A lot of what's changed isn't parenting instincts but the systems kids are embedded in. Traffic speed, liability fears, school policies, and surveillance culture all push toward zero-risk tolerance. When the background structure punishes normal exploration, parents behave accordingly. Freedom and safety aren't individual traits; they're properties of an environment.
Where do the children play?
251–260 of 264 posts
Re: Where do the children play?
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the rural towns I've been to in Texas are just farm roads that you'd never want to walk down and towns with no real centers/plazas to hang out at (and you'd have to drive there anyways). Then I moved to Mexico and they were on to something there: small towns have central plazas that are heavily used for social activities, young men and women can walk around meeting each other, and they build densely enough to whe…
Most small towns in New England are laid out like those towns in Mexico. I wonder if it's a question of age? The pressure to create town squares must have been a lot higher before the automobile came around.
I think in the western US, the government gave people parcels of land but the land may have been far away from population centers.
Re: Where do the children play?
#253It's cars. It was always cars.
Plenty of cars in the 90s and we played outside all day. The biggest change since then is two things. One is that there’s way more to do inside now, mostly games and shows. The second is that baseless kidnapping panics convinced society that children can never be unattended. The main vector was daytime TV and now true crime podcasts. The reality is that kidnapping is statistically extremely rare and more than 95% of…
> Plenty of cars in the 90s and we played outside all day.
Same in the 1970s/1980s. I grew up in a suburb-type neighborhood. Needed a car to go to work or to do any shopping or go basically anywhere. Rode a bus to school. The idea that car-centric development is a relatively new phenomenon is just wrong. It's been happening since the 1950s. We still played outside. We had TV but like 6 channels and nothing very interesting for a kid most of the time. Now we have ubiquitous computers and phones, and the sociopathic tech companies, which have really been just terrible for everyone except their investors.
Re: Where do the children play?
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plenty of cars in the 90s and we played outside all day. The biggest change since then is two things. One is that there’s way more to do inside now, mostly games and shows. The second is that baseless kidnapping panics convinced society that children can never be unattended. The main vector was daytime TV and now true crime podcasts. The reality is that kidnapping is statistically extremely rare and more than 95% of…
While I mostly agree with you, cars then and cars now in the US are not the same. The typical car back then was a 5 door sedan, think ford crown, Chevrolet lumina, etc. These days almost everyone is driving pretty much a light truck.
You may not remember the "land yacht" sedans, or the gargantuan station wagons, which were common family cars back in the day. Longer, wider, and heavier than any modern SUV, crossover, or minivan.
Re: Where do the children play?
#255Travelling in Japan recently we came across a park where the kids could start fires to roast nuts; play with real hammers, nails and saws; dig holes with proper shovels; climb on all sorts of 'unsafe' structures. Certainly the first time my 2yo had used a hammer and a saw, though she uses secateurs at home and has had a [blunt] knife for quite a while. She loved it and wants to go back.
Re: Where do the children play?
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It doesn’t take much time to fix a puncture with a tiny kit the size of a matchbox. That's a dependency. Now you need to remember to have that kit with you. This is like solving the short battery life in phones with a portable battery charger. You still have to remember to charge the charger beforehand and bring it with you. Small kits are easy to lose sight of that by the time you need them so you don't know where…
People have been stashing a puncture repair kit in a small saddle bag since the nineteenth century. The kit just sits there until it is needed, potentially for years. To depict this as a big stress and risk is a real reach.
> To depict this as a big stress and risk is a real reach.
Yet here we are, living in a world where most parents would NOT let their kids travel around unsupervised even though it has been going on for longer than the 19th century. People have also been making fires for far longer than that. Both of these are depicted as big risks. You might find it a real reach or not but the overall point is that we don't live in a 19th century world anymore and our worldview is for better or worse different.
Try ask parents who can't barely make ends meet to get a puncture repair kit for their kid. You know the kit will be a cheap 5 star rated one from Amazon/Temu and the second it gets needed it won't work as it is meant to. This is reality
Re: Where do the children play?
#257I grew up in one of the metropolitan cities in Asia and I traveled around the city and went wherever I wanted since 6.
And we I knew in the US and maybe European countryside kids r literally stuck at the tiny area around their home r mind blowing.
I would call the system that not letting kids develop their own agency systematically child abuse.
Re: Where do the children play?
#258I 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.
I grew up in Tokyo-like(maybe less big) Asian cities too. and I can't agree more. I would definitely not be going to raise my kids in the US or anywhere where kids can't go to school on their own and are literally stuck at home. It sounds like systemic child abuse to me.
Re: Where do the children play?
#259Yeah well, we have one kid, and we're too old to have another. He's the only grandchild on both sides of the family. He has no cousins, first or second. That's apparently the new normal in many countries. Of course he's going to live a sheltered life! It's easy to tell parents to let their kids roam free, but that advice is to copy the behaviour of parents that had ten kids. I said "had", because on average, two of t…
Disagree. Kids in Japan go to school on their own since kindergarten. Many of them are the only children of the family. It's not about kids are "more precious" or not
Re: Where do the children play?
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The thing that cities provide that's harder to access in the countryside is exposure to people other than you, with different (not necessarily incompatible) perspectives and value systems. I think it's actually really important for kids to be exposed to people that disagree with their parents and learn that people can disagree with their parents while still being reasonable, kind people that their parents more or les…
That is what University is for ;)
I don't think they need that at K->grade school level (or younger) where they are first realizing how big the world actually is by exploring safely. You start with your room, your house, your yard, then spiral out until you gain confidence. Hard to do that in a dense urban area by yourself.