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Comment by screwturner68 | Hacker News Reader

So X'ers what happened to us? If you are a "kid today" your parents are either X'ers or Millenials. As X'ers we've made it a point of pride that we played till the street lights came on, we walked to school, we walked where ever we wanted. We had jobs and started adulting at a much younger age, living at home with mommy at 25 wasn't cool it made you a joke. So what happened? Why did we raise these kids and never let them out of our site? Why did we drive them to school? Why did we invite fully employed adults to live in their childs room instead of letting them grow up? Who thought this was a good idea? I think we fucked up a whole generation of kids.

Please don't say safety because things are much much safer now than they were in the 70's, 80's and 90's.

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Every generation gets fucked up in new and interesting ways. We all grow up with our own traumas. How we lived our lives informs how we view life. And we respond to all of that in two major ways: acceptance or rejection.

Acceptance is repeating the mistakes of the past. Basically neglecting children and turning them into adults sooner than they're ready.

Rejection is making sure that does not happen at all. Doing the complete opposite of what was done to us.

They're both wrong. The answer is some weird blend of the two. Children need the autonomy to become adults but also need the safety net of having actual adults around.

Kids can play outside. There are adults outside, too; and they can come back home where presumably their parents are hanging out.

I don't see the trade-off?

If safety were an argument how comes all the other western countries where kids still roam freely don't have increased or at least statistically visible issues.

To pick up a few arguments. My neighbours are farmers, there are more ford raptors and guns than anywhere else in the country. Yet kids walk a hour to school by their own and play far from their parents vision.

Not sure this is a generational thing or perhaps a how you were raised thing? I’m an X’er and I don’t think I ever went in the front yard (or beyond) unattended until I was in late junior high out perhaps even high school. I just hung out playing video games or dicked around inside or played in the backyard. My guess is that the people of my generation who were adventurous kids probably have more adventurous kids now.

I'm a millenial. At 7, I was allowed to cross the street and walk within one block (quiet suburb). At 12 I went to a school outside my immediate area, and I took the city bus there on my own. At 14 or so, I was allowed to travel anywhere in the city, provided my parents approved. Went to a concert with friends around that age. I took my first overnight trip away from home on my own at 16 to go visit a friend who had moved.

That experience seemed normal to me at the time, but me and my friends may have been the tail end of that degree of freedom. Funnily enough I rarely exercised it. My parents encouraged me to explore more than I did. I was a very introverted and nerdy type who spent most of the time indoors. But I would spend my weekends and summers with my friends. And my parents wouldn't usually be willing to drive me once they considered me old enough to walk there or take the bus.

Millennial here. By grade 6 (11-12 yrs. old) everyone I can remember walked to and from school. Often with groups of friends. In the evenings my friends and I were free to do whatever we liked unsupervised as long as we were home by sun down. Typically we’d never venture out more than maybe a 15 minute walk from home though.

What happened is car dependent societies and urban sprawl.

There are always people who blame cars every time this topic comes up, but my life is no more automobile-dependent today than it was growing up as a millennial. I live in the same metro area, on a very similar street, and yet the parents in my neighborhood today generally give their kids a fraction of the freedom I had growing up.

The "cars" angle feels more like a favorite boogeyman around here than an actual explanation for the change.

>The "cars" angle feels more like a favorite boogeyman around here than an actual explanation for the change.

It is. Especially on the internet, once people find a cause to champion they'll try shoehorn it into everything, regardless of relevance. I'm only surprised someone isn't trying to pin this on a lack of nuclear energy power plants, which is another internet favorite go-to.

There is correlation[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35419097

There is a correlation with urban sprawl and the autonomy of children[1].

Depending on where you live, it's harder young people to get around compared to 40 years ago. Like this HN user's experience in this same thread[2].

By making society car centric we have made it difficult for children to exercise independence even if their parents allowed them to.

In a non metro area your options as a teen to go somewhere are to beg your parents to drive you somewhere or to walk for hours to a bus stop. These barriers and the rise in pedestrian fatalities do not incentivize autonomy.

[1] https://youtu.be/oHlpmxLTxpw Why we won't raise our kids in suburbia

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35417776

A city planned for humans is automatically difficult to access with private cars (gotta have narrower pedestrian-only streets, public transport), which are required to get away unseen smoothly in case of legitimate kidnappings. A city planned for humans is dense, walking anywhere alone your kid is seen by a neighboring grandma, the likely existence of whom in any of the hundreds of flats within earshot also acts as a deterrent. In a city optimized for cars, easy access by a car means easy way of transporting a number of large firearms without being seen.

> In a non metro area your options as a teen to go somewhere are to beg your parents to drive you somewhere or to walk for hours to a bus stop.

I had a bike as a kid, and got my driver's license as soon as I turned 16. The bike isn't the fastest option, but it was just fine for getting to school, to friend's houses and to the local Walmart. And once I had a driver's license, I could and did borrow the family car, and many of my peers had a car that was specifically designated for the kids. Being able to drive a car used to be a symbol of independence for us, but today fewer and fewer teens are even getting a driver's license.

Yes, not every family has a car that's available to borrow, but most in suburbia do.

Cars are absolutely one factor but not the only factor.

Both Pedestrian fatalities and injuries are rising.[1] While cars are getting safer for passengers, manufacturers are not required or tested on improving pedestrian safety. You can see this in the rise of % of fatalities from car accidents that are pedestrians (less people dying in car crashes inside cars, more people dying by being hit by cars).

This is despite the numbers improving drastically in the 00s[2].

I don't think cars are the primary driver though; I think it's the 24/7 news cycle and the various iterations of the dangers to children drilled into people's psyches. Random guy at the park? Paedophile. Kid makes up a story? Satanic panic. Kid hides near a weather balloon? National news sensation. You're constantly surrounded by evil and danger and you must do what you can at all costs to protect your child -- that's the message the media pushes. The people who grew up (as I did) with the primary directive of "come home when the streetlights come on" just weren't being exposed to that stuff then but were later on in life.

I also think video games and the sheer amount of media we can consume are also big factors. People just don't want to go outside as much anymore, so outside spaces in newer suburban neighbourhoods tend to be awful. Houses are larger and more tightly packed, so kids have to go to the park. More tightly packed homes with smaller property sizes means more people (and more cars).

There's probably a bunch of other factors I'm not thinking of as well. The short answer to the thread's question is essentially just "things are different."

[1]: (PDF) https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

[2]: (PDF) https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

I live across the street from a grade school, nobody that goes to this school lives more than 3/4 of a mile from the school. There is one street that might be considered busy but there is a stop light and a crossing guard. Further there are sidewalks all the way and crime for all practical purposes doesn't exist and yet every morning there is a line of giant SUVs dropping kids off at school and picking them up every night. Honestly there's no excuse no to walk but the majority are driven.

Cars are a part of it, along with greater urbanization (I roamed around a lot as a kid, but I lived in smaller towns and cities at those ages), but a much bigger one is simply that Americans became far more paranoid in the 21st century.

i would not say life has become any more car dependent than it was in the 90s, if anything, public transport where i live has improved dramatically.

Our parents were emotionally absent. Now we swing the opposite way and interfere too much in fear or being the wrong type of parent. Our fear of traumatising our children causes trauma due to too much constraining.

I had to laugh reading this because it hits home. My parents were absent and my millennial friends and family that are parents are extremely on the far end of being very afraid of messing up their kids.

Fear of stranger danger I would guess. The news is relentless about peddling fear.

> Please don't say safety because things are much much safer now than they were in the 70's, 80's and 90's.

All those statistics that show kids are safer today are at least partially the result of the changes in behavior we're talking about.

As Xennial father of 2 kids - cars happened, when I was growing up in 80s families had at max 1 car, some didn't have car at all or used it rarely only on weekends, now many families have two cars, which they use on daily basis + same thing happened in companies which could do without cars back then. Back then I was riding bike 8-9yo to the other side of the town 2-3km and played there in forest or next to river with friend who lived there.

My 2nd grader started to walk home from school (~1km, two busier roads, one without crossing and bunch of smaller roads without crossing) by himself couple of weeks ago and he is still rarity in his class. Last week his class teacher refused to let him go without special paper despite he had no problem to leave from (after) school club for weeks already, where I specifically written he can go home by himself whole school year to not write paper almost every day. My mistake for writing in initial registration I am picking him up, now with younger kid joining the school she will have straight from 1st grade written in official documents she can go by herself and it will be only up to our agreement how she will get home without dumb teachers stopping us.

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