[HN Gopher] Deterioration of Local Community a Major Driver of L...
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Deterioration of Local Community a Major Driver of Loss of Play-
Based Childhood
Author : throwup238
Score : 58 points
Date : 2024-06-10 19:00 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.afterbabel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.afterbabel.com)
| tmaly wrote:
| I would have thought that two parents working and not technology
| would have been the major contributor to loss of the community in
| early periods.
| graemep wrote:
| Non working parents were major contributors to local
| communities.
|
| I have noticed that community organisations now are far more
| dependant on retired peopke than they were a few decades ago.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| I think it's a complex system, where it's not so much any one
| factor but rather the presence of so many different factors
| that each have a small impact and which together combine to
| have a big impact. So you could be right at the same time the
| article is right. Technology has become a great atomizing force
| in our society, from automobiles keeping us from talking to
| each other in traffic to cell phones keeping us from talking to
| each other at the store. Even online shopping atomizes us. And
| in the mean time, both parents basically have to be working all
| the time to keep paying for their lifestyle. All of this
| combined leads to isolated childhoods, and because we tend to
| keep the habits we learn as children, isolated adulthoods.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > I would have thought that two parents working and not
| technology would have been the major contributor to loss of the
| community in early periods.
|
| I had one working parent and I had a community because I had
| places to go.
|
| My 5 kids had 1 parent at home full time and zero community.
| For most hours they were trapped in a building with adults.
| Sometimes they were contained in some highly limited adult-made
| program. And that was what they had. Also most every other kid.
| swatcoder wrote:
| FWIW, that doesn't counter the GP's suggestion that changes
| to the community _norm_ might have impacted the experience
| for everyone.
|
| Your 1-parent childhood may still have benefited from having
| many other stay-at-home parents keeping an eye out the window
| an ear to street for kids who need attention, and likewise
| your kids childhood may have been more isolated for the lack
| of that, even with a parent staying at home for them
| individually.
|
| Sometimes, it's not about the circumstances of one's own home
| so much as about the prevailing circumstances (and
| expectations) of the community as a whole.
| scarby2 wrote:
| I had 2 working parents and a community. The perceived safety
| and walkability of an area has a lot to do with it. My
| parents weren't worried if they didn't see me from morning
| until dinner time (and obviously they had no way of getting
| in contact with me other than maybe phoning all the other
| parents - assuming we weren't off in a field somewhere).
| ajma wrote:
| Does families having fewer number of children contribute to this?
| The most local community would be children that live under the
| same roof.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Does families having fewer number of children contribute to
| this?
|
| It could have decades ago, when kids still had places to go.
| Not now.
|
| I had 5 who spent their childhood persistently locked away in
| one adult construct or another - because there was/is no local
| community. Within their reach were roads and private property
| and that's about it. They were in the same boat as most other
| US kids.
| thimkerbell wrote:
| How would you (could one) change this, Waron? Just throwing
| something out there, not a carefully thought out How.
| analog31 wrote:
| My kids faced the same situation, though at least the
| neighbors also had kids. I think that parents have to
| revolt _en masse_ against saturating their kids with
| extracurriculars. One family going it alone is going to
| have lonesome kids.
|
| The competitiveness has to go away -- the feeling that your
| kids have to be 100% occupied in order to give them a
| fighting chance in the future.
|
| Schools need to back off on homework.
| Firaxus wrote:
| What I observed in my neighborhood is that the school
| playgrounds which used to be unfenced were essentially
| secondary parks. But they have since been "locked down",
| removing more places kids once could just go to hang out in
| our paved over subrbia. I also had the benefit of an
| undeveloped forest behind my house to go explore and play
| in, but I don't think most kids these days have access to
| that without an adult driving them to such a location.
| Walkability to nature is a big plus.
| swalling wrote:
| It's not just a lack of siblings, it's also a smaller number of
| extended relations of a similar age, i.e. cousins.
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/cousins-decline-canada-1.7103...
| chris_va wrote:
| Apologies for being critical, but this reads like the author had
| a conclusion they wanted to reach and worked backward to some
| flashy graphs to make it work (the right side of the "lies, damn
| lies, and statistics" spectrum).
|
| There is no discussion of confounders, no control groups or
| paired studies, and there are million things correlated with the
| last 50 of societal development years besides the topics
| mentioned here. The mention of phones and other influences in
| teen behavior is completely unrelated to the main point in the
| discussion and just serves to provide credibility by association.
|
| All in all, this is not science, it is just a reductionist oped
| presented as fact using classic internet hooks.
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| > All in all, this is not science
|
| It's not trying to be. The intended audience is not peers
| reading a research journal, it's normal folks and policy makers
| who don't know what a confounding variable is but still want to
| make modern life suck less.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| Since the audience isn't technical enough to realize the
| author excluded confounders, doesn't that make it even worse?
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Confounders or not, kids don't have crap for communities.
| They have 24/7 adulting, most of it spent in one building
| or another.
|
| source:5 kids. source:15 years scout leader. source:10
| years youth leader, other.
| sircastor wrote:
| I think it's trying to _appear_ to be science. They want the
| appearance of legitimacy and objectivity to encourage a
| particular position.
|
| A quick read through of the site shows it's a conservative-
| leaning group, and I'd be willing to bet that sooner-or-later
| they'll be pushing "a return to traditional values" as the
| cure for all our ills.
| jc6 wrote:
| Is this what Zgmunt Bauman called the transition from Solid
| Modernity to Liquid Modernity?
|
| With rents going up and switching jobs more frequently than past
| generations it becomes harder to stuck around in one place long
| enough for strong communities to form.
| doe_eyes wrote:
| The rate of work-related moves is half of what it used to be in
| the 1960s. By all accounts, mobility is decreasing, not
| increasing.
|
| The reality is that we just don't talk to each other much. If
| you want to look for the decline of one institution that
| provided some degree of community cohesion, then the answer is
| going to be pretty unpopular: we don't go to church anymore.
| a1o wrote:
| It doesn't have to be churches, local school with parents
| association making events, libraries that have spaces for the
| kids to hangout with others and work on projects together,
| open sports areas, parks and small festivities, farmers
| market that have a set periodicity. But it has to have one
| space where people can start to meet each other so they can
| talk and desire more things so they can build these other
| spaces or have some unified way to demand it from their local
| mayor.
| rightright wrote:
| Perhaps it's because of all the child molestation that has
| happened at churches over the last what 100 years? Weird that
| people don't want to go there anymore.
|
| Also the fact that it's about money and control.
|
| Religion is a mental illness.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Hah, I've just read _Bowling Alone_ and was really wishing for an
| updated version. I 'll put _The Upswing_ on the reading list.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| America is transitioning from a high trust society to a low trust
| society. This is one of the many consequences.
| peepeepoopoo75 wrote:
| But the delicious ethnic food was worth it!!
| bedobi wrote:
| are you seriously implying that immigration is responsible
| for a sudden reduction in public trust? american immigration
| has been a thing for 300 years
| peepeepoopoo75 wrote:
| Yes, I am absolutely implying that intentionally
| undermining a country's cultural cohesion through mass
| unassimilated immigration will reduce trust. Thank you for
| noticing!
| mihaaly wrote:
| Are liberal and secular teenagers more willing/open to admit
| problems or seek help for unusual troublesome matters set them
| apart form others than religious peers perhaps? Human culture of
| the past several centuries are full of art and documents showing
| the repressive nature of religious or other prescribed
| expectation oriented groups. There are countless movements to
| counteract with the oppressive side of prescribed behaviour and
| group habits too.
| standardUser wrote:
| I think it's an important topic but I reject these explanations
| entirely. Television may have stolen time from other activities,
| but during that era television was itself a unifying activity,
| generating a previously undreamt of amount of shared cultural
| experiences. I'd argue excessive television-watching was a
| _result_ of reduced social cohesion and community, not a cause.
|
| I blame very different trends from that era...
|
| First, the Drug War and "tough on crime" policies that generated
| a massive amount of fear among parents and created a hostile
| relationship between police and youth (and continues to, to this
| day).
|
| Second, Christian fear-mongering over Satanism and witchcraft,
| creating even more reasons to keep a close watch on your kids.
|
| Third, racial integration of schools and neighborhoods which gave
| white parents an urgent reason to restrict and monitor which kids
| their kids played with.
|
| It wasn't distractions and technology or the lack of a global war
| that lead to reduced trust and cohesion. It was the spectacular
| and enduring success of professional fear-mongers.
| bedobi wrote:
| The design of the physical environment is in no small part
| responsible for this. Don't believe me go to Europe and Japan
| where kids are still allowed to walk and bike to school, to
| friends places and just in general play and exist outside
| unattended to a much higher degree than in the US. Because in the
| US they would be roadkill, and even if they somehow survived
| outside of a car, car centric design means there's nowhere for
| them to go on foot or by bike anyway. Everything is too far.
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(page generated 2024-06-10 23:00 UTC)