aeonmagazine | When I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations.
We had school (which was not the big deal it is today), and we also had
what I call a hunter-gather education. We played in mixed-age
neighbourhood groups almost every day after school, often until dark. We
played all weekend and all summer long. We had time to explore in all
sorts of ways, and also time to become bored and figure out how to
overcome boredom, time to get into trouble and find our way out of it,
time to daydream, time to immerse ourselves in hobbies, and time to read
comics and whatever else we wanted to read rather than the books
assigned to us. What I learnt in my hunter-gatherer education has been
far more valuable to my adult life than what I learnt in school, and I
think others in my age group would say the same if they took time to
think about it.
For more than 50 years now, we in the United States have been
gradually reducing children’s opportunities to play, and the same is
true in many other countries. In his book Children at Play: An American History
(2007), Howard Chudacoff refers to the first half of the 20th century
as the ‘golden age’ of children’s free play. By about 1900, the need for
child labour had declined, so children had a good deal of free time.
But then, beginning around 1960 or a little before, adults began
chipping away at that freedom by increasing the time that children had
to spend at schoolwork and, even more significantly, by reducing
children’s freedom to play on their own, even when they were out of
school and not doing homework. Adult-directed sports for children began
to replace ‘pickup’ games; adult-directed classes out of school began to
replace hobbies; and parents’ fears led them, ever more, to forbid
children from going out to play with other kids, away from home,
unsupervised. There are lots of reasons for these changes but the
effect, over the decades, has been a continuous and ultimately dramatic
decline in children’s opportunities to play and explore in their own
chosen ways.
Over the same decades that children’s play has been declining,
childhood mental disorders have been increasing. It’s not just that
we’re seeing disorders that we overlooked before. Clinical
questionnaires aimed at assessing anxiety and depression, for example,
have been given in unchanged form to normative groups of schoolchildren
in the US ever since the 1950s. Analyses of the results reveal a
continuous, essentially linear, increase in anxiety and depression in
young people over the decades, such that the rates of what today would
be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are
five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. Over the same period,
the suicide rate for young people aged 15 to 24 has more than doubled,
and that for children under age 15 has quadrupled.
The decline in opportunity to play has also been accompanied by a
decline in empathy and a rise in narcissism, both of which have been
assessed since the late 1970s with standard questionnaires given to
normative samples of college students. Empathy refers to the ability and
tendency to see from another person’s point of view and experience what
that person experiences. Narcissism refers to inflated self-regard,
coupled with a lack of concern for others and an inability to connect
emotionally with others. A decline of empathy and a rise in narcissism
are exactly what we would expect to see in children who have little
opportunity to play socially. Children can’t learn these social skills
and values in school, because school is an authoritarian, not a
democratic setting. School fosters competition, not co-operation; and
children there are not free to quit when others fail to respect their
needs and wishes. Fist tap Dale.
