City children four times more lonely than those in countryside | Hacker News Reader

City children four times more lonely than those in countryside

telegraph.co.uk

46 pointslaurex8 comments

My pet theory: Cities foster loneliness. The bigger the city, the worse it gets. You avoid eye contact with people. You assume anyone trying to talk to you wants money from you or sell you something. You are on your way somewhere, in a hurry, and have no time to chat. You want to chat but don’t want to bother anyone.

For children especially, cities can be tough. You can't exactly "play" in your frontyard if you live on a busy street. There's less serendipity and unstructured play time when you have to go to a public park or another location to get together.

There was another hacker news article that has the opposite conclusions; Poor people in cities do play in their streets.

But anecdotally, I know of families who live on a street where cars routinely go 45mph to get to the neighborhood inside a neighborhood, so can't play in the street in the suburbs.

I visited Vancouver, BC recently, including a few days driving around. I was amazed at how slow people drove there. I mean, it's really only slow compared to the NASCAR driving typical across the U.S. But it was really enjoyable and much less stressful.

I remember when Americans drove like that, before we rescinded the national 55mph cap. Over the past few decades things have gotten so bad here. Urban, suburban, and rural areas. Small neighborhoods and highways. Both coasts and everywhere in between. We just drive ridiculously fast.

I think of all the roads I walked (to meet friends, to get to school, to play catch) in Illinois, Florida, Alabama, D.C., and Virginia.... I've been back to all those places and they're way more dangerous.

Children in the countryside have access to social media, too, so blaming it on that seems disingenuous, while ignoring the massive cultural shifts occurring in the EU.

Most kids in cities aren't allowed to just go fuck off outside by themselves for long periods of time, people consider it dangerous and don't allow it. In the countryside it is a different story where if their kid(s) go outside and don't come back for 6 hours, no big deal. Being cramped up in buildings all day every day is mentally stressful whether people realize it or not, we simply did not evolve under such conditions and it wasn't even a possibility to avoid the outdoors and other random people until pretty recently.

There is also other factors like increased pollution, including noise and light pollution which may also have an impact on people's mental state over time.

I wonder if this corrects for ease of public transportation and how muc independence the parents give the kids? I’d imagine it would be pretty lonely if you always saw people outside but could never actually go out and play.

Yes in addition to the lack of a front or back yard as mentioned in another comment, there's an increasing trend in city parenting to schedule the entire lives of their children, including "play dates". Not that play dates are inherently bad, but if you grow up with someone making all the social (and other) decisions for you, you kind of miss out on learning self-sufficiency and the ability to socialize with strangers.

More suburban and rural parenting tends toward unstructured time, in my observation. This likely does have a lot to do with the home setup being more conducive to spontaneity.

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