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

331–340 of 534 posts

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

#331

Post by emiliobumachar »

jedberg wrote: post #78

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 ju…

There's a way to pre-emptively ask a court whether it's legal to do something.

A few years back, some researches did just that in the USA, asking whether they could publish their research despite some deal with the funding corporation, which did not want it published.

I'm afraid I don't remember the details. May be a state-specific thing.

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

#332

Post by gambiting »

valuearb wrote: post #5

When I was 6 or 7 years old, during the summers every morning my mom would give me $1.25, and I would get on my bike and ride to the public pool with my friends that was about 5 miles away in the center of our small town. We'd swim all day and go to the Burgerville for lunch where I could get a wonderfully tasty cheeseburger with fries and coke for my $1.25. Finally I had to be home by dinner. If we didn't go swimmin…

I grew up in the 90s, and when I was 7 years old I was expected to leave the house all by myself(school started at 8am, my parents already left for work by then), lock the door behind me, walk 2km to school(crossing 2 roads), and then get back home around 3pm, let myself in, and if either parent wasn't home yet make myself something to eat.

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

#333

Post by pantalaimon »

credit_guy wrote: post #156
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…

(Parent of a 6yo and a 1yo). I feel the same, I was orders of magnitude freer as a kid as my children are now. One day the nanny of my 1yo found my 6yo outside of our school (which is across the street) almost ready to cross the street on the pedestrian crossing. We wrote to the teacher, who told us she couldn't sleep that night. It's very likely that if we had reported the incident to the principal she would have be…

> I think it's worth shielding our children from danger for as long as possible, so they can focus on learning. Life will come at them, that's for sure. And then they'll have the motivation to learn how to deal with all the bad stuff. But until them they'll learn more of the good stuff if we remove the distraction of having to look out for themselves.

But how will they ever learn that when all they've been brought up with was that they can't be trusted to do anything on their own?

What good is all the learning when you lack confidence to apply it to something new, unknown, where you don't know the outcome 100%?

You make it sound like you are living in a war zone when in fact, your children are probably much safer than they ever were in history.

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

#334

Post by throwanem »

jimmaswell wrote: post #80
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 steep…

One of the two bones I broke as a kid had a similar cause. That might sound like an endorsement of your claim, except first that it gave me powerfully to understand the value of forethought on the subject of not being a damn fool, and second that the other broken bone resulted from jumping up and down on an ordinary floor - not even jumping off anything. Are floors a problem?

I have a scar at the base of each thumb. One came from carelessness with the Boy Scout folder whose purchase price I'd years earlier worked hard to earn. It wasn't the first time I'd hurt myself through carelessness with that knife, either. It was the last, though, with any. Are pocketknives a problem?

The other scar I earned through waving a stick around. It wasn't really an instance of culpable carelessness on my part, in that if the stick hadn't had a twig stump where it did, or had I held it differently, it wouldn't have gouged me. I found a lesson there about unintended consequences that's served me well in life. Are sticks a problem?

In rough terms, I spent half my pre-adolescent childhood running around barefoot climbing trees and derelict farm equipment, and the other half indoors reading and playing NES games and writing Applesoft BASIC. I found both enjoyable, and a worthwhile way to spend time. I would not have attempted to replace either with the other. To make the attempt would have struck me as arrant foolishness, even at such a callow age, and I cannot say the idea seems any more sensible from a perspective more heavily weighted with years.

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

#335

Post by kwhitefoot »

saurik wrote: post #153
Kluny wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's weird as hell to be the only person walking on an empty street.

I actually got stopped by the local police a year or two ago for going on a walk during a holiday, as they received reports of some strange guy walking alone.

I remember reading that it happened to Isaac Asimov many decades ago so it's not a new thing (in the US that is).

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

#336

Post by wolfgke »

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 think I would be charged with child endangerment these days if my kid (3 years in the future) was doing stuff like that.

> [...]

> The media is part of the problem.

Not the media is the real problem, but the tolerance of people towards the mentioned kind of laws.

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

#337

Post by throwanem »

jimmaswell wrote: post #191
robbrown451 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"My proposed alternative is good video games with open exploration" I don't even know what to say to that. Seriously?

I never really liked outside much as a kid and found those kinds of games a lot more fun and "adventurous" than outside. To recall my exact feelings at the time, in Spyro I was working towards goals and finding cool stuff like fairies and treasure, while trees and rocks outside were just "there." Nowadays I can appreciate nature just fine (lately I watched a particular great blue heron occasionally throughout a semes…

That sounds much less like a genuine lack on the part of reality, and much more like your reward system being tuned so strongly to favor shiny polygons popping out from under polygonal rocks that, when you turn over a real one, their absence disappoints you.

Your other examples are just as flawed. When you build a treehouse in your backyard, you end up with a treehouse - and the knowledge that you built a treehouse, and that you can build a treehouse. When you build a treehouse in Minecraft, you end up with nothing. It's an arrangement of bytes that's rendered by an imaginary machine into an arrangement of pixels that corresponds roughly with some abstract idea of what a treehouse might be. There is nothing in the slightest about it which is real, and that includes the feeling it might give of having accomplished anything.

I get that, in an industry which revolves around building imaginary machines, it's easy for us to get confused and forget that's what we are doing. That it's easy is no excuse to let it betray you into sloppy thinking, though, and that's what I see here. Imaginary machines appear to have satisfied you well enough as a kid, which is reasonable. Assuming from this that imaginary machines are good enough for every kid is not reasonable at all. What you found to enrich your life would've intolerably impoverished mine, and those of almost all the people with whom I grew up. As such, I find your prescriptivism uninformed, premature, and faintly arrogant in a way I don't think you've reflected upon or even recognized.

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

#338

Post by whiskers08xmt »

jimmaswell wrote: post #231
slacka wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really feel that proposing video games over being outside does a huge disservice to us as people. This. Growing up, I was only allowed 1 hr of video games or TV per day. And on nice days, I was ordered to play outside. I grew up with a love of outdoors, sports, and have always been in good shape. My cousins were encouraged to stay in and play video games and never allowed out alone. We are similar age and genetic…

Exercise is overwhelmingly dwarfed by calorie consumption, in terms of weight. Not eating an apple is about equivalent to running an entire mile. Most likely your cousins just had a worse diet. Exercise as a weight loss solution is essentially a lie sold by con artists - you can't outrun a bad diet, as they say.

Weight is not the primary concern of being in good shape. Being thin, but in bad shape, is almost as detrimental to your health as being over weight and in bad-shape.

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

#339

Post by witty_username »

mverwijs wrote: post #252
witty_username wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations don't force it on you. People voluntarily use that. Corporations provide those things because people want them.

Advertisements target your lizard brain. That bypasses your rational thinking. It is not a fair fight and not merely "just say 'no'".

I'm not saying a person is perfectly rational. But if you don't like something just don't do it. Corporations aren't forcing you.

Could you give an example of how you can't say no to advertisement?

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

#340

Post by throwanem »

jimmaswell wrote: post #179
johngalt wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I ended up with a crushed wrist and internal bruising, and I was lucky I even lived. And I bet you wear a seat belt every day in your car as an adult. Invincibility is one of those myths you want to dispel when kids are young and the stakes aren't as high.

I wore my seat belt every day before that anyway, not even because I had to but because I wanted to. The only thing that really changed after that point was I didn't want to ride bikes anymore. I really can't be the only one who thinks brushes with death are not a good thing to have just because they can teach you a lesson when you're fortunate enough to walk away from them. Would you also say Russian Roulette is a g…

One might argue that the correct lesson to draw, from a broken bone got by doing something stupid on a bike, is not that one shouldn't ride a bike, but rather that one shouldn't do something stupid. That's the lesson I drew from it, anyway.

I'd be curious to know how old you were when you did the damnfool thing, and how your folks reacted to it. I was eleven or twelve and mine were generally unsympathetic, which suited me fine - it's not like I couldn't see in retrospect what a jackass I'd been, or like I wasn't quite properly embarrassed by the result. One does, after all, prefer to be able to say one earned a visible injury in some more respectable fashion than that!

Post reply on HN