I wrote a book advising parents how to give kids a life of independent neighborhood play. Check out Playborhood - http://playborhood.com
In a nutshell, I contend that this is a social problem of neighborhood culture, and parents should work to make their neighborhoods as fun and inviting as video games and the Internet. Simply cutting off electronics and shoving them out the door won't do it because there's no one out there - neighborhoods are very boring. Somehow, we need to create a culture of play, first with parents, and later without, in our neighborhoods. The book Playborhood is all about that.
Yes it is, but you aren't going to solve it without rolling back women's rights. Neighbourhoods are not communities anymore because there aren't enough adults around during the day. With both parents working 9-5, there aren't any moms around to keep an eye on the kids playing during summer break.
It was bad when we as a society told women they're not allowed to work. Now women have to work just to be able to afford a house on two incomes which previously cost only one.
I'm sorry but this is BS through and through. I grew up in a very small town with, by today's standards, very little with regard to what was available to entertain us. My friends and I always had things to do. Kids want to be outside, play outdoor games and pretend outdoors. It's the parents that mess it up by assuming there's nothing for them and then by also being overprotective and limiting the ability to explore. Growing up during my summers off my Mother and Father worked during the day. Starting around age 10 I was trusted with the responsibility of maintaining myself as well as household tasks. The reality was >90% of my parentless time was free. And I was always doing something. Most of the time it was friends self-organizing and the rare (for me) structured outing with the local town's rec center.
As a parent now I encourage free and outdoor play whenever possible. Winter, summer - doesn't matter. They love being outside and self-organize. Sure they're young enough still to want help with setting up games from time to time, but it's crazy how much imagination and natural inquisitive nature is in them. Parents overcommit kids today. Play is work now. And work sucks as a kid. Don't do that.
But the premise that communities are gone because parents aren't around isn't founded in anything but an assumption and is wildly inaccurate in my daily life.
Not true, as there was more to neighbourhood society than stay at home mums. When I grew up in the 70s, in a major city, and there were many more stay at home mums in one earner, two parent households, for sure. But...
The local shopkeepers and retired would keep an eye on the local kids too. If anything we'd be more likely to be pulled up and ticked off by the old lady doing her gardening or the old fella taking the dog for a walk than the local mums. The mums were often busy with the youngest of the family, cooking, and other jobs keeping them inside. Not all had toddlers of course.
The local shopkeepers - newsagent, butcher, baker all knew our mums as they were in every week so if we pushed too far it was certain to get back home. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. A non-automated surveillance state. :)
So what did we kids do? Went and played on the demolished old factory site, along the canal, or on the disused railway station and line. No one got to keep an eye on anyone there.
The situation of women having to work is just as repressive of women's rights as not allowed. I'm sure there's a lot of women, and some men, who would stay home with the children whilst young if it were possible. The expectation now is they have to juggle both.
That's not the reason. I grew up in the 1970s in a neighborhood where there were usually several different roving packs of kids playing in a variety of ways for hours on end, after school and all day on weekends and holidays. Thinking back on it, I estimate 75% of the Moms had jobs, and the Moms who didn't were rarely seen anyway.
In other words, there were usually no parents supervising anything in my neighborhood in the 70s, yet our play culture was dramatically different from present day play culture.
This might be a factor, but I live in a neighbourhood where there are plenty of SAHM's and it's not like kids play is flourishing like it did in my generation (and there are plenty of kids). There are multiple factors. I also think a big one that contributes to the "helicopter parent" perception. Is our towns and cities. We built them around cars. I remember reading there are 3-4x cars on the road now as opposed to in the 80s. My parents would let us wander very far from home when we were young because they knew we could bike many places without hitting a really busy or high-speed-limit street for a while. Nowawadays, there are cars everywhere and it does lead to a heightened sense of danger (real or perceived).
>Yes it is, but you aren't going to solve it without rolling back women's rights.
The economic pressure to work to support your family is not what I would call a right, but a modern requirement (of both men and women). If anything, this is an advancement of an employers right to extract cheap labor while maintaining a moral high ground in the name of equality and phony, corporate backed, dollars-and-cents egalitarianism.
>It was bad when we as a society told women they're not allowed to work.
To be clear I agree, and, upon further inspection, so do you: :-)
>Now women have to work just to be able to afford a house on two incomes which previously cost only one.
Posting anyway because maybe there's something to be said about the choice of words ('rights' to work) here, which should perhaps be considered for rephrasing en masse (as I'm sure you're aware, but was not explicitly said).
I grew up in the late 90s and early 2000s in an apartment complex where about a dozen of us kids in the area spent all day out and about. We built clubhouses in the woods, played Pokemon and Yugioh on the sidewalks, and as we got older started trekking up and down a walking trail next to the complex to convenience stores and towns up to several miles away.
At the same time, there were probably another half dozen kids we knew of living in and around the area whose parents refused to let them come out to play. In hindsight, they were the rising tide that seems to have taken over parenting, despite all those kids probably now being able to testify they missed the opportunity.
I grew up in India so maybe the situation was different, but during summer vacation i would be practically out of my house from 7am to 9 pm ( apart from breakfast at 9am, lunch and then be at someone's home for a bit in afternoon) completely unsupervised. Lack of gameboys, mobile phones and playstations meant that even when we went to somebody else's place for a family dinner/lunch/get-together, all the kids would go outside and play on their own, again unsupervised.
As my childhood was in last soviet days and early post-soviet times all the parents were working. There weren't moms looking after kids after school. But there there were always elder neighbors that were already pensioners that were always observing yard in case of children were getting too wild. They knew all the kids of the building and were running out another unknown kids from other blocks (especially if they seemed to be aggressive). If some "own" child was misbehaving too much they were reporting to parents. So IMO this thing had also an effect of involving lone elders into community.
> Now women have to work just to be able to afford a house on two incomes which previously cost only one.
I frequently see people argue that you now have to have two incomes to have a normal middle-class lifestyle, but it doesn't square at all with my own experience. I come from a pretty conservative sub-culture, where it's much more common for a husband/father in a family to be the primary breadwinner and for the wife/mother not to work. Sure, a lot of our friends are highly-paid engineers and the like, which makes that easier. But others aren't - off the top of my head, I can name teachers (in a state known for terrible teacher pay), law enforcement officers, city maintenance workers, etc. All of these people are figuring out how to live a fairly normal middle-class lifestyle on one income.
How is that possible? We make other choices that support the goal of a single-income family. Most of us shop at Aldi, not Whole Foods. Nobody drives new cars (our nicer car is a 2005, for example). We do a lot of home maintenance ourselves. We share clothes, toys, and kids' supplies with each other, or get them on consignment. You get the idea. (Oh, and we also don't have to pay higher-tax-bracket taxes on the second income, high property taxes on big homes and new cars, or pay for daycare when we're at work.)
There's of course nothing wrong with women working or with nice cars or shopping at Whole Foods, and I respect the fact that different people choose to handle these issues differently. But don't be deceived - it's still possible for most middle-class Americans to live on one income, as long as they're willing to choose to make the sacrifices in other areas that facilitate that lifestyle.
(I won't claim to be able to speak to how this goes for poorer classes.)
Increased remote working or changing the core hours people work would both solve the issue of adults not being around during the day.
Massively increasing the supply of housing so a parent regardless of gender could stay at home and still afford a house would also fix the problem.
A universal basic income would also fix the issue of both parents needing to work to afford a house.
We could also consider parenting a job and pay parents a living wage to stay at home and raise their kids.
The fact you immediately suggested the only solution to this problem would be to limit women's right to work is a bit sad. There are plenty of good solutions that would work well and don't need to restrict or rollback the progress we've made towards equality. At the very least you could have suggested limiting families to one working parent rather than specifically women.
> Yes it is, but you aren't going to solve it without rolling back women's rights.
We live in 2019 -- who says it's the women that need to stay at home? I'd happily swap with my wife and stay home while she was working, but I seriously doubt she'd let me. :D
Other than that, you're right. We need people working less (on average), and we need to start building actual communities instead of online social networks.
That is simply not true. Children do not need adult supervision 24/7, and from age 10 and up they are more than capable to be out and about for hours without parents checking in on them. Well, they are if they've been allowed some independence anyway.
During my summer vacation growing up we played for hours, completely unsupervised. There needs to be a culture of allowing kids to play without parents watching over.
I know most people are disagreeing with you but I mostly agree. I think it is a big cultural change. Most parents today won't even let their kid outside without them because they are worried about abduction or some other tragedy. You are missing a couple of things though. Houses used to all have porches and the retirees sat out there and could also keep an eye on people (kids or strangers).
The other issue is that most people don't even know their direct neighbors or spend any significant time together. That is definitely their choice but that is what is required to turn a group of houses into a neighborhood. This is much harder in the suburbs than in the cities where there are already known collecting spots like stores, parks, playgrounds and courts. In the suburbs, most people get home after dark from work and kids activities and then it is off to bed for the kids and Netflix for the parents. We all need to slow the hell down.
I think having a more disperse mix of generations would solve this. Not every family's kids need parents in the backyard, but some retirees could be there. Not necessarily to be actively engaging with the kids, but keeping an eye on them. Just to make sure they are safe.
Solution I have seen around me is more semi-structured groups. I.e. I am kinda sad we missed-out on sunday-school, but I will be trying to get my girl at least to some scouting org :)
The important thing seems to be a balance between the structured activity in the group (I have seen peers that had so many activities, but little connection with the kids they were around, because there is little time to interact in i.e. gymnastic class) and just messing around :)
> Yes it is, but you aren't going to solve it without rolling back women's rights.
Reducing required household market labor for basic living, perhaps. But, even to the extent that is true, just because in the past that was done by constraining women's choices doesn't mean that it can only be done with gendered constraints.
The problem I see is that people simply don't have children anymore. We are surrounded by couples in their 20s-50s living in houses without children. When my kids want to visit friends they have to ride their bikes 1+ miles to the next family with kids (and we don't live in a rural area, we live in a densely populated suburban area) and from their those 2 kids will ride another 1+ miles to the next family with kids. I suppose the real culprit is people can't afford to have kids anymore (though we managed to have 7 kids on a single income, so it is possible).
The problem I see is that people simply don't have children anymore.
Is that actually true, beyond this anecdote? FWIW, my own suburban neighborhood (a cluster of about 60 townhomes) has enough kids that there's usually a small basketball game going on in the parking lot. And often bikes left scattered around (until dinner time, when the kids pick them up and go home).
In my experience as a parent (my son moved out last year), there were always kids around, but they were scheduled down to the minute in sports, STEM enrichment activities, scouts, or church. And those kids from families that didn't have that kind of budget were glued to TV screens or computer monitors.
We tried to give our son free time to play, but there was nobody around to play with. The kids were there, just not available.
Now that we've moved to a smaller house, with THs instead of SFHs, it appears to be slightly better. More play in the parking lot. But, the kids still seem pretty tightly scheduled (almost all are in sports leagues year-round).
I don't think this is the issue. It's much more a cultural thing, statistically richer countries have lower birthrates.
But getting married and having kids is no longer accepted as "just what you do". Less people are getting married, that also may play a role.
I'd also imagine it's different in different areas. Might even map to incomes, or political leanings of different zip codes.
Keeping in mind I am no way a necessary fan of raising children in suburbia: My own parents moved from acreage into suburbia when I was 10 or so, but its not like distances were shorter out in the semi-rural area. And its not like many of us have a practical choice.
But of all its problems, what's the problem with kids having to ride 1+ miles to their friends?
When I was about 10-11, I was riding 2kms by myself (and then with my younger sister) in the Australian summer holidays down to a tennis camp. Sometimes it ran late and the sun went down, so my parents would come and pick us up in their car...just kidding, they bought me a generator to put on my bike and a reflector and I rode home in the dark.
When we moved again, I had a regular neighbourhood friend and we'd go and play networked computer games and nintendo during school holidays and after school during my teenage years (having two pc's you could network was quite advanced for the 1990's). But putting this into google, his place was 1.4 kms away from my house.
There was a video store 5 to 6 kms by car that had some rental games and videos, but of course we couldn't drive. But it must of been 4-5 kms by taking a shortcut through a nature reserve with our mountain bikes. And that's what we did. After a year or two, another store opened up a few kms in the other direction and we went there as well.
Even back then, video games were a huge part of my life...we were nerds in the absolute sense, but so were the mountain bikes and the exploring. Maybe we were lucky backing on to some nature reserves, but even in the staid morass of suburbia, are there too many places with nothing in a 10km radius? And even if the answer is yes, even that I'm a bit skeptical of. The nature reserve attracted us because it was a place without adults and it was a little bit dangerous, not because it was set up with activities or playgrounds.
In my mind, the distance wasn't a barrier to playtime. The fact that our parents would let us out to explore, and we subsequently went within about a 10km radius of our homes unsupervised on our bikes and without cell phones WAS the playtime.
The changing variable isn't the distances: its the supervisory culture and the fact that everything is now streamed conveniently into our homes on demand, and the fact that many of these products are now specifically engineered to try to turn people into screen viewing zombies.
>(and we don't live in a rural area, we live in a densely populated suburban area)
That doesn't necessarily mean much. Moving from urban areas to suburban ones already greatly reduces density and access to services and the sort of institutions we are talking about.
To give some sense of proportion, the average American suburb has[1] a density of about 2.7k people per square mile. That's about 2 1/2 times less dense than a Western European suburb (6.2k), and about eight times less dense than a Western European core urban area (18.8k).
American suburbia is extremely sparsely populated and fundamentally unfit to provide the cultural institutions that modern, small families and communities require. Calls for larger families is simply unrealistic, because the opportunities that each kid in a large family on a single income in a developed knowledge economy gets are abysmal. In our modern world, quality trumps quantity so to speak.
That may just be situational. My neighborhood has a mix of everyone from childless 20-50 couples, retired folks, and families. There's a basketball game going on right now out in front of my house, in fact, with a half dozen elementary/middle school age kids.
To offer a counter-anecdote, my street is a veritable spawning pool. Four or five houses have kids, there are probably 10 kids primary-school-aged and younger and another 4-5 high school aged kids. It's very location-dependent (obviously).
Interesting thought, if you double the workforce, but not double the available jobs, salaries will go down. In game theory, the first ones to start working would be winners, but after a while everyone will be losers.
I don't know how to identify them ahead of time, but there are definitely pockets that are densely populated with children, and I lucked into one. My kids have loads of neighborhood kids to play with. The place we moved from across town has no kids to speak of. I'd draw the same conclusion as you, if I still lived on the other side of town.
When I went back to my parents' home around new years, you could definitely tell the demographics have changed. 35ish years ago it was a newly built neighbourhood; now, the kids (like me) have moved out and while new families have moved in, it was still a lot quieter around new year's.
I think you're right. Just unplugging and kicking the kids out the door just isn't effective, ultimately. I think that's true mainly because it takes all of the parents in the neighborhood doing the same thing. Otherwise, your kids end up outside with no one to play with because all of the kids their age are still inside attached to their electronic devices. I think it's much harder today to create alternative activities than it used to be.
I think siblings play an important role here. More than a few times I remember going out and having no one to play with but my brother, only to be joined later on by other kids.
Moreover, I can only assume that it was through me that my brother got introduced to the "social scene" of the neighborhood. I was the older one, so when we came out to play, I was in charge of him, and that meant always inviting him to play and introducing him to all my friends.
Siblings are like friends you have no option but having (and playing with). Incredibly reliable, in that sense (:
Or worse, one family kicks their kids out, and they float around to all the neighbors. Eventually, neighbors learn to avoid them because it's everyday and they misbehave. /Rant
What changed to make them boring? Couldn't it rather be that neighborhoods are now considered boring due to highly interactive electronic entertainment being available, as an alternative, pretty much everywhere, at any time?
Mind you: I'm not saying these things are equal, but by now electronic entertainment has been designed to be as appealing as possible, in contrast to that, the alternative of going outside to look for stimuli, has become quite unappealing and bothersome to many.
Why go out in the world, to get sensual and intellectual stimulation, when you can just click away on the Internet or in Fortnite to get your "fix"? Particularly with the news cycles constantly bombarding everybody with FUD these days, making parents less likely to give their children unsupervised "outside time" even if the kids actually want to go outside.
I remember neighbourhood play at seven years old when my friend's older brothers donned us with boxing gloves and had us fight each other. Good memories.
It is an issue no doubt because parents just honestly don't have the confidence to let their kids go.
They are paranoid not just about kidnappers or child molesters, but they are worried about not preparing their kids for school and "getting ahead", thus the over planned childhoods.
I really wish parents would just let go a little.
1) Read to your kids at night. Do it as old as they want you to do it.
2) Give them unstructured play time with friends consistently. After age 9 or so, they really can go off on their own without parents around.
3) Younger kids should experience a variety of things well through middle school. The more things they do, the better. Sure, they should get good grades (A's and B's), but obsessing over all A's in middle school isn't worth it.
4) High school is when structure starts to be more important IF they want to get into a competitive school. And forcing a high school kid to get a perfect score on his SAT is a recipe for disaster. It should be the kids choice.
Way too many parents are obsessed about making sure their son or daughter get into THE college they want. It's more about the parent than the student.
I wish I could tell more parents to let fucking go. Teenagers go to war, they start businesses, they do all sorts of grown up things.
Keep them away from drugs and help them find a passion. That's about it.
I am not paranoid about kidnappers and child molesters, but I am paranoid about other grownups who are paranoid about kidnappers and child molesters. I fully expect if I let my kids have the freedom previous generations had I would soon be visited by police and CPS because other paranoid do-gooders would report my kids as being in danger.
The trick seems to be to put them on bikes. At least where I'm at kids that are riding bikes are assumed to be "free range" while kids on foot are assumed to be lost.
I don’t think that’s a viable strategy in today’s world. The kids I knew growing up that were pushed hard by their parents are doing much better (and happier) than those that were not.
Kids don’t reliably make good long term decisions for themselves. It’s more fun to play fortnite than to practice for a math/piano competition. They can’t see the long term impact of not working out and eating poorly.
I got pushed pretty hard as a kid. It wasn’t fun at the time, but now I appreciate it. There’s a widening gap between the rich and poor in America, and it’s a lot nicer to be on the rich side.
There is a difference between kids whose parents kept an eye on them and made sure they didn't go too far off the beaten path and kids whose parents structured their lives so heavily that they never had a chance to breathe for themselves.
If you are from a stable family situation, it's easy to gloss over how shitty some kids have it at home.
I specifically said to give them a variety of activities. Letting them play fortnite everyday doesn't qualify as a variety of activities.
And I never said to not push a kid. If that's what you think will help him, then do it.
If a kid has a bad habit of quitting things when they get tough, then you may need to "force" them to do something.
And part of having them try a variety of activities will mean forcing them to do it.
You can make them do a variety of things while also letting them have unstructured free time.
I think too, when I say unstructured free time, I mean outside play time with no screens.
I guess you could say that a parent is "forcing" them to not use a screen, so it's not really "free play time", but I think making kids go outside and play without giving them any directions on what to do, is a very good thing.
> The kids I knew growing up that were pushed hard by their parents are doing much better (and happier) than those that were not.
For all the nostalgia, parents often make decisions based on their own observations about their own generation and themselves. It is interesting that none of these articles ever consider that some parent may go to the other extreme, because not everything was sunny and awesome all the time in the past.
If I “let my kids go”, they go to the TV, iPad, or Kindle.
My kids, like most of their friends, get structured time so they don’t always fall back on what they do during unstructured time — technology stuff. I can take away those options (and we do that during the week), but if I want them to have fun the way they define it, often that means an iPad. And I offer to go climbing, hiking, etc with them, but so far it’s the older one that will embrace that while the younger sees it as a chore that takes her away from Roblox or some other game. That’s the irony of “free range” parenting — the “free” part explicitly excludes an option that didn’t exist when I was a kid because of what looks an awful lot like nostalgia.
I should have clarified that when I say unstructured, I meant without any screens. Basically, you tell the kid they can do whatever they want without screens.
Be creative, play a sport, walk around, read a book, go explore.... whatever, as long as it isn't tech related.
> I really wish parents would just let go a little.
And so should schools. While we preach healthy work/life balance for adults, we bury children in huge amounts of homework that can stretch into or fill whole evenings.
I'm all for a demanding, highly structured and efficient time spent at school, but please give them a chance to explore own interests and hobbies after school.
In Manitoba I can be fined up to $50,000 and given 24 months in prison if I allow my kids to play alone under the age of 12.
The PDF refers to child 'home' or 'in a vehicle' alone, but the details of the law are that the guardian of any child under the age without adequate supervision is liable.
I'm not even that old and I used to play in a park with my friends, in one of the rougher neighborhoods in my city, 2 kilometers from my parents house when I was 8.
Those were great experiences my kids can't legally have.
After wandering around in Germany, coming home late etc my kid was shocked when we put him in a US school 6 year ago (i.e. post smartphone). It wasn't just the unstructured time, but the range of things kids are allowed to do. Amusingly/sadly he said things like "people here haven't heard of freedom".
We had neighbors with a kid precisely the same age as him, but the kids were never around, instead being driven from place to place.
(BTW it's pretty common to complain about the quality of US education too but in this case it was actually OK, especially when compared to the notorious Berlin schools, and he decided on a US undergraduate education which I think was a good decision.)
That's a good question. This was through the eyes of a 13 year old.
On the general side: I'd say the German approach for kids (2-12) is "super strict on the basics, then have at it." So you are very strict that they must stand behind the yellow line, don't interrupt grown ups, behave yourself at the table, etc, but once you have the core down there are few restrictions (this changes as you grow up...I like to joke that Ordnung is the German state religion). So he was used to unsafe playgrounds, coming home late from just exploring the U-bahn with his friends (all ignoring texts from parents) etc. He compared that to American kids who seemed to always being told not to do things without having a set of basics to make their own decisions. He had one Palo Alto classmate who was grounded if he wasn't home 15 minutes after school let out!
An example: in grade six he and his friends found a bottle of vodka in the schoolyard (urban school). As any 12 year olds would, they took one of their gym sneakers, filled it with vodka, and set it on fire. The maths teacher passed by and said "boys, school starts in a few minutes; don't be late" and kept going. He told me he'd be expelled from his US school if he had matches or a lighter. In Germany that didn't even rate a letter home from the school.
He also complained that grownups were always involved. Schools have police officers in them, scouts have parents involved, etc. Kids don't get to run things and screw them up like they do in Germany. I went to a Christmas service in a church where the kids wrote and put on a Christmas play -- apparently Noah brought the animals, 2x2, to see the newborn. I am not christian but I'm pretty sure that isn't doctrine -- but everyone seemed to like it.
He found the US school routine quite rigid with little time for exploration of the material but instead memorization. If anything the US seemed more like the asian schooling my mother went through, or perhaps the prewar Prussian system. I know the US kindergarteners are told to learn the alphabet while the German one was mainly focused on getting along and learning, by the end of the year, to keep your clothes on all day. They left the alhpabet (in two languages!) to the first grade.
It was much much different in schools pre 9/11. My high school was like a college campus. We could roam around the campus, eat lunch around campus, and all the doors were unlocked. Is it was easy to get in and no one would really question you during non class times like lunch.
Post 9/11 everything was locked down and continued to get worse.
This is largely an American problem. When I lived in Europe I didn't see people being "fearful" about letting their children roam the streets. During my recent trips to Japan, I also felt that same vibe. Children under the age of 10 taking the trains by themselves or with friends, even in Tokyo.
Exactly. I was in Germany recently and saw small children walking home from school alone. In America, this can get parents arrested in many states.
In Japan, they basically force kids to walk to school without parents when they're 7-8 years old. If I ever have kids, I'd want to raise them someplace like that, not in a country where I'm legally required to be a helicopter parent until the kid is a legal adult.
I walked to school for 4 years in the US. Not to mention I biked or walked anywhere I could from about 6-16. No one is stopping kids and then arresting parents, it’s absurd to say.
It did happen in Maryland. Guess what? The CPS completely changed their rules after the justified outcry.[1] Not a single person was arrested in this matter.
Raising kids in Japan means that you’re raising them in a culture that has an alarmingly high youth suicide rate [0], and that your daughter taking the subway on her own is likely to be sexually assaulted [1].
And since the original link is about quality youth playtime, let’s not forget all the hours spent at cram schools in the evenings and weekends if you want a shot at a decent university.
I’m not a big fan of the US either when it comes to parenting/educational trends, but there’s no silver bullet.
(Unsurprised by the downvotes, given how fetishized Japan is in the West and how most are incapable of looking at the country through a critical lens)
I live on a NASA/military base near Mountain View, my 4, 6 and 7 year olds routinely ride their bikes to the other side of the airfield — pretty much all over the place and the NASA and military cops just wave at them. The entire enclave is like that: kids can explore and do whatever and as long as they don’t try to leave the base. They’re not only safe, but everyone around her keeps an eye on everyone else. My 4 year old thought he was going to ride his little scooter to downtown Mountain View and the gate sentries stopped him and pointed him back to safety. I point this out as a contrast to their school neighborhood in Palo Alto: if they roamed around like that there, they’d likely be run over by a Tesla, hit by a bus or some Palo Alto matron would call the cops and have me arrested for negligence. This isn’t meant to be too political, but in very “rich white liberal” places, the propensity for collective freak outs over “neglect” is much greater than anything I have experienced living in more “red” or minority areas. Anecdotal certainly, but it does feel like areas like Palo Alto or Upper West Side NYC would be more likely to call CPS/Police or kids that weren’t properly ensconced in their Mandarin or ballet classes.
Agree with this, I wonder some times if the top 50 schools put on their entrance requirements "We prefer students who have spent there early youth camping, playing energetic games with friends, and pursuing exploratory activities." If that wouldn't create an entire cottage industry of 'get kids out of the house' services.
> Children under the age of 10 taking the trains by themselves or with friends, even in Tokyo.
that has a lot more to due with safe transit. I would NOT send a 10 year old kid to take BART or MUNI by themselves. In fact i literally know a couple who's 12 year old son basically got intimidated into giving away their iPod on MUNI.
> In fact i literally know a couple who's 12 year old son basically got intimidated into giving away their iPod on MUNI.
While I'm sure the financial loss was irritating, if this is the worst that comes from letting children ride transit alone, I'd consider it an acceptable cost. Depending on the details, it could even make for a good learning experience.
I was on a business trip to Japan for over a month, and in that time I got to know a few of my associates on a pretty personal level. We talked a few times about this exact issue, and I wondered if in the younger generation there was any erosion of the language, or inability to write the language, particularly Kanji, with the mass adoption of technology. They said that many schools and parents prevent the use of computers and tablets until high school.
Europe is behind - but it goes in the same direction. It is not that this is very new - my father (in the 1950s) used to wander whole day in the forests, I did not have exactly the same freedom (in 1980s) - but still a lot of it, a few years ago when I let my 5 years old daughter to go outside alone (we live in a fenced off condo, a couple of hundreds of meters long) then other parents wanted me to stop this because their children wanted too.
I suspect this may be the result of a lower fertility rate - if you have less children, you're bound to spread your affection/attention across less children meaning that you get "overly attached" to the ones you do have.
It’s nice to make this just another problem with ‘American isolationism’, but I’d say this is true in the U.K. too after years of pedophile scares in the media.
It’s not isolationism, that’s been around forever and this fear for kids thing is more recent.
I’d argue it has a lot to do with the increasingly far-flung suburban housing that most people live in, and how dangerous the roads are.
1. Parents don’t want their kids getting hit by cars.
2. As they get older parents let them walk around the neighborhood —— but there’s nothing there except boring locked houses and front yards that, if you try to play in, you’ll get yelled at or worse.
3. The sprawl means even in these burbs there often aren’t many other kids around.
This terrible sprawl creates the reality that if you want your kids to get to hang out with other kids, or go to school, or go to a friends house, or do ANYTHING, you have to drive them there. And that’s such a time suck it’s not realistic to do all the time. Thus the helicopter parenting shuttling kids from one activity to another and then when exhausted saying “just watch Netflix.”
> During my recent trips to Japan, I also felt that same vibe. Children under the age of 10 taking the trains by themselves or with friends, even in Tokyo.
It's my understanding that it's a big part of their process of growing up - as it should be. There are actually TV shows in Japan secretly filming and celebrating young kids' first errands. It's adorable really.
Japan is homogenous. (Generally speaking) Americans are isolated against not only the world but also each other as a result of sparely populated areas, car culture + tech (no interaction with others), and media feeding the average American fear stories all day.
All these stories on raising children confuse the issue and keep parents in paralysis.
If you want to take the pressure off - tell parents their kids won't be left out like millennials are. Give them a safety net. Let parents know their kids will have a pretty good life. On the other hand, if they know their kids will be in a dog-eat-dog world where even hard work gets you nowhere - they're going to raise their kids with a zero-sum game theory.
I have to disagree. You want to take the pressure off, you need to take the pressure off. Make it clear that I'm not going to have my kids taken away and/or thrown in jail because they're biking around downtown a mile away from me, or because I left them at home while I went grocery shopping or something.
I don't find myself questioning whether I should let them go because I'm worried that they might not get into Harvard or that they may not make as much money as me, or because I'm just so consumed with worry about inequality or something so abstract. I'm worried about them being taken away or me going to jail. Instead of being a black swan event (and we can't get it below that), it's merely "fairly unlikely", which for such a disastrous outcome isn't really unlikely enough.
I grew up in a suburb. It's important to remember that kids are closer to the ground. Shrubbery. Slates and what burrows beneath. Trees—the texture of the bark and the vestibular effects of climbing. Ice on the ground in this season, the smell of gasoline and grass in another, and the detritus of illegal fireworks after a holiday.
Seeing strangers. Seeing new strangers. Seeing the same old strangers every day until those strangers are recognized as neighbors.
Just being in that world is an experience of wonder and learning.
Do you know what happened during the housing boom in the US? The 1950 to 1960 was one of the biggest housing explosions in the US. As well as one of the biggest population explosions with the population growing some 20% in those 10 years. This [1] is the population of the largest cities in the US in 1950. This [2] is their population in 1960. You might notice something quite interesting. The population of nearly all major cities declined!
The housing boom was not people building up residential areas inside of well developed cities. It was people accepting some sacrifice and moving outside of cities into areas where previously there was nothing. This is a big part of the reason why housing was so cheap. It also helped keep city housing prices low since it had a [quite extreme] depressing effect on demand.
The reason I mention this is because when you build houses in the middle of nowhere you don't often have to go far to find more nowhere. Everywhere you look is just row and row of cookie cutter houses, then a 2 mile bike trip and you're in the 'wild lands'. Lots of children got to grow up in these exact sort of areas. I had the fortune of getting to spend some brief part of my childhood in an area like this, and then most of the rest in an ultra urban area apartment in the middle of the city. Suffice to say, I won't be raising my kids in the middle of a city!
> It was people accepting some sacrifice and moving outside of cities into areas where previously there was nothing.
The word for it is “white flight", it was publicly subsidized (largely by the GI Bill) deliberate racial segregation acheived through restrictive covenants, and discriminatory lending and real estate sales practices.
"It was people accepting some sacrifice and moving outside of cities into areas where previously there was nothing."
that sacrifice is getting bigger over time. when my neighbor moved into his house in the 70s people thought it's nuts that he was moving that far out and commuted from there. Now this is perfectly normal and maybe a double commute would be viewed as long.
I'm currently in the process of moving my family (including 6 kids) from a 1/3 acre lot in Utah (there really isn't much land here because it's a desert) to a 15-acre farm in Tennessee for these reasons exactly.
Helicopter parenting requires one to sacrifice a lot. It is not lack of sacrifice that leads to it. A lot of it is people unable to tell no to further personal sacrifice (whether for subjective or objective reasons).
We actually moved into downtown for that sort of experience - we live close to the river valley so there will be a ton of area for our kids to explore. The edge of the urban sprawl is utterly soulless - nothing but row upon row of houses, but once you leave that you're in a field, nothing to explore or see, and it's killing our infrastructure as the city grows outwards and outwards and considerations need to be made for transit and road maintenance and utilities.
It depends. In Washington, DC, or its suburbs, probably most locations are within a couple of miles of a stream valley park, or simply a wooded ravine that is public land.
Until recently there were pockets of "interesting" places for kids to screw around . If there wasn't some forested land there was an abandoned factory or dead construction site (e.g. the pit in parks and rec). That sort of stuff is fenced off (or otherwise made hard to access) much more thoroughly these days and people are much more likely to call the cops if they see unattended kids poking around.
True. I remember playing in all of the local construction sites with my friends as a kid. There were nails, wood scraps, tools, and even huge piles of hay used to keep the concrete from freezing at night that we would jump into from the second story of the house. Of course, that was all illegal and likely quite dangerous. But man, it was fun! And the danger part of it was what made it so fun. We knew we shouldn't be there and so we hid whenever a car drove by. But that should be a part of childhood. Exploring and making mistakes.
I do remember getting busted a couple of times. Those were some life-long lessons that I haven't forgotten, that's for sure.
But today, with attractive nuisance laws so strict and the liability associated with those laws so severe, no wonder kids are locked indoors for most of their formative years!
While a low probability to fine someone who did, I did grow-up on island in Alaska (Kodiak) with endless (well up to the ocean) of forests, mountains, and rivers to explore right outside my backyard.
I wonder how much of this is really the "good old days" effect. I recall reading about research fairly recently that suggests we forget the bad things first, and that is why there's nostalgia for the "good old days".
I mean it is true that kids go outside a lot less these days, especially American kids. We're immigrants, and we often go to a nearby lake in the summer. Easily 80% of families there are Latino and Russian. I wonder where native-born American parents take their kids, if anywhere.
But I also wonder whether it's such a big deal. From what I can _factually_ remember from my own childhood, my "time outside" was rather haphazard and I got into all sorts of trouble (including starting smoking at the tender young age of 8 - this lasted for a few weeks until my parents found out). I very much doubt this was significantly better for me than staying at home.
It's definitely incredibly easy to forget boredom. As you experience boredom, time slows to a crawl, but you don't remember much later since memories are discrete events. I would wager that a lot of outside time is actually quite boring but romanticized in hindsight.
And yes, much of my (memorable) unsupervised outside time was spent jumping off roofs and shooting things with BBs. Kind of like video games except with a decent chance of physical injury.
But then again who cares what I did and why do I use my personal experiences as a standard for others?
In grades 3-6 I remember spending hours meandering around Seattle's Beacon Hill area on my way home after school. It was great fun exploring under freeways, urban forests, abandoned buildings, etc., by myself or with a friend or two.
Today these areas are mostly unauthorized homeless camps filled with garbage, human waste, and used needles.
When I was older (middle school) I recall about half-dozen times creeps in cars drove up to me and asked me to come party with them or do some swimsuit modelling. Gross.
My kids grew up in different world than I did. Thus they had a much different childhood. I can't imagine letting my two girls roam around like I did.
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In a nutshell, I contend that this is a social problem of neighborhood culture, and parents should work to make their neighborhoods as fun and inviting as video games and the Internet. Simply cutting off electronics and shoving them out the door won't do it because there's no one out there - neighborhoods are very boring. Somehow, we need to create a culture of play, first with parents, and later without, in our neighborhoods. The book Playborhood is all about that.
Yes it is, but you aren't going to solve it without rolling back women's rights. Neighbourhoods are not communities anymore because there aren't enough adults around during the day. With both parents working 9-5, there aren't any moms around to keep an eye on the kids playing during summer break.
It was bad when we as a society told women they're not allowed to work. Now women have to work just to be able to afford a house on two incomes which previously cost only one.
As a parent now I encourage free and outdoor play whenever possible. Winter, summer - doesn't matter. They love being outside and self-organize. Sure they're young enough still to want help with setting up games from time to time, but it's crazy how much imagination and natural inquisitive nature is in them. Parents overcommit kids today. Play is work now. And work sucks as a kid. Don't do that.
But the premise that communities are gone because parents aren't around isn't founded in anything but an assumption and is wildly inaccurate in my daily life.
The local shopkeepers and retired would keep an eye on the local kids too. If anything we'd be more likely to be pulled up and ticked off by the old lady doing her gardening or the old fella taking the dog for a walk than the local mums. The mums were often busy with the youngest of the family, cooking, and other jobs keeping them inside. Not all had toddlers of course.
The local shopkeepers - newsagent, butcher, baker all knew our mums as they were in every week so if we pushed too far it was certain to get back home. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. A non-automated surveillance state. :)
So what did we kids do? Went and played on the demolished old factory site, along the canal, or on the disused railway station and line. No one got to keep an eye on anyone there.
The situation of women having to work is just as repressive of women's rights as not allowed. I'm sure there's a lot of women, and some men, who would stay home with the children whilst young if it were possible. The expectation now is they have to juggle both.
In other words, there were usually no parents supervising anything in my neighborhood in the 70s, yet our play culture was dramatically different from present day play culture.
The economic pressure to work to support your family is not what I would call a right, but a modern requirement (of both men and women). If anything, this is an advancement of an employers right to extract cheap labor while maintaining a moral high ground in the name of equality and phony, corporate backed, dollars-and-cents egalitarianism.
>It was bad when we as a society told women they're not allowed to work.
To be clear I agree, and, upon further inspection, so do you: :-)
>Now women have to work just to be able to afford a house on two incomes which previously cost only one.
Posting anyway because maybe there's something to be said about the choice of words ('rights' to work) here, which should perhaps be considered for rephrasing en masse (as I'm sure you're aware, but was not explicitly said).
At the same time, there were probably another half dozen kids we knew of living in and around the area whose parents refused to let them come out to play. In hindsight, they were the rising tide that seems to have taken over parenting, despite all those kids probably now being able to testify they missed the opportunity.
I frequently see people argue that you now have to have two incomes to have a normal middle-class lifestyle, but it doesn't square at all with my own experience. I come from a pretty conservative sub-culture, where it's much more common for a husband/father in a family to be the primary breadwinner and for the wife/mother not to work. Sure, a lot of our friends are highly-paid engineers and the like, which makes that easier. But others aren't - off the top of my head, I can name teachers (in a state known for terrible teacher pay), law enforcement officers, city maintenance workers, etc. All of these people are figuring out how to live a fairly normal middle-class lifestyle on one income.
How is that possible? We make other choices that support the goal of a single-income family. Most of us shop at Aldi, not Whole Foods. Nobody drives new cars (our nicer car is a 2005, for example). We do a lot of home maintenance ourselves. We share clothes, toys, and kids' supplies with each other, or get them on consignment. You get the idea. (Oh, and we also don't have to pay higher-tax-bracket taxes on the second income, high property taxes on big homes and new cars, or pay for daycare when we're at work.)
There's of course nothing wrong with women working or with nice cars or shopping at Whole Foods, and I respect the fact that different people choose to handle these issues differently. But don't be deceived - it's still possible for most middle-class Americans to live on one income, as long as they're willing to choose to make the sacrifices in other areas that facilitate that lifestyle.
(I won't claim to be able to speak to how this goes for poorer classes.)
Massively increasing the supply of housing so a parent regardless of gender could stay at home and still afford a house would also fix the problem.
A universal basic income would also fix the issue of both parents needing to work to afford a house.
We could also consider parenting a job and pay parents a living wage to stay at home and raise their kids.
The fact you immediately suggested the only solution to this problem would be to limit women's right to work is a bit sad. There are plenty of good solutions that would work well and don't need to restrict or rollback the progress we've made towards equality. At the very least you could have suggested limiting families to one working parent rather than specifically women.
We live in 2019 -- who says it's the women that need to stay at home? I'd happily swap with my wife and stay home while she was working, but I seriously doubt she'd let me. :D
Other than that, you're right. We need people working less (on average), and we need to start building actual communities instead of online social networks.
You know you can also have men keeping an eye on children while their spouse (of any gender) work.
The other issue is that most people don't even know their direct neighbors or spend any significant time together. That is definitely their choice but that is what is required to turn a group of houses into a neighborhood. This is much harder in the suburbs than in the cities where there are already known collecting spots like stores, parks, playgrounds and courts. In the suburbs, most people get home after dark from work and kids activities and then it is off to bed for the kids and Netflix for the parents. We all need to slow the hell down.
The important thing seems to be a balance between the structured activity in the group (I have seen peers that had so many activities, but little connection with the kids they were around, because there is little time to interact in i.e. gymnastic class) and just messing around :)
Reducing required household market labor for basic living, perhaps. But, even to the extent that is true, just because in the past that was done by constraining women's choices doesn't mean that it can only be done with gendered constraints.
May I rephrase this: "without strengthening parental and co-parental rights" (this includes grandparents and the extended family).
Framing it as "rolling back" plays into the feminists' hands. Yes, your rolling back, but you're rolling back what's effectively a regression.
Is that actually true, beyond this anecdote? FWIW, my own suburban neighborhood (a cluster of about 60 townhomes) has enough kids that there's usually a small basketball game going on in the parking lot. And often bikes left scattered around (until dinner time, when the kids pick them up and go home).
In my experience as a parent (my son moved out last year), there were always kids around, but they were scheduled down to the minute in sports, STEM enrichment activities, scouts, or church. And those kids from families that didn't have that kind of budget were glued to TV screens or computer monitors.
We tried to give our son free time to play, but there was nobody around to play with. The kids were there, just not available.
Now that we've moved to a smaller house, with THs instead of SFHs, it appears to be slightly better. More play in the parking lot. But, the kids still seem pretty tightly scheduled (almost all are in sports leagues year-round).
I don't think this is the issue. It's much more a cultural thing, statistically richer countries have lower birthrates. But getting married and having kids is no longer accepted as "just what you do". Less people are getting married, that also may play a role.
I'd also imagine it's different in different areas. Might even map to incomes, or political leanings of different zip codes.
But of all its problems, what's the problem with kids having to ride 1+ miles to their friends?
When I was about 10-11, I was riding 2kms by myself (and then with my younger sister) in the Australian summer holidays down to a tennis camp. Sometimes it ran late and the sun went down, so my parents would come and pick us up in their car...just kidding, they bought me a generator to put on my bike and a reflector and I rode home in the dark.
When we moved again, I had a regular neighbourhood friend and we'd go and play networked computer games and nintendo during school holidays and after school during my teenage years (having two pc's you could network was quite advanced for the 1990's). But putting this into google, his place was 1.4 kms away from my house.
There was a video store 5 to 6 kms by car that had some rental games and videos, but of course we couldn't drive. But it must of been 4-5 kms by taking a shortcut through a nature reserve with our mountain bikes. And that's what we did. After a year or two, another store opened up a few kms in the other direction and we went there as well.
Even back then, video games were a huge part of my life...we were nerds in the absolute sense, but so were the mountain bikes and the exploring. Maybe we were lucky backing on to some nature reserves, but even in the staid morass of suburbia, are there too many places with nothing in a 10km radius? And even if the answer is yes, even that I'm a bit skeptical of. The nature reserve attracted us because it was a place without adults and it was a little bit dangerous, not because it was set up with activities or playgrounds.
In my mind, the distance wasn't a barrier to playtime. The fact that our parents would let us out to explore, and we subsequently went within about a 10km radius of our homes unsupervised on our bikes and without cell phones WAS the playtime.
The changing variable isn't the distances: its the supervisory culture and the fact that everything is now streamed conveniently into our homes on demand, and the fact that many of these products are now specifically engineered to try to turn people into screen viewing zombies.
That doesn't necessarily mean much. Moving from urban areas to suburban ones already greatly reduces density and access to services and the sort of institutions we are talking about.
To give some sense of proportion, the average American suburb has[1] a density of about 2.7k people per square mile. That's about 2 1/2 times less dense than a Western European suburb (6.2k), and about eight times less dense than a Western European core urban area (18.8k).
American suburbia is extremely sparsely populated and fundamentally unfit to provide the cultural institutions that modern, small families and communities require. Calls for larger families is simply unrealistic, because the opportunities that each kid in a large family on a single income in a developed knowledge economy gets are abysmal. In our modern world, quality trumps quantity so to speak.
[1]http://www.demographia.com/db-intlsub.htm
I often wonder how much of my solitary/introverted personality is the result of my environment.
Moreover, I can only assume that it was through me that my brother got introduced to the "social scene" of the neighborhood. I was the older one, so when we came out to play, I was in charge of him, and that meant always inviting him to play and introducing him to all my friends.
Siblings are like friends you have no option but having (and playing with). Incredibly reliable, in that sense (:
What changed to make them boring? Couldn't it rather be that neighborhoods are now considered boring due to highly interactive electronic entertainment being available, as an alternative, pretty much everywhere, at any time?
Mind you: I'm not saying these things are equal, but by now electronic entertainment has been designed to be as appealing as possible, in contrast to that, the alternative of going outside to look for stimuli, has become quite unappealing and bothersome to many.
Why go out in the world, to get sensual and intellectual stimulation, when you can just click away on the Internet or in Fortnite to get your "fix"? Particularly with the news cycles constantly bombarding everybody with FUD these days, making parents less likely to give their children unsupervised "outside time" even if the kids actually want to go outside.
They are paranoid not just about kidnappers or child molesters, but they are worried about not preparing their kids for school and "getting ahead", thus the over planned childhoods.
I really wish parents would just let go a little.
1) Read to your kids at night. Do it as old as they want you to do it.
2) Give them unstructured play time with friends consistently. After age 9 or so, they really can go off on their own without parents around.
3) Younger kids should experience a variety of things well through middle school. The more things they do, the better. Sure, they should get good grades (A's and B's), but obsessing over all A's in middle school isn't worth it.
4) High school is when structure starts to be more important IF they want to get into a competitive school. And forcing a high school kid to get a perfect score on his SAT is a recipe for disaster. It should be the kids choice.
Way too many parents are obsessed about making sure their son or daughter get into THE college they want. It's more about the parent than the student.
I wish I could tell more parents to let fucking go. Teenagers go to war, they start businesses, they do all sorts of grown up things.
Keep them away from drugs and help them find a passion. That's about it.
> After age 9 or so, they really can go off on their own without parents around.
I'd say more like age six, depending on the kid. Kids are much more independent and aware than adults give them credit for.
> I wish I could tell more parents to let fucking go.
It's ironic that just doing this -- letting go -- would probably do more good than any "educational" activity they schedule into their kids' lives.
It should be a gradual process of teaching a kid how to be independent and have independent skills from the time they are toddlers.
Kids really appreciate being taught patiently how to do a life skill.
And if they don't want to learn how to do laundry, you make them learn.
Kids don’t reliably make good long term decisions for themselves. It’s more fun to play fortnite than to practice for a math/piano competition. They can’t see the long term impact of not working out and eating poorly.
I got pushed pretty hard as a kid. It wasn’t fun at the time, but now I appreciate it. There’s a widening gap between the rich and poor in America, and it’s a lot nicer to be on the rich side.
If you are from a stable family situation, it's easy to gloss over how shitty some kids have it at home.
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And I never said to not push a kid. If that's what you think will help him, then do it.
If a kid has a bad habit of quitting things when they get tough, then you may need to "force" them to do something.
And part of having them try a variety of activities will mean forcing them to do it.
You can make them do a variety of things while also letting them have unstructured free time.
I think too, when I say unstructured free time, I mean outside play time with no screens.
I guess you could say that a parent is "forcing" them to not use a screen, so it's not really "free play time", but I think making kids go outside and play without giving them any directions on what to do, is a very good thing.
For all the nostalgia, parents often make decisions based on their own observations about their own generation and themselves. It is interesting that none of these articles ever consider that some parent may go to the other extreme, because not everything was sunny and awesome all the time in the past.
My kids, like most of their friends, get structured time so they don’t always fall back on what they do during unstructured time — technology stuff. I can take away those options (and we do that during the week), but if I want them to have fun the way they define it, often that means an iPad. And I offer to go climbing, hiking, etc with them, but so far it’s the older one that will embrace that while the younger sees it as a chore that takes her away from Roblox or some other game. That’s the irony of “free range” parenting — the “free” part explicitly excludes an option that didn’t exist when I was a kid because of what looks an awful lot like nostalgia.
I have lots of good nostalgic memories of climbing trees and stuff on my early childhood, and of LAN parties and couch gaming on my late childhood.
Both were "unproductive" and seen by adults as "pointless". Both were very fun.
Be creative, play a sport, walk around, read a book, go explore.... whatever, as long as it isn't tech related.
And so should schools. While we preach healthy work/life balance for adults, we bury children in huge amounts of homework that can stretch into or fill whole evenings.
I'm all for a demanding, highly structured and efficient time spent at school, but please give them a chance to explore own interests and hobbies after school.
http://cwrp.ca/sites/default/files/publications/en/144e.pdf
In Manitoba I can be fined up to $50,000 and given 24 months in prison if I allow my kids to play alone under the age of 12.
The PDF refers to child 'home' or 'in a vehicle' alone, but the details of the law are that the guardian of any child under the age without adequate supervision is liable.
I'm not even that old and I used to play in a park with my friends, in one of the rougher neighborhoods in my city, 2 kilometers from my parents house when I was 8.
Those were great experiences my kids can't legally have.
We had neighbors with a kid precisely the same age as him, but the kids were never around, instead being driven from place to place.
(BTW it's pretty common to complain about the quality of US education too but in this case it was actually OK, especially when compared to the notorious Berlin schools, and he decided on a US undergraduate education which I think was a good decision.)
On the general side: I'd say the German approach for kids (2-12) is "super strict on the basics, then have at it." So you are very strict that they must stand behind the yellow line, don't interrupt grown ups, behave yourself at the table, etc, but once you have the core down there are few restrictions (this changes as you grow up...I like to joke that Ordnung is the German state religion). So he was used to unsafe playgrounds, coming home late from just exploring the U-bahn with his friends (all ignoring texts from parents) etc. He compared that to American kids who seemed to always being told not to do things without having a set of basics to make their own decisions. He had one Palo Alto classmate who was grounded if he wasn't home 15 minutes after school let out!
An example: in grade six he and his friends found a bottle of vodka in the schoolyard (urban school). As any 12 year olds would, they took one of their gym sneakers, filled it with vodka, and set it on fire. The maths teacher passed by and said "boys, school starts in a few minutes; don't be late" and kept going. He told me he'd be expelled from his US school if he had matches or a lighter. In Germany that didn't even rate a letter home from the school.
He also complained that grownups were always involved. Schools have police officers in them, scouts have parents involved, etc. Kids don't get to run things and screw them up like they do in Germany. I went to a Christmas service in a church where the kids wrote and put on a Christmas play -- apparently Noah brought the animals, 2x2, to see the newborn. I am not christian but I'm pretty sure that isn't doctrine -- but everyone seemed to like it.
He found the US school routine quite rigid with little time for exploration of the material but instead memorization. If anything the US seemed more like the asian schooling my mother went through, or perhaps the prewar Prussian system. I know the US kindergarteners are told to learn the alphabet while the German one was mainly focused on getting along and learning, by the end of the year, to keep your clothes on all day. They left the alhpabet (in two languages!) to the first grade.
HTH
Post 9/11 everything was locked down and continued to get worse.
American isolationism creates fearfulness.
In Japan, they basically force kids to walk to school without parents when they're 7-8 years old. If I ever have kids, I'd want to raise them someplace like that, not in a country where I'm legally required to be a helicopter parent until the kid is a legal adult.
It did happen in Maryland. Guess what? The CPS completely changed their rules after the justified outcry.[1] Not a single person was arrested in this matter.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meitiv_incidents
And since the original link is about quality youth playtime, let’s not forget all the hours spent at cram schools in the evenings and weekends if you want a shot at a decent university.
I’m not a big fan of the US either when it comes to parenting/educational trends, but there’s no silver bullet.
(Unsurprised by the downvotes, given how fetishized Japan is in the West and how most are incapable of looking at the country through a critical lens)
[0] https://www.humanium.org/en/child-suicide-in-japan-the-leadi...
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/03/sexual-as...
that has a lot more to due with safe transit. I would NOT send a 10 year old kid to take BART or MUNI by themselves. In fact i literally know a couple who's 12 year old son basically got intimidated into giving away their iPod on MUNI.
While I'm sure the financial loss was irritating, if this is the worst that comes from letting children ride transit alone, I'd consider it an acceptable cost. Depending on the details, it could even make for a good learning experience.
I’d argue it has a lot to do with the increasingly far-flung suburban housing that most people live in, and how dangerous the roads are.
1. Parents don’t want their kids getting hit by cars.
2. As they get older parents let them walk around the neighborhood —— but there’s nothing there except boring locked houses and front yards that, if you try to play in, you’ll get yelled at or worse.
3. The sprawl means even in these burbs there often aren’t many other kids around.
This terrible sprawl creates the reality that if you want your kids to get to hang out with other kids, or go to school, or go to a friends house, or do ANYTHING, you have to drive them there. And that’s such a time suck it’s not realistic to do all the time. Thus the helicopter parenting shuttling kids from one activity to another and then when exhausted saying “just watch Netflix.”
It's my understanding that it's a big part of their process of growing up - as it should be. There are actually TV shows in Japan secretly filming and celebrating young kids' first errands. It's adorable really.
edit - here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5k5XTZy0rA
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Don't mention the R word.
If you want to take the pressure off - tell parents their kids won't be left out like millennials are. Give them a safety net. Let parents know their kids will have a pretty good life. On the other hand, if they know their kids will be in a dog-eat-dog world where even hard work gets you nowhere - they're going to raise their kids with a zero-sum game theory.
I don't find myself questioning whether I should let them go because I'm worried that they might not get into Harvard or that they may not make as much money as me, or because I'm just so consumed with worry about inequality or something so abstract. I'm worried about them being taken away or me going to jail. Instead of being a black swan event (and we can't get it below that), it's merely "fairly unlikely", which for such a disastrous outcome isn't really unlikely enough.
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Most kids don't have "an expansive wilderness" to explore. Most of them have miles and miles of residential streets to "explore" in Baltimore.
Seeing strangers. Seeing new strangers. Seeing the same old strangers every day until those strangers are recognized as neighbors.
Just being in that world is an experience of wonder and learning.
The housing boom was not people building up residential areas inside of well developed cities. It was people accepting some sacrifice and moving outside of cities into areas where previously there was nothing. This is a big part of the reason why housing was so cheap. It also helped keep city housing prices low since it had a [quite extreme] depressing effect on demand.
The reason I mention this is because when you build houses in the middle of nowhere you don't often have to go far to find more nowhere. Everywhere you look is just row and row of cookie cutter houses, then a 2 mile bike trip and you're in the 'wild lands'. Lots of children got to grow up in these exact sort of areas. I had the fortune of getting to spend some brief part of my childhood in an area like this, and then most of the rest in an ultra urban area apartment in the middle of the city. Suffice to say, I won't be raising my kids in the middle of a city!
[1] - https://www.biggestuscities.com/1950
[2] - https://www.biggestuscities.com/1960
The word for it is “white flight", it was publicly subsidized (largely by the GI Bill) deliberate racial segregation acheived through restrictive covenants, and discriminatory lending and real estate sales practices.
that sacrifice is getting bigger over time. when my neighbor moved into his house in the 70s people thought it's nuts that he was moving that far out and commuted from there. Now this is perfectly normal and maybe a double commute would be viewed as long.
I do remember getting busted a couple of times. Those were some life-long lessons that I haven't forgotten, that's for sure.
But today, with attractive nuisance laws so strict and the liability associated with those laws so severe, no wonder kids are locked indoors for most of their formative years!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodiak_bear
I suppose that the situation is fine once you and several friends are old enough to bring a couple rifles with .300 Winchester Magnum or better.
I mean it is true that kids go outside a lot less these days, especially American kids. We're immigrants, and we often go to a nearby lake in the summer. Easily 80% of families there are Latino and Russian. I wonder where native-born American parents take their kids, if anywhere.
But I also wonder whether it's such a big deal. From what I can _factually_ remember from my own childhood, my "time outside" was rather haphazard and I got into all sorts of trouble (including starting smoking at the tender young age of 8 - this lasted for a few weeks until my parents found out). I very much doubt this was significantly better for me than staying at home.
And yes, much of my (memorable) unsupervised outside time was spent jumping off roofs and shooting things with BBs. Kind of like video games except with a decent chance of physical injury.
But then again who cares what I did and why do I use my personal experiences as a standard for others?
In grades 3-6 I remember spending hours meandering around Seattle's Beacon Hill area on my way home after school. It was great fun exploring under freeways, urban forests, abandoned buildings, etc., by myself or with a friend or two.
Today these areas are mostly unauthorized homeless camps filled with garbage, human waste, and used needles.
When I was older (middle school) I recall about half-dozen times creeps in cars drove up to me and asked me to come party with them or do some swimsuit modelling. Gross.
My kids grew up in different world than I did. Thus they had a much different childhood. I can't imagine letting my two girls roam around like I did.
edit: typo(s) and word order ffs.