When School Wasn't Such a Big Deal, Interview with Dr. Peter Gray

Ginny: Thank you for doing this. I'm so thrilled and excited. I'm Ginny and I know we've never met before, but I've been following you for a long, long time. Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. I have never been more excited than I am right now to be across the camera from Dr. Peter Gray. 

Peter: You can just call me Peter.

Ginny: Peter Gray’s book Free to Learn changed my life. And I also have his other new ones. You can see all my tabs here. And so I just want to publicly say to Peter, thank you. I'm sure people say it all the time, but you have changed my life. You have changed our family's life. You have changed life for our children. It's a generational impact. I speak around the country at homeschool conferences and every single presentation I do includes your quotes and includes your book. Your impact is so far reaching. It's amazing how one book can permeate so deeply. So I wanted to say thank you to you and to say thank you for being here. Could you take a minute to introduce yourself and maybe tell a little bit how you came to this book here?

Peter: Sure. So I'm a research professor at Boston College. I retired quite some years ago from teaching, but continue to do research and writing. I'm an evolutionary psychologist, which means that I'm interested in human nature and how our nature came about by natural selection. And for many years now, I've been primarily interested in children's nature and more specifically in the and the natural ways that children explore and learn about the world around them.

My research has led me to become an advocate for what I call self directed education, where children are learning through their own initiative. Children, I'm convinced, come into the world biologically designed to educate themselves, their playfulness, their curiosity, their sociability, their desire to grow up. All of these basic drives and children, I'm convinced, were shaped by natural selection to serve the function of their education.

And so I'm concerned that we allow children to do that. I think that we are increasingly controlling children's lives in ways that prevent them from using their natural, self educated instincts. And so I'm pretty sure that my interest crosses with your interest in children having more free time and specifically time to to play and explore outdoors.

Ginny: We landed on our path by accident. aWe re a homeschooling family, but I was planning on being a director. I was planning on directing the day and filling the time. And circumstantially, we just had too many young kids at the time and I couldn't do that. And so by happenstance, by accident, by grace, we went with a different approach out of necessity.

And your book was part of our path to change our life. It helped us feel better about what we were doing. And in the end, our kids are thriving. I'm so glad that our path went this way as opposed to a different way and that the resources were there from you to back it, to have this understanding of why stepping back is sometimes better, is often better for kids.

So this is one thing that I have been trying to wrap my brain around for a long time. One of the things that is at the very end of the book and just completely took me aback, was that in 1982, you had a 13 year old son who went to London for two weeks without a cell phone, by himself, right? You said he flew overseas by himself. He planned his trip. He earned the money when he was 12. And at age 13, went to London all by himself for two weeks to go exploring. I want to know all about that. 

Peter: Well, so he first of all, let me say that at that time, I had never been to London. I had never been abroad, nor had his mother. We were kind of stay-at-home, stick-in-the-mud types of people. I've done a lot of traveling since that time, but up to that point, we'd never gone anywhere.

And my son was a more adventurous type of person. And he decided he wanted to go to London. He had good reasons for wanting to go. He was deeply immersed in the game, Dungeons and Dragons. And as a result of that, he knew a lot about British history and wanted to go to museums there to see some of the things that he was aware of. He wanted to see castles. He wanted to do certain things he wanted to do. So he approached his mother and me, saying that he was planning a trip. At the time he approached us, he had already planned the trip.

He was 12 years old. And, you know, we didn't have the Internet at that time to do the planning. He had to get books from the library and figure things out, he had to find out how you do it, how do you make plane reservations. All this he did by himself even before he let us know that he was planning to do this.

And so I have to say that our major concern was the fact that he's a Type 1 diabetic. And I worry about anybody with Type 1 diabetes traveling alone. So that was truly our major concern. But I had to admit that from the age of nine, when we first became aware of his diabetes, he had been giving himself his insulin. He'd been monitoring his diabetes very, very carefully. And so when he told us and at first we were hesitant to let him go because of that he said, well, you know, I'm always going to have diabetes. And when I'm 18, you're not going to be able to stop me from traveling. And so really what you're saying is that this is because of my age.

So we kind of backed out on that because we recognize that regardless of his age, he is a very responsible person who could take care of himself. He was going to wear his medallion that shows he's diabetic and in case he had an insulin reaction or something like that. And then he short cut our excuse that we couldn't afford it by saying he’d earn the money himself, which he earned largely by working in a restaurant.

You know, this was a different time. I'm pretty sure it's legal for 12 year olds to work in a restaurant today. At first, he was washing dishes. But as time went on, he was operating. He was working at the grill, you know, and so he did this all by himself. He traveled. And he also in fact, I didn't learn until sometime later, he also went to Paris as part of this trip as a sort of side trip. So that was an adventure.

You know, I have to say at that time, it wasn't as odd sounding as it is today, but it was still to some people. You know, even then, people raised their eyebrows about it.

But, you know, if you think about it, it wasn't that long before that, you know, you'd have 12, 13 year old kids crossing the ocean on a steamer, you know, into the new world to start their life and seek their fortunes. So from that kind of a historical perspective, it's not so terribly strange that a 12 or 13 year old would have the wherewithal to take charge of an activity like that was certainly definitely a growing experience for him. Since then he’s done a lot of traveling. He likes to travel. You can save up enough money to go someplace, you go someplace. That's the nature of my son.

Ginny: It started when he was young. He had that instilled in him. He wanted to see the world. It is fascinating. I have thought about it so often since I read the book. You know, it's been 40 years since 1982. I remember my parents, they usually listen to this, when I turned 13, I had three friends over from church. They spent the night and we wanted to go to the mall by ourselves. We wanted to be dropped off at 13 and the other girls were 14, but my parents, they trailed us the whole time, 

I have a 13 year old. We just went to Cedar Point, which is an amusement park. It's in Ohio. We went with some other families and a group of kids went off by themselves without the parents. And my son didn't have a phone. He was with some other kids. They had phones. A few were 16. He’s in a group of all these kids but throughout the day I have this anxiety like I wonder if they're getting enough food and, oh, if only I could check in and see. And I kept thinking about your book where your son goes to London for two weeks. Did he check in? You know, you just dropped him off at the airport and you come back two weeks and he’s got adventures to tell?

Peter: Yeah, that's pretty much it. He called us once. We asked them to call us at least once, now if I remember. He did call us, and wanted to assure us that he was fine. You know, that was back in the day when phone calls were kind of expensive, just a long distance call. So, you know, so that's. We just decided that we were pretty confident that he would be fine.

Ginny: I think it's such an important story to know. I think it helps as parents now to take a step back and ask ourselves, you know, I'm being too overbearing. It's such an influential and impactful story.

One of the things that Lenore talked about was how when kids do these certain things, you would tend to think that that confidence they learn is only repeatable in the same situation. So if your son went to London, he could go back to London. He feels really confident about it.

But what she was saying is that he's this confident with certain things, that confidence shows up in other areas. So she was talking about, for example, a kid that learns to cook eggs on the stove and all of a sudden is not asking for as much help tying shoes, that type of thing.

And so I've been thinking a lot about that, how when you kind of step back, you never know where that confidence or the skill sets that they learned, where else those are going to show up and that those are so beneficial. And I think it's quite beneficial for the parents to stretch as a parent a little bit. You become more trusting, a little more laid back. If you can go to London, you can go down to the park or something like that. 

Peter: Right. You have to keep in mind at that time, kids were all a lot more independent than they are today. They were probably a little bit less so than when I was a kid in the 1950s. But in the late 1970s, early 1980s, kids walked to school. They rode their bikes to school. They played outdoors at all ages in the neighborhood without adults watching them. It was a different world.

And so as a consequence, children, including my son, developed the sense of I can take care of myself, I can do things, I can solve problems, I can figure things out. And we're kind of preventing that for our children today by virtue of not allowing them to have these types of experiences. So if he hadn't had these little adventures, if he hadn't been able to take care of himself and, you know, go off visiting friends by himself and go, he would never have been able to plan a trip to Europe or to have the confidence that he could do that. So I think it's important. 

You know what? Unfortunately, what happens today is so many children are so completely overprotected and then suddenly they're sent off to college. And at that point, even though parents are still on the phone with them a great deal and they're on the phone with their parents a great deal, there's not the same direct oversight over what they're doing. And unfortunately, a lot of kids at that age, and I'm calling them kids instead of adults. But at that age, this is their first time where there is not somebody getting them up in the morning, telling them to do their homework, warning them of this and that. And now they're off and aren't necessarily very good at running their own lives. And we're seeing a lot of that.

Ginny: The consequences are different at that age because you need to be successful because you're starting your life at that point. 

One of the things I noticed as a theme through your book and through the new four books is this concept of substitution. It's like we have substituted, I like this phrase, a school centric view of development.

You talk about a careerist approach to childhood. And so we've substituted what the child is naturally wanting to do. We've substituted it with this adult direction and adult guidance. And as you say often in your books, you talk about how you can't really substitute. Like you say, “nothing that we do, no amount of toys we buy or quality time or special training we give our children can compensate for the freedom we take away. The things that children learn through their own initiatives in free play cannot be taught in other ways.” And you echo that “play is nature's way of teaching children how to solve their own problems, control their impulses, modulate their emotions from others perspectives, negotiate differences, get along with others as equals. There is no substitute for play as a means of learning these skills that cannot be taught in school.” So maybe we could talk about that for a minute, which is how we came to substitute what really works for things that don't really work and are also a lot more expensive and difficult to manage? 

Peter: So this is a change that I've observed in our culture over my adult life. I think that the default condition when I was a kid and for some time after that was, you send kids out to play. You want them out of the house, get out of the house, And I think several things gradually changed that. One was that in the 1980s, there were a couple of very celebrated cases of children being kidnaped. And this got into the popular press and we began to hear warnings about the dangers of children being out there on their own. Of course, there always were dangers, but they weren't necessarily publicized. And the danger, you know, these kinds of terrible events that we are all so afraid of are very, very rare, extremely rare. You know, of course, you can get hit by lightning. All kinds of things can happen. But when this happened and it got into the press, it became kind of a cause, a national cause. And so you had milk cartons, you had pictures of missing children. And so you'd be eating your morning breakfast cereal and looking at these missing children on the milk carton and saying, oh, my God, that could be my child.

And so and then you began to hear on the radio public service announcements. Do you know where your child is? As if you are a negligent parent if you don't. And so we began to have those warnings because of the fear of dangers out there. And that fear exploded. I mean, it became big. And this sense, this almost moral sense that if you're not watching your child or have somebody watch your child all the time, it means you're a negligent parent and even began to get into the kind of legal system where you might have your child taken away. If your young child was out there by themselves without adults or what previously was normal, child rearing suddenly became immoral and possibly illegal. So that's what occurred.

And then the other thing that occurred and this again, was kind of in the 1980s, we began to have this over concern about schooling. We always had school, but school was just not the big deal that it became beginning around the 1980s, late 1980s in particular. 

When I was in elementary school in the 1950s, there was no homework for elementary school kids. Once in a while, we might be asked to write a story at home or a poem, something fun like that that we would bring in. But we didn't lug books and worksheets back and forth. When we were home, we were at home and even during school we had plenty of opportunities to play.

I can't say for sure for all the grades I was in, but I remember very well fifth and sixth grade at that time. Sixth grade was part of elementary school. We had six hour school days but two of those hours were outdoors playing. We had a half hour recess in the middle of the morning and half hour recess a little afternoon, a full hour lunch. Some people went home for lunch. They walked home for lunch. But most of us carried a little bag lunch and spent most of that time playing outdoors. And during those times of play, I can't say for sure, but I don't recall teachers watching us. We played in whatever ways we wanted to play. We had snowball fights. We built forts. At that time, you know, all boys carried jack knives and we played with knives, various kinds of different games. We didn't throw them at one another just through the trees. We played various kinds of games you play with knives. 

Even at school, the expectation was children can manage themselves. You don't have to be watching them every minute.

And there was also not this expectation that children should be able to sit in their seats for hours on end doing tedious schoolwork. We were never in our seats for more than an hour at a time. And so that changed in ways that really are not normal for children.

It's not normal for children to be sitting in their seats for more than an hour at a time. Even then, an hour is stretching it. School became so all important and all the propaganda was about the importance of school. And parents, of course, fell for this. And so the pressure on children to do more schoolwork and then, well, if school is good for children, then more school must be better for children. And more school-like activities outside of school must be better for children.

So this combination of we need to watch our kids all the time and more schooling, whether it's school in school or school outside of school, more adult direction where adult teaching or adult control, this is good for children. That became the message that everybody kept hearing. And so instead of just sending our kids out to play, increasingly, we would roll them in some kind of adult directed sports or in some kind of karate classes or this or that. And the belief that this is good for children. 

And if they were getting less free play outdoors, we would rationalize it by saying, well, they're getting exercise in these adult directed sports that they're getting. But let me explain the difference, because there's a huge difference between an adult directed sporting activity and going out and creating your own play. And the biggest difference, of course, is simply that when you're creating your own play, you are creating your own play. You are creating something. You are doing something. You're taking initiative. You're doing something creative. You're solving your own problems.

So, for example, in some of the places I think even in my book Free to Learn, I describe the difference between an old fashioned pickup game of baseball, the way we used to play when I was a kid and a little league game. So in the old fashioned pickup game, which is the way children traditionally have always played until recent times, not necessarily baseball, but whatever it is they're playing, you go you go outdoors. There's a bunch of other kids out. There you go. If it's baseball, you go to the vacant lot. It's not a manicured field. You have to figure out how you're going to set up the bases. There is a kind of a ragtag bunch of kids. There are various ages and various abilities. And you have to choose teams, figure out how you're going to play. There's no umpire to call balls and strikes. You're going to have to figure out how to do that. You're going to have to figure out what's fair and foul. And you make up the teams as fair as possible. You're not going to have eighteen players. So you figure out ways of doing this, maybe one person catches for both teams or there's some people who plays outfield for both teams. 

Not everybody has a bat and a ball. You're sharing things. You share gloves. Not everybody has that. So imagine what's going on here. All this negotiation, all this planning, all this give and take about it. I want to pitch, but you want to pitch. Well, OK, so we'll take turns pitching. The biggest lesson that you learn is that you have to keep your playmates happy or they're going to go home. That and your playmates include the people on the other team, too. It's just arbitrary who is on which team. So you're learning how to negotiate. You're learning how to pay attention to whether your colleagues, your playmates are happy or not. You're learning how to get along with people. You're learning how to solve your own problems. And all of these things are way more important than baseball, right?

I mean, no matter what you're playing, you're learning these things, these extraordinarily important life skills. When you go out to play Little League Baseball, maybe it's a good place to learn how to but or to slide into second base or to throw a curve ball, which you shouldn't be doing anyway if you're under the age of 14, because it's bad for your shoulder. But you are not learning these other things because the coach and the referee, they've taken care of all this other stuff for you. The field is laid out. You don't have any real problems to solve. You're just told what to do, just like you are in school.

And so children are growing up more and more in situations where they're always being told what to do. Their problems are being solved for them rather than having to figure out how to solve the problems themselves. And so that's really the fundamental problem.

And in addition, the truth of the matter is, even in terms of exercise, there's been research that shows when children who are in an adult directed sports, they're actually getting less exercise than when they're playing out there on their own. When you’re in an adult-directed sport, you're spending a lot of time just sitting and listening, sitting on the sidelines, waiting for your turn and so on and so forth. When kids are playing on their own, even when your team is up, you might be playing a side game of tag. You know, you might be doing different kinds of other things. You're active, because that's the nature of children. You don't want to just sit there. So even in terms of exercise, the evidence is you're getting more exercise.

There's one other point I want to make about the difference between adult directed sports and children's free play. And that there's actually data. We think it's safer for children to be an adult directed activities then when they're playing on their own. The truth of the matter is there is actual research showing that the rate of serious injuries is greater for children and adult directed sports than it is for when children are just playing on their own. The reason for that is that when they're in adult directed sports, the emphasis is on winning. And you feel like you've got to try to win no matter how much that shoulder is hurting or you slide hard into second base because that's what the coach tells you to do. And you might injure the second baseman by doing that.

When you're playing on your own, you don't hurt yourself, your shoulder starts to hurt you say, all right, I'm easing up or I'm going home now or you know, or let's let me take a different position. You're not over using particular muscles the way you do when you're striving to win and when that adrenaline is high because you're so, so oriented towards winning and pleasing the coach and pleasing your teammates and getting that trophy and all of that, you are pushing your body in ways that your body really shouldn't be pushed. When you are playing, you're pushing your body in ways that are fun and enjoyable. You're not doing the same thing all the time and you're actually getting better conditioning as a result of that. 

Giny: And one of the things you say is because kids are intrinsically motivated to continue to play, they don't want to hurt anybody else. We've all seen a situation where then that kid is crying and they're hurt and they have to quit. Everything that you've laid out now is upended because someone had to leave. 

Peter: The greatest freedom in play, I often say, is the freedom to quit. And that's what makes play the most democratic of activities. Because if you and I are playing together, I've got to listen to you. I've got to compromise with you or you'll say, I hear my mom calling. I'm going home now. So you know, if I want to play with you, I can't just have it my way all the time. And that's an extraordinarily important lesson that children learn when they're playing with other children with no adults around. 

Ginny: And so parents can get from all of these things that you're saying, and from your book, that play seems frivolous, it seems like a waste of time. It seems like a time filler. And yes, play is actually hard. And you talk about that in your book some, but it's just so layered. All of the things that are happening during play. I try to play with my kids. It's hard, you know, when you really try and do it and you're trying to pretend and make up these things. I'm not as good at it as they are. You know, there is a lot to it. It's so worthy.

I have found it takes a little bit of humbleness to step back and to say what their bodies are driving them to do. I could swoop in and say, “Let's do this.” And so our parenting journey has been one of stepping back. If they're engaged in something, I'm not going to come in and say it's time to do that. Let it ride out. So I think you just laid out so many deep, deep skills and lifelong skills that kids can learn through play.

You talk about something that surprised me in your book. It was a study that kids prefer outdoor play with friends over video games. And I have seen that in our own family. Our kids don't want to go out and play, but as soon as their friends are involved, they absolutely want to go. But I was surprised that so many kids would pick outdoor play over video games. Do you think parents are surprised when they hear those statistics? 

Peter: Yeah, so this was a study done a while ago, I thought it was a study done shortly before I wrote my book and it was a study in which so all the kids that were surveyed had computers because a survey was done over the computer. And the question was, “If right now you had the opportunity to go out and play with your friends in the park or play your favorite video game, which would you prefer?” I don't remember the exact data, but something like eighty five percent of them said they would prefer to go out and play with their friends in the park, but that wasn't possible. And I think that's still true today.

I think that you might say that there are some kids who have had so little opportunity to play outdoors with other kids that they might not even know exactly what that means. And maybe there would be less of an inclination to say that because they don't they can't quite fathom what it would be. But my experience is from observing kids that at Democratic schools where they can do whatever they want in the school, they're in charge of their own day, their own activities. And there's an age mixed group of kids. And these kinds of schools are like the Sudbury Valley School and other schools that are modeled after it. And what is regularly observed is that, yeah, the kids do a lot of computer play as well. They should. They live in the computer age. And these are valuable skills and the games are getting more and more interesting all the time. And there's a lot of learning that occurs through those games.

But they're also, most of them, also playing outdoors a lot. They'll get a pretty good balance. And so I think the reason there's always kids outdoors is because there are other kids. The most important thing for kids to play is the presence of other kids. If you send your child out alone to play, the child is going to pretty quickly get bored. Not all children, but most children are going to pretty quickly get bored. They want to play with other children.

I know not everybody agrees with me, but I don't think that we have a strong, basic love of nature. I think it's more of an acquired taste. Children learn to love nature because they're out there playing in nature and they're out there playing in nature with other kids. So if you grow up playing outdoors, you begin to appreciate the trees to climb and the river to swim in. There are all the swimming pools and swimming and all the stones to throw, all the things out there that are great playthings.

But it's boring for most kids to play alone. They're not learning those social skills that are so important and that they're driven by natural selection to play with other kids because those social skills are so important. So I think that the primary factor is that we need to figure out for this day and age how to arrange the opportunities. It used to be just omnipresent for children to go outdoors and find other children to play with without adult intervention because they don't want adult intervention. They don't want adults controlling what they're doing. Natural selection has given children the appropriate understanding that they've got to learn to take control of their own life. And the only way they're going to do that is by getting away from controlling adults. So we have to figure out how to compensate.

We're not going to immediately go back to the nineteen fifties world where I was a kid, where every parent is just sending their kids outdoors. So you go outdoors and have all the other kids in the neighborhood out there because their parents sent them outdoors. 

So how do we solve that problem? And that's one of the things actually you said that you interviewed Lenore, but Lenore and I are working on that through the Let Grow organization, various other ways of finding ways to bring kids together on a regular basis without adult intervention and what they're doing right. 

Ginny: And we've done it. So we do it sort of on a small scale, which is, you know, since our kids have been small, we have a group of seven or eight families that are like minded. And you get together and you go to the park and you're going to be there for several hours. And the moms are just kind of there, but they're not intervening in the kids' play. And they have these experiences. But it is different.

I remember as a child, my childhood really was a lot like yours. I mean, we played pickup games at the park. You know, you're the only outfielder and so you have to run a lot more. And this tree is the base and that stone is the base and I remember the mom across the street in the summer would lock her doors and her kids were out all day. 

Now, that seems kind of ideal, right? I mean, she had all sorts of time to get things done and clean and prepare dinner. Who knows what she was doing there all day? She's got these four kids and she's got this quiet house. So what I am finding is that it takes more effort to make it happen, but the effort really feels worth it. I mean, my house is maybe not as clean as that mom’s would have been, but I'm getting a lot out of it, too, from the fresh air and the relationships.

And so for our family, that's sort of what we're finding works to get the kids outdoor playing with their friends. It was impactful for me to read that study because as a parent, you feel like, oh, they just rather be home playing video games. You feel like you're kind of dragging them around. But I was glad to learn that, you know, and I see it.They light up, they light up with their friends. They always want to go if their friends are going to be there.

You talked about video games for a minute and we're in this computer age. And so one of the things I liked that you talked about in your book was that video games are sort of serving this play purpose and also this purpose where adults aren't directing everything and kids get to have a little bit of autonomy. I think that's important for parents to hear. Can you talk a little bit about thar? 

Peter: Well, I think that we adults tend to villainize video games. This is something that's happened throughout history. Whenever there is some kind of new technology, new way of playing new and new activities, new pastimes, the older generation is always skeptical about it, always believes this is going to be the ruination of the next generation of people.

And so at some point, you know, I use I'm not a video game player myself, although my son, he kind of grew up at the time when the desktop computer was not really quite there. But you could buy a kit and make your computer, which he did. And so he kind of grew up and still plays video games as a middle aged adult.

But I've tried it and they're too hard for me. So I don't enjoy them. I'm beginning to think I ought to enjoy them. There's more and more evidence that playing video games forestalls the mental decline that occurs in old age because they are so cognitively challenging in so many ways.

I was constantly asked, I would be giving talks to parents and groups of educators and so on about the value of play. And my focus was primarily on outdoor play, as we've been talking about here. And normally the first question would be, “Well, what about video games?” And the implication would be that and oftentimes people would say, “But of course, what you haven't mentioned is the big problem right now is video games. Video games are seducing children. They're addicted to video games. They're not going outdoors because of video games” and so on and so forth.

And so I didn't exactly know how to answer that question. So what I did was I decided, well, let me look into the research on video games. What do we actually know about it? You can support anything you want with a case example. You know, at that time, there was some young man in South Korea, I think it was, who had played a video game for two weeks straight and died. You oh, so you get that kind of a scare story. And then you said, oh, my God, my child plays video games, and is going to get addicted. He is going to go without eating or sleeping or drinking water, and he's going to die. Well, what do we actually know overall about video games?

So I started this venture into video games by Googling harmful effects of video games and came up with a list. You know, a lot of video games are violent. And so they caused violence in young people. Video games are the major cause of obesity among our children. And video games are socially isolating. And so children are not learning how to make friends and have friends. Video games stunt the mind, they kill the intellect, they're dumbing us all down and so on and so forth.

And I ended up I think I started off the blog article I wrote the first one I wrote with some statement like, well, based on my Googling, video games are the cause of all the maladies of adolescence with the possible exception of acne. And then and then I went through the list and I said, so what do we know about the evidence for this? And so it turns out when you actually look at the research, it turns out there's a lot of research, more now than there was then, a lot of research on video play that simply doesn't support these horror stories that we all that we keep reading about.

First of all, there's still to this day, there's no evidence whatsoever that playing violent video games causes real world violence. Those studies that tend to show a relationship to aggression. Yes, fake aggression, display play aggression in the laboratory that increases the there have been some well done studies looking at our kids who play violent video games. Are they more likely to be violent in the real world? In every study that's been done of that sort is negative. They're not you know, there were reports at that time that one of the school shooters was somebody who played violent video games. And so the assumption was he became a school shooter because he played violent video games. Well, you stop and reflect. And if most kids are playing violent video games, most boys and young men are. Most of them don't become school shooters, so the question becomes overall, if you look at all the school shooters, were they more likely to be playing violent video games than those who are not school shooters? Somebody actually did that study and found they were less likely to be playing violent video games than those who were school shooters. I don't think that playing violent video games necessarily reduces violence, but I think what really is the basis for that result is people who become violent or often people who don't play anything that are not playful people.

And so I often make the analogy that, you know, when I was a kid, we played cops and robbers with cap guns. And, you know, I killed lots of cops as a kid. But this was all pretend and I didn't become a cop killer, nor did any of my friends. And there's a whole history of research on just watching violent movies causing violence in children. The results are negative.

Regarding the other cognitive issue it turns out that video games build intelligence more so than anything else that children can play. The evidence is overwhelming. There are now literally many dozens, probably even hundreds of studies that show that basic cognitive abilities are being stretched and exercised by these video games, the kinds of things that we measure in IQ.

One of the initial observations was that kids who play a lot of video games have higher IQ than kids who don't. That could be a correlation that video games are difficult, cognitively difficult. So maybe they attract people who are good at those kinds of skills. But then they began to do studies. You take people who don't play video games, largely this at the time these studies began. These were college women because it was hard to find college men who don't play video games. So you take college women and those who are in the experimental group would be assigned to play a particular video game, a certain number of hours a week for maybe five or six weeks. The others would be in a control group. They do something different. You test them on some kind of cognitive measure, IQ type test before and after. And those who are playing the video games improve significantly compared to the control group.

So there's now actually quite a number of review articles and academic journals such that there's more and more. That's why I say there's more and more suggestions that people of my age are beginning to feel like you're losing some of your memory ability and so on and so forth that it’s not a bad idea to play video games. It'll help restore those cognitive abilities. 

So I could go on and on through the list. But the idea of addiction, the idea so we kind of overuse the word addiction in our culture. We use it for things that we like to do. And sometimes we brag about being addicted. People say, “Oh, I'm addicted to my work” or, you know, people talk about being addicted to chocolate or being addicted to this and the things that we like, we tend to consume or we tend to engage ourselves in. And so we tend to overuse that term.

I think that there definitely are kids and adults who play video games or do other things online to an excess that even they recognize is interfering with other aspects of their life. And I think that is a problem. But that's a problem no matter what the activity is that you are engaged and that is interfering with other parts of your life. And having said that, today, the most common activity of that sort is video games. And and it's not surprising the video games are so varied. They're so interesting and challenging. They're so social these days. Kids are interacting with other kids socially and they're always there. You can always go to it, you know, so so it's kind of an easy way to get involved and play to be interacting with other people and so on and so forth.

And so I think it's quite understandable when a family says, well, let's make a rule in our family that we're going to all eat dinner together. We're going to do certain things together. And there should be certain times when all of us adults as well as the kids, we're not going to be on the computer. We're going to be together. We're going to be doing these other things. I think that's a perfectly reasonable kind of thing to do.

I have somebody I know who is sort of a colleague at Boston College who is a psychotherapist who specializes in treating people who have so-called video game addiction, who come to him because they've been recommended to. They seem to have this problem that they play video games, more of that is good for them. And the first thing he does when somebody will come in, and they'll say, “Well, you know, I play video games all the time. I'm just good for nothing and lazy. And everybody tells me I'm good for nothing and lazy because all I do is play video games” and so on and so forth. And so then he'll ask them, “Well, so what is the game? What are some of your favorite games?” And they'll get into a conversation about the game.

So this therapist is a gamer himself. He knows most of these games and then he'll say, so what level are you at on that game? And the young person will say, “Well, I'm on level 12” or whatever level is. And he'll say, “Wow, that's amazing. We can rule out lazy. You're not lazy if you were able to reach that level of a difficult game. That takes work to get to that. So let's rule out lazy.”

Now, let's talk about addiction. So what does it mean when you say you're addicted? They'll say, “Well, I do this instead of other things” and so forth. And I even recognize I should be spending more time on my schoolwork or my job or whatever it is that they're neglecting. And he'll say, “Well, so what you've got is a time management problem.”

Let's get away from the word addiction. That's a pathological term. You're not chemically addicted to this thing the way you would be if he were on heroin or nicotine or something like that. Let's just say you're doing this thing because you like to do it and you're doing more of it than you want to do. And so you kind of bring it into the realm of normality. So then they go on and talk about how to manage your time so that you're not spending so much time on video games, how you might set a timer. You work out rational strategies for doing that. 

So let me add one more thing, because I think it would be valuable for most parents to know this. I said that there are quite a lot of studies that show beneficial effects of video play and that tend to run counter to the story that video play is causing all these harmful effects. One of the most impressive studies, in my view, was a study done three or four years ago. The Columbia University School of Mental Health, in collaboration with some universities in Europe, conducted this worldwide study that involved children between the age of six and 11. And they looked at how many hours a week the kids were playing video games based on the parents' assessment of how many hours a week they're playing video games. And then based on teachers reports for each of these children, they got data on how many friends that the children, how socially competent the child was based on teachers reports, how well the how bright the child seemed to be, how emotionally stable they seem to be, and so on and so forth on every single measure that they looked at.

The kids who are playing at least five hours a week of video games were doing better than those who play less than five hours a week of video games on every single measure that they looked at. Now, to me, that's not surprising, because in this day and age, if you're not playing at least five hours a week of video games, there's a pretty good chance you're not playing at all. And there's a pretty good chance that you're kind of a social isolette, because this is what the kids are talking about. This is what the kids interact about. So parents who are depriving their child, they say, “I'm not allowing my child to play video games” are in a sense, depriving their child from being part of what today is the child's culture. And so I think that although there's good reason to say, let's figure out how not to let video games take over our lives, there's also good reason to say let's not prevent our children from playing these games.

Ginny: Right. And that is I did get that out of your book. You talked about living in a computer age. And one of the things that you said was that especially because kids don't have all this free play time and so much of their life is directed that oftentimes this is the only outlet. And now adults are so enmeshed with what kids are doing, but not when they're playing video games. They're just on their own. You know that maybe the only time where they're getting to make their own decisions. And like you said, now you can socially interact online, and so it helped me to better understand kids' needs and how they're adapting to fulfill the needs that they have and balancing that out with the culture that they're growing up in. Super interesting.

So this is the podcast where Dr. Peter Gray recommends five hours plus of video games. But I think families will find that very interesting. I think those are really good things to know because like you said, there's a lot of anti-screen  things and we're just looking at balance and also remembering that the kids are growing up in a culture that's filled with technology and they need to learn how to manage that. 

I have so much else here. We're running out of time. I want to show your books here. I've got these five. “Free to Learn” was the first one I read and the subtitle is phenomenal: “Why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier, more self-reliant and better Students for Life.” What a subtitle. Lifelong benefits. Who wouldn't want happier, more self-reliant, better students for life? 

And then these books are newer. These four. I love the size of them. I can throw them in my bag. Mother Nature's Pedagogy, Evidence that Self-Directed Education Works, How Children Acquire Academic Skills Without Formal Instruction. Fascinating. And The Harm of Coercive Schooling. So these are fantastic books. If people are interested in buying your books, in finding you and I know you blog a lot, where should they go?

Peter: Well, so I do a blog for Psychology Today. You can find the title of the blog is “Freedom to Learn” but you can just Google “Peter Psychology Today.” I have about 200 essays now on that blog.

Over the years, those small books that you just showed are actually collections of blog essays that I had done, and they're published by the Alliance for Self Directed Education and all the profits of those go to help support the Alliance for Self Directed Education. So those books can be best purchased by going to the website for the Alliance for Self Directed Education and purchasing them there.

Free to Learn has sold more every year since it's been out than it did the previous year. And it's continuing to be a major book. And of course, you can buy that through Amazon or through any place that you normally would purchase books.

So I'm working on a new book. Actually, there's there's two more books that I really want to write, both of which involve a lot of research and I need to create the time to do them. But the next book I'm kind of working on now has the tentative title of “The Obsolescence of School.” 

School as we know it today arrived at a time in history that was very different from today. And it served a particular set of purposes which are counterproductive to what we need today in people's development. We need people who are creative. We need people who are innovative, who think outside of the box. We need people who can take initiative and so on and so forth. And schools were really developed to quash all that, and they were fairly effective in quashing all of that and creating “good citizens” in the sense of people who would obey and follow and not rebel and so on and so forth. And I think we're actually beginning to evolve away from schools.

It's happening gradually as more and more people are leaving standard schools for homeschooling and other kinds. With covid, we've seen a huge change. The most recent poll was done in May of this year, and 19 and a half percent of Americans with school age children were homeschooling. That's an absolutely huge increase from what had been for many years, around three and a half percent.

So because of covid, many, many families have taken their child out of public schooling and are doing homeschooling or creating learning pods and doing all kinds of alternative things. No doubt many of them will go back to sending their child to school if and when the threat of covid declines. But I hear from many who say we're staying with homeschooling. It's really working out great for us. I see my child blossoming. I see my child developing interests that they couldn't pursue in school. They're clearly learning a great deal.

So I think we're on this kind of track. And I think we're also on a track where the so-called value of a college education is being put more in its place. We kind of had reached a point where college education, the goal of college education and getting your child into an elite college seemed to be the primary purpose of being a parent. And so you're trying to run your life in a way that will get your child into a fancy college.

Children who are going to go on to a fancy college get there anyway and one way or another to a large extent. There is actually research showing that even in terms of traditional measures like how much money you are earning at age 40, if you match for background, if you control for socioeconomic background and other variables like that, it doesn't matter what college you go to at all. Those kids who went to the local state college are doing just as well as those who went to an Ivy League school.

When you control for background, I mean, of course, the usual data that you read as well. Harvard students are making so much money. Well, what you don't recognize is Harvard students had a lot of money to begin with. They come from rich families. If you come from a rich family, you're going to be rich, like likely, you know that. And so once you control for that, the advantage of a Harvard education disappears. So that's that's the thing that most people don't know.

The other thing that's happening is that as college becomes more and more expensive and as also as the job market changes such that many college graduates can't get good jobs, there's a recognition that the kinds of jobs that can't be shipped overseas are often jobs that don't require a college education. And more and more companies are realizing that college doesn't really train people to do what they want people to do in their industry or their company anyway. So they're better off training them themselves with an apprenticeship program. So there's more and more apprenticeships. And I think apprenticeships are going to become more common in the future than college education, that people are going to say, I'm really interested in this. And so I'm going to go and train myself in this by doing an apprenticeship and in this field. And I think that's a very healthy track. We'll have people our people will, instead of spending all this money and getting yourself in debt, you'll actually be earning a little bit of money as an apprentice as you're learning. And you're also finding out in a real indirect way, do I like this career or if I don't decide to try an apprenticeship in some other area? 

So I think of people, for example, who decide for whatever reason, or maybe their parents decide for them, that they want to be a doctor. They're going to a four year college where they learn nothing about being a doctor. They don't have any experience with doctoring or sick people. They're spending a huge amount of money. Then there's more money to go to medical school and somewhere along the way at medical school, they're finally having hospital experiences and at that point it's a little late to learn that. And that's why we have a lot of unhappy doctors and unhappy lawyers and unhappy business executives. It's much more important to figure out what it is that you like to do and then try it in some fashion if you really like to do it before you start spending a lot of money on that. 

Ginny: No one talks about that a lot. John Taylor Gatto said he did this with his students. He would try and match them in apprenticeship programs where they would maybe go for free and an office would take that free work for two weeks and they would learn, do I like this or not like it?

He also said it only takes 50 hours to get to functional literacy at the right age and stage to where you could learn anything that you want to learn. And so that's one week of school, one and a half weeks of school, you know, at the right age.

I always say Free to Learn is a book that every parent should read. There's only a couple of books that I say that about, but this is one. And you said there might be another book beyond that? 

Peter: The other book would be more of an academic book on play. There has not been a really good book for four decades that is designed for the public about really what is the role of play in human evolution, the various functions of play not only for children, but for adults. There was a book many years ago that is still kind of the book about play but it was written in the 1930s by a cultural historian about the value of play and the development of human culture and so on and so forth. And I think it's time for a new one. [01:06:41][62.7]

Ginny: Can we end with a favorite outdoor childhood memory of yours? 

Peter: Yeah, so I think this is the one I describe in the book, and it is really a favorite childhood memory of mine. When I was a kid, I wasn't addicted to video games because we didn't have video games. I was addicted to fishing. I loved fishing. I would sometimes go before school to fish. I would go fishing as often as I could, most often with my friends.

But this particular memory that has stuck with me, I was probably 11 years old, and sometimes I would get up early in the morning and go fishing before school. And when I did this, I was by myself. I couldn't get any of my friends to get up that early and go fishing before school. So I'd bicycle down to this river and fish and there’s this particular memory I have. I was fishing. It was spring in northern Minnesota. The snow was melting. So there's still some snow on the ground.

But it was a sunny morning. And I just remember being there and just really, maybe for the first time, seeing how beautiful the world is. You know, seeing the trees and the sun and the snow on the bank and and feeling what I suppose if I were a religious person, I might call it connection to God or what what some humanistic psychologist would say, a peak experience where you sort of feel you're just connected to the universe and you kind of have this almost sort of mystical sense. 

And I think the point I was making when I talk about this is that the fact that it was just me there allowed that to happen. If there had been an adult there, it wouldn't have happened just by virtue of the fact that that adult would have been bigger than me and some kind of a dominating figure, even if the adult was not trying to dominate, I don't think I would have had that experience. So sometimes when I give a talk, I'll ask the audience to think about some childhood memory of theirs that really stands out to them as an experience that was in some sense transformative to them and to jot it down. And then I'll ask, “So for how many of you was there an adult in the picture?” And for most of them, there was no adult in the picture.

So that, I think, is a very common thing. That these kinds of experiences that you have as a child that really stand out in your memory are experiences where there's no adult there dominating the picture. Interacting yourself, whether it's with nature or whether it's with other kids or whatever it is, but very often it is with nature. I think there is something about that kind of experience that leads one to sort of feel this sort of connection to the larger universe. 

Ginny :Well, I just want to extend my profound gratitude for your book, for your blog, for your new books, for everything that you've put out into the world. I think that you have changed the world with what you've shared. And there's never been a time, I think, that we need it more than now. And so I just highly recommend “Free to Learn”, I think for every family, it's a great one, a good one to give it a baby shower because it's just so transformative. And thank you for joining me here. I really appreciate your time and really look forward to what's coming down the road.

Peter: Thank you, Ginny. This has been a great pleasure.