If you want your kids to thrive this summer, don’t just turn off their phones – open your front door, too

 Children’s worlds have been shrinking and it’s harming their mental health. It’s time for parents to be brave and allow them a little independence

In books and movies that pack a wallop you will usually find a “charged object” – an item crucial to the plot and freighted with emotion. The slipper in Cinderella. The apple in Adam and Eve. And today, in the story of what has gone wrong with childhood: the smartphone.

It’s not that phones aren’t a real problem. We have all seen it. Kids glued to their phones in a restaurant. Kids glued to their phones at the bus stop. The other day I saw a girl swinging on a swing – the classic summer pastime – glued to her phone. And oh, the content! This study alone will give you pause: ParentsTogether Action reports that children see sex and drug content every few minutes on Snapchat. If only we could take away their phones, a happy childhood would be restored – or so it can seem.

But there is another crucial object that is so not charged, so unsexy that it is barely noticed at all. It is the front door. Take away the phone and open the door – that’s when childhood changes. Just taking away the phone does not do the trick.

Currently, as children look forward to their summer breaks from school, most of their doors are sealed like safes. An Institute for Family Studies survey of 24,000 American parents asked what age they let their kids walk around their neighbourhoods. The majority said they wouldn’t even let them leave the block – at age 14.

In the UK, meanwhile, a classic article, How children lost the right to roam in four generations, chronicled the childhoods of one British family, beginning with the 88-year-old great-grandpa: “When George Thomas was eight he … regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision.” The walking range of each generation keeps shrinking until we get to George’s eight-year-old great-grandson, who “enjoys none of that freedom. He is driven the few minutes to school, is taken by car to a safe place to ride his bike and can roam no more than 300 yards from home. Even if he wanted to play outdoors, none of his friends strays from their home or garden unsupervised.”

That article was published in the Daily Mail on 15 June 2007. The iPhone’s launch in the US wasn’t until 14 days later.

My point is that children’s independent, wind-in-their-hair afternoons were disappearing long before it was even possible to give them a smartphone. Which means taking away that supremely charged object will not, in itself, bring back a childhood filled with neighbourhood friends and frolics.

Bringing that back requires us to reverse decades of closed doors, car rides to school, organised sporting activities and calls to the police when a child is spotted walking to the shops. I personally know how judgey people can be about parents who take their eyes off their kids. After I wrote a column about letting my nine-year-old travel home on the New York subway by himself, I was called the “world’s worst mum”. (My son, meanwhile, had the time of his life.) So while the phone has been damned as an “experience blocker” by Jonathan Haidt, a co-founder at my childhood-independence initiative, Let Grow – and I agree – the original experience blocker is fear. It has been building for a while. A generation or two of the 24/7 news cycle (and increasing economic worries) have made parents fear that if their children are left unsupervised they are going to get snatched by a guy in a white van – or fall behind (academically or athletically). So we don’t let them do anything on their own.

This experience blocking is at least partly to blame for the childhood mental health crisis. A 2023 Journal of Pediatrics paper by another Let Grow co-founder, Peter Gray, shows how the decline in kids’ independence and free play parallels the rise in their anxiety and depression – correlation that his research suggests is causation, too.

If you are over a certain age you still remember how great it felt to get up and go out to explore the woods, or – oh, the thrill – the unfinished homes on a construction site. You were alive. Excited. Usually, you were running. For a kid to feel that again doesn’t just require the absence of a phone. It requires the absence of us. We have to let them go off without us always watching, helping and offering snacks.

Of course, kids still need parameters – and parents. We need to teach them how to cross the street safely. Where they’re allowed to go – and not. How they can talk to strangers, but not go off with strangers. In turn, they need to prove that they are responsible by coming home on time, or checking in as requested. If not, independence must wait a little longer.

But there is risk, also, in restricting children’s movements in an attempt to keep them safe. Doctors now say that children in the UK will be one of the unhealthiest generations in years, with obesity and mental health disorders among the problems they will face. It doesn’t have to be this way. Gray’s paper cites a naturally occurring experiment in two demographically similar Zurich towns. In one, kids as young as five were allowed to play outside unsupervised. In the other, traffic forbade it. This had a huge impact on their lives. “Those who could play freely in neighbourhoods spent, on average, twice as much time outdoors, were much more active while outdoors, had more than twice as many friends and had bettermotor and social skills than those deprived of such play,” reports Gray. Simply opening the door gave those kids a fuller, happier, healthier childhood – and presumably adulthood, since they grew up more connected and active.