Comment by ux-app | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ux-app | Hacker News Reader

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>I consider one of my goals to get my daughter to walk to the park alone at five, since that was the age I had agency to go wherever I wanted.

Are you maybe misremembering your age at the time? I have a 4.5 year old at home and there is no way that I think he will be ready to go the park a couple of streets away on his own. By not ready I mean, in no way capable of judging when to cross a street safely and may get lost on the way, especially if he gets distracted and absentmindedly wanders in an unfamiliar direction.

There was a recent study [1] that showed that kids have a highly elevated risk of accident when crossing the road right up to the age of 14 (!! was surprised to read this). Some points from the research:

- simulating traffic showed accident rates as high as eight per cent with six-year-olds

- Even those aged 12 were hit by vehicles two per cent of the time

- It was not until early adolescence that children crossed the road safely

Just thought I'd point this out in case you were not aware of the research.

Kudos for promoting self-reliance and independence though. I am a long way in the other direction where I do way too much to try and ensure my kid's safety. I know I need to ease up so that he can start to make his own mistakes.

[1] https://now.uiowa.edu/2017/04/why-children-struggle-cross-bu...

In Japan they send their kids shopping at 5-6. It's Super safe in Japan, but the point is kids are very fast learners and learn to be independent fairly easily if pushed or directed in that direction..

I wonder if these kids need to cross any streets and what the accident rate there is. I'm assuming Japanese 6 year olds are developmentally very similar to western 6 year olds. So according to the research that I linked to above they have an 8% chance of getting hit by a car when crossing the road.

Would you cross the road if you were hit by a car for every 12 times you crossed?

> kids are very fast learners and learn to be independent fairly easily if pushed or directed in that direction..

An acceptable level of risk awareness can't be taught to kids under a certain age because their brain development is not yet at the level where they are capable of learning certain things. For example: do you think there is any level of training that you could give a 5 year old to safely handle a loaded gun? Do you think there is a level of training you could give a 5 year old to then leave them unsupervised with a gun? Crossing a street is no different. It's life and death.

If you've ever spent any time around kids 6 and younger you will know that they have very intense tunnel vision and very poor situation awareness. It's not their fault. They literally don't yet have the brain development necessary for accurately predicting future events and predicting the consequences of their actions.

I agree and wouldn't push my own kids for that type of activity, simply not safe here.. But as other people's comments, there are lots of ways to make kids responsible and independent even in the confines of your own home such as cooking, cleaning, other types of chores, etc

I suggest you read David F. Lancy’s Anthropology of Childhood. If children were as stupid as you suggest none of them would make it through childhood. No parent can watch even one child all the time and it’s possible to kill your self getting out of bed.

> “Perhaps the most persuasive evidence regarding the attitude of adults toward children acquiring culture through play – without the need for adult guidance – comes from widespread reports of parents’ indifference and even encouragement of toddlers playing with machetes and other sharp and dangerous tools (Howard 1970: 35). For example, from the Kwoma of Papua New Guinea: “I once saw Suw with the blade of a twelve-inch bush knife in his mouth and the adults present paid no attention to him” (Whiting 1941: 25). Aka mothers regret it when their infants cut themselves while playing with “knives but they don’t want to restrain their exploration and learning (Hewlett 2013: 65–66). The Aka provide scaled versions of items in their tool inventory to their very young children and enjoy observing (and, occasionally correcting) their practice strikes (Hewlett et al. 2011: 1175). Four-and-a-half-year-old Okinawan children readily peel the outer skin off a length of sugar cane with a sharp sickle. When a mother was asked how the child acquired this skill she was at a loss for a reply. “‘I don’t know! He must have watched us and learned himself by trying it out!’ she said” (Maretzki and Maretzki 1963: 511)”

>If children were as stupid as you suggest none of them would make it through childhood.

They're not stupid and I didn't say they are. They lack experience and do not have the skills (brain development) that are necessary to cross a road without significant risk.

Read: https://now.uiowa.edu/2017/04/why-children-struggle-cross-bu...

From the research:

> "The researchers found 6-year-olds were struck by vehicles 8 percent of the time; 8-year-olds were struck 6 percent; 10-year-olds were struck 5 percent; and 12-year-olds were struck 2 percent. Those age 14 and older had no accidents.

Children contend with two main variables when deciding whether it’s safe to cross a street, according to the research. The first involves their perceptual ability, or how they judge the gap between a passing car and an oncoming vehicle, taking into account the oncoming car’s speed and distance from the crossing. Younger children, the study found, had more difficulty making consistently accurate perceptual decisions.

The second variable was their motor skills: How quickly do children time their step from the curb into the street after a car just passed? Younger children were incapable of timing that first step as precisely as adults, which in effect gave them less time to cross the street before the next car arrived."

Your quote from David F. Lancy’s Anthropology of Childhood is an anecdote. Was there a study done to measure child mortality and injury in this community? Would it be acceptable by modern standards?

My dad was raised in an eastern European village in the 1950s. From his stories child supervision was non existent. He has many stories of children who died due to accidents, e.g. children who misjudged the thickness of a frozen lake, fell through and drowned. Of course most survived into adulthood, but by modern standards child mortality rates were completely unacceptable.

Your associations with the word stupid are your own. If children were as poor at dealing with the environment as you believe they are I would not be unable to name a classmate who died during primary or secondary school.

I haven’t read the article you quote and I won’t because the conclusions you’re drawing from it are insane. Maybe the internal validity is good and if the experiment was replicated the same results would be obtained. The external validity is obviously not there. They are attempting to measure how traffic mortality from independent road crossing and they get numbers so high that it’s obvious their experiment doesn’t generalise to the question they’re actually interested in.

If we pretend that children do not cross the road until age 12 and assume 0.99 chance of surviving one crossing a day, after 100 days 63% will be dead.

Or I could just examine my own experience. My father and I both grew up within 100m of a main road with heavy traffic and we survived unscathed. The paper does not support your conclusion.

There may be a sensible conversation to be had on child supervision but my father grew up in the 50s too and it was not the hellscape you depict. If you look at deaths per 100,000 young children 5-14 they’re at worst three times current levels. By the 80s they’ve dropped to less than double current levels and people weren’t going insane wrapping their children in cotton wool and depriving them of all contact with the real world then. Deaths in childhood are so low that accidents are a minority of childhood deaths.

You’re advocating depriving children of freedom under a model of the world where childhood is so dangerous no one would survive when the trends in death rates are pretty much the same across industrialised countries while the insane helicopter parenting isn’t.

www.freerangeparenting.com

So you refuse to read the study because you don’t like the conclusion and instead rely on your own personal anecdote. Your reasoning has no place on HN.

> I haven’t read the article you quote and I won’t because the conclusions you’re drawing from it are insane

They're not my conclusions, I quoted a summary the researchers provided.

>Or I could just examine my own experience

Since when do personal anecdotes trump research?

Barry has a point, one piece of research does /= the absolute truth. Research is the scientific process of moving closer to the actual truth through experimental investigation. While you may believe this study, do not be certain that it can't be falsified.

sure, but you counter research with more research not a personal anecdote.

It really depends where the kids grow up. Free range parenting is possible, but in metropolitan neighborhoods with lots of traffic and psychos the risks are quite high. Im a parent and would love for my kid to grow up the way I did, free range and all. But there are always risks. I remember being hit by cars twice. The first time just a bruise, the second time broken leg, double fracture, from which I developed a slight scoliosis. Some kids I grew up with died in stupid accidents so I keep the risks in balance. Are you a parent yourself? Would you let your kids free range in a city like NYC?? Yikes..

One thing that's different is that in many places in Japan there's a 2- or 3-foot high metal barrier between the sidewalk and the road. It's impossible to just wander out into traffic except at crossings.

Those are the exception, not the norm. Just about all residential neighborhoods are filled with streets that have no sidewalks, much less barriers between car and pedestrian traffic.

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