Restoring Childhood, with Peter Gray

Yeah, so, so what do I mean by childhood? So I, um, am an evolutionary psychologist, so I look at, uh, human beings, human, uh, development from a, an evolutionary perspective.

From an evolutionary perspective, childhood, or more generally the juvenile period if we're talking about other mammals, is the time during which the new person becomes increasingly independent of parental or other adult care and protection.

So all mammals, including our children, are born totally dependent for their survival on their parents or substitutes for parents to care for them.

And the object of this developmental period is to become increasingly freed from that, increasingly able to care for yourself, increasingly able to protect yourself, less and less dependent upon parental or other adult close care.

So that's the purpose of childhood, so it's not surprising that children, and the same is true for other young mammals, are born with strong drives to assert their independence, to do things independently.

They wanna do things [laughs] on their own to the degree possible.

We see that very clearly in our young children.

As soon as they can move around, they wanna do whatever they can do on their own.

So that's really what childhood, childhood is, it's this period of asserting your independence, becoming more independent as the path to growing up.

Okay.

Now, um, I recognized as, as I read the book that your childhood in the, uh, was, was freer than mine, but not by a whole lot.

A lot of the changes have happened since I was a child in the '70s.

So what are some of the ways that we have, as you put it in your book, tightened the leash on children over the last 50 or 70 years?

Yeah, so I, I devote a chapter to talking about roughly 11 or 12 different social changes, all of which had the effect of reducing the opportunity and the incentive for, uh, children to assert their independence and do things independently.

Just a, a few of the major ones, one of them is the, is a huge increase in the amount of time that children are spending in school, coupled with a decrease in the amount of freedom they had in school.

[laughs] So the school year between, uh, the 1950s and the end of the 20th century increased by five full weeks.

That took away five weeks of free time away from kids, right?

Right.

Now, even probably more significant than that was the addition of homework even in elementary school.

In 1950s, there, there was no homework in elementary school.

Once in a while, a teacher would ask you to write a poem or a story at home, something fun like that, and bring it in to share, but we didn't walk back and forth, uh, between home and school with, uh, workbooks or, or textbooks.

Uh, when we were out of school, we were out of school, right?

Right.

So another change is the substitution of free play, taking away f- opportunities for free play and substituting adult-directed sports.

So in the 1950s and even into the 1960s, and to a lesser degree in the 1970s, if you wanted to play baseball, let's say, you'd go out to the vacant lot or a park and there'd be other kids who you, who are your friends who would regularly show up.