Where do the children play? • Hacker News Board

Re: Where do the children play?

#161

Post by Vinnl » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 1:46 PM UTC

CalRobert wrote: post #151

Vinnl wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those places are very much not like the USA yet. Though as the article points out, they are definitely going in that direction. In the Netherlands, some things are trending in that direction (e.g. car sizes/hood heights), but I wouldn't call it a general trend; infrastructure, for one, is still massively improving. Where it was bicycle-friendly twenty years ago, it's way more so today, and bound to be even more so…

It’s not a foregone conclusion though, in addition to higher and blunter hoods there’s just more cars (over ten million now), and the EU may recognise US safety standards in trade negotiations. Not that the latter matters when you can import violating vehicles (like Dodge Rams) under individual vehicle approval. The Netherlands is in danger of resting on its laurels and getting complacent. Some places (Hilversum come…

No, I indeed wouldn't say it's bound to end up in a good place - just that it's too pessimistic a view to think that it's generally trending in the wrong direction. We're seeing all the bad signs we're seeing elsewhere, but also many of the good ones, such as entire new car-free neighbourhoods being built.

Re: Where do the children play?

#162

Post by loughnane » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 1:51 PM UTC

> Consider some statistics on the American childhood, drawn from children aged 8-12: 62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult

At least in the US, my guess for the cause of this is goes something like:

1. Housing is expensive.

2. People move to where housing is cheap (ie plenty of land, easy to build). In the last few decades that's more often than not been in the south.

3. Big population changes in those areas demand more schools.

4. Big school is built on the edge of town, because that's where the land is and one school has better economies of scale than multiple neighborhood schools

5. No one lives close to the school anymore, so everyone has to drive.

Throw in the sprawl that often accompanies new development in areas with wide open land and its easy to see how we end up here.

I live in Brookline, MA (in the North, next to Boston) and it's very much a walk-to-school town. The structural reason for that is our schools are in the neighborhoods, have been around for a long time, and there's nowhere "on the edge of town" to build a new one. Our town has financial pressures like everyone else and I few government's are able to resist the temptation of cost savings---we just don't have the option to build that way. Thank goodness.

Re: Where do the children play?

#163

Post by slumberlust » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 2:03 PM UTC

loughnane wrote: post #162

> Consider some statistics on the American childhood, drawn from children aged 8-12: 62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult At least in the US, my guess for the cause of this is goes something like: 1. Housing is expensive. 2. People move to where housing is cheap (ie plenty of land, easy to build). In the last few decades that's more often than not been in the south. 3. Big popu…

Inner city, especially in the oldest and most established, is an outlier experience. My friends on Melrose drive to their schools, and here in Southern NH it's driving or buses.

The main reason I wouldn't let our gradeschooler walk/ride .5 miles to school is a lack of consistent sidewalks and drivers who are constantly distracted and/or road raged.

Re: Where do the children play?

#164

Post by uahajakka » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Where do the children play?

#165

Post by neutronicus » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 2:13 PM UTC

emil-lp wrote: post #6

> Consider some statistics on the American childhood, drawn from children aged 8-12: 62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult This is really not representative for other Western countries. Where I'm from, I would say that 75% of 6 year olds walk/bike to school alone, and 100% of older kids do. > In physical space, Western children are almost comically sheltered. I think the author…

6-year-olds, huh?

I'm in the US and my almost-6-year-old and I bike to school together. We're exceptional in this regard - I don't see anyone else doing this and other parents are constantly commenting (positively!). It helps that he and his newborn brother are six years apart. Other families of our SES generally pump them out 2 years apart and move the brood around in a wagon for ease of supervising the oldest, while we had the luxury of forcing him to walk places without worrying about any other children's schedules.

I'm almost more worried about him managing his possessions at the endpoint than the ride itself. Locking the bike up, actually bringing his backpack in, etc.

Although I suppose I'm also a little worried about cars not seeing him at stop signs since (unlike me) he's below the hoods of a lot of cars.

Re: Where do the children play?

#166

Post by em-bee » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 2:20 PM UTC

WA wrote: post #113

em-bee wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The other side of the coin is that you have ambitious kids in a class who are distracted and sometimes even bullied by kids with zero ambitions. You think that's more fair to the ambitious kids when 2/3 of the class think it's cool to NOT learn anything and playing pecking order games all day?

that's not the other side of the coin. that's the other end of the extreme. there are other solutions that can accommodate both needs. the problem with splitting up schools is that kids are not always ambitions and faster, nor always slower or lazy. that changes over time. a better system needs to have the flexibility to adjust for kids as they are developing and growing. switching schools back and forth is the worst way to achieve that. i'd rather find extracurriula activities that keep the kids interested than force them to switch schools. the problem is teacher training and an inflexible education system. the ability to switch schools does not make the system any more flexible.

a better school lets you choose a more or less academic focus if that is what the kids want.

the best system btw is montesori where kids really can learn at their own pace. it is designed in such a way that even within a class different kids work on different projects. they even mix ages so that younger ambitious kids can work with older ones.

Re: Where do the children play?

#167

Post by casey2 » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 2:24 PM UTC

Americans think they are free. In reality they are free to do a very limited subset of basic necessity and socialization tasks. You can drive your tank to the the local shopping center, maybe a shooting range. And you wonder why people freak out when you try to take away their guns and trucks.

You are free to travel to some business that has taken care of all the legal requirements for you. Some freedom. You aren't even free to connect some fiber to "your" house you only have the freedom to choose which product to buy and maybe if you are one of the lucky few which product to sell (not fiber though that's a state funded monopoly)

Re: Where do the children play?

#168

Post by beAbU » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 2:28 PM UTC

mlrtime wrote: post #96

goodcanadian wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legal e-bikes are fine. The ones you are complaining about are probably illegal, not that there is any real enforcement.

Serious Q: What is the fundamental difference between a legal and illegal e-bike. This largely is differentiated by the location but I don't know what illegal e-bike means.

In addition to the other answer you got. E-bikes are pedal assist, so illegal ones usually have throttles in addition to more powerful motors. This depends on the region though.

Re: Where do the children play?

#169

Post by em-bee » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 2:34 PM UTC

mlrtime wrote: post #125

em-bee wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the unfairness criticism is nonsense. it's just politics. and it doesn't even apply here because the existence of different school types would be unfair as well. splitting kids up by ability is not unfair. forcing them in different schools however is. because switching schools takes a lot of effort and it gets harder the older you get simply because the curriculum diverges to much. so even if i am bored in a lower tier school, i could not catch up to a higher tier one. for most kids the moment the school tier is chosen after grade 4, the kid is stuck in that tier, no matter how able the kid turns out to be.

merging school types is not about treating everyone the same, but it is about acknowledging that kids develop and you can't evaluate the ability of a child based on their performance at age 9.

as i said, i would not have made it in a tiered system because i would have been stuck in the lowest tier. my parents were to busy to argue with each other to even care and my performance suffered because of them.

those are circumstances a tiered system can't handle. a merged system that can deal with children at all levels however can, and that made the difference for me. that has nothing to do with treating all kids the same. on the contrary, it has everything to do with treating kids individually and not stuffing them in boxes like a tiered system does.

as for a perfect system, montessori gets pretty close. three years of age are grouped together in one class. that alone require that the kids in that class are not all treated the same. it allows all kids to learn at their own pace, so younger, faster kids can easily catch up to older kids and work with them or be given extra activities without disturbing other kids in the same class learning something else

Re: Where do the children play?

#170

Post by Gazoche » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 2:53 PM UTC

Pretty insightful article, it resonates with what I remember of my experience as a kid.

But while I believe the general trends outlined here, it's important to remember that "the world" != "the West" != "the US", and even within a single country, the situation can be vastly different from one place to another, one socio-economic stratum to another, or even one family to another.

I also think kids escaping to digital places is not a very recent phenomenon, and has been happening for at least a generation. It's just that the platforms have changed. Back in my days, that place was Facebook, and we had entire digital lives there that our parents knew little about. And it's no coincidence that we started migrating elsewhere at the time when the adults started joining as well (though the general enshitification of the platform certainly didn't help either).