By Dixie Lane, Public Discourse. (Photo: Unsplash)
Peter Gray’s controversial new book, Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety, has me convinced: contrary to what we might wish, taking away kids’ smartphones will not solve the mental health decline of our nation’s children.
I am not convinced, however, that smartphones, social media, and the internet at large are not still a big part of the problem. Or to put it another way: smartphones are a poor solution to children’s needs when compared to other sources of childhood independence and free play.
As an evolutionary psychologist, Peter Gray has been studying childhood for a long time, and his research has often focused on topics linked to childhood freedom or autonomy, which is also a major theme in this new book. Gray is interested in autonomy and related concepts (such as self-directed learning) because they relate to psychologists’ definition of play and its role in healthy human development. This concept of play is not the same thing as what we might just call “fun”; it’s more specific than that. True play, Gray tells us, “is (1) chosen and directed by the players themselves; (2) intrinsically motivated; (3) structured by mental rules; and (4) always creative and often highly imaginative.” It is “the practice space for adulthood,” without which children become unhappy and anxious in the short term, and socially and personally underdeveloped in the long term.
Among other things, this interest in play led Gray to join with Lenore Skenazy, Jonathan Haidt, and Daniel Shuchman about ten years ago to found Let Grow, a leading nonprofit that provides resources and encouragement in support of childhood independence and free play, as well as lobbying for reasonable childhood independence legislation. (Full disclosure: I have occasionally written for the Let Grow website.) Gray’s book, however, is making waves in part because it takes the work of his co-founder Jonathan Haidt to task.