Leave those children alone
Timothy P. Carney
If you rely on sociologists to understand why people are having fewer children, you’re apt to hear that this is a happy story: In wealthy societies, parents are choosing “quality over quantity.”
“With fewer children to support, parents and society can both invest more in each child, helping them to climb the ladder and become productive citizens in their adult years,” Brookings Institution scholar Isabel Sawhill writes.
It sure doesn’t seem that way, though. It seems adults are overinvesting in each child, micromanaging their lives in the name of “enrichment” or safety, and that adults and children are a lot less mentally healthy because of it.
“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,” child development experts write in the Journal of Pediatrics.
Whether the “high-quality” parents are doing it to get their children into Yale, out of fear of their child falling into the underclass, or out of terror of human traffickers around every corner, parents are denying children the freedom they need.
Children are far less likely to walk to and from school — or anywhere, really — than they were a generation or two ago. Parents don’t let 10-year-olds go to the playground unaccompanied. And then, we fill the children’s time with music lessons, travel lacrosse, and mountains and mountains of homework — on top of all the clubs with which they’re supposed to fill out their high school transcripts.
Even recess seems to be disappearing. Children get less than 30 minutes a day of freedom at school, and many get none, according to the paper in the Journal of Pediatrics.
The authors suggest this is a leading cause of the massive increase in anxiety, mood disorders, and suicide and suicidal thoughts.
Freedom (and even boredom) makes children happy in the short term and probably more equipped for life in the long run. Making up your own games, wandering the neighborhood for hours, and even getting lost all help make well-adjusted children. But children do that less and less every year.
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Many parents don’t choose to overparent, they just find that they are expected to — and instructed to. After all, who would deny their child “high-quality” parenting?
But it turns out that there’s nothing high-quality about max-effort parenting and minimum-freedom childhood.