The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of small Metro. Nothing special about it at all.
Every time I see one of these articles I always wonder who they're talking about.
I always feel like this is just one of those news headlines that won't go away, but isn't quite tethered to reality, but people really like to feel bad about modern life and so we keep talking about it as if it's real. I suspect the real reason kids aren't playing outside, if there is one, is not because they can't, it's because they choose not to. Just as adults are no longer choosing to go to third spaces. Screens came for everyone.
It's also not particularly expensive to live in a bougie place. I grew up in Mclean, VA. My dad ran into Dick Cheney at the CVS once. But you can get an apartment in Mclean on a journalist's salary, especially if your parents paid for college and you have no debt. You can’t afford to raise a family there, but you can live there, near your social circle. Conversely, you'll see lots of trades people, cops, etc., living in places that aren't bougie at all, despite making more money than the lower end of the professional class. People find ways to congregate around others in their social class, income notwithstanding.
It was once a job where many if not most of the practitioners didn't have a college degree, now it is the most expensive graduate school program you can do. I think the median price is something like $250K.
If you don't pay writers, you eliminate all of the writers who have to work for a living.
Regardless since journalists aren't well paid but a lot of them live in expensive areas the money has to come from somewhere.
Also, they dont live in parents houses.
You are making stuff up about lives of journalistals to invalidate their claims.
I live in Redmond, WA. Bougie? My rube Midwestern ass thinks so. And there are feral kids all over my neighborhood. Plenty of kids walking to school in groups, or solo. Neighbor kids talk about riding the bus/train to places. Granted, there are a lot of immigrant families around here (hello, Microsoft, et al.), and I'm sure that skews things.
Seattle also has a pretty decent policy around the radius for kids walking to school, so there are always gaggles of kids walking together to and from school for elementary and even some middle schoolers. The high schools are spaced far enough out that kids use buses at that age.
My coworkers in lower CoL areas seem mystified why I'm paying an arm and a leg to live in Seattle to raise a kid. And yeah there are some serious downsides (20-30k a year daycare, restaurants are too expensive to go out to often, even take out is insane), but there are kids playing soccer in the streets after school and kids setting up lemonade stands in the park.
That's what I'm paying for - A city that is built for people to live in, not just for cars to drive around.
Also, places are just too far due to the aforementioned 6 lane roads and 100ft+ wide intersections. And crossing those intersections on foot, in daytime, is daunting as an adult.
I asked my family member why they didn't just build one playground for all the kids, and they said the HOA voted against it (for whatever reason, ongoing costs, legal liability costs, etc). I look at that waste and can only laugh at the "efforts" to be green or pro environment as a joke to appease those who can be easily swayed.
Whenever I get angry about 40 percent of my paycheck going to the government I try to make a list of countries that are better and it's not a long list.
> The economic growth and so-called advanced economies (think Germany, The U.S, Japan, etc. What's been referred to as the “Global North”) relies by a large proportion on a significant net appropriation of resources and labor from the “Global South” (think Kenya, Peru, the Philippines, etc). This appropriation reaches astronomical levels. In 2015 alone, the north appropriated 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labor; worth [a total] $10.8 Trillion in northern prices. Enough to end extreme poverty 70x over.
The West steals $10-$12 Trillion/yr in embodied raw material equivalents, embodied land, embodied energy, and embodied labour.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...
It’s their own fault that they do not have visionary leaders like Lee Kuan Yew or a dynasty like the CCP that’s willing to sacrifice entire generations for future generations.
To not allow a country to govern itself into oblivion is the peak of western paternalism.
I don't know what it is about rich white people and freaky helicopter parenting. I also notice it with homeschooling and those crazy borderline eating disorder diets. There seems to be an association there between rich white people and pushing self-destructive behavior on kids.
That's not too say they're not helicoptered too, but Chinese parents are a whole other level.
Think strapping a 3-4 year old into a high chair and handfeeding them, or scheduling every waking moment of a primary school kid's life.
There is this town nearby where I live - super white, gives old money type of vibe, very expensive real estate. It’s full of free range kids running around on the streets.
It was shock to me to see it, after our diverse suburb, where kids pretty much either locked at home doing homework or at classes all the times.
So in my opinion there is definitely a cultural aspect of it.
I have seen and experienced some real extremes there.
Are you in a "wild and unsupervised" state when you leave your house and go to work?
The poster clearly meant it with a flavor of whimsy to it, not in a derogatory way. Maybe also as a tongue in cheek jab at how people they perceived as overly concerned about supervision would describe such kids.
I'll put my hand up as having been a joyfully feral kid once upon a time.
I never said the feral kids were participating in those activities. :-) Look, it was loose use of the word, you're placing way more judgement on the term than was ever intended. Yes, the children have homes and parent, of course they're not feral.
One would expect that after your first sentence, the second sentence would be a counterexample.
> But I actually find ideological bias to be less concerning than the more fundamental problem that the class of people who determine the boundaries of debate share a set of demographic and experiential traits that they don’t recognize as distinctive.
> This class of people includes journalists, yes, but also people who work in the tech industry, academics, nonprofit leaders, influencers, and those who work in politics. From now on, I’ll refer to this group broadly as “the messenger class.”
> The messenger class’s distinctive experiences — like living in downtown Washington, D.C., or living in one of the parts of New York highlighted in red — shape the boundaries of normal in ways harder to counteract than pure ideological or partisan bias.
> The messenger class plays a fundamental role in any democracy. Democratic self-governance requires not just fair procedures for making decisions but an accurate and shared picture of social reality to reason about. That picture is revealed through the communicated experiences of citizens, filtered through the messenger class, which decides which experiences are urgent and require intervention.
Your kids are hardly free-range. Let me guess, there's no way for them to actually meaningfully leave the area (no train, bus, etc)? It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and saying they can do whatever they want. hardly free-range in the way described in the article.
Presumably you live in a suburb for the reasons the person in the article checked in on the free-range kid.
my personal litmus test is if you'd let your 13 year kid explore Manhattan alone during the day. Many say no because it's dangerous, and yet Manhattan is safer than most American suburbs. just FUD all the way down sadly.
the biggest things parents should worry about is their kid being bullied by other kids during school, a supposedly safe place, and other family. strangers just aren't the major source of violence towards children.
She is now in a neck brace, and her mother is absolutely distraught, saying this is something she cannot fix for her beloved daughter. I am distraught as well that this could happen to anyone at all on the same train that I ride every week.
I’ve noticed a trend of people attaching a sort of personal identification with headlines
Imagine that!
The crux of my stress on this is that riding the light rail is a very common thing for me and millions of my neighbors. In fact we are shocked because we consider it so safe. The LRT should be the safest place in the city, given the cameras, the crowds, the security guards and the vigilant operators.
To think that a vulnerable, female high school student was attacked, broad daylight, onlookers looking, mob of boys (high school I would assume) is just beyond the pale. Nobody did nothing, and the attack continues after she disembarks? It's just unthinkable. There is a Jesuit Catholic boys' school just up the line from where she boarded. Were none of the Brophy boys on hand to step in, to say "stop it" or do anything about it?
And to watch the interview with the mother was just the last straw for me. How upset she is now. Her daughter means the world to her; she couldn't protect her, and she can't "fix this" for her. It's heartwrenching. It should've been safe, especially for a girl like her, so close to adulthood, but legally a child.
A lot of U.S. residents inure themselves to random acts of violence because they either feel helpless to change the societal contexts of that violence and/or because admitting that violence would require confronting the benefits of power exploitation vs. the drawbacks of racism, sexism, bullying, and bystanderism. That swarm of boys abusing a girl to enforce societal mores that benefit them to her detriment is a trope from Pleasantville. This isn’t some new or unknown thing. This is a standard-issue United States Lynch Mob that’s been known about for a century.
I’ve been upset about this for thirty years, which is when I first discovered this. Welcome to the shameful desert of the real. Sad that it took y’all so long to see it; but now you have a chance to decide a way forward. Circle the wagons and raise sheltered, and therefore weakened, children? Teach every family about this threat all the way down to the youngest that kids understand danger? Crossing guards that ride the buses and have safety whistles and self-defense training? Lobby your city government to shift policing dollars to transit safety officers? Lobby your regional government to shift road maintenance dollars to gang violence de-escalation efforts?
As you can see, it’s difficult to find a way forward that feels appropriately vengeful upon ‘those that hurt our budding flower’ while also having a meaningful impact on the quality of the future. Most regions would just try to defund bus service, which fucks over everyone except wealthy adults on time scales longer than ten years or so, because at least that ‘feels’ like an effective response.
Good luck.
Completely normal. Trauma at a certain level, unlike other memories and emotions, doesn't seem impacted by time. I'm sorry to hear what happened to you.
> that is quite normalized in the U.S., especially if you’re not white. / A lot of U.S. residents inure themselves to random acts of violence
This part seems to universalize the experience, though. What is the basis for it? Crime is at generational lows. I've used public transit in cities uncounted times and I have never seen a crime; that's what is normal for me.
No, not traumatized for thirty years; that’s not a valid substitution here. Upset, in the way that people that want to effect societal change are upset at acceptance of the status quo. The alternative is apathy and hopelessness, and I refuse to adopt salves (such modern rationalism) that would let me stop caring about difficult ‘uphill’ battles.
> I'm sorry to hear
I refuse your apology; instead, exert your own form of societal pressure against, say, bullying. It’s a more approachable target than lynching and will help you switch your instincts from irrelevant sympathy to relevant action. (And if you already do, bully for you, pun intended :)
> I've used public transit in cities uncounted times and I have never seen a crime; that's what is normal for me.
Mixed-wealth U.S. cities, in daytime and at night? In exclusively downtown, college, and/or affluent neighborhoods? (So excluding for example Stanford, Palo Alto, and Mountain View, which are tilted quite high-wealth and thus low-crime, Brock Turners notwithstanding.)
Also: Are you a white man of middle-class or greater wealth? That generally matters greatly when evaluating anecdotes on this topic, independent of all other factors, and is strongly correlated with ‘I have no matching anecdotes from my own experience’ annotations.
I've seen lots of death on the roads around me.
But sure, it's the train that's unsafe.
Unless there's a big strict enforcer to keep everyone in line of course.
Within a few generations, their decendants marry each other.
Philadelphia in 2025 had a higher murder rate than Belfast during the height of a civil war.
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_countries_result.jsp?co...
Crime in the USA is also extremely regional and local in pattern.
I don't know how your link gathers data (website only shows one dude, software engineer, not a professional survey statistician), but from personal experience I can surely say it's rankings are BS.
The closest in US are the "bad towns" like East Palo Alto or some neighborhoods of Oakland, with their respect for ex-cons and prison slang.
And you know, you can also ask people. In software there is a large population that grew up in the ex-USSR. Many of us still regularly visit the old country and talk to friends and family that live there. And we aren't all bots, despite what many seem to believe.
In public schools there's this unofficial "letter grade system". Unlike the US, where kids homerooms are mixed around each year on purpose, in Russia a homeroom group sticks together through the entirety of their school career, grades 5-12. Of course some kids will move away, and new kids will join, but the core group remains. Many lifelong friendships are formed this way.
Now - and this part doesn't officially exist, but it certainly does in practice - these groups are not created equal. Let's say there are 3 teachers who are picking up a grade 5 homeroom. They will stick with these kids until they graduate. So, the teacher with the most seniority has their pick of the "best" graduating elementary students. These will be well-behaved and academically strong kids. Their new homeroom will be called 5A. Then the second most senior teacher has their pick. This homeroom will become 5B. And 5C onwards are the "leftovers". And these groups will stick together until they are 12A, B, and C.
If you want a good school experience for a nerdy shy kid - they have to be in "A". Of course, as a newbie who is unfamiliar with the system... your kid will likely be put in "C" ("ve"). And you probably know enough about how Russia works by now to understand how to go about changing that ;)
Do you have a cite? In American cities crime is at generational lows, including / especially murder.
"The numbers of homicides and shooting victims in Philadelphia have continued their sharp declines since the pandemic. There were 222 homicides last year, the fewest since 1966, and 935 shooting victims, the first time there had been under 1,000 since at least 2007."
https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/pew-state-of-city...
More important is that helicopter-style parenting is unthinkable there, people will just not understand if someone would attempt that. Also not much in insane laws (they have some, but..) and the police will tell you to bugger off if you try make them act on those that exist. So the situation in the article is impossible.
My children cross town by themselves to attend classes, it’s normal to see children walking or riding public transport by themselves once they turn about age 7.
There’s crime and bullying — we have always homeschooled successfully and have had negative experiences with classrooms here — but in my opinion it’s not as bad as the places I’ve lived in the US.
And the streets are definitely safer. There are some risks like gopniki enjoying causing random trouble like pepper spraying strangers, but I believe that type of danger is a threat mostly to young adult men and almost certainly not children. Our daughters can safely do what they need to do with appropriate precautions (that do not include staying within single-digit meters of a vigilant adult at all times else CPS!!!).
Also, French, German, Swesish, you name it do all the stuff alone. And third, they have less bullying in schools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
Not sure "sending them to be killed by Ukrainians" is better then incarceration. But, probably costs less money.
I wanted to write that the requirements to teach in russian language in russian schools is relatively new one. But turns out, you could still do it. Not like in private schools, you can have a government school in another language.
It can be argued that there is unifying postsoviet culture, but since different regions were treated differently under Soviet regime, there is a lot of differences.
but Japan is much safer than the US, in no small part because they have the sense to not allow people to own weapons
The dealers didn't bother the kids, and the kids knew not to go into that yard.
There were plenty of street walkers on a particular stretch of streets. They weren't talking to anyone who wasn't looking to buy.
Of course I had the advantage of being a broke kid at the time, so I wasn't a mark for crime. I was just another neighborhood kid who was walking through. It was a working class neighborhood with a few sketchy parts. There was the occasional shooting or drive by, and property theft was common (every bike I had as a kid was stolen from me at some point), but it wasn't unsafe in regards to violence.
I almost impaled myself on a rebar pole while jumping my bike over hills at an abandoned construction site. That was the most dangerous thing that ever happened to me growing up there. (well aside from the time I almost died falling into a sink hole and managed to grab onto a nearby tree root and pull myself up in time, but that was in the middle of nearby woods, so not gonna blame that on societal problems!)
What do you mean it's like dumping kids on a farm? Are the suburbs really THAT lethally dangerous?
Source [22 minutes]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLAfDrFUBkA
[something traumatic happens and 50 people run for their safety]
see and as proven, only 1 person was assaulted!
I think a future society that counts trauma and mental health disruptions instead of just the crime stats will reach different conclusions on areas considered safe
My parents let me (14) and my brother (9) explore central Paris on our own when my Dad was working at the Paris air show for the RAF. No problems at all even though this was just after the student protests in the 60s, and so things were a little tense.
I think Manhattan would be OK too, though I've only been there as an adjust. Certainly, you see kids running around London.
I also let him play at the park on his own occasionally. I will get calls from well meaning but extremely overprotective friends to let me know that “they can’t watch him anymore.” He is ten! The library, connected to the park, has a phone which he can use to reach us.
People called my parents hover parents, but at ten I could have played at the neighborhood park by myself.
it is, and we do:
https://www.offthegridnews.com/current-events/mom-charged-wi...
https://reason.com/2025/08/09/child-protective-services-inve...
https://reason.com/2026/01/16/she-let-her-6-year-old-ride-to...
https://edition.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrest...
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/parents-investig...
https://nationalpost.com/news/growing-up-independent-is-ille...
https://www.todaysparent.com/blogs/mom-arrested-leaving-daug...
https://legalclarity.org/is-it-illegal-to-let-your-kid-play-...
those are all from the first page of a search for "parents charged for letting kids alone on the playground"
there are probably many more such stories.
just fine
I'm pretty sure the data shows the opposite actually, that compared to today some percentage more of them didn't make it out.
This depends on the area. In more urban areas exploring can be done on foot or bike. I live in Seattle, which has some fantastic bike trails that can go on and on for miles and cross into multiple adjacent cities.
In some cities parents are fighting to let their kids play in their own front yard unsupervised. Not an issue in Seattle, where kids are required to walk to and from their neighborhood school by the school district.
But denser areas also have lots of stuff to do within the neighborhood. Within 2 or so miles there is a massive shopping area, multiple bakeries, tons of restaurants, a slew of parks (Seattle has an obscene density of parks, it is one of the best aspects of living here), a lakefront beach (lots of bodies of water in Seattle), 2 swimming pools, tennis courts, and a bunch of other stuff I am probably forgetting right now.
So define free range. If a gaggle of kids travel to the local grocery store together to buy lemons and sugar, then self organize selling lemonade to people passing by on a hot day, is that free range? I'd argue yes.
"free range kids" doesn't mean playing outside in a suburban cul-de-sac; it's the ability to go outside the immediate neighborhood on their own (walking, cycling, or public transport) -- stuff I did all the time as a 11-13 year old that is pretty rare these days. I don't think I've ever seen a preteen on the local city transport alone
I don't see child welfare agencies personally as a particular threat when it comes to this topic. Maybe they ARE more likely to get involved in cases of more free range parenting where before they weren't, but it doesn't register as a real worry.
The major difference I see between when I was growing up and now is that when I went out onto the streets, there were other kids on the streets. My parents didn't know exactly what they were sending me out to, but they knew that there as a general crowd of kids that would be out on the street until some point in the evening, and that they would all go home at around the same time, and that's also when you were expected home.
The draw of smartphones and video games as indoor entertainment can't be understated, but I can exercise some parental tyranny here and always kick him out of the house to go play like my folks used to do.
But there are no other kids out there. I'm sending him out into streets empty of kids.
To mitigate this I'm trying to nudge things in the direction of him and his friends forming some sort of after-school crew that finds outside activities to do together, undirected. There are other like minded parents that I've found that are also interested in enabling something like this.
On the subject of risks - I strongly believe that the role of parenthood is to mediate a child's exposure to the real trauma of a hostile, often absurd reality that they will grow up into. Controlled exposure to risk, to self-directed decision making in times where they feel like someone won't be there to help them out and they need to figure things out on their own, these are critical requirements in parenting IMHO. And all risk comes with some small chance of tragedy, and that's a burden we as parents have to bear: to expose ourselves to the emotional trauma of the possibility of our children getting hurt, however small the chance, so that they are able to grow into healthy well-adjusted adults.
I feel like I have to work a lot harder than my parents did to enable that exposure.
At the ski hill kids 5+ roam free- it’s always fun getting on the chairlift and a little kid says “ can you help me get on?” And you have to physically pick them up onto the moving (fixed grip) chairlift. There’s no cell service.
Mountain bike trails around town are full of groups of kids 5+.
My advice: move to a small town, it’s like going back in time in a very good way.
That said, "move to a small town" is easier said than done when you have a family and kid :)
I have a family and a kid
This. It's a number's "game".
My father, born in rural Romania, had 8 siblings, one of them died of an accident in his childhood (yeah, during "free range stuff"). I was born in a town and have 2 brothers. Live in a city and have one kid.
I can't send my kid out carelessly because I don't have a backup.
That is part of the genius. They hide the data then declare "just show us the data" knowing damn well they hid it then try to hide under just being reasonable and why can't you prove it. It's quite sadistic actually and of course arguments such as yours play into this intentional subterfuge. Note that this hiding of evidence, when done by private actors, in a court of law usually means it is entered in evidence in favor of the other side as hiding means the worst case scenario of that is contributed towards the burden of proof ("spoliation of evidence.") You don't get to play the fuck-fuck game of simply asking for additional burden of proof when you've intentionally induced spoliation of the evidence.
She may theoretically birth another child but there's a substantial risk.
There are "physical aspects", just because it's all theoretical and principles to you doesn't make them go away.
So on HN, that’s the 70s through the 90s.
Since then maternal mortality in the USA has only increased. The reasons vary, but this still supports your comment as less people ought to be willing to risk having more children.
I would add, that this stat also pairs with the prevalence of hard pregnancies in the USA, so people may become more protective of their children since they suffered more to have them.
Other countries don’t have this issue, and also have more free range child allowances (e.g. Japan with low mortality, low number of children, but highly independent children supported and watched by adults in general and not their parents).
I don't understand this reasoning. Are you saying you're knowingly stunting the growth of your child because you would have to deal with your emotions if something terrible happened?
I understand the emotional pull of it, but I don't understand being able to identify it, put it into words, and then continue to do it.
He's not chained to a tree. He goes to private school in a country where public schools are free and excellent. Visits his friends and play in the public park or the private yard. Spends vacations in the countryside unsupervised by me because unlike the city, chances of being run over by a retard driving a car are much lower. Still, I advise him not to wander around freely as I did in my childhood because the world has become much shittier. One thing, there are bears everywhere, thanks to the animal rights lobbyists. I feared dogs and bulls when wandering across countryside as a kid, now I have to add bears too for my kid.
This part. I’m not going to assume what that person meant, but there’s always a few people about in these conversations lamenting that when they were six, they were certainly never hit by a car, and really you have to let your children take a few risks etc…
I was freerange growing up in rural england, so I have no problem with the youth roving about. My wife is horrified by the idea, so our kids are somewhat coddled.
In the UK at least, children are objectively safer in every metric apart from getting fat. Kidnap, abuse, getting lost, car accidents are all way way down.
The interesting thing is that here you wouldn't be threatened with child services, You'd have to be pretty abusive or get your kid picked up by the police for the state to get involved. Mostly its pure classism, nice middle class kids aren't allowed to walk about on their own until they are 16, at least.
So while kids might appear to be slightly safer in their childhood, the reality is that those other dangers were never a serious statistical danger to begin with, but not creating health habits is a contributing factor to the most likely cause of death when they’re older.
I think people vastly underestimate how dangerous living an inactive lifestyle is. I’m not saying this because I grew up super active and now I’m judging people who live their life differently to me, I’m saying it because those are the statistics, and because I DIDN’T grow up being active.
Deaths from inactivity are going to show up in 40s and 50s after long and expensive periods of medical treatment. THats a problem because we are only really going to see significant issues around about now. But that trend of inactivity isn't equally distributed over time.
I arrived at the school just as it was getting out for the day. I did not see a single student of any age leave without an adult.
Like so many people of my generation, I can only wonder at the cost, and be grateful that I was born when I was.
lol
The average person ability to make and fix their own tools. Build and fix their shelter.
Free range childhood.
Average person getting dirt under their fingernails.
Being in sync with sunlight cycle.
Stargazing at night.
These are off the top of my head (I'm not op).
“acquire food from nature (farm, hunt, gather) and cook it for themselves.”
Or
“make and fix their own tools. Build and fix their shelter.”
(Culturally, those tasks often specialize by vocation, gender etc.)
You said 50%, you said 15-20, you are speaking in absolute terms.
I'm pointing at trends.
Do you deny the trends?
While unstructured, this kind of standard life knowledge was intentionally and systematically passed down to most boys in every community I lived even when in elementary school. It was expected that you knew how to do these things and men would go out of their way to teach you if you didn't.
Kids did fishing, trapping, hunting, building out camp sites, etc for fun when I was growing up and it was generally encouraged. Learned helplessness wasn't really a thing.
This started to die out decades ago. Most zoomers I know didn't have anything like this experience.
> A shifting baseline (also known as a sliding baseline) is a type of change to how a system is measured, usually against previous reference points (baselines), which themselves may represent significant changes from an even earlier state of the system that fails to be considered or remembered.
[0]: Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline.
[1]: Earth.org article that reads nicer: https://earth.org/shifting-baseline-syndrome/
Growing up, I think many girls had ended their babysitting careers by 13.
When you walk, you go in the opposite direction of cars and can see them coming and, if necessary, move off to the side more.
I know it's survivorship bias, but it worked for me.
Now I get that population density is increasing, and probably so is traffic. Though so are automatic safety features that cause cars to brake rather than hit things.
Are there statistics on vehicular fatalities in suburbs?
Quote from CDC
During 2013–2022, U.S. traffic-related death rates increased a relative 50.0% for pedestrians and 22.5% overall, compared with those in 27 other high-income countries, where they declined a median of 24.7% and 19.4%, respectively. Across countries, U.S. pedestrian death rates were highest overall and among persons aged 15–24 and 25–64 years.
Wasn't there a trend in the US away from pompous SUVs and towards smaller cars, people even starting to re-evaluate some European-favored "city" cars more?
Also aren't cars also getting ligther, with less heavy / metallic exterior over time?
Obviously, as a business, you have to give customers what they want or else you will go out of business.
The government is, however, very lax on prioritizing the safety of people outside of vehicles (which would mean limiting vehicle size and speed and enforcing harsh penalties for unsafe driving).
It turns out that Cedric, being superfluous to the "Resurrection Ritual" and Voldemort's plan of revenge, is actually a spare. In fact it was unexpected that two boys get through the whole thing with the Portkey and all. Harry was the only one who was supposed to end up there with the Death Eaters in the first place, so Cedric's appearance was quite unfortunate for everyone involved.
But Cedric's "spareness" certainly didn't have to do with expendability as far as his Dad was concerned, which you can clearly understand once his Dad gets going in the mourning for his death.
Cars on the roads in the '80s were very low to the ground. Even a child standing on the sidewalk could easily see over the hood of a car parked on the road. Now, hoods have gotten so tall that neither can the child see past it to what's on the other side, nor can the drivers see the children.
The lion's share of loving a child is intervening in proportion to actual risk.
As a society, that means, more than any other single reform, relieving our cities of the burden of maintaining lethal, taxpayer-funded compatibility with the auto industry's machinery.
It is frightening once they learn to drive, isn't it?
It's disgusting that this has become a casual attitude and admission by the tech worker class. No one should be getting this free pass.
"I am actively harming children and society with my livelihood (except my own, because I am so smart). Here I am proudly and smugly stating this in a news article."
The only differences as far as I can see are in buying- a child could technically buy a phone for themself if they had the money and create an account on Instagram for free, and in cultural recognition of social media as a vice, which I believe is starting to change.
The overall point is, the law should assume that adults are reasonably intelligent and responsible people, and that parents should be the ones responsible for parenting their own children their own way.
We want to make money.
> The overall point is, the law should assume that adults are reasonably intelligent and responsible people,
Over cigarettes and alcohol. The most inconsequential stuff.
But don’t say the words “direct democracy”.[1] Then people being reasonably intelligent and responsible gets forgotten. By the hive mind at least.
But people should be assumed to be reasonably intelligent and responsible. If that narrative allows us to make money off them. Not when it comes to democracy and political autonomy, of course. Shudders.
Where’s the option for people who are weak willed when it comes to something? Can they ban themselves from buying these goods? If not, where are the heroes that are working on that?
> and that parents should be the ones responsible for parenting their own children their own way.
There are whole studies of psychology weaponized against children to make them act as consumer proxies for their parents. To optimize nagging.
But every pair of parent for themselves. Against all of marketing. “Responsibility.” Because that makes money.
Software is eating the world they say but they can’t get an honest do-no-evil CRUD job apparently.
Low key looks like some sketchy that-happened journalistic rage bait though. I casually found some unscrupulous nerd that is making YOU doomscroll
I largely blame cell phones for the Karens being able to impose their will. When I was a kid we were all out about and/or doing dumb shit, but anyone who wanted to call the authorities had to go home to find a telephone. By that time we were long gone. As long as we didn't go near houses, no one could touch us. Now they will just follow the kid with their cellphone until the rat-fuckers from CPS or the police arrive.
Thankfully this never happened to me as a child, I don't even know what I'd do.
Depends on your risk appetite and your systems tolerance for the inevitable consequences of errors...
A 5 year old free range kid on a scooter died outside a nearby school a few months ago.
Hit by a SUV
Was riding back from primary school on a scooter, without the mother.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-14/islah-metcalfe-rouse-...
A massive investigation, police, social services, traffic consultants, a million plus spent on upgrading safety, mother and father demonised in the community,etc ...
Teachers involved who responded or gave CPR ( I know some of them) given counselling.
The mother is likely to have lost custody of her other children.
This is really the problem.
Everybody is an island. I don't know what has caused this, but it seems like it's happening in most 1st world countries. Anyone have insights about this?
1. Historically women were largely responsible for community building. As they joined the workforce, they had less time to community build and so there became less community.
2. Technology allowing home entertainment. People can now stream movies instead of going to theaters. Play computer games instead of go to arcades. Check Facebook instead of call friends to catch up. Use a Keurig for convenient coffee instead of go to a cafe.
So if your streets are deserted, ask the locals their views on parenting. Paranoid parents will talk up the safety factor, but it's overblown.
This very individualistic society can only critique itself in terms of individual failings. Which leads to the catch-22, anti-communal, ankle-deep critiques: people are on their phones, people are asocial, why don’t “people” all get a clue individually and fix this via some spontaneous autoenlightenment.
I hear that risk-tolerance normalization and freedom of kids in the 70's was even greater, so this trend appears to be a multi-decade decline.
What I miss most though is cool stuff like interactive art installations and improvised playground features made for kids that were ripped out in the 90's and 00's. Decommissioned Korean war jets, telephone pole obstacle courses, and a myriad of other things without so much as a web page anywhere lost to history.
e.g. at 10 years old, my cousins and I were running around in the woods at my gradparents' home in rural Pennsylvania. I was the oldest of the group with my youngest cousin probably being 6. No cell phones. No Apple watches etc. We were outside of that house around 9am and would come back for lunch and then dinner when my grandmother rang the bell.
My oldest has an Apple watch and is both reachable able trackable yet the above still feels little strange to me.
I let my 13 year old go out by himself, walk to places, take the street car; he has a phone so he can contact us if he needs help, and we can see where he is if we're concerned. It's ironic that parents are more worried today when technology makes it much _easier_ to track/communicate with your child (back in the day at that age, when I was out of the house my parents had no way of reaching me).
You will see lots of kids free-ranging in Lakewood, NJ. A lot of families there have banned TV from the home.
One has to think if a state wanted to eliminate individualism in society this application of surveillance and restraint to children would be entirely by design...
I think the clubs suck the fun out of it. Even with the expense, American players perform much worse than players in other countries where the kids have just been playing for fun for years until they start getting paid.
> Stranger kidnappings are exceptionally rare. They occur roughly 100 times per year, which works out to a 1-in-720,000 annual risk of a child being kidnapped — less likely than being struck by lightning at some point in their life.
> A Pew Research Center survey from 2022 found that about 60% of U.S. parents were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about their children being kidnapped,
The only thing that presents a persistent risk to children, I think, is motor vehicles and the way they’re driven. Children make mistakes and San Francisco’s tolerance for traffic fatalities is very high.
The number of pre-teen traffic fatalities is the only concern I have when I’m thinking of letting my children walk around because I think the other risks are relatively overblown. Sure we have an occasional Bill Gene Hobbs and the like but I think only traffic fatalities are near certainty.
These are for accompanied children, so leaving a 5 year old to wander is way different than when I was 5 years old. In SF, I’d rate the chance of survival to 12 at under 90% for unaccompanied 5 year olds walking around the city along the range that I used to at that time.
Teens are pretty self-capable in decision making but pre-teens just don’t have judgment yet. I feel like this is a pretty reasonable statistic to match.
The funny thing is it'd be safer: Kids have cell phones now by like 7 or 8 in a lot of cases and can call for help! Back when I was that age if I got injured or something I might've had to knock on strangers' doors!
once my friend get arrested in LA by police when he jogging. they say they arrest him for his own safety because he shouldnt be out jogging in "this neighborhood"
turns out people in america get murdered and attacked in the street all the time for... no reason. yes literally, no motive.
The danger to children is largely the police and CPS, who rip apart families for hallucinations or levels of parenting sin that are far more benign than the emotional cost to children of authorities bearing down on them.
now, if your child is too playful for Ms. Karen, they will give them a shit load of adderal as well
you may consider paying for a private school to avoid Karens drugging your children
it isn't. Crime is highly concentrated and the vast majority of, at least median affluent America, is about as safe as it gets. Same goes for any big cities, usually you can count risky streets on one hand, where 90% of the violence happens.
Not to mention, developing countries are if anything the only places where kids still run around and play on the street. I've spend a fair amount of time in Latin American countries with much higher violent crime rates than most of the world and you don't see much helicopter parenting
if anything in the first world this style of parenting is a result of excess safety, not lack of it. The world has seen a secular decline in violent crime over the last few decades, and yet this paranoia is distinctly new.
I'm also quite certain that in much of Latin America anyone fucking with a child would not go through a trial and handled with kid gloves, but rather there are plenty of videos of the internet of such people being held down while Rottweilers literally rip their balls off. Probably not an ideal version of justice but also perhaps more effective at pursuading people not to fuck with children.
So, we were sort of carpetbaggers from the beginning. We were enrolled in a parochial school in the next parish over, which was a 10+ minute drive for Mom. Of course we could never walk or ride bicycles or public transit that far!
As a child, while I was granted roller skates and bicycles, me and my sister were both forbidden from straying beyond the block where we lived. And neighborhood peers were few and far between. We had few playmates, and nearly none from school. Our classmates were in different socioeconomic classes, and often of different ethnicities and cultures. At least 1/3rd of them were bused in from North County, where new Catholics were settling, but no schools were available yet.
Our neighborhood was a sleepy suburb surrounded by dead-end streets and canyons. There were no city parks or playgrounds. There was exactly one city bus line that was about 7 minutes' walk away, which we never ever rode. Grandma, on the other hand, took us on walking/shopping tours all over her neighborhood, which was completely amazing, and also to every shopping mall we could reach by city bus, which was doubly amazing. Grandma's neighborhood had a full-fledged recreational center and a park with a playground, where I could fly kites or do whatever.
Here is the paradoxical contrast: though we could have no physical contact with neighbors or friends, I could own any book, watch any TV channel and program, and listen to any radio station whatsoever. That included "border blasters" from Mexico that were intent on corrupting American values. Literally any book we wanted, we could read it or discard it into our voluminous bookshelves. Later, Mom and Dad were reluctant to hook us up with a modem, because they knew what that would mean, but college opened up the entire Internet to us, and it was game over.
You can physically shelter your kids all you want, but if you have a TV, a radio, and computers in the home, you're constantly inviting a parade of strangers, scammers, and perverts inside your securely-locked doors. Think about that. It is far kinder to allow your children to mix with neighborhood friends and freely explore this world, than to let them dive unsupervised into cyberspace.
There's a huge set of initiatives for a maximum control of any individual since childhood under all children-safety laws.
Is that really for freedom or democracy? Or is that for something else?
Thats... displeasing to hear.
Its it survivor bias? I grew up in a small village/city during communism. I was basically unsupervised from morning to night since I have memories about me walking around in that village.
We were doing a lot of dangerous things while playing. And there are kids that got injured for life or lost their lives: falling from trees, drawn in a river, leg lost due to a horse injury, losing an eye during a game with some pipes, jumping from high places like 1st floor or more, ... I managed to not get hurt but the examples I gave are real.
I am not even talking about any of the fights between kids verbal or physical there were happening that todays will be labeled trauma.
So I do wonder if this free range thing that we desire is really what we want and we can accept the consequences?
I am not sure in all cases, depending of course of kids age and ability to reason, for each individual child this total liberty is the right path. I do understand the benefit for the society.
It misses the point entirely to seek control over whether your kids are "free range" enough. That style of parenting worked so well in the past (it didn't really, but I digress) because they left well enough alone. They weren't trying to contrive anything. Your kids absorb everything from you. Don't let your insecurities be part of it.
What I would argue is much more important is keeping things fresh with new opportunities. That's your main job as a parent. Keep them thinking and engaged with their mostly self-directed path in life. The goal is to open their eyes and help them understand the world. Respect their intelligence and let them decide things on their own.
Many of those so called free range childhoods of the past were actually just empty and boring. That's when they got into trouble. That's not something to be nostalgic about. When I hear about trends like this I have to wonder if some parents are just looking for excuses to be lazy.
> “We work in tech,” she says. “Our kids [aren’t] getting any cell phones, no smartphones, no Instagrams. I write the algorithms. I don’t want my kids to touch those algorithms.”
Yeah it's ok for the rest of us, but not your kids. Who the fuck do you guys thing you are? You shouldn't be making society worse.
Maybe, back in the days, it was just a different time? A more high trust society that worked well?
Nowadays, we have news stories, where 70 year olds get stabbed by youngsters because they got lectures on their bad behaviour. When I was young, I had respect towards a 70 year old. Big time. Never would we have thought to pull out a knife…
Life changed a lot in recent years and not for the better on all dimensions.
Europe is still pretty save though. At least if you trust the statistics
Plus, now, basically every kid is running around with a phone that gives them access to talk to the police or their parents at any time. So it's going to be a lot riskier for someone to try anything against them. Even then, between 80-90% of sexual assaults are performed by people the victims already know, and around 30% of those are relatives of the victim.
You should flip through some newspaper archives from when you were a kid. I don’t know where you are, but I can almost certainly guarantee that there were kids attacking people back then too. Just because you and most you know would never have pulled a knife, doesn’t mean that there weren’t those that would. After all, you say the teens today attack old people with knives, but I really don’t think your teen daughters are stabbing people with knives.
How can you reasonably let your teen daughters out alone? Well, be reasonable. Find out if your fears are amped up by sensationalist press. Go meet your refugee neighbours. Quite honestly it sounds like YOU spend too much time inside.
Edit: I just saw your comment about importing men from countries where rape is natural. I can’t imagine that we have the same definition of reasonable.
Where I live my neighbors have chickens and one has a horse and they never get hassled, the kids roam through the neighborhood under the age of ten without getting picked up by the authorities (well, one time one got lost and a helpful cop brought him home, but that was the end of it), if your dog wanders off animal control will call you to come pick it up (first time they waive the fee), you can collect shells, rocks, driftwood and seaweed for fertilizer off the beach. We have euthanasia but it is a carefully controlled process that involves multiple independent doctors and a lucid patient, and the supermajority (84%) of people approve of it!
Canada sounds like a terrible place, but you are more than welcome in the country I call home; Canada. Oh wait…
There's a kid (7-8 years old I think) a few houses down that carries a walkie-talkie with him during the summer. He'll be out for several hours (probably not farther than 10 houses away from his own house), and his mom checks on him every now and then using the walkie-talkie. I'll buy a set for own kids this summer for the exact same purpose.
The only thing I'm kind of scared of are the cars, because they tend to drive too fast (for my taste) and kids tend to not always look when they cross the street when they're too excited playing their games.
Edit: I just remembered that a few years ago, the cops showed up because there was a complaint about our kids being left unsupervised. They were playing in the backyard, which is completely fenced off, while we were inside cooking supper. Our kitchen window faces the yard so we could see them, and the window was open so we could hear them. At least the cops realized that the complaint was BS and didn't even come inside to check for anything. We live in Canada.