All told, John’s weekdays run to eleven hours of activities. His weekends are crammed with practice and competition. That’s a lot for a nine-year-old who weighs just over seventy pounds soaking wet.
High-achieving children like John fire up the competitive and anxious impulses in my brain. I start to worry: Should I be pushing my own kids more? What if I had introduced sports and music earlier—would they be top performers now?
John’s older sister Lily played varsity tennis, excelled at painting, and graduated from an elite Northern Virginia high school as well as an Ivy League college. She just signed on with a private equity firm. “I told her, you are only rich if you spend less than you’re earning,” said Jennifer, who had only $300 when she came from China to the United States in 1991 for graduate school. “I try to teach her, in addition to being successful in your career, you also have to be wise.”
Jennifer said that John enjoys his activities and usually completes his tasks on time. But the one thing that falls off John’s schedule is playtime. There’s no chance to roam the neighborhood backyards or play a pickup game of catch. “Occasionally we’ll have playdates, but not a lot because his schedule is kind of busy,” she said. “When he goes to swim every day, he has some friends there. He will chat with them, socialize with them, and ‘do business’ with them, he calls it, with the Pokémon cards.”
This keeps my inner tiger mom at bay.
We know that play is important by looking at the animal kingdom. From dolphins to ravens and dogs, animals instinctively play with objects and with each other as part of their healthy development. Indeed, when not eating or sleeping, young mammals are most likely found playing.
Rats and monkeys deprived of play become more aggressive and fearful than their peers. Research with monkeys suggests that young monkeys raised without peer play opportunities can’t interpret other monkeys’ emotional signals and experience difficulty in social situations. By contrast, playful rats show higher levels of a protein that is key to developing neural plasticity—in other words, the ability to learn.
When it comes to young humans, play is just as important—if not more, given how complex our social interactions are. Through play, children learn how to make decisions, solve problems, and control their emotions.
“Young human beings are designed to develop through play. You can list all the aspects—physical, intellectual, emotional—play promotes all of that,” said Peter Gray, professor emeritus at Boston College and the author of Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. “We in our modern society have destroyed the culture of childhood. Children are more or less constantly directed, supervised, and protected by adults. They’re not learning how to plan their own activities. They’re not learning to negotiate with their playmates about rules, because there’s always an adult there to do it for them.”
Gray points to a barrage of evidence that children who have more autonomy and more unsupervised playtime develop better learning skills, more creativity, and a greater sense of responsibility for their own actions. In a 2014 paper, researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder reported that children with more unstructured time displayed better executive function, which is the ability to control their thoughts and behavior to achieve a goal. This is an especially important finding because children with better executive function are more likely to succeed in school and career—and even to become healthier adults—according to decades of longitudinal studies.
Remarkably, executive function is a more important predictor of academic success than intelligence.
The third-graders at Ohio Avenue Elementary School in Columbus love to play “Mrs. Davies Says.” They quickly copy their teacher’s movements as she calls out:
“Mrs. Davies says put your hands on your head!”
“Mrs. Davies says touch your toes!”
“Mrs. Davies says hop on one leg!”
“Keep hopping.”
They sigh, good-naturedly, when they miss a cue and have to sit down. Then they watch with bright eyes, enjoying their classmates’ attempts to resist Mrs. Davies’s trickery.
They don’t realize that this simple game—a rebranded Simon Says—is helping them develop self-control. They must check their impulse to copy their teacher’s visual movements until their brains process her words to determine whether she said, “Mrs. Davies says…” before the command. The more they practice this self-control in play, the better they get at controlling their impulses in other contexts, such as jostling in line or competing for favorite toys at recess.
“The very best prediction of how a child will do in school is whether they can sit still and get along with others,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a Temple University professor and the coauthor of Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children. “They may look like they’re playing, but really they’re developing those skills.”
Another simple way to develop executive function is a drum circle or rhythm game. Children must look at each other and listen to the rhythm, adjusting their own beat to stay in sync with the other players.
“All of these games share that they’re asking you to regulate, to think, to stop before you act. If I can get you to think and stop before you act, I’ve created social regulation,” Hirsh-Pasek said.
Make-believe games involve several important social skills that build children’s self-control. They first must plan their play, by deciding who will be the doggy, the robber, or the teacher. Then they must control their impulses and follow the rules of whatever scenario they’ve devised. The patient in a game of doctor, for instance, must resist the urge to try on the stethoscope. That’s the doctor’s role. Finally, pretend play encourages the development of perspective-taking—the ability to see someone else’s point of view—as children try on different roles. This ability is key to nurturing empathy and guarding against narcissism.
“When I look at play, I don’t see what other people see,” Hirsh-Pasek said. “I put on a different kind of glasses, and those lead me to a suite of skills that are very important for children’s success.”
Sadly, a focus on academics and testing has pushed recess and play out of the school day. From 1981 to 2003, the amount of time school-age children spent playing fell by one-third. The overload of academic work doesn’t end when the school bell rings: children as young as three years old are enrolled in after-school tutoring programs like Junior Kumon and Kaplan, part of a $4 billion tutoring industry.
Many parents have a secret desire to raise superstars like John and Lily Wang, who excel at sports, music, and school and eventually will land top jobs in corporate America. But the research on play and executive function reminds me that these prodigies can’t be created on demand through rigid training schedules—these are children who are naturally gifted and competitive and already inclined to excel early in life. Children develop on their own schedule, and pushing them young risks burning them out. Ultimately, I will measure the success of my own parenting, not by the medals and awards my children win, but by their character, work ethic, and independence.
WHEN CHILDREN SHUTTLE FROM PLAYDATE to soccer practice to home without much say in the daily schedule, they miss out on unstructured, kid-directed play. They rarely get to negotiate with playmates, work out problems, and control their own emotions and responses in order to stay in the game. These are all crucial skills for success in school and life, but kids are hampered from practicing them because there’s always an adult watching, ready to intervene.
My own children attended full-time day care from the time they were five months old until they started kindergarten. They played with other kids in a supervised way, with a teacher always nearby to interrupt rising conflict. By the time they were in first and third grades, they were attending an organized after-school activity every day, partly as enrichment and partly as convenient child care. Around that time, I learned about some of the bene
fits of unstructured play.
So I decided to scale back. Soon my kids had just one or two commitments after school. On other days, they sought out their neighborhood friends, playing in each other’s yards or roaming through our shared backyard woods. Many times they were gone for hours, building forts, or kicking a soccer ball around together. Occasionally a child would return early, upset over a fight with a friend. One time my daughter burst through the door complaining of a torn shirt—the neighbor boy had been too rough tackling her in soccer. She refused to play with him for several days—and I’m guessing he learned a lesson about the importance of self-control while missing his former playmate.
The self-regulation crisis isn’t just an issue for middle- and upper-middle-class families. On the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, children also face rising rates of ADHD and anxiety and other disorders associated with surviving trauma and living in an uncertain environment. Many don’t even have access to a safe playground where they’d develop those important peer interaction and self-regulatory skills. In either setting, children lack opportunities for the exploratory play that develops self-control or the parent-supervised household chores that can give them a real sense of contributing to the family.
Physical trauma, such as abuse, and emotional trauma, such as living with a drug-addicted parent, make children more likely to develop anxiety, depression, and substance abuse in adulthood. Emotionally neglected children are more socially withdrawn, inattentive, and academically underachieving in their elementary school years. In a sense, the United States protects children less than any other major country—corporal punishment is legal, and the United States is the only country that hasn’t ratified the United Nations’ “Convention on the Rights of the Child.”
Is it any wonder that there’s an explosion of teen mental illness and failure to launch among adult children in their midtwenties?
Take nine-year-old Elyse David of Rumson, New Jersey. Since kindergarten, she’s been on the go nonstop. The skinny, brown-haired ball of energy plays soccer, dances, takes gymnastics, acts in plays, takes singing lessons, and participates in Girl Scouts. Her weekly schedule is a checkerboard full of activities and out-of-school commitments.
By third grade, Elyse had been diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety. Her mother, Susan David, felt exhausted just trying to keep up with the tween’s changing moods and perfectionism. Elyse acted as if her life were a precariously balanced stack, and if one thing went wrong—if she missed a step in dance or misplaced her soccer uniform—it would all come tumbling down.
“When she thinks something is going to be too hard, she will avoid it because she doesn’t want to fail,” said David, a self-employed caterer and single mom. “She’s frustrated and sad a lot of the time because she feels she’s letting herself and everybody down. It’s hard to watch your kid be like that.”
But David doesn’t see much of an alternative to her daughter’s packed schedule. Elyse’s classmates and the other kids in the neighborhood are similarly busy with after-school pursuits, so even if Elyse had more free time, she’d have trouble finding playmates.
You can never say conclusively that a child’s anxiety is caused by overscheduling or competitive parenting. Mental and behavioral illnesses develop because of a combination of genetic vulnerability and the environmental conditions the child experiences. That’s one reason siblings raised in the same home can turn out so differently. But the conditions of modern middle-class life can push susceptible children over the edge into a disorder, whereas a few decades ago, they would’ve grown up without any problems. It’s clear the pressure doesn’t help.
By allowing their kids to follow their drive to play, parents may help protect them against developing the kind of anxiety that besets kids like Elyse, Kaya, and London.
Beginning in the early twentieth century, psychologists believed that phobias develop from previous traumatic experiences, perhaps even ones that are poorly remembered. They relied on Ivan Pavlov’s observations of dogs becoming conditioned to associate a ringing bell with receiving food and John B. Watson’s controversial experiments on a child who grew fearful of a white rat once the researchers associated the animal with a loud noise. In the mid-1990s, however, some scientists, including Richie Poulton, a New Zealand clinical psychologist, seriously challenged this conditioning hypothesis.
Poulton directs the Dunedin longitudinal study, one of the most comprehensive and long-running collections of data on individuals’ physical and behavioral health over the life span. The study follows more than 1,000 people born in 1972 and 1973 in Queen Mary Maternity Centre in the Otago region in southeastern New Zealand. Scientists gather answers from individuals (or their parents) at ages three, five, seven, nine, eleven, thirteen, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-six, thirty-two, and thirty-eight. The study is known for its low dropout rate, compared to other longitudinal studies. Poulton and his team work to minimize the inconvenience for participants of being assessed by helping them travel to the university and giving them breaks between the sessions of questions and physiological assessments.
After several researchers found no relationship between early traumas and children’s phobias through parent questionnaires, Poulton grew interested in whether he could ask the question more rigorously through the Dunedin data set. Retrospective studies, in which researchers ask people to recall past episodes, are typically less reliable than an analysis of their answers given at the same time they are experiencing events.
Poulton started digging through his databases. He began with falls, which are the most common accident for young children, whether from playground equipment, a ladder, or another structure. He looked at children who had experienced a fall between ages three and nine that was serious enough to require medical attention. Then he pulled up the list of simple fears at age eleven and again at age eighteen to see whether there was any pattern connecting the children who had a fall with those who developed a phobia about heights.
He discovered a pattern, but not the one that Pavlov and Watson would have predicted. Rather than causing children to become scared of heights later in life, an early fall seemed instead to have protected them from developing such a phobia. The children without a fear of heights were actually more likely to have experienced a fall at an earlier age.
How could this be?
He repeated the study with children who had a water phobia, looking for traumatic experiences with water earlier in life. No relationship. Then he looked at separation anxiety. Again, he found that those children who had experienced separations from their parents early in life were less likely to have separation anxiety at ages eleven or eighteen.
The impulse to shield children from early injuries and scares, rather than exposing them to these experiences, appears to actually contribute to their fears, anxieties, and phobias later in life. Poulton’s research suggests that, within reason, we should let kids naturally experience the consequences of risky play and exploration. That’s how they learn their own limits and develop confidence in themselves.
Unfortunately, over the last sixty years, children’s unsupervised and outdoor playtime has fallen sharply. One report found that the area where children are allowed to roam unsupervised has shrunk by 90 percent since the 1970s. This shift arises not only from overscheduling of academics and extracurriculars but also from parental fears that kids roaming unsupervised might be hurt or even abducted. More significantly, as women flooded into the workforce and divorce rates climbed, the model of a breadwinner father and a stay-at-home mother disintegrated. Now, in the vast majority of households raising children, every adult works for pay. There’s no parent home after school when kids might be playing in the backyard or down the street. Instead, kids go to after-care or day care.
As a working mother myself, I’m not recommending a return to the 1960s model, if such a thing were even possible. But it’s important to recognize the impact of these broad societal changes on our children and to compensate in the
ways we can. That’s why the writer Lenore Skenazy created the “free-range kids” movement to support parents in letting their children walk or bike to school, play unsupervised, and take small steps to becoming more independent. Skenazy burst into the national spotlight when a column about her nine-year-old riding the New York City subway alone came under intense criticism.
When I first started interviewing play researchers and reading up on the benefits of downtime, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. Perhaps I’d ruined my children. After all, they’d been in day care since before they could walk, constantly under the eye of a responsible adult. No wonder they lost sweatshirts and homework sheets! How could they possibly have developed adequate executive function? They had experienced all three of the factors that researchers blame for children’s loss of the ability to self-regulate: the growth of media and technology; a focus on academics and abilities instead of contribution and character; and the decline in both unstructured play and outdoor time.
Faced with the evidence of all the rising maladies and dysfunctions of our modern society, it’s tempting to throw up our hands and despair. But since we can’t go back in time, we must find our way forward. We must accept that the world has been transformed. We no longer live in villages where aunts and grandmothers lend a hand to new parents, or where kids can roam from house to house safely.
Children’s response to discipline has fundamentally changed—forever. We can’t just give up on the tens of millions of kids who misbehave or have anxiety, ADHD, or depression. Obedience is no longer our goal. We must tackle the defining challenge of our era: teaching our children how to self-regulate.
As I learned about the dramatic increases in disorders related to a lack of self-regulation, my kids’ short fuses and uncooperative behavior made more sense. I vowed to rebuild their self-control. But where to start? I needed to understand more about how the brain works, both in a developing child and in the moment when self-control is needed. Next stop: a neuroscience laboratory.
The Good News About Bad Behavior Page 4
