No pre-set plan, no parental supervision, just a “I’m going to go meet my friends on this summer day, I’ll be back before dinner.” For purposes of illustration, assume these kids are aged 9-14, or thereabouts. Too young to drive, too old to be doted over every minute of the day.
If you would (and I hope you would!), would their friends’ parents? Would they be able to go casually knock on their friends’ doors (or even neighbors’ doors), be it biking or walking, and socialize, like kids do?
My guess is probably not. And that’s not the kids’ doing— that’s OUR doing. If parents really wanted their kids to go outside and explore, that would be the norm. But for far too many kids it’s not, because parents don’t want it to be: they’re worried about their kid getting hit by a car, kidnapped, getting in trouble, learning a lesson, the list goes on and on. The built environment reflects that kids are not expected to be outside, as if we’ve kid-proofed it. And so even if you want your kid to play outside, no one else is, and of course no kid wants to play alone!
Ironically, you would probably see more kids out and about, safe to be kids, in gasp New York City than in “safe” suburbia, from my own anecdotal experience.
I chose to live in a more urban area of Seattle (Ballard) because I want my now 1st grader to be able to do things when he is a bit older. Still not as nice as Tokyo, but it could be a lot worse if we lived further north or on the east side.
It's still that way, only with more bike lanes and fewer kids outside.
I grew up in a typical suburban-style neighborhood (a few meandering roads with a lot of cul-de-sacs branching off and some connecting streets, quarter-acre lots, three-to-five bedroom ranches, two-stories, or bi-levels mostly spec-built). There was a park of about one square block, and a gas station at one of the neighborhood entrances. We rode bikes around, got soda or candy at the gas station, played in friends yards or at the park or at driveway basketball goals, nothing super exciting but kids find ways to entertain themselves. They don't need a bunch of "destinations" like adults do. This was all pre-computer, and there was nothing interesting to a kid on TV during the day.
Kids just need unstructured time with other kids, they will make up something to do. It's not really an intrisic problem with suburbia, it's a problem with hovering, overprotective adults.
I'm talking mostly about kids 8-14 or so. Older teens will get more bored and mischevious. Fortunately by that age there's more stuff they can be involved in at school or they can get a job.
In my experience, at least, this is a large contributor to the drug epidemic. You could get a job, or you could get high. For a lot of people, it's an easy choice.
I was under the impression it was more of a 20+ thing.
I guess I romanticized the big city as a kid, leading me to prefer urban over suburban living for my own kid. Maybe this will backlash and he will choose suburbia for his own kid(s).
Still, I’ve always romanticized the big city. Never lived it, though, so maybe it’s a grass-is-greener thing, but maybe I’ll be able to give it a whirl someday.
As a curiosity, I checked out the neighborhood I used to live in on google maps to see if they had put any parks or sidewalks since. Nope, exactly the same.
The important thing is just having some sort of space, as the article puts it.
>> As described by Ray Oldenburg, “third places” are locations where locals can meet, interact, and relax in a place that isn’t their home or place of work. In these locations, kids get the chance to socialize and develop intellectually. American suburbs don’t have these places.
There's rightfully no stipulation whether that's a corner store, mall, park, empty lot, or wild area.
The important thing is that it's accessible to kids and parents aren't around.
Kids need parks, sports fields, cinemas, hobby stores, places to get food, etc, and they need them within walking distance. Being virtually dependent on cars to get anywhere is very crippling for kids.
If there were free taxi services (or other transit), kids would be fine.
And honestly, most of the evil comes from overly-empowering parents. "I don't think you should go there / do that / hang out with those friends" is toxic.
Healthier, as kids mature, for them to be able to do things that parents disapprove of... but can't stop. While still allowing prevention of serious choices.
Making kids dependent on parents' cars increases parents' power from "I can speak out about things I disagree with" to "My agreement is required for anything to happen."
And that's really not healthy, for the kid or the parent.
I think it would be great if kids could take themselves to gymnastics practice on public transit. But giving them the choice between that and smoking pot with friends? I think the choice hurts rather than helps.
Last I looked it up, there were pretty serious mental health issues associated with the tiger parenting technique.
Kids aren't glued to their phones because there isn't a street of coffee shops and delis to buy £5 drinks and £10 sandwiches or a nightclub scene, and they wouldn't tend to go to the art gallery or library to play if moved somewhere more urban, they'd hang around on street corners, head to small parks that aren't dissimilar to the suburban ones or go explore the relative abundance of derelict buildings, industrial sites and railway sidings.
Particularly amusing to see British style terraced housing painted as a solution, as if the street corners the kids who grow up there hang out on (if they go outside at all) are some kind of idyll suburbia is depriving them of with its gardens and lack of corner stores that'll sell them vapes.
There’s a world out there far and beyond whatever bubble you’re in. My daughter (6) can go out back on the playground or practice archery or whatever. My next-door neighbor (next-door in the original, pre-app sense) has a dirt bike track for his handful of kids (5+ and up)
I’ve got all kinds of neighbors with kids doing all the old things we did pre-Black Mirror in the pocket.
Don’t get me wrong, I FIGHT like a… expletive, with my kids about screen time to a degree that my folks and older siblings laugh about given I’m a self-taught teenage hacker.
But kids and communities with “go do shit” old-er school norms exist outside of the big cities.
What you described is the exception, most people live in either sterile suburbs and small towns, or densely packed (and dangerous) cities. Space for a dirt track in your backyard is a pipe dream. Around the world, the closest to your description would be rural areas in less developed countries, which is also a small % of the population.
The bubble, in this context, is the average/representative lifestyle and parenting depicted in lifestyle journalism/blogging space. The proverbial TED abstraction.
Obviously physical circumstances are vary, but that didn't start in the smartphone era.
For what it's worth, I wouldn't claim either of the sides in this conversation are the norm; I know plenty of people who will let their kids run around, and plenty of people who wouldn't.
Anyway.. if you want to have a conversation about childhood, parenting, suburbs.. quantifications and statistics (assuming that is what you're looking for) are allowed.. but the conversation will be fundamentally subjective.
There's no other way, that isn't meaningless, to have this conversation.
If you want to narrow down, to a specific point that can actually be settled in such a way.. that's great. A great point in the conversation. Not the conversation itself.
There is no way to quantify or settle this debate.. with published social studies. The complex relationship between parental culture, modern childhood, screens, neighborhoods... There is no reason to think this will be modeled out in a comprehensive,"objective" way.
You can make a data centered argument, that is fine. It is not possible to do this honestly, well being both broad and tight.
Iregardless, OP's point stands. "It's the screens."
Trying to isolate kid culture, school culture, parents, parenting.. it can't be done. It's a complex. It is now a complex operating in a highly computerized world. The way to think of it is as one major aggravating factor.. that changing material culture.. and how it is affecting the complex that is parenting-childhood-culture. Every element of that complex is co-evolving tightly interrelated.
If you want to think of this objectively (in a pragmatist sense), which outside (the complex) change is the primary driver. Suburban design, or screens.. a computerization of culture.
Arguably everyone has always been in the bubble of our own life. OP had an intention, using the term. He's not talking about stereotypes or extremes. He's talking about the normal life of of most parents reading hn. Even if not, he just gave an example from his life.. demonstrating why he thinks that screens>suburban planning as factors.
Then in commeth the recycled meme version of this conversation. Memes of 7-year-olds taking their dirt bikes to the hardware store. Reddit class politics. Second hand TED arguments about parents not letting kids be free.
I take all the points, but a whole variety of social conditions play.. now and in the past. Also coevolving parenting culture. Also suburban planning, the actual topic of the article.
There's nothing unreasonable about OP's point. That the main factor is screens. It's arguable, and it would be interesting & reasonable to argue a contrary point too. Good faith would be to assume that he/she is someone up to date with the meme version.. as most of us are.
Instead, he gets a snarky, internet-bubble suggestion that parental reticence is at the heart. It is, quite honestly, typically internet.
A 15-year-old analysis, that "went TED" 10 years ago. Went viral 5 years ago.. and jammed into this thread.
This is in fact, a good demonstration of how digital culture prevails. It is aloof from normal life. Allowing children freedom is one thing. Getting them to exercise it, in practice, is the primary challenge most parents see and face. They don't want to go explore. Run wild with their friends. They want screen time. You have to force the little bastard outside
Anyway.. from here the word bubble is the conversation.. and since someone mentioned the word suburb.. Reddit class politics.
We really need to do better on this. These conversations are making us dumber, not smarter.
> Perhaps, but that is a seperate debate.
Barely, like how a noose and a neck aren't the same thing. But they both play a critical part in the life-altering catastrophe.
Last year both my kids and a bunch from around the neighborhood decided to walk back together. They had a roaring good time. School would release at 3. It would be 4 by the time they got back home after stops at the park, jumping across the small creek, etc etc. The big kids went off to middle school so they aren’t walking back anymore. But everyone of them still misses the walk back.
The place where I’m at is surprisingly walkable at least in the 1.5 mile radius enough to get the kids to their local cafe or run errands. The 10 and above kids regularly take off on their own. The phones have location turned on anyway.
It was really one of the most unexpectedly heartening things I've seen in a while.
What are the odds they would all sit around together, outside, on their phones?
> My guess is probably not. And that’s not the kids’ doing— that’s OUR doing.
It's parent's doing both because of their regulations. It's also parent's doing because parents choose to live in suburbia / pay a premium to do so. If parents paid premiums to live in dense urban neighborhoods, more would be built / development patterns would change.
It's weird. As I said... we live in an inner city (we're 1.5 miles from downtown core of our west coast city). You'd think our streets were busy, but ... they're less busy than the suburban street I grew up in. Here's the difference.. in a city. Few people drive. There are certainly main thoroughfares that are very crowded (my kids are not allowed to cross the large streets themselves). But within our neighborhood, bounded by large streets, the streets are really tiny and there's few drivers. My house is actually quieter than the suburban street I grew up on. It's silent at night. Cars are the noise, not people. People are quiet.
So that is to say... Yes it's parents fault. But parents are responding to their built environment, not any internal moral failing. The main issue is that parents are unable to understand the consequences of suburban living.
The parents are practically committing a crime if they let their kids do this.
> more kids . . . New York City
Or any big city. Even in wealthy neighborhood.
In the suburbs you almost never see kids outside without an adult present.
Not in the European countries I know
It’s a class/culture issue rather than an urban planning issue. I grew up in a car-dependent suburb in the 1990s, and in the summer I used to spend all day roving around the neighborhood with the neighbor kids. Kids in the same suburb don’t do that today, because parents are more protective, kids are glued to screens, etc.
Anecdotally, the people I have in my life who are the most afraid of leaving their kids alone are suburbanites.
Yes, and recently in USA. A handful of times I had a tinge of worry when they were gone much of the day, and they returned better than I could have planned it. One occasion I recall they hiked to a lake and had packed backpacks with lunches water sunscreen. It was my brain that worried, and a joy to watch the children grow and explore!
The mother next door, apprehensive about rogue police, instructed her children that if they see the police to run home and don't stop. There is no recourse when the cops crack skulls, so it's best to stay out of their grip.
As a kid grown up in the smartphone era (I’m 18 now), these words of yours hurt my soul. Me and all of my friends are smartphone addicts. Everyone I know are using their smartphone as much as the rest of their life allows. But ofc, your brains are not messed up enough, so you don’t understand and you’re gonna just let your be consumed by it.
Seriously, go read the works of the world-renowned psychologist Jonathan Haidt. https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/
I’m deeply sorry with every person whose life is literally wasted for that sweet $1/user/month ad money.
I cannot express my sadness for the next generation who are literally born into it and grow up with YouTube Kids. Thank God at least I lived about 12 years of real life.
Kids are curious and stimulation-receptive and motivated, and so they're going to chase easy sources of those things.
Parents, meanwhile, can either work to balance the easy sources with other sources that might enrich them in novel ways (like going outside or being bored), accepting that their kids may not buy into the idea, or they can defer to their child's sense and avoid tantrums and defiance.
It seems like kids turn into adults either way, but the choice is ultimately one being made by the parent, not by the availability of screens per se. The easy stimulation is omnipresent. That ship sailed about 100 years ago. As a parent caring for kids (and a person caring for yourself!) you ultimately have to figure out what you want to do about it.
Screens today provide a bottomless pit of content for kids. At a parent, yes I have to limit my kids time or they'd just do it 24/7. People talk about letting their kids figure out how to moderate themselves, but either I'm doing that wrong or (perhaps more likely) that just doesn't work the same for every kid.
Digital equivalents are pushed in every workspace. Scrawling unnecessarily on paper would be frowned on as wasteful in the average office. Sending a paper letter instead of an email is rare.
I'm not arguing that there aren't advantages of physical books, board games, and literal painting, but doing things the "right way" is clearly more expensive, less space efficient, and uses up more time packing up. It all influences parenting decisions.
In my experience in most places libraries are not common. They use lots of space and money, that usually is needed for more important things like building sewers in neighborhoods that have none.
While probably too far to walk for the average American, it's certainly not too far as to be unreachable.
No, at least no for most folks in western world. If you make your life hard on purpose living far away from civilization for whatever reason then yes you created your own challenges, but that's on you and you dragged rest of your family into it.
We have tons of libraries around, what kind of developed society would ignore such an important place? We also have 'ludotheques' which are literally for kids and also have various rental toys. And we live in small village, surrounded by other small villages. Complaining books take space... thats just sad, not commenting on that one.
Lego / Duplo are amazing (we bought 2 full sack of potatoes worth of original used duplos for like 50 or 100 bucks, with massive train setup), kids love it, but if you list as an issue that kids actually have to clean up after themselves, it becomes pretty obvious problem lies elsewhere (rest of your comment says so too). Parenting is hard, moreso these days, but its also massively due to the fact many parents simply don't do good parenting, they can't suffer even a bit for their kids because they are oh-so deep in their comfort zones or feeling important or whatever. Rather few teach discipline which is one of the most important skills for their future life success regardless of their path, and it shows pretty much immediately. But folks without discipline themselves probably can't teach one. More often than not they are glued to screens even in front of their kids. I am literally naming various shitshows and their direct causes we see around us across few countries and societies.
What kind of hobbies and passions do kids have? How did you invest yourself into developing those passions? What kind of role model are you for them? Thats completely parent responsibility, schools will never supplant that and its not their purpose (the fact that good teachers often end up as huge parental figure in their pupil's lives just shows what they have at home, have a friend a teacher on private school for very rich and influential people in Geneva, Switzerland and stories he tells me about 6-7 years old who like him much much more than their own dad with 7 lamborghinis...). And so on.
But if parent's mode is career and money first or general me-first and kids leave my precious free time alone then its always the same sad story at the end.
Libraries in much of the developed world are seeing decline. The problems of American libraries are often reported on HN. As an OpenStreetMap editor working across small-town Europe, the library is one of those pieces of community infrastructure I go look for first, but I have seen firsthand how they have been shut down, or opening hours may have been slashed to e.g. just a couple of hours on two days of the week. In cities library locations get merged when budgets are an issue, and while occasional big new central library projects are approved, they are a different kind of facility than the library of yore.
I'm talking about how small decisions influence parenting in general, including habits of busy or lazy parents, and how it's changed over recent decades. When I was young, consoles were barely a thing, so you played with construction toys and board games - everyone did. You couldn't read on a Kindle or app. There wasn't Procreate and a stylus. My point is that the modern equivalents are often very engaging (Minecraft, as one example), space efficient and affordable. When things are often easier and cheaper, people tend to roll downhill towards them.
Weekends only had good stuff on in the morning on Saturday and then on Sunday night, depending on what age you're thinking of.
On those occasions when we let them watch more than they should I'm sometimes amazed that they even remember to go to the bathroom. Good grief the devices today are addicting.
We've really mastered the art of creating compelling and addictive time sucks, and our kids are paying the price for it. Ok we're all paying a price for it, but kids the worst.
You really could and while its lost somewhere now I had the Pitfall Harry Explorer's Club patch I earned by doing just that.
Yep, Gen X is the last generation to have played with literal rocks and sticks.
> Yeah. 1980s.
As someone who actually group up in the 1980s, I am sad to report that 30 years ago was the 1990s.
> Books? lol. Your school hands you the the book Jane Eyre.
Both bookstores and free public libraries with books more interesting to most kids of the time than Jane Eyre were, in fact, things in the 1980s and 1990s. As were gaming consoles, home computers, handheld electronic games,
> Kids back then had fucking nothing.
Nah, kids often had lots of stuff in the home.
But they also had a culture which supported parents allowing children unsupervised in the neighborhood at much early ages then is considered acceptable today, which meant that more of them were allowed to go out beyond the home more often than is the case today.
Model rockets. Water balloons. Oh yeah, if someone replaced their kitchen cabinets, there'd be cabinet doors in the alley to use as... a bike jump.
Soccer or kickball in the alley. Walkie-talkies. Cops & robbers. A swingset to jump off of.
Computers. We all had computers; my clique had Ataris. Also records. Movie theaters. Blockbuster.
The public pool. The beach.
Slot cars. I had a slot-car set, up in our attic.
And none of that stuff was expensive, except the computers.
Growing up in the '80s was great. And today, we have mastery of technology but weren't shackled to it as kids. Growing up today seems like a stressful, distracted, and rather empty affair.
I basically don't want TV anymore, and my kids are limited to 3 hours of screentime per day, which they basically only get on weekends. (They get maybe an hour during the weekday, but that's because their school/daycare/aftercare days are much longer than mine were as a kid). I do set limits for them, but both of them (preschool-age) are able to turn off the tablets on their own if faced with the choice of doing it themselves or having mommy & daddy do it.
Not "endlessly." 30 years ago, in the suburbia being decried, I had a bike and friends my age in the neighborhood. You called to see if they wanted to go do something, or went down the street and knocked on the door. And this was in a time (1990s) when the country's violent crime rate was about double what it is today, but there was no social media and 24-hour news doomscrolling making parents paranoid.
The older I get, the more I value ignorance about certain things like what’s happening in the wider world (beyond maybe 15 mins of headlines a day). The overload of minutia about people’s lives and irrational fears is such a waste of time and bad for health.
And someone else's news is not necessarily my news. Horrible crimes happening on the other side of the country don't make it any more likely that there's going to be a horrible crime in my backyard. That's a local news story, but drives clicks and outrage, so now it's national/world news.
It's possible to some extent. Different parents will have different levels of ability and success.
This is relevant (but difficult) advice for individual parents, but it's a minor point if we're discussing society. People (parents and kids) exist in an environment. "Just going out to play," isn't part of the world/environment/culture. The way kids/parents did thing differently in the past was by existing in a different culture.
Easy Vs hard stimulation is one paradigm, but you can't just view everything through this lens. Life is more complex. There are looping and knotting causal relationships and we can't know all of them. It's a complex.
Life is just very screen based. Ours and theirs.
They study via screens, and don't really know how to "do school" analogue. Social life is, largely through screens... and increasingly part of the media spectrum. Work will, eventually, be screened-based. So are life's administrative tasks.
Life's administrative tasks got way worse with computwrisation. Now I have to book my own flight, make sure they match with hotels, take my own reading from electric, water and gas meters, register everywhere myself and endlessly prove my indetity to hindreds of institutions.
I have an email mailbox for changes in terms and conditions that get sent to me, it is about 800 emails. If I hired a lawyer to go through them, it would probably cost $100,000
Meanwhile.. it's also not overwhelmingly true that administration, and other things heavily affected by computerisation are "better," more efficient or productive.
That's easy to see in non-commercial space. It's also true in commercial space. Government. Universities. Education.
This is all tightly coupled with op's point. Digitization, computerization, networking... These really were major revolutions. They impacted and totally reformed everything. However, this has been more of a change than an improvement in many applications. Slightly better in some ways, slightly worse and others, ambiguous, mixed... complex.
The computerization of social life, entertainment.. childhood experiences. Etc. There are long causality chains.. and we don't really understand the consequences of everything.
But in any case.. I think you're absolutely right on TCs and administrative life.
Technology made it easy to have more, more complex paperwork. That allows us to produce a lot more paperwork. A handwritten contract with two lawyers present.. is a marginal cost. Even a sign here, take-it-or-leave-it contract (EG financing, or opening an account) representing some marginal cost.
Computerization makes this whole thing more efficient. Automated emails, tick-to-agree pop-ups... Those allow humanity to create many more contracts than previously possible.
That's efficiency, of a sort. If you consider contracts themselves to be an output... The efficiency gains a greater than Henry Ford's entire lifetime.
I think we've learned something. Technological change, and it's proliferation does not necessarily aggregate in an idealic way.
I think the fear of paperclip maximizing AIs.. I think this is more of an analogy to our experience with recent tech shifts.. beyond its veracity as a danger vector for AI specifically.
Technology has made our lives faster, but not better.
Plus, there needed to be something interesting on schedule which was completely outside of my control.
It took some patience and some trust in own abilities w.r.t. a long-term goal.
Because he’s not interested (and a little jealous I bet), he mentions they could 3d print castles easier (neither own one so I’m not sure it’s a valid argument).
Screens are much more compelling than playing outside. Kids are still using their imaginations but they're playing in a much more powerful sandbox. And, at the same time, outside is actually getting less compelling.
It's not healthy -- probably both in a physical and mental sense -- but the solution is far from just taking away screens. Society is structured around this now.
So much this. When I was a kid (late 70's), I could count on going outside and finding other kids to play with. Or if I didn't find anyone, I'd ride my bike around until someone came outside. Or, I could even simply knock on my friend's door and say "Can Robert come out and play?" and this was completely acceptable.
I'd love to send my kid outside to play, but he'd just be wandering around by himself. Knocking on a friend's door (though he knows a same-age kid two doors away) would be considered out of bounds nowadays. Any kid get-togethers must be carefully arranged ahead of time with at least one adult monitoring the "playdate."
Yeah, the social dynamics of this kind of thing baffles me. I'm sure it's very neighborhood-dependent, but neighbors don't "check" up on each other either.
I think this is more U.S.-wide: it's not socially acceptable to knock on someone's door or ring their doorbell even if they're waiting for me. You're supposed to text that you're waiting outside. Doorbells are only for deliveries and unknown strangers (like selling something, politics, religious missionaries).
If it's not socially acceptable to knock on a friend's door when they're waiting for you to get there, then it's definitely not gonna be socially acceptable to just knock, see if they're home, say hi, and that's it.
In my case, (36M living in Texas) it's totally normal for people to knock or ring the doorbell. Neighbors drop by to talk about what's happening in the neighborhood, friends come to visit, etc.
Whatever's going on there, it's serious. I bet in 50 years we discover that some chemical in our food/water/air was responsible, analogous to the leaded gasoline issue.
It’s also a nasty feedback loop where all of this “mental health awareness” is blasted at kids all day and they start to assume there is a 50/50 chance they have anxiety and start to… get anxious about it.
And I live in Chicago.
I enjoy a nice stroll in nature as an adult, but I would have been bored out of my mind as a kid. Sports never appealed, and treehouses are even more boring than sitting in a room with no internet.
What I liked doing was mall walking, or walking through busy cities. But my parents would rarely take me to do that. So I was "lazy."
Not sure if there is a list of such places though
I literally cannot parse or make sense of your comment.
Which is one indication of just how fundementally different various parts of the world are.
But I think there must be a misunderstanding, as it would be unusual for a place near suburbia to be a national park or similar area with restrictions like this.
Around the world some place back onto national parks, other places have large areas of undeveloped land that aren't national parks (cattle stations, community land, etc).
The video I linked is representative of the kind of ocean land I grew up on and still live near part time - it's a good place to raise children, plenty to do.
And for the record: I could only climb trees if I didn't get caught, really. If I climbed trees, I might fall and get injured. (I did get injured once: a twig got stuck in my wrist (was a fairly minor injury). Hide and seek only works if you have friends around to play with. I had that during some of elementary school, but we moved before my siblings were similar ages and there weren't other kids around the same age.
I just could not be motivated to travel 40 minutes to an event, and Xbox Live was an equivalent surrogate
Move on campus in the middle of things and I’m out almost every day. Keep everything in walking distance and I’m very social in person. We’ll see if suburbs ever appeal to me, more likely would have to be a reimagined version of the concept.
Why? Because we limit the time they spend on screens.
Very, very few people have this. Sounds like you have your own "third place" that the neighborhood kids can leverage, and which provides a compelling alternative to screens.
In the earlier, more spacious location, there were nice spaces for grownups to decompress after a workday, but we had to be driven around if we wanted to play with our friends. Television (and learning how to pirate Game Boy ROMs) was novel and interesting when a peer group wasn’t available.
Humans are social beings. We are motivated to do things through our peers doing things. What you describe is probably really nice for people who enjoy exercise and spending time in nature. But for social beings, what you are describing is absolute isolation from society.
I would posit that a big part of what glues the kids to the screen is that the screen is a window to the real world. When they look into the screen, they have an endless stream of other people, expressing opinions, doing things, existing in society. When they look outside, there's no society, there's no people. It's just trees.
The internet has become sort of a "third place", but since it has no precedent, none of us knew how to leverage it as such, so we have people glued to screens.
I have hope for the generation after gen Z though - my toddler knows exactly when I'm looking at my phone instead of giving her attention and in such instances proposes that I put it away.
It's very much like my generation annoyed at their parents who watch TV all day instead of interacting.
While the internet is certainly addictive, I'd assume that most people who, like me, waste their lives online, do so primarily because no real alternative is available.
What’s the point of a treehouse if they just play by themselves? Also, no child is going to walk on a trail by themselves for fun. Same with a sports field. lol. Get realistic dude.
Suburbia sucks. I grew up in it. My childhood was spent playing video games, going to school, socialize/learn, maybe after school sports, go back home, study. Weekends were a bit rough. Usually just stuck with parents. Had a park within 15 minute WALK. But friends lived in diff suburb so it was at least a 40 minute walk (maybe 15 min by bike). Occasionally parents drive me to friends house, but again mostly just to play games (this is an era where play over internet was not feasible or widely available).
Also the suburbs were a bit dangerous to walk or bike in. Cars zooming up and down streets with reckless abandon. Worse during commuting. I imagine it’s worse today with the massive compensators that exist on the road now.
I was essentially a prisoner up until I was able to get my learners permit and start driving.
I've noticed that my kids will go outside more when I walk the dog more. They either join me or go outside on their own.
The same applied when I work in the yard.
There’s also talk in this thread about how we’ve designed the outside to be kid-unfriendly. Let’s think for a second about how we design our home spaces inside to have screens all around. I’d wager that if you could walk into any house in suburbia, 90%+ will have a massive flat screen hanging in the main living space. Not only that, but all the chairs are aimed to face it! It’s the focal point and THE activity to be done in that space. Some houses will have screens in nearly every room. A screen in every pocket and maybe some portable screens too! With so much priority put on these screens and when parents, grandparents, friends, etc all spend a majority of their waking life on them, what is a kid going to mimic and learn is acceptable?
We definitely still struggle with screen time for our kids. They’re getting much better about turning it off without tantrums, but we only have one TV in our bedroom (rarely turned on), an iPad, and our phones. We try to watch TV or movies together rather than having a screen on in the background or relying on a screen to entertain our kids while we go off and do something else. All that said, our oldest (4 y/o) reads chapter books like there’s no tomorrow because she sees my wife and I read physical books. We also frequent the library often where she can have some independence to wander and find what interests her to bring home. Parent friends always make remarks about how smart she is and how they wish their kid would read more, but they can’t get them to stop wanting to watch TV or the tablet… but we’ve been to several friends’ houses and they always have a TV on nonstop and they themselves don’t read any books.
It's one thing to be poorly designed, it's another to be socially isolated with no one to talk to.
> we had a Nintendo 64
Those two doesn't agree with each other. If you grew up in 1980s you were an adult or close to when Nintendo 64 were out.
But..do you have their friends in that space? I’m not naive I realize a lot of kids actually just want to TikTok, but “go hiking” isn’t a valid alternative. Kids want friends and unstructured time with them not beholden to their parents ability to drive them somewhere.
I imagine that if you're taking advantage of the outdoors regularly, your kids will follow sooner or later.
Compared to nature and fields, a stimulating place to hang with friends around lots of other people gives a sense of independence and is a stronger draw for most.
Forced timeout almost never works. It merely reinforces their craving for what has been taken away from them.
> Because of screens.
Your kids. Not mine, who predated screens. There was nowhere to go. They could walk to the neighborhood entrance. They could walk back. They could do that again.
Past that the choices were walking along a thruway easement or risk trespassing charges by being anywhere else.
Not just my kids. I spent >20 years in leadership in scouting and youth programs, 1990s onward. I worked with a LOT of kids. When they weren't in home/school/extremely-supervised-structured-and-typically-not-free-activities, those kids stayed mostly home because there was nowhere for them to go.
Most.
Kids.
Have.
Nowhere.
To Go.
The entire human history of kids having peer-only time to learn negotiation, compromise, ambition, boundaries, loyalty, conflict resolution, basically learning how to think has been replaced with ceaseless adult supervision or being shut away.
Parenting time has increased 10-fold and that heavy-handed excess is supposed to somehow replicate their most critical learning time - the exact space where children become people.
It doesn't. It can't. Five seconds of considering it makes that plain. We've illegalized childhood and substituted the most counterproductive thing we could find.
Screens really aren't the cause of a catastrophe that began taking shape generations ago.
Like I was always planning on putting my kids in public school. I got a great education in them.
But now I'm wondering if I'll be forced to hunt down a school that avoids screens as much as possible. I've heard good things about Waldorf schools but the vaccination rates at those schools freak me out even more.
(Not to mention I've seen some terrible examples of educational software that is so buggy and unusable that it's actively hindering learning, making students feel stupid when they would've been fine with traditional methods.)
I'm being facetious, but maybe not really...
If you buy construction/plumbing/electrical/etc labor, surely you have seen prices skyrocketing.
What's the problem exactly with taking their devices? They cry and complain, so? People resist change, but they eventually get used to it.
We're trying like hell to slow the onslaught with my son, but the kids make fun of him because "you don't even play Roblox" or whatever.
The public schools are all in on screens, at least where we are. They literally issued my kindergartener a Chromebook and expect us to do 30 minutes a night on the apps they recommend. It's really disheartening.
I think this is a strong overstatement. It's one thing to be completely out of the loop for any and all media, and another to watch perdiodically.
Sports are still huge, so obviously there's a significant demo of kids who aren't solely watching tv and gaming all the time.
> the kids make fun of him
Some. That can happen whether your kid is glued to screens or not.
Even if it's a minority it's still very disruptive.
Maybe you can find local groups of like minded families for your kids to find friends.
Because it's illegal in most of North America (especially when you consider where people actually live) for them to leave the house. That is the beginning and end of it.
If this answer isn't blindingly obvious to you, you are part of the problem. Either you don't notice it because you're more focused on being angry about "suburbia" than you are the objective well-being/freedom of your own children, or you actively encourage it because you think it's a net good (either because you're paranoid, because you're a victim of misinformation, or because you're a concern troll).
Things are safer than ever before yet most children have fewer rights and ways to develop available to them than at any point in recorded history. Sure, there might not be any place for them to go to exercise that freedom, but if you legalize it they'll eventually start coming back.
As for now, keep cheering on the arrests of children playing on their own front lawns. The reason suburbia exists in the first place is because that's the place your kids are maximally safe from this while still allowing you to be sufficiently gainfully employed, and making that way of life slightly more aesthetically acceptable to childless apartment-dwellers will do nothing to fix this.
Karen delenda est.
> Because it's illegal in most of North America (especially when you consider where people actually live) for them to leave the house.
It is not illegal in most of North America, if you consider the USA (not sure about Canada/Mexico), only three states have laws that make it actually illegal. Consider:
> Washington doesn't have a state law that dictates whether children can or can't be left at home that's dependent on age, according to Seattle-based law firm Elise Buie Family Law. In nearby Oregon, though, the law states the child must be at least 10 years old to be home alone.
Or California, which has alot of people:
> In the state of California, there is no legal age stipulated on when a child can be left home alone or allowed to walk outside alone. There is a law, however, that children 6 years old and younger cannot be left alone in a car.
So for the west continental coast we have Oregon until 10...and in California if a car isn't involved no constraint. Oregon is just one of three states with actual laws on the books:
> Three states legally require kids to be of a certain minimum age to be left on their own for some time: Illinois (14 years old) Oregon (10 years old) Maryland (8 years old)
I'm not sure Maryland is being unreasonable here, but Illinois and Oregon probably are.
Then the chilling effect starts and people just never bother because they read or heard of that happening once somewhere.
In the case you mention, kids would be supposedly taken away for being without supervision in the car. Shoplifting is unrelated crime.
But come summer, I take him to a small Spanish port town. It has beaches where teens can surf and spearfish. There's always an available pickup game of soccer or basketball, even at midnight. Bars and restaurants one can walk to, and complete independence, barring budgetary constraints. The area that in the US has a dozen teenagers, over there has about 300 or so. Suddenly it's not all screens, because there are competing alternatives. Want to go play DnD poolside with the nerdiest of the lot? No need to ask anyone.
Suburbs don't force kids into being alone in front of screens, any more than they force adults to be lonely and asocial. But they so do change the level of effort required to do anything else.
It’s connection they are looking for. Nobody wants to play in big backyard treehouse alone. At least the screens let them talk to other people or at least pretend to.
Having a house in a suburb where kids can’t walk to anybody they have connections with isolates and pushes them to the screens.
I grew up with Nintendos and such, even the handheld gameboys, so I always had screens available to me.
But my friends and I went outside and met up and rode our bikes all around town all the time.
Not entirely true. When kids used to go outside, they went alone outside since the age of 6 or even 5. That is impossible now. In order for kids to go outside, an adult must be there with them. That is adult bored on playground, cant cook, cant clean, cant socialize with friends, cant have fun. So adults wont go.
And then by the time kids are allowed to go outside, they dont know what to do there, other kids are not there and they are too old.
Problem solved.
Can't this (admittedly blunt) technique translate to contemporary situations ?
I hear people complaining about the lack of iPads due to low school funding. I'm thinking this might be a good thing. IMHO tablets are the worst case scenario, they're made for pure consumption. Keyboard input on screen is bad, productive software is limited - these are machines made for pure consumption of media.
We all consume enough media nowadays. If you teach programming on proper laptops/desktops, or how to use spreadsheets, and writing text on computers, I get that this is useful knowledge. I just can't think of anything you need to teach with a tablet in school. And I think we should also not allow phones in school, it's just too damn entertaining. Adults barely are able to unglue themselves from their phones, we need to create a distraction free zone conducive for learning.
Our streets have become hostile to anything but cars.
Not Just Bikes video on suburbia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw
Because of screens.
We have a forest in our backyard with a 2 story fully enclosed treehouse (including electricity), sports fields within a 5 minute walk, tons of hiking trails, etc. But it is a real struggle to get them to leave the house because they want to be on the Internet 24/7. Of course we take away the devices, but that just leads to them bemoaning their screen less state. One of the problems is, this is taught in the schools. Pretty much every class is using screens constantly. Our local school district recently experienced a hack that made it so they couldn’t use chromebooks for a few days. All the teachers lesson plans were completely centered around devices, so the kids just watched movies all day instead.