What are the results of more parental supervision and less outdoor play?

Parents supervise their children way more than they used to

Children spend less of their time in unstructured play than they did in past generations.

Parental supervision is way up. The wild thing is that this is true even while the number of children per family has decreased and the amount of time mothers work outside the home has increased.

(What’s happening in France? I don’t know.)

Western children are typically not allowed to go as far from their home unattended as in past generations. This map of the shrinking walkshed over four generations is anecdotal but I think typical — ask any older person about when they walked to school unsupervised.

More supervision means less outdoor play

Most of this supervision is indoors, but here I’ll focus on outdoor play. Needing a parent to take you outside means that you spend less time outside, and that when you are outside you do different things.

It’s surprisingly hard to find data on how much time children spend playing outside now vs. in past generations. Everyone seems to agree it’s less now, and you can look at changing advice to parents, but in the past people didn’t collect much data about children’s time use.

“A study conducted in Zurich, Switzerland, in the early 1990s . . .  compared 5-year-olds living in neighborhoods where children of that age were still allowed to play unsupervised outdoors to 5-year-olds living in economically similar neighborhoods where, because of traffic, such freedom was denied. Parents in the latter group were much more likely than those in the former to take their children to parks, where they could play under parental supervision. The main findings were that those who could play freely in neighborhoods spent, on average, twice as much time outdoors, were much more active while outdoors, had more than twice as many friends, and had better motor and social skills than those deprived of such play.” More

Adolescent mental health has worsened

This year’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey looked pretty bad about the wellbeing of American adolescents.

People squint at correlations, but theories include: 

• Social media and phone use
• Political messages of helplessness and despair
• Not enough play and freedom

Play used to be more dangerous

My grandfather was a small-town newspaper reporter in the early 20th century. He wrote “I remember a newspaper story about a boy who suffered a broken arm when, as the account read, he ‘fell or jumped’ from a low shed roof. Nobody knew whether kids fell or jumped because they were usually doing one or the other.”

Our next-door neighbor had a twin brother who drowned at age 6 in the river while playing boats with an older child (in 1950s Cambridge MA, not a remote rural area).

Our housemate grew up on a farm, where he and his friends would amuse themselves by cutting down trees while one of them was in the tree. “It was fun, but there were some scary times when I thought my friends had been killed.”

Playground injuries are . . . up?

I was expecting that more supervision meant fewer injuries. This doesn’t seem to be the case at playgrounds, at least over the last 30 years.

From a large study of US visits to emergency rooms related to playground equipment:

Maybe children are spending more time at playgrounds if they’re not playing in empty lots and such? But here’s children injured at school playgrounds (which are presumably seeing similar use over time) in Victoria, Australia. I don’t think this is just because of wider awareness of concussions or something, because even in the 80s you still got treated at a hospital if you broke your arm.

But deaths from accidents are down

US accidental deaths of children age 10-19:

UK in the 80s and 90s, aged 19 and under:

The types of accidents that kill children and teens are mostly cars and drowning.

Most of the motor vehicle deaths are while riding in cars, which is a different topic. What about while children are playing or walking around?

As parental supervision has increased, child pedestrian deaths have fallen. Some of this may be because of better pedestrian infrastructure like crosswalks and speed bumps. But I suspect much of it is an adult being physically present with children when they’re near streets.

Trends in pedestrian death rates by year, United States, 1995-2010, children ages 19 and under. The article says 90% of injured child pedestrians are unaccompanied by an adult at the time of the injury. But this is mostly teenagers, so it’s not surprising they’re unaccompanied.

Drownings are also down over this time, probably partly because of rules about fences around pools and partly because of more supervision. The drownings of babies under 1 is mostly in bathtubs, so I expect the gains there are largely from more awareness and more supervision within the home.

Some personal takeaways

Whatever we’re doing in supervising children at playgrounds is not reducing injuries. We might as well let them play in a more traditional, unstructured, unsupervised way — at least in spaces where they won’t be hit by cars.

Car traffic still seems worth worrying about. The most dangerous thing I see kids doing in our neighborhood is riding scooters on the sidewalk and zooming across intersections without checking for cars. 

When we’re near water, I take drowning risk seriously.

Boys play outside more than girls and have higher injury rates than girls. If I had boys, or kids who were generally more into risk-taking, I might worry more about serious injuries. But I’d also worry about stifling them too much or not letting them develop common sense from minor injuries.

I haven’t looked at the evidence on bike helmets for kids, but they seem like a pretty good idea. After a sledding accident involving a brick wall, we also use them for stuff like sledding and climbing big rocks.

More prosaically, warm enough clothing means we spend more time outdoors. Both kids and adults in our family wear snowpants a lot in the winter, which makes outdoor play much more viable in New England. They’re easy to get cheap on Ebay.

You can’t single-handedly recreate the 1960s

One friend said that after reading about historical rates of parental supervision, she’d take her preschooler to the park and say, “Have fun, I’ll be over here reading my book.” I also try to channel the older laid-back approach to supervision of outdoor play.

But you can’t create the social environment that existed when all the kids had less supervision. This isn’t just the “someone will call the police” fear; it’s more prosaic too. At some point other parents will view you as suspect and won’t let their kids play with yours, which defeats some of the purpose.

Some methods we’ve used:

• A lot of it was luck to be in a pretty walkable neighborhood with well-used playgrounds. Courtyard apartments (or other spaces where kids don’t have to cross a street to access play space) seem especially good for letting urban kids play unsupervised at a younger age.
• Jeff writes: “Before letting the kids be at park on their own I talked with a lot of the other park parents. These conversations usually started with me asking something like “How are you thinking about when kids are ready to be at the park on their own?”, and then touched on a lot of things including what I was planning, walkie talkies, etc. People were neutral to supportive; no one seemed to think it would be irresponsible or unreasonable. This was useful both for reducing the chance that I had misjudged the situation, and reducing the risk that other people would call the cops.”
• Supervision theater: when my kids were preschoolers and playing at the park while I was present but not hovering, other parents would start looking around to see if these children were alone. I’d periodically announce things like “Your water bottle is here if you want it,” and then the other adults wouldn’t bother us.
• Moderating: “You can climb that tree, but one person at a time.”
• Teaching street-crossing with toddlers and older kids
• Walkie-talkies: They’re quite a bit better than in past decades; they reach a quarter mile and mean both we and the kids have more freedom of movement. We can take one kid to the nearby park while another one stays home, able to radio us. We trust our kids to play at the park before we trust them to cross the street, so they sometimes play at the park and radio home when they want us to walk them home.
• Rehearsing with my kids what they’d say if a grownup asks why they’re alone: “My parents said it’s ok for me to be here.”
• Making friends with other families with more free-range kids. We met one such family (recent immigrants from Europe) because they had the only other five-year-old we’d seen playing on the bike path with no adult immediately present.
• More ideas from Peter Gray