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

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

#501

Post by jimt1234 »

tonymet wrote: post #448

Facebook/Nextdoor has been a curse for kids. Parents gossip, moan and report kids constantly. Recently hysteria over e-bikes. But really it’s any trivial annoyance. I think adults / elderly completely lack perspective and compassion for kids. Berating them for using iPads, berating them for playing outside. In reality there aren’t that many kids out socializing, and not many avenues for them to be free and be themsel…

I'm a Gen-Xer. I work with a lot of younger, fresh-out-of-college kids. I tell them about how it was as a kid in the 70's and 80s, but they generally reject it with disbelief. They think I'm lying when I tell them that my single mother would leave for work in the morning, and us kids would have absolutely zero supervision until she got home, usually around 7PM. Contacting her at work was basically impossible ("If you call me at work, someone better be dead!") In the summer months we roamed the streets with other neighborhood kids like a pack of wolves on BMX bikes - completely unsupervised.

I had a friend get shot (some dumb-ass kid was playing with his dad's gun in the woods). One of the neighborhood kids was a Boy Scout and knew enough to tourniquet his leg. Another kid knew how to drive his dad's pickup truck, so we threw him in the back and drove to the ER. No parents around (until they showed up at the ER).

There was also a time when some creepy older dude used to come down to the woods where we all hung out and rode our BMX bikes. He was probably in his mid-20s. It was totally stereotypical. He used to offer us beer and rides in his cool Trans Am. We all thought he was a creep so we stayed away. One of the kids told his dad, and shortly thereafter the dude stopped coming around. I assume some sort of "street justice" took place, but I'm not sure.

Kids would get in fist fights around lunchtime, then be best friends by dinnertime. We lit stuff on fire, built ramps and treehouses with wood we stole from the nearby construction site, and we drank water directly from random houses' garden hoses.

Anyway, all of this stuff (and A LOT more) happened all the time. All the neighborhood kids stuck together and looked out for one another, even if we didn't necessarily like one another. Parental involvement really wasn't an option. Almost all our parents worked. And the best part: it was awesome!

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

#503

Post by wizzwizz4 »

strken wrote: post #466
probably_wrong wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that loitering laws are much older than that - the first versions of these laws seems to date to 1342 [1]. IMO what all these laws have in common is that they're designed to allow the police to legally ask questions to people (or straight up remove them) who look suspicious but haven't committed any crime. Why would anyone want to remove people who haven't done anything wrong is a more nuanced que…

There's an inherent tension between protecting public spaces and protecting vulnerable but disruptive people. Your link refers to an article which is very American and very 2018. Lots of large font size headings about race and sexuality and gender. I don't think it's a productive take on how to manage the tension. Racially homogenous societies still need to decide how to handle people who try to sleep at train statio…

Sleeping at train stations is fine (as is sleeping on trains), and yelling at commuters is disruptive / antisocial behaviour. (I don't like the word "antisocial" in laws, because it's too open to interpretation, and then you have a load of case law defining what precisely "antisocial" means, known only to legal experts, leaving everyone else ignorant of the law.) It seems to me that additional rules against loitering are not useful for the situation you described.

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

#504

Post by dfxm12 »

mindcrime wrote: post #491

As a GenX kid who was pretty much literally "raised on hose water and neglect", I find it incredibly hard to relate to modern parenting (disclaimer: I don't have children). I had SO much freedom to roam around and do stuff, and half the time my parents had no idea where I was. Once I got into bicycle riding, I'd jump on my bike and go miles and miles from home. And there were no ubiquitous cell phones back then, so i…

That said, if I were a parent today, I think I'd be somewhat scared to give my kids the same amount of freedom I had.

Why? Stranger kidnappings are down since you were a kid. What media are you consuming and what is it saying? "if it bleeds, it leads" has long been an adage that the news talks more about violence than other things, so take the volume of violent stories with a grain of salt.

I think when you are a parent, you also understand that other people in the community are watching out for stuff like this, whether they have a stake specifically in your kids, or keeping your community a nice place to live. Other parents, the guy at the corner store, older siblings, the coach at the basketball court at the playground, the teacher who lives in the neighborhood, etc. It takes a village and if you aren't going to school or other community events, you can lose sight of the village that's out there.

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

#505

Post by macNchz »

oersted wrote: post #261
macNchz wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most of the US, only single family detached houses are built (by law), which makes things spread out enough that people will want to drive. To address that, businesses are required to have a bunch of parking space. The end result of that is that, outside of a few places built before these rules took hold, living near amenities means living by parking lots and car traffic. The kind of street that "feels alive" is b…

Surely there could be small shops and restaurants dispersed at walking distances that don’t require parking space. I get that it is low density, but not that low, and there is some money to spend in such areas. They would do good business.

There's definitely plenty of suburban development in the US that could support small neighborhood businesses without parking spaces, but in the overwhelming majority of the country, they're literally not allowed to exist without special permission.

In theory this ensures that any one business doesn't put undue strain on the local supply of parking spaces, but in reality I think it creates a sort of feedback loop that hollows out walkable downtowns/village centers, in favor of sprawl, where a car is required for 100% of trips (which in turn further increases demand for parking).

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

#506

Post by buildsjets »

Aeolun wrote: post #390
sarchertech wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

Surely that’s just because people go to drink in the city center? 1 out of 1000 violent drunks sounds like a pretty reasonable ratio.

I don't think you have an accurate and full understanding of the issues plaguing some areas of American city centers. I can't even recall the last time I saw a person who was drunk in public causing a serious issue after leaving a downtown bar. It just doesn't happen. Besides, you don't need to go to the city center to get drunk, we sell full proof booze in the supermarkets here.

People go to the city center to buy their fentanyl and their P-2P supermeth, shoot up, and zombify the city streets. I see that on a daily basis. If you are not familiar with this phenomenon, go to YouTube and search for Kensington, Philadelphia. Most American cities have similar areas, For example Pike/Pine in Seattle, Tenderloin in SFO, and Skid Row in LA, but the scope of the situation is of a different magnitude in Philly.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kensington+phil...

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

#507

Post by breezybottom »

buellerbueller wrote: post #488
breezybottom wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the nicest apartment I ever had, I still had to listen to my upstairs neighbor scream and beat up his wife.

sounds like a sample size/bias problem to me. maybe you're just drawn to slums?

Ah the libertarian solution. "Just stop being poor"

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

#508

Post by HomeDeLaPot »

Andrex wrote: post #288
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But life is full of safety vs. living tradeoffs. That's not even the issue. Suppose that more people wanted to live in a city than currently do. The market implies that -- the price per square foot is higher in cities. And that's the problem, when the city isn't allowed to grow. The existing city already has tall buildings, so if there is more demand than supply, to create more of it you need to add more somewhere…

In the extremes I fear this would lead to Dredd-like Mega Cities just taking over the entire continent. At some point, a lot of people want a multi-generational space to stick around in for a long time (where the sun isn't blotted by tall buildings). Tearing up suburbs for skyscrapers every generation can't possibly be "the answer..."

There are many types of houses in between suburbs and skyscrapers. This is "missing middle" housing. Duplexes, townhouses, small apartment buildings, etc. Look at Old Town Alexandria, VA on Google Street View, for example.

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

#509

Post by prmoustache »

tshaddox wrote: post #159
hibikir wrote: post #101

What I see in my deep suburbia is just far less interest in wandering past the front yard, because there's nothing to do: House after house where no front yard has anything for anyone, and quite long distances before you get somewhere you might be welcome, or have a chair. When my son, a pre-teen at the time went to Spain with me, things were quite different: A small town that even had stores targeting kids, places t…

While Spain does sound lovely, I don’t think “having anything to do” was really in my generation/demographic’s mindset while we roamed around the neighborhood. This was small town Midwest in the 90s. We just roamed around doing nothing.

Also you'd take your bicycle and pretend it is a motorbike, hacking stuff likw mounting a playing card to the seatstay so it hits the spoke and make revving sound when you accelerated or looking for planks and construction material to build ramps

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

#510

Post by iamalizard »

philosopherNoob wrote: post #108
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…

Had to jump in here to say: Don’t show children gore videos if you can help it. They’ll remember the horror more than the lesson. All it’ll do is make them calloused (or scared). If you want something with a gut punch related to car safety, check out British vehicle PSA advertisements. Holy moly are those grim! They’re memorable, focused, and unflinching. Personally, I’d go with some mini-documentaries or after-the-f…

Having soon a lot of real gore from a relatively young age, I may be calloused but in a good way - when something really fucked up happens that actually involves gore, death, violence or really scary, unpredictable or urgent things, I am quite calm and am able to handle situation much better than people who feel like vomiting at the sight of blood or a worm on an infection. Sure, some of the stuff I saw was in my mind for days, but I got used to it. Not to say I'm desensitized to it in a way that makes me not care about it. I'm still very empathetical to anyone who's suffered even the smallest of wounds or hardships.

I was exposed to violence first from movies (my parents let me watch anything and I thank them for that), then from shock sites, 4chan, liveleak, /r/watchpeopledie and so on.

I think I've really internalized how dangerous the road is, how dangerous machines are, how horrible war really is, how you can get killed by just saying the wrong thing, how there's always a chance you can die from anything at any moment. I still sometimes cross on reds and mouth off at someone who might be dangerous - I'm not scared of anything to an unnecessary degree, although being "scared" in a rational way is good IMO. I think I have a better way to assess risk than the average person, though.

I found some of the PSAs and they involve mild injuries or death without the injury itself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKHY69AFstE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeUX6LABCEA

I bet if you show kids actual footage of road accidents, it will burn into their memory for a few days, long enough for them to think it over a few times. The PSAs are really forgettable here.

I really like this PSA about safety conditions as it made me recall it for a few days:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOk2Akqb3CI

Now I'm actually really careful about any type of spills or grease in my kitchen even though I rarely move around big pots of boiling water.

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