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Welcome to Raising Good Humans. I'm Dr. Alisa Pressman and today we are talking about play.

We are having a serious talk about play and I have Professor Peter Gray who is a research

professor at Boston College and the author of Free to Learn. He's conducted and published

research and neuroendocrinology, developmental psychology, anthropology and education and his

current research and writing really focuses on children's natural ways of learning and the

lifelong value of play. So we're defining play, what it is and what it isn't. We're talking about

rough housing, we're talking about the benefits of play with and without adults, structure and what

we think of as unstructured and how to incorporate more play into our daily lives. Thank you for

listening and if you enjoy this episode, please don't hesitate to subscribe if you haven't already.

Rate and write a little review and as always, please DM me on my Instagram at Raising Good Humans

podcast for questions on the bonus episode and videos that I can do on social media.

So I wanted to start our conversation by asking you to define play.

Yeah, that's actually something I've given a lot of thought to and written about because so many

people, especially within psychology, say they don't study play because they can't define it.

It's not definable. It's not, you know, so I thought, well, it's really pretty important to define it.

So here's the way I define it. First of all, like so many terms that have to do with human behavior

and mood and so forth, it's not defined in terms of one simple statement. Play is an activity

that has a number of characteristics to it and play and an activity can be more or less

playful to the degree that it has these characteristics. So let me list what the characteristics are.

The first one and probably most important is that it is self chosen and self directed.

It's something that you have chosen to do and that you and your playmates, if you're playing

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