I think that the baby boom mitigated some of these trends. Parents with 4 or more children cannot closely supervise and schedule each one, even if they want to.
This is a significant factor. I was the first of five children born between 1955 and 1962. My thoroughly devoted parents could not have fussed over us regarding supervised play, including driving us around to various activities - not that there were many such pursuits like karate, horse riding or coached team sports in the 1960s compared to the 1980s onwards.
There is a multiplier affect in this regard with multiple families children nearby, compared to a lower birth rate and so a sparser distribution of approximately similar aged children. Also, now, with more specialised choices of schools, in part because the local public school might be overly woke and/or under-resourced, compared to paid-for private schools, children are transported to schools by car, which are further away, so their school-mates are geographically much more thinly distributed in the local, walkable, area.
As a mom of 4 in 2023, I have to agree! I’m stretched too thin if I have to watch their every move. They usually go out to play with friends together and I’ve encouraged them to look out for one another. I have triplets who will be 7 soon & their 4.5 year old brother. Even the little brother keeps up with the bigs. But when they go out as a pack, I’m less concerned anyway … safety in numbers, I guess.
Sounds like you are doing very well. You also, as a mum in 2023, have to take account of and be influenced by the safetyist peer and cultural pressure of the times. I (like the author of this very interesting article) am a child of the 50s. We played in the streets (where the traffic was maybe 10% of what it is now). At age 16 my friends and I set ourselves loose on long overnight hitch-hiking 'safaris' exploring the country (England) - and all this despite the fact that my mother was worry-on-a-stick. How times change....and how, to every upside there is always a downside.
Unfortunately I think we have a lot of Oedipus going on, and not from the child’s perspective, but from the mother and father. The devouring witch from Hansel and Gretel, “come and eat treats and you will be young forever.” Parents, mothers especially, infantilize their precious offspring to the point of suffocation. I see parents parasitizing the youth of their children. Mothers obsessing over the beauty of their daughters, and mothers confusing boys by telling them they are vulnerable and fragile. Youth will always be venerated because it is inherently associated with fertility and vigor. As parents delay child bearing farther and farther (they are older and older at their first child) I think this youthful vampirism strengthens. When a man is losing his strength and vigor it is natural to obsess over the football prowess over his teenage son. When a women is losing her attractiveness to the sands of time it is only natural for her to live vicariously through the beauty and attention of her daughter. Parents must realize that rearing children isn’t about themselves, it is about creating the environment for normal human development. Unfortunately, as Peter points out, we increasingly live in a world where the environment for normal human development is stymied by the “gifts” of the modern world, television, the internet, the automobile, birth control pill. Children need freedom and scratches and the ability to fail and the ability to succeed. They need friends and neighbors and adult relatives and adult role models and parents and grandparents. In short, it takes a village, because if it is only mom, or only mom and dad, then all the baggage that comes from mom and dad gets put on the kids because they know nothing else. Parents are told that the world will consume their children if they don’t keep them close, but in this protection the children are consumed by the suffocation of parents. Every successful parent fails, because they cannot control their children, but must let them go.
Good description. One wonders how the parents got like this.
Philosophically, this can be seen as the consequences of not accepting death and decay as part of life. Tolkien wrote in his letters how both men and elves sought power in an effort to deny death. Living vicariously through one's children, in effect treating them as gholas of oneself (Dune) would seem to be another example of this.
It is probably harder to accept death of course when one has never truly lived, as an individual making ones own choices and creating one's own life.
I think the answer to how parents, and adults in general, got like this lies in changing demographics (fewer kids, more time for each one), changes in where we derive meaning in life (less derived from work when corporations replaced mutual benefit with greed, which meant more people getting their meaning in life from parenting), and the sheer number of jobs generated by seeing kids as fragile morons who are learning “disabled.” A huge impetus for the bloated school calendar kids now endure must surely be the jobs mill the school system has become. Add to that after-school care programs, summer camp, daycare, and on and on. Distrusting children is good for adults; what’s good for children is irrelevant. Just as kids were discovered to be worth billions in toy sales and then fast food sales, so too have they been discovered to be a cash cow for the millions of professional child minders we have in this country. It’s no different.
Brining out the Tolkien! I love it:) the inability to accept our own finite part of this eternal world is the definition of the existential angst of our era. Very appropriate. I also was thinking about the role the “gifts” of the modern world play in increasing adult obsessiveness over youth. Mass media, sexual liberation and the dissolution of the nuclear family mean that each atomized adult is more and more a consumer and less and less a human (or mother or father, or brother or mentor or apprentice). We are defined less and less by the value we add to intimate relations with real humans and more and more defined by our value on the market. Whether this is the job market, the tinder market, whatever it is, because of our connectedness beyond that which is tangible and physical we have transmogrified into these cyborgs which care more about this much more universal, rather than local, status. I think this process of selling things to people and people selling themselves brings out the worst most base instincts in us and the scramble for youth (particularly among women because of the limiting biological window of fertility) increases. It is so sad for me to see so many 40-50 year old women not being able to find their value beyond the gaze of male attention, and yet wanting it so badly. All the Botox and surgery and make up is over the top. We need to stop seeing ourselves as commodities on a market and have our emotions tied to our relative value to others on said market and strive to find our value in intimate relationships. If we do this maybe we have nothing to fear in death. And maybe our children have a fighting chance.
I completely agree about the profound changes in life experience of children over the decades, including the hypothesis that video/computer games for boys gave them a pursuit in which their skills and actions mattered, albeit in an isolated aspect of life. I think this is especially true with Internet connected games where teams play against other teams.
I am a 1955 model, born in Wantage, England, 90km west of London. Television played very little role in my life before we left in 1961 for Australia. I remember the Flower pot men. Radio had no impact. I was obsessed with "My old man's a dustman" and the 7" record was heavily worn from use.
By 4 or 5 I regularly wandered down the street to a park with a brook, sometimes on my own (my brothers were all younger) and other times with local children of the same and older ages. I would play in the brook and once got my welly boots stuck in the quicksand there, where I left them behind. There was no kindergarten. I did about a year of school there. At one stage I took myself off without asking my parents to take a girl from the local shop to the fair, which was 260 metres from home, across a junction where there are now traffic lights. This was outside normal arrangements and my parents came and found me, but not before I took her for a ride on one of those big swinging boats. I still remember my plastic purse and the sixpence.
I had a small bike - no gears, but chain drive, front and back brakes. My brother and I used to ride all around local streets with these. Once I came off and had sticky plaster over half a dozen or more scrapes all over my body. Helmets are a 1980s creation, I recall. I grew up with an extensive Meccano set. My father borrowed parts of it for a physics experiment at Harwell. Lego came much later and I always thought it was a big step down from Meccano, which could be used to build robust, potentially useful, mechanisms.
Shortly after arriving in Australia, I would have just turned 6. I modified a smaller firecracker into a skycrocket, with a grass stick and some sticky tape. It shot up into the blue sky and I never saw it come down. I did this in a local quarry, a few blocks from where we lived, in Newport, a Melbourne suburb.
In Mont Albert, with bigger pushbikes, we rode far from home - 2 to 5 km, to creeks and the like, from Mont Albert to Box Hill shopping centre. Look up Doncaster Shopping Town now. Then this was in a dirt-road crossroads - that site had an apple cool store on it.
I recall being about 7 and buying fireworks from the local milk-bar (corner shop). Penny bungers were the workhorses for blowing up clay dams in the gutter, launching baked bean cans into the air and the like. However, I did buy a few tuppenny bungers. Placed on the ground with a galvanised steel rubbish bin face down over it, these would throw the bin up about six feet. We roamed around doing this in the afternoon, with no adult supervision. Now all I have are halfpenny bungers, which are tame by comparison - and I wouldn't let any off except at New Year's Eve when everyone else does, for fear of alarming the neighbours and having the local police arrive with sirens wailing.
I was experimenting with valve radios (350 volt DC power supply) by age 13, and direct 240 volt mains powered circuits not long afterwards. There were no earth leakage circuit breakers - I could easily have electrocuted myself.
In Mont Albert we had a magnificent oak tree in the back yard. We climbed up the trunk and up and down branches. We had a dual rope swing with a seat at the end of each rope. The two would become twisted and the two children would orbit each other with our centre of gravity also in another orbit, with our relative orbit getting smaller and faster as the ropes twisted more. Around 1966 we hosted the first of several Aboriginal children from Cherbourg in Queensland, as part of the Harold BlairScheme. Within minutes we learned to circumnavigate the tree from branch to branch, and slide down outer branches to the ground. There were many acorn fights. The only injury was one friend of my brother who broke his arm falling from our tree. At the local North Balwyn Baths, we used to do various splash inducing dives into the water, for the admiration of onlookers, not least girls. My limit was the 7 metre platform. My brother Gerald would do hand-stands or running back flips from the 10 metre platform. He once broke his arm doing such things.
We walked to primary school, which was in the same street, and came home for lunch.
Walking and riding with other children to areas which were not parks - creek areas which were wastelands, but now freeways - was a crucial part of how we grew up. I had a paper round for a while. When I was about 14 my father found me a job in a big factory - Silcraft - with 200 tonne presses, electroplating and all sorts of manufacturing processes. I learned a bit about arc welding and we did useful work, including one job which adults couldn't do - epoxy (and maybe lead) painting the inside of an air compressor storage tank. The "man-hole" was too small for adults. There was an adult supervising, sometimes. We had a crude air supply from an air compressor - some kind of mask. People today would be horrified, with reason. The benefit was my work-mate and I - the same age - had to think and act carefully so we didn't get stuck or run out of air.
I am looking forward to further accounts of play and (mis)adventure from decades past!
I used to get my pants leg stuck in my bicycle chain pretty frequently.
To the point of kids and freedom: one year my mother sewed me a clown costume for trick-or-treating. For whatever reason I didn't have anyone to trick or treat with that year. Perhaps the other kids had outgrown it or my closer friends had moved away. But that didn't have anything to do with whether I would go! Halloween and to a lesser extent Easter meant candy in a way that is hard to appreciate now perhaps, just as Christmas meant presents i.e. *there weren't any presents the rest of the year*.
I thus decided to bike so as to cover more ground. I set off with my plastic pumpkin candy bucket.
Soon my voluminous clown pants were all tangeld up in the chain. I remember dragging my bike many blocks home in the dark, clutching my bucket with the other hand.
I remember another time, walking home from my friend Katie's house after a heavy rain. The bayou had risen up. Plastic shoes were the fashion. I remember my plastic shoe spinning away in a current too fast for me to get it.
The nice thing about an outdoor childhood even in the diminished environment that was a housing development in the pines (it was indeed woodsy then, it is manicured now) is that my very elderly parents still live there, so I can go for walks when I visit and it all feels very familiar; I am 45 years back.
One really important aspect of play at the primary school I attended in 1963 to 1966 - Mont Albert State School (previously "Central School", which went to form 2 = year 8) was that in about 1964 they constructed an extensive "monkey bars" play area. A bluestone (Victorian basalt) block wall was constructed, about 45 x 65 feet (15 x 20 metres) on the somewhat sloping site so it could be entered from the higher side. This enclosed rubble, gravel and then sand, so there was a deep layer of sand under all the steel structures. I don't recall anyone digging to the bottom of the sand. It must have been over a foot deep.
There was a great variety of swings, bars etc. Not as wild as the first photo at: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/dangerous-playgrounds-1900s, but I have never seen a better set of monkey bars since. Most children used these with great enthusiasm. Some years later it was dismantled, no-doubt due to safety concerns.
A typical maneuver was The Flip. Hang upside down by your knees (I never did this), swing and let go, to land on your feet. This required bars which I recall were about 7 foot high (2 metres plus). This is plenty high enough to break your neck if you fell straight down. I don't recall any injuries, though I guess there must have been a few over the years.
The school https://www.google.com/maps/@-37.8119014,145.103335,236m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu was established in 1903 with extensive grounds, including a full-size oval. The green paved area at the south-west was a dust bowl with a little grass and very large pine trees along Barloa Rd. There was a hall in the south, the original solid brick double-storey central building, and timber and alumiunium 1950s / 1960s classrooms on the east side. The playground was in a big gap between the northern-most and southern-most of these.
The massive red gable roof building on Trent St now covers the playground site. The triangular and rectangular buildings north of the 1903 building did not exist. We could play anywhere, including around the far edges of the oval. We could dig grooves in the dirt at the edge of the dust bowl for marble runs. I was running around there one day and fell headlong onto a large rock which happened to be there. I am sure it was not planned or placed there. There are some class photos from the late 1950s at: https://victoriancollections.net.au/collections?q=mont%20albert%20central%20school,%20laurie%20young,%20laurie%20newton,%20education . These children look much the same to me as those in the early 1960s. I had never heard of autism until the late 1960s - one child, not in this school or at Camberwell (boys) Grammar where I did form 1 to 6.
There seem to be no photos of the monkey bars on the Web now.
We would make up ball games and even play "British Bulldog", which I recall was some kind of game where one child ran and others teamed up to capture them. Chasey ("chasings" in Tasmania, I was later told) was popular.
The teachers did call a halt to one game which arose ca. 1965: Two children - girls or boys - would stand facing each other on dirt or grass with their feet apart. They would take it in turns to thrown knives of some kind, or at least metal compasses, into the ground near their feet. I never played that.
Catholic and inner city State schools had small grounds, all bitumen - no grass and few trees. Mont Albert Primary School was paradise by comparison.
The North Balwyn Baths remain to this day, complete with open air Olympic, learner and 16 ft deep diving pool with 10 metre tower and springboards. https://www.google.com/maps/@-37.8032379,145.0870905,172m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu The extensive grounds are now built over, and the toddler pool is gone. No-one was allowed to simply jump into the water feet first, since that would invite doing a jackknife or banana - hold one knee and stick the other leg out, leaning back, to do a "bomb" and make a splash, and risk cracking one's noggin on the edge of the pool. We did this anyway, and got told off. Otherwise everyone had to dive head-first (even if Goofy style, hands pressed together as in prayer, shoulders first legs retracted and knees bent, and rolling over on impact to make a tremendous sound and splash) or do a forward or backwards somersault before entering feet first.
The pool was teeming with children, adolescents and adults on hot days, with a short queue to dive off the starting blocks on the hottest days. (Plenty of vitamin D and sunburn - and now probably skin cancer.)
Lance Bond, was an Aboriginal boy from Queensland, who visited us one summer holidays, when he was about 10 or 11. He wanted to go off the 7.5 metre platform, but not being allowed to jump in feet first, and being too scared to dive, he did a full forward assault and went in feet first. My siblings and I were in *awe*.
Robin, if you want further accounts of how we used to live in our day, I would suggest my new book, Life Before the Internet, which shows how the last unconnected generation used to live, from home and school to work and leisure.
Hi Michael, I am pretty overloaded with reading about nutrition, especially regarding vitamin D and the immune system: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/. Almost everyone in the world should be supplementing vitamin D3 in quantities well above the very small amounts recommended by governments. This is especially so for people with brown or black skin, no matter how sunny it is where they live.
I have ordered your book https://www.lifebeforetheinternet.com, which I think has a most engaging cover. I think it is important to document aspects of life which are not the focus of commerce, pop-culture recollections and facsimile copies and so-on.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s a few children had cod liver oil and perhaps some vitamin D supplementation or a very small amount of vitamin D2 in fortified foods such as milk. It was common to expose babies and everyone else to lots of UV-B in high elevation sunlight. More than a little of this was bad in terms of sunburn and long-term problems with skin cancer - especially for babies whose immune systems are learning what epitopes (short 3D arrangements of amino acids, as part of proteins) are self and not. I understand that pre-cancerous cells in babies, which resulted from UV-B skin exposure, at that early stage, causes the immune system, for the rest of life, to regard such cells as "self" and so not to be eliminated. This raises the risk of skin cancer later in life.
However, UV-B exposure at all stages of life, in the absence of the proper vitamin D3 supplements everyone should be taking (for 70 kg 154 lb body weight, without obesity, about 0.125 milligrams 5000 IU a day), had the immense benefit of raising the otherwise terribly low 25-hydroxyvitamin D level in the bloodstream (vitamin D3 is hydroxylated primarily in the liver) to improve immune system function AND to improve neurodevelopment.
Neither vitamin D3 nor 25-hydroxyvitamin D are hormones. They are not signaling molecules. However, 25-hydroxyvitamin D is an essential input for the intracrine (inside each cell) and paracrine (to nearby cells) signaling systems which many types of immune cell depend upon so that each cell can respond to its changing circumstances. Most immunologists and doctors have no idea about this, which is why I collected and discussed the most pertinent research at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ .
It is reasonable to assume that other cell types involved in neurodevelopment also rely on good supplies of 25-hydroxyvitamin D for their ability to function properly in their delicate roles of affecting the growth and/or pruning of neurons and parts of neurons - dendrites and axons. The harmful impact of low maternal and early childhood 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels are profound - and so common as to be almost ubiquitous, at least to degrees which are not distinctly discernible. See https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.2 regarding autism, intellectual disability, low birth weight, preeclampsia and pre-term birth. I will soon add Rodgers, Hollis and Wagner et al. 2023 "Vitamin D and Child Neurodevelopment - a Post-Hoc Analysis": https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/19/4250. Low 25-hydroxyvitamin D in utero and in early childhood has lifelong detrimental impacts on most people, but especially so on people with dark or brown skin who live far from the equator. This is surely a significant, easily correctable, factor in differences in on-average outcomes for African Americans and other such racial/ethnic groups - even when they live close to the equator.
There is now a resurgence of interest in such play equipment, but the average child now spends little time on them compared to video games on computers, tablets or cell phones. To run the quite extraordinary (moral, aesthetic and 3D visuals at least) game Genshin Impact, it is necessary to have a recent release PC with a USD$500 plus video card. The card has ~12 gigabytes of exceedingly fast (faster than the PC) memory and an Nvidia GPU ship with over 3000 32 bit (with floating point) CPUs running about 2 billion instructions a second. Each such CPU is probably 10,000 times more powerful than a mid-1960s mainframe. Strange that this is a cheap and unhelpful replacement for welded 2 1/4 inch galvanised steel gas pipe constructions in playgrounds.
Children - and adults - are desperate for engagement, with others and simply with things in the environment which respond to their actions. Video games provide this in some ways, but there's no exercise, whole-body coordination, outdoor experience, novel, unplanned, situations - and no actual risk and requirement to develop judgment, courage and confidence in genuinely challenging and dangerous situations. For instance luciaphile's experiences (above), far from the help, sympathy or supervision of another child or adult.
"Lady Allen of Hurtwood a landscape architect from England became involved in child-centred causes during World War 2, and established the World Organisation for Early Childhood Education in 1948.
"Commenting on the safety of these playgrounds, she was heard to have said “Better a broken arm than a bruised spirit,” and urged New York parents to sue the city fathers “for emotional damage to their children because they failed to provide suitable and exciting playgrounds for them"."
Thanks, fellow IT engineer! Re monkey bars (or what we used to call the jungle gym) was by far the largest draw for us kids in the park. The almost limitless movements and contortions possible along any axis shows to what extent children seek out complex movements when playing, without even being aware of it.
On the west side of the oval at Mont Albert Primary School was a sloping to the north straight concrete path which veered right in front of a grassy area at the bottom.
This was the ideal place to push our billy carts, letting gravity do the rest. The most minimal billy cart is two steel axles, with four steel wheels with solid rubber tyres and no chassis at all - just a rope tying them together in their middles. We would sit on the rear axle, holding on to it with our hands, and steer with our feet on the front axle.
An adult would tend to build a billy cart with such axles and wheels from the hardware store with timber frame, seat, perhaps quite long with ropes for steering, and even a wooden lever for a brake onto the ground.
In the early to mid-1960s, few cars had automatic transmissions and it was fairly common for local mechanics to dismantle the manual gearboxes. This provided us with a supply of ball bearings ca. 3.5 inches outer diameter, 3/4 inch depth and with an inner race hole ca. 1 inch in diameter.
These were great for making billy carts out of scrap wood - just saw and chisel a piece of timber down to 1 inch or so round, jam the bearing on and use a few nails to secure them.
Being steel, these would slide on the concrete at the bottom of the path, when negotiating the curve, sometimes produce sparks. If the cart slipped off, that was fine, since there was soft grass there.
However, the sliding ability of the front steel bearings limited the cart's performance.
So we built hybrid models with conventional axle and solid rubber tyred wheels at the front for steering, with a low-set rear axles with the ball bearings at the rear for the best sideways slip broadside performance as we tried to negotiate the corner. This lead to even more sparks. So we soaked the rear wheels in petrol and they would burst into flames as we went round the corner.
In the mid-1960s my brother Gerald and I constructed wooden ramps to jump our old, and now too small, bikes at the school grounds. His only had a single piece tubular frame and we bent it inwards due to the frontal impact of landing.
In the late 1970s I met some teenage boys who had used similar small bikes - by now BMX I guess - in a ramp they constructed in Kew or Richmond which enabled them to launch themselves into the Yarra river. I was most impressed.
Here is something which I regard as highly significant. I guess this has been addressed in the formal discourse on play, but perhaps not.
In the 1950s and 1960s, as I wrote above, and as is well documented, many children were able to - and did - play a great deal without adult supervision or manufactured toys. They did so alone, or among their friends and siblings, with the 100% physical world, without rules, administration or anything other than perhaps a bat and a ball, or a bicycle. (Early skateboards became available in the 1960s, but they were not as maneuverable as current boards and there was no skate parks, hip-hop music or intense culture associated with them.)
Now, most children grow into adulthood without much, or any, such experience - in which we constantly challenged ourselves to do risky things without coming unstuck.
Now, a tremendous fraction of children's and adolescents' time, energy and so potential for development exists in activities conducted via screens, with video and sound, but no taste, smell, danger of injury or real exercise or need of whole-body coordination. This is very well recognised.
Perhaps it is not widely enough recognised that these activities, always exist in highly complex, totally artificial settings which are highly administered. Every video / computer game is programmed to implement numerous rules. Unless someone hacks the program, these rules are absolutely immutable.
Furthermore, to play most video games now, or to use the Internet for any kind of social purpose, from email to text or video "chat" sessions, one needs to have an *account*. One needs to seek and obtain *approval* from some distant corporation to do anything at all with the mechanisms by which most children, adolescents and adults spend a great deal of their time and emotional energy.
This is such a profound change that it would be the basis for multiple hearty PhD dissertations.
That this is how people grow up, and live, now is breathtakingly different from all prior human history.
Pretty much every child of 9 or 10 or older now needs at least a tablet (iPad, or perhaps Android) to exist as a normal child - because the children socialise via apps on these hand-held communicators. Not to have one would leave them excluded from normal social networks.
Everything which is possible on these devices requires accounts and permissions. While the nature of text, speech and video is free-form, the apps and their communication systems are highly ordered, non-physical, constructs, almost always (open source projects are the exceptions) the products of multi-million/billion dollar for-profit, global, corporations.
Very very good points about how having part time jobs as a kid quelled worries about supporting oneself as an adult. That’s a point I haven’t seen brought up before but makes immediate and intuitive sense.
I see a lot of people commenting about how they were raised, but few seem to recognize that it’s extremely risky to push against this now and attempt to parent differently. I personally know of a parent who was cited for child neglect for leaving their toddler asleep in a locked car on a cool day for less than 3 minutes. Another parent in a different state let their elementary-aged child sit in the car, again on a cool day, playing on a tablet while the parent grabbed a few things from a store. They were gone perhaps 10 minutes and ended up being criminally charged and having to take a plea bargain. Yet another parent was visited by child protective services because they allowed their 8-year-old to walk their dog around the block; the child didn’t even cross any streets but the police believed they were in danger. My friend won’t let her very capable 9-year-old walk by themself less than a block to school because the child would have to cross a neighborhood street (granted, some parents drive like crazy people nearby during dropoff and pickup).
I’d love to have my oldest, 9, ride their bike to school and back, but they’re convinced it’s not safe. That’s not a message my spouse or I have been giving them, but it’s what society tells them.
The section on “stranger danger” touches on it, but it’s not really like that at all. The fifties was a drastically different time period, and kids actually were much safer then. The male influence made that possible. A child molester probably wouldn’t have lived long enough to be imprisoned. Divorce was seen as shameful. A grand majority attended churches. Patriotism was never in any way decried as “nationalism.”
Today unattended children are not safe. The criminal element is everywhere, fathers are not present, few attend church, divorce is expected.
What else would you expect of generations raised by single mothers and faithless upbringing. If that pisses anybody off, tough.
I wrote something myself a while back on the subject from my own point of view. There are some parallels with your take, despite me growing up in the UK largely in the 1980s, how I saw a safety culture eroding free play.
The comment about how it "wasn't all about school" for the kids in the first half of the 20th C really struck a chord with me. I grew up in the 80's and was a latchkey kid. My husband basically thought I raised myself. While this independence was great, my tiger mom made it very clear that my job was to perform exceptionally well in school. She didn't even want me to do high school sports (I still played tennis on my team but ONLY if it didn't interfere w/ my grades of course). By high school, this was a lot of pressure and once I got my driver's license I really wanted an after school job and experience "life." But my mom did not let me b/c my job was to study study study! Of course this was not good for my mental well-being and I really wanted to just die by my senior year. I surely could have been one of those statistics .... but I did see college/moving out as freedom so I stuck it out.
Now I'm raising my son, I think, completely the opposite of how I was raised. We'll see how this experiment pans out.
Great article! Very grateful GenX kid here to have had a childhood with kids. I had to grow up fast in many ways but have always kept the wonder of a kid and hope never to lose it. Dad was a Korean War marine so you KNOW how I was raised. I might also mention that I had the first of many surgeries at 9 days old due to myelomeningocele. My parents very rarely coddled me and expected me to be like every other kid. Thank God for the balance between my folks and a neurologist who wisely told them, “Whatever he CAN do, let him.”
I am a bit older than other parents of kids my kid’s age, and I’m always surprised at how much more they feel it necessary to worry about their kids than I do. It’s not that I actually worry less - I do! But they seem to feel it’s an obligation to fear their kid will be hurt, so it won’t be their fault if the kid is hurt. Whereas I just look at the actual statistics and think “well, what I FEEL to be dangerous and what actually is likely, are two different things. I am going to need to prepare my kid for dangerous situations that are realistic - like a trusted adult who is actually a predator or another kid pressuring them to play with a gun - rather than fearing strangers or buses.” I can teach my kid how to cross a street and how to ask for help and how to stand up for herself. That’s not always going to keep her safe, but it’s safer than not doing it lest she talk back or go further than I’m comfortable.
I am always reminded of my father’s friend’s story about being cornered in an alley by the neighborhood pervert, at about age 8. He looked down and saw a broken bottle, caught it up and said “you leave us alone!” Whereupon the creeper left. I want for all our children the right and ability to talk back and see themselves as able, while not blaming themselves if they cannot get out of a bad situation.
There are lots of things that have made our kids safer overall - helmets, safety belts, social-emotional learning, squishy playground surfaces, being allowed to talk back, etc. I like all those things (apparently unlike some of the commenters here!) But I’d really love us as a society to back off the stranger danger and push forward to realistic self-confidence and practical life skills.
Too many parents have tried to press their worries right on to me, “Well, I told her that girls should really walk together and not alone” or “but there are _homeless people_ in the library” or “I don’t let the kids out in the yard without me.” We live in a safe, middle class suburb, with low speed limits and traffic lights and no poisonous snakes. Don’t freak my kid out about things she’s been confident about, that’s sexism rearing its ugly head, mostly.
I was a child in the 1970s. At age 7, my 5-year-old sister and I were allowed to wander through the neighborhood looking for kids to play with. Several lived on the same street, and we played outside almost every day (in California, where we could do that year-round). Our parents weren't watching us and we went into each other’s houses sometimes. I think a part of what made it feel safe was that my mother knew all the neighbors. She stayed home as most of the moms did, so they were friends.
My kids grew up in the 2000s. I let them play in the yard alone. At 8 and under, I went outside to watch the road as they rode their bikes up and down. Drivers would get annoyed if the kids didn't move to the side immediately! Once they were about 9 they seemed to have it down, so I let them ride on their own, including going a few blocks away to a school friend’s house. At 11-12, they were allowed to go to the 7-11 about a half mile away. My younger son was able to walk a mile to school in 8th grade (age 13), and they both walked or took the light rail train in high school. My oldest seemed to feel claustrophobic at home. Even though he loved video games, he would travel all over by train - before age 18.
I strongly agree that kids need to be on their own as much as possible. I loved watching them (as I peeked through the window) invent complicated play-acting scenarios with friends.
I do think chores are important, too. I asked them to pitch in with things from around 2 years old. My friends were shocked when I taught my first child to operate the dishwasher at that age. They felt that the kids would mess around with it, so it was better to make the entire kitchen off-limits. My thought on that is, if they learn what things are, what they do, and how to be safe with them, they don't need to sneak to play with it (and my kids never did). Starting that early also meant that I didn't have to have a big conversation about chores later on. For as long as they could remember, they were asked to help out.
Though late in the sequence, I think politically manufactured fears of (and the need for Wars on) "Crime," "Drugs" and "Terrorism" contributed to this.
Competitive universities could help a bit by explicitly valuing paid employment among applicants.
I struggle with this as my 5 year old is an only child. The neighborhood is more urban sprawl then busy metropolis. I believe one of the incidents of child abduction you refer to is John Jubert (not sure if I even spelled that correctly). They were actually a couple kids from a town over. The story from my mother is he tried to originally gain entry into my church school at the time. While I'm not sure hiw true that is. I do remember it sending my mother into a manic worry that makes me never forget his name. Even so, I remember walking a mile away to our town store and playing in the neighborhood blocks away for hours. We had games of hide and go seek that were a square mike endeavors. I do not believe my child will experience anything like that. However, I do think the dynamics of work, being more isolated online tasks, and out interactions has adults has changed. I do not see this change dramatically happening in the 90s, but am still interested to see where you go with the idea.
I was born in Dearborn, Michigan, in 1959, my sister in December of the same year and my brother in January of 1961. We were each assigned chores at the age of three: making our bed, sweeping the stairs, emptying wastebaskets and washing the bathroom sink. Like you, at four I was running errands for my mom, riding my training-wheeled bike to the meat market to buy meat and bread. At seven, we learned to make pies, as we already knew the rudiments of cooking. When I was eight, we moved to a farm and took on outdoor chores such as feeding animals, mucking the barns, and putting up hay, among other things. We each were also set up in a business: I had chickens and sold eggs, my sister raised rabbits for pets and meat, and my brother, who was six, boarded dogs. The idea was that we would learn the value of money by working to buy our own bicycles at first, and later, for my brother and sister, motorcycles and snowmobiles. We moved again when I was fourteen to a dairy farm. We three kids would be left alone during summer days to run the place while our parents were attending to other business. We worked from when we were very little, and we liked it. It was fun. Not only that, when it came time for us to leave home, we each knew how to run a household, keep books and work for a living. We had many skills. We didn’t feel used or abused. We felt honored, appreciated, needed, responsible and useful. We had purpose growing up. My young relatives spend their lives in front of a giant television. They do no chores at all, not even cleaning their bedrooms. They have no responsibility at all. They do not like to work. Everything they have, and they have a lot, is given to them. Nothing is earned. When I think of all the fun I had contributing to the wellbeing of my family and how good it made me feel, I am sad for children like my young relatives. They are missing out on fun, feeling useful and learning the skills they will need to take care of themselves and their families. You are spot on, Dr. Gray.
Dr Peter Gray: This article chronicling the declining loss of freedom for children is a gem. Especially as you comparatively reminisce about your own childhood and the strengths you developed through experience.
For me, reading this article was like time traveling to another time and place where the human person was free to discover its own potential on its own---mostly unfettered.
To share my own story, I came to the United States as a child when I was 12yrs old from South America. And you know what was most different? Exactly what you just described: the degree of freedom in the two locations!
In my native Peru, almost all my memories of childhood are from the outdoors. And by that I mean both the great outdoor as well as the humble outdoor setting afforded by my grandparents home.
Being able to enjoy so much independence and unstructured opportunities for play, game creation and all kind of adventures, shaped me then and over the years into a "natural leader"
By leader, I don't mean a CEO or a boss. I mean, an influencer. It's happened almost without trying at various points of my life and I credit that to my early years of self exploration through play and social adventures.
When I came to the US, however, all my freedom to play outdoors mostly shrank as the focus (as you aptly stated) was now on school. School became pretty much the entire focus of my life from 2000-2012 and even if I came to discover more about the world and society through my studies, it's also true, that it shrank my time for unstructured exploration and risk taking.
So culture and country of origin definitely play a role in how much freedom one has as a child.
All the points and the analysis you have kindly shared will be invaluable as I parent my own child, who is just at the very beginning of infancy.
I thank you for all of these extremely powerful points, as both a parent and a researcher on child development. Truly priceless information and I know that my child will one day thank you for it!
I think that the baby boom mitigated some of these trends. Parents with 4 or more children cannot closely supervise and schedule each one, even if they want to.
This is a significant factor. I was the first of five children born between 1955 and 1962. My thoroughly devoted parents could not have fussed over us regarding supervised play, including driving us around to various activities - not that there were many such pursuits like karate, horse riding or coached team sports in the 1960s compared to the 1980s onwards.
There is a multiplier affect in this regard with multiple families children nearby, compared to a lower birth rate and so a sparser distribution of approximately similar aged children. Also, now, with more specialised choices of schools, in part because the local public school might be overly woke and/or under-resourced, compared to paid-for private schools, children are transported to schools by car, which are further away, so their school-mates are geographically much more thinly distributed in the local, walkable, area.
As a mom of 4 in 2023, I have to agree! I’m stretched too thin if I have to watch their every move. They usually go out to play with friends together and I’ve encouraged them to look out for one another. I have triplets who will be 7 soon & their 4.5 year old brother. Even the little brother keeps up with the bigs. But when they go out as a pack, I’m less concerned anyway … safety in numbers, I guess.
Sounds like you are doing very well. You also, as a mum in 2023, have to take account of and be influenced by the safetyist peer and cultural pressure of the times. I (like the author of this very interesting article) am a child of the 50s. We played in the streets (where the traffic was maybe 10% of what it is now). At age 16 my friends and I set ourselves loose on long overnight hitch-hiking 'safaris' exploring the country (England) - and all this despite the fact that my mother was worry-on-a-stick. How times change....and how, to every upside there is always a downside.
I have tried to hammer into my wife that the second we had three it was time to just let things happen.
Unfortunately I think we have a lot of Oedipus going on, and not from the child’s perspective, but from the mother and father. The devouring witch from Hansel and Gretel, “come and eat treats and you will be young forever.” Parents, mothers especially, infantilize their precious offspring to the point of suffocation. I see parents parasitizing the youth of their children. Mothers obsessing over the beauty of their daughters, and mothers confusing boys by telling them they are vulnerable and fragile. Youth will always be venerated because it is inherently associated with fertility and vigor. As parents delay child bearing farther and farther (they are older and older at their first child) I think this youthful vampirism strengthens. When a man is losing his strength and vigor it is natural to obsess over the football prowess over his teenage son. When a women is losing her attractiveness to the sands of time it is only natural for her to live vicariously through the beauty and attention of her daughter. Parents must realize that rearing children isn’t about themselves, it is about creating the environment for normal human development. Unfortunately, as Peter points out, we increasingly live in a world where the environment for normal human development is stymied by the “gifts” of the modern world, television, the internet, the automobile, birth control pill. Children need freedom and scratches and the ability to fail and the ability to succeed. They need friends and neighbors and adult relatives and adult role models and parents and grandparents. In short, it takes a village, because if it is only mom, or only mom and dad, then all the baggage that comes from mom and dad gets put on the kids because they know nothing else. Parents are told that the world will consume their children if they don’t keep them close, but in this protection the children are consumed by the suffocation of parents. Every successful parent fails, because they cannot control their children, but must let them go.
Good description. One wonders how the parents got like this.
Philosophically, this can be seen as the consequences of not accepting death and decay as part of life. Tolkien wrote in his letters how both men and elves sought power in an effort to deny death. Living vicariously through one's children, in effect treating them as gholas of oneself (Dune) would seem to be another example of this.
It is probably harder to accept death of course when one has never truly lived, as an individual making ones own choices and creating one's own life.
I think the answer to how parents, and adults in general, got like this lies in changing demographics (fewer kids, more time for each one), changes in where we derive meaning in life (less derived from work when corporations replaced mutual benefit with greed, which meant more people getting their meaning in life from parenting), and the sheer number of jobs generated by seeing kids as fragile morons who are learning “disabled.” A huge impetus for the bloated school calendar kids now endure must surely be the jobs mill the school system has become. Add to that after-school care programs, summer camp, daycare, and on and on. Distrusting children is good for adults; what’s good for children is irrelevant. Just as kids were discovered to be worth billions in toy sales and then fast food sales, so too have they been discovered to be a cash cow for the millions of professional child minders we have in this country. It’s no different.
Brining out the Tolkien! I love it:) the inability to accept our own finite part of this eternal world is the definition of the existential angst of our era. Very appropriate. I also was thinking about the role the “gifts” of the modern world play in increasing adult obsessiveness over youth. Mass media, sexual liberation and the dissolution of the nuclear family mean that each atomized adult is more and more a consumer and less and less a human (or mother or father, or brother or mentor or apprentice). We are defined less and less by the value we add to intimate relations with real humans and more and more defined by our value on the market. Whether this is the job market, the tinder market, whatever it is, because of our connectedness beyond that which is tangible and physical we have transmogrified into these cyborgs which care more about this much more universal, rather than local, status. I think this process of selling things to people and people selling themselves brings out the worst most base instincts in us and the scramble for youth (particularly among women because of the limiting biological window of fertility) increases. It is so sad for me to see so many 40-50 year old women not being able to find their value beyond the gaze of male attention, and yet wanting it so badly. All the Botox and surgery and make up is over the top. We need to stop seeing ourselves as commodities on a market and have our emotions tied to our relative value to others on said market and strive to find our value in intimate relationships. If we do this maybe we have nothing to fear in death. And maybe our children have a fighting chance.
I completely agree about the profound changes in life experience of children over the decades, including the hypothesis that video/computer games for boys gave them a pursuit in which their skills and actions mattered, albeit in an isolated aspect of life. I think this is especially true with Internet connected games where teams play against other teams.
I am a 1955 model, born in Wantage, England, 90km west of London. Television played very little role in my life before we left in 1961 for Australia. I remember the Flower pot men. Radio had no impact. I was obsessed with "My old man's a dustman" and the 7" record was heavily worn from use.
By 4 or 5 I regularly wandered down the street to a park with a brook, sometimes on my own (my brothers were all younger) and other times with local children of the same and older ages. I would play in the brook and once got my welly boots stuck in the quicksand there, where I left them behind. There was no kindergarten. I did about a year of school there. At one stage I took myself off without asking my parents to take a girl from the local shop to the fair, which was 260 metres from home, across a junction where there are now traffic lights. This was outside normal arrangements and my parents came and found me, but not before I took her for a ride on one of those big swinging boats. I still remember my plastic purse and the sixpence.
I had a small bike - no gears, but chain drive, front and back brakes. My brother and I used to ride all around local streets with these. Once I came off and had sticky plaster over half a dozen or more scrapes all over my body. Helmets are a 1980s creation, I recall. I grew up with an extensive Meccano set. My father borrowed parts of it for a physics experiment at Harwell. Lego came much later and I always thought it was a big step down from Meccano, which could be used to build robust, potentially useful, mechanisms.
Shortly after arriving in Australia, I would have just turned 6. I modified a smaller firecracker into a skycrocket, with a grass stick and some sticky tape. It shot up into the blue sky and I never saw it come down. I did this in a local quarry, a few blocks from where we lived, in Newport, a Melbourne suburb.
In Mont Albert, with bigger pushbikes, we rode far from home - 2 to 5 km, to creeks and the like, from Mont Albert to Box Hill shopping centre. Look up Doncaster Shopping Town now. Then this was in a dirt-road crossroads - that site had an apple cool store on it.
I recall being about 7 and buying fireworks from the local milk-bar (corner shop). Penny bungers were the workhorses for blowing up clay dams in the gutter, launching baked bean cans into the air and the like. However, I did buy a few tuppenny bungers. Placed on the ground with a galvanised steel rubbish bin face down over it, these would throw the bin up about six feet. We roamed around doing this in the afternoon, with no adult supervision. Now all I have are halfpenny bungers, which are tame by comparison - and I wouldn't let any off except at New Year's Eve when everyone else does, for fear of alarming the neighbours and having the local police arrive with sirens wailing.
I was experimenting with valve radios (350 volt DC power supply) by age 13, and direct 240 volt mains powered circuits not long afterwards. There were no earth leakage circuit breakers - I could easily have electrocuted myself.
In Mont Albert we had a magnificent oak tree in the back yard. We climbed up the trunk and up and down branches. We had a dual rope swing with a seat at the end of each rope. The two would become twisted and the two children would orbit each other with our centre of gravity also in another orbit, with our relative orbit getting smaller and faster as the ropes twisted more. Around 1966 we hosted the first of several Aboriginal children from Cherbourg in Queensland, as part of the Harold BlairScheme. Within minutes we learned to circumnavigate the tree from branch to branch, and slide down outer branches to the ground. There were many acorn fights. The only injury was one friend of my brother who broke his arm falling from our tree. At the local North Balwyn Baths, we used to do various splash inducing dives into the water, for the admiration of onlookers, not least girls. My limit was the 7 metre platform. My brother Gerald would do hand-stands or running back flips from the 10 metre platform. He once broke his arm doing such things.
We walked to primary school, which was in the same street, and came home for lunch.
Walking and riding with other children to areas which were not parks - creek areas which were wastelands, but now freeways - was a crucial part of how we grew up. I had a paper round for a while. When I was about 14 my father found me a job in a big factory - Silcraft - with 200 tonne presses, electroplating and all sorts of manufacturing processes. I learned a bit about arc welding and we did useful work, including one job which adults couldn't do - epoxy (and maybe lead) painting the inside of an air compressor storage tank. The "man-hole" was too small for adults. There was an adult supervising, sometimes. We had a crude air supply from an air compressor - some kind of mask. People today would be horrified, with reason. The benefit was my work-mate and I - the same age - had to think and act carefully so we didn't get stuck or run out of air.
I am looking forward to further accounts of play and (mis)adventure from decades past!
I used to get my pants leg stuck in my bicycle chain pretty frequently.
To the point of kids and freedom: one year my mother sewed me a clown costume for trick-or-treating. For whatever reason I didn't have anyone to trick or treat with that year. Perhaps the other kids had outgrown it or my closer friends had moved away. But that didn't have anything to do with whether I would go! Halloween and to a lesser extent Easter meant candy in a way that is hard to appreciate now perhaps, just as Christmas meant presents i.e. *there weren't any presents the rest of the year*.
I thus decided to bike so as to cover more ground. I set off with my plastic pumpkin candy bucket.
Soon my voluminous clown pants were all tangeld up in the chain. I remember dragging my bike many blocks home in the dark, clutching my bucket with the other hand.
I remember another time, walking home from my friend Katie's house after a heavy rain. The bayou had risen up. Plastic shoes were the fashion. I remember my plastic shoe spinning away in a current too fast for me to get it.
The nice thing about an outdoor childhood even in the diminished environment that was a housing development in the pines (it was indeed woodsy then, it is manicured now) is that my very elderly parents still live there, so I can go for walks when I visit and it all feels very familiar; I am 45 years back.
One really important aspect of play at the primary school I attended in 1963 to 1966 - Mont Albert State School (previously "Central School", which went to form 2 = year 8) was that in about 1964 they constructed an extensive "monkey bars" play area. A bluestone (Victorian basalt) block wall was constructed, about 45 x 65 feet (15 x 20 metres) on the somewhat sloping site so it could be entered from the higher side. This enclosed rubble, gravel and then sand, so there was a deep layer of sand under all the steel structures. I don't recall anyone digging to the bottom of the sand. It must have been over a foot deep.
There was a great variety of swings, bars etc. Not as wild as the first photo at: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/dangerous-playgrounds-1900s, but I have never seen a better set of monkey bars since. Most children used these with great enthusiasm. Some years later it was dismantled, no-doubt due to safety concerns.
A typical maneuver was The Flip. Hang upside down by your knees (I never did this), swing and let go, to land on your feet. This required bars which I recall were about 7 foot high (2 metres plus). This is plenty high enough to break your neck if you fell straight down. I don't recall any injuries, though I guess there must have been a few over the years.
The school https://www.google.com/maps/@-37.8119014,145.103335,236m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu was established in 1903 with extensive grounds, including a full-size oval. The green paved area at the south-west was a dust bowl with a little grass and very large pine trees along Barloa Rd. There was a hall in the south, the original solid brick double-storey central building, and timber and alumiunium 1950s / 1960s classrooms on the east side. The playground was in a big gap between the northern-most and southern-most of these.
The massive red gable roof building on Trent St now covers the playground site. The triangular and rectangular buildings north of the 1903 building did not exist. We could play anywhere, including around the far edges of the oval. We could dig grooves in the dirt at the edge of the dust bowl for marble runs. I was running around there one day and fell headlong onto a large rock which happened to be there. I am sure it was not planned or placed there. There are some class photos from the late 1950s at: https://victoriancollections.net.au/collections?q=mont%20albert%20central%20school,%20laurie%20young,%20laurie%20newton,%20education . These children look much the same to me as those in the early 1960s. I had never heard of autism until the late 1960s - one child, not in this school or at Camberwell (boys) Grammar where I did form 1 to 6.
There seem to be no photos of the monkey bars on the Web now.
We would make up ball games and even play "British Bulldog", which I recall was some kind of game where one child ran and others teamed up to capture them. Chasey ("chasings" in Tasmania, I was later told) was popular.
The teachers did call a halt to one game which arose ca. 1965: Two children - girls or boys - would stand facing each other on dirt or grass with their feet apart. They would take it in turns to thrown knives of some kind, or at least metal compasses, into the ground near their feet. I never played that.
Catholic and inner city State schools had small grounds, all bitumen - no grass and few trees. Mont Albert Primary School was paradise by comparison.
The North Balwyn Baths remain to this day, complete with open air Olympic, learner and 16 ft deep diving pool with 10 metre tower and springboards. https://www.google.com/maps/@-37.8032379,145.0870905,172m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu The extensive grounds are now built over, and the toddler pool is gone. No-one was allowed to simply jump into the water feet first, since that would invite doing a jackknife or banana - hold one knee and stick the other leg out, leaning back, to do a "bomb" and make a splash, and risk cracking one's noggin on the edge of the pool. We did this anyway, and got told off. Otherwise everyone had to dive head-first (even if Goofy style, hands pressed together as in prayer, shoulders first legs retracted and knees bent, and rolling over on impact to make a tremendous sound and splash) or do a forward or backwards somersault before entering feet first.
The pool was teeming with children, adolescents and adults on hot days, with a short queue to dive off the starting blocks on the hottest days. (Plenty of vitamin D and sunburn - and now probably skin cancer.)
Lance Bond, was an Aboriginal boy from Queensland, who visited us one summer holidays, when he was about 10 or 11. He wanted to go off the 7.5 metre platform, but not being allowed to jump in feet first, and being too scared to dive, he did a full forward assault and went in feet first. My siblings and I were in *awe*.
No-one was allowed down from a diving platform, so everyone who when up had to exit via the pool. However, someone has taken a photo from the 10 metre platform, of a boy upside down mid-air: https://www.facebook.com/boxhillvic/videos/somersaults-off-the-tower-at-the-balwyn-bathsphotos-we-grew-up-in-north-balwyn-p/1782804231761089/ That could be my brother Gerald. The best thing was to make the splash land on the young lifeguard in the white toweling hat who supervised the diving tower when it was open, from between the 1 and 3 metre springboards.
Thomas Buckley seems to have coined the term "perma-coddle": https://thomas699.substack.com/p/the-cult-of-safety-3b2 . I don't know where to nominate it, but this gets my vote for neologism of the year.
Robin, if you want further accounts of how we used to live in our day, I would suggest my new book, Life Before the Internet, which shows how the last unconnected generation used to live, from home and school to work and leisure.
Hi Michael, I am pretty overloaded with reading about nutrition, especially regarding vitamin D and the immune system: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/. Almost everyone in the world should be supplementing vitamin D3 in quantities well above the very small amounts recommended by governments. This is especially so for people with brown or black skin, no matter how sunny it is where they live.
Via the wonders of the Internet https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/twofold/202308/twins-memoirs-and-autobiographies I learned that you and your twin brother Robert, who is also a writer, are 1957 models and https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelgentle that like me, you are involved in engineering, IT and even privacy.
I have ordered your book https://www.lifebeforetheinternet.com, which I think has a most engaging cover. I think it is important to document aspects of life which are not the focus of commerce, pop-culture recollections and facsimile copies and so-on.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s a few children had cod liver oil and perhaps some vitamin D supplementation or a very small amount of vitamin D2 in fortified foods such as milk. It was common to expose babies and everyone else to lots of UV-B in high elevation sunlight. More than a little of this was bad in terms of sunburn and long-term problems with skin cancer - especially for babies whose immune systems are learning what epitopes (short 3D arrangements of amino acids, as part of proteins) are self and not. I understand that pre-cancerous cells in babies, which resulted from UV-B skin exposure, at that early stage, causes the immune system, for the rest of life, to regard such cells as "self" and so not to be eliminated. This raises the risk of skin cancer later in life.
However, UV-B exposure at all stages of life, in the absence of the proper vitamin D3 supplements everyone should be taking (for 70 kg 154 lb body weight, without obesity, about 0.125 milligrams 5000 IU a day), had the immense benefit of raising the otherwise terribly low 25-hydroxyvitamin D level in the bloodstream (vitamin D3 is hydroxylated primarily in the liver) to improve immune system function AND to improve neurodevelopment.
Neither vitamin D3 nor 25-hydroxyvitamin D are hormones. They are not signaling molecules. However, 25-hydroxyvitamin D is an essential input for the intracrine (inside each cell) and paracrine (to nearby cells) signaling systems which many types of immune cell depend upon so that each cell can respond to its changing circumstances. Most immunologists and doctors have no idea about this, which is why I collected and discussed the most pertinent research at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ .
It is reasonable to assume that other cell types involved in neurodevelopment also rely on good supplies of 25-hydroxyvitamin D for their ability to function properly in their delicate roles of affecting the growth and/or pruning of neurons and parts of neurons - dendrites and axons. The harmful impact of low maternal and early childhood 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels are profound - and so common as to be almost ubiquitous, at least to degrees which are not distinctly discernible. See https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.2 regarding autism, intellectual disability, low birth weight, preeclampsia and pre-term birth. I will soon add Rodgers, Hollis and Wagner et al. 2023 "Vitamin D and Child Neurodevelopment - a Post-Hoc Analysis": https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/19/4250. Low 25-hydroxyvitamin D in utero and in early childhood has lifelong detrimental impacts on most people, but especially so on people with dark or brown skin who live far from the equator. This is surely a significant, easily correctable, factor in differences in on-average outcomes for African Americans and other such racial/ethnic groups - even when they live close to the equator.
See also https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.3 on Parkinson's disease and other forms of age-related neurodegeneration.
More wonders via the Internet: images of monkey bars with monkey-like children all over: https://www.google.com/search?lr=&sca_esv=573369116&as_qdr=all&q=1960s+%22Monkey+bars%22&tbm=isch&chips=q:1960s+monkey+bars,online_chips:playground+1960s:VrbTeWiFISM%3D This is natural healthy child behavior - a genuine need which can't be met by other means.
There is now a resurgence of interest in such play equipment, but the average child now spends little time on them compared to video games on computers, tablets or cell phones. To run the quite extraordinary (moral, aesthetic and 3D visuals at least) game Genshin Impact, it is necessary to have a recent release PC with a USD$500 plus video card. The card has ~12 gigabytes of exceedingly fast (faster than the PC) memory and an Nvidia GPU ship with over 3000 32 bit (with floating point) CPUs running about 2 billion instructions a second. Each such CPU is probably 10,000 times more powerful than a mid-1960s mainframe. Strange that this is a cheap and unhelpful replacement for welded 2 1/4 inch galvanised steel gas pipe constructions in playgrounds.
Children - and adults - are desperate for engagement, with others and simply with things in the environment which respond to their actions. Video games provide this in some ways, but there's no exercise, whole-body coordination, outdoor experience, novel, unplanned, situations - and no actual risk and requirement to develop judgment, courage and confidence in genuinely challenging and dangerous situations. For instance luciaphile's experiences (above), far from the help, sympathy or supervision of another child or adult.
http://www.architectureofearlychildhood.com/2012/01/post-war-adventure-or-junk-playgrounds.html has more photos and:
"Lady Allen of Hurtwood a landscape architect from England became involved in child-centred causes during World War 2, and established the World Organisation for Early Childhood Education in 1948.
"Commenting on the safety of these playgrounds, she was heard to have said “Better a broken arm than a bruised spirit,” and urged New York parents to sue the city fathers “for emotional damage to their children because they failed to provide suitable and exciting playgrounds for them"."
Thanks, fellow IT engineer! Re monkey bars (or what we used to call the jungle gym) was by far the largest draw for us kids in the park. The almost limitless movements and contortions possible along any axis shows to what extent children seek out complex movements when playing, without even being aware of it.
On the west side of the oval at Mont Albert Primary School was a sloping to the north straight concrete path which veered right in front of a grassy area at the bottom.
This was the ideal place to push our billy carts, letting gravity do the rest. The most minimal billy cart is two steel axles, with four steel wheels with solid rubber tyres and no chassis at all - just a rope tying them together in their middles. We would sit on the rear axle, holding on to it with our hands, and steer with our feet on the front axle.
An adult would tend to build a billy cart with such axles and wheels from the hardware store with timber frame, seat, perhaps quite long with ropes for steering, and even a wooden lever for a brake onto the ground.
In the early to mid-1960s, few cars had automatic transmissions and it was fairly common for local mechanics to dismantle the manual gearboxes. This provided us with a supply of ball bearings ca. 3.5 inches outer diameter, 3/4 inch depth and with an inner race hole ca. 1 inch in diameter.
These were great for making billy carts out of scrap wood - just saw and chisel a piece of timber down to 1 inch or so round, jam the bearing on and use a few nails to secure them.
Being steel, these would slide on the concrete at the bottom of the path, when negotiating the curve, sometimes produce sparks. If the cart slipped off, that was fine, since there was soft grass there.
However, the sliding ability of the front steel bearings limited the cart's performance.
So we built hybrid models with conventional axle and solid rubber tyred wheels at the front for steering, with a low-set rear axles with the ball bearings at the rear for the best sideways slip broadside performance as we tried to negotiate the corner. This lead to even more sparks. So we soaked the rear wheels in petrol and they would burst into flames as we went round the corner.
In the mid-1960s my brother Gerald and I constructed wooden ramps to jump our old, and now too small, bikes at the school grounds. His only had a single piece tubular frame and we bent it inwards due to the frontal impact of landing.
In the late 1970s I met some teenage boys who had used similar small bikes - by now BMX I guess - in a ramp they constructed in Kew or Richmond which enabled them to launch themselves into the Yarra river. I was most impressed.
Here is something which I regard as highly significant. I guess this has been addressed in the formal discourse on play, but perhaps not.
In the 1950s and 1960s, as I wrote above, and as is well documented, many children were able to - and did - play a great deal without adult supervision or manufactured toys. They did so alone, or among their friends and siblings, with the 100% physical world, without rules, administration or anything other than perhaps a bat and a ball, or a bicycle. (Early skateboards became available in the 1960s, but they were not as maneuverable as current boards and there was no skate parks, hip-hop music or intense culture associated with them.)
Now, most children grow into adulthood without much, or any, such experience - in which we constantly challenged ourselves to do risky things without coming unstuck.
Now, a tremendous fraction of children's and adolescents' time, energy and so potential for development exists in activities conducted via screens, with video and sound, but no taste, smell, danger of injury or real exercise or need of whole-body coordination. This is very well recognised.
Perhaps it is not widely enough recognised that these activities, always exist in highly complex, totally artificial settings which are highly administered. Every video / computer game is programmed to implement numerous rules. Unless someone hacks the program, these rules are absolutely immutable.
Furthermore, to play most video games now, or to use the Internet for any kind of social purpose, from email to text or video "chat" sessions, one needs to have an *account*. One needs to seek and obtain *approval* from some distant corporation to do anything at all with the mechanisms by which most children, adolescents and adults spend a great deal of their time and emotional energy.
This is such a profound change that it would be the basis for multiple hearty PhD dissertations.
That this is how people grow up, and live, now is breathtakingly different from all prior human history.
Pretty much every child of 9 or 10 or older now needs at least a tablet (iPad, or perhaps Android) to exist as a normal child - because the children socialise via apps on these hand-held communicators. Not to have one would leave them excluded from normal social networks.
Everything which is possible on these devices requires accounts and permissions. While the nature of text, speech and video is free-form, the apps and their communication systems are highly ordered, non-physical, constructs, almost always (open source projects are the exceptions) the products of multi-million/billion dollar for-profit, global, corporations.
Very very good points about how having part time jobs as a kid quelled worries about supporting oneself as an adult. That’s a point I haven’t seen brought up before but makes immediate and intuitive sense.
I see a lot of people commenting about how they were raised, but few seem to recognize that it’s extremely risky to push against this now and attempt to parent differently. I personally know of a parent who was cited for child neglect for leaving their toddler asleep in a locked car on a cool day for less than 3 minutes. Another parent in a different state let their elementary-aged child sit in the car, again on a cool day, playing on a tablet while the parent grabbed a few things from a store. They were gone perhaps 10 minutes and ended up being criminally charged and having to take a plea bargain. Yet another parent was visited by child protective services because they allowed their 8-year-old to walk their dog around the block; the child didn’t even cross any streets but the police believed they were in danger. My friend won’t let her very capable 9-year-old walk by themself less than a block to school because the child would have to cross a neighborhood street (granted, some parents drive like crazy people nearby during dropoff and pickup).
I’d love to have my oldest, 9, ride their bike to school and back, but they’re convinced it’s not safe. That’s not a message my spouse or I have been giving them, but it’s what society tells them.
The section on “stranger danger” touches on it, but it’s not really like that at all. The fifties was a drastically different time period, and kids actually were much safer then. The male influence made that possible. A child molester probably wouldn’t have lived long enough to be imprisoned. Divorce was seen as shameful. A grand majority attended churches. Patriotism was never in any way decried as “nationalism.”
Today unattended children are not safe. The criminal element is everywhere, fathers are not present, few attend church, divorce is expected.
What else would you expect of generations raised by single mothers and faithless upbringing. If that pisses anybody off, tough.
"A child molester probably wouldn’t have lived long enough to be imprisoned. "
I think someone is thinking that "Nighhtmare in Elm Street" is a documentary...
Just stating a fact. Such people were inactive out of fear.
I appreciate your insights.
I wrote something myself a while back on the subject from my own point of view. There are some parallels with your take, despite me growing up in the UK largely in the 1980s, how I saw a safety culture eroding free play.
https://open.substack.com/pub/juliedee/p/a-wolf-named-safety?r=1c4b56&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The comment about how it "wasn't all about school" for the kids in the first half of the 20th C really struck a chord with me. I grew up in the 80's and was a latchkey kid. My husband basically thought I raised myself. While this independence was great, my tiger mom made it very clear that my job was to perform exceptionally well in school. She didn't even want me to do high school sports (I still played tennis on my team but ONLY if it didn't interfere w/ my grades of course). By high school, this was a lot of pressure and once I got my driver's license I really wanted an after school job and experience "life." But my mom did not let me b/c my job was to study study study! Of course this was not good for my mental well-being and I really wanted to just die by my senior year. I surely could have been one of those statistics .... but I did see college/moving out as freedom so I stuck it out.
Now I'm raising my son, I think, completely the opposite of how I was raised. We'll see how this experiment pans out.
Great article! Very grateful GenX kid here to have had a childhood with kids. I had to grow up fast in many ways but have always kept the wonder of a kid and hope never to lose it. Dad was a Korean War marine so you KNOW how I was raised. I might also mention that I had the first of many surgeries at 9 days old due to myelomeningocele. My parents very rarely coddled me and expected me to be like every other kid. Thank God for the balance between my folks and a neurologist who wisely told them, “Whatever he CAN do, let him.”
I am a bit older than other parents of kids my kid’s age, and I’m always surprised at how much more they feel it necessary to worry about their kids than I do. It’s not that I actually worry less - I do! But they seem to feel it’s an obligation to fear their kid will be hurt, so it won’t be their fault if the kid is hurt. Whereas I just look at the actual statistics and think “well, what I FEEL to be dangerous and what actually is likely, are two different things. I am going to need to prepare my kid for dangerous situations that are realistic - like a trusted adult who is actually a predator or another kid pressuring them to play with a gun - rather than fearing strangers or buses.” I can teach my kid how to cross a street and how to ask for help and how to stand up for herself. That’s not always going to keep her safe, but it’s safer than not doing it lest she talk back or go further than I’m comfortable.
I am always reminded of my father’s friend’s story about being cornered in an alley by the neighborhood pervert, at about age 8. He looked down and saw a broken bottle, caught it up and said “you leave us alone!” Whereupon the creeper left. I want for all our children the right and ability to talk back and see themselves as able, while not blaming themselves if they cannot get out of a bad situation.
There are lots of things that have made our kids safer overall - helmets, safety belts, social-emotional learning, squishy playground surfaces, being allowed to talk back, etc. I like all those things (apparently unlike some of the commenters here!) But I’d really love us as a society to back off the stranger danger and push forward to realistic self-confidence and practical life skills.
Too many parents have tried to press their worries right on to me, “Well, I told her that girls should really walk together and not alone” or “but there are _homeless people_ in the library” or “I don’t let the kids out in the yard without me.” We live in a safe, middle class suburb, with low speed limits and traffic lights and no poisonous snakes. Don’t freak my kid out about things she’s been confident about, that’s sexism rearing its ugly head, mostly.
I was a child in the 1970s. At age 7, my 5-year-old sister and I were allowed to wander through the neighborhood looking for kids to play with. Several lived on the same street, and we played outside almost every day (in California, where we could do that year-round). Our parents weren't watching us and we went into each other’s houses sometimes. I think a part of what made it feel safe was that my mother knew all the neighbors. She stayed home as most of the moms did, so they were friends.
My kids grew up in the 2000s. I let them play in the yard alone. At 8 and under, I went outside to watch the road as they rode their bikes up and down. Drivers would get annoyed if the kids didn't move to the side immediately! Once they were about 9 they seemed to have it down, so I let them ride on their own, including going a few blocks away to a school friend’s house. At 11-12, they were allowed to go to the 7-11 about a half mile away. My younger son was able to walk a mile to school in 8th grade (age 13), and they both walked or took the light rail train in high school. My oldest seemed to feel claustrophobic at home. Even though he loved video games, he would travel all over by train - before age 18.
I strongly agree that kids need to be on their own as much as possible. I loved watching them (as I peeked through the window) invent complicated play-acting scenarios with friends.
I do think chores are important, too. I asked them to pitch in with things from around 2 years old. My friends were shocked when I taught my first child to operate the dishwasher at that age. They felt that the kids would mess around with it, so it was better to make the entire kitchen off-limits. My thought on that is, if they learn what things are, what they do, and how to be safe with them, they don't need to sneak to play with it (and my kids never did). Starting that early also meant that I didn't have to have a big conversation about chores later on. For as long as they could remember, they were asked to help out.
Though late in the sequence, I think politically manufactured fears of (and the need for Wars on) "Crime," "Drugs" and "Terrorism" contributed to this.
Competitive universities could help a bit by explicitly valuing paid employment among applicants.
I struggle with this as my 5 year old is an only child. The neighborhood is more urban sprawl then busy metropolis. I believe one of the incidents of child abduction you refer to is John Jubert (not sure if I even spelled that correctly). They were actually a couple kids from a town over. The story from my mother is he tried to originally gain entry into my church school at the time. While I'm not sure hiw true that is. I do remember it sending my mother into a manic worry that makes me never forget his name. Even so, I remember walking a mile away to our town store and playing in the neighborhood blocks away for hours. We had games of hide and go seek that were a square mike endeavors. I do not believe my child will experience anything like that. However, I do think the dynamics of work, being more isolated online tasks, and out interactions has adults has changed. I do not see this change dramatically happening in the 90s, but am still interested to see where you go with the idea.
I was born in Dearborn, Michigan, in 1959, my sister in December of the same year and my brother in January of 1961. We were each assigned chores at the age of three: making our bed, sweeping the stairs, emptying wastebaskets and washing the bathroom sink. Like you, at four I was running errands for my mom, riding my training-wheeled bike to the meat market to buy meat and bread. At seven, we learned to make pies, as we already knew the rudiments of cooking. When I was eight, we moved to a farm and took on outdoor chores such as feeding animals, mucking the barns, and putting up hay, among other things. We each were also set up in a business: I had chickens and sold eggs, my sister raised rabbits for pets and meat, and my brother, who was six, boarded dogs. The idea was that we would learn the value of money by working to buy our own bicycles at first, and later, for my brother and sister, motorcycles and snowmobiles. We moved again when I was fourteen to a dairy farm. We three kids would be left alone during summer days to run the place while our parents were attending to other business. We worked from when we were very little, and we liked it. It was fun. Not only that, when it came time for us to leave home, we each knew how to run a household, keep books and work for a living. We had many skills. We didn’t feel used or abused. We felt honored, appreciated, needed, responsible and useful. We had purpose growing up. My young relatives spend their lives in front of a giant television. They do no chores at all, not even cleaning their bedrooms. They have no responsibility at all. They do not like to work. Everything they have, and they have a lot, is given to them. Nothing is earned. When I think of all the fun I had contributing to the wellbeing of my family and how good it made me feel, I am sad for children like my young relatives. They are missing out on fun, feeling useful and learning the skills they will need to take care of themselves and their families. You are spot on, Dr. Gray.
Dr Peter Gray: This article chronicling the declining loss of freedom for children is a gem. Especially as you comparatively reminisce about your own childhood and the strengths you developed through experience.
For me, reading this article was like time traveling to another time and place where the human person was free to discover its own potential on its own---mostly unfettered.
To share my own story, I came to the United States as a child when I was 12yrs old from South America. And you know what was most different? Exactly what you just described: the degree of freedom in the two locations!
In my native Peru, almost all my memories of childhood are from the outdoors. And by that I mean both the great outdoor as well as the humble outdoor setting afforded by my grandparents home.
Being able to enjoy so much independence and unstructured opportunities for play, game creation and all kind of adventures, shaped me then and over the years into a "natural leader"
By leader, I don't mean a CEO or a boss. I mean, an influencer. It's happened almost without trying at various points of my life and I credit that to my early years of self exploration through play and social adventures.
When I came to the US, however, all my freedom to play outdoors mostly shrank as the focus (as you aptly stated) was now on school. School became pretty much the entire focus of my life from 2000-2012 and even if I came to discover more about the world and society through my studies, it's also true, that it shrank my time for unstructured exploration and risk taking.
So culture and country of origin definitely play a role in how much freedom one has as a child.
All the points and the analysis you have kindly shared will be invaluable as I parent my own child, who is just at the very beginning of infancy.
I thank you for all of these extremely powerful points, as both a parent and a researcher on child development. Truly priceless information and I know that my child will one day thank you for it!