The Over-Protected Generation

This article in The Grauniad talks about how different the lives of children are today compared to twenty years ago:

[. . .] Mayer Hillman's classic One False Move, a study of children's independent mobility [. . .] suggests that, in a single generation, the "home habitat" of a typical eight-year-old — the area in which children are able to travel on their own — has shrunk to one-ninth of its former size. Do not underestimate the significance of this change: for the first time in the 4m-year history of our species, we are effectively trapping children indoors at the very point when their bodies and minds are primed to start getting to grips with the world outside the home.

My wife and I have talked about this issue a great deal lately . . . our son is 13 and yet has less effective freedom of movement than either of us did at age 8 or 9. She was raised on the edge of the Don Valley in Toronto, and had pretty much the entire area from just above the mouth of the river up to Eglinton or even Lawrence Avenue as her wandering zone. I spent much of my childhood in what is now Mississauga, and my "free-movement area" was easily ten-to-twenty kilometres in diameter: on my bicycle, I ranged from the centre of town east to the end of the subway system in Etobicoke, west to Winston Churchill Boulevard, south to the lake, and north to Eglinton (there was not much of interest north of there in those days).

Our parents insisted that we get out of the house and "get some fresh air" for most of our waking hours that were not spent at school. If we did that with our own son, we'd quickly have the Children's Aid Society on our doorstep to investigate what sort of child abuse we were conducting.

Admittedly, in our day, we didn't have computers or CD players or hundreds of channels of TV programming available, but as the article says, these are often just tools to stave off cabin fever, not actual reasons to keep children indoors.

The decline is, in part, a side effect of wider social changes. Shrinking families, more parents working longer hours and increasingly fragmented communities have left children with fewer friendly faces to look out for them. Many more children have their own rooms, and the entertainment industry makes ever more seductive indoor offers to stave off cabin fever.

Fear plays a key role: parents' fears of traffic (probably justified) and strangers (arguably not), and children's fear of crime and bullying. There is growing hostility to children in public space. Behaviour that would a few years ago have been "larking about" is now labelled antisocial, and parents fear being judged harshly if their kids are seen out of doors unaccompanied.

Those parental fears are not at all ill-founded. The role of government in raising children today is far greater than in our own parents' day, and the degree of conformance to government-enforced norms is much higher now. At least on the part of parents. Teenagers nowadays are much more sure of their "rights", at least as far as "nobody can tell me what to do". [Cue the old coot with the "Back in my day, sonny . . .]

This also dovetails with the modern phenomenon of childrens' lives being over-scheduled with music lessons, softball games, dance classes, soccer games, pre-school and after-school sessions, and so on. Some parents spend so much time synchronizing their family appointments and activities that they rarely spend time at home with the family during waking hours.

So what's my clever answer? Ain't got one. One parent staying at home is only an option for a small number of families nowadays. Telecommuting (which is something I do a few days a week, outside deadline crunch periods) is only available to a subset of workers in the main economy. Government-provided daycare? No, don't get me started.