How the next generation’s mental health crisis might recall the timeless values of wandering and wayfinding.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Most people know that something is going badly awry with the next generation.
We know this not because older people are, as always, complaining about how the morals and manners of kids these days are so much worse than they used to be. We know it instead because the young people themselves are telling us so. In almost every category of mental health disorder—anxiety, depression, and so on—we see spikes that are unprecedented. The question is why, and why now?
It’s not often that an executive summary from TheJournal of Pediatrics ricochets around the internet. But this week we saw just that with the findings of a study from three researchers entitled “Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Well-Being: Summary of the Evidence.”
The broad thesis is that, while many factors have led to the national emergency we are seeing with adolescent mental health, there is one major factor that is insufficiently recognized: the decline in unstructured, unmanaged, and unsupervised play.
The study shows, for instance, how rates of children playing outside has plummeted. This is not because of the “laziness” of video-gaming kids but because of parents’ fears of crime or traffic or, I would add, of not being seen as good parents.
This research is supported by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s upcoming book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, which releases in March 2024. After reading the manuscript, I believe this will be a decade-shaping book—Haidt’s arguments are compelling and reshaped my thinking. …
Continue reading…