I love working with young children because developmentally, this is the age when our brains are wired to acquire social skills, in addition to language, the foundations of mathematical thinking and complex problem solving and all this other amazing stuff. There is not another time in modern childhood where most kids have a chance at intensive, personalized instruction on how to be a member of society. This is somehow meant to be taught at home or picked up organically, but we have changed the terms of childhood so radically that there isn’t enough opportunity for our kids to learn the way we have done in the past.

Kids used to play in mixed-age groups of other kids, loosely (if at all) supervised by whatever adults were around. Free play is a very organic and useful social structure for peer teaching. Kids in free play care for the younger children and experiment with their power over them; they teach them and bring them into the fold; they help and coach them at just the right level where the younger child gets to learn how to do things themselves and keep up. Younger kids watch and follow and imitate the older kids. They moderate their innate self-centeredness in order to continue to be included; they fall behind and catch back up. 

In the span of the last generation or so, we have removed most of the opportunities our kids have had for free play. We seem to have convinced ourselves that enrichment classes would be like play, but better, because a grown-up is in charge of it. It won’t get too chaotic, there won’t be so much arguing. Everyone will line up and do the thing when the adult in charge tells them to do it, and they will be getting exercise, and they will be around other children, and they will burn off some of that infernal energy that has them resist bedtime and makes them climb the furniture like monkeys. 

Our children aren’t allowed to roam the neighborhood with whatever kids are available to come out and play. Those days of “come home when the street lights come on” are long gone. They don’t have to figure out how to play with that kid next door whose interests are different from theirs, because we just drive them to a playdate with the friend they prefer. We sit there drinking our coffee, supervising and hovering and admonishing and making sure all the million toys get put away at the end. Somehow none of those million toys ends up sustaining their interest, but we persist in buying more because something has got to keep these kids occupied for more than a few minutes so I can check my email, and cook dinner, and move the laundry to the dryer; beholden to all the modern conveniences that were supposed to make life easier.

Other people are the missing ingredient. We are social animals, immutably, and we have designed a society in which the highest expression of prosperity and wellness is to isolate ourselves in nuclear family units in elaborately maintained private boxes. Somehow we are meant to do many hours of paid work outside the home in order to fund a life where we don’t have time to relax or visit friends and family very much, and cannot invite them into our homes because our homes are too messy from being lived in and the expectation is Instagram perfection at all times. We are trying to get our kids to go to sleep so we can have a little time for “self-care” or to “work on our relationship” with our partners, and in response, our kids resist being sidelined during the brief period of time when the whole family is home for once, because they want to be together. 

We are, as a nation, wealthy and successful, and how we demonstrate that to everyone is by being alone all the time. The pandemic highlighted a feature of our current culture that was waiting to be addressed: we created an ideal where we live isolated even from our extended families, and then when people are experiencing suffering because of loneliness, we medicate it, or use dopamine-pumps like video games and social media to try and maintain homeostasis. Simultaneously, many of us crave downtime from the constant demand of our intimate relationships, including those with our children. It's not a paradox but a symptom of the same disease. In traditional societies, our children have many alloparents, including older siblings and cousins, aunts and uncles and grandparents and friendly neighbors and their children, who all participate in caring for the children. We have designated those as markers of poverty, made them unfashionable. 

During the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, many families were asked to shift to remote learning, classrooms empty, waiting for the air to be safe to breathe. For children of all ages, this was a huge change: my middle school aged son did the academic work of sixth grade remotely, and never saw more than the head and shoulders of his classmates. Can you imagine middle school minus the social component? I was at once a bit jealous and also I marveled at the enormity of the missing learning, so much of it outside of the planned curriculums. For our youngest children, right at the time when we are wired to acquire language and social customs, they were home with their parents, sometimes not seeing any other children for more than a year. 

Typical development depends on a fairly typical social environment. In the last few years, classroom teachers in every age range have been discussing the huge gaps and delays in the skills that we had come to expect at each age. The experience of increased isolation during the pandemic only exacerbated what we had already arranged through our value of isolation in small family units. 

Disconnection is toxic to humans. We can’t breathe in it. It literally kills us.

Kids need to talk to one another. They need to negotiate their play, which sounds to adults like bickering. They need to have opportunities to figure out what to do when nobody is telling them what to do. They need to be bored. They need to play with people who aren’t their favorite person. They need to try ways of engaging other people that fail. They need to make offers that get rejected. They need to doodle. They need to lollygag. They need to sing little songs to keep themselves company. They need to bump into people when they are all trying to get through a doorway at once. These are all forms of experiential learning that conventional schools tend to stifle. The adults want to solve those problems before they start by instructing everyone to line up single file, or stay in their seat quietly so as not to disturb others. Trace these diagonal lines, next to a drawing of an apple. When the bell rings, do the next activity so that they keep moving, stay alert. It’s a poor substitute for actual engagement with the material. 

We do Cottage the way we do because we love humans, radically, unconditionally, in all of our complexity. We feel that pull to connect with other people, many other people, and form bonds and be embarrassing in front of each other, and be messy. We want to feel alive, not just prosperous. It’s like we developed antimicrobial hand sanitizer but for our humanness, and what we really need is good clean dirt.