[Rotdhizon]

Seems like society is constantly pushing to remove all the ways in which kids used to live. Can't just wonder around and play on the sidewalks or the streets anymore with your friends, someone will call the police on you. Can't hang out in the woods, as those have mostly been torn down to make way for new neighborhoods, and the woods that do remain are typically private property. Unless you are lucky enough to live in a place that still has a good wooded area where there's no busy bodies, you are out of luck. Can't hang out at the mall, they will kick you out if you aren't accompanied by an adult. Can't hang out at your favorite local joints anymore, they'll kick you out. I was also among the last generations that really got to experience freedom and a playful world as a child, I can't imagine growing up in the world today.

The biggest problem are people who can't mind their business and people who have been conditioned to fear the world. The 24/7 fear cycle of news has drilled it into so many peoples minds that if you see someone anywhere on your street outside, they are there to murder, rob, mutilate, or otherwise commit crime.

[parasubvert]

This is all pretty US-centric.

Kids are allowed a fair amount of freedom in Canada and Europe, where I still see a lot of kids around malls, or parks, playing basketball in courts (which still happens in NYC), or wooded areas. Sure, more are on their phones etc. But it’s really not that different from the 90s IMO, in many locations.

The biggest change is there aren’t so many clusters of “neighbourhood kids” as there used to be, as people are having fewer children later in life... unless you deliberately seek out a unicorn neighbourhood with similar aged kids. Playgroups and play dates need to be actively organized by parents due to distances between houses.

(I raise two children, and the 10 year old is free to ride his bike and wander, so long as he keeps a phone on for location - he’s taken plenty of bike camps to learn to be responsible).

[dtwest]

Of course it is US-centric, the post is from a US newspaper. Nobody would comment "This is all pretty German-centric" if the post came from a German newspaper. Maybe I don't understand your point.

That aside, I completely agree with your comment. Public spaces and well designed cities that allow for those clusters are very important to kids.

For whatever it's worth though, I don't think things were that much better in the US back in the 90s. In recent history the US has always been worse in this regard than Canada and Europe.

[mosselman]

> Of course it is US-centric, the post is from a US newspaper.

What is your point? Whether this is a US-centric or global issue seems like valuable information for the discussion. If it really is a US-centric problem, the solution, for the US, might be to look outward at other countries. If it were a global issue, we'd all have to look into our past to find a solution. It is important to know the scale of the problem don't you think?

[ryandrake]

> If it really is a US-centric problem, the solution, for the US, might be to look outward at other countries.

Given the state of other US-specific problems like our dysfunctional healthcare system and mass-shootings, I think it’s pretty clear the US is rarely interested in learning from outside its borders.

[vibrio]

"This is all pretty US-centric."

Is it US-Centric or urban centric? My guess is most of this board falls on the Urban side (Me included). I am unable to apply many of my valuable unstructured rural experiences as a youth to how I want to raise a child in a city. I thing I'd have the same challenge with Rome, Dallas, Barcelona, or most other urban centers.

[jimbokun]

My kids go to a city high school.

They have different kinds of unstructured experiences. After school, they have all kinds of restaurants and coffee shops to choose from. They can hang out at the Jewish Community Center and play FIFA. They sometimes wonder with their friends to a field at a local university to play soccer. They watch movies at the local theatre I only find out about when they mention later what they saw.

Heck, my older son took his girlfriend to a fancy restaurant I haven't even been to yet. :)

Before high school, a big mile stone was when they were old enough to safely cross streets on their own to walk to the local pool and basketball courts in the summer.

So there are still plenty of unstructured, unsupervised experiences to be had, just different than the rural ones.

[conductr]

I feel grateful to have grown up in a mid sized town. Population ~200k + College town of ~50k students. My bike radius was determined by my fitness level. I had all of these city experiences and the rural ones too because it was 100 miles to a big city. Even that was close enough for when you needed it but far enough we weren’t a suburb. The constant flow of college students kept the restaurants and entertainment at a high quality and on trend.

However, my bike gang was a bunch of little vandals. So we probably skewed the stats towards not letting kids outside.

Now I’m parenting in big city and I feel sad for how kids around here live. Trying to figure that one out before he gets older. He’s only 1 so I have time.

[vibrio]

Thanks for this. That sounds pretty nice too. Different. I was thinking about it last night and there are aspects of my youth I very much miss. being able to wander in woods with no-one around. playing hide and go seek with a handful of friends over more than a square mile of hilly-wooded area. Discovering crayfish in creeks or finding an awesome uncharted sledding hill in the winter. that said, my extended family was in a very large city and we visited frequently. One thing I think I resented about my town (though I don't think I knew it specifically) was the lack of some of some of the culture you describe. Plus there are just few people in small cities-the of everyday life cast of characters is very small, repetitious and limiting. That can be odd. Not sure how to explain that better.

[icebraining]

In some places, you can have both; when I lived in Brussels, my apartment - which was quite close from streets with plenty of shops, bars, universities, etc - was also 10 minutes by bicycle away from the 16 square mile (44 km²) Sonian forest.

[jimbokun]

No need to explain, as I grew up in a small town probably closer to your experience. :) As a kid, I was fascinated by what growing up in the city would be like, so it's been interesting to watch my kids grow up here.

[cuddlybacon]

I'm in Canada and the post you're replying to is pretty spot on in my experience.

There are no kids outside, except on halloween. To be fair, there aren't many adults outside either which I think is a part of the problem.

I have a 4 year old nephew. Once I took him to a park near where he lives. There were only 4 other kids there. In the time we were there, the cops showed up to shoe away 2 boys who were 10-12 years old. All they had been doing was sitting there chatting. If you can't even use a public park for its intended purpose anymore, why would you even try going outside as a kid?

[nojvek]

I just finished watching “Stranger things” on Netflix. It hits home. I was allowed to wander with my friends during the day, granted I got home for dinner. We used to walk almost a mile to school and back on our own. We didn’t have mobile phones and our parents really didn’t care. It was a way of life. “Where are your kids? Somewhere with their friends”.

I think the iPad generation now live virtual lives with their friends. Kinda sad but that’s what fearmongering by media gets us.

[parasubvert]

I’m also in Canada and see lots of kids at parks, which tend to be pretty busy. My kiddo loves video games but is also outdoors a lot.

A lot depends on parents to drive behaviour and introduce these days, again, due to lack of spontaneity / proximity that many grew up with.

[johnisgood]

We have built large parks/playgrounds for kids here in Eastern Europe, and we have upgraded most of our playgrounds. There are many of them. Kids can freely be kids here still. :)

What is happening in the US is quite depressing to me. Your kid can be shot for having a toy that the cop perceives to be a gun. It is crazy! Things like that never happen here, even if that toy is a toy gun.

[9HZZRfNlpR]

It doesn't happen that often, that's the point. People are afraid everything and everyone. We euros tend to forget how big USA really is. Of course all sort of shit happens.

[llukas]

EU has more citizens than USA and it is unthinkable that such thing would happen in EU.

[Zak]

That may be true, but it illustrates an important point: we shouldn't need tragedies to be unthinkable in order to make reasonable decisions about their probability.

We don't do this in every situation. Most American parents transport their kids by car without giving the risk much thought, though car crashes kill significantly more children than homicide in the US (source: CDC). I'm not sure there's a good solution to the cognitive bias of discounting relatively mundane risks.

[psychrometer]

Millions of people go on holiday to Caribbean countries which have much higher rates of homicide and killings by law enforcement. The fact that people choose to go to places that are much worse than the US in this regard makes me think the rates in the US do not really weigh that much upon people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

[jhbadger]

Tourism in the Caribbean isn't like tourism in first-world countries. Relatively few tourists wander the streets by themselves where the local crime (and law enforcement killing) rates would be relevant but stay in resort areas heavily protected by resort staff and local police who fear the loss of the tourism economy. When a tourist goes missing or is murdered in the Caribbean, it makes world news.

[Moru]

Yesterday I was out biking in the area (German small town) with my daughter. I was so happy to see a bunch of kids sitting on the road side with their bikes lying on the ground. All bent over some interesting thing on the ground. You know, like we used to do when we found a dead bird or a lizard crossing the road.

When we turned around and came by them again I realised they were watching YouTube on a phone. But at least they were outside, sitting on a not unused car road on the edge of the village.

[Smithalicious]

I see this sentiment (it's not like this in Europe) all the time, yet in NL where I live it definitely seems to be about the same as the US.

[api]

> The 24/7 fear cycle of news has drilled it into so many peoples minds that if you see someone anywhere on your street outside, they are there to murder, rob, mutilate, or otherwise commit crime.

Join NextDoor.com if you want a dose of how nuts people have gone.

I live in Orange County CA and I have checked it from time to time. Apparently this place is a crime infested jungle full of human trafficking gangs that abduct kids and street gangs that will sell your fifth grader fentanyl. There are also gangs of Satan worshippers that will sacrifice your kids to the devil or something. Then there are the sightings of pedestrians...

Then look up the actual crime statistics. With the exception of a few spots here and there this is "officer! Have you seen my cat?" territory. The stuff about gangs is the most laughable. The joke is "OC gangstaz be like 'it's not a phase mom!'"

As a general rule, the safer the area the crazier NextDoor becomes. Anaheim does have actual crime and the community boards are pretty sane. South County is almost zero crime and the paranoia on the neighborhood boards is off the charts.

[wingspar]

Do you think the paranoia leads to lower crime, via vigilance and reporting? And/or does the actual crime lead to ‘acceptance’ as displayed in the Anaheim boards?

Perhaps a manifestation of the broken windows theory? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

[ip26]

My suspicion is more like allergy theory, wherein if most of your life has no allergens (e.g. no pets, city life) then when you encounter the tiniest of allergens (a suspicious teenager wearing a hoodie) your system goes on total self paralyzing freakout (anaphylaxis).

[heymijo]

Good question, and my next one would be "at what cost?"

What are the externalities of services like NextDoor, local FB groups, etc keeping this in people's conscious all the time?

If I had to come up with a hypothesis and test it via the scientific method it would probably be: This is not good as it is a positive reinforcement loop that causes our lizard brains to see danger everywhere/all the time.

[rjbwork]

Haha. Yes, I briefly rented a separated basement apartment in one of the most well-to-do neighborhoods in the city I live in. The NextDoor forums are absolutely absurd. I like checking in every now and then for a laugh and a sigh.

[Balgair]

As a sampling for users that are unfamilar, there is a twitter account that posts some of the jewels : https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor?lang=en

[selimthegrim]

The citydata.com forums are a laugh riot too

[Reedx]

I think this is one of the reasons why Minecraft was so successful, especially with kids. It fulfilled a need they're not able to get in real life: exploring freely with their friends.

[Bartweiss]

I keep seeing stories about how kids are talking to their friends more online and less in person, almost always spun as "tech is supplanting face-to-face interactions!"

The reverse explanation seems screamingly obvious. Minecraft, Fortnite, Facebook, AIM, pick your program, are all things kids and teens do to talk and interact when they can't be together in person. They'll play videogames at a sleepover, sure, but it's a very different thing than getting on a game every night to chat. If your friends live driving distance away, you don't have anywhere fun to hang out, and you probably can't go out on schoolnights anyway, it's no surprise that socialization moves online.

Even beyond exploration, Minecraft is a perfect vector for this. It's collaborative and persistent, the same as building a treehouse would be. It can be closed-access, so your parents don't have to worry about strangers. It's drop-in with no fixed player count, so your friends can all cycle in and out for dinner, bedtime, and so on. And it's varying intensity, so you can do anything from fighting monsters to chatting about the schoolday as you decorate a house.

The decline of physical "third places", and the outright death of third places for children, is really depressing to behold. But I think Minecraft is at least a bright spot helping to offset that; it offers practically everything you could want except physicality.

[jstarfish]

That and the fact that Legos have become absurdly expensive.

[maire]

I am not sure how old you are but everything seemed to change when abducted children were put on milk cartons in the mid 1980s. Before that, kids roamed free. I tell my foreign friends that kids used to run the streets in America and they can hardly believe it.

The funny thing is that the danger of "stranger abductions" has been over blown. Most abductions are non-custodial parents.

[baddox]

Maybe it spread from more urban areas to more rural areas, because growing up in the mid and late 90s in a small midwestern town we were pretty much let loose on the streets with our bicycles with no restrictions other than “don’t get into trouble” and a time we needed to be back.

[dragonwriter]

> I am not sure how old you are but everything seemed to change when abducted children were put on milk cartons in the mid 1980s. Before that, kids roamed free.

That actually started in the early 1980s, and kids roamed free well into the 1990s.

[saiya-jin]

I don't think there is only 1 reason. I can think of several others - ie Marc Dutroux's case was highly medialised in Europe.

People generally have less and less time with kids due to work, and then overcompensate by being over-protective ("I suck at spending enough time with my kids, but look at how I protect them! I must still be a good parent then!").

There are much more cars everywhere, they drive faster too. Especially US problem from my experience, since whole infrastructure is designed around car usage. How are kids supposed to roam freely in urban areas then? I recall having to do 45 min walk to get to my work which was 1km away in LA, and this was including taking forbidden shortcut via highway road. Otherwise a solid 1h walk, to do frakin' 1km distance. Because nobody thought that there are pedestrians. Well kids are pedestrians, even on bikes.

[aiyodev]

Which countries still allow children to grow up free?

[fsloth]

Finland. The environment is safe, and kids can roam free. We consider it as a fact that if a kid is above 7 they can manage by themselves a couple of hours without supervision. Including going to school, a visit to the near by store, a stroll in the park or woods and so on.

[pmjordan]

Having close connections to both countries, I can say that kids in Austria are definitely freer than in the UK.

For one, in Austria, kids have a legal right to go to school on their own, be it on foot or by public transport. A lot of parents do drive their kids to school, unfortunately even where it's really not necessary, but you do also see plenty of young kids walking there or home, or taking the bus or train. You definitely also see more kids "hanging out" in Austria - in the UK, everyone seems quick to jump to conclusions about gangs, so I guess "respectable" parents won't let their kids do that.

On the other hand, I felt I probably had even more freedom growing up in the 90s (in Austria) than many of today's kids. This is probably more of an individual choice of the parents (for some reason, people are afraid, despite this being one of the safest countries in the world) than direct societal pressure (being reported to the cops or social services, etc.) as it seems to be in the UK or US.

[unlaxedneurotic]

I live in India, and the children are relatively free to do whatever they want

[estsauver]

Anecdotally, I see a lot of kids biking by themselves on the streets in the Netherlands.

[kurthr]

Also Japan... at least in Tokyo and I expect most other cities.

[konart]

Russia. (the irony)

[dgellow]

Any country in Western Europe.

[jaclaz]

Yep, but still the amount of kids "roaming free" is far less what used to be (Italy here), in the old days (I am talking og the '70's) - with some due exceptions - after school we had lunch, spent maybe 1 hour doing homework and then (from the age of 6 or 7) "roamed free", usually on bycicles, till there was enough light (or the time was a quarter to 20:00, whatever came first).

A as a side note, most kids wore shorts until roughly 13, the long trousers were reserved to "official" occasions, holiday visits to relatives, (rare) lunches at the restaurants, and similar.

And it was not common to see a kid with both knees not-bruised or non-orange, a much used item was, besides hydrogen peroxide, mercurochrome.

[dgellow]

What you describe sounds normal to me, I'm from Switzerland and was a kid during the 90s.

[johnisgood]

Probably many Eastern European countries.

[CMCDragonkai]

When I was a kid, New Zealand.

[maxheadroom]

>...and the woods that do remain are typically private property.

I've heard that in the states you can own a piece of property but have "no right" to get to it, as it's surrounded by other pieces of private property and, so, you're at the whims of those properties' owners. Is this true?

In Sweden, we have the concept of 'Allemansrätten'[0]; which is to say that 'private property' (in the absolute sense) doesn't exist and you have the freedom to roam, as long as you don't disturb or destroy anything.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#Sweden

[Broken_Hippo]

Agreed with other poster: If you own land that is completely surrounded by other land, you generally have the right to go through other's land.

But on the other hand, it really isn't "allmansrätten" either. (I am from the US and live in Norway - and norway has the same sort of laws). Here in Norway, you can simply camp for a night in some unused wooded area or a field that is obviously not used. In the US, you can get arrested for doing such a thing. Nature isn't something that is free for everyone to enjoy, but rather, it is the property of whoever owns the land even if there is no barrier or signs to alert you otherwise.

How often that is enforced varies. My parents owned land and generally didn't care, though they wanted hunters to alert them first so the could keep themselves safe. Many area residents didn't care if a couple people were walking in their woods - but don't get the idea that you could camp there without law enforcement being called unless you had express permission of the landowner.

[technothrasher]

This depends upon the state. Here in MA, you cannot stop people from being on your 'unimproved land'. In other words, people are not allowed to trample your lawn, but they are free to wander your woods. There are generally town bylaws against hunting land without the owner's permission though.

[jpindar]

In NH, landowners get a significant discount on their property tax if they allow hiking, fishing etc. on their unimproved land.

[piker]

No, that's generally incorrect. If your property is surrounded by others' private property in the US, an "easement by necessity" will generally be automatically granted which allows you access to your property through the surrounding private property.

[blaser-waffle]

Not that easements are easy to get or are free of contention -- a lot of pedantic property law comes out of asshole neighbors making other people's lives miserable.

Source: good buddy of mine is a real estate lawyer, and after a couple drinks he'll bitch and moan about it for hours

[cr0sh]

My brother-in-law went through that with a piece of property he bought in California; it was a house on top of a "hill" (or small mountain?).

Two "neighbors" colluded to shut off all easements to the property, hoping that in 7 years (or whatever) they'd get the right to the property and could fix it and resell it. It was originally owned by investors, who wanted to offload it because they were fighting the same fight, and one of them had a heart attack and was dying, and they just wanted out. Along comes my BIL and he gets it for a song.

And the issues to boot.

The neighbors - one was a known "a-hole" in the neighborhood who would sue anyone and everyone; indeed, if you looked up his name in California, he had a record of using the courts almost as if it were his job. The other guy, he owned a large avocado orchard which bordered the property; he had fenced over one of the plat map easements. The other easement was a road which led to the property, which the first guy lived next to, just down below from the house. He blocked it off with a metal gate. He also owned another house he used as a rental, which was just immediately below the house. So he'd leave the gate open sometimes, and would give a key to the renters, but otherwise it was closed off. He'd also let people in for maintenance and inspection of a water tank which served for water in the neighborhood.

The story is wild and long - they didn't count on the tenacity of the family I married into. They didn't count on my brother-in-law, who works construction - being willing to run his dump truck for 48 hours straight with little-to-no sleep to make money in any way possible so he could pay his lawyer bill every single month (which ran to insane levels). He didn't count on my sister-in-law being willing to live in the house, to establish residency, while her husband worked a state away.

We had to hike up to the house one, using machetes to cut thru the undergrowth. My brother-in-law later ran a bulldozer to cut a path up the side of it, to get past the gate (he came from the avocado side - which the sheriff allowed him to cut past the fence, because of the plat map, and thus had to fight that neighbor in court too) - they then used 4wd vehicles to get up the side to the house.

He never counted on any of this and more. My brother-in-law flew a pirate flag from the flagpole, just to give the other guy the finger during all this.

Eventually, after several years, my brother-in-law won the lawsuit, and got access to the road. The gate was removed. The entire neighborhood rejoiced, and my BIL became the "hero" of their area, because they had long suffered various indignities by that guy.

A few months after my BIL won the case, the guy ended up having a heart attack, and died. The other guy lived a few years longer, but also ended up dying of natural causes.

My brother-in-law's house, now that it has access, instantly shot up in value several times over. He and his wife are now thinking of selling it, and moving on to other things.

[Upvoter33]

"and the woods that do remain are typically private property"

This is not really true, there are thousands of forests and lands that are public spaces. Whatever the problem is, it's not this.

[beauzero]

Depends on which coast you live. West coast, central US lot's of government land (BLM, Forest Service, National Parks, etc.). The east coast, not so much. Most of it is private. It was a shock to me when I moved from Montana to Georgia.

[mkr-hn]

Georgia has a lot of state parks. Sometimes you can get a park pass from the library with your PINES card.

[Bartweiss]

The accessible woods are often private property, though, at least on the east coast. BLM and other state/federal lands are fantastic, and they're certainly plentiful out west. But lots of that land demands serious hiking or backpacking, and even the land that's easy to walk into isn't generally accessible without driving. It's not an option for inviting a friend over after school to explore the woods.

The land that is accessible by foot or bike is much more likely to be privately owned. And when it is public space, it's often a town or state park - which is quite likely to come with enough curfews, enforced bans on unaccompanied minors, and other child-unfriendliness that it's functionally private.

[francisofascii]

Right. Freedom to roam in the US is all but lost. A century ago the notion of private land was how you describe. Today, you might have a property owner calling the police or pointing a gun at you.

[netmonk]

There was this study published around 10 years ago, showing that in 1850 the average diameter of field of play of children were around 10km close to the house. In 2007 it was mostly 250m away from the house.

[seanhandley]

One word: cars.

[neuronic]

Another word: What?

[aaroninsf]

7z unpacks this as:

American post-war car-centric urban design transformed public space from one accessible to, and commonly ranged by, all (including children), into one largely accessible by motorized transit.

Children without licenses and access to vehicles consequently lost direct autonomous access to the core locations in their lives (home - school - simple shopping - peers - common wild space), and have been discouraged from attempting to navigate these spaces on foot (for fear of injury or unrealistic transit distance/detours required).

The author does not state, but one may infer, that car-centric living is coupled to the overscheduling and helicopter parenting at issue in the original article; and that children raised in a car-centric environment experience something akin to learned helplessness.

These problems are further compounded by comparatively poor American public transit systems and a contemporary mindset in which fearful parents discourages free-range children from making use of what transit options are present before the last few years of childhood; and by safety concerns around biking and skating in environments which do privilege cars.

[aaroninsf]

As a parent these considerations are omnipresent in my household.

My own kids are in the top quintile of "most free range" in our cohort; that feels possible in San Francisco in some ways which do not appear as feasible in many other urban areas. That's one reason we continue to try to raise our kids here.

But they do not get anything like the benevolent neglect of my own latchkey neighborhood-wandering local-kid-pack-factions semi-rural/suburban childhood.

[honzzz]

>>> someone will call the police on you

This may be a naive question but please bear with a non-US person - what would happen in the US if someone actually called police on you? Could you just say "these are my children and I think it is good for them to be unsupervised, good bye"?

[parrellel]

From multiple previous news articles, Child Protective Services hounds you, possibly takes your children for a bit, and then sticks you on a list for if there's ever any sort of repeat 'trouble'.

Given, these things probably get to be news because they're so extreme, but it pops up every few months. Look up the Maryland family that got in trouble for letting their kids walk to the park for the prototypical example.

[dougmwne]

You could be arrested or your children could be taken away from you.

http://www.freerangekids.com/category/child-protective-servi...

[johnisgood]

What the heck? Madness. When I was a kid (not too long ago), we used to throw rocks at other people's windows. Cops has been called out. They came and told us in a polite, friendly manner to not do that, or go elsewhere. Nothing else happened! We were unsupervised, etc. Would have I been taken away from my family in the US for this incident?

[Broken_Hippo]

Possibly: It is just as or more likely that you, as a child, might have had to deal with the juvenile justice system, depending on your age. 4-5, maybe not, but 10-12? Definitely.

I'll add that your treatment would likely depend on the color of your skin, how well-to-do your neighborhood was, and how familiar the cop was with you and your family (small town vs large one, really). They may or may not call child services on your family.

[Bartweiss]

It varies wildly and unpredictably.

We could talk about era (this is largely 90s and more recent), location (small towns are often better, suburbs are overzealous but not viciously policed, cities are less likely to intrude but often more heavy-handed when they do), income, and race (the predictable biases). There are definitely places where children have been systematically taken away (mostly poor, minority communities).

But for most people, this comes down to "99.5% of the time, no, but there's no way to be sure you're safe." It just takes a run of bad luck: an invasive bystander, followed by an overzealous cop or social worker, perhaps followed by a judge without much common sense. Which means that it has an extremely widespread chilling effect. I've heard several people say that they know the crime stats and aren't scared of their kid being attacked if they go out alone - but still won't allow it because they're scared of the police and child protective services.

[ocschwar]

It really depends on where you are. Local cultures differ on this, and the only place stronger than Facebook at encouraging peer-enforced group think is the break room at a police station. If the cops in your town are cool with kids running free, then you're fine. If they're not cool with it, then you have a problem.

The other issue is a real concern: what are the prevailing traffic speeds in your neighborhood. I'm in Massachusetts, where roads are narrow and lined with all sorts of attitude adjusting devices for bad drivers. So people are driving at mostly under 40kmh. Other parts of suburban America, people will literally reach 80kmh as soon as they've left their driveway, in which case, sorry, you do have to keep your children prisoner in their own home until they can eyeball the speed of a moving car. That only kicks in at about age 9, and there is no known way to hasten that skill in children. So, TLDR: avoid the suburbs if you want your kids to run free.

[Bartweiss]

> TLDR: avoid the suburbs if you want your kids to run free.

A lot of the decline in free-range childhood clicked into place once I realized just how terrible suburbs are for little kids.

The roads are the worst part - wide, empty streets that invite speeding, connectivity that make them short-cuts for outside drivers, lots of bends and bushes that obscure the view. But they're not the only major issue.

Suburbs are usually built for cars, meaning no sidewalks or bike lanes, just a choice between walking in the road and upsetting the neighbors with their manicured lawns. They're usually fully developed, meaning no woods or fields to play in. And they're privatized, meaning no sports fields, no open grass for games unless the neighbors approve, not even any parking lots for safer street ball. They're featureless, so littler kids can't find their street or house in a maze of HOA-mandated similarity. And while our fears of crime are exaggerated, they're perversely insecure, combining a rural lack of bystanders with urban anonymity.

My run-down, dead-end street growing up seems weirdly idyllic in hindsight. Speeding was impossible, no one but the residents had a reason to drive through, every house looked different, there were trees to climb and a bit of undeveloped land at the end of the road. Even the neighbors who hated kids and each other had to use spite fences and complaining, not impersonal HOA crackdowns. But of course, there have been plans to suburb-ify it for decades now...

[salawat]

Where is this obsession with cars being the issue come from?

Many a time in the 'burbs, were we playing a game in the street only to quickly scatter to the shout of "Car!", followed by a hasty resumption of whatever we were doing.

There was generally 1 or 2 streets of particular note that you just knew to avoid or not play in due to the fact that it was commonly used as a sacrificial throughway.

And homogeneity? That was half of what taught us how to navigate. You do it based off of street signs. The kids who can't read shouldn't be wandering the streets necessarily anyway, and there was generally enough web of trust in the immediate vicinity where even if you couldn't get home, you could find an adult or another kid to point you in the right direction.

None of what you brought up really strikes me as a problem. It was just normal life skills.

[ocschwar]

> Where is this obsession with cars being the issue come from?

Cities that have the whole motor vehicle danger thing under control are safe for kids under 8 to wander around barely supervised. SRSLY.

[cuddlybacon]

In my experience, if the cops were called on you they probably wouldn't take you to your parents. Instead they would hassle you a bit for "causing trouble" then require that you leave.

If you stood up for yourself, then they'd take you to your parents.

[teddyuk]

I live in a village and there is a village face book group, literally an un-marked amazon delivery van needs to go through and someone will post "suspicious looking vehicle seen driving slowly and looking at each house" <-- roads with no house numbers, what else can delivery drivers do? ha ha

[flyinghamster]

I'm in the SW Chicago suburbs, and things aren't quite so bad here - I see kids on bikes out and about, and even saw one with a fishing pole sticking out of his bike bag the other day. Maybe parents here are wising up about giving the kids some room to breathe.

But the mall/hangout issue still stands, and that's assuming the malls themselves are still standing. A lot of malls have shot themselves in the foot by banishing the kids; when they grow up, the last place they'll even think about shopping is at a mall.

[mlrtime]

The problem is that statistically there will be a non 0 chance that a kid will be abducted over a certain timeline if all kids are let free. No parent wants their child to be the 1/1000000. It seems as if it is a good trade off.