We Have Ruined Childhood • Hacker News Board

Re: We Have Ruined Childhood

#501

Post by icebraining » Wed, Aug 21, 2019, 12:31 AM UTC

vibrio wrote: post #499

jimbokun wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kids go to a city high school. They have different kinds of unstructured experiences. After school, they have all kinds of restaurants and coffee shops to choose from. They can hang out at the Jewish Community Center and play FIFA. They sometimes wonder with their friends to a field at a local university to play soccer. They watch movies at the local theatre I only find out about when they mention later what they…

Thanks for this. That sounds pretty nice too. Different. I was thinking about it last night and there are aspects of my youth I very much miss. being able to wander in woods with no-one around. playing hide and go seek with a handful of friends over more than a square mile of hilly-wooded area. Discovering crayfish in creeks or finding an awesome uncharted sledding hill in the winter. that said, my extended family wa…

In some places, you can have both; when I lived in Brussels, my apartment - which was quite close from streets with plenty of shops, bars, universities, etc - was also 10 minutes by bicycle away from the 16 square mile (44 km²) Sonian forest.

Re: We Have Ruined Childhood

#502

Post by parasubvert » Wed, Aug 21, 2019, 1:54 AM UTC

cuddlybacon wrote: post #456

parasubvert wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all pretty US-centric. Kids are allowed a fair amount of freedom in Canada and Europe, where I still see a lot of kids around malls, or parks, playing basketball in courts (which still happens in NYC), or wooded areas. Sure, more are on their phones etc. But it’s really not that different from the 90s IMO, in many locations. The biggest change is there aren’t so many clusters of “neighbourhood kids” as there…

I'm in Canada and the post you're replying to is pretty spot on in my experience. There are no kids outside, except on halloween. To be fair, there aren't many adults outside either which I think is a part of the problem. I have a 4 year old nephew. Once I took him to a park near where he lives. There were only 4 other kids there. In the time we were there, the cops showed up to shoe away 2 boys who were 10-12 years…

I’m also in Canada and see lots of kids at parks, which tend to be pretty busy. My kiddo loves video games but is also outdoors a lot.

A lot depends on parents to drive behaviour and introduce these days, again, due to lack of spontaneity / proximity that many grew up with.

Re: We Have Ruined Childhood

#503

Post by ocschwar » Wed, Aug 21, 2019, 2:22 AM UTC

salawat wrote: post #497

Bartweiss wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TLDR: avoid the suburbs if you want your kids to run free. A lot of the decline in free-range childhood clicked into place once I realized just how terrible suburbs are for little kids. The roads are the worst part - wide, empty streets that invite speeding, connectivity that make them short-cuts for outside drivers, lots of bends and bushes that obscure the view. But they're not the only major issue. Suburbs are u…

Where is this obsession with cars being the issue come from? Many a time in the 'burbs, were we playing a game in the street only to quickly scatter to the shout of "Car!", followed by a hasty resumption of whatever we were doing. There was generally 1 or 2 streets of particular note that you just knew to avoid or not play in due to the fact that it was commonly used as a sacrificial throughway. And homogeneity? That…

> Where is this obsession with cars being the issue come from?

Cities that have the whole motor vehicle danger thing under control are safe for kids under 8 to wander around barely supervised. SRSLY.

Re: We Have Ruined Childhood

#504

Post by snvzz » Wed, Aug 21, 2019, 9:47 AM UTC

code_duck wrote: post #298

oska wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to re-read your comment. At first I thought you were saying you had one hour of homework per night. One hour per class per day is insane. I regularly avoided doing homework throughout my school life. The only thing I think that suffered was my understanding of physics & chemistry. I doubt I would have better understanding now in any other subject area if I had done more homework, including maths and the foreign…

I would rarely do any homework, because I was way more interested in using my Amiga, but I paid close attention in class. For many classes, the way the grading worked out would be that I would get an A for participation, an A for all of the quizzes and tests because I was paying attention knew the material, and an F or D homework, which would work out to a D (65%) in the class. It doesn’t really make any sense consid…

Seconded about Amiga. Who knows which factory I would be earning wages to survive payday to payday today if I didn't have that Amiga at that key point in time.

I did well in school regardless, because school is about surviving without becoming dumb. The more the effort put into a program that's designed for the stupidest kid, the dumber you become. It was about efficiency, better results than most with minimum effort.

Refer to Taylor Gatto's The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher[0].

[0] http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

Re: We Have Ruined Childhood

#505

Post by jimbokun » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 12:45 PM UTC

vibrio wrote: post #499

jimbokun wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kids go to a city high school. They have different kinds of unstructured experiences. After school, they have all kinds of restaurants and coffee shops to choose from. They can hang out at the Jewish Community Center and play FIFA. They sometimes wonder with their friends to a field at a local university to play soccer. They watch movies at the local theatre I only find out about when they mention later what they…

Thanks for this. That sounds pretty nice too. Different. I was thinking about it last night and there are aspects of my youth I very much miss. being able to wander in woods with no-one around. playing hide and go seek with a handful of friends over more than a square mile of hilly-wooded area. Discovering crayfish in creeks or finding an awesome uncharted sledding hill in the winter. that said, my extended family wa…

No need to explain, as I grew up in a small town probably closer to your experience. :) As a kid, I was fascinated by what growing up in the city would be like, so it's been interesting to watch my kids grow up here.