fourth characteristic of play is although play has structure, the structure always leaves plenty of room for creativity and imagination, especially young children’s play is highly imaginative. So children are, you think about children engaged in, um, pretend play.
They are engaged in practicing the highest order of human thinking, which is hypothetical, deductive reasoning. Think about children, four year olds playing around the kitchen table, and one of them says, uh, there’s a troll under the bridge pointing under the kitchen table. Well, this is a, this is hypothetical.
There’s. Actually not a troll under the bridge, but let’s suppose there’s a troll under the bridge. They don’t say,
they say there’s a
troll under the bridge.
Yeah.
And then another child says, well, we better not go under the bridge. Uh, this is hypothetical deductive reasoning. Right. And, you know, PI claimed that children under 11 are not capable of it, but four year olds do it all the time in the context of play.
So here, the fact that play is imaginative and one of the things that children are exercising is, uh, is really hypothetical, deductive reasoning in the course of their play, that reasoning gets more and more sophisticated over time. And play is always creative. Play is the most creative thing that people do.
There’s always, every, at every move in play, essentially every move in play, there’s, there’s a range of. Of things you could do, and you’re making a choice of what you can do. So play by definition is creative. And it’s almost true that creativity, by definition is pretty highly playful. So that’s, that’s my definition of play.
Mm-hmm.
And, okay,
Rusty Keeler: so that’s play, but why play? So we are started with being born as human and there’s infancy and where we’re, you know, dependent on the parents or on adults or the pack of wolves that adopted us. And then we kind of learn to do everything. Not that the goal is to be an adult, but. What is, what is happening in, in all that?
So that’s, I mean, I, I, I love those definitions.
Peter Gray: So let me start off by pointing out that as, as far as we can tell, all young mammals play, so it’s not just human beings. Mm-hmm. Natural selection has yet has led young mammals to play. We play more than other young mammals. We play over a longer period of time.
We have a longer juvenile period, which is really the period. Why do we have such a long juvenile period? Because we need a lot of time to play. Uh, we need a lot of time to play. And why do we need a lot of time to play? That’s basically our question. What is the function of play? Mm-hmm. The function of play is to practice.
That’s the primary function of play, is to practice skills. It’s to learn how to do the things. That are important for you to be able to do, to live, uh, an independent life as the creature that you are. So the first person to present this so-called practice theory of play was Carl Gru, way back at the turn of the, of the 19th century into the 20th century.
He wrote a book published in, in, uh, 1898 that the, the English title was, was The Play of Animals. And Gru was one of the early scholars to totally understand Darwin, to totally understand Darwin’s theory. In fact, by my reading, he had a better understanding of Darwin than Darwin did. He had a better understanding of, in some ways, he corrected Darwin in his writing.
Bruce should be, be more well known. He is not well known, but he it, this book, he presented the idea than the play of animals. He started off, he asked the logical question. So according to Darwin, we have certain instincts and behavioral tendencies that came about because they promote our survival and reproduction.
So play, at least when you first look at it. It doesn’t seem to be doing that. You know, it’s, uh, it’s not getting you anything. As I said, that’s part of the definition. It’s not getting you anything. Mm. Mm-hmm. And you’re putting yourself at a certain amount of risk when you’re playing. You know, you, why don’t these young animals, why aren’t they just, uh, brewing down in a cave someplace, keeping out trouble instead of making a lot of noise, attracting predators, you know, why are they doing this?
And he also pointed out that sometimes they’re playing essentially deliberately at risky things. You know, the monkeys are chasing one another around high up in trees where if they fell, they could, they could hurt themselves, they could injure them, they might even die. They, you know, so people have observed young animals actually killing themselves in play.
Not very often, but occasionally. Mm-hmm. His, his. So he said, so there must be some compensating advantage to this. And so he developed the theory that the compensating advantage is that mammals come into the world with incomplete instincts, and to complete them, they have to practice them. So play is kind of the instinct to practice other instincts.
So what he argued was, and, and he had amazing support for this. First of all, he pointed out that, first of all, most. You know, when you look at animals that come into the world with more complete instincts like fish, it’s questionable whether they play at all. You know, some people claim they do, but it’s a stretch.
You know, fish, reptiles, amphibians don’t play much. Some birds seem to play, but, uh, it’s main, mainly mammals and mammals have a lot to learn. And that’s, so that’s one thing he pointed out. And then the second thing he pointed out was that you could pretty much predict what Ena Mammal will play at. By knowing what they have to learn.
So predatory animals play at praying. They play at chasing down things and jumping on ’em. And depending on the type of predatory animal, I mean your, your dog chases tennis balls and it’s practice. And that’s essentially sort of an instinct to practice chasing down small game. It chases cars. That’s an instinct to chase down big game, right?
Comes up from the wolf ancestry, uh,
uhhuh their
cat. You know, dogs and cats, by the way, have been bred to be juveniles their whole lives. In a way they’re, they always act like, like young ones. That’s why we love them so much. Mm-hmm. So they, um, so your cat, you know, plays at pouncing, creeping up on pouncing, on things that’ll pounce out a ball of yarn or whatever.
So the, uh, so predatory animals play at predation prey animals. What do they play at? They play at dodging and darting. Getting away from prey. So young gelles or young zebras practice, they play at dodging and darting. They stay pretty well hidden except for times when they’re playing those ways. And once they’re good at that, then they sort of can come out and explore the world a little bit.
So the uh, argument. That he made and, and you and he, you could run through, you could run through, you know, not every instance of play seems to fit this way, but to a large degree, the main ways that animals play can be mapped on to what it is they have to learn in order to survive as their species. And he also pointed out that, that primates generally have to learn more than other animals.
And not surprisingly, uh, he claimed primates play more than other animals do. So then three or four years later, he wrote another book called The Player of Man. And in that book, he said, so everything I said about animals applies to human play also. But humans have way more to learn than other animals do.
That’s why we have such a longer juvenile period, which he called the juvenile period as the, as the period of play. That’s what it’s for. That’s why it’s there is so that, so there’s this period of time, prolonged period of time for us compared to other mammals where you’re supported by your parents or other adults depending on the culture that you’re growing up in.
And so you have ample time to play. And play is how you develop the skills. Now the pointed out that humans play more than other animals, but he also pointed out we have way more things that we have to learn than any other animals do. Therefore we play at a much larger variety of activities than other animals do.
So we, there are certain species specific things we play at. We children learn to talk and play, watch, watch babies, learn to talk. You know, they’re. Their first utterances are always in a playful mood. Their first words are never used instrumentally to ask for something. It’s just playfully pointing things out.
They’re playing with language as they get older, they’re playing. They become little poets with literations and rhymes and riddles and so on and so forth, and they’re playing with language. They, we are the animal that walks on two legs that watch children walk there. Nobody has to motivate them to walk.
They’re naturally, they’re play and they’re playing it, walking. It looks very serious, but they, but it’s self-motivated. It’s clearly rewarding to them. Has all the characteristics of play. We’re the animal that builds things and children all over the world when they are free to play at the level that they desire, play at building things, what they build depends on where they’re growing up, but.
Play at, they play at building things. Uh, we are the animal that has to live by rules and including formal rules. And so children everywhere play formal games where they’re learning how to follow rules. We are more than anything else, the animal that depends upon imagination. All of our, all of our higher order thought processes.
And so, lo and behold, children are playing imaginative games all the time, and especially when they’re young. So you can really run down the list of things that human beings have to learn everywhere. And those are the things that children everywhere play at. But Gru went beyond that. He said the other thing about human beings.
Unlike other animals, we have to learn not just the things that human beings everywhere have to learn, not just the things that our species everywhere has to learn. We have to learn the things that are important to our particular culture, right? Right. We grow up in a culture and we grow, you know, so if you’re growing up in, in a hunter gatherer culture that uses Bos and arrows, you wanna play at Bos and arrows.
If you’re growing up in a farming culture, you wanna play with farming equipment. If you’re growing up in modern post-industrial information age, you better play with computers. Right? That’s the tool of our age. And he pointed out he didn’t know anything about computers, but he would’ve predicted that that children are gravitate.
To whatever are the primary tools of their culture. And they wanna play with those things because at some level in their DNA, they understand I better get good at this because this is what people of my culture do. So children play at the activities that they see are important to the culture that they’re growing up in.
Rusty Keeler: Well, that’s interesting because that’s, uh, you know, some of these instincts are like a long term. We’re learning to, you know, whether it’s the pre predators or prey or, you know, we’re making our way in the world or language or culture. But then suddenly, like culture is changing so quickly that the instinct is, is isn’t to like, oh, I’m going to be do the farm stuff, or I’m going to, you know, do the hunting gathering.
It’s the instinct is to absorb what, it’s almost like language absorb whatever is happening in society and culture.
Peter Gray: Exactly. So we have long, really long be even, even during hundreds of thousands of years, presumably of hunter gatherer existence. Agriculture just came about about 10,000 years ago. But even during all of that period.
Human beings lived in a lot of different ways. It turns out human beings were rather mobile environments changed in some sense. In some ways, you know, the, the, the survival value, the survival characteristic of human beings is the ability to adapt to almost any environment. We can live like polar bears up there, you know?
Mm-hmm. We can live in the jungles, we can live in the deserts, we can live on mountains. We can, we can live, we are able to live in all these different ways. And the reason we can do that is because we can adapt to these changes and Wow. There’s, there’s a lot of research showing that the adaptation is led.
By the kids. The kids are the first to understand the change and to accept the change there. There was an interesting article that illustrated this with a hunter gatherer culture that was forced to move out of the, out of the forest to an area next to a river. And the adults absolutely hated this move.
They dreaded this move. They would trek miles back into the forest to continue hunting the own way the kids learned to fish.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And the
culture survived because the kids adapted. So the kids, so kids not only look to what older people are doing, but they’re also very attuned to, they’re very attuned, quite understandably.
I’ve gotta attend to the now and the future. Hmm. Whereas adults might be hooked on the past. Hmm. Kids are hooked on now and the future sometimes to the frustration of the older generation. Mm-hmm. Who think, oh my God, why are they spending so much time on those computers? Or By God, why are they out fishing when they ought to be hunting and gathering like decent people?
Rusty Keeler: But there they are in, in tune. I mean, so there’s that instinct of like, what is the now? What is the, what’s right in front? What do we see that that isn’t, we’re not blinded by what has always been done, but the children are leading the way. I tend to think, you know, as an outdoor play person and nature play and you know, I want to be connecting children to the earth and that kind of stuff.
But it also feels like here they’re diving in this other, this other realm of technology and, and kind of, and the connections and, and the cre creativity through that. But you know, there, there’s some adults that are like, yes, that’s the way it is. And then there’s some adults that are like, no, you know, they’re missing, they’re losing something or, you know, they’re not able to.
What do you think about dichotomy?
Peter Gray: So my experience is, so as, as you might know, I’ve, among other things, studied kids in, um, radically alternative school settings where they’re really free to play and do whatever they want all day long, as long as they don’t violate the democratically made rules. And what I find in that environment is, of course there are differences among individual kids.
There’s always been differences among individual kids. I’ve always been an outdoor person like you. But on the other hand, you know, I had a brother. Grew up in the same house, same time, you know, a year and a half younger than me. I guess you would call him a nerd. You know, he was an indoor person. He was a big reader.
He had, he, he played music, he did all kinds of, those kinds of things. He, he didn’t go out fishing with me or playing baseball or exploring in the woods. He just wasn’t interested in that. There’s always been differences among kids. He turned out okay. Right? He turned out okay. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, so what I observe at a place like the Sunbury Valley School, that where I’ve done some of my studies and, and other places comparable.
Is that they could, in theory be on the computer all day long. And there’s a few who essentially are just like, some kids have always been on books all day long, which is every bit is sedentary, every bit is indoors, every bit is even more, cuts you off. Much more cuts you off from social interaction than computers do because you most, mostly they’re playing computers with other kids these days.
So at any rate they the, there are differences, but I would say that the majority of kids are kind of in a balance. They’re spending a fair amount of time outdoors and they’re also spending a fair amount of time indoors on the computer. The reason they’re outdoors and is because there are other kids to play with outdoors.
You know, you and I might, might wish that the love of the outdoors was, is an instinctive, natural predilection. I’ve become convinced that it’s not, uh, it is, uh, an acquired taste. Hmm. And it’s acquired by children from playing outdoors with other kids. So I think the frustration that I hear from a lot of parents is, so I want my kid to play outdoors.
I send him outdoors and he gets bored and he wants to come back inside, or he just gets on if he sneaks his cell phone out, even though I’ve told him not to take it out, he gets on his cell phone, starts communicating with his friends. And so the problem is, as I would say, is that. Kids want to play with other kids.
Mm-hmm. The primary stimulus for play for kids is other kids. And we all like a certain amount of individual play, but kids especially really seek and need play with other kids. And you know, when I was mentioning the things that that kids learn through play, the most important thing they learn is how to get along with peers.
Hmm. And so, mother Nature or natural selection, design them to wanna play with other kids, whether it’s indoors or outdoors. No matter what the game is, they wanna play with other kids. And so we’ve created a world today where it’s very hard to play with other kids outdoors without some adult in your face trying to control what you’re doing.
And then mm-hmm. It becomes not play anymore.
Mm-hmm.
But you can still do it on the computer. So no wonder kids wanna play computer games and play on the computer more than play outdoors. But what I find is that at a setting where there’s a lot of kids outdoors with no adults interfering with what they’re doing, kids still do like to play outdoors.
Rusty Keeler: I mean, it’s, it’s very interesting to look out, you know, my own window here in Ithaca, New York, where it’s, it’s a very child friendly place. Pedestrian friendly, bike friendly, but you don’t see kids out. Certainly not the way it was when I was growing up. Um, and even in, I was in my, the smaller town that I grew up in, we were there recently.
And the same thing even on the sidewalk. So wherever I travel around, it’s that has. Shifted. That has, that has changed for, you know, lots of different reasons, right? There’s a worry that they’re, they’re missing something, that they’re missing some connection to the, the, the real, or that they feel isolated or they, or that they’re, they don’t have that kind of agency.
I think that locus of control, control if, if adults are controlling things and they’re not able to, you know, make their decisions, you know, the way it was, like the traveling band of kids, you know, through creeks and ditches and vacant lots and things. So sometimes I, I worry about that of like, where do humans, they need that?
The social, the social. Those connections, those those experiences kind of from your, you know, the early definitions of play, like. And then at the same, gosh, and then I’ll just jump to like, my son now is a teenager and he got his first phone. And, uh, lots of, there’s no social media, there’s no, you know, I kind of limited it to start us off because you know about to jump into this world, but then it’s suddenly, it wasn’t like start small, even though I kinda limited things.
It wasn’t just start small. Suddenly he is in this web of connection with all these other friends and these group, right. Group texts and single texts and, and you know, and some of it is making plans to be in the real world, but it’s also like suddenly there’s this communication and connection and, and I go back and forth of like, you know, Hey, I want you to be in the real world with us.
But also knowing, well wait. You are forming your connections and having your inside jokes and you know you’re with your people, your peers, and that’s a good thing,
Peter Gray: right? Yeah. I think the, I think that the sad thing is that we adults, the adult society has pretty much outlawed outdoor play. Geez. I don’t think that’s too extreme a statement.
We’ve pretty much outlawed it. We don’t let kids outdoors to play as we used to. We don’t. We are, uh, for, we are irrationally afraid of things. We’ve even reached the point where somebody might call 9 1 1 if they see a kid outdoors without an adult. A kid there, he’s a kid out
Rusty Keeler: there,
Peter Gray: there’s a cat, a loose child out there.
Capture him. Right? So this is, this has changed. There’s a lot, I’ve written a lot about this. I’ve written about the changes that have occurred over my lifetime. So I grew up in the 1950s and. Every, almost every, at least in the places I live, almost every mom’s refrain was Get out of the house.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah, right.
Go, go. Don’t want, don’t
Peter Gray: want you in the house. You’re in my way. So there’s a lot of things that have changed among other things. Houses have gotten bigger, families have gotten smaller. There’s less motivation to kick the kids out of the house, less motivation for the kids to wanna get out of the house.
Um, television came along. It played a role. It kept people in watching, watching. Uh, and you know, instead of, uh, I still remember when the Mickey Mouse Club started in the 19 fif, mid 1950s. It was also about the time we got our first tv, and that was when I began, instead of just hanging around the school yard to play after school, I’d come.
Home and watch the Mickey Mouse Club, uh, 10 or 11 years old, you know, uh, Annette Ello was, uh, was the, uh, was the dream girl that all of us, 11-year-old boys were in love with, and we had to get home. And so this was, so the, the television played a role. Mm-hmm. Uh, a lot of, you know, little league baseball came around and other kinds of sports came around and a lot of people thought it was better for kids to do that than to just go out and make up their own game.
I’ve written a lot about why it’s, you learn so much more when you’re, uh, that’s important when you’re making up your own game than when you’re playing an adult directed sport. But that came around, that interfered with it. School became a much bigger thing over time, the actual number of days in school.
Homework even in elementary school, became a thing, which it wasn’t when I was a kid. More and more pressure for school performance, more and more schoollike things outside of school. All of those things played a role. And then in the, in the, uh, beginning of the 1980s, there were a couple of, of, uh, very much published cases of 6-year-old boys who were snatched away, apparently by strangers.
And one of them definitely murdered and the other one never found. And this made huge news. No surprising, huge news, huge news. Partly because it’s so rare. Things are news if they’re rare, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But so there’s millions of kids out there playing. Two of them were snatched away, and they happened to be at that time.
And suddenly it became, I. Immoral for you to allow your children to go out and play without somebody watching them. You began to hear public service announcements. Do you know where your child is now? You began to see milk cartons with missing children on them. Now it turned out that most of those all, essentially all those missing children were runaways.
Mm-hmm. But that was, but the assumption, the implication was this, this is, this is, somebody was snatched away by a stranger and this could happen to, you’re a child, so you’re reading, you’re eating your breakfast cereal, you’re looking at this. Yeah. So the culture changed such that prior to the 1980s. The, it was still generally believed that getting your kids out independent of you doing things is a good thing for your kids and also for you as the parents.
But the, uh, but that changed beginning in the 1980s and it changed rather sharply beginning then and, and we’re still living with that today. So those are, those are the things that deprived children By 1990 already, children were pretty, well not, not quite as fully as today, but they were already pretty fully deprived of opportunities to just go out and play with other kids the way kids in earlier decades did.
So it is very interesting to note. And this is kind of the theme of a book I’m writing now. I’ve charted the suicide rate among, uh, teenagers over the course of my lifetime. And between the 1950s and 1990s, there was a continuous I. Essentially linear increase in suicide rate, also in other measures of depression and anxiety, such that by 1990, the suicide rate was about five times what it was in, uh, in the 1950s for teenagers.
Other measures, uh, to the degree that there’s consistency in these other measures and you can, you can make an estimate, other measures, anxiety, depression has seemed to be even a bigger increase in what would today be called, uh, major depressive disorder or clinically significant anxiety disorder. So huge increases.
Now, here’s something that most people don’t know, and in fact, I was kind of aware of it, but I ignored it because it was inconvenient. Between 1990 and 2000 suicide rate went down for teenagers as well as other measures of, of depression and anxiety went down not all the way to 19. Fifties levels, but by, but a third of the way back.
And then it kind of leveled off between 2000 and 2010, but continued a little bit sloping downward. At 2010, it started going up again and eventually reached the same level as 1990. Now, how do we interpret that? I’ve scratched my head. I’ve looked for every possible reason one might think of for why things got better beginning in the 1990s.
I am, I am convinced I know the answer to that. Okay. The answer is the computer revolution. By the early 1990s, most families in America with teenagers had a computer. By the mid 1990s, most families with, with, uh, teenagers had an internet connection. Teenagers glommed onto this. We had already, by 1990, largely deprived kids of the opportunities to play and explore independent of adults.
Like, you have to keep emphasizing that because it needs to be independent of adults to meet the needs of kids. And we’d almo, we had already deprived them of that outdoors. Now they had a new way. They were planned, they were communicating with one another. They were keeping touch with friends. They were sharing emotional experiences.
They were doing what kids need to do, like complain about their parents. Mm-hmm. They were doing all of this kind of stuff that teenagers need to do for mental health. There’s even data showing that those kids, if you control for other factors, those kids that were on computers and playing computer games were psychologically healthier than those who were not over that period of time.
So the computers became a saving grace, saving kids from what adults had done, which was to deprive them of the opportunity to be kids. Now they had a new way. Kids are very clever. Mm. They figured out how to do it.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. There they are going to the, the stream to fish. Yeah. Now, right? Oh, then the woods got cut off.
Okay. This is, this is how we can connect. This is how we can play. Right.
Peter Gray: Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: And then what happened?
