Vacation season is upon us. But that doesn’t necessarily translate to teens roaming free.
A new poll finds that less than half of U.S. parents feel comfortable leaving their teenager alone in a hotel room while they grab breakfast. Fewer than a third would let their teen walk alone to a coffee shop. And only 1 in 5 would be okay with their teen wandering solo around an amusement park.
Those results, released June 16, are troubling, says Sarah Clark, a public health expert and codirector of the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health, which conducted the survey. Teenagers, she says, need the freedom to develop the confidence that they can navigate the world on their own.
The nationally representative poll surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. parents with children ages 13 to 18. It was conducted by the Mott Poll team at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, which regularly surveys a subset of the 50,000 households in its panel about issues pertaining to parental attitudes and child health.
For years, researchers and policymakers have been sounding the alarm about the limited opportunities children and teenagers have to play and explore without adults around. For instance, children across much of the Western world are less likely to hold part-time jobs or walk or bike to school alone compared with previous generations, psychologist Peter Gray and colleagues noted in a September 2023 review in the Journal of Pediatrics. Other research shows that parents report increasing discomfort with letting their kids engage in risky, unsupervised play.
That loss of freedom coincides with a decades-long uptick in teen mental health problems. But showing that one causes the other has proven difficult because of all the other recent changes to childhood, such as technology use, researchers say.
But it’s clear that squelching childhood independence undermines normal development, including a teenager’s innate need for close peers and intimate partners, says Gray, of Boston College. “It’s absolutely no surprise to me that we are seeing these dramatic rises in anxiety, depression, even suicide among teenagers.”
Vacations present an ideal opportunity for teens to practice independence, Clark says. Parents can plan where to stay to optimize teen freedom. And they can set parameters, such as asking their teen to text when they get to their destination and agreeing on when and where to reconvene. Promisingly, Clark says, two-thirds of parents polled felt confident their teenage children would follow their rules even without them around.
Adults need to flip the script from protecting teens from all dangers to helping them practice life skills, such as riding public transit, knowing what to do when approached by a stranger or ordering a sandwich on their own, Clark says. “If we reach some families and just approach this upcoming summer a little differently, I feel like that’s a big win.”
