We no longer live in an era of footbinding, writes my Let Grow Co-Founder Peter Gray, the psychologist who studies the importance of mixed-age, unsupervised play. But for about a thousand years, he notes in a recent Substack post, girls in China would have their feet broken and bound to stop them from growing. This was considered not only normal but crucial: Girls with unbound, functional feet were considered low class and ugly.
It wasn’t until the 20th century that this practice went from cultural norm to culturally unthinkable. But today? “There are other ways in which we interfere with our children’s development,” writes Gray. And I think you can guess his point:
More than one way to stunt a person.
While we no longer stunt our kids’ bodies, our new cultural norms stunt their curiosity. Their competence is also stunted via excessive adult supervision:
“Children are by nature designed to develop physically, socially, emotionally, and intellectually largely through self-directed play and exploration with other children…. Over the last few decades, however…social norms have gradually developed that prevent such play.”
These new norms, Gray believes, “are a major cause of the extraordinarily high levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide among young people over recent decades.”
How a bad idea becomes a “good” one.
That’s a pretty bold claim. But recall that last year The Journal of Pediatrics published a paper by Gray and two colleagues showing that as kids’ independence and free play have been going down over the decades, their depression and anxiety have been going up.
Why would a culture persist in a practice so damaging to the children it cherishes? Gray explains how norms develop:
Someone does something that seems to be advantageous, and others copy it. (With footbinding, a 10th century emperor became enamored of a concubine who bound her feet, and everyone else wanted their daughters to be as enchanting as she was.)
America’s wrong turn.
As for curtailing kids’ freedom, it’s hard to say exactly when this started. But in the 1980s, with the birth of the 24-hour news cycle, the spread of cable TV, and the missing kids’ pictures on the milk cartons, it began to feel as if kids were being kidnapped right and left. (They weren’t, and still aren’t. Most missing kids are runaways or taken in a custodial dispute. See our crime stats page.)
But good parents protect their kids from terrible danger, so supervision became a hallmark of morality. Parents copied each other, and the level of supervision kept increasing.
And pretty soon, you’ve got a new moral code.
The problem is, “Social norms sometimes take the form of moral imperatives,” writes Gray, making it really hard to violate them. In America, it has gotten to the point where an unsupervised child is seen by many folks as automatically in danger. This means that any parent who is NOT constantly supervising their child is seen as a monster who don’t care if their child lives or dies! “Extreme protection,” says Gray, “has become not just a social norm but a moral imperative.”
Gray cites a study by University of California Irvine professors that found that the more that constant supervision becomes engrained in our culture, the more danger we see in giving kids even a smidgen of unsupervised time. Rationality doesn’t matter. Only following the social norms does.
Same as in the days of footbinding. A three-inch foot was beautiful. A fully grown foot was disgusting.
Reverse-engineering a cultural mistake.
In all our years of working to reverse the norm of excessive supervision, Let Grow has found that the only thing that snaps people back to reality is…reality. That’s why we recommend schools assign The Let Grow Experience. All the students get the same assignment: Do something new on your own. All the parents must, thus, let them.
Do it once, and it’s scary but rewarding. Do it over and over, and pretty soon, reality will trump the fear. Do this with other parents – everyone sending their kids to the store, the park, or the bus stop on their own — and the social norms actually shift. You win, and so do your kids. They are, in a word, unbound.
A plug:
Need help getting started at home? Our free Independence Kit is the family edition of the The Let Grow Experience.
