QotD: Modern Childhood

It is damn tough to be a kid growing up in today's America. According to the Monitoring the Future Study, an ongoing survey of eighth, 10th, and 12th graders, kids do fewer recreational (read: illegal) drugs, drink less booze, and smoke fewer cigarettes than their counterparts did 30 years ago (not for nothing did last year's remake of 1976's Bad News Bears substitute non-alcoholic beer for the real thing in the movie's final celebratory scene). Fewer of them are having sex, too, says the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (and it seems a foregone conclusion that, in a world with less drugs, booze, and smokes, what little sex they are having can't be very good). They start school earlier and go longer than ever before.

Perhaps most chillingly, scholars at the University of Michigan Survey Research Center have documented a stunning decline in unstructured, unorganized "free time," with kids losing a dozen hours a week of unfettered hang-time since the late '70s. As any pint-sized Pete Rose could tell you, time in organized sports has doubled over the same period and, as a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette account grimly notes, "the amount of homework increased dramatically between 1981 and 1997 . . . The amount given to 6- to 8-year-olds tripled during that time." Suffer the little children (and, in this case at least, their parents)!

Forget for the moment that today's kids will live longer and richer lives (the bastards). And that they face a future overstuffed with options when it comes to education, work arrangements, and lifestyle choices. Childhood has in some serious way been stripped of its essential aimlessness, of shapeless, formless, and seemingly endless days and nights spent whiling away the time doing precisely nothing that will help you get a Rhodes Scholarship or first-round venture capital for a startup. Between the Hooked on Phonics tapes and the Reader Rabbit computer games, between the increasing amount of obligatory "volunteer work" and the fast-becoming-mandatory SAT prep class, kids are now effectively on the career track by the time they step out of Pampers.

Nick Gillespie, Reason, 2006-03-03