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Comment by sasawpg | Hacker News Reader

Fully agreed here - I grew up in ex-Yugoslavia, which while it wasn't part of the Eastern bloc, it wasn't too dissimilar. It was perfectly acceptable and expected for kids to be out and about without direct parent supervision. Neighbours knew kids from the surrounding and would take care of them as needed. At 11-12, I walked to the store by myself or with similar aged friends many times to buy beer for my dad. The store owner happily sold it to me as he knew my dad and knew if I did buy it for myself, it would take no more than a day or two to find out. Police would have never questioned any part of this behaviour, it was fully normalized. I'd say it definitely resulted in children being more independent.

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You and the parent are touching on the key difference. The neighborhood was a community who knew each other and looked out for each other. In the US this dichotomy is exceptionally rare, so a young child walking alone is truly among strangers. I am not saying that kids shouldn't have freedom to roam but it's different.

America lacks community in many places. I don't know if it's uniquely American, but it's very common. Neighbors don't know neighbors, the shop owner doesn't know who kid's parents are. This is in my opinion is the primary reason why kids aren't allowed out alone.

> This is in my opinion is the primary reason why kids aren't allowed out alone.

I guess this is polar opposite: the situation is like this because kids are not allowed outside. Since kids are not allowed outside, you build "suburban sprawls": rows of houses with literally nowhere for those kids to go even if they wanted. And then you transport them directly to school and sports with a personal car. So the kids do not have interaction with other kids, because they are neither allowed to nor there is a field to play in. Naturally the other parents don't know the kids further than immediate neighbors.

The twist is that now the infrastructure is suddenly lone-kid-hostile.

> the situation is like this because kids are not allowed outside.

Imagine if the street-scene was crowded with kids. They would witness vandalism and bad behaviour, and wrongdoers would be much more cautious. I wish kids would play outside on the estate where I live.

>This is in my opinion is the primary reason why kids aren't allowed out alone.

All other developed nations have big, urban areas where people don't know all their neighbors, yet they don't have this weird problem America has. I live in Tokyo, the most populated metro area on the planet, and I see little kids riding around on their bikes, by themselves, at night. Little kids riding the subways to places far from home, by themselves, is perfectly normal. I've also seen kids walking by themselves in Europe.

This is uniquely an American problem. IMO, Americans are simply paranoid.

How do we find places that still value and foster this kind of community?

And how do we contribute to it ourselves? Lately I've been wanting to be intentional about getting involved, getting to know people, etc. I came across this blog post on the topic from HN a few months ago: https://www.seanblanda.com/its-time-for-localism-in-america/

It's just my own theory but perhaps there is some relationship between loss community and a few things:

* A two parent working household meant that there were less stay-at-home moms around to network in the community and build familiarity with other moms and neighboring families.

* The use of cars meant that there was less opportunity for interaction while walking in the neighborhood.

* Local church where people built a community through faith.

I grew up in the former Eastern bloc (Poland) in a small town and we had this sort of free-range parenting there. When I was around 9 or 10 I would spend my whole days playing outside with the other kids from the neighborhood, especially in the summer. Sort of like the "Bullerbyn children" in Astrid Lindgren's book. Sometimes one of us was sent on an errand (like to a local shop) and others went along to keep company. There were 5 of us hanging out regularly and most of us lived in two working parent households except one who had a SAH mother and another who was raised by a working single mother. So I don't think the lack of SAH moms is a factor here. Also, my parents are not religious and there definitely was no faith-based community. My parents actually didn't know that well the parents of other kids, we kids just met each other somehow in the area or were introduced by other kids that we knew. I think it was rather a combination of living in a safe neighborhood - suburb with low traffic (even now Poland has less cars per capita than US https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle...) and people being just less paranoid back then. Also, the societal expectations towards children have shifted in the recent years, now people often try to micromanage their children's time and provide them with too many after-school activities so kids don't have time to just hang around.

Interesting, thanks for the insight. You're right, you never see kids just hanging out anymore. Like you said, it's more organized and micromanaged.

>America lacks community in many places.

Arguably the most painful aspect of survival in our late-stage capitalist society.

Regardless of Eastern bloc vs West, or anywhere else, I think the biggest issue might simply be era.

Parents in the States were much more permissive in the 80s, and to a certain extent the 90s. That started to change in the 2000s, with far greater "helicopter parenting."

So are these descriptions of idyllic life in ex-Yugoslavia five years ago, or twenty?

I grew up in central Europe in the 80s and was given plenty of freedom, but I don't know whether kids there have the same amount as before, or if it has been changed like in the US.

There are plenty of countries where kids can still live in freedom. I can let my 8 year old son play outside with his 7 year old friend, and trust they'll be alright. I see lots of kids around their age go to their judo lessons on their own. This should be completely normal.

For police to come and arrest parents for trusting their children with some basic freedom is unbelievably oppressive. It's bizarre to hear this coming from a country that once claimed to be the "land of the free". And this is hardly the first story like this.

My experience ends in mid-90s, but from what I understand it is still far more permissive than US/Canada. In Finland for example, kids go to school alone starting in grade 1 (walk or public transport). That is definitely not something you will see often in Canada. I do absolutely agree though - anecdotally speaking of course, parents today are far less permissive than "back in the day".

I have no issue with my kids (8 and 9) playing outside alone provided they don't venture out onto the thoroughfare street. My concern is with irresponsible and inattentive drivers, including residential construction traffic.

I walked to school for Kindergarten and 1st grade. Roughly a mile each way. This was in the early 70s, and though I see some kids walk to the nearby elementary school, the majority are dropped off by their parents in their huge SUVs...

My 7yo daughter goes to school alone, by subway. Not every day, and it's only two stations, but still. Nobody bats an eye. This is in Berlin, though not in a dangerous area.

I feel like the fear around "stranger danger" played a huge role in normalizing the idea that children shouldn't be unsupervised and that the police needed to enforce truancy laws with more urgency.

I was just thinking about my childhood and how much freedom I had at that age. Car rides from parents for when the weather sucked

Nobody is making the literal comparison. Eastern bloc was a totally different form of repression, the top poster in the thread was just making a clumsy comparison between different forms of oppressive state action. Connecticut has plenty of citizens with license plates, stickers, and flags on vehicles that mock or call for violence against the current US president. They do so without any fear of imprisonment. Try that with a Solidarity sticker in Poland in the 80s. I have no doubt they had a healthier view towards independence in childhood in Poland in the 1980s, though.

As smart people, let's get a grip and realize that outlier incidents happen all the time, and just question the why and when they get coverage.

This is maybe more about time then about the place. Before, growing up in Slovakia, I walked streets of a city as kid alone. Now when I mentioned it to some parents (even in village) they think that I was so brave (even if they did the same).

Only children that you can see in parks or on the streets of Bratislava alone are refugees from Ukraine.

I bet the parents didn't watch the news there, either.

Serious question: what did the Eastern block used to do sex offenders?

I'm not sure what you're getting at. In ex-Yu, they'd go through criminal proceedings.

it's a sincere question, though I was more intending to find out the severity of the penalty then the legal procedures

Would they survive to make it to the proceedings?

They probably did watch the news, but it would be very different news on the state-run Jugoslavenska Radiotelevizija.

(If this incident had happened in Yugoslavia, or something similar with unjust police harassment, would anyone have heard about it on the news? Of course not.)

Probably not as different as one would hope compared to North American news of unjust harassment/abuse by police, religious/sport organization some 10-20+ years ago. I didn't see major Canadian news sources overflowing with content about abuse suffered in residential schools until fairly recent for example. That's not to paint any sort of a rosy Jugo picture, far from it.

> Serious question: what did the Eastern block used to do sex offenders?

Unless the EB was radically different from the rest of 1970s Earth, nothing.

In the US, pre-1980s kids knew not to take any kind of abuse to the police. At best they'd be gaslit or outed to their abuser (who was commonly family). For most of LEO history cops (who reflected society in general) were not there to protect kids. Perps certainly knew this.

Source: We kids talked to each other and figured out reality pretty fast.

Ah yes - familiar and agree with this as well. It does however depend significantly on whether the perp was known to you or not. You'd be far more likely to report a stranger abusing you randomly on the street than say your family member, teacher, coach, etc. (see Hockey Canada for a sad example of this continuing to date).

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