When the kids were babies we had the standard debate of move to the countryside for fresh air and gambolling in the fields etc. But so glad we stayed in London, the kids have so much freedom with public transport they can organise their own meet ups and activities and go running around all over town without any parental assistance or intervention at all. Whereas elsewhere we'd need to drive them everywhere, they'd be stuck at home way more, they'd have no real agency in their lives - I grew up like that and hated it.
You're more thinking suburban, or super rural. I grew up in a rural Welsh town (~3000 people), and was is walking distance of basically everyone we knew. I walked to school, to the pool, to the shops, my friends, everything.
Same, somewhat bigger town but it had everything within walking or cycling distance, it was only when I was 17 or so that I had to cycle to the next town over for school. But small towns are emptying out too, a lot of aging, elementary schools are merging and closing, local shops and amenities are closing down. The town used to have a bank, post office and police station, but banking and mailing changed to the point where it was no longer viable to have those services in town.
There's a middle-ground between a big city and full countryside.
I lived my childhood in a place with about 4000 people in it. School, friends and everything else I needed was within walking, or at least biking distance. My parents didn't have to drive me everywhere. Obviously there weren't as many possible hobbies and events as in big cities, but mobility wasn't an issue.
Smaller cities with about 40k-200k inhabitants can also be a nice sweet spot: big enough to have a decent number of events and hobby opportunities, small enough that you have low-traffic sidestreets within walking distance of the city center, and nature is still very much in reach
Assuming a European city layout where a city center exists and the 200k inhabitants aren't all spread out into suburban sprawl. Suburbia quickly kills the idea of walking and biking distances
I live in suburbia in a sprawling European city of 200K inhabitants, and design can fix a lot of that. The neighbourhoods are designed like little towns themselves, each having stores, schools, day cares, sports / leisure activities, restaurants and other businesses of their own, as well as playgrounds and nature areas which are often used by local youths to build shelters and play in.
The old city center - museums, historical buildings, big library, cinema, theater etc - is a longer trek, but still doable in ~20 minutes cycling. Plus there's trains and buses.
TL;DR, suburban doesn't mean it should kill things being in reasonable distances. However, big caveat, it's all kind of built in a compact way; garden space is often limited (total ground is usually 2x the house itself, so 50m2 ground floor space + 50m2 garden), roads are narrow (but this is good because it's bike / pedestrian optimized, cars can't go fast), etc. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinex-location for a superficial description, or look at a map of Dutch suburbs or houses (https://www.funda.nl/) to see what it's like.
The other comments already pointed out that there is plenty to do for kids growing up in villages - it's not until they're teenagers that it becomes limiting, really (speaking from personal experience and what I was told by friends who also grew up in the countryside).
Funny that you're talking about having to drive them everywhere though, because the main worry I have as a parent is the impact of car traffic on child safety.
I grew up in a Dutch village of 1500 people, and my parents let me wander about from when I was five, six years old or so. If I still lived there I would feel completely comfortable with giving my child the same freedom (once she's old enough - she's only a toddler now).
The main reason for that is that there is only one road that goes through village. Everything else is a street (see the wiki page on "stroads" for a clarification about the distinction [0]). And anyone driving through the village knows there might be kids playing there.
Contrast that with where I currently live: in apartment block in a city that is right next to a crossing of two stroads. We actually have very nice parks and playgrounds within walking distance. But to get here we have to cross at least one road or stroad. The thought of letting a six year old do that by herself scares me.
On a rational level I'm aware that this is probably my sheltered upbringing and that she will understand the dangers of car traffic better than I did at the age of six because she's growing up in a city, but I can't help but worry that she'll underestimate it until she's a bit older - a voice in my goes "it doesn't matter how often she does do it right, she only has to absentmindedly cross the road and get herself run over once."
I dunno - I have a seven year old whom I try to allow to be as feral as possible. We let him go alone to the neighborhood park, which requires seven small residential street crossings. But I would hesitate also about a multi-lane stroad if there wasn't a lot of pedestrian traffic. Kids are small and cars have gotten huge and drivers are very distracted, especially post-pandemic.
(We're in the US, and I draw the line at letting him cross ordinary 25mph residential streets but not the "25mph" artery road on which many of the drivers go 40mph. It's only one lane in each direction but there are no lights or crossings and the effective speed is quite high.)
That seems like a sensible cut-off point. You would probably (and probably rightfully) laugh at what I consider a stroad in the Swedish city of Malmö where I live, with traffic lights and zebra crossings everywhere. Like I said, I know on a rational level that my fear is irrationally heightened from my own memories of being extremely careless at a young age because I safely could be.
Wait, how old are your kids, that they gallivant around London on their own? Are we talking about teenagers?
Because yeah, I agree with you that in that sense cities are better than the often car-centric countryside for teenagers; but for young kids (elementary school and below, which is what the article covers) it's a very different equation.
Not really. I live in Zone 4/5 West London (postcode TW area), and kids as young as I'd say around 9 or 10 are getting themselves to school on buses, trains and tubes every day. Not much different to my day - I was taking myself to school around 7/8 years old living in a small (10k pop.) semi-rural town.
After school they're getting themselves home as well, often in groups causing the traditional nuisance in newsagents and supermarkets (thank god the energy drinks are now not sold to kids!), and going to parks and whatever.
I think they have to be a little older to confidently get their way into Zone 1 on their own if they should need to, but I regularly see youngsters I'd guess are 11-12 years old going into town on their own, clearly to meet friends.
Despite what the media (and for crying out loud, the US President), says, London is actually a remarkably safe city. Murder/homicides are at a low they haven't been at for decades (possibly centuries), and while sexual assaults are rising, that is seen as mostly attributable to more reporting (victims coming forward more). In the case of assault on a child, that's more likely to occur in a family setting than it is in a public place during daylight hours.
I have just done the opposite - left London for the countryside and am currently very much enjoying it. As our toddler gets older it will interesting to see how we deal with the challenges of letting them find their own space.
There's two aspect of "country" relative to somewhere like London. There's an estate in various towns, where there's plenty of actual public space, playing fields and grounds, walk into town, to shops, bus/train to larger towns. Plenty of open space.
Then there's the real country, where there's very little public space - nowhere to ride a bike other than narrow country roads, you can walk but only in restrictive footpaths over fields - some of which are sabotaged by farmers (I file 2 or 3 complaints with the right-of-way office each year as footpaths get blocked, barbed wire put over stiles, etc). We have an open forest area, but it's a 2 mile walk.
There are 4 children in our village at the "local" primary school, across the 7 years. My youngest's nearest friend is 6 miles away - again via 60mph roads. That means having to be driven to places. There is a school bus (which for americans reading is relatively rare in the UK -- you get one upto age 11 if you live more than 2 miles from the nearest school, or 3 miles for 11-16), but that doesn't help for after school clubs.
A toddler isn't going to be independent with travel, so driving them places is fine. In a few years though, you want them to be able to travel and meet friends, go to the shop etc, independently. That's easy enough in a city or in a town, not in the country.
That said, just having that access doesn't mean they will use it. My 13 year old's main social interaction is via minecraft sessions where they have a group call and yell at each other, doesn't matter if someone lives nearby (which one of the group does), or 30 miles away (which another does).
(It's worth highlighting that UK suburbia is very different to US suburbia)
You're right. Personally, now that it's getting wet and cold, I'm getting kind of landlocked by mud. There's one tarmac road out in both directions, but only one of them leads to somewhere that somewhat resembles civilisation, or has pavement.
I can relate. Nice article. We had that same debate and ended up moving to the countryside. Surprisingly, it worked out well. + real forests. With today’s e-bikes, even hills or longer distances aren’t really a blocker for kids anymore. In the end, it feels like the bigger factor is how you organize daily life, not whether you’re in a city or in a rural area.
>With today’s e-bikes, even hills or longer distances aren’t really a blocker for kids anymore
Unlike public transport, with an e-bike, the chances of getting a puncture or a malfunctioning battery increase with usage. Plus, there is also the very common bike theft and road accidents if you live in a country where bikes need to go on the road (like the UK)
We haven’t had a malfunctioning battery in ~40 000km of ebike use in our family. We have one that failed to charge due to age. The number of times we ran out of battery due to forgetting to charge can be counted on one hand. The number of flat tires is in the single digits - modern general use tires are really sturdy, especially if you combine them with sealant.
Serious Q: What is the fundamental difference between a legal and illegal e-bike. This largely is differentiated by the location but I don't know what illegal e-bike means.
Maximum power output and maximum (assisted) speed are generally legislated. In the UK, an e-bike is up to 250 W and 25 kph. More than that, it would classify as a motorbike and you'd need a license (not particularly onerous). The bike itself is often built differently to accommodate the different power profile.
As a pedal cyclist, I feel that's a reasonably sensible limit as much faster than that you should be more experienced as a cyclist to control the bike and anticipate the conditions.
Cities feel riskier, but in many ways they offer more room to grow. Kids don't just need nature; they need space to navigate the world on their own terms
I'm going to get criticism because I feel HN is mostly urban based... but I don't think kids need "cities" to grow. They need nature.
I picture rural/suburban areas that aren't fully built out with small wooded areas , creeks and playground 5-10 minute walk. They need to get dirty, play in water etc.
When I think cities, I think dense urban areas that rarely offer this unless living in a expensive or unique neighborhood (like within 1-2 blocks of Central Park or Prospect Park).
I relate to this as the parent I am and the kid I was.
I went to boarding school in the 80’s and 90’s. There were houses, there was the school, the masters, the usual abuses - but there were also the gangs. They’d all have a name along the lines of “The Orcs” or “The Goonies”, and a clubhouse built of scrap and brush somewhere in the woodland attached to the school, usually accessible only by crawling through tunnels of brambles and a hidden trapdoor, and knowing where the tripwires and murderous sash weights were concealed. Most would have a few dozen boys in them, spread over the five years of the school. Younger boys would be skivvies, diggers, and by the time you were 12 you’d be a war chief, and organising and leading raids against other camps. Old pool cover was a particularly sought after commodity during raids - not only did it keep the rain out, but it kept the place warm in the winters.
Outside of term I’d go and saunter around abandoned factories and rail yards near our home.
Anyway. I think they cut the woodland down decades ago to replace it with more playing fields.
That thing, however - that little, tribal community of kids - is very much live and kicking, but non the west, very much no longer in the physical world.
My kid is being raised in a forest - and I’m acutely aware that sooner rather than later she is going to need a gang.
In the US cars jockey for space with guns to claim the title of leading cause of dead kids.
But we often forget that cars kill kids at an astonishing rate -even though kids stopped playing outside-. In that light, the bloodbath that is American suburbia becomes much more clear. When pedestrian deaths go up even as miles walked (in aggregate) goes down, the situation is even more dire than it seems.
My kids play outside. But we moved to the Netherlands so they could. And even here, large SUVs and even -bafflingly- giant American Dodge Rams are becoming distressingly common.
This is an aside. Yesterday I was in a shopping centre (ie a mall) and a bunch of kids ran through the food court, maybe 10 of them all around the 9-12
A grumpy lady shouted at them "kids you shouldnt be running!"
I turned to whom I was eating with and our discussion could be summarised as "kids should be running. The problem isn't they're running, the problem isn't even directly where they're running. Where they're running is a symptom of them having no where else to run"
No? I grew up in a rural area, with fields and places to run... and run I did.
A nearby huge city had a mall. City being 30k people. Yet left in that mall, with 10 friends, I'd run there too.. until chastised. No real difference 50 years ago, in a rural area with a mall than now.
Groups of kids running tend to bump into things, fall into people, excited kids aren't known for taking care. It's been typical for at least going back to the 50s to stop that.
It's also why kids are typically told to stop running around a house.. and to go outside.
So strongly disagree that it is a symptom of no where else to run. Of course, I find it sad if kids have no place to go run.
I don't disagree with you, but the fact that something has been done since the 50s when it comes to child care is not necessarily an indicator that it's good. We imposed many things on children during that time that would be widely considered damaging and counter productive today.
Telling kids not to run around indoors where they can collide with objects or people, break things, injure themselves, and generally get in the way isn't damaging - or at least is significantly less damaging than the perception in this thread that telling kids not to do something is awful.
This is just standard manners and teaching children how to interact with an adult society. Why does anybody think telling kids not to run indoors is wrong?
It does not even have to be urban areas. We have parks all around the city. Our schools have playgrounds. Everything is still there from when I was a kid, i.e. ~20 years ago.
Kids should be running but not if they cause a nuisance - this is the part not highlighted in the article, societal oversight. When kids are out in the forests they aren't bothering or harming anyone, but when in public they will have to conform to some standards / rules.
"It takes a village" is a well known saying, I've always interpreted that that it's not just the parents that raise kids.
Sorry, but no. You shouldn't be running in crowded areas like food courts (or indoor areas not specifically created for athletics), and playing smug semantic arguments like that doesn't help.
The kids aren't running because they're unable to go outside. They're running because no one's been enforcing that they act within the standards of basic decency.
Kids should be screaming and singing sometimes, but you wouldn't tell someone in the library not to hush them.
> You shouldn't be running in crowded areas like food courts (or indoor areas not specifically created for athletics)
I guess this is a cultural thing, i.e. what is expected of kids. Among my age-group in Eastern Europe (25-30 y/o), we joke around that our parents didn't let us stay in home, which has a lot of truth to it. Once we were out in the city, they didn't even have a idea where we went, and we didn't have mobile phones either. We used to run around everywhere without exception - malls, forests - you name it. That is still expected of kids nowadays, but the kids themselves are far more drawn to the digital world nowadays
> And in Eastern Europe 25-30 years ago, other adults would have no problem yelling at you to behave in their own language/words.
Nobody yelled at us then or even thought that we were doing something wrong. If you would yell at a kid in a shopping mall for running around like crazy - people would look at your weirdly. It was expected of kids to behave this way in my culture, and still is to this day. This may not be the case elsewhere, hence why I think that there is a heavy cultural aspect.
You're right it is cultural, I was thinking more Slavic where bad behavior from other kids isn't tolerated by adults and they have no fear expressing it.
>and playing smug semantic arguments like that doesn't help.
How is it semantic? They go outside and now they are running in a giant parking lot. They go a bit further and now you're a bad parent for not keeping an eye on your kid. Tell them to sit down and play on a tablet and you're also a bad parent.
There's no winning here.
>you wouldn't tell someone in the library not to hush them.
I don't consider a mall the equivalent of a libary in this situation.
Just because this trend of kids having less free play outside doesn't excuse parents of these kids from taking any space they want. Any reasonable person can see there are still boundaries, are we just disagreeing on what those are? Kids still can't/shouldn't run at swimming pools, it's been that way for decades (just an example).
> If you let your kids run around in giant parking lots I would argue you are a bad parent.
> Ever heard of parks?
I remember being bored as hell when my parents used to take me to the city park. Many other kids thought the same, too. I couldn't wait to run around with my friends wherever else in the city afterwards. I'm thankful for my "bad parents" for letting me roam around anywhere I wanted, as was the norm back then for kids where I grew up in Europe
I'm guessing you are talking with someone who is used to life in the North American suburbs, where kids need to be driven around and most of the options for activities are indoors.
There was an interesting plot I saw somewhere reversing the old thing about Halloween being the deadliest day for kids by dividing the number of dead kids by the number of kids on the street on a given day. It turns out that Halloween ends up being by far the safest day per capita.
One of the things I like about some of the overseas malls is they have places designated for kids to run around and play. I've even seen that as a common amenity in restaurants (play room).
The tragedy isn't just that they're doing this online, it's that it's the only place left. We paved over their physical freedom, then panic when they carve out virtual freedom we can't supervise. And ironically, we moralize their digital behavior while ignoring the real-world conditions that pushed them there in the first place
We literally punish them for loitering around anywhere without paying. Or worse, parents are chastised by authorities if they let their kids try to do something on their own.
We really can't be surprised when we close down society and the youth proceed to find the only space not heavily regulated.
> Consider some statistics on the American childhood, drawn from children aged 8-12: 62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult
This is really not representative for other Western countries. Where I'm from, I would say that 75% of 6 year olds walk/bike to school alone, and 100% of older kids do.
> In physical space, Western children are almost comically sheltered.
I think the author should stick with "kids in the USA" when he means that.
> Where I'm from, I would say that 75% of 6 year olds walk/bike to school alone, and 100% of older kids do.
When I was growing up in the 80's in the US, I walked to school alone; but there was institutional support for that. There were adults paid to help kids cross major roads, and there were older children ("safetys") who wore an orange sash, trained and assigned to help younger kids walk to school.
I don't see that same infrastructure here in England. I'd be happy to let my 5-year-old walk to a local school if it were present.
EDIT: To be clear, I said "I don't see...", not "There are no...". It's possible I just haven't noticed, or that it's a quirk of my locality. And, my son doesn't go to a local school, so it's a bit moot; he can cycle to his school when he's older.
There are still lollipop ladies/men (crossing guards, if you will), here and there, but UK roads are nowhere near as dangerous as US roads: smaller cars, lower speeds, most of the roads between you and the school will be 20mph or 30mph limits, and so on.
I'd say even then, five is a little low by UK standards. I think I started walking solo to school when I was about 7 or so. By 11 I was walking a mile to a train station and catching the train 15 miles to another town (nearest Catholic secondary/high school). 5 years old is not far off 7 or 11, but it's a big chasm - be ready for it to go by in a flash! :)
I think a lot of this simply depends on the distance between home and school (or other places kids need to go to) – so it's the difference between a compact city and sprawling suburbs.
Where I live (central Europe), the density of public elementary schools in cities is high, so kids walk there alone. The density of secondary schools is lower, so most kids use bicycles or trams / buses.
Interestingly, there are a few private elementary schools (usually english speaking) for children of expats, where cars queue up in the morning, while parents drop off their children. I've never seen this at public schools. I believe this is because there are only a handful of those schools, so they are further apart – and maybe also because the parents (growing up in the US or UK) are already conditioned that this is a normal thing to do.
Hundreds of 7 year old kids elementary are taking subway to go to school in my neighbourhood here in Tokyo. What you see is an American solution to an American problem.
To be fair, I saw the same in Canada as well, so I understand USA isn’t alone.
Having grown up and gone to school exclusively in the USA I always thought it was crazy how many parents preferred to drive their kids to school instead of having them take the bus. By high school I would guess that less than half of kids actually got to school by bus despite them all being part of the bus pickup network.
In Figure 13, there are some Western countries listed for how much children can roam, and Ireland is indeed near the bottom.
But the Netherlands, Nordics and Germany are still very much on the other side of the spectrum in these studies.
See for instance the books "The Happiest Kids in the World", "Achtung Baby" and "There is No Such Thing as Bad Weather" about raising children in the Netherlands, Berlin and Sweden respectively.
Those places are very much not like the USA yet. Though as the article points out, they are definitely going in that direction.
By the way the rest of the (actual) saying that is the title for the Swedish book is "Only Bad Clothes". In Swedish it rhymes [1] which of course increases its power. I know it from when I was a kid 40+ years ago, and I think both my kids would recognize it or at least get the meaning.
That being said, obviously mobile phones etc are huge and (in my opinion) problematic among kids here, too.
> Those places are very much not like the USA yet. Though as the article points out, they are definitely going in that direction.
In the Netherlands, some things are trending in that direction (e.g. car sizes/hood heights), but I wouldn't call it a general trend; infrastructure, for one, is still massively improving. Where it was bicycle-friendly twenty years ago, it's way more so today, and bound to be even more so tomorrow.
It’s not a foregone conclusion though, in addition to higher and blunter hoods there’s just more cars (over ten million now), and the EU may recognise US safety standards in trade negotiations. Not that the latter matters when you can import violating vehicles (like Dodge Rams) under individual vehicle approval.
The Netherlands is in danger of resting on its laurels and getting complacent. Some places (Hilversum comes to mind) are still quite mediocre.
What an eye-opening article. I fully agree with the fact that the kids become more and more constrained and having a hard time seeking their freedom and independence.
But perhaps not so everywhere in the world... We are in the middle of Europe and specifically moved to a smaller town outside the big city when our kids were born. We live in a kid-rich neighborhood with only quiet side-streets/walkways and amble play opportunities in a 300 m radius around the house. Our kids roamed the neighborhood playgrounds already at a young age with large groups of their friends. And when primary school started (age 6-7), we were told, that it is recommended for the kids to walk without adults to school after the first two months of settling in. Also, being in boyscouts is an amazing experience for the kids. Our little one participated in a first camp at age 6 for a whole week. I am pretty confident they have/had their "forests" to roam.
The older one now games a lot on the computer with a group of friends. The younger one is almost permanently in video calls with friends when not outside the house. Reading about private digital spaces with peer groups makes a lot of sense now...
I admit that our situation is pretty ideal. And it cannot be generalized, not even for our country or even our region. But we did actively seek an environment, where our kids could grow up this way and were incredible lucky to find one.
a bit off but it sometimes feels like a self-reinforcing loop in Western societies:
We have fewer children because we optimize so hard for money, stability, and personal security. But because we have fewer children, each child becomes “economically and emotionally precious.”
And the more precious they become, the more afraid we are to let them take risks, explore freely, or just do their own thing.
The end result is kids who grow up with less independence, less trust in the world around them, and fewer peers out on the streets to learn from.
In a way, our desire for security creates the insecurity we’re trying to avoid — and the cycle keeps feeding itself.
This summarises my thoughts as well. People used to give away children that were too much of a burden. With higher mortality, some were also not expected to make it.
We're in a societal place where we have set the bar high in terms of an expected level of education and quality of life for our kids. kids are expensive and we've grown the population massively. There is also a social stigma associated with having lots of kids in Western countries.
I worry about my kids. But im always fascinated when they stretch the boundaries and show me how resilient they are. So I let them push limits but explain the pros and cons hoping they build their own feedback loops with some sense of perspective.
It's a delicate balance as a parent. I'm consistently fascinated how others parent. It's amazing how changes in parental style can be generational and show how long the changes will take to change.
This is not a standalone loop, it is initiated by external factors which are bigger: De-industrialization of the West, with the social changes it implies (feminism, gentrification, many things including the single-child phenomenon). It will go away if the world changes its equilibrium — maybe with AI — for the better or worse.
Don't you think AI, for example, will just be another facet of de-industrialization? I think the way we are headed now, this loop will only grow bigger...
I think this heavily depends on location. At 7 my child can check nearly all the boxes for independent activities. My wife may not like it, but the surroundings are probably safer than anywhere else in the world. The only thing we don’t have is forests.
This is central Tokyo.
Kids still spend a lot of time on Roblox because everyone tends to be deathly afraid of letting them ring each other’s doorbells.
Seeing tiny tiny kids walking around is one of my favourite qualities of Japanese life, and on the flipside I sensed a quiet but shared responsibility/interest everyone took in making sure no harm befell the child on their journey. One the purest luxuries of living in such a high trust society
I also live in Suginami! There's always a lot of kids running around together, especially after school, but that feels quite normal for anywhere in Japan, no?
I can’t speak to the rest of Japan, but in Tokyo, yes.
Suginami in particular seems to be very kid focused in terms of infrastructure development efforts. 6 years ago the was a wild sprouting of daycare facilities everywhere around, and these days new parks pop up everywhere. They were going to close the nearby jidoukan, and the new major seems to have reversed all of that. Japan is absolutely making an effort to reverse population decline xD
I'm trying to raise confident, independent kids. It is exceptionally more difficult to allow them to play outside on their own, walk to the grocery store, etc, for mainly two reasons:
1. There are no other kids outside. We live in a neighbourhood with many young families, at all age ranges (littles to teen). We rarely see kids outside, and if we do, it's mainly kids walking with their parents somewhere (eg to the local grocery store)
This is a walkable neighbourhood 5km from city centre of a city of 500,000. The same applies to other neighbourhoods even closer to the city, those known as "family friendly". I do runs through these neighbourhoods and they are ghost towns.
When my kid has friends over, they can run to the park up the street (600m) and play together. I'm not worried, as they are together. Sometimes other kids will show up and join them. I think it's a sign that kids are inside, not sure what to do: they crave play with others their age.
2. Large, speeding vehicles.
We live in an area where we can walk to a few smaller grocers and restaurants, which is fantastic. My kids only need to cross a local retail strip to get to most of these. The crossing is two car lengths, and I feel pretty good about this. There are bike lanes which act as a buffer to the sidewalk as well and vehicles can't travel fast.
Now if my kid wants to go to their friends house? They have to cross two arterials. These are four lane roads with fast moving traffic, uncontrolled signals, lots of road rage, fast cuts on corners, etc.
My kids are gaining confidence and the skills in navigating these tough roads, but I struggle with the transition to full independence for this particular area. That one mistake can end it all.
My kids are 9 and 5, for reference. The five year old is still attached to me, but the oldest is beginning to crave more independence.
>Now if my kid wants to go to their friends house? They have to cross two arterials. These are four lane roads with fast moving traffic, uncontrolled signals, lots of road rage, fast cuts on corners, etc.
Well why did you choose to live there if you wanted to raise independent kids. Baffles the mind.
Narrow minded response. Perhaps it was cost, availability of housing?
The neighbourhood I speak of is objectively quite walkable (per my other points). It's just the shape of the city I live in: It contains a number of these arterials which glue the city (for vehicles) together. Less so for humans.
There were reasons for the contrast with Western world. Safety and risk aversion is a major reason. City living means we don't know what the other person on the road is thinking. This was not the case in small villages or tribal settlements. Everyone knows about every move of the others. The whole community is like a single creature with many arms.
The other reason is, prosperity means more affordability to avoid risk and seek comfort. There is no need to take risk, develop, fight for survival or grow up with friction.
A lot of people do think that other people are scary.
The UK has got to the point where a lot of people think parents cannot be trusted with their kids (in an IRL discussion multiple people supported the Online Safety Act on the grounds most parents will let their kids watch porn) let along strangers.
If you read a lot of commentary on urban vs rural living, this is usually the top criticism of living in a small town. I've lived in both, and I much prefer knowing my neighbors.
> City living means we don't know what the other person on the road is thinking. This was not the case in...
I'd explain it this way: City living means that we don't know the other person, and they don't know us. The affects both driver behavior - 99% of people are more careful driving around pedestrians and other drivers who they know - and our perception of driver risks. "Chris who's always lived at 3rd and Cherry" is not some random stranger, to easily stereotype as a threat. Even if we know that Chris is not a good driver. Because humans are biased to judge members of "their" social group by very different standards than non-members.
While the point is valid. I believe the experience described is mostly American not "western".
And I find the anti-modernity sentiment embedded in the fascination with hunter-gatherer cultures obnoxious.
Is the author aware that child mortality in hunter-gather cultures is like 50%?
Not that its correlated with childhood independence, we used to have plenty of independence when I grew up in the 90s and the mortality rate was about the same as it is now. But the point is kids need independence, not woods nor machetes. You can be independent in the park, in the streets, the undeveloped lots, the empty parking lots, your friends basement, and their yard when their parents are away.
As an ex-child. The best years I remember are with a small group of kids who would wander all over the suburb playing at different parks, or whatever crazy idea someone came up with, finding bee hives, climbing trees or exploring past the boundary of what we always stayed inside of. They were only a few years, but a major highlight.
The article only discusses the west and hunter gatherer societies. Most of the world is neither. That is a big omission because it avoids the comparison with other developed and urbanised societies.
> Why do our children spend more time in Fortnite than forests? Usually, we blame the change on tech companies. They make their platforms as addicting as possible, and the youth simply can’t resist — once a toddler locks eyes with an iPad, game over.
> I want to suggest an alternative: digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us
I still think it's the addiction of digital media. I have tried to get my kids to play outside, to visit their friends, etc. They refuse, because they're addicted to the screen. In fact, friends with stricter limits on screen use are more likely to come here looking for my son to play. Outside, or, if they can, on a screen here.
I'm fairly sure the kids from the article can also be made addicted to digital media if you start them young. Let's not, and let's give our kids stricter limits.
3rd grade, the year kids start at 8 and turn 9 during, is when our city schools will allow them to self dismiss. 8 seems like a reasonably benchmark age to start with.
I think that something else changed and should be added to the analysis: the number of children. There are less of them so there are less chances to reach a critical mass that lets kids play together every day. When I was little it was common to have between 10 to 30 of us within the fence of our city building. Parents and grandparents were looking at us from the windows but they were probably hearing us scream and play, a sign that all was good, and we were left alone to do what we liked to do. Where do you find 10 kids together now, if not at a school or in another organized context (organized by adults) ?
Where I grew up, Rural UK, there was a kid my age who lived a mile away. There was noone else for 5 miles. We used to cycle to see each other all of the time, go on adventures. But were always outsiders at school to the kids from areas with more kids, especially those where there was a girl! Another boy moved in once we were older and it transformed our group.
Every other house had older adults in it.
In 1940 you could imagine there would have been many more kids in the local village.
A peer culture needs peers and it's hard to form one when there aren't enough kids around to organically gather and create those little “societies” of play
Walk to the park at the corner, have your child shout a few times, they’ll all pop their heads out of the door at the sound of others playing, desperate to do anything other than sit inside with their parents.
Yes, my mother walked me to one of those parks sometimes but it was a little pointless when I could play with my friends outside my home or my grandparents' home. The kids at the park were strangers. We played together but we did not create any relationship. It was like playing with the other kids while adults were busy inside the restaurant after a marriage. A fun afternoon but it ends there if you don't meet them regularly.
Reading the US 8-12 year olds' stats made me flinch, because as someone grow up in the middle east this is inconceivable. I guess I'll dive into rabbit hole about modern-day stats of Europe and other places to compare.
Same phone addiction in Europe as elsewhere. No way to fight addictive stuff. Most parents don’t even try or care. Add tragic demographics and 8-12 year olds are all alone with their phones.
Let’s talk about special school system here in Bavaria (Germany). Kids from specific area go to same school for the first 4 grades. Afterwards they are divided between little geniuses going into „Gymnsasium“, average ones going to „Realschule“ and good-for-nothings going to „Mittelschule“. For the first years kids move between schools and later between classes according their preferred specialization. No way to make friendships when kids come and go. Obviously there is nobody to play with left. Only reliable phone and games there. And nice videos there. Education system actively pushes kids into phones since real connections can’t happen.
I see lots of negativity here. Folks, do you really believe, that throwing a child into new environment every other year is the way to craft friendships in the real world?
Your scenario paints an overly negative picture. Neither do the majority of the kids move between schools every year, nor do they switch up classes within a school every year. They usually stay with the same class 2-3 years and only switch for individual courses for a couple of hours per week.
You can criticize the way how kids are separated into different levels by 5th grade, but this has nothing to do with being able to find friends.
Furthermore, your argument doesn't make much sense, because the school system is like this way before smartphones even existed and kids were able to find friends back then. It's not like the school system forces them into escapism. Just that smartphones are simply addictive.
> Afterwards they are divided between little geniuses going into „Gymnsasium“, average ones going to „Realschule“ and good-for-nothings going to „Mittelschule“.
I would totally land in Realschule because I had an educational slump in fourth grade.
Over here they tried a similar system - middle school spanning classes 7-9 inclusively, named "Gymnsasium" as well, but it included everyone[0] and I recall having a similar sentiment, thinking: "why shove people around like that? So that we don't form lasting friendships and thus make better worker drones?"
Ironically I'm still in touch weekly with the three guys who were my only friends at the time, even though we live in different cities now.
[0] The split between college material and the rest only happened around high school.
agreed. the whole system is bonkers and screams of elitism. like you are either born smart or you'll never make it. fortunately there is also gesamtschule. which does away with that, there is no distinction between levels. only your grades have to be good enough by grade 10 to make it into the oberstufe (yrs 11-13).
i barely made it through, and i would not have made it without that because neither my parents nor me had any ambitions, so switching schools would not have worked for me.
when i was younger we moved around a lot. different problem but same result, i didn't make any friends in school because we kept witching schools. by the time we stayed in one location it was already to late.
>like you are either born smart or you'll never make it.
That is a bit dramatic. This topic has been talked about over and over. There is no perfect system. Treat everyone the same and high potential kids suffer. Split them up by ability and you get "unfairness" criticisms.
If you look past the cringey, r/im14andthisisdeep edge, Its essentially saying the same thing. A desire for peer communities not available in the physical world.
Plenty of cars in the 90s and we played outside all day.
The biggest change since then is two things.
One is that there’s way more to do inside now, mostly games and shows.
The second is that baseless kidnapping panics convinced society that children can never be unattended. The main vector was daytime TV and now true crime podcasts. The reality is that kidnapping is statistically extremely rare and more than 95% of all child sexual or other abuse is perpetrated by someone the child knows. Most kidnappings are also by someone the child knows.
While I mostly agree with you, cars then and cars now in the US are not the same.
The typical car back then was a 5 door sedan, think ford crown, Chevrolet lumina, etc. These days almost everyone is driving pretty much a light truck.
I'll give you a hint about statistics... there will always be a #1 killer of children. Today it's car accidents, 100 years ago it was disease. After disease it was other accidents, and 100 years from now it will be something else.
Listen I agree with both you and the poster I replied to. What I am saying is that the risk from cars really did increase. Not that it's the only reason that the change happened.
If children were to spend time in digital spaces they should be disconnected from adults (especially the adults who try to prime, turning them into next generation of consumers).
Scary statistics from the US. Here's some anecdotal data from Norway (my daughter being the data, she's 11):
- Walked in a different aisle at a store. My daughter started going to the store alone from she was about 7.
- Talked with neighbours without parent. Uhm. That's just weird. I'm assume she was around 4? That's when we moved here..
- Made plans with friends, yeah, from she was around 5/6 or thereabouts.
- Walked/biked w/o parent: From 6/7, to/from school, and to friends.
- Built a structure outside: She's been part of building various structures in scouts.
- Sharp knife: Since she was about 6 or 7.
And now I realize I need to wag my hands a bit back and forth with all the 6-7 stuff.
Anyhow; one of the best things we did was ensuring she joined the scouts. Creates incredibly independent kids. I've seen threads on reddit where people are wondering if it's OK to leave the 9 year old at home alone for 30 minutes, and I'm wondering what kind of lunacy that is. My daughter has been capable of walking / biking home from school since she was 6 or 7, and proceed to make her own afternoon snack before we arrive home from work. She's been baking since she was 8. Making toasts, omelets and whatnot since the same age. Scouts taught her how to use a gas burner outside when she was about 8 or 9.
Are there any studies on people who grew up with similar isolated childhoods in the 20th century (as in modern-day levels, even comparing with the late 20th declining average)? It would be interesting to see the similarities/differences between them and modern cohorts, and if surrounding culture made adult integration harder or easier (though I'm rather pessimistic on that). Any HNer willing to share a personal anecdote on this?
>They noticed that the children liked to roam through bomb sites, where they would build fires and play hide-and-seek.
This reminded me of one of my all-time favorites, the Animatrix. There is a story in this anthology, Beyond, that centers around this exact concept. I still get goosebumps just from reading its Wikipedia entry.
Well, I think it's fine, building jumbo planes Or taking a ride on a cosmic train Switch on summer from a slot machine Yes, get what you want to if you want 'Cause you can get anything
I know we've come a long way We're changing day to day But tell me, where do the children play?
Well, you roll on roads over fresh green grass For your lorry loads pumping petrol gas And you make them long, and you make them tough But they just go on and on, and it seems that you can't get off
Oh, I know we've come a long way We're changing day to day But tell me, where do the children play?
> There’s no point in whining about the impulses endowed to them by several hundred thousand years of evolution. Don’t hate the player; hate the game. And if you really hate the game, make a better one.
I have contact with kids from 3 different places, 2 with high independent mobility and 1 with low independent mobility, and as much I like to agree that kids needs to be free, there's an important parental argument that needs to be talked about that is risk vs reward function if the kids get hurt.
In places with high mobility (at least 2 of them in the chart) there's some state support in terms of children's sick leave if something happens, plus work protections if you need to be absent for more than 6 weeks, and the education system has mechanisms to not let this kid be left behind (for example, if a kid breaks his/her legs).
In those places with low independence, I talk with some parents, and all of them are scared of the possibility of something permanent happens or something that can demand continuous support during working time; in those cases I can see why they play safe.
In the other hand, another second-order effect is that in those places with low independency, one thing that I noticed is that the motor coordination takes way more time to develop, and it cascades down for instance during sports activities (of the lack of), physical development and so on.
Wait, so you're saying the major factor in the parents decision making on letting kids run free is not if they'll get hurt or not, its if they get hurt enough to miss school and not being able to take off work?
One thing not mentioned is the effect of Covid and lockdowns.
On the one hand, my youngest was just getting into gaming with friends when the first lockdown started. I will be forever grateful that he did as his social life hardly seemed to suffer and he just carried on playing online, shouting and yelling with them just as much as if he was outside at a playground.
My teenage daughters had a much harder time of it though, as neither were into gaming and lost a lot of treasured contact with friends. Both suffered poor exam results as a result and have struggled to stay in touch with friends since.
The other aspect is those babies and toddlers who grew up in lockdown with no peer interaction at all. AIUI, they are still having a terrible time adjusting to school and normal social interaction.
I don't know how folks did it elsewhere, or what the rules was.
Here, a friend and I created ourselves a "bubble". My family and his family hanged out with each other. My kid was playing with his kid. We went on long forest walks, with the kids, and they could roam and play.
We didn't have contacts with lots of others, and if we did, we stayed away from each other for ~4 days or so, until we shared the same social bubble again.
There's been a destruction of the commons in general, and no place where people are allowed to loiter outdoors without falling under suspicion or actually being arrested. Children are also people. When I was a child, I hung out in the streets all day.
The trapping of children was just the prelude. Adults are also trapped at home, especially when they don't have any money to spend. Even if they do have money, there are no places they can go where they are expected to interact with strangers. The number of adult virgins has gotten absurdly high.
We have a tool that we could use to fight that: adult education. We have state colleges that we could be trying to attract adults to, rather than acting like people are done learning at 22. Chicago had/had a network of "Field Houses" that are community centers associated with parks where you could teach a class, or have a local group meeting, etc.
Instead, people are isolated and atomized into perfect little consumers who can't share things and can't organize politically except through an online petition encouraged by a "social network."
I live in San Francisco, about a block from when a speeding driver killed a little girl by driving around the outside of a car that was waiting for a family to cross the road. The family had the light, yes. The killer will attend a driver’s safety course and do some community service.
In general, in this city there are people who call themselves “natives” who promote the idea that children should live highly constrained lives. Others, who call themselves “progressive activists” have fought for the rights of pedophiles to be released early. Unsurprisingly, often such pedophile immediately assault people days within release.
Because of the asymmetry in outcome, those with children slowly cede ground to those without by simply leaving. This feedback loop accelerates until little enclaves start forming. Inside SF this is the Mission Bay / Mission Rock area where today I saw a gaggle of unaccompanied 10-12 year olds. This isn’t a common sight elsewhere in the city where the “natives” and “progressive activists” have sway.
For our part, we have a plan to buy some undeveloped land where we can reliably camp. The current constraints are that maintenance of this in fire-prone California isn’t straightforward. There are minimum standards for defensible space and so on that regulate newer purchases that often require a great deal of time and effort to meet. I’ll find a way, however.
As a society we find violence or harm against children to be extremely shocking and tragic. As a society we would do almost anything to prevent it.
Giving children the kinds of freedoms discussed in this article would lead to some harm coming to them. Accidents, violence, kidnap, etc.
Therefore, society won't give them those freedoms.
This tendency has been exagerated by mass media in the modern era. Every single case, every piece of anecdata, makes massive headlines and instills the fear into parents everywhere.
It's impossible for society to reverse course because that would mean acknowledging, implicitly or explicitly, that some level of harm for some children is justified by the developmental benefits to all children of increased freedom.
I think you're onto something here. We do a lot to protect children, but we've outsourced that protection to institutions—police, laws, politicians—rather than building it into our communities. If we had stronger communal networks where neighbors actively looked out for each other's kids, parents would feel comfortable letting them roam. Without that social fabric, we're stuck with a binary choice: either rely on law enforcement to intervene after something goes wrong, or keep kids sheltered at home.
> Giving children the kinds of freedoms discussed in this article would lead to some harm coming to them. Accidents, violence, kidnap, etc.
Not really most of the violence against children originates from adults within and near the family.
The American public has allowed some rare stories that made it to the news and the Satanic panic of the 80s to form their world view.
A survey in 2021 found that 15% of Americans that's 31 million people believed the government was run by Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
To sum up children do face risks of violence and sexual abuse but it's mostly from trusted people in their environment, the risk of some random person kidnapping a child of the street is rather low.
Now given that society has decided to keep children locked away, letting your kid run around is not really a viable option it's a collective action problem.
The fact that you think heaven and earth have to be moved over a single school shooting (as terrible as it was) is a symptom. School is the safest place where children are. They're more likely to be murdered and abused at home.
I'm 50, but when I was a kid I took the bus by myself: when I was 12, on the South Side of Chicago, which had an order of magnitude more violence than your kids will ever be exposed to. I ran around with my friends within a block or two, we were big into BMX bikes. Kids got hurt periodically, but sometimes kids will get hurt; sometimes kids will die. A few hundred years ago, most kids would die. Now we (not we, but mostly a certain demographic whose aesthetic is imposed on everyone else) find it unacceptable to hear about kids dying on television, nowhere near us.
It was bad when 50% of kids died, but I've had the belief that whatever the number it now is too few. We need the number of kids who die through "death by misadventure" to go up. Raising kids in a box leaves them dumb and unsocialized. Kids need independence, and to be allowed the ability to make some bad decisions with real consequences. They need to be able to fall off the monkey bars.
Well, this doesn’t exactly check out when you compare to countries and cultures who already give children these freedoms and have the built environment to support it (transport, walkability, parks/spaces to play, etc). They are not only “just fine”, but their children are generally much more mature and confident (as in skilled), than their Anglo counterparts.
France, Netherlands, Denmark, former commie block come to mind. It was one of the things that really stuck out to me: how mature/well behaved and independent/confident the children were there (for the most part). There's even books on the topic (Raising Bebe, The Danish Secret to Happy Kids) which I was not aware of after spending a lot of time in those places. At lot of it has to due with the built environment - kids can literally walk out the front door to parks and stuff unlike in suburban places, but also culture.
Yeah well, we have one kid, and we're too old to have another. He's the only grandchild on both sides of the family. He has no cousins, first or second. That's apparently the new normal in many countries.
Of course he's going to live a sheltered life!
It's easy to tell parents to let their kids roam free, but that advice is to copy the behaviour of parents that had ten kids.
I said "had", because on average, two of them will survive to adulthood and procreation. That's natural. That's the way things were for our species for megayears.
Does that make it sad that it's not like that any more?
Maybe. Maybe not.
If you want to change it, recognise that first, society and our very civilization would need to change back to the era of every family having half a dozen or more kids. Then, then you'd have to figure out what to do about the excess population: unsustainable exponential growth or mass child deaths. You choose!
> I said "had", because on average, two of them will survive to adulthood and procreation. That's natural. That's the way things were for our species for megayears.
Where are you getting that stat? For the majority of human history the childhood mortality rate has hovered around 50% not 80%.
Back in the second century BC if you had 10 children you expected half of them to reach adulthood.
In addition I can't find specific stats but I would wager that the vast majority like 90% of those deaths happened at infancy. So it doesn't really factor in how they would be raised.
And as others have noted. We were free to run around as much as we wanted in the 90s and the average family had like 2ish children.
Basic population dynamics. For a population to remain steady, a breeding pair can only have on average two surviving children that procreate themselves.
If you want to get into the weeds, there's obviously some "fudge factors" that bring this a little bit up above two.
1. Not every kid that survives to adulthood will go on to procreate themselves, so the remainder need slightly more than two to make up the slack.
2. During periods of population growth, the average survivorship has to be higher.
3. The percentage surviving depends on how many were born per family to begin with. I didn't state a percentage, I said two. Okay, fine 2.4 or whatever, but not a fraction, that "depends" on too many variables.
> For the majority of human history the childhood mortality rate has hovered around 50% not 80%.
RECORDED history, which is a short blip in our evolutionary history as a species. I said megayears, a.k.a.: millions of years, for most of which we have scant evidence. Extrapolating from our wild animal cousins and just observing how these "uncontacted" tribes live, it's pretty obvious that for 99% of the time we could be called human, we had five+ kids per couple, and ten+ wasn't uncommon... of which two-point-something survived.
That's just the way it is, for essentially all species. It has to be, otherwise populations would explode in numbers until it's standing room only for the entire surface planet.
PS: Next time you watch some BBC documentary about some species giving birth to hundreds of offspring, well... now you know. They didn't make it. Certainly, statistically, most of them must not have, because if they could and did, then that species would have their population numbers grow astronomically fast!
PPS: You hand-waved away a 50% loss rate as if it's a detail. That in no way undermines my argument that if you have an only child, or even two or three, that losing half of them is not considered acceptable parenting in this day and age. There is absolutely no way anyone I know would trade half of their children so that they can have a wild, carefree, and unsupervised childhood like "nature intended"!
> That's just the way it is, for essentially all species. It has to be, otherwise populations would explode in numbers until it's standing room only for the entire surface planet.
Human population has been increasing for at least thousands of years. Our best estimates put the human population 30000 years ago to about 8 million people, at about 1 ad the population is estimated at about 200 million people, in the 17 hundreds the population is estimated at about 600 million.
That is not a stable population, that's a growing population. You also have to take into account pandemics, widespread violence, etc. The black plague killed 1/3 of the population of Europe, you can be pretty sure that the reproduction rate was above 2 both before and after the pandemic. Millions of people died when Europeans colonized the Americas again the population growth rate would have to be much larger after the event for the population to bounce back.
Additionally adult mortality before procreation does not factor in child rearing behavior. Because why would it?
And lastly all that is pretty much irrelevant especially the habits of prehistoric people, because the change in how Americans raise their children happened in the last 20 years. Not in the 1900s when child mortality went way down.
The thing that changed between the 80s and now was not the acceptability of losing children, what changed was how Americans in particular assess risk, the Satanic Panic of the 80s, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007, the revelation of how widespread childhood sexual abuse is (before the 90s it was estimated at about 1% of the population turns out it's over 16%), all of these factors made the American public incredibly afraid about their children safety.
It's not that people in the 70s and 60s were okay with harm coming to their children it's that they didn't believe harm would come to their children when they were with other children alone running around. Which by the way was mostly a correct assessment.
In Japan the fertility rate is 1.2 per woman and yet 6 and 7 year olds got to school on their own. Because the culture there believes that is a safe practice, mostly because it is.
Go watch Old Enough, obviously it's a television show exaggerated and not how life really works in Japan, the production team and the parents are essentially watching over the children, but it clearly demonstrates that the culture there expects children to roam the cities safely.
Oh and by the way on average preindustrial families had 5 to 7 children not 10 so 50% survival rate is 2.5 to 3.5. Which taking into account occasional widespread population collapses fits much better with the observed long term growth.
>our very civilization would need to change back to the era of every family having half a dozen or more kids.
Let's try improving public transportation, making more walkable communities, and encouraging independent exploration first. If those don't work, then sure. We can try the Shinzo Abe initiative to make big families.
Japan has had this issue for longer than the US, but it is not impacted the same way in terms of kids socializing.
I wish people would come up with examples that are more than 'Just look at Japan'. Japan is great, and I think we could learn a lot from them. However, their society is extremely homogeneous (98%+ ethnically Japanese) with deeply shared cultural norms that have been reinforced over centuries. This creates a fundamentally different trust environment than what exists in diverse, multicultural societies.
> It's easy to tell parents to let their kids roam free, but that advice is to copy the behaviour of parents that had ten kids. I said "had", because on average, two of them will survive to adulthood and procreation. That's natural. That's the way things were for our species for megayears.
We still roamed pretty free as kids in the 90s. That's long after the decline of childhood mortality and large families - I don't know more than a handful of families from that era who had more than 2 kids.
I was an only kid that roamed pretty free as young as four, wandering the neighbourhood with similarly aged kids.
I chalk that up to the inertia of social behaviour. My parents grew up in a generation where they all had many brothers and sisters, and their parents were one of eight. They learned parenting from their parents, and I learned parenting from mine.
We adjust with each generation, but not completely.
You have likely not lived in a society where every family has many kids, so extended families have dozens of grandkids/cousins. It gets to the point that in times of plenty there's an "excess" and societies go to war in some sense just to see if they can carve out a bit of territory at the "mere" cost of some tens of percent of their youth. I mean.. why not? If you have half a dozen that "made it" and enough land for only two to inherit, flip the coin on the rest of them and maybe they'll find glory and conquer some new patch of land. Or not. What other option is there?
That's how people used to think and behave for millenia.
Modern life is very, very different to even just a couple of hundred years ago, let alone for most of human existence pre-history!
I read a statistic that before modern times something like 15%-60% of men died due to violence! For comparison, if you're an adult male in Ukraine, you've had about a 0.5% chance of death from violence, 30x to 120x safer in the middle of a war than during peacetime in pre-state tribal life.
When the kids were babies we had the standard debate of move to the countryside for fresh air and gambolling in the fields etc. But so glad we stayed in London, the kids have so much freedom with public transport they can organise their own meet ups and activities and go running around all over town without any parental assistance or intervention at all. Whereas elsewhere we'd need to drive them everywhere, they'd be stuck at home way more, they'd have no real agency in their lives - I grew up like that and hated it.
reply