Freedom is beneficial to children

Back in 2017, I posted Moral judgments influence assessments of objective risk wrapping together a range of research articles about parental liabilities in the context of childhood risks.  

I ended the post with:

But there remains an empirical question unanswered - Is it riskier for children to be closely supervised or to be left on their own to play? The researchers don't tackle that question. In the interviews and the reporting, multiple issues are run together without distinguishing them. Everyone is absolutely correct that stranger danger remains a real but vanishingly small danger to children. But the question as to whether children are safer supervised or unsupervised is different. Is a child more likely to suffer death and injury on their own or in the company of their parents. I don't have access to a robust treatment of that question but I would feel fairly confident that, whether in absolute terms or by a normalized rate, children are almost certainly in greater jeopardy when unsupervised.

From their interviews, the researchers appear to want to reduce the frequency with which parents, and mothers in particular, are harassed for leaving their children unsupervised. I agree. Absent clear and present danger, the state has no business intruding in parental risk assessment. I agree with the researchers goal but their work does not address the relevant question and unfortunately were such work to be done, it likely would support the nanny-state proposition and enshrinement of the precautionary principle (which is fundamentally wrong) that nothing should be done unless it can be shown to be risk free.

I think the reporters and researchers are adopting the wrong framing of the question.

Everything entails risk. Some number of children will die each year from avoidable accidents, whether supervised or unsupervised.

The better framing of the question is: What is the optimal balance of autonomy and supervision over a childhood in order to prepare them with the best assortment of knowledge, skills, values, and behaviors for a successful adulthood?

We are seeing more and more evidence of the harm that arises from children with too sheltered a childhood. Adulthood is postponed, critical skills are learned later when there are substantive consequences, behaviors and values are not acquired at all or too late.

If you practice free range child rearing, you commit to a life strategy where children build skills, knowledge, values and behaviors early on which will ensure that they have greater probabilities of success later on in life. You accept a tiny increase in risk of mortality, and a (probably) significant increase risk of injury in childhood when they are most resilient in order for the child to have long term strategic benefits (including, because of the better knowledge, values, skills, and behaviors, better morbidity and reduced adult mortality.)

If you commit to a helicopter parenting strategy, you commit to a life strategy where children are more protected and sheltered in childhood but at the risk that they have a poor mix of knowledge, skills, values, and behaviors when they emerge as young adults.

Right now, I am unaware of any research that allows us to answer those questions. And indeed, I think, based on our constitution, that it would anyway be moot. The state should not be impinging on the freedom of parents in that fashion in order to adjudicate complex and contingent risks. It would be interesting to know the answer, and I am inclined towards the free-range end of the spectrum, but it would provide no moral basis for law.

The evidence continues to slowly mount regarding the dangers of over-protectiveness and the benefits of a free-range childhood.  This spring there was another study on the topic.  

From Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Wellbeing: Summary of the Evidence by Peter Gray, David F. Lancy, and David F. Bjorklund.  From the Abstract.

It is no secret that rates of anxiety and depression among school-aged children and teens in the United States are at an all-time high. Recognizing this, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association issued, in 2021, a joint statement to the Biden administration that child and adolescent mental health be declared a “national emergency.”

Although most current discussions of the decline in youth mental health emphasize that which has occurred over the past ten to fifteen years, research indicates that the decline has been continuous over at least the last five or six decades.2,3 Although a variety of causes of this decline have been proposed by researchers and practitioners (some discussed near the end of this commentary), our focus herein is on a possible cause that we believe has been insufficiently researched, discussed, and taken into account by health practitioners and policy makers.

Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults. Such independent activities may promote mental wellbeing through both immediate effects, as a direct source of satisfaction, and long-term effects, by building mental characteristics that provide a foundation for dealing effectively with the stresses of life.

We develop the thesis by summarizing evidence for, respectively, (a) a large decline over decades in children’s opportunities for independent activity; (b) a large decline over the same decades in young people’s mental health; (c) effects of independent activity on children’s immediate happiness; and (d) effects of independent activity in building long-term psychological resilience. Then we discuss the relation of independent activity to wellbeing from the perspectives of self-determination theory and evolutionary mismatch. In two final sections, we briefly review the evidence cited, comment on some other putative causes of declining mental health in youth, and offer some suggestions for pediatric practice. Unless otherwise noted or obvious, we use the word “children” throughout this article to refer to people under age 18.