Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. A plane goes down somewhere in the Pacific. The survivors, stranded on a deserted island, are a group of schoolboys. At first, they celebrate their newfound escape from adult supervision, playing on the beach. Then they organize. They elect one of the boys, Ralph, as their chief. Ralph and several others get a fire going.
But soon the boys begin resisting Ralph's efforts to lead them. The boys assigned to watch over the fire get distracted, and the fire goes out. They become paranoid and stoke each other's fears of a beast they're convinced is stalking the island. They split into warring factions and begin attacking one another. Three of them die. This is the story told in the 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies.
It was written by an English schoolteacher named William Golding, and it reflected his harsh view of humans in general and children in particular. The novel ends when a British naval officer lands on the island and finds the children in a ragged, feral state. The novel entered the cultural consciousness as a warning.
Without rules, systems, and adult supervision, children left alone would descend into chaos. As with many generalizations, there is some truth to this. A multitude of studies suggest kids thrive when they have stability. Chaotic and unpredictable environments can bring out the worst in us. But today we explore whether many societies have taken William Golding's warning too much to heart.
If some supervision of children is a good thing, lots of parents, teachers, and school administrators seem to think more is always better. When more is less and less is more, this week on Hidden Brain. When you're first learning to swim, it's not a good idea to be pushed into very deep water. You could drown. But it's also not a very good idea to simply waddle around in the shallow.
You'll never learn to swim. If you're a parent or a teacher, you're constantly asking yourself how to balance risk and safety for the kids in your care. Tip too far in one direction, and you can put children in danger. go too far in the other, and you deprive kids of the joy and power of exploration.
At Boston College, psychologist Peter Gray studies how the balance between exploration and safety has changed for many children and the effects this has on their minds. Peter Gray, welcome to Hidden Brain.
I'm very happy to be here.
Peter, you were once at a pop-up event where the organizers provided kids with various materials, including twigs and tree branches, old boards, hammers, nails. Paint me a picture of the scene and tell me what happened.
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Chapter 2: Why is independent play crucial for child development?
Yeah, I mean his rebellion was very different from the typical naughty boy who's maybe shooting spitballs and so on. His rebellion was almost like a planned rebellion. So just for example, when the teacher would teach him a specific way of doing arithmetic problems and how you're supposed to show your work, he would deliberately – find a different way to do it.
And then the teachers complained to us about that. And I asked him, so why do you do it a different way? And he said, it's because it's the only way I can make it fun. And when they were teaching about punctuation and capital letters and how to put them into sentences, he actually declared, I'm going to write now like E.E. Cummings, the poet, and put punctuation and capitals wherever I please.
So that was, that was him. Ultimately, it led to a meeting in the principal's office in which his teacher, the principal, assistant principal, school psychologist, another psychologist called from outside, his mom and me were all there to tell him in no uncertain terms that he had to follow the rules of the school. And he, nine years old, looked at us big adults and he said, go to hell.
As a dad, Peter knew something had to change. But as a researcher, he started to ask himself, is it possible the problem was not with kids like Scott, but with adults like himself? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
When it comes to rearing happy and healthy children, when should we lend a helping hand and when should we step away and let kids figure out things for themselves? At Boston College, psychologist Peter Gray studies what adults today do and what they ought to do to maximize the well-being of children.
He says an important question parents, teachers, and school administrators should ask themselves when it comes to rules and structure is how much is too much? Peter, you decided to start your research by delving into what anthropologists have found about child-rearing practices throughout human history. What was the typical pattern before modern times?
Yes, so I began to get interested in how children historically have acquired the culture that they're growing up in, learning from others what you need to know to succeed in that culture eventually as an adult. And I'm an evolutionary psychologist, so I look at human nature from the perspective of Darwinian evolution.
If you look at human nature from that perspective, you automatically become interested in hunter-gatherers because we were all hunter-gatherers during 99% or so of our biological evolution.
As you undoubtedly know, there have been hunter-gatherers in isolated parts of the world who, at least into the middle to even late 20th century, were still living in a rather pristine hunter-gatherer way of life. There were anthropologists who had trekked out into those areas to make contact with them and study them. I began to read what I could of such work.
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Chapter 3: What changes have occurred in American culture regarding children's independence?
And ultimately, along with a graduate student, surveyed a group of anthropologists who had studied various different groups of hunter-gatherers in different parts of the world to find out from them what are children's lives like in the culture that they observe? What's the relationship between adults and children?
And what I found in every case, seven different cultures on three different continents, was that the children were free to play and explore pretty much all day long. They might be asked to do little chores, but no such thing as school. You know, the adults might say, you know, don't eat these mushrooms, they're poisonous. They would point out things that are dangerous.
But the assumption was that children would learn by observing, by exploring, by playing, And when I asked the anthropologists, well, what did the children play at? They talked about play that seemed to be, in essentially every case, modeled after the activities that were important to the culture in which they were growing up.
So in a culture where the men hunt big game, the little boys and middle-sized boys too were playing at hunting big game. In a culture where they used dugout canoes. The kids were playing with dugout canoes, um, and so on and so forth.
They played at the games and music and art of the culture and not because anybody was requiring them to do so, but because it just seemed apparently natural for them to do that. And, um, What the anthropologists pointed out is they would play at these things and eventually they were actually doing these things. The play would merge into adult-like activity.
So there was no real difference between what you're doing when you're playing and what you're doing when you are an adult actually doing this thing that you were playing at before. So this was very interesting to me.
And of course, the children would have been hanging out with a range of other children, probably of different ages. Presumably, they would be learning not just from children who are exactly their own age, but from children who are a little older. And those children might have learned things from children who are a little older than them.
That's a very important observation that These are all band cultures, so they're relatively small. Even if you wanted to just hang out with kids your own age, there wouldn't be enough. So you're always playing with kids who are both older and younger than yourself. So a typical play group might be kids from age 4 to 12 or age 8 to 16, all playing together.
But when children are playing across age, The younger children are always learning from the older children. They're being boosted up to higher levels of activity. And the older children are in very important ways learning from younger children. They're learning how to be leaders. They're learning how to be caretakers.
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Chapter 4: How can parents encourage unstructured play for their children?
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.
And in some ways, I suppose all of this points back to the central thing that children need to learn, which is to learn to be independent. Perhaps we're taking that away from 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.
You say that when children spend a lot of time in the company of adults, they are less likely to participate in what you call authentic communication, and they're more likely to do this when they're in the company of other children. What do you mean by this term, Peter?
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. These were young children, about probably five or six years old, and then also recorded them when they were in class talking with their teacher and also recorded them when they were just sitting around having lunch.
When they were playing, the language was far more sophisticated, far more real, far more authentic than in any other situation. Because when you're playing with other kids, you're constantly negotiating, you know, Maybe picture a group of young children playing that they're going to the King's Ball. And, you know, who's going to marry the prince? And so then there's a discussion about that.
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Chapter 5: What role do schools play in fostering independent play?
Some of them are quite legitimate. One of them is, well, there's nobody else outside. And so my child goes outside to play and there's nobody to play with. Or, you know, I've heard of this case recently in our neighborhood where somebody let their child out to play with other children and somebody called the police and then protective services arrived. So
The culture has changed such that you are considered to be a negligent parent if you allow your child outside without observing that child. Now, why did the culture change? And I think that the biggest change occurred in the 1980s. There were a couple of cases of young boys. In both cases, they were six years old.
One of these instances occurred actually in 1979 and the other in 1981 who were taken by a stranger on the street and ultimately murdered. This is, of course, a very rare event. And because it's rare, it made headlines. It was in the news all the time. And it led to programs trying to protect, make sure that this doesn't happen again.
And among those programs was to put pictures on milk cartons of missing children. And the assumption was that when you were eating your breakfast cereal and looking at this milk carton, that these missing children were people, little kids who had been snatched away by some stranger on the street. And the whole concept of stranger danger was developed.
And once a person has this image in their head it's hard to get it out of your head. So it leads to a belief that the world is more dangerous than it actually is. The truth of the matter is the world is not more dangerous today than it was decades ago.
You know, it's also the case that families are having fewer children today. This is not just in the United States. It's in many countries around the world. And I'm not necessarily suggesting that parents who have many kids, you know, love their children any less than parents who have few kids.
But it is certainly the case that I think parents direct more attention to their kids now, in part because families are smaller. And that's driven by, you know, demographic and economic changes that are probably well beyond the control of any individual.
I think that is definitely a contributing factor. When you have more kids, you're more likely to want some of them out of the house, if not all of them out of the house, right? And houses have gotten bigger too. When you've got a small house and a bunch of kids, you don't want them all hanging around the house.
You say that another reason adults have intruded in their children's lives is that increasingly many adults feel the need to prepare children for a very competitive world. Talk about this idea, Peter.
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Chapter 6: How does adult supervision affect children's problem-solving skills?
We heard earlier about how Peter's son Scott rebelled against conventional school when he was a boy. Eventually, it became clear that Scott needed something different from school.
Finally, it kind of reached a crisis point near the end of fourth grade where his mother, me, various adults from the school, including the school principal and some psychologists all met with him about you have to follow the rules. He'd been very deliberately rebelling in ways that obviously the school, the teacher couldn't really tolerate. But it was all a message to us that he was
really unhappy in school. He needed something different. And this was his way of telling us that. So ultimately, the result of that was that we found a very alternative school, a school that it's a place where there are all sorts of opportunities for learning, but no coercion about it.
The name of the school, for people who are interested, it's the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, still in existence. It's actually been in existence for over 50 years. It's a school that is based on the principle that children learn best when they direct their own learning, when they make their own decisions about what they want to learn. It's a democratic school.
It's run by the school meeting where everybody has a vote. students and staff members. The students are there from four on through late teenage years. The children are not segregated by age. Part of the philosophy of the school is that younger children learn naturally from older children and older children learn how to be caring and leaders by interacting with younger children.
So this is a school he went to and he went all the way through what elsewhere would be called high school. It changed my career because as a concerned parent, I, like many listeners here, might wonder, well, boy, what's going to happen if I allow them to go all the way through high school here? So I've been doing a very different kind of research at Boston College.
I've been doing brain research with rodents. But I decided, you know, I need to find out what happens with the graduates of this school. This school had already been around long enough that there were graduates. And so I did a study of the graduates and found they're doing very well. And that kind of changed the direction of my career.
Would there be instructors or teachers at the school in the formal sense?
So it's interesting. The staff members at the school, and by the way, my son is now a staff member there. So the staff members at the school don't call themselves teachers. And the reason they don't is they believe that they don't do any more teaching than anybody else does. They believe that learning comes from conversations, from all sorts of experiences.
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