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Patricia Zaballos's avatar

I’m a longtime fan of your work, Dr. Gray, and am so grateful for all you’re doing to bring awareness to the losses in freedom kids have been enduring over the years.

I’m guessing that the 1990 drop might be related to changes in parenting. 1990 teens were likely to be the products of homes where more mothers had returned to work. Teens of the ‘80s (I was one) and the early ‘90s are often referred to as “latchkey” kids and those parents are often now called “neglectful.” (I don’t agree with that as a blanket assessment.) However, there’s no doubt that kids in that era had much more freedom in their lives than the kids to come.

The societal pressures around parenting began to change in the late ‘90s with the rise of the parenting “expert” and that got intensified with the rise of the internet in the early 2000s. Parents were suddenly told they could not trust their intuition and they needed to listen to experts—and the experts were pushing a more intensive style of parenting. Combine that with losses of freedom in education after the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, competitiveness over college admissions which rose in the early 2000s, fears over youth safety that began in the late ‘80s and only intensified over time, the rise of for-profit youth sports and test prep and tutoring companies, etc. and parents were suddenly getting the message that childhood was basically preparation for adulthood. Youth freedoms, as you’ve long been pointing out, we’re being stripped away from all sides.

I want to point out that I don’t blame parents for this rise in “intensive parenting.” They’re being bombarded with messages that if they don’t push their kids to succeed, the kids will fail. They are also not being supported in their abilities to trust their intuition as parents.

(Can you tell I’m working on a book about this?)

All of these things happened earlier than 2010 however. Why the delay? Because it took that long for these kids to reach their teenage years. And that’s when we started seeing the effects.

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Laura Creighton's avatar

One of the things that was different between the early internet and the later one was the primitive graphics of the early internet. The early internet was largely for readers. The later internet was largely for viewers. Reading, and listening to stories stimulates your imagination. You have to imagine your fictional world in order to partake of it. Books, and early internet games relies on 'the willing suspension of disbelief'. If you didn't engage with the world, you thought 'this book is boring' or something and stopped reading it.

Things changed as 'the attention economy' became a thing. Things were no longer left to the imagination, and that aspect of play was neglected in the favour of games and activities which were hard to put down. A friend of mine, who was a child psychologist since the 1970s, sadly now deceased, and whose specialty was children who had undergone trauma -- not abuse, in particular, but more of car accidents, earthquakes, having a close relative die -- and who were having a hard time getting over it. She said that early in her career, if you had a child who had difficulty imagining things in your office, this was likely to be a symptom of depression, and you had to look around and see if you could find a root cause of the depression, which might not be the earthquake or what have you that the child was having problems with. And a great many children other had problems precisely because they were so imaginative -- they could imagine so many, many, many things that could go wrong as part of an earthquake and felt oppressed by all the things that were out of control that didn't happen as much as those that were out of control and did.

At the end of her career she was treating more children whom, she thought, had 'lack of imagination' not caused by some sort of trauma she needed to discover, but simply because they were 'normally' unimaginative. Their imaginations were strongly constrained into imagining 'what it is that the adults want me to think and do' so they could obey them more effectively, and weren't available to help them 'imagine their way out of their own problems' or 'think about ways that this could be better'. They had managed to trade obedience for creativity, and the result was not good for them as soon as 'being obedient' became impossible or unsatisfactory.

Do we have any ongoing tests of creativity with results for the time period? It's hard to know whether this is a problem with children in general or with her patients, who are by definition a self-selected set without some sort of standardised testing.

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