Have We Destroyed Childhood?
Early in the psychologist Peter Gray’s new book, “Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety,” he proposes a thought experiment. “Imagine that your spouse or your closest friend had the same power over you that parents typically have over children,” he suggests. Although you’re an adult, this “loving person” insists that you never leave the house without an accompanying guardian or a G.P.S. tracker. When you return, they demand a full account of what you did. Frequently, they communicate with your boss, who “controls you the way a teacher controls children at school.” This boss reprimands you for arriving even a minute late, and prohibits you from talking with your co-workers without permission; you must even ask, publicly, to use the bathroom. “Everything you do is judged and ranked in comparison to the work of your coworkers,” Gray goes on. And, when you wrap up at the office, “your employer also requires you to do more work at home,” and “encourages your loving spouse (or friend) to be sure you do that work.”
This doesn’t sound like a very nice life, does it? It’s an existence in which you’re micromanaged and surveilled, given almost no freedom or privacy, and put under constant pressure while, at the same time, being seen as incompetent and lazy. (Why else would all this have to be done to you, for your own good?) And yet, Gray argues, it’s how many children live in affluent Western countries, including the United States. Now eighty-two, Gray has spent decades studying kids, particularly how they spend their free time. In “Restoring Childhood,” he warns that they now have none, in both senses: they have no time, because they are over-scheduled and over-schooled, and their time isn’t free, because adults are neither willing nor able to leave even older kids unsupervised.
There’s a kind of book that tells you something you already know, but shows that it’s worse than you think. Samuel Moyn’s “Gerontocracy in America,” which I wrote about a few months ago, is such a book: you knew that the population was aging, but it’s a shock—and an illuminating one—to learn that the median age of a voter in a political primary is now sixty-five. “Restoring Childhood,” similarly, reveals that the slopes of familiar trend lines are steeper than you thought. In 1971, for instance, eighty-six per cent of English elementary-school children had permission to walk home from school alone; that number dropped to thirty-five per cent in 1990, and to twenty-five per cent in 2010. Child-protective services used to intervene mainly in cases of child abuse; over the decades, however, their remit grew to include not just neglect but “supervisory neglect,” a new parental offense that might involve leaving children briefly unattended in benign circumstances. Today, Gray reports, thirty-eight per cent of children will be at the center of a C.P.S. investigation at some point in their lives.
If you let your children play at the park by themselves, you could be reported by your neighbors and led away in handcuffs: it’s no wonder that many of today’s parents keep their kids on a short leash. Gray, meanwhile, describes how, at age four, he was sent to the corner store by himself to buy cigarettes, crossing the street along the way. A few years later, he joined the scrum of kids who spent their after-school time playing around the neighborhood almost entirely unsupervised. Decade by decade, he writes, the childhood he enjoyed has been replaced by a new way of growing up. And the result, he argues, has been an ongoing decline in the happiness and mental health of young people. “The ultimate goal of childhood is to break away from dependence on parents and establish oneself as one’s own person,” Gray asserts. But adults, increasingly, are building a world in which this is impossible.
The rise in documented mental-health troubles among young people is beyond doubt. Currently, about one in six American children have some sort of mental-health diagnosis; for kids older than twelve, the numbers have increased steadily since about 2010. In “The Anxious Generation,” from 2024, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argued that smartphones and social media are largely to blame. The book marshalled substantial scientific evidence, and reinforced the intuitions of parents dismayed by their phone-addled children. But researchers received “The Anxious Generation” more cautiously. In 2025, a team of scholars convened a hundred and twenty experts from a range of disciplines, asking them to evaluate the arguments in the book. The resulting paper—“A Consensus Statement on Potential Negative Impacts of Smartphone and Social Media Use on Adolescent Mental Health”—has a Rorschach quality. The experts were quite certain that youth mental health has declined, and that smartphones can cause sleep problems. But in many other areas they took a more middle-of-the-road view. Although the majority of experts believed that smartphones could cause “social deprivation,” for example, almost all of them also said that “both the magnitude and direction” of those effects “are likely influenced by various individual and social moderators.” In other words, a lot depends on the context and the kid. For some people, social media really is social.
It would be convenient if smartphones were the root of all evil. If that were the case, then banning them would resolve the crisis of kids’ mental health. Yet, despite the subtitle of his book—“How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness”—Haidt, like Gray, situates the rise of the smartphone within a larger transformation in the nature of childhood, urging parents to give their children more “opportunities to exercise agency” and “pursue unsupervised adventure.” The phone question, therefore, is one of proportion. How much of the problem is attributable to the use of smartphones? How much of it might be solved by prying them from our children’s hands?
It’s notable that many studies of smartphone bans show modest effects. A recent study, published in May, found that bans in Florida middle and high schools had no substantial effect on test scores. The most encouraging study I’ve come across is “Smartphone Bans, Student Outcomes and Mental Health,” by Sara Abrahamsson, a Norwegian researcher. Her clever approach looks at a large number of middle schools in Norway, ranking their divergent smartphone policies across a range from strictness to leniency. (Some schools have no policy; others ban phones entirely; those in the middle allow students to use them sometimes.) She then compares these policies with grades and independent mental-health data from Norway’s health-care system. Abrahamsson finds that there are benefits to the bans (less bullying, better grades, and fewer mental-health consultations), that there is more benefit when they are more stringent, and that the gains are largest among girls, who use their phones more. Her most striking finding is that girls are less likely to seek mental-health care if they go to a school where phones are banned. And yet the academic gains, though real, are equivalent to the ones you might see if class size were reduced by one student. The number of mental-health appointments for girls goes down, but their rate of diagnosis doesn’t change. We might have hoped for larger effects, given the alleged power of the phone.
Gray has two theories about why such bans don’t seem to be producing bigger shifts. First, he suggests that the negative effects of smartphone use are overestimated; in fact, he goes further, arguing that phones and social media have upsides for many kids, those who find them rewarding and fun and enjoy them without having their brains “rewired.” His over-all reading of the research on phones and kids is that the devices “can have both positive and negative effects on kids’ emotions, and these can vary greatly from person to person,” such that “neither reliably trumps the other for the population of teens as a whole.” Ultimately, he sees phone use as not fundamentally dissimilar from internet use in the pre-phone era. When kids first got online, parents were bewildered and alarmed, but kids, who tend to gravitate to new technology, found freedom in a space that was basically ungoverned. Similarly, kids today use phones mainly to communicate with their friends about the incomprehensible stuff they find interesting. They gossip, fight, explore, flirt, nerd out, bully each other, and forge friendships—just like they would in person, if their parents would ever let them hang out unsupervised.
One might object, reasonably, that today’s phones, with their habit-forming social platforms and red-pilled or body-shaming influencers, are portals to a novel hellscape. But Gray’s second theory, broadly, is that of course we’d think that—we’ve lost all sense of the gulf that ought to exist between parents and children, and now take it for granted that our kids’ lives should be almost totally transparent to us, so that we can better insure that all of their activities satisfy our adult senses of propriety, safety, and usefulness. Yet independence, Gray writes, must be authentic if it’s to be learned, and risk must be actual. (He notes that kindergarteners, when presented with images of kids having fun and asked to identify “play,” tend to choose pictures with no adult in the picture.) In the old days, when parents shooed their children out of the house and let them roam around, they knew their kids might get up to no good—and that they might not find out about it. But this seemed an acceptable trade-off for a childhood in which kids quickly learned to act independently. The adults of the past, in other words, understood that kids needed to be kids, and that they could succeed in this only when adults weren’t there.
Taking this idea seriously requires believing in a now vanished world. Over the course of a chapter titled “Tightening the Leash,” Gray charts the “many intertwined changes” that have eroded “children’s freedom to play and move about independent of adult control.” There was television, which, starting in the nineteen-fifties, kept kids indoors; also, houses got a lot bigger, and families smaller, so that most kids suddenly had the option of retreating to their own bedrooms. Outside the home, adults took control of kids’ sports, replacing sandlot games with Little League and other organized, competitive, coach-centered endeavors. Housing developments increasingly omitted sidewalks, favoring drivers over walkers, and the country grew more litigious, making planners wary of playgrounds, which could attract lawsuits when kids got hurt. (“The number of lawyers in the United States per thousand citizens increased from 1.46 in 1950 to 3.9 in 2023,” Gray notes.) In the nineteen-eighties, parents grew terrified of “stranger danger,” even though most missing kids are runaways. And social norms changed: it became less common for teens to hold jobs and make their own money. (Today’s kids “are anxious about their future partly because they have reduced opportunity to experience the work world,” Gray suggests.)
An especially important change, Gray argues, was that school got more intense. Between 1950 and 2015, the average American school year got five weeks longer. Recess shrunk, and time for lunch contracted from an hour (at many schools) to twenty minutes. Academic requirements increased dramatically, even for very young children, with more time spent sitting at desks, and less time devoted to art, music, and other fun activities; a pervasive emphasis on standardized tests disheartened teachers and made schoolwork itself more boring. Meanwhile, homework piled up, eating into what remained of kids’ autonomy after school. When asked what makes them stressed, Gray observes, children don’t talk about their phones: “In every national survey I have been able to find in which school-aged kids are asked to identify the main causes of psychological distress, school pressure comes out on top by a large margin.” Adults like the idea of school, Gray concludes, and so are reluctant to criticize it. But, in his view, the discussion of mental distress among kids ought to focus there.
Who’s right, Haidt or Gray? Will banning phones bring real-world clarity and connection to kids’ lives, or deprive them of one of their last routes to autonomy in a claustrophobic world? This might strike you as a disagreement that’s unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. But, if Gray and Haidt disagree sharply, they also share a lot of common ground—in fact, until recently, they served together on the board of Let Grow, a nonprofit dedicated to “leading the movement for childhood independence.” (In The Atlantic, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes that Gray resigned from the board last year, so that the other members wouldn’t be “caught in the middle of a conflict.”) Their accounts are in competition, but are still useful together: if you find one persuasive, you ought to read the other.
Social phenomena are hard to explain. Almost always, they’re multicausal—that is, caused by a multitude of factors that swirl together. The difficulty with multicausal problems is that it’s hard to effect multipronged solutions. Suppose that Gray is right, and that today’s kids are suffering from sixty years of accumulated social, economic, and technological change. And suppose, additionally, that Haidt is also right, and that—for many kids—smartphones are deepening these problems and adding new ones. No individual person, school superintendent, or government agency can undo or mitigate all of these developments simultaneously. The best anyone can do is to choose a lever and pull it. From this perspective, the existence of disagreement is a good thing. It gives us more levers to pull. ♦