Every year, right around late May, something statistically unusual happens.

Teen mental health improves. Emergency room visits for anxiety disorders, mood disorders, and intentional self-harm drop dramatically from May through July. Psychiatric hospitalizations decline. Kids breathe easier.

Then August hits. School starts. And it all comes roaring back.

Dr. Peter Gray has been watching this pattern for decades. He's a biopsychologist and the author of Free to Learn, published in 2013—a book that became foundational for parents questioning how we educate children. He's spent his career researching how children naturally learn through play, why freedom makes them happier, and what happens when we systematically take that freedom away.

What he's discovered contradicts the story we've been telling ourselves.

Researchers in Canada tracked over 20,000 children and documented the same phenomenon year after year. Mental health admissions plummet when school ends. They spike when it resumes.

Of course, correlation doesn't prove causation. Couldn't it have something to do with the season? Perhaps, but even during COVID lockdowns, the same pattern held. When schools closed in March 2020, mental health improved across the board. It only got worse again when kids returned to in-person classrooms.

When you ask teenagers what's stressing them out, 83% cite one thing.

Not TikTok. Not Instagram.

We've been pointing our worry at screens while ignoring what the data keeps screaming at us.

READ MORE

Why School Gets a Free Pass

"As a culture,” Gray tells me, “we would far rather blame social media than blame school.”

He refers to an undeserved “halo” around school that blinds us to what’s happening. We see our kids glued to phones and assume that's the problem. We don't see what happens when school closes for the summer and they suddenly seem lighter. We don't connect the dots, but they’ve been getting more visible for almost 70 years.

The rise in anxiety and depression among young people didn't start in 2010. It didn't start with smartphones or social media. It's been happening since the 1950s.

By 1990, rates of anxiety and depression among young people were 5 to 8 times higher than they were in 1950. That's 40 years of gradual, continuous decline in youth mental health—decades before Instagram existed.

Between 1990 and 2000, those rates actually got better. Kids' mental health improved significantly. Then it leveled off from 2000 to 2010, only to spike again after 2010.

If social media caused the crisis, why did mental health improve during the decade when the internet arrived? And why did things get worse starting in 2010? Peter suggests a different narrative.

The Decline of Freedom

Between 1950 and 1990, childhood transformed. The school year increased by five weeks. Homework, which was rare in the 1950s, became standard. Organized sports replaced free play. Television brought kids indoors. Families got smaller, but houses got bigger, so children had no need to leave them.

Every single change eliminated children's freedom. They had no space to play, explore, fail, or figure things out on their own. And mental health declined in lockstep.

The next act in the story comes with the advent of the personal computer.

By the early 1990s, most teenagers had access to computers. By the mid-to-late 90s, they had internet connections. Peter frames this as a new outlet for kids to escape adult micromanagement. They could play games, explore, and interact with peers without constant supervision.

"Computer games are real play, people," Peter said, challenging the panic many parents feel about screen time. "Adults want to demonize them, but that's not the science."

What is the science around video games? The kids who played computer games in the 1990s were doing better psychologically than kids who didn't.

For a decade, kids had breathing room again. And mental health improved.

Fast forward to 2010. Mental health starts declining again right around the time that smartphones became ubiquitous and social media exploded.

And suddenly, we had ourselves a convenient new scapegoat.

Except, Peter says, the data doesn't support it.

School Is the Variable

Hundreds of studies have examined the correlation between social media, smartphone use, and mental health decline among young people. Meta-analyses show small to moderate correlations at best—some show slight positive effects, some show slight negative effects. Overall, they largely cancel out.

Furthermore, the United States and the UK are the only two developed countries that experienced this recent mental health spike. Europe adopted smartphones and social media just as quickly but mental health among Kids in France, Germany, and Spain actually improved during the same period when it worsened in the US. While the US implemented Common Core—limiting teacher flexibility, increasing standardized testing, and ramping up academic pressure—European educational systems maintained more balanced approaches. In short, it wasn't the phones. It was what was happening inside schools.

None of Peter’s work is intended as an attack on teachers or administrators. His critique is structural.

"We have convinced children that how they're doing in school is a measure of them," Peter explained. "That they are constantly being judged. They're constantly being assessed. They're being compared to others. They're being made to feel like, if I am a failure at school, I'm a failure as a human being."

That constant assessment creates a baseline of anxiety that never fully lifts. Until summer, when it does for 10 glorious weeks of freedom.

Self-Directed Education

The purpose of childhood, according to Peter's research in evolutionary biology, is straightforward: to become independent adults. Children are born totally dependent. The extended childhood period exists for them to gradually develop the capacity to take care of themselves. They need time to do things alone. They need to interact with other children away from adults, learning to get along with peers without supervision. They need to solve their own problems and live with the consequences.

But ever since the 1950s, we've been systematically eliminating those opportunities. Children are monitored and directed by adults constantly. We've scheduled every hour, optimized every activity, turned childhood into a resume-building exercise instead of a crucible for developing capability.

It’s no surprise that kids in more open, self-directed education environments—where they follow their own interests and solve their own problems—show better outcomes than kids in traditional school. They're happier, more capable, more resilient.

"If instead of dropping out of school, students transition to self-directed education—where they follow their own interests with support—they do far better," Peter said.

This is exactly what open education is all about. We believe in providing kids with enough structure to still give them the freedom to explore their curiosities and develop into their own unique human beings. It's about creating environments where children can discover who they are while building the skills they need to thrive.

Peter offered concrete starting points:

Make Children Responsible for Their Own Activities

• Stop being your child's calendar keeper. Tell them directly: "I'm not your calendar keeper. That's your job. If you need a ride and can't get there yourself, I'll provide it—but you have to remind me."
• Use this as a test of genuine interest. If you have to constantly remind them about an activity, they're probably not genuinely interested in it. Children who truly care about something will remember it themselves.
• Let activities drop if they forget. This approach helps identify which extracurricular activities children actually want versus which ones they feel pressured to attend. Many kids are in far more scheduled activities than they should be and don't have time to do things themselves.

Encourage Independent Mobility

• Children should walk or bike when possible. Even kindergarteners used to walk to school. This builds both independence and physical health. Now even teenagers don't walk anywhere.
• Use public transportation. If a destination is too far to walk or bike, children should learn to take public transportation rather than always relying on parents for rides.
• Start early with outdoor independence. In the 1950s, even four-year-olds were sent on errands. By age 8, children should be walking to school. By age 10, they should be able to do some shopping independently.
• Recognize the environmental and developmental costs of driving everywhere. Parents driving kids everywhere wastes time, pollutes the atmosphere, and deprives children of fresh air and exercise—all while preventing them from developing the independent mobility they need.

In short, give children back unstructured time. They need it more than they need another activity.

The pattern is too consistent to ignore. The data is too clear. School isn't just correlated with anxiety—it's causing it. Mental health improves when school is out. It declines when school is in. Social media use stays constant. School is the variable.

We've been looking in the wrong direction. The answer isn't taking away phones. It's giving back freedom—the very thing childhood is supposed to provide.

About Dr. Peter Gray

Dr. Peter Gray is a biopsychologist and author of Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life (Free Press, 2013). He has dedicated his career to researching how children naturally learn and develop through play and self-directed exploration. His work challenges conventional educational wisdom and has become foundational for parents and educators rethinking how we raise and teach kids.

Connect with Peter:

• Website: petergray.org
• Substack: petergray.substack.com

Transcript

00:00 - Introduction to Peter Gray

Ela Richmond: Welcome back to the OpenEd Podcast. I'm your sometimes host Ela, and today my guest needs absolutely no introduction. Peter Gray is here. He's the author of Free to Learn, published in 2013. He's a biological psychologist who goes into the background of education, how children learn, why play makes children happier, and the types of play that are really important for children. Today we're getting into a fascinating conversation. Welcome to the podcast, Peter.

Peter Gray: Happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Ela Richmond: When I first started reading your book, I was fascinated that you wrote it a long time ago. We're starting to see the effects of things you were writing about—anxiety, depression, all these things are the result of children not having the right type of education, not having the right relationship with freedom. Can you speak to the fact that you were writing all of these things more than 10 years ago? What did you see back then, and now with the perspective of having written the book and been in education for a long time, what is your perspective? Is it fascinating to see all the things you predicted coming to fruition in such a drastic way?

Peter Gray: A lot of people have the mistaken belief that this rise in anxiety, depression, even suicide among young people is new. It's not new. It has been going on since the 1950s. Ever since about 1950, there has been a continuous rise in anxiety, depression, suicide among young people.

03:30 - The Anxiety Crisis Started in 1950 (Not 2010)

Peter Gray: By 1990—well before I wrote my book—the rates of anxiety and depression were somewhere between five and eight fold higher than in 1950, based on questionnaires assessing anxiety and depression given to normative groups over those decades. If you use the scores to make a judgment of what would likely be diagnosed as major depressive disorder or a clinically significant anxiety disorder, those rates increased by five to eight fold between 1950 and 1990. The rate of suicide among teenagers increased fourfold over that 40-year period.

Interestingly, those rates went down a little bit. Starting at 1990, they went down between 1990 and 2000, and they didn't go all the way back to 1950s levels, but they went about a third of the way back—a significant decline. Almost nobody pays any attention to that. We all notice when bad things happen, but we tend to ignore when something good happens.

Those rates got better for a period of time. They stayed level at this somewhat reduced rate between 2000 and 2010. Then around 2010, they started to go up again. That most recent increase is what people talk about as the evidence, but people aren't aware those rates today are not any higher than they were in 1990.

Ela Richmond: Interesting.

Peter Gray: We had a decline, and then we've had a rise up again. I was primarily focusing in Free to Learn on what had happened in the second half of the 20th century. I have to admit that even though I was somewhat aware that things had at least leveled off when I wrote Free to Learn, I did not talk about it and nor did anybody else. It seemed like maybe this is a blip and we should just ignore it. I don't know exactly how to explain it. Other people aren't writing about it, so I kind of ignored it too. But I've realized more recently that I can't ignore it. It's too big a change. It's a real significant change and it occurs in every measure of psychopathology.

I've now written about it. In my new book, I talk about this whole curve. Why did things get worse between 1950 and 1990? Why did they get better between 1990 and 2000? And then why did they start getting worse again around 2010?

Ela Richmond: So fascinating. Are you willing to give us a little sneak peek into that?

Peter Gray: Sure. Between 1950 and 1990, I summarized something like 11 or 12 different social changes that occurred over that period, all of which had the effect of reducing children's outdoor freedom. Schooling increased greatly. The amount of time kids were spending in school increased. For example, the school year—the amount of weeks of school—increased by five weeks between 1950 and about 1990. School recesses were already being cut down by 1990 from what they had been earlier.

Homework in the 1950s and 1960s—kids were not given homework. Maybe in the beginning of the 1960s to some degree they were, but in elementary school, there was no homework in the 1950s. Once in a while, a teacher might ask children to write a poem or a story at home, something fun. But kids did not walk back and forth between school and home carrying workbooks and homework, and parents weren't involved in homework. When kids were out of school, at least for elementary school kids, they were free.

In secondary schools, people had study hours. For the most part, you could do your assignments during study hour. There was some homework in high school, no question. But not nearly as much. And school wasn't nearly as big a deal.

The other thing that changed over this period—one of them was simply television. That came into being, and most families got televisions in the 1950s. By the 1960s, almost all families with kids had television. Television brought kids indoors. Instead of staying outdoors after school to play until dinner time, kids came home to watch the Mickey Mouse Club on television.

Sports changed. When I was a kid in the 1950s, sports meant you would go out to the vacant lot or the street, depending on where you lived, or maybe a playground if there was a playground in your neighborhood. There'd be a bunch of other kids that would show up and you'd create your game. This was real play. This was kids creating their own play.

Beginning in—although Little League officially started in 1938 for baseball—it didn't really become a big thing until the 1960s. Then there were adult-run leagues for all sorts of other sports: hockey, football, soccer, basketball. Parents seemed to believe that this may be better for their kids than just going out and playing on their own. Kids liked it too. Many of the kids did. But that meant that instead of just going out and making up their own game, which is real play, which is creative, which teaches you how to solve problems and take control of your own life, you are in something that's basically like school.

Ela Richmond: Mm-hmm.

Peter Gray: It's run by adults and the kids are basically pawns in it. They're being told what to do, their problems are being solved. They don't have to learn how to get along with one another because there's a coach taking care of all that for them. They don't have to figure out how to make up rules because there's an umpire who's got the rules there. We replaced free play increasingly with adult-directed activities over this period.

Families got smaller over this period. As families got smaller and there were fewer kids outdoors to play, that also reduced the incentive to go out and play. As families had fewer kids and as houses got bigger—houses gradually became bigger—there was less incentive for parents to kick their kids out of the house. As we reached the point where many kids had their own bedroom, they could get away from the ruckus of the house by just going into their bedroom. They didn't have to go outside to get away from it.

All of those kinds of changes occurred, reducing the opportunities for children to really be children, which is to play and explore and solve their own problems, get into trouble, figure out how to get out of trouble. All the things that children need to do to grow up. Those opportunities were reduced.

Ela Richmond: This makes sense.

12:15 - How School Changed: The Great Freedom Decline

Peter Gray: So then the question is, what happened beginning in 1990 that made things better? I've looked at every possibility, and there's only one answer that makes sense to me, and that is the development of the computer.

By the early 1990s, the majority of families that had teenagers had a computer. By the mid-1990s, not only did they have a computer, but they had an internet connection. We had pretty much taken away, by 1990, children's freedom to spend lots of time playing and exploring outdoors, hanging out with one another outdoors away from adults. Away from adults is a key part of this, because kids really need to get away from adults to be free to be kids.

We had pretty much taken that away by 1990. Now kids had a new way they could do it—on the computers. They could play computer games. And computer games are real play. Adults want to demonize them, but the truth is this is real play. Kids enjoyed them. They're creative, they're interactive. Once you had an internet connection and they were multiplayer games, they were interactive.

I went back and reviewed the research from those times, and the research is unequivocal: those kids who were on computers and playing computer games, even if you control for background factors like socioeconomic category, were doing better psychologically than those who weren't on computer games. This is true for every age group. It's true for young kids as well as for teenagers.

The computer was kind of a saving grace. The other thing to keep in mind is for households—for people who are as old as I am, who are old enough that you had a teenage kid in the house at that time—the teenagers were the ones who figured out how to use this stuff.

Ela Richmond: Mm-hmm.

Peter Gray: They became the computer experts. They gained a new kind of level of respect and competence. You could walk into department stores in the 1990s, into the computer section of department stores, and who would be selling the computers, explaining them to middle-aged adults? It would often be a teenager.

Teenagers glommed onto this. It was in some sense the Wild West to explore. There were all kinds of new possibilities. This was exciting for teenagers especially, but younger kids too as they got into it. Now they had a way of playing, exploring, interacting with one another—the early forms of what we now call social media, chat groups and so forth. This became a way that kids could hang out with their friends. They could spend the time that they need with their friends, which they were not allowed to do outdoors or away from adults at that time.

There was a study done by a woman named Danah Boyd around the time in the very early 21st century, in the very early stages of computer use and the very beginning of what we now call social media. She crossed the country interviewing teenagers—several hundred teenagers—about why they're on social media so much. The answer she got over and over and over again is: this is the only way we can get together without adults in our face.

She documented that this was kind of a saving grace at a time when many of them said, "We'd love to be able to get together in person, but there's various reasons why we can't." One is that even if I am allowed out by my parents, my friends aren't all allowed out by their parents. Secondly, it's becoming harder and harder for us to find a place to be where we're tolerated, where teenagers are accepted as a group.

We became a society kind of afraid of teenagers. We didn't like teenagers to gather together on street corners or in diners or even in shopping malls as time went on. Those things had happened, but now teenagers have this new way online of getting together.

I think that accounted for why things got better between 1990 and 2000 and they remained kind of better. This doesn't completely replace the value of getting together in person and outdoors. It's not as good as that, but it is better than not being able to get together at all and better than not being able to play at all—much better.

That accounts for that change.

22:45 - Why Kids Got Better in the 1990s

Peter Gray: And what accounted for things getting worse beginning around 2010? Now the story that a lot of people want to believe, which I do not believe, is that what accounted for getting worse is social media—that the iPhone became increasingly popular, kids had smartphones, they were on smartphones a lot. It's very tempting for adults to look at kids on smartphones and say, "They're addicted to it," or "This is why they're not getting together in person—because they're spending all their time on smartphones," or "They're involved in social comparison. They see how beautiful their friends have made themselves look and by comparison they feel bad."

This whole story that has been around for a while is not supported by science. The scientific research does not support this story. There have been literally hundreds of studies looking at correlation between smartphone use, social media use, and mental health among young people, which all in all show no meaningful correlation. Some studies show a little bit of a positive effect of social media use and smartphone use on mental wellbeing. Some show a little bit of a negative effect. If you combine them all, they tend to cancel one another out.

There have been multiple reviews and meta-analyses showing that if you bring all the studies together, you get basically a null effect. Clearly there are some beneficial effects of all of this and some potentially harmful effects, but they kind of cancel one another out. There's no interesting overall evidence at all that social media is the cause of the rise in anxiety and depression.

One of the lines of evidence against it is that the United States is not the only country in the world where kids glommed onto smartphones and social media. This occurred in the United States, and it occurred in two or three other countries—well documented in two or three other countries—but it did not occur in most countries.

Ela Richmond: Interesting.

Peter Gray: In all of the European Union, it did not occur. It occurred in the UK, which is actually not part of the European Union, and I have an explanation for why it occurred there, but it did not occur in the EU. Over the same period of time, between 2010 and about 2018 or 2019 when this all began to level off in the United States, over that period of time when there was this fairly steep rise in anxiety, depression, suicide among young people in the United States, there was actually a decline—a small decline—of all of this in the European Union, even though kids were onto smartphones and social media every bit as much there as they are here.

I don't buy that argument.

Ela Richmond: Interesting.

Peter Gray: I don't buy that argument, nor does anybody else who actually does research in this area. I don't do research in this area, but I'm good at reading research and I've reviewed the studies that have been done. I talked to Jonathan Haidt before he published his book, and I said, "This does not fit with the actual science."

Ela Richmond: What did he say to that?

33:00 - The Social Media Myth Debunked

Peter Gray: He ignored me. Instead of—the people who really do the research are actually somewhat angry about this book because he ignored them. He acted as if there had been no research done, and the only research was done by his graduate student who he hired to collect studies that support his thesis. It's a very cherry-picked set of studies. There have actually been dozens of meta-analyses by people who do this research, and you won't find references to any of that in his book.

People who aren't sophisticated about this read the book and they think, "Here's this scientist, a well-known scientist, a public intellectual who is telling us that the science tells us that this is destroying our children's mental wellbeing." We have movements to take smartphones away from kids because of this.

There's a long history of this, which I've written about on one of my Substack posts, and there are actually books on this—a long history of what are called moral panics about children's choices of media.

Way back in the Victorian era, the moral panic was about what in the UK were called Penny Dreadfuls—cheap novels, thrilling novels about murders and all this kind of stuff that were available cheap enough you could buy them presumably for a penny in England. They were called dime novels in the United States because you could buy them for a dime here. Kids were glomming onto this. They were even learning how to read by reading these things. Adults felt this was terrible, that this was leading to the moral corruption of the young because they were reading about all this stuff.

We went through that era. Later on it was movies. When motion pictures became available, there were serious panics about the corruption of the youth watching these movies that had romance and murders and so on in them, and depicted a glamorous life. This was during the depression period in the United States, so of course people wanted to dream about a more glamorous life, teenagers included. There were books written about how terrible this was for kids.

Then it was comic books a little bit later on. Then it became computer games. We're pretty much over that now. Then it became social media.

This is a long chain. Whenever the kids glom onto something new, we think this is going to be the destruction of this next generation of people. The adults sort of get on a bandwagon to try to ban it, to take it away from kids. But then by the time those kids who are doing this become adults, it becomes an accepted part of everybody's understanding, and the panic is over.

Ela Richmond: Interesting.

43:15 - Parenting Became a Job (Here's How to Stop)

Ela Richmond: I want to dive into this idea of what's actually important. You've mentioned media and the fact that right now there's this craze and scare about social media being harmful for kids. But your book talks a lot about the things that are necessary to make our children happier, more self-reliant, and better students for life.

I think you have a very interesting perspective as well, because as a biological psychologist, you're very focused on evolution—the purpose of evolution is building humans that can learn and adapt and grow and continue forward and progress. Something interesting about the industrialized school system is that it is not helping kids progress or build those skills to progress or adapt or grow or make decisions for themselves. It's much more creating children that can operate inside of an existing model.

You've pointed a lot to the fact that that is something that creates anxiety and depression. Maybe we have it slightly wrong—we're pointing the finger at social media, we used to point the finger at movies, we used to point the finger at certain books. Maybe that's not the culprit.

I'm curious from your perspective, like what is the most important thing? If a parent has decided, "I really care about my child flourishing as an adult." You also have talked about the fact that as parents, we've gotten into this mindset of resume building for children—we need to make sure they have the best opportunities and that they're extremely accomplished by the time they go off to college. What is the most important first building block for parents?

Peter Gray: The purpose of childhood—the purpose for all mammals really, of the juvenile period—is to become increasingly independent. Mammals, and this is especially true for human beings, are born dependent on their parents. They can't just run off and be themselves. They're absolutely dependent on their parents from the beginning, totally dependent. But the purpose of the extended childhood is to become increasingly independent.

Children need time to do things by themselves, to interact with other children away from adults so they learn how to get along with peers without an adult governing them. They need to be able to do more and more things on their own without an adult monitoring them, guiding them, telling them what to do.

Over time, in modern times—really ever since the 1950s—we have been increasingly taking those freedoms away from children. Children are more or less being monitored and directed and controlled by adults all the time.

Ela Richmond: Mm-hmm.

Peter Gray: I just described a way that children escaped that for a period of time on computers. Children are always looking for a way to escape that. But what has happened over time—here's how school figures in. School figures into the increased anxiety and depression and suicide in two ways.

One way is it takes so much of children's time that they don't have time to just daydream, figure out what they want to do, hang out with other kids, play, explore, discover who they are. They're spending so much time doing what adults are telling them to do, not just in school but also in adult-directed sports and other kinds of things that are adult-directed. They're spending so much time doing what adults are telling them to do that they don't have time to just figure out what they honestly really like to do. You need lots of time to play and explore and discover what you like to do, to discover who you are, to learn how to solve your own problems.

Part of it is school. As we devote more and more time to school, we're taking more and more time away from children's opportunity to be children.

But the other thing that happens with school is it has become over time ever more an immediate source of distress to children.

Ela Richmond: Mm-hmm.

52:30 - School: The Direct Cause of Teen Anxiety

Peter Gray: We have convinced children that how they're doing at school is a measure of them. That they are constantly being judged. They're constantly being assessed. They're being compared to others. They're being made to feel like if I am a failure at school, I'm a failure as a human being.

Ela Richmond: Mm-hmm.

Peter Gray: It's no surprise that every year—this has been true for a long time—every year, the rate of suicide and the rate of admission into mental hospitals, emergency admissions for pediatric mental health emergencies, plummets. It goes way down every summer. School closes and the kids are doing better. School opens up and it gets worse again.

It even plummeted during the COVID lockdown. Suicides, anxiety, depression, mental health admissions all went down. They didn't go back up again even when schools opened online. They didn't go back up again until school opened up in person.

School is a direct cause of anxiety and depression.

I said before that there are some countries that, like the United States, also showed an increase in anxiety, depression, and suicide. One of them being the UK. They are countries which, like the United States, underwent a major so-called reform in education. In our country, it was Common Core, which initiated a so-called common curriculum that limited what teachers could do in the classroom by way of accommodating to children's real needs. There's no question that school became far more anxiety-provoking as a result of Common Core than it had been before. It was already anxiety-provoking, but it became more anxiety-provoking after Common Core.

I'm convinced that it's the initiation of Common Core that led to that spike of anxiety, depression, suicide that began around 2010. That's when Common Core began. It was in full effect in most states, either Common Core or similar thing, by 2013. Over that period of time, school became more stressful.

Every study in which you ask children and teenagers what's stressing them out—far and away the leading answer they give is school. Far away. The things that we like to think are stressing them out are way down the list.

Ela Richmond: Like social pressures and social media. That's cool.

Peter Gray: That's stressing them out. And that's true across social class. It's true for rich kids. It's true for poor kids. This is what they say is the cause of their anxiety and depression.

For example, in 2013, the American Psychological Association did a survey. They do a survey periodically called Stress in America. Usually they only include adults, but in 2013 they included teenagers. Teenagers came out as the most stressed-out people in America in that study.

Ela Richmond: Wow.

Peter Gray: And when there was a checklist of what you could check that indicated what is the main source of your stress, 83% checked school. Nothing else came close. Nothing else came close to that.

We as a culture would far rather blame social media than blame school. School has a halo around it.

Ela Richmond: Why is that?

Peter Gray: That's a really good question. I think there are a number of reasons. One is that historically we have had school now for several generations. All of us went to school—almost all of us went to school. Our parents went to school. Probably our grandparents went to school. It has been part of the cultural myth all along that school is essential for growing up.

We also know that historically and even today, people who drop out of school—we call them dropouts—don't do well in the world. They're more likely to become homeless. They're more likely to be involved in crime. We tend to look at that and say, "School must be saving people."

There's a certain sense in which that's true. You can't just put people out on the street and expect that they're going to be fine. That's the typical dropout.

But what I've shown in my research is if instead of dropping out, you are sort of dropping up—you are leaving school for something different from school, but still is something that you see as positive, which is self-directed education, whether it's in a school for self-directed education where children can follow their own interests and be supportive for following their own interests, or homeschooling by a method in which children are in charge of their own curriculum—we see that children do far better in those situations. But that's relatively new and most people have not come to understand it yet or encountered it. More and more people are, however. It's beginning to happen.

Ela Richmond: I find it interesting—the phrase you used, "cultural myth," because I actually think that that is a huge concept. There's this tendency to believe that it was always that way because for a couple generations it's been that way. We have a really hard time questioning the way that school is and the way that we've done it and the way that we structure it because it just seems so obvious. Why would that be the thing that's wrong?

59:45 - Self-Directed Education Works (Here's Why)

Ela Richmond: I'm curious your thought on—I know that there's a difference between putting kids into a ton of experiences like a piano class, a math class, a science class, and even in sort of like a self-directed education. There are ways that people are building self-directed education, quote unquote, but they're still—instead of allowing their kid to play on the piano as free play—they're putting them into a class and that's how they're packing their schedule. What's the difference there, and how as a parent do you determine what should be, if anything, structured versus what should be free play as a thing that the kid leads?

Peter Gray: Let me just say one more thing I wanted to say about school. One of the things that has happened—the changes in school, certainly from the 1950s until now, have been gradual over time. We've gradually added more days to school. We've gradually added more homework. We've gradually increased the tests. We've gradually taken away recess, reduced recess. All these changes are gradual. So parents don't see them as big changes. It's not what my kids are doing, they would say. It's not all that much different from what I did. This is what society is.

If you had back in the 1950s, if somebody had proposed, "We're going to change schools so instead of having two hours outdoors every day—an hour of recess, a half hour or an hour of lunch period to play outdoors, half an hour of recess in the middle of the morning, half in the afternoon—we're going to only have 15 minutes of recess," nobody would have allowed that. You can't do that to kids, people would say.

If suddenly people said back then, when kindergartens were kind of optional if they existed at all, if you said, "We're going to give homework to kindergarten kids," people would have said, "That's crazy. These are just little children. The purpose of kindergarten is to learn how to get along with other children, to hear stories, to play games. It's not to be—we shouldn't be sitting them down with worksheets at five years old."

Then if somebody said, "What about four-year-olds in preschool?" as we're doing now, people would have just thought you're crazy.

We have made these changes gradually over time and people have accepted it as normal because it's been so gradual that if somebody had proposed those changes suddenly, there would have been a rebellion about it.

Ela Richmond: That is so funny and true.

Peter Gray: So a lot of the problem is exactly that. I think part of the problem right now is that so many parents are obsessed not only about their child going to college, but the idea that their child should go to a fancy college, to an elite college. I don't know why parents want to pay the most they can possibly pay for college. Why don't they just want them to go to the local community college or the state college? It's just as good, but anyway—

Partly because of that, partly because of this belief that it's sort of almost parents' job to get their kids into an elite college. The belief is that to get into that elite college, you not only have to have perfect grades in school, get into all the honors classes, do all these extracurricular activities and excel in them, but you also have to be well-rounded. You should be taking music lessons. You should be doing whatever it is, studying whatever it is.

Kids get assigned into so many different things that aside from homework, they're spending time on all these other adult-directed activities. Of course, kids to some degree buy into this. Kids are not impervious to the cultural beliefs. They begin to believe that if I'm going to succeed in life, I've got to do all these things.

It's also the case that in terms of adult-directed sports, it's almost true that if you want to have friends in the physical world that you're going to see every day, where are you going to find them? You almost have to find them by being part of an adult-directed activity because you're not going to just go out to the vacant lot or the shopping mall and find them as you once did.

Kids who want to be part of other kids and have friends with other kids, sometimes almost the only way they can do it is to join a sports team or to join some other kind of adult-directed activity where at least you could sort of play between the cracks. You can be sitting on the bench and playing with your friends on the bench while you're waiting to get into the game.

Kids get attracted to it to some degree, but to a large degree they feel pressured to be part of it. They feel like just like they feel that it's important that they do well in school, they begin to feel it's important that they be in these extracurricular activities. Adults are encouraging them to do it and either subtly or even unsubtly pressuring them to do it.

The result is that kids are in far more scheduled adult activities than they should be in, and they don't have time to do things themselves.

What I tell parents when I talk to parents is that it would be a good idea to talk with your kids about, "You're in all these activities and I see that you're really busy all the time and you don't have a lot of time to do things that you yourself might like to do. Are there some of these things that you feel you could give up?"

If adults took that approach, I think there's a chance that most kids would say, "Oh yeah, I'm really not into competitive swimming. I could give that one up," or "Those music lessons—I know you would really like me to learn the piano, but I'm not at all that into it, to tell you the truth."

I think if you could have an honest discussion with your child, you might find that your child really isn't so interested as you might think they are, or even as they might pretend they are, if you could have an honest discussion about it.

The other thing I suggest is one way to tell what your child really cares about and doesn't care about is to make them responsible for remembering when they have to go to this event.

Ela Richmond: Mm-hmm.

Peter Gray: If you have to remind them, then chances are they're not really that interested. If they're really interested, they'll remember. So one way to do it is to say to your kids, "I'm not going to take responsibility to be your calendar and your reminder. That's not my job. That's your job. If it's true that I have to drive you there because there's no way you can get there by yourself, I'm willing to do that, but you've got to remind me when it is rather than the other way around."

That's one way to see how interested they actually are in it. Because if they really are interested, they'll put it on their calendar. They'll remember it. They'll remind you as the parent that this is coming up and would you please take them to it if they can't get there on their own.

Ela Richmond: Mm-hmm.

Peter Gray: The other thing I think parents should be doing is encouraging their children to get on their own in any way that they can, whether by public transportation, walking, bicycling. This is part of growing up—being able to have independent mobility outdoors. That's something that has largely been lost in our culture. Kids always, even kindergarten kids, used to walk to school. Nowadays even teenagers are not walking to school. They ought to be walking to school or bicycling to school if it's too far to walk, or taking public transportation if there's not a school bus and it's that far away.

The idea that parents have to drive their kids to school—I see schools around here and all these cars are lined up, spewing fumes into the atmosphere. They're wasting a huge amount of time. They're polluting the atmosphere. Meanwhile, the kids could be getting fresh air and exercise just walking home. Most of them live close enough to walk home by any reasonable stretch. Certainly bicycle home. We're not doing anybody a favor by driving them everywhere.

These are some of the things that I think parents could be doing much more of to give their children more opportunity to be outdoors and do things on their own.

67:20 - Practical Advice for Giving Kids Back Freedom

Ela Richmond: This is so fascinating. What do you believe the role of a parent is? And then how does that evolve as they get older? Because I know that in the work that you've done, you've showcased a lot of different cultures and how different cultures give responsibility to younger and younger children. They do actually see that younger children are capable, they are independent, they can make choices. What do you see, especially in our modern society, what is the role of a parent and how does that evolve? Because it's a lot easier to ask your kid what do you want to be involved in when they're 10 as opposed to when they're three.

Peter Gray: That's right. First of all, I would say that the role of parents in children's lives should decline with every year that the child grows older. There's no question about what an infant needs—a lot of attention and a lot of parental involvement. There's no question about that.

By the time a child is four, the child is capable of a lot more independence already. By the time of two, the child wants to do more things by themselves and can do more things by themselves, but they still need to be watched—two-year-olds and three-year-olds. I would not send them out to run errands by themselves. But four-year-olds can do it.

I did it at four. When I was four years old, I lived with my mother and grandmother. My mother was a single parent, single mom at that time, and my grandmother and my mom worked full time. My grandmother was somewhat crippled. At four years old, she would send me—we lived on a busy street in Minneapolis, Minnesota—she would send me two blocks away to buy, of all things, cigarettes for her. This was a long time ago. Four-year-olds at that time, at least I—and I'm not sure that all four-year-olds, but certainly by five, kids were out there doing things like that. They could run errands for their parents, they could do things.

In hunter-gatherer cultures, I did studies a few years ago—not directly, unfortunately, living in a hunter-gatherer culture; I didn't have the opportunity to do that, but by surveying anthropologists who had—the general belief among hunter-gatherer adults is that four years old is sort of a turning point when children have common sense. When children don't need to be watched all the time, they can run off with the other kids, they can do things. They're not going to do stupid things any more than any of us do. We all do stupid things, but they're capable of understanding rules. They're capable of thinking about things. They're not going to run off and get lost in the woods. They're going to have enough sense not to do that by about four years old.

It's interesting to me also in this regard that I've been very long involved with a radically alternative school called the Sudbury Valley School, where children are not watched. They're free to roam around the campus and in the woods as part of the campus without adults following them. The youngest children they will accept is four because they don't believe three-year-olds generally are capable of managing themselves, but four-year-olds are.

Even four-year-olds have to have a visiting week to show that they're capable of managing themselves at the school. In fact, every new student has to have a visiting week because there are teenagers who aren't capable of managing themselves too, or are going to do things that violate the school rules or even state laws on campus, and they can't tolerate that. But the point I'm really making is there's a shift at four years old.

There's even laboratory research showing that children by four years old have generally internalized language well enough that they're capable of thinking verbally, which means they can remember rules. They can remember, "Mom said don't touch that hot stove," or "Look both ways before I cross the street." They're capable of remembering and following rules and guiding themselves that way.

The point I'm making is increasingly, over time, children should have more and more independence, more and more opportunity to do things on their own. In this world today, I'm not going to tell parents to send your four-year-old out to buy cigarettes or anything else because no parent is going to do it and somebody might even call 911—very likely would call 911—if they saw a four-year-old walking down the street with no adult with them. We are in a different world.

But I would tell them, your eight-year-old ought to be walking to school. Your 10-year-old certainly should be able to do some shopping for you. And it will be good for them to do that. They will feel proud about doing it. It will be a grown-up sort of thing to do. They will be happier, they will have a greater sense, a less fear of becoming an adult because as they're growing up, they're doing more and more adult-like things.

Ela Richmond: Yeah. Something that you've mentioned before—

Peter Gray: I think what's happened with parents—it's traditionally, of course, the role of parents is to feed the child, to house the child, to love the child, which should come pretty naturally, comfort the child when the child needs comforting. We have taken on, parents have taken on the additional job of managing the child.

Ela Richmond: Interesting.

Peter Gray: And that is not—that should not be part of the parent's job. The children should be managing themselves. Parents should be helping the children when the children need help in managing themselves. But parents have taken on the task of manager where they're sort of telling the child what they need to do and enabling the child to do the things that the parent has decided they should be doing. They become the child's manager.

That's not a good parent-child relationship. It often puts the parent and the child at odds with one another. I think that the way parents should think about children is—at least once they're beyond the age of four, and this might sound like a little bit of an exaggeration—begin to think about your child the same way you might think about your spouse.

Your job with your spouse is to be in relationship with that person, to help that person when they need help, to care about that person, to love that person, to understand that person and help that person meet the needs that they want to meet, to be a partner with that person in that way. If parents could think of their children more in those terms—this is a relationship. This is not a job. It's sort of a job when it's an infant. There's almost no way around it. Changing diapers is a job. But once the child is beyond a certain age, instead of thinking of it as job, instead of thinking of parenting as a job, think of being a parent as a relationship, as a child-adult relationship.

How do you make that relationship a really good, loving and caring relationship? A two-way relationship. Respecting the child, respecting the child's needs for privacy, just like you would respect your spouse's needs for privacy. Your spouse would object if every time they came home from work, you wanted a detailed report about what happened at work. Your spouse would rebel if you tracked them digitally as they went out. This would be an invasion of privacy. You would not want that from your spouse. Your spouse would not want that from you. You need to be respectful and trusting of one another.

I think the same is true between a parent and a child. Certainly beyond a certain age with the child, children need their independence, they need increasing independence, they need respect, they need to be understood, rather than for parents to act as if the child is really incapable of making good judgments.

If you have that kind of a two-way relationship, your child will ask you for your opinion. You don't have to—and then you don't have to present your opinion. If your child needs your opinion, wants your opinion, they will ask you.

Ela Richmond: Mm-hmm.

Peter Gray: But if you give your opinion too often, they will avoid asking you. They don't want to hear more than they are asking for.

Ela Richmond: This makes sense.

Peter Gray: They want to run their own life.

Ela Richmond: This makes a lot of sense. And I think it ties back to what you were saying earlier about the ego that is tied up with parenting and also university and getting into elite colleges. It's like this fear of failure. So you're going to manage so tightly to make sure that they're successful, quote unquote, by somebody else's standards.

Something that I love that you said in the book—and I would encourage anybody to read it—is this whole safety question. Most parents' perspective on "Should I just let my kid do their thing?" is to cite safety—"Well, this world isn't safe." You go into that, and one of your takes, especially from the book, is to choose your community wisely and make choices that make it easier to give your kids freedom.

There are a lot of very practical solutions. You said as an example, make sure you choose your neighborhood wisely. If you can, make sure that you have chosen a place where you can make these decisions to allow your kid to have freedom, or go and meet your neighbors. How can you build a world where you are not as afraid of it so that you actually can give your kids these very necessary things to do and to build independence?

My last question for you—and again, I'd encourage anybody to read the book and whenever your new book comes out, we would love to share it with our whole audience and everybody that reads our newsletter—what is your perspective on personalities?

I have chatted with a lot of people who philosophically completely agree with the fact that it would be amazing if all kids were self-directed and took control of their learning. But they have had kids where they have gone so unstructured that it's actually been negative for the kid because a kid needs more structure—like the kid's personality needs more structure. Do you think personality plays a role in that? Do you think it's something that wasn't maybe built as a foundational element early on? What is your perspective on choosing education models, choosing the right path for a specific kid versus saying, "Okay, this is going to suit all kids"?

Peter Gray: When I hear about—some children are more self-motivated than others, and the question is, well, self-motivated for what? Is the parent saying, "This child is not self-motivated to learn how to read. This child is not self-motivated to do the things I want the child to do"? Or is the child truly not motivated to do anything? Is the child just sitting there doing nothing? Is it even possible to sit there and do nothing?

Have you ever seen a truly non-self-motivated three-year-old or four-year-old? They're all self-motivated. They're always doing things. Watch any baby. They're always doing things. They're always curious. They're playful. They're trying to figure out the world.

I think when we talk about the non-self-motivated child, there are two things that could be referring to. One is when children reach school age and they are constantly—their own questions are no longer important or respected, and play is regarded as a waste of time and disruptive. So the things they're motivated to do, their motivation is being suppressed, and instead they're being told you have to do what we adults are telling you to do. I think you can, at least for some people, kind of quash the self-motivation. Curiosity and playfulness can kind of be quashed by too much suppression of it, too many times telling you that's a waste of time, we can't, we don't have time for that, this is what the lesson is. I think that we can create people who don't trust their own ability to make decisions about what to do.

The other thing that relates to self-motivation is, as I said before, self-motivated for what. I think that if one wants to take the educational track that I advocate in the book Free to Learn, and that I've been involved in studying and have done further studies of since, one has to be very trustful of children. If your child isn't reading at five or six or seven or even eight years old, you have to trust that eventually your child will learn to read.

I have never seen a child in self-directed education who hasn't learned to read. They all learn to read, but they learn to read at different times. They're not all motivated to read at age six or seven or eight. Some kids are motivated to be out climbing trees then. Some kids are motivated to be creating art or music then. It doesn't involve reading. Some kids these days are "reading"—they call it ear reading—where they're listening to books. They're listening to audiobooks or they're exploring other ways of learning.

Sometimes what people mean by not self-motivated is they're not self-motivated to learn the stuff that they would be being taught in school if they were in school. I think that's the thing that one has to—if one wants to allow your child into a self-directed journey for education, you have to be trustful. You have to believe the data from many studies now that children will eventually learn the things that are important for them to learn to live a meaningful and satisfying life.

It would be interesting for people who believe that somebody's not self-motivated to define exactly what it is that they mean by not self-motivated.

Ela Richmond: That's very interesting.

Peter Gray: The other thing in terms of structure—people talk about structure. Structure of course is important for all of us, but society creates structure. Sudbury Valley School, which is a school for self-directed education, is not lacking in structure.

Ela Richmond: Mm-hmm.

Peter Gray: For example, there are lots of rules at that school. The rules are all made democratically by the democratic school meeting. There are rules that you—none of the rules have to do with learning. The rules have to do with just rules of behavior, things you can and cannot do on campus. There's a lot of rules. This is not anarchy, this is rule by law, but democratically created law at the school. There's that kind of structure involved—there's limits on what you're allowed to do. You can't do things that harm other people. You can't litter without picking up your litter. You can't take something out without putting it away. You certainly can't break state laws by using illicit drugs or alcohol on campus. There are all kinds of rules like that, so it's not anarchy.

The other thing is that when children are playing, play is always structured. People talk about unstructured play, but there's no such thing as unstructured play. When children are playing, they're playing at something, and that "at" implies structure. They're building a sandcastle—that's a structured activity. They're having a play fight—that's a structured activity. You're pretending to fight without really hurting one another. Whatever children are playing at is structured. When they play, the way children learn how to structure their activities is by playing, by playing in a way that requires structure. All play requires structure, and in social play you have to agree on the structure of what you're playing.

Ela Richmond: We're—

Peter Gray: You know, we're pretending we're going to the ball at the king's castle, and you're creating the structure in your head of what you're going to be now acting out.

Ela Richmond: This is very fascinating. So I'm going to hit you with a couple rapid-fire questions to close this out. I am very fascinated. Everything that you've been saying, I've been nodding along to. It's very aligned with all the research that you shared, and it was very fascinating to hear about your new book. I cannot wait to read it.

How would you recommend people look into more research about self-directed paths? Because I think a very common experience is—we all went through the experience of here are the important subjects to learn, I'm going to teach my kids that these are also the important subjects to learn. The mentality that your kid's going to learn what is valuable for them to learn, period, and the trust that's associated with that as opposed to—we send kids through math classes and science classes, and lots of times they don't even learn anything in them. They're just checking boxes, taking tests, and going through them. But it's still this pervasive cultural myth, to use your words, that we need those things. Do you have any readings or podcasts or people that you'd recommend people look into if they're kind of interested in that?

Peter Gray: One of the things that I have written about on my Substack and my blog, reviewing other people's research as well as my own research, is that I think what parents worry about if their children aren't learning on the school schedule and learning school things—I think the primary thing they're worried about is that they won't be able to go to college.

I don't think anybody believes that they're learning in school things that are really important for daily life because they're obviously not. It used to be that schools offered more things that had to do with daily life. There were shop classes, there were home ec classes. Unfortunately, they were sex-segregated, which they shouldn't have been. We should have had boys in home ec and girls in shop, but it didn't back then. The idea was that you're kind of helping to educate kids for life. But I think now schools are almost entirely oriented towards what they call academic education, the goal of which is to prepare them for college, the ultimate goal of which is to prepare them for college.

Here's the thing that I learned in my very first study of the Sudbury Valley School graduates—done long ago, and I described this study in the book Free to Learn—you don't have to do any of that stuff and you can still go to college and you can still do well in college. That was the most surprising result to me, and it was one of the main reasons I did that study. My son had become a student at this school and I was considering, well, what if he wanted to go to college? When he graduated from that school, would he be able to?

I did a study of the graduates and there were some of the graduates who had never been to a typical school. They had never taken what we would call a school course. They had never taken an exam until maybe they took the SAT exam, which they prepared for. Then they went on to college, they got into college, and they did well in college.

Once they were there, as a college professor, it doesn't honestly surprise me that they can do well once they're there. One of the reasons it doesn't surprise me is most kids graduating from high school, even from fancy high schools, even if they got all A's, don't remember what they learned in high school anyway. Every class starts pretty much from the beginning anyway. The introductory biology class does not assume that you remember any biology from high school biology. They start from the beginning, maybe go at a higher level or a faster pace than high school would have been, at a more intellectual level. But they don't assume that you know anything.

If they do assume that you might know something, it's easy—and I learned this from the kids who had gone on who had not taken previous courses—it's easy to catch up. You just—this term that professor used the term myosis, I don't know what myosis means, so I look it up. Now I know what myosis means. In this day and age, it's all the easier—you can be sitting there in class and take out your smartphone and look it up. I haven't even fallen behind in this lecture. I understand entirely what myosis means.

Ela Richmond: There you go.

Peter Gray: Kids who have learned to take responsibility for their learning are at a big advantage in college. The kids who have been involved, taken responsibility for their learning throughout in self-directed education, are really at an advantage in college because they do take responsibility and they're in college for a good reason. They're not in college because their parents have forced them to go to college. They're in college for a real reason, and they want to get the most out of it because they've decided themselves to go. That makes a huge difference.

One of the things that I've sometimes emphasized in talks is what the research shows. First of all, this is not entirely true in other parts of the world, but it is definitely true in the United States: anybody can go to college. Anybody. There are colleges who will take you and it doesn't matter that much what college you go to.

One of the things that sometimes happens with some kids who are graduates of self-directed education is they go first to a community college, a two-year college. The two-year college will take anybody, low tuition, some places free tuition. You go there, you take some courses there, and you use that transcript to go on to a four-year college if that's what you want to do. Anybody can do that, and that's a reasonable step.

The other thing is that there's actually research—this was done some time ago, started some time ago. This is longitudinal research that has to occur over time. In which what these researchers did—the research team that I'm thinking of, one of them is an economist and the other is a statistician—they did the statistical equivalent of creating identical twins. Let's basically identify people who by all background characteristics are as similar to one another as we can make them. They come from economically similar homes. They have similar IQs, to the degree that one can assess IQ. Let's look at the difference. Let's look at whether it matters whether they go to an elite college, a college it's hard to get into, or they go to the local branch of the state college, state university.

It turns out when you do that kind of matching, there's no overall benefit of having gone to the elite college.

Ela Richmond: Really?

Peter Gray: That's really true. No overall benefit.

Ela Richmond: Not even relationships?

Peter Gray: Even by the measure of how much money you're making at age 40, which is a common index.

Ela Richmond: Wow.

Peter Gray: Certainly not by relationships. Certainly not that. I mean, you are as likely to make friends, maybe more likely to make friends in the less stressful, less elite college. There are advantages and disadvantages to the elite college, and I think the reason that there's no difference is that the advantages and disadvantages tend to cancel one another out. That's my interpretation of it.

You go to the elite college and you are more likely to make connections with other kids who come from wealthy families who may be able to connect you to their parents and their parents' businesses. You are more likely to find recruiters looking for you to recruit you into their law firm or whatever. This is more true for graduate students than undergraduates, but you're more likely to have that. You have those benefits.

On the other hand, you go to the less elite college and you have the benefit of what researchers call the big fish in the little pond effect. You stand out. If you are the kind of person who could have gotten into a more elite college but didn't, you stand out in this other college as a really top student. The professors notice that, and especially if it's a college that doesn't have graduate students, you get invited to work with the professors, you get invited to collaborate with them. You get almost treated like a graduate student. Those professors are going to write great reviews for you. You'd have been just one of the run of the mill at the fancy college, but here you are—you're kind of a star at this college.

That's one example I'm giving, but that's true all the way down the line. If you're sort of a mediocre student, somehow you make it into Harvard, you're kind of one of the failures now. You feel like you're a failure. But you go to the other college and you feel like I'm okay. I'm just like other people. It affects your self-esteem. It affects your own image of yourself and what you can do.

There's a lot of research showing that what is called academic self-esteem goes down when you go from a place where—from, say, a high school where you were one of the top students to now a college where you're kind of just average or less than average. It really affects your self-esteem, which then also affects your performance. It lowers your aspirations to some degree.

Ela Richmond: This is so fascinating, and I'm really glad that you tackled this because I think you are correct in your analysis that what parents are afraid of is what happens next. Will my child be successful? Will they be able to get into college? What is their path? Am I opening the right doors for them? Parents usually want the best for their children. So they have this innate desire to open as many doors as possible and create as many opportunities as possible. What's funny is sometimes the answer's not necessarily controlling everything, it's actually letting go. And that's a lot harder.

Do you have a list of books that you'd highly recommend people read if they're interested in learning more about education and children and they're in the midst of trying to build something that's right for their kids or help guide them in the right direction?

Peter Gray: There are quite a number of books that would be relevant. One book that I kind of regularly suggest to parents is Alison Gopnik's book The Gardener and the Carpenter. Do you know that book? Alison Gopnik is a leading developmental psychologist who studies the cognitive abilities of little children and publishes these amazing—children are so much more logical than we think they are and able to solve problems and so on and so forth.

But she wrote this book that is really aimed at parents called The Gardener and the Carpenter. She talks about sort of two different approaches to being a parent. The carpenter approach is the approach that you're sort of sculpting your child, you're creating, you're building your child. Your child is your product, just like if you were a carpenter making a table or a chair, that would be your product. She argues that this is the wrong way to think about being a parent. You can't build your child. Your child just isn't buildable. Your child is going to resist that. You're going to be disappointed. You can't have a sense—if you're a carpenter and you're building something, you can have a sense of an image: this would be the perfect chair that I want to build. But that would be a terrible mistake to say, "This is the perfect child that I want my child to be."

First of all, the chair doesn't respond negatively to that kind of pressure, but the child does. The gardener approach to being a parent is the approach that says children, just like all biological things, have in their DNA a plan for growth, a plan for growing up, a plan for development that's in their DNA, and you're not going to affect that. You could fight it and make things worse for the child, but what you want to do as the gardener approach is just provide the fertilizer that helps the child grow the way they are going to grow.

There are personality differences, and part of the job of the parent is to recognize that my child is not the same person that I am. My child has a random selection of my genes and a random selection of my partner's genes. But this is a whole different person. This is not me, it's not a replica of me. People talk about reproduction—they're not reproducing themselves, they're producing an entirely different creature, an entirely different human being. The job of the parent is to learn who that person is and to help that person be who they are rather than to try to decide what that person should be.

Now I'm elaborating on Gopnik's point using some of my own language in this, but that's her point. She makes a very effective case that really the job of parents is to be in relationship with their child, to understand who their child is and to provide what their child seems to need, rather than what they or society is somehow telling them they should be foisting on their child.

Ela Richmond: Wow.

Peter Gray: She also tackles—she's the one who says, she points out that the word "parenting" as if it were a job was in non-existence prior to about 1970. Nobody talked about parenting.

Ela Richmond: Interesting. I didn't know that.

Peter Gray: Yeah. I didn't know it either, to tell you the truth, even though I was around before that. It became a popular phrase as people began to think of being a parent as a job. She says we shouldn't use—I can't get away from parenting, it's so much in our vocabulary. I use it, I even use it in titles to things. But she says we shouldn't talk about parenting our children any more than we talk about wifeing our husbands or husbanding our wives.

Ela Richmond: That's funny.

Peter Gray: We should think of it as a relationship. She's very effective, I think, in talking about that. She's coming as one of the top researchers, academic researchers in child development, to talk to parents.

There's another book—I'm having difficulty right at this moment thinking of the name of the author. The title is something like How to Raise an Adult. Do you know this book?

Ela Richmond: I think so. It's by a woman—

Peter Gray: It is by a woman who was formerly the dean of freshmen at Stanford University.

Ela Richmond: It's Julie Lythcott-Haims.

Peter Gray: That's exactly who it is. That's right. There you go.

She's talking about her experience as the dean of freshmen. Stanford is of course one of the elite colleges, and parents would love to get their kids into. Her experience as dean of freshmen is that so many kids were suffering and so many kids were not prepared for college. Not because they weren't academically prepared, but they weren't emotionally and developmentally prepared. They weren't prepared to live independently. They didn't know how to take care of themselves. They didn't know how to deal with real life without an adult there standing over them because they had been so overprotected.

She says in her book that this experience working with freshmen at Stanford, coming from these privileged families who had sort of given them everything, was—"I'm going to, with my own child or children"—I don't remember if she has more than one—"I'm going to change the way I interact with this. I'm going to insist that they do chores around the house. I don't want to send them off to college not knowing how to make their own bed or clean their own room, or if they're living off campus, how to cook. These are important skills and they are at least as important as what they're learning in school."

"I'm going to put less emphasis—I'm not going to worry about their academic performance. I'm going to be more concerned with their development as whole people who feel comfortable within themselves, who know what they want to do, who if they do go to college, have a reason to go to college."

Ela Richmond: This is so good. I'm going to note both of those down and read both of those books. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I know that people can read your writings a lot on Substack. You're pretty active on Substack, which is such a gift. People can follow you there. Is there anywhere else that people can follow you and do you have a date for your new book publishing?

Peter Gray: Yes, I just learned—I'm somewhat sad to learn that the publication date is not until September 29th of this coming year, 2026.

Ela Richmond: Oh, no.

Peter Gray: My manuscript is done, but they go through a process that takes about a year. Close to a year, about nine months. It still has to be copy-edited. That won't take long, but I think there's a time—I don't know exactly all what goes into the publication. It's a big publishing company, and I'm not in a position to argue with them about that. It's not until then that the book will be published.

Meanwhile, much of the ideas are in some of my Substack posts. The other thing that people can get access to—I have a personal website that is just at petergray.org. It's an easy URL to remember. You can download there almost most of my academic articles, or many of my academic articles, are available as PDFs there. I write in a way, though, even though they're published in academic journals—I think that they're very readable by anybody who can read. I don't use fancy language and I always write in a way that I'm aiming to try to communicate with anybody who really wants to understand what I'm saying. Don't be put off by the fact they're published in academic journals.

You can find, for example, my studies of grown homeschoolers that show that they can go to college. My studies of those graduates of Sudbury Valley School. I have a chapter published in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Educational Research that is a chapter on self-directed education that was an invited chapter. People who are looking for the actual published peer-reviewed research on what is possible for children who grow up with self-directed education can find my articles, which also review other people's work in this area, at that website.

Ela Richmond: That's amazing. Well, we'll keep all of the links in the descriptions and then also we usually publish an article as well. We'll make sure that everybody can find those because you are a very, very good writer and very uniquely, as opposed to many academic writers, you write very approachably as well. So I always appreciate that.

Peter Gray: I always attribute it to not knowing very many big words.

Ela Richmond: Well, this is so fun, Peter. It was so great chatting with you, and thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing your thoughts.

Peter Gray: Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.

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