Raising Children Up
For a decade, young people have been suffering a mental health crisis. A major driver of this crisis has been a misunderstanding, by well-intentioned parents, of the best way to protect children. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues, we have over-protected children in the real world and under-protected them in the online world.
This episode of Article 13 offers guidance for parents seeking a way forward. Lenore Skenazy and Peter Gray explain why children need more real-world free play and independent activity to find resilience and joy, and how a parent’s reliable care gives children confidence to venture out on real-world explorations. As part of that care, Kim John Payne invites parents to build a protective boundary around childhood, filtering out the stressors of the online adult world and preserving space for play, self-discovery, and nurturing relationships.
FEATURED VOICES
* Peter Gray [https://www.petergray.org/]
* Jonathan Haidt [https://jonathanhaidt.com/]
* Freya India [https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/about]
* Kim John Payne [https://www.simplicityparenting.com/about-us]
* Lenore Skenazy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenore_Skenazy]
* Vivek Murthy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivek_Murthy]
* Tina Bryson [https://www.tinabryson.com/]
LISTEN ON APPLE OR SPOTIFY
Article 13 is a new narrative podcast from Faith Matters that brings together cutting-edge research and spiritual wisdom to offer blueprints for a better world. American society is fractured across political and cultural lines. Healing will not happen quickly or easily, but will require a sustained commitment to peaceful discussion and the development of new, creative frameworks for finding common ground.
Hosted by Zachary Davis and featuring deep-dives into vital social issues, extraordinary guests, and beautiful sound design, Article 13 aims to model the kind of hopeful, intelligent discourse our country needs—and to offer ways that each individual listener can start the healing, right where they are.
Article 13 is produced by Maria Devlin McNair [https://www.linkedin.com/in/maria-devlin-mcnair-a5636983/], Zachary Davis [https://www.zacharystevendavis.com/], Gavin Feller [https://www.gavinfeller.com/], and Music by Steve LaRosa [https://www.wonderboyaudio.com/who-we-are]. Art by Charlotte Alba [https://charlottealbaart.com/]. You can learn more about Article 13 here. [https://www.faithmatters.org/p/article-13]
We express our thanks to the Wheatley Institute [https://wheatley.byu.edu/who-we-are] for their support.
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
If you’re a parent, you’ve probably heard the stories and statistics around youth mental health:
60 Minutes [https://youtu.be/7nnb5Jg9fH0?si=2SWGEPhN4Tycd58L]: The US surgeon general has called it an urgent public health crisis : a devastating decline in the mental health of kids across the country
Dr. Vivek Murthy [https://youtu.be/K1DMovED52Q?si=vaO_zQY4Sixk9rKX]: There are few numbers I like to keep in mind to remind me of how significant this is. One is a number, 57. That’s a percent increase in the suicide rate among young people that we saw in the decade prior to the pandemic. The other number that I keep in mind is the number 44 percent. That’s the percentage of high school students who feel persistently sad or hopeless.
That was Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy in conversation with Bernie Sanders in 2023. Murthy warned about the “devastating effects” of mental health challenges for young people in 2021 – the same year that the American Academy of Pediatrics and other groups declared a National State of Emergency in Children’s Mental Health.
For parents, these figures are frightening. With so many young people facing depression, anxiety, hopelessness, and other mental health crises, how can you help protect the children in your family and community?
There are some answers. There are other ways a child’s story could go.
[Children and adults speaking about the Let Grow Experience [https://youtu.be/GNtsY%20n0I9jQ?si=Vx04Li6BHYo8SJ_r]]
How does doing something on your own make you feel?
I feel awesome, excited, big, nervous, strong, proud.
Are you ready? Yes!
I made eggs for my family.
What kind of eggs?
Scrambled, and I learned how to use the stove and I didn’t it burn myself.
For my project, I tried to pick up a grasshopper because I’ve been scared of bugs my whole life and I just wanted to take a closer look.
Are you going to get it right the first time?
No!
No but does that mean we give up?
No!
No! Would you say you’re resilient?
Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah!
Welcome to Article 13 – a podcast that brings together cutting edge research and spiritual wisdom to provide blueprints for a better world. I’m Zachary Davis. In this episode, we explore the task of parenting today. As overprotective and underprotective parenting are called out for contributing to children’s struggles, we explore what it means to be rightly protective. We explore how protecting your children can sometimes mean letting them go and how some attachments can keep protecting them wherever they end up.
The need for freedom and play
The stories just shared came from students at Ortwein Elementary School in Las Vegas, Nevada, who participated in something called the “LetGrow Project.” The project directive is simple: go do something new, on your own. It’s a core initiative of LetGrow, an organization co-founded by Lenore Skenazy.
Skenazy: We’re trying to make it easy, normal, and legal to give kids back some old fashioned independence.
A core idea of LetGrow is a simple psychological principle. Independence builds resilience. Children need to experience freedom and risk to develop the capacity to handle greater freedom and risk.
But the reason Skenazy needed to start an enormous campaign around this simple idea is that it’s become difficult for many parents today to accept. Skenazy first came to public prominence when she wrote a column about letting her 9-year-old-son ride the New York City subway by himself; in the media firestorm that resulted, she was dubbed, “America’s Worst Mom.” For several decades, one of the dominant messages aimed at parents has been that children are under constant threat and that parents’ primary job is to protect their children’s physical safety at all times.
Skenazy: What’s new is the last 40 years or so [is] parents feeling increasingly like anytime they weren’t with their kids, their kids were in automatic danger. And so we were told that every moment that we’re not with them is bad and every moment that we’re with them, we’re giving them the gift of safety.
Of course parents need to keep their children safe. But “always safe” often turns out to mean “always supervised.” Things that were common for kids a generation ago – being allowed to play outside on their own, walking to school by themselves, organizing their own games, taking risks in their play, enjoying unstructured free time – are rarities now. The norm for many kids now is to be transported, directed, and supervised in their activities by adults. This strategy guards against threats to children’s physical safety. But if parents focus on those threats alone, they can inadvertently introduce other kinds of threats that aren’t so visible but can be very harmful.
Skenazy: The idea that if they’re constantly watched, that’s how they’re going to be safe, we’ve just seen that as they got more and more constantly watched, other bad things crept in. And sometimes it’s like it’s easier to imagine the kidnapping than it is to imagine the depression, or the anxiety. And anxiety and depression are going up. So, you know, there’s always this trade off. You’re protecting them from the very off chance of kidnapping, and you’re not protecting them from the very likely chance of heightened anxiety.
It turns out that there’s a strong causal link between depression, anxiety, and other mental health problems that are on the rise, and the childhood freedom that’s been on the decline.
Gray: All kinds of independent activities that children used to do, we’ve gradually been taking them away from children so that they’re more and more supervised all the time, less and less opportunity for them to have to figure out their own things for themselves. Over that same period of time, we’ve seen continuous increases in all sorts of indices of emotional and personal suffering among young people.
This is Dr. Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College who studies play and a co-founder of LetGrow. His research shows how taking away independence and free play from kids has caused their mental health to decline.
Gray: Play actually provides the conditions in which children develop the skills and the character traits that lead them to be able to deal with the problems of life. They learn courage in play. They learn that they can solve problems in play. They learn how to make friends in play. And these, of course, are important skills that help protect you from anxiety and depression.
There’s another crucial way that play or other independent activity can stave off anxiety and depression: by giving you the sense that you are in charge of your own life
Gray: You develop what psychologists refer to as an internal locus of control, which is really the sense that I am, at least largely, in control of my own experiences and my own fate, I can solve problems, I can run my life – versus an external locus of control, which is the sense that I’m kind of a victim of circumstances outside of my control. Now, there’s a lot of research that shows that for people of any age, if you don’t have a strong internal locus of control, that sets you up for anxiety and depression.
Of course, there are many reasons why an individual child might be suffering from depression and anxiety. There might be economic stressors on the family. They may have suffered losses or experienced some kind of trauma. But any child in these difficult circumstances will find them even harder to cope with if they are also deprived of free play – the primary way that humans and mammals evolved to learn and grow stronger.
Gray [https://youtu.be/Y_Jv85mkbuU?si=fb--wS9lT0tC_XCj]: Think how often children play at what we think of as dangerous things. They climb too high in trees. They’d jump off of cliffs. They skateboard down banisters. They do these things that frighten parents. And what are they doing? They’re learning how to experience fear and realize that they can tolerate fear, that they can get over it. So that the child climbing a tree is climbing just to the point where the fear is barely tolerable. He feels frightened, but he’s experiencing that fear. And then he’s coming down, and he realizes, ‘I could handle that. I don’t have to panic from fear.’
Free play benefits children physically, socially, and emotionally as they learn to handle fear. It protects against depression and anxiety and increases confidence in oneself. This means one of the best things you can do as a parent is introduce more free play into your kids’ lives – being clear, of course, on what “free play” really means.
Gray: What they learn is how to initiate their own activities and how to take charge of their own activities. Ultimately, they’re learning how to take charge of their own life. That’s one of the major functions of play. And of course, we destroy that when we adults step in and try to run it for them. The key thing about independent play that parents do is they get out of the way, right, intervene as little as possible.
Parents shouldn’t direct children’s play. What they should do is provide the right conditions for it to happen. Don’t fill your kids’ schedules with activities – build in lots of free time. Create play-friendly space in your home or get your kids outside. Keep out the things that ruin free play, whether that’s attention-grabbing devices or the interference of other adults. And most importantly of all, bring in other kids.
Stepping back and letting kids figure things out on their own isn’t just a recipe for good play. It’s actually been shown in clinical settings to help reduce anxiety. This is Dr. Camilo Ortiz, a clinical therapist who’s been inspired by the LetGrow project:
Ortiz [https://youtu.be/GH48E10X3v8?si=5mZZKv-pWMYPd0X4]: I’ve developed a new treatment for child anxiety which is based on what I call Mega doses of child Independence.
When parents over-supervise children, says Ortiz, they actually foster anxiety. Kids who don’t get independent activity, quote, “are less self-confident, have worse social skills, are less tolerant of uncertainty, have worse problem-solving skills, and are less resilient.”
The good news is that, for many kids, it doesn’t take much to reverse this harmful trend. Ortiz’s “Independence therapy” works very simply. The child comes up with a list of things he’d like to do on his own, and over several weeks completes the list. These are mildly challenging activities, like cooking a meal or biking to the park, that are done without any help from adults.
So far, says Ortiz, “we have found that these short bursts of independence have led to reduced anxiety in kids and their parents.” One child, for instance, was afraid to go up and down the stairs at home by himself. After some independence therapy, he was ready to go without his parents – to his first day of school.
Skenazy: But this kid, [after] five … I guess four weeks of therapy, told his parents, ‘Actually, no, I can handle this. It’s just the first day of school. I’m excited.’ And when he came home, it was great. He had a good time. And he said, ‘And guess what? I was like one of the only kids there without my parents.’
Of course, there will be times when stepping back as a parent doesn’t feel good. Your child will be playing high in a tree and you’ll feel a powerful instinct to rush over and support them on their way down. But try not to give in to that instinct right away. Give your child a chance to see what they can do without your help. Because they are probably undertaking this little solo adventure with more help from you than you think.
Attachment theory
Along with the instinct to play, young mammals have another vital instinct that guides them as they grow. This is the instinct to attach to a caregiver or “attachment figure.” When a child feels threatened or fearful, he will seek out his attachment figure. A responsive attachment figure provides immediate comfort and safety and stabilizes the child’s physiological responses. Over time, they build the child’s resilience and help the most sophisticated parts of the child’s brain to grow – as parenting expert Dr. Tina Bryson explains.
Bryson: Those repeated experiences over time, where you have a need or you’re in distress and someone shows up for you and helps you in those moments, it actually helps build the prefrontal cortex, and so it builds the brain in the most optimal ways.
A parent who reliably shows up for the child when he is in need is a secure attachment figure. And there’s almost nothing more powerful than such a person in a child’s life.
Bryson [https://youtu.be/8XA1xyz6_Xw?si=XUexu6RGeIlxODKl]: One of the single best predictors for how well children turn out, despite anything that they face in the world and measuring them on every possible way we can think to measure children, one of the best predictors for how they turn out is that they have this secure attachment with at least one person. So secure attachment means you are in distress, you have a need, your caregiver sees it and responds or shows up in that moment in a way that, most of the time, in a fairly predictable way, regulates your emotions and your bodily states.
So how can you be a secure attachment figure for your child? How can you show up for them? Bryson and her colleague Daniel Seigel recommend what they call the “four S’s” – making a child feel safe, seen, soothed, and thus secure. As Bryson says, the four S’s send the child the message, “I’m here for you. I will protect you. I am the nest, the protective home you can count on, and when you’re afraid or in danger, I’ll always be here. Count on it.”
Bryson [https://youtu.be/8XA1xyz6_Xw?si=XUexu6RGeIlxODKl]: The ‘Four S’s’ is always my north star. If I can respond to my child in a way that helps them feel safe and seen and soothed and secure, and knowing I’m going to keep showing up for them, then I am doing the best possible thing I can do for them relationally and in terms of their brain development.
Bryson and Siegel are sometimes asked whether this “soothing” approach can backfire and produce dependence on the attachment figure or anxiety when they’re away. In fact, they say, the opposite is true. The secure base provided by the attachment figure isn’t just a safe haven; it’s also a launching pad.
Gray: Attachment is extraordinarily important for infants. Children need the warmth and comfort and security of a close by parent. Now by the time a child is four, however, then the child who feels this security is ready to explore. That child wants to get away from Mom, knowing that Mom is there if I come back, Mom isn’t going to abandon me, Mom or Dad, whoever it is the attachment object is – but it’s somebody who’s there, somebody I can depend on. And so what you find with secure attachment is, those are the kids who feel most comfortable getting away from their attachment object.
Making yourself a secure base isn’t just the best way to help your child feel emotionally comfortable when they’re with you; it’s the best way to help them explore uncomfortable new terrain on their own.
Imagine that scenario again, of the child up in the tree who wants to climb down by herself. You may be standing physically far away. But you are still present to that child as she makes her climb. Through the past history of your nurturing interactions, you have given her greater emotional stability and security and a more integrated, self-regulating brain, which all results in higher inner resilience and confidence. “As the [securely attached] child develops she is able to internalize the secure base,” explains psychologist Jonathan Haidt. “She doesn’t need the parent’s physical presence to feel that she has support, so she learns to face adversity by herself.” In other words, you are helping her climb down that tree all by herself.
* The phone-free childhood
Jonathan Haidt describes this growth process in his book The Anxious Generation. He agrees that parents need to show up in their children’s lives as protective figures. The problem, he says, is that for the last couple decades, we’ve entirely mistaken what “protection” really requires.
Haidt [https://youtu.be/-L58niidJM0?si=tTkA7kjOV_Bl7e87]: So my argument in brief is that humans had a play-based childhood for millions of years, because that’s what mammals do, all mammals play, they have to play to wire up their brains. But that play-based childhood began to fade out in the 1980s in the United States, and it was gone by 2010. And that’s because right around 2010 is when the phone-based childhood sweeps in, our children are now raised largely with a phone at the center of everything.
Haidt [https://youtu.be/-L58niidJM0?si=tTkA7kjOV_Bl7e87]: Another way I can summarize my book is by saying we have overprotected our children in the real world and we have underprotected them online. And both of those are mistakes.
Over the last several decades, Haidt says, parents have over-restricted their children’s risky free play and independent activity, but have hardly restricted at all when it came to their kids’ lives online. And so the whole of the Internet, and with it the whole adult world, has been flooding children’s lives and minds with devastating consequences.
Child and family counselor Kim John Payne came to this realization in a particularly stark way. Payne volunteered at camps in Asia for refugees displaced by war. The children here, Payne writes, “were very clearly diagnosable with post-traumatic stress disorder. They were jumpy, nervous … and quite a few had hair-trigger tempers.” Later, when he began practicing in the UK, he was astounded to see similar symptoms there. Children from fairly affluent and stable homes showed nervousness, hyper-vigilance, anxiety, and states of mental disorder and distress similar to those in refugee children. Payne’s research revealed why:
Payne [https://youtu.be/Rk1wHicrLrI?si=cuYMa3wLsj1BRDJp]: There was just too much, too soon, too sexy, too young, and they were being overwhelmed, their nervous systems were being overwhelmed, and I started thinking that this was cumulative stress reaction. Things are moving so fast, and there’s such a deluge of information particularly through screens.
It turns out that a major stressor for children and driver of mental disorders is an unfiltered flow of content from the adult world and the Internet, through social media and smartphones.
Studies show that the average US teen spends 5 hours a day on social media. Jonathan Haidt points out that these social media feeds can be “randomly interspersed with videos more horrific than anything their parents had been exposed to as children,” including “violence and animal cruelty … car accidents, suicides and suicide posts, strangers masturbating, and hardcore pornography, some of which involves children.” CUT
These examples are extreme. But even the most commonplace social media content can be more distressing than parents might imagine. There’s the personalized ads that are designed to prey specifically on a child’s vulnerabilities and fears. There are the photos and selfies that make a child feel insecure beside their peers – as a young person on CBS morning describes.
CBS Morning [https://youtu.be/-YXK2vy8Y90?si=X5TIjmhxdgqKsheF]:
“You’re scrolling and you see all these different people you constantly compare yourself, and I think that’s definitely a negative, and it always seems like they’re living the perfect life that you are not, even though that’s not true.”
“No, I agree with what ellie said, like [] they have a perfect [life] and they’re perfect ,they can do whatever they want, they have all that money, compared to them, I’m a nobody”
College students Aliza Kopans and Emma Lembke co-created the organization Tech(nically Politics) to help change digital regulation laws because of what they’d seen social media doing to them and to their peers. This is Kopans and Lembke on 60 minutes:
Kopans [https://youtu.be/XvM8hqoHXkI?si=y1OcwBnwf4KiS1A0]: In eighth grade after years and years of me pushing to get social media, my parents finally relented, and that year was the worst mental health year of my life.
Lembke [https://youtu.be/XvM8hqoHXkI?si=1TjkflEHLBxLhtF2]: Big Tech didn’t care that I was a 12-year-old girl who went on YouTube and fell into these harmful rabbit holes that caused me to actually have disordered eating. They didn’t care that I would count my likes and followers and quantify my worth consistently for years and that led to increased rates of anxiety and depression. They didn’t care as long as my eyes were on the screen and as long as I was making them profit.
Life lived online, on social media, floods children’s consciousness with disturbing pieces of the adult world and with endless messages that amplify their insecurities and diminish their sense of self. Researchers disagree about the exact contribution of screens and social media to the youth mental health crisis, but Jonathan Haidt and his research team conclude that the screen-based life is a major driving factor of this crisis.
And, Haidt says, another tech-driven disaster could be coming – from artificial intelligence.
Of particular concern for children are “AI companions.” These are AI-powered chatbots designed to provide personalized emotional support that mimics human interaction. A recent report [https://aibm.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Companions-FINAL.pdf] from Dr. Rupert Gill relates that about half of all teenagers in the US are regular users of AI companions, with 20% saying they spend as much or more time with AI companions as with their human friends.
Gill notes that there are benefits [https://aibm.org/commentary/synthetic-companions-real-risks-why-ai-painkillers-for-loneliness-need-evidence-before-scale/] from AI companions. Conversation with an AI companion can improve emotional expression and reduce self-reported loneliness, particularly for neurodivergent youth. The benefits are strongest when the chatbots are used for temporary, targeted interventions.
But there are also considerable risks [https://aibm.org/commentary/synthetic-companions-real-risks-why-ai-painkillers-for-loneliness-need-evidence-before-scale/]. Some of these have been well-publicized: AI-powered talking teddy bears that discuss sex and bondage with children; an 11-year-old girl who fell into a mental health crisis after sexualized conversations with AI-chatbots; a teenager who committed suicide after a chatbot implored him to “come home.” These dangerous and inappropriate interactions aren’t uncommon. As Jonathan Haidt writes [https://www.afterbabel.com/p/dont-give-your-child-an-ai-companion], “An AI companion bot has no morals, no feelings, no shame. It is built to keep users of all ages “engaged” with it … my message to parents is simple: DO NOT GIVE YOUR CHILDREN ANY AI COMPANIONS OR TOYS.”
But what if, as developers promise, they really did iron out all the “bugs”? What if every AI companion becomes “safe, appropriate, and emotionally attuned … says all the right things”? What if it becomes, “the easiest relationship [https://www.mandymclean.com/p/the-problem-with-perfect-ai-friends]” a child has ever had?
Then we’ve put the child in a new kind of danger.
As researcher Mandy McLean writes [https://www.mandymclean.com/p/the-problem-with-perfect-ai-friends], “Children develop the capacity for healthy relationships, [not from] seamless attunement [but from] rupture and repair.” A child reaches for connection from a caregiver and doesn’t get what they want. They experience frustration or distress. The caregiver notices, reaches out, and makes some amends. This rupture-repair cycle, repeated over and over again, teaches the child crucial lessons: “that relationships can survive conflict. That your needs matter and aren’t the only needs that matter.”
We aren’t born with empathy. We develop it by encountering other people with their own experience that we need to understand and accommodate. But, says McLean, “An AI companion … makes no demands; it never needs the child to notice its emotional state, to adjust, to accommodate, or to wait. The child is empathized with … but never has to practice empathy toward anything … This is the asymmetry at the heart of AI companionship, and no amount of better guardrails will fix it. In fact, better models make it worse … The more perfect the AI friend, the more it displaces the imperfect human connections that actually build the capacity for connection.”
Dr. Rupert Gill recommends [https://aibm.org/commentary/synthetic-companions-real-risks-why-ai-painkillers-for-loneliness-need-evidence-before-scale/] that large-scale safety testing be done, similar to the kind done on new medications, on the impacts of AI companions before young people are allowed unregulated access to them. Mandy McLean insists that we ask in this process, not just “Is this AI safe for children?”, but “What kind of adults are we raising?”
As McLean writes, [https://www.mandymclean.com/p/the-new-altars-that-ask-nothing-of]“Relationships that never push back don’t teach you how to tolerate discomfort, navigate conflict, or matter to someone who also has needs of their own. Over time, the absence of these demands doesn’t just make us lonelier, it leaves us less capable of relationship itself.”
Disrupting and protecting connection
Protecting your child’s relationships – and protecting their very ability to have meaningful relationships – is one reason to monitor closely the technology in your child’s life. It’s also a reason to look at the technology in your life. Your own screentime may be leaving you less available for relationship with your family.
A 2024 study found that the more parents were on screens themselves, the more likely the children were to have problematic screen behaviours that disrupted their daily functioning [https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/health/parents-kids-screen-time-wellness/index.html]. Teenagers also reported that their parents feel “unavailable” when on their phones. Kids don’t feel they can just go up to their parents and talk when they need to.
Kim John Payne sees phones breaking the parent-child connection so often that he gave the phenomenon a name: micro-abandonment.
Payne [https://youtu.be/T7JlTy71Wvc?si=8cuYkEiwPA5NBn5H]: One of the leading stresses for a child is to feel abandoned, and our phones are doing that all the time. Every time we’re engaged with a child and we’re playing with them, we’re picking them up from school and they come running out from school to greet us and the phone goes and the text goes, notification goes off, and for that moment we look down, and our eyes go down onto the screen and away from a child who’s running towards us so happy to see us – that is what I mean by a ‘micro abandonment.’
And every time that happens, a child starts to feel, ‘My mom, my dad, my guardian is – not only are they not quite there for me, that even when we’re doing something and the phone gives a notification, that is more important than me.’
Because they’ve got this underlying feeling that they’re secondary, that they’re being displaced, and that’s a very insecure place for a child.
Be conscious of how screens can damage your connection to your child. And be conscious of how screens disrupt children’s connection to themselves.
Reflecting on how social media has affected Gen Z, author Freya India writes [https://www.afterbabel.com/p/algorithms-hijacked-my-generation], “Algorithms … [s]haped our identities … What these continuous streams of content do is prevent you from taking a second to pause, reflect on who you really are … There are a lot of us now in our 20s who feel utterly lost. Detached from who we really are. We don’t recognise – or even like – ourselves.”
This sense of disconnection from who you really are is a core reason why Kim John Payne worries about the effects of screens on children.
Payne [https://youtu.be/G-s8W4KyMZU?si=l3ysWupbCKj-4YIv]: It’s all about connection and the disruption to connection. Screens risk disrupting our essential connections. When I think about what truly it is that makes us human and humane, that’s right at the core, a child’s connection or a human being’s connection to their sense of self – that this is what I stand for, this, for me, is where I stand.
What we can do is give our kids the ground to stand on out of which they can make their morally guided judgments. It’s got to do with our kids having this sense of true north, as opposed to the magnetic north of popular toxic pop culture.
How do we help our kids develop that inner sense of moral true north? Most immediately, by not allowing the online world to flood kids’ lives through screens. More generally, by keeping a certain metaphor of Payne’s in mind.
Payne once came across a harbor with a stone wall wrapping nearly all the way around, leaving a narrow entrance where the boats would go in and out. Within the harbor, sailors would rest, chat, and laugh, and safely reprovision and repair their boats for the next journey out.
Payne [https://youtu.be/G-s8W4KyMZU?si=7bk1jDgkyyxCs_w2]: And I was standing looking at this and thinking, ‘That, that is just like how we want our classrooms and homes to be. That. That is what we want it to be. Because out there, the seas were rocky, the buoys were bobbing up and down, but in here, the water was pretty calm, it was surprisingly calm, it was pretty flat, compared to the turmoil out there.’ We can build an “in here,” so that our children can come back in, repair their metaphoric boats, and back out they go, and we can know that we have given them that harbor in which to repair, to build, to prepare, to go out, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. That is beautiful. That is what parents have been doing for thousands of years – because you know what, at the end of that harbor wall, was the harbor master. And as the boats came by, he was checking things out, occasionally he would come out and just pull the boat in and check out what was going on – we are the harbor masters. We’re it. That’s our job.
We can rightly protect our kids by building this harbor wall around their environment and keeping watch on what comes in. A wall sounds like it’s designed to keep things out – and it is. It should keep out the destructive parts of the adult and technological world. But this wall can also keep many more things in a child’s life that might otherwise have been crowded out. It can keep in the time and space for free play, for hobbies, for real-world exploration, for reading, for generative idleness and boredom, for creativity. The harbor wall can protect the child’s vital developing relationships with friends, with family, with nature, and with themselves
Conclusion
As we have overprotected our children in the real world, we’ve deprived them of the free play and independence that they need to develop their skills and build their self-confidence. As we’ve underprotected children online, we’ve allowed the virtual world to heighten their anxiety and smother their true sense of self. All kinds of cultural forces have pressured parents into these modes. But we can step into another mode. In fact, we’ve already begun to do so.
In January 2025, Jonathan Haidt and his research team wrote that, “As we begin the new year, we are looking back at 2024 as the year the phone-based childhood began to reverse … What we’re seeing now is a cultural awakening about the dangers of a phone-based childhood and the importance of free play and childhood independence.” In December 2025, the team wrote [https://www.afterbabel.com/p/a-year-of-real-progress-for-kids]with a new update: “We witnessed spectacular steps forward in policy-change: Across the United States, 40 states [https://substack.com/redirect/419505ed-cbb3-4d73-bc87-894b0d151e01?j=eyJ1IjoiMXg5eG5iIn0.v7AIOUy0mi_GJTz0UHTRl9cFI0m6sHkrtdWOMUVwmuY] have now enacted or advanced phone-free school legislation [https://substack.com/redirect/3dfbbad0-74ed-4937-9e7a-c1a2e0aceae8?j=eyJ1IjoiMXg5eG5iIn0.v7AIOUy0mi_GJTz0UHTRl9cFI0m6sHkrtdWOMUVwmuY] … Everyday now, teachers share with us anecdotes about kids laughing in the hallways, playing games at the lunch table, being more attentive in class [https://substack.com/redirect/9c8f3a26-f561-43fd-a1ab-6045b46387dc?j=eyJ1IjoiMXg5eG5iIn0.v7AIOUy0mi_GJTz0UHTRl9cFI0m6sHkrtdWOMUVwmuY], and reading more books [https://substack.com/redirect/63508786-0af6-4bc0-9a6c-46875dbf521f?j=eyJ1IjoiMXg5eG5iIn0.v7AIOUy0mi_GJTz0UHTRl9cFI0m6sHkrtdWOMUVwmuY]. … Cultural change is moving just as quickly to restore the play-based childhood. Families around the globe are giving their children [https://substack.com/redirect/a65e0790-2e8f-4a90-b418-ae6f02162590?j=eyJ1IjoiMXg5eG5iIn0.v7AIOUy0mi_GJTz0UHTRl9cFI0m6sHkrtdWOMUVwmuY] more freedom to roam in the real world.”
Culture can change course, and so can we. We can give our children more independence – to help them feel “awesome, excited, big, nervous, strong, proud,” as the Ortwein children felt after their LetGrow experience. We can build a harbor wall around childhood, removing what doesn’t belong and protecting what does. And within that harbor, we can offer the secure attachment that gives a child a restorative base at home and a powerful launching pad out into the world.
Kim John Payne describes what can result when a child is given that space to find their true self.
Payne [https://youtu.be/G-s8W4KyMZU?si=l3ysWupbCKj-4YIv]: There was a little girl in an elementary school class, and she was doing a free drawing, and the teacher was walking around and looked at the little girl’s painting and said, ‘Ooh, what are you painting?’ and she said, ‘I’m painting God.’ And the teacher, before she could stop herself, she said, ‘Ooh, but no one knows what God looks like.’ And she, without even looking up, said, ‘Well, they will when I finish this painting.’ And I thought, There – there it is, there is this core of this little girl emerging into the world with confidence, with real confidence, that I can do this. It’s not the false idols, the images, what’s coming down through the screens, through the marketing forces, it’s something that she has within herself, not something that is being sold to her outside.
When parents create a safe harbor, they allow the child to discover what they have within themselves. As so many young people struggle with anxiety, self-doubt, and depression, a rightly protective parent can help the core of their child to emerge – and emerge with confidence.
This episode was composed without the use of generative AI.
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