Everything Our Kids Can’t Do: We’ve Bubble-Wrapped Children So Much They Can't Even Function
sergey novikov | Canva Americans have confused thoughts about their teenagers. They tend to believe that these humans with developing “frontal lobes” (often the phrase) must be protected from every bit of decision-making.
They cannot figure out how to get to school, or how to use a mobile phone well, or decide if they need to go to class, or what their schedule might be, or how to consume alcohol, or even how to participate in a non-adult-coached athletic activity. And yet, they must be “held accountable” with “real consequences” for being late, or skipping school, or (gasp!) being intimate in a place where they’re barely allowed to choose to protect themselves.
Or, and I have said this since I was a police officer years ago, the only way someone under 25 can be sure to be treated as an adult is to commit a crime. An old friend, a county sheriff’s deputy, once told a group of university law enforcement students that “No one under 25 should ever go to adult court. We say all the time that their brains are not fully developed. If that’s true, they’re not capable of adult self-control.”
In other words, our kids are incompetent fools, incapable of being responsible, and yet we hold them responsible
Seems fair? TLDR, but I think this matters. Then, of course, we add generational slander:
“The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents,” screamed the Fortune magazine headline for an article by Sasha Rogelberg, a late Millennial who graduated from high school in a Charlotte, NC community where the median household income is over $113,000 and the median home price is $675,000, spent seven years as a student at Bryn Mawr College (total cost of attendance this year: $90,000) and more at the University of Pennsylvania ($95,612).
She now writes articles blaming contemporary technologies for the apparent failure of everyone younger than herself. (I’m picking on her because these theories almost always arise from people who have grown up in the most privileged environments: Jonathan Haidt, Scarsdale, NY; Matt Richtel, Boulder, CO; Paul Tough, an elite private school kid from Toronto, etc.)
I had to reflect on this again after a few arguments on LinkedIn regarding student freedom and technology. If you want to fight teen “phone addiction,” the answer is freedom, not bans, which contain these paragraphs: “This school does not currently ban phones — in fact, kids can use their phones to order drinks from the school’s barista bar in the morning. (Their orders are delivered to the classroom)
“I watched kids in many classes. There were phones everywhere, but rarely were they in use, beyond an occasional 30-second check. In one class, a “catch-up” math class, every student had a phone in front of them; many had food with them (the school serves breakfast multiple times a day), but both eating and phone use were entirely appropriate. Kids glanced at their phones, took a bite of food, and went right back to their calculators or work on paper. “It looks exactly like morning in any adult workplace,” one observing teacher commented. "Isn’t that what we want to teach them?"
I also noted: “This high school has seven-minute intervals between classes and is organized around a central cafeteria that serves as the circulation space. During those seven minutes, hundreds of students gather in the cafeteria with no obvious supervision. As we watched, we never saw more than two phones in use.
What we saw instead were kids talking face-to-face, enjoying each other, and being the kids we want them to be — so they can become the kind of adults we hope they will be.” and “This high school lets kids choose where to sit, lets them eat when they want, gives them significant control of their schedule, and treats them with respect.
It was a good school, but having all faculty conduct empathy interviews with at least two students brought a transformation in adult beliefs, turning it into a great school. All of this allows kids to be with each other, talk to each other, and perform the real work of adolescence, the building of successful lives and communities for their future.”
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This proved incredibly threatening to certain educators: A social science educator from Maryland’s wealthiest county was sure this was a unique environment that could not be replicated: “What school is this? Because it’s safe to assume, based on the description, that it doesn’t represent the vast majority of public schools in the US. And that renders your post wholly illegitimate as a policy recommendation for the nation’s schools as it relates to cell phone bans.”
When I answered that it was a school in a classic Upper-Midwest working-class community (54% free lunch, $53,000 median family income, $149,000 median house price, edge suburban/rural community outside a struggling post-industrial city), they were still looking to explain why their school in a rich Washington, DC suburb couldn’t accomplish the same.
“Is it a public school or is it a charter school?” they demanded to know. I said that this was a simple, basic public school with a long tradition of having a learner-centric, adolescent-enabling environment.
And a “Head of School” from a San Francisco private school (High School tuition: $53,550, New student fee: $2,000) was also certain that their students were incapable of handling this freedom.
“Children and teenagers need boundaries and rules to feel safe. All people do. I’m sure the unlimited food and DoorDash-like classroom delivery at this school are awesome (and incredibly costly! Who’s paying for this?). Adults still have to teach children and teenagers how to be responsible with phones. I don’t know where this Utopia school is or what caliber of student goes there, but it isn’t your average public or independent school, believe me. I’ve been in a ton of them, and students (and their parents!) need to have phones stashed away, collected, and turned off for the sake of their developing frontal lobes.” (Gotta love the head of a $ 53,000-a-year school demanding to know how a public school manages to get its kids food.)
Notice, in both cases, these educators were claiming that what I’ve observed at this high school, or in high schools from rural Virginia to lower-income urban Las Vegas, in rural and urban Kentucky, in public schools and democratic schools, would be impossible for their kids — and that their incompetent, untrustable kids are the norm.
That is sad. But, since what we know usually determines what we believe, it is not surprising.
A detour to emphasize the point I'm making
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For several years, I would take 25 or so teachers from Virginia to New York City to see the World Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science. This was an incredible reallocation of resources. Instead of sending central office administrators to multiple conferences each year, we shifted those funds to cover the costs of exposing teachers to radical new learning environments.
And nothing was more eye-opening than our weekend studying informal learning. This was wall-to-wall professional learning. On our train ride north, we challenged the teachers to imagine lesson designs around everything from how our trains were being powered, to how the bridges and tunnels were constructed, to what this trip would have been like in 1775 or 1861.
The next morning, before the Fair began, we took learning tours of the city: how people learn in Times Square, at the New York Public Library, at Macy’s, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in Prospect Park, at Coney Island. In other words, focusing on learning, literacy, mathematics, history, and communication in real life, because you should never design a system of formal education without a deep dive into how humans learn informally.
Usually, a conversation would unfold as we got on the subway early on a Friday morning:
A teacher would say to me, “What are all these kids doing on the subway now?”
I’d answer, “They’re going to school.”
“But some of them look like they’re twelve.”
“Some are; they’re going to middle school.”
New York City kids very often travel to distant secondary schools, and they do that on their own, using mass transit.
And then the teacher would say, “Our kids couldn’t do that.”
What would you say to that? I would say, I did say, “Of course our kids could do this. Our kids aren’t any less intelligent. They’re not less capable. But we’ve never expected them to do it, and so we’ve never helped them learn to do it.”
The basic truth is this: our kids become who they can be, and who we allow them to be
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If you treat them with complete disrespect and treat them like prisoners, they will be that.
The Gothamist, March 24, 2026: “It’s Tuesday in New York City, where students say permission to use the bathroom has taken an Orwellian turn at more than 150 New York City public schools. New digital hall passes, called SmartPasses, allow teachers to more closely monitor where and for how long a student has gone to the bathroom, making it easier to “disrupt bathroom meetups.” But some students are up in arms over what they see as an expansion of the surveillance state.”
Up in arms? No duh, as they might say. “‘It’s taken micromanaging students to a whole other level,” said Shokhjakhon Samiev, 18. “We’re here to educate ourselves, not learn how to use the bathroom, right?”’
The Civil Liberties Union understands: “It’s just creepy,” Johanna Miller, director of education policy at NYCLU, said of SmartPass. She warned that it would “inevitably turn a student into a product and turn a student’s behavior into a long-term record that is exploitable, hackable, and can be used against the kids.” Because, you know, everything that’s recorded is used against kids, and every kid knows it. Every adult does too, but in the interest of absolute control, they choose to forget it — until it’s used against their child.
But why do people diss their kids? Why do they claim their kids are incapable of even the most basic things?
There are a few reasons. It might not be their intention, but it does let adults off the hook. They don’t need to change anything they do; they need not reflect on their practices; they need not learn anything new themselves. If kids are just savages or simply stupid in Sasha Rogelberg’s vision — think of the way Lord of the Flies is usually taught — then expectations for parents and school adults drop to zero.
But the bigger reason remains that for many people, for most Americans, the frame of reference is brutally narrow. If you’ve never seen anything different, you don’t know anything except the beliefs of those who rule over you.
I know that once you observe recess at an Irish primary school, without any adult supervision, you should think differently about kids’ social skills. Once you’ve watched a K-5 classroom or a high school where kids use phones appropriately, you should imagine what’s possible where you work. Unfortunately, seeking excuses is easier.
I do have an advantage: I attended a public high school’s “alternative school” that took a couple of hundred of the most problematic kids and gave them maximum freedom, because maximum freedom forces maximum responsibility. As our lead teacher wrote, “That sage, [x] (also a non-classtaker, by the way) once said, “The 3Is isn’t a program. The 3Is doesn’t have a program. You can do whatever you want.” [x] did.
And he discovered what anyone discovers when he/she can do what he/she wants. T. H. Huxley, a 19th-century biologist and teacher, said it well: “A man’s worst difficulties begin when he can do as he likes.” He added, “Now you may not be able to do exactly as you like, but even if you could, you wouldn’t be satisfied. The problem with doing whatever you like is that, first, you have to discover what that is.
That’s a real problem. And further, assuming you do discover what you want to do, how long will it be before you don’t want to do it anymore and recommence the search? Partial definition of a human being: a creature who is chronically dissatisfied (see Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents).
Nevertheless, [x] was at least partly right — 3Is is less a program than an opportunity. Admittedly, one that has its limitations. Probably because the restless fires of youth no longer flame in me (wow), I don’t mind the limits much, but am thankful for the opportunity.” ([x] turned out to have a 50-year career at The New York Times.)
What I learned in that school was that you always have an excuse for failure when someone else has all the power, but when you have the power, it’s all on you, and you better get it together.
When we first built out a K-5 learning space for 130 kids and six teachers, it worked magically from day one
Giulia Squillace / Unsplash+
As the principal said on the first day, “It’s heaven.” Kids became amazingly independent learners and peer teachers. Visitors, though, could not see it. “They all just came back in and started working on their stuff,” a visiting superintendent said. “No teacher said a thing.”
When I said I’d seen this before in peer-regulated multiage classrooms, the visitor said, “It wouldn’t work in our schools.” I had to wonder why. He was observing a very high-poverty school with dozens of languages and students from an international refugee center. What, I wondered, could be wrong with his kids? This went on and on.
Visiting school administrator in one of our high schools: “You let your kids eat and drink everywhere?”
Me: “Yes.”
Visitor: “But what about the garbage?”
Me: “We put out trash bins; our kids know how to use trash bins.”
Visitor: “Our kids couldn’t do that.”
Visitor to a middle school: “You don’t have any bells?”
Me: “No.”
Visitor: “How do they know when classes begin and end?”
Me: “The same way everyone at a college does. They all have clocks in their hands.”
Visitor: “That wouldn’t work with our kids.”
Visitor to a 9th-grade cross-curricular space for students who struggled in 8th-grade: “They can sit anywhere they want? Any way they want?”
Me: “Sure, that’s pretty much our rule for all kids.”
Visitor: “Don’t they fight over the best furniture?”
Me: “No, we never see that.”
Visitor: “Our kids would fight.”
Visitor to a middle school mechatronics lab: “You let them use all these power tools?”
Me: “Yes,” they get checked out on them, then they’re free to go.”
Visitor: “But kids don’t follow rules.”
Me: “Kids don’t follow rules that make no sense to them, but if you say, “If you don’t do this right, you’ll cut your hand off.” They do follow the rules.”
Visitor: “Our kids wouldn’t.”
It all sounds funny in the telling, but bubble-wrapping our kids isn’t funny at all
Children and adolescents read adults well. And children and teens only really trust adults when that trust is reciprocal. When you tell kids that you don’t trust them, you create a generational war you will not win, or will only win with brutality.
And you miss out on what our teens can do. This week, I saw a wheelchair for a kindergarten student built by students from the local, rural high school. The kids had seen the student and had heard the teachers’ frustration that the girl could not be lowered to floor level to interact with other kids. So they designed, engineered, 3D printed, and assembled a height-variable wheelchair.
When kids are trusted, when they are freed, they do incredible things. I’ve seen this so often, with every kind of kid in every kind of place. Incredible feats of engineering, acts of empathy, effective political persuasion, and incredible community accomplishments. I think you should let your kids do those things.
Ira David Socol has been an NYPD officer, a special educator, a school technology and innovation director, and the author of five books and many articles. He consults nationally and internationally with schools and educators on progressive education and universal design.
