Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only people who find this joke funny don’t have any children.
As a father, this is false.
10000% false (another father) :)))
The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
251–260 of 303 posts
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie places reporters live. I live in Redmond, WA. Bougie? My rube Midwestern ass thinks so. And there are feral kids all over my neighborhood. Plenty of kids walking to school in groups, or solo. Neighbor kids talk about riding the bus/train to places. Granted, there are a lot of immigrant families around here (hello, Microsoft, et al.), and I'm sure that skews thin…
Whenever these conversations come up, I've always noted that they don't really seem to apply to the PNW. My neighborhood (in Seattle proper) has lots of kids running around as well. Neighborhood kids will stop by to pickup my son and whisk him off to some adventure down the block. Getting your kid back involves listening for the correct sounding screams of joy as you walk around and figure out whose yard they are in.…
It is a function of road design. If the neighborhood is just houses with all the places to go located on 40mph+ roads (meaning people are driving their high grill head height SUVs and pickup trucks at 50mph+ while looking at their phones), possibly without sidewalks, I’m not letting my kids go out there alone until they are teenagers.
Also, places are just too far due to the aforementioned 6 lane roads and 100ft+ wide intersections. And crossing those intersections on foot, in daytime, is daunting as an adult.
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie places reporters live. I dropped my daughter off at the mall to hang out with their friends and one of the moms followed them around the whole time. They're all 13!
This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie places reporters live. I live in Redmond, WA. Bougie? My rube Midwestern ass thinks so. And there are feral kids all over my neighborhood. Plenty of kids walking to school in groups, or solo. Neighbor kids talk about riding the bus/train to places. Granted, there are a lot of immigrant families around here (hello, Microsoft, et al.), and I'm sure that skews thin…
'Feral' seems like an odd choice of word, given the activities you're describing. It sounds like they're just out and about doing totally normal stuff. I bet you wouldn't appreciate someone describing you as 'feral' if they saw you in public walking to the store or getting on a train.
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> But there are no other kids out there. I'm sending him out into streets empty of kids. This. It's a number's "game". My father, born in rural Romania, had 8 siblings, one of them died of an accident in his childhood (yeah, during "free range stuff"). I was born in a town and have 2 brothers. Live in a city and have one kid. I can't send my kid out carelessly because I don't have a backup.
One of the many reasons you should have more kids.
Easier said than done when you don’t have to suffer the physical consequences of having them.
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why you have an emergency backup child for redundancy in case of failure of the main child.
Riight! I was wondering why some people had more than one. Like, I wonder that every single ever-loving day
I don’t know if you’re being serious, but I wanted at least two so they had another kid to play with at home, and hopefully be on good terms with a family member they can relate to into their old age.
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The cars are getting bigger Wasn't there a trend in the US away from pompous SUVs and towards smaller cars, people even starting to re-evaluate some European-favored "city" cars more? Also aren't cars also getting ligther, with less heavy / metallic exterior over time?
We have a regulatory regime that requires that SUVs be bigger each year. It saves the environment that way.
This is not true at all. People who buy cars were willing to pay higher prices for cars where they sit higher up and take up more space, even specifically as a defensive maneuver to be safer in the event of a collision.
Obviously, as a business, you have to give customers what they want or else you will go out of business.
The government is, however, very lax on prioritizing the safety of people outside of vehicles (which would mean limiting vehicle size and speed and enforcing harsh penalties for unsafe driving).
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that was the crux of the inquiry / objection. It's wonderful to feel such a bond with one's _community_, but it's a different thing to bind oneself to such a dramatic statistical outlier and make decisions ("dealing with") as if it's a common occurrence.
I mean, I don't know what "decisions" would be made but often people say we are "dealing with" emotions or stress related to something that comes out in the news. The crux of my stress on this is that riding the light rail is a very common thing for me and millions of my neighbors. In fact we are shocked because we consider it so safe. The LRT should be the safest place in the city, given the cameras, the crowds, the…
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Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#258I think this is more a data point towards the quiet disappearnce of community / the steady march towards pervasive isolation
Correct. There are no communities anymore, just groups of houses. You see it in the death of social and civic organizations, churches, and other community groups. Everybody is an island. I don't know what has caused this, but it seems like it's happening in most 1st world countries. Anyone have insights about this?
Technology has caused this. Once a society becomes highly developed, it fuses itself with technology that eventually replaces human culture with efficiency, productivity and similar crap.
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#259The lower density culture of the US is problematic for children freedom. In Europe the situation is better but still worse than 30-40 years earlier. Time passes and things change. After 30-40 years there might not be kids anymore to stay locked at home.