What's the matter with kids today? Phones? Common Core?

Children should be able to explore and play outside -- and online, argues psychologist Peter Gray in an upcoming book, Restoring Childhood: How To Set Kids Free in an Age of Anxiety

Gray, the author of the 2013 book Free to Learn, argues that children grow up healthy if they have plenty of unsupervised, unstructured, outdoor play, writes Kaitlyn Tiffany in The Atlantic. He helped found Let Grow, which calls itself the "childhood independence" movement. The nonprofit "encourages parents and teachers to stop watching kids so intently, and tries to fight “neglect” laws that frame a lack of child supervision as criminal or reckless behavior."

But Gray has broken with his old allies on the issue of free play online. “To grow up well, children have to be able to play in the world that they’re growing up in,” he told Tiffany. That includes the online world.

Gray's former colleague, Jon Haidt, published The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness in 2023, arguing for an end to the "phone-based childhood." A bestseller, it's been very influential in persuading schools to ban smartphones and legislators to propose social media restruction for children under 16, writes Tiffany.

Gray vehemently disagrees with Haidt's premise that the internet is too dangerous for children. “As a society we have almost a knee-jerk reaction to believe that the solution to any problem experienced by kids is to deprive them of yet one more freedom, and this book is helping to jerk some of those knees even further,” he wrote.

The new book blames the childhood mental-health crisis on school-centered stress, writes Tiffany. He believes Common Core standards, adopted in 2010, "narrowed teachers’ options for creative curricula and increased the amount of time that the average American student spent taking tests."

The percentage of U.S. teenagers who said doing well in school was a source of stress jumped from 43 percent in 2009 to 83 percent in 2013, according to the annual Stress in America study, Gray writes. School reforms in Sweden and England also raised stress levels, he argues.

"School policies were not the only things that changed from 2009 to 2013," Tiffany writes. "Smartphone use, for example, skyrocketed across the same few years."

The standards-and-accountability movement, which led to more testing, started in the 1980's, long before Common Core. I don't see any evidence that Common Core -- or anything else -- got students to work harder. Students are spending less time on homework and less time reading.

School was not always so central to American childhood, notes Jia Lynn Yang in a New York Times' story on the mental-health crisis. "In 1950, less than half of all children attended kindergarten. Only about 50 percent graduated from high school, and without much professional penalty. . . . However bored a child might become sitting behind a desk, freedom awaited after the final bell rang, with hours after school to play without the direction of adults.

Now, three- and four-year-olds may be school for the whole day, and kindergarteners tackle what used to be the first-grade curriculum. "In a 2020 paper, Yale researchers found that nearly 80 percent of high schoolers said they were stressed; almost 70 percent reported being bored," she writes. Maybe they're burned out.