[HN Gopher] The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
___________________________________________________________________
The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
Author : sylvainkalache
Score : 181 points
Date : 2026-04-18 11:43 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bigthink.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bigthink.com)
| lmf4lol wrote:
| this resonates a lot. I am not sure how to handle this though.
| Next to our house (500m), the city government established a camp
| for "asylum seekers". 100 men. Men only. How can I reasonable let
| my pre-teen daughters roam freely now? Id love to, but my gut
| feeling doesnt allow me to.
|
| Maybe, back in the days, it was just a different time? A more
| high trust society that worked well?
|
| Nowadays, we have news stories, where 70 year olds get stabbed by
| youngsters because they got lectures on their bad behaviour. When
| I was young, I had respect towards a 70 year old. Big time. Never
| would we have thought to pull out a knife...
|
| Life changed a lot in recent years and not for the better on all
| dimensions.
|
| Europe is still pretty save though. At least if you trust the
| statistics
| techjamie wrote:
| Statistically, we live in the safest society we ever have. We
| see a lot of bad stuff happening because news reporting travels
| further and faster than ever before, amplifying the perception
| the world is going to shit.
|
| Plus, now, basically every kid is running around with a phone
| that gives them access to talk to the police or their parents
| at any time. So it's going to be a lot riskier for someone to
| try anything against them. Even then, between 80-90% of sexual
| assaults are performed by people the victims already know, and
| around 30% of those are relatives of the victim.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Do you have any evidence or are you just basing your fears on
| feelings? Has there been a rise in sex attacks associated with
| this particular refugee housing?
|
| You should flip through some newspaper archives from when you
| were a kid. I don't know where you are, but I can almost
| certainly guarantee that there were kids attacking people back
| then too. Just because you and most you know would never have
| pulled a knife, doesn't mean that there weren't those that
| would. After all, you say the teens today attack old people
| with knives, but I really don't think your teen daughters are
| stabbing people with knives.
|
| How can you reasonably let your teen daughters out alone? Well,
| be reasonable. Find out if your fears are amped up by
| sensationalist press. Go meet your refugee neighbours. Quite
| honestly it sounds like YOU spend too much time inside.
|
| Edit: I just saw your comment about importing men from
| countries where rape is natural. I can't imagine that we have
| the same definition of reasonable.
| baublet wrote:
| This is bigotry dressed up as concern. It's also not something
| widespread. Seems like you just think immigrants are rapists.
| roxolotl wrote:
| I'm reasonably convinced this explains basically everything
| currently attributed to social media, for children at least, and
| likely can also help explain some concern around birth rates and
| child rearing costs. Starting with the satanic panic the US has
| slowly closed down children's lives because of concern that
| terrible things will happen to children if not continually under
| supervision. And the true is that yes sometimes bad things happen
| and have always happened. But if you look to many other countries
| they do not have the same extreme expectations of parents or the
| state to keep children's lives locked down.
| trallnag wrote:
| Does the term "satanic panic" also apply to the EU restricting
| internet access for the youth?
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Satanic panic was a very specific phenomenon in the US.
| coldtea wrote:
| No, that's plain old security state motivation hidden behind
| plain old moral panic justifications nobody buys.
| spicyusername wrote:
| I don't know. Maybe this is going away in some places, maybe I
| just have my own anecdata, but my kids play outside unsupervised
| all the time, as do all the kids in my neighborhood.
|
| I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood on the outskirts
| of small Metro. Nothing special about it at all.
|
| Every time I see one of these articles I always wonder who
| they're talking about.
|
| I always feel like this is just one of those news headlines that
| won't go away, but isn't quite tethered to reality, but people
| really like to feel bad about modern life and so we keep talking
| about it as if it's real. I suspect the real reason kids aren't
| playing outside, if there is one, is not because they can't, it's
| because they choose not to. Just as adults are no longer choosing
| to go to third spaces. Screens came for everyone.
| rayiner wrote:
| This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie places
| reporters live. I dropped my daughter off at the mall to hang
| out with their friends and one of the moms followed them around
| the whole time. They're all 13!
| garbawarb wrote:
| Do journalists live in bougie places? It's not a particularly
| well-paying job.
| rayiner wrote:
| It's a job that requires strong credentials and is gated by
| unpaid internships. So it disproportionately attracts
| people from relatively affluent backgrounds:
| https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/the-
| cos.... And those folks live near and, more importantly,
| travel in social circles with affluent people.
|
| It's also not particularly expensive to live in a bougie
| place. I grew up in Mclean, VA. My dad ran into Dick Cheney
| at the CVS once. But you can get an apartment in Mclean on
| a journalist's salary, especially if your parents paid for
| college and you have no debt. You can't afford to raise a
| family there, but you can live there, near your social
| circle. Conversely, you'll see lots of trades people, cops,
| etc., living in places that aren't bougie at all, despite
| making more money than the lower end of the professional
| class. People find ways to congregate around others in
| their social class, income notwithstanding.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Yes. Journalists don't make a living from journalism, they
| live on family money. That's why working class journalists
| have disappeared along with working class perspectives.
|
| It was once a job where many if not most of the
| practitioners didn't have a college degree, now it is the
| most expensive graduate school program you can do. I think
| the median price is something like $250K.
|
| If you don't pay writers, you eliminate all of the writers
| who have to work for a living.
| ghaff wrote:
| Don't disagree with the general point but I'm not sure
| J-School was ever a particularly good entree into
| journalism. Most of the journalists I know and knew
| didn't have the grad degree.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| TIL I and my friends and colleagues live on family money.
| mikestew wrote:
| _This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie
| places reporters live._
|
| I live in Redmond, WA. Bougie? My rube Midwestern ass thinks
| so. And there are feral kids all over my neighborhood. Plenty
| of kids walking to school in groups, or solo. Neighbor kids
| talk about riding the bus/train to places. Granted, there are
| a _lot_ of immigrant families around here (hello, Microsoft,
| et al.), and I 'm sure that skews things.
| com2kid wrote:
| Whenever these conversations come up, I've always noted
| that they don't really seem to apply to the PNW. My
| neighborhood (in Seattle proper) has lots of kids running
| around as well. Neighborhood kids will stop by to pickup my
| son and whisk him off to some adventure down the block.
| Getting your kid back involves listening for the correct
| sounding screams of joy as you walk around and figure out
| whose yard they are in.
|
| Seattle also has a pretty decent policy around the radius
| for kids walking to school, so there are always gaggles of
| kids walking together to and from school for elementary and
| even some middle schoolers. The high schools are spaced far
| enough out that kids use buses at that age.
|
| My coworkers in lower CoL areas seem mystified why I'm
| paying an arm and a leg to live in Seattle to raise a kid.
| And yeah there are some serious downsides (20-30k a year
| daycare, restaurants are too expensive to go out to often,
| even take out is insane), but there are kids playing soccer
| in the streets after school and kids setting up lemonade
| stands in the park.
|
| That's what I'm paying for - A city that is built for
| people to live in, not just for cars to drive around.
| array_key_first wrote:
| I've noticed the less American and less wealthy people are,
| the more normal their kids interact with the world, i.e.
| "free range".
|
| I don't know what it is about rich white people and freaky
| helicopter parenting. I also notice it with homeschooling
| and those crazy borderline eating disorder diets. There
| seems to be an association there between rich white people
| and pushing self-destructive behavior on kids.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Might be different in Australia vs the US, but the white
| kids here are definitely more "free range" than the
| Asians.
|
| That's not too say they're not helicoptered too, but
| Chinese parents are a whole other level.
|
| Think strapping a 3-4 year old into a high chair and
| handfeeding them, or scheduling every waking moment of a
| primary school kid's life.
| pessimizer wrote:
| From the mall story, you also seem to be living in a "bougie"
| place. What makes you think that places other than where you
| live are different?
|
| One would expect that after your first sentence, the second
| sentence would be a counterexample.
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/shoot-the-messenger
|
| > But I actually find ideological bias to be less concerning
| than the more fundamental problem that the class of people
| who determine the boundaries of debate share a set of
| demographic and experiential traits that they don't recognize
| as distinctive.
|
| > This class of people includes journalists, yes, but also
| people who work in the tech industry, academics, nonprofit
| leaders, influencers, and those who work in politics. From
| now on, I'll refer to this group broadly as "the messenger
| class."
|
| > The messenger class's distinctive experiences -- like
| living in downtown Washington, D.C., or living in one of the
| parts of New York highlighted in red -- shape the boundaries
| of normal in ways harder to counteract than pure ideological
| or partisan bias.
|
| > The messenger class plays a fundamental role in any
| democracy. Democratic self-governance requires not just fair
| procedures for making decisions but an accurate and shared
| picture of social reality to reason about. That picture is
| revealed through the communicated experiences of citizens,
| filtered through the messenger class, which decides which
| experiences are urgent and require intervention.
| ekropotin wrote:
| Was the mom Asian? Asking because my pre-teen daughter has a
| lot of Asian friends and I clearly see a pattern of hyper
| vigilance among their moms.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| > my kids play outside unsupervised all the time, as do all the
| kids in my neighborhood. I live in just a regular suburban
| neighborhood
|
| Your kids are hardly free-range. Let me guess, there's no way
| for them to actually meaningfully leave the area (no train,
| bus, etc)? It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and saying
| they can do whatever they want. hardly free-range in the way
| described in the article.
|
| Presumably you live in a suburb for the reasons the person in
| the article checked in on the free-range kid.
|
| my personal litmus test is if you'd let your 13 year kid
| explore Manhattan alone during the day. Many say no because
| it's dangerous, and yet Manhattan is safer than most American
| suburbs. just FUD all the way down sadly.
| ghaff wrote:
| The usual contrast being drawn is kids wandering around a
| suburban area, walking to school, playing with kids in a
| nearby rural property. It's not hopping onto a bus to the
| city a few tens of miles away. You do see schoolchildren in
| Japan on the train by themselves but I'm not sure that's ever
| been very common in the US.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| there's really no reason American kids in metro areas like
| SF, Boston, DC, NYC couldn't take a bus 5 miles away by
| themselves. when one comes up of an actual reason to why,
| it contradicts real statistics.
|
| the biggest things parents should worry about is their kid
| being bullied by other kids during school, a supposedly
| safe place, and other family. strangers just aren't the
| major source of violence towards children.
| ButlerianJihad wrote:
| Welp this week we in Phoenix are dealing with a report of
| a 17-year-old high school girl who boarded a light rail
| train (the one with security cameras and guards) and she
| was harassed and assaulted by a mob of boys on the train,
| presumably in front of human onlookers; she disembarked,
| and was assaulted some more.
|
| She is now in a neck brace, and her mother is absolutely
| distraught, saying this is something she cannot fix for
| her beloved daughter. I am distraught as well that this
| could happen to _anyone at all_ on the same train that I
| ride every week.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's a sad story though getting a bit far afield from
| young kids taking public transit or otherwise traveling
| away from their homes. At 17 I was in college and taking
| urban transportation (and flights) all the time.
| weakfish wrote:
| I'm also curious why you write "we in Phoenix are dealing
| with..."
|
| I've noticed a trend of people attaching a sort of
| personal identification with headlines
| coldtea wrote:
| Perhaps they don't identify as a passive news consumer
| about irrelevant people, but as a resident with a bond to
| their city and wider community.
|
| Imagine that!
| jMyles wrote:
| I don't think that was the crux of the inquiry /
| objection. It's wonderful to feel such a bond with one's
| _community_, but it's a different thing to bind oneself
| to such a dramatic statistical outlier and make decisions
| ("dealing with") as if it's a common occurrence.
| altairprime wrote:
| Someone and their gang pulled a knife on me as a kid when
| I was riding the bus forty years ago in a university
| town, but that doesn't make what they did normalized, it
| just makes an anecdote. As it happens, though, that is
| quite normalized in the U.S., especially if you're not
| white.
|
| A lot of U.S. residents inure themselves to random acts
| of violence because they either feel helpless to change
| the societal contexts of that violence and/or because
| admitting that violence would require confronting the
| benefits of power exploitation vs. the drawbacks of
| racism, sexism, bullying, and bystanderism. That swarm of
| boys abusing a girl to enforce societal mores that
| benefit them to her detriment is a trope from
| _Pleasantville_. This isn't some new or unknown thing.
| This is a standard-issue United States Lynch Mob that's
| been known about for a century.
|
| I've been upset about this for thirty years, which is
| when I first discovered this. Welcome to the shameful
| desert of the real. Sad that it took y'all so long to see
| it; but now you have a chance to decide a way forward.
| Circle the wagons and raise sheltered, and therefore
| weakened, children? Teach every family about this threat
| all the way down to the youngest that kids understand
| danger? Crossing guards that ride the buses and have
| safety whistles and self-defense training? Lobby your
| city government to shift policing dollars to transit
| safety officers? Lobby your regional government to shift
| road maintenance dollars to gang violence de-escalation
| efforts?
|
| As you can see, it's difficult to find a way forward that
| feels appropriately vengeful upon 'those that hurt our
| budding flower' while also having a meaningful impact on
| the _quality_ of the future. Most regions would just try
| to defund bus service, which fucks over everyone except
| wealthy adults on time scales longer than ten years or
| so, because at least that 'feels' like an effective
| response.
|
| Good luck.
| mmooss wrote:
| > I've been upset about this for thirty years
|
| Completely normal. Trauma at a certain level, unlike
| other memories and emotions, doesn't seem impacted by
| time. I'm sorry to hear what happened to you.
|
| > that is quite normalized in the U.S., especially if
| you're not white. / A lot of U.S. residents inure
| themselves to random acts of violence
|
| This part seems to universalize the experience, though.
| What is the basis for it? Crime is at generational lows.
| I've used public transit in cities uncounted times and I
| have never seen a crime; that's what is normal for me.
| altairprime wrote:
| > _Trauma at a certain level_
|
| No, not _traumatized_ for thirty years; that's not a
| valid substitution here. Upset, in the way that people
| that want to effect societal change are upset at
| acceptance of the status quo. The alternative is apathy
| and hopelessness, and I refuse to adopt salves (such
| modern rationalism) that would let me stop caring about
| difficult 'uphill' battles.
|
| > _I 'm sorry to hear_
|
| I refuse your apology; instead, exert your _own_ form of
| societal pressure against, say, bullying. It's a more
| approachable target than lynching and will help you
| switch your instincts from irrelevant sympathy to
| relevant action. (And if you already do, bully for you,
| pun intended :)
|
| > _I 've used public transit in cities uncounted times
| and I have never seen a crime; that's what is normal for
| me._
|
| Mixed-wealth U.S. cities, in daytime and at night? In
| exclusively downtown, college, and/or affluent
| neighborhoods? (So excluding for example Stanford, Palo
| Alto, and Mountain View, which are tilted quite high-
| wealth and thus low-crime, Brock Turners
| notwithstanding.)
|
| Also: Are you a white man of middle-class or greater
| wealth? That generally matters greatly when evaluating
| anecdotes on this topic, independent of all other
| factors, and is strongly correlated with 'I have no
| matching anecdotes from my own experience' annotations.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| This was of course the trains fault
| vel0city wrote:
| Multiple people died on the same stretch of road on the
| same afternoon that I drive on often about a month ago.
| One was just a teenager in a car that was following the
| law, it was the other car that was speeding.
|
| I've seen lots of death on the roads around me.
|
| But sure, it's the train that's unsafe.
| NordStreamYacht wrote:
| Japan is a monocultural civilisational state. That is a big
| factor.
| garbawarb wrote:
| American children are in more danger because the
| country's more diverse?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Diversity doesn't make places more dangerous (if i
| understand the stats). But humans are naturally tribal
| and fear those who look and act significantly different.
| coldtea wrote:
| Because humans are tribal they will also go on to attack
| and prey on those who are outside their tribe, making
| diversity more dangerous. Especially when diversity is
| not merely some people of different ethnic/racial
| backgrounds living and working together, but a population
| split into isolated cultures with different
| circumstances.
|
| Unless there's a big strict enforcer to keep everyone in
| line of course.
| macNchz wrote:
| This is something a lot of people seem to believe that is
| not borne out in the research. Plenty of specific counter
| examples like Queens NY, a densely populated and
| exceptionally diverse place with crime rates comparable
| or better than many much more homogenous places in
| America. Poverty and income inequality are much better
| predictors. I felt this reddit comment from a while ago
| did a pretty good job rolling up sources on this: https:/
| /www.reddit.com/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion/comments/1jxff...
| mmooss wrote:
| That depends on an arbitrary perception of 'my tribe'.
| Irish and Italians used to riot against each other.
| Germans were hated (look up a quote from Benjamin
| Franklin). Protestants and Catholics used to riot. Every
| wave of immigrants seems to get the same treatment by
| some.
|
| Within a few generations, their decendants marry each
| other.
| xavortm wrote:
| To his point - I would say, it's a bug factor BECAUSE on
| average their culture seems more safe. But it's not
| because it's monocultural. Bad "monoculture" is bad, good
| one is good, nothing complex there. Simplifying, but
| that's pretty much what is said
| rawgabbit wrote:
| It is the difference in culture. In big cities, Japan
| doesn't tolerate public deviance. Police are visible in
| every block. They are very strict about weapons; you
| can't bring a knife in public for no reason etc.
| spinach wrote:
| They also have a culture of enduring things in silence
| for the greater collective good. For instance, most girls
| and women will have stories of harassment, especially by
| men on crowded trains but almost none of them will do
| anything about it.
| sfifs wrote:
| Russia is fairly mono cultural too. Is it safe?
| GerryAdamsSF wrote:
| Yes. Russia is inarguably safer in terms of street crime
| than the USA.
|
| Philadelphia in 2025 had a higher murder rate than
| Belfast during the height of a civil war.
|
| https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_countries_result.jsp
| ?co...
|
| Crime in the USA is also extremely regional and local in
| pattern.
| deepsun wrote:
| Oh no, no way. Child violence on the streets and in
| school is WAY higher, it's ingrained in culture. It's
| also pretty rare if a Russian kid would tell his parents
| about it (only if property damage is involved).
|
| I don't know how your link gathers data (website only
| shows one dude, software engineer, not a professional
| survey statistician), but from personal experience I can
| surely say it's rankings are BS.
|
| The closest in US are the "bad towns" like East Palo Alto
| or some neighborhoods of Oakland, with their respect for
| ex-cons and prison slang.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Philadelphia in 2025 had a higher murder rate than
| Belfast during the height of a civil war.
|
| Do you have a cite? In American cities crime is at
| generational lows, including / especially murder.
| jemmyw wrote:
| I don't think numbeo can be a good source, it seems to be
| self reported metrics. I asked it for comparison of NZ to
| USA and it told me that NZ was about the same or worse on
| most numbers. But actual crime rates are lower in NZ. The
| murder rate is 5x lower.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Plenty of trouble for a 13 year old in Manhattan. Even if
| it's not dangerous, you can find your own problems easily
| enough.
| kingraoul wrote:
| I mean by that standard there's plenty of trouble
| everywhere for everyone.
| borski wrote:
| You can find your own problems on an abandoned farm too. A
| kid can always _choose_ to get into trouble, but that's not
| what we're talking about here.
| tayo42 wrote:
| The type of trouble is different. Your not going to get
| robbed trying to buy drugs on a farm.
| borski wrote:
| Humboldt County would like a word.
| com2kid wrote:
| I grew up in a neighborhood that had a drug den next to
| the 7-11 that all the kids went to buy slurpees at.
|
| The dealers didn't bother the kids, and the kids knew not
| to go into that yard.
|
| There were plenty of street walkers on a particular
| stretch of streets. They weren't talking to anyone who
| wasn't looking to buy.
|
| Of course I had the advantage of being a broke kid at the
| time, so I wasn't a mark for crime. I was just another
| neighborhood kid who was walking through. It was a
| working class neighborhood with a few sketchy parts.
| There was the occasional shooting or drive by, and
| property theft was common (every bike I had as a kid was
| stolen from me at some point), but it wasn't unsafe in
| regards to violence.
|
| I almost impaled myself on a rebar pole while jumping my
| bike over hills at an abandoned construction site. That
| was the most dangerous thing that ever happened to me
| growing up there. (well aside from the time I almost died
| falling into a sink hole and managed to grab onto a
| nearby tree root and pull myself up in time, but that was
| in the middle of nearby woods, so not gonna blame that on
| societal problems!)
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| > It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and saying they can
| do whatever they want.
|
| What do you mean it's like dumping kids on a farm? Are the
| suburbs really _THAT_ lethally dangerous?
|
| Source [22 minutes]:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLAfDrFUBkA
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > and yet Manhattan is safer than most American suburbs
|
| [something traumatic happens and 50 people run for their
| safety]
|
| _see and as proven, only 1 person was assaulted!_
|
| I think a future society that counts trauma and mental health
| disruptions instead of just the crime stats will reach
| different conclusions on areas considered safe
| zabzonk wrote:
| > my personal litmus test is if you'd let your 13 year kid
| explore Manhattan alone during the day
|
| My parents let me (14) and my brother (9) explore central
| Paris on our own when my Dad was working at the Paris air
| show for the RAF. No problems at all even though this was
| just after the student protests in the 60s, and so things
| were a little tense.
|
| I think Manhattan would be OK too, though I've only been
| there as an adjust. Certainly, you see kids running around
| London.
| graemep wrote:
| London and the bits of Pars I have seen are pleasant places
| to work around. London does have its bad areas, as do other
| cities. Small towns in the UK are fine, as is most public
| transport. Parents have got more protective but I still see
| plenty out by themselves where I live.
| zabzonk wrote:
| s/adjust/adult/
| semiquaver wrote:
| 13??? I'm shocked that it's even a question. Of course a 13
| year old should be allowed to do that.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, I always through "free range" meant the kid walking (or
| taking the bus/train) a few miles through the city to get to
| an actual "other place" destination. Not "playing across the
| street in the suburban park." If the latter is now considered
| unusual, we have some big problems!!
| nostrebored wrote:
| It is in SF. My son's school would not let him walk 3
| minutes to an aftercare program. They were actually willing
| to break federal law to stop him from walking a single
| block away.
|
| I also let him play at the park on his own occasionally. I
| will get calls from well meaning but extremely
| overprotective friends to let me know that "they can't
| watch him anymore." He is ten! The library, connected to
| the park, has a phone which he can use to reach us.
|
| People called my parents hover parents, but at ten I could
| have played at the neighborhood park by myself.
| em-bee wrote:
| _If the latter is now considered unusual, we have some big
| problems!!_
|
| it is, and we do:
|
| https://www.offthegridnews.com/current-events/mom-charged-
| wi...
|
| https://reason.com/2025/08/09/child-protective-services-
| inve...
|
| https://reason.com/2026/01/16/she-let-her-6-year-old-ride-
| to...
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-
| arrest...
|
| https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/parents-
| investig...
|
| https://nationalpost.com/news/growing-up-independent-is-
| ille...
|
| https://www.todaysparent.com/blogs/mom-arrested-leaving-
| daug...
|
| https://legalclarity.org/is-it-illegal-to-let-your-kid-
| play-...
|
| those are all from the first page of a search for "parents
| charged for letting kids alone on the playground"
|
| there are probably many more such stories.
| beej71 wrote:
| I grew up in the 70s in a town of 30,000 and consider that
| time free-range. There was no public transit, only bicycles.
| buu700 wrote:
| Manhattan is one thing, but I would never let my kids go to
| the 70s unsupervised.
| com2kid wrote:
| > Your kids are hardly free-range. Let me guess, there's no
| way for them to actually meaningfully leave the area (no
| train, bus, etc)? It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and
| saying they can do whatever they want. hardly free-range in
| the way described in the article.
|
| This depends on the area. In more urban areas exploring can
| be done on foot or bike. I live in Seattle, which has some
| fantastic bike trails that can go on and on for miles and
| cross into multiple adjacent cities.
|
| In some cities parents are fighting to let their kids play in
| their own front yard unsupervised. Not an issue in Seattle,
| where kids are required to walk to and from their
| neighborhood school by the school district.
|
| But denser areas also have lots of stuff to do within the
| neighborhood. Within 2 or so miles there is a massive
| shopping area, multiple bakeries, tons of restaurants, a slew
| of parks (Seattle has an obscene density of parks, it is one
| of the best aspects of living here), a lakefront beach (lots
| of bodies of water in Seattle), 2 swimming pools, tennis
| courts, and a bunch of other stuff I am probably forgetting
| right now.
|
| So define free range. If a gaggle of kids travel to the local
| grocery store together to buy lemons and sugar, then self
| organize selling lemonade to people passing by on a hot day,
| is that free range? I'd argue yes.
| shawn_w wrote:
| Redmond has decent (though not great) bus coverage and light
| rail stations to Seattle and points beyond in the core
| downtown area and next to a huge park.
| bdangubic wrote:
| I live in suburb of a metro area, as safe as it gets (my front
| door is unlocked overnight often and almost never locked during
| the day, my garage is also frequently open). my 12-year old
| (5'8" 125lbs) went to walk the dog to the park about 1/2 mile
| from my house, someone called the police and I had to deal with
| social services...
| guelo wrote:
| I do know. No kids play outside in my neighborhood. The story
| resonates because your personal annecdote is not very common.
| (Not as the sibbling comment says, that reporters all out of
| touch elites).
| xtiansimon wrote:
| My free range childhood friends and I would have been all _get
| bent_ to that lady--even at 6 yro. I can tell you this because I
| was also getting a whooping at home from da for saying the same
| to my ma. I was a dreadful child.
| jl6 wrote:
| It's easier to let kids play around the neighborhood when you
| know who the neighbors are.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| most acts of abuse to family members are by other family
| members. ironically strangers are more likely to leave your kid
| alone than extended family.
| phyzix5761 wrote:
| That's a problem of access not familiarity.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Know which of your neighbors have unsecured firearms lying
| around. Sadly all to common where I am.
| homeonthemtn wrote:
| I think this is more a data point towards the quiet disappearnce
| of community / the steady march towards pervasive isolation
| Loughla wrote:
| Correct. There are no communities anymore, just groups of
| houses. You see it in the death of social and civic
| organizations, churches, and other community groups.
|
| Everybody is an island. I don't know what has caused this, but
| it seems like it's happening in most 1st world countries.
| Anyone have insights about this?
| lencastre wrote:
| and yet everybody is one discoord channel away from everybody
| else hundreds if not thousands of km away, eager to talk,
| voice their opinions etc... crossing the street, meet your
| neighbor, too much hassle
| GoldenRacer wrote:
| There's a book called "Bowling Alone" that explores a lot of
| ideas around this. Iirc the conclusion is two fold:
|
| 1. Historically women were largely responsible for community
| building. As they joined the workforce, they had less time to
| community build and so there became less community.
|
| 2. Technology allowing home entertainment. People can now
| stream movies instead of going to theaters. Play computer
| games instead of go to arcades. Check Facebook instead of
| call friends to catch up. Use a Keurig for convenient coffee
| instead of go to a cafe.
| esafak wrote:
| I think it depends on the locale. I moved from SF, which is
| career oriented, to OH, which is family oriented and, as I
| expected, I found more kids roaming the streets.
|
| So if your streets are deserted, ask the locals their views
| on parenting. Paranoid parents will talk up the safety
| factor, but it's overblown.
| keybored wrote:
| Bourgeoisie society. Not values, not culture, not mindset.
| It's rooted in how society is structured. But values,
| culture, and mindset reinforce it.
|
| This very individualistic society can only critique itself in
| terms of individual failings. Which leads to the catch-22,
| anti-communal, ankle-deep critiques: people are on their
| phones, people are asocial, why don't "people" all get a clue
| individually and fix this via some spontaneous
| autoenlightenment.
| metalman wrote:
| here in Canada, social service "baby snatchers" have destroyed
| basic community cohesion and along with many other wildly out of
| control beurocratic policing forces, such as the spca making
| having animals a huge liability, litteral special subdivisions,
| chicken police, horse police, and an enacted rock police to
| prevent the totaly illegal practice of picking rocks off a beach,
| but hey it is legal to pack granma into the back of a motor home
| and drive her to the government canabis store, get her wrecked,
| and then take her in so she can ask to be euthanized. cant make
| this shit up as they say.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Wow!
|
| Where I live my neighbors have chickens and one has a horse and
| they never get hassled, the kids roam through the neighborhood
| under the age of ten without getting picked up by the
| authorities (well, one time one got lost and a helpful cop
| brought him home, but that was the end of it), if your dog
| wanders off animal control will call you to come pick it up
| (first time they waive the fee), you can collect shells, rocks,
| driftwood and seaweed for fertilizer off the beach. We have
| euthanasia but it is a carefully controlled process that
| involves multiple independent doctors and a lucid patient, and
| the supermajority (84%) of people approve of it!
|
| Canada sounds like a terrible place, but you are more than
| welcome in the country I call home; Canada. Oh wait...
| scelerat wrote:
| My biggest fear of letting my young kid play alone outside is
| getting hit by a car.
| neogodless wrote:
| When I was a kid I was taught not to walk in the street.
|
| When you walk, you go in the opposite direction of cars and can
| see them coming and, if necessary, move off to the side more.
|
| I know it's survivorship bias, but it worked for me.
|
| Now I get that population density is increasing, and probably
| so is traffic. Though so are automatic safety features that
| cause cars to brake rather than hit things.
|
| Are there statistics on vehicular fatalities in suburbs?
| tomasphan wrote:
| Pedestrian traffic deaths are going down again after peaking
| in 2022. Accidents are less survivable in the US due to
| bigger cars and higher hoods.
|
| Quote from CDC
|
| During 2013-2022, U.S. traffic-related death rates increased
| a relative 50.0% for pedestrians and 22.5% overall, compared
| with those in 27 other high-income countries, where they
| declined a median of 24.7% and 19.4%, respectively. Across
| countries, U.S. pedestrian death rates were highest overall
| and among persons aged 15-24 and 25-64 years.
| bojan wrote:
| The cars are getting bigger. That means that the impact is
| more deadly, and the line of sight is higher - making it easy
| to overlook a child. The sensors often won't react at low
| speeds which are common for residential neighborhoods, and at
| high speeds they are late anyway.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _The cars are getting bigger_
|
| Wasn't there a trend in the US away from pompous SUVs and
| towards smaller cars, people even starting to re-evaluate
| some European-favored "city" cars more?
|
| Also aren't cars also getting ligther, with less heavy /
| metallic exterior over time?
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| There is some bimodal distribution. I routinely encounter
| trucks where I cannot see over the hood. I suspect most
| of these vehicles have never carried so much as a 2x4 in
| the bed.
| QuarterReptile wrote:
| We have a regulatory regime that requires that SUVs be
| bigger each year. It saves the environment that way.
| scelerat wrote:
| It's not even "in the street" I'm worried about -- it's the
| lunatics who drive like they are the main character in a
| single-player RPG. Not looking for bikes or pedestrians,
| crashing into parked cars and houses.
| delichon wrote:
| That's why you have an emergency backup child for redundancy in
| case of failure of the main child.
| NordStreamYacht wrote:
| Ah, the Spare. You must be British royalty.
| ButlerianJihad wrote:
| I had to go look it up, because in _Harry Potter and the
| Goblet of Fire_ , Voldemort orders Cedric's murder with:
| "Kill the Spare!"
|
| It turns out that Cedric, being superfluous to the
| "Resurrection Ritual" and Voldemort's plan of revenge, is
| actually a spare. In fact it was unexpected that two boys
| get through the whole thing with the Portkey and all. Harry
| was the only one who was supposed to end up there with the
| Death Eaters in the first place, so Cedric's appearance was
| quite unfortunate for everyone involved.
|
| But Cedric's "spareness" certainly didn't have to do with
| expendability as far as his Dad was concerned, which you
| can clearly understand once his Dad gets going in the
| mourning for his death.
| mynegation wrote:
| The only people who find this joke funny don't have any
| children.
| procaryote wrote:
| You can have humour and children at the same time...
| delichon wrote:
| My dad told it to me. I was the second backup.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| There's a star trek fan who has a primary dog and an
| emergency backup dog. There's also the british _' heir
| and a spare'_.
| coldtea wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72rU64yq-zU
| tmseidman wrote:
| Third string
| coldtea wrote:
| Or people who have a sense of black humor. Never heard dads
| make dark puns and jokes of similar nature?
| jbm wrote:
| The same people downvoting you would be outraged and
| screenshotting you for a mob on Reddit and private Discord
| servers if you made similar comments about their pets.
| throwaway132448 wrote:
| Congrats you just invented someone for you to be mad at.
| Maybe lay off the rage bait for a little bit?
| D13Fd wrote:
| Six kids here, I use the "we needed some backups" joke all
| the time.
| projektfu wrote:
| Sounds like a game of Paranoia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-
| playing_game)
| cap11235 wrote:
| Remember, they're cattle, not pets.
| scelerat wrote:
| Riight! I was wondering why some people had more than one.
| Like, I wonder that every single ever-loving day
| seb1204 wrote:
| I don't think roads were ever considered a safe area to play.
| Even in cities in 80 the bugger roads were too busy. This is
| why cities need spaces for people including youth and teens not
| just playgrounds for toddlers. Yes traffic is more dense and
| faster, cars get bigger etc. but aren't cars also safer? I have
| heard the cars in the USA are crazy big which has larger dead
| angles particularly bad for smaller humans.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Cars are safer for those inside of them. For those outside of
| them, well, it's their fault for not having crumple zones!
|
| Cars on the roads in the '80s were very low to the ground.
| Even a child standing on the sidewalk could easily see over
| the hood of a car parked on the road. Now, hoods have gotten
| so tall that neither can the child see past it to what's on
| the other side, nor can the drivers see the children.
| D13Fd wrote:
| This is so true. It's much harder for drivers to see
| pedestrians these days. And walkers now have to deal with
| E-bikes and electric scooters flying down the sidewalks at
| high speed and silently. I've nearly been hit many times
| even as a very visible adult.
| jMyles wrote:
| Of course; that's the only reasonable conclusion from a
| straightforward reading of the risk profile for children after
| they age out of drowning and before they age into opioid
| overdose.
|
| The lion's share of loving a child is intervening in proportion
| to actual risk.
|
| As a society, that means, more than any other single reform,
| relieving our cities of the burden of maintaining lethal,
| taxpayer-funded compatibility with the auto industry's
| machinery.
| nkrisc wrote:
| For real. Way too many people drive around our neighborhood way
| too fast and looking at their phone the whole time. Of course
| they're also driving their enormous pedestrian-crusher trucks.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I remember when I was a kid I would bike to a park around a half
| mile away by myself, definitely before I was 13, and I admit it
| feels weird to suggest a kid can go to the park down just a
| single block alone today.
|
| The funny thing is it'd be safer: Kids have cell phones now by
| like 7 or 8 in a lot of cases and can call for help! Back when I
| was that age if I got injured or something I might've had to
| knock on strangers' doors!
| gehsty wrote:
| As a parent you feel the push and pull of not ignoring your child
| while also not mollycoddling them. For me let the kid do what
| they want - if your kid wants to stay home let them, if they want
| to climb trees and go off on their bike let them. Help them learn
| what is safe (which rods can they cross), what are their
| boundaries. Hopefully they get it, maybe they don't. Don't
| restrict access to devices or screens too harshly. Encourage
| games of any kind. Wear sunscreen.
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| I have a 10 year old boy and I'm facing these issues right now.
| I'm also in Canada so culturally adjacent to the US and similar
| enough with regards to this topic.
|
| I don't see child welfare agencies personally as a particular
| threat when it comes to this topic. Maybe they ARE more likely to
| get involved in cases of more free range parenting where before
| they weren't, but it doesn't register as a real worry.
|
| The major difference I see between when I was growing up and now
| is that when I went out onto the streets, there were other kids
| on the streets. My parents didn't know exactly what they were
| sending me out to, but they knew that there as a general crowd of
| kids that would be out on the street until some point in the
| evening, and that they would all go home at around the same time,
| and that's also when you were expected home.
|
| The draw of smartphones and video games as indoor entertainment
| can't be understated, but I can exercise some parental tyranny
| here and always kick him out of the house to go play like my
| folks used to do.
|
| But there are no other kids out there. I'm sending him out into
| streets empty of kids.
|
| To mitigate this I'm trying to nudge things in the direction of
| him and his friends forming some sort of after-school crew that
| finds outside activities to do together, undirected. There are
| other like minded parents that I've found that are also
| interested in enabling something like this.
|
| On the subject of risks - I strongly believe that the role of
| parenthood is to mediate a child's exposure to the real trauma of
| a hostile, often absurd reality that they will grow up into.
| Controlled exposure to risk, to self-directed decision making in
| times where they feel like someone won't be there to help them
| out and they need to figure things out on their own, these are
| critical requirements in parenting IMHO. And all risk comes with
| some small chance of tragedy, and that's a burden we as parents
| have to bear: to expose ourselves to the emotional trauma of the
| possibility of our children getting hurt, however small the
| chance, so that they are able to grow into healthy well-adjusted
| adults.
|
| I feel like I have to work a lot harder than my parents did to
| enable that exposure.
| testing22321 wrote:
| Small town Canada here. In winter all the kids above school
| toboggan and slide down the roads (GT racers). All the kids
| below trudge up carrying their slider of choice. In the
| afternoon the roles are reversed. Not an adult in sight.
|
| At the ski hill kids 5+ roam free- it's always fun getting on
| the chairlift and a little kid says " can you help me get on?"
| And you have to physically pick them up onto the moving (fixed
| grip) chairlift. There's no cell service.
|
| Mountain bike trails around town are full of groups of kids 5+.
|
| My advice: move to a small town, it's like going back in time
| in a very good way.
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| I learned to snowboard in Wapiti Valley which is a little
| river valley skislope setup way out in the middle of nowhere
| saskatchewan. I know what you're talking about. I took the
| lift up with both 6 year olds and 86 year olds and both would
| offer advice to a new learner. I drove 3 hours in from "big
| city" Saskatoon but most of the attendees were kids and
| adults from the nearby towns. Loved the literal 30-second
| wait times to catch a lift back up - it was a really great
| environment to learn in.
|
| That said, "move to a small town" is easier said than done
| when you have a family and kid :)
| testing22321 wrote:
| It's still like that today, and it doesn't have to be
| Saskatchewan either.
|
| I have a family and a kid
| MichaelRo wrote:
| >> But there are no other kids out there. I'm sending him out
| into streets empty of kids.
|
| This. It's a number's "game".
|
| My father, born in rural Romania, had 8 siblings, one of them
| died of an accident in his childhood (yeah, during "free range
| stuff"). I was born in a town and have 2 brothers. Live in a
| city and have one kid.
|
| I can't send my kid out carelessly because I don't have a
| backup.
| xyzelement wrote:
| One of the many reasons you should have more kids.
| mothballed wrote:
| If one in 8 has that kind of accident in America they will
| seize all the kids and you will lose all of them, so other
| than just spreading your DNA that approach won't work.
| There are many, many documented cases of people having all
| their kids seized because they had a child with a brittle
| bone disease, and after their brittle bones break (happens
| easily with such child) the government blames the parent
| and takes all the other children too.
| xyzelement wrote:
| Ok I am not sure what exact point you are making or
| arguing with. The op grew up as 1 of 3 and I think that's
| better than 1 of 1 :)
| dublinstats wrote:
| statistically you'd only need about 0.0002 additional
| children to counter the risk of accidental deaths prior
| generations of children experienced.
| shigawire wrote:
| Many, many seems like overstating a rare corner case that
| can easily be proven.
| ip26 wrote:
| Totally onboard with some managed risk of injury being ok. Very
| much _not_ onboard with the parents who trust their six year
| olds to face mortal peril alone and make good choices.
| semiquaver wrote:
| I read through the comment you replied to multiple times and
| I'm not seeing any mortal peril referenced. What are you
| referring to?
| oakashes wrote:
| Great point. Intuitively it makes sense that sending kids out
| when you expect a bunch of their peers to be there is different
| from sending them out into empty streets. Thinking a little
| more about why this intuition holds: it's because once upon a
| time you were sending them out into a community, where they
| would learn the tried and tested practices by example. Once the
| link of cultural transmission is severed, it's hard to
| bootstrap it back again, even if you had a bunch of families
| that wanted to try.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Where I am in the UK its the "problem" kids that are seen out
| and about on their own.
|
| I was freerange growing up in rural england, so I have no
| problem with the youth roving about. My wife is horrified by
| the idea, so our kids are somewhat coddled.
|
| In the UK at least, children are objectively safer in every
| metric apart from getting fat. Kidnap, abuse, getting lost, car
| accidents are all way way down.
|
| The interesting thing is that here you wouldn't be threatened
| with child services, You'd have to be pretty abusive or get
| your kid picked up by the police for the state to get involved.
| Mostly its pure classism, nice middle class kids aren't allowed
| to walk about on their own until they are 16, at least.
| DANmode wrote:
| How'd you get pulled into that situation? =]
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Blame a litigious culture where agencies have far too much power
| to "fix" other people. People in many places in America live with
| a fear of losing their children or getting sued and losing
| everything.
| eweise wrote:
| When my child was an infant, my wife parked in a parking lot and
| starting chatting with a friend about 10 yards away. Minutes
| later a woman came by and starting claiming the child was not
| safe and was going to call protective services. This freaked both
| of us out that a stranger could potentially have the power to
| cause the government to become involved with our family.
| Fortunately, we didn't let that experience prevent us from
| letting our kids wander freely. But it does just take one over-
| concerned parent, to get you into trouble.
| mothballed wrote:
| I had something like that happen I was out of town and forgot
| most places in America have a way more fascist child snatchers
| than where I live. The police contacted a national database
| check, their local child services, and my hometown child
| services. Thankfully my hometown child services told them to go
| fuck themselves (the place I live in now thankfully doesn't
| usually get involved unless there is serious abuse) and the
| ones in the place I was at didn't have time to deal with it
| before I left, but they certainly would have if I were a
| resident there.
| ceayo wrote:
| > fascist child snatchers
|
| lol
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| A friend of mine was outside with his kids. He read a book and
| a woman who drove by yelled at him to always watch the kids and
| not read a book.
| sublinear wrote:
| I do get that it's stressful to raise a family. You're being held
| accountable for many things you don't have much control over, but
| I don't think this is a big deal either way. This is a false
| dichotomy like all the other nonsense aimed at parents.
|
| It misses the point entirely to seek control over whether your
| kids are "free range" enough. That style of parenting worked so
| well in the past (it didn't really, but I digress) because they
| left well enough alone. They weren't trying to contrive anything.
| Your kids absorb everything from you. Don't let your insecurities
| be part of it.
|
| What I would argue is much more important is keeping things fresh
| with new opportunities. That's your main job as a parent. Keep
| them thinking and engaged with their mostly self-directed path in
| life. The goal is to open their eyes and help them understand the
| world. Respect their intelligence and let them decide things on
| their own.
|
| Many of those so called free range childhoods of the past were
| actually just empty and boring. That's when they got into
| trouble. That's not something to be nostalgic about. When I hear
| about trends like this I have to wonder if some parents are just
| looking for excuses to be lazy.
| seb1204 wrote:
| I have to keep telling my kids that "this is not the USA", all
| the things they see or hear are so dominated by USA views and
| experiences that the kids need to be reminded that this should
| not be transferred to where we live without consideration. This
| is a constant effort to review concerns and angst that might
| arise. E.g. school shootings and metal detectors on school
| entrances. Sure there are socioeconomic issues around when
| looking at high schools here but not like that. Personally I
| think we need to ground ourselves and not get shit crazy or
| paralysed by fear.
| polivier wrote:
| I do feel like we as a society are moving in the direction
| discussed by the article, as a general trend. But this is not my
| personal experience. We live in typical suburbs, and we are lucky
| enough that our street has a bunch of like-minded young families
| that let their kids play outside. Our street really feels like
| what you would imagine if you were thinking of a typical street
| in the 1960s. Kids aged 5 to around 10 playing ball in the
| street, going in each other's yards/houses, etc. There's a
| Catholic church less than 1km away, and at 6pm every day the
| bells ring. All the kids go back to their houses for supper when
| they hear the bells. It's great.
|
| There's a kid (7-8 years old I think) a few houses down that
| carries a walkie-talkie with him during the summer. He'll be out
| for several hours (probably not farther than 10 houses away from
| his own house), and his mom checks on him every now and then
| using the walkie-talkie. I'll buy a set for own kids this summer
| for the exact same purpose.
|
| The only thing I'm kind of scared of are the cars, because they
| tend to drive too fast (for my taste) and kids tend to not always
| look when they cross the street when they're too excited playing
| their games.
|
| Edit: I just remembered that a few years ago, the cops showed up
| because there was a complaint about our kids being left
| unsupervised. They were playing in the backyard, which is
| completely fenced off, while we were inside cooking supper. Our
| kitchen window faces the yard so we could see them, and the
| window was open so we could hear them. At least the cops realized
| that the complaint was BS and didn't even come inside to check
| for anything. We live in Canada.
| skrrtww wrote:
| > "We work in tech," she says. "Our kids [aren't] getting any
| cell phones, no smartphones, no Instagrams. I write the
| algorithms. I don't want my kids to touch those algorithms."
|
| It's disgusting that this has become a casual attitude and
| admission by the tech worker class. No one should be getting this
| free pass.
|
| "I am actively harming children and society with my livelihood
| (except my own, because I am so smart). Here I am proudly and
| smugly stating this in a news article."
| pickledish wrote:
| Don't know why you were downvoted -- I scoffed at that part
| too. The least we in tech can do is have some self-awareness
| tmseidman wrote:
| I disagree- I think it's not much different than working at a
| distillery or cigar company (wrappery?). Social media is a vice
| not very different than whiskey or cigars- they're addictive,
| feel good in the short term, and are problematic to have too
| much or to do habitually. But we still let people indulge in
| them because they're fine in small quantities for responsible
| adults, and we expect that parents will not let their kids have
| access to them.
|
| The only differences as far as I can see are in buying- a child
| could technically buy a phone for themself if they had the
| money and create an account on Instagram for free, and in
| cultural recognition of social media as a vice, which I believe
| is starting to change.
|
| The overall point is, the law should assume that adults are
| reasonably intelligent and responsible people, and that parents
| should be the ones responsible for parenting their own children
| their own way.
| projektfu wrote:
| Don't get high on your own supply. Famous advice.
| keybored wrote:
| Weird. I was told by HN that it's not the worker's fault. They
| have kids to feed. Oh my gosh the Bay Area rent/mortgage. Blah
| blah blah.
|
| Software is eating the world they say but they can't get an
| honest do-no-evil CRUD job apparently.
| beej71 wrote:
| I recently revisited my childhood town and walked from my
| childhood home to my school. I hadn't done that for nearly 50
| years. It was shorter than I remember, of course, but it was
| still several blocks. The last time I walked it, I was five. I
| also learned to ride a bicycle when I was five, so that took the
| place of walking for the latter part of the kindergarten school
| year.
|
| I arrived at the school just as it was getting out for the day. I
| did not see a single student of any age leave without an adult.
|
| Like so many people of my generation, I can only wonder at the
| cost, and be grateful that I was born when I was.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Yeah. Not seeing it. The local neighbourhood here in Arizona is
| infested with 12 year olds on e-bikes. It's great.
| mothballed wrote:
| It work on the dirt-bike tier e-bikes because they can get
| away. IF they are walking my child has been harassed by Karens
| asking "why they are out on their own." I look forward to the
| day they are old enough to ride a fast enough e-bike to escape
| people with cell phones that will rat them out for being out
| and about.
|
| I largely blame cell phones for the Karens being able to impose
| their will. When I was a kid we were all out about and/or doing
| dumb shit, but anyone who wanted to call the authorities had to
| go home to find a telephone. By that time we were long gone. As
| long as we didn't go near houses, no one could touch us. Now
| they will just follow the kid with their cellphone until the
| rat-fuckers from CPS or the police arrive.
| garbawarb wrote:
| We tell children not to talk to strangers but if a random
| adult goes up to a child and says something like "Why are you
| out on your own," what are they supposed to do?
|
| Thankfully this never happened to me as a child, I don't even
| know what I'd do.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| "Nothing at all until you groped me, Karen. Don't make me
| call the cops on you, pedo"
| DaedalusII wrote:
| america is more dangerous than many 3rd world and developing
| countries on the street
|
| once my friend get arrested in LA by police when he jogging. they
| say they arrest him for his own safety because he shouldnt be out
| jogging in "this neighborhood"
|
| turns out people in america get murdered and attacked in the
| street all the time for... no reason. yes literally, no motive.
| mothballed wrote:
| Me and my child were detained by the police in a park because
| my child is a different race and some Karen called it in as
| suspicious and I was detained as a "kidnapper." I ended up
| buying acreage in the country just to escape all the pieces of
| shit that would harass me and my child for playing outside.
|
| The danger to children is largely the police and CPS, who rip
| apart families for hallucinations or levels of parenting sin
| that are far more benign than the emotional cost to children of
| authorities bearing down on them.
| DaedalusII wrote:
| you are a real american now, you play outside in your private
| land that you drive to. there is peace in the universe again
|
| now, if your child is too playful for Ms. Karen, they will
| give them a shit load of adderal as well
|
| you may consider paying for a private school to avoid Karens
| drugging your children
| coldtea wrote:
| Also so conditioned to this warzone levels of violence, that
| many consider them normal, or will cite stats with 5x-10x the
| violence of an equivalent sized city in the rest of the West
| and East saying "that's good odds, just X of 100K murdered last
| year".
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >america is more dangerous than many 3rd world
|
| it isn't. Crime is highly concentrated and the vast majority
| of, at least median affluent America, is about as safe as it
| gets. Same goes for any big cities, usually you can count risky
| streets on one hand, where 90% of the violence happens.
|
| Not to mention, developing countries are if anything the only
| places where kids still run around and play on the street. I've
| spend a fair amount of time in Latin American countries with
| much higher violent crime rates than most of the world and you
| don't see much helicopter parenting
|
| if anything in the first world this style of parenting is a
| result of _excess_ safety, not lack of it. The world has seen a
| secular decline in violent crime over the last few decades, and
| yet this paranoia is distinctly new.
| mothballed wrote:
| Well we also view children as completely disempowered unlike
| before. Starting around age 7 my parents gave me a gun and
| ammunition and I would roam the countryside all day long. It
| was mostly for hunting but if someone tried to inflict mortal
| bodily injury upon me my father gave me the instructions to
| aim between their eyeballs.
|
| I'm also quite certain that in much of Latin America anyone
| fucking with a child would not go through a trial and handled
| with kid gloves, but rather there are plenty of videos of the
| internet of such people being held down while Rottweilers
| literally rip their balls off. Probably not an ideal version
| of justice but also perhaps more effective at pursuading
| people not to fuck with children.
| Grappelli wrote:
| Interesting to read this from outside the US.
|
| Growing up in the former Soviet space in the 90s, unsupervised
| childhood was simply the default - not a parenting philosophy.
| Kids walked to school alone at 6, spent entire days outside with
| no adult in sight. Nobody called it "free-range", it was just...
| childhood.
|
| What strikes me about the American situation is that the risk
| perception seems almost entirely detached from actual statistics.
| The article mentions stranger abduction fears driving this, yet
| abduction rates are extremely low. Meanwhile the documented harms
| from over-supervision - anxiety, depression, inability to handle
| conflict independently - are well-documented.
|
| The Georgia mother arrested for letting her 10-year-old walk a
| mile into town is a remarkable data point. A mile at 10 would
| have been considered a short distance where I grew up.
|
| I wonder how much of this is specifically American vs. a broader
| trend in wealthy countries. Anyone from Western Europe seeing
| similar patterns?
| zkmon wrote:
| It's not isolated phenomenon.If we look at the larger scale of,
| say, 100 years, a lot of things are rapidly disappearing. It's
| actually some sort of extinction that is underway, but you don't
| feel it on a smaller scale of time. Similar to how Romans
| wouldn't have been aware of the Fall of Roman empire while it was
| happening, because it was too slow to notice.
| ceayo wrote:
| Can you give some examples of things rapidly disappearing?
| FloorEgg wrote:
| The average person's ability to acquire food from nature
| (farm, hunt, gather) and cook it for themselves.
|
| The average person ability to make and fix their own tools.
| Build and fix their shelter.
|
| Free range childhood.
|
| Average person getting dirt under their fingernails.
|
| Being in sync with sunlight cycle.
|
| Stargazing at night.
|
| These are off the top of my head (I'm not op).
| rao-v wrote:
| I don't think in 1926 more than 50% of global 15-20 year
| olds could:
|
| "acquire food from nature (farm, hunt, gather) and cook it
| for themselves."
|
| Or
|
| "make and fix their own tools. Build and fix their
| shelter."
|
| (Culturally, those tasks often specialize by vocation,
| gender etc.)
| kube-system wrote:
| They absolutely could. A quarter of _Americans'_ primary
| job was agriculture in the 1920s. While job
| specialization was certainly a thing that didn't mean
| people outsourced _all_ of these tasks the way people do
| today.
| rao-v wrote:
| That's different from solo gather and cook and repair
| which is the artificially inflated bar being set here. I
| know people from multiple parts of the world who grew up
| on family working farms - specializing very real (esp.
| gender based)
| FloorEgg wrote:
| I'm saying that the number of people doing these things
| are disappearing relative to the past. Seems to me like
| you are the one making up and moving bars around.
|
| You said 50%, you said 15-20, you are speaking in
| absolute terms.
|
| I'm pointing at trends.
|
| Do you deny the trends?
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| I don't know about "globally" but I would be surprised if
| 50% of American males couldn't do this in 1926. These
| were skills taught to most young males and the country
| was far more rural. It was far less universal among
| females though some did learn these skills.
|
| While unstructured, this kind of standard life knowledge
| was intentionally and systematically passed down to most
| boys in every community I lived even when in elementary
| school. It was expected that you knew how to do these
| things and men would go out of their way to teach you if
| you didn't.
|
| Kids did fishing, trapping, hunting, building out camp
| sites, etc for fun when I was growing up and it was
| generally encouraged. Learned helplessness wasn't really
| a thing.
|
| This started to die out decades ago. Most zoomers I know
| didn't have anything like this experience.
| Sam6late wrote:
| Learnt how to balance and ride a cycle on my own when I was
| a kid, and I used to 'run away from home' for 12 hours with
| other kids, I learnt how to swim after drowning, twice, ate
| whatever was around, green almonds from trees, grapes from
| vineyards, but raw corn was painful, I would not advise
| trying. We tried to hunt with arrows and sometimes used gun
| powder in a primitive red-loading rifle, but we sucked at
| it. we got chased by dogs in farms we raided and chased by
| an armed man who claimed we caused his wife's abortion
| while we were playing football in the street. Another armed
| man chased us brandishing his gun after we attacked him
| with stones after we caught him staring at our neighbor's
| daughter while she was on the balcony. This was in 1969 to
| 1973 before we moved to an apartment building and all that
| ended. Now I joke telling my family that I wish for once
| the police would call me for something my son has done, but
| no luck with that:) . Here some photos I wish you could
| recognize that dude on my shirt https://imgur.com/a/JCFMgap
| mcastle wrote:
| The dude on your shirt is Mork from the show Mork &
| Mindy, played by Robin Williams.
| amingilani wrote:
| I think OP is talking about Shifting Baseline Syndrome[0].
|
| > A shifting baseline (also known as a sliding baseline) is a
| type of change to how a system is measured, usually against
| previous reference points (baselines), which themselves may
| represent significant changes from an even earlier state of
| the system that fails to be considered or remembered.
|
| [0]: Wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline.
|
| [1]: Earth.org article that reads nicer:
| https://earth.org/shifting-baseline-syndrome/
| rolodato wrote:
| Being able to see stars in the night sky
| moralestapia wrote:
| Sure, here's one!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47815127
| neuroelectron wrote:
| >What changed? In a 2023 article for Psychology Today, Gray
| proposed some factors that began reshaping parents' attitudes and
| children's behavior around the middle of the century: "the
| arrival of television, the rise of adult-directed kids' sports,
| the gradual exclusion of kids from public spaces, the declining
| opportunities for gainful employment or meaningful contributions
| to the family economy, and, finally, the increased mandate that
| kids must be constantly monitored and protected."
|
| You will see lots of kids free-ranging in Lakewood, NJ. A lot of
| families there have banned TV from the home.
| semiquaver wrote:
| That paragraph bothered me. It gives a strong "assuming the
| conclusion" vibe. Oh, a factor reshaping parents attitudes is a
| "mandate that kids must be constantly monitored and protected"
| (in other words, parents' attitudes)? You don't say.
| ls612 wrote:
| No, the mandate is enforced by the government coming and
| taking away your children by force, for some indeterminate
| period of time, until your lawyer goes in front of a judge
| and (hopefully) the judge rules that the government is stupid
| and should give you your kids back. But by then the damage is
| done.
|
| One has to think if a state wanted to eliminate individualism
| in society this application of surveillance and restraint to
| children would be entirely by design...
| hawaiianbrah wrote:
| Lakewood is a fascinating place, to be sure!
| projektfu wrote:
| The takeover of US kids soccer by club soccer is disturbing to
| me. Generally kids who play are either well off or extremely
| talented (called "scholarship"?).
|
| I think the clubs suck the fun out of it. Even with the
| expense, American players perform much worse than players in
| other countries where the kids have just been playing for fun
| for years until they start getting paid.
| KnuthIsGod wrote:
| On the other hand, stuff happens.
|
| Depends on your risk appetite and your systems tolerance for the
| inevitable consequences of errors...
|
| A 5 year old free range kid on a scooter died outside a nearby
| school a few months ago.
|
| Hit by a SUV
|
| Was riding back from primary school on a scooter, without the
| mother.
|
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-14/islah-metcalfe-rouse-...
|
| A massive investigation, police, social services, traffic
| consultants, a million plus spent on upgrading safety, mother and
| father demonised in the community,etc ...
|
| Teachers involved who responded or gave CPR ( I know some of
| them) given counselling.
|
| The mother is likely to have lost custody of her other children.
| namero999 wrote:
| As a counter example, I witnessed 3 months ago a similar scene
| in my neighborhood, where a kid on a bike, crossing on
| pedestrian stripes, was hit by a taxi. It was a bad accident
| but luckily he didn't die. His dad was following right behind
| him. I'm leaning to think that "shit happens" in any case, but
| overprotection adds on top another layer of subtle, long term
| risks.
| projektfu wrote:
| There was no support in the link for your assertion that the
| mother is likely to lose custody. Money was raised in support
| of the parents. Your link says two other children were struck
| at the same intersection before this, and the municipality
| didn't take notice. Yet you blame the parents for not driving
| to school instead of the driver of the truck, and the traffic
| situation?
|
| This is really the problem.
| ww520 wrote:
| Gen X was the last free range children. They ran wild after
| school without the tethering cell phones, playing in sand and
| drinking from garden hoses. The silent generation turned out to
| be a great generation building most of modern technologies.
| semiquaver wrote:
| Judging by this comment thread, this is just not something HN is
| capable of having a reasonable discussion on.
| QuarterReptile wrote:
| I think Maryland deserves a special shoutout. It's illegal, and
| not just in a CPS-steamrolls-your-rights-and-family sort of way,
| for an 8 year old to be left with children <13.
|
| Growing up, I think many girls had _ended_ their babysitting
| careers by 13.
| croisillon wrote:
| Related: 2017 (but based on a 2007 DailyMail article), 520
| comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13547089
| jhoechtl wrote:
| A delicate topic with many perspectives. Our small families make
| it possible to devote so much energy to our kids. However
| autonomy is all so important to become a strong adult later. We
| deliberately need let go more than we do now.
| alexpotato wrote:
| As a relatively "free range" child in my youth and now the parent
| of children, even I find it hard to reconcile how I feel
| differently that my parents.
|
| e.g. at 10 years old, my cousins and I were running around in the
| woods at my gradparents' home in rural Pennsylvania. I was the
| oldest of the group with my youngest cousin probably being 6. No
| cell phones. No Apple watches etc. We were outside of that house
| around 9am and would come back for lunch and then dinner when my
| grandmother rang the bell.
|
| My oldest has an Apple watch and is both reachable able trackable
| yet the above still feels little strange to me.
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