What is your parenting style?

What are your thoughts on a recent article in the New Yorker? What comes to mind when you imagine a happy child? Maybe they are running through a meadow — a tickless one, of course — or playing hide-and-seek with friends. Maybe they’re joining a game of pickup basketball or soccer, or reading comic books in the coziness of a blanket fort, or walking home from the local bodega with friends, messily eating candy. Whatever you picture, it’s probably through a nostalgic filter. So much of how we talk about children today concerns their unhappiness.

Most experts agree that young people are more anxious and risk averse than their predecessors. Since the publication of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation in 2024, the argument that smartphones are to blame for their discontent has been widely accepted by educators, policy-makers, and parents. But with his recent book Restoring Childhood, psychology professor and researcher Peter Gray offers a counterargument: It’s not the phones at all; it’s the hovering omnipresence of adults, which has expanded in both intensity and duration with parents managing their kids’ lives well into the college years. Adults are more present physically — as coaches and play facilitators whose jobs are to structure and often rigidly define the terms of children’s leisure activities — and atmospherically, as stricter rules around unaccompanied children are enforced by child protective services and the school year and the classroom day have lengthened.

Gray’s book is a direct rejoinder to Haidt’s, and it might have cost the two academics their professional relationship. Together, they helped found the Let Grow organization in 2017 to advocate for childhood autonomy in play and learning, but in recent years they’ve had an intellectual falling-out. Gray argues that The Anxious Generation motivated a moral panic using exaggerated bits of evidence and ignoring contradicting claims to build a case. While both agree on what kids need to thrive — more opportunities for independence in all aspects of life — they have divergent perspectives on what caused the remarkable rise in youth anxiety and distress over the past few decades.

Haidt has made claims that screens of all kinds are to blame; Gray sees it differently. He considers computer gaming to be a rare and precious site of autonomy for kids, a place where the fundamentals of free, self-directed play can still exist. Even social media, Gray has said, shouldn’t be dismissed. “Smartphones and social media are tools that can be used for an extraordinary variety of purposes,” he writes, concluding from his review of the literature that “teens, by their own reports, experience more emotional benefits than detriments from social media use.” His diagnosis for what is plaguing young people is, basically, adult meddling. So much added structure and supervision around children’s lives, Gray argues, has jeopardized childhood itself.

What both men seem to miss entirely is that children do require a certain amount of looking after, even from a casual, non-hovering distance — a level of care Gray had from his own grandmother. And much of the data showing increased suffering among children starting around 1950 mirrors one of the most fundamental social transformations of the 20th century, one with a seismic effect on domestic life and all the logistics surrounding it: the impact of middle-class women joining the workforce and the resulting absence of a nationwide corps of stay-at-home moms and nearby extended family providing an oceanic environment of care — both supervised and unsupervised.

Throughout Restoring Childhood, Gray relishes his fond recollections of play outside as a child in Minnesota, roaming free with neighbors and friends through yards and parks and onto the ice of frozen ponds. But the degree to which these experiences relied on the presence of a responsible adult at home, even at a distance of several blocks away, is given only a few glancing acknowledgments. This isn’t so much a matter of supervision as availability — and proximity.

Gray seems to take for granted the presence of some kind of at-home caregiver, and this is also a missed opportunity to better understand how and why parents became more overbearing over the past 50 years. Surely, some of it had to do with the media offensive waged against working women through the 1970s and ’80s, the “mommy wars” that cast them as bad mothers and unsupervised children as “latchkey kids.” For the first generation of women in the workforce, the social costs of allowing their children to engage in unsupervised play scaled alongside their careers. Is it any wonder that children began to spend more time indoors after school in front of the TV — a phenomenon Gray notes disapprovingly but does not further interrogate?

The great mystery at the center of both Gray’s and Haidt’s books is how parents became so risk averse — and why the norms of hypervigilant parenting replaced the looser norms that came before. American parenting culture can’t seem to break out of a zombified version of its mid-century self, and Gray’s book reflects this condition while railing against it. “Because of media and other means of connection,” he writes vaguely, “we have a shared national understanding of what it means to be a good or bad parent, and that understanding today is very different from what it was decades ago.” What could possibly have influenced those views? Gray doesn’t elaborate.

Meanwhile, workplaces and schools still operate as though there’s a parent at home, expecting parents to pick up kids in the middle of the afternoon and providing limited if any affordable accommodations for families whose schedules don’t match the school’s. Hand-wringing around helicopter parenting rarely accounts for how hard it is to both work full time and make mental space for the possibility that your child is having a free-range experience that might go wrong and interrupt the last two hours of your workday. The nice thing about organized activities is they tend to unfold somewhat predictably, which is a balm for the overworked parent’s soul.

It’s as much for practical reasons as moral ones that parents rely on forms of child minding that eliminate risk, whether that means signing up kids for organized after-school activities or letting them play two hours of Minecraft while the adults race to finish their deliverables. Ultimately, maybe this requires a vision that goes beyond Haidt’s and Gray’s professional purviews: This is a structural problem as much as a social one.

throughout the 20th century — as families became more nuclear, society secularized, and women joined the workforce — many Americans might have experienced what the sociologist Émile Durkheim once called “anomie,” a feeling of widespread directionlessness and dissatisfaction that can result from periods of rapidly changing norms. When American public policy failed to acknowledge the end of the era of stay-at-home parents; failed to create affordable, safe, and lightly structured before- and aftercare programs for children with working parents (Gray calls these spaces “Play Clubs,” and they sound fantastic — if only they were widely adopted across the country); failed to account for children in urban planning; and ramped up apparatuses of surveillance that criminalized working parents, the anomie of 20th-century childhood was born.

The solutions Gray offers are compelling and sound, if a bit utopian in nature. He calls for adopting “trustful, autonomy-supporting parenting,” which one can’t help but nod along with approvingly. The question remains: Autonomy where, and under what circumstances? Can parents let themselves and each other off the hook long enough to allow their children to take unsupervised risks? It sounds too good to be true. Maybe Gray is right that by banning phones outright, we’re only further constraining and controlling the freedom of children. But no parent is going to give their kids the sort of once-and-future idyllic childhood Gray remembers without having some assurance that someone, somewhere, will be close at hand with a snack and a comforting word, just in case. At GRIT our goal is to support parents in their journey to build independant, confident children. Look forward to your thoughts.