Understanding Child Development

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Anthropologists have observed that youngsters play at the skills critical for well-being in their own culture.

The fundamental task of childhood is to grow ever more independent of adult care and protection.

Gray documents possible beneficial effects of screen time as it provides new ways for children to play.

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........

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