When those of us of a certain age, which is to say, senior citizens, reminisce on our childhoods, we usually recall entire mornings, afternoons and evenings of playing outside with our friends, riding our bicycles around town, or exploring forests, climbing trees, scaling rocks, dropping from roped tires into local swimming holes, sledding down the town’s steepest hills, building rafts to embark on our own on the Little River, playing hide-and-go-seek in the dark. We were outside all day, called inside only for lunch, dinner, and bedtime. “Go play,” was the instruction we received from our parents. Turns out, they weren’t negligent. Our parents really did know what they were doing.

Such is the subject of the New York Times best-seller published last year, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Author Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist who has written several books, discusses the adverse consequences of the shift from “play-based childhood” to “phone-based childhood”, which includes all internet-connected electronic devices – computers, laptops, tablets, consoles and smartphones. Haidt’s studies further the findings of Richard Louv in Last Child in the Woods, which defined “nature deprivation” and its negative impact physically, intellectually, and emotionally on children and informed the No Child Left Inside Act of 2023. Louv identified out-door play as the most important element in reversing the trend, specifically unstructured, unregulated play. Haidt echoes and extends these assertions, focusing less on interactions with nature, with fresh air and sunshine, and more on the importance of free play.

Haidt relies on developmental psychologist Peter Gray’s definition of play as “activity that is freely chosen and directed by the participants and undertaken for its own sake, not consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself.” He asserts that outdoor play, with children of mixed ages, is the “healthiest, most natural, most beneficial sort”. Haidt stipulates that to enhance physical skills, through self-imposed risks and challenges, social skills, through learning to take turns and resolve conflicts, and emotional skills, through self-regulation of one’s own feelings and awareness of the feelings of others, play must be unstructured and unsupervised. “When parents, teachers and coaches get involved,” he asserts, “it becomes less free, less playful, and less beneficial”.

Decisions on strict supervision of children, arising around the same time as computer use, were counterintuitive, Haidt claims. The fear of “outside” escalated at the same time crime and violence against children dropped precipitously, while predators became prevalent on the internet, resulting in the “overprotection in the real world and under-protection in the virtual world,” Haidt writes. While a normal degree of parental protectiveness is innate, somehow this instinct has spilled into what’s commonly called “helicopter parenting”, the “hyper-involvement in all aspects of a child’s life”, interfering with children’s homework, teams, and friends, selecting and scheduling activities to consume their free time, and eliminating challenges children select for themselves to tackle and solve. The “discover mode” in children, Haidt explains, the behavioral activation system which provides opportunities, and the “defense mode”, the behavioral inhibition system which detects threats, need to work in consort. An overabundance of vigilance correlates with later anxiety disorders because the defense mode becomes a child’s default, rather than the discover mode, which fosters learning and growth.

Unsupervised play instructs children on taking risks. “By building physical, psychological and social competence, it gives kids confidence that they can face new situations, which is an inoculation against anxiety.” Children innately include risk in their play, and increasingly add to it. They need to swing way into the air, and jump off. They need to slide down slippery hills. They need to ride rollercoasters. There are six types of risky play: heights, as in climbing trees and playground equipment; speed, on bicycles and sleds; tools, as in bows and arrows and hammers; elements, like water; rough-and-tumble play; and disappearing, as in hide-and-go-seek. Play with a degree of physical risk teaches children to look after themselves and each other, to learn to judge risk for themselves and to take appropriate action. And parents need to remember: children are “anti-fragile”. Just as early exposure to dirt is essential for children’s immune system, thrilling experiences produce anti-phobic effects.

Public playgrounds have also become over-protective, though one could argue that this is the result of over-protection against potential law suits. Think of the difference between the playgrounds of today and yesterday. Haidt compares photographs of “overly safe playgrounds”, equipment insulated from all possible risk leaving children with no way “to learn how to not get hurt”, with what he labels “the greatest piece of playground equipment ever invented” – the spinner. Remember those? Fondly, I’ll bet. This wheel allowed for at least eight children to hold on to side rails, standing or sitting, while the spinner went round and round. The more kids, the merrier, or rather, the faster. The equipment provided thrills, required cooperation, taught lessons on centrifugal force, and offered opportunities for risk with minimal risk to injuries. Haidt writes: “Researchers who study children at play have concluded that the risk of minor injuries should be a feature…in playground design.”

In our yard, though upon request we play Hide-and-Go-Seek, Mother May I?, Red Light! Green Light!, badminton, catch and tag, most of the summertime is spent with the directive – “Go play”, and our grandson has never complained, from dawn to dusk, of boredom, or that he couldn’t find something to do. We find him in a tree, challenging himself to higher limbs, on the stone wall, wielding fallen branches like a swashbuckler, in the sand box, mixing concoctions or building roads for his trucks, or aloft in the tree house. As I write this, he’s dreaming of snow to build with, slide on, and throw, happy for now with the opportunity to crash through the thin ice of puddles in the lawn, and skate on the solid ice of ponds. New England is so fortunate in its seasons.

I’ve written of the role the garden plays in children’s lives several times. The Flowers of Childhood urged gardeners to permit wildflowers like milkweed and daisies into the garden. Children in the Garden reminded readers of their inherent wonderment in nature. No Child Left Inside provided ideas on fostering their natural curiosity. Most recently, I wrote of the role the garden played in my daughter’s life, and in her son’s. Haidt encourages parents to “become better gardeners – those who create a space in which their children can learn and grow – in contrast to carpenters who try to mold and shape their children directly.” He asserts that the most important thing we can do to become ‘better gardeners’ is to facilitate more unsupervised free play. Calling the “rewiring of childhood” a “catastrophic failure,” he writes: “It’s time to end the experiment. Let’s bring our children home”.

Dayna McDermott