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With some exceptions, children’s lives in the United States and other developed nations have become more intensely surveilled over the last 30 years, thanks to the intensification of parenting, the spread of surveillance technology in schools, and increased restrictions upon children’s use of public space. Yet childhood scholars argue that children’s autonomy and self‐efficacy are important not just as basic human rights, but also because they help children improve coping skills, learn better, and, and become trusting and trustworthy. Existing scholarship, then, might predict that trends of heightened surveillance negatively impact children’s well‐being. Instead, contemporary children are doing better, as measures of abuse and assault, physical health, educational achievement, and other outcomes attest. Given childhood studies scholarship, how do we understand children’s decreasing autonomy and increasing well‐being? We call this puzzle the “paradox of constrained well‐being.” We explore four possible explanations: stratification of childhood, safe bondage/risky freedom, mental‐health‐as‐SOS‐signal, and mental‐health‐as‐harbinger. Presenting evidence, we evaluate the capacity of each to explain the paradox of constrained well‐being. We conclude by suggesting all four have considerable purchase, and that our penchant for easily measurable and reportable metrics blinds us to the costs of constraints on children’s agency, liberty, mental health, and equity.

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This paper addresses a misreading of Willis’s Learning to Labour within the American sociology of education, arguing that his central theoretical move, the treatment of cultural production as autonomous from social reproduction, has been neglected. Willis’s concepts of differentiation and integration extend dominant cultural approaches to racial inequality in education, theorizing how youth’s oppositional countercultures emerge through conflict with the institutional logic of schools. However, Willis’s theorization must be extended to account for race in addition to class and gender. Using black working-class boys in American schools as a comparison case, this paper argues that race alters the temporality of differentiation, with black boys perceived as noncompliant and disruptive by teachers prior to participating in high school oppositional countercultures. In response, black boys develop strategies of integration, managing their cultural performances to re-establish the terms of the educational exchange. These strategies may help facilitate class mobility for black youth.