We Weren’t Neglected.
We Were Just... Unsupervised.
A reflection on growing up free, getting lost, and why science has finally caught up with what we already knew in our bones.
I turned 66 this year.
Which means I am now officially old enough to start sentences with “back in my day” without anyone raising an eyebrow. Old enough to look at the world and feel a peculiar mixture of bewilderment and quiet satisfaction. Old enough to read a psychology research paper and think: yes, obviously, what took you so long?
The paper in question was published recently in the journal Development and Psychopathology, and it pooled together 52 separate research studies to conclude something that will surprise absolutely nobody who grew up in the 1960s or 70s. It found consistent links between overprotective parenting and higher rates of anxiety and depression in young people. In other words... hovering over your children, solving their every problem, intercepting every discomfort before it lands, might actually be making them worse off.
Science, bless it. Arriving fashionably late to a party we’ve been at for six decades.
Now, before I get accused of being one of those grumpy older people who thinks everything was better when they were young... I want to be clear: I am absolutely one of those people. But I’m also trying to be honest about it, which I think earns me at least partial credit.
The World We Came From
Let me paint you a picture.
It is a sunny morning in the school summer holidays. I am somewhere between eight and eleven years old, depending on which particular summer we’re visiting. My mum is in the kitchen doing something that does not involve me. My dad is at work. There is no plan, no itinerary, no “enrichment activity” waiting in the diary.
What there is, is a back door. And beyond that back door, an entire neighbourhood that functions as our world.
Someone knocks for me. Or I knock for someone. And then we are just... gone. Out. Loose in the streets and fields and scrubland and building sites (yes, building sites, don’t write in) like small, sunburned mammals with bad haircuts and no particular agenda. We come back when we’re hungry, or when it gets dark, or occasionally when someone has done something requiring either a plaster or an apology.
That was it. That was the whole arrangement. And I don’t remember anyone calling it neglect at the time.
My mother didn’t know exactly where I was on any given afternoon, and she would have been absolutely fine telling you that. She trusted the general direction of the neighbourhood and her knowledge of which kids I was likely to be with and the fairly reasonable assumption that if something serious had happened, someone would have come to find her. This was not carelessness. This was a working understanding of how children operate.
The Scrapes That Taught Us Everything
Here is what we learned out there, in those long, unstructured, gloriously unsupervised days.
We learned that arguments don’t resolve themselves. Someone has to say sorry first, and it’s often you, and that is uncomfortable, but you do it because you want to keep playing and the game matters more than your pride. That’s a negotiation skill. We didn’t know it at the time. We just knew that if you stayed sulking on the wall, you missed the second half.
We learned that some risks are worth taking and some are genuinely stupid, and the only reliable way to tell the difference is to occasionally take the stupid ones and find out. The tree branch that looked solid. The short cut through the grumpy neighbour’s garden. The homemade go-kart with no actual braking mechanism worth speaking of.
We learned boredom. Proper, stretchy, aching boredom, the kind that has no screen to disappear into, the kind that eventually forces the brain to do something. Invent a game. Build something. Start a story. Most of the creative instincts I still carry around in me at 66 were born directly out of those long, empty, magnificent summer afternoons with nothing to do and nowhere to be.
We learned, without anyone ever teaching it to us formally, what researchers now call self-regulation. The ability to manage your own feelings without requiring someone else to manage them for you. To sit with frustration long enough for it to pass. To take a knock, feel the feeling, and carry on. Not because we were tough. Because we had no other option on offer.
What the Research Actually Says (And What It Doesn’t)
I want to be fair here, because I think there’s a version of this conversation that tips into nostalgia-as-argument, and that’s not quite what I’m after.
The researchers are careful about their findings. They note the links between overparenting and anxiety and depression are consistent but not enormous. They acknowledge that an anxious child can produce a hovering parent just as easily as a hovering parent can produce an anxious child. The cycle runs in both directions, apparently. Which is the kind of nuance that doesn’t fit neatly on a meme, but matters.
They also note, and I think this is crucial, that none of this is an argument for actual neglect. Serious neglect harms children. That’s not what any of us are talking about when we get nostalgic about riding our bikes for hours without a GPS tracker. There is a world of difference between a child who is free and a child who is abandoned.
What the research does suggest, backed up by studies on unstructured play from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children and work on what they call “risky play” (which is just a clinical way of saying climbing trees and playing rough), is that children who are given room to make choices, handle frustration, and sort out small problems on their own tend to develop stronger emotional foundations. More capacity to regulate themselves. More resilience, in the truest sense.
Not resilience as a buzzword. Resilience as a lived capability. The kind built from a thousand small moments of figuring it out without anyone stepping in.
The Thing We’ve Lost (And Why I’m Not Sure We Can Find It Again)
Here is where I try not to sound like I’m blaming anyone, because I genuinely don’t think blame is useful here.
Parents today are not hovering over their children because they are weak or foolish. They are doing it because the world they live in seems more threatening, more surveilled, more full of judgment. There are CCTV cameras and social media and WhatsApp parent groups and the constant, low-level hum of other people potentially watching and forming opinions. The road traffic is worse. The fear is real, even when the statistics don’t entirely support it. And, perhaps most pointedly, a parent whose child gets hurt on their watch now faces a very different kind of social reckoning than my mother ever did.
The researchers note that traffic, specifically, is one of the main reasons children roam less today. A large international study across 16 countries found that parental concerns about traffic were the single most-cited reason for restricting children’s independent movement. That is not overprotectiveness. That is a reasonable response to a genuine environmental change.
So the world changed, and parenting changed with it. I understand that. I really do.
But I also think we’ve lost something that’s genuinely hard to name, and harder still to rebuild deliberately. You can’t schedule unstructured freedom. You can’t put “have an adventure with uncertain outcomes” in the school planner. You can’t hand a child resilience the way you hand them a packed lunch. It has to be stumbled into. Earned in the slow, inefficient, sometimes painful way that only real experience allows.
What 66 Years Teaches You
I’ve been thinking about the moments in my life that genuinely shaped me. The ones that gave me something solid to stand on.
Almost none of them were comfortable. Barely any of them were planned. A number of them were, in retrospect, quite stupid. But they were mine. I navigated them without anyone smoothing the edges first, without a parent telephoning ahead to make sure the rough bits had been removed.
I got lost, literally and metaphorically, more times than I can count. I fell out with friends and had to find my way back. I made terrible decisions and had to live with the consequences long enough to actually learn from them, rather than having the consequences softened before they could teach me anything. I was bored, repeatedly, deeply, productively bored, until the boredom cracked open into something useful.
And here I am at 66, not perfectly formed, not without my scars and my blind spots and my ongoing collection of questionable choices. But fundamentally okay. Able to sit with discomfort. Able to problem-solve when there’s no manual. Able, when life does what life does, to find my footing again.
I don’t think that came from particularly brilliant parenting. My parents were decent people doing their best, but they weren’t following a methodology. I think it came from all those unsupervised hours. All that freedom that looked, from a certain angle, like being overlooked. All that boredom and argument and risk and mess and getting it wrong and trying again.
Which is exactly what the research is now telling us, in peer-reviewed, academically cautious language.
We were, it turns out, the lucky ones. Not because our parents were better at parenting. But because they were, largely, too busy to be helicopter parents. They had jobs and worries and lives of their own. They needed us to be okay without constant supervision, so we learned to be. And in learning to be, we became something they couldn’t have deliberately engineered.
The irony of it is thick enough to spread on toast.
A Small Plea for the Unscheduled
I’m not suggesting we turn back time. I’m not suggesting we plonk children back into the 1970s and hope for the best. The world is different, the risks are different, and some of those differences genuinely matter.
But I do think there might be something worth fighting for in the middle ground. A bit more room for children to feel bored and have to solve it. A bit more tolerance for the scraped knee and the unresolved argument and the small disaster that sorts itself out without adult intervention. A bit less of the hovering. A bit more of the trusting.
Not neglect. Not absence. Just... space.
The kind of space where a child can figure out who they are before anyone gets there first to tell them.
The kind of space we had, without knowing how lucky we were.
The kind we should, perhaps, be brave enough to offer the children who come after us.
Even when it’s uncomfortable. Perhaps especially then.
Inspired by a recent piece on ECOticias examining the meta-analysis published in Development and Psychopathology by Qi Zhang and Wongeun Ji, which pooled 52 studies on the links between overparenting and young people’s mental health. Well worth a read if you want the science to sit alongside the nostalgia.
Until Next Time
You bring back memories! Tail end Gen X here, we were truly the last of the kids where 'free-ranging' was the norm and there were no cell phones. Be home for dinner and again before dark were the big rules for me.
Thanks for the trip back! I was born in '66 and grew up in Philadelphia. That big, beautiful, diverse world beyond that door was our extended home and extended family. We were never unsupervised. There were eyes EVERYWHERE. LOL, if a neighbor saw you doing something stupid, you got smacked. If you went home to complain to Mom that Mrs. So-and-So smacked you...Mom would smack you because the neighbor had already called her and told her. I was one of the lucky/good ones. I never got smacked by a neighbor. 😇