When I was a kid, my mother delineated a roughly four-block area around our house that I was never to go beyond. She called the perimeter my “boundaries.” But within them, where all of my friends lived, I was free to play after school and all day on the weekends, coming home only for meals, hearkening to her calling my name out the window. (Her voice could carry!)
But from 1981 to 1997, American kids’ unstructured playtime went down 25 percent. In the ’70s, nearly half of students in kindergarten through eighth grades walked or biked to school; today, only about one in 10 do. In a 2004 survey, 70 percent of mothers said they played outside every day as kids, but only about a third of their kids did. For her book “Free-Range Kids,” Lenore Skenazy mentions a reporter who interviewed four generations of a family (in Britain, where this has happened as well) and found that:
The 88-year-old great-grandpa, George, used to walk six miles to his favorite fishing hole, alone, at age 8. His son, now 63, played in the woods a mile from his home when he was 8. His daughter, at that same age, walked half a mile to school. Now her son, age 8, is driven to school. He is not allowed to leave his block, and neither are any of his friends. Most of them don’t even leave their yards.
There are new neighborhood norms, such as parents shaming one another for letting their 8- and 10-year-olds ride three blocks to other kids’ houses or for letting their fifth graders walk five blocks to school, according to “Free-Range Kids.” The way the kids in “Peanuts” lived looks antique now.
But should it? Never playing without grown-ups around is a problem for children. In line with many studies, a recent article by Peter Gray, David Lancy and David Bjorklund concludes that “a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults.” True and extended play — rather than supervised “activities” — gives kids a sense of autonomy and helps them learn social skills and even physical coordination. Elsewhere, Gray has said, “Until very recent times, during all of human history with the exception of times of child slavery or intense child labor, children always spent enormous amounts of time playing and exploring with other children away from adults.”
One might reasonably suppose that we hold our kids so close today because the danger of their being assaulted or abducted has risen since the old days. The problem — good news — is that it hasn’t. Violent crime peaked in the United States in the early 1990s, but today children are as safe overall as they were before.
That may sound counterintuitive, but Skenazy is invaluable on this point. She was briefly notorious in 2008, when she published an article in The New York Sun noting that she allowed her then-9-year-old son to ride the New York City subway by himself. (It should be noted that fewer assaults and murders happened on New York subways in this era than in the post-pandemic situation I have described here.) Labeled “America’s worst mom,” Skenazy founded the Free-Range Kids movement and is now the president of its nonprofit organization, Let Grow. It is dedicated to making it “easy, normal and legal to give kids the independence they need to grow into capable, confident and happy adults.”