I gave my kids a summer like mine in the 1980s – every parent should try it

What a strange experience. I'm not sure exactly what this article was trying to convey, because the parent didn't seem to actually leave their kids to do their own thing for more than 20 minutes at a time before reverting back to television and devices. And rather than actually giving the kids the freedom we had when we were young, the author laments that this freedom can't exist (not sure why?). So this article really isn't about anything.

Parenting is hard. A freshly-minted parent has so many good resolutions.

After eleven years of parenting we had five weeks of summer without holidays (holidays meaning staying at least three nights not at home). We just had some events like zoos, museums, hiking, rope parks, grocery shopping, household chores, and so on, and each week about two or three days of doing nothing at home. And in the last week I found a way to curb the excessive online time when being lazy. Alternate between being online and offline every hour and use something like a tomato timer and switch when it buzzes off. I also was not telling the kids what they can do when offline. They had to figure out themselves what to do when bored. After two days of this regime, my older son told me he liked it and was not in a hurry to go back online.

I keep thinking about this experience. Why is it so hard not to be online?

On the days we were not at home, we all had almost no online presence. More often than not I told my older son not to bring his cell phone along, and we parents also left our cell phones mostly in the bag, sometimes even in airplane mode.

But it is really hard.

That's what has changed when I was a child. Online presence is difficult to avoid. And that's what's making parenting difficult today.

Sometimes I have to look up things to organize a short trip while the boys aren't allowed to be online. I always feel guilty towards them that I can't stop being online and still don't allow them the same. There are a few applications which could be understood as not being online, like reading an ebook, but others don't, like playing Exponentile or being on Hacker News.

By the way, my wife and I are early retired because of some serious health issues, so we don't need to do business, but sometimes we are exhausted. I know all parents are exhausted sometimes, but perhaps we are more than others.

I remember my teacher lamenting: You will be the first generation that has to pay some corporation for entertainment.

He was talking about how e.g. swimming in a river was replaced with a swimming pool. (This was before facebook etc were popular)

This article is incomplete, yet the title alone was enough to trigger a trauma response in me. My new girlfriend is a school teacher, just like my mom was back in the 80s, and so offers a good comparison of how modern life is different than that era. Between teaching summer school, professional development days, and continuing education, the new GF got approximately one week of actual vacation this summer, whereas mom could get away for a number of weeks. My dad, who I am estranged from, never took any vacation ever because he cared more about his career than his family, and yet here I am wanting nothing more than to spend time with my kids (single dad), but have to do nothing but work to keep a roof over our heads in this economic climate.

So it's nice to talk about raising our kids in a simpler way, but it ignores that my parents had so much more disposable income and time. Yes my kids (teens) are left to figure it out on their own like kids of the past, but we're also in a far more competitive world today where a significant chunk of their summer vacation is put into activities that are "life prep" - and my family is significantly more relaxed in this regard than many high-achiever families.

Thought this was about phones. This is more or less how kids live in Germany today still

I think you would have to take your kids to some remote area, with no traffic, no internet and very few people and tell them to 'go out and play'.

Well, I'm glad so many HN commenters enjoyed a pleasant, bucolic childhood wandering freely, but my parents were raised with a similar amount of freedom, but instead had to contend with things like neighborhood perverts sexually harassing/assaulting them, various forms of violence, being attacked by packs of wild dogs, and one of their childhood friends got into the car of someone never identified and later found murdered in a stone quarry.

They had the misfortune of living in a low-income neighborhood, and I can understand why me and my siblings weren't given the same amount of freedom growing up.

If you have the fortune to be in a place where such freedom isn't so dangerous, congratulations, but I feel it's not necessarily the norm.