 Can everybody hear me okay? I'm a product of my history, which is why I don't use PowerPoint, but I do have a handout. And if you take a look at the handout, you'll see that on the front page is an outline of what I'm going to be talking about, and you could make notes there if you want. And on the back page are some references to some of the things that I'm going to say. But if I'm going to make claims that are not intuitively obvious claims, the people hearing me at least have the opportunity to check the documentation of these. So my thesis is that play, free play, undirected by adults, is essential to children's healthy development. And I'm going to develop that thesis by first talking about play among hunter-gatherer children, and then talk about a change that has occurred sociologically in the last 50 to 60 years in the United States and other developed countries, which is a change that has led to a tremendous decline in children's freedom, in children's freedom, particularly to play and to play outdoors away from adults and to learn all the things that children learn through such play. And I will make the point that over the same period that there's been this dramatic decline in children's opportunities to play, there has been a dramatic increase in all sorts of childhood psychopathology. So that's the thesis of the talk. I must confess that I've never lived in a hunter-gatherer band. I've never observed one directly, so I'm relying entirely on what other people say. And I will in part document with some quotations. I have, I believe, studied rather fully the literature written by anthropologists and other observers, direct observers of hunter-gatherer cultures. And a few years ago, a graduate student of mine and I conducted a survey of 10 anthropologists who had all lived in hunter-gatherer bands. Among them, they had lived in seven different hunter-gatherer cultures on three different continents. So they represented some, at least geographically, some differences in hunter-gatherer bands and asked them questions about what they observed among children, even if they weren't there to specifically study children. And anthropologists don't study children as much as I think they should, but they're there to study other things, but they can't help but observe the kids, so I asked them a lot of questions about the kids. So that's the basis, the literature and then this survey is kind of the basis for what I have to say about hunter-gathers. Now, the hunter-gatherer groups that I am focusing entirely on are those that are called band societies or egalitarian societies. These are not tribes. We sometimes use the term tribe, but I don't think it's appropriate to use it. Tribes are really kind of groups that are headed by a big man or a chief. We think of tribes as sort of war-like and so on and so forth. These are small band societies, 30 to 60 people, typically in a band. They're egalitarian, they're also called egalitarian hunter-gathers because they have no hierarchical social structure. Decisions are made by consensus. They don't have a chief or a big man. In fact, in their vocabulary, to call somebody a chief or a big man is a put down. It's like you are just too big for your britches. And that is one of the ways, in fact, that they maintain a sense of equality is by belittling anybody who tries to rise up above other people or tries to act like they have the right to tell other people what to do. So those are the kinds of bands that I'm looking at and there are a lot of such bands that have been studied. Let me just give you, just list a few that might be familiar to. The Jowansi, or better known as the Kung, in Africa's Kalahari Desert. The Mutu of Congo's Rainforest, the Batak of Peninsular Malaysia. The Acta of the Philippines, the Ace of Eastern Paraguay, and so on and so forth. There are really several dozen such groups that have been found and studied mostly kind of in the mid 20th century. I will be talking about them largely in the past tense, because to a considerable degree their cultures are now destroyed. People talk about studying hunter-gathers, but now many of these kids are actually going to school. They're actually living in ways that are very much affected by Western culture. So the cultures that the anthropologists have studied, and to the degree that they could be found in their original form, are different in many ways, having to do with the geography that they're living in and so on. But in terms of their basic social structure, they're remarkably similar. And they're remarkably similar in their attitudes towards children. At least as judged by what I learned in this survey about childhood, and what I've been able to read in the anthropological literature and talking with various other anthropologists. The words most often used by researchers in describing hunter-gather parenting styles are indulgent, trustful, and respectful. Indulgent sounds in our ears kind of like a negative term, whereas respectful and trustful, which in some ways means the same thing, sound in our ears like positive terms. Respect for each person's autonomy is really part and parcel of the egalitarian ethos of hunter-gatherer bands. And amazingly, amazingly to us, they apply this same respect to their children as they do to one another. To illustrate this, let me read here five brief quotations, each from a different researcher observing a different hunter-gatherer band. This will give you something of a flavor and there are many other quotations I could give. These are all from the literature, not from our survey. Aborigin children of Australia are indulged to an extreme degree and sometimes continue to suckle until they're four or five years old. Physical punishment for a child is almost unheard of. This was Richard Gould. Here's another one, paracana adults do not interfere with their children's lives. They never beat, scold, or behave aggressively with them physically or verbally, nor do they offer praise or keep track of their development. This is Yumi Goso. The third one, the idea that this is my child or your child does not exist among the Iquana. Deciding what another person should do no matter what his age is outside the Iquana vocabulary of behaviors. There is great interest in what everyone does. But no impulse to influence let alone coerce anyone. The child's will is his motive force. This is Jean Leidloff. Infants and young children among Inuit hunter-gatherers of the Hudson Bay area are allowed to explore their environments to the limits of their physical capabilities and with minimal interference from adults. Thus if a child picks up a hazardous object, parents generally leave it to explore the dangers on its own. The child is presumed to know what it is doing. I've seen films that a friend of mine who has studied the FA in Africa has taken of little toddlers playing with machetes, playing in the fire and so on and so forth. Nobody's particularly concerned. As far as she could tell, the toddlers don't get hurt. The belief is, if you're going to learn how to use these things, if your children are going to learn how they have to be able to explore. We don't, little pocket knife now, you don't allow even maybe a 12-year-old to carry around. Here's our fifth one. Johansi children very rarely cried, probably because they had little to cry about. No child was ever yelled at or slapped or physically punished and few were even scolded. Most never heard a discouraging word until they were approaching adolescence. And even then the reprimand, if it really was a reprimand, was delivered in a soft voice. This is Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in a relatively new book called The Old Way. And Thomas went on to write, we are sometimes told that children who are treated so kindly become spoiled. But this is because those who hold that opinion have no idea how successful such measures can be. Free from frustration or anxiety, sunny and cooperative, the children where every parent's dream. No culture can ever have raised better, more intelligent, more likable, more confident children. If this were just one person saying this, I would think this person is overly romanticizing. And perhaps to some degree is. But I've heard similar comments from so many, many people. For example, my colleague who studied the FA, I once asked her, what does whining sound like? Because a graduate student who was studying whining and had an evolutionary view about the universality of whining, asked about whining and hunter-gathered couches. So I asked my friend, she said, you know, I lived for two years among the FA and I never heard a child whine. So this is quite a remarkable statement. It's so unlike what we would, the way we picture the necessity of childhood. So in response to our question, how much time did hunter-gatherer children have to play? All of the respondents to our survey said that the children they observed were free to play essentially all day, every day. They didn't have to work. We often think all hunter-gatherer children must have had to work so hard. In fact, the adults don't work very hard. There have been studies showing that the adult, it takes about 20 hours a week to gather your food and hunt your food. And it's rather exciting, it's fun to do it. It's hard, it's in the sense it takes a great deal of skill and that actually is what adds to the fun. It's not drudgery, it's very exciting. And in between, the adults are doing a lot of visiting with neighboring tribes. They do dances, they play music, they have rich cultural lives. They're not people who are working all the time. And so they don't all have really any need for children's child labor. Child labor came with farming. Once you have farming and you start to have the big farm, big families that come with farming. Farming is drudgery and there's a lot of unskilled labor, so you can begin to use child labor. You can't really use child labor for hunting because it's so skilled. In fact, the best hunters are not even the young men. They're the middle aged men because it takes so long to develop this skill. So hunter-gatherers believe that childhood is a time of learning. It's a time of education. It's a time to develop the skills and knowledge and the wit and abilities that you need to become an effective adult. But they believe that you do that through play. And so they allow their children time to play and explore right into adolescence. So here's a couple of quotes that came from our survey in response to the question, how much time did hunter-gatherer children have to play? So here's one, both boys and girls had almost all day, every day free to play. This was Alan Brainard concerning the narrow of Southern Africa. Children were free to play nearly all the time. No one expected children to do serious work until they were in their late teens. This is Karen Endicott concerning the Batec. Boys were free to play nearly all the time until age 15 to 17 for girls most of the day in between a few errands and some babysitting was spent in play. It is interesting that even in hunter-gatherer cultures, if there's a distinction, it's usually the girls that have to do more work than the boys. That distinction, however, becomes even much greater once you get to farming communities. I might add that children begin playing away from adults at about age four, which is the age when hunter-gatherers believe that children have sense. That children are able to make good judgments, that they're not going to wander off into the jungle or do dangerous things all by themselves. They don't have to be watched. Children beginning with age four are playing all day long in age-mixed groups with other kids all the way up to 17 or so, generally away from adults. Sometimes in some of these communities, they build little villages, little play villages next to the camp. They build their own little huts and they act out the things that they see in the main camp among the adults. So this is the context of play in hunter-gatherer cultures. The children could observe directly what the adults did in the band that they were growing up in and they incorporated those activities into their play. And that's how they developed the kinds of skills that they needed to grow into adulthood. So in our survey, one of our questions was about the forms of play, the kinds of play. What did they play at? And here's just a partial list of some of the things that we got, which show that they played very often at subsistence activities and at the artistic and cultural activities of their culture. Making and shooting bows and arrows, this was a huge one. Digging up tubers, fishing, smoking porcupines out of holes, cooking, caring for infants, climbing trees, building vine ladders, building huts, using knives and other tools, making tools, carrying heavy objects, building rafts, making fires, defending against attacks from pretend predators, imitating animals, which is a means of learning to identify animals and learning their habits. Making music, dancing, storytelling and arguing were all mentioned by one or more of the respondents. Of course, the specific list varied from culture to culture and cultures that use dugout canoes the children played at making dugout canoes and so on and so forth. It's quite natural, apparently, for children to look around, see what the adults in your culture are doing and play at that and in that way to develop skill at it. But now what I want to do is to focus not on the subsistence and artistic skills that were developed in play, but on the social and emotional skills that were developed in play. Play by its very nature is an egalitarian cooperative activity. Let me explain that. One of the defining characteristics of play is that it is self-chosen and self-directed. Play is what you want to do, not what you have to do. So the most basic freedom in play is freedom to quit. And I really want to emphasize that. It's freedom to quit that makes play play. If you can't quit, it's not play. The fact that the other players can quit means that if you want to keep the game going, you've got to keep them happy. In other words, in social play, because you want to play, the child is driven, motivated to play, you are also motivated to make your playmates happy. Because if you try to bully them, if you try to make rules that they don't agree to and so on and so forth, they will leave. And so therefore, social play, whether it's in our culture or in a hunter-gatherer culture, is always an exercise in getting into the minds of your playmates, understanding their needs and satisfying their needs while at the same time satisfying your own needs and what could be a more important skill to develop, especially in a culture that depends upon people working together and cooperating. Players know that playmates who feel coerced will quit and therefore all decisions in play have to be made by consensus. And anybody here who's observed, you know, nursery school kids, kids in any place playing, little kids playing, more time is being spent negotiating the play, negotiating the rules. Who gets to be what? Making out compromises, okay, I'll be the daddy in the house for now, but then I get to be the baby and so on and so forth, whatever the choices are. You figure it out in a way that makes everybody happy. You're constantly practicing. I would argue that play evolved, our play drive evolved in the context of a hunter-gatherer culture and it evolved in part to develop precisely these kinds of social skills that were so essential to a hunter-gatherer culture, but are really essential for a happy social life in every culture. Play by nature is cooperative. Social play is cooperative. You have to work together to carry it out. You have to coordinate your activities. That's true for any kind of social play. It's particularly true in the social play that one observes in hunter-gatherer cultures apparently. An enormous amount of their play is dances and dance-like play where the activities are necessarily coordinated, both adults and kids play in these kinds of way. They have complex games with rules, but the games are not competitive. The games are things like to keep the melon going as you're passing it over your head to the next person. It's to keep it all going and it requires coordinated activity. None of their play is competitive. In fact, Colin Turnball describes how in the group that he observed, sometimes they played in ways that mocked the idea of competition. And some of these cultures, the idea of competition in play had been introduced. So for example, people might be taught to play soccer, which is a competitive game. But the kids and the adults too would play soccer in a way that's non-competitive. Let's just keep the ball in the air. Let's just keep it going and so on and so forth. Here's a nice description that Turnball gives of a tug of war that he observed. This was a situation where the men were on one side and the women were on the other side. The men and boys and women and girls on the other side. Men and boys take one side of the vine rope, women and girls take the other, and they sing in antiphony as they pull. When the men and boys start to win, one of them will abandon his side and join the women, pulling up his bark cloth and adjusting it in the fashion of women, shouting encouragement to them in a false settle, ridiculing womanhood by the very exaggeration of his mime. Then when the women and girls start to win, one of them adjusts her bark cloth down, strides over to the men's side and joins their shouting in a deep vase voice, similarly mocking manhood. Each person crossing over tries to outdo the ridicule of the last, causing more and more laughter until when the contestants are laughing so hard they cannot sing or pull anymore, they let go of the vine rope and fall to the ground in near hysteria. Although both youth and adults cross sides, it is primarily the youth who really enact the ridicule. The ridicule is performed without hostility, rather with a sense of identification and empathy. It is in this way that the violence and aggressivity of either sex winning is avoided and the stupidity of competitiveness is demonstrated. To be a successful hunter-gatherer, one must not only be willing and able to cooperate with others, but one must also be able to assert one's own needs and wishes effectively without antagonizing others. Practice in such self-assertion occurs in social play everywhere as players negotiate rules and decide on who gets to be whom and so on and so forth. In addition, according to the respondents to our survey, hunter-gatherer children often deliberately played at argument. They would observe the arguments and discussions in camp and then they would in a sense reenact them in their little play village. So here, once again, is Colin Turnbull on that. It may start through imitation of a real dispute the children witnessed in the main camp, perhaps the night before. They all take roles and imitate the adults. It is almost a form of judgment for if the adults talk their way out of the dispute, the children having performed their imitation once are likely to drop it. If the children detect any room for improvement, however, they will explore that. And if the adult argument was inept and everybody went to sleep that night in a bad temper, then the children try, excuse me, and show that they can do better. And if they cannot, then they revert to ridicule which they play out until they're all rolling on the ground in your hysterics. That happens to be the way many of the most potentially violent and dangerous disputes are settled in adult life. Play fosters self-control and emotional regulation. By all accounts, hunter-gatherers, children were free from anxiety. It seemed to be reported generally to me by our respondents, it seems to be in the literature. Childhood depression seems to be unknown. And moreover, the children seem to be extraordinarily controlled, as for example, by my friend Jilda's statement that she never heard whining. Here's a little story this time from Elizabeth Marshall-Thomas concerning the Jowansi. She recounts a scene in which a young Jowansi girl, about 11 years old, was walking away from camp and she stepped into a steel trap that had been set by a biologist working in the area. And her foot got, the trap went through her foot and the trap was fixed to the ground in such a way that she was unable to move that foot or to sit down. So she had to stand on one foot. She was way away from anybody. She was in an area frequented by hyenas. Here is what Thomas has to say. This all happened until finally after hours her uncle found her and rescued her. But here's what Thomas has to say about this experience. I will always remember her calmness as we brought her to the encampment and dressed the wound. She had been alone, helpless and in pain for many hours in a place frequented by hyenas. Yet she acted as if nothing had happened, nothing at all. Instead she chatted with other people about this and that in an offhand manner. To me such composure in these circumstances did not seem possible. And I remember wondering if their nervous system were the same as ours. But of course their nervous systems were the same as ours. It was their self-control that was superior. You can say that things are wrong but you cannot show it. Your body language must suggest that everything is fine. I mean this little girl knew that she had to in the first place not make a fuss and attract hyenas. She had to stand perfectly still and she did. And in the second place, because it's part of the culture's mores she doesn't want to be weak and disabled in the presence of the rest of the band who needs each other's strength, not each other's weakness. I can't pretend to know all of the factors that go into such extraordinary self-control but I suspect that the continuous play is one of the major factors for it. Play as Lev Vygotsky, the great Russian developmental psychologist pointed out some years ago, is the means by which children learn self-control as well as the means by which they learn so much else. What Vygotsky pointed out is that all play has rules. And to play the game, you have to control yourself to follow the rules. And children are so motivated to play that they will put themselves into all sorts of discomfort. They will do things in play that they would not do at least in our culture in real life. You can get a child to stand, even a child with ADHD to stand motionless for hours if he's doing it in play whereas could never do that if we were sitting in class in school. So in play, children rise above their normal capacities but they develop capacities that then they can bring to real life according to Vygotsky. So for example, just an example of the point that all play has rules and the kinds of sociodramatic play that young children play if they're playing, let's say you're playing that you are Superman or that you are a great hunter and you believe that Superman, if he falls down and cries or falls down or a great hunter falls down and gets hurt, doesn't cry. So when you fall down, you don't cry. You control yourself. If you were to cry, that would kind of end the game. So you don't cry. You hold yourself, you control your emotions. In play, children are constantly putting themselves into fearful situations. They climb trees. They dive off, they jump off cliffs. They do things that are on the edge of a level of fear that they can tolerate. Parents hate it, at least in our culture, when they see children doing this. But what are children doing? They're developing their capacity to experience fear, to realize that they can control their fear and that they can overcome it. We know that if we deprive animals, animals do the same thing. And we know that if we deprive animals of the opportunity to play, there are experiments done with rats and with monkeys, they show inability to regulate their emotions in adulthood. They show excessive fear when they're placed in a fearful situation and they lash out in anger when they're placed in a situation with a peer that would normally, whether or even if the peer is making friendly overtures towards them. So one of the theories of play is the emotion regulation theory of play. So it doesn't seem impossible to me that the fact that hunter gatherer children are spending so much time at play is part of the reason that they're able to develop such emotional resilience. Now finally, I'm moving to part two, Roman numeral two on the outline that you have. The decline of play and the rise of childhood psychopathology in modern North America. Over the past 50 or 60 years, over my lifetime, there has been a tremendous decline in the United States and in other Western cultures in children's freedom, in children's opportunities to play. Howard Shudikoff in an authoritative book on the history of play in America refers to the first half of the 20th century as the golden age of play and he says it's been all downhill since then. 20th, early 20th century was the golden age because by that time children didn't have to do too much work. They were no longer working in factories to a considerable extent they weren't. They no longer were laboring all day long on farms. They had a fair amount of freedom and although there was school, it was not the big deal that it is today and they didn't have all these kinds of adult directed activities so children in the first half of the 20th century had a lot of free time to play. Since about 1950, we have with every decade increased the amount of control that adults exert over children's activities. They're spending more time in school, more years, more days, more hours, less recess. They are spending more time out of school in situations where they are directed by adults rather than free to roam and play and explore on their own. I won't go into the reasons for this. There's good sociological reasons for this which many of you can guess at and have been discussed elsewhere but the fact is that children for whatever reason are far less free now than they were before and this decline in freedom has been a linear decline to the degree that we can measure it beginning about 1955 and continuing on through today and the trajectory of the decline seems to be continuing based on the kinds of policies that are being talked about largely today. Over this same period that play has declined, there has been a dramatic and linear rise in all sorts of childhood psychopathology. The best evidence for this, and this is not just that we're recognizing it, where we didn't recognize it before. The best evidence for this I think comes from the work of Jean Twenge but others have replicated some of this work that involves the analysis of scores on various standardized clinical assessment questionnaires that have been given to normative samples of children and adolescents over the decades in unchanged forms or at least where many of the questions were unchanged. So for example, the MMPI, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory has been given since 1938 and you can compare scores on it where there's a version for adolescents that has been given for high school students really that's been given since 1951. Taylor's Manifest Anxiety Scale has been used to assess anxiety levels in college students since 1952 and a version for children has been used with elementary school students since 1956. Based on analyses of these scores and looking at cut-off values on the scores it would be used today to say that this individual is clinically depressed or this individual is clinically anxious. The level of clinically significant depression and anxiety has increased five to eightfold between 1950 and today. This increase according to Twenge's data is a linear increase. It doesn't cycle according to wars going on or other events in the world. It's a linear change that mirrors the linear decline in play. Let me give you, to illustrate this just a little bit further let me give you a few examples of specific questions. It happened that there were major normative tests using the MMPI for children aged 14 to 16 done in 1948 and 1989 and Cassandra Newsom analyzed the results for those two years. Here's some differences. Here's some specific items. The way the MMPI works is there are self statements which you either agree to or disagree. So here one statement is I wake up fresh and rested most mornings. In 1948, 75% of 14 to 16 year olds said yes. In 1989, only 31% said yes. 31%. In other words, 69% were saying I do not wake up fresh and rested most mornings. I work under a great deal of tension. In 1948, 68% said yes. In 1989, 42% said yes. Life is a strain for me much of the time. In 1948, 9% said yes. In 1989, 35% said yes. I am afraid of losing my mind. Can you imagine a 14 to 16 year old afraid he's losing my mind? In 1948, only 4% said yes, still too many. In 1989, 23% of 14 to 16 year olds said yes to the question I am afraid I am losing my mind. What are we doing to children? In case you're skeptical of questionnaire data, look at suicide rates. This is a hard cold statistic. Suicide rates over the period from the 1950s today have increased threefold among people 15 to 24 years old, fourfold among children under 15 years old. They have increased only slightly in adults between the age of 25 and 40 and they've actually declined in adults over 40. The world has become worse for children. The world has become less tolerable for children because of what we are doing to them. Play is how children learn to control their own lives, how to solve their own problems, how to regulate their emotions. Is it any wonder that if we deprive children of free play and we take control of their lives that they suffer all these disorders? Playfulness and curiosity are the hallmarks of childhood. Children are designed by evolution to play and explore and in that way develop the skills including social and emotional skills that they need for development into adulthood. Hunter-gatherers implicitly recognize that by allowing children to play and explore all the time. In the 1950s, parents partly explicitly recognize that. When I was a kid in the 1950s, we had two educations. We had school, but also we had many more hours than school for the hunter-gatherer education when we were out there all the time, after school until dark, all weekend long, all summer. We had some chores to do, but by and large, we were running around in age mix groups, playing, mimicking adults, getting into all sorts of mischief, learning how to control ourselves, learning how to regulate our emotions, doing things that stretch our capacities to deal with fear and so on and so forth and today we deprive children of those opportunities. Increasingly, we are treating childhood as a time of resume building, not the time of joy and freedom and growth that it should be and with that I'll end and maybe there's a time for a question or two. Yes. Hi, that was delightful, thank you. I haven't quite formulated my question, but I'm a parent of a young child and also a teacher in an elementary school and I think that most of the teachers I work with feel, I agree with what you're saying and we feel that these structures that exist prevent, the recess is short and we wanna let kids play and we can't and so this just kind of echoes what we've heard in other talks about well how do we get the stuff to the mainstream but just do you have any ideas about what teachers and parents, I have more control as a parent and I've let my five-year-old go play around the neighborhood with I'm so very lucky that we have mixed-aged kids in our neighborhood but as a teacher, I feel more like my hands are tied. Yeah, I mean I think it's hard to act as an individual teacher, I've talked to a lot of teachers about this and I've said well why don't you do this or that and they say well I'd be fired. Why do you give this? You don't like the standardized test, why do you give it? Because I'd be fired. But what if half the teachers in the school refused to give it? What if you got together? What if you said look, enough is enough. We know kids. We are not gonna do this to kids. What if you did that? What if teachers organized not just to improve their salaries but organized to improve what they're doing for education and stop hurting kids? Hi, thank you so much for your talk. I'm the mother of four young children between the ages of four and 11. Over the last year I pulled them all out of their after school activities because I just saw how detrimental it was becoming to our family. But I just wanted to see what your suggestions are about how to incorporate this into our modern day world. My children are in school till 4.15 every day. The winter time they're, you know, we're eating dinner, going to bed so. But I feel like this is so important. Yeah, I think that's a great question and it doesn't have a short answer but there's a book that I would recommend. It's a new book by Mike Lanza called Plaiberhood. I've been in some contact with him. He also has a website. He's been tackling this problem specifically. He turned his own neighborhood into a plate, what he calls a plaiberhood. He found ways to overcome the isolation of families. He put his playthings in the front yard instead of the backyard. He put up essentially a please trespass sign. He did away with hedges. And he got some of his neighbors to do this too. And suddenly now the kids are running around and playing the, instead of the belief that the next door neighbor might be a child molester, they know their next door neighbor is a pretty good guy and they don't worry about letting him play in this yard letting. So part of the problem is that back in the 1950s we had neighborhoods. People trusted their neighbors. You didn't have to watch your kids all the time. You could let them run around. You didn't believe that they were gonna be snatched up. Of course, kids are not being snatched up, but we believe they are. We believe they are. And we've gotta overcome that belief and the way to do it is part of the way to do it I think is outlined in this book. Now that's only a partial answer. There are a lot of other things you can do. Instead of taking a family vacation just by your family, take a vacation with a bunch of family. So the kids can play with the other kids and do kids things and get away from you. Your kid needs to get away from you. Your kid doesn't need more mommy time. The kid needs more kid time. So, Plaborhood by Mike Lanza. I think it's a really good book. I've been sort of advertising it wherever I speak. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.