How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations | Hacker News Reader

How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

freerangekids.com

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I was thinking about this the other day. Ironically this is the safest time in all of history to let kids do this. Crime is historically very low and our kids want to carry around magical devices that lets us know where they are at all times and contact them instantly.

This should be a golden age, yet we've turned it into jail. What gives everyone?

Edit: And by "what gives" I mean literally, I live in the US and have children ages 7-12 and I don't let them do these things solely because I'm afraid of government busy-bodies. Not crime, not injury, not abduction. I'm frankly and bluntly afraid of the limitless power a bored bureaucrat will help himself/herself to over my family if given the slightest reason. That's what gives for me anyway.

>Ironically this is the safest time in all of history to let kids do this.

Well what's the cause and effect here? Maybe it happens less often today just because there are less kids outside.

There is definitely a vicious cycle:

* Media hypes a tragedy concerning a child

* Parents on the margin keep their kids indoors more often

* Streets have less children

* Automobiles become less vigilant / Criminals concentrate on the fewer remaining kids outside

* Tragedy happens again

Crime is not the problem, traffic is. I grew up in a blind alley, and the whole town was really low in traffic. I started cruising around with my bike together with the neighbors at age 7, and we met a car every 10 minutes, tops. They slowed down to a stop, mostly, when they saw us.

Fast forward, we are living in a city of 30k citizens now, though on the outskirts; there is a major road about 200m away, and although we have a tight speed limit in our area (30kmh), I'm not sure we can allow roaming around before age 10. Cats are run over all the time here, people just don't look before going around corners. And then there's the occasional report (or rumor?) of people trying to spirit children away from their parents in the local mall.

That being said, maybe I felt a lot safer as a kid in the same circumstances.

more cars bigger cars faster cars cars in a hurry because they live 1 hour from work and hate life

Also more soundproof cars. You can't hear kids playing two feet away in modern vehicles if the windows are up.

You also can't hear kids playing two feet away in 40 year old cars, windows or not, because they are too noisy. And if you rely on hearing for detecting kids, especially two feet away, you're going to have a bad time, even with the windows down.

Yes. Everyone is falling over themselves in this thread to bemoan the sensationalist media and irrational fear of kidnapping, but cars are a dramatic difference in the risks of letting children wander that just didn't exist 100 years ago.

I do not believe there are likely to be many centenarians among those here disagreeing with the idea that daily life is so much more deadly now as to justify the degree of restriction under discussion.

> but cars are a dramatic difference in the risks of letting children wander that just didn't exist 100 years ago.

100 years ago, sure[1] -- but there's also a dramatic difference in behaviour from 40 years ago, and traffic is significantly safer today than then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reported_Road_Casualties_Great...

1: I'm sure more kids flat out died from catching untreatable infections when playing outside 100 years ago than are even mildly hurt in traffic today.

We could continue this debate over whether the increase in restrictions is rational, by me pointing out that as all-cause child mortality falls, and as others methods of getting children from A to B become cheaper, it makes sense for parents to take steps to avoid sources of risk that were acceptable in the past. But that is not even really my point. The point is that the discussion in the thread is hopeless if most commenters focus on feeling smug without considering all these effects in detail.

Totally off topic but the way you used 'spirit away' made me realise the title for Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away". I never bothered to look it up and felt it was about ghost 'spirits'.

I think the title (the English version, at least) is supposed to evoke both meanings.

Traffic doesn't have to be a problem. My city has significant sidewalk infrastructure. Also, the right way to do this is to start off by taking long walks as a family and training kids to cross the street properly and be vigilant of their surroundings. My 3 year old already has a natural fear of large, fast-moving vehicles.

I grew up on a fairly busy road, 60Km/h two lanes both ways, not exactly a highway but still quite busy. We were crossing unassisted with no lights or zebra crossings since about the age of 6 or 7.

> This should be a golden age, yet we've turned it into jail

gilded cage. freedom means not _needing_ these complications in our lives. the technology is potentially liberating but our culture is not a liberated culture.

I COMPLETELY AGREE!! I have been the victim of slander, sadly, so people are right to worry about the state getting all up in one's supposed personal business. Ask any parent of special needs children..State children services getting involved over some BS from the schools.I've seen that situation more than once.:-\

This American Life had a funny anecdote illustrating the opposite extreme where a woman who doesn't quite understand the meaning of "summer camp" leaves her kids at a campground by themselves for a week.

  My mother emigrated to the United States from Germany in 
  the '50s. And her understanding of American culture and 
  traditions wasn't always quite clear. And one of her 
  confusions was about summer camp. She knew that kids 
  should go to summer camp, but she didn't realize that it 
  usually involved 24 hour adult supervision. So one week 
  she drove us up to a campground on the coast of Malibu 
  and set us up in this tent, and left us some groceries, 
  and then she drove home to go back to work.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/109/...

I feel like this more than a cultural misunderstanding. It would not be considered normal or acceptable to leave your children alone for so long in Germany either.

Well, a day or two would be normal if the environment is trustworthy – such as a known campsite – but not otherwise.

I’ve also met two people who went on vacation (to another country!) on their own with 14 and 16yo, and no one seemed to consider that weird either.

But yeah, even in Germany leaving 10-12yos alone for a week would be unusual in the post-1960 world.

Misunderstanding or not I think that as a kid I would have thought it was a pretty awesome experience!

It's a cultural misunderstanding, but not the sort you're thinking of. The mother in question wasn't following the culture she grew up in; rather, she was trying to follow the culture she had moved into, but failed in a hilarious way due to her misunderstanding of American culture.

But the more important point: She may have been baffled, but she was obviously not terribly concerned by the level of danger she was exposing her kids to.

Social proof matters. If everybody else is leaving their kids alone for a week, clearly it's not as unsafe as it sounds.

(And as with raising funding from VCs, social proof depends on whether they think other VCs are investing, not on whether other VCs actually are.)

I actually share the same understanding of summer camp as the woman (I’m from Germany). For me, summer camp means I pay for the stay of my children, drop off my children and leave because there are employees that take care of all the children in the camp. I would also not expect a 1:1 care, just enough employees to take care of the children. Of those employees I would expect many to be just around 18–21 years of age because it is common summer job for students.

There's a difference between camps with employees around to supervise children (a "summer camp") and camps where a family might go by themselves with just a tent and a van and stay for a weekend. Campsites for families/adults might have just a single park ranger there 8 hours a day, or no supervision at all. They usually provide a cleared area in the woods for a car and a tent, a water spigot, maybe an electricity hookup, a fire pit in the middle of a clearing, but that's about it. They're often located in more scenic campgrounds for people who don't like to hike, but want to be out in the wilderness, build a fire, cook food outdoors, and sleep in a tent.

The woman from Germany left her kids at a campsite/clearing in the woods, with no supervision -- not a summer camp designed for children, with adults (or, at least, college students) providing some type of supervision.

My Mom exactly this in '76 in Germany, for two or three weeks as I recall. She looked after me and my brother once or twice a week. It was at least a 3/4h drive from our home. No one gave a blink. It was a valuable experience for us.

What could possibly go wrong? There where lots of adults in the camp. The camp supervisor had a landline phone so in case something severely happened he could have called home or an emergency.

I think our cognitive ability for risk management for abstract risks is pretty poor. The foreigner kids predator is a black swan event. It's much more risk for kids to be harmed by someone he knows.

When I was 6 or 7 years old, during the summers every morning my mom would give me $1.25, and I would get on my bike and ride to the public pool with my friends that was about 5 miles away in the center of our small town. We'd swim all day and go to the Burgerville for lunch where I could get a wonderfully tasty cheeseburger with fries and coke for my $1.25. Finally I had to be home by dinner.

If we didn't go swimming, there was a 40 acre woods/orchard behind our houses and we would search it for anything exciting, like bugs, squirrels or wild animals.

When I turned 8 we moved out into the country and I had to walk a few miles just to get to a friends house. We'd usually take our air rifles and go try to shoot things. By the time I was 10 most of us had our own motorcycles and parents who would let us borrow their shotguns for some real fun.

This was in the 1970s.

I had a similar experience in the rural south in the 90s, for what it's worth. I was largely given free reign to tromp around the (expansive) woods, had a bb gun that I liked to tote around, and at one point had a motorcycle - a ratty little 50cc honda dirtbike that I repeatedly wrecked into ditches and briar patches.

Point is, at least for "country" millennials, I think plenty of roaming did happen.

At least for me this happened in suburbia too in the 90s. (Minus the motorcycle)

edit: $1.25 at Burgerville is bonkers to me. We just had $0.29/$0.39 burger/cheeseburger Tuesday deal at McDonalds. Those days are gone...

Ditto. and ours was a slingshot not an air rifle.

Ditto - early 90s, suburbia, Great Lakes region.

Latchkey kid, summers spent biking around a couple mile radius, walked to the mall to play arcade games and eat McDonalds... magical times.

This was my experience in the suburban south in the 90s. I think the south tends to be more hands off in many ways.

oh brother/sister...your experience mirrors mine completely. 6-7 years old and wandering around woods, the pool, etc..

It must be the turrists.

Ugh, I hate tourists too.

Oh, the sweet taste of freedom...

I grew up in the 90s, and when I was 7 years old I was expected to leave the house all by myself(school started at 8am, my parents already left for work by then), lock the door behind me, walk 2km to school(crossing 2 roads), and then get back home around 3pm, let myself in, and if either parent wasn't home yet make myself something to eat.

I suspect this is not just an American or British or solely cultural thing but also a number-of-children thing. This seems like it would also be the natural response to having fewer children.

If you have 3-10 kids, you can "afford" to let them off the leash so to speak, if only psychologically. Your kids going missing or getting hurt is an eventuality anyway, maybe.

If you have 1 or 2 kids, you are investing a lot more mindshare per kid and are probably a lot more worried about such roaming as a result.

The easiest way to get back the right to roam, I suspect, would be to simply triple your number of kids. But almost no one is willing to do that for other reasons.

Only child, grew up in the 90's in a neighborhood of one and two child families. We were all wild roamers, generally disappearing on weekends and summer days from sun up to sun down. Usually at someone else's house or in the creeks and woods between people's houses.

First child of 2 growing up in the 80s; I was allowed to go anywhere in our village and a bit beyond. It was fun ;) Cannot phantom being restricted to our garden...

>> I suspect this is not just an American or British or solely cultural thing but also a number-of-children thing. This seems like it would also be the natural response to having fewer children.

I suspect the same. When the first child is born, parents tend to be extremely protective of them. By the time 3rd, 4th is born, they are in "been there, done that" mode.

Further, by the time the 3rd and 4th kids are born, the older ones are already starting to take up some responsibilities. That includes, rearing the younger siblings.

Note: Not talking about graphs or trees

This is correct, sort of. I think it has less to do with investment per child and more to do with experience.

My wife is the oldest of ten, and her mother had twelve siblings. After a certain number, you realize that getting lost is recoverable, broken bones won't kill you, and all-in-all kids are made out of very sturdy stuff.

I would say it isn't just that you can "afford" to let them off the leash more it's that you don't have the time/energy to keep track of them. If you are dealing with an infant a toddler and a 5 year old, you are simply won't be able to follow the 8 year old around. Let's say they run off with some frinds with out permission you can either leave the 3 other kids alone to find you 8 year old (who is going to be home when they get hungry anyways) or you can say, "fuck it" I got more important things to handle.

What? You could put them in the car and drive around. What else are you going to do, running on foot to find them?

Good luck finding me when I'm climbing in chaparal canyons looking for rattlesnakes. The only cars that ever made it out to where we hung out were beaters driven by horny teenagers willing to offroad in the hopes of getting some action.

Take Japan as a counterpoint, or Switzerland just to name two that have been discussed on this thread and have a lower birth rate than the US. The extremism is mainly an american thing.

Obviously is a continuum with total supervision 24 hours a day on on end and nothing on the other, and most societies fall somewhere in the middle, but this level of extremism is mostly an american thing.

I wonder how much of it just has to do with the immediate environment available to kids. People have concentrated into larger cities in the last 40 years. There might not be much reason to give permission to roam in certain directions (say a sea of housing hemmed in by a busy road).

I think it's a bit more than the number of children, although that's strongly correlated: I think it's about the likelihood of children dying from other causes.

If your children have a 30% chance of dying from disease / malnutrition / war / etc. then a 0.0001% chance of them being abducted by a stranger not only is irrelevant, but feels irrelevant. If all of your friends have lots children from commonplace causes, you're not likely to pay much attention to the story about the babysitter of the friend of a friend whose son disappeared while going fishing.

On the other hand, if 99.9% of children live from one year to the next, incredibly rare events are now higher up on the list of dangers; if you don't know anyone personally who has lost a child, the tragic third-hand story about a missing child feels far more immediate.

Yes.

K-selection vs. N-selection is what you're talking about in evolutionary biology. Few offspring, high resources invested vs many offspring, lower resources invested per child.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

(K/N selection doesn't perfectly describe modern kids, and it's not an ironclad model anyway, but evolutionary biologists have thought about this a decent amount.)

That depends on the location I guess; where I live in Spain kids can basically do whatever. Hell, they come to parties with their parents that last until 8 in the morning. There we do not have the paranoid thing that guys cannot pick up / play with children of others without being called a sex offender either. He is talking about western world, but I am in Cambodia now and here kids seem to be allowed to wander (or boat in floating villages) very far and in cities I saw almost no parents picking up kids from primary school; they all seem to walk away alone.

In the Netherlands, for the parents I know, are also not very restrictive or paranoid, even in cities.

Maybe this is fear induced US/UK stuff mostly? I do not know about the US but the UK parents I know seen weirdly over protective to me as the article states. Not sure that is good for children, especially considering that most kids, if not allowed something, will try to do it anyway or excessively do it when older and/or away from home. Like when relatively young UK guys came to a campground in Amsterdam on their own, we (Dutch) were looking in horror at 17-18 year olds smoking weed, drinking, passing out and vomiting basically 24/7. As my parents told me to try anything, I did not feel the inclination to try a lot and as I did not have to sneak around, I never felt the need to do things in excess when away from home.

Yup, one of the things I dearly miss from living in NL and/or Spain is really having our kids safely roaming around with no worries of CPS or worse.

Here is the US it'd be mental to allow them more than a hundred feet away.

So much for the land of the brave and the free!

As for your last point, I see that here in Japan as well. There are a lot of vending machines here that sell alcohol (5% beer, 8% alcopop and shochu) with no monitoring or ID checks. And it just doesn't seem to be a problem at all. (although TBH, the cigarette machines do require an ID card to be scanned)

Another massive freedom kids have lost is the right to have independent friendships with adults. Given what we have collectively understood about the behaviour of some adults this is perhaps understandable. However it is a big loss for the majority cases.

As a kid I spent whole days out on the farm with farmhands. Often just one on one. One of them in particular taught me to drive a tractor and all about plants and animals. Also I got all my ethics from him since my own father didn't do ethics.

So I am sad for my kids that they will be very unlikely to have that experience.

I don't even talk to kids because you never know which ones have hysterical moms. Recently I was on a camping trip with a friend and a kid (about 13) came over and chatted about fishing, etc. . We wanted to talk more, and their dad seemed affable enough, but there was a definite "OK, we're going to stand on the opposite side of the campground from you and have this conversation loudly" vibe.

I have thought about this a lot. I pass my elementary school on my way to work each morning. As kids we just walked there it was a 10-15 minute walk. At around the 4th grade we took our bikes. We were accompanied by our parents the first week or so and then just walked in groups. No danger, no incidents, nothing. And this was true for all kids that attended the school. There were maybe 3 out of the 40ish kids in my grade that lived too far away and arrived by car. These days...there's traffic backing up all around the school, every single kid arrives by car, the thingy where you can lock up your bikes is completely empty.

Our days as kids looked like this: Back home from school, lunch, play until the night...usually outdoors wherever we found interesting stuff. No set dates or sheduling, you just walked over to your friends house and figured out what to do, maybe pick up a couple of other friends. If someone wasn't there you just tried the next house. The activities involved climbing trees, building your own boat to paddle on a small creek and other things that would be considered deadly activities these days. Lots of sports and getting dirty, too. Surprisingly enough no kids got abducted. On the flip side I watched very little TV (we didn't have a TV for a decent chunk of my childhood) and I didn't have any computer for a good chunk of my childhood either.

I also think parents spent more quality time with their kids "back in my day". Family trips to the zoo or just playing football in a park or something. I see these parent/kid teams a lot less these days. It's a very strange development because the benefits seem so obvious to me and the "downside" is spending more time with your kids or letting them do more things they enjoy.

> These days...there's traffic backing up all around the school, every single kid arrives by car, the thingy where you can lock up your bikes is completely empty.

As a german this seems insane to me. For a long time I actually thought that driving the kids to the school was just something that is misrepresented in american media like films and tv shows.

We went to school on our own, regardless of distance, either by public transport or by walking and biking.

Early episodes of Sesame Street now come with a warning: "These early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grownups and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child."[1]

This is episode 1.[2] This may terrify today's parents. Watch the first three minutes.

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sesame-street-for-adults-only/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLEiZmPNguU

The biggest issue is the courts. I have a two year old, and her grandma lives one mile away. I fully intend to let her walk there by herself when she is 6 or 7. Crime rate data supports me in that this is perfectly safe.

But I'll always have this nagging feeling in my mind of some local busybody parent (and there are a lot) reporting me to CPS and then having to defend my decision and hope that I get a data driven judge.

You could get her a bike.

Where do you live? I live in a small town in SC. We have little hoodlums ranging free all over the place. We all keep an eye out to make sure they're safe. No way in hell would anyone report their parents for negligence, and God help the social worker who tried to make that accusation.

There's a way to pre-emptively ask a court whether it's legal to do something.

A few years back, some researches did just that in the USA, asking whether they could publish their research despite some deal with the funding corporation, which did not want it published.

I'm afraid I don't remember the details. May be a state-specific thing.

Never thought about this before but it really does make sense for every government to provide a service like this.

Honestly, this seems like a pretty short sighted view of the safety of roaming. In any American city how far could an African American kid roam from their neighborhood in 1926?

How much space could an unmarried female white expect to have before societal conventions interfered in 1926?

What about an urban Irish boy in 1926 NYC, how much space could he roam in safely?

In the 20s, poorer American children worked. Flappers were a thing. So I think pretty far, in all cases.

Its my impression from the histories I've read of my city (Chicago) that black people certainly didn't have 6 miles of uninterrupted neighborhoods where it would be safe for them to meander in.

Further, Italians, Jews, and Eastern Europeans were still very much segregated into smaller enclaves than that. The Irish were only recently able to move about freely at that point, and there were certainly places they couldn't go.

The larger point of this article seems to be, rural people have more space, which doesn't seem to have much value as an observation.

I think the point of the article is that, societally, we are perhaps too focused on children's safety to the point of depriving them of some perfectly harmless freedom. The argument is not, as you seem to interpret it, strictly geometric. In the 20s, the world was far less safe for children yet far more independence and agency was required of many of them. I'm sure not every shoeshine or newspaper boy was engaging in these activities in their ethnic ghetto.

I guess I just don't understand the point of the article. To me it seems an indictment of current parenting modes, based on the amount of geometric freedom allowed a very small subset of the population in comparison to the amount of geometric freedom allowed another, different very small subset of the population.

I guess what I'm saying is, its a pretty ridiculous article that doesn't line up with reality now or then.

It's anecdotal but it doesn't seem that ridiculous, at least, not in the face of your criticism which seems to be 'think of the disadvantaged kids'. Disadvantaged kids may have had even greater constraints and lived in a more dangerous world but that's a point in favour of the article - they had to get around and so did anyway.

I'm going straight to hell for using this as an example in a pointless forum argument but since we got here (and I'm rationalizing it to myself that it's somehow your fault, sorry) - Emmett Till's mother put him on a train in Chicago and sent him, by himself, to visit relatives in Mississippi. At age 14 he was expected not only to travel solo cross-country but to safely navigate an actually dangerous, pointedly racist world. The demands on disadvantaged kids were even greater but the fact that they couldn't ride their bikes to the municipal pool doesn't mean they just sat at home under the watchful eye of their governess.

So this actually gets to 2 different readings of the point of the article.

One reading, the one that maybe I'm reading into it, is that parents now are viewing the world as more dangerous than it is, and are ignoring the dangers that existed in the past to get to this viewpoint. This viewpoint is then informing their view about what is appropriate for their children. That is, I took the anecdote to mean, parents are misjudging the risks currently and were viewing the past to be less risky than it was.

The other viewpoint, which I think you are presenting is, parents now don't have any different assessment of the risks, they just have less appetite for risk. Given that interpretation, I'll buy the lesson of the anecdote is just have more appetite for risk.

Oh! Are you not familiar with the 'free range kids' people? They've been in the news a few times over the last few years. Their thing is that this is a better way to parent and they're being unreasonably prevented from doing so by social norms and often laws. Without that context the article probably looks a lot weirder than it is.

Anecdotally I was born in 1990, I spent the first 10 years of my life in Tacoma WA, USA where during summers I would leave in the morning and be gone all day, all of the neighborhood kids would do the same.

When I was 10 we moved to San Diego, CA USA, where I lived until adulthood. During the summers had the same freedom, I would roam free with the neighborhood kids all day long.

Now I'm married with children of my own (3 and 0) and think about the scariness of letting them roam free, but they're really young so I think that is normal.

However, I also have 2 stepsons who are 13 and 11. During the summers they roam free, we have a field behind our backyard which butts up against a forest and an industrial park, and sometimes they're gone for the entire day.

The only real difference is they have cell phones now, and can call us if there is an emergency.

As a parent of a young child in London there is no way I'm letting my son wander around our area without being within eyesight. There are just too many degenerate members of British society to take a chance with my son's life and welfare.

On the other hand, if we were to ever move to New Zealand where I lived most of my life, or to the town in Poland where my son's mother grew up, this would be an entirely different story.

Anywhere in New Zealand is quite honestly Disneyland compared to the UK (and I am thinking of the 'hard' parts in New Zealand like Māngere or Ōtāhuhu)... and Radomsko in Poland still has some nice forest areas and a lake that is walking distance from the town.

I think the author needs to take into account that there are just some places in the world where you must be on guard and be extra vigilant. This isn't limited to London, for example Cape Town in South Africa or Rio de Janeiro in Brazil spring to mind.

I am however very much aware of the impact my decision to keep my family in London will have on my son's childhood and frankly I would rather move outside of the M25, to say the outer edges of Surrey, where I would feel slightly more at ease but still ever vigilant. Until I can afford to do that, holidays to Poland will have to suffice.

I remember when I was a kid, I was allowed to roam and go on adventures. Especially at my grandma's house because she was next to the woods.

I thought I went so far. I thought I was so adventurous. Turns out the max I ever dared go was about 1km. Maaaaybe 2km. The distances that used to look so far and adventurous, don't even feel like a walk anymore.

Maybe that was just me, but it sounds like even if you give kids freedom to go wherever, they won't really roam that far. So maybe it's pretty safe to give them that freedom? They'll use it age appropriately.

By the time I would have roamed further than the 1 or 2 kilometers, I had discovered books and internet and computers and I was like "lol why would I leave the living room?"

I think it depends upon the kids and how far you have to go for adventure.

I grew up in San Jose and when we were in elementary school, we would take our bikes to the surrounding hills all the time, anywhere from 1-10 miles. One of my brothers, when he was in middle school, would regularly bike to Santa Cruz, which is about 50 miles away.

That, and I think my grandma used a trick. She'd let me out in the wild, but the next meal was never more than 2 or 3 hours away. This limited how far I could roam without feeling like it did.

You wouldn't just skip a meal when you're 6 or 7. Not when everything's so delicious!

At home, in the city, it was similar. Sure I could do whatever I wanted between school and when my parents came home 3 hours later. But there's only so much you can do in 3 hours.

Man, for three months I lived in San Jose and tried to bike commute to my job in Newark. I got screamed at, swerved at, and nearly killed many times. The situation improved remarkably when I moved to Berkeley (and stopped cycling in the south bay).

I grew up in a city of 100,000 in the Midwest I was biking to school 4.5 miles at age 12.

I soon figured out I could get detention, miss the bus, but still get home on my bike. Couple that with a habit of getting the mail daily, and I was able to to serve detention without my parents knowledge (I think).

I think there are a lot more roads/freeways now than back then as other commenters have pointed out. We've built our cities for cars, not for people. One possible side-effect of self driving cars, is it may make it safer for kids to wander again. I know I'd love to just attach a GPS tracker to my now 1yr old daughter in 5 years, and let her go where she pleases here in SF.

Indeed, one does not simply double the population without limiting the distance people can walk. It's a simple matter of geometry. The number of households in the USA has doubled in the last 40 years. The number of major roads has radically increased. Most (85%) live in urban areas so there is only somewhere to walk in the woods if you live on the edge of the sprawl.

Or if your city is built vertically, but with lots of forests throughout it.

That's very rare. American cities are built on "free market" principles as distorted by politics. They are not built for livability, beauty, or any other quantitative or qualitative measure.

I personally advocate for this type of development, but it's unlikely that I will ever see it built: http://carfree.com/topology.html

Like any market, it's not free but created to favor some condtions. Permits for high-rise housing are harder to get than to build a mcmansion far away. True cost of roads does not get paid - the reason why highways are full is that people don't pay market price for using them - in fact government gives them away for free. Proper prices for using roads and burning gas (externalities included) and more american cities would start building highrises for housing.

There's a critique of that design on new world economics:

http://newworldeconomics.com/lets-kick-around-carfree-com/

I think the author did a poor job of arguing there compared to his usual articles, but he does make some decent points.

It's not Venice, that's true. I simply use it as an example of how a city of millions of people could easily be built in a compact area, without high rise apartment buildings, and with tons of open space.

The articles of this author are interesting, but he’s missing something.

Really narrow roads (<6m) work, but not always. In many cities you have situations where the pedestrian traffic alone is enough to fill 15-20m wide streets.

But he is right that the #1 priority is in proportions.

(Replying to myself because I can’t edit)

For example, during large events, even smaller cities’ streets can look like this: http://www.bergmann-gruppe.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/vo... (A picture taken during Kieler Woche, one of the largest Volksfests in Europe.)

(Image description for the visually impaired: The image shows a roughly 20-30m wide street directly at the edge of the water in a harbour, people completely fill it, as densely as possible, in the background one can see that it continues for hundreds of meters, all the while being this densely filled with people)

Even neighborhood roads are larger and faster- the street I grew up on in the 80's is about half the width of the street I live on now (2000's construction), and was short and straight compared to the wide sweeping arcs that seem to be in vogue in newer neighborhoods.

As another in a long line that identifies with this, my partner and I are taking steps to buy a small acreage on the outskirts of a city where we can 'free-range' our kids whilst giving me access to city work. While we also want this lifestyle we think this is super important for our young'uns (5&7) and I'm more than happy to accept the additional commute to give them this. This will take my commute to about 90 min each way but I'll try and offset with 2 days a week working from home if possible.

So for all the people acknowledging the loss, it's completely an option to give your kids a free range life if you willing to give up the inner city life yourself.

I am very lucky, the core of my city has a practically untouched river valley running through it. My kids play in the creek and woods near the river every day. But from there we are a 10 minute walk to downtown. Are there no wild places downtown where you live?

Very much have access to bush. I'm in suburbia in the middle of a national park: https://goo.gl/Chb3fU

We want to take that further with an acreage for animals, hobby farmer experience, rural lifestyle vs city suburb etc. I know we might hate it in reality but we'll never know if we dont try.

Before you buy property and extend your commute to 3 hours per day, you should test if such a long commute doesn’t slowly deteriorate your life. Start today. Tell your wife you want to test the commute back home, then pick a route that takes 1.5 hours. Tomorrow take a route that takes 1.5 hours to work. Repeat for the next 3 months. Ask your employer for those 2 days per week home office. See if it works for both of you. If your employer is not willing to let you remote work now then it is going to be a big gamble later.

If you can keep it up without problems, I’m all for it, go ahead and buy that property. My guess is after a while you might feel stressed and tired and think “This commute sucks. Luckily this ends after three months!”. If you catch yourself thinking this, you should reconsider your plan of moving this far away from your job. (Or think about looking for a new job closer to that property.)

Thanks for the insight. I currently have a 75 min commute so know what I'm getting into. It's really is something to consider.

I find the travel time is OK when you have fairly direct transport where you can do something. For me the significant majority time is on the train so I work on my side business which works nicely having that time immediately pre/post office hours. It does take much time from life so I personally wouldn't do it if I was driving and unable to get stuff done.

This short article is basically a bunch of quotes from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-... (2007).

I think this is highly dependent on the parents. I'm 32 and my parents let me go all over town, pretty much where I wanted with no adult supervision, for as long as I wanted. I was allowed to stay out past dark until about 9 on school nights, later on the weekends and in the summer. All this and I have a medical condition that could get me seriously hurt or killed.

My parents trusted me, and they taught me early on to be responsible.

That said, I regularly see young kids in SF out by themselves. I'd say as a parent, if you are one, get ahold of yourself and allow your kids some freedom.

> I'm 32 and my parents let me go all over town

Your parents are taking a big risk. I hope you're carrying a cell phone.

There's nothing I want more than to let my kids roam like I did in the late 80s and early 90s. Sadly, I can't, because I'm quite literally afraid that someone will take my kids (completely ignoring that the real dangers of the foster home system vastly exceed any risk I would let my kids take).

Perhaps your worry is unfounded:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/...

someone = child services I assume

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I'm not afraid of strangers, I'm afraid of social workers for Child Protective Services. I'm afraid of legalized kidnapping because my preferred way of parenting would expose my kids to small risks now so they're at far less risk as adults.

When I was 15 years old in the 1970s, I went a 100 mile backpacking trip with five youth between 15 and 16 years old. We thought it was normal at the time. When I told my younger colleagues at work about this trip, they were shocked that our parents sent us off without adult supervision. There was also some concern that we went on this trip without a mobile phone!

I suspect that a lot of people today would be seriously bothered by the fact that mobile phones and other forms of emergency contact just weren't an option until relatively recently.

I also went to college at 16 which I suspect would horrify some people today.

The strange thing is that CPS is considered the enemy here. It seems like CPS should be a group that listens to the needs of parents and helps build a community to cater to those needs, not some kind of self-important authority figure. Maybe it should be rebranded as Child Development Services or something.

"When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere. It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision."

Thought about this a lot. In kinder it was 400m for me. PS, 20km and by the age of 16 my range was more than 200 SqrKm. This was alone, on foot, by bike, train or bus.

In 1956 I was 6 years old in Pasadena, CA. We lived in a trailer park on the east side of town. Each morning I went down to Colorado Blvd, by myself, wait for a city bus, rode half way across town, got off the bus and walked a few blocks to a private school, reversing the trip each afternoon.

I don't think people have changed, I don't believe the world is more dangerous, so why can't kids now do what I did?

When I grew up (in Australia) in the early-to-mid 90s I was allowed to roam quite a bit. The rough rule of thumb was that I would need to be home by sunset or have already called mum from a friend's house letting her know where I was and agreeing to a plan to stay after sunset. I think my parents struck a pretty good balance between driving me places when it made sense vs. just making me ride a bike/walk to the local town area or to friends' houses when I wanted to go of my own accord - it taught me responsibility and independence.

I really value it (still) and plan to allow the same freedoms if I have kids.

Same for me, go anywhere but be back by 6 when dinner goes on the table.

I wonder if this explains a lot about child hood obesity, when ever I go back to where I grew up I'm amazed at the sheer number of miles I did everyday by walking or by bike. If I stay with my parents now and go to the beach I'm getting a lift or a cab, but we used to walk or bike from the same house, often multiple times a day. Often laden with fishing gear as well.

Similar story, grew up in a rural part of England in the mid 90s. Simple rules, be back before dark or call if you're not. Summer holidays were the best as it wouldn't get dark until 10pm

For what its worth, the vast majority of children in my south side Chicago (gasp) neighborhood, walk to elementary school without a parent. They are often without adult supervision in the hours after school lets out, and before their parents come home from work.

There are frequently older siblings, but that doesn't seem like some vast generational sea change.

Instead, I think this story is more about multi-generational moves from rural to urban life, that resonates with parents who can afford to be over protective of their children and feel bad about it.

A lot of the anecdotes in this thread seem to be from more rural areas or out in a small town. I grew up in Minneapolis (born in the 80s) and could do all these things in our neighborhood in the summers (except for shooting guns, but I'd get that in the summer with my cousins in South Dakota). I'd meet up with the neighborhood kids around 11 and my mom (or one of their moms) would have lunch and snacks ready for us around 1 or so. We'd just roam around the neighborhood all day playing street hockey or basketball or whatever.

...none of this goes on in my neighborhood anymore. One proximate cause that I think we're missing is that a lot of us moved away, and housing costs are so high that I'm putting off buying a home and my friends are too - or are doing so out in the suburbs. Demographic changeover could be a contributing factor.

I was looking at this phone for kids recently: http://tinitell.com/ - just GPS and voice, but let's a kid be in contact.

I'd be curious if people have tried this sort of thing, and if it works... mostly if it works psychologically. Do you find yourself really giving your kid more freedom? Does it address the anxieties that keep us from giving kids freedom?

It doesn't address the highly structured time, but at least I'm doing OK there by just not opting in to most structured activities.

I don't want to blame any parents for the desire of knowing where their kids are and that they're save. But at the same time I'm very glad that I was born two decades before parents started to think that making their kids carying a GPS tracker is the prequisite for "more freedom".

I'm sure my parents were better off many times with not knowing where I was. So I think the psychological part isn't going to play out well - at least for the kids.

I came from Philippines. Now in the US. When I was young I had a bike. I would go out in the morning anywhere I want to go, come back for lunch to eat lunch. Go out again and comeback before dinner. These days, this is not possible anymore. I don't know why. I think people have less kids and are more afraid of kidnappings etc. I miss those days and I wish I could give my children that kind of freedom.

I think this phenomenon depends on the nation/neighborhood.

For example, I was watching videos of Seoul subways systems and the expat was commenting how young kids were going about on their own to school and such, without adult supervision.

Same with Tokyo too.

But yes, I don't let my kids out. I would only if I lived in a gated, nice community. But I don't so they rarely go out on their own, except for soccer games, school etc...

Man, what have we done?

I was very excited to read this post, as it's premise appeals very strongly to me. Wandering is crucial, and every bit of wandering I was allowed to do as a kid I treasured then and treasure now.

She lost me immediately at

"Imagine if this had happened to any other group: If we kept restricting the rights of women, or minorities — it would be seen as a terrifying, intolerable assault on their freedom."

Come on.

This is kind of disconcerting.. It's like the government is forcing the future generations to be acclimated to imprisonment or lack of freedom and lack of independence... so that they can be controlled..

Well one might also argue that there are much more unsafe factors out there nowadays than before though. I guess the increasing inequality and social segregation also has something to do with it. Generally, the modern life is just factually much different from the life 100 years ago.

Though I definitely agree this shouldn't go too far. There was this article that I just read a few days ago, that stated that Iceland was able to drastically curb teenage drug/alcohol use with some measures, which included after school interest clubs etc. and especially, a law that prevented them from being outside after 0:00 (summer) or 22:00 (winter)... which I certainly find way too draconian. You'd definitely still want to give the teens much more freedom even if it entails a risk of them getting influenced by some negative factors. Still, it's their life and you need to let them learn stuffs and explore on their own.

It's odd that mobile phones didn't change this trend.

You'd think the giving a 6 year old something they could use if they did get in trouble and that enabled parents to talk to them would make it safer.

I walked to school in the 1980s and would really like my kids to do the same, but my partner, who also walked to school, won't have it.

Or because they have phones they are using them to communicate instead

This phenomenon is also very pronounced in China, mostly due to urbanization I think.

When my parents or grandparents were still children, most of them live in small towns or countryside, where facilities are far away and main mode of communication is walking or cycling. There was nothing wrong with travelling far distance as a child, because there was not much danger. Also, there wasn't really any alternatives to travelling alone if your house is 2km away from the school or kids-playing-place and your parents have better things to do than sending you there.

Now most children grow up in cities, where cars and large density of population can both pose danger to children wandering around. Plus parents will just drive their kids to school which costs only a few minutes.

This story fits amazingly well with the lyrics from "Where do the Children Play" by Cat Stevens, released back in 1970. [1]

Just felt like it was worth mentioning because, let's face it, he's asking a great and important question :)

  Well I think it's fine, building jumbo planes.
  Or takin' a ride on a cosmic train.
  Switch on summer from a slot machine.
  Get what you want to if you want,
  Cause you can get anything.

  I know we've come a long way,
  We're changin' day to day,
  But tell me,
  Where do the children play?

  By Cat Stevens

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_vy-eWGKSk

What's up with parents driving kids to school? My generation, born in the late 70s, was rarely dropped off or picked up from school.

Everyone took the bus or walked.

I grew up in LA. I lived half an hour from school and there was no school bus service, so my parents HAD to drive me.

I think that this has been largely caused by the media. Every time that a child was attacked or taken in the UK during my childhood, the press would go crazy for weeks. 'Stranger Danger' was a phrase that often came up. The resulting parental hysteria restricted the freedom of children and now it has become normalised. Now it is negligent to allow your kids to roam free and you might get in trouble for it.

I think it happened in one generation. My generation roamed quite extensively starting at about 7 years old. My daughter's generation did not. We drove her to her friends houses (or their parents to ours). Sometimes they would play outside. And I'm not saying there was no roaming, but it started much later and was not as geographically broad.

And the worse part: by driving them to their friends' houses, it's implied that you need to like/approve their parents. During my childhood I could befriend kids whose parents would never be friends of my parents. The actual status quo intensifies segregation.

One thing lacking though is a view on the evolution of the area between the times of the great grand father and the son. How did the urbanization evolved ? I remember 25 years ago, aged 9/10, when I was living in ( really ) rural France, I was riding by bicycle at least 10 kms around, walking in woods, building tree houses.

Every several months something like this is posted on HN, and I log in to post a couple of things:

1. During the baby boom, there was a lot of intermittent surveillance. Fewer mothers worked, and every ten or fifteen minutes one might give a look out the back window to see what was going on. This was not intrusive, but it kept down the mischief level on the one hand and the anxiety level on the other.

2. People on HN have a way of talking about suburbs as if they are all cul-de-sacs surrounded by highways. I grew up in a close-in suburb of a large Midwestern city. I was three blocks from school and library, two blocks from grocer, baker, and five-and-dime. In sixth grade, after a transfer, I did take the bus to and from school, though I could and sometimes did walk. Junior high was a mile and a quarter, usually reached by bike.

"During the baby boom, there was a lot of intermittent surveillance. Fewer mothers worked, and every ten or fifteen minutes one might give a look out the back window to see what was going on."

@cafard sort of applies to suburban areas. In semi-rural hilly country on bikes and foot, there is no houses for miles. My folks and others wouldn't have been able to see me or my friends, though we'd tell them where we'd been.

There's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma working here too. If you're the only family that lets their child wander, your child is far more likely to be the one that's abducted. Therefore nobody lets their kids wander, so everyone's kids have a substandard childhood.

When I grew up in Berlin in the 90s I was not really given restrictions on how far I could roam. I just had to leave a note or give a call if I wanted to stay out beyond a certain time.

I remember being given keys to the apartment being a big deal since it meant freedom to me, less hassle for my parents - since they didn't have to fetch me from school or kindergarden every day - and they did a lot of emphasizing that I should never ever forget or lose them somewhere.

And that was in a big city. Now I live in a bit more rural area where many kids cycle several kilometers to school every day and I also see them on bikeways during school vacations, so it seems like most parents here are fine with letting them roam.

In the 70's I used to roam for miles on foot and on bike. My own children hardly venture outdoors. The fear of crime is much greater now. What did we give up to lose our freedom?

I saw it written somewhere that when we were young, we had freedom but no information. Today, kids have all the information, but no freedom.

Proof once again that life is a series of tradeoffs.

I'm tired of this claim that kids today are less free-roaming. Such articles never seem to provide empirical evidence to back it up. The term "helicopter parent" is thrown around as if it has some sort of scientific definition. In actuality, it is just a pejorative used to label any parent we have observed being overprotective.

These claims about a societal shift serve only to tickle persons' biases that kids today are coddled, lack personal responsibility, and generally thin-skinned. (On the contrary, parenting styles are as diverse as children themselves.)

Never mind that adults' personal anecdotes about their childhoods are unreliable and subject to massive bias. Think about it: Most people have scarcely any vivid memories of their 0-5 years. Many claim that they were allowed to roam free back in the day. Adults remember being allowed to run around, seemingly unsupervised. They are oblivious to protective steps taken by their parents. Most everyone with children knows the parenting tactic of giving kids the impression of freedom while taking discreet steps to protect them from harm.

How old are you?

I think your weariness at seeing a claim which from all evidence appears true not backed up by "empirical evidence" is a bit self-indulgent. I've met many N American adults whose own childhoods align with what the article says and almost none who said they had a shorter leash than children do now. I've seen more children taking the metro by themselves in Japan in a one week visit than I did living the US for three years. It's also undeniable that social workers taking children from families due to them having been unsupervised is something that the state barely had resources for 100 years ago even if, contrary to numerous historical accounts, it had the will.

No, I don't have statistics on exactly how far away the average 9 year-old was allowed to bike in various years. History books also don't come with a stack of empirical evidence to back them up. At some point, you have to either accept them until seeing more compelling conflicting accounts or dig into the sources and do the research yourself.

If numerous anecdotal claims and published accounts isn't good enough for you, then the onus is on you to provide a more convincing argument in the opposite direction.

My claim is that persons' own recollection of their childhood is inherently biased. As kids, they weren't privy to many of their parents' protective actions. Never mind nostalgia, selective memory, etc.

Yes, but things like "walked half a mile to school every day at age 5", "was allowed to bike 5 miles from home after entering the 5th grade and 10 miles after 6th grade" are pretty clear cut.

Hmm. That begs a question. There must be some hn'ers on here that are old enough to have 20/30 year old kids. I'm 27, I remember having about 5km of freedom at age 8. So I'm old enough to say things like "back in the day, we roamed as far as we wanted." Can anyone who's old enough to be my mom or dad confirm or deny whether you let your kids roam as far as they wanted?

Very interesting, irrational fears and obsession for safety affect so many things nowadays. Every-time I go snowboarding I'm stunned at how in just 20 years, we pretty much went from zero to something like 90%+ skiers wearing helmets.

That's funny. I didn't know that had happened. I can't think of any serious skiing accidents that have happened in/near my social circle, nor on the news, where a helmet would have been determinative to the outcome.

In what percentage of serious skiing accidents would a helmet help. Or is it merely one of those "precautionary principle" things: why take a chance?

> In what percentage of serious skiing accidents would a helmet help. Or is it merely one of those "precautionary principle" things: why take a chance?

I'm not quiet sure about the percentage, but I'm certain wearing a helmet does lessen the chances a bit. The problem really is that the majority of ski injuries are not exactly what we imagine - it's pretty natural to imagine smashing our skulls on a rock or on some ice, it's very graphic too, I'm not saying they don't exist, but I can tell you that spine/cervical injuries are way more common. In addition to avalanches of course where the helmet isn't particularly useful, another frequent (and graphic!) one is beeing traversed by a tree branch :P

Just to be clear, I'm not saying helmets are useless tho, but I note that may give a false sense of security.

Relevant: https://www.outsideonline.com/1928266/we-dont-need-no-educat...

It's cars, cars, cars. That's what I'm afraid of for my kids.

I don't think it's that bad nowadays. My ten year old daughter is walking quite a distance in pursuit of her pokemon. kids tend to take as much freedom as they need (as they grow older)

Could this also have as much to do with the baby boomer generation growing up with more children nearby? In our neighborhood, there are only two other children my son's age.

I'm highly skeptical of all the claims made by this blog, as the author isn't exactly making a well reasoned argument for unleashing children on the wilderness again (although I do find all the discussion here about child roaming positively riveting); citing a Daily Mail puff piece is one thing, but the crime stats (and interpretation) are pretty awful.

The "Stranger Danger?" subsection in particular seems insane. 3% of children under 5 being murdered by strangers absolutely does not mean your child is safer with strangers.

Also lost the right to catch polio

Working on that.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/azeenghorayshi/trump-kennedy-antiva...

I have a 4 year old, in my mid 40s, and think about this a lot for some reason.

In the 70s during the summer, when I was around 7, we would wake up, eat breakfast, go out and about wherever we wanted, come back for lunch, out again, come back for dinner, and then out again past dark to play flashlight tag.

I think I would be charged with child endangerment these days if my kid (3 years in the future) was doing stuff like that. And frankly, I think I've been conditioned to think that I would be a negligent parent if I did this.

The media is part of the problem. 24/7 news, social media, and channels like ID (real life murder 24/7) scare the bejeezus out of people. But besides that, we have an acceptance of nanny-state government - that the government should be a much closer "partner" in child rearing than 40 years ago.

I always say, there's a consequence for everything, including seemingly innocuous laws to protect people.

But as a parent of a 4-year old in 2017 (and a 7 year old in 2020), I know I would be gnashing my teeth if my kid was roaming the streets and woods all day long...even if I did it.

Man that reminds me so much of my growing up experience. Spent most free time outside on a bike, playing with a football, climbing trees and only coming back indoors for food.

Same here.

I grew up on a 80 acre farm. We lived there until I was 7 and my sister was 10. My parents didn't even get home from work until 7PM.

We had a full on welding and machine shop and a pretty fantastic place for woodworking in the shop. We had two creeks that were lined with trees hanging over them.

My dad had pretty much taught us how weld and use the plasma cutter and drill press and all the wood working stuff. Looking back I even find it insane to teach your 6 year old how to weld. But somehow I am still alive.

But the last few years we lived there my sister asked if we could build a tree-house in one of the trees that branched out over a creek. My mom said to go for it. My dad did help build the base (he was a mechanical engineer) and we did the rest. It was massively unsafe now that I think about it 33 years later.

The funny thing is we only had one major emergency at that house. My sister was making a frozen pizza and didn't check when she started preheating the oven. There were a few dozen glazed doughnuts in a box in the oven. They burst into flames and she pulled the entire rack onto the floor. We got the fire to go out.

And a few days later my dad taught me a lot about replacing a kitchen floor.

As a Swiss with a small child, this is the main reason why I couldn't move to the US or UK. Your 70ies examples are still common enough in Switzerland. 6 year olds are sent to Kindergarden on their own (after a bit of training with their parents). Put the visibility triangle on and off you go. Parents are discouraged by the school authorities to bring by car. Today looking back at this I can see the value. Maybe it has to do with Switzerland being small enough for horrible child abduction stories to be very rare, and if they happen outside Switzerland we tend to think as something that happens to other people - as nationalistic as that sounds, but that's just how most people's minds work, for better or worse, in this instance probably for the better.

I think you're right. Kids being randomly abducted is vanishingly rare, but the faster and further news spreads, the more 'real' it seems. A smaller country would be less likely to see it as a problem that "happens here".

I was born in 1981 and from the age of 7 or 8 I remember walking to school (1.5mi and parts of it along a busy street). My friends and I would play in the drainage culvert under the road, walking back and forth, the far side actually was basically a cliff, but we didn't want to fall, so we took care. I remember at age 10 wanting to ride my bicycle to a friend's house across town, but it was "too far" according to my parents. It actually was quite far though; at least 6 miles and mostly on very busy streets, no cycling infrastructure. By 11 or 12 I was riding my bike dozens of miles from home. My friends and I went all over the place unsupervised, all summer long, and this was just in the mid 90s. It was just your average middle class suburban American town.

I definitely hope people takes these stories to heart and it encourages folks to let their kids roam. But it's hardly a memory of generations past.

I was born in the early 80s as well. I was way out in the suburbs and took the bus to school, but there were plenty of kids that walked. (Occasionally a teacher would forget to unlock the back gate and you'd see them all standing there in the morning when the first bell rang ... usually followed by an announcement of how none of the walkers should be counted late).

I walked everywhere, which even then, wasn't all that common. It was ~2 miles (4km) to church, and there were several times when other parents would stop and offer me rides.

In the mid-2000s I was in Cincinnati, and noticed a lot of the neighbourhoods close to the city usually had squares with the usual restaurants, ice cream shops, bars, etc. It was refreshing to see teenagers out in the evening in the weekend. They had places that were easily walk-able to meet up with friends (even though the bus there is less than ideal).

I would have much rather grown up in that kind of environment that way out in the suburbs where you needed rides eveywhere and few of your friends were in walking distance.

>> Kids being randomly abducted is vanishingly rare, but the faster and further news spreads, the more 'real' it seems

The problem is that a single abduction is touted by the media as though 1,000,000 children were taken. It's the exact same propaganda as terrorism - one attack by a foreigner that kills 10 people is treated as though the entire nation of 319 million people were wiped out. When the police and child services can now pick your child off the street and put them into a foster home because they were "not under the supervision of a parent at all times", you have no chance. The U.S. has given away their freedom, simple as that.

To be fair, in a recent brief visit to Switzerland I stayed with some friends in a small village near Zug and saw examples of this sort of attitude throughout more aspects of life than just child-raising. For example, many farmers were leaving produce out with price tags on and relying on an honour system for payment. Some did a 'pay what you want' system for their produce and just relied on people to do the right thing when valuing the items. It was really nice and refreshing and had a very positive community feel to it. It wouldn't surprise me if it's an attitude conditioned through exposure to it in all kinds of different aspects of life. I hope it stays around.

Forget farms, this is even how the supermarket produce section works in Switzerland. You pick your stuff, you weigh it yourself, you choose the right tag (without anyone looking over your shoulder) and then you go to a (nowadays potentially automated) cashier.

Heck, it's how the tax system works as well. Government has no way of knowing how much is actually on your bank account, well at least not officially (gov was probably quite happy about the US breaking our banking secrecy). So everyone is supposed to be responsible enough to fill out their taxes and hand in all the information needed. At the end it all works out fine - turns out you can mostly trust people to be honest and the system keeps working for everyone, at least it did so for the last 170 or so years.

> "You pick your stuff, you weigh it yourself, you choose the right tag"

How is that different from self checkout in most of the big food stores in USA?

I haven't been to too many US supermarkets, but don't you get the vegetables in already weighed and tagged portions? IMO if you do that yourself, and there isn't even a cashier doing a bit of sanity checking, there's just more opportunity to cheat. With self checkout alone you can just not scan something, but it would seem a bit more obvious to catch (which I could see the chains doing with security cams). Almost certainly noone is going to notice if people print the tag for cheap Apples and put it on a bag of expensive ones.

Here in Toronto, we have both. In fact, one location of a grocery chain might allow you to tag and weigh your own items, whereas another location of the same grocery chain might require an attendant (usually right next to the automated machines) to verify it.

I've seen one location go from requiring an assistant to allowing full self-serve.

Not sure about the U.S. but I have the impression that there must be places which are similar in the U.S.

No. The majority of vegetables I buy (in Canada but it's the same in the US as far as I've seen) are not pre-packaged. Self checkouts have a scale built into them that you weigh your own produce and punch in the code to say what kind of food it is. It's trivial to cheat if you want, but most people are honest. This is also true in hardware store self checkouts where you buy loose items and the store relies on you being honest about punching in the correct code when you check out.

Not exactly. Typically there will be a sign that lets you know how much the produce is per imperial pound. There are analog scales there that you can use to weigh your produce to give you an idea of how much it will be, but the real digital scales are at checkout. At self-checkout you put the produce onto a scale and then click on the picture of the produce your are purchasing so the computer can correlate the weight with the item. There isn't anything stopping you from clicking the picture of a cheaper produce item other than the honesty system.

... and the staff member hovering around the self check out area.

Who is definitely going to notice the that you rung up something expensive as something cheap...

Not around where I live. They hang out about 15 feet away.

Here in the UK, like the US, the self-checkout machines have built-in scales that weigh your produce and calculate the price automatically.

There's no extra tags involved, you just have to select what the produce is if it doesn't have a barcode.

There is indeed an opportunity to "cheat" by weighing something expensive but telling the machine it's something cheap like onions or potatoes.

But the machines can be monitored remotely from a security station, so there is a small chance you'd get caught. That keeps most people pretty honest.

I'm sure a few cheats do slip though, but the losses from this sort of thing are presumably much less than the savings from employing less checkout staff!

> already weighed and tagged portions

generally no. They do sell stuff like that as well, but most is out in the open and you bag yourself. And then punch in the item codes or look them up at the self checkout. There's no real check, although sometimes they catch people cheating by reviewing video.

Selfcheckouts are pretty recent. Grocery shopping like described above is how it worked forever.

You can mostly trust Swiss people to be that honest. It doesn't work like that everywhere.

Isn't that a chicken-and-egg problem? IMO if a society treats people like responsible adults they'll rise up to the task. The question is of course how to transition there. I can't say to have any recipes, but I'm reasonably sure that taking away civic rights is counterproductive. Maybe try to get one electable political party that makes it their thing to protect and even expand citizen's rights and allow for more self responsibility? I don't like the Libertarians for some of their antisocial ideas, but at least that's where they seem to have gotten something right.

>IMO if a society treats people like responsible adults they'll rise up to the task.

That's one hypothesis. Another is that trustworthiness is a genetic trait.

I'm sure it has genetic components, but the question for me is rather whether those components differ between peoples. I'd assume that evolutionary pressure selected quite heavily for people who can be trusted to cooperate.

But there are also obvious evolutionary pressures towards self-interest, even when it means breaking promises/trustworthiness. (Remember, selection happens at the level of individuals, not of whole groups and societies!) The balance between the two pressures could be different in different environments. In other words, it's quite possible that one environment could select more for trustworthiness, another more for untrustworthy self-interest.

Not being a dick and working together without everyone constantly on edge that everyone else is going to screw them the first chance they get is a totally valid strategy, even from a self-interest standpoint.

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4341

Crikey, anyone seriously think its a genetic trait?

Do you imagine the children taken into care at a young age turn into bad people just like their parents anyway?

Surely everyone thinks that trustworthiness is about poverty, inequality and values?

I don't know about trustworthiness in particular, but lots and lots of personality traits turn out to have a heritability of about 50% (or more), so much so that it's a decent rule of thumb to guess that a trait is about 50% heritable.

Actually, what I recall from reading studies of adoption and criminality (it was a few years ago, though, so I don't remember the authors or exact titles to find them) the "the children taken into care at a young age turn into bad people just like their parents anyway" has a truth in it - if you analyze the heritability of antisocial behavior and criminality (and the heritability clearly exists) to see how much of it is e.g. "nature vs nurture" or genetics vs environment and socioeconomic status, then about half of it still remains in case of adoption to a 'low risk' environment.

One plausible explanation for some of that, which wasn't analyzed there, but has some basis in other research is that things like risk-taking behavior or being prone to addiction are quite genetic.

But in any case, for many(most? all?) "moral" characteristics saying that they're only about "poverty, inequality and values" is wishful thinking. Yes, they are in part about that, but they are also in part about genetics; the answer to "nature or nurture" pretty much always is both.

Quite so. Most twin studies on the subject turn up similar findings: https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2015/10/02/time-preferen...

"The best fitting model for 41 key studies (58 independent samples from 14 month old infants to adults; N=27,147) included equal proportions of variance due to genetic (0.50) and non-shared environmental (0.50) influences, with genetic effects being both additive (0.38) and non-additive (0.12). Shared environmental effects were unimportant in explaining individual differences in impulsivity."

So impulsivity (which is obviously closely related to your propensity to betray the trust of your fellow-man for a short-term gain) appears to be a combination of genetics and random luck (non-shared environment).

Everyone thinks that way, but it turns out the science says otherwise.

I am more inclined to believe it is a CULTURAL trait.

You and the folks who down-voted the parent comment agree on that point. That doesn't make it true.

> IMO if a society treats people like responsible adults they'll rise up to the task.

Like passing anti-minaret laws?

Societies and culture are more complex than you make it sound.

if there would be public vote about this in all european countries, most if not all would ban it. that's the current attitude unfortunately. swiss are just the most free nation to decide these things themselves

You can still do this at hardware stores in the US. You put your nuts and bolts in the plastic bag and write down the price and quantity and then they add them up at the register. I was really shocked as a teenager when I realized they just "trusted" you to do it correctly.

Well...

Worked in a busy bike shop as a kid and sometimes you would have someone come through the door after a nut or bolt. I would go to the workshop and spend quite a bit of time finding the bolt, then I would only be able to charge 50p for it. By the time I had came back I could have used that time to serve a customer after some real purchases, e.g. a whole bicycle. There wouldn't even be any 'word of mouth' benefits, the bolt could be for a lawnmower or something and the customer could be far too wedded to their tin box vehicle for there to be the chance to upgrade them to a bicycle.

Anyway, it was not cost effective to do personal service bolt sales, at 50p a time, had I been smarter I would have had a big box of random bolts under the counter and made things 'self service'.

well, for supermarket this is common all around europe for fruit&veggies, east, west, everywhere. probably cheaper than hiring extra person to mark everything correctly.

all super/hypermarkets in france are same, shopping there every weekend.

>You pick your stuff, you weigh it yourself, you choose the right tag (without anyone looking over your shoulder) and then you go to a (nowadays potentially automated) cashier.

The US has its faults to be sure, but it's not that different here for buying produce these days. A lot of things had little stickers on them which can be scanned directly, and for other things the automated cashier lets you type in or look up a code number and then set the item(s) on the scanner/scale to be weighed. If you really wanted to cheat, it would be trivial to buy a bag full of some expensive item and type in the code number for some cheap item.

I recall my childhood in rural Australia and am greatful for our freedom then and hopefully still now. We would ride for hours all around town, once even riding to a neighboring town along the coast.

Doors and cars are also typically unlocked, sometimes the keys are left in the car too. I have always mused that if you wanted to steal a bunch of cars you would just take a trailer to a country town and load them right up.

It all worked out fine because it was a small community and people would know who did what. Steal a car? Where are you gonna drive it? Everyone will know it's not yours.

The other thing I imagine helps is that there are fewer mentally unstable people just thanks to there being fewer people. So someone "a bit off" would be known to the community. That can be good and bad.

>Doors and cars are also typically unlocked, sometimes the keys are left in the car too. I have always mused that if you wanted to steal a bunch of cars you would just take a trailer to a country town and load them right up.

>It all worked out fine because it was a small community and people would know who did what. Steal a car? Where are you gonna drive it? Everyone will know it's not yours.

>The other thing I imagine helps is that there are fewer mentally unstable people just thanks to there being fewer people. So someone "a bit off" would be known to the community. That can be good and bad.

Congratulations on describing a small town pretty much anywhere in the western world.

Cheers mate. Perhaps you would like to join the discussion yourself?

"Congratulations on describing a small town pretty much anywhere in the western world."

Except, do you think they'd chase Wallabies on their bikes, catch Blue-Tongues, Magpies and Gang-Gangs?

You just snarkily made the parent's point that "it works because it was a small community". You even quoted that bit. Weird.

"For example, many farmers were leaving produce out with price tags on and relying on an honour system for payment"

FWIW this fairly common in rural Ontario and probably other parts of Canada too. I imagine it happens in parts of the US too.

Yep. Happens in Michigan, just 15 minutes outside of a city with 200k people.

And up in the thumb, too.

Edit: But not in Ann Arbor, the purportedly safest city in the state... Go figure.

Right here in suburban San Jose too. Phil Cosentino (one of the Cosentino brothers of local grocery fame) and his family run J&P Farms on Carter Avenue near 85 and Camden. They sell organic fruit from their backyard orchard.

Sometimes you will run into one of them at the produce stand in front of their house, but usually when I've been there it's unattended. The baskets of fruit have prices on them and there's a slot in the counter to put your money in.

http://www.jandpfarms.com/

Relatively common in rural Australia. Have also seen it here in China, in Laos and in Thailand.

common in outer fringes of Melbourne, 50 to 70km. This ones in Kinglike (https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/30900586330) another, down the mountain in Strathewen (https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/28426890045)

This is every rural county in the US, more or less.

Seriously, it seems like 90% of the HN crowd has was born in SV. You don't even have to go very far inland, from either coast.

I think your perception of HN membership is way off. I'd frankly be surprised if 50% of HN members live in the SF/SV area. Not sure how either of us can be proven correct, however, at least not without mod assistance. Perhaps user IPs?

I attended Caltech in the 70s, and the Honor System there is similar. It worked well.

Well, a few months ago I bought several cartons of berries at a honor system you-pick farm. To be fair that was in Vermont, which probably isn't representative of the whole of the United States.

For that matter, I regularly see schoolchildren riding the New York City subway accompanied only by their friends...

To be fair, NYC is very, very different from the rest of the US. Reading over many of these comments, the people saying that kids can't roam in their areas are living in suburban places where you need a car to go anywhere, and it's simply not safe as a pedestrian. NYC is not like this: everyone takes the subway or walks all over the place there, and many people do not have cars, or use them within the city if they do. It's totally walkable. So I can see how kids walking around by themselves won't have people worried the way they would in suburban areas.

> Reading over many of these comments, the people saying that kids can't roam in their areas are living in suburban places where you need a car to go anywhere, and it's simply not safe as a pedestrian.

It's safer as a pedestrian in the suburbs than in urban environments, which is one of the reasons people move to suburbs to raise kids. In fact, one of the reasons public transit doesn't work in suburbs and you need a car to get anywhere out of your residential neighborhood is that suburbs are usually designed to limit both traffic volume and traffic speed in residential neighborhoods (which typically include small parks and other facilities specifically for for kids) to provide pedestrian safety (which has a side effect of requiring longer, both in road distance and time, trips to anywhere else than straight-libe distance would suggest, and making efficient public transit routes impractical where this is done through branching designs without connecting loops, and making distances impractical for walking out of the neighborhood to other areas -- though this is sometimes, in better suburbs, mitigated by walking/bike paths which make non-carbonated distances closer to straight-line than the motor vehicle routes.)

This is essentially how it works in Japan as well; once the kids are old enough, the parents will walk with them to school a couple of times - to ensure they learn the route and to introduce them to neighbors they might meet on the way - and then the kids are on their own.

Japan's cultural safety net (by which I mean the overarching concept that everyone is more or less working together for the common good) is one of my favorite things about the country, and one of the most startling to me after moving to Asia.

Yes, I live in Japan now and I see that every day. One note though: In cities there's actually a watch organised, every street corner there's a different parent or grand parent waiting at a specific time for the children to arrive. Also, older kids are officially tasked with guiding the younger ones on the way to school.

I was just going to mention this exact same observation from my visit to Japan in October. I stayed in an Airbnb north of Shibuya and morning and night we saw little kids walking to and from school. It was awesome. That, coupled with everybody leaving their bikes unlocked, was such a stark contrast to what I'm used to here in the US.

The concept of "us vs everyone else" or "other people are dangerous and untrustworthy" is probably the most clear difference in US TV shows when I compare it to where I live.

It always seems to be the exception rather than the rule, that people might be willing to co-operate. The idea of "only we are sane" is another. Assuming everyone else is crazy or disagreeable seems to be common.

I wonder if that is something reflected by US media correctly or if it is something skewed.

I've wondered the same thing. It concerns me that there are more police dramas than any other genre on American television.... and even more that they are so popular. It says alot about a cultural mindset. One the one hand you can argue the shows are being pushed.. but they wouldn't continue to do so if people didn't eat them up.

It's a gut fear that is being appealed to, and simultaneously teaching people exactly "us vs everyone else" and "other people are dangerous and untrustworthy." Even your neighbor. Even your friends.

Makes me sad.

It didn't used to be that way in the US. It's certainly gotten worse.

Bike theft is actually a surprisingly big thing in Japan. However, they have another method to control it: all bikes are registered and police conduct random spot checks of ID and registration. (Foreigners tend to get "randomly" checked more often.)

There was on article here a few weeks ago about how Japanese parents and teachers train children to be safe before letting them out on their own.

https://savvytokyo.com/japan-prepares-children-independence/

Most American parents, on the other hand, don't teach their kids anything about being safe on the streets (other than basic theory, like "don't cross on a red light") because they're always shuttling them around in a car. The reason it's unsafe for American children to roam free is because they don't know how to. In the past, they learned from older siblings and friends. Nowadays there's nobody to teach them. And as soon as you turn 16, you're suddenly free to drive anywhere. It doesn't feel safe to be a pedestrian in a town where most drivers have never been a pedestrian. And so the vicious cycle continues.

Maybe in the suburbs. Here in New York City kids are expected to make their own way home by the fifth grade. And take mass transit to school by themselves by sixth. I'm not sure if it's safe, but plenty of kids manage it themselves. My eight year old is eagerly awaiting the day he can walk home by himself.

It might have to do with the fact that fewer people drive in New York City. Suburban parents can drop their kids off at the school on their way to work. Trying to do the same in New York City would be a massive waste of time!

The last few decades were all about ever-expanding suburbs. It would be interesting to study the effect of urban revival and gentrification on parenting behavior and the larger culture over the next few decades.

New York City is one of the safest place to be a pedestrian.

See the "AMERICAN CAR-NAGE" section of Jeff Speck's Walkable City

https://books.google.com/books?id=kbfeAQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA37&ots=...

Does Switzerland publish where sex offenders live?

One piece of information present now is that I can see all the child molesters within a mile of where I live. You see that half a mile away there is someone convicted of "Rape of child with force" and it messes with you.

I'm pretty sure it doesn't have such a public registry. Some of the legal system in the US are very foreign to Swiss (and probably most continental Europeans for that matter), for example the way court proceedings are published and the accused can be named in the media before conviction. In almost every case, Swiss law enforcement and their corrective measures are meant to be that - corrective, not revengeful. This can sometimes lead to bad results (with quite a few people getting angry when crimes go with no or only light punishments), but overall most people probably think it's better to go too soft rather than too harsh, because the latter makes the government into a bully that everyone needs to fear, which people really don't want (and which a very active direct democracy hopefully somewhat protects against).

My main concern would be traffic. I live in an affluent neighbourhood with a lot of stressed people driving SUVs. I've had a car run over my foot. On one occasion, my kids had to be yanked out of the way by their mother to avoid being hit by a left-turning car that didn't see them.

My impression is that the Swiss are more fastidious about following traffic regulations. Is this outdated?

It probably depends on the location in the US, but every time I go there I find Americans amazingly relaxed when driving. Swiss are probably some of the more careful drivers in continental Europe (which is to say they're slow), but I think it's still way more nervous than in the US. However, one of the issues is probably the sheer size of US roads, it's just much harder to cross I think. And from my own experience, kids who are tasked to look after themselves, after a certain age will actually learn to be careful very quickly. Plus, near school there's lots of warning signs and drivers are generally careful there. Generally it's not an issue, but I can see how US suburbia could be ill fitted for such a system.

I've also seen lots of hand-made signs like "Attention! Kids! Voluntary 30km/h!" in Switzerland.

Parents put "Drive like your kids live here" signs in some parts of Palo Alto. I think the clever phrasing makes it more likely to be taken seriously by a driver.

This is in Toronto, Canada, but we share a lot of US behaviours.

US drivers seem particularly hostile to pedestrians. I spent only a couple of months there, but there were two times (one each in TX, CA) that I was crossing with the 'walk' sign and had to literally stop because a car was turning right in front of me and I would have walked into the side of it. And I'm a 6'6" guy with broad shoulders, not hard to see. There were other close shaves and pedestrian-hostile behaviour as well, but actually having to literally stop walking stuck with me.

Oddly, despite the reputation, I actually felt safer to cross the road in NYC than most other places.

As a Swiss with a small child, this is the main reason why I couldn't move to the US or UK.

There always seems to be plenty of children, of various ages, running around my London neighbourhood unsupervised. The noisy little blighters!

That's good to hear. Some of the things I hear from the UK sound at least as authoritarian as the US, so I thought that CPS has similarly harsh measures - apparently it's not that big of an issue?

Working class and upper class children seem to have this freedom in London, having lived in both to press of area.

When I lived in Richmond there were often children alone on the bus or train with expensive belongings like musical instruments or sports equipment. My middle class parents would never have allowed that - but they would expect me to get to school on public transport alone.

Also, there are no rules or laws against this. It's cultural. See http://www.btp.police.uk/advice_and_information/travelling_s... for one example - there's no minimum age to travel alone on a train.

There were a couple of highly publicised cases which I suspect may not be accurately reported in the newspapers, but generally UK child protection is under-funded and errs on the side of non-intervention. Which has tragic consequences of its own: Victoria Climbie, "Baby P" and so on.

As a Dutch guy visiting Switzerland regularly for skiing and just regular recreational purposes, I was surprised how many young children are getting on the bus for the slopes without a parent. Seeing a young child sitting/skiing/snowboarding on their own wasn't anything unusual.

Late 20's(mid 1990's as a kid) here in Northeast US. I had the same experience growing up, days when it was nice outside, we were expected to not stay in and watch TV, so we would go outside and find things to do. I feel like it's that last part though that may have changed over the years as well. There's so many compelling forces today that A) make kids want to stay inside and B) make parents want to want their kids inside.

In these discussions, I hear people say "I'd be charged if I let my kids outside today", but it doesn't also address the cultural shifts that have happened to both the kids and adults that make "outside" a worse off place to be.

What part of the US do you live in? I have 3 kids ages 7 to 12 and they and all of the neighborhoods kids wander together over a distance of several miles.

We make sure they have a phone and a time they are expected to return. The kids always group up as there is more safety in numbers. Life isn't worth living if you don't actually live.

Yes, you can definitely find places where kids still play by themselves in the US! But it takes work and the regional and even neighborhood-level differences in kids' behavior are enormous.

We used to live in suburban Washington DC and I didn't let my kids out of sight of the house.

Now we live in suburban Denver. We cared about play a lot so we used it as the main criterion of where we bought a house. We drove through neighborhoods on Saturday mornings until we found one where kids were out riding bikes and playing without adult supervision. We found a neighborhood that was both well designed (pools, a network of walking trails away from roads, school in walking distance) and full of people who were culturally supportive of free-range kids.

If you want to find or help to foster such a neighborhood, I recommend the book we used, "Playborhoods": http://playborhood.com

For sure the media is the main problem. the commercial news media sells fear.

I'm 30 and my childhood in the Midwest was very similar to yours.

Perhaps, it's a regional thing - but I hope to bring up my future children in a similar manner. It's important for young people to have some autonomy.

Has anyone considered that, like many things, maybe childraising knowledge has improved over time, and maybe it is true that it's dangerous and a bad idea to let them roam around far away unsupervised? It always seemed reasonable to me, even when I was that age myself. An anecdote is that the only bone injury I had as a kid resulted from riding bikes with some other kids who had a "fun idea" of biking down this steeply sloped road, which wouldn't have been allowed had an adult been present, and I ended up with a crushed wrist and internal bruising, and I was lucky I even lived - could have easily hit my head for example. The aftermath of that incident is probably largely to blame for the weight problem I developed at the time.

My proposed alternative is good video games with open exploration (something like the original Spyro the Dragon games has a great sense of exploration and adventure) or that are otherwise engaging. I always found them a lot more intellectually stimulating/interesting than meandering around outside as a kid anyway. Local multiplayer is a good social activity. Continuing the tangent on other benefits, I remember being motivated to read faster as a kid to keep up with certain text boxes that would disappear quickly, and achieving it.

With all this balanced with other stuff like encouraging playing musical instruments or art and such, I don't see a need for unsupervised "roaming," especially a need outweighing the risks.

I really feel that proposing video games over being outside does a huge disservice to us as people. Maybe I'm centennial, but there's something visceral and amazing about being outside.

I think we have made some changes for the better. I remember as a teenager I noticed all the metal jungle jims at playgrounds were gone. It made me said, but I realized it was probably because falling from one could injure or kill a kid; and today we see that many of them have come back, but in the much safer rope based variety with that cool recycled rubber matting under them.

There is something about risk that is important in helping people develop:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2008/aug/06/children.pla...

Your own stories show you learned from your mistakes. Yes, you could have died, but you didn't. That action and memory create a different reality for you, and the way you view it deeply impacts the opinion you've presented here.

> I really feel that proposing video games over being outside does a huge disservice to us as people.

This. Growing up, I was only allowed 1 hr of video games or TV per day. And on nice days, I was ordered to play outside. I grew up with a love of outdoors, sports, and have always been in good shape. My cousins were encouraged to stay in and play video games and never allowed out alone. We are similar age and genetics, yet they are both overweight and unhealthy. Whereas my sister and I are healthy.

I know it's anecdotal, but my families experience sure matches your centennial common sense.

Exercise is overwhelmingly dwarfed by calorie consumption, in terms of weight. Not eating an apple is about equivalent to running an entire mile. Most likely your cousins just had a worse diet. Exercise as a weight loss solution is essentially a lie sold by con artists - you can't outrun a bad diet, as they say.

You can if you just do truly massive amounts of exercise. At one point last year I was doing 12 hours of cycling per week and my maintenance caloric intake was approximately 3000 kcal, or that of one and a half normal people.

Weight is not the primary concern of being in good shape. Being thin, but in bad shape, is almost as detrimental to your health as being over weight and in bad-shape.

Maybe if you spend all your time outside, you've got less temptation/time to snack and thus consume less calories ?

Sounds like someone thinking of an excuse not to exercise :)

A quick Google suggests running a mile burns about 100 calories and an apple is about 50.

In a more general sense, you can't really compare the two. You can't say exercise is "dwarfed" by consumption because they're not on the same scale; unless you're talking about, say, perceived willpower of eating less versus exercising more.

Google said 90 calories to an apple for me.

How was measure calories is terrible. Carbs should be measured different from calories. If you cut out bread, pasta, soda and other major sources of starches and sugars (you can keep fiber and sugar alcohols), weight loss and overall health greatly improve.

Exercising is good and healthy for you. You should do it. But you won't loose weight by it. Your diet is way more important.

> and maybe it is true that it's dangerous to let them roam around far away unsupervised?

...and maybe there are unseen benefits that outweigh those risk factors? It's true that in the past few years childhood mortality has lowered, and that the highest risk factor for anyone up to age 44 is "unintentional injuries;" however, other statistics may be more troubling.

For example, the teen suicide rate was steadily declining throughout 1985 to 2000, but since then, there has been a steady uptick in the suicide rate for children under 18. It's the second leading cause of death for people 10 to 34 in the united states, out-ranking even murder and cancer for these groups.

Is there any evidence that that correlation is causal? You could just as easily point to any of the other myriad things that have changed since then.

> I ended up with a crushed wrist and internal bruising, and I was lucky I even lived.

And I bet you wear a seat belt every day in your car as an adult.

Invincibility is one of those myths you want to dispel when kids are young and the stakes aren't as high.

I wore my seat belt every day before that anyway, not even because I had to but because I wanted to. The only thing that really changed after that point was I didn't want to ride bikes anymore.

I really can't be the only one who thinks brushes with death are not a good thing to have just because they can teach you a lesson when you're fortunate enough to walk away from them. Would you also say Russian Roulette is a good thing to try out because you might learn to value life more afterwards?

What are the odds of dying due to a mountain biking accident? What are the odds of dying while playing Russian Roulette?

The fact that the chance of a negative outcome exists does not mean that we should avoid the activity. Measure the reward vs. the risk.

I can't help but think you're drastically overstating the danger of riding a bike, even in less than safe conditions. I was heavily into downhill mountain biking during my invincible teenage years and only even heard of someone doing major damage to themselves second hand (they managed to impact their spine flying head first off their bike into a tree trunk).

Scrapes, bruises, cuts, and even bones heal relatively easily in children. At least for me learning that things will probably be OK was a valuable thing which has made me more comfortable taking calculated risks later in life, and the times things weren't quite OK taught me a healthy level of caution in calculating those risks.

"I was heavily into downhill mountain biking during my invincible teenage years "

But those mountains probably didn't pose the risk of getting crushed by two tons of steel when somebody decides they'd rather look at their phone than the road.

They were more hills than mountains, and while they weren't full of traffic I crossed (and in some cases rode along) some pretty major roads to get to them.

One might argue that the correct lesson to draw, from a broken bone got by doing something stupid on a bike, is not that one shouldn't ride a bike, but rather that one shouldn't do something stupid. That's the lesson I drew from it, anyway.

I'd be curious to know how old you were when you did the damnfool thing, and how your folks reacted to it. I was eleven or twelve and mine were generally unsympathetic, which suited me fine - it's not like I couldn't see in retrospect what a jackass I'd been, or like I wasn't quite properly embarrassed by the result. One does, after all, prefer to be able to say one earned a visible injury in some more respectable fashion than that!

About 5. They pretty much blamed the kids present/the parent. They apparently biked down that all the time but also had a lot more bicycle experience.

That's a very different situation indeed! I can see how it'd put you off cycling, too. But, again, I'd hesitate to generalize.

"My proposed alternative is good video games with open exploration"

I don't even know what to say to that. Seriously?

I never really liked outside much as a kid and found those kinds of games a lot more fun and "adventurous" than outside. To recall my exact feelings at the time, in Spyro I was working towards goals and finding cool stuff like fairies and treasure, while trees and rocks outside were just "there." Nowadays I can appreciate nature just fine (lately I watched a particular great blue heron occasionally throughout a semester that hangs around campus waiting to see if I could watch it catch a fish from the pond and it eventually did, cool thing to see) but at the time it kind of felt like a chore having to go outside. In addition to satisfying the criteria of exploration, I think the right kinds of video games are very beneficial with regards to reading/coordination/other skills at a young age, like with my reading anecdote, but I haven't read any actual studies on it. For stuff like building treehouses and other more creative ventures there's Minecraft et al. All without losing real limbs, falling down real wells, or getting stung by real bees a real mile from home and learning you have a real bee allergy.

There's a big difference between letting a kid play in the way they want to play (with limits, of course), and forcing or strongly encouraging playing video games instead of playing outside.

That sounds much less like a genuine lack on the part of reality, and much more like your reward system being tuned so strongly to favor shiny polygons popping out from under polygonal rocks that, when you turn over a real one, their absence disappoints you.

Your other examples are just as flawed. When you build a treehouse in your backyard, you end up with a treehouse - and the knowledge that you built a treehouse, and that you can build a treehouse. When you build a treehouse in Minecraft, you end up with nothing. It's an arrangement of bytes that's rendered by an imaginary machine into an arrangement of pixels that corresponds roughly with some abstract idea of what a treehouse might be. There is nothing in the slightest about it which is real, and that includes the feeling it might give of having accomplished anything.

I get that, in an industry which revolves around building imaginary machines, it's easy for us to get confused and forget that's what we are doing. That it's easy is no excuse to let it betray you into sloppy thinking, though, and that's what I see here. Imaginary machines appear to have satisfied you well enough as a kid, which is reasonable. Assuming from this that imaginary machines are good enough for every kid is not reasonable at all. What you found to enrich your life would've intolerably impoverished mine, and those of almost all the people with whom I grew up. As such, I find your prescriptivism uninformed, premature, and faintly arrogant in a way I don't think you've reflected upon or even recognized.

I doubt it. There's a difference between playing and exploring the real world, and sitting in a room.

My parents took the easy route of indoor parenting, with video games / books / school / instrument practice... be safe all the time. I was consistently at the top of my class and reasonably successful socially... but that upbringing did a lot of damage mentally. It's like being raised in a glass cage.

I plan to go the other way with my kids. Buy 10 acres out in the country or woods near some other families, far from the concrete jungle... Let the kids run free and explore, sit and learn, play video games, whatever. My parenting mentality is to provide freedom, and advice on using that freedom (living). If they ignore my advice and do stupid stuff, the pain will teach them the value of advice.

How did the mental damage express itself, more specifically? Not necessarily doubting it, but I'm curious what you feel the effects were on you.

I never visited a psych so I don't know the right terms, but it was probably some form of derealization. Reality always felt shallow, every experience lacked detail and substance... that served as the foundation for other problems. Mechanically, I suspect the derealization resulted from under-trained neurons/networks that couldn't accurately feed forward perceptions of the world.

Once I got to college, I spent the vast majority of my time outside and offline... after a month I distinctly remember noticing how everything felt so real. After a year I'd realized and unwound most of the neurosis on my own.

One of the two bones I broke as a kid had a similar cause. That might sound like an endorsement of your claim, except first that it gave me powerfully to understand the value of forethought on the subject of not being a damn fool, and second that the other broken bone resulted from jumping up and down on an ordinary floor - not even jumping off anything. Are floors a problem?

I have a scar at the base of each thumb. One came from carelessness with the Boy Scout folder whose purchase price I'd years earlier worked hard to earn. It wasn't the first time I'd hurt myself through carelessness with that knife, either. It was the last, though, with any. Are pocketknives a problem?

The other scar I earned through waving a stick around. It wasn't really an instance of culpable carelessness on my part, in that if the stick hadn't had a twig stump where it did, or had I held it differently, it wouldn't have gouged me. I found a lesson there about unintended consequences that's served me well in life. Are sticks a problem?

In rough terms, I spent half my pre-adolescent childhood running around barefoot climbing trees and derelict farm equipment, and the other half indoors reading and playing NES games and writing Applesoft BASIC. I found both enjoyable, and a worthwhile way to spend time. I would not have attempted to replace either with the other. To make the attempt would have struck me as arrant foolishness, even at such a callow age, and I cannot say the idea seems any more sensible from a perspective more heavily weighted with years.

Media is part of it, but the other part is this, taken from the first comment on the linked article:

"I can’t help but notice how many freeways and roads are between Sheffield and Rother Valley. We can’t blame parents alone for the loss of childhood freedom. Since 1919 We have purposely designed our cities to maximize vehicle throughput and require car ownership and the result is an environment that is lethal for 8 year olds. You can’t blame parents for wanting to keep their children safe when it’s barely safe to cross the street."

I hardly feel safe roaming my own town as an adult, and it's mostly due to the rivers of high-speed traffic that cut up the city, that I have to cross to get to anywhere interesting.

This is definitely the issue from what I see. I have a neighborhood road that runs in front of my home. Speed limit is 25 mph. Doesn't matter, cars still do 55 or more at times. When I was growing up, you'd never see anyone going that fast down a residential street.

Because kids playing in the street, cyclist and other hazards were more common, road markings were less obvious and road surfaces were rougher.

After reading the parent I was about to say "I'm almost 30 and I barely feel safe wandering alone".

Not just crossing major roads (I live downtown in my little city, but I have to cross a major road to get to any shops, which puts a big damper on my walking) but just one person walking down the road, by themselves? It's almost a scandal. And if I'm biking around town, especially not dressed in spandex like a bicyclist... what, did you have your driver's license taken away?

I know those are purely my hang ups and no one has ever stopped me and questioned my motives, but the idea comes from somewhere. It comes from a childhood where you weren't supposed to wander alone, and you were supposed to avoid strange men on the street. Then when you grow up to become a strange man on the street, you can't help but feel uncomfortable about it. At least I can't.

Yeah, it's weird as hell to be the only person walking on an empty street.

I actually got stopped by the local police a year or two ago for going on a walk during a holiday, as they received reports of some strange guy walking alone.

That's a bummer.

One of my favorite things is to walk down the middle of the street in my Grandma's town on Thanksgiving or Christmas. Small town, shops are closed, quiet except for a few bars and people's homes. Also a good break from family, and a walk on a day where I eat a lot.

Me too.

Cop said, "are you English?"

"Yep"

"Though so"

Hahaha I get this every time I cross a street upon a suitably large gap in traffic rather than waiting for the lights... because that's what we learn growing up in England where almost nobody waits for the lights - especially if there's a gap in traffic. The numbers of people gobsmacked at this behaviour here is... funny, honestly.

As a pedestrian, are you really going to stand around and be dictated what you can and can't do by a stupid fcking light? Life is short, get your head out of your phone, pay attention to your surroundings and cross the fcking road before the little light comes to tell you that your time is up and it's your turn to go to the next life and you missed it.

Every time someone baulks at me for doing it, I can't help but grin and remember the quote from the original Point Break:

"It was about us against the system. That system that kills the human spirit. We stand for something. To those dead souls inching along the freeways in their metal coffins ... we show them that the human spirit is still alive."

You and Bob Dylan.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/08/14/bob.dylan/

Now there's a title that's straight from The Onion.

"Walking, just walking, walking?"

This reminded me of the short story "The Pedestrian" by Ray Bradbury:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pedestrian

We've studied this story in the English class (probably some 25 years ago).

I lived in a place that was about 5 miles outside of town if you took a main road, and 6-8 miles if you took the country route.

Of course, taking the main road by foot or bicycle would get you stopped by the police telling you to not do that on that road. It was for cars, not pedestrians.

I remember reading that it happened to Isaac Asimov many decades ago so it's not a new thing (in the US that is).

My uncle, aunt and their two children moved to the US for a few years a long time ago, and had the same happen: First day in a new neighbourhood, what do you do but have a walk around to see what it's like? The police assumed their car must have broken down, and on hearing they'd intentionally set out to walk around the neighbourhood, they seemed to imply they didn't think it was safe and offered to drive them home.

It satisfied a few European stereotypes of America all in one go.

I'm pleased to have visited various parts of the US since, and confirmed it certainly doesn't happen everywhere, but I've also experienced first hand just how pedestrian hostile some areas are...

Happened to me as well. A culture filled with imaginary dangers lurking behind every corner could benefit from some soul searching.

Sadly, the less people walk around the more pedestrian hostile the city becomes.

Sometimes it can get worse than that. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/assault-charges-dr...

Reminds of a time when a friend Of mine was rollerblading to my home from hers (~5 miles). She called me mid way because she found 2 kids (maybe 12 years old) carrying a ton of stuff down an empty 3 mile road. She asked me to drive my car to them to help them out carrying all the stuff. When I got there, one of them hopped on right away but the other held back, almost with a scared face. My friend insisted that they let us help but I told her to leave them alone. We left.

It felt weird to feel like I did something wrong.

Imagine the story from the kids point of view. "We were walking down the road in an isolated place, and this car came along and tried to make us get in"...

This is one of the biggest reasons it was refreshing as hell to move to the big city, as paradoxical as that sounds.

Rural/suburban life is like living in a barren wasteland marked by occasional oases you have to travel between in a metal spaceship.

Living in an area where commuting to work and activities by foot is completely normal feels like rediscovering a lost sense of communal society, and there's a relief and a comfort to it that's difficult to articulate.

>Rural >barren wasteland

If you're a glass half empty person. Many people see it as freedom to do close to whatever you want without anyone caring.

What, people who live in cities don't have freedom? And the user you replied to wasn't talking about space available like in a truly rural setting, they were talking about how it's impossible to live in a suburban or rural setting without centering your life around the car you drive.

Cities offer more choices, rural areas offer more freedom

Oh, were it that simple.

Really? Have you tried wearing drag in a rural area?

Have you tried plinking cans in your backyard, or cleaning a deer, in a city?

That's a very specific case. Plinking cans would be illegal around here, except in a shooting range.

As for deer, does boar count? If so, then definitively.

I don't know where "here" is. But drag is a very specific case, too.

I assure you that you won't be arrested for wearing drag in rural Pennsylvania, you will however be arrested in Philadelphia if you start a bonfire or ride a dirtbike in your backyard.

I don't know if I've ever seen "choices" and "freedom" framed as in opposition. And I don't see how having to pour money into a fossil fuel powered cage and having to keep your kids inside like this post talks about is helping in the directive of freedom.

I think the important distinction there is between rural and suburban.

I grew up in a rural small town and now live in NYC... I love my neighborhood in the city for how extremely walkable it is, the breadth of diversity in people, food, opportunities etc. However I do often miss, for example, going for aimless drives with no traffic or stoplights, finding solitude on a dirt road 5 minutes from home with not a house or person in sight, hiking, camping, shooting and snowmobiling essentially right outside the door.

In the burbs I still get the same kind of 'trapped' feeling I'll sometimes get in the city, but without the benefits of living in a dense city: endless things to do, many friends within walking distance, and tons of places to share a drink or meal with them.

I can assure you, your suburban HOA is extremely caring about what you do. Heaven forbid you change the colour of your curtains.

Think past the suburbs...

Suburbs are really the worst of both worlds. City and rural both have their appeals. Suburbs have nothing.

Often newer housing that is closer to the urban center where people work (something you typically do 5 times a week) but is also so much more affordable than living in the city. I think they have appeal, but only for the budget-minded.

The suburbs truly are a barren wasteland of nothing. Without your car, they're a soul sucking prison with all the rules of the city and none of the pay-offs.

I now live in rural Canada. I've spent much of my adult life living in dense cities after having grown up in rural England - London, Vancouver, Houston, Toronto. You can't compare the advantages of either environment - rural or city, but the suburbs truly are the worst of each. You get a lot of space you can't do anything of any value with because of all the rules defined for the comfort of your neighbours who you either have never met or are a pain in your ass; and you can't walk anywhere because there's nowhere to walk.

When you live surrounded by farmland, you can camp for free, hunt, be outdoors, roam on your bike, let your kids climb trees and hike and explore on their own, build treehouses and let them play Lord of the Flies to their heart's content. They can grow, find themselves and become self confident self assured leaders who don't need Mommy every time they graze a knee and have thick skin that doesn't cry to be soothed every time someone insults them, because "they've got this".

In the city you've still got all the stifling rules of suburbia, but you have a pay off: Everything is to hand, you can ditch your car and walk everywhere or take public transit, get on your bike, become part of a tight community of city dwellers. There's extensive culture right outside your door, night life, excitement and high energy... that never. Ever. Shuts. Off.

Eventually the city grinds you down though. It's exciting and freeing for a while, and if you grew up in the city, you might never notice it; but if you grew up in the countryside or the mountains eventually you'll notice it and begin to feel trapped, you'll begin to miss your roots and the simple life, you'll grow sick of trying to keep up with the relentless onslaught of the media, the billboards, the shop windows telling you that you're not enough, you need this to feel better, you need this to look better, you need this to be better and you'll begin to long for an escape from the ceaseless assault of your mind.

Rural life is a different kind of freedom... where you can see the stars.

That was beautiful :) I'm stealing your closing line.

Thanks, I don't mind you stealing it ;)

As someone who considered this, there are a few other factors where cities are preferable.

Work. If you're not running your own online business and need a skilled/tech job, you don't have much choice.

Schools. Cities often have better school options for your kids.

Politics. Rural areas across the world generally lean conservative, and sometimes downright way too conservative.

Work: This is a matter of priority... you can always find ways to pay the bills and put food on the table. It might not be doing exactly what you love, or it may be. There are ways to make almost anything work if you spend the graft making a name for yourself. You're right, it's frequently easier, dare I say simple to find a comfortable job doing what you love in the city. I'm at a point now where I have enough of a client base who trust the quality of my work to give me the freedom to work from home part time which makes this a lot easier. But even in the countryside, if you're capable and interested in learning new skills to a high degree of quality, which I am, there will always be people willing to help you put a roof over your head and food on your table.

Schools: I agree, you can't substitute a good education, but there are more ways to educate kids to a high level than sitting in a classroom. Scouts, Guides, 4H, Outward Bound, there are many stables that need stable hands, farms that need labour. There are endless numbers of lessons to be learned about working as a team, discipline to work on your own etc. etc. etc. There are many ways to effectively supplement their academics that they would never stand a chance of getting in the city. It just takes a different way of looking at things. That's not to say that the academic education kids get in the city is to be dismissed. But the more I hear about our inner city schools failing our kids, the more I wonder how effective they even are in this current climate.

Politics: This is very geo-specific. There are many liberal, conservative and more socialist leaning communities. It really depends on the demographic of that area and who the tax system is set up to benefit. The village I grew up in tended to be much more moderate... I'm not sure how to describe it actually, liberally conservative perhaps? We had a socialist mayor when I was growing up there and the closest town was quite metropolitan, but still enjoyed the benefits of the socialist leaning community that all looked out for one another. It was pretty much live and let live, help each other out, look after your neighbours, proud of their community and the town was very well kept and maintained. If an area is downright too conservative and that's not for you, I'd suggest not living there ;)

Even in rural areas, you can find much more in common with your neighbour than you think, regardless of their political sway, whether they're a hardcore biker or businessman, doctor, lawyer, farmer. We're all in this together, even if some of their ideals don't quite mesh with your own.

https://peperperspective.com/2017/02/01/we-are-more-alike-th...

Thanks for your response. One thing I got curious about -- are you aware of any liberal or socialist leaning communities in rural Canada?

Most of Canada is pretty liberal leaning... especially since the Harper Government was ousted. Most of the country seem to like Trudeau pretty well.

Many of the more European leaning communities are much more inclusive of neighbours needs and looking after each other which is a more socialist type trait.

Let me clarify, when I say socialist, I don't mean the brand of socialism that's sold by American propaganda in the way Communism was in the 60's which caused everyone to be terrified of it. I mean the brand of socialism where everyone is not only happy to contribute and be taxed for the good of their community, to improve infrastructure, hospitals, education, waste services, emergency services etc. but they feel it's their duty to their community and do it proudly. Everyone feels it's their duty to ensure that nobody is left behind and mucks in to make it so.

Conservative everyone-out-for-themselves-and-fuck-everyone-else attitudes tends to be a much more American stance on Conservatism, even Conservatives here in Canada tend to be much more community minded and inclusive - it's enshrined in the culture here, "immigration and diversity is our strength." Especially in communities with a large youth contingent.

I'm guessing, so please take this with a grain of salt: I would say look at the age demographics of a community, the lower the median age, I would wager, the more likely the community is to lean more moderately or towards liberal or socialist ideals.

It has been my experience that French communities tend to lean more heavily towards the ideals of France, which are more socialist in that respect and the Polish people I know also seem to lean more heavily towards the ideals of Poland, which being European isn't a world different. Immigrants (in my experience) tend to favour what they grew up with and know. As an immigrant myself, I can understand that sentiment.

I've lived in suburbs most of my life and have never had a HOA.

I've lived all my life without ever visiting China.

Not sure the point of this. The implication of the parent was that HOAs severely restrict freedoms in the suburbs. My point was that HOAs are not a requirement for living in the suburbs.

but many suburbs don't have a HOA at all. I think some of the issue here is specifically upper-middle class problems. In my suburb its been just as it was when I grew up. Kids can play on the road easily, they live within walking distances of schools, etc,

What do you have the freedom to do that you can't do in a city, other than constraints of space and physical geography? Rurally you're still constrained by all that seemingly open land belonging to other people, plus the time constraints of getting to places.

You have fresh air, views, and quiet (provided you're not in the middle of an agribusiness rural area).

(Talking about "freedom" in the pure abstract is vague; freedom to/from what?)

I know this discussion is from the US point of view, but land belonging to other people is not a problem everywhere. Many countries (at least in Northern Europe) have "freedom to roam" [1] which in addition to actual roaming may include camping, picking berries and mushrooms, et cetera.

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

I live in a small suburban city and I can walk to:

* The library (5 minutes)

* A supermarket (8 minutes)

* A dozen restaurants (7-15 minutes; mostly local restaurants + 2 fast food chains)

* Two liquor stores

* A drug store (12 minutes)

* A coworking space (15 minutes)

* Several antique stores (12-15 minutes)

* (Almost forgot) Walmart (10 minutes)

* Two barbers (8-12 minutes)

* At least three major bus lines

And if I get on a bike, I can go across the entire town in 20 minutes, which puts me in range of more supermarkets, a local game store, a Gamestop, a bowling alley, at least two dozen more restaurants, and tons more.

There are places to live in my town that I would be stuck driving (or at least biking) everywhere. But I chose a place near the downtown area, and I can walk to tons of places. And I do.

Not fond of big cities. My kids can wander around my neighborhood or walk to the park, and we don't worry at all. Granted it's not six miles to the park. Six miles in any direction and you've left the small city I live in. But we're trying to resist the helicopter parenting style.

That said, I think there's another thing that's missing from this discussion: People are having fewer kids. Sometimes they have a single kid. So it's natural when all your eggs are in one basket to be a bit more paranoid about that basket.

Curious - what city is this?

Lafayette, CO. Though neighboring Louisville is similar, and Boulder proper has some very walkable areas as well (at twice the price).

Edit to add: Longmont, CO has a charming walkable downtown as well, plus gigabit ethernet for cheap. In case you care. :)

> when all your eggs are in one basket

Almost literally your eggs in one "basket".

That's exceptional though. Most American suburbs aren't like that at all, and many of the ones that do have a walkable area, most of their housing is still in unwalkable areas.

Specificlly built to be unwalkable in fact, to keep out "undesirables".

Source?

Look up "white flight". http://www.alternet.org/story/65404/the_future_of_cities%3A_...

Ah, I stand corrected. Thank you.

To a certain extent you have to read between the lines, people aren't usually gonna come out and say, "Yes, these regulations are to prevent minorities and the poor from coming to my neighborhood." But that's kind of the obvious takeaway from, say, zoning regulations that mandate houses/lot sizes of a minimum large size: they make it so that a lower-middle class family can't enter an upper-middle class neighborhood by simply purchasing a smaller house on a smaller plot of land.

Probably 30% of the housing in my town is manufactured homes, though (i.e., dirt cheap), and the city council and planners are actively looking for ways to improve diversity of housing. The people living here in the rich-people subdivisions predictably are against any higher density housing being built, though, probably for exactly the reasons you site (some explicitly site "undesirables", despite the already existing low-income housing).

They also complain that it will affect their view, though. Not the view from their homes, but as they drive along the road. Considering the housing is proposed for right behind a WalMart and other big box development, and in the opposite direction from the mountains from their subdivision. Sigh. "But we'll have to drive past it on the way to WalMart or the grocery! OMG!"

Despite having plenty of "undesirables" (not my word), we're in the top-10 safest cities in the state (#3 or 4, if I recall). The neighboring town (Louisville, CO) has won "best place in the US to raise a family" several times.

And the state is Colorado, where even the "rough" cities are actually pretty safe to begin with. I used to live in Oakland, CA, so there's probably no area in Denver that I'd be uncomfortable walking around at night. There are places I've been quite wary of in Oakland, though.

>That's exceptional though.

Yes, it's the exception. But it's not non-existent. You just need to choose to live in an area like that.

I lived in Oakland, CA, and had the ability to walk to tons of restaurants, a post office, and a library. And Bart. But Oakland counts as "big city" by most measures.

I also lived in Lafayette, CA [0], walkable to Bart, restaurants, and grocery shopping. And Alameda, CA, walkable to grocery, the post office, an entire shopping center (Southshore [1]), and a beach. And in Boulder CO where I could walk to a supermarket, restaurants, and a library. And another location in Boulder where I could walk to restaurants.

And I've looked at walkable housing in a dozen other suburban cities. If "walkability" is your priority, you can find it all over the place.

[0] Ironically I'm now in Lafayette Colorado. I keep saying I just have a couple more Lafayttes to live in, and I can collect the whole set. :)

[1] http://www.alamedasouthshorecenter.com/

Sounds like an old railroad town that became a suburb. When was your city founded?

1888

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafayette%2C_Colorado

Another reason is that things are generally very spread out in the US. Since it was taken for granted that everyone has a car, house lots are large and commercial areas are far from residential areas.

Yep I (20 year old) rode a bike quite often down to say the public library about two miles, but it was all sidewalks on slow roads. It's one of the things I really miss about where I live now. It would be almost criminal to try having a kid ride to the library from here.

This isnt it. The town I grew up in had precisely the same number of interstates and major roads as it did 30 years ago (flat population) and children today have nowhere near the freedom that I did as a child.

Are you saying that the causes can't be different from town to town or region to region, or that such actions couldn't be justified and rational in one region, while not justified and irrational in another region?

No, he's saying that "there's more roads so people drive everywhere" is not the blanket scapegoat that many around here make it out out to be.

Can you provide some details? I'm amazed by the idea that there's still a place like this. I'm guessing it's a relatively small town pretty far from any major urban centers?

I'm curious why you're amazed at this notion. Surely the vast majority of towns have not been significantly urbanized or had significant road changes in the last thirty years.

Not in my experience. I've lived in a variety of places in my life, one specific cross-section of America: from farm towns and small-to-medium cities in the midwest to major urban areas including New York, DC, and Chicago. Basically everywhere I've known for more than a few years has had some measure of road building. Perhaps other parts of the US haven't seen the same trend?

I'm not talking about "significant urbanization", but I definitely am talking about suburbanization, which is a pox that affects the whole country, as far as I know.

My home town in the UK hasn't substantially changed since I was growing up. There's a few junctions which have changed, but no major new roads.

I think this is a distinct difference in culture though. Over here its still the norm for kids to walk to school by themselves from the age of eight or nine, and once they reach secondary school to travel relatively long distances either by foot or public transport. I think there has been a drop in the number of primary school kids playing outside by themselves, but I have a feeling I had a less regimented childhood than many of my friends as a result of living on a quiet road.

I'm not sure you're right. We live in a fairly compact city community, quite suburban but close to town. The primary school doesn't allow children to leave unaccompanied until Y5/Y6 (9-11yo). It's c. 50% that then do walk.

In contrast older children are expected to walk 3 miles before they get transport cost assistance. Regardless of the social dangers of the route.

Reminds me of "Taken for a Ride", a somewhat famous documentary about the auto industry seeking to gut forms of public transportation in many cities.

Having traveled quite a bit I believe the US's public transportation systems, within cities and between regions, is a national embarrassment.

It will be interesting to see if self-driving cars lead to parents being more comfortable with their children exploring.

This is one of the aspects that are most exciting for me about self-driving cars: no road rage, no hurrying, complete respect for road rules. You wouldn't have to do the "game of chicken" on the crosswalk where you start crossing, but in such a way that you can always bail out if the oncoming traffic doesn't stop. You wouldn't have to fear for your life when simply riding your bike on a wide street. You wouldn't be one person having a bad day away from needing a wheelchair for the rest of your life. To me that day can't come soon enough.

Yes, more than that: if robot cars could be made incapable of hitting pedestrians, then children might start to roam again. It would be a marvellous unintended consequence...

No, from talking with some of these engineers, I'm pretty sure it's completely intended.

that is impossible in real world. if you go 50 kmh in 50 kmh zone, and small kid jumps 2m in front of your car suddenly, there is nothing anybody or any software can do. if it's 5m, would you rather crash and kill the parents than the kid? what about 2 kids?

it's dangerous direction of thoughts, meaning kids won't have to be careful when outside. but you have bikes, you have tons of other dangers.

Take an evasive maneuver at the very limits of the car's handling, brought to you by the speed of computers, while all the other cars around you adjust at similarly lightning-fast speeds?

Plus kids seldom appear completely out of nowhere. They will be tracked even when they are just on the side of the road.

It will still be possible to hit a pedestrian, but much less likely.

Well yes, we can't eliminate all dangers, but we can bring them down significantly and the rest is covered by teaching our children basic self-preservation practices. Like don't run out on to the street without looking even if cars can stop automatically.

Yeah the traffic is a killer, I was almost killed by a driver who straight up ran a red light going around 75mph and nearly collided with me, an old man and an (estimated) 8 year old girl, its very dangerous to be a pedestrian, even more dangerous than being a motorcycle rider.

its very dangerous to be a pedestrian, even more dangerous than being a motorcycle rider

I'm assuming you're presuming somehow controlling for the fact that one of those two is on motorcycle?

> We have purposely designed our cities to maximize vehicle throughput and require car ownership

This is just one specific example of the broader phenomenon, which is corporations seek to remove all of our abilities to take care of ourselves and our communities, so that they may resell those things to us as products. Requiring cars to move around is just the surface.

We go to coffee shops and restaurants to see our friends.

We purchase MP3s or concert tickets to hear music.

We order food instead of cooking it let alone growing it.

And of course this is all a luxury to some: many of us would be happy to never have to walk significant distance, cook, or listen to a local musician ever again.

But it's in the corporations best interest that children aren't really given a choice. And that serves nation states' best interest, which is to grow the GDP. But the result is a world of people who, without a credit card, are babies unable to care for themselves. Short of someone putting food in our mouths and maintaining the grounds around us, we would be lost. Luckily we have the cash to afford these things.

And those who fall through the cracks of being able to hold a job are eaten up.

All hail GDP. All hail capital. Thank you Gates, Koch, Slim, Walton, for providing us with internet connectivity, petrol, and toilet paper this day.

Just a few days ago I was walking into Costco to buy a loaf of bread. Outside at the food court was an old Chinese man with what looked like a 4 year old grandson. The old man was playing a bamboo flute, very beautifully, while his grandson ate some food. The whole area was filled with some beautiful music which transported me back to time I have spent in China. I wish listening to live music was more common again.

> corporations seek to remove all of our abilities to take care of ourselves and our communities

Please.

It's in a corporation's best interest to give the customer exactly what he wants.

We still have "our abilities to take care of ourselves and our communities," but we also have the option of a corporation providing for our every whim.

It's in the corporation's best interest to ensure a steady income flow. That's about it. Corporations only care about 'what the customer wants' insofar as how much it affects a steady income flow.

I think you have misinterpreted what the parent comment was saying. He wasn't saying there are limited options, just that we choose to have corporations take care of things for us, and now that we have chosen this we are more dependent on them. He wasn't stating that you could not take care of yourself if you want to. Just that it's easier to let the corporation do it for you.

No, he sounds like evil coroporations force us to meet friends in coffeshops, etc. When in reality we just don't want to tidy up our houses before inviting friends over, do the dishes, etc. And it also gives us an opportunity to leave the house :)

Then why do corporations spend billions of dollars each year on advertising? Surely it's to convince you to buy something that may not be exactly what you want.

A corporation's main goal is to drive up profits and if it's more convenient for them to manipulate a populace into acting a certain way than it is to give the populace exactly what they want then that's what they'll do.

There is probably not a conspiracy from corporations or government to undermine people's freedom and what not but it doesn't mean that it isn't the end result.

Advertising is 99% about making you aware that theproduct exists and fulfills the needs you already have, and at most 1% about making you want theproduct.

How is that true? What about all the various gadgets that exist that nobody wanted until they were advertised to them? If you don't know about something then how can it possibly be exactly what you want? You wouldn't want it if you didn't know it existed. Or how about brands like Coca-Cola, everyone knows they exist but they keep advertising, surely it's to make you want it!

If you don't know about something then how can it possibly be exactly what you want? You wouldn't want it if you didn't know it existed.

You may want something with accomplishes some goal without knowing exactly what. If a person thinks "I have to go out but I'm waiting for a call", they may not imagine the cellphone as an object, but they still want something that solves their problem.

That said, 73.6% of all statistics are made up. Many ads in fact are designed with both goals in mind.

[Citation needed]

It is to convince that you want this particular product by this particular company over the competition.

There are some adverts that sell a product against its competitors. But there are plenty that sell the idea that with a particular company's logo on a product you'll be fashionable. And, there are plenty that sell products that people don't need, at all, using the idea that the product will make your life more fulfilling.

We don't watch broadcast TV at home. 30 mins in front of a friend's TV and our kid suddenly 'need' a ton of new stuff. At the cinema "you should get that car Dad", etc..

It's psychological manipulation, it's rarely ever a helpful synopsis of a products comparative specifications.

No, it's actually in the corporation's best interests to have customers who want whatever is most profitable for the corporation to produce.

In many many cases, it's more cost effective to modify the customer's wishes than it is to change the corporation and what it produces.

Many corporations create "needs" that didn't exist before, and spend marketing effort convincing consumers that that need exists. This is telling the customer what they want, or at the very least deflecting existing wants into the corporation's exploitable direction.

> It's in a corporation's best interest to give the customer exactly what he wants.

Comcast comes to mind here. Or Better Business Bureau and the sole reason for its existence.

Exactly. It's in a corporation's best interest to fleece its customers for as much as it can get away with. Monopolies have a much easier time of it.

> It's in a corporation's best interest to give the customer exactly what he wants.

It's in a corporation's best interest to instil in the customer an idea of what he or she wants.

...and then yes, your version.

I love it. The top comment is about how this is caused by government, the third comment is about how this is caused by corporations. Obviously some force greater than ordinary humans must be at fault for this!

Governments and corporations are both made up of people. The leeches win when good people can't be bothered to show up and do the work.

I'd like to mildly challenge your accounting. I believe when you say "the third comment" you're referring to the top comment responding to the top comment responding to the top comment. Recognizing the threaded nature of the comments here makes this fact not at all surprising.

There is no evil corporation stopping you from dropping out of the rat race and moving to a farm to live life off the grid. What's stopping you from doing this and living the life you appear to desire?

There is also no evil corporation ordering people to give up subsistence farming and move to cities. Why do people, all around the world, still do it?

Probably financial reasons due to an increased of cost living.

The cost of living a subsistence lifestyle is very low. Land in the middle of nowhere is cheap, and property taxes are almost non-existant, you don't need to pay 25% of the turnips you grow to the state as an income tax, and gasoline is very cheap in the US.

There's that whole big-corporation medical care business, but if you're willing to forego it, the dream can be yours - for much less then the cost of a small suburban home.

> The cost of living a subsistence lifestyle is very low.

As with Linux, this is only true if your time has no value.

Yes, you have to set that to zero or infinity, depending on whether you're a half full or empty kind of guy.

>Land in the middle of nowhere is cheap, and property taxes are almost non-existant

Housing is not cheap, no matter where you go in the US. Sure, the land it sits on may be cheaper in some places, but the cost of building materials is the same everywhere, and houses have to be built to code, and old houses that aren't maintained well enough get condemned so you're not allowed to live in them. Of course, you can always just get an old trailer home or something.

>and gasoline is very cheap in the US.

Yes, and distances are far when you're talking about living in "the middle of nowhere", and if you have an old vehicle, it's probably going to have terribly fuel economy, so you're still looking at a significant fuel bill just to get to the grocery store. No, you're not going to succeed in getting yourself a proper diet with your home garden. And you still need some kind of income to buy that land and whatever structure you live in, and that gas for your car/truck.

>There's that whole big-corporation medical care business, but if you're willing to forego it,

That's not allowed unless the ACA is repealed. Of course, with a low enough income, you might qualify for Medicaid, but that really depends. I believe a lot of states won't allow you to enroll if you're an adult, saying you should just get a job.

Most of the cost of housing is in labor, not building materials. And, as you said, there's always the trailer. It'll be cold in the winter, though.

My parents do part-time homesteading (My father works - he will retire in a few years) - and they only need to go into town once a month for staples - supplemental chicken feed, milk, fertilizer, etc. Fuel economy isn't that big a deal.

The ACA tax is based on your income. If you have no income, the tax is tiny.

No, of course you can't start all that having nothing. However, most of the posters on HN are more then able to save up to afford this life.

The other problem you're missing is what happens when you have health problems? No health insurance means you're screwed as soon as you have any kind of problem at all.

erikpukinskis - the great-grand-parent of my post was talking about dropping out of the rat race that is modern life, which presumably means that you are OK with not having access to a $400,000 treatment plan should you get lung cancer. You can't really have it both ways, though.

I think there's truth on both sides. I feel this is a good time to link to this article again that I believe was discussed on here some months ago: http://www.meltingasphalt.com/ads-dont-work-that-way/

I find its theory compelling that a lot of advertising works by cultural imprinting: corporations use their power to create a presence in the public sphere which changes the underlying culture of society, and we as individuals have no choice about that.

Obviously individuals can in principle just ignore and go against the prevailing culture (in sufficiently free countries, at least), but even in free countries, that's a lot harder than just going with the flow. That's just how humans are wired, and the likely fact that corporations - i.e, non-human intelligences - have such influence over us by changing the very fabric of society is a cause for concern. Like all influence it can turn out to be good or bad, but ignoring it is not an option.

> There is also no evil corporation ordering people to give up subsistence farming and move to cities

Good luck growing modern plants, they're mostly hybrid and massively drop in yield if you decide to plant part of your harvest next year. Not to mention that Monsanto will be all over your field if they get wind of you violating their copyright by doing so.

So, don't get hybrid seeds?

Corporations don't force it on you. People voluntarily use that.

Corporations provide those things because people want them.

Advertisements target your lizard brain. That bypasses your rational thinking. It is not a fair fight and not merely "just say 'no'".

That just sounds like a way to dodge responsibility.

I wish it were merely a way to avoid taking personal responsibility. There's much more to it than that.

Read "The Psychology of Influence" along with some of the stuff by, e.g, Kahneman and/or Tversky on behavioral economics and the various cognitive biases humans have that lead them to make poor decisions. I assure you that corporations have read all of this and are taking advantage of it to part you from your money, selling you products that they make you think will increase your happiness. Another resource on this would be Robert Shiller's book "Phishing for Phools, The Economics of Manipulation and Deception".

This isn't about taking personal responsibility. Even when you become fully aware of the insidious way in which our culture works, it's impossible to entirely avoid being taken advantage of by marketing and advertising. We humans are made to think in certain ways, our brains have evolved in a way that gave us cognitive biases we can't escape, even when we're aware of them. Being aware can motivate us to change the culture itself (and its laws), though, so in the future people are less affected by corporate deceit and greed. Yes, this would likely mean lower corporate profits. (Question how we're conditioned to think of lower corporate profits as a bad thing.)

What is wrong with corporate greed?

I want the best returns out of the corporations I invest in.

> Question how we're conditioned to think of lower corporate profits as a bad thing.

Perhaps it is my neoliberal worldview, but I think most people are like "corporate profits can go down" for <my cause>. People think that corporations are owned only by billionares.

Lower corporate profits are a bad thing for shareholders.

Why don't we just take poor people's money since they're so greedy for wanting money? Most of the arguments against excess wealth can be used against many first-world people including HNers.

Take it further. Why are you a shareholder? Why are so many people shareholders? Investing for retirement is pushed heavily and incentivized by the government but is it for our own good or is it to provide liquidity in the financial game? If you are pushed to invest then you have skin in the game and are a shareholder who wants to increase corporate profits. This puts you almost directly at odds with all non-shareholders who are negatively affected by increasing profits.

People are shareholders to make money.

> This puts you almost directly at odds with all non-shareholders who are negatively affected by increasing profits.

Economics is not zero-sum. Few people such as competitors will be negatively affected, but for the average person there will be little impact. For example, if Google makes more profits I am hardly impacted.

So what exactly are you saying these influences can do? If you tell me that they're going to make me slightly more likely to buy one brand of soap than another, I can accept that. If you tell me that they're going to make me buy diamonds when I have no conceivable use for diamonds, I'm gonna have to call BS.

Well, people buy diamonds and they're basically useless, other than signalling that the purchaser has a certain amount of money. The price for them is much inflated over what it would be if priced purely for their practical value. Artificial diamonds are identical to the naked eye, yet the diamond industry somehow influences our culture to make people think they need to spend many thousands of dollars on useless "real" diamonds.

On a (somewhat) related note, this conversation reminded me of a George Carlin routine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac

It is funny you mention diamonds, since they are the epitome of marketing a valueless product into something everybody (except you) wants to buy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...

'In its 1947 strategy plan, the advertising agency strongly emphasized a psychological approach. "We are dealing with a problem in mass psychology." '

I'm not saying a person is perfectly rational. But if you don't like something just don't do it. Corporations aren't forcing you.

Could you give an example of how you can't say no to advertisement?

The problem with manipulation is that there is no 'forcing'. That is the entire problem.

And sometimes they remove competing things that people want so that the only thing available is what corporations have to offer.

Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

While car corporations were obviously behind car-oriented policies as well, the American electorate was also completely on board. It didn't have to be this way.

> corporations seek to remove all of our abilities to take care of ourselves and our communities, so that they may resell those things to us as products

That's an interesting thought. I was thinking that probably UBI won't come to pass (politicians corruptible, corporations greedy and short sighted) thus people will have to rediscover self-reliance in order to improve their situation.

I really don't think it's some sort of conspiracy: it's just that it's more efficient for someone to grow all your food, someone to make all your clothes, someone to purify all your water, someone to generate all your electricity &c. while you do what you do best than it is for you to learn how to do all of those things, acquire the raw materials and spend decades trying to make a computer from some copper, oil and sand.

I recall that Mao Zedong tried to get every farmer to smelt his own iron, which rather predictably led to a lot of poor-quality iron, and a food shortage.

I get the appeal of self-sufficiency, I really do (one of my dreams is to grow all of my own food), but I think it's a luxury for the rich and inescapable misery for the poor. Modern capitalism has made everyone richer.

>many of us would be happy to never have to walk significant distance, cook, or listen to a local musician ever again.

You say that like local musicians are somehow a good thing... I'm quite sure there's none in my little area that I'd have any interest in listening to. Whether local musicians are good depends on your taste in music and the local culture where you happen to live.

> it's mostly due to the rivers of high-speed traffic that cut up the city

and that is the priority.

you have to be able to drive as fast as the roadway allows to get where you're going without needing to think about the safety of others.

if some kid runs out in front of your car, its not going to be a question of if you were driving to fast but one of "where the hell were the parents?"

the assumption being that the vehicle occupant has the right to get where they're going absolutely as goddamn fast as is humanly possible and nothing had better get in their way.

driverless cars can't get here soon enough.

typical commuter mindset. me and my needs are above everybody's else because... i have a car?

I see your point, but don't you think it's possible to teach children to cross traffic safely?

When I was little, I regularly walked 3 or 4 miles to visit friends. I had to cross at least one "big" road on my way, where I just took extra care, because my parents had reminded me to.

Never has a thread been more full of survivorship bias. If you had juggled chainsaws as a kid and survived it wouldn't be any more relevant.

So what you're saying is that most adults never crossed any major roads as children and most children that have crossed major roads didn't grow up to be adults? I know traffic statistics are depressing, but surely they can't be that bad.

You're making it sounds like there's a pile of dead kids just growing on the side of the road every day. Lethal traffic incidents among children are non-trivial, but no-where near enough to introduce any kind of "survivorship bias" effect.

The point is that "I did X and I survived!" does not advance the conversation, regardless of which side is right.

Indeed. Among the many reasons life-expectancy was worse back then, children were less likely to survive to adulthood. Among "Great Grandpa's" 13 siblings growing up on the farm, the one who drowned unsupervised at the ol' swimmin' hole six miles from home is just another statistic next to the couple who died as infants from disease.

Everyone's grandparents who survived just fine are exactly that: just fine, because they survived.

Nowadays, with parents having fewer children on average and with tragic childhood accidents being more exceptional, I would only expect modern parenting to favor greater restrictions.

If you're imagining a single kid, it sounds reasonable. Now think about the millions of kids across the country: what are the odds that in a year, none of them will make a fatal mistake while crossing a street?

Even adults screw up, we can't reasonably expect kids not to when the consequences can be fatal. We could easily make our streets safer and more tolerant of user error if we actually cared, look at Sweden or the Netherlands. We just have to make safety a higher priority than speed in road design.

Think about how insane it is that we're expecting kids to regularly navigate an environment where, if they make even a small mistake, they can die. In what universe is that reasonable? Why are expecting our children to regularly dodge death?

We were 5 children.

I posted some statistics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13549214

> Now think about the millions of kids across the country: what are the odds that in a year, none of them will make a fatal mistake while crossing a street?

What price a life? What else would you block to save a life? Pen lids? Swimming pools? Marshmallows?

> if they make even a small mistake, they can die. In what universe is that reasonable?

This universe. It is nature's way. Nature is unemotionally brutal, and cares not for a slip-up. We just try to insulate ourselves from its brutality.

Edit to reply to Tullius (I've hit my comment limit): The whole origin of this discussion is the hit to quality of life that losing the 'right to roam' has given. Also, while pen lids and marshmallows are outliers, swimming pool deaths aren't - between 1 and 4yo, drowning is the leading cause of death in the US, and drowning is up there with traffic accidents up until the teen years.

> What price a life? What else would you block to save a life? Pen lids? Swimming pools? Marshmallows?

Obviously there's some limit to the degree we can protect ourselves, however as it stands, traffic fatalities are one of the highest-ranked causes of death for kids and youth, and we know of plenty of things that could increase traffic safety while still satisfying our transportation needs. There's no need to debate some silly extreme when we can make vast improvements without compromising quality of life.

> This universe. It is nature's way. Nature is unemotionally brutal, and cares not for a slip-up. We just try to insulate ourselves from its brutality.

Yes, and we could insulate ourselves a lot better if we took up better traffic engineering principles.

Traffic is already the biggest killer of kids (afaik). You can only teach kids so much. They are kids - sometimes impulsive...

I agree. And it's different if a child is 4 or 9 years old.

I posted some statistics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13549214

For those interested: I live in Austria, the year of my story was about 1992.

These are the statistics about traffic-accidents back then. Unfortunately there's no distinction whether the children were in the car or walking/cycling.

* Austria had 7.8 million inhabitants back then, 24% were 0-19 years old.

* There were 4.682 accidents involving children 0-14 years old

* 4.843 times a child was hurt

* 56 children were killed

Source: http://www.statistik.at/web_de/statistiken/energie_umwelt_in...

It is possible. In fact, we have proof suggesting it's possible (me and millions like me who grew up that way and lived) while we have no proof suggesting otherwise. It's not like children died en masse due to being allowed outside, so people decided it was a bad idea. People just became obsessed with their children's safety and stopped letting them outside just in case. At no point was there some large-scale problem of children dying due to being allowed to roam.

The only large-scale problem was the anxiety suffered by parents who started obsessively worrying about their child, and maintaining tighter control over children is mainly medicine to alleviate their anxiety.

> It's not like children died en masse due to being allowed outside

Do you know what the rates of accidental death were in the 1970s vs today?

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just interested if you know the data.

EDIT: indeed, most children killed in car accidents were inside the vehicles, so driving kids everywhere may be increasing their risk of death. And a decreasing death rate might just be better car safety features - better car seats; better seatbelts and seatbelt laws.

EDIT2: Something like 12,000 US children die each year from unintentional injury, and 29million have non fatal injuries. Most of these are preventable.

I have no real stats, but I can tell you that from the hundreds of kids at my school zero died from getting hit by a car. There was exactly 1 accident-related death and it was while playing sports, and this was a much older kid (like 12-13).

Now that's not a very good sample size for a low-probability event, but it's not entirely insignificant either. If children had to dodge death at every turn like one commenter suggested, zero out of several hundred would have been unlikely.

As for non-fatal injuries, that's different, we were CONSTANTLY injured. Not from cars, but from just being clumsy stupid little fucks. It was normal for a kid to have bloody knees or scabs on their knees in my childhood. But I don't consider that a problem.

yeah, preventable. strap kid to the bed or lock in the cellar and no car will ever harm it, right.

there will never be 100% safety, kids do stupid dangerous things, climb stuff that shouldn't be climbed, we all did. in past, people accepted that, accepted the risk of injury and death for their kids, it was part of growing up. we just grew weaker recently, became control freaks, with illusion that we can control everything, while losing so much more. freedom.

fck, i am so glad i grew up in exactly that period of experiencing many good old things, and be able to apreciate new cool stuff too.

(repost)

Statistics about my situation (1992, Austria):

These are the statistics about traffic-accidents back then. Unfortunately there's no distinction whether the children were in the car or walking/cycling.

* Austria had 7.8 million inhabitants back then, 24% were 0-19 years old.

* There were 4.682 accidents involving children 0-14 years old

* 4.843 times a child was hurt

* 56 children were killed

Source: http://www.statistik.at/web_de/statistiken/energie_umwelt_in...

One more thing (can't edit the other comment), I am talking about the late 80s / early 90s, not the 70s. I am not from the US, so it is possible that the "protect the children" mentality was adopted later here. Kids were definitely still free to roam around in 1990.

I'm curious if that's a sufficient explanation. Do all the parents today (who remember roaming as kids but who wouldn't let their own kids roam now) live somewhere with more dangerous roads than where they grew up? I wonder if my own home town, which I know has not had significant road changes, has experienced the same alleged decline in roaming.

It's not just roaming. If you let your small children play in the front yard alone, neighbors can call CPS.

This is very true in London, unfortunately. Cars destroy the city - both by polluting it, and making walking and biking dangerous. Boris Johnson's goal as mayor was to optimise traffic flow through London, which just encouraged more cars. Going to a city like Cambridge where the center is shut down to cars is quite eye opening - lots of kids and people walking and biking. In London it's just a sea of cars driving and parked on sidewalks so you can't actually walk anywhere safely.

Case in point: my daughter had a very near miss when she was about 2. She was walking down the side walk a bit in front of me, and this middle aged lady in a Range Rover went onto the sidewalk to get around a stopped car, barely missing my daughter. I yelled at her but she didn't even notice in her sound proof SUV.

I make a point of banging on any vehicle that's nearly hit someone and not noticed/acknowledged it - regardless of whether it was me they nearly hit or not.

People get mad (especially people driving vans/small trucks), but it's disgraceful that people are driving multi-tonne vehicles and are completely oblivious to their surroundings.

I'm glad your daughter is ok.

I did that when I was nearly hit in a marked crosswalk (they didn't slow down and were less than arm's length from me) that was at an intersection with no light. They went around the block to come back and start threatening me for hitting their car...

As a cyclist it happens all the time, it goes something like this:

1) A car comes within centimeters of side swiping me and knocking me down. They don't even notice I'm there.

2) They stop at the next traffic light, I tap on the window to tell them to be more careful.

3) They get angry at me.

4) Other drivers see this interaction and soon you see articles in newspapers complaining about "militant cyclists"

Yes, this is mostly my experience as well. I had a delivery truck driver get out and start yelling abuse because I banged on the back of his vehicle to alert him that he nearly knocked a woman off her bike a couple days ago.

This isn't rare, either - there's at least 1 shouted interacted per week.

It's no wonder my friends are afraid to get on the roads/their bikes.

I mean, around me the made a law that you can't be within 3 feet of a cyclist. After that passed there was a group of cyclists going around with yardsticks trying to smack cars while riding.

Pretending that there aren't extremely toxic cyclists doesn't help the problem.

I LOVE this idea. Don't want your precious car scratched, then give 3 feet. My street has no sidewalks and cars constantly exceeding the 25mph limit. I'm pretty sure I could damage some vehicles doing nothing more than holding my house keys sideways in my hands as I walk/run. Drivers truly don't care about anything outside their windshield.

They were actively riding into lanes and hitting cars.

Cyclists will often ride between rows of cars that are stopped at a traffic light in an effort to get to the front, probably assuming that the 3 feet law doesn't apply in that case.

Cyclists don't have to be toxic for the whole setup to not work, they just have to not obey the same laws that are in place for cars. Where I live, I'm more likely to be hit by a cyclist on a pedestrian crossing than by a car.

In London riding to the front is actually encouraged, if I understand local traffic mores right. (And it seems like the sensible thing in any case.)

What a strange double standard. Presuming your anecdote is true (and statistically, it isn't), your greatest risk is minor injury if hit by a cyclist, while that's the best possible outcome from an interaction with a car.

And no, cyclists don't often ride between lines of cars. Some cyclists do that. Just like some drivers are reckless jerks.

Every group has bad actors. I'd even wager both groups -- cyclists and drivers -- have the same percentage of morons.

You seem to be claiming that all cyclists have to be saints "for the setup to work", which is bizarre. The rules in most cities in the US clearly prioritize cars over people. As plenty of other cities around the world have demonstrated, changing those priorities changes behavior.

In SF, I see cyclists jumping traffic lights, ignoring STOP signs, not giving right of way to pedestrians in the cross walk etc. etc.. In my anecdotal experience I see more cyclists breaking traffic laws everyday than cars. I havent felt the same way in other American or European cities, so its possible this is an SF only thing.

From my experience, it's all too common in Boston, too. Zero regard for traffic signs, lights, or pedestrian activity. It's usually the couriers that ride unsafely.

Ha, I remember knocking on the rear windscreen of a car as it passed me by, I was doing about 20mph, the car not much faster, I didn't even need to stretch my arm to do so. The driver pull over further down the street and I had a conversion with him very calmly, he wasn't happy about me knocking on the window and told me that if he was younger he'd punch my lights out.

As a pedestrian in SF, I feel a lot more threatened by cyclists than by cars. The car-pedestrian right of way rules are clearly established, but the pedestrian-cyclist rules, if they exist, seem to be ignored by cyclists. I have numerous times had cyclists bike 2 feet in front of me instead of stopping at a pedestrian crossing. I am not sure cyclists in SF grok the idea of a stop sign either. Same thing with traffic lights, which a lot of cyclists treat as mere suggestions.

I used to do this all the time as well, and then I started noticing that it only increased the rage that I felt and also the rage in the other drivers. It finally came to a head when a car tried to run me down between multiple lights.

My new form of riding in the city is to be 100% defensive all the time, but not in a give up my rights as a cyclist way. I assume cars will do dumb things (because they always do) so I avoid their blind spots, never pass on the right, alsways take the entire lane so that a car can not pass you if it's not safe (only do this in the city), when traffic is slow assume cars will jump quickly around in lanes etc.

Many people get angry and defensive when you yell at or reprimand them. The goal is to try and inform them of their poor driving without increasing anger on both sides. Now I do this with a look, and no anger, and people tend to respond to that apologetically.

Any vehicle that is close enough for me to touch I hit. There's no reason to drive that close to a human being who doesn't have hundreds of pounds of armor around them.

I am the USA, in like a suburb-ish area. And uh.. Cars on sidewalks? Is that common in London? How did that become a thing? It sounds super dangerous.

I've ended up on a sidewalk turning with snow on the ground. If the sidewalks are the round kinds it seems like that'd be especially easy.

It's not as bad as the parent suggests, but our roads are much smaller than in the US, so on residential streets it is common to have only a single effective lane even if residents park on the pavement (as we call sidewalks). So to stop completely blocking traffic flow, this is what happens. There's typically plenty of room still on the pavement to walk in this scenario, so I've no idea why they're complaining. It's never been an issue in my entire life living here.

It's an every day occurrence in London unfortunately. People park on sidewalks, cars parked down both sides of narrow streets with no room for cars to pass in opposite directions, you have to pull into gaps between parked cars to allow head on traffic to pass. In some places there you only have inches on either wing mirror to even pass through. If you've never been to London, you can't begin to appreciate the width of your roads here in North America.

In places where you have 20 mph zones because you feel like you can't physically get 2 cars past each other in North America, not only do you have traffic flow in both directions, the speed limit is 10 mph faster and everyone is still speeding.

There are places where if you don't park on the sidewalk, there isn't enough space on the actual roadway for traffic to pass... so people park on the sidewalk because "where else am I gonna park?"

This is everyday life in London, and people rarely even give it a second thought or bat an eyelid until someone gets hit, and then there's outrage for a day or two and then everyone shrugs and say "that's just the way it is" and goes back to their everyday lives.

Is this crazy? I guess it is, but that's London... and every other old world town in the country. Streets were built long before there were cars, houses line both sides of streets and so the roads can't be widened without knocking down hundreds or in the occasional place thousands of years of history. We take our heritage more seriously than our need for wider roads.

We all greatly over estimate our ability to drive and we all think we're the next World Rally Championship champion - because we all drive stick. None of those shitty automatics you North Americans love. When we drive, we want to drive, not cruise luxuriously on our floating cloud, cut off from the feeling of the road by soft suspension.

So imagine cars dashing through tight streets, with no room for two way traffic - even though it's a 2 way street, other cars parked close on either side, almost grazing your wing mirrors as you whip through and your only thought is I hope nothing comes the other way, the last place I could've let them pass was 400m back and I'd have to back up this bastard all the way back to there to let them pass.

Ironically, you have one of 2 states when you're driving on the circular road around London, our M25 motorway (that's what we call highways in the UK, motorways). You're either whipping along at 90mph (the speed limit is 70mph) 15ft from the bumper of the guy in front of you and the guy behind you 15ft from your bumper... all the way around the M25, or someone's had an accident and you're crawling along at 20mph wondering if you're ever going to get home. The 3 lanes of the motorway much of the way around is narrower than your 2 lane highways here.

The first time you ever drive in this kind of environment you feel one of two feelings - either trepidation, anxiety and nausea, or a level of indescribable exhilaration.

That's what driving in England is like. It's like an extreme sport compared to driving in North America.

The Irish are just as crazy, they pass busses at highway (should I say motorway?) speeds on what I would call a one lane road. The busses suck together when they pass. It's terrifying.

We grew up in this environment though; and just like you guys are desensitized to the media hype of which country you're bombing next for their resources (heck your national anthem even celebrates that insanity - bombs bursting in air indeed!), we (for the most part) don't even think about how dangerous our roads are... we just accept that and find a way to enjoy it.

Every country has its own behaviour that shocks and horrifies the rest of the world. Britains roads, drivers and completely topless Page 3 girls in mainstream newspapers that even our kids can leaf through are ours. I guess we'd rather die at high speed in our own car in a land we own where our kids grow up with a healthy appreciation of breasts than be desensitized to the rape and pillage of foreign lands for their wealth ;)

You realize "bombs bursting in air" is a reference to the British bombing us

I did, lol

You may have missed the tone of the rest of my post which should have implied a tongue in cheek mood... you'll have to forgive how dry our humour is, something else that is uniquely British ;)

you need to start a СтопХам[0] UK Chapter because, in free-market Russia, pedestrians park on you.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/user/Lomak1581

I visited Ireland last year as a Wisconsinite..... being driven around the Northern Irish countryside was terrifying. Also everyone parks on the sidewalk, and its completely impractical to own a truck because the roads are about half the size of American roads..

As an American in London, or in fact pretty much any town or city in England, I'd wager you'd feel much the same way.

A little secret though, we already know you guys feel this way, and we take that into consideration when we drive you... we add a little extra excitement to the drive, you know, because we know you guys are addicted to drama :D

We know you're already uncomfortable because you feel like you're on the wrong side of the car and on the wrong side of the road, exposed and white knuckling it, so we just like to send you home with a little something to remember us by... that time you took your life in your own hands by getting in the car with a crazy Brit and lived to tell the tale ;)

Depending on the city, it's a thing in China. Some areas will have so many cars and scooters parked on the sidewalk that everyone walks in the street.

"This is very true in London, unfortunately ..."

I admire the Dutch. They use the bicycle everywhere and in all weather conditions. The result? Their cities even sound so different. It is calm, very little car noise. Amazing.

Dangerous as a pedestrian though - especially if you aren't used to it!

yes, I wanted to add that remark as well, especially because the topic is about kids. But I didn't.

And of course bicycles are far less dangerous than any car. So there is no reason to complain or criticise this great achievement.

The kids ride bikes too.

Yes, it wasn't meant so much as a criticism as a caveat.

It is a bullshit caveat. Bikes are orders of magnitude less dangerous than cars for children.

You complain about London---and I just moved from Sydney to London and enjoy the relative pedestrian-friendliness here compared to that car-centric hellhole down-under.

Your comment made me consider this point, and I think it's a good one. That said, I actually live in a less crowded and busy city than I did as a child, yet the conditioning the parent poster mentions is there.

As a 6 year old, I would walk next to busy urban streets alone, cross streets, get on trams, and go to school. I don't think the risk of that has really gotten much higher, we just perceive it differently. A good example is how cars didn't have seatbelts (at the back at least), or headrests, and they had a tendency to crumple and have the steering column impale the driver during collisions.

We seem to be more keenly aware of these issues nowadays, and are somehow more averse to them - quite aside from any actual changes for the worse.

But the driver for building roads is frequently that roads enable an upgrade in zoning for land that fronts on those roads.

More modern roadways are quite distant and independent of even the usual retail/restaurant establishments. You have to take an exit. These roads tend to be toll. I don't know how anyone who hasn't used them would be able to see what I mean, but around Houston, the new 99 and I45 stand as examples of the two approaches.

I grew up deep inside a suburban development in Pennsylvania. We could ride our bikes for miles and still avoid major roads. Street hockey games very rarely had to move nets for cars. A number of friends lived easily within walking/biking distance. Even leaving my development usually meant dealing with one "major" road before getting into the quiet streets of the next one.

I would love to let my 8 year old daughter roam our current neighborhood like that, but we get more speeding cars in an afternoon cutting through our street than I would see in a weeks at my parents'.

I can't help but notice that this is close to Rotherham. The second hit when you google for Rotherham is the Wikipedia article on the "Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal".

The report estimated that 1,400 children had been sexually abused in the town between 1997 and 2013, predominantly by gangs of British-Pakistani men.[7] Abuses described included abduction, rape, torture and sex trafficking of children.

Perhaps freeways aren't the only factor here.

Great point to consider geography and the urban environment. In the suburb I grew up in there were no sidewalks, and a few woodsy areas around my parents house were quickly developed and turned into more suburban dwellings, so there really wasn't anywhere to roam.

Rivers of high-speed traffic in the city? Dude, I feel like I can't allow my kids to walk alone to school that's four blocks over in my own neighborhood without some nanny state enabler calling child services on me.

Hell, I don't let them play in the front yard and wonder how long it'll be before I get the knock on the door because I let them play unsupervised in the fenced backyard with a trained full-grown German shepherd on watch.

Things are seriously screwed up.

And then it spitballs. The police / CPS will listen, and we've all heard horror stories about "good people" getting slapped with lawsuits, fines, community service[1], or straight up losing their kids[2] because of a system gone mad.

And the sad part is that we've been conditioned to it. The parent that lets their kids roam with that kind of societal norm and social pressure? You start wondering...

[1] http://www.salon.com/2014/06/03/the_day_i_left_my_son_in_the... [2] http://www.sunherald.com/news/special-reports/dhs/article950...

From the second article: "... adding that forging a document to take away a child is almost as severe an allegation as kidnapping."

Holy shit, that is fucking kidnapping. But somehow because a government worker does it somehow it's not the same thing?

I think this is a large part of it. I don't care so much as 5 cents about what somebody at child protective services thinks...but where I live people drive so fast it is a bit ridiculous..but also my neighborhood has roaming packs of dogs. For whatever reason my area seems to be where people go to drop off unwanted dogs; they pack up and become dangerous. I have been attacked 3 times, my wife once and I am not too keen on my children's ability to defend themselves against them. I have disposed of many of them but it seems just when it is safe again to go for a run...there are more dogs.

>I have disposed of many of them but it seems just when it is safe again to go for a run...there are more dogs.

Sounds like you need to pack a pistol and some mace when you run.

Traffic is definitely a big, unsolved problem in todays cities -- but in this context, it doesn't really fit into the causal chain: People report roaming about freely as kids in the 70s and 80s (that would include myself), several decades into the golden age of cars everywhere. Obviously individual areas can change, but the world at large today isn't significantly more dangerous for traffic reasons than it was 40 years ago.

When I was 12, I rode my bike three miles to the bus stop where I hitched it to the bus and rode from a small town in San Diego down to the El Cortez Hotel where Comic Con was being held. I paid my own way, stayed for about 7 hours, then rode back home. I can't imagine being allowed to do that today...

I also just remembered another anectdote. One morning (age 13) I set out to go birdwatching. I had to get up around 5am, in order to get to the estuary before sunrise. I had a small backpack with all my gear, and about a mile from my home, a sheriff's deputy stopped me in his squad car. He quizzed me on what I was doing, asked to look in my backpack, and after 15 minutes, I was on my way. He was obviously surprised to see me out that early, but once he was convinced of my sincerity, I didn't warrant any further scrutiny.

> He quizzed me on what I was doing, asked to look in my backpack, and after 15 minutes, I was on my way

I don't know what the laws are where you live but I would guess he had no right to search your backpack without your consent. To me, what you're describing is police aggression and you must always push back against any such aggression. You should not have submitted to the search. The legal system is adversarial and you must protect yourself from the very first moment you are in any way involved with it.

To quote James Duane from his book You Have the Right to Remain Innocent: "Nobody of sound mind can dispute that there is something fundamentally wrong, and intrinsically corrupt, about a legal system that encourages police officers and prosecutors to do everything in their power to persuade you and your children (no matter how young or old) to 'do the right thing' and talk - when they tell their own children the exact opposite."

The book: https://www.amazon.com/You-Have-Right-Remain-Innocent/dp/150...

He didn't search his backpack without consent - he asked for, and was presumably given, consent.

There are certainly scenarios where you should consider the police to be your adversary and enforce every right you have to its fullest extent, but choosing your battles is just as important. The police have far more rights to detain a juvenile compared to an adult, and an unaccompanied 13 year old with a backpack at 5am is out of the ordinary. The officer was already starting from a place with a reasonable assumption that the child may be lost or a runaway, in which case he can probably already take him back home (or to the station for CPS to talk to if he's completely uncooperative).

Allowing a quick search to confirm that you're just pursuing a harmless hobby and are not putting yourself in any danger or likely to be reported missing a couple of hours later, seems like the easiest and fastest way to deal with that particular encounter.

> He didn't search his backpack without consent

I never said he did. I said greedo shouldn't have given that consent.

> Allowing a quick search to confirm that you're just pursuing a harmless hobby and are not putting yourself in any danger or likely to be reported missing a couple of hours later, seems like the easiest and fastest way to deal with that particular encounter.

It puts you in danger of arrest and false charges. It's irrelevant what police suspect. You do not submit to them to make things 'easier' or 'faster'. Your only concern must be to protect yourself, even and especially when you're 13.

Duane's book is full of examples of people who thought it would be a good idea to cooperate with police, only to find themselves charged with crimes they didn't commit and some of them ended up in jail.

If you're starting from a position where the police can't take any action against you without more evidence, and they need you to provide that evidence, sure. In that case, there may be no benefit to you to cooperating. But that's not where the parent post was.

He was a juvenile, carrying a rucksack, walking alone at 5am. He is already starting from a position of being detained as a potential runaway. His encounter can get better (proving that he's just a birdwatcher and being allowed on his way) or worse (if he's carrying anything he can be arrested for). If he's just carrying a camera and a pair of binoculars, it seems like its worth the risk. The officer has better things to do with his day than ferry around kids who clearly aren't runaways.

> In that case, there may be no benefit to you to cooperating.

There's never any benefit to you in cooperating. You do the absolute minimum you are compelled by law to do, and do nothing further.

I encourage you to read James Duane's book. You are the target audience.

In this case, failing to cooperate would almost certainly have led to him being detained as a potential runaway, and returned to his parents, or if he refused to provide any information at all, taken to the police station and turned over to Child Protective Services. In this particular scenario, it seems that cooperating was the best approach.

By all means enforce your rights, but make sure you know your opponents rights too, and choose your battles carefully.

I was 13, maybe 5'8, and 100lbs soaking wet. He was probably twice my size, armed with numerous weapons. Sure I could have exercised my 4th Amendment rights, but most judges would believe that he had probable cause. Expecting a 13 year old to be a constitutional lawyer (especially back in 1977) is a bit much.

> I was 13, maybe 5'8, and 100lbs soaking wet. He was probably twice my size, armed with numerous weapons.

This is the best possible reason to know your rights. Might does not make right.

> Expecting a 13 year old to be a constitutional lawyer (especially back in 1977) is a bit much.

No one's expecting you to be a lawyer but it's not too high an expectation to know your rights, which is the point of Duane's book. Learning your civil rights should be part of everyone's education and it's a shame that it isn't. Police exploit that ignorance, as they did to you.

So I resist, get arrested, taken to jail. My folks woken up at 6am on a weekend to come pick me up. When my parents try to hire a lawyer, they'll be informed of how reasonable suspicion and probable cause work, for an hourly fee. All because a cop did his job by investigating a minor who from his perspective could have been a runaway or someone stealing junk.

Now while I can foresee situations where a 13 year old could successfully resist a search of their body/property, but I can't see a lawyer counseling it in this situation. Then again, IANAL.

> So I resist, get arrested, taken to jail.

You don't resist, you assert your rights. You fail to assert your rights and that will be exploited. If you get arrested for asserting your rights then you take them to court and you win.

> All because a cop did his job by investigating a minor who from his perspective

His perspective is irrelevant. Your only concern must be to protect yourself, which you failed to do.

Unfortunately San Diego has been pretty opposed to making any safety improvements for bicycles, even as plenty of folks are killed by drivers.

Taxpayer-provided parking welfare is more important than keeping people alive. http://bikesd.org/2016/08/hba-hole-worrying-precursor-future...

My problem is neighbors. They would call the cops instead of talking to me if they saw my daughter out there biking or playing. Can't they just chill and keep an eye out? I do for their kids and even let them play on my lot.

Nope - they all hide behind the drawn in curtains and think there's pedophiles lurking in my backyard bush.

Seconded. People see crap they don't like and escalate to some 3rd party without at least making a token effort solve it first get a special place in hell.

We have been conditioned to appeal to authority in disputes rather than handling them ourselves.

Remember, whenever you call the police, you are requesting people with guns to enter into an unknown situation on your behalf. Tragedy happens.

"We have been conditioned to appeal to authority in disputes rather than handling them ourselves."

Well that is how a dignity society operates; ignore it, or draw on authority. The alternative is an honour society, and those produce far worse outcomes for almost everyone. The problem here isn't that people appeal to authority in disputes; it's that people's idea of what constitutes a dispute is broken.

Adam Walsh was murdered in the early 80's. John Walsh scared the sh out of everyone because of it.[0]

[0] I'd like to think I'd be as tireless at trying to find my son's killer as well, so not trying to be disrespectful here.

(Parent of a 6yo and a 1yo). I feel the same, I was orders of magnitude freer as a kid as my children are now. One day the nanny of my 1yo found my 6yo outside of our school (which is across the street) almost ready to cross the street on the pedestrian crossing. We wrote to the teacher, who told us she couldn't sleep that night. It's very likely that if we had reported the incident to the principal she would have been fired. At end of the day, the main function of the schools nowadays is to keep our children safe, not to educate them.

But here's the thing, I feel the same as you. Part of it could be the PG observation of asymmetry of benefit vs risk for kids and parents ([1], paragraph before "Discipline"). But part of it is that the whole "world is tough, so toughen up" is a big misconception. I'm struggling to articulate a good argument, but I think it's worth shielding our children from danger for as long as possible, so they can focus on learning. Life will come at them, that's for sure. And then they'll have the motivation to learn how to deal with all the bad stuff. But until them they'll learn more of the good stuff if we remove the distraction of having to look out for themselves.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

> I think it's worth shielding our children from danger for as long as possible, so they can focus on learning. Life will come at them, that's for sure. And then they'll have the motivation to learn how to deal with all the bad stuff. But until them they'll learn more of the good stuff if we remove the distraction of having to look out for themselves.

But how will they ever learn that when all they've been brought up with was that they can't be trusted to do anything on their own?

What good is all the learning when you lack confidence to apply it to something new, unknown, where you don't know the outcome 100%?

You make it sound like you are living in a war zone when in fact, your children are probably much safer than they ever were in history.

I don't know the answer yet (my being a parent is still work in progress, you know...) but I think my son will earn my trust to let him go to and from school by himself in a few years. I don't think there will a sharp demarcation line at 18 or any other age: you are under constant supervision up to here, and completely on your own from here on.

It's just that I don't think it's so important for him at this age to learn to negociate the street traffic, even if I was roaming the streets when I was his age. Can he do it? Sure. Are there dangers? You bet. Are they negligible? Maybe, some people say they are, some are freaked out. But we have a huge bias in our perception: we are all alive. We enjoyed our freedom when we were kids, but some of us died, and we, the survivors, tend to not include their experience in our assessment of the dangers.

I did play with carbide cannons as a kid, and also with matches, firecrackers, I climbed trees, and of course, I got in numerous fights with other boys. And here I am, safe and sound, living proof that it's ok to do all of those. Only the proof is flawed. One of my coworkers had a classmate die while playing with a carbide cannon. It's really not that safe to play with carbide cannons, or with fire, or to dash across the street right before a car was passing (forgot to mention I did that too).

>I think I've been conditioned to think that I would be a negligent parent if I did this.

>The media is part of the problem. 24/7 news, social media, and channels like ID (real life murder 24/7) scare the bejeezus out of people. But besides that, we have an acceptance of nanny-state government - that the government should be a much closer "partner" in child rearing than 40 years ago.

The whole intent is to condition you to normality. Not unlike civil forfeiture and intrusive security checks when travelling.

Growing up parents gradually loosened the restrictions on my roaming from age 7-12. As an adult, I think that taught me independence, love of nature, and exercise / outdoor activities.

Do you not feel the benefits outweigh the risks? I've watched aunt shelter her 2 children. Both of her boys are sickly and extremely sheltered. Sure I had some minor adventures like stepping on nails and falling off my bike. But I learned and grew from those experiences.

Comparing how my sister and I turned out compared to my sheltered cousins, it seems like my parents did the right thing. You recognize that the world is just as safe and it's the media that scares people. Don't you worry that you are being selfish by being overprotective?

"child endangerment"

This seems to run rampart in the US, but also a little bit over here in Germany.

My daughter (now 12) is allowed to use public transport across my city (Munich) since she was 9 (close to 10) - and my son who's 9 will change schools in summer and take public transport to there as well.

What's (still!) normal here might be child endangering in the US. The kids are free to roam from here to the city's river Isar (around a 20 minute walk, 1 subway station) because there's just a green, nice place.

And no, Munich is not a rural area, it's a 1.6 Million people city. And the first year when my daughter was taking public transport she was switching lines at Munich central station. In 2015. During those days when there were several thousand refugees here.

You teach the kids about sensible behaviour, about how to travel safely. And then you have to let them take a risk, because locking them up in the apartment is a very dangerous thing, for their mind, for their health.

There IS a certain risk that something bad happens. But I refuse to encumber the kids souls with fear and panic. I definitely believe part of the "obesity epidemic" is parents driving their kids everywhere because "its safer". No it's not. The kids get sick and fat.

> I know I would be gnashing my teeth if my kid was roaming the streets and woods all day long...even if I did it.

I think what has changed is our attitude towards risks. We just can't stand even the slightest risk on our children. It's a form of entitlement - we want to raise kids risk-free, but that is dangerous in itself. Lacking experience, children are much worse prepared for life.

There have been vast societal changes too (in the UK). 30-40 years ago a lot of residential streets would have parents home during the day. That doesn't seem true now.

I was allowed to roam as a child. But was in a village area where all the families knew each other, primarily because mother's were home with their kids for 5 years of their lives at least.

Great point, I've not seen this point mentioned elsewhere in these types of discussions.

> I think I would be charged with child endangerment these days if my kid (3 years in the future) was doing stuff like that.

> [...]

> The media is part of the problem.

Not the media is the real problem, but the tolerance of people towards the mentioned kind of laws.

Or. Just google child predators in your neighborhood. Some states require these databases updated regularly. Statistically you should have one within walking distance. Sleep tight!

How does the US have a "nanny-state government" regarding child rearing?

More immigration will fix this.

From or to where?

Parent was missing a /s

whoops yea i should add one for HN. I wish I could say something intelligible, but it's so complicated I don't even know what's going on anymore with western culture.

> This Daily Mail piece...

Lost me in literally four words. This is blogspam about something from the Daily Mail, guaranteed to be terrible.

This may be talking about a legitimate problem but sure isn't citing a legitimate source.

Oh my god the daily mail!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2z-AdzgKjY

I think most of this is the one-child family effect.

You have three or four kids and one gets lost.... well, it is a tragedy, but you still have kids.

You have one kid, and it's all your eggs (mostly literally) in one basket.

Early-mid 2000's kid here. I roamed without second thoughts: Explored forests, cities, trespassed on forsaken enchanted lands and everything in between. I admit there has been stark differences in outdoor activities; but this isn't a "it's too dangerous for Johnny to go outside" scenario, it's a "Johnny is too glued to his iPad 8.0 to enjoy going outside" scenario.

At what age can a child roam without supervision these days?

Aren't there laws that require kids below 12 to be with adult supervision at home?

as a child, i used to go over to my friend's house on my bike and a bunch of us would play D&D in the basement. afterwards, we'd get on our bikes and ride through the foggy streets alone, trying our best not to accidentally cross the path of a demogorgon.

one time, we met this weird girl with really short hair and telekinetic powers. she needed a place to stay, so we hid in her in my friend's basement.

it was pretty creepy. sure am glad that's over.

I have seen stranger things than this.

Crime in many parts of America is higher than it was in medieval and middle ages in Europe, judged by intentional homicide rates. Also, crime approximated by intentional murder rate, outside of periods of war, is historically higher now than in history.

source: https://ourworldindata.org/homicides/#germany

Ummm. Your citation has the exact opposite conclusion to what you say. So much so that I had to read it 3 times to make sure I wasn't missing anything. What precisely do you mean?

What are you looking at? According to Wikipedia(1), it is 3.9/100,000 in the USA, and 16 in the Americas. From the source(2), it was less than 1 in the USA by 1800.

There also variable crime by region in America. Baltimore, St Louis, Detroit and New Orleans have homicide rates around 50. That's higher than any country in Africa or the Middle East.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

2 - https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/homici...

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate

I mean, I guess maybe I'm taking quotes like "The homicide rate in the US has fallen dramatically over the past few centuries." out of context?

If you look at the data sources they linked to, they don't support that -- although the data source linked immediately after that quote is from the 1600s - 1800s where the rate did fall dramatically, so maybe that was what was the intended meaning? I don't know what the author's intention is, but the actual data that is not supportive of that, and you can look at it.

Edit: to below: go click on the links to the datasets I provided you. Look at the datasets. Do you see historical murder rate in the USA around 1 - 5 in the USA, and that it is now over 50 in some parts.

>nor the crime rate in the USA historically compared to now

My thesis was that some parts of the USA have higher crime rates than historical (they do). That was my thesis. An additional thesis is also true: At some points in history the historical murder rate in the USA was lower than it is today.

You need to link to actual data. The data I linked to supports my thesis.

Click on this link and look for yourself. I honestly don't know what your problem is. Are you not clicking the links or being intentionally difficult or something?: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/homici...

I'm sorry, I don't see either of your thesis' supported by your citation. Neither the crime rate in the USA compared to medieval European rates, nor the crime rate in the USA historically compared to now, is worse. Are we just reading the same data completely differently?

What? Go click on the links to the datasets I provided you. Look at the datasets. Notice that you see historical murder rate in the USA around 1 - 5 in the USA, and that it is now over 50 in some parts.

>nor the crime rate in the USA historically compared to now

You need to link to actual data. The data I linked to supports my thesis.

Click on this link and look for yourself. I honestly don't know what your problem is. Are you not clicking the links or being intentionally difficult or something? https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/homici...

Ok, I get where we are crossing wires now. Your "ourworldindata" citations show a decreasing crime rate through basically every period of data except the 1960s and 70s. The period between 1940-1950 show a lower period than now in that it is around 4 p100k then and around 6 p100k now.

You are then comparing that to certain city numbers in the USA that are ~50 p100k now. That makes more sense as a thesis and I think I now understand what you are saying.

That said, I think it is an entirely incorrect way to interpret the data, as the aggregate numbers that have sub 4 p100k in the historical record do not break out p100k numbers per city. So you have no idea if St. Louis (for instance) is worse now than it was in the "ourworldindata" data set as it isn't broken out that way.

The murder rate has decreased since the 60s, 70s and 80s, but that does not invalidate my thesis. Also, interpreting the data is only wrong if the data does not support it. I did say that it was higher in some parts

It is true though that during many years of comparable peace and without economic hardship the rate in the USA had gone down to below what it is today. For example, estimated at 1/100,000 in year 1800.

OK. Trying to restate your premise:

1) There are cities in the US that currently have intentional murder rates higher than aggregate medieval European ones.

2) There are points in history where the aggregate murder rate is better than the current one.

If I understand those 2 correctly, I'm no longer arguing that the data doesn't agree with that. That was a misunderstanding on my part about what you were suggesting.

Now what I'm saying is that it is largely not germaine to the article as:

A) in 1926 when the article makes its first sample point, the aggregate rate in the US at least, was worse than now and

B) specific city numbers in comparison to aggregate numbers are not revelatory as you have no idea what they were historically (at least from the citation).

The current aggregate number is clearly much lower than the current St. Louis number so if we assume a linear correlation in those numbers then the St. Louis number would be worse in 1926. If we aren't going to assume a linear correlation between the aggregate numbers and the city specific ones, I'm fine with that, but I'd like to know why as none of the data sets imply that city murder rates have changed.

>If I understand those 2 correctly, I'm no longer arguing that the data doesn't agree with that.

I think we're close to being on the same page. About your objection, my argument actually does not really revolve around the idea that there is some correlation b/w city vs state rates.

I'm just looking at the statistics themselves. The fact is there are several cities in the USA that have higher murder rates than any country in Africa or the Middle East. So if you were randomly placed somewhere at random b/w several US cities and vs Africa or the Middle East, you would live in an area with less murders choosing a place at random in Africa or the Middle East.

I've heard that there was a sharp increase from the early 20th century to the 70s-80s, then a small decline since then (maybe due to deleading gasoline among other things), and it seems to have happened in other countries too http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/olym....

It's a bit hard to judge since there are only a few crimes where measurement has been consistent and good, e.g., homicide and violent crime. And there you have to take into account the decline in lethality due to better medical care:

https://twitter.com/RAVerBruggen/status/754446756805509120

https://twitter.com/RAVerBruggen/status/756512858331082752.

I'd like to see the trend in assaults, which would be most relevant to free-range parenting, but haven't been able to find it anywhere.

>I've heard that there was a sharp increase from the early 20th century to the 70s-80s, then a small decline since then (maybe due to deleading gasoline among other things), and it seems to have happened in other countries too http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/olym....

That's true. However there are estimates that historically, during periods in peace and without severe economic hardship, the murder rates had settled at very low numbers in America (lower than today). In the data I linked it is 1/100,000 in 1800 which is lower than around 4 today, and around 50 in several cities. However, there are problems with the datasets as you mentioned, but some of those problems would make the historical homicide rate even lower than higher (i.e. better survival rate from medical care).

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