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Comment by sloreti | Hacker News Reader

Disappointing that an article like this wouldn’t mention one of the main reasons children are given less autonomy in the US: our built environment. The vast majority of our children grow up in neighborhoods in which one can’t easily be a pedestrian at any age. Low density communities, in which almost all trips have to be taken in cars, are of course not friendly to non-drivers.

Japan builds dense, mixed use neighborhoods. As a result, children are empowered to walk to the store or a friend’s house.

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I don't think this is the main reason. It fails to explain why neighborhoods that kids played freely in decades ago now keep their kids inside. I'm talking about suburban neighborhoods in modest towns that haven't seen population growth or urban development.

I used to walk to school frequently, every time I missed the bus it was a two mile walk down country roads. If the weather was nice, sometimes I'd choose to walk without even missing the bus. My mother retired from that school district last year, and she tells me things are very different. She would be required to report any kid who was walking to school, it simply isn't allowed anymore. So what changed? Did the town get bigger? Nope, it actually shrunk a bit since the plant was sold. Did the roads get narrower? Twistier? Nope, they're the same as they ever were. The school? Still the same place they ever were. The only thing that changed was people became more fearful.

Is it an elementary school?

In our rural school district, you're probably not even going to be on the school bus schedule if you live within a mile unless you're still in elementary school. In middle school/high school you can have up to a 1 mile walk to the bus before they will add a new stop. Elementary school kids have to be farther than 1/4 mile from the bus stop before they add a new stop.

Bear in mind though, that a lot of these rules are because it gets so cold here and they don't want 6 year-olds walking a mile to school in a blizzard when it's -20F.

Elementary school through highschool. All those schools were within about a mile radius of each other and were served by the same school buses for all grades.

I think it's hard to get a read on this and it really depends. For example, where I live there's an elementary school in the neighborhood, low traffic (even though it is the suburbs), and there's a walking path and a playground at the school. When the weather is halfway decent, there are kids streaming through there all day. During the pandemic it was just a party back there, in a good way.

But not all suburbs are like this, and I do think that low density and focusing on cars over people makes kids unlikely to go outside. Where I live, yea the school is nice, but I've seen kids standing in the middle of 5 lanes of traffic (they are standing in the turning lane) trying to pass and standing there with, say, a skateboard.

This is definitely a problem.

On the other hand, I think kids are just staying inside and playing with electronics more too. But why are they doing that? Is the neighborhood not stimulating enough? Is there anything to do outside? Again in the suburbs I'm in, what is a kid to do? You can't really walk to any store, park (besides the school area), or anywhere else. You can't even bike anywhere. You'd definitely get hit by a car at some point.

So I think it's a bit of a cultural shift, sure, but I think that doesn't account for poor urban planning. Most likely in the past kids were just so damn bored that they'd overcome crappy neighborhoods because there was literally nothing else to do. Now? Why risk riding down a country road on your bike and getting hit by a car when you can just sit at home and text your friends?

> I think kids are just staying inside and playing with electronics more too. But why are they doing that? Is the neighborhood not stimulating enough?

Well, that one is easy: their parents permit it. The rule in my home was simple: if you start a video game, you also start a 30 minute egg timer. If you forgot the timer and got caught, you lost the privilege for a week. The egg timer could be upgraded to an hour if I was getting good grades, but the thought of playing games for several hours a day was almost inconceivable. I only got away with that when I was home alone.

Sometimes when I was feeling mopey and started complaining about being bored my mother would get sick of it and yell at me "GO BE BORED OUTSIDE"

> On the other hand, I think kids are just staying inside and playing with electronics more too. But why are they doing that? Is the neighborhood not stimulating enough?

Taking for granted this is true for the discussion:

Electronics are way more prevalent, stimulating and social than ever before.

Growing up, my indoor entertainment options were basically reading books, reading comics, watching four channels of often rather snowy TV, or doing other random indoor activities like drawing poorly or playing various physical toys/games depending on age. So things like climbing trees were often more interesting even without usually having other people around--I grew up in the country. (Not that I disliked reading in particular.)

Well, that's not the only thing that has changed. 40 years ago when I was walking to elementary school nobody, absolutely nobody, was driving a pick-up truck except to a farm or job site. Now the majority of people are driving vehicles that are much larger than a 1982-model work pickup, and with 5-10x the engine power. Although I admit up-front that the national statistics are badly skewed by the fact that Florida is the most dangerous place on earth for pedestrians, the national pedestrian fatality rate doubled in the 20 years to 2020. Part of this is the built environment and part is what that built environment enabled: people barreling down roads that are far too wide in cars that are far too large, and doing it while browsing Instagram with one hand and both eyes.

> Now the majority of people are driving vehicles that are much larger than a 1982-model work pickup, and with 5-10x the engine power.

The 1982 F-150 had around 200 horsepower, depending on the configuration. If you believe the majority of people are driving between 1,000 to 2,000 hp cars today you are badly mistaken. An Abrams tank has around 1,500 hp but not too many of my neighbors drive those to work.

https://itstillruns.com/1982-ford-f150-specifications-759817...

The '82 F150 only had that much power if you got a loaded truck with a V8. The base V6 engine was 130hp.

You could also get pickups with 52 horsepower in 1982 as well:

http://vwtruckforsale.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/specs-s...

A 2021 Ram TRX has 13.5 times that amount of power. (702hp)

The smallest pickups you can get in the US today, the Maverick and the Santa Cruz both start at 3.7 times that amount of power (191hp).

And the new electric Hummer (now branded as GMC) is ~20x!=]

Yeah this is an overlooked factor, people may not be driving actual tanks as sibling comment mentions but they are driving death machines almost perfectly designed to cause maximum injury to children [0].

I think a combination of increased vehicle size and number of vehicles per capita probably explains why parents would feel less comfortable having their children walk down country roads to school.

[0]: https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/new-study-suggests-todays-s...

40 years ago, memories of the 1970s fuel shortages were fresh in everyones' minds.

Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine really hit home on the fear factory that major news networks promote on nonstop 24h basis.

In addition to buying more guns, people also fear everyone else. CPS gone wild is a direct result of that.

> CPS gone wild is a direct result of that.

I read somewhere that some states are passing laws now specifically to protect parents from prosecution for letting 9 year olds play in parks unsupervised. I guess people see kids playing without parents now and think it's some kind of child abuse.

Ithaca, NY did this, they declared themselves a "free range kid city"

https://ithacavoice.com/2018/11/city-proclaims-ithacas-kids-...

Utah did the same! https://www.npr.org/2018/04/01/598630200/utah-passes-free-ra...

Please don't upvote if you found this helpful. I want to get back down to 777.

Many people trace the inflection point back to the kidnapping of Etan Patz in 1979. The case was highly publicized and made many parents afraid of child predators in a way they really hadn't been before. That case and a few others led to putting pictures of missing children on milk cartons so then the fear was in their faces every day.

https://crimereads.com/how-the-disappearance-of-etan-patz-ch...

And today‘s parents were kids then. So they grew up with pics of missing kids on their milk cartons.

As a child in the US in the 1980s we were told over and over by the TV and school to never talk to strangers, to run away from people offering us candy or asking us to help them find their lost puppy. But there was essentially no education about how to avoid abuse by teachers, sports coaches, and family.

> It fails to explain why neighborhoods that kids played freely in decades ago now keep their kids inside. I'm talking about suburban neighborhoods in modest towns that haven't seen population growth or urban development.

This is a good point, although I would like to see some data to know whether this is actually common, or whether it's merely a common perception. If you actually control for things like population density, demographics (most notably age distribution), traffic, road design, city design (distance to schools, playgrounds, etc.) do you see a clear pattern of reduction in the number of children playing freely outside?

I have no doubt that there are plenty of places where this has happened, but I also have anecdotes of places where this hasn't happened (at least in the area I grew up in since I was a kid in the 90s).

In my city in Canada I noticed a lot of kids playing outside last summer. However, they were all East African or Arabs: I assume refugees from Eritrea and Syria. They were doing the stuff I did (playing with sticks, climbing the sand piles, widening the fence holes) and stuff I didn’t (parking lot soccer).

I’ve started seeing more white kids out in my neighborhood this spring though, maybe things are going back?

As a teacher, my anecdotal opinion that is kids have much more available - and higher quality - indoor entertainment. As a kid in the 90’s, I didnt want to be inside. It was boring.

I also do believe kids are over-scheduled and that youth sports require wildly excessive investment compared to my era.

> As a kid in the 90’s, I didnt want to be inside. It was boring.

Exactly. We had Super Nintendo, which was great, but you were limited by the carts you owned or rented. You had to sit down in front of the TV at a specific time each day to catch the show you liked, and that was it—one episode, now go find something else to do.

The Internet is an infinite supply of everything. You can watch an entire season of your favorite show nonstop in one sitting, or download ROMs of every SNES game ever created and play through them one by one. And as soon as a kid figures this out, it’s game over.

Hmm, do they? I believe everyone has tales like this but I was visiting Grover Beach a couple of months ago sitting on my friend's porch and you know what happened? A small group of kids came flying down the road on electric scooters. I saw them a mile away later when I went to get a haircut with no sign that they were going back. No helmets or anything. One of them said to the other "I think mine is in low speed or something" and the other said "Why would you do that" and then disappeared over the hill screaming "I AM SPEEEED!". It reminded me of my childhood and that maybe 5% of these kids are going to die of traumatic brain injuries and the rest are going to have incredibly fun memories of childhood.

Fascinating to me.

I wouldn't want a child of mine doing that without a helmet, and I'd prefer a bicycle, but if he's going to break a bone doing a jump over a little hump on the side of the road, haha, more power to you little fellow. Go break that bone. Learn the limits of your power. And I think I could do that in Grover Beach if I wanted.

> The only thing that changed was people became more fearful.

Because they got richer and all their "real problems" evaporated.

Kids play in the street where I live. But I live in the kind of place that makes HN demographics hand wring about violent crime and bad schools.

I think it is two factors: admins in full cya mode and the perceived value of a child increased (going from a necessary nuisance of society to planed single child (not finding the 100% right word here))

"She would be required to report any kid who was walking to school, it simply isn't allowed anymore."

With apologies, I don't believe this is true.

Where does this requirement come from and to whom would she deliver these reports ?

There are multiple news stories of busy body neighbors and passerbyers calling the cops when they see children walking to places like parks and schools if they don't immediately see a parent, often times with major consequences for the parents

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/child-protection-aervice...

https://www.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrested-s...

That was not my question.

My parent commenter stated that she was required to report.

Where does the requirement come from and to whom would she report ?

What we really need is some kind of Mind Your Own Business law to punish these busy body neighbors. There should be civil or criminal penalties for someone calling the cops on someone else doing nothing wrong. Or enforce existing laws. There must be some kind of Abuse Of Public Services law that can be used to deter these nosey ninnies. Make people think twice and be 100% sure before they stick their nose into other people’s lives.

I know this would severely reduce the content on NextDoor, r/PublicFreakout and r/byebyejob, but it’s a price we should be willing to pay.

School teachers are 'mandatory reporters', they are required by law to report any evidence of abuse or neglect. Teachers in her district were all told that a child walking to school by themself was evidence of neglect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_reporting_in_the_Uni...

Thanks - appreciated.

However, if I understand correctly, the law is the mandatory reporting of abuse or neglect ... but the directive she received, that " ... a child walking to school by themself was evidence of neglect ..." is not a law.

What school district is this, by the way ? What ages are we talking about ?

> The only thing that changed was people became more fearful.

Well for one thing this happened; and received a lot of national news:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jacob_Wetterling

> She would be required to report any kid who was walking to school, it simply isn't allowed anymore.

This is definitely true, here in BC. Kids under the age of 11 should not be unsupervised at any time; the rules aren't clear, but the case precedent make it not worth the risk.

https://www.crossroadslaw.ca/blog/what-age-can-you-leave-a-c...

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/bc-to-par...

https://cwrp.ca/sites/default/files/publications/Legal%20Age...

> The only thing that changed was people became more fearful.

People absolutely drive considerably faster. There are many reasons for that, but they do. When I was a kid roaming around on my own in the 1980s and 1990s, the roads simply weren't as dangerous as they are now.

People not only drive faster, but driver visibility is much worse--because A frames, because SUVs, etc.

I agree fear has grown considerably. But not all that extra fear is irrational--at least some of it is justified.

Yep. More drivers driving more miles faster.

Maybe in US but not in eastern Europe. Speed limits and road restrictions are significantly hardened last two decades, as well as casualties per capita.

There are more cars then years ago. Way more cars.

I live in the suburbs and the school bus stop is in our subdivision in front of the entrance. Its a 80 house subdivision and you can walk from the front to anywhere in less than 10 minutes at even a slow pace.

Every morning and afternoon there's a crowd of parents waiting with their kids in the morning or for their kids in the afternoon.

I don't know why. The kids are old enough to walk to and from. In elementary school I walked home, middle school I waited at the bus stop with only other students, no parents and it was only a few of us on the corner.

I also get a kick of parents driving there on a perfectly good day and blocking the roads...a whooping 30 second drive.

I feel if I have my kids walk the few minutes by themselves I'll be labeled a bad parent.

There's one school near me where kids are picked up by bus and driven 500 ft to the school on a safe residential street.

I grew up in Bulgaria, but my experience as a kid (80s-90s) seems like similar to what my (future) boss (in Los Angeles) when he was growing up in SF Valley (60s-70s) - get on the bike, go places, school, etc.

We had much smaller amount of cars. For one we had these self-made wood carts with ball-bearings as "tires", and we would slide with them on the streets while other cars were driving. Ok, not on the main street, but somewhere on a hill. If I get bloodied, my gramma would be - yaaah it's fine. Go to the doctor (by myself, 2nd grade) and get tetanous shot (I vividly remember this when I stepped on a rusty nail). They were still worried, but I guess due to lack of phones (even land line wasn't covered well), that's the best they can do.

One day, I was 4, maybe 5, me and my cousin (year older) decided (well it was my decision apparently, lol) that we need our plastic toy truck from my grandparents, and decided to take it. So we took off from a small city (Tzhernomortez) nearby my home city (Burgas) - and decide to walk it - I haven't checked - but the distance is 20-30km. So we walk, put some signs down, ate some really bad grassy looking thing, a bus of janitors/workers picked us up and left us somewhere, so probably from 9:00AM somewhere to 2, 3pm was our "trip". And we end up knocking on my grandparents door - we need our truck! :) - Well, yes everyone was spooked (normal), but that was it. It was later just told as funny story. Now many years later, in US, with my son (~15 soon) I'm still spooked where he goes, we have the tracker (he's okay with it) and track each other in case something happens. I wish I had less available information...

But also the streets in the US, even in neighbourhoods where people live, not work are just too damn wide :) - and cars, while observing most of the time the speed limits, when comes traffic time and they look for shortcuts, some of them go way too fast (and yes, I probably did the same in other places, when in a hurry). We had our neighbour's two dogs killed, because someone was swerving too fast, where you should slow down to a crawl really.

But it is, what it is.

You have a tracker on your 15 year old son?

Isn't that extreme?

> Isn't that extreme?

What do you think smart phones are? That's exactly what they're optimized for, in addition to mass distraction and aimless and feckless doom scrolling for dopamine that is.

I can't post because i triggered the algo:

> My wife and I use Apple's "Find My" feature to keep tabs on when each other will be home. Makes it easy to time dinner so it's hot for everyone.

The Silicon Valley TV series was great not just because it called out the Valley's BS tropes and made fun of it's absurdity, but because Judge really had the best material write itself: this is a prime example of what I could see an episode's plot being based on.

A (smart) phone being used not to actually call each other, but as the spy device that it is.

Sadly, in it's latter seasons it went into a territory it's writers neither understood or articulated well but appealed to the lowest common denominator: Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

Billions of people have smartphones. How many of them use them to keep track of their loved one's movements?

My wife and I use Apple's "Find My" feature to keep tabs on when each other will be home. Makes it easy to time dinner so it's hot for everyone.

I personally know of at least 2 families. My guess would be millions.

Phone does not imply detailed tracking by parent at all.

We all agreed to have it on. It's helpful if he's with friends, and I need to pick him up, I don't need to call him. Or the opposite.

He can turn it off anytime too.

> For one we had these self-made wood carts with ball-bearings as "tires", and we would slide with them on the streets while other cars were driving.

HA, I thought that was only in my country we had those :D. In Brazil it's called "carrinho de rolemã"!

Awesome!!! It's "lagerna kolichka" (lager=ballbearing, kolichka=car/cart) - https://www.google.com/search?q=%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B3%D0%B5%D1%... ("лагерна количка") search to show them :)

> Now many years later, in US, with my son (~15 soon) I'm still spooked where he goes, we have the tracker (he's okay with it) and track each other in case something happens. I wish I had less available information...

You wish you had less available information? So turn the the tracker off?

Agreed. I sometimes feel tense crossing big box parking lots where mostly no space has been designated to walking. Imagine a small person surrounded by pickup trucks and SUV’s from which they’re completely invisible.

Absolutely correct. The USA worships the car's speed above the child's freedom.

This reminds me of "The Sacred Rat" short story (fair warning, this site is a bit of an eyesore): http://www.drabruzzi.com/sacred_rac.html

This is hilarious, thank you

> Absolutely correct. The USA worships the car's speed above the child's freedom.

To be honest, this was never really a consideration in my calculus growing up, and I did so during the age of the super car going into hypercar era in SoCal and the presence of those cars around us would become a large part of our 'tuner' culture as it's literately the car mod capital of the World.

Never once did that deter us from hitting the street on skateboards, rollerblades etc.., in fact I like to believe I was part of a large collection of 90s kids who invented street luging on hills where lots of sports cars were hitting the canyons.

Honestly, this is peak over-regulation trying to pawn off the horrendous outcomes on cars because that is the convenient target de jure: I went from having a modest car and motorcycle collection to now simply having 3 must-haves and I honestly I've ridden 10000s more miles via public transportation this year (planes included) whereas I've only driven like 200 miles via car. And I did for environmental reasons as an environmental activist that traveled all over the World for projects where I could see first hand the damage of climate change, I didn't need some app or social media brigrading to change my mind as I was capable of seeing what government, petrol companies and Auto makers collusion can do: I worked at VW during Dieselgate.

The problem stems from parents deferring their responsibilities to the State when it comes to every facet of Life, and that is why these kids are soft and need safe spaces and feel threatened by anything that is against their idealized narratives. Universities pander to these clients because they often have the most resources as opposed to those who simply made their way up the hard way--excluding SATS was a red herring, most of the kids who got into Prestigious/Ivy Leagues didn't need them in the first place as legacy admissions plays a big part, and where that fails they'll just bribe them as we've ween before [0].

This is what happens when you allow and standardize nepotism, and it always back fires as the following generations are simply not capable of enduring anything after being sheltered their whole life.

This is one of the reasons that Silicon Valley is the cesspool that it is now, it's culture went from rugged entrepreneurialism in the 50s-90s when it was mainly an extension of Californian culture that changed the World to what is now a woke dystopia that caters and panders to the least capable form the right schools but is none the less optimized using lemmings to do the busy leg work for vulture capitalists with deep ties to VC that seek to mine your data as a business model.

Honestly, this is why I have no sympathy for what is happening in the Valley right now, you made your own hell now fix it if you really think you're so bright and deserve the acclaim that you think you're entitled to.

Sure, you've collectively made a feudal lords (FAANG) immensely wealthy beyond comprehension, but beyond that you've done nothing to' make the 'World a better place.'

In fact you're the useful idiot you speak down to here, but are oblivious to the fact you're the worst of the worst when it comes to that.

The sad thing is, it's mainly transplants that made it this way.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_briber...

> The problem stems from parents deferring their responsibilities to the State when it comes to every facet of Life,

Gotta love this comment under article and issue of overparenting literally about parents putting in more work so that kids don't go alone.

I don't really agree with that. I grew up in a small rural town where things were quite spread out. I would run and ride my bike all over the "neighborhood", which would encompass an area of well over 4 square miles. We had small dirt roads with no shoulders or sidewalks and we would ride our bikes down them, if someone came up behind you would get out of the way. It was not at all uncommon to have a groups of 5 and 6 year olds out and about.

I think the biggest thing is parents have embraced fear over reason and are terrified something bad might happen to their child.

> small dirt roads with no shoulders

...on which cars are limited to very low speeds and make a great deal of noise. Bicycles are barely safe on asphalt even when they have bike lanes.

I grew up in a small rural town as well, and this post gave me major nostalgia. When I was 7 or so, my parents limited me to a pretty small area (it was our "block", but that had a pretty different meaning from what most city folk would think of when they hear "block").

At some point, my limits were updated, and I was allowed to go anywhere that did not involve crossing the main street in the town (which at the time was a reasonably busy section of OH SR 30.) I'd ride to my grandma's house for a Coke or some ice cream and chat with her for hours at a time. There was a local playground near her house with the old school kind of swings that really let you get high up in the air.

I remember vividly the day when I discovered that I could ride my bike to the local Dollar General via a back route without crossing that street and the sense of freedom that gave me. I could also make the 2 mile ride to my best friend's house.

When I was a bit less than 10, the restriction on crossing that street was lifted, and the whole town was open to me. My friends and I rode our bikes absolutely everywhere and explored creeks, parks, and country roads like there was no tomorrow.

Now I live in a medium sized city, and every once in a while, I think about the proximity to family and the freedom to roam that I enjoyed growing up. More than anything else about home, I miss these things, and I have to wonder if I'm denying something to my kids by living in the city. Sadly, there aren't many software dev gigs in rural Ohio, and now that my kids are entrenched in the local schools (which, to be fair, are miles ahead of what exists back home), their upbringing as city kids seems to be written in stone.

Anyway, sorry for the rant - waxed nostalgic for a bit there.

Low density is not the reason you have to walk a long way to get to a house that it would take you seconds to get to if you climbed a backyard fence. It's just the stupid tree-of-cul-de-sacs layout.

Most of Japan isn't dense; it's single-family, detached dwellings. Those neighborhoods are walkable in spite of that. In metropolitan areas like around Tokyo, sure the houses are on small plots and close together; but houses are houses. It's still pretty low density.

It feels like a mix of both.

Even in my relatively walkable suburb (Reston, VA), it's not really walkable by a child. And things are far enough that a bike is better.

But, just around the beltway in Silver Spring, there was a family that made the news a few years ago because they let their kids walk to/from the playground. This was a few city blocks, in an urban area. Somebody saw the kids, went full Karen and called the police, and child protective services got involved. It was a mess.

Afterwards Texas and Oklahoma both passed laws that parents are allowed to let their kids play outside unsupervised.

Kinda sad that was necessary.

Reston is hit and miss for pedestrians. It was built during the height of automobile centered development, but the primary constituents were artists who cared about aesthetics. It has a lot of housing developments that are fully equipped with sidewalks, but are also not near much of anything. You can walk, but not really go anywhere.

At least it's not Tysons Corner. They're going to be spending decades trying to undo the damage done by the car centric design.

You can walk, but not really go anywhere

Yeah, not as bad as Ashburn, but not as good as Ballston or Clarendon (both of which now qualify as fully urban).

They added bike lanes to the major road outside my subdivision. Great, except they stop for 2 blocks near the school complex (ES, MS, HS on same big plot) because they needed extra turn lanes for cars. And then stopped the bike lanes again for 2 blocks near the shopping center for the same reason. So, the two places you'd want to ride a bike aren't connected. Massive failure. I sometimes wonder if VDOT/Fairfax planners half-ass these things on purpose just to prove "but nobody uses the bike lanes, see, empty!"

I think another part of it is that people don't know their neighbors as well as they used to. Here in Seattle there is a problem called the Seattle freeze and when you encounter other people who won't even say hello back to you in passing let alone can have a conversation with you become weary of who they are in private and how they could be a threat to your children.

You said that mixed-use neighborhoods lead to empowered children. Really? If that were the case, there'd be empowered children in mixed-use neighborhoods all over the world, including in the US. But that clearly isn't the case.

Most of Japan is rural. It's not uncommon to walk or bike up to an hour away to get to the nearest store. Yet children are still given responsibility and agency. In fact, it may be much more common in rural areas around the world rather than in dense mixed-use neighborhoods.

But that's not the reason either. It's clear that both urban mixed-use neighborhoods and rural communities have nearly the same consideration about children, within a single country/culture. If a society perceives it as safe and a good idea (or even necessary) for a child to run errands, then that's what happens. If the society perceives it as unsafe or irresponsible, then they don't. It's nothing more than a culture meme.

> Most of Japan is rural. It's not uncommon to walk or bike up to an hour away to get to the nearest store.

This is exaggerated. There are some people live in such rural area, but definitely not majority in every prefecture. I agree latter part, since such rural area is very few risk.

> Japan builds dense, mixed use neighborhoods.

This is true, but it’s not like they have an alternative. The population density and mountainous terrain pretty much dictates the urban design.

I’d say the UK is a better comparison, I was quite surprised to see tightly packed row houses even out in the countryside where open space appeared to be plentiful.

That's wrong. Perpendicularly opposite arguments for the same questions are in the well-crowded cities in exUSSR eastern europe. It's just a result of masses controlling. By the fear.

Nonsense, kids have met up in car centric suburbs in the US for decades now. The problem is a combination of stranger danger, nosy, entitled neighbors and the incredible powers of CPS and the internet/video game indoor culture.

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