When the kids were babies we had the standard debate of move to the countryside for fresh air and gambolling in the fields etc. But so glad we stayed in London, the kids have so much freedom with public transport they can organise their own meet ups and activities and go running around all over town without any parental assistance or intervention at all. Whereas elsewhere we'd need to drive them everywhere, they'd be stuck at home way more, they'd have no real agency in their lives - I grew up like that and hated it.
There's a middle-ground between a big city and full countryside.
I lived my childhood in a place with about 4000 people in it. School, friends and everything else I needed was within walking, or at least biking distance. My parents didn't have to drive me everywhere. Obviously there weren't as many possible hobbies and events as in big cities, but mobility wasn't an issue.
You're more thinking suburban, or super rural. I grew up in a rural Welsh town (~3000 people), and was is walking distance of basically everyone we knew. I walked to school, to the pool, to the shops, my friends, everything.
The other comments already pointed out that there is plenty to do for kids growing up in villages - it's not until they're teenagers that it becomes limiting, really (speaking from personal experience and what I was told by friends who also grew up in the countryside).
Funny that you're talking about having to drive them everywhere though, because the main worry I have as a parent is the impact of car traffic on child safety.
I grew up in a Dutch village of 1500 people, and my parents let me wander about from when I was five, six years old or so. If I still lived there I would feel completely comfortable with giving my child the same freedom (once she's old enough - she's only a toddler now).
The main reason for that is that there is only one road that goes through village. Everything else is a street (see the wiki page on "stroads" for a clarification about the distinction [0]). And anyone driving through the village knows there might be kids playing there.
Contrast that with where I currently live: in apartment block in a city that is right next to a crossing of two stroads. We actually have very nice parks and playgrounds within walking distance. But to get here we have to cross at least one road or stroad. The thought of letting a six year old do that by herself scares me.
On a rational level I'm aware that this is probably my sheltered upbringing and that she will understand the dangers of car traffic better than I did at the age of six because she's growing up in a city, but I can't help but worry that she'll underestimate it until she's a bit older - a voice in my goes "it doesn't matter how often she does do it right, she only has to absentmindedly cross the road and get herself run over once."
I relate to this as the parent I am and the kid I was.
I went to boarding school in the 80’s and 90’s. There were houses, there was the school, the masters, the usual abuses - but there were also the gangs. They’d all have a name along the lines of “The Orcs” or “The Goonies”, and a clubhouse built of scrap and brush somewhere in the woodland attached to the school, usually accessible only by crawling through tunnels of brambles and a hidden trapdoor, and knowing where the tripwires and murderous sash weights were concealed. Most would have a few dozen boys in them, spread over the five years of the school. Younger boys would be skivvies, diggers, and by the time you were 12 you’d be a war chief, and organising and leading raids against other camps. Old pool cover was a particularly sought after commodity during raids - not only did it keep the rain out, but it kept the place warm in the winters.
Outside of term I’d go and saunter around abandoned factories and rail yards near our home.
Anyway. I think they cut the woodland down decades ago to replace it with more playing fields.
That thing, however - that little, tribal community of kids - is very much live and kicking, but non the west, very much no longer in the physical world.
My kid is being raised in a forest - and I’m acutely aware that sooner rather than later she is going to need a gang.
Wait, how old are your kids, that they gallivant around London on their own? Are we talking about teenagers?
Because yeah, I agree with you that in that sense cities are better than the often car-centric countryside for teenagers; but for young kids (elementary school and below, which is what the article covers) it's a very different equation.
I have just done the opposite - left London for the countryside and am currently very much enjoying it. As our toddler gets older it will interesting to see how we deal with the challenges of letting them find their own space.
Cities feel riskier, but in many ways they offer more room to grow. Kids don't just need nature; they need space to navigate the world on their own terms
Curious what age you started letting them ride the tube on their own? I’m in London as well and we’re starting to have the “walk to school” conversation but it is still early days and a 15 minute jaunt so not nothing.
I can relate. Nice article. We had that same debate and ended up moving to the countryside. Surprisingly, it worked out well. + real forests. With today’s e-bikes, even hills or longer distances aren’t really a blocker for kids anymore. In the end, it feels like the bigger factor is how you organize daily life, not whether you’re in a city or in a rural area.
The tragedy isn't just that they're doing this online, it's that it's the only place left. We paved over their physical freedom, then panic when they carve out virtual freedom we can't supervise. And ironically, we moralize their digital behavior while ignoring the real-world conditions that pushed them there in the first place
We literally punish them for loitering around anywhere without paying. Or worse, parents are chastised by authorities if they let their kids try to do something on their own.
We really can't be surprised when we close down society and the youth proceed to find the only space not heavily regulated.
Seriously. I always hated that mall hanging was organized around an icon of capitalism, but we don't even have those anymore (in many places). The US just doesn't consider public space a thing.
I often wonder why I felt so disengaged from school, sports, and real life friendships back in the 2010s. Today, I think I can attribute most of that (and heavily relate to the article) to the freedom of online spaces and the lack of supervision; primarily, Roblox. As long as I kept good grades, no one really never peered into what I did online. It didn't help that I lived in the suburbs in the LA county all my life, so I felt both a "push and pull" toward online spaces.
Even back then, that era of Roblox felt distinct from the platform it is today. Roblox used to have their own bespoke forum page, and each forum "topic" had its own culture and regular users. Hence, it resulted in a lot of tribal behavior and personal identification with said topic label (some players would even make "bunkers" as places, where regular hangouts would happen.)
As a result, familiar faces (usernames) arose, and that's where I met my first and only consistent friend group lasting from middle school to university. Though I haven't talked to them much since.
I did get my programming interest and grew skills from such a creative platform, but I think I'm still reeling from my stunted social growth as well. As I hear about the current generation of schools, I wonder how much worse off I'd be if I had to grow up during the 2020s.
I think this heavily depends on location. At 7 my child can check nearly all the boxes for independent activities. My wife may not like it, but the surroundings are probably safer than anywhere else in the world. The only thing we don’t have is forests.
This is central Tokyo.
Kids still spend a lot of time on Roblox because everyone tends to be deathly afraid of letting them ring each other’s doorbells.
Seeing tiny tiny kids walking around is one of my favourite qualities of Japanese life, and on the flipside I sensed a quiet but shared responsibility/interest everyone took in making sure no harm befell the child on their journey. One the purest luxuries of living in such a high trust society
I also live in Suginami! There's always a lot of kids running around together, especially after school, but that feels quite normal for anywhere in Japan, no?
I grew up in Tokyo-like(maybe less big) Asian cities too. and I can't agree more. I would definitely not be going to raise my kids in the US or anywhere where kids can't go to school on their own and are literally stuck at home. It sounds like systemic child abuse to me.
a bit off but it sometimes feels like a self-reinforcing loop in Western societies:
We have fewer children because we optimize so hard for money, stability, and personal security. But because we have fewer children, each child becomes “economically and emotionally precious.”
And the more precious they become, the more afraid we are to let them take risks, explore freely, or just do their own thing.
The end result is kids who grow up with less independence, less trust in the world around them, and fewer peers out on the streets to learn from.
In a way, our desire for security creates the insecurity we’re trying to avoid — and the cycle keeps feeding itself.
This summarises my thoughts as well. People used to give away children that were too much of a burden. With higher mortality, some were also not expected to make it.
We're in a societal place where we have set the bar high in terms of an expected level of education and quality of life for our kids. kids are expensive and we've grown the population massively. There is also a social stigma associated with having lots of kids in Western countries.
I worry about my kids. But im always fascinated when they stretch the boundaries and show me how resilient they are. So I let them push limits but explain the pros and cons hoping they build their own feedback loops with some sense of perspective.
It's a delicate balance as a parent. I'm consistently fascinated how others parent. It's amazing how changes in parental style can be generational and show how long the changes will take to change.
This is not a standalone loop, it is initiated by external factors which are bigger: De-industrialization of the West, with the social changes it implies (feminism, gentrification, many things including the single-child phenomenon). It will go away if the world changes its equilibrium — maybe with AI — for the better or worse.
What an eye-opening article. I fully agree with the fact that the kids become more and more constrained and having a hard time seeking their freedom and independence.
But perhaps not so everywhere in the world... We are in the middle of Europe and specifically moved to a smaller town outside the big city when our kids were born. We live in a kid-rich neighborhood with only quiet side-streets/walkways and amble play opportunities in a 300 m radius around the house. Our kids roamed the neighborhood playgrounds already at a young age with large groups of their friends. And when primary school started (age 6-7), we were told, that it is recommended for the kids to walk without adults to school after the first two months of settling in. Also, being in boyscouts is an amazing experience for the kids. Our little one participated in a first camp at age 6 for a whole week. I am pretty confident they have/had their "forests" to roam.
The older one now games a lot on the computer with a group of friends. The younger one is almost permanently in video calls with friends when not outside the house. Reading about private digital spaces with peer groups makes a lot of sense now...
I admit that our situation is pretty ideal. And it cannot be generalized, not even for our country or even our region. But we did actively seek an environment, where our kids could grow up this way and were incredible lucky to find one.
> Why do our children spend more time in Fortnite than forests? Usually, we blame the change on tech companies. They make their platforms as addicting as possible, and the youth simply can’t resist — once a toddler locks eyes with an iPad, game over.
> I want to suggest an alternative: digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us
I still think it's the addiction of digital media. I have tried to get my kids to play outside, to visit their friends, etc. They refuse, because they're addicted to the screen. In fact, friends with stricter limits on screen use are more likely to come here looking for my son to play. Outside, or, if they can, on a screen here.
I'm fairly sure the kids from the article can also be made addicted to digital media if you start them young. Let's not, and let's give our kids stricter limits.
I'm trying to raise confident, independent kids. It is exceptionally more difficult to allow them to play outside on their own, walk to the grocery store, etc, for mainly two reasons:
1. There are no other kids outside. We live in a neighbourhood with many young families, at all age ranges (littles to teen). We rarely see kids outside, and if we do, it's mainly kids walking with their parents somewhere (eg to the local grocery store)
This is a walkable neighbourhood 5km from city centre of a city of 500,000. The same applies to other neighbourhoods even closer to the city, those known as "family friendly". I do runs through these neighbourhoods and they are ghost towns.
When my kid has friends over, they can run to the park up the street (600m) and play together. I'm not worried, as they are together. Sometimes other kids will show up and join them. I think it's a sign that kids are inside, not sure what to do: they crave play with others their age.
2. Large, speeding vehicles.
We live in an area where we can walk to a few smaller grocers and restaurants, which is fantastic. My kids only need to cross a local retail strip to get to most of these. The crossing is two car lengths, and I feel pretty good about this. There are bike lanes which act as a buffer to the sidewalk as well and vehicles can't travel fast.
Now if my kid wants to go to their friends house? They have to cross two arterials. These are four lane roads with fast moving traffic, uncontrolled signals, lots of road rage, fast cuts on corners, etc.
My kids are gaining confidence and the skills in navigating these tough roads, but I struggle with the transition to full independence for this particular area. That one mistake can end it all.
My kids are 9 and 5, for reference. The five year old is still attached to me, but the oldest is beginning to crave more independence.
>Now if my kid wants to go to their friends house? They have to cross two arterials. These are four lane roads with fast moving traffic, uncontrolled signals, lots of road rage, fast cuts on corners, etc.
Well why did you choose to live there if you wanted to raise independent kids. Baffles the mind.
When some people see a child without parents in arms reach, they assume the worst and report the situation. Many parents live in fear of being perceived as negligent, and for good reason. There are some real horror stories about parents getting in big trouble for situations no one would have batted an eye at in the 80s. Even if a kid has earned trust and the parent knows the kid would be fine, there is still the looming threat of someone reporting negligence.
If children do not learn independence, they will not be prepared and will carry a lot of anxiety when they need to be independent.
We have indeed traded liberty for safety... I wish I could tell someone that it's none of their business where my 10 year old can walk alone, but someone not too far from me has forcefully been entered into the child services bureaucracy for doing the same thing. Not the pit I want to climb out of. I'd rather hear my child tried to join the circus.
> Consider some statistics on the American childhood, drawn from children aged 8-12: 62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult
At least in the US, my guess for the cause of this is goes something like:
1. Housing is expensive.
2. People move to where housing is cheap (ie plenty of land, easy to build). In the last few decades that's more often than not been in the south.
3. Big population changes in those areas demand more schools.
4. Big school is built on the edge of town, because that's where the land is and one school has better economies of scale than multiple neighborhood schools
5. No one lives close to the school anymore, so everyone has to drive.
Throw in the sprawl that often accompanies new development in areas with wide open land and its easy to see how we end up here.
I live in Brookline, MA (in the North, next to Boston) and it's very much a walk-to-school town. The structural reason for that is our schools are in the neighborhoods, have been around for a long time, and there's nowhere "on the edge of town" to build a new one. Our town has financial pressures like everyone else and I few government's are able to resist the temptation of cost savings---we just don't have the option to build that way. Thank goodness.
Inner city, especially in the oldest and most established, is an outlier experience. My friends on Melrose drive to their schools, and here in Southern NH it's driving or buses.
The main reason I wouldn't let our gradeschooler walk/ride .5 miles to school is a lack of consistent sidewalks and drivers who are constantly distracted and/or road raged.
I feel both unfortunate and lucky to have grown up in a subsidized housing development. In school I was always seen as the poor kid from that "sketchy area", but as a child, this place was a haven for unplanned adventures and low friction hanging outside with friends. All the housing units were surrounded by a large greenspace area full parks, hills, and a community centre where they ran morning breakfast programs and afterschool clubs.
I have countless childhood memories growing up there. All I had to do was step outside and some fun adventure was going to happen among the kids in the area. As online gaming started to become more popular, the area got much quieter. Not sure what it's like now that there's an abundance of online distraction. I do see the social value in online spaces like VR chat though.
I live in San Francisco, about a block from when a speeding driver killed a little girl by driving around the outside of a car that was waiting for a family to cross the road. The family had the light, yes. The killer will attend a driver’s safety course and do some community service.
In general, in this city there are people who call themselves “natives” who promote the idea that children should live highly constrained lives. Others, who call themselves “progressive activists” have fought for the rights of pedophiles to be released early. Unsurprisingly, often such pedophile immediately assault people days within release.
Because of the asymmetry in outcome, those with children slowly cede ground to those without by simply leaving. This feedback loop accelerates until little enclaves start forming. Inside SF this is the Mission Bay / Mission Rock area where today I saw a gaggle of unaccompanied 10-12 year olds. This isn’t a common sight elsewhere in the city where the “natives” and “progressive activists” have sway.
For our part, we have a plan to buy some undeveloped land where we can reliably camp. The current constraints are that maintenance of this in fire-prone California isn’t straightforward. There are minimum standards for defensible space and so on that regulate newer purchases that often require a great deal of time and effort to meet. I’ll find a way, however.
I think that something else changed and should be added to the analysis: the number of children. There are less of them so there are less chances to reach a critical mass that lets kids play together every day. When I was little it was common to have between 10 to 30 of us within the fence of our city building. Parents and grandparents were looking at us from the windows but they were probably hearing us scream and play, a sign that all was good, and we were left alone to do what we liked to do. Where do you find 10 kids together now, if not at a school or in another organized context (organized by adults) ?
Where I grew up, Rural UK, there was a kid my age who lived a mile away. There was noone else for 5 miles. We used to cycle to see each other all of the time, go on adventures. But were always outsiders at school to the kids from areas with more kids, especially those where there was a girl! Another boy moved in once we were older and it transformed our group.
Every other house had older adults in it.
In 1940 you could imagine there would have been many more kids in the local village.
A peer culture needs peers and it's hard to form one when there aren't enough kids around to organically gather and create those little “societies” of play
Walk to the park at the corner, have your child shout a few times, they’ll all pop their heads out of the door at the sound of others playing, desperate to do anything other than sit inside with their parents.
As someone who grew up physically _and_ digitally sheltered, I am grateful for this article. It helped me articulate what I had wanted so badly, to be a kid.
Reading the comments gives me hope that there are still places safe enough and parents brave enough to let their kids run free. I hope to be this parent. And if I’m not, I at least hope I remember how important a digital friend can be for a kid who feels alone.
If you look past the cringey, r/im14andthisisdeep edge, Its essentially saying the same thing. A desire for peer communities not available in the physical world.
Reading the US 8-12 year olds' stats made me flinch, because as someone grow up in the middle east this is inconceivable. I guess I'll dive into rabbit hole about modern-day stats of Europe and other places to compare.
Same phone addiction in Europe as elsewhere. No way to fight addictive stuff. Most parents don’t even try or care. Add tragic demographics and 8-12 year olds are all alone with their phones.
Let’s talk about special school system here in Bavaria (Germany). Kids from specific area go to same school for the first 4 grades. Afterwards they are divided between little geniuses going into „Gymnsasium“, average ones going to „Realschule“ and good-for-nothings going to „Mittelschule“. For the first years kids move between schools and later between classes according their preferred specialization. No way to make friendships when kids come and go. Obviously there is nobody to play with left. Only reliable phone and games there. And nice videos there. Education system actively pushes kids into phones since real connections can’t happen.
I see lots of negativity here. Folks, do you really believe, that throwing a child into new environment every other year is the way to craft friendships in the real world?
Travelling in Japan recently we came across a park where the kids could start fires to roast nuts; play with real hammers, nails and saws; dig holes with proper shovels; climb on all sorts of 'unsafe' structures. Certainly the first time my 2yo had used a hammer and a saw, though she uses secateurs at home and has had a [blunt] knife for quite a while. She loved it and wants to go back.
There's been a destruction of the commons in general, and no place where people are allowed to loiter outdoors without falling under suspicion or actually being arrested. Children are also people. When I was a child, I hung out in the streets all day.
The trapping of children was just the prelude. Adults are also trapped at home, especially when they don't have any money to spend. Even if they do have money, there are no places they can go where they are expected to interact with strangers. The number of adult virgins has gotten absurdly high.
We have a tool that we could use to fight that: adult education. We have state colleges that we could be trying to attract adults to, rather than acting like people are done learning at 22. Chicago had/had a network of "Field Houses" that are community centers associated with parks where you could teach a class, or have a local group meeting, etc.
Instead, people are isolated and atomized into perfect little consumers who can't share things and can't organize politically except through an online petition encouraged by a "social network."
If children were to spend time in digital spaces they should be disconnected from adults (especially the adults who try to prime, turning them into next generation of consumers).
3rd grade, the year kids start at 8 and turn 9 during, is when our city schools will allow them to self dismiss. 8 seems like a reasonable benchmark age to start with.
As an ex-child. The best years I remember are with a small group of kids who would wander all over the suburb playing at different parks, or whatever crazy idea someone came up with, finding bee hives, climbing trees or exploring past the boundary of what we always stayed inside of. They were only a few years, but a major highlight.
Americans think they are free. In reality they are free to do a very limited subset of basic necessity and socialization tasks. You can drive your tank to the the local shopping center, maybe a shooting range. And you wonder why people freak out when you try to take away their guns and trucks.
You are free to travel to some business that has taken care of all the legal requirements for you. Some freedom. You aren't even free to connect some fiber to "your" house you only have the freedom to choose which product to buy and maybe if you are one of the lucky few which product to sell (not fiber though that's a state funded monopoly)
Scary statistics from the US. Here's some anecdotal data from Norway (my daughter being the data, she's 11):
- Walked in a different aisle at a store. My daughter started going to the store alone from she was about 7.
- Talked with neighbours without parent. Uhm. That's just weird. I'm assume she was around 4? That's when we moved here..
- Made plans with friends, yeah, from she was around 5/6 or thereabouts.
- Walked/biked w/o parent: From 6/7, to/from school, and to friends.
- Built a structure outside: She's been part of building various structures in scouts.
- Sharp knife: Since she was about 6 or 7.
And now I realize I need to wag my hands a bit back and forth with all the 6-7 stuff.
Anyhow; one of the best things we did was ensuring she joined the scouts. Creates incredibly independent kids. I've seen threads on reddit where people are wondering if it's OK to leave the 9 year old at home alone for 30 minutes, and I'm wondering what kind of lunacy that is. My daughter has been capable of walking / biking home from school since she was 6 or 7, and proceed to make her own afternoon snack before we arrive home from work. She's been baking since she was 8. Making toasts, omelets and whatnot since the same age. Scouts taught her how to use a gas burner outside when she was about 8 or 9.
The article only discusses the west and hunter gatherer societies. Most of the world is neither. That is a big omission because it avoids the comparison with other developed and urbanised societies.
Plenty of cars in the 90s and we played outside all day.
The biggest change since then is two things.
One is that there’s way more to do inside now, mostly games and shows.
The second is that baseless kidnapping panics convinced society that children can never be unattended. The main vector was daytime TV and now true crime podcasts. The reality is that kidnapping is statistically extremely rare and more than 95% of all child sexual or other abuse is perpetrated by someone the child knows. Most kidnappings are also by someone the child knows.
Are there any studies on people who grew up with similar isolated childhoods in the 20th century (as in modern-day levels, even comparing with the late 20th declining average)? It would be interesting to see the similarities/differences between them and modern cohorts, and if surrounding culture made adult integration harder or easier (though I'm rather pessimistic on that). Any HNer willing to share a personal anecdote on this?
In the US cars jockey for space with guns to claim the title of leading cause of dead kids.
But we often forget that cars kill kids at an astonishing rate -even though kids stopped playing outside-. In that light, the bloodbath that is American suburbia becomes much more clear. When pedestrian deaths go up even as miles walked (in aggregate) goes down, the situation is even more dire than it seems.
My kids play outside. But we moved to the Netherlands so they could. And even here, large SUVs and even -bafflingly- giant American Dodge Rams are becoming distressingly common.
This is an aside. Yesterday I was in a shopping centre (ie a mall) and a bunch of kids ran through the food court, maybe 10 of them all around the 9-12
A grumpy lady shouted at them "kids you shouldnt be running!"
I turned to whom I was eating with and our discussion could be summarised as "kids should be running. The problem isn't they're running, the problem isn't even directly where they're running. Where they're running is a symptom of them having no where else to run"
There was an interesting plot I saw somewhere reversing the old thing about Halloween being the deadliest day for kids by dividing the number of dead kids by the number of kids on the street on a given day. It turns out that Halloween ends up being by far the safest day per capita.
One of the things I like about some of the overseas malls is they have places designated for kids to run around and play. I've even seen that as a common amenity in restaurants (play room).
Yeah well, we have one kid, and we're too old to have another. He's the only grandchild on both sides of the family. He has no cousins, first or second. That's apparently the new normal in many countries.
Of course he's going to live a sheltered life!
It's easy to tell parents to let their kids roam free, but that advice is to copy the behaviour of parents that had ten kids.
I said "had", because on average, two of them will survive to adulthood and procreation. That's natural. That's the way things were for our species for megayears.
Does that make it sad that it's not like that any more?
Maybe. Maybe not.
If you want to change it, recognise that first, society and our very civilization would need to change back to the era of every family having half a dozen or more kids. Then, then you'd have to figure out what to do about the excess population: unsustainable exponential growth or mass child deaths. You choose!
> It's easy to tell parents to let their kids roam free, but that advice is to copy the behaviour of parents that had ten kids. I said "had", because on average, two of them will survive to adulthood and procreation. That's natural. That's the way things were for our species for megayears.
We still roamed pretty free as kids in the 90s. That's long after the decline of childhood mortality and large families - I don't know more than a handful of families from that era who had more than 2 kids.
> I said "had", because on average, two of them will survive to adulthood and procreation. That's natural. That's the way things were for our species for megayears.
Where are you getting that stat? For the majority of human history the childhood mortality rate has hovered around 50% not 80%.
Back in the second century BC if you had 10 children you expected half of them to reach adulthood.
In addition I can't find specific stats but I would wager that the vast majority like 90% of those deaths happened at infancy. So it doesn't really factor in how they would be raised.
And as others have noted. We were free to run around as much as we wanted in the 90s and the average family had like 2ish children.
>our very civilization would need to change back to the era of every family having half a dozen or more kids.
Let's try improving public transportation, making more walkable communities, and encouraging independent exploration first. If those don't work, then sure. We can try the Shinzo Abe initiative to make big families.
Japan has had this issue for longer than the US, but it is not impacted the same way in terms of kids socializing.
Disagree. Kids in Japan go to school on their own since kindergarten. Many of them are the only children of the family. It's not about kids are "more precious" or not
While the point is valid. I believe the experience described is mostly American not "western".
And I find the anti-modernity sentiment embedded in the fascination with hunter-gatherer cultures obnoxious.
Is the author aware that child mortality in hunter-gather cultures is like 50%?
Not that its correlated with childhood independence, we used to have plenty of independence when I grew up in the 90s and the mortality rate was about the same as it is now. But the point is kids need independence, not woods nor machetes. You can be independent in the park, in the streets, the undeveloped lots, the empty parking lots, your friends basement, and their yard when their parents are away.
When I grew up, in the late 80s/early 90s, we'd be outside like 90% of the time. This was in rural northern Europe, and from my memories, parents there just used to send their kids out. The few times we were allowed to be inside, we really had to ask nice.
Outside activities included playing soccer, biking around, exploring places, building stuff.
It is such a huge contrast to my peers / people my age are raising their kids now. Some of the parents are basically hovering over their kids from 7 in the morning to 9 in the evening. It's non-stop.
Well, I think it's fine, building jumbo planes Or taking a ride on a cosmic train Switch on summer from a slot machine Yes, get what you want to if you want 'Cause you can get anything
I know we've come a long way We're changing day to day But tell me, where do the children play?
Well, you roll on roads over fresh green grass For your lorry loads pumping petrol gas And you make them long, and you make them tough But they just go on and on, and it seems that you can't get off
Oh, I know we've come a long way We're changing day to day But tell me, where do the children play?
As a society we find violence or harm against children to be extremely shocking and tragic. As a society we would do almost anything to prevent it.
Giving children the kinds of freedoms discussed in this article would lead to some harm coming to them. Accidents, violence, kidnap, etc.
Therefore, society won't give them those freedoms.
This tendency has been exagerated by mass media in the modern era. Every single case, every piece of anecdata, makes massive headlines and instills the fear into parents everywhere.
It's impossible for society to reverse course because that would mean acknowledging, implicitly or explicitly, that some level of harm for some children is justified by the developmental benefits to all children of increased freedom.
Well, this doesn’t exactly check out when you compare to countries and cultures who already give children these freedoms and have the built environment to support it (transport, walkability, parks/spaces to play, etc). They are not only “just fine”, but their children are generally much more mature and confident (as in skilled), than their Anglo counterparts.
> Giving children the kinds of freedoms discussed in this article would lead to some harm coming to them. Accidents, violence, kidnap, etc.
Not really most of the violence against children originates from adults within and near the family.
The American public has allowed some rare stories that made it to the news and the Satanic panic of the 80s to form their world view.
A survey in 2021 found that 15% of Americans that's 31 million people believed the government was run by Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
To sum up children do face risks of violence and sexual abuse but it's mostly from trusted people in their environment, the risk of some random person kidnapping a child of the street is rather low.
Now given that society has decided to keep children locked away, letting your kid run around is not really a viable option it's a collective action problem.
I think you're onto something here. We do a lot to protect children, but we've outsourced that protection to institutions—police, laws, politicians—rather than building it into our communities. If we had stronger communal networks where neighbors actively looked out for each other's kids, parents would feel comfortable letting them roam. Without that social fabric, we're stuck with a binary choice: either rely on law enforcement to intervene after something goes wrong, or keep kids sheltered at home.
A lot of what's changed isn't parenting instincts but the systems kids are embedded in. Traffic speed, liability fears, school policies, and surveillance culture all push toward zero-risk tolerance. When the background structure punishes normal exploration, parents behave accordingly. Freedom and safety aren't individual traits; they're properties of an environment.
I grew up in one of the metropolitan cities in Asia and I traveled around the city and went wherever I wanted since 6.
And we I knew in the US and maybe European countryside kids r literally stuck at the tiny area around their home r mind blowing.
I would call the system that not letting kids develop their own agency systematically child abuse.
>They noticed that the children liked to roam through bomb sites, where they would build fires and play hide-and-seek.
This reminded me of one of my all-time favorites, the Animatrix. There is a story in this anthology, Beyond, that centers around this exact concept. I still get goosebumps just from reading its Wikipedia entry.
There were reasons for the contrast with Western world. Safety and risk aversion is a major reason. City living means we don't know what the other person on the road is thinking. This was not the case in small villages or tribal settlements. Everyone knows about every move of the others. The whole community is like a single creature with many arms.
The other reason is, prosperity means more affordability to avoid risk and seek comfort. There is no need to take risk, develop, fight for survival or grow up with friction.
> City living means we don't know what the other person on the road is thinking. This was not the case in...
I'd explain it this way: City living means that we don't know the other person, and they don't know us. The affects both driver behavior - 99% of people are more careful driving around pedestrians and other drivers who they know - and our perception of driver risks. "Chris who's always lived at 3rd and Cherry" is not some random stranger, to easily stereotype as a threat. Even if we know that Chris is not a good driver. Because humans are biased to judge members of "their" social group by very different standards than non-members.
If you read a lot of commentary on urban vs rural living, this is usually the top criticism of living in a small town. I've lived in both, and I much prefer knowing my neighbors.
One thing not mentioned is the effect of Covid and lockdowns.
On the one hand, my youngest was just getting into gaming with friends when the first lockdown started. I will be forever grateful that he did as his social life hardly seemed to suffer and he just carried on playing online, shouting and yelling with them just as much as if he was outside at a playground.
My teenage daughters had a much harder time of it though, as neither were into gaming and lost a lot of treasured contact with friends. Both suffered poor exam results as a result and have struggled to stay in touch with friends since.
The other aspect is those babies and toddlers who grew up in lockdown with no peer interaction at all. AIUI, they are still having a terrible time adjusting to school and normal social interaction.
As another data point, my son was 5 when the lockdowns hit and missed the end of his kindergarten year and the entirety of first grade. He's doing fine.
My daughter was 18 months and went back to preschool at age three. She's also doing fine.
In fact I don't know any of their peer group who I would consider to be "having a terrible time adjusting to school and normal social interaction" which could be directly tied to Covid. There were some kids who had already been identified as having developmental challenges, and that hasn't changed.
I don't know how folks did it elsewhere, or what the rules was.
Here, a friend and I created ourselves a "bubble". My family and his family hanged out with each other. My kid was playing with his kid. We went on long forest walks, with the kids, and they could roam and play.
We didn't have contacts with lots of others, and if we did, we stayed away from each other for ~4 days or so, until we shared the same social bubble again.
> There’s no point in whining about the impulses endowed to them by several hundred thousand years of evolution. Don’t hate the player; hate the game. And if you really hate the game, make a better one.
I have contact with kids from 3 different places, 2 with high independent mobility and 1 with low independent mobility, and as much I like to agree that kids needs to be free, there's an important parental argument that needs to be talked about that is risk vs reward function if the kids get hurt.
In places with high mobility (at least 2 of them in the chart) there's some state support in terms of children's sick leave if something happens, plus work protections if you need to be absent for more than 6 weeks, and the education system has mechanisms to not let this kid be left behind (for example, if a kid breaks his/her legs).
In those places with low independence, I talk with some parents, and all of them are scared of the possibility of something permanent happens or something that can demand continuous support during working time; in those cases I can see why they play safe.
In the other hand, another second-order effect is that in those places with low independency, one thing that I noticed is that the motor coordination takes way more time to develop, and it cascades down for instance during sports activities (of the lack of), physical development and so on.
Wait, so you're saying the major factor in the parents decision making on letting kids run free is not if they'll get hurt or not, its if they get hurt enough to miss school and not being able to take off work?
Pretty insightful article, it resonates with what I remember of my experience as a kid.
But while I believe the general trends outlined here, it's important to remember that "the world" != "the West" != "the US", and even within a single country, the situation can be vastly different from one place to another, one socio-economic stratum to another, or even one family to another.
I also think kids escaping to digital places is not a very recent phenomenon, and has been happening for at least a generation. It's just that the platforms have changed. Back in my days, that place was Facebook, and we had entire digital lives there that our parents knew little about. And it's no coincidence that we started migrating elsewhere at the time when the adults started joining as well (though the general enshitification of the platform certainly didn't help either).
When I let my kids have freedom in the various stores we go into, I get nearly instant looks of disgust from people. It's like everybody has forgotten what it's like to be a kid and why that kind of independence is necessary. Socially it's verboten.
> Consider some statistics on the American childhood, drawn from children aged 8-12: 62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult
This is really not representative for other Western countries. Where I'm from, I would say that 75% of 6 year olds walk/bike to school alone, and 100% of older kids do.
> In physical space, Western children are almost comically sheltered.
I think the author should stick with "kids in the USA" when he means that.
> Where I'm from, I would say that 75% of 6 year olds walk/bike to school alone, and 100% of older kids do.
When I was growing up in the 80's in the US, I walked to school alone; but there was institutional support for that. There were adults paid to help kids cross major roads, and there were older children ("safetys") who wore an orange sash, trained and assigned to help younger kids walk to school.
I don't see that same infrastructure here in England. I'd be happy to let my 5-year-old walk to a local school if it were present.
EDIT: To be clear, I said "I don't see...", not "There are no...". It's possible I just haven't noticed, or that it's a quirk of my locality. And, my son doesn't go to a local school, so it's a bit moot; he can cycle to his school when he's older.
I think a lot of this simply depends on the distance between home and school (or other places kids need to go to) – so it's the difference between a compact city and sprawling suburbs.
Where I live (central Europe), the density of public elementary schools in cities is high, so kids walk there alone. The density of secondary schools is lower, so most kids use bicycles or trams / buses.
Interestingly, there are a few private elementary schools (usually english speaking) for children of expats, where cars queue up in the morning, while parents drop off their children. I've never seen this at public schools. I believe this is because there are only a handful of those schools, so they are further apart – and maybe also because the parents (growing up in the US or UK) are already conditioned that this is a normal thing to do.
I'm in the US and my almost-6-year-old and I bike to school together. We're exceptional in this regard - I don't see anyone else doing this and other parents are constantly commenting (positively!). It helps that he and his newborn brother are six years apart. Other families of our SES generally pump them out 2 years apart and move the brood around in a wagon for ease of supervising the oldest, while we had the luxury of forcing him to walk places without worrying about any other children's schedules.
I'm almost more worried about him managing his possessions at the endpoint than the ride itself. Locking the bike up, actually bringing his backpack in, etc.
Although I suppose I'm also a little worried about cars not seeing him at stop signs since (unlike me) he's below the hoods of a lot of cars.
retube|3 months ago
When the kids were babies we had the standard debate of move to the countryside for fresh air and gambolling in the fields etc. But so glad we stayed in London, the kids have so much freedom with public transport they can organise their own meet ups and activities and go running around all over town without any parental assistance or intervention at all. Whereas elsewhere we'd need to drive them everywhere, they'd be stuck at home way more, they'd have no real agency in their lives - I grew up like that and hated it.
reeredfdfdf|3 months ago
I lived my childhood in a place with about 4000 people in it. School, friends and everything else I needed was within walking, or at least biking distance. My parents didn't have to drive me everywhere. Obviously there weren't as many possible hobbies and events as in big cities, but mobility wasn't an issue.
dukeyukey|3 months ago
vanderZwan|3 months ago
Funny that you're talking about having to drive them everywhere though, because the main worry I have as a parent is the impact of car traffic on child safety.
I grew up in a Dutch village of 1500 people, and my parents let me wander about from when I was five, six years old or so. If I still lived there I would feel completely comfortable with giving my child the same freedom (once she's old enough - she's only a toddler now).
The main reason for that is that there is only one road that goes through village. Everything else is a street (see the wiki page on "stroads" for a clarification about the distinction [0]). And anyone driving through the village knows there might be kids playing there.
Contrast that with where I currently live: in apartment block in a city that is right next to a crossing of two stroads. We actually have very nice parks and playgrounds within walking distance. But to get here we have to cross at least one road or stroad. The thought of letting a six year old do that by herself scares me.
On a rational level I'm aware that this is probably my sheltered upbringing and that she will understand the dangers of car traffic better than I did at the age of six because she's growing up in a city, but I can't help but worry that she'll underestimate it until she's a bit older - a voice in my goes "it doesn't matter how often she does do it right, she only has to absentmindedly cross the road and get herself run over once."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad
madaxe_again|3 months ago
I went to boarding school in the 80’s and 90’s. There were houses, there was the school, the masters, the usual abuses - but there were also the gangs. They’d all have a name along the lines of “The Orcs” or “The Goonies”, and a clubhouse built of scrap and brush somewhere in the woodland attached to the school, usually accessible only by crawling through tunnels of brambles and a hidden trapdoor, and knowing where the tripwires and murderous sash weights were concealed. Most would have a few dozen boys in them, spread over the five years of the school. Younger boys would be skivvies, diggers, and by the time you were 12 you’d be a war chief, and organising and leading raids against other camps. Old pool cover was a particularly sought after commodity during raids - not only did it keep the rain out, but it kept the place warm in the winters.
Outside of term I’d go and saunter around abandoned factories and rail yards near our home.
Anyway. I think they cut the woodland down decades ago to replace it with more playing fields.
That thing, however - that little, tribal community of kids - is very much live and kicking, but non the west, very much no longer in the physical world.
My kid is being raised in a forest - and I’m acutely aware that sooner rather than later she is going to need a gang.
gyomu|3 months ago
Because yeah, I agree with you that in that sense cities are better than the often car-centric countryside for teenagers; but for young kids (elementary school and below, which is what the article covers) it's a very different equation.
paxiongmap|3 months ago
ErigmolCt|3 months ago
abbadadda|3 months ago
ensocode|3 months ago
schnitzelstoat|3 months ago
I live in a massive city now (1.5m pop.) and I'd be nervous to let my kids walk around alone because there's quite a lot of crime.
I feel a town is probably the sweet spot.
bamboozled|3 months ago
carlosjobim|3 months ago
m463|3 months ago
I grew up with something different - "go out and play", coming back for dinner.
catlover76|3 months ago
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nine_zeros|3 months ago
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ErigmolCt|3 months ago
johnnyanmac|3 months ago
We really can't be surprised when we close down society and the youth proceed to find the only space not heavily regulated.
virgil_disgr4ce|3 months ago
euvin|3 months ago
Even back then, that era of Roblox felt distinct from the platform it is today. Roblox used to have their own bespoke forum page, and each forum "topic" had its own culture and regular users. Hence, it resulted in a lot of tribal behavior and personal identification with said topic label (some players would even make "bunkers" as places, where regular hangouts would happen.)
As a result, familiar faces (usernames) arose, and that's where I met my first and only consistent friend group lasting from middle school to university. Though I haven't talked to them much since.
I did get my programming interest and grew skills from such a creative platform, but I think I'm still reeling from my stunted social growth as well. As I hear about the current generation of schools, I wonder how much worse off I'd be if I had to grow up during the 2020s.
Aeolun|3 months ago
This is central Tokyo.
Kids still spend a lot of time on Roblox because everyone tends to be deathly afraid of letting them ring each other’s doorbells.
djtango|3 months ago
rcpt|3 months ago
rvrs|3 months ago
testacc74|3 months ago
ensocode|3 months ago
The end result is kids who grow up with less independence, less trust in the world around them, and fewer peers out on the streets to learn from. In a way, our desire for security creates the insecurity we’re trying to avoid — and the cycle keeps feeding itself.
manc_lad|3 months ago
We're in a societal place where we have set the bar high in terms of an expected level of education and quality of life for our kids. kids are expensive and we've grown the population massively. There is also a social stigma associated with having lots of kids in Western countries.
I worry about my kids. But im always fascinated when they stretch the boundaries and show me how resilient they are. So I let them push limits but explain the pros and cons hoping they build their own feedback loops with some sense of perspective.
It's a delicate balance as a parent. I'm consistently fascinated how others parent. It's amazing how changes in parental style can be generational and show how long the changes will take to change.
eastbound|3 months ago
jkl12|3 months ago
But perhaps not so everywhere in the world... We are in the middle of Europe and specifically moved to a smaller town outside the big city when our kids were born. We live in a kid-rich neighborhood with only quiet side-streets/walkways and amble play opportunities in a 300 m radius around the house. Our kids roamed the neighborhood playgrounds already at a young age with large groups of their friends. And when primary school started (age 6-7), we were told, that it is recommended for the kids to walk without adults to school after the first two months of settling in. Also, being in boyscouts is an amazing experience for the kids. Our little one participated in a first camp at age 6 for a whole week. I am pretty confident they have/had their "forests" to roam. The older one now games a lot on the computer with a group of friends. The younger one is almost permanently in video calls with friends when not outside the house. Reading about private digital spaces with peer groups makes a lot of sense now...
I admit that our situation is pretty ideal. And it cannot be generalized, not even for our country or even our region. But we did actively seek an environment, where our kids could grow up this way and were incredible lucky to find one.
mcv|3 months ago
> I want to suggest an alternative: digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us
I still think it's the addiction of digital media. I have tried to get my kids to play outside, to visit their friends, etc. They refuse, because they're addicted to the screen. In fact, friends with stricter limits on screen use are more likely to come here looking for my son to play. Outside, or, if they can, on a screen here.
I'm fairly sure the kids from the article can also be made addicted to digital media if you start them young. Let's not, and let's give our kids stricter limits.
luxurytent|3 months ago
1. There are no other kids outside. We live in a neighbourhood with many young families, at all age ranges (littles to teen). We rarely see kids outside, and if we do, it's mainly kids walking with their parents somewhere (eg to the local grocery store)
This is a walkable neighbourhood 5km from city centre of a city of 500,000. The same applies to other neighbourhoods even closer to the city, those known as "family friendly". I do runs through these neighbourhoods and they are ghost towns.
When my kid has friends over, they can run to the park up the street (600m) and play together. I'm not worried, as they are together. Sometimes other kids will show up and join them. I think it's a sign that kids are inside, not sure what to do: they crave play with others their age.
2. Large, speeding vehicles.
We live in an area where we can walk to a few smaller grocers and restaurants, which is fantastic. My kids only need to cross a local retail strip to get to most of these. The crossing is two car lengths, and I feel pretty good about this. There are bike lanes which act as a buffer to the sidewalk as well and vehicles can't travel fast.
Now if my kid wants to go to their friends house? They have to cross two arterials. These are four lane roads with fast moving traffic, uncontrolled signals, lots of road rage, fast cuts on corners, etc.
My kids are gaining confidence and the skills in navigating these tough roads, but I struggle with the transition to full independence for this particular area. That one mistake can end it all.
My kids are 9 and 5, for reference. The five year old is still attached to me, but the oldest is beginning to crave more independence.
casey2|3 months ago
Well why did you choose to live there if you wanted to raise independent kids. Baffles the mind.
mrinterweb|3 months ago
If children do not learn independence, they will not be prepared and will carry a lot of anxiety when they need to be independent.
micromacrofoot|3 months ago
loughnane|3 months ago
At least in the US, my guess for the cause of this is goes something like:
1. Housing is expensive.
2. People move to where housing is cheap (ie plenty of land, easy to build). In the last few decades that's more often than not been in the south.
3. Big population changes in those areas demand more schools.
4. Big school is built on the edge of town, because that's where the land is and one school has better economies of scale than multiple neighborhood schools
5. No one lives close to the school anymore, so everyone has to drive.
Throw in the sprawl that often accompanies new development in areas with wide open land and its easy to see how we end up here.
I live in Brookline, MA (in the North, next to Boston) and it's very much a walk-to-school town. The structural reason for that is our schools are in the neighborhoods, have been around for a long time, and there's nowhere "on the edge of town" to build a new one. Our town has financial pressures like everyone else and I few government's are able to resist the temptation of cost savings---we just don't have the option to build that way. Thank goodness.
slumberlust|3 months ago
The main reason I wouldn't let our gradeschooler walk/ride .5 miles to school is a lack of consistent sidewalks and drivers who are constantly distracted and/or road raged.
famahar|3 months ago
I have countless childhood memories growing up there. All I had to do was step outside and some fun adventure was going to happen among the kids in the area. As online gaming started to become more popular, the area got much quieter. Not sure what it's like now that there's an abundance of online distraction. I do see the social value in online spaces like VR chat though.
renewiltord|3 months ago
I live in San Francisco, about a block from when a speeding driver killed a little girl by driving around the outside of a car that was waiting for a family to cross the road. The family had the light, yes. The killer will attend a driver’s safety course and do some community service.
In general, in this city there are people who call themselves “natives” who promote the idea that children should live highly constrained lives. Others, who call themselves “progressive activists” have fought for the rights of pedophiles to be released early. Unsurprisingly, often such pedophile immediately assault people days within release.
Because of the asymmetry in outcome, those with children slowly cede ground to those without by simply leaving. This feedback loop accelerates until little enclaves start forming. Inside SF this is the Mission Bay / Mission Rock area where today I saw a gaggle of unaccompanied 10-12 year olds. This isn’t a common sight elsewhere in the city where the “natives” and “progressive activists” have sway.
For our part, we have a plan to buy some undeveloped land where we can reliably camp. The current constraints are that maintenance of this in fire-prone California isn’t straightforward. There are minimum standards for defensible space and so on that regulate newer purchases that often require a great deal of time and effort to meet. I’ll find a way, however.
pmontra|3 months ago
jimnotgym|3 months ago
Every other house had older adults in it.
In 1940 you could imagine there would have been many more kids in the local village.
ErigmolCt|3 months ago
paulorlando|3 months ago
Aeolun|3 months ago
Walk to the park at the corner, have your child shout a few times, they’ll all pop their heads out of the door at the sound of others playing, desperate to do anything other than sit inside with their parents.
joshtbradley|3 months ago
Reading the comments gives me hope that there are still places safe enough and parents brave enough to let their kids run free. I hope to be this parent. And if I’m not, I at least hope I remember how important a digital friend can be for a kid who feels alone.
bawolff|3 months ago
If you look past the cringey, r/im14andthisisdeep edge, Its essentially saying the same thing. A desire for peer communities not available in the physical world.
seqizz|3 months ago
lnsru|3 months ago
Let’s talk about special school system here in Bavaria (Germany). Kids from specific area go to same school for the first 4 grades. Afterwards they are divided between little geniuses going into „Gymnsasium“, average ones going to „Realschule“ and good-for-nothings going to „Mittelschule“. For the first years kids move between schools and later between classes according their preferred specialization. No way to make friendships when kids come and go. Obviously there is nobody to play with left. Only reliable phone and games there. And nice videos there. Education system actively pushes kids into phones since real connections can’t happen.
I see lots of negativity here. Folks, do you really believe, that throwing a child into new environment every other year is the way to craft friendships in the real world?
cmoski|3 months ago
pessimizer|3 months ago
The trapping of children was just the prelude. Adults are also trapped at home, especially when they don't have any money to spend. Even if they do have money, there are no places they can go where they are expected to interact with strangers. The number of adult virgins has gotten absurdly high.
We have a tool that we could use to fight that: adult education. We have state colleges that we could be trying to attract adults to, rather than acting like people are done learning at 22. Chicago had/had a network of "Field Houses" that are community centers associated with parks where you could teach a class, or have a local group meeting, etc.
Instead, people are isolated and atomized into perfect little consumers who can't share things and can't organize politically except through an online petition encouraged by a "social network."
tartoran|3 months ago
I think offline spaces should be just fine.
apexalpha|3 months ago
The statistics presented have very different implications whether the kid is 12 or 8, I think.
That said, as a Dutch parent we tend to let our children grow up relatively unsupervised. At least many foreign parents are a bit startled at first.
This article helps me understand them better.
wffurr|3 months ago
Weryj|3 months ago
(Australian suburbs ~2004)
casey2|3 months ago
You are free to travel to some business that has taken care of all the legal requirements for you. Some freedom. You aren't even free to connect some fiber to "your" house you only have the freedom to choose which product to buy and maybe if you are one of the lucky few which product to sell (not fiber though that's a state funded monopoly)
arcade79|3 months ago
- Walked in a different aisle at a store. My daughter started going to the store alone from she was about 7.
- Talked with neighbours without parent. Uhm. That's just weird. I'm assume she was around 4? That's when we moved here..
- Made plans with friends, yeah, from she was around 5/6 or thereabouts.
- Walked/biked w/o parent: From 6/7, to/from school, and to friends.
- Built a structure outside: She's been part of building various structures in scouts.
- Sharp knife: Since she was about 6 or 7.
And now I realize I need to wag my hands a bit back and forth with all the 6-7 stuff.
Anyhow; one of the best things we did was ensuring she joined the scouts. Creates incredibly independent kids. I've seen threads on reddit where people are wondering if it's OK to leave the 9 year old at home alone for 30 minutes, and I'm wondering what kind of lunacy that is. My daughter has been capable of walking / biking home from school since she was 6 or 7, and proceed to make her own afternoon snack before we arrive home from work. She's been baking since she was 8. Making toasts, omelets and whatnot since the same age. Scouts taught her how to use a gas burner outside when she was about 8 or 9.
I mean; come on.
graemep|3 months ago
Earw0rm|3 months ago
api|3 months ago
The biggest change since then is two things.
One is that there’s way more to do inside now, mostly games and shows.
The second is that baseless kidnapping panics convinced society that children can never be unattended. The main vector was daytime TV and now true crime podcasts. The reality is that kidnapping is statistically extremely rare and more than 95% of all child sexual or other abuse is perpetrated by someone the child knows. Most kidnappings are also by someone the child knows.
peebeebee|3 months ago
bilegeek|3 months ago
CalRobert|3 months ago
But we often forget that cars kill kids at an astonishing rate -even though kids stopped playing outside-. In that light, the bloodbath that is American suburbia becomes much more clear. When pedestrian deaths go up even as miles walked (in aggregate) goes down, the situation is even more dire than it seems.
My kids play outside. But we moved to the Netherlands so they could. And even here, large SUVs and even -bafflingly- giant American Dodge Rams are becoming distressingly common.
AndrewDavis|3 months ago
A grumpy lady shouted at them "kids you shouldnt be running!"
I turned to whom I was eating with and our discussion could be summarised as "kids should be running. The problem isn't they're running, the problem isn't even directly where they're running. Where they're running is a symptom of them having no where else to run"
carlob|3 months ago
cpursley|3 months ago
jiggawatts|3 months ago
Of course he's going to live a sheltered life!
It's easy to tell parents to let their kids roam free, but that advice is to copy the behaviour of parents that had ten kids.
I said "had", because on average, two of them will survive to adulthood and procreation. That's natural. That's the way things were for our species for megayears.
Does that make it sad that it's not like that any more?
Maybe. Maybe not.
If you want to change it, recognise that first, society and our very civilization would need to change back to the era of every family having half a dozen or more kids. Then, then you'd have to figure out what to do about the excess population: unsustainable exponential growth or mass child deaths. You choose!
swiftcoder|3 months ago
We still roamed pretty free as kids in the 90s. That's long after the decline of childhood mortality and large families - I don't know more than a handful of families from that era who had more than 2 kids.
throwawayffffas|3 months ago
Where are you getting that stat? For the majority of human history the childhood mortality rate has hovered around 50% not 80%.
Back in the second century BC if you had 10 children you expected half of them to reach adulthood.
In addition I can't find specific stats but I would wager that the vast majority like 90% of those deaths happened at infancy. So it doesn't really factor in how they would be raised.
And as others have noted. We were free to run around as much as we wanted in the 90s and the average family had like 2ish children.
master-lincoln|3 months ago
Kids can play with other kids that are not in the family too...
johnnyanmac|3 months ago
Let's try improving public transportation, making more walkable communities, and encouraging independent exploration first. If those don't work, then sure. We can try the Shinzo Abe initiative to make big families.
Japan has had this issue for longer than the US, but it is not impacted the same way in terms of kids socializing.
testacc74|3 months ago
straydusk|3 months ago
What an observation. I agree with this.
pjc50|3 months ago
throwawayffffas|3 months ago
And I find the anti-modernity sentiment embedded in the fascination with hunter-gatherer cultures obnoxious.
Is the author aware that child mortality in hunter-gather cultures is like 50%?
Not that its correlated with childhood independence, we used to have plenty of independence when I grew up in the 90s and the mortality rate was about the same as it is now. But the point is kids need independence, not woods nor machetes. You can be independent in the park, in the streets, the undeveloped lots, the empty parking lots, your friends basement, and their yard when their parents are away.
TrackerFF|3 months ago
Outside activities included playing soccer, biking around, exploring places, building stuff.
It is such a huge contrast to my peers / people my age are raising their kids now. Some of the parents are basically hovering over their kids from 7 in the morning to 9 in the evening. It's non-stop.
kimovski|3 months ago
I know we've come a long way We're changing day to day But tell me, where do the children play?
Well, you roll on roads over fresh green grass For your lorry loads pumping petrol gas And you make them long, and you make them tough But they just go on and on, and it seems that you can't get off
Oh, I know we've come a long way We're changing day to day But tell me, where do the children play?
pseudonymcoward|3 months ago
Giving children the kinds of freedoms discussed in this article would lead to some harm coming to them. Accidents, violence, kidnap, etc.
Therefore, society won't give them those freedoms.
This tendency has been exagerated by mass media in the modern era. Every single case, every piece of anecdata, makes massive headlines and instills the fear into parents everywhere.
It's impossible for society to reverse course because that would mean acknowledging, implicitly or explicitly, that some level of harm for some children is justified by the developmental benefits to all children of increased freedom.
cpursley|3 months ago
throwawayffffas|3 months ago
Not really most of the violence against children originates from adults within and near the family.
The American public has allowed some rare stories that made it to the news and the Satanic panic of the 80s to form their world view.
A survey in 2021 found that 15% of Americans that's 31 million people believed the government was run by Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
To sum up children do face risks of violence and sexual abuse but it's mostly from trusted people in their environment, the risk of some random person kidnapping a child of the street is rather low.
Now given that society has decided to keep children locked away, letting your kid run around is not really a viable option it's a collective action problem.
mlrtime|3 months ago
johnnyanmac|3 months ago
The moment Sandy Hook happened and US society just shrugged at it, we relinquished our ability to use this dynamic for anything serious.
We can't pretend to care about kids while treating their murders as an inevitability of life and not something to reform over.
Vera_Wilde|3 months ago
testacc74|3 months ago
npteljes|3 months ago
This reminded me of one of my all-time favorites, the Animatrix. There is a story in this anthology, Beyond, that centers around this exact concept. I still get goosebumps just from reading its Wikipedia entry.
zkmon|3 months ago
The other reason is, prosperity means more affordability to avoid risk and seek comfort. There is no need to take risk, develop, fight for survival or grow up with friction.
tobyhinloopen|3 months ago
Usually something like "I hope I'm not late for my job" or "The weather is shit today". Other people aren't that scary.
bell-cot|3 months ago
I'd explain it this way: City living means that we don't know the other person, and they don't know us. The affects both driver behavior - 99% of people are more careful driving around pedestrians and other drivers who they know - and our perception of driver risks. "Chris who's always lived at 3rd and Cherry" is not some random stranger, to easily stereotype as a threat. Even if we know that Chris is not a good driver. Because humans are biased to judge members of "their" social group by very different standards than non-members.
mlrtime|3 months ago
If you read a lot of commentary on urban vs rural living, this is usually the top criticism of living in a small town. I've lived in both, and I much prefer knowing my neighbors.
kitd|3 months ago
On the one hand, my youngest was just getting into gaming with friends when the first lockdown started. I will be forever grateful that he did as his social life hardly seemed to suffer and he just carried on playing online, shouting and yelling with them just as much as if he was outside at a playground.
My teenage daughters had a much harder time of it though, as neither were into gaming and lost a lot of treasured contact with friends. Both suffered poor exam results as a result and have struggled to stay in touch with friends since.
The other aspect is those babies and toddlers who grew up in lockdown with no peer interaction at all. AIUI, they are still having a terrible time adjusting to school and normal social interaction.
duderific|3 months ago
My daughter was 18 months and went back to preschool at age three. She's also doing fine.
In fact I don't know any of their peer group who I would consider to be "having a terrible time adjusting to school and normal social interaction" which could be directly tied to Covid. There were some kids who had already been identified as having developmental challenges, and that hasn't changed.
arcade79|3 months ago
Here, a friend and I created ourselves a "bubble". My family and his family hanged out with each other. My kid was playing with his kid. We went on long forest walks, with the kids, and they could roam and play.
We didn't have contacts with lots of others, and if we did, we stayed away from each other for ~4 days or so, until we shared the same social bubble again.
Worked wonderfully well.
braza|3 months ago
I have contact with kids from 3 different places, 2 with high independent mobility and 1 with low independent mobility, and as much I like to agree that kids needs to be free, there's an important parental argument that needs to be talked about that is risk vs reward function if the kids get hurt.
In places with high mobility (at least 2 of them in the chart) there's some state support in terms of children's sick leave if something happens, plus work protections if you need to be absent for more than 6 weeks, and the education system has mechanisms to not let this kid be left behind (for example, if a kid breaks his/her legs).
In those places with low independence, I talk with some parents, and all of them are scared of the possibility of something permanent happens or something that can demand continuous support during working time; in those cases I can see why they play safe.
In the other hand, another second-order effect is that in those places with low independency, one thing that I noticed is that the motor coordination takes way more time to develop, and it cascades down for instance during sports activities (of the lack of), physical development and so on.
mlrtime|3 months ago
Sounds very situational.
Gazoche|3 months ago
But while I believe the general trends outlined here, it's important to remember that "the world" != "the West" != "the US", and even within a single country, the situation can be vastly different from one place to another, one socio-economic stratum to another, or even one family to another.
I also think kids escaping to digital places is not a very recent phenomenon, and has been happening for at least a generation. It's just that the platforms have changed. Back in my days, that place was Facebook, and we had entire digital lives there that our parents knew little about. And it's no coincidence that we started migrating elsewhere at the time when the adults started joining as well (though the general enshitification of the platform certainly didn't help either).
Yhippa|3 months ago
paxiongmap|3 months ago
Relevant to the discussion about online spaces and autonomy in childhood, I'd jump into this discussion about teen suicide rates: https://petergray.substack.com/p/d3-why-did-teen-suicides-es...
We have robbed our children of autonomy and freedom and then wonder why anxiety and depression are rampant.
aitchnyu|3 months ago
losvedir|3 months ago
emil-lp|3 months ago
This is really not representative for other Western countries. Where I'm from, I would say that 75% of 6 year olds walk/bike to school alone, and 100% of older kids do.
> In physical space, Western children are almost comically sheltered.
I think the author should stick with "kids in the USA" when he means that.
gwd|3 months ago
When I was growing up in the 80's in the US, I walked to school alone; but there was institutional support for that. There were adults paid to help kids cross major roads, and there were older children ("safetys") who wore an orange sash, trained and assigned to help younger kids walk to school.
I don't see that same infrastructure here in England. I'd be happy to let my 5-year-old walk to a local school if it were present.
EDIT: To be clear, I said "I don't see...", not "There are no...". It's possible I just haven't noticed, or that it's a quirk of my locality. And, my son doesn't go to a local school, so it's a bit moot; he can cycle to his school when he's older.
fainpul|3 months ago
Where I live (central Europe), the density of public elementary schools in cities is high, so kids walk there alone. The density of secondary schools is lower, so most kids use bicycles or trams / buses.
Interestingly, there are a few private elementary schools (usually english speaking) for children of expats, where cars queue up in the morning, while parents drop off their children. I've never seen this at public schools. I believe this is because there are only a handful of those schools, so they are further apart – and maybe also because the parents (growing up in the US or UK) are already conditioned that this is a normal thing to do.
CalRobert|3 months ago
neutronicus|3 months ago
I'm in the US and my almost-6-year-old and I bike to school together. We're exceptional in this regard - I don't see anyone else doing this and other parents are constantly commenting (positively!). It helps that he and his newborn brother are six years apart. Other families of our SES generally pump them out 2 years apart and move the brood around in a wagon for ease of supervising the oldest, while we had the luxury of forcing him to walk places without worrying about any other children's schedules.
I'm almost more worried about him managing his possessions at the endpoint than the ride itself. Locking the bike up, actually bringing his backpack in, etc.
Although I suppose I'm also a little worried about cars not seeing him at stop signs since (unlike me) he's below the hoods of a lot of cars.
uahajakka|3 months ago
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D13Fd|3 months ago
clove|3 months ago
chasing0entropy|3 months ago
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