Oct 22, 2023 in Life Coaching

It’s About The Kids

Our kids need to be outside, unsupervised, more than we’re allowing them to be.

There’s a meme that resonated with me and while I don’t remember the exact wording, it had to do with an 80s or 90s kid going out to play. He said to his mom there was a dead body in the woods and he and his friends wanted to go see it. And let’s be real, those woods are probably 5 miles away on a back country road with one hundred distractions along the way.  Before I tell you what she said, let me guess what you’re saying. “How irresponsible!” “She needs to keep him safe!” “What if he gets dry rot from touching the body?” “What if he’s a ghost and it’s his dead body?” Maybe that last one is because I’ve seen Sixth Sense too many times. But you get the idea. That type of freedom is unheard of today. What did that mom say? “You better not bring any dead bodies back to this house or you wait until your father gets home!” Funny, but that was the attitude of many parents, which has since waned.

We live in a society that was brought up by the first generation of helicopter parents from the late 70s going all the way into the 90s and beyond. Ironically, during that time we also coined the term “latchkey kid” because they stayed at home alone for a few hours because both parents worked. Slowly and slowly, we’ve begun restricting kids’ freedom from the outside world with the safety of supervised activities. We could say it’s an effort to keep them away from the television or out of gangs or keep them “off the street”, but the reality is, we want control and knowledge of where our kids are at. All. The. Time. We need to know they’re safe. Not just pray (if that’s your thing) or hope they are. We worry about sex trafficking and abductions, even though there’s no evidence to support that those crimes are on the rise. In fact, there’s evidence to suggest crime has decreased in the United States since the 1970s. Even more frustrating—it’s easy to correlate this with the rise of televisions in the home and the rise of the Internet.

“Oh, here we go.” I hear you. I do. You’re tired of hearing how television and the Internet are bad for us. I am too. I hated hearing that and have been a part of the anti-censorship movement since I could form intelligent arguments. But let’s take our feelings out of the mix for a second and look at the data. I have two sites I trust for this kind of information. The first is the Pew Research Institute and the other is the website FiveThirtyEight.com, which was founded by Nate Silver. Maggie Koerth and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux of the latter website wrote an article on crime in the United States. What they found was violent crime has decreased since the 1970s, not increased (they did remove 2020 data because it was an anomaly based on the pandemic). Why is this important though? Because kids need to be outside, unsupervised, more than we’re allowing them to be.

Peter Gray, a professor of psychology at Boston College, is one of the world's foremost experts on play for children. He gave a TED Talk regarding the state of play in America and founded LetGrow.org, which is dedicated to helping parents find strategies to give kids more autonomy for play. In his research, he found correlating evidence with the rise of depression, anxiety, and suicide in young children and teens to the lack of unsupervised play. Given both of these facts, we’ve done children a serious disservice and it’s not because we’re uninformed or misinformed, as Koerth and Thomson-DeVeaux state in their article. It’s because we’re over-informed. We hear more about bad things going on not only in the country but around the world than we ever have before.

Think about what’s happened during the last 50 years or so. Televisions went from 1 % ownership in 1948 to more than 95% in the mid-90s. Cable television subscriptions also steadily rose over that time and the Internet became prevalent in the majority of homes in the mid to late 90s. And now we have, I would argue, an epidemic of mental health problems in our children. While correlation does not equal causation, as Gray also pointed out, the evidence is damning all the same. This rise in information has led to our lack of feeling secure in our own neighborhoods. And we’re terrible at assessing those kinds of dangers, as the Koerth article points out. Did you know people don’t feel safe in their neighborhoods because of litter or abandoned vehicles? Also, if there were young black men living in those neighborhoods that also decreased people's feelings of safety, that statistic included both white and black households. We perceive danger through a distorted lens based on experiences or hearsay rather than the actual facts. Are some cities safer than others, sure. It only makes sense there are more dangers in highly populated areas than in places that are less populated. It’s another numbers game. But that doesn’t mean we’re less safe in the US. As I mentioned earlier, we see the opposite, criminally speaking.

So, the solution here is two-fold. Not only do we need to allow our kids to have more freedom in order to right the ship on this mental health crisis, but we also need to examine our fears and correct the lenses through which we see the world. Counseling or therapy, personality/spirituality coaching, or even consuming less media are other ways to help us examine ourselves and the world around us. If we want to make less anxious kids, we need less anxious adults.

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