No One Wants to Raise a Little A--hole

Alfredo Jaar (Mahatma Grandi's "Seven Social Sins")

A little over a decade ago a study led by Harvard psychologist Richard Weissbourd found that 80 percent of US children believe their parents are more concerned with their grades and test scores than such things as kindness and compassion.

I don't imagine much has changed in the past decade. Recently, Pope Francis felt compelled to defend Jesus Christ's most famous speech, The Sermon on the Mount, because so many congregants, especially in the US, are objecting to its central message of forgiveness, generosity, humility, and peace as being too "woke." This week, on the day we've set aside to celebrate the life of Martin Luther King Jr., we installed a President who, whatever you think of his politics, is a notoriously boastful bully. Many of his supporters say they see this as "strength."

Selfishness and self-interest are clearly ascendant in contemporary society. Perhaps it's always been this way. I mean, politicians and organized religion don't have a particularly clean track record when it comes to virtues, but it does seem, for better or worse, that we've stopped trying to hide it and our children have noticed. We can lecture them all we want. We can tell them stories of goodness. We can let them know how we expect them to behave, but at the end of the day, our counter messages of kindness and compassion, selflessness and humility, are being overwhelmed by the real world.

Or is it? Yes, it's a problem that children think their parents care more about school success than being kind to others. I imagine that had the Harvard study asked their parents, most of them would reply that kindness and compassion come before grades. Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, but having spoken to thousands of parents about their aspirations for their child, I've never met one who placed academic achievement over virtue. After all, no one wants to raise a little asshole.

There are those who believe that humans are essentially evil, of course, and that there is nothing we can do about any of this other than Skinnerian punishments and rewards. There are others who believe that we are essentially good, and that if parents/schools/society could just ensure that everyone is has their physiological needs met (e.g., food, clothing, shelter), are physically safe, and know that they are loved, then virtue will naturally emerge.

A 2007 study out of Yale found that infants as young as six months old possess an innate sense of morality, can distinguish right from wrong, and show a preference for good over bad. Subsequent research finds that children as young as 18 months will set aside their own pleasure in order to help strangers, even if no reward is offered for doing so. On the other hand, when resources are limited, when children find themselves arbitrarily divided into groups, or when they are explicitly taught that their needs are more important than the needs of others, they tend to behave in selfish ways, including bullying. In other words, children tend to behave according to the environment in which they find themselves. But they start on the side of virtue.

Competitive schooling and parents who focus on academic achievement obviously steer children toward selfishness. Children who are raised in a world in which the wealthy and powerful are raised onto pedestals, obviously learn the lessons of wealth and power. Children who see boastful bullies elevated and praised understandably conclude that kindnesss and compassion are weakness.

As Rutger Bregman writes in his book Humankind, "(T)o stand up for human goodness is to take a stand against the powers that be. For the powerful, a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening. Subversive. Seditious. It implies that we're not selfish beasts that need to be reined in, restrained and regulated. It implies that we need a different kind of leadership. A company with intrinsically motivated employee has no need of managers; a democracy with engaged citizens has no need of career politicians."

To stand up for goodness is to invite cynicism and ridicule, but only from cynics and those whose power is threatened by goodness. As Bergman tells us, a British study finds that nearly 75 percent of us report that we identify more with "values such as helpfulness, honesty and justice than with wealth, status and power," yet almost the same percentage believe that others are more selfish than they actually are. In other words, it appears that we've been "taught" to assume the worst of one another. We've been taught that if we aren't selfish, we're losers. No wonder so many of us behave like little assholes.

It seems that young children are born knowing the opposite. It also seems that most of us grow into adulthood knowing the difference between right and wrong.

I'm taking a break from the news and am trying to manage my social media use in a way that allows me to focus on my friends, family, and the community of early childhood educators and parents who are attracted to the things Teacher Tom is up to. I'm reading more, especially fiction, which is known to increase empathy and compassion. I'm spending more time with people in the real world, my neighbors and friends, and while I might disagree with them about many things, I find that our opinions about values are more similar to mine than not. In other words, I'm being subversive and even seditious.

Our species has always produced selfish people, but for most of our 300,000 year history they were pointed out as such. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were intolerant of boastful bullies, ridiculing them, and even banishing them if it got too bad. So it hasn't always been this way, but we have always had to act against it. As Bergman says, "That's how good overpowers evil -- by outnumbering it."

We have the numbers, despite what the cynics say, and there are more of us being born every day.

As early childhood educators, we must know that not only are the children in our care programmed by evolution for virtue, at least 75 percent of their parents value virtue as well. "Teaching" the virtues, however, is a famously difficult thing to do: we must live it, role model it, and be courageous (one of the most important virtues) in standing up even when those around us are giving in. This is how our children will come to learn not only that we value goodness over evil, but that it's something worth fighting for.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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!

Why We Need Children in the Midst of Life Itself

My brother and I used to fight over who got to sit in the window seat on airplanes. We wanted to be able to look out. The world from 30,000 feet was an amazing thing. And it was all right there through these portholes with double panes. We weren't the only ones. Nearly everyone lucky enough to be seated by a window watched the world from this unique perspective, at least during take offs and landings.

Today, I still tend fly with my shade open, but most people close them the moment they're seated. I've become aware of this because my fellow passengers have actually asked me, if I'm not actively peering out, to close my shade. I understand that for some people the constant reminder that they are traveling in a metal tube suspended at the edge of outer space is nerve wracking. But most make the request because they're planning to get some sleep or the glare washes out their device screen.

I was born in 1962, right in the middle of the so-called "golden age" of air travel. This is when jet engine aircraft with pressurized cabins became commonplace enough that middle class people could take advantage of this awe-inspiring amazing technology. It was new and exciting for everyone. Today, commercial air travel is old hat, except when it comes to young children: air travel still excites them.

Curmudgeonly adults tend to only notice the kids who are having a bad day or the crying babies, but when I look around, I see children who are every bit as excited as we were as everyone was when I traveled as a boy. They're at the windows asking questions about every detail of what they see going on out on the tarmac. They pepper their adults questions about everything. Once on the plane, they keep the shades open . . . then closed, then open, the closed again. Same with their tray tables. "I have my own little table!" "I got a magazine!" "The arm rest goes up!" "We're moving!" "We're going up!" "We're up!" "I can see houses!" "The cars down there are tiny!" "We're flying in clouds!"

Most adults I know today talk about air travel with a cynic's sigh. They gird themselves for hardship. But these children, if we allow them, remind us that what we are doing is still awe-inspiring. It would be enough if all they did was remind us that there is good reason to be excited about living, today, right now. It's something that most adults miss as they spend their days in places where the presence of children is frowned upon, if not outright banned. Indeed, most of society misses this as young children have been more or less relegated to their homes, school, and a handful of other places designed specifically for children.

For most of human history, children were part of every aspect of life, participating in the hunting, gathering, farming, commerce, cooking, and manufacturing. That was their education, learning alongside their elders. Were they underfoot? Did they cry and fuss? Did they run around and behave boisterously? Of course, they're children, they did all those things. They were there to remind the adults that the emerging present moment is the best time to fully engage life itself. To laugh and cry and feel.

Because they are so much newer to the world, young children serve as societal novelty detectors, finding something new in the commonplace. We see it every time we watch a child make a toy of a bottle cap or a stick. We see it when they make treasures of pebbles or maple leaves. We see it when they discover new possibilities for things we've long taken for granted. Having young children in our lives helps us see the new possibilities in the everyday. They paint rainbows through our grayness.

Likewise, their curiosity, their thousand questions, forces us to focus on providing answers. So often, adults, in their hurry, are dismissive -- "Because I said so," "That's just the way it is," "The sky is blue because it isn't green" -- but when we take the time to answer respectfully, we deepen our own understanding of the world by putting what we know into words. And often we discover that we ourselves don't know the answer and we can then join them in their wonder.

In this, early childhood professionals are the lucky ones. We know to keep the shades open on the plane, to appreciate the magic of a leaf, and to wonder at the shape and size and heft of pebbles. I often wonder how much different the world would be if we didn't segregate our young children into pink collar ghettos and instead included them, as they deserve, in the midst of life itself.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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!

How We Create Ourselves

Our dog Stella is over ten years old and it seems like she's still learning new tricks. In the past couple years, she seems to have taken more than passing interest in how humans use their voices and has been experimenting with her own.

She's always barked, of course, but not long ago, she started howling joyfully whenever we have guests over to the house. I reckon she's noticed that everyone's voices jump up in intensity and volume as we greet one another. I've read that dog's can hear our heart beats. I imagine that she's responding to the excitement or nervousness we all feel about the evening to come. We've taught her not to be reactive to other dogs when we're out walking, but lately I've noticed that as we say "Good morning" to people with their leashed dogs, she's started "talking" as well. It might sound like a kind of whine -- and maybe that's all it is -- but it sure feels like she's also using her voice to greet those we pass. For years, when she wanted something -- to be fed, to go outside -- she would just sit and stare at us, but lately she's added a low rumbling voice to her repertoire. And sometimes, when my wife and I are engaged in a long conversation, she joins us in a way that seems, well, conversational.

We're warned against andromorphizing animal behavior (e.g., attributing human traits, feelings, and behaviors to non-humans) but the more I learn about animals, and plants for that matter, the more I'm convinced that we don't andromorphize enough. 

By now, Stella knows that we're not big fans of wild barking, lurching toward other dogs, and other "unruly" behavior. These are, however, natural ways for canines to connect with the world. My theory is that with those things off the table, she's figuring out new, approved ways of creating relationships with the world around her. Traditional animal behaviorists might insist that it's all some sort of Skinnerian conditioning and that she's really motivated by instincts to, say, dominate or control territory or secure food. But as one of her most constant companions, I see the same thing I see in young children: everything is about relationships, and our voices are a key way that humans do this.

From the moment we're born, we begin creating relationships with people, places, and things. Our voices, a baby's cry, for instance, is one of the first ways we begin to entangle ourselves in the world. We tend to think of our voices as something ephemeral because they lack substance, but from the very beginning of life, we use our voices to move the world. Our cry brings us food, snuggles, and responding voices: connection. This is what lets us know we're alive, that we're safe, that we're real. Maybe I am andromorphizing, but it sure seems to be that this is what Stella has figured out and she wants a little of that for herself.

Physicist Carlo Rovelli, who I've written about on this blog many times before and whose books I enjoy reading and re-reading, has a gift for "andromorphizing" physics. But that doesn't mean he isn't a serious scientist, it's just that he's capable of using, say, the poetry of Dante to communicate about the nature of the universe.

Rovelli argues that the physical world is nothing more than a web of relations. He writes that we live in "a world of happenings, not of things," drawing his conclusions from the study of quantum mechanics where time and space are not objective things, but rather relationships between something and something else. "There is no longer space that 'contains' the world, and there is no longer time 'in which' events occur. There are only elementary processes wherein quanta of space and matter continually interact with one another. The illusion of space and time that continues round us is a blurred vision of this swarming of elementary processes."  In this understanding of the universe, there is no cause and effect, just relationships between things and the stories we tell about them. As science writer George Musser puts it in his new book Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, "Not only does a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it make no sound, but it doesn’t even exist."

It sounds fantastical, but these are logical conclusion based on the language of logic: math. Obviously, these kinds of conclusions may very well simply point to flaws in our theories and there are many physicists who think Rovelli and others who think like him are wrong. Still, this notion that even such fundamental things as gravity and magnetism have no properties in isolation, but rather only acquire them through entanglement with other things is one that has parallels in the world outside those ivory towers.

We know, for instance, that humans kept in isolation lose their minds. Their brains literally shrink. They hallucinate, they lose their sense of self. Indeed, when a person is kept in isolation long enough, they come to believe they no longer exist. Babies who are not held roll over and die. Just as the tree in the forest doesn't exist without relationships, we ourselves do not exist without them.

As Musser writes, "By analogy, consider a famous optical illusion by the German psychologist Walter Ehrenstein, in which lines converge on a point but never actually meet, like a wheel with spokes but no hub. We still see a hub, because the brain fills it in. Similarly, we see relations in the world, and our Brians presume those relations must be anchored in concrete objects, but maybe those objects are illusory."

One of the most mysterious things in quantum mechanics is the phenomenon of quantum entanglement in which two or more particles (e.g., electrons, photons) are connected and their properties are dependent on one another, even when separated by large distances. They are in entangled with one another in a way the defies our day-to-day experience of space and time, suggesting to me that relationship is everything, something our babies know, something Stella knows.

"Children," writes Rovelli, "grow up and discover that the world is not as it seemed from within the four walls of their homes. Humankind as a whole does the same." At the end of the day, learning is about creating entanglements, or rather playing, with people, places, and things. When we do this, we are not simply seeing, smelling, tasting, feeling, or hearing what is there, but rather creating what is there through the relationship we forge beyond the metaphorical four walls of ourselves. This is likewise how we create ourselves.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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 loerht of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Because of the Beauty Part

Before moving to the Center of the Universe, the sidewalk in front of our old school was a long, tempting hill down which the children would regularly run after they had left with their parents. I couldn't see them do this because of the 7-foot high fence that surrounded our courtyard, but I heard them declaring their intent to run down it. I heard their mothers warn them to be careful. And, not always, but regularly, I heard the sickening sound of their bodies succumbing to gravity when they stumbled and fell headlong onto the concrete.

Watching as children make pendulum paintings is like reading Moby Dick. We are, of course, playing with the great forces of nature, in this case gravity, one that will always, inevitably win out over all our efforts to control it.

Our cups of paint swing with a universal predictability, with an original trajectory of our own devices, but with a destiny predetermined by the laws of physics.

When we just stand back and observe, indescribable beauty is revealed to us.

But it's hard for us to just stand back. We want to put our hands on and see if we can control these mighty forces, just as we want to challenge ourselves by running down the hill in front of the school.

I see that the paint is flowing in a stream from the bottom of the cup, pooling

where it lands.

The grown-up is urging me to let it go, so I finally do, and see that it swings,

making a straight line.

And this is what happens when I give it a push in another direction.

It's an experiment, of course, but it's also hard to not see it as a kind of battle between the forces of nature and man's eternal struggle to control them. Or maybe it's just a struggle to come to grips with them.

One time, as we played with our painting pendulums, an inevitable geologic process was coming to a head under Tokyo, one that would soon devastate an unsuspecting nation. Millions of people were to be horribly reminded of the supreme power of nature; how thin that veneer of control really is.

How brave we must be, really, to go about our lives knowing that the flip side of that indescribable beauty is indescribable tragedy.

I suppose it's normal to want to protect our children from this, at least until they are older and somehow more sophisticated, but at the same time I suspect they know it already, perhaps not intellectually, but at a deeper level, because they've tried the experiment of running down the hill in front of the school and have fallen on the concrete.

And once the pain has subsided, they'll want to try it again. That's because of the beauty part.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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!

Before We Colonize Their Brains With Literacy

Most of the two-year-olds I've ever met could already sing at least part of the Alphabet Song. I didn't teach it to them. It's something that parents sing to their children at home, probably because it's one of the first songs they themselves learned.

The tune comes from the mid-18th century and accompanied several nursery rhymes including Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and Baa Baa Black Sheep, while the A-B-C lyrics were first "copyrighted" a century later (can you copyright the alphabet?). The simple, memorable tune, which was employed by Mozart in his Twelve Variations, has become the primary way that we teach the alphabet in a variety of European languages. With few exceptions, every child I've ever known has had it down by the time they were three.

For most of human history, there was no alphabet. Up until relatively recently, there were still languages in the world, that is to say entire cultures, that did not translate into a phonetic alphabet. 

A phonetic alphabet is a way to communicate through language over space and time. In doing so, it greatly simplifies language, reducing it to 26 sounds, a few diphthongs, and some consonant blends, leaving out most of the sounds humans are capable of using to communicate. In other words, the alphabet tends to restrict and simplify. In fact, since the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet by the Greeks during the 8th century BC, it's asserted that human language has likely become less varied and nuanced than in pre-alphabet eras. This, in part, reflects concerns expressed by Socrates who was famously opposed to the use of the alphabet; we know this because his student Plato recorded his words using that same alphabet.

Most languages spoken in the world today have been translated alphabetically, usually employing the letters with which anyone reading here is familiar. As philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote, "(A)ny society possessing the alphabet can translate any adjacent cultures into its alphabetic mode. But this is a one-way process. No non-alphabetic culture can take over an alphabetic one; because the alphabet cannot be assimilated; it can only liquidate or reduce." McLuhan suggests that it was the adoption of the alphabet that ultimately lead Western civilization down an inevitable the path to colonialism.

I often think of the culture of young children as a pre- or non-alphabetic culture. I mean, we tend to dismiss a baby's cry as a kind of "catch all" communication, leading frantic parents to "try" everything in the effort to respond to what they are trying to "tell" us. Sometimes they're telling us they're hungry. Sometimes we can't figure out what they're saying. And sometimes, perhaps more often than our alphabet shaped minds can understand, they're expressing something we are simply unable to comprehend. Looked at this way, one could argue that the alphabet song is a kind of colonial foray of adults into the world of childhood, forever liquidating and reducing it.

I'm of course not trying to make the case that we should stop singing that song, but it's also important, I think, as adults who work with young people, that we take a moment to consider that these minds not yet shaped like ours. We worry that today's technologies, like smartphones, are changing our brains, and they are, in the same way that the phonetic alphabet changes our brains. Indeed, any form of literacy -- be it technological, social-emotional, or good old fashioned reading -- changes our brains. 

McLuhan actually predicts (or at least speculates) that the phonetic alphabet, in the broader sweep of existence, may be on it's way out as technology allows us to increasingly communicate through space and time without resorting to the A-B-C's. Real world cases in point: people are sending me audio "text" messages; email is being replaced by Zoom; how-to guides have been supplanted by YouTube videos. In the future, will we even need the alphabet?

Our children's brains will change, that's what learning is, but I worry about what we lose, what we miss out on, and what harm we may be doing when we seek to rush children towards literacy. After all, long before the alphabet, the evolutionary process created human brains that were much more like our children's than the brains we carry around in our adult heads. It seems that we should respect our children as they are enough to allow them their time before we colonize their brains with literacy. Perhaps we should view these precious years as an opportunity to study what it means to think and feel and know without letters instead of, as we too often do, hurry to liquidate and reduce their experience to 26 letters.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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!

The Antidote to the Mean World Syndrome

Keith Haring (Luna Luna)

I know several people who have been directly impacted by the ongoing firestorm in Los Angeles, four of whom have lost their homes. 

I've been on a strict news break for the past few months. I didn't learn about the disaster until people I know told me about it. The only stories I've heard are from the perspective of people who have experienced it. These people have all been fortunate enough to have not been physically harmed, to have escaped with their loved ones, their pets, and a handful of their most important keepsakes. They are sad, of course, but also, all of them, have expressed gratitude. "It's just stuff," they've said. They've talked more about the people who have it worse than they do than they have themselves, urging me to contribute to this or that effort to provide food, clothing, and shelter for those who need it. "We'll be okay," they've said from where they are living out of a suitcase. Even as they've lost their homes, they are expressing compassion for those who have lost even more or who were not as well prepared.

I don't know what people on the news are saying. I'm sure there have been interviews with people expressing sentiments similar to my friends, but I also have no doubt that fingers are being pointed, that ideologues have taken up microphones to blame other ideologues, that people from one state are gloating about what happened in another state. I know this because I've watched the news for most of my adult life.

George Gerbner, a professor, author, media critic, and founder of what's called cultivation theory, spent his career studying how the news, and particularly television news, impacts our perception of society. He coined the term "mean world syndrome," a phrase he used to describe the fact that people who watch large amounts of television are more likely to perceive the world as a dangerous and frightening place. They tend to be more cynical, more misanthropic, and more pessimistic than those who watch less. They believe that their fellow humans are more selfish and self-centered than they really are. They believe that individuals are helpless to better the world and are far more likely to be stressed and depressed. Is it any surprise that we've become so radically anti-social?

In just a few months of avoiding the news, I've seen a change in my own perceptions of the world. For one thing, I'm a much better listener. My mind still wants to know what's going on in the world, but without the news, I have to count on people I know. Yes, many of them know what they know through the news, but it comes to me filtered through the perspective of actual human beings in my life and that makes a difference. Actual humans, as opposed to the talking heads motivated by ratings, are more inclined to deliver "the news" with a catch in their throat, with tears in their eyes, and, like with my friends who have lost their homes, gratitude and compassion.

Gratitude and compassion are the antidotes to "mean world syndrome." When I reflect on my wonderful life amidst young humans, I can't tell you how often I've seen a child fall and another help them get back up. I'll never forget one boy who was having a difficult day who sat on a swing shouting "Help! Help!" His classmates swarmed to him, like anti-bodies to a wound. He wanted them to push him, but it was clear that he also wanted more than that, and the other children responded the way human beings always have, by helping him. I think of how excited and grateful a child can be over the smallest thing -- a special rock, a scent, a song.

This is who we are.

I hold a degree in journalism. "The news," by definition, is something out-of-the-ordinary. Dog biting man is not news. Man biting dog is. The "mean" things, the tragedies, the hate, the violence, the anger, these things are in the aberrations. We don't see much gratitude and compassion on the news because it's found everywhere the news is not. 

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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!

It's As If They Have Never Before Seen a Human Ready and Eager to Learn

Jean-Michel Basquiat (Luna Luna)

Over my decades as a play-based preschool teacher, I've never had to deal with a bored child. I've worked with sad and angry children, frightened and frustrated children, and even children who were experiencing emotions that our language cannot fully describe, but never a bored one . . . or at least not for long.

In our play-based program, children engage with an object or a game or a person of their choosing for a time. They are attracted by the novelty of whatever it is, drawn in by the questions they have about it. They put their hands on it, their minds to it. What is it? What can I do with it? What will it do with me? In other words, they play with it. Then, as their questions get answered, they start to lose interest and something like boredom creeps in, which is the brain's signal to move on to the next novelty. This is how humans have evolved to educate themselves.

From the perspective of neuroscience, the neural network that makes up our brain is, as most of us know by now, initially very plastic which allows it to absorb new information, but over time, and as the information becomes repetitive, it starts to solidify. We can actually feel this happening: we start with the thrill of novelty, followed by the satisfaction of mastery, and then comes the restlessness, the boredom, that draws us into new challenges. And in a play-based program there is always a new challenge, which is why I've never had to deal with a bored child: in a varied and beautiful environment, free people are always learning.

For a long time, we believed that this plasticity naturally solidifies as we age, achieving its "final" form in young adulthood, but we now know that our brains can remain plastic throughout life if only we continue to find ourselves in the presence of novelty. This is one of the reasons I read books, both fiction and nonfiction, history, mysteries, science, politics, psychology, classic novels, and especially books written by people who are not middle-aged, middle-class, American males because, being one of those, I'm a bit bored by that singular perspective. My day-to-day life may not always present me with all the novelty I need, but books are entire worlds I can access from within my current life. Of course, I also seek novelty in travel, in trying new things, in meeting new people. It takes more effort than it did when I was a child and everything was new, but I'm committed to not aging into a calcified old man.

In recent years, it's become an expression of common wisdom to say something like, Let your children be bored; that's how they learn to be creative. The idea is that kids will naturally overcome the lethargy and discomfort of their boredom by finding something to do and, bingo, the boredom is over. This is of course true, as we see every day in play-based preschool. But increasingly our children feel trapped in a life in which they see little novelty and, perhaps more importantly, they have no permission to seek novelty.

As a boy, I recall experiencing boredom on days when I was stuck at home. Mom was busy, my brother irritating, and the toys were all played out. In other words, I'd mastered what there was to master, draining my self-contained world of novelty. I'd have watched TV, but back then, there was very little to interest children outside of Saturday mornings. If I complained, mom suggested chores. I would typically solve the problem by picking up a book, picking a fight with my brother, or going outside. In other words, I would escape to where the novelty was.

Today's children still have the escapes of books and bickering, although the habit of reading is on the wane and adults usually don't tolerate bickering. The sure fire option of going outside has pretty much been replaced by video games and an internet that provides 24/7 children's programming. However, we adults have, rightly or wrongly, determined that screen-based activities must be restricted in the name of health and safety, so we cut off that escape route. We buy them more toys than ever before, but the novelty of manufactured toys is, by design, always short-lived. We sign them up for classes and sports teams and whatnot. Sometimes that works, especially if a child discovers an art or pursuit or activity that inspires them, but since most of these types of things are offered on a schedule and at a remote location, they aren't options for long afternoons during which "There's nothing to do." They require boredom to happen on a schedule.

Standard schooling is even worse than being at home. Children are literally confined to rooms, to desks, to mandated curricula. They are made to memorize material in which they have no interest and learn skills for which they see no applicability. When they try to connect with the other children, they are told "no socializing." When novelty accidentally occurs -- a flooded playground, new toilets being installed, a raccoon family wanders past -- the children are shooed away. In many standard schools novelty is so rare that on those days in which it is consciously introduced -- an assembly, a visit from firefighters, a pizza party -- the adults are frightened by the children's excitement. It feels like things are on the verge of being out-of-control. 

It's as if they have never before seen a human ready and eager to learn.

And here's the point, boredom is meant to be a short-lived thing, fixed by going outside or reading a book or engaging with friends. The kind of chronic boredom that characterizes standard schooling is not a benign thing. Extended periods of boredom damage the mind (see what happens to prisoners in isolation). It affects mental health. It leads to rage, depression, and worse. This is why I worry every time an adult dismisses a child's boredom as "a good thing." A little bit is necessary. A lot, however, is deadly.

Our brains cannot tolerate ongoing, inescapable boredom, but it needs those small doses that let it know it's time to move on. We have evolved to keep ourselves, as science journalist George Musser puts it, "on the cusp between frustration and boredom," in that wonder-filled space between What is this and what can I do with it? and I'm ready for something new. This is what we see when children are uncaged, when they know they have permission to play in a varied and beautiful environment.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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.

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