#121. "Free Range” Offline and On - by Peter Gray

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#121. "Free Range” Offline and On<br>But what do I really mean by "free range"? How do we keep kids safe enough?

Peter Gray<br>Jul 17, 2026

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Dear friends,<br>A few days ago, a friend sent me a link to this little article, from the online publication Streamline. It is the best very short article I’ve seen yet summarizing my view about children’s needs to be online as well as offline in today’s world.<br>The article prompts me to think about the concept of “free range kids” as applied to both offline and online freedom. I was one of the founders of the nonprofit organization, Let Grow, some years ago, along with Lenore Skenazy (author of the book Free Range Kids) and two others.<br>From the beginning, Let Grow has been dedicated to creating more freedom for kids to play and explore independent of direct adult control and monitoring. In founding the organization, we were focused primarily on children’s outdoor freedom. Over decades, but particularly beginning in the early 1980s, adults added ever more restrictions on children’s abilities to play and explore freely outdoors. My research and that of others (e.g. here and here) had shown that such restrictions were likely major causes of increased rates of anxiety, depression, and even suicide among young people over this period. With such control and overprotection, children and teens were (and are) not learning how to take control of their own lives and deal with the inevitable bumps in life’s road. Because they were (and are) being treated as fragile, they were (and are) to some degree growing up fragile.<br>More recently, however, public alarm has been raised about the dangers to children of online behavior. There is a clear similarity between this alarm and the alarm raised around 1980 about the dangers to children outdoors. Let Grow was developed to mute the alarm about outdoor play and exploration. Now, how would it respond to the alarm about online play and exploration? Are the dangers online so much greater than, and so much different from, the dangers outdoors that we cannot or should not apply “free range” principles to the former?<br>A popular belief today is that kids’ heavy use of smartphones and social media is a major cause of an increase in kids’ anxiety and depression beginning around 2010. One group of people who do not share that belief are the scientists who have been researching the relationship between kids’ technology use and mental health (see, for example, here). Research has continuously disputed the idea that there is an overall clinically meaningful causal relationship between kids’ uses of smartphones or social media, or screens in general, and their mental health.<br>In previous letters I have described multiple lines of research evidence countering the idea that smartphones or social media are a major cause of kids’ mental health decline since 2010 (e.g. here, here, here, and here) and supporting the idea that increased pressures for superficial adult-judged “achievements” in school (especially with the advent of Common Core) and elsewhere were major causes of those declines (e.g. here, here, here, and here). I elaborate on such evidence much more fully in my new book, Restoring Childhood, to be released September 15.<br>Children are growing up in the digital age. The digital world is as much a part of today’s “real world” as is the physical outdoor world. That is not going to change. It’s only going to become more true. To grow up well today, children must learn how to navigate both worlds, which requires that they be able to play and explore in both worlds. To deprive children of freedom in the digital world is no less constraining on their development than is depriving them of freedom in the outdoor physical world.<br>What I want to do in the rest of this letter is elaborate a bit on what the concept “free range” means to me, as applied to children’s outdoor and online freedom.<br>“Free Range” Does Not Excuse Adults from Preparing Kids for Potential Dangers

Dangers exist both outdoors and online. We do not do children a service by denying them the opportunity to explore in both spaces, nor do we do them a service if we deny or blind ourselves to the dangers in both spaces. We do them a service by letting them know, in respectful ways, what the dangers are and by providing respectful suggestions about how to deal with them. We help children in their “free-range” explorations also by being on their side, showing that, if they tell us about unhappy encounters, we are not going to punish them by removing some aspect of their treasured freedom, but will listen respectfully and enter into a discussion about how to manage such encounters.<br>In the 1950s, when my parents (more specifically, my mother and grandmother) allowed me great outdoor freedom, they prepared me for such freedom. They warned me about traffic; about the dangers of chasing a ball into the street;...