PostHole
Compose
Login
Is Too Little Play Hurting Our Kids?
A long-term decline in unsupervised activity may be contributing to mental health declines in children and adolescents.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
December 4, 2023
Is Too Little Play Hurting Our Kids?
A long-term decline in unsupervised activity may be contributing to mental health declines in children and adolescents.
By Joseph Polidoro edited by Jeffery DelViscio
[A young girl sitting on a bed with her head in her hands]
[Illustration of a Bohr atom model spinning around the words Science Quickly with various science and medicine related icons around the text]
Apple | Spotify | YouTube |RSS
Peter Gray: It’s not just moderate evidence. It’s overwhelming evidence that if you take away children’s opportunities for independent activity, they’re not going to learn how to be independent, and that’s going to lead them to be anxious and depressed, fearful about the future and all the things that we’re seeing now.
Joseph Polidoro: It’s been declared a national emergency00111-7/fulltext). Mental health among children and adolescents decreased steadily between 2010 and 2020. By 2019 death by suicide had become the second-leading cause of death for those between age 10 and 24.
But this mental health decline may have been decades in the making. And according to a team of researchers, it’s partly because we’re not giving kids the independence they need.
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
For Science, Quickly, I’m Joseph Polidoro.
[CLIP: Music]
Gray: I’m Peter Gray. I’m a research professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College.
Polidoro: In the September issue of the Journal of Pediatrics00111-7/fulltext), Gray and his co-authors observed a continuous increase in depression, anxiety and suicide rates among children and adolescents since at least 1960. And they link it to a decline in unsupervised play and other independent activities.
Gray: Play is how children pursue what’s fun for them. That’s an immediate source of mental health—part of mental health really means “I’m happy” or “I’m most satisfied with my life right now.”
Polidoro: Gray says that play and other independent activities also have far-reaching long-term effects on children’s mental health and resilience.
Gray: I think that the real crisis is that young people are losing a sense of, “I can solve problems, I can deal with bumps in the road of life.” And the way the children learn to do these things is through play where they are responsible to solve their own problems. They negotiate with their peers. They figure out how to solve quarrels among themselves. If somebody gets hurt, they figure out what to do about being hurt.
Polidoro: When kids are allowed to make decisions and solve problems, they exercise what’s called their internal locus of control. They begin to feel they have control over experiences and their lives, rather than experiences controlling them.
Gray and his team cite work by psychologist Jean Twenge. She observed a dramatic increase in anxiety and depression from the 1960s through the 1990s. During the same timeframe, say Gray and his team, Twenge also reported a steep decline in internal locus of control. Gray says this correlation likely suggests that the decline in internal locus of control helps explain the mental health decline.
Gray: There’s evidence for people of all ages that having a weak internal locus control is predictive of future anxiety and depression. If you believe that anything can happen at any time and you can’t do anything about it, that’s a pretty anxiety-provoking view of life.
Polidoro: Control is also central to another set of established research, called self-determination theory. This research shows that children and adults have three basic psychological needs. If they’re not fulfilled, we’re not happy.
Gray: The first of those needs is autonomy. The sense that we have some freedom to choose what we’re going to do, that we’re in charge of our own life.
The second of these needs is competence. Not only am I free to choose what I want to do, but I can do it.
And the third is relatedness. It’s also important that I have other people on my side on this. Connection with peers by this theory is an extremely important contributor to the sense of well-being.
Polidoro: These ideas are borne out in indigenous cultures, where very young children are close to their mothers until about the age of four. From that point on...
Gray: They are free to run and roam with other kids. They may be sent on errands. In every one of these cultures as far as have been studied, children have an enormous amount of freedom and also an enormous amount of responsibility. There’s higher expectations of what children can do.
Polidoro: These anthropological findings suggest that from an evolutionary perspective, independent activity, personal responsibility, and self-initiated exploration and learning ideally begin at an early age.
It’s a very convincing case, especially for anyone who remembers adolescents with paper routes, grade-school kids walking to school unsupervised, and kids of all ages playing together outside. But is the data there?
As Gray and his co-authors make very clear, they’re presenting correlational evidence, albeit from many, many sources. And relying on correlations makes some scientists uneasy.
Cory Keyes: My name is Corey Keyes. I’m a professor of sociology, and I spent my career at Emory University.
Polidoro: Keyes does believe there’s a case for play as a developmentally rich activity for kids.
Keyes: I think that’s unequivocal in the research literature.
Polidoro: But…
Keyes: There’s so many other things that have changed that would make me suspect that decline in play isn’t just another sign of the mental health problem rather than a cause of it.
Polidoro:Stephan Collishaw also likes the argument but hesitates at its conclusions.
Stephan Collishaw: I’m a professor in developmental psychopathology at Cardiff University and also the co-director of the Wolfson Center for Young Peoples’ Mental Health.
We need to be cautious about drawing a causal connection between those trends. And it’s particularly, in my view, unclear how far we can kind of correlate broad social trends in aspects such as independent play and mental health.
Polidoro: Collishaw sees many changes over time that could be involved—school pressures, highly structured schedules, the mental health of parents and the rise of digital technology.
Collishaw: It’s hard to disentangle those and make a strong case that one has a causal effect on the other.
[...]