The psychologist Peter Gray opens his new book, Restoring Childhood, with a thought experiment: imagine a loving person who makes you wear a GPS tracker, escorts you everywhere, and coordinates with a boss who controls you the way a teacher controls a schoolchild. Adults would call that a nightmare. Gray calls it modern childhood.
The case, via Joshua Rothman’s review essay:
- The trend lines: in 1971, 86 percent of English elementary schoolers walked home from school alone; by 2010, just 25 percent. Today 38 percent of US children will be the subject of a CPS investigation at some point — “supervisory neglect” is now a parental offense
- How the leash tightened: TV from the fifties, adults replacing sandlot play with Little League, car-first housing without sidewalks, eighties “stranger danger” panic, and a school year that grew five weeks between 1950 and 2015 while recess and lunch shrank
- The phone question: a 2025 panel of 120 experts split the difference on Haidt’s Anxious Generation — the mental-health decline is real, phones cause sleep problems, but effects depend heavily on the kid. Ban studies show modest gains: Norway’s best-evidence ban was worth about as much as cutting class size by one student
- Gray’s contrarian claim: phones aren’t fundamentally different from the pre-phone internet; the real loss is the unsupervised time with friends that phones partly replaced. Show kindergarteners pictures of play and they pick the frames with no adult in them
Rothman’s synthesis is the useful part: Gray and Haidt share more than their feud suggests — both sat on the board of the childhood-independence group Let Grow — and their accounts work best read together. Social phenomena are multicausal, and no one can undo sixty years of accumulated change at once, so the practical move is to pick a lever and pull it. Disagreement, he writes, gives us more levers.
An ideas essay that refuses the moral panic — a grounded complement to the usual “phones destroyed a generation” takes.