Kids are allowed a fair amount of freedom in Canada and Europe, where I still see a lot of kids around malls, or parks, playing basketball in courts (which still happens in NYC), or wooded areas. Sure, more are on their phones etc. But it’s really not that different from the 90s IMO, in many locations.
The biggest change is there aren’t so many clusters of “neighbourhood kids” as there used to be, as people are having fewer children later in life... unless you deliberately seek out a unicorn neighbourhood with similar aged kids. Playgroups and play dates need to be actively organized by parents due to distances between houses.
(I raise two children, and the 10 year old is free to ride his bike and wander, so long as he keeps a phone on for location - he’s taken plenty of bike camps to learn to be responsible).
That aside, I completely agree with your comment. Public spaces and well designed cities that allow for those clusters are very important to kids.
For whatever it's worth though, I don't think things were that much better in the US back in the 90s. In recent history the US has always been worse in this regard than Canada and Europe.
What is your point? Whether this is a US-centric or global issue seems like valuable information for the discussion. If it really is a US-centric problem, the solution, for the US, might be to look outward at other countries. If it were a global issue, we'd all have to look into our past to find a solution. It is important to know the scale of the problem don't you think?
Given the state of other US-specific problems like our dysfunctional healthcare system and mass-shootings, I think it’s pretty clear the US is rarely interested in learning from outside its borders.
Is it US-Centric or urban centric? My guess is most of this board falls on the Urban side (Me included). I am unable to apply many of my valuable unstructured rural experiences as a youth to how I want to raise a child in a city. I thing I'd have the same challenge with Rome, Dallas, Barcelona, or most other urban centers.
They have different kinds of unstructured experiences. After school, they have all kinds of restaurants and coffee shops to choose from. They can hang out at the Jewish Community Center and play FIFA. They sometimes wonder with their friends to a field at a local university to play soccer. They watch movies at the local theatre I only find out about when they mention later what they saw.
Heck, my older son took his girlfriend to a fancy restaurant I haven't even been to yet. :)
Before high school, a big mile stone was when they were old enough to safely cross streets on their own to walk to the local pool and basketball courts in the summer.
So there are still plenty of unstructured, unsupervised experiences to be had, just different than the rural ones.
However, my bike gang was a bunch of little vandals. So we probably skewed the stats towards not letting kids outside.
Now I’m parenting in big city and I feel sad for how kids around here live. Trying to figure that one out before he gets older. He’s only 1 so I have time.
There are no kids outside, except on halloween. To be fair, there aren't many adults outside either which I think is a part of the problem.
I have a 4 year old nephew. Once I took him to a park near where he lives. There were only 4 other kids there. In the time we were there, the cops showed up to shoe away 2 boys who were 10-12 years old. All they had been doing was sitting there chatting. If you can't even use a public park for its intended purpose anymore, why would you even try going outside as a kid?
I think the iPad generation now live virtual lives with their friends. Kinda sad but that’s what fearmongering by media gets us.
A lot depends on parents to drive behaviour and introduce these days, again, due to lack of spontaneity / proximity that many grew up with.
What is happening in the US is quite depressing to me. Your kid can be shot for having a toy that the cop perceives to be a gun. It is crazy! Things like that never happen here, even if that toy is a toy gun.
We don't do this in every situation. Most American parents transport their kids by car without giving the risk much thought, though car crashes kill significantly more children than homicide in the US (source: CDC). I'm not sure there's a good solution to the cognitive bias of discounting relatively mundane risks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
When we turned around and came by them again I realised they were watching YouTube on a phone. But at least they were outside, sitting on a not unused car road on the edge of the village.
Join NextDoor.com if you want a dose of how nuts people have gone.
I live in Orange County CA and I have checked it from time to time. Apparently this place is a crime infested jungle full of human trafficking gangs that abduct kids and street gangs that will sell your fifth grader fentanyl. There are also gangs of Satan worshippers that will sacrifice your kids to the devil or something. Then there are the sightings of pedestrians...
Then look up the actual crime statistics. With the exception of a few spots here and there this is "officer! Have you seen my cat?" territory. The stuff about gangs is the most laughable. The joke is "OC gangstaz be like 'it's not a phase mom!'"
As a general rule, the safer the area the crazier NextDoor becomes. Anaheim does have actual crime and the community boards are pretty sane. South County is almost zero crime and the paranoia on the neighborhood boards is off the charts.
Perhaps a manifestation of the broken windows theory? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
What are the externalities of services like NextDoor, local FB groups, etc keeping this in people's conscious all the time?
If I had to come up with a hypothesis and test it via the scientific method it would probably be: This is not good as it is a positive reinforcement loop that causes our lizard brains to see danger everywhere/all the time.
The reverse explanation seems screamingly obvious. Minecraft, Fortnite, Facebook, AIM, pick your program, are all things kids and teens do to talk and interact when they can't be together in person. They'll play videogames at a sleepover, sure, but it's a very different thing than getting on a game every night to chat. If your friends live driving distance away, you don't have anywhere fun to hang out, and you probably can't go out on schoolnights anyway, it's no surprise that socialization moves online.
Even beyond exploration, Minecraft is a perfect vector for this. It's collaborative and persistent, the same as building a treehouse would be. It can be closed-access, so your parents don't have to worry about strangers. It's drop-in with no fixed player count, so your friends can all cycle in and out for dinner, bedtime, and so on. And it's varying intensity, so you can do anything from fighting monsters to chatting about the schoolday as you decorate a house.
The decline of physical "third places", and the outright death of third places for children, is really depressing to behold. But I think Minecraft is at least a bright spot helping to offset that; it offers practically everything you could want except physicality.
The funny thing is that the danger of "stranger abductions" has been over blown. Most abductions are non-custodial parents.
That actually started in the early 1980s, and kids roamed free well into the 1990s.
People generally have less and less time with kids due to work, and then overcompensate by being over-protective ("I suck at spending enough time with my kids, but look at how I protect them! I must still be a good parent then!").
There are much more cars everywhere, they drive faster too. Especially US problem from my experience, since whole infrastructure is designed around car usage. How are kids supposed to roam freely in urban areas then? I recall having to do 45 min walk to get to my work which was 1km away in LA, and this was including taking forbidden shortcut via highway road. Otherwise a solid 1h walk, to do frakin' 1km distance. Because nobody thought that there are pedestrians. Well kids are pedestrians, even on bikes.
For one, in Austria, kids have a legal right to go to school on their own, be it on foot or by public transport. A lot of parents do drive their kids to school, unfortunately even where it's really not necessary, but you do also see plenty of young kids walking there or home, or taking the bus or train. You definitely also see more kids "hanging out" in Austria - in the UK, everyone seems quick to jump to conclusions about gangs, so I guess "respectable" parents won't let their kids do that.
On the other hand, I felt I probably had even more freedom growing up in the 90s (in Austria) than many of today's kids. This is probably more of an individual choice of the parents (for some reason, people are afraid, despite this being one of the safest countries in the world) than direct societal pressure (being reported to the cops or social services, etc.) as it seems to be in the UK or US.
A as a side note, most kids wore shorts until roughly 13, the long trousers were reserved to "official" occasions, holiday visits to relatives, (rare) lunches at the restaurants, and similar.
And it was not common to see a kid with both knees not-bruised or non-orange, a much used item was, besides hydrogen peroxide, mercurochrome.
I've heard that in the states you can own a piece of property but have "no right" to get to it, as it's surrounded by other pieces of private property and, so, you're at the whims of those properties' owners. Is this true?
In Sweden, we have the concept of 'Allemansrätten'[0]; which is to say that 'private property' (in the absolute sense) doesn't exist and you have the freedom to roam, as long as you don't disturb or destroy anything.
But on the other hand, it really isn't "allmansrätten" either. (I am from the US and live in Norway - and norway has the same sort of laws). Here in Norway, you can simply camp for a night in some unused wooded area or a field that is obviously not used. In the US, you can get arrested for doing such a thing. Nature isn't something that is free for everyone to enjoy, but rather, it is the property of whoever owns the land even if there is no barrier or signs to alert you otherwise.
How often that is enforced varies. My parents owned land and generally didn't care, though they wanted hunters to alert them first so the could keep themselves safe. Many area residents didn't care if a couple people were walking in their woods - but don't get the idea that you could camp there without law enforcement being called unless you had express permission of the landowner.
Source: good buddy of mine is a real estate lawyer, and after a couple drinks he'll bitch and moan about it for hours
Two "neighbors" colluded to shut off all easements to the property, hoping that in 7 years (or whatever) they'd get the right to the property and could fix it and resell it. It was originally owned by investors, who wanted to offload it because they were fighting the same fight, and one of them had a heart attack and was dying, and they just wanted out. Along comes my BIL and he gets it for a song.
And the issues to boot.
The neighbors - one was a known "a-hole" in the neighborhood who would sue anyone and everyone; indeed, if you looked up his name in California, he had a record of using the courts almost as if it were his job. The other guy, he owned a large avocado orchard which bordered the property; he had fenced over one of the plat map easements. The other easement was a road which led to the property, which the first guy lived next to, just down below from the house. He blocked it off with a metal gate. He also owned another house he used as a rental, which was just immediately below the house. So he'd leave the gate open sometimes, and would give a key to the renters, but otherwise it was closed off. He'd also let people in for maintenance and inspection of a water tank which served for water in the neighborhood.
The story is wild and long - they didn't count on the tenacity of the family I married into. They didn't count on my brother-in-law, who works construction - being willing to run his dump truck for 48 hours straight with little-to-no sleep to make money in any way possible so he could pay his lawyer bill every single month (which ran to insane levels). He didn't count on my sister-in-law being willing to live in the house, to establish residency, while her husband worked a state away.
We had to hike up to the house one, using machetes to cut thru the undergrowth. My brother-in-law later ran a bulldozer to cut a path up the side of it, to get past the gate (he came from the avocado side - which the sheriff allowed him to cut past the fence, because of the plat map, and thus had to fight that neighbor in court too) - they then used 4wd vehicles to get up the side to the house.
He never counted on any of this and more. My brother-in-law flew a pirate flag from the flagpole, just to give the other guy the finger during all this.
Eventually, after several years, my brother-in-law won the lawsuit, and got access to the road. The gate was removed. The entire neighborhood rejoiced, and my BIL became the "hero" of their area, because they had long suffered various indignities by that guy.
A few months after my BIL won the case, the guy ended up having a heart attack, and died. The other guy lived a few years longer, but also ended up dying of natural causes.
My brother-in-law's house, now that it has access, instantly shot up in value several times over. He and his wife are now thinking of selling it, and moving on to other things.
This is not really true, there are thousands of forests and lands that are public spaces. Whatever the problem is, it's not this.
The land that is accessible by foot or bike is much more likely to be privately owned. And when it is public space, it's often a town or state park - which is quite likely to come with enough curfews, enforced bans on unaccompanied minors, and other child-unfriendliness that it's functionally private.
American post-war car-centric urban design transformed public space from one accessible to, and commonly ranged by, all (including children), into one largely accessible by motorized transit.
Children without licenses and access to vehicles consequently lost direct autonomous access to the core locations in their lives (home - school - simple shopping - peers - common wild space), and have been discouraged from attempting to navigate these spaces on foot (for fear of injury or unrealistic transit distance/detours required).
The author does not state, but one may infer, that car-centric living is coupled to the overscheduling and helicopter parenting at issue in the original article; and that children raised in a car-centric environment experience something akin to learned helplessness.
These problems are further compounded by comparatively poor American public transit systems and a contemporary mindset in which fearful parents discourages free-range children from making use of what transit options are present before the last few years of childhood; and by safety concerns around biking and skating in environments which do privilege cars.
My own kids are in the top quintile of "most free range" in our cohort; that feels possible in San Francisco in some ways which do not appear as feasible in many other urban areas. That's one reason we continue to try to raise our kids here.
But they do not get anything like the benevolent neglect of my own latchkey neighborhood-wandering local-kid-pack-factions semi-rural/suburban childhood.
This may be a naive question but please bear with a non-US person - what would happen in the US if someone actually called police on you? Could you just say "these are my children and I think it is good for them to be unsupervised, good bye"?
Given, these things probably get to be news because they're so extreme, but it pops up every few months. Look up the Maryland family that got in trouble for letting their kids walk to the park for the prototypical example.
http://www.freerangekids.com/category/child-protective-servi...
I'll add that your treatment would likely depend on the color of your skin, how well-to-do your neighborhood was, and how familiar the cop was with you and your family (small town vs large one, really). They may or may not call child services on your family.
We could talk about era (this is largely 90s and more recent), location (small towns are often better, suburbs are overzealous but not viciously policed, cities are less likely to intrude but often more heavy-handed when they do), income, and race (the predictable biases). There are definitely places where children have been systematically taken away (mostly poor, minority communities).
But for most people, this comes down to "99.5% of the time, no, but there's no way to be sure you're safe." It just takes a run of bad luck: an invasive bystander, followed by an overzealous cop or social worker, perhaps followed by a judge without much common sense. Which means that it has an extremely widespread chilling effect. I've heard several people say that they know the crime stats and aren't scared of their kid being attacked if they go out alone - but still won't allow it because they're scared of the police and child protective services.
The other issue is a real concern: what are the prevailing traffic speeds in your neighborhood. I'm in Massachusetts, where roads are narrow and lined with all sorts of attitude adjusting devices for bad drivers. So people are driving at mostly under 40kmh. Other parts of suburban America, people will literally reach 80kmh as soon as they've left their driveway, in which case, sorry, you do have to keep your children prisoner in their own home until they can eyeball the speed of a moving car. That only kicks in at about age 9, and there is no known way to hasten that skill in children. So, TLDR: avoid the suburbs if you want your kids to run free.
A lot of the decline in free-range childhood clicked into place once I realized just how terrible suburbs are for little kids.
The roads are the worst part - wide, empty streets that invite speeding, connectivity that make them short-cuts for outside drivers, lots of bends and bushes that obscure the view. But they're not the only major issue.
Suburbs are usually built for cars, meaning no sidewalks or bike lanes, just a choice between walking in the road and upsetting the neighbors with their manicured lawns. They're usually fully developed, meaning no woods or fields to play in. And they're privatized, meaning no sports fields, no open grass for games unless the neighbors approve, not even any parking lots for safer street ball. They're featureless, so littler kids can't find their street or house in a maze of HOA-mandated similarity. And while our fears of crime are exaggerated, they're perversely insecure, combining a rural lack of bystanders with urban anonymity.
My run-down, dead-end street growing up seems weirdly idyllic in hindsight. Speeding was impossible, no one but the residents had a reason to drive through, every house looked different, there were trees to climb and a bit of undeveloped land at the end of the road. Even the neighbors who hated kids and each other had to use spite fences and complaining, not impersonal HOA crackdowns. But of course, there have been plans to suburb-ify it for decades now...
Many a time in the 'burbs, were we playing a game in the street only to quickly scatter to the shout of "Car!", followed by a hasty resumption of whatever we were doing.
There was generally 1 or 2 streets of particular note that you just knew to avoid or not play in due to the fact that it was commonly used as a sacrificial throughway.
And homogeneity? That was half of what taught us how to navigate. You do it based off of street signs. The kids who can't read shouldn't be wandering the streets necessarily anyway, and there was generally enough web of trust in the immediate vicinity where even if you couldn't get home, you could find an adult or another kid to point you in the right direction.
None of what you brought up really strikes me as a problem. It was just normal life skills.
Cities that have the whole motor vehicle danger thing under control are safe for kids under 8 to wander around barely supervised. SRSLY.
If you stood up for yourself, then they'd take you to your parents.
But the mall/hangout issue still stands, and that's assuming the malls themselves are still standing. A lot of malls have shot themselves in the foot by banishing the kids; when they grow up, the last place they'll even think about shopping is at a mall.
The biggest problem are people who can't mind their business and people who have been conditioned to fear the world. The 24/7 fear cycle of news has drilled it into so many peoples minds that if you see someone anywhere on your street outside, they are there to murder, rob, mutilate, or otherwise commit crime.