The central idea of my forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation, is that we have overprotected children in the real world, where they need a lot of free play and autonomy,while underprotecting them online, where they are not developmentally ready for much of what happens to them. Much of my thinking about the importance of free play comes from Peter Gray, a professor of psychology at Boston College who is one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of play. See his powerful TED talk, where he lays out the evolutionary origins of play—a necessity for all young mammals. He then shows how we have systematically deprived children of free play since the 1970s and shows that adolescents’ mental health has declined substantially over the same period. He notes that this is a correlation, not proof of causation, although experiments with animals support the claim that play deprivation causes anxiety and poor social development.
Peter gave that talk in 2014. Since then, the mental health of children and adolescents has worsened, and evidence has increased showing that Peter was correct. Peter recently published a major review article in the Journal of Pediatrics titled Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Well-being: Summary of the Evidence. I think it’s among the most important essays ever written on play. I was planning to write a summary of the article for the After Babel Substack, but a few days ago, I got Peter’s own summary of the article, which he posted on his new Substack, Play Makes Us Human, which you can find and subscribe to here: