By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn Some doctors are prescribing gardening for stress disorders, instead of drugs. I’ve been vegetable gardening pretty much my whole adult life, so it’s fun to see research revealing its benefits. Perhaps you’ve read about the Blue Zones, areas of the world, described by […]
The school holidays are here, and parents struggling to get their children to bed will no doubt be thinking: what is wrong with you? I would do anything to get more sleep! Children seem to do everything possible to avoid sleep, yet many adults can’t seem to get enough of it. […]
Small children learn language at a pace far faster than teenagers or adults. One explanation for this learning advantage comes not from differences between children and adults, but from the differences in the way that people talk to children and adults. For the first time, a team of researchers developed […]
“America’s worst mom” is making kids’ life better Lenore Skenazy Source: Permission of Lenore Skenazy and Chasing Childhood In 2008, when she had allowed her then-9-year-old son to take the subway from Macy’s in Manhattan to their home in Queens by himself, Lenore Skenazy became nationally known as “America’s worst […]
By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn Achievement pressure promotes mental anguish at the so-called “best schools.” Many parents strive mightily to get their children into a high-achieving high school. A high-achieving school (or HAS) is defined as one where students score high on standardized tests and a high percentage go on […]
By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn What little children need is play, care, and love, not school. The Biden administration has announced an ambitious, expensive plan for universal preschool for three- and four-year-olds. Some of the language in the White House (2021) announcement sounds comforting: Source: We Heart It. […]
(Credit: Newman Studio/Shutterstock) When it comes to raising kids, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Kids forbidden to talk to strangers. Kids afraid to go inside a store on their own. Kids terrified of cooking an egg for fear of burning the house down. These are examples Lenore Skenazy, who pioneered the […]
By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn Early academic pressure creates learning blocks, diagnosed as disorders. Source: Flickr Creative Commons Our standard schools operate on the assumption that all children of a given age should learn the same lessons, in the same ways, at the same time. That assumption is […]
How a learning disorder diagnosis can become a self-fulfilling prophesy. By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn Source:Randen_pederson_creative_commons Many years ago, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1968) performed a fascinating experiment in elementary school classrooms. They led teachers to believe that a special test had revealed that certain students would […]
Sometimes a fiction is repeated so often that people believe it’s true. By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn “Well, what about Lord of the Flies?” How often I have heard someone say that after I’ve talked about the value of children’s independent play, away from adults, or about a […]