Have American Parents Got It All Backwards

8/13/2019 Have American Parents Got It All Backwards

1/16

Have American Parents Got It All Backwards?Posted: 05/07/2013 10:25 am

Follow

Childhood Obesity , American Parenting , Delayed Gratification , French Parents,International Parenting , Korean Parents , Parenting , Parenting Advice , Parenting Around The World , Parenting

Study , Parenting Styles , Parenting Tips , Moms , Risk-Taking,Self-Control , Parents News

45,321

1,816

0

5,807

1242

GET PARENTS NEWSLETTERS:

Enter emailSUBSCRIBE

The eager new mom offering her insouciant toddler an array of carefully-arranged healthy snacks from an ice cube tray?

That was me.

The always-on-top-of-her-child's-play parent intervening during play dates at the first sign of discord?

That was me too.

We hold some basic truths as self-evident when it comes to good parenting. Our job is to keep our children safe, enable them to fulfill their potential and make sure

they're healthy and happy and thriving.

The parent I used to be and the parent I am now both have the same goal: to raise self-reliant, self-assured, successful children. But 12 years of parenting, over five

years of living on and off in Japan, two years of research, investigative trips to Europe and Asia and dozens of interviews with psychologists, child development

experts, sociologists, educators, administrators and parents in Japan, Korea, China, Finland, Germany, Sweden, France, Spain, Brazil and e lsewhere have taught

me that though parents around the world have the same goals, American parents like me (despite our very best intentions) have gotten it all backwards.

Why?

We need to let 3-year-olds climb trees and 5-year-olds use knives.

Imagine my surprise when I came across a kindergartener in the German forest whittling away on a stick with a penknife. His t eacher, Wolfgang, lightheartedly

dismissed my concern: "No one's ever lost a finger!"

Similarly, Brittany, an American mom, was stunned when she moved her young family to Sweden and saw 3- and 4-year-olds with no adult supervision bicycling

down the street, climbing the roofs of playhouses and scaling tall trees with no adult supervision. The first time she saw a 3-year-old high up in a tree at preschool,

she started searching for the teacher to let her know. Then she saw another parent stop and chat with one of the little tree occupants, completely unfazed. It was

clear that no one but Brittany was concerned.

"I think of myself as an open-minded parent," she confided to me, "and yet here I was, wanting to tell a child to come down from a tree."

Why it's better:Ellen Hansen Sandseter, a Norwegian researcher at Queen Maud University in Norway, has found in her researchthat the relaxed approach to

risk-taking and safety actually keeps our children safer byhoning their judgment about what they're capable of. Children are drawn to the things we parents fear:

high places, water, wandering far away, dangerous sharp tools. Our instinct is to keep them safe by childproofing their lives. But "the most important safety

protection you can give a child," Sandseter explained when we talked, "is to let them take... risks."

Consider the facts to back up her assertion: Sweden, where children are given this kind of ample freedom to explore (while at the same time benefitting from

comprehensive laws that protect their rights and safety), has thelowest rates of child injuryin the world.

Children can go hungry from time-to-time.

In Korea, eating is taught to children as a life skill and as in most cultures, children are taught it is important to wait out their hunger until it is time for the whole

family to sit down together and eat. Koreans do not believe it's healthy to graze or eat alone, and they don't tend to excuse bad behavior (like I do) by blaming it on

low blood sugar. Instead, children are taught that food is best enjoyed as a shared experience. All children eat the same things that adults do, just like they do in

most countries in the world with robust food cultures. (Ever wonder why ethnic restaurants don't have kids' menus?). The result? Korean children are incredible

eaters. They sit down to tables filled with vegetables of all sorts, broiled fish, meats, spicy pickled cabbage and healthy grains and soups at every meal.

Why it's better:In stark contrast to ourgrowing child overweight/obesity levels, South Koreans enjoy thelowest obesity rates in the developed world.A closely

similar-by-body index country in the world is Japan, where parents have a similar approach to food.

Instead of keeping children satisfied, we need to fuel their feelings of frustration.

The French, as well as many others, believe that routinely giving your child a chance to feel frustration gives him a chance to practice the art of waiting and

developing self-control. Gilles, a French father of two young boys, told me that frustrating kids is good for them because it teaches them the value of delaying

gratification and not always expecting (or worse, demanding) that their needs be met right now.

Why it's better:Studiesshow that children who exhibit self-control and the ability to delay gratification enjoygreater future success.Anecdotally, we know that

children who don't think they're the center of the universe are a pleasure to be around. Alice Sedar, Ph.D., a former journalist forLe Figaroand a professor of

French Culture at Northeastern University, agrees. "Living in a group is a skill," she declares, and it's one that the French assiduously cultivate in their kids.

Children should spend less time in school.

Children in Finland go outside to play frequently all day long. "How can you teach when the children are going outside every 45 minutes?" a recent American

Fulbright grant recipient in Finland, who was astonished by how little time the Finns were spending in school, inquired curiously of a teacher at one of the schools

she visited. The teacher in turn was astonished by the question. "I could not teach unless the children went outside every 45 minutes!"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/childhood-obesityhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/american-parentinghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/american-parentinghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/delayed-gratificationhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/delayed-gratificationhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/french-parentshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/french-parentshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/international-parentinghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/international-parentinghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/international-parentinghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/korean-parentshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/korean-parentshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parentinghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parentinghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parenting-advicehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parenting-advicehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parenting-around-the-worldhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parenting-around-the-worldhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parenting-studyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parenting-studyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parenting-studyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parenting-styleshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parenting-styleshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parenting-tipshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parenting-tipshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parents-momshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parents-momshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/risk-takinghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/risk-takinghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/self-controlhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/self-controlhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/self-controlhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/parentshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/parentshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/parentshttp://void%280%29/http://void%280%29/http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/EP092572842.pdfhttp://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/EP092572842.pdfhttp://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/EP092572842.pdfhttp://www.cecde.ie/english/pdf/Vision%20into%20Practice/Sandseter.pdfhttp://www.cecde.ie/english/pdf/Vision%20into%20Practice/Sandseter.pdfhttp://www.cecde.ie/english/pdf/Vision%20into%20Practice/Sandseter.pdfhttp://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/repcard2e.pdfhttp://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/repcard2e.pdfhttp://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/repcard2e.pdfhttp://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/obesity/facts.htmhttp://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/obesity/facts.htmhttp://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/obesity/facts.htmhttp://www.oecd.org/health/49716427.pdfhttp://www.oecd.org/health/49716427.pdfhttp://www.oecd.org/health/49716427.pdfhttp://healthland.time.com/2011/09/06/the-secrets-of-self-control-the-marshmallow-test-40-years-later/http://healthland.time.com/2011/09/06/the-secrets-of-self-control-the-marshmallow-test-40-years-later/http://healthland.time.com/2011/09/06/the-secrets-of-self-control-the-marshmallow-test-40-years-later/http://www.sciencemag.org/content/244/4907/933.abstracthttp://www.sciencemag.org/content/244/4907/933.abstracthttp://www.sciencemag.org/content/244/4907/933.abstracthttp://www.sciencemag.org/content/244/4907/933.abstracthttp://healthland.time.com/2011/09/06/the-secrets-of-self-control-the-marshmallow-test-40-years-later/http://www.oecd.org/health/49716427.pdfhttp://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/obesity/facts.htmhttp://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/repcard2e.pdfhttp://www.cecde.ie/english/pdf/Vision%20into%20Practice/Sandseter.pdfhttp://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/EP092572842.pdfhttp://void%280%29/http://www.huffingtonpost.com/parentshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/self-controlhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/risk-takinghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parents-momshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parenting-tipshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parenting-styleshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parenting-studyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parenting-studyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parenting-around-the-worldhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parenting-advicehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/parentinghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/korean-parentshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/international-parentinghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/french-parentshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/delayed-gratificationhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/american-parentinghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/childhood-obesity


2/16

TheFinnish model of educationincludes a late start to academics (children do not begin any formal academics until they are 7 years old), frequent breaks for

outdoor time, shorter school hours and more variety of classes than in the US. Equity, not high achievement, is the guiding principle of the Finnish education

system.

While we in America preach the mantra of early intervention, shave time off recess to teach more formal academics and cut funding to non-academic subjects like

art and music, Finnish educators emphasize that learning art, music, home economics and life skills is essential.

Why it's better:American school children score in themiddle of the heapon international measures of achievement, especially in science and mathematics.

Finnish children, with their truncated time in school, frequently rank among thebest in the world.

Thou shalt spoil thy baby.

Tomo, a 10-year-old boy in our neighborhood in Japan, was incredibly independent. He had walked to school on his own since he was 6 years old, just like all

Japanese 6-year-olds do. He always took meticulous care of his belongings when he came to visit us, arranging his shoes just so when he took them off, and he

taught my son how to ride the city bus. Tomo was so helpful and responsible that when he'd come over for dinner, he offered to run out to fetch ingredients I

needed, helped make the salad and stir-fried noodles. Yet every night this competent, self-reliant child went home, took his bath and fell asleep next to his aunt,

who was helping raise him.

In Japan, where co-sleeping with babies and kids is common, people are incredulous that there are countries where parents routinely put their newborns to sleep

in a separate room. The Japanese respond to their babies immediately and hold them constantly.

While we think of this as spoiling, the Japanese think that when babies get their needs met and are loved unconditionally as infants, they more easily become

independent and self-assured as they grow.

Why it's better:Meret Keller, a professor at UC Irvine, agrees that there is an intriguing connection between co sleeping and independent behavior. "Many

people throw the word "independence" around without thinking conceptually about what it actually means," she explained.

We're anxious for our babies to become independent and hurry them along, starting with independent sleep, but Keller'sresearchhas found that co-sleeping

children later became more independent and self-reliant than solitary sleepers, dressing themselves or working out problems with their playmates on their own.

Children need to feel obligated.

In America, as our kids become adolescents, we believe it's time to start letting them go and giving them their freedom. We want to help them be out in the world

more and we don't want to burden them with family responsibilities. In China, parents do the opposite: the older children get, the more parents remind them of

their obligations.

Eva Pomerantz of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign has found through multiplestudiesthat in China, the cultural ideal of not letting adolescents go

but of reminding them of their responsibility to the family and the expectation that their hard work in school is one way to pay back a little for all they have

received, helps their motivation and their achievement.

Even more surprising: She's found that the same holds for Western students here in the US: adolescents who feel responsible to their families tend to do better in

school.

The lesson for us:if you want to help your adolescent do well in school make them feel obligated.

I parent differently than I used to. I'm still an American mom -- we struggle with all-day snacking, and the kids could use more practice being patient. But 3-year-

old Anna stands on a stool next to me in the kitchen using a knife to cut apples. I am not even in earshot when 6-year-old Mia scales as high in the beech in our

yard as she feels comfortable. And I trust now that my boys (Daniel, 10, and Benjamin, 12) learn as much out of school as they do in the classroom.

WATCH:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-grossloh/have-american-parents-got-it-all-

backwards_b_3202328.html?utm_hp_ref=fb

&src=sp&comm_ref=falseThe play deficit

Children today are cossetted and pressured in equal measure. Without the freedom to play

they will never grow up

byPeter Gray5,100 words

Read later or Kindle
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.htmlhttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.htmlhttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.htmlhttp://neatoday.org/2010/12/07/pisa2009/http://neatoday.org/2010/12/07/pisa2009/http://neatoday.org/2010/12/07/pisa2009/http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/46581035.pdfhttp://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/46581035.pdfhttp://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/46581035.pdfhttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/icd.523/abstracthttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/icd.523/abstracthttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/icd.523/abstracthttp://news.illinois.edu/news/11/0511children_EvaPomerantz.htmlhttp://news.illinois.edu/news/11/0511children_EvaPomerantz.htmlhttp://news.illinois.edu/news/11/0511children_EvaPomerantz.htmlhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-grossloh/have-american-parents-got-it-all-backwards_b_3202328.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=falsehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-grossloh/have-american-parents-got-it-all-backwards_b_3202328.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=falsehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-grossloh/have-american-parents-got-it-all-backwards_b_3202328.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=falsehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-grossloh/have-american-parents-got-it-all-backwards_b_3202328.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=falsehttp://aeon.co/magazine/author/peter-gray/http://aeon.co/magazine/author/peter-gray/http://aeon.co/magazine/author/peter-gray/http://aeon.co/magazine/author/peter-gray/http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-grossloh/have-american-parents-got-it-all-backwards_b_3202328.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=falsehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-grossloh/have-american-parents-got-it-all-backwards_b_3202328.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=falsehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-grossloh/have-american-parents-got-it-all-backwards_b_3202328.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=falsehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-grossloh/have-american-parents-got-it-all-backwards_b_3202328.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=falsehttp://news.illinois.edu/news/11/0511children_EvaPomerantz.htmlhttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/icd.523/abstracthttp://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/46581035.pdfhttp://neatoday.org/2010/12/07/pisa2009/http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html


3/16

In the country of Le Grandes Meaulnes; children play near the village of Baudrmont, Meuse, France. Photo by AlexWebb/Magnum

Peter Grayis a psychologist and research professor at Boston College. He writes the Freedom to Learn blog, and is the author of Free to Learn (2013)

andPsychology (2011).184

76982

2931

0

When I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations. We had school (which was not the big deal it is today),

and we also had what I call a hunter-gather education. We played in mixed-age neighbourhood groups almost every day after

school, often until dark. We played all weekend and all summer long. We had time to explore in all sorts of ways, and also time

to become bored and figure out how to overcome boredom, time to get into trouble and find our way out of it, time to daydream,

time to immerse ourselves in hobbies, and time to read comics and whatever else we wanted to read rather than the books
http://aeon.co/magazine/author/peter-gray/http://aeon.co/magazine/author/peter-gray/http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/children-today-are-suffering-a-severe-deficit-of-play/#disqus_threadhttp://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/children-today-are-suffering-a-severe-deficit-of-play/#disqus_threadhttp://aeon.co/magazine/author/peter-gray/


4/16

assigned to us. What I learnt in my hunter-gatherer education has been far more valuable to my adult life than what I learnt in

school, and I think others in my age group would say the same if they took time to think about it.

For more than 50 years now, we in the United States have been gradually reducing childrens opportunities to play, and the same

is true in many other countries. In his book Children at Play: An American History(2007), Howard Chudacoff refers to the first

half of the 20th century as the golden age of childrens free play. By about 1900, the need for child labour had declined, so

children had a good deal of free time. But then, beginning around 1960 or a little before, adults began chipping away at thatfreedom by increasing the time that children had to spend at schoolwork and, even more significantly, by reducing childrens

freedom to play on their own, even when they were out of school and not doing homework. Adult-directed sports for children

began to replace pickup games; adult-directed classes out of school began to replace hobbies; and parents fears led them, ever

more, to forbid children from going out to play with other kids, away from home, unsupervised. There are lots of reasons for

these changes but the effect, over the decades, has been a continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in childrens opportunities

to play and explore in their own chosen ways.

Over the same decades that childrens play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing. Its not just that

were seeing disorders that we overlooked before. Clinical questionnaires aimed at assessing anxiety and depression, for

example, have been given in unchanged form to normative groups of schoolchildren in the US ever since the 1950s. Analyses of

the results reveal a continuous, essentially linear, increase in anxiety and depression in young people over the decades, such that

the rates of what today would be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are five to eight times what theywere in the 1950s. Over the same period, the suicide rate for young people aged 15 to 24 has more than doubled, and that for

children under age 15 has quadrupled.

The decline in opportunity to play has also been accompanied by a decline in empathy and a rise in narcissism, both of which

have been assessed since the late 1970s with standard questionnaires given to normative samples of college students. Empathy

refers to the ability and tendency to see from another persons point of view and experience what that person experiences.

Narcissism refers to inflated self-regard, coupled with a lack of concern for others and an inability to connect emotionally with

others. A decline of empathy and a rise in narcissism are exactly what we would expect to see in children who have little

opportunity to play socially. Children cant learn these social skills and values in school, because school is an authoritarian, not a

democratic setting. School fosters competition, not co-operation; and children there are not free to quit when others fail to respect

their needs and wishes.

In my book,Free to Learn(2013), I document these changes, and argue that the rise in mental disorders among children is

largely the result of the decline in childrens freedom. If we love our children and want them to thrive, we must allow them more

time and opportunity to play, not less. Yet policymakers and powerful philanthropists are continuing to push us in the opposite

directiontoward more schooling, more testing, more adult direction of children, and less opportunity for free play.

Irecently took part in a radio debate with a woman representing an organisation called the National Center on Time andLearning, which campaigns for a longer school day and school year for schoolchildren in the US (a recording of the debate can

be foundhere). Her thesisconsistent with her organisations purpose and the urgings of President Barack Obama and the

Education Secretary Arne Duncanwas that children need more time in school than currently required, to prepare them for

todays and tomorrows competitive world. I argued the opposite. The host introduced the debate with the words: Do students

need more time to learn, or do students need more time to play?

Learning versus playing. That dichotomy seems natural to people such as my radio host, my debate opponent, my President, my

Education Secretaryand maybe you. Learning, according to that almost automatic view, is what children do in school and,

maybe, in other adult-directed activities. Playing is, at best, a refreshing break from learning. From that view, summer vacation is

just a long recess, perhaps longer than necessary. But heres an alternative view, which should be obvious but apparently is not:
http://radioboston.wbur.org/2013/06/19/will-a-longer-academic-year-improve-our-schoolshttp://radioboston.wbur.org/2013/06/19/will-a-longer-academic-year-improve-our-schoolshttp://radioboston.wbur.org/2013/06/19/will-a-longer-academic-year-improve-our-schoolshttp://radioboston.wbur.org/2013/06/19/will-a-longer-academic-year-improve-our-schools


5/16

playing is learning. At play, children learn the most important of lifes lessons,the ones that cannot be taught in school. To learn

these lessons well, children need lots of playlots and lots of it, without interference from adults.

Im an evolutionary psychologist, which means Im interested in human nature, its relationship to the nature of other animals, and

how that nature was shaped by natural selection. My special interest is play.

The young of all mammals play. Why? Why do they waste energy and risk life and limb playing, when they could just rest,

tucked away safely in a burrow somewhere? Thats the kind of question that evolutionary psychologists ask. The first person to

address that particular question from a Darwinian, evolutionary perspective was the German philosopher and naturalist Karl

Groos. In a book calledThe Play of Animals(1898), Groos argued that play came about by natural selection as a means to ensure

that animals would practise the skills they need in order to survive and reproduce.

This so-called practice theory of play is well-accepted today by researchers. It explains why young animals play more than

older ones (they have more to learn) and why those animals that depend least on rigid instincts for survival, and most on learning,

play the most. To a considerable degree, you can predict how an animal will play by knowing what skills it must develop in order

to survive and reproduce. Lion cubs and other young predators play at stalking and pouncing or chasing, while zebra colts and

other prey species play at fleeing and dodging.

Do we need more people who are good at memorising answers to questions and feeding them back? Whodutifully do what they are told, no questions asked?

Groos followed The Play of Animalswith a second book, The Play of Man(1901), in which he extended his insights about animal

play to humans. He pointed out that humans, having much more to learn than other species, are the most playful of all animals.

Human children, unlike the young of other species, must learn different skills depending on the culture in which they are

developing. Therefore, he argued, natural selection in humans favoured a strong drive for children to observe the activities of

their elders and incorporate those activities into their play. He suggested that children in every culture, when allowed to play

freely, play not only at the skills that are valuable to people everywhere (such as two-legged walking and running), but also at the

skills that are specific to their culture (such as shooting bows and arrows or herding cattle).

My own research and ideas build on Grooss pioneering work. One branch of that research has been to examine childrens lives

in hunter-gatherer cultures. Prior to the development of agriculture, a mere 10,000 years ago or so, we were all hunter-gatherers.Some groups of people managed to survive as hunter-gatherers into recent times and have been studied by anthropologists. I have

read all the writings I could find on hunter-gatherer childhoods, and a number of years ago I conducted a small survey of 10

anthropologists who, among them, had lived in seven different hunter-gatherer cultures on three different continents.

Hunter-gatherers have nothing akin to school. Adults believe that children learn by observing, exploring, and playing, and so they

afford them unlimited time to do that. In response to my survey question, How much time did children in the culture you

observed have for play?, the anthropologists unanimously said that the children were free to play nearly all of their waking

hours, from the age of about four (when they were deemed responsible enough to go off, away from adults, with an age-mixed

group of children) into their mid- or even late-teenage years (when they would begin, on their own initiatives, to take on some

adult responsibilities). For example, Karen Endicott, who studied the Batek hunter-gatherers of Malaysia, reported: Children

were free to play nearly all the time; no one expected children to do serious work until they were in their late teens.

This is very much in line with Grooss theory about play as practice. The boys played endlessly at tracking and hunting, and both

boys and girls played at finding and digging up edible roots. They played at tree climbing, cooking, building huts, and building

other artefacts crucial to their culture, such as dugout canoes. They played at arguing and debating, sometimes mimicking their

elders or trying to see if they could reason things out better than the adults had the night before around the fire. They playfully

danced the traditional dances of their culture and sang the traditional songs, but they also made up new ones. They made and

played musical instruments similar to those that adults in their group made. Even little children played with dangerous things,

such as knives and fire, and the adults let them do it, because How else will they learn to use these things? They did all this, and

more, not because any adult required or even encouraged them to, but because they wanted to. They did it because it was fun and


6/16

because something deep inside them, the result of aeons of natural selection, urged them to play at culturally appropriate

activities so they would become skilled and knowledgeable adults.

In another branch of my research Ive studied how children learn ata radically alternative school, the Sudbury Valley School, not

far from my home in Massachusetts. Its called a school, but is as different from what we normally think of as school as you can

imagine. The studentswho range in age from four to about 19are free all day to do whatever they want, as long as they

dont break any of the school rules. The rules have nothing to do with learning; they have to do with keeping peace and order.

To most people, this sounds crazy. How can they learn anything? Yet, the school has been in existence for 45 years now and has

many hundreds of graduates, who are doing just fine in the real world, not because their school taught them anything, but because

it allowed them to learn whatever they wanted. And, in line with Grooss theory, what children in our culture want to learn when

they are free turns out to be skills that are valued in our culture and that lead to good jobs and satisfying lives. When they play,

these students learn to read, calculate, and use computers with the same playful passion with which hunter-gatherer kids learn to

hunt and gather. They dont necessarily think of themselves as learning. They think of themselves as just playing, or doing

things, but in the process theyarelearning.

Even more important than specific skills are the attitudes that they learn. They learn to take responsibility for themselves and

their community, and they learn that life is fun, even (maybe especially) when it involves doing things that are difficult. I should

add that this is not an expensive school; it operates on less than half as much, per student, as the local state schools and far lessthan most private schools.

The Sudbury Valley School and a hunter-gatherer band are very different from one another in many ways, but they are similar in

providing what I see as the essential conditions for optimising childrens natural abilities to educate themselves. They share the

social expectation (and reality) that education is childrens responsibility, not something that adults do to them, and they provide

unlimited freedom for children to play, explore, and pursue their own interests. They also provide ample opportunities to play

with the tools of the culture; access to a variety of caring and knowledgeable adults, who are helpers, not judges; and free age-

mixing among children and adolescents (age-mixed play is more conducive to learning than play among those who are all at the

same level). Finally, in both settings, children are immersed in a stable, moral community, so they acquire the values of the

community and a sense of responsibility for others, not just for themselves.

I dont expect to convince most people, any time soon, that we should abolish schoolsas we know them today and replace themwith centres for self-directed play and exploration. But I do think there is a chance of convincing most people that play outside of

school is important. We have already taken too much of that away; we must not take away any more.

President Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, along with other campaigners for more conventionalschooling and more tests, want children to be better prepared for todays and tomorrows world. But what preparation is needed?

Do we need more people who are good at memorising answers to questions and feeding them back? Who dutifully do what they

are told, no questions asked? Schools were designed to teach people to do those things, and they are pretty good at it. Or do we

need more people who ask new questions and find new answers, think critically and creatively, innovate and take initiative, and

know how to learn on the job, under their own steam? I bet Obama and Duncan would agree that all children need these skills

today more than in the past. But schools are terrible at teaching these skills.

For more than two decades now, education leaders in the US, the UK and Australia have been urging us to emulate Asian schools

especially those of Japan, China, and South Korea. Children there spend more time at their studies than US children, and they

score higher on standardised international tests. What US Education Secretary Duncan apparently doesnt realise, or

acknowledge, is that educational leaders in those countries are now increasingly judging their educational system to be a failure.

While their schools have been great at getting students to score well on tests, they have been terrible at producing graduates who

are creative or have a real zest for learning.


7/16

In an article entitled The Test Chinese Schools Still Fail inThe Wall Street Journalin December 2010, Jiang Xueqin, a

prominent Chinese educator, wrote: The failings of a rote-memorisation system are well known: lack of social and practical

skills, absence of self-discipline and imagination, loss of curiosity and passion for learning. One way well know were

succeeding in changing Chinas schools is when those scores [on standardised tests] come down. Meanwhile, Yong Zhao, an

American education professor who grew up in China and specialises in comparing the Chinese educational system with the

system in the US, notes that a common term used in China to refer to graduates isgaofen dineng, meaning high scores but low

ability. Because students spend nearly all their time studying, they have little opportunity to be creative, take initiative, ordevelop physical and social skills: in short, they have little opportunity to play.

Unfortunately, as we move increasingly toward standardised curricula, and as we occupy ever more of our childrens time with

schoolwork, our educational results indeed are becoming more like those of the Asian countries. One line of evidence comes

from the results of a battery of measures of creativitycalled the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)collected

from normative samples of US schoolchildren in kindergarten through to 12th grade (age 17-18) over several decades. Kyung-

Hee Kim, an educational psychologist at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, has analysed those scores and reported

that they began to decline in 1984 or shortly after, and have continued to decline ever since. As Kim puts it in her article The

Creativity Crisis, published in 2011 in theCreativity Research Journal, the data indicate that children have become less

emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less

unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesising, and

less likely to see things from a different angle.

You cant teach creativity; all you can do is let it blossom, and it blossoms in play

According to Kims research, all aspects of creativity have declined, but the biggest decline is in the measure called creative

elaboration, which assesses the ability to take a particular idea and expand on it in an interesting and novel way. Between 1984

and 2008, the average elaboration score on the TTCT, for every grade from kindergarten onwards, fell by more than one standard

deviation. Stated differently, this means that more than 85 per cent of children in 2008 scored lower on this measure than did the

average child in 1984. If education reformers get their way, it will decline further still as children are deprived even more of

play. Other research, by the psychologist Mark Runco and colleagues at the Torrance Creativity Center at the University of

Georgia, shows that scores on the TTCT are the best childhood predictors we have of future real-world achievements. They are

better predictors than IQ, high-school grades, or peer judgments of who will achieve the most.

You cant teach creativity; all you can do is let it blossom. Little children, before they start school, are naturally creative. Our

greatest innovators, the ones we call geniuses, are those who somehow retain that childhood capacity, and build on it, right

through adulthood. Albert Einstein, who apparently hated school, referred to his achievements in theoretical physics and

mathematics as combinatorialplay. A great deal of research has shown that people are most creative when infused by the spirit

of play, when they see themselves as engaged in a task just for fun. As the psychologist Teresa Amabile, professor at Harvard

Business School, has shown in her book Creativity in Context(1996) and in many experiments, the attempt to increase creativity

by rewarding people for it or by putting them into contests to see who is most creative has the opposite effect. Its hard tobe

creative when you are worried about other peoples judgments. In school, childrens activities are constantly being judged.

School is a good place for learning to do just what someone else wants you to do; its a terrible place for practising creativity.

When Chanoff and I studied Sudbury Valley graduates for our paper Democratic Schooling: What Happens to Young People

Who Have Charge of Their Own Education?, we asked about the activities they had played as students and about the careers

they were pursuing since graduation. In many cases, there was a direct relationship between the two. Graduates were continuing

to play the activities they had loved as students, with the same joy, passion, and creativity, but now they were making a living at

it. There were professional musicians who had played intensively with music when they were students, and computer

programmers who had spent most of their time as students playing with computers. One woman, who was the captain of a cruise

ship, had spent much of her time as a student playing on the water, first with toy boats and then with real ones. A man who was a

sought-after machinist and inventor had spent his childhood playfully building things and taking things apart to see how they

worked.


8/16

None of these people would have discovered their passions in a standard school, where extensive, free play does not occur. In a

standard school, everyone has to do the same things as everyone else. Even those who do develop an interest in something taught

in school learn to tame it because, when the bell rings, they have to move on to something else. The curriculum and timetable

constrain them from pursuing any interest in a creative and personally meaningful way. Years ago, children had time outside of

school to pursue interests, but today they are so busy with schoolwork and other adult-directed activities that they rarely have

time and opportunity to discover and immerse themselves deeply in activities they truly enjoy.

To have a happy marriage, or good friends, or helpful work partners, we need to know how to get along with otherpeople: perhaps the most essential skill all children must learn for a satisfying life. In hunter-gatherer bands, at Sudbury Valley

School, and everywhere that children have regular access to other children, most play is social play. Social play is the academy

for learning social skills.

The reason why play is such a powerful way to impart social skills is that it is voluntary. Players are always free to quit, and if

they are unhappy they will quit. Every player knows that, and so the goal, for every player who wants to keep the game going, is

to satisfy his or her own needs and desires while also satisfying those of the other players, so they dont quit. Social playinvolveslots of negotiation and compromise. If bossy Betty tries to make all the rules and tell her playmates what to do without paying

attention to their wishes, her playmates will quit and leave her alone, starting their own game elsewhere. Thats a powerful

incentive for her to pay more attention to them next time. The playmates who quit might have learnt a lesson, too. If they want to

play with Betty, who has some qualities they like, they will have to speak up more clearly next time, to make their desires plain,

so she wont try to run the show and ruin their fun. Tohave fun in social play you have to be assertive but not domineering; thats

true for all of social life.

Watch any group of children in play and you will see lots of negotiation and compromise. Preschoolers playing a game of house

spend more time figuring out how to play than actually playing. Everything has to be negotiatedwho gets to be the mommy

and who has to be the baby, who gets to use which props, and how the drama will unfold. The skilled players use tag questions to

turn their assertions into requests: Lets pretend that the necklace is mine. OK? If its not OK, a discussion ensues.

Were not all equally strong, equally quick-witted, equally healthy; but we are all equally worthy of

respect and of having our needs met

Or watch an age-mixed group of children playing a pickup game of baseball. A pickup game is play, because its directed by

the players themselves, not by outside authorities (coaches and umpires) as a Little League game would be. The players have to

choose sides, negotiate rules to fit the conditions, decide whats fair and foul. They have to co-operate not just with the players on

their team, but also with those on the other team, and they have to be sensitive to the needs and abilities of all the players. Big

Billy might be the best pitcher, but if others want a turn at pitching hed better let them have it, so they dont quit. And when he

pitches to tiny Timmy, who is just learning the game, hed better toss the ball gently, right toward Timmys bat, or even hisown

teammates will call him mean. When he pitches to walloping Wally, however, hed better throw his best stuff, because Wally

would feel insulted by anything less. In the pickup game, keeping the game going and fun for everyone is far more important than

winning.

The golden rule of social play is not Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Rather, its something much more

difficult: Do unto others astheywould have you do unto them. To do that, you have to get into other peoples minds and see

from their points of view. Children practise that all the time in social play. The equality of play is not the equality of sameness.

Rather, it is the equality that comes from respecting individual differences and treating each persons needs and wishes as equally

important. Thats also, I think, the best interpretation of Thomas Jeffersons line that all men are created equal. Were not all

equally strong, equally quick-witted, equally healthy; but we are all equally worthy of respect and of having our needs met.


9/16

I dont want to over-idealise children. Not all children learn these lessons easily; bullies exist. But social play is by far the most

effective venue for learning such lessons, and I suspect that childrens strong drive for such play came about, in evolut ion,

primarily for that purpose. Anthropologists report an almost complete lack of bullying or domineering behaviour in hunter-

gatherer bands. In fact, another label regularly used for such band societies is egalitarian societies. The bands have no chiefs, no

hierarchical structure of authority; they share everything and co-operate intensively in order to survive; and they make decisions

that affect the whole band through long discussions aimed at consensus. A major reason why they are able to do all that, I think,

lies in the extraordinary amount of social play that they enjoy in childhood. The skills and values practised in such play areprecisely those that are essential to life in a hunter-gatherer band. Today you might survive without those skills and values, but, I

think, not happily.

So, play teaches social skills without which life would be miserable. But it also teaches how to manage intense, negative

emotions such as fear and anger. Researchers who study animal play argue that one of plays major purposes is to help the young

learn how to cope emotionally (as well as physically) with emergencies. Juvenile mammals of many species deliberately and

repeatedly put themselves into moderately dangerous, moderately frightening situations in their play. Depending on the species,

they might leap awkwardly into the air making it difficult to land, run along the edges of cliffs, swing from tree branch to tree

branch high enough that a fall would hurt, or play-fight in such a way that they take turns getting into vulnerable positions from

which they must then escape.

Tantrums might work with parents, but they never work with playmates

Human children, when free, do the same thing, which makes their mothers nervous. They are dosing themselves with fear, aimed

at reaching the highest level they can tolerate, and learning to cope with it. Such play must always be self-directed, never forced

or even encouraged by an authority figure. Its cruel to force children to experience fears they arent ready for, as gym teachers

do when they require all children in a class to climb ropes to the rafters or swing from one stand to another. In those cases the

results can be panic, embarrassment, and shame, which reduce rather than increase future tolerance for fear.

Children also experience anger in their play. Anger can arise from an accidental or deliberate push, or a tease, or from failure to

get ones way in a dispute. But children who want to continue playing know they have to control that anger, use it constructively

in self-assertion, and not lash out. Tantrums might work with parents, but they never work with playmates. There is evidence that

the young of other species also learn to regulate their anger and aggressiveness through social play.

In school, and in other settings where adults are in charge, they make decisions for children and solve childrens problems. In

play, children make their own decisions and solve their own problems. In adult-directed settings, children are weak and

vulnerable. In play, they are strong and powerful. The play world is the childs practice world for being an adult. We think of

play as childish, but to the child, play is the experience of being like an adult: being self-controlled and responsible. To the

degree that we take away play, we deprive children of the ability to practise adulthood, and we create people who will go through

life with a sense of dependence and victimisation, a sense that there is some authority out there who is supposed to tell them what

to do and solve their problems. That is not a healthy way to live.

Researchers have developed ways to raise young rats and monkeys in such a way that they experience other forms of social

interaction but not play. The result is that the play-deprived animals are emotionally crippled when tested as young adults. When

placed in a moderately frightening novel environment, they freeze in terror and fail to overcome that fear and explore the novel

area, as a normal rat or monkey would do. When placed with an unfamiliar peer they might cower in fear or lash out with

inappropriate and ineffective aggression, or both.

In recent decades we as a society have been conducting a play-deprivation experiment with our children. Todays children are not

absolutely deprived of play as the rats and monkeys are in the animal experiments, but they are much more deprived than

children were 60 years ago and much, much more than children were in hunter-gatherer societies. The results, I think, are in. Play

deprivation is bad for children. Among other things, it promotes anxiety, depression, suicide, narcissism, and loss of creativity.

Its time to end the experiment.


10/16

Tiger Mom: Some cultural groups

are superiorByMaureen Callahan

January 4, 2014 | 3:17pm

Modal Trigger

"Tiger Mom" Amy Chua is known for claiming that Chinese women make the best mothers, but now she and her husband say that some groups are just plain better thanothers.Photo: ZUMAPRESS.com

Shes doubling down.

Amy Chua, the self-proclaimed Tiger Mom who,in 2011, published a book arguing that Chinese women are superior mothers thus their offspring

superior children has even more to say.

In The Triple Package, Chua and her husband, co -author Jed Rubenfeld, gather some specious stats and anecdotal evidence to argue that some

groups are just superior to others and everyone else is contributing to the downfall of America.
http://nypost.com/2014/01/04/tiger-mom-some-groups-are-just-better-than-others/http://nypost.com/2014/01/04/tiger-mom-some-groups-are-just-better-than-others/http://nypost.com/author/maureen-callahan/http://nypost.com/author/maureen-callahan/http://nypost.com/author/maureen-callahan/http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/tiger-mom-feature.jpghttp://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/tiger-mom-feature.jpghttp://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/tiger-mom-feature.jpghttp://nypost.com/author/maureen-callahan/http://nypost.com/2014/01/04/tiger-mom-some-groups-are-just-better-than-others/http://nypost.com/2014/01/04/tiger-mom-some-groups-are-just-better-than-others/


11/16

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese Chua and the Jewish Rubenfeld belong to two of the eight groups they deem exceptional. In no seeming order of

importance, they are:

Jewish Indian Chinese

Iranian Lebanese-Americans

Nigerians Cuban exiles Mormons

These groups cultural, mind you, never ethnic or racial or religious all possess, in the authors estimation, three qualities that theyve

identified as guarantors of wealth and power: superiority, insecurity and impulse control.

That certain groups do much better in America than others as measured by income, occupational status, test scores and so on is difficult to talk

about, the authors write. In large part, this is because the topic feels so racially charged.

And so begins their cat-and -mouse polemic, in which they claim theyre courageously agitating for a greater good: the revival of America itself as a

Triple Package Culture. Its a series of shock-arguments wrapped in self-help tropes, and its meant to do what racist arguments do: scare people.

Chua, a law professor at Yale, became a media sensation in 2011, when The Wall Street Journal published an extract from her b ook Battle Hymn of the

Tiger Mother. She herself is an American, raised in the Midwest, but she used her heritage and all the worst stereotypes of Chinese women cold,

rigid Dragon Ladies, hostile towards their own children to criticize the Western way of parenting, which she also said would be the downfall of

America.


12/16

Modal Trigger

Chua made waves with Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, but she makes even more outrageous claims in her new book.

Chua wrote about calling one of her two daughters garbage for being rude, dismissing a homemade birthday card as subpar (I dont want this I

want another one), refusing to let her girls watch TV or participate in school plays or have sl eepovers, of threatening to give away a beloved dollhouse

if her daughter couldnt master a complicated classical composition within days.

Her book really can be reduced to a simple argument: Chinese mothers are better than those of any other race, and these parenting methods are going

to result in the Wests big fear the continued rise and ultimate supremacy of China. Chuas book was a best -seller, so its little surprise shes back with

an even more incendiary thesis, one so well timed to deep economic anxiety, to the collective fear that the American middle class is about to disappear,

for good, and the misguided belief that immigration reform will result in even less opportunity for Americans than there is now.

She and Rubenfeld stoke those fears. Although rarely mentioned in media reports, they write, the studies said to show the demise in upward mobility

largely exclude immigrants and their children.
http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/tiger-mom.jpghttp://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/tiger-mom.jpg


13/16

Modal Trigger

Chua with her husband and co -author Jed Rubenfeld pose with their two daughters.Photo: Peter Z. Mahakian

Yet the authors do not mention whether these immigrants are low-wage workers who have a greater chance at upward mobility, and the Pew study they

cite is from 2007 one year before the global financial collapse, resulting in an American economy that may be structurally altered for decades to

come.

All of the groups profiled by Chua and Rubenfeld are d one so only as American immigrants, with the exceptions of M ormons and Jews, who are

superior to Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, atheists and Muslims the latter group, it seems, too controversial to warrant a mention.

On to the distinguishing factors that make these eight groups the best in America:

1. A superiority complexAny group that collectively believes they are inherently better than any other, say the authors, has an advantage. They do no t note that this is perhaps

humanitys oldest and ugliest flaw, the bottom-line cause of wars and genocide. In their estimation, its not nearly common enough in America, where

the Superiority Complex . . . is antithetical to mainstream liberal thinking . . . the stuff of racism, colonialism, imperialism, Nazism. This way of

thinking, they write, has been a big boon to Mormons and Jews, though they also fail to note that believing in the superiority of a belief system is the

driving force behind almost all organized religion. (Except the Amish. The authors freely note that the Amish are losers for this very reason.)

2. InsecurityHere are the authors sounding most like Malcolm Gladwell: Posit something, make a solid case for it, then immediately refute it with equal fervor. The

result: Readers are so confused that they can only conclude that this book is so much smarter than they are.
http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/tiger-mom-insert.jpghttp://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/tiger-mom-insert.jpg


14/16

The authors are very impressed with their boldness in juxtaposing insecurity with superiority. That insecurity should be a critical lever of success is

another anathema, flouting the entire orthodoxy of contemporary popular and therapeutic psychology, they write. In fact, ins ecurity has long been

known as a prime motivator among actors, artists, CEOs, d espots. Imposter syndrome, the term used to describe highly successful individuals who

believe, deep down, they are frauds, was identified back in 1978.

Note that theres a deep tension between insecurity and a superiority complex, the authors continue. Its odd to think of people being simultaneously

insecure but also convinced of their divine election or superiority. Really? Just ask anyone whos ever met a narcissist, or read a profile of A-Rod.

3. Impulse Control

Yet another hallmark of self-help, impulse control is consid ered to be a key factor in personal success the ability to delay instant gratification in the

service of a greater goal. But this isnt really what the authors have in mind: As well use the term, they write, impulse control refers to the ability to

resist temptation, especially the temptation to give up in the face of hardship or quit instead of persevering at a difficult task.

You know whos bad at this? Americans not among their eight groups. Because all three elements ofthe Triple Package run so counter to modern

American culture, it makes sense that Americas successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another, they write. Paradoxically, in modern

America, a group has an edge if it doesnt buy into or hasnt yet bought into mainstream, post-1960s, liberal American principles.

As curious as the groups that Chua and Rubenfeld elevate are the absence of ones they denigrate. Asid e from the Amish (not big book-buyers), the only

other group the authors take aim at are the Appalachian poor, noting, without irony, that its far more socially acceptable today to insult and look down

on white trash than the poor of any other racial group.

Modal Trigger
http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/tiger-mom-romney.jpghttp://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/tiger-mom-romney.jpg


15/16

Even though he lost the election to Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and his family somehow prove the superiority of Mormons.Photo: Getty Images

As for why African-Americans dont make the list, the authors believe that the Civil Rights Movement took away any hope for a superiority narrative,

and so the black community is screwed even as they cite Mitt Romneys loss to Barack Obama as evidence of Mormon ascendancy.

In this paradoxical sense, equality isnt fair to African -Americans, they write. Superiority is the one narrative that America has relentlessly de nied or

ground out of its black population.

Nigerian immigrants, they argue, are bolstered by the belief that they are better than other West Africans much as the Lebanese believe, as

descendants of Phoenicians, that they are superior, or that the Chinese believe that their 5,000-year-old civilization makes them superior. But feeling

superior to other nations, races or religions is nothing more than that a feeling.

The authors have such dubious data getting a statistical fix on Mormon income and wealth is notoriously difficult; hard numbers, however, are

surprisingly hard to come by that they undermine every assertion of so-called cultural supremacy.

Modal Trigger

Chua and her co-author husband Jed Rubenfeld rely on flimsy evidence to make their argument in The Triple Package.

The real story here the less controversial one, the more interesting and possibly instructive one is that historically, immigrant groups tend to

experience upward mobility in America until the third generation, and then, for reasons unknown, tend to level off. Its inte resting, too, that the authors

either dismiss or outright ignore the large swaths of immigrant groups who built up this country the English, Irish, Italians, Germans, Eastern

Europeans. They ignore two very basic explanations for the success of immigrant groups in America: Anyone who leaves their homeland for parts

unknown, no matter how desperate, is, by definition, bold; Americas uniqueness as a nation founded by immigrants.
http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/tiger-mom-triple-package.jpghttp://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/tiger-mom-triple-package.jpg


16/16

Once we were a Triple Package nation, say the authors, but no more. We have been done in by our superiority complex, our poor, Western- style self-

esteem parenting and lack of impulse control.

The question they finally pose Should America be a Triple Package country again? Can it? is followed by a paragraph-long, yes-no-maybe answer

that will give you whiplash.

The real promise of a Triple Package America, they conclude, is the promise of a day when there are no longer any successf ul groups in the United

States only successful individuals.

Today, the demographic predicted to have the greatest impact economically, politically and culturally, by the year 2042, are Hispanics. Just dont tell

the Mormons or the Jews.

Have American Parents Got It All Backwards

Documents

Transcript of Have American Parents Got It All Backwards