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Where do the children play?

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Re: Where do the children play?

#201

Post by elgenie »

Aeolun wrote: post #27
pmontra wrote: post #26

I think that something else changed and should be added to the analysis: the number of children. There are less of them so there are less chances to reach a critical mass that lets kids play together every day. When I was little it was common to have between 10 to 30 of us within the fence of our city building. Parents and grandparents were looking at us from the windows but they were probably hearing us scream and p…

> Where do you find 10 kids together now Walk to the park at the corner, have your child shout a few times, they’ll all pop their heads out of the door at the sound of others playing, desperate to do anything other than sit inside with their parents.

This working is a function of density. First, imagining a park at the corner is a huge assumption.

Second, if the park isn't within shouting distance of the necessary number of kids, half of the ones within shouting distance are at parent-scheduled activities, and half of the remainder aren't allowed to brave street crossings because of the six-foot-tall hoods and inattentive drivers of passing ChildMurker1050s, no amount of park yelling will be sufficient.

Re: Where do the children play?

#202

Post by duderific »

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…

As another data point, my son was 5 when the lockdowns hit and missed the end of his kindergarten year and the entirety of first grade. He's doing fine.

My daughter was 18 months and went back to preschool at age three. She's also doing fine.

In fact I don't know any of their peer group who I would consider to be "having a terrible time adjusting to school and normal social interaction" which could be directly tied to Covid. There were some kids who had already been identified as having developmental challenges, and that hasn't changed.

Re: Where do the children play?

#204

Post by iso1631 »

Macha wrote: post #194
ctoth wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are 4 children in our village at the "local" primary school Four? How... What? How does any of this actually work (you clearly live there, so it obviously does?) That seems like you're living somewhere that's just like ... empty? How do any services/infrastructure/... How many old people live in this village? Is this the demographic collapse people are going on about?

That sounds like the village in which I spent my teens. Population of ~500, and for We didn't have nice paths, there was a (former) main road going through the middle of the village. As far as local infrastructure, there was the pub, a car mechanic, and every few years a corner shop would open up and last about 2-3 years before shutting down again. If you needed groceries you went to the larger village (population ~1…

That's about here, although the town is only a 10 minute drive.

And people moan that some kids get taxis to school, because the government has decided that it's not worth operating a school closer than 5 miles, but when you need to shift 2 people you don't put on a minibus.

There's only two primary schools within 10 miles which have fewer than 50 pupils on the (7 year) roll though, it's not an overly rural area. I suspect townies would have palpitations when they find out about state boarding schools, because if you live on Tresco you can't commute to the high school every day

Re: Where do the children play?

#205

Post by bluGill »

manc_lad wrote: post #71
ensocode wrote: post #23

a bit off but it sometimes feels like a self-reinforcing loop in Western societies: We have fewer children because we optimize so hard for money, stability, and personal security. But because we have fewer children, each child becomes “economically and emotionally precious.” And the more precious they become, the more afraid we are to let them take risks, explore freely, or just do their own thing. The end result is…

This summarises my thoughts as well. People used to give away children that were too much of a burden. With higher mortality, some were also not expected to make it. We're in a societal place where we have set the bar high in terms of an expected level of education and quality of life for our kids. kids are expensive and we've grown the population massively. There is also a social stigma associated with having lots o…

> People used to give away children that were too much of a burden. With higher mortality, some were also not expected to make it.

Don't confuse that for them not loving their children or not being devastated by the deaths when they happened. We don't know how often kids were given away, but there isn't strong evidence it happened often.

Re: Where do the children play?

#206

Post by nine_zeros »

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…

[dead]

Re: Where do the children play?

#207

Post by CalRobert »

carlob wrote: post #138
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…

There was an interesting plot I saw somewhere reversing the old thing about Halloween being the deadliest day for kids by dividing the number of dead kids by the number of kids on the street on a given day. It turns out that Halloween ends up being by far the safest day per capita.

Can you share a source? It doesn't match with my own reading (https://www.wpr.org/health/studies-show-pedestrian-fatalitie... for instance - """he average Halloween resulted in four additional pedestrian deaths, and the highest increase was among children. Pedestrians between 4 and 8 years old saw a 10-fold increase in fatalities on Halloween. Risk was highest around 6 p.m. and in residential neighborhoods.""")

Re: Where do the children play?

#208

Post by em-bee »

WA wrote: post #174
em-bee wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree on the needed flexibility part. > the best system btw is montesori I disagree on that. See a recent HN discussion on Montessori: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45674002 tl;dr: it works for some kids, just like the current German system works for some (other) kids.

you may notice that i took an active part in that discussion.

tl;dr: montessori really does work for almost all kids, not just for some. the cases in the discussion where montessori didn't work don't provide any evidence that they actually received real montessori education as the name "montessori" is not protected.

Re: Where do the children play?

#209

Post by lotsofpulp »

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…

>On a rational level I'm aware that this is probably my sheltered upbringing and that she will understand the dangers of car traffic better than I did

She can understand it all she wants, it won’t make a difference to a driver who is texting in a huge suv/pickup truck with a hood twice your daughter’s height.

It is objectively more dangerous to be a pedestrian/bicyclist/even a person in a smaller car than in previous decades.

And if it’s dark or raining outside, forget about it. Crossing a 50ft wide road with a 40mph speed limit (which means people are actually distracted driving at 50mph) as a kid is daunting.

A 50ft wide road is just 5 lanes, 2 in each direction, and 1 turning lane. Very common in the US, even in small communities.

Re: Where do the children play?

#210

Post by canucker2016 »

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…

My parents like to tell the story about me getting bored at kindergarten class one day.

I grew up in a residential area in a city of several million people.

The teachers had let the kids out for recess. But even that amount of playful distraction didn't diminish my boredom that day.

So I went home.

In the middle of the school day.

Without the teacher finding out...

I had to cross a stroad to get home - two lanes each way. I can't recall if I crossed at the street light or at a crosswalk a few blocks away. But I made my way home unscathed. My mom was surprised when I showed up at home a few hours early.

The next few days at school, I could feel the teacher's eyes boring into my back as I played during recess. Definitely felt like I was being watched for awhile. :)

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