Times Change!

 The television presenter Kirstie Allsopp tweeted this week that she was proud of her 15-year-old son for having just spent three weeks travelling in Europe with a 16-year-old friend. It ignited a fierce debate, with Kirstie alternately denounced for letting her child travel independently too young or praised for giving him choice and experience.

I'm with Allsopp. The danger for this generation doesn't come from encountering life but from being shielded from and reluctant to engage with it. We're so preoccupied with children's physical safety that we've discouraged them from taking risks. At the same time we've gifted them an online universe which is so addictive that many of them would rather mediate most of their interactions with other people through it...

We are trapping the young and cutting them off from what was normal for millennia; the overriding need to relate to the human beings around them and to learn  how to move confidently through the physical world.

This shift is a shock to my generation. In the 1960s and 1970s most children had far greater freedom, responsibility and everyday interaction with people than they do now. My five-year-old sister cycled a mile and a half most days to her country school... Sending children out to play or explore, alone or in groups in cities or the country, was what families did. At nine in rural Norfolk, I would spend the day riding my pony without anyone knowing where I'd gone...

Low Tide
Dorothea Sharp (1874-1955)
Photo Credit: Rochdale Arts & Heritage Service [CC BY-NC]

At seven or eight years old, several of my friends flew unaccompanied to school from Hong Kong, Argentina or Malaysia, making conversation with passengers and  being escorted by stewardesses to stay at stopover hotels in rooms  by themselves. They learnt resilience and how to be agreeable to strangers. Ten-year -old farmers' sons drove tractors, milked cows, mended engines and helped farmhands with the harvest... 

It is this accumulated experience and confidence that's being lost as children are increasingly confined to their homes, glued to their addictive screens, perhaps ferried by anxious parents to circumscribed, improving activities...

One thirtysomething father of a 10 and 13-year-old in a country town ... "They're so passive, all of them. They don't want to go out ... they'd rather be in their bedrooms on Snapchat. I can't just send my children out to play, like I did, because nobody else does ... They aren't growing up with the confidence we had."...

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has catalogued the devastating effect of phone-based childhoods. They've led to a catastrophic rise in misery and mental health problems worldwide...

We're betraying children  by distorting what childhood has always been; an apprenticeship for adult life. Phone addiction  stunts that. Many of Allsopp's critics are almost right; the 15-year-olds they know can't cope with travel at that age, but only because they haven't been brought up to manage it. They need liberating...

(Jenni Russell, The Times, 2024)

If childhood is an apprenticeship for adult life then perhaps the phone addiction shown by many parents is certainly reflected by the phone-based childhood of their children. Unfortunately, restricting phone use by many adults and children is a battle that, largely, has been lost.