Re:Children, left behind by suburbia, need better community ...
by WarOnPrivacy on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @07:04PM
(#38372493)
>> Why don’t children leave the house?
> 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.
> 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.