Of Foot Binding and Modern Childhood

We no longer live in an era of foot binding, writes my Let Grow cofounder Peter Gray, a psychologist who studies the importance of mixed-age, unsupervised play. But for about a thousand years, as he notes in a recent Substack post, girls in China would have their feet broken and bound to stop them from growing. This was considered not only normal but crucial: Girls with unbound, functional feet were considered low-class and ugly.

It wasn't until the 20th century that this practice went from cultural norm to culturally unthinkable. But today? "There are other ways in which we interfere with our children's development," writes Gray. And I think you can guess his point.

We no longer stunt our kids' bodies. But our new cultural norms stunt their curiosity and competence via excessive adult supervision:

"Children are by nature designed to develop physically, socially, emotionally, and intellectually largely through self-directed play and exploration with other children," Gray writes. "Over the last few decades, however ... social norms have gradually developed that prevent such play."

These new cultural, hovering norms, Gray believes, "are a major cause of the extraordinarily high levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide among young people over recent decades. I'm not sure that depriving children of play is less cruel than binding their feet."

That's a pretty bold claim. But recall that last year The Journal of Pediatrics published a paper by Gray and two colleagues showing that as kids' independence and free play have been going down over the decades, their depression and anxiety have been going up.

Why would a culture persist in a practice so damaging to the children it cherishes? Gray explains how norms develop:

Someone does something that seems to be advantageous, and others copy it. (With foot binding, a 10th-century emperor is said to have become enamored of a concubine who bound her feet, and everyone else wanted their daughters to be as enchanting as she was.)

As for curtailing kids' freedom, it's hard to say exactly when this started. But in the 1980s, with the birth of the 24-hour news cycle, the spread of cable TV, and the kids' pictures on the milk cartons, it really began to feel as if kids were being kidnapped right and left. (They weren't and still aren't. Most missing kids are runaways or taken as part of a divorce dispute.)

But obviously good parents protect their kids from terrible danger, so supervision became a hallmark of morality. Parents copied each other, and the supervision just kept increasing.

The problem, writes Gray, is that "(s)ocial norms sometimes take the form of moral imperatives," making it really hard to violate them. In America, it has gotten to the point where an unsupervised child is seen by many folks as automatically in danger. This means any parent who is NOT constantly supervising their child is seen as a monster who doesn't care if their child lives or dies! "Extreme protection of children," writes Gray, "has become, unfortunately, not just a social norm, but a moral imperative."

Same as in the days of foot binding. A three-inch foot was beautiful. A fully grown foot was disgusting.

In my years of trying to reverse the norm of excessive supervision, I've found that the only thing that snaps people back to reality is ... reality. That's why I recommend schools assign The Let Grow Experience. All the students get the same assignment: Do something new on your own. All the parents must, thus, let them.

Do it once, and it's scary but rewarding. Do it over and over, and pretty soon reality trumps the fear. Do this along with other parents — everyone sending their kids to the store, the park or bus stop on their own — and reality trumps the social norms, which then shift. You win, and so do your kids.

They are unbound.