Kids Who Get Driven Everywhere Don't Know Where They're Going (2012)

I grew up in a suburban community. Nothing was in walking distance and everywhere I went, I was driven. When my mom asked me where the roads were in our city, I listed all the ones I could remember, but I listed none in order and missed a lot. My mom was perplexed, she said “how could you not know where the roads are? I drive you everywhere.” I think we don’t realize that the amount of control we have over a situation changes our memory of the situation. There’s no reason to remember if there’s no impact of knowing, despite being present in the same situation. I think this can answer why online classes are hard, why some students don’t learn from lectures and why there’s wisdom in the phrase “you learn by doing”.

To rephrase the title, “people who don’t do things themselves don’t learn to do things.”

Growing up in the Chicago suburbs I never knew where I was going until about age 15 my Dad got me a giant laminated map of the city and surrounding areas about 4’ x 5’. I hung it on my wall and it was my job to give directions. Until being forced to learn I never cared. The article is unsurprising. It’s like learning a new programming language, you don’t learn it by watching YouTube videos, you learn by writing code.

I believe that, I use a website called Citystrides that tracks my runs from Runkeeper and plots all my runs onto a map, the idea is to run your whole city, this is my map now: https://imgur.com/S3sTSml

Before a run, I will roughly sketch out my route and then run it.

Before I started I only knew the main roads, now I know areas I didn't know before, and I know a lot of the shortcuts and how everything is connected.

> In sum, as exposure to auto traffic volumes and speed decreases, a child’s sense of threat goes down, and his/her ability to establish a richer connection and appreciation for the community rises.

makes sense, intuitively. if you can go play and explore, the memories will reflect it. hide and seek, tag, capture the flag, scrimmages of hockey/basketball/football/soccer will take place. this is a fundamentally fertile area for a young brain to take intellectual nourishment from its environment.

I drive myself everywhere and still don't know where I'm going.

I grew up poor, and we had no vehicle, ever. We did a lot of walking. From age 10 or so, I was quite the explorer (didn't have great supervision, but I also grew up in a smallish city of around 30k, not a large city). I certainly am not the world's best navigator, but I feel like I can drop down in the middle of any city and get around pretty well.

When I use a navigator, I can't find my way back. If I look up the route beforehand and look at a map, I can.

When I first moved to Seattle, on weekends I would sometimes just aimlessly drive down various roads. I wound up building a mental map of the city that has served me well ever since.

That’s how I feel if you use GPS navigation a lot. When I moved to LA I used my cell phone a lot to get to places but after a while I realized that I didn’t really know where things are. Now I am making a point to use the phone as little as possible and I feel I have a much better idea where things are.

Adults too. As a young adult I was amazed at my friend's ability to know where we were in the city. When I started driving I learned fast.

It's similar to learning something by either being told or by coming to the conclusion yourself. The latter feels much more solid.

This is true to an extent. But at the same time the argument is kind of flawed: can kids safely walk around their neighborhoods nowadays?

At least where I lived, the city was nice but there were too many cars and it was unusual to see anyone walking... nevertheless kids walking.

This is one of those things that I just thought was common knowledge. I forced my nieces and nephews to get familiar with the local bus routes before they we're old enough to drive. Having to plan a trip and look at a map do wonders.

I grew up in Moscow, and my family used a private car to get around the city. I always knew where I was, because I figured one day my turn would come to navigate the roads on my own.

I’m raising my daughter in Manhattan, the least car-friendly place in the US. Until we ditched transit and began driving everywhere, she had no idea where we were or in which direction we were heading. Nowadays she makes suggestions from the back seat regarding which road is best and which stops we must make on the way.

That, my friends, is anecdata; but so is every citylab article. The world can’t be described by a naive generalization that, ironically, even a child can see through.

I didn't know the months of the year in perfect order by the time I was a teenager. I had most of them right, though. When my mother found out I spent a few minutes on the ones I wasn't clear on, reviewed them once or twice and never forgot.

There is nothing that everyone automatically focuses on and remembers when focus and memory are not required.

I bet we could help people regain some of this ability via video games. A lot of time people are fast traveling or following from point A to B on a minimap without needs to understand how landmarks and directions relate to your position. Anecdotally, I've found people like myself who prefer GPS when traveling to always keep the map pointed north have a better understanding of how and where to get from place to place because landmarks are also tied to a sense of cardinal direction. Many games offer this as an option as well. Despite growing up in a 900-person town, memorizing the Los Santos and San Fiero in GTA: San Andreas made city navigation later in life something I had already trained my brain on.

"Windshield perspective" is telling. Even with a windshield, it's a lot easier to see where you're going if you are adult-height and sit in the front seat.

Moreover, drives can be extremely boring: getting stuck behind large vehicles that obscure any view, sitting through traffic jams and delays, waiting at stop lights, etc.. It's not surprising that passengers may not pay much attention to them.

And it's not just being driven - the heavy traffic seemed to degrade the neighborhood in predictable ways.

Before I moved to the capital, we visited a couple of times on vacation. We drove everywhere, so while I knew most of the major attractions, I didn't know where they were in relation to each other.

Later, when I moved here, I took the bus and train everywhere, so I knew the rail network and various places in relation to train stations, but not the actual physical layout of the city.

It was only when I got a car and later started biking instead, that it all fell into place for me. It wasn't that I felt lost before, but my navigation was based primarily on train stations and rail lines.

I always had to hold the Delorme Gazeteer or later, run the Garmin, when we went on road trips, from the time I was seven or eight years old. I suspect that early exposure to maps like that is the reason I have to have GPS navigation systems stay north-oriented, rather than rotating with the vehicle's heading.

This was before in-car entertainment systems also, I suppose, so there wasn't much to do other than look out the window, so you'd pick up a lot of the landscape and landmarks as well.

I grew up in a small (30k pop) city in "rural" Missouri and had no idea when I was going when my parents drove me around as a kid. I got older and started slinging pizzas and learned every nook and cranny in the whole town. This was before google maps took over. It's cool to learn every which way to get around a small town, but probably not that important in the grand scheme. I'm happy to offload this computation to my smart phone these days.

I like to joke that Google Maps/Waze purposely route you different ways to the same places to make you helpless and in need of GPS so you will keep using them.

My girlfriend moved towns to move in with me. We both work from home, together... and I usually drive (newer, bigger car).

She doesn’t really know how our town is laid out. We joke about it but know why that’s the case. We’ve just moved. I think she’ll have more solo transit time here.

My son will have to fly back and forth a bit. He doesn’t want a car, so I suspect he’ll know airports and trains better than he’ll know the roads.

In my neighborhood, on a dead end street we would make cars wait while a hockey play was in flight. One more second please Mrs. Stevenson!

That same street is a ghost town not really because of cars but two things. 1. Empty nesters didn't move out and 2. The kids that are there would rather be in front of a screen then wonder outside.

If you saw a kid outside you would jump out the door and play. That doesn't happen like it use to.

I traveled with my best friend few years ago in South America

I was usually on the navigation and guiding us from place to place

When we went out for drinks at night he never knew the way back, or even which area we are

I beleive that because in his mind, I'm the one who need to guide us, his brain didn't focus on remembering places and elements on the way that can give him a clue about the way back

I must be the exception to this rule. As a kid I always preferred 'shotgun' and/or the window seat so I could look out and see where I was going. I think I must have been paranoid to always know the safe route back to 'base' (school, home, etc).

This also applied to when my parents took me to things like swimming lessons (in a suburb over).

It’s a fair point, I was felt like I was being teleported around as a kid. It wasn’t until I was driving myself until I started to realize how the different places of my childhood were connected in relation to each other. I would be driving down a street and go “oh, that’s where the Spring Training stadium is”

I don't believe this, I think some people are imbued with a sense of direction and others aren't. Some are only capable of following turn by turn instructions, they don't comprehend where they are in relation to anything.

My two older kids have the worst sense of direction I've ever encountered but my 3 year old has built in GPS. We were all in the car going somewhere one day and sitting at an intersection my 3 year old says "the Indian restaurant is over there" and points in the direction of a restaurant we frequent that was about 1/2 mile away. The 14 year old looks at me confused and I nodded "yes".

I work in a building that's rotationally symmetrical and the only indications of orientation are the carpet colors for the 4 quadrants. I'm consistently amazed at how many people will get off an elevator and have no idea which direction to go. I've tried given cardinal directions to no avail, some people are just oblivious to their surroundings.