American Children Are Under House Arrest
“They’re always on their iPads. When I was their age, I would be playing outside.”
I often hear older adults make remarks like these with a certain amount of disdain and condescension. When I first heard this as a 10 year-old Generation Z child, I took it as a challenge. I decided to venture outside and run to the park. Little did I know how treacherous it would be.
The landscape was barren and desolate. No one else was outside. I tried to ignore the eerie quietude as I trudged across the endless swathes of sidewalk-less lawns. I had made it but a few paces when my heart suddenly stopped. Thundering bellows and foul smoke from pickup trucks made me shudder as I approached the first major intersection.
I braced myself. Somehow, I had to get through this six-lane barrage of gargantuan automobiles that never seemed to stop. Taking a deep breath, I took my first step when suddenly I heard a loud honk.
“Upayan, is that you? You’re going to get yourself killed out here!”
It was Ben’s mom. After relentlessly insisting on me getting in the car, she proceeded to lecture me on the dangers of traveling alone on foot. Had she not rescued me, I could have easily gotten kidnapped in a stranger’s car or worse, run over within a second, she explained.
“Next time you want to play outside, just ask your mom to call me and then we can arrange a play date,” she helpfully offered as she dropped me home.
What if I just wanted to aimlessly run around though? Looking back to that day now, I realize that my suburban classmates and I grew up as prisoners in our own homes. Beyond our white picket fence neighborhoods, the outside world was largely forbidden to us. Very few destinations of interest could be reached without a car. Even walking alone on the barren suburban streets was dangerous.
The world we grew up in was entirely different from that of our parents. In the timespan of a few generations, lively neighborhood streets with corner-stores and children biking around had been replaced with wide-laned stroads bustling with automotive traffic and a sea of concrete parking lots.
Fears of the hostile outside world have coerced well-intentioned parents into being the unwitting captors of their children. This protective behavior has only exacerbated the problem. With fewer and fewer children venturing outside, the outside world has truly become even more hazardous for children. No longer providing “safety in numbers” like their predecessors, today’s automobile -laden stroads render children particularly vulnerable to bad actors like negligent drivers and kidnappers.
It should come as no surprise then that my generation and the coming ones are so technology-obsessed. We live in a society that denies its youngest citizens the natural human right to move freely. How else are children supposed to fulfill the natural human need to explore? How else are they supposed to satisfy the need for human interaction? Shackled to their homes and devices, today’s children are left with only one outlet for satiating these basal needs: the internet.
Bouncing from picture to video to article can trick the visual system into feeling a sense of movement. Scrolling through an Instagram feed of friends’ pictures can provide a pseudo-sense of connection. But that is all it will ever be: an illusion.
We are social animals. Our bodies are wired to move freely in the outdoors. Constraining interaction indoors to a two-dimensional screen is to limit the human experience and it has its consequences. With depression and anxiety levels at an all-time high, children today are unhappier than ever before.
When I think about where I’d want to start a family, the last place that comes to mind is the quintessential “family-friendly” suburb. Not only do suburbs imprison children but they also burden responsible parents with the onus of being obligate chauffeurs. But my choices are limited. Over a century of lobbying from automakers like General Motors and Ford coupled with policies rooted in racial discrimination have made the construction of most other options illegal or prohibitively expensive.
It is tempting to accept the reality and buy into the cookie-cutter American Dream but I think we can do better. Instead of building monstrous electric trucks, let’s replace our redlining highways with public transit options that are safe for all. Instead of building larger houses, let’s legalize the construction of multifamily homes that foster community. Instead of deforesting to build opulent lawns, let’s invest in public parks that are conducive to unstructured play.
Protecting the environment is often seen at odds with improving quality of life. In this case, it isn’t. We can let children be children and help save the planet at the same time.
