Peter Gray

And children are pretty good at that.

But when there's adults around, at least in this day and age, they kind of assume the adults are responsible for deciding if it's safe or not.

The adults are responsible.

If somebody is teasing you, instead of for you to figure out what am I going to do about this person who's teasing me, you go and tell the adult.

So even just the mere presence of adults influences the way children play.

I kind of assumed, well, this is an opportunity for me to sort of teach them about Scrabble.

I'm pretty good at Scrabble, and I'm sure they're novices.

And I sat down to play Scrabble with them and started to explain the rules.

But they had played the game before and went right into a game that was modeled after Scrabble, but it had their own rules.

So instead of having to play an actual word,

They could play any kind of a nonsense word as long as it sounded like a word.

And the longer and sillier it sounded, the better.

They had no interest in keeping score.

They were just having a great time playing nonsense words.

And then they would once in a while challenge the other person, what's the meaning of this?

And then the other one would pretend to look it up in the dictionary and cite a very funny meaning that fit a little bit with the way it sounded.

And

I just sat back after a little bit of protesting, hey, this is Scrabble, let's really play Scrabble.

I just finally sat back and I realized, hey, these girls are really playing.

My way of playing Scrabble is a little bit more like work than like play.