A new survey of U.S. parents by the Institute for Family Studies suggests that kids are still overprotected in the real world and underprotected online.
I was walking to and from the local library by myself when I was 6 and 7 in the 90s, but frankly if I let my kids play at the playground across the not so busy street, in full view of my house, by themselves at that age I'd probably be arrested. I want my kids to have independence, I trust them, I totally believe our neighborhood is safe, but I do not want to end up on a police blotter. Seriously, how do we parent against the grain in a culture where strangers give me lectures for letting my 4 year old "wander too far" playing 20 yards from me on an empty beach in plain sight...
Totally agree. The data I want to see about supervision is the public at large. I believe (and attempt to implement) independence and freedom of my kids to move about our community. However it’s the people who aren’t currently parents that hold me back. We had an experience where my kiddo went to the bus stop, which is at our driveway, very early. We live at the top of a hill, and on the way to our school. Within 5 minutes of him going out the door, I received a phone call from the school asking if I knew he was outside. A short time later the police arrived. He never left OUR YARD.
Unfortunately, some of the safest neighborhoods also have the most overprotective and overbearing neighbors/HOA that constantly surveil their streets and post everything on the community social media pages.
This past weekend, my son and 2 friends went to the pond to fish, about a mile away. The pond is located by the entrance of the gated community. He told me that several cars slowed down to look at them closely. At dinner, my SIL assumed someone would post on their neighborhood page about them and checked. Surprisingly no one did...yet.
Another time, a "neighborhood watch" type of woman posts on our community crime alert pages trying to shame kids online. One of my friend's son (12 at the time) was pictured at the local grocery store by this woman claiming these kids bought drinks without paying for them and created a ruckus.
I'm not worried about kidnappers, I'm more worried about neighbors trying to get my son in trouble for harmless things and posting his face online.
I will admit that I am not a fan of Haidt or 'The Anxious Generation' for many reasons. But the thing that I most agree with the author about - 100% aligned, in fact! - is the idea that we are overprotecting in person and underprotecting online.
Overprotecting in person long pre-dates smartphones and ubiquitous internet access. Lenore Skenazy first published her blog "Free Range Kids" in 2008. I've spoken with parents since then and asked them if they would allow their children to have the same freedom that they enjoyed and the answer has always been a resounding 'No!'.
I appreciate this article's focus on the data around child mobility, I just wish it were presented first instead of after the screentime data. As it is, the natural conclusion is that increased screen time has led to this crisis of reduced childhood freedom. In fact, I would argue the exact opposite. Parents for many reasons, some valid and some less so, have severely restricted their child's movement and access to outdoor, unsupervised play. They have also needed to spend more time out of the home working in order to survive. As a result, children have had more access to screens and online activities.
"When that is all the autonomy you are allowed, it should not surprise anyone that you’d DIVE INTO YOUR PHONE where you can meet up with friends, chat, play, go on adventures and exercise your curiosity. It is an alternative universe to the one that is right outside your door but OFF LIMITS to you."
There's an uncomfortable reading of the class gradient finding that the authors don't follow through on.
The report frames it as: educated parents make better technology choices. But educated parents also have resources that make screen limitation developmentally viable. Limiting screens only works as a strategy when something replaces them — music lessons, travel sports, enriched summers, social networks that build human capital. Without the substitutes, you're not producing outdoor play and self-directed exploration. You're producing boredom inside a constrained opportunity structure.
The things that historically gave working-class kids developmental texture — apprenticeships, real youth employment, thick civic and religious institutions, unstructured neighborhood peer culture — have been hollowing out for decades, independently of smartphones. What remains is expensive and credentialed. For a lot of kids, the phone isn't displacing a rich alternative. It's filling a void that was already there.
Which means the intervention the report implies — adopt better media hygiene — is being recommended to families without the infrastructure to make it work. That's not parenting advice. That's asking people to act on norms built for a different material situation.
The comic book panic had the same class valence: anxious professionals worried about what working-class kids were consuming while their own children had piano teachers and summer camps. The digital divide inversion the report discovers isn't new. It's the same structure with the mechanism updated.
The honest question — one this report can't answer — is whether heavy phone use is causing constrained development in lower-SES kids or reflecting a prior and more intractable constriction in opportunity. That distinction matters enormously for what actually needs fixing.
Let me reply: my kids don't have music lessons, don't take part in school sports, they don't have enriched summers. They get home, eat something, do their homework, and walk to the nearest park / playground, expected to be back before it's dark. Those under 7 need an older sibling to chaperone them to and fro (if the older ones don't want to go that day, tough luck, play with your legos, draw, whatever), but that's it.
Thank you for providing these frightening statistics! The amount of time children spend on devices at daycare or school is often missing from these screen time numbers which I imagine would make these figures a lot higher! So much is lost when children's eyes are diverted to a screen rather than the real world around them. There is still so much work to be done!
My 9 year old grandson conveyed that 'internet safety' instruction in his class is solely focused on child trafficking. Nothing at all about too much screen time, dangers to attention span, fake news, harm to social relationships, sleep, etc. NOTHING. So, his formally uneducated mom and he himself think the only fear is some rando asking to meet him at the mall and kidnapping him and thus he spends hours a day online- at home and in school. My heart is breaking.
I tried to install parental controls on my kids’ devices. My daughter would just text herself links to YouTube and it would let her watch all the content she wanted even though I had specifically blocked YouTube because I knew it was a time suck for her. After that I quit bothering with parental controls as it just felt futile. So I ended up fighting it from the other end by making sure they spent time outside and on wholesome activities to counteract the time spent on their devices. All three of my kids are Eagle Scouts and will go camping without their phones at the drop of a hat. They also read classic literature and garden and work in the shop and play musical instruments. Hopefully that stuff counteracts some of the brain rot. My husband was raised on a steady diet of tv and that is how he spends his free time now for the most part. I would love to think that this issue is as easy as turning on parental controls, but it isn’t.
My daughter is in Girl Scouts and she loves it! It's been so good for her. I hear you on the YouTube issue; it's a shame it's been so hard to manage things like that. (Been there!) There is a way to block it even on Messages on iOS via Screen Time -> Content & Privacy Restrictions -> App Store, Media, Web & Games -> Web Content -> Never Allow -> https://www.youtube.com
I took my 8 year old to a playground the other day. It was right as schools in the neighborhood were letting out and I expected to see a bunch of children coming to play. It was a beautiful day after a few days of rain.
The playground is in full view of many larger houses, where you'd expect there to be many children. We saw a school bus drop off children. We saw children being walked home by adults. We even saw some children on bikes. But none came to the playground.
My parents still live in the house I grew up in, and the bus stop is still on the same corner. When I was a kid everyone would just walk home from the bus stop, even young kids. There are multiple stops in the neighborhood, so the walks home are short. Now the kids all get picked up by parents in their cars! Just to drive two blocks up the street! We would have been mortified as kids to be picked up from the bus stop.
I homeschool but the bus stop for our school is less than 2 blocks from our house. Our neighbor has walked her daughter there and back every day until the girl was 10. The other neighbor is currently doing the same. I let my son walk nearly that same distance to go visit a friend. There are only a few children in our neighborhood even close to my son's age but we're the ones getting the others out of the house. If he doesn't ring their doorbells, the children don't come out.
I don't think all began with the internet. I grew up when TV was relatively new. I probably spent hours equivalent to what your stats show in the graph. And the internet is probably more intellectually challenging. At least you interact.
But I also could go wherever I wanted, from a very early age. Helicopter parents can prevent their children from really growing up.
The article The State of Childhood in the U.S. correctly identifies something most parents can already see in plain sight: children are spending enormous amounts of time online while simultaneously losing real-world autonomy, unsupervised play, and embodied social experience. Its central argument — that modern childhood is characterised by “overprotection in the real world and under protection in the virtual world” — is persuasive, and the large-scale survey data give empirical weight to concerns many people already intuitively recognise.
But the article ultimately remains trapped within the very framework it is trying to critique.
It begins too late.
It starts with behavioural outcomes — screen time, supervision levels, outdoor play, mobility — and works backwards. It asks how childhood behaviours have changed, rather than asking the more fundamental question: what is a child?
The hidden assumption throughout the article is that the child is essentially a developing brain whose behaviour must be managed correctly. Outdoor play is treated as beneficial because it improves psychological development; screen time is treated as harmful because it disrupts cognition and socialisation. But this framing still positions the body as secondary — a kind of transport system carrying the brain through childhood.
That is the conceptual mistake.
A child is not a brain being ferried around by a body. A child is a whole organism. Cognition does not emerge from the brain in isolation, but from the equilibrium of nested biological systems: autonomic, immune, metabolic, endocrine, sensory, relational, affective, and neural. The developing mind is not installed automatically by genes, nor simply shaped by “screen habits.” It emerges from the child’s interostate — the organism’s internal equilibrium of equilibria.
This changes the meaning of childhood entirely.
Outdoor play matters not because it is nostalgic or morally wholesome, but because it provides the organism with the developmental conditions it evolutionarily expects: movement, uncertainty, risk negotiation, peer interaction, sensory richness, boredom resolving into imagination, challenge followed by recovery, and co-regulated social experience. These experiences shape autonomic flexibility and widen access to reflective cognition.
Likewise, excessive screen exposure is not merely “too much technology.” It is a radically different developmental ecology. It alters attention, recovery rhythms, sensory load, tolerance to uncertainty, inflammatory tone, sleep architecture, and patterns of social attunement. In TGTS terms, it biases the child toward reactive equilibria in which the Thought Generator overwhelms the Thought Selector. Reflection narrows. Prediction dominates.
This is why the article, although correct in its descriptive account, misses the deeper issue.
The anxious generation is not simply a generation with excessive screen time. It is a generation of disrupted interostates.
The modern environment has interrupted childhood’s ancient biological role. Historically, childhood functioned as a developmental buffer that brought most nervous systems into a workable range of autonomic flexibility through rhythm, attachment, movement, nature, co-regulation, and embodied experience. Today’s environment increasingly selects for different equilibria: vigilance, reactivity, rigidity, fragmented attention, and chronic low-level autonomic activation.
What appears as rising “neurodiversity” may therefore not represent the unveiling of previously hidden identities, but the environmental stabilisation of different cognitive equilibria.
The solution is therefore deeper than simply “less phone, more play.”
The solution is the intentional design of developmental ecologies that bias the organism toward autonomic flexibility.
This is where the Willowsway becomes important.
The Willowsway does not attempt to engineer a specific cognitive outcome or enforce a preferred neurotype. It recognises that we cannot know a child's full polygenic architecture in advance. What we can shape is the environment within which that child develops. The Willowsway therefore focuses on the conditions that support broad reflective accessibility: nutrition that reduces inflammatory load, movement that promotes autonomic flexibility, gratitude that reduces internal threat signalling, loving relationships that externalise regulation until the child can internalise it, and embodied play that repeatedly cycles manageable uncertainty into recovery and reward.
In this framework, freedom itself becomes biological.
Reflection is not simply taught. It emerges when the organism can tolerate uncertainty without collapsing into defensive prediction. The purpose of childhood is therefore not merely academic preparation or behavioural management. It is the construction of the conditions under which a reflective human being can emerge at all.
The real question is no longer:
“How do we reduce screen time?”
It is:
“What kind of organismic equilibrium is modern childhood creating?”
I really enjoyed this article and your comment, Kevin. I was walking to the library by myself by 8 or 9 - but it certainly wasn't safe! Pig farmers who molested kids shot bb guns and teenagers getting high in rusted out cars. But it did form me and I had many moments of deep peacefulness, contemplation, navigating fear and danger, as well as losing my thoughts in nature. Love looking into word "interostate." My son is autistic and that makes mobility a different issue for many reasons. Curious about your comment on "rising neurodiversity" - my understanding is that autistic genetics are ancient and have been conserved through evolution. Will be looking into Willowsway.
The term “rising neurodiversity” was used instead of “rising neurodivergence”; it was a lazy use. You are quite correct that the polygenic landscape has not changed, but for cognition the epigenetic landscape has. My article on autism might help.
If I get this right, cognition formatively begins with the TG - thought generation, including all sorts of low-level inputs, which may then proceed through a gate to PreForm:
"a transient, biologically gated workspace where the output of the Thought Generator (TG) can be held, inhibited, compared, or recombined before being enacted or dismissed. It is not a permanent module or trait-like faculty, but a conditional state—accessible only when the interostate is within a regulated window. PreForm serves as the central bottleneck for reflective cognition in the TGTS model: thoughts are generated continuously, but only become available for evaluation when PreForm is open"
The third element - TS, or thought selection - only happens when we are comfortable enough in our interostate - "a dynamic, real-time configuration of physiological signals that determines whether reflective cognition is possible."
This is where reflective as opposed to reflexive can happen. I've been looking at lesser life forms which are more purely reflexive, as contrasted against primate cognition, exhibiting a more reflective capacity.
I want to bounce this idea off of you. I have a 3-element model, but at this point my third element varies from TS a bit. Perhaps it is upon how it is put. You have selection, based upon various possibilities in reflection. The way that I model my 3rd element is at the point of clarity and definition (from the standpoint of consciousness, and at the product of association). What do you think of the idea of formatting TS as the one choice that comes out of clarity? I may be jumping the gun at that point, because as you say, selection has to occur, but also, is this the point at which you would say there is (or may be) a united resolve?
Your system also reminds me of Charles Sanders Peirce's 3 categories. Your "apps" even remind me of his 3rd category.
Mark, thank you for taking the time to engage with the paper so carefully. What you are reading there is actually about a year old now, and in many ways I was still finding my footing cognitively at that stage.
My background is in immunology rather than cognitive neuroscience, so this has been a gradual process of learning to formalise these ideas properly. The earlier TGTS papers still carried traces of a more traditional “executive” framing, whereas the newer versions make a much sharper distinction between thought generation, reflective accessibility, and eventual stabilisation/selection.
Your comments about clarity, resolve, and Peirce are genuinely interesting to me because they touch exactly on areas I’ve been refining. In the latest version, I no longer treat Thought Selection as a little chooser inside the system, but more as an emergent stabilisation process within a biologically constrained inferential landscape.
I’d be happy to share the latest version with you if you’d like to take a look. I think you would probably find the newer formulation much closer to the distinctions you are pointing toward here.
I think you've really got your finger on something, here. I recently learned about cognitive development (in species), from reflexive to reflective, and I've noticed amazing changes in the way the total brain system works when becoming more reflective - among its parts, it unfolds in more directions.
You use words that have to be looked up. I now see "interostate" as a good category to key on, I had to search out TGTS (Thought Generator–Thought Selector), and I have not yet found "the WIllowsway".
It looks to me like interostates may turn out to be a great way to look at a person's whole development.
Thanks for your interest, Mark. The Willowsway is a pedagogy used by Willows Preschool. It was introduced in 2009. I could not post an attachment here, but I did in notes. It might help visualise the interostate.
I see the Willowsway picture. I see giving the child a variety of support for, as it says, greater flexibility. What more can a school do?
I am reminded of the ultimate fallback, it seems, in a child's life. More than anything else, they want to be loved by their parents. I've seen examples where they can survive just about anything, but I think that love is profoundly important. They seem so dependent upon it.
I enjoy the holistic view of the person. Doing so adds perspective; it gives a greater framework within which, as you say, online and screen-based developments occur. We should come to understand why it is that more screen time in modern schooling can be associated with less learning and child development. Perhaps there is simply what the biological organism is comprised of, and what it needs. This would be quite contrary to the simple regard, for example, of what a workplace would need.
Appreciate the findings. Parental controls are faulty and difficult, but must be attempted (I appreciate the mention; our device guides try to demystify them as much as possible). I wonder if parents include watching the Smart TV (which isn't always horrible, even though it's connected to the internet) and homework on the school-issued device. Regardless, long live childhood, and let's get them back to some analog living.
Not surprised by the survey results reported here, and thanks for sharing. May I add…..as long as there are screens of any kind in the child’s bedroom and game consoles in the home, it’s a bigger risk to the child. Adults need to model this and leave TVs and phones, etc. out of their own bedrooms. Children notice everything.
The “overprotected in the real world, underprotected in the virtual world” frame still feels like the clearest diagnosis. We have made childhood physically safer but developmentally stranger. Kids need risk, friction, boredom, movement, and real-world independence — not just cleaner apps and better parental controls.
I was walking to and from the local library by myself when I was 6 and 7 in the 90s, but frankly if I let my kids play at the playground across the not so busy street, in full view of my house, by themselves at that age I'd probably be arrested. I want my kids to have independence, I trust them, I totally believe our neighborhood is safe, but I do not want to end up on a police blotter. Seriously, how do we parent against the grain in a culture where strangers give me lectures for letting my 4 year old "wander too far" playing 20 yards from me on an empty beach in plain sight...
Totally agree. The data I want to see about supervision is the public at large. I believe (and attempt to implement) independence and freedom of my kids to move about our community. However it’s the people who aren’t currently parents that hold me back. We had an experience where my kiddo went to the bus stop, which is at our driveway, very early. We live at the top of a hill, and on the way to our school. Within 5 minutes of him going out the door, I received a phone call from the school asking if I knew he was outside. A short time later the police arrived. He never left OUR YARD.
Unfortunately, some of the safest neighborhoods also have the most overprotective and overbearing neighbors/HOA that constantly surveil their streets and post everything on the community social media pages.
This past weekend, my son and 2 friends went to the pond to fish, about a mile away. The pond is located by the entrance of the gated community. He told me that several cars slowed down to look at them closely. At dinner, my SIL assumed someone would post on their neighborhood page about them and checked. Surprisingly no one did...yet.
Another time, a "neighborhood watch" type of woman posts on our community crime alert pages trying to shame kids online. One of my friend's son (12 at the time) was pictured at the local grocery store by this woman claiming these kids bought drinks without paying for them and created a ruckus.
I'm not worried about kidnappers, I'm more worried about neighbors trying to get my son in trouble for harmless things and posting his face online.
I will admit that I am not a fan of Haidt or 'The Anxious Generation' for many reasons. But the thing that I most agree with the author about - 100% aligned, in fact! - is the idea that we are overprotecting in person and underprotecting online.
Overprotecting in person long pre-dates smartphones and ubiquitous internet access. Lenore Skenazy first published her blog "Free Range Kids" in 2008. I've spoken with parents since then and asked them if they would allow their children to have the same freedom that they enjoyed and the answer has always been a resounding 'No!'.
I appreciate this article's focus on the data around child mobility, I just wish it were presented first instead of after the screentime data. As it is, the natural conclusion is that increased screen time has led to this crisis of reduced childhood freedom. In fact, I would argue the exact opposite. Parents for many reasons, some valid and some less so, have severely restricted their child's movement and access to outdoor, unsupervised play. They have also needed to spend more time out of the home working in order to survive. As a result, children have had more access to screens and online activities.
Take a moment to read one Skenazy's most recent posts: https://www.freerangekids.com/lenore-do-you-not-care-about-kids-and-phones/
"When that is all the autonomy you are allowed, it should not surprise anyone that you’d DIVE INTO YOUR PHONE where you can meet up with friends, chat, play, go on adventures and exercise your curiosity. It is an alternative universe to the one that is right outside your door but OFF LIMITS to you."
Insightful comment!
There's an uncomfortable reading of the class gradient finding that the authors don't follow through on.
The report frames it as: educated parents make better technology choices. But educated parents also have resources that make screen limitation developmentally viable. Limiting screens only works as a strategy when something replaces them — music lessons, travel sports, enriched summers, social networks that build human capital. Without the substitutes, you're not producing outdoor play and self-directed exploration. You're producing boredom inside a constrained opportunity structure.
The things that historically gave working-class kids developmental texture — apprenticeships, real youth employment, thick civic and religious institutions, unstructured neighborhood peer culture — have been hollowing out for decades, independently of smartphones. What remains is expensive and credentialed. For a lot of kids, the phone isn't displacing a rich alternative. It's filling a void that was already there.
Which means the intervention the report implies — adopt better media hygiene — is being recommended to families without the infrastructure to make it work. That's not parenting advice. That's asking people to act on norms built for a different material situation.
The comic book panic had the same class valence: anxious professionals worried about what working-class kids were consuming while their own children had piano teachers and summer camps. The digital divide inversion the report discovers isn't new. It's the same structure with the mechanism updated.
The honest question — one this report can't answer — is whether heavy phone use is causing constrained development in lower-SES kids or reflecting a prior and more intractable constriction in opportunity. That distinction matters enormously for what actually needs fixing.
Let me reply: my kids don't have music lessons, don't take part in school sports, they don't have enriched summers. They get home, eat something, do their homework, and walk to the nearest park / playground, expected to be back before it's dark. Those under 7 need an older sibling to chaperone them to and fro (if the older ones don't want to go that day, tough luck, play with your legos, draw, whatever), but that's it.
Thank you for providing these frightening statistics! The amount of time children spend on devices at daycare or school is often missing from these screen time numbers which I imagine would make these figures a lot higher! So much is lost when children's eyes are diverted to a screen rather than the real world around them. There is still so much work to be done!
Seeing screen times for 4, 5, 6 year olds... It makes me shudder.
My 9 year old grandson conveyed that 'internet safety' instruction in his class is solely focused on child trafficking. Nothing at all about too much screen time, dangers to attention span, fake news, harm to social relationships, sleep, etc. NOTHING. So, his formally uneducated mom and he himself think the only fear is some rando asking to meet him at the mall and kidnapping him and thus he spends hours a day online- at home and in school. My heart is breaking.
I tried to install parental controls on my kids’ devices. My daughter would just text herself links to YouTube and it would let her watch all the content she wanted even though I had specifically blocked YouTube because I knew it was a time suck for her. After that I quit bothering with parental controls as it just felt futile. So I ended up fighting it from the other end by making sure they spent time outside and on wholesome activities to counteract the time spent on their devices. All three of my kids are Eagle Scouts and will go camping without their phones at the drop of a hat. They also read classic literature and garden and work in the shop and play musical instruments. Hopefully that stuff counteracts some of the brain rot. My husband was raised on a steady diet of tv and that is how he spends his free time now for the most part. I would love to think that this issue is as easy as turning on parental controls, but it isn’t.
My daughter is in Girl Scouts and she loves it! It's been so good for her. I hear you on the YouTube issue; it's a shame it's been so hard to manage things like that. (Been there!) There is a way to block it even on Messages on iOS via Screen Time -> Content & Privacy Restrictions -> App Store, Media, Web & Games -> Web Content -> Never Allow -> https://www.youtube.com
I took my 8 year old to a playground the other day. It was right as schools in the neighborhood were letting out and I expected to see a bunch of children coming to play. It was a beautiful day after a few days of rain.
The playground is in full view of many larger houses, where you'd expect there to be many children. We saw a school bus drop off children. We saw children being walked home by adults. We even saw some children on bikes. But none came to the playground.
My parents still live in the house I grew up in, and the bus stop is still on the same corner. When I was a kid everyone would just walk home from the bus stop, even young kids. There are multiple stops in the neighborhood, so the walks home are short. Now the kids all get picked up by parents in their cars! Just to drive two blocks up the street! We would have been mortified as kids to be picked up from the bus stop.
I homeschool but the bus stop for our school is less than 2 blocks from our house. Our neighbor has walked her daughter there and back every day until the girl was 10. The other neighbor is currently doing the same. I let my son walk nearly that same distance to go visit a friend. There are only a few children in our neighborhood even close to my son's age but we're the ones getting the others out of the house. If he doesn't ring their doorbells, the children don't come out.
I don't think all began with the internet. I grew up when TV was relatively new. I probably spent hours equivalent to what your stats show in the graph. And the internet is probably more intellectually challenging. At least you interact.
But I also could go wherever I wanted, from a very early age. Helicopter parents can prevent their children from really growing up.
The article The State of Childhood in the U.S. correctly identifies something most parents can already see in plain sight: children are spending enormous amounts of time online while simultaneously losing real-world autonomy, unsupervised play, and embodied social experience. Its central argument — that modern childhood is characterised by “overprotection in the real world and under protection in the virtual world” — is persuasive, and the large-scale survey data give empirical weight to concerns many people already intuitively recognise.
But the article ultimately remains trapped within the very framework it is trying to critique.
It begins too late.
It starts with behavioural outcomes — screen time, supervision levels, outdoor play, mobility — and works backwards. It asks how childhood behaviours have changed, rather than asking the more fundamental question: what is a child?
The hidden assumption throughout the article is that the child is essentially a developing brain whose behaviour must be managed correctly. Outdoor play is treated as beneficial because it improves psychological development; screen time is treated as harmful because it disrupts cognition and socialisation. But this framing still positions the body as secondary — a kind of transport system carrying the brain through childhood.
That is the conceptual mistake.
A child is not a brain being ferried around by a body. A child is a whole organism. Cognition does not emerge from the brain in isolation, but from the equilibrium of nested biological systems: autonomic, immune, metabolic, endocrine, sensory, relational, affective, and neural. The developing mind is not installed automatically by genes, nor simply shaped by “screen habits.” It emerges from the child’s interostate — the organism’s internal equilibrium of equilibria.
This changes the meaning of childhood entirely.
Outdoor play matters not because it is nostalgic or morally wholesome, but because it provides the organism with the developmental conditions it evolutionarily expects: movement, uncertainty, risk negotiation, peer interaction, sensory richness, boredom resolving into imagination, challenge followed by recovery, and co-regulated social experience. These experiences shape autonomic flexibility and widen access to reflective cognition.
Likewise, excessive screen exposure is not merely “too much technology.” It is a radically different developmental ecology. It alters attention, recovery rhythms, sensory load, tolerance to uncertainty, inflammatory tone, sleep architecture, and patterns of social attunement. In TGTS terms, it biases the child toward reactive equilibria in which the Thought Generator overwhelms the Thought Selector. Reflection narrows. Prediction dominates.
This is why the article, although correct in its descriptive account, misses the deeper issue.
The anxious generation is not simply a generation with excessive screen time. It is a generation of disrupted interostates.
The modern environment has interrupted childhood’s ancient biological role. Historically, childhood functioned as a developmental buffer that brought most nervous systems into a workable range of autonomic flexibility through rhythm, attachment, movement, nature, co-regulation, and embodied experience. Today’s environment increasingly selects for different equilibria: vigilance, reactivity, rigidity, fragmented attention, and chronic low-level autonomic activation.
What appears as rising “neurodiversity” may therefore not represent the unveiling of previously hidden identities, but the environmental stabilisation of different cognitive equilibria.
The solution is therefore deeper than simply “less phone, more play.”
The solution is the intentional design of developmental ecologies that bias the organism toward autonomic flexibility.
This is where the Willowsway becomes important.
The Willowsway does not attempt to engineer a specific cognitive outcome or enforce a preferred neurotype. It recognises that we cannot know a child's full polygenic architecture in advance. What we can shape is the environment within which that child develops. The Willowsway therefore focuses on the conditions that support broad reflective accessibility: nutrition that reduces inflammatory load, movement that promotes autonomic flexibility, gratitude that reduces internal threat signalling, loving relationships that externalise regulation until the child can internalise it, and embodied play that repeatedly cycles manageable uncertainty into recovery and reward.
In this framework, freedom itself becomes biological.
Reflection is not simply taught. It emerges when the organism can tolerate uncertainty without collapsing into defensive prediction. The purpose of childhood is therefore not merely academic preparation or behavioural management. It is the construction of the conditions under which a reflective human being can emerge at all.
The real question is no longer:
“How do we reduce screen time?”
It is:
“What kind of organismic equilibrium is modern childhood creating?”
I really enjoyed this article and your comment, Kevin. I was walking to the library by myself by 8 or 9 - but it certainly wasn't safe! Pig farmers who molested kids shot bb guns and teenagers getting high in rusted out cars. But it did form me and I had many moments of deep peacefulness, contemplation, navigating fear and danger, as well as losing my thoughts in nature. Love looking into word "interostate." My son is autistic and that makes mobility a different issue for many reasons. Curious about your comment on "rising neurodiversity" - my understanding is that autistic genetics are ancient and have been conserved through evolution. Will be looking into Willowsway.
Good morning, Susan. Your trip to the library seems a little chaotic!
The Willowsway is proven pedagogy that biases children towards curiosity and resilience - with a smile. https://willowspreschool.org.uk/willowsway/
The term “rising neurodiversity” was used instead of “rising neurodivergence”; it was a lazy use. You are quite correct that the polygenic landscape has not changed, but for cognition the epigenetic landscape has. My article on autism might help.
https://rethinkingneurodiversity.substack.com/p/autism-isnt-eye-colour
I spent some time with your TGTS paper - a tripartite system file:///C:/Users/coopa/Documents/Thoughts/TGTS%20version%204.0.pdf
[Edit-add: TGTS model is here: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Reflective-Access-is-Gated-by-the-Interostate-The-amygdala-functions-as-a-central_fig1_394967429 ]
If I get this right, cognition formatively begins with the TG - thought generation, including all sorts of low-level inputs, which may then proceed through a gate to PreForm:
"a transient, biologically gated workspace where the output of the Thought Generator (TG) can be held, inhibited, compared, or recombined before being enacted or dismissed. It is not a permanent module or trait-like faculty, but a conditional state—accessible only when the interostate is within a regulated window. PreForm serves as the central bottleneck for reflective cognition in the TGTS model: thoughts are generated continuously, but only become available for evaluation when PreForm is open"
The third element - TS, or thought selection - only happens when we are comfortable enough in our interostate - "a dynamic, real-time configuration of physiological signals that determines whether reflective cognition is possible."
This is where reflective as opposed to reflexive can happen. I've been looking at lesser life forms which are more purely reflexive, as contrasted against primate cognition, exhibiting a more reflective capacity.
I want to bounce this idea off of you. I have a 3-element model, but at this point my third element varies from TS a bit. Perhaps it is upon how it is put. You have selection, based upon various possibilities in reflection. The way that I model my 3rd element is at the point of clarity and definition (from the standpoint of consciousness, and at the product of association). What do you think of the idea of formatting TS as the one choice that comes out of clarity? I may be jumping the gun at that point, because as you say, selection has to occur, but also, is this the point at which you would say there is (or may be) a united resolve?
Your system also reminds me of Charles Sanders Peirce's 3 categories. Your "apps" even remind me of his 3rd category.
Mark, thank you for taking the time to engage with the paper so carefully. What you are reading there is actually about a year old now, and in many ways I was still finding my footing cognitively at that stage.
My background is in immunology rather than cognitive neuroscience, so this has been a gradual process of learning to formalise these ideas properly. The earlier TGTS papers still carried traces of a more traditional “executive” framing, whereas the newer versions make a much sharper distinction between thought generation, reflective accessibility, and eventual stabilisation/selection.
Your comments about clarity, resolve, and Peirce are genuinely interesting to me because they touch exactly on areas I’ve been refining. In the latest version, I no longer treat Thought Selection as a little chooser inside the system, but more as an emergent stabilisation process within a biologically constrained inferential landscape.
I’d be happy to share the latest version with you if you’d like to take a look. I think you would probably find the newer formulation much closer to the distinctions you are pointing toward here.
Sounds good. I PM'd you.
Thanks Mark..I have responded
I think you've really got your finger on something, here. I recently learned about cognitive development (in species), from reflexive to reflective, and I've noticed amazing changes in the way the total brain system works when becoming more reflective - among its parts, it unfolds in more directions.
You use words that have to be looked up. I now see "interostate" as a good category to key on, I had to search out TGTS (Thought Generator–Thought Selector), and I have not yet found "the WIllowsway".
It looks to me like interostates may turn out to be a great way to look at a person's whole development.
Thanks for your interest, Mark. The Willowsway is a pedagogy used by Willows Preschool. It was introduced in 2009. I could not post an attachment here, but I did in notes. It might help visualise the interostate.
I see the Willowsway picture. I see giving the child a variety of support for, as it says, greater flexibility. What more can a school do?
I am reminded of the ultimate fallback, it seems, in a child's life. More than anything else, they want to be loved by their parents. I've seen examples where they can survive just about anything, but I think that love is profoundly important. They seem so dependent upon it.
I enjoy the holistic view of the person. Doing so adds perspective; it gives a greater framework within which, as you say, online and screen-based developments occur. We should come to understand why it is that more screen time in modern schooling can be associated with less learning and child development. Perhaps there is simply what the biological organism is comprised of, and what it needs. This would be quite contrary to the simple regard, for example, of what a workplace would need.
Appreciate the findings. Parental controls are faulty and difficult, but must be attempted (I appreciate the mention; our device guides try to demystify them as much as possible). I wonder if parents include watching the Smart TV (which isn't always horrible, even though it's connected to the internet) and homework on the school-issued device. Regardless, long live childhood, and let's get them back to some analog living.
Not surprised by the survey results reported here, and thanks for sharing. May I add…..as long as there are screens of any kind in the child’s bedroom and game consoles in the home, it’s a bigger risk to the child. Adults need to model this and leave TVs and phones, etc. out of their own bedrooms. Children notice everything.
Have you seen this? AI is way worse than social media
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/25/schoolboys-ai-girlfriends/
The “overprotected in the real world, underprotected in the virtual world” frame still feels like the clearest diagnosis. We have made childhood physically safer but developmentally stranger. Kids need risk, friction, boredom, movement, and real-world independence — not just cleaner apps and better parental controls.
Even at 17, >60% aren’t allowed to leave their neighborhood unsupervised. By age 14, most can’t go beyond their own street.
Mind blown 🤯
Can it really be true that 8% of 17 year olds aren't allowed to leave the house??