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Comment by namelosw | Hacker News Reader

Kids are so less adventurous nowadays.

I'm not sure about teenagers, but for college students, it's more obvious. I believe it's because society is less forgiving - young people spent a ton of money or taking loans, work hard at school, cannot find jobs that are not stressful and underpaid. Or couldn't even find jobs at all. One step wrong and they would be screwed.

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As a parent, I've noticed the biggest problem that prevents "free range" kids is other adults without kids.

Those of us WITH kids relish getting the kids outside and out of our hair. But those without kids frequently are calling the parents to complain our children are roaming the neighborhood, perhaps on their property. Or they fear these kids will create problems. Usually, however, they're just kids being kids. Going on adventures & learning to resolve their own problems without a grownup hovering over them.

I think the issue is the proportion of adults with kids has declined, so parents run into non-parents all the time that don't enjoy seeing kids roaming around. Whereas when I was a kid, most adults were more understanding.

I don't know.

In Spain kids are indeed less adventurous than my generation, specially in the cities, but I've never heard about someone complaining about kids roaming.

I think the number of alone activities kids can do these days to keep themselves entertained (videogames, internet, netflix, etc) is a much more influential factor.

I agree - as someone without kids in a neighborhood full of kids. In my decade of living in the burbs, I have not seen 2 children playing/going somewhere/interacting without an adult around once. I think most parents don't leave their children unsupervised AND there is a very easy alternative (videogames, internet, netflix, etc - as you mentioned).

> but I've never heard about someone complaining about kids roaming.

It's a thing:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2018/09/05/mom...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/04/14/parent...

https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/13/living/feat-maryland-free-ran...

https://nypost.com/2015/04/13/cops-coerced-our-kids-into-squ...

Apparently this is somehow seen as neglect, a type of child abuse, by others.

> In Spain

GP says. What you describe is very much an American phenomenon. At least I haven't heard anything similar happening in the rest of the world.

I don’t know, kids being kids is just another word for getting in trouble. I certainly wouldn’t want kids roaming around my property if they are anything like I was at that age.

It's liability. Letting people onto your property is liability no matter what the context. Unsupervised kids roaming my property is a no-go and not my responsibility.

I get that people want to have their ideals here, but there's a whole "risk to the property owner" side to this conversation that's not happening.

Or just teach them to not go into other people's property? I didn't when I was their age. Families had fences to designate property.

Agree. In my family we weren't allowed to trespass and had designated areas that were public where we would go off and adventure. Some involved a short bike ride. We weren't allowed to just go start playing in someone else's yard.

Ninja edit: but in my anecdotal experience there are a ton of parents that don't do this and are shocked/insulted when you ask them politely to keep their kids off of your private property.

It seems to me the idea of premise liability should probably be re-evaluated. When a place is not open to the public, and especially when someone is trespassing, the bar for liability should be quite high.

For those downvoting me I'd really like to hear a supporting argument as-to why I should let your kids roam my property? One that doesn't posit a world different than it is today - I don't want to hear how it SHOULD be... that's moot.

I refuse to take liability and/or responsibility for people on my property that are there without my permission. If I find someone on my property who is there without permission I have a full lawful right to ask them to leave immediately as they are TRESPASSING.

YOUR children are not MY responsibility.

Kids being kids for me, when I was a kid was:

  * walking to the local convenience store
  * roaming the woods
  * playing paintball in the woods
  * building forts
  * playing manhunt
  * going on _long_ bike rides
  * paddling out on a canoe in our neighborhood's lake
  * staying up stupid late, playing video games with friends
    all in a single room together, also eating pizza

We also didn't go _into_ other people's properties, in general. We went into this weird county-owned forest thing, or walked the streets on sidewalks in our suburbs (and ran across 6 lanes of traffic to get to the other side of the street for the store)

As someone without kids please keep your kids off of my property/etc. I know this will not be a popular thing to say but you have NO right to put the liability of someone getting hurt on my hands.

This isn't a knock on the kids, but much more the adult world in the US - lawsuits are real and I 100% would expect expensive legal issues if a kid got hurt on my property. Hiring a lawyer is incredibly expensive and the court system is literal hell.

So yeah - keep your kids off my lawn.

It's harder to be forgotten. One mistake can follow you for the rest of your life, via social media, via background checks.

I think it's also definitely the case that social media increases peer pressure to conform. If you say the wrong thing, have the wrong political opinion, you will be publicly shamed.

At least in Orwell's 1984 the Tele-Screens were imposed by an external authority. The present day is much worse than he could have ever imagined.

Everyone over the age of 13 carries a high-quality camera with them at every waking moment; in fact, they regularly shell out for higher-quality cameras as technology improves! Not only that, but they've been operant-conditioned to take photos and videos of any interesting events and send it to the central servers of spy companies like Facebook and Snap, where they will be stored permanently for the foreseeable future - and they do this all for free!

I think kids have been less adventurous than their parents for quite a while, and needless to say the correct level of adventurousness was in my generation. :-P

There are now highways where there used to be fields, rivers or just empty land.

I mean this as much in a figurative sense as in a literal one.

It's not just that, but we became a culture where your neighbors will call the police if you let your kids walk around the block alone.

The Baby Boomers criminalized and curtailed almost all the risk that made childhood and teenage years adventerous. I got to watch things getting systematically removed as I grew up. My brother is a few years older than me and we went through the same junior high. His experience including shop class, wrestling in gym, and dissecting a frog. Mine didn't.

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