I think Maryland deserves a special shoutout. It's illegal, and not just in a CPS-steamrolls-your-rights-and-family sort of way, for an 8 year old to be left with children Growing up, I think many girls had ended their babysitting careers by 13.
The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
161–170 of 303 posts
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the many reasons you should have more kids.
If one in 8 has that kind of accident in America they will seize all the kids and you will lose all of them, so other than just spreading your DNA that approach won't work. There are many, many documented cases of people having all their kids seized because they had a child with a brittle bone disease, and after their brittle bones break (happens easily with such child) the government blames the parent and takes all…
Ok I am not sure what exact point you are making or arguing with. The op grew up as 1 of 3 and I think that's better than 1 of 1 :)
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
there's really no reason American kids in metro areas like SF, Boston, DC, NYC couldn't take a bus 5 miles away by themselves. when one comes up of an actual reason to why, it contradicts real statistics. the biggest things parents should worry about is their kid being bullied by other kids during school, a supposedly safe place, and other family. strangers just aren't the major source of violence towards children.
Welp this week we in Phoenix are dealing with a report of a 17-year-old high school girl who boarded a light rail train (the one with security cameras and guards) and she was harassed and assaulted by a mob of boys on the train, presumably in front of human onlookers; she disembarked, and was assaulted some more. She is now in a neck brace, and her mother is absolutely distraught, saying this is something she cannot…
Multiple people died on the same stretch of road on the same afternoon that I drive on often about a month ago. One was just a teenager in a car that was following the law, it was the other car that was speeding.
I've seen lots of death on the roads around me.
But sure, it's the train that's unsafe.
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#164I have a 10 year old boy and I'm facing these issues right now. I'm also in Canada so culturally adjacent to the US and similar enough with regards to this topic. I don't see child welfare agencies personally as a particular threat when it comes to this topic. Maybe they ARE more likely to get involved in cases of more free range parenting where before they weren't, but it doesn't register as a real worry. The major…
Great point. Intuitively it makes sense that sending kids out when you expect a bunch of their peers to be there is different from sending them out into empty streets. Thinking a little more about why this intuition holds: it's because once upon a time you were sending them out into a community, where they would learn the tried and tested practices by example. Once the link of cultural transmission is severed, it's hard to bootstrap it back again, even if you had a bunch of families that wanted to try.
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#165On the other hand, stuff happens. Depends on your risk appetite and your systems tolerance for the inevitable consequences of errors... A 5 year old free range kid on a scooter died outside a nearby school a few months ago. Hit by a SUV Was riding back from primary school on a scooter, without the mother. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-14/islah-metcalfe-rouse-... A massive investigation, police, social services,…
As a counter example, I witnessed 3 months ago a similar scene in my neighborhood, where a kid on a bike, crossing on pedestrian stripes, was hit by a taxi. It was a bad accident but luckily he didn't die. His dad was following right behind him. I'm leaning to think that "shit happens" in any case, but overprotection adds on top another layer of subtle, long term risks.
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#166Related:
2017 (but based on a 2007 DailyMail article), 520 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13547089
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#167I don't know. Maybe this is going away in some places, maybe I just have my own anecdata, but my kids play outside unsupervised all the time, as do all the kids in my neighborhood. I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of small Metro. Nothing special about it at all. Every time I see one of these articles I always wonder who they're talking about. I always feel like this is just one of those…
This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie places reporters live. I dropped my daughter off at the mall to hang out with their friends and one of the moms followed them around the whole time. They're all 13!
https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/shoot-the-messenger
> But I actually find ideological bias to be less concerning than the more fundamental problem that the class of people who determine the boundaries of debate share a set of demographic and experiential traits that they don’t recognize as distinctive.
> This class of people includes journalists, yes, but also people who work in the tech industry, academics, nonprofit leaders, influencers, and those who work in politics. From now on, I’ll refer to this group broadly as “the messenger class.”
> The messenger class’s distinctive experiences — like living in downtown Washington, D.C., or living in one of the parts of New York highlighted in red — shape the boundaries of normal in ways harder to counteract than pure ideological or partisan bias.
> The messenger class plays a fundamental role in any democracy. Democratic self-governance requires not just fair procedures for making decisions but an accurate and shared picture of social reality to reason about. That picture is revealed through the communicated experiences of citizens, filtered through the messenger class, which decides which experiences are urgent and require intervention.
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think in 1926 more than 50% of global 15-20 year olds could: “acquire food from nature (farm, hunt, gather) and cook it for themselves.” Or “make and fix their own tools. Build and fix their shelter.” (Culturally, those tasks often specialize by vocation, gender etc.)
They absolutely could. A quarter of Americans’ primary job was agriculture in the 1920s. While job specialization was certainly a thing that didn’t mean people outsourced all of these tasks the way people do today.
That’s different from solo gather and cook and repair which is the artificially inflated bar being set here. I know people from multiple parts of the world who grew up on family working farms - specializing very real (esp. gender based)
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Welp this week we in Phoenix are dealing with a report of a 17-year-old high school girl who boarded a light rail train (the one with security cameras and guards) and she was harassed and assaulted by a mob of boys on the train, presumably in front of human onlookers; she disembarked, and was assaulted some more. She is now in a neck brace, and her mother is absolutely distraught, saying this is something she cannot…
Someone and their gang pulled a knife on me as a kid when I was riding the bus forty years ago in a university town, but that doesn’t make what they did normalized, it just makes an anecdote. As it happens, though, that is quite normalized in the U.S., especially if you’re not white. A lot of U.S. residents inure themselves to random acts of violence because they either feel helpless to change the societal contexts o…
> I’ve been upset about this for thirty years
Completely normal. Trauma at a certain level, unlike other memories and emotions, doesn't seem impacted by time. I'm sorry to hear what happened to you.
> that is quite normalized in the U.S., especially if you’re not white. / A lot of U.S. residents inure themselves to random acts of violence
This part seems to universalize the experience, though. What is the basis for it? Crime is at generational lows. I've used public transit in cities uncounted times and I have never seen a crime; that's what is normal for me.
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
American children are in more danger because the country's more diverse?
Diversity doesn't make places more dangerous (if i understand the stats). But humans are naturally tribal and fear those who look and act significantly different.
That depends on an arbitrary perception of 'my tribe'. Irish and Italians used to riot against each other. Germans were hated (look up a quote from Benjamin Franklin). Protestants and Catholics used to riot. Every wave of immigrants seems to get the same treatment by some.
Within a few generations, their decendants marry each other.