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Comment by buboard | Hacker News Reader

Worth noting that this is a western city- centric view of children. It's much different for people living in small communities or near parents and other family. Children spend way less time near parents when the neighborhood is familiar and safe enough, and instead spend most of their time playing with other kids. Parents today spend twice as much time with their kids than 2 generations ago, and it's probably not because they really really want to, but that there is no other option. I'm also not sure if kids spending so much of their childhood around adults instead of other kids is better.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-...

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Of course, in the good/bad old days, sometimes kids just died. My wife talks fondly of free-roaming LA in the 70s, and parenthetically mentions the kid that got molested and the other one that got run over by a car.

In general, in the West at least, folks had bigger families and started earlier (just make a new one!).

A friend of ours from rural China (Dalian province, I think) talked about how all the kids would go out by themselves and teach each other how to swim in the river. We expressed some admiration for that, and she said, "oh, I don't know - a few kids drowned every year". Every year!

In my experience, people who go on about 'helicopter parents' are awfully brave with the welfare of other people's kids.

We're pretty free-roam, but I spent a lot of time worrying about traffic when my youngest was the height that he could be invisible before stepping out from behind a car.

Maybe I'd be more relaxed about this if, for instance, someone blasting through inner-city streets in a SUV while texting, was legally treated as a potential murderer (or an actual one if things go badly).

I grew up in a more rural area east of San Diego. Very free roam. Kids were spread out but we could bike to each other's houses. A couple of kids at my elementary school died. One in a cave-in of a small cave some friends dug in the side of a cliff. Another when he went for a ride in the 4WD of a teenager that flipped over on a hillside. I wonder what the fatality rate was in the old days versus these days.

My parents (who grew up in rural China in 1960s) love to talk about chopping firewood or collecting mushrooms in the forests, alone or with their siblings, when they were 8 or 10 or something. They often give me parenting advices like "don't worry about the kids; they just need one more pair of chopsticks" (as in you feed the kids and they'll take care of themselves).

In part I think it's also the development of greater paranoia and zero risk tolerance (for whatever reason). It seems like nowadays if you let your kid play by themselves, or even if you aren't hovering over them close enough, some other parent will call the cops and you'll get in trouble for being a "negligent parent". When I was a kid (80s/90s), I'd ride my bike around the neighborhood alone or with friends, walk to friends' houses by myself, etc., and that was the norm.

Which is funny because the average neighborhood is safer than ever before. What has gone way down is our tolerance for accidents (which I guess is a good thing, but certainly has its tradeoffs).

I'm not sure that's true, when comparing cities to towns (and parent specifically mentioned this was a city-centric view of kids.)

While there is less crime, there is a lot less space for kids to just run around, mostly because there's cars everywhere, which are obviously extremely unsafe for kids.

Yeah, this has me looking for a city where cars are kept on the outskirts, so that most of the city is safe for kids to live and participate in without our watching them constantly. I know this is a thing in other parts of the world, especially Europe, but I haven't found a good one in the US yet.

Just move to some place more rural. Kids will stay off the road if they have woods to explore. Good way to get away from pollution too.

Safer in terms of crime, but if you live next to a street where cars are moving at high speed, the older behavior of just letting your kids run outside would likely be unsafe indeed.

Yeah but that is more of a city vs suburb/rural problem rather than then vs now.

Not sure this is the distinction that's important. I agree with what you're saying, but ... I think the difference is that while neighborhoods are "safer", they are less "known". Millennials (I am one) in big cities move around a lot because of high rents and high cost of living, and it's hard to establish permanence in a community. Even if you're a Church-going family that would have social structures to lean on, everyone is facing the same problem.

The struggle of establishing a family here (on the West coast) makes me want to just give up and move back to the Midwest, to be honest. We want to have lots of kids and it's just horribly hard to do that out here.

Edit: My sister just brought up a good anecdote. She babysat for three different families on our block growing up. I can't ever imagine that being possible where I live now. No one has kids, and those that do move out of the city.

In all honesty- don’t be afraid to make the move, especially to family. I switched roles at one the tech giants from software development to the "field" (sales, service, and support) in order be able to move closer to my wife, and have stuck with it to be closer to family while raising our kids. It was a definite sacrifice and I won't pretend like I don't still fantasize abut jumping back into a product group somewhere, but I've still enjoyed my career so far.

Overall though, its been worth it. The familial support is just such a game changer, as is living in what is IMO a friendlier and more family centric community.

I've known a fair number of people make similar jumps and come out fine. I don't want to make any blanket statement that moving out of a coastal tech capital is the right move generally, but it is definitely possible to accept a down grade in your work life for an improvement in your home life and feel like you came out ahead.

Thanks, I really appreciate comments like this.

I wouldn't conflate it to a western view, but a suburban one.

Most suburbs lack the density to make neighborhood friends. None of my friends from school lived near me; my little neck of the suburbs was occupied by retirees or kids over a decade apart from me. Visiting friends meant parents organizing a play date and a 15 minute one way car ride. There are rare cases where you do have a little neighborhood gang to play with, but it wasn't like when my parents grew up in the 50s-60s when an entire generation was birthed in sync and you could walk to 8 kids houses on a whim. Suburbs used to be only new families, with zero retirees when they began.

Living in LA now, I get to see that urban upbringing I missed. Kids are always walking around with their friends or siblings, visiting parks and rec centers, taking transit, walking to school, going to stores, etc. There are enough people where even though the generations of kids are blurred compared to the massive pulse of the boomer generation, you live among so many people that there will always be a few kids your age nearby that you can play with.

Suburbs or in the city, this rate of having a similar aged neighbor is probably the same, so upping the amount of neighbors makes this outcome almost assured.

Amen! I wrote about this (and other) aspect(s) of suburbia in an article that gathered some controversy on HN a while back:

https://likewise.am/2016/05/08/why-suburbia-sucks/

Do you know of any places in the US that buck this trend?

In degrees. In my opinion, NYC, Chicago and SF are about the only cities recognisable to a European, and even then, a great many of their denizens reside in suburban settings hardly differing from 99% of Middle America (apart from costing 4x more).

Having grown up in the Midwest/Rust Belt and then moved to the southeast, I can safely say that older cities up north are more dense and have some aspects of traditional community building. The south - with its pervasive new construction and far-aflung exurbs and cookie-cutter subdivisions - seems to be the absolute worst. Not sure how things are in the middle of the country. The west seems to vary a lot.

But no, I don't really know any place in the US, apart from inner-city NYC, Chicago, SF and maybe Seattle and Portland and one or two other places, that isn't fundamentally car-dependent. Life in the vast majority of the US is quite homogenous in this regard, at a general level.

Yeah, that mirrors what I’ve found. Hoping to find something smaller than SF/NYC that’s also dense enough to be walkable. A book I read called “Happy City” mentioned streetcar suburbs (suburbs built when streetcars were dominant for commuting) as good options for walkability, but I’m not sure how to identify those without knowing cities pretty well.

Here in Chicago, half my team bikes or walks to work and the other half takes public transit. Most everyone over age 30 or 35 can scrape up enough to own a property on a rather average tech salary. Other than the intolerable weather during the month of January it really is a fantastic alternative to the coasts.

Oh yeah, thanks for the reminder. I liked Chicago when I visited (in the summer, not the infamous winter).

I'm really hoping to find a place with no cars where unsupervised kids can get run over by them, but I know that might not be possible to find in the US. Dense and walkable would be a decent consolation prize.

If you double the number of adult words a child is exposed to growing up, it may have some positive impact on them.

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