My dad still tells the story of how, at age seven, he was sent to walk to the local shops in Melbourne to pick up the milk and the paper for his mother. Alone. Crossing roads. Carrying the change in his pocket. It wasn’t a special occasion. It was Tuesday.
Today that errand would, in some places, get a parent reported. In 1962 it was just what kids did.
I find myself, as a new father, sitting with the contrast a lot. My parents were born in the 1950s and grew up across that long, slightly rough stretch of childhood that ran through the sixties and seventies. Their generation was the last one to absorb a particular rule almost universally, before the cultural pendulum swung hard the other way.
The rule was simple. The world was not going to soften itself to fit them. Adults had their own problems. Figuring it out was the assignment.
That rule, internalized before age ten, produced a kind of self-reliance that’s become genuinely rare. And the more I look at how parenting has changed in the decades since, the more I think modern childhood, for all its good intentions, is engineered to prevent that exact rule from being learned.
This isn’t a “back in my day” piece. There were real costs to how that generation was raised, and I’ll get to them. But there’s something psychologically important in what they absorbed, and naming it honestly might be useful for those of us trying to figure out how to raise the next set of kids.
What the unspoken rule actually taught
Most parents in the sixties and seventies were not running their kids’ emotional lives in any detail.
Children played outside in mixed-age packs without supervision. They got hurt. They worked it out. They came home when the streetlights came on. Conflicts with other kids were resolved between the kids, not mediated by parents. Boredom was the kid’s problem to solve, not the parent’s job to fix. Disappointment was something you cried about briefly and then got over.
If you skinned your knee, your mum would clean it up. She wasn’t going to ask how you felt about it.
The rule wasn’t cruelty. Most of those parents loved their kids fiercely. The rule was a particular framing of what childhood was for. Childhood was a training ground for adult life. The job of childhood was to learn how to handle things. The job of the parent was to keep you safe enough to survive while you learned, not to remove all difficulties from your path.
Compare that to today. There’s a strong case to be made that contemporary parenting in much of the developed world has shifted toward the opposite framing. The job of childhood is now, in many circles, to be happy and emotionally regulated. The job of the parent is to monitor, mediate, and intervene whenever discomfort arises.
In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and First Amendment scholar Greg Lukianoff coined a term for this shift. They called it safetyism, defined as a culture that treats safety, including emotional safety, as a sacred value, often at the cost of resilience and the willingness to engage with difficulty. Their argument, supported by significant data on rising youth anxiety and depression, is that we’ve trained a generation of kids to see discomfort as dangerous rather than as a normal part of being alive.
The kids of the sixties and seventies were taught the opposite. Not because their parents had a theory about it. Because the cultural water they swam in assumed it.
The research on what we lost
This isn’t just nostalgia. There’s a growing body of developmental research on what happened when we systematically removed independence from childhood.
A 2023 paper by psychologist Peter Gray and colleagues, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, made a direct case. They argued that a primary cause of the rising mental health crisis in young people is the decades-long decline in opportunities for children to play, roam, and engage in activities independent of direct adult oversight. Their data on this is striking. In England, the percentage of elementary-age children allowed to walk home from school alone dropped from 86% in 1971 to 25% in 2010. The trajectory is similar across most developed countries.
What got lost in that decline wasn’t just freedom. It was the slow, ordinary accumulation of experiences in which a child encountered a problem, no adult was available to fix it, and the child figured it out anyway. Those experiences, repeated thousands of times across childhood, build something that no parenting book can substitute for.
Gray’s term for what they build is psychological resilience. The internal sense that you can handle things. That when something is hard, you’ll find your way through. That the world isn’t an emergency, it’s just life.
The kids of the sixties and seventies got that resilience installed by accident. The cultural setup did the work. Their parents weren’t unusually wise. They just hadn’t been told that hovering was the job.
What this looks like in the people I love
Watching my parents now, in their seventies, I notice things about them that are quietly different from people my own age.
They handle hard situations without making a production of them. When something goes wrong, they don’t seem to need anyone to validate that it’s wrong before they get on with dealing with it. When they’re hurt, they tend to absorb the hurt, address what can be addressed, and move forward. They’re not stoic in some cold, repressed way. They’re warm, expressive people. They just don’t seem to have been taught that every difficult feeling requires an audience.
My mum once told me that when she was eight, her dog died, and her father told her, kindly but firmly, that this was sad and that she would be okay, and that was roughly the extent of the emotional processing offered. She doesn’t tell that story as a complaint. She tells it as a statement of fact about the era. And she’d say the same thing now, at seventy. It was sad. She was okay. She got on with it.
Compare that to a lot of my own generation, myself very much included. We’re more emotionally articulate than our parents. We’re more willing to talk about our feelings. These are real gains and I won’t dismiss them. But we’re also, on average, more fragile. More likely to spiral when things get hard. More likely to feel that a setback is somehow proof that the universe is broken.
I’ve talked about this before but the trade-off between emotional articulacy and practical resilience is one of the more interesting tensions in modern psychology. The sixties-and-seventies kids weren’t articulate about their feelings. They could, however, handle a lot.
We’re articulate. The handling part has eroded.
The honest costs of how that generation was raised
I want to be careful here, because there’s a temptation in writing pieces like this to romanticize a kind of childhood that had real downsides.
Plenty of kids of the sixties and seventies absorbed the rule too cleanly. They learned that needs were a burden. They grew into adults who couldn’t ask for help, who suppressed their emotions until those emotions came out as ulcers or alcoholism or affairs, who treated their own kids with the same emotional unavailability they’d received. The mental health field is full of older men in particular who would have benefited enormously from someone telling them, at age six, that their feelings mattered.
There were also kids who needed protection that they didn’t get. The “let them figure it out” ethos failed badly when what a child was facing wasn’t just a skinned knee but bullying, abuse, real distress. The cultural assumption that adults had their own problems sometimes meant kids didn’t get the adults they needed.
So I’m not saying that generation got it right. I’m saying that one specific psychological gift that came with that era, the gift of self-reliance built before age ten, is the thing modern parenting is now organized around preventing.
The right answer is presumably some integration. A kind of childhood where kids feel emotionally seen and supported, and where they’re also expected to handle a great many things on their own. Where parents are warm and attuned, and also clearly not running their kid’s life as a project to be optimized.
That kind of integration is harder to engineer than either extreme. Most cultures end up overcorrecting in one direction.
What my dad understands that took me decades to learn
When I was struggling in my twenties, working a warehouse job in Melbourne and feeling totally lost despite having a psychology degree, my dad gave me one piece of advice that I didn’t appreciate at the time.
He said, “Stop trying to figure out the meaning of it. Just do the next thing.”
I remember being mildly annoyed by this. I wanted insight. I wanted depth. I wanted the existential conversation. He was offering me the working-class wisdom of his own father, which was that life is mostly composed of doing the next thing, and that meaning tends to follow action rather than precede it.
It took me about a decade to understand that he was right.
There’s something the kids of the sixties and seventies absorbed about action over rumination, about getting on with it, about not letting the analysis paralyze the doing. It’s not anti-intellectual. Plenty of them went on to read deeply and think carefully about their lives. But they had a base layer that prevented the thinking from becoming a substitute for living.
A lot of my own generation, raised on therapy-speak and constant self-monitoring, has gotten stuck inside the analysis. We can describe our patterns endlessly. The doing is harder.
The Buddhist version of this
Eastern philosophy hits this same insight from a different angle.
There’s a teaching in Zen, often attributed loosely to various masters, that goes something like: before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. The point is that the activity of life is the practice. There’s no level of insight that exempts you from showing up and doing the next thing.
The kids of the sixties and seventies, without ever encountering this teaching, often lived a version of it. They didn’t expect their lives to be cleared of obstacles. They didn’t expect their feelings to be managed by others. They woke up, did the next thing, and trusted that meaning would emerge from that doing.
This isn’t a particularly comfortable philosophy for modern wellness culture, which is built on the premise that with the right practices, the right tools, the right insights, life can be optimized into something smooth. The older view is grittier and, in my experience, also closer to true. Life is mostly difficult. The skill is in handling it well, not in eliminating the difficulty.
Final words
If you have parents or grandparents who came up in the sixties or seventies, ask them sometime about what their childhoods were actually like. Not the highlight reel. The ordinary stuff. What they did after school. How conflicts with other kids got handled. What happened when they were upset.
You’ll probably hear a version of what I’ve been describing. A childhood that was rougher around the edges than what we’d accept today, but that produced a particular kind of adult who can handle things.
If you’re a parent now, the question worth sitting with isn’t whether to go back to that model. We can’t, and we shouldn’t. The question is whether we can extract the gift, the training in self-reliance, without inheriting the costs, the emotional unavailability and the failure to protect kids who needed protection.
I don’t have a clean answer to that, and I’m wary of anyone who claims to. What I do know, watching my parents, is that the rule they absorbed before age ten gave them something most of my own generation had to spend years in therapy to slowly construct in adulthood.
The world isn’t going to soften itself for you. Adults have their own problems. Figuring it out is the assignment.
There’s a hardness in those sentences. There’s also, if you sit with them long enough, a kind of freedom. You stop waiting for life to arrange itself in your favor. You start handling what’s in front of you. The handling, over time, becomes its own sort of competence, and the competence, over time, becomes its own sort of peace.
The kids of the sixties and seventies got handed that peace early, often without anyone meaning to give it to them. The rest of us, raised more carefully, are mostly trying to find our way back to it.
