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Give Me a Secret Garden

nytimes.com

79 pointssethbannon20 comments

This was basically the plot of the Black Mirror episode "Arkangel" [0]

We need to give kids more space to discover their own limits, and to get hurt. I look at the kids in "Stranger Things" riding their unsupervised across town, playing in a junk yard, and I remember doing that stuff (child of the 80s/early 90s here.) Staying out until the streetlights came on. Yes, we got injured. Yes, I ended up in parts of town I probably shouldn't have been in. Occasionally, I got my ass kicked. This was all part of growing up for most of human history.

I never see the kids in my neighborhood doing that. I've never seen any of them leave the street, and always with the parents on the patio, chatting with each other. The last time I saw a roving band of 9-to-13 year-olds biking around town was probably the early 2000s.

I kind of understand what changed media- and culture-wise, but has the real world actually changed that much in 25 years to merit the sort of constant-supervision-every-moment-planned-and-accounted-for world kids now grow up in?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkangel_(Black_Mirror)

>I never see the kids in my neighborhood doing that. I've never seen any of them leave the street, and always with the parents on the patio, chatting with each other. The last time I saw a roving band of 9-to-13 year-olds biking around town was probably the early 2000s.

My life was similar. Be home by dark and stay in the neighborhood. Aside from that, it was explorations in the woods, roaming around, and generally just making fun where I found it.

I now have an 11 year old, and we recently put up a basketball hoop. A side effect is that we've started to attract some neighborhood kids. When it's a first time visitor, I do like to query to make sure it's ok that they're out and about, and I've received a refreshing number of "Yeah, I just have to be home by 6" responses. Occasionally, my son will join a small group and "go on an adventure" and I remind him to stay in the neighborhood, and be home by dinner.

Yes, it's a bit nerve-wracking at first, and I'm sure there's a non-zero risk of something happening, but watching my son thrive and the pride he has at having some independence is immeasurable. As parents, I think we forget that our task is not merely to get our kids safely to a certain age, but it's also to enable them to operate in the real world as independent, fully functional humans.

I read a quote recently,"We're not here to stop our kids getting hurt, just to stop them getting maimed or killed". While a bit exaggerated it rings true for me. I don't see how children can build a worthwhile sense of responsible independence without learning where the boundaries are and how to judge risk for themselves.

There is probably a whole book on the subject but I think society has lost some of the ability to look out for others, when I was young if you were hurt or too far from home you could always rely on a neighbour to help and would have no issue in knocking on their door, even the old single guys.

The other side of the argument now is the fear of interacting with somebody elses child as and adult, last year I came across a small girl(5/6) who had fallen and grazed her leg and there was nobody else around, I was really deliberate about not touching her in case parent or guardian came around the corner. I felt horrible about it but thats the way things are I guess.

>I read a quote recently,"We're not here to stop our kids getting hurt, just to stop them getting maimed or killed".

I agree with this wholeheartedly, but unfortunately the most likely thing to kill them are the cars that are everywhere they might go. My kids are too young for this to be applicable right now, but someday I hope to give them this kind of independence, but I don't know how to do it with the sheer volume of traffic and terrible drivers. I even don't feel safe biking myself.

I'm perfectly happy letting them take risks where they might break bones, but I just don't know how to deal with a world where they're reasonably likely to get killed if they're on the street with a bike.

>The other side of the argument now is the fear of interacting with somebody elses child as and adult, last year I came across a small girl(5/6) who had fallen and grazed her leg and there was nobody else around, I was really deliberate about not touching her in case parent or guardian came around the corner. I felt horrible about it but thats the way things are I guess.

I know the feeling. I was walking my son home from school in downtown Boston and we approached a street corner where two young girls (looked like Grades K and 3) were sitting on the ground. I did go through the mental process of asking myself it was OK to talk to them because my son was with me and then (most importantly) thinking about what I'd want a friendly stranger to do if it was my kid there.

As it turns out, they were dropped off by their school bus, but there was a miscommunication between mom and dad about who was to handle pickup. Fortunately the older one knew dad's phone number. He ignored my call, but immediately called when I followed up with a text to explain the situation.

You do have to be very careful, though. As a coach of youth sports, a common task for the very young kids is to help them tie things. I'll do shoes, but mom or dad have to help with your shorts.

As a kid of seven or eight, I remember roaming out in the forest (I lived in the mountains of western North Carolina) only to come home and find the occasional tick on my head. These days, I'd be scared to death of contracting Lyme Disease, but I have to wonder if that's just media scare mongering.

Nope, Lyme is real and can really mess people up. I wonder if we (and the doctors) are just getting better at diagnosing/more aware of it. I'd say I've known quite a few people that have gotten lyme, some with worse outcomes than others, but that might be selection bias cuz I know lots of "outdoorsy" people, and I'm getting older. The other part is, have we gotten rid of lots of natural predators of ticks?

The tick load on deer in the Upper Midwest of the US has gone up, and the number of deer is up too compared to 40 years ago. Winter ticks are actually killing moose in both the Upper Midwest and New England, and different species of ticks are being found in the Upper Midwest than used to be found (like Lone Star tick).

My knee-jerk reaction is to agree with you, but I think we're doing what every generation does... Things aren't as different as they seem.

> I never see the kids in my neighborhood doing that. I've never seen any of them leave the street, and always with the parents on the patio, chatting with each other. The last time I saw a roving band of 9-to-13 year-olds biking around town was probably the early 2000s.

I dunno... I see "roving bands of kids on bikes" a lot. Also kids playing unattended in vacant lots/etc. Perhaps it's because I work from home and am therefore in a residential neighborhood when school gets out. I never noticed "roving kids" when I worked downtown and didn't get home until 6-ish.

Kids will always be kids. They'll always find ways to get away and be unsupervised. For our generation, most shenanigans happened on the way home from school, anyway. That's still unsupervised time. I feel like kids today interact differently due to omnipresent communication, but they certainly still wander around and get "into trouble" pretty regularly.

I think we also forget how much of our time was supervised. Sure, I played with friends down by the creek and out in the woods, but someone usually knew exactly where we were, and we were rarely out of shouting distance. We remember the crazy romps around wherever, but we forget how much of the time a parent was just around the corner. It's really not so different today.

My early years were in the Bay Area and Sacramento and I shake my head at the things we did (late 80s). My girlfriend grew up in Santa Cruz and the things her and her siblings did, she never will let her daughter do. And it's less about helicopter parenting/etc and more about the addict/criminal element that has crept in to a good deal of the city. More freedom as they get older, but there are things I never had to deal with - rampant numbers of unstable individuals.

When I was a kid, I roved around with my friends, but not really ever in places where adults were able to observe me. So there might be some selection bias at play here.

For a few weeks in 2016, my neighborhood was transformed by Pokemon Go. Children were everywhere. They roamed in twos and threes on every block; dozens gathered in the park. I couldn't believe that my neighborhood was home to so many kids. Then, as suddenly as they appeared, they were gone. I think if there were more reasons to be outdoors having fun with friends, children would find a way.

This is an interesting article discussing the differences regarding “free range parenting” in America compared to many other places

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/reader-center/free-range-...

We've replaced unsupervised access to outdoors with unsupervised access to the internet.

Please care less and less about the real world. Watch teens, they barely even acknowledge the world, if it's not in their phone it's not real.

It seems to be a century-plus-long trend, to go by this fun interesting book https://www.amazon.com/Where-Did-Out-What-Nothing/dp/0393339... written in the 1950s contrasting the author's childhood with the kids thenadays. My 1970s childhood wasn't too different from the 50s described, but had a little more control-and-safety, especially starting in the 80s.

The general idea reminds me of the Asimov story "It's a Beautiful Day", from 1955 [1]. (The details are all different, so I'm not suggesting anything nefarious. Just listing another take on one of the same themes).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Such_a_Beautiful_Day

This line stood out to me, after the op-ed argues about having "gardens" that exist in the "invisible parts" of the city that are only visible to people without iGlasses:

> We are fighting a piece of legislation on the governor’s desk that would change the augmented reality settings of the entire city, making the invisible parts visible again and destroying our gardens in the process.

The legislation sounds like it would make the invisible parts visible again to everyone, even when you're wearing iGlasses. Isn't that what she wants? No, what Mary wants is a space where people wearing iGlasses can't discover her. Making the "invisible parts" visible again would remove the only gardens that she has. She's not fighting for more transparency and freedom, she's fighting for a private space where she can't be observed.

A nice touch that I almost just skimmed past.

This resonates with me. Secret gardens are everywhere if you look. For me, in Cleveland, in the 90s it was the `Temple of Lost Love` beneath the Eagle St. Bridge in the Flats. It attracted art of all types, delinquents, prep students, you name it. A place to go for privacy or camaraderie. The saddest day was in the early 00's when it was painted over, fenced off, and patrolled.

EDIT: P.S. Hannu Rajaniemi is an amazing author. `Quantum Thief` is one of my favorite books.

Seeing things for what they really are...isn’t that our greatest desire and our greatest fear? I love the voice in this fiction, and the astonishing fact that it is provided to the world in a newspaper. Speculative fiction is where truth can be approached safely. Keep it going.

If you would like to read without trackers, the Times no longer allows private browsing:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190603190109/https://www.nytim...

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