#52. Children’s Rights and Adults’ Wrongs

Over recent decades we have increasingly deprived kids of basic human rights.

SamDuluth/Wikimedia Commons

Dear friends,

I stole the title for this letter from an article with this same title by Meyer Hillman of the Policy Studies Institute, London. The UK is very similar to the US regarding the decline over decades in children’s freedoms. The right that Hillman focused on most explicitly is the right to play, explore, or even run family errands outside the home without adult interference. He wrote:

“First and foremost, a steady, albeit unwitting erosion of their rights to a safe and clean environment beyond the boundaries of their home, needs to be highlighted. Compared with their parents and even more so their grandparents when they were children, their lives are now much more circumscribed. Just consider how rare it is nowadays to see children socialising in a relaxed way in the streets or playing football, or just doing shopping for the family.”

I’m going to continue here with three rights that have been rather thoroughly taken away from kids in the U.S. over the period of my time on the planet. I’ll start with the one Hillman emphasizes.

The Right to Travel Freely in Public Spaces

As I have emphasized in previous letters, there has been a continuous, gradual, but over time huge decline in children’s freedom to leave their homes to play, explore, work, run errands, or do anything else without an adult guard. People sometimes justify this by saying that public dangers have become much greater. But crime is down, not up, and “stranger danger” has always been much more myth than reality.

The only realistic danger that has increased derives from the increase in traffic and continuous trend of cities, towns, and the whole nation to design for traffic and make it ever harder to walk or cycle safely. That is an adult wrong. We are designing for adults in cars and trucks and discounting children on foot or bicycle—the two primary ways children have traditionally gotten around. Children lack political and economic power; they aren’t allowed to vote. So, it’s easy to ignore their needs.

Quite a few children live in my Massachusetts suburban neighborhood, but I never see them outdoors except when they are standing at the end of their driveway waiting for the school bus, carefully guarded by a parent. I must admit that even I would be reluctant to allow a young child to walk or bike to school or anywhere in my neighborhood, as the cars travel well above the already-too-high speed limit on a curvy road with no sidewalks. Not only are there no sidewalks, but lush crops of poison ivy grow right up to the blacktop over long stretches of this road. I suppose the town figures nobody walks anyway, so why invest in sidewalks or even clear the poison ivy off the road edges.  That kind of thinking, of course, makes “nobody walks” a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The Right to Adequate Time for Leisure

By leisure I mean time to do your own thing, including what looks like nothing if you so choose. Leisure time is time not devoted to labor or what adults call “education” or what adults believe is good for you in the long term. Put differently, for children leisure means time to play, explore, or just hang out in their own ways. Even from the perspective of what is good for children in the long run, let alone from the standpoint of social justice, children need much more leisure time than we are affording them. As I have shown in much of my academic and non-academic writings (e.g. here and here), Mother Nature has endowed children with instincts to play, explore, and contemplate—during their free time—in ways that are far more educationally valuable than what we do to them in school.

In the early 20^th century, many states and ultimately the federal government passed laws making long hours of child labor illegal. Part of the motivation for that came from a growing understanding by progressive thinkers that children need ample time to play and explore in the ways that have always been natural to children. But, as the historian Howard Chudacoff documented in his book on the history of children’s play in America, beginning in the mid 20^th century adults began in various ways to take that leisure time away. As another author (Mukherjee, 2024) has put it, adults over time “colonized” the culture of childhood by forcing into it more and more of what the adults thought was correct and ignoring or even debasing children’s preferences. This is an adult wrong.

Because of child labor laws, children today don’t labor long hours for wages, but now they labor long hours at what we call “education.” Over time since the 1950s we have increased the length of the school year, removed most of what play and free time used to occur at school, and greatly increased the amount of homework, especially for little kids. Many children today spend far more time laboring at rather meaningless schoolwork than their parents spend earning a living. School is an almost totally sedentary job ill befitting the active nature of kids. Moreover, it is a micromanaged, incredibly boring job that no adult who had a choice would be willing to take. In most schools, basically all the human rights we think of as “inalienable” are taken away from kids—the rights of free assembly, free movement, free speech, due process if accused of misbehavior, and most certainly the right to choose your own path to happiness.

The Right to Privacy

Children, like all of us, need some privacy, especially privacy from those who want to control us and don’t trust us to make our own decisions. Teenagers especially need privacy from adults, as they try out new ways of being, aimed toward adulthood, including ways of being intimate, that none of us would have wanted our parents to know about when we were teens.

Children and teens used to gain privacy from parents and other interfering adults just by going outdoors. They could be alone or with friends away from the sight and hearing of parents. They could choose where to go without having to justify it to non-trusting adults. That opportunity waned as the option to go outside without an adult guard waned, and then it waned even further when adults discovered they could use GPS technology to track their kids’ every move. Recently I asked the high-school aged daughter of a friend of mine if some of her friends are tracked in this way by their parents. She said most of them are (but fortunately not her). She went on to say that she even had friends in college who are still tracked by their parents! All this snooping is clearly an adult wrong.

How did you feel when you first found out that your mother was reading your diary? (A hypothetical question; I hope it never happened.)

Almost the only way kids can communicate with one another away from adult ears now is with their smartphones.  And now some people want to take those away from kids!

Further Thoughts

Another right kids should have, of course, is the right to good food, decent shelter, a non-toxic environment, and good medical care. How long has it been since we had a government seriously committed to reducing poverty?  Many of the very people who want to deprive women of the right to decide when to have or not have children oppose every measure aimed at helping bring those children out of poverty. They call such measures “socialism” or most ridiculously “communism,” and thereby demonize the measures in the eyes of many who know nothing about these terms except that they are “bad.”  We are by some measures the richest country in the world, and we should be ashamed of our failure to share some of that wealth with so many needy families.

This Substack series is, in part, a forum for thoughtful discussion. I greatly value readers’ contributions, even when they disagree with me, and sometimes especially when they do. You will notice in reading comments on previous letters that everyone here is polite. Your questions and thoughts will contribute to the value of this letter for me and other readers. Perhaps you would like to add to my short list here of kids’ rights and adults’ wrongs, or elaborate further on one or another of them.

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With respect and best wishes,

Peter