Surprised? No.
Delighted? Yes.
Worried? Also yes.
Study of 4000 kids indicates that "increasing outdoor play may be a useful public health approach to reduce child mental health problems."
So why am I worried?
Kids aren't playing outdoors very much.
https://t.co/UtavZDFBJw
Everyone is missing what this study actually says to parents.
The graph shows two paths to the same destination. The yellow line (early specialization) gets there faster in the early years. The blue line (multi-disciplinary) gets there slower but breaks through to world-class.
The key insight: individuals who perform best at a young age are usually not the same people who later reach the world-class level.
This came from 34,839 top performers across four domains: Nobel laureates, Olympic medalists, elite chess players, and renowned classical composers.
The researchers found three consistent patterns.
First, the best kids and the best adults are mostly different people.
Second, future world-class performers showed gradual development and werenât among the best in their age group.
Third, they didnât specialize early but engaged in multiple disciplines.
The research team proposes three mechanisms that explain why breadth beats depth.
The search-and-match hypothesis suggests that exposure to multiple disciplines increases the likelihood of eventually finding the best personal fit.
The enhanced-learning-capital hypothesis proposes that learning in diverse areas strengthens overall learning capacity, making it easier to continue improving later at the highest level within a chosen field.
The limited-risks hypothesis argues that engaging in multiple disciplines reduces the chance of setbacks such as burnout, unhealthy work-rest imbalances, loss of motivation, or physical injury.
That third one matters enormously. Specialized athletes are 2.25 times more likely to get overuse injuries than multi-sport athletes. The American Academy of Pediatrics, AOSSM, and American Medical Society for Sports Medicine all recommend against early specialization before age 15 for most sports.
The lead researcher, Arne GĂŒllich from RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, puts it bluntly: âDonât specialize in just one discipline too early. Encourage young people by providing opportunities to pursue different areas of interest, and support development in two or three disciplines.â
The two or three disciplines donât need to be related. Language and mathematics. Philosophy and geography. The researchers cite Einstein pursuing physics and violin.
The connection between domains seems to build cognitive infrastructure that pure depth cannot replicate.
Hereâs what makes this uncomfortable for parents. The early specialization path produces visible results faster. Your kid looks better at age 10. They make the travel team. They win the tournament. The graphs cross and diverge later, around peak performance age, when the multi-disciplinary kids start pulling ahead.
The entire youth talent ecosystem runs on selecting early performers and accelerating them. Travel leagues, elite academies, showcase tournaments. Every incentive pushes toward specialization.
But the research shows this system is optimizing for the wrong metric.
It produces great 14-year-olds, not great 24-year-olds.
The practical takeaway: let your kid play three sports until at least middle school.
Let them quit the piano and try drums. Let them be mediocre at several things instead of great at one thing. The data says this approach produces both more elite performers and fewer burnout casualties.
The hardest part is watching other kids pass yours on the yellow line while trusting the blue line catches up.
When I was thirteen, I started at a new school. The other kids disliked me and called me names. I found the work boring and pointless. I felt like an alien. I dreaded each interminable day. I stopped wanting to go to school. Every Sunday evening I was filled with misery.
If that happened today, theyâd say I was anxious about school. I could have been said to have âEmotionally Based School Avoidance (EBSA)â or âschool anxietyâ. Then, it was just called âschool refusalâ.
I was anxious about school, thatâs true.
I was anxious about school when I was told that there was no choice but to go every day and that I âlooked fine when youâre thereâ. I was anxious when I was told that if I didnât attend school, Iâd have no future. I was anxious when I was told that it was an âexcellent schoolâ and that perhaps I just didnât appreciate my luck.
I was anxious because I felt trapped in a place where I was miserable. Thereâs nothing wrong with someone who feels anxious in those circumstances. In fact, Iâd worry more about someone who DOESNâT feel anxious. Certainly most adults would.
Once I had been defined as âanxiousâ I could have been sent to see a specialist. I could have been told I had a mental health problem. My hatred of school would have been turned into a problem with me. âSuccessful treatmentâ would have meant âBack to schoolâ.
And what I would have learnt was that I was the problem. Iâve have learnt to keep quiet and stop telling others how I felt. Iâve have learnt (as I already suspected) that there was something wrong with me, not the school.
In fact I was lucky. That didnât happen. I moved house and changed schools and the next school was different. I felt different almost immediately.
Anxiety is a understandable reaction to many circumstances. Itâs an emotional response to uncertainty, novelty or lack of safety. It lets us know that extra caution is required. It keeps us alert through hard times. It is useful. We need our anxiety.
Yet with children, weâve decided that their anxiety is the problem, that it means something is wrong with them. Weâve even told them this, with mental health awareness campaigns on toilet doors and in classrooms. Weâve encouraged them to see their emotional reactions as a sign of dysfunction, as something outside the ordinary. A problem in their heads, rather than a meaningful reaction to the world.
By turning childrenâs distress into a mental health problem, we depoliticise it. Instead of asking questions about the school system and whether it is fit for children, we suggest that the problem is our childrenâs reaction to school.
Weâre using âanxietyâ to keep children quiet.
We donât ask whether our schools might be designed in ways which provoke distress and anxiety. We donât ask if they might be developmentally inappropriate and in need of change. Instead we say that they need counsellors, and mindfulness courses, and emotional regulation apps. Ways to âcopeâ, whilst the system carries on regardless.
If only our children could just stop having those inconvenient emotions, we think, then we could carry on as we were. There would be no need to change anything.
But they can't. No more than I could, all those years ago. Our childrenâs reactions are showing us that thereâs a problem.
What will it take for us to listen?
(with @_MissingTheMark)
Education is not a science. However, just like the scientific study of music or theater can be worthwhile despite it never really leading to better music or theater, studying education has a place too, a small place.
Ăkningen i mental ohĂ€lsa kom med nya lĂ€roplanen 2011, som för mĂ„nga andra lĂ€nder nĂ€r de införde lĂ€roplaner med fokus pĂ„ prestation pĂ„ nationella prov. TyvĂ€rr skylls ungdomars problem pĂ„ mobilanvĂ€ndande, trots bristande bevisföring. #skoltwitter https://t.co/iufsRSceQM
idk who needs to hear this but you can just treat your kid like an adult straight out of the womb, it's your parenthood- my dad turned every chicken dinner into a lecture on diapsid evolution & you can just start telling your kid about napoleon & atomic bombs when they're like 4
@AnnaBjorklund Ja, i en skolskjutning Ă€r motivet att en elev (ibland fd) Ă€r traumatiserad av hur den blivit behandlad under sin tid i skolan. ĂrebrodĂ„det handlar om rasistisk terrorism. NĂ„got helt annat.
@shpetter@FMannerheim@Kettilikorthet Ja, om du har behov av vĂ„rd under arbetstid. Jag förutsĂ€tter att specialpedagogerna Filippa syftar pĂ„ ser att omsorg behövs dĂ€r och dĂ„. Ăven om sĂ„ inte Ă€r fallet vore det bra om skolan kunde garantera barns vĂ€lmĂ„ende under den tid de vistas dĂ€r, nĂ€r personalen ser behov.
@FMannerheim@Kettilikorthet BÄde och. Eller sÄ mÄste barnens behov av vÄrd och omsorg tillgodoses pÄ annat sÀtt. Eleverna vistas den mesta delen av dagen i skolan, rimligen borde deras behov av vÄrd och omsorg tillgodoses dÀr.
Celebrating mindless striving culture reeks of Asian chauvinism and begs the question of why the most high impact individuals - from technologists to artists - do not have cookie cutter childhoods that were mainly spent being groomed for the Ivy League.
Contrary to what Vivek says, the jock or cheerleader being fĂȘted in American high schools isnât a sign of mediocrity; itâs actually the essence of what makes America so exceptional.
While the school valedictorian is an objective choice based on academic excellence, the high status archetypes that Vivek belittles, have actually achieved prominence and popularity in *ways that cannot be taught*
Their future success is based on something truly transformational that cannot be gleaned from textbooks: charisma, talent (non-academic), boldness, EQ, etc.
Thereâs a concept in vector mathematics called path dependency. In âstriving culturesâ that are synonymous with the âimmigrant mentality,â success is not only very narrowly defined but also extremely path dependent.
Your outcomes depend heavily on the previous step, and the previous step depends heavily on the previous one, and so on so forth.
At any point in the path, degrees of freedom are very low.
In America, what you have is path independence, and in my opinion, it is one of the most underrated reasons that makes America so great.
Itâs a society characterized by a normal distribution with very wide standard deviation - a lot of singular Great Men of History types at the high end of the tail, and lots of dumbfucks at the bottom tail.
Compare this to striving cultures that produce normal distractions with very low variance, tightly clustered around the mean.
That said, @VivekGRamaswamy is right that you can tell a lot about a society about who they idolize and who they shame. America - and the West - does get this wrong when moral degenerates whose only claim to fame is something like leaking a sex tape, are not only NOT marginalized and shamed, but actually adored by millions and rewarded financially and socially.
@fredrikarboga@F3Kpilot@frksarapersson Ok, fattar. Allt det dĂ€r tror jag pĂ„. Men det Ă€r nog inte till mycket nytta i dagens skola, som du sĂ€ger. Lite som att tro pĂ„ kulturodling nĂ€r man Ă€r storbonde i Idaho med statlig beordran att leverera 10 ton majs đœ per hektar.
@pmarca Why are all the law and order people the most keen on not being reminded of when they act illegally? And in this case itâs limitations that literally save peopleâs lives.
@PatrikAskPM Itâs not nostalgia for slavery, itâs nostalgia for having an authoritarian father in their lives like they had as children. The term is âpaternal transference syndromeâ.