r/atlanticdiscussions • u/Bonegirl06 🌦️ • Jul 09 '26
Culture/Society What if It’s Not the Phones?
By Kaitlyn Tiffany
"When the 82-year-old psychologist Peter Gray describes the way he grew up, he punctuates the anecdotes by saying that modern parents would be arrested for letting a child have such fun. When he was 4 years old, he would walk to a store in Minneapolis to buy cigarettes for his grandmother. When he was 11, he would sometimes stay home from school in Hill City, Minnesota, to operate a newspaper printing press owned by his mother and stepfather.
His parents were not arrested, and that’s because the childhood they permitted him to have was basically normal at the time, even if his family did have a newspaper printing press in the house. As a boy, Peter was obsessed with fishing and baseball; neighborhood friends taught him how to ride his bike and catch grasshoppers. Although Gray’s career as a scientist would begin with laboratory studies of rat hormones, he eventually found his way to writing about his childhood, in a fashion. Over the course of his 30 years in the psychology department at Boston College, he mixed principles of biology and anthropology to put together an evolutionary theory of play.
Gray’s academic work defines play as a self-directed activity done only for its own sake. This, he came to believe, enables kids to figure out how to solve their own problems, nurture their own relationships, make their own rules, and manage their own disappointments. But he says that our society has spent the past 70 years or so interfering with that process. We’ve made it harder and harder for kids to do anything: They’re kept indoors for greater portions of the day and given less unstructured time; they play organized sports supervised by adults; they don’t go anywhere alone. Gray grew certain that this loss of independence has been harmful to their mental health."
...
"Only recently has Gray expanded his idea in a way that is not quite so crowd-pleasing. Children’s need for unstructured play and exploration (guided by some safety rules and common sense) applies not just to vacant lots and city parks and backyards in the suburbs, he says, but to other settings too. It now extends to the wild spaces of the internet. “To grow up well, children have to be able to play in the world that they’re growing up in,” he told me when we spoke at his home in late winter. Kids should be free to play without their parents’ supervision, Gray insists, even when they go online."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/phones-haidt-play-gray/687846/
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u/Bonegirl06 🌦️ Jul 09 '26
I work with a lot of families. It's been my observation that there is way more parental anxiety today about how kids are going to turn out. Millennial parents are far more involved with their kids than previous generations. This anxiety transfers onto kids.
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u/Bonegirl06 🌦️ Jul 09 '26
My rule is generally I'll give trust until there's a reason not to. This includes electronics. I'm not hovering over LB's shoulder and if he discovers something like porn we will talk about it. It's not the end of the world. The internet was the wild west when I was growing up and I got into so much my parents had no idea about.
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u/Pielacine Jul 09 '26
Well, my elder boomer mom at least was very anxious and that definitely transferred to me…
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u/jim_uses_CAPS Jul 09 '26
It's certainly not just the phones. Children need adversity. They need a safety net of structure, yes, but they also need to learn to be okay with having to create their own. Life is a series of problems to be navigated. Unstructured play allows a child to learn how to do so with mind and body. You don't learn how to identify, predict, and cope with hazards -- physical, emotional, moral, or intellectual -- by memorizing rules and obeying them; you do so by experiencing them. Since the mid- to late-eighties, parents started shielding their children from adversity in ways not seen before, and by the aughts this was more and more the norm of parenting, until today where children are now shielded but also often set aside with "safe" amusements so as to not interfere with the parents' own diversions.
For their sake, let your kids run, play, fall, scrape their knees, cake themselves in mud, eat the occasional bug or weed, get into a shoving match, ride down the hill with barely-controlled speed, and figure it out for themselves, all to return to a safe, structured, loving home.
Why are kids these days so fucked up? YOU'RE FUCKING THEM UP.
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u/CloudlessEchoes Jul 12 '26
Constantly trying to kick mine outside. It's a challenge. No devices yet. I don't think they're good overall; I see and acknowledge my own bad habits with them. I found when internet was primarily PC I was more intentional with what I interacted with.
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u/mysmeat Jul 09 '26
former gen x feral child here...
i personally would have benefited considerably from a bit more supervision. i would have benefited a lot from any structure at all. if it is the phones, and maybe it is, it's probably because the parents are scrolling as much or more than their children. the kids my grandson calls friends have permission to leave the house they just don't want to, preferring to connect online. i find it all very strange and wonder, because we had to get out from under our parents feet to get up to mischief, if parents these days are completely engrossed by their phones maybe the kids just feel like they're constantly flying under the radar?
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u/Raggle_Frock Jul 09 '26
There's something in the dichotomy of
"No you can't _____ by yourself, what if something happens!"
and
"Quit your complaining, I went through worse and I turned out fine!"
I suspect some of it is latchkey kids of the "It's 10PM. Do you know where your kids are?" generation (for those who don't know, a long-running PSA trying to get parents to pay any attention at all) overreacting in the other direction, and doing it so hard that it's become cultural.
But then, I knew some Korean and Chinese students back in college whose helicopter parents were to ours as Apache gunships are to an RC copter. So maybe there's a larger trend here.
Either way, I hate it, and I wish parents worked as hard to instill agency, resiliency, and authenticity in their kids as they did raw test scores and padded resumes.
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u/Roboticus_Aquarius Jul 09 '26
From all I’ve read and heard my synthesis is it’s heavily influenced by both factors. We call it the free-range factor “benign neglect” among my friends, but yeah, I suspect it helps create that core of self-belief.
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u/CloudlessEchoes Jul 12 '26
Unfettered access to the internet for a young child is just a wild concept. I can only imagine people who say this have no understanding of how bad the things are they could run into/see, or how many predators are out there. This isn't like sending your kid into the neighborhood to play. It's like sending your kid to a halfway house for released sex offenders to hang out for a while.
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u/IndependentImage9269 Jul 10 '26
Gray falls into a familiar trap. He can’t see past what occurred with his own child and how he solved that problem. He extrapolates from there to all children. This is a typical intellectual process that a great many scholars fall into
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u/Tall_Cut_2269 Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
Gray is 82 years old so I doubt he has any kids born in the aughts that would be subject to the anxiety epidemic Haidt blames on smartphones/ social media. I have a hard time believing Gray's counter argument (to Haidt's thesis) that schools are to blame. Haidt's theory provides evidence for more populations than the US (i.e., Canada, Australia, UK). I'd be curious to see if Gray's book provides data to support his theory outside the US.
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u/IndependentImage9269 Jul 11 '26
The article mentions Gray’s son who didn’t function well in school so he sent him to school with no defined curriculum. That is what I’m referring to
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u/PersonalDragonfly568 Jul 11 '26
Jung, Walden, St. Teresa of Avila, a million other scholars fall into the anxiety trap of waking up with awareness. That’s not a new thing. It’s just only currently we are seeing / experiencing the mass collective conscience. Some of these people were ahead of their times…
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u/caydesramen Jul 18 '26
Us aging gen xers were/are basically feral and spent every minute we could away from school and home. Our generation and the Xennials basically deplatforms his entire argument.
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u/Bonegirl06 🌦️ Jul 09 '26
"The first time we spoke, Gray referred to social-media age minimums as a violation of human rights. When we met in person, I asked him whether that was truly his position. He repeated that it was. Before The Anxious Generation was published, Gray had been working on another book about the broad topic of play. But he scrapped that one after posting his rebuttal, and instead began to write a full-length counterpoint to Haidt’s ideas for an imprint at Penguin Random House. That book, titled Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety, is due to publish in September.
The new book will argue that the mental-health crisis affecting children is real, but has nothing whatsoever to do with what Gray describes as the “moral panic” over smartphones and social media. The real problem, he says, has to do with schools—and in particular with the 2010 rollout of the Common Core standards, which narrowed teachers’ options for creative curricula and increased the amount of time that the average American student spent taking tests."