“The land of the free”? An appalling new study finds most American parents confine children to house arrest
Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| May 2026
Where are children and teenagers supposed to be? Not online. Not out in their communities. If they sat in a lotus in their rooms chanting ohm all day, legislators would ban that.
Generation Z is right — Americans, stop having kids. That issue is raised by the Institute for Family Studies damning new report, “High Tech, Low Play: The Life of American Children.” It is inciting the usual moronic anti-youth media distortions divorced from what it really shows.
The IFS’s latest study follows its February 2026 survey of 24,000 parents of 40,000 children/teens, “Resilient Children, Struggling Parents.” That initial report reached a revolutionary conclusion: parents who want to “raise their children to be independent, free-spirited” and “resilient” must actively DEFY American “cultural norms.”
Great conclusion! The problem: American grownups, especially authorities, fear and hate “independent, free-spirited, resilient” young people.
So, what American “cultural norms” are preventing healthy, challenging youth from growing up? Two stand out.
House arrest. Social media bans.
The IFS reports – stunning indictments of American adulthood because they let the grownups speak for themselves – highlight the percentages of children/youth whose parents do not allow them to walk, bike, or drive outside their homes, yards, and immediate neighborhoods: 98% of 5-year-olds, 98% of 12-year-olds, 73% of 16-year-olds.
In fact, very few parents allow grade-schoolers to leave their house or yard – and 44% similarly confine their 12-year-olds to literal house arrest.
Maybe the parents answering the IFS survey are grossly exaggerating to conform to social norms to “act tough.” But if the survey really reflects how repressive grownups have become, then those concerned for emerging generations must hope children and teens are sneaking out and bravely gaining experience with the larger world beyond their yards.
America’s natural laboratory shows what we do does not work. American adults are monumentally messed up more than any other on earth.
CDC, FBI, Census, and related statistics consistently show our 25-29-year-olds, 30-agers, 40-agers, and 50-agers – the grownups with supposedly developed brains and maturity, the controllers of wealth, families, institutions, politics, power – are exactly the ones setting horrific global records for wildly excessive drug and alcohol overdose, criminal behaviors, gun violence, domestic violence (including killing our own children), suicide, violent death, and political extremism.
Of course, American authorities aren’t about to tell us that. The IFS is gentle on the grownups. Its report only asked parents’ (not kids’) opinions about “kids today.” It never broached tough subjects like parental abuses, addictions, severe mental troubles, and violence – unlike the Centers for Disease Control’s 2023 survey that found three-fourths of teens reported experiencing at least one of these serious grownup household abuses and adversities, half suffered 3 or more, and one-sixth suffered 5 or more in their homes.
A huge part of our failure to solve basic social and health problems is authorities’ constant search for powerless scapegoats to blame.
As grownups get worse, so does the scapegoating
The ban on teens in public accompanies legislation to ban teens under age 16 (18 is next, then 21) from going online.
The ban-teens-from-social-media lobbies fantasize that children and teens will miraculously give up their keyboards and screens (something their own elder generations didn’t and don’t do, spending dozens of hours a week staring at TVs and gabbing on phones) and pour out into the healthy, safe parks and playgrounds to frolic.
Yeah, right. You think the panic over teens being online is crazed (as this substack repeatedly documents)? Just look at the daily ragings against “teen takeovers” – which means any group of Black youth in public in which someone does something that would be perfectly tolerated if they were older adults. I’ll be looking at what police statistics show about these “teen takeovers” and who’s really causing crime in a later substack.
No, the American grownups’ unspoken ideal for middle-schoolers now, older teenagers soon, and young adults within a few years is no exploring, no unsupervised time, no expression, no independence, no socializing, just 24-7 adult and government surveillance by older generations whose failure to manage their own lives is the root cause of the youth problems they complain about.
Demagogues fervently claiming to “protect children!” demand their banishment from online experiences – which, complementing public life, are beneficial to growth and adaptation – because they might encounter a porn image or an insulting message or a remote predator contact on their screens.
It’s the same mentality as the joint police/politician/media crusade to demand bans on all teens in public spaces because a few might cause trouble – a standard of collective guilt adults don’t apply to ourselves (our higher crime, drug, and violence rates are individual problems).
These repressions converge in the demand that children and teens be confined to the very families and established institutions proven to inflict by far the most abusive and dangerous real-life physical, personal endangerments, like churches, schools, sports, youth organizations like Scouting, police custody, and, especially, families.
The IFS’s findings really argue for radically expanding youth access to varied settings. So, naturally, they’re being grossly distorted by culture warriors to justify banning teens from everywhere. That’s their real ideal.