Dear friends,

In previous letters, and in my new book Restoring Childhood, I have presented multiple lines of evidence that school has long been a major cause of anxiety and depression among school-aged kids and that a change in school policy, not the advent of social media and smartphones, was the primary cause of the rise of such suffering in the U.S. beginning in 2010 or shortly after.

I am finding that many people agree that smartphones and social media are not a significant cause of the rise of kids’ suffering beginning around 2010. Among those who agree are essentially all the social scientists who have been most immersed in conducting and reviewing research pertaining to that hypothesis. The data simply do not support the social media/smartphone hypothesis (see for examples, here, here, and here).

But even those in authoritative positions who reject the media/smartphone hypothesis have so far almost uniformly avoided examining my alternative hypothesis—that a major change in how we do schooling, instituted by the Common Core State Standards—increased the stress of schooling and thereby elevated the rates anxiety and depression among school-aged kids, especially teens. They neither support nor deny what I say about this; they just ignore it.

Evidence of the Psychological Harm Produced by Our Schools

On the face of it, one would think that a national change in school policy is the first place one would look for a potential cause of a rise in kids’ psychological suffering. Children spend more time in school than in any other setting aside from home, and our schools, by their very nature, are stress-inducing.

In school children are micromanaged, told almost every minute what they must do and must not do. In school they are constantly judged in comparison to their peers—who is better, who is worse? In school they are not allowed to consult with their companions unless they are told to do so, and then they are required to do so. In school they are reprimanded if they are even a minute late, and they must ask permission to go to the bathroom. In school, children are deprived of what the rest of us think of as basic human rights.

As I have said many times before (and so far nobody has contradicted me on this), no adult would willingly accept a job that is anything like the schooling we impose on our kids. We would all see it as a job from hell. On top of all that, many kids are led to believe that failure to succeed in school predicts failure to succeed in life. It is as if their school performance is a measure of their worth as human beings.

The logic of why school would promote anxiety and depression among kids is so obvious that one might consider empirical evidence of that to be redundant. But there is overwhelming empirical evidence. Here, in bulleted form, is some of the evidence I have documented in previous letters (e.g. here) and document further in my new book:

• In surveys in which kids are asked what is stressing them out, school always comes out on top. Nothing else comes close. That is true for school kids of all ages and both genders.

• Every year, when summer vacation from school begins, rates of anxiety, depression, pediatric mental health admissions, and teen suicides plummet, and every fall, when school starts again, those rates go up again. By some measures they double.

• In cross-nation studies, rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide do not correlate with the availability of smartphones or social media for kids but correlate strongly with the stress-inducing characteristics of the school system.

• The Common Core State Standards, adopted by most of the 50 U.S. states beginning in 2010 (and implemented gradually over the next two or three years) dramatically increased the stress of schooling. Common Core dictated that teachers, principals, and whole school districts would be evaluated based on the students’ scores on standardized tests covering a narrow range of curriculum, especially math and literacy. The inevitable effect was reduction in teachers’ freedom to adapt what they were doing to meet the needs and interests of students and truly engage students intellectually, and an increase in boring, time-wasting drill. Recesses and other previously enjoyable activities and courses were cut back for the sake of test drill. In surveys in the early years of Common Core, teachers, school psychologists and others involved with schooling, not just students, reported that these changes increased the stressfulness of school. Many of the best teachers quit or took early retirement.

Let me be clear. I am not saying that school pressure is the only cause of mental suffering among kids, nor am I saying that it is the main cause for every kid. For children suffering from abuse at home, or from drug-addicted parents, or from relentless bullying, or from some sort of serious life trauma, those sources of distress may dramatically outweigh the stress of schooling. But those sources of stress affect only a fraction of the total population of kids, while school affects essentially everyone. That is why, in surveys of the whole population of kids, school always comes out on top as the major source of distress and those other causes are way down the list.

Why Don’t We Face the Facts?

So why are we adults so reluctant to admit what seems to be obvious, that school, for the population of our kids overall, is the major cause of psychological suffering? Why do even the scientists who publish data in academic journals showing the harm of schooling not share their findings more widely? Why don’t journalists pick up on it? Why do parents who see their own kids’ school-related suffering commonly attribute it to something else—maybe “neurodiversity” or some such problem with the kid and not a problem with school? I think it really is a matter of burying our heads in the sand.

We simply don’t want to believe that our public school system, which has long had an undeserved halo around it and where children are compelled by law to be, is a major source of children’s suffering. To do so would be to blame ourselves, as adults who share in responsibility for allowing an abusive system to continue. Moreover, fixing our system of schooling in a way that really solves the problem seems like a monumental task.

It is far easier and more comfortable to blame those greedy social media companies. And, yes, they are greedy; and, yes, they do try to use whatever means available to exploit us and our kids; but they are NOT a major cause of an increase in our kids’ psychological suffering.

------

Reminder

For those who might have missed my previous letter on this, my new book, Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety, will be released on September 15. The publicists at Penguin Random House have informed me that they will provide a link to the book’s Introduction, so you can get an early start in reading it, if you preorder the book before its publication date. Preorders are valuable, because they help convince marketers that the book will sell well, so they stock up and put the book front and center in their sales procedures. The earlier you preorder the better. Here are links to some places where you can preorder.

Amazon Barnes & Noble Books A Million Bookshop.org Hudson Booksellers Powell’s Target Walmart

And here is the link to claim your small gift, the book’s Introduction.

For more about the book, see here.

Part of restoring childhood involves changes in our school system. But that is only part of it, as you will see in the book.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

The toilet’s plugged, the cat’s been peeing on the couch, the lawn mower won’t start, the electric bill is through the roof, and my best friend is mad at me. Oy vey.

How might we respond to the everyday problems of life?

Here’s a thought. Problems are what make life interesting. In fact, much of what we call play is problem solving. When we play any kind of game, we are deliberately setting up problems to be solved. How can I get out of this difficult chess position? What’s a 3-letter word starting with a that means having a bug? How can I handle my tennis opponent’s vicious serve? Likewise, in any sort of artistic play, or adventurous play, or any play at all, the fun is in solving problems. The joy of play is, to a considerable degree, the joy of solving problems. Play without problems would be boring, no fun. It would not be play.

So, if problems in play are what make play fun, then why don’t we enjoy problems in real life? In a way, I think, problems in real life do bring joy. We don’t experience the joy when the problem confronts us; we may more often experience frustration, anger, anxiety, or guilt—distress of one sort or another. But when we solve the problem, we feel good. We are born to solve problems. That’s the purpose of the higher parts of our brain. Life, like play, would be boring if there were no problems to solve.

What’s the difference between play and non-play? As I’ve pointed out before play is freely chosen activity that is intrinsically motivated (that is, done for its own sake rather than for some end outside of itself). In play we are free to fail, as there are no real-world consequences for failure. So, in play, the problems are there just for fun. That’s not true with real-life problems. Problems in real life have real-life consequences.

What would it take to turn real-life problems into something akin to play, so we can experience less stress and more pleasure in confronting them?

One step would be to realize, or convince ourselves, that in some sense we chose these problems. We chose to have a house with an indoor toilet, to have a cat and a couch, to have a lawn that needs mowing, to have all these electricity-gobbling appliances, and to be friends with this now angry person. We chose all this knowing that toilets, cats, lawns, electrical appliances, and friendships can sometimes be challenging. So, all of this is at least a bit like play. It is, ultimately, voluntary. We could live without these things.

A second step, related to the first, is to minimize the real-world significance of the problem and realize that failure to solve it ourselves would not be a catastrophe. With that approach, we might see the problem as an interesting challenge. Can I solve it? If I succeed, I’ll feel great. If I fail repeatedly, I might have to call in an expert, but that would be OK. I had fun trying.

Previously (e.g. here and here) I’ve written about how band hunter-gatherers view all of life as play. One of my favorite passages from any book is one from Jean Liedloff’s classic The Continuum Concept. As a young woman she had joined with two Italian men and several native South Americans of the Tauripan culture, whom they had hired as helpers, in a diamond hunting adventure in Venezuela. The Tauripans were not full hunter-gatherers but close to it. At one point they were all struggling to haul their very heavy dugout canoe over treacherous, sun-baked rocks. As an excuse to take some rest from this, she stepped back to photograph the scene and, from this more detached perspective, made the following observation:

“Here before me were several men engaged in a single task. Two, the Italians, were tense, frowning, losing their tempers at everything, and cursing nonstop in the distinctive manner of the Tuscan. The rest [the Tauripans] were having a fine time. They were laughing at the unwieldiness of the canoe, making a game of the battle, relaxed between pushes, laughing at their own scrapes, and especially amused when the canoe, as it wobbled forward, pinned one, then another, underneath it. The fellow held barebacked against the scorched granite, when he could breathe again, invariably laughed the loudest, enjoying his relief. … As I finished photographing and rejoined the team, I opted out of the civilized choice and enjoyed, quite genuinely, the rest of the portage.”

That’s the difference between a playful and non-playful approach to solving a difficult problem.

Reminder

For those who might have missed my previous post on this, my new book, Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety, will be released on September 15. The publicists at Penguin Random House have informed me that they will provide a link to the book’s Introduction, so you can get an early start in reading the book, if you preorder the book before its publication date. Preorders are valuable, because they help convince marketers that the book will sell well, so they stock up and put the book front and center in their sales procedures. The earlier you preorder the better. Here are links to some places where you can preorder.

Amazon Barnes & Noble Books A Million Bookshop.org Hudson Booksellers Powell’s Target Walmart

And here is the link to claim your small gift, the book’s Introduction.

For more about the book, see here.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

Perhaps you’ve noticed that my letters recently have a been spaced a bit farther apart than usual. I’ve been somewhat overwhelmed with tasks, but in a good way. Prepublication announcements about my new book—Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety—have led to a flurry of media activity on top of everything else I was doing. Perhaps you saw the Atlantic article, or the recent New York Times article. Almost every day lately I’ve been involved in some sort of interview or media event. Earlier today I was interviewed for an upcoming NPR Ted Radio Hour discussion and composed and recorded a “Book Bite” for the Next Big Idea Club. Tonight, at 9 pm Eastern, I’ll be on McGraw Milhaven’s America at Night talk radio show. (Don’t worry; my wife is very good at keeping my head from swelling.)

Admittedly, I’ve been quite justly accused at times of being overly optimistic, but I think my new book has the potential to change the way we, as a society, think about children and what they need (and don’t need) from us. There seems to be lots of media interest in the research-supported insights I present in Restoring Childhood. If you have been a regular reader of these letters, you will not be surprised by the insights, but you will find them more fully developed, supported, and in some ways more nuanced in the book.

Here, Briefly, Are Some of the Insights

• The fundamental task of childhood is to grow ever more independent of parental (or other adult) care and protection. Current societal practices are hindering, even preventing, children from pursuing that task. This has led to psychological suffering.

• Children need time and space to play, explore, daydream, find themselves. We are keeping children way too busy with adult-directed activities.

• Children need less forced instruction, less oversight, more trust. All those extra hours of schooling along narrow, curriculum-determined lines, are burning kids out, not educating them. Academic instruction to little kids, in preschool and kindergarten, has proven to be especially harmful.

• Children gain courage, agency, social skills, emotional control, and much more through their independent play with other children, away from adult intervention and control. For a satisfying life, these skills are way more important than what is taught in school.

• We need to stop forcing anxiety-inducing competitions onto children, in school and elsewhere. We should encourage cooperation, not competition. Making friends is much more important than winning.

• We must stop thinking of childhood as a period of résumé building for some future charted by adults and start thinking of it as a period of finding oneself and figuring out how that self fits best into today’s world.

• The parental practices that have come to be labeled “intensive parenting” are harmful to children and parents alike.

• Teenagers need more acceptance into the culture as the apprentice adults they truly, biologically are. We need to stop treating them like infants.

• We need to welcome kids into public spaces rather than discourage them.

• To adapt well in today’s world, children need freedom to play and explore in digital space, just as they need freedom to play and explore in other spaces. The digital world is increasingly an integral part of all aspects of the “real world” in which our children are growing. There is no going back.

A Small Gift for You

The publicists at Penguin Random House have informed me that they will provide a link to the book’s Introduction, so you can get an early start in reading the book, if you preorder the book before its publication date (Sept. 15). Preorders are valuable, because they help convince marketers that the book will sell well, so they stock up and put the book front and center in their sales procedures. The earlier you preorder the better. Here are links to some places where you can preorder.

Amazon Barnes & Noble Books A Million Bookshop.org Hudson Booksellers Powell’s Target Walmart

And here is the link to claim your small gift, the book’s Introduction.

For those of you who are paid subscribers, either our September or October online meeting (or both) for paid subscribers will be devoted to a discussion of Restoring Childhood.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

Our next Zoom meeting for paid subscribers will begin at 2:00 pm Eastern time, Saturday, August 15. It would be great to see you there.

If you would like to pose a question in advance of the meeting, so I can think about it in beforehand, feel free to do so in the comments section to this post, available to paid subscribers.

The rest of this letter (below my name), which includes the link necessary to register for the meeting, is open to paid subscribers only. You can unlock that portion, and register for the meeting, by becoming a paid subscriber now (for $50 a year or $100 for a “founding subscription”). I donate all funds that come to me for paid subscriptions to nonprofit organizations aimed at bringing more play and freedom to children’s lives, so the money goes to good causes.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Read more

Dear friends,

Recently, Cevin (pronounced Kevin) Soling sent me a link to a new article he and Kathryn Burrows published in the scholarly journal Educational Studies. The article is entitled Compulsory schooling as a form of captivity: A polemic.

Cevin is not one to mince words. He calls something what it is. I first met Cevin years ago, shortly after I had viewed his 2009 award-winning film The War on Kids, in which, among other things, he compares the typical urban public school (unfavorably) to a high-security prison. For a few years we served together on the board of directors of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education. Cevin is a gentle, kind person whose words, soft-spoken, cut to the heart of things.

His article with Kathryn Burrows begins with the following paragraph:

“Every weekday morning across America, millions of children are required by law to report to designated institutional facilities where they will spend much of their waking hours under systematic surveillance, movement restriction, and behavioral control. This phenomenon—compulsory schooling—has become so normalized that questioning its fundamental structure appears radical, even though the conditions it creates would be considered unacceptable in any other context involving free citizens.”

Soling and Burrows define captivity, just as researchers studying captive animals or humans in prison define it, as a condition that includes the following four components: (1) constraint on preferred movements, (2) segregation from attached environments, (3) institutional provision of survival needs, and (4) taming through privacy reduction and behavior control.

It is not hard for the authors to establish clearly that our standard schools are captive environments for children, by all these criteria. Children are required by law to be there, they are removed from their homes and other environments to which they might feel attached, their basic needs are managed by the institution, and their behavior is systematically and deliberately shaped toward compliance. The authors acknowledge that children are not in school around the clock, so they are not always in captivity, but that does not negate the fact that they are in captivity while at school, which amounts to a good portion of their time. You can read Soling’s and Burrows’s discussion in full by downloading their article. But now, here, I want to turn attention to the consequences of their analysis for the study of child psychology.

Why Researchers Study Animals and Children in Captivity

Researchers who study animal or human behavior love to do experiments. The experimental method is regarded as the queen of methods for studying cause-effect relationships. In experiments, you manipulate the conditions for different groups, or for the same group at different times, and record the behavioral effects. But to conduct experiments with animals or children, you almost need to work with captive subjects. Your subjects must be in a setting and disposition where they can be manipulated, that is, where they will accept being put into one condition or another. This is why most research on animal behavior is conducted with animals in cages and most research on children is done in schools or school-like settings.

Children in school, and heavily schooled children even when not in school, are ripe to be subjects in experiments. They are used to being told what to do, used to conditions where the task is to please the authority figure. So, it is easy to assign some to Condition A and others to Condition B and then give them some sort of test to see if the two conditions produce different results. And, voila, you have, quite likely, a finding that you can publish in a scholarly journal of child psychology.

Even if you do the experiment in a laboratory rather than in the school building itself, you are dealing with subjects who have been schooled to do as they are told, without questioning, when confronted by an authority figure seen as the equivalent of a schoolteacher. As I have discussed previously, the major lesson in school is obedience. To avoid punishment and pass in school, the main requirement is that you do what you are told to do, no matter how silly or stupid it is. Almost the only way you can fail is to challenge authority, either directly or indirectly by not doing what you are told to do. This kind of conditioning creates adequately tamed subjects for research.

A problem with all such studies is that the behavior of animals and children in captivity may be quite different from their behavior in the wild. This is well understood and often acknowledged in animal research but generally ignored in research on children. For children, we might think of “in the wild” as being settings where children are free to behave in accordance with their natural drives, instincts, and what they have learned in conditions of freedom, as contrasted with “in captivity” where they understand that they must do as they are told.

If you want to study animals in the wild, you must be like Jane Goodall in her study of wild chimpanzees. You must seek them out in their natural settings, find ways to get close enough to them to see what they are doing, and watch them for perhaps hundreds of hours to see how they respond to various conditions that occur in their natural environment. If you are studying children in the wild, you must do something comparable to that. You must find ways to observe them as they go about their freely chosen activities without disrupting those activities.

Such work is hard. It may take a long time—longer than PhD students may be able or willing to take to get their degree, and longer than assistant professors may be able to take before a tenure decision is made. Moreover, because such naturalistic studies can almost never be described in the terminology of experiments (with independent and dependent variables), and cannot rigorously test cause-effect hypotheses, they are often not given the same respect by the research community as experiments, even though they may tell us much more about the real priorities and behaviors of the species being studied.

How Might Research on Captive Children Distort Our Understanding of Children’s Nature?

Research on animal behavior has revealed many differences between animals in captivity and in the wild, which vary depending on the species and the conditions of captivity (e.g. here and here). Reviews suggest that captivity has dramatic effects on moods: It can create anger, anxiety, and/or depression. It can create purposeless pacing or what might be called behavioral tics. It can lead to learned helplessness, in which the animal stops trying to cope with stressful situations or trying in other ways to satisfy its own needs and desires. It can lead to physiological changes, such as high levels of stress hormones, particularly cortisol and other glucocorticoids.

What are some of the effects that the school setting, or the condition of being heavily schooled, may have on children?

One effect, directly predictable from the animal research, is that we would see more of what we call mental illness in captives. Elsewhere (e.g. here and in my new book) I have presented much evidence that, as schooling has become ever more restrictive and consuming of children’s time, and as settings outside of school have become increasingly school-like, we have seen increased rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among kids.

Another effect is helplessness. Researchers have regularly found that captivity, where the captives can do little for themselves and are dependent on their captors for their survival needs, stop taking initiative for themselves, stop seeking ways of coping with the stressful situation. Soling and Burrows contend, quite aptly, that coercive schools are not just settings for learned helplessness; they are settings for taught helplessness. In schools, using systems of rewards and punishments, authorities actively suppress children’s attempts to take initiative, to be creative, to take charge of their own lives. While agency is a positive value in the “wild,” it gets you into trouble in school.

Arguably (maybe inarguably) the most defining characteristics of childhood are curiosity and playfulness, yet relatively little can be found on these in the research literature on child psychology. Why? Because they are suppressed in school and because they can only be studied under conditions in which children are free. Curiosity and playfulness originate from within children; for us to see the effects of these drives we need to stand back and let them happen. That does not fit the experimental paradigm. The research literature is jammed with studies of children’s so-called “academic” behavior, because that is easily studied in school, but sparse in studies of children’s play and almost devoid of studies of children’s curiosity (as I discussed in detail here).

Another research distortion created by schooling concerns children’s playmates. In school children are strictly segregated by age, and age-segregated schooling has led to a continuation of age segregation even outside of school. In contrast, studies of children in cultures without coerced schooling reveal that children almost always play in age-mixed groups. Indeed, elsewhere I have contended that same-age play is an artifact of modern times; it rarely occurred prior to the advent of age-graded schools. Age-segregated play lacks much of the developmental value clearly seen in mixed-age play.

Still another distortion has to do with competition versus cooperation. Children in school are not only captive, deprived of opportunity to behave as they otherwise would prefer, but are forced by adults into continuous competitions with one another. Who is best? Who wins? Who gets the highest grades? Who gets honors? Who makes the varsity team? Elsewhere I have pointed out that when competition isn’t forced on children, they are generally far more cooperative, less competitive, than they are in adult-controlled activities. They are far more interested in making friends with peers than in beating them.

Concluding Thoughts

There are two ways to think about the purpose of research into child psychology. One is to think of its purpose as documenting the moods and behavioral tendencies of most children in our current society. If that is the purpose, then studying captive children is the way to go, as most children today spend much of their life in captivity.

Another way, however, is to think of the purpose as that of understanding children as biological creations of Mother Nature (natural selection), who innately strive to take control of their lives, strive for independence, and play and explore in quite remarkable ways when free to do so. To pursue that purpose, we must study children in settings outside of captivity and, ideally, study children who have not been held captive to the degree that most children today have been. This is the argument for studying child behavior in settings such as centers for Self-Directed Education, where children are free to choose their own activities and free to mingle with whomever they choose. Next to studying children in hunter-gatherer societies or other unschooled societies, this is the closest we can come to understanding the biological nature of childhood. That’s why I have focused much of my own research on children in those settings.

As always, I am interested in your thoughts and questions related to the ideas discussed here. This Substack is, in part, a forum for discussion. Your comments add to the value of these letters for me and other readers. You will notice that commenters on these letters are highly respectful of one another, regardless of whether they agree or disagree.

Leave a comment

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With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

A concept that we who are concerned about youth mental health should talk more about is resilience. Resilience is the ability to bounce back when bad things happen.

We all experience bad things. To avoid them completely would be to avoid life. The main difference between mentally healthy and mentally suffering people is resilience. The former experience bumps, register them, learn from them, and go on with life. The latter exaggerate the significance of bumps, catastrophize, and go on with a sense of permanent harm and increased fear of life. Clearly, a major goal for parents and others who are involved with children should be to help them develop resilience.

In previous writings I have documented the rise of anxiety and depression among young people over recent decades and presented evidence that much of this rise derives from overprotection (e.g. here and here). One way to understand the link between overprotection and the decline in youth mental health is to realize that overprotection interferes with children’s development of resilience.

When we empower children to play and explore independently, we are giving them the message that they are powerful, capable, and can deal with bumps, i.e., are resilient. As children experience bumps and work through them successfully, their sense of power increases; their fear of future bumps declines, they become even more resilient.

If our children have a trusting relationship with us, so they can freely tell us about the most bothersome bumps they experience, we can help them through those bumps and in that way strengthen their resilience. We can sympathize, maybe offer suggestions about how to right some wrong that has occurred, help them reduce any guilt or shame they may feel for getting into the bumpy situation, reinforce the love and respect we feel toward them, and reinforce their sense of strength for making it through. Seeking social support and reassurance is a huge component of resilience. We can be sources of such support and reassurance only if we do not overreact or punish the child for opening up to us.

We interfere with children’s development of resilience if we guard them constantly from experiencing bumps, or if we overreact to their bumps and make them think the harm is more than it really is, or if we treat them as if they are fragile.

A Research Study to Learn How Adults Can Help Kids Develop Online Resilience

In searching for research on how adults can help kids develop resilience, I came across a relatively recent short book, by British researchers Andy Phippin and Louisa Street, entitled Online Resilience and Wellbeing in Young People: Representing the Youth Voice.

The book begins by pointing out that adults commonly fail to appreciate the benefits that kids get from their online activity and exaggerate the harm. Adult views are too often founded on untested assumptions, conjectures, misinformation, and biased reporting by the media. The book aims to help us adults understand young people’s online experiences, so we will be more able to promote their online resilience and less inclined to impede it.

The data presented in the book come from qualitative analyses of focus group meetings with approximately 1000 young people, about 700 of whom were teenagers in secondary schools. In the group meetings, the participants responded to and discussed questions about (a) why they are online so much, (b) their experiences of online harm, (c) their willingness or lack of willingness to reveal negative online experiences to their parents or other adults, and (d) their views about how adults could help them deal with negative online experiences. In these group meetings, the researchers posed the questions and listened to and recorded the ensuing discussion among the teens, without suggesting any answers themselves. In what follows I’ll summarize the findings regarding each of these, focusing on the responses by those of secondary school age.

Why Are Teens Online So Much?

In response to this question, most teens acknowledged that they spend many hours a day online, though the amount varied considerably from teen to teen. Some said they were online 6 or more hours a day. When adults hear of such reports, they often act shocked and suggest that this must represent some sort of pathology, “addiction.” In the discussion groups, teens suggested that adults would not be so shocked if they understood the many diverse things they were doing online.

They pointed out that a lot of schoolwork is done online, and this is not something they have a choice about. In a world where it is hard for teens to socialize with friends anywhere else, a lot of their socializing is online. They also go online to consume media, watch films, play games, interact with family (e.g. grandparents), search for useful information, and arrange offline meetings and events. The teens were quick to point out that they are living in a world where online and offline are very much intertwined. Online and offline are intermixed parts of the “real world.”

My own further comment here is that the computer is now the vehicle of much of what used to be done with books, newspapers, magazines, television, movie theaters, board or card games, telephones, pen and paper, typewriters, and more. My guess is that if you added all that up to account for how previous generations of teens spent their time, it might well average to more than 6 hours a day.

What Are the Main Upsetting Online Experiences for Teens?

Adult conjectures about dangers to kids online tend to focus on upsetting content they may come across (e.g. pornography and depictions of violence), sexual solicitations, bullying, and addictive effects of social media algorithms or video games. In the focus groups, kids were acutely aware of these adult fears and, while not dismissing them, argued that they were overblown. Most of the teens felt that adults greatly exaggerate such online dangers and fail to recognize online benefits.

The consensus among the teens was that most of their upsetting online experiences came not from content imposed on them from strangers or media companies, but from conflictual interactions with their peers, other teens they knew. This should not be surprising. Teens have always, for good evolutionary reasons, been concerned about fitting in, being liked, being accepted as part of the “in group,” and sometimes this concern can lead to pain. Learning how to deal with the fact that others are not always nice and not everyone likes you is part of growing up.

Adults often refer to such conflict and meanness as “cyberbullying,” but the teens’ discussions made it clear that this term is unhelpful, because it covers too wide a range of experiences. [Parenthetically, I add that another researcher, dana boyd (see here) who spells her name without capitals, found that much of what adults call online bullying is what teens call “drama.” Some of that drama is exciting and kids seek it and promote it, but some of it is truly annoying.] A common response to the question of how to deal with truly upsetting online meanness was to ignore it, to block or avoid interacting with the source of that meanness. To respond is to get a response in return, which augments the drama.

Related to teens’ desires to be popular, some noted that comparing one’s online presence to that of others can be a source of anxiety. Such comparisons might have to do with physical appearance, descriptions of social activities, or number of “likes” to social media posts. Teens were, however, aware that photos may be touched up and social activities exaggerated, and that seeking “likes” can interfere with authenticity, so they had some mental tools to counter these anxieties.

In response to questions about online sexual solicitations from strangers, most teens were aware of these even if they had not personally experienced them. They talked about “pervs” or “pedos” and, again, said that the most effective way to deal with them would be to ignore or block them.

When asked specifically about pornography, the general response was that pornography has become a normal part of young people’s experiences. Although they felt that younger children might be upset by pornographic images, they did not report being upset by them themselves. If they didn’t like something, they could just turn it off.

They also, however, recognized that some versions of pornography could have harmful effects if people began to compare their own bodies to those of porn stars or if viewers took what they saw online as appropriate or normal for real-world sexual behavior. All in all, the teens came across as more sophisticated about pornography than adults might believe.

(Parenthetically, I personally believe that misogynic, violent pornography should be illegal, just as child pornography is illegal. While such pornography has been defended constitutionally as free speech, I think it could be banned as hate speech. But I recognize the problems in enforcing such bans, and this did not come up in the focus groups with teens.)

A topic that led to much discussion in the focus groups was that of sending nude pictures of oneself to a boyfriend or girlfriend. Although only a small percentage of teens had done this, the teens recognized that when it happens it can create serious problems. The biggest problem arises when the supposed friend shares the image publicly or threatens to share it as a form of blackmail. I’ll return to this problem in the section on how adults can be helpful in remedying an online problem.

Interestingly, concerning online photos, a common complaint by teens was about photos of themselves that their parents had posted, some of which were embarrassing. Teens, understandably, would rather be in control of what gets posted concerning them.

Finally, it is worth noting that some teens indicated that the truly disturbing messages they get online come from news about the state of the world—about global warming, threats or realities of war, economic disasters, and the like. The world we have created for our kids to grow up in is a legitimate cause of concern, and many teens are concerned.

Why Are Teens Reluctant to Talk with Parents or Other Adults About Negative Online Experiences?

When asked if they talked with parents or other adults about disturbing online experiences, the majority said no or rarely. When asked why, they had a simple, almost uniform, obvious answer. They said that adults generally do not understand the online issues teens face and tend to overreact to situations. Instead of providing support, parents might blame the teen for getting into a troubling situation or might even take away some of the teens’ online freedom.

One girl, in response to a question about asking parents for help in a hypothetical case of a boy threatening to make public a nude photo of her, said she absolutely would not say anything about this to her parents. Why? “Because my father would kill him.”

Teens were much more likely to seek support and help from their friends, because their friends understood the situation better, would be less likely overreact, and less likely to punish.

How Can Adults Reduce Potential Online Harm to Teens?

In theory, there are three routes to reducing online harm to kids:

(1) Deny kids access to the putative sources of harm (e.g. don’t allow them on social media or don’t allow them to have smart phones).

(2) Prevent harm at its source, through restrictions on what can be made available online and algorithms to filter out what should not be made available.

(3) Help kids understand the potential dangers and how to deal with them and provide constructive support and help when they do report negative experiences, thereby helping to build their online resilience.

Movements initiated by adults aimed at reducing potential harm to teens, especially those stimulated by the publication of The Anxious Generation, have focused almost entirely on the first two approaches. What do kids think of these approaches?

Not surprisingly, in the discussions, teens almost universally rejected the first approach. To limit their online freedom is to limit their ability to experience, understand, and learn to deal with what has become an essential part of the real world. It would disrupt their ability to take part in the teen culture, which is so essential to their wellbeing. They agreed that limits for younger children might be reasonable, but not for those aged about 12 or above. Moreover, such limits send a message of lack of trust, of disempowerment rather than empowerment. As pointed out by the authors, Phippen & Street, even if bans were imposed, whether by parents or governments, kids would get around them, as has been shown by the high number of young teens on social media in states and nations where such bans have been made.

Teens, and authors Phippen and Street, also described limitations of the second approach. The internet is so vast and complex that controlling its content is, at best, very difficult. Any algorithm aimed at stopping pornography will also stop non-pornographic images or messages that happen to contain the cues that the algorithm uses and will therefore disrupt legitimate free speech. Teens generally agreed that there is no way to prevent disturbing things from going out on the internet, so a better approach is to support kids in dealing with the disturbances. Teens believed strongly, therefore, that the focus should be on the third approach.

When teens were asked what adults can do to help teens deal with online disturbances, they had three almost unanimous resounding responses:

• Listen.

• Understand.

• Don’t judge.

Teens said that if their parents or other adults, such as school counselors, would do those things they would feel comfortable about talking with those adults about their online problems and seeking help.

Some of the discussion of this centered on the hypothetical example, introduced previously, of a girl who has sent a naked picture of herself to her supposed boyfriend, who then blackmailed her with threats to make the photo public unless she sent him more such photos. Most teens said they would not go to an adult for help in such a case because the adult would blame them for sending the nude photo in the first place (as if the girl isn’t already suffering enough from self-blame), would over-react (make the consequences seem even worse than they are), and perhaps punish the girl further by taking away some or all of her online freedom.

To illustrate what might be the ideal dialogue between child and parent about such an incident, derived from the teens’ discussions, I’ve invented the following (which, of course, is an abbreviated and somewhat stylized version of what would be a real conversation):

Daughter: I’m really upset about something that has happened and don’t know what to do about it. I made terrible mistake—I know it was a mistake. I sent a nude picture of myself to John, you know, the boy I have been seeing. Now John wants me to send more such pictures and says if I don’t he’ll distribute this one widely on the Internet.

Parent: Ouch. My darling, I’m so sorry. I can see how this is upsetting. But blaming yourself too much doesn’t help. We all make mistakes and get into trouble from them. That’s part of life. Now, I wonder if there is any way I can help you deal with this one. … Can you tell me more about John, about your relationship with him, about his family if you know them?

The daughter responds with her impression that John is usually a decent person, though this incident will lead her to end her relationship with him. He seems not to understand why she won’t send more nude pictures to him. If she loves him, she should do so. He’s threatening her to get more such pictures, and she doesn’t really know if he would follow through on the threat or not. She doesn’t know how serious he is.

From this and further discussion, the parent and daughter explore possible solutions together. Are there ways to get photos removed from the internet? What would happen if the daughter told John that she had told her parents about what he has done, and her parents will inform his parents about it unless he removes that picture immediately and revokes the threat? Or: “What if you invited John over to the house and we as a family sat down with him and confronted him directly about what he has done and how it hurts? We won’t kill him, promise; we’ll talk with him. We’ll start with the assumption that he himself doesn’t know how much this hurts you and has made a mistake, which he can now rectify.”

The point here is that parents really can be helpful in reducing teens’ psychological pain if they listen, strive fully to understand, don’t judge, and then engage respectfully with the teen in thinking about solutions. In the process, they are helping the teen build resilience. You can make mistakes, get into trouble and recover, but sometimes you need help. Resilience is not always a solo activity.

Final Thoughts

This letter is, to some degree, designed as a follow-up to Letter #121, where I suggested that the same “free range” principles that apply to kids’ outdoor explorations should apply to their online explorations. I went on to point out that there are dangers in both of those spaces, so it would be irresponsible to set kids completely free in either without preparing them for those dangers. We need to understand the dangers ourselves, realistically, meaning that we don’t inflate them out of proportion but also don’t blind ourselves to them. In response to Letter #121, some who commented implied or said directly that, perhaps because of my age, I’m unaware of what kids experience online today. I’m not unaware. I’m a parent to step-kids who were teens in the digital age and are now parents to my grandchildren. More significantly, I’ve paid attention to multiple research studies—not just the study described here—in which kids are surveyed or interviewed about both the harm and benefit from their online experiences. I’ve come to the conclusion that kids are often more sophisticated about all this than are the adults waving the flag to ban them from social media or take their smartphones away. And where they aren’t more sophisticated, our responsibility should be to help them become so.

To those who think I must be behind the times, I report that I am very much a part of today’s “real world.” We live in the digital age. Kids, as has always been true, know instinctively that to adapt to the world they are growing up in they must play and explore in its various spaces. Kids are not as fragile, or as vulnerable to manipulation, or as stupid as some seem to think they are, though our assumptions can in some cases, admittedly, become self-fulfilling prophesies. We made a terrible mistake as a society, around the year 1980, when we decided that kids should not be allowed to play and explore independently outdoors because of “stranger danger” and other overblown adult fears, spread by the media and various crusaders. Let’s not make the same mistake now because of exaggerated fears about online dangers. Let’s empower our kids, not disempower them.

For those who have been regular readers of Play Makes Us Human, I note that there are limits to my ability to dig deeply and widely into the research evidence, and elaborate fully, in these necessarily brief letters. There are no such limits, however, in my forthcoming book, Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety. The book will be available, published by Penguin Random House, Sept. 15, but you can preorder it now. By preordering you can be certain to be among the first to get a copy, and your order will send a message to marketers that this is a book they should stock up on and put front and center in their displays.

One more message. I have been holding monthly meetings—on Saturday afternoons—with paid subscribers. You can join those meetings by becoming a paid subscriber. The meetings are billed as “Ask Me Anything,” but I usually begin by responding to questions that people have posed in one or more of my letters. In the August meeting I will begin by addressing questions and counterpoints that readers have raised regarding this letter and Letter #121.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

A few days ago, a friend sent me a link to this little article, from the online publication Streamline. It is the best very short article I’ve seen yet summarizing my view about children’s needs to be online as well as offline in today’s world.

The article prompts me to think about the concept of “free range kids” as applied to both offline and online freedom. I was one of the founders of the nonprofit organization, Let Grow, some years ago, along with Lenore Skenazy (author of the book Free Range Kids) and two others.

From the beginning, Let Grow has been dedicated to creating more freedom for kids to play and explore independent of direct adult control and monitoring. In founding the organization, we were focused primarily on children’s outdoor freedom. Over decades, but particularly beginning in the early 1980s, adults added ever more restrictions on children’s abilities to play and explore freely outdoors. My research and that of others (e.g. here and here) had shown that such restrictions were likely major causes of increased rates of anxiety, depression, and even suicide among young people over this period. With such control and overprotection, children and teens were (and are) not learning how to take control of their own lives and deal with the inevitable bumps in life’s road. Because they were (and are) being treated as fragile, they were (and are) to some degree growing up fragile.

More recently, however, public alarm has been raised about the dangers to children of online behavior. There is a clear similarity between this alarm and the alarm raised around 1980 about the dangers to children outdoors. Let Grow was developed to mute the alarm about outdoor play and exploration. Now, how would it respond to the alarm about online play and exploration? Are the dangers online so much greater than, and so much different from, the dangers outdoors that we cannot or should not apply “free range” principles to the former?

A popular belief today is that kids’ heavy use of smartphones and social media is a major cause of an increase in kids’ anxiety and depression beginning around 2010. One group of people who do not share that belief are the scientists who have been researching the relationship between kids’ technology use and mental health (see, for example, here). Research has continuously disputed the idea that there is an overall clinically meaningful causal relationship between kids’ uses of smartphones or social media, or screens in general, and their mental health.

In previous letters I have described multiple lines of research evidence countering the idea that smartphones or social media are a major cause of kids’ mental health decline since 2010 (e.g. here, here, here, and here) and supporting the idea that increased pressures for superficial adult-judged “achievements” in school (especially with the advent of Common Core) and elsewhere were major causes of those declines (e.g. here, here, here, and here). I elaborate on such evidence much more fully in my new book, Restoring Childhood, to be released September 15.

Children are growing up in the digital age. The digital world is as much a part of today’s “real world” as is the physical outdoor world. That is not going to change. It’s only going to become more true. To grow up well today, children must learn how to navigate both worlds, which requires that they be able to play and explore in both worlds. To deprive children of freedom in the digital world is no less constraining on their development than is depriving them of freedom in the outdoor physical world.

What I want to do in the rest of this letter is elaborate a bit on what the concept “free range” means to me, as applied to children’s outdoor and online freedom.

“Free Range” Does Not Excuse Adults from Preparing Kids for Potential Dangers

Dangers exist both outdoors and online. We do not do children a service by denying them the opportunity to explore in both spaces, nor do we do them a service if we deny or blind ourselves to the dangers in both spaces. We do them a service by letting them know, in respectful ways, what the dangers are and by providing respectful suggestions about how to deal with them. We help children in their “free-range” explorations also by being on their side, showing that, if they tell us about unhappy encounters, we are not going to punish them by removing some aspect of their treasured freedom, but will listen respectfully and enter into a discussion about how to manage such encounters.

In the 1950s, when my parents (more specifically, my mother and grandmother) allowed me great outdoor freedom, they prepared me for such freedom. They warned me about traffic; about the dangers of chasing a ball into the street; about the need to look both ways before crossing a street, even if I had the green light; about not getting into a car or going off with a stranger who offered me candy or some such inducement. They also pointed out the value, when possible, of going with friends rather than alone, as there is safety in numbers. Before they allowed me to go out on a rowboat fishing without an adult, they insisted I take swimming lessons and prove to be a good swimmer. And even then, I needed to wear a life jacket. My parents were not unique. Most parents understood that they had a responsibility to help their kids understand and deal with outdoor dangers.

My parents allowed me great freedom, but they did not send me unprepared. Age was not the issue. I could understand and follow these rules, and was a good swimmer, by the age of 5. People would have thought my parents were crazy if they said I couldn’t explore independently on foot, on bicycle, or by rowboat until age 13 or 16. If they had deprived me of those freedoms for all those years of my early development, I would have grown up crippled in some ways, and I most certainly would have had a less happy childhood.

The world is different now than in the 1950s. A major difference, of course, is that we now live in the digital age. There is no going back. Our children are growing up in a digital world, and if they are to grow up well, they need to embrace and not be afraid of that world. They need to feel in control of it, not controlled by it. Just as the street, vacant lots, lakes, and rivers were key parts of the world important to my development, the digital world provides a whole set of key components to children’s development today. Children today play and explore and make friends in the digital world and profit from that, in ways that are in essence no different from my play and exploration in the physical outdoor world. To grow up well, they need freedom in both worlds.

In fact, increasingly, the digital world and the physical world are not truly distinct. We use digital devices to navigate, both literally and figuratively, the physical world. We use digital devices to figure out how to get together with friends in the physical world. We use digital devices in numerous ways to be safer in the physical world and to get the most out of our adventures there. This is as true for children as it is for you and me.

Children’s digital play is in many ways about issues pertaining to the physical world, just as their imaginary play has always been about the serious world in which they are growing and how to adapt to it. As pointed out by digital play expert Andy Robertson in a yet-to-be published book (Digital Playgue) that I’m currently reviewing, it makes ever less sense to distinguish between digital activity and so-called “real world” activity. They are merged.

We as a species have always been the technological animal, from the days of digging sticks and bows and arrows to the present day of computers and AI. We have never been technology-devoid creatures naked in nature. In every era, children have glommed on to the latest technology because their DNA tells them that this is crucial to their development, despite the fact that the older generation decries the new technology and may try to keep kids from it.

What are the dangers of online activity? There is, of course, the notorious “algorithm,” which is primarily a system that keeps feeding us what we seem to like. That’s good in that it gives us what we like, but bad if it constrains our exposure to other ideas and other sources of enjoyment. It’s also bad if it sucks us into spending more time on some chain of feeds than we want to spend. There are also the dangers of rudeness, even bullying, of inappropriate sexual advances, and of strangers trying to lure one away. It’s not clear that these dangers online are more or less than the same dangers offline. As some kids have pointed out in surveys, at least in the online world you can turn them off, which you can’t do in the school hallway or recess playground where you are locked in with the bullies. There is also the danger of getting sucked into spending money recklessly or even gambling. We need to steel our children (and ourselves) against such vulnerability. Knowledge is power.

This, of course, is just a beginning in thinking about dangers. With a little exploration you can find more and think of ways to help children recognize and guard against them. The overriding point, consistent with so many of my other letters, is that our goal as parents should be to empower our children, not disempower them; help them understand the dangers and help them realize they are strong, resilient, capable and can enjoy their online explorations and play while minimizing the dangers. Knowledge is power.

“Free Range” Does Not Excuse Businesses and Communities from Reducing Some Dangers and Making Others Clear

Eliminating all danger from either the outdoor or online world is not possible and would not be desirable. Children love to play in somewhat risky ways. As I and others have explained before (e.g. here and here), this is how children develop courage and prove to themselves that they can manage risk. Challenges at which they fail are also valuable in play, as they help children learn to manage disappointment and, depending on circumstances, find ways to meet those challenges or change their goals. As Andy makes clear in his forthcoming book, risky play in the online world serves the same functions as risky play in the offline world. The attempts to eliminate all danger from outdoor playgrounds have made them boring and, therefore, pretty much devoid of any children above the age of about five. The same would happen with online play.

But there is a difference between risks and hazards. Risks are dangers that are obvious, aboveboard. Because you can see them, you can choose to accept them as challenges or avoid them. Hazards are dangers that are hidden or not likely to be noticed. Communities have an obligation, or should have an obligation, to remove hazards from the places that children (and adults) inhabit. For example, instead of banning children from walking or biking independently to school, communities should create safer ways (sidewalks and bike paths) to support such independence, to reduce the hazards created by automobiles.

Concerning online danger, we should not let media companies off the hook. There should be clear safeguards concerning pornography, concerning gambling and anything approaching gambling, and any messages tempting kids (and other users) to spend money without clear information about what they are getting. I could go on, but you could probably do at least as good a job as I in coming up with a list.

Concluding Thought

I know I am fighting an uphill battle here. In the 1980s, parents and all sorts of institutions involved with kids developed the view that it was dangerous for kids to explore and play outdoors without immediate adult guards. This resulted in a dramatic reduction in children’s freedom and increase in their rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide. I and some others have long been arguing against such restrictions, but the arguments have obviously had little effect. Kids are as restricted outdoors now as much as ever.

In the 1990s, with the advent of computers, video games, and online ways for kids to communicate and play with one another, kids’ mental health began to improve (see here). But now, here we are, in a world where parents and all sorts of institutions involved with kids think it’s dangerous for kids to play and explore online, and laws are being passed aimed at seriously limiting their opportunities to do so. As a society, we are making the same mistake now, about online behavior, that we made beginning in the 1980s about offline behavior. Again, I and some others who have seriously assessed the data are fighting an uphill battle. But I think we will win in the end.

And now, what are your thoughts about all this? This substack is, in part, a forum for discussion, and your thoughts, stories, and questions are treated respectfully by me and other readers, regardless of the degree to which we agree or disagree. Comments add to the value of these posts for everyone.

Leave a comment

If you are enjoying these letters and can afford $50 a year (or $100 for a “founding subscription”), I urge you to become a paid subscriber. I use all funds from paid subscriptions to help support nonprofit organizations whose mission is to bring more play and freedom to children’s lives. Paid subscriptions also help convince me that people value these letters and thereby encourage me to continue. For you, one benefit is you will be invited to join me and other paid subscribers in monthly online “Ask Me Anything” meetings. [Our next meeting is tomorrow, July 18, and if you want to register for it, go here.]

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

Our next meeting for paid subscribers will begin at 1:00 pm Eastern time, Saturday, July 18.

If there is interest, we could begin with questions you might have concerning the article by Kaitlyn Tiffany about me and my forthcoming book that appeared July 9 online in the Atlantic. Not surprisingly, such a short article did not present much nuance. It focused mostly on the disagreement between me and Jonathan Haidt about causes of the rise in teen anxiety beginning around 2010 and generated, so far, over 240 comments, mostly (not surprisingly) negative about my views. Then we could move on to questions about anything having to do with the various themes of Play Makes Us Human.

If you would like to pose a question in advance of the meeting, so I and others can think about it beforehand, feel free to do so in the comments section to this post, available to paid subscribers.

The rest of this letter (below my name), which includes the link necessary to register for the meeting, is open to paid subscribers only. You can unlock that portion, and register for the meeting, by becoming a paid subscriber now (for $50 a year or $100 for a “founding subscription”). I donate all funds that come to me for paid subscriptions to nonprofit organizations aimed at bringing more play and freedom to children’s lives, so the money goes to good causes.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

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Dear friends,

This is not my usual kind of Substack letter. I’m doing no research for it. I’m documenting nothing. I’m on vacation with my wife at our A-frame cottage on Blodgett Hill in Cabot, Vermont. I’m typing semi-reclined on a futon looking out at a beautiful blue sky above the towering green of the trees. I’m writing as I might in an actual letter to friends. I am not giving it a number, as it is not part of the collection of letters I recycle on Facebook.

I like to think of Cabot as “where I’m from,” but truth be told I only resided here year-around for two years—my last two years of high school. I’m a 1962 graduate of Cabot High School. But my parents and younger bothers stayed here for years after that, and one brother still lives with his family in Plainfield, near Cabot, so this is where I have for 64 years been going “home” to family. I also have ancestors (no longer living) who lived in this area before the ancestral branch that produced me moved to Minnesota, which is where I mostly grew up before we moved to Cabot.

If you have heard of Cabot, it’s probably because of Cabot cheese and other Cabot dairy products. Those now are sold nationally, even internationally, and are made not just in Cabot but also at branch creameries elsewhere. Cabot Creamery products were just local when I lived in Cabot. I worked for a few months in high school at the creamery, as an afterschool job.

Regular readers of my writings know well my distaste for conventional schooling, but I must confess that I liked Cabot School. When I was a student there, there were just 52 students in the high school, just 12 in my graduating class. The school is still going strong, with about the same number of students as it had then. Cabot has stubbornly resisted pressures to consolidate with schools in other towns, which attempts had been present even before I became a student there. I’m glad of that.

When a school is small and everyone knows everyone, it has a kind of family feel. At least that’s how I felt about Cabot School. Courses were adapted to some degree to the needs of the students, and I recall teachers and the school principal being rather humble and open to students’ ideas and opinions. We had most of the usual extra-curricular activities, and the great thing about them was that anybody who wanted to be part of them could be—in fact was encouraged to be. To have boys’ and girls’ basketball teams (which competed with other small schools throughout the state) we needed all the boys and girls who wanted to play, regardless of ability. Similarly with the boys’ baseball team. We also had a school chorus, student newspaper, student yearbook, one or two school plays a year, and a debate team that did well even against big schools, including those in Burlington and Montpelier. I was part of all of them. Our teams did well, but we didn’t feel much pressure about winning. We were in it for fun. We did well despite our small size because, in a setting where they know they can be on the team, kids rise to the occasion and become pretty good.

The A-frame cottage, from which I am writing this letter, was built by my uncle Wyman Smith shortly after I left Cabot to go to New York City for college and graduate school. I helped a little on a visit home one summer. Wyman is the uncle who encouraged my family of origin to move to Cabot from Duluth, Minnesota, where we had previously lived. Wyman was a lawyer by profession, but his love was maple sugaring. He had purchased what people call a “sugarbush,” here on Blodgett Hill, and spent as much time as he could working it. Helping him with the sugaring—at a time when we hung buckets rather than plastic tubing—was another of my learning experiences the two years I lived in Cabot. Wyman also was the volunteer who coached our school debate team and drove us around to meets throughout the state.

When Wyman died his children inherited the cottage and land (about 70 acres of woods), but after a few years I learned they had put it up for sale. I bought it to keep it in the family, I think in 1998, and have spent time here ever since when possible. My mother—who lived up here her last days—is buried on the property. She’s buried the way she wanted to be buried—in a pine coffin made by my brothers Fred and Barney, in a hole my brothers and I (her four sons) dug together in the woods. She wanted no marker, but her brother Wyman put a small one there later, anyway. I’m glad of that, as it has allowed me to find the spot and think about her from time to time as I walk the woods.

But now I want to turn my attention to yesterday, the Fourth of July, 2026, the 250^th anniversary of the founding of this country. Cabot regularly has perhaps the greatest small-town Fourth of July parade in Vermont. People come from surrounding towns to participate in it and see it. Not surprisingly, at such events my own eyes are drawn to the children.

After the parade, as people picnicked and examined the wares at various booths on the town common, children frolicked as children do whenever there is a bunch of them together and nobody stops them. I watched a kid, maybe about 7, somehow get himself up into a tree that had no lower branches. He climbed barefoot, and used his feet the way a monkey would. I watched kids chasing one another around, doing wheelies on bikes, climbing on the Civil War monument, and on and on—doing what kids are designed to do—and nobody was telling them not to. Maybe Independence Day, at least in Cabot, is Independence Day for kids.

We need in this country a new Declaration of Independence, a declaration that children, to grow, must have more time than we currently allow them, and more time every year as they grow older, in which they are not guarded and told what to do by adults, but are free to manifest their biological drive to make their own decisions, play in their own ways, take charge of themselves, and play with other kids unimpeded by adult-imposed constraints. For more on that, I refer you to Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids blog post, The Declaration of Childhood Independence!

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

In Letter #119, I asked two sets of questions:

1. When you think back on your secondary schooling (middle school or high school) what course or lesson seems most valuable to you now, in the sense that it has somehow enriched your life? How has it enriched your life? Do you believe such a course or lesson is sufficiently useful that it should be part of the required school curriculum?

2. When you think back about the years of your secondary schooling, what do wish had been part of the curriculum that was not? What course or lesson might have helped you best as you entered independent adulthood? Given that we have compulsory education with required courses, do you think that course or lesson should be among the requirements?

Forty-two people responded in the comments, 35 of whom gave answers to one or both of these questions. Here I will briefly summarize those answers and then present my own thoughts about life-valuable lessons.

Courses Readers Found to Be Valuable

Twenty-three of those who commented cited at least one course they took in secondary school that they have found to add valuable to their life. The courses listed covered a wide range. The only specific course mentioned by more than two people was typing (or keyboarding), mentioned by 6. Six others mentioned courses that fell into a category I labeled broadly as household skills, including home economics, cooking and nutrition, consumer education, and tool use. Some noted that these courses were not recommended to them in the academic track, but they took them anyway as electives. Four people mentioned courses that improved their ability to speak publicly (labeled oral communication, speech and debate, public speaking, and drama). Only 7 out of the 23 mentioned a course that we usually think of as standard academics. Those were world literature, history, English, French, Spanish, and precalculus. Nobody claimed to believe that the courses they found to be valuable should be required. Not surprisingly, most readers of this Substack agree that coercion spoils learning.

Courses Readers Wish Had Been Part of the Curriculum

Twenty-four of those who commented listed courses they wished had been available to them when they were in secondary school. It was apparently easier to think of these than to think of courses that were part of their curriculum and were valuable. The number of courses listed per person in response to this second question ranged from 1 to 8, with a mean of 3.6. In contrast, the number listed per person in response to the first question ranged from 1 to 4, with a mean of 1.6. And that doesn’t include those who said or implied that none of the courses they took were valuable.

To make sense of the rather large lists of wished-for courses, I categorized them into six groups, which I list below:

• Emotional and Social Wellbeing. Thirteen people listed at least one course in this category. Some of the specific ones listed were mindfulness, self-management, kindness, meditation, group decision making, trauma management, social skills, understanding others, empathy, nonviolent communication, conflict resolution, controlling stress, self-awareness, and science of relationships.

• Home Economics and Home Maintenance. Twelve people listed at least one course in this category. Some of the specific ones listed were home economics, home maintenance, cooking, meal planning, growing food, nutrition, tool use and repair, and fixing things.

• Practical Financial Information and Skills. Twelve people listed at least one course in this category. Among the specific ones listed were understanding finances, economics, accounting, financial planning, practical math, filing taxes, money skills, capitalism, and financial literacy,

• Critical Thinking and Logic. Eight people listed at least one course in this category. Among them were critical thinking, critical writing, applied logic, ethical reflection, executive function, Fermi estimation, reasoning, and learning to learn.

• Understanding Humans, Society, and Social Diversity. Six people listed at least one course in this category. Among them were history of human societies, world cultures, social studies, comparative religions, and human history starting with earliest Homo sapiens.

• Miscellaneous. Eight people listed at least one item that did not fit any of the above categories. Among these were computer programming, ecology, earth science, physiology and disease, systems theory, drawing and painting, and swimming.

My List of Courses That Would Be Valuable

For whatever it may be worth, here is a list I came up with, of courses I think should be available to everyone of secondary school age. (I generated a longer list, but this is all I have energy for right now.) I list them not in an order of judged importance but in the order they occurred to me as I was thinking about the question.

• Swimming. I’m probably biased here because of a long life on the water. Red Cross swimming is the only course my mother ever insisted I take. I was five years old at the time and still remember the struggle of learning the skill of rhythmically exhaling under water and inhaling out of water—an essential skill for feeling comfortable in water. My mother wanted to make sure I would never drown and would enjoy life on any of the 11,000 lakes for which Minnesota (where we lived) is famous. I am grateful for that. I learned early to be comfortable in the water and my life has been enriched by that ever since. I became a lifeguard on a Duluth beach when I was 16 and for four summers after that I was waterfront director and swimming instructor at summer camps. Today kayaking on rivers, lakes, and sometimes the ocean is among my greatest outdoor pleasures.

Surveys show that approximately 15% of American adults report that they cannot swim. Those people are in danger whenever they are in a boat or on a pier over water. Every year roughly 4,000 Americans die from unintentional drowning. That, admittedly, amounts to a small percentage of accidental deaths (dwarfed by deaths from auto accidents), but it is significant and largely preventable. Even more significant is that people who can’t swim, or can barely swim, are, by avoiding lakes, rivers, and oceans, missing out on joyful water adventures. Columbia College, where I was an undergraduate, had and still has a requirement for graduation that students (barring physical handicaps) prove they can swim at least 75 yards. Those who enter unable to do so must take lessons until they can. I felt at the time, and still feel, that swimming was the only Columbia College requirement that made sense. I would not oppose a policy requiring it for graduation from public high schools.

• CPR (Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation). Perhaps the most important things for people to learn are things that promote safety without detracting from adventure. Our schools might be more useful if they were run by the Red Cross rather than by people trained in “education.” On a statistical basis, in terms of lives saved, knowing CPR is even more important than swimming. Much more. According to the American Heart Association, CPR saves roughly 32,000 to 36,000 lives per year in the U.S. (here). It would save even more lives if more people knew how to do it.

• Home Economics. Back in the gender differentiated world of my school days, Home Ec was a course taken by all girls and Shop was a course taken by all boys. I’d like to see a revival of these, but without the gender segregation and with a twist toward all the practical skills involved in maintaining a household. We have way too many adults today who don’t know how to plan nutritious meals, or cook, or properly maintain a home, or raise their own vegetables, or fix things around the house such as leaky faucets. A result is that too many people are wasting money eating non-nutritious food out or ordering it delivered, hiring people to make small repairs they should be able to do easily themselves, hiring landscaping companies with big noisy machines to mow their little lawns, and on and on. There is joy in doing these things yourself and much money to be saved. Learning in secondary school how to do these things would allow people to live happier, healthier lives, on a smaller budget.

• Mathematics of Money Management. Speaking of budgets…. Most Americans are terrible at money management. They spend money on things they don’t need or even enjoy, run up debts and waste money on interest, avoid saving for retirement, and can’t manage tax forms. Imagine a course that teaches young people how to solve story problems such as the following: “If instead of spending $25,000 on a wedding you spent just $5,000 and invested the difference in a fund earning 8% a year, compounded annually, how much would that be worth by the time you retire, in 50 years?” (Spoiler: The answer is $926,385.88). Similar story problems could be about money lost paying credit card debt, or a more complicated one on whether a college education is worth it on purely financial grounds, depending on certain reasonable assumptions.

The course would emphasize the value of budgeting and always remaining within budget. I recall long ago reading a quote by some famous person that went something like this: “Earn X dollars a month and spend one more than X a month, and you live with stress and worry. Earn X dollars a month and spend one less than X a month, and you live happily and luxuriously.” While on the topic of quotes about mismanaged money, one of my favorites is an old one from Will Rogers: “Too many people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t want to impress people they don’t like.” The people who benefit from our ignorance, of course, are the financial companies that lend money and the people who sell us stuff that we do not need and do not add joy to our lives.

• Probability and Statistical Reasoning. Aside from math related to money management, the most useful mathematics for most people have to do with principles of probability and statistics. A course on this could focus on many practical applications. One, related to money management, has to do with gambling. Currently, with the promotion of sports betting, huge numbers of people (including teens) are throwing money away, believing they can beat the system when they can’t. The same is true with state lotteries and all varieties of casino gambling. The systems are rigged so the chance of coming out ahead in the long run is nearly nil. The only sorts of gambling where skill is involved are those where there is no “house” running it to make money. A skilled poker player or pool shark who knows how to hustle might make money from those foolish enough to play with him or her, but otherwise gambling is nearly always a losing proposition. The course I have in mind would show why. Next to alcohol and other drug addictions, gambling is the surest way to ruin yourself and your family.

Beyond understanding the pitfalls of gambling, statistical reasoning would help people make other life choices. Concerning dangers that people fear and that limit their lives or their children’s lives, what is the likelihood of each danger? Instead of allowing scare stories to control our lives and our children’s, we should look for reliable data on actual probabilities. For example, on average, what is the probability of an 8-year-old getting a serious injury (or being sexually abused) playing an adult-directed sport compared to the chance of their getting a serious injury (or being sexually abused) playing with friends outdoors away from adult control?

The course could also help us think more critically and rationally about the uses of numbers by advertisers or by those who are trying to promote a particular idea or point of view. Even scientists often present their data in ways that make an effect seem bigger or more reliable than it truly is. When I was teaching statistics to social science majors at Boston College, I supplemented the main textbook with a little paperback, published in 1954, entitled How to Lie with Statistics. It was written by Darrell Huff and is still available. That would be a great book to include in a high school course. If everyone read it, we would all be wiser consumers of statistics-based claims slung at us every day.

• Skepticism. A more general course aimed at dealing with the information and misinformation slung at us every day might be called Skepticism or Critical Thinking. In this world of scams, exaggerations, and lies coming from our top officials on down, how do we know what to believe, or what to credit as “likely true,” “possibly true,” or “clearly false?” How do we distinguish among truth tellers, people who think they are truth tellers but are mistaken or ignorant, and out-and-out liars? Skepticism has become a clear survival skill. To be honest, it’s (sadly) way more important than swimming. There is no easy formula for distinguishing truth from error and error from lies, but there are lots of ways to help make those distinctions. There are lots of questions we should ask before making an important decision (such as whether to vaccinate a child) based on somebody’s claim. I imagine a course here in which students investigate claims made by advertisers, politicians, scientists, and social media influencers and hold debates about the veracity of the claims. What information must you gather to test the veracity?

• The Interdependent Web of Life. The course could also be called Ecology. For the long-term welfare of humanity on Earth, we need a populace that understands the interdependence of living beings and natural non-living entities and the disruptive effects of our human activity. We are already seeing disastrous effects of fossil fuel use, throw-away plastics, and the like, yet we continue our reckless ways. Ignorance or deliberate head-in-the-sand behavior may shorten our lives as individuals and as a species.

Concluding Thoughts

It seems strange, or should seem strange, that we have a compulsory education system that teaches stuff quite divorced from people’s real lives and needs, stuff that is learned just long enough to pass the test, by students who see no other purpose for learning it. If kids must go to school, we should at least be offering lessons that are likely to improve their lives in the long run. Here, readers who commented on Letter #119 and I have offered some suggestions about courses students might find valuable. (Of course, now I’m sure the public education monopolistic bureaucracy will jump to it and reform the curriculum.)

I’m not yet done with this topic. If you, after reading this, have further thoughts about useful curriculum reform in public schools, I’d love to read them. Put your thoughts into the comments section below. All comments written respectfully are treated respectfully by me and other readers, whether we agree or disagree. Indeed, disagreements can be especially thought-provoking and valuable. I do value reasoned skepticism!

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If you are enjoying these letters and can afford $50 a year, I urge you to become a paid subscriber. I use all funds from paid subscriptions to help support nonprofit organizations whose mission is to bring more play and freedom to children’s lives. Paid subscriptions also help convince me that people value these letters and thereby encourage me to continue. For you, one benefit is you will be invited to join me and other paid subscribers in a monthly online “Ask Me Anything” meeting and discussion.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Share Play Makes Us Human

Dear friends,

As regular readers of my writings know, I’m not a fan of compulsory (forced) schooling. It wastes huge amounts of children’s time. In its modern rendition it is the primary cause of anxiety and depression among kids (see here). And remarkably little is learned, remembered, or used from all that time and effort spent. My research and that of others have made me a fan of Self-Directed Education (see, for examples, here and here).

In my most recent (June 20) Zoom meeting with paid subscribers to this Substack, one of the questions and subsequent discussion got me thinking along this line: Given that we have a coercive educational system, and given that for some time to come, many if not most kids are going to be victims of it, what courses should be required? What lessons are so important that we should try to get everyone to learn them? Let’s focus this question on secondary school, not elementary school.

Suppose we believe there are certain things everyone should learn so they can go on to live a good life—a life in which they are happy, can support themselves well, and contribute at least as much to society as they take? What are those things?

In other words, if our compulsory schooling system were truly designed to enable people to live a good life, and if we persisted in the (in my opinion mistaken) belief that certain courses or lessons should be required, what are those courses or lessons?

I’ve been playing with that question a bit myself and have some thoughts, which I’ll share in my next letter. But now, with this letter, I want to get your thoughts. Here are two sets of questions to you:

1. When you think back on your secondary schooling (middle school or high school) what course or lesson seems most valuable to you now, in the sense that it has somehow enriched your life? How has it enriched your life? Do you believe such a course or lesson is sufficiently useful that it should be part of the required school curriculum?

2. When you think back about the years of your secondary schooling, what do wish had been part of the curriculum that was not? What course or lesson might have helped you best as you entered independent adulthood? Given that we have compulsory schooling with required courses, do you think that course or lesson should be among the requirements?

If you have thoughts about either or both of these questions, please share them in the comments section here. Your responses, along with some of my own thoughts, will contribute to my next Substack letter.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

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Dear friends,

I’m always interested in people who develop a passionate interest and leave their comfort zone to pursue it. One such person is Bernhard Warsitz, a secondary school teacher in Munich, Germany, who loved some of what was happening at the Montessori school where he was teaching and hated some of it. His love-hate feelings led him to take a sabbatical adventure, traveling partly by bicycle, to visit diverse parts of the world, interview people about issues related to education and human wellbeing, and create a documentary film The Forgotten Sides of Learning: School and the Crisis of the Psyche.

I invited him to write a guest essay about his adventure and, in that way, introduce his film to you.

Here goes:

Bernhard’s Story

The Forgotten Sides of Learning: A Journey from the Classroom into the Unknown

Hi everyone,

I’m Bernhard Warsitz. Since 2012, I’ve been teaching pedagogy and psychology to 11th through 13th graders at a Montessori high school in Munich, Germany. The story of my film begins there, inside the classroom and on our school trips to Albania, where we volunteered at care facilities for people with disabilities.

To be honest, I never wanted to be a teacher. I had dropped out of my traditional teacher-training program and earned a master’s degree in education instead, because the rigid, traditional school system had been a nightmare for me as a student. Yet somehow, at age 44, I ended up in the classroom. Fortunately, it was at a Montessori school, which promised a certain degree of freedom. And it was in some ways quite wonderful.

I used the curriculum merely as a springboard to reflect on authentic, real-world topics with my students. For example, in one classroom discussion a student shared a dream in which she was standing in a ditch by the side of the road, and her parents were reaching with their hands to pull her up. She explained that she didn’t want to let them help her—she wanted to take their hands, but at the same time, she didn’t. She felt torn and isolated. The entire group of students were moved by this dream and its possible meaning. I could see clearly that young people’s intellectual engagement is not distinct from their emotions and personal experiences. This view was reinforced by comments at a 5-year class reunion of former students, who had invited me to be with them. Many of them commented on how valuable the discussions of personal, sometimes emotion-provoking experiences had been.

The Turning Point: Despair Within the System

These meaningful connections, however, were only one side of my job. I also had to prepare my young friends for the state-administered Abitur (the rigorous German standardized graduation exams). This is where a story of growing despair began, which ultimately drove me to take a sabbatical and create a documentary film.

I knew every student deeply and cared about them. Yet, year after year, these exams came around, graded by external examiners in ways that seemed arbitrary and unfair. The worst part was that the human beings I had come to know and love suddenly no longer mattered. All that counted was a single, isolated performance on a test, a test that clearly failed to tap the richness of my students’ thoughts and understanding.

In my classroom, I had always tried to follow my students’ thoughts and understand them. In the world of standardized testing, that no longer existed. It was a world of absolute right and wrong. It was almost entirely about who was better at rote memorization and who worked harder to prepare for the test. The system ignored my students’ individual talents. Every year, the state exam results in Bavaria for Pedagogy/Psychology are low. Who is blamed for that? Never the institutions organizing the curriculum and doing the testing, but always the students, who supposedly aren’t industrious enough. There is zero accountability on the part of the state system. There is no attention to the issues that truly engage students both emotionally and intellectually.

After ten years of feeling powerless in meetings with external examiners—almost all of whom believed their own judgment was the only “correct” one—I couldn’t take it anymore. It became clear to me that I was working within a deeply autocratic school system. I was suffering under it as much as my students were. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the world came to a standstill, I finally had time to think: What can I do to scream out loud? To take a stand against this absurd testing world?

Stepping into the Unknown

The spark came from Albania, one of the poorest countries in Europe. Before the pandemic, I had taken my students there to complete internships in social care facilities. In Albania, being multi-disabled often means being excluded from society. The students got to know and care about these people. One student spent an entire afternoon holding the hand of a bedridden resident. For that woman, it was the highlight of her day.

After our shifts, we would sit together and process our experiences. Many students later described this trip as the highlight of their school career. For me, too, these were the most moving moments of my life as a teacher. We debated boundaries, closeness and distance, dignity, and appreciation. The teenagers were flooded with intense impressions that overwhelmed them at first, but they grew through sharing their feelings and thoughts. These were incredibly humanizing experiences. We all grew closer to one another, and the students surpassed themselves. These experiences were the opposite of the state system: no preordained goals, no standardized outcomes, but authentic experiences as a foundation for reflection. That was my goal.

In 2019, I was fortunate to have a student named Anton Geiselbrechtinger on the trip. For his independent 8th-grade Montessori thesis project, he had taught himself how to film and edit. He captured the essence of our journey in a 90-second film—no commentary, just raw images, perspectives, and music. That film touched my soul. I asked Anton if he wanted to make a full-length documentary with me. He said yes.

He, 35 years younger than me, became my film mentor and sharpest critic, my ‘critical friend’. He challenged my script ideas; beautifully shaped the composition of words, imagery, and music. His help in the filming and editing was invaluable.

There is so much to be gained from recognizing and fostering the passions of our students, which rarely have to do with the school-imposed curriculum.

I took a sabbatical and planned a journey to explore two major themes—the relation of schooling to societal authoritarianism and the relation of school to young people’s mental health. I had no script, no filmmaking background, no experience in the documentary world. But with Anton’s help and a burning desire do something meaningful, I pushed forward into the unknown. Sometimes traveling with Anton or another companion, but mostly alone, I hit the road.

On a Folding Bike Through Europe: Encounters That Changed Everything

I love trains, ferries, and my folding e-bike. My first major destination was Romania. To get there, I took a ferry across the Mediterranean from Italy to Albania and navigated from there to Romania using my folding bike and local trains.

As I left the port of Durrës, my navigation app guided me along a beautiful route far from the busy main roads. The landscape became increasingly rural, nature felt close enough to touch, and the scent of the Mediterranean coastal macchia filled the air. In that moment, I felt the thing I love most: freedom. As I rode along that road, thinking freely, the question that had plagued me for years bubbled up: “Bernhard, what are you doing here?” But this time the thought was comfortable. I knew that this was exactly the right place for me to be, right now. I was immersed in uncertainty but knew I had the freedom to at least try to do something meaningful. I felt a deep sense of vitality. This is my life.

In Romania, I wanted to meet someone I had often introduced to my students during lessons on social work: Jenny Rasche. She is the mother of seven biological and eleven adopted children and runs an organization that helps children in dire need near Sibiu. At age 19, Jenny had visited Romania for the first time. In the middle of a freezing night, she and her boyfriend picked up a hitchhiking young Sinti and Roma mother with a child who was insufficiently clothed for the weather. That night, she ended up in a slum. On pure impulse, Jenny decided to help, and the help continued. Today, her organization has built 158 permanent houses and eliminated hunger for countless families, ensuring that—as she puts it—“a new generation can grow up learning to feel their own worth and embrace education.” In 2021, the EU honored her as a Woman of Action.

I wanted to understand what decades of poisonous pedagogy under the Ceaușescu autocracy - which produced some of the worst orphanages in human history - had done to the people. And I wanted to see how Jenny manages to interact with her employees, who grew up under that system of subjugation, in ways that help them rebuild their sense of agency and self-esteem. Jenny herself grew up in East Germany, making her a child of autocracy as well. This was my first film topic: authoritarianism.

Jenny generously permitted me to shadow and film her for three weeks. I have never met another human being with such energy. She works 12 to 16 hours a day to ensure that people can live in dignity and, what moved me deeply, die in dignity as well. While I was there, she rescued a completely neglected, severely disabled child from a state institution, Christoph, 15 years old, who weighed just 30 pounds (14 kilograms). His limbs were shockingly frail. Jenny had fought with the officials to get him. She provided him with medical care and brought him into her own home, making him part of her family. For a long time, it was uncertain if he would survive. He did. Jenny explained to me that she prefers to take in the toughest “system-crashers”—the ones who have nowhere else to go. She believes that no child is a lost cause; they just need a safe harbor to heal and pull their life together.

Uncovering the Youth Mental Health Crisis: From Herbert Renz-Polster to Peter Gray

After my time with Jenny Rasche, with my growing concern about the harm of an authoritarian mindset and lack of emotional security for children, I made my way to the home of the German scholar and author of the 2009 bestseller Understanding Childen, Dr. Herbert Renz-Polster. In our interview, we spoke about the first system of governance a person experiences, the family. He described a study by the advocacy organization Save the Children, which ranked U.S. states based on where children experience the greatest emotional and physical abuse. The study revealed that those states correlated perfectly with the states where Donald Trump received the most votes in the 2016 election.

According to Renz-Polster, the study illuminates an underlying psychological mechanism: Those who experience harshness, helplessness, and submission during childhood often crave authoritarian structures and strongman leaders later in life to compensate for their deep-seated insecurity. The autocratic structure of modern schooling and upbringing worldwide may be part of what fuels the shift toward societal autocracy we are witnessing, especially among young people. I wanted to show this in the film.

As my journey continued, the second major theme took center stage, the dramatic decline in youth mental health. I had previously listened to Peter Gray give an online lecture in Germany. His insights on the fundamental importance of free play resonated deeply with me, and after reading his book Free to Learn, I knew I had to interview him. I deeply respect pedagogical thinkers like Herbert Renz-Polster, Peter Gray, Remo Largo, Janusz Korczak, and Maria Montessori who anchor their thinking on knowledge about our evolutionary roots. Peter agreed to an online interview.

Our conversation became a game changer, altering my travel itinerary. Peter argued that the common narrative blaming smartphones and social media as the primary cause of a sharp rise in anxiety, depression, and suicide among adolescents is not supported by research. Instead, he pointed out that schools’ increasing reliance on standardization, high-stakes testing, and top-down state control of curricula has created severe, chronic psychological stress among students.

The Tragic Side of School Reform in India

Knowing that India had aggressively aligned its school system with this Western, hyper-competitive model over the last 15 years, I looked into the data there. The findings were horrifying. The increase in youth suicides from 2009 to 2021 was nearly 400%. I immediately decided to travel to Delhi and Jaipur, where I had excellent connections to local schools, as I had previously organized school exchange programs there.

What I found in India weighed heavily on my heart. In one of my many interviews, I met 16-year-old Samriddhi. She unhesitatingly and dramatically confirmed Peter’s theories: “Academic competition is killing many of the children here in India.” With courageous vulnerability, she shared how much she suffers under the system. She cannot celebrate her successes because an internal expectation immediately demands that she must do even better. A profound sense of insecurity follows her everywhere. Even if 100 people agree with her, it takes just one critic to trigger an existential self-doubt. It is easy to see how a system that looks continuously for mistakes, and which sees achievement, by the superficial criteria the system establishes, as a measure of young people’s worth, creates deep-seated anxiety.

An Indian teacher pointed out one of the core problems with the system. In schools, we ask almost exclusively closed-ended questions instead of asking open-ended ones that allow for individual thought and creation. Closed questions, which lend themselves to standardized testing, have fixed answers and promote memorization. Open questions lead to creativity, personal takeaways, and self-actualization. So simple, yet so profoundly true.

On top of the school pressure, the students in Delhi live under a permanent, toxic cloud of smog, surrounded by plastic waste. The weight of global crises, wars, and climate change rests heavily on this new generation, not just in India but also with my students back in Germany and everywhere. In contrast to the serious local and world problems to be solved, the problems put to students by standard curricula in schools are largely meaningless.

Learning as Discovery: Learning from a Former Student in Uganda

At the end of my journey, I traveled to Uganda to visit my former student, Alexandra Müller. At just 20 years old, she had already founded her own school there. I wanted to know what skills and competencies enabled her to bring such a massive project to fruition.

Her answer was revealing. First, she said, “It is so important to realize that you don’t hold definitive knowledge and that you don’t know better than the local community.” Talking to Alexandra, and weaving in Peter Gray’s insights, the circle closed for me: Most learning happens naturally when we stop trying to force it. It happens implicitly—through daily life, self-directed exploration motivated by curiosity, and self-directed play. It can be abetted by internships and projects without rigid lesson plans or standardized benchmarks. When we try to mold children according to our own agendas and force them into standardized molds, we crush their vitality and destroy their zest for discovery. At some level I always knew this, but my interviews with these insightful people made it clear.

What I Hope to Achieve with This Film

What, for me, is this documentary truly about? I have always identified with David in the David-Goliath story. I find it exciting to create something powerful from small resources.

Of course, I would feel good if the film broke even financially. But what is infinitely more important to me is that the film be seen in schools and be debated deeply among those who might influence how schools operate. I want to inspire many Davids to initiate their own journeys and help conquer the societal forces that are making people unhappy.

In Germany, I am organizing screenings where teachers, students, school administrators, and parents sit down after the film to engage in open dialogue. I would like to achieve this also in the English-speaking world, including the United States. I am looking for individuals who can help promote this documentary and organize events where we can reflect on the two parts of the film:

• Part I: Authoritarianism and School. The number of young people drifting into anti-democratic, extremist right-wing spaces is alarming. In Germany, that number spiked by 50% between 2021 and 2023; a third of all adolescents now hold views aligned with these mindsets. In the U.S. similar drifts are occurring.

My documentary suggests that the autocratic structure of our schools—where young people experience almost no agency and are treated as passive consumers at the bottom of a strict top-down hierarchy rather than as active thinkers and creators—fuels this trend. School must shift from a focus on ovedience to autocratic demands to a focus on active, creative participation in a democratic community that promotes self-efficacy and a sense of belonging. To achieve this, we need an educational revolution.

• Part II: Mental Health and School. Here, too, the data cry out against our current ways of schooling. Across Western school systems, a quarter of all adolescents now suffer from clinically diagnosed mental health disorders. Mental well-being must finally become more important than a high GPA or high scores on standardized tests. Instead of being a place of toxic pressure, school could be students’ strongest safety net. As Herbert Renz-Polster writes: Children do not become strong, curious, and creative by merely executing their teachers’ lesson plans. They must be allowed to follow their own learning agendas and shape them alongside other children.

I would be deeply grateful if educators and other concerned people in the United States and elsewhere would reach out to me about ways to bring this film and associated discussions to their local community. You can email me at warsitz@education-for-future.com.

Watch the English trailer here:

Stream the full film (for $6.99) here:

movie.education-for-future.com

Thank you for reading this.

Bernhard Warsitz.

Concluding Thoughts

Thank you, Bernhard!

Friends, I hope you will watch the brief trailer, consider watching the whole film, and think about possible ways the film might be used to advance public discussion about the need for a true revolution in how we do schooling. Bernard’s welcomes thoughts about how the film might be used, which you can email to him at warsitz@education-for-future.com. He has also told me that he would be glad to respond to questions you may pose to him in the comments to this letter.

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As the world moves ever more to extreme versions of Western style shooling, kids everywhere become increasingly anxious, depressed, and suicidal. It is time for a reckoning.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

Our next meeting for paid subscribers will begin at 2:00 pm Eastern time, Saturday, June 20.

The meeting will begin with discussion of a question, raised by Moira Mills, about what “success” in school actually indicates and why it may not be a meaningful index of education. See her Substack post on this topic.

Then, the rest of the time will be devoted to any questions from participants that are in any way related to the themes of this Substack—particularly having to do with play, child development, education, and being a parent.

If you would like to pose a question in advance of the meeting, so I and others can think about it beforehand, feel free to do so in the comments section to this post available to paid subscribers.

The rest of this letter (below my name), which includes the link necessary to register for the meeting, is open to paid subscribers only. You can unlock that portion, and register for the meeting, by becoming a paid subscriber (for just $50 a year or $100 for a “founding subscription”) now. I donate all funds that come to me for paid subscriptions to nonprofit organizations aimed at bringing more play and freedom to children’s lives, so the money goes to good causes.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

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Read more

Dear friends,

I have seen data like these before, so I should not be shocked. But every time I read of a new survey showing how restricted American children are I’m shocked again.

The most recent such study I’ve come across is one by the Institute for Family Studies. The researchers surveyed almost 24,000 U.S. parents of over 40,000 children whose ages ranged from less than 1 to 17. One question, pertaining to each child, had to do with parental permission for the child to go away from home without adult supervision. As illustration, I’ll present here the findings for 10-year-olds, 14-year-olds, and 17-year-olds:

…………………..CANNOT LEAVE

AGE …Home …Yard …Street ..Neighborhood

10 .……..28% ……58% ……88% ………98%

14 ……….11% …….27% …..55% ……….91%

17 ……….8% …….16% …….30% ……….62%

What has happened to us!

Looking just at the second data column, 58% of 10-year-olds, 27% of 14-year-olds, and 16% of 17-year-olds cannot leave their own yard without adult accompaniment. And looking at the last column, 98% of 10-year-olds, 91% of 14-year-olds, and 62% of 17-year-olds cannot leave their own neighborhood without adult accompaniment. There is no way to describe this other than to say it is both crazy and cruel (though not deliberately cruel).

The study further showed that these data are very little affected by the nature of the neighborhood or the socioeconomic class of the respondents. Children and teens in neighborhoods rated by the EPA as highly “walkable” were just as restricted in movement as those in neighborhoods rated as less walkable, and the findings were very similar across socioeconomic groups.

Remarkably, in the same survey, 62% of parents said that children in the 8 to 12-year-old range should receive more supervision than they currently do! It’s hard to imagine how that would even be possible, when 58% of 10-year-olds are not allowed to leave their own yard without an adult guard.

One of the clear effects of such restraints on independent movement is loss of opportunity to socialize and make friends with other kids. The researchers found that, regardless of age, the primary variable affecting children’s time spent with other children, outside of school or other adult-controlled activities, was their degree of freedom to travel away from home on their own.

What has happened to us! If I put a question mark at the end of that sentence rather than an apostrophe, I have a lot to say. I’ve written about the societal changes that have led to such craziness and about the harm this has done to children’s development in previous letters—e.g. Letters #D4, #41, #52, #53, #54, #56, #68, #73, #79. My new book, Restoring Childhood (to be published Sept. 15, 2026), will give a full account of the craziness and harm and how we can reverse this child-harming trend. I’m keeping this letter deliberately short, not repeating causes and effects I’ve described before. But no matter how much I have looked into the causes and effects of such chaining of kids, each new study showing the degree to which we infantilize children and teens shocks me once again.

Are you shocked by such findings? The natural goal of children is to grow up—to become increasingly independent and responsible for themselves with each passing year. We are preventing children from doing what they are biologically, for good evolutionary reasons, designed to do. So, of course, they are suffering. Of course, as kids have become more chained over decades, they have become increasingly anxious, depressed, and suicidal. There should be no mystery about it.

Sadly.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

Several people have suggested that I occasionally post Substack letters announcing upcoming events that I’m involved in that are open to the public and new articles that may be of general interest. Here is the first such letter.

This Wednesday, June 3, 12:00-1:00 pm EST. National Learning Institute Webinar

This free webinar opens with a recording of a talk I presented at a recent NLI convention, entitled The Forces That Have Brought Kids Indoors, and How We Can Get Them Out Again. This will be followed by about half an hour of facilitated Q&A/discussion, live, with me. Here is the link to register for this event.

Summary of the presentation: Over the past 75 years, multiple societal forces have combined to limit children’s free play, independence, and outdoor freedom. What are these forces—and what movements are countering them? If we want children outdoors more, we must give them the freedom to play outside with peers, without adult interference. That is the challenge.

Thursday, June 11, My Presentation at the AERO (Alternative Education Resources Organization) Conference in Manchester, NH.

This in-person conference will run from June 11-13, at St Anselm College, Manchester, NH. My presentation will be from 1:00 to 2:30 June 11. It will be a précis to my new book (to be published in September of this year), entitled Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in an Age of Anxiety. You can find out more about the conference and purchase tickets at the conference website. It would be great to see you there.

Looking Ahead. Outdoor Play the Scottish Way!

I am delighted to announce that I will be joining Rusty Keeler, Cameron Sprague, and the Stramash team on what promises to be an amazing week-long professional learning journey, exploring pioneering outdoor nurseries and play environments in Scotland, March 1-7, 2027. I’m announcing this now because this event is very likely to sell out well in advance of the start date. It will be limited to 20 participants. For more information, and to reserve your spot for this adventure, see the event website here.

New Free Brief Article Published by Big Think, in May 2026 Issue

You may enjoy this whole issue, entitled The Power of Play. My article, which you will find there, is titled What Children Learn When Adults Aren’t Around.

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Please this with others who might be interested in any of these.

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Happy June.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

For the past three years, I have been deeply immersed in the research literature pertaining to changes in children’s and teens’ mental health over the past 75 years and the societal changes that have caused those mental health changes. (This was on top of decades of previous research into conditions that promote children’s healthy psychological development.) If you have been following this Substack since its inception three years ago, you have seen some of the preliminary fruits of that immersion.

Now comes the whole story, refined, integrated, in the form of my new book, to be published by Penguin Random House, Sept. 15 of this year. The full title is Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety. It is heavily research-based, as you would guess if you have been following my work, but fleshed out with stories from my own life experience over the decades described in the book.

I want you, my Substack subscribers and followers, to be among the first to read the book. You will have opportunities, here and elsewhere, to give me your thoughts about it after you have read it. Those of you who have been regular readers of Play Makes Us Human deserve my thanks, as your reading and comments have helped keep me on task and sharpened my thinking.

I could have called the book Destroying Childhood (one possible title I flirted with was Huckleberry Chained) as much of it deals with the ways we have, as a society, restricted children’s natural ways of being, their natural ways of growing up, by preventing them from behaving as Mother Nature (my anthropomorphic term for natural selection) intended. But that title would have been a downer. I am optimistic. We can restore what we have destroyed. In the book, I describe multiple societal changes that have reduced children’s freedom to be children. In one chapter, I describe in some detail eleven of those changes. The longest chapter by far, however, is the last one, in which I set out, in concrete terms, ways that all of us, regardless of our position in society, can help restore childhood.

I’m deliberately keeping this short. I don’t want to give away too much. But you can read more about the questions the book addresses, and find links to preorder the book, on the book page of my personal website. I do hope you will preorder it soon. Preorders help convince retailers that there is demand and prompt them to stock up and promote the book. By preordering, you will be assured to be among the first to receive the book after Sept. 15 and will be doing me and the book’s cause a favor by helping to demonstrate the book’s potential to reach a large, broad set of readers.

Please share this letter with everyone you know who might be interested in Restoring Childhood (the book and the act).

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With respect and best wishes,

Peter

PS: What do you think of the cover? Do you get it? Those kids are going away from us, and we are letting them go. But we’ve made sure they’re wearing helmets!

A few weeks ago, I was walking in the woods near my home, as I often do, and I happened upon a trail I had not been on before. As I was walking, I came across two piles covered with tarps. Next to one was a sign saying, “Let Children Play.” Wow. I lifted the tarps. In the photos here you can see what I found—loose parts for play.

Wow again. This is what I keep telling people. If you want to get kids to like the woods, you must find ways for them to play in the woods, more specifically, play with other kids in the woods, with no or minimal direct adult involvement. Someone had done it. This charming spot had more than piles of human-made loose parts, it also had the playthings that nature provides—trees, boulders, dirt, mud, and sticks. All just an easy couple of miles walk from my home.

I put the tarps back over the loose parts and when I got home I did some Googling and made a phone call and found that the “someone” who set this up is Megan Devendorf. She was as surprised to learn that I live near her play area as I was to discover her play area near me. To make it all legal, she had formed an LLC and contracted with the person who owns the woods. (See her website.) She invited me to visit at any of her “Play Fridays,” and today (the day I am writing this, Friday, May 22) I made that visit.

Because school is still in session, the kids were mostly preschool age, though there was one 8-year-old. There were probably about 12 kids (I didn’t think to count), and parents were sitting on blankets talking with one another, letting the kids play, not even paying much attention when the kids were engaged in what some might think of as “risky” adventures.

I focused most of my attention on kids who were very carefully climbing up the side of a boulder and sliding down a plastic slide that had been set up against it. I was impressed by their natural caution. This was difficult for some of them and a bit scary. They moved carefully, testing each foothold before putting weight on it, especially the first few times. The biggest challenge was climbing up the back of the boulder, and some of the little ones couldn’t do it, though they tried persistently. I was pleased that no adults came over to help them up or to stand guard in case someone fell.

I was even more pleased when the 8-year-old (the one in the green shirt), seeing the little kids struggle, unearthed a little ladder from the loose parts pile and brought it over. No adult prompted him to do it. He saw what the little kids needed and provided it. Now all kids could get to the top and slide. As I keep saying, when kids play in age-mixed groups, everyone benefits.

There should be nothing surprising about this. Kids are amazingly competent in play. It’s just that many adults today have forgotten that or maybe never knew it, and, as a consequence, intervene in kids’ play and prevent them from manifesting their competence. The parents of these lucky kids did not intervene.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

Netflix is airing a 4-part “Lord of the Flies” series based, of course, on William Golding’s classic 1954 novel by that name. It strikes me, therefore, that this would be a good time to re-post an essay about Golding and his famous novel that I posted originally on my Psychology Today blog nearly 6 years ago. Here goes:

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“Well, what about Lord of the Flies?” How often I have heard someone say that after I’ve talked about the value of children’s independent play, away from adults, or about a democratic school where children of a wide range of ages interact without adult supervision. “Lord of the Flies” is the shorthand that people use to express the belief that children are incapable of self-discipline and will eventually run amok and attack one another if not supervised by adults. My first response, when I hear this expression, has always been, “Well, you know, Lord of the Flies is a work of fiction.”

William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, as you probably know, is about a group of British schoolboys who were stranded on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. At first, they cooperated and worked out rational survival strategies, but, over time, the worst instincts of the least disciplined of them took over and they broke into warring factions. By the time a rescue ship arrived, three of the boys were dead and the island was in flames. Golding saw it as a story about human nature, not just children’s nature, but because the characters are children, it is passed along as a lesson about children’s nature, especially boys’ nature.

In the real world, children rarely, if ever, act like the fictitious children of Lord of the Flies. When children become brutal, there are usually adults leading or provoking the brutality. When real children are abandoned and realize their lives are in danger, their survival instincts kick in and lead them to cooperate even more than they normally do. They know, deep in their DNA that cooperation is their only chance of saving themselves.

Think, for example, of the Lost Boys of Sudan—the thousands of orphaned boys who, in groups of various sizes, escaped the genocide in their homeland and trekked, in some cases thousands of miles, toward refugee camps, helping one another along the way. Generally, the older boys were the leaders in any given group, but in some groups, those older boys were as young as 10 to 12 years old.

A true-life example of boys stranded on a deserted island

The Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman, some years ago, unearthed a nearly lost true story of boys who actually were stranded on an uninhabited island, much like the island of Golding’s fantasy, and he wrote about it in his wonderful book Humankind.

The boys were students at a strict Catholic boarding school, in the Polynesian kingdom of Tonga, who, sick of school, decided to “borrow” (without permission) a fishing ship and escape to Fiji, about 500 miles away. But they didn’t know much about sailing, and a storm came up and ruined the ship. After eight days of drifting, they came to an uninhabited Island. The boys were on the island for 15 months, beginning in June of 1965, until they saw and hailed a passing ship and were rescued. Bregman managed to locate the ship captain and one of the boys—who were by then old men and were still close friends to one another—and learned the story.

The boys did quarrel, but they developed ways of resolving their quarrels peacefully. One of them managed to create a fire by rubbing sticks together, and they carefully kept the fire going the whole time they were there. They figured out what they could eat. They created a garden. They kept regular watch to hail any ship that might pass. They made a sort of guitar using driftwood, a coconut shell, and steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat and played it to lift their spirits. One of the boys fell and broke a leg, but the others managed to set it and all of them took care of that boy as he healed. They survived a severe summer drought by taking great care of what water they could find.

When they were finally rescued, the doctor who examined them was amazed at their excellent health and at how well the boy’s broken leg had been set and had healed. The conditions of this real-life story were very much like those of Golding’s fiction, but the outcome was entirely different.

The attraction of schools to Golding’s book

In 2010, Time Magazine included Lord of the Flies in a review of “The Top 10 Books You Were Forced to Read in School.” Yes, it’s right up there with Macbeth and The Scarlet Letter. I think it’s no surprise that this book is so often assigned in school. It’s a morality tale that fits with a fundamental assumption behind compulsory schooling—the assumption that kids just make a mess of things if left to their own devices.

As I noted in a previous post (updated here), schools, as we know them today, have their origin in the schools of the Protestant Reformation, which were premised on the idea that human beings are innately sinful and need discipline to drive the sinfulness out of them. Our secular schools today don’t generally talk about sin, but the premise remains that obedience to authority, not self-initiative, is the route to improvement.

It’s interesting to note that Golding himself was a schoolteacher, up until his earnings from Lord of the Flies allowed him to leave that job for full-time writing (Carey, 2009). I can’t help but suspect that classroom teaching played a role in the development of his book.

Keeping control of the classroom is the number one task of the teacher. Teachers who fail at that will be fired; teachers who succeed at it will be kept on, almost no matter how terrible they are at actually helping kids learn. Teachers have the constant fear that if their authority lapses, the class will erupt in chaos. They may be right about that, but that’s the result of the unnatural, repressive classroom situation, not evil human nature. In Golding’s Lord of the Flies, children released from the classroom with no adult control start killing one another, literally. It’s a teacher’s worst nightmare.

As Golding’s biographer (Carey, 2009) has pointed out, Golding himself had a very dark side, with which he struggled throughout his life. In a memoir that he never published, Golding admitted to attempting to rape a 15-year-old girl when he, at age 18, was home from college. He drank heavily throughout his adult life, sometimes behaved violently when drunk, was often depressed and had a turbulent relationship with his own children and wife. He struggled consciously with these aspects of himself, and his biographers attribute his book about the darkness of human nature in part to that struggle.

Well, that’s fine, but let’s not jump from Golding’s struggle with his inner demons to a conclusion that people in general, or boys in particular, are innately vicious and require authoritarian control to keep them in line. Authoritarian control much more often incites violence than prevents it.

And now, your thoughts

Readers, I’m curious to know about your history with Golding’s novel. If it was required reading in high school, what do you recall was the message reinforced by the teacher or class discussion? Regardless of when you read it (or saw the film), what impact did it have on you? Have your experiences with children generally affirmed or disconfirmed what seems to be Golding’s message? This Substack is, in part, a forum for discussion, and your comments, stories, and questions are valued and treated respectfully by me and other readers, regardless of the degree to which we agree or disagree.

Leave a comment

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

References

Bregman, R. (2020). Humankind. English translation.

Carey, J. (2009). William Golding: The man who wrote Lord of the Flies.

Time Magazine (2010, July 9). “Top 10 books you were forced to read in school.”