Let Grow surveyed eight-to-13-year-olds in the first two months of the lockdown, and found they were more likely to describe themselves as “happy” than “sad” – 71% said their parents were letting them do more things on their own, and 72% reported finding new things to fill their time. With schools and after-school clubs closed, children – particularly of so-called helicopter parents – who’d always had their lives timetabled suddenly had a lot of unstructured time to fill. Some children did see benefits, says Skenazy, at least at the beginning. ‘It’s a good idea for kids to be able to walk and cycle more.’ Photograph: mrs/Getty Images For the families who are in difficult circumstances, things have got worse.” But there’ll be others who have had a traumatic and turbulent year and a half. Tim Gill, a play expert and author of Urban Playground: How Child-Friendly Planning and Design Can Save Cities, says that “there will be some parents and children who gained insights into what really matters – some of the good things on their doorstep, or the value of more family time. How easily we shut down children’s lives speaks, according to Lee, “to the lack of seriousness with which culture has taken the problem of what’s going on with children, what we expect of them and what their lives are”. “I was really struck by how almost frightened adults had become of children,” she says. Worse, children came to be seen as vectors of disease. Instead of getting children to participate in aid groups, “we went down the route of saying we’re going to keep you at home”. For those families, they may not return to how they were before and so the pandemic may end up restricting children’s movements and freedom even more.”Įllie Lee, director of the centre for parenting culture studies at the University of Kent, believes we failed during the height of the pandemic, particularly in the first wave of newfound community support. “I think there are many children who’ve got used to being in the house and being with their parents most of the time … they’ve kind of forgotten that the world is out there, and it’s fun to get outside and be active. “We’re at a point where it could go in either direction,” says Helen Dodd, a professor of child psychology at the University of Exeter (she led the study on the age children were allowed to play outside unsupervised). So you’re not letting kids out until they’re hitting puberty? That’s unprecedented.” “That’s such a giant leap, or step backwards, in one generation. Kids spend four to seven minutes outside in unstructured, unsupervised time a day here in America.” She points to a B ritish study that found today’s parents were allowed to play outside unsupervised from the age of nine. “I was concerned that it’s becoming weird to let your kids outside without either an adult, a cell phone or a GPS of some sort. She wondered what it might be doing to a generation of kids and wrote a book, Free-Range Kids, which she has just updated, as well as launching Let Grow, an organisation that promotes children’s independence, and has free resources for schools and parents. Puzzled by people’s horror, she became interested in how parents had become so risk-averse and were monitoring their children’s every move. In 2008, she was described as “ the world’s worst mom” after she wrote an article about letting her then nine-year-old son find his own way home on the subway. Lenore Skenazy with her son Izzy at around the time she was called the ‘world’s worst mom’.
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