Parents: Keep Out!

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. A plane goes down somewhere in the Pacific. The survivors stranded on a deserted island are a group of schoolboys. At first, they celebrate their newfound escape from adult supervision playing on the beach. Then they organize. They elect one of the boys, Ralph, as their chief. Ralph and several others get a fire going. But soon, the boys begin resisting Ralph's efforts to lead them. The boys assigned to watch over the fire get distracted and the fire goes out. They become paranoid and stoke each other's fears of a beast they're convinced is stalking the island. They split into warring factions and begin attacking one another. Three of them die. This is the story told in the 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies. It was written by an English school teacher named William Golding, and it reflected his harsh view of humans in general and children in particular. The novel ends when a British naval officer lands on the island and finds her children in a ragged, feral state. The novel entered the cultural consciousness as a warning. Without rules, systems, and adult supervision, children left alone would descend into chaos. As with many generalizations, there is some truth to this. A multitude of studies suggest kids thrive when they have stability. Chaotic and unpredictable environments can bring out the worst in us. But today, we explore whether many societies have taken William Golding's warning too much to heart. If some supervision of children is a good thing, lots of parents, teachers, and school administrators seem to think more is always better. When more is less and less is more, this week on Hidden Brain. When you're first learning to swim, it's not a good idea to be pushed into very deep water. You could drown. But it's also not a very good idea to simply waddle around in the shallow. You'll never learn to swim. If you're a parent or a teacher, you're constantly asking yourself how to balance risk and safety for the kids in your care. Tip too far in one direction, and you can put children in danger. Go too far in the other, and you deprive kids of the joy and power of exploration. At Boston College, psychologist Peter Gray studies how the balance between exploration and safety has changed for many children and the effects this has on their minds. Peter Gray, welcome to Hidden Gray. Oh, I'm very happy to be here. Peter, you were once at a pop up event where the organizers provided kids with various materials, including twigs and tree branches, old boards, hammers, nails. Paint me a picture of the scene and tell me what happened. Yeah. So there were two young children, maybe around six years old, very happily taking a couple of some of the very narrow boards and laying them out on the grass and walking along them like they were walking on a tightrope and pretending …