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What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

stevemagness.substack.com

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Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#211

Post by brightball »

flakeoil wrote: post #144
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in walking distance of all these things, and the farthest I’ve gotten my kid to do things alone is to walk to and from school (a whole 8 minutes). But even in my dense neighborhood, it’s not dense enough, kids are hardly at the playground unless it’s nice out, the ice cream shop is a bit too expensive for kids on their own, the 7-11 is probably the sketchiest place they could go to. I’m not really sure what we…

Is go shopping in malls what kids should do?

I spent so much time hanging out at the mall in middle school. My friends and I would play in the arcade, wander around exploring book stores, game stores, walk around and bump into other people. Then we would make a collect call to one of our parents and give the name “come pick us up” before hanging up real quick to avoid charges.

It was a good time. The arcade especially because if you were good at a game you could keep playing without putting in more money, so we got really good. You can’t do that with arcade games now.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#212

Post by TylerE »

parineum wrote: post #109
alex_young wrote: post #17

I want to let my kids walk wherever they want to. It’s great for them. My 5 year old bikes to school, accompanied by an adult. It’s a bit more than half a mile away from the house. I’d like to tell him he can do this on his own next year, but there’s a single intersection he has to cross that makes this difficult. I’m not worried about him getting lost, abducted by a stranger or any host of movie plot scenarios. I’m…

> 40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches > Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities. I'm not sure that height matters for a young kid and, 40 years ago, there weren't abs and sensors that will brake for you. Plus, drunk driving rates were much, much…

40 years ago there was ABSOLUTELY ABS.

ABS in aviation goes back to the 1950s in planes and the late '60s in cars.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#213

Post by TrackerFF »

Did we stop letting kids leave the front yard, or did they simply stop doing that themselves?

I grew up in the late 80s / early to mid 90s. We were allowed the roam around until dark. But that was also a more natural thing to do, as there weren't a whole lot of things to do inside (we had to ask very nicely if we could stay inside to play).

But as I got into my teens, indoor activities became more accessible. Everyone had a computer, the internet became a thing, you suddenly had more options than to just bike around or play. As I got into my young adult years, I noticed that team sports and things like that had dropped off significantly where I came from. Even in my small rural town we'd have 3-4 soccer teams in my age group...10 years later, they could barely string together a single team of teens to play for our town team. Many kids had simply lost interest, and were occupied with other things.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#214

Post by holoduke »

My oldest son of 10 years already cycles alone through our village. Hangs out with friends in nearby parks or soccer fields. Here in the Netherlands infrastructure is build around cyclists and pedestrians. I can't imagine him sitting home all the time. As soon as he wakes up in the weekend he leaves the house. During the week he cycles to school which is about 2 miles by bike. No phone, no gps. It's how we live.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#215

Post by fergal_reid »

dust-jacket wrote: post #206
kleiba2 wrote: post #167

> When I tell people these numbers, the usual response is some version of “the world is more dangerous now.” It certainly feels that way. The only problem is that all of the data we have shows it’s much safer than when you or I were wandering the streets. Violent crime against children has fallen steadily since the early 1990s. Stranger abductions, the thing every parent imagines when they hesitate to let a 10-year-o…

You could defintiely argue abductions and crime have reduced because there are fewer opportunities (because we keep the kids safe). But that still doesn't mean you can conclude the world is MORE dangerous.

Well, you could conclude the world is now more dangerous for any kid let wander - even if fewer do, and even if the observed average risk to any kid is lower (given they are allowed wander a lot less).

I don't want to be on the 'overprotect kids' side of the argument, but I'm not sure the numbers argur cleanly in one direction or the other.

I also often think of selection bias whenever anyone says "I was allowed do a lot more and we were fine" in the context of child safeguarding; because it also sounds like a lot of kids were abused in the past, who don't speak up in that conversation.

I don't know. I worry I overprotect my kids, but I also am not sure how to price in small risks of massively negative events. I think that's the crux of it for parents - trying to weigh hard tradeoffs.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#216

Post by wheels »

A quirky thought: I'm very much an advocate of "free range parenting", and mostly grew up with it myself in the US, and it's what my kids have here in Germany. My 7 year old walks to school alone (in my neighborhood), my 10 year old takes the subway to school, and they have a large degree of freedom in our neighborhood, generally going to after-school activities on their own.

But I wonder if part of why people worried less in earlier generations is that we were so close to the time where childhood actually was dangerous: 100 years ago in the US, 20% of kids didn't live to adulthood (mostly because of diseases we can now prevent). I wonder if that had some cultural impact on perception of relative dangers.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#217

Post by throwawayffffas »

What happened is we learned the extend of sexual abuse of minors. Estimates in the early 90s was around 1%.

Research in the late nineties revealed the actual percentage was about 9% and 10%.*

Are we over-reacting maybe but maybe not.

* I vaguely recall that in an episode of PsychologyInSeattle, a guest that was doing research into food addiction back then realized that over 40% of their patients had experienced some sort of sexual abuse when they were a child, this led them to expand their research into that subject and discover the full extent of the issue. I think the research they did put the figure for the general population at 16% but take these numbers with a grain of salt it's been a while since I listened to it.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#218

Post by jlengrand »

Moved house earlier this year, from an apartment in a not so safe area to a house in a family area with no cars and more green. The kiddos have been out so much more, and it's awesome to see how they find phones / screens less interesting when they can just go and play outside.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#219

Post by calgoo »

swiftcoder wrote: post #176
torben-friis wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spain is particularly screwed in terms of housing. Access to mortgages is ridiculous, requiring sources of income that can be proved to be stable and ~35% of cost paid upfront, which means that most Spaniards rely on inheritance to reach a point where they can consider children. Tourism also balloons real estate prices even more than is usual everywhere nowadays. But the children friendly aspect of society described…

> Access to mortgages is ridiculous, requiring sources of income that can be proved to be stable and ~35% of cost paid upfront Also out here in rural Galicia, the minimum mortgage size the bank will give is something like 2x the average home price. A friend wanted a ~€30k mortgage to buy a fixer-upper in a small village, and the bank was just like "we don't make loans that small".

As someone living in the center of Barcelona, i might have to come over to Galicia in the future. Hows the public schools in general, similar to here in catalunya i assume. Buying anything around here feels like a half million investment and its not wort it.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#220

Post by pjc50 »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #217

What happened is we learned the extend of sexual abuse of minors. Estimates in the early 90s was around 1%. Research in the late nineties revealed the actual percentage was about 9% and 10%.* Are we over-reacting maybe but maybe not. * I vaguely recall that in an episode of PsychologyInSeattle, a guest that was doing research into food addiction back then realized that over 40% of their patients had experienced some…

.. however, isn't that almost entirely from people known to the child? Authority figures, teachers, priests, step-parents? "Stranger danger" was in some ways a recoil from recognizing how bad the "system" was in secret, as it relied on abuse of trust.
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