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Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

afterbabel.com

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Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#31
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

are you seriously implying that immigration is responsible for a sudden reduction in public trust? american immigration has been a thing for 300 years

The type of immigration the US has experienced has changed a fair bit over those 300 years, let alone the last 50 years.

Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#32
post #29

The design of the physical environment is in no small part responsible for this. Don't believe me go to Europe and Japan where kids are still allowed to walk and bike to school, to friends places and just in general play and exist outside unattended to a much higher degree than in the US. Because in the US they would be roadkill, and even if they somehow survived outside of a car, car centric design means there's now…

You're also putting Europe on a pedestal. In many urban areas (where the majority of the population lives) it's no longer safe for kids to walk + bike to school freely. Not necessarily because of cars but significant crime.

Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#33
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you seriously implying that immigration is responsible for a sudden reduction in public trust? american immigration has been a thing for 300 years

[flagged]

In the future only money will have freedom of movement, never humans. You are serving your intended role in the consent-manufacture machine working to ensure that outcome. If you actually still believe in the idea of nations as anything besides a means to divide and conquer Us from Them, I would encourage you to learn about the death and posthumous citizenship of Raoul Wallenberg. The US State Department FOIA cables would be a great place to start.

Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#34
post #10

Is 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.

The rate of work-related moves is half of what it used to be in the 1960s. By all accounts, mobility is decreasing, not increasing. The reality is that we just don't talk to each other much. If you want to look for the decline of one institution that provided some degree of community cohesion, then the answer is going to be pretty unpopular: we don't go to church anymore.

An amusing thing about this is my reaction to reading this piece was that community was enabled in my own youth (which took place in the 80s) by something likely to be even more unpopular on Hacker News than church: sports. My dad was involved in adult softball leagues and many of my earliest friends were the kids of his teammates. We all went to tournaments together and played with each other while the adults played their softball. I was also involved in little league and youth basketball and made friends that way and spent a ton of time at the park with other kids playing baseball and basketball even outside of any kind of league. The neighborhood gathered together in one house even under the guise of television, which united us much more than it divided us, typically to do things like watch Lakers and Dodgers playoff games or major boxing matches that were only on pay-per-view, presumably because households didn't all want to have to pay separately.

Frankly, it's hard for me to imagine what could possibly create a community in my neighborhood today. Half the properties here are AirBNB party houses. The average tenure of a neighbor who actually lives in their own property feels like maybe three years. Hard to make any kind of lasting connections, with or without a church.

Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you (could one) change this, Waron? Just throwing something out there, not a carefully thought out How.

My kids faced the same situation, though at least the neighbors also had kids. I think that parents have to revolt en masse against saturating their kids with extracurriculars. One family going it alone is going to have lonesome kids. The competitiveness has to go away -- the feeling that your kids have to be 100% occupied in order to give them a fighting chance in the future. Schools need to back off on homework.

The problem there is college. You'd have to either make college admissions much less "holistic", or make sure there are non-college paths to success (something people have been trying hard for many years with little success), or both.

Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#36
post #29

The design of the physical environment is in no small part responsible for this. Don't believe me go to Europe and Japan where kids are still allowed to walk and bike to school, to friends places and just in general play and exist outside unattended to a much higher degree than in the US. Because in the US they would be roadkill, and even if they somehow survived outside of a car, car centric design means there's now…

Most parents in Europe would not let their kids walk alone to school lol, maybe outside of large cities but it is not the norm anymore.

Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#37
> In 1995, in the initial academic essay that became the book, Putnam described the social-capital-destroying effects of the rise of television [...]

Jon Haidt really gives too much credit to television. It's an easy thing to reach for when mobile phones and social media are are the present day forces we content with. But there's a deeper story. I'm reminded by Thatcher's 1987 quote:

> You know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.

Maybe it wasn't true then, but people believed them and in their belief they made it true. In a world where men, women, and families exist, there isn't room for community. It was dismantled by disbelief.

In the same way we don't have the ability to reach the moon anymore, I wonder if we don't have the ability to reconstitute communities, like lost and ancient knowledge, eventually they will fade from living memory.

Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rate of work-related moves is half of what it used to be in the 1960s. By all accounts, mobility is decreasing, not increasing. The reality is that we just don't talk to each other much. If you want to look for the decline of one institution that provided some degree of community cohesion, then the answer is going to be pretty unpopular: we don't go to church anymore.

[flagged]

Child molestation happens outside of churches too. You need to normalize by something.

Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#39
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

are you seriously implying that immigration is responsible for a sudden reduction in public trust? american immigration has been a thing for 300 years

Public trust is a function of common values, as values diverge, trust plummets. Unassimilated immigrants is one of the bigger factors in divergent values among others.
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