Give Your Teen Some Freedom on Their Summer Vacation
Most parents say they wouldn’t let their teen wander alone on vacation. But a study shows that declining independence in children could be feeding anxiety and depression.
Would you let your teenager stay in the hotel room while you went downstairs to eat breakfast in the restaurant on vacation? The majority of American parents would not, according to a new survey from the University of Michigan/C.S. Mott Children's Hospital. Only 31 percent say they would let their teenager walk a short distance alone to a café.
The survey also found that fewer than one in four parents were likely to let their teen go to another part of an amusement park without them, or even to a different exhibit at a museum. This was true even though more than half of parents said they track their kids' location by phone.
A family vacation is a great time to make memories and spend time together without being interrupted by soccer practice or homework. Yet I've met so many adults who remember with great fondness the time when they—either with their parents' blessing or otherwise—separated from their families on vacation, many even before they were teens.
Historian Fernande Raine still recalls visiting New York City as a kid and desperately wanting to explore on her own. "I distinctly remember standing with my toes hanging over the pier at the South Street Seaport," Raine told me. "I had tried a million times to get close to that edge, and my parents had always called me back for fear I would fall into the toxic sludge of the East River. Standing there alone with my toes just over the concrete, peering down at the water gave me a sense of power, freedom, and elation all in one as I realized that I could manage my own risk and very consciously choose to not fall into the water." She was only 5 years old at the time.
Needless to say, her mom did not feel that same elation. A cop soon found Raine and returned her to her folks. But Raine credits that experience with helping to ignite a love of world travel and adventure that she feels to this day.
Michelle Berney, a New York nonprofit administrator and mom of three, took a vacation to London last year with her husband and their youngest child, Sam, then age 12. While they were eating dinner, wondering whether they'd have enough time to get tickets to the show they wanted to see, Sam volunteered to go get them.
When Berney and her husband said OK, Sam proceeded to navigate the Underground, get the tickets, and Uber back, triumphant. For him, says Berney, that errand "was the high point of the trip. He felt so independent."
Independence isn't just fun; it's crucial to child development. It's a rite of passage that we've been steadily denying our kids for a generation or two now—with disastrous mental health results.
A 2023 study in The Journal of Pediatrics found that as kids' independence has been going down over the decades, their anxiety and depression have been going up.
"If you always err on the side of restricting their autonomy, not only are they miserable and depressed and rebellious, they're also not prepared to live on their own," says Barbara Sarnecka, a professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Naturally, being unprepared makes kids anxious. They don't know if they'll be able to handle whatever's ahead.
A family vacation could be the perfect time for kids to explore on their own. They're somewhere new, so they can't run on autopilot, and usually they're someplace exciting enough to get them off the couch—maybe even off their phones. Giving your kids some unsupervised time on this summer's vacation can show them (and you) who they are and how much they're ready to handle on their own.
