Peter Gray

And that's the way we did it.

And I was very proud of it.

He was proud of it.

He painted it up himself and,

I showed him how to attach the wheels on and he did that.

So I played a role kind of showing him how to do things.

But then when we showed up, all the other cars were beautifully crafted.

They were just so smooth, perfectly painted.

And my son and I, we just almost left.

We didn't even want, his looked like it was made by an eight year old, right?

It did not run as smoothly as the others.

And I think the others refrained from laughing at us, but we were embarrassed.

In many ways, adults have taken over children's lives.

I think in some sense with good intentions, there's a lot of promotion of the idea that parents should be very much involved with their children's lives, that parents are expected almost these days, much more so than in the past, to kind of be teachers to their children as well as comforters and nurturers and so on.

And I think the cost of that has been that it takes away from children's own initiative, from children's own opportunities to figure things out for themselves and learn how to solve problems.

In my experience, children actually take responsibility when there's no adults around.

That's part of the advantage of there being no adults around.

They have to take responsibility.

If there's no adults there to tell you what to do, you've got to kind of say, oh, is this safe or not safe?

Is this a reasonable thing to do or not?