Where do the children play?

Summary

I don’t remember the first time I held a machete, because I’ve never held one. Most members of the BaYaka — a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers found in the Congolese rainforests — probably don’t remember either, but for different reasons. Early memory has its limits. Among the BaYaka, picking up a machete is developmentally akin to language, walking, and chewing solid food.So goes a BaYaka childhood. Children wander the forests in packs. They climb saplings and bathe in the rivers. They conduct day-long fishing trips: their parents glance toward them as they organize themselves, then let the kids go on their way. A few months ago, an anthropologist named Gül Deniz Salalı documented these dynamics in a brilliant documentary (linked below), which I cannot recommend highly enough. To our eyes, their lives are utterly strange. We shouldn’t forget how lucky we are to live in a time where we can see such wonders from the comfort of a chair. But the BaYaka childhood isn’t a novelty. As I’ll discuss shortly, it is probably the norm for our species. And that means something has gone terribly wrong in the West. Consider some statistics on the American childhood, drawn from children aged 8-12: 45% have not walked in a different aisle than their parents at a store;56% have not talked with a neighbor without their parents;61% have not made plans with friends without adults helping them;62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult;63% have not built a structure outside (for example, a fort or treehouse);71% have not used a sharp knife;Meanwhile, 31% of 8-12 year olds have spoken with large language models. 23% have talked to strangers online, while only 44% have physically spoken to a neighbor without their parents. 50% have seen pornography by the time they turn 13. In physical space, Western children are almost comically sheltered. But in digital space, they’re entirely beyond our command; and increasingly, that’s where children spend most of th...