"Play is a powerful way to impart social skills," writes Peter Gray, an evolutionary psychologist who believes children's lives have become ruinously regimented. Until age 7, what children really need is … play. Starting children too early on formal learning, he maintains, can cause "profound damage," including stress and mental-health problems. He and 120 other experts have launched a campaign to get the British government to roll back early education, which begins at 5.
He's a psychologist at Cambridge University who specializes in the early years.
The kids have never learned to stand on their own two feet.Ĭould it be that we are doing them more harm than good?ĭavid Whitebread thinks so. Professors complain that for their male students in particular, 19 is the new 17. Universities report record levels of stress among their students. Once they're on their own, they fall apart. All their lives, somebody else has told them what to do and where to be. By 18, they are seasoned veterans of the programmed life. If they have some athletic talent, their parents will start investing serious time and money in it. In high school, they start building their résumés for university. The children of the upper middle class are busy, busy, busy, with schedules that would rival that of any CEO. They're at Kumon or dance or art, or swimming or tae kwon do.
Instead of pickup street hockey, they're playing organized sports with regularly scheduled practices and games, supervised by grown-ups. In all-day kindergarten or regulated daycare. Where are they? Indoors, doing homework or playing Nintendo. No kids running wild in packs until their moms call them in for supper. But the streets and sidewalks are eerily quiet. The brand-new subdivisions of Toronto roll on and on into the cornfields, a new one every month.
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