Cities Aren’t Built for Kids

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence,

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In only three generations, children in the British Isles as well as the United States have lost their freedom to roam, their independently explorable territories shrinking from hundreds of acres to the dimensions of each child’s own back yard. This is not an accusation toward parents; their decisions reflect their judgments about their children’s s

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Presumably, parents in the past cared as much about their kids' safety as parents today do. But they took far fewer precautions than parents today, and exerted far fewer controls over kids' behavior. Perhaps they thought it was important that children learn to take risks in order to develop courage. Or perhaps they thought that getting into scrapes... See more

Jonathan Haidt is right when he talks about the sudden switch from play-based to phone-based childhoods and how it destroyed mental health—particularly for young girls. Our childhoods weren’t spent toying with risk and danger, teaching ourselves we could cope with it, learning that it’s baked into life. We had bans on play fighting. Health and safe... See more