How can we expect young people to become responsible adults when we’re constantly sheltering them?
How can we expect young people to become responsible adults when we’re constantly sheltering them?
F ormer Senator Ben Sasse’s recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal exposes the damage that parents do by keeping their children indoors with nothing useful to do. In our work launching St. Dunstan’s Academy — a farm, trades, and classics boarding school for young men that we are building on a 176-acre farm in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains — we have encountered countless parents who recognize the seriousness of the problem.
But parents alone cannot transform the underlying cultural conditions that leave children passive and immobilized in front of screens. They need help from legislators.
The data Sasse lays out from the Institute for Family Studies is shocking: “60 percent of 6-year-olds have access to internet-connected tablets, but 58 percent of kids that age aren’t allowed to play in their own yards unsupervised. . . . At 11, 1 in 4 kids aren’t allowed outside without adult supervision. More than half of 14-year-olds don’t have permission to leave their streets. . . . Nearly two-thirds of 17-year-olds can’t leave their neighborhoods without adult supervision.”
As Sasse points out, it is absurd to expect an infantilized 17-year-old to transform into a responsible member of the voting public upon that magical 18th birthday — much less be ready to serve in the military, weigh decisions about college debt, or navigate an uncertain workforce future.
Sasse’s recommendations, though, only get at part of the solution. According to Sasse, “Cultural change starts at home and then moves out to neighborhoods, communities and institutions. . . . Policy or legislation isn’t the solution.” It is true that parents bear much of the responsibility for our misguided “safety first” culture. If we are going to see real change, parents must take the lead and embrace a prudential “safety third” approach — parenting in such a way as to teach their children that there are some things, such as goodness and usefulness, that are more important than avoiding all risk of bodily harm.
But they cannot change the culture alone. In many respects, our “safety first” culture, as well as the screen-dominated indoor childhood that goes along with it, are top-down phenomena. As Sasse himself points out, the physical realities of many suburban neighborhoods are much to blame for our culture’s screen-based indoor childhood. If there is nowhere worth going on a bicycle or on foot — and no reasonable way to get there without a car — then young people will stay put, regardless of what mom and dad think about danger and risk.
Parents may genuinely wish to offer children developmentally appropriate challenges. But if they have reason to believe that letting their kids play unsupervised in their yards — much less walk or bike around the neighborhood — could result in a visit from Child Protective Services, they will be hard-pressed to act on these beliefs.
Sasse rightly says that “a significant reason for the next generation’s addiction to screens is the current generation’s failure to give them something better to do” — but, in many cases, giving them better things to do is against the law.
Last summer here at St. Dunstan’s, we hired the 18-year-old son of a friend to help us build our dormitory. Our friend also wanted his 15-year-old younger son to work for us, but the Fair Labor Standards Act would not let us pay him to do anything worth doing on our worksite. When federal law makes it illegal for a teenager to operate a miter saw on a job site, healthy parental attitudes do not count for much.
There are ways to work around these restrictions. Young people are allowed to run chop saws in shop class at school, on volunteer projects at church, or in dad’s woodshop at home. These exceptions enable us to do all the trades education we want with our students at St. Dunstan’s. Meanwhile, our rural campus offers plenty of room to roam.
But if we want these opportunities to be more widely available to our young people — if we want St. Dunstan’s to be more than an exception proving the rule — then legislation must be a part of the solution.
A new bipartisan bill promoting childhood independence from Representatives Blake Moore (R, Utah) and Jennifer McClellan (D, Va.) — modeled on a similar law that McClellan sponsored when she was a Virginia state senator — is one good step. Revising some of the well-intended but outdated restrictions of our labor laws is another. Reimagining the design and purpose of our neighborhoods to make them more walkable for children could be yet another.
Sasse is right that, in spite of these headwinds, parents — not legislators — must take the lead in rolling back safetyism and our culture’s screen-centered indoor childhood. Legislators cannot fix our cultural ills. But they can help ensure that it is both legal and feasible for parents to do so.
Thomas Fickley is Founder and Headmaster of St. Dunstan’s Academy and a licensed commercial contractor in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Mark Perkins is Chaplain and Assistant Headmaster of St. Dunstan’s Academy and a priest in the Anglican Province of America.