Very interesting hypothesis. I agree that boys' lives transformed in the 1990s and 2000s as they moved their social lives online, especially to video games. But i see two inconsistencies with the timing:
1) The period of greatest crackdown on childhood autonomy was the 1990s and 2000s. That's when the tipping point happened: 9 year olds could no longer go outside without an adult. yet that's when suicide rates drop to low points.
2) The period in which video games got truly communal and amazingly engaging was the late 2000s, as high speed internet made online multiplayer gaming much more available and better. Yet that's when boys mental health begins to decline most rapidly, with suicide rates turning back up around 2008.
Also: around 5-10% of boys develop addiction or problematic video game use. For that large minority, their lives are badly damaged. I think the evidence on the benefits of video games is quite mixed: there's evidence on both sides.
This is why Zach Rausch and I think that the move online was, ultimately, bad for boys' mental health. We think the big drop in suicide was more likely related to the huge reduction in leaded gas and lead exposure in the late 1970s and especially early 1990s. This, we think, is why boys' suicide rates closely tracks boys' murder rates from the 1960s.... until the late 2000s when they diverge.
Thank you, Jon.. It's great to see your name here! The thoughts you express here clearly require more discussion than I have provided so far. My plan is to allow further comments on this letter to accumulate and then address them all at once, yours included, either in a new D letter or in a thread attached to this one. Very briefly, however, I must say that the evidence, as I read it, does not support the contention that the greatest crackdown on childhood autonomy was the 1990s and 2000s. The change occurred gradually, beginning as early as the 1960s and has continued gradually ever since. If anything, the evidence suggests that the greatest rate of this change was in the 1980s. Of course, you are right that computer games continued to become ever more interesting and challenging after the time period I have discussed here. Although I hinted in this letter at why the digital revolution may have begun to contribute less to a culture of childhood after about 2005 (because adults became increasingly involved with it), that is clearly not the whole story. When I come to my letter on the rise in suicides over the past 10 to 15 years, I will bring in some new factors, about social changes I have not yet discussed in this series of letters.
I have also always thought that helicopter parenting really took off in the 1990s. I've talked to many people and seen many memes that affirm that the 1970s were a golden era for free range childhood. I don't doubt that gradual change got underway in the 1950s, but compared to today, that time was a paradise for children's independence! That said, I think it's very astute to divine that young people, especially boys, got a big boost in confidence and a sense of mastery from a technology that they were frequently asked to teach to adults. Also, I think it was one of your insights, Peter, that kids today often escape to their screens to carve out some time away from adults; makes so much sense! This would seem to indicate that the more adults demonize social media, the more attractive it becomes to young people who desperately need time away from needy yet controlling adults.
Megan, thanks for these thoughts. You are certainly correct that the 1970s seemed like a "golden era" for free range childhood compared to subsequent decades. However, if you read the histories of childhood in America (such as Chudacoff's) or if you had lived in the earlier decades (as I did) you would see that kids in the '50s and '60s had more freedom, more independent responsibilities, and greater independence from adults than did kids in the 1970s. I could cite many sources on this. Chudacoff, with evidence, describes the first half of the 20th century as the "golden age" of children's free play and shows how social changes beginning as early as 1955, including the introduction of television and greater involvement of adults in kids' activities, reduced children's outdoor free time and cut into the culture of childhood that had prevailed earlier. The change over time from 1950 to 1990 was gradual, though there was an acceleration of it in the 1980s, which may be why the 1970s stand out in many people's minds as a time of freedom for kids.
Certainly anyone who grew up in the 1960s and 70s would see the stark contrast between the micromanagement kids endure today and the 1970s, and this might make it hard to see the subtle changes that were gathering earlier. I can be guilty of what so many defenders of conventional schooling are guilty of: taking what feels intuitively true and assuming it's objective truth, or someone else's truth. Thanks for the response. I will have to read Chudacoff. I often draw on your work and insights to argue that "the problem with kids today" is not social media but the grief and deep boredom that resulted from the loss of autonomy and adequate amounts of play time. Getting the timeline right matters a great deal to me, so thank you.
I’m not Jon, nor can I point you to relevant literature (maybe some else can?), but I suspect it has something to do with an underlying genetic predisposition to “addiction” pathways in the brains neurochemical circuits... along with environmental reinforcers and feedback, of course!
I found this very interesting to read! It actually brought me back to a sweet memory of when my family got our first Atari console in the early 80's and laughing along with my sisters every time we died during Space Invaders. You state that at the time, video games gave kids something to talk about as well as a feeling of autonomy and competence. Back then, kids were still communicating face to face and creating social connections in person because there were no handheld computers. As an SLP that supports students social skill development, I have always been interested in the topic of how the decline in free play has impacted social skill development, especially in today's day and age. This is why I enjoy your substack! I also noticed around this time (early 2000's) that the academic push was no longer about what was developmentally appropriate, especially in the younger grades. For example, kindergarten became more about reading and writing and less about play (all those block areas and dramatic play areas were replaced with individual computer stations) . I feel as though the non-developmentally appropriate academic demands (especially in preK to early elementary) along with the increased use of technology in schools contribute to all of this as well. I look forward to reading more of your posts as well as Jonathan Haidt's research and hope I can do my part to support play and social connections for the students that I work with!
Peter - I'm late in responding to this since you've already posted the next letter in the series, but there's a potentially significant factor but I feel like hasn't been considered adequately. Wouldn't there be a compelling narrative that the overall worldview in the 1990s was objectively more positive than it had been in the preceding decades? The cold war dissipated with notable cultural moments such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, democracy seemed to be on the rise across the globe, etc.
I agree with your overall assessment that these trends are complex with multiple contributing factors, but this is one that I feel you may be underestimating.
I think that tech is too frequently written off as devil or saviour when in truth it has always been both. As you say, in the early days of the massive lift off we saw, children and teens probably felt very empowered by having ‘the mantle of the expert’. It was a power.
It was also something with definite time allotted to it hence the term ‘screen time’ where as now due to smart phones, obviously it is a constant thread running through daily life that kids struggle to turn off from, copying an adult culture in which emails are sent and many expected to be on call 24/7.
I suspect the near constant intrusion of technology & information at all times is the big variable that’s changed in the last decade or so. It’s too much information over which we have no personal agency, and often “ramps up” our nervous system (flight v. fight response), IMHO. I find the framework of “evolutionary mismatch” really helpful here - in essence, our physical bodies & brains are not adapted to all the stimuli they are bombard with, and are easily overwhelmed. (Just imagine if this level of “current” data had been available worldwide during WWII...)
This is why I feel apathy becomes the necessary and best available ‘toolkit’ if you like, to override such feelings of bombardment. For most of us, not just kids.
And what about girls? Gamers are overwhelmingly guys. This is a study about boys.... not children. Boys here are the only ppl worth studying? Boys who game turn into men who game and all are equally boring and stunted. In the Free Range days-- ALL the kids would get together and play. Now, the guys think they're doing community service by gaming but are just as insular and asinine as if they never left the tree fort. "Restored the culture of childhood" Please, give me a fucking break. When the helicopter parents lay off and let the neighborhood play kick the can until dark then you can talk about how childhood was restored. Until then-- a dude in his room alone with headphones on drinking red bull playing Call of Duty for ten hours and taking a break every two hours to jerk off isn't restoring anything.
Interesting hypothesis. Presumably if video games did reduce the rate of suicide, we would see some evidence by looking at socioeconomic trends in suicide data. Consoles and computers were fairly cost-prohibitive in the early days, so I'm imagining that we would see a decline in suicide rates beginning with more affluent teens. Do you think there's a way to dig into that further?
This piece really resonated with me as someone who grew up in a household of free play in which consoles played a significant role. I had so much fun with my siblings and friends, often ten or more kids crowding round a four-player game. We invented ways to take turns fairly, as well as ways to handicap the older players (who were usually better). We messed with the game mechanics on purpose just to see if it had a funny outcome. Even in a one-player game, other kids would watch from the side-lines and help navigate the maps and solve puzzles.
It got me thinking that I had the same experience of the early internet between 2000-2011. Things like MSN, Neopets, and Myspace were online spaces where kids could connect with our friends away from adult interference. Yes, our desktop computers were in the family room, but we all became masters at switching to the Google page when we heard a parent approaching. Perhaps the drop in teen's mental health from c. 2012 onwards reflects not the point at which social media and phones became too prevalent in childhood (as Haidt argues), but the point at which *adults* began joining social media in droves, robbing teenagers of their final private space. Significantly, journalists began mining previously youth-only online spaces for click-bait culture war content and everything kids did online became fair-game for public debate, criticism, and analysis by adults- both adults they knew and complete strangers.
This resonates with my experience. Gaming was communal and I would disagree with Jon and say gaming peaked early 2000s when high-speed home internet was not readily available (at least for low-income or working class families).
This meant a lot of "split-screen" gaming on the GameCube, LAN parties (where Internet was not needed since it was a local server), or the evenings hanging at the public cyber café.
By the late 2000's, nobody had a dial-up connection anymore and everyone had fast home internet for gaming. That's when multi-player gaming begin to get toxic. The younger kids talked about having gaming friends that they had never met IRL before. That was wild and unheard of. Gaming friends were people you met in person. A lot of friends of friends who became part of the "tribe".
To me, the stats correlate to a time when gaming involved a "third space" by necessity. That might be the home of one of the participants which is transformed when his buddies come over with Cheetos and Mountain Dew
I’m surprised you don’t mention the explosion of youth sports in the 1990s which created a highly structured, ritualized forum to craft friendships? The social psychology of suicide has a large literature in which it is the lack of connection and hopelessness that ensues from it driving these tragedies. It is not a psychological issue at all. Play works because it ritualized reciprocal social relationships..at its best. At its worst, unstructured play simply teaches a noncommittal approach to social life.
I found this intriguing, Peter. I didn't engage with video games as a kid beyond a passing fancy with one or two Game Boy games, but my brothers did. My youngest brother especially loved to play not to play alone but precisely because it was a highly social activity. Perhaps part of his enthusiasm also stemmed from the fact that I wasn't into video games and my other brother had largely lost interest by the time his picked up. The games were a space he could carve out as his own and then shine without us casting shadows.
I should have realized!! My apologies :). I’m clearly just learning about it, and have focused on the curriculum parts of the website. I really love what you all are doing! Thanks for your work.
Cool hypothesis. I've always found these discussions interesting, maybe because I had a pretty free-range childhood, and I find the increasing restrictions many children face very concerning. Looking forward to reading more.
So disappointing. You could just as easily make that argument for rap music or Terry Pratchett Books or Star Trek episodes of anything else that came out in the 90s, grunge and nu metal, Friends, Fraiser, oh my goodness just pick anything that came out in those years and you can cobble together a clapped out biased argument about it. I'm so extremely disappointed - you're so wedded to this single-minded obsession that you're losing the science and publishing essentially biased guesses with no rigorous underpinnings. It feels like when I found out Conan-Doyle was an Occultist, but at least he was never a hero to me.
Bex, I'm sorry you are disappointed. Perhaps if you followed up on all the references i give and looked at the evidence you would be less inclined to think this is biased.
Hi Peter,
Very interesting hypothesis. I agree that boys' lives transformed in the 1990s and 2000s as they moved their social lives online, especially to video games. But i see two inconsistencies with the timing:
1) The period of greatest crackdown on childhood autonomy was the 1990s and 2000s. That's when the tipping point happened: 9 year olds could no longer go outside without an adult. yet that's when suicide rates drop to low points.
2) The period in which video games got truly communal and amazingly engaging was the late 2000s, as high speed internet made online multiplayer gaming much more available and better. Yet that's when boys mental health begins to decline most rapidly, with suicide rates turning back up around 2008.
Also: around 5-10% of boys develop addiction or problematic video game use. For that large minority, their lives are badly damaged. I think the evidence on the benefits of video games is quite mixed: there's evidence on both sides.
This is why Zach Rausch and I think that the move online was, ultimately, bad for boys' mental health. We think the big drop in suicide was more likely related to the huge reduction in leaded gas and lead exposure in the late 1970s and especially early 1990s. This, we think, is why boys' suicide rates closely tracks boys' murder rates from the 1960s.... until the late 2000s when they diverge.
We should talk.
Thank you, Jon.. It's great to see your name here! The thoughts you express here clearly require more discussion than I have provided so far. My plan is to allow further comments on this letter to accumulate and then address them all at once, yours included, either in a new D letter or in a thread attached to this one. Very briefly, however, I must say that the evidence, as I read it, does not support the contention that the greatest crackdown on childhood autonomy was the 1990s and 2000s. The change occurred gradually, beginning as early as the 1960s and has continued gradually ever since. If anything, the evidence suggests that the greatest rate of this change was in the 1980s. Of course, you are right that computer games continued to become ever more interesting and challenging after the time period I have discussed here. Although I hinted in this letter at why the digital revolution may have begun to contribute less to a culture of childhood after about 2005 (because adults became increasingly involved with it), that is clearly not the whole story. When I come to my letter on the rise in suicides over the past 10 to 15 years, I will bring in some new factors, about social changes I have not yet discussed in this series of letters.
I have also always thought that helicopter parenting really took off in the 1990s. I've talked to many people and seen many memes that affirm that the 1970s were a golden era for free range childhood. I don't doubt that gradual change got underway in the 1950s, but compared to today, that time was a paradise for children's independence! That said, I think it's very astute to divine that young people, especially boys, got a big boost in confidence and a sense of mastery from a technology that they were frequently asked to teach to adults. Also, I think it was one of your insights, Peter, that kids today often escape to their screens to carve out some time away from adults; makes so much sense! This would seem to indicate that the more adults demonize social media, the more attractive it becomes to young people who desperately need time away from needy yet controlling adults.
Megan, thanks for these thoughts. You are certainly correct that the 1970s seemed like a "golden era" for free range childhood compared to subsequent decades. However, if you read the histories of childhood in America (such as Chudacoff's) or if you had lived in the earlier decades (as I did) you would see that kids in the '50s and '60s had more freedom, more independent responsibilities, and greater independence from adults than did kids in the 1970s. I could cite many sources on this. Chudacoff, with evidence, describes the first half of the 20th century as the "golden age" of children's free play and shows how social changes beginning as early as 1955, including the introduction of television and greater involvement of adults in kids' activities, reduced children's outdoor free time and cut into the culture of childhood that had prevailed earlier. The change over time from 1950 to 1990 was gradual, though there was an acceleration of it in the 1980s, which may be why the 1970s stand out in many people's minds as a time of freedom for kids.
Certainly anyone who grew up in the 1960s and 70s would see the stark contrast between the micromanagement kids endure today and the 1970s, and this might make it hard to see the subtle changes that were gathering earlier. I can be guilty of what so many defenders of conventional schooling are guilty of: taking what feels intuitively true and assuming it's objective truth, or someone else's truth. Thanks for the response. I will have to read Chudacoff. I often draw on your work and insights to argue that "the problem with kids today" is not social media but the grief and deep boredom that resulted from the loss of autonomy and adequate amounts of play time. Getting the timeline right matters a great deal to me, so thank you.
Hi Jon,
I wonder, do you have an explanation for why playing video games becomes problematic for some kids and not others ?
I’m not Jon, nor can I point you to relevant literature (maybe some else can?), but I suspect it has something to do with an underlying genetic predisposition to “addiction” pathways in the brains neurochemical circuits... along with environmental reinforcers and feedback, of course!
I found this very interesting to read! It actually brought me back to a sweet memory of when my family got our first Atari console in the early 80's and laughing along with my sisters every time we died during Space Invaders. You state that at the time, video games gave kids something to talk about as well as a feeling of autonomy and competence. Back then, kids were still communicating face to face and creating social connections in person because there were no handheld computers. As an SLP that supports students social skill development, I have always been interested in the topic of how the decline in free play has impacted social skill development, especially in today's day and age. This is why I enjoy your substack! I also noticed around this time (early 2000's) that the academic push was no longer about what was developmentally appropriate, especially in the younger grades. For example, kindergarten became more about reading and writing and less about play (all those block areas and dramatic play areas were replaced with individual computer stations) . I feel as though the non-developmentally appropriate academic demands (especially in preK to early elementary) along with the increased use of technology in schools contribute to all of this as well. I look forward to reading more of your posts as well as Jonathan Haidt's research and hope I can do my part to support play and social connections for the students that I work with!
Peter - I'm late in responding to this since you've already posted the next letter in the series, but there's a potentially significant factor but I feel like hasn't been considered adequately. Wouldn't there be a compelling narrative that the overall worldview in the 1990s was objectively more positive than it had been in the preceding decades? The cold war dissipated with notable cultural moments such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, democracy seemed to be on the rise across the globe, etc.
I agree with your overall assessment that these trends are complex with multiple contributing factors, but this is one that I feel you may be underestimating.
Thank you for your post.
I think that tech is too frequently written off as devil or saviour when in truth it has always been both. As you say, in the early days of the massive lift off we saw, children and teens probably felt very empowered by having ‘the mantle of the expert’. It was a power.
It was also something with definite time allotted to it hence the term ‘screen time’ where as now due to smart phones, obviously it is a constant thread running through daily life that kids struggle to turn off from, copying an adult culture in which emails are sent and many expected to be on call 24/7.
I suspect the near constant intrusion of technology & information at all times is the big variable that’s changed in the last decade or so. It’s too much information over which we have no personal agency, and often “ramps up” our nervous system (flight v. fight response), IMHO. I find the framework of “evolutionary mismatch” really helpful here - in essence, our physical bodies & brains are not adapted to all the stimuli they are bombard with, and are easily overwhelmed. (Just imagine if this level of “current” data had been available worldwide during WWII...)
This is why I feel apathy becomes the necessary and best available ‘toolkit’ if you like, to override such feelings of bombardment. For most of us, not just kids.
Agreed!!
And what about girls? Gamers are overwhelmingly guys. This is a study about boys.... not children. Boys here are the only ppl worth studying? Boys who game turn into men who game and all are equally boring and stunted. In the Free Range days-- ALL the kids would get together and play. Now, the guys think they're doing community service by gaming but are just as insular and asinine as if they never left the tree fort. "Restored the culture of childhood" Please, give me a fucking break. When the helicopter parents lay off and let the neighborhood play kick the can until dark then you can talk about how childhood was restored. Until then-- a dude in his room alone with headphones on drinking red bull playing Call of Duty for ten hours and taking a break every two hours to jerk off isn't restoring anything.
Interesting hypothesis. Presumably if video games did reduce the rate of suicide, we would see some evidence by looking at socioeconomic trends in suicide data. Consoles and computers were fairly cost-prohibitive in the early days, so I'm imagining that we would see a decline in suicide rates beginning with more affluent teens. Do you think there's a way to dig into that further?
This piece really resonated with me as someone who grew up in a household of free play in which consoles played a significant role. I had so much fun with my siblings and friends, often ten or more kids crowding round a four-player game. We invented ways to take turns fairly, as well as ways to handicap the older players (who were usually better). We messed with the game mechanics on purpose just to see if it had a funny outcome. Even in a one-player game, other kids would watch from the side-lines and help navigate the maps and solve puzzles.
It got me thinking that I had the same experience of the early internet between 2000-2011. Things like MSN, Neopets, and Myspace were online spaces where kids could connect with our friends away from adult interference. Yes, our desktop computers were in the family room, but we all became masters at switching to the Google page when we heard a parent approaching. Perhaps the drop in teen's mental health from c. 2012 onwards reflects not the point at which social media and phones became too prevalent in childhood (as Haidt argues), but the point at which *adults* began joining social media in droves, robbing teenagers of their final private space. Significantly, journalists began mining previously youth-only online spaces for click-bait culture war content and everything kids did online became fair-game for public debate, criticism, and analysis by adults- both adults they knew and complete strangers.
This resonates with my experience. Gaming was communal and I would disagree with Jon and say gaming peaked early 2000s when high-speed home internet was not readily available (at least for low-income or working class families).
This meant a lot of "split-screen" gaming on the GameCube, LAN parties (where Internet was not needed since it was a local server), or the evenings hanging at the public cyber café.
By the late 2000's, nobody had a dial-up connection anymore and everyone had fast home internet for gaming. That's when multi-player gaming begin to get toxic. The younger kids talked about having gaming friends that they had never met IRL before. That was wild and unheard of. Gaming friends were people you met in person. A lot of friends of friends who became part of the "tribe".
To me, the stats correlate to a time when gaming involved a "third space" by necessity. That might be the home of one of the participants which is transformed when his buddies come over with Cheetos and Mountain Dew
I’m surprised you don’t mention the explosion of youth sports in the 1990s which created a highly structured, ritualized forum to craft friendships? The social psychology of suicide has a large literature in which it is the lack of connection and hopelessness that ensues from it driving these tragedies. It is not a psychological issue at all. Play works because it ritualized reciprocal social relationships..at its best. At its worst, unstructured play simply teaches a noncommittal approach to social life.
I found this intriguing, Peter. I didn't engage with video games as a kid beyond a passing fancy with one or two Game Boy games, but my brothers did. My youngest brother especially loved to play not to play alone but precisely because it was a highly social activity. Perhaps part of his enthusiasm also stemmed from the fact that I wasn't into video games and my other brother had largely lost interest by the time his picked up. The games were a space he could carve out as his own and then shine without us casting shadows.
Peter, I hope you are familiar with:
letgrow.org
(Spearheaded by Camilo Ortiz PhD out of LIU-Post and Lenore Skenazy)
As a child clinical person (& parent!), I would much rather see this approach in schools than much of the packaged “SEL” that’s out there these days!
Love the title of your blog! Play is essential.
I was one of the founders of Let Grow and am on the board of directors.
I should have realized!! My apologies :). I’m clearly just learning about it, and have focused on the curriculum parts of the website. I really love what you all are doing! Thanks for your work.
I'm delighted that you have found Let Grow.
Cool hypothesis. I've always found these discussions interesting, maybe because I had a pretty free-range childhood, and I find the increasing restrictions many children face very concerning. Looking forward to reading more.
So disappointing. You could just as easily make that argument for rap music or Terry Pratchett Books or Star Trek episodes of anything else that came out in the 90s, grunge and nu metal, Friends, Fraiser, oh my goodness just pick anything that came out in those years and you can cobble together a clapped out biased argument about it. I'm so extremely disappointed - you're so wedded to this single-minded obsession that you're losing the science and publishing essentially biased guesses with no rigorous underpinnings. It feels like when I found out Conan-Doyle was an Occultist, but at least he was never a hero to me.
Bex, I'm sorry you are disappointed. Perhaps if you followed up on all the references i give and looked at the evidence you would be less inclined to think this is biased.
Why did the rates rebound after 2005?
That, as I said in this letter, is a to be discussed in a future letter soon. Keep tuned! I'm tackling changes in the curve one part at a time.
Well-said
I discussed that gap extensively in Letter D1.