Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
61–70 of 480 posts
Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
#62I would have thought that two parents working and not technology would have been the major contributor to loss of the community in early periods.
if two parents worked 20-30 hours a week each, probably not as big a deal.
Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
The type of immigration the US has experienced has changed a fair bit over those 300 years, let alone the last 50 years.
How? Other than it's by land instead of by sea? My immigrant grandparents came here seeking asylum from persecution in their home country. The other side all came seeking jobs. How is that different?
Societies regulate the influx of strangers to protect their culture — and the rapid influx of people who don’t share cultural values has damaged American culture.
Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
#64Apologies 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…
Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
#65Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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“Most people” who dispute the idea that there’s a purposeful undermining of social cohesion via permissive immigration policy are disputing it because they are willing to uproot their entire lives to switch countries?!
Holy smokes.
Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
#67Apologies 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…
Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's trying to appear to be science. They want the appearance of legitimacy and objectivity to encourage a particular position. A quick read through of the site shows it's a conservative-leaning group, and I'd be willing to bet that sooner-or-later they'll be pushing "a return to traditional values" as the cure for all our ills.
> A quick read through of the site shows it's a conservative-leaning group While there's nothing wrong with being conservative, the group's founder is a self-described Democrat. > I'd be willing to bet that sooner-or-later they'll be pushing "a return to traditional values" as the cure for all our ills If "growing up in close-knit communities" (from the article) is a traditional value, then yes, they are saying that…
Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Confounders or not, kids don't have crap for communities. They have 24/7 adulting, most of it spent in one building or another. source:5 kids. source:15 years scout leader. source:10 years youth leader, other.
I hear a lot about excessive parenting on here but I wonder if it's just a segment of society. Can anyone but wealthy parents have time to occupy their kids 24-7? The freedom I and friends had as a kid was not a decision of my parents so much as a necessity. Parents dont get home from work until 6, school lets out at 2, we get at least 4 free hours of undisturbed freedom. Why would that be different now?
My son is playing with other kids. I wander off. When I check back, all the kids are watching a screen. I say “what’s going on?” And some parent says “the kids were getting roudy, so I put on a show to calm them down”.
Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood
#70The 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…