The generation that raised itself (sort of)
Children who grew up in the 1960s and 70s typically left the house in the morning, came back when the streetlights came on, and figured things out in between. They settled their own disputes, managed their own boredom, and fell out of trees — learning, without explanation, that gravity was not negotiable.
Their parents were not negligent by the standards of the era. They operated under a different set of assumptions: children were durable, the neighbourhood was safe enough, and hovering was considered odd rather than virtuous.
In a Harvard Graduate School of Education interview, psychologist Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College, described a continuous and measurable decline in children’s opportunities to play freely from the 1960s onward. Over that same period, anxiety, depression, and suicide among young people have steadily climbed. Gray argues the mechanism is straightforward: independent play is how children develop an internal locus of control — the belief that they can influence what happens to them. Without that belief, the psychological groundwork for anxiety and depression is laid.
What the research actually shows
In 2023, Gray and colleagues published a major review in The Journal of Pediatrics examining decades of evidence. The paper makes a direct case: the systematic removal of unsupervised, self-directed activity from childhood has contributed to the mental health crisis among young people.
The findings are significant. Children who engage in independent play learn to regulate their own emotions because no adult steps in to do it for them. They learn to negotiate social hierarchies because they have to. They learn to tolerate frustration, boredom, and minor failures because those experiences are baked into the texture of unstructured time.
As ScienceDaily reported on the study, the researchers concluded that although well-intentioned, adults’ drive to guide and protect children has deprived them of the independence they need for mental health. Children need to feel they can deal effectively with the real world — not just the world of school.
The children of the 1960s and 70s were not building resilience because their parents had a brilliant developmental philosophy. They were building resilience because their parents were busy. The space was not designed. It was accidental. And it worked.
Boredom as a training ground
The ability to tolerate boredom is a skill, and like most skills, it develops through practice. Children in the 1960s and 70s experienced deep, restless, nothing-to-do boredom — the kind that forces a brain to generate its own entertainment. Staring at ceilings, inventing games with sticks, spending entire afternoons doing nothing — somewhere in that emptiness, a child learns that unstimulated existence is survivable, that external input is not required to feel okay.
That is organic self-soothing: the kind that develops when a child is left alone with their own mind often enough to become comfortable with it.
In an NPR interview about his research, Gray noted that the mental health crisis did not start with COVID and did not start with the internet. It started decades earlier, when adults began systematically replacing children’s free time with structured, supervised activity. Each generation since the late 1970s has had less independent time than the one before, and each generation has shown higher rates of anxiety and depression.
The timeline is not subtle. In 1971, roughly 80 percent of American third-graders walked to school by themselves. The suggestion would provoke alarm today.
The uncomfortable truth about “good” parenting
None of this is an argument that parental neglect is good. Children who are genuinely neglected — whose parents are absent because of addiction, abuse, or indifference — suffer enormously. That is well documented.
But there is a wide spectrum between neglect and the hyper-attentive parenting that has become the cultural default. Somewhere on that spectrum sits a sweet spot that the 1960s and 70s accidentally found: present enough to provide security, absent enough to allow independence.
Florida Atlantic University’s summary of the research captures this tension. Co-author David Bjorklund noted that parents today are bombarded with messages about dangers and the value of achievement, but hear almost nothing about the countervailing reality: children need increasing opportunities for independence to grow up well-adjusted. They need to feel trusted, responsible, and capable — a feeling that cannot develop if someone is always standing three feet away, ready to intervene.
The irony is thick. Modern parenting, with all its resources and good intentions, may be producing children who are safer but less capable of handling the world they will eventually inherit. Meanwhile, the generation raised by parents who were simply too busy to helicopter ended up with a set of psychological tools that nobody planned to give them.
The absence that may have mattered most
The parents of the 1960s and 70s were not thinking about locus of control, self-regulation, or the developmental benefits of risky play. They were simply living their lives and letting their children live theirs. The research now suggests that may have been exactly the right approach — not because those parents were wise, but because their absence created the one thing modern childhood is desperately short on: space.
Space to be bored. Space to fail. Space to sit with discomfort and discover, on one’s own terms, that it is survivable. That is not a parenting strategy. It is the absence of one — and it may have been the most effective developmental tool of the twentieth century.
