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Comment by ccleve | Hacker News Reader

I came here to post exactly this. It is appalling that we live in a neighborhood where everyone can walk, there are plenty of kids that my son knows within a mile, he's 14 and more than old enough to be out on his own, but every one of his friends is in a math class, or French school, or out of town on vacation, constantly. He goes to the park and there is no one there. So he stays home and watches anime. The only way we can get him out is to call other parents and schedule something.

There is something deeply wrong here. I blame other parents who overschedule their kids.

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I'm at the age where I'm seeing the endgame of this, our cohort of kids & friends are applying to college. They did all these after-school activities, tutors, sports, etc. They were over programmed over achievers. And guess what, even with their 4.5 GPAs and impressive resumes, they aren't getting into the colleges they want (University of California). So what was the point of all that?

This is the result of NIMBY, but for education. Same as the housing market - once you're in it, you're invested in housing prices not going down (and certainly not build-build-build as we should be doing).

What we should have done is expand access to elite colleges commensurate with demand, and thereby dilute the status of the "elite" college. Harvard still accepts ~2000 people, around the same as 40 years ago, even though demand has skyrocketed. That is basically leading to more and more competition over the same slots, same as the bidding wars in the housing market. And all of the alumni of the University get to ride the wave of more and more exclusivity (they benefit from a low acceptance rate), so this is unlikely to change.

Artificial scarcity rules the day.

Better to not have “elite” colleges at all.

Agreed. We're at a point where if you want to get into a top college, you have to be interesting. You must have done something unusual, ambitious, creative, or anything beyond sports or band or violin and a bunch of AP courses.

Guess what? Kids who have never had time to play are ones who have never had time to develop cool interests.

Jack Nicholson said it best (repeatedly): All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Why this burning desire to go to a top college?

I know enough of those who went to these so-called top tier colleges, meanwhile I took my time getting through an average college, but nonetheless exploring interests, making eclectic friends.

Most people around me were treating life like a sprint - My young self even back then knew it was a marathon.

I am not saying be aimless but don't drive yourself crazy at this altar of success - it will come, but there are life lessons you learn in your 20s - that are the foundation for a better life later.

Because the kids now, and their parents, have mostly gone through an education system that constantly hammers you on how you need to get into the top college, you must go to college, you should be taking as many AP classes as possible to get into a top college. They've had 30 or so years to be propagandized into believing it.

There was also definitely a strong undercurrent of first-generation immigrants to the US pushing their kids hard, because they had no reason to distrust the message that if you want to succeed in the US, you need to go to a top college so you can get a good job.

Yes, this culture of parents scheduling play dates drives me insane. And even if you try to schedule, everyone is so busy. Kids have karate and 30 minutes later baseball and that's after school. It so much different from our childhood and we struggle to integrate into it.

When I first heard about play dates it reminded me of a scene in The Devil's Advocate where one of the wives of the lawyers said that whenever she wants to see her husband, she has to schedule an appointment.

It's tough but doable. You have to get on people's calendars a week or two out whenever you can, and if you're lucky, it eventually turns into easy, low-stress, open-ended playdates.

Meeting other parents is a huge effort, though! It's basically dating all over again. If your kids ride the school bus, that's a big help because you automatically meet nearby parents who are home in the afternoon. Otherwise, you have to go to lots of events and ask parents for their phone numbers, but the majority don't work out for random reasons.

I think the parent is not so much complaining that it's doable, more that the concept of play dates as a thing at all is what's infuriating. I agree with this as well.

When I was young, my parents knew the parents of maybe one or two of my friends, and that was only largely because they knew each other from somewhere else. We didn't need to have our parents organize and sync up their schedules to go play together. We'd just go and meet up. If no one was around outside, might go up and knock on the door of a few friends see if they wanted to do something. But ultimately, we had largely free reign to ourselves.

Now, at a later age, I also really wouldn't want to have to get to know the parents of my kids' friends either. Meet once or twice to get to see them face-to-face, maybe get some basic contact info just in case, but for the most part, I don't really want my kids' social relationships to be based on how well I can get along with other parents (with a few small exceptions.)

As someone that was always surprised at how much more free time I had compared to other kids back in my school days - I'm still very much in support of limited structured activities. Me and the boys would just goof off on bikes and in backyards. This was 15-10 years ago.

I'd talk to people in class and they'd claim to have like 1 or two hours free between school and sleep. And I had something like 8 hours free. What the hell?

Same here besides some travel ball that screwed up a couple summers for me when I was a pre-teen. I ended up getting burnt out with baseball and quit. Besdies that, from my earliest memories to about 20 I screwed off basically 95% of the time and had a blast. Still ended up going to a top notch university, although it was a struggle for me at first.

Fast forward to present day and my kids are beginning to build ramps for their bikes just like I used to do - and I'm right out there with them building so I can shred on my MTB just like the old days lol.

The neighbors have been gone every weekend to a different part of the state or another state entirely for 8U baseball, and I can't help but feel sorry for them as someone who went through the same thing as a kid.

I used to think parents who overscheduled their kids were reacting to incentives put in place by college admissions offices and secondary selective admissions schools, and ultimately employers who demand elite credentials.

But as I've studied this issue and experienced life, it seems to be the case that credentials are in reality overrated compared to competence and experience. The vast majority of colleges will admit anyone, and the vast majority of employers requiring a degree just ask that you have a degree of any kind.

So now I think parents should just chill, not because it's the altruistic strategy in game theory, but because that's how the actual labor market works. Parents are killing themselves and their kids for no reason.

Boredom can be a great breeding ground for creativity.

This is absolutely true, but the problem is that we are oversaturated with time-wasters that prevent that kind of deep, creativity-breeding boredom. There's always another phone game, another show, more social media -- and these things were specially designed to hold your attention and prevent you from being "good bored". South Park nailed it with their discussion about how the problem with doing pot as a kid is that it makes you OK with being bored. Well, now we have millions of things like that.

Road trips. I remember those wonderful long boring trips before our girls had phones.

Oh, and even after, gee, sorry, not charging phones when on the road.

> I blame other parents

Ah, the mantra of our parental lives!

These classes kids go to aren’t always some kind of arduous, academic overachiever factory. My kid goes to a Spanish immersion after school program once a week and she loves it. She’s made a ton of friends there. We’re not shoving her through the door.

Don’t get me wrong, some parents do go over the top with it, no doubt. But a lot of these activities are genuinely enriching.

It's not about your kid going to a Spanish class once a week, and the objection isn't that doing that isn't enriching for your kid.

The problem is over the holidays when all your kid's friends have been sent to camps and summer schools (mostly as a form of holiday childcare for working parents presumably) or taken away on holiday, leaving your kid with nobody to play with. It presumably varies a lot but it's a real thing in our and our childrens' lives. The summer holidays should be filled with friends and play, not spent at home with your parents because nobody's available.

I still prefer my kid I'm camp or summer school over the kid on Netflix or Steam or whatsapp whole day. Or over me forcing them away from the above after which they still don't go play outside with friends, because friends watch anime or play video game.

I met some of my current friends not from school, but from seeing them at the park or in the neighborhood while playing, walking, or biking around.

Given that the anime waifu crowd is a huge reason why AI image generation is moving as fast as it does, it's probably better for society that he becomes a weeaboo. It's thankless work but someone has to label all the images on the -booru websites for the good of humanity (unironically).

Blaming other parents is great and probably correct, but putting blame on things outside of your control is a cop out.

Why don't you move to an area that's not like that, or you go an play with your kid at the park until other kids show up.

or build an app that makes the makes scheduling the play time very seamless.

Yeah dude why don't you take your 14 year-old to the park to play with their mom or just launch a startup to solve this problem.

It's actually a great opportunity to teach your kid to code so they can learn to solve their own problems by learning to launch their own startups.

Teaching your kid to code is not even close to replacing social interaction with their peers. (In case your comment wasn't sarcasm)

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