The Shrinking World of Children
In Matt Yglesias’s new book, One Billion Americans, he argues that one of the reasons parents aren’t having as many kids as they want is because the opportunity cost of parenting has gone up. Because increased productivity means the time of parents is more valuable now than it used to be, parents sacrifice more to spend time raising children than they used to.
This is a good insight, but it also understates how the direct time costs of childrearing have also increased unnecessarily. As a result, Yglesias’s claim that solution is to get rid of summer vacation so that children can spend more time in school, and thus less time burdening parents, is at least incomplete. Instead, we can significantly reduce the time cost of parenting, at least for the ages of around 9–18, without substantial expenditure or forcing children to spend more time institutionalized. Not only can this plan free up parents, it can also create healthier and more socially connected youth. The goal is simple: increase the independent mobility of children.
Independent childhood mobility refers to the ability of children to get around their environment without assistance from their parents. This means walking to school instead of being driven, going to a local park to meet up with friends without a chaperone, and, fundamentally, more free time for parents.
By comparing independent mobility between countries over time, we can understand the tradeoffs for providing children with more or less mobility. What we find is that children with more independent mobility experience less obesity, have closer relationships with their peers, and a closer emotional bond with their environment. At the same time, when children can entertain themselves without adult supervision, parents have more time freed for work or leisure. Others have made broader claims about how a lack of childhood mobility may be resulting in less independent adults, such as Jonathan Haidt in “The Coddling of the American Mind,” but those claims are still fairly contested. You don’t need to go that far to see that it’s clearly good for children to have more freedom.
Despite that, most countries are at an all time low for childhood mobility, even as technologies like cell phones seem like they should have lowered the risks for children having more freedom. If we accept that increasing mobility is good, what are the forces that lead parents to give their children less freedom?
There are two primary forces at work here: fear of traffic and fear of crime. The first is the larger determinant, but has gotten much less attention in the media. If parents are worried about their children getting hit by a car, they won’t want their children wandering around the streets. This fear is totally warranted; traffic related fatalities have been rising for years, and are the leading cause of death among children. In fact a strong argument can be made that the primary driver for reduced mobility has been the increasing danger that traffic presents.
At the same time that streets have become more deadly, especially to the forms of mobility that children have access to (bicycles and walking), the safer modes of transport have become more restricted. A child cannot drive a car, but they can take public transit, something seen widely in countries with high independent childhood mobility. But in many cities transit has been decaying for years and only very recently has energy been put into rebuilding transit networks. Many parents chose to live in the suburbs where the situation is even worse, since many forms of public transit are just not viable in a more suburbanized environment.
As a result, we have children who can’t walk or bike because their parents are (justifiably) worried about traffic, but also can’t use alternative modes to get around. These children are left either stuck at home, or being chauffeured to and from planned events, both of which result in a significant time and energy cost to parents.
The solution here is simple: make streets safer. The details on how to do this are probably too much to cover here, but efforts like lower speed limits, automated speed enforcement, improved street design, and smaller cars can all work to reduce the threat traffic poses to children. Once children are more free to move around the city by themselves, they are also more free to simply spend time without parents. Kids can go to the local park to play with friends, and that’s an activity that doesn’t involve basically any energy or time from their parents. Even for children, there are a bevy of reasonably safe and enriching activities available to them in almost any environment, from the inner city to the suburb to the rural mountains.
However, even if parents aren’t as worried about their children traveling to and from places because of safer streets, they may still be worried about the safety of their children as they play. That leads into the second main factor that causes parents to restrict the independence of their children, perceived crime.
Parental fears of kidnapping or assault are an important factor in the childhood mobility question, and have been covered in depth by high profile books like the aforementioned “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Fundamentally, the problem is that even though violent crime rates and kidnapping have been falling for decades, parents are more worried than ever about their children being attacked or abducted. This is the so-called “stranger danger”, and it is ultimately a matter of public messaging. Programs in schools, alongside media incentives to tell stories that scare, have resulted in many parents having fears about the safety of their children that are totally disconnected from the actual dangers that children face. This is a hard trend to reverse, but schools and public welfare institutions could do a better job helping parents understand the relative risks their children face.
Schools should spend essentially no time telling children about the dangers of abduction, something that is so rare as to be a non-issue, and instead focus on assault by family members or friends, something that is much more common. At the same time, as a culture we need to change the way we look at children using public spaces. There have been a bevy of high profile stories about police or child protective services being called on parents who let their kids ride public transit or walk unaccompanied. We need to renormalize children being on their own, and instead of calling the police, help look out for the safety of children as a community.
I won’t lie and say that reversing the decades long trend in parenting will be easy, but the evidence overwhelmingly supports that it would be good for both parents and children. Beyond the hard science, it seems quite likely that there are positive psychological benefits to having more freedom as a child, that are simply very difficult to study rigorously. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes that increasing institutionalization of children is tied to their increased rates of anxiety and depression. Maybe time and additional research will prove him right.
So before we start talking about getting rid of summer vacation to lower the burden on parents, maybe we should consider just giving children back some of the freedom they had a few decades ago. If we can ratchet down the pressure on what it means to be a “good parent”, you might see a lot more prospective parents decide that they are in fact able to raise a family.
Many thanks to Dr. Marketta Kyttä, for her extensive research on the topic, and for taking the time to answer many of my questions. She has recently helped create Maptionnaire, a tool to help improve the urban planning public participation process.
