‘Restoring Childhood’
The experiences and opportunities presented in childhood—a pivotal period of brain and body development crucial for cognitive, social, emotional, and physical growth—lay the foundation for how children learn, build relationships, and prepare for life.
Against this backdrop, prominent scholar and bestselling author Peter Gray, a research professor in psychology and long a proponent of childhood freedom and exploration, which he says are no longer the norm—takes aim at our societal focus on safety and childhood protection, for fostering increased anxiety and making children prone to depression and mental illness.
In his new book, Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety, Gray addresses whether we are collectively hindering children’s development and setting them up for failure: backfiring in the effort to make their lives achievement-oriented, to help them succeed in an increasingly competitive adult world.
Restoring Childhood illustrates the dramatic changes in childhood which have negatively affected youths in the United States over the past 75 years.
The book—which has made headlines in such high-profile publications as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times—presents findings from Gray’s three-year immersion in research literature on shifts in children’s and teens’ mental health during that period. Their rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide escalated to unprecedented levels, a spike that began long before widespread use of the Internet and increased screen time, both often demonized.
Gray examines societal trends he says have created a fundamentally anti-child environment, such as more supervision at home, more pressure at school, more focus on achievement—and less on independence. With the resulting decline in free play, exploration, and unsupervised peer interaction, the resilience and well-being of children have suffered.
But Gray believes Restoring Childhood has the potential to change the way society thinks about children and what they need—and just as importantly, don’t need—from adults in their lives.
“If I dare claim to have a magnum opus, this is it,” Gray wrote on his website.
For decades he has studied the biology and evolution of human learning, conditions that promote children’s healthy psychological development, and the educative value of play.
“Restoring Childhood is the book I have been working toward my whole life, although unconsciously until the last couple of years,” he explains on his website. “It is the culmination of my decades of research and analyses of others’ research into child development and a lifetime of real-world experience with kids.”
Gray’s thesis is that adult overprotection is a large part of the reason children today struggle. This “hovering omnipresence” leads to over-scheduling, structured play, and strict safety laws, robbing children of the independent, risky play necessary to build emotional resilience. Children need what is missing from modern childhood: chances to explore, solve problems, and take age-appropriate risks without constant adult supervision.
Restoring Childhood has earned praise from New York Times best-selling authors Julie Lythcott-Haims (How to Raise an Adult) and Jennifer Breheny Wallace (Never Enough, Mattering), who describe the book as an essential, gentle, and eye-opening roadmap that challenges our obsession with perfection and forces a hard look at what society has stripped from modern youth. The American Journal of Play called Restoring Childhood “a passionate paean to the kind of free play and free learning that helps children grow into capable, joyful adults.”
“Peter Gray is one of the world’s experts on the evolution of childhood play,” added psychologist Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind Works. “He forces us to rethink our convictions on how schools should be designed to accommodate the ways that children learn.”
Taking away freedom, Gray maintains, is the real cause of rising youth mental health issues, not where blame is typically laid—social media, smartphones, or video games (though he advocates setting digital boundaries).
“If we continue to tighten the leash on our kids, no amount of screen-time restriction will reverse the alarming mental health crisis we see our kids enduring today,” he says.
He argues that the 2010s spike in teen mental health struggles stems from rigid, high-stakes schooling. Extra hours of schooling along curriculum-determined lines cause burnout, he explains, and preschool and kindergarten academic instruction has proven especially harmful.
“I could have called the book ‘Destroying Childhood,’” Gray wrote in his popular Substack series “Play Makes Us Human,” “as much of it deals with the ways our society has restricted children’s natural ways of being, their natural ways of growing up, by preventing them from behaving as Mother Nature intended.”
So how do parents and teachers balance freedom and safety for children—and promote their self-reliance and self-directed growth, confidence, and emotional health—without putting them in danger or robbing them of the joy of exploration, autonomy, and play?
After describing the multiple societal changes that have reduced children’s freedom, Gray concludes the book by outlining “in concrete terms, ways that all of us, regardless of our position in society, can help restore childhood.”
Among many strategies Gray suggests for parents is to empower children by being trustful and autonomy supportive (TAS). “TAS parents not only trust their children to direct their own behavior but support those decisions by providing help where help is needed and desired.”
Such parents, he explains, recognize the child as a whole person, not their creation; attempt to see from the child’s point of view; focus on the child’s present, not future; do not do for children what they can do for themselves; and expect children to be partners in family chores. They also involve the child in decision making and problem solving; reinforce moral values more than achievement; teach safety rules rather than ban activities; respect the child’s privacy; resist fear-based and defensive modes of parenting, and enable free play and independent exploration.
Gray advocates that more play should be facilitated by and in schools: increasing the amount and quality of recess and becoming centers for play during non-school hours. He also suggests expanded and creative programming offered for children at public libraries and by parks and recreation programs.
He advises governments and city planners to embrace New Urbanism, the goal of which is to create cities and child-friendly neighborhoods that support community. In collaboration with the National Institute for Play, Gray and others have initiated a campaign to encourage pediatricians to include the value of play into their well-child interviews and to promote outdoor exercise.
“This book is not just an intellectual dive into fascinating questions about children and society,” Gray notes. “It is also a call to action. My hope is that it will lead all readers to ask: In my capacity, ‘What can I do to help restore normal childhood?’”
A self-proclaimed optimist, Gray concludes, “We can restore what we have destroyed.”