Jonathan Haidt, professor of social psychology at New York University (NYU) Stern School of Business, is a crusader for getting kids off screens. As a front-line witness to his students’ social shift from friend groups to being utterly lost in the online world, he has advocated for getting cellphones out of schools. In his most recent published research with Zach Rausch, an NYU colleague, and Lenore Skenazy, co-founder of the nonprofit Let Grow, whose mission is to promote childhood independence, the trio teamed up with Harris Poll to find out what kids desire as an alternative to being on their phones.
The survey solicited answers from 500 participants ages 8-12. Most of them had access to a cellphone, and almost all of them had a friend who was on social media. Each of the children was asked how he or she prefers to spend time with friends: unstructured play, organized activities, or online. The clear winner was unstructured play. More importantly, children wanted freedom from helicopter parenting, which they have only been able to find through online gaming and social media.
Kids want their friendship community, yes, but they also want more universal freedom than they have been given in this day and age.
In a different Harris survey, parents were asked what they believed would happen to a pair of 10-year-olds if they were permitted to play at their local playground unsupervised. Half of the parents believed the children would get kidnapped. While that’s not entirely an unreasonable fear, parents today have a very hard time letting go. We have been told that we live in a dangerous world and that kids who aren’t watched in perpetuity have terrible things happen to them. There’s an implicit belief that too much freedom means you don’t love your kids.
Have we as parents inadvertently stunted our kids’ development because we are afraid to let them play unsupervised out of fear that they’ll get hurt, or worse?
It’s a balancing act. On the one hand, parents have become fearful that they are feeding the very digital monster that’s keeping their kids sedentary and chronically online. Children today are less capable and independent as a result. Gen Zers struggle to interact socially, and most are so dependent on their parents that they take them to job interviews. On the other hand, too much freedom without guidance or care can put kids in dangerous, sometimes unthinkable situations.
We need to find the middle ground. Kids crave that sense of independence and freedom, but they also need it developmentally. How will they know where the boundaries are if they don’t push to find them? They need this autonomy for their mental well-being as well because they’ve been so protected and monitored from getting into anything dangerous that they have developed a sense of helplessness, which is likely contributing to the adolescent mental health crisis.
“One of the best solutions for combating mental health problems and raising happy, confident kids is to give them more independence, not less,” notes an article by two Chicago-area moms on Let Grow.“ Children need autonomy. Research in developmental science shows that autonomous, unsupervised play is not a ‘nice to have’ in childhood — it is an indispensable ingredient for healthy social, cognitive and emotional development. This includes, at minimum, letting them out of your sight for a few minutes at the playground once they’re of a certain age.”
As much as we want free-range kids, we need to acknowledge that this is not always a possibility. Some examples are if you live in a rough neighborhood, in a community where there aren’t other children, or in an urban area where there is a playground desert.
Nevertheless, there are ways to allow your child to develop those skills and feel confident without adult supervision. Some ideas about how to facilitate this autonomy include having them go into a fast-food restaurant to order their food, sending them to the grocery store with a list and money, dropping them off at the library, or coordinating a play date with friends at a park in a safe neighborhood and picking them up at a predetermined time.
By overprotecting our children, we are keeping them in perpetual adolescence and robbing them of the ability to think independently and critically without adult input. Perhaps changes are coming. As parents move away from gentle parenting and adopt a more authoritative style of parenting — FAFO, if you will — the fear of their children not being able to handle themselves in the real world will become less acute. It may also have the added benefit of detoxing them from their screen addiction. What a blessing that would be.
