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The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

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Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

#281

Post by mikestew »

foldr wrote: post #253
mikestew wrote: post #75

Earlier 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…

'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.

'Feral' seems like an odd choice of word, given the activities you're describing.

I never said the feral kids were participating in those activities. :-) Look, it was loose use of the word, you're placing way more judgement on the term than was ever intended. Yes, the children have homes and parent, of course they're not feral.

Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

#283

Post by expedition32 »

com2kid wrote: post #142
mikestew wrote: post #75

Earlier 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.…

People decry this as socialism but remember that gated communities with security guards also cost money.

Whenever I get angry about 40 percent of my paycheck going to the government I try to make a list of countries that are better and it's not a long list.

Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

#284

Post by SapporoChris »

pandaman wrote: post #264
SapporoChris wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly the differences matter. If the vast majority of the abductions are 'Parental child abduction' and very few children are abducted by strangers. "On average, fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year since 2010, the FBI says. From 2010 through 2017, the most recent data available, the number has ranged from a low of 303 in 2016 to a high of 384 in…

It's bizarre, I have people responding with outdated or anachronistic statistics again on HN. Is this because LLMs get trained to a certain date? 2017 was almost 10 years ago. Also, for some reason "abducted by strangers" is not the only alternative to "parental abductions", this document, for example [1], differentiate "non-family" and "strangers" for whatever reason. And "non-family" abductions were ~60K in 1999! P…

Examples of nonfamily abduction episodes are omitted because NISMART–3 identified too few to analyze. Source: https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh176/files/pubs/250... which is the source of what you cited as your source.

Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

#285

Post by y0eswddl »

expedition32 wrote: post #283
com2kid wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

People decry this as socialism but remember that gated communities with security guards also cost money. Whenever I get angry about 40 percent of my paycheck going to the government I try to make a list of countries that are better and it's not a long list.

where do you think all our money comes from?

> The economic growth and so-called advanced economies (think Germany, The U.S, Japan, etc. What's been referred to as the “Global North”) relies by a large proportion on a significant net appropriation of resources and labor from the “Global South” (think Kenya, Peru, the Philippines, etc). This appropriation reaches astronomical levels. In 2015 alone, the north appropriated 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labor; worth [a total] $10.8 Trillion in northern prices. Enough to end extreme poverty 70x over.

The West steals $10-$12 Trillion/yr in embodied raw material equivalents, embodied land, embodied energy, and embodied labour.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...

Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

#287

Post by xboxnolifes »

MichaelRo wrote: post #52
kannanvijayan wrote: post #37

I have a 10 year old boy and I'm facing these issues right now. I'm also in Canada so culturally adjacent to the US and similar enough with regards to this topic. I don't see child welfare agencies personally as a particular threat when it comes to this topic. Maybe they ARE more likely to get involved in cases of more free range parenting where before they weren't, but it doesn't register as a real worry. The major…

>> 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.

> I can't send my kid out carelessly because I don't have a backup.

I don't understand this reasoning. Are you saying you're knowingly stunting the growth of your child because you would have to deal with your emotions if something terrible happened?

I understand the emotional pull of it, but I don't understand being able to identify it, put it into words, and then continue to do it.

Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

#288

Post by xboxnolifes »

ip26 wrote: post #244
semiquaver wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read through the comment you replied to multiple times and I’m not seeing any mortal peril referenced. What are you referring to?

all risk comes with some small chance of tragedy This part. I’m not going to assume what that person meant, but there’s always a few people about in these conversations lamenting that when they were six, they were certainly never hit by a car, and really you have to let your children take a few risks etc…

Every time someone drives their child somewhere, they are being put into a position of a small chance of tragedy. The chance of tragedy doesn't go away, only our perceptions of it. People seem to be more okay with dying with their child than their child dying away from them, so I guess that makes sense.

Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

#289

Post by xboxnolifes »

beacon294 wrote: post #271
arjie wrote: post #263

We recently lived in Taiwan for a month and I was struck by the fact that from 2022-2024 Taipei had zero pre-teen traffic fatalities. My own San Francisco neighborhood has had more within the last two months! The only thing that presents a persistent risk to children, I think, is motor vehicles and the way they’re driven. Children make mistakes and San Francisco’s tolerance for traffic fatalities is very high.

To be fair, you're cherry picking traffic fatality data. It's topical now but it's not common.

There's no need to cherry pick data. The US's traffic fatality record is bad pretty much over the entire country.

Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

#290

Post by pandaman »

SapporoChris wrote: post #284
pandaman wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's bizarre, I have people responding with outdated or anachronistic statistics again on HN. Is this because LLMs get trained to a certain date? 2017 was almost 10 years ago. Also, for some reason "abducted by strangers" is not the only alternative to "parental abductions", this document, for example [1], differentiate "non-family" and "strangers" for whatever reason. And "non-family" abductions were ~60K in 1999! P…

Examples of nonfamily abduction episodes are omitted because NISMART–3 identified too few to analyze. Source: https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh176/files/pubs/250... which is the source of what you cited as your source.

I believe you wanted to say that the NISMART is the source, not the pamphlet you referenced, right? Because my source does not reference your pamphlet. Still looking for statistics of abductions, from people who claimed they are very rare yet cannot show the numbers. NISMART-3 is from 2013, 13 years ago.
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