There is a stubborn image in my head of kids in the 1960s congregating in doorways and on pavements exchanging small ruthless verdicts about each other and then getting on with the day. It was messy. It was loud. It was often unfair. And it trained people in a set of social muscles that feel, to my mind, under-tended today. This is not a nostalgia piece that softens the past. It is a reckoning. The way 60s kids learned to be with others without screens created patterns of attention and habits of repair that are instructive for parents educators and anyone who cares about how humans connect.
The apprenticeship of attention
Kids in the 1960s lived in a braided world of family neighbours and immediate public spaces. That braided world demanded different kinds of attention. You learned to listen because gossip mattered and because adults would call you out for not noticing. You learned to wait your turn because opportunities were physically limited. These constraints were not simply lack of resources they were a curriculum.
Practice through friction
Where digital life offers curated interaction friction in the 1960s taught negotiation by accident. I remember a story told by a neighbour who as a child argued over a swing and lost the argument only to find a new friend later when they bartered a comic swap. The argument did two things simultaneously. It taught the child how to tolerate being wrong and it taught them how to repair a relationship in real time. That repair was visible awkward and clumsy and yet strangely effective because it had to be. Modern digital lives often let us hide our repairs behind edits and deletes.
Rules were learned in public
Social rules were not handed down in manuals. They were learned in the presence of people who would show displeasure or delight. You failed in front of witnesses. That social exposure was an economy. It taught children that their immediate environment mattered and that reputation could change by small acts of generosity or cruelty. It was trial by communal feedback. Today reputations are co-curated by algorithms and private audiences yet we pay less attention to the small immediate cues that sharpen empathy.
The grammar of bodily nuance
Someone born in the 60s will often tell you they learned the language of faces and hands before they learned to code. Micro gestures were not a background detail they were the grammar. And learning that grammar happens slowly and through iteration. It is not taught in an hour long class. It is earned through repetition. You squinted at someone you loved and noticed the way their shoulders fell and you filed it under later use. Phones dilute this grammar by flattening signals into text and reaction icons.
Even very young children are the best learners and they do it in record time and with very little teaching.
That line from Alison Gopnik is a useful corrective. The skills we call social are not rarefied traits. They are learned. They thrive in messy environments and with modest adult guidance. Gopnik’s research reminds us that children extract patterns from everyday life and that the patterns you give them matter.
Workplaces of play not apps of instruction
Play in the 1960s was a workplace. Children built economies with marbles or sticks negotiated leadership with small rituals and enforced rules that stuck. It wasn’t gamified by design it was self-organised. These informal governance structures trained conflict resolution, persuasion and a healthy dose of humility. Today many digital spaces simulate these dynamics but they do so with invisible rules and unpredictable incentives. The result is often faster escalation and less effective repair.
Long arcs of accountability
In those old neighbourhoods people lingered. An insult had a shelf life you could see. If you behaved badly you encountered the same faces the next day and sometimes for years afterward. That continuity created an incentive to moderate. Online interactions too often lack that visible continuity which encourages impulsive gestures and then swift disengagement.
Every time you check your phone in company what you gain is a hit of stimulation a neurochemical shot and what you lose is what a friend teacher parent lover or co worker just said meant felt.
Turkle’s warning lands hard. What we substitute for immediate attention is often novelty. It is seductive but shallow. Deep social skill requires absorption not intermittent reward.
What 60s kids had that we can recover
There is no quick transfer from a 1960s street to modern life. But there are recoverable practices.
First the practice of accountable visibility. Make interactions that matter visible to the actors involved. Second the patience to see relationships as slow forming. Third the apprenticeship ethos where older people do not only lecture but work alongside younger people in ordinary tasks. And fourth the tolerance for small public failures because those failures are where the learning happens.
I am not arguing for a return to an imagined utopia. I saw real harm in the old structures too. They excluded they policed and they hardened certain hierarchies. But within that roughness there were learnings that modern design has forgotten: how to sit with boredom how to repair a rift without swiping how to notice someone else’s defeat and do something about it.
Not everything old was good and not everything new is bad
There is nuance here. Screens gave voice to people who were previously unheard and opened new ways of organising. But they also restructured attention and outsourced certain social practices. The question then becomes an active one. What practices do we intentionally design into childhood today so that the human material of attention confidence and repair is still cultivated?
Small experiments that are not fads
Try replacing one family habit with a communal public moment. Instead of private instant updates create small rites where the family or group must be physically present and silent for something mundane and then respond. This reintroduces practice in a low stakes setting. Or in schools create roles whose worth is visible beyond points and badges. Make children responsible in ways that require them to look at each other’s faces not just icons.
These are not prescriptions that will fix everything but they are practical interventions that assume social skills are crafted not merely inherited.
Final reflection
There is an honesty in the 1960s that matters. It was unromantic and often ugly. But it forced attention and required repair. We can recover that honesty without abandoning the real gains of technology. It starts by believing that attention is trainable and that public repair matters. If you accept that then you also accept that the design of childhood matters more than the brand of device in the pocket. The rest is practice and patience.
| Key Idea | What It Looks Like |
|---|---|
| Apprenticeship of attention | Learning to notice through repeated messy interactions. |
| Practice through friction | Conflict and repair happening in visible public spaces. |
| Long arcs of accountability | Shared communities where reputation matters across time. |
| Recoverable practices | Rituals that require presence roles that require empathy and visible responsibility. |
FAQ
How exactly did kids in the 1960s learn to read social cues better than today?
They spent more hours physically near a variety of people and less time with mediated signals. That proximity meant more iterative exposure to facial micro expressions voice modulation and body language. Learning was distributed across daily chores playtime and neighbour interactions not confined to a lesson plan. This repetition hardened certain habits of attention which are useful later in life. It is not absolute superiority but different conditioning that produced different strengths.
Are screens the only reason modern kids struggle socially?
No. Screens are one factor among many that include changes in family structure urban design and schooling pressure. Screens are distinctive because they alter attention rhythm and allow for different levels of editability in social performance. The combination of these features magnifies certain behaviours such as boundary erosion and impulsivity but other structural forces are equally important.
Can schools teach the missing skills directly?
Yes schools can design curricula that focus on tangible social practices not just theoretical instruction. Role based tasks apprentice models and community accountability can be integrated into existing timetables. The key is to make the learning public repeated and consequential rather than an abstract lesson evaluated by a test.
Should parents ban devices to encourage these old style skills?
Banning alone is unlikely to create durable skills. What works better is substituting alternative practices that require presence and visible repair and then supporting children through the awkwardness of learning them. The aim is to cultivate attention not merely to punish distraction.
What is one small habit to try this week?
Create a brief evening ritual where everyone in the household shares one small failure and one small kindness from their day without screens. Make it short and routine. The ritual gives repeated low stakes practice in noticing expressing and repairing which over time accrues into social competence.
That is the hard edge of the lesson from the 1960s. None of it was tidy. None of it was marketed. It was learned through repetition friction and the shadow of other people who both corrected and applauded you. We can borrow those features while keeping the good of modern life. We just have to do the work.
