Listen to thisThe kid world, the adult world, and the family world have lost their boundaries
Over the past two-plus decades, it has become clear that mothers and fathers, especially those in the middle class and above, are helping children do things that kids are entirely capable of doing on their own. Solve peer conflicts. Do homework. Even accompany grown kids to job interviews! Parental over-involvement in children's lives, many cultural observers believe, plays a large role in the mental health crisis affecting both parents and young people today.
Increasingly, parents have become irrationally fearful of letting their children out of their sight, contends Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids and co-founder of Let Grow. We’ve been brainwashed, she says, to believe that any time our kids aren’t with us, they're in danger of “being kidnapped by a guy in a white van looking for his puppy.”
When Gen X were children, “there were three worlds that were perfectly balanced,” she explains: The kid world, the adult world, and the family world. “But now, they’ve all been sort of mashed up together.” Today, with the three worlds out of balance, the result is both parental anxiety and what Skenazy calls the “adult takeover of childhood.”
A recent study at the University of Michigan found that while most parents recognize the importance of children’s independence, more than half endorsed the idea that “unsupervised children cause trouble.” One quarter said they have criticized another parent for not adequately supervising their child, and more than one in 10 said that they themselves have been criticized for the same.
Among the children of the respondents, only a small minority of 5-8 year olds regularly did things like order for themselves at a restaurant (24%) or prepare their own meal or snack (20%). The majority of children between 9 and 11 were not allowed to stay at home alone for even 30-60 minutes, walk or bike alone to a friend’s house, or play unsupervised at a park with a friend.
A particularly striking finding is that only half of parents said that, while in a grocery market, they let their tweens go to a different aisle without them. “We’ve got to get brave enough to send our kids to the canned food aisle,” Skenazy quips.
Rates of mental illness among teens and young adults so raised have reached levels that leave universities struggling to keep up. And young adults report being lonelier than ever.
The American Enterprise Institute’s 2019 Survey on Community and Society found that 44% of 18- to 29-year-olds report at least sometimes feeling completely alone. (In contrast, among 60- to 70-year-olds, the proportion was 19%.) Between 2016 and 2022, the prevalence of depression in American children ages 3–17 increased almost 50%, and anxiety increased more than 50%.
As children lost unsupervised playtime, the only spaces where they could be unsupervised were online—possibly the worst places to leave children to their own devices (literally).
A Parent and Child Mental Health Crisis
In June 2024, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for social media platforms to come with warning labels similar to those on cigarettes and alcohol. “The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency,” he stated. “Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms.” And as of the summer of 2023, adolescents’ average daily dose of social media was 4.8 hours.
Later in the year, Murthy also released the U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents, reporting that one-third of parents with children under 18 said they experienced high levels of stress in the past month (compared to one-fifth of other adults).
Skenazy is convinced that the solution to children’s anxiety and the solution to parents’ anxiety is the same: Separate the child’s world from the worlds of adulthood and family. “You’ve got to pull apart those worlds [and] put them back in balance.”
Free Range and Free Play
Skenazy is now advocating for a new law, the Reasonable Childhood Independence Law, to give children back the right to play freely. The proposal clarifies that when children are allowed to safely participate in appropriate unsupervised activities, it does not constitute neglect. So far, the law has been passed in nine states.
As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and I wrote in 2018, “free play in which kids work out their own rules of engagement, take small risks, and learn to master small dangers (such as having a snowball fight) turns out to be crucial for the development of adult social and even physical competence. Depriving them of free play stunts their social-emotional growth.”
Let Grow promotes programs schools can adopt that allow children to choose activities they can do on their own — with their parents’ permission but without supervision. “Childhood’s magic words,” Skenazy declares, “are 'I did it myself'.” If you can let go and trust your kids to do things on their own, she insists, your kids will end up less anxious, smarter, and will “feel really proud.”
But, she tells parents, “not as proud as you.”
Key points
From: Psychology Today - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/happiness-and-the-pursuit-of-leadership/202504/the-adult-takeover-of-childhood
