A few years ago I was sitting drinking coffee at sunset in a small village at the edge of a forest in Cauca, in the southwest of Colombia. A few thousand people lived there, growing the caffeinated drinks that we glug across the world to keep ourselves alert. I watched them as they slowly unwound for the day. The adults had put tables and chairs out on the street, and they were talking and chatting in the shadow of a lush green mountain. I looked on as they wandered from table to table, when I noticed something that I rarely see in the Western world anymore. All across the village, children were playing freely, without adults watching over them. Some had a hoop they were rolling along the ground in a group. Some were chasing each other around at the edge of the forest, and daring each other to run in, only to dash out again thirty seconds later, shrieking and laughing. Even very small children—they seemed to be three or four—were running around with just other kids to look out for them. Occasionally, one of the children would fall over and run back to their mother. The rest only returned home when their parents called for them at eight in the evening, and the streets would finally empty.
It occurred to me that this is what childhood looked like for my parents, in very different places—an Alpine Swiss village, and a working-class Scottish tenement. They ran around freely without their parents for most of the day from when they were quite small, and only returned to eat and sleep. This is, in fact, what childhood looked like for all of my ancestors, so far as I can tell, going back thousands of years. There are periods when some children didn’t live like this—when they were forced to work in factories, for example, or during the living nightmare of chattel slavery—but in the long human story, these are extreme exceptions.
Today, I don’t know any children who live like that. In the past thirty years there have been huge changes in childhood. By 2003, in the U.S. only 10 percent of children spent any time playing freely outdoors on a regular basis. Childhood now happens, overwhelmingly, behind closed doors, and when they do get to play, it is supervised by grown-ups, or takes place on screens. The way children spend their time at school has also changed dramatically. The school systems in the U.S. and Britain have been redesigned by politicians so that teachers are forced to spend the majority of their time preparing and drilling children for tests. In the U.S., only 73 percent of elementary schools now have any form of recess. Free play and free inquiry have fallen off a cliff.
These changes have happened so quickly, and all at once, that it’s hard to scientifically measure the effects this transformation might be having on children’s ability to pay attention and focus. We can’t randomly assign some kids to live freely in that village in Cauca, and some to live indoors in an American suburb, and come back to see how well they focus. But there is, I believe, a way we can begin to figure out some of the effects of this shift. We can do it if we break down this big transformation into its smaller constituent parts, and see what the science tells us about those effects.
One of the ways I did this was by following the story of a remarkable woman I got to know named Lenore Skenazy. She’s not a scientist. She’s an activist. She was driven to try to understand how this transformation is affecting kids because of a shocking experience she had in her own life. It led her to start to work with some of the best social scientists studying these questions. Together with them, she has pioneered practical proposals to understand why so many more kids seem to be struggling to focus—and how to restore it.
In the 1960s, in a suburb of Chicago, a five-year-old girl walked out of her house, alone. It was a fifteen-minute walk to Lenore’s school, and every day she did it by herself. When she got to the road near school, she was helped to safely cross by another child, a ten-year-old boy wearing a yellow sash across his chest whose job was to stop the cars and shepherd the smaller kids across the tarmac. At the end of each school day, Lenore would walk out of the gates, again without an adult, and she would wander the neighborhood with her friends, or try to spot four-leaf clovers, which she collected. There was often a kickball game going on outside her house that the kids would spontaneously organize, and sometimes she would join in. By the time she was nine years old, when she felt like it, she would get on her bike and ride a few miles to the library to pick out books, and then curl up reading them somewhere quiet. At other times, she’d knock on her friends’ doors to see if they wanted to play. If Joel was home, they’d play Batman, and if Betsy was home, they’d play Princess and the Witch. Lenore always insisted on being the witch. Finally, when she was hungry or it started to get dark, she went home.
To many of us, this scene now seems jarring, or even shocking. Across the U.S. over the past decade, there have been many instances where people have seen children as old as nine walking unaccompanied in the street and they’ve called the police to report it as a case of parental negligence. But in the 1960s, this was the norm all over the world. Almost all children’s lives looked something like this. Being a kid meant you went out into your neighborhood and you wandered around, found other kids, and made up your own games. Adults had only a vague idea where you were. A parent who kept their child indoors all the time, or walked them to school, or stood over them while they played, and intervened in their games, would have been regarded as crazy.
By the time Lenore had grown up and had her own children, in New York City in the 1990s, everything had changed. She was expected to walk her own children to school and wait while they went through the gates, and then pick them up at the end of the day. Nobody let their kids out to play unsupervised, ever. Children stayed in the home all the time, unless there was an adult to watch over them. One time, Lenore took her family to a resort in Mexico, and the kids would gather every morning on the beach and play, usually at whatever game they made up among themselves. It was the only time she had ever seen her son get up before her. He would race to the beach to find the other kids. She had never seen her son so gleeful. Lenore told me: “What I realized is that for one week, he had what I had for my entire childhood—which was the ability to go outside, meet up with friends, and play.”
Lenore thought that back home, her nine-year-old son, Izzy, still needed to have some small taste of freedom if he was going to mature. So when, one day, he asked her if he could be taken to a place in New York he’d never been to before and then be left to find his own way home, it struck her as a good idea. Her husband sat on the floor with him and helped him plan out the route he would take, and one sunny Sunday, she took him to Bloomingdale’s, and—with a little catch in her heart—they parted ways. An hour later, he appeared at the door of their apartment. He had taken a subway and a bus, alone. “He was very happy—I’d say he was levitating,” she recalls. It seemed like such a commonsense thing to do that Lenore—who was a journalist—wrote an article telling this story, so other parents would have the confidence to do the same thing.
Then something strange happened. Lenore’s article was greeted with horror and revulsion. She was denounced on many of the top news shows in the United States as “America’s worst mom.” She was slammed as shamefully neglectful, and she was told that she had put her own child at terrible risk. She was invited to appear on TV shows where they would put her on with a parent whose child had been kidnapped and murdered, as if it was equally likely that your child would ride the subway safely and that he would be killed. Every host would ask her a variant of: But, Lenore, how would you have felt if he never came home?
“I was always flabbergasted,” Lenore told me when we sat together in her home in Jackson Heights in New York. She told them that she was simply giving her son what she—and all the adults condemning her—had taken for granted when they were kids, just a few decades before. She tried to explain to people that we live in one of the safest moments in human history. Violence against adults and children has dramatically plunged, and our children are now three times more likely to be struck by lightning than to be killed by a stranger. She asked: Would you imprison your child to prevent them from being hit by lightning? Statistically, that would make more sense. People responded with disgust to this argument. Other mothers told her that every time they turned their heads, they pictured their kids being snatched. After hearing this a lot, Lenore realized, “That was my crime. My crime was not thinking that way. I hadn’t gone to the darkest place first and decided—oh my God, it’s not worth it. To be a good American mom is to think that way now.” She realized that somehow, we had—in a very short period of time—ended up believing only “a bad mom takes her eyes off her kids.”
She noticed that when a DVD of the early episodes of Sesame Street from the late 1960s was released, they had put a warning on the screen at the start. Five-year-olds are shown walking the streets on their own, talking to strangers, and playing on vacant lots. The warning says: “The following is intended for adult viewing only and may not be suitable for our youngest viewers.” She realized the change was so dramatic that now it was as if kids couldn’t even be allowed to see what freedom might look like. Lenore was puzzled by how quickly this “gigantic shift” had happened. Children’s lives have come to be dominated by ideas “that are very radical and new. The idea that kids can’t play outside without this being dangerous—that has never been the case in human history. Kids have always played together, much of the time without direct adult supervision…. That’s been the way for all of humanity. To suddenly say no, it’s too dangerous—it’s like saying kids should sleep upside down.” It’s an inversion of what every previous human society has thought.
As I spent a lot of time with Lenore, I came to believe that to understand the effects of this change, we need to break it down into five different components and look at the scientific evidence behind each one. The first is the most obvious. For years, scientists have been discovering a broad body of evidence showing that when people run around—or engage in any form of exercise—their ability to pay attention improves. For example, one study that investigated this found exercise provides “an exceptional boost” to attention in children. Professor Joel Nigg, who I interviewed in Portland, has summarized the evidence clearly—he explains that “for developing children, aerobic exercise expands the growth of brain connections, the frontal cortex, and the brain chemicals that support self-regulation and executive functioning.” Exercise causes changes that “make the brain grow more and get more efficient.” The evidence showing this is so broad that these findings should be regarded, he writes, as “definite.” The evidence couldn’t be clearer: if you stop kids from acting on their natural desire to run around, on average, their attention, and the overall health of their brains, will suffer.
But Lenore suspected there might be an even deeper way this is harming kids. She started to seek out the leading scientists who have studied these questions—including professor of psychology Peter Gray, evolutionary primatologist Dr. Isabel Behncke, and social psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt. They taught her that in fact it is when children play that they learn their most important skills—the ones they need for their whole lives.
To understand this second component of the change that has taken place—the deprivation of play—picture again that scene on Lenore’s street when she was a child back in that Chicago suburb, or the scene I saw in Colombia. What skills are the kids learning there, as they play freely with each other? For starters, if you’re a kid and you’re on your own with other kids, “you figure out how to make something happen,” Lenore says. You have to use your creativity to come up with a game. You then have to persuade the other kids that your game is the best one they could play. Then “you figure out how to read people enough so that the game keeps going.” You have to learn how to negotiate when it’s your turn and when it’s their turn—so you have to learn about other people’s needs and desires, and how to meet them. You learn how to cope with being disappointed, or frustrated. You learn all this “through being excluded, through coming up with a new game, through getting lost, through climbing the tree and [then] somebody says, ‘Climb higher!’ and you can’t decide if you will or you won’t. Then you do, and it’s exhilarating, and then you climb a little higher the next time—or you climb a little higher and it’s so scary that you’re crying…. And yet—now you’re on top.” These are all crucial forms of attention.
One of Lenore’s intellectual mentors, Dr. Isabel Behncke, the Chilean expert on play, told me when we sat together in Scotland that the scientific evidence we have so far suggests “there are three main areas [of child development] where play has a major impact. One is creativity and imagination”—it’s how you learn to think about problems and solve them. The second is “social bonds”—it’s how you learn to interact with other people and socialize. And the third is “aliveness”—it’s how you learn to experience joy and pleasure. The things we learn from play aren’t trivial add-ons to becoming a functioning human being, Isabel explained. They are the core of it. Play builds the foundation of a solid personality, and everything that adults sit down and explain to the child afterward builds on this base. If you want to be a person who can pay attention fully, she told me, you need this base of free play.
Yet suddenly, we have been “taking all this out of kids’ lives,” Lenore says. Today, even when children do finally get to play, it’s mainly supervised by adults, who set the rules and tell them what to do. On Lenore’s street when she was a kid, everyone played softball and policed the rules themselves. Today, they go to organized activities where the adults intervene all the time to tell them what the rules are. Free play has been turned into supervised play, and so—like processed food—it has been drained of most of its value. This means that now, as a kid, Lenore said, “you’re not getting that [chance to develop these skills]—because you’re in a car being driven to a game where somebody tells you what position you’re playing, and when to catch the ball, and when it’s your time to hit, and who’s bringing the snack, and you can’t bring grapes because they have to be cut into quarters and it’s your mom’s job to do that…. That’s a very different childhood, because you haven’t experienced the give-and-take of life that’s going to prepare you for adulthood.” As a result, kids are “not having the problems and the exhilaration of getting there on their own.” One day, Barbara Sarnecka, an associate professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California, Irvine, told Lenore that today “adults are saying: ‘Here’s the environment. I’ve already mapped it. Stop exploring.’ But that’s the opposite of what childhood is.”
Lenore wanted to know: Now that they are effectively under house arrest, what are kids doing with the time they used to spend playing? One study of this found that this time is now overwhelmingly spent on homework (which exploded by 145 percent between 1981 and 1997), screens, and shopping with their parents. A 2004 study found that U.S. kids spent 7.5 hours more each week on academics than they had twenty years before.
Isabel told me the schools squeezing out play are “making a huge mistake.” She said: “I would first ask them—what is their objective? What are you trying to achieve?” Presumably, they want children to learn. “I just can’t see where these people get their insights from, because all the evidence shows it’s the other way round: our brains are more supple, more plastic, more creative” when we have had the chance to “learn through play. The primary technology for learning is play. You learn to learn in play. And in a world where information is always changing, why do you want to fill their heads with information? We have no idea what the world will be in twenty years. Surely we want to be creating brains that are adaptable, and have the capacity to assess context, and can be thinking critically. All these things are trained through play. So it’s so misguided, it’s unbelievable.”
This led Lenore to explore the third component of this change. Professor Jonathan Haidt—a leading social psychologist—has argued that there has been a big rise in anxiety among children and teens, in part because of this play deprivation. When a child plays, he learns the skills that make it possible to cope with the unexpected. If you deprive children of those challenges, as they grow up they will feel panicked and unable to cope a lot of the time. They don’t feel they are competent, or can make things happen without older people guiding them. Haidt argues this is one reason why anxiety is skyrocketing—and there is strong scientific evidence that if you are anxious, your attention will suffer.
Lenore believes there is also a fourth factor at work. To understand it, you have to grasp a discovery that was made by the scientist Ed Deci, a professor of psychology who I interviewed in Rochester in upstate New York, and his colleague Richard Ryan, who I also spoke with.
Their research uncovered that all human beings have within us two different kinds of motivation for why we do anything. Imagine you are a runner. If you go running in the morning because you love how it feels—the wind in your hair, the sense that your body is powerful and it’s carrying you forward—that’s an “intrinsic” motive. You’re not doing it to get some other reward farther down the line; you’re doing it because you love it. Now imagine you go running not because you love it, but because you have a drill-sergeant dad who forces you to get up and run with him. Or imagine you go running in order to post the videos of you shirtless on Instagram and you’re hooked on getting the hearts and “yum, you’re so hot” comments you receive. That would be an “extrinsic” motive to run. You’re not doing it because the act itself gives you a sense of pleasure or fulfillment—you are doing it because you have been forced to, or to get something out of it at a later point.
Richard and Ed discovered that it’s easier to focus on something, and stick with it, if your motives are intrinsic—if you are doing something because it’s meaningful to you—than if your motives are extrinsic, and you’re doing it because you are forced to, or to get something out of it afterward. The more intrinsic your motivation, the easier it will be to sustain your attention.
Lenore came to suspect that children—in this new and radically different model of childhood—are being deprived of the chance to develop intrinsic motives. Most people, she said, “learn focus by doing something that is either very important or very interesting to them.” You “learn the habit of focus by being interested in something enough that you notice what’s going on, and you process it…. The way you learn to focus is automatic if there’s something that interests you…or absorbs you, or thrills you.” But if you are a kid today, you live almost all of your life according to what adults tell you to do. She asked me: “How do you find meaning when your day is filled, from seven in the morning to nine at night when you go to bed, with somebody else’s idea of what is important?…If you don’t have any free time to figure out what [emotionally] turns you on, I’m not sure you’re going to find meaning. You’re not given any time to find meaning.”
As a child, wandering around her neighborhood, Lenore had the freedom to figure out what excited her—reading, writing, playing dress-up—and to pursue these things when she wanted to. Other kids learned they loved soccer, or climbing, or little scientific experiments. That was at least one way they learned attention and focus. That route is largely being cut off for kids now. She asked me: If your attention is constantly managed by other people, how can it develop? How do you learn what fascinates you? How do you find your intrinsic motives, the ones that are so important to developing attention?
After learning all this, Lenore was so worried about what we are doing to our kids that she started to tour the country, urging parents to let their children play in a free, unstructured, unsupervised way some of the time. She set up a group named Let Grow, designed to promote free play and freedom to explore for kids. She would say to the parents: “I want everybody to think back to your own childhood” and to describe “something that you loved—absolutely loved—to do, that you don’t let your own children do.” Their eyes would light up with memories. They would tell her: “We built forts. We played manhunt.” Lenore added: “I met a guy the other day who played marbles. I said, ‘What was your favorite marble?’ He said, ‘Oh, it was burgundy, and it was a swirl.’ You could just see this love of something from so long ago. It infused him with joy.” The parents admitted that “they all rode their bikes. They all climbed trees. They all went to town and got candy.” But then they said it was much too dangerous today to allow their kids to do the same.
Lenore would explain how absolutely minuscule the risk of kidnapping is—and that violence is lower now than when they were young. This is not, she added, because we hide our kids away—we know that because violence against adults has also massively fallen, and they still move around freely. Parents would nod, and keep their kids indoors nonetheless. She would explain the clear benefits of free play. Parents would nod, and still they wouldn’t let their kids out. Nothing seemed to work. She became more and more frustrated. She began to conclude that “even the people who are on our side, or who wonder what happened…they can’t let go.” She realized “you can’t be the only people [doing it]—because then you’re the crazy person sending your kid” out alone.
So she asked herself: What if we did this differently? What if we stopped trying to change parents’ minds, and started trying to change their behavior instead—and what if we tried to change them not as isolated individuals, but as a group? With those thoughts, Lenore became a part of a crucial experiment.
One day, Roanoke Avenue Elementary, a school on Long Island, decided to take part in something called Global Play Day, where for one day a year, kids are allowed to play freely and create their own fun. The teachers filled four of their classrooms with empty boxes and Lego and some old toys, and they said, Go play. You get to choose what you do. Donna Verbeck, who had been a teacher at the school for more than twenty years, watched the kids, expecting to see glee and laughter—but she quickly realized something was wrong. Some of the kids plunged in and started playing right away, as she’d expected—but a large number of the children just stood there. They stared at the boxes and the Lego and the handful of children who were starting to improvise games, but they didn’t move. They watched, inert, for a long time. Finally one of the kids, puzzled by the experience and unsure what to do, lay down in a corner and went to sleep.
Suddenly Donna realized, as she explained to me later: “They don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to get involved when somebody else is playing, or how to just start free play by themselves. They just did not know how to do it.” Thomas Payton, who was the principal, added: “And we’re not talking one or two kids. There were a lot of kids like that.” Donna felt shaken, and sad. She realized that these kids had never been set free to play before. Their attention had been constantly managed for them by adults for their whole lives.
So Roanoke Avenue Elementary decided to become one of the first schools to sign up for the program that Lenore leads. Let Grow is based on the idea that if children are going to become adults who can make their own decisions and pay attention, they need to experience increasing levels of freedom and independence throughout their childhood. When a school signs up, they commit that one day a week, or once a month, a child’s “homework” will be to go home and do something new, independently, without adult supervision, and then report back on it. They choose their own mission. Every child, when they go out into the world, is given a card to show to any adult who stops them to ask where their parents are. It says: “I’m not lost or neglected. If you think it’s wrong for me to be on my own, please read Huckleberry Finn and visit letgrow.org. Remember your own childhood. Was your parent with you every second? And with today’s crime rate back to what it was in 1963, it is safer to play outside now than when you were at my age. Let me grow.”
I went to meet the kids who had been taking part in this program at Roanoke for over a year. It’s in a poor neighborhood with a lot of parents who are financially struggling, and many who are recent immigrants. The first group I met were nine years old, and they jostled to tell me about what they had done as part of their project with a gleeful energy. One of them set up a lemonade stand on his street. Another walked down to the local river and collected the trash that had built up there, because she said this would “save the turtles.” (A few of the other kids joined in when she said this and shouted, “Save the turtles! Save them!”) A little girl told me that, before this project: “Well, I’d literally sit in front of a TV all day. It doesn’t really pop into your head to do stuff.” But for Let Grow, the first thing she did was cook something for her mother on her own. She waved her hands excitedly as she described it. It seemed to have blown her mind—to discover that she could do something.
I also wanted to talk with the kids who didn’t immediately volunteer their stories, so I spoke with a pale, rather serious-faced boy. He told me quietly: “We have a rope [in our backyard] that’s connected to a tree.” It had never crossed his mind to try to climb it. “But I finally said, well, I could at least try to do it.” He managed to get a little way up. He offered a sly little beam of a smile as he described how it felt to be climbing for the first time.
Some of the kids discovered new ambitions. In Donna’s class, there was a boy I’ll call L.B., who wasn’t particularly academic, and had often been distracted or bored in lessons. There was a constant struggle between him and his mom to get him to read or do his homework. He chose as his Let Grow project to build a replica of a boat. He assembled a piece of wood, a foam core, a hot-glue gun, and toothpicks and thread, and he sat night after night, intensely working on it. He tried one set of techniques, and the boat fell apart—so he tried again, and again. Once he had successfully built this small boat and showed it to his friends, he decided he was going to build something bigger—a life-size wagon that he could sleep in, in his yard. He took an old door that was in his garage, and his dad’s wrenches and screwdrivers, and he started to read about how to put all this together. He persuaded his neighbors to give him some old bamboo they had lying around in their garden, to use for the frame. Before long, L.B. had a wagon.
Then he decided he wanted to do something even more ambitious—to build an amphibious wagon, one he could push out onto the ocean. So he started to read about how to build things that float. When I talked with L.B., he described the process of building it in detail. He told me he was going to build another wagon next: “I have to figure out how I’m going to cut the hula hoops to go on it, and then I got to lay shrink-wrap over it.” I asked him how this project made him feel. “It’s different because I’m actually using my hands on materials…. I think it’s cool to just have your hands on something instead of seeing it on a screen, not really being able to touch it.” I went to meet his mother, who worked in medical billing, and she told me: “I don’t think, as a parent, I realized how much he could do on his own.” She saw him change: “I could see the confidence—and him wanting to do more and more and figure it out his way.” She glowed with pride. Her struggles to get him to read had ended, because now he was reading all the time about how to build stuff.
It struck me: When L.B. was being told what to do constantly—when he was being forced to act on extrinsic motivations—he couldn’t focus, and he was bored all the time. But when he was given the chance, through play, to find out what interested him—to develop an intrinsic motivation—his ability to focus flourished, and he worked for hours and hours without a break, building his boats and wagons.
His teacher, Donna, told me L.B. changed in class after that. His reading hugely improved, and “he didn’t consider it to be ‘reading,’ because it was his hobby. It was something he really, really liked.” He started to gain status among the other kids—whenever they wanted to build anything, the cry would go up to find L.B., because he knew how to do it. She told me that—like with all the deepest learning—“nobody taught him. His mom and dad just let him do it…. He just used his own head and really taught himself.” Gary Karlson, another teacher there, told me: “That learning is going to do more for that kid than anything academic that we could’ve brought to him through his time here.”
As I talked with L.B., I thought about another aspect of attention that I had been taught about by scientists—one that is, I think, the fifth way in which we are currently hobbling our children’s attention. In Aarhus in Denmark, Jan Tonnesvang, a professor of psychology there, had told me that we all need to have a sense of what he called “mastery”—that we are good at something. It’s a basic human psychological need. When you feel you are good at something, you will find it much easier to focus on it, and if you feel incompetent, your attention will shrivel like a salted snail. When I listened to L.B., I realized that we have a school system right now that is so narrow that it makes a lot of kids (especially boys, I think) feel that they aren’t good at anything. Their experience of school is contantly being made to feel incompetent. But once L.B. started to feel that he could master something—that he could become good at it—his focus began to form.
I went to see another aspect of the program, half an hour’s drive away at a local middle school, in a wealthier part of Long Island. The teacher, Jodi Maurici, told me she realized her students needed a Let Grow program when thirty-nine out of her two hundred students—aged twelve and thirteen—were diagnosed with anxiety problems in a single year, way more than she’d ever had before. Yet when Jodi explained that their thirteen-year-olds should do something—anything—independently, lots of parents became angry. “I had one child tell me they wanted to do the laundry, and [her] mom said, ‘Absolutely not. You’re not doing the laundry. You may ruin it.’ The child was so defeated at that point…. When I say defeated, I mean defeated.” They told Jodi: “They don’t even trust me to try on my own.” She said: “[The kids] get no confidence, because the small things build confidence.”
When I talked with Jodi’s students, it was startling to hear how terrified they had been at the start of the program. A tall, strapping fourteen-year-old boy told me he had always been too frightened of kidnapping and “all the ransom calls that happen” to walk into town. He lives in a place where the French bakery is across the street from the olive oil store, but he had anxiety levels that would have been appropriate to living in a war zone. The Let Grow program gave him a taste of independence in small steps. First, he did his own laundry. Then, a month later, his parents let him go for a run around the block. Within a year, he had teamed up with his friends and they had built a fort in their local woods, where they now spend a lot of their time hanging out. He told me: “We sit there and talk, or we have little competitions. We don’t have our moms. We can’t say, ‘Hey, Mom—can you get us this?’ It doesn’t work like that. It’s different.” As I spoke with him, I thought about something the writer Neale Donald Walsch wrote: “Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.”
Lenore met this boy with me, and afterward she said: “Think of history, and prehuman history. We have to chase things to eat. We have to hide from things that want to eat us, and [we have to] seek. We need to build shelter. Everybody does that for a million years, and just this generation, we’ve taken it all away. Kids don’t get to build their shelter, or hide, or seek with a bunch of other kids on their own…. And that boy, given the chance, went into the woods and built a shelter.”
One day, after a year of growing, and building, and focusing, L.B. and his mom walked down to the ocean, and placed the amphibious wagon he had built onto the water. They pushed it out to sea. They watched it float for a moment—and then it sank. They went home.
“I felt disappointment, but I was kind of determined to get it afloat. So I siliconed it,” L.B. told me. They went back to the ocean. This time, the wagon floated, and L.B. and his mother watched it drift away. “I felt kind of proud,” L.B. told me. “I was happy to see it float.”
And then they went home, and he started to focus on the next thing he wanted to build.
At first, a lot of parents were very nervous about letting their kids take part in the Let Grow experiment. But, Lenore said, “when the kid comes through the door proud, and happy, and excited, and maybe a little sweaty or hungry, and they met a squirrel, or they ran into a friend, or they found a quarter,” the parents see that “their kid rose to the occasion.” Once this happens, “they are so proud that the parents are rewired. The parents are like—‘That’s my boy. Look at him.’ That’s what changes them. Not me telling them this is what is going to be good for your kid…. The only thing that actually changes the parents is seeing their own kids do something without them watching or helping…. People have to see it to believe it. See their kid blossom. And afterward they can’t understand why they didn’t trust their kids sooner. You have to change the picture in people’s heads.”
After everything I had learned from Lenore and the scientists she works with, I began to wonder if our kids are not only more confined at home, but also more confined at school too. I started to ask myself: Is the way our schools are structured today helping our kids develop a healthy sense of focus, or in fact hindering it?
I thought about my own education. When I was eleven years old, I was sitting at a wooden desk in a chilly classroom on my first day at secondary school, which is roughly equivalent to middle school in the U.S. A teacher placed a piece of paper in front of every kid in the class. I looked down and saw that on this sheet of paper, there was a grid, full of little boxes. “This is your timetable,” I remember him saying. “It says where you have to be, and at what time, every day.” I looked at it. It said that on Wednesday at 9 a.m. I would be learning woodwork; at 10 a.m. history; at 11 a.m. geography; and so on. I felt a flush of anger, and looked around me. I thought, Wait, what’s happening here? Who are these people to tell me what I will be doing at 9 a.m. on a Wednesday morning? I haven’t committed any crime. Why am I being treated like a prisoner?
I put up my hand and asked the teacher why I had to do these lessons, and not, say, learn about things I found interesting. “Because you have to,” he said. This didn’t seem to me to be a satisfying answer, so I asked him what he meant. “Because I say so,” he said, flustered. In every lesson after that, I asked why we were learning these things. The answers were always the same: because you’ll have a test on it; because you have to; because I tell you so. After a week, I was told to “shut up and learn.” When I was at home, choosing my own material, I could read for days on end. At school, I could barely read for five minutes. (This was before the notion of ADHD had spread to Britain, so I was not given stimulants, though I suspect that if I was at school today I would be.)
I always loved learning, and I always hated school. For a long time I thought this was a paradox, until I got to know Lenore. Because it consisted mostly of fragmented rote-learning, very little in my education was meaningful to me, and since I was at school twenty-five years ago, education has been stripped of meaning even more. Across most of the Western world, the school system has been radically restructured by politicians to prioritize testing children much more. Almost everything else has been steadily squeezed out—from play, to music, to breaks. There was never a golden age when most schools were progressive, but there has been a swing toward a school system built around a narrow vision of efficiency. In 2002, George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, which massively increased standardized testing across the U.S. In the four years that followed, diagnoses of severe attention problems in children rose by 22 percent.
I thought back over all the factors that I had learned make it possible for kids to develop attention. Our schools allow kids less exercise. They allow kids less play. They create more anxiety, because of the frenzy of tests. They don’t create conditions where kids can find their intrinsic motivations. And for many kids, we don’t give them opportunities to develop mastery—the sense they are good at something. All along, many teachers warned that dragging schools in this direction was a bad idea, but politicians tied financial support for schools to it nonetheless.
I wondered if there was a better way—so I decided to visit places that take a radically different approach to education, to see what I could learn from them. In the late 1960s, a group of Massachusetts parents who were unhappy with their kids’ schooling decided to do something that sounds, at first glance, quite mad. They opened a school that would have no teachers, no classes, no curriculum, no homework, and no tests. One of the founders told me their goal was to create a completely new model, from scratch, of how a school could be. It left out almost everything we think of as schooling. More than fifty years later, I arrived at their creation. It is named Sudbury Valley School, and from the outside, it looks like a raddled Downton Abbey—a big, roomy, old-fashioned mansion, surrounded by woods and barns and creeks. It feels like you are stepping into a clearing in a forest, with the scent of pine trees filling every space you enter.
An eighteen-year-old student named Hannah offered to show me around and explain how the school works. We stood at first by the piano room, with kids milling freely around us, and she explained that before she came here, she went to a standard American high school. “I just dreaded it. I didn’t want to get up. I was so anxious, and then I’d just go to school, and I’d get through it, and then I’d just get home as fast as I could,” she said. “It was really hard for me to have to sit still and learn stuff that I didn’t think was any good to me.” So, she told me, when she arrived here, four years before I met her, “it was shocking.” It was explained to her that there is no structure at Sudbury except for the one you create with your fellow students. There’s no timetable or lessons. You learn what you want. You choose how to spend your time. You can ask the staff—who mill around and talk to the kids—to teach you things if you want, but there’s no pressure to do that.
So, I asked, what do the kids do all day? From age four to eleven, the kids spend most of their time playing extraordinarily elaborate games they have created, which go on for months, and build up into an epic mythology, like a children’s version of Game of Thrones. They have clans and fight goblins and dragons, and in the school’s extensive grounds, they build forts. Waving toward the rocks, Hannah says that through all these games, “I think they’re learning problem-solving, because they’re building these forts, and then there could be a conflict within the group, and they have to figure that out. They’re learning how to be creative and think about things in a different way.”
The older students tend to form groups and ask to learn things together—whether it’s cooking, or pottery, or music. People go on learning jags, she says. “I’ll find this topic that I’m really interested in, and I’ll just latch onto it, and I’ll research it or I’ll read about it for a week or a few days, and then I move on to the next thing…. I’m really interested in medicine, so there’s one specialty of medicine [where] I would read about it intensively and learn everything I could. Then I would go to lizards—lizards are my favorite animal, so I read a lot about lizards. Right now, there’s a bunch of people who have been doing origami all day, which is really cool.” Hannah had been spending the past year teaching herself Hebrew, with the help of a staff member.
The fact that you have to create order for yourself doesn’t mean there’s no order at all, she told me as we walked through the grounds. On the contrary: all the school’s rules are created and voted on by a daily meeting. Anyone can turn up and make a proposal, and anyone can vote on it. Everyone—from a four-year-old to the adult staff—has the same say, a single vote. There’s an elaborate legal code that the school has built up over the years. If you are caught breaking the rules, you get tried by a jury that represents the whole age range of kids at the school, and they decide on the punishment. For example, if you break a tree branch, they might decree that you aren’t allowed on the trees for a few weeks. The school is so democratic that the kids even vote on whether the individual staff members get rehired every year.
We walked through the dance room, the computer room, and past many walls covered with books. At this school, it became clear, kids only do things that are meaningful to them. “I think if you’re not getting to use your imagination and be creative, then it’s really putting you in a box,” Hannah told me. “I don’t feel as much pressure to learn every single fact, and I trust that the main idea or the most important things will just stay in my brain, and not having tests also gives me the freedom to take my time learning things.” Because I—and everyone I know—was raised in such a different system, I found this, at first glance, overwhelmingly weird. Given the freedom to do nothing, wouldn’t most kids go crazy and indulge themselves? There aren’t even formal lessons in reading at Sudbury, though kids can ask the staff, or each other, to show them how reading works. Surely, I thought at first, this produces semiliterates?
I wanted to know what the outcome of this kind of education is, so I went to interview Professor Peter Gray, a research psychologist at Boston College who tracked down the alumni of Sudbury Valley School to see how they turned out. Were they undisciplined wrecks who couldn’t function in the modern world? It turned out that over 50 percent went on to higher education, and almost all of them, he has written, have been “remarkably successful in finding employment that interested them and earned them a living. They had gone on, successfully, to a wide range of occupations, including business, arts, science, medicine, other service professions, and skilled trades.” There have been similar results for other kids like them in other places. Peter’s research found that kids who have been “unschooled” like this were more likely to go on to higher education than other kids.
How can that be? Peter explained to me that in fact for most of human history, children have learned in the way they do at Sudbury. He studied the evidence that’s been gathered about children in hunter-gatherer societies—the way humans lived until, in evolutionary terms, the day before yesterday. At Sudbury, kids will play, mill around, imitate adults, ask lots of questions, and slowly, over time, they become competent, without being formally instructed very much. The anomaly isn’t Sudbury, he explained—it’s the modern school, which was designed very recently, in the 1870s, to train children to sit still, shut up, and do what they are told, to prepare them to work in factories. He told me that children evolved to be curious and to explore their environment. They naturally want to learn, and they’ll do it spontaneously when they can pursue things that seem interesting to them. They learn primarily by playing freely. His research found that Sudbury was particularly effective with kids who had been told that they had learning problems. Of the eleven students he studied who had been judged to have “serious learning difficulties” before they arrived at Sudbury, four went on to receive college degrees and a fifth was enrolled to get one.
These findings are important but need to be handled with a bit of caution. Sudbury Valley charges fees between $7,500 and $10,000 a year—so the parents who send their kids there already have more financial advantages than the rest of the population. That means their kids would already—in any circumstances—be more likely to go on to higher education, and the parents themselves are also quite likely to teach their kids some stuff at home. So the success of the kids at Sudbury Valley can’t be attributed solely to the school.
But Peter argues this model is doing something that does boost real learning, in a way conventional schools don’t. To understand why, he says, we should look at the evidence for what happens when animals are deprived of play. For example, he told me he started to study this subject after he was struck by a typical study—which I later read myself—that compared two groups of rats. The first were prevented from playing with other rats at all. The second were allowed to play with other rats for one hour a day. The scientists then watched as they grew up, to see if there were any differences. By the time they became adults, the play-deprived rats experienced much more fear and anxiety, and they were much less able to deal with unexpected events. The rats who got to play were braver, more likely to explore, and better able to cope with new situations. They tested both sets of rats for their ability to solve new problems—they set it up so that in order to get food, the rats would have to figure out a new sequence. It turned out the rats who had been allowed to play when they were young were significantly smarter.
At Sudbury, Hannah told me that once she was free from the mindless and meaningless grilling of standardized schooling, she found, “I really appreciate education more, and I’m excited to learn, and I want to pursue different things. Since I don’t feel like I’m being forced to, I’m motivated to do that.” This fits with a wider body of scientific evidence—the more something is meaningful, the easier it is to pay attention to and learn, for adults and kids. Standardized schooling too often drains learning of meaning, while progressive schooling tries to infuse it into everything. This is why the best research on this question shows that kids at more progressive schools are more likely to retain what they’ve learned in the long run, more likely to want to carry on learning, and more likely to be able to apply what they’ve learned to new problems. These, it seems to me, are among the most precious forms of attention.
Standing outside Sudbury, Hannah told me she used to long for the school day to end, but now, “I don’t want to go home.” The other kids I spoke with told me they had a similar point of view, before they ran off to join some collective activity with other children. I found it startling to discover that you can throw out almost everything we regard as schooling—all the testing, all the assessments, even formal teaching—and still produce people who can read, write, and function in society. This tells you how much of what we are neurotically putting our kids through is pointless (at best).
Personally, my instinct is that Sudbury goes too far. I went to other progressive schools to see if there’s a way you can mix much greater freedom with some adult guidance. One I particularly liked was in Berlin, named the Evangelische Schule Berlin Zentrum. There, the kids decide collectively on a topic they want to investigate—when I visited, it was whether humans can live in space. Then, for a whole term, half of all their lessons are built around investigating this question—they investigate the physics of how to build rockets, the history of going to the moon, the geography of what would grow on other planets. It builds to a big collective project—they were literally building a rocket in their classroom. In this way, subjects that seem dry and boring when they are broken up and rote-learned were infused for these kids with meaning, and they wanted to know more about them.
Because I had grown up in such a different system, I kept having doubts about these alternatives. But I kept coming back to one key fact: The country that is often judged by international league tables to have the most successful schools in the world, Finland, is closer to these progressive models than anything we would recognize. Their children don’t go to school at all until they are seven years old—before then, they just play. Between the ages of seven and sixteen, kids arrive at school at 9 a.m. and leave at 2 p.m. They are given almost no homework, and they take almost no tests until they graduate from high school. Free play is at the beating heart of Finnish kids’ lives: by law, teachers have to give kids fifteen minutes of free play for every forty-five minutes of instruction. What’s the outcome? Only 0.1 percent of their kids are diagnosed with attention problems, and Finns are among the most literate, numerate, and happy people in the world.
Hannah told me as I was leaving that when she remembers her time at a conventional high school, “I see myself sitting at a desk, and it’s all gray. It’s this weird image.” She told me she worries about her friends still stuck in that system. “They hate it, and I feel bad they don’t have the opportunity to do something else.”
When adults notice that children and teens seem to be struggling to focus and pay attention today, we often say it with a weary and exasperated superiority. The implication is: Look at this degraded younger generation! Aren’t we better than them? Why can’t they be like us? But after learning all this, I think about it very differently. Children have needs—and it’s our job, as adults, to create an environment that meets those needs. In many cases, in this culture, we aren’t meeting those needs. We don’t let them play freely; we imprison them in their homes, with little to do except interact via screens; and our school system largely deadens and bores them. We feed them food that causes energy crashes, contains drug-like additives that can make them hyper, and doesn’t contain the nutrients they need. We expose them to brain-disrupting chemicals in the atmosphere. It’s not a flaw in them that causes children to struggle to pay attention. It’s a flaw in the world we built for them.
Now, when Lenore speaks to parents, she still gets them to talk about the happiest moments in their own childhoods. It’s almost always a moment when they were free—building a fort, walking through the woods with friends, playing out in the street. She says to them: “We’re scrimping and saving to send them to the dance class,” but when it comes down to it, “you’re not giving them the thing you loved the most.” We don’t have to continue like this, she tells them. There’s a different childhood waiting for our kids, if we commit, together, to rebuild it—one where they can learn, like L.B. building his boats, to focus deeply again.