Why Our Kids Can't Play the Way We Did

This morning I woke up thinking about Laura and Luca, after last night I wrote Laura her first message in the capsule, pretty late, and after that I held Luca on my belly. Or more precisely, his little belly rested on my big belly. That's a more accurate way to put it. I was thinking about how, over the years, society has evolved, and I was thinking about their childhood and how it will evolve, and at the same time about my own childhood.

And I was wondering why the world has changed, why the world has evolved so much, and why I have the feeling that nowadays children can't be happy anymore, can't play the way they used to play. I remember that in the early '90s, all we did was stay outside. We didn't have any other activity we could or couldn't do predominantly. We were outside, mostly playing with a ball, interacting and relating to other kids. Yes, probably we didn't always want to play with everyone, but as a group of kids who'd gather from all over the apartment block, we always found someone who had a ball to play with.

That was the most important thing. Why? Because when he had to go home, when his parents called him inside, everyone lost the ball. The game ended for everyone. Anyone else might have had to leave, but that one was essential. And in the evening, when our parents called us back inside, most of the time they'd stick their head out the window or onto the balcony and shout for us to come in. It's gotten dark. They couldn't even see us anymore, in the dark. But there was no question of us not being safe, or of them needing to control us, to know exactly where we were.

Nowadays, those times are gone. They just don't exist anymore. And unfortunately, the reality we live in today is completely different from what it used to be — and I don't think it can ever really come back. What my generation had, and the generations before us, isn't something we can realistically get back today. Even if it were somehow possible for Laura, say, or Luca, to play outside and stay out late at night playing football, I don't think I'd feel safe letting them do that in today's world.

Another element of this shift is that sometimes I feel like kids don't know what happiness even is anymore. They have a distorted reality, some strange standards by which they measure themselves. I see this with Laura. Laura is four years old and goes to kindergarten, and she already worries whether her little dress is straight, whether it's wrinkled, whether it's pretty enough. Because I think the little lady got her first dose of dopamine the moment one of the kids complimented her dress. Just as she was pretty shaken when someone told her that the t-shirt she was wearing was ugly.

Now, I'm not saying these are unimportant things, but I don't remember my parents bothering much if my feelings happened to be hurt by remarks like that. So I honestly don't remember that ever happening. So either these values have become more important and we're paying more and more attention to them, or kids have become more and more sensitive. It's probably also a byproduct of how social media has taken over our lives — they no longer know how to relate to things.

And I see this, I notice it, in the patients I have at my practice. I see young people who, from the outside, looking at it objectively, have a beautiful life, have parents who support them, back them, cognitively, intellectually, are on a good path to accomplish something, and yet somehow they crack under pressure. They have the feeling that something isn't right, they're depressed.

And I see them — I see them come into the practice, I see how depressed they are, I see how they try to make sense of certain symptoms, certain problems, that wouldn't even register for someone in my position, for example. I wouldn't have had problems like that a few years ago, and I think this is just the beginning of the serenade. I think in the coming years these psychological problems — depression, anxiety, social isolation — are only going to get worse. Because people have become more isolationist. Before, everyone talked to everyone. Here in France, where we live now, this trait is pretty strong — though I don't think it's tied to any one country. Yes, some countries are more isolated, more reserved than others, but I think this phenomenon is happening everywhere: people are less and less willing to have meaningful interactions with strangers on the street, precisely because of certain things they see on social media or in the news, in one form or another.

More and more often you end up at 60-70-80 years old, alone, withdrawn, without friends, and depressed. And I have patients who are alone. 80 years old, alone, with one granddaughter she sees three times a year. Other than that, the granddaughter isn't involved in her life, out of fear that she might end up living with her, being responsible for her, having to take care of the old lady once she can no longer take care of herself.

And so it makes me think that in a world where everything is digitized, cultures like those in Latin America, maybe Spain, maybe certain Asian countries, even India — where children continue to take care of their parents and grandparents, where multiple generations live under one roof — might become more and more appealing, simply from the standpoint of social and psychological wellbeing.

And I was wondering, when did it happen — the thought I woke up with this morning is actually the curiosity of when did this shift take place, from playing together in the evening without hesitation, to sitting alone, introverted, anxious around other kids, and having to schedule playdates with other parents just to play together. And if that was the evolution over 40 years, basically one generation gap, what will that evolution look like in 30 years for Laura, Luca, and the generations that come after them? Probably it won't end well.

And the question is: if we've truly identified this problem, how could we fix it, how could we repair it? Because if we sit down and look at the core of it, the main issue is that our children have fewer and fewer social interactions. And because of that, it creates a whole pile of frustration, anxiety, stress, depression — because they don't interact enough with other kids, and they don't hear often enough that their t-shirt is ugly. So the one time someone finally does say it, it lands like a crime against humanity. It's a situation they can't relate to, don't know how to interpret, don't know what to do with. The same goes for when they do manage to get an hour or two to play with someone — most of the time, they don't even know how to interact anymore.

The days when we'd go outside at 4 or 5 in the afternoon and not come back until 10 or 11 at night, after playing with all the kids in the neighborhood, are gone. But those were the moments when we, as kids — my generation, the '80s — built real skills: how to interact, how to discover the world around us, how to trust the people we interacted with. And nowadays, that no longer exists.

So my question is: how do we get these experiences back for our children, and give them a development, a growth, as close to normal as possible? Even biologically, as a species, we weren't built to be solitary beings. The way we interact, the way we feed ourselves — going all the way back to our earliest tasks, gathering food, hunting — all of it had to be teamwork.

So this morning I was trying to figure out whether this is a problem of lack of teamwork, whether it's a communication problem, or maybe a problem of self-confidence. Honestly, the truth is I still don't have an answer. But I think this is the direction we need to reflect on going forward — to try to clearly identify exactly what the problems are in this chain, and to see, somehow, whether in the world we live in today, in the society we live in today, we can find a solution to problems like these.

Colmar, July 17, 2026, 13:00