Discussion
The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
spicyusername: I don't know. Maybe this is going away in some places, maybe I just have my own anecdata, but my kids play outside unsupervised all the time, as do all the kids in my neighborhood.I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of small Metro. Nothing special about it at all.Every time I see one of these articles I always wonder who they're talking about.I always feel like this is just one of those news headlines that won't go away, but isn't quite tethered to reality, but people really like to feel bad about modern life and so we keep talking about it as if it's real. I suspect the real reason kids aren't playing outside, if there is one, is not because they can't, it's because they choose not to. Just as adults are no longer choosing to go to third spaces. Screens came for everyone.
roxolotl: I’m reasonably convinced this explains basically everything currently attributed to social media, for children at least, and likely can also help explain some concern around birth rates and child rearing costs. Starting with the satanic panic the US has slowly closed down children’s lives because of concern that terrible things will happen to children if not continually under supervision. And the true is that yes sometimes bad things happen and have always happened. But if you look to many other countries they do not have the same extreme expectations of parents or the state to keep children’s lives locked down.
lmf4lol: this resonates a lot. I am not sure how to handle this though. Next to our house (500m), the city government established a camp for “asylum seekers”. 100 men. Men only. How can I reasonable let my pre-teen daughters roam freely now? Id love to, but my gut feeling doesnt allow me to.Maybe, back in the days, it was just a different time? A more high trust society that worked well?Nowadays, we have news stories, where 70 year olds get stabbed by youngsters because they got lectures on their bad behaviour. When I was young, I had respect towards a 70 year old. Big time. Never would we have thought to pull out a knife…Life changed a lot in recent years and not for the better on all dimensions.Europe is still pretty save though. At least if you trust the statistics
jl6: It’s easier to let kids play around the neighborhood when you know who the neighbors are.
xtiansimon: My free range childhood friends and I would have been all _get bent_ to that lady—even at 6 yro. I can tell you this because I was also getting a whooping at home from da for saying the same to my ma. I was a dreadful child.
homeonthemtn: I think this is more a data point towards the quiet disappearnce of community / the steady march towards pervasive isolation
techjamie: Statistically, we live in the safest society we ever have. We see a lot of bad stuff happening because news reporting travels further and faster than ever before, amplifying the perception tge world is going to shit.Plus, now, basically every kid is running around with a phone that gives them access to talk to the police or their parents at any time. So it's going to be a lot riskier for someone to try anything against them. Even then, between 80-90% of sexual assaults are performed by people the victims already know, and around 30% of those are relatives of the victim.
scelerat: My biggest fear of letting my young kid play alone outside is getting hit by a car.
metalman: here in Canada, social service "baby snatchers" have destroyed basic community cohesion and along with many other wildly out of control beurocratic policing forces, such as the spca making having animals a huge liability, litteral special subdivisions, chicken police, horse police, and an enacted rock police to prevent the totaly illegal practice of picking rocks off a beach, but hey it is legal to pack granma into the back of a motor home and drive her to the government canabis store, get her wrecked, and then take her in so she can ask to be euthanized. cant make this shit up as they say.
trallnag: Does the term "satanic panic" also apply to the EU restricting internet access for the youth?
rayiner: This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie places reporters live. I dropped my daughter off at the mall to hang out with their friends and one of the moms followed them around the whole time. They're all 13!
neogodless: When I was a kid I was taught not to walk in the street.When you walk, you go in the opposite direction of cars and can see them coming and, if necessary, move off to the side more.I know it's survivorship bias, but it worked for me.Now I get that population density is increasing, and probably so is traffic. Though so are automatic safety features that cause cars to brake rather than hit things.Are there statistics on vehicular fatalities in suburbs?
ocdtrekkie: I remember when I was a kid I would bike to a park around a half mile away by myself, definitely before I was 13, and I admit it feels weird to suggest a kid can go to the park down just a single block alone today.The funny thing is it'd be safer: Kids have cell phones now by like 7 or 8 in a lot of cases and can call for help! Back when I was that age if I got injured or something I might've had to knock on strangers' doors!
shrubble: I think it’s the importation of men from countries where rape is seen as natural and not illegal that’s the key concern here…
Loughla: Correct. There are no communities anymore, just groups of houses. You see it in the death of social and civic organizations, churches, and other community groups.Everybody is an island. I don't know what has caused this, but it seems like it's happening in most 1st world countries. Anyone have insights about this?
amazingamazing: > my kids play outside unsupervised all the time, as do all the kids in my neighborhood. I live in just a regular suburban neighborhoodYour kids are hardly free-range. Let me guess, there's no way for them to actually meaningfully leave the area? It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and saying they can do whatever they want. hardly free-range in the way described in the article.Presumably you live in a suburb for the reasons the person in the article checked in on the free-range kid.
dghlsakjg: Satanic panic was a very specific phenomenon in the US.
delichon: That's why you have an emergency backup child for redundancy in case of failure of the main child.
realo: Wow. Are you for real?I thought this kind of bigotry was only used by far right shit to manipulate feeble-minded people.I'll be generous and assume this comment was not made by a human, but by a bot.
ghaff: The usual contrast being drawn is kids wandering around a suburban area, walking to school, playing with kids in a nearby rural property. It's not hopping onto a bus to the city a few tens of miles away. You do see schoolchildren in Japan on the train by themselves but I'm not sure that's ever been very common in the US.
amazingamazing: there's really no reason American kids in metro areas like SF, Boston, DC, NYC couldn't take a bus 5 miles away by themselves. when one comes up of an actual reason to why, it contradicts real statistics.the biggest things parents should worry about is their kid being bullied by other kids during school, a supposedly safe place, and other family. strangers just aren't the major source of violence towards children.
dghlsakjg: Do you have any evidence or are you just basing your fears on feelings? Has there been a rise in sex attacks associated with this particular refugee housing?You should flip through some newspaper archives from when you were a kid. I don’t know where you are, but I can almost certainly guarantee that there were kids attacking people back then too. Just because you and most you know would never have pulled a knife, doesn’t mean that there weren’t those that would. After all, you say the teens today attack old people with knives, but I really don’t think your teen daughters are stabbing people with knives.How can you reasonably let your teen daughters out alone? Well, be reasonable. Find out if your fears are amped up by sensationalist press. Go meet your refugee neighbours. Quite honestly it sounds like YOU spend too much time inside.
gehsty: As a parent you feel the push and pull of not ignoring your child while also not mollycoddling them. For me let the kid do what they want - if your kid wants to stay home let them, if they want to climb trees and go off on their bike let them. Help them learn what is safe (which rods can they cross), what are their boundaries. Hopefully they get it, maybe they don’t. Don’t restrict access to devices or screens too harshly. Encourage games of any kind. Wear sunscreen.
amazingamazing: most acts of abuse to family members are by other family members. ironically strangers are more likely to leave your kid alone than extended family.
NordStreamYacht: Ah, the Spare. You must be British royalty.
kannanvijayan: I have a 10 year old boy and I'm facing these issues right now. I'm also in Canada so culturally adjacent to the US and similar enough with regards to this topic.I don't see child welfare agencies personally as a particular threat when it comes to this topic. Maybe they ARE more likely to get involved in cases of more free range parenting where before they weren't, but it doesn't register as a real worry.The major difference I see between when I was growing up and now is that when I went out onto the streets, there were other kids on the streets. My parents didn't know exactly what they were sending me out to, but they knew that there as a general crowd of kids that would be out on the street until some point in the evening, and that they would all go home at around the same time, and that's also when you were expected home.The draw of smartphones and video games as indoor entertainment can't be understated, but I can exercise some parental tyranny here and always kick him out of the house to go play like my folks used to do.But there are no other kids out there. I'm sending him out into streets empty of kids.To mitigate this I'm trying to nudge things in the direction of him and his friends forming some sort of after-school crew that finds outside activities to do together, undirected. There are other like minded parents that I've found that are also interested in enabling something like this.On the subject of risks - I strongly believe that the role of parenthood is to mediate a child's exposure to the real trauma of a hostile, often absurd reality that they will grow up into. Controlled exposure to risk, to self-directed decision making in times where they feel like someone won't be there to help them out and they need to figure things out on their own, these are critical requirements in parenting IMHO. And all risk comes with some small chance of tragedy, and that's a burden we as parents have to bear: to expose ourselves to the emotional trauma of the possibility of our children getting hurt, however small the chance, so that they are able to grow into healthy well-adjusted adults.I feel like I have to work a lot harder than my parents did to enable that exposure.
NordStreamYacht: Japan is a monocultural civilisational state. That is a big factor.
garbawarb: American children are in more danger because the country's more diverse?
ButlerianJihad: Welp this week we in Phoenix are dealing with a report of a 17-year-old high school girl who boarded a light rail train (the one with security cameras and guards) and she was harassed and assaulted by a mob of boys on the train, presumably in front of human onlookers; she disembarked, and was assaulted some more.She is now in a neck brace, and her mother is absolutely distraught, saying this is something she cannot fix for her beloved daughter. I am distraught as well that this could happen to anyone at all on the same train that I ride every week.
ghaff: That's a sad story though getting a bit far afield from young kids taking public transit or otherwise traveling away from their homes. At 17 I was in college and taking urban transportation (and flights) all the time.
garbawarb: Do journalists live in bougie places? It's not a particularly well-paying job.
lencastre: and yet everybody is one discoord channel away from everybody else hundreds if not thousands of km away, eager to talk, voice their opinions etc… crossing the street, meet your neighbor, too much hassle
baublet: This is bigotry dressed up as concern. It’s also not something widespread. Seems like you just think immigrants are rapists.
tayo42: Plenty of trouble for a 13 year old in Manhattan. Even if it's not dangerous, you can find your own problems easily enough.
yieldcrv: > and yet Manhattan is safer than most American suburbs[something traumatic happens and 50 people run for their safety]see and as proven, only 1 person was assaulted!
Mordisquitos: >Let me guess, there's no way for them to actually meaningfully leave the area (no train, bus, etc)? It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and saying they can do whatever they want.What do you mean it's like dumping kids on a farm? Are the suburbs really THAT lethally dangerous?Source [22 minutes]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLAfDrFUBkA
xavortm: To his point - I would say, it's a bug factor BECAUSE on average their culture seems more safe. But it's not because it's monocultural. Bad "monoculture" is bad, good one is good, nothing complex there. Simplifying, but that's pretty much what is said
paulryanrogers: Diversity doesn't make places more dangerous (if i understand the stats). But humans are naturally tribal and fear those who look and act significantly different.
mynegation: The only people who find this joke funny don’t have any children.
weakfish: I’m also curious why you write “we in Phoenix are dealing with…”I’ve noticed a trend of people attaching a sort of personal identification with headlines
testing22321: Small town Canada here. In winter all the kids above school toboggan and slide down the roads (GT racers). All the kids below trudge up carrying their slider of choice. In the afternoon the roles are reversed. Not an adult in sight.At the ski hill kids 5+ roam free- it’s always fun getting on the chairlift and a little kid says “ can you help me get on?” And you have to physically pick them up onto the moving (fixed grip) chairlift. There’s no cell service.Mountain bike trails around town are full of groups of kids 5+.My advice: move to a small town, it’s like going back in time in a very good way.
phyzix5761: People hold beliefs based on information they've received from sources they perceive as trustworthy. Maybe the sources they're basing their beliefs on are not so trust worthy or maybe they have a different perspective on events. I'm inclined to say its an issue of trustworthiness because the source is likely news and media and those are created for the sole purpose of pushing specific agendas and narratives.
givemeethekeys: Blame a litigious culture where agencies have far too much power to "fix" other people. People in many places in America live with a fear of losing their children or getting sued and losing everything.
paulryanrogers: Know which of your neighbors have unsecured firearms lying around. Sadly all to common where I am.
MichaelRo: >> But there are no other kids out there. I'm sending him out into streets empty of kids.This. It's a number's "game".My father, born in rural Romania, had 8 siblings, one of them died of an accident in his childhood (yeah, during "free range stuff"). I was born in a town and have 2 brothers. Live in a city and have one kid.I can't send my kid out carelessly because I don't have a backup.
sfifs: Russia is fairly mono cultural too. Is it safe?
procaryote: You can have humour and children at the same time...
zabzonk: > my personal litmus test is if you'd let your 13 year kid explore Manhattan alone during the dayMy parents let me (14) and my brother (9) explore central Paris on our own when my Dad was working at the Paris air show for the RAF. No problems at all even though this was just after the student protests in the 60s, and so things were a little tense.I think Manhattan would be OK too, though I've only been there as an adjust. Certainly, you see kids running around London.
