As a parent, I relate to all this. Great piece.
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.
Smaller cities with about 40k-200k inhabitants can also be a nice sweet spot: big enough to have a decent number of events and hobby opportunities, small enough that you have low-traffic sidestreets within walking distance of the city center, and nature is still very much in reach
Assuming a European city layout where a city center exists and the 200k inhabitants aren't all spread out into suburban sprawl. Suburbia quickly kills the idea of walking and biking distances
I live in suburbia in a sprawling European city of 200K inhabitants, and design can fix a lot of that. The neighbourhoods are designed like little towns themselves, each having stores, schools, day cares, sports / leisure activities, restaurants and other businesses of their own, as well as playgrounds and nature areas which are often used by local youths to build shelters and play in.
The old city center - museums, historical buildings, big library, cinema, theater etc - is a longer trek, but still doable in ~20 minutes cycling. Plus there's trains and buses.
TL;DR, suburban doesn't mean it should kill things being in reasonable distances. However, big caveat, it's all kind of built in a compact way; garden space is often limited (total ground is usually 2x the house itself, so 50m2 ground floor space + 50m2 garden), roads are narrow (but this is good because it's bike / pedestrian optimized, cars can't go fast), etc. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinex-location for a superficial description, or look at a map of Dutch suburbs or houses (https://www.funda.nl/) to see what it's like.
Right. Most people in "rural" places live in small towns. My wife went to high school in a rural Iowa town with 2,000 people. You can walk from the high school to anywhere in town in 30 minutes.
All the rural towns I've been to in Texas are just farm roads that you'd never want to walk down and towns with no real centers/plazas to hang out at (and you'd have to drive there anyways).
Then I moved to Mexico and they were on to something there: small towns have central plazas that are heavily used for social activities, young men and women can walk around meeting each other, and they build densely enough to where you can walk around the town.
So I envy anyone whose rural US upbringing is like your wife's. I didn't think we had that as an option anywhere in the US except for movies.
Most small towns in New England are laid out like those towns in Mexico. I wonder if it's a question of age? The pressure to create town squares must have been a lot higher before the automobile came around.
I think in the western US, the government gave people parcels of land but the land may have been far away from population centers.
Samesies. It wasn't until my friend group in rural Texas got enough licenses that we could actually drive somewhere to hang out that spending time together outside of school became plausible.
A lot of older small towns are good but newer stuff tends to be built along highways with no other connecting roads, and more spread out
Also, a lot of the "rural" population in census data is actually living in outer suburbs and newer suburbs tend to be pretty unsafe for kids to walk/bike around
Likewise. All my friends were within cycling distance and we had nature to play in. Personally I can't imagine growing up in a city like London.
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.
Same, somewhat bigger town but it had everything within walking or cycling distance, it was only when I was 17 or so that I had to cycle to the next town over for school. But small towns are emptying out too, a lot of aging, elementary schools are merging and closing, local shops and amenities are closing down. The town used to have a bank, post office and police station, but banking and mailing changed to the point where it was no longer viable to have those services in town.
When I was growing up 90-ies, a mix of using public metro and buses to roam the city (since I was in second grade, when I was allowed to take metro to do afterschool karate) and spending summers in various countryside locations where my grandparents resided was a good mix.
I disagree that the kids need or want to roam without grownups all the time. Grownups are not the problem. Kids are fun for the parents, the company of parents and their peers is kinda amazing.
Systems and institutions are the problem. When kids are stuck in the daycare or school, in a very limited space, grownups are stuck at the office and grandparents are in a different state for tax purposes - that is the problem.
I don't know if this is true, but Patagonia claimed at some point that they used to maintain daycares and allow kids to roam the campus...
Rural in Wales is not like rural in most of North America.
The post I responded to mentioned this:
> But so glad we stayed in London
So I figure they are UK based and not in North America.
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 dunno - I have a seven year old whom I try to allow to be as feral as possible. We let him go alone to the neighborhood park, which requires seven small residential street crossings. But I would hesitate also about a multi-lane stroad if there wasn't a lot of pedestrian traffic. Kids are small and cars have gotten huge and drivers are very distracted, especially post-pandemic.
(We're in the US, and I draw the line at letting him cross ordinary 25mph residential streets but not the "25mph" artery road on which many of the drivers go 40mph. It's only one lane in each direction but there are no lights or crossings and the effective speed is quite high.)
That seems like a sensible cut-off point. You would probably (and probably rightfully) laugh at what I consider a stroad in the Swedish city of Malmö where I live, with traffic lights and zebra crossings everywhere. Like I said, I know on a rational level that my fear is irrationally heightened from my own memories of being extremely careless at a young age because I safely could be.
My parents like to tell the story about me getting bored at kindergarten class one day.
I grew up in a residential area in a city of several million people.
The teachers had let the kids out for recess. But even that amount of playful distraction didn't diminish my boredom that day.
So I went home.
In the middle of the school day.
Without the teacher finding out...
I had to cross a stroad to get home - two lanes each way. I can't recall if I crossed at the street light or at a crosswalk a few blocks away. But I made my way home unscathed. My mom was surprised when I showed up at home a few hours early.
The next few days at school, I could feel the teacher's eyes boring into my back as I played during recess. Definitely felt like I was being watched for awhile. :)
>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
She can understand it all she wants, it won’t make a difference to a driver who is texting in a huge suv/pickup truck with a hood twice your daughter’s height.
It is objectively more dangerous to be a pedestrian/bicyclist/even a person in a smaller car than in previous decades.
And if it’s dark or raining outside, forget about it. Crossing a 50ft wide road with a 40mph speed limit (which means people are actually distracted driving at 50mph) as a kid is daunting.
A 50ft wide road is just 5 lanes, 2 in each direction, and 1 turning lane. Very common in the US, even in small communities.
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.
Not really. I live in Zone 4/5 West London (postcode TW area), and kids as young as I'd say around 9 or 10 are getting themselves to school on buses, trains and tubes every day. Not much different to my day - I was taking myself to school around 7/8 years old living in a small (10k pop.) semi-rural town.
After school they're getting themselves home as well, often in groups causing the traditional nuisance in newsagents and supermarkets (thank god the energy drinks are now not sold to kids!), and going to parks and whatever.
I think they have to be a little older to confidently get their way into Zone 1 on their own if they should need to, but I regularly see youngsters I'd guess are 11-12 years old going into town on their own, clearly to meet friends.
Despite what the media (and for crying out loud, the US President), says, London is actually a remarkably safe city. Murder/homicides are at a low they haven't been at for decades (possibly centuries), and while sexual assaults are rising, that is seen as mostly attributable to more reporting (victims coming forward more). In the case of assault on a child, that's more likely to occur in a family setting than it is in a public place during daylight hours.
"Despite what the media (and for crying out loud, the US President), says, London is actually a remarkably safe city."
I'm not sure what the media or president is saying, but looking at the data I would not call it "remarkably safe". It sounds like the London violent crime rate is 28 per 1000 while New York and Los Angeles are about 700 per 100,000. I wouldn't let my kids ride public transport all over those cities until they were at least teens (the laws might not allow it anyways).
Why? Plenty of elementary aged kids use the tube
Do they? I don't think I've seen anyone younger than 12 unattended on the tube
I used to live round the corner from a private school in London (ages 5-16 or 5-18, not sure).
They were never on the tube with me, but plenty of children would be arriving at about 8:15, as I was departing to get to work for 9:00. Private school children are more likely to have a longer journey to school, therefore less likely to have a direct bus, and presumably more likely to have parents who will pay for the tube/train. (Only buses are free for children.)
The DLR at some hours between some stops is practically a school bus.
I guess it's possible they're small but not <12yo
Are you calling 12y olds small? That is an age many female already have their periods. My youngest daughter is 12y old and almost 1m70 (5'7").
In some countries and even US states this is already an age you can marry.
Without court approval, no one under 16 can get married in any US state.
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.
There's two aspect of "country" relative to somewhere like London. There's an estate in various towns, where there's plenty of actual public space, playing fields and grounds, walk into town, to shops, bus/train to larger towns. Plenty of open space.
Then there's the real country, where there's very little public space - nowhere to ride a bike other than narrow country roads, you can walk but only in restrictive footpaths over fields - some of which are sabotaged by farmers (I file 2 or 3 complaints with the right-of-way office each year as footpaths get blocked, barbed wire put over stiles, etc). We have an open forest area, but it's a 2 mile walk.
There are 4 children in our village at the "local" primary school, across the 7 years. My youngest's nearest friend is 6 miles away - again via 60mph roads. That means having to be driven to places. There is a school bus (which for americans reading is relatively rare in the UK -- you get one upto age 11 if you live more than 2 miles from the nearest school, or 3 miles for 11-16), but that doesn't help for after school clubs.
A toddler isn't going to be independent with travel, so driving them places is fine. In a few years though, you want them to be able to travel and meet friends, go to the shop etc, independently. That's easy enough in a city or in a town, not in the country.
That said, just having that access doesn't mean they will use it. My 13 year old's main social interaction is via minecraft sessions where they have a group call and yell at each other, doesn't matter if someone lives nearby (which one of the group does), or 30 miles away (which another does).
(It's worth highlighting that UK suburbia is very different to US suburbia)
You're right. Personally, now that it's getting wet and cold, I'm getting kind of landlocked by mud. There's one tarmac road out in both directions, but only one of them leads to somewhere that somewhat resembles civilisation, or has pavement.
> There are 4 children in our village at the "local" primary school
Four? How... What? How does any of this actually work (you clearly live there, so it obviously does?) That seems like you're living somewhere that's just like ... empty? How do any services/infrastructure/... How many old people live in this village?
Is this the demographic collapse people are going on about?
That sounds like the village in which I spent my teens. Population of ~500, and for <18s there was myself, my sibling, and there was a "new" housing estate had a handful of kids around 5.
We didn't have nice paths, there was a (former) main road going through the middle of the village. As far as local infrastructure, there was the pub, a car mechanic, and every few years a corner shop would open up and last about 2-3 years before shutting down again.
If you needed groceries you went to the larger village (population ~1000) which was about a 40 minute walk along the main road (which only got dedicated pavements after I had moved out), or a 5 minute drive. For amenities that larger village had 2 bars, 2 churches, a takeaway, a supermarket, a primary school and a garden centre.
If you needed anything more than groceries, you needed to go to one of the nearby towns which were ~20-30 minutes by car and (according to google maps) ~2 hours walk.
That's about here, although the town is only a 10 minute drive.
And people moan that some kids get taxis to school, because the government has decided that it's not worth operating a school closer than 5 miles, but when you need to shift 2 people you don't put on a minibus.
There's only two primary schools within 10 miles which have fewer than 50 pupils on the (7 year) roll though, it's not an overly rural area. I suspect townies would have palpitations when they find out about state boarding schools, because if you live on Tresco you can't commute to the high school every day
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.
for travel to school was 10, but was direct no changes and only a short walk the other end. then for social etc from around 12, by 13 travelling all over london on trains, buses, tubes, albeit always with friends, then alone probably 14
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
I'm going to get criticism because I feel HN is mostly urban based... but I don't think kids need "cities" to grow. They need nature.
I picture rural/suburban areas that aren't fully built out with small wooded areas , creeks and playground 5-10 minute walk. They need to get dirty, play in water etc.
When I think cities, I think dense urban areas that rarely offer this unless living in a expensive or unique neighborhood (like within 1-2 blocks of Central Park or Prospect Park).
The thing that cities provide that's harder to access in the countryside is exposure to people other than you, with different (not necessarily incompatible) perspectives and value systems. I think it's actually really important for kids to be exposed to people that disagree with their parents and learn that people can disagree with their parents while still being reasonable, kind people that their parents more or less trust in their presence.
Rural and suburban communities are far more likely to be a monoculture than cities, which, if you're not careful, can make your child's social development trickier.
It's by no means universal or impossible, just a consideration I don't see verbalized a whole lot.
I also really like that you can find groups of people doing the same thing you like to do, no matter how niche it is.
You can find mono-culture in both cities and rural areas. In cities there are more options, but in rural areas you can really get into it. In cities you can select from several different mono-cultures and ignore all others. In rural areas you can really get deep though because a commune can ensure you never encounter anything else, while in cities you still see them on the streets you just don't interact (though my experience is communes have outsiders come in for various supplies from time to time). If you don't live in a commune though rural areas don't provide choice - your neighbor is the only option no matter how strange they are.
That is what University is for ;)
I don't think they need that at K->grade school level (or younger) where they are first realizing how big the world actually is by exploring safely. You start with your room, your house, your yard, then spiral out until you gain confidence. Hard to do that in a dense urban area by yourself.
Why do they “need” nature?
Looking back on my childhood, I think I got tremendous value from the diversity of experiences I was exposed to, not any one specific thing. The nature at my grandfather’s dacha was lovely and enjoyable, but so was urban life in a 4m+ population city. Both contributed equally to the adult I’ve become.
> They need to get dirty, play in water etc.
cities != concrete
There are plenty of well sized parks in many cities. In some case there are even beaches, woods and mountains. Mine has all three.
I think the problem with your thought is that it really requires a "stars to align perfectly" kind of thing for that to actually be achieved, especially over the long-term.
Many people had that sort of experience in say....the 1950-2000. You had a lot of smaller new developments bulldozed into new areas, and for the first 20 years especially - almost everyone who moved in to those new homes, moved in at a similar time and with young children of a similar age.
In this way, those pockets of suburbia had a bunch of temporary features. You had a much higher quantity of local children within walking distance than would naturally be the case in the long-term for that number of mid-sized SFH homes, and you had a highly developed area with a highly undeveloped area nearby. (land not yet turned into subdivisions like your own).
But a few decades down the line, even without the large behavioral shifts in society - now you've got an endless sea of divided-up suburbia with no nearby wilderness accessible by children on foot/bike, and there's only 2 nearby kids of the same age range rather than 20.
Which is to say - I think it's very difficult to achieve that as as a stable long-term environment, at least with the typical US SFH subdivision density.
And once you get out to rural you run into the problem of the kids not being able to see each other without parental involvement.
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Anyway, I did grow up in a "goldlocks zone" environment like you describe. It was very nice, and I was particularly adventurous + had more relaxed than average parents.
But I actually found in (Upstate NY) college that the kids who had the most similar levels of life experience to me were the...NYC kids. The city enabled and outright required them to be much more independent than the more normal US suburb experience was. They'd be taking transit all over the city, many even just to get to school by middle/high school - and then after school they'd be going out with their friends to get snacks or hang out in the park or whatever.
In contrast, many of the "average" suburb peers had basically never been able to go a single place in their lives without an adult driving them until maybe they got a license at 16-17 and seemed very limited in their development for it.
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tl;dr - I think the idealized version of a suburb can be good for it, the average US suburb can't stay that way, but I also think major cities offer a lot of potential for them. Denser + walkable medium towns + nature outside them could also be good - but that's more of a EU than US development pattern.
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.
>With today’s e-bikes, even hills or longer distances aren’t really a blocker for kids anymore
Unlike public transport, with an e-bike, the chances of getting a puncture or a malfunctioning battery increase with usage. Plus, there is also the very common bike theft and road accidents if you live in a country where bikes need to go on the road (like the UK)
We haven’t had a malfunctioning battery in ~40 000km of ebike use in our family. We have one that failed to charge due to age. The number of times we ran out of battery due to forgetting to charge can be counted on one hand. The number of flat tires is in the single digits - modern general use tires are really sturdy, especially if you combine them with sealant.
Must have been a high end bike because the ones I have used have had multiple punctures within a year and running out of battery in the middle of trip has happened several times which is not great if you live in a hilly area
The bosch drivetrain is pretty much bog standard on the german market and available on almost all price classes and Schwalbe Marathon/Big Apple tires are aren't exactly restricted to the higher price classes as well.
Now, if you're riding Mountainbike or Gravel tires, your tradeoffs are different - they sacrifice puncture resilience in favor of less weight.
The “high-end”-ness of a bike and the likelihood of punctures are completely orthogonal. You can get a low-end e-bike and just put decent tires on it. Since weight is less of an issue with e-bikes than acoustic bikes, it’s common for people to choose heavier tires like Schwalbe Pickups that offer very high puncture-resistance.
It doesn’t take much time to fix a puncture with a tiny kit the size of a matchbox. There are also tubeless tires with liquid sealant.
An e-bike with a dead battery becomes a heavy bike.
Theft and accidents, okay, but the first sentence is just fearmongering.
> It doesn’t take much time to fix a puncture with a tiny kit the size of a matchbox.
That's a dependency. Now you need to remember to have that kit with you. This is like solving the short battery life in phones with a portable battery charger. You still have to remember to charge the charger beforehand and bring it with you. Small kits are easy to lose sight of that by the time you need them so you don't know where they are.
Tubeless tires are sadly not compatible with most bikes. I am not trying to be downer, this is just my experience (losing the kit and finding out that the bike I bought is not compatible with tubeless tires). I do agree though that bikes are definitely the way to go. But I wouldn't rely on them too much, especially on the electric components. Humans have a tendency to aim for convenience above all and being stranded in the middle of nowhere with dead phone and a bike with a dead battery in winter is not fun
People have been stashing a puncture repair kit in a small saddle bag since the nineteenth century. The kit just sits there until it is needed, potentially for years. To depict this as a big stress and risk is a real reach.
> To depict this as a big stress and risk is a real reach.
Yet here we are, living in a world where most parents would NOT let their kids travel around unsupervised even though it has been going on for longer than the 19th century. People have also been making fires for far longer than that. Both of these are depicted as big risks. You might find it a real reach or not but the overall point is that we don't live in a 19th century world anymore and our worldview is for better or worse different.
Try ask parents who can't barely make ends meet to get a puncture repair kit for their kid. You know the kit will be a cheap 5 star rated one from Amazon/Temu and the second it gets needed it won't work as it is meant to. This is reality
Man, your post is just so out of touch. Puncture-repair kits are cheap, you can find them from hardware stores for just a couple of euro even in countries seen as expensive. And those kits work just fine regardless of how cheap they are, because the tech is so simple and unchanged since a century ago: rubber patch, chunk of metal to work as a tire lever, tiny piece of sandpaper or other abrasive, rubber cement. As long as that rubber-cement tube stays unopened, that kit will last years inside a saddle bag.
I spend a lot of time traveling the world by bicycle (hence the HN username), and I have bought cheap Chinese puncture-repair kits around the developing world, whether in China itself, Central Asia, or Sub-Saharan Africa. They have always served me fine.
> That's a dependency. Now you need to remember to have that kit with you.
You put it on the bike and don’t worry about it. This is less onerous than remembering your bus pass or cars keys.
Whitewashing motorcycles as e-bikes scares me more than anything else for the next generation.
Legal e-bikes are fine. The ones you are complaining about are probably illegal, not that there is any real enforcement.
Serious Q: What is the fundamental difference between a legal and illegal e-bike. This largely is differentiated by the location but I don't know what illegal e-bike means.
Maximum power output and maximum (assisted) speed are generally legislated. In the UK, an e-bike is up to 250 W and 25 kph. More than that, it would classify as a motorbike and you'd need a license (not particularly onerous). The bike itself is often built differently to accommodate the different power profile.
As a pedal cyclist, I feel that's a reasonably sensible limit as much faster than that you should be more experienced as a cyclist to control the bike and anticipate the conditions.
In addition to the other answer you got. E-bikes are pedal assist, so illegal ones usually have throttles in addition to more powerful motors. This depends on the region though.
In the United States, throttle-only ebikes that go up to 20 miles per hour (Class 2 ebikes) are legal pretty much everywhere. They're required to have functional pedals, but no pedal assist function is required.
E-Bikes are sold & regulated in "classes" (at least where I live in the US).
A class 1 e-bike is pedal-assist and stops assisting beyond 20mph (mine, for instance, tapers off starting probably around 15 mph).
A class 2 is the above, plus a throttle.
A class 3 is anything that assists over 20mph. The "basically motorcycle" set exists here.
Your class 3 definition is inaccurate. Class 3 is limited to 28mph and cannot have a throttle, only pedal assist.
Anything that doesn't fall in one of those classes is a motorcycle that is not street legal and can only be rudden of private property (unless you can convince your DMV to give you registration as a motor vehicle.)
This can vary somewhat from state to state, but most states have adopted or are moving to adopt these classes.
Limited to 25 kph they seem fine (if only just, and a helmet is a good idea at that speed) but violations and disabled limiters are common
I grew up in a town outside of London (100k pop.) and it was pretty decent as I could walk pretty much everywhere.
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.
We live in the mountains , our kids ski all the time , lots to do in the summer, can bike and walk everywhere, not sure what you’re on about?
Didn't you have a bicycle?
This sounds really different from present-day America where helicoptering seems to be the new default. sigh.
I grew up with something different - "go out and play", coming back for dinner.
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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.
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 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
It's great, you just need to be Japanese.
That feeling of shared societal responsibility probably has at least something to do with the birth rate. Japan is down to just 686K babies born per year from a population of 123 million.
This is why so many libraries, etc in US ban kids without parents. No one wants the slightest annoyance of even the possibility they could hypothetically be bothered to assist a child.
In Los Angeles we let our 8 year old walk half a mile to school and someone called the cops on us.
My kid was interrogated for walking about 50 ft 'alone' ( I was actually watching further away and intervened before the Karen got to the point of calling it in) on our own property.
In the middle of nowhere, rural desert. Random Karen drove by at the wrong place and time, saw my kid, stops and questioned. Unbelievable. Literally the second you give a child independence a Karen will appear like clockwork, it's insane.
What did the cops say?
They followed them to school and told the teachers that someone called the police for escort.
There's nothing illegal about this and nobody got in trouble but it still sucks.
You are lucky they called the police and not CPS.
CPS have nearly unlimited ability to fuck with your family, whereas police generally can't fuck with you without probable cause a crime has occurred. There is no such process or due process with child protection services as breaking apart families and tossing kids into the abusive foster system is considered 'civil.' CPS doesn't require a criminal law be broken to take action and can declare weaknesses in your parenting for things as simple as dirty dishes in the sink or your refrigerator empty because you're at the end of your grocery cycle.
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 can’t speak to the rest of Japan, but in Tokyo, yes.
Suginami in particular seems to be very kid focused in terms of infrastructure development efforts. 6 years ago the was a wild sprouting of daycare facilities everywhere around, and these days new parks pop up everywhere. They were going to close the nearby jidoukan, and the new major seems to have reversed all of that. Japan is absolutely making an effort to reverse population decline xD
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.
> People used to give away children that were too much of a burden. With higher mortality, some were also not expected to make it.
Don't confuse that for them not loving their children or not being devastated by the deaths when they happened. We don't know how often kids were given away, but there isn't strong evidence it happened often.
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.
Don't you think AI, for example, will just be another facet of de-industrialization? I think the way we are headed now, this loop will only grow bigger...
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.
Narrow minded response. Perhaps it was cost, availability of housing?
The neighbourhood I speak of is objectively quite walkable (per my other points). It's just the shape of the city I live in: It contains a number of these arterials which glue the city (for vehicles) together. Less so for humans.
Good luck finding a North American city without roads like that. Our cities are terrible and laid out for cars not people.
Then don't live in North America.
Yeah I'll get right on that. Move away from all my family and friends and also negotiate visa hassles, etc.
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.
> Inner city, especially in the oldest and most established, is an outlier experience.
Totally right. I called out the south explicitly, but the same stuff is true in suburbs. We lived in Nashua for 5y and it was just as you describe.
I'd submit though that the lack of sidewalks and dangerous drivers aren't really a cause, rather a symptom of the same cause: towns laid out in such a way where things are too far to walk and so everyone must drive to everything.
The traditional US thing is to charge parents with negligence for letting their kids walk to the store if someone else kills them while they cross the road https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/parents-are-charged-son-...
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 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 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
I've noticed the critical mass issue also. If your kids do free range as described, who else is out there to meet?
> Where do you find 10 kids together now
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.
Yes, my mother walked me to one of those parks sometimes but it was a little pointless when I could play with my friends outside my home or my grandparents' home. The kids at the park were strangers. We played together but we did not create any relationship. It was like playing with the other kids while adults were busy inside the restaurant after a marriage. A fun afternoon but it ends there if you don't meet them regularly.
This working is a function of density. First, imagining a park at the corner is a huge assumption.
Second, if the park isn't within shouting distance of the necessary number of kids, half of the ones within shouting distance are at parent-scheduled activities, and half of the remainder aren't allowed to brave street crossings because of the six-foot-tall hoods and inattentive drivers of passing ChildMurker1050s, no amount of park yelling will be sufficient.
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.
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.
Weirdly enough, the thing this most reminded me of is https://phrack.org/issues/7/3
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?
Your scenario paints an overly negative picture. Neither do the majority of the kids move between schools every year, nor do they switch up classes within a school every year. They usually stay with the same class 2-3 years and only switch for individual courses for a couple of hours per week.
You can criticize the way how kids are separated into different levels by 5th grade, but this has nothing to do with being able to find friends.
Furthermore, your argument doesn't make much sense, because the school system is like this way before smartphones even existed and kids were able to find friends back then. It's not like the school system forces them into escapism. Just that smartphones are simply addictive.
The scenario is shit. I know. I don’t paint it pink. But it is as it is today somewhere between Munich and Alps. The today’s challenge is the demographics. The kids are rare. Retirees live in the majority of houses around us. The few kids of the street were divided between 3 school types in 4 different locations. They meet occasionally, but friendships were lost. There are simply no other kids around to go out together. Some parents are really desperate to organize (paid!!!!) play dates.
I am not scientist of society dynamics, but I don’t see any positive aspects of Bavarian school system. Producing lots of factory workers from “Real-“ and “Mittelschule”? Last factories are disappearing. Early separation of kids and continuous shuffling bewteen classes brings no positive effects for kids. Can a 10 year old boy have any idea what he wants to do in 15 years?.. Can a 10 year old boy know his strengths and weaknesses? I really doubt it. Sometimes I think Bavarian school system was CIA psyop after WW2 to cripple German society development. No close friends, no bonds in the society.
The founders of the Miniaturwunderland Hamburg were in the media describing how they push back against smartphones and media in their family life: https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/ndr-talk-show/miniatur-wun...
Strange coincidence: shortly after they were hacked https://www.borncity.com/blog/2025/11/12/miniatur-wunderland...
Every morning I see dozens of kids sitting (this week in unpleasant cold) on pavement or standing somewhere in the rain with their smartphones on the way to school. No phones in/around school building! It’s a plague and doesn’t look normal at all for me. I would expect some regulations from government regarding this insanity. There are phone-watches and dumb phones to reach kids if really needed. It must be profitable to someone to hook kids like that. Weirdest poses in rain, cold just to have quality time with their smartphones. I want scream when I see this every day. In most discussions with adults I end up as a luddite, because I don’t support technology. In my times modern technology was messing with autoexec.bat and we learned something from that for later.
> Afterwards they are divided between little geniuses going into „Gymnsasium“, average ones going to „Realschule“ and good-for-nothings going to „Mittelschule“.
I would totally land in Realschule because I had an educational slump in fourth grade.
Over here they tried a similar system - middle school spanning classes 7-9 inclusively, named "Gymnsasium" as well, but it included everyone[0] and I recall having a similar sentiment, thinking: "why shove people around like that? So that we don't form lasting friendships and thus make better worker drones?"
Ironically I'm still in touch weekly with the three guys who were my only friends at the time, even though we live in different cities now.
[0] The split between college material and the rest only happened around high school.
agreed. the whole system is bonkers and screams of elitism. like you are either born smart or you'll never make it. fortunately there is also gesamtschule. which does away with that, there is no distinction between levels. only your grades have to be good enough by grade 10 to make it into the oberstufe (yrs 11-13).
i barely made it through, and i would not have made it without that because neither my parents nor me had any ambitions, so switching schools would not have worked for me.
when i was younger we moved around a lot. different problem but same result, i didn't make any friends in school because we kept witching schools. by the time we stayed in one location it was already to late.
The other side of the coin is that you have ambitious kids in a class who are distracted and sometimes even bullied by kids with zero ambitions.
You think that's more fair to the ambitious kids when 2/3 of the class think it's cool to NOT learn anything and playing pecking order games all day?
that's not the other side of the coin. that's the other end of the extreme. there are other solutions that can accommodate both needs. the problem with splitting up schools is that kids are not always ambitions and faster, nor always slower or lazy. that changes over time. a better system needs to have the flexibility to adjust for kids as they are developing and growing. switching schools back and forth is the worst way to achieve that. i'd rather find extracurriula activities that keep the kids interested than force them to switch schools. the problem is teacher training and an inflexible education system. the ability to switch schools does not make the system any more flexible.
a better school lets you choose a more or less academic focus if that is what the kids want.
the best system btw is montesori where kids really can learn at their own pace. it is designed in such a way that even within a class different kids work on different projects. they even mix ages so that younger ambitious kids can work with older ones.
I agree on the needed flexibility part.
> the best system btw is montesori
I disagree on that. See a recent HN discussion on Montessori: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45674002
tl;dr: it works for some kids, just like the current German system works for some (other) kids.
you may notice that i took an active part in that discussion.
tl;dr: montessori really does work for almost all kids, not just for some. the cases in the discussion where montessori didn't work don't provide any evidence that they actually received real montessori education as the name "montessori" is not protected.
>like you are either born smart or you'll never make it.
That is a bit dramatic. This topic has been talked about over and over. There is no perfect system. Treat everyone the same and high potential kids suffer. Split them up by ability and you get "unfairness" criticisms.
the unfairness criticism is nonsense. it's just politics. and it doesn't even apply here because the existence of different school types would be unfair as well. splitting kids up by ability is not unfair. forcing them in different schools however is. because switching schools takes a lot of effort and it gets harder the older you get simply because the curriculum diverges to much. so even if i am bored in a lower tier school, i could not catch up to a higher tier one. for most kids the moment the school tier is chosen after grade 4, the kid is stuck in that tier, no matter how able the kid turns out to be.
merging school types is not about treating everyone the same, but it is about acknowledging that kids develop and you can't evaluate the ability of a child based on their performance at age 9.
as i said, i would not have made it in a tiered system because i would have been stuck in the lowest tier. my parents were to busy to argue with each other to even care and my performance suffered because of them.
those are circumstances a tiered system can't handle. a merged system that can deal with children at all levels however can, and that made the difference for me. that has nothing to do with treating all kids the same. on the contrary, it has everything to do with treating kids individually and not stuffing them in boxes like a tiered system does.
as for a perfect system, montessori gets pretty close. three years of age are grouped together in one class. that alone require that the kids in that class are not all treated the same. it allows all kids to learn at their own pace, so younger, faster kids can easily catch up to older kids and work with them or be given extra activities without disturbing other kids in the same class learning something else
All the levels of education at my high school happened in the same buildings. There were people in my graduating class of 86 people that I never said ten words to in six years in the same school. I was never in the same classes and didn’t live near them.
Which is to say that tracking of any kind is going to end up with this, whether they are separate physical schools or separate curricula within one school.
i get your point, but i have a different experience. i also believe you are missing that once you made friends, switching tracks will only make it slightly more difficult to keep in touch. i didn't make many friends in school, but the friends i did make were not limited to my class and track. i can still see them during breaks, and we still share the same routes to and from school, ad we may still participate in the same extracurricular activities or clubs. those things would not change when switching tracks.
separate physical schools however may mean that i may never see some of these friends ever again. different school routes (even if we live in the same neighborhood). no chance to meet in breaks, etc. that's a whole different world.
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."
While I understand the general sentiment I think grouping kids in a cohort from 8 till 12 is a very wide cohort.
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.
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.
(Australian suburbs ~2004)
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).
I think offline spaces should be just fine.
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.
I mean; come on.
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.
It's cars. It was always cars.
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.
While I mostly agree with you, cars then and cars now in the US are not the same.
The typical car back then was a 5 door sedan, think ford crown, Chevrolet lumina, etc. These days almost everyone is driving pretty much a light truck.
I'll give you a hint about statistics... there will always be a #1 killer of children. Today it's car accidents, 100 years ago it was disease. After disease it was other accidents, and 100 years from now it will be something else.
Listen I agree with both you and the poster I replied to. What I am saying is that the risk from cars really did increase. Not that it's the only reason that the change happened.
I don't think you ever saw the cars my grandmother drove when my dad was a kid. It was not a "light truck" or anything of the type. It was a 'car' and it was actually bigger, by quite a large margin.
You may not remember the "land yacht" sedans, or the gargantuan station wagons, which were common family cars back in the day. Longer, wider, and heavier than any modern SUV, crossover, or minivan.
We did, but some kids got killed or badly injured as a result. It was pretty common where I live.
And while speeds are a bit lower now, the median driver attitude and aggression level seems to be a lot worse. I'm not sure whether that's because of phone distractions, or they're stressed out by exploitative employers, or have cooked their brains online, or some demographic change in who does the most driving, but when I'm on foot, being driven AT is not an uncommon experience at all.
Totally unrelated, but awesome username!
> Plenty of cars in the 90s and we played outside all day.
Same in the 1970s/1980s. I grew up in a suburb-type neighborhood. Needed a car to go to work or to do any shopping or go basically anywhere. Rode a bus to school. The idea that car-centric development is a relatively new phenomenon is just wrong. It's been happening since the 1950s. We still played outside. We had TV but like 6 channels and nothing very interesting for a kid most of the time. Now we have ubiquitous computers and phones, and the sociopathic tech companies, which have really been just terrible for everyone except their investors.
I’m Belgium it was Dutroux. It changed everything and is a cross generational trauma that still has its effects.
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"
No? I grew up in a rural area, with fields and places to run... and run I did.
A nearby huge city had a mall. City being 30k people. Yet left in that mall, with 10 friends, I'd run there too.. until chastised. No real difference 50 years ago, in a rural area with a mall than now.
Groups of kids running tend to bump into things, fall into people, excited kids aren't known for taking care. It's been typical for at least going back to the 50s to stop that.
It's also why kids are typically told to stop running around a house.. and to go outside.
So strongly disagree that it is a symptom of no where else to run. Of course, I find it sad if kids have no place to go run.
Local parks can help with this in urban areas.
I don't disagree with you, but the fact that something has been done since the 50s when it comes to child care is not necessarily an indicator that it's good. We imposed many things on children during that time that would be widely considered damaging and counter productive today.
Telling kids not to run around indoors where they can collide with objects or people, break things, injure themselves, and generally get in the way isn't damaging - or at least is significantly less damaging than the perception in this thread that telling kids not to do something is awful.
This is just standard manners and teaching children how to interact with an adult society. Why does anybody think telling kids not to run indoors is wrong?
No need to put words in my mouth. I specifically referred to the fact that just because something has been done since the 50s that it doesn't have automatic relevance when it comes to modern child raising, not that telling kids today to cut it out when running on public places is a bad thing.
Ok, no disagreement there, but that wasn't my point.
It does not even have to be urban areas. We have parks all around the city. Our schools have playgrounds. Everything is still there from when I was a kid, i.e. ~20 years ago.
Kids should be running but not if they cause a nuisance - this is the part not highlighted in the article, societal oversight. When kids are out in the forests they aren't bothering or harming anyone, but when in public they will have to conform to some standards / rules.
"It takes a village" is a well known saying, I've always interpreted that that it's not just the parents that raise kids.
Kids should be running, but not in food court. 9-12 old are big enought to recognize space full of plates and food.
Sorry, but no. You shouldn't be running in crowded areas like food courts (or indoor areas not specifically created for athletics), and playing smug semantic arguments like that doesn't help.
The kids aren't running because they're unable to go outside. They're running because no one's been enforcing that they act within the standards of basic decency.
Kids should be screaming and singing sometimes, but you wouldn't tell someone in the library not to hush them.
> You shouldn't be running in crowded areas like food courts (or indoor areas not specifically created for athletics)
I guess this is a cultural thing, i.e. what is expected of kids. Among my age-group in Eastern Europe (25-30 y/o), we joke around that our parents didn't let us stay in home, which has a lot of truth to it. Once we were out in the city, they didn't even have a idea where we went, and we didn't have mobile phones either. We used to run around everywhere without exception - malls, forests - you name it. That is still expected of kids nowadays, but the kids themselves are far more drawn to the digital world nowadays
And in Eastern Europe 25-30 years ago, other adults would have no problem yelling at you to behave in their own language/words.
Very much different than today where people mostly mind their own business and judge in silence.
I'm good with the former, it's inline with "It takes a village".
> And in Eastern Europe 25-30 years ago, other adults would have no problem yelling at you to behave in their own language/words.
Nobody yelled at us then or even thought that we were doing something wrong. If you would yell at a kid in a shopping mall for running around like crazy - people would look at your weirdly. It was expected of kids to behave this way in my culture, and still is to this day. This may not be the case elsewhere, hence why I think that there is a heavy cultural aspect.
You're right it is cultural, I was thinking more Slavic where bad behavior from other kids isn't tolerated by adults and they have no fear expressing it.
>and playing smug semantic arguments like that doesn't help.
How is it semantic? They go outside and now they are running in a giant parking lot. They go a bit further and now you're a bad parent for not keeping an eye on your kid. Tell them to sit down and play on a tablet and you're also a bad parent.
There's no winning here.
>you wouldn't tell someone in the library not to hush them.
I don't consider a mall the equivalent of a libary in this situation.
Why is everything so black and white?
Do kids need more places to run free, yes.
Should they be running in mall food courts, no.
Just because this trend of kids having less free play outside doesn't excuse parents of these kids from taking any space they want. Any reasonable person can see there are still boundaries, are we just disagreeing on what those are? Kids still can't/shouldn't run at swimming pools, it's been that way for decades (just an example).
>Why is everything so black and white?
because you see the effects but fail to trace the cause. I'm beyond tired of people attacking the symptoms but ignoring the cause.
If you let your kids run around in giant parking lots I would argue you are a bad parent. That seems like asking for an accident.
> Tell them to sit down and play on a tablet and you're also a bad parent.
Yes. If this is the alternative to playing in parking lots that comes to your mind first, I really wonder what kind of experiences you had.
> There's no winning here.
Ever heard of parks?
> If you let your kids run around in giant parking lots I would argue you are a bad parent.
> Ever heard of parks?
I remember being bored as hell when my parents used to take me to the city park. Many other kids thought the same, too. I couldn't wait to run around with my friends wherever else in the city afterwards. I'm thankful for my "bad parents" for letting me roam around anywhere I wanted, as was the norm back then for kids where I grew up in Europe
I'm guessing you are talking with someone who is used to life in the North American suburbs, where kids need to be driven around and most of the options for activities are indoors.
Sadly, yes. The nearest park is 5 miles from me or the mall. The buses run on the hour and will get you within 2 miles of the park. They stop running around 7pm.
I wonder why more kids aren't at the park.
How do they get to the park?
>Ever heard of parks?
Yeah, my city did a great down tearing down amenities for the kids and yelling at kids to stay off the grass. I love my city.
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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.
Can you share a source? It doesn't match with my own reading (https://www.wpr.org/health/studies-show-pedestrian-fatalitie... for instance - """he average Halloween resulted in four additional pedestrian deaths, and the highest increase was among children. Pedestrians between 4 and 8 years old saw a 10-fold increase in fatalities on Halloween. Risk was highest around 6 p.m. and in residential neighborhoods.""")
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 was an only kid that roamed pretty free as young as four, wandering the neighbourhood with similarly aged kids.
I chalk that up to the inertia of social behaviour. My parents grew up in a generation where they all had many brothers and sisters, and their parents were one of eight. They learned parenting from their parents, and I learned parenting from mine.
We adjust with each generation, but not completely.
> 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.
> Where are you getting that stat?
Basic population dynamics. For a population to remain steady, a breeding pair can only have on average two surviving children that procreate themselves.
If you want to get into the weeds, there's obviously some "fudge factors" that bring this a little bit up above two.
1. Not every kid that survives to adulthood will go on to procreate themselves, so the remainder need slightly more than two to make up the slack.
2. During periods of population growth, the average survivorship has to be higher.
3. The percentage surviving depends on how many were born per family to begin with. I didn't state a percentage, I said two. Okay, fine 2.4 or whatever, but not a fraction, that "depends" on too many variables.
> For the majority of human history the childhood mortality rate has hovered around 50% not 80%.
RECORDED history, which is a short blip in our evolutionary history as a species. I said megayears, a.k.a.: millions of years, for most of which we have scant evidence. Extrapolating from our wild animal cousins and just observing how these "uncontacted" tribes live, it's pretty obvious that for 99% of the time we could be called human, we had five+ kids per couple, and ten+ wasn't uncommon... of which two-point-something survived.
That's just the way it is, for essentially all species. It has to be, otherwise populations would explode in numbers until it's standing room only for the entire surface planet.
PS: Next time you watch some BBC documentary about some species giving birth to hundreds of offspring, well... now you know. They didn't make it. Certainly, statistically, most of them must not have, because if they could and did, then that species would have their population numbers grow astronomically fast!
PPS: You hand-waved away a 50% loss rate as if it's a detail. That in no way undermines my argument that if you have an only child, or even two or three, that losing half of them is not considered acceptable parenting in this day and age. There is absolutely no way anyone I know would trade half of their children so that they can have a wild, carefree, and unsupervised childhood like "nature intended"!
> That's just the way it is, for essentially all species. It has to be, otherwise populations would explode in numbers until it's standing room only for the entire surface planet.
Human population has been increasing for at least thousands of years. Our best estimates put the human population 30000 years ago to about 8 million people, at about 1 ad the population is estimated at about 200 million people, in the 17 hundreds the population is estimated at about 600 million.
That is not a stable population, that's a growing population. You also have to take into account pandemics, widespread violence, etc. The black plague killed 1/3 of the population of Europe, you can be pretty sure that the reproduction rate was above 2 both before and after the pandemic. Millions of people died when Europeans colonized the Americas again the population growth rate would have to be much larger after the event for the population to bounce back.
Additionally adult mortality before procreation does not factor in child rearing behavior. Because why would it?
And lastly all that is pretty much irrelevant especially the habits of prehistoric people, because the change in how Americans raise their children happened in the last 20 years. Not in the 1900s when child mortality went way down.
The thing that changed between the 80s and now was not the acceptability of losing children, what changed was how Americans in particular assess risk, the Satanic Panic of the 80s, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007, the revelation of how widespread childhood sexual abuse is (before the 90s it was estimated at about 1% of the population turns out it's over 16%), all of these factors made the American public incredibly afraid about their children safety.
It's not that people in the 70s and 60s were okay with harm coming to their children it's that they didn't believe harm would come to their children when they were with other children alone running around. Which by the way was mostly a correct assessment.
In Japan the fertility rate is 1.2 per woman and yet 6 and 7 year olds got to school on their own. Because the culture there believes that is a safe practice, mostly because it is.
Go watch Old Enough, obviously it's a television show exaggerated and not how life really works in Japan, the production team and the parents are essentially watching over the children, but it clearly demonstrates that the culture there expects children to roam the cities safely.
Oh and by the way on average preindustrial families had 5 to 7 children not 10 so 50% survival rate is 2.5 to 3.5. Which taking into account occasional widespread population collapses fits much better with the observed long term growth.
What a take...so if you had 3 kids and lost one it would only hurt a third as much as losing your one child now?
Kids can play with other kids that are not in the family too...
> losing your one child now?
You have likely not lived in a society where every family has many kids, so extended families have dozens of grandkids/cousins. It gets to the point that in times of plenty there's an "excess" and societies go to war in some sense just to see if they can carve out a bit of territory at the "mere" cost of some tens of percent of their youth. I mean.. why not? If you have half a dozen that "made it" and enough land for only two to inherit, flip the coin on the rest of them and maybe they'll find glory and conquer some new patch of land. Or not. What other option is there?
That's how people used to think and behave for millenia.
Modern life is very, very different to even just a couple of hundred years ago, let alone for most of human existence pre-history!
I read a statistic that before modern times something like 15%-60% of men died due to violence! For comparison, if you're an adult male in Ukraine, you've had about a 0.5% chance of death from violence, 30x to 120x safer in the middle of a war than during peacetime in pre-state tribal life.
>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.
I wish people would come up with examples that are more than 'Just look at Japan'. Japan is great, and I think we could learn a lot from them. However, their society is extremely homogeneous (98%+ ethnically Japanese) with deeply shared cultural norms that have been reinforced over centuries. This creates a fundamentally different trust environment than what exists in diverse, multicultural societies.
Focusing on Japan is a non-sequitr. This is pretty much all of Asia and half of the EU.This isn't unique to them. Japan was only mentioned because it's probably the first country to have needed to make national population crisis initiatives (as the GP wanted to suggest).
>deeply shared cultural norms that have been reinforced over centuries
Yes and Americans had this too, once upon a time. We did a good job tearing that down in the last 60 years to push consumerism instead.
It took 60 years to get there, we aren't going to fix it overnight. And that's also part of the problem. No one wants to put the time in for the effort.
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
> digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us
What an observation. I agree with this.
.. which era is of course also being shut down, with the widespread implementation of age verification.
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.
Care to list a few examples that aren't Anglo?
France, Netherlands, Denmark, former commie block come to mind. It was one of the things that really stuck out to me: how mature/well behaved and independent/confident the children were there (for the most part). There's even books on the topic (Raising Bebe, The Danish Secret to Happy Kids) which I was not aware of until after spending a lot of time in those places. At lot of it has to due with the built environment - kids can literally walk out the front door to parks and stuff unlike in suburban places, but also culture.
> 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.
>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
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.
There have always been people who went into schools to kill children. In 1927, a guy blew up a school in Bath, Michigan, killing 38 kids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
The fact that you think heaven and earth have to be moved over a single school shooting (as terrible as it was) is a symptom. School is the safest place where children are. They're more likely to be murdered and abused at home.
I'm 50, but when I was a kid I took the bus by myself: when I was 12, on the South Side of Chicago, which had an order of magnitude more violence than your kids will ever be exposed to. I ran around with my friends within a block or two, we were big into BMX bikes. Kids got hurt periodically, but sometimes kids will get hurt; sometimes kids will die. A few hundred years ago, most kids would die. Now we (not we, but mostly a certain demographic whose aesthetic is imposed on everyone else) find it unacceptable to hear about kids dying on television, nowhere near us.
It was bad when 50% of kids died, but I've had the belief that whatever the number it now is too few. We need the number of kids who die through "death by misadventure" to go up. Raising kids in a box leaves them dumb and unsocialized. Kids need independence, and to be allowed the ability to make some bad decisions with real consequences. They need to be able to fall off the monkey bars.
We're close to the same age and I grew up on the south side of Chicago, so I'm cheekily going to ask if by "a bus on the south side" you meant Hyde Park or Beverly. :)
>The fact that you think heaven and earth have to be moved over a single school shooting (as terrible as it was) is a symptom.
no, the symptom is that kids have to normalize lockdown drills and how to barricade a door to protect from shooters. I had earthquake and fire drills as a kid, but it wasn't culturalized to accept that school shootings are a thing.
Now we can map out mass shootings by year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
Now we can expect 4-5 school shottings a year, documented by year. Trying to make this equivalent to "well kids get hurt" completely misses the point. But I'm not surprised at this point.
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.
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.
>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.
Usually something like "I hope I'm not late for my job" or "The weather is shit today". Other people aren't that scary.
A lot of people do think that other people are scary.
The UK has got to the point where a lot of people think parents cannot be trusted with their kids (in an IRL discussion multiple people supported the Online Safety Act on the grounds most parents will let their kids watch porn) let along strangers.
To be fair, combine "I hope I'm not late for my job" with a 2.5 ton wheeled death machine, and it's pretty scary even without bad intent.
"I how I'm not late" is a bad mix when operating heavy machinery like a car around places where children are supposed to be able to walk safely.
> 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.
Actually, when I wrote "road" I was thinking of roads full of pedestrians. Not cars and drivers.
>Everyone knows about every move of the others.
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.
Worked wonderfully well.
> 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?
Sounds very situational.
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.
I highly recommend Peter Gray's writing: https://petergray.substack.com/
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.
Umm, do most of those kids have distended bellies?
I was wondering about that, too. It means they're malnourished, right?
Apparently potbellies can be caused by:
* extreme protein malnourishment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor
* intestinal parasites
Given that the kids don't exhibit extreme wasting on their facial features and limbs, I would say it's probably the latter. Still really sad though, the poor kids!
> 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.
There are still lollipop ladies/men (crossing guards, if you will), here and there, but UK roads are nowhere near as dangerous as US roads: smaller cars, lower speeds, most of the roads between you and the school will be 20mph or 30mph limits, and so on.
I'd say even then, five is a little low by UK standards. I think I started walking solo to school when I was about 7 or so. By 11 I was walking a mile to a train station and catching the train 15 miles to another town (nearest Catholic secondary/high school). 5 years old is not far off 7 or 11, but it's a big chasm - be ready for it to go by in a flash! :)
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>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.
This still exists in the Netherlands: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verkeersbrigadier
We used to have lollipop ladies back when I was growing up...
In England you don't have lollipop ladies/men?
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.
Having grown up and gone to school exclusively in the USA I always thought it was crazy how many parents preferred to drive their kids to school instead of having them take the bus. By high school I would guess that less than half of kids actually got to school by bus despite them all being part of the bus pickup network.
I drive my kid to the bus in the morning because it allows them to sleep an extra hour (and they are not old enough to bicycle to school yet).
Hundreds of 7 year old kids elementary are taking subway to go to school in my neighbourhood here in Tokyo. What you see is an American solution to an American problem.
To be fair, I saw the same in Canada as well, so I understand USA isn’t alone.
Where are you from? I would say that seems accurate for Ireland, for instance.
In Figure 13, there are some Western countries listed for how much children can roam, and Ireland is indeed near the bottom.
But the Netherlands, Nordics and Germany are still very much on the other side of the spectrum in these studies.
See for instance the books "The Happiest Kids in the World", "Achtung Baby" and "There is No Such Thing as Bad Weather" about raising children in the Netherlands, Berlin and Sweden respectively.
Those places are very much not like the USA yet. Though as the article points out, they are definitely going in that direction.
By the way the rest of the (actual) saying that is the title for the Swedish book is "Only Bad Clothes". In Swedish it rhymes [1] which of course increases its power. I know it from when I was a kid 40+ years ago, and I think both my kids would recognize it or at least get the meaning.
That being said, obviously mobile phones etc are huge and (in my opinion) problematic among kids here, too.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Svenska/comments/vj2630/no_such_thi...
> Those places are very much not like the USA yet. Though as the article points out, they are definitely going in that direction.
In the Netherlands, some things are trending in that direction (e.g. car sizes/hood heights), but I wouldn't call it a general trend; infrastructure, for one, is still massively improving. Where it was bicycle-friendly twenty years ago, it's way more so today, and bound to be even more so tomorrow.
It’s not a foregone conclusion though, in addition to higher and blunter hoods there’s just more cars (over ten million now), and the EU may recognise US safety standards in trade negotiations. Not that the latter matters when you can import violating vehicles (like Dodge Rams) under individual vehicle approval.
The Netherlands is in danger of resting on its laurels and getting complacent. Some places (Hilversum comes to mind) are still quite mediocre.
No, I indeed wouldn't say it's bound to end up in a good place - just that it's too pessimistic a view to think that it's generally trending in the wrong direction. We're seeing all the bad signs we're seeing elsewhere, but also many of the good ones, such as entire new car-free neighbourhoods being built.
I’m very excited to see how bloom merwede works out!
Yeah same, definitely going to visit when it's done.
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Right, I’m raising my kids in the Netherlands, but sadly this sort of environment is increasingly the exception.
I live in Finland, and here the kids mostly walk to/from their schools themselves and that starts around age 7.
Sometimes the kids walk alone, sometimes they pickup friends en route, or they have to take a bus/tram.
6-year-olds, huh?
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.
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This is literal racism.
What should families with mixed-race children do, then?
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