Toy Story 5: The Truth About Kids, Screens, and Loneliness

Toy Story 5 is billed as a battle of Toys vs. Tech, but that’s wrong. Not only do the two sides end up working together (lives there a Toy Story where they don’t?), tech is not the root problem.

Tech is just a bad solution to a bad situation: Extreme childhood loneliness. 

The movie stars 8-year-old Bonnie, a child without any friends to play with. She does, however, love her old-school toys and boy do they love her. It’s a great relationship – toy-meets-girl — but she’s alone, at home. 

Bonnie is too wracked by social anxiety (or maybe it’s just good old-fashioned shyness) to ask the kids next door to play. But it’s not all on her. Those kids hop out of a car when they get home. They’ve obviously been ferried door to door someplace by mom or dad, and they quickly scamper inside. No one reappears with a scooter, bike, or ball.

Bonnie’s toys spy on the kids and see them, blob like, on the couch, scrolling. The problem is thus presented: Kids are isolated, thanks to tech. But that’s a bit unfair. Yes they are stuck on their screens. But the truth is they’ve been stuck inside for more than a generation, thanks to the original fun-blocker: adult fear. 

That fear got jumpstarted in the 80s when missing kids’ pictures appeared on milk cartons without an asterisk explaining, “I was most likely a run-away, or taken in a custodial dispute between my divorced parents.” Stranger danger – especially kidnapping – was and remains incredibly rare. 

Eating Rice Krispies with these pictures made it feel like letting your kid leave the house on their own was like sending them off to ‘Nam. And despite a crime rate today that is lower than it was in the 80s, that fear just has not let up. When a Harris poll last summer asked parents what was likely to happen if two 10-year-olds played unsupervised in the park, literally 50% replied: They’d be abducted. (True fact: If you WANT your kids to be abducted by a stranger how long would you have to keep them outside for this to be statistically likely to happen? 750,000 years. It just is NOT common.)

Gradually it just became expected that an adult would always be supervising kids outside. Since most parents don’t have their afternoons, weekends, and summers free to do that, childhood shrank beyond recognition. 

The classic article, “How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Four Generations” compared how far an 88-year-old great grandpa was allowed to go on his own – 6 miles – with how far his great grandson, age 8 (just like Bonnie), can go: 300 yards from the front door. 

That article was published in The Daily Mail on June 15, 2007.

The iPhone wasn’t launched until sixteen days later. 

My point is that children’s independent, exciting, play-outside lives were disappearing long before it was normal – or even possible — to give a kid a smartphone. So taking away tech will not, in itself, bring back afternoons filled with neighborhood fun and friends. Those were already gone. 

In Toy Story, the parents are so desperately sad for their disconnected child that they allow her to get an iPad, er…”Lilypad,” hoping she can meet friends on it.

Of course, this proves disastrous to the Toy Story toys, who are ignored, and to Bonnie, who ends up bullied online. It looks like tech is ruining her life. And in a couple of truly poignant scenes, we see tablets glowing from every room in every house in the neighborhood. But that’s at night, when kids usually wouldn’t be outside anyway.

What we don’t see is the simplest way to combat this problem, which is to re-normalize the idea of kids being outside again, playing at the park, walking to the store, even hanging out at the mall. 

That may sound impossible, but I keep hearing of parents who are just as worried as the ones in Toy Story, making pacts: “Let’s all send our kids outside on Friday afternoons.” “Your kids can ring my doorbell to play if mine can ring yours.” “What if we got the school to stay open for free play in the afternoon?”

The collective problem – kids at home on screens – can be solved by a low-lift, collective solution: letting kids roam without us. It works even better if there’s a central meeting spot – a park or even one family’s front yard – where kids know to go to see who else is out.

Tech is a problem kids are being sucked into. But that’s because they have no place else to go. Roaming is the original escape from the house, from screens, from boredom. When Bonnie runs outside with her hard-won friend at the end, the neighboring twins happen to be outside too – and they run over.

The solution to a tech-centric childhood is right outside the door.

Let Grow here: Love these ideas for getting kids out into the real world, making their own fun! If you’d like more ideas, check out our FREE program, “Four Weeks to a Let Grow Kid.”