Clinical reflections following Newstalk's Kids Clinic

I joined Newstalk's Kids Clinic this week to discuss a question I am asked, in some form, in almost every clinical assessment I conduct: why are today's children presenting with anxiety symptoms at a rate and intensity previous generations did not experience?

The segment was prompted by Arlene Harris's piece in the Irish Independent, which argued that the 1970s generation was raised with a capacity to cope that many children today are not developing. The clinical evidence supports this concern, and it is worth examining why.

The Independence Gap

The shift in children's independent mobility over the past two generations is well documented in the research literature. Children today are not permitted independent outdoor freedom until nearly two years later than their parents were at the same developmental stage. In an Irish context, a 2024 national survey found that 68% of parents do not allow their child to walk or cycle on roads unsupervised.

This is not a minor cultural shift. It represents a significant reduction in the volume of unsupervised, self-directed experience available to a developing child — experience that, from a neurodevelopmental standpoint, is not incidental to healthy development. It is foundational to it.

The Japanese Model: Tōkō Tsugaku

On air, I drew attention to Japan, where the independent school commute — known as tōkō tsugaku — is treated not as a risk to be managed away, but as an expected developmental milestone. It is common to see elementary school-aged children in Japan walking to school, or running errands, entirely unaccompanied.

What is clinically significant about the Japanese model is not simply that children are given independence earlier. It is how that independence is structurally supported by the surrounding community:

• Parents map and file a fixed route to school with the school in advance

• Younger children travel in organised neighbourhood groups led by older pupils

• Local volunteers, often older residents, are scheduled to watch over key points on the route

Independence in this model is not a withdrawal of adult oversight. It is a redistribution of it — from one anxious parent to an entire community acting in concert.

The Neurodevelopmental Case for Resilience

Resilience is frequently misunderstood as an innate trait — something a child either possesses or lacks. Clinically, this is inaccurate. Resilience is a constructed neurological capacity, built incrementally through repeated exposure to manageable, age-appropriate challenge.

Each unsupervised experience — navigating an unfamiliar route, managing a disagreement without adult intervention, tolerating boredom without immediate rescue — contributes to the development of risk judgement, self-regulation, and adaptive coping. Remove these experiences systematically across childhood, and a child does not become safer. They simply reach adolescence and adulthood without the regulatory architecture that manageable risk would otherwise have built.

This is consistent with what the research literature describes as the overprotection-anxiety cycle: overprotective parenting restricts a child's opportunities to develop coping capacity, which is associated with elevated anxiety in the child, which in turn reinforces parental overprotection. The cycle is self-perpetuating in both directions.

A Note on Risk Perception

It is worth stating plainly: the perceived increase in risk to children does not correspond to an actual increase in risk. Crime rates affecting children have, on the whole, fallen since the 1990s. What has changed substantially is parental exposure to worst-case scenarios, via a media and information environment that did not exist for the previous generation. Parental anxiety in this domain is, in many cases, a rational response to an irrational information diet — not a failure of parental judgement.

Clinical Recommendations

• Apply graduated independence rather than a binary all-or-nothing approach to autonomy

• Recognise that micro-freedoms — ordering food independently, choosing a route, managing a minor social conflict — build the same regulatory pathways as larger freedoms

• Monitor parental affect at points of separation; children are highly attuned to caregiver nervous system states and will calibrate their own anxiety accordingly

• Consider community-level interventions — walking groups, supervised routes, neighbourhood schemes — rather than placing the full burden of risk management on individual families

In clinical practice, the children I see presenting with the most pronounced anxiety symptoms are rarely those who have faced genuine difficulty. They are, more often, the children who have never been permitted to encounter any. The 1970s child was not raised by superior parents. They simply accumulated more practice — practice we would do well to reintroduce, deliberately and collectively, as Japan has done.

Ollwyn Moran M.Ed. | Founder & Clinical Director, CogniClinic

Specialist neurodevelopmental assessment and therapy — Sligo · Dublin · Cork

hello@cogniclinic.ie | cogniclinic.ie