Children, left behind by suburbia, need better community design | Hacker News Reader

Children, left behind by suburbia, need better community design

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328 pointsjseliger358 comments

> Why don’t children leave the house?

Because of screens.

We have a forest in our backyard with a 2 story fully enclosed treehouse (including electricity), sports fields within a 5 minute walk, tons of hiking trails, etc. But it is a real struggle to get them to leave the house because they want to be on the Internet 24/7. Of course we take away the devices, but that just leads to them bemoaning their screen less state. One of the problems is, this is taught in the schools. Pretty much every class is using screens constantly. Our local school district recently experienced a hack that made it so they couldn’t use chromebooks for a few days. All the teachers lesson plans were completely centered around devices, so the kids just watched movies all day instead.

I don't disagree but I think what we tend to forget is thst children mimic their parents.

I've noticed that my kids will go outside more when I walk the dog more. They either join me or go outside on their own.

The same applied when I work in the yard.

That’s a good point. In turn I’d ask why the parents don’t leave the house? Because of screens…?

My parents didn't spend much time out of the house, but they'd kick us out occasionally. We'd bike around, go to parks, or visit friends. Are parents even allowed to say "Go play outside until the street lights turn on" anymore?

I was going to reply with this exact sentiment, so I’m glad you brought it up.

There’s also talk in this thread about how we’ve designed the outside to be kid-unfriendly. Let’s think for a second about how we design our home spaces inside to have screens all around. I’d wager that if you could walk into any house in suburbia, 90%+ will have a massive flat screen hanging in the main living space. Not only that, but all the chairs are aimed to face it! It’s the focal point and THE activity to be done in that space. Some houses will have screens in nearly every room. A screen in every pocket and maybe some portable screens too! With so much priority put on these screens and when parents, grandparents, friends, etc all spend a majority of their waking life on them, what is a kid going to mimic and learn is acceptable?

We definitely still struggle with screen time for our kids. They’re getting much better about turning it off without tantrums, but we only have one TV in our bedroom (rarely turned on), an iPad, and our phones. We try to watch TV or movies together rather than having a screen on in the background or relying on a screen to entertain our kids while we go off and do something else. All that said, our oldest (4 y/o) reads chapter books like there’s no tomorrow because she sees my wife and I read physical books. We also frequent the library often where she can have some independence to wander and find what interests her to bring home. Parent friends always make remarks about how smart she is and how they wish their kid would read more, but they can’t get them to stop wanting to watch TV or the tablet… but we’ve been to several friends’ houses and they always have a TV on nonstop and they themselves don’t read any books.

I have to agree. My children have a 2 acre backyard with woods and a treehouse. They play outside with the neighborhood kids almost every day. When bad weather keeps them inside, they make up new games to play throughout the house.

Why? Because we limit the time they spend on screens.

This is how I was raised. I’ll forever be thankful.

> My children have a 2 acre backyard with woods and a treehouse.

Very, very few people have this. Sounds like you have your own "third place" that the neighborhood kids can leverage, and which provides a compelling alternative to screens.

I noticed this sort of thing as a child when my family moved to a slightly more dense suburb. We’d do more things on our own with our peers once there were spaces that accommodated this within walking distance (parks, shops, libraries, etc.).

In the earlier, more spacious location, there were nice spaces for grownups to decompress after a workday, but we had to be driven around if we wanted to play with our friends. Television (and learning how to pirate Game Boy ROMs) was novel and interesting when a peer group wasn’t available.

This is how I was raised. Running around and forced to come up with games to entertain myself all day. As soon as I moved out for college I finally got to spend as much of my time on the computer as I wanted. It was great, and I still enjoy programming and video games way more than hiking or sports. I basically consider all that time outside as a waste; I could have been having more fun and learning more but my parents decided that I should enjoy the outdoors. That's not to say that I resisted and moped rather than engaging (most of the time), I tried to make the best of it. But I was constantly aware that I could be doing something I'd enjoy much more. I wouldn't say I resent my parents for raising me like that; they were doing what they thought best. I just think they were wrong.

I remember getting annoyed listening to my parents opine about why I stayed inside a lot without ever asking me, knowing I would be chastised if I dared to speak for myself.

I enjoy a nice stroll in nature as an adult, but I would have been bored out of my mind as a kid. Sports never appealed, and treehouses are even more boring than sitting in a room with no internet.

What I liked doing was mall walking, or walking through busy cities. But my parents would rarely take me to do that. So I was "lazy."

my parents thought I was a combination of introverted and not social

I just could not be motivated to travel 40 minutes to an event, and Xbox Live was an equivalent surrogate

Move on campus in the middle of things and I’m out almost every day. Keep everything in walking distance and I’m very social in person. We’ll see if suburbs ever appeal to me, more likely would have to be a reimagined version of the concept.

Yes, just going on a walk can be boring for a child, but you don't need to just walk through the woods. You can go exploring, dig for treasure, climb trees, play hide and seek, build a fort, etc.

What hiking trail allows this? Going off-trail, digging, climbing, and building will all get you booted. These are natural environments where the trail is already a significant compromise to justify the preservation.

I had some experiences like this thanks to boy scouts, but it was on private land owned by another family for timber, or at a summer camp hardly an everyday thing though. Depending on what you're doing/season/location national forests allow gathering wood and stuff for building fires.

There is a park in my neighborhood, half of which is designated as a nature play space. Where all those things are allowed, lots of forts. It appears it was associated with the national wildlife federation natural learning initiative. https://www.nwf.org/Kids-and-Family/Connecting-Kids-and-Natu...

Not sure if there is a list of such places though

Nature play spaces are common in Australian schools now. Logs, rocks, dirt. Kids make forts and grind up rocks and so on. 40 years ago at the same school, we had old car tyres to roll around.

I grew up in Northern Australia, later returned to raise my kids there, I'm back again with grand children.

I literally cannot parse or make sense of your comment.

Which is one indication of just how fundementally different various parts of the world are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c

https://nt.gov.au/parks/safety-rules

But I think there must be a misunderstanding, as it would be unusual for a place near suburbia to be a national park or similar area with restrictions like this.

There's nothing there I can see in the NT park rules that precludes digging or building a fort.

Around the world some place back onto national parks, other places have large areas of undeveloped land that aren't national parks (cattle stations, community land, etc).

The video I linked is representative of the kind of ocean land I grew up on and still live near part time - it's a good place to raise children, plenty to do.

Same, from Romania. If you hike you can more or less do anything you want along the way. The only thing "booting you" would probably be fatigue :-)))

There are lots of trails that are not on protected wilderness areas.

These aren't things that everyone gets.

And for the record: I could only climb trees if I didn't get caught, really. If I climbed trees, I might fall and get injured. (I did get injured once: a twig got stuck in my wrist (was a fairly minor injury). Hide and seek only works if you have friends around to play with. I had that during some of elementary school, but we moved before my siblings were similar ages and there weren't other kids around the same age.

Do you use screens in front of them? Have you researched a school that doesn't use screens? They exist, my kids go to one.

What's the problem exactly with taking their devices? They cry and complain, so? People resist change, but they eventually get used to it.

It's not quite that simple. Literally all their schoolmates are watching shows, playing video games etc. So they become ostracized as a result of not having the same context as the other kids.

We're trying like hell to slow the onslaught with my son, but the kids make fun of him because "you don't even play Roblox" or whatever.

The public schools are all in on screens, at least where we are. They literally issued my kindergartener a Chromebook and expect us to do 30 minutes a night on the apps they recommend. It's really disheartening.

> they become ostracized

I think this is a strong overstatement. It's one thing to be completely out of the loop for any and all media, and another to watch perdiodically.

Sports are still huge, so obviously there's a significant demo of kids who aren't solely watching tv and gaming all the time.

> the kids make fun of him

Some. That can happen whether your kid is glued to screens or not.

I sympathize. As I said my kids school doesn't use screens and has a strict no media/screen policy at home. And yet, some families don't comply and a few kids will bring these convos to the play yard.

Even if it's a minority it's still very disruptive.

Maybe you can find local groups of like minded families for your kids to find friends.

"screen" is too wide category for what people do. Reading textbook on "screen" is almost same as the real book. Watching educational YouTube could be great. Watching YouTube Shorts isn't so good.

Kids 30 years ago wanted to endlessly watch TV, play video games, listen to tapes, and read books. 30 years before that, it was radio, TV, vinyl, and books. 30 years before that: radio, vinyl, and books.

Kids are curious and stimulation-receptive and motivated, and so they're going to chase easy sources of those things.

Parents, meanwhile, can either work to balance the easy sources with other sources that might enrich them in novel ways (like going outside or being bored), accepting that their kids may not buy into the idea, or they can defer to their child's sense and avoid tantrums and defiance.

It seems like kids turn into adults either way, but the choice is ultimately one being made by the parent, not by the availability of screens per se. The easy stimulation is omnipresent. That ship sailed about 100 years ago. As a parent caring for kids (and a person caring for yourself!) you ultimately have to figure out what you want to do about it.

It's only in recent decades that media has begun to adapt itself to increase captivity of individual consumers. That feels like a qualitative difference between your time horizons.

My two children 12 years apart in age and they have had a dramatically different childhoods. Unless you are a parent right now, you probably have no idea how quickly childhood has changed in the last decade.

Or a teacher, or childcare worker, or pediatrician or nanny or school bus driver or any of the bazillion different ways that many adults actually get quite a clear idea of how childhood changes over time. Possibly more clear than parents, since they see kids going through the same stage over time.

My close friend is a teacher and we have quite a few interesting conversations about kids and technology. I imagine there are lot of people on HN that aren't parents, teachers, or bus drivers.

> Kids 30 years ago wanted to endlessly watch TV, play video games, listen to tapes, and read books.

Not "endlessly." 30 years ago, in the suburbia being decried, I had a bike and friends my age in the neighborhood. You called to see if they wanted to go do something, or went down the street and knocked on the door. And this was in a time (1990s) when the country's violent crime rate was about double what it is today, but there was no social media and 24-hour news doomscrolling making parents paranoid.

also 30 years ago, you did not have busybodies calling child services on anyone who left their kid alone.

Health services and cops also gave less of a shit about things like that. This was great for the wider society but the small minority of kids that had it bad suffered.

The older I get, the more I value ignorance about certain things like what’s happening in the wider world (beyond maybe 15 mins of headlines a day). The overload of minutia about people’s lives and irrational fears is such a waste of time and bad for health.

There is not enough actual news happening in the world to justify 24-hour news coverage. So the media has to make stuff up until they fill the time. But then once they do this, they're also somehow incapable of telling the difference between what they've made up and actual news.

And someone else's news is not necessarily my news. Horrible crimes happening on the other side of the country don't make it any more likely that there's going to be a horrible crime in my backyard. That's a local news story, but drives clicks and outrage, so now it's national/world news.

I was a kid 30 years ago. I may have wanted to watch TV all the time, but it was self-limiting back then. Much of the time the stuff on TV wasn't anything a kid would want to watch. There were only certain times of the day that you could find someone you wanted.

Screens today provide a bottomless pit of content for kids. At a parent, yes I have to limit my kids time or they'd just do it 24/7. People talk about letting their kids figure out how to moderate themselves, but either I'm doing that wrong or (perhaps more likely) that just doesn't work the same for every kid.

I feel like it's also hard money wise as a kid, I remember wanting a milling machine and tools/materials to build a boat that was just too absurdly expensive at the time. Also just being limited by cars and stuff, would've loved to be able to go surfing but it's a hard sell to convince your parents to drive 6+ hours round trip for something like that.

That's another challenge for parents. Books are expensive and take up space. Lego and various other toys are also expensive, take up space, and children constantly need reminders to pack it up. Arts and craft quickly dominate spaces and lead to disputes over which child made all the mess. Contrast with reading on an app like Libby (free, no bookshelves), playing Minecraft (cheap, no pack-up), or digital art/puzzles.

Digital equivalents are pushed in every workspace. Scrawling unnecessarily on paper would be frowned on as wasteful in the average office. Sending a paper letter instead of an email is rare.

I'm not arguing that there aren't advantages of physical books, board games, and literal painting, but doing things the "right way" is clearly more expensive, less space efficient, and uses up more time packing up. It all influences parenting decisions.

Books aren’t expensive if you teach them about the library

Assuming there's one within walking distance for the kid.

Why wouldn't there be one within walking distance, or even driving distance (assuming most people would want to drive their kids to nourishing activities)?

You must live in a wealthy place.

In my experience in most places libraries are not common. They use lots of space and money, that usually is needed for more important things like building sewers in neighborhoods that have none.

I live in the US, in the Midwest. However it seems that the average distance to a library across the country is around 2-5 miles.

While probably too far to walk for the average American, it's certainly not too far as to be unreachable.

That's fair, but if you have a library card and the Libby app, you can queue and borrow e-books for free and without leaving the house or remembering returns. My kids borrow from their school library but also read on Libby a reasonable amount. I use the Books app. My wife reads on Libby as much as she reads physical books. If we go away for a week, it's easier to pack an old phone or Kindle than a stack of books when the older kids can get through 2-3 novels a day.

> That's another challenge for parents. Books are expensive and take up space. Lego and various other toys are also expensive, take up space, and children constantly need reminders to pack it up. Arts and craft quickly dominate spaces and lead to disputes over which child made all the mess. Contrast with reading on an app like Libby (free, no bookshelves), playing Minecraft (cheap, no pack-up), or digital art/puzzles.

No, at least no for most folks in western world. If you make your life hard on purpose living far away from civilization for whatever reason then yes you created your own challenges, but that's on you and you dragged rest of your family into it.

We have tons of libraries around, what kind of developed society would ignore such an important place? We also have 'ludotheques' which are literally for kids and also have various rental toys. And we live in small village, surrounded by other small villages. Complaining books take space... thats just sad, not commenting on that one.

Lego / Duplo are amazing (we bought 2 full sack of potatoes worth of original used duplos for like 50 or 100 bucks, with massive train setup), kids love it, but if you list as an issue that kids actually have to clean up after themselves, it becomes pretty obvious problem lies elsewhere (rest of your comment says so too). Parenting is hard, moreso these days, but its also massively due to the fact many parents simply don't do good parenting, they can't suffer even a bit for their kids because they are oh-so deep in their comfort zones or feeling important or whatever. Rather few teach discipline which is one of the most important skills for their future life success regardless of their path, and it shows pretty much immediately. But folks without discipline themselves probably can't teach one. More often than not they are glued to screens even in front of their kids. I am literally naming various shitshows and their direct causes we see around us across few countries and societies.

What kind of hobbies and passions do kids have? How did you invest yourself into developing those passions? What kind of role model are you for them? Thats completely parent responsibility, schools will never supplant that and its not their purpose (the fact that good teachers often end up as huge parental figure in their pupil's lives just shows what they have at home, have a friend a teacher on private school for very rich and influential people in Geneva, Switzerland and stories he tells me about 6-7 years old who like him much much more than their own dad with 7 lamborghinis...). And so on.

But if parent's mode is career and money first or general me-first and kids leave my precious free time alone then its always the same sad story at the end.

Get off your high horse. We should be thankful these parents even bit the bullet and had kids in the first place. With the way demographics are going, I’m only half kidding

"We have tons of libraries around, what kind of developed society would ignore such an important place?"

Libraries in much of the developed world are seeing decline. The problems of American libraries are often reported on HN. As an OpenStreetMap editor working across small-town Europe, the library is one of those pieces of community infrastructure I go look for first, but I have seen firsthand how they have been shut down, or opening hours may have been slashed to e.g. just a couple of hours on two days of the week. In cities library locations get merged when budgets are an issue, and while occasional big new central library projects are approved, they are a different kind of facility than the library of yore.

My kids have loads of Lego, hundreds of books (plus library access), and rooms full of art supplies. They're well travelled, very knowledgeable, outdoorsy and more.

I'm talking about how small decisions influence parenting in general, including habits of busy or lazy parents, and how it's changed over recent decades. When I was young, consoles were barely a thing, so you played with construction toys and board games - everyone did. You couldn't read on a Kindle or app. There wasn't Procreate and a stylus. My point is that the modern equivalents are often very engaging (Minecraft, as one example), space efficient and affordable. When things are often easier and cheaper, people tend to roll downhill towards them.

Yeah. 1980s. Try watching reruns of love boat for 1 hour with interruptions of dandruff shampoo commercials. Give it a shot as an adult, then imagine being 10. You will tear your eyes out. Sure, flip one of 10 channels to Golden Girls, you will try to hang yourself. Books? lol. Your school hands you the the book Jane Eyre. As a 12 year old boy, you might not relate to 19th century English countryside drama. Kids back then had fucking nothing. They went outside. Youtube is a god damn game changer - I wouldn't go out either.

Absolutely. And the video games of the era were so hard and/or frustrating that you couldn't really play them all day.

We've really mastered the art of creating compelling and addictive time sucks, and our kids are paying the price for it. Ok we're all paying a price for it, but kids the worst.

> Absolutely. And the video games of the era were so hard and/or frustrating that you couldn't really play them all day.

You really could and while its lost somewhere now I had the Pitfall Harry Explorer's Club patch I earned by doing just that.

> Kids back then had fucking nothing.

Yep, Gen X is the last generation to have played with literal rocks and sticks.

Hey we had knives too! Dunno if anyone still played mumblety-peg in the West by then but behind the curtain pocket knife games were super popular.

> > I was a kid 30 years ago.

> Yeah. 1980s.

As someone who actually group up in the 1980s, I am sad to report that 30 years ago was the 1990s.

> Books? lol. Your school hands you the the book Jane Eyre.

Both bookstores and free public libraries with books more interesting to most kids of the time than Jane Eyre were, in fact, things in the 1980s and 1990s. As were gaming consoles, home computers, handheld electronic games,

> Kids back then had fucking nothing.

Nah, kids often had lots of stuff in the home.

But they also had a culture which supported parents allowing children unsupervised in the neighborhood at much early ages then is considered acceptable today, which meant that more of them were allowed to go out beyond the home more often than is the case today.

We had tons of stuff. First off, bikes. We biked, biked, biked everywhere all the time.

Model rockets. Water balloons. Oh yeah, if someone replaced their kitchen cabinets, there'd be cabinet doors in the alley to use as... a bike jump.

Soccer or kickball in the alley. Walkie-talkies. Cops & robbers. A swingset to jump off of.

Computers. We all had computers; my clique had Ataris. Also records. Movie theaters. Blockbuster.

The public pool. The beach.

Slot cars. I had a slot-car set, up in our attic.

And none of that stuff was expensive, except the computers.

Growing up in the '80s was great. And today, we have mastery of technology but weren't shackled to it as kids. Growing up today seems like a stressful, distracted, and rather empty affair.

I was a kids 30 years ago (1993), tv had stuff I could watch from getting home from school through to 11pm.

Not sure where you grew up or if you had cable. My family did not. 5-7pm was news on every channel ( all 4 that we received), and most nights after 8pm were adult dramas that kids under 10 wouldn't generally want to watch.

Weekends only had good stuff on in the morning on Saturday and then on Sunday night, depending on what age you're thinking of.

After school cartoons and Saturday morning cartoons were a life send when I was an 80s kid. PBS had some interesting programming that could appeal to kids on Friday nights (Blakes 7, Doctor Whoever). Even cable was a wash back then, you got bored of Nickelodeon quickly and there was no cartoon channel yet.

Dr Whoever, LOL. Great pun!

Not to mention all the commercials, which if nothing else the commercial break was sometimes enough to dislodge us and get us to think about doing something else. Now with streaming, kids can just go from one show to the next without any interruptions.

On those occasions when we let them watch more than they should I'm sometimes amazed that they even remember to go to the bathroom. Good grief the devices today are addicting.

Don’t beat yourself up: kids don’t master self-control until adulthood. It’s natural and normal for self-control to be challenging.

Thanks, though I'm not sure I have a lot of hope. Even most adults (myself included) can't seem to exercise enough self control over all the screens in our lives.

No, a lot of people just never master self control.

30 years ago my afternoon consisted of getting home at 2:30, watching The Disney Afternoon until about 5:00, then watching Square One, Reading Rainbow, and ideally 3-2-1 Contact (though it conflicted with The Mcneil-Lehrer News Hour that my mom always wanted to watch). Then it'd be on to The Cosby Show or Star Trek or some other sitcom. I think I averaged between 3.5-5 hours of TV per day. No cable.

I basically don't want TV anymore, and my kids are limited to 3 hours of screentime per day, which they basically only get on weekends. (They get maybe an hour during the weekday, but that's because their school/daycare/aftercare days are much longer than mine were as a kid). I do set limits for them, but both of them (preschool-age) are able to turn off the tablets on their own if faced with the choice of doing it themselves or having mommy & daddy do it.

how old are 'kids'? very few children under say 13 were obsessed with radio, records, books.. i see kids from age 3 who can't put down their tablets

I definitely remember seeing "turn off the TV" campaigns back then as a kid!

I think you’re lying to yourself if you really think vinyl and books are a fair equivalence to the TikToks and Snapchats of today.

It’s not the same. This line of whataboutism doesn’t work. None of those mediums were interactive or had their social networks on them. Almost everyone (kids) I knew watched a few hours of TV a day tops. There just wasn’t enough content with scheduled programming/without content on demand. Radio was even more limited. Honestly I really wish the government banned kids from using computers for more than a few hours a day (like some authoritarian country like China) and completely banned smart phones for everyone under 18.

>>Parents, meanwhile, can either work to balance the easy sources with...

It's possible to some extent. Different parents will have different levels of ability and success.

This is relevant (but difficult) advice for individual parents, but it's a minor point if we're discussing society. People (parents and kids) exist in an environment. "Just going out to play," isn't part of the world/environment/culture. The way kids/parents did thing differently in the past was by existing in a different culture.

Easy Vs hard stimulation is one paradigm, but you can't just view everything through this lens. Life is more complex. There are looping and knotting causal relationships and we can't know all of them. It's a complex.

Life is just very screen based. Ours and theirs.

They study via screens, and don't really know how to "do school" analogue. Social life is, largely through screens... and increasingly part of the media spectrum. Work will, eventually, be screened-based. So are life's administrative tasks.

> life's administrative tasks.

Life's administrative tasks got way worse with computwrisation. Now I have to book my own flight, make sure they match with hotels, take my own reading from electric, water and gas meters, register everywhere myself and endlessly prove my indetity to hindreds of institutions.

I have an email mailbox for changes in terms and conditions that get sent to me, it is about 800 emails. If I hired a lawyer to go through them, it would probably cost $100,000

True. Arguably, work and social life have also gotten more difficult, at least for some.

Meanwhile.. it's also not overwhelmingly true that administration, and other things heavily affected by computerisation are "better," more efficient or productive.

That's easy to see in non-commercial space. It's also true in commercial space. Government. Universities. Education.

This is all tightly coupled with op's point. Digitization, computerization, networking... These really were major revolutions. They impacted and totally reformed everything. However, this has been more of a change than an improvement in many applications. Slightly better in some ways, slightly worse and others, ambiguous, mixed... complex.

The computerization of social life, entertainment.. childhood experiences. Etc. There are long causality chains.. and we don't really understand the consequences of everything.

But in any case.. I think you're absolutely right on TCs and administrative life.

Technology made it easy to have more, more complex paperwork. That allows us to produce a lot more paperwork. A handwritten contract with two lawyers present.. is a marginal cost. Even a sign here, take-it-or-leave-it contract (EG financing, or opening an account) representing some marginal cost.

Computerization makes this whole thing more efficient. Automated emails, tick-to-agree pop-ups... Those allow humanity to create many more contracts than previously possible.

That's efficiency, of a sort. If you consider contracts themselves to be an output... The efficiency gains a greater than Henry Ford's entire lifetime.

I think we've learned something. Technological change, and it's proliferation does not necessarily aggregate in an idealic way.

I think the fear of paperclip maximizing AIs.. I think this is more of an analogy to our experience with recent tech shifts.. beyond its veracity as a danger vector for AI specifically.

I don't remember where I read, but someone said:

Technology has made our lives faster, but not better.

I could not endlessly watch TV, because it was in the living room and I was not only one able to pick programs. Parents had a say and there was no privacy over what I was watching.

Plus, there needed to be something interesting on schedule which was completely outside of my control.

As a teenager (70s) I was into, among other things, assembling balsa wood model airplanes. Does anyone even do that any more ?

It took some patience and some trust in own abilities w.r.t. a long-term goal.

Many of my real life building hobbies died when I realized I could build digital things.

My kid doesn’t have the dexterity (and thus the patience) for it but his best friend is constantly trying to get him to make castles.

Because he’s not interested (and a little jealous I bet), he mentions they could 3d print castles easier (neither own one so I’m not sure it’s a valid argument).

How often do you go to the tree-house and forest?

The forest? Daily. The treehouse? Not as often. I do go out there and work sometimes. It has a really comfortable window seat with windows looking out to a pond and the forest.

Often I see parents that complain about their kid's addiction to devices also suffer from addictions to media, often worse than the kids. The apple rarely falls far from the tree.

I imagine that if you're taking advantage of the outdoors regularly, your kids will follow sooner or later.

Kids learn habits from their parents. Never forget that you are their first role model. How often do you leave the house and how often are you using screens when you are home?

There's a feedback loop happening as well. Kids don't play outside so there are no kids playing outside.

Screens are much more compelling than playing outside. Kids are still using their imaginations but they're playing in a much more powerful sandbox. And, at the same time, outside is actually getting less compelling.

It's not healthy -- probably both in a physical and mental sense -- but the solution is far from just taking away screens. Society is structured around this now.

> There's a feedback loop happening as well. Kids don't play outside so there are no kids playing outside.

So much this. When I was a kid (late 70's), I could count on going outside and finding other kids to play with. Or if I didn't find anyone, I'd ride my bike around until someone came outside. Or, I could even simply knock on my friend's door and say "Can Robert come out and play?" and this was completely acceptable.

I'd love to send my kid outside to play, but he'd just be wandering around by himself. Knocking on a friend's door (though he knows a same-age kid two doors away) would be considered out of bounds nowadays. Any kid get-togethers must be carefully arranged ahead of time with at least one adult monitoring the "playdate."

> Knocking on a friend's door (though he knows a same-age kid two doors away) would be considered out of bounds nowadays.

Yeah, the social dynamics of this kind of thing baffles me. I'm sure it's very neighborhood-dependent, but neighbors don't "check" up on each other either.

I think this is more U.S.-wide: it's not socially acceptable to knock on someone's door or ring their doorbell even if they're waiting for me. You're supposed to text that you're waiting outside. Doorbells are only for deliveries and unknown strangers (like selling something, politics, religious missionaries).

If it's not socially acceptable to knock on a friend's door when they're waiting for you to get there, then it's definitely not gonna be socially acceptable to just knock, see if they're home, say hi, and that's it.

I'm not sure where this is coming from, maybe it's a generational thing?

In my case, (36M living in Texas) it's totally normal for people to knock or ring the doorbell. Neighbors drop by to talk about what's happening in the neighborhood, friends come to visit, etc.

No I don’t think it’s generational. I see it across the age spectrum and I am in Texas too. Lots of neighborhoods just don’t interact. The gems are the neighborhoods where people live there because they really want to live in that house within that neighborhood.

The invention of "anxiety" as a condition afflicting everyone under 40 means it's a faux pas to knock on a door, call a phone, or otherwise interact with anybody unless you warn them ahead of time.

I agree in principle, but I'm pretty sure the anxiety pandemic is real, not invented. Ask a middle- or high-schooler what percent of their class is on medication for anxiety, the answer will surprise you. In my grandma's day, that number would have been zero.

Whatever's going on there, it's serious. I bet in 50 years we discover that some chemical in our food/water/air was responsible, analogous to the leaded gasoline issue.

Or maybe doctors are happy prescribing pills to paper over mundane life issues.

It’s also a nasty feedback loop where all of this “mental health awareness” is blasted at kids all day and they start to assume there is a 50/50 chance they have anxiety and start to… get anxious about it.

Kids are suffering from increased anxiety due to social media in less pill happy places than the US.

The weird thing is that nobody seems interested in _not_ being anxious.

I don't know how you would justify such an observation, I suppose you could also quietly observe a bunch of disabled people in wheelchairs and say to yourself "they don't seem interested in not using wheelchairs" but I'm pretty sure they're very interested in not using wheelchairs.

That's fair, my comment wasn't helpful. I have had a few situations where I had to fix my coworkers' mess and they chalked up their inability to help to having anxiety or feeling vulnerable and I was a bit salty about it.

There are lot less stay-at-home parents around. Both my parents worked and I was called a latchkey kid. Nobody uses that terminology anymore. A while a lot of kids did have both parents that worked there were still a lot of mothers around.

Kids from my neighbourhood consistently come and knock on our door to play with our kids outside (and vice-versa) - not from the States, Canada. Even if there are no other kids to play with I send mine outside to play in the yard, that's how they met most of the kids in the neighbourhood to begin with.

We (my neighbors and I) had to institute a rule that if the gate is shut no knocking on our door because all the kids were running around knocking on each others doors so much. No one could get a meal in or sleep in on the weekend past 8.

And I live in Chicago.

We hit the jackpot when we moved and by chance ended up about 100 meters from a street with a critical mass of kids right around my kids' age. My daughters can bike in the street with them after dinner in summer. It's not the city I wanted to settle in forever (Hilversum, NL) but the minute I can buy a house next to the other kids, I'm doing it.

But would you let them? Alone, I mean.

No pre-set plan, no parental supervision, just a “I’m going to go meet my friends on this summer day, I’ll be back before dinner.” For purposes of illustration, assume these kids are aged 9-14, or thereabouts. Too young to drive, too old to be doted over every minute of the day.

If you would (and I hope you would!), would their friends’ parents? Would they be able to go casually knock on their friends’ doors (or even neighbors’ doors), be it biking or walking, and socialize, like kids do?

My guess is probably not. And that’s not the kids’ doing— that’s OUR doing. If parents really wanted their kids to go outside and explore, that would be the norm. But for far too many kids it’s not, because parents don’t want it to be: they’re worried about their kid getting hit by a car, kidnapped, getting in trouble, learning a lesson, the list goes on and on. The built environment reflects that kids are not expected to be outside, as if we’ve kid-proofed it. And so even if you want your kid to play outside, no one else is, and of course no kid wants to play alone!

Ironically, you would probably see more kids out and about, safe to be kids, in gasp New York City than in “safe” suburbia, from my own anecdotal experience.

There's currently a strike in Portland, and I've appreciated seeing kids out and about being little adults, taking the bus, etc, makes me really glad to live in city even with all the cars and noise.

I've noticed that too during this teachers' strike in Portland!

It was really one of the most unexpectedly heartening things I've seen in a while.

I’m trying to put this politely - I promise!

There’s a world out there far and beyond whatever bubble you’re in. My daughter (6) can go out back on the playground or practice archery or whatever. My next-door neighbor (next-door in the original, pre-app sense) has a dirt bike track for his handful of kids (5+ and up)

I’ve got all kinds of neighbors with kids doing all the old things we did pre-Black Mirror in the pocket.

Don’t get me wrong, I FIGHT like a… expletive, with my kids about screen time to a degree that my folks and older siblings laugh about given I’m a self-taught teenage hacker.

But kids and communities with “go do shit” old-er school norms exist outside of the big cities.

That sounds great! But have you considered that you may be the one living in a bubble?

What you described is the exception, most people live in either sterile suburbs and small towns, or densely packed (and dangerous) cities. Space for a dirt track in your backyard is a pipe dream. Around the world, the closest to your description would be rural areas in less developed countries, which is also a small % of the population.

Good point! Excuse me for interjecting here, but is it possible that you yourself are in a bubble of sorts?

It’s bubbles all the way down.

The bubble op referred to is not a particular place or lifestyle.

The bubble, in this context, is the average/representative lifestyle and parenting depicted in lifestyle journalism/blogging space. The proverbial TED abstraction.

Obviously physical circumstances are vary, but that didn't start in the smartphone era.

Yeah and the person with kids being allowed outside is the one living in a bubble in USA. And the people outside of his bubble do get really outraged over the idea that 7 years old could be outside without parent.

Lots of people handwaving about "bubbles" and making vast generalizations about massive populations. Is there any objective data to back these claims up?

For what it's worth, I wouldn't claim either of the sides in this conversation are the norm; I know plenty of people who will let their kids run around, and plenty of people who wouldn't.

Objective in what way? What claim are you rejecting?

Anyway.. if you want to have a conversation about childhood, parenting, suburbs.. quantifications and statistics (assuming that is what you're looking for) are allowed.. but the conversation will be fundamentally subjective.

There's no other way, that isn't meaningless, to have this conversation.

If you want to narrow down, to a specific point that can actually be settled in such a way.. that's great. A great point in the conversation. Not the conversation itself.

There is no way to quantify or settle this debate.. with published social studies. The complex relationship between parental culture, modern childhood, screens, neighborhoods... There is no reason to think this will be modeled out in a comprehensive,"objective" way.

You can make a data centered argument, that is fine. It is not possible to do this honestly, well being both broad and tight.

Iregardless, OP's point stands. "It's the screens."

Trying to isolate kid culture, school culture, parents, parenting.. it can't be done. It's a complex. It is now a complex operating in a highly computerized world. The way to think of it is as one major aggravating factor.. that changing material culture.. and how it is affecting the complex that is parenting-childhood-culture. Every element of that complex is co-evolving tightly interrelated.

If you want to think of this objectively (in a pragmatist sense), which outside (the complex) change is the primary driver. Suburban design, or screens.. a computerization of culture.

Perhaps, but that is a seperate debate.

Arguably everyone has always been in the bubble of our own life. OP had an intention, using the term. He's not talking about stereotypes or extremes. He's talking about the normal life of of most parents reading hn. Even if not, he just gave an example from his life.. demonstrating why he thinks that screens>suburban planning as factors.

Then in commeth the recycled meme version of this conversation. Memes of 7-year-olds taking their dirt bikes to the hardware store. Reddit class politics. Second hand TED arguments about parents not letting kids be free.

I take all the points, but a whole variety of social conditions play.. now and in the past. Also coevolving parenting culture. Also suburban planning, the actual topic of the article.

There's nothing unreasonable about OP's point. That the main factor is screens. It's arguable, and it would be interesting & reasonable to argue a contrary point too. Good faith would be to assume that he/she is someone up to date with the meme version.. as most of us are.

Instead, he gets a snarky, internet-bubble suggestion that parental reticence is at the heart. It is, quite honestly, typically internet.

A 15-year-old analysis, that "went TED" 10 years ago. Went viral 5 years ago.. and jammed into this thread.

This is in fact, a good demonstration of how digital culture prevails. It is aloof from normal life. Allowing children freedom is one thing. Getting them to exercise it, in practice, is the primary challenge most parents see and face. They don't want to go explore. Run wild with their friends. They want screen time. You have to force the little bastard outside

Anyway.. from here the word bubble is the conversation.. and since someone mentioned the word suburb.. Reddit class politics.

We really need to do better on this. These conversations are making us dumber, not smarter.

>> people outside of his bubble do get really outraged over the idea that 7 years old could be outside without parent.

> Perhaps, but that is a seperate debate.

Barely, like how a noose and a neck aren't the same thing. But they both play a critical part in the life-altering catastrophe.

What if you’re in yet another bubble!? It’s bubbles all the way down.

Most suburbanites don't have the room for a dirt bike track in their backyard, or a playground with room for archery practice.

Like 7 years ago (I'm 17), I was running around playing from 9 am to 8 pm during the summer, without a phone.

My daughter is five and walks a block to her grandparent's house regularly (by herself, yes I know). In a few years, she will be walking to the corner store for basics or ice cream, or whatever. As for friend's parents, we live in a walkable urban neighborhood (we chose this), and yes, kids do this all the time.

> My guess is probably not. And that’s not the kids’ doing— that’s OUR doing.

It's parent's doing both because of their regulations. It's also parent's doing because parents choose to live in suburbia / pay a premium to do so. If parents paid premiums to live in dense urban neighborhoods, more would be built / development patterns would change.

It's weird. As I said... we live in an inner city (we're 1.5 miles from downtown core of our west coast city). You'd think our streets were busy, but ... they're less busy than the suburban street I grew up in. Here's the difference.. in a city. Few people drive. There are certainly main thoroughfares that are very crowded (my kids are not allowed to cross the large streets themselves). But within our neighborhood, bounded by large streets, the streets are really tiny and there's few drivers. My house is actually quieter than the suburban street I grew up on. It's silent at night. Cars are the noise, not people. People are quiet.

So that is to say... Yes it's parents fault. But parents are responding to their built environment, not any internal moral failing. The main issue is that parents are unable to understand the consequences of suburban living.

NYC really isn't that unfriendly to kids: plenty of public transit to get places, lots of places to be a pedestrian, lots of things to do. In much of suburbia...where do you go? There isn't really much you can do until you are 15 or 16 and get a drivers license.

I chose to live in a more urban area of Seattle (Ballard) because I want my now 1st grader to be able to do things when he is a bit older. Still not as nice as Tokyo, but it could be a lot worse if we lived further north or on the east side.

Growing up in a suburban environment was pretty boring. Bikes made it a bit better because we could at least ride around the place but with no malls or activity zones (lakes/pools/forests etc) around it just meant that we wandered a lot.

I feel like that's more true of ex-urbs. I lived in sububia and there were creeks, schools, pools, malls, a graveyard, train tracks, sport courts and churches, all within a 15-20min bike ride. Half of that was within a 15-20min walk, including the houses of half of my friends. "Downtown" was most of a mile walk and a 30-40min bus ride. Granted, it was old suburbia from the 50s-60s rather than new 90s builds, but there wasn't more than a 2 story building within a mile in any direction.

It's still that way, only with more bike lanes and fewer kids outside.

So usually people who talk about suburbs refer more to the sprawling burbs of like late 60s+. What you’re referring to sounds like a “streetcar suburb”, which urbanists usually like

I follow this debate often on HN and I've learned that those who say you can't walk or bike anywhere in a suburb are talking about areas I consider rural.

Or different suburbs than you’re used to. The ones nearest to where I live in DC are more urban than the California suburbs I grew up in (which were by no means rural) but they were designed without sidewalks or direct routes so kids need to be comfortable biking in the street with huge SUVs and pickups passing a foot away at 40mph – unsurprisingly they don’t and that’s probably the right call because multiple times a year someone in those safe suburbs is killed at a place where their city felt street parking was more important than sidewalks.

You can still walk and bike in the suburbs I’m thinking of- it’s just dangerous and/or extremely inefficient a lot of the time. And getting worse because of larger cars and road design prioritizing vehicle speed over everything.

> In much of suburbia...where do you go?

I grew up in a typical suburban-style neighborhood (a few meandering roads with a lot of cul-de-sacs branching off and some connecting streets, quarter-acre lots, three-to-five bedroom ranches, two-stories, or bi-levels mostly spec-built). There was a park of about one square block, and a gas station at one of the neighborhood entrances. We rode bikes around, got soda or candy at the gas station, played in friends yards or at the park or at driveway basketball goals, nothing super exciting but kids find ways to entertain themselves. They don't need a bunch of "destinations" like adults do. This was all pre-computer, and there was nothing interesting to a kid on TV during the day.

Kids just need unstructured time with other kids, they will make up something to do. It's not really an intrisic problem with suburbia, it's a problem with hovering, overprotective adults.

I'm talking mostly about kids 8-14 or so. Older teens will get more bored and mischevious. Fortunately by that age there's more stuff they can be involved in at school or they can get a job.

I only experienced that in Sylvania Ohio (a suburb of Toledo). In Vicksburg MS, where I was living in the county...it was a real neighborhood (not the sticks) but we had no parks, well it was the deep south. In outside of Bothell Washington it was the same thing, but I could drive by then so whatever.

I guess I romanticized the big city as a kid, leading me to prefer urban over suburban living for my own kid. Maybe this will backlash and he will choose suburbia for his own kid(s).

I grew up in Madison/Ridgeland, Ms, where I did experience this. To some extent, at least. I had neighborhood friends. We rode bikes, crossed the tracks to go to the comic book store, etc.

Still, I’ve always romanticized the big city. Never lived it, though, so maybe it’s a grass-is-greener thing, but maybe I’ll be able to give it a whirl someday.

Grass is greener for me, but you have to choose the right big city, and those cities are expensive because lots of people make the same conclusions.

As a curiosity, I checked out the neighborhood I used to live in on google maps to see if they had put any parks or sidewalks since. Nope, exactly the same.

Parks are sanitized vacant lots.

The important thing is just having some sort of space, as the article puts it.

>> As described by Ray Oldenburg, “third places” are locations where locals can meet, interact, and relax in a place that isn’t their home or place of work. In these locations, kids get the chance to socialize and develop intellectually. American suburbs don’t have these places.

There's rightfully no stipulation whether that's a corner store, mall, park, empty lot, or wild area.

The important thing is that it's accessible to kids and parents aren't around.

I was born and raised in Vicksburg, MS. As kids, we rode bikes, made makeshift dams in Clear Creek, threw dirt clods at each other in the woods, played sports in backyards, and I don't remember ever asking our parents to take us to the park or downtown. We had grass, trees, fresh air and good company. I miss those days.

> I'm talking mostly about kids 8-14 or so. Older teens will get more bored and mischevious. Fortunately by that age there's more stuff they can be involved in at school or they can get a job.

In my experience, at least, this is a large contributor to the drug epidemic. You could get a job, or you could get high. For a lot of people, it's an easy choice.

Is the drug epidemic a kid problem?

I was under the impression it was more of a 20+ thing.

"Unstructured time with other kids" is also the source of many many problems (as you acknowledge). Especially if the only destination is a gas station.

Kids need parks, sports fields, cinemas, hobby stores, places to get food, etc, and they need them within walking distance. Being virtually dependent on cars to get anywhere is very crippling for kids.

Being dependent on adults to drive cars is the crippling component.

If there were free taxi services (or other transit), kids would be fine.

And honestly, most of the evil comes from overly-empowering parents. "I don't think you should go there / do that / hang out with those friends" is toxic.

Healthier, as kids mature, for them to be able to do things that parents disapprove of... but can't stop. While still allowing prevention of serious choices.

Making kids dependent on parents' cars increases parents' power from "I can speak out about things I disagree with" to "My agreement is required for anything to happen."

And that's really not healthy, for the kid or the parent.

Do you have any evidence of that? Asian American parents generally strictly control their kids’ choices, and they have much better outcomes than white American kids.

I think it would be great if kids could take themselves to gymnastics practice on public transit. But giving them the choice between that and smoking pot with friends? I think the choice hurts rather than helps.

Outcomes measured with what endpoints?

Last I looked it up, there were pretty serious mental health issues associated with the tiger parenting technique.

A whole bunch of stuff—from income mobility to life expectancy to incarceration rates to morality rates from avoidable causes.

Dollars and cents

What do you mean in the second paragraph about gymnastics practice? It's implying kids cannot take public transit, but why? That was fairly common, even recently, and I'm trying to understand if something has changed in some regions.

My roaming range on my bike was about 5 miles in any direction. All of those places cost money. I'm not sure what kind of childhood you had, but I didn't have a job at 14, and those are places I rarely went. What you seem to be advocating for is a credit card more than a ride.

Yeah, this. There are many arguments against suburbs, but they're relatively good places for kids. Big gardens, quiet roads, full of young families with similar age kids, and relatively free of the stuff people don't want their kids interacting with like bars and liquor stores, gang culture and street crime, "bad example" young adults and places they really shouldn't be exploring, so if anything they're a reason for parents to be less protective about letting kids go off on their own.

Kids aren't glued to their phones because there isn't a street of coffee shops and delis to buy £5 drinks and £10 sandwiches or a nightclub scene, and they wouldn't tend to go to the art gallery or library to play if moved somewhere more urban, they'd hang around on street corners, head to small parks that aren't dissimilar to the suburban ones or go explore the relative abundance of derelict buildings, industrial sites and railway sidings.

Particularly amusing to see British style terraced housing painted as a solution, as if the street corners the kids who grow up there hang out on (if they go outside at all) are some kind of idyll suburbia is depriving them of with its gardens and lack of corner stores that'll sell them vapes.

Same for Munich. Englisch Garden hosts packs of children in the park during summer, including joyous play on the circuit of floating the river and taking the tram back to the start while dripping wet. I'm no longer a child, though I enjoyed the river float circuit!

What are the odds they would all sit around together, outside, on their phones?

From my experience…very high.

Actually I would. My kid does this regularly.

Last year both my kids and a bunch from around the neighborhood decided to walk back together. They had a roaring good time. School would release at 3. It would be 4 by the time they got back home after stops at the park, jumping across the small creek, etc etc. The big kids went off to middle school so they aren’t walking back anymore. But everyone of them still misses the walk back.

The place where I’m at is surprisingly walkable at least in the 1.5 mile radius enough to get the kids to their local cafe or run errands. The 10 and above kids regularly take off on their own. The phones have location turned on anyway.

> “I’m going to go meet my friends on this summer day, I’ll be back before dinner.”

The parents are practically committing a crime if they let their kids do this.

> more kids . . . New York City

Or any big city. Even in wealthy neighborhood.

In the suburbs you almost never see kids outside without an adult present.

> The parents are practically committing a crime if they let their kids do this.

Not in the European countries I know

Or in the rural US.

My neighborhood has kids roaming freely through it. The little biker gangs are total hoodlums. For context, I’m in suburbia in South Carolina.

I’ve lived in wealthy neighborhoods in a bunch of cities (Atlanta, Chicago, New York City, Baltimore, DC) and you barely see kids period, much less ones running around unsupervised.

Less kids more people is interesting,

They are absolutely everywhere in Chicago, running around everywhere unsupervised.

Same for NYC. Maybe rayiner stuck to neighbourhoods where they don't uncap fire hydrants in summer.

Do wealthy neighborhoods in NYC uncap fire hydrants in the summer?

How wealthy? Perfectly regular neighbourhoods do and are also full of unsupervised kids.

During the pandemic lock-down, I walked around my neighborhood once or twice a day (a Washington, DC, neighborhood nearly all of free-standing houses). I constantly saw kids out playing minimally supervised--i.e. Mom or Dad might have looked out the window every half hour, but Mom and Dad weren't out with them. I still see boys throwing baseballs or footballs in the street not far from here.

Have you ever seen a kid under 14 without parents in New York City—whose parents are in an economic class where they could afford to live in the suburbs if they wanted? I certainly haven’t.

It’s a class/culture issue rather than an urban planning issue. I grew up in a car-dependent suburb in the 1990s, and in the summer I used to spend all day roving around the neighborhood with the neighbor kids. Kids in the same suburb don’t do that today, because parents are more protective, kids are glued to screens, etc.

I can't speak to New York City, but certainly can to Chicago, where they are ubiquitous.

Yes, absolutely, in my neighborhood in Manhattan, all the time; it's honestly one of the most pleasant things about this place. They're usually in small groups, and almost never "glued to screens", for what it's worth. (I've seen the glued to screens thing, but usually when families are together.)

Anecdotally, the people I have in my life who are the most afraid of leaving their kids alone are suburbanites.

> No pre-set plan, no parental supervision

Yes, and recently in USA. A handful of times I had a tinge of worry when they were gone much of the day, and they returned better than I could have planned it. One occasion I recall they hiked to a lake and had packed backpacks with lunches water sunscreen. It was my brain that worried, and a joy to watch the children grow and explore!

The mother next door, apprehensive about rogue police, instructed her children that if they see the police to run home and don't stop. There is no recourse when the cops crack skulls, so it's best to stay out of their grip.

> And that’s not the kids’ doing— that’s OUR doing. If parents really wanted their kids to go outside and explore, that would be the norm.

As a kid grown up in the smartphone era (I’m 18 now), these words of yours hurt my soul. Me and all of my friends are smartphone addicts. Everyone I know are using their smartphone as much as the rest of their life allows. But ofc, your brains are not messed up enough, so you don’t understand and you’re gonna just let your be consumed by it.

Seriously, go read the works of the world-renowned psychologist Jonathan Haidt. https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/

I’m deeply sorry with every person whose life is literally wasted for that sweet $1/user/month ad money.

I cannot express my sadness for the next generation who are literally born into it and grow up with YouTube Kids. Thank God at least I lived about 12 years of real life.

I don't see the issue, almost all the high paying jobs nowadays are just staring at screens all day anyway.

I'm being facetious, but maybe not really...

I think this is changing as we speak, maybe even has over the past 10 years. I expect physical labor, and in person labor prices to increase faster than desk labor wages.

If you buy construction/plumbing/electrical/etc labor, surely you have seen prices skyrocketing.

> We have a forest in our backyard with a 2 story fully enclosed treehouse (including electricity), sports fields within a 5 minute walk, tons of hiking trails, etc.

Humans are social beings. We are motivated to do things through our peers doing things. What you describe is probably really nice for people who enjoy exercise and spending time in nature. But for social beings, what you are describing is absolute isolation from society.

I would posit that a big part of what glues the kids to the screen is that the screen is a window to the real world. When they look into the screen, they have an endless stream of other people, expressing opinions, doing things, existing in society. When they look outside, there's no society, there's no people. It's just trees.

This.

The internet has become sort of a "third place", but since it has no precedent, none of us knew how to leverage it as such, so we have people glued to screens.

I have hope for the generation after gen Z though - my toddler knows exactly when I'm looking at my phone instead of giving her attention and in such instances proposes that I put it away.

It's very much like my generation annoyed at their parents who watch TV all day instead of interacting.

Agreed. I'd say the source of the problem is the lack of real third places. I like to call this "the abolition of society", but I'm a bit dramatic.

While the internet is certainly addictive, I'd assume that most people who, like me, waste their lives online, do so primarily because no real alternative is available.

Moms aren't around, more are working and not looking out for each other's kids, even when they are roaming the neighborhood.

When kids roamed alone, they did not roamed where moms were. And moms were in the kitchen or with youngest baby. And also, back then kids in areas where women worked due to not being middle class, still roamed alone.

was in europe over the summer I did see a lot of teens doing dumb shit that teens do by the subway and in the streets. maybe they'd go out more if there was stuff to do. let's be real suburbia kind of sucks.

“ We have a forest in our backyard with a 2 story fully enclosed treehouse (including electricity), sports fields within a 5 minute walk, tons of hiking trails, etc. But it is a real struggle to get them to leave the house because”

But..do you have their friends in that space? I’m not naive I realize a lot of kids actually just want to TikTok, but “go hiking” isn’t a valid alternative. Kids want friends and unstructured time with them not beholden to their parents ability to drive them somewhere.

Hobbies and interests are not uniform across age groups. Just because the children are interested in different things than you think they should be interested in, doesn't mean they are the ones who are wrong.

Forced timeout almost never works. It merely reinforces their craving for what has been taken away from them.

this YouTube short does a good job contrasting the two https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ih12x3hmw2M?app=desktop

do they have peers that would join them if they went?

Can they walk to meet with their friends and get something to eat or drink?

Compared to nature and fields, a stimulating place to hang with friends around lots of other people gives a sense of independence and is a stronger draw for most.

>> Why don’t children leave the house?

> Because of screens.

Your kids. Not mine, who predated screens. There was nowhere to go. They could walk to the neighborhood entrance. They could walk back. They could do that again.

Past that the choices were walking along a thruway easement or risk trespassing charges by being anywhere else.

Not just my kids. I spent >20 years in leadership in scouting and youth programs, 1990s onward. I worked with a LOT of kids. When they weren't in home/school/extremely-supervised-structured-and-typically-not-free-activities, those kids stayed mostly home because there was nowhere for them to go.

Most.

Kids.

Have.

Nowhere.

To Go.

The entire human history of kids having peer-only time to learn negotiation, compromise, ambition, boundaries, loyalty, conflict resolution, basically learning how to think has been replaced with ceaseless adult supervision or being shut away.

Parenting time has increased 10-fold and that heavy-handed excess is supposed to somehow replicate their most critical learning time - the exact space where children become people.

It doesn't. It can't. Five seconds of considering it makes that plain. We've illegalized childhood and substituted the most counterproductive thing we could find.

Screens really aren't the cause of a catastrophe that began taking shape generations ago.

The school issue is the single hardest thing.

Like I was always planning on putting my kids in public school. I got a great education in them.

But now I'm wondering if I'll be forced to hunt down a school that avoids screens as much as possible. I've heard good things about Waldorf schools but the vaccination rates at those schools freak me out even more.

(Not to mention I've seen some terrible examples of educational software that is so buggy and unusable that it's actively hindering learning, making students feel stupid when they would've been fine with traditional methods.)

Speaking as someone who was a teenager in the suburbs in the 90s, it totally predated screens. Walking 40 min on a road with no sidewalks got you to a 7-11. We used to go play in the woods until they knocked them down to build a "golfing community" (ie golf course interspersed with McMansions)

I grew up with lots of space outdoors. Not a lot of people. Screens were my way to be social.

It's one thing to be poorly designed, it's another to be socially isolated with no one to talk to.

Screens are a proximate cause, not the underlying problem: as others have pointed out, children are just as social as we are. If being behind a screen is how they obtain those social experiences, then the corrective action isn’t to remove them but to augment them in a way they ultimately find more appealing. The article’s observation about suburban design is spot-on insofar as suburbs have both trended towards architectural and cultural insularity.

Screens are an issue, for sure. But kids stopped going out before computer and phone screens became common.

When was that? I grew up in the 1980s and we would be outside messing around from dawn to dusk, even though we had a Nintendo 64, Nickelodeon, MTV (back when they actually had music videos), a vcr, etc.

> I grew up in the 1980s

> we had a Nintendo 64

Those two doesn't agree with each other. If you grew up in 1980s you were an adult or close to when Nintendo 64 were out.

probably born in the 80s, child of the 90s

Don't think so. I was born in 89 and we used to play outside till our parents called us in

Our kids were born in the 80s. That happened to them. No one around to play with

yea it’s a 5 minute walk for your child. But friends probably live 40 minutes away if they walk.

What’s the point of a treehouse if they just play by themselves? Also, no child is going to walk on a trail by themselves for fun. Same with a sports field. lol. Get realistic dude.

Suburbia sucks. I grew up in it. My childhood was spent playing video games, going to school, socialize/learn, maybe after school sports, go back home, study. Weekends were a bit rough. Usually just stuck with parents. Had a park within 15 minute WALK. But friends lived in diff suburb so it was at least a 40 minute walk (maybe 15 min by bike). Occasionally parents drive me to friends house, but again mostly just to play games (this is an era where play over internet was not feasible or widely available).

Also the suburbs were a bit dangerous to walk or bike in. Cars zooming up and down streets with reckless abandon. Worse during commuting. I imagine it’s worse today with the massive compensators that exist on the road now.

I was essentially a prisoner up until I was able to get my learners permit and start driving.

They have lots of friends in our neighborhood. But those kids don’t want to go outside either. If they do venture forth (like when we kick them out and tell them don’t come back till dinner) to a friends house, it is just to get on a device with them. And our neighborhood is very safe. I’d be fine if I didn’t see them from dawn to dusk.

It's very hard to parent around this alone though. As you say, if you take away devices, the kids don't switch to using the treehouse/sports/hiking... Online is where their friends are, not the treehouse.

>Why don’t children leave the house?

Because it's illegal in most of North America (especially when you consider where people actually live) for them to leave the house. That is the beginning and end of it.

If this answer isn't blindingly obvious to you, you are part of the problem. Either you don't notice it because you're more focused on being angry about "suburbia" than you are the objective well-being/freedom of your own children, or you actively encourage it because you think it's a net good (either because you're paranoid, because you're a victim of misinformation, or because you're a concern troll).

Things are safer than ever before yet most children have fewer rights and ways to develop available to them than at any point in recorded history. Sure, there might not be any place for them to go to exercise that freedom, but if you legalize it they'll eventually start coming back.

As for now, keep cheering on the arrests of children playing on their own front lawns. The reason suburbia exists in the first place is because that's the place your kids are maximally safe from this while still allowing you to be sufficiently gainfully employed, and making that way of life slightly more aesthetically acceptable to childless apartment-dwellers will do nothing to fix this.

Karen delenda est.

But this isn’t a factor outside North America and Suburbia is still failing children.

> >Why don’t children leave the house?

> Because it's illegal in most of North America (especially when you consider where people actually live) for them to leave the house.

It is not illegal in most of North America, if you consider the USA (not sure about Canada/Mexico), only three states have laws that make it actually illegal. Consider:

> Washington doesn't have a state law that dictates whether children can or can't be left at home that's dependent on age, according to Seattle-based law firm Elise Buie Family Law. In nearby Oregon, though, the law states the child must be at least 10 years old to be home alone.

Or California, which has alot of people:

> In the state of California, there is no legal age stipulated on when a child can be left home alone or allowed to walk outside alone. There is a law, however, that children 6 years old and younger cannot be left alone in a car.

So for the west continental coast we have Oregon until 10...and in California if a car isn't involved no constraint. Oregon is just one of three states with actual laws on the books:

> Three states legally require kids to be of a certain minimum age to be left on their own for some time: Illinois (14 years old) Oregon (10 years old) Maryland (8 years old)

I'm not sure Maryland is being unreasonable here, but Illinois and Oregon probably are.

It's about being effectively illegal or illegal 'enough'. If there is a good chance you will get a CPS call for your kids 'welfare' due to not being 'supervised', even if nothing happens, is plenty enough for most parents to not let their children be unsupervised no more. Most CPS visits have a background threat of 'we will take away your children', and that is plenty enough of a threat as it is.

Then the chilling effect starts and people just never bother because they read or heard of that happening once somewhere.

In a world where CPS can’t even take kids away from parents whose car catches on fire with their kids in it while they are shoplifting at a Walmart for a few hours, I don’t really see this as effectively chilling.

It is chilling. And beyond kids being taken away, being forced to go to parenting classes or just having to be there for follow up visits, having to pay layer are all significant hurdles.

In the case you mention, kids would be supposedly taken away for being without supervision in the car. Shoplifting is unrelated crime.

The adults left the kids in the car to go shoplifting for hours. But more to the point: you think CPS is way more effective (let alone over effective) than it actually is. The few anecdotes to back that up have always concluded in favorable outcomes to the parents.

My teenager has screens, and he is a total nerd. When we are in our sea of US suburbia, where there is absolutely nothing to do, and no neighbor kids that share much with him, he just chooses screens at all times.

But come summer, I take him to a small Spanish port town. It has beaches where teens can surf and spearfish. There's always an available pickup game of soccer or basketball, even at midnight. Bars and restaurants one can walk to, and complete independence, barring budgetary constraints. The area that in the US has a dozen teenagers, over there has about 300 or so. Suddenly it's not all screens, because there are competing alternatives. Want to go play DnD poolside with the nerdiest of the lot? No need to ask anyone.

Suburbs don't force kids into being alone in front of screens, any more than they force adults to be lonely and asocial. But they so do change the level of effort required to do anything else.

> because of screens

It’s connection they are looking for. Nobody wants to play in big backyard treehouse alone. At least the screens let them talk to other people or at least pretend to.

Having a house in a suburb where kids can’t walk to anybody they have connections with isolates and pushes them to the screens.

Well it's because of the Internet then not just "screens" right?

I grew up with Nintendos and such, even the handheld gameboys, so I always had screens available to me.

But my friends and I went outside and met up and rode our bikes all around town all the time.

Same! We have an acre of trees, a hill, boulders, 2 sheds, trampoline, bikes, digging tools. Nope. Screens.

For what it's worth when we had a few acres in the country our kids didn't really want to leave. Now that we live where they can bike with friends they want to go do that. But I am not happy with how many screens are in the school.

> Because of screens.

Not entirely true. When kids used to go outside, they went alone outside since the age of 6 or even 5. That is impossible now. In order for kids to go outside, an adult must be there with them. That is adult bored on playground, cant cook, cant clean, cant socialize with friends, cant have fun. So adults wont go.

And then by the time kids are allowed to go outside, they dont know what to do there, other kids are not there and they are too old.

My mom had a quick fix for this. If we were spending too much time in front of the TV on a nice day, she'd simply come in the room and shut off the TV and tell us to go outside. Now!

Problem solved.

Can't this (admittedly blunt) technique translate to contemporary situations ?

>One of the problems is, this is taught in the schools. Pretty much every class is using screens constantly.

I hear people complaining about the lack of iPads due to low school funding. I'm thinking this might be a good thing. IMHO tablets are the worst case scenario, they're made for pure consumption. Keyboard input on screen is bad, productive software is limited - these are machines made for pure consumption of media.

We all consume enough media nowadays. If you teach programming on proper laptops/desktops, or how to use spreadsheets, and writing text on computers, I get that this is useful knowledge. I just can't think of anything you need to teach with a tablet in school. And I think we should also not allow phones in school, it's just too damn entertaining. Adults barely are able to unglue themselves from their phones, we need to create a distraction free zone conducive for learning.

Screens are part of the problem but the biggest cause is lack of space to be a child, and the biggest culprit is our car-centric urban planning which transformed our streets into car storage space / racing track.

Our streets have become hostile to anything but cars.

Not Just Bikes video on suburbia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw

The author attends the High School I attended nearly 40 years ago. I was born, raised, and still live in Fremont.

Fremont has begun doing some of these trendy concepts that are mentioned in the article, but when I grew up none of these ideas had been implemented. I socialized with other kids and rode bike around the neighborhood. As a pre-teen, we socialized in the street and at each other's houses. As a teen I was not really restricted in where to go and there are plenty of neighborhood parks and libraries to hang out at.

None of the article's critiques of suburbia ring true to me with respect to Fremont. If you are seeking nightlife as an adult, you might feel it is a wasteland. But for children growing up I'm not seeing a problem. Part of that is that most of the city can be navigated without ever being on an arterial. Part of that is that most of the city was developed during an era where neighborhood parks could be mandated. Part of that is the city was master planned when it was small and they foresaw today's population.

It is true children spend less time outside than they used to. Part of that is fear; when my kids were young, I didn't trust that strangers wouldn't be a problem if they were outside the house. But right or wrong, that fear is worsened by the proposed changes to how suburbs are laid out, not improved.

The fear has nothing to do with "stranger danger". The fear is that kids will get run over by drivers, which happens all the time.

As a parent, I was not concerned with that. But everyone has their own worries.

>The fear has nothing to do with "stranger danger".

The reasonable fear there is helpful citizens + media bullhorning false stranger risk + police bullhorning false stranger risk + just one overzealous officer = recurring CPS visits (and/or neglect charges if officials feel feisty).

Tell your kids to not play in the street, to watch for cars when they cross the street, then stop worrying about it.

The absolute number of pedestrian deaths has been plateaued for 50 years despite the population size increasing: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...

60% of pedestrian deaths occur on high capacity urban roads. Kids in light residential neighborhoods don't deal with those roads. Tell your kids to stay away from heavily trafficked roads.

30% of pedestrian deaths involved a drunk pedestrian. Tell your children not to get drunk.

https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pedestrian_safety/i...

73% of pedestrian deaths occur at night. Tell your kids to be home before dark.

17% of pedestrian deaths were on freeways. Don't walk on freeways!

https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Ped-Spotli...

If you still find yourself worrying despite taking basic common sense precautions, then you should unsubscribe to whatever fearmongering echo chambers you're getting this fear from (reddit and youtube are common sources for this fearmongering I believe.)

> 60% of pedestrian deaths occur on high capacity urban roads. Kids in light residential neighborhoods don't deal with those roads. Tell your kids to stay away from heavily trafficked roads.

And when they have to cross one of those roads to get to school or a friend's house? What do you propose they do?

>What do you propose they do?

To participate in politics to end this farce in American urban planning when they grow up. Like the previous 2-3 generations should have done.

2-3 generations ago, parents weren't terrified of letting their children play outside in suburbia. Or if they were, it was because of previous moral panics like satanism and kidnappers, not cars.

Those aren't the kind of roads that suburbs are made of. Tell them to stay away from those roads. Kids in high density urban areas need to worry about those roads, but this discussion is about the viability of suburbia for children.

Okay, let's make this more concrete. Here's the school district map for Cherry Hill, NJ, a suburb of Philadelphia: https://www.chclc.org/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?module...

And here's a route from a residential street to one of the schools on that map within the same school catchment area: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/39.9349018,-74.9901605/Thoma...

I challenge you to find me a walking route between those two points that does not involve crossing a heavily trafficked road.

I walked across a street with a light I had to wait for starting in 1st grade. I was lucky it was less than a mile away. By 4th grade I had to walk most of a mile to a bus stop. By 6th grade I was riding 4 miles to junior high, then 5 miles to high school. The 80s had still had huge land barge Cadillac's, early SUVs

When did I stop going out? When there was dialup internet and MUDs.

80’s cars have hoods shorter than your average child. 20’s SUVs and trucks have hoods as tall as some adults. That’s a major difference. Also, there’s probably more traffic in any given area as there are like a 100 million more people in the US than back in the 80’s.

I'm a parent of three. Traffic is my key concern. There are more parked vehicles blocking sightlines, taller vehicles, and drivers are more likely to be distracted by their phone.

"In England, housing is often characterized by closely situated semi-detached or terraced structures built under flexible zoning regulations. This environment allows small businesses to coexist harmoniously with residential areas, in contrast to the rigid industrial zoning common in the United States."

I'm American and live in Oz. Australia does this well imo. Small cafes and shops are sprinkled throughout neighborhoods. For any large grocery runs, I need to take my car but day to day basics (and more importantly...coffee) are within only a few minutes walking distance.

Are the prices comparable?

Not even close but then again I don't know which market in the US to compare to. I'm originally from Houston which is suburban sprawl at its worst. I could get a McMansion for $500k USD.

I live in the northern beaches area of Sydney and a "knockdown rebuild" can go for roughly $2m-3m AUD ($1.3-1.9m USD). I struggle with real estate prices here.

Actually, I meant the prices of food at the local shops versus large grocery stores.

The prices are generally higher however the quality and service is better than what you'd get from Woolworths or Coles, the big chains here. We have a local butcher who's stuff is higher quality than what the chains carry. I can also order stuff not readily available (like a thanksgiving turkey).

At least in Melbourne, this is only really the case for more established (and typically expensive) suburbs. Go out to Clyde North or Officer and you've got basically nothing in a walkable distance.

Even in (relatively affluent, semi-inner) Burwood East many of the old strip shops have been converted to non-regular or non-retail businesses (e.g kitchen showroom, accountant, baked goods wholesaler). You'd need to go up to Kmart Plaza to get groceries or coffee.

In Sydney, it's generally the case for established neighbourhoods close to the CBD. Walkability in inner city suburbs like Balmain, Leichhardt, Rozelle, any of the eastern suburbs really is super high.

Contrast this to urban-sprawl created suburbs like Marsden Park and a few of the Hills district burbs and it's the opposite - barely any public transport and next to no community infrastructure.

There's a good channel on YT that documents this sort of stuff here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDhbm-t3dXU

Yeah I’m in Melbourne and thanks to working in tech, I can afford to live in one of those inner areas with cafes and community events at my doorstep. But the average person is forced out to some hellscape like Craigieburn or Melton where kids will be surrounded by mega highways in every direction.

We really need to do more to bring pedestrianisation and walkability out to the cheaper areas rather than having them be a luxury for the rich.

There's an additional factor that is significant in my corner of the world:

Plenty of people work in businesses that are necessarily far from any city, like factories, so not only they can't really afford living in those dense areas with cafes and the lot, they couldn't live there anyway because there's little to no mass transit to this middle of nowhere where they're headed every day, so they need to drive.

Communists approached the problem by just building residential areas around the factory, but it was unhealthy and in this day and age you can't expect anyone to work at the same steel mill for 35 years, like my grandpa did, so it's not a solution.

Usually they're sprinkled on arterials of some scale. Suburbs could support more corner shops and studios, but (at least where I live) it feels like councils are nervous about parking burdens created by these. Developers avoid giving up any more land to parking than they need to. Residents don't want employees and patrons of a corner hairdresser or architect swamping their streets with parked cars. So we mostly get endless blocks of residential, and some old corner stores revert to living rooms instead of what they were designed as.

“Why don’t children leave the house?”

I did, until I was at a certain age (roughly early teenager).

Then, there were a bunch of news shows talking about men driving around in brown vans abducting kids. Or kids just smoking pot at the parks.

So I stopped being let to go there without adults. And that's about the time that we got a computer with a modem and I discovered online games...

I grew up in the suburbs and did all kinds of things on my own. From 1991-1997 I rode my bike all around, went to the park, played sports, socialized, went to stores and fast-food on my own. My parents set some reasonable limitations on it: had to come back periodically and check in, let them know where I was, couldn't cross busy streets. I even had an SNES and my friends had Sega, and we played video games and watched TV, but we got bored of that and went outside at least as much as we stayed in.

I don't know what happened between then and now. I don't have kids so I don't know how people make decisions about them. I know a big part of it is fear of child abductions and getting hit by cars. I think it's just an irrational fear of those things (or bullying or using drugs) that slowly led to tightening the leash on kids. Today I rarely see kids doing anything in public without a helicopter parent within 50-ft. One of the middle schools I drove by allows one child to leave the door, go straight to their parents car, before the next car pulls up. They aren't even allowed to walk home unsupervised.

Yeah, suburbia is not the problem. I'd much rather live in suburbia than a city. But if you can't go outside on your own, that loses a lot of the benefit.

THIS. Back when, I walked to/from kindergarten & elementary school daily. In pretty much whatever weather there was. Usually alone. Mostly along a main-ish residential street. Those walks added up to ~12 miles/week. Pretty much all the other kids at my school did the same; I'd guess the maximum walk was ~15 miles/week.

(Also - this was back when all the kids went home to eat lunch each day, then came back to school. "School lunch" for the few oddballs, who had no housewife mom available, amounted to a few folding picnic tables in a dead-end hallway, and BYO sack lunch.)

Same.

My parents are horrified when I suggest that their grandchildren should have the same freedom to roam around that they gave us.

They believe the world is more dangerous than ever even though murders, violent crime, child abductions, and car accidents peaked when we were kids. And we didn't have cellphones to check in or call 911 with.

It's baffling.

I once stayed with a couple whose worldview was formed by the sensationalist news channels on tv [0]. They genuinely believed the outside world was a scary place with constant abductions, hate crimes, murder and all that. It was absolutely baffling to experience.

Not sure what to take from it. But it's very sobering to see how much damage is being done that way.

[0] At least I presume that's where it came from. The news was on every single day in that household and it certainly felt like some kind of twisted suffering and misfortune porn.

Yup, I have older relatives who are exactly like this and they ALL have a 24/7 news channel almost constantly playing on TV.

It’s an utterly toxic diet of fear-mongering and negativity that cripples anyone who gets addicted to it.

I think equally if not more to blame are the gruesome crime and medical shows that seem to be the only things on network television for the past twenty years.

A steady stream of the most depraved and violent criminal human behavior with the crime shows, and with the medical shows the most horrific one-in-a-million accidents.

And continuously ratcheting up because each episode has to be more inventive than the last.

I think it gives them security because it constantly reinforces their existing world-views. It repeatedly shocks them and then leads them back to the same set of beliefs so they feel comforted that they're the right ones, and all those other people are causing the horror. Right and left wing media do this. It's the utter opposite of challenging you to think and decide.

One thing to take from it if that tv usage is a net negative for most people when it comes to trying to understand the world.

Regarding child abductions specifically, there's two independent benefits to teh "strength in numbers" strategy. For one, children playing in groups are less likely to be victims, and secondly, if everyone's kids went out and played, its less likely that any single one of them would be the victim. If no kids play and your kid and his/her friend are the only available targets, then sadly it is more likely something will happen to them.

Car accidents have been rising since about 2010.

The numbers were way, way higher when I was a kid, even with this blip of an increase.

Back up cameras also weren't a thing.

I don't have kids either, but I'm in touch with my nephews (ages 7-14), and get to see how they're growing up. It's a very weird mix of culture change, everyone's being on their phones 24/7, and not walkable streets for kids. Luckily they live in NYC, and eldest one is now allowed to subway around, go to places as long as he follows the general guidelines set by my sister. That being said, he tells me how nobody else in his class is allowed to do the same, and their parents basically take them everywhere. At the end of the day, he still goes and plays Fortnite with his online friends anyways though.

It is definitely different from my childhood where even as an 8 year old I remember going to school by myself, hanging out in the neighbourhood with friends and etc. Definitely wouldn't blame it on just one thing, as every complex problem, it has multiple contributors.

I think part of it is also that many parents in our cohort were already raised as indoor and car-shuttled kids themselves. Some of us were still roaming around the bush in the '90's but it was already fewer of us than it was 10 and 20 and 30 years before then.

What should we expect of those folk as they become parents themselves? They have no nostalgia to lean on, and if they developed self-confidence and contentment as adults, then they're probably more inclined to refine the way were raised rather than challenge it.

So while media dramatization and fear culture surely played a role in the cycle too, and perhaps the initiating role, generational re-emphasis are probably what let it feel so pervasive and permanent.

I grew up about 10 years after you. I had pretty much free reign to do whatever I wanted. Let me just say that drug use is not an irrational fear. There are very few things to do to keep a 16-18 year old occupied in a suburban town. Drug use is an easy way to keep occupied for many people.

I grew up in a small-ish town. It was the worst. My street didn't have sidewalks and the only people in my neighborhood were very old. I was raised by a single mother who had cancer for the majority of my childhood. Getting her to take us places, like to see other kids, was awful. Either she couldn't or she just didn't want to. I usually didn't speak between the time I went home from school and the time I arrived the next day. I don't think many people understand that level of isolation, but I definitely believe it was pretty damaging to both child-me and adult-me.

Some people in my life don't understand why I'll never live outside of a city. I kinda feel like it's obvious in retrospect.

I’d love some walkable neighbourhoods in my suburbia. Automotive industry invested heavily to ensure this was so. Dependence on a vehicle in most North American cities is not an accident

why not... leave suburbia, then, and go where the walkable neighborhoods are?

Because if you want your kids’ peers in school to mostly be from households that earn a similar or higher income than your household, the best way to do that is to move to a school district with the biggest lots and homes you can afford, thereby ensuring the population of the school is made up only of people who can afford all the space and driving.

It is literally what makes “good” school districts “good”, the household incomes of the student population. And moving to a suburban place filters that nicely. Same reason why residents will often times oppose apartment developments, since they allow lower income residents to move into the district.

Wow. That's a really... foreign mindset. Thank you for helping me understand.

Right. Next time you see an American arguing that we need vouchers, realize that this would greatly help redistribute where wealth is. If people could send their kid to any school they wouldn't have to all live in suburbia. They could instead choose the environmentally and socially positive option without risking their child's education.

It is funny because, here in Paris, the urban core is where upwards life is and suburbia is the land of social despair. The opposite logic from the USA, which makes some forum threads awkward with both sides of the Atlantic talking past each other !

There's a lot of differences between the US and France that result in different suburb/city situations, but I think "white flight" and "redlining" cover a decent chunk of it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

recently though white flight (if we refer to the general progression of people to suburbs away from cities) is dominated by people of color. Suburbia is basically about as representative demographically as the rest of the country at this point.

Because almost without exception these neighborhoods were built a long time ago, are closer to the city center and are the most expensive in the city. Until a few years ago it was possible for upper middle class like the dear readers of HN to afford these neighborhoods in middle tier cities like Boise, Austin, Denver, Nashville, etc. but now even those are out of reach unless you are wealthy or willing to pay most of your income in mortgage AND have two working parents.

For about 20 years in there, we called that process gentrification and it was specifically led by ambituois young professionals (like those on HN) who bought into traditionally ethnic and/or ailing neighborhoods and filled them with cronut shops and ukelele performance centers (or boot stores and gastropubs).

But as you note, that movement petered out and more and more money came in and now those same neighborhoods are inaccessible to the same kind of people that first gentrified them.

Except that, as many predicted as gentrification became rampant, it's not really sustainable to drive all the service workers and their families out of the city center, and so now they just live on the streets outside of the cronut shops and gastropubs.

So if you give it another 10 or 20 years though, you can expect another urban flight to manifest and balance things out a little more again.

It’s way above my pay grade to be able to afford to live there

Because people doing that is why this will never change. Every time someone leaves the suburbs for the city, a vote in town elections goes with them. Every time, it becomes less likely that zoning or other local laws affecting land/property use will change. The only way to make the suburbs better, to turn all of these urban-design principles we all know so well into reality, is for more people to stay and fight.

"Move to the city" (or any other already-walkable place) is part of the problem, not the solution. For one thing, people won't do it en masse. Even if they did, those too-few places would become even less affordable, plus their power/water/waste infrastructure would get strained beyond breaking. It's a very privileged and selfish position to take. Instead, we need to make more such places, reconfiguring and repurposing buildings and other infrastructure where they are and where the people are. And that takes voting power. Don't tell people to throw that away.

Here in Seattle, over two-thirds of the land inside city limits is locked up in suburban-style low-density, single-family-only residential zoning. We would not need the suburbs if we could stop forcing people out of the city by prohibiting natural urban development. Seattle needs more people living in the city who want city life, so we can get these policies changed and build out proper urban amenities: mixed-use zoning, rapid transit, bike infrastructure, walkable neighborhoods.

Infrastructure gets upgraded when the tax base arrives to justify it. Yes, you are right, "we need to make more such places", and the low-density neighborhoods closest to the city center are the most efficient places to do that.

It is a genuine tragedy that so much sprawl has been built over the last 60-70 years. Much of that construction can never afford its own maintenance without subsidy from the city centers. To make this sustainable, we must densify and contract.

The low-density areas within city limits are functionally suburbs. You basically said as much yourself. Whether they have their own name and mayor or town council is a historical accident, not significant in this context. For example, Detroit is one of the geographically largest cities in the US. I lived there, and I lived in an adjoining suburb. There was no difference with respect to density or development type. The stroad near our house in Detroit was actually worse than the stroad near our house in Hazel Park. Whatever you can do within the "suburban style" parts of Seattle you can do in a politically separate suburb, as long as there are votes.

Cities absorbing their near suburbs (as Detroit did long ago except for Hamtramck and Highland Park) and using weight of numbers to force change would possibly allow for greater density and more walkable areas in those places, but nowadays no current suburb would allow that to happen (because of property values, school funding, etc.) so it's a pipe dream. Transit would not be affected, since that's usually regional anyway. Again, the only way to affect how suburbs are built is to vote there. Running away helps the individual, but doesn't help society, and I'm sorry that people would rather not hear that about themselves but it's the truth here in reality.

> Whatever you can do within the "suburban style" parts of Seattle you can do in a politically separate suburb

I can't speak to Detroit, but here in Seattle, I just don't believe that's true. For example, look at Greenwood - close to the dense part of the city, it has a classic grid layout and there's already a good commercial core. Great bones, ready to pop, it just needs a zoning change and some transit investment:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Greenwood,+Seattle,+WA/@47...

Madison Valley, where I used to live, is currently going through that transition, and may in another 10-20 years become properly urban:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Madison+Valley,+Seattle,+W...

Compare this to a neighborhood in the suburbs, built in the sprawl era - for example East Hill, in Kent. What can be done with a place like this, full of wide roads, big box stores with vast parking lots, and meandery low-density cul-de-sac blocks which don't connect to each other?

https://www.google.com/maps/place/East+Hill,+Kent,+WA+98031/...

Move to a place like that and vote all you like, the whole structure of the place has been built around cars in a way which will be very difficult to fix. Lest you accuse me of cherry-picking a particularly obnoxious example, here's Totem Lake, equally hopeless:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Totem+Lake,+Kirkland,+WA/@...

If Seattle relaxed its zoning and let urban development happen throughout, we could fit an enormous share of the region's population growth into the city limits. This would create a virtuous cycle where investment grows, rapid transit development becomes increasingly economical, the economy diversifies, and services improve. That can't be done in a remote suburb, because urban value is a function of proximity to resources.

> Again, the only way to affect how suburbs are built is to vote there.

Why do any more suburbs need to be built at all? Fix the cities and there will be plenty of space.

> the economy diversifies, and services improve

Pure wishful thinking. Is there any empirical reason to believe this would be more true with everyone living in a couple of dozen large cities (as if that can even happen - see later) instead of in a greater number of more self-sufficient smaller cities and towns within a region? It's not like every company even in your own metropolitan area wants to be in "Seattle proper" is it? I used to work at a large one that basically moved out and they're not the only one. Investors didn't seem to mind one bit.

> Why do any more suburbs need to be built at all

I never said that they should. They need to be rebuilt, not built anew. More precisely, they need to be reconfigured to avoid the waste and ecological damage of tearing down one place and then building somewhere else.

> Fix the cities and there will be plenty of space.

Fix the suburbs and you'll have plenty of space too. Consolidation can happen as easily in each town as in the central city, and without some of the downsides - increased prices and decreasing affordability (already a major problem in Seattle), power distribution, waste disposal, what traffic still (and necessarily) remains, etc. I've been to Seattle. Consolidating most of the region's population into Seattle city limits would not be a utopia; it would be a nightmare even from a new-urbanist perspective. Ditto for the many other cities I've been to. A certain level of geographic expansion is inevitable, but not all such expansion is sprawl.

More importantly, restructuring suburbs in place is the only way this can happen. People just won't move to the cities en masse. The current milieu of property values, school funding, etc. won't allow it. Changing those realities would be even harder than adopting a strong towns[1] or missing middle[2] approach in the places where people are and will remain. And that requires people voting where they are instead of running away.

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/

[2] https://missingmiddlehousing.com/

I'm going to take a slightly different tack, one that will probably also provide walkable.

We should be transitioning as many neighborhoods to be aligned around the e-bike, which provides a lot more transportation utility, a fair amount more range, but not nearly as much danger to pedestrians, climate impact, etc.

Walkability comes practically for free from such an approach.

The ebike should provide just enough range + concentration to enable the big box store. What is not talked about with walkable neighborhoods is that they are rich neighborhoods with rich people that don't mind paying twince Walmart costs.

Especially post-covid-inflation, this won't fly. You need SOME big box scale.

Because no one talks about the bodega in the slum. There's lots of poor neighborhoods with expensive bodegas that are poor people's only options. People do not rave about that.

Nice to see a high quality article by a high school student – kudos to this young new urbanist.

I see this "screen-time" issue pop up over and over again, but who is to blame? Parents make a stink about kids' screen time ALL THE TIME, yet almost never go outside themselves. Children emulate their parents. Go set an example instead of blaming the child you are responsible for.

I know that every time I would see my dad spend hours in the garden, basically doing a full workout cleaning it up and making it pretty, while I was inside programming, I feld really terrible.

I felt like a bum. This works. Set an example for your kids :)

I don’t really understand how this is a new thing. The claim is that children today are being “left behind by suburbia” as if that wasn’t true of older generations of children and we as a society once all lived in an urban utopia and now it somehow isn’t the case.

Car-dependent suburbia was fundamentally impossible 100 years ago because most people didn't have a car. Kids could socialise with their friends outside because everything had to be accessible via waking, cycling or public transit. It was also socially and legally acceptable to have young kids out on their own.

When I grew up in suburbia my friends from school were a half hour drive away. When we met up we usually went outside and socialised. But that always meant organising with parents to drive us around. Looking back I think "left behind" isn't quite strong enough.

Exactly this. I live in the now-inner-city (a residential area mile or so from downtown office buildings and a few blocks away from small office buildings). Back in the day our walkable neighborhood was built, it was considered the outer suburbs. It's still extremely dense. Way denser than the 60s/70s suburb I grew up in, and way denser than anything today. Density isn't just about how close the houses are but how close the nearest cafe and store is too.

>It was also socially and legally acceptable to have young kids out on their own.

Here in Japan, it's still socially and legally acceptable for young kids to be on their own outside. I see it all the time. Kids under the age of 10 regularly take subways by themselves, ride on bikes outside, etc.

The US seems extremely devoid of individual freedoms compared to most other countries.

It wasn't always like that: it was pretty normal back in the 80s for kids to run around by themselves. However, at some point, the whole society became paranoid, perhaps because of 9/11, perhaps before, I'm not sure.

However, you're right in other ways. For instance, walking around with an open can of beer, or drinking a beer in the park, can get you arrested in the US. In Japan, it's perfectly legal, and people do it all the time (drinking beer with a picnic in the park; they don't walk and drink though, but there's no law against it). There's many other ways that individual freedoms are infringed in the US and aren't here, like how you can use your property. If you want to open a small cafe in your house, for instance, you can do it here.

It started with news television causing cognitive distortions about the rate of kidnap and murder of children, which plays into parental instincts real bad. It was essentially the first mass media engagement bait, like we talk about with social media today. Then you get stranger danger and the entire cycle starts.

Genuine question (I'm not American): How much do you think this was intended?

On one hand, I really don't want this to sound like a conspiracy theory.

On the other hand, it is well know that in the Us, the Media is tightly controlled by private interests, with a clear agenda, on both sides. Nothing controversial about this. So I don't think many wide trends like this just "happen" without the people at the top noticing...

Furthermore, there are obvious, very strong incentives for the people with power to tighten the control of the population as much as they can, for all sorts of vested interests as well as because that's literally what it means to "govern".

This has been true as long as mass media as existed, and way before that throughout history.

So my honest question is. How likely is it that the distortion about "kidnap and murder of children" danger (which for an outsider, is an objective absurdity), was a planned and deliberate campaign?

I think it happened due to simple money making incentives. 1. Media companies make more money with more viewers, because they get more ad impressions. 2. The most successful newsmakers make content that gets more viewers to advance their promotions 3. They use stuff that pull at human instincts, other news makers see it's effectiveness and start copying it. 4. repeat

Once you've worked in large organizations for a while, you realize that humanity most of the time is way too disorganized and gives too little of a shit for any kind of "conspiracy" to be that coherent.

As someone who grew up in South Africa, I envied the freedom American kids seemed to have. Crime is extremely high here and safety was always a huge concern in our high-walled suburbs.

I'm sorry to say this but South Africa is towards the bottom of most safety rankings I've seen. Of course most other places do better, including the US :-(

Suburbia + office-only downtowns are largely a post-WWII North American phenomenon. It's very much a recent trend in terms of history.

Streetcar suburbs came before that. The lot sizes were just as big too. Though the streetcar meant less cars.

It's written by a highschool student, so it's subject to the usual teenage "everything I'm experiencing for the first time is universally new," coupled with basically just being a regurgitation of the anti-suburban angst spewed by various YouTube channels and subreddits

The article is a joke, and so is the author. Everyone says we should listen to the youth because they are young. Meanwhile, the young are inexperienced, irrational, and mercurial with a very limited perspective helmed by an under-developed brain and an even less developed sense of self and purpose. Teenagers eat tide pods and routinely kill themselves or their friends (or others) driving drunk. The question is, why do we need advice from high school students? Easy. We don't.

I've been househunting in various locales, and judging from when the neighborhood homes were built, it appears to have started in the early 50's. No public spaces and often no sidewalks.

Yes and a semi regular steam of articles that seem like extreme cases but nonetheless repay children taken from parents for free ranging. Further back the articles were about stranger danger and kids being kids.

It's as though we've been captured by the worst cases and the illusion of a guarantee of harm avoidance without noticing the embodied harm.

I used to drive my kids everywhere. I lived in the SF Bay Area and transit sucked. I moved to Vancouver, Canada and my kids can just roam around. Kids under 12 can ride for free on transit. The mall is 4 blocks away and there is a skytrain station there. I do track their phones but it is way safer.

Are you familiar with https://5kids1condo.com/?

I'm also from abroad and live in metro Vancouver, also have kids. Are you in Vancouver proper or the burbs? I'm pretty frustrated with walkability here, but Vancouver proper is just too expensive.

Parents looking for screen alternatives: Check out the book "Playborhood" by Mike Lanza.

His neighborhood had no kids playing outside, so his kids didn't want to play outside. He did something about it, and he tells us how to do the same where we live.

https://playborhood.com/

Seconding this recommendation.

The idea of solving this issue at a societal level is really daunting, but Playborhood was an empowering read as a parent. It makes the case that, at least for your children and your (hyper-local) neighborhood, you can create conditions that significantly change your kid's childhood (and mental well-being) for the better. And it provides actionable steps and examples to do that, rather than just bemoaning the state of the world.

We idealistically designed our suburbs at first. Then commercial and industrial interests took charge.

Suburban dwellers were an early large dataset for corporations looking to maximize "engagement."

"Public transport is the only guaranteed way for a young person to be free and enjoy mobility."

Wrong. We seldom used public transportation. We rode bikes. To school, to movies, to friends' houses, to the beach.

Now, entire neighborhoods come to a standstill because the streets are clogged with hundreds of cars driving one child each door-to-door from home to school. WTF? WHY? And I was riding my bike to school in a Chicago suburb. Now I'm in L.A., where apparently the perfect year-round weather is TOO MENACING for kids to get themselves to school.

Pathetic.

I didn't see any specific basis for this article's assertions. What specifically has changed in suburbia that makes it so horrible for kids now?

What's changed is a huge increase in cars and driving, and the size of the cars has made them more dangerous.

Got any citations for that? The "increase in cars and driving?" And per what? Per block? Yes, we have entitled trash driving around in giant barges. But we also have anti-lock brakes.

Not sure how the heavy, all-steel cars of decades ago compare to the bloated 5000-pound hogs favored for driving one kid to school today, admittedly.

In addition to overprotective parents and screens, there’s the fact that there’s just fewer kids today, reducing the chances that any kid has a critical mass of similar age neighbors to play with. The percentage of the population that’s under 18 peaked at 36% in 1960, and is down to 22% now.

And that understates the perceived decline, because most children are now born to minority families. Only 18% of the non-Hispanic white population is children. So if you’re the kind of person writing about these issues—probably a college-educated, non-immigrant white living among other similar people—the percentage of your local community that’s kids is even less.

Whenever this topic comes up on HN I'm always in dismay of HN's worship of cities. The main reason anyone (edit: the most common reason anyone) lives in a city in the US is for their job. And they are generally living in small apartments. There also exists some people who can afford massive brick houses in eg. Park Slope who wonder how anyone could live in such dreadful dessert wastelands called suburbs. Then you get these think of the children arguments from groups like "Congress for the New Urbanism" in order to save them by banning cars. Supposedly Suburbanite children have no friends, and are trapped in their houses on their phones.Of course there is never any data to back up this claim. If we are lucky we will get a statistic about car injuries. I wonder why this is?

>The suburban preschool children spent more time outdoors, were read to more frequently, visited the library more frequently and more often attended summer camp. The suburban school age children spent more time outdoors, more frequently participated in a community sport league and more often attended summer camp. The urban school age children watched more television or videos. During the summer, suburban school age children spent more time outdoors, while during the school year, suburban school age children used the library more frequently.[0]

[0]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1015254007582

> The main reason anyone lives in a city in the US is for their job.

This is a failure to acknowledge the existence of values systems other than your own. I live in a city because I like being around people. I spent the first 30 years of my life in rural and suburban areas, which was enough to tell me that they're not for me. If they're for you, then good for you. But other people can think differently.

what I meant is that the most common reason people live in cities is for their job. I didn't mean that for each person that lives in a city, the most important factor to them living there was their job. The usage of "anyone" here was indeed wrong. Thanks for pointing that out.

There is only one city in the USA, and it's called new york. Everything else are central business districts surrounded with suburbs, and if they are lucky, have some commuter rail to alleviate the traffic. Urban is a code word for 'poor' , 'too poor and can only afford multifamily housing', or 'lives in slightly more dense poor suburb'. And yes, if you compare the poor who live in 'urban' food desserts with parents who have no time to interact with their children working their 2 jobs, they will always, always, do worse in stats.

And even in new york, you can live 1 hour away by train and have your idyllic suburban lifestyle too.

The US needs better cities.

Most cities with apartment buildings with 2-4-6 floors are very charming and the convenience they offer is astounding, it's basically an unbeatable combo.

Where does the US have that in large numbers? Ah, yes, practically nowhere.

I grew up in the suburbs and in college I met a lot of people who grew up in the city, and I became quite jealous of their childhood. They had an independence that I never had. Many of them still don't know how to drive since we all live in Seattle near transit.

These milquetoast articles either all bury the lede or simply never get to the main issue.

If real estate is the biggest expense line in a typical household, how much money would it cost to rebuild entire communities across the country? Trillions of dollars. At least. Millions of work-hours.

It's probably cheaper to build new communities that foster this kind of child activity than to rebuild existing suburban stroad hellscapes. Many communities have barely enough money to keep the infrastructure from falling apart, how do you plan on rebuilding those?

And that's no guarantee of success either. A lot of millennials and younger are just incredibly lazy (or too busy) physically and are in poor shape to enjoy the outdoors. I frequently find myself to be the most fit of several groups despite using the gym last time before COVID.

> It's probably cheaper to build new communities that foster this kind of child activity than to rebuild existing suburban stroad hellscapes. Many communities have barely enough money to keep the infrastructure from falling apart, how do you plan on rebuilding those?

This is extraordinarily easy actually. You eliminate residential zoning. Every house can now partake in limited commercial activity. Want to start a cafe? No problem. Want to start a barbershop? Sure. Massage studio, yes. Doctor office, yes. Office? Sure. Small grocery stor.? Absolutely.

We can have moderate limitations for parking and congestion, but no actual restrictions on what can take place. This will immediately raise property and income taxes which can be reinvested into infrastructure. In the meantime, there's no need to immediately deal with stroads. People will be using the stroads less since they can get a significant portion of needs met locally.

This is not a radical proposal. We already allow some home-based businesses and they do fine, like daycares, etc.

Once the stroads are less used, and people mostly shopping locally, then we can narrow the stroads bit by bit and turn them into nice proper commercial districts.

> This is extraordinarily easy actually. You eliminate residential zoning.

I've yet to see zoning become less restrictive in communities that actually have the money to start their own businesses. It's an interesting paradox.

The only advance I've seen so far is some localities began to allow building ADUs, in very limited capacity in hopes to alleviate housing shortages. But that's so local and so sparse that it's not going to make any kind of impact like the article suggests.

That's hypocritical. You want to eliminate residential zoning, but that's not necessary in order to allow home businesses.

Your scenario is also NOT why politicians are attacking residential areas; if you look at corrupt legislation like California's SB 9/10, it allows ONE house to be replaced by a 10-unit monstrosity without permits or any vetting or veto power by municipalities. So trees get wiped out, ground is paved over, and heat islands expand.

"then we can narrow the stroads bit by bit and turn them into nice proper commercial districts."

Now you want "proper commercial districts" but not residential "districts?"

>Your scenario is also NOT why politicians are attacking residential areas; if you look at corrupt legislation like California's SB 9/10, it allows ONE house to be replaced by a 10-unit monstrosity without permits or any vetting or veto power by municipalities.

Sure. That's because California didn't follow my suggestions until they hit an emergency stage. If they had made sensible stepwise decisions they wouldn't have to make drastic ones.

It's like all the cities who defunded the police suddenly deciding to up funding beyond where it used to be.

If they had been sensible they would have kept funding stable while implementing stepwise reform. Instead they goofed and now have to spend more for less

"It's like all the cities who defunded the police"

Tip: Stop regurgitating this lie.

My city of Portland did exactly this.

PBS: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/portland-among-u-s-citie...

First the reporting on the defunding:

> The City Council responded by cutting $15 million. An additional $12 million was cut due to pandemic-caused economic shortfalls. As a result, school resource officers, transit police and a gun violence reduction team — which was found to disproportionately target Black Portland residents during traffic stops, according to an audit in March 2018 — were disbanded.

So we've established the council cut enough funds that several major teams were defunded, including the gun violence team, the transit police, and school resource officers. This is not a nominal reduction, but an actual elimination.

Secondly, we establish that they refunded the departments:

> Now, a year and a half later, officials partially restored the cut funds. On Wednesday, the Portland City Council unanimously passed a fall budget bump that included increasing the current $230 million police budget by an additional $5.2 million.

Similar things happened in other communities:

> In the wake of protests, the Los Angeles City Council cut $150 million from the police budget, promising to put that money into other social services. Likewise, in New York City lawmakers approved a shift of $1 billion from policing to education and social services. At the time the NYPD budget was around $6 billion, with several billion dollars more in shared city expenses such as pensions. However, since the cut, concerns about crime led to about $200 million in restored funding.

Stop repeating the big lie.

In the US it is not as easy as that and the zoning requirements are so anti-white and anti-Christian home schooling, and anti-Black and anti-immigrant for home businesses to support unions and retirees.

It's not a radical proposal, but stroads aren't the problem, carefully targeted regulations aren't the problem, communities/villages may be a solution?

Why on earth is the picture of a busy truck stop type place? Most suburban neighborhoods have low traffic and plenty of places to ride your bike. Often have pools and basketball courts or fields to play in.

It's not just a truck stop. Breezwood, PA is a meme at this point used to malign suburbs.

How funny, because when you look at it from the map, there's proably < 100 housing units within a ~3 mile radius. Of course there's not a bike path and roundabouts! It's the ideal place for a stroad: a pit-stop off the interstate with almost no housing nearby, with a cold the climate half the year.

That place is awful.

If a truck driver stops for the night, but fancies a meal from the other side of the road there's no sidewalk, and no crossing. Just lots of "no pedestrians" signs.

How do you get from the Tesla Supercharger to McDonald's?

Nobody intended Breezewood to be the way it is, it's the result of a bureaucratic jam between the state and the federal government decades ago. It hasn't been fixed since then because it's profitable the way it is. Virtually nobody actually lives there so there's no local pressure to change it. It is in no way representative of other communities in the region.

Yup - instantly recognized. (I've also been there.)

Can get some idea of it if you go to Street View and "zoom in" with the mouse wheel.

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9993331,-78.2406551,3a,15y,9...

Instantly recognized is an interesting characterization for a place that has no distinct visual characteristics at all (which I think was your point). Although I tend to agree with most urbanist arguments, many people limit their animosity to critiques of the physical land use patterns, but stop short of being so critical towards the emptying of unique cultural capital a place might otherwise have if it weren't filled with only the blandest low-risk franchise investments like Starbucks, Dairy Queen, etc...

In Canada, most towns look 95% alike to this the one you linked, with the exception of a few franchises that don't cross the border. That means I can drop a street view pin in any "neighborhood" that was built in the last decade (often including many mixed-use or more contemporary building types), and more than likely find one giant super grocery, an Orange theory fitness, a Freshii, a Subway, a gas station, a bank, a Tim Hortons, a Starbucks, and at least one mega fucking big parking lot.

I rent a car when I want one for road trips, but after driving through innumerable small towns and cities, it's a sad feeling to visit and just know that... there's literally no good local offerings here, not anymore.

It's an absurd meme perpetuated by the ignorant. I've been through Breezewood countless times, I grew up less than a hour away. If you drive just a minute or two away from Breezewood you'll be in the beautiful rolling hills of Pennsylvnaia. Gorgeous countryside, a great place to raise kids.

This is 3 minutes outside of Breezewood. This is what urban propagandist dudebros would have you believe is suburban hell: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.0062641,-78.230818,3a,75y,35...

Breezewood isn't even a suburb, less than two hundred people actually live there. It's essentially a rest stop, a bizarro artifact of some esoteric interaction between I-70 and the turnpike. Any other small town in the area is completely different.

Uhh... ok. If you drive a few minutes past the horrifying automotive blight you arrive at... a shoulderless road going through an empty field. It's not a suburb, but it demonstrates the problem with car-centric development and sprawl. I grew up in a similar area a couple hours away, and it was a terrible place to be a kid. Yeah, I had some fun exploring the woods by my house until I got old enough to be bored by it, but that cost was that I never got to see other kids or go anywhere without having to bother my parents to arrange something and drive me somewhere. I always figured that suburban kids got to play with other kids all the time, but the impression I get is that this doesn't really happen. Suburbs are still car islands, and a kid has to be pretty lucky to have other kids their age they get along with in their general vicinity.

That "horrifying automotive blight" is less than one square kilometer and virtually nobody lives there. If you don't like it (few people do) then don't live there. The rest of Bedford Country has thousands of other square kilometers for you to live in, with numerous small towns that aren't interstate rest stops. Go streetview in Bedford PA, where about 3000 people live vs Breezewood's <200. It's a modest community, the people there aren't rich but they have nice yards, sidewalks all over the place, and few cars on any of the roads. Teach your kids to look both ways before crossing a street and they'll be fine. Only somebody who's hopelessly neurotic would worry about their kids walking to their friend's house in Bedford.

> kids don't like growing up in the country

Most do, but if you think yours won't then go live in a small town or a city. Citing Breezewood as a problem with American society is simply idiotic. It's a tiny aberration that doesn't effect you or anybody else except for the handful of weirdos who choose to live there.

I read the image as a visualization of why it feels hostile, to a suburban child, to walk to a point of gathering or "third place." For many suburban children, this kind of intersection is fairly representative of the closest points of interest to their home, accessible only by car via highways.

You are wrong. It's absolutely not representative. Closet point of interest would be a suburban park/playground.

Maybe to a very young child that is an interesting spot, but this kind of intersection certainly was representative of the closest points of interest in the suburb where I spent my middle-school years.

In my experience, older children tended to want to congregate at cafes, Einstein Bagels, etc., especially if coming home after school when the parents aren't home and all one wants is a spot for a hanging out with friends over a snack. Also, a park being a gathering place assumes ample tree cover and good weather, missing during most of the the academic year. Meanwhile, at least in the American southwest, a park is unbearably (near 100F) hot in the summer.

I feel like the weather bit is something people forget about.

I live in the southern US and I don't want to go outside most of the year either, because it's miserable.

And I don't have hard data on hand to back it up but it certainly seems to me and my dad that it's hotter, and more often, than it was when we were kids.

In mice !

This.Most suburban communities build in the last 50 years are pretty nice. Almost no traffic, sidewalks everywhere, safe to ride a bike or walk your dog. If you have businesses in the community it brings traffic and noise. Much nicer to separate residential and commercial.

So it's safe to walk and ride your bike, but you have nothing close by worth biking or walking to? Sounds counter productive. What do you do, bike in circles?

Or my guess: you have to drive everywhere. Hence no autonomy for the kids.

That's exactly what I like to do. Cycle around the neighborhood, look at people'e beautiful front yards. But kids can also bike or walk to school or visit their friends in walking/cycling distance.

  "" You can bike around any time you like  
  But you can never leave ""
  - The Eagles, almost

What suburbs are you talking about? Whenever I see the topic discussed here, people always seem to be referring to some strawman neighborhood surrounded by desert and highway. And maybe that's true out west where land is sparse, but all the suburbs I've known have been places like Abington, PA. Look at it from street view. There's plenty of sidewalks, detached houses, shops and restaurants, big chain stores, small mom and pop stores, and train stations that take you downtown. You can start from anywhere on that map and make it to a supermarket within 20 minutes of walking.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Abington,+PA

You complain about people cherry-picking an unfriendly suburb, and then cherry-pick a friendly one. There are both types, and it's basically pure luck (as a kid) if you happen to live in a friendly one.

I didn't cherry pick anything. I'm just saying that no suburb I've ever seen fits the strawman description. And I've looked at plenty of them up and down the Northeast corridor.

"suburbia" generally refers to areas that were built out in the last 70 years, not towns that are 300+ years old

> If you have businesses in the community it brings traffic and noise

Surely if there's a coffee shop within walking distance, it would reduce traffic as people don't have to drive to get coffee?

Who goes to a coffee shop from home just to get a cup of coffee? Most people can make coffee at home. Coffee shops are more for meetings people or to get coffee on the way to/from work.

Sidewalks vary wildly, often with some nasty history. I grew up in Southern California and and was used to sidewalks pretty much everywhere, rode my bike to school a couple miles away in bike lanes, etc. I thought pretty much the same as you.

Then I moved to the east coast and, wow, there are visible fault lines from white racists losing Brown v. Board & other civil rights cases in the form of these suburbs built between 1950 and maybe 2000 which have no sidewalks, windy layouts designed to discourage visitors and prevent transit, no public pools but private ones, etc. One of my coworkers lives off of a very busy road which has a sidewalk from their neighborhood which ends abruptly a ¼ mile away in front of the house with the Confederate flag whose owner has gone to every meeting for like 40 years arguing that completing the connection to the park & bus stop will lead to a crime spree. Most of these places had racial covenants in the deeds which are no longer enforceable but definitely set a trend for the formative decades.

(This is not to say that California doesn’t have exclusionary suburbs – I used to ride my bike through some of the ones around San Diego where a Caribbean friend only rode when there was a group to vouch for him after he got tired of explaining to the local police why a black dude was on a nice bike – but they tend to be smaller and less inclined to forgo basic civic infrastructure. Even with that experience I was surprised by how widespread it was in a lot of cities we’ve visited from Florida up to Massachusetts)

> If you have businesses in the community it brings traffic and noise. Much nicer to separate residential and commercial.

Completely false. If you have a bunch of small cafes, small scale grocery stores, etc, it brings no traffic. It reduces traffic because now people walk instead of driving to those places. I used to live in a suburb that somehow managed to grandfather in a small convenience store. It was great. I went to the grocery store less because when I ran out of bell peppers I just walked to the store. We drove way less.

Now I live in the inner city a few blocks from a thriving commercial district and there's hardly any cars. I have no idea why people actually believe this. Our neighborhood is pitch silent at night.

> Most suburban neighborhoods have low traffic and plenty of places to ride your bike

Until you actually try to go anywhere and find that you cant't without riding through an arterial road with heavy dangerous traffic. The quiet suburban roads don't form a network that allows you to go to actual destinations.

Here in Toronto they are trying to address that by building (a few) cycle tracks running parallel to these horrible arterial roads, but it's still an awful experience. There are a few quiet greenways without any motor traffic, but they don't help you reach any destination.

Neighborhoods that were built before the advent of the car are more amenable to cycling.

While you can't get very far, you can still get to a park on those streets, which is what OP was talking about. There are generally enough kids in the neighborhood that you can find someone to play with of about your age.

Of course the kids need to go outside to meet those other kids (and the other kids need to go out as well), and parents need to let kids out of their sight to go to the park.

My kids can't even go to their (suburban) school by bike because they can't get there without riding on a road for part of the way. That's a direct consequence of car-centric urban planning.

These low-density car-dependent suburbs provide a very poor experience for everybody outside a car, from children/teens who can't drive yet to people who are trying to get to a destination (work, shop, library, restaurant, etc.) without a car.

> There are generally enough kids in the neighborhood that you can find someone to play with of about your age.

Is there? This is actually a problem. In many neighborhoods, especially in the nicest areas where people are richer, there are fewer and fewer kids. Today, there are significantly fewer kids than adults. Just a few decades ago, kids outnumbered adults in many neighborhoods.

I mean this really matters. If you have a community of 40 families and twenty kids, there's hardly any kids that can actually play with each other. They're probably too different in age, to have groups of more than 2 or 3, and that's a stretch because if you only have two or three there's a significant chance you may not get along / might not be super-interested.

There are loads of communities outside the GTA which are largely post-war and are still exceptionally bikable. Collingwood, Guelph, Orangeville, Owen Sound, Brantford - even Hamilton comes to mind. I don’t think Ontario is a great example of your heuristic here, if anything it demonstrates the opposite. Those cities are only bikable _because_ of the wide, smooth roads necessitated by cars.

"The quiet suburban roads don't form a network that allows you to go to actual destinations"

Why not? Mine sure did.

Sounds like Toronto suffers from L.A.'s problem: It's an asinine mess where you're going town a street and then... it dead-ends into a house. It's irritating as shit. None of the streets go anywhere.

Some L.A. apologists were offended by facts. Shocker. They'd rather kill the messenger than stand up for a better reality.

Breezewood, PA is basically a flag for american new urbanists to wave at each other, a rallying cry of what not to repeat.

Funny, too, because I'd only driven through the place twice but it was still enough of a core memory for me to recognize it right away the first time I'd seen it used in this kind of article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breezewood,_Pennsylvania

At this point that picture is standard operating procedure for the people who endlessly pontificate on the "evils" of suburbs. They always post it, or use it in their YouTube videos, or whatever else. At this point if you see it, you almost always know the content of the argument that will follow, and can just ignore it

> The average American will spend over six months of their life behind a traffic light.

Yeah if you spent 8 hours a day at a light! I think somebody applied the *60 operation twice…

Yes it’s well known that children in dense walkable mixed use cities such as New York spend all their time outside.

In downtown Tokyo it’s normal to see school children walking the streets on their own. Not everywhere is a penal colony like the USA is.

If this was the goal of the America-haters, then maybe they won after all.

The major problem here is capitalism.

Car-centrism in urban design wasn't an accident. It was intentional to create indebted workers who now needed to borrow money to buy cars and houses. 30 year mortgage are a relatively new phenomenon.

Likewise, we have people working 2 or 3 jobs to make ends meet. This again is intentional to extract even more surplus labor value from people. This comes at the cost of people spending time outside of work, including with their families.

Destruction of community is a side effect of this and that too is intentional.

A much more minor point that is worth mentioning is that there are a lot of people who have children who don't actually like children. Or they want adult children without going through all the steps to get there. These are people who will intentionally work late to avoid chaos at home or have really time-consuming hobbies (eg distance running) that take them out of the home for significant periods of time.

Some of this I can attribute to the insecurity of not being able to provide for material needs. And that's the part capitalism plays.

I don't really buy it. It's not like capitalism is something new in the US. Blaming the change on something that's always been there is not really a good argument. Besides car-centrism isn't inherently needed either in a capitalistic society. You can live your whole life in a lot of capitalist countries without a car

Times change.

Feudalism existed for centuries until it fell to capitalism.

Prior to WW2 there was a strong labor movement in the US. There was a reason the US was paranoid about communists. Abraham Lincoln was basically a Marxist in this sense [1][2]. That's how far right things have shifted, particularly since Ronald Reagan.

The Red Scare dstroyed any sense of class consciousness people had and neoliberalism ran wild. This doesn't happen overnight.

[1]: https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/lincoln-abraham_on...

[2]: https://www.openculture.com/2022/01/how-karl-marx-influenced...

Here is the full speech for reference, but Abraham Lincoln was far from a Marxist given that he describes essentially the American dream of starting from nothing to build your own enterprise.

"Again, as has already been said, there is not of necessity any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life. Many independent men everywhere in these States a few years back in their lives were hired laborers. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just and generous and prosperous system which opens the way to all, gives hope to all, and consequent energy and progress and improvement of condition to all."

[1]:https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeche...

He's talking about workers owning the means of production. That's straight socialism. Small businesses are socialist. Family farms are socialist. It's large companies that become capitalist as the workers become further and further removed from the means of production.

Also, Lincoln is talking about the master-apprentice relationship common in trades. We've seen such arrangements erode in our society. Now we expect people to take out student loans and fund their own education and then spend years paying off that debt.

Lincoln's approach is, at a minimum, collectivist.

I don't get how any of this is related to a car dependent society.

Abraham was certainly not a marxist. Even if he was wasn't really the question of car dependency on the agenda during his time.

The US isn't the only capitalistic country. I live in Sweden for example where car dependency isn't really an issue for people in small tows/suburbs

Given that the alternative has typically wound up as tofu-dreg towers or khrushchevkas, I think capitalist suburbs are the lesser evil.

I don't think capitalism is the problem here, it's government policies. Zoning codes which only permit low density development and require parking spaces encourage car centrism, and all the problems you mentioned. If these codes were changed to allow for more density and no parking minimums, the free market would be free to determine the optimum density and required parking for an area.

These articles are always idiotic by nature because they are solutions in search of problems.

The suburbs are not and have never been a problem for kids. There are plenty of other kids in the suburbs to play with and far more room to do things than you will ever find in an urban area. I don't want to live in a fucking cave right up next to my neighbor and I won't as long as I can afford it.

Why is it that we've got tens of millions of examples of people who grew up in the suburbs and fucking loved their childhoods, but these dimwits keep on pushing urbanism as a panacea to a problem that only ever exists if parents allow it?

I grew up in the suburbs during the 80s and early 90s. My childhood was to wake up at 6ish, watch some cartoons, and then get locked outside the house except for lunch or a snack. I rode my bike, played sports, played in makeshift forts, went fishing, and went hunting. I would show up again when the sun started going down. That was my day, every day that the weather wasn't bad.

My dad usually dominated the TV during the evenings, and so my time was spent playing or reading or doing homework. We didn't have a lot of money, but I did have a bunch of hand-me-down lego sets, and I would create Transformers and other toys with the lego pieces. My dad had old military blankets which I would use to create forts, or alternatively, mountains to drive my Hot Wheels cars through. I would just pile them up and shove my arms through them to create tunnels. And I'd play video games, but that time was limited and on a 13 inch black and white TV.

Was it perfect? No. My parents were emotionally abusive at times. But I had to meet my friends every day in person and I had to learn how to get along with them and their parents and families. I couldn't just toss a tablet on a bed when I had an issue with GoatHumper666. Sometimes that was arguments. Sometimes that was fights. But we were all we had and we would make up at the end of the day.

Go talk to a teacher. Ask them how the kids are doing today. They're all ultra-self-entitled. A bunch of little princes and princesses who won't listen to teachers because they have no incentive to do so. The school systems will push their little unsocialized, imagination-bereft asses along and the teachers themselves are powerless to discipline them in any way that actually matters. A bunch of children being raised by screens because their parents are distracted by screens and the teachers who are forced to attempt to deal with all of their pent up energy when they can't look at those same screens.

So, a for profit company that has the sole purpose of taking taking money from people and sponsors in order to create "think pieces" about walkable cities, pushes a propaganda piece with a major premise being that our suburbs are bad for kids because of our reliance on cars.

However .. the entire premise instantly falls apart when you ask why we didn't have the same problem in the past when we were even MORE based around cars than we are today.

> CNU is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization headquartered in Washington, DC.

At what point in the past was America more dependent on cars, especially for children and youths?

when delivery wasn't a button away.

I don't have a problem with the cynicism about the article... but as for not having the problem in the past - Rush: Subdivisions was effectively a pop culture essay on this problem from 1982.

"Subdivisions" is a song about a nerdy kid finding it hard to fit in, and the similarity of the houses in large developments is treated as a metaphor for the limited range of identities kids could adopt if they didn’t want to be socially excluded. The song says nothing about kids finding it hard to play together, because in lyricist Neil Peart’s childhood all the way to the 1990s, children were finding things to do together in those suburbs regardless. Moreover, the perspective of the song is a high-school one (“…in the basement bars, in the backs of cars…”, plus see the music video), not younger children.

Sounds a lot like the themes of Malvina Reynolds - Little Boxes (1961).

(Some) People just don't like those cookie cutter conformity machines.

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