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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“A mix of shifting parental attitudes, car-dependency, and urbanization have led to an unprecedented situation in the history of human childhood. Children don’t have peer cultures, because they have nowhere to play and no one to play with. Even if those factors were ameliorated, we might not let them out anyway. Too bad for them – they can’t hide... See more

The conversation around getting kids off screens ignores that we’ve systematically eliminated the physical spaces where they could roam independently.