There are moments when I’m blown away by what is deemed an experiment on kids and what is accepted as business as usual.
Any school or teacher trying to bring play into the learning experience will have met with resistance, perhaps outrage — How dare you experiment with my child! And yet, the actual experiment in this context is the increasing regimentation and oversight of childhood and the resulting decline in play.
The results of this experiment are in, and they’re numerous and conclusive.1 In reducing play we are robbing our kids of what they need to grow as healthy people. We see the symptoms and talk about them all the time. I hear adults bemoaning that kids these days aren’t resilient, motivated, curious, persistent, adaptable; that instead they are apathetic, depressed, unsocial, unable to focus.
What will it take for us to join the dots?
And I also think of how normal it is now for kids, even young ones, to have their own devices, and how that inevitably comes with social media accounts. We are conducting an experiment on the nature of childhood, but no one seems to recognise it as such.2 — It seems to be accepted as business as usual, a natural evolution.
Once again, the results are in, and they’re conclusive. Social media use DOES cause mental illness. And let’s not fool ourselves - if a kid has their own device, they will have a social media account, which will pull them in multiple times a day, distracting them, isolating them, and psychologically removing them from their physical place.
When we look at these two experiments together, what do we see? — A rejection of the good thing for kids and the acceptance of the harmful thing.
The takeaway is clear. If we want our schools to be places of learning, they need to be places where play is encouraged and device use is minimised. If you’re not prepared to do that, at least be honest about what you’re about, because it’s not learning and healthy human development.
eg, from the abstract of Yogman, M., Garner, A., Hutchinson, J., … Smith, J. (2018)
“Play is not frivolous: it enhances brain structure and function and promotes executive function (ie, the process of learning, rather than the content), which allow us to pursue goals and ignore distractions.
When play and safe, stable, nurturing relationships are missing in a child’s life, toxic stress can disrupt the development of executive function and the learning of prosocial behavior”
Jon Haidt expresses this well, describing the experiment in this post as being
“the transition from a play-based childhood involving a lot of risky unsupervised play, which is essential for overcoming fear and fragility, to a phone-based childhood which blocks normal human development by taking time away from sleep, play, and in-person socializing, as well as causing addiction and drowning kids in social comparisons they can’t win.”