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Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

Kids growing up in close-knit communities where the social ties are thick are more protected from the harms of the phone-based childhood.

Building on the country’s long-standing associational spirit, which Alexis de Tocqueville had praised in the 1830s, the extensive civic cooperation and institutional trust developed in the Progressive Era, and solidarity spurred by the attack on Pearl Harbor and the four-year national struggle against Germany and Japan, Americans had extraordinarily high levels of social capital in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. Kaplan isn’t part of the generation we’re most concerned about, but as sociologist Robert Putnam observed in his 2001 book “Bowling Alone,” the disintegration of communal life in the United States began in the 1960s as fewer adults attended religious services and civic engagement fell. This can help us understand — beyond differences in parenting — why most secular teens across the political spectrum raced into the virtual world more quickly and stayed online longer than their religious conservative peers: They were searching for a community many felt was missing from their lives.

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