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Kids need freedom, too

persuasion.community

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Re: Kids need freedom, too

#291

Post by kelnos »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #152
ghaff wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My feeling has always been... I've been wearing soft contacts for decades--and now multifocals. I do wear reading glasses for, well, reading and other close work when I have the contacts in. (Probably more than I really need to.) So maybe LASIK is super-safe at this point but, honestly, there's very little about my current situation that inconveniences me in any appreciable way.

I would not get refractive eye surgery if I was old enough to have reading glasses (since nothing fixes that yet), but if all you have is run of the mill myopia, a couple thousand dollars to spare, and you are 25 to 30, LASIK or PRK is one of the best quality of life improvements you can make. The clarity with which you can see everything is stunning at first, and the lack of inconvenience is incredible. If you’re in…

> and you are 25 to 30

Or older, even. I got PRK at 34 and my eyesight is still 20/20 (or better), nearly 6 years later.

Re: Kids need freedom, too

#292

Post by eru »

rmah wrote: post #204
CalRobert wrote: post #154

It's great to allow your kids to take risks, and we do this with our own as much as we can (they're 1 and 3, so "within reason" is still doing some heavy lifting. I pick ticks off of them now and then and patch up their share of bruises). But fundamentally, what I want most is to be somewhere my kids can ride bikes or walk alone to school, to friends, to the shop, etc. from the age of 7 or so. As best I can tell that…

In NYC, over a million kids of all ages walk, skateboard, bike, kick-scooter, or take the bus and subway to school every day. Little kids as young as 10 take the subway alone to/from school. Well, really they travel in packs, but still. Even in the dangerous Big Apple, the number of serious accidents or criminal incidents while going to/from school is just a handful a year. When I was young and growing up in the burb…

> Little kids as young as 10 take the subway alone to/from school.

That's not a little kid, that's just a kid. Americans have weird standards for kids' independence.

Compare the Japanese show 'my first errand' where little kids go on their first errands:

https://www.reddit.com/r/JapaneseGameShows/comments/1lvvgm/h...

Re: Kids need freedom, too

#293

Post by eru »

wheels wrote: post #273
CalRobert wrote: post #154

It's great to allow your kids to take risks, and we do this with our own as much as we can (they're 1 and 3, so "within reason" is still doing some heavy lifting. I pick ticks off of them now and then and patch up their share of bruises). But fundamentally, what I want most is to be somewhere my kids can ride bikes or walk alone to school, to friends, to the shop, etc. from the age of 7 or so. As best I can tell that…

> the Netherlands, parts of Denmark, or perhaps Japan I think it's far more common than that -- actually, guessing wildly, I suspect most children around the world get themselves to school and that the US is the outlier. In Germany, where I live, and where my oldest will be starting school in two months, it's common and encouraged for kids to walk to school in their first year (age 6). Admittedly, ours is only a quar…

When I went to Kindergarten in the late 80s / early 90s in East Germany, many kids went home by themselves.

Re: Kids need freedom, too

#294

Post by ekianjo »

eru wrote: post #292
rmah wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In NYC, over a million kids of all ages walk, skateboard, bike, kick-scooter, or take the bus and subway to school every day. Little kids as young as 10 take the subway alone to/from school. Well, really they travel in packs, but still. Even in the dangerous Big Apple, the number of serious accidents or criminal incidents while going to/from school is just a handful a year. When I was young and growing up in the burb…

> Little kids as young as 10 take the subway alone to/from school. That's not a little kid, that's just a kid. Americans have weird standards for kids' independence. Compare the Japanese show 'my first errand' where little kids go on their first errands: https://www.reddit.com/r/JapaneseGameShows/comments/1lvvgm/h...

You'd probably want to avoid citing Japanese TV shows as reference. They are all fake and completely scripted/heavily edited from start to finish.

Re: Kids need freedom, too

#295

Post by dukeofdoom »

The biggest benefit of Covid that I've seen where I live is that kids are out of the house and playing outdoors. I notice more parents go for walks with them too. But I think having to sit there for online school during lockdown, they really want to get outside after to see their friends.

Re: Kids need freedom, too

#296

Post by lotsofpulp »

mips_avatar wrote: post #255
II2II wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't just near collisions. I was once stuck be a car with enough force that it bent my bike frame, ripped the mirror off of their car, and created a crashing sound loud enough for people to hear inside their homes. As far as I can tell, the motorist never even slowed down. The people who came to my aid were nearby residents and pedestrians. How I managed to walk away from that one with little more than (nasty) br…

I want to find out what kind of architecture/design humanizes people. Because everywhere I go in Canamerica people have to drive and I agree with you that it makes people worse.

It is not having quarter acre single family homes with garages and 2 car driveways. And not having 6+ lane wide intersections. And using traffic circles instead of traffic lights.

But mostly the first one. The second you start giving everyone a 2k+ square foot home and backyard and front yard and 2 car parking, you now have everything spaced so far apart that you need cars. And everyone needs space to put their car, so that means huge setbacks for storefronts, huge parking lots, etc.

You cannot have a community optimized for both numerous cars and non car traffic. It is one or the other, and once the layout is done, it is not politically changeable. Certainly not the huge personal vehicles almost everyone drives today.

Re: Kids need freedom, too

#297

Post by sjwalter »

sjg007 wrote: post #272
korethr wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am seeing this, too. Oftentimes, ostensibly in the interest of protecting children from harm, we try to control their behavior with increasingly disproportionate ultimatums, to the point where the authority's response is vastly more harmful than the situation itself. And IMO, perversely, this incentivizes behavior problems. Kids sooner or later (and often sooner in the case of smarter kids) catch onto when adults…

My kids figured this out... I think the solution is that you have to be consistent and both parents have to back each other up. Some people say that you should setup house rules and let the kids help set them up that way they have ownership. The other thing would be to go to therapy. We don't teach people how to be parents but there is a lot of applied child development skills you can learn.

It is shocking to me how often I hear the advice "go to therapy".

Therapy presents its own risks, often never discussed. And it screams of a total lack of self confidence.

Re: Kids need freedom, too

#298

Post by SilverRed »

cuddlybacon wrote: post #75

Jonathan Haidt wrote a book called The Coddling of the American Mind [0]. He'd agree that adults need to give children their freedom back. He talks about what the consequences for not doing so have been for Zoomers and it is quite worrying: escalating rates of depression and anxiety, increased rates of suicide, fewer friends, even fewer close friends, reduced social trust, more on-campus violence, increased favorabil…

I think it's far too complex to attribute these results to a particular cause. Almost all of our food packaging and cookware contain new and known bad chemicals which we do not understand the implications of. Social media has gone from nothing to everywhere which has nothing to do with caution and lack of freedom. Cars have become more essential and people are spaced further apart than before.

As well as a better understanding of what depression and anxiety are. I suspect its much more likely a child today would be able to express what they are feeling and have it reported in a statistic instead of being told they need to stop being a girl and have a spoon full of cement.

Re: Kids need freedom, too

#299

Post by clairity »

ryukafalz wrote: post #286
clairity wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

speed doesn’t cause fatalities, or even cause collisions, it increases severity in the case of a collision. collisions cause (pedestrian) fatalities, and distracted driving is the leading cause of collisions.

Well no; speed does increase severity in the case of a collision as you say, but it also directly impacts your stopping distance, even at the same level of alertness/reaction time/etc. If a kid runs out in front of your car, you are both more likely to hit them at 30 mph than 15 mph (due to not being able to stop in time) and more likely to kill them having hit them.

you see, that's exactly the kind of marginal thinking that gets us into these kinds of shut-in situations for children in the name of "safety". that exact scenario, where only the speed difference rather than a myriad of other factors, is material to life and death, is a tiny, and probably an undifferentiable, portion of collisions. putting forth such imagined scenarios as if they present significant risk is poor rationale.

support traffic calming measures (like narrowing car lanes, adding streetside trees, converting parking to bike lanes, etc.), not for specious reasons like this, but because they reduce distracted driving, and thereby reduce collisions and injury/death. it's at best misdirection to talk about reducing speed, and at worst, leads to poor policy that not only doesn't address the problem (reducing injury/death) but creates unintended consequences (like traffic and more distracted driving).

Re: Kids need freedom, too

#300

Post by jollybean »

We also don't talk about 'all those other things' that went along with freedoms. I used to buy my father cigarettes as a kid in a small town where they knew who I was buying for. We used to have 7 kids in the back of a pickup truck on the back roads. We didn't wear helmets for anything, though adults did 'mostly' on motorcycles. We'd climb way, way up high in barns and jump down into hey stacks with god knows what kind of nails and chains floating around. We ran go-karts down treacherous hills. Adults didn't usually wear life vests on the lake and definitely had beers out fishing. And I'm not that old. So it's not quite just 'helicoptor' parenting ... kids used to die at higher rates from all sorts of things though I think largely disease, but I think this made us more risk tolerant.

Have a gander at this [1].

When your parents were born, infant mortality was 'pretty bad'. When your grandparents were born ... it's traumatic. Furtherback it looks almost unthinkable.

Just look at what the lived trauma in that chart must represent. Basically - everyone had young children die on them. Imagine that being 'normal'.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041751/canada-all-time-...

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