Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

freerangekids.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 534 posts

Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

#71

Post by m_mueller »

usaphp wrote: post #64
m_mueller wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget farms, this is even how the supermarket produce section works in Switzerland. You pick your stuff, you weigh it yourself, you choose the right tag (without anyone looking over your shoulder) and then you go to a (nowadays potentially automated) cashier. Heck, it's how the tax system works as well. Government has no way of knowing how much is actually on your bank account, well at least not officially (gov was…

> "You pick your stuff, you weigh it yourself, you choose the right tag" How is that different from self checkout in most of the big food stores in USA?

I haven't been to too many US supermarkets, but don't you get the vegetables in already weighed and tagged portions? IMO if you do that yourself, and there isn't even a cashier doing a bit of sanity checking, there's just more opportunity to cheat. With self checkout alone you can just not scan something, but it would seem a bit more obvious to catch (which I could see the chains doing with security cams). Almost certainly noone is going to notice if people print the tag for cheap Apples and put it on a bag of expensive ones.

Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

#72

Post by zik »

ma2rten wrote: post #44
kqr2 wrote: post #17

This American Life had a funny anecdote illustrating the opposite extreme where a woman who doesn't quite understand the meaning of "summer camp" leaves her kids at a campground by themselves for a week. My mother emigrated to the United States from Germany in the '50s. And her understanding of American culture and traditions wasn't always quite clear. And one of her confusions was about summer camp. She knew that ki…

I feel like this more than a cultural misunderstanding. It would not be considered normal or acceptable to leave your children alone for so long in Germany either.

Misunderstanding or not I think that as a kid I would have thought it was a pretty awesome experience!

Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

#73

Post by kijin »

culturestate wrote: post #39
m_mueller wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Swiss with a small child, this is the main reason why I couldn't move to the US or UK. Your 70ies examples are still common enough in Switzerland. 6 year olds are sent to Kindergarden on their own (after a bit of training with their parents). Put the visibility triangle on and off you go. Parents are discouraged by the school authorities to bring by car. Today looking back at this I can see the value. Maybe it h…

This is essentially how it works in Japan as well; once the kids are old enough, the parents will walk with them to school a couple of times - to ensure they learn the route and to introduce them to neighbors they might meet on the way - and then the kids are on their own. Japan's cultural safety net (by which I mean the overarching concept that everyone is more or less working together for the common good) is one of…

There was on article here a few weeks ago about how Japanese parents and teachers train children to be safe before letting them out on their own.

https://savvytokyo.com/japan-prepares-children-independence/

Most American parents, on the other hand, don't teach their kids anything about being safe on the streets (other than basic theory, like "don't cross on a red light") because they're always shuttling them around in a car. The reason it's unsafe for American children to roam free is because they don't know how to. In the past, they learned from older siblings and friends. Nowadays there's nobody to teach them. And as soon as you turn 16, you're suddenly free to drive anywhere. It doesn't feel safe to be a pedestrian in a town where most drivers have never been a pedestrian. And so the vicious cycle continues.

Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

#74

Post by germinalphrase »

FrancoDiaz wrote: post #10

I have a 4 year old, in my mid 40s, and think about this a lot for some reason. In the 70s during the summer, when I was around 7, we would wake up, eat breakfast, go out and about wherever we wanted, come back for lunch, out again, come back for dinner, and then out again past dark to play flashlight tag. I think I would be charged with child endangerment these days if my kid (3 years in the future) was doing stuff…

I'm 30 and my childhood in the Midwest was very similar to yours.

Perhaps, it's a regional thing - but I hope to bring up my future children in a similar manner. It's important for young people to have some autonomy.

Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

#75

Post by kuschku »

stuckagain wrote: post #30
guimarin wrote: post #14

I think there are a lot more roads/freeways now than back then as other commenters have pointed out. We've built our cities for cars, not for people. One possible side-effect of self driving cars, is it may make it safer for kids to wander again. I know I'd love to just attach a GPS tracker to my now 1yr old daughter in 5 years, and let her go where she pleases here in SF.

Indeed, one does not simply double the population without limiting the distance people can walk. It's a simple matter of geometry. The number of households in the USA has doubled in the last 40 years. The number of major roads has radically increased. Most (85%) live in urban areas so there is only somewhere to walk in the woods if you live on the edge of the sprawl.

Or if your city is built vertically, but with lots of forests throughout it.

Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

#77

Post by randlet »

NamTaf wrote: post #37
m_mueller wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Swiss with a small child, this is the main reason why I couldn't move to the US or UK. Your 70ies examples are still common enough in Switzerland. 6 year olds are sent to Kindergarden on their own (after a bit of training with their parents). Put the visibility triangle on and off you go. Parents are discouraged by the school authorities to bring by car. Today looking back at this I can see the value. Maybe it h…

To be fair, in a recent brief visit to Switzerland I stayed with some friends in a small village near Zug and saw examples of this sort of attitude throughout more aspects of life than just child-raising. For example, many farmers were leaving produce out with price tags on and relying on an honour system for payment. Some did a 'pay what you want' system for their produce and just relied on people to do the right th…

"For example, many farmers were leaving produce out with price tags on and relying on an honour system for payment"

FWIW this fairly common in rural Ontario and probably other parts of Canada too. I imagine it happens in parts of the US too.

Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

#78

Post by jedberg »

The biggest issue is the courts. I have a two year old, and her grandma lives one mile away. I fully intend to let her walk there by herself when she is 6 or 7. Crime rate data supports me in that this is perfectly safe.

But I'll always have this nagging feeling in my mind of some local busybody parent (and there are a lot) reporting me to CPS and then having to defend my decision and hope that I get a data driven judge.

Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

#79

Post by pvg »

kasey_junk wrote: post #48

Honestly, this seems like a pretty short sighted view of the safety of roaming. In any American city how far could an African American kid roam from their neighborhood in 1926? How much space could an unmarried female white expect to have before societal conventions interfered in 1926? What about an urban Irish boy in 1926 NYC, how much space could he roam in safely?

In the 20s, poorer American children worked. Flappers were a thing. So I think pretty far, in all cases.

Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

#80

Post by jimmaswell »

FrancoDiaz wrote: post #10

I have a 4 year old, in my mid 40s, and think about this a lot for some reason. In the 70s during the summer, when I was around 7, we would wake up, eat breakfast, go out and about wherever we wanted, come back for lunch, out again, come back for dinner, and then out again past dark to play flashlight tag. I think I would be charged with child endangerment these days if my kid (3 years in the future) was doing stuff…

Has anyone considered that, like many things, maybe childraising knowledge has improved over time, and maybe it is true that it's dangerous and a bad idea to let them roam around far away unsupervised? It always seemed reasonable to me, even when I was that age myself. An anecdote is that the only bone injury I had as a kid resulted from riding bikes with some other kids who had a "fun idea" of biking down this steeply sloped road, which wouldn't have been allowed had an adult been present, and I ended up with a crushed wrist and internal bruising, and I was lucky I even lived - could have easily hit my head for example. The aftermath of that incident is probably largely to blame for the weight problem I developed at the time.

My proposed alternative is good video games with open exploration (something like the original Spyro the Dragon games has a great sense of exploration and adventure) or that are otherwise engaging. I always found them a lot more intellectually stimulating/interesting than meandering around outside as a kid anyway. Local multiplayer is a good social activity. Continuing the tangent on other benefits, I remember being motivated to read faster as a kid to keep up with certain text boxes that would disappear quickly, and achieving it.

With all this balanced with other stuff like encouraging playing musical instruments or art and such, I don't see a need for unsupervised "roaming," especially a need outweighing the risks.

Post reply on HN