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Comment by meowster | Hacker News Reader

I volunteer with a U.S. Scout troop. I see boys that don't know whether or not they can go on an activity/campout because they have to ask their parents if they're free that day/weekend. I try to tell them their old enough (most are teenagers) that they should start deciding for themselves what activities they participate in. Most all of them just seem apathetic.

I'm sure their parents are trying to do what is best for their children, but it doesn't seem to be working.

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I don’t know what it means for kids to be free nowadays. Free to visit a friend’s home seems like the only thing, because everything else is a home that’s an anonymous unit or a commercial establishment that’s gated by money.

It’s not like you’re releasing your child to be raised by the experiences of the village.

With that in mind, many parents are probably struggling to not have their kids consumed by the web during free time, esp during COVID lockdowns.

We raised my son in the DC suburbs (Herndon, VA). There is still a "town center" of sorts, with several parks nearby. So, free for him meant a combo of going to friends (mostly in the same large subdivision), getting to school on his own (bike, board, foot, bus), and running around after school (parks, downtown, whatever - I know a few of his common haunts, but didn't track his every waking moment).

Skateboarding? Climbing trees? Taking apart a toy? Messing around with a computer and a programming language? Inventing a game?

There are plenty of areas open to the public that are accessible to children: playgrounds, libraries, schoolyards, skateparks, large underused parking lots, malls, public pools. Some places have great nature nearby: beaches, creeks, rivers, hills, and mountains. Some of those are more dangerous than others, but they are all accessible if the parent allows it.

In the US, if the children in question are under 12 and going to any of those places unsupervised, they're likely to get the police and/or CPS called on them.

Sadly true. And part of the problem. There's now an expectation (at least in upper middle class areas) that kids be in formal, supervised activities 24/7.

I still remember growing up, playing around the neighborhood, and a parent would call out the front door "Danny, dinner time!" and all the kids would scatter to get home for dinner.

#getoffmylawn #wheresmycane

It depends on where. A few years ago, I lived in a falling-down house in a family neighborhood of mainly immigrants. There was a school a few blocks away, and kids used to come hang out in our trees (I’m pretty sure they thought the place was abandoned) and occasionally set off fireworks by the creek we lived next to.

I wouldn’t have called the cops on them since they weren’t causing any real trouble, but if my neighbors did, no one ever came. There are bigger problems in that town (like the feral fucking dogs) that the cops refused to do anything about.

But honestly, most of the neighbors were familiar with each other and let their kids roam pretty free. It was nice to see that places like that still exist.

That's one cool thing about living in Utah: https://www.npr.org/2018/04/01/598630200/utah-passes-free-ra...

The other cool thing is all the natural parks and outdoor activities (skiing, biking, climbing.)

The downsides are the utter lack of nightlife (not really my jam anyway, but whatever) and all the damn Mormons (I am one.)

This upsets me a lot. I'm in my 30's and I was still allowed to ride bikes around the neighborhood, go to the store for snacks, etc. with my brother. I don't understand how kids can develop a sense of exploration without these opportunities. Hopefully it's still possible to develop it during the teen years.

It gets beaten out of you and the easiest response is to just give up and wait it out.

“You don’t want to do this anymore? You need this for college, you shouldn’t quit everything you do, I wish I could have done this” etc.

Eventually it’s just easier to passively suffer whatever activity you dislike and just recognize the starting cost to trying new things is extreme.

> “ I try to tell them their old enough (most are teenagers) that they should start deciding for themselves what activities they participate in.”

I’d start with asking them about what their parents are like.

I know what they're parents are like during meetings and campouts. I have to manage them as much as I manage the boys. Some of them try to helicopter during meetings. There was one Scout that I've only seen smile when his dad wasn't around.

They don't seem to like the idea that Scouts is supposed to be youth-run/led and that it's okay to fail as long as they learn from it and improve. The parents just don't want them to fail or be uncomfortable at all (it's not always dry and warm outside).

Cool - sounds like you have the context.

I just remember adults yelling at me as a kid for things like this. “You should take responsibility.” Etc.

At the time I didn’t know what to do.

I wish I had just said, “I have no control over my life”.

I think other adults can sometimes be clueless about what a kid’s family life is like.

it can be sort of futile. as a kid, you can argue, resist, or break the rules, but until you can support yourself financially, your parents get the final say on most important matters.

reminds me of my first meeting with my advisor at college to pick courses for freshman year. I came in with a few ideas for courses/majors that my dad thought were practical. my advisor picked up on this almost immediately and asked "okay, but what are you interested in?". we had a nice talk, but at the end I went back to picking from the list my dad approved of. my advisor was disappointed and insisted that I needed to chart my own path through college. my response: "yeah, but I need my dad to write the check".

Yeah, I think some people are clueless to this context.

Even in more direct ways.

I remember getting yelled at in middle school because I would show up late to early morning jazz band practices I had to be driven to. I was ready to go 40min before we had to be there. I can't make my mom get me there on time.

I think adults forget kids are not independent.

There is truth to both. The problem with charting your own course as a kid is you often don't really know what is worth doing. "Underwater basket weaving" might be interesting, but it won't prepare you for any future. There are a lot of good choices though, you don't have to be a doctor just because your dad wants you to. And your dad might still be under the illusion that lawyer is a great paying job, when for the most part it isn't anymore (or maybe I'm wrong and it will go back to that? your guess is as good as mine).

I think there's a difference between a parent saying, "You should consider the economic ROI of what you choose to study, the risk of success/failure, and what life it could lead to" vs. "be a lawyer". If your kid really wants to act then they can go to LA and learn what the best way to do that is.

I think parents bias to being risk-adverse in advice for their kids because they only experience the downside risk and little of the upside from potentially riskier paths. I think a good parent would communicate some of this, but that's not a skill everyone has.

A lot parents just don't know that much and are over confident (like most people) even if their intentions for their kid are good. Others leverage their power over their kids to force them into certain paths which isn't great either.

Downside risk being having to support adult children who can't support themselves?

> Most all of them just seem apathetic.

Which seems the other side of helicopter parenting; kids don't get much of a say in deciding what they fill their free time with, so they don't develop an opinion in things like that.

Plus (and I'm going to sound old here, give me my cane so I can shake it), there's a lot more casual entertainment lying around the house nowadays to fill the voids in people's time. "doing nothing" is not much of a thing anymore, because people will casually browse their phone or turn on the TV or something. (I'm guilty of that as well).

In the previous generation, there would be a TV but not everything on there would catch the interest of everyone.

I wonder if browsing your phone is really much different from channel surfing. I suppose by sheer volume you never run out of "channels" on the internet.

It's all so strange to me.

My son (now 26) always had summers free at minimum. While he was younger, he did go to a YMCA outdoor "adventure" day camp at a nearby lake park. Once he was in middle school, he stayed home. Sports 2-3 seasons, but he got to pick which one he played and never the crazy travel league stuff. In high school, he was free to do what he wanted (football for 2 years, guitar all 4, and a mix of rec league basketball and volleyball when he felt like it). Always plenty of time to ride his bike, play at the park, run around with friends. Starting in middle school, he'd often disappear across town on bike of skateboard for hours at a time. School was 2.5 miles away and he often opted to ride his skateboard instead of the bus.

I see kids today where every free moment is booked with stuff. All in some sisyphean effort to get into Harvard or something. I mean, sure, I get a desire to go to a top name uni, but the changes of little Johnnie getting in, regardless of extra-curricular, is so small that all the effort seems mostly wasted to me. I "only" went to UVA and turned out fine, IMO, so maybe I'm biased. I dunno.

I don't disagree with your premise, I'm strongly against parents trying to game college admissions for their 13 year old. But getting into UVA is not easy at all. Especially out of state, the admit rate is like 15% - so while not as crazy as Harvard it's in line with a few of the Ivies.

IMO a lot of the admissions-centered thinking has propagated down the rankings further and further in recent years too. Anecdotally I've seen people over-scheduling their children for target schools in a tier below UVA. This attitude of course creates a terrible feedback cycle, as admissions gets more and more competitive. At some point I'd like to think the admit offices are sick of seeing so many prototypical candidates, but still you need to do something to stand out. Ideally the parent should advise the kid on this meta-info, without literally telling them what to pursue.

These days, there aren't many kids who only do Scouting...it's an over-scheduling comorbidity. For kids who resist over-scheduling, scouting seems to be one of the first things to go...because den and pack meetings are by and for adults, they never make it to a troop.

Or to put it another way, teenage apathy prevalence is probably pre-teen survivor bias.

I wonder what the rate of dropping out during Cub Scouts is vs Scouts BSA, vs how many don't cross over from Cubs to Scouts. The crossover happens around age 11, so I would imagine most of the dropouts happen later.

Anecdotal observation from my child's experience is nearly everyone who dropped out dropped out as a cub scout. That was a very large fraction. Those who crossed over are typically Eagle Scouts. But for one of those kids, they were all highly scheduled. But for a different one, they were each complying with parental wishes.

My child was over Cub Scouts by Bears.

But more than a decade later, my grown-ass child hangs out with several of the Eagles. They are close friends.

The scouting, at least here, is very time consuming. It seems to want to be your whole lifestyle.

Most actives do. Commitment is the way to win championships, so any one moment you are not practicing your sport is a chance to lose the award. That things can/should be fun is lost. Scouting is a bit better than sports, but they still want your life.

They don't. You can go to piano teacher once a week. You then train at home as a side hobby. You go to art lesson once or twice a week. You go to sport training 2-3 times a week and that can be it. There are plenty of clubs like that. They even have competitions one in a while - you won't be champion but you will compete against kids like you.

There are also super competitive clubs, but huge amount of them is not like that. My own kids go to clubs like that, my friends kid go to clubs like that. The teacher typically acts seriously and attempts to teach you what is possible during that time.

But scouting is whole another level, occupying afternooms, weekends and plus giving "homework" projects. The kids were either fully into it or left.

That was not my experience with Scouting as a youth. My troop was around 30 kids. It was one 90 minute meeting a week, one weekend campout a month, an annual food drive, and an every-other-month selling consessions at the church bingo game as a fundraiser for about 2 hours.

Pretty much everything else can be done at summer camp (1 week a summer) or maybe a merit badge fair on a Saturday once a year.

Sure, you might have to keep a log for a month of your chores, or do a home improvement project for the Family Life merit badge, but it never felt like a time sink as a kid, and didn't occupy all my afternoons. I essentially never had "homework" from Scouts.

Maybe some troops are really gung-ho, but there are plenty of troops that aren't. Troops are not allowed to set requirements that aren't in the Scout Handbook, if they are, there's the district, the council, and ultimately the national office that can put a stop to it or revoke the unit's charter.

How so? When my son was in scouts, it was a weekly meeting, usually after dinner (to avoid sports). Plus one optional weekend activity (camping, etc) per month (and these usually slowed between Nov-Mar because fewer people want to camp when it's freezing and wet).

I don't think attitudes to infant care translate in any way to how older kids or teenagers are treated in different cultures. I'm not a parent, but I was a child and teenager at some point, so I can say from personal experience that parents who are extremely present at a young age can actually give you more leeway later in life.

On a more general note, I can recommend Jared Diamond's 'The World Until Yesterday' - it covers similar topics to the bbc article and more.

That seems normal to me? I'm well-past the teenage years, and I wouldn't commit to a weekend activity without double-checking with the rest of my family first.

I think it's "normal" only in the sense that most everyone behaves this way today, but I don't think it should be that way.

By the time I was older in Scouts, my siblings were in college and my parent could drive me to wherever, or at least to the meeting place where I could carpool. The times when my parent wasn't available, I took the city bus.

I imagine if one of my siblings was was the same age and our parent could only drive one of us, the other would take the bus.

The first time I took the bus, my parent went with me to show me how, and then let me do it myself going forward.

I dont think the person you responded to was thinking about driving vs busses.

Basically, you are 16 and want to spend whole weekend out of house including during the night. Not doing it without parental permission seems normal to me.

Nor it seems new. My gradma or grandpa definitely could not just spend whole night and weekend away just by own decision. They would expect my parents to ask them for permission. I was expected the same.

Mine was default allow, his was default block. I had to inform, he had to get permission. Perhaps same result, but one feels more autonomous than the other.

From another one of my comments:

> I always just told my parent that I was doing something just so they knew where I was - not necessarily asking for permission, but that gave them the chance to veto it (which they only did one time as punishment when I got in trouble at school).

> I think that parents need to teach their kids how to be responsible and autonomous, and treat them like they are their own person

I dont think it necessary implies default block. It just implies you have to ask before comitting to activity. Whether the parents are more likely to say yes or no is orthogonal.

Also, we are talking here about overnight camping. It is not the same out for few hours. 16 years old being expected to sleep at home by default does not strike me as overly controlling.

There is nothing new in that? When I was pre teen and teen, I definitely had to get parents permission for weekend campout. It seems to me normal that parent have a say in whether the non-adult child sleep at home. Plus there were weekend activities woth familly I was expected to participate in - trips, familly visits, grandpa birthsday, etc.

So I would ask. I mean, idea that 16-17 years old goes for campout without asking parents strikes me as wtf.

I don't know, my parents always asked me if I wanted to go to my Grandmother's house or other trips (I did).

I always just told my parent that I was doing something just so they knew where I was - not necessarily asking for permission, but that gave them the chance to veto it (which they only did one time as punishment when I got in trouble at school).

I think that parents need to teach their kids how to be responsible and autonomous, and treat them like they are their own person, because they need to be to have any chance at being successful.

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