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How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

freerangekids.com

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

#341

Post by kittiepryde »

nvarsj wrote: post #293
Kluny wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Media is part of it, but the other part is this, taken from the first comment on the linked article: "I can’t help but notice how many freeways and roads are between Sheffield and Rother Valley. We can’t blame parents alone for the loss of childhood freedom. Since 1919 We have purposely designed our cities to maximize vehicle throughput and require car ownership and the result is an environment that is lethal for 8 y…

This is very true in London, unfortunately. Cars destroy the city - both by polluting it, and making walking and biking dangerous. Boris Johnson's goal as mayor was to optimise traffic flow through London, which just encouraged more cars. Going to a city like Cambridge where the center is shut down to cars is quite eye opening - lots of kids and people walking and biking. In London it's just a sea of cars driving and…

I am the USA, in like a suburb-ish area. And uh.. Cars on sidewalks? Is that common in London? How did that become a thing? It sounds super dangerous.

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

#342

Post by wj »

ciaranm wrote: post #321
nvarsj wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very true in London, unfortunately. Cars destroy the city - both by polluting it, and making walking and biking dangerous. Boris Johnson's goal as mayor was to optimise traffic flow through London, which just encouraged more cars. Going to a city like Cambridge where the center is shut down to cars is quite eye opening - lots of kids and people walking and biking. In London it's just a sea of cars driving and…

I make a point of banging on any vehicle that's nearly hit someone and not noticed/acknowledged it - regardless of whether it was me they nearly hit or not. People get mad (especially people driving vans/small trucks), but it's disgraceful that people are driving multi-tonne vehicles and are completely oblivious to their surroundings. I'm glad your daughter is ok.

I did that when I was nearly hit in a marked crosswalk (they didn't slow down and were less than arm's length from me) that was at an intersection with no light. They went around the block to come back and start threatening me for hitting their car...

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

#343

Post by witty_username »

hsitz wrote: post #284
E6300 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just sounds like a way to dodge responsibility.

I wish it were merely a way to avoid taking personal responsibility. There's much more to it than that. Read "The Psychology of Influence" along with some of the stuff by, e.g, Kahneman and/or Tversky on behavioral economics and the various cognitive biases humans have that lead them to make poor decisions. I assure you that corporations have read all of this and are taking advantage of it to part you from your money…

What is wrong with corporate greed?

I want the best returns out of the corporations I invest in.

> Question how we're conditioned to think of lower corporate profits as a bad thing.

Perhaps it is my neoliberal worldview, but I think most people are like "corporate profits can go down" for . People think that corporations are owned only by billionares.

Lower corporate profits are a bad thing for shareholders.

Why don't we just take poor people's money since they're so greedy for wanting money? Most of the arguments against excess wealth can be used against many first-world people including HNers.

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

#345

Post by throwanem »

jessriedel wrote: post #279
manmal wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crime is not the problem, traffic is. I grew up in a blind alley, and the whole town was really low in traffic. I started cruising around with my bike together with the neighbors at age 7, and we met a car every 10 minutes, tops. They slowed down to a stop, mostly, when they saw us. Fast forward, we are living in a city of 30k citizens now, though on the outskirts; there is a major road about 200m away, and although…

Yes. Everyone is falling over themselves in this thread to bemoan the sensationalist media and irrational fear of kidnapping, but cars are a dramatic difference in the risks of letting children wander that just didn't exist 100 years ago.

I do not believe there are likely to be many centenarians among those here disagreeing with the idea that daily life is so much more deadly now as to justify the degree of restriction under discussion.

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

#346

Post by taurath »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #290
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a small suburban city and I can walk to: * The library (5 minutes) * A supermarket (8 minutes) * A dozen restaurants (7-15 minutes; mostly local restaurants + 2 fast food chains) * Two liquor stores * A drug store (12 minutes) * A coworking space (15 minutes) * Several antique stores (12-15 minutes) * (Almost forgot) Walmart (10 minutes) * Two barbers (8-12 minutes) * At least three major bus lines And if I…

That's exceptional though. Most American suburbs aren't like that at all, and many of the ones that do have a walkable area, most of their housing is still in unwalkable areas.

Specificlly built to be unwalkable in fact, to keep out "undesirables".

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

#347

Post by danielbarla »

Kluny wrote: post #114
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…

Media is part of it, but the other part is this, taken from the first comment on the linked article: "I can’t help but notice how many freeways and roads are between Sheffield and Rother Valley. We can’t blame parents alone for the loss of childhood freedom. Since 1919 We have purposely designed our cities to maximize vehicle throughput and require car ownership and the result is an environment that is lethal for 8 y…

Your comment made me consider this point, and I think it's a good one. That said, I actually live in a less crowded and busy city than I did as a child, yet the conditioning the parent poster mentions is there.

As a 6 year old, I would walk next to busy urban streets alone, cross streets, get on trams, and go to school. I don't think the risk of that has really gotten much higher, we just perceive it differently. A good example is how cars didn't have seatbelts (at the back at least), or headrests, and they had a tendency to crumple and have the steering column impale the driver during collisions.

We seem to be more keenly aware of these issues nowadays, and are somehow more averse to them - quite aside from any actual changes for the worse.

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

#348

Post by redsummer »

driverdan wrote: post #76

> This Daily Mail piece... Lost me in literally four words. This is blogspam about something from the Daily Mail, guaranteed to be terrible. This may be talking about a legitimate problem but sure isn't citing a legitimate source.

Oh my god the daily mail!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2z-AdzgKjY

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

#349

Post by TheGrumpyBrit »

clouddrover wrote: post #167
greedo wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also just remembered another anectdote. One morning (age 13) I set out to go birdwatching. I had to get up around 5am, in order to get to the estuary before sunrise. I had a small backpack with all my gear, and about a mile from my home, a sheriff's deputy stopped me in his squad car. He quizzed me on what I was doing, asked to look in my backpack, and after 15 minutes, I was on my way. He was obviously surprised t…

> He quizzed me on what I was doing, asked to look in my backpack, and after 15 minutes, I was on my way I don't know what the laws are where you live but I would guess he had no right to search your backpack without your consent. To me, what you're describing is police aggression and you must always push back against any such aggression. You should not have submitted to the search. The legal system is adversarial an…

He didn't search his backpack without consent - he asked for, and was presumably given, consent.

There are certainly scenarios where you should consider the police to be your adversary and enforce every right you have to its fullest extent, but choosing your battles is just as important. The police have far more rights to detain a juvenile compared to an adult, and an unaccompanied 13 year old with a backpack at 5am is out of the ordinary. The officer was already starting from a place with a reasonable assumption that the child may be lost or a runaway, in which case he can probably already take him back home (or to the station for CPS to talk to if he's completely uncooperative).

Allowing a quick search to confirm that you're just pursuing a harmless hobby and are not putting yourself in any danger or likely to be reported missing a couple of hours later, seems like the easiest and fastest way to deal with that particular encounter.

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

#350

Post by purity_resigns »

kittiepryde wrote: post #341
nvarsj wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very true in London, unfortunately. Cars destroy the city - both by polluting it, and making walking and biking dangerous. Boris Johnson's goal as mayor was to optimise traffic flow through London, which just encouraged more cars. Going to a city like Cambridge where the center is shut down to cars is quite eye opening - lots of kids and people walking and biking. In London it's just a sea of cars driving and…

I am the USA, in like a suburb-ish area. And uh.. Cars on sidewalks? Is that common in London? How did that become a thing? It sounds super dangerous.

I've ended up on a sidewalk turning with snow on the ground. If the sidewalks are the round kinds it seems like that'd be especially easy.
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