Paranoid parenting prepares today’s children to embrace the three Great Untruths, which means that when they go to college, they are psychologically primed to join a culture of safetyism.
CHAPTER 9
The Decline of Play
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
PROVERB, seventeenth century
Why don’t kids like to be “it”? Why, at the start of a game of tag, do they each call out, “Not it!” and then point to the loser, the last one to reject the role?
A provocative answer can be found by looking at the play of other mammals, most of which have some version of chasing games. In species that are predators, such as wolves, their pups seem to prefer to be the chasers. In species that are prey, such as rats, the pups prefer to be chased.1 Our primate ancestors were both prey and predator, but they were prey for much longer. That may be why human children particularly enjoy practicing their fleeing and hiding skills.2
When seen from a distance, child’s play is a strange thing. Peter LaFreniere, a developmental psychologist at the University of Maine, notes that children’s play “combines the expenditure of great energy with apparently pointless risk.”3 But if nearly all mammals do it, and if some of them get injured or eaten while doing it, it must offer some pretty powerful benefits to compensate for the risks.
It does. Play is essential for wiring a mammal’s brain to create a functioning adult. Mammals that are deprived of play won’t develop to their full capacity. In one experiment demonstrating this effect, rat pups were raised in one of three conditions: (1) totally alone in a cage; (2) alone except for one hour a day with a normal, playful young rat, during which time normal rough-and-tumble play occurred; and (3) same as condition 2, except that the visiting young rat was treated with a drug that knocked out rough-and-tumble play while leaving other social behaviors, such as sniffing and nuzzling. When the young rats were later put into new situations, those that had engaged in rough-and-tumble play showed fewer signs of fearfulness and engaged in more exploration of the new environment.4
A key concept from developmental biology is “experience-expectant development.”5 Human beings have only about 22,000 genes, but our brains have approximately 100 billion neurons, with hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections. Our genes could never offer a codebook or blueprint for building anything so complex. Even if a blueprint could be passed down in our genes, it would not be flexible enough to build children who were well adapted to the vast range of environments and problems that our wandering species has gotten itself into. Nature found a better way to wire our large brains, and it goes like this: Genes are essential for getting the various cell lines started in the embryo, and genes guide brain development toward a “first draft” in utero. But experience matters, too, even while the baby is in the uterus; and after birth, it matters enormously. Experience is so essential for wiring a large brain that the “first draft” of the brain includes a strong motivation to practice behaviors that will give the brain the right kind of feedback to optimize itself for success in the environment that happens to surround it. That’s why young mammals are so keen to play, despite the risks.
It’s easy to see how this works with language in humans: The genes get the ball rolling on the development of brain structures for language, but the child must actually encounter and practice a language to finish the process. The linguistic brain is “expecting” certain kinds of input, and children are therefore motivated to engage in back-and-forth reciprocal exchanges with others in order to get that input. It’s fun for them to exchange sounds, and later, real words, with other people. A child who was deprived of these linguistic interactions until puberty would be unable to fully acquire a language or learn to speak normally, having missed the “critical period” for language learning that is part of the normal developmental process.6
It’s the same logic for physical skills (such as fleeing from predators) and social skills (such as negotiating conflicts and cooperation). The genes get the ball rolling on the first draft of the brain, but the brain is “expecting” the child to engage in thousands of hours of play—including thousands of falls, scrapes, conflicts, insults, alliances, betrayals, status competitions, and acts of exclusion—in order to develop. Children who are deprived of play are less likely to develop into physically and socially competent teens and adults.7
Research on play has increased rapidly since 1980. Evidence for the benefits of play is now strong, and there’s a growing body of scholarship—suggestive though not conclusive—linking play deprivation to later anxiety and depression.8 As stated in one review of this literature:
Research has shown that anxious children may elicit overprotective behavior from others, such as parents and caretakers, and that this reinforces the child’s perception of threat and decreases their perception of controlling the danger. Overprotection might thus result in exaggerated levels of anxiety. Overprotection through governmental control of playgrounds and exaggerated fear of playground accidents might thus result in an increase of anxiety in society. We might need to provide more stimulating environments for children, rather than hamper their development [emphasis added].9
Given this research, and given the rising levels of adolescent anxiety, depression, and suicide, which we described in chapter 7, our educational system and parenting practices should offer kids more time for free play. But in fact, the opposite has happened.
In this chapter, we investigate why the most beneficial forms of play have declined sharply since the 1970s, and we ask what effects this change in childhood might have on teens and college students. The decline of unsupervised free play—including ample opportunities to take small risks—is our fourth explanatory thread.
The Decline of Free Play
Peter Gray, a leading researcher of play, defines “free play” as “activity that is freely chosen and directed by the participants and undertaken for its own sake, not consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself.”10 Piano lessons and soccer practice are not free play, but goofing around on a piano or organizing a pickup soccer game are. Gray and other researchers note that all play is not equal. Vigorous physical free play—outdoors, and with other kids—is a crucial kind of play, one that our evolved minds are “expecting.” It also happens to be the kind of play that kids generally say they like the most.11 (There is also a good case to be made for the importance of imaginative or pretend play,12 which is found not only in less rambunctious kinds of indoor free play but often in rough-and-tumble outdoor free play as well.)
Gray notes the tendency of kids to introduce danger and risk into outdoor free play, such as when they climb walls and trees, or skateboard down staircases and railings:
They seem to be dosing themselves with moderate degrees of fear, as if deliberately learning how to deal with both the physical and emotional challenges of the moderately dangerous conditions they generate. . . . All such activities are fun to the degree that they are moderately frightening. If too little fear is induced, the activity is boring; if too much is induced, it becomes no longer play but terror. Nobody but the child himself or herself knows the right dose.13
Unfortunately, outdoor physical play is the kind that has declined the most in the lives of American children. The study that offers the clearest picture of the relevant trends was carried out in 1981 by sociologists at the University of Michigan, who asked parents of children under thirteen to keep detailed records of how their kids spent their time on several randomly chosen days. They repeated the study in 1997, and found that time spent in any kind of play went down 16% overall, and much of the play had shifted to indoor activities, often involving a computer and no other children.14 This kind of play does not build physical strength and is not as effective at building psychological resilience or social competence, so the drop in real, healthy, sociable free play was much greater than 16%. That study compared Generation X (who were kids
in 1981) to Millennials (who were kids in 1997). Twenge’s analysis of iGen, the current generation of kids, shows that the drop in free play has accelerated. Compared with Millennials, iGen spends less time going out with friends, more time interacting with parents, and much more time interacting with screens (which can be a form of social interaction but can have some negative effects, as we discussed in chapter 7).15
Compared with previous generations, members of iGen have therefore had much less of the kind of unsupervised free play that Gray says is most valuable. They have been systematically deprived of opportunities to “dose themselves” with risk. Instead of enjoying a healthy amount of risk, this generation is more likely than earlier ones to avoid it. Twenge shows how responses have changed to the survey question “I get a real kick out of doing things that are a little dangerous.” From 1994 through 2010, the percentage of adolescents who agreed with that question held steady, in the low 50s. But as iGen enters the dataset, agreement drops, dipping to 43% by 2015. If members of iGen have been risk-deprived and are therefore more risk averse, then it is likely that they have a lower bar for what they see as daunting or threatening. They will see more ordinary life tasks as beyond their ability to handle on their own without help from an adult. It should not surprise us that anxiety and depression rates began rising rapidly on campus as soon as iGen arrived.
In contrast to the decreased time spent in play between 1981 and 1997, that same time-use study found that time spent in school went up 18%, and time spent doing homework went up 145%.16 Research by Duke University psychologist Harris Cooper indicates that while there are benefits to homework in middle school and high school, provided it’s relevant and in the right amount, achievement benefits in elementary school are smaller, and homework that isn’t realistic in length and difficulty can even decrease achievement.17 Yet elementary school students have seen an increase in homework over the past twenty years.18 Some schools even assign homework in kindergarten. (Lenore Skenazy told us that when she asked her son’s teacher why homework was being assigned in kindergarten, the teacher responded, “So they will be ready for homework in first grade.”19)
Why is this happening? Why have we deprived kids of the healthiest forms of play and given them more homework and more supervision instead? One of the major reasons for the decline of all forms of unsupervised outdoor activity is, of course, the unrealistic media-amplified fear of abduction, which we described in the previous chapter. In one large survey, published in 2004, 85% of mothers said that their children played outdoors less frequently than they themselves had played when they were the same age. When asked to select reasons to explain why their children didn’t spend more time on outdoor play, 82% of the mothers chose “safety concerns,” including the fear of crime.20
But there’s a second reason, a second fear that haunts American parents and children—particularly those in the middle class and above—far more than it did in the late twentieth century: the college admissions process.
Childhood as Test Prep
When the parents of Millennials and iGen were children, early education was very different than it is today. Take a look at a checklist from 197921 that helped parents decide whether their six-year-old was ready to start first grade. It has just twelve items, and almost all of them are about physical and emotional maturation and independence—including one item that could get parents arrested today (#8).
IS YOUR CHILD READY FOR FIRST GRADE: 1979 EDITION
Will your child be six years, six months or older when he begins first grade and starts receiving reading instruction?
Does your child have two to five permanent or second teeth?
Can your child tell, in such a way that his speech is understood by a school crossing guard or policeman, where he lives?
Can he draw and color and stay within the lines of the design being colored?
Can he stand on one foot with eyes closed for five to ten seconds?
Can he ride a small two-wheeled bicycle without helper wheels?
Can he tell left hand from right?
Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend’s home?
Can he be away from you all day without being upset?
Can he repeat an eight- to ten-word sentence, if you say it once, as “The boy ran all the way home from the store”?
Can he count eight to ten pennies correctly?
Does your child try to write or copy letters or numbers?22
Compare that to one from today. A checklist from a school in Austin, Texas, has thirty items on it, almost all of which are academic, including:
Identify and write numbers to 100
Count by 10’s to 100, by 2’s to 20, by 5’s to 100
Interpret and fill in data on a graph
Read all kindergarten-level sight words
Be able to read books with five to ten words per page
Form complete sentences on paper using phonetic spelling (i.e., journal and story writing)23
Kindergarten in 1979 was devoted mostly to social interaction and self-directed play, with some instruction in art, music, numbers, and the alphabet thrown in. Erika Christakis notes that kindergarten classrooms would have been organized to build social relationships and facilitate hands-on exploration (such as with blocks or Lincoln Logs) and imaginative and symbolic play (such as a store or housekeeping corner with props and costumes). Back then, kindergarten, which for most children was a half day, probably looked more like what passes for a progressive preschool today, consisting of “open-ended free play, snack, singing songs with rhyming words for a little oral language exposure, a story, maybe an art project and some sorting games or block building for math awareness.”24 Today, kindergarten is much more structured and sedentary, with children spending more time sitting at their desks and receiving direct instruction in academic subjects—known as the “drill and skill” method of instruction, but that teachers not-so-affectionately call “drill and kill.”25 Such methods are sometimes effective ways to communicate academic information to older children, but they are not appropriate for use with young children. There is growing evidence that with young children, these methods can backfire and produce negative effects on creativity as well as on social and emotional development.26
Researchers at the University of Virginia compared kindergarten classes in 1998 (composed of some of the last members of the Millennial generation) to kindergarten in 2010 and found that by 2010, the use of standardized tests in kindergarten was much more common. Teaching methods and classroom organization had changed, and far more time was spent on advanced reading and math content. The study also found that teachers’ academic expectations of kindergarteners in 2010 were far higher than they had been in 1998,27 a trend that seems to continue. For example, today’s Common Core kindergarten math standards include “construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others,”28 and reading skills include “read emergent-reader texts with purpose and understanding.”29
In response to things like the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, state preschool standards, a general emphasis on testing, and then the introduction of Common Core standards, the preschool and kindergarten landscape has changed enormously.30 Christakis laments that social time and play have been sacrificed in preschool to keep up with academic expectations for kindergarten readiness. As she reports, kindergarten teachers still claim that the most important skills for kindergarten are not academic but social and emotional (like listening and being able to take turns).31
Beginning in preschool and continuing throughout primary school, children’s days are now more rigidly structured. Opportunities for self-direction, social exploration, and scientific discovery are increasingly lost to d
irect instruction in the core curriculum, which is often driven by the schools’ focus on preparing students to meet state testing requirements. Meanwhile, especially for wealthier kids, instead of neighborhood children finding one another after school and engaging in free play, children have after-school activities like music lessons, team sports, tutoring, and other structured and supervised activities.32 For younger children, parents schedule playdates,33 which are likely to occur under the watchful eye of a parent.
For children of many educated parents with means, instead of afternoons and weekends spent hanging out with friends or resting, that nonschool time is increasingly used to cultivate skills that will allow those children to stand out later on in the college admissions game. It’s no wonder that parents work so hard to plan their children’s time. What eight-year-old has the foresight to play the tuba or girls’ golf—activities that might make them more attractive to colleges?34 What thirteen-year-old has the organizational skills and forward thinking (not to mention transportation plan) to follow the advice of The Princeton Review, which urges students to increase their appeal to colleges by picking one community-service activity early on and sticking with it year after year, volunteering two hours a week through senior year?35
The Coddling of the American Mind Page 20