Getting Childhood Wrong

A facet of modern life that troubles me is the way today's adults seem to micromanage their children, often out anxiety, to where the childhood I had in the ’70s and early ’80s has become unimaginable. School would get out at 2:15, we'd go home, drop off our books, then head right back out. On foot, on our bikes. We knew to be home by dinnertime, but otherwise, this was all unsupervised fun. No parent knew exactly where we were.

Why, at Halloween we would knock on the doors of strangers' houses, ask for candy, then eat it!

Unthinkable today. Now kids go from car seats to pre-school, to after-school activities, to AYSO-this and piano-lessons that, chauffeured from appointment to appointment by white-knuckled parents who are just sure that if they turn their heads for a moment, disaster will befall their little one.

It's all about safety. All the time. And self-esteem. No skinned knees allowed and no bruised feelings, either.

So has all of this made kids safer?

Clinical questionnaires aimed at assessing anxiety and depression, for example, have been given in unchanged form to normative groups of schoolchildren in the US ever since the 1950s. Analyses of the results reveal a continuous, essentially linear, increase in anxiety and depression in young people over the decades, such that the rates of what today would be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. Over the same period, the suicide rate for young people aged 15 to 24 has more than doubled, and that for children under age 15 has quadrupled

Quadrupled! Read the whole thing at Aeon Magazine. It explains beautifully why unstructured play is actually better for children.

HT:  Instapundit.com