#68. The Culture of Childhood: We’ve Almost Destroyed It

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#68. The Culture of Childhood: We’ve Almost Destroyed It<br>Children learn the most valuable lessons with other children, away from adults.

Peter Gray<br>Mar 05, 2025

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Roman Children Playing. Marie-Lan Nguyen. CC<br>Dear friends,<br>Part of Mother Nature’s program for children’s development is a strong drive, planted in children’s brains, to spend lots of time with other children, away from adults. Children everywhere are drawn to other children. They pay attention to other children, try to fit in with them, and strive to do what the others do and know what they know. Throughout most of human history, that drive has played a huge role in children’s education. In settings where adults don’t segregate children by age, children are attracted to others over a broad range of ages. In mixed-age groups, younger children acquire skills and advanced ways of thinking through interactions with older ones, and older children practice leadership and nurturing skills through interactions with younger ones (for more on this, see Letters #10 and #11).<br>Play Makes Us Human is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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I first became interested in the developmental value of children’s natural mixed-age interactions when a graduate student of mine and I conducted an observational study at a democratic school where students, from age 4 through late teenage years, are free to interact with one another throughout each school day regardless of age. We saw and documented many benefits of such interactions (Gray & Feldman, 2004). Subsequently, I conducted a survey of anthropologists who had lived in and studied hunter-gatherer societies and found that children in those societies spent most of every day playing and exploring with other children, in mixed-age groups, largely away from adults, and that the adults seemed to understand that this is how children become educated (Gray, 2012).<br>Anthropologists who have studied children in other types of traditional cultures have also written about children’s involvement in mixed-age groups as a primary means of their socialization and education (e.g. Lancy et al, 2010; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989). In a discussion of such research, one child development specialist (Judith Harris) noted that the popular phrase “It takes a village to raise a child” is true if interpreted differently from the usual Western interpretation. In her words: “The reason it takes a village is not because it requires a quorum of adults to nudge erring youngsters back onto the paths of righteousness. It takes a village because in a village there are always enough kids to form a play group” (Harris, 1989, p 161).<br>My own and my friends’ childhoods, in Minnesota and Wisconsin in the 1950s, were in many ways like that of children in traditional societies. We had school (which was not the big deal it is today) and chores, and some of us had part-time jobs, but still, most of our awake time was spent with other children away from adults. My family moved frequently, and in each village or city neighborhood to which we moved I found a somewhat different childhood culture, with different games, different traditions, somewhat different values, different ways of making friends.<br>Whenever we moved, my first big task was to figure out the culture of my new set of peers, so I could become part of it. I was by nature shy, which in one way was an advantage because I didn’t just blunder in and make a fool of myself. I observed, studied, practiced the skills that I saw to be important to my new peers, and then began cautiously to join the play and make friends. In the mid 20th century, researchers described and documented many of the childhood cultures that could be found in neighborhoods in Europe and the United States (Corsaro & Eder, 1990; Opie & Opie, 1969). The culture of childhood, became, for a while, a topic of research pursued by anthropologists and sociologists.<br>Researchers interested in culture began to realize that in any given community there were at least two cultures, the adults’ and the children’s. The two, of course, were never completely independent of one another. They interacted and influenced one another; and as children grow up they gradually left the culture of childhood and entered the culture of adulthood. Children’s cultures can be understood, at least to some degree, as practice cultures, where children try out various ways of being and practice, modify, and build upon the skills and values of the adult culture. Sometimes they emulate the adult culture, sometimes they deliberately flout it, sometimes they mock it. In such behavior they are acting out ideas and reactions they have concerning their elders’ behavior. This is all part of Mother Nature’s way of helping them grow. They don’t just blindly follow the examples they see...