The Essential Benefits of Free Play
By Peter Gray
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Educators in the United States and many other developed
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countries have had a very schoolish attitude toward
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children. (I chose that term deliberately because it rhymes
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with foolish.) We believe implicitly if not explicitly that
children develop best when they are continuously guided,
directed, taught, monitored, and evaluated by adults. This has led to a big increase in the time
children spend in school (and doing homework after school); an even bigger increase in the time
they spend under adult direction outside school (organized sports, classes, and the like); and a
drastic reduction in their opportunities to play freely, away from adults, in their own self-created
ways.
These changes have taken place gradually over sixty years, so many people aren’t aware of the
dramatic cumulative effect. When I was a child in the 1950s, the U.S. school year was five
weeks shorter than it is today. The elementary school day was six hours long, but typically only
four of those hours were spent in the classroom. Many schools had half-hour outdoor recesses
in the morning and afternoon and a full hour for lunch, so children were generally in the
classroom for only an hour at a stretch. Homework for elementary students was almost unheard
of. When not in school—late afternoons and evenings, all day on weekends, and all summer
long—children played, often with no adults in sight. If they wanted to go somewhere, they
walked or rode their bikes.
Children, by nature, learn through self-directed play and exploration. In play they practice the
physical, social, emotional, and intellectual skills essential to healthy development. By
observing, exploring, and questioning they acquire an enormous amount of knowledge about
their physical and social world. Think how much little children learn before anyone tries to teach
them anything in any systematic way! This innate drive to learn does not turn itself off at age five
or six or thirteen. We turn it off by depriving children of freedom and convincing them, in and out
of school, that their own questions and quests don’t count.
Our schoolish attitude has had tragic consequences. Over the same sixty-year period that
children’s freedom has continuously declined, we’ve seen a continuous increase in mental
disorders in children, adolescents, and young adults. Analyses of standard clinical
questionnaires, given unchanged to normative groups over the decades, show that rates of
major depression and anxiety disorders among young people are now five to eight times what
they were in the 1950s. The suicide rate among children under age fifteen is four times what it
was in the 1950s. Researchers have also documented a rise in narcissism, a decline in
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empathy, a decline in creative thinking, and a decline in a sense of control over one’s own life
among young people. These are all effects researchers expect when children are deprived of
play.
When children play together with no adult directing or intervening, they must figure out
themselves what and how to play. They must agree on the rules, negotiate differences, and
solve their own problems. A fundamental freedom in play is the freedom to quit. Knowing
anyone may quit at any time forces children who play together to attend to one another’s needs.
If Billy tries to dominate in ways that others don’t like, the others will quit and leave Billy alone—
a powerful lesson that may lead him to be more attuned to others’ needs and desires next time.
You can’t be a self-centered narcissist in play. Your parents may treat you as if you are the
center of the universe, but your playmates won’t.
Play always involves rules; it is never random. Even rough-and-tumble play-fighting, which looks
wild, is guided by rules. You can’t kick, bite, scratch, or hurt the other person; if you are the
stronger, you handicap yourself in some way to keep it fun for your playmates as well as
yourself. Play is always an exercise in self-control, motivated by the desire to continue playing.
You must follow the rules and control your impulses and emotions to keep the game going. You
must control your anger, because a fight or tantrum will terminate play. A tantrum might work
with parents, but never with playmates. You learn to modulate your anger and use it
constructively—to assert your needs and demand your rights—if you want to continue playing.
Play is also how children learn to manage fear. Children everywhere, when free, play in
moderately risky ways. Depending on the culture and the artifacts available, they may climb
high up in trees, swing high in swings, dive off cliffs, skateboard down banisters, or explore new
and possibly dangerous territory. Young mammals of other species also engage in risky play.
Why? Why hasn’t natural selection weeded out the desire for such play? Apparently, the
survival advantages of risky play outweigh the risks. Children and other young mammals in play
challenge their own ability to manage fear. They climb just high enough or skateboard just fast
enough to experience fear without panic. All of us at times experience emergencies in which the
capacity to keep our head and control our body may save our or others’ lives. In risky play,
children and other young mammals practice that ability.
Children in play also regularly exercise their imagination and creativity. They create with
whatever materials and tools are available—mud, sand, blocks, crayons, computers, or purely in
their heads with imagination alone. Imagination lies at the core of all higher-order human
thinking. The ability to think abstractly is the ability to think about things not immediately in front
of us, and that always involves the imagination. Imagination underlies the scientist’s ability to
develop hypotheses, the architect’s ability to design a new house, and the ability of all of us to
anticipate and prepare for what might happen tomorrow.
We act today as if the most difficult things for children to learn are reading, writing, and
arithmetic. In fact, these are easy to learn when children want to learn them. The skills that are
hard to learn, and far more important, are how to get along well with other people, how to
control our own emotions and behavior, and how to think creatively yet logically. These are skills
that cannot be taught but are practiced regularly by children in play.
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Educators, if we truly want to serve children’s needs, must strive to decrease, not increase, the
schoolish attitude. Children need more freedom and opportunity to play, not more lessons, and
teachers can be powerful advocates for this, both in and out of school. We need to restore
recesses, but, even more, we need to help communities create safe places for children to
gather and play without adult interference. Schools can become play centers after school.
Educators can help create environments that optimize children’s abilities to learn through selfdirected activities.
Children learn best when they can play and explore with other children in mixed-age groups
(younger children acquire more advanced skills and ways of thinking by observing and
interacting with older ones, and older children acquire nurturing skills by interacting with younger
ones) in settings where they have access to tools that are valuable to the culture and experts
(including other children) who can give help when asked but who don’t offer unsolicited advice
or judgment. In some of my research I’ve observed that teenagers who have the opportunity to
interact regularly with much younger children retain their own playfulness, curiosity, and
creativity, and build on these attributes in ways other teens in our culture rarely do. The agesegregated environment of schools is an unnatural one for normal development; we need to find
ways to bring children of various ages to together, at least when they are not in school.
Sometimes educators think of play as the province of only young children, but we all learn
through play, regardless of our age, if we allow ourselves to do so.
Note:
Peter Gray is a research professor of psychology at Boston College. He is author of Free to
Learn: Why Releasing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant,
and Better Students for Life (Basic Books, 2013). Documentation of claims made in this essay
can be found in that book and/or in “The Decline of Play and the Rise of Psychopathology in
Childhood and Adolescence,” American Journal of Play 3, 443–63 (2011) and “The Special
Value of Age-Mixed Play,” American Journal of Play 3, 500–522 (2011).
Peter Gray, research professor of psychology at Boston College, has conducted
and published research in neuroendocrinology, animal behavior, developmental psychology,
anthropology, and education. His most recent book is Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the
Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life
(Basic Books, 2013).
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