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,

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

The wonderful convenience of city sidewalks is an important asset to children too. Children are at the mercy of convenience more than anyone else, except the aged. A great part of children’s outdoor play, especially after they start school, and after they also find a certain number of organized activities (sports, arts, handcrafts or whatever else

In order to develop and express their culture and achieve such feats of coordination, children require time and space apart from adult supervision. In the West today, outside of tiny pockets, this independence is almost exclusively the prerogative of poor children surrounded by crumbling cultures that lack the will to monitor and protect them.

There’s a second plotline here: the well-intentioned and disastrous shift toward overprotecting children and restricting their autonomy in the real world. Children need a great deal of free play to thrive. It’s an imperative that’s evident across all mammal species. The small-scale challenges and setbacks that happen during play are like an inocula