One of the Best Documentaries on the Loss and Recovery Of Childhood Independence

“Chasing Childhood” contrasts the play-based, “free-range” childhood of the 1980s with the over-supervised and fearful childhoods of today. It’s great for inspiring collective action.

Introduction from Jon Haidt and Lenore Skenazy:

One of the paradoxes of the “great rewiring” of childhood is that the real world has gotten so much safer since the 1990s, while parents have gotten ever more afraid of letting their children out to play and explore in that world. We keep them in, we keep them supervised, we don’t let them develop independence and the self-confidence that comes with it. This is why we (Jon and Lenore) co-founded the nonprofit  Let Grow in 2017. 

This is also the paradox behind the documentary Chasing Childhood. Filmmakers Margaret Munzer Loeb and Eden Wurmfeld grew up in New York City in a time when crime rates were vastly higher—and so was the amount of independence children were given.  What happened to our ability to trust our kids when they are out and about? What is all this supervision doing to them? And what can we do to restore healthier, happier childhoods—and healthier, happier communities? 

The film centers on families that are trying to change, often as they or their kids’ schools implement The Let Grow Experience. That’s a K-12 homework assignment that asks students to go home and do something new, on their own, with their parents’ permission but without their parents. 

Our favorite sequence follows a totally smothered 6th grader who, for his Let Grow Project, packs his own suitcase (a first!) and takes the subway to his divorced dad’s apartment on his own (also a first!). While the mom is wracked with worry, the boy seems to grow three inches taller as he finally gets to show his mom—and himself—just how capable he really is.  

The film illustrates not only how structured and anxious kids' lives have become, but also how something as simple as assigning The Let Grow Experience gently nudges both parents and kids out of their comfort zone. The resulting pride starts muscling out the anxiety.

Both of us love Chasing Childhood. Lenore is honored to be in it. And we think it would be a great film for schools to screen for parents, students, educators, and counselors, especially if they're considering doing one of Let Grow’s programs. 

— Jon and Lenore

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As filmmakers and mothers who grew up in the gritty New York City of the 1970s and ‘80s, our film Chasing Childhood was inspired by our youth, our children’s upbringing, and the seemingly vast differences between the two. What started out as an anecdotal hunch bore out in spades—something really was off for the current generation of kids.

We were desperate to understand why the mental health of our children, their friends and, more broadly, kids across the country was getting so much worse. We realized that maybe we were part of the problem. Our kids were living very scheduled lives, with few impromptu play opportunities, and adults very involved at every step along the way. This was very different from our own childhoods. When we were kids, the concrete sidewalks were our unsupervised playground. Independence was not an aspiration but a necessity. As young as six, we started to frequent the local pizza parlors and neighborhood arcades with our older siblings. By third grade, we unknowingly became latchkey kids, donning a key nonchalantly around our necks. After school, we took a public bus home and climbed the kitchen counter to get ourselves a snack. Sometimes we ran outside to play with our siblings or neighborhood kids. Our parents worked, and we self-curated until dinner, when at least one adult usually had come home. Perhaps time transforms the past into a mythic ideal of youth, free of phones but full of endless excitement and freedom to make up games and creatively overcome boredom. 

What began as our parental musings became the quest of our film, Chasing Childhood. We started interviewing experts like Lenore Skenazy, Julie Lythcott Haims, and Peter Gray. When Skenazy asked parents at a NYC middle school PTA meeting to reminisce about their own childhoods, the contrasts with their children’s daily lives became clear:

Video. CHASING CHILDHOOD | Lenore Skenazy | Childhood 

What did we get from all that time spent jumping rope, climbing trees, and playing tag relatively unsupervised? We learned to make the rules, win, lose, and be mischievous. We had worlds and goals that had nothing to do with grades or adult affirmation. In the pure, present focus of play, we formed memories and honed skills without planning to. Those experiences taught us how to feel both joy and disappointment, find happiness, and cope with setbacks – lessons that remain with us as adults. The educators in Wilton, CT articulated similar realizations in conversation with Lenore Skenazy:

Video. CHASING CHILDHOOD | Lenore Skenazy | "How is playing like sex?" 

After decades of friendship, now with our own school-age children, we huddled over tea on a winter afternoon. We complained that our kids’ schools would not allow children to walk home by themselves a few blocks, even in 5th grade, and that other parents were judging our child-rearing. Together we realized that our kids, growing up in New York City as we had, were not spending their afternoons or weekends freewheeling around the neighborhood on roller skates or spontaneously playing outside with other kids. What were they missing out on? Is it possible that free play isn’t just fun but actually crucial? 

Dr. Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn, says there’s a reason all animals play:

Video. CHASING CHILDHOOD | Peter Gray 

We wanted to drill down on what had changed and explore if this new, more structured, curated, and supervised childhood was serving the interest of kids. The film follows Let Grow, the brainchild of Skenazy, Gray, Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Shuchman, to three locations implementing its programs: East Side Middle School in Manhattan, the Patchogue-Medford school district on Long Island, and the town of Wilton, Connecticut.  

As we made the film, through our interviews and research, we learned that play and independence are developmentally essential. But we also became painfully aware that it would be almost impossible to give our children what we’d had because there were no other kids outside to play with. Safety and achievement cultures were fueling parental fear and causing them to overschedule their kids from a very young age, and this was true across socio-economic backgrounds, except for those families living in living in poverty. How did we get so far away from cultivating independence, confidence, and competence in our kids? When we spoke to kids at a public middle school in upper Manhattan, we found a similar truth:

Video. CHASING CHILDHOOD | After School Activities 

Childhood had changed. And the results weren’t great. Play, chores, and real-life tasks are the building blocks of becoming effective and competent adults.  As we spoke to kids in high school in both Wilton, CT and from more high-achieving public and private schools in New York City, we found the same over-curated, achievement-oriented culture on steroids: 

Video. CHASING CHILDHOOD | High School Anxiety 

What happens once these students leave their high-pressure homes for college? Julie Lythcott-Haims, former Dean of Freshmen and Undergraduate Advising at Stanford, told us that the most successful kids “on paper” were showing up to college and falling apart because they couldn’t cope on their own. They were accustomed to a level of scaffolding and hand-holding that was historically unprecedented. After all, if mammals are supposed to raise their young to independence, then we humans are failing our offspring, says Lythcott-Haims: 

Video. CHASING CHILDHOOD | Julie Lythcott-Haims 

While multiple factors have led to the mental health crisis plaguing our youth, one of the most significant additional factors has been the emergence of the smartphone and social media.  As Jonathan Haidt explains in The Anxious Generation: the adolescent mental health crisis exploded at the same time and in the same way across so many countries in the early 2010s, making the advent of smartphones and social media a clear culprit. Just as Let Grow helps communities shift culture to allow children to do more and more on their own, The Anxious Generation helps us imagine a world for kids without social media, FOMO, and a rectangular, hyper-connected, digital appendage.

What if we click the circular card of our 1978 Viewfinder forward a notch to a more perfect future? We might see parks filled with kids devising their own games and walking themselves to friends’ houses, robust recess in every school, and young adults and college students talking and problem-solving in ways that ultimately make the world a better place. Let’s stop chasing childhood and take it back for good. Let’s join Jonathan and the thousands of other parents who are ready to give children back their independence.

Chasing Childhood is available to stream via Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video. To find a community screening, or host one yourself, please visit our website: www.chasingchildhooddoc.com