“In many ways, America has given up on childhood, and on children.” From the NYT, it’s really getting difficult to find happy well adjusted young adults because we’ve (their caretakers) deprived them of many opportunities to attempt (and sometimes, to fail) to form relationships all on their own. Too much well-intentioned parent-structured play time is making for anxiety-ridden and depressed young adults.  They are struggling to figure out this alien-seeming thing of learning to form meaningful relationships, and it’s driving more than a few of them to suicide.

What follows is anecdotal, but I am sure it could be established statistically: When I and many of my well-adjusted peers were kids, we left the house in the morning and we played all day. We came home when it started to get dark.  When we disagreed with each other, there were no adults to adjudicate the differences. We did that ourselves and we figured it out well enough often enough. We didn’t have ANY adults telling us how to play. No one arranged play dates for us. We chose who to spend time with. If another kid was a pain in the ass, we avoided him/her, and he/she would need to learn make adjustments in order to get back in our social graces. Same thing for me, of course. If any of us offended someone, we didn’t run to our parents to negotiate with their parents; rather, we needed to go to the fear and figure something out on our own (though many parents did provide a good listening ear in the evening).

We sometimes did things that would be considered dangerous. We played in the creek, unsupervised. Here in St. Louis, where I live, I have since learned that the creek I played in had serious radioactive contamination that is a prime suspect in some cases of Leukemia. Sometimes, someone would pull out fireworks and no adult was around. Sometimes we got burned or scraped. No adult was around to put cartoon-character band-aids on laughably tiny wounds and give us false commiseration.

We didn’t have organized sports teams, for the most part. We picked teams on our own. Where there were disputes, we resolved them, sometimes using a “do-over.” Where less talented kids showed up, we often (not always) had them join the teams in equal doses. They did not get applause for failing, no trophies were handed out for merely showing up, and I’m sure that hurt some feelings, but kids have a willingness to call out when the emperor has no clothings and this is a very good thing in the long run.  Many of these kids got to be better athletes and received increasing amounts of applause as they worked hard to improve their game.   It wasn’t often “Lord of the Flies.” Kids are often fair and kind and encouraging to others who need it.

Growing up was a giant laboratory for kids to conduct trial and error, every day, every hour. We learned many things, including self-reliance. We learned what worked and what to avoid. We learned how to relate to other people by doing it.

I’m not suggesting that we should expose children to obvious dangers, like unrestricted use of BB guns. There are limits to what I’m suggesting, and I often think about how lucky I am that I didn’t lose an eye as a child. No child should be exposed to destructive bullying or terror-mongering by bigger and stronger kids and adults. And I admit that it’s sometimes difficult to know where to draw the line for nervous adults who feel compelled to intervene often.

That said, there are great dangers to being over-supervised by adults, and they are pointed out in the NYT article, titled, “We Have Ruined Childhood: For youngsters these days, an hour of free play is like a drop of water in the desert. Of course they’re miserable.” Here is an excerpt:

For many Americans, the nuclear family has become a lonely institution — and childhood, one long unpaid internship meant to secure a spot in a dwindling middle class.

Something has to change, says Denise Pope, a co-founder of Challenge Success, an organization based in Palo Alto, Calif., that helps schools make research-backed changes to improve children’s mental health. Kids need recess. They need longer lunches. They need free play, family time, meal time. They need less homework, fewer tests, a greater emphasis on social-emotional learning.

Challenge Success also works with parents, encouraging them to get together with their neighbors and organize things like extracurricular-free days when kids can simply play, and teaching them how not to intervene in normal peer conflict so that children can build problem-solving skills themselves. A similar organization, Let Grow, helps schools set up unstructured free play before and after the school day.

The above article, and other similar articles reminds me that we have a severe mental-health threat on our hands, and much of it is self-inflicted. Some of it is caused by excessive screen time, but the other side of that coin is that too much screen time means inadequate time to run self-directed social experiments as a kid. Who would want to put one’s future into the hands of a kid (the younger version of yourself) at age 7, or 8 or 11? We might not have a choice. This brings to mind William Wordsworth’s quote: “The child is the father of the man”

For a similar perspective, See the writings of Lenore Skenazy and Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Coddling of the American Mind.