Highlights
I grew up just outside a small town of about 300 in northern Minnesota. Everyone knew everyone. When I walked into a shop, I was proud to be known as Ben's daughter, and Dave's granddaughter. After school, my siblings and I would sometimes walk the half mile or so up the road to the corner store, where you could reliably count on church ladies drinking black coffee at one end and hunters checking the weather at the other. The store served our community as part diner, part gas station, part bait and tackle shop. The people behind the counter knew us. They also told my parents what we did.
That arrangement is increasingly rare. In a new brief released earlier this month, the Institute for Family Studies finds that nearly 60% of American 17-year-olds are still not allowed to leave their neighborhood unsupervised. Earlier IFS research found that only 1% of 9-year-olds are free to "go anywhere." This is not how American children once lived. In 1969, roughly half of American schoolchildren walked or biked to school; by 2017, only about 1 in 10 did. My childhood experience is now a minority practice.
The children kept inside the house are not, of course, idle there. By age 11, more than 60% of American kids have a smartphone, and most of those phones come with few meaningful restrictions. The geography of American childhood has been inverted: the world children once moved through with their bodies has grown smaller, while the world they now scroll is vast. The implications of this inversion for children's mental health and family life are by now well-documented: rising rates of anxiety and depression, the loss of real-world play, and the way unrestricted screen access has reshaped childhood from the inside out. But the damage isn’t only to happy childhoods. We’re losing our footing on the very foundation of American self-government.
A republic requires of its citizenry a set of practices they must be capable of performing—practices that are not automatic, but obligations of citizenship we must learn. Each is a habit, built through repetition, in low-stakes encounters before it is needed in high-stakes ones. A country whose citizens have not built those habits cannot govern itself well.
The same conditions producing anxiety are also producing a generation that has not been allowed to rehearse the habits our country runs upon.
Is free-range childhood uniquely American? It is not. Children in many cultures grow up unsupervised, and the adults they become are capable of running their own lives. What is uniquely American is the responsibility those adults inherit. A republic, at least the kind our founders designed, does require citizens who have honed these capacities. A monarchy can run on subjects who never had to negotiate; an administrative state can run on citizens who defer to expertise. Ours cannot.
Alexis de Tocqueville saw this clearly when he traveled the country in the 1830s. What made American democracy work, he argued, was not the cleverness of its institutions but the habits of its people: a citizenry that, from a young age, organized itself and took initiative without waiting for permission. The American republic ran because Americans had practiced running it long before they were asked to. The question, then, is where we practiced.
The answer is simple: we practiced in real life at real places. We practiced on the half-mile walk to the corner store and on the long way home, in the woods behind the house, in the empty lot, on the gravel road, and at the creek. These were the hours between school letting out and dinner being on the table, with no adult’s scolding eyes, no app tracking our location. American childhood was not designed as civic training, but it was where civic training happened nonetheless.
Consider the small civic capacities an unsupervised childhood develops, and that a supervised one does not. A child who never roams unsupervised never has to negotiate with peers without an adult arbiter. He never has to form a temporary association to accomplish something like the kids who decide together to build a fort, dig a hole, or, in my case once, pull a sunken paddle boat out of a creek. Walking the trail one afternoon, a friend and I found one completely underwater and half-buried in silt. We had walked that trail a hundred times. Nothing on that trail had ever been so interesting. We ran home for rope, and spent the rest of the day hauling it out and cleaning it up. We stood on the bank for a long minute, half-proud and half-uncertain whether we were about to be in trouble. We sold it to a family friend. We must have looked ridiculous, two girls covered in mud dragging an old boat along—but the proceeds funded our snacks for the rest of the summer, and while our parents had questions, they didn't seem too upset.
Looking back, each act that day was a citizenship skill in miniature. The decision to pull the boat out was judgment. The partnership we struck on our own was cooperation. Going home for rope was initiative. Hoping our parents wouldn't be mad was risk. Selling it to a family friend was small commerce.
The geography of American childhood has been inverted: the world children once moved through with their bodies has grown smaller, while the world they now scroll is vast.
Without that runway, a child never has to deal with a stranger without an adult to mediate. They never have to decide what to do with money in their pocket. They never have to fill their own hours. Each is a habit that, scaled up, is what self-government is. American children still need these skills, but we have replaced the runway of unstructured time with structured activities run by credentialed adults in leagues, lessons, clubs, and camps. Not bad in their own right, but together building a different disposition entirely: deference, permission-seeking, waiting for an expert to adjudicate. IFS research documents that parents who deliberately resist this drift, and try to raise resilient, independent children, also report feeling unsupported by the cultural norms around them. The free-range parent is now the deviant one. So is the free-range child.
This is not a call to neglect children, nor is it nostalgia. The neighborhood eyes that once watched my siblings and me walk to the corner store (and watched out for us, with a tolerance for the small foolishness of being a kid) have been replaced, in many places, by eyes that report. This is not the fault of any one parent.
But it is fixable, one step out of the house at a time. The nine-year-old who walks to a friend's house and figures out how to deal with any conflict when he gets there is rehearsing what citizens do. The 11-year-old who is given a few dollars and a destination is rehearsing what citizens do. The 14-year-old who is allowed to take a small risk and live with the result is rehearsing what citizens do. None of these is a substitute for civics class; rather, they are civics applied and brought to life.
A republic depends on citizens who have practiced self-government before they are asked to perform it. That practice has a window, and we are closing it. The same conditions producing anxiety are also producing a generation that has not been allowed to rehearse the habits our country runs upon. We should not be surprised when the citizenry that follows does not have them.
Danielle Franz is the chief executive officer of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC). She lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband and young son. Follow her on X @DanielleBFranz.
*Photo credit: Shutterstock
