Research suggests the generation that grew up in the 1960s and 70s wasn't hardened by trauma so much as tempered by ordinary difficulty — the kind of low-level, unmanaged adversity that modern safety culture has almost completely removed from childhood
When children encounter everyday scrapes and tumbles, they build resilience that safety-obsessed parenting may inadvertently undermine.
My uncle fell out of a mango tree at nine and broke his arm in two places. Nobody sued the tree. There was no incident report, no family meeting, no follow-up email. He got a cast, a scolding, and a month later he was back up the same tree, only better at it.
I thought about that last week when a friend sent me a photo of her son’s new school playground here in Bangkok. Rubber flooring. Every corner rounded. A climbing frame roughly the height of a kitchen counter. It looked less like a playground than a very expensive apology.
And she wasn’t wrong to want it. That’s the part that makes this worth writing about.
Some difficulty beats none
The usual story about the generation raised in the sixties and seventies is that they were hardened by hardship. I don’t think that’s quite it. The more interesting claim is that they were tempered by ordinary difficulty, the low-grade, unmanaged, nobody-is-coming kind.
There’s research pointing this way. A large longitudinal study by Mark Seery and colleagues at Buffalo and UC Irvine tracked a national sample over several years and found something counterintuitive: people who had lived through a moderate amount of lifetime adversity reported better mental health than people with a lot of it. Fair enough. But they also reported better mental health than people with none at all.
The shape of the finding is a U. Too much difficulty flattens you. None at all leaves you untested. The middle is where people seemed to build something.
Seery was careful about this, and I will be too. It’s correlational. You cannot randomly assign people terrible childhoods to check. But he made a point I keep coming back to: they studied major adversity, and there’s reason to think smaller, more mundane experiences do similar work.
What actually disappeared
Here’s where it gets concrete. In 1971, researchers in England found that around 80 per cent of seven and eight year olds were allowed to get to school on their own. By 1990, in the follow-up study by Mayer Hillman and his colleagues, that figure had collapsed to 9 per cent.
Nine per cent. Inside twenty years.
That’s not a story about trauma. Walking to school is not a hardship. It’s a story about a thousand tiny problems that used to be a child’s to solve. Which route. What to do when it rains. How to handle the older kid who wants your lunch money. Whether to say something or keep walking.
Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College, has spent years arguing that the decline in free, unsupervised play tracks the rise in anxiety and depression among young people over the same decades. His stronger claim is about something called locus of control, which is a clunky term for a simple idea: do you believe your life is mostly steered by you, or mostly by forces outside you? Over the second half of the twentieth century, young people’s answers drifted steadily towards the second one.
Gray’s argument is that you cannot develop a sense that you can handle things without ever being left to handle things.
I am not romanticising 1974
Let me be honest about the other side, because the nostalgic version of this argument is rubbish.
The seventies also had no seatbelts, lead in the petrol, casual violence in schools, and a culture that told children with genuinely awful home lives to get on with it. A lot of what we now call safety culture is straightforwardly good. Fewer children die. That is not a trade-off, it’s a win.
The trouble is that we removed two things at once. We removed the genuine dangers, which was correct, and we removed the ordinary friction, which came along for the ride. Those are different problems and we solved them with the same tool.
I grew up in Manila in the nineties, which was somewhere in the middle of this shift. I was later sent to boarding school in Australia, which I don’t recommend as a parenting strategy but which did teach me, at thirteen, that if I forgot my kit nobody was going to drive it over. Small thing. Stuck, though.
Risk and danger are not the same word
This is the distinction that unlocks the whole thing for me.
Danger is a hazard the child cannot see or assess. A broken bottle in the sandpit. A gap in a fence near a road. You remove those, always, without debate.
Risk is something the child can see, weigh up, and choose. Climbing higher. Going further. Handling a tool that could pinch. A systematic review led by Mariana Brussoni at the University of British Columbia looked at twenty-one studies on risky outdoor play and found broadly positive effects on physical activity, social behaviour and, notably, no clear evidence that it produced more injuries.
Kids are surprisingly decent risk assessors when they’re given anything to practise on.
— the kind of low-level, unmanaged adversity that modern safety culture has almost completely removed from childhood
When children encounter everyday scrapes and tumbles, they build resilience that safety-obsessed parenting may inadvertently undermine.
My uncle fell out of a mango tree at nine and broke his arm in two places. Nobody sued the tree. There was no incident report, no family meeting, no follow-up email. He got a cast, a scolding, and a month later he was back up the same tree, only better at it.
I thought about that last week when a friend sent me a photo of her son’s new school playground here in Bangkok. Rubber flooring. Every corner rounded. A climbing frame roughly the height of a kitchen counter. It looked less like a playground than a very expensive apology.
And she wasn’t wrong to want it. That’s the part that makes this worth writing about.
Some difficulty beats none
The usual story about the generation raised in the sixties and seventies is that they were hardened by hardship. I don’t think that’s quite it. The more interesting claim is that they were tempered by ordinary difficulty, the low-grade, unmanaged, nobody-is-coming kind.
There’s research pointing this way. A large longitudinal study by Mark Seery and colleagues at Buffalo and UC Irvine tracked a national sample over several years and found something counterintuitive: people who had lived through a moderate amount of lifetime adversity reported better mental health than people with a lot of it. Fair enough. But they also reported better mental health than people with none at all.
The shape of the finding is a U. Too much difficulty flattens you. None at all leaves you untested. The middle is where people seemed to build something.
Seery was careful about this, and I will be too. It’s correlational. You cannot randomly assign people terrible childhoods to check. But he made a point I keep coming back to: they studied major adversity, and there’s reason to think smaller, more mundane experiences do similar work.
What actually disappeared
Here’s where it gets concrete. In 1971, researchers in England found that around 80 per cent of seven and eight year olds were allowed to get to school on their own. By 1990, in the follow-up study by Mayer Hillman and his colleagues, that figure had collapsed to 9 per cent.
Nine per cent. Inside twenty years.
That’s not a story about trauma. Walking to school is not a hardship. It’s a story about a thousand tiny problems that used to be a child’s to solve. Which route. What to do when it rains. How to handle the older kid who wants your lunch money. Whether to say something or keep walking.
Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College, has spent years arguing that the decline in free, unsupervised play tracks the rise in anxiety and depression among young people over the same decades. His stronger claim is about something called locus of control, which is a clunky term for a simple idea: do you believe your life is mostly steered by you, or mostly by forces outside you? Over the second half of the twentieth century, young people’s answers drifted steadily towards the second one.
Gray’s argument is that you cannot develop a sense that you can handle things without ever being left to handle things.
I am not romanticising 1974
Let me be honest about the other side, because the nostalgic version of this argument is rubbish.
The seventies also had no seatbelts, lead in the petrol, casual violence in schools, and a culture that told children with genuinely awful home lives to get on with it. A lot of what we now call safety culture is straightforwardly good. Fewer children die. That is not a trade-off, it’s a win.
The trouble is that we removed two things at once. We removed the genuine dangers, which was correct, and we removed the ordinary friction, which came along for the ride. Those are different problems and we solved them with the same tool.
I grew up in Manila in the nineties, which was somewhere in the middle of this shift. I was later sent to boarding school in Australia, which I don’t recommend as a parenting strategy but which did teach me, at thirteen, that if I forgot my kit nobody was going to drive it over. Small thing. Stuck, though.
Risk and danger are not the same word
This is the distinction that unlocks the whole thing for me.
Danger is a hazard the child cannot see or assess. A broken bottle in the sandpit. A gap in a fence near a road. You remove those, always, without debate.
Risk is something the child can see, weigh up, and choose. Climbing higher. Going further. Handling a tool that could pinch. A systematic review led by Mariana Brussoni at the University of British Columbia looked at twenty-one studies on risky outdoor play and found broadly positive effects on physical activity, social behaviour and, notably, no clear evidence that it produced more injuries.
Kids are surprisingly decent risk assessors when they’re given anything to practise on.