Peter Gray: "The decline of play" at TEDxNavesink

In following TEDx Talk, author, American psychologist, and research professor of psychology at Boston College (@BostonCollege) Dr. Peter Gray discusses play as well as our children's and students' access to it.  He suggests that, since the 1950s, there has been "a dramatic decline in children's freedom to play with other children" without the presence of adult supervision (passages taken from the YouTube (@YouTube) description offered by TEDx Talks).  He also notes a "dramatic increase in anxiety, depression, feelings of helplessness, suicide, and narcissism in children and adolescents" and hypothesizes that this trend is directly influenced by the decline of play.  Ultimately, he argues that "free play is essential for children's healthy social and emotional development."

The particularly chilling aspect of this talk is that Dr. Gray's message was delivered only six months ago.  Occasionally we are able to construct for ourselves a kind of barrier in which we are able to rationalize danger simply by measuring the passage of time.  For example, a person might be able to defuse the call-to-arms offered by a video concerned with antibiotic resistant strains of diseases merely because the video was released several years earlier.  Even if no measurable and substantial progress has been made, time in itself gives the viewer the illusion that things have improved.  But this video, so pivotal to the emotional states of our children and students as they learn in school right now, allows us no such buffer.  The question remains, then:  what can we do to change this? What plans can we immediately initiate to alleviate this problem and bring more unstructured free time back into the lives of young people?