Children need risk, fear, and excitement in play
afterbabel.com
afterbabel.com
I know exactly what they mean by fear, excitement and risk. It was fun while it was dangerous yet it was extremely rare for a kid to fall off and be hurt.
I fondly remember those steel bars polished by countless human hands like it was yesterday.
I don’t know what’s there now. Probably a big sign that says “Your parents made you a pussy”
But I don't think the thing that spoiled them are the safe the playgrounds; it's the constant access to computers, tablets, the internet, Youtube, etc. In my day you had to wait until Wednesday or Saturday to get your cartoon fix. Nowadays there's instant gratification and constant passive entertainment. They're not bored anymore, they have no need to be inventive. I suspect that's a bigger problem than safe playgrounds.
Do you yourself still climb trees?
I still do and my small kids do, too.
But perhaps once these practices begin to be reversed, people will feel that it's terrifying that the children are suddenly independent and not incredibly passive and cowardly.
/hint: I'm lying.
There was a particularly dangerous piece of playground equipment that the kids called the “witch’s hat,” which was a 15’ or so tall round central metal pipe maybe 3-4” in diameter, which had a cap on the top that could freely spin. Attached to the cap were maybe 12 10’ chains attached, which linked to a giant octagon or decagon made out of 1-2” or so straight pipe sections which were fitted together in angle brackets. It was essentially an inverted merry go round which you would need a few kids on opposing sides to operate, all running in the same direction. It would cause a kind of wave as the weight distribution shifted as kids were lifted off the round while hanging on, and then your side would come back down and you would hit the ground running while hanging on for dear life.
Some kid flew off and broke their collarbone and they ended up soft-banning it except when the teachers weren’t looking, and eventually they decommissioned it. It was a sad day on the playground when that happened.
But it is also, according to the same dictionary, defined as "a cat" as well as "a timid and cowardly person (typically used of a man)." It turns out that words can have more than one meaning and is pretty clear, given the context, that the last definition is the one at play here.
If there is any kind of conflation happening, it is only you that has done the conflating. If you don't like your behaviour, just don't do it? Seems pretty simple. No need to tell us about it.
Cool, but the dictionary provides record of the prevailing use of words, and it is clear that the original comment was said in the same vein as how most people define it – "a timid and cowardly person (typically used of a man)". There was no association with female body parts (or cats, for that matter) made in the original comment. Whatever pet definition found in your community may be is irrelevant here.
> I suggest asking the women in your life how they feel about the term
I'll be sure to ask the cats in my life while I'm at it...
You know what is useless and complains loudly at the first sign of damage? Testicles.
"Are you scared of that, you massive testicle?"
Then they removed it, because the local council was afraid some kid might get hurt.
It's sad.
See https://www.americanparkscompany.com/playground-equipment/co... or https://www.gametime.com/playground-equipment/gt-wave for examples.
It off gassed for a tiny bit iirc, but once it was open it was fine.
He learned his lesson!
And we didn't sue, because kids can be dumbasses and will always find ways to hurt themselves. If he wasn't jumping off a 5' tall jungle gym, he'd be doing backflips out of swings or jumping from tree to tree or something else that doesn't make any sense to adults with fully developed brains.
You say this as a virtue, and I get it. But this shouldn't even be a possibility.
A few problems I see:
1) Very few people take personally responsibility for their choices [kudos to you]
2) Someone always has to be at blame, there can't just be accidents
3) Scrupulous lawyers looking for paydays.
4) Local governments pay out somewhat easily for accidents [see NYC]
5) Tort reform is not popular due to lobbying.
Like, a two story jungle gym probably shouldn't exist. But a "normal" shoulder height version? Sure, I have no problem with that.
But I also let my son skateboard several miles across town to get to middle school, so I'm obviously crazy and a terrible parent. /s
I mean, it's just a number right? So how many kids does a playground need to kill every year before you'd say "oh, maybe we should nerf the monkey bars"?
Time-and-time again is see the masses have zero idea how many people are getting killed regularly until the stats are put in front of them. We assume it's small, but often non-negligible, like the fact that there are 11 drowning deaths every single day: https://www.cdc.gov/drowning/facts/index.html
We can have swimming pools were kids drown. If a bunch of kids are drowning, we can require a locked gate around the pool, so that children cannot enter without supervision. If kids keep drowning, we could require pool covers that need to be removed before use.
The point isn't to remove autonomy, the point is to require everyone to admit that preventable mistakes happen, and we need to take reasonable precautions "for our own good."
The best analogy is ticketing cars that block fire hydrants when "popping into to a store real quick." We know that universalizing that habit will cause fires grow where they wouldn't otherwise, and people could die because of it. However, when the fire truck eventually shows up, the person blocking the hydrant will respond with "what are the odds." We know the odds are low, but non-zero, but the negative payoffs are extreme, that's why we need to always take precautions.
I read somewhere that propensity to war is proportional to the average age of a society. I think the same phenomenon applies to acceptance of risk in child behaviour but now related to fertility rate.
- I can only assume that if a kid doesn't have an older sibling "to keep an eye on them" the parents take this role, and parents tend to be more risk-adverse and responsible caretakers than siblings.
- I've never lived in the American suburbs, but they don't seem very dense. I know that, growing up in Mexico, the kid density was great. Some of it probably has to do with the fact everyone had siblings. Matching ages with nearby neighbors is more likely when there's more kids too. We were outside all the time, older siblings introduced younger ones to the crowd. Friendships were made, broken and fixed. Adventures were had. More than once we got into situations that I knew my mom wouldn't be happy about too.
This hypothesis doesn't make sense, because all children were treated differently many decades ago, and by pure math the most common type of child is the first born. Every family no matter the size has a firstborn child, who by definition has no older sibling to keep an eye on them. The fact is that parents were just less hovering helicopters in the past. I can attest to this as firstborn myself.
I understand the sentiment you're trying to convey but I have to point out that's only true if the average family size is less than 2. The second it hits a full 3 that's very obviously untrue and most cultures in the past definitely had averages above 3.
Only under a very uncharitable misunderstanding of what I said. If the categories are simply "first born" and "not first born", then first born ceases to be the most common as family size increases. But if the categories are "first born", "second born", "third born", etc., then first born never ceases to be the most common. And as I said, "Every family no matter the size has a firstborn child, who by definition has no older sibling to keep an eye on them", so it hasn't been explained why parents were less risk-adverse in the past toward firstborn children (who have no older silbings to keep an eye on them). Every parent past and present had to deal with a firstborn.
People also seem to have fewer kids if they have them. That implies fewer cousin interactions like I had and also all those things you mentioned never happen. It's unbelievably sad.
Don't read the above as kids were allowed to do anything. They were cared for, but it wasn't as close as modern families would care for them. If the kid is mostly safe that is good enough.
But if you have ten kids, you won't be able to pay as much attention to each one as if you only had one, so even if you're perfect you'll have the kids doing more things without the parents knowing.
From there, it seems the single biggest remaining factor is malaria.
(50% feels about right given reading accounts of "back then" and browsing graveyards)
On the first child, parents are still learning. They're risk conscious and worry about everything. On the second child, they've picked up a few specific fears ("What if Alice gets hit in the head while horse-riding like Bob did?") and stopped stressing about the others. On children three and four they've got much more experience and just don't worry about things as much.
With larger families, this attitude would come to be reflected by society as a whole. With smaller families, parents don't make it past the first and second child so often, and they never stop worrying.
There's no actual empirical evidence for this pop psychological theory, and it's certainly not my experience as a firstborn way back in the day. Moreover, we're not talking about babies, who of course need to be coddled. The issue is with kids who are old enough for unsupervised play, by which time the parents are already experienced, literally 10+ years of parenting experience, and if they have two kids, they've likely had both before one of them is old enough for unsupervised play, at most maybe five years apart.
In fact, parents are more likely to forget than they are to learn. It's not like they've never encountered kids before in their lives. They were kids themselves! They just need to remember what it was like for them as kids. The hardest part is taking care of infants, because you generally don't remember what it was like to be an infant, so infants are somewhat more mysterious than older kids.
Anyway, I'm not denying your specific experience. It all depends on the time and the place and the parents, and those can all be different. I'm not even denying that firstborns may be treated a little differently than later children. What I am denying is that firstborn risk consciousness can explain a major societal shift in childrearing attitudes. In general, firstborn children 50 years ago were given much more personal freedom than even later children today, despite the fact that "GenX" was a smaller generation in population with few siblings.
> children's birth order and family size are consistently related to styles of parenting (i.e., levels of control and levels of warmth) which are known to influence achievement directly (Baumrind, 1767, 1971; Dornbusch, et al., 1987; Paulson, 1994; Steinberg, et al., 1789). For example, firstborn children have rated parents higher on behaviors such as parental control (Schaller, 1978) and parental strictness (Rule, 1991) than later-born children
The pop-science explanation may or may not be true, but the underlying fact that later children get a different parenting style has supporting evidence.
1) Kids and parents have differing perceptions of the parenting style: "Birth-order and family-size differences were found in adolescents' achievement and perceptions of parenting style and parental involvement but not in parents' perceptions of parenting." Thus, your statement "the underlying fact that later children get a different parenting style" doesn't actually seem to be a fact.
2) Parenting style, whether it actually differed or not among children, didn't seem to explain the differences in archievement: "these parenting characteristics did not mediate the differences seen in achievement by birth order and family size."
This seems unlikely. I had only one sibling, but way back when I was young we were given free rein. And we were latchkey kids, because both parents were working. The only rule was that you had to be home in time for dinner, but otherwise we were completely unsupervised after school and could roam anywhere our feet or bicycles could take us. Everyone was like this at the time, all of the kids, regardless of family size. My next door neighbor and good friend was an only child. IIRC most of my friends had one sibling at most.
I think what's changed is the media fearmongering about the dangers to kids. Crap like America's Most Wanted freaked out parents, massively damaging our collective psyche. Also, the rise of the internet has given ultra-judgmental cranks a platform to spread their opinions about child rearing and tut-tut any parent who isn't a helicopter. Indeed, ultra-judgmental internet cranks have practically taken over every aspect of society now.
Even if your smaller family and others like it had a more relaxed approach to parenting, no doubt that was in part due to the culture of the time where people generally had larger families.
The collective media fearmongering that is persistent nowadays is only popular because most people accept the narrative. This could easily be because today they generally have one or two children whereas when you grew up that was not the norm and such ideas would not have been popular.
Nope. If you think about it, GenX was the smallest of the recent generations, despite Boomers being a large generation (hence their name), so family sizes had already shrunk dramatically before the more recent phenomenon of helicopter parenting. "Gen Xers were sometimes called the "latchkey generation", which stems from their returning as children from school to an empty home and needing to use a key to let themselves in. This was a result of what is now called free-range parenting, plus increasing divorce rates, and increased maternal participation in the workforce prior to widespread availability of childcare options outside the home." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X
As far as I remember, almost all of my peers had only one sibling at most. Families of two children or even one child were extremely common at the time.
By the way, the reason that people had larger families in the past wasn't because kids died and needed to be replaced. It was because they didn't have birth control.
Once you fix that, kids are going to be kids.
The solution, of course, is technology and drones ;)
Well, actually you're not totally off. Having more kids (we have three, more on the way hopefully) definitely lowers the pressure on individual ones. But moreover, and more importantly, seeing our friends with large families (5+), the biggest reason the kids can play is that the older siblings are there. When we get together with a few other families of that size, the oldest kids are like 8 - 10 (i.e., old enough to let us know if the littles are in serious trouble). It's really easy to let your kids go play in the woods by themselves if you trust the older ones to run and tell you if something is wrong. Bonus points for having multiple families with the same arrangement so one can tell you something is wrong while the group is still 'supervised'.
My eldest girl (one of the youngest in the group) is convinced that the older kids are still 'kids', but she also naturally listens to them despite having a dominant personality herself. Thus, she gets to have fun with them, while we are happy the kids have some sense in the group.
So from my perspective I think the following is true:
1. Most people have one or two kids. This makes the child density very low. Parents today have to actually work to get their kids around other kids.
2. The way cities are set up makes it hard for kids to interact. While we live in a walkable neighborhood and some of our friends with large families do too, they're unfortunately not well connected except by car, so my wife or I have to make an effort to see them. Luckily, we're good friends with the parents, but otherwise this would make it difficult.
3. Schooling artificially limits the age range kids are exposed to. Obviously, you only get kids your age in your class, but because of (1), even if you got to know their siblings, you still only get one more age, and siblings are likely to not be super far apart.
4. Yes, parents certainly feel more trepidation when they've invested everything into one kid, versus investing everything into multiple kids. I don't see how anyone can honestly doubt this. I don't even think it's callous. Just reality.
I mean, I saw it with my grandparents, who had more kids than my parents did. They were easily taken care of in their old age by the multiple children they had, whereas by choosing a smaller family (not totally their choice), my parents put a much greater burden on my brother and I (mostly me, since I live closer). That's just the truth of the thing.
I've been around horse barns for many years. Rode today. It's not a kids thing any more. Most of the riders are not only adults, but older adults. Few kids take riding lessons. The old ponies are under-used.
Fifteen years ago, the ponies were usually being ridden or groomed by girls in their early teens. We used to see groups of kids go out on the trails unsupervised. That was normal. The kids would go out for an hour or so. Nobody does that any more.
Now, if there's a kid around, it's usually because the parent is a horse person. Barns that teach kids are very organized. Kids are never out of sight of an adult. Usually the parents sit there and watch.
It's sad. Kids that grow up around horses tend not to have trouble with bullies. After you're used to dealing with half-ton, somewhat pushy animals with huge teeth and steel-shod hooves, big guys just don't look that big.
Outside of regions with horse culture, it's definitely a rich man's hobby.
Riding is like 1/4 of the whole time spent with the animal.
I can't really say "her horse" as he wasn't the type that would listen to commands.
It's really nothing like having an inanimate object, like a bicycle.
A horse emits an average of two tonnes of carbon emissions a year [1], comparable to that of a car [2].
The full picture gets complicated when you account for vehicle fuel, horse diet, age of vehicle/horse, land use, storage etc. But in general it's fair to say that horses are broadly similar to cars in carbon impact.
Compare both with pedal bicycles, where impacts are effectively negligible [3]
[1] https://www.yourhorse.co.uk/news/agria-hoofprint-calculator/ [2] https://www.ageco.co.uk/useful-articles/car/what-are-the-co2... [3] https://keith.seas.harvard.edu/blog/climate-impacts-biking-v...
adding this to my list of thing to look into if I ever have a daiughter.
This is mostly rhetorical; the point is the constant (necessary) risk calculus is draining, and parents are rational to err on the side of caution.
It has been observed that most public spaces in America are default adult spaces where children are only tolerated. It follows most public spaces will tend to have adult levels of hazard and risk.
This all has 2 psychological effects: when parents feel like they’re just barely keeping this teetering lifestyle from falling over, they become very controlling. Tight control becomes the name of the game: it’s how everything’s done and anyway no one has the time or energy for the unexpected.
Also, when the child represents a gargantuan investment, people become realty protective over their fragile prize. Like a luxury car that you can barely afford: all protective measures will be taken.
Also biologically your whole legacys survival lies on one kid.
Naturally you'd expect this to result in a much higher base level of fear, as compared to when your community was just people you knew and trusted personally.
2. Children used to die all the time from various causes. I remember e.g. the case of Mozart who had just one surviving sibling and 5 who died early. I can't imagine what the parents had to go through - their first 3 children died early. You have to become desensitized to not go crazy.
2. Social status / value of children grew a lot.
Probably 90% of kids in the US live boxed in a relatively small area by roads that are 50ft+ (if not 80ft) wide with 40mph speed limits so that huge vehicles are actually traveling at 50mph driven by people looking at their phone.
In addition, the density of kids is far less. A single street light only have a handful of kids, and probably not all the same age. A neighborhood might have a bunch, but not enough for the kids to mingle.
Plus many send their kids to daycare or afterschool activities. I spend $20k per year per toddler just so they can interact with other toddlers.
Children can find out that rocks hurt through trial and error throwing pebbles at their friends, and they will figure it out. They are instinctively wary of things like snakes.
But the threat posed by electrical sockets, stovetops, cars, bleach, power tools, and so forth are not forgiving to experimentation and not instinctive.
Parents these days aren't rational at all. They worry about protecting the physical nature of the child and leave their development and ability to accurately assess risk on their own as an afterthought. That's how you perpetuate failure: with children who grow up while never possessing the life experience necessary to properly raise kids of their own. The world simply isn't that fucking scary.
At least they learned how to cross the street safely at a young age. That's the one bit of independence that stuck.
This is what my grandparents did to my mom and aunts and uncles when they were growing up during the 60s and 70s. They weren't allowed back inside before dinner, but they had to return by sunset.
They were used to it, and spent their time playing in the woods and playing games with the neighborhood kids.
Nowadays, if you kicked them outside the house, they'd probably just have each other to play with, because kids don't play outside as much.
They aren't worried about the child. Anyone with a typical five year old knows they'll be able to cross the neighbourhood just fine.
What they are actually worried about what other adults will think the five year old is seen out alone.
That they aren't worried about the child is just an irrational statement. If there was nothing to worry about, then there's no reason to keep the kid cooped up out of public sight.
Yeah, it’s nonsensical, but such is people. Similar to why most people aren’t having children in their sexual prime, instead waiting until they are of geriatric age. The harsh reality is that society says it’s wrong to have children “young” and ostracizes anyone who does. Just ask any teenage mother about the scorn they had to deal with.
Thousands of years ago most people didn't have time to sit around and evaluate what other people, especially those outside of the immediate tribe, do. Back then, life was actually hard. Only the richest kings could even begin to live in that kind of luxury. And even up until around the 1950s, most people lived rurally, so the kids weren't apt to leave the property anyway – if they did, who was going to see it? Not to mention that there wasn't the "You must go to university or you will ruin your life" nonsense that has emerged in the past ~30 years. Hell, in my grandparents time, it was uncommon to even go to high school. Back then, growing up and having children was celebrated, not featured on MTV with a show that tries to convince people to remain children for life.
The times have changed and the people have adjusted accordingly. When the public welcomes children back into the world, the parents will let their children back out into the world. But so long as the passive onlookers who don't know how to think rationally or keep their mouth shut believe that children should be nothing more than porcelain dolls that are there only to hang on the shelf for guests to admire...
I suppose it's a Nietzsche thing; the "Death of God" turns us into "The Last Man".
When my sister and I were growing up, we were given our independence in different areas at different ages: it was a matter of when we felt confident doing those things unsupervised and when we earned our parents' trust. As a general rule, I got to do responsibility-based tasks (like stay home alone, pick my own bedtime, and set my own homework schedule) at an earlier age than my sister, but she got to do physically risky tasks (like use knives, use the stove, and play high-risk sports) at an earlier age than me.
In all cases, it was a gradual process: they guided us, then they let us try while they watched, then they let us try while they were on hand if we called out for help, then they let us do it alone. Each step took as long as they (or we) felt was needed.
My parents are both highly anxious/cautious people, so I know it wasn't easy for them to give us these freedoms, but they understood intellectually that it was vital that we practice for adulthood well before we were suddenly on our own. They knew they only had a few short years to teach us how to survive independently of them.
It must have been a lot of work for them, but we were planned children (not accidents) and they put a lot of thought into how they wanted to raise us.
Nowadays middle-class people tend to have just one or two children, they literally cannot afford the space or childrearing costs for more - for lower classes eligible for government assistance such as the un(der)employed the situation does look different as society picks up large parts of the tab. Additionally, ever rising requirements in employment criteria make it necessary to invest more and more into their education: up until maybe 2-3 decades ago, even a school dropout could work in construction, a factory, retail, farm or mine and make a relatively decent living. But these jobs have largely gone away to China/India or to automation, so the few employment options for "undereducated" people are highly contested.
And so, the kid must turn out perfect: there is no room for the kid to make mistakes, especially not ones that endanger their career prospects, and hence all the helicopter parenting.
On top of all of that come decades of media/politician "fear brainwashings" (aka, the "pedo child-snatcher van" myth), as well as the legitimate collapse of a high-trust society (homeless, drunk and mentally ill people literally everywhere in major cities; police simply not enforcing laws any more).
Sure they can. Early North American settlers lived in tiny, one room log cabins, and raised those 3+ children in them just fine. Homes that small are not even allowed in most jurisdictions these days. The middle class have way more space to work with these days.
Let's face it, the reality is that middle class people just don't want children. It's not 'cool' to have children. Society says you need a career instead, and so that's what most people buy into and turn their attention towards.
Just having your children learning to swim costs 1000 euro!
Sure, but... who wants to go back to the days of the early settlers "living" in such conditions? We're in 2024, not 1607 after all. As a species, as a society we should progress, not regress. Just because our ancestors had to live in filth, it doesn't mean we have to as well.
> Let's face it, the reality is that middle class people just don't want children. It's not 'cool' to have children.
Anecdata ahead: many of my relatively middle-ish class friends want children but no one can afford them - the biggest road block is of course housing (the market is completely dead here in Germany - sales aren't happening because everyone fears the market correction / to realize a value depreciation, and rentals are routinely at 300+ interested candidates for a single apartment), but also a lack of stable career perspective: academia is a shitshow of limited-term contracts anyway, government doesn't pay anywhere near enough to be competitive with the private sector (usually about 60-70%, but IT and legal staff <<40%), NGOs pay even less than government, and the only way to get raises in the private sector outside of highly competitive unionized shops is to regularly churn companies which has the downside you're the first one to be on the chop block in case of layoffs.
Back in '91 when I was born, a lowly police officer could support a family on his own, even in a big city like Munich. Nowadays? Completely impossible.
It's what kind of risk we're talking about. When I'm supervising my 4-year-old, I definitely want to prevent him from getting life-altering brain trauma. But if he falls and breaks his arm? Certainly worth warning him about, but in the end he'll be fine, and giving him the choice to take that risk is part of his development.
I let him use the battery-powered electric drill (under close supervision), because he's shown that he's careful, and the worst that can could happen is he get some skin abrasions. He's not getting anywhere near the circular saw until he's a lot older.
When first hearing about it sounded just a bit extreme, but the moreI read about it the darker and gloomer it gets, and it's a phenomenon that is having a deep impact on the whole Korean society's future.
Thank you for posting this. I was thinking of going for a vacation to Korea _with kids_, and now I don’t think I will.
Can’t imagine needing to explain to my well-behaved 8-year old that, no, we can’t go to some place we’d want to go, because other kids can’t behave. This should totally be illegal.
When I grew up the road by my grandparents house was wide and empty and you could see anything coming a mile away and drivers could see the kids playing just as well.
Now it has been redesigned to be a cluttered mess to "discourage speeding" even adding parking spots to reduce the width of the road. You could drive through it at walking speed and still wouldn't see a kid trying to cross the road before it popped out from behind a car right in front of you.
Ideally they'd add parking protected bike lanes
Nobody swims in my pool without a buddy. Ever.
The point being is that there is no algorithm to sort this out. I would trust a young teen [just an example] to swim alone if they have demonstrated good risk behavior and swimming experience.
Nope. No buddy, no swimming. I don't even swim alone, even though I know chances are it would be fine 99% of the time.
> The point being is that there is no algorithm to sort this out.
Sure there is.
if swimmer_cout < 2:
throw NoSwimException
I think that's a great example of what I think of as the distinction between safetyism and preparedness: the former is all about no fun allowed in the presence of any level of risk whatsoever, with no rational consideration of likelihood and mitigating factors, while the latter is about doing fun stuff while taking reasonable procautions to mitigate realistic dangers. It's not going backpacking at all vs. taking a first aid class and bringing the ten essentials.
Awesome. We're going to the quarry, and we're going to jump off the cliff over 10 feet of rock into the water.
Bring a case of Meister Brau.
That said, I think the argument about how fears are misplaced since now is the most safe time to be a kid is bad.
> And it is widely believed that the world is no longer a safe place for children to play in. Yet statistics show that it has never been a safer time to be a child. Injury-related deaths are at an all-time low in most Western nations. In the US, deaths from unintentional injuries fell by 73% for boys and 85% for girls between 1973 and 2010. This misperception of risk creates the parental paradox.
This doesn't make much sense. Parents have mass migrated to a different style of parenting. In the same period life has gotten much safer for children. Therefore we should revert to the older style of parenting and not be afraid that the risks will return?
I think this cause is really hurting itself with this kind of weak argument.
> This is the most dangerous time to be a pedestrian in over 40 years.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/04/us/dangerous-time-pedestrian-...
I would love for my daughter to get to roam the neighborhood like I roamed mine. But despite choosing one of the safest, lowest-traffic neighborhoods in our city - with 25 mph speed limits - I still regularly see drivers flying by at twice that, in a lifted truck, with a phone in front of their face.
And second issue is that they do NOT engage with other host of issues that limit outside play. For example, unsupervised playing kids are annoying to many unrelated adults - and adults who strongly dislike kids and want to exclude them from everywhere are very common. Or, simple fact that just meeting friends often requires in advance agreed upon play date and a drive by car. Or, simple fact that before you was bored in your room and outside had things to do, nowdays you have fun stuff at home (computer, tablet, phone) and outside has not much to do above the age of 7.
Half of this feels like fighting fear by adding new dangers and threats to the equation. Hey, not only you need to add risk, if you dont your kid will have serious mental health issues. Hey, lets worry simultaneously about risk taking while doing safe activities while also worrying they dont take enough risk.
Things are made “safe” because there is now always a risk of getting sued when stuff happens.
It would never happen in my neighborhood.
I believe it's now illegal in some jurisdictions.
This is so true it could be physics.
We dismiss nutrition studies with more evidence. The standard of evidence doesn't chabge just because we want it to be true.
For example, I believe the current rise in mental health issues is due to smartphone use. But I admit that's only a theory.
Seems great, and I think most of us enjoyed it, but the kids who really got ahead in life stayed inside studying.
Fast forward several decades, I raised some kids of my own and by and large we let them have a lot of a fun. That said, the stakes are so much higher these days that it is impractical to give kids total freedom. The long-term costs and lost opportunity is just way too high.
I'm curious, could you expand on this? In what ways are the stakes higher?
Now, there are pretty much two groups: 1. the top-top-top of both your class and your entire region, with above a 4.0GPA, with all the expected community service and extracurriculars, and so on, who end up in elite schools and prestigious careers, and 2. everyone else, who end up scrapping with each other over the lower-and-lower paying jobs and more tenuous future. There's no middle anymore.
To put this in American terms, is it really the end of the world to just earn your bachelor's at a solid but not necessarily elite public university? Thereby avoiding the need to "grind" so hard throughout your youth and adolescence? What are the stakes really?
The way I see it, if elite academics is the goal, graduate school is the time to be more selective because at that point one knows where to go based on one's research interests. If entrepreneurship is the dream, then the choice of school doesn't matter much at all! Otherwise, I think there are plenty of great jobs out there that don't require you to have gone to the #1 school in the country.
To be clear, I'm not American so I may just be completely misjudging the apparent importance of choice in school. Also, I likely have different personal priorities than you, so I'm not trying to deny your experience. I just question whether it is _really_ necessary "these days" to optimize childhood around getting into an elite university. I think it's really just a matter of priority.
A lot of things have changed since then. Requirements and competition for positions have increased exponentially just as salaries have skyrocketed in the more technical fields. No surprise there, but that competitive pedigree system has filtered all the way down to primary and secondary education (to say nothing of college systems).
So it is the end of the world? No. But it will cost you tens of thousands of dollars in the near term and perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime in lost potential earnings. Slipping out of the higher level schools can also make it extremely difficult to get into specific companies.
As for entrepreneurship, that’s also subject to the same issues. Sure, anyone can start a company if they want, but if you want to fund that company the path is much easier if you went to Stanford than say Oklahoma State.
I think this is the reason for the childhood/teen mental health epidemic.
If you're not optimizing your child's life, they won't be competitive for jobs or college or whatever in the future.
It's exhausting.
Another path I see are kids who just opt out entirely. They go to that 5th or 6th tier school and are totally unmotivated. This doesn’t hit them early but it will have a long term impact on job prospects and their career arc. This one is actually becoming more common from what I hear.
To me, the real disconnect is happening in high school here in the US where we are still educating kids like it is 1950 (or 1850). Teachers are overworked and underpaid, and the administration is apathetic. All of that can easily combine for a couple of poor grades or missed expectations in extracurricular activities which in turn cut your opportunities when you apply for college. Sounds extreme but that is how it is today and it is why so many parents are overprotective to the point of being manic.
So instead of physically separating her from a hot kettle they just go "it's very hot!" and demonstrate by touching it carefully and then pulling their hand away. They let her play with matches.
She could pick up on these cues long before she could understand words. But it does look exhausting. And there have been some moments (once she was trotting around holding scissors pointing up in the air) where I've thought "no that's too risky and no amount of careful supervision can prevent injury here". She has also burned herself, but only once.
So overall I am pretty impressed, at least in principle, and if I have kids I'll definitely endeavour to try and curb my overprotective instincts.
Kids are smart, if you treat them like little adults instead of little helpless goo goo ga ga babies - they will generally pick up on things. Which actually makes it easier on the parents.
The side effect of this, is that then they might be scared of things that are only slightly hot. But that's something easier and less risky to deal with IMO and they'll eventually understand that there's different levels.
*babies/toddlers have a skin that is a lot more sensitive, so this should be taken into consideration.
As far as I acted on a baseless fear that they were at meaningful risk of stranger kidnapping, I was a stupid father. That's mostly a different kind of bad father but whatever.
The kidnapping thing doesn’t happen like that. Not in the US. It happens to vulnerable families at the border who pay unscrupulous coyotes to bring them over.
Can you elaborate on what was are your grounds for labeling yourself as a bad father?
I mostly label myself a father. There would always have been bad parts but these stand out. They're bad fathering.
As far as grounds for my complaint, my children needed a steady diet of adult free hours. I mostly failed to recognize it, prioritize it and act accordingly.
I have two memories
1) I was playing in my grandfather’s pipe yard with my cousins. Lots of heavy equipment and stuff that was precariously stacked. Very easily could have ended up in a situation were something fell on me and killed me. Instead, I just ran headlong into a rusty pipe and nearly broke my nose.
2) I was in my early teens riding a 3 wheeled ATV. I was going too fast and went into a wash and flipped the machine over me. I didn’t kill myself. Didn’t even get seriously hurt, but easily could have.
I was incredibly lucky to come out of both of those experiences relatively unscathed. It’s not really a tough calculus thinking “well, my daughter doesn’t have an eye anymore, but at least she was having fun!”
I instead encourage my kids to have fun in activities that _feel_ risky but where the chance of life altering injury is low. Like walking on a high brick fence or jumping from a high point into a big deep body of water.
Anyway, as a parent I’m so fucking tired of people trying to tell me how to raise a kid.
60 S Church St https://maps.app.goo.gl/niB4443VK65M8LPB6
Balancing Outdoor Risky Play and Injury Prevention in Childhood Development
Examples:
"Don't sit on the backrest of that chair, it will topple over". "No, that's not true at all, you're wrong!!!" 5 minutes later: Crash. Quiet. Cry. Never done again.
"You cannot build bridges out of sofa cushions between the sofa and the coffee table, it won't support you". "No! I am small! It will hold!" 5 minutes later: Crash. Quiet. Cry. Never done again.
On bicycle: "Drive slower, you have to break!". "No, I like it fast! I cannot fall, my tires are big!" Seconds later: Crash against fence. Quiet. Cry. Now she drives carefully.
In winter: "Be careful on that ice!". "But my new shoes have rubber, dad, they won't slip, don't you know that?!?" Seconds later: Slip. Bamm. Quiet. Cry. Now she knows rubber soles slip on ice.
As long as there is no risk of a serious, life-threatening accident, I have become pretty relaxed. I remember that I constantly had scraped knees and bruises as a child. When I was 7, my grandparents regularly send me to a gas station nearby to buy the paper, and my mother would send me to the supermarket with my 4 year old brother to get groceries. I walked to kindergarten by myself when I was 5.
It’s weakest when it speaks about “risky” play, where the author seems to focus on the excitement & fear etc. that comes from physically risky play. I don’t think physical risk should be a requirement for a robustly healthy childhood play experience. From the article, bemoaning the lack of play in abandoned locations seems fairly absurd, though again some other points are well taken.
I will note one interesting trend that may partially be a product of this desire &/or need for risky play, which is the recent popularity of much more elaborate & diverse videogames in the “sandbox survival crafting” genre. These for me actually do seem to evoke a similar feel to the childhood sense of exploration and creative play. I’m not necessarily proposing these as a solution to what we had decades ago but it may be that just as the “safety” movement didn’t happen overnight, perhaps cultural solutions to fill these same needs will take a bit more time as well.
I grew up in 80's the time where almost everybody played in parks and fields. But I can't give that to my own son of 7.
He has to cross 3 streets to reach a playground 200m from here,the worst of the crossings a street with 50km/h limitsand 1 car every 10 seconds. Not much, except just enough people drive like idiots, 90km/h or more on a road not even 500m long.
We've been teaching him good pedestrian behaviour since he could walk. We've done a few tests where he walked to the baker, thinking he was unsupervised. He probably can do it most of the time. Except, 1 distraction while an idiot drives by will kill him.
So I bring him to the playground and let him play as unsupervised as possible for an adult on the side of a playground. Of course, he knows I am there.
I start working with him with more dangerous tools like a soldering iron. He can deal well enough with these risks. But not the streets.
The problem with statements like this is that they hide actual risk. The reality is that child road deaths are dramatically down, in line with all road deaths. Roads in the 1970s were basically warzones by today's standards. The fact that 3/8 of deaths occur there today is because we have come so far in decreasing all the other sources of early death.
US child pedestrian deaths 1975: 1632. US child pedestrian deaths 2019: 138.
https://seriousaccidents.com/blog/children-traffic-fatalitie...
I had a prof once joke that they worst thing anyone could do in the fight against heart disease would be to cure cancer: By taking cancer out of the picture, the percentage of deaths from heart disease would skyrocket. But exactly that has happened to children in recent years. Childhood cancer is no longer a death sentence, so too innumerable other conditions. And when kids do get sick they live long enough not to die as kids. So the smaller and smaller number of child road deaths each year ironically now represents a greater and greater percentage of total child deaths. The reality is that kids today are safer crossing the road than ever before.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a756524ed915...
UK Child death/injury in 1979: 12,458. UK Child death/injury in 2013: 1,980.
And that is despite roads now being massive more crowded and full of larger vehicles. The total population has also increased by at least 50% since the 70s, making the reduction in net traffic deaths even more dramatic.
Does this reflect safer streets, or just fewer (esp. unsupervised) child pedestrians?
In 1969, 48 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (The National Center for Safe Routes to School, 2011).
In 2009, 13 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011).
* In 1969, 41 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school; 89 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (U.S. Department of Transportation [USDOT], 1972).
* In 2009, 31 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school; 35 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011).
So you can't state from your data that it has got safer: you need the child deaths/km or deaths/hr walking.
The graph in the article explains this. Kids just don't go outside anymore.
Not to mention that the US population in the 1970 census was 203M. In the 2020 census, 331M - a 63% increase from 1970!
So a 91% reduction in deaths while population increased 63%. I'm not a statistician but that seems pretty great.
I'm sure the children-per-capita rate changed during that time as well so maybe someone who knows that figure could do some more precise math.
But overall the "oh no my kids couldn't possible cross the street without being immediately killed!" hyperbole seems just that.
You don't seriously think children stand more of a chance against cars of today with their ridiculously inflated size, power and weight do you?
> According to the Insurance Research Council (irc), an industry data group, 29% of claims nationally (and over 50% in several states) involve people insured at the state minimums [in the tens of thousands of dollars]. Few policies go beyond a few hundred thousand dollars of liability. The cost of a serious crash “is never going to be covered by that”, says Dale Porfilio, of the irc. By contrast, in Germany drivers are required to have €7.5m ($8.2m) of bodily-injury coverage, and in Britain liability is unlimited.
I don't have a car, but I acknowledge that most Americans live in places where not having a car would make their lives much harder. Still, it seems reasonable for me to raise insurance requirements on enormous SUVs. They're 50-100% more dangerous to pedestrians, so this would reflect a higher actual cost inflicted on other people. If you don't want to pay that cost, and you still need the transportation of a personal car, buy the smaller and less dangerous vehicle.
Yep. This is enormously unpopular among suburbanites but America does too much to subsidize dangerous SUVs. Insurance should be by pound
If you don't have any assets, why would you need liability insurance?
The requirement to have liability insurance in order to license a car was introduced when I was young, before that, you didn't need it. I remember being in traffic court around the time they introduced it, the judge refused to enforce tickets for driving without insurance because, paraphrasing from something said decades ago, "I don't work for the insurance companies". This was in a poor area. The other alternative was, after getting a ticket for driving without insurance, to purchase one week's insurance, show proof of that to the court, after which the ticket would be dismissed.
I'm not poor anymore but I still think forcing poor people to buy liability insurance is bullshit. They don't have anything to insure. If they accidentally bump into your car and cause $100 of damage, they're bankrupt. Rich people are the ones with assets to insure, rich people should pay for the insurance.
At this point it shouldn't be required by law or it should be subsidized for those for whom it represents an undue burden.
But in some places (for instance where I live, Lausanne Switzerland) it's becoming easier to escape this car culture. I don't have kids, but some colleagues do. One of them does not own a car and her 2 children (6 and 9 years old) do everything by bike : going to school, to the activities (they climb!), etc. They surely look much more agile and risky than other colleague's children. It's quite crazy to see these two kids on their bikes, and how much liberating it is for them to move by theirselves. Unlike most kids who just commute in their parents's car.
Of course, I am aware this works only because there's a really good bike infrastructure. And people drive pretty well too, I guess.
I think this is just the decline of the birth rate. I think about my neighborhood. My kid should be spoiled for kids to play with, but couple only has one kid and the ages are spread from infant to nearly an adult, so it works out in the whole neighborhood theres only a handful of kids she can play with. I see bus stops with just 2 kids there. When I was a lid there were nearly a dozen at just my stop.
I really think because there are less kids, it's just less safe for them because people don't honestly think they'll turn the corner and there well be half a dozen kids playing basketball in the street or something.
Thanks to the safety of their cage, cars can roam in freedom without having to worry about needlessly interferences.
I have been lately despising every kind of caged playground, where children might find fun in a sandbox.
I realize it's not possible for everybody, but there are areas where this is still possible. Even in the suburbs.
My current "town" - Reston, VA - is like this. I can walk to all three schools (~1 mile), two lakes (~2 miles), a shopping center (~1 mile), community center (~1 mile), ball fields (~0.5 miles), and miles of wooded trails without crossing a single street at grade (we have pedestrian tunnels). And you can buy a decent TH for ~$600k (that's "affordable" for DC metro).
It always amazes me that people willingly choose newer/bigger homes with crap infrastructure for families to live locally over older/smaller homes where the QOL is, by my measure, so much higher.
there is a lot of bad urbanism about new suburbs, but the parks are a bright spot.
That's not affordable, not even for DC metro. Houses in Greenbelt (one of the nation's original walkable planned communities) can be had for less than $400k. $600k is "large colonial" money, or "walk to UMD's campus" money. Even those numbers are not necessarily comfortable swings for the median worker.
Reston is a gem. It's not perfect by any means, but it was intentionally designed to be something other than unmitigated suburban sprawl. And it helps a lot. There's still a big reliance on cars to get around, but the wide availability of trails is fantastic.
The pressure from parents on other parents has made it so we dont trust children to handle risks that are pretty manageable.
I grew up in a village and I felt like I owned it, a few roads of course but they had to careful, not us.
I believe that sort of mentality helps a lot in feeling connected with a place and not just a foreign object who has to take armored vehicles (e.g. Cars) to move from point to point.
https://walkbiketoschool.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Fina...
""" ▪ In 1969, 48 percent of students in grades K through eight (ages 5 through 14) walked or bicycled to school.1 ▪ In 2009, only 13 percent of students in grades K through eight walked or bicycled to school. """
Step 1 is to reduce speed limit to 45kph (25mph) anywhere a pedestrian could interact with the road which is what Vision Zero recommends.
Now, I'm in a city (in the Bay Area) and I was walking from a residential area into the city (2-3 miles one way). Still, you would not expect lawful crossing of a street to be so dangerous.
I was shocked coming to Germany and seeing cyclists not constantly being attacked by the general public. In the UK it's seen as totally illegitimate.
Plus, I know at least 3 people that were kids when I was a kid, within several years, that are now disabled adults because of that unstructured play. Two broke their necks, one broke so many bones they were in a wheelchair for several years. I know probably half a dozen kids that were hit by cars in some form. Several kids dead by drunk driving. So that unstructured play isn't without cost.
There are other tradeoffs, too. I know several kids that are raised more unstructured because of their specific situation, and they have a lot of social and physical confidence, but they are also kinda dumb. Like they lack intellectual curiosity. Anecdotal, I know, but I just don't think things are as clear as they make it out to be.
My son's playgrounds were still fairly dangerous, so I think the pendulum has started swinging back. When he was 6-9 or so, his favorite two playground stuctures were a 15' tall climbing tower, and the old school metal merri-go-round thing. Oh, and one elementary school had two huge play structures made of wood with all kinds of tunnels and nooks and crannies, he had tons of fun with that with his friends.
What I mostly missed with him is his ability to just go outside and play with a bunch of kids - there is a negative feedback loop where even if you want your kid to do that, there are no other kids out there in many places. Plus there are just not many interesting "third spaces" anymore that are fun for kids but also ok for them to be kids.
This thread notes the decline of horse girls and car guys - (it's gender roles too, but) maybe everything is just online now. Idk if toontown or minecraft or whatever perfectly replaces playing on a playground, but maybe? There is a sort of exploration, maybe not the same. There is a perception of in game risk without the risk of physical injury, but also without physical fitness benefits.
I don't see research or data to back this up in the article.
It seems that the conclusion that "Children Need Risk, Fear, and Excitement in Play" is based on the authors personal interpretation of her research around play and development, rather than actual data and experimentation on risk, fear, excitement in play.
It would also be helpful to define 'need'.
Overall, the ideas in the article seems bypass the reader's critical thinking by appealing to "back in my day", and "kids these days" attitudes and feelings.
The dangerous playgrounds of 1900s through vintage photographs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31855163
If this is reactionary, bring it on.
I’m starting to see a lot more free ranging kids in my neighborhood. White pill.
My neighborhood has narrow streets and no sidewalks, and I'm paranoid about letting my children walk around freely. I don't really see kids unsupervised until they are about 10-12 years old.
Also it's hard not being risk-averse when you have only one child you can barely afford to raise since it costs 50-100K a year.
How on earth will children learn to deal with and solve conflicts if conflict is banned??
Other than that let them fall a few times and stuff in controlled manner and they get better at risk assessment. Otherwise they default to being risk adverse because you’ve been always telling them everything is risky
Using that phrase is... 80s childhoods weren't some sort of trial by fire threshing machine, dude. By and large everybody survived. Children being lost to quicksand or stumbling across gangs of counterfeiters holed up in abandoned mills who black-bagged them is a thing that happened in Scooby Doo and The Hardy Boys, not real life.
This elides the main issue; children need to be left to play unsupervised as the machiavellian instigator types only reveal themselves when nobody's watching. It isn't so much about letting the children take risks as it is about figuring out who's always present when something odd and painful happens to somebody else.
If you are within earshot of your children, you are not "letting them play by themselves." You are supervising their play from a distance. They are not the same. Know why bullies have it so easy nowadays? Because once upon a time, a bully was usually a kid who came from an abusive household and they were just demonstrating what they learned at home. Eventually, they'd end up getting their asses kicked by a kid who had the means and background to defend himself, and they'd learn something from it.
Today, the world is full of little Eric Cartman wannabes: little asshole kids whose parents hover around them and will defend them to the ends of the Earth. It's screwed up child socialization and it's ruined childhood education because teachers with three degrees would rather do anything than take abuse from those bad kids and their pathetic, enabling parents.
Kyle's mother do though. But Kyle is not an asshole.
Given that those critical adult-free hours were the norm ~throughout human history, I think the year part of yesteryear sells it short.
How about Yesterever?
You also don't have to go too far back, just 150 years, to when children were largely used for labor. Childhood itself is a relatively new invention.
The idea that kids sat around doing nothing but getting in trouble with other kids all day is just wrong.
You don't learn much from accidents. Anything that is climbable is dangerous enought. You don't need to add rocks on the ground, to use another strawman.
> Injury-related deaths are at an all-time low in most Western nations.
To a normal person this is proof helicopter parenting is working.
Two practical choices
1. Have more kids again so they are more disposable. This is a big part of the change. This will happen with UBI. If UBI is a while away, weak kids are here to stay.
2. They don't normally talk about pretense of risk and independence.
They mention heights. This can be done safely. I'm really scared to climb the trees I used to as a kid, part is fear of heights growing with age the other is common sense. But why not have 'safe' climbing frame that go to 50+ meters?
This is really hard for most things... How do you blow up gas cylinders with a thrill and be safe? Mixing explosive material that's a thrill, again hard to do safely. The fun is not being supervised and in a lab. Blowing off fingers.... not the end of the world. Maybe when eyesight and hearing is restorable it'd be fine again. Killing animals is another one no one openly talks about but is important, it's why biology is failing they are all imposers who want to cuddle a lion, not cut a frog open to see how it works.Dunno why you think more prosperity leads to more children when it's almost always the other way around. Poorer, less educated people have more kids. Once a society develops economically, they have less kids. This is a worldwide phenomenon.
UBI will free you from having to work shitty jobs. You think people will spend their newfound time raising kids instead? Doubt
Because capitalism incorporates more and more of their lives in the production of economic value. That isn't the same thing as prosperity. If economic value isn't distributed to the working classes, there's more work without prosperity.
Look at South Korea, where people work hard in order to cover basic essentials like housing. Maybe according to the WEF or Economist that's "prosperity" and a "higher standard of living", but it's an obvious scam to anyone who isn't thoroughly brainwashed by capitalism
I never played any organized football, but I played a ton of informal touch football, and very occasionally tackle.
Same with most baseball: a bunch of us kids got together and played. In most of the world, it's football ("soccer" as Americans call it).
(best image I could find, apologies if it's not ideal) https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-8a9efc9ebb63702cc0a26...