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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

#41

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

verve_rat wrote: post #34
iamalizard wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm almost 2 meters tall and was crossing a street at a crosswalk with my bike yesterday, walking and pushing it at normal walking speeds, like the law requires. There was a car about to turn left from the lanes going left. There was a car from the lanes going right (the closest lanes to me) that slowed down as I started crossing the street. I assumed they saw me and that's why they were slowing down. Nope - they alm…

Maybe, instead of trying to scare (scar?) children you should just teach them to make eye contact with the driver so you are sure they have seen you before you put yourself in the path of their car? How much of our "safety" culture around kids is because people don't have basic life skills and aren't passing them on to kids?

So many scenarios where this doesn't save you. SUV driver makes eye contact, stops, kid starts crossing the street, impatient driver behind them (who can't see past their big rear) gets tired of waiting and floors it around them into the open lane, not realizing that the driver in front was stopped for a valid reason...

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

#42

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

nine_k wrote: post #39
alex_young wrote: post #17

I want to let my kids walk wherever they want to. It’s great for them. My 5 year old bikes to school, accompanied by an adult. It’s a bit more than half a mile away from the house. I’d like to tell him he can do this on his own next year, but there’s a single intersection he has to cross that makes this difficult. I’m not worried about him getting lost, abducted by a stranger or any host of movie plot scenarios. I’m…

I wonder why all these trucks (with the size, these are not cars) don't have forward-looking cameras mounted somewhere near headlights and feeding a screen on the dashboard, which would offer a "window" through the motor compartment. It should be trivially simple to produce, and most vehicles already have a screen for the camera on the back. Its presence would likely lower the insurance premium significantly, due to…

That would be a good start. Also they should put screens on the outside of the vehicle, so that the kids can see past the giant hood.

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

#43

Post by andai »

m3kw9 wrote: post #7
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…

people still think about bloodline when having kids or when caring about safety? I would think that would be the last thing to worry about with kids safety.

Well they tried to minimize the number of kids until they hit middle age and suddenly want to maximize the number of grandkids. Unfortunately it doesn't work like that ;)

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

#44

Post by zkmon »

This is not a isolated phenomenon. Security measures for software products, for example, kept increasing making good old working software to be highly vulnerable in today's world. There are some islands that have un-contacted tribes. They can't survive if they move out of the island. In my childhood, there were some popular movie songs and stories which advised people to stay in villages, not to venture out to town-side and showed the scary stories of what happened to people who ventured out.

It's the context around you that is changing. Also, the digital divide is so strong that many old people and village folks see anything related to technology or complex online processes as alien things that they can't dare to deal with. They are basically living in the non-digital islands. The logins, MFA, password recovery, OTP, finding the correct web portal, filling in the right information - it's a nightmare for a common human.

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

#45

Post by snapplebobapple »

alex_young wrote: post #17

I want to let my kids walk wherever they want to. It’s great for them. My 5 year old bikes to school, accompanied by an adult. It’s a bit more than half a mile away from the house. I’d like to tell him he can do this on his own next year, but there’s a single intersection he has to cross that makes this difficult. I’m not worried about him getting lost, abducted by a stranger or any host of movie plot scenarios. I’m…

Thats the ubfortunate side effect of cafe standards. They have had to make what people want bigger each year to keep it exempted

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

#46

Post by 5-0 »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #41
verve_rat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, instead of trying to scare (scar?) children you should just teach them to make eye contact with the driver so you are sure they have seen you before you put yourself in the path of their car? How much of our "safety" culture around kids is because people don't have basic life skills and aren't passing them on to kids?

So many scenarios where this doesn't save you. SUV driver makes eye contact, stops, kid starts crossing the street, impatient driver behind them (who can't see past their big rear) gets tired of waiting and floors it around them into the open lane, not realizing that the driver in front was stopped for a valid reason...

Where I live, overtaking at a crosswalk is illegal because of that risk.

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

#47

Post by giardini »

iamalizard wrote: post #23
alex_young wrote: post #17

I want to let my kids walk wherever they want to. It’s great for them. My 5 year old bikes to school, accompanied by an adult. It’s a bit more than half a mile away from the house. I’d like to tell him he can do this on his own next year, but there’s a single intersection he has to cross that makes this difficult. I’m not worried about him getting lost, abducted by a stranger or any host of movie plot scenarios. I’m…

I'm almost 2 meters tall and was crossing a street at a crosswalk with my bike yesterday, walking and pushing it at normal walking speeds, like the law requires. There was a car about to turn left from the lanes going left. There was a car from the lanes going right (the closest lanes to me) that slowed down as I started crossing the street. I assumed they saw me and that's why they were slowing down. Nope - they alm…

I don't think you need to show videos, but definitely discuss street safety with your children when they are young. Possibly several times at different ages.

When I was young my dad took me out to the curb and warned me about the dangers of being on the street. He pointed out how fast cars were going, how being hit could be really damaging, how animals not infrequently died from being hit. He also warned about getting excited while playing games and inadvertently running into the street. Even bicycles were a danger. Everything changes at the curb. Having a good imagination, I took the lesson to heart.

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

#48

Post by giardini »

rwmj wrote: post #38
verve_rat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, instead of trying to scare (scar?) children you should just teach them to make eye contact with the driver so you are sure they have seen you before you put yourself in the path of their car? How much of our "safety" culture around kids is because people don't have basic life skills and aren't passing them on to kids?

Or drivers could look where they're going.

And slow down too.

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

#49

Post by giardini »

obscurette wrote: post #13
paulmooreparks wrote: post #5

I'm 55. Growing up in Florida in the 70's and 80's, I was outside for hours at a time. I would wander in the woods, following streams to their source and actually mapping the entire forest (I still have the map). I rode my bicycle all over town, by myself and with my equally adventurous friends, getting into all sorts of dangerous things. I went fishing by myself, literally dodging moccasins and alligators. I'd clean…

I'm in my sixties and my experience is same. But now we live in the world, where my granddaughter (12) got into real trouble because a birthday present I gave her – a real Leatherman (pink of course). Of course she brought it to the school, it was confiscated, she, her parents and I was questioned by police etc.

Good for you!

When I was a boy I wanted a pocket knife b/c a friend got one and I saw it as useful. My Dad vetoed that until....I joined the Boy Scouts! Mom paid for a new official BSA knife along with the uniform. I promptly cut myself once with the knife, despite warnings from Dad. Doing so is a rite of passage for a knife-owner, I believe.

Fast forward to today. I've almost always carried a pocket knife and found it enormously useful. For my ~30th birthday my Dad finally bought me an Uncle Henry's 3-blade pocket knife about 3" long. It is finely made, always sharp, but difficult to fiddle with and not really very practical. I think of it as his acknowledgment that I am ready to carry a knife!8-) I'm glad I didn't have to ask him for a penis, though!

That little knife always sits atop my file cabinet. Someday I'll pass it along to someone else to perplex them. And I carry a folder of my own choice in my pocket.

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

#50

Post by phil21 »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #41
verve_rat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, instead of trying to scare (scar?) children you should just teach them to make eye contact with the driver so you are sure they have seen you before you put yourself in the path of their car? How much of our "safety" culture around kids is because people don't have basic life skills and aren't passing them on to kids?

So many scenarios where this doesn't save you. SUV driver makes eye contact, stops, kid starts crossing the street, impatient driver behind them (who can't see past their big rear) gets tired of waiting and floors it around them into the open lane, not realizing that the driver in front was stopped for a valid reason...

You can only mitigate risk so much. At some point life is for living and there is a risk involved in it. Sequestering oneself or one's kids to home seems outright inhumane to me.

Making eye contact and waiting for a vehicle to actually respond to the conditions at hand will eliminate the vast majority of "assumed" mistakes. Trying to be 100% aware of traffic and understanding that folks can be even bigger aggressive idiots is also part of it, but not perfect.

You just have to accept that in some rare instances the swiss cheese holes will line up regardless of what you do. And be at peace with it.

I suppose since this seems to logical and "not a big deal" to me means that I am extreme outlier on the subject.

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