251–260 of 480 posts
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People's desires are the direct driver of gigantification of vehicles. I assure you nobody buying a RAM or F150 gives two shits about EPA or fuel efficiency.
People had no choice. When they come out with a new generation of car model they stop producing the old.
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.
I would say one off the biggest threat for pedestrians in European city are electric scooters.
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My daughter has been playing outside since she was 4 years old, unsupervised. She's 9 now. A lot of the other neighborhood kids have followed suit (I really suspect our "benign neglect" made the other parents thing "well if nothing bad happened to her our kids will be fine" and we have about 8-10 kids around the same age on the block that are constantly going to each other's houses and hanging out doing whatever it i…
9pm and you don’t know where your 9 year old is? That going too far in the other direction in my opinion. How is she doing academically? I feel like that much freedom, that early, makes it easy to pick up bad habits with the “bad” kids.
Do you home school? Because if you don't home school, surprise! "Bad" kids are everywhere, including in any school that exists.
The best you can do is talk about bad influence. Peer pressure. Tailoring that conversation to the child's personality.
My thoughts on this are, the time to teach self-control and responsibility is when young. It won't take completely when young, as the brain is literally not fully developed in that capacity yet, but the lessons can stick, and be known when older.
Those lessons are action->consequence outcomes, and in a sense, borking up responsibility at times becomes a leaning moment. Put another way, mistakes are how we learn, and small mistakes when young, are better than massive mistakes when 20.
Yes, bad habits are a worry. I don't think there is any simple answer here, except independence is important for any adult mind, and that flows from independence in youth.
And of course, this all depends upon the child too. Some have more sense at 5, than others at 50.
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That’s a super bonkers theory amigo. “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.
Read what I said again, and more carefully.
Apologies 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…
Some people complain about something not because it is lacking, but because they struggle internally with the results. "You didn't run tests 50 times, you run them only 20". I see some parts mentioning religion, and I can guarantee that some people with have problem with only that, as it can often be as a red flag for a bull.
I do not also need complex studies to see effect of games, TV on my kids. I can simply observe them.
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My particular bugbear here is the absolutely insanity of truck and SUV heights, to the point that even full-grown adults are no longer clearly visible from inside new vehicles ( https://i.imgur.com/1dHWVxn.png ).
I'm in Eastern Europe; I've only seen an "American-style" SUV once I think two decades ago. I still can't get that image out of my mind. It was like a tank in front of my car. I couldn't understand how it fits our streets, how it parks, I couldn't see around it. Just... wow, honestly. I have no idea what car it was, but it was like a huge pick-up.
And I don't mean the driver was an asshole, it simply wouldn't have fit in otherwise.
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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?
An event that happens much too often to me: 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”.
If you try to encourage non-screen time socially, their friends stop coming over.
At best, your kid will just want to leave the house to go watch tv/play video games over at the friend's house, but just as likely is that the kid stops having a friend because they're not mindshared in anymore.
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…
I live in the US and my kids walk and bike to school. You're making wide generalizations across a large country.
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Maybe a tiny part of a suburb where you're not just near both the school and grocery store but it's nice to walk there and you're not crossing major roads. So, a tiny fraction of the US population. Either way, some Americans will hear people talk about Europe or Japan or whatever and tell themself "I totally have that too where I live in the US" yet it's not even close.
Yup, in every European or Japanese town or city I've lived in (with the exception of one very small and isolated town), I never bothered getting a car. Everything was close enough to walk to (usually 2-5 minutes walk), and for things that were too far, I'd take the tram or train. I've also lived in a few American cities, and it's a completely different experience. Even from downtown Philly it was inconvenient to get…
On the other hand, if i need groceries I just take a backpack and walk 5-10 minutes to one of the 5 different stores. I can even afford to be picky and get my butter from one, bread from the other etc :)