Free to Learn Chapter 1. What Have We Done to Childhood?

Author: Peter Gray Publisher: New York, NY: Basic Books. Publish Date: 2013 Review Date: 2022-4-15 Status:⌛️

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many feel burned out by the time they graduate from high school, if not before. Here’s a quotation, clipped from an article in my local newspaper, from an eighteen-year-old high school graduate, who could be Evan seven years older: “I was consumed with doing well and didn’t sleep a lot the last two years. I would have five or six hours of homework almost every night. The last thing I wanted to do was more school.” In the same article, another eighteen-year-old, who had been accepted to Harvard, described his stressful last year of high school. Among other things, he had juggled six Advanced Placement courses while wrestling competitively, playing the viola, and taking classes in Chinese black-and-white portraiture. He, too, felt burned out, in need of at least a year off before going on to college.

Representing the other end of the school-age spectrum, here’s a comment that was posted on a blog I write for Psychology Today magazine: “Here in NYC, the kids start Kindergarten at 4. My best friend’s son started this past September. About 2 weeks into the school year, he was getting letters home from the teacher that he was ‘falling behind academically.’ Since then, he’s gotten letter after letter, and meeting after meeting with the teacher. My friend has been trying to deal with the problem by drilling his son at home in the evenings. The poor kid begs to be allowed to go to bed. The both of them are discouraged and feel like failures.”13 Comments such as these are depressingly easy to find.

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RATES OF STRESS-RELATED MENTAL DISORDERS in young people have skyrocketed over the past fifty years. These increases are not simply the result of greater awareness of such disorders and greater likelihood that they will be detected and treated. They represent real increases in incidences of the disorders. Psychologists and psychiatrists have developed standard questionnaires to assess mental problems and disorders, some of which have been used with large samples of young people for several decades. Therefore, it is possible to look at changes in the rates of certain mental disorders over time using the very same, unchanged measures.

For example, Taylor’s Manifest Anxiety Scale has been used to assess anxiety levels in college students since 1952, and a version of this test for children has been used with elementary school students since 1956. Another questionnaire, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), has been given to college students since 1938, and a version for adolescents (the MMPI-A) has been used with high school students since 1951.

The MMPI and MMPI-A are designed to assess levels of a number of psychological problems and disorders, including depression. All of these questionnaires consist of statements about the self, to which the person must agree or disagree. For example, Taylor’s Manifest Anxiety Scale includes such statements as “I often worry that something bad will happen” and “Most of the time I feel pleasant.” A “yes” to the first statement would add to the anxiety score and a “yes” to the second would subtract from it. An example of a question on the MMPI for which a “yes” adds to the depression score is “The future seems hopeless to me.”

Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University in California, has conducted extensive analyses of changes in young people’s scores on these tests over time. The results are truly disheartening. By these measures, anxiety and depression have increased continuously, linearly, and dramatically in children, adolescents, and college students over the decades since the tests were first developed. In fact, the increases are so great, for both anxiety and depression, that approximately 85 percent of young people today have scores greater than the average for the same age group in the 1950s. Looked at in another way, five to eight times as many young people today have scores above the cutoff for likely diagnosis of a clinically significant anxiety disorder or major depression than fifty or more years ago. These increases are at least as great, if not greater, for elementary and high school students as for college students.14

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Twenge (2000); Twenge et al. (2010).

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Newsom et al. (2003).

An even more sobering index of decline in young people’s mental health is found in suicide rates. Since 1950, the US suicide rate for children under age fifteen has quadrupled, and that for people age fifteen to twenty-four has more than doubled. During this same period, the suicide rate for adults age twenty-five to forty rose only slightly and that for adults over age forty actually declined.17

In work conducted independently of Twenge and her colleagues, psychologist Cassandra Newsom and her colleagues analyzed MMPI and MMPI-A scores collected from adolescents age fourteen to sixteen between 1948 and 1989.15 Their results were comparable to Twenge’s, and their article includes tables showing how the adolescents responded to specific questionnaire items in 1948 and in 1989—years when large normative samples were tested. Here, for illustration, are the results for five items that were among those showing the largest changes.16

1948

1989

“I wake up fresh and rested most mornings.”

74.6%

31.3%

“I work under a great deal of tension.”

16.2%

41.6%

“Life is a strain for me much of the time.”

9.5%

35.0%

“I have certainly had more than my share of things to worry about.”

22.6%

55.2%

“I am afraid of losing my mind.”

4.1%

23.4%

ONE THING WE KNOW for sure about anxiety and depression is that they correlate strongly with people’s sense of control or lack of control over their own lives. Those who believe they are in charge of their own fate are much less likely to become anxious or depressed than are those who believe they are victims of circumstances beyond their control. You might think that the sense of personal control would have increased over the past several decades. Real progress has occurred in our ability to prevent and treat diseases; the old prejudices that limited people’s options because of race, gender, or sexual orientation have diminished; and the average person is wealthier today than in decades past.

the data indicate that young people’s sense of control over their own destinies has declined continuously.

The standard measure of sense of control is a questionnaire called the Internal-External Locus of Control Scale, developed by psychologist Julien Rotter in the late 1950s. The questionnaire consists of twenty-three pairs of statements. One statement in each pair represents belief in an internal locus of control (control by the person) and the other represents belief in an external locus of control (control by circumstances outside of the person). For each pair, the person taking the test must decide which of the two statements is truer. One pair, for example, is the following: (a) I have found that what is going to happen will happen. (b) Trusting to fate has never turned out as well for me as making a decision to take a definite course of action. In this case, choice (a) represents an external locus of control and (b) represents an internal locus of control.

Twenge and her colleagues analyzed the results of many studies that had assessed locus of control with groups of college students and of children (age nine to fourteen) from 1960 through 2002. They found for both age groups that over this period, average scores shifted dramatically, away from the internal toward the external end of the scale, so much so, in fact, that the average young person in 2002 was more external (more prone to claim lack of personal control) than were 80 percent of young people in the 1960s. The rise in externality over this forty-two-year period showed the same linear trend as did the rise in depression and anxiety.18

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Twenge et al. (2004). In these studies Rotter’s Locus of Control Scale was used with college students and the Nowicki-Stricklund Locus of Control Scale for Children was used for the nine- to fourteen-year-old children.

There is good reason to believe that the rise of external locus of control is causally linked to the rise in anxiety and depression. Clinical researchers have shown repeatedly, with children and adolescents as well as with adults, that the helpless feelings associated with an external locus of control predispose people to anxiety and depression.19 When people believe they have little or no control over their fate, they become anxious. “Something terrible can happen to me at any time and I will be unable to do anything about it.” When the anxiety and sense of helplessness become too great, people become depressed. “There is no use trying; I’m doomed.” Research has also shown that those with an external locus of control are less likely to take responsibility for their own health, their own futures, and their communities than are those with an internal locus.20

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For evidence of a causal link between a helpless style of thinking and depression, see Abramson et al. (1989); Alloy et al. (2006); Weems & Silverman (2006); Harrow et al. (2009).

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References in Twenge et al. (2004); Reich et al. (1997).

As any good scientist will tell you, correlation does not prove causation. The observation that anxiety, depression, sense of helplessness, and various other disorders have all increased in young people as play has declined does not by itself prove that the latter causes the former. However, a strong logical case can be built for such causation.

Free play is nature’s means of teaching children that they are not helpless. In play, away from adults, children really do have control and can practice asserting it. In free play, children learn to make their own decisions, solve their own problems, create and abide by rules, and get along with others as equals rather than as obedient or rebellious subordinates. In vigorous outdoor play, children deliberately dose themselves with moderate amounts of fear—as they swing, slide, or twirl on playground equipment, climb on monkey bars or trees, or skateboard down banisters—and they thereby learn how to control not only their bodies, but also their fear. In social play children learn how to negotiate with others, how to please others, and how to modulate and overcome the anger that can arise from conflicts. Free play is also nature’s means of helping children discover what they love. In their play children try out many activities and discover where their talents and predilections lie. None of these lessons can be taught through verbal means; they can be learned only through experience, which free play provides. The predominant emotions of play are interest and joy.

In school, in contrast, children cannot make their own decisions; their job is to do as they are told. In school, children learn that what matters are test scores. Even outside of school, children spend increasing amounts of their time in settings where they are directed, protected, catered to, ranked, judged, criticized, praised, and rewarded by adults. In a series of research studies conducted in wealthy suburban neighborhoods in the northeastern United States, psychologist Suniya Luthar and her colleagues found that those children who felt most pressured by their parents to achieve in school and were most frequently shuttled from one extracurricular activity to another were the most likely to feel anxious or depressed.21 Every time we reduce children’s opportunities for free play by increasing their time at school or at other adult-directed activities, we reduce further their opportunities to learn to control their own lives, to learn that they are not simply victims of circumstances and powerful others.

A few years ago, research psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jeremy Hunter conducted a study of happiness and unhappiness in public school students, in 6th through 12th grades. More than 800 participants, from 33 different schools in 12 different communities across the country, wore special wristwatches for a week, which were programmed to provide signals at random times between 7:30 A.M. and 10:30 P.M. Whenever the signal went off participants filled out a questionnaire indicating where they were, what they were doing, and how happy or unhappy they were at the moment. The lowest levels of happiness, by far, occurred when children were at school, and the highest levels occurred when they were out of school and conversing or playing with friends. Time spent with parents fell in the middle of the happiness-unhappiness range. Average happiness increased on weekends, but then plummeted from late Sunday afternoon through the evening, in anticipation of the coming school week.22 How did we come to the conclusion that the best way to educate students is to force them into a setting where they are bored, unhappy, and anxious?

Notes

Amount: 10

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