Is not rocket science, if everyone has enough, then everyone has something to contribute, then a nicer environment flourishes. Why do you think the finland example is there. Inequality create problems
What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard
111–120 of 632 posts
Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Specifically pickup trucks and SUVs This is a big one for me. Not that long ago I just about got into a fistfight with some asswipe who drove his Ram through a crosswalk in a school zone, while children were crossing. With a crossing guard. And somehow he thought I was the jerk for flipping him the bird as he went through.
Most popular vehicle for DUIs incidentally.
Unsurprising. Where I live, the Dodge Ram is the answer to the question "how can I signal to everyone else that I'm a piece of shit?"
All the tradies around here are mostly driving Fords and Tacomas.
Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard
#113I 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…
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 walked the mile or so each way to school from the age of 5. I'd usually never see another soul on the sidewalk, even though it was all rows of houses. There were plenty of cars about, and I had to cross a bunch of intersections, but I had some sense about me. All the kids had some vague story about knowing someone who had been run down by a car because they didn't look properly when crossing.
Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have kids? Did you let them grow up the same way?
I'm father of three daughters and they grew up almost like this in nineties. My grandchildren don't have this chance any more. It's a little bit about changing times, but mostly because of public – it's just not acceptable for others to do all these things and parents would get into real trouble. When I was 10, I drove tractor, had already several scars from knife and axe and visited my grandmother more than hundred…
I remember one vacation to Paris as a kid, maybe 12 years old. There was a science museum I wanted to see, so my parents stuffed a bunch of Francs into my hands and wished me luck and shuffled me out of the hotel room. You have to learn these skills at some point. I had a thoroughly lovely day pressing random buttons on random exhibits and I can still remember it all clearly now over 30 years later.
I'm loathe to imagine what kind of trouble they might get into now for that.
Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard
#115I 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…
> 40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches > Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities. I'm not sure that height matters for a young kid and, 40 years ago, there weren't abs and sensors that will brake for you. Plus, drunk driving rates were much, much…
Obviously they haven’t gone up, all rates are massively down. They’re just a worrier.
It’s a perfect example from the article. “I totally would let my kid leave the house, but [made up danger]”
Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard
#116I 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,…
I think that at least partly it's the consequence of the very same safetyism. If I look at my generation (in my sixties), we still start conversations with strangers, especially if they are our neighbours and things happen between us. But it doesn happen't between people in their thirties any more. And if I look at my students (highschool and college level), then for them it's very alien and even afraid of situation where they have to. Why? I guess they were not allowed to practice and explore this.
Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sad. When I was a child, I always had with me a multi-tool Swiss army knife, including at school, because I was very frequently building various things, or disassembling others to see how they were made. That early experience was very influential in becoming a successful engineer. Decades later, as an adult, I was astonished to learn about the so-called "no tolerance" policies of many US schools, where the possession…
> colleagues Northern Spain? (Maybe francophone Swiss? Southern France? Belgium?) (Pardon me for being presumptuous) Imho school admins need to have skin in the bullying game. Bullying seems to be a natural (=inevitable) outcome of kids exploring social status outside the normative system of rules. I have always been fascinated with how bullies justify (sometimes "subconsciously") their own behaviour, and how these j…
Yeah, European.
When I was a child, bullying happened, but it was infrequent. Teachers would punish it severely if reported, but snitching was considered rather shameful, so it was more frequent that bullying was handled by the weaker bullied children teaming against the stronger bully.
Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard
#118What 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…
100% this. Every time someone visits me in my city home, they comment on how nice it must be able to walk to school, the ice cream shop, the library, the playground full of other kids who walked or biked there, or just see other people out and about. But, they say, they could never live in the city. It's too dangerous. Cars are dangerous. No sidewalks on 50mph roads are dangerous. Loneliness is dangerous. And yes, th…
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 are missing, but it’s way different compared to when we are in China and there is a whole mall next door.
Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard
#119I 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 aren’t uncommon). It still puts me on nerve a bit.
It’s too bad the district no longer lets middle school or high school students do crossing guard jobs anymore.
Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard
#120I was a lot more permissive parent when my children were imaginary.