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Comment by riversflow | Hacker News Reader

The amount of natural curiosity that exploring around the diversity of native species inspired in me was far and away more valuable than running around on a lawn. I spent countless hours as a kid turning over rocks, rooting through leaf clutter and turning over leaves on a property that was mostly natively maintained. I learned about pest species, insect biology/morphology(helps that my neighbor was an entomologist!), the food chain, water cycles, amongst many other things as a young child growing up, simply because I was curious about the things I saw and had intelligent adults who could answer my questions and any follow-ups.

As adult, I still love doing many of these things, and find your observation that “you can’t do anything with native plants” bizarre, you get to enjoy the native life that they bring with them.

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You speak of "running around on a lawn" like the kids are running laps or something, and not developing social skills by playing games, staying healthy through exercise and developing physical coordination for the rest of their lives. And just having fun.

I'm all for curiosity about life and exploration, but for a lot of games a flat field is simply better, and those games have tons of value. How well you work/interact with other people has a huge impact on life, and active play directly develops those capabilities.

My physical education classes were just that: Games with rules and things that were physical. You can set a good example by taking regular walks and inviting the children, explaining that you do it for exercise, and it is more fun with others sometimes. Besides, you can learn to work and interact with people by playing games, either online or not.

And how often did you do that in your yard as a kid? For me the answer is pretty much never and not because we didn't have a big one full of grass.

> how often did you do that in your yard as a kid?

All the time.

Every day. Growning up, friends and I would play games in our yards all the time. "Back in the day" we'd play neighborhood wide games of hide and seek, running across neighbors yards (who didn't have kids, but didn't mind) and everything. We routinely played baseball, football and soccer too.

Everyone's desire for a big yard means such gatherings can be pretty rare because there aren't many kids to gather with. Not clear to me why somebody's house is going to be better than a park anyway.

I grew up in a house with a double lot, and the neighborhood kids would come around. It was the baby boom, so even in a suburb there were lots of kids. We would play tag, hide-and-go-seek, kickball, whiffle ball, touch football, mother-may-I, and who knows what else I've forgotten.

Wait, you don’t develop coordination picking up tiny bugs, jumping rock to rock, climbing trees or moving over uneven terrain? The irony is particularly deep here because I’ve come to appreciate how much more agile I am as an adult due to my outdoorsy upbringing in a mountainous area.

You don’t develop valuable social skills asking adults about things you want to learn more about? Learning how and when to ask questions is extremely valuable. And that’s not to say you can’t play plenty of social games in a woods –– many that don’t work on grass, tag is way more fun, any sort of fantasy/imagination type game is much more vivid, hide and seek is actually a fun game.

> I'm all for curiosity about life and exploration, but for a lot of games a flat field is simply better, and those games have tons of value. How well you work/interact with other people has a huge impact on life, and active play directly develops those capabilities.

This is... reductive. I didn't play any organized sports as a kid, but I don't have trouble working with others. On the other hand I've met plenty of people that played sports all through primary school and they're utter assholes as adults. This narrative is also often used to justify why schools often cut funding for science/arts before cutting sports. To my ear it sounds like someone justifying why their preferred childhood activities were better than someone else's preferred childhood activities.

or in the US why lessons that actually bring in money are preferable to those that don't

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