Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety

by Peter Gray

What if the cause of the youth mental health crisis wasn’t actually social media at all?

When was the last time you actually saw a group of kids—without adults—playing on a playground? Fourty years ago, an American ten-year-old could expect to walk to school, bike to a friend’s, or play pick-up games with other kids in the neighborhood. Today, our children are supervised and controlled at every opportunity.

As author, researcher, and psychology professor Peter Gray shows in Restoring Childhood, kids aren’t depressed and anxious because of social media. They’re retreating to social media because they lack agency and autonomy in the real world. Social media use is just a symptom of the larger the disappearance of childhood as a stage of life solely for experimentation, play, and learning you can do things on your own. And if we continue to tighten the leash on our kids, no amount of screen-time restriction will reverse the alarming mental health crisis we see our kids enduring today.

Restoring Childhood is a radical examination of how certain societal trends—from round-the-clock news coverage, to increasing reliance on cars, to the introduction of Common Core, to growing wealth inequality—conspired to create a fundamentally anti-child environment. If we want to raise mentally healthy and resilient kids, Gray argues, we must restore childhood to children. We must, individually and collectively, prioritize adult-free play, and the time for it—in our schools, in our neighborhoods, and as parents.

Genres: Parenting, Nonfiction, Psychology, Education, Audiobook

352 pages, Hardcover

Published September 15, 2026

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[Paige S · Rating 5 out of 5]

First off, this author has citations for all facts that need referencing. This means you can check his information, which I really appreciate. Secondly, it's an easy read. The author writes well, without errors, and summarizes chapters. It's a unique style that I really appreciated in a book like this—one where you provide a lot of data and information that is easy to lose by the end of the chapter. So the summaries are great. He also points out what he is trying to accomplish.

He answers these questions:
1. What does the author mean by childhood?
2. How has childhood been lost?
3. Why should we restore childhood?
4. How can we restore childhood?

What changes brought about this decline? TV, increased house size and decreased family size, knowing your neighbors declined, adult-directed sports instead of kid-directed sports, public spaces are less kid-friendly, parental fear of outdoor dangers increased, CPS over-regulates what is considered neglect, societal views of parenting changed, school requires increasing time, increased parental anxiety about a child's future, and meaningful chores and kid-friendly jobs declined.

What is the premise?
1. There is such a thing as a normal childhood.
2. Of recent decades, we have deprived children of a normal childhood.
3. This loss has increased mental suffering of young people.
4. To restore their mental well-being, we must restore childhood.

Play is defined as:
1. Chosen and directed by children (not adults).
2. Internally directed.
3. Structured by mental rules.
4. Creative and highly imaginative.

I like the way each chapter has a short synopsis and if the author is going to cover something more in-depth later in the book, he lets you know that. He argues that a normal childhood promotes mental well-being, and that deprivation of it promotes mental suffering. He defines different types of play and how these activities promote a child's long-term mental well-being by satisfying the three basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness by promoting an internal locus of control and by building courage.

Importantly, he addresses the computer, internet revolution, and gaming and how they improved the mental well-being of children. While not everyone may agree, he presents compelling evidence that has me rethinking allowing my child to have more access to these activities.

He addresses the belief that phones, social media, and video games are to blame for worsening mental health among children vs the author's argument that stricter school requirements are to blame. I admit, I had believed anecdotal evidence about this, but he presents compelling evidence (and the studies to back it up) to the contrary.

Overall, a well researched and well written book with actionable steps to address the worsening mental health crisis for future adults by addressing the shortfalls in childhood now.

[Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really struggled with this book. I have been following Peter Gray’s work for a few years now and find his passion to improve children’s wellbeing inspiring. Despite my agreement on the major issue that this book deals with, I do not recommend this book. I will detail what I thought was encouraging and what I felt fell short and may even contribute to further harm done to the most vulnerable children.

As a teacher who completed her bachelor’s degree in Early Childhood through 6th grade education right in the middle of the time period in which No Child Left Behind was being adopted across the US, I agree that there has been a huge shift towards teaching to the test. Schools have had much stricter rules about keeping to the schedule, and the arts and music departments are either removed completely or severely downgraded. Kids aren’t enjoying school, and a discussion about this is timely.

Encouraging aspects of this book:

Discussing moral panic was a big chunk of the first half of the book, and I think this definitely is important for us adults to consider. The apocalyptic attitude of a lot of my peers towards social media and screen time for kids and themselves has been disturbing. Especially since I grew up in the early days of the internet and found so much good there, I see the internet as a tool and new technology that requires us to build skills around, rather than stigmatize and fear. Learning a bit more history around the previous moral panics was astonishing.

Another encouraging part of the book was about building new urban cities. It is vital that we begin adapting existing cities so that children are included and encouraged to exist in public, and planning budding cities with children in mind from the start. His discussion on playgrounds with more open ended play in mind, and a designated adult who is there just for emergencies gave me hope. The Let Grow activities being hosted in public school playgrounds and classrooms was a new topic for me, and I have already begun looking into what my area is doing towards that.

The issues I have with the book fall into 4 categories, racism, ableism, “the good ol’ days”, and emotional abuse

Racism: as a White man, Gray should be careful to select who he uses as examples of harsh parenting. In a book mostly focused on the statistics and research about children’s experiences, Gray decides to use a Chinese woman’s memoir to contrast his philosophy with “achievement pressure” parenting. At no point does Gray reflect on how immigrating to a racist culture such as the US places unfair burdens on those families, where they correctly perceive that their kids will have to work twice as hard to get half the pay of their White peers. He equates Chua’s parenting method with “the way the Chinese treat [their kids]” despite also pointing out that many of the Chinese reviewers of the book criticized it and found it was a harmful way to parent. This distracts readers from the prevalence of western parenting methods that are too fixated on achievement.
The other example in this chapter is a book by Hillary Friedman, who actually has interviewed parents about a competitive culture. It is my belief that Gray should have used this example as his main one in this chapter, and left Amy Chua out of it entirely. If Peter Gray wants to fairly engage different parenting styles, it would be much more effective to stick to the research, not just throw an example of one parent’s story to us, and ignore how the implicit biases against women of color will emotionally charge his point.

Ableism: So much of Gray’s discussion around adult led activities is focused on sports. While I agree that this causes harm to kids who are able bodied by being shuttled around constantly, directed by adults instead of allowed to play with their peers and be creative and collaborative, it entirely leaves out discussion of the kids who have disabilities and are both harmed by being left out of sports, and harmed by other adult centric parts of society. It’s evident that Gray spent a lot of his childhood playing sports with other kids. He seems uninformed about the options for kids who are disabled and cannot romp around the neighborhood as he did.
In the last section of the book he goes on a tirade against ADHD medication. I am hesitant to defend it’s wide use, and I agree that standards are sometimes incredibly low for getting school aged kids who fit the stereotype diagnosed and medicated, but I am shocked at how violently he opposes the diagnosis and believes it is unhelpful and even harmful. A group of people who continue to experience poor effects in this world far into adulthood would argue that ADHD is not new, and that despite being missed throughout their school years in the 80s and 90s adults who have ADHD are now finding hope in the diagnosis and medication. Although he states that it is not “because of a brain difference” there is much evidence that it is about difference in brains.

The Good Ol’ Days: Peter Gray often reminisces about his childhood and bases many of his theories on returning to the way things were in the 50s and 60s when he was young. This is a phenomenon that is all too familiar lately, and while I can understand that there is a longing for childhood as you age, it is vital to prevent our nostalgia from driving the discussion of the future. Gray’s experience of childhood sounds lovely as he writes it, but he was one of the lucky few. He grew up in small towns and spent much of his time playing with friends and doing sports, which indicates that his family was well enough off that he didn’t need to bring in money for them to make ends meet, and makes it clear that he did not suffer from any disability that made that vigorous outdoor play difficult. He almost waxes poetic about having to do chores as a kid and getting a part time job doing a paper route. While it would be nice to imagine that all kids at that time lived in this way, the statistics paint a very different picture of that era. Children growing up in cities or children of marginalized groups have told very different stories about those years. His very premise that there is such a thing as “normal childhood” and that it used to be supported by community in the past assumes that childhood experiences were mostly like his own. In Chapter 2 he writes: “that which prevailed through most of our evolutionary history, when children spend much time playing and exploring” as if the horrors of death in infancy, child labor, and child marriage never existed or were very rare. Children have been seen as property for most of history, but Gray makes it sound like they had endless hours to play.

Emotional abuse: Gray seems to confuse the outcome of being oppressed with the effect of being pampered. What many have clearly understood to be the result of injustice against children, he attributes to being babied and not given enough responsibility. This comes out right at the beginning of the book in the introduction when he writes: “by treating children as fragile we, as a society, have made them fragile.” and it comes up again as he is discussing the social and emotional learning (SEL) curriculum that has been adopted around the world in schools. While I do not claim to be an expert on this particular curriculum, I am intimately familiar with the rhetoric he uses to push against it. His first argument is that the benefit of such programs does not last very long. That is concerning, but doesn’t lead one to throw the whole program out, rather we should investigate ways to have longer lasting impact. Then, he discusses the research that showed that high school students were less happy with the relationships they have with their parents after the lessons on emotional maturity. Attempting to use this to argue the curriculum made their lives worse indicates that he would side with the people who claim that therapy causes people to be unhappy with their marriages, relationships with parents, etc. rather than giving them language and a different norm to aspire to. I’m reminded of germ theory, where once we discovered germs, we began finding them everywhere. That doesn’t mean germs didn’t exist before, it just meant we didn’t know to look for them. That applies to diagnoses of ADHD, Autism, and it applies to emotional and social learning as well.
This oversimplification of how emotional and social awareness impacts a population is disappointing. His conclusion is that SEL programs tell children that they are fragile and it will be a self fulfilling prophecy, or that by talking about emotions children will ruminate on them. I learned lately that someone who is interested in harming you will also usually be invested in keeping you in the dark about the harm. Who benefits if kids don’t learn what emotions they are experiencing? What beliefs might be reinforced if readers who have been told their whole lives that “emotions aren’t that big of a deal” are then told that curriculum that talks about emotions makes otherwise happy kids unhappy?

In summary, this book failed to convince me that Gray knows what “normal” childhood looks like, and his obvious bias against people who aren’t just like him makes me question his education and his values. I cannot refer people to this book. I had hoped this would be a great tool to bring people around to the cause of free range parenting, unschooling, and children’s inclusion in building cities. Instead, it left me feeling disgusted that even the most well known voices in this movement would rather place children’s wellbeing on the altar instead of interrogating their own biases.

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for my review, but clearly my unfavorable opinions are not those of the publisher nor the author.

[Lavern Mast · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is written to address the same issue as The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, but offers a very different diagnosis. While Haidt blames technology use and social media, Gray argues that tech serves as an escape hatch for anxious or depressed teens.
It's refreshing to read a book that disagrees with the popular narrative about tech and teens and is more aligned with my techno-optimism . The best part? Gray is right! At least, more right than Haidt is...

Great book overall, but I'm docking one star because Gray is overly black-and-white with many of his opinions. He crossed a line when, instead of saying he thinks ADHD is overdiagnosed and overtreated, he claimed that kids are being drugged en masse simply because they want to play. Do better.

[Katie Verrue · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agreed with a lot of this book, but he is woefully ignorant of the dangers of the digital world and of digital devices themselves. One would think that the addictive nature of devices would raise a red flag for Gray, but it appears he thinks kids should have them and not be monitored at all on them. He should be interviewing and spending time with teachers who have taught for decades and ask them personally what they’ve observed instead of cherry-picking studies about how great video games, phones, and screen time is. This was a bizarre mix of opinions and I’m not sure why he wrote this book other than that he hates Haidt’s “Anxious Generation”.

[Chelsea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you for the advanced reader copy, Netgalley.

While I deeply appreciate the research compiled in Restoring Childhood, the book ultimately fell flat for me. The core message is vital, but the writing is quite repetitive and fluffy, making it a bit of a tedious read. Furthermore, many of the suggested actionable steps felt impractical or out of reach for the average family. If you are entirely new to this topic, the research here is solid, but seasoned readers of parenting or development books may find little new information here.

[James Hendrickson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book that Jonathan Haidt should have written...or at least the book that people should have read rather than Haidt's poorly researched disaster. If anyone has a hankering to burn a book, Haidt's book should be a candidate (largely for how disproportionally influential it is in comparison to how divergent it is from actual scientific research)....I will never recommend burning books but please take Haidt's book out of the hands of your friends, neighbors, teachers, pediatricians and pastors and put this in their hands instead.

Friends don't let friends read Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness (unless you cut out all of the smart phone and social media parts first).

The things I really enjoyed about this book (a selection...there is so much more):

• Frequent summaries of what was included in the chapter and the book
• Clear-eyed approach and summary of moral panics (Penny Dreadfuls, Movies, and Video games) and the way that societies sort of collectively lose their reason in favor of deeply held feelings
• Good, clear definition of play: It is (1) chosen and directed by the players themselves; (2) intrinsically motivated; (3) structured by mental rules; and (4) always creative and often highly imaginative.
◦ Deft application of these definitions to video games which very nicely reframes any lingering debate about video games being good for kids
• Data-based attack on the anxiety produced by teaching to standard testing like Common Core.
◦ Interesting to see teenage anxiety drop in Korea as they reduced their emphasis on common core-like testing
• Great emphasis on play and childhood exploration
• Connecting social media use as a way for children to connect with friends because parents had eliminated ways of connecting with peers in person. This is something I hadn't considered before.
• Practical approaches to addressing some of the anxiety in childhood now, I especially liked Play Club as a very tangible approach that solves a number of problems. Restoring recess seems like an easy, and testable solution (I didn't realize we had become so outcome oriented that we largely abandoned recess).
• Highlighting the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child and specifically Article 31 "“States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate in the cultural life of the arts." I would have used that to great advantage had I known about it as a child, but of course the United States is the only UN Country not to have ratified this.
• Pointing me to the review of Haidt's book in Nature from Candice Odgers that opens with this:
Two things need to be said after reading The Anxious Generation. First, this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe. Second, the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.

Please rewire your brain and read this now!

[Jason Wang · Rating 2.5 out of 5]

I thought the book is just OK. I totally agree with the author's premise that kids need more free play, and I'm happy we have another author out there banging that drum. It's not new territory. Skenazy, Haidt, and others have already written much about kids' need for free play. Gray does contribute something helpful to the field in terms of bringing up how public infrastructure has often deprioritized the needs of children. It's really important that we build walkable/bikable safe communities and especially safe routes to school, parks, and town centers. I'm happy Gray is raising this issue.

I do, to some degree, buy Gray's argument that school has gotten too academic. At the same time, some of the low rates of achievement in American schools is truly unacceptable. We do need our education system to produce some level of reading/writing/'rithmetic ability compatible with success in today's world. It's probably true that many kids don't have adequate recess and spend too much of school strapped into their seats, and I find it plausible that this may have contributed to the rise in ADHD diagnoses among children. I believe he is rehashing good arguments from people like Allen Frances and Abigail Shrier, from many years ago. I think he's on the right track in terms of how America is a winner-takes-all society, so there is much more pressure on our children to do well.

But I have a really hard time buying Gray's theory about how video games and the early internet were significantly responsible for improving childhood mental health in the 90-00's. Sure, it was a fun and exciting time -- but responsible for a broad-based improvement in a whole generation's mental health? I really don't think so.

And I don't see why he feels this need to pick a fight with Haidt. Smartphones clearly ARE a problem. Take one look at a gaggle of middle schoolers all staring at their phones instead of interacting with each other. It's obviously terrible. He leans heavily on one meta-analysis by Ferguson et al that didn't show a significant detrimental effect from social media, but the field is very very heterogeneous in terms of methodology, so one could easily erase a real effect by combining a bunch of heterogeneous studies. Disclaimer, I am NOT a psychologist/psychiatrist and I am not deeply familiar with the primary literature, but I do happen to be an addiction physician. I don't think Gray is on the right track at all by trying to absolve smartphones and social media companies. He is way off.

Finally, there are just some really weird digressions and the final quarter of the book drags on. I have no idea why he spends so much time talking about Amy Chua. It was utterly bizarre that Chua wanted to write about her uhhhhh parenting style in the first place. She is N=1 and has little to no societal relevance today. It's just pointless to bring her into the book, in my opinion.

So, overall: I love the central thesis that kids need free play. I love the (short) discussions about the role of infrastructure. The stuff about school is interesting, but not all that new or compelling. I don't buy the conclusion that the early internet/video gaming contributed to massive, broadly detectable improvements in young people's mental health. I don't buy that social media/technology in the modern world is harmless for young people. I don't care about Amy Chua.

[Melanie Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

Restoring Childhood argues that children thrive when they have more freedom to play, explore, take reasonable risks, and solve problems independently. Peter Gray draws on decades of research in psychology and education to show how increasing adult control has contributed to rising anxiety and declining resilience in children. One point that resonated with me was his discussion of how unstructured, mixed-age play teaches social skills that are difficult to replicate in organized, adult-led activities.

As a homeschool parent, much of this aligned with what I've seen firsthand. Children often learn their most valuable lessons when they have the space to be curious, work through disagreements, and figure things out on their own. Even when I didn't agree with every conclusion, I found the book to be a thoughtful, well-researched contribution to the conversation about what children need to grow into confident, capable adults. My sincere thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a free advance review copy.

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty generic and pretty boring; all good points but nothing new here; at the core of a child's development is play, good old fashioned analogue play, in contact and relation with the physical world and other children; everything substituting for this set-up, in particular the simulacrum of the actual world offered by screens, is for the worse. On the subject be sure to check out some classics: The Power of Showing Up: How Parental Presence Shapes Who Our Kids Become and How Their Brains Get Wired , Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers and Raising a Secure Child: How Circle of Security Parenting Can Help You Nurture Your Child's Attachment, Emotional Resilience, and Freedom to Explore.

[Michelle Crunkleton-Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book that explores how our current educational system impacts our children. Peter Gray has many important things to say that we should take to heart. However, there is a giant hole in his research. You cannot fully explore education and mental health while leaving out the mountains of research on how early school start times have created a public health epidemic of sleep deprivation in our teens. There is a reason that the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Psychologic Association, and many, many other heath and educational entities have issued statements and guidelines on school start times. I have followed Peter Gray for a while and I’ve read all his books. I don’t know why he continues to ignore this research.

[Pat Rumbaugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dr. Peter Gray's second book, "Restoring Childhood," made me thankful for my childhood. I was one of the lucky ones who got to play outside for hours daily. In his book Dr. Gray gives clear examples of what needs to be done, so our children can live happy, healthy and stress free childhoods. Give children time to play everyday, free play, where they choose what they want to play, eliminate homework for elementary school age children, actually for all children offer play opportunities in school, out of school and in their community. Pat Rumbaugh, The Play Lady, Co-Founder/Executive Director of the nonprofit letsplayamerica.org

[Jonathan · Rating 3.75 out of 5]

This book was hard to read because of how little time my kids and other kids have to play. By play, I mean UNSTRUCTURED and UNADULTERATED (a play on words: no adult influence at all). Kids set the rules, argue about them, stand up for themselves, work through the hard moments, and grow from all of it. It’s the kind of fun I look back on with a lot of nostalgia.

I disagree with one point: online play should always be monitored by an adult. With some eventual release for kids to monitor themselves after HS.