By JOHN T. BRODERICK
I grew up in a middle-class town of 18,000 people north of Boston. My Dad, who had two chemistry degrees from Boston College, taught science at the local high school and my Mom, whose family couldn’t afford the nursing degree she wanted, worked in an office in the neighboring town. My sister and I felt enveloped by the love of our parents and guided by the values they modeled every day. We had modest home-cooked meals every night and midday Sunday dinners. Everyone did. Our parents were around in the evenings and our weekends weren’t planned, just lived. The rhythm around me was unassuming and reassuring.
Our several-block neighborhood of modest capes and colonials sprinkled generously with shade trees was our playground. We knew the kids in most of the houses and we knew their parents, too. They knew our names and they knew my parents. As you might imagine my neighborhood self-policed pretty well. We all knew what was expected of us.
“Playdates” didn’t exist but unstructured, unsupervised play every afternoon when school got out was our oxygen. We had two sets of clothes–one for school and one for “after school.” Changing wasn’t optional. No one was on a travel team because they didn’t exist and personal technology was not on anyone’s radar. The closest thing to personal technology was an answering machine and we never had one of those.
We were a one-car family so my sister and I walked a lot of places–including school—or rode our bikes. We had family rules, of course, but they weren’t overly confining. I had to be home for dinner. Homework was always on the menu after supper. Dinner was a time for my parents to talk about their days or about issues in town or notable national events and for my sister and me to casually share our stories and talk about friends, our school or our worries.
I learned a lot about life from listening to my parents at those long-ago dinners and a lot about them, too. Above all, I felt safe, loved and respected as a kid. I felt I belonged. My parents supported my dreams as the years passed but never created them and never micro-managed my decisions or my choices. They must have felt they had done their jobs well enough to trust me. That trust allowed me to become self-confident, resilient and comfortable in my own skin. My parents bestowed the gift of a childhood where I never felt compared, pressured to achieve or constantly compete against someone or something.
Having spent the last 10 years of my life traveling to hundreds of schools throughout New England talking to tens of thousands of kids in grades 6 through 12 about mental health awareness and listening attentively to several thousand confided stories from that audience after my talks, my childhood often seems a bygone relic. My undisturbed, well-paced, contented, and supported childhood seems to have nearly vanished. What has often replaced it is causing anxiety, depression, and stress in kids never before seen. All the surveys confirm what I have seen and sometimes hugged. Perpetual, addictive technology is a big part of it but social-emotional growth needs the nurturing and character-building space and time that only an uncluttered and relatively unstructured childhood allows. Kids today may have more problems, but the kids are not the problem.
Most neighborhoods and school yards don’t host playing kids anymore when school is dismissed for the day; after school practices, clubs, and adult-supervised games have gobbled up free time; dinners are too often consumed on the way to practices and sporting events and weekends belong to travel teams. Evenings have been surrendered to screens and TikTok. Chasing and achieving have replaced the unstructured spontaneity of a creative childhood.
Most kids don’t even know their neighbors now and parents in those enclaves don’t know them like they used to, either. No wonder more of us are feeling lonely. That essential feeling of belonging is slowly slipping away. And with it the indispensable ingredient to a happy and successful life.
John T. Broderick, Jr. is the former Senior Director of External Affairs at Dartmouth-Hitchcock and formerly served as Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court.
