What children learn when adults aren't around

Children are born dependent on adults and develop independence through instinctive drives, especially the drive to play. Play teaches empowerment, responsibility, and social engagement, and restricting independent play undermines these developments. Young mammals practice the skills needed for adult survival through play, such as predation for predators and dodging for prey. Humans have a longer juvenile period and therefore play in more varied ways to learn more adult competencies. With freedom and time, children practice physically vigorous and risky activities to build courage and physical skill, construct objects to develop brain and muscle coordination, and use language, imagination, and logic to gain uniquely human abilities. They also learn rule-following and rule creation through games and become skilled at using cultural tools.

"Children, like all mammals, are born completely dependent on adults for survival. The primary task of childhood is to grow increasingly independent of this care, and so they are also born with instinctive drives to practice independence to the degree that they can. The most powerful of these is the drive to play."

"In play, children learn the most important lessons in life, lessons of personal empowerment, responsibility, and effective social engagement - and when we don't let kids play on their own, we undermine this development."

"Anthropologists have found that when children have ample freedom and time to play, they play at the full range of skills that are crucial to human development everywhere. They play in physically vigorous and risky ways and thereby acquire physical skills and courage. They play at building things and thereby exercise the parts of the brain and musculature involved in conceiving of an object and then creating it."

"We undermine children's play when we intervene, no matter how well intended."

Read at Big Think