My mother grew up in rural Australia in the seventies. She has told me stories about summers that sound, to modern ears, almost implausibly free. Out after breakfast, back for dinner. No phone. No schedule. No adult tracking her movements. Just a neighborhood of kids, a creek, a few square kilometers of countryside, and the full unstructured weight of an entire Saturday to fill however they wanted.

She was not neglected. She was not unsupervised because nobody cared. She was unsupervised because that was what childhood was. The adults trusted the day to sort itself out. And mostly it did.

I think about this when I watch my own daughter here in Saigon, navigating a childhood that looks nothing like that. More structured, more monitored, more scheduled. Safer in some measurable ways. And I wonder sometimes what is being built in her, and what might be missing.

The research on what unstructured play was actually doing

Boston College evolutionary psychologist Peter Gray has spent his career studying the decline of free play and what that decline has cost children. In a widely cited paper on the decline of play and the rise of psychopathology in children and adolescents, published in the American Journal of Play, Gray documents a steady fall in children’s opportunities for self-directed, unsupervised activity since roughly the 1960s, tracking almost perfectly alongside a steady rise in childhood anxiety, depression, and feelings of helplessness.

His argument is not sentimental. It is functional. Free play, he argues, is the mechanism through which children learn to regulate their own emotions, negotiate with other people, make decisions, experience consequences, and develop what psychologists call an internal locus of control, which is the sense that your actions have some real effect on the world around you. When children set the rules of a game and enforce them among themselves, when they manage conflict without an adult stepping in to adjudicate, when they get bored and have to find their own way out of the boredom, they are building something that no structured activity can build for them.

The children of the seventies were doing this constantly. They did not know it had a name. They were just playing.

What happened to locus of control

Jean Twenge and her colleagues at San Diego State University ran a large meta-analysis examining how children’s sense of personal control shifted over the second half of the twentieth century. Their findings, published in Personality and Social Psychology Review, are stark. Between 1960 and 2002, young Americans shifted dramatically toward an external locus of control, meaning they increasingly believed that their lives were shaped by forces outside themselves rather than by their own choices and efforts. By 2002, the average young person was more externally oriented than eighty percent of young people in the early 1960s.

That is not a small shift. It is a generational change in how young people fundamentally relate to their own lives. And the shift in locus of control tracked closely with the rise in anxiety and depression over the same period. When you grow up believing the world acts on you rather than the other way around, you are not just adopting a philosophical position. You are developing a relationship with helplessness. And helplessness, as any psychologist will tell you, is one of the most reliable pathways into depression.

The seventies kids were not developing this. They were out there making things happen, getting into trouble, sorting it out, falling off things, arguing about the rules, figuring out what they actually liked and did not like, entirely on their own terms. That was not accidental. That was the work.

Why the scheduling of childhood changed everything

The shift did not happen because parents stopped caring. It happened, in many cases, because parents started caring more, or at least more anxiously. Safety concerns tightened. Neighborhoods became more insular. The school system intensified. And somewhere in the late seventies and accelerating through the eighties, the idea took hold that a productive childhood was a scheduled one. That the best thing you could do for a child was fill their time with organized enrichment.

What this did, psychologically, was transfer the ownership of childhood from the child to the adult. The child was no longer the architect of their own days. They were a participant in days that adults had designed. And no matter how well-intentioned the design, that transfer has a cost. The cognitive and emotional muscles that only develop through autonomous navigation of your own experience, boredom, conflict, failure, recovery, do not get built in a structured environment. They cannot be coached into existence. They require actual freedom, including the freedom to make a mess of things.

What that generation actually got

People who grew up with that kind of freedom often describe it in terms that are hard to articulate precisely, but that come down to something like ownership. They owned their own time. They made decisions about what to do with their afternoons and then lived with those decisions. They sorted out their own friendships, their own conflicts, their own creative projects. Nobody was managing the quality of their experience.

This built something. It built a sense that they were capable of handling whatever the day produced. It built comfort with uncertainty and with boredom. It built what Gray calls the internal locus of control, the quiet, foundational belief that your choices matter and that you have some real capacity to shape your own circumstances.

Buddhism points at something similar in the concept of sati, or mindful presence. There is a quality of direct engagement with experience, unmediated by an adult structuring it for you, that develops a particular kind of groundedness. The child who is bored and has to sit with it before finding their own way out is practicing something real. I write about this kind of self-reliant awareness in my book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism, and the parallels with what this research describes are striking.

What this means now

I am not arguing that seventies childhoods were perfect. A lot of real harm happened under the cover of benign neglect. Plenty of kids needed more support than they got. The freedom that felt liberating for some was genuinely frightening for others.

But the research asks us to sit with an uncomfortable question. In improving the safety and structure of childhood, in filling every hour, in never letting children be bored or unsupervised or responsible for navigating their own social world, what have we taken away? The answer, according to the data, is something important. The generation that got dirty, got into trouble, sorted it out themselves, and came home when the streetlights came on was not missing out. They were, in ways that only became legible later, doing exactly the developmental work that childhood was designed for.

My daughter is four. She plays in ways that surprise me, inventing rules, negotiating with imaginary characters, sorting out her own logic. When I resist the urge to organize it for her and just let her go, I can almost watch something building. I do not always have a name for it. But I recognize it. It looks a lot like the thing my mother described from those summers by the creek.