People who grew up without seatbelt laws, bicycle helmets, or parental supervision past the front door often describe their childhoods not as reckless but as unusually free, and many are still sorting out which of those things they believe

If you grew up riding your bike until the streetlights came on, without a phone and without much of a plan, you are not imagining that things were different. A 2023 paper in the Journal of Pediatrics by Boston College psychologist Peter Gray, anthropologist David Lancy, and psychologist David Bjorklund stated that the key driver of falling mental wellbeing in young people is the decline in children’s independent activity. It’s the kind of research that helps put some form to a feeling many millennials have had for years: that something has changed in how kids grow up, and not for the better.

What ‘free’ really meant
For a lot of millennials and older Gen Z, the freedom of childhood was not a huge philosophical issue. It was normal. You left the house after breakfast, you came back for dinner, and nobody really knew where you were in between. You had to learn to fight other kids yourself. You got lost and found your way back. Sometimes you got bored, and that was fine.

That doesn't mean everything about it was great. Kids got hurt. Some of the independence perhaps was just the lack of anyone paying attention. And it’s worth being honest that this kind of freedom was never equally available to everyone. The unsupervised afternoons that one kid fondly remembers may be the same situation another kid experienced as simply not enough support at home. Any fair look back at this era has to hold both of those realities at once.


Why supervision took over
That shift to constant supervision wasn’t really about kids being in more danger. Gray's research shows that children today spend far less time outdoors making friends and creating their own games, and far more time at home doing homework or consuming media under parental supervision. He argues that this shift has been detrimental to their development and wellbeing.

A lot of this goes back to the 80s and 90s when media coverage of child abductions exploded, although they are statistically rare events. Parents began to watch more closely, schedules filled with organized activities, and unsupervised play was no longer the norm. Even when enough families changed habits, there often weren't other kids around to play with outside anyway. Today, children are seen as requiring regular adult supervision and protection as opposed to the view of children as competent, responsible and resilient children which persisted in the past, and this has steadily diminished children’s freedom to undertake some risk and personal responsibility activities away from adults.

The mental health connection
Now this is where the subject leaves nostalgia and gets more urgent. Gray and colleagues drew on a large body of research from developmental psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology to make the case that child and teen mental health has actually been declining for at least five decades, a time frame that closely tracks with the decline in opportunities for kids to play, roam, and do things apart from adult oversight.

The researchers don’t just point to mood. Part of their argument concerns what psychologists term “locus of control,” meaning whether a person feels they have real influence over their own life or believes that everything simply happens to them. Studies the authors cite suggest that weak internal control is strongly correlated with anxiety and depression in kids and adults, and independent activity is one of the main ways that kids develop that sense of control in the first place. In plain terms, kids who never get to try their hand at handling stuff don't get the practice that teaches them they can do it.

The researchers are quick to note that adults’ efforts to shepherd and shield kids are well-meaning, but argue that this same instinct has robbed kids of the independence they need for healthy mental development, contributing to record levels of anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts among young people.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has collaborated with Gray, makes a similar point in his book, The Anxious Generation. His main argument is that children are overprotected in the real world but underprotected online. Two trends in opposite directions, happening together, both with consequences.

States are starting to write this into law
This is where it gets interesting for people who are now parents themselves, or thinking about becoming one. In 2018, Utah became the first state to pass what's known as a "Reasonable Childhood Independence" law, designed to protect parents who allow their children to walk to school, play outside, or do other age-appropriate activities without supervision. As of early 2026, Texas, Colorado, Virginia, Connecticut, Illinois, Georgia and Florida are among thirteen states that have enacted similar laws.

The laws are not meant to force any particular style of parenting on anyone. It’s to make sure parents who want to give their kids a little more independence, like walking to a friend’s house or waiting in the car for a moment, aren’t penalized as neglectful by the system for doing so.

So what do we do
Most people lucky enough to have grown up with more freedom aren't trying to replicate their exact childhood for their own kids. There are real new risks in the world that didn't exist before, especially online, and it wouldn't be smart to ignore that either. Research suggests the old hands-off approach to the physical world was not just an artifact of a less careful time. The researchers themselves are clear that the aim is not to discard concern for safety or the worth of adult guidance, but to appreciate that as children grow up they require steadily increasing opportunities to control their own activities on their own.

The honest version of this conversation is probably not “bring back the old days” or “supervision is bad.” It’s more like asking how much of the supervision around us is really helping kids, and how much of it is just making adults feel better. Those two things can look the same on the outside, but they lead to very different childhoods.

If any of this brings up conflicting feelings about your own upbringing, either as a parent making these choices now or just as someone processing how you were raised, talking it through with a therapist can help. Some of what this topic touches on is beyond parenting philosophy.