Children need risk, fear, and excitement in play
afterbabel.com
afterbabel.com
I know exactly what they mean by fear, excitement and risk. It was fun while it was dangerous yet it was extremely rare for a kid to fall off and be hurt.
I fondly remember those steel bars polished by countless human hands like it was yesterday.
I don’t know what’s there now. Probably a big sign that says “Your parents made you a pussy”
Then they removed it, because the local council was afraid some kid might get hurt.
It's sad.
See https://www.americanparkscompany.com/playground-equipment/co... or https://www.gametime.com/playground-equipment/gt-wave for examples.
/hint: I'm lying.
But perhaps once these practices begin to be reversed, people will feel that it's terrifying that the children are suddenly independent and not incredibly passive and cowardly.
But I don't think the thing that spoiled them are the safe the playgrounds; it's the constant access to computers, tablets, the internet, Youtube, etc. In my day you had to wait until Wednesday or Saturday to get your cartoon fix. Nowadays there's instant gratification and constant passive entertainment. They're not bored anymore, they have no need to be inventive. I suspect that's a bigger problem than safe playgrounds.
Do you yourself still climb trees?
I still do and my small kids do, too.
I don't remember my father ever climbing a single tree, yet I loved it as a kid and was doing it until late teenagehood.
Leading by example is good, but definitely not necessary in all cases.
We grown up at the same place with access to the same experiences and trees.
Maybe your kids are just not that into the idea of tree climbing as you were, and maybe this doesn't mean anything about generations?
But yes, it is leading by example. If other kids climb trees, that is an example as well. If "kids these days" rather play on their devices, but I want my kids to experience something different, then yes, I need to show it to them. (But I also, or mainly do it, because it is fun and training for myself).
If we are with other, wilder kids, which we occasional are, no need to show anything to them. But on the default playground today, it really does seems like it has gotten very rare. A tree is not a certified playelement after all and who to sue if something happens, so best to avoid it, is what most probably think.
Maybe that's where they taught me how to climb.
There was a particularly dangerous piece of playground equipment that the kids called the “witch’s hat,” which was a 15’ or so tall round central metal pipe maybe 3-4” in diameter, which had a cap on the top that could freely spin. Attached to the cap were maybe 12 10’ chains attached, which linked to a giant octagon or decagon made out of 1-2” or so straight pipe sections which were fitted together in angle brackets. It was essentially an inverted merry go round which you would need a few kids on opposing sides to operate, all running in the same direction. It would cause a kind of wave as the weight distribution shifted as kids were lifted off the round while hanging on, and then your side would come back down and you would hit the ground running while hanging on for dear life.
Some kid flew off and broke their collarbone and they ended up soft-banning it except when the teachers weren’t looking, and eventually they decommissioned it. It was a sad day on the playground when that happened.
You know what is useless and complains loudly at the first sign of damage? Testicles.
"Are you scared of that, you massive testicle?"
But it is also, according to the same dictionary, defined as "a cat" as well as "a timid and cowardly person (typically used of a man)." It turns out that words can have more than one meaning and is pretty clear, given the context, that the last definition is the one at play here.
If there is any kind of conflation happening, it is only you that has done the conflating. If you don't like your behaviour, just don't do it? Seems pretty simple. No need to tell us about it.
Cool, but the dictionary provides record of the prevailing use of words, and it is clear that the original comment was said in the same vein as how most people define it – "a timid and cowardly person (typically used of a man)". There was no association with female body parts (or cats, for that matter) made in the original comment. Whatever pet definition found in your community may be is irrelevant here.
> I suggest asking the women in your life how they feel about the term
I'll be sure to ask the cats in my life while I'm at it...
He learned his lesson!
And we didn't sue, because kids can be dumbasses and will always find ways to hurt themselves. If he wasn't jumping off a 5' tall jungle gym, he'd be doing backflips out of swings or jumping from tree to tree or something else that doesn't make any sense to adults with fully developed brains.
You say this as a virtue, and I get it. But this shouldn't even be a possibility.
A few problems I see:
1) Very few people take personally responsibility for their choices [kudos to you]
2) Someone always has to be at blame, there can't just be accidents
3) Scrupulous lawyers looking for paydays.
4) Local governments pay out somewhat easily for accidents [see NYC]
5) Tort reform is not popular due to lobbying.
Like, a two story jungle gym probably shouldn't exist. But a "normal" shoulder height version? Sure, I have no problem with that.
But I also let my son skateboard several miles across town to get to middle school, so I'm obviously crazy and a terrible parent. /s
It off gassed for a tiny bit iirc, but once it was open it was fine.
I mean, it's just a number right? So how many kids does a playground need to kill every year before you'd say "oh, maybe we should nerf the monkey bars"?
Time-and-time again is see the masses have zero idea how many people are getting killed regularly until the stats are put in front of them. We assume it's small, but often non-negligible, like the fact that there are 11 drowning deaths every single day: https://www.cdc.gov/drowning/facts/index.html
We can have swimming pools were kids drown. If a bunch of kids are drowning, we can require a locked gate around the pool, so that children cannot enter without supervision. If kids keep drowning, we could require pool covers that need to be removed before use.
The point isn't to remove autonomy, the point is to require everyone to admit that preventable mistakes happen, and we need to take reasonable precautions "for our own good."
The best analogy is ticketing cars that block fire hydrants when "popping into to a store real quick." We know that universalizing that habit will cause fires grow where they wouldn't otherwise, and people could die because of it. However, when the fire truck eventually shows up, the person blocking the hydrant will respond with "what are the odds." We know the odds are low, but non-zero, but the negative payoffs are extreme, that's why we need to always take precautions.
I read somewhere that propensity to war is proportional to the average age of a society. I think the same phenomenon applies to acceptance of risk in child behaviour but now related to fertility rate.
- I can only assume that if a kid doesn't have an older sibling "to keep an eye on them" the parents take this role, and parents tend to be more risk-adverse and responsible caretakers than siblings.
- I've never lived in the American suburbs, but they don't seem very dense. I know that, growing up in Mexico, the kid density was great. Some of it probably has to do with the fact everyone had siblings. Matching ages with nearby neighbors is more likely when there's more kids too. We were outside all the time, older siblings introduced younger ones to the crowd. Friendships were made, broken and fixed. Adventures were had. More than once we got into situations that I knew my mom wouldn't be happy about too.
This hypothesis doesn't make sense, because all children were treated differently many decades ago, and by pure math the most common type of child is the first born. Every family no matter the size has a firstborn child, who by definition has no older sibling to keep an eye on them. The fact is that parents were just less hovering helicopters in the past. I can attest to this as firstborn myself.
I understand the sentiment you're trying to convey but I have to point out that's only true if the average family size is less than 2. The second it hits a full 3 that's very obviously untrue and most cultures in the past definitely had averages above 3.
Only under a very uncharitable misunderstanding of what I said. If the categories are simply "first born" and "not first born", then first born ceases to be the most common as family size increases. But if the categories are "first born", "second born", "third born", etc., then first born never ceases to be the most common. And as I said, "Every family no matter the size has a firstborn child, who by definition has no older sibling to keep an eye on them", so it hasn't been explained why parents were less risk-adverse in the past toward firstborn children (who have no older silbings to keep an eye on them). Every parent past and present had to deal with a firstborn.
US birth rates dropped dramatically between the late 1950s and the late 1970s, resulting in this small generation. (I attribute the drop to the increasing financial independence of women and the widespread adoption of birth control.) GenX family sizes were small, with few siblings. Yet GenX kids "enjoyed" (or suffered from, depending on your perspective) the absence of supervision for large parts of their days. Helicopter parenting didn't exist at that time. GenX is the glaring counterexample to the family size theory.
The past with extended families all living together — grandparents, cousins, et al. — is more distant than people are acknowledging.
Gen-x was more independent because they were allowed to be, the family size doesn't have a lot of bearing on that, but more than that it's a non-sequitur that somehow gen-x is a counter-example to the idea that smaller families lead to higher value placed on child safety. child safety and independence are orthogonal ideas.
Correct.
> the family size doesn't have a lot of bearing on that
Correct.
> child safety and independence are orthogonal ideas.
Incorrect.
In truth, a child can grab a can of soda out of the fridge without it being a safety concern.
That's basically a nonsensical reply.
> In truth, a child can grab a can of soda out of the fridge without it being a safety concern.
Nobody is talking about children grabbing cans of soda. That's a non sequitur. The submitted article: "Children need risk, fear, and excitement in play".
we're done here.
That appears to be what you're claiming.
No?
> That appears to be what you're claiming.
I have no idea where you're getting this crazy interpretation.
My point was that firstborn children don't have any siblings to watch over them, because they are the oldest child, and firstborn children didn't always have helicopter parents either. In other words, "watched by adults" vs "watched by sibling" was a false dichotomy.
> They [firstborn children] literally have zero siblings.
strongly implies children with siblings are not firstborn children.
As I said elsewhere, your thought process is all over the place. If you meant that firstborn children don't have _older_ siblings then you chose a poor way of communicating that.
But to rebut your statement, as someone else pointed out, firstborn children would often have cousins and neighborhood kids watch them.
No, my thought process has been in exactly the same place the entire time.
> If you meant that firstborn children don't have _older_ siblings then you chose a poor way of communicating that.
My HN comments are not perfect prose, nor are they intended to be. Nonetheless, you can and in fact should assume that I'm not insane. What I meant was that firstborn have no siblings when they're born, and older siblings are the only relevant siblings as far as "watching over" is concerned.
> But to rebut your statement, as someone else pointed out, firstborn children would often have cousins and neighborhood kids watch them.
I've already addressed this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39553084
To me it gives the impression of a semi-mythical tale. Other than for occasional, specific babysitting gigs (usually paid), I've personally never "watched over" other children, whether a younger sibling, a neighborhood kid, or a cousin (all of whom lived at least hundreds of miles away). It's not something that happened in general. Kids are generally busy being kids themselves, doing their own things, and playing with their own friends. Perhaps in the distant past there was little in life except one's own extended family, but that past is long gone.
Oh well, I guess if it can't be perfect then no one has a license to tell you the reasonable reading of your words is completely different from what you meant. Improvement is only for those who don't think in binary terms.
I will say, growing up most of us have encountered that 1 kid who is just a bit weird due to the way his or her parents were raising them. I say this because that linked comment and your last paragraph display a belief of normalness that isn't normal. I'm sure it's your lived experience but I'm just as sure that's part of the problem with having parents who don't understand safety vs independence.
And as I said in the other comment, we're done here. Your thought process is all over the place and I think most of it is a difficulty to communicate and I'm not in the mood to even try.
"is your claim that the firstborn child stops being the firstborn child when another child is born?" is not a reasonable reading of my words in any way, shape, or form. It's an absolutely absurd reading.
> I will say, growing up most of us have encountered that 1 kid who is just a bit weird due to the way his or her parents were raising them.
How is this relevant? I'm not denying it, just wondering what exactly it's supposed to prove, if anything. My only claim is that the family-size psychological theory proposed by the OP is not true.
> I'm not in the mood to even try.
That much is obvious, given your aforementioned absurd interpretation.
which is why I asked for clarification. Just because what you said is ridiculous doesn't mean I should know what you meant.
your communication sucks, get better at it. or don't, but the feedback has been given.
People also seem to have fewer kids if they have them. That implies fewer cousin interactions like I had and also all those things you mentioned never happen. It's unbelievably sad.
This seems unlikely. I had only one sibling, but way back when I was young we were given free rein. And we were latchkey kids, because both parents were working. The only rule was that you had to be home in time for dinner, but otherwise we were completely unsupervised after school and could roam anywhere our feet or bicycles could take us. Everyone was like this at the time, all of the kids, regardless of family size. My next door neighbor and good friend was an only child. IIRC most of my friends had one sibling at most.
I think what's changed is the media fearmongering about the dangers to kids. Crap like America's Most Wanted freaked out parents, massively damaging our collective psyche. Also, the rise of the internet has given ultra-judgmental cranks a platform to spread their opinions about child rearing and tut-tut any parent who isn't a helicopter. Indeed, ultra-judgmental internet cranks have practically taken over every aspect of society now.
Even if your smaller family and others like it had a more relaxed approach to parenting, no doubt that was in part due to the culture of the time where people generally had larger families.
The collective media fearmongering that is persistent nowadays is only popular because most people accept the narrative. This could easily be because today they generally have one or two children whereas when you grew up that was not the norm and such ideas would not have been popular.
Nope. If you think about it, GenX was the smallest of the recent generations, despite Boomers being a large generation (hence their name), so family sizes had already shrunk dramatically before the more recent phenomenon of helicopter parenting. "Gen Xers were sometimes called the "latchkey generation", which stems from their returning as children from school to an empty home and needing to use a key to let themselves in. This was a result of what is now called free-range parenting, plus increasing divorce rates, and increased maternal participation in the workforce prior to widespread availability of childcare options outside the home." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X
As far as I remember, almost all of my peers had only one sibling at most. Families of two children or even one child were extremely common at the time.
By the way, the reason that people had larger families in the past wasn't because kids died and needed to be replaced. It was because they didn't have birth control.
Once you fix that, kids are going to be kids.
Well, actually you're not totally off. Having more kids (we have three, more on the way hopefully) definitely lowers the pressure on individual ones. But moreover, and more importantly, seeing our friends with large families (5+), the biggest reason the kids can play is that the older siblings are there. When we get together with a few other families of that size, the oldest kids are like 8 - 10 (i.e., old enough to let us know if the littles are in serious trouble). It's really easy to let your kids go play in the woods by themselves if you trust the older ones to run and tell you if something is wrong. Bonus points for having multiple families with the same arrangement so one can tell you something is wrong while the group is still 'supervised'.
My eldest girl (one of the youngest in the group) is convinced that the older kids are still 'kids', but she also naturally listens to them despite having a dominant personality herself. Thus, she gets to have fun with them, while we are happy the kids have some sense in the group.
So from my perspective I think the following is true:
1. Most people have one or two kids. This makes the child density very low. Parents today have to actually work to get their kids around other kids.
2. The way cities are set up makes it hard for kids to interact. While we live in a walkable neighborhood and some of our friends with large families do too, they're unfortunately not well connected except by car, so my wife or I have to make an effort to see them. Luckily, we're good friends with the parents, but otherwise this would make it difficult.
3. Schooling artificially limits the age range kids are exposed to. Obviously, you only get kids your age in your class, but because of (1), even if you got to know their siblings, you still only get one more age, and siblings are likely to not be super far apart.
4. Yes, parents certainly feel more trepidation when they've invested everything into one kid, versus investing everything into multiple kids. I don't see how anyone can honestly doubt this. I don't even think it's callous. Just reality.
I mean, I saw it with my grandparents, who had more kids than my parents did. They were easily taken care of in their old age by the multiple children they had, whereas by choosing a smaller family (not totally their choice), my parents put a much greater burden on my brother and I (mostly me, since I live closer). That's just the truth of the thing.
On the first child, parents are still learning. They're risk conscious and worry about everything. On the second child, they've picked up a few specific fears ("What if Alice gets hit in the head while horse-riding like Bob did?") and stopped stressing about the others. On children three and four they've got much more experience and just don't worry about things as much.
With larger families, this attitude would come to be reflected by society as a whole. With smaller families, parents don't make it past the first and second child so often, and they never stop worrying.
There's no actual empirical evidence for this pop psychological theory, and it's certainly not my experience as a firstborn way back in the day. Moreover, we're not talking about babies, who of course need to be coddled. The issue is with kids who are old enough for unsupervised play, by which time the parents are already experienced, literally 10+ years of parenting experience, and if they have two kids, they've likely had both before one of them is old enough for unsupervised play, at most maybe five years apart.
In fact, parents are more likely to forget than they are to learn. It's not like they've never encountered kids before in their lives. They were kids themselves! They just need to remember what it was like for them as kids. The hardest part is taking care of infants, because you generally don't remember what it was like to be an infant, so infants are somewhat more mysterious than older kids.
Anyway, I'm not denying your specific experience. It all depends on the time and the place and the parents, and those can all be different. I'm not even denying that firstborns may be treated a little differently than later children. What I am denying is that firstborn risk consciousness can explain a major societal shift in childrearing attitudes. In general, firstborn children 50 years ago were given much more personal freedom than even later children today, despite the fact that "GenX" was a smaller generation in population with few siblings.
We have the English world kindergarten from this.
> children's birth order and family size are consistently related to styles of parenting (i.e., levels of control and levels of warmth) which are known to influence achievement directly (Baumrind, 1767, 1971; Dornbusch, et al., 1987; Paulson, 1994; Steinberg, et al., 1789). For example, firstborn children have rated parents higher on behaviors such as parental control (Schaller, 1978) and parental strictness (Rule, 1991) than later-born children
The pop-science explanation may or may not be true, but the underlying fact that later children get a different parenting style has supporting evidence.
1) Kids and parents have differing perceptions of the parenting style: "Birth-order and family-size differences were found in adolescents' achievement and perceptions of parenting style and parental involvement but not in parents' perceptions of parenting." Thus, your statement "the underlying fact that later children get a different parenting style" doesn't actually seem to be a fact.
2) Parenting style, whether it actually differed or not among children, didn't seem to explain the differences in archievement: "these parenting characteristics did not mediate the differences seen in achievement by birth order and family size."
Don't read the above as kids were allowed to do anything. They were cared for, but it wasn't as close as modern families would care for them. If the kid is mostly safe that is good enough.
But if you have ten kids, you won't be able to pay as much attention to each one as if you only had one, so even if you're perfect you'll have the kids doing more things without the parents knowing.
From there, it seems the single biggest remaining factor is malaria.
(50% feels about right given reading accounts of "back then" and browsing graveyards)
The solution, of course, is technology and drones ;)
I've been around horse barns for many years. Rode today. It's not a kids thing any more. Most of the riders are not only adults, but older adults. Few kids take riding lessons. The old ponies are under-used.
Fifteen years ago, the ponies were usually being ridden or groomed by girls in their early teens. We used to see groups of kids go out on the trails unsupervised. That was normal. The kids would go out for an hour or so. Nobody does that any more.
Now, if there's a kid around, it's usually because the parent is a horse person. Barns that teach kids are very organized. Kids are never out of sight of an adult. Usually the parents sit there and watch.
It's sad. Kids that grow up around horses tend not to have trouble with bullies. After you're used to dealing with half-ton, somewhat pushy animals with huge teeth and steel-shod hooves, big guys just don't look that big.
adding this to my list of thing to look into if I ever have a daiughter.
Riding is like 1/4 of the whole time spent with the animal.
I can't really say "her horse" as he wasn't the type that would listen to commands.
It's really nothing like having an inanimate object, like a bicycle.
A horse emits an average of two tonnes of carbon emissions a year [1], comparable to that of a car [2].
The full picture gets complicated when you account for vehicle fuel, horse diet, age of vehicle/horse, land use, storage etc. But in general it's fair to say that horses are broadly similar to cars in carbon impact.
Compare both with pedal bicycles, where impacts are effectively negligible [3]
[1] https://www.yourhorse.co.uk/news/agria-hoofprint-calculator/ [2] https://www.ageco.co.uk/useful-articles/car/what-are-the-co2... [3] https://keith.seas.harvard.edu/blog/climate-impacts-biking-v...
Outside of regions with horse culture, it's definitely a rich man's hobby.
If you live in the countryside it's not a big deal, if you live in the middle of a city or suburban area it becomes more expensive.
This is mostly rhetorical; the point is the constant (necessary) risk calculus is draining, and parents are rational to err on the side of caution.
It has been observed that most public spaces in America are default adult spaces where children are only tolerated. It follows most public spaces will tend to have adult levels of hazard and risk.
I think that's a great example of what I think of as the distinction between safetyism and preparedness: the former is all about no fun allowed in the presence of any level of risk whatsoever, with no rational consideration of likelihood and mitigating factors, while the latter is about doing fun stuff while taking reasonable procautions to mitigate realistic dangers. It's not going backpacking at all vs. taking a first aid class and bringing the ten essentials.
If I was walking on the beach and I saw someone swimming alone I probably would hang out in the area and keep a passive eye on them until they got out. I wouldn't feel the need to get in the water unless I saw that they needed help.
You'd be surprised at how rarely this happens, though. Usually there are lots of people at the beach.
Also having grown-up on the coast, since I was a child I've always been in the water with all the other kids, without parents around, never had any life-threatening cramp, never seen it happen either. Maybe I've just been lucky and you've been unlucky, since it's all anecdata anyway - but it's strange to me how it can both be so jarring for you to do it alone, and jarring for me to be afraid of doing it alone. For me it's like you said it's dangerous to walk in the park by yourself because a tree branch can fall on your head. It's true but I will eyeroll almost unconsciously.
I have lived 15 minutes from the ocean my entire life and I have never gone swimming in it alone.
I'm not an absolutist either, each situation has to be assessed on its own merits. If the kids are all strong swimmers and they want to go to the pool without an adult, that's fine with me. I might even let them go together into the sea depending on which beach they're headed to. But if they're taking the 3-year-old in water wings out to the open ocean I'm going to be tagging along.
Likewise, if you want to walk alone in the park I think you'll probably be all right, but if you're hiking 10 miles out into the wilderness I'm going to strongly suggest you bring a buddy, whatever your age.
I was thinking about it more and I think one aspect that is important is what you mention about "which beach". I agree with you completely, there's beaches in our coast we'd never swim in, not even in a group, even as adults. And in some areas of the country almost all the beaches are in that category. So I think you're quite right, your position was more general and I was thinking too much about the beaches I had nearby while growing up. Particularly how many meters of "foot" (not sure what the word is in english) you have - ie can you just stand up and not have to stay afloat.
That was always the understood rule as kids, we can go alone to the sea but we need to stay "with foot".
Awesome. We're going to the quarry, and we're going to jump off the cliff over 10 feet of rock into the water.
Bring a case of Meister Brau.
Also biologically your whole legacys survival lies on one kid.
2. Children used to die all the time from various causes. I remember e.g. the case of Mozart who had just one surviving sibling and 5 who died early. I can't imagine what the parents had to go through - their first 3 children died early. You have to become desensitized to not go crazy.
2. Social status / value of children grew a lot.
This all has 2 psychological effects: when parents feel like they’re just barely keeping this teetering lifestyle from falling over, they become very controlling. Tight control becomes the name of the game: it’s how everything’s done and anyway no one has the time or energy for the unexpected.
Also, when the child represents a gargantuan investment, people become realty protective over their fragile prize. Like a luxury car that you can barely afford: all protective measures will be taken.
Naturally you'd expect this to result in a much higher base level of fear, as compared to when your community was just people you knew and trusted personally.
Children can find out that rocks hurt through trial and error throwing pebbles at their friends, and they will figure it out. They are instinctively wary of things like snakes.
But the threat posed by electrical sockets, stovetops, cars, bleach, power tools, and so forth are not forgiving to experimentation and not instinctive.
Probably 90% of kids in the US live boxed in a relatively small area by roads that are 50ft+ (if not 80ft) wide with 40mph speed limits so that huge vehicles are actually traveling at 50mph driven by people looking at their phone.
In addition, the density of kids is far less. A single street light only have a handful of kids, and probably not all the same age. A neighborhood might have a bunch, but not enough for the kids to mingle.
Plus many send their kids to daycare or afterschool activities. I spend $20k per year per toddler just so they can interact with other toddlers.
Parents these days aren't rational at all. They worry about protecting the physical nature of the child and leave their development and ability to accurately assess risk on their own as an afterthought. That's how you perpetuate failure: with children who grow up while never possessing the life experience necessary to properly raise kids of their own. The world simply isn't that fucking scary.
At least they learned how to cross the street safely at a young age. That's the one bit of independence that stuck.
This is what my grandparents did to my mom and aunts and uncles when they were growing up during the 60s and 70s. They weren't allowed back inside before dinner, but they had to return by sunset.
They were used to it, and spent their time playing in the woods and playing games with the neighborhood kids.
Nowadays, if you kicked them outside the house, they'd probably just have each other to play with, because kids don't play outside as much.
I suppose it's a Nietzsche thing; the "Death of God" turns us into "The Last Man".
They aren't worried about the child. Anyone with a typical five year old knows they'll be able to cross the neighbourhood just fine.
What they are actually worried about what other adults will think the five year old is seen out alone.
That they aren't worried about the child is just an irrational statement. If there was nothing to worry about, then there's no reason to keep the kid cooped up out of public sight.
Yeah, it’s nonsensical, but such is people. Similar to why most people aren’t having children in their sexual prime, instead waiting until they are of geriatric age. The harsh reality is that society says it’s wrong to have children “young” and ostracizes anyone who does. Just ask any teenage mother about the scorn they had to deal with.
Thousands of years ago most people didn't have time to sit around and evaluate what other people, especially those outside of the immediate tribe, do. Back then, life was actually hard. Only the richest kings could even begin to live in that kind of luxury. And even up until around the 1950s, most people lived rurally, so the kids weren't apt to leave the property anyway – if they did, who was going to see it? Not to mention that there wasn't the "You must go to university or you will ruin your life" nonsense that has emerged in the past ~30 years. Hell, in my grandparents time, it was uncommon to even go to high school. Back then, growing up and having children was celebrated, not featured on MTV with a show that tries to convince people to remain children for life.
The times have changed and the people have adjusted accordingly. When the public welcomes children back into the world, the parents will let their children back out into the world. But so long as the passive onlookers who don't know how to think rationally or keep their mouth shut believe that children should be nothing more than porcelain dolls that are there only to hang on the shelf for guests to admire...
Thousands of years ago, people CERTAINLY had to the time to sit around and evaluate other people. You think everyone was running around in a field with a spear? They'd plant crops, do chores, and then sit around and do fuck-all, especially when it got hot in the afternoon hours.
Stop defending childish, modern idiocy. The times haven't changed at all. The people have changed. They've become cowards.
Found the busybody.
Nowadays middle-class people tend to have just one or two children, they literally cannot afford the space or childrearing costs for more - for lower classes eligible for government assistance such as the un(der)employed the situation does look different as society picks up large parts of the tab. Additionally, ever rising requirements in employment criteria make it necessary to invest more and more into their education: up until maybe 2-3 decades ago, even a school dropout could work in construction, a factory, retail, farm or mine and make a relatively decent living. But these jobs have largely gone away to China/India or to automation, so the few employment options for "undereducated" people are highly contested.
And so, the kid must turn out perfect: there is no room for the kid to make mistakes, especially not ones that endanger their career prospects, and hence all the helicopter parenting.
On top of all of that come decades of media/politician "fear brainwashings" (aka, the "pedo child-snatcher van" myth), as well as the legitimate collapse of a high-trust society (homeless, drunk and mentally ill people literally everywhere in major cities; police simply not enforcing laws any more).
Sure they can. Early North American settlers lived in tiny, one room log cabins, and raised those 3+ children in them just fine. Homes that small are not even allowed in most jurisdictions these days. The middle class have way more space to work with these days.
Let's face it, the reality is that middle class people just don't want children. It's not 'cool' to have children. Society says you need a career instead, and so that's what most people buy into and turn their attention towards.
Sure, but... who wants to go back to the days of the early settlers "living" in such conditions? We're in 2024, not 1607 after all. As a species, as a society we should progress, not regress. Just because our ancestors had to live in filth, it doesn't mean we have to as well.
> Let's face it, the reality is that middle class people just don't want children. It's not 'cool' to have children.
Anecdata ahead: many of my relatively middle-ish class friends want children but no one can afford them - the biggest road block is of course housing (the market is completely dead here in Germany - sales aren't happening because everyone fears the market correction / to realize a value depreciation, and rentals are routinely at 300+ interested candidates for a single apartment), but also a lack of stable career perspective: academia is a shitshow of limited-term contracts anyway, government doesn't pay anywhere near enough to be competitive with the private sector (usually about 60-70%, but IT and legal staff <<40%), NGOs pay even less than government, and the only way to get raises in the private sector outside of highly competitive unionized shops is to regularly churn companies which has the downside you're the first one to be on the chop block in case of layoffs.
Back in '91 when I was born, a lowly police officer could support a family on his own, even in a big city like Munich. Nowadays? Completely impossible.
Those who want to have children. But I agree, people don't want children, they want other things in life. And fair enough. It is their life to live as they see fit.
> many of my relatively middle-ish class friends want children but no one can afford them - the biggest road block is of course housing
So they say. But really, they're just complaining about the housing situation using a device that they hope will pull on the right heart strings (and most likely are just repeating what they heard someone else say). Let's face it: Whatever housing they've already got, even if just a tent, will be fine for the children. Children don't care.
> Back in '91 when I was born, a lowly police officer could support a family on his own, even in a big city like Munich. Nowadays? Completely impossible.
Or, perhaps, children were the contributors that made those things possible? We don't have to go too far back in history to find a time where adults were unable to survive without children. Being able to opt to not have children today is a luxury afforded to those well off (yes, that includes the middle class).
> We don't have to go too far back in history to find a time where adults were unable to survive without children. Being able to opt to not have children today is a luxury afforded to those well off (yes, that includes the middle class).
That was when children helped on the farm or with odd jobs to earn extra income. You're talking about industrialization and child labor laws, not luxury or even class.
> Whatever housing they've already got, even if just a tent, will be fine for the children. Children don't care.
This is just hyperbole on verge of trolling. Yes, those kids in Dorothea Lange photos sure look like they're having a good time.
The average woman in Niger will have seven children. Clearly that's a good enough standard of living, else they would have no children by your logic.
You can't provide a better life to one child, let alone seven, than someone in Niger? And if not, how do you explain your parents? That means they had no trouble bringing you into a horrible existence. Something doesn't quite add up here.
> You're talking about industrialization and child labor laws
I agree that industrialization was the catalyst that made everyone richer, allowing them to no longer need children to support them. In the first world, even the poorest people are much, much, much richer today than rich people were in earlier times.
> You can't provide a better life to one child, let alone seven, than someone in Niger?
We are not talking about having no children. We are talking about why people might have one or two children instead of more. The focus of this conversation is on costs of living, of which housing is the chief expense. More children means more space means more cost.
Yet, hilariously, the average home size keeps on growing. Where I live, the average home built today is 25% larger than in 1990 and 100%+ larger than the average house prior to 1950. There is a pretty strong inverse correlation between family size and housing size – as families get smaller, houses get bigger.
It seems people have no trouble bearing the cost of larger housing. They just don't want to fill them with people. Again, because people don't want the children.
Why would they? You don't need the 'mule' anymore. Rich people can hire someone else from outside of the family to do the work. Today, you don't need a kid slaving away in the kitchen to ensure you are fed, you can simply go to McDonalds.
https://usafacts.org/articles/why-are-us-homes-getting-bigge...
Also, while past generations may have expected much from children in terms of work, I don’t think forcing kids to literally cook supper was a typical responsibility.
No doubt. Poor people have always had to leave their family behind to make a go of life. There weren't enough resources found "at home" to support multiple adult generations. But when one is rich, they don't have to set out unto the world. They can bring the resources to where they already are.
> I don’t think forcing kids to literally cook supper was a typical responsibility.
Alone? Probably not. Alongside a parent? Most definitely. There wasn't enough time in the day to get everything done if you didn't have their help. I will also note that rich people today also have modern kitchen appliances to further replace those children, so even if you're not going to McDonalds, you're probably using things like a food processor and dishwasher to do the work the children would have historically done. So, again, no need for the 'mule'.
> you're probably using things like a food processor and dishwasher to do the work the children would have historically done
That recontextualizes your earlier statements, which are made even more dubious. Chopping vegetables and handwashing dishes are chores, not “slaving away in the kitchen.”
Where the people were rich, sure. Of course you were going to have all the generations living in your castle. Why wouldn't you? But for a poor family in that 200 sq.ft. thatch hut? Yeah, no.
> Chopping vegetables and handwashing dishes are chores, not “slaving away in the kitchen.”
Fine, slave away in the dining room. I don't care where the actual chore was done. The significance is the act, not the precise location.
That is not borne by the historical record.
> for most of American history, multigenerational living has been the norm, not the exception. […] Throughout the 19th century, most Americans lived in a multigenerational household, with a majority of elderly Americans living with an adult child. The main driver of this living arrangement was the country’s agrarian economy. For farmers, there was an incentive to have many children, as this meant more help around the farm. It was common for one child to remain at the farm after reaching adulthood to continue working with the anticipation of eventually inheriting it. If more than one child stayed, the land was sometimes divided between children, forming smaller farms.
https://dreamcollaborative.com/full-house-a-history-of-ameri...
> The significance is the act
The act is not “slaving away,” it is a common chore.
Each rebuttal grows flimsier and flimsier. Have you even seen a child? Has this entire discourse been with ChatGPT?
You must have copied the wrong account, then. The American farmer in the 19th century owned their land. They were not under serfdom. These were quite wealthy people. By the 19th century, anyone who was poor was relegated to the city.
> The act is not “slaving away,” it is a common chore.
Is there something actually here or are you just trying to go down some silly semantic rabbit hole because you don't want to admit that people don't have children simply because they don't want to have children?
He says following pulling out the historical record that contracts his own claim. At least your comedy routine is down pat.
Quite a cynical reply. Social services will care if you try to raise a child in a tent here where temperatures are freezing. And the child will prefer better lodging after a single sleepover with the neighbor kids.
Sure, so as you point out there is absolutely no reason why you can't have children, even if you are in the most dire of straights[1]. As you point out, other people will happily help you out with those children if you are struggling to make it on your own.
The only reason to not have children is because you don't want them. Anything else is a lame excuse.
[1] Of course, we're specifically talking about middle class people here. Middle class people don't live in tents. They live in comparatively large houses that are far bigger than would ever be necessary to raise many children. Even if they wanted to live in smaller houses, must jurisdictions don't allow it.
I guess that’s why the average home built today is ~100% bigger than an average home built 100 years earlier - ironically, when people actually had large families. No concept of what large even is.
Just having your children learning to swim costs 1000 euro!
I can't speak for anything outside the US, but here in the states we have lakes and rivers that do just fine for teaching kids to swim.
Poor people aren't apt to care if someone thinks they are an asshole, but the middle class people we're talking about feel like they have to keep up appearances for some reason. And, so, they miss out on having children they claim they want because of it. Strange, but that's people for ya. They don't put much thought into things.
whoever thinks this is true is either in a thought bubble or have surrounded themselves with shitty people.
none of this is anywhere near true for me, but I live in flyover country. Who knows, perhaps we're lucky that the dicks fly over rather than land and stay.
Let me draw a far more likely scenario, so likely I've actually seen it.
You're at the river with lots of people with kids and teenagers of various ages. One kid disappears under the water. Every adult and teenager goes diving into the water, as in full on sprint from the bank into the water. Kid gets pulled out of the water and everyone is concerned regardless of whose kid it is.
maybe you just live around assholes.
Maybe you're just an asshole?
It's what kind of risk we're talking about. When I'm supervising my 4-year-old, I definitely want to prevent him from getting life-altering brain trauma. But if he falls and breaks his arm? Certainly worth warning him about, but in the end he'll be fine, and giving him the choice to take that risk is part of his development.
I let him use the battery-powered electric drill (under close supervision), because he's shown that he's careful, and the worst that can could happen is he get some skin abrasions. He's not getting anywhere near the circular saw until he's a lot older.
When my sister and I were growing up, we were given our independence in different areas at different ages: it was a matter of when we felt confident doing those things unsupervised and when we earned our parents' trust. As a general rule, I got to do responsibility-based tasks (like stay home alone, pick my own bedtime, and set my own homework schedule) at an earlier age than my sister, but she got to do physically risky tasks (like use knives, use the stove, and play high-risk sports) at an earlier age than me.
In all cases, it was a gradual process: they guided us, then they let us try while they watched, then they let us try while they were on hand if we called out for help, then they let us do it alone. Each step took as long as they (or we) felt was needed.
My parents are both highly anxious/cautious people, so I know it wasn't easy for them to give us these freedoms, but they understood intellectually that it was vital that we practice for adulthood well before we were suddenly on our own. They knew they only had a few short years to teach us how to survive independently of them.
It must have been a lot of work for them, but we were planned children (not accidents) and they put a lot of thought into how they wanted to raise us.
When I grew up the road by my grandparents house was wide and empty and you could see anything coming a mile away and drivers could see the kids playing just as well.
Now it has been redesigned to be a cluttered mess to "discourage speeding" even adding parking spots to reduce the width of the road. You could drive through it at walking speed and still wouldn't see a kid trying to cross the road before it popped out from behind a car right in front of you.
Ideally they'd add parking protected bike lanes
When first hearing about it sounded just a bit extreme, but the moreI read about it the darker and gloomer it gets, and it's a phenomenon that is having a deep impact on the whole Korean society's future.
Thank you for posting this. I was thinking of going for a vacation to Korea _with kids_, and now I don’t think I will.
Can’t imagine needing to explain to my well-behaved 8-year old that, no, we can’t go to some place we’d want to go, because other kids can’t behave. This should totally be illegal.
It really has nothing to do with having or not having R-rated movies. It’s just discrimination against children, and by extension their parents.
'Discrimination' is not "bad" per se. It is merely a social contract to prohibit it to some protected classes. Discrimination literally just means to differentiate, the negative connotations are social and cultural bias, and thus are socially constructed. Society does that because we've found that to lead better outcomes. There's no inherent naturalistic justification to these protections, besides weird Locke-ian attempts to justify "human rights" based on a higher entity (gods). Legislation is drawn as an attempt to resolute differing, conflicting ideas. It is not innate, it is not given by god(s).
Knowing this, then the equivocation of "Irish, Muslisms, old people, women, men, gay people" to "people like to have areas without kids" is ridiculous. The class of a parent and their offspring is not the same as the class of a religion or a sexuality (something that you can't even choose -- whereas you can choose to be a parent (discounting rape, because that is an extraordinary circumstance)).
This is right to the point. Having kids socialize and be integrated in everyday life as much as possible has centuries of proven efficiency, for kids, parents, and society in general.
I don't think there's any solid high minded argument that goes one way or the other, it comes down to the practical repercussions of cutting a specific group from a whole slide social activities.
EDIT: And my son can’t actually choose to not be 8. He’s the person primarily being discriminated against.
As you point out birth rates are falling, and society thoroughly making sure the fun stuff happens where no kids are allowed is both easier to do than ever, and accelerating that trend to an extent that is hard to describe.
I think people will still want kids, and couples in the right time and place will have one. But not two, or three. Because once they'll experience how it feels to be cut from society as an adult for about a decade, it's a real tough choice to go through that again given all the other sacrifices (career, money, housing, the sheer grunt of it) while getting no sympathy for it ("previous gens all did it, why you complain ? Also can't that kid shut up ?")
"no kids zone" in all nice places is fine if we all accept that we don't really need population renewal or have alternatives ways to preserve our species (There must be some movie with a plot of growing kids on a farm upstate until they're ready for societal life ?)
In Logan's Run the people live in a bubble-dome city, a portion of which is essentially an unmaintained ruin that feral children run around until they're old enough to be civilized.
Nobody swims in my pool without a buddy. Ever.
The point being is that there is no algorithm to sort this out. I would trust a young teen [just an example] to swim alone if they have demonstrated good risk behavior and swimming experience.
Nope. No buddy, no swimming. I don't even swim alone, even though I know chances are it would be fine 99% of the time.
> The point being is that there is no algorithm to sort this out.
Sure there is.
if swimmer_cout < 2:
throw NoSwimException
That said, I think the argument about how fears are misplaced since now is the most safe time to be a kid is bad.
> And it is widely believed that the world is no longer a safe place for children to play in. Yet statistics show that it has never been a safer time to be a child. Injury-related deaths are at an all-time low in most Western nations. In the US, deaths from unintentional injuries fell by 73% for boys and 85% for girls between 1973 and 2010. This misperception of risk creates the parental paradox.
This doesn't make much sense. Parents have mass migrated to a different style of parenting. In the same period life has gotten much safer for children. Therefore we should revert to the older style of parenting and not be afraid that the risks will return?
I think this cause is really hurting itself with this kind of weak argument.
> This is the most dangerous time to be a pedestrian in over 40 years.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/04/us/dangerous-time-pedestrian-...
I would love for my daughter to get to roam the neighborhood like I roamed mine. But despite choosing one of the safest, lowest-traffic neighborhoods in our city - with 25 mph speed limits - I still regularly see drivers flying by at twice that, in a lifted truck, with a phone in front of their face.
And second issue is that they do NOT engage with other host of issues that limit outside play. For example, unsupervised playing kids are annoying to many unrelated adults - and adults who strongly dislike kids and want to exclude them from everywhere are very common. Or, simple fact that just meeting friends often requires in advance agreed upon play date and a drive by car. Or, simple fact that before you was bored in your room and outside had things to do, nowdays you have fun stuff at home (computer, tablet, phone) and outside has not much to do above the age of 7.
Half of this feels like fighting fear by adding new dangers and threats to the equation. Hey, not only you need to add risk, if you dont your kid will have serious mental health issues. Hey, lets worry simultaneously about risk taking while doing safe activities while also worrying they dont take enough risk.
Things are made “safe” because there is now always a risk of getting sued when stuff happens.
It would never happen in my neighborhood.
I believe it's now illegal in some jurisdictions.
This is so true it could be physics.
We dismiss nutrition studies with more evidence. The standard of evidence doesn't chabge just because we want it to be true.
For example, I believe the current rise in mental health issues is due to smartphone use. But I admit that's only a theory.
Seems great, and I think most of us enjoyed it, but the kids who really got ahead in life stayed inside studying.
Fast forward several decades, I raised some kids of my own and by and large we let them have a lot of a fun. That said, the stakes are so much higher these days that it is impractical to give kids total freedom. The long-term costs and lost opportunity is just way too high.
I think this is the reason for the childhood/teen mental health epidemic.
If you're not optimizing your child's life, they won't be competitive for jobs or college or whatever in the future.
It's exhausting.
Another path I see are kids who just opt out entirely. They go to that 5th or 6th tier school and are totally unmotivated. This doesn’t hit them early but it will have a long term impact on job prospects and their career arc. This one is actually becoming more common from what I hear.
To me, the real disconnect is happening in high school here in the US where we are still educating kids like it is 1950 (or 1850). Teachers are overworked and underpaid, and the administration is apathetic. All of that can easily combine for a couple of poor grades or missed expectations in extracurricular activities which in turn cut your opportunities when you apply for college. Sounds extreme but that is how it is today and it is why so many parents are overprotective to the point of being manic.
I'm curious, could you expand on this? In what ways are the stakes higher?
Now, there are pretty much two groups: 1. the top-top-top of both your class and your entire region, with above a 4.0GPA, with all the expected community service and extracurriculars, and so on, who end up in elite schools and prestigious careers, and 2. everyone else, who end up scrapping with each other over the lower-and-lower paying jobs and more tenuous future. There's no middle anymore.
To put this in American terms, is it really the end of the world to just earn your bachelor's at a solid but not necessarily elite public university? Thereby avoiding the need to "grind" so hard throughout your youth and adolescence? What are the stakes really?
The way I see it, if elite academics is the goal, graduate school is the time to be more selective because at that point one knows where to go based on one's research interests. If entrepreneurship is the dream, then the choice of school doesn't matter much at all! Otherwise, I think there are plenty of great jobs out there that don't require you to have gone to the #1 school in the country.
To be clear, I'm not American so I may just be completely misjudging the apparent importance of choice in school. Also, I likely have different personal priorities than you, so I'm not trying to deny your experience. I just question whether it is _really_ necessary "these days" to optimize childhood around getting into an elite university. I think it's really just a matter of priority.
A lot of things have changed since then. Requirements and competition for positions have increased exponentially just as salaries have skyrocketed in the more technical fields. No surprise there, but that competitive pedigree system has filtered all the way down to primary and secondary education (to say nothing of college systems).
So it is the end of the world? No. But it will cost you tens of thousands of dollars in the near term and perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime in lost potential earnings. Slipping out of the higher level schools can also make it extremely difficult to get into specific companies.
As for entrepreneurship, that’s also subject to the same issues. Sure, anyone can start a company if they want, but if you want to fund that company the path is much easier if you went to Stanford than say Oklahoma State.
So instead of physically separating her from a hot kettle they just go "it's very hot!" and demonstrate by touching it carefully and then pulling their hand away. They let her play with matches.
She could pick up on these cues long before she could understand words. But it does look exhausting. And there have been some moments (once she was trotting around holding scissors pointing up in the air) where I've thought "no that's too risky and no amount of careful supervision can prevent injury here". She has also burned herself, but only once.
So overall I am pretty impressed, at least in principle, and if I have kids I'll definitely endeavour to try and curb my overprotective instincts.
Kids are smart, if you treat them like little adults instead of little helpless goo goo ga ga babies - they will generally pick up on things. Which actually makes it easier on the parents.
The side effect of this, is that then they might be scared of things that are only slightly hot. But that's something easier and less risky to deal with IMO and they'll eventually understand that there's different levels.
*babies/toddlers have a skin that is a lot more sensitive, so this should be taken into consideration.
As far as I acted on a baseless fear that they were at meaningful risk of stranger kidnapping, I was a stupid father. That's mostly a different kind of bad father but whatever.
Can you elaborate on what was are your grounds for labeling yourself as a bad father?
I mostly label myself a father. There would always have been bad parts but these stand out. They're bad fathering.
As far as grounds for my complaint, my children needed a steady diet of adult free hours. I mostly failed to recognize it, prioritize it and act accordingly.
Every school day after three in the afternoon - so, half an hour ago (it being 3:30 pm here in Australia GMT+8).
I can't speak to your 11 year old, but I'm happy leaving my grandkids with money .. typically I've let them (and my kids when younger, nieces, nephews, et al) pull molten glass from a furnace from 5 onwards (with half an eye watching from not too far away), relatively unsupervised after they've left primary school.
First year high school is typically 12 or so (IIRC).
Chainsaws, angle grinders, etc. are definitely a high school thing, as is riding bikes to the beach and free diving with a gidgee .. as long as they bring back fish.
Maybe you might want to unseat yourself and attend to your problems before telling others what to do. Cheers.
The kidnapping thing doesn’t happen like that. Not in the US. It happens to vulnerable families at the border who pay unscrupulous coyotes to bring them over.
I have two memories
1) I was playing in my grandfather’s pipe yard with my cousins. Lots of heavy equipment and stuff that was precariously stacked. Very easily could have ended up in a situation were something fell on me and killed me. Instead, I just ran headlong into a rusty pipe and nearly broke my nose.
2) I was in my early teens riding a 3 wheeled ATV. I was going too fast and went into a wash and flipped the machine over me. I didn’t kill myself. Didn’t even get seriously hurt, but easily could have.
I was incredibly lucky to come out of both of those experiences relatively unscathed. It’s not really a tough calculus thinking “well, my daughter doesn’t have an eye anymore, but at least she was having fun!”
I instead encourage my kids to have fun in activities that _feel_ risky but where the chance of life altering injury is low. Like walking on a high brick fence or jumping from a high point into a big deep body of water.
Anyway, as a parent I’m so fucking tired of people trying to tell me how to raise a kid.
60 S Church St https://maps.app.goo.gl/niB4443VK65M8LPB6
Balancing Outdoor Risky Play and Injury Prevention in Childhood Development
Examples:
"Don't sit on the backrest of that chair, it will topple over". "No, that's not true at all, you're wrong!!!" 5 minutes later: Crash. Quiet. Cry. Never done again.
"You cannot build bridges out of sofa cushions between the sofa and the coffee table, it won't support you". "No! I am small! It will hold!" 5 minutes later: Crash. Quiet. Cry. Never done again.
On bicycle: "Drive slower, you have to break!". "No, I like it fast! I cannot fall, my tires are big!" Seconds later: Crash against fence. Quiet. Cry. Now she drives carefully.
In winter: "Be careful on that ice!". "But my new shoes have rubber, dad, they won't slip, don't you know that?!?" Seconds later: Slip. Bamm. Quiet. Cry. Now she knows rubber soles slip on ice.
As long as there is no risk of a serious, life-threatening accident, I have become pretty relaxed. I remember that I constantly had scraped knees and bruises as a child. When I was 7, my grandparents regularly send me to a gas station nearby to buy the paper, and my mother would send me to the supermarket with my 4 year old brother to get groceries. I walked to kindergarten by myself when I was 5.
It’s weakest when it speaks about “risky” play, where the author seems to focus on the excitement & fear etc. that comes from physically risky play. I don’t think physical risk should be a requirement for a robustly healthy childhood play experience. From the article, bemoaning the lack of play in abandoned locations seems fairly absurd, though again some other points are well taken.
I will note one interesting trend that may partially be a product of this desire &/or need for risky play, which is the recent popularity of much more elaborate & diverse videogames in the “sandbox survival crafting” genre. These for me actually do seem to evoke a similar feel to the childhood sense of exploration and creative play. I’m not necessarily proposing these as a solution to what we had decades ago but it may be that just as the “safety” movement didn’t happen overnight, perhaps cultural solutions to fill these same needs will take a bit more time as well.
I grew up in 80's the time where almost everybody played in parks and fields. But I can't give that to my own son of 7.
He has to cross 3 streets to reach a playground 200m from here,the worst of the crossings a street with 50km/h limitsand 1 car every 10 seconds. Not much, except just enough people drive like idiots, 90km/h or more on a road not even 500m long.
We've been teaching him good pedestrian behaviour since he could walk. We've done a few tests where he walked to the baker, thinking he was unsupervised. He probably can do it most of the time. Except, 1 distraction while an idiot drives by will kill him.
So I bring him to the playground and let him play as unsupervised as possible for an adult on the side of a playground. Of course, he knows I am there.
I start working with him with more dangerous tools like a soldering iron. He can deal well enough with these risks. But not the streets.
But in some places (for instance where I live, Lausanne Switzerland) it's becoming easier to escape this car culture. I don't have kids, but some colleagues do. One of them does not own a car and her 2 children (6 and 9 years old) do everything by bike : going to school, to the activities (they climb!), etc. They surely look much more agile and risky than other colleague's children. It's quite crazy to see these two kids on their bikes, and how much liberating it is for them to move by theirselves. Unlike most kids who just commute in their parents's car.
Of course, I am aware this works only because there's a really good bike infrastructure. And people drive pretty well too, I guess.
My kids are 6 and 4 though.
Hilversum is the nicest place I've ever lived for biking and walking, but it's still not as good as Houten, parts of Utrecht, etc.
But I would bet that every service you might reasonably need is within a few kilometers of your home, and every conceivable service is likely within 100km. Many people do not live in such environments. I'm in a town of 16k people, but the nearest allergist 200+km away, the nearest railroad 400km away. (One of my team is away today because he has to take his kid to the allergist, an all-day trip by car.) And it was -30c this morning. Car "culture" isn't a fashion choice but a necessity for anyone not living in a warm suburban village.
Yes, pickups do outnumber cars here. Most don't really need them daily, but offroad ability is an actual thing in winter in areas where the roads are not plowed ever 20 minutes, and in summer when forest fires evacuation is a real thing.
That is correct. Kindergarten, doctors, train station and my work are all within 7 kilometers. My wife's work is 60 km away, but reachable via train in 40 min. My parents live 400 km away, but are also reachable via train in 3h.
I am not advocating this lifestyle at all. I don't even think it is a lifestyle - as mentioned above, we didn't consciously decide to not own a car, it's just something that slowly developed.
As my wife cannot drive, living in an area like you are describing would be a prison sentence for her, so we avoid that. This has also has its downsides: a house in a remote black forest village with a bus every 2 hours would cost 1/3 of what a house costs in our area.
People around here say exactly the same thing about cities. Not being able to go hunting/hiking/camping/fishing. Not being able to ride a dirtbike/snowmobile. Getting a ticket if you cut down a tree in your back yard without government permission. Having to pay for parking. Having to adjust your work schedule around the mass transit schedule. People looking in through your windows. Being woken up by cop cars at all hours. They describe city life as "prison".
Being isolated in an area that depends on a car for any movement but not being able to drive actually is isolating like a a prison, however.
I think this is just the decline of the birth rate. I think about my neighborhood. My kid should be spoiled for kids to play with, but couple only has one kid and the ages are spread from infant to nearly an adult, so it works out in the whole neighborhood theres only a handful of kids she can play with. I see bus stops with just 2 kids there. When I was a lid there were nearly a dozen at just my stop.
I really think because there are less kids, it's just less safe for them because people don't honestly think they'll turn the corner and there well be half a dozen kids playing basketball in the street or something.
Lol. Maybe it is "safer" now because gangs of teenagers no longer roam the streets. I think today that many older people are happy not to see teens hanging in public. The old always fear the young.
I grew up in a village and I felt like I owned it, a few roads of course but they had to careful, not us.
I believe that sort of mentality helps a lot in feeling connected with a place and not just a foreign object who has to take armored vehicles (e.g. Cars) to move from point to point.
The pressure from parents on other parents has made it so we dont trust children to handle risks that are pretty manageable.
I suspect that overall deaths are down, even if simply because overall total percentage of travel that is on freeway (controlled-access) is up.
Thanks to the safety of their cage, cars can roam in freedom without having to worry about needlessly interferences.
I have been lately despising every kind of caged playground, where children might find fun in a sandbox.
I was shocked coming to Germany and seeing cyclists not constantly being attacked by the general public. In the UK it's seen as totally illegitimate.
> According to the Insurance Research Council (irc), an industry data group, 29% of claims nationally (and over 50% in several states) involve people insured at the state minimums [in the tens of thousands of dollars]. Few policies go beyond a few hundred thousand dollars of liability. The cost of a serious crash “is never going to be covered by that”, says Dale Porfilio, of the irc. By contrast, in Germany drivers are required to have €7.5m ($8.2m) of bodily-injury coverage, and in Britain liability is unlimited.
I don't have a car, but I acknowledge that most Americans live in places where not having a car would make their lives much harder. Still, it seems reasonable for me to raise insurance requirements on enormous SUVs. They're 50-100% more dangerous to pedestrians, so this would reflect a higher actual cost inflicted on other people. If you don't want to pay that cost, and you still need the transportation of a personal car, buy the smaller and less dangerous vehicle.
Further research supports these findings, showing that trucks and SUVs with hood heights greater than 40 inches are about 45% more likely to cause fatalities in pedestrian crashes than shorter vehicles with sloped hoods. The study, also by the IIHS, used data from nearly 18,000 crashes and noted that tall, squared-up hoods, characteristic of many best-selling SUVs and trucks, contribute significantly to the risk. The number of pedestrian deaths has significantly increased, with pedestrian fatalities jumping 13% to 7,342 in 2021, marking the highest number since 1981. This rise in pedestrian deaths has outpaced the increase in overall U.S. traffic deaths, highlighting a growing crisis in road safety related to larger vehicles[1].
These findings underscore the need for vehicle design changes to improve pedestrian safety, particularly as the proportion of SUVs on U.S. roads continues to rise. Despite advancements in vehicle safety that have reduced overall motor vehicle crash fatalities, the increased lethality of SUVs to pedestrians poses a significant challenge that requires attention from both manufacturers and regulatory bodies.
[0] https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/new-study-suggests-todays-s...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/tall-trucks-suvs-are-45-dea...
(ChatGPT 4)
It’s funny, I’m often tempted to fact check data or lookup jargon, etc. and comment to save someone else the trouble. I once did this on the seriouseats subreddit with copy paste from a relatively reliable source and met with an insane heated argument over what amounted to semantics and a flurry of downvotes. I wonder if attribution to ChatGPT increases civility towards the commenter or if HN is just generally more civilized.
And they present very little risk to pedestrians as a result. You're sitting LOWER than the pedestrians. You can see a bottle-cap on the road. You don't feel superior to anyone at all.
At this point it shouldn't be required by law or it should be subsidized for those for whom it represents an undue burden.
Finally, "accidents" that cause injury or death are treated way too lightly by the justice system. If you kill someone in any other way and get convicted, you're doing hard time in prison. If you kill someone with your car, you might not even get jail time if it was deemed an accident.
1: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/insurance/minimum-car-ins...
However, the first dollars of insurance are often the most expensive; so the price to customers going from $50k to $500k may be not as much as even the first $50k was.
IIRC, a VERY low percentage of people who kill a pedestrian are ever even charged (like 3%) with anything. In the vast majority of cases, there is negligence involved and everyone is just like "ok, you killed someone though your own negligences, but turns out there are no consequences for that"???
My stance here is that if you're going to make it required by law, someone needs to subsidize it and I believe it should be the insurance companies.
The low minimums you're complaining about exist specifically because the law is trying to split the difference between requiring insurance and not causing too much harm to those that can't afford it, or can barely afford it.
Here's how insurance works.
I purchase insurance. Someone hits me. My insurance company pays to repair the vehicle and the medical coverage needed (per my insurance policy). They then sue the other party to recoup the money. If it's another insurance company they're typically guaranteed 2 things.
1. The company can afford to pay out
2. The company doesn't want to go to court so gentleman's agreements are made between the insurance company to minimize overhead costs.
If the other party is uninsured they're typically forced to eat the cost because the chances of getting money out of someone who can't afford insurance isn't worth the overhead of even trying.
This is why it's a business risk that the insurance companies have mitigated by getting it required by law.
How did they mitigate it if as said the punishment for not having insurance is not too severe and many people are driving without an insurance? (again as per said above, I have no independent confirmation of this)
Yes, you are reading my message correctly. It was not clear to me.
Now that I am reading your answer I am realising that you did not mean “completely mitigate”, just increase the chances of someone having insurance. That was the core of my misunderstanding.
Thank you for the clarification.
Doubly so if they have "badass offroad cosplay" mods like welded bumpers and lightbars. Yes okay maybe you need that out in the dunes, but if you're playing at that level you should be trailering the warmachine to the dunes and towing it behind something with better visibility. If that tank touches pavement, it should pay the insurance risk commensurate with its armor.
A poor person won't be purchasing a newer vehicle but that has no bearing on the make and model they end up driving.
An SUV with the floor rusted out and leaking oil and no A/C is going to be cheaper to purchase than a used corolla with under 50k miles on it and everything generally working decently.
20-30 y/o SUV's exist, 0 year old corolla's exist. It turns out the size of the vehicle isn't nearly the largest determinant of price for vehicles.
And you can get what has happened multiple times - when gas prices rise substantially, low-mpg vehicles get dumped on the used market, so you have poor people and kids driving massive boats (the hotrodding scene from the 70s is a direct result of this).
and I'm skeptical that you're a moral human being. Apparently poor people with families don't need larger vehicles the way middle class people with families do.
Your idea is stupid and untenable, let it go.
Hm, surely we don't need to go that far. This is an internet discussion, we're supposed to be nice to each other!
> Apparently poor people with families don't need larger vehicles the way middle class people with families do.
Maybe I don't understand what claim you're making: is it 1) vans/SUVs must not become any more expensive (via higher insurance requirements), or else poor people will be priced out of owning a car entirely, or 2) owning a van/SUV is almost a human right, and raising the barrier to it is immoral?
I've tried looking at listings and I don't see evidence of the claim that somehow poor people are forced to buy SUVs because they're cheaper. There appear to be many big and small cars at every price range.
For 2), huge cars have only been widespread for a decade or two. The idea that they're somehow necessary for a meaningful human life is hard for me to grok.
You're on a crusade against larger vehicles and you think that crusade is more important than avoiding more harm to poor people, to the point that you said they have no need of larger vehicles (with a straight face) so it's ok to place a tax on them that will mean the poor will be forced to forego something as simple as a minivan for their family due to the extra taxes on them.
that's an immoral stance, one that you can only have gotten to because poor people is an abstract idea to you, you don't attribute any humanity to that abstract idea.
What makes it even worse is that you're so far gone you thought my issue with your statement was because I think owning a van or SUV is a human right rather than your entirely cavalier dismissal of the poor as being people.
rethink your strategy, the harm from your current strategy means it will never be implemented.
Also, minivans and vans have been around since the 1930's. Get your facts right.
Yep. This is enormously unpopular among suburbanites but America does too much to subsidize dangerous SUVs. Insurance should be by pound
If you don't have any assets, why would you need liability insurance?
The requirement to have liability insurance in order to license a car was introduced when I was young, before that, you didn't need it. I remember being in traffic court around the time they introduced it, the judge refused to enforce tickets for driving without insurance because, paraphrasing from something said decades ago, "I don't work for the insurance companies". This was in a poor area. The other alternative was, after getting a ticket for driving without insurance, to purchase one week's insurance, show proof of that to the court, after which the ticket would be dismissed.
I'm not poor anymore but I still think forcing poor people to buy liability insurance is bullshit. They don't have anything to insure. If they accidentally bump into your car and cause $100 of damage, they're bankrupt. Rich people are the ones with assets to insure, rich people should pay for the insurance.
Step 1 is to reduce speed limit to 45kph (25mph) anywhere a pedestrian could interact with the road which is what Vision Zero recommends.
Edit: and that's car accidents, not pedestrian accidents which is also a fraction of that 4k.
https://walkbiketoschool.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Fina...
""" ▪ In 1969, 48 percent of students in grades K through eight (ages 5 through 14) walked or bicycled to school.1 ▪ In 2009, only 13 percent of students in grades K through eight walked or bicycled to school. """
The problem with statements like this is that they hide actual risk. The reality is that child road deaths are dramatically down, in line with all road deaths. Roads in the 1970s were basically warzones by today's standards. The fact that 3/8 of deaths occur there today is because we have come so far in decreasing all the other sources of early death.
US child pedestrian deaths 1975: 1632. US child pedestrian deaths 2019: 138.
https://seriousaccidents.com/blog/children-traffic-fatalitie...
I had a prof once joke that they worst thing anyone could do in the fight against heart disease would be to cure cancer: By taking cancer out of the picture, the percentage of deaths from heart disease would skyrocket. But exactly that has happened to children in recent years. Childhood cancer is no longer a death sentence, so too innumerable other conditions. And when kids do get sick they live long enough not to die as kids. So the smaller and smaller number of child road deaths each year ironically now represents a greater and greater percentage of total child deaths. The reality is that kids today are safer crossing the road than ever before.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a756524ed915...
UK Child death/injury in 1979: 12,458. UK Child death/injury in 2013: 1,980.
And that is despite roads now being massive more crowded and full of larger vehicles. The total population has also increased by at least 50% since the 70s, making the reduction in net traffic deaths even more dramatic.
Does this reflect safer streets, or just fewer (esp. unsupervised) child pedestrians?
They don't do anything, it just increases alert fatigue.
Probably both. The streets are probably "safer" because there are fewer pedestrians-car interactions. We now have walking trails and such separate from roads. And driving kids around in vehicles might be bad environmentally, but if we are talking about traffic deaths then it is a legitimate tool (ie busses rather than kids walking to school).
I suspect much of it is simply that kids no longer wander around on roads. They spend less time outside and when they do it isn't near roads. But the numbers between the 1970s and 2020s are so dramatic that one must conclude that roads are generally safer places for everyone today.
Your article is a perfect example of misjudging risk. Roughly 100 kids die in pedestrian accidents per year. Even if those SUVs are doubling the chance of an accident, those SUVs are only a portion of all vehicles on the road, say 10%. 100 kids goes up to 110. It's just noise when you account for all mortalities.
Media has been fueling fear bullshit for decades.
Furthermore according to some quick googling, SUVs are between 21% and 29% of the fleet in the United States right now, and pickup trucks which have all the same issues are about 17%. So it's not "say 10%", it's between 38% and 46%. Which certainly lines up with what I see day to day during my time on the road.
And this:
> Given that more intelligent people breed less, the avg parent isn't as smart as the avg person. And we know how smart the average person is.
This is just gross, just all the way around. I'm not a parent and in fact am child-free, but this is offensive even to me. I really hope you're not in a career that requires empathy.
In 1969, 48 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (The National Center for Safe Routes to School, 2011).
In 2009, 13 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011).
* In 1969, 41 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school; 89 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (U.S. Department of Transportation [USDOT], 1972).
* In 2009, 31 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school; 35 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011).
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/school-car...
Not to mention that the US population in the 1970 census was 203M. In the 2020 census, 331M - a 63% increase from 1970!
So a 91% reduction in deaths while population increased 63%. I'm not a statistician but that seems pretty great.
I'm sure the children-per-capita rate changed during that time as well so maybe someone who knows that figure could do some more precise math.
But overall the "oh no my kids couldn't possible cross the street without being immediately killed!" hyperbole seems just that.
That's easily disprovable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
Should have said ~38% to ~24%.
So you can't state from your data that it has got safer: you need the child deaths/km or deaths/hr walking.
The graph in the article explains this. Kids just don't go outside anymore.
I learned to chop wood and use a chainsaw as a child, partially during Boy Scouts activities. OMG that is a risky thing for a kid. Never would I suggest that be taught to kids today.
Why not?! Understanding how to handle dangerous situations in a safe manner is a huge learning opportunity for a young person. If you have a chainsaw at home ( and lots of us do ) young people absolutely need to have a healthy appreciation for the danger of that machine.
A ten-year old being taught how to handle tools could likely be safer than a 25 year old who has never seen or used one before, but just bought one.
You don't seriously think children stand more of a chance against cars of today with their ridiculously inflated size, power and weight do you?
I realize it's not possible for everybody, but there are areas where this is still possible. Even in the suburbs.
My current "town" - Reston, VA - is like this. I can walk to all three schools (~1 mile), two lakes (~2 miles), a shopping center (~1 mile), community center (~1 mile), ball fields (~0.5 miles), and miles of wooded trails without crossing a single street at grade (we have pedestrian tunnels). And you can buy a decent TH for ~$600k (that's "affordable" for DC metro).
It always amazes me that people willingly choose newer/bigger homes with crap infrastructure for families to live locally over older/smaller homes where the QOL is, by my measure, so much higher.
Reston is a gem. It's not perfect by any means, but it was intentionally designed to be something other than unmitigated suburban sprawl. And it helps a lot. There's still a big reliance on cars to get around, but the wide availability of trails is fantastic.
there is a lot of bad urbanism about new suburbs, but the parks are a bright spot.
From what I've seen, there may be parks, but they rarely seem to be walkable, and if they are, they're just a swing set (and not a full field with room for older kids to run). Lots of disjointed sidewalks, where the developer put sidewalks in/around the cluster of homes, but failed to link it anywhere useful.
The latter two often are quite walkable and even advertise it as a feature. It depends on what is selling.
As house prices level off, expect to see developers throw more money at things like walkability and parks, as they hate to ever have to reduce prices in a development or an area, and would rather "throw more on".
That's not affordable, not even for DC metro. Houses in Greenbelt (one of the nation's original walkable planned communities) can be had for less than $400k. $600k is "large colonial" money, or "walk to UMD's campus" money. Even those numbers are not necessarily comfortable swings for the median worker.
The average home sale for all of DC Metro, for all home types, is right around $600k. And average new homes in Fairfax County is around $1 million.
That's why I had "affordable" in quotes - it's not cheap, no debate there, but it's reasonable for the area given the demographics (and you can spend less, but get a less desirable home design or location). Lots of teachers and SAHM/Fs in my neighborhood, which you're less likely to find in Ashburn or McLean.
AFAIK it's never been $600k. NOVA prices have always been inflated and overweight the average (for super-fun reasons I won't get into but that you can probably guess), not a norm that MD prices fail to reach. This mortgage calculator (https://themortgagereports.com/mortgage-calculator) pegs a $600k home at ~$3700/m, which is going to be about 45% of the post-tax income (assuming a take-home of about $100k from that $135k), or ~1/3 of pre-tax. Depending on who you ask, that's just on the edge of affordability; it leaves no wiggle room, particularly if you've seen or will see transportation or food or other costs rise (so it makes sense that the actual median is lower).
It's perhaps advantageous for some to project the idea that a $600k median is reasonable, because they derive certain privileges from both the rising figures and the delta with what people in the area can actually afford comfortably, but I guess my point is that it's not actually reasonable. It puts a strain on household budgets and redirects funds that should be going to things like infrastructure, disproportionately affecting the less well-off. (It's also a bit of a feedback loop, as higher housing values can be borrowed against, and the debt used to bid up the prices of other goods.)
Now, I'm in a city (in the Bay Area) and I was walking from a residential area into the city (2-3 miles one way). Still, you would not expect lawful crossing of a street to be so dangerous.
Plus, I know at least 3 people that were kids when I was a kid, within several years, that are now disabled adults because of that unstructured play. Two broke their necks, one broke so many bones they were in a wheelchair for several years. I know probably half a dozen kids that were hit by cars in some form. Several kids dead by drunk driving. So that unstructured play isn't without cost.
There are other tradeoffs, too. I know several kids that are raised more unstructured because of their specific situation, and they have a lot of social and physical confidence, but they are also kinda dumb. Like they lack intellectual curiosity. Anecdotal, I know, but I just don't think things are as clear as they make it out to be.
My son's playgrounds were still fairly dangerous, so I think the pendulum has started swinging back. When he was 6-9 or so, his favorite two playground stuctures were a 15' tall climbing tower, and the old school metal merri-go-round thing. Oh, and one elementary school had two huge play structures made of wood with all kinds of tunnels and nooks and crannies, he had tons of fun with that with his friends.
What I mostly missed with him is his ability to just go outside and play with a bunch of kids - there is a negative feedback loop where even if you want your kid to do that, there are no other kids out there in many places. Plus there are just not many interesting "third spaces" anymore that are fun for kids but also ok for them to be kids.
This thread notes the decline of horse girls and car guys - (it's gender roles too, but) maybe everything is just online now. Idk if toontown or minecraft or whatever perfectly replaces playing on a playground, but maybe? There is a sort of exploration, maybe not the same. There is a perception of in game risk without the risk of physical injury, but also without physical fitness benefits.
I don't see research or data to back this up in the article.
It seems that the conclusion that "Children Need Risk, Fear, and Excitement in Play" is based on the authors personal interpretation of her research around play and development, rather than actual data and experimentation on risk, fear, excitement in play.
It would also be helpful to define 'need'.
Overall, the ideas in the article seems bypass the reader's critical thinking by appealing to "back in my day", and "kids these days" attitudes and feelings.
The dangerous playgrounds of 1900s through vintage photographs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31855163
If this is reactionary, bring it on.
I’m starting to see a lot more free ranging kids in my neighborhood. White pill.
My neighborhood has narrow streets and no sidewalks, and I'm paranoid about letting my children walk around freely. I don't really see kids unsupervised until they are about 10-12 years old.
Also it's hard not being risk-averse when you have only one child you can barely afford to raise since it costs 50-100K a year.
How on earth will children learn to deal with and solve conflicts if conflict is banned??
Other than that let them fall a few times and stuff in controlled manner and they get better at risk assessment. Otherwise they default to being risk adverse because you’ve been always telling them everything is risky
Given that those critical adult-free hours were the norm ~throughout human history, I think the year part of yesteryear sells it short.
How about Yesterever?
Using that phrase is... 80s childhoods weren't some sort of trial by fire threshing machine, dude. By and large everybody survived. Children being lost to quicksand or stumbling across gangs of counterfeiters holed up in abandoned mills who black-bagged them is a thing that happened in Scooby Doo and The Hardy Boys, not real life.
This elides the main issue; children need to be left to play unsupervised as the machiavellian instigator types only reveal themselves when nobody's watching. It isn't so much about letting the children take risks as it is about figuring out who's always present when something odd and painful happens to somebody else.
You also don't have to go too far back, just 150 years, to when children were largely used for labor. Childhood itself is a relatively new invention.
The idea that kids sat around doing nothing but getting in trouble with other kids all day is just wrong.
If you are within earshot of your children, you are not "letting them play by themselves." You are supervising their play from a distance. They are not the same. Know why bullies have it so easy nowadays? Because once upon a time, a bully was usually a kid who came from an abusive household and they were just demonstrating what they learned at home. Eventually, they'd end up getting their asses kicked by a kid who had the means and background to defend himself, and they'd learn something from it.
Today, the world is full of little Eric Cartman wannabes: little asshole kids whose parents hover around them and will defend them to the ends of the Earth. It's screwed up child socialization and it's ruined childhood education because teachers with three degrees would rather do anything than take abuse from those bad kids and their pathetic, enabling parents.
Kyle's mother do though. But Kyle is not an asshole.
You don't learn much from accidents. Anything that is climbable is dangerous enought. You don't need to add rocks on the ground, to use another strawman.
> Injury-related deaths are at an all-time low in most Western nations.
To a normal person this is proof helicopter parenting is working.
Two practical choices
1. Have more kids again so they are more disposable. This is a big part of the change. This will happen with UBI. If UBI is a while away, weak kids are here to stay.
2. They don't normally talk about pretense of risk and independence.
They mention heights. This can be done safely. I'm really scared to climb the trees I used to as a kid, part is fear of heights growing with age the other is common sense. But why not have 'safe' climbing frame that go to 50+ meters?
This is really hard for most things... How do you blow up gas cylinders with a thrill and be safe? Mixing explosive material that's a thrill, again hard to do safely. The fun is not being supervised and in a lab. Blowing off fingers.... not the end of the world. Maybe when eyesight and hearing is restorable it'd be fine again. Killing animals is another one no one openly talks about but is important, it's why biology is failing they are all imposers who want to cuddle a lion, not cut a frog open to see how it works.Dunno why you think more prosperity leads to more children when it's almost always the other way around. Poorer, less educated people have more kids. Once a society develops economically, they have less kids. This is a worldwide phenomenon.
UBI will free you from having to work shitty jobs. You think people will spend their newfound time raising kids instead? Doubt
Because capitalism incorporates more and more of their lives in the production of economic value. That isn't the same thing as prosperity. If economic value isn't distributed to the working classes, there's more work without prosperity.
Look at South Korea, where people work hard in order to cover basic essentials like housing. Maybe according to the WEF or Economist that's "prosperity" and a "higher standard of living", but it's an obvious scam to anyone who isn't thoroughly brainwashed by capitalism
I never played any organized football, but I played a ton of informal touch football, and very occasionally tackle.
Same with most baseball: a bunch of us kids got together and played. In most of the world, it's football ("soccer" as Americans call it).
Pick up games are dead for vast, vast portions of the country.
https://www.wikihow.com/Play-Spikeball
I also occasionally see pickup touch football games, and of course soccer. Baseball: maybe you're right, only adults play that anymore.
And let's not forget pickleball. Contrary to the stereotype of its being an elderly sport, go look at a court sometime: people of all ages play it.
When I was a kid, I hated structured play to the extent that I would rather not play at all. That even applied to video games; I wanted them to be as open and free as possible, with many ways for me to solve problems (and equally many ways to fail to solve problems). Most games were unplayable to me.
I think this is because I was (and still am) very diligent by nature. I was extremely dutiful and obedient, always did schoolwork to the best of my ability, etc. Playtime was my desperately needed creative outlet, where I could just try things unplanned and discover what I was capable of.
My parents did try to introduce me to some structured activities, but when I didn't click with any of them, they stopped pushing them. Looking back as an adult, I think that was 100% the right call.
Even better, they did not assume my little sister would be like me. They introduced her to structured activities even after I had long left them behind, and she took to them in a way I never did. She was naturally disorganized, basically my opposite, and I think these activities gave her some much-needed balance (in much the same way that unstructured play did for me).
(best image I could find, apologies if it's not ideal) https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-8a9efc9ebb63702cc0a26...