Why Don't Kids Play Outside Anymore?

I am not a parent, so feel free to toss out any of my thoughts below. However, I have spent over $32,000 unsuccessfully trying to be a parent in my life, so maybe that means I think about this stuff a little bit more? Do with it what you will.

Guys like Jonathan Haidt have been banging the drum on “kids need more autonomy” for years, in addition to “ban phones in schools,” and it’s hard for me to see how any reasonable person would be against either. I understand each family is nuanced in their own way, though.

On the kids need more autonomy front, which is where I want to take this article, I’ve kinda sorta maybe addressed it before, but here I think are your big buckets:

Exhaustion

Easy to blame this on the increasing necessity of two incomes, meaning two working parents provided the parents are even together, and maybe that’s trite. But I do think when you combine economic realities with lack of job stability with political chaos with power grabs, people feel exhausted. And if they have kids, instead of really doubling down on those kids, they are content to throw them in front of a tablet for three hours to catch a break themselves. Now, does a tablet mean no autonomy? Not necessarily. But in this specific example, we are kinda talking about “autonomy” as equivalent to the argument of “I never see kids playing outside anymore.”

Destination vs. Journey

At this point, if I was going to write a book, I’d probably write it about this topic, given how much energy it consumed for me since about 2020. What I mean here is that sometimes, it feels like modern parenting is more about the destination, I.e. I am a parent, I have the bonafides, I am in the club, my Instagram just got more interesting and my husband has now disappeared from it. That is in opposition to the journey, I.e. “For as long as I remain alive, I will be tied to this child and helping it navigate the ways of this crazy world.”

It is trite to say “No one ASKS to be born,” but no one does. So if you make that choice, or you decide to go through with that choice, you need to subsequently own it. It’s now a journey. And obviously we love babies and they are the completion of a story that a woman told herself about who she is (and maybe a man too), but we still need to value kids at 15, 20, 24, etc.

It was natural for us to arrive at a potential space of “destination vs. journey” because when kids were an economic necessity, they were thus a true destination. You need more hands in the business/on the farm. The journey stemmed from what was initially an economic destination. Now it’s different, and kids are almost a luxury good. Even if you think all your friends tried for three months per kid, you absolutely know someone who did six rounds of IVF and thus spent about $120,000 to have a single child. You may not think you do, but you do.

As kids became a luxury good and a “nice to have” vs. a “need to have,” this discussion became more confusing.

So bring that back to autonomy. If you see your kid as a destination, a lot of that maternal model also sees a kid as extension of self. How many women post on Instagram and use “Mini-Me!” in the caption? Probably hundreds of thousands per day. Dads do it too, sometimes with sports and sometimes with other things.

If you see a kid as an extension of self and not their own unique human being who will build their own life and experiences and failures, then obviously you’d default to some form of “snowplow parenting” to pave over failures and mistakes for the “Mini-Me.”

But snowplow parenting runs counter to autonomy.

Public Education

A lot of people still have their kids in public, despite other models rising up in recent decades, and let’s look at this pull quote re: public school from this newsletter:

“Schools feel like prison.”

If you experience that for a chunk of your day as your brain is developing, of course we’ll be off-base on “autonomy” as a concept.

Fear Mongering

Here’s my third trite comment of this post, but yes, the media divides us. Ideology divides us. We are divided by a lot of aspects of modern life, and within that division is a degree of fear-mongering. How many times has a conservative said how unsafe everything is since 2020? And yes, Laken Riley got killed while jogging, and Rachel Morin got killed while hiking, and these things do happen. But a lot of parents see those headlines, and see the fear-mongering, and they would rather reduce autonomy in the name of safety. That’s a completely logical trade-off, but a kid with reduced autonomy also will have other problems as they become a teenager, a 20-something, etc.

You may have noticed there is also a massive moral panic about OnlyFans and whether certain groups of young women are OK. We tend to also (weirdly) make this a liberal vs. conservative thing, but let’s just talk about casual sex for a second. “Body count” has become a huge talking point.

I can only speak anecdotally and from a few surveys I’ve seen, but look, the difference between a woman you can sleep with the first time and a woman that waits on it has a lot to do with how she was raised and what experiences and guardrails were put in place for her. A completely-sheltered woman is often a massive freak, because they want to unlock that aspect of themselves. Is that also trite? Yes. But I’ve seen it play out dozens of times for both myself and my friends.

So perhaps paradoxically, if you want to reduce this idea of everyone selling feet pics at 19, maybe offer more safe opportunities for life and relational exploration at 14, 15, etc.

Some people just aren’t good parents

We don’t like to say it, but it’s true. And maybe if I ever got the chance, I’d be terrible. I have no idea. I’m sure it would be hard, though, and I’d try my best at it. I just wasn’t per SE “blessed” in that way.

What else would you add on kids and autonomy?