What "Disrespectful" and "Destructive" Children are Telling Us

Not long ago, I was tagged in a Facebook thread of teachers complaining about the behavior of their students. I only spent a few minutes scrolling through the comments, but most of them seemed to be coming from middle school teachers in public schools who were accusing the kids of being disrespectful and destructive. Some even provided photographic evidence of vandalism and general disregard for property.

"Uncaring" and "disconnected" parents seemed to be receiving most of the blame with the Covid pandemic coming in a close and intertwined second. Unaddressed mental health challenges were mentioned as a cause as was our namby-pamby society in which adults are no longer allowed to hit children to "teach them respect." In fairness, there were a few commenters who pointed their fingers at modern schooling itself, but they were few and far between. A huge percentage of these teachers asserted that they were quitting their jobs as soon as possible.

I clicked away after a minute or two, however, in part because I've been trying to remain conscious of my online scrolling behavior, but mostly because my personal focus is preschool-aged children, not middle schoolers.

In my conversation with author, educator, and parenting and resilience specialist Maggie Dent for Teacher Tom's Podcast she made the off-hand comment, "Teenagers are preschoolers on steroids." (There's a reason she's called the "Queen of Common Sense.")

In preschool, we say that behavior is communication. If a preschooler behaves disrespectfully or destructively we would immediately assume that they were trying to tell us that they're sad, afraid, confused, overwhelmed, frustrated, angry, or otherwise dysregulated, and it's our job, as the adults, to try to figure out what it is they are telling us. Their family life might well have something to do with it. For instance, it's quite common for a formerly single child to engage in selfish behavior while adjusting to a new baby at home. Maybe someone in the family has lost their job. Maybe there are marital problems. These kinds of things impact teenagers as well. 

In my experience, most troubling behaviors have their roots in something going on at home, but it would never occur to me as a preschool teacher to blame parents. 

When I think of the behavior of these young teenagers, most of whom are at an age that traditional cultures consider to be adults, I wonder if maybe they're the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. These teachers seemed to be insisting that this kind of behavior is relatively new, that it didn't used to be this way. These teachers seem to be reporting from all corners of the country. Now, granted, this Facebook thread, like all gripe-fests, is a self-selected group which is not inclusive of those who are not experiencing challenging behaviors or who feel on top of things, but this isn't the first time I've heard about rising disrespect and destructiveness. 

Maybe these children's behavior is the tip of a much larger iceberg. Maybe the disrespect and destructiveness isn't isolated to middle school classrooms. Indeed, it's quite clear that it isn't. Some days it feels as if the entire world is behaving like these middle schoolers.

Young children who behave disrespectfully, I've found, are the children who are treated disrespectfully by the adults in their lives. Young children who behave destructively, I've found, are the children who feel they have little choice in their lives, who feel trapped or caged or otherwise un-free to engage the world in personally meaningful ways.

One of the reasons I strive to stop scrolling is because too much of what I find there is disrespect, destruction and finger-pointing. It's not just middle schoolers, it's all of us. Perhaps not you or me, but our behavior as a culture is communicating, and what I hear it saying is "I am human, too!"

What I've found with preschoolers is that disrespect and destructiveness tends to disappear when I stop trying to control them and instead make the effort to listen to what their behavior is communicating. Often, all it takes is that: listening. When I listen, I understand that these children are only asking for the same thing all of us are asking for: to be allowed to pursue a life of meaning and purpose in a reasonably safe environment of respect. When we don't get that, we often respond with disrespect and destruction.

When I listen to young children, more often than not, I hear myself, and that is where understanding begins.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Directing Our Own Evolution Through Play

Ethologists are zoologists who study the behavior of animals in their natural habitat. They study orcas in the ocean, not Sea World. They study cheetahs on the savannah, not in the zoo. This makes sense. When we study animals in captivity most of what we learn is how that species responds to captivity. As writer and filmmaker Carol Black points out in her brilliant essay A Thousand Rivers, much of the data we collect on human learning has come from studies of children in schools, which is to say, children in captivity.

This question of "captivity" hangs over much, if not most, of the so-called science of learning. After all, virtually all of our children spend most of their lives in the captivity of schools. It's uncomfortable to think about, but it doesn't require a cynic to recognize that schools and prisons have a great deal in common. The inmates are under constant supervision by superiors who are empowered to punish them if they step too far out of line. Their daily schedules are proscribed. They spend most of their time indoors. They cannot leave or opt out or choose to do something other than what they're required to do.

We try to make ourselves feel better about it by telling ourselves the story that it's a benign captivity, one that is "for their own good," but there is no doubt that if left to their own devices, most of our children would choose to spend their time playing, preferably outdoors. In other words, they would choose the opposite of captivity, which is liberty. We all would.

From the perspective of ethology, the only way we will ever understand human learning is to study humans who are at liberty, which is to say, while at play. In my 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning, we will be, in our way, becoming ethologists by exploring what it would mean to make our preschool classrooms and playgrounds into the kind of liberated places children need to learn at full capacity. (See below)

There can be no doubt that this urge to play is an adaptive trait, one that is essential to human survival. As journalist David Toomey puts it in his new book Kingdom of Play:

At present, evolutionary biologists do not know that a master gene enabled and orchestrated play, much less which master gene. Neither do they know where or when play began. They have no map, no cladogram, depicting the evolution of all animal play. But they know that play has a history stretching back hundreds of millions of years, and that its roots, that hypothetical suite of master genes, may be older still. Play has endured the formation and reformation of continents, three ice ages, and two mass extinctions. So they — and we— can be certain of one aspect of play. Whatever its adaptive advantages, they are worth the trouble. Nature takes play seriously.

Since we have, for better or worse, chosen to raise our own young in captivity, if we are to likewise take play seriously, we are best served by turning to ethologists, who, as Toomey puts it, "believe that innovative play might be a means by which an animal gains a measure of control over its own evolution."

Evolution is generally thought about in terms of random genetic mutations and law of the jungle consequences, and that obviously still plays a significant role, but it seems that the existence of play allows us to consider evolution from a new perspective. Looked at this way, we see that evolution takes place as a process of living things playing with their environment. When they learn something from their play that enhances their life — e.g., makes it easier to get food, more likely to reproduce, or simply brings joy -- they then teach what they’ve learned to others through role modeling. Over time, natural selection favors those who are best able to take advantage of this learning, so they are the individuals whose genes are the ones that are more likely to be passed along to future generations. And those are the genes, whether or not we know exactly which ones they are, that favor play.

For anyone versed in classic evolutionary theory, this is a bit mind-blowing. After all, this means that animals, through play, are capable of liberating themselves from the forces of natural selection, and to at least some degree direct them. But this kind of liberty is not possible for an animal held in captivity.

Modern school thwarts play. Indeed it often punishes play. Schooling replaces our children's natural urge to direct their own learning through play with a curriculum that determines, in advance, what they will learn, how they will learn it, and according to what schedule. As Dr. Denisha Jones, director of Defending the Early Years, tells us in our conversation about "liberation pedagogy" on Teacher Tom's Podcast, "A system that determines what you will learn kills curiosity" and curiosity is the driving force behind play. And as Denisha tells us, "Play is freedom. Play is liberation."

In the early years, many of us strive to create programs that free children to play, to provide them with a natural habitat for learning. This means that we are in the vanguard of understanding human learning. We are the "ethologists" specializing in our own species because we are among the few who live amongst free humans. There is a societal tendency to pat us on the head and patronizingly praise us for doing "such important work," but what they mean, most of the time, is that they're glad we're willing to muck around amidst the pink eye, diaper changing, and temper tantrums, so they don't have to. But this is simply evidence of how little we, as a culture, understand about learning, and it explains why they're unwilling to listen to us when we tell them about play and liberation.

It's from this perspective that we can see that it's not just our children we keep in captivity, but also ourselves. We live in a world that doesn't understand play at all, that denigrates it, that commodifies it, that relegates it to recesses, weekends, and two-weeks of paid vacations.

When I'm with liberated children, however, I find myself, for a time at least, swimming with the orcas, running with the cheetahs, and playing with the children. I'm liberated. And I know that I am in my natural habitat. 

******

If you're interested in transforming your own space into this kind of learning environment, you might want to join the 2025 cohort for my 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning. This is a  deep dive into transforming your classroom, home, or playground into the kind of learning environment in which young children thrive; in which novelty and self-motivation stand at the center of learning. In my decades as an early childhood educator, I've found that nothing improves my teaching and the children's learning experience more than a supportive classroom, both indoors and out. This course is for educators, parents, and directors. You don't want to miss this chance to make your "third teacher" (the learning environment) the best it can be. I hope you join me! To learn more and register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

The Only Happy Ending

Last week on my social media pages, I asked for readers to describe the summer breaks of their childhood.

It's a question I've asked adults in various forms over the course of the last couple decades, sometimes asking it as "What are your fondest memories of childhood? or "Describe a beautiful moment from your childhood." Sometimes I've even asked it as "What from your own childhood do you wish the children in your life could experience."

"We were feral children," replied one commenter, going on to describe summers during which she would ride her bike "much farther" than her mother allowed, going to shops, getting to know the neighbors, exploring a "haunted house," mucking about in drainage ditches, and generally getting up to mischief.

"Our only instructions were to stay out of trouble and be home before the street lights came on," wrote another. "We drank out of garden hoses and used library, park & rec bathrooms or even peed under a tree!"

And yet another wrote, "(I) spent my summers in the woods of Maine with a large group of cousins. We were allowed to be in the house when it rained and when we ate. The rest of the time we were outside."

Nearly every response involved being outside, unsupervised by adults, with other children, and sweeps of time during which to play. Bicycles featured prominently. Aside from that, the only toys that came up with any frequency were dolls and balls. And almost everyone who went into any detail mentioned doing things of which the adults would have disapproved, often involving risk . . . Outdoors, unsupervised, in the company of other children, with lots of time, few toys, and risk: this is the stuff of our beautiful childhood moments, our summers.

Yes, there were a number of broken bones and other injuries mentioned, even "crimes" (breaking into an abandoned -- "haunted" -- house). A few people said that they were expected to work during the summer months, either to supplement the family income or because their parents felt that summer jobs built character and fostered independence. Many described going elsewhere, spending weeks or months with relatives on farms, at the shore, in the woods, or other "wild places." Others fondly recall reading "lots of books" of their own choosing, making things with their own hands, and growing and eating vegetables and fruits that they then ate right from the garden.

Many responders took the opportunity to bemoan the plight of today's children who have virtually no opportunity for unsupervised play, let alone outdoors, who are heavily scheduled,  and who have never experienced going up and down the street knocking on doors to see who else could come out to play. We blame the economy. We blame screens. We blame fear -- of injury, liability, and crime. Several readers would let their children roam more freely, but are afraid that the authorities will crack down on them. More fear.

At the same time, there is a mountain of evidence that what children need more than anything else -- for their mental, physical, and intellectual health -- is exactly what our summer memories revealed: lots of unstructured time, outdoors, with other children, and yes, risk. These are not just "beautiful" experiences we are recalling, but rather formative ones. This is where we learned resilience and independence, where we developed confidence, and how we came to respect what parent educator and Teacher Tom's Podcast guest Maggie Dent calls "natural consequences." It is simply not an accident that today's children are facing, simultaneously, both a mental and physical health crisis. Childhood anxiety, depression, and obesity are the "natural consequences" of this accidental experiment we are performing on a whole generation. The lessons learned by these kinds of formative experiences are passivity, dependence, insecurity, and a general disconnect from the real world of cause-and-effect.

In a nutshell, we've gone from a world in which adults said, "You're driving me crazy, go outside," to one in which they say, "You're driving me crazy, go watch a show."

I'm encouraged by the number of responders who said they were doing everything they could to provide their own children with at least modicum of independence and risk. It's still possible, even if it isn't the same.

Next week, we will be opening registration for the 2024 cohort for my 6-week course, Teacher Tom's Risky Play, which could have just as easily been called Teacher Tom's Summer Play. In this course, we explore how to negotiate the modern world, its fears and challenges, and still provide the children in our lives with the kind of formative experiences they need for mind, body, and soul. This is for educators and parents. When we offered this course last year, several groups took it together as a way to spark conversations in their community (school, neighborhood) about why and how more risk and independence is good for kids, even if it does mean an uptick in mischief.

Author Ray Bradbury is mostly known as a writer of science fiction, but his book Dandelion Wine is one of the most realistic, even if fictionalized, memoirs I've ever read. It takes place during an idyllic, small town summer in the 1950's, centering around independent children living in their world. The adults are present, sometimes important, but mostly on the periphery. It's amber-ized, of course, nostalgic in the way memories become as we reach a certain age, but Bradbury parts the curtain to glimpses of danger, even horror, failure, disappointment, and sorrow, which are all part of the beautiful whole of childhood. It's an evocation of the kind of authentic childhood in which resilience, confidence, compassion, and heartbreak, not mere endless, joyful days, are the result.

As we Americans head into our Independence Day celebrations, I'll leave you with words from Bradbury's protagonist Douglas giving the advice of his experience to his younger brother: "You just won't admit you like crying too. You cry just so long and everything's fine. And there's your happy ending. And you're ready to go back out and walk around with folks again." This is the lesson of resilience that cannot be learned without the freedom to take risks, experience failure, then figuring out how to get back up to walk around with folks again. At the end of the day, that is the only happy ending.

******

 In my 6-week course Teacher Tom's Risky Play, we will take a deep-dive into what means to trust children, to stand back, and explore what tools we need to keep children safe while also setting them free to become the kind of resilient people the world needs. This course is about us as adults as much as the children. We will begin registration for the 2024 cohort for this course in the coming days. To learn more and to get on the waitlist, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Emissaries of the Gods

On a recent episode of Teacher Tom's Podcast, parent educator Maggie Dent tells the story of sheltering from a storm under a tree with one of her grandchildren. In this small, dim place the toddler went immediately to work, exploring the confines with all his senses, investigating "fronds," testing them, lining them up, picking them apart. As educators, we recognize this as curiosity-driven learning, but in Maggie's telling of the story we find that much of the learning, perhaps most of it, is her own.

At one point or another, anyone who has spent time with young children has realized that "our children are our greatest teachers." In preparing to write this post, I sought out a source for this quote, but it's been said or written or thought so many times by so many people in so many eras in so many cultures, that I've concluded that it's universal wisdom, even if it's easily forgotten in the rush and crush of day-to-day life.

In her strange and beautiful novel Briefing for a Decent into Hell, Doris Lessing, creates a mythology in which all of us are sent to Earth as emissaries of the gods, sent to fix what ails humanity, to teach, to inspire, and to bring our species back into harmony with the universe. Tragically, in her myth, we've created a world in which these emissaries, babies, are inconvenient to most of us most of the time: they don't sleep when we want them to sleep; they are loud when we want them to be quiet; they are energetic, active, and into everything; they ask too many questions, take risks, and generally behave in ways that are very unlike what we expect from our fellow humans. As one of the novel's characters says to a lecture hall of adults concerned with education, "Everybody in this room believes, without knowing it, or perhaps without formulating it, or at least behaves as if he believes -- that children up to the age of seven or eight are of a different species from ourselves."

In Lessing's myth, "society," instead of listening to these emissaries of the gods, does everything in it's power to shape them into proper humans, ones who sleep the proper amount and at the proper times; who control their energy, ask fewer question, and learn to value caution over courage. 

But this audience of parents and educators is more enlightened than that. "We see children as creatures about to be trapped and corrupted by what trapped and corrupted ourselves. We speak of them, treat them, as if it were possible to make happen events which are almost unimaginable. We speak of them as beings who could grow up into a race together superior to ourselves. And this feeling is in everyone. It is why the field of education is always so bitter and embattled, and why no one ever, in any country, is satisfied with what is offered to children . . . "

I certainly see myself in this and I know that many of you who read here at least sometimes feel this bitterness and embattlement. None of us is entirely, or even mostly, satisfied with what is offered to children.

"For it should be enough to teach the young of a species to survive, to approximate the skills of its elders, to acquire current technical skills. Yet every generation seems to give out a bellow of anguish at some point, as if it had been betrayed, sold out, sold short."

I know I've bellowed, especially as a young teen, the age at which traditional cultures around the world have considered their children to be officially adults with all the rights and responsibilities. Our daughter, like most Jewish children, became a "woman" when she had her bat mitzvah at 12, yet few of us really believe that any longer. Yet this is a crucial moment, in the spirit of Lessing's myth, one that was understood by the ancients, but almost entirely forgotten today: this is exactly when we ought to most devotedly listen to our children, learn from them, but instead we rant about "kids these days," even punishing them as they struggle to convey the message they were sent to deliver. It's a message that we crave, yet also fear. No wonder they feel betrayed, no wonder they become surly and rebellious: they are still, on the cusp of adulthood, striving desperately to fulfill their purpose as emissaries. 

And let's be honest, we know they're right, yet we feel helpless because we ourselves have long ago been forced to abandon the mission for which we were sent.

"Every generation dreams of something better for its young, every generation greets the emergence of its young into adulthood with a profound and secret disappointment, even if these children are in every way paragons from society's point of view. This is due to the strong but unacknowledged belief that something better than oneself is possible."

I believe this. Something better than myself is possible. Maybe you believe this as well.

"Who has not at least once looked into a young child's eyes and seen the criticism there, a hostility, the sullen knowledgeable look of a prisoner? This happens very young, before the young child is forced to become like the parents, before its own individuality is covered over by what the parents say he is. Their 'this is right, that is wrong, see things my way.'"

But we know that something better than oneself is possible. We know this because when we do what Maggie did with her grandson, when we get down on our knees with young children, not as instructors, but as students, even as disciples, and acknowledge them as the emissaries of the gods that they are, that is when we find ourselves finally in harmony with the universe, fully immersed in "fronds."

"Education means only this -- that the lively alert fearless curiosity of children must be fed, must be kept alive. That is education."

It's their fearless curiosity that frightens us, not you and me perhaps, but the larger us. We worry that without our adult wisdom and control the children cannot survive, but at a less conscious level, we are terrified that what they have been sent here to teach us will reveal that all we've accomplished, despite our so-called wisdom, is survival. 

Leonard Cohen sang, "It doesn't matter how you worship, as long as you're down on your knees." When we fall to our knees with young children, under trees or sky, with no agenda but to listen with our whole selves, we are finally in a place to receive the message from these emissaries of the gods. And to be reminded that we are likewise emissaries and it's never too late to deliver the message of harmony with which we are also entrusted.

******

Listening to children like this is how we begin to really trust them, to understand that while they may have not been sent here by "the gods," their fearless curiosity is central to how they, and we, must engage with life itself. And there will be risk-taking! In my 6-week course Teacher Tom's Risky Play, we will take a deep-dive into what means to trust children, to stand back, and explore what tools we need to keep children safe while also setting them free to be the "emissaries" the world needs. This course is about us as adults as much as the children. We will begin registration for the 2024 cohort for this course in the coming days. To learn more and to get on the waitlist, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Learning to Be Courageous

The children were rowdily queuing up to take turns jumping from the impromptu "diving board" they had created from a plank of wood that they had rigged up. The distance from springboard to the ground was less than two feet. A few leapt fearlessly, hurling their bodies into the air with abandon, but most were more cautious, some exceedingly cautious, and many remained on the sidelines, watching.

This was, in the eyes of most of the children, risky business. They didn't need adults hanging around cautioning them. They most definitely didn't need anyone commanding them to "be careful." They were all, clearly, approaching this self-created, self-selected challenge with the knowledge that pain was a possible consequence and were taking due measures.

One of my wife's relatives, a man who had made pediatric orthopedic devices for a living, was famous within the family for having regularly joked that "Kids are always trying to kill themselves" which was in large measure, he claimed, why he remained in business. It was an edgy joke, one I'm sure he rarely made in front of the families he served, but it echoes an attitude that many of us carry with us about young children: they may not be trying to get hurt, but they are certainly too ignorant, innocent, careless, and foolhardy to be trusted with their own assessment of risk.

Our first responsibility as adults working with young children is safety. We tend to define a "safe environment" for children as one in which injuries are rare. All preschools and child care centers have safety protocols. Hazards are identified and removed. Rules are made to prevent children from engaging in activities the adults deem too risky. Educators are often called to the carpet, fired, or even sued when a child is injured on their watch. Yet we all know, just as did the children lining up for this diving board (which would likely be banned in many settings), that complete certainty and safety in life is impossible.

And I think most of us also know, or at least we should know, that if we ever managed to create a completely certain and safe environment, it would be a kind of hell on earth. Novels of dystopia are written about futures in which the only freedom is the freedom from risk. Recent Teacher Tom's Podcast guest Lenore Skenazy's Free Range Kids movement emerged from the recognition that in our extreme efforts to keep children safe we are inadvertently teaching our children (and parents) to be incompetent and fearful. Gever Tulley's book Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do) is a stark reminder of how our culture's anxious embrace of safety at all costs is a very recent phenomenon, one that robs children of an authentic childhood.

I won't to go into the research about the benefits, indeed necessity, for children to engage in risky play, but if that's what you're looking for, Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter is one of the pre-eminent researchers and scholars in the area and you'll find everything you're looking for in her blog.

In another recent conversation on the podast with Australian parent educator Maggie Dent, we discuss how this cultural fear of risk and independence has become a kind of self-perpetuating spiral for both children and their parents. "The fundamental needs of children haven't changed," she tells us, "but the world has," in both real and imaginary ways. We're not likely to go back to a world in which one parent stayed home with the kids, for instance, but we can do something about the over-abundance of scripted toys which Maggie says tend to limit creative thinking and problem solving. But more importantly, we can do something about these untethered fears of children "killing themselves" through their own ignorance or being harmed by skulking strangers that has lead to a generation of children (and parents) that is more passive and anxious than children in the past. They are less resilient, have poorer self-regulation, and are struggling with both fine and gross motor skills. Independent play, including risky play, Maggie tells us, is the cure. 

At least once a day, someone writes or says to me that they genuinely want to offer their kids more independence and the opportunity for risk, but say they are stopped by their own fears. What I want to share here is some of the thinking that helped me both as a parent and early childhood educator to get my mind around the more philosophical and psychological side of risk and especially how it promotes the often forgotten virtue of courage.

Not only is life without risk impossible, but a life without it is no life at all, which is to say the only absolute certainty and safety is death itself. The great American psychologist William James wrote: "It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all." One of the great problems, according to James, is that life is full of decisions and most of the time we're forced to decide even when the evidence is less than fully persuasive either way. In other words, no matter how scientifically we approach our decisions, no matter how carefully we analyze the data, no matter how orderly our row of ducks, at the end of the day every important decision we make first requires us to make a decision about what to believe.

In our scientific age, however, deciding what to believe is a kind of sacrilege. It calls into question the very concept of truth. It requires faith that takes us outside of the realm of evidence. When those children edged out to the end of the diving board, contemplated, then leapt, they were not thinking about educating their vestibular systems or developing their pre-frontal cortexes, they were choosing to believe that they would land safely. And those who turned around and edged back to the security of the solid ground were choosing to believe that they would not . . . At least not today.

We worry about the kid who leaps, but we should be at least equally worried, perhaps more so, about the child who never chooses to leap. 

Courage is the ancient virtue that is called forth when we choose to believe, then act. And courage only comes to those who practice. Indeed, the more we practice behaving courageously, as these children were doing, the more courageous we become. This is how we reverse the spiral of fear, by creating a counter-spiral of courage. 

As I stood watching the children, I saw them grow, before my eyes, more courageous with each effort. Before long, those who chose to believe, were believing more and more courageous things about themselves: leaping higher, farther, and faster until they had played the risk out of this game and were ready for another. And, as the game went on, many of those who at first chose not to believe began to.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that "action is character" an assertion that is supported by both neuroscience and social research. The more people engage in day-to-day acts of courage, which is choosing to believe that they will stick their landings, the more courageous they become. Having the courage to act in the face of uncertainty is the very definition of human freedom. 

It takes courage to step back and watch our children step off into the unknown based on nothing more than faith, but when we as adults find the courage within ourselves to let go, we find, one small step a time that we can reverse the spiral of fear into which we have, as a culture, fallen. At the end of the day, practicing courage is not just the antidote to fear, but it is also the only path to freedom. 

******

We live in a world of fear around allowing children even a modicum of independence and risk in their play. This 6-week course will help you develop the tools, knowledge, and mindset to overcome a fearful world and offer the children in your life an authentic childhood, in which they learn resilience and courage through their independent play. If this sounds like something you want for the children in your life, get on the waitlist for the 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Risky Play. Together, we will explore how we can, even in today's fearful world, offer children the kind of playfully risky childhood's they need and deserve. To learn more and to get on the waitlist, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

If You Go Outside You'll Find that Today is a Day of Awe and Wonder

With each passing generation, we are spending less and less time outdoors. There was a time, not very long ago, that we all understood that we needed, every day, for many hours a day, to step out from under our ceilings, to be free of our walls, to escape from the straight lines imposed upon the world by humans, and bathe in the undulations and curves of the natural world.

At the same time, the world is demanding that we engage in more and more abstract thought. The gathering and hunting lifestyle for which we've evolved called for what those who study these things call "passive attention." As we move through nature (without our devices, of course), our attention is more easily brought into the present, where our thoughts tend to drift easily from object to object and from topic to topic in an effortless way. This makes perfect sense because our ancestors needed to remain aware of their surroundings: to become lost in thought while, say, in a jungle or savannah greatly increased the odds of becoming a predator's meal. Engaging in, say, mental mathematics meant missing out on those berries or nuts. In other words, Homo sapiens that were unable to allow their thoughts to attend to the sounds, scents, and sights of the world around them, to enter a state of what psychologists call "soft fascination", did not tend to survive long enough to procreate. In other words, except in certain, relatively rare circumstances, too much abstract through could be deadly.

This is why we tend to grow restless and increasingly distracted when we've spent too much time indoors. Multiple studies have shown the mental benefits of getting outdoors. Doctors in South Korea, the UK, and other places are prescribing "forest bathing" to their patients. A twenty-minute walk in a park has been shown to improve children's concentration and impulse control (both of which are required for engaging in abstract thought) as much as a dose of Ritalin.

Anyone who has spent time with young children have seen the effects of moving from indoors to outdoors. It's like pushing a mental reset button. And by now, everyone in our field, even those who continue to, misguidedly, impose academics on young children, should be well-aware of the mountains of data telling us to get children outdoors, preferably in natural spaces.

In my conversation with author and parent educator Maggie Dent on Teacher Tom's Podcast we discuss the current mental health crisis that is impacting even in our youngest citizens. She asserts that a big part, perhaps the most important part, of any cure must be getting our children playing in the natural world. In nature their play becomes more imaginative. It's while playing in nature that they most naturally practice being resilient, where they develop their fine and gross motor abilities, and where they most easily enter into that state of soft fascination which is what science journalist Annie Murphy Paul refers to as the brain's "default mode network."

But what stuck me most in my conversation with Maggie was her assertion that "nature offers awe and wonder."

Psychologist and author Dacher Keltner has studied awe and wonder. His bestseller is called AWE: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and how it Can Transform Your Life. He tells us that the experience of awe is like pushing a reset button for the brain. It makes us more curious and more likely to rethink what we thought we already knew. When we find ourselves in the presence of something bigger than ourselves we become less self-centered and more inclined to feel connected to other people and the world, which is, at the end of the day, what stands at the core of mental health: connection.

And while I'm sure that it's possible, under just the right conditions, to experience awe while indoors, the most reliable source of awe is nature. Maggie tells the story of ducking under a tree with her grandson to escape a sudden rain storm and how he spent 45 minutes immersed in a self-directed, free-form study of "fronds." The word awe tends to evoke mighty mountains, vast oceans, and the night time sky, but it is also found in fronds and twigs and pebbles. It's located in birds and bees. It's there, just awaiting our passive fascination to be struck by it in the wind, the rain, and the clouds. Indeed, what is more awe-inspiring than an hour lying in the grass, eyes closed, just listening?

Today, June 20, 2024 is the summer solstice, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, the longest day of the year. It is an event that has awed us since at least the Neolithic era, but probably even predates that. Humans have expressed our awe in celebrations and monuments. Just because science has explained it, doesn't mean it isn't any less awe-inspiring today, although most modern humans will spend this day, this day of days, indoors, completely unaware of this magnificent, brain-enhancing thing. No wonder so many of us, including our children, feel so disconnected.

The solstice officially occurs at 1:50 p.m. PST. I plan to be outdoors at that very moment. Perhaps you'll join me.

******

Another thing Maggie and I discuss is the vital importance of risky play to the development of young minds and bodies. Nature is not only the source of awe, but also offers many of the "just right" risk taking opportunities they need to develop into curious, resilient, and courageous humans. Sadly, as Maggie points out, we live in a world of fear around allowing children even a modicum of risk in their play. If you are interested in providing the children in your life a summer of outdoor play (and beyond), please consider joining the 2024 cohort for my 6-week course Teacher Tom's Risky Play. In it this course, we will explore how we can, even in today's fearful world, offer children the kind of playfully risky childhood's they need and deserve. To learn more and to get on the waitlist, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

"Disrespectful" and "Destructive" Children

Not long ago, I was tagged in a Facebook thread of teachers complaining about the behavior of their students. I only spent a few minutes scrolling through the comments, but most of them seemed to be coming from middle school teachers in public schools who were accusing the kids of being disrespectful and destructive. Some even provided photographic evidence of vandalism and general disregard for property.

"Uncaring" and "disconnected" parents seemed to be receiving most of the blame with the Covid pandemic coming in a close and intertwined second. Unaddressed mental health challenges were mentioned as a cause as was our namby-pamby society in which adults are no longer allowed to hit children to "teach them respect." In fairness, there were a few commenters who pointed their fingers at modern schooling itself, but they were few and far between. A huge percentage of these teachers asserted that they were quitting their jobs as soon as possible.

I clicked away after a minute or two, however, in part because I've been trying to remain conscious of my online scrolling behavior, but mostly because my personal focus is preschool-aged children, not middle schoolers.

In my conversation with author, educator, and parenting and resilience specialist Maggie Dent for Teacher Tom's Podcast she made the off-hand comment, "Teenagers are preschoolers on steroids." She's not called the "queen of common sense" for nothing!

In preschool, we say that behavior is communication. If a preschooler behaves disrespectfully or destructively we would immediately assume that they were trying to tell us that they're sad, afraid, confused, overwhelmed, frustrated, angry, or otherwise dysregulated, and it's our job, as the adults, to try to figure out what it is they are telling us. Their family life might well have something to do with it. For instance, it's quite common for a formerly single child to engage in selfish behavior while adjusting to a new baby at home. Maybe someone in the family has lost their job. Maybe there are marital problems. These kinds of things impact teenagers as well. 

In my experience, most troubling behaviors have their roots in something going on at home, but it would never occur to me as a preschool teacher to blame parents. 

When I think of the behavior of these young teenagers, most of whom are at an age that traditional cultures consider to be adults, I wonder if maybe they're the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. These teachers seemed to be insisting that this kind of behavior is relatively new, that it didn't used to be this way. These teachers seem to be reporting from all corners of the country. Now, granted, this Facebook thread, like all gripe-fests, is a self-selected group which is not inclusive of those who are not experiencing challenging behaviors or who feel on top of things, but this isn't the first time I've heard about rising disrespect and destructiveness. 

Maybe these children's behavior is the tip of a much larger iceberg. Maybe the disrespect and destructiveness isn't isolated to middle school classrooms. Indeed, it's quite clear that it isn't. Some days it feels as if the entire world is behaving like these middle schoolers.

Young children who behave disrespectfully, I've found, are the children who are treated disrespectfully by the adults in their lives. Young children who behave destructively, I've found, are the children who feel they have little choice in their lives, who feel trapped or caged or otherwise un-free to engage the world in personally meaningful ways.

One of the reasons I strive to stop scrolling is because too much of what I find there is disrespect, destruction and finger-pointing. It's not just middle schoolers, it's all of us. Perhaps not you or me, but our behavior as a culture is communicating, and what I hear it saying is "I am human, too!"

What I've found with preschoolers is that disrespect and destructiveness tends to disappear when I stop trying to control them and instead make the effort to listen to what their behavior is communicating. Often, all it takes is that, listening. When I listen, I understand that these children are only asking for the same thing all of us are asking for: to be allowed to pursue a life of meaning and purpose in a reasonably safe environment of respect. When we don't get that, we often respond with disrespect and destruction.

When I listen to young children, more often than not, I hear myself, and that is where understanding begins.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Play Allows Us to Direct Our Own Evolution

Ethologists are zoologists who study the behavior of animals in their natural habitat. They study orcas in the ocean, not Sea World. They study cheetahs on the savannah, not in the zoo. This makes sense. When we study animals in captivity most of what we learn is how that species responds to captivity. As writer and filmmaker Carol Black points out in her brilliant essay A Thousand Rivers, much of the data we collect on human learning has come from studies of children in schools, which is to say, children in captivity.

This question of "captivity" hangs over much, if not most, of the so-called science of learning. After all, virtually all of our children spend most of their lives in the captivity of schools. It's uncomfortable to think about, but it doesn't require a cynic to recognize that schools and prisons have a great deal in common. The inmates are under constant supervision by superiors who are empowered to punish them if they step too far out of line. Their daily schedules are proscribed. They spend most of their time indoors. They cannot leave or opt out or choose to do something other than what they're required to do.

We try to make ourselves feel better about it by telling ourselves the story that it's a benign captivity, one that is "for their own good," but there is no doubt that if left to their own devices, most of our children would choose to spend their time playing, preferably outdoors. In other words, they would choose the opposite of captivity, which is liberty. We all would.

From the perspective of ethology, the only way we will ever understand human learning is to study humans who are at liberty, which is to say, while at play.

There can be no doubt that this urge to play is an adaptive trait, one that is essential to human survival. As journalist David Toomey puts it in his new book Kingdom of Play:

At present, evolutionary biologists do not know that a master gene enabled and orchestrated play, much less which master gene. Neither do they know where or when play began. They have no map, no cladogram, depicting the evolution of all animal play. But they know that play has a history stretching back hundreds of millions of years, and that its roots, that hypothetical suite of master genes, may be older still. Play has endured the formation and reformation of continents, three ice ages, and two mass extinctions. So they — and we— can be certain of one aspect of play. Whatever its adaptive advantages, they are worth the trouble. Nature takes play seriously.

Since we have, for better or worse, chosen to raise our own young in captivity, if we are to likewise take play seriously, we are best served by turning to ethologists, who, as Toomey puts it, "believe that innovative play might be a means by which an animal gains a measure of control over its own evolution."

Evolution is generally thought about in terms of random genetic mutations and law of the jungle consequences, and that obviously still plays a significant role, but it seems that the existence of play allows us to consider evolution from a new perspective. Looked at this way, we see that evolution takes place as a process of living things playing with their environment. When they learn something from their play that enhances their life — e.g., makes it easier to get food, more likely to reproduce, or simply brings joy -- they then teach what they’ve learned to others through role modeling. Over time, natural selection favors those who are best able to take advantage of this learning, so they are the individuals whose genes are the ones that are more likely to be passed along to future generations. And those are the genes, whether or not we know exactly which ones they are, that favor play.

For anyone versed in classic evolutionary theory, this is a bit mind-blowing. After all, this means that animals, through play, are capable of liberating themselves from the forces of natural selection, and to at least some degree direct them. But this kind of liberty is not possible for an animal held in captivity.

Modern school thwarts play. Indeed it often punishes play. Schooling replaces our children's natural urge to direct their own learning through play with a curriculum that determines, in advance, what they will learn, how they will learn it, and according to what schedule. As Dr. Denisha Jones, director of Defending the Early Years, tells us in our conversation about "liberation pedagogy" on Teacher Tom's Podcast, "A system that determines what you will learn kills curiosity" and curiosity is the driving force behind play. And as Denisha tells us, "Play is freedom. Play is liberation."

In the early years, many of us strive to create programs that free children to play, to provide them with a natural habitat for learning. This means that we are in the vanguard of understanding human learning. We are the "ethologists" specializing in our own species because we are among the few who live amongst free humans. There is a societal tendency to pat us on the head and patronizingly praise us for doing "such important work," but what they mean, most of the time, is that they're glad we're willing to muck around amidst the pink eye, diaper changing, and temper tantrums, so they don't have to. But this is simply evidence of how little we, as a culture, understand about learning, and it explains why they're unwilling to listen to us when we tell them about play and liberation.

It's from this perspective that we can see that it's not just our children we keep in captivity, but also ourselves. We live in a world that doesn't understand play at all, that denigrates it, that commodifies it, that relegates it to recesses, weekends, and two-weeks of paid vacations.

When I'm with liberated children, however, I find myself, for a time at least, swimming with the orcas, running with the cheetahs, and playing with the children. I'm liberated. And I know that I am in my natural habitat. 

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!