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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

#171

Post by erremerre »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #119
alex_young wrote: post #17

I want to let my kids walk wherever they want to. It’s great for them. My 5 year old bikes to school, accompanied by an adult. It’s a bit more than half a mile away from the house. I’d like to tell him he can do this on his own next year, but there’s a single intersection he has to cross that makes this difficult. I’m not worried about him getting lost, abducted by a stranger or any host of movie plot scenarios. I’m…

Our local school is right across the street from a busy arterial and we lost our only crossing guard a few years ago (he retired, as a retiree already, and no one wanted the min wage job). I still let him cross alone because he is 9 now (8 when he started walking alone) and there are lots of kids and adults around when school starts and ends, and we aren’t known for lots of SUVs (although delivery and work trucks are…

Would not make more sense to install a traffic light with a button, press button, goes red for cars, kids cross. They could also have the button deactivated at school hours and work with a time counter.

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

#172

Post by Thlom »

coryrc wrote: post #98
nine_k wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why all these trucks (with the size, these are not cars) don't have forward-looking cameras mounted somewhere near headlights and feeding a screen on the dashboard, which would offer a "window" through the motor compartment. It should be trivially simple to produce, and most vehicles already have a screen for the camera on the back. Its presence would likely lower the insurance premium significantly, due to…

They need to just be banned on public roads. Require what Europe requires for pedestrian safety and visibility. They still have trucks.

We have trucks, but almost no one has a truck as a family car because they are expensive and inconvenient.

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

#173

Post by lb1lf »

rwmj wrote: post #38
verve_rat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, instead of trying to scare (scar?) children you should just teach them to make eye contact with the driver so you are sure they have seen you before you put yourself in the path of their car? How much of our "safety" culture around kids is because people don't have basic life skills and aren't passing them on to kids?

Or drivers could look where they're going.

It never ceases to amaze me how many drivers appear to not register blindingly obvious objects in their path.

Ranging from the understandable, but unacceptable (Say, CBDR/Constant bearing, decreasing range, which makes a lot of drivers misidentify an object as stationary even as it is moving towards them on a collision course) to the flat out unbelievable - I've been almost run over in a lit pedestrian crossing. While wearing hi-vis clothing. Pushing a baby stroller, also hi-vis. AFTER having made eye contact with the driver and even gotten a nod from her. After the car slowed down. Sigh.

In the latter case, it turned out she had assumed that us making eye contact meant that I had seen the car and would wait until it had safely passed the crossing. At least that was what she claimed when I asked why, oh why she'd approached the crossing, slowed down, made eye contact with the pedestrian - and yet proceeded to drive through...

Oh, and don't even get me started on the proliferation of touch screens forcing the driver to take his or her attention off the road to interact with the car. This was a solved problem, using physical buttons you soon learned the exact location of so you could reach for them while still keeping your attention on what was in front of you.

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

#174

Post by swiftcoder »

flakeoil wrote: post #144
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in walking distance of all these things, and the farthest I’ve gotten my kid to do things alone is to walk to and from school (a whole 8 minutes). But even in my dense neighborhood, it’s not dense enough, kids are hardly at the playground unless it’s nice out, the ice cream shop is a bit too expensive for kids on their own, the 7-11 is probably the sketchiest place they could go to. I’m not really sure what we…

Is go shopping in malls what kids should do?

It'd be better if there were better 3rd spaces, sure, but hanging out at the mall with friends is still better than sitting at home watching reels

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

#175

Post by 9rx »

giantg2 wrote: post #54
obscurette wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in my sixties and my experience is same. But now we live in the world, where my granddaughter (12) got into real trouble because a birthday present I gave her – a real Leatherman (pink of course). Of course she brought it to the school, it was confiscated, she, her parents and I was questioned by police etc.

I accidentally had a pocket knife in my backpack after a camping trip when I was a kid 20 years or so ago. Being a good/naive kid, I told the teacher. Luckily the teacher was cool and said just leave it alone and we never had this conversation. That could have ended very differently with no tolerance policies starting around then. In high school, many kids had rifles and shotguns in their cars to go hunting after sch…

The high school I attended had a shooting range once upon a time. It was expected that the kids would brings their rifles to school to use it.

How times have changed.

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

#176

Post by swiftcoder »

torben-friis wrote: post #169
porphyra wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Access to mortgages is ridiculous, requiring sources of income that can be proved to be stable and ~35% of cost paid upfront

Also out here in rural Galicia, the minimum mortgage size the bank will give is something like 2x the average home price. A friend wanted a ~€30k mortgage to buy a fixer-upper in a small village, and the bank was just like "we don't make loans that small".

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

#177

Post by defrost »

erremerre wrote: post #171
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our local school is right across the street from a busy arterial and we lost our only crossing guard a few years ago (he retired, as a retiree already, and no one wanted the min wage job). I still let him cross alone because he is 9 now (8 when he started walking alone) and there are lots of kids and adults around when school starts and ends, and we aren’t known for lots of SUVs (although delivery and work trucks are…

Would not make more sense to install a traffic light with a button, press button, goes red for cars, kids cross. They could also have the button deactivated at school hours and work with a time counter.

It's important to have good sound engineering along with the lights.

* https://old.reddit.com/r/bluey/comments/1qc7iz1/listen_close...

* https://www.youtube.com/shorts/smSqEI3aG38

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

#178

Post by lb1lf »

rootusrootus wrote: post #102
helterskelter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as visibility is concerned, the only problems I've encountered in a big truck are to do with the driver-side A-pillar obscuring pedestrians about to cross the street on the other side of an intersection. It's the perfect width, and in just the right spot that I've had to stop in the middle of an intersection a few times now because I didn't see somebody as they just started to cross. I'm building the habit of…

Agreed. I have a model 3 and a Lightning, and I’ve had more visibility issues on the model 3. Height is never the issue, it’s the ginormous A-pillars modern cars have.

Of course, they do serve a purpose, in that there's more often than not airbags in them, plus they provide structural integrity often lacking in older cars - so making the car safer for its occupants at the cost of anyone outside the car.

Say, I have a Range Rover Classic (1972, 3.5l V8) I mostly use for fun and games during weekends in the summer months. Its A-pillars look like strands of spaghetti, making for excellent situational awareness from the driver's seat. It is effectively like driving around in a moving greenhouse. (Doubly so in summer, seeing as the A/C is of dubious efficacy, to put it mildly.)

If I ever roll the thing, I'll be done for, though.

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

#179

Post by Dig1t »

Very likely declining social trust has something to do with this phenomenon.

>But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

>"The extent of the effect is shocking," says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.

>https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/world/americas/05iht-dive...

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