When I was a kid, my parents told us to stay away from the house until dinner time. They didn't worry where we went or what we did as long as we didn't "get in trouble." We were "out playing." This was normal everywhere. (It was a long time ago. Not many Redditors are older than me.)
Now, parents who raise their children this way -- it's called "free-range parenting" -- actually get investigated or prosecuted for neglecting their children. As far as I can tell, these days kids either stay indoors, or engage in "supervised activities," like piano lessons, youth soccer, gymnastics, and so on. Parents feel, strongly, that unsupervised play is "unsafe" for children of any age. I started to notice this in the early 1980s, as I recall. It's much stronger now. And yet, crime rates are much lower than they were in the 1980s. Most parents seem more worried about abduction and sexual abuse than anything else.
How did this immense social change happen? And when? And why? Someone must have studied it carefully.
I’m not an expert on this so my reading of the literature is severely lopsided but here goes …
In the US context (and elsewhere, but not universally, it would seem) there have been definite changes in parenting, evident since the 1970s, which touch on many of the factors you have listed and are deemed as consequent to rising levels of parental anxiety and risk aversion. However, the negative perception of this change – which elides class, ethnic and gender differences in the culture of children – is strongly coloured by a romanticised, nostalgic memory of middle-class ‘Cold War boyhood and girlhood’ in the US. The belief of many is that this earlier period constituted something of a golden age of childhood when:
‘society was more child-centred … and afforded children many more opportunities for free, unstructured, outdoor play. Many worry that traditional childhood rituals and pastimes have faded and that childhood innocence has been exploited and corrupted by the instruments of consumer culture.’ (Mintz, 2012: 52)
To those who grew up in the 1950s, their memories recall a childhood that was apparently ‘less pressured, and less structured and hurried than childhood today’. This perspective, it has been argued (Mintz, 2012) is fundamentally flawed; it ignores childhood scares of the period over issues as diverse as polio and comic books; it neglects various relevant racial, gender and social injustices; and it misinterprets the nature of change (‘the commercialisation and acceleration of childhood’) – seeing it as a form rupture rather than incremental process that had its roots in the 1950s. Most importantly, it misinterprets the pertinent causal factors as deriving from value changes rather than structural changes in ‘demography, economics and technology’.
The middle-class children’s cultures of the 1970s and 1980s onwards differed fundamentally from that of the Cold War era. This was driven by changing demographics as family sizes decreased markedly. Family dynamics were different in smaller families with parents devoting more time to their kids and parent-child relationships were more ‘intense’; only children also tend to spend more time on their own. Decreasing numbers of neighbourhood children, due to decreasing family sizes, gave rise to the ‘play date’ as well as an ‘increase in structured, adult-supervised sports activities’.
Simultaneous, the age at which people married and gave birth to children went up considerably and mothers increasingly joined the labour market. As a result, fewer mothers were available to ‘informally supervise children’s outdoor activities’. Families were more mobile and tended to make fewer friends in their neighbourhoods and so were less inclined to allow their children to go outside and play without supervision. Changes in legal liability meant that spaces that children formerly might have used as play areas (empty lots, etc) were no longer available to them.
At the same time, the value of education – and the financial for not completing a secondary education – increased. Middle-class parents responded by ‘adopting a highly intensive form of child rearing that involved early cultivation of children’s cognitive skills’ (Mintz, 2012: 56)
Mintz (2012: 56) also refers to the impact of various information and screen technologies, the accessibility of pornography, depictions of violence, etc, which ‘expose children to adult realities from an early age’.
In terms of cultural change, Mintz also refers to the ‘discovery of risk’ (2012: 57) as parents increasingly fretted over their children’s psychological and physical well-being and also felt increasingly responsible that they were not bored or unhappy. Anxiety, driven by range of panics over paedophilia, stranger abduction, poisoned Halloween candy, obesity, etc., is thus, meant, to define so-called postmodern parenting. Anxious parents have turned to paid forms of care, structured and organised activities, and supervision to allay their fears.
Feminism is also attributed with having a significant impact on the gendered nature of childhood, moving away from the strictly gender-segregated childhood activities of the 1950s.
The impact of all this has been profound on childhood cultures. There has been a significant decline in biking, and walking and time spent outside by children as their freedom to autonomously negotiate geographical space has diminished. Fewer neighbourhood children, means kids spend lots of time playing alone and frequently with technological aids or under direct adult supervision.
Advertisements are more and more frequently directed at children, their spending has increased substantially.
Steven Mintz (2012), ‘The Changing Face of Children’s Culture’. In Paula S Fass and Michael Grossberg Reinventing Childhood after World War II. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp.50-62.
Wow! You worked hard on this, spent a lot of time. Also, wrote clearly and carefully. Your reply seems about right, and covers a lot of bases. Next time I wonder about this, I'll have some better answers for myself.
I suspect there are other changes you didn't mention. I don't know if Mintz did. I'll look for his book.
--People don't know their neighbors the way they did when I was a kid.
--Fear of crime seems to be growing stronger, even though crime rates are much lower than they were twenty or thirty years ago, in most places. (Maybe, once people start fearing something, they continue to fear it for the rest of their lives. During my childhood, it was fear of communism and nuclear war.)
--Fear of pedophiles is particularly intense, and so is fear of more or less normal sex play among consenting children of approximately similar age.
As your reply suggests, some neighborhoods once had high concentrations of stay-at-home moms with younger children. They might have performed important social functions -- keeping a collective eye on the kids around the neighborhood, reporting problems, dangers and bad people to each other, performing first aid on neighbor children, and so on. My mom was like this, and there were many others like her around the neighborhoods where I lived.
By the way I don't idealize my own childhood. It had good and bad. For example, my parents seemed to think that rock fights between groups of rowdy boys were just normal childhood play. They seemed kind of dangerous to me at the time. Later on, I gradually realized that they are insanely dangerous.
Hi, this question sounds like a job for /r/AskSocialScience: do consider x-posting over there