AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Some of you may remember this New York public service announcement that ran from the 1960s to the '90s.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?
RASCOE: The PSA was meant to remind parents to make sure their kids were home and safe. Today, children in the U.S. are highly supervised in physical spaces but not as strictly online. To understand the consequences of that, we're joined by Eli Stark-Elster. He studies the evolution of human society at UC Davis. Welcome to the show.
ELI STARK-ELSTER: Happy to be here.
RASCOE: For years, kids played unsupervised outdoors and spent a lot of time together without adults. What changed?
STARK-ELSTER: When you look at the record of childhood across human societies, you find that kids are generally afforded a really high degree of independence and autonomy. They spend much of their time in independent peer cultures. And in the early 1970s or so, the ability for kids to develop these kinds of independent peer cultures drops really precipitously, and that has not changed to the present day.
I think one big factor underlying this shift is the urbanization of the United States. It is arguably just a little less safe for kids to roam around due to traffic concerns. Often, kids are just not all that close to other kids physically. Another, I think, underlying concern here is just the fear of stranger danger.
RASCOE: In the physical space, there's a lot more supervision, but that hasn't translated to a lot of supervision in the digital space?
STARK-ELSTER: Yes, yeah, that's correct. This is a very recent innovation, and so we understand very little about how these kinds of environments actually work and how they're affecting our children. We often emphasize what technology is doing to our children. But I think when you look at the trend in human evolution and this desire kids clearly have to build their, you know, sort of secret worlds away from us, the picture that arises is kids are using digital space as sort of of the last frontier to get away from us.
RASCOE: Well, how important is it for kids to have those adult-free zones?
STARK-ELSTER: Immensely important. And we see a very stark trend that different measures of mental health among children begin to decline at around the same time their autonomy becomes more and more restricted. There's a study conducted by UNICEF every few years where they track independent mobility in different countries, the amount of freedom kids have to move from place to place by themselves, against measures of well-being, and you see a very clear trend that greater mobility leads to greater well-being and vice versa.
RASCOE: The kids in my house, my kids, are constantly, like, online, playing Roblox with each other, playing, you know, Minecraft and other games, but they're playing together. Talk to me about that.
STARK-ELSTER: I think one contrast that is maybe useful is between two games, both of which kids love. One is Minecraft, and the other is Fortnite. When you look at the way that these games are built, I think there are very different reasons that kids are drawn to them. One of those reasons is good, and the other one is probably bad.
In the case of Fortnite, the company that designs the game has essentially built it like a casino. It is designed to draw kids in, hook their attention and keep them in these repetitive loops that encourage them to eventually spend lots of money on the game.
Minecraft is not built that way. It's a one-time purchase, and I think they love it for a different reason than Fortnite, which is that it's a very open-ended, exploratory game where you can collaborate with your friends, and they have pretty much total control over what they choose to do.
So when you sort of zoom out, it can look like these are two instances of a similar thing, of kids addicted to video games. When you zoom in on what they're actually doing and how those games are built, you get a very different picture, I think, of what's actually happening in those worlds.
The key thing to look for here, when kids are playing or in a physical or a virtual space, is do they have the freedom to make their own decisions in this space? Are they exploring? Are they spending time with other kids? If the answer to all those questions is, yes, my sense is that the play is probably just as good, regardless of the domain.
RASCOE: So how should parents be thinking about how much time kids spend in the digital space?
STARK-ELSTER: The key question that parents should probably ask is, are my kids getting space to be independent from me, to spend time with their friends unsupervised and to explore in ways that they are determining on their own?
RASCOE: Ultimately, I guess, how do you keep your kids safe?
STARK-ELSTER: I think perspective here is a trade-off between short-term safety and long-term ability to flourish as an adult. So just as an example, a colleague of mine mentioned this recently, he was at a park with his 5-year-old son, and his 5-year-old son had a little toy truck. Some other kid came and pulled it away. His son and this other kid started fighting.
Now, in the long term, it would actually probably be really good for his son and this other kid to just figure out this conflict themselves, right? But he and the other parent both jump in and resolve it. And they're doing that because in the short term, they want to keep their kids safe. They want to make sure no one gets hit and so on.
In the long term, though, that might not be such a good thing for the safety. And so when we think about the safety of our kids, the real question is, what is going to help them flourish as adults? And in many cases, the measures that we think we're taking to make them safer in the short term are probably harmful in the long term.
RASCOE: That's Eli Stark-Elster. He studies the evolution of human society at UC Davis. Thank you so much for joining us.
STARK-ELSTER: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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