Have We Fixed the Children?

The Long Read: When it Comes to Kids, America Never Grows Up

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. — Flannery O’Conner

Recently, an odd and beguiling child accosted me in the park. She was an imp of about six, smudged of cheek and snarled of hair, wearing a tutu that had been dragged through the wars. This child demanded to know my business in her woods and then tailed me on a blue bicycle with rattling training wheels.

Apparently, she belonged to the park’s stable manager, who was nowhere to be seen. She boasted of living in a barn (by the state of her, that seemed plausible). Older siblings, a feral boy and girl straight from a Sally Mann photograph, popped out of the underbrush, shouting gibberish and wielding branches like machetes. The pair ran off to scale an Ararat of mulch and left their sister to fate.

My acquaintance urged me to come see her ponies—the one who bit, the one she loved best, and the one who was shy. If she’d been coached about stranger danger, the warning didn’t take. I accepted the invitation nervously and waited for the authorities to haul me away.

I’ve spent a good chunk of my life looking after small people. Still, it was ages since I’d met such a perfectly undomesticated goblin— likely deep in the 1970s or 1980s, when I was one myself. Here was a sprite out of Swallows and Amazons, as bold as they come. The woods she roamed are in the middle of a notoriously dangerous city, yet her parents were out of the frame. Perhaps this girl was later mauled by a hair brush and frogmarched to Kumon class. But in that moment, she seemed like an apparition from a lost era.

The unaccompanied American child is a startlingly rare phenomenon. When we trip across one, we’re conditioned to alert the constabulary. Diabolical harm awaits stray innocents; we read about these atrocities daily. But not so long ago, even the very young roamed around unsupervised. Childhood was once shaggy, chaotic and spiced with danger.

Spend time among modern parents, and you’ll get an earful about what’s changed. We schedule our kids’ lives to the minute, then speak fondly of being allowed to run amuck until the streetlights came on. The grownups who raised us neglected to check homework, smoked in cars with the windows rolled up and rarely materialized at soccer games. Parents of that age were emphatically bored by kid stuff. They may have been misguided about many things, but they were right to ignore us.

Collective memory is hinky —surely not every Gen X and Millennial parent was in the cast of Stand By Me—but it does get at deeper truths. In an effort to inoculate children against all manner of unpleasantness, we may have suffocated childhood. This has not made for happier kids.

Recent studies reveal that too many young people are struggling. For a host of well-publicized factors, American kids die at higher rates than peers in other wealthy nations. Hardship falls disproportionally on the poor, but even the affluent young flail in existential crisis. It may be perennial for adults to worry about the younger generation, but something grimmer is going on.

According to the CDC, nearly three in five female adolescents described themselves as having persistent feelings of despair in 2021; more than one in three said they considered suicide. Boys play it closer to the vest, but actions speak louder than surveys: Suicide among males 15-24 spiked by 8 percent in the same period, to 38,025, compared with 9,621 for females.

Depending on your op-ed writer, particular bugaboos— screens, economic dislocation, environmental doomsaying, the pandemic, the collapse of pro-social institutions, and of course, gun violence—get different helpings of blame. Pan-ideological consensus can be found when it comes to one culprit: Until there’s a Meta-funded study debunking it, mounting evidence suggests social media has been a mental health disaster for the young.

We all have a part to play in this glum business. Americans long ago made a fetish of childrearing, transforming organic human experience into a competitive sport. We are great at mouthing platitudes about grit, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee and the urgent need for every kid to be pried from a computer and rolled in fresh grass. Typically, we prescribe these remedies for others while furiously bubble-wrapping our own offspring.

It’s only human to wring your hands while escalating a child-rearing arms race, in which more ever-more ingenious weaponry is deployed. America—rootless, violent, socially atomized and hyper-focused on material success— has always been a tricky place to bring up a kid. The reflexive response is to throw good money after bad.

We’ve only begun pestering young folks about their emotional health lately, but thousands of years of human experience ought to teach us childhood is never carefree. Innocence merely exists to be lost. Fighting like hell to protect it has evolved into a new sort of religion. Like all faiths, it is riddled with epistemological holes.

If Ted Talks could cure what ails kids, they’d be fixed by now. Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher’s bestseller about turmoil suffered by girls, came out in 1994; Peg Tyre’s The Trouble With Boys, which exposed a crisis among young males, hit bookstores in 2009. These are holy books in an ever-multiplying genre. Reams of serious scholarship and cheap pop psychology are devoted to girls who hurt themselves, to boys tormented by feelings, to the gifted and the challenged, to the over-sexualized and the identity-questioning, to the bullied and the bullies. Publishing always promises to smooth the rocky path to adulthood. It obdurately resists paving.

Our sprawling child-rearing industrial complex — self-help manuals, classes, parenting groups, theorists, tutors, therapists, meds, ideological manifestos —brings us no closer to Eden. It has shaped public policy and our ideas about childhood itself. In a few generations, we have dragged kids from the darkened stairwell, where they eavesdropped on the conversations of grown-ups who ran the world, and into the hot heart of cultural discourse.

To borrow from Isaiah, the result is often an And a little child shall lead them approach to just about every dilemma. Children are not up for the gig, even when it comes to their own problems. That’s why they have parents. Our new attitudes are an entirely well-meaning form of abrogation. They have illuminated aspects of childhood and made for kinder, gentler elders. But they place a heavy burden of expectation on the young.

As they say in horror movies, this call is coming from inside the house. I pulled out all the stops for my kids. Like most parents, I believed it was the minimum job requirement and periodically went overboard. (Once, when I told an older colleague I was shuttling my eldest to fencing and sailing lessons, he asked if I was raising Alexander Onassis.) My children will pass final judgment on those efforts. I’m certain they find them variously comical and disastrous. Should they have children, their parenting decisions will likely be gentle acts of generational rebuke.

Among my crowd, intensely child-focused parenting was a small rebellion against the grandparents, who mostly hailed from the generation known as Me. These people had been assigned one set of familial expectations, and round about 1968, began jettisoning them. Those who grew up in the last 50 years were frequently raised by adults who pursued their happiness first. They did so not out of selfishness, but because the entire culture urged them to go find themselves.

The latchkey kids of the late 20th century became parents hellbent on making up for perceived neglect. They bathed their children in bespoke care and sweated preschool interviews. They meddled in spats among friend groups and hovered over college decisions. These days, they are routinely blamed for the consequences of imminently good intentions.

By the by, the culture was flooded by terrifying media, reinforcing the idea that predators lurked around every corner. After lurid TV movies and milk carton kids came the internet, which supercharged primal parenting anxieties. Among these are the idea that bullying is a constant menace, that trauma is terminal and that words have an unholy power to crush souls.

Into this stew, babies were plopped. Of course we were determined to protect them. The old American tendency to moral panic hinges on concern for children. Political debate is routinely reduced to the harm one set of ideas or another will do to kids. We characterize policies we oppose as not merely bad for our little ones, but likely to cause their deaths. Our fascination with child abduction and murder, statistically a very rare horror, knows no limits.

Expressions of our paranoia—Have you checked the children? It’s 10 p.m., do you know where your children are? — are everywhere. Mass shootings, only the latest American nightmare, have not led to more effective gun laws but do boost the urge to create safety zones so restrictive they verge on airless.

The result is a culture that frets endlessly about child welfare while methodically eliminating unsupervised kids from every nook of public space. Too many communities are eerily quiet, even though places devoid of kids feel neither welcoming or safe. A truly free and open society would be one where children had the run of the place.

Parenthood was a term my own parents loathed. In their words, they found it insufferably touchy-feely. They far preferred to live in the world of grownups. The family operating principle was simple: Adults, volatile and magnetic, were the sun and children were the planets. When I had kids of my own, I had no interest in replicating that dynamic.

But it turns out that every unhappy childhood at least has the virtue of being interesting, while the happy childhood, as we have exhaustively reimagined it, can be terribly dull.

When my own son was the same age as the wild girl in the woods, I asked him what he thought the best thing about being a grownup would be. Without hesitation, he answered: People don’t follow you around all the time.

We did indeed follow him around — to Suzuki violin lessons, to T-ball, to scrupulously arranged playdates and a lavish array of enriching activities. Curating the world for him and his younger sister became the art and labor of our lives. Like parents from the beginning of time, we only wanted to give him everything we believed we lacked. But the gift he most wished for was the simple pleasure of being left alone.

---

You are reveling in CultureWag, the best newsletter in the universe, edited by JD Heyman and created by The Avengers of Talent. We lead the conversation about culture—high, medium and deliciously low. Drop us a line about any old thing, but especially about what you want more of, at intern@culturewag.com.

“You only live once, but if you read the Wag, once is enough.”—Mae West

---

---