The social commentator Matthew Yglesias posted a note about his son’s childhood on Twitter yesterday — under an amazing (and, to me, infuriating and heartbreaking) graph from the Institute for Family Studies:
Wrote Yglesias:
My son (age eleven) is definitely allowed to go places in the neighborhood but compared to how I remember myself does not have that much interest in doing so — “at home” has become way more entertaining than it used to be and most of his friends don’t live very close to us.
I replied:
It’s way easier to get our kids outside when there are friends nearby, of course, but it’s also possible for them to make neighborhood friends — if kids are out and about and visible.
How can we help make that happen? A couple ideas:
1 – Organize a “friendship club” with 2 or 3 nearby families: “My kid can knock on your door and vice versa, without pre-planning a playdate.”
2 – Organize a “Let Grow Play Club” or “Free Play Friday.” Notify neighbors that your kids will be playing at a local park X day/time and others are welcome.
3 – Ask your school to try our (free!) independence-building program, The Let Grow Experience. Kids get a monthly homework assignment: “Go home and do something new, on your own, WITH your parents’ permission, but WITHOUT your parents.” Oftentimes kids start walking to friends’ homes, riding their bikes, going to the store — all of this renormalizing the sight of kids out and about. AND getting us parents used to the idea of LETTING THEM GO OUTSIDE WITHOUT US! When a bunch of families are doing this at once, the stigma disappears and the collective excitement reinforces itself.
In a Harris Poll I helped design with my @LetGrowOrg co-founder @JonHaidt and his chief researcher Zach Rausch, 73% of kids agreed:
“I would spend less time online if there were more friends in my neighborhood to play with in person.”
Kids LONG for free play with their friends. Let’s make that easier to happen!
3 Comments
Limit screen time, and outside will start to look a lot better.
Nearly a third of seventeen-year-olds are still restricted to their street? This is astonishing. At seventeen, I had a job fifteen miles from my house that I drove to five days a week. At seventeen, my dad was on the crew of a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Pacific, hoping to avoid kamikazes. I fear that society has become too bizarre ever to return to normality.
I find it much more disturbing that 11% of 16 year olds and 8% of 17 year olds can’t leave the yard without an adult accompanying them, and 8% of 17 year olds can’t even leave the house. Fortunately the research paper does clarify the numbers by saying:
“While we hasten to note that the exact prevalences shown here could reflect various kinds of sampling errors or idiosyncratic respondent behaviors (as well as some share of parents who may have children with disabilities), the overall conclusion is hard to escape: a very large share of American teenagers are not allowed much autonomy at all.” Source: https://ifstudies.org/report-brief/high-tech-low-play-the-life-of-american-children
So hopefully the situation for late teenagers isn’t isn’t quite as bleak as the chart numbers make it appear.
But even if the numbers are somewhat off, The percentage of kids at every age who can’t play in their own yard without an adult is appalling.