Causes of Kids' Gradual Loss of Freedom from 1950 to 1990
Gray, Peter. 2023-10-10.
Vinklinger
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Oppvekst: Amerikanske barns oppvekst har blitt gradvis mer begrenset og voksenstyrt siden 1950-årene.
In his book on the history of children’s play in America, Howard Chudacoff (2007) refers to the first half of the twentieth century as the golden age of play. Child labor laws had largely freed children from sweat shops by the beginning of the century, and the Progressive Movement early in the century emphasized the value of play, creativity, and freedom. Schools allotted plenty of time for play, and children were generally welcome in public spaces everywhere when school wasn’t in session. Despite two world wars and the Great Depression, and despite many other social ills, 1900 to 1950 was generally a great time to be a kid. Children spent huge amounts of time playing and exploring outdoors, with other children, largely away from adults.
The turning point, according to Chudacoff, came in the 1950s, which was the decade in which most families acquired their first television set. Television brought kids indoors, to a much greater extent than before. Television by its nature is passive-you just watch it. It’s entertainment, not play. It tends to isolate kids into their nuclear families, away from the outside world. As a specific turning point, Chudacoff cites the Mickey Mouse Club TV program, which began in 1955. It aired daily after school and before dinner, which led many kids to go home to the TV rather than hang out and play with other kids after school.
In the early 1950s and before, kids of all ages (from about 5 on up) were almost everywhere. They played in the streets and in vacant lots and sometimes in neighbors’ yards. They were present (without adults) in shops, movie theaters (for 25 cents), and all varieties of public transportation.
Some adults enjoyed the sight of kids everywhere, but others found them to be a nuisance. Some worried about their safety, and some felt threatened by older kids. Kids were noisy, disruptive, sometimes downright delinquent. Gradually, over time—often under the banner (sometimes legitimate) of protecting kids—measures were taken to remove kids from public spaces. Security guards began shooing them away from shops; police were called when adults perceived kids as a threat; parents were blamed for not controlling their kids; city planners stopped taking kids into account as they planned public areas (Cahill, 1990; Valentine, 1996). These changes were continuous and gradual throughout the 40-year period we are considering here. The “public” in public spaces gradually came to mean “adult.” Increasingly, kids were part of the public only if accompanied by an adult.
As Markella Rutherford (2011) points out in her book Adult Supervision Required, children not only had greater opportunity for out-of-home employment decades ago but were also generally more likely to contribute meaningfully to the family at home. She notes that until about 1960, the idea that children would be responsible for household chores was taken for granted. Beginning around 1960, chores became a topic of discussion, which centered more on what is good for the child than what is good for the family. The attitude began to develop that children’s real job is schoolwork, so school homework began to replace housework.
As one writer (Zelizer, 1994) put it, “Children became economically useless but emotionally priceless.” I’m pretty sure that growing up feeling either economically useless or emotionally priceless, let alone both, is not healthy. You grow up feeling like a pet rather than a person.
Something we too often forget these days: Kids like to feel useful.
For the reasons I’ve already given, children’s presence outdoors had already declined greatly, but from 1980 on it declined even more. In truth, the kinds of crime that frightened parents were and are extremely rare, but the media played them up dramatically, and essentially the whole society bought into this fear. As Rutherford points out in her book, by the mid-1990s you risked being accused of negligence if you allowed your kids to play even on the block where you lived or to walk a few blocks to school without an adult—things essentially all kids were allowed to do before 1980.
While kids were once seen as tough and competent (though often annoying and sometimes delinquent) they came increasingly to be seen—by adults and, most sadly, by the kids themselves—as precious, fragile, and economically useless. If you see yourself that way, life is scary and depressing. It is no wonder that rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide rose continuously and dramatically for teenagers over this 40-year period.
As I described in my last post, kids received a bit of reprieve for a while beginning around 1990, as new technology brought new usefulness, new forms of play, and new ways of connecting with others. As a result, anxiety, depression, and suicides declined over a roughly 12-year period. But then, beginning around 2010, they rose again. In a future post, I will present some thoughts about why that happened.