Peter Gray

And so there are a few neighborhoods who have done that, including some that have actually got the city to close off the streets if it's a busy street during that period of time when it's playtime.

And once the kids are playing together and they get to know one another, then they may find other ways to play during other times as well, other than just the formally chosen one.

And what play club is, is an hour of free time.

Age-mixed play, usually in elementary schools, all the grades combined, so it's age 5 through 11 roughly all combined, all playing together.

Usually it is before school, but sometimes after school.

And so this takes a little bit of effort on the part of the school.

They have to have somebody there to manage it.

And the teachers who monitor play club are advised, taught really,

Not to solve little quarrels, not to tell the children how to play better, not to worry if somebody looks unhappy.

The whole purpose of play is for children to learn how to solve their own problems.

For the schools that have adopted this, this has been very successful.

really what we're talking about here is to what degree do you as a parent feel that you need to control your child?

And to what degree do you feel you can trust your child to do what is good for the child themselves without you controlling?

So really, ultimately, what I mean by a trustful parent is one who trusts the child's

developmental processes and allows those developmental processes to occur, which really means allowing the child to play, to explore, ask questions of adults when they want to ask those questions and all of that, to do the things that children by nature want to do.

There was a real case in the 1960s of a group of schoolboys about the same age as the fictitious children in Lord of the Flies living on a Pacific island.

They ranged in age from 13 to 16.

And they had decided they were tired of school.

They were at a boarding school and they called it borrowing, but they basically stole a fishing boat.

And they weren't really very good sailors.