It’s early on a January morning in 1979, I’m 10 years old, and the adventure is about to begin.
My alarm jolts me awake. Snow is falling outside, and my mother tells me that school is canceled. We canceled school every time it snowed in Kentucky, and for me, that was always the best possible news. I grab my winter gear, scarf down some Cheerios, and then I’m off. “Bye, Mom,” I say. “I’m going to Brent’s house,” and that’s the last she sees of me for about 10 hours — until I’m home for family dinner.
The day starts with a pickup hockey game on a frozen pond in our neighborhood and then moves to snow football in Brent’s backyard. We play for hours, and we’re almost ready to go inside for some hot chocolate when we hear the ultimate siren song for a young boy’s brain — go-karts racing in an open field.
We run over and beg to take turns competing on a makeshift dirt track, driving as fast as we can for as long as we can. No one wears helmets. No adults are in sight. And then, with our fingers and toes so cold that we can barely feel them, we hobble back inside — just in time for dinner.
“How was your day?” my mother would ask. “Fun,” I’d respond, and I’d regale my family with tales of my athletic exploits. I’d smooth out the rough edges. I wouldn’t tell them about the minor fistfight over late tackles in the snow football game, or the fact that Jeff drove one of the go-karts into a tree (he was fine; there was only a little blood).
I’d end the day exhausted, happy — and praying fervently that the snow would keep falling. I lost our snow football game, and I needed to get my revenge.
My memory tracks the story that Gen X likes to tell about itself. We’ve been called the least-parented generation in American history, with some justification. It’s not just that we were free-range kids — given permission to roam our neighborhoods at will. Then, independent childhoods were the norm. But we were also the first peacetime generation that grew up with two working parents as a normal part of life, and we were the first generation to live with the consequences of widespread divorce and single parenting, which at that time meant almost entirely single mothers.
In other words, we weren’t experiencing fantastic adventures as much as many of us were experiencing loneliness and abandonment. All across America, young kids would get off their school buses, unlock their houses and fend for themselves for hour after hour, until Mom or Dad came home from work. We were, in the phrase that launched a thousand newsweekly covers, latchkey kids.
My parents exerted tremendous efforts to make sure that one of them was home when my sister and I came home from school, so my latchkey experience is measured in weeks and months, not years, like it was for many of my friends.
For me, the experience was benign, fun even. I was too much of a rule-following nerd to get into real trouble. So my life during those afternoons after school mainly consisted of challenging my neighbor Rob to chess matches and one-on-one basketball games.
When I tell my story, it sounds almost idyllic, and for me, it was. My childhood was a real-life version of one of those annoying Instagram videos about life in the 1970s and 1980s, depicting independent kids playing in safe neighborhoods with good friends — learning resilience as we worked through our own problems without much help from our parents.
But if our childhoods were that wonderful, why didn’t Generation X replicate our own experiences for our children? Why did so many millions of free-range kids grow up to become helicopter parents?
When Americans lament the rise of what the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the “anxious generation,” Generation X should look in the mirror. Our kids, in other words, did not raise themselves. Their anxiety is, in many ways, our fault, often a reflection of our own fears.
If you look closely at Gen X actions and ignore Gen X words (as a group, we love to brag about our free-range lives), it looks as if we’ve repudiated virtually every aspect of our childhood experience. If helicopter parenting didn’t begin with Generation X (baby boomers helped start the trend, parenting millennial kids), we took the baton with gusto.
We lived lives full of free play, with no adults to be found to manage our fights and arguments. Our kids — especially upper-middle-class kids — play sports through micromanaged, year-round school and travel teams.
Our latchkey lives meant we spent countless hours at home, watching what we wanted, doing what we wanted, with a code of silence rigorously enforced to keep parents from knowing about our many transgressions and sins.
The children of Gen X parents, by contrast, live in a world in which day care, extracurricular programs and extended athletic seasons mean that there’s never any need for kids to be home alone. Our kids’ days are fully programmed and — most important — fully supervised.
Our baby boomer parents had bigger families, and divorce was more common. We have smaller families, spend more time with our kids and tend to marry later and stay married.
The longer I live, the more I realize that the story I told about my childhood is not the Generation X norm. I was blessed with an intact, loving family. I lived in a safe neighborhood. I was fortunate in my friendships — they were great kids who also came from great families.
The older I get, the more I’ve heard the other stories from Generation X — of young girls harassed and molested when they were isolated and alone, of young boys brutally bullied day after day after day. The consequences of childhood anarchy can be far more grave than skinned knees or even broken bones.
In that context, helicopter parenting isn’t paranoia — it’s a parent vowing, “My child will not have to face what I faced.” The free-range childhood wasn’t all sweetness and light.
It’s not just that our families were more likely to be fractured by divorce. I grew up in safety, but that was hardly the universal experience. Generation X, it turns out, grew up in an era that was far more violent than our own. Yes, there were irrational fears (think of the satanic panic, for example, or the fear of kidnappings by strangers), but one reason the irrational fears took such a hold on us is that they were often buttressed by very real, very negative experiences.
In 2024 a study done by Phillip Hughes and Kathleen Thomas from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, found that there are generational differences in what they call adverse childhood experiences. Generation X was more likely to endure adverse childhood experiences than baby boomers, and Generation X was most likely of all modern generations to experience an adverse childhood experience with sexual abuse.
While some adversity is healthy for kids, serious adverse events in childhood can have lifelong consequences. As Robert Putnam points out in his indispensable book, “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,” severe early childhood adversity, often experienced by working-class kids, can create long-term disadvantages. There is, obviously, such a thing as too much pain for children, and many of my friends and peers crossed that threshold when they were young.
If Newton’s third law of motion is that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, then its cultural corollary is that every extreme is answered by an equal and opposite extreme. We enjoyed extreme freedom, and now many of us impose extreme control.
But extreme control also has costs. As I’ve written before, my generation’s parents feared the corrupting influence of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. We are raising a much more sexless generation that is instead beset by anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation.
We protect kids from physical bullying only to watch as they endure psychological warfare on social media. We corrected for the absence of adult influence by micromanaging their lives to such an extent that our kids are conditioned to appeal to authority figures for help whenever they encounter emotional discomfort.
Our protective instincts have helped make our kids anxious and sad, and now we’re looking for another change. Haidt, for his part, argues for the return of the play-based childhood. That means less travel ball and more free play. That means less time on screens and more time outside.
Crucially, that also means kids should spend less time with adults. And that includes their parents. As Lenore Skenazy, the author of a book called “Free Range Kids: How Parents and Teachers Can Let Go and Let Grow,” argued in a compelling TED Talk, parents should back off a bit.
I strongly agree with Haidt and Skenazy. We’ve gone too far. Our kids are too controlled. But if we reverse course and liberate kids again, doesn’t that mean we’ll simply swap the new problems for the old problems? That the next generation will roam free, suffer bullying and abuse and then revert to hovering over their kids the same way so many of us hovered over ours?
My generation has learned two harsh lessons. As kids, we learned that independence without safety and stability can lead to profound harm and even abuse. As adults, we learned that safety and stability without independence can foster anxiety and depression. But there is a third lesson to learn: There is no need to swing to either extreme.
I don’t agree with helicopter parenting, but we’re too hard on helicopter parents. Many millions are reacting against the worst elements of their childhood, pouring time into their kids so that they don’t suffer from the same traumas, the same loneliness and the same sense of abandonment.
In that sense, our kids’ anxiety is a side effect of our intense love — especially when intense love leads to intense caution that deprives kids of the independence that builds confidence and self-reliance. But the answer doesn’t lie in replicating the anarchy of our own upbringing.
Instead, it’s worth considering another way, where a greater degree of independence becomes an element of our careful, intensive parenting. Less time together can yield greater resilience, but only when our kids also know that we are always there when their needs are at their greatest.
In that formulation, the home becomes both a launchpad and a landing zone. We endeavor to create a solid home base even as we swallow our anxieties and fears and let them roam — a bit more each year, until they’ve grown fully into the freedom they need.
Think of the story that started this newsletter. The magic of my childhood wasn’t just in my freedom, though I loved my freedom. The magic was also in that dinner, or — more precisely — in that home. It was in parents who loved me, a sister who was also a close friend, and in the security that nothing could shake our bond.
Some other things I did
My Sunday column took a look at what we can learn from two of the silliest controversies of 2025 — the weeks of right-wing outrage that a few online leftists objected to a Sydney Sweeney ad campaign and the volcanic anger that erupted when Cracker Barrel, a regional restaurant chain, adopted a new, “woke” corporate logo:
On one hand, it feels ridiculous to write about Sweeney and Cracker Barrel — after all, I’m writing this column at the same time that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is waging a reckless war against the foundations of our nation’s public health. But these incidents are important because they’re illustrative of the way the right sees the world, and they demonstrate the new right’s theory of power.
If you had to sum up the mission of right-wing media in a sentence, it would be: Democrats are weird, humorless and evil, and they want to destroy your way of life. No distinction would be made between the Democrats and the far left — anything that any far-left activist does is automatically attributed to the Democratic Party — and so the Democratic Party has to answer for anything the far left does.
Sometimes right-wing media can highlight genuinely troubling extremism and intolerance. It has closely covered antisemitism on college campuses, for example, and there have been several genuinely disturbing and intolerable incidents.
But if there’s a conflict between telling the truth and stoking outrage, time and again, the right chooses outrage.
The cardinal example, of course, is participating in Trump’s fundamentally dishonest campaign to overturn the 2020 election, but there’s something profoundly dishonest about even the Sweeney and Cracker Barrel stories. There was no actual groundswell of opposition to Sweeney. There was no evidence that Cracker Barrel’s redesign was “woke.”
It’s also fantastical to claim that the restaurant is somehow committed to “gay race communism” (an odd position for a private company that’s obviously trying to fix its declining stock price and reverse its diminishing net income).
The process of stoking outrage has another effect: It crowds out the news cycle. Most Democrats I know would be shocked at how little the average Republican knows about Trump’s actual conduct and his actual wrongdoing. Republicans can, however, cite chapter and verse about left-wing outrages and left-wing overreactions to Trump.
That creates a reality where they simply can’t conceive of how any reasonable, rational person would vote Democratic or oppose the president and his policies.
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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