Column- Meghan Leahy October 9, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT Washington Post
A parent wants to educate their 6-year-old daughter this election year but isn’t sure where to start.
Hi Meghan: I am wondering about your recommendations for age-appropriate news for kids. I have a 6-year-old daughter and the U.S. political process this year seems historic. My husband and I are pretty attentive to political news and we have just started talking about voting with her and want to talk about some of what’s going on, although we skipped the horror of the July rally shooting.
Are there any media outlets or products for young kids that make short videos we can use to jump-start conversations and share some news at the right level? My husband and I are trying to figure out how to hit the right level of detail for her to understand and absorb it, and we would love tools to help these discussions.
Is there anything like “Schoolhouse Rock” anymore? I’m wondering about both conceptual explainers and kid-targeted current news broadcasts. Thanks for continuing to take questions!
Wondering: Thank you for this question. We are certainly in a historic time, and it seems to just keep unfolding in unpredictable and shocking ways. Your question has me a bit stymied because I really am of two minds about it. On one hand, educating our children about how people are elected and why it matters is our parental and civic duty. Americans are well-versed in social media but largely don’t understand how the government functions, and it is disconcerting. On the other hand, talking at our kids about these issues is a losing game. It’s boring and doesn’t meet them where they are developmentally. Sure, a 6-year-old could be interested in gerrymandering, but really, the average 6-year-old just wants to play.
You are headed in the right direction with fun and interesting media to share this information! A quick peek at Commonsense Media (a great resource for parents about all things media and children) yields an abundance of sites and videos, but most are geared toward children age 8 and up. This is because the typical 7- or 8-year-old is able to have more patience, consider others’ feelings with more predictability and can have sustained attention. So you won’t find too many “educational” political videos for a 6-year-old. Kids Academy on YouTube has some short and informative videos on the branches of government, the importance of voting, civil rights and Election Day. PBS Kids has a nice array of voting videos (Arthur is great), and they offer some great book suggestions.
In terms of the “right level of detail” for these discussions, this wholly depends on your child (and you know her best!). Make conversations about voting and elections, local elections especially, a daily topic and watch for when her eyes glaze over; that’s when you stop. The more you can make the topic about what interests her, the more likely she is to engage! Does she love the zoo? How are funds allocated to it? Does she love your local park? What parts of your local government help keep the park clean and open to all? Does she love to ride her bike? How does your town or city keep bikers safe? When you reflect, you’ll see that every part of your family’s life is touched by the government in big and small ways, so engage your daughter in what she cares about! And move on when she has that “I am so bored” look in her eye.
Your best bet for sharing your political interests is to live out your values, and bring her along for the ride. Volunteer in the voting process and let her see you working. Go door to door to help people register to vote and bring her along. Attend “get out the vote” gatherings and have the whole family attend. Discuss the day’s news at dinner, and make it understandable for your daughter. Discuss your own values and why they are important to you, and allow spirited and respectful disagreements to occur between you and your partner. Ask for your daughter’s opinion (if she seems interested), otherwise just model healthy debate and fact-based language. It may not “feel” like much, but children are keen observers.
It has been four and a half years since public schools across the country closed their doors to in-person learning. There is evidence that this generation of K-12 students has not fully recovered academically — and may never do so.
Test scores on core subjects are lower than they have been in decades, and the achievement gap between rich and poor students has widened even further. When I interview teachers, they tell me that some of their students are behaviorally and socially stunted in ways that aren’t always captured by statistics.
Americans are not happy about the state of education. Though satisfaction with the quality of education has recovered a bit from its record lows in 2023, Americans’ overall sentiment toward K-12 public schools is still “underwater,” according to Gallup.
I was really hoping that in an election year, the serious problems facing K-12 education — which are not limited to Covid learning loss — might merit attention from Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. And yet, neither candidate has really addressed primary education. The entire topic of education barely came up in this year’s presidential debates, beyond a few brief mentions of student loans and school shootings.
Trump’s concept of a plan for education is about banning critical race theory and abolishing the Department of Education. He’s focused on inflaming culture war issues, not on building fundamentals. “Harris and Democrats have talked as much, if not more, about early childhood education and child care than they have about K-12 policies,” according to NPR. While I agree with the Democratic Party platform that “free, universal preschool for 4-year-olds” would be really nice to have, budgets are finite and I wish Democratic politicians would focus more energy on the K-12 system that already exists and is in need of funding and imaginative and effective policy.
The Scope of the K-12 Education Crisis
The downward trend for America’s schools started about a decade ago, so the pandemic destabilized an already weakened structure. Then the Covid shutdowns were like “this comet that hit our education system,” said Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Instead of being honest about the scope of the problems kids are facing, he said, “most of our schools have decided that that’s just the way it’s going to be, that this generation of kids is not going to catch up.
The most recent test results from National Assessment of Educational Progress — which my colleague Dana Goldstein calls “the gold-standard federal exam” — show that reading and math scores for fourth and eighth graders are at their lowest levels in decades. While test results cratered after 2020, “the downward trends reported” in 2023 “began years before the health crisis, raising questions about a decade of disappointing results for American students,” Goldstein wrote.
Things are continuing in the wrong direction. A study from the Northwest Evaluation Association, the organization that conducts MAP testing, which measures academic growth in a variety of K-12 subjects, showed that “the gap between pre-Covid and Covid test score averages widened in 2023-24 in nearly all grades, by an average of 36 percent in reading and 18 percent in math.” The association estimates that “the average student will need the equivalent of 4.8 additional months of schooling to catch up in reading and 4.3 months in math.”
Because of the decentralized structure of the American education system, much of the control over schools lies with states and local communities. Yet additional funding to help schools during the pandemic came from the federal government. States received $190 billion in pandemic aid through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief program, and the money had to be allocated by last month. A few “funds were distributed through the same formula as federal Title I education funding, which allocates more resources to districts with a high proportion of low-income families than to wealthier districts,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The money was given largely without restrictions, except that 20 percent of the last installment was supposed to be dedicated to addressing learning loss. But “the allowable activities” to address that learning loss “were extremely broad and inclusive. Without a clear purpose or goal, districts could — and did — spend their money in wildly different ways,” Chad Aldeman pointed out in The 74. “There was little tracking of how, exactly, the federal dollars were spent,” my colleague Sarah Mervosh wrote, so it’s very difficult to know what academic interventions worked better than others.
Instead of addressing the decline in academic achievement by figuring out what is working to help get kids back to grade level, some states are lowering the bar. As Linda Jacobson reported, also in The 74, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Alaska and New York have all made adjustments to what qualifies as a passing score or recalibrated their proficiency levels so that more children appear to be meeting basic standards. This kind of obfuscation does not fix what Covid broke.
What Should the Candidates Propose?
I asked a handful of academics who study education what kinds of plans they hoped to hear from a new administration. A majority of them mentioned a need for more federal enforcement of state accountability for student outcomes. They specifically cited the shortcomings of the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which gave a lot more power to the states and walked back some of the reforms of No Child Left Behind (N.C.L.B.), which was passed in 2002. ESSA was a bipartisan attempt, led by President Barack Obama, to improve on N.C.L.B. by giving states more flexibility and allowing the federal government less control. They emphasized that N.C.L.B. was not a perfect law, but they thought that ESSA went too far in the other direction.
“The federal government gave states more control over ‘differentiated’ and flexible accountability systems. That devolution seems to have resulted in a kind of cosmetic ‘accountability theater’ in many states,” said Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. Lowering proficiency levels is a prime example of this kind of theater.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that more federal oversight to ensure better outcomes should look exactly like No Child Left Behind, said Dan Goldhaber, vice president of the American Institutes for Research. N.C.L.B. focused on schools’ raw test scores rather than their test score growth over time, which “often sent the wrong message about which schools were doing well,” Goldhaber said.
Those suggestions are probably too in the weeds for either Harris or Trump to squeeze into a sound bite before Election Day. So Dee said he’d like to hear the candidates focus on singular issues like chronic absenteeism, which isn’t going away and is where attention might actually help shape policy.
I would personally like to see a federal push for more easily understandable data from states — both on school performance and our kids’ performance. There is a disconnect between grades, which have been inflated, and student knowledge. The Associated Press’s Annie Ma reported on a 2023 Gallup survey that showed that “88 percent of parents say their child is on grade level in reading, and 89 percent of parents believe their child is on grade level in math. But in a federal survey, school officials said half of all U.S. students started last school year behind grade level in at least one subject.”
Tim Daly, the chief executive of EdNavigator and the author of a newsletter on education, would also like to see better data coming from states. “When I looked at higher levels of teacher absenteeism — which Illinois reports at the school level — I found that the data are very sketchy,” he said. “Many of the figures were implausible or the districts outright refused to confirm them. If this is true of teacher absenteeism, is it true of other things? Probably? I feel like this is indicative of our bigger pandemic recovery problem. We’re stuck.”
Without data, we can’t understand the scope of our problems. And without a sense of urgency from either candidate for education reform on a national level, our children will not get the help they need. I don’t think it’s acceptable to just give up on the kids who had the misfortune of being school-age from 2020 to 2022. There’s a month left before the election, and the candidates still have time to say something — anything — about how they’re going to help.
Montgomery County voters willdecide on Nov. 5 who will helpgovern Maryland’s largest school district as it continues to recover from pandemic-related learning losses and stabilize after a year of internal turmoil.
Typically, schoolboard races don’t catch much attention because they are farther down the ballot. But the Montgomery system has beenheavily scrutinized over the past year after a Washington Post investigation found officials promoted a middle school principal while he was under investigation internally for allegations of sexual misconduct, bullying and retaliation. The school board is also being sued by a group of parents who say their religious freedom rights were violated when school officials stopped allowing parents to opt their children outof reading storybookswith LGBTQ+ characters.
Six candidates are competing for three seats: one representing District 2, which covers parts of Gaithersburg and Rockville; one representing District 4, which includes Takoma Park and Silver Spring; and a countywide, at-large seat.
The Washington Post asked candidates about top issues, including academic performance; school safety; the “Blueprint for Maryland’s Future,” a multibillion-dollar investment to expand pre-K, and other efforts. Candidates’ responses were edited for brevity and clarity.
Meet the candidates
At-large:
Lynne Harris, 62, of Rockville, an at-large school board member since 2020, is a former countywide PTA president and county teacher. She listed “creating inclusive, affirming schools” and improving special education services aspriorities and also aims to make the district “a destination employer.”🌸
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Rita Montoya, 42, of Silver Spring,is an attorney and former juvenile public defender. She has two children enrolled in the school system andis a former PTA president. She said that to help children meet their goals, the district must have fully staffed schools with “proven curricula and extracurricular programs,” ensure students and staff members feel safe, and rebuild trust in the district and the school board.
District 2:
Brenda Diaz, 47, of Gaithersburg,has over 20 years of experience as an educator and is a parent of three children. She wants to “revitalize MCPS” by prioritizing safety, teacher morale, academic rigor and parental involvement.
Natalie Zimmerman, 28,of Rockville, is a third-grade teacher in the district. She said she is running for the school board because she has “seen the system fail students and educators alike” and wants to take action.
District 4:
Shebra Evans, 52, of Silver Spring, has represented District 4 since 2016 and twice served as board chair. Evans said she kept the system focused on providing an excellent education, despite changes in superintendent leadership. She also said that during her tenure, the system enhanced career and technical education, and more students have graduated with their associate’s degree and high school diploma.
Laura Stewart, 53, of Silver Spring,is a full-time volunteer and parent of two recentgraduates. Stewart said she decided to run after a report from the county inspector general found thatthe school district was warned multiple times since 2019 about problems with how itinvestigated employee reports of misconduct. She wants to bring “more accountability, collaboration and transparency to MCPS.”
Is the Blueprint working?
The Post asked: How well do you think the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future is working? Are there any changes you would make to its requirements or funding?
Harris, at-large: The Blueprint is well-researched and well-intended, but as currently outlined, more common sense needs to infuse implementation. Community schools are working well, and the gradual expansion is smart. Pillar 2 [which sets mandatory teacher salaries] needs to be expanded to cover the non-teacher workforce, particularly paraeducators. All of this requires funding, and we need to see the state create dedicated, stable funding streams commensurate with the critical importance of public education. … Achieving the public/private balance of pre-K programs is problematic everywhere. Maryland bureaucracy around pre-K educator and pre-K facility certification and licensure must be streamlined to eliminate barriers. The Accountability and Implementation Board oversight work is essential, but we need to fix those areas of work requiring school systems to report progress before the metrics to measure that progress are in place.
Montoya, at-large: Its implementation thus far demonstrates that it may need some alterations. The timeline seems ambitious for the realities: insufficient funding and significant levels of need by students — academic and personal (food insecurity, housing instability, mental health challenges). I fully support expansion of pre-K as a solid return on investment but am concerned that space, including construction, and staffing are insufficiently funded. More funding is needed to support the valuable and necessary Maryland Blueprint.
Diaz, District 2: We must ensure a strong return on investment in education. However, recentdata reveals concerning results: Only 54 percent of MCPS students in grades three to eight are proficient in reading, 34 percent in math, and just 22 percent in Algebra I. Parents and teachers are frustrated with policies such as no homework, grade inflation and chronic absenteeism, which lead to these alarming outcomes. With a $3.3 billion budget, these results are unacceptable. Every dollar must be dedicated to improving student outcomes, especially forfree-and-reduced-meal and Title I students. … Contracts such as the electric bus debacle show that the current Board of Education rubber-stamps faulty MCPS initiatives and are easily distracted from meeting the primary mission of the public education system — providing high-quality education to our children.
Zimmerman, District 2: I support the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. I do have concerns about its continued funding. Many of the initiatives that we want to implement here in Montgomery County rely on funding from the Blueprint at the state level. The main changes I would make have to do with proving that someone is an expert educator. We need to create additional pathways beyond just being a National Board Certified Teacher, as this process takes multiple years and has a fee.
Evans, District 4:In my opinion, the Blueprint for Maryland is well-designed to give every student a legitimate chance at success. The Blueprint’s focus on early-childhood education builds on clear research that investment in the early years is critical to set all students up for success, but especially students growing up economically disadvantaged. Pre-K expansion will help level the playing field, eliminate learning gaps and allow many families to work. While there will be challenges to dedicate the resources needed, the return on investment has the potential to be life-changing. Moreover, at a time of critical teacher shortage, increasing the pay for teachers will make the profession more attractive and help recruit and retain top talent, as will the career ladder opportunities.
Stewart, District 4: We are still learning how to implement the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, so I would give it an “incomplete” grade. There hasn’t been a full budget analysis on the true cost of fully implementing Blueprint goals, so I support that effort, which is an ongoing ask by the Maryland Education Coalition. To recruit and keep a highly trained and diverse workforce, I would like to expand our “grow your own” initiative in our high schools. We also need to better support teachers so that they stay in the profession. There needs to be work done on college and career readiness. … In my opinion, implementing community schools has great potential.
How to improve student performance?
The Post asked: Since 2021, performance on state tests has fallen below pre-pandemic levels, though students are recovering in English Language Arts. What interventions would you support to improve performance?
Harris, at-large: We need to improve the instructional support for our special-education and English language development teachers, and provide more targeted professional development around scaffolding to address a wide range of learning styles and needs. At the secondary level, systemwide professional development around English language development — designed to better support our emergent multilingual learners — is proving to improve literacy among all students and is strengthening essential language development across all content areas. For math, the deployment of content coaches is showing great results, but we currently lack the resources to comprehensively expand that approach to all schools.
Montoya, at-large: Interventions like D.C. Public Schools’ high-impact tutoring demonstrate student progress and growth. Several MCPS elementary schools piloted a program referred to as WIN, or “What I Need.” WIN provides focused small-group instruction several times per week during the school day. Placement is based on students’ needs to include enrichment for those at grade level or above. My child’s former elementary school piloted WIN last year and saw measurable growth in students’ test scores. My child loved the program, made new friends and even made meaningful connections with other educators who taught his WIN class. I would support and expand this program.
Diaz, District 2: Our top priority must be providing grade-appropriate assignments, strong instruction and high expectations for all students, regardless of race, income or performance. We must bring back midterms and finals to encourage cumulative learning. Students need regular, rigorous academic challenges like reading whole books. Second, families must be authentic partners in education. Parents are frustrated by rushed conferences and restricted back-to-school nights. We need more time for meaningful parent-teacher interactions, regular progress updates and homework for extra practice. Finally, we must require regular materials-based professional development in reading, writing and math instruction, along with advanced degrees evidencing mastery of their content, to make sure teachers are implementing high-quality instruction with fidelity. Regular teacher observations and feedback will improve instruction in every class.
Zimmerman, District 2: One of the things that I come with to the board is a master’s degree in elementary education with additional certifications in special education, English language development and English language arts. I can speak to curricula selection from a classroom perspective and with multiple degrees on instructing students. Only this year are we using a data-driven practice called the science of reading or structured literacy to educate our studentsfrom kindergarten to fifth grade. Many schools are also implementing an intervention block every day. The problem is that classroom teachers are only afforded 25 minutes per day to both fill gaps for students who need them and enrich students who are ready for more in both reading and math. We need more time in the day for this focused instruction and more time built into curriculums for pauses to address instructional needs. Beyond that, we need to be considering how the system can increase these focused instruction times into middle and high schools so our students who were not afforded instructional intervention opportunities in elementary school can get gaps in knowledge and skills addressed.
Evans, District 4: Focusing in on literacy and math data and closely measuring the effectiveness of academic interventions has been a hallmark of my years on the board. As president of the board, I worked closely with then-superintendent Jack Smith to increase the data analysis brought to and shared with the board to measure student growth and achievement. As a direct result of this heightened focus on data, my colleagues and I on the board supported the addition of reading and math coaches and invested in the transition to science of reading before the rest of the state required this shift. Reading and math coaches are providing important support to teachers working with struggling learners and reinforcing skills to achieve grade-level rigor. We also need to better engage parents whose students are not on track academically to enlist their support at home but also to ensure that they can hold our schools accountable.
Stewart, District 4: We need to be focused on expanding pre-K, in-school supports including in-class paraeducator support for teachers, a proven math curriculum with support in multiple languages, quality science-of-reading teacher training, and the same for elementary math. We must eliminate the tutoring gap by partnering with nonprofits so that more children can access high quality tutoring and mentoring. As we track disaggregated student progress, if there are outlier schools with lower scores, central office should send resources to that school to determine if more training is needed or a reorganization of staff. Parents should have access to an early-warning system as described by the “Black and Brown Coalition.”
Ideas for making school safer
The Post asked: What steps should be taken to improve school safety?
Harris, at-large: We need to problem solve alongside our students who — through 2023-24 studentboard member Sami Saeed — made a series of school safety recommendations embedded in boardresolutions. Among their common-sense solutions that are being implementedare school ID requirements, enhanced security camera placement and door alarms, and vape detection pilots. It’s also important to center conversations around school safety on prevention — creating the conditions where students feel welcome and valued. Our mental wellness teams are essential. Over the past several months, school security evaluations were completed for every school, and the issues identified are being prioritized to ensure security infrastructure — including emergency communications — are robust.
Montoya, at-large: Long-term, to address physical violence, hate and mental health challenges, we should aim to foster an environment of belonging and connection. Sufficiently staffing psychologists, social workers and school counselors may foster connection. Ensuring students receive care outside of school may help. Accessible, culturally competent education may support families’ efforts to improve their child’s well-being. In the short term, the hate, guns, drugs, trespassers and other weapons must stay out of our schools. Annual, expert-led staff training and explicit, age-appropriate education for students can help them understand what constitutes hate, its impact and how to recognize their own biases. While education about weapon and drug safety are essential, to prevent harm to students and staff, students need access to adults with age and culturally appropriate security training so that when they know of trespassers/weapons, they can report and it can be addressed immediately. The community would benefit from in-school opportunities for positive engagement between students and police officers to build connection so that when serious situations occur, they can work together.
Diaz, District 2: A combination of capital improvements and nonstructural approaches is needed to enhance school safety. We should continue by upgrading security cameras in entryways, hallways and outdoor areas, and ensuring secure vestibules where visitors can be screened. Reinforcing doors and windows, installing shatter-resistant glass, and implementing lockdown mechanisms are also essential. All MCPS personnel must maintain relationships with law enforcement and community organizations to improve communication and response strategies. Peer mentoring programs can foster a positive climate among students. An anonymous reporting system must be in place at every school. Revising the Student Code of Conduct to protect students from bullying, hate bias, and assaults is key. We must also have trained security personnel in all schools with authority to manage disruptive students.
Zimmerman, District 2: Step one is to ensure emotional safety. MCPS does not meet nationally recommended ratios for school counselors, school psychologists, nor social workers. We need to create safe environments for our students so they can come to adults and divulge information to prevent safety concerns. There was an incident that was prevented this spring at a high school because students felt safe enough to report what they saw in a classmate. I do believe that the restorative approach in MCPS has a poor reputation because it is not implemented with fidelity. Some schools have a full-time restorative coach while others only have part time and some do not have a designated position at all. As a teacher, I have never been offered professional development on a restorative approach. I would like to see us implement a restorative approach with integrity along with ensuring logical consequences for students.
Evans, District 4: We should never shy away from wanting to do our best and being the best at getting better. That means admitting there is still work that needs to be done to increase confidence that the district is committed to safety and security. Steps are underway to allow for quicker access to information about what’s happening in each school. Ongoing audits are being done across the district to increase transparency and accountability. The student ID program has been implemented in schools and we are watching closely to assess best practices. Cameras continue to be strategically placed throughout buildings and more doors are alarmed to monitor who is entering our buildings. This work is most effective when done in partnership with the community especially when related to issues that cross the school boundary like bullying and drugs. The work is ongoing and should be done in partnership with students and families for a better sense of belonging.
Stewart, District 4: MCPS needs more security and preventive measures to keep kids and staff safe. I propose school safety and climate teams composed of the entire school community to develop safety plans to be submitted to the superintendent. These plans should assess the need for more security officers, cameras, vape detectors, bathroom safety measures, the level of coordination with community engagement officers (CEOs) and the need for more CEOs if there are certain hot spots. On the preventive side, an assessment should be performed on the need for mediation services, mental health services, addiction therapy, family support, and after-school activities. Healthy school climate can also be a factor in keeping kids safe from bullying. There should be more training and programs on antisemitism, Islamophobia, LGBTQ+ bigotry, and racism.
Your curiosity is more appealing than your accomplishments.
The most popular Modern Love article of all time, “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love,” has been read by more than 75 million people. Nothing I have (or will ever) put out into the world will effect more positive change than that short article.
My hope is that most readers absorbed the simple truth that being curious about people you meet is far more seductive than talking about your accomplishments. The most common complaint I hear (by far) about bad first dates is of people droning on about themselves and not asking questions. So skip the self-promotion. Be curious instead. If you need prompts, here are 36 of them.
In Mandy Len Catron’s Modern Love essay, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This,” she refers to a study by the psychologist Arthur Aron (and others) that explores whether intimacy between two strangers can be accelerated by having them ask each other a specific series of personal questions. The 36 questions in the study are broken up into three sets, with each set intended to be more probing than the previous one.
The idea is that mutual vulnerability fosters closeness. To quote the study’s authors, “One key pattern associated with the development of a close relationship among peers is sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personal self-disclosure.” Allowing oneself to be vulnerable with another person can be exceedingly difficult, so this exercise forces the issue.
The final task Ms. Catron and her friend try — staring into each other’s eyes for four minutes — is less well documented, with the suggested duration ranging from two minutes to four. But Ms. Catron was unequivocal in her recommendation. “Two minutes is just enough to be terrified,” she told me. “Four really goes somewhere.”
Set I
1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?
2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?
3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?
4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?
5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?
6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?
7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?
8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.
9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?
10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?
11. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.
12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
Set II
13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?
14. Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?
15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?
16. What do you value most in a friendship?
17. What is your most treasured memory?
18. What is your most terrible memory?
19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?
20. What does friendship mean to you?
21. What roles do love and affection play in your life?
22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.
23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?
24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?
Set III
25. Make three true “we” statements each. For instance, “We are both in this room feeling … “
26. Complete this sentence: “I wish I had someone with whom I could share … “
27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know.
28. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met.
29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.
30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?
31. Tell your partner something that you like about them already.
32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?
33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?
34. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?
35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?
36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.
TINY LOVE STORIES Discover our new weekly feature, Tiny Love Stories, which is essentially Modern Love in miniature — reader-submitted stories of no more than 100 words.
COVID exposed the cracks in the health care and education systems, showing that closing schools to protect the physical health of students exposed them to higher risks to their mental health and overall social-emotional wellbeing. Those local communities already lacking resources fell further behind, with rates of depression, suicide, absenteeism and even online disengagement rising to record levels. Since school in person has returned, the recovery from learning loss has been the focus of MCPS and most school districts, but the legacy of a year of lost socialization is still taking its toll among the neediest students.
Project CHANGE’s data from service of 3000 + MCPS students each year over the last 3 years show that up to 70% of young people are not excited about learning, and upwards of 40% give up when things get hard. These scores are validated by their low sense of confidence to learn.
In 2021-2, MCPS conducted their own Student Wellness Survey for 61,000 MCPS students and found that across all grades, 28% of students said they struggled dealing with stress, 26% felt lacking in self-esteem, and 22% needed help with expressing their emotions. In 2023, the recovery from COVID learning loss was uneven and absenteeism was at 32%, 6 points above the national average, and reflecting over 5 million lost hours of learning. When the system is obsessed with testing and with closing the achievement gap through improving test scores, the most disadvantaged students struggle even more in a culture that defines their deficiency as a deviancy. The very system committed to help them learn is teaching them they are losers. School is a race they are forced to compete in and run last.
Project CHANGE is committed to counter this destructive lesson and support students to become successful life learners, even if that sometimes means unlearning the lessons of school. The MyScore instrument which Project CHANGE uses to map the culture of learning through the 5C’s has proven success in first of all, diagnosing the problem by taking the student’s self-assessment seriously and validating it with classroom behavior, and from these data points, plan and implement a low-level intervention through mentoring and accompaniment.
Dr. Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of “On Freedom.”
I know a town in southern Ukraine where every single house has been destroyed by shelling or bombing. Even the ruins are riddled by bullet holes. Posad-Pokrovske, in the Kherson region, was occupied by Russians for most of 2022, before they were driven out by the Ukrainian army.
I visited there a year ago and met Mariia. She was living in a corrugated-metal hut behind the rubble of her house, her possessions arranged neatly, water bottles in a line, extension cords from the generator well hidden. She was proud of her Ukrainian government and cried in sympathy with her president, Volodymyr Zelensky. He seemed so young to her. Mariia is 86.
When we spoke, in Ukrainian, she used the word “de-occupation” rather than the expected “liberation.” I had a draft of a book about freedom in my backpack. I got it out and made a note.
We like to think that people are free when the correct army arrives: a liberation. But removing evil is not enough. Mariia would be less free without her temporary dwelling, provided by an international organization. She will be more free when the lane through the rubble is wide enough for her walker, and when the buses are running again.
The Ukrainians don’t expect us to bring them freedom. One soldier told me to remind Americans that they don’t need our troops. They do need our weapons, as one tool of many to keep their futures open. No one can bring anyone else freedom. But freedom can arise from cooperation.
Ukrainians have to keep fighting because they know what Russian occupation means. They have every reason to think of freedom as negative, as just the removal of what is wrong. But in the hundreds of conversations I have now had with Ukrainians about freedom, including soldiers on the front this month, I have never heard anyone say that. Freedom is about moral commitments and multiple possibilities. The Ukrainians driving vans to the front and rebuilding houses also speak of their actions in terms of freedom.
In the ruins of the Kharkiv suburbs recently, and in the rubble of the Kherson region last year, I was reminded of a nurse who arrived at a Nazi concentration camp in 1945 after “liberation.” She wrote in her diary that this was not the correct word. Inmates could not be regarded as free, she thought, until they had been restored to health and their trauma was addressed.
To be sure, it matters when Russian power is removed from Ukraine. And of course it mattered when the SS fled the camps. No one is free behind barbed wire or under bombing, whether we are talking about the past or the present, about Xinjiang or Gaza or anywhere else.
But freedom is not just an absence of evil. Freedom is a presence of good. It is the value of values, the condition in which we choose and combine the good things, bringing them into the world, leaving our own unique trace. It is positive.
So long as Americans imagine freedom as negative, as a matter of getting rid of power, we will have no land of the free. We will have to listen to one another about how power can create the conditions of freedom. As conservatives say, virtue is real. As liberals believe, there are many virtues, which we have to consider and combine. And as social democrats maintain, we need to work together to create structures that allow us to do that work.
Freedom helps us know how to govern. Freedom, in my view, takes five forms, connecting philosophy to politics. The first, sovereignty, means the capacity of children to understand themselves and the world. We think of states as sovereign, but a politics that begins with freedom requires a government that helps make people so. The second, unpredictability, makes us unruly and lively. The third, mobility, is the multiplicity of paths across space and time that opens before us. The fourth, factuality, is the grip on the world that allows us to change it. And the fifth, solidarity, is the recognition that freedom must be for us all.
And the home of the brave? It is cowardly to believe that freedom is just negative, just an absence. When we think of freedom that way, we leave all the hard questions open: Who are we? What do we care about? For what will we take a risk? What we are really saying is that someone or something else will fill the void and do the work for us. A leader will tell us what to think. Or a market or a machine will do the thinking for us. Or it will be the founders who somehow did all the thinking long ago.
We need government to solve certain problems so that we can be free. Only a government will stop an invader or break up a monopoly. But that is just the beginning. When people have health care, they are less worried about the future and free to change jobs. When children have access to school, adults are more free to organize life. Children who learn can defend themselves against the lies of aspiring tyrants.
Freedom is national work. It takes a cooperative nation to create free individuals. That cooperation is called government. And freedom is generational work. For children to grow up free, the necessary institutions and policies must already be in place. Infants cannot create the conditions of their own upbringing. No young person can build the roads and the universities needed for the American dream. We have to always be looking ahead. It is this prospect, this sense of a better future enabled by present decisions, that makes a land of the free.
When we believe freedom is negative, we believe that we are always right. We separate ourselves from the outside world, believing that this is liberation. We end up in a safe space with other Americans who think the same way. Some outside force is supposed to make us free, and when it does not, we call our condition freedom anyway. We have an answer for everything: Whatever happens, the government is to blame. And so we live inside a story.
A free person knows that there is no one answer to everything and no single story for everybody. As I finished my book about freedom, I tried to listen to people whose predicaments were different from mine. Mariia was one of them. She got me thinking about de-occupation, about how we get from the negative to the positive. She smiled when she spoke to me, and offered me the one beautiful object she had rescued from her ruined house as a gift. I looked at her walker and thought about what more she needed to be free.
To be free, we have to see other people, not least to be able to see ourselves. If we understand freedom correctly, if we draw the right lessons from extreme situations, we can connect freedom to government. Then that better future awaits us: a beautiful range of possibilities for unpredictable, unruly people.More on Ukraine.
Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University. His most recent book is “On Freedom.”
Source photographs by aguadeluna, Claudiad and banabana-san/Getty Images.
Jennifer Szalai New York Times June 5, 2024 In a new book, the journalist and science fiction writer Annalee Newitz shows how we have used narrative to manipulate and coerce.
A story can entertain and inform; it can also deceive and manipulate. Perhaps few stories are as seductive as the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves — those reasonable, principled creatures so many of us presume ourselves to be.
As Annalee Newitz writes in “Stories Are Weapons,” propaganda is premised on exploiting the discrepancy between surface beliefs and unconscious motives. A clever propagandist can get any number of people who see themselves as invariably kindhearted to betray their ideals. Newitz gives the example of anti-immigration campaigns: Make humans so fearful that even pious, churchgoing grandmothers will countenance rounding up their fellow humans in detention camps.
Not that Newitz, a journalist and science fiction author who uses they/them pronouns, depicts all propaganda as necessarily evil. “Stories Are Weapons,” an exploration of our culture wars’ roots in psychological warfare, contains a chapter on comic book artists like William Moulton Marston, the psychologist and creator of Wonder Woman, who “wanted to empower women” and believed that “propaganda was a progressive force.” But much of the book is about stories that have been used to undermine, to exclude and to wound: myths about the frontier and the “last Indian”; pseudo-intellectual treatises expounding junk-science racism; conspiracy theories about “pizza-eating pedophiles”; and moral panics about rainbow stickers.
And then there are the stories that sow confusion. Newitz explains that they began researching this book in the middle of 2020, while the pandemic was raging and the president was promoting the healing powers of sunlight and bleach. The gutting of reproductive rights and the introduction of anti-trans bills, Newitz says, made them feel as if they were under siege.
“For anyone who has been told that they should not be alive,” Newitz writes on the dedication page. “Together we will survive this war.” Stories are weapons — but Newitz argues that they can also open up pathways to peace. “As a fiction writer, I knew there were other ways to get at the truth, to make sense of a world gripped by absurdity and chaos. I had to tell a story.”
That story is introduced through the exploits of two central figures. The first is Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, a pioneer in the field that became known as “public relations.” To sell Lucky Strike cigarettes to women, Bernays devised a publicity campaign that linked the product to women’s desires for freedom. “Bernays had successfully turned his uncle’s project to promote mental health into a system for manipulating people into behaving irrationally,” Newitz writes, recounting how he later worked with the C.I.A. to drum up antipathy toward Guatemala’s democratically elected government. A prime beneficiary of the eventual coup was Bernays’s client, United Fruit, which owned huge swaths of Guatemalan land.
Newitz contrasts Bernays’s cynicism with the idealism of Paul Linebarger, who wrote a handbook for the U.S. Army in 1948 called “Psychological Warfare” — offering “the opportunity of strategic advantage without the cataclysmic danger of a worldwide showdown” — and published novels under various pen names. As Cordwainer Smith, he wrote science fiction; he had formidable “worldbuilding” skills that he was able to carry over into the military’s psychological operations, or psyops, designed to influence adversaries’ opinions and behaviors. Given that he believed the alternative to words was the bomb, Linebarger was prone to think about his work in optimistic terms. “Psychological warfare is good for everybody,” he declared, deeming it “the affirmation of the human community against the national divisions which are otherwise accepted in war.”
The book goes on to narrate numerous instances of weaponized storytelling at work. Newitz is so skillful at elucidating such a tangled, morally contentious history that I never felt lost, though I sometimes thought that the word “psyop” was doing a lot of heavy lifting. Is Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s “The Bell Curve,” which claimed that racial disparities in economic success were due mainly to genetics, more usefully characterized as a “psyop” or a terrible, odious book? What kind of analytical purchase is gained by using the phrase “the psyops known as Jim Crow laws” to describe racist legislation whose primary purpose wasn’t just to demoralize Black Americans in the South but to restrict their actual bodies?
Of course, military lingo packs an emotional payload, which is presumably why Newitz uses it. Tell people that they’re being pummeled by propaganda or a psyop, and you put them on guard. After all, nobody likes to think they are easily manipulated. Newitz shows how conservatives are well versed in the tactic of declaring harm, too: Denouncing something as “woke propaganda” can mobilize people to boycott Wonder Woman or ban a book.
There is a tension, then, between the imperative to seek the truth and the imperative to win the war. The vocabulary of war divides the world into stark binaries: Whatever helps the cause is good; whatever hampers the cause is bad. Complexities that don’t fit neatly into the ironclad narratives brandished by either side can get obscured.
“Stories Are Weapons” critiques this dynamic, but sometimes Newitz succumbs to the urge to oversimplify. The Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm that interfered in the 2016 election by slipping anti-Democratic propaganda into people’s social media feeds, “unleashed a new kind of psyop on the American people,” Newitz writes, presenting the presidency of Donald Trump as proof of concept: “It’s hard to argue with results like the ones we saw in the 2016 election.”
But people have done just that, maintaining that Russian trolls weren’t the decisive factor in Trump’s victory. Even Newitz recognizes that the metaphor of war is constraining and can take their story only so far. They condemn how online disagreements swiftly degenerate into violent recriminations and death threats — something that appalls Newitz, but is arguably made more likely when stories are equated with violent attacks.
Psychological disarmament, along with a commitment to a shared future, is made harder by the decimation of trust during wartime. Still, Newitz is hopeful. Weapons, whether rhetorical or physical, offer the power to dominate, but there’s so much more they cannot do. “We do not reach consensus by threatening one another with death,” Newitz writes. “Instead, we promise one another a better life.”
STORIES ARE WEAPONS: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind | By Annalee Newitz | Norton | 246 pp. | $27.99
By Jonathan Haidt and Jean M. Twenge New York Times July 31, 2021
The authors are psychologists who have spent years studying the effect of smartphones and social media on our daily lives and mental health.
As students return to school in the coming weeks, there will be close attention to their mental health. Many problems will be attributed to the Covid pandemic, but in fact we need to look back further, to 2012.
That’s when rates of teenage depression, loneliness, self-harm and suicide began to rise sharply. By 2019, just before the pandemic, rates of depression among adolescents had nearly doubled.
When we first started to see these trends in our work as psychologists studying Gen Z (those born after 1996), we were puzzled. The U.S. economy was steadily improving over these years, so economic problems stemming from the 2008 Great Recession were not to blame. It was difficult to think of any other national event from the early 2010s that reverberated through the decade.
Jonathan learned, while writing an essay with the technologist Tobias Rose-Stockwell, that the major social media platforms changed profoundly from 2009 to 2012. In 2009, Facebook added the like button, Twitter added the retweet button and, over the next few years, users’ feeds became algorithmicized based on “engagement,” which mostly meant a post’s ability to trigger emotions.
By 2012, as the world now knows, the major platforms had created an outrage machine that made life online far uglier, faster, more polarized and more likely to incite performative shaming. In addition, as Instagram grew in popularity over the next decade, it had particularly strong effects on girls and young women, inviting them to “compare and despair” as they scrolled through posts from friends and strangers showing faces, bodies and lives that had been edited and re-edited until many were closer to perfection than to reality.
For many years now, some experts have been saying that smartphones and social media harm teens while others have dismissed those concerns as just another moral panic, no different from those that accompanied the arrival of video games, television and even comic books. One powerful argument made by skeptics is this: The smartphone was adopted in many countries around the world at approximately the same time, so why aren’t teens in all of these countries experiencing more mental health issues the way Americans have been? Where’s the evidence for that?
This is a difficult question to answer because there is no global survey of adolescent mental health with data before 2012 and continuing to the present. However, there is something close. The Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, has surveyed 15-year-olds in dozens of countries every three years since 2000. In all but two administrations, the survey included six questions about loneliness at school. Loneliness is certainly not the same as depression, but the two are correlated — lonely teens are often depressed teens, and vice versa. And loneliness is painful even without depression.
So what does the PISA survey show? In a paper we just published in The Journal of Adolescence, we report that in 36 out of 37 countries, loneliness at school has increased since 2012. We grouped the 37 countries into four geographic and cultural regions, and we found the same pattern in all regions: Teenage loneliness was relatively stable between 2000 and 2012, with fewer than 18 percent reporting high levels of loneliness. But in the six years after 2012, rates increased dramatically. They roughly doubled in Europe, Latin America and the English-speaking countries, and rose by about 50 percent in the East Asian countries.
This synchronized global increase in teenage loneliness suggests a global cause, and the timing is right for smartphones and social media to be major contributors. But couldn’t the timing just be coincidental? To test our hypothesis, we sought data on many global trends that might have an impact on teenage loneliness, including declines in family size, changes in G.D.P., rising income inequality and increases in unemployment, as well as more smartphone access and more hours of internet use. The results were clear: Only smartphone access and internet use increased in lock step with teenage loneliness. The other factors were unrelated or inversely correlated.
These analyses don’t prove that smartphones and social media are major causes of the increase in teenage loneliness, but they do show that several other causes are less plausible. If anyone has another explanation for the global increase in loneliness at school, we’d love to hear it.
We have carried out an extensive review of the published research on social media and mental health, and we have found a major limitation: Nearly all of it, including ourown, looks for effects of consumption on the individuals doing the consuming. The most common scientific question has been: Do individual teens who consume a lot of social media have worse health outcomes than individual teens who consume little? The answer is yes, particularly for girls.
We believe, however, that this framework is inadequate because smartphones and social media don’t just affect individuals, they affect groups. The smartphone brought about a planetary rewiring of human interaction. As smartphones became common, they transformed peer relationships, family relationships and the texture of daily life for everyone — even those who don’t own a phone or don’t have an Instagram account. It’s harder to strike up a casual conversation in the cafeteria or after class when everyone is staring down at a phone. It’s harder to have a deep conversation when each party is interrupted randomly by buzzing, vibrating “notifications.” As Sherry Turkle wrote in her book “Reclaiming Conversation,” life with smartphones means “we are forever elsewhere.”
A year before the Covid-19 pandemic began, a Canadian college student sent one of us an email that illustrates how smartphones have changed social dynamics in schools. “Gen Z are an incredibly isolated group of people,” he wrote. “We have shallow friendships and superfluous romantic relationships that are mediated and governed to a large degree by social media.” He then reflected on the difficulty of talking to his peers:
There is hardly a sense of community on campus and it’s not hard to see why. Often I’ll arrive early to a lecture to find a room of 30+ students sitting together in complete silence, absorbed in their smartphones, afraid to speak and be heard by their peers. This leads to further isolation and a weakening of self-identity and confidence, something I know because I’ve experienced it.
All young mammals play, especially those that live in groups like dogs, chimpanzees and humans. All such mammals need tens of thousands of social interactions to become socially competent adults. In 2012 it was possible to believe that teens would get those interactions via their smartphones — far more of them, perhaps. But as data accumulates that teenage mental health has changed for the worse since 2012, it now appears that electronically mediated social interactions are like empty calories. Just imagine what teenagers’ health would be like today if we had taken 50 percent of the most nutritious food out of their diets in 2012 and replaced those calories with sugar.
So what can we do? We can’t turn back time to the pre-smartphone era, nor would we want to, given the many benefits of the technology. But we can take some reasonable steps to help teens get more of what they need.
One important step is to give kids a long period each day when they are not distracted by their devices: the school day. Phones may be useful for getting to and from school, but they should be locked up during the school day so students can practice the lost art of paying full attention to the people around them — including their teachers.
A second important step is to delay entry into social media, ideally keeping it entirely out of elementary and middle schools. At present, many 10- and 11-year-olds simply lie about their age to open accounts, and once that happens, other kids don’t want to be excluded, so they feel pressured to do the same.
The platforms should — at a minimum — be held legally responsible for enforcing their stated minimum age of 13. Since social media platforms have failed to do so using post-hoc detection methods, they should be required to implement age and identity verification for all new accounts, as many other industries have done. Verified users could still post under pseudonyms, and the verification could be done by reliable third parties rather than by the platforms themselves.
Even before Covid-19, teens were finding themselves increasingly lonely in school. The rapid transition to smartphone-mediated social lives around 2012 is, as we have shown, the prime suspect. Now, after nearly 18 months of social distancing, contagion fears, anxious parenting, remote schooling and increased reliance on devices, will students spontaneously put away their phones and switch back to old-fashioned in-person socializing, at least for the hours that they are together in school? We have a historic opportunity to help them do so.More on what social media is doing to our minds.
Jonathan Haidt (@JonHaidt) is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a co-author of “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Jean M. Twenge (@jean_twenge), a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, is the author of “iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.”
In January, I had the odd experience of nodding along with Senator Lindsey Graham, who can usually be relied on to be wrong, as he berated the supervillain Mark Zuckerberg, head of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, about the effect its products have on kids. “You have blood on your hands,” said Graham.
That evening, I moderated a panel on social media regulation whose participants included New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, a progressive crusader and perhaps Donald Trump’s single most effective antagonist. Her position wasn’t that different from that of Graham, a South Carolina Republican. There is a correlation, she pointed out, between the proliferation of addictive social media algorithms and the collapse of young people’s mental health, including rising rates of depression, suicidal thoughts and self-harm.
“And I’ve seen that for myself,” she said, describing helping the family of a young girl find a scarce psychiatric bed during the pandemic. “She talked to me a lot about social media.”
Because alarm over what social media is doing to kids is broad and bipartisan, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is pushing on an open door with his important new book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” The shift in kids’ energy and attention from the physical world to the virtual one, Haidt shows, has been catastrophic, especially for girls.
Female adolescence was nightmarish enough before smartphones, but apps like Instagram and TikTok have put popularity contests and unrealistic beauty standards into hyperdrive. (Boys, by contrast, have more problems linked to overuse of video games and porn.) The studies Haidt cites — as well as the ones he debunks — should put to bed the notion that concern over kids and phones is just a modern moral panic akin to previous generations’ hand-wringing over radio, comic books and television.
But I suspect that many readers won’t need convincing. The question in our politics is less whether these ubiquitous new technologies are causing widespread psychological damage than what can be done about it.
So far, the answer has been not much. The federal Kids Online Safety Act, which was recently revised to allay at least some concerns about censorship, has the votes to pass the Senate but hasn’t even been introduced in the House. In the absence of federal action, both red and blue states have tried to enact their own laws to safeguard kids online, but many have been enjoined by courts for running afoul of the First Amendment. Lawmakers in New York are working on a bill that tries to rein in predatory social media apps while respecting free speech; it targets the algorithms that social media companies use to serve kids ever more extreme content, keeping them glued to their phones. But while the law seems likely to pass, no one knows whether courts will uphold it.
There are, however, small but potentially significant steps local governments can take right now to get kids to spend less time online, steps that raise no constitutional issues at all. Phone-free schools are an obvious start, although, in a perverse American twist, some parents object to them because they want to be able to reach their kids if there’s a mass shooting. More than that, we need a lot more places — parks, food courts, movie theaters, even video arcades — where kids can interact in person.
In “The Anxious Generation,” Haidt argues that while kids are underprotected on the internet, they’re overprotected in the real world and that these two trends work in tandem. For a whole host of reasons — parental fear, overzealous child welfare departments, car-centric city planning — kids generally have a lot less freedom and independence than their parents did. Sitting at home in front of screens may keep them safe from certain physical harms, but it leaves them more vulnerable to psychological ones.
Reading Haidt’s book, I kept thinking of a park in Paris’s Les Halles district where adults aren’t allowed and how much easier it would be to keep kids off the internet if there were similar parks scattered around American cities and towns. I would much rather have my children, who are 9 and 11, roaming the neighborhood than spending hours interacting with friends remotely on apps like Roblox.
But it’s hard to make them go outside when there are no other kids around. One of my favorite days of the year is my Brooklyn neighborhood’s block party, when the street is closed to traffic and the kids play in packs, most ignored by their tipsy parents. It demonstrates how the right physical environment can encourage offscreen socializing.
As I was finishing “The Anxious Generation,” a book that partly overlaps with it arrived in the mail: “Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be.” The author, Timothy P. Carney, is a conservative Catholic father of six who wants to encourage other people to have lots of kids. He and I agree about very little, but we’re in complete accord about the need for communities to be “kid-walkable and kid-bikeable” so that children will have more real-world autonomy. Carney cites a 2023 paper from The Journal of Pediatrics concluding that a “primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults.”
If we want to start getting kids off line, we need to give them better places to go instead.
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Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
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