How getting richer made teenagers less free • Hacker News Board

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#231

Post by rurp » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 5:13 PM UTC

dlisboa wrote: post #102

smallnix wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the risk What is the risk really? I mean put in numbers.

Do you have children? Would you point them a loaded gun that's only, say, 0.5% likely to go off and shoot them? 1 in 100k cancers also disappear spontaneously, should I wait and see for my kid and not treat them? When it comes to your own children the only number that matters is 1. The 1 time it happens their lives, your life, is over.

The chances of your kid being abducted by a stranger because you let them walk home from school are so many orders of magnitude lower than 0.5% that the analogy doesn't make any sense. You're probably more likely to kill them by handing them a plate of food or some other benign every day factor that isn't nearly as dramatic as anything the national news covers.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#232

Post by squeefers » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 5:19 PM UTC

squeefers wrote: post #22

TrackerFF wrote: post #15

I grew up in the late 80s/early 90s, and came from a rural place with a lot of poverty and at best working class people. We'd be outside all day long - being inside was considered a privilege. Weekdays and weekends. Decades later, most of my peers have middle-class jobs. Their kids are barely outside. Their parents are involved with them from morning to evening, or chauffeuring them between sports and other extracurr…

> and came from a rural place with a lot of poverty > We'd be outside all day long > most of my peers have middle-class jobs. >Their kids are barely outside. wonder what the link is there then?

what absolute cretins downvoted that?

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#233

Post by S_Bear » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 5:24 PM UTC

squeefers wrote: post #24

komali2 wrote: post #3

> When teenagers aren’t trusted to walk over to a friend’s house or play in the park, when they almost never have a part-time job where they can earn a paycheck and meet expectations that aren’t purely artificial, then I think it’s much harder for them to have a realistic, non-algorithm-driven worldview and concrete life goals they can work toward. This, and the car-centric design of the American suburb, I think are…

> so basically for 4 years the majority of my free time was spent playing WoW and posting on 4chan. because the sidewalk was next to a busy road? sounds like a bit of a reach

I was at a conference in St Cloud, MN a few years ago, and I could see the Panda Express from my hotel. Took around 40 minutes to walk there because I couldn't get the timing right to frogger myself across the 6 lanes. Got stuck in the island in the middle for a good 15 minutes because the slip lane always had cars in it.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#234

Post by AnimalMuppet » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 5:29 PM UTC

blitzar wrote: post #83

TrackerFF wrote: post #15

I grew up in the late 80s/early 90s, and came from a rural place with a lot of poverty and at best working class people. We'd be outside all day long - being inside was considered a privilege. Weekdays and weekends. Decades later, most of my peers have middle-class jobs. Their kids are barely outside. Their parents are involved with them from morning to evening, or chauffeuring them between sports and other extracurr…

A trend amongst peers I have noticed ... people are parenting in the opposite manner to the way their werre raised. Your parents were very active / suffocating ... do free range parenting. Your parents let you roam outside with few sports, clubs and activities ... do 7 day a week scheduled activities. You went to private school ... send kids to shittiest free school you can find.

Most of us had parents that made mistakes. Some of those mistakes hurt us, stunted our development, or damaging our psyches. When we become parents, we try not to make the mistakes that our parents make.

But the problem is, there's more than one set of mistakes. In fact, they often come in pairs. If you move too far away from one mistake, you may not wind up in the sweet spot. You may be doing the other mistake.

In Zion National Part there is a hike called "Angel's Landing". You wind up on this ridge, with a 1000 foot dropoff on one side and a 500 foot dropoff on the other side. If you move too far away from one cliff, you fall off the other.

Parenting is like that. Take permissive vs. discipline, for example. If you avoid discipline too much, you may damage your kids by being too permissive.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#235

Post by squeefers » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 5:29 PM UTC

CrossVR wrote: post #31

squeefers wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so basically for 4 years the majority of my free time was spent playing WoW and posting on 4chan. because the sidewalk was next to a busy road? sounds like a bit of a reach

If you're in a suburb what else is there to do? Going to any interesting spots to hang out with friends involve asking your parents to bring you there with the family car and then arranging a strict timetable on when to pick you up again.

> If you're in a suburb what else is there to do?

i mean, i agree with you, theres nothing to do anymore. but surely there was less to do in the 50s? if youre poor, theres never much to do really.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#236

Post by yesfitz » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

insane_dreamer wrote: post #228

yesfitz wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the census, cars were NOT just as plentiful. The number of cars per household has risen slightly[1] (although they stop keeping track after 3 cars), but the number of households have doubled[2] between 1970 and 2020. As for the bikes, it's a vicious cycle compounded by distracted driving via cell phone. Less bikes means less drivers expecting to see a bike, making it more dangerous for bikes, meaning less bi…

sure, population has grown, but unless density has increased substantially, then on any given ride you're likely to encounter similar number of vehicles than before, not counting major / commute roads of course, but those aren't the ones kids are riding on also, bike lanes were virtually non-existent back then

Fantastic news, population density has increased substantially![1] 57.5 average people/square mile in 1970, growing to 93.8 in 2020.

1: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/density-d...

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#237

Post by senordevnyc » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 5:51 PM UTC

insane_dreamer wrote: post #211

senordevnyc wrote: post #192

I have a ten year old daughter in NYC, and I’m probably one of the types of parents who many here are castigating. I’m not ready for her to go out and explore the city on her own. Here’s what I worry about: - cars: she’s not always the most present and aware, and it takes one mistake to ruin or end her life. - bikes and scooters: less dangerous in some ways, but more ubiquitous and unpredictable than cars - sexual ha…

I understand and worry about my kids the same age too. But the paradox I myself admit to is that those perceived dangers aren't new nor have they increased significantly since I was young in the 70s -- other than scooters being new -- and yet I, and pretty much every other kid, had tons of freedom and was just fine. So it's mostly about the fears in my head, not the reality on the ground.

Yeah, but “I made it just fine” is poor logic to me. This would be true for kids who grew up with parents smoking, mom drinking while pregnant, no seatbelts, etc. They were mostly fine too.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#238

Post by myko » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 6:02 PM UTC

Hendrikto wrote: post #52

walthamstow wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accurate. Oddly enough on this side of the pond most people who would not want to raise their kids in the US would mention school shootings. The real, ubiquitous, daily danger is massive cars and lazy drivers.

Just because you have even bigger problems in the US, that does not mean that is isn’t cause for concern to be the school shooting capital of the world by an enormous margin. The US have more school shootings than the rest of the world combined. It is not unfounded or irrational to be concerned.

As an aside, firearms are the leading cause of deaths for kids in the US:

https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2025/12/guns-are-the-leadi...

https://www.cnn.com/health/guns-death-us-children-teens-dg

I don't think it's particularly useful to focus on school shootings in particular vs other shootings

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#239

Post by rawgabbit » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 6:15 PM UTC

csa wrote: post #227

rawgabbit wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These extra curricular activities, were the secret game you had to play, to get into prestigious universities. At least, it was just a few years ago. Besides niche sports like lacrosse and rowing, there was the volunteer activities like serving at a soup kitchen. When Ivy League universities saw a resume like that, they knew which social class the student belonged to.

So much of your comment is wrong: > These extra curricular activities, were the secret game you had to play, to get into prestigious universities. At least, it was just a few years ago. Extracurriculars have been a part of elite school admissions for about a century. It hasn’t really been a secret for most of that time. Some people (somewhat correctly) say that this requirement was added to discriminate against Jews…

Really. A wide range of classes of people do these things. I didn't know.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#240

Post by em-bee » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 6:29 PM UTC

YaeGh8Vo wrote: post #226

throwaway732255 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interestingly, I've heard from parents that many feel like they're both suffocating and feeling inadequate When my spouse and I were dating, we made fun of those “overly involved parents” who tried to live vicariously through their kids and over-scheduled them. Since having kids, my spouse has (over a one year period) put our 5 year old in: T-ball, swimming, dance, theater, Sunday school, church, soccer, gymnastics…

What's striking is the helplessness that seeps through your message. As if you had zero control over what happens. You're just a bystander watching what happens to your children. It's time for you to wake up, and start exercising your own authority.

you are not married, are you? that's not how this works. while they certainly need to talk, and not just once, but continuously, you don't have the authority to change your partners behavior. you need to discuss your feelings about this matter and come to a consensus about the activities and the goals for your child.

it won't be easy. if i were in this position, i can't imagine what i would do. i feel even stronger than GP about this, and i'd probably feel quite helpless trying to get my partner to understand how i feel about this. even just trying to get my voice heard. if you don't have a way to communicate openly in your marriage from the start, then talking about things openly can be very hard, seemingly impossible even. with one issue that my wife and me had, it first took me years to notice and understand the issue and start to speak up about it, then it took a few more years for my wife to recognize and acknowledge the issue for herself, and then she still struggled to do something about it. and very time i messed up somewhere in our relationship, it was a setback for her development too. and i can't even blame her. it's something she learned from her parents (which is how she eventually figured it out)