I’m not much of a moralist. I often have “extreme” positions and very “radical” and out of the ordinary principles but this isn’t rooted in a traditional moral outlook. Here is an example of that …

If the world is abusive, you are probably a negligent parent by not abusing your child. As a huge advocate for children, gentle parenting, unschooling, etc. that would seem like a crazy position, but roll with me for a minute.

In a tough world of murder and violence, the people who thrive are the people who have normalized conditions and know how to navigate the waters. Evolutionarily, we don’t have free association and we don’t get to choose. Children are best served for existence by having parents who reflect the conditions of reality.

The main reason I am a gentle parent, unschooler and advocate for children is because of free association. This is something that is a modern invention. I want my children to normalize the tools afforded to individuals by having access to billions of options. I also want my children to normalize respect, kindness, individual responsibility, and a whole myriad of other attributes that I believe maximize happiness and success in today’s world.

If you abuse your children, punish them, and take out your frustrations on them, they will normalize that behavior, and when they are sifting through their options of jobs, friends, relationships, etc. they will have a very low bar of expectations. They will let life guide their options rather than taking advantage of great opportunities and escaping shitty circumstances. People are wonderful and horrible. Jobs are rewarding and miserable. Treat your children like they deserve great things in life and they will be vastly more likely to search for it.

The one thing that has really taken my relationship with my children to a more peaceful and prosperous level, is the commitment I’ve made to giving them what is theirs by virtue of their humanity, the right to do whatever they want, albeit with a few caveats. Let me explain.

Radical Unschooling

We began unschooling seven years ago (2011). What is that? Unschooling is the education philosophy that says that children learn best through play and by following their own interests and passions. Quite the opposite of schooling, hence the name. I discovered unschooling while researching homeschooling options after I became unconvinced that government schools were in any way good or helpful to the development of young minds. I shiver these days when I see hordes of the next generation marching toward school. When my son made his decision to stay home, I was relieved, excited, and envious (my schooled inner-child). But I also lamented the commitment that unschooling would require of me, that is, the presence, the helpfulness, the patience, the creativity, and the drive that had theretofore been weaknesses of mine.

Whatever They Want

Seven years later, I’m better at all of those things (not perfect, mind you), and it’s because I’ve realized that, yes, our children should be allowed to do whatever they want, and here’s the unless, 1) they’ll unintentionally hurt themselves, 2) they’ll hurt someone else, and 3) they’ll violate someone else’s property rights. But that’s it. If they want to play video games or watch TV all day, eat ice cream for breakfast, stay up all night, roll around in the dirt, whatever, they have every right to do so.

What the Crazy?!

Now, I know what some are probably thinking that I’m a nut job. That allowing my kids these liberties will produce entitlement, sloth, deviance, and a host of other vicious and undesirable traits for people in society to have. But here’s the thing, so far, it’s only brought peace, prosperity, learning, and growth (for them and me). And not just in my home. I’ve met or read about countless fellow unschoolers, from kids to adults, who were likewise allowed to do whatever they want, and also became happy, productive members of society. Actually, with their penchant for entrepreneurship and creativity, I consider them the best kind of members that society can have. Also, consider our evolution as a species. Biologically, including our brains, we’re still hunter-gatherers, whose children do whatever they want, all day long, all year long, for their entire childhood and young adult life. In other words, we’ve been programmed by evolution to learn best through free play. And that’s exactly what my children enjoy.

My Role

In a word, partnership. That’s the role played by every unschooling parent, to be their child’s partner through the business of life. I’m not their ruler nor their master. I’m their partner. Once I accepted that role, I thought about what a partner is. A partner is not there to tell you what to do or to judge you, but instead to help you see clearly the path before you, to assist you, to keep you from unintentionally hurting yourself by making interests and passions safe, to offer insight and wisdom, and just as importantly, to let you fail when you insist on doing something that they might see as foolish, but harmless. There’s something to learn in everything we do, win or fail, and a partner opens up the way before you and stands by your side as you make the journey. That’s my role as an unschooling parent.

Final Thoughts

As I mentioned, I’ve yet to overcome my weaknesses and still do the unhelpful and impatient things that I lament doing. My kids are young and this lifestyle is still new to me. But I’m getting better. My relationships with my children are the best they’ve ever been. They each scream my name and run into my arms the moment I arrive home from work. That’s my measurement. If they ever stop, I’ll now that I’m starting to fail. And now we have another little one arriving shortly. Yes, my kids are allowed to do whatever they want, and my highest valued work is helping them do it.

The word “addiction” is sorely overused in our society. Any time someone spends an inordinate amount of time on something, those who are annoyed by it will call it an “addiction” and proceed to, in one way or another, shame the person. This seems foolish.

I believe that addiction is a real thing, that people can form physical or mental dependencies on particular substances or activities, the removal which can cause adverse effects. But it doesn’t follow that every time someone is into something, they are addicted. Here’s a better non-stigmatizing word to use: fascination.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, not because I am addicted to podcast listening, but because so many podcasts are fascinating to me, and I have time to listen. (I used to read a lot more than I do now, also.) My son plays a lot of video games, not because he is addicted to video gaming, but because so many video games are fascinating to him, and he has time to play them. My daughter makes a lot of YouTube videos, not because she is addicted to producing videos, but because producing videos fascinates her, and she has time to do it.

Before disrespecting people’s fascinations by labeling them an addiction, determine whether they are just something that fascinates them more than whatever else they could be spending their time doing. I don’t think that the problem of addiction should be considered unless this fascination is having the effect of causing the person to shirk legitimate responsibility, leading toward self-destruction.

There are so many fascinating things in this world. When a person has the time and resources to devote to them, that can be a very beautiful thing. Imagine if the world’s greatest inventors, philosophers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and artists, in every field, were shamed as having an addiction to their craft. Sometimes we let our preferences about how other people should spend their time blind us to the wonder that they are engaged with.

Many times quitting is the best option. In fact, the vast majority of the time it is the best option.

I have quit on every romantic relationship I have ever been in, except for one. I have quit every perspective profession I have ever been in, except for one. I have quit most of my friendships, I have quit most of my hobbies, I have quit many endeavors, I have quit most things in my life.

Intelligent people don’t indiscriminately plow through hard things. They find the projects, subjects, books, professions, ideas, and people that make them feel passionate and they deeply desire to progress, work and excel within these endeavors.

I am a highly trained artist who can sing opera, play piano, write music, play brass instruments, teach acting, and many other things. I was incredibly passionate about about these subjects for many years. I don’t have musicians as parents. I didn’t have pushy teachers. I sat down and taught myself piano, and I spent my free time learning and studying music and performing arts.

Today, I own a pest control company. Today, music is a side hobby. I quit the trajectory I once was on. Now I am passionate about family, business and philosophy. Today I am happy to work hard in these endeavors without anyone pushing me to take the hard route.

I want my children to know themselves and discover their interests and values. I don’t think forcing them to learn physics makes them better people (by the way, I loved physics and math when I was in school, but forgot most everything beyond algebra as an adult).

There is an absolutely horrible idea that is extremely popular in raising, teaching and generally working with children … encouragement. I know it sounds kind of shocking, but roll with me for a minute.

Kids are exploring who they are, what they are good at, what interests them, and a myriad of other concepts related to their goals and self-identity. This exploration is subtly negotiating the desires and skills of a child with the realities of the environment (people, markets, physics, etc). When left unimpeded, some interests will grow, some will wane, and all sorts of various subtle variations. The child might see an economic reality that shifts their desired profession, or they might lose interest in a hobby they aren’t adequately able to express themselves with to their desire. A child’s interests are a constantly evolving ecosystem.

In our society, we commonly and appropriately demonize discouragement because we see it as someone interjecting themselves into this exploration. Discouragement is a tool to distort the exploration of a child in favor of the insecurities and self-interest of the discourager. It is a means of the adult trying to live through their child. Discouragement is someone trying to tip and distort the scales within the ecosystem of a child’s discovery process.

The last paragraph also perfectly describes the problems of encouragement. You are just tipping the scales on another direction, but you are still applying pressures that a child now needs to also consider. An interest that was once waning, they might feel compelled to continue because of their parents investment. The encouragement provides the same emotional pressures, but in the opposite direction. Sure, in the moment, discouragement is much more harsh and feels worse … but in both scenarios you are providing the equivalent scale tipping and ecosystem distortions.

As added downside to discouragement we get insecurity, and as an added downside to encouragement we get delusional self-image (the first several episodes of any season of American Idol gives you a good image of that). Yes, the immediate feelings of discouragement hurt more, but they are equivalent distortions in the long run.

What runs through people’s minds when I’ve said this is “so I am supposed to be indifferent to my child’s activities and not say anything? That seems horrible.”

In some ways I suggest people to be indifferent. Be indifferent to their destination and dispassionately let them discover who they are. However, enjoy whatever you desire to enjoy and openly express this.

“I loved going to your concert” and “I think you have a beautiful voice” is different than saying “you should try out for this,” or “you can be famous.”

If my daughter asks me if she should play professional women’s soccer, I will say this … “I have no idea. While you seem skilled at this level, I’m not sure what your desires will be in the future, I’m not sure how your skills will develop, I’m not sure of almost anything in this realm to give you an informed opinion … and no one else is either. However, I enjoy going to your soccer matches, and if you continue to enjoy it, it might be something worth your time. That’s up to you.“

Kids can’t do anything they set their minds to. That’s a dangerous lie that promotes delusional behavior and ultimately leads to an extreme cynical view of reality.

While writing this I thought of a musical that had two very powerful songs that represent both sides of the coin in encouragement. From In The Heights, by the same guy who wrote the musical Hamilton (Lin Manuel Miranda) the song “Inutil” has a father who is incredibly discouraging ( and abusive). Eventually the kid grows up to be very encouraging of his daughter … this is to the point that when she drops out of school she feels suffocated by the shame she feels … in the song “Breathe.” I doubt Miranda had the same philosophy I have on the matter, but the music he wrote reflects the realities and downsides of both encouragement and discouragement.

Almost every child, on the first day he sets foot in a school building, is smarter, more curious, less afraid of what he doesn’t know, better at finding and figuring things out, and more confident, resourceful, persistent and independent than he will ever be again in his schooling – or, unless he is very unusual and very lucky, for the rest of his life. Already, by paying close attention to and interacting with the world and people around him, and without any school-type formal instruction, he has done a task far more difficult, complicated and abstract than anything he will be asked to do in school, or than any of his teachers has done for years. He has solved the mystery of language. He has discovered it – babies don’t even know that language exists – and he has found out how it works and learned to use it. He has done it by exploring, by experimenting, by developing his own model of the grammar of language, by trying it out and seeing whether it works, by gradually changing it and refining it until it does work. And while he has been doing this, he has been learning other things as well, including many of the “concepts” that the schools think only they can teach him, and many that are more complicated than the ones they do try to teach him.

In he comes, this curious, patient, determined, energetic, skillful learner. We sit him down at a desk, and what do we teach him? Many things. First, that learning is separate from living. “You come to school to learn,” we tell him, as if the child hadn’t been learning before, as if living were out there and learning were in here, and there were no connection between the two. Secondly, that he cannot be trusted to learn and is no good at it. Everything we teach about reading, a task far simpler than many that the child has already mastered, says to him, “If we don’t make you read, you won’t, and if you don’t do it exactly the way we tell you, you can’t”. In short, he comes to feel that learning is a passive process, something that someone else does to you, instead of something you do for yourself.

In a great many other ways he learns that he is worthless, untrustworthy, fit only to take other people’s orders, a blank sheet for other people to write on. Oh, we make a lot of nice noises in school about respect for the child and individual differences, and the like. But our acts, as opposed to our talk, says to the child, “Your experience, your concerns, your curiosities, your needs, what you know, what you want, what you wonder about, what you hope for, what you fear, what you like and dislike, what you are good at or not so good at – all this is of not the slightest importance, it counts for nothing. What counts here, and the only thing that counts, is what we know, what we think is important, what we want you to do, think and be.” The child soon learns not to ask questions – the teacher isn’t there to satisfy his curiosity. Having learned to hide his curiosity, he later learns to be ashamed of it. Given no chance to find out who he is – and to develop that person, whoever it is – he soon comes to accept the adults’ evaluation of him.

He learns many other things. He learns that to be wrong, uncertain, confused, is a crime. Right answers are what the school wants, and he learns countless strategies for prying these answers out of the teacher, for conning her into thinking he knows what he doesn’t know. He learns to dodge, bluff, fake, cheat. He learns to be lazy! Before he came to school, he would work for hours on end, on his own, with no thought of reward, at the business of making sense of the world and gaining competence in it. In school he learns, like every buck private, how to goldbrick, how not to work when the sergeant isn’t looking, how to know when he is looking, how to make him think you are working even when he is looking. He learns that in real life you don’t do anything unless you are bribed, bullied or conned into doing it, that nothing is worth doing for its own sake, or that if it is, you can’t do it in school. He learns to be bored, to work with a small part of his mind, to escape from the reality around him into daydreams and fantasies – but not like the fantasies of his preschool years, in which he played a very active part.

The child comes to school curious about other people, particularly other children, and the school teaches him to be indifferent. The most interesting thing in the classroom – often the only interesting thing in it – is the other children, but he has to act as if these other children, all about him, only a few feet away, are not really there. He cannot interact with them, talk with them, smile at them.
In fact, he learns how to live without paying attention to anything going on around him. You might say that school is a long lesson in how to turn yourself off, which may be one reason why so many young people, seeking the awareness of the world and responsiveness to it they had when they were little, think they can only find it in drugs. Aside from being boring, the school is almost always ugly, cold, and inhuman.

And so, in this dull and ugly place, where nobody ever says anything very truthful, where everybody is playing a kind of role, as in a charade where the teachers are no more free to respond honestly to the students than the students are free to respond to the teachers or each other, where the air practically vibrates with suspicion and anxiety, the child learns to live in a daze, saving his energies for those small parts of his life that are too trivial for the adults to bother with, and thus remain his. It is a rare child who can come through his schooling with much left of his curiosity, his independence or his sense of his own dignity, competence and worth.

Our compulsory school-attendance laws once served a humane and useful purpose. They protected the children’s right to some schooling, against those adults who would otherwise have denied it to them in order to exploit their labor, in farm, store, mine or factory. Today the laws help nobody – not the schools, not the teachers, not the children. To keep kids in school who would rather not be there costs the schools an enormous amount of time and trouble – to say nothing of what it costs to repair the damage that these angry and resentful prisoners do every time they get a chance. Every teacher knows that any kid in class who, for whatever reason, would rather not be there, not only doesn’t learn anything himself but makes it a great deal tougher for anyone else. As for protecting the children from exploitation, the chief and indeed only exploiters of children these days are the schools.

We need to get kids out of the school buildings, and give them a chance to learn about the world at first hand. It is a very recent idea, and a crazy one, that the way to teach our young people about the world they live in is to take them out of it and shut them up in brick boxes. Aside from their parents, most children never have any close contact with any adults except people whose sole business is children. No wonder they have no idea what adult life or work is like. A child learning to talk does not learn by being corrected all the time – if corrected too much, he will stop talking. He compares, a thousand times a day, the difference between language as he uses it and as those around him use it. Bit by bit, he makes the necessary changes to make his language like other people’s. In the same way, kids learning to do all the other things they learn without adult teachers – to walk, run, climb, whistle, ride a bike, skate, play games, jump rope – compare their own performance with what more skilled people do, and slowly make the needed changes. But in school we never give a child a chance to detect his mistakes, let alone correct them. We do it all for him. We act as if we thought he would never notice a mistake unless it was pointed out to him, or correct it unless he was made to. Soon he becomes dependent on the expert. We should let him do it himself. Let him figure out what this word says, what is the answer to that problem, whether this is a good way of saying or doing this or that. Our job should be to help him when he tells us that he can’t find a way to get the right answer. Let’s get rid of all this nonsense of grades, exams, marks. We don’t know now, and we never will know, how to measure what another person knows or understands. We certainly can’t find out by asking him questions. All we find out is what he doesn’t know which is what most tests are for, anyway. Throw it all out, and let the child learn what every educated person must someday learn, how to measure his own understanding, how to know what he knows or does not know.

People remember only what is interesting and useful to them, what helps them make sense of the world, or helps them get along in it. All else they quickly forget, if they ever learn it at all. The idea of a “body of knowledge,” to be picked up in school and used for the rest of one’ s life, is nonsense in a world as complicated and rapidly changing as ours. Anyway, the most important questions and problems of our time are not in the curriculum, not even in the universities, let alone the schools.

Children want, more than they want anything else, and even after years of miseducation, to make sense of the world, themselves, and other human beings. Let them get at this job, with our help if they ask for it, in the way that makes most sense to them.

Originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, February 8, 1969.

Dear Baby Collins,

Having just entered life and found myself as your father, you’re probably thinking, “Great, who’s this schlub?” I know, I know, I’m not all that impressive on first glance, but before you decide to pack your things and leave – which is entirely your right – allow me to make my case. If you are willing to hear it, please proceed.

While it is true that you exist as a result of your mother and I engaging in intimate copulation, such should not be the reason you accept me as your father. Sharing DNA should not be the basis for voluntary association. Rather, I advise you to consider the merits of any given association and its effect on your future happiness. Having dismissed the presumption of default association by blood, I will now proceed to explain why I’m your best option for a father/progeny partnership.

Besides your mother and future spouse, nobody will love you as much as I, my love being completely unconditional. As a human child, you have a psychological need for unconditional love from your parents, a need that I will meet completely, from your perspective as much as mine. While we might not always see eye to eye, I promise to always respect your decisions, because whether foolish or wise, they will provide you a valuable learning experience. And when you err, as we humans are wont to do, I will not make you feel ashamed or unloved. You will never be punished for your mistakes, nor rewarded for your triumphs. Either would make you believe that my love is conditional, when its not.

Rather, when you do make a mistake, I will help you understand the natural consequences of your actions, and stand by your side as you face them. And your triumphs will be their own reward, though I’ll likely reinforce them by asking about what they mean to you. I’ll want to know in order to get to know you better. Further, I’ll do my best to decode your messages to me about the way you feel. Please forgive me if I have a hard time with this, as some messages are more difficult than others to convey at such a young age.

I’ll also do my best to meet every other need you have. I’ll keep you safe and warm, your belly full, and your bottom clean. I’ll coddle you when you need me to and attend to every hurt you experience. And just as importantly, I’ll try to never be the cause of your pain and suffering. Life is challenging enough without a father making it harder.

One of the most exciting things you’ll get from me is a commitment to your intellectual needs, which as a human include complete academic freedom and noninterference with your natural desire to play around the clock with your siblings, friends, and sometimes, I hope, me!. That’s right, unless your security as it risk, I will never force you to do anything or associate with anyone against your will.

Whether or not to attend school, participate in team sports or other organized activities, or give someone hugs and kisses, family or not, is completely up to you. And more, I will not only respect your choice, but I will defend it against any would-be encroachers. Your life, your body, and everything you legitimately acquire are your own. Nor will I encroach on these, your self-ownership and property rights. If I want a kiss or a hug, I’ll ask for it. Of course, and this is me being completely honest, something else I plan to do, I will take a few liberties while you’re still an infant on the kisses and hugs front. If this is a problem for you, I promise to make amends.

In conclusion, I will not be your ruler, master, or boss. Instead, I will be your partner in accordance to all that partnership entails. The course of your life is yours to chart, and I will be here to aid and mentor you every step of the way. That is, if you’ll have me. Won’t you?

Most sincerely,
Dad

PS: I’ve made a lot of promises here, but I’ll be most grateful if you’ll remember that I, too, am human and will undoubtedly err. However, I will do my best to make amends and seek to repair our relationship, which will always be at the top of my list of priorities.

Originally published on PsychologyToday.com at my blog, “Freedom to Learn“.

Fear, you would think, is a negative experience to be avoided whenever possible. Yet, as everyone who has a child or once was one knows, children love to play in risky ways—ways that combine the joy of freedom with just the right measure of fear to produce the exhilarating blend known as thrill.

Six categories of risky play

Ellen Sandseter, a professor at Queen Maud University in Trondheim, Norway, has identified six categories of risks that seem to attract children everywhere in their play.[1]  These are:

•  Great heights. Children climb trees and other structures to scary heights, from which they gain a birds-eye view of the world and the thrilling feeling of I did it!.

•  Rapid speeds. Children swing on vines, ropes, or playground swings; slide on sleds, skis, skates, or playground slides; shoot down rapids on logs or boats; and ride bikes, skateboards, and other devices fast enough to produce the thrill of almost but not quite losing control.

•  Dangerous tools. Depending on the culture, children play with knives, bows and arrows, farm machinery (where work and play combine), or other tools known to be potentially dangerous.  There is, of course, great satisfaction in being trusted to handle such tools, but there is also thrill in controlling them, knowing that a mistake could hurt.

• Dangerous elements. Children love to play with fire, or in and around deep bodies of water, either of which poses some danger.

• Rough and tumble. Children everywhere chase one another around and fight playfully, and they typically prefer being in the most vulnerable position—the one being chased or the one underneath in wrestling–the position that involves the most risk of being hurt and requires the most skill to overcome.

• Disappearing/getting lost.  Little children play hide and seek and experience the thrill of temporary, scary separation from their companions.  Older ones venture off, on their own, away from adults, into territories that to them are new and filled with imagined dangers, including the danger of getting lost.

The evolutionary value of risky play

From an evolutionary perspective, the obvious question about risky play is this:  Why does it exist?  It can cause injury (though serious injury is rare) and even (very rarely) death, so why hasn’t natural selection weeded it out?  The fact that it hasn’t been weeded out is evidence that the benefits must outweigh the risks.  What are the benefits?  Laboratory studies with animals give us some clues.

Researchers have devised ways to deprive young rats of play, during a critical phase of their development, without depriving them of other social experiences.  Rats raised in this way grow up emotionally crippled.[3, 4]  When placed in a novel environment, they overact with fear and fail to adapt and explore as a normal rat would.  When placed with an unfamiliar peer, they may alternate between freezing in fear and lashing out with inappropriate, ineffective, aggression.  In earlier experiments, similar findings occurred when young monkeys were deprived of play (though the controls in those experiments were not as good as in the subsequent rat experiments).

Such findings have contributed to the emotion regulation theory of play—the theory that one of play’s major functions is to teach young mammals how to regulate fear and anger.[4]  In risky play, youngsters dose themselves with manageable quantities of fear and practice keeping their heads and behaving adaptively while experiencing that fear.  They learn that they can manage their fear, overcome it, and come out alive.  In rough and tumble play they may also experience anger, as one player may accidentally hurt another.  But to continue playing, to continue the fun, they must overcome that anger.  If they lash out, the play is over.  Thus, according to the emotion regulation theory, play is, among other things, the way that young mammals learn to control their fear and anger so they can encounter real-life dangers, and interact in close quarters with others, without succumbing to negative emotions.

The harmful consequences of play deprivation in our culture today

On the basis of such research, Sandseter[1] wrote, in a 2011 article in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, “We may observe an increased neuroticismor psychopathology in society if children are hindered from partaking in age adequate risky play.”  She wrote this as if it were a prediction for the future, but I’ve reviewed data—in Free to Learn(link is external) and elsewhere[5]–indicating that this future is here already and has been for awhile.

Briefly, the evidence is this.  Over the past 60 years we have witnessed, in our culture, a continuous, gradual, but ultimately dramatic decline in children’s opportunities to play freely, without adult control, and especially in their opportunities to play in risky ways.  Over the same 60 years we have also witnessed a continuous, gradual, but ultimately dramatic increase in all sorts of childhood mental disorders, especially emotional disorders.

Look back at that list of six categories of risky play.  In the 1950s, even young children regularly played in all of these ways, and adults expected and permitted such play (even if they weren’t always happy about it).  Now parents who allowed such play would likely be accused of negligence, by their neighbors if not by state authorities.

Here—as an admittedly nostalgic digression—are just a few examples of my own play, as a child in the 1950s:

•  At the age of 5, I took bike rides with my 6-year-old friend all over the village where I lived and into the surrounding countryside.  Our parents gave us some limits as to when we had to be back, but they didn’t restrict our range of movement.  (And, of course, we had no cell phones then, no means of contacting anyone if we got lost or hurt.)

• From the age of 6 on, I, and all the other boys I knew, carried a jackknife.  We used it not just for whittling, but also for games that involved throwing knives (never at each other).

• At age 8, I recall, my friends and I spent recesses and lunch hour wrestling in the snow or grass on a steep bank near the school.  We had tournaments that we arranged ourselves. No teachers or other adults paid attention to our wrestling, or, if they did, they never interfered.

• When I was 10 and 11, my friends and I took all-day skating and skiing hikes on the 5-mile-long lake that bordered our northern Minnesota village. We carried matches and occasionally stopped on islands to build fires and warm ourselves, as we pretended to be brave explorers.

• Also when I was 10 and 11, I was allowed to operate the big, dangerous, hand-fed printing press at the print shop where my parents worked.  In fact, I often took Thursdays off from school (in 5^th and 6^th grade), to print the town’s weekly newspaper.  The teachers and principal never complained, at least not that I know of.  I think they knew that I was learning more valuable lessons at the print shop than I would have at school.

Such behavior was unexceptional in the 1950s.  My parents may have been a bit more trusting and tolerant than most other parents, but not by much.  How much of this would be acceptable to most parents and other adult authorities today?  Here’s an index of how far we have moved:  In a recent survey of over a thousand parents in the UK, 43% believed that children under the age of 14 shouldn’t be allowed outside unsupervised, and half of those believed they shouldn’t be allowed such freedom until at least 16 years of age![6].  My guess is that roughly the same would be found if that survey were conducted in the US.  Adventures that used to be normal for 6-year-olds are now not allowed even for many teenagers.

As I said, over the same period that we have seen such a dramatic decline in children’s freedom to play, and especially in their freedom to embrace risk, we have seen an equally dramatic rise in all sorts of childhood mental disorders.  The best evidence for this comes from the analyses of scores on standard clinical assessment questionnaires that have been given in unchanged form to normative groups of children and young adults over the decades.[5]  Such analyses reveal that five to eight times as many young people today suffer from clinically significant levels of anxiety and depression, by today’s standards, than was true in the 1950s.  Just as the decline in children’s freedom to embrace risk has been continuous and gradual, so has the rise in children’s psychopathology.

The story is both ironic and tragic.  We deprive children of free, risky play, ostensibly to protect them from danger, but in the process we set them up for mental breakdowns.  Children are designed by nature to teach themselves emotional resilience by playing in risky, emotion-inducing ways.  In the long run, we endanger them far more by preventing such play than by allowing it. And, we deprive them of fun.

Play, to be safe, must be free play, not coerced, managed, or pushed by adults.

Children are highly motivated to play in risky ways, but they are also very good at knowing their own capacities and avoiding risks they are not ready to take, either physically or emotionally. Our children know far better than we do what they are ready for.  When adults pressure or even encourage children to take risks they aren’t ready for, the result may be trauma, not thrill.  There are big differences among kids, even among those who are similar in age, size, and strength.  What is thrilling for one is traumatic for another.  When physical education instructors require all of the children in a gym class to climb a rope or pole to the ceiling, some children, for whom the challenge is too great, experience trauma and shame.  Instead of helping them learn to climb and experience heights, the experience turns them forever away from such adventures.  Children know how to dose themselves with just the right amount of fear, for them, and for that knowledge to operate they must be in charge of their own play. [Parenthetically, I note that a relatively small percentage of children are prone to overestimate their abilities and do repeatedly hurt themselves in risky play.  These children may need help in learning restraint.]

An ironic fact is that children are far more likely to injure themselves in adult-directed sports than in their own freely chosen, self-directed play.  That’s because the adult encouragement and competitive nature of the sports lead children to take risks–both of hurting themselves and of hurting others—that they would not choose to take in free play.  It is also because they are encouraged, in such sports, to specialize, and therefore overuse specific muscles and joints.  According to the latest data(link is external) from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 3.5 million children per year under the age of 14 receive medical treatment for sports injuries.  That’s about 1 out of every 7 children engaged in youth sports.  Sports medicine for children has become a big business, thanks to adults who encourage young pitchers to throw so hard and so often they throw out their elbows, encourage young football linemen to hit so hard they get concussions, encourage young swimmers to practice so often and hard they damage their shoulders to the point of needing surgery.  Children playing for fun rarely specialize (they enjoy variety in play), and they stop when it hurts, or they change the way they are playing.  Also, because it’s all for fun, they take care not to hurt their playmates. Adults, who get all wrapped up in winning and may hope for eventual scholarships, work against nature’s means of preventing damage.[7]

So, we prevent children from their own, self-chosen, thrilling play, believing it dangerous when in fact it is not so dangerous and has benefits that outweigh the dangers, and then we encourage children to specialize in a competitive sport, where the dangers of injury are really quite large.  It’s time to reexamine our priorities.

For much more about young people’s need for free play, see Free to Learn(link is external).

References

[1] Sandseter, E. (2011). Children’s risky play from an evolutionary perspective.  Evolutionary Psychology, 9, 257-284.

[2] Spinke, M., Newberry, R., & Bekoff, M. (2001). Mammalian play: Training for the unexpected. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 76, 141-168.

[3] e.g. Pellis,S., & Pellis, V. (2011).  Rough and tumble play: Training and using the social brain.  In A. D. Pelligrini (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of the development of play, 245-259. Oxford University Press.

[4] LaFreniere, P. (2011). Evolutionary functions of social play: Life histories, sex differences, and emotion regulation.  American Journal of Play, 3, 464-488.

[5] Gray, P. (2011). The decline of play and the rise of psychopathology in childhood and adolescence. American Journal of Play, 3, 443–463.

[6] Referenced in Burssoni, M., Olsen, L., Pike, I., & Sleet, D. (2012).  Risky play and children’s safety: Balancing priorities for optimal development.  International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 9, 3134-3148.

[7]  For an excellent book on the harm adults cause to children in youth sports, see Mark Hyman’s Until It Hurts.

Young people should have the right to control and direct their own learning; that is, to decide what they want to learn, and when, where, how, how much, how fast, and with what help they want to learn it. To be still more specific, I want them to have the right to decide if, when, how much, and by whom they want to be taught and the right to decide whether they want to learn in a school and if so which one and for how much of the time.

No human right, except the right to life itself, is more fundamental than this. A person’s freedom of learning is part of his freedom of thought, even more basic than his freedom of speech. If we take from someone his right to decide what he will be curious about, we destroy his freedom of thought. We say, in effect, you must think not about what interests and concerns you, but about what interests and concerns us.

We might call this the right of curiosity, the right to ask whatever questions are most important to us. As adults, we assume that we have the right to decide what does or does not interest us, what we will look into and what we will leave alone. We take this right for granted, cannot imagine that it might be taken away from us. Indeed, as far as I know, it has never been written into any body of law. Even the writers of our Constitution did not mention it. They thought it was enough to guarantee citizens the freedom of speech and the freedom to spread their ideas as widely as they wished and could. It did not occur to them that even the most tyrannical government would try to control people’s minds, what they thought and knew. That idea was to come later, under the benevolent guise of compulsory universal education.

This right of each of us to control our own learning is now in danger. When we put into our laws the highly authoritarian notion that someone should and could decide what all young people were to learn and, beyond that, could do whatever might seem necessary (which now includes dosing them with drugs) to compel them to learn it, we took a long step down a very steep and dangerous path. The requirement that a child go to school, for about six hours a day, 180 days a year, for about ten years, whether or not he learns anything there, whether or not he already knows it or could learn it faster or better somewhere else, is such a gross violation of civil liberties that few adults would stand for it. But the child who resists is treated as a criminal.

The right I ask for the young is a right that I want to preserve for the rest of us, the right to decide what goes into our minds. This is much more than the right to decide whether or when or how much to go to school or what school you want to go to. That right is important, but it is only part of a much larger and more fundamental right, which I might call the right to learn, as opposed to being educated, i.e. made to learn what someone else thinks would be good for you. It is not just compulsory schooling but compulsory education that I oppose and want to do away with.

That children might have the control of their own learning, including the right to decide if, when, how much, and where they wanted to go to school, frightens and angers many people. They ask me, “Are you saying that if the parents wanted the child to go to school, and the child didn’t want to go, that he wouldn’t have to go? Are you saying that if the parents wanted the child to go to one school, and the child wanted to go to another, that the child would have the right to decide?” Yes, that is what I say. Some people ask, “If school wasn’t compulsory, wouldn’t many parents take their children out of school to exploit their labor in one way or another?” Such questions are often both snobbish and hypocritical. The questioner assumes and implies (though rarely says) that these bad parents are people poorer and less schooled than he. Also, though he appears to be defending the right of children to go to school, what he really is defending is the right of the state to compel them to go whether they want to or not. What he wants, in short, is that children should be in school, not that they should have any choice about going.

But saying that children should have the right to choose to go or not to go to school does not mean that the ideas and wishes of the parents would have no weight. Unless he is estranged from his parents and rebelling against them, a child cares very much about what they think and want. Most of the time, he doesn’t want to anger or worry or disappoint them. Right now, in families where the parents feel that they have some choice about their children’s schooling, there is much bargaining about schools. Such parents, when their children are little, often ask them whether they want to go to nursery school or kindergarten. Or they may take them to school for a while to try it out. Or, if they have a choice of schools, they may take them to several to see which they think they will like the best. Later, they care whether the child likes his school. If he does not, they try to do something about it, get him out of it, find a school he will like.

I know some parents who for years had a running bargain with their children, “If on a given day you just can’t stand the thought of school, you don’t feel well, you are afraid of something that may happen, you have something of your own that you very much want to do – well, you can stay home.” Needless to say, the schools, with their supporting experts, fight it with all their might – Don’t Give in to Your Child, Make Him Go to School, He’s Got to Learn. Some parents, when their own plans make it possible for them to take an interesting trip, take their children with them. They don’t ask the school’s permission, they just go. If the child doesn’t want to make the trip and would rather stay in school, they work out a way for him to do that. Some parents, when their child is frightened, unhappy, and suffering in school, as many children are, just take him out. Hal Bennett, in his excellent book No More Public School, talks about ways to do this.

To say that children should have the right to control and direct their own learning, to go to school or not as they choose, does not mean that the law would forbid the parents to express an opinion or wish or strong desire on the matter. It only means that if their natural authority is not strong enough the parents can’t call in the cops to make the child do what they are not able to persuade him to do. And the law may say that there is a limit to the amount of pressure or coercion the parents can apply to the child to deny him a choice that he has a legal right to make.

When I urge that children should control their learning there is one argument that people bring up so often that I feel I must anticipate and meet it here. It says that schools are a place where children can for a while be protected against the bad influences of the world outside, particularly from its greed, dishonesty, and commercialism. It says that in school children may have a glimpse of a higher way of life, of people acting from other and better motives than greed and fear. People say, “We know that society is bad enough as it is and that children will be exposed to it and corrupted by it soon enough. But if we let children go out into the larger world as soon as they wanted, they would be tempted and corrupted just that much sooner.”

They seem to believe that schools are better, more honorable places than the world outside – what a friend of mine at Harvard once called “museums of virtue.” Or that people in school, both children and adults, act from higher and better motives than people outside. In this they are mistaken. There are, of course, some good schools. But on the whole, far from being the opposite of, or an antidote to, the world outside, with all its envy, fear, greed, and obsessive competitiveness, the schools are very much like it. If anything, they are worse, a terrible, abstract, simplified caricature of it. In the world outside the school, some work, at least, is done honestly and well, for its own sake, not just to get ahead of others; people are not everywhere and always being set in competition against each other; people are not (or not yet) in every minute of their lives subject to the arbitrary, irrevocable orders and judgment of others. But in most schools, a student is every minute doing what others tell him, subject to their judgment, in situations in which he can only win at the expense of other students.

This is a harsh judgment. Let me say again, as I have before, that schools are worse than most of the people in them and that many of these people do many harmful things they would rather not do, and a great many other harmful things that they do not even see as harmful. The whole of school is much worse than the sum of its parts. There are very few people in the U.S. today (or perhaps anywhere, any time) in any occupation, who could be trusted with the kind of power that schools give most teachers over their students. Schools seem to me among the most anti-democratic, most authoritarian, most destructive, and most dangerous institutions of modern society. No other institution does more harm or more lasting harm to more people or destroys so much of their curiosity, independence, trust, dignity, and sense of identity and worth. Even quite kindly schools are inhibited and corrupted by the knowledge of children and teachers alike that they are performing for the judgment and approval of others – the children for the teachers; the teachers for the parents, supervisors, school board, or the state. No one is ever free from feeling that he is being judged all the time, or soon may be. Even after the best class experiences teachers must ask themselves, “Were we right to do that? Can we prove we were right? Will it get us in trouble?”

What corrupts the school, and makes it so much worse than most of the people in it, or than they would like it to be, is its power – just as their powerlessness corrupts the students. The school is corrupted by the endless anxious demand of the parents to know how their child is doing – meaning is he ahead of the other kids – and their demand that he be kept ahead. Schools do not protect children from the badness of the world outside. They are at least as bad as the world outside, and the harm they do to the children in their power creates much of the badness of the world outside. The sickness of the modern world is in many ways a school-induced sickness. It is in school that most people learn to expect and accept that some expert can always place them in some sort of rank or hierarchy. It is in school that we meet, become used to, and learn to believe in the totally controlled society. The school is the closest we have yet been able to come to Huxley’s Brave New World, with its alphas and betas, deltas and epsilons – and now it even has its soma. Everyone, including children, should have the right to say “No!” to it.

Excerpted from Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children. New York: Ballantine Books, 1974.

A concern I’ve heard regarding unschooled kids is that “they’ll be different”. What is meant by this is that they won’t have the same education, the same experiences, the same memories, the same cultural influences, yadda, yadda, yadda, as their “peers”. In my opinion, that’s just dandy.

Yes, they will be different, but to what end? Will their lives be harder? More stressful? Etc.? I don’t believe so. In fact, I believe the inverse is true. There are all sorts of benefits with the unschooling approach to life and learning that compulsory schooling can’t match. While I believe the “education” part will actually be better, as their learning is interest-based and interest-based learning is harder to forget than rote memorization, unschooled kids develop initiative and problem solving skills far greater than compulsory-schooled kids. It’s self-evident. Kids that are given the freedom to explore their curiosities are practicing initiative, and kids that are running into problems, say a road block of some sort, are more likely to solve them if they have a real interest in what they’re trying to accomplish.

All well and good, but what I really wanted to touch on here can be explored via analogy. My wife’s from Mexico City. She moved to the United States when she was 19. She lived in Chicago, and then moved to Salt Lake City 3 years later. While we were dating, we had all sorts of conversations about our lives. They were quite different. We grew up in different cultures and different countries. I still learn things about her life I didn’t know from time to time. She’s different. I’m different. So what?

When I gaze through my crystal ball into the future, I see my children as self-starting, hard-working, curious, always-learning, climbing to new heights, loving and respectful individuals. Their childhood will be different from most people they come into contact with. Their conversations will be that much more exciting and interesting. They’ll learn all about what schooling was like, and others will learn all about what unschooling was like. Experiences will be shared, and relationships will be made.

I have several friends that grew up different than me. I have friends from Mexico, Finland, Guatemala, Peru, Nigeria, and several other places. As an adult, you meet people all the time that are different, come from different countries, from different cultures, with different educational backgrounds. It’s a very small world and everybody is more easily connected with everybody else. Being different is what I’ve come to expect from people I meet. Being different is normal in the 21st century. Being different is good.