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Where do the children play?

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Re: Where do the children play?

#101

Post by mlrtime »

ErigmolCt wrote: post #51
retube wrote: post #19

As a parent, I relate to all this. Great piece. When the kids were babies we had the standard debate of move to the countryside for fresh air and gambolling in the fields etc. But so glad we stayed in London, the kids have so much freedom with public transport they can organise their own meet ups and activities and go running around all over town without any parental assistance or intervention at all. Whereas elsewhe…

Cities feel riskier, but in many ways they offer more room to grow. Kids don't just need nature; they need space to navigate the world on their own terms

I'm going to get criticism because I feel HN is mostly urban based... but I don't think kids need "cities" to grow. They need nature.

I picture rural/suburban areas that aren't fully built out with small wooded areas , creeks and playground 5-10 minute walk. They need to get dirty, play in water etc.

When I think cities, I think dense urban areas that rarely offer this unless living in a expensive or unique neighborhood (like within 1-2 blocks of Central Park or Prospect Park).

Re: Where do the children play?

#102

Post by mcv »

> Why do our children spend more time in Fortnite than forests? Usually, we blame the change on tech companies. They make their platforms as addicting as possible, and the youth simply can’t resist — once a toddler locks eyes with an iPad, game over.

> I want to suggest an alternative: digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us

I still think it's the addiction of digital media. I have tried to get my kids to play outside, to visit their friends, etc. They refuse, because they're addicted to the screen. In fact, friends with stricter limits on screen use are more likely to come here looking for my son to play. Outside, or, if they can, on a screen here.

I'm fairly sure the kids from the article can also be made addicted to digital media if you start them young. Let's not, and let's give our kids stricter limits.

Re: Where do the children play?

#103

Post by Cthulhu_ »

wongarsu wrote: post #45
reeredfdfdf wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a middle-ground between a big city and full countryside. I lived my childhood in a place with about 4000 people in it. School, friends and everything else I needed was within walking, or at least biking distance. My parents didn't have to drive me everywhere. Obviously there weren't as many possible hobbies and events as in big cities, but mobility wasn't an issue.

Smaller cities with about 40k-200k inhabitants can also be a nice sweet spot: big enough to have a decent number of events and hobby opportunities, small enough that you have low-traffic sidestreets within walking distance of the city center, and nature is still very much in reach Assuming a European city layout where a city center exists and the 200k inhabitants aren't all spread out into suburban sprawl. Suburbia q…

I live in suburbia in a sprawling European city of 200K inhabitants, and design can fix a lot of that. The neighbourhoods are designed like little towns themselves, each having stores, schools, day cares, sports / leisure activities, restaurants and other businesses of their own, as well as playgrounds and nature areas which are often used by local youths to build shelters and play in.

The old city center - museums, historical buildings, big library, cinema, theater etc - is a longer trek, but still doable in ~20 minutes cycling. Plus there's trains and buses.

TL;DR, suburban doesn't mean it should kill things being in reasonable distances. However, big caveat, it's all kind of built in a compact way; garden space is often limited (total ground is usually 2x the house itself, so 50m2 ground floor space + 50m2 garden), roads are narrow (but this is good because it's bike / pedestrian optimized, cars can't go fast), etc. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinex-location for a superficial description, or look at a map of Dutch suburbs or houses (https://www.funda.nl/) to see what it's like.

Re: Where do the children play?

#104

Post by luxurytent »

casey2 wrote: post #87
luxurytent wrote: post #62

I'm trying to raise confident, independent kids. It is exceptionally more difficult to allow them to play outside on their own, walk to the grocery store, etc, for mainly two reasons: 1. There are no other kids outside. We live in a neighbourhood with many young families, at all age ranges (littles to teen). We rarely see kids outside, and if we do, it's mainly kids walking with their parents somewhere (eg to the loc…

>Now if my kid wants to go to their friends house? They have to cross two arterials. These are four lane roads with fast moving traffic, uncontrolled signals, lots of road rage, fast cuts on corners, etc. Well why did you choose to live there if you wanted to raise independent kids. Baffles the mind.

Narrow minded response. Perhaps it was cost, availability of housing?

The neighbourhood I speak of is objectively quite walkable (per my other points). It's just the shape of the city I live in: It contains a number of these arterials which glue the city (for vehicles) together. Less so for humans.

Re: Where do the children play?

#105

Post by throwawayffffas »

While the point is valid. I believe the experience described is mostly American not "western".

And I find the anti-modernity sentiment embedded in the fascination with hunter-gatherer cultures obnoxious.

Is the author aware that child mortality in hunter-gather cultures is like 50%?

Not that its correlated with childhood independence, we used to have plenty of independence when I grew up in the 90s and the mortality rate was about the same as it is now. But the point is kids need independence, not woods nor machetes. You can be independent in the park, in the streets, the undeveloped lots, the empty parking lots, your friends basement, and their yard when their parents are away.

Re: Where do the children play?

#106

Post by Cthulhu_ »

AndrewDavis wrote: post #25
CalRobert wrote: post #11

In the US cars jockey for space with guns to claim the title of leading cause of dead kids. But we often forget that cars kill kids at an astonishing rate -even though kids stopped playing outside-. In that light, the bloodbath that is American suburbia becomes much more clear. When pedestrian deaths go up even as miles walked (in aggregate) goes down, the situation is even more dire than it seems. My kids play outsi…

This is an aside. Yesterday I was in a shopping centre (ie a mall) and a bunch of kids ran through the food court, maybe 10 of them all around the 9-12 A grumpy lady shouted at them "kids you shouldnt be running!" I turned to whom I was eating with and our discussion could be summarised as "kids should be running. The problem isn't they're running, the problem isn't even directly where they're running. Where they're…

Kids should be running but not if they cause a nuisance - this is the part not highlighted in the article, societal oversight. When kids are out in the forests they aren't bothering or harming anyone, but when in public they will have to conform to some standards / rules.

"It takes a village" is a well known saying, I've always interpreted that that it's not just the parents that raise kids.

Re: Where do the children play?

#107

Post by mlrtime »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #70
Arainach wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but no. You shouldn't be running in crowded areas like food courts (or indoor areas not specifically created for athletics), and playing smug semantic arguments like that doesn't help. The kids aren't running because they're unable to go outside. They're running because no one's been enforcing that they act within the standards of basic decency. Kids should be screaming and singing sometimes, but you wouldn't…

>and playing smug semantic arguments like that doesn't help. How is it semantic? They go outside and now they are running in a giant parking lot. They go a bit further and now you're a bad parent for not keeping an eye on your kid. Tell them to sit down and play on a tablet and you're also a bad parent. There's no winning here. >you wouldn't tell someone in the library not to hush them. I don't consider a mall the eq…

Why is everything so black and white?

Do kids need more places to run free, yes.

Should they be running in mall food courts, no.

Just because this trend of kids having less free play outside doesn't excuse parents of these kids from taking any space they want. Any reasonable person can see there are still boundaries, are we just disagreeing on what those are? Kids still can't/shouldn't run at swimming pools, it's been that way for decades (just an example).

Re: Where do the children play?

#108

Post by pessimizer »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #80
pseudonymcoward wrote: post #14

As a society we find violence or harm against children to be extremely shocking and tragic. As a society we would do almost anything to prevent it. Giving children the kinds of freedoms discussed in this article would lead to some harm coming to them. Accidents, violence, kidnap, etc. Therefore, society won't give them those freedoms. This tendency has been exagerated by mass media in the modern era. Every single cas…

>As a society we find violence or harm against children to be extremely shocking and tragic. As a society we would do almost anything to prevent it The moment Sandy Hook happened and US society just shrugged at it, we relinquished our ability to use this dynamic for anything serious. We can't pretend to care about kids while treating their murders as an inevitability of life and not something to reform over.

There have always been people who went into schools to kill children. In 1927, a guy blew up a school in Bath, Michigan, killing 38 kids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster

The fact that you think heaven and earth have to be moved over a single school shooting (as terrible as it was) is a symptom. School is the safest place where children are. They're more likely to be murdered and abused at home.

I'm 50, but when I was a kid I took the bus by myself: when I was 12, on the South Side of Chicago, which had an order of magnitude more violence than your kids will ever be exposed to. I ran around with my friends within a block or two, we were big into BMX bikes. Kids got hurt periodically, but sometimes kids will get hurt; sometimes kids will die. A few hundred years ago, most kids would die. Now we (not we, but mostly a certain demographic whose aesthetic is imposed on everyone else) find it unacceptable to hear about kids dying on television, nowhere near us.

It was bad when 50% of kids died, but I've had the belief that whatever the number it now is too few. We need the number of kids who die through "death by misadventure" to go up. Raising kids in a box leaves them dumb and unsocialized. Kids need independence, and to be allowed the ability to make some bad decisions with real consequences. They need to be able to fall off the monkey bars.

Re: Where do the children play?

#109

Post by Tade0 »

lnsru wrote: post #10
seqizz wrote: post #5

Reading the US 8-12 year olds' stats made me flinch, because as someone grow up in the middle east this is inconceivable. I guess I'll dive into rabbit hole about modern-day stats of Europe and other places to compare.

Same phone addiction in Europe as elsewhere. No way to fight addictive stuff. Most parents don’t even try or care. Add tragic demographics and 8-12 year olds are all alone with their phones. Let’s talk about special school system here in Bavaria (Germany). Kids from specific area go to same school for the first 4 grades. Afterwards they are divided between little geniuses going into „Gymnsasium“, average ones going t…

> Afterwards they are divided between little geniuses going into „Gymnsasium“, average ones going to „Realschule“ and good-for-nothings going to „Mittelschule“.

I would totally land in Realschule because I had an educational slump in fourth grade.

Over here they tried a similar system - middle school spanning classes 7-9 inclusively, named "Gymnsasium" as well, but it included everyone[0] and I recall having a similar sentiment, thinking: "why shove people around like that? So that we don't form lasting friendships and thus make better worker drones?"

Ironically I'm still in touch weekly with the three guys who were my only friends at the time, even though we live in different cities now.

[0] The split between college material and the rest only happened around high school.

Re: Where do the children play?

#110

Post by braza »

> There’s no point in whining about the impulses endowed to them by several hundred thousand years of evolution. Don’t hate the player; hate the game. And if you really hate the game, make a better one.

I have contact with kids from 3 different places, 2 with high independent mobility and 1 with low independent mobility, and as much I like to agree that kids needs to be free, there's an important parental argument that needs to be talked about that is risk vs reward function if the kids get hurt.

In places with high mobility (at least 2 of them in the chart) there's some state support in terms of children's sick leave if something happens, plus work protections if you need to be absent for more than 6 weeks, and the education system has mechanisms to not let this kid be left behind (for example, if a kid breaks his/her legs).

In those places with low independence, I talk with some parents, and all of them are scared of the possibility of something permanent happens or something that can demand continuous support during working time; in those cases I can see why they play safe.

In the other hand, another second-order effect is that in those places with low independency, one thing that I noticed is that the motor coordination takes way more time to develop, and it cascades down for instance during sports activities (of the lack of), physical development and so on.

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