This stuck a nerve. I was lucky enough to have a childhood where I at least spent a few months wandering the wild parts of my parents’ villages for a few months a year. Those experiences have been formative in shaping who I am today.I see kids today and the only play they get is in between dodging incoming vehicles.

As an adult now living in the city, I often find myself wondering, where do kids go for that kind of independent play today? This is exactly what evolutionary anthropologist Eli Stark-Elster explores in a recent essay.

We like to blame tech companies for trapping our kids in digital spaces – and sure, the slot-machine mechanics are real. But Stark-Elster argues we’re missing the bigger picture:

“Digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us. For most of our evolutionary history, childhood wasn’t an adult affair. … 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.”

The statistics he cites are jarring. Among American kids aged 8–12: 45% have never walked in a different aisle than their parents at a store; 62% have never walked or biked somewhere without an adult; 71% have never used a sharp knife. Meanwhile, 31% have chatted with large language models and 50% have seen pornography by age 13.