I have one young kid and two teenagers, so I don’t worry about CPS or traffic or eating lead paint etc. And I wish there was enough life and community on my street to even feel judged, but since no one is out there, who cares what they privately think of me? That is the core problem here for me. No one is out there. That’s where safety and fun is, everyone in and outside; laughing and talking shit and playing. It’s an enormous loss, harder to grieve since the death was never recorded.
But I’d hazard a guess and say the best way to feel less assailed by the judgment of others is to stop yourself from judging others. If that’s not the ideal fix, it seems like the only one within reach to any person.
I resisted the social pressures early in my child's life because I happened to read John Holt's book, "How Children Fail". I was fortunate enough to grow up in the MidWest in the 60s, and I was free to roam. However I didn't feel as lucky during school, and while reading the book I felt like I was reading about my own personal experience on almost every page. My daughter was still an infant, but that is when I dedicated myself to learning as much as I could about unschooling. By the time she was school-age I had found an unschooling community. We had to drive to be with this community, but we were a large group of families with kids of all ages who supported each other with a very different set of values compared to the norm. They became our social life, and I am so grateful that we found them.
Even so, I can't say that my daughter was able to grow up free to roam. I mean she was, but when she went out there just weren't any other kids around. We even lived within a few houses of a girl her age, but that girl's mom would *never* let her play (neither outside nor inside!) But when we were with our unschooling friends several days a week life was very different.
Our daughter attends a Waldorf Steiner school - definitely a non-conformist choice here in the UK where 'Steiner parents' are regarded with a degree of suspicious curiosity. Our fellow parents are universally a play-loving, freedom-loving lot and many encourage independence of movement from an early age. However this was where we resisted conformity with the non-conformists (!) for the very reason given by Americ, and reinforced by Peter, that each child is on their own uniquely charted journey.
Our daughter was very 'dreamy' until she hit puberty, what her teacher delightfully described as 'taking her time to wake up to the world'. She loved nature and stories and had an amazing imagination, and her friends regarded her as a great playmate. But she took a long time to learn left from right and for a long time was oblivious to the potential hazards of city life. This meant that I chose to accompany her to school myself, long after her peers were walking, bussing and cycling on their own. She had no objection to thid because we could read stories on the bus, but other kids would sometimes wonder, 'Why does your mum still bring you to school?'
Of course, in her own time, our daughter did 'wake up to the world' and learnt to manage road crossings, unreliable bus timetables and all the distractions of the city. Now a grown-up teenager, she roams independently with confidence - just like the peers who got there sooner - incuding travelling abroad solo.
As parents, we need to remember that each child is unique and on their own journey through life ... just like their mum and dad!
The so-called 'parenting industry' has made being a parent much more complicated than it need be.
We live in Madrid and after a lot of research I found a Waldorf school and I become in love with the way they respect each kid development and freedom of playing.
I resist social pressure when people ask my eldest (5yo) who is his fab soccer player and he doesn’t know about soccer more than playing himself with the ball. We don’t have TV and my kids don’t know anything about soccer or Disney movies or cartoons (which I found terrible for creativity and brain development as they depict stories that doesn’t have a lot of sense). I’m usually the only one that knows about brain development and child psychology and I’m always the hippie and non-conformist in the groups I’m in…
My husband and I are quite resistant to social pressure, following our own judgements rather than the pressure from outside. We are trying to use each opportunity to promote the independence of our 8 year old son, even if this is somewhat contrary (we live in Belgium where there is less threat by police or CPS). We are greatly inspired and strengthened in our decision by these letters and the Let Grow blog posts.
However, the part of independently roaming with other kids is difficult to realize. There are no children allowed to play outside. Advocating for our beliefs to other parents is something we try to avoid. Mainly because our fear that our son would potentially gets isolated.
As we have no authority in pedagogy or psychology, we would be judged as the people ‘who know it better’, who do they think they are. The same goes to sharing our beliefs with teachers and school principals (they are the authority, why should we question that).
I think authority figures having direct influence on the parents (e.g. schools, pediatricians, and not to forget media) will have to be convinced (by other authority figures e.g. universities, policy makers) to really change the tides and make this mainstream.
Dr Naomi Fisher has been talking a lot about this recently - she was citing the instance of, when she had her first child, reading books on parenting. She tried the things suggested and they failed - with the result that SHE felt a failure.
I commented on her post because it - and the discussion here - are, to me, all symptoms of the same disease.
Society is constantly JUDGING others. Society is constantly trying to force people of all shapes and sizes into the same-sized hole - from parenting, through education (all so over-obsessed with assessment, with accountability, with micro-managing), through careers and other aspects of adult life, this just never stops.
Is it any wonder that so many people are needlessly unhappy??
When I was younger I was often by myself because I had stuff I wanted to do in my house. I didn't have many friends until my 2nd year of high school. I (almost) always resisted social pressure and gradually grew to just hate the implication that I needed to worry about peer pressures. Especially me, because "what peers?"
I might feel social pressure if more people talked to me. Most of my friends are quite weird. When I talk to them about how school is mostly a dumpster fire they relate. Lots of people still don't talk to me, except the weird ones. Those are my people.
I think that one of the key issues is that for a parent to allow free play they must first not buy into the social pressures and fear mongering. This is harder when their own anxiety is high. When they do not feel that their livelyhood is safe. That they have stability. Much of what we do in schools and parenting culture is a direct reflection of parents displacing their own anxiety on their kids.
If you know that you could lose your job at any moment and have no safety net, then you'll worry more about your kids. You'll want to keep pushing them until they have the skills you believe they need to be "safe" in our culture. We can try to teach parents that their anxieties are not fully warranted but that's hard when they are already anxious.
I will add to my own comment that when parents get the opportunity for more free play in their lives it is likely they will be more able to create that in their kids lives. Many people are working so hard that they forget how to play. I know I'm struggling with that.
I have been working with children and families for the past 27 years as a pediatric OT. Through the years I have noticed a few trends. First, parents have too many choices in terms of how to parent. They have the internet at their fingertips and will Dr. Google anything. On the internet you can find anything you are looking for. If your child is having difficulty with their speech development, you can find someone who tells you to wait to get help because their kid stated talking at 5 years old. Or on the flip side you can find someone who tells you your 9 month old should be starting to say the "p" sound. Both scenarios are out of development norms. Parents are trying to do the right thing, but in the end miss the mark.
Another trend I find in parents is a major lack of critical thinking and self reflection. Both of these characteristics go hand in hand in parenting. Most parents don't know who they are as a person and then what kind of parent they want to be. For example a parent who wants to potty train a child as an infant. In theory this type of potty training can be done, but what if your child doesn't follow the steps and they don't achieve the potty training just like the expert told you? What if your child has some sort of delay or medical condition and they can't potty train that early? My point is this- if a parent wants to achieve a goal on their parenting journey they must be able to make adjustments for their child in case the "thing" can't be achieved. Instead of being set on potty training your infant, the parent must be able to throw out the idea based on the facts the child is presenting.
The second prevalent fact I see is that most parents don't think about their child in terms of being on their own journey. Parents judge themselves or others if their child is not developing like their peers or if their child does something they don't like. This is where self reflection comes in. Parents who are not self aware tend to blame others for their child's behavior or mistakes. Or parents blame themselves for not doing right by their child. Both of parent tendencies miss the parenting mark. A child is their own person and PLAY is the way they learn how to be the person they are meant to be. The parent must allow their child to make mistakes and instead of taking on the guilt or lashing out at others for their child's problem/mistake they should learn how to guide their child through them. If a parent is not self reflective, being a guide for their child is difficult. I think the lack of play is the foundation to most child and parent problems in our society. I have three children and I did my best to give them a magical childhood. Because I understood that play was the most important work of a child, my now 16, 18 and 22 year old children are able to critically think through challenging problems.
Americ, I especially like your point that "most parents don't think about their child in terms of being on their own journey." If only more parents thought about that, more would take their parenting cues from their children, not so much from "experts" or parent peers.
Peter- Thanks! There needs to be a switch in the parents brain where they can start to separate themselves from their child. Once that switch happens, the parent's journey becomes more fun and the kid learns how to be the person they are meant to be. I think there is a major break down if the parent never recognizes their child is on their own path. This is where you get a child trying to be who the parent wants them to be. Possibly the professional parents who pushes their child towards college and the child wants to be a plumber instead. This is a minor example, but I see it all the time. These small parenting examples turn into big problems for the kid. It's a cycle that keeps going. I could go on all day long so I will stop. :)
'There needs to be a switch in the parents brain where they can start to separate themselves from their child. Once that switch happens, the parent's journey becomes more fun and the kid learns how to be the person they are meant to be.'
Yes, yes, YES!
I have witnessed, over and over, people who have been damaged because of parental expectations. They suffer with guilt, with resentment, with general unhappiness.
I once read a book about another culture, don't remember where. A mother spoke of the "joy of watching her child grow into themselves." It is a perspective much more respectful of the child as an individual than our culture of "raising" a kid. Like it's all parental work that "creates" the final product.
I don't think many American parents realize how much a violation of boundaries is going on when we are so focused on our influence on who they are? become?
Yep: you can send your kid out to play, but that doesn’t mean they’ll find anyone to play with.
I’ve spent most of my kids’ lives trying to low-key “help” them find friends, in various ways, and it hasn’t worked out. The only place they consistently see the same kids is at their prison of a school, which is why I’m hesitant to stop sending them, even tho I hate how the place is run.
At least the kids can bond over their common enemy?
My kids have never been to school. They are 8&12 and you’re right, there are rarely kids out during school hours. Though the parks get a few between school and dinner. The thing to remember though, is that kids don’t just make friends with kids. Mine have a true friend in many adults and teens that work in places we frequent like grocery store cashiers, the librarian, the waitress at my favorite restaurant. They keep us standing in these places for ages having conversations with any age person that’ll pay them the time of day. But we also have a homeschool group we meet up with a few times a week for a few hours for them to play and we don’t make them stay in sight, just together in groups of at least 2. That’s about 3-9 hours of the same big revolving group of all age kids from babies to teens that get to grow up playing together every week, developing long term friendships. And with the freedom they need out of our sight...
I'm originally from Australia, where I remember all summer long I played outdoors with my friends and no adult supervision. I live in China now with a 2 year old and a 5 year old. I take them to the playground and there are zero kids there. I heard even in Kindergarten in China, the kids are doing homework till 12am, 1am etc, before starting kindergarten/school at 7am the next day. It sounds like a torturous prison.
Yes having lived in China for a while, I realize that what it is for, is what University you get into, which basically will determine your whole life (basically money, which is the number one important thing for almost all Chinese people). Also teaching at a University I realized that the students pay no attention to me or the lectures, the only thing that matters is cramming for the exam to get as close to 100% as possible in the exam. There are a few exceptions, like children of the elite who will make it up the ladder no matter what, and normally the elite will send their kids to Eton in UK or something equivalent in USA. Or at the other extreme, peasants, who can't afford to send their kids to any school, but their not really free to play, they are helping their parents tiliing the fields etc.
This assessment matches better with epistemic evidence then previous articles about stress induced school homework leading to suicide spikes. And is what I struggle with. In the 80s, even with John Jubert fluttering my mother's heart to over protection. We still rode our bikes through the neighborhoods until mom's wistle announced streetlights had indeed illuminated. The 90s brought massive changes that my country farm boy father could not fathom in the life of his suburban dwelling son. You had implementation of gang influences, you had readily available drugs, I watched hand guns being sold in junior high and finding a girl who hadn't lost her virginity in high school was rare. I live next to a massive public park flanked by an electric school. I see unsupervised children all the time and the tboys have changed. They got electric 2 person scooters, gas powered motor bikes, good size dogs in tow as they swing golf clubs aimed at school roofs. I would Love to send my 6 year old into the fray. But man, she knows and sees things I NEVER did at her age. The term growing up fast isn't coined by accident. And some of my friends that grew up in the inner city. They hawk their kids the most because they were watched zero as a child. Only to witness and fall into Crack dealing that led to a lifetime of being in the system. Now which do I worry about more? Stunting my daughters growth from not enough unsupervised play dates? Or doing cochise and getting pregnant by age 14 on the back of a motor bike. My mother's worry over John Jubert seems trivial by comparison.
Those specific issues aren't so much the case where I live, but do I send my kids to go by themselves downtown where, sure, there's a lot of fun stuff, but there's also unhoused folk on drugs who will just decide to hit random people? No child should have to witness that.
Exactly. This is a big problem where my sister lives in Seattle. She lives in a very nice, upscale neighborhood with a big park. The park has been invaded by unhoused, sometimes mentally ill people, with GUNS. There have been fatal shootings. Her daughter drove by an intersection one day, and a few minutes later, somebody was shot at that intersection. The park has become unusable for a lot of people as a result. Young people gather there at night and play music from huge speakers so loudly that people can't sleep, even far away from the park. The cops say they are too overloaded already to deal with the problem.
I have a couple of mildly naughty elementary school boys who were just caught this week playing ding-dong-ditch (ringing doorbells and running away). My husband and I told them we don’t want to meet all our neighbors by taking our children around to apologize for bad behavior. We want them to get out and play, we don’t want to hover, and then we get another report that they and the rest of the neighborhood boys are being wild again. They scared an elderly lady. I’m at a loss. I think there are a lot of people in our neighborhood who would prefer to never see children anywhere anyway.
I don't think "overprotectiveness" is the only issue here that people do due to social pressure. There are a lot of other parenting practices unique to the US that parents try to do or say they do because otherwise they are seen as a bad parent. Parents don't bedshare, out of fear of being seen as an unsafe parent. Parents force "independent play" on kids that are too young for that despite the child's protests, because other people's kids play independently. Parents sleep train their kids because everyone else is doing it and tells them to, even if it goes against their every instinct, and then they beat themselves up for being weak. Parents force their kids into daycare because they think that's what you're supposed to do. Even stay at home moms make their kids go to daycare for the "socialization". And they do this even if their kids hate it, because that's how you build individualistic children like america wants, not namby pamby sensitive kids.
The reason this is relevant here is it is upstream of all the malaises that you talk about. Parents start off parenting going against every protective instinct they had about their baby. You're not entirely comfortable putting your kid in daycare at 8mo but due to circumstances and peer pressure, you think it's the only choice. Try as you may, your natural instinct to care for your child in a personalized way is not going to go away, and it manifests as "overprotection". And for good reason TBH, there's too many daycares that are awful to kids and you need to be quite watchful. And even in school, you can't just send your kid to school and let the teachers do their work - you're supposed to fundraise. You're supposed to reinforce what teachers teach. You're supposed to be part of the PTA and buy teachers supplies. And then teachers aren't great and you need to advocate for your children. The reason parents need to be overprotective is because institutions either don't do their job or have in front of them an impossible job that is better done by the parents.
If parents don't spend a lot of time with their children in the first three years, they aren't familiar enough with their kids to be confident in their abilities, and they aren't able to hold their hand through their initial risk-taking to make them bolder. As kids get older, the distance grows and the picture of the kid's needs and wants get even murkier.
A dad i know works 12-14 hour days, barely gets to hang with the kids. The one thing he went to was a father's day event at the preschool where all the kids had drawn pictures of their dads. Well, most, because his kid had just scribbled on paper and couldn't draw a face. His only idea of his kid's abilities and process was through this picture, and he saw his kid was lagging, so he straight up instructed the kid's mom to work on the kid's face drawing ability. If you aren't spending a lot of time with your kids, you don't get their perspective of wins and losses, all that happens is you see when they fail and then rush to fix that. Their wins are expected, losses are bad and need correction. That's what leads parents to be "overprotective".
If a parent walks with his kid to the park regularly, he's going to be way more confident letting him walk alone one day and be more confident in telling him what to avoid, and as the kid does small things like this, his own confidence and his parent's confidence in him grows. But if that's not what's happening, then no one's going to get more confident.
I am currently reading The Anxious Generation and it's annoying to see parents being blamed for being too overprotective, while no one's talking about why parents feel less confident themselves. Everyone on this topic seems to assume that kids can just raise themselves while adults do their own thing, if only they are given a big enough playground. No one seems to even consider the role of the parents and teachers in early childhood apart from keeping the child alive. And hence the problems you bring up won't get solved. Which seems to suit a lot of the people here, they just seem to get rich off of alarmism and writing new books saying "the problem is even worse than i imagined and my last book didn't have allll the solutions, but this one definitely..."
Thank you, Peter, for your as usual thought provoking post.
As a teacher of Parent Effectiveness Training by Thomas Gordon and an accompanier of John Holt (especially for your topic here, his “Escape From Childhood) for me your post on the crippling conformity to social (ab)norms regarding restricing children’s freedom to protect them can be understood via this quote of John’s:
“To trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves; and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.” John Holt
As Goethe knew “As you come to trust yourself you will know how to live.”
The counter-point to this discussion is that the main social conformity that parents' face is in accepting the dual income work culture. This is perhaps the main driver of the childhood mental health crisis that we now see. Economics is more at the center of our social dysfunction than psychology/sociology/social psychology.
The impact of work culture on the well-being of children was highlighted for me by my primary school experience. Even in early primary school grades some of my classmates already were demonstrating mental distress. However, I was an incredibly happy grade school student; it was a super fun time in my life. I had a stay at home mom and life was great. At that time I already assumed the role of being part of the support system for my peers who were shouldering grown up responsibilities in support of their dual income families. Having children grow up too fast is not a blueprint for lifelong mental well-being. I am the first generation of my family to live in an urban environment, and it seemed somewhat surprising that happy children seemed like such an oxymoron.
It was only in middle school and high school that we finally wised up and conceded to the relentless pressure to accept the dual income work culture. My family quickly became just as mentally distressed as my friends had been. We were no longer the suckers who were providing psychological support to our peers. Mentally healthy children is a luxury that the upwardly striving middle class cannot afford. Modern urban life has then become an increasingly toxic environment for children. Almost immediately once I left the bricks and mortar dystopia, I felt tremendously better. The answer to our problems is so obvious -- embrace remote lifestyles so that you are not internalizing other people's psychic toxins. Funnily enough, as soon as people embrace this strategy, bricks and mortar will be immediately motivated (for the sake of their continued existence) to create healthier environments for children.
It was only through the years that I have been able to sort through the logic of the above.
In economics, it is called the tragedy of the commons. Imagine that there is a field of strawberries. Everyone in the community can go to the field and pick as many strawberries that they like. For years and years everyone enjoys picking a few strawberries and there seems a limitless supply. Then one day they bring in robotic strawberry pickers and all of the strawberries are picked and the community cannot enjoy the common resource. In the analogy the strawberries are the happy children.
Another way to describe this is as a negative externality. Parents have realized that they can dump all sorts of mental stress onto their children (without expense) and then this is externalized to the community in the schools. It is no mystery that working reasonable hours can provide a good childhood. Yet, not maximizing work hours is a marginal cost for parents.
To maximize their utility all one needs to do is make someone else pay the "psychic" costs for you. The dismal science wins once again: There might then seem to be no easy way around the tragedy of the commons problem. Childhood will continue to become bleaker and bleaker until we reach some sort of equilibrium at a disturbingly low level.
However, school choice might finally help us break out of this abysmal logic. As soon as choices are available, the more optimal outcome of happy children becomes possible once again. Parents could then choose to send their children to schools with happy children whose parents are not externalizing psychic costs.
When my rural relatives became aware of how us city folks lived, they were truly shocked. They could not imagine the level of child abuse that was involved. Down home, the community will not allow the type of behavior that I have described. I found their surprise equally surprising because in our community the above logic has become normalized. Social conformity in work culture has moved us to the point in which childhood has become an exceptionally bleak time without any clear escape -- school choice is then a welcome ray of sunshine. Is it really any mystery why total fertility rates have plummeted? Who wants to bring children into a world in which their lives are described by the tragedy of the commons?
I live in a rural community where physical abuse is not only condoned but considered to be a Christian duty. Sexual abuse of children is also all too common: I get frequent emails telling me that a sex offender has moved out of my neighborhood. The crime is always sexual abuse of a minor. (For some reason they don't tell me when the perpetrator moves INTO the neighborhood.) Social workers are too overloaded to be bothered with something like hitting a child. If you want your child to be free from physical punishment at school, you have to fill out a special form. So physical abuse is not just in cities, or not even mainly in cities where I live.
Also school choice here in TN means that there are charter schools run by private entrepreneurs students can attend for free as if it was a public school, but my experience working at charter schools revealed that many of them are very poorly run by people with no experience in school administration or even teaching. Sometimes it means that Christian schools are supported by state dollars.
Regarding child abuse, I was thinking more about psychological abuse. Yet, physical and sexual abuse of children by bricks and mortar schools immediately stops when online learning choices are offered. Once again we see in bricks and mortar school environments how government monopolized systems inevitably lead to high risk of abuse exactly because there are no realistic options presented. If I had been given such choices, I would have left my school environments for these very reasons.
School choice clearly seems to be a step forward. We need innovation -- we need more individualized environments for learning -- we need free markets to help improve the monopoly structures that we currently have. A revolution in enhanced child-well-being is underway. I have experienced online learning and it has made a transformative impact on my life (in comparison to bricks and mortar). Online learning institutes appear highly aware of the competitive marketplace that they are in and behave accordingly.
I'm sorry but your statement that abuse stops when children switch from physical schools to online learning is just incorrect. Isolating children with no trustworthy figures to help them but their parents is exactly how abuse happens. They would also be further isolated if their computer activities are monitored, like a lot of learning software is doing now.
Thank you very much for commenting Gwen! I find that when people engage in honest dialogue there is a way to elevate the conversation and arrive at a better synthesis.
This is true that yet different forms of abuse could then arise as you move to an online learning model. I was thinking more of the physical, sexual and other abuse that can be present in bricks and mortar reality. The problem is that bricks and mortar monopoly school environments have been widespread for over a century and so they have been highly analyzed by those with an intent to control and abuse others. Those with insight into the nature of these school environments clearly understand how truly dysfunctional they can be.
My overwhelmingly personal experience has been that online learning environments were vastly less abusive than physical environments. After leaving bricks and mortar learning spaces I immediately felt a massive wave of relief. It was an extreme experience. You feel so trapped in these monopolies and there is no obvious escape from them. With online learning environments I have not felt like that; it always feels much more tentative. Whenever I choose I can go to another online school -- there is no longer the same strong need to stay in any one "place". Taking away the physical control that is present in bricks and mortar reality and adding in a world of online choice entirely changes the nature of the power relationships involved.
Interestingly, after COVID, a large number of workers voted on whether they wanted to remain remote -- many workplaces overwhelmingly voted in favor of not returning to the office. Workers often expressed the sentiment that they derived ZERO happiness from their work environment. None of their coworkers gave them any joy? The same basic aspects of control issues that arose in bricks and mortar learning environments seemed to transfer over to physical work environments.
In the online learning environments that I have been part of there is minimal "daycare" type monitoring: You just do your work. Even cyberbullying is absent because one need not have ANY contact with other students or largely even the tutors. Online learning can then be heterogeneous in ways that a physical school could never be and it can be implemented in ways in which parallels to physical world settings are no longer possible. Ironically, with online learning there is a return to a focus purely on learning and away from a very wide range of issues that are merely distractions from learning -- strangely, many students then are uncomfortable with such learning environments.
The problem with the idea of school choice. As it is on the ballot here in the battle ground of District 2 Nebraska. Is that its a catch all for moving public tax dollars to private institutions ran by church groups. In rural areas it would basically be public school vs Catholic church. Free market systems do not solve utility like institutions.
Yes, you are quite correct that there is now evolving a certain second wave logic around school choice. What we typically see when government monopolies collapse is a near complete implosion of the entire system -- That is what happened when the Wall fell and the post-Soviet nations flipped their entire political systems overnight.
This breaking of the dam has already occurred with the first round of states choosing universal school choice. However, there are still a few more laggard states from the first wave that are in motion towards legislating on this. Mostly, what we see are the states below the 37th North latitude are embracing the full transition-- They form the core of a school choice revolution that has now seemingly become a permanent feature of the educational landscape.
The Northern Great Plain States have been much less enthusiastic in joining the revolution; In fact, none of them have actually accepted universal school choice. Sometimes we can move directly from one type of totalitarianism to another form of totalitarianism -- Everyone is expected to be part of the school choice revolution, even when it does not really reflect their particular experience. To avoid this you really want to think carefully about what is right for different places with different needs and then fit the upgrade to respect such differences; one possible workaround in some states (perhaps such as Nebraska) might be more that big cities and places that have multiple learning choices available to students would be designated school choice areas and rural and small towns that do not currently support such abundant choice would not be included in the school choice legislation. This could avoid the potential problem of greatly stressing a small town's only high school etc. by offering school vouchers. It is somewhat surprising to me that such an approach has not been more widely recognized. Basically, it would entirely undermine the political resistance that we have seen.
I feel this assessment. There was a previous letter that Grey wrote. It's thesis allocated spikes in anxiety from school work related pressure with results in increased suicides as evidence. However, with a huge portion of our population not capable of reading or writing at 7th grade levels. I find the thesis breaks. If you tweak the hypothesis tho, to include parent child interaction and not isolate it to child society interaction. You see a reduction in anxiety amongst children during Covid not because of a lack of school work. But because an absent parent under economic stress was suddenly present and prioritizing what mattered most. The child.
Yes, there are all of these theories about cell phones and even children's play, all the while ignoring the elephant in the closet -- the parental work culture. There are so many vested interests involved in avoiding the obvious; the government and others likely will even give parents awards for their service to the community as they neglect their duty to protect their own children. This is supposedly some great sign of progress, even when we see this increasingly disturbing decline in childhood well-being. Traditional societies have been able to rear healthy happy children for thousands of years -- how is it that modern urban educated societies are failing so dramatically?
The research that you noted is truly sobering. It is almost hard to believe that the evidence of school psychological harm is now so clear. Children self-harm more when they are in school and when they are out of school they self-harm less. COVID even showed that this cycle can be changed during the school year by shutting down the school system. How is it that this is not considered an emergency that needs to be corrected immediately?
While I agree that kids nowadays need more time for unstructured, unsupervised play, I don't believe it is a panacea for the depression and mental problems that seem so prevalent in people these days. Some of the most psychologically disturbed people I know had remarkably free childhoods, and yet they are still quite dysfunctional.
One cousin of my own age grew up on an island in Hawaii in the 1960s. The kids had little schoolwork, and were able to run around a small community outside most of the time. Unfortunately, my cousin was subjected to some sexual abuse in childhood while she lived in Hawaii. Again, I don't know if that's the main reason for her dysfunction, but at present at age 69 she is unable to function normally and have normal relationships.
I didn't realize how bad the situation was until recently. She went to stay for a while at a house in the mountains that I am responsible for. She said she was coming for two weeks, and then asked to stay another week. Then she stayed on again for another week and clearly had no intention of leaving. In the end, I had to get her brother to pressure her to leave, and I had to text her and her daughter repeatedly. I heard that they left a terrible mess in the kitchen that I will have to clean up. This cousin has not worked in decades, and her daughter only works sporadically. They have few relationships, and their relationships with family are very strained.
This kind of exploitative and sometimes abusive personality disorder in people my own age is pretty common. We who grew up in the 50s and 60s had quite a lot of freedom away from adult control. But it did not result in perfectly well-adjusted adults! Nor was that the case with the previous generation who had even more freedom: my dad and his sister, born in the rural South in the 1920s, were fairly successful professionally, but both were quite narcissistic and sometimes abusive toward other people.
Some of the most difficult adults I've ever encountered were from this generation of people born in the 1920s and raised in the 1930s. At times I attributed their extreme narcissism and even violence to the fact that they were neglected because of the Great Depression. The kinds of childhoods they describe would certainly be described now as neglectful. My aunt told me of a serious injury she incurred while playing in the early 1930s: she had to get herself to the hospital in her small town, and her parents didn't show up until hours later, as they had driven to another town that day. But according to Peter, this "neglect" was actually beneficial.
It's possible that it was not the neglect per se that made these adults so awful. There were also crazy child-rearing theories abounding in the early 20th century in the US, such as the idea that holding and touching and cuddling children was harmful to them. This advice was aimed at "overly sentimental" mothers in particular. In photographs from the 1930s, I see that my grandparents rarely did hold their children, even for feeding: they kept them literally at arms' length, in special baby chairs and the like. At most they might be seated next to a child, but there are no photos of them with my dad and his sister on their laps.
We can be grateful that this very damaging idea was discredited, but it did a great deal of harm to a lot of people, ironically the most educated people. Educated women were the ones who were likely to read books about "scientific child-raising," and to believe the men who said they should not hold their babies. Those babies, in turn, grew up to be adults who had trouble being affectionate with their own children, the baby boomers. Luckily the baby boomers rejected this whole manner of child-rearing and resurrected natural birth and breastfeeding and cuddling. Our own kids are better parents as a result.
Yeah lol American child rearing practices have been toxic for about a 100 years now, and harking back to any past might not give any good results. What I think people are now calling "mental health crisis" in adolescents is just a spike in internalizing mental health issues like anxiety and depression. But folks I know from previous generations seem like all had a lot of externalizing mental health issues where they acted out in all kinds of ways, ran away, committed crimes, had sex too young, drank, and what not to cope. I don't think that's what we need to go back to.
There was also a lot of depression and anxiety though. My mother was deeply depressed and anxious from the time she was a young adult. My dad told me, after she died, that she had been that way when they got married. But she got little help for it; just some amphetamines! My dad didn't seem to think it was a problem to leave her alone all day with three small children. It was kind of a disaster for us, the children, though.
A friend in New Orleans told me that when he was growing up there in the 1950s and 60s, a lot of the mothers were alcoholics. Some of them were also violent and shot at their husbands sometimes. There were suicides.
Mental health was not good in previous generations, I think. There were a lot of closeted gay people, including my grandfather. There were a lot of men having extramarital affairs, which made wives unhappy, but they couldn't talk about it. When babies died, there was no grief counseling. You were just supposed to get over it and carry on and not burden other people with your "problems." As bad as mental health care is now in the US, it did not exist at all for previous generations.
My own mom has some pretty horrible anxiety issues. She grew up mostly outdoors and mostly unsupervised. What it does is it changes anxiety from manifesting as being afraid to do things to being afraid to do things, doing them in a super stressed out way, and then spreading the stress around by yelling at people and stewing in anger for a few hours.
It's made me realize mental health issues result from recurrent patterns of communication and inadequate soothing of stress in early childhood (and metabolic issues, but that's for later). You won't get rid of mental health issues without looking at early childhood development.
Oh this is something I have been ruminating on, ever since having my daughter made me realize that while genetics can make you more sensitive to environmental stress which leads to mental health issues, it's mostly how that sensitivity is dealt with and the communication patterns that add to/remove stress from your life that led to my anxiety, depression and ADHD symptoms (I have official diagnoses for all those things). It's been a sample size of ... my family and my husband's family to come up with this theory. I wonder how well it generalizes, but my hunch is that a lot of things we write off as genetic, including mental health, talent and intelligence, are things that are passed on from parent to child in very early childhood. I've written about some of my journey here https://lila2.substack.com/p/adhdsct-is-a-stress-issue-not-a-broken
I think it’s undeniable that good parent child relationship is also of extreme importance. A sort of prerequisite perhaps or even a separate subject entirely though, despite their being intertwined, from the freedoms children need from their parents that Peter refers to here. He’s not saying this is the only thing children need, just that it is one of the important things children need.
Agree. But let's not kid ourselves: giving kids more freedom will not automatically create happy kids. Freedom is a slippery term: it can also mean "hegemonic liberty," that is, the freedom for mean kids to bully other kids out of the sight of adults. It should be a positive kind of freedom that is psychologically safe for even weak and small kids. And although adults don't like to think about it, we have made the American environment unsafe for most kids, with our cars and our guns and our sometimes mentally ill unhoused population, not to mention just the garden variety predatory men around. Most American neighborhoods are not that safe for adult women, much less kids. I don't feel safe in many places from male violence; why should I think a kid should be? There have been whole decades in my rural neighborhood when sexual harassment was a daily problem, aimed at grown women and also girls.
If you live in a small town that is safe, or a rural area that is safe, be very very grateful, because these kinds of places are becoming more rare.
I have one young kid and two teenagers, so I don’t worry about CPS or traffic or eating lead paint etc. And I wish there was enough life and community on my street to even feel judged, but since no one is out there, who cares what they privately think of me? That is the core problem here for me. No one is out there. That’s where safety and fun is, everyone in and outside; laughing and talking shit and playing. It’s an enormous loss, harder to grieve since the death was never recorded.
But I’d hazard a guess and say the best way to feel less assailed by the judgment of others is to stop yourself from judging others. If that’s not the ideal fix, it seems like the only one within reach to any person.
I resisted the social pressures early in my child's life because I happened to read John Holt's book, "How Children Fail". I was fortunate enough to grow up in the MidWest in the 60s, and I was free to roam. However I didn't feel as lucky during school, and while reading the book I felt like I was reading about my own personal experience on almost every page. My daughter was still an infant, but that is when I dedicated myself to learning as much as I could about unschooling. By the time she was school-age I had found an unschooling community. We had to drive to be with this community, but we were a large group of families with kids of all ages who supported each other with a very different set of values compared to the norm. They became our social life, and I am so grateful that we found them.
Even so, I can't say that my daughter was able to grow up free to roam. I mean she was, but when she went out there just weren't any other kids around. We even lived within a few houses of a girl her age, but that girl's mom would *never* let her play (neither outside nor inside!) But when we were with our unschooling friends several days a week life was very different.
Our daughter attends a Waldorf Steiner school - definitely a non-conformist choice here in the UK where 'Steiner parents' are regarded with a degree of suspicious curiosity. Our fellow parents are universally a play-loving, freedom-loving lot and many encourage independence of movement from an early age. However this was where we resisted conformity with the non-conformists (!) for the very reason given by Americ, and reinforced by Peter, that each child is on their own uniquely charted journey.
Our daughter was very 'dreamy' until she hit puberty, what her teacher delightfully described as 'taking her time to wake up to the world'. She loved nature and stories and had an amazing imagination, and her friends regarded her as a great playmate. But she took a long time to learn left from right and for a long time was oblivious to the potential hazards of city life. This meant that I chose to accompany her to school myself, long after her peers were walking, bussing and cycling on their own. She had no objection to thid because we could read stories on the bus, but other kids would sometimes wonder, 'Why does your mum still bring you to school?'
Of course, in her own time, our daughter did 'wake up to the world' and learnt to manage road crossings, unreliable bus timetables and all the distractions of the city. Now a grown-up teenager, she roams independently with confidence - just like the peers who got there sooner - incuding travelling abroad solo.
As parents, we need to remember that each child is unique and on their own journey through life ... just like their mum and dad!
The so-called 'parenting industry' has made being a parent much more complicated than it need be.
We live in Madrid and after a lot of research I found a Waldorf school and I become in love with the way they respect each kid development and freedom of playing.
I resist social pressure when people ask my eldest (5yo) who is his fab soccer player and he doesn’t know about soccer more than playing himself with the ball. We don’t have TV and my kids don’t know anything about soccer or Disney movies or cartoons (which I found terrible for creativity and brain development as they depict stories that doesn’t have a lot of sense). I’m usually the only one that knows about brain development and child psychology and I’m always the hippie and non-conformist in the groups I’m in…
My husband and I are quite resistant to social pressure, following our own judgements rather than the pressure from outside. We are trying to use each opportunity to promote the independence of our 8 year old son, even if this is somewhat contrary (we live in Belgium where there is less threat by police or CPS). We are greatly inspired and strengthened in our decision by these letters and the Let Grow blog posts.
However, the part of independently roaming with other kids is difficult to realize. There are no children allowed to play outside. Advocating for our beliefs to other parents is something we try to avoid. Mainly because our fear that our son would potentially gets isolated.
As we have no authority in pedagogy or psychology, we would be judged as the people ‘who know it better’, who do they think they are. The same goes to sharing our beliefs with teachers and school principals (they are the authority, why should we question that).
I think authority figures having direct influence on the parents (e.g. schools, pediatricians, and not to forget media) will have to be convinced (by other authority figures e.g. universities, policy makers) to really change the tides and make this mainstream.
Dr Naomi Fisher has been talking a lot about this recently - she was citing the instance of, when she had her first child, reading books on parenting. She tried the things suggested and they failed - with the result that SHE felt a failure.
I commented on her post because it - and the discussion here - are, to me, all symptoms of the same disease.
Society is constantly JUDGING others. Society is constantly trying to force people of all shapes and sizes into the same-sized hole - from parenting, through education (all so over-obsessed with assessment, with accountability, with micro-managing), through careers and other aspects of adult life, this just never stops.
Is it any wonder that so many people are needlessly unhappy??
Something HAS to change.
:(
When I was younger I was often by myself because I had stuff I wanted to do in my house. I didn't have many friends until my 2nd year of high school. I (almost) always resisted social pressure and gradually grew to just hate the implication that I needed to worry about peer pressures. Especially me, because "what peers?"
I might feel social pressure if more people talked to me. Most of my friends are quite weird. When I talk to them about how school is mostly a dumpster fire they relate. Lots of people still don't talk to me, except the weird ones. Those are my people.
I think that one of the key issues is that for a parent to allow free play they must first not buy into the social pressures and fear mongering. This is harder when their own anxiety is high. When they do not feel that their livelyhood is safe. That they have stability. Much of what we do in schools and parenting culture is a direct reflection of parents displacing their own anxiety on their kids.
If you know that you could lose your job at any moment and have no safety net, then you'll worry more about your kids. You'll want to keep pushing them until they have the skills you believe they need to be "safe" in our culture. We can try to teach parents that their anxieties are not fully warranted but that's hard when they are already anxious.
How do we make it better?
1. fix schools. Follow "Finnish Lessons 3.0." check out this article about a Maryland school district that's showing how it can be done: https://www.the74million.org/article/what-happens-when-a-48k-student-district-commits-to-the-science-of-learning/?
2. Tax the rich and build social safety nets,
3. universal play based childcare
4. provide parental leave
5. universal healthcare
6. universal elder care
7. gun control
8. invest in school psychology so troubled kids get help, makes schools safer
9. build a kinder gentler society that feels less cut throat
When parents feel safe. Then they can breathe and relax...and stop displacing their anxiety on their kids.
Until then, individual parents who support free play are stuck with finagling ways to let their kids have some freedom.
I will add to my own comment that when parents get the opportunity for more free play in their lives it is likely they will be more able to create that in their kids lives. Many people are working so hard that they forget how to play. I know I'm struggling with that.
I would add: men need to train other men so that violence against women and girls is not the ubiquitous, common problem that it is today.
I have been working with children and families for the past 27 years as a pediatric OT. Through the years I have noticed a few trends. First, parents have too many choices in terms of how to parent. They have the internet at their fingertips and will Dr. Google anything. On the internet you can find anything you are looking for. If your child is having difficulty with their speech development, you can find someone who tells you to wait to get help because their kid stated talking at 5 years old. Or on the flip side you can find someone who tells you your 9 month old should be starting to say the "p" sound. Both scenarios are out of development norms. Parents are trying to do the right thing, but in the end miss the mark.
Another trend I find in parents is a major lack of critical thinking and self reflection. Both of these characteristics go hand in hand in parenting. Most parents don't know who they are as a person and then what kind of parent they want to be. For example a parent who wants to potty train a child as an infant. In theory this type of potty training can be done, but what if your child doesn't follow the steps and they don't achieve the potty training just like the expert told you? What if your child has some sort of delay or medical condition and they can't potty train that early? My point is this- if a parent wants to achieve a goal on their parenting journey they must be able to make adjustments for their child in case the "thing" can't be achieved. Instead of being set on potty training your infant, the parent must be able to throw out the idea based on the facts the child is presenting.
The second prevalent fact I see is that most parents don't think about their child in terms of being on their own journey. Parents judge themselves or others if their child is not developing like their peers or if their child does something they don't like. This is where self reflection comes in. Parents who are not self aware tend to blame others for their child's behavior or mistakes. Or parents blame themselves for not doing right by their child. Both of parent tendencies miss the parenting mark. A child is their own person and PLAY is the way they learn how to be the person they are meant to be. The parent must allow their child to make mistakes and instead of taking on the guilt or lashing out at others for their child's problem/mistake they should learn how to guide their child through them. If a parent is not self reflective, being a guide for their child is difficult. I think the lack of play is the foundation to most child and parent problems in our society. I have three children and I did my best to give them a magical childhood. Because I understood that play was the most important work of a child, my now 16, 18 and 22 year old children are able to critically think through challenging problems.
Americ, I especially like your point that "most parents don't think about their child in terms of being on their own journey." If only more parents thought about that, more would take their parenting cues from their children, not so much from "experts" or parent peers.
Peter- Thanks! There needs to be a switch in the parents brain where they can start to separate themselves from their child. Once that switch happens, the parent's journey becomes more fun and the kid learns how to be the person they are meant to be. I think there is a major break down if the parent never recognizes their child is on their own path. This is where you get a child trying to be who the parent wants them to be. Possibly the professional parents who pushes their child towards college and the child wants to be a plumber instead. This is a minor example, but I see it all the time. These small parenting examples turn into big problems for the kid. It's a cycle that keeps going. I could go on all day long so I will stop. :)
'There needs to be a switch in the parents brain where they can start to separate themselves from their child. Once that switch happens, the parent's journey becomes more fun and the kid learns how to be the person they are meant to be.'
Yes, yes, YES!
I have witnessed, over and over, people who have been damaged because of parental expectations. They suffer with guilt, with resentment, with general unhappiness.
LET PEOPLE BE.
I once read a book about another culture, don't remember where. A mother spoke of the "joy of watching her child grow into themselves." It is a perspective much more respectful of the child as an individual than our culture of "raising" a kid. Like it's all parental work that "creates" the final product.
I don't think many American parents realize how much a violation of boundaries is going on when we are so focused on our influence on who they are? become?
Yep: you can send your kid out to play, but that doesn’t mean they’ll find anyone to play with.
I’ve spent most of my kids’ lives trying to low-key “help” them find friends, in various ways, and it hasn’t worked out. The only place they consistently see the same kids is at their prison of a school, which is why I’m hesitant to stop sending them, even tho I hate how the place is run.
At least the kids can bond over their common enemy?
My kids have never been to school. They are 8&12 and you’re right, there are rarely kids out during school hours. Though the parks get a few between school and dinner. The thing to remember though, is that kids don’t just make friends with kids. Mine have a true friend in many adults and teens that work in places we frequent like grocery store cashiers, the librarian, the waitress at my favorite restaurant. They keep us standing in these places for ages having conversations with any age person that’ll pay them the time of day. But we also have a homeschool group we meet up with a few times a week for a few hours for them to play and we don’t make them stay in sight, just together in groups of at least 2. That’s about 3-9 hours of the same big revolving group of all age kids from babies to teens that get to grow up playing together every week, developing long term friendships. And with the freedom they need out of our sight...
I'm originally from Australia, where I remember all summer long I played outdoors with my friends and no adult supervision. I live in China now with a 2 year old and a 5 year old. I take them to the playground and there are zero kids there. I heard even in Kindergarten in China, the kids are doing homework till 12am, 1am etc, before starting kindergarten/school at 7am the next day. It sounds like a torturous prison.
I read of this sort of regime in this part of the world all the time. It's horrendous.
:(
Yes it's the communist way
Awful. I've been reading recently of two year-olds taking grade music exams and reaching grade 8 by the age of 6.
I can't help wonder what it's all actually FOR.
Yes having lived in China for a while, I realize that what it is for, is what University you get into, which basically will determine your whole life (basically money, which is the number one important thing for almost all Chinese people). Also teaching at a University I realized that the students pay no attention to me or the lectures, the only thing that matters is cramming for the exam to get as close to 100% as possible in the exam. There are a few exceptions, like children of the elite who will make it up the ladder no matter what, and normally the elite will send their kids to Eton in UK or something equivalent in USA. Or at the other extreme, peasants, who can't afford to send their kids to any school, but their not really free to play, they are helping their parents tiliing the fields etc.
This assessment matches better with epistemic evidence then previous articles about stress induced school homework leading to suicide spikes. And is what I struggle with. In the 80s, even with John Jubert fluttering my mother's heart to over protection. We still rode our bikes through the neighborhoods until mom's wistle announced streetlights had indeed illuminated. The 90s brought massive changes that my country farm boy father could not fathom in the life of his suburban dwelling son. You had implementation of gang influences, you had readily available drugs, I watched hand guns being sold in junior high and finding a girl who hadn't lost her virginity in high school was rare. I live next to a massive public park flanked by an electric school. I see unsupervised children all the time and the tboys have changed. They got electric 2 person scooters, gas powered motor bikes, good size dogs in tow as they swing golf clubs aimed at school roofs. I would Love to send my 6 year old into the fray. But man, she knows and sees things I NEVER did at her age. The term growing up fast isn't coined by accident. And some of my friends that grew up in the inner city. They hawk their kids the most because they were watched zero as a child. Only to witness and fall into Crack dealing that led to a lifetime of being in the system. Now which do I worry about more? Stunting my daughters growth from not enough unsupervised play dates? Or doing cochise and getting pregnant by age 14 on the back of a motor bike. My mother's worry over John Jubert seems trivial by comparison.
Those specific issues aren't so much the case where I live, but do I send my kids to go by themselves downtown where, sure, there's a lot of fun stuff, but there's also unhoused folk on drugs who will just decide to hit random people? No child should have to witness that.
Exactly. This is a big problem where my sister lives in Seattle. She lives in a very nice, upscale neighborhood with a big park. The park has been invaded by unhoused, sometimes mentally ill people, with GUNS. There have been fatal shootings. Her daughter drove by an intersection one day, and a few minutes later, somebody was shot at that intersection. The park has become unusable for a lot of people as a result. Young people gather there at night and play music from huge speakers so loudly that people can't sleep, even far away from the park. The cops say they are too overloaded already to deal with the problem.
I'm a huge advocate of free play but we all need to be aware that some families live in environments that are truly concerning.
I have a couple of mildly naughty elementary school boys who were just caught this week playing ding-dong-ditch (ringing doorbells and running away). My husband and I told them we don’t want to meet all our neighbors by taking our children around to apologize for bad behavior. We want them to get out and play, we don’t want to hover, and then we get another report that they and the rest of the neighborhood boys are being wild again. They scared an elderly lady. I’m at a loss. I think there are a lot of people in our neighborhood who would prefer to never see children anywhere anyway.
I don't think "overprotectiveness" is the only issue here that people do due to social pressure. There are a lot of other parenting practices unique to the US that parents try to do or say they do because otherwise they are seen as a bad parent. Parents don't bedshare, out of fear of being seen as an unsafe parent. Parents force "independent play" on kids that are too young for that despite the child's protests, because other people's kids play independently. Parents sleep train their kids because everyone else is doing it and tells them to, even if it goes against their every instinct, and then they beat themselves up for being weak. Parents force their kids into daycare because they think that's what you're supposed to do. Even stay at home moms make their kids go to daycare for the "socialization". And they do this even if their kids hate it, because that's how you build individualistic children like america wants, not namby pamby sensitive kids.
The reason this is relevant here is it is upstream of all the malaises that you talk about. Parents start off parenting going against every protective instinct they had about their baby. You're not entirely comfortable putting your kid in daycare at 8mo but due to circumstances and peer pressure, you think it's the only choice. Try as you may, your natural instinct to care for your child in a personalized way is not going to go away, and it manifests as "overprotection". And for good reason TBH, there's too many daycares that are awful to kids and you need to be quite watchful. And even in school, you can't just send your kid to school and let the teachers do their work - you're supposed to fundraise. You're supposed to reinforce what teachers teach. You're supposed to be part of the PTA and buy teachers supplies. And then teachers aren't great and you need to advocate for your children. The reason parents need to be overprotective is because institutions either don't do their job or have in front of them an impossible job that is better done by the parents.
If parents don't spend a lot of time with their children in the first three years, they aren't familiar enough with their kids to be confident in their abilities, and they aren't able to hold their hand through their initial risk-taking to make them bolder. As kids get older, the distance grows and the picture of the kid's needs and wants get even murkier.
A dad i know works 12-14 hour days, barely gets to hang with the kids. The one thing he went to was a father's day event at the preschool where all the kids had drawn pictures of their dads. Well, most, because his kid had just scribbled on paper and couldn't draw a face. His only idea of his kid's abilities and process was through this picture, and he saw his kid was lagging, so he straight up instructed the kid's mom to work on the kid's face drawing ability. If you aren't spending a lot of time with your kids, you don't get their perspective of wins and losses, all that happens is you see when they fail and then rush to fix that. Their wins are expected, losses are bad and need correction. That's what leads parents to be "overprotective".
If a parent walks with his kid to the park regularly, he's going to be way more confident letting him walk alone one day and be more confident in telling him what to avoid, and as the kid does small things like this, his own confidence and his parent's confidence in him grows. But if that's not what's happening, then no one's going to get more confident.
I am currently reading The Anxious Generation and it's annoying to see parents being blamed for being too overprotective, while no one's talking about why parents feel less confident themselves. Everyone on this topic seems to assume that kids can just raise themselves while adults do their own thing, if only they are given a big enough playground. No one seems to even consider the role of the parents and teachers in early childhood apart from keeping the child alive. And hence the problems you bring up won't get solved. Which seems to suit a lot of the people here, they just seem to get rich off of alarmism and writing new books saying "the problem is even worse than i imagined and my last book didn't have allll the solutions, but this one definitely..."
Thank you, Peter, for your as usual thought provoking post.
As a teacher of Parent Effectiveness Training by Thomas Gordon and an accompanier of John Holt (especially for your topic here, his “Escape From Childhood) for me your post on the crippling conformity to social (ab)norms regarding restricing children’s freedom to protect them can be understood via this quote of John’s:
“To trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves; and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.” John Holt
As Goethe knew “As you come to trust yourself you will know how to live.”
Get free, stay free.
The counter-point to this discussion is that the main social conformity that parents' face is in accepting the dual income work culture. This is perhaps the main driver of the childhood mental health crisis that we now see. Economics is more at the center of our social dysfunction than psychology/sociology/social psychology.
The impact of work culture on the well-being of children was highlighted for me by my primary school experience. Even in early primary school grades some of my classmates already were demonstrating mental distress. However, I was an incredibly happy grade school student; it was a super fun time in my life. I had a stay at home mom and life was great. At that time I already assumed the role of being part of the support system for my peers who were shouldering grown up responsibilities in support of their dual income families. Having children grow up too fast is not a blueprint for lifelong mental well-being. I am the first generation of my family to live in an urban environment, and it seemed somewhat surprising that happy children seemed like such an oxymoron.
It was only in middle school and high school that we finally wised up and conceded to the relentless pressure to accept the dual income work culture. My family quickly became just as mentally distressed as my friends had been. We were no longer the suckers who were providing psychological support to our peers. Mentally healthy children is a luxury that the upwardly striving middle class cannot afford. Modern urban life has then become an increasingly toxic environment for children. Almost immediately once I left the bricks and mortar dystopia, I felt tremendously better. The answer to our problems is so obvious -- embrace remote lifestyles so that you are not internalizing other people's psychic toxins. Funnily enough, as soon as people embrace this strategy, bricks and mortar will be immediately motivated (for the sake of their continued existence) to create healthier environments for children.
It was only through the years that I have been able to sort through the logic of the above.
In economics, it is called the tragedy of the commons. Imagine that there is a field of strawberries. Everyone in the community can go to the field and pick as many strawberries that they like. For years and years everyone enjoys picking a few strawberries and there seems a limitless supply. Then one day they bring in robotic strawberry pickers and all of the strawberries are picked and the community cannot enjoy the common resource. In the analogy the strawberries are the happy children.
Another way to describe this is as a negative externality. Parents have realized that they can dump all sorts of mental stress onto their children (without expense) and then this is externalized to the community in the schools. It is no mystery that working reasonable hours can provide a good childhood. Yet, not maximizing work hours is a marginal cost for parents.
To maximize their utility all one needs to do is make someone else pay the "psychic" costs for you. The dismal science wins once again: There might then seem to be no easy way around the tragedy of the commons problem. Childhood will continue to become bleaker and bleaker until we reach some sort of equilibrium at a disturbingly low level.
However, school choice might finally help us break out of this abysmal logic. As soon as choices are available, the more optimal outcome of happy children becomes possible once again. Parents could then choose to send their children to schools with happy children whose parents are not externalizing psychic costs.
When my rural relatives became aware of how us city folks lived, they were truly shocked. They could not imagine the level of child abuse that was involved. Down home, the community will not allow the type of behavior that I have described. I found their surprise equally surprising because in our community the above logic has become normalized. Social conformity in work culture has moved us to the point in which childhood has become an exceptionally bleak time without any clear escape -- school choice is then a welcome ray of sunshine. Is it really any mystery why total fertility rates have plummeted? Who wants to bring children into a world in which their lives are described by the tragedy of the commons?
I live in a rural community where physical abuse is not only condoned but considered to be a Christian duty. Sexual abuse of children is also all too common: I get frequent emails telling me that a sex offender has moved out of my neighborhood. The crime is always sexual abuse of a minor. (For some reason they don't tell me when the perpetrator moves INTO the neighborhood.) Social workers are too overloaded to be bothered with something like hitting a child. If you want your child to be free from physical punishment at school, you have to fill out a special form. So physical abuse is not just in cities, or not even mainly in cities where I live.
Also school choice here in TN means that there are charter schools run by private entrepreneurs students can attend for free as if it was a public school, but my experience working at charter schools revealed that many of them are very poorly run by people with no experience in school administration or even teaching. Sometimes it means that Christian schools are supported by state dollars.
Thank you for your comment shannon.
Regarding child abuse, I was thinking more about psychological abuse. Yet, physical and sexual abuse of children by bricks and mortar schools immediately stops when online learning choices are offered. Once again we see in bricks and mortar school environments how government monopolized systems inevitably lead to high risk of abuse exactly because there are no realistic options presented. If I had been given such choices, I would have left my school environments for these very reasons.
School choice clearly seems to be a step forward. We need innovation -- we need more individualized environments for learning -- we need free markets to help improve the monopoly structures that we currently have. A revolution in enhanced child-well-being is underway. I have experienced online learning and it has made a transformative impact on my life (in comparison to bricks and mortar). Online learning institutes appear highly aware of the competitive marketplace that they are in and behave accordingly.
I'm sorry but your statement that abuse stops when children switch from physical schools to online learning is just incorrect. Isolating children with no trustworthy figures to help them but their parents is exactly how abuse happens. They would also be further isolated if their computer activities are monitored, like a lot of learning software is doing now.
Thank you very much for commenting Gwen! I find that when people engage in honest dialogue there is a way to elevate the conversation and arrive at a better synthesis.
This is true that yet different forms of abuse could then arise as you move to an online learning model. I was thinking more of the physical, sexual and other abuse that can be present in bricks and mortar reality. The problem is that bricks and mortar monopoly school environments have been widespread for over a century and so they have been highly analyzed by those with an intent to control and abuse others. Those with insight into the nature of these school environments clearly understand how truly dysfunctional they can be.
My overwhelmingly personal experience has been that online learning environments were vastly less abusive than physical environments. After leaving bricks and mortar learning spaces I immediately felt a massive wave of relief. It was an extreme experience. You feel so trapped in these monopolies and there is no obvious escape from them. With online learning environments I have not felt like that; it always feels much more tentative. Whenever I choose I can go to another online school -- there is no longer the same strong need to stay in any one "place". Taking away the physical control that is present in bricks and mortar reality and adding in a world of online choice entirely changes the nature of the power relationships involved.
Interestingly, after COVID, a large number of workers voted on whether they wanted to remain remote -- many workplaces overwhelmingly voted in favor of not returning to the office. Workers often expressed the sentiment that they derived ZERO happiness from their work environment. None of their coworkers gave them any joy? The same basic aspects of control issues that arose in bricks and mortar learning environments seemed to transfer over to physical work environments.
In the online learning environments that I have been part of there is minimal "daycare" type monitoring: You just do your work. Even cyberbullying is absent because one need not have ANY contact with other students or largely even the tutors. Online learning can then be heterogeneous in ways that a physical school could never be and it can be implemented in ways in which parallels to physical world settings are no longer possible. Ironically, with online learning there is a return to a focus purely on learning and away from a very wide range of issues that are merely distractions from learning -- strangely, many students then are uncomfortable with such learning environments.
The problem with the idea of school choice. As it is on the ballot here in the battle ground of District 2 Nebraska. Is that its a catch all for moving public tax dollars to private institutions ran by church groups. In rural areas it would basically be public school vs Catholic church. Free market systems do not solve utility like institutions.
Thank you for commenting Ryan!
Yes, you are quite correct that there is now evolving a certain second wave logic around school choice. What we typically see when government monopolies collapse is a near complete implosion of the entire system -- That is what happened when the Wall fell and the post-Soviet nations flipped their entire political systems overnight.
This breaking of the dam has already occurred with the first round of states choosing universal school choice. However, there are still a few more laggard states from the first wave that are in motion towards legislating on this. Mostly, what we see are the states below the 37th North latitude are embracing the full transition-- They form the core of a school choice revolution that has now seemingly become a permanent feature of the educational landscape.
The Northern Great Plain States have been much less enthusiastic in joining the revolution; In fact, none of them have actually accepted universal school choice. Sometimes we can move directly from one type of totalitarianism to another form of totalitarianism -- Everyone is expected to be part of the school choice revolution, even when it does not really reflect their particular experience. To avoid this you really want to think carefully about what is right for different places with different needs and then fit the upgrade to respect such differences; one possible workaround in some states (perhaps such as Nebraska) might be more that big cities and places that have multiple learning choices available to students would be designated school choice areas and rural and small towns that do not currently support such abundant choice would not be included in the school choice legislation. This could avoid the potential problem of greatly stressing a small town's only high school etc. by offering school vouchers. It is somewhat surprising to me that such an approach has not been more widely recognized. Basically, it would entirely undermine the political resistance that we have seen.
I feel this assessment. There was a previous letter that Grey wrote. It's thesis allocated spikes in anxiety from school work related pressure with results in increased suicides as evidence. However, with a huge portion of our population not capable of reading or writing at 7th grade levels. I find the thesis breaks. If you tweak the hypothesis tho, to include parent child interaction and not isolate it to child society interaction. You see a reduction in anxiety amongst children during Covid not because of a lack of school work. But because an absent parent under economic stress was suddenly present and prioritizing what mattered most. The child.
Thank you for replying Ryan.
Yes, there are all of these theories about cell phones and even children's play, all the while ignoring the elephant in the closet -- the parental work culture. There are so many vested interests involved in avoiding the obvious; the government and others likely will even give parents awards for their service to the community as they neglect their duty to protect their own children. This is supposedly some great sign of progress, even when we see this increasingly disturbing decline in childhood well-being. Traditional societies have been able to rear healthy happy children for thousands of years -- how is it that modern urban educated societies are failing so dramatically?
The research that you noted is truly sobering. It is almost hard to believe that the evidence of school psychological harm is now so clear. Children self-harm more when they are in school and when they are out of school they self-harm less. COVID even showed that this cycle can be changed during the school year by shutting down the school system. How is it that this is not considered an emergency that needs to be corrected immediately?
While I agree that kids nowadays need more time for unstructured, unsupervised play, I don't believe it is a panacea for the depression and mental problems that seem so prevalent in people these days. Some of the most psychologically disturbed people I know had remarkably free childhoods, and yet they are still quite dysfunctional.
One cousin of my own age grew up on an island in Hawaii in the 1960s. The kids had little schoolwork, and were able to run around a small community outside most of the time. Unfortunately, my cousin was subjected to some sexual abuse in childhood while she lived in Hawaii. Again, I don't know if that's the main reason for her dysfunction, but at present at age 69 she is unable to function normally and have normal relationships.
I didn't realize how bad the situation was until recently. She went to stay for a while at a house in the mountains that I am responsible for. She said she was coming for two weeks, and then asked to stay another week. Then she stayed on again for another week and clearly had no intention of leaving. In the end, I had to get her brother to pressure her to leave, and I had to text her and her daughter repeatedly. I heard that they left a terrible mess in the kitchen that I will have to clean up. This cousin has not worked in decades, and her daughter only works sporadically. They have few relationships, and their relationships with family are very strained.
This kind of exploitative and sometimes abusive personality disorder in people my own age is pretty common. We who grew up in the 50s and 60s had quite a lot of freedom away from adult control. But it did not result in perfectly well-adjusted adults! Nor was that the case with the previous generation who had even more freedom: my dad and his sister, born in the rural South in the 1920s, were fairly successful professionally, but both were quite narcissistic and sometimes abusive toward other people.
Some of the most difficult adults I've ever encountered were from this generation of people born in the 1920s and raised in the 1930s. At times I attributed their extreme narcissism and even violence to the fact that they were neglected because of the Great Depression. The kinds of childhoods they describe would certainly be described now as neglectful. My aunt told me of a serious injury she incurred while playing in the early 1930s: she had to get herself to the hospital in her small town, and her parents didn't show up until hours later, as they had driven to another town that day. But according to Peter, this "neglect" was actually beneficial.
It's possible that it was not the neglect per se that made these adults so awful. There were also crazy child-rearing theories abounding in the early 20th century in the US, such as the idea that holding and touching and cuddling children was harmful to them. This advice was aimed at "overly sentimental" mothers in particular. In photographs from the 1930s, I see that my grandparents rarely did hold their children, even for feeding: they kept them literally at arms' length, in special baby chairs and the like. At most they might be seated next to a child, but there are no photos of them with my dad and his sister on their laps.
We can be grateful that this very damaging idea was discredited, but it did a great deal of harm to a lot of people, ironically the most educated people. Educated women were the ones who were likely to read books about "scientific child-raising," and to believe the men who said they should not hold their babies. Those babies, in turn, grew up to be adults who had trouble being affectionate with their own children, the baby boomers. Luckily the baby boomers rejected this whole manner of child-rearing and resurrected natural birth and breastfeeding and cuddling. Our own kids are better parents as a result.
Yeah lol American child rearing practices have been toxic for about a 100 years now, and harking back to any past might not give any good results. What I think people are now calling "mental health crisis" in adolescents is just a spike in internalizing mental health issues like anxiety and depression. But folks I know from previous generations seem like all had a lot of externalizing mental health issues where they acted out in all kinds of ways, ran away, committed crimes, had sex too young, drank, and what not to cope. I don't think that's what we need to go back to.
There was also a lot of depression and anxiety though. My mother was deeply depressed and anxious from the time she was a young adult. My dad told me, after she died, that she had been that way when they got married. But she got little help for it; just some amphetamines! My dad didn't seem to think it was a problem to leave her alone all day with three small children. It was kind of a disaster for us, the children, though.
A friend in New Orleans told me that when he was growing up there in the 1950s and 60s, a lot of the mothers were alcoholics. Some of them were also violent and shot at their husbands sometimes. There were suicides.
Mental health was not good in previous generations, I think. There were a lot of closeted gay people, including my grandfather. There were a lot of men having extramarital affairs, which made wives unhappy, but they couldn't talk about it. When babies died, there was no grief counseling. You were just supposed to get over it and carry on and not burden other people with your "problems." As bad as mental health care is now in the US, it did not exist at all for previous generations.
My own mom has some pretty horrible anxiety issues. She grew up mostly outdoors and mostly unsupervised. What it does is it changes anxiety from manifesting as being afraid to do things to being afraid to do things, doing them in a super stressed out way, and then spreading the stress around by yelling at people and stewing in anger for a few hours.
It's made me realize mental health issues result from recurrent patterns of communication and inadequate soothing of stress in early childhood (and metabolic issues, but that's for later). You won't get rid of mental health issues without looking at early childhood development.
It could also be partly genetic.
Oh this is something I have been ruminating on, ever since having my daughter made me realize that while genetics can make you more sensitive to environmental stress which leads to mental health issues, it's mostly how that sensitivity is dealt with and the communication patterns that add to/remove stress from your life that led to my anxiety, depression and ADHD symptoms (I have official diagnoses for all those things). It's been a sample size of ... my family and my husband's family to come up with this theory. I wonder how well it generalizes, but my hunch is that a lot of things we write off as genetic, including mental health, talent and intelligence, are things that are passed on from parent to child in very early childhood. I've written about some of my journey here https://lila2.substack.com/p/adhdsct-is-a-stress-issue-not-a-broken
I think it’s undeniable that good parent child relationship is also of extreme importance. A sort of prerequisite perhaps or even a separate subject entirely though, despite their being intertwined, from the freedoms children need from their parents that Peter refers to here. He’s not saying this is the only thing children need, just that it is one of the important things children need.
Agree. But let's not kid ourselves: giving kids more freedom will not automatically create happy kids. Freedom is a slippery term: it can also mean "hegemonic liberty," that is, the freedom for mean kids to bully other kids out of the sight of adults. It should be a positive kind of freedom that is psychologically safe for even weak and small kids. And although adults don't like to think about it, we have made the American environment unsafe for most kids, with our cars and our guns and our sometimes mentally ill unhoused population, not to mention just the garden variety predatory men around. Most American neighborhoods are not that safe for adult women, much less kids. I don't feel safe in many places from male violence; why should I think a kid should be? There have been whole decades in my rural neighborhood when sexual harassment was a daily problem, aimed at grown women and also girls.
If you live in a small town that is safe, or a rural area that is safe, be very very grateful, because these kinds of places are becoming more rare.