Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where do the children play?

unpublishablepapers.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 264 posts

Re: Where do the children play?

#211

Post by volkl48 »

mlrtime wrote: post #101
ErigmolCt wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cities feel riskier, but in many ways they offer more room to grow. Kids don't just need nature; they need space to navigate the world on their own terms

I'm going to get criticism because I feel HN is mostly urban based... but I don't think kids need "cities" to grow. They need nature. I picture rural/suburban areas that aren't fully built out with small wooded areas , creeks and playground 5-10 minute walk. They need to get dirty, play in water etc. When I think cities, I think dense urban areas that rarely offer this unless living in a expensive or unique neighborh…

I think the problem with your thought is that it really requires a "stars to align perfectly" kind of thing for that to actually be achieved, especially over the long-term.

Many people had that sort of experience in say....the 1950-2000. You had a lot of smaller new developments bulldozed into new areas, and for the first 20 years especially - almost everyone who moved in to those new homes, moved in at a similar time and with young children of a similar age.

In this way, those pockets of suburbia had a bunch of temporary features. You had a much higher quantity of local children within walking distance than would naturally be the case in the long-term for that number of mid-sized SFH homes, and you had a highly developed area with a highly undeveloped area nearby. (land not yet turned into subdivisions like your own).

But a few decades down the line, even without the large behavioral shifts in society - now you've got an endless sea of divided-up suburbia with no nearby wilderness accessible by children on foot/bike, and there's only 2 nearby kids of the same age range rather than 20.

Which is to say - I think it's very difficult to achieve that as as a stable long-term environment, at least with the typical US SFH subdivision density.

And once you get out to rural you run into the problem of the kids not being able to see each other without parental involvement.

-------

Anyway, I did grow up in a "goldlocks zone" environment like you describe. It was very nice, and I was particularly adventurous + had more relaxed than average parents.

But I actually found in (Upstate NY) college that the kids who had the most similar levels of life experience to me were the...NYC kids. The city enabled and outright required them to be much more independent than the more normal US suburb experience was. They'd be taking transit all over the city, many even just to get to school by middle/high school - and then after school they'd be going out with their friends to get snacks or hang out in the park or whatever.

In contrast, many of the "average" suburb peers had basically never been able to go a single place in their lives without an adult driving them until maybe they got a license at 16-17 and seemed very limited in their development for it.

-------

tl;dr - I think the idealized version of a suburb can be good for it, the average US suburb can't stay that way, but I also think major cities offer a lot of potential for them. Denser + walkable medium towns + nature outside them could also be good - but that's more of a EU than US development pattern.

Re: Where do the children play?

#212

Post by abbadadda »

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…

Curious what age you started letting them ride the tube on their own? I’m in London as well and we’re starting to have the “walk to school” conversation but it is still early days and a 15 minute jaunt so not nothing.

Re: Where do the children play?

#213

Post by bamboozled »

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…

We live in the mountains , our kids ski all the time , lots to do in the summer, can bike and walk everywhere, not sure what you’re on about?

Re: Where do the children play?

#214

Post by avhon1 »

beAbU wrote: post #168
mlrtime wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the United States, throttle-only ebikes that go up to 20 miles per hour (Class 2 ebikes) are legal pretty much everywhere. They're required to have functional pedals, but no pedal assist function is required.

Re: Where do the children play?

#215

Post by paulorlando »

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…

I've noticed the critical mass issue also. If your kids do free range as described, who else is out there to meet?

Re: Where do the children play?

#216

Post by mothballed »

rcpt wrote: post #182
Aeolun wrote: post #4

I think this heavily depends on location. At 7 my child can check nearly all the boxes for independent activities. My wife may not like it, but the surroundings are probably safer than anywhere else in the world. The only thing we don’t have is forests. This is central Tokyo. Kids still spend a lot of time on Roblox because everyone tends to be deathly afraid of letting them ring each other’s doorbells.

In Los Angeles we let our 8 year old walk half a mile to school and someone called the cops on us.

My kid was interrogated for walking about 50 ft 'alone' ( I was actually watching further away and intervened before the Karen got to the point of calling it in) on our own property.

In the middle of nowhere, rural desert. Random Karen drove by at the wrong place and time, saw my kid, stops and questioned. Unbelievable. Literally the second you give a child independence a Karen will appear like clockwork, it's insane.

Re: Where do the children play?

#217

Post by shkkmo »

strix_varius wrote: post #200
mlrtime wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

E-Bikes are sold & regulated in "classes" (at least where I live in the US). A class 1 e-bike is pedal-assist and stops assisting beyond 20mph (mine, for instance, tapers off starting probably around 15 mph). A class 2 is the above, plus a throttle. A class 3 is anything that assists over 20mph. The "basically motorcycle" set exists here.

Your class 3 definition is inaccurate. Class 3 is limited to 28mph and cannot have a throttle, only pedal assist.

Anything that doesn't fall in one of those classes is a motorcycle that is not street legal and can only be rudden of private property (unless you can convince your DMV to give you registration as a motor vehicle.)

This can vary somewhat from state to state, but most states have adopted or are moving to adopt these classes.

Re: Where do the children play?

#218

Post by mothballed »

elgenie wrote: post #199
djtango wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing tiny tiny kids walking around is one of my favourite qualities of Japanese life, and on the flipside I sensed a quiet but shared responsibility/interest everyone took in making sure no harm befell the child on their journey. One the purest luxuries of living in such a high trust society

That feeling of shared societal responsibility probably has at least something to do with the birth rate. Japan is down to just 686K babies born per year from a population of 123 million.

This is why so many libraries, etc in US ban kids without parents. No one wants the slightest annoyance of even the possibility they could hypothetically be bothered to assist a child.

Re: Where do the children play?

#219

Post by johnnyanmac »

pessimizer wrote: post #108
johnnyanmac wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As a society we find violence or harm against children to be extremely shocking and tragic. As a society we would do almost anything to prevent it The moment Sandy Hook happened and US society just shrugged at it, we relinquished our ability to use this dynamic for anything serious. We can't pretend to care about kids while treating their murders as an inevitability of life and not something to reform over.

There have always been people who went into schools to kill children. In 1927, a guy blew up a school in Bath, Michigan, killing 38 kids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster The fact that you think heaven and earth have to be moved over a single school shooting (as terrible as it was) is a symptom. School is the safest place where children are. They're more likely to be murdered and abused at home. I'm…

>The fact that you think heaven and earth have to be moved over a single school shooting (as terrible as it was) is a symptom.

no, the symptom is that kids have to normalize lockdown drills and how to barricade a door to protect from shooters. I had earthquake and fire drills as a kid, but it wasn't culturalized to accept that school shootings are a thing.

Now we can map out mass shootings by year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

Now we can expect 4-5 school shottings a year, documented by year. Trying to make this equivalent to "well kids get hurt" completely misses the point. But I'm not surprised at this point.

Re: Where do the children play?

#220

Post by archagon »

mlrtime wrote: post #101
ErigmolCt wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cities feel riskier, but in many ways they offer more room to grow. Kids don't just need nature; they need space to navigate the world on their own terms

I'm going to get criticism because I feel HN is mostly urban based... but I don't think kids need "cities" to grow. They need nature. I picture rural/suburban areas that aren't fully built out with small wooded areas , creeks and playground 5-10 minute walk. They need to get dirty, play in water etc. When I think cities, I think dense urban areas that rarely offer this unless living in a expensive or unique neighborh…

Why do they “need” nature?

Looking back on my childhood, I think I got tremendous value from the diversity of experiences I was exposed to, not any one specific thing. The nature at my grandfather’s dacha was lovely and enjoyable, but so was urban life in a 4m+ population city. Both contributed equally to the adult I’ve become.

Post reply on HN