Why giving kids more unsupervised time and freedom could lead to lower anxiety and higher happiness
). The pressure and continuous monitoring and judgments from adults, coupled with the loss of freedom to follow their own interests and solve their own problems, results in anxiety, depression, and general dissatisfaction with life.
Now, in what follows, I examine this relationship between changes in how young people are treated and the decline in their mental well-being through the lens of BPNT. My contention is that we have, over decades, been decreasing children’s opportunities to experience autonomy, competence, and relatedness.This is obvious. We have in many ways, over the years, been decreasing children’s opportunities to find and pursue their own paths.
The feeling of competence is not independent of the feeling of autonomy. Research shows that people feel most competent when they succeed in efforts that they themselves have chosen . Most students, even those who get A's and honors, feel motivated largely by external pressures, not by their own internal, autonomous motives. Even so-called “top students” are often cynical about their school achievements because they know how shallow the achievements are.
Traditionally, children and teens have developed a sense of competence by such means as pursuing and becoming skilled at hobbies that they themselves chose; taking on part-time jobs, which provide a taste of success in the work world; and independently performing chores at home, which were real contributions to the family economy. As pointed out in myThe primary way that children make friends is through play.
But now even teens are commonly deprived of opportunities to get together for long periods, privately, away from adults (
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