{"id":116874,"date":"2026-10-01T05:36:53","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T09:36:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/?post_type=articles&p=116874"},"modified":"2026-10-01T05:36:53","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T09:36:53","slug":"according-to-psychologists-people-born-between-1960-and-1970-were-the-last-generation-to-have-a-truly-free-childhood-25497-g01","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/according-to-psychologists-people-born-between-1960-and-1970-were-the-last-generation-to-have-a-truly-free-childhood-25497-g01\/","title":{"rendered":"According to Psychologists, People Born Between 1960 and 1970 Were the Last Generation to Have a Truly Free Childhood"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"iStock
According to Psychologists, People Born Between 1960 and 1970 Were the Last Generation to Have a Truly Free Childhood – iStock @uanmonino<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If you were a child in the late 1960s or the 1970s, you probably remember the rule: be home when the streetlights come on. Between breakfast and dinner, nobody knew exactly where you were. You rode your bike to a friend’s house, built forts, settled your own arguments and came back with scraped knees and stories. To many people who grew up that way, it simply felt like childhood. To a growing number of psychologists, it looks like something rarer: one of the last generations to grow up with real independence, and possibly better equipped for life because of it.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The freedom that quietly disappeared<\/b><\/h2>\n

The research most often cited on this comes from the psychologist Peter Gray of Boston College, who has spent years studying children’s play. In a 2023 paper in The Journal of Pediatrics<\/a>, written with anthropologist David Lancy and developmental psychologist David Bjorklund, he summarized decades of evidence that children’s free play, especially outdoors and away from adults, began to decline from about 1960 onward and has kept shrinking ever since. Free neighborhood play, where children organize their own games, has largely been replaced by adult-directed activities and organized sports.<\/span><\/p>\n

The shift is easy to see in the numbers on independence. In England, a well-known study by the Policy Studies Institute found that in 1971, around 80 percent of seven- and eight-year-olds walked to school without an adult; by 1990, fewer than one in ten did. Children born in the 1960s were, in other words, among the last to be routinely trusted to move around their world on their own. Parents today often say the same thing in surveys: their children play independently outdoors far less than they themselves did.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why it may have mattered so much<\/b><\/h2>\n

Gray and his co-authors argue that this freedom was not a small detail of a happy childhood but one of its foundations. Free play, they write, is an immediate source of happiness for children, and the play scholar Brian Sutton-Smith liked to say that the opposite of play is not work, it is depression. Children with more time for independent activity score higher on measures of emotional control, self-regulation and social ability. And in retrospective studies, adults who remembered lots of adventurous free play in childhood showed greater ability to adapt to change and better overall psychological health.<\/span><\/p>\n

The mechanism, as the researchers describe it, is a sense of control. Children who decide what to play, solve their own problems and take small risks learn that they can handle things. That internal sense of control is strongly linked to resilience later in life. Over the same decades in which children’s independence declined, they point out, rates of anxiety and depression among young people rose steadily, so much so that in 2021 the American Academy of Pediatrics and other bodies called child and adolescent mental health a national emergency.<\/span><\/p>\n

What it does not mean<\/b><\/h2>\n

This is not a claim that every 1970s childhood was idyllic, or that today’s children are doomed. Plenty of children of that era faced real hardship, and the researchers themselves say that the loss of independence is likely a major cause of the decline in young people’s well-being, but not the only one. Nor is it a call to send small children out unsupervised all day. The point is narrower and more useful: the freedom many people now in their fifties and sixties took for granted was valuable, and much of it has been lost without anyone quite deciding to lose it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Passing it on<\/b><\/h2>\n

For the generation that grew up this way, there is something worth holding on to. Many now have grandchildren, and the researchers’ message is aimed as much at them as at parents: as children grow, they need ever-increasing opportunities to manage their own activities. A walk to a friend’s house, an afternoon with no plan, a problem left for them to solve. Nostalgia, in this case, may be pointing in the right direction, much like the way so many people reach for the things that defined the 1970s<\/a><\/strong> and find they still work. And as psychologists have noted about people who reach their seventies<\/a><\/strong>, what we pass on often matters more than what we keep.<\/span><\/p>\n

The takeaway<\/b><\/h2>\n

People born between 1960 and 1970 grew up at the tail end of an era when children roamed, played and solved problems largely on their own. Psychologists who study play believe that freedom built resilience, and that its steady disappearance since is one reason young people today struggle more. If you remember coming home when the streetlights came on, you may have been given something more valuable than it seemed at the time.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42777,"featured_media":116876,"template":"","format":"standard","categories":[3914],"yoast_head":"\nAccording to Psychologists, People Born Between 1960 and 1970 Were the Last Generation to Have a Truly Free Childhood - Grazia USA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/according-to-psychologists-people-born-between-1960-and-1970-were-the-last-generation-to-have-a-truly-free-childhood-25497-g01\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"According to Psychologists, People Born Between 1960 and 1970 Were the Last Generation to Have a Truly Free Childhood\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"If you were a child in the late 1960s or the 1970s, you probably remember the rule: be home when the streetlights come on. 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