Restlessness, Retirement, and Risk-taking
How learning about changes in risk-taking among teens caused me to reexamine my own habits and tune in to my body
About ten days ago, I hosted a community conversation for my high school about Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) had just issued their guidance about phone-free schools in response to Governor Youngkin’s executive order requesting that they develop a model policy.
Media coverage of The Anxious Generation tends to focus on Haidt’s recommendations that schools be phone-free, one of four changes he asserts must occur together to improve the mental health of children and adolescents:
No smartphones until high school
No social media until 16
Phone-free schools
More freedom for children in the real world
As the fourth action reflects, he argues that it is the combined impact of “safetyism” or the overparenting of kids in the real world and the simultaneous underprotection of kids in the virtual world that has led to their increasing rates of anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues.
While I’d heard research about girls and social media or boys and video games before, among the stats that surprised me were ones about the decline in real-world risk-taking among young people—both the tree-climbing or skateboarding kind, and social risks like talking to a classmate you don’t know, navigating conflicts that arise among kids when an adult isn’t there to mediate, or going on a date.
I didn’t have a flip phone in my pocket during my teens, let alone a smartphone, and when home Internet access rolled out after I graduated from college, it was accompanied by the crunching, pebbles-falling-on-metal sound and wait time of dial-up. But I had more freedom than my pockets could hold.
Whether wandering in the woods, turning over rocks in the creek to look for crawdads, biking, dropping from a tree onto my best friend’s pony, or playing made-up games with fluid rules, I spent lots of time with friends, my brother, or on my own without an adult within earshot, let alone close enough to correct or redirect me with a sharp gaze. When I was 10 or 11, Mom drove me to the local hospital to take a babysitting course because I’d started looking after children younger than me.
During the community conversation, I polled attendees about how old they were when their parents first let them venture out on their own without adult supervision. In two-year increments, I offered choices ranging from 5 or 6 up to 15 or 16. Responses ran the gamut. If their experiences aligned with Haidt’s findings, it was the students in attendance who responded 11 or 12, 13 or 14, and 15 or 16, and teachers and parents who responded with younger age ranges. For me, it was 7 or 8.
One data point Haidt offers to support his claim about lower risk-taking among young people is the change in hospitalization rates for unintentional injuries. In 2000, males aged 10-19 had unintentional injuries requiring hospital care roughly three times more often than men their grandfather’s age. By 2018, they had fewer such injuries than men in both their father’s and grandfather’s generations. Statistics about females reflect similar trends, though with less difference between age groups in 2000 and less change by 2018. He attributes this decrease to myriad factors: children spending less time playing outdoors or in free play unsupervised by adults, and the increased attention to safety in playgrounds and youth sports.
How have these cultural shifts influenced me? How has social media shaped the way I envision retirement or what I perceive as a successful one? Travel and leisure get the lion’s share of attention. But what’s hiding behind the curtain? To what extent do posted photos or stories accurately reflect people’s lived experience of retirement? How much has the rise of safetyism or time spent indoors and on screens contributed to my restlessness?
I don’t know about you, but my spirit has grown steadily more restless in recent years. I figured this stemmed from an increasing yearning for some kind of change after three decades in public education and almost two decades in the same school, along with an intensifying desire to retire as more of my friends and colleagues do. But what if that conclusion is wrong? What if my restlessness springs from something else?
Without realizing the decision might have been spurred by reading Haidt’s book, I took an unplanned physical risk earlier this month. I’d signed up for a SpeakUp 5K to raise funds for teen mental health. The CKG Foundation offered participants the option to complete the 5K in a location of their choice rather than traveling to the main event with its fun zones, bubbles, and lively after-party for thousands of runners and walkers. After a busy and peopled week, I chose the remote option. The unplanned risk was deciding to push myself to run/jog the 5K instead of walk.
I couldn’t recall the last time I’d run (1998 maybe?), so I didn’t tell my wife I planned to run, and I chose a quiet park instead of our favorite riverside trail. That way, there would be fewer witnesses if I failed. Running might trigger my intermittent hip pain, or I might trip on the roots that riddle the trails, particularly if I was moving faster than usual—but I still wanted to see if I could do it.
The next morning, I took a selfie at the trail entrance and set off. Winded within minutes, my breath audible as I huffed and puffed, I wove my way through the woods, across creeks, and up and down hills as sunlight streamed through the canopy. My goal was to keep my heart rate above 130 which I did for about 90% of the time, averaging 148, peaking at 161.
Drenched in sweat when I returned to my truck, I felt tired yet happy. I’d slowed to a walk in a few stretches and stumbled on roots or rocks a couple times but covered four miles (a tad more than a 5K) in an hour. My hips, at least at that moment, didn’t hurt much. As physical risks go, it was a small one, but finishing gave me a jolt of satisfaction.
Last week, I was reminded how social risks can deliver a similar jolt.
Annette had designed flyers for two get-out-the-vote postcard parties, the first of which was the next day. As dusk fell, we drove around the neighborhood, striving to deliver as many as we could before dark. Each time I hopped out of the car and walked up to the door of a neighbor I didn’t know (which is most—we’re only on cup-of-sugar terms or closer with our immediate neighbors and a handful more), I felt my heart pounding—and these were doors of folks whose yard signs align with ours.
When it comes to risks, I’m even less of a risk-taker with my “hello” than with my body. But as I kept knocking and talked to people who answered their doors, I felt a heightened sense of presence and purpose.
Listening to Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, a lifelong human rights and peace activist, motivated me to keep taking such risks. I heard her speak on Wednesday during a webinar hosted by the Living Legacy Project as part of their education series Who Knew? - Civil Rights Activists Who Led the Movement from Behind the Scenes.
At 19, after her freshman year at Spelman, Dr. Simmons (then Gwen Robinson) traveled to Mississippi, a place her grandma had warned her about when she was raising Gwen, a place she’d promised her grandmother she’d never go. Thinking she was going there to help organize a Freedom School in Laurel, a place where the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had no existing infrastructure, she ended up unexpectedly leading that effort.
Knowing no one in the community, she and a colleague started knocking on doors. How her heart must have thudded in her ears as she rapped her knuckles on that first door. The woman who answered, Mrs. Euberta Sphinks, looked Gwen up and down, taking in her afro and blue jeans while Gwen fumbled with how to ask for the help they needed (housing while they organized) and asked, “are you one of those freedom riders?” Even though she was in Laurel on a slightly different mission, Gwen said yes.
“I’ve been waiting on you all my life,” Mrs. Sphinks replied.
She invited Gwen to stay in her home, even though doing so in 1964 Mississippi meant risking her job, home, and possibly more.
Compared to the courage of Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons and Mrs. Euberta Sphinks, my door-knocking is miniscule. Will the 250 voters who receive the postcards written at our first postcard party feel more valued as voters and make a plan to ensure they cast their vote even if personal circumstances such as long work hours, childcare or eldercare responsibilities, or physical challenges make that difficult for them to do? I hope so. In the meantime, the list of neighbors with whom we’re on cup-of-sugar terms is longer and I feel more connected to our neighborhood.
As volunteers wrote, told stories, and ate cookies around our table, the topic of aging and physical ability arose. “What does your body say to you?” one person asked.
“My body tells me all kinds of things,” another replied. We all fell out laughing.
My body’s telling me things too. Restlessness is a signal it’s been sending for a while. Many years ago, when I was unhappy in a long-term relationship but unwilling to consciously admit that to myself, my body kept me awake, insomnia its cue that there was something I needed to do. My body knew a truth that my mind refused to accept. Now, I’m reexamining what this restlessness might be telling me.
Virginia is only one of the states that has called for bell-to-bell phone-free schools in response to Haidt’s book and similar research. While I don’t agree with all of his interpretations, conclusions, or suggestions, I share his concern for teen mental health—and I continue to ponder the assertions he makes about safetyism and social media.
My earlier assumptions about my restlessness aren’t necessarily wrong. But they’re incomplete. My reluctance to take risks and the increasing time I spend indoors and on screens are likely contributing factors. Though I don’t anticipate rappelling down a cliff or leading a march, I will strive to listen closer to my body in the weeks and months ahead. I will be my own experiment. What changes will I make? Will those changes calm or amplify my restlessness? I don’t know. But I intend to find out.
Here are two poems for your pocket until the next post: “Climbing” by Amy Lowell, published in 1912, and “Green, Green Is My Sister’s House” by Mary Oliver (2012), published a century later. Toward the end of her poem, Oliver writes, “I try to be good but sometimes / a person just has to break out and / act like the wild and springy thing / one used to be. It’s impossible not / to remember wild and want it back.”
I can’t imagine how it would feel if I had no wild to remember (even if my wild was relatively tame, more aptly named something like free range).
How old were you when the adult(s) raising you allowed you to venture off solo or with siblings, cousins, or friends without adult supervision? Is there a wild you remember? What have you noticed about risk-taking and/or restlessness in your own life? What has your body been telling you lately? Leave a comment below.
Very thought provoking…and maybe even risk provoking! Thank you, Wendy, for this “push,” in thought and deed.
As a risk-averse, non-physical, scared-of-anything-wild person, this hits me where I live. I’m so impressed with your run, especially after not running for years, and especially in Larus Park! The few risks I take these days involve decisions about art and sewing. Thanks for the prod to stick my neck out a bit further.