High density living in cities is dreadful for providing enough outdoors / free activity space for kids to be kids - too much noise (or a risk of them making too much noise), too much communal property they shouldn't damage or can't work on.
Growing up, I have memories of my dad building things around the house (including our cubby house), having a sandpit etc. How do you do any of that in an apartment in the city? How do you even have reasonable transit distances to places you can do those things?
This is not unusual in Manhattan. Pick any apartment and walk five minutes in every direction. You'll find a playground.
In the winter we take the subway 20 minutes to a large indoor complex with better equipment and hundreds of other children. They are not quiet!
Of all the places we go, his favorite is the subway, where he gets to say Hi! and Bye! to lots of people.
I dread the loneliness of the burbs.
There would be literally hundreds of children playing daily in that park when the weather was nice, and usually a smaller number when it wasn’t as nice, but still hardly ever zero during reasonable “kids playing outside hours”.
Ages were between kids that could barely walk there with parents or nannies all the way to young teens.
I’m sure many other cities are not like this, but in neighborhoods where people with children in NYC actually live (like the UES) there are plenty of parks and people to fill them.
Quite frankly it’s a miracle that the school district works at all. Having experienced it, school choice does not scale to a million plus kids.
Mine has a community sports league for just about anything you can think of. Swimming, soccer, baseball, lacrosse, touch football, cross country, etc...
There are four different community swimming pools, miles and miles of hiking trails, and sidewalks everywhere for bikes and dog walking. Courts for tennis and basketball. There are kids everywhere. It isn't unusual for the doorbell to ring with a kid wanting to know if your kid can come out to play. One neighbor kid used to ring our bell to ask if he could go in our backyard to play with our dog. On days like hallowe'en, people block the roads off and kids run wild.
There are elementary schools and middle schools spread throughout the neighborhood. Kids can walk or bike to school, although lots of busy parents still drive their kids.
As a 12 year old in a city you can walk to a park or get on the metro/bus and visit some friends or go see a movie etc. In the burbs if your parents aren't home or are otherwise unwilling to drive you somewhere you're basically stuck at home counting the days until you turn 16.
But overall I'm glad we did. As a teen there was absolutely nothing to do in the town we moved from. Drugs became a really big issue I heard. At least the city provided activities so we didn't get bored out of our minds.
If some "concerned citizen" doesn't report the 12 year old to child protective services. Looking at how children are pushed into so much fear it is no wonder how many of them escape into the virtual.
That sounds more to me like a thing that happens in the suburbs, where kids need to be chauffeured around in cars everywhere and the streets are too fast and too packed with cars for bikes to be safe, so parents don't even get the opportunity to contemplate letting their kids out of their sight.
https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/national-international/M...
> Skenazy's April 1, 2008 column in The New York Sun, "Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone," described her making the controversial decision to let her son take the New York City Subway home alone, which was completed without incident.
When I was a kid in Cupertino and San Jose, I biked everywhere. I biked to school, to meet friends in other neighborhoods, shopping centers (even Milpitas to Eastridge), etc. Even the shitshow that was County Transit got me to Los Gatos ahd Palo Alto. The nearest bus stop was a mile away; I biked there.
And I'd argue that most burbs have fewer crime and drug risks, but both tend to be way overstated by media.
Akao, cities tend to have a much higher ratio of people to sports fields. If you play baseball / football / soccer, you have much greater access (for pickup games as well as organized leagues).
It's not like combining a suburb space / greenery etc with a city experience is impossible. We just don't do it, since we mostly build our cities and suburbs for cars.
Cities should have plenty of parks, easy access to dense areas tastefully built (for walking, shopping, restaurants, coffee), and have plenty of trees, small and larger squares, and public transport, with several public buildings and monuments thrown in. A river or large lake or sea wouldn't hurt either where possible.
I grew up in a midsized city, when I was a kid I could walk, bus, or ride my bike literally anywhere I wanted to go without really any notable restrictions, including parks with sandpits. My parents kept a draw full of bus schedules. The best part is there were literally kids everywhere, so you were never lonely even if you left the house alone. We'd organize pick-up games of soccer or baseball or kickball, etc. I even went ice skating by myself. Sometimes I'd just walk outside during the summer just to see which of the "neighborhood kids" were out. I'd spend hours just exploring the city on foot or bike, so much so that I'd come home with sore legs. All snow storms were followed by sledding in the park. I spent very little time with my parents.
When we got older it was mall and movies, record stores, arcades.
We also had a back yard, shared between six families.
Sometimes my parents would even send me on errands for them.
I had an after school job starting at 16 and I'd never be able to if I had to be driven there, my dad was always home, but without a car. I'd take the bus there.
I was rarely home, it was amazing.
Compare that to the suburbs or rural areas where the only way to get anywhere is a parent driving a kid somewhere. Sounds stifling. My parents would never shuffle me around everywhere. (In fact, I didn't even care for it as an adult, sometimes I just wanted to go for a walk! But leaving required a car, no sidewalks, traffic much too fast for a bike)
I grew up in the suburbs. All my friends where within walking or biking distance, as was the local library. There was a small forest less than 5 minutes walk from our house we could explore, as well a nice sledding hill. There was a small field at the end of the road that had a couple of soccer goals. The 'big city' was ~30 minutes away by bus. When I got a bit older they even opened a mall within 20 minute bike ride of where we lived.
Basically whether a place is "good for kids" is entirely orthogonal to if its urban or suburban.
I could walk, bus, or ride my bike literally anywhere ... Compare that to the suburbs or rural areas
Anyway, it’s fine to worry but personally I’d try to hold off until there’s some empirical evidence that there is a problem. If there is (“study shows kids raised in city are maladjusted” — after controlling for all other variables), I’m not aware of it.
Our apartment building has its own patio space, a reasonably large butterfly garden, and some gardening plots in the back yard. We've set aside one of the garden plots for the kids to do whatever they want in (last summer's cherry tomato harvest was a sight to see), and turned another into a sandbox.
We spend lots and lots of time outside in those sorts of communal spaces. For my part, I feel sorry for kids living in these intensively inward-facing suburban environments where there are no sidewalks or community spaces, and kids are dependent on adults with cars to help them get together with their friends.
I walk across the street to the municipal park, where there's not only a playground, but also open outdoor spaces that people use for (to cite things I've observed this weekend) picnics, childrens' birthday parties, pickup sports, martial arts classes, playing frisbee with dogs, and general horsing around. There are smaller parks with playgrounds every 3 blocks or so in my part of town.
People raised in a stereotypical American suburb (as I was) tend not to grow up with common spaces that people use for individual purposes. It can be easy to end up equating space that's useful with space that one has exclusive use of, and so assume that city dwellers must be deprived.
Also, not everyone in a city lives in an apartment. Condos and single-family-homes typically include an outdoor space.
Globally, the figure is about 55%, passing the midpoint in the 2010s. The US became 50% urban in the 1920s. For England and Wales, the 1890s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization#/media/File%3AHis...
This is simply so untrue, that's it's laughable. High density, urban spaces have by-and-lqege more opportunities and places for kids than the hellhole that is the exurbs and most of the post war suburbs.
And really, if we can’t unthinkingly trust Dimitri Christakis of Seattle Children’s Hospital, what can we believe in???
The journalistic practice of inserting quotes from official-sounding people as “evidence” is epistemologically revolting.
I agree that we shouldn’t have unquestioning faith in anything anyone says. However, that doesn’t mean we also need to assign equal weight to everyone’s ideas. If someone has relevant expertise—-and being the lead author of a professional organization’s guidelines is surely relevant here—it doesn’t seem bonkers to give their persepective a bit more weight.
Mentioning actual research would be better, of course. I would bet dollars to donuts that the next bit of the author’s conversation with him was “For example, in our 2005 APAM paper, we found that....” However, the newspaper article’s author probably doesn’t want to go on a long tangent trying to meta-analyze the existing research, all to make a point that’s incidental to the article’s thesis. In that context, a quote from an expert seems totally reasonable.
OK, to be fair, they didn't mention all that in the Times article, but they did mention that he is the lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics's guidelines on screen time. As far as I am aware, the AAP has a good scientific reputation, so one would expect that they wouldn't get someone who doesn't know his stuff to author their guidelines.
The Times also has a good reputation, so I'd expect the journalist to have looked up Dr. Christakis and seen that he appears to be qualified on this subject.
You are right that we shouldn't unthinkingly trust...but we also to avoid being excessive about it, because no one has the time to personally check everything. This is why reputation matters. If you get your information from reputable sources, you can delegate more of the checking to them without much risk. This is one of those cases, especially since they gave enough information to trivial look up more about him if you don't want to go by the Times and the AAP reputations.
[1] https://www.seattlechildrens.org/directory/dimitri-a-christa...
Both blocks and Minecraft require spatial reasoning Minecraft worlds, being larger, might even require more. However, young kids are still learning motor skills and sensorimotor integration, which will be very different when manipulating real blocks vs. an iPad. Playing with blocks could also offer different opportunities for practicing verbal or social skills, and needs a bit more imagination.
Figuring out the “best” amount of screen vs. real world time is tricky—-this sort of research is hard to do well—-and undoubtedly varies from kid to kid.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/1rcoqu/my_3year_...
Also, playing with blocks doesn’t do anything to your inner ear.
That old person already developed their spatial skills in an actual 3D environment. There is evidence that babies and toddlers need substantial experience to learn to see their environment properly.
In experiments, an infant will accept that an object transformed into a random other object while briefly out of their sight. They will not accept that one object turned into two objects.
This makes sense. A plate is flat from one angle of view and round from another. You change the angle of view, the shape radically changes. But it remains a single object.
Babies don't yet know which transformations make sense, so they will accept that a truck transformed into a clown toy. They will not accept that a truck transformed into two clown toys.
So I think you have that backwards. People with an already developed understanding of 3D spatial relationships based on lots of living in an actual 3D world can relate meaningfully to a virtual environment. This in no way supports the idea that simply seeing a representation on a screen of a 3D environment can help a developing child properly code up their spatial reasoning.
This combined with the Lego talk above reminded me of having to constantly check my VCR slot for Lego bricks placed there by my toddler daughter.
I'm right with you. I grew up on the cusp of the internet's explosive growth. I got online every chance I could get, but until I was in my mid-teens our internet was dial-up and I wasn't allowed to monopolize the phone line.
I still spent a lot of time on computers, but without the internet it was a very different dynamic, IMHO. You had to engage the critical-thinking bits of your brain a lot more, since answering questions didn't involve inputting those questions into Google and having StackOverflow/Wikipedia/random blog posts give you the answer sans any of the process/context required to arrive at that answer.
I also spent more time interacting with things physically too. Lego (parents bought me a Mindstorm kit one christmas), physical books, even just tearing apart old computers and putting them back together.
There’s a whole field of embodied cognition and linguistics that predicts this
Based on what ACTUAL evidence?
Seems analogous to the argument against video games replacing blocks.
Why can't you do both?
Did they also study how much you learn about using a computer by stacking bricks?
What if they found that kids who only play with bricks suck at Tetris? Would that be a cause for concern?
Children should be interacting with the physical world because they’re little animals who should be interacting with their surroundings to learn how they work, just as you and I should be using our bodies because it feels great and helps our minds to work.
Using a computer is an abstraction that can wait until after children have a solid model for how the world works. Computers are tools, wonderful, fascinating, useful tools, but Tetris isn’t even 3D, generalising from actual blocks to Tetris is not going to tax the imagination of anyone.
I'm pretty sure we recently saw a study that showed a lot of kids being tech illiterate despite growing with and regularly using a bunch of gadgets.
Turns out playing with a screen doesn't teach you computers.
Honestly, some people just treat computers as magic despite using them every day and having it explained what it's doing. We don't need to expose kids to computers more -- it's literally impossible not to -- we need to get them to -- or not squash -- their desire to ask 'why', 'how', and 'how can this be changed'.
That's a poor measure of somethings value.
Do you have elderly parents you support with their computers? Then maybe you know what I am talking about.
I am not saying kids shouldn't play with bricks. The whole premise of the article seems silly. Nobody claims kids should play with computers instead of bricks.
As for becoming computer savvy, I've seen kids pick up quite a lot from playing with computers. They quickly figure out how to find and launch the games they like, for example. And they also experiment, for example rearranging the UI. Then there is Minecraft.
This is sad. I myself am addicted to computer games but played with a TON of lego growing up. I can easily rotate 3d shapes and a bunch of stuff in my visual eye, and imagine the 'feel' of how it would interact with other physical things and I think its probably somewhat attributed to all those formative years. Internet didn't exist or when it did , ran at 14.4kbps, not very compelling. Can't believe the struggles modern kids will have growing up trying to combat video game / screen addiction.