Peter Gray is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College. He spoke with Plough’s Susannah Black Roberts about his research and the work he is doing to encourage free play.

Plough: What is the problem with play in our culture?

Peter Gray: Over the past seven decades, we in the United States have been taking play and independent activity away from children. It is reasonable to say we are depriving them of a childhood. And we are seeing the consequences of that in extremely high rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among school-aged children, especially teenagers.

There have been plenty of correlational studies but why do you even need those? It ought to be obvious, right? It just ought to be obvious. Independent play is what makes kids happy. You take freedom away from anybody regardless of age, they are going to be unhappy.

What counts as play, and why is it important?

Play has four characteristics. First, it is self-chosen and self-directed by the player or players. If there is an authority figure who directs it, it is automatically not play. Little league baseball is not play. Children are not learning the same lessons, because they are not in charge.

Second, play is intrinsically motivated: you are doing it for its own sake. You are not doing it for a trophy or praise from a teacher or a parent. It has huge benefits, but you are not thinking about those.

The third characteristic of play is structure. People talk about unstructured play, but we should ban that from our vocabulary. It is always structured by the players themselves. They may adopt rules that are passed down, but they decide on the rules. This is how children learn to create structure. It’s how they learn to create, enforce, and follow rules, to inhibit their impulses. The interesting thing about play is that play is freely chosen, but when a child chooses to play, the child is choosing not to be free.

Bianca Berends, Busy Beach Boy in Yellow, oil bars on printed canvas, 2019. Used by permission.

And the fourth characteristic of play is creativity. The rules are never so strict or specific that they tell you just what you have to do on every move. And for young children, play is not only creative, it’s almost always imaginative. They’re imagining a situation that doesn’t exist in the real world. They’re imagining that they’re Wonder Woman, or that they’re off fighting dragons. they’re exercising their ability to think in an imagined world, which really means to think hypothetically. They’re thinking, “If this is true, then what else has to be true in this scene that we’re creating?” Children are developing this remarkably high order of thinking when they’re playing. Even very young children are doing that.

What can parents do to promote this kind of play?

In the 1950s, you just shooed your kid out of the house and all the other kids were shooed out too, so kids would find others and play with them, or they’d hang out after school and play and not come home until dinnertime. But now, if a parent says, “Go out and play,” there is a fairly decent chance that somebody is going to call child protective services.

In addition, even if you send your child out, there is a good chance there are no other children out there. And the most important stimulus for play is other kids to play with. We might wish that kids just had a love for the great outdoors, but I am convinced that to a large extent, the love of nature is an acquired taste, and you acquire it as a child by playing with kids outdoors.

We parents might think, “Oh, you know, the love of nature will make them enjoy the outdoors.” And so even if the child is out there alone, we think, “This is so much better than if they are indoors alone.” But most children don’t think that way. When you send them outdoors, if they’ve been able to sneak their cellphones out with them and there is nobody to play with, they will just get on their phones and interact with their friends in the only way they are able.

Bianca Berends, Girl with Doll, oil on canvas, 2019. Used by permission.

What you’ve got to do in our world today to create real play is find ways to get a bunch of kids together at the same time, on a regular basis, and do it in a way that parents think is safe enough. That generally means there has to be at least one adult there. The ideal would be someone who will not tell the kids how to play, who will not intervene, but who is just there for emergencies. And so that is the kind of situation you have to work toward.

The first step is to get to know your neighbors. And one of the problems today is that most of us don’t know our neighbors. And that’s part of the reason we are reluctant to send our kids out. In particular, get to know the neighbors who have kids. Suggest it: wouldn’t it be great if our kids had this chance to get out and play like kids used to? Suppose we have certain hours of the week where we all act like old-fashioned parents and kick our kids out of the house. “Get out of the house, and leave your cellphone inside!” They might complain the first time, but once they start making friends with the other kids, they’ll be eager to do it.