Peter Gray

Or maybe the child will say, I'd actually like to cook dinner.

But now the child has asked and the parent is having this discussion.

And the idea would be to reach some kind of a

kind of agreement, well, okay, you can do this.

And it may not be exactly what the child's asking for, but something that the parent thinks is okay.

So that kind of breaks into this cycle where you sort of change the discussion.

It's not now just about safety.

It's now about balancing safety with an acknowledged value in independent activity and an acknowledgement that what the child wants to do

is actually important.

This has actually occurred in some neighborhoods, I wish it occurred more, where some parent, or maybe more than one parent, have decided

you know, we really would like our children to have more opportunities to play without us intervening.

We remember our own experiences as children and what we benefited from play.

We need to provide this for our children.

How can we do it?

And so one strategy is to get together with the neighbors who have kids and you say,

All right, every Saturday, we're all going to send our kids out and keep your devices inside.

We're going to send you out, but they're all going out.

If some of the parents are concerned about safety, we'll have one adult out there just for safety.

In my opinion, ideally, that adult is a grandparent because I find that grandparents tend to be a little less likely to intervene than parents are.

But the understanding would be that that adult is there like a lifeguard on an ocean beach, only there in case there's some kind of real danger, but not to tell the children how to play or to solve minor problems.