My daughter is three years old and already her childhood looks nothing like mine.
She has a schedule. A routine. Structured play, supervised activities, and two parents who are almost always within arm’s reach. By every modern standard, she’s getting exactly the kind of attentive upbringing that experts recommend.
But sometimes I watch her and think about my own childhood in Australia, and the contrast is so sharp it almost feels like a different species of growing up. Because nobody supervised me. Nobody structured my play. My parents weren’t reading parenting books or optimizing my development. They were at work, or in the kitchen, or simply elsewhere. And according to a growing body of research, that absence may have been one of the most important things they ever gave me.
The generation that raised itself (sort of)
If you grew up in the 1960s or 70s, your childhood probably looked something like this: you left the house in the morning, you came back when the streetlights came on, and in between, you figured things out for yourself. You settled your own disputes. You managed your own boredom. You fell out of trees and learned, without anyone explaining it to you, that gravity was not negotiable.
Your parents weren’t negligent in the way we’d define it today. They just operated under a completely different set of assumptions. Children were durable. The neighborhood was safe enough. And hovering over your kids wasn’t considered good parenting. It was considered odd.
In a Harvard Graduate School of Education interview, psychologist Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who has spent decades studying play, described this shift in vivid terms. He explained that from the 1960s onward, there has been a continuous and measurable decline in children’s opportunities to play freely, away from adult intervention and control. And over that same period, anxiety, depression, and suicide among young people have steadily climbed.
The correlation is striking. But Gray argues it’s more than correlation. The mechanism, he says, is straightforward: independent play is how children develop what psychologists call an internal locus of control, which is the belief that you can influence what happens to you. And without that belief, you’re set up for anxiety and depression.
What the research actually shows
In 2023, Gray and his colleagues published a major review in The Journal of Pediatrics titled “Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Wellbeing.” The paper pulls together decades of evidence and makes a case that’s hard to argue with: the systematic removal of unsupervised, self-directed activity from childhood has contributed directly to the mental health crisis among young people.
The findings are worth sitting with. Children who engage in independent play learn to regulate their own emotions because there’s no adult stepping in to do it for them. They learn to negotiate social hierarchies because they have to. They learn to tolerate frustration, boredom, and minor failures because those experiences are baked into the texture of unstructured time.
As ScienceDaily reported on the study, the researchers concluded that although well-intentioned, adults’ drive to guide and protect children has deprived them of the independence they need for mental health. Children need to feel they can deal effectively with the real world, not just the world of school.
That last point is the one that hits me hardest. Because the children of the 60s and 70s weren’t building resilience because their parents had some brilliant developmental philosophy. They were building resilience because their parents were busy. The space wasn’t designed. It was accidental. And it worked.
Boredom as a training ground
Here’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough: the ability to tolerate boredom is a skill, and like most skills, it develops through practice.
Children in the 60s and 70s were bored constantly. Not the kind of boredom you fix by scrolling a phone, but the deep, restless, nothing-to-do boredom that forces your brain to generate its own entertainment. You stared at ceilings. You invented games with sticks. You spent entire afternoons doing absolutely nothing, and somewhere in that nothing, you learned that you could survive unstimulated. That you didn’t need external input to be okay.
That’s self-soothing. Not the kind that comes from a breathing exercise you learned in a workshop. The kind that develops organically when a child is left alone with their own mind often enough to become comfortable with it.
In an NPR interview about his research, Gray made a point that stuck with me. He said that the mental health crisis didn’t start with COVID and didn’t start with the internet. It started decades earlier, when adults began systematically replacing children’s free time with structured, supervised activity. Each generation since the late 1970s has had less independent time than the one before. And each generation has shown higher rates of anxiety and depression.
The timeline isn’t subtle. In 1971, roughly 80 percent of American third-graders walked to school by themselves. Try suggesting that today and watch the reaction you get.
The uncomfortable truth about “good” parenting
I want to be careful here, because I’m not arguing that parental neglect is good. It isn’t. Children who are genuinely neglected, whose parents are absent because of addiction, abuse, or indifference, suffer enormously. That’s well documented and not in question.
What I am saying is that there’s a wide spectrum between neglect and the kind of hyper-attentive parenting that has become the cultural default. And somewhere on that spectrum, there’s a sweet spot that the 60s and 70s accidentally found: present enough to provide security, absent enough to allow independence.
Florida Atlantic University’s summary of the research captures this tension perfectly. Co-author David Bjorklund noted that parents today are bombarded with messages about dangers and the value of achievement, but hear almost nothing about the countervailing reality: that children need increasing opportunities for independence to grow up well-adjusted. They need to feel trusted, responsible, and capable. And you can’t develop that feeling if someone is always standing three feet away, ready to intervene.
The irony is thick. Modern parenting, with all its resources and research and good intentions, may be producing children who are safer but less capable of handling the world they’ll eventually inherit. Meanwhile, the generation raised by parents who were simply too busy or too distracted to helicopter ended up with a set of psychological tools that nobody planned to give them.
What I’m wrestling with as a parent
I think about this constantly. I live in Ho Chi Minh City with my wife and daughter, and the parenting culture here is, if anything, even more protective than what you see in Australia or the US. Children are watched closely, accompanied everywhere, and rarely left to their own devices.
And I get it. The streets here are chaotic. The traffic is genuinely dangerous. I’m not about to send my three-year-old out to “figure it out” on the motorbike-clogged roads of Saigon.
But I am trying to build in the spaces where I can. I let her be bored sometimes, even when I could easily hand her a screen. I let her struggle with problems before I step in. I resist the urge to narrate every experience or turn every moment into a teaching opportunity. Sometimes I just let her sit on the floor and do nothing, which is harder for me than it is for her.
In Buddhism, there’s a concept called “beginner’s mind,” the idea of approaching each moment without preconceptions or the need to control the outcome. I think children naturally have beginner’s mind. They don’t need us to manufacture it. They just need us to stop filling every second with structure long enough for it to emerge.
The parents of the 60s and 70s didn’t know any of this. They weren’t thinking about locus of control or self-regulation or the developmental benefits of risky play. They were just living their lives and letting their kids live theirs.
And the research now suggests that might have been exactly the right approach. Not because those parents were wise. But because their absence created the one thing that modern childhood is desperately short on: space.
Space to be bored. Space to fail. Space to sit with discomfort and discover, on your own terms, that you can handle it.
That’s not a parenting strategy. It’s the absence of one. And it may have been the most effective developmental tool of the twentieth century.
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