We have a forest in our backyard with a 2 story fully enclosed treehouse (including electricity), sports fields within a 5 minute walk, tons of hiking trails, etc. But it is a real struggle to get them to leave the house because they want to be on the Internet 24/7. Of course we take away the devices, but that just leads to them bemoaning their screen less state. One of the problems is, this is taught in the schools. Pretty much every class is using screens constantly. Our local school district recently experienced a hack that made it so they couldn’t use chromebooks for a few days. All the teachers lesson plans were completely centered around devices, so the kids just watched movies all day instead.
No pre-set plan, no parental supervision, just a “I’m going to go meet my friends on this summer day, I’ll be back before dinner.” For purposes of illustration, assume these kids are aged 9-14, or thereabouts. Too young to drive, too old to be doted over every minute of the day.
If you would (and I hope you would!), would their friends’ parents? Would they be able to go casually knock on their friends’ doors (or even neighbors’ doors), be it biking or walking, and socialize, like kids do?
My guess is probably not. And that’s not the kids’ doing— that’s OUR doing. If parents really wanted their kids to go outside and explore, that would be the norm. But for far too many kids it’s not, because parents don’t want it to be: they’re worried about their kid getting hit by a car, kidnapped, getting in trouble, learning a lesson, the list goes on and on. The built environment reflects that kids are not expected to be outside, as if we’ve kid-proofed it. And so even if you want your kid to play outside, no one else is, and of course no kid wants to play alone!
Ironically, you would probably see more kids out and about, safe to be kids, in gasp New York City than in “safe” suburbia, from my own anecdotal experience.
There’s a world out there far and beyond whatever bubble you’re in. My daughter (6) can go out back on the playground or practice archery or whatever. My next-door neighbor (next-door in the original, pre-app sense) has a dirt bike track for his handful of kids (5+ and up)
I’ve got all kinds of neighbors with kids doing all the old things we did pre-Black Mirror in the pocket.
Don’t get me wrong, I FIGHT like a… expletive, with my kids about screen time to a degree that my folks and older siblings laugh about given I’m a self-taught teenage hacker.
But kids and communities with “go do shit” old-er school norms exist outside of the big cities.
NYC really isn't that unfriendly to kids: plenty of public transit to get places, lots of places to be a pedestrian, lots of things to do. In much of suburbia...where do you go? There isn't really much you can do until you are 15 or 16 and get a drivers license.
I chose to live in a more urban area of Seattle (Ballard) because I want my now 1st grader to be able to do things when he is a bit older. Still not as nice as Tokyo, but it could be a lot worse if we lived further north or on the east side.
My daughter is five and walks a block to her grandparent's house regularly (by herself, yes I know). In a few years, she will be walking to the corner store for basics or ice cream, or whatever. As for friend's parents, we live in a walkable urban neighborhood (we chose this), and yes, kids do this all the time.
> My guess is probably not. And that’s not the kids’ doing— that’s OUR doing.
It's parent's doing both because of their regulations. It's also parent's doing because parents choose to live in suburbia / pay a premium to do so. If parents paid premiums to live in dense urban neighborhoods, more would be built / development patterns would change.
It's weird. As I said... we live in an inner city (we're 1.5 miles from downtown core of our west coast city). You'd think our streets were busy, but ... they're less busy than the suburban street I grew up in. Here's the difference.. in a city. Few people drive. There are certainly main thoroughfares that are very crowded (my kids are not allowed to cross the large streets themselves). But within our neighborhood, bounded by large streets, the streets are really tiny and there's few drivers. My house is actually quieter than the suburban street I grew up on. It's silent at night. Cars are the noise, not people. People are quiet.
So that is to say... Yes it's parents fault. But parents are responding to their built environment, not any internal moral failing. The main issue is that parents are unable to understand the consequences of suburban living.
There's currently a strike in Portland, and I've appreciated seeing kids out and about being little adults, taking the bus, etc, makes me really glad to live in city even with all the cars and noise.
Last year both my kids and a bunch from around the neighborhood decided to walk back together. They had a roaring good time. School would release at 3. It would be 4 by the time they got back home after stops at the park, jumping across the small creek, etc etc.
The big kids went off to middle school so they aren’t walking back anymore. But everyone of them still misses the walk back.
The place where I’m at is surprisingly walkable at least in the 1.5 mile radius enough to get the kids to their local cafe or run errands. The 10 and above kids regularly take off on their own. The phones have location turned on anyway.
No pre-set plan, no parental supervision, just a “I’m going to go meet my friends on this summer day, I’ll be back before dinner.” For purposes of illustration, assume these kids are aged 9-14, or thereabouts. Too young to drive, too old to be doted over every minute of the day.
What are the odds they would all sit around together, outside, on their phones?
Yes, and recently in USA. A handful of times I had a tinge of worry when they were gone much of the day, and they returned better than I could have planned it. One occasion I recall they hiked to a lake and had packed backpacks with lunches water sunscreen. It was my brain that worried, and a joy to watch the children grow and explore!
The mother next door, apprehensive about rogue police, instructed her children that if they see the police to run home and don't stop. There is no recourse when the cops crack skulls, so it's best to stay out of their grip.
Have you ever seen a kid under 14 without parents in New York City—whose parents are in an economic class where they could afford to live in the suburbs if they wanted? I certainly haven’t.
It’s a class/culture issue rather than an urban planning issue. I grew up in a car-dependent suburb in the 1990s, and in the summer I used to spend all day roving around the neighborhood with the neighbor kids. Kids in the same suburb don’t do that today, because parents are more protective, kids are glued to screens, etc.
> And that’s not the kids’ doing— that’s OUR doing. If parents really wanted their kids to go outside and explore, that would be the norm.
As a kid grown up in the smartphone era (I’m 18 now), these words of yours hurt my soul. Me and all of my friends are smartphone addicts. Everyone I know are using their smartphone as much as the rest of their life allows. But ofc, your brains are not messed up enough, so you don’t understand and you’re gonna just let your be consumed by it.
I’m deeply sorry with every person whose life is literally wasted for that sweet $1/user/month ad money.
I cannot express my sadness for the next generation who are literally born into it and grow up with YouTube Kids. Thank God at least I lived about 12 years of real life.
Kids 30 years ago wanted to endlessly watch TV, play video games, listen to tapes, and read books. 30 years before that, it was radio, TV, vinyl, and books. 30 years before that: radio, vinyl, and books.
Kids are curious and stimulation-receptive and motivated, and so they're going to chase easy sources of those things.
Parents, meanwhile, can either work to balance the easy sources with other sources that might enrich them in novel ways (like going outside or being bored), accepting that their kids may not buy into the idea, or they can defer to their child's sense and avoid tantrums and defiance.
It seems like kids turn into adults either way, but the choice is ultimately one being made by the parent, not by the availability of screens per se. The easy stimulation is omnipresent. That ship sailed about 100 years ago. As a parent caring for kids (and a person caring for yourself!) you ultimately have to figure out what you want to do about it.
I was a kid 30 years ago. I may have wanted to watch TV all the time, but it was self-limiting back then. Much of the time the stuff on TV wasn't anything a kid would want to watch. There were only certain times of the day that you could find someone you wanted.
Screens today provide a bottomless pit of content for kids. At a parent, yes I have to limit my kids time or they'd just do it 24/7. People talk about letting their kids figure out how to moderate themselves, but either I'm doing that wrong or (perhaps more likely) that just doesn't work the same for every kid.
> Kids 30 years ago wanted to endlessly watch TV, play video games, listen to tapes, and read books.
Not "endlessly." 30 years ago, in the suburbia being decried, I had a bike and friends my age in the neighborhood. You called to see if they wanted to go do something, or went down the street and knocked on the door. And this was in a time (1990s) when the country's violent crime rate was about double what it is today, but there was no social media and 24-hour news doomscrolling making parents paranoid.
It's only in recent decades that media has begun to adapt itself to increase captivity of individual consumers. That feels like a qualitative difference between your time horizons.
>>Parents, meanwhile, can either work to balance the easy sources with...
It's possible to some extent. Different parents will have different levels of ability and success.
This is relevant (but difficult) advice for individual parents, but it's a minor point if we're discussing society. People (parents and kids) exist in an environment. "Just going out to play," isn't part of the world/environment/culture. The way kids/parents did thing differently in the past was by existing in a different culture.
Easy Vs hard stimulation is one paradigm, but you can't just view everything through this lens. Life is more complex. There are looping and knotting causal relationships and we can't know all of them. It's a complex.
Life is just very screen based. Ours and theirs.
They study via screens, and don't really know how to "do school" analogue. Social life is, largely through screens... and increasingly part of the media spectrum. Work will, eventually, be screened-based. So are life's administrative tasks.
I could not endlessly watch TV, because it was in the living room and I was not only one able to pick programs. Parents had a say and there was no privacy over what I was watching.
Plus, there needed to be something interesting on schedule which was completely outside of my control.
It’s not the same. This line of whataboutism doesn’t work. None of those mediums were interactive or had their social networks on them. Almost everyone (kids) I knew watched a few hours of TV a day tops. There just wasn’t enough content with scheduled programming/without content on demand. Radio was even more limited. Honestly I really wish the government banned kids from using computers for more than a few hours a day (like some authoritarian country like China) and completely banned smart phones for everyone under 18.
There's a feedback loop happening as well. Kids don't play outside so there are no kids playing outside.
Screens are much more compelling than playing outside. Kids are still using their imaginations but they're playing in a much more powerful sandbox. And, at the same time, outside is actually getting less compelling.
It's not healthy -- probably both in a physical and mental sense -- but the solution is far from just taking away screens. Society is structured around this now.
> There's a feedback loop happening as well. Kids don't play outside so there are no kids playing outside.
So much this. When I was a kid (late 70's), I could count on going outside and finding other kids to play with. Or if I didn't find anyone, I'd ride my bike around until someone came outside. Or, I could even simply knock on my friend's door and say "Can Robert come out and play?" and this was completely acceptable.
I'd love to send my kid outside to play, but he'd just be wandering around by himself. Knocking on a friend's door (though he knows a same-age kid two doors away) would be considered out of bounds nowadays. Any kid get-togethers must be carefully arranged ahead of time with at least one adult monitoring the "playdate."
I remember getting annoyed listening to my parents opine about why I stayed inside a lot without ever asking me, knowing I would be chastised if I dared to speak for myself.
I enjoy a nice stroll in nature as an adult, but I would have been bored out of my mind as a kid. Sports never appealed, and treehouses are even more boring than sitting in a room with no internet.
What I liked doing was mall walking, or walking through busy cities. But my parents would rarely take me to do that. So I was "lazy."
Yes, just going on a walk can be boring for a child, but you don't need to just walk through the woods. You can go exploring, dig for treasure, climb trees, play hide and seek, build a fort, etc.
my parents thought I was a combination of introverted and not social
I just could not be motivated to travel 40 minutes to an event, and Xbox Live was an equivalent surrogate
Move on campus in the middle of things and I’m out almost every day. Keep everything in walking distance and I’m very social in person. We’ll see if suburbs ever appeal to me, more likely would have to be a reimagined version of the concept.
> We have a forest in our backyard with a 2 story fully enclosed treehouse (including electricity), sports fields within a 5 minute walk, tons of hiking trails, etc.
Humans are social beings. We are motivated to do things through our peers doing things. What you describe is probably really nice for people who enjoy exercise and spending time in nature. But for social beings, what you are describing is absolute isolation from society.
I would posit that a big part of what glues the kids to the screen is that the screen is a window to the real world. When they look into the screen, they have an endless stream of other people, expressing opinions, doing things, existing in society. When they look outside, there's no society, there's no people. It's just trees.
The internet has become sort of a "third place", but since it has no precedent, none of us knew how to leverage it as such, so we have people glued to screens.
I have hope for the generation after gen Z though - my toddler knows exactly when I'm looking at my phone instead of giving her attention and in such instances proposes that I put it away.
It's very much like my generation annoyed at their parents who watch TV all day instead of interacting.
My teenager has screens, and he is a total nerd. When we are in our sea of US suburbia, where there is absolutely nothing to do, and no neighbor kids that share much with him, he just chooses screens at all times.
But come summer, I take him to a small Spanish port town. It has beaches where teens can surf and spearfish. There's always an available pickup game of soccer or basketball, even at midnight. Bars and restaurants one can walk to, and complete independence, barring budgetary constraints. The area that in the US has a dozen teenagers, over there has about 300 or so. Suddenly it's not all screens, because there are competing alternatives. Want to go play DnD poolside with the nerdiest of the lot? No need to ask anyone.
Suburbs don't force kids into being alone in front of screens, any more than they force adults to be lonely and asocial. But they so do change the level of effort required to do anything else.
I have to agree. My children have a 2 acre backyard with woods and a treehouse. They play outside with the neighborhood kids almost every day. When bad weather keeps them inside, they make up new games to play throughout the house.
Why? Because we limit the time they spend on screens.
> My children have a 2 acre backyard with woods and a treehouse.
Very, very few people have this. Sounds like you have your own "third place" that the neighborhood kids can leverage, and which provides a compelling alternative to screens.
This is how I was raised. Running around and forced to come up with games to entertain myself all day. As soon as I moved out for college I finally got to spend as much of my time on the computer as I wanted. It was great, and I still enjoy programming and video games way more than hiking or sports. I basically consider all that time outside as a waste; I could have been having more fun and learning more but my parents decided that I should enjoy the outdoors. That's not to say that I resisted and moped rather than engaging (most of the time), I tried to make the best of it. But I was constantly aware that I could be doing something I'd enjoy much more. I wouldn't say I resent my parents for raising me like that; they were doing what they thought best. I just think they were wrong.
yea it’s a 5 minute walk for your child. But friends probably live 40 minutes away if they walk.
What’s the point of a treehouse if they just play by themselves? Also, no child is going to walk on a trail by themselves for fun. Same with a sports field. lol. Get realistic dude.
Suburbia sucks. I grew up in it. My childhood was spent playing video games, going to school, socialize/learn, maybe after school sports, go back home, study. Weekends were a bit rough. Usually just stuck with parents. Had a park within 15 minute WALK. But friends lived in diff suburb so it was at least a 40 minute walk (maybe 15 min by bike). Occasionally parents drive me to friends house, but again mostly just to play games (this is an era where play over internet was not feasible or widely available).
Also the suburbs were a bit dangerous to walk or bike in. Cars zooming up and down streets with reckless abandon. Worse during commuting. I imagine it’s worse today with the massive compensators that exist on the road now.
I was essentially a prisoner up until I was able to get my learners permit and start driving.
They have lots of friends in our neighborhood. But those kids don’t want to go outside either. If they do venture forth (like when we kick them out and tell them don’t come back till dinner) to a friends house, it is just to get on a device with them. And our neighborhood is very safe. I’d be fine if I didn’t see them from dawn to dusk.
Your kids. Not mine, who predated screens. There was nowhere to go. They could walk to the neighborhood entrance. They could walk back. They could do that again.
Past that the choices were walking along a thruway easement or risk trespassing charges by being anywhere else.
Not just my kids. I spent >20 years in leadership in scouting and youth programs, 1990s onward. I worked with a LOT of kids. When they weren't in home/school/extremely-supervised-structured-and-typically-not-free-activities, those kids stayed mostly home because there was nowhere for them to go.
Most.
Kids.
Have.
Nowhere.
To Go.
The entire human history of kids having peer-only time to learn negotiation, compromise, ambition, boundaries, loyalty, conflict resolution, basically learning how to think has been replaced with ceaseless adult supervision or being shut away.
Parenting time has increased 10-fold and that heavy-handed excess is supposed to somehow replicate their most critical learning time - the exact space where children become people.
It doesn't. It can't. Five seconds of considering it makes that plain. We've illegalized childhood and substituted the most counterproductive thing we could find.
Screens really aren't the cause of a catastrophe that began taking shape generations ago.
I was going to reply with this exact sentiment, so I’m glad you brought it up.
There’s also talk in this thread about how we’ve designed the outside to be kid-unfriendly. Let’s think for a second about how we design our home spaces inside to have screens all around. I’d wager that if you could walk into any house in suburbia, 90%+ will have a massive flat screen hanging in the main living space. Not only that, but all the chairs are aimed to face it! It’s the focal point and THE activity to be done in that space. Some houses will have screens in nearly every room. A screen in every pocket and maybe some portable screens too! With so much priority put on these screens and when parents, grandparents, friends, etc all spend a majority of their waking life on them, what is a kid going to mimic and learn is acceptable?
We definitely still struggle with screen time for our kids. They’re getting much better about turning it off without tantrums, but we only have one TV in our bedroom (rarely turned on), an iPad, and our phones. We try to watch TV or movies together rather than having a screen on in the background or relying on a screen to entertain our kids while we go off and do something else. All that said, our oldest (4 y/o) reads chapter books like there’s no tomorrow because she sees my wife and I read physical books. We also frequent the library often where she can have some independence to wander and find what interests her to bring home. Parent friends always make remarks about how smart she is and how they wish their kid would read more, but they can’t get them to stop wanting to watch TV or the tablet… but we’ve been to several friends’ houses and they always have a TV on nonstop and they themselves don’t read any books.
My parents didn't spend much time out of the house, but they'd kick us out occasionally. We'd bike around, go to parks, or visit friends. Are parents even allowed to say "Go play outside until the street lights turn on" anymore?
Screens are a proximate cause, not the underlying problem: as others have pointed out, children are just as social as we are. If being behind a screen is how they obtain those social experiences, then the corrective action isn’t to remove them but to augment them in a way they ultimately find more appealing. The article’s observation about suburban design is spot-on insofar as suburbs have both trended towards architectural and cultural insularity.
“ We have a forest in our backyard with a 2 story fully enclosed treehouse (including electricity), sports fields within a 5 minute walk, tons of hiking trails, etc. But it is a real struggle to get them to leave the house because”
But..do you have their friends in that space? I’m not naive I realize a lot of kids actually just want to TikTok, but “go hiking” isn’t a valid alternative. Kids want friends and unstructured time with them not beholden to their parents ability to drive them somewhere.
>One of the problems is, this is taught in the schools. Pretty much every class is using screens constantly.
I hear people complaining about the lack of iPads due to low school funding. I'm thinking this might be a good thing. IMHO tablets are the worst case scenario, they're made for pure consumption. Keyboard input on screen is bad, productive software is limited - these are machines made for pure consumption of media.
We all consume enough media nowadays. If you teach programming on proper laptops/desktops, or how to use spreadsheets, and writing text on computers, I get that this is useful knowledge. I just can't think of anything you need to teach with a tablet in school. And I think we should also not allow phones in school, it's just too damn entertaining. Adults barely are able to unglue themselves from their phones, we need to create a distraction free zone conducive for learning.
Speaking as someone who was a teenager in the suburbs in the 90s, it totally predated screens. Walking 40 min on a road with no sidewalks got you to a 7-11. We used to go play in the woods until they knocked them down to build a "golfing community" (ie golf course interspersed with McMansions)
It's not quite that simple. Literally all their schoolmates are watching shows, playing video games etc. So they become ostracized as a result of not having the same context as the other kids.
We're trying like hell to slow the onslaught with my son, but the kids make fun of him because "you don't even play Roblox" or whatever.
The public schools are all in on screens, at least where we are. They literally issued my kindergartener a Chromebook and expect us to do 30 minutes a night on the apps they recommend. It's really disheartening.
It’s connection they are looking for. Nobody wants to play in big backyard treehouse alone. At least the screens let them talk to other people or at least pretend to.
Having a house in a suburb where kids can’t walk to anybody they have connections with isolates and pushes them to the screens.
Screens are part of the problem but the biggest cause is lack of space to be a child, and the biggest culprit is our car-centric urban planning which transformed our streets into car storage space / racing track.
Our streets have become hostile to anything but cars.
Not entirely true. When kids used to go outside, they went alone outside since the age of 6 or even 5. That is impossible now. In order for kids to go outside, an adult must be there with them. That is adult bored on playground, cant cook, cant clean, cant socialize with friends, cant have fun. So adults wont go.
And then by the time kids are allowed to go outside, they dont know what to do there, other kids are not there and they are too old.
Kids learn habits from their parents. Never forget that you are their first role model. How often do you leave the house and how often are you using screens when you are home?
Can they walk to meet with their friends and get something to eat or drink?
Compared to nature and fields, a stimulating place to hang with friends around lots of other people gives a sense of independence and is a stronger draw for most.
When kids roamed alone, they did not roamed where moms were. And moms were in the kitchen or with youngest baby. And also, back then kids in areas where women worked due to not being middle class, still roamed alone.
The forest? Daily. The treehouse? Not as often. I do go out there and work sometimes. It has a really comfortable window seat with windows looking out to a pond and the forest.
My mom had a quick fix for this. If we were spending too much time in front of the TV on a nice day, she'd simply come in the room and shut off the TV and tell us to go outside. Now!
Problem solved.
Can't this (admittedly blunt) technique translate to contemporary situations ?
It's very hard to parent around this alone though. As you say, if you take away devices, the kids don't switch to using the treehouse/sports/hiking... Online is where their friends are, not the treehouse.
Because it's illegal in most of North America (especially when you consider where people actually live) for them to leave the house. That is the beginning and end of it.
If this answer isn't blindingly obvious to you, you are part of the problem. Either you don't notice it because you're more focused on being angry about "suburbia" than you are the objective well-being/freedom of your own children, or you actively encourage it because you think it's a net good (either because you're paranoid, because you're a victim of misinformation, or because you're a concern troll).
Things are safer than ever before yet most children have fewer rights and ways to develop available to them than at any point in recorded history. Sure, there might not be any place for them to go to exercise that freedom, but if you legalize it they'll eventually start coming back.
As for now, keep cheering on the arrests of children playing on their own front lawns. The reason suburbia exists in the first place is because that's the place your kids are maximally safe from this while still allowing you to be sufficiently gainfully employed, and making that way of life slightly more aesthetically acceptable to childless apartment-dwellers will do nothing to fix this.
> Because it's illegal in most of North America (especially when you consider where people actually live) for them to leave the house.
It is not illegal in most of North America, if you consider the USA (not sure about Canada/Mexico), only three states have laws that make it actually illegal. Consider:
> Washington doesn't have a state law that dictates whether children can or can't be left at home that's dependent on age, according to Seattle-based law firm Elise Buie Family Law. In nearby Oregon, though, the law states the child must be at least 10 years old to be home alone.
Or California, which has alot of people:
> In the state of California, there is no legal age stipulated on when a child can be left home alone or allowed to walk outside alone. There is a law, however, that children 6 years old and younger cannot be left alone in a car.
So for the west continental coast we have Oregon until 10...and in California if a car isn't involved no constraint. Oregon is just one of three states with actual laws on the books:
> Three states legally require kids to be of a certain minimum age to be left on their own for some time: Illinois (14 years old) Oregon (10 years old) Maryland (8 years old)
I'm not sure Maryland is being unreasonable here, but Illinois and Oregon probably are.
Like I was always planning on putting my kids in public school. I got a great education in them.
But now I'm wondering if I'll be forced to hunt down a school that avoids screens as much as possible. I've heard good things about Waldorf schools but the vaccination rates at those schools freak me out even more.
(Not to mention I've seen some terrible examples of educational software that is so buggy and unusable that it's actively hindering learning, making students feel stupid when they would've been fine with traditional methods.)
Hobbies and interests are not uniform across age groups. Just because the children are interested in different things than you think they should be interested in, doesn't mean they are the ones who are wrong.
Forced timeout almost never works. It merely reinforces their craving for what has been taken away from them.
When was that? I grew up in the 1980s and we would be outside messing around from dawn to dusk, even though we had a Nintendo 64, Nickelodeon, MTV (back when they actually had music videos), a vcr, etc.
For what it's worth when we had a few acres in the country our kids didn't really want to leave. Now that we live where they can bike with friends they want to go do that. But I am not happy with how many screens are in the school.
was in europe over the summer I did see a lot of teens doing dumb shit that teens do by the subway and in the streets. maybe they'd go out more if there was stuff to do. let's be real suburbia kind of sucks.
I think this is changing as we speak, maybe even has over the past 10 years. I expect physical labor, and in person labor prices to increase faster than desk labor wages.
If you buy construction/plumbing/electrical/etc labor, surely you have seen prices skyrocketing.
The author attends the High School I attended nearly 40 years ago. I was born, raised, and still live in Fremont.
Fremont has begun doing some of these trendy concepts that are mentioned in the article, but when I grew up none of these ideas had been implemented. I socialized with other kids and rode bike around the neighborhood. As a pre-teen, we socialized in the street and at each other's houses. As a teen I was not really restricted in where to go and there are plenty of neighborhood parks and libraries to hang out at.
None of the article's critiques of suburbia ring true to me with respect to Fremont. If you are seeking nightlife as an adult, you might feel it is a wasteland. But for children growing up I'm not seeing a problem. Part of that is that most of the city can be navigated without ever being on an arterial. Part of that is that most of the city was developed during an era where neighborhood parks could be mandated. Part of that is the city was master planned when it was small and they foresaw today's population.
It is true children spend less time outside than they used to. Part of that is fear; when my kids were young, I didn't trust that strangers wouldn't be a problem if they were outside the house. But right or wrong, that fear is worsened by the proposed changes to how suburbs are laid out, not improved.
>The fear has nothing to do with "stranger danger".
The reasonable fear there is helpful citizens + media bullhorning false stranger risk + police bullhorning false stranger risk + just one overzealous officer = recurring CPS visits (and/or neglect charges if officials feel feisty).
I'm a parent of three. Traffic is my key concern. There are more parked vehicles blocking sightlines, taller vehicles, and drivers are more likely to be distracted by their phone.
I walked across a street with a light I had to wait for starting in 1st grade. I was lucky it was less than a mile away. By 4th grade I had to walk most of a mile to a bus stop. By 6th grade I was riding 4 miles to junior high, then 5 miles to high school. The 80s had still had huge land barge Cadillac's, early SUVs
When did I stop going out? When there was dialup internet and MUDs.
60% of pedestrian deaths occur on high capacity urban roads. Kids in light residential neighborhoods don't deal with those roads. Tell your kids to stay away from heavily trafficked roads.
30% of pedestrian deaths involved a drunk pedestrian. Tell your children not to get drunk.
If you still find yourself worrying despite taking basic common sense precautions, then you should unsubscribe to whatever fearmongering echo chambers you're getting this fear from (reddit and youtube are common sources for this fearmongering I believe.)
"In England, housing is often characterized by closely situated semi-detached or terraced structures built under flexible zoning regulations. This environment allows small businesses to coexist harmoniously with residential areas, in contrast to the rigid industrial zoning common in the United States."
I'm American and live in Oz. Australia does this well imo. Small cafes and shops are sprinkled throughout neighborhoods. For any large grocery runs, I need to take my car but day to day basics (and more importantly...coffee) are within only a few minutes walking distance.
At least in Melbourne, this is only really the case for more established (and typically expensive) suburbs. Go out to Clyde North or Officer and you've got basically nothing in a walkable distance.
Even in (relatively affluent, semi-inner) Burwood East many of the old strip shops have been converted to non-regular or non-retail businesses (e.g kitchen showroom, accountant, baked goods wholesaler). You'd need to go up to Kmart Plaza to get groceries or coffee.
In Sydney, it's generally the case for established neighbourhoods close to the CBD. Walkability in inner city suburbs like Balmain, Leichhardt, Rozelle, any of the eastern suburbs really is super high.
Contrast this to urban-sprawl created suburbs like Marsden Park and a few of the Hills district burbs and it's the opposite - barely any public transport and next to no community infrastructure.
Yeah I’m in Melbourne and thanks to working in tech, I can afford to live in one of those inner areas with cafes and community events at my doorstep. But the average person is forced out to some hellscape like Craigieburn or Melton where kids will be surrounded by mega highways in every direction.
We really need to do more to bring pedestrianisation and walkability out to the cheaper areas rather than having them be a luxury for the rich.
Usually they're sprinkled on arterials of some scale. Suburbs could support more corner shops and studios, but (at least where I live) it feels like councils are nervous about parking burdens created by these. Developers avoid giving up any more land to parking than they need to. Residents don't want employees and patrons of a corner hairdresser or architect swamping their streets with parked cars. So we mostly get endless blocks of residential, and some old corner stores revert to living rooms instead of what they were designed as.
Not even close but then again I don't know which market in the US to compare to. I'm originally from Houston which is suburban sprawl at its worst. I could get a McMansion for $500k USD.
I live in the northern beaches area of Sydney and a "knockdown rebuild" can go for roughly $2m-3m AUD ($1.3-1.9m USD). I struggle with real estate prices here.
I grew up in the suburbs and did all kinds of things on my own. From 1991-1997 I rode my bike all around, went to the park, played sports, socialized, went to stores and fast-food on my own. My parents set some reasonable limitations on it: had to come back periodically and check in, let them know where I was, couldn't cross busy streets. I even had an SNES and my friends had Sega, and we played video games and watched TV, but we got bored of that and went outside at least as much as we stayed in.
I don't know what happened between then and now. I don't have kids so I don't know how people make decisions about them. I know a big part of it is fear of child abductions and getting hit by cars. I think it's just an irrational fear of those things (or bullying or using drugs) that slowly led to tightening the leash on kids. Today I rarely see kids doing anything in public without a helicopter parent within 50-ft. One of the middle schools I drove by allows one child to leave the door, go straight to their parents car, before the next car pulls up. They aren't even allowed to walk home unsupervised.
My parents are horrified when I suggest that their grandchildren should have the same freedom to roam around that they gave us.
They believe the world is more dangerous than ever even though murders, violent crime, child abductions, and car accidents peaked when we were kids. And we didn't have cellphones to check in or call 911 with.
I once stayed with a couple whose worldview was formed by the sensationalist news channels on tv [0]. They genuinely believed the outside world was a scary place with constant abductions, hate crimes, murder and all that. It was absolutely baffling to experience.
Not sure what to take from it. But it's very sobering to see how much damage is being done that way.
[0] At least I presume that's where it came from. The news was on every single day in that household and it certainly felt like some kind of twisted suffering and misfortune porn.
Regarding child abductions specifically, there's two independent benefits to teh "strength in numbers" strategy. For one, children playing in groups are less likely to be victims, and secondly, if everyone's kids went out and played, its less likely that any single one of them would be the victim. If no kids play and your kid and his/her friend are the only available targets, then sadly it is more likely something will happen to them.
I don't have kids either, but I'm in touch with my nephews (ages 7-14), and get to see how they're growing up. It's a very weird mix of culture change, everyone's being on their phones 24/7, and not walkable streets for kids. Luckily they live in NYC, and eldest one is now allowed to subway around, go to places as long as he follows the general guidelines set by my sister. That being said, he tells me how nobody else in his class is allowed to do the same, and their parents basically take them everywhere. At the end of the day, he still goes and plays Fortnite with his online friends anyways though.
It is definitely different from my childhood where even as an 8 year old I remember going to school by myself, hanging out in the neighbourhood with friends and etc. Definitely wouldn't blame it on just one thing, as every complex problem, it has multiple contributors.
I think part of it is also that many parents in our cohort were already raised as indoor and car-shuttled kids themselves. Some of us were still roaming around the bush in the '90's but it was already fewer of us than it was 10 and 20 and 30 years before then.
What should we expect of those folk as they become parents themselves? They have no nostalgia to lean on, and if they developed self-confidence and contentment as adults, then they're probably more inclined to refine the way were raised rather than challenge it.
So while media dramatization and fear culture surely played a role in the cycle too, and perhaps the initiating role, generational re-emphasis are probably what let it feel so pervasive and permanent.
I grew up about 10 years after you. I had pretty much free reign to do whatever I wanted. Let me just say that drug use is not an irrational fear. There are very few things to do to keep a 16-18 year old occupied in a suburban town. Drug use is an easy way to keep occupied for many people.
THIS. Back when, I walked to/from kindergarten & elementary school daily. In pretty much whatever weather there was. Usually alone. Mostly along a main-ish residential street. Those walks added up to ~12 miles/week. Pretty much all the other kids at my school did the same; I'd guess the maximum walk was ~15 miles/week.
(Also - this was back when all the kids went home to eat lunch each day, then came back to school. "School lunch" for the few oddballs, who had no housewife mom available, amounted to a few folding picnic tables in a dead-end hallway, and BYO sack lunch.)
Yeah, suburbia is not the problem. I'd much rather live in suburbia than a city. But if you can't go outside on your own, that loses a lot of the benefit.
I grew up in a small-ish town. It was the worst. My street didn't have sidewalks and the only people in my neighborhood were very old. I was raised by a single mother who had cancer for the majority of my childhood. Getting her to take us places, like to see other kids, was awful. Either she couldn't or she just didn't want to. I usually didn't speak between the time I went home from school and the time I arrived the next day. I don't think many people understand that level of isolation, but I definitely believe it was pretty damaging to both child-me and adult-me.
Some people in my life don't understand why I'll never live outside of a city. I kinda feel like it's obvious in retrospect.
I’d love some walkable neighbourhoods in my suburbia. Automotive industry invested heavily to ensure this was so. Dependence on a vehicle in most North American cities is not an accident
I'm going to take a slightly different tack, one that will probably also provide walkable.
We should be transitioning as many neighborhoods to be aligned around the e-bike, which provides a lot more transportation utility, a fair amount more range, but not nearly as much danger to pedestrians, climate impact, etc.
Walkability comes practically for free from such an approach.
The ebike should provide just enough range + concentration to enable the big box store. What is not talked about with walkable neighborhoods is that they are rich neighborhoods with rich people that don't mind paying twince Walmart costs.
Especially post-covid-inflation, this won't fly. You need SOME big box scale.
Because no one talks about the bodega in the slum. There's lots of poor neighborhoods with expensive bodegas that are poor people's only options. People do not rave about that.
Because if you want your kids’ peers in school to mostly be from households that earn a similar or higher income than your household, the best way to do that is to move to a school district with the biggest lots and homes you can afford, thereby ensuring the population of the school is made up only of people who can afford all the space and driving.
It is literally what makes “good” school districts “good”, the household incomes of the student population. And moving to a suburban place filters that nicely. Same reason why residents will often times oppose apartment developments, since they allow lower income residents to move into the district.
Because almost without exception these neighborhoods were built a long time ago, are closer to the city center and are the most expensive in the city. Until a few years ago it was possible for upper middle class like the dear readers of HN to afford these neighborhoods in middle tier cities like Boise, Austin, Denver, Nashville, etc. but now even those are out of reach unless you are wealthy or willing to pay most of your income in mortgage AND have two working parents.
Because people doing that is why this will never change. Every time someone leaves the suburbs for the city, a vote in town elections goes with them. Every time, it becomes less likely that zoning or other local laws affecting land/property use will change. The only way to make the suburbs better, to turn all of these urban-design principles we all know so well into reality, is for more people to stay and fight.
"Move to the city" (or any other already-walkable place) is part of the problem, not the solution. For one thing, people won't do it en masse. Even if they did, those too-few places would become even less affordable, plus their power/water/waste infrastructure would get strained beyond breaking. It's a very privileged and selfish position to take. Instead, we need to make more such places, reconfiguring and repurposing buildings and other infrastructure where they are and where the people are. And that takes voting power. Don't tell people to throw that away.
Readit News
Because of screens.
We have a forest in our backyard with a 2 story fully enclosed treehouse (including electricity), sports fields within a 5 minute walk, tons of hiking trails, etc. But it is a real struggle to get them to leave the house because they want to be on the Internet 24/7. Of course we take away the devices, but that just leads to them bemoaning their screen less state. One of the problems is, this is taught in the schools. Pretty much every class is using screens constantly. Our local school district recently experienced a hack that made it so they couldn’t use chromebooks for a few days. All the teachers lesson plans were completely centered around devices, so the kids just watched movies all day instead.
No pre-set plan, no parental supervision, just a “I’m going to go meet my friends on this summer day, I’ll be back before dinner.” For purposes of illustration, assume these kids are aged 9-14, or thereabouts. Too young to drive, too old to be doted over every minute of the day.
If you would (and I hope you would!), would their friends’ parents? Would they be able to go casually knock on their friends’ doors (or even neighbors’ doors), be it biking or walking, and socialize, like kids do?
My guess is probably not. And that’s not the kids’ doing— that’s OUR doing. If parents really wanted their kids to go outside and explore, that would be the norm. But for far too many kids it’s not, because parents don’t want it to be: they’re worried about their kid getting hit by a car, kidnapped, getting in trouble, learning a lesson, the list goes on and on. The built environment reflects that kids are not expected to be outside, as if we’ve kid-proofed it. And so even if you want your kid to play outside, no one else is, and of course no kid wants to play alone!
Ironically, you would probably see more kids out and about, safe to be kids, in gasp New York City than in “safe” suburbia, from my own anecdotal experience.
There’s a world out there far and beyond whatever bubble you’re in. My daughter (6) can go out back on the playground or practice archery or whatever. My next-door neighbor (next-door in the original, pre-app sense) has a dirt bike track for his handful of kids (5+ and up)
I’ve got all kinds of neighbors with kids doing all the old things we did pre-Black Mirror in the pocket.
Don’t get me wrong, I FIGHT like a… expletive, with my kids about screen time to a degree that my folks and older siblings laugh about given I’m a self-taught teenage hacker.
But kids and communities with “go do shit” old-er school norms exist outside of the big cities.
I chose to live in a more urban area of Seattle (Ballard) because I want my now 1st grader to be able to do things when he is a bit older. Still not as nice as Tokyo, but it could be a lot worse if we lived further north or on the east side.
> My guess is probably not. And that’s not the kids’ doing— that’s OUR doing.
It's parent's doing both because of their regulations. It's also parent's doing because parents choose to live in suburbia / pay a premium to do so. If parents paid premiums to live in dense urban neighborhoods, more would be built / development patterns would change.
It's weird. As I said... we live in an inner city (we're 1.5 miles from downtown core of our west coast city). You'd think our streets were busy, but ... they're less busy than the suburban street I grew up in. Here's the difference.. in a city. Few people drive. There are certainly main thoroughfares that are very crowded (my kids are not allowed to cross the large streets themselves). But within our neighborhood, bounded by large streets, the streets are really tiny and there's few drivers. My house is actually quieter than the suburban street I grew up on. It's silent at night. Cars are the noise, not people. People are quiet.
So that is to say... Yes it's parents fault. But parents are responding to their built environment, not any internal moral failing. The main issue is that parents are unable to understand the consequences of suburban living.
Last year both my kids and a bunch from around the neighborhood decided to walk back together. They had a roaring good time. School would release at 3. It would be 4 by the time they got back home after stops at the park, jumping across the small creek, etc etc. The big kids went off to middle school so they aren’t walking back anymore. But everyone of them still misses the walk back.
The place where I’m at is surprisingly walkable at least in the 1.5 mile radius enough to get the kids to their local cafe or run errands. The 10 and above kids regularly take off on their own. The phones have location turned on anyway.
What are the odds they would all sit around together, outside, on their phones?
Yes, and recently in USA. A handful of times I had a tinge of worry when they were gone much of the day, and they returned better than I could have planned it. One occasion I recall they hiked to a lake and had packed backpacks with lunches water sunscreen. It was my brain that worried, and a joy to watch the children grow and explore!
The mother next door, apprehensive about rogue police, instructed her children that if they see the police to run home and don't stop. There is no recourse when the cops crack skulls, so it's best to stay out of their grip.
It’s a class/culture issue rather than an urban planning issue. I grew up in a car-dependent suburb in the 1990s, and in the summer I used to spend all day roving around the neighborhood with the neighbor kids. Kids in the same suburb don’t do that today, because parents are more protective, kids are glued to screens, etc.
The parents are practically committing a crime if they let their kids do this.
> more kids . . . New York City
Or any big city. Even in wealthy neighborhood.
In the suburbs you almost never see kids outside without an adult present.
As a kid grown up in the smartphone era (I’m 18 now), these words of yours hurt my soul. Me and all of my friends are smartphone addicts. Everyone I know are using their smartphone as much as the rest of their life allows. But ofc, your brains are not messed up enough, so you don’t understand and you’re gonna just let your be consumed by it.
Seriously, go read the works of the world-renowned psychologist Jonathan Haidt. https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/
I’m deeply sorry with every person whose life is literally wasted for that sweet $1/user/month ad money.
I cannot express my sadness for the next generation who are literally born into it and grow up with YouTube Kids. Thank God at least I lived about 12 years of real life.
Kids are curious and stimulation-receptive and motivated, and so they're going to chase easy sources of those things.
Parents, meanwhile, can either work to balance the easy sources with other sources that might enrich them in novel ways (like going outside or being bored), accepting that their kids may not buy into the idea, or they can defer to their child's sense and avoid tantrums and defiance.
It seems like kids turn into adults either way, but the choice is ultimately one being made by the parent, not by the availability of screens per se. The easy stimulation is omnipresent. That ship sailed about 100 years ago. As a parent caring for kids (and a person caring for yourself!) you ultimately have to figure out what you want to do about it.
Screens today provide a bottomless pit of content for kids. At a parent, yes I have to limit my kids time or they'd just do it 24/7. People talk about letting their kids figure out how to moderate themselves, but either I'm doing that wrong or (perhaps more likely) that just doesn't work the same for every kid.
Not "endlessly." 30 years ago, in the suburbia being decried, I had a bike and friends my age in the neighborhood. You called to see if they wanted to go do something, or went down the street and knocked on the door. And this was in a time (1990s) when the country's violent crime rate was about double what it is today, but there was no social media and 24-hour news doomscrolling making parents paranoid.
It's possible to some extent. Different parents will have different levels of ability and success.
This is relevant (but difficult) advice for individual parents, but it's a minor point if we're discussing society. People (parents and kids) exist in an environment. "Just going out to play," isn't part of the world/environment/culture. The way kids/parents did thing differently in the past was by existing in a different culture.
Easy Vs hard stimulation is one paradigm, but you can't just view everything through this lens. Life is more complex. There are looping and knotting causal relationships and we can't know all of them. It's a complex.
Life is just very screen based. Ours and theirs.
They study via screens, and don't really know how to "do school" analogue. Social life is, largely through screens... and increasingly part of the media spectrum. Work will, eventually, be screened-based. So are life's administrative tasks.
Plus, there needed to be something interesting on schedule which was completely outside of my control.
It took some patience and some trust in own abilities w.r.t. a long-term goal.
Screens are much more compelling than playing outside. Kids are still using their imaginations but they're playing in a much more powerful sandbox. And, at the same time, outside is actually getting less compelling.
It's not healthy -- probably both in a physical and mental sense -- but the solution is far from just taking away screens. Society is structured around this now.
So much this. When I was a kid (late 70's), I could count on going outside and finding other kids to play with. Or if I didn't find anyone, I'd ride my bike around until someone came outside. Or, I could even simply knock on my friend's door and say "Can Robert come out and play?" and this was completely acceptable.
I'd love to send my kid outside to play, but he'd just be wandering around by himself. Knocking on a friend's door (though he knows a same-age kid two doors away) would be considered out of bounds nowadays. Any kid get-togethers must be carefully arranged ahead of time with at least one adult monitoring the "playdate."
I enjoy a nice stroll in nature as an adult, but I would have been bored out of my mind as a kid. Sports never appealed, and treehouses are even more boring than sitting in a room with no internet.
What I liked doing was mall walking, or walking through busy cities. But my parents would rarely take me to do that. So I was "lazy."
I just could not be motivated to travel 40 minutes to an event, and Xbox Live was an equivalent surrogate
Move on campus in the middle of things and I’m out almost every day. Keep everything in walking distance and I’m very social in person. We’ll see if suburbs ever appeal to me, more likely would have to be a reimagined version of the concept.
Humans are social beings. We are motivated to do things through our peers doing things. What you describe is probably really nice for people who enjoy exercise and spending time in nature. But for social beings, what you are describing is absolute isolation from society.
I would posit that a big part of what glues the kids to the screen is that the screen is a window to the real world. When they look into the screen, they have an endless stream of other people, expressing opinions, doing things, existing in society. When they look outside, there's no society, there's no people. It's just trees.
The internet has become sort of a "third place", but since it has no precedent, none of us knew how to leverage it as such, so we have people glued to screens.
I have hope for the generation after gen Z though - my toddler knows exactly when I'm looking at my phone instead of giving her attention and in such instances proposes that I put it away.
It's very much like my generation annoyed at their parents who watch TV all day instead of interacting.
But come summer, I take him to a small Spanish port town. It has beaches where teens can surf and spearfish. There's always an available pickup game of soccer or basketball, even at midnight. Bars and restaurants one can walk to, and complete independence, barring budgetary constraints. The area that in the US has a dozen teenagers, over there has about 300 or so. Suddenly it's not all screens, because there are competing alternatives. Want to go play DnD poolside with the nerdiest of the lot? No need to ask anyone.
Suburbs don't force kids into being alone in front of screens, any more than they force adults to be lonely and asocial. But they so do change the level of effort required to do anything else.
Why? Because we limit the time they spend on screens.
Very, very few people have this. Sounds like you have your own "third place" that the neighborhood kids can leverage, and which provides a compelling alternative to screens.
What’s the point of a treehouse if they just play by themselves? Also, no child is going to walk on a trail by themselves for fun. Same with a sports field. lol. Get realistic dude.
Suburbia sucks. I grew up in it. My childhood was spent playing video games, going to school, socialize/learn, maybe after school sports, go back home, study. Weekends were a bit rough. Usually just stuck with parents. Had a park within 15 minute WALK. But friends lived in diff suburb so it was at least a 40 minute walk (maybe 15 min by bike). Occasionally parents drive me to friends house, but again mostly just to play games (this is an era where play over internet was not feasible or widely available).
Also the suburbs were a bit dangerous to walk or bike in. Cars zooming up and down streets with reckless abandon. Worse during commuting. I imagine it’s worse today with the massive compensators that exist on the road now.
I was essentially a prisoner up until I was able to get my learners permit and start driving.
> Because of screens.
Your kids. Not mine, who predated screens. There was nowhere to go. They could walk to the neighborhood entrance. They could walk back. They could do that again.
Past that the choices were walking along a thruway easement or risk trespassing charges by being anywhere else.
Not just my kids. I spent >20 years in leadership in scouting and youth programs, 1990s onward. I worked with a LOT of kids. When they weren't in home/school/extremely-supervised-structured-and-typically-not-free-activities, those kids stayed mostly home because there was nowhere for them to go.
Most.
Kids.
Have.
Nowhere.
To Go.
The entire human history of kids having peer-only time to learn negotiation, compromise, ambition, boundaries, loyalty, conflict resolution, basically learning how to think has been replaced with ceaseless adult supervision or being shut away.
Parenting time has increased 10-fold and that heavy-handed excess is supposed to somehow replicate their most critical learning time - the exact space where children become people.
It doesn't. It can't. Five seconds of considering it makes that plain. We've illegalized childhood and substituted the most counterproductive thing we could find.
Screens really aren't the cause of a catastrophe that began taking shape generations ago.
I've noticed that my kids will go outside more when I walk the dog more. They either join me or go outside on their own.
The same applied when I work in the yard.
There’s also talk in this thread about how we’ve designed the outside to be kid-unfriendly. Let’s think for a second about how we design our home spaces inside to have screens all around. I’d wager that if you could walk into any house in suburbia, 90%+ will have a massive flat screen hanging in the main living space. Not only that, but all the chairs are aimed to face it! It’s the focal point and THE activity to be done in that space. Some houses will have screens in nearly every room. A screen in every pocket and maybe some portable screens too! With so much priority put on these screens and when parents, grandparents, friends, etc all spend a majority of their waking life on them, what is a kid going to mimic and learn is acceptable?
We definitely still struggle with screen time for our kids. They’re getting much better about turning it off without tantrums, but we only have one TV in our bedroom (rarely turned on), an iPad, and our phones. We try to watch TV or movies together rather than having a screen on in the background or relying on a screen to entertain our kids while we go off and do something else. All that said, our oldest (4 y/o) reads chapter books like there’s no tomorrow because she sees my wife and I read physical books. We also frequent the library often where she can have some independence to wander and find what interests her to bring home. Parent friends always make remarks about how smart she is and how they wish their kid would read more, but they can’t get them to stop wanting to watch TV or the tablet… but we’ve been to several friends’ houses and they always have a TV on nonstop and they themselves don’t read any books.
But..do you have their friends in that space? I’m not naive I realize a lot of kids actually just want to TikTok, but “go hiking” isn’t a valid alternative. Kids want friends and unstructured time with them not beholden to their parents ability to drive them somewhere.
I hear people complaining about the lack of iPads due to low school funding. I'm thinking this might be a good thing. IMHO tablets are the worst case scenario, they're made for pure consumption. Keyboard input on screen is bad, productive software is limited - these are machines made for pure consumption of media.
We all consume enough media nowadays. If you teach programming on proper laptops/desktops, or how to use spreadsheets, and writing text on computers, I get that this is useful knowledge. I just can't think of anything you need to teach with a tablet in school. And I think we should also not allow phones in school, it's just too damn entertaining. Adults barely are able to unglue themselves from their phones, we need to create a distraction free zone conducive for learning.
What's the problem exactly with taking their devices? They cry and complain, so? People resist change, but they eventually get used to it.
We're trying like hell to slow the onslaught with my son, but the kids make fun of him because "you don't even play Roblox" or whatever.
The public schools are all in on screens, at least where we are. They literally issued my kindergartener a Chromebook and expect us to do 30 minutes a night on the apps they recommend. It's really disheartening.
It’s connection they are looking for. Nobody wants to play in big backyard treehouse alone. At least the screens let them talk to other people or at least pretend to.
Having a house in a suburb where kids can’t walk to anybody they have connections with isolates and pushes them to the screens.
Our streets have become hostile to anything but cars.
Not Just Bikes video on suburbia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw
Not entirely true. When kids used to go outside, they went alone outside since the age of 6 or even 5. That is impossible now. In order for kids to go outside, an adult must be there with them. That is adult bored on playground, cant cook, cant clean, cant socialize with friends, cant have fun. So adults wont go.
And then by the time kids are allowed to go outside, they dont know what to do there, other kids are not there and they are too old.
Compared to nature and fields, a stimulating place to hang with friends around lots of other people gives a sense of independence and is a stronger draw for most.
Problem solved.
Can't this (admittedly blunt) technique translate to contemporary situations ?
I grew up with Nintendos and such, even the handheld gameboys, so I always had screens available to me.
But my friends and I went outside and met up and rode our bikes all around town all the time.
Because it's illegal in most of North America (especially when you consider where people actually live) for them to leave the house. That is the beginning and end of it.
If this answer isn't blindingly obvious to you, you are part of the problem. Either you don't notice it because you're more focused on being angry about "suburbia" than you are the objective well-being/freedom of your own children, or you actively encourage it because you think it's a net good (either because you're paranoid, because you're a victim of misinformation, or because you're a concern troll).
Things are safer than ever before yet most children have fewer rights and ways to develop available to them than at any point in recorded history. Sure, there might not be any place for them to go to exercise that freedom, but if you legalize it they'll eventually start coming back.
As for now, keep cheering on the arrests of children playing on their own front lawns. The reason suburbia exists in the first place is because that's the place your kids are maximally safe from this while still allowing you to be sufficiently gainfully employed, and making that way of life slightly more aesthetically acceptable to childless apartment-dwellers will do nothing to fix this.
Karen delenda est.
> Because it's illegal in most of North America (especially when you consider where people actually live) for them to leave the house.
It is not illegal in most of North America, if you consider the USA (not sure about Canada/Mexico), only three states have laws that make it actually illegal. Consider:
> Washington doesn't have a state law that dictates whether children can or can't be left at home that's dependent on age, according to Seattle-based law firm Elise Buie Family Law. In nearby Oregon, though, the law states the child must be at least 10 years old to be home alone.
Or California, which has alot of people:
> In the state of California, there is no legal age stipulated on when a child can be left home alone or allowed to walk outside alone. There is a law, however, that children 6 years old and younger cannot be left alone in a car.
So for the west continental coast we have Oregon until 10...and in California if a car isn't involved no constraint. Oregon is just one of three states with actual laws on the books:
> Three states legally require kids to be of a certain minimum age to be left on their own for some time: Illinois (14 years old) Oregon (10 years old) Maryland (8 years old)
I'm not sure Maryland is being unreasonable here, but Illinois and Oregon probably are.
It's one thing to be poorly designed, it's another to be socially isolated with no one to talk to.
Like I was always planning on putting my kids in public school. I got a great education in them.
But now I'm wondering if I'll be forced to hunt down a school that avoids screens as much as possible. I've heard good things about Waldorf schools but the vaccination rates at those schools freak me out even more.
(Not to mention I've seen some terrible examples of educational software that is so buggy and unusable that it's actively hindering learning, making students feel stupid when they would've been fine with traditional methods.)
Forced timeout almost never works. It merely reinforces their craving for what has been taken away from them.
I'm being facetious, but maybe not really...
If you buy construction/plumbing/electrical/etc labor, surely you have seen prices skyrocketing.
Dead Comment
Fremont has begun doing some of these trendy concepts that are mentioned in the article, but when I grew up none of these ideas had been implemented. I socialized with other kids and rode bike around the neighborhood. As a pre-teen, we socialized in the street and at each other's houses. As a teen I was not really restricted in where to go and there are plenty of neighborhood parks and libraries to hang out at.
None of the article's critiques of suburbia ring true to me with respect to Fremont. If you are seeking nightlife as an adult, you might feel it is a wasteland. But for children growing up I'm not seeing a problem. Part of that is that most of the city can be navigated without ever being on an arterial. Part of that is that most of the city was developed during an era where neighborhood parks could be mandated. Part of that is the city was master planned when it was small and they foresaw today's population.
It is true children spend less time outside than they used to. Part of that is fear; when my kids were young, I didn't trust that strangers wouldn't be a problem if they were outside the house. But right or wrong, that fear is worsened by the proposed changes to how suburbs are laid out, not improved.
The reasonable fear there is helpful citizens + media bullhorning false stranger risk + police bullhorning false stranger risk + just one overzealous officer = recurring CPS visits (and/or neglect charges if officials feel feisty).
When did I stop going out? When there was dialup internet and MUDs.
The absolute number of pedestrian deaths has been plateaued for 50 years despite the population size increasing: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...
60% of pedestrian deaths occur on high capacity urban roads. Kids in light residential neighborhoods don't deal with those roads. Tell your kids to stay away from heavily trafficked roads.
30% of pedestrian deaths involved a drunk pedestrian. Tell your children not to get drunk.
https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pedestrian_safety/i...
73% of pedestrian deaths occur at night. Tell your kids to be home before dark.
17% of pedestrian deaths were on freeways. Don't walk on freeways!
https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Ped-Spotli...
If you still find yourself worrying despite taking basic common sense precautions, then you should unsubscribe to whatever fearmongering echo chambers you're getting this fear from (reddit and youtube are common sources for this fearmongering I believe.)
I'm American and live in Oz. Australia does this well imo. Small cafes and shops are sprinkled throughout neighborhoods. For any large grocery runs, I need to take my car but day to day basics (and more importantly...coffee) are within only a few minutes walking distance.
Even in (relatively affluent, semi-inner) Burwood East many of the old strip shops have been converted to non-regular or non-retail businesses (e.g kitchen showroom, accountant, baked goods wholesaler). You'd need to go up to Kmart Plaza to get groceries or coffee.
Contrast this to urban-sprawl created suburbs like Marsden Park and a few of the Hills district burbs and it's the opposite - barely any public transport and next to no community infrastructure.
There's a good channel on YT that documents this sort of stuff here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDhbm-t3dXU
We really need to do more to bring pedestrianisation and walkability out to the cheaper areas rather than having them be a luxury for the rich.
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I live in the northern beaches area of Sydney and a "knockdown rebuild" can go for roughly $2m-3m AUD ($1.3-1.9m USD). I struggle with real estate prices here.
I did, until I was at a certain age (roughly early teenager).
Then, there were a bunch of news shows talking about men driving around in brown vans abducting kids. Or kids just smoking pot at the parks.
So I stopped being let to go there without adults. And that's about the time that we got a computer with a modem and I discovered online games...
I don't know what happened between then and now. I don't have kids so I don't know how people make decisions about them. I know a big part of it is fear of child abductions and getting hit by cars. I think it's just an irrational fear of those things (or bullying or using drugs) that slowly led to tightening the leash on kids. Today I rarely see kids doing anything in public without a helicopter parent within 50-ft. One of the middle schools I drove by allows one child to leave the door, go straight to their parents car, before the next car pulls up. They aren't even allowed to walk home unsupervised.
My parents are horrified when I suggest that their grandchildren should have the same freedom to roam around that they gave us.
They believe the world is more dangerous than ever even though murders, violent crime, child abductions, and car accidents peaked when we were kids. And we didn't have cellphones to check in or call 911 with.
It's baffling.
Not sure what to take from it. But it's very sobering to see how much damage is being done that way.
[0] At least I presume that's where it came from. The news was on every single day in that household and it certainly felt like some kind of twisted suffering and misfortune porn.
It is definitely different from my childhood where even as an 8 year old I remember going to school by myself, hanging out in the neighbourhood with friends and etc. Definitely wouldn't blame it on just one thing, as every complex problem, it has multiple contributors.
What should we expect of those folk as they become parents themselves? They have no nostalgia to lean on, and if they developed self-confidence and contentment as adults, then they're probably more inclined to refine the way were raised rather than challenge it.
So while media dramatization and fear culture surely played a role in the cycle too, and perhaps the initiating role, generational re-emphasis are probably what let it feel so pervasive and permanent.
(Also - this was back when all the kids went home to eat lunch each day, then came back to school. "School lunch" for the few oddballs, who had no housewife mom available, amounted to a few folding picnic tables in a dead-end hallway, and BYO sack lunch.)
Some people in my life don't understand why I'll never live outside of a city. I kinda feel like it's obvious in retrospect.
We should be transitioning as many neighborhoods to be aligned around the e-bike, which provides a lot more transportation utility, a fair amount more range, but not nearly as much danger to pedestrians, climate impact, etc.
Walkability comes practically for free from such an approach.
The ebike should provide just enough range + concentration to enable the big box store. What is not talked about with walkable neighborhoods is that they are rich neighborhoods with rich people that don't mind paying twince Walmart costs.
Especially post-covid-inflation, this won't fly. You need SOME big box scale.
Because no one talks about the bodega in the slum. There's lots of poor neighborhoods with expensive bodegas that are poor people's only options. People do not rave about that.
It is literally what makes “good” school districts “good”, the household incomes of the student population. And moving to a suburban place filters that nicely. Same reason why residents will often times oppose apartment developments, since they allow lower income residents to move into the district.
"Move to the city" (or any other already-walkable place) is part of the problem, not the solution. For one thing, people won't do it en masse. Even if they did, those too-few places would become even less affordable, plus their power/water/waste infrastructure would get strained beyond breaking. It's a very privileged and selfish position to take. Instead, we need to make more such places, reconfiguring and repurposing buildings and other infrastructure where they are and where the people are. And that takes voting power. Don't tell people to throw that away.