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Comment by parasubvert | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

> 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?

> 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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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