What if It’s Not the Phones? - The Atlantic

When the 82-year-old psychologist Peter Gray describes the way he grew up, he punctuates the anecdotes by saying that modern parents would be arrested for letting a child have such fun. When he was 4 years old, he would walk to a store in Minneapolis to buy cigarettes for his grandmother. When he was 11, he would sometimes stay home from school in Hill City, Minnesota, to operate a newspaper printing press owned by his mother and stepfather.<br>His parents were not arrested, and that’s because the childhood they permitted him to have was basically normal at the time, even if his family did have a newspaper printing press in the house. As a boy, Peter was obsessed with fishing and baseball; neighborhood friends taught him how to ride his bike and catch grasshoppers. Although Gray’s career as a scientist would begin with laboratory studies of rat hormones, he eventually found his way to writing about his childhood, in a fashion. Over the course of his 30 years in the psychology department at Boston College, he mixed principles of biology and anthropology to put together an evolutionary theory of play.<br>Gray’s academic work defines play as a self-directed activity done only for its own sake. This, he came to believe, enables kids to figure out how to solve their own problems, nurture their own relationships, make their own rules, and manage their own disappointments. But he says that our society has spent the past 70 years or so interfering with that process. We’ve made it harder and harder for kids to do anything: They’re kept indoors for greater portions of the day and given less unstructured time; they play organized sports supervised by adults; they don’t go anywhere alone. Gray grew certain that this loss of independence has been harmful to their mental health.<br>Gray’s theory, which he laid out in a 2013 book called Free to Learn, quickly found a welcome audience. The book was celebrated by advocates of free-range parenting and won endorsement from academic luminaries such as Steven Pinker. When Gray’s fellow psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his co-author Greg Lukianoff published their 2018 best seller on the threat of safetyism, The Coddling of the American Mind, they used the title of Gray’s popular TEDx talk “The Decline of Play” as a chapter header. Haidt, who is an Atlantic contributor, told me that Gray was “the star academic” in the section of his book that deals with play. “I wish every school in America could hear a talk by Peter Gray,” he said.<br>Only recently has Gray expanded his idea in a way that is not quite so crowd-pleasing. Children’s need for unstructured play and exploration (guided by some safety rules and common sense) applies not just to vacant lots and city parks and backyards in the suburbs, he says, but to other settings too. It now extends to the wild spaces of the internet. “To grow up well, children have to be able to play in the world that they’re growing up in,” he told me when we spoke at his home in late winter. Kids should be free to play without their parents’ supervision, Gray insists, even when they go online.<br>Gray has always been a playful academic. As a graduate student at Rockefeller University during the late 1960s, he once filled every mailbox at the school with a note proclaiming that neckties were no longer required in the dining hall because they stifled thought by cutting off circulation to the brain. But the turning point in his career came a decade later, when his son, Scott, took up the mantle of rebelling at his school. Gray and his now-late wife moved him to a nontraditional school in Framingham, Massachusetts, where children received no formal coursework and directed their own education.<br>Scott thrived in his new environment, and Gray, who saw how much happier and more engaged his son became, pivoted from doing lab experiments on rats to making more philosophical explorations of play and learning. He also studied his son’s new school, publishing survey data on the careers and lives of its alumni, as well as detailed observations of how its students played.<br>Eventually, Gray would have enough of structured academia himself. By 2002, he’d made sufficient money off of a well-regarded psychology textbook that he was able to resign from Boston College and live comfortably in the small town of Millis, Massachusetts. The back of the wood-paneled house that he shares with his second wife is made entirely of glass, providing a broad view of the Charles River. By his account, his retirement has been as idyllic as his childhood. Gray sometimes kayaks against the current, up the river, for exercise.<br>When I visited him on a frigid day in March, he was wearing the uniform of a practical person—simple shoes, navy trousers, light layers topped with a grandpa cardigan. David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist and friend of Gray’s who is a professor emeritus at Binghamton University, described him to me as an old man with a “very...