Causes of Kids' Gradual Loss of Freedom from 1950 to 1990

In a recent post I contended that a major cause of the continuous rise in teens’ suicides from 1950 to 1990 was a continuous decline over this period in opportunities for kids to engage in the sorts of independent activities that are essential both for immediate happiness and development of the courage, confidence, and sense of agency required to meet life’s challenges with equanimity.

Some readers, who were kids in the 1970s and recalled a childhood of far more freedom and independence than kids have today, were surprised by my contention that children’s freedom had already been declining before the 1970s. Because of this, I’m presenting here some history about kids’ lives over the 40 years from 1950 to 1990. I’m relying on published works on the history of American childhood, but, for illustration, am also providing examples from my own life. I was born in 1944, so I have lived the decades described here. I hope you won’t think I’m being too egocentric in referring to my own experiences. I do so because these are the examples I know best. (Well, and it is fun to reminisce.)

In his book on the history of children’s play in America, Howard Chudacoff (2007) refers to the first half of the twentieth century as the golden age of play. Child labor laws had largely freed children from sweat shops by the beginning of the century, and the Progressive Movement early in the century emphasized the value of play, creativity, and freedom. Schools allotted plenty of time for play, and children were generally welcome in public spaces everywhere when school wasn’t in session. Despite two world wars and the Great Depression, and despite many other social ills, 1900 to 1950 was generally a great time to be a kid. Children spent huge amounts of time playing and exploring outdoors, with other children, largely away from adults.

The societal changes that reduced children’s opportunities for independent adventure after about 1950 include the arrival of television, the rise of adult-directed kids’ sports, the gradual exclusion of kids from public spaces, the declining opportunities for gainful employment or meaningful contributions to the family economy, and, finally, the increased mandate that kids must be constantly monitored and protected. I consider these one at a time below.

Television Brought Kids Indoors.

The turning point, according to Chudacoff, came in the 1950s, which was the decade in which most families acquired their first television set. Television brought kids indoors, to a much greater extent than before. Television by its nature is passive-you just watch it. It’s entertainment, not play. It tends to isolate kids into their nuclear families, away from the outside world. As a specific turning point, Chudacoff cites the Mickey Mouse Club TV program, which began in 1955. It aired daily after school and before dinner, which led many kids to go home to the TV rather than hang out and play with other kids after school.

I remember the show very well. I was 11 years old in 1955, and my family had just purchased our first TV. And, yes, watching that show cut into my time fishing or playing pick-up ball games or sledding or pond skating with other kids outdoors after school. (I freely confess that, like millions of 11-year-old boys across the country, I was in love with Mouseketeer Annette Funicello.)

Chudacoff suggests that TV not only reduced kids’ outdoor time directly but also provided opportunity for marketers to advertise toys directly to children, and most of these toys (including Barbie dolls for girls) were for indoor play. Instead of finding or creating their own playthings, kids could now beg their parents for the already created things they saw on TV.

Adult-Directed Sports Began to Displace Kid-Directed Play.

In the 1950s, I played lots of baseball, basketball, and football (of the touch variety), and some hockey (on frozen ponds in Minnesota). None of it was organized by adults, and, in fact, there were usually no adults in sight. All these games were organized by whatever group of kids showed up at the vacant lot, or school yard, or the pond where we played.

Little League Baseball was created in 1939, but it didn’t spread much until the mid-1950s. The 1960s was a decade of huge increases in offerings of adult-directed sports. In addition to Little League there was Biddy basketball, Pee Wee hockey, and Pop Warner football (Friedman, 2013). Parents bought into these even more than did kids, and parents commonly drove kids to the events and stayed to cheer their kids on. We see here the intrusion of adults into what had previously been children’s world. Adults simply took over, and the kids became pawns rather than creators. As I discussed in a previous post, adult-directed sports do not offer the opportunities for kids to learn how to direct their own activities and solve their own problems that are endemic to kid-directed play.

I avoided all this, as I preferred the informal play and my parents were wise enough not to encourage me. I did not take part in adult-directed sports until I joined my high school basketball and baseball teams. But many of my friends joined such leagues, which reduced the number of kids available for informal play.

“Public” Space Came Increasingly to Mean “Adult” Space.

In the early 1950s and before, kids of all ages (from about 5 on up) were almost everywhere. They played in the streets and in vacant lots and sometimes in neighbors’ yards. They were present (without adults) in shops, movie theaters (for 25 cents), and all varieties of public transportation.

When I was 4 years old, in 1948, I lived with my mother (who worked days) and grandmother on a busy street in a working-class area of Minneapolis. My grandmother, who was partly crippled, taught me how to cross streets and would send me to a store, about two blocks away, to get things she needed (including cigarettes). I might have been a little younger than most kids given such a responsibility at that time, but not by much. I don’t think anyone batted an eyelash when I entered a tobacco store and asked for a “pack of Kools for my gramma.” I remember these experiences well because they gave me such a grown-up feeling. At 4 I was not a helpless baby; I was someone who could navigate a busy city street and help my grandmother. That was no doubt a strengthening experience.

Some adults enjoyed the sight of kids everywhere, but others found them to be a nuisance. Some worried about their safety, and some felt threatened by older kids. Kids were noisy, disruptive, sometimes downright delinquent. Gradually, over time—often under the banner (sometimes legitimate) of protecting kids—measures were taken to remove kids from public spaces. Security guards began shooing them away from shops; police were called when adults perceived kids as a threat; parents were blamed for not controlling their kids; city planners stopped taking kids into account as they planned public areas (Cahill, 1990; Valentine, 1996). These changes were continuous and gradual throughout the 40-year period we are considering here. The “public” in public spaces gradually came to mean “adult.” Increasingly, kids were part of the public only if accompanied by an adult.

Opportunities for Gainful Employment and Meaningful Contributions to the Family Economy Declined.

In the 1950s it was generally illegal for kids under 16 or so to work full time for pay, but there were lots of part-time jobs that gave kids their own spending money and provided an opportunity to demonstrate, to themselves and others, their competence and reliability. Again, humor me as I illustrate with some of my own experiences.

By the age of 9 or 10 I was making a little money mowing neighbors’ lawns (with one of those old-fashioned no-motor reel push mowers) in summer and shoveling sidewalks in winter. By age 11 I had a paper route. In fact, I had two routes—an early-morning route and an afternoon one. When I was 13, we lived in Duluth and I had an after-school job making deliveries throughout the city by foot, for a book-binding company, and sweeping up at the end of their workday. I began contributing to Social Security then, as I am now reminded every year when I examine my Social Security benefits. At age 16 I was hired by the city of Duluth as a lifeguard.

These work experiences were valuable not just because they gave me money that was my own, but even more because they quelled whatever fears I might otherwise have had about supporting myself when I became an adult. I was trusted to do responsible jobs and was paid to do them. Today kids are anxious about their future partly because they have little opportunity to experience the work world. By the time my son was a kid in the 1970s and early ‘80s, most of the kinds of jobs I had as a kid were no longer available at those ages, and now none of them are.

As Markella Rutherford (2011) points out in her book Adult Supervision Required, children not only had greater opportunity for out-of-home employment decades ago but were also generally more likely to contribute meaningfully to the family at home. She notes that until about 1960, the idea that children would be responsible for household chores was taken for granted. Beginning around 1960, chores became a topic of discussion, which centered more on what is good for the child than what is good for the family. The attitude began to develop that children’s real job is schoolwork, so school homework began to replace housework.

As one writer (Zelizer, 1994) put it, “Children became economically useless but emotionally priceless.” I’m pretty sure that growing up feeling either economically useless or emotionally priceless, let alone both, is not healthy. You grow up feeling like a pet rather than a person.

Again, indulge me as I describe some ways I contributed at home—beyond buying cigarettes for my grandmother at age 4. I, of course, mowed our lawn and shoveled our walks, by age 8 or 9. By age 10 I had the regular (exciting to me) job of burning the trash in the incinerator behind our house. I was trusted by age 11 or 12 to paint my own bedroom and a little later to paint all the other rooms in the house.

When I was 10 and 11 my mother and stepfather were trying to make ends meet running a small-town weekly newspaper at a time when such papers were going out of existence everywhere. The paper was printed each Thursday morning on a huge hand-fed press, so it could go out later that day. Often my parents would have been up all night getting it ready to print, and then they would ask me to print it Thursday morning while they slept. That meant I had to (got to!) skip school that morning.

I imagine my parents worried a little about my safety in operating that press, which could crush your hand if you failed to move it quickly after feeding the paper in. But they must have figured it was safer for me to do it, after having a good night’s sleep, than for one of them to do it after no sleep. They were right, and that made me feel proud.

Today, in addition to safety concerns, people would be worried about my missing school, but I don’t recall anyone being concerned about that, not even my teacher or the school principal. I wasn’t the best student, but I was in no danger of failing. Moreover, what I was doing was not much different from what some of my 10- and 11-year-old friends on farms were doing. They were operating heavy farm equipment and sometimes missing school to help their families during harvest season, when their help was really needed. It wasn’t all about school then. Something we too often forget these days: Kids like to feel useful.

Conceptions of “Stranger Danger” Led to Panic about Kids’ Safety.

I’ll be brief here, because this is something I have written much about previously (e.g., Gray, 2011, 2013) and something most readers have experienced first-hand. In the late 1970s and early 1980s—resulting in part from two highly publicized cases of young boys who were kidnapped and murdered by strangers at that time—parents began to hear messages aimed at convincing them that their children were in grave danger if they were anywhere in public without an adult immediately present to protect them.

For the reasons I’ve already given, children’s presence outdoors had already declined greatly, but from 1980 on it declined even more. In truth, the kinds of crime that frightened parents were and are extremely rare, but the media played them up dramatically, and essentially the whole society bought into this fear. As Rutherford points out in her book, by the mid-1990s you risked being accused of negligence if you allowed your kids to play even on the block where you lived or to walk a few blocks to school without an adult—things essentially all kids were allowed to do before 1980.

One way to illustrate the change comes by way of a small study conducted in north England around 2010 (Woolley and Griffin, 2015). England has followed essentially the same trajectory as the United States concerning kids’ freedom. The researchers interviewed the grandmothers and mothers in two families that had lived in the same region in Sheffield for three generations to find out how far each was allowed to go by themselves when they were 6 to 10 years old and how far their own 6- and 10-year-olds could go. One grandmother (who would have been a child in the late 1950s and early 60s) said there was no parental limit on her range of mobility, and the other recalled destinations that were 2 or 3 kilometers away from home. For the mothers (who were children in the early 1980s), the range of mobility was much less—a maximum of about 0.5 kilometers from home. For the current children, there was no range at all. They weren’t allowed to leave their front yard without an adult.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

All the developments I have described here led, over 40 years, to a dramatic shift in how kids were viewed. While kids were once seen as tough and competent (though often annoying and sometimes delinquent) they came increasingly to be seen—by adults and, most sadly, by the kids themselves—as precious, fragile, and economically useless. If you see yourself that way, life is scary and depressing. It is no wonder that rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide rose continuously and dramatically for teenagers over this 40-year period.

As I described in my last post, kids received a bit of reprieve for a while beginning around 1990, as new technology brought new usefulness, new forms of play, and new ways of connecting with others. As a result, anxiety, depression, and suicides declined over a roughly 12-year period. But then, beginning around 2010, they rose again. In a future post, I will present some thoughts about why that happened.

As always, I welcome your thoughts and questions. Psychology Today does not allow comments, so I have posted this on a different platform where you can comment. I invite you to comment here.

References

Cahill, S.E. (1990). Childhood and public life: reaffirming biographical divisions. Social Problems, 37, 390-402.

Chudacoff, H.P. (2007). Children at play: An American history. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Gray, P. (2011). The decline of play and the rise of psychopathology in childhood and adolescence. American Journal of Play, 3, 443-463.

Gray, P. (2013). Free to learn: why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier, more self-reliant, and better students for life. Basic Books, 2013.

Friedman, H.L. (2013). When did competitive sports take over American childhood? The Atlantic. Sept. 20, 2013.

Rutherford, M.B. (2011). Adult supervision required: private freedom and public constraints for parents and children. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Valentine, G. (1996). Children should be seen and not heard: The production and transgression of adults’ public space. Urban Geography 17, 205-220.

Woolley, H.E. & Griffin, E. (2015). Decreasing experiences of home range, outdoor spaces, activities and companions: changes across three generations in Sheffield in north England. Children's Geographies, 13, 677-691.

Zelizer, V.A. (1994). Pricing the priceless child: the changing social value of children. Basic Books.