Eli Stark-Elster is the author of Unpublishable Papers and a PhD student in Anthropology at UC Davis. He studies the subjective effects, neural dynamics, and cross-cultural uses of psychedelics. He conducts fieldwork in Southern Africa, where he recently documented the first clear evidence of indigenous psilocybin use outside the Americas.
I don’t remember the first time I held a machete, because I’ve never held one. Most members of the BaYaka — a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers found in the Congolese rainforests — probably don’t remember either, but for different reasons. Early memory has its limits. Among the BaYaka, picking up a machete is developmentally akin to language, walking, and chewing solid food.
So goes a BaYaka childhood. Children wander the forests in packs. They climb saplings and bathe in the rivers. They conduct day-long fishing trips: their parents glance toward them as they organize themselves, then let the kids go on their way.
A few months ago, an anthropologist named Gül Deniz Salalı documented these dynamics in a brilliant documentary (linked below), which I cannot recommend highly enough. To our eyes, their lives are utterly strange. We shouldn’t forget how lucky we are to live in a time where we can see such wonders from the comfort of a chair.
But the BaYaka childhood isn’t a novelty. As I’ll discuss shortly, it is probably the norm for our species. And that means something has gone terribly wrong in the West.
Consider some statistics on the American childhood, drawn from children aged 8-12:
45% have not walked in a different aisle than their parents at a store;
56% have not talked with a neighbor without their parents;
61% have not made plans with friends without adults helping them;
62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult;
63% have not built a structure outside (for example, a fort or treehouse);
71% have not used a sharp knife;
Meanwhile, 31% of 8-12 year olds have spoken with large language models. 23% have talked to strangers online, while only 44% have physically spoken to a neighbor without their parents. 50% have seen pornography by the time they turn 13.
In physical space, Western children are almost comically sheltered. But in digital space, they’re entirely beyond our command; and increasingly, that’s where children spend most of their time. You don’t need me to tell you about the dire consequences of that shift.
Why do our children spend more time in Fortnite than forests? Usually, we blame the change on tech companies. They make their platforms as addicting as possible, and the youth simply can’t resist — once a toddler locks eyes with an iPad, game over.
I want to suggest an alternative: digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us.1 For most of our evolutionary history, childhood wasn’t an adult affair. Independent worlds and peer cultures were the crux of development, as they still are among the BaYaka; 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. They find a proverbial forest to wander. They don’t know what we know: this forest has eyes and teeth.
Bridges to Terabithia
In most human societies, children have spent much of their time exploring and playing within independent peer cultures. This term reflects two important features of human childhood. First, the groups consist entirely of other children. Second, they are functionally and culturally distinct from adult society; they exist alongside but apart from the world of adults.2
The evidence for this pattern is rich and widespread. During his research among the Trobriand Islanders, for instance, Bronislaw Malinowski described the “small republic” of children that “acts very much as is its own members determine, standing often in a sort of collective opposition to its elders.”
Margaret Mead reported similar patterns in Samoa. One group of young girls formed a cohort “which played continually together and maintained a fairly coherent hostility towards outsiders.” Of their activities, she writes:
On moonlight nights they scoured the villages alternately attacking or fleeing from the gangs of small boys, peeking through drawn shutters, catching land crabs, ambushing wandering lovers, or sneaking up to watch a birth or a miscarriage in some distant house . . . They were veritable groups of little outlaws escaping from the exactions of routine tasks. (Coming of Age in Samoa, p. 62).
These peer cultures don’t like to be seen — many ethnographers have noticed how playgroups prefer to segregate themselves from adults. Among the Mbuti, another Central African foraging group, Colin Turnbull observed children spending most of their time in a bopi, a playground set away from the main camp:
The water was fairly shallow there, and all day the long the children splashed and wallowed about to their hart’s content . . . Infants watched with envy as the older children swung wildly about, climbing high up on the vine strands and performing all sorts of acrobatics. (The Forest People, p.128).
Even in industrial societies, this love of solitude shows up. In the 1950s, Iona and Peter Opie documented the behaviors of post-war British children. They noticed that the children liked to roam through bomb sites, where they would build fires and play hide-and-seek.
It is possible to see these interests playing out in ancient societies, too. A paper by Ella Assaf and colleagues documented handprints, footprints and paintings left in Paleolithic caves, all probably produced by children. Through involvement in ritual activities, they propose, “Upper Paleolithic children were able to actively shape their own reality as individuals, as well as the reality of their community and its well-being.”
Why do independent peer cultures emerge so reliably in our species? Anthropologists tend to view childhood as a period during which we over imitate and copy our way to cultural competency. But if that’s true, it seems hard to account for the fact that kids really, really want to get away from adults. They would rather spend time with each other. If childhood is all about efficient cultural transmission, children should be hanging on our every word.
As of yet, I don’t think there’s a good explanation. Maybe independent peer cultures expose children to a wider variety of information. Maybe they provide safe spaces for the mimicry of adult activities. Maybe adults just aren’t very much fun. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes in The Little Prince: “All grown-ups were children once, but only a few of them remember it.”
All of these accounts are probably a little bit true. The important point is that kids want to spend time together, in their own space, away from the tiresome grown-ups.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains
Which is relatively easy, if you’re living in a giant forest with parents who don’t pay much attention to your activities. But our children now find themselves in a strange situation — they have nowhere to hide, and even if they did, we might not let them go there in the first place.
Over the past few decades, childhood mobility in the West has dropped precipitously. You might think that the change has something to do with the emergence of the Internet. But longitudinal data suggests otherwise. Check out these statistics from a decades-long survey on the mobility of English children:
At least in England, independence isn’t an Internet problem. Drop-offs in English childhood mobility have been ongoing since the 1970s. In 1971, 80% of seven and eight-year-old children went to school unaccompanied by an adult, and 55% of children under ten-years-old were allowed to travel alone to places other than school within walking distance. By 1990, those numbers had dropped to 9% and 30%, respectively.
We see similar patterns in other places. Here’s data from Sweden, for instance.
In the United States, similarly, there was a drop-off from 42% (1969) to 16% (2001) in the number of children who walked or biked to school alone.
So it doesn’t seem like the collapse of independent mobility is a phone issue. The truth is much more complicated.
One element is parental attitudes: according to responses from a survey by Play England, many parents fear “stranger danger” or judgement from neighbors if they let their kids play unsupervised outdoors.
Adult employment patterns and lifestyle changes have also been slowly trending toward car-dependency, which means that kids often end up living far away from their friends. If children want people to play with, the most efficient solution is for their parents to drive them to an organized sport or other structured activity.
In the Play England survey, though, parents were most afraid that their kids would get hit by a car. Sadly, this isn’t an unreasonable fear. All the forests are covered in concrete. What would we make of a city-bound parent who let their toddler roam the streets without an adult nearby?
Unsurprisingly, these changes have been very bad for children. In 2013, UNICEF tracked childhood well-being against independent mobility, and their results reveal a stark correlation.
A mix of shifting parental attitudes, car-dependency, and urbanization have led to an unprecedented situation in the history of human childhood. Children don’t have peer cultures, because they have nowhere to play and no one to play with. Even if those factors were ameliorated, we might not let them out anyway. Too bad for them — they can’t hide from us anymore.
Or can they?
A world without us
The kids won’t get off their damn phones. Children aged 6-14 average nearly three hours per day of screen time, not counting schoolwork. 50% of teenagers average over four hours of screen time daily. And so on — you know the statistics.
Amidst all the horror stories, though, people often ignore the fact that the kids don’t like it either. For example: most teens, especially girls, say they spend too much time on their smartphones. 72% of 8 to 12-year-olds say they would rather “spend most of their time together doing things in-person, without screens.” The kids are not alright, but they aren’t dumb — they understand that something is wrong with the technological world we’ve handed them.
So why don’t they just stop?
Usually, we blame the corporations. And there are lots of fingers to point. It is now well-known, I think, that many platforms design their applications like slot machines to maximize our attention, and that they purposefully aim for the more malleable minds of children.
But data on the varieties of screen usage suggests another explanation. Social media and gaming are now arguably the two most common digital activities for children: notably, and unlike television, both allow children to engage with distinct virtual communities that adults don’t notice or understand.
Tellingly, kids really want those communities to exist. 45% of American 8 to 12-year-olds say they would prefer to “participate in an activity with their friends in person that’s not organized by adults.” 61% wish they had more time to “play with friends in person without adults.” And again, most of them wish they could spend less time on screens. It seems like what they want is to wander together in a forest.
But they can’t. So they boot up Fortnite or TikTok instead.
By retreating to digital space, children have found an open frontier that lies beyond the interest or comprehension of their parents. We don’t know how to play Roblox, or what “6-7” means. These worlds are so impenetrable that The Guardian writes explanatory articles to keep us at least slightly up-to-date.
But the kids know, and they know that the other kids know, and they know that we don’t know shit. Children have always looked for a world without us. With the advent of the Internet, they have found one lying in the rubble.
Learning to walk in the (e-)forest
Of course, the problem is that social media platforms and video games are not Congolese rainforests — though at least there are no leopards. These digital spaces make our children depressed and anxious and insecure. They expose them to pornography. They drive them into frightening political rabbit holes. The children need somewhere to play, but this can’t possibly be the right place for it.
And yet, it’s hard to picture an alternative. Parents should worry less about stranger danger: fine. But everything is still covered in concrete, and everyone is still moving to cities. Do we want to tear down the skyscrapers and unpave the roads? Should we demand a forest for our children?
The truth is that we’re not going back. My children will not grow up like the BaYaka, and there is nothing I can do about it.
But that doesn’t change the fact that kids need their independent peer cultures. If we can’t provide physical spaces for them to form, then we must accept that they will often form in digital spaces instead. So if we’re unhappy with the digital spaces on offer — if we think there are too many figurative leopards in those forests — then we should make something better.
What does ‘something better’ look like? Well, probably a platform that preserves the aspects of digital space that kids find freeing, but without the aspects that make those spaces dangerous and addictive.
Games like Roblox present some interesting ideas. Children absolutely love Roblox; according to the game’s parent corporation, their monthly player base includes half of all American children under the age of 16. They love it because it’s multiplayer, exploratory, and extremely open-ended. Independent cultures and systems of governance emerge in the course of gameplay. They’re sufficiently complex that some of my colleagues are now using Roblox as a playground for studying collective behavior in humans.
But there are adults in Roblox, hidden behind avatars. Their presence ensures that kids will end up seeing disturbing content that they don’t have the tools to understand. Roblox is also highly Vegasified, featuring all the usual exploitative tactics of loot boxes, season upgrades and cosmetic passes. So it is nowhere near the ideal; all things considered, children would probably be better off if we banned them from playing.
Still, I can picture something like Roblox that might also sustain peer cultures. When I remember the happiest parts of my childhood, everything centers on secret places: pillow forts, hidden corners in parks, soccer fields after dark. But I also remember Minecraft. My friends and I would set up a Skype call, start a world and spend hours exploring and building.
When we spent time together in physical space, we were nearly always being supervised. Not so in Minecraft. I spent thousands of hours mastering the rules of that procedurally generated world; my parents didn’t even know what ‘procedurally generated’ meant. So, dystopian as it may sound, Minecraft servers were the closest thing I had to sprawling Congolese rainforests.
Perhaps that isn’t so bad. I wish the children of today had a forest. But they don’t. They’re making do with what history has handed them.
We can complain about their screen time, lament the anxious generation, scoff at how ‘unnatural’ this brave new world has become. Simultaneously, though, we should do our best to understand why kids are behaving this way. There’s no point in whining about the impulses endowed to them by several hundred thousand years of evolution. Don’t hate the player; hate the game. And if you really hate the game, make a better one.
To be clear, this is not mutually exclusive from the influence of addictive platform design.
Thank you for identifying the original link to these ideas. Interesting....and so very concerning. Nature has very different lessons than human built machines. In these times, we are just seeing how horrifying human society becomes when individualism, isolation and greed predominate in humans overpopulated spaces. Humans were unable to learn from the warnings of the 1960s, where this fantastic fallacy of 'unlimited growth', dug in. We have our very own version of stupid.
That's an interesting take, but you are right I think. I love the "little outlaws" reference. As a child, we developed our own sort of society; we felt safe, and our parents expected us to make decisions and mistakes. A B+ didn't eliminate college prospects, and clip our future. For my own children, I fully admit that I acted as a safety net. My goal was to help them become functional, independent adults, and I did that by not allowing them to practice the skills they needed to accomplish it. Thank goodness they were too rebellious to allow me to hold them back. I'm not sure what the answer is at this point, but I'm pretty sure it's not in a monitor.