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Comment by MisterBastahrd | Hacker News Reader

You want more active kids in the US? This is easy. Every neighborhood needs to have multiple adjacent lots with no construction on it. Aka, a park of sorts. It doesn't need to have slides, or games, or any of that other stuff. It just needs to be an open space with enough room that groups of kids can go and engage in outdoor activities without the need to be constantly monitored by adults. That's it.

They can play football or baseball or soccer or frisbee or tag. Doesn't matter. What matters is that you give them the room and let them do their own thing. Not only would this help them be more active, but it'd help them socialize a great deal more than they normally do.

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Easiest would be to forbid cars access to the school. All over the world kids are walking to school and when I talk to US people I hear some of them are even prevented from letting their kids walking to school. Apparently some of them introduced rules out of the jealousy of the fat parents that don't want to see healthy kids walking past their diabetic ones and enter the school while they are still waiting in line in their cars.

My neighborhood has a big city park just across the street from our house, with a lot of free / empty space. One observation: The kids are too busy to go there, as they're kept occupied by homework and organized extracurriculars.

We're seeing (and contributing to, if I'm honest) this parenting mindset that you have to keep kids busy to "keep them out of trouble", thus the schedules get loaded up with organized activities. At least one outcome is that we reached a point where basically none of my kids friends were ever around for just... play. Then our kids are bored, and we'd like them to be doing something with others too, and soon we're signing up them up for activities and the cycle perpetuates.

I had a culture shock regarding this around a decade ago when my coworker declared (with pride) that his teenage son has his schedule filled up to the brim.

I recall thinking how to respond. Was that a good thing? What was he so proud of? Two extracurriculars were already a lot back in my school days.

To add to the confusion the kids in my neighbourhood don't seem to attend many classes as I see them on the playground. Is this an upper-middle class thing that I'm supposed to participate in now?

Part of it is the race to stay in the middle class by maximizing their chances of getting into a STEM college.

Sounds great, but is really about the minimum that needs to be done. Active kids is much more than allowing them access to an "activity zone"; it's about allowing kids and families to build activity into their normal life, which in practice means active transport and walkable/cyclable cities.

The biggest challenge for this is the risk of cars. Many suburbs don’t have sidewalks, and the sprawl often means a substantial walk. That leads to an arms race of sorts: people who think it’s too dangerous drive, making it more dangerous for everyone else and conditioning everyone to think a distance greater than the walk from the parking lot is an unreasonable level of physical exertion.

Given that cars are a leading cause of death for children past age 5, I can’t completely blame the parents for this, either – poor design is a societal failure and they’re mostly responding to the incentives set up half a century ago.

I’m not sure what you mean by “without the need to be monitored by adults.” A friend of mine from college was prosecuted for letting her kids play alone in the park across the street. Leaving kids alone outside in a US city park is child endangerment, literally.

That’s pretty startling to hear. As a child growing up in a london suburb we would disappear for hours to the local park and environs. Playing cricket, other games, or just roaming around. About the only supervision was if the dog came too.

It's literally how children have played for 99.99% of human existence.

What really endangers the development of children is the lack of adult-free outdoor play. They need to learn by themselves to assess risks and solve conflicts without any adult supervision.

Well, that and getting crushed by cars.

Wow, sounds like a great idea but how is there a way for me to take financial gain from it? And can we protect them from active shooters in the area? Sounds like it should be under constant monitoring from the police.

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