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This Daily Mail article got a lot of blog coverage last week, but I wanted to write about it myself. The basic premise of the story is that children today are not allowed to wander very far from home and the watchful eye of a parent. The allowable perimeter has been shrinking for nearly a century as the map above indicates (Here is a link to the full-size image at the Daily Mail site in case you want to see much more detail). The reporter also brings up evidence that lack of interaction with the outdoors may be a factor in developing depression and anxiety, as well as the more obvious issues with lack of exercise.
The basic findings of the study cited are a bit self-evident, but the graphic really brings home the drastic reduction in allowable roaming space, I think. What stuck out for me was how much smaller the perimeter had become for the boy born in 1950 compared to his own father's. Usually when this issue comes up, people of my generation (say, anyone between 35 and 55) tend to think that we had a lot more leeway to go wherever we wanted, yet even we were a good deal more circumscribed.
This issue almost always gets played as a contemporary societal issue, but it seems to me that this article and the study it discusses belie that. Clearly, it's a trend that has been going on for a century. The urbanization of the places where most of us hail from is a contributing factor, certainly, but probably not enough to explain the entire reduction. Similarly, this leads me to think that our current fear-driven culture is not entirely to blame; I think it does probably explain the really drastic limitation modern children, but it's just exacerbating an existing trend.
Implied in the article is that because kids don't go out to play, they stay at home and veg out, and I'm not sure I buy that. Unstructured outdoor play has been supplanted with heavily-structured activity schedules, as I can now speak to from first-hand experience. Some of those activities are outdoor, some are not, so it's probably fair to say that contemporary children do spend less time in outdoor play to some degree, but not to the total exclusion of it.
I find myself a bit torn about how to process this information, frankly. It's a little too facile to adopt the "when I was a kid" argument here, for the reason I cited above, but also because it's unreasonable to expect that the world will never change from the way it was when you were a kid (a lesson A LOT of conservatives need to learn). On the other hand, the present-day obsession with unlikely threats coupled with the "nanny-state" response from people who make policy is equally unreasonable. I will say that seeing the graphic has made me start thinking about how we'll apply perimeter restrictions to Charlotte and how other parents' restrictions are likely to have an effect on her.
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