My son was born in 1980, and he grew up on a farm where he and his friends had a lot of freedom to run around outside on our 13 acres. He and most of his friends were homeschoolers until about ninth grade, when most of them went to high school. There were a few close calls, mostly caused by adults, not kids, but as long as they were here on the farm, nobody got hurt.
When he started going to school in Nashville, he did have a closer call: he and some friends built a cardboard car and put a car battery in a backpack, which he wore, to run the lights. Then they "drove" this car around in downtown Nashville. Some of the battery acid leaked out and burned a hole about the size of a silver dollar in my son's skin! This was pretty bad but didn't require any skin graft.
I have thought about this incident and why it happened: they built the car at a friend's house. His parents were apparently not paying any attention at all to what the boys were doing, or if they did, didn't see a problem with it. One parent evidently drove them to the downtown location with the car and the backpack without realizing it could be a problem. I think this shows that a lot of PARENTS don't have a basic understanding of how things work. I would not have permitted the battery in the backpack if it had been up to me, because somebody could get shocked badly. I might not have thought about the battery acid leaking.
Another time an adult loaned me a car and did not tell me that the parking brake did not work. It was parked on a hill at my farm. Some boys climbed into the back of the hatchback and the car started rolling with them in it. I ran toward the car to try to get in it and put the brake on, but the door of the car knocked me to the ground. Fortunately the car got hung up in some bushes and didn't roll all the way down the hill into the creek.
I guess what I'm saying is that adults are often as clueless or more clueless than kids about how things work, perhaps because they themselves have had too little contact with the real world, physics, and chemistry. Many people nowadays don't deal with the physical world much at all: they don't grow food, make fires, repair cars, etc.
When my son was in his teens, and the internet came along and then web browsers, my dad was very worried he would look at porn online. At that time it was not free: you needed a credit card, and he didn't have one. So I told my dad not to worry. I'm not sure what I would say now about teenagers and unlimited access to the internet. My son did have a screen time limit until he was about 13. This included TV, movies, and video games. The limit was one hour a day, and you could blow the whole week's allowance at once if you wanted. Later I found out that he and his friends would stay up late at night after I went to sleep and turn the screens back on! But he grew up and got a job with Microsoft's X Box department so maybe it was ok.
Dr. Gray, respectfully, this is an area where I think it is difficult for older generations to understand Millenial-and-younger parents' concerns about one danger you did not mention: online pornography. Unwanted sexual advances, yes - you mentioned those, and I certainly don't want my kid receiving unsolicited AirDropped nudes in the middle of 7th grade English class, just as I don't want him to run across a flasher. But more than that is the sense that I would like my child to have the privilege, taken for granted in prior generations, of growing into his sexuality in the context of actual intimate human relationships that have not been warped by violent and degrading understandings of sex. People whose teenage years might have involved some small number of still-photograph magazines passed around furtively among a peer group just may not understand what we're talking about here. The algorithms are designed to keep people scrolling and feed ever more extreme content, and developing brains are plastic. With smartphone access (his or peers') there is a very real danger that my son will watch video evidence of an actual r*pe before he has his first kiss - and it will not be represented to him as a heinous crime but as part of what's normal and titillating. That is very alarming to most parents, and it informs a lot of our fears about taking the "free range" approach online - how do we prep kids for that danger? (Relevant: https://unherd.com/newsroom/violent-porn-is-behind-the-rise-in-youth-sexual-offences/)
Megan, actually, I did include pornography in the lis of things that need to be regulated. And, please, you don't know me well enough to think that my age is a constraint in understanding today's world.
I really did mean my "respectfully" because it always does feel like a bit of an "OK boomer" remark to bring up, which I certainly do not intend! My experience is based on repeated conversations with colleagues; those of us who got high-speed internet on personal devices while we were young tend to nod along seriously while those who did not have sometimes dismissed the concerns as prudish or overblown, unless we get really graphic and specific with the conversation which no one wants to do. I certainly do not mean to imply that you specifically haven't given this thought, and would welcome thoughts on what parents can do to prepare our kids for this particular danger while giving them access to all the good things on the internet. It feels much harder to address than real-world dangers, and I'm not hopeful that regulation will happen in time to matter for my own kids.
Since no one seems able to effectively regulate pornography or other harmful content on the internet (including school districts, where parents have little visibility or control), what would you suggest parents do?
I realize the article shared in Dr. Gray’s post and the post are arguing Jonathan Haidt’s stance. Yet I am sharing a post by Haidt because it goes along with Megan’s statement about the algorithm pushing more extreme content to encourage more use. I understand the usefulness of tech and its role in human development and evolution and that tech is a major cultural learning ground. I do use it as such but I still remain skeptical of internet and social media use. Parents really are at a disadvantage with pornography and violence pushing algorithms. Tech companies haven’t figured out ways to keep porn and violence out of our children’s hands due to the algorithm, yet parents are supposed to outsmart it all with reasoning, education, and boundaries? At least playing outside, there isn’t a system put in place to practically make sure my kids run into pornography.
I especially appreciate your distinction between risk and hazard, whether outdoors or online, and the child’s need to develop courage and resilience. (Access to porn is a hazard to tweens and young teens; interfacing with online bullying is a risk.) I am appreciative of your counterpoint to the worry by some experts that all pathologies are caused by social media. Parents and educators can help kids find balance in their types of play….
"Are the dangers online so much greater than, and so much different from, the dangers outdoors that we cannot or should not apply “free range” principles to the former?"
In a word, YES.
Also, "letting them know, in respectful ways, what the dangers are" is really vague. Define the dangers, because there is a wild variety online that isn't comparable to exploring the outdoor world. And there is a vast difference in being able to explain the innumerable threats online to a 7-year-old versus a 17-year-old (or 27-year-old, for that matter). My elementary school aged son is very smart but isn't going to get the concept of algorithmic influence.
"There should be clear safeguards concerning pornography, concerning gambling and anything approaching gambling, and any messages tempting kids (and other users) to spend money without clear information about what they are getting." There sure should be, but there aren't. I can tell my son not to drink alcohol as a minor, explain to him why, but also know that liquor stores and bars won't allow him in until he's of age. There's no equivilent online. Can he procure a fake ID? Sure, but there's a lot of friction there. Can he open a porn site or sports gambling app and tell it he's 18? He can. That's a problem.
Also, it feels like you've lumped all places outside of the home as appropriate for children to "explore," unless you meant to include exceptions? Sex shops, dark alleys, etc? We don't say "Hey bud, meth heads love to stake out abandoned warehouses, so keep that in mind while you're poking around in one!" and think we've prepared them for such an inappropriate situation.
Once when we were in Washington DC, and my son was about 8, we walked by a store front where the door was open. Men were sitting looking at video screens. He thought it was a gaming place and literally ran in there. It turned out to be a kind of "peep show" place! This was in about 1988 before the internet. He came out pretty quick. It was funny at the time but it would not be funny if an 8 year old got addicted to online porn and nobody knew about it.
It really is kind of hard to know what all to "warn" somebody about. I had no idea that my son would think it was ok to put a car battery in a backpack and wear it, for example. He did some other dangerous things when he was a bit older and survived, but some kids don't. For example, in my rural county, teens get shot sometimes by friends. And they die. You can't just "warn" a kid that "guns are dangerous." When they're face to face with a friend who is angry and is pointing a gun at them, at that point it may be too late. It's the responsibility of adults to get rid of all these guns that are just lying around unlocked.
There's also a difference in your son clocking something isn't right, he left, and you're outside, as opposed to being on his phone by himself and able to access it again and again (unlike the storefront snafu) until he starts to believe that sex = porn. And to be clear, I agree with Dr. Gray that kids have had play taken away from them in a really detrimental way, but unfettered internet access isn't the answer.
I think about Jerome Bruner in paper "The course of Cognitive Growth".
Below is one of my favourite passages of this paper. I think Bruner argued that culture was a form of technology the was part of human evolution. As I reflect on our current culture, technology is woven into it. Gatekeeping children from tech isn't going to support their development.
I think children learn from those around them and that includes our relationship with technology.
"This implies that the principal change in man over a long period of years—perhaps 500,000 thousand—has been alloplastic rather than autoplastic. That is to say, he has changed by linking himself with new, external implementation systems rather than by any conspicuous change in morphology —"evolution-by-prosthesis," as Weston La Barre (1954) puts it. The implement systems seem to have been of three general kinds—amplifiers of human motor capacities ranging from the cutting tool through the lever and wheel to the wide variety of modern devices; amplifiers of sensory capacities that include primitive devices such as smoke signaling and modern ones such as magnification and radar sensing, but also likely to include such "software" as those conventionalized perceptual shortcuts that can be applied to the redundant sensory environment; and finally amplifiers of human ratiocinative capacities of infinite variety ranging from language systems to myth and theory and explanation. All of these forms of amplification are in major or minor degree conventionalized and transmitted by the culture, the last of them probably the most since ratiocinative amplifiers involve symbol systems governed by rules that must, for effective use, be shared."
I believe there is a great difference between outdoor exploration and online activity. For one thing, there are two types of outdoor spaces to explore: man-made and natural spaces. Man-made spaces are potentially more dangerous and are not explored or played in the same way as natural spaces. There is poison ivy in the woods, as I well know. There are bears and sharks in nature, too. Playing around large farm animals can be dangerous too. Falling out of a tree can hurt or break bones, as well as rough physical play.
Man-made spaces have a different set of problems, such as gangs, drugs, hatred, and weapons. Most of these are social issues. The internet is man-made and has dangers in illicit content, commercialization, and addiction. Screen time is problematic for both children and adults. Playing games all night is not good for anyone. Adults make choices, and children do too, but with less cognitive development. With children, we have to consider their cognitive development, not just their birth date.
I love outdoor education. I am afraid of just letting kids "free-range" in man-made environments without some oversight and guidance. Kids running around late at night is trouble waiting to happen. In man-made environments, they encounter our social problems that even adults can not solve. I knew boys who had to change bandanas depending on whose gang territory they had to walk through on their way to and from school.
I would be interested in hearing your take on Michaeleen Doucleff's latest book, Dopamine Kids. I think she makes a very compelling argument that, from a neurological perspective, tech companies have figured out ways of harnessing human's dopamine reward systems in a way that really holds us captive. It's much more powerful than the forces at play in the physical world, and it doesn't fulfill the same needs. Many tweens and teens say they actually want their parents' help in controlling their media use, because without fully developed prefrontal cortexes its even harder for them to resist the dopamine hit they get from this technology. I love your perspective on outdoor play as something we evolved to need, but can we really say the same of social media and screens? My kids are still young, 4 and 6, but eliminating addictive tablets and streaming services from our home has been a game changer. There's just no way that my kids could be expected to self-regulate in the face of such powerful attention magnets. And I think the neuroscience backs that up.
My son was born in 1980, and he grew up on a farm where he and his friends had a lot of freedom to run around outside on our 13 acres. He and most of his friends were homeschoolers until about ninth grade, when most of them went to high school. There were a few close calls, mostly caused by adults, not kids, but as long as they were here on the farm, nobody got hurt.
When he started going to school in Nashville, he did have a closer call: he and some friends built a cardboard car and put a car battery in a backpack, which he wore, to run the lights. Then they "drove" this car around in downtown Nashville. Some of the battery acid leaked out and burned a hole about the size of a silver dollar in my son's skin! This was pretty bad but didn't require any skin graft.
I have thought about this incident and why it happened: they built the car at a friend's house. His parents were apparently not paying any attention at all to what the boys were doing, or if they did, didn't see a problem with it. One parent evidently drove them to the downtown location with the car and the backpack without realizing it could be a problem. I think this shows that a lot of PARENTS don't have a basic understanding of how things work. I would not have permitted the battery in the backpack if it had been up to me, because somebody could get shocked badly. I might not have thought about the battery acid leaking.
Another time an adult loaned me a car and did not tell me that the parking brake did not work. It was parked on a hill at my farm. Some boys climbed into the back of the hatchback and the car started rolling with them in it. I ran toward the car to try to get in it and put the brake on, but the door of the car knocked me to the ground. Fortunately the car got hung up in some bushes and didn't roll all the way down the hill into the creek.
I guess what I'm saying is that adults are often as clueless or more clueless than kids about how things work, perhaps because they themselves have had too little contact with the real world, physics, and chemistry. Many people nowadays don't deal with the physical world much at all: they don't grow food, make fires, repair cars, etc.
When my son was in his teens, and the internet came along and then web browsers, my dad was very worried he would look at porn online. At that time it was not free: you needed a credit card, and he didn't have one. So I told my dad not to worry. I'm not sure what I would say now about teenagers and unlimited access to the internet. My son did have a screen time limit until he was about 13. This included TV, movies, and video games. The limit was one hour a day, and you could blow the whole week's allowance at once if you wanted. Later I found out that he and his friends would stay up late at night after I went to sleep and turn the screens back on! But he grew up and got a job with Microsoft's X Box department so maybe it was ok.
Dr. Gray, respectfully, this is an area where I think it is difficult for older generations to understand Millenial-and-younger parents' concerns about one danger you did not mention: online pornography. Unwanted sexual advances, yes - you mentioned those, and I certainly don't want my kid receiving unsolicited AirDropped nudes in the middle of 7th grade English class, just as I don't want him to run across a flasher. But more than that is the sense that I would like my child to have the privilege, taken for granted in prior generations, of growing into his sexuality in the context of actual intimate human relationships that have not been warped by violent and degrading understandings of sex. People whose teenage years might have involved some small number of still-photograph magazines passed around furtively among a peer group just may not understand what we're talking about here. The algorithms are designed to keep people scrolling and feed ever more extreme content, and developing brains are plastic. With smartphone access (his or peers') there is a very real danger that my son will watch video evidence of an actual r*pe before he has his first kiss - and it will not be represented to him as a heinous crime but as part of what's normal and titillating. That is very alarming to most parents, and it informs a lot of our fears about taking the "free range" approach online - how do we prep kids for that danger? (Relevant: https://unherd.com/newsroom/violent-porn-is-behind-the-rise-in-youth-sexual-offences/)
Megan, actually, I did include pornography in the lis of things that need to be regulated. And, please, you don't know me well enough to think that my age is a constraint in understanding today's world.
I really did mean my "respectfully" because it always does feel like a bit of an "OK boomer" remark to bring up, which I certainly do not intend! My experience is based on repeated conversations with colleagues; those of us who got high-speed internet on personal devices while we were young tend to nod along seriously while those who did not have sometimes dismissed the concerns as prudish or overblown, unless we get really graphic and specific with the conversation which no one wants to do. I certainly do not mean to imply that you specifically haven't given this thought, and would welcome thoughts on what parents can do to prepare our kids for this particular danger while giving them access to all the good things on the internet. It feels much harder to address than real-world dangers, and I'm not hopeful that regulation will happen in time to matter for my own kids.
Since no one seems able to effectively regulate pornography or other harmful content on the internet (including school districts, where parents have little visibility or control), what would you suggest parents do?
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/snapchat-recommends-harmful-content-kids-brooke-istook-2026?r=4v837i&utm_medium=ios
I realize the article shared in Dr. Gray’s post and the post are arguing Jonathan Haidt’s stance. Yet I am sharing a post by Haidt because it goes along with Megan’s statement about the algorithm pushing more extreme content to encourage more use. I understand the usefulness of tech and its role in human development and evolution and that tech is a major cultural learning ground. I do use it as such but I still remain skeptical of internet and social media use. Parents really are at a disadvantage with pornography and violence pushing algorithms. Tech companies haven’t figured out ways to keep porn and violence out of our children’s hands due to the algorithm, yet parents are supposed to outsmart it all with reasoning, education, and boundaries? At least playing outside, there isn’t a system put in place to practically make sure my kids run into pornography.
I especially appreciate your distinction between risk and hazard, whether outdoors or online, and the child’s need to develop courage and resilience. (Access to porn is a hazard to tweens and young teens; interfacing with online bullying is a risk.) I am appreciative of your counterpoint to the worry by some experts that all pathologies are caused by social media. Parents and educators can help kids find balance in their types of play….
"Are the dangers online so much greater than, and so much different from, the dangers outdoors that we cannot or should not apply “free range” principles to the former?"
In a word, YES.
Also, "letting them know, in respectful ways, what the dangers are" is really vague. Define the dangers, because there is a wild variety online that isn't comparable to exploring the outdoor world. And there is a vast difference in being able to explain the innumerable threats online to a 7-year-old versus a 17-year-old (or 27-year-old, for that matter). My elementary school aged son is very smart but isn't going to get the concept of algorithmic influence.
"There should be clear safeguards concerning pornography, concerning gambling and anything approaching gambling, and any messages tempting kids (and other users) to spend money without clear information about what they are getting." There sure should be, but there aren't. I can tell my son not to drink alcohol as a minor, explain to him why, but also know that liquor stores and bars won't allow him in until he's of age. There's no equivilent online. Can he procure a fake ID? Sure, but there's a lot of friction there. Can he open a porn site or sports gambling app and tell it he's 18? He can. That's a problem.
Also, it feels like you've lumped all places outside of the home as appropriate for children to "explore," unless you meant to include exceptions? Sex shops, dark alleys, etc? We don't say "Hey bud, meth heads love to stake out abandoned warehouses, so keep that in mind while you're poking around in one!" and think we've prepared them for such an inappropriate situation.
Once when we were in Washington DC, and my son was about 8, we walked by a store front where the door was open. Men were sitting looking at video screens. He thought it was a gaming place and literally ran in there. It turned out to be a kind of "peep show" place! This was in about 1988 before the internet. He came out pretty quick. It was funny at the time but it would not be funny if an 8 year old got addicted to online porn and nobody knew about it.
It really is kind of hard to know what all to "warn" somebody about. I had no idea that my son would think it was ok to put a car battery in a backpack and wear it, for example. He did some other dangerous things when he was a bit older and survived, but some kids don't. For example, in my rural county, teens get shot sometimes by friends. And they die. You can't just "warn" a kid that "guns are dangerous." When they're face to face with a friend who is angry and is pointing a gun at them, at that point it may be too late. It's the responsibility of adults to get rid of all these guns that are just lying around unlocked.
There's also a difference in your son clocking something isn't right, he left, and you're outside, as opposed to being on his phone by himself and able to access it again and again (unlike the storefront snafu) until he starts to believe that sex = porn. And to be clear, I agree with Dr. Gray that kids have had play taken away from them in a really detrimental way, but unfettered internet access isn't the answer.
I think about Jerome Bruner in paper "The course of Cognitive Growth".
Below is one of my favourite passages of this paper. I think Bruner argued that culture was a form of technology the was part of human evolution. As I reflect on our current culture, technology is woven into it. Gatekeeping children from tech isn't going to support their development.
I think children learn from those around them and that includes our relationship with technology.
"This implies that the principal change in man over a long period of years—perhaps 500,000 thousand—has been alloplastic rather than autoplastic. That is to say, he has changed by linking himself with new, external implementation systems rather than by any conspicuous change in morphology —"evolution-by-prosthesis," as Weston La Barre (1954) puts it. The implement systems seem to have been of three general kinds—amplifiers of human motor capacities ranging from the cutting tool through the lever and wheel to the wide variety of modern devices; amplifiers of sensory capacities that include primitive devices such as smoke signaling and modern ones such as magnification and radar sensing, but also likely to include such "software" as those conventionalized perceptual shortcuts that can be applied to the redundant sensory environment; and finally amplifiers of human ratiocinative capacities of infinite variety ranging from language systems to myth and theory and explanation. All of these forms of amplification are in major or minor degree conventionalized and transmitted by the culture, the last of them probably the most since ratiocinative amplifiers involve symbol systems governed by rules that must, for effective use, be shared."
I believe there is a great difference between outdoor exploration and online activity. For one thing, there are two types of outdoor spaces to explore: man-made and natural spaces. Man-made spaces are potentially more dangerous and are not explored or played in the same way as natural spaces. There is poison ivy in the woods, as I well know. There are bears and sharks in nature, too. Playing around large farm animals can be dangerous too. Falling out of a tree can hurt or break bones, as well as rough physical play.
Man-made spaces have a different set of problems, such as gangs, drugs, hatred, and weapons. Most of these are social issues. The internet is man-made and has dangers in illicit content, commercialization, and addiction. Screen time is problematic for both children and adults. Playing games all night is not good for anyone. Adults make choices, and children do too, but with less cognitive development. With children, we have to consider their cognitive development, not just their birth date.
I love outdoor education. I am afraid of just letting kids "free-range" in man-made environments without some oversight and guidance. Kids running around late at night is trouble waiting to happen. In man-made environments, they encounter our social problems that even adults can not solve. I knew boys who had to change bandanas depending on whose gang territory they had to walk through on their way to and from school.
I would be interested in hearing your take on Michaeleen Doucleff's latest book, Dopamine Kids. I think she makes a very compelling argument that, from a neurological perspective, tech companies have figured out ways of harnessing human's dopamine reward systems in a way that really holds us captive. It's much more powerful than the forces at play in the physical world, and it doesn't fulfill the same needs. Many tweens and teens say they actually want their parents' help in controlling their media use, because without fully developed prefrontal cortexes its even harder for them to resist the dopamine hit they get from this technology. I love your perspective on outdoor play as something we evolved to need, but can we really say the same of social media and screens? My kids are still young, 4 and 6, but eliminating addictive tablets and streaming services from our home has been a game changer. There's just no way that my kids could be expected to self-regulate in the face of such powerful attention magnets. And I think the neuroscience backs that up.