Have we destroyed childhood?

Joshua Rothman, New Yorker - 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.  MORE