I remember when I was a kid growing up in South America, my favourite part of the day was right when I was done practicing volleyball or soccer. The school was quiet, most people were gone except some teachers and kids doing extracurriculars. My parents who had to come pick me up from school were late sometimes due to work, so I got to roam the halls of the school and play with my friends until they arrived.
Supervision time was over. It was just me, an empty school, and any kids waiting to be picked up. We would climb trees, use sticks as swords, run as fast as we could to the other side of the hall for no reason. We went “hunting” for iguanas in the forest next to the school, naming them and trying to find identifying marks so we could find them again another day.
No itinerary, no check ins, no GPS tracking. Just us, some sticks, and an hour of gloriously unsupervised chaos.
I’ve heard similar stories from Mikaila and other people that grew up around here. You used to be able to just go outside, find other kids to play with, and roamed around until dinner time when your parents would come find you and bring you home.
But nowadays, how many kids can still experience that same kind of freedom and independent play? This is exactly what evolutionary anthropologist Eli Stark-Elster explores in a recent essay titled “Where do the Children Play?”.
We tend to blame tech companies for trapping our kids in digital spaces, and sure, the addictive slot-machine mechanics are real. But Stark-Elster argues we’re missing the bigger picture:
“Digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us. For most of our evolutionary history, childhood wasn’t an adult affair. … kids spent their time together, largely beyond the prying eyes of grown-ups. But in the West, the grown-ups have paved over the forests and creeks where children would have once hidden. They have exposed the secret places. So the children seek out a world of their own, as they have for millennia, if not longer.”
The numbers back this up. A 2025 Harris Poll survey of American kids aged 8-12 found that 45% have never walked in a different aisle than their parents at a store; 62% have never walked or biked somewhere without an adult; 71% have never used a sharp knife.
Similarly, a 2020 national survey of over 2,000 Canadian parents found that nearly three in ten children had zero independent mobility. Kids weren’t allowed to walk home from school alone, cross a main road alone, or go anywhere without adult supervision. The average Canadian kid scored just 1.9 out of 6 on basic mobility freedom.
And it’s not because kids don’t want to be outside. The Harris Poll survey also found that 72% of kids would rather spend time together in person, without screens. 61% wish they had more time to play with friends without adults organizing everything for them. 87% wish they could spend more time with friends outside of school.
ParticipACTION, Canada’s leading voice on physical activity, tracks this decline through annual report cards that grade children and youth across 14 different indicators painting the same picture. In 2022, Canadian youth received a D for overall physical activity and a D-minus for active play. The 2024 report shows a slight improvement, overall physical activity bumped up to a D+, but active play stayed at D-minus. These are still failing grades.
Only 39% of Canadian children and youth meet the recommendation of 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity per day. Just 22% get more than two hours of unstructured play daily.
Stark-Elster traces childhood mobility data back to the 1970s, long before the internet existed. In England, 80% of seven and eight-year-olds went to school alone in 1971. By 1990, that number had dropped to 9%. This isn’t a phone problem, it’s a decades-long transformation driven by car dependency, stranger danger paranoia, and pouring concrete over forests.
So kids did what kids have always done. They found a digital world we couldn’t follow them into. Roblox, social media, etc.
So the question isn’t how to get kids off screens, the real question is what are willing to give them instead. Where are the spaces built for independence, exploration, peer culture, the ability to be properly bored together and figure things out?
Until we answer that, we’ll keep watching them vanish into their phones. Not because they don’t want to be present with each other, but because we’ve left them with nowhere else to go.
Resources:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10036309/
https://theharrispoll.com/briefs/what-children-are-saying-about-phones-freedom-and-friendship/
https://www.participaction.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/2022-Children-and-Youth-Report-Card.pdf
https://www.participaction.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2024-Children-and-Youth-Report-Card-Highlight-Report-1.pdf
https://unpublishablepapers.substack.com/p/where-do-the-children-play
