For a long as I can remember, I loved to play and wound up studying play in various animals for decades, something I still do. When I first learned of Peter Gray’s work on childhood development with a focus on play, I immediately became a huge fan. He and I have published on a number of similar topics, and among the ones on which we converged, often unknowingly, was the importance of play for youngsters of many species. One example is the importance of the Golden Rule for maintaining a friendly and fair play space.^{1, 2}

For these and many other reasons, I was thrilled to learn about Gray’s highly acclaimed, paradigm-changing new book Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety.

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write Restoring Childhood?

Peter Gray: In early 2024, I was gearing up to write a different book, which would be entitled Play Makes Us Human. That book would be about the role of play in shaping us through our three histories: our evolutionary history, our cultural history, and our individual developmental history. Then, in March of that year, Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, was published.

While I, of course, liked the portion of Haidt’s book aimed at promoting more traditional outdoor freedom and play for children, I was concerned about the portion to which most readers were attending—the portion claiming that modern technology, especially smartphones and social media, was a major cause of the mental health decline among teens beginning around the year 2010. I had been following carefully the research on effects of such technology on teens and could see that Haidt’s book referred only to a very small set of the hundreds of relevant studies and completely ignored the many published reviews and meta-analyses of those studies, which consistently revealed no meaningful relationship between teens’ uses of such technology and their mental health. The book was feeding into what was already something of a moral panic about teens and technology, and I felt a need to bring data and reason to the public concern about this.

MB: How does your book relate to your background and general areas of interest?

PG: I am an evolutionary psychologist. Among the most powerful of the drives aimed at enabling independence is the drive to play. Anthropologists who have studied children in cultures where children have ample time and freedom to play report that children there play at the full range of skills that are crucial for human well-being everywhere and also play at the skills that they can see as critical for well-being in the culture where they are developing.

MB: Who do you hope to reach?

PG: I hope to reach everyone. A message presented most forcefully in the last chapter is that all adults should feel obliged to help create a society conducive to healthy child development. I describe especially the roles of educators, parents, city and town planners, recreation departments, librarians, and pediatricians, but I conclude by asking everyone to think about what they can do to help bring more play and freedom to children’s lives.

MB: What are some of the topics you consider, and what are some of your major messages?

PG: To address this question, I will list the major insights conveyed in the book:

• The fundamental task of childhood is to grow ever more independent of parental (or other adult) care and protection. Current societal practices are hindering, even preventing, children from pursuing that task. This has led to psychological suffering.
• Children need time and space to play, explore, daydream, and find themselves. We are keeping children way too busy with adult-directed activities.
• Children need less forced instruction, less oversight, more trust. All those extra hours of schooling along narrow, curriculum-determined lines are burning kids out, not educating them. Academic instruction to little kids, in preschool and kindergarten, has proven to be especially harmful.
• Children gain courage, agency, social skills, emotional control, and much more through their independent play with other children, away from adult intervention and control. For a satisfying life, these skills are far more important than what is taught in school.
• We need to stop forcing anxiety-inducing competitions onto children, in school and elsewhere. We should encourage cooperation, not competition. Making friends is much more important, for long-term happiness and the benefit of society, than winning.
• We must stop thinking of childhood as a period of résumé building for some future charted by adults and start thinking of it as a period of finding oneself and figuring out how that self fits best into today’s world.
• The parental practices that have come to be labeled “intensive parenting” are harmful to children and parents alike.
• Teenagers need more acceptance into the culture as the apprentice adults they truly, biologically are. We need to stop treating them like infants.
• We need to welcome kids into public spaces rather than discourage them.
• To adapt well in today’s world, children need freedom to play and explore in digital space, just as they need freedom to play and explore in other spaces. The digital world is increasingly an integral part of all aspects of the “real world” in which our children are growing. There is no going back. The popular view that digital activities are more harmful than helpful to children and teens is not supported by science.

MB: How does your book differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?

PG: There is no other book like it. Historians (especially Howard Chudacoff and Steven Mintz) have written about the decline of U.S. children’s freedom to play since about 1960, but nobody has documented, to the extent that I have, the consequence of this decline on children’s well-being.

Also, my book is the first to document the beneficial effects that the computer revolution had on children’s well-being, as it provided new ways for children to play and interact with one another.

MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about the critical importance of “having a proper childhood” for normal development and later life, they will do all they can do to allow kids to be kids?

PG: This book is meant to be a call to action, not just an intellectually interesting exploration of the societal conditions required for healthy child development. At the end, I ask readers to go to my personal website and leave a message stating what they are doing, or gearing up to do, to help “restore childhood.” So, yes, I am hopeful.