How getting richer made teenagers less free
We value children more than ever. But we're suffocating them.
In 1913, journalist Helen Todd talked to hundreds of 14- to 16-year-olds working in American factories. Most of their fathers were dead or had crippling health issues thanks to decades of work in unsafe factories, and their mothers were supporting an average of five children on low wages. By doing piecemeal work for excruciatingly low pay in dangerous factories, the teenagers were keeping their families afloat.
Todd asked these teenage laborers whether they would choose work in the factory or school if their families were rich enough that they didn’t need to work.
Overwhelmingly, they chose the factory:
“The children don’t holler at ye and call ye a Christ-killer in a factory.”
“They don’t call ye a Dago.”
“They’re good to you at home when you earn money.”
“Youse can eat sittin’ down, when youse work.”
“You can go to the nickel show.”
“You don’t have to work so hard at night when you get home.”
“Yer folks don’t hit ye so much.”
“You can buy shoes for the baby.”
“You can give your mother yer pay envelop.”
“What ye learn in school ain’t no’ good. Ye git paid just as much in the factory if ye never was there. Our boss he never went to school.”
“That boy can’t speak English, and he gets six dollars. I only get four dollars, and I’ve been through the sixth grade.”
“When my brother is fourteen, I’m going to get him a job here. Then, my mother says, we’ll take the baby out of the ‘Sylum for the Half Orphans.”
No one in America today lives under the cloud of desperation that these children did. In the last century, economic growth has transformed our society from every conceivable angle. But one we don’t dwell on much is how it has transformed childhood.
In 1910, shortly before these children were interviewed, 16% of American children died before age 5 and 19% before age 18. Just 13.5% of adults had a high school diploma, and the median adult had about an eighth-grade education. The 1910 Census found 41% of 14- to 15-year-old boys gainfully occupied (that is, in the workforce), and 79% of boys and young men aged 16 to 20.
Naturally, these changes — in the odds that children survive to adulthood, in the age at which they first work, in how many of them complete high school — have profoundly shaped our conception of childhood.
Kids’ lives are better — but involve much less autonomy
As the nation grew wealthier and more children began to survive to adulthood, we became vastly more protective of them — and permitted them far fewer risks. It’s hard to invest (either emotionally or literally) in children when poverty, disease, and starvation haunt your days. And now that we are less desperately poor, we can afford to ask less of our children — no family need choose between sending their 14-year-old to the factories or surrendering their baby to an orphanage.
Today, legal protections for minors are more expansive than they ever have been. Cultural expectations have shifted enormously. Americans hit their children less than we used to. We spend more time playing with them. We spend, of course, far more money on them. We supervise them more.
“The very successes achieved in improving children’s lives led to an escalation in what came to be seen as the minimal standard for children’s well-being,” wrote Peter Stearns in his history of American child-rearing. “Levels of anxiety experienced by parents did not correlate with what might have been registered as historic progress in children’s quality of life.”
Obviously, “kids rarely die these days” is a massive change for the good, and I’m also not exactly here to defend children dropping out of middle school to tape labels on cigarettes for six cents per thousand (as one child featured in Todd’s article does).
But the same forces that worked to eliminate child labor and exploitation and gave parents more room and incentive to invest in their progeny have also worked to strip children of independence.
This month, The Argument polled voters about modern parenting. I found it striking how far our society has pushed back the age at which children are trusted with even the barest autonomy — or, from another angle, how many years we expect parents to dedicate all their time to closely supervising them. (The full crosstabs are available to paying subscribers at the bottom of this post.)
We asked “At what age do you think it is appropriate for a child to stay home alone for an hour or two?” To my astonishment, 36% of respondents said that it was not appropriate until “between the ages of 14 and 17.”
Are a third of you really refusing to leave your 13-year-olds home alone for a couple hours while you go to the grocery store? Or are those respondents the ones who don’t have children?
I asked my colleague Lakshya Jain to break the data down for me, and parents aren’t much different than nonparents here — 37% of parents and 35% of nonparents said it wasn’t appropriate until the child was aged 14 to 17.
Or take the responses to another question we asked: “When parents allow a 10-year-old child to play alone in a nearby park for three hours, should they be investigated by Child Protective Services for potential neglect?” Again, 36% of respondents said that they should — and since it only takes one person to make a CPS call, many of your neighbors thinking it’s wildly inappropriate for a child to play alone at the park could amount to an effective ban on doing so.
If you don’t have kids, it can be pretty hard to have a good mental picture of what capabilities a 10-year-old has and doesn’t have, so I expect some readers may be adrift in trying to estimate whether this survey result is reasonable or nuts. And 10-year-olds also vary enormously in their maturity and common sense. But I interact with lots of kids, so let me tell you: This is absolutely nuts.
Ten-year-olds are way past the age where you have to worry about them running into the road; I would trust the majority of 10-year-olds to play unsupervised for a few hours, and parents deciding whether to allow this have far more knowledge than anyone else of their specific child. Cellphones mean that it’s easy for a kid to contact their parents immediately if something comes up. When I was 10, I babysat for the neighbors, and I was a perfectly adequate babysitter; I think in most U.S. states today, that might be regarded as child neglect.
The role of CPS in accelerating this transition to a highly supervised, highly limited childhood is probably underrated. Around 35% of American families have been investigated by CPS. In most of these cases, no maltreatment will be found — only about 1 in 8 families will ever have a finding of maltreatment. But obviously it is terrifying, as a parent, to be investigated, even if you are found to be doing fine; it will naturally heighten the anxiety experienced by parents and lead them to further restrict the activities of their children.
If you get CPS called on you for letting your 10-year-old play at the park across the street, you aren’t likely to do it again even if CPS drops the investigation.
But despite my trepidations, the very population most likely to have CPS called on them are the ones most likely to support state intervention. Fully 50% of Black voters in our poll agreed that allowing a 10-year-old to play unsupervised at a park for a few hours was grounds for a CPS call. Just 33% of white voters and 37% of Hispanic voters said the same.
This might reflect the relatively higher rates of risk faced by Black children who are more likely to be victims of crimes, but the absolute risk is small enough for all children that playing freely in the park clearly passes the cost-benefit sniff test — especially when you consider the alternative.
In about a century, we’ve gone from a world where many 14-year-olds are the breadwinners for their family — bad! — to a world where many of them aren’t even trusted to be in the house without a babysitter — also bad!
There has to be a middle ground, where we ensure that 14-year-olds don’t permanently foreclose opportunities for their future selves, ensure they all get a good education, and also don’t make them miserable by extending their adolescence a full decade during which they’re cut off from all the parts of the world that offer autonomy and meaning.
Many analyses of the consequences of our ethos of extended childhood focus on the indirect effects on the parents. They focus on how the increasing demands of parenthood mean that parents are much less happy, without any corresponding benefit to their children. Or they focus on declining birth rates. These are serious problems, but it’s worth not skipping over the direct impacts on teenagers themselves.
Teenagers are allowed to do less and less in the physical world, even as (thanks to technological advancement) they have more and more access to the digital world. I’m not going to recapitulate Jonathan Haidt here; I actually feel very confused about precisely the role that Instagram and TikTok play in the stress and unhappiness of the modern American adolescent. But I feel on much more solid ground saying that the effects of the digital world on our kids is worse when it is the only world they have access to.
When teenagers aren’t trusted to walk over to a friend’s house or play in the park, when they almost never have a part-time job where they can earn a paycheck and meet expectations that aren’t purely artificial, then I think it’s much harder for them to have a realistic, non-algorithm-driven worldview and concrete life goals they can work toward.
We don’t have good data on teen suicides in 1910 — and it has historically been common for suicides to be recorded as accidents, making it extremely hard to confidently compare across time periods. All the same, I think teen suicides are up. In 1950, there were 2.7 suicides per 100,000 15- to 19-year-olds. Today, there are 7.5 (though that’s down from a 1990s peak of 13.2).
No one could possibly examine what it was like to be a teenager a century ago and soberly call for a return to it. Things are better now.
Still, it would be a tragedy if the explosion of prosperity that freed our children from labor traps them under increasing supervision and diminished opportunities for meaningful choice and meaningful participation in society. Today’s child endangerment doesn’t come from dangerous machines, high mortality rates, or a lack of K-12 opportunities — it often comes from a lack of agency.
In the last 100 years, we gave our children better and safer childhoods. Now it’s time to give them the teen years they deserve.
Thank God CT passed Public Act 23-176 in 2023 explicitly defining that neglect must consist of "obvious danger" and that activities like walking to school or parks unsupervised are allowed. Here in Wallingford, especially during the summer, there's roving bands of children through teenagers on bikes and it's great.
Another possible culprit is the american car culture.
When everything is built for car drivers, kids -- who cannot independently drive -- suffer. They could ride a bike, but biking infrastructure is not great which makes it more dangerous (and thus, less parent-approved). They can't just walk to a friend's house or to hang out in the park, if they have to cross an intersection or a giant parking lot to get there, which the parents won't allow. Taking a bus to move around the suburbs can be hard/impossible. Their geographic range of classmates is constrained to anyone who could *drive* to school, rather than anyone who could *walk/bike* there, so it's much less likely that they befriend neighbor kids. All of this makes children end up stuck at home far more often than before. (and that's before video games and social distancing...)