Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
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Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
#2I would have thought that two parents working and not technology would have been the major contributor to loss of the community in early periods.
Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
#3I would have thought that two parents working and not technology would have been the major contributor to loss of the community in early periods.
Non working parents were major contributors to local communities.
I have noticed that community organisations now are far more dependant on retired peopke than they were a few decades ago.
Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
#4I would have thought that two parents working and not technology would have been the major contributor to loss of the community in early periods.
I think it's a complex system, where it's not so much any one factor but rather the presence of so many different factors that each have a small impact and which together combine to have a big impact. So you could be right at the same time the article is right. Technology has become a great atomizing force in our society, from automobiles keeping us from talking to each other in traffic to cell phones keeping us from talking to each other at the store. Even online shopping atomizes us. And in the mean time, both parents basically have to be working all the time to keep paying for their lifestyle. All of this combined leads to isolated childhoods, and because we tend to keep the habits we learn as children, isolated adulthoods.
Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
#5Does families having fewer number of children contribute to this? The most local community would be children that live under the same roof.
Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
#6Apologies for being critical, but this reads like the author had a conclusion they wanted to reach and worked backward to some flashy graphs to make it work (the right side of the "lies, damn lies, and statistics" spectrum).
There is no discussion of confounders, no control groups or paired studies, and there are million things correlated with the last 50 of societal development years besides the topics mentioned here. The mention of phones and other influences in teen behavior is completely unrelated to the main point in the discussion and just serves to provide credibility by association.
All in all, this is not science, it is just a reductionist oped presented as fact using classic internet hooks.
Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
#7Apologies for being critical, but this reads like the author had a conclusion they wanted to reach and worked backward to some flashy graphs to make it work (the right side of the "lies, damn lies, and statistics" spectrum). There is no discussion of confounders, no control groups or paired studies, and there are million things correlated with the last 50 of societal development years besides the topics mentioned her…
> All in all, this is not science
It's not trying to be. The intended audience is not peers reading a research journal, it's normal folks and policy makers who don't know what a confounding variable is but still want to make modern life suck less.
Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
#8Apologies for being critical, but this reads like the author had a conclusion they wanted to reach and worked backward to some flashy graphs to make it work (the right side of the "lies, damn lies, and statistics" spectrum). There is no discussion of confounders, no control groups or paired studies, and there are million things correlated with the last 50 of societal development years besides the topics mentioned her…
> All in all, this is not science It's not trying to be. The intended audience is not peers reading a research journal, it's normal folks and policy makers who don't know what a confounding variable is but still want to make modern life suck less.
Since the audience isn't technical enough to realize the author excluded confounders, doesn't that make it even worse?
Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
#9Does families having fewer number of children contribute to this? The most local community would be children that live under the same roof.
> Does families having fewer number of children contribute to this?
It could have decades ago, when kids still had places to go. Not now.
I had 5 who spent their childhood persistently locked away in one adult construct or another - because there was/is no local community. Within their reach were roads and private property and that's about it. They were in the same boat as most other US kids.
Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
#10Is this what Zgmunt Bauman called the transition from Solid Modernity to Liquid Modernity?
With rents going up and switching jobs more frequently than past generations it becomes harder to stuck around in one place long enough for strong communities to form.