Go watch Sesame Street, S01EO1.[1]
Early Sesame Street is all about unsupervised kids in a big city.
Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
141–150 of 413 posts
Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Routinely in New York City at least, you can kill someone using a motor vehicle almost with complete impunity. The driver who led to Sammy's Law (which still hasn't passed) only received a 180 day license suspension a year and a half after the accident, even though he sped past a stopped vehicle on the righthand side (the vehicle had stopped for the child). Death by car is often considered acceptable. There is really…
7,485 pedestrians were killed by cars in the whole of the US in 2021. this is a great example of where whataboutism is not a logical fallacy. i mean what is your solution? ban all driving? sure, but give me a proper public transport network that can supply the suburbs and rural areas. fix urban cost of living while you're at it.
Remove zoning restrictions is step 1 to allow denser more walkable areas, which will reduce urban cost of living.
Step 2 is to change the highway code to make stroads illegal and make more normal safe roads.
Step 3 is change the fha rules so more dense homes are built.
Step 4 change cafe standards so smaller lighter cars are the norm, possibly tax suvs and trucks.
These are all stroke of a pen changes.
Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wholeheartedly agree based on my own kids, but want to add a caution lest someone misunderstand: this testing, learning, and growing is of a kind that can only be done without adult supervision. It's not something that you can give them with a private lesson. It's not something that can be taught in a classroom. It's not something that can happen at all without adults letting the kids figure it out on their own by…
Whenever this kind of opinion props up I wonder how far would you let your child to "fail"? Clearly we need our children to stumble and fail in a low-stake environment before they actually experience them later on in life. This naturally involves taking some risk. I remember being able to walk freely around the village pretty much without any supervision, I did get hurt a lot either from running into walls or getting…
> modern society can't seem to tolerate even a single dead children
You mean parents can't seem to tolerate even a single dead child. And that's true, especially when most parents only ever have one or two children.
Obviously they don't want them to die. To parents, their children aren't an abstract idea or a number that they can rationalize away.
Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things like this are actually some of the main reasons I'm moving my family to Europe. In Europe, my kid can be her own person with her own schedule and her own environment to explore on her own terms. In america, she'd be isolated and dependent.
Unfortunately it’s getting worse here. In my youth few kids had scheduled activities. 20 years later, many kids are on a rather tight schedule.
Not really discounting your experiencs, but 20 years ago plenty of folks had scheduled activities. Music lessons didn't get invented in the past two decades. Nor did school/college prep. Indeed, the numbers typically show that those that did this, had a better chance of success at whatever they were scheduled to do. (This fits expectations, too. People succeed at that that they are prepared to do...)
Would love to see updated numbers on it.
Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't allow your kids to fuck up, they will never build healthy behaviors around fucking up. It's very helpful for kids to give them safe chances to fuck up.
Witnessed this kind of thing today. Doting father of three boys on vacation. They're all ditzing around on busy sidewalks and the father barks "Control yourselves!" It occurred to me at that moment that this kind of hovering and scolding teaches children to externalize the responsibility of understanding their environment and their place within it . They will literally never learn the lessons this father wants to imp…
Eh don't beat yourself up. I grew up with a lot of unstructured play time and I still don't feel like I have any real passions or a very satisfying career. I think that's pretty normal and a lot of what people talk about with regards to passions and interests is just bullshit or making conversation.
A father or mother admonishing their kids to behave in public is not really anything new either.
Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We know the toy will break if it's repeatedly thrown down the stairs, so we impose a rule that "we don't do that in our house" For many parents, the toy is expensive enough that it warrants a rule (like the stove.)
Indeed, it's not just that I'm anxious the toy will break. It's that I'm anxious the behavior will continue and the replacement will be broken in short order and so on.
Why replace it? You're just teaching the child that breaking things has consequences for others but not for them.
Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
That goes back to a time when most homes had a stay-at-home homemaker. Today, I'm not really crazy about the idea of a random pop-in, having to cut the few hours of time that I do have for laundry, dishes, or just a bit of down time, to have to make coffee and find snacks and sit down for a chat. If I were home all day that would be quite different, or so I think.
Where I grew up people still do pop ins. You get around your problem by helping the person out with what they were doing when you popped in. Doing the dishes when you pop in? Cool, you get to dry them as I wash. Everyone basically follows this rule. There’s no expectation of entertaining guests if you pop in for a visit.
I feel like a literal pop in does not work for many people due to mobile phones and suburbs. Suburbs make it so you have to go at least a little out of your way to visit someone, which means you might as well call to make sure they are available before wasting your time on a detour.
Although, I see no problem with impromptu visits, I get them all the time. They just happen to call or text before coming.
Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this seems to be purely a thing in the english speaking cultures This is a major thing in many East Asian cultures as well, China/Taiwan/Japan/Korea. Korea had to pass a law saying that private academies have to close at 10pm, so that kids aren't studying past midnight, but some academies still stay open secretly as the parents are demanding the extra hours. It's a vicious circle: kids compete for the few spots in…
I'm not familiar with this custom, but wouldn't kids with more balanced extracurricular lives have an advantage over those who fill their day to the brim? Surely after some point you hit diminishing returns, and after that it becomes downright damaging (in terms of mental health etc). So I'd expect the cycle to balance itself after a while, with parents eventually recognizing the importance of downtime. What gives? (…
You end up with generational trauma, Asian parents who were worked to the bone as children, saw peers find higher-paying jobs as a result, the people who had mental breakdowns are presumably brushed aside and viewed as a source of shame, many keep grinding through the system because the alternative is poverty as a farmer, end up with scars repressed and treating their children the same way... and the children who break from the pressure bond over the Internet and try to treat each other with kindness, but are often unable to provide for each other because they're too mentally scarred to find jobs and make a living.
Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
#149"About 1 in 36 children has been identified with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) according to estimates from CDC's Autism."
When I was growing up, basically no one had it. The rates were 1 per 1,000 or lower. So one or two kids in the entire high school. Now you can expect one in your class. Many of these kids are supper naive and vulnerable, just trying to fit in. One reason why the right is skeptical of what is being taught to them.
Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
#150Meanwhile I know people who look at analytics and numbers to decide what sports and activities their child (who is still in elementary school!) should be doing in order to maximize college admissions chances. It's madness. Don't play violin (even if you like it) because there are too many people doing that, you have to do something unique. Don't play basketball, it's too common and therefore too hard to stand out, yo…
> Meanwhile I know people who look at analytics and numbers to decide what sports and activities their child (who is still in elementary school!) should be doing in order to maximize college admissions chances. Those people are dumb; ignore them. They're "fighting the last war", so to say. Seriously, an orchestra needs 30-40 violins per tuba. There has to be a lot of violin players, or there is no orchestra (the Harv…
They're not trying to optimize so the kid can be a profession violinist -- god forbid, there's hardly any money there at all! No, the idea is to just do things which make the kid look different on a college application. That's it. Once the Harvard letter comes in, the cello can be sold, it's served its purpose.