My uncle fell out of a mango tree at nine and broke his arm in two places. Nobody sued the tree. There was no incident report, no family meeting, no follow-up email. He got a cast, a scolding, and a month later he was back up the same tree, only better at it.<\/p>\n
I thought about that last week when a friend sent me a photo of her son\u2019s new school playground here in Bangkok. Rubber flooring. Every corner rounded. A climbing frame roughly the height of a kitchen counter. It looked less like a playground than a very expensive apology.<\/p>\n
And she wasn\u2019t wrong to want it. That\u2019s the part that makes this worth writing about.<\/p>\n
Some difficulty beats none<\/p>\n
The usual story about the generation raised in the sixties and seventies is that they were hardened by hardship. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s quite it. The more interesting claim is that they were tempered by ordinary difficulty, the low-grade, unmanaged, nobody-is-coming kind.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s research pointing this way. A large longitudinal study by Mark Seery and colleagues at Buffalo and UC Irvine tracked a national sample over several years and found something counterintuitive: people who had lived through a moderate amount of lifetime adversity<\/a> reported better mental health than people with a lot of it. Fair enough. But they also reported better mental health than people with none at all.<\/p>\n The shape of the finding is a U. Too much difficulty flattens you. None at all leaves you untested. The middle is where people seemed to build something.<\/p>\n Seery was careful about this, and I will be too. It\u2019s correlational. You cannot randomly assign people terrible childhoods to check. But he made a point I keep coming back to: they studied major adversity, and there\u2019s reason to think smaller, more mundane experiences do similar work.<\/p>\n What actually disappeared<\/p>\n Here\u2019s where it gets concrete. In 1971, researchers in England found that around 80 per cent of seven and eight year olds were allowed to get to school on their own. By 1990, in the follow-up study<\/a> by Mayer Hillman and his colleagues, that figure had collapsed to 9 per cent.<\/p>\n Nine per cent. Inside twenty years.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not a story about trauma. Walking to school is not a hardship. It\u2019s a story about a thousand tiny problems that used to be a child\u2019s to solve. Which route. What to do when it rains. How to handle the older kid who wants your lunch money. Whether to say something or keep walking.<\/p>\n