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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

#361

Post by zwischenzug »

boelboel wrote: post #16
andai wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as an only child it's a weird burden to be the guy who makes or breaks the whole bloodline. No pressure right ;) But that pressure is on the parents too. There's this weird two-way feedback loop. Single child household has made parenting culture neurotic. Because if you screw it up it ends your entire bloodline. But the neurotic attitude makes child rearing feel like such a burden, people can hardly imagine doi…

I'm not sure if single child households have done this to parenting culture as much as neurotic culture/economic incentives have pushed single child households. When everyone is competing it makes sense to focus on one child as you don't want your child to be at a disadvantage vs those who can spend on tutors/extra curriculars/.... It's a problem in Italy and some eastern countries, a bad and anti-social evolution in…

People used to knock out children as a social security/insurance policy for old age, or to work the farm as they aged. The rise of the welfare state(s) in urban societies removed that need.

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

#362

Post by nostats »

breezybottom wrote: post #271
Poacher5 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there was a place in which to do nothing - whether it was a scrappy patch of land that's now a big-box store, or a permissive neighbour's garden who has now put up a fort knox of ring cameras, or a mall that used to tolerate kids just screwing around that now has a fleet of rent-a-cops. Third spaces aren't just trendy urban cafes, especially as a child. Having a place that feels like "your bit" is increasingly ra…

You think malls didn't have security on the past?

I came up in malls in the past. They did but it was also different. You could be a kid there and it was more tolerated. You weren't treated like a suspicious person by default. (Unless you were not white, or a punk. Then security tailed you the whole time.)

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

#363

Post by breezybottom »

swiftcoder wrote: post #356
breezybottom wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What data measures "childhood freedom"? That sounds more like conjecture.

You can lookup the studies on loss of 3rd spaces and the relation to mental health in adolescents (and adults, albeit to a lesser degree). This is pretty well-trod science

Well trod doesn't mean good. Social science is notorious for bunk. How many can actually support a causal relationship?

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

#364

Post by archonis »

BurningFrog wrote: post #349
ryandrake wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point about the proliferation of the absurd “crime” of loitering, which apparently just means “existing somewhere without spending money.” I remember being a teen in the 80s and what we did every day would be considered “loitering” today. There’s not much else for kids to do outside the home besides loiter.

So why were loitering laws introduced? I doubt it was purely a sadistic effort to ruin the lives of kids. My guess is that combatting gang crime was a major reason.

Loitering laws have existed since english commonlaw, but in the modern era were adapted to penalize homelessness, unemployment, etc...

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

#365

Post by dyauspitr »

Xirdus wrote: post #282
skandinaff wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do we get out of this mess? Because now, as an adult, I see no value in those electronic gadgets, videogames, especially at ages <16yo. Do we create laws and ban all of this? The democrats among us will scream and shout. Leave it to "each family's consideration" and we'll get the lowest common denominator scenario.

There is huge value in being acquainted with computers at a young age, especially if they end up in STEM or some white collar job.

There is no value. You can learn programming in months and that’s if it is even a real job in a couple of years.

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

#366

Post by jonahrd »

I overall agree with this article. I was mostly raised in the US but spent time from ages 7-9 in Finland, where I took the metro to school alone, so I see myself reflected in this statistic:

> For example, in Finland, the majority of 7 year olds are routinely allowed to walk or bike alone. And by 8, the majority of kids cross main roads, commute to school, and navigate their neighborhoods unaccompanied.

However, I feel the need to push back against this small addition to the main point:

> It's providing trigger warnings, so that people can walk out instead of face being uncomfortable in the classroom.

The article is about parents and parenting-culture _restricting_ a child's freedom, especially during important developmental stages.

Trigger warnings in a college classroom are for adults to casually and quickly let other adults know when content might trigger their PTSD (not simply discomfort) so they can make an informed decision about attending a lecture or not, given that it simply might not be worth their time if they won't be able to listen and learn in a clear-minded state. There are no restrictions to anyone's ability to make these decisions, simply a bit more information being provided up front to allow one to do so.

It feels rare to find authors online who both see the danger of raising a generation of children who are never taught that they are allowed to take care of themselves, but who also recognize the value of being kind enough to warn people when you are going to discuss sensitive topics in a lecture, harming nobody in the process.

edit: In fact, thinking a bit more about it, one of the large points the author makes is that consuming either traditional or social media, which is biased towards showing us negative content related to crime, violence, tragedy, etc, will prime parents to over-protect their children. And in the same article, claims that being warned about content that might provoke an intense emotional reaction is an overstep.

Maybe if these parents were also warned that "hey, I know you're just trying to catch up to the news, but reading about a child abduction 2 states over is actually just going to spike your cortisol and make you a worse parent", it would help a generation of parents self-select the media they consume, and help them avoid this trend?

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

#367

Post by mothballed »

slfnflctd wrote: post #320
cbondurant wrote: post #296

I remember being young when "kids don't play in the yard anymore, they just play on their phone/consoles/computer" started to be a big talking point. Even then I recognized that the reason I was on the computer so much was, at least in part, because it was so much easier to hang out with my friends online than it was to coordinate with my parents to try and get travel to their house, or to convince my parents to let…

My childhood was free range. Some of the greatest memories of my life (admittedly, also some not-so-great ones, but still) are from that time period. Maybe I was lucky to not get severely injured or abducted, but I do feel it helped me become a more resilient and independent person. I moved out of my parents' house at 18 and never had to go back for more than a few weeks. I have persevered through a widely varied arr…

I started trying doing for my kids what was done to me and quickly ran into a brick wall. Had school refuse to release child when I wasn't physically present at bus stop, had cops called at the park, and have had Karens roll up and interrogate my kid for walking "alone" on our property.

Only solution I found was to move in the middle of nowhere and buy acreage. No other kids but at least the Karens can be trespassed and the child snatchers are too underfunded / too far of a drive away for them to bother us over a sad faced Karen calling.

The other option that's really going to piss some people off when I say, but matches my reality, is living in a few ghetto neighborhoods when I was broke there were literally so many single moms that the child snatchers could not possibly punish all of them and the kids roamed because momma was at work and they were protected from the Karens/CPS by having critical mass.

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

#368

Post by sarchertech »

buellerbueller wrote: post #337
trgn wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i live in the midwest and the core of the city is dirt cheap. people don't want to live here because of the crime and vagrancy. it's a foul atmosphere. i do live here with my children, and it's just because we grew up in similar environment, and works well for other logistical arrangements, etc. i love it for many reasons, but outsiders do see the issues that i have become blind to. the problem really is all of the a…

i, too, live in the midwest. the core of the city is cheaper than the suburbs. i see people who don't want to live there because of their overestimated risk about the crime and vagrancy. it is a foul atmosphere, fomented by a mix of local news hysteria, malicious internet commenters, and statistical ignorance.

There’s definitely some of that. Relatively in most places in the US, it’s safer now than it has been since the 60s.

But the relative comparison works over distance as well as time. For example in the city center 25 minutes from me the violent crime rate is about 1,000 per 100k people. In my suburb, it’s 80. The difference in property crime is even worse.

Edit: 80/100k is also an overestimate because they included simple assault, and the violent crime stats I was looking at for the city center only included aggravated assault. Also if you look at murders, we haven’t had one since the late 80s.

So apples to apples it’s essentially 0 compared to 1000/100,000

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

#369

Post by micromacrofoot »

It doesn't even matter if you choose to parent your kids like this anymore... there's nowhere for them to go and no one else to hang out with these days. There's no more village.

There's also one metric that I've heard that gives a lot of parents pause: while being out and about in the world is generally safer than ever in the US from a social standpoint, it's more dangerous than ever to be a pedestrian.

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

#370

Post by stephen_g »

breezybottom wrote: post #270
oersted wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a European, I don’t understand why there’s such resistance to this. I get it NIMBY, but why? Surely good amenities would improve property values and life quality. If it’s right next to your home all the better. Peaceful quietness is so overrated by US and northern Europe. It feels creepy and dead to me, a liminal space. Besides, modern insulation does wonders for blocking noise if that bothers you, not to mention…

That's easy to say if you'd never had to live in a slum, but constant noise actually has negative health effects.

That’s a false dilemma if I’ve ever seen one. As if those are the only options - that’s just silly defeatism and reductionism!
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