The play deficit (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The play deficit (2013)

aeon.co

Note that the article is from 2013, though I imagine things have only gotten worse for children since then. I think a decrease in family size and number of cousins might also be a factor.

I’m lucky enough to live on a street with a few families with similar age children, and it’s such a difference in enjoyment levels when all the kids are able to get together and play compared to just one or two.

I wonder if we’ll see a rise in popularity of co-op type groups for families with similar mindsets to get together for adult-free play.

Jonathan Haidt, well-known author of "The Anxious Generation", has spoken a lot about the transition from "play-based childhood" to a "phone-based childhood", and it makes me incredibly sad whenever I hear him talk about it.

Year added above. Thanks!

The dream is to live somewhere my kids can run around safely outside. It's maddening how hard that is to find, given that my kids are likely to be the ones who "dart" in front of some poor innocent driver.

This, in Davis, would be amazing. https://nstreetcohousing.org/

Not children today, (2013)

A bunch of more recent related essays/articles and discussion about this:

Balancing Outdoor Risky Play and Injury Prevention in Childhood Development

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39139540

Children, left behind by suburbia, need better community design

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38370203

Children Need Neighborhoods Where They Can Walk and Bike

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40095217

What adults lost when kids stopped playing in the street

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41104919

Really interesting read! It touched on parts of childhood that I hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about before. Looking back, it's clear that over the last few decades there has been a stark growth in the number of "helicopter parents" that put their kids in various after-school activities to try and shape them based on their ideals.

There's also been a lot of discussion on the internet about the loss of "third places" in society and I wonder how that has played a role in accelerating the loss of play in the youth of today.

Helicopter parents are more about not giving a child room to explore and make mistakes. They micromanage every activity. Those parents are seriously handicapping their childs brain development.

The more "helicoptery" segments of society seem to be doing better, at least economically, than their more hands-off counterparts. There's a couple of possible explanations for this (including reverse-causation), but it seems at least plausible that there may be a material trade-off here, where the kind of self-denial that makes you miserable is also what gets you ahead. I haven't personally found that that's the case - one of the big personal reasons I founded my company is to take a bet that I can succeed without being anything other than myself, both to prove it to myself and to everyone else - but I could very easily be wrong, especially because I really don't want it to be true.

The increasing competitiveness of careers and the ability to get "locked out" from early missteps seems like another possible causative factor. Setting aside for a moment to what extent it's actually true, it's certainly true that a lot of youth have a strong perception that missteps can screw them over for good separately from the ideas they're getting from parents.

There's less room to do stupid things in high school when your future depends (or at least, depends as far as you're concerned) on a four-year degree from a good school. To get into a good school, you need to rack up those AP credits. Better start in tenth grade, there's not enough hours in the day to get them all. And to get into those classes you'd better do well on that prep PSAT you took in eighth grade, so you should start prepping for it in seventh, and whoops look at the time you'd better start working hard there, hypothetical nine-year-old.

"Third spaces" vanishing is a physical manifestation of a broader phenomenon: the elimination of slack in a world that is optimizing it away in favor of, well, Slack.

> company is to take a bet that I can succeed without being anything other than myself, both to prove it to myself and to everyone else

I’m about to try the same, any tips? (Can I email you for advice?)

i've always wanted to try to start a company and really strike out on my own, but it's a terrifying prospect.

if i'm honest, the real reason isn't that i want to be my own boss or control my schedule -- it's that I think succeeding as your own business is the only way I could vanquish my persistent imposter syndrome.

It's no less terrifying to do it. But speaking as someone who did pull the trigger: it doesn't vanquish your imposter syndrome, it just makes every downturn feel like proof of it.

Ego's also a very dangerous thing in business. You have to have enough of it to get started, but it's also very easy to refuse to change course or deal with an inconvenient reality when you feel like it's a referendum on you. For me, at least, it helps to remember that "I am a smart person who is doing a really hard thing pretty successfully" and "I will be horribly wrong frequently" are not mutually exclusive statements. There's a good reason I wrote thousands of words about how a lot of very smart people ended up not succeeding; it's probably the most important thing I learned at my last job.

Sure. Although most of the tips I'm going to give you are just business tips. Being yourself is easy; being the most successful version of yourself is very hard.

> seem to be doing better, at least economically, than their more hands-off counterparts. There's a couple of possible explanations for this

It's in the text:

    decline in empathy and a rise in narcissism

I would like to let my kids play in the street in front of our house, but drivers kill kids who do that.

Do they? Really? Numbers? Stats?

Grew up playing in the street. As I recall the adults where more afraid of us than we were of them. Somehow we all survived…adults included.

It depends on the street. My childhood street was safe, but where I live the delivery drivers barely even brake downhill. It’s unsafe

Pedestrian deaths are at a 40 year high.

https://www.vox.com/23784549/pedestrian-deaths-traffic-safet...

Which is even more worrying considering that this happens as far fewer people walk to school.

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.

In 2017, only 11 percent of students in grades K through eight walked or bicycled to school.

In 1969, 89 percent of students in grades K through eight who lived within one mile of school usually walked or bicycled to school.

In 2009, only 35 percent of students in grades K through eight who lived within a mile of school usually walked or bicycled to school even once a week """

The reasons seem to be more complicated than that article (and the common narrative) suggests

This page has a more clear statistical picture, though no interpretation.

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...

A pool full of sharks won't have many drownings, either.

Also, you all survived, but dead kids aren't able to represent themselves in this conversation.

when I was a kid, we'd play road hockey all day, everyday. Canadian kids literally dont do that anymore.

The nanny state criminalized this. The consequences? Kids just stay inside more? Less socialization? But also canada being a great at hockey has long slipped away.

Last time Canada won the stanley cup was 1993.

100% of the blame for social crisis and this play deficit is the nanny state.

Is Canada's NHL deficit the fault of the nanny-state, or the fault of big money in sports? I don't like what our kids are reduced to either, but I don't think that's the main cause.

i wonder how much of kids technology use today could count as 'play'?

there's a lot of undirected activity that wouldn't count because they're just passive consumers, but surely some of it could count as a way of exercising creative impulses and learning various social norms (even though those are online norms and not real-life norms)?

> i wonder how much of kids technology use today could count as 'play'?

Basically, none. The 'play' that is important here is unstructured play with other children, face-to-face. All social mammals engage in play of this type, and it's critical for teaching a lot of important skills.

To clarify, there may be other things kids do that can validly be called "play" that are solitary, but that's really not the issue that's at hand here, and those types of solitary play activities can't substitute for play with other kids.

Technology simply can't, and shouldn't, be confused as a substitute for a lot of human interactions. I really like Esther Perel's talks about the new "AI", meaning artificial intimacy, where "I have a thousand friends, but nobody to feed my cat."

I'd argue it is play, but not sufficient play.

I learned to type by trying to frantically communicate with other players in World of Warcraft. I wasn't trying to learn to type, any more than a kid playing soccer is trying to develop motor skills, but I learned by exposure. Kids today playing games on an iPad or texting their friends don't think of those things as developing technological fluency or language skills, but that's exactly what it is, and that does matter.

It's just that other things matter too.

I'd call what you're calling "play" something like "social play". And in this framing the problem is that, by providing more immediately-available and compelling activities than talking with their friends, we're denying the incidental development of social bonds and skills (like negotiating rules or handling conflicts) that kids need. So they're getting play that's heavily focused in one area, rather than the varied exposure that equips them for all the different pieces of life.

i'm asking because i grew up under what would now be called 'helicopter parents' that were very restrictive and controlling when it came to the real-world play opportunities.

however, the early internet at the time gave me a chance to explore something on my own without supervision. and a chance to create some sort of space that i had control over (even if it was just stupid geocities html or microsoft bob desktops).

i know that i missed out on the ability to ride my bike around all day and go on real world adventures or start random pick up games with the neighbors, but this had to count for something, right?

modern technology play might give kids a sense of their "own space", but it seems so much less playful.

None of it counts as play. If there are no real stakes (cuts and bruises) there is no real learning. Children need boredom to force themselves to seek new experiences. Technology disrupts critical brain development for anyone under 16.

Discussed (a bit) at the time:

The Play Deficit (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9730870 - June 2015 (1 comment)

We just let our kids leave. Which apparently has made them extremely popular and every parent on the block is texting my wife asking if they can come over and play. My 9 year old is known as the kid who comes up with fun games to play.

The five year old is in a wheelchair but her sister puts her in the buggy stroller with rollbars (made sense to buy the nice one since she’ll need it essentially indefinitely) and she’ll hang out too. She used to have some severe health problems that kept her at home but just because she can’t walk doesn’t keep her from getting out of the house for some unsupervised play. It’s not that hard, I live in one of the safest places in the entire world, it’ll be fine. It’s funny because when I lived in the really bad part of town there were even MORE kids walking around aimlessly outside than there are in the nice part of town.

We also aggressively restrict screen time and have a lot of board games, stuff for the kids to do, which really helps.

Today my daughter had a whole conflict with the neighborhood bullies after her friend called them frogheads. They yelled back, and my daughter flipped them off. I wouldn’t admit it to their parents but I’m a little proud, haha. Those kids are jerks.

Sometimes it's the best way to respond to your critics. (Please educate your precious snowflake about the historic 1976 Nelson Rockefeller salute)

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/rockefeller-middle-finger-1... - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nelson+rockefeller+dole+finger&ia=...

And the Norman Rockwell painting. https://www.artpublikamag.com/post/the-sweet-story-behind-no...

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