A Conversation with Dr. Peter Gray About Restoring Childhood

Debbie:
Hey Peter, welcome to the podcast.

Peter Gray:
I’m happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Debbie:
Oh my goodness, I was so pleased and excited when I heard from your publicist about your new book and asked if I would be interested in bringing you onto the show. It’s like I said yes before I even got a copy of your book. So I’m super excited to just have this opportunity to connect with you. You have a brand new book out. It’s called Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety. And so I’d love to just kind of start there. Could you tell us about why this book was so important for you to get out into the world?

Peter Gray:
Well, it’s important. I think this is an issue that should be important to everybody who’s concerned about kids and about the future. Kids certainly in the United States, but in many other parts of the world, are suffering at extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, even suicide, which is the tip of the iceberg of mental suffering, if you will. I’ve seen this increase in anxiety and depression among young people throughout my lifetime. This is not a brand new thing. The world has become more stressful in some ways for children, or maybe not, maybe more stressful is not quite the right word, but more resistant to allowing children to do the things that they need to do to develop good mental health, to develop the attitudes and abilities, a sense of agency that is required to feel confident, to feel that I can handle problems, that I can, that my future is going to be okay because I can do things. I’ve seen this change and I’m not the only person who’s documented it. There are historians who’ve documented the decline in children’s freedom to play and explore and do other things independently of direct adult control. And so that’s fundamentally what this book is about. When I say restoring childhood, the first question that might come to somebody’s mind is, well, what do I mean by childhood? So what I mean by childhood is sort of what I call a normal childhood, which is a period of time in which young people are increasingly taking control of their own lives. All mammals, including our children, are born totally dependent upon parents or other direct caregivers. And the task of the juvenile period, or for us childhood, is to become increasingly independent of that. And throughout most of human history, intuitively, parents understood that. But in recent times we have become so concerned with safety, so concerned with protecting children, so concerned with quote, educating them along very narrow prescribed lines that we are not allowing children to do the things that they need to do to develop well. So it’s become very important to me to get this message out to people.

Debbie:
Yeah. Yeah, and I will say too, for listeners, if you haven’t checked out Peter’s TED talk, which is about play specifically, it’s fantastic. I’ll have it in the show notes page. And also, you know, your last book is Free to Learn, and you explore play through that book as well. And you’re approaching the conversation in a different way through this book. Could you talk about that?

Peter Gray:
Yes. Well in my earlier book, Free to Learn, I was especially focusing on how children learn and the role of their own instinctive ways of learning, you know, children are born extraordinarily curious. They wanna know about the world around them. That’s how they find out information. And they’re also born extraordinarily playful. They wanna do things. And it turns out that when children are free, they do things that are relevant to the world they’re growing up in and they acquire the kinds of skills that they need to grow up well. And so that book was about primarily about how our constraints on children are preventing them from becoming well educated in a broad sense, a much broader sense than the way school defines education, which is a very narrow sense. So that book, and it appealed especially, I think, to people who were dissatisfied with the school system and they kind of wanted to look at alternatives. And so it was a little bit more of a niche book, although I think it also brought a general audience as well. This book is designed for everyone. Everyone who’s concerned at all with children or the future that children will bring us, this book is aimed more broadly. And in the last chapter I actually talk about regardless of who you are, what your position is in the world, there are things you could do to help restore childhood. And I’m making some suggestions there. And I’m even in the very end asking people who read the book to respond on a page on my website to what they’re going to do to help restore childhood, bring more freedom to children’s lives.

Debbie:
Yeah. Yeah, you’re on a mission, which I love talking to people who are on a mission.

Peter Gray:
I do see it as a mission. I am a missionary in this sense.

Debbie:
Yeah. No, it’s wonderful. It’s a gift, I think, to the rest of us. So, first of all, I just want to say I love how you define childhood as increasingly taking control of their own lives. It’s so simple when you describe it in that way. And I do think we can get as parents so caught up in the minutia, the day to day and all the decisions we’re making and trying to ensure or guarantee this kind of, you know, best possible future for our child that we forget that this is what we’re actually zooming out and trying to do. So I wanna definitely get into the tech side, the smartphones. There’s so much happening in the news around that. But before we do, I actually want to touch upon intensive parenting as kind of a style, right? So there’s articles about intensive parenting and helicopter parenting and you know the over controlling parenting. And I think it’s interesting to think about that. And I, you know, even within the context of parents who are raising neurodivergent kids, we might find ourselves really involved in scaffolding our kids’ skill development and things like that. And sometimes the line can be a little bit blurry, but can you talk about how you define intensive or helicopter parenting and what the harms of that are for our kids really developing into whole humans who can live self-actualized lives?

Peter Gray:
Right. Well, intensive parenting is a term that was coined maybe 20 years ago. It’s become ever more common, certainly in the United States, but in many other parts of the world as well over time. The view has gradually developed that parents play a huge role in children’s development. I agree parents play an important role, but we’ve exaggerated that role. We’ve underestimated the role that children themselves play, that children’s peers play, the role that the larger community plays. So parents, many parents today feel that every little thing that they do could either mess up their child or it could benefit their child. You enter a kind of continuous state of anxiety if you have that belief. You know, if I holler at my child, my God, that might be terrible. But if I allow my child to do this, that might be terrible. So that’s part of it. The other part of it is really an overconcern with safety. It almost sounds funny to say an overconcern with safety. But when you become so concerned with safety that you’re not allowing your child to do the things that could be a little bit dangerous but are really important for the child to do, to learn how to do them, to learn how to manage themselves, you are in some sense preventing your child from growing up. So we have a world where parents don’t allow their children to walk to school by themselves, or to play in the park away from adults, or to use sharp knives in the kitchen, or to light fires in the fireplace. These are all fun things for kids, they’re all valuable things for kids, but we worry so much that the child might get hurt, or even worse. And how could we live with ourselves if that would happen? You know? So because of that, parents are spending way more time monitoring their child, following their child around, planning their child’s life, the worry that my child’s future is in my hands, the parents’ hands. Will my child get into a good college or not, that I have to help steer my child into a good college. That’s all part of intensive parenting. It’s like it really, it’s not the way intensive parents would put it. But it is really kind of taking charge of my child’s life. And that’s where the mistake arises for the child, because the child’s job is to increasingly take charge of their own life, which means parents have to increasingly let go of their charge. So it’s harming children for the reasons that I gave initially, to practice independence to gain independence. It’s harming parents because parents are running themselves ragged with all this work. There’s data, at least in the United States, that working mothers today who have full-time jobs are spending more time with their children than stay-at-home parents did decades ago.

Debbie:
Wow.

Peter Gray:
And no wonder people are frazzled. No wonder the birth rate is going down. You know, having a child has become a job and it shouldn’t be a job. It should be a great pleasure. It should be a relationship. It’s always a job with a little kid. But by the time a kid gets a little bit bigger, the child should be contributing as much as they’re taking, you know, so that, and that was the way it was decades in the past. But children have become kind of a full time job on top of whatever other full time job, and it’s usually the mom, so I’ll say the mom already has. And it’s no wonder that people are reluctant to have kids these days. It seems like why would I take on such a burden? It does not have to be such a burden.

Debbie:
Well, even just you saying the future is in my hands, like I felt very seen in you saying that. I think we do put such a tremendous amount of pressure on ourselves. I will also say, you know, we were talking before I hit record. I’m an American. I’ve lived in the US for probably half of my parenting life, but I’m in the Netherlands now and it’s a different vibe here. Like it was something I noticed when I moved here when my kid was nine. Just the freedom that the kids had and also the, it wasn’t disinterest or uninvolvement, but it was definitely a different dynamic between the parents and the child.

Peter Gray:
Yes, I’ve heard that independently also. And I’ve been to the Netherlands a couple of times and have some friends there who would confirm that view.

Debbie:
Yeah. Yeah. I actually want to pivot and kind of get to some aspects of your book, which I think are so timely. The day we’re recording this, I just listened to an episode of the Daily, and they were recapping the social media restrictions that Meta is going to be imposing on teens about their social media use. And obviously there’s a huge conversation right now happening about the increased anxiety and depression in kids and screen and tech use and social media. So you argue in your book that the youth mental health crisis started long before smartphones. So could you kind of touch upon one of your core premises of the book about that relationship?

Peter Gray:
So first of all, as you referred to, there was a huge increase in anxiety and depression, and even suicide among kids in the twentieth century, well before we had digital technology. And in the book I describe thirteen different societal changes that occurred over that second half of the twentieth century that reduced children’s opportunities and inducements to go out and play with other kids away from adults. A whole set of changes and I present reasons to believe that there’s a cause effect relationship there. Taking away that freedom reduces children’s ability to develop a sense of competence, a sense of agency, it’s the kind of courage that it takes to face the bumps in the road of life, that was already occurring well before we had digital technology. Interestingly, there was a period of improvement in mental health beginning around 1990 until the early 21st century. And in the book, I attribute that to the computer revolution. Children now had new ways of playing. They had new ways of interacting with one another. And there’s a lot of evidence, in fact, that those kids who had access to a computer were doing better psychologically, other things being equal, including socioeconomic class and so on, than those who didn’t. And so they found a new way of playing, exploring, making friends, interacting with one another. And so things got a little bit better, not all the way back to nineteen fifties levels, but about forty percent of the way back in terms of mental health measures. But then in 2010, and this is where your question begins, in 2010 in the United States, rates of anxiety, depression, suicide began to increase again. And by twenty eighteen, they were all the way back up to those nineteen ninety levels again. Not higher, but back up to that again. And so the question is, what happened beginning around 2010 that would have caused that change? Now the belief, even before Jonathan Haidt’s book, the common belief among Americans at least was that that increase must be due to smartphones and social media. You look around and kids are on their smartphones, they’re on social media. And you know, you’re an adult looking at that and you kind of imagine the worst. You think it can’t be up to no good. This must be harming them. And you understand that anxiety and pressure is going up and you put two and two together and you say, well it’s gotta be the smartphones and social media. So that was a view that was already out there. And then Jonathan Haidt wrote his book. And it seemed to confirm that view to people who already believed it, right? So suddenly now this became a big issue. We began to have lawsuits against the companies as we’re seeing now and so on and so forth. Well, there’s one group of people who have never agreed with Jonathan Haidt’s book. Right from the beginning, they were critical of the book. Those are the people who’ve actually done the research on this issue. It turns out that there are literally hundreds of research studies aimed at testing the hypothesis that being on social media or smartphones worsens mental health for the general population of kids. And the studies have been done with kids of various ages, both genders, various kinds of studies. There have been reviews of those studies, meta-analyses, which is a way of putting many studies together to look at what the overall relationship is if you combine studies. What the overall finding is is that not even any meaningful correlation, let alone evidence of cause-effect relationship, between the amount of time kids are on smartphones, or amount of time they’re devoted to social media, or the amount of total screen time, none, no relation with any of those measures with the degree to which children are suffering from mental problems. You can find individual cases where it looks like it’s having a negative effect. You can find individual cases where it looks like it’s having a positive effect. You can find small studies that show a negative effect and small studies that show a positive effect. But when you look at the larger, more well-controlled studies, or when you combine studies, the finding regularly, not just from one researcher, but from many researchers, is there’s no overall correlation. No meaningful, no clinically meaningful correlation. Sometimes you find a small correlation, but it’s not sufficient to account for a clinically significant change. So that’s one kind of finding. But then there’s another interesting finding. This sharp increase in anxiety, depression, and suicide was largely an American phenomenon. It did not occur in most of the rest of the world. It did not, for example, I looked up the suicide rate data for the European Union. And during the same period for teenagers, during the same period that the suicide rate among teenagers between twenty ten and twenty eighteen was rapidly rising, it was actually decreasing a little bit in the European Union. European Union kids are not deprived of smartphones and social media. Why didn’t it affect them if that’s what it is? There were other studies done throughout the world looking at is there any correlation between the rollout of this technology and teens’ use of it, on the one hand, any correlation overall between that and an increase in anxiety and depression among young people, and study after study of this sort has shown no correlation. So all of this is really pretty strong evidence. It turns out that Jonathan Haidt refers only to a very small sample of the total number of studies done. He doesn’t refer to any of the review studies, any of the meta-analyses. He ignored the big picture of what the researchers had found and selected a handful, really, maybe about 20 studies actually referred to in the book that seem at least superficially to support the smartphone social media hypothesis. Even those particular studies, because I looked up and read some of them, don’t actually support it, or they provide very weak support. So I think that what happened is that at least the American public and maybe to some degree the world public was prepared to believe that this technology can’t be good for kids. And then when this book by a respected psychologist was published, that put the nail in the coffin. That told us for sure that this is the problem. And most people aren’t gonna go and look up the actual original research. I did, you know.

Debbie:
Yeah.

Peter Gray:
And the people who do the research, and I’ve talked to some of those people who do the research. I’ve read reviews from them and they, as far as I can tell, uniformly disagree with Jonathan Haidt’s conclusion in that book.

Debbie:
Yeah, I mean, it’s that confirmation bias. It’s something we believe, or a lot of parents are just uncomfortable with their kids’ tech use and something doesn’t feel right. So it’s like, yes, this must be what’s going on. And so it did kind of hand an answer, right? To parents in the way that, like I was just thinking as you were answering that, you know, violent video games are the cause of violence in kids, and that is also something that the science just doesn’t back up.

Peter Gray:
That’s exactly right. You know, we’ve been through this kind of thing several times in the last century or so. There’s a new technology, there’s a new thing that the kids glump onto. I think that there is some rationale, it’s probably a positive thing that we are a little bit neophobic. Something’s new. We’re a little bit afraid of it. We’re a little bit afraid that maybe this is bad and then we see the kids are all doing this, we think, this, you know, this wasn’t part of my growing up and look how great I am, you know. And so now we have to worry. Our kids are growing up with this thing that we didn’t grow up with, and especially if you’re looking at your own kid. Imagine this, you’re looking at your own kid. And you recognize your kid’s got some problems. I mean, what kid doesn’t have problems, right? There’s always some problems, some kinds of unhappiness, some kinds of problems. But if you’re prone already to kind of believe it must be this new thing they’re doing that’s causing the problem, you look at your kid and you say, so my kid is having some difficulty sleeping, or my kid is feeling some anxiety, or my kid is feeling this, it must be due to that. And so you’re kind of confirming, even with your own kid, a pre-belief that you have. And so then when you talk to other people, and then you hear from a famous professor that this is having bad effects, then you put yourself on a bandwagon about it. So this has happened in the past about horror comic books in the post-war era. It happened in the nineteen twenties in the depression about movies when kids were going to cheap movies all the time and a lot of the movies were about gangsters and so on and so forth. It happened even before that with what are called, what in the UK were called Penny Dreadfuls, little serial publications that are all adventure stories and romance and so on, and adults believed that this was the ruination of the new generation. And in fact, it was probably a major reason why kids got literate at that time. It happened really before compulsory schooling. Kids were learning to read on this stuff. And so we’ve been through this before. And I think that’s kind of what’s happening now. I think it’ll wear itself out when the kids who now are growing up with social media, when they have their own kids, they’ll be less afraid of their kids being on social media.

Debbie:
Yeah. Yeah. So we’ve talked about the screen and tech use and how the science doesn’t back up that that’s kind of the underlying cause for what we’re seeing in this increase of anxiety, depression, and mental health challenges in kids. So tell us what you found in your research and what you’re presenting in the book.

Peter Gray:
So my alternative theory for why there was this increase is that there is in the United States and a couple of other countries as well, there was a dramatic change in the schooling system. School has always been, when you’re looking at the population of school-aged children as a whole, the leading source of stress and anxiety, depression. Even before 2010, every study that I’ve been able to find in which kids are asked what’s stressing you out, far and away the leading response is school, school pressure. That doesn’t mean that’s the only thing stressing people out. And that doesn’t mean it’s the most stressful thing for every child. For children who have abusive families, that’s the most stressful thing. For children who are regularly bullied, that’s the most stressful thing, and so on and so forth. But when you’re looking at the population as a whole, because the whole population essentially is going to school, and school is very stressful. School for the population as a whole is the most stressful experience overall. And that shouldn’t surprise us because children spend more time in school than any place else except home. And school, by its very nature, the way we do school in modern societies, is stressful. You are in school, you are micromanaged in a way that no adult would tolerate at work. You are told what to do all the time. You are constantly being evaluated, who’s better, who’s worse compared to your peers. You even have to ask permission to go to the bathroom. There’s no way around it. This is a stressful environment. So if you make a federally mandated change that makes school even more stressful than it was before, it shouldn’t be surprising that you would see a population-wide spike in anxiety, depression, and even suicide among school-age kids. Even before Common Core, even before 2010, not only did self-reports show school to be most stressful, but there was data, published data showing that every year when school opens in the fall, rates of anxiety, depression, pediatric mental health admissions and suicides about school-aged children increase. And every spring when school closes, it goes down. The rates of all of these things are about half as high in the summer as they are during the school year. So this has been well published. There’s a number of studies showing this. Even during COVID, when schools close because of COVID, rates of pediatric health admissions declined, rates of suicide declined because school was closed. And when school reopened again, they went up again. So there’s a direct relationship between schooling and, now what happened with Common Core? So people outside of the United States, and many people even in the United States are not quite aware of this. But many years ago, the federal government passed a law called No Child Left Behind. And the idea of that law was that schools needed to become accountable for the product they were producing, that product being defined as high grades in tests that students were taking. In other words, this was sort of like a business mentality about education that the purpose of education is to increase learning, and how do we measure learning? We measure it with standardized tests. We can’t just judge that teachers are saying kids are learning. We have to have some hard and fast measure of it in this society where everything has to be quantified and measured. But that law never had strong teeth. It had some effects and schools got, in my mind, worse because of it even before 2010. But in 2010, it took teeth. And the reason it took teeth is because the federal government was beginning to really be a little bit more threatening. We really are going to hold back federal funds to states for schools if you don’t prove to us that the test scores are improving. And so most of the states in the United States, most of the 50 states got together and said, we’re going to work together to create what we’ll call a common core curriculum. We’ll all create this curriculum together. All the states involved in this will do this. And what this means is that every school in the state will be teaching the same curriculum for those classes that are relevant to the federal government. And we will be giving standardized tests on that. We will be evaluating whole school districts, school superintendents, principals, teachers on the basis of increased test scores on the part of the students. So now it’s not just the students who are being evaluated by test scores, it’s everybody involved with the school. It shouldn’t surprise us what happens when you declare that. Teachers, even teachers who have a long reputation of being wonderful teachers, the kids love them, the principals love them, no longer are they going to be evaluated because the kids like them and everybody seems to be learning and enjoying the class. They’re now going to be evaluated based on the test scores. So, what’s going to happen? It’s pretty predictable. You’re going to start teaching to the test. You’re going to stop doing the things that you were doing before that made school kind of fun, that got kids intellectually engaged, and you’re going to engage in kind of the lowest level of what you could do in the school, which is test drill of one sort or another. And you’re also going to decrease the emphasis or the time devoted in the school to those things that were always kind of more enjoyable. Music classes, art classes, recess, all these decreased, more time devoted to those subjects that even before were less pleasant, but more time devoted to it in the least pleasant kind of way. So at the time that these changes began, there were a lot of reports from teachers, from school psychologists, and so on that school had become more stressful for everybody. Everybody was recognizing that within the school system. And there was resistance to it, but it continued on. And so to me, no surprise. It resulted in a population-wide increase in anxiety, depression, and even suicide among young people. Interestingly, that increase reached a peak in 2018. And although I don’t really talk about this in the book because it was still a little bit too new for me to be sure of what’s happening, it’s gone down a little bit since then. I think what’s happened is that Common Core has, most people recognize it, even for its original purpose of increasing test scores, it didn’t work. Test scores ever since Common Core was started have been going down in the very subjects that are being pushed by Common Core. To me, no surprise. If you just drill people on that, you just burn them out about it. You don’t learn much by being drilled. You learn by being intellectually engaged. Good teachers before Common Core knew how to intellectually engage their kids. Even a few minutes of intellectual engagement in something is more valuable than hours of empty drill on something in terms of what you actually learn, incorporate into your actual real understanding of this subject matter. So I think it was destined to fail, but I think that by now, even by about 2019, many school systems recognize this isn’t working. Let’s start returning some of this judgment to our teachers instead of trying to control our teachers. I can’t prove that that’s happened, but that’s my hypothesis for why things are starting to actually get a little bit better now for kids.

Debbie:
Yeah, I mean, I definitely feel like there’s been a pushback against Common Core, No Child Left Behind for a while now, but also systems, especially the traditional educational model, is really slow to change. And again, as parents of neurodivergent kids, I just finished writing a chapter for a book on school fit and how challenging it is for parents like us, we often find we’re maybe the canaries in the coal mine, like this isn’t working because our kids can’t learn the way that they learn and they’re being kind of forced into a model that wasn’t designed for them. But that’s the case for all children, is what you’re saying.

Peter Gray:
Well, I think that’s the case for all children and what’s happened over time, and this occurred even before Common Core, is that the channel that kids are being pushed through through the regular school system gets narrower and narrower. So there are more and more kids who don’t make it through that channel with any ease. Every time school systems become more constraining, the rates of diagnosis of ADHD go up. This isn’t because of changes in the brains of the children. This is because of changes in the school that make school incompatible with an increasing number of kids.

Debbie:
Gosh, there’s so much we could go into, and I’m cognizant of the time. So let’s kind of bring it home. And I’m just going to encourage readers to check out Peter’s new book. It’s called Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety. It’s a really accessible book. I read a ton of books for work, but this is full of the research and the studies, but the way you present it all just made so much sense. And it was truly an engaging read. So I just want to put that out there too. But let’s talk about what parents and listeners can do. Like, can you leave us with a couple of things to kind of think about how we could take action in our own schools or our own communities right now to kind of restore childhood?

Peter Gray:
So I think the first step is to what action can you take with regard to your own children, and then also what actions can you take with the schools of the larger community? The first step with your own child, I would say, would be to sit down with your child and say, assuming your child is more than five years old, but especially if they’re ten years old or older, sit down with your child and say, are there things you would like to be doing independently that you’re not currently doing? And I’d like to hear what those things are, or make a list of them. And maybe the child hadn’t even thought about that, right? But now you’re asking them to think about that. And then let’s have a discussion about which of these things you might actually do that I as your parent would approve of your doing. Maybe there’d be a little negotiation, maybe. You know, you wanna go on a trip all by yourself across the country. I’m not ready to let you do that, but how about going across town? You know, kind of negotiation to, but it breaks into that cycle of overprotection to instead of the focus on what you can’t do, let’s look at what I’m saying you can do, and even kind of encouraging you to do. So that’s one thing parents can do. This is, it turns out that there’s a psychologist who works with children who’s been using this as actually a therapy measure for children who suffer from anxiety. He talks with the children about what they would like to do, and then he talks with the parents about letting them do it. And he finds that they overcome generalized anxiety disorders as a result of just doing more things themselves, taking a little courage, learning they can face their fears and succeed. So that’s one thing. A second thing, because school for so many children is such a high rate of stress, what the research shows is the most protective thing from really serious stress from that is if the parents aren’t adding to the stress. In other words, parents should make it very clear to their child, look, I love you. I accept you for who you are, not for your test scores. That has nothing to do with my love and my acceptance of you. I want to support you whatever direction you go. It’s those kids who not only are getting pressure from school, but who are feeling like their parents’ approval of them depends upon their doing well in school. Those are the ones suffering the most, as it turns out. There’s actual research showing this. And so if parents can lighten up on that and not worry so, you know, it turns out that certainly in the United States, parents are way too concerned about their child getting into an elite college. It turns out it doesn’t make much difference. When you control for background factors, the kids who go to the local state university do as well, even by measures of income at age forty as those who go to an Ivy League college. When you control for background factors, we call that the socioeconomic category you’re coming from and so forth. Most parents don’t realize that. They think somehow they’ve got to get their kid into an elite college or their kid, you know, to be only slightly exaggerating, and some parents actually feel this way, they may end up homeless, you know. These kinds of things are, and then finally, I would say that if your child is overscheduled, your child is scheduled into so many out-of-school activities that between school and homework and all these other, you know, adult directed sports and other kinds of things that they’re in outside of school, they have very little time to themselves. Then I think it’s time for the parent to talk with the kid. Do you really want to be in all this stuff? You know, which ones could you drop? You know, would you feel okay not going to this? Some kids may be doing these things because they think their parents want them to be in it rather than because they actually do want to be doing it. And so reducing rather than increasing all this scheduled activity. It’s very interesting. We actually did a study through the Let Grow organization, and I wrote an article about it. Believe it or not, during the COVID pandemic, children became less anxious, less depressed, more feeling their own agency than they did before the pandemic or again after. And when I first published this result, we surveyed 1600 families with kids between the age of eight and thirteen asking both the kids and the parents in different cases about the child’s level of anxiety. Are you more anxious or less anxious than before the pandemic, the school closure? The great majority said less anxious. We asked the parents, are you getting along better or worse with your child now during the pandemic than before. The majority said better. And when we asked in the open-ended question, what’s happened? Parents said, you know, I’m really proud of my kids. I thought I was gonna have to amuse them all the time. I thought when everything’s closed, all these extracurricular activities, they were out of school, I thought they would be at loose ends. They wouldn’t know what to do. They’re finding things to do. They’re reading books they like to read. Some of them are wanting to learn how to cook dinner. You know, this was like a new discovery because suddenly all these kids whose time was being taken up with all these adult demands, suddenly they had time of their own. And all despite the anxieties about COVID and the negative aspects of it, despite that, the kids were doing better during that period of time. When I first published this, the editor of the journal questioned it because this violated what everybody else was predicting would happen. It turned out, and I was glad to point out by the time that article was actually published, there were three other studies using different methods but the same conclusion. Kids were actually doing better psychologically during the pandemic, school closure and closure of everything else, than before. What does that tell us? It tells us our kids need more time for themselves than we’re giving them.

Debbie:
Wow. So fascinating. Just to mention on COVID too. I think again, those of us with kids that don’t typically fit into the school system, COVID for a lot of us, it was a gift because suddenly we weren’t trying to fit into that school system. And I think a lot of us held on to the hope that that disruption would be like a reset that would continue. And it seems like things went back to business as usual much quicker than many of us anticipated or hoped.

Peter Gray:
Yes. I think the school system learned the wrong lesson from it. They began to believe there’s all this learning loss. So we’ve got to do even more than we were doing before. The lesson should have been, wow, look, kids are doing better psychologically. Let’s continue opportunities for play and recess at school instead of, you know, even more restrictions on their lives than they had before the COVID period.

Debbie:
Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Once again, I just want to say thank you. I so appreciate you taking the time to walk through this with us today. It’s super interesting. I think it’s very much in alignment with, you know, what we hear. And many of my listeners, we really are big advocates of autonomy supportive parenting. And this just feels very much in alignment with everything that you shared today. So thank you again. Congratulations on the book and I hope it starts a lot of conversations out in the world.

Peter Gray:
I hope so too. Thank you.