Your Kids Don’t Need More Achievement. They Need More Freedom | Dr. Peter Gray - EP 826

Passion Struck with John R. Miles

Dr. Peter Gray discusses the biological necessity of childhood play and how modern societal shifts are eroding children's independence. He a

Key takeaways

• Dr. Peter Gray posits that childhood's biological purpose is to gradually develop independence through play.
• The implementation of Common Core in 2010 significantly increased academic pressure and teacher burnout.

Main topics

• Childhood play and development
• Youth mental health crisis

Notable quotes

Play isn't just preparation for life. In many ways, it's where we begin learning how to live.

Conclusion

The episode provides a profound look at how reclaiming freedom and aut

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:01) Hey friends, what if your biggest problem isn't that you're not doing enough, but that you've spent too long proving that you are enough? You can be successful, needed, and surrounded by people, and still feel completely unseen. That's the problem I explore in my new book, The Mattering Effect. I show you how we become hyper-visible for what we produce, while quietly becoming invisible to ourselves, and introduce the matter framework to help you reclaim meaning, autonomy, trust, time, energy, and reciprocity. Stop auditioning for your worth. Start living from it. The Mattering Effect is available for pre-order now at matteringeffect.com. Speaker 4 (1:07) What if we don't discover our passion by figuring out what we want to do with our lives? What if we discover it by playing? As children, we're constantly experimenting. We follow our curiosity. We make things up. We explore what interests us. And somewhere in that process, we begin to discover what matters to us. But what happens when we take away that freedom? What happens... when childhood becomes less about exploring the world and more about preparing for the future. Dr. Peter Gray has spent decades studying childhood, play, independence, and human development, and he argues that one of the most important things children learn through play is how to take charge of their own lives. So I asked him, how do you actually discover your passion? His answer was simple. Take a listen. Speaker 2 (2:04) How do you discover your passion? How do you discover what's meaningful to you? What matters to you? You discover it as a child in play. You play at this, you play at that, you play at various things, you acquire kind of a broad understanding of things by playing and exploring in various ways, but then something really hits you. I love to do this, right? I really love to do this. and you do it enough that you become good at it. Speaker 4 (2:35) Hey, Speaker 2 (2:36) it's your friend Speaker 4 (2:37) John, and welcome to Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it. Speaker 4 (3:16) Welcome back to Passion Struck. This is episode 826, and we're continuing our series, The Adaptive Human, How We Thrive in a Changing World. Over the past several conversations, we've been exploring the forces that shape who we become. Angela Duckworth showed us that our situations can bring out different versions of ourselves. Marty Sligman reminded us that agency begins with the belief that what we do can make a difference. David Epstein challenged us to see constraints differently. Cole Brower showed us what adaptation looks like when there's nowhere to hide from the decisions in front of you. And Marissa Franco took us inward to our relationship with ourselves, our memories, our sense of worth, and the parts of ourselves we've learned to ignore. But today's conversation takes us back to the beginning. Where do we first learn that we have a say in our own lives? And perhaps more importantly, Where do we first discover what matters to us? My guest is Dr. Peter Gray, an evolutionary psychologist and the author of Restoring Childhood, How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety. Peter argues that childhood isn't simply a period of preparation for adulthood. Its deeper purpose is to help us gradually become more independent, to take increasing charge of our own lives. And one of the primary ways children do that is through play. Play gives children opportunities to explore, solve problems, negotiate with one another, make decisions, and experience what it feels like to be the author of their own activity. In other words, play isn't just preparation for life. In many ways, it's where we begin learning how to live. And that connects directly to something I've been exploring in The Mattering Effect. What happens when we grow up in environments where our choices, interests, and contributions gradually stop feeling like they matter? Peter and I get into that question through the lens of childhood, agency, independence, passion, and meaning. And I think you'll hear why this conversation isn't really just about children. It's about all of us. Let's get into my conversation with Peter Gray. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey. to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin. Speaker 1 (5:38) For many of us, going further isn't a choice. It's a feeling we can't ignore because ambition has a way of outgrowing where it began, turning dreams into direction. Every journey brings us closer to the life we imagine. So, where will your journey take you? Etihad, beyond borders. Speaker 4 (6:13) I am absolutely thrilled today to welcome Peter Gray to PassionStruck. Peter, it is such an honor to have you on today's show. Speaker 2 (6:20) It's an honor to be here. Thank you. And I Speaker 4 (6:23) am so excited about your upcoming book, Restoring Childhood. What made you think that now was the best time to bring the book out into the world? Speaker 2 (6:34) That's a good question. I suppose you could say that the best time to bring it out would have been whenever I was ready to bring it out. It wouldn't have hurt to bring it out sometime before now, because the problem that's described in the book has been going on for a long time. I wrote a book called Free to Learn that was published in 2013 on quite a different book, but in many ways overlapped with the thesis of my new book. children have not been allowed to be free to be themselves and that this has had disastrous effects on their on their psychological well-being i already had that idea out there i've been writing academic articles about it i've been doing psychology today blog posts and then more recently sub stack letters on this topic so it's been a topic on my mind for a long time when it came when i had the space now to write a book this was the book i wrote restoring childhood Speaker 4 (7:37) Thank you for that opening. As I have read the book, and I read your previous book because I actually used your research in my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect, it seems to me the larger question you've really been asking is this. What is childhood actually for? If we misunderstand the purpose of childhood, do we inevitably misunderstand how to raise children? Speaker 2 (8:02) I'm glad you asked that. That's a very basic question. That's where we need to start. I'm a biologist by background. I think about human behavior from a biological point of view, evolutionary biologist. And so all mammals, including our children, are born totally dependent on parents or other caregivers. Absolutely, totally dependent on them. The whole purpose of what with mammals is called the juvenile period is to become independent. So the goal of, if you are, or the task of the juvenile period, or what we call childhood when we're talking about human beings, is to gradually become more independent, gradually take increasing charge of our own lives. gradually do more and more of what adults do in the culture. And so that's what childhood is. The reason we humans have a fairly extended juvenile period compared to other mammals is it takes us longer. We, in some sense, have to develop more. We have to acquire more information, more skills than other animals do. And so we have a somewhat long, we have a longer period than other. mammals for this. So every species of mammal, including human children, are born At some level of their being, knowing, not consciously knowing, but in their DNA and in their brains, knowing that their job is to assert their independence to the degree that they can, beginning even in infancy. By the time they're two, their favorite word is no. I'm not going to do what you're telling me to do right now. Or I want to do it myself when parents want to do it for them. And this is healthy. This is what children need to do in the past. Speaker 2 (10:19) We understood this. I'm old enough. I was a child in the 1950s. And I think that whether it was conscious knowledge or just a general understanding that children need to be independent. But if your child is five years old and is not walking to school by themselves, that's a problem. We need to encourage them to get out and start doing these independent. That was the way parents talked. back in the 1950s and even into the 1960s. So over time, for a variety of reasons, we have lost sight of that. And we are preventing children, actively preventing children from asserting their independence, being more independent, taking more responsibility for their own lives. doing increasingly, especially as they enter the teen years, increasingly adult-like things, being gradually accepted into the adult world, still being treated like children, even into their late teens and sometimes into their 20s. Speaker 4 (11:26) Thank you for explaining that. And I wanted to go one layer deeper into this from an evolutionary standpoint. So for much of human history, Up until recent years, we were hunter-gatherers, and we existed within what Robin Dunbar's work calls tribes of 150 or less. What happens now to a child when they've entered an arena that really doesn't have walls and now expands to a global presence of billions of people? How does that affect a normal childhood? I Speaker 2 (12:09) think that you could say that the child is entering a world where there's so many people and so on and so forth. On the other hand, the child's world is not all of that, right? The child's world is their family, their friends, the neighborhood, the kids they're going to school with. I don't think it's so radically different for the child. But of course, as children grow up and they're growing up in this larger world, depending on who they are, depending on what interests they develop, they may or may not become. Speaker 2 (12:44) concerned with the much larger issues of the world as opposed to just the issues that are related to their more immediate sphere of activity. I don't see that as a particular problem. I think that the big issue that is the difference between the way children in hunter-gatherer cultures grow up. and the way our children grow up, at least if we're talking about band hunter-gatherers, which are the hunter-gatherer groups that survived into relatively modern times and have been studied by anthropologists, is that they are not told what to do. They are, I've written, I did a study actually in the late 1990s. along with one of my graduate students, where we surveyed 10 anthropologists, all of whom had lived in and studied hunter-gatherer cultures. In the mid-20th century, it was still possible for anthropologists to trek out and find people still living in a relatively pristine hunter-gatherer type of way. And so we identified anthropologists who had done that in various parts of the world, seven different. hunter-gatherer groups. And what we learned is that in every one of these cultures that these anthropologists studied at least, children were free to play and explore all day long. Nothing like school. Children were trusted to essentially educate themselves. So I think that's the big difference between a hunter-gatherer culture. I think that one of the reasons I was interested in children in hunter-gatherer cultures is I'm interested in what is the biological basis for children's drive to educate themselves, to learn what they need to know. And so I thought through most of our history, essentially all of our history, we were hunter-gatherers. I would learn something about that by looking at how hunter-gatherer children are treated and how they learn. Speaker 4 (14:55) I want to move here now to the topic of play. So you grew up in the 50s. I grew up in the 70s and 80s. And even for me, when I was growing up from as early as I could remember, my school was half a mile, maybe three quarters of a mile away. And I would walk both to and from school. Speaker 4 (15:19) would go to school and we had morning and afternoon breaks and then we had a large lunch break. And so some of my biggest memories from school were playground activities where we were doing unsupervised play and sometimes it would lead to fights on the playground. Sometimes it would lead to football games. Sometimes it would lead to playing hopscotch. what have you. And then after school, my mom would just say, when it gets dark, come home for dinner. And so we would just go out and explore the world. How does... That model, compared to what's happening today, influenced childhood development. Speaker 2 (16:07) This is much of what my new book, Restoring Childhood, is about. What you are describing is what I would call a normal childhood. I had a normal childhood also a couple decades earlier than yours. And this is what the way children throughout the world, except in times of slavery or times of intensive child labor, this is the way children have more or less always grown up. Exactly the way they play varies from culture to culture and so on and so forth. But children historically have always been free to get away from adults, to play with other children. And it's through that kind of play that young people learn how, children learn how to take charge of their own activities. When you're playing out there with other kids, no adults around, think of the problems you have to solve. You have to figure out how to get along with those other kids. You have to figure out how to deal with minor bullying, which is inevitably going to occur to some degree. You have to negotiate your play with your playmates. You have to create rules and figure out how among those of you, you're going to enforce the rules. If you've got rules, you're playing some kind of formal game, pick up game of baseball. What are the ground rules? All of this is extraordinarily important learning for your future well-being because these are lessons that Speaker 4 (17:35) apply to all of life. Speaker 2 (17:37) When there's an adult there Speaker 4 (17:39) doing that stuff for you, when that pickup Speaker 2 (17:42) game of baseball becomes Little League, you're not learning any of that stuff. You're being a puppet. You are being controlled by an adult. The adults are solving your problems for you. You are not acquiring the skills that you need for a successful, independent life as you grow up. So that's extraordinarily important. One thing, what you're describing has been well documented. There are two books I know of on the history of American childhood. One is by Howard Chudakov, and he describes the first half of the 20th century. He considers the turning point to be 1955 for reasons of his own. The first half of the 20th century as the golden age of children's play. By the beginning of the 20th century, we had pretty much done away with intensive child labor. We had compulsory schooling, but it was nowhere close to the big deal it later became. And so children had a lot of free time to play, explore, to get into trouble, figure out how to get out of trouble, all the things that children do as they're growing up. But according to Chudakov, and this is consistent with my life experiences, I was a child in the 1950s. Ever since about 1955, adults have been gradually chipping away at that freedom in various ways. In my new book, I describe 11 societal changes, all of which reduced the likelihood that children were going to spend time outdoors after school and play with other kids. reduce the chance that parents would allow them to do that, increase the incentive to go home and do things at home alone instead of being out playing with other kids. So it's not just one thing. It's a whole set of societal changes that led to that. Interestingly, that corresponds precisely with data on changes in the mental health of young people. The mental health of young people has been declined continuously throughout the 40-year period between 1950 and 1990. Almost linearly, the rate of suicide quadrupled during that period for teenagers, rates of anxiety, depression to the degree that we can estimate them from standardized clinical questionnaires, given the normative groups, increased about five or six-fold. huge changes, huge declines in mental health between the 1950s and close to the end of the 20th century, that in my writing, I bring lots of evidence that