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What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

stevemagness.substack.com

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Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#161

Post by tweetle_beetle »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #126
hibikir wrote: post #101

What I see in my deep suburbia is just far less interest in wandering past the front yard, because there's nothing to do: House after house where no front yard has anything for anyone, and quite long distances before you get somewhere you might be welcome, or have a chair. When my son, a pre-teen at the time went to Spain with me, things were quite different: A small town that even had stores targeting kids, places t…

You just listed some of the reasons why I moved from San Francisco to Venice, Italy. I have a young kid and I hope he'll enjoy the village-like, car-free environment here.

Isn't Venice as problematic/artificial as suburbia in its own way? If you're saying car-free then I assume you mean the centre, where the real population is tiny (compared to San Francisco at <50k), aging, declining amd dwarfed by tourists. My understanding is that it's increasingly meeting needs of tens of millions of ultra short term visitors rather than real communities. It feels like there must be a wide range of happy medium places in between.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#162

Post by keepamovin »

jaboostin wrote: post #79
keepamovin wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential to risks raised in the article I guess, but I cannot understand something that's happening in the US: it's crazy how many demented people there are. That there is a market that captures children in order to traffick them for sex; that there are hundreds of people doing this regularly being wrapped up by LE raids, and dozens of children freed; that these raids happen on the frequency of weeks, or months; th…

100,000/yr is insane, where are you getting that stat? Best I could find is ~250 abducted per year in the US, not specifically for trafficking. There are 200-300,000 reported missing per year but >90% are runaways and return.

OK I did some searching and found I'm no expert and I didn't understand the numbers: I think I put the 100K+ "unaccompanied children" at border each year together with the FBI raid cadence and thought it was all trafficking. Quick searching indicates: there's maybe 85K "lost contact" children after placement from border, which also doesn't mean what I thought; and FBI/LE recovered maybe 1000s of trafficked children in last decade. Still unimaginably large but not the numbers I thought I'd heard.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#163

Post by virgildotcodes »

watwut wrote: post #150
tintor wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happier? In a city? Have you been to big US cities? Angry people, crime, homeless, mentally ill people, lack of police.

Rural people are absurdly scared of own imagination. And if urban people talked about rural areas the way they talk about cities, we would get 234 think pieces about how inappropriate and out of touch it is.

Idk, I’ve seen Deliverance, plus all those horror movies that start out on some desolate road in the woods at night. Seems likely a fair depiction of country living.

No thank you, I’ll stay in Manhattan and not get kidnapped and murdered by monsters tyvm.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#164

Post by TylerE »

keepamovin wrote: post #74
PantaloonFlames wrote: post #22

The article is confused. The opinion is, it's so much safer _now_ than it was in the 1970s, it makes no sense to restrict children's wanderings. But the article doesn't consider whether restricting children's wanderings is the REASON it is so much safer for children now. "We have so many fire-safety rules in the building codes in Seattle. But get this: we haven't had any major fires since 1889! It's obvious we don't…

Tangential to risks raised in the article I guess, but I cannot understand something that's happening in the US: it's crazy how many demented people there are. That there is a market that captures children in order to traffick them for sex; that there are hundreds of people doing this regularly being wrapped up by LE raids, and dozens of children freed; that these raids happen on the frequency of weeks, or months; th…

The vast majority of child sexual abuse is committed by family members, not strangers.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#165

Post by TylerE »

lmm wrote: post #148
AlotOfReading wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get me started with bike helmets Bike helmets mitigate one of the most serious and common forms of injury while riding bikes. You can fall or be hit by a car/tree branch anywhere. They don't prevent you from doing anything you would otherwise do. I'm someone who advocates for rolling back helmet laws because they decrease ridership, but helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE, not overactive safetyism…

> Bike helmets mitigate one of the most serious and common forms of injury while riding bikes. A form that is still extremely rare. No-one seriously advocates helmets for car passengers, for example, even though the injury rates are very similar. > be hit by a car Cars don't hit people, drivers hit people. > They don't prevent you from doing anything you would otherwise do. They're annoying enough that they do, in pr…

Not that rare. When I was a kid (in the 90s) I lost two classmates to bike crashes. One actually dead, the other severely brain damaged for life.

Neither accident involved a car.

Both would have likely had a few broken bones at the absolute worst if they’d been wearing helmets.

I wasn’t in an especially large elementary school, either.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#166

Post by darkwater »

> In England data shows that in 1971, 86% of primary-age children traveled home from school unaccompanied. By 1990, that had fallen to 35%. By 2010, it was 25%.

So basically the main change affected already the childhood of, what? 85% of the average HN reader, at least if they are from England. What are we talking about then?

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#167

Post by kleiba2 »

> When I tell people these numbers, the usual response is some version of “the world is more dangerous now.” It certainly feels that way. The only problem is that all of the data we have shows it’s much safer than when you or I were wandering the streets. Violent crime against children has fallen steadily since the early 1990s. Stranger abductions, the thing every parent imagines when they hesitate to let a 10-year-old walk to a friend’s house, were rare in 1985 and are rarer today.

Could it be possible that we're confusing cause and effect here?

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#168

Post by lb1lf »

rkagerer wrote: post #57
iamalizard wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm almost 2 meters tall and was crossing a street at a crosswalk with my bike yesterday, walking and pushing it at normal walking speeds, like the law requires. There was a car about to turn left from the lanes going left. There was a car from the lanes going right (the closest lanes to me) that slowed down as I started crossing the street. I assumed they saw me and that's why they were slowing down. Nope - they alm…

I gained a lot of independence and had real unrestricted fun, but in hindsight I might've died a few times. Yeah, that's called living! I definitely got myself into one or two dangerous situations growing up. I couldn't imagine a childhood where everything is safety railings and padded walls.

It's called living, which has become insanely safe compared to what it used to be only a generation or two ago.

Looking at the statistics here in my native Norway, children killed in traffic is down a couple of orders of magnitude since the sixties - while traffic, at the same time, has increased by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Same goes for drowning - drastically reduced rates compared to the sixties.

Of course, I guess one can argue that maybe it has become too safe - in the sense that kids aren't exposed to enough risk to learn how to evaluate it, leading to major crashes with reality later on.

Then again, as a parent, I kind of like the idea that there's never been a safer time to be a child.

That doesn't stop me from urging them to ditch the screen time in favour of heading out into the boonies to find something to do, though.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#169

Post by torben-friis »

porphyra wrote: post #155
hibikir wrote: post #101

What I see in my deep suburbia is just far less interest in wandering past the front yard, because there's nothing to do: House after house where no front yard has anything for anyone, and quite long distances before you get somewhere you might be welcome, or have a chair. When my son, a pre-teen at the time went to Spain with me, things were quite different: A small town that even had stores targeting kids, places t…

Spain sounds like a child's paradise. Too bad their birth rates are one of the lowest in Europe (and in the world) at around 1.1 births per woman.

Spain is particularly screwed in terms of housing. Access to mortgages is ridiculous, requiring sources of income that can be proved to be stable and ~35% of cost paid upfront, which means that most Spaniards rely on inheritance to reach a point where they can consider children.

Tourism also balloons real estate prices even more than is usual everywhere nowadays.

But the children friendly aspect of society described above is 100% true. It hasn't degraded at all compared to when I was a kid.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#170

Post by d1sxeyes »

human305893 wrote: post #62

I can think of so many reasons but the biggest I think is the reduction of community. - When I was a kid mums worked part time or not at all. We had school fates and lots more community gatherings. - Dads didn't work as hard. Half of them would be at your soccer practice at 6pm to hang out - Parents were on local sports teams together or other social groups as well - You did most of your shopping at the local shops,…

- When I was a kid mums worked part time or not at all.

This is a big factor. Although the gender side of things is kind of loaded, it used to be broadly the case that a two-parent household would often have one primary breadwinner and one home-maker. Nowadays, both parents need to make money which means that the 'home-making' needs to be done after both parents have finished work. So at 6pm, you're cooking, not hanging out at soccer practice. After that, you need to do the washing up, hang out the clothes, etc. There's just less time for leisure. On top of that, there's a lot of folks (probably some of them reading this comment) paid very well to keep folks indoors consuming, instead of outside meeting people.

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