Peter Gray

decide, you know, who's going to play what positions and so on and so forth.

And for some reason, even though I was one of the youngest players, the players chose me on my team to be the coach.

So that meant that I was the one who had to remind people when the games were.

I had to decide who was going to pitch.

Everybody wanted to pitch.

So I

I had to figure out some rotating way to please everybody.

I mean, the biggest challenge, of course, you have in a situation like this is you want everybody to stay on the team.

You want to keep everybody happy.

And it was kind of very much an adult-like responsibility to manage this team when I was, I suppose I would have been about eight years old at that time.

But there were no adults.

Adults never came to these games, you know, that...

The only adult involved was, it probably was a teenager, who would be an umpire there, who would call balls and strikes and fair and foul.

And that's what made it different from our pickup games.

That's right.

This is a change in our expectations.

It's not a change in what people are capable of biologically, but it's in other cultures, in hustler-gatherer cultures, you would not be surprised by something like this, that an eight-year-old could take that kind of responsibility.

What is something that you really would like to do, that you feel you could do, but you'd like to do on your own?

initiate that conversation, see what the child says.

And maybe the child will say, well, you know, I'd like to be able to ride my bicycle all by myself to my friend's house.