It was a Saturday morning sometime in the early 1970s, and I was about nine years old. My brothers and I had been booted out of the house by our mother with a simple instruction: “Go play. Be back for dinner.”

That was it. No schedule, no supervision, no GPS tracker in our pockets. We roamed the neighborhood for hours, building forts out of scrap wood, settling disputes with rock-paper-scissors, and occasionally coming home with scraped knees and bruised egos. Nobody called it “character building.” It was just called being a kid.

But here’s what’s fascinating: psychology now suggests that this kind of unsupervised, unstructured childhood produced a type of emotional resilience that modern parenting, with all its good intentions, may have quietly engineered out of an entire generation.

I’m not here to romanticize the past or bash today’s parents. Every era has its blind spots, and ours certainly had plenty. But the research on what’s changed in childhood over the last few decades is worth paying attention to, especially if you’re raising kids or grandkids right now.

1) The “play-based childhood” wasn’t a luxury, it was a training ground

When I was growing up as one of five kids in a working-class family in Ohio, our parents didn’t have the time or the resources to hover over us. That wasn’t neglect. It was just the reality of a household where both parents were stretched thin and kids were expected to figure a fair amount out on their own.

And that figuring out? It turns out it was doing something important.

Research published in PMC involving emergency room doctors and nurses (who, interestingly, are parents themselves) found that children who engage in risky, challenging play develop greater distress tolerance and emotional regulation. They learn to self-navigate failure, manage fear, and cope with conflict. These are skills that can’t really be taught through lectures or structured programs. They’re built through experience.

In the 1960s and ’70s, that experience came naturally. You fell off a bike, you got back on. You lost a neighborhood game and had to deal with the sting of it without a parent rushing in to make it better. You scraped your way through boredom without anyone handing you a screen.

None of it felt particularly meaningful at the time. But looking back, those small moments of discomfort were quietly wiring our brains for resilience.

2) Boredom used to be the birthplace of resilience

Here’s something that might surprise you. Research highlighted by Psychology Today documented a continuous decline in creativity among American schoolchildren beginning around the mid-1980s and continuing ever since. And one of the proposed culprits? The systematic removal of unstructured time from children’s lives.

Back in the ’60s and ’70s, boredom was a regular part of childhood. You’d sit on the porch with nothing to do and eventually invent something. Maybe it was a game with sticks. Maybe it was a terrible attempt at building a treehouse. The point is, you were forced to use your own resources to solve the problem of having nothing to do.

Today’s kids rarely get that chance. Their schedules are packed from sunrise to sunset with structured activities, academic enrichment, and screen time. There’s barely a moment left for the kind of creative problem-solving that only arises when you’re stuck with nothing but your own imagination.

And as I once read in a parenting book years ago, the ability to tolerate discomfort, including the discomfort of boredom, is one of the earliest building blocks of emotional strength.

3) Unsupervised time taught kids to manage social conflict

Think about what happens when a group of kids plays a pickup game of anything without adults around. Someone cheats. Someone gets upset. Someone storms off. And then, eventually, they work it out, because if they don’t, the game ends and nobody wants that.

That kind of social negotiation is incredibly valuable. Dr. Peter Gray, a research psychologist at Boston College who has spent his career studying free play, argues that the contraction of children’s independent activity since the 1960s has made them markedly less resilient and less able to handle life’s bumps. He points out that over several decades, there has been a continuous decline in children’s opportunities to play freely, and during those same decades, anxiety, depression, and suicide among young people have steadily climbed.

If you’re a regular reader here, you may remember I’ve talked before about the importance of letting kids take ownership of their experiences. This is a big part of it. When adults mediate every disagreement and smooth every rough edge, kids never develop the internal toolkit they need to handle conflict on their own.

My brothers and I shared a bedroom growing up. Three boys, one room, and about a thousand reasons to argue. We had to learn compromise, boundary-setting, and when to just let things go. Nobody taught us that in a formal sense. We learned it because we had to.

4) “Helicopter parenting” may be doing more harm than good

Now, I want to be careful here because I know most parents are doing their absolute best, and the instinct to protect your child is natural and good. But the research on overprotective parenting is hard to ignore.

A systematic review published in Frontiers in Psychology found consistent links between helicopter parenting and increased anxiety and depression in children and adolescents. The authors noted that this style of intensive, controlling parenting started rising around 1985 and has since become a cultural norm across social classes.

The core problem? When parents constantly intervene, solve problems on their child’s behalf, and shield them from every possible failure, they inadvertently send a message: “You can’t handle this on your own.” Over time, the child internalizes that message. Their self-efficacy, which is the belief in their own ability to cope, takes a hit. And when they eventually face challenges without a parent nearby, they’re not equipped to manage it.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t immune to this myself. I was too controlling with my eldest daughter Sarah when it came to her college choices, and I regret it. Sometimes the urge to steer our children comes from love, but it can still do damage if we’re not careful.

5) The shift from “play-based” to “phone-based” childhood accelerated the problem

Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist behind the bestselling book “The Anxious Generation,” makes a compelling case that what began as a gradual decline in free play was supercharged by the arrival of smartphones and social media.

His argument, backed by a significant body of data, is that children went from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood” in a remarkably short window of time. The result? Rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide among adolescents surged beginning around 2012 and have continued climbing.

Haidt isn’t just pointing fingers at screens, though. He emphasizes that the loss of real-world play, independence, and face-to-face social interaction created a vulnerability that technology then exploited. Kids who might have once spent their afternoons climbing trees and settling arguments in the backyard were now scrolling feeds in isolation, comparing themselves to curated versions of other people’s lives.

It’s a one-two punch: less real-world resilience training, plus more digital exposure to the kinds of social pressures that even adults struggle to navigate.

6) Minor failures in childhood prevent major breakdowns in adulthood

There’s a concept Haidt borrows from Nassim Taleb’s work that I find particularly useful: the idea that children are “antifragile.” That is, they don’t just withstand stress, they actually need a certain amount of it to grow stronger.

Think of bones. Bones need stress and impact to build density. Without it, they weaken. Children’s emotional systems work in a similar way. Small setbacks, manageable failures, and age-appropriate challenges are the impact that builds psychological density.

In the ’60s and ’70s, these challenges were baked into daily life. You didn’t make the team. Your friend said something hurtful at recess. You got lost on the way to the store and had to figure your way home. These weren’t traumas. They were growth opportunities dressed up as bad days.

A study published by the American Psychological Association found that overcontrolling parenting negatively affects a child’s ability to regulate emotions and behavior. Children in the study who had helicopter parents struggled more in school and in social environments compared to those who were given room to manage things independently.

The takeaway isn’t to throw kids into the deep end and walk away. It’s to resist the urge to remove every obstacle from their path. They need some obstacles. That’s how they learn to navigate.

7) We can bring some of it back without turning back the clock

I’m not suggesting we return to the 1970s wholesale. We didn’t have seatbelt laws, sunscreen was optional, and I’m pretty sure half the playgrounds in my neighborhood would be condemned by today’s standards. Progress is a good thing.

But we can borrow from the principles that made those childhoods effective at building resilience, without throwing out the genuine improvements we’ve made in child safety and wellbeing.

That might mean letting your kids walk to a friend’s house instead of driving them. It might mean allowing unstructured time after school instead of packing every hour with activities. It might mean stepping back when they’re arguing with a sibling and letting them work it out before you intervene.

I take my grandchildren on weekly nature walks, and one of my favorite things is watching them explore without being told what to do or where to go. They pick up sticks, chase bugs, argue over who found the better rock, and occasionally trip over their own feet. And every time they dust themselves off and keep going, I see that same resilience my brothers and I built all those decades ago in Ohio.

Parting thoughts

The children of the 1960s and ’70s didn’t have better parents. They had a different set of conditions, conditions that, almost by accident, gave them the raw materials for emotional toughness.

Today’s parents face challenges previous generations couldn’t have imagined. But in the rush to protect children from every scrape and setback, it’s worth asking: are we building them up, or are we quietly hollowing out the very strength they’ll need most?