Below, Peter Gray shares five key insights from his new book, Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety.
Peter is a research psychologist and professor emeritus at Boston College, where he has studied the biology and evolution of human learning and play for decades. He is also a founding member of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education and the nonprofit Let Grow.
What’s the Big Idea?
A young woman from Kenya arrived in America at 16 and was struck by one overwhelming impression: the children here seemed unfree and unhappy. “It’s like they’re all on leashes,” she said. She wasn’t wrong. Over the past 70 years, American kids have steadily lost access to the kind of unsupervised play, outdoor exploration, and genuine independence that once defined childhood—and their mental health has suffered dramatically as a result. The crisis is real, but the cause isn’t what most people think, and the solution is more radical and more hopeful than most people dare to imagine.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Peter himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.
1. The fundamental task of childhood is to become increasingly independent.
From an evolutionary perspective, children arrive in the world entirely dependent on adults for survival. Everything that follows is a long, biological push away from that dependence. Natural selection has equipped children with powerful inborn drives aimed at helping them with this task. These include strong drives to play, explore, and test themselves in exactly the ways that serve this purpose. They build essential skills, learn how the physical and social world works, and practice making their own decisions and solving their own problems.
After about age four or five, children begin actively seeking opportunities to get away from adult control. They are especially motivated to play independently with other children. This is how they practice getting along with peers and making friends without reliance on powerful authority figures. It is how they develop social skills and confidence.
In their teen years, the drive shifts again. Adolescents don’t just want freedom from adult oversight—they want entry into the adult world, on their own terms. Part-time jobs, real responsibilities, the sense that they’re becoming capable people: these are what teens biologically need. Childhood, understood properly, is a developmental arc from full dependence to full participation in the adult world.
2. Over the past 70 years, children’s independence has been systematically dismantled.
Historian Howard Chudacoff called the first half of the twentieth century “the golden age of unstructured play.” Historian Steven Mintz, tracing the same arc from the other end, described the second half of the twentieth century as a period in which adults gradually took over children’s lives. He wrote, “contemporary children are more regimented and constrained than ever before” and have “fewer socially valued ways to contribute to their family’s well-being or to participate in community life.”
The societal changes reducing children’s opportunities included:
- Neighborhood cohesion declined, leading to reduced neighborhood play.
- Houses got bigger and families smaller, reducing parents’ incentive to shoo kids outdoors.
- Adult-directed sports displaced kid-directed sports.
- Parents’ fears of outdoor dangers to children (like strangers) increased.
- Schooling and school homework took increasing amounts of children’s time and became a greater source of anxiety due to achievement pressure.
- Expectations that children would help with domestic chores declined, and part-time work for teens declined.
- Parental anxieties about their kids’ future increased, leading many to see childhood as a period of résumé building rather than a time for free play.
3. Mental health data tells a story no one is talking about.
Charts depicting indices of children’s mental health reveal three distinct phases of change between the 1950s and about 2018.
Between the mid-1950s and 1990, children’s mental health declined steadily. The teen suicide rate quadrupled. Anxiety and depression among young people rose steeply. Children’s sense of agency—their sense that they can take charge of their own lives—declined continuously. Clinical research reveals that, for people of any age, a decline in a sense of agency is predictive of anxiety and depression. We have here a cause-and-effect chain: Decline in opportunity to take charge of one’s own life leads to decline in a sense of agency which leads to increased anxiety and depression.
Then, between 1990 and about 2010, something quite interesting happened: the mental health of teens improved, not all the way back to 1950s levels, but about 40 percent of the way. The explanation that makes most sense is that this was the era of the home computer and early internet revolution. Kids glommed onto this new technology. They now had a new way to play (computer games) and to connect with peers (through early forms of social media). The computer and internet partially restored childhood.
Kids could play, explore, and communicate with one another online, away from adult control, even if they still had limited opportunities to do so offline. This technology also helped kids take on more adultlike responsibilities. In most families with teens, the teen quickly became the family computer guru, who helped their parents with this new technology. Multiple studies found that kids with regular computer access did better psychologically than those without.
“The computer and internet partially restored childhood.”
Sadly, this improvement did not last. Between 2010 and 2018, kids’ anxiety and depression increased again, rapidly, reaching the 1990 peak.
4. Smartphones didn’t cause the mental health crisis. School policy did.
The dominant cultural narrative blames smartphones and social media for the sharp rise in youth anxiety and depression after 2010. It’s a plausible story—but the research doesn’t support it.
Hundreds of studies have examined the relationship between social media use and young people’s mental health. The consistent finding is that smartphones and social media have real effects, both harmful and beneficial, that vary considerably from person to person—but on the population level, these effects cancel each other out. There is no clinically meaningful relationship between smartphone or social media use and mental health for young people, regardless of age or gender. Moreover, in most other countries where kids glommed onto new technology at rates like those in the U.S., there was no general decline in youth mental health. While the teen suicide rate rose steeply in the U.S. between 2010 and 2018, it actually declined slightly in Europe.
Much evidence indicates that the most significant cause of declining mental health among American youth was a radical change in schooling. In 2010, most states adopted the Common Core State Standards, which required all schools to teach a common curriculum and evaluated teachers, principals, and whole schools based on students’ scores on standardized tests. Even before Common Core, research had repeatedly shown that school is the single biggest source of kids’ anxiety and depression, both by their own reports and by objective indices. Common Core further deprived children of childhood by reducing whatever freedom they may have previously experienced at school and increasing pressure for achievement through the narrow standards imposed by the curriculum.
Cross-national comparisons bear this out: increases in youth anxiety and depression during this period correlate with restrictive education reforms, not with rates of digital technology adoption.
5. We must find ways to enable kids’ independent activities in the modern world.
We are not going back to the 1950s, and that’s probably for the best. What we need is to identify what children actually need to develop well and find ways to provide it within the world as it actually exists. Throughout history, children have latched onto the latest technology, which is good because it is the technology most likely to bolster their success as adults. We must empower kids to play and explore online, offline, and at the intersection of the two.
“Parents, despite societal constraints, can support greater autonomy and more play.”
Everyone can contribute to the restoration of childhood. Educators can make the school environment more compatible with children’s biological nature. Parents, despite societal constraints, can support greater autonomy and more play. Governments and city planners can create infrastructures conducive to children’s independent mobility. Many libraries are already responding to children’s needs for play by developing makerspaces and other play opportunities at the library. Park and recreation departments could do much more to enable exciting kid-directed play. Pediatricians can begin counseling parents and children about the health value of free play and other independent activities.
If we are going to end the youth mental health crisis, we must, collectively and as individuals, make children’s freedom a high priority in all policies and planning.
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