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The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

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Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

#221

Post by left-struck »

KaiserPro wrote: post #181
kannanvijayan wrote: post #37

I have a 10 year old boy and I'm facing these issues right now. I'm also in Canada so culturally adjacent to the US and similar enough with regards to this topic. I don't see child welfare agencies personally as a particular threat when it comes to this topic. Maybe they ARE more likely to get involved in cases of more free range parenting where before they weren't, but it doesn't register as a real worry. The major…

Where I am in the UK its the "problem" kids that are seen out and about on their own. I was freerange growing up in rural england, so I have no problem with the youth roving about. My wife is horrified by the idea, so our kids are somewhat coddled. In the UK at least, children are objectively safer in every metric apart from getting fat. Kidnap, abuse, getting lost, car accidents are all way way down. The interesting…

I think mentioning those safety metrics is really important because for any person, not just in the UK but in many countries like it, the thing that will most likely kill them are diseases related to being unfit and overweight.

So while kids might appear to be slightly safer in their childhood, the reality is that those other dangers were never a serious statistical danger to begin with, but not creating health habits is a contributing factor to the most likely cause of death when they’re older.

I think people vastly underestimate how dangerous living an inactive lifestyle is. I’m not saying this because I grew up super active and now I’m judging people who live their life differently to me, I’m saying it because those are the statistics, and because I DIDN’T grow up being active.

Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

#222

Post by pandaman »

Grappelli wrote: post #102

[flagged]

How are abduction rates extremely low? Where did you get the rates? I could only find FBI NCIC reports, which do not differentiate the reason, but it shows 300K+ missing children in 2025. That's quite a lot. It does not say what fraction of those are abductions, but I doubt it makes a big difference for the parents looking for the missing child if the reason for the child missing is an abduction or something else. Also, AMBER alerts go off so often that everyone I know turns off alerts on their phones. Still see them on highway displays all the time.

Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

#224

Post by hackinthebochs »

baublet wrote: post #31
lmf4lol wrote: post #2

this resonates a lot. I am not sure how to handle this though. Next to our house (500m), the city government established a camp for “asylum seekers”. 100 men. Men only. How can I reasonable let my pre-teen daughters roam freely now? Id love to, but my gut feeling doesnt allow me to. Maybe, back in the days, it was just a different time? A more high trust society that worked well? Nowadays, we have news stories, where…

This is bigotry dressed up as concern. It’s also not something widespread. Seems like you just think immigrants are rapists.

It's interesting how much some of you expect us to ignore gut feelings and statistics to avoid the appearance of bigotry. We should at the very least be able to acknowledge statistical reality then we can debate what is an appropriate response. Hell, I don't even need to know the backgrounds of the immigrants. We know that males engage in almost all the violent/forcible sexual assaults. We know that a lack of community engagement increases the chance for anti-social behavior. We know that access is a prerequisite for interpersonal crime. That itself is enough to warrant heightened concern.

Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

#225

Post by hackable_sand »

array_key_first wrote: post #184
mikestew wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie places reporters live. I live in Redmond, WA. Bougie? My rube Midwestern ass thinks so. And there are feral kids all over my neighborhood. Plenty of kids walking to school in groups, or solo. Neighbor kids talk about riding the bus/train to places. Granted, there are a lot of immigrant families around here (hello, Microsoft, et al.), and I'm sure that skews thin…

I've noticed the less American and less wealthy people are, the more normal their kids interact with the world, i.e. "free range". I don't know what it is about rich white people and freaky helicopter parenting. I also notice it with homeschooling and those crazy borderline eating disorder diets. There seems to be an association there between rich white people and pushing self-destructive behavior on kids.

[flagged]

Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

#226

Post by Jensson »

NicuCalcea wrote: post #189
pessimizer wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Journalists don't make a living from journalism, they live on family money. That's why working class journalists have disappeared along with working class perspectives. It was once a job where many if not most of the practitioners didn't have a college degree, now it is the most expensive graduate school program you can do. I think the median price is something like $250K. If you don't pay writers, you eliminate…

TIL I and my friends and colleagues live on family money.

Could be a husband that pays for the home etc as well, that is also living on family money.

Regardless since journalists aren't well paid but a lot of them live in expensive areas the money has to come from somewhere.

Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

#227

Post by ButlerianJihad »

In my childhood, my Mom said "we were the first Democrats in the neighborhood" as part of a new wave of young families. But we were also next door to the gayest neighborhood in San Diego (Hillcrest) and so our neighbors were mostly childless, and our Catholic parish had no school attached, for obvious reasons.

So, we were sort of carpetbaggers from the beginning. We were enrolled in a parochial school in the next parish over, which was a 10+ minute drive for Mom. Of course we could never walk or ride bicycles or public transit that far!

As a child, while I was granted roller skates and bicycles, me and my sister were both forbidden from straying beyond the block where we lived. And neighborhood peers were few and far between. We had few playmates, and nearly none from school. Our classmates were in different socioeconomic classes, and often of different ethnicities and cultures. At least 1/3rd of them were bused in from North County, where new Catholics were settling, but no schools were available yet.

Our neighborhood was a sleepy suburb surrounded by dead-end streets and canyons. There were no city parks or playgrounds. There was exactly one city bus line that was about 7 minutes' walk away, which we never ever rode. Grandma, on the other hand, took us on walking/shopping tours all over her neighborhood, which was completely amazing, and also to every shopping mall we could reach by city bus, which was doubly amazing. Grandma's neighborhood had a full-fledged recreational center and a park with a playground, where I could fly kites or do whatever.

Here is the paradoxical contrast: though we could have no physical contact with neighbors or friends, I could own any book, watch any TV channel and program, and listen to any radio station whatsoever. That included "border blasters" from Mexico that were intent on corrupting American values. Literally any book we wanted, we could read it or discard it into our voluminous bookshelves. Later, Mom and Dad were reluctant to hook us up with a modem, because they knew what that would mean, but college opened up the entire Internet to us, and it was game over.

You can physically shelter your kids all you want, but if you have a TV, a radio, and computers in the home, you're constantly inviting a parade of strangers, scammers, and perverts inside your securely-locked doors. Think about that. It is far kinder to allow your children to mix with neighborhood friends and freely explore this world, than to let them dive unsupervised into cyberspace.

Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

#228

Post by insensible »

sfifs wrote: post #51
NordStreamYacht wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan is a monocultural civilisational state. That is a big factor.

Russia is fairly mono cultural too. Is it safe?

Good morning from Russia, where I moved my large free-range family (from the US) with the topic of free-ranging children very high on the list of reasons why.

My children cross town by themselves to attend classes, it’s normal to see children walking or riding public transport by themselves once they turn about age 7.

There’s crime and bullying — we have always homeschooled successfully and have had negative experiences with classrooms here — but in my opinion it’s not as bad as the places I’ve lived in the US.

And the streets are definitely safer. There are some risks like gopniki enjoying causing random trouble like pepper spraying strangers, but I believe that type of danger is a threat mostly to young adult men and almost certainly not children. Our daughters can safely do what they need to do with appropriate precautions (that do not include staying within single-digit meters of a vigilant adult at all times else CPS!!!).

Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

#229

Post by insensible »

deepsun wrote: post #93
GerryAdamsSF wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Russia is inarguably safer in terms of street crime than the USA. Philadelphia in 2025 had a higher murder rate than Belfast during the height of a civil war. https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_countries_result.jsp?co... Crime in the USA is also extremely regional and local in pattern.

Oh no, no way. Child violence on the streets and in school is WAY higher, it's ingrained in culture. It's also pretty rare if a Russian kid would tell his parents about it (only if property damage is involved). I don't know how your link gathers data (website only shows one dude, software engineer, not a professional survey statistician), but from personal experience I can surely say it's rankings are BS. The closest…

1) Russia is generally very safe, and 2) I agree that the violence amongst children is crazy. It’s a great place to homeschool and free-range and I have not found a way to send children to school in a way that’s acceptable to us.

Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

#230

Post by insensible »

lstodd wrote: post #212
sfifs wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia is fairly mono cultural too. Is it safe?

It by no means is monocultural. As for safety, well, yes, pretty safe. More important is that helicopter-style parenting is unthinkable there, people will just not understand if someone would attempt that. Also not much in insane laws (they have some, but..) and the police will tell you to bugger off if you try make them act on those that exist. So the situation in the article is impossible.

That “but..” is a big key to the difference between Russia and the US in this conversation. The US has a severe cultural propensity for rule-following and reporting things, but in Russia there’s an interesting mix of people seeing society as a commons, seeing personal responsibility as foremost, seeing laws as guidelines that may or may not correspond to reality, and seeing reporting something as fairly extreme behavior. And this includes people at all levels.
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