The Overprotected Kid (2014)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I have a two-year-old; she's allowed to play with a hammer and nails, but she can't use a real knife without supervision. That's because the potential for real damage or lasting harm are both high with a knife - she shouldn't use that on her own until she has been trained with techniques for doing it safely. Next year, she'll probably be allowed to use a knife on food, if not on wood (safe whittling takes a little more effort than safe cutting).
The distinction between damage and lasting harm is especially hard for many people to grasp. Going to the hospital usually means you have damage - you need stitches, a cast, crutches. Harm is only 'lasting' if it will not totally go away in the next few years - spinal injuries or major disfiguring burns.
For the most part, I just let "pain" happen. You knew it was going to, and it was hard not to say anything. It didn't always happen, but it usually did. This is stuff like jumping off swings, "sword fights" with sticks, snowball fights, sledding, etc. When it did happen, they always look over to see your reaction. Mostly it was a raised eyebrow or smile and a small shake of the head. Most of the time they went right back to doing what they were doing.. but generally didn't get hurt again. Progress, right?
For light "damage", I'd warn them, "uh, that's not such a good idea..." or I'd force them to add some safety equipment to try to mitigate the damage (knee pads, long pants, gloves, that sort of thing). They've got a few scars, but no broken bones - probably equal parts luck and caution on the kid's part.
Tree-climbing (and other forms of climbing) were the hardest things to deal with because the skill and the limit testing is so important, but the consequences can so variable.
Anything over that, I'd be heavily involved - supervision, stopping them, etc.
On the other hand, there were quite a number of things I tried to get them to do that were pretty dangerous, but they wouldn't do.. I tried really hard to get them into Karting, but no luck. One of the two, the older one, has taken to climbing walls, but the other hasn't.
I think they've developed pretty good self confidence and risk management.
They still sword fight like idiots, tho. That ALWAYS ends up in tears..
I grew up in the Czech Republic and I was allowed access to knives at age 3 or so. Sometimes I cut myself. My grandpa would just tell me "Nešikovne maso musí prič." which translates roughly as "Unskilled meat has got to go." I was allowed to wander around the forest, start fires and climb trees. I got lost, burned and I fell. Even in the city I remember going on errands when I was in kindergarden. Nobody batted an eye at a 6 year old kid walking into a store to return some bottles so he could buy a lolipop.
I really appreciate the skills and perspective I gained from my upbringing.
Most significantly it instilled in me a deep sense of personal responsibility.
From an early age I knew that mistakes were nobody's fault but my own. I learned to think before I acted. I am eternally grateful to my parents for providing me with that sort of childhood.
I am glad that I could have died.
"... that's the real death; not this death when you depart the body, but being dead while you're alive. That's real death, I think." ~ Henry Miller
Bah! My grandpa was sending me to buy cigarettes for him when I was in primary school.
This was in the early and mid 90's. It was amazing. I had a turf around our house that I would patrol. I knew where every plant was, which neighbourhood dogs are friendly and which aren't, where each climbable tree could be found, and I knew exactly how long it took to tumble down the nearby hill.
I was deathly scared of rollerblading down the paved hill. Natural aversion to pain, you see.
And yes, plenty of scraped knees[1]. Many bruises. Perhaps a stitch or two. But I bloody well learned my limits and could spend hours upon hours entertaining myself with everything from random hammers to pitchforks and planks that I made bike jumps out of.
It used to be so cool to be a kid.
My sister is 8 years younger. She no longer went to the playground without my mum. Not because my mum wouldn't let her, but because she didn't want to. Somewhere somehow she got the idea that she needs to be constantly supervised.
[1] Apparently there was a particular summer where both my knees and both elbows essentially had a permanent scrape. I'd always replace it with a new one before the old one healed.
And my father was kicked out of his home to a nearby town when he was 14, to be able to attend high school and had to work.
Right now we are joking that kids are stupid, and that is the reason they heal so fast ;)
The modern sterile parenting excels in increasing the survival chances until adulthood (and with the sterile hypothesis for allergies and autoimmune disorders, may not even that), but at what price.
Indeed. It was the mantra when I was a kid. In my neighborhood, if I said that to my kid, he'd be the only one out there. The rest of the kids are inside, playing video games or studying.
Last summer, my 13 yr old didn't see one of his friends face-to-face, but had a summer of playing with them and talking while doing so over Skype. He went to a bunch of camps, and saw kids his own age there, and spent a week with his cousins, but saw none of his school friends in person.
Yeah, it was very disturbing to me, and I tried many times to insist "wouldn't you like to have some friends over?" only to hear "no, I'm good"... several times I thought about forcing him outside, but really, the playgrounds have only young kids with parents hovering over them. He would have been alone out there.
I'm been saying to anyone that would listen that there will be unintended consequences for this shift. Dramatic ones. I hope they aren't too bad for our kids and society, and that I'm overstating it. I would love to be wrong here.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/decision-in-fr...
- touching dog poop to enter a "ninja" club
- entering many private properties
- climbing dangerously high trees
- crossing quadruple railroad tracks with TGVs passing on them.
- putting my head next to a passing TGV (about 2 feet away), just to see how it feels and be scared
- jumping off high ledges to see how far I can fall without hurting myself.
- walking near ledges with a 2 story drop.
- playing with explosive fireworks, big enough to blow up a couple of fingers. I could just buy these as a kid in France.
This is just a small list, and I was honestly a very quiet, calm kid. I just had an active friend. And as I said, I don't remember this teaching me anything.
Whereas I remember spending time programming (visual programming) at 8 years old, and that was awesome and taught me a lot.
But you turned out OK, right? Why rob them of the experiences that shaped you into the wonderful adult human being you are today?
But as I am in the US now, I can't really even consider the same level of freedom, I would just end up in jail.
I'll just try to give my kids as much freedom as I can. For my 2-year-old for example, when we are outside, I let her do anything as long as it's safe. Jumping into puddles, touching things covered in dirt, let her choose the streets she wants to walk on. At this age it's not really extreme yet :)
BTW: I am a germaphobe. But as long as my own house is clean I'm ok with that. I just get my kid cleaned up as soon as she gets home. It is hard for me to watch her jump in puddles, but she is having so much fun :)
Survivor bias. The kids who get killed playing on railway lines don't grow into adults to make a post on HN about how they used to play on railway lines.
Ever seen this episode? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapestry_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_G...
I probably wouldn't want my kid to do the railroad stunts, but I think I'll be totally fine with the rest. Especially fireworks is something I want my kid to play with. Rockets are cool.
There are a lot of cool fireworks, I just thought there was a few a bit too dangerous being sold in France. But most of the ones I bought were safe and fun.
This is actually VERY IMPORTANT knowledge. Knowing how much your body can take and knowing how to fall in a way that increases how much your body can take could mean the difference between life and death in many situations.
As the Grim Reaper said when asked about giving a sword to a kid who could cut themselves: "That will be an important lesson."
Six-year-old me was fascinated with jumping off of the thing. And yes, it hurt sometimes. I fell on my face, I fell on my ass, I took hard landings that jarred my bones. But I learned, and it got to the point where I was taking a running start before jumping off (Parents pulled the plug at that point).
Kids should learn that sort of stuff. Ideally, you want to protect them from "kill / maim you with no warning" stuff like electrical transformers, the third rail on the subway, dangerous chemicals, etc. You want to inculcate a healthy fear of stuff that will cause lasting harm. And, well, everything else should be free game. My parents told me I was free to go wherever on the bike as long as I stayed away from the really busy roads and wore my helmet (again, kill / maim you with no warning).
The funny thing, to me, is that many of the sports that kids play are far, far more dangerous than these childhood games. Football kills and cripples kids every single year, but it's organized, so it's okay!
Liability and blame. Parents are okay with letting their kids get injured if there is somebody to blame. Like the coach. Or some higher purpose "Oh they were training for a competition"
But parents, and people in general, balk at personal responsibility.
> - touching dog poop to enter a "ninja" club
Dog poop is icky and kids will make other kids do anything, and they will do anything.
> - entering many private properties
A lot of private property is not very tightly secured.
> - climbing dangerously high trees
You can climb trees. Might save your life one day.
> - crossing quadruple railroad tracks with TGVs passing on them. > - putting my head next to a passing TGV (about 2 feet away), just to see how it feels and be scared
TGVs are fast and dangerous. Also said railroad tracks may not be adequately secured.
etc. What would you have learned if you had stayed indoors? Nothing.
The only things I improved was my climbing skills. But I was doing a lot of climbing outside of this. My parents were letting me climb trees, and they did sign me up for acrobranch classes (real tree climbing, from bottom to top, not just the parks you explore that are man made), but I was safe, with a harness in these cases.
http://media.moddb.com/images/engines/1/1/29/krnl386_003.png
Or which later became Click & Create, and The Games Factory
Do you know the statistics for children hurt by passing TGV trains, both now and back then? I suspect it is zero if not near zero.
It's very unlikely that someone would call the police on your 5 year old playing outside. These stories are rare and outrageous, that's why they make the news.
Let your kid play outside. Encourage other parents. It will make a difference in your community.
This is one of those trade-offs we've made to reap the many advantages of urban- and suburban-ization.
We have plenty of examples where people thought "Hey, that's $NAME, they would not abuse children" and then reports from children of abuse from $NAME were discounted.
Your thing seems to be a different problem. It's good that people trust people they know. It's bad that people betray that trust in sometimes horrible ways, but the solution isn't to be suspicious of everyone… Right?
It caused a lot of shameful conversions, calls to work from police, visits to the house, and stuff like that.
And they never figured out yet who it was...
My son threw a conniption fit in public. Leaving the zoo, heading back to the car. I had him under one arm (kicking & screaming) and my "dad bag" under the other.
A thoughtful neighbor yelled down at me "Stop beating your kid! I've called the police!" Okay then. I put my kid the car (leaving door open), sat on the curb, and waited for the cop.
Last thing I want is an AMBER alert and then get pulled over. Then I'd be late for the parent handoff, and then the fur really flies.
Older (experienced) cop shows up. My son's still grumpy. Cop sizes up situation and sends us on our way. The 15 minutes served as a pretty good cool down.
In general, abused kids do not throw tantrums in public, normal parents keep their cool when their kids just need a nap.
That's just the first three nodes of a N>10^8 causal graph.
Wasting police time is an issue, yes. It would be even more of a waste of time trying to establish whether this person had reasonable cause to call the police or was just trolling. Not to mention the other consequences I touch on above.
Suppose you want to incentivize people to report if they are at least 5% confident that there is a problem.
If you choose some small cost (say, $5 for example) if one is wrong, then if you assign a reward which is at least 19 times the cost if one is wrong, then the expected monetary value of reporting (in addition to the benefit from/of being altruistic) is positive when one is at least 5% confident that there is a problem.
(The ratio, where p is the minimum level of confidence you want people to report if they have, between the cost and reward, is (1-p)/p .)
One might question whether creating a monetary incentive scheme like this would still cause problems (akin to the expiraments about kids being monetarily rewarded for quality of artwork in schools decreases motivation or something like that), and that does seem like something that could be the case,
But one can set up a system that doesn't just disincentivize reporting when one has any doubt (as a simple fine for false reports would do), but still disince tivizes sufficiently uncertain reports.
That doesn't mean it would be a good idea though. I don't know if it would be.
The real problem lies in the numbers: To put it simply, the cost (salaries + funding) to research this issue and evaluate a good scheme and then implement it could be much higher than several years' worth of "noisy" police calls. Add this up with the opportunity costs (what those thinkers/researchers aren't doing while they're busy with this) and it's probably all the way down to "Will Do This Only If My Next Election Depends On It".
I've had someone call the cops on me because my son had a meltdown. I'm white so I just had a nice conversation with the cop, and I didn't get shot. But there are certainly people for whom even a random encounter with the cops has a good chance of turning out very badly.
No, it isn't. It's a parenting fail if you can't control a situation to the point where your child is experiencing emotional distress to the point of kicking and screaming.
That's them trying to communicate and a parent failing to understand what the child is trying to say.
(Unless the child has some kind of neuro-diversity)
EDIT: But calling the police is totally wrong in that situation.
This is an incredibly broad and judgemental comment. Kids experience "emotional distress" all the time, without it being a "parenting fail". Many kids go through a "kicking and screaming" phase, and it takes time to work through this phase.
In my experience, children attempt to manipulate parents by throwing fits from the ages of about 2-5, no matter what. If you don't spoil your child, they will grow out of it. But, they're going to do it.
And, especially for new parents, failing is very common. I wouldn't judge them too harshly.
Whereas parents who give in instantly to stop the tantrum are never noticed and tsked by busybodies.
How many times are the children allowed to try it during the process of learning that it doesn't work?
Or rather, how is a parent to teach their children it doesn't work after the first (and only in your unrealistic view) time?
It's only a parenting fail if they continue the behavior beyond a generalized age of say 5 years old. And how can you, as a passerby determine if "this" time is a first/early attempt at manipulation or just the result of learning that it works?
I've learned not to be so judgmental of other parents after becoming a parent. I hope you do too.
The time leading up to the parent hand off was always difficult. If I could have let him calm down on his own timeline, I would have.
That said, every person (kid, teenager, adult) is going to have a melt down now and again.
I know it's hard to believe, and I didn't fully grasp this until I had some of my own, but children are remarkably varied in many different ways -- compared to other kids, compared to adults, and compared to themselves (even on a minute-to-minute or hour-by-hour basis).
As far as children being like small adults -- I think it's closer to the truth to consider them as small, temporarily insane adults-to-be.
Haven't you read TFA? This happens so seldom that defending against it causes more harm than good.
Articles like this are written because people like to talk about them and they drive page views.
Don't overestimate how real or serious the threat actually is based on sensational journalism.
Here it's articles 10, 12, and 16.
And the children have rights (although the US, along with Sudan, haven't ratified the rights of the child). Here the relevant articles are 3, 5, 9, and 12.
I grew up in a rural (ish) part of the rust belt northeast. I was still in grade school, and my parents and the parents of my friends would send us out to play, and we'd go out miles into the woods, past the end of the paved roads, in the dead of winter, and stay there all day! (We were very well bundled up by mom, feeling kinda spherical by the end of the bundling process.)
When my parents were growing up in Korea, such things were "normal." (1) My dad has stories about he used to roam Seoul with his friends and devise ways to sneak into movie theaters or read books in bookstores until the shop owners kicked them out and proceed to the next one.
(1) - "Normal," with the caveat that they also remember the Imperial Japanese occupation and the Korean War.
And that is to be an active parent and go camping, hunting, fishing with kids. Geocaching, bushwalking, kayaking, long distance bike rides etc.
These are some good starting lists: http://www.natureplaysa.org.au/resources/2/51-things-to-do-b... https://www.50things.org.uk/activity-list.aspx
When I was a kid, my over protective asian mother would let me out of the house when I got home from school, and I'd wander around the neighborhood with the neighborhood kids, and come back when it got dark.
My generation's (I'm 30) ideas of "proper parenting" are too god-damn time intensive. You should be doing stuff with your kids, sure, but beyond a pretty young age, it's their job to entertain themselves.
They go to playgrounds before and after school every day and play with other kids so it isn't like they don't get time to do their thing. My 4yo loves digging up the yard and build things in it which is great when I have a deadline. They have offcuts of wood and real hammers and nails at pre-school for my 4yo.
I really don't think my kids are wrapped in cotton wool. But there are boundaries. It is great for kids to have play areas where they can build stuff but kids also like to play sport, swim, learn music etc. I think sometimes ideas get romanticised and people lose perspective.
Using the "gie a man a fish, teach a man to fish" idea, I'd say the gist of it is "Give a kid a fishing rod, and let's see what comes out of it".
The operative part is that they're doing things not with you, learning to interact with each other and navigate challenges on their own terms, not their parents'. Outdoor activities are great, of course, but it is no better or worse than any other supervised activitiy.
A hundred years ago kids might go out with some other kids and learn some bushcraft or fishing or hunting. These days many of the other kids are housebound, often the ones I most wish my kids could be playing with.
I would rather my kids learn about the world constructively than play Lord of the Flies. They still play with other kids a lot and that is necessary, not sufficient. I would like my kids to get a balance of free unrestricted time and learning a bit of discipline and team work playing team sports and doing solo activities where they can learn some self-reliance. I think these articles romanticise one aspect of childhood to the exclusion of others.
I live in a small town and as soon as my kids can negotiate the roads safely they will have the run of it unrestricted but that doesn't mean that all they are going to do is hang out at a building site with old matresses and broken palletes. They will be riding to sports practice or the swimming pool, or skatepark or to go fishing.
I have fond memories of being there as a young child. Want a hammer? Pick up 10 stray nails and trade them for a hammer. Then go smash things, attach things, whatever you like.
There's a zip line and a giant cargo net to climb. It's an incredibly empowering experience for children.
Security theater, safety theater, everyone too afraid to point out the obvious because they don't want to make it easy for others to accuse them of callousness in a way that's hard to defend against.
> Tulley delivered a talk at the TED2007 [2] conference entitled "5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do". In this talk, Tulley makes the argument that a growing trend towards over-protection of children is harming their ability to learn and think. Thus, Tulley advocates for parents to allow their children to do supervised activities that are considered to be dangerous such as driving a car or playing with fire. By doing so, Tulley believes children will learn concepts that they may not learn in more structured and conventional activities.
Later, he published a book "50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do)"
[1] http://www.tinkeringschool.com
[2] http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_...
* play with fire
* own a pocket knife
* throw a spear
* deconstruct appliances
* break the DMCA
* drive a car
* Building a fire
* Training to use a pocket knife (and being allowed to own one thereafter)
* Shooting a rifle without my parents present
As a kid, I was causing all sorts of trouble, broke a couple bones, created scars, pissed off a neighbor or two, played hockey, and had an outlet for figuring out who I was without my parents around. I turned out fine. I was able to make it through my problems with dyslexia and except that was part of me, I knew what pain felt like, and I learned how to treat people with respect because they didn't yell at me or call the cops; they talked to me like a little human that could learn a lesson (okay, maybe a few yelled at me).
Now I see certain family members completely sheltering their kids. No vaccines, play time inside, choosing the TV they watch, the books they read, the bikes they ride, home schooling. This is becoming a very popular way to raise kids and it's no fun.
The girl got "stuck" with her front wheel against the end of the driveway, and called for her mom! (And yes, her mom came over and helped her roll past the "obstacle.")
Before fifth grade, we would build fires to roast marshmallows and hot dogs in the disused sandbox, watched over by the honeysuckles (and, I'm sure, mom from a window). We would have pinecone wars, but only when the season was right - fresh 'cones hurt too much. We would climb trees to see how high we could get; we would head into the woods and build forts from branches and detritus. Once, during a slumber party, we snuck out late at night to ride our bikes through the witching hour. A neighbor called the police on us, thinking we were casing houses. Maybe it was our hoodies. We were, at most, 8 or 9.
By fifth grade, the neighborhood kids my age had all moved away. The one up the street - his mom a single mom, divorced from a gay ex-minister but still active in the LDS, with three younger sisters - wasn't allowed to play with us off their property once his mother caught wind of our backyard roasts and called the fire department. She was a night shift nurse. Once, when we were riding our bikes along the busy two lane (double yellow) road that ran parallel to the train and past my back yard, we saw a squirrel dead from impact. He used the front tire of his bike to crush its head, fascinated by how its eyes bulged. I threw up. A cop pulled up and gave us a stern talking to about respecting animals - even ones that were already dead. "It may be dead, but we don't know if it can still feel pain or not," he said, and went on his way.
The one down the street always had a German Shepherd that they'd give away once it got too old and untrained and relegated to a 20' length of chain. One of them had an accident in their play room once - I can't remember if it was Jupiter or Saturn (never Uranus) - and it had worms squirming in it. The stench was overwhelming. We climbed their maple trees often, we built bicycle ramps on the downslope to the coul-de-sac. Once I raced down it so fast, and the pavement was so rough, that I lost traction and slid fifteen feet on my side and knee. I was fascinated when the gravel wormed its way up through my skin; I still have the scar. We would find hollows between the lawn and the curb, or make them in the woods or in the stacked square logs that held erosion at bay and place GI Joes in battle stance, squared against Cobra in their pretend pillboxes. They had Beastmaster I and II on laserdisc, his parents smoked like a coal plant, and they moved.
The other one down the street, his dad would beat him with a belt. Once we were in their front yard and I shinnied up a tree. Misjudged. Slipped, tore the skin off my shin. I was pretty high up. Never climbed a tree after that. Never saw that one again, either. I can't remember his name. I hope he didn't continue the cycle of abuse.
I couldn't figure out, for the life of me, why we weren't allowed to cross the gentle slope that formed a lip round one side of the playground in fifth grade. I got in trouble for wandering down there several times. A boy showed me a playboy magazine there; I thought the distended breasts were gross; I tattled. He had gotten rid of the evidence in the toilet trash can, but still got in trouble. It flurried one day, and my math teacher had us stay indoors while she went outside and frolicked in it, gloating at us. She made me feel stupid for not knowing long division - when I insisted that fractions were clearly better: .3 repeating made less sense to me than 1/3.
By middle school, recess turned into "socialization time": 200 sixth graders standing for half their lunch period in sweltering heat or shivering cold, milling around bleachers and prohibited from going on the football field below by the panopticonic gym teacher with his comical shorts and puffed out chest and bulging belly and Kenny G hair, forced to interact with no context but that which came as visual, auditory, olfactory baggage.
That's when the bullying started.
It might at that. My writing style on this was quite a but different than my typical comment, though -- discussion of a topic is different than telling a story.
My therapist has hinted that writing down things about my past would be beneficial, and has been trying to get me to do it for a while. I'd started this as to illustrate the unsupervised play in my childhood as a nostalgic positive, but realized there were a whole lot of other things, not so positive, that had happened too. Between the bullying in school and boy scouts and the sexual assault in the boy scouts, it's been hard to think back and remember what my childhood was like before that. Sure I remember some of the good times, but a lot of the things in the post above I haven't thought about in decades - and thought didn't remember until I began writing and it all spilled out.
There was a more conventional playground at an adjacent park and then a neighboring section of townhouses with an open field up at a higher elevation, and then by a strip mall on the other side. The whole area was maybe 2km x 1km.
The entire area was boxed in by 2 high-speed roads and on the other side a crazy intersection. So it formed a kind of "natural" range for us.
It was in the middle of a city so it wasn't too big of a deal for my friends and I to run around all over the complex (there were three different concrete playgrounds and a pool), go over to each other's apartments, run over to the park, play around in the parking garage. Run over to the local computer store. Nobody's parents really seemed to care too much where we went inside of this box so long as we were home by dark.
There was a 7-11 across one of the busy streets with a couple arcade games and they sold comic books and baseball cards, so the braver of us would head over there on occasion and spend our meager allowances on that stuff. It was at about here I learned that different houses had different allowances on our range. Some kids would get in trouble if they came back toting comic books or candy that could have only come from the 7-11, some kids didn't. And so by consensus us kids learned where was the furthest from home we could safely stray.
While most of my friends had a mother at home, I was fully latchkey, both of my parents worked, often till quite late. There was some strangeness in how this was managed:
- During the school year, between getting home from school and dark, I was free to go anywhere in this box I wanted, so long as I called my parents when I got home from school.
- If I was going to a friend's apartment, I had to let them know this. If I was just going to play outside it didn't matter where I went.
- During the summer, my mother would hire a local mother to be my babysitter. Her sons and I were already friends, and their house rules were more or less the same as mine. So really we'd just come home for lunch and she wouldn't see us all day after that. But at least there was a "responsible adult in charge"
- There was an apartment rule that if you wanted to use the pool, and were under 12, you needed a responsible child 12 or older to bring you.
- If my parents decided to go out to a function by themselves at night, they'd hire in a babysitter, usually a local teen, I'd spend most of the evening outside with my friends, but within eyeshot of my house.
- Once it got dark, I had to report back in at home, then I was free to go back outside so long as it was within eyeshot/holler distance from home.
It seemed awesome at the time and I completely enjoyed growing up there. After this, we moved to the country, and strangely it seemed my range shrunk as there simply wasn't really any place to go so it wasn't much worth getting out of the house for. I had a couple friends that were within a couple miles, and on occasion I'd walk to their houses or they would walk to mine, but that was it, for the most part my world shrunk.
I learned much later that there was a darker side to all this childhood freedom.
- A known sex predator lived in our complex. My mother found out years later that many of my play friends had been abused by him. I believe one time he may have tried to get me to come to his apartment as I remember meeting a strange man at the neighboring strip mall who "wanted to buy my bike for $1000, but I had to come back to his apartment to get the money" The police never investigated any of the cases, and I rarely remember ever seeing police in the area.
- The tall apartment buildings were popular spots for suicides. I think I remember at least knowing about 3 or 4 suicides while I lived there. I know that one of the bodies was found by one of my play friends. It was so traumatic that he was pulled out of school and the family moved away.
- The brutalist design and the underground parking garage were extremely dangerous. Several of my play friends ended up in the hospital with broken bones and concussions from falling off of things or getting clipped by cars.
A couple years ago I went back to see my old stomping grounds. Of course it was much smaller as an adult than as an 8 year old.
- All of the playgrounds had been removed.
- A fountain feature had also been removed.
- Many of the concrete planters had also been torn up.
- A high fence had been put up around the pool.
- Some of the "secret" entrances into weird structural parts of the underground garage had been fenced over.
- The walking path to the neighboring strip mall had been removed and replaced with another high-speed road (shrinking the safe play range).
- The path to neighboring neighborhood had been completely removed. Shrinking the range more.
There were other bits of "civilizing" that had occurred, but it seemed like a less interesting place overall.
I don't have any kids, but I'm mixed on allowing them the measure of freedom I had. There were many instances I can think of where we had gotten ourselves into real danger, and only by dumb luck did nobody get hurt. Parents who's kids did end up in the ER very quickly put restrictions on their kids. On the flip side, it was incredibly enriching to have my world be my playground. To see or know about a place I could walk or bike to, and simply go there without any interference.
However, these days, I lament that there's a bus stop outside of my house, that picks up high school kids, and takes them to a school a half-mile down the road. I would definitely let my kid walk to school instead.