Play Day

7/31/23

Play Day

Just add kids. [Source]

To be clear: this blogger has no children and hasn’t raised any, which is rather liberating. Not having direct experience with something frees us to comment on the subject matter without restraint, injecting useful advice into anyone else’s life at the drop of a hat, and with the type of confidence and authority that accumulates when we don’t know what we’re talking about. Lack of direct personal experience imparts a great confidence and certainty that can only arise when left unopposed by reality.

That much clarified, permit me to observe that you parents out there have done it all wrong. You were supposed to let your children play more. But you didn’t, did you? You insisted your kids avoid the perils of the outdoors, ranging from Lyme disease to sketchy adults and—horrors!—lack of adult supervision. If you’d only asked me about what to do ahead of time.

But if you wouldn’t listen to me, then at least listen to psychologist Jonathan Haidt and psychology professor Peter Gray, both of whom have been studying what’s wrong with kids these days.

Humans, like other mammals, appear to require play during their early years to develop healthy minds as adults. These researchers and others like them have concluded that modern society and the parenting it encourages are robbing youngsters of opportunities for play. By “play”, they mean specifically play among the children’s peers, where kids gain several important skills. Peter Gray summarizes the general research findings in a guest essay for Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel Substack, titled “Play Deprivation Is A Major Cause of the Teen Mental Health Crisis”, where he says:

Dozens of research studies, conducted with people of a wide range of ages, have led to the conclusion that mental health for all of us depends on our ability to satisfy three basic psychological needs—the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The logic underlying this is straightforward. To feel in charge of our life, to feel we can meet the bumps in the roads of life with equanimity, we must feel free to choose our own paths (autonomy); feel sufficiently skilled to pursue those paths (competence); and have friends and colleagues for support, including emotional support (relatedness).

Lack of these play experiences leads to reduced happiness later in life, the research says. But read the whole thing. Or watch the TEDx talk Haidt also recommends as capturing the scale and scope of the problem:

For my part, I was concerned that Gray would wind up making the 1950s of his childhood into a perfect past, where ideal kids from ideal families had the best play experiences—after which everything has since gone down the tubes. Needless to say, the era was far from ideal for everyone. But it does appear to have been less filled with hovering parents fearful that their offspring will miss out on moments of adult-structured play or scientifically designed learning—or else they will wind up victimized by menacing strangers from the seedier fringes of Adult World.

At any rate, the described idyl of hunter-gatherer societies (mentioned in the TED Talk) is a very long way off from where we are today. In those “primitive” societies, they let the kids play all day long without adult supervision. Many a modern parent will certainly find appeal in the very thought.