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Childhood's job is independence
Why childhood exists
Every mammal is born totally dependent on its parents or other caregivers, and the whole purpose of the juvenile period is to become independent. Humans have a longer juvenile period than other mammals because there is more information and more skill to acquire.
Children seem to carry this knowledge in their DNA and their brains, starting in infancy. By two, a favorite word is no, and so is the insistence on doing things themselves when a parent wants to do them for them.
How it changed
In the 1950s and into the 1960s, parents understood this. A five-year-old who wasn't walking to school alone was a problem, and parents encouraged children to get out and start doing things independently.
Now children are treated as children into their late teens and sometimes into their 20s, and adults actively keep them from taking responsibility for their own lives.
Why do humans have such a long childhood?
Humans take longer to reach maturity than any other primate, and the extra years coincide with a large brain that continues developing after birth. Anthropologist Barry Bogin has argued that childhood is a distinct stage of human life, falling between weaning and the juvenile years. Humans are weaned earlier than the great apes, which leaves a stretch of years when children can eat but still depend on adults for food and protection.
Why do toddlers say no so often?
Developmental psychologists treat the toddler's refusal as a sign of a growing sense of self. Erik Erikson, in his stages of psychosocial development, named the period from roughly age one to three autonomy versus shame and doubt. Toddlers at that age discover that their choices can change what happens around them, and they test it constantly.
How did children's freedom to roam shrink?
In 1971, the Policy Studies Institute's Mayer Hillman and colleagues found that most seven- and eight-year-old children in England went to school without an adult. When they repeated the survey in 1990, the share had dropped to a small fraction, around one in ten. The report was published as One False Move, and it showed the change within a single generation.
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