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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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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))

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.

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.)

> 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

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.

"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 ?

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