Childhood

Putnam believed that the single biggest risk factor was the growing amount of time people spent alone.

Even back when he wrote Bowling Alone —before smartphones and apps—teens were solitary for three-and-a-half hours per day. Adolescents spent more time alone than with their family.

For the first time in history, people were growing up disconnected... See more

Boredom, lust, embarrassment, resentment, confusion, euphoria, anger, ambivalence… everything is amplified in the febrile, white-hot heat of adolescence. As we navigate this perilous passage between childhood and adulthood, we’re unwittingly forging the neural pathways, habits and identities that we’ll likely spend the ensuing years attempting to d

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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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only a handful of people who profess to have had a happy childhood; all the rest are survivors, everyone was given either too much or too little, life is always a long journey of healing from childhood.

Hila Blum, How to Love Your Daughter

It seems to me that school, by nature of its inefficiency and coercion into it, just eats the life out of kids. It slows them down, forces them to stare ahead, forces them to learn rigidly. It's worse than a prison, it's a gunshot wound straight into the heart of agency