Peter Gray is a research professor of psychology at Boston College and author of a textbook on Psychology. He’s written a blog post for Psychology Today called “Freedom to Learn.” The subtitle of the article is “The Dramatic Rise of Anxiety and Depression in Children and Adolescents: Is It Connected to the Decline in Play and Rise in Schooling?”
I recommend spending a few minutes reading the entire article, but here are some excerpts to give you a sense of where he’s going with this:
Today five to eight times as many high school and college students meet the criteria for diagnosis of major depression and/or an anxiety disorder as was true half a century or more ago. This increased psychopathology is not the result of changed diagnostic criteria; it holds even when the measures and criteria are constant.
The increased psychopathology seems to have nothing to do with realistic dangers and uncertainties in the larger world. The changes do not correlate with economic cycles, wars, or any of the other kinds of world events that people often talk about as affecting children’s mental states. Rates of anxiety and depression among children and adolescents were far lower during the Great Depression, during World War II, during the Cold War, and during the turbulent 1960s and early ‘70s than they are today. The changes seem to have much more to do with the way young people view the world than with the way the world actually is.
One thing we know about anxiety and depression is that they correlate significantly with people’s sense of control or lack of control over their own lives. People who believe that they are in charge of their own fate are less likely to become anxious or depressed than are those who believe that they are victims of circumstances beyond their control. … The standard measure of sense of control is a questionnaire, developed by Julien Rotter in the late 1950s, called the Internal-External Locus of Control Scale. … Many studies over the years have shown that people who score toward the Internal end on Rotter’s scale fare better in life than do those who score toward the External end. They are more likely to get good jobs that they enjoy, take care of their health, and play active roles in their communities; and they are less likely to become anxious or depressed.
Twenge’s own theory is that the generational increases in anxiety and depression are related to a shift from “intrinsic” to “extrinsic” goals. Intrinsic goals are those that have to do with one’s own development as a person–such as becoming competent in endeavors of one’s choosing and developing a meaningful philosophy of life. Extrinsic goals, on the other hand, are those that have to do with material rewards and other people’s judgments. They include goals of high income, status, and good looks. Twenge cites evidence that young people today are, on average, more oriented toward extrinsic goals and less oriented toward intrinsic goals than they were in the past. For example, a poll conducted annually of college freshmen shows that most students today list “being well off financially” as more important to them than “developing a meaningful philosophy of life,” while the reverse was true in the 1960s and ’70s.
Twenge suggests that the shift from intrinsic to extrinsic goals represents a general shift toward a culture of materialism, transmitted through television and other media. Young people are exposed from birth on to advertisements and other messages implying that happiness depends on good looks, popularity, and material goods. My guess is that Twenge is at least partly correct on this, but I am going to suggest here a further cause, which I think is even more significant and basic. My hypothesis is that the generational increases in Externality, extrinsic goals, anxiety, and depression are all caused largely by the decline, over that same period, in opportunities for free play and the increased time and weight given to schooling.
…children’s freedom to play and explore on their own, independent of direct adult guidance and direction, has declined greatly in recent decades. Free play and exploration are, historically, the means by which children learn to solve their own problems, control their own lives, develop their own interests, and become competent in pursuit of their own interests. … In fact, play, by definition, is activity controlled and directed by the players; and play, by definition, is directed toward intrinsic rather than extrinsic goals.
By depriving children of opportunities to play on their own, away from direct adult supervision and control, we are depriving them of opportunities to learn how to take control of their own lives. We may think we are protecting them, but in fact we are diminishing their joy, diminishing their sense of self-control, preventing them from discovering and exploring the endeavors they would most love, and increasing the chance that they will suffer from anxiety, depression, and various other mental disorders.
Children today spend more hours per day, days per year, and years of their life in school than ever before. More weight is given to tests and grades than ever before. Outside of school children spend more time than ever before in settings where they are directed, protected, catered to, ranked, judged, and rewarded by adults. In all of these settings adults are in control, not children.
In school, children learn quickly that their own choices of activities and their own judgments of competence don’t count; what matters are the teachers’ choices and judgments. Teachers are not entirely predictable. You may study hard and still get a poor grade, because you didn’t figure out just exactly what the teacher wanted you to study or guess correctly what questions he or she would ask. The goal in class, in the minds of the great majority of students, is not competence but good grades. Given a choice between really learning a subject and getting an A, the great majority of students would, without hesitation, pick the latter. That is true at every stage in the educational process, at least up to the level of graduate school. That’s not the fault of students; that’s our fault. We’ve set it up that way. Our system of constant testing and evaluation in school–which becomes increasingly intense with every passing year–is a system that very clearly substitutes extrinsic rewards and goals for intrinsic ones. It is a system that is almost designed to produce anxiety and depression.
School is also a place where children have little choice about with whom they can associate. They are herded into spaces filled with other children that they did not choose, and they must spend a good portion of each school day in those spaces. In free play, children who feel harassed or bullied can leave the situation and find another group that is more compatible; but in school they cannot. Whether the bullies are other students or teachers (which is all too common), the child usually has no choice but to face those persons day after day. The results are sometimes disastrous.
Anyone who looks honestly at the experiences of students at Sudbury model democratic schools and of unschoolers–where freedom, play, and self-directed exploration prevail–knows that there is another way. We don’t need to drive kids crazy to educate them. Given freedom and opportunity, without coercion, young people educate themselves. They do so joyfully, and in the process they develop intrinsic values, personal self-control, and emotional wellbeing. … It’s time for society to take an honest look.
As Christian parents who care deeply about the development of our children, I think there are important observations to take from this article. On one hand, if we homeschool, we can feel good about rescuing our kids from an environment that may contribute to anxiety and depression. On the other hand, we need to wrestle with how to provide the freedom for our kids to grow in a self-controlled manner while ensuring they are as safe as possible from very real physical and spiritual dangers. My hope and prayer is that Hschooler.net provides an environment that supplements the homeschooling experience with an online environment that is both a fun place to grow and a safe place to be.
