Peter Gray

So kids were outdoors and they'd find one another and they'd play with one another.

This was not just the 1950s and 1960s America.

This is the way hunter-gatherer children played, as I described before.

This is generally the way children throughout the world have played.

And so this is a new thing, in some sense, in the history of the world, where

we are not allowing children independent activity away from adults.

We've got adults around them all the time.

Yeah, so if you ask parents why they're not allowing their children outside, you'll get a variety of answers.

Some of them are quite legitimate.

One of them is, well, there's nobody else outside.

And so my child goes outside to play and there's nobody to play with.

Or, you know, I've heard of this case recently in our neighborhood where somebody let their child out to play with other children and somebody called the police and then protective services arrived.

So

The culture has changed such that you are considered to be a negligent parent if you allow your child outside without observing that child.

Now, why did the culture change?

And I think that the biggest change occurred in the 1980s.

There were a couple of cases of young boys.

In both cases, they were six years old.

One of these instances occurred actually in 1979 and the other in 1981 who were taken by a stranger on the street

and ultimately murdered.