Peter Gray

These are social skills.

These are the skills of knowing how to initiate an activity and direct that activity's problem-solving skills.

Children practice these skills when they're playing and when they're playing with other children.

When adults are around, adults step in and solve the problems for the children.

The adults tell them how to play and that children, therefore, are not learning how to take initiative, not learning how to create

rules for themselves, not learning how to negotiate with other children to solve problems.

If there's always an adult there doing it for them.

That's well put.

Because again, from an evolutionary perspective,

What do we even have this long period of childhood?

What is the purpose of the juvenile period, as we would say, in all mammals?

It is to develop the skills that allow you to become increasingly independent.

But the only way you can develop those skills is by being allowed increasing amounts of independence as you are growing older from year to year.

That used to occur in our culture.

That was certainly true when I was a child many, many decades ago.

And it was even true when my son was a child fewer decades ago.

But today, we are not allowing children to do the things that they should be doing, that they're capable of doing for a variety of reasons.

But the end result is that children are more or less supervised, directed, monitored, corrected all the time.

Let me refer to a research study that was done some time ago.

These researchers recorded children's voices while they were playing with other children.