Childhood, Rewritten
Childhood today feels unrecognizable. Parks are quieter, neighborhoods emptier, but screens glow all day. Over the last decade, we’ve made the real world safer and the online world a free-for-all. What we ended up with is a generation that’s physically protected but emotionally fragile.
The book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt is an attempt to trace how we got here. It’s not anti-tech. It’s not nostalgic. It’s a thoughtful look at what changed, and what we might need to rethink.
Safety in the Wrong Places
Somewhere along the way, we swapped our instincts. We became overprotective offline and completely hands-off online. We worry if a child walks alone to the park but hand them an internet connected device without much thought.
There’s data to back this shift. Around 2011, childhood fracture injuries began to fall sharply. Fewer kids on bikes, fewer monkeybar tumbles. At the same time, teen anxiety and depression started to climb. The correlation is hard to ignore.
When you remove all real world risks, kids don’t become more confident. They become less prepared. A scraped knee is a small cost for learning how to climb. Unstructured play, where kids make up rules and negotiate on the fly, teaches them how to manage uncertainty. Even silly, goalless games serve a purpose. They build synchrony, empathy and trust.
Maybe the answer isn’t just protecting kids from harm, but letting them get familiar with small, manageable forms of it.
A Phone Based Childhood
The smartphone didn’t just change how kids spend their time. It changed how they form their identity. Earlier generations looked to friends, family and books. Today’s kids are shaped by the feed.
Humans are built to compare. That part of the brain works on autopilot. Even if you know an Instagram photo is filtered, your subconscious still takes it at face value. The result is a loop of low self worth, especially during adolescence when identity is fragile.
Giving a child full access to social media before they have a sense of self is like dropping them into a never ending popularity contest. Delaying phones and social media isn’t about being strict. It’s about giving kids more time to be kids, without constantly watching themselves from the outside. Some families are creating collective pacts to delay smartphones till ninth grade. Others are opting for basic phones that offer connection but not distraction. These aren’t silver bullets. But they are steps that shift the default.
Adolescence Without Anchors
In earlier times, growing up was marked by some kind of transition. In India, this could mean leaving home to live in a guru’s ashram like the Pandavas did with Dronacharya. Elsewhere, it might have been a religious ceremony, apprenticeship, or a first job. These weren’t perfect systems, but they gave teenagers a clear sense that they were moving from one stage of life to another.
That transition wasn’t just symbolic. It created space for identity to shift. You were no longer treated like a child, and you weren’t expected to be an adult overnight either. You were in between and figuring things out, facing challenges, and earning autonomy step by step.
Today, that space has shrunk. Many teenagers go from being monitored kids to fully online individuals with almost no buffer in between. The first phone, the first social media account, these often arrive before a sense of self has formed. It’s not that rituals or ashrams were better. It’s that they offered structure, separation, and a change in expectations. Our current version of adolescence lacks all three.
Without these transitions, identity formation becomes shakier. The line between who you are and how you appear to others blurs. Adolescence becomes less about exploration and more about presentation, less inner work, more outer performance.
Some schools are trying to bring back boundaries. Phone free classrooms. More real world group work. Time outdoors. These aren’t just rules. They’re ways to give teens room to become someone, instead of performing for everyone.
Let the Kids Roam
There’s a version of childhood that involves scrapes, lost time, silly games and no adult in sight. It’s not chaotic. It’s how most of us grew up. It made us adaptable, self aware, and capable of handling risk.
That version is fading.
In trying to keep kids safe, we might be holding them back. A generation that never gets lost can’t learn to find its way. If we want them to grow into resilient, self governing adults, we’ll have to get comfortable with a little discomfort.
We’ll have to let them roam.
I run a startup called Harmonize. We are hiring and if you’re looking for an exciting startup journey, please write to jobs@harmonizehq.com. Apart from this blog, I tweet about startup life and practical wisdom in books.