I was born in 1990 and I feel like my childhood sort of straddled the line between these two realities. When my family moved to California in the early 90's, I made friends with the neighbor kids simply because they were the neighbor kids, and we many afternoons finding wandering around looking for ways to entertain ourselves. Kids would frequently play in the middle of the street. Nowadays, the streets of that neighborhood are empty. I'll go to the small nearby park, and maybe see kids if there's a youth sports league game or someone having a birthday party there.

Having spent some time in Australia recently, one of the things that struck me is how often you see kids (often in their school uniforms) walking around town by themselves, going to get fast food with friends or hang out at the library. In the US, I've also noticed it in several ethnic neighborhoods (Jewish and Chinese neighborhoods, specifically).

Part of me wonders how much of this is born out of affluence. On occasion, I'll find myself passing through a lower-income part of town, and the dynamic changes. You see kids walking to the store alone, maybe to buy things, maybe just to hang around and wait for their friends to stop by. Often, groups of kids consist of an older kid (maybe 10 years old) acting as a "caretaker" for a younger group of siblings. You'll be pumping gas, and someone at the opposite pump randomly strike up a conversation with you. If you're not used to it, it actually kind of catches you off guard. I know some people flee to suburbs specifically to avoid these kinds of interactions, but once you get past the initial surprise of, "huh, someone I don't know started talking to me just to talk to me, that doesn't happen every day," I actually find certain parts of it to be quite pleasant. It reminds me of how I used to live, and how I suspect my parents (and their parents) lived.

Too dangerous and the school does not want any liability for a kid being struck and killed.

But what are the distances kids have to travel to school or their friends nowadays vs back then? I mean the school bus was a thing back then too.

This highly depends on the area, at least with schooling. In Indiana, it was around a half mile when I was a child in the 80's. This was where the school wouldn't bus you. Sometimes in high school, it was around a mile. Some folks have to walk a mile and a half.

My sister just spent some time in Connecticut - there were no busses for anyone. Only one of the busy roads had a crossing guard and things for elementary students.

For playing and whatnot, I think this highly depends on area and parents. While I could walk to a friend's house in the same neighborhood in the town I grew up in, my sister often couldn't because the town of 40,000 we lived in was a normal, sprawled, midwestern town and it was often too far to walk. By the time my brother (11 years younger than me) reached some of those ages, they moved to a rural location and distances got further. I had friends with much more freedom than I had, however: My mother was fairly strict.

As a parent, this has not been my experience. In our (pretty affluent and safe) town I still see kids walking to elementary school alone. I let my kids stay home alone when they were 3-5 (you can go with me to the grocery store or play home, your choice) with main fear while I am gone being that of police or juvenile justice Nazis.

The media and government do seem intent on snuffing this out. In their view we must be afraid and any attempt to let kids play by themselves is placing them in unnecessary risk.

More encouraging to me, I'm seeing more kids out on bikes here recently (and they and the skateboards never went away entirely).

Even better, on the bike trails I'm seeing more young kids with their parents, riding bikes rather than sitting in trailers.

Wait, what? Parents are paying other parents for play dates these days?

Didn't this friend also come by your house to play or stay overnight and ofc, after so many hours playing, wouldn't your mom make yourselves a nice snack for you to charge up and stuff? How come your friend's mom do something as autistic as that?

imho, his mom didn't like you (or was just jealous you were hanging out too much? narcissistic parents and stuff) and just wanted to kill the friendship....

srsly dude, the more you live the more you get spooked by people, thank you for refreshing my view of humanity.

"but kids will bring home a note with the contact details of their playmate, and their parents will schedule it. The whole calendar scheduling, driving, chaperoning etc are things that definitely happens."

There are a few who walk home from my son's school and it's great to see them take 30 minutes to play or even just sit together throwing cut-grass in the air.

Everything is too scheduled. Its hard to break out of the "if it isn't schedule, it isn't happening" model when everyone in the family is so busy. We try and encourage independence even in our youngest, but "free time" is at a premium.

NOTE: my kids aren't "neurotypical" and have lots of appointments, etc adding an extra layer of "busy"

Actually Stranger Things already alludes to that.

Sadly, kids in our direct neighborhood don't generally mingle or have unschedule play. Definitely different from the way I grew up (grew up in the 90s: little to no supervision, just wandered the neighborhood.)

That is, unless you're arranging play dates at free / public venues... like some kind of common poor.

Maybe I'm old now, but the whole concept of "play dates" rubs me the wrong way...

I also live in a neighborhood where you see everyone outside regularly so a lot of it is spontaneous.

Even with my wife's moms group that has arranged playdates, though, no one pays anyone else.

But I brought up a (now) 20 year old in Palo Alto without the scheduling, tutoring, driving around and other nonsense, and he did get into a “top” school (whatever “top” really means).

But it did show a clear partition in which kids he could in practice be friends with.

OTOH he was able to pocket quite a bit of cash tutoring some pampered kids!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Wetterling

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial

We're a part of the problem, my daughter is lucky she can walk to one of her schoolfriends houses. Her other besties are a minimum 30 minute walk, but they all attend the same school they're zoned for.

Though that statistic is skewed by me being a nerdchild with few friends...

That's what bikes are for though, right?

I think this helicopter parent micromanagement has just exploded with smartphone gps availability whereas in the 90's parents were pulling out the ol' paper map before road trips and maybe had a malfunctioning Tom Tom gps. Would love to see some data on tech savvy parents tracking their kids, anyone know about this?

My brother wouldn't let her go visit them before he got her a GPS tracking smartwatch with LTE for kids.

(We grew up riding our bikes to/from school, going and playing with neighborhood kids, wandering around, etc...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_murders_of_1979%E2%80%...

Now that the snow is gone one of them switched to hitting pieces of wood with a croquet mallet.

The kids are alright.

I'd bet most of these replies in this nature are written by child-less people giving their view of how things are so much worse now than when they were kids.

They're still doing the same stuff they've always done (wasting time and having fun).

It's basically accurate in the literal sense. Or at least, I'm a parent and I'm seeing this essentially word-for-word with all nearby parents/children in our area. The venmo part stands out as being a SF thing. In the midwest, even young families are mostly old school and just pay with a credit card or paper check (yes literal paper checks written from a checkbook).

But the rest of it...yeah? It's essentially accurate.

Playdates are always scheduled beforehand (in Google Calendar, or far more commonly via Facebook invites between the parents). You do have to drive the child 10-15 blocks to every event (children are so expensive and housing is even more expensive, no one can afford to live near each other, so kids of similar age groups are still all spread out across the metro region and not in any one area/neighborhood). You can check on your kids at via smartphone at any daycare, and any other activity requires at least one parent be present anyway. All activities are required to have some attempt at "education", no matter how silly or tenuous that is.

And it's kind of tricky because it's a defacto part of society. I hate this hyper-scheduled hyper-data-driven stuff myself. But since the large majority of other parents do this, I can't avoid it -- we must contribute to this with our own kid too, otherwise we'd be depriving the child of social interaction with other children of matching ages.

The five-year-old will come in shortly; the ten-year-old will be home later; I expect the thirteen-year-old home sometime around sundown. I planned none of this -- none of it was scheduled. Moreover, none of this is an attempt to educate them in any conventional way, and the only data driving is that freedom and unstructured time help build important qualities like independence and resilience.

As with so many things, there are many microclimates of parenting and child-rearing; if you value unstructured time for your kids and building their independence, you can likely find a community that shares those values.

So did you look for such a community yourself, or did it just happen? Either way, do you have any tips that maxsilver and others can use to find or create a good "microclimate"?

None of this is easy, but finding a community that matches your values (or at least isn't inconsistent with them) is worth the effort: it's one of the most important decisions you'll make in your adult life, and merits special time and attention.

Here in Japan if someone throws a house party it's common for everyone to pitch in $10-$30. Before I moved to Japan I had never heard of such a thing. In the USA when I or my family through a party for friends it was always our treat (we paid everything) and anytime I visited a friend's party they never asked for or expected money. The closest to that kind of thing was a "potluck" party where every one brought some food or drink.

Now that I've lived in Japan for a long time I've started to see the benefits of paying. It spreads the burden. It makes it easier to consider throwing a party since you know it won't cost you $50 to $200 in expenses.

Also in Japan it's extremely common to rent an an entire bar, space, restaurant for parties and tell all your friends, come to my party, $30 a person. Before I was lived here that idea would have blown my mind? $30? I'm not going if it even costs $5!. Now that I'm used to it I just see it has "paying for experience" and or "the cost of having fun" and I see that it enables cool venues and also places to be loud without annoying neighbors (since clubs and bars are usually designed for sound). I've gone to the opposite extreme where I'm disappointed when my western friends complain about having to contribute.

So, paying for playdates sounds like it might have positives. More playdates. Maybe easier for the organizer to stock all the various alternative diets the different kids need. etc...

But as I said earlier, 20XX is making yesterdays satirical jokes and turning it into today's headlines.

The problem is that this behavior is driven by a tiny monitory, and supported by the rest.

The honest answer is to be the jerk who doesn't go along with it. The only way we can stop being victim to societal trends is to go against the flow.

This. Or to put it another way: "You know who's a more interesting person in adulthood? Someone whose parents didn't bow to peer pressure when they were a kid."

FFS. If you're a parent, you're supposed to be setting an example. Not giving in to the same impulses we ostensibly teach our children to resist.

You absolutely can opt out of socialization for both you and your kid. But, that is what you are doing there.

There's also, you know, letting your kid hang out with other kids organically. They do that naturally, you know?

If other parents expect planned meetups, then "organically" is exactly that. Even if they take no issue random meets in principle, they already planned most time for other things. Their kids are not outside to be randomly met. Often other kids don't even live within walkable distance.

For that matter 3-6 years old don't "organically" start to visit each other alone without parents. How exactly you expect that to happen, really?

That is: the caricature's funny, but it sounds like _way_ too much damn work.

They exist, but most families don't have the time and money.

Apart from the Smash Bros., it could have been a scene from Andy Griffith or something. If it matters, this is from a pretty wealthy area (Michael Jordan's mansion is about 10 minutes up the road from us).

Paying off the debts owed to society of course

...mindless consumption

Wow. Surely this is hyperbole?