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Where do the children play?

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Re: Where do the children play?

#121

Post by pessimizer »

There's been a destruction of the commons in general, and no place where people are allowed to loiter outdoors without falling under suspicion or actually being arrested. Children are also people. When I was a child, I hung out in the streets all day.

The trapping of children was just the prelude. Adults are also trapped at home, especially when they don't have any money to spend. Even if they do have money, there are no places they can go where they are expected to interact with strangers. The number of adult virgins has gotten absurdly high.

We have a tool that we could use to fight that: adult education. We have state colleges that we could be trying to attract adults to, rather than acting like people are done learning at 22. Chicago had/had a network of "Field Houses" that are community centers associated with parks where you could teach a class, or have a local group meeting, etc.

Instead, people are isolated and atomized into perfect little consumers who can't share things and can't organize politically except through an online petition encouraged by a "social network."

Re: Where do the children play?

#122

Post by throwawayffffas »

api wrote: post #86
Earw0rm wrote: post #72

It's cars. It was always cars.

Plenty of cars in the 90s and we played outside all day. The biggest change since then is two things. One is that there’s way more to do inside now, mostly games and shows. The second is that baseless kidnapping panics convinced society that children can never be unattended. The main vector was daytime TV and now true crime podcasts. The reality is that kidnapping is statistically extremely rare and more than 95% of…

While I mostly agree with you, cars then and cars now in the US are not the same.

The typical car back then was a 5 door sedan, think ford crown, Chevrolet lumina, etc. These days almost everyone is driving pretty much a light truck.

Re: Where do the children play?

#123

Post by carlosjobim »

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…

Didn't you have a bicycle?

Re: Where do the children play?

#124

Post by dgacmu »

vanderZwan wrote: post #97
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…

The other comments already pointed out that there is plenty to do for kids growing up in villages - it's not until they're teenagers that it becomes limiting, really (speaking from personal experience and what I was told by friends who also grew up in the countryside). Funny that you're talking about having to drive them everywhere though, because the main worry I have as a parent is the impact of car traffic on chil…

I dunno - I have a seven year old whom I try to allow to be as feral as possible. We let him go alone to the neighborhood park, which requires seven small residential street crossings. But I would hesitate also about a multi-lane stroad if there wasn't a lot of pedestrian traffic. Kids are small and cars have gotten huge and drivers are very distracted, especially post-pandemic.

(We're in the US, and I draw the line at letting him cross ordinary 25mph residential streets but not the "25mph" artery road on which many of the drivers go 40mph. It's only one lane in each direction but there are no lights or crossings and the effective speed is quite high.)

Re: Where do the children play?

#125

Post by mlrtime »

em-bee wrote: post #56
lnsru wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

agreed. the whole system is bonkers and screams of elitism. like you are either born smart or you'll never make it. fortunately there is also gesamtschule. which does away with that, there is no distinction between levels. only your grades have to be good enough by grade 10 to make it into the oberstufe (yrs 11-13). i barely made it through, and i would not have made it without that because neither my parents nor me…

>like you are either born smart or you'll never make it.

That is a bit dramatic. This topic has been talked about over and over. There is no perfect system. Treat everyone the same and high potential kids suffer. Split them up by ability and you get "unfairness" criticisms.

Re: Where do the children play?

#126

Post by bean469 »

mlrtime wrote: post #112
bean469 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You shouldn't be running in crowded areas like food courts (or indoor areas not specifically created for athletics) I guess this is a cultural thing, i.e. what is expected of kids. Among my age-group in Eastern Europe (25-30 y/o), we joke around that our parents didn't let us stay in home, which has a lot of truth to it. Once we were out in the city, they didn't even have a idea where we went, and we didn't have mo…

And in Eastern Europe 25-30 years ago, other adults would have no problem yelling at you to behave in their own language/words. Very much different than today where people mostly mind their own business and judge in silence. I'm good with the former, it's inline with "It takes a village".

> And in Eastern Europe 25-30 years ago, other adults would have no problem yelling at you to behave in their own language/words.

Nobody yelled at us then or even thought that we were doing something wrong. If you would yell at a kid in a shopping mall for running around like crazy - people would look at your weirdly. It was expected of kids to behave this way in my culture, and still is to this day. This may not be the case elsewhere, hence why I think that there is a heavy cultural aspect.

Re: Where do the children play?

#127

Post by arcade79 »

kitd wrote: post #75

One thing not mentioned is the effect of Covid and lockdowns. On the one hand, my youngest was just getting into gaming with friends when the first lockdown started. I will be forever grateful that he did as his social life hardly seemed to suffer and he just carried on playing online, shouting and yelling with them just as much as if he was outside at a playground. My teenage daughters had a much harder time of it t…

I don't know how folks did it elsewhere, or what the rules was.

Here, a friend and I created ourselves a "bubble". My family and his family hanged out with each other. My kid was playing with his kid. We went on long forest walks, with the kids, and they could roam and play.

We didn't have contacts with lots of others, and if we did, we stayed away from each other for ~4 days or so, until we shared the same social bubble again.

Worked wonderfully well.

Re: Where do the children play?

#128

Post by mlrtime »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #122
api wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of cars in the 90s and we played outside all day. The biggest change since then is two things. One is that there’s way more to do inside now, mostly games and shows. The second is that baseless kidnapping panics convinced society that children can never be unattended. The main vector was daytime TV and now true crime podcasts. The reality is that kidnapping is statistically extremely rare and more than 95% of…

While I mostly agree with you, cars then and cars now in the US are not the same. The typical car back then was a 5 door sedan, think ford crown, Chevrolet lumina, etc. These days almost everyone is driving pretty much a light truck.

I'll give you a hint about statistics... there will always be a #1 killer of children. Today it's car accidents, 100 years ago it was disease. After disease it was other accidents, and 100 years from now it will be something else.

Re: Where do the children play?

#129

Post by graemep »

The article only discusses the west and hunter gatherer societies. Most of the world is neither. That is a big omission because it avoids the comparison with other developed and urbanised societies.

Re: Where do the children play?

#130

Post by wffurr »

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.

Good luck finding a North American city without roads like that. Our cities are terrible and laid out for cars not people.
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