The Importance of Play

 "People say, should we just try to improve things a little bit by making the social media content a little healthier? That's like saying, can't we design guns with bullets that are nicer? And my concern is that we talk so much about the phone. The other half of this conversation has to be about play."

[Jonathan] Haidt, the social psychologist became famous with his 2018 bestseller (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff), The Coddling of the American Mind about the peculiar mental fragility of Gen Z undergraduates who feel "unsafe" exposed to any opinion they disagree with...

By every objective metric - suicide rates, psychiatric hospitalisation, A&E self harm admissions - all over the world  their mental health was collapsing. For girls in particular, the crisis is now off the charts. The father of a son, 17 and a daughter, 14, Haidt was stunned...

"I realised this is one of the biggest - if not the biggest - public health stories ever." It began,  he says 40 years ago.

At Play
Edward Henry Corbould (1815-1905)
Photo Credit: Atkinson Art Gallery Collection [CC BY-NC-SA] 

Like every generation for millennia, Haidt had enjoyed an unsupervised "play-based" childhood. In the New York suburb of Scarsdale he was left to his own devices from the end of school until dinnertime. He messed about outdoors with friends, built fires, had rock fights with neighbourhood kids, experimented with alcohol.

"It could have been dangerous - but that was the point". Just as germs fortify children's immunity, "the risk of harm is an active ingredient in learning how to manage risk." Equally essential to social development is physical  free play. "Like all mammals, we have evolved to mature through play."

In the late 1980s, though, a new concept he calls "safetyism" began to pressure parents to prioritise safety above all else, leading to the anxious helicoptering and hot-housing parenting culture of today...

The  second half of the story began in 2010 withe the arrival of the iPhone 4...

"As parents," Haidt recalls, "we discovered that if your child is crying and you just give them a smartphone, he's happy you're happy" Thus the "phone-based childhood" was born.

When none of the boys at my son's seventh birthday party in 2018 knew how to play and demanded video games, I was puzzled. When those boys' teenage sisters began cutting and starving themselves and talking about suicide, I was as baffled as everyone else. The correlation between the advents of social media and social anxiety didn't prove causation, did it? Haidt's book (The Anxious Generation) answers that question emphatically...

America might ban the Chinese-owned TikTok on national security grrounds, but it's notable that in China there is no such thing as TikTok; addictive algorithms are against the law. The Chinese access an altogether more wholesome app called Douyin. Public opinion and political pressure are certainly now shifting against social media.

(Decca Aitkenhead, The Sunday Times Magazine, 2024)

In Japan, particularly in cities like Tokyo, it is not uncommon for children as young as five to travel to school by themselves thus fostering meaningful independence. It seems that the concept of "safetyism" prevalent in some western countries hinders this aspect of development.

As for the phone: A Welsh poet, William Henry Davies has a suggestion!

What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass, Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight, Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance, And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare."