27 ms·

How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

556 points by bootload 10y ago

bootload 10y ago
"When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere. It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision." Thought about this a lot. In kinder it was 400m for me. PS, 20km and by the age of 16 my range was more than 200 SqrKm. This was alone, on foot, by bike, train or bus.
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kasey_junk 10y ago
For what its worth, the vast majority of children in my south side Chicago (gasp) neighborhood, walk to elementary school without a parent. They are often without adult supervision in the hours after school lets out, and before their parents come home from work. There are frequently older siblings, but that doesn't seem like some vast generational sea change. Instead, I think this story is more about multi-generational moves from rural to urban life, that resonates with parents who can afford to be over protective of their children and feel bad about it.
Swizec 10y ago
I remember when I was a kid, I was allowed to roam and go on adventures. Especially at my grandma's house because she was next to the woods. I thought I went so far. I thought I was so adventurous. Turns out the max I ever dared go was about 1km. Maaaaybe 2km. The distances that used to look so far and adventurous, don't even feel like a walk anymore. Maybe that was just me, but it sounds like even if you give kids freedom to go wherever, they won't really roam that far. So maybe it's pretty safe to give them that freedom? They'll use it age appropriately. By the time I would have roamed further than the 1 or 2 kilometers, I had discovered books and internet and computers and I was like "lol why would I leave the living room?"
- sbov 10y ago
  I think it depends upon the kids and how far you have to go for adventure. I grew up in San Jose and when we were in elementary school, we would take our bikes to the surrounding hills all the time, anywhere from 1-10 miles. One of my brothers, when he was in middle school, would regularly bike to Santa Cruz, which is about 50 miles away.
  - Swizec 10y ago
    That, and I think my grandma used a trick. She'd let me out in the wild, but the next meal was never more than 2 or 3 hours away. This limited how far I could roam without feeling like it did. You wouldn't just skip a meal when you're 6 or 7. Not when everything's so delicious! At home, in the city, it was similar. Sure I could do whatever I wanted between school and when my parents came home 3 hours later. But there's only so much you can do in 3 hours.
  - CalRobert 10y ago
    Man, for three months I lived in San Jose and tried to bike commute to my job in Newark. I got screamed at, swerved at, and nearly killed many times. The situation improved remarkably when I moved to Berkeley (and stopped cycling in the south bay).
- eagletusk 10y ago
  I grew up in a city of 100,000 in the Midwest I was biking to school 4.5 miles at age 12. I soon figured out I could get detention, miss the bus, but still get home on my bike. Couple that with a habit of getting the mail daily, and I was able to to serve detention without my parents knowledge (I think).
valuearb 10y ago
When I was 6 or 7 years old, during the summers every morning my mom would give me $1.25, and I would get on my bike and ride to the public pool with my friends that was about 5 miles away in the center of our small town. We'd swim all day and go to the Burgerville for lunch where I could get a wonderfully tasty cheeseburger with fries and coke for my $1.25. Finally I had to be home by dinner. If we didn't go swimming, there was a 40 acre woods/orchard behind our houses and we would search it for anything exciting, like bugs, squirrels or wild animals. When I turned 8 we moved out into the country and I had to walk a few miles just to get to a friends house. We'd usually take our air rifles and go try to shoot things. By the time I was 10 most of us had our own motorcycles and parents who would let us borrow their shotguns for some real fun. This was in the 1970s.
- ahoy 10y ago
  I had a similar experience in the rural south in the 90s, for what it's worth. I was largely given free reign to tromp around the (expansive) woods, had a bb gun that I liked to tote around, and at one point had a motorcycle - a ratty little 50cc honda dirtbike that I repeatedly wrecked into ditches and briar patches. Point is, at least for "country" millennials, I think plenty of roaming did happen.
  - pshposh 10y ago
    At least for me this happened in suburbia too in the 90s. (Minus the motorcycle) edit: $1.25 at Burgerville is bonkers to me. We just had $0.29/$0.39 burger/cheeseburger Tuesday deal at McDonalds. Those days are gone...
    - rconti 10y ago
      Ditto. and ours was a slingshot not an air rifle.
    - brandonmenc 10y ago
      Ditto - early 90s, suburbia, Great Lakes region. Latchkey kid, summers spent biking around a couple mile radius, walked to the mall to play arcade games and eat McDonalds... magical times.
simonsarris 10y ago
I suspect this is not just an American or British or solely cultural thing but also a number-of-children thing. This seems like it would also be the natural response to having fewer children. If you have 3-10 kids, you can "afford" to let them off the leash so to speak, if only psychologically. Your kids going missing or getting hurt is an eventuality anyway, maybe. If you have 1 or 2 kids, you are investing a lot more mindshare per kid and are probably a lot more worried about such roaming as a result. The easiest way to get back the right to roam, I suspect, would be to simply triple your number of kids. But almost no one is willing to do that for other reasons.
- jboggan 10y ago
  Only child, grew up in the 90's in a neighborhood of one and two child families. We were all wild roamers, generally disappearing on weekends and summer days from sun up to sun down. Usually at someone else's house or in the creeks and woods between people's houses.
  - tluyben2 10y ago
    First child of 2 growing up in the 80s; I was allowed to go anywhere in our village and a bit beyond. It was fun ;) Cannot phantom being restricted to our garden...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- NTDF9 10y ago
  >> I suspect this is not just an American or British or solely cultural thing but also a number-of-children thing. This seems like it would also be the natural response to having fewer children. I suspect the same. When the first child is born, parents tend to be extremely protective of them. By the time 3rd, 4th is born, they are in "been there, done that" mode. Further, by the time the 3rd and 4th kids are born, the older ones are already starting to take up some responsibilities. That includes, rearing the younger siblings. Note: Not talking about graphs or trees
- 10y ago
FrancoDiaz 10y ago
I have a 4 year old, in my mid 40s, and think about this a lot for some reason. In the 70s during the summer, when I was around 7, we would wake up, eat breakfast, go out and about wherever we wanted, come back for lunch, out again, come back for dinner, and then out again past dark to play flashlight tag. I think I would be charged with child endangerment these days if my kid (3 years in the future) was doing stuff like that. And frankly, I think I've been conditioned to think that I would be a negligent parent if I did this. The media is part of the problem. 24/7 news, social media, and channels like ID (real life murder 24/7) scare the bejeezus out of people. But besides that, we have an acceptance of nanny-state government - that the government should be a much closer "partner" in child rearing than 40 years ago. I always say, there's a consequence for everything, including seemingly innocuous laws to protect people. But as a parent of a 4-year old in 2017 (and a 7 year old in 2020), I know I would be gnashing my teeth if my kid was roaming the streets and woods all day long...even if I did it.
- secfirstmd 10y ago
  Man that reminds me so much of my growing up experience. Spent most free time outside on a bike, playing with a football, climbing trees and only coming back indoors for food.
  - johnpowell 10y ago
    Same here. I grew up on a 80 acre farm. We lived there until I was 7 and my sister was 10. My parents didn't even get home from work until 7PM. We had a full on welding and machine shop and a pretty fantastic place for woodworking in the shop. We had two creeks that were lined with trees hanging over them. My dad had pretty much taught us how weld and use the plasma cutter and drill press and all the wood working stuff. Looking back I even find it insane to teach your 6 year old how to weld. But somehow I am still alive. But the last few years we lived there my sister asked if we could build a tree-house in one of the trees that branched out over a creek. My mom said to go for it. My dad did help build the base (he was a mechanical engineer) and we did the rest. It was massively unsafe now that I think about it 33 years later. The funny thing is we only had one major emergency at that house. My sister was making a frozen pizza and didn't check when she started preheating the oven. There were a few dozen glazed doughnuts in a box in the oven. They burst into flames and she pulled the entire rack onto the floor. We got the fire to go out. And a few days later my dad taught me a lot about replacing a kitchen floor.
guimarin 10y ago
I think there are a lot more roads/freeways now than back then as other commenters have pointed out. We've built our cities for cars, not for people. One possible side-effect of self driving cars, is it may make it safer for kids to wander again. I know I'd love to just attach a GPS tracker to my now 1yr old daughter in 5 years, and let her go where she pleases here in SF.
- stuckagain 10y ago
  Indeed, one does not simply double the population without limiting the distance people can walk. It's a simple matter of geometry. The number of households in the USA has doubled in the last 40 years. The number of major roads has radically increased. Most (85%) live in urban areas so there is only somewhere to walk in the woods if you live on the edge of the sprawl.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Or if your city is built vertically, but with lots of forests throughout it.
    - stuckagain 10y ago
      That's very rare. American cities are built on "free market" principles as distorted by politics. They are not built for livability, beauty, or any other quantitative or qualitative measure. I personally advocate for this type of development, but it's unlikely that I will ever see it built: http://carfree.com/topology.html http://carfree.com/topology.html
      - happosai 10y ago
        Like any market, it's not free but created to favor some condtions. Permits for high-rise housing are harder to get than to build a mcmansion far away. True cost of roads does not get paid - the reason why highways are full is that people don't pay market price for using them - in fact government gives them away for free. Proper prices for using roads and burning gas (externalities included) and more american cities would start building highrises for housing.
tluyben2 10y ago
That depends on the location I guess; where I live in Spain kids can basically do whatever. Hell, they come to parties with their parents that last until 8 in the morning. There we do not have the paranoid thing that guys cannot pick up / play with children of others without being called a sex offender either. He is talking about western world, but I am in Cambodia now and here kids seem to be allowed to wander (or boat in floating villages) very far and in cities I saw almost no parents picking up kids from primary school; they all seem to walk away alone. In the Netherlands, for the parents I know, are also not very restrictive or paranoid, even in cities. Maybe this is fear induced US/UK stuff mostly? I do not know about the US but the UK parents I know seen weirdly over protective to me as the article states. Not sure that is good for children, especially considering that most kids, if not allowed something, will try to do it anyway or excessively do it when older and/or away from home. Like when relatively young UK guys came to a campground in Amsterdam on their own, we (Dutch) were looking in horror at 17-18 year olds smoking weed, drinking, passing out and vomiting basically 24/7. As my parents told me to try anything, I did not feel the inclination to try a lot and as I did not have to sneak around, I never felt the need to do things in excess when away from home.
- mbroncano 10y ago
  Yup, one of the things I dearly miss from living in NL and/or Spain is really having our kids safely roaming around with no worries of CPS or worse. Here is the US it'd be mental to allow them more than a hundred feet away. So much for the land of the brave and the free!
- kalleboo 10y ago
  As for your last point, I see that here in Japan as well. There are a lot of vending machines here that sell alcohol (5% beer, 8% alcopop and shochu) with no monitoring or ID checks. And it just doesn't seem to be a problem at all. (although TBH, the cigarette machines do require an ID card to be scanned)
kqr2 10y ago
This American Life had a funny anecdote illustrating the opposite extreme where a woman who doesn't quite understand the meaning of "summer camp" leaves her kids at a campground by themselves for a week. My mother emigrated to the United States from Germany in the '50s. And her understanding of American culture and traditions wasn't always quite clear. And one of her confusions was about summer camp. She knew that kids should go to summer camp, but she didn't realize that it usually involved 24 hour adult supervision. So one week she drove us up to a campground on the coast of Malibu and set us up in this tent, and left us some groceries, and then she drove home to go back to work. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/109/transcript https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/109/...
- ma2rten 10y ago
  I feel like this more than a cultural misunderstanding. It would not be considered normal or acceptable to leave your children alone for so long in Germany either.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Well, a day or two would be normal if the environment is trustworthy – such as a known campsite – but not otherwise. I’ve also met two people who went on vacation (to another country!) on their own with 14 and 16yo, and no one seemed to consider that weird either. But yeah, even in Germany leaving 10-12yos alone for a week would be unusual in the post-1960 world.
  - zik 10y ago
    Misunderstanding or not I think that as a kid I would have thought it was a pretty awesome experience!
  - cperciva 10y ago
    It's a cultural misunderstanding, but not the sort you're thinking of. The mother in question wasn't following the culture she grew up in; rather, she was trying to follow the culture she had moved into, but failed in a hilarious way due to her misunderstanding of American culture.
shard972 10y ago
More immigration will fix this.
- stuckagain 10y ago
  From or to where?
  - imron 10y ago
    Parent was missing a /s
    - shard972 10y ago
      whoops yea i should add one for HN. I wish I could say something intelligible, but it's so complicated I don't even know what's going on anymore with western culture.
cowardlydragon 10y ago
I think most of this is the one-child family effect. You have three or four kids and one gets lost.... well, it is a tragedy, but you still have kids. You have one kid, and it's all your eggs (mostly literally) in one basket.
BarkMore 10y ago
When I was 15 years old in the 1970s, I went a 100 mile backpacking trip with five youth between 15 and 16 years old. We thought it was normal at the time. When I told my younger colleagues at work about this trip, they were shocked that our parents sent us off without adult supervision. There was also some concern that we went on this trip without a mobile phone!
- ghaff 10y ago
  I suspect that a lot of people today would be seriously bothered by the fact that mobile phones and other forms of emergency contact just weren't an option until relatively recently. I also went to college at 16 which I suspect would horrify some people today.
tommynicholas 10y ago
I was very excited to read this post, as it's premise appeals very strongly to me. Wandering is crucial, and every bit of wandering I was allowed to do as a kid I treasured then and treasure now. She lost me immediately at "Imagine if this had happened to any other group: If we kept restricting the rights of women, or minorities — it would be seen as a terrifying, intolerable assault on their freedom." Come on.
wallace_f 10y ago
Crime in many parts of America is higher than it was in medieval and middle ages in Europe, judged by intentional homicide rates. Also, crime approximated by intentional murder rate, outside of periods of war, is historically higher now than in history. source: https://ourworldindata.org/homicides/#germany https://ourworldindata.org/homicides/#germany
- kasey_junk 10y ago
  Ummm. Your citation has the exact opposite conclusion to what you say. So much so that I had to read it 3 times to make sure I wasn't missing anything. What precisely do you mean?
  - wallace_f 10y ago
    What are you looking at? According to Wikipedia(1), it is 3.9/100,000 in the USA, and 16 in the Americas. From the source(2), it was less than 1 in the USA by 1800. There also variable crime by region in America. Baltimore, St Louis, Detroit and New Orleans have homicide rates around 50. That's higher than any country in Africa or the Middle East. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#By_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... 2 - https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/homicide-rates-in-the-northeastern-united-states-1636-1900-pinker-2011-jpg.jpg https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/homici... 3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate
    - kasey_junk 10y ago
      I mean, I guess maybe I'm taking quotes like "The homicide rate in the US has fallen dramatically over the past few centuries." out of context?
      - wallace_f 10y ago
        If you look at the data sources they linked to, they don't support that -- although the data source linked immediately after that quote is from the 1600s - 1800s where the rate did fall dramatically, so maybe that was what was the intended meaning? I don't know what the author's intention is, but the actual data that is not supportive of that, and you can look at it. Edit: to below: go click on the links to the datasets I provided you. Look at the datasets. Do you see historical murder rate in the USA around 1 - 5 in the USA, and that it is now over 50 in some parts. >nor the crime rate in the USA historically compared to now My thesis was that some parts of the USA have higher crime rates than historical (they do). That was my thesis. An additional thesis is also true: At some points in history the historical murder rate in the USA was lower than it is today. You need to link to actual data. The data I linked to supports my thesis. Click on this link and look for yourself. I honestly don't know what your problem is. Are you not clicking the links or being intentionally difficult or something?: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/homicide-rates-in-the-northeastern-united-states-1636-1900-pinker-2011-jpg.jpg https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/homici...
ianbicking 10y ago
I was looking at this phone for kids recently: http://tinitell.com/ http://tinitell.com/ - just GPS and voice, but let's a kid be in contact. I'd be curious if people have tried this sort of thing, and if it works... mostly if it works psychologically. Do you find yourself really giving your kid more freedom? Does it address the anxieties that keep us from giving kids freedom? It doesn't address the highly structured time, but at least I'm doing OK there by just not opting in to most structured activities.
- schlowmo 10y ago
  I don't want to blame any parents for the desire of knowing where their kids are and that they're save. But at the same time I'm very glad that I was born two decades before parents started to think that making their kids carying a GPS tracker is the prequisite for "more freedom". I'm sure my parents were better off many times with not knowing where I was. So I think the psychological part isn't going to play out well - at least for the kids.
chrisgd 10y ago
Could this also have as much to do with the baby boomer generation growing up with more children nearby? In our neighborhood, there are only two other children my son's age.
Gustomaximus 10y ago
As another in a long line that identifies with this, my partner and I are taking steps to buy a small acreage on the outskirts of a city where we can 'free-range' our kids whilst giving me access to city work. While we also want this lifestyle we think this is super important for our young'uns (5&7) and I'm more than happy to accept the additional commute to give them this. This will take my commute to about 90 min each way but I'll try and offset with 2 days a week working from home if possible. So for all the people acknowledging the loss, it's completely an option to give your kids a free range life if you willing to give up the inner city life yourself.
- cknoxrun 10y ago
  I am very lucky, the core of my city has a practically untouched river valley running through it. My kids play in the creek and woods near the river every day. But from there we are a 10 minute walk to downtown. Are there no wild places downtown where you live?
  - Gustomaximus 10y ago
    Very much have access to bush. I'm in suburbia in the middle of a national park: https://goo.gl/Chb3fU https://goo.gl/Chb3fU We want to take that further with an acreage for animals, hobby farmer experience, rural lifestyle vs city suburb etc. I know we might hate it in reality but we'll never know if we dont try.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y ago
  Before you buy property and extend your commute to 3 hours per day, you should test if such a long commute doesn’t slowly deteriorate your life. Start today. Tell your wife you want to test the commute back home, then pick a route that takes 1.5 hours. Tomorrow take a route that takes 1.5 hours to work. Repeat for the next 3 months. Ask your employer for those 2 days per week home office. See if it works for both of you. If your employer is not willing to let you remote work now then it is going to be a big gamble later. If you can keep it up without problems, I’m all for it, go ahead and buy that property. My guess is after a while you might feel stressed and tired and think “This commute sucks. Luckily this ends after three months!”. If you catch yourself thinking this, you should reconsider your plan of moving this far away from your job. (Or think about looking for a new job closer to that property.)
sien 10y ago
It's odd that mobile phones didn't change this trend. You'd think the giving a 6 year old something they could use if they did get in trouble and that enabled parents to talk to them would make it safer. I walked to school in the 1980s and would really like my kids to do the same, but my partner, who also walked to school, won't have it.
- nfbush 10y ago
  Or because they have phones they are using them to communicate instead
NamTaf 10y ago
When I grew up (in Australia) in the early-to-mid 90s I was allowed to roam quite a bit. The rough rule of thumb was that I would need to be home by sunset or have already called mum from a friend's house letting her know where I was and agreeing to a plan to stay after sunset. I think my parents struck a pretty good balance between driving me places when it made sense vs. just making me ride a bike/walk to the local town area or to friends' houses when I wanted to go of my own accord - it taught me responsibility and independence. I really value it (still) and plan to allow the same freedoms if I have kids.
- flukus 10y ago
  Same for me, go anywhere but be back by 6 when dinner goes on the table. I wonder if this explains a lot about child hood obesity, when ever I go back to where I grew up I'm amazed at the sheer number of miles I did everyday by walking or by bike. If I stay with my parents now and go to the beach I'm getting a lift or a cab, but we used to walk or bike from the same house, often multiple times a day. Often laden with fishing gear as well.
- JammyDodger 10y ago
  Similar story, grew up in a rural part of England in the mid 90s. Simple rules, be back before dark or call if you're not. Summer holidays were the best as it wouldn't get dark until 10pm
iamleppert 10y ago
I think this is highly dependent on the parents. I'm 32 and my parents let me go all over town, pretty much where I wanted with no adult supervision, for as long as I wanted. I was allowed to stay out past dark until about 9 on school nights, later on the weekends and in the summer. All this and I have a medical condition that could get me seriously hurt or killed. My parents trusted me, and they taught me early on to be responsible. That said, I regularly see young kids in SF out by themselves. I'd say as a parent, if you are one, get ahold of yourself and allow your kids some freedom.
- chmaynard 10y ago
  > I'm 32 and my parents let me go all over town Your parents are taking a big risk. I hope you're carrying a cell phone.
kasey_junk 10y ago
Honestly, this seems like a pretty short sighted view of the safety of roaming. In any American city how far could an African American kid roam from their neighborhood in 1926? How much space could an unmarried female white expect to have before societal conventions interfered in 1926? What about an urban Irish boy in 1926 NYC, how much space could he roam in safely?
- pvg 10y ago
  In the 20s, poorer American children worked. Flappers were a thing. So I think pretty far, in all cases.
  - kasey_junk 10y ago
    Its my impression from the histories I've read of my city (Chicago) that black people certainly didn't have 6 miles of uninterrupted neighborhoods where it would be safe for them to meander in. Further, Italians, Jews, and Eastern Europeans were still very much segregated into smaller enclaves than that. The Irish were only recently able to move about freely at that point, and there were certainly places they couldn't go. The larger point of this article seems to be, rural people have more space, which doesn't seem to have much value as an observation.
    - pvg 10y ago
      I think the point of the article is that, societally, we are perhaps too focused on children's safety to the point of depriving them of some perfectly harmless freedom. The argument is not, as you seem to interpret it, strictly geometric. In the 20s, the world was far less safe for children yet far more independence and agency was required of many of them. I'm sure not every shoeshine or newspaper boy was engaging in these activities in their ethnic ghetto.
      - kasey_junk 10y ago
        I guess I just don't understand the point of the article. To me it seems an indictment of current parenting modes, based on the amount of geometric freedom allowed a very small subset of the population in comparison to the amount of geometric freedom allowed another, different very small subset of the population. I guess what I'm saying is, its a pretty ridiculous article that doesn't line up with reality now or then.
nickjarboe 10y ago
This short article is basically a bunch of quotes from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-... (2007).
gremlinsinc 10y ago
This is kind of disconcerting.. It's like the government is forcing the future generations to be acclimated to imprisonment or lack of freedom and lack of independence... so that they can be controlled..
intrasight 10y ago
I think it happened in one generation. My generation roamed quite extensively starting at about 7 years old. My daughter's generation did not. We drove her to her friends houses (or their parents to ours). Sometimes they would play outside. And I'm not saying there was no roaming, but it started much later and was not as geographically broad.
- galfarragem 10y ago
  And the worse part: by driving them to their friends' houses, it's implied that you need to like/approve their parents. During my childhood I could befriend kids whose parents would never be friends of my parents. The actual status quo intensifies segregation.
brohoolio 10y ago
What's up with parents driving kids to school? My generation, born in the late 70s, was rarely dropped off or picked up from school.
- brohoolio 10y ago
  Everyone took the bus or walked.
- magic_beans 10y ago
  I grew up in LA. I lived half an hour from school and there was no school bus service, so my parents HAD to drive me.
jemfinch 10y ago
There's nothing I want more than to let my kids roam like I did in the late 80s and early 90s. Sadly, I can't, because I'm quite literally afraid that someone will take my kids (completely ignoring that the real dangers of the foster home system vastly exceed any risk I would let my kids take).
- certifiedloud 10y ago
  Perhaps your worry is unfounded: https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/14/theres-never-been-a-safer-time-to-be-a-kid-in-america/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/...
  - qntty 10y ago
    someone = child services I assume
  - jemfinch 10y ago
    Sorry, I should have been clearer. I'm not afraid of strangers, I'm afraid of social workers for Child Protective Services. I'm afraid of legalized kidnapping because my preferred way of parenting would expose my kids to small risks now so they're at far less risk as adults.
driverdan 10y ago
> This Daily Mail piece... Lost me in literally four words. This is blogspam about something from the Daily Mail, guaranteed to be terrible. This may be talking about a legitimate problem but sure isn't citing a legitimate source.
- redsummer 10y ago
  Oh my god the daily mail!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2z-AdzgKjY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2z-AdzgKjY
jedberg 10y ago
The biggest issue is the courts. I have a two year old, and her grandma lives one mile away. I fully intend to let her walk there by herself when she is 6 or 7. Crime rate data supports me in that this is perfectly safe. But I'll always have this nagging feeling in my mind of some local busybody parent (and there are a lot) reporting me to CPS and then having to defend my decision and hope that I get a data driven judge.
- megablast 10y ago
  You could get her a bike.
- christophilus 10y ago
  Where do you live? I live in a small town in SC. We have little hoodlums ranging free all over the place. We all keep an eye out to make sure they're safe. No way in hell would anyone report their parents for negligence, and God help the social worker who tried to make that accusation.
- emiliobumachar 10y ago
  There's a way to pre-emptively ask a court whether it's legal to do something. A few years back, some researches did just that in the USA, asking whether they could publish their research despite some deal with the funding corporation, which did not want it published. I'm afraid I don't remember the details. May be a state-specific thing.
  - flukus 10y ago
    Never thought about this before but it really does make sense for every government to provide a service like this.
HillaryBriss 10y ago
as a child, i used to go over to my friend's house on my bike and a bunch of us would play D&D in the basement. afterwards, we'd get on our bikes and ride through the foggy streets alone, trying our best not to accidentally cross the path of a demogorgon. one time, we met this weird girl with really short hair and telekinetic powers. she needed a place to stay, so we hid in her in my friend's basement. it was pretty creepy. sure am glad that's over.
- rimantas 10y ago
  I have seen stranger things than this.
dba7dba 10y ago
I think this phenomenon depends on the nation/neighborhood. For example, I was watching videos of Seoul subways systems and the expat was commenting how young kids were going about on their own to school and such, without adult supervision. Same with Tokyo too. But yes, I don't let my kids out. I would only if I lived in a gated, nice community. But I don't so they rarely go out on their own, except for soccer games, school etc... Man, what have we done?
frankosaurus 10y ago
I'm tired of this claim that kids today are less free-roaming. Such articles never seem to provide empirical evidence to back it up. The term "helicopter parent" is thrown around as if it has some sort of scientific definition. In actuality, it is just a pejorative used to label any parent we have observed being overprotective. These claims about a societal shift serve only to tickle persons' biases that kids today are coddled, lack personal responsibility, and generally thin-skinned. (On the contrary, parenting styles are as diverse as children themselves.) Never mind that adults' personal anecdotes about their childhoods are unreliable and subject to massive bias. Think about it: Most people have scarcely any vivid memories of their 0-5 years. Many claim that they were allowed to roam free back in the day. Adults remember being allowed to run around, seemingly unsupervised. They are oblivious to protective steps taken by their parents. Most everyone with children knows the parenting tactic of giving kids the impression of freedom while taking discreet steps to protect them from harm.
- ScottBurson 10y ago
  How old are you?
- xiaoma 10y ago
  I think your weariness at seeing a claim which from all evidence appears true not backed up by "empirical evidence" is a bit self-indulgent. I've met many N American adults whose own childhoods align with what the article says and almost none who said they had a shorter leash than children do now. I've seen more children taking the metro by themselves in Japan in a one week visit than I did living the US for three years. It's also undeniable that social workers taking children from families due to them having been unsupervised is something that the state barely had resources for 100 years ago even if, contrary to numerous historical accounts, it had the will. No, I don't have statistics on exactly how far away the average 9 year-old was allowed to bike in various years. History books also don't come with a stack of empirical evidence to back them up. At some point, you have to either accept them until seeing more compelling conflicting accounts or dig into the sources and do the research yourself. If numerous anecdotal claims and published accounts isn't good enough for you, then the onus is on you to provide a more convincing argument in the opposite direction.
ghola2k5 10y ago
Also lost the right to catch polio
- stuckagain 10y ago
  Working on that. https://www.buzzfeed.com/azeenghorayshi/trump-kennedy-antivaccine https://www.buzzfeed.com/azeenghorayshi/trump-kennedy-antiva...
dbancajas 10y ago
I came from Philippines. Now in the US. When I was young I had a bike. I would go out in the morning anywhere I want to go, come back for lunch to eat lunch. Go out again and comeback before dinner. These days, this is not possible anymore. I don't know why. I think people have less kids and are more afraid of kidnappings etc. I miss those days and I wish I could give my children that kind of freedom.
zizzles 10y ago
Early-mid 2000's kid here. I roamed without second thoughts: Explored forests, cities, trespassed on forsaken enchanted lands and everything in between. I admit there has been stark differences in outdoor activities; but this isn't a "it's too dangerous for Johnny to go outside" scenario, it's a "Johnny is too glued to his iPad 8.0 to enjoy going outside" scenario.
julienmarie 10y ago
One thing lacking though is a view on the evolution of the area between the times of the great grand father and the son. How did the urbanization evolved ? I remember 25 years ago, aged 9/10, when I was living in ( really ) rural France, I was riding by bicycle at least 10 kms around, walking in woods, building tree houses.
noonespecial 10y ago
I was thinking about this the other day. Ironically this is the safest time in all of history to let kids do this. Crime is historically very low and our kids want to carry around magical devices that lets us know where they are at all times and contact them instantly. This should be a golden age, yet we've turned it into jail. What gives everyone? Edit: And by "what gives" I mean literally, I live in the US and have children ages 7-12 and I don't let them do these things solely because I'm afraid of government busy-bodies. Not crime, not injury, not abduction. I'm frankly and bluntly afraid of the limitless power a bored bureaucrat will help himself/herself to over my family if given the slightest reason. That's what gives for me anyway.
- bluthru 10y ago
  >Ironically this is the safest time in all of history to let kids do this. Well what's the cause and effect here? Maybe it happens less often today just because there are less kids outside.
  - clarkmoody 10y ago
    There is definitely a vicious cycle: * Media hypes a tragedy concerning a child * Parents on the margin keep their kids indoors more often * Streets have less children * Automobiles become less vigilant / Criminals concentrate on the fewer remaining kids outside * Tragedy happens again
- manmal 10y ago
  Crime is not the problem, traffic is. I grew up in a blind alley, and the whole town was really low in traffic. I started cruising around with my bike together with the neighbors at age 7, and we met a car every 10 minutes, tops. They slowed down to a stop, mostly, when they saw us. Fast forward, we are living in a city of 30k citizens now, though on the outskirts; there is a major road about 200m away, and although we have a tight speed limit in our area (30kmh), I'm not sure we can allow roaming around before age 10. Cats are run over all the time here, people just don't look before going around corners. And then there's the occasional report (or rumor?) of people trying to spirit children away from their parents in the local mall. That being said, maybe I felt a lot safer as a kid in the same circumstances.
zanethomas 10y ago
In 1956 I was 6 years old in Pasadena, CA. We lived in a trailer park on the east side of town. Each morning I went down to Colorado Blvd, by myself, wait for a city bus, rode half way across town, got off the bus and walked a few blocks to a private school, reversing the trip each afternoon. I don't think people have changed, I don't believe the world is more dangerous, so why can't kids now do what I did?
cavanasm 10y ago
I'm highly skeptical of all the claims made by this blog, as the author isn't exactly making a well reasoned argument for unleashing children on the wilderness again (although I do find all the discussion here about child roaming positively riveting); citing a Daily Mail puff piece is one thing, but the crime stats (and interpretation) are pretty awful. The "Stranger Danger?" subsection in particular seems insane. 3% of children under 5 being murdered by strangers absolutely does not mean your child is safer with strangers.
remarkEon 10y ago
A lot of the anecdotes in this thread seem to be from more rural areas or out in a small town. I grew up in Minneapolis (born in the 80s) and could do all these things in our neighborhood in the summers (except for shooting guns, but I'd get that in the summer with my cousins in South Dakota). I'd meet up with the neighborhood kids around 11 and my mom (or one of their moms) would have lunch and snacks ready for us around 1 or so. We'd just roam around the neighborhood all day playing street hockey or basketball or whatever. ...none of this goes on in my neighborhood anymore. One proximate cause that I think we're missing is that a lot of us moved away, and housing costs are so high that I'm putting off buying a home and my friends are too - or are doing so out in the suburbs. Demographic changeover could be a contributing factor.
antoniuschan99 10y ago
At what age can a child roam without supervision these days? Aren't there laws that require kids below 12 to be with adult supervision at home?
Animats 10y ago
Early episodes of Sesame Street now come with a warning: "These early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grownups and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child."[1] This is episode 1.[2] This may terrify today's parents. Watch the first three minutes. [1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sesame-street-for-adults-only/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sesame-street-for-adults-only/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLEiZmPNguU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLEiZmPNguU
paradite 10y ago
This phenomenon is also very pronounced in China, mostly due to urbanization I think. When my parents or grandparents were still children, most of them live in small towns or countryside, where facilities are far away and main mode of communication is walking or cycling. There was nothing wrong with travelling far distance as a child, because there was not much danger. Also, there wasn't really any alternatives to travelling alone if your house is 2km away from the school or kids-playing-place and your parents have better things to do than sending you there. Now most children grow up in cities, where cars and large density of population can both pose danger to children wandering around. Plus parents will just drive their kids to school which costs only a few minutes.
MichaelMoser123 10y ago
I don't think it's that bad nowadays. My ten year old daughter is walking quite a distance in pursuit of her pokemon. kids tend to take as much freedom as they need (as they grow older)
kriro 10y ago
I have thought about this a lot. I pass my elementary school on my way to work each morning. As kids we just walked there it was a 10-15 minute walk. At around the 4th grade we took our bikes. We were accompanied by our parents the first week or so and then just walked in groups. No danger, no incidents, nothing. And this was true for all kids that attended the school. There were maybe 3 out of the 40ish kids in my grade that lived too far away and arrived by car. These days...there's traffic backing up all around the school, every single kid arrives by car, the thingy where you can lock up your bikes is completely empty. Our days as kids looked like this: Back home from school, lunch, play until the night...usually outdoors wherever we found interesting stuff. No set dates or sheduling, you just walked over to your friends house and figured out what to do, maybe pick up a couple of other friends. If someone wasn't there you just tried the next house. The activities involved climbing trees, building your own boat to paddle on a small creek and other things that would be considered deadly activities these days. Lots of sports and getting dirty, too. Surprisingly enough no kids got abducted. On the flip side I watched very little TV (we didn't have a TV for a decent chunk of my childhood) and I didn't have any computer for a good chunk of my childhood either. I also think parents spent more quality time with their kids "back in my day". Family trips to the zoo or just playing football in a park or something. I see these parent/kid teams a lot less these days. It's a very strange development because the benefits seem so obvious to me and the "downside" is spending more time with your kids or letting them do more things they enjoy.
- thirdsun 10y ago
  > These days...there's traffic backing up all around the school, every single kid arrives by car, the thingy where you can lock up your bikes is completely empty. As a german this seems insane to me. For a long time I actually thought that driving the kids to the school was just something that is misrepresented in american media like films and tv shows. We went to school on our own, regardless of distance, either by public transport or by walking and biking.
peter_retief 10y ago
In the 70's I used to roam for miles on foot and on bike. My own children hardly venture outdoors. The fear of crime is much greater now. What did we give up to lose our freedom?
temp2093745 10y ago
When I grew up in Berlin in the 90s I was not really given restrictions on how far I could roam. I just had to leave a note or give a call if I wanted to stay out beyond a certain time. I remember being given keys to the apartment being a big deal since it meant freedom to me, less hassle for my parents - since they didn't have to fetch me from school or kindergarden every day - and they did a lot of emphasizing that I should never ever forget or lose them somewhere. And that was in a big city. Now I live in a bit more rural area where many kids cycle several kilometers to school every day and I also see them on bikeways during school vacations, so it seems like most parents here are fine with letting them roam.
robochat42 10y ago
I think that this has been largely caused by the media. Every time that a child was attacked or taken in the UK during my childhood, the press would go crazy for weeks. 'Stranger Danger' was a phrase that often came up. The resulting parental hysteria restricted the freedom of children and now it has become normalised. Now it is negligent to allow your kids to roam free and you might get in trouble for it.
daxfohl 10y ago
The strange thing is that CPS is considered the enemy here. It seems like CPS should be a group that listens to the needs of parents and helps build a community to cater to those needs, not some kind of self-important authority figure. Maybe it should be rebranded as Child Development Services or something.
daxfohl 10y ago
There's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma working here too. If you're the only family that lets their child wander, your child is far more likely to be the one that's abducted. Therefore nobody lets their kids wander, so everyone's kids have a substandard childhood.
scandox 10y ago
Another massive freedom kids have lost is the right to have independent friendships with adults. Given what we have collectively understood about the behaviour of some adults this is perhaps understandable. However it is a big loss for the majority cases. As a kid I spent whole days out on the farm with farmhands. Often just one on one. One of them in particular taught me to drive a tractor and all about plants and animals. Also I got all my ethics from him since my own father didn't do ethics. So I am sad for my kids that they will be very unlikely to have that experience.
- CalRobert 10y ago
  I don't even talk to kids because you never know which ones have hysterical moms. Recently I was on a camping trip with a friend and a kid (about 13) came over and chatted about fishing, etc. . We wanted to talk more, and their dad seemed affable enough, but there was a definite "OK, we're going to stand on the opposite side of the campground from you and have this conversation loudly" vibe.
vidoc 10y ago
Very interesting, irrational fears and obsession for safety affect so many things nowadays. Every-time I go snowboarding I'm stunned at how in just 20 years, we pretty much went from zero to something like 90%+ skiers wearing helmets.
- ci5er 10y ago
  That's funny. I didn't know that had happened. I can't think of any serious skiing accidents that have happened in/near my social circle, nor on the news, where a helmet would have been determinative to the outcome. In what percentage of serious skiing accidents would a helmet help. Or is it merely one of those "precautionary principle" things: why take a chance?
  - vidoc 10y ago
    > In what percentage of serious skiing accidents would a helmet help. Or is it merely one of those "precautionary principle" things: why take a chance? I'm not quiet sure about the percentage, but I'm certain wearing a helmet does lessen the chances a bit. The problem really is that the majority of ski injuries are not exactly what we imagine - it's pretty natural to imagine smashing our skulls on a rock or on some ice, it's very graphic too, I'm not saying they don't exist, but I can tell you that spine/cervical injuries are way more common. In addition to avalanches of course where the helmet isn't particularly useful, another frequent (and graphic!) one is beeing traversed by a tree branch :P Just to be clear, I'm not saying helmets are useless tho, but I note that may give a false sense of security.
sgarrity 10y ago
It's cars, cars, cars. That's what I'm afraid of for my kids.
icu 10y ago
As a parent of a young child in London there is no way I'm letting my son wander around our area without being within eyesight. There are just too many degenerate members of British society to take a chance with my son's life and welfare. On the other hand, if we were to ever move to New Zealand where I lived most of my life, or to the town in Poland where my son's mother grew up, this would be an entirely different story. Anywhere in New Zealand is quite honestly Disneyland compared to the UK (and I am thinking of the 'hard' parts in New Zealand like Māngere or Ōtāhuhu)... and Radomsko in Poland still has some nice forest areas and a lake that is walking distance from the town. I think the author needs to take into account that there are just some places in the world where you must be on guard and be extra vigilant. This isn't limited to London, for example Cape Town in South Africa or Rio de Janeiro in Brazil spring to mind. I am however very much aware of the impact my decision to keep my family in London will have on my son's childhood and frankly I would rather move outside of the M25, to say the outer edges of Surrey, where I would feel slightly more at ease but still ever vigilant. Until I can afford to do that, holidays to Poland will have to suffice.
49531 10y ago
Anecdotally I was born in 1990, I spent the first 10 years of my life in Tacoma WA, USA where during summers I would leave in the morning and be gone all day, all of the neighborhood kids would do the same. When I was 10 we moved to San Diego, CA USA, where I lived until adulthood. During the summers had the same freedom, I would roam free with the neighborhood kids all day long. Now I'm married with children of my own (3 and 0) and think about the scariness of letting them roam free, but they're really young so I think that is normal. However, I also have 2 stepsons who are 13 and 11. During the summers they roam free, we have a field behind our backyard which butts up against a forest and an industrial park, and sometimes they're gone for the entire day. The only real difference is they have cell phones now, and can call us if there is an emergency.
OpenDrapery 10y ago
I saw it written somewhere that when we were young, we had freedom but no information. Today, kids have all the information, but no freedom. Proof once again that life is a series of tradeoffs.
cafard 10y ago
Every several months something like this is posted on HN, and I log in to post a couple of things: 1. During the baby boom, there was a lot of intermittent surveillance. Fewer mothers worked, and every ten or fifteen minutes one might give a look out the back window to see what was going on. This was not intrusive, but it kept down the mischief level on the one hand and the anxiety level on the other. 2. People on HN have a way of talking about suburbs as if they are all cul-de-sacs surrounded by highways. I grew up in a close-in suburb of a large Midwestern city. I was three blocks from school and library, two blocks from grocer, baker, and five-and-dime. In sixth grade, after a transfer, I did take the bus to and from school, though I could and sometimes did walk. Junior high was a mile and a quarter, usually reached by bike.
- bootload 10y ago
  "During the baby boom, there was a lot of intermittent surveillance. Fewer mothers worked, and every ten or fifteen minutes one might give a look out the back window to see what was going on." @cafard sort of applies to suburban areas. In semi-rural hilly country on bikes and foot, there is no houses for miles. My folks and others wouldn't have been able to see me or my friends, though we'd tell them where we'd been.
deleted 10y ago
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bamboozled 10y ago
This story fits amazingly well with the lyrics from "Where do the Children Play" by Cat Stevens, released back in 1970. [1] Just felt like it was worth mentioning because, let's face it, he's asking a great and important question :) Well I think it's fine, building jumbo planes. Or takin' a ride on a cosmic train. Switch on summer from a slot machine. Get what you want to if you want, Cause you can get anything. I know we've come a long way, We're changin' day to day, But tell me, Where do the children play? By Cat Stevens [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_vy-eWGKSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_vy-eWGKSk
SZJX 10y ago
Well one might also argue that there are much more unsafe factors out there nowadays than before though. I guess the increasing inequality and social segregation also has something to do with it. Generally, the modern life is just factually much different from the life 100 years ago. Though I definitely agree this shouldn't go too far. There was this article that I just read a few days ago, that stated that Iceland was able to drastically curb teenage drug/alcohol use with some measures, which included after school interest clubs etc. and especially, a law that prevented them from being outside after 0:00 (summer) or 22:00 (winter)... which I certainly find way too draconian. You'd definitely still want to give the teens much more freedom even if it entails a risk of them getting influenced by some negative factors. Still, it's their life and you need to let them learn stuffs and explore on their own.
forestriver 10y ago
Relevant: https://www.outsideonline.com/1928266/we-dont-need-no-education https://www.outsideonline.com/1928266/we-dont-need-no-educat...

556 points by bootload 10y ago

"When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere. It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision." Thought about this a lot. In kinder it was 400m for me. PS, 20km and by the age of 16 my range was more than 200 SqrKm. This was alone, on foot, by bike, train or bus.

deleted 10y ago

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kasey_junk 10y ago

For what its worth, the vast majority of children in my south side Chicago (gasp) neighborhood, walk to elementary school without a parent. They are often without adult supervision in the hours after school lets out, and before their parents come home from work. There are frequently older siblings, but that doesn't seem like some vast generational sea change. Instead, I think this story is more about multi-generational moves from rural to urban life, that resonates with parents who can afford to be over protective of their children and feel bad about it.

Swizec 10y ago

I remember when I was a kid, I was allowed to roam and go on adventures. Especially at my grandma's house because she was next to the woods. I thought I went so far. I thought I was so adventurous. Turns out the max I ever dared go was about 1km. Maaaaybe 2km. The distances that used to look so far and adventurous, don't even feel like a walk anymore. Maybe that was just me, but it sounds like even if you give kids freedom to go wherever, they won't really roam that far. So maybe it's pretty safe to give them that freedom? They'll use it age appropriately. By the time I would have roamed further than the 1 or 2 kilometers, I had discovered books and internet and computers and I was like "lol why would I leave the living room?"

sbov 10y ago
I think it depends upon the kids and how far you have to go for adventure. I grew up in San Jose and when we were in elementary school, we would take our bikes to the surrounding hills all the time, anywhere from 1-10 miles. One of my brothers, when he was in middle school, would regularly bike to Santa Cruz, which is about 50 miles away.
- Swizec 10y ago
  That, and I think my grandma used a trick. She'd let me out in the wild, but the next meal was never more than 2 or 3 hours away. This limited how far I could roam without feeling like it did. You wouldn't just skip a meal when you're 6 or 7. Not when everything's so delicious! At home, in the city, it was similar. Sure I could do whatever I wanted between school and when my parents came home 3 hours later. But there's only so much you can do in 3 hours.
- CalRobert 10y ago
  Man, for three months I lived in San Jose and tried to bike commute to my job in Newark. I got screamed at, swerved at, and nearly killed many times. The situation improved remarkably when I moved to Berkeley (and stopped cycling in the south bay).
eagletusk 10y ago
I grew up in a city of 100,000 in the Midwest I was biking to school 4.5 miles at age 12. I soon figured out I could get detention, miss the bus, but still get home on my bike. Couple that with a habit of getting the mail daily, and I was able to to serve detention without my parents knowledge (I think).

valuearb 10y ago

When I was 6 or 7 years old, during the summers every morning my mom would give me $1.25, and I would get on my bike and ride to the public pool with my friends that was about 5 miles away in the center of our small town. We'd swim all day and go to the Burgerville for lunch where I could get a wonderfully tasty cheeseburger with fries and coke for my $1.25. Finally I had to be home by dinner. If we didn't go swimming, there was a 40 acre woods/orchard behind our houses and we would search it for anything exciting, like bugs, squirrels or wild animals. When I turned 8 we moved out into the country and I had to walk a few miles just to get to a friends house. We'd usually take our air rifles and go try to shoot things. By the time I was 10 most of us had our own motorcycles and parents who would let us borrow their shotguns for some real fun. This was in the 1970s.

ahoy 10y ago
I had a similar experience in the rural south in the 90s, for what it's worth. I was largely given free reign to tromp around the (expansive) woods, had a bb gun that I liked to tote around, and at one point had a motorcycle - a ratty little 50cc honda dirtbike that I repeatedly wrecked into ditches and briar patches. Point is, at least for "country" millennials, I think plenty of roaming did happen.
- pshposh 10y ago
  At least for me this happened in suburbia too in the 90s. (Minus the motorcycle) edit: $1.25 at Burgerville is bonkers to me. We just had $0.29/$0.39 burger/cheeseburger Tuesday deal at McDonalds. Those days are gone...
  - rconti 10y ago
    Ditto. and ours was a slingshot not an air rifle.
  - brandonmenc 10y ago
    Ditto - early 90s, suburbia, Great Lakes region. Latchkey kid, summers spent biking around a couple mile radius, walked to the mall to play arcade games and eat McDonalds... magical times.

simonsarris 10y ago

I suspect this is not just an American or British or solely cultural thing but also a number-of-children thing. This seems like it would also be the natural response to having fewer children. If you have 3-10 kids, you can "afford" to let them off the leash so to speak, if only psychologically. Your kids going missing or getting hurt is an eventuality anyway, maybe. If you have 1 or 2 kids, you are investing a lot more mindshare per kid and are probably a lot more worried about such roaming as a result. The easiest way to get back the right to roam, I suspect, would be to simply triple your number of kids. But almost no one is willing to do that for other reasons.

jboggan 10y ago
Only child, grew up in the 90's in a neighborhood of one and two child families. We were all wild roamers, generally disappearing on weekends and summer days from sun up to sun down. Usually at someone else's house or in the creeks and woods between people's houses.
- tluyben2 10y ago
  First child of 2 growing up in the 80s; I was allowed to go anywhere in our village and a bit beyond. It was fun ;) Cannot phantom being restricted to our garden...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
NTDF9 10y ago
>> I suspect this is not just an American or British or solely cultural thing but also a number-of-children thing. This seems like it would also be the natural response to having fewer children. I suspect the same. When the first child is born, parents tend to be extremely protective of them. By the time 3rd, 4th is born, they are in "been there, done that" mode. Further, by the time the 3rd and 4th kids are born, the older ones are already starting to take up some responsibilities. That includes, rearing the younger siblings. Note: Not talking about graphs or trees
10y ago

FrancoDiaz 10y ago

I have a 4 year old, in my mid 40s, and think about this a lot for some reason. In the 70s during the summer, when I was around 7, we would wake up, eat breakfast, go out and about wherever we wanted, come back for lunch, out again, come back for dinner, and then out again past dark to play flashlight tag. I think I would be charged with child endangerment these days if my kid (3 years in the future) was doing stuff like that. And frankly, I think I've been conditioned to think that I would be a negligent parent if I did this. The media is part of the problem. 24/7 news, social media, and channels like ID (real life murder 24/7) scare the bejeezus out of people. But besides that, we have an acceptance of nanny-state government - that the government should be a much closer "partner" in child rearing than 40 years ago. I always say, there's a consequence for everything, including seemingly innocuous laws to protect people. But as a parent of a 4-year old in 2017 (and a 7 year old in 2020), I know I would be gnashing my teeth if my kid was roaming the streets and woods all day long...even if I did it.

secfirstmd 10y ago
Man that reminds me so much of my growing up experience. Spent most free time outside on a bike, playing with a football, climbing trees and only coming back indoors for food.
- johnpowell 10y ago
  Same here. I grew up on a 80 acre farm. We lived there until I was 7 and my sister was 10. My parents didn't even get home from work until 7PM. We had a full on welding and machine shop and a pretty fantastic place for woodworking in the shop. We had two creeks that were lined with trees hanging over them. My dad had pretty much taught us how weld and use the plasma cutter and drill press and all the wood working stuff. Looking back I even find it insane to teach your 6 year old how to weld. But somehow I am still alive. But the last few years we lived there my sister asked if we could build a tree-house in one of the trees that branched out over a creek. My mom said to go for it. My dad did help build the base (he was a mechanical engineer) and we did the rest. It was massively unsafe now that I think about it 33 years later. The funny thing is we only had one major emergency at that house. My sister was making a frozen pizza and didn't check when she started preheating the oven. There were a few dozen glazed doughnuts in a box in the oven. They burst into flames and she pulled the entire rack onto the floor. We got the fire to go out. And a few days later my dad taught me a lot about replacing a kitchen floor.

guimarin 10y ago

I think there are a lot more roads/freeways now than back then as other commenters have pointed out. We've built our cities for cars, not for people. One possible side-effect of self driving cars, is it may make it safer for kids to wander again. I know I'd love to just attach a GPS tracker to my now 1yr old daughter in 5 years, and let her go where she pleases here in SF.

stuckagain 10y ago
Indeed, one does not simply double the population without limiting the distance people can walk. It's a simple matter of geometry. The number of households in the USA has doubled in the last 40 years. The number of major roads has radically increased. Most (85%) live in urban areas so there is only somewhere to walk in the woods if you live on the edge of the sprawl.
- kuschku 10y ago
  Or if your city is built vertically, but with lots of forests throughout it.
  - stuckagain 10y ago
    That's very rare. American cities are built on "free market" principles as distorted by politics. They are not built for livability, beauty, or any other quantitative or qualitative measure. I personally advocate for this type of development, but it's unlikely that I will ever see it built: http://carfree.com/topology.html http://carfree.com/topology.html
    - happosai 10y ago
      Like any market, it's not free but created to favor some condtions. Permits for high-rise housing are harder to get than to build a mcmansion far away. True cost of roads does not get paid - the reason why highways are full is that people don't pay market price for using them - in fact government gives them away for free. Proper prices for using roads and burning gas (externalities included) and more american cities would start building highrises for housing.

tluyben2 10y ago

That depends on the location I guess; where I live in Spain kids can basically do whatever. Hell, they come to parties with their parents that last until 8 in the morning. There we do not have the paranoid thing that guys cannot pick up / play with children of others without being called a sex offender either. He is talking about western world, but I am in Cambodia now and here kids seem to be allowed to wander (or boat in floating villages) very far and in cities I saw almost no parents picking up kids from primary school; they all seem to walk away alone. In the Netherlands, for the parents I know, are also not very restrictive or paranoid, even in cities. Maybe this is fear induced US/UK stuff mostly? I do not know about the US but the UK parents I know seen weirdly over protective to me as the article states. Not sure that is good for children, especially considering that most kids, if not allowed something, will try to do it anyway or excessively do it when older and/or away from home. Like when relatively young UK guys came to a campground in Amsterdam on their own, we (Dutch) were looking in horror at 17-18 year olds smoking weed, drinking, passing out and vomiting basically 24/7. As my parents told me to try anything, I did not feel the inclination to try a lot and as I did not have to sneak around, I never felt the need to do things in excess when away from home.

mbroncano 10y ago
Yup, one of the things I dearly miss from living in NL and/or Spain is really having our kids safely roaming around with no worries of CPS or worse. Here is the US it'd be mental to allow them more than a hundred feet away. So much for the land of the brave and the free!
kalleboo 10y ago
As for your last point, I see that here in Japan as well. There are a lot of vending machines here that sell alcohol (5% beer, 8% alcopop and shochu) with no monitoring or ID checks. And it just doesn't seem to be a problem at all. (although TBH, the cigarette machines do require an ID card to be scanned)

kqr2 10y ago

This American Life had a funny anecdote illustrating the opposite extreme where a woman who doesn't quite understand the meaning of "summer camp" leaves her kids at a campground by themselves for a week. My mother emigrated to the United States from Germany in the '50s. And her understanding of American culture and traditions wasn't always quite clear. And one of her confusions was about summer camp. She knew that kids should go to summer camp, but she didn't realize that it usually involved 24 hour adult supervision. So one week she drove us up to a campground on the coast of Malibu and set us up in this tent, and left us some groceries, and then she drove home to go back to work. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/109/transcript https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/109/...

ma2rten 10y ago
I feel like this more than a cultural misunderstanding. It would not be considered normal or acceptable to leave your children alone for so long in Germany either.
- kuschku 10y ago
  Well, a day or two would be normal if the environment is trustworthy – such as a known campsite – but not otherwise. I’ve also met two people who went on vacation (to another country!) on their own with 14 and 16yo, and no one seemed to consider that weird either. But yeah, even in Germany leaving 10-12yos alone for a week would be unusual in the post-1960 world.
- zik 10y ago
  Misunderstanding or not I think that as a kid I would have thought it was a pretty awesome experience!
- cperciva 10y ago
  It's a cultural misunderstanding, but not the sort you're thinking of. The mother in question wasn't following the culture she grew up in; rather, she was trying to follow the culture she had moved into, but failed in a hilarious way due to her misunderstanding of American culture.

shard972 10y ago

More immigration will fix this.

stuckagain 10y ago
From or to where?
- imron 10y ago
  Parent was missing a /s
  - shard972 10y ago
    whoops yea i should add one for HN. I wish I could say something intelligible, but it's so complicated I don't even know what's going on anymore with western culture.

cowardlydragon 10y ago

I think most of this is the one-child family effect. You have three or four kids and one gets lost.... well, it is a tragedy, but you still have kids. You have one kid, and it's all your eggs (mostly literally) in one basket.

BarkMore 10y ago

When I was 15 years old in the 1970s, I went a 100 mile backpacking trip with five youth between 15 and 16 years old. We thought it was normal at the time. When I told my younger colleagues at work about this trip, they were shocked that our parents sent us off without adult supervision. There was also some concern that we went on this trip without a mobile phone!

ghaff 10y ago
I suspect that a lot of people today would be seriously bothered by the fact that mobile phones and other forms of emergency contact just weren't an option until relatively recently. I also went to college at 16 which I suspect would horrify some people today.

tommynicholas 10y ago

I was very excited to read this post, as it's premise appeals very strongly to me. Wandering is crucial, and every bit of wandering I was allowed to do as a kid I treasured then and treasure now. She lost me immediately at "Imagine if this had happened to any other group: If we kept restricting the rights of women, or minorities — it would be seen as a terrifying, intolerable assault on their freedom." Come on.

wallace_f 10y ago

Crime in many parts of America is higher than it was in medieval and middle ages in Europe, judged by intentional homicide rates. Also, crime approximated by intentional murder rate, outside of periods of war, is historically higher now than in history. source: https://ourworldindata.org/homicides/#germany https://ourworldindata.org/homicides/#germany

kasey_junk 10y ago
Ummm. Your citation has the exact opposite conclusion to what you say. So much so that I had to read it 3 times to make sure I wasn't missing anything. What precisely do you mean?
- wallace_f 10y ago
  What are you looking at? According to Wikipedia(1), it is 3.9/100,000 in the USA, and 16 in the Americas. From the source(2), it was less than 1 in the USA by 1800. There also variable crime by region in America. Baltimore, St Louis, Detroit and New Orleans have homicide rates around 50. That's higher than any country in Africa or the Middle East. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#By_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... 2 - https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/homicide-rates-in-the-northeastern-united-states-1636-1900-pinker-2011-jpg.jpg https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/homici... 3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate
  - kasey_junk 10y ago
    I mean, I guess maybe I'm taking quotes like "The homicide rate in the US has fallen dramatically over the past few centuries." out of context?
    - wallace_f 10y ago
      If you look at the data sources they linked to, they don't support that -- although the data source linked immediately after that quote is from the 1600s - 1800s where the rate did fall dramatically, so maybe that was what was the intended meaning? I don't know what the author's intention is, but the actual data that is not supportive of that, and you can look at it. Edit: to below: go click on the links to the datasets I provided you. Look at the datasets. Do you see historical murder rate in the USA around 1 - 5 in the USA, and that it is now over 50 in some parts. >nor the crime rate in the USA historically compared to now My thesis was that some parts of the USA have higher crime rates than historical (they do). That was my thesis. An additional thesis is also true: At some points in history the historical murder rate in the USA was lower than it is today. You need to link to actual data. The data I linked to supports my thesis. Click on this link and look for yourself. I honestly don't know what your problem is. Are you not clicking the links or being intentionally difficult or something?: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/homicide-rates-in-the-northeastern-united-states-1636-1900-pinker-2011-jpg.jpg https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/homici...

ianbicking 10y ago

I was looking at this phone for kids recently: http://tinitell.com/ http://tinitell.com/ - just GPS and voice, but let's a kid be in contact. I'd be curious if people have tried this sort of thing, and if it works... mostly if it works psychologically. Do you find yourself really giving your kid more freedom? Does it address the anxieties that keep us from giving kids freedom? It doesn't address the highly structured time, but at least I'm doing OK there by just not opting in to most structured activities.

schlowmo 10y ago
I don't want to blame any parents for the desire of knowing where their kids are and that they're save. But at the same time I'm very glad that I was born two decades before parents started to think that making their kids carying a GPS tracker is the prequisite for "more freedom". I'm sure my parents were better off many times with not knowing where I was. So I think the psychological part isn't going to play out well - at least for the kids.

chrisgd 10y ago

Could this also have as much to do with the baby boomer generation growing up with more children nearby? In our neighborhood, there are only two other children my son's age.

Gustomaximus 10y ago

As another in a long line that identifies with this, my partner and I are taking steps to buy a small acreage on the outskirts of a city where we can 'free-range' our kids whilst giving me access to city work. While we also want this lifestyle we think this is super important for our young'uns (5&7) and I'm more than happy to accept the additional commute to give them this. This will take my commute to about 90 min each way but I'll try and offset with 2 days a week working from home if possible. So for all the people acknowledging the loss, it's completely an option to give your kids a free range life if you willing to give up the inner city life yourself.

cknoxrun 10y ago
I am very lucky, the core of my city has a practically untouched river valley running through it. My kids play in the creek and woods near the river every day. But from there we are a 10 minute walk to downtown. Are there no wild places downtown where you live?
- Gustomaximus 10y ago
  Very much have access to bush. I'm in suburbia in the middle of a national park: https://goo.gl/Chb3fU https://goo.gl/Chb3fU We want to take that further with an acreage for animals, hobby farmer experience, rural lifestyle vs city suburb etc. I know we might hate it in reality but we'll never know if we dont try.
tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y ago
Before you buy property and extend your commute to 3 hours per day, you should test if such a long commute doesn’t slowly deteriorate your life. Start today. Tell your wife you want to test the commute back home, then pick a route that takes 1.5 hours. Tomorrow take a route that takes 1.5 hours to work. Repeat for the next 3 months. Ask your employer for those 2 days per week home office. See if it works for both of you. If your employer is not willing to let you remote work now then it is going to be a big gamble later. If you can keep it up without problems, I’m all for it, go ahead and buy that property. My guess is after a while you might feel stressed and tired and think “This commute sucks. Luckily this ends after three months!”. If you catch yourself thinking this, you should reconsider your plan of moving this far away from your job. (Or think about looking for a new job closer to that property.)

sien 10y ago

It's odd that mobile phones didn't change this trend. You'd think the giving a 6 year old something they could use if they did get in trouble and that enabled parents to talk to them would make it safer. I walked to school in the 1980s and would really like my kids to do the same, but my partner, who also walked to school, won't have it.

nfbush 10y ago
Or because they have phones they are using them to communicate instead

NamTaf 10y ago

When I grew up (in Australia) in the early-to-mid 90s I was allowed to roam quite a bit. The rough rule of thumb was that I would need to be home by sunset or have already called mum from a friend's house letting her know where I was and agreeing to a plan to stay after sunset. I think my parents struck a pretty good balance between driving me places when it made sense vs. just making me ride a bike/walk to the local town area or to friends' houses when I wanted to go of my own accord - it taught me responsibility and independence. I really value it (still) and plan to allow the same freedoms if I have kids.

flukus 10y ago
Same for me, go anywhere but be back by 6 when dinner goes on the table. I wonder if this explains a lot about child hood obesity, when ever I go back to where I grew up I'm amazed at the sheer number of miles I did everyday by walking or by bike. If I stay with my parents now and go to the beach I'm getting a lift or a cab, but we used to walk or bike from the same house, often multiple times a day. Often laden with fishing gear as well.
JammyDodger 10y ago
Similar story, grew up in a rural part of England in the mid 90s. Simple rules, be back before dark or call if you're not. Summer holidays were the best as it wouldn't get dark until 10pm

iamleppert 10y ago

I think this is highly dependent on the parents. I'm 32 and my parents let me go all over town, pretty much where I wanted with no adult supervision, for as long as I wanted. I was allowed to stay out past dark until about 9 on school nights, later on the weekends and in the summer. All this and I have a medical condition that could get me seriously hurt or killed. My parents trusted me, and they taught me early on to be responsible. That said, I regularly see young kids in SF out by themselves. I'd say as a parent, if you are one, get ahold of yourself and allow your kids some freedom.

chmaynard 10y ago
> I'm 32 and my parents let me go all over town Your parents are taking a big risk. I hope you're carrying a cell phone.

kasey_junk 10y ago

Honestly, this seems like a pretty short sighted view of the safety of roaming. In any American city how far could an African American kid roam from their neighborhood in 1926? How much space could an unmarried female white expect to have before societal conventions interfered in 1926? What about an urban Irish boy in 1926 NYC, how much space could he roam in safely?

pvg 10y ago
In the 20s, poorer American children worked. Flappers were a thing. So I think pretty far, in all cases.
- kasey_junk 10y ago
  Its my impression from the histories I've read of my city (Chicago) that black people certainly didn't have 6 miles of uninterrupted neighborhoods where it would be safe for them to meander in. Further, Italians, Jews, and Eastern Europeans were still very much segregated into smaller enclaves than that. The Irish were only recently able to move about freely at that point, and there were certainly places they couldn't go. The larger point of this article seems to be, rural people have more space, which doesn't seem to have much value as an observation.
  - pvg 10y ago
    I think the point of the article is that, societally, we are perhaps too focused on children's safety to the point of depriving them of some perfectly harmless freedom. The argument is not, as you seem to interpret it, strictly geometric. In the 20s, the world was far less safe for children yet far more independence and agency was required of many of them. I'm sure not every shoeshine or newspaper boy was engaging in these activities in their ethnic ghetto.
    - kasey_junk 10y ago
      I guess I just don't understand the point of the article. To me it seems an indictment of current parenting modes, based on the amount of geometric freedom allowed a very small subset of the population in comparison to the amount of geometric freedom allowed another, different very small subset of the population. I guess what I'm saying is, its a pretty ridiculous article that doesn't line up with reality now or then.

nickjarboe 10y ago

This short article is basically a bunch of quotes from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-... (2007).

gremlinsinc 10y ago

This is kind of disconcerting.. It's like the government is forcing the future generations to be acclimated to imprisonment or lack of freedom and lack of independence... so that they can be controlled..

intrasight 10y ago

I think it happened in one generation. My generation roamed quite extensively starting at about 7 years old. My daughter's generation did not. We drove her to her friends houses (or their parents to ours). Sometimes they would play outside. And I'm not saying there was no roaming, but it started much later and was not as geographically broad.

galfarragem 10y ago
And the worse part: by driving them to their friends' houses, it's implied that you need to like/approve their parents. During my childhood I could befriend kids whose parents would never be friends of my parents. The actual status quo intensifies segregation.

brohoolio 10y ago

What's up with parents driving kids to school? My generation, born in the late 70s, was rarely dropped off or picked up from school.

brohoolio 10y ago
Everyone took the bus or walked.
magic_beans 10y ago
I grew up in LA. I lived half an hour from school and there was no school bus service, so my parents HAD to drive me.

jemfinch 10y ago

There's nothing I want more than to let my kids roam like I did in the late 80s and early 90s. Sadly, I can't, because I'm quite literally afraid that someone will take my kids (completely ignoring that the real dangers of the foster home system vastly exceed any risk I would let my kids take).

certifiedloud 10y ago
Perhaps your worry is unfounded: https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/14/theres-never-been-a-safer-time-to-be-a-kid-in-america/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/...
- qntty 10y ago
  someone = child services I assume
- jemfinch 10y ago
  Sorry, I should have been clearer. I'm not afraid of strangers, I'm afraid of social workers for Child Protective Services. I'm afraid of legalized kidnapping because my preferred way of parenting would expose my kids to small risks now so they're at far less risk as adults.

driverdan 10y ago

> This Daily Mail piece... Lost me in literally four words. This is blogspam about something from the Daily Mail, guaranteed to be terrible. This may be talking about a legitimate problem but sure isn't citing a legitimate source.

redsummer 10y ago
Oh my god the daily mail!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2z-AdzgKjY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2z-AdzgKjY

jedberg 10y ago

The biggest issue is the courts. I have a two year old, and her grandma lives one mile away. I fully intend to let her walk there by herself when she is 6 or 7. Crime rate data supports me in that this is perfectly safe. But I'll always have this nagging feeling in my mind of some local busybody parent (and there are a lot) reporting me to CPS and then having to defend my decision and hope that I get a data driven judge.

megablast 10y ago
You could get her a bike.
christophilus 10y ago
Where do you live? I live in a small town in SC. We have little hoodlums ranging free all over the place. We all keep an eye out to make sure they're safe. No way in hell would anyone report their parents for negligence, and God help the social worker who tried to make that accusation.
emiliobumachar 10y ago
There's a way to pre-emptively ask a court whether it's legal to do something. A few years back, some researches did just that in the USA, asking whether they could publish their research despite some deal with the funding corporation, which did not want it published. I'm afraid I don't remember the details. May be a state-specific thing.
- flukus 10y ago
  Never thought about this before but it really does make sense for every government to provide a service like this.

HillaryBriss 10y ago

as a child, i used to go over to my friend's house on my bike and a bunch of us would play D&D in the basement. afterwards, we'd get on our bikes and ride through the foggy streets alone, trying our best not to accidentally cross the path of a demogorgon. one time, we met this weird girl with really short hair and telekinetic powers. she needed a place to stay, so we hid in her in my friend's basement. it was pretty creepy. sure am glad that's over.

rimantas 10y ago
I have seen stranger things than this.

dba7dba 10y ago

I think this phenomenon depends on the nation/neighborhood. For example, I was watching videos of Seoul subways systems and the expat was commenting how young kids were going about on their own to school and such, without adult supervision. Same with Tokyo too. But yes, I don't let my kids out. I would only if I lived in a gated, nice community. But I don't so they rarely go out on their own, except for soccer games, school etc... Man, what have we done?

frankosaurus 10y ago

I'm tired of this claim that kids today are less free-roaming. Such articles never seem to provide empirical evidence to back it up. The term "helicopter parent" is thrown around as if it has some sort of scientific definition. In actuality, it is just a pejorative used to label any parent we have observed being overprotective. These claims about a societal shift serve only to tickle persons' biases that kids today are coddled, lack personal responsibility, and generally thin-skinned. (On the contrary, parenting styles are as diverse as children themselves.) Never mind that adults' personal anecdotes about their childhoods are unreliable and subject to massive bias. Think about it: Most people have scarcely any vivid memories of their 0-5 years. Many claim that they were allowed to roam free back in the day. Adults remember being allowed to run around, seemingly unsupervised. They are oblivious to protective steps taken by their parents. Most everyone with children knows the parenting tactic of giving kids the impression of freedom while taking discreet steps to protect them from harm.

ScottBurson 10y ago
How old are you?
xiaoma 10y ago
I think your weariness at seeing a claim which from all evidence appears true not backed up by "empirical evidence" is a bit self-indulgent. I've met many N American adults whose own childhoods align with what the article says and almost none who said they had a shorter leash than children do now. I've seen more children taking the metro by themselves in Japan in a one week visit than I did living the US for three years. It's also undeniable that social workers taking children from families due to them having been unsupervised is something that the state barely had resources for 100 years ago even if, contrary to numerous historical accounts, it had the will. No, I don't have statistics on exactly how far away the average 9 year-old was allowed to bike in various years. History books also don't come with a stack of empirical evidence to back them up. At some point, you have to either accept them until seeing more compelling conflicting accounts or dig into the sources and do the research yourself. If numerous anecdotal claims and published accounts isn't good enough for you, then the onus is on you to provide a more convincing argument in the opposite direction.

ghola2k5 10y ago

Also lost the right to catch polio

stuckagain 10y ago
Working on that. https://www.buzzfeed.com/azeenghorayshi/trump-kennedy-antivaccine https://www.buzzfeed.com/azeenghorayshi/trump-kennedy-antiva...

dbancajas 10y ago

I came from Philippines. Now in the US. When I was young I had a bike. I would go out in the morning anywhere I want to go, come back for lunch to eat lunch. Go out again and comeback before dinner. These days, this is not possible anymore. I don't know why. I think people have less kids and are more afraid of kidnappings etc. I miss those days and I wish I could give my children that kind of freedom.

zizzles 10y ago

Early-mid 2000's kid here. I roamed without second thoughts: Explored forests, cities, trespassed on forsaken enchanted lands and everything in between. I admit there has been stark differences in outdoor activities; but this isn't a "it's too dangerous for Johnny to go outside" scenario, it's a "Johnny is too glued to his iPad 8.0 to enjoy going outside" scenario.

julienmarie 10y ago

One thing lacking though is a view on the evolution of the area between the times of the great grand father and the son. How did the urbanization evolved ? I remember 25 years ago, aged 9/10, when I was living in ( really ) rural France, I was riding by bicycle at least 10 kms around, walking in woods, building tree houses.

noonespecial 10y ago

I was thinking about this the other day. Ironically this is the safest time in all of history to let kids do this. Crime is historically very low and our kids want to carry around magical devices that lets us know where they are at all times and contact them instantly. This should be a golden age, yet we've turned it into jail. What gives everyone? Edit: And by "what gives" I mean literally, I live in the US and have children ages 7-12 and I don't let them do these things solely because I'm afraid of government busy-bodies. Not crime, not injury, not abduction. I'm frankly and bluntly afraid of the limitless power a bored bureaucrat will help himself/herself to over my family if given the slightest reason. That's what gives for me anyway.

bluthru 10y ago
>Ironically this is the safest time in all of history to let kids do this. Well what's the cause and effect here? Maybe it happens less often today just because there are less kids outside.
- clarkmoody 10y ago
  There is definitely a vicious cycle: * Media hypes a tragedy concerning a child * Parents on the margin keep their kids indoors more often * Streets have less children * Automobiles become less vigilant / Criminals concentrate on the fewer remaining kids outside * Tragedy happens again
manmal 10y ago
Crime is not the problem, traffic is. I grew up in a blind alley, and the whole town was really low in traffic. I started cruising around with my bike together with the neighbors at age 7, and we met a car every 10 minutes, tops. They slowed down to a stop, mostly, when they saw us. Fast forward, we are living in a city of 30k citizens now, though on the outskirts; there is a major road about 200m away, and although we have a tight speed limit in our area (30kmh), I'm not sure we can allow roaming around before age 10. Cats are run over all the time here, people just don't look before going around corners. And then there's the occasional report (or rumor?) of people trying to spirit children away from their parents in the local mall. That being said, maybe I felt a lot safer as a kid in the same circumstances.

zanethomas 10y ago

In 1956 I was 6 years old in Pasadena, CA. We lived in a trailer park on the east side of town. Each morning I went down to Colorado Blvd, by myself, wait for a city bus, rode half way across town, got off the bus and walked a few blocks to a private school, reversing the trip each afternoon. I don't think people have changed, I don't believe the world is more dangerous, so why can't kids now do what I did?

cavanasm 10y ago

I'm highly skeptical of all the claims made by this blog, as the author isn't exactly making a well reasoned argument for unleashing children on the wilderness again (although I do find all the discussion here about child roaming positively riveting); citing a Daily Mail puff piece is one thing, but the crime stats (and interpretation) are pretty awful. The "Stranger Danger?" subsection in particular seems insane. 3% of children under 5 being murdered by strangers absolutely does not mean your child is safer with strangers.

remarkEon 10y ago

A lot of the anecdotes in this thread seem to be from more rural areas or out in a small town. I grew up in Minneapolis (born in the 80s) and could do all these things in our neighborhood in the summers (except for shooting guns, but I'd get that in the summer with my cousins in South Dakota). I'd meet up with the neighborhood kids around 11 and my mom (or one of their moms) would have lunch and snacks ready for us around 1 or so. We'd just roam around the neighborhood all day playing street hockey or basketball or whatever. ...none of this goes on in my neighborhood anymore. One proximate cause that I think we're missing is that a lot of us moved away, and housing costs are so high that I'm putting off buying a home and my friends are too - or are doing so out in the suburbs. Demographic changeover could be a contributing factor.

antoniuschan99 10y ago

At what age can a child roam without supervision these days? Aren't there laws that require kids below 12 to be with adult supervision at home?

Animats 10y ago

Early episodes of Sesame Street now come with a warning: "These early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grownups and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child."[1] This is episode 1.[2] This may terrify today's parents. Watch the first three minutes. [1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sesame-street-for-adults-only/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sesame-street-for-adults-only/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLEiZmPNguU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLEiZmPNguU

paradite 10y ago

This phenomenon is also very pronounced in China, mostly due to urbanization I think. When my parents or grandparents were still children, most of them live in small towns or countryside, where facilities are far away and main mode of communication is walking or cycling. There was nothing wrong with travelling far distance as a child, because there was not much danger. Also, there wasn't really any alternatives to travelling alone if your house is 2km away from the school or kids-playing-place and your parents have better things to do than sending you there. Now most children grow up in cities, where cars and large density of population can both pose danger to children wandering around. Plus parents will just drive their kids to school which costs only a few minutes.

MichaelMoser123 10y ago

I don't think it's that bad nowadays. My ten year old daughter is walking quite a distance in pursuit of her pokemon. kids tend to take as much freedom as they need (as they grow older)

kriro 10y ago

I have thought about this a lot. I pass my elementary school on my way to work each morning. As kids we just walked there it was a 10-15 minute walk. At around the 4th grade we took our bikes. We were accompanied by our parents the first week or so and then just walked in groups. No danger, no incidents, nothing. And this was true for all kids that attended the school. There were maybe 3 out of the 40ish kids in my grade that lived too far away and arrived by car. These days...there's traffic backing up all around the school, every single kid arrives by car, the thingy where you can lock up your bikes is completely empty. Our days as kids looked like this: Back home from school, lunch, play until the night...usually outdoors wherever we found interesting stuff. No set dates or sheduling, you just walked over to your friends house and figured out what to do, maybe pick up a couple of other friends. If someone wasn't there you just tried the next house. The activities involved climbing trees, building your own boat to paddle on a small creek and other things that would be considered deadly activities these days. Lots of sports and getting dirty, too. Surprisingly enough no kids got abducted. On the flip side I watched very little TV (we didn't have a TV for a decent chunk of my childhood) and I didn't have any computer for a good chunk of my childhood either. I also think parents spent more quality time with their kids "back in my day". Family trips to the zoo or just playing football in a park or something. I see these parent/kid teams a lot less these days. It's a very strange development because the benefits seem so obvious to me and the "downside" is spending more time with your kids or letting them do more things they enjoy.

thirdsun 10y ago
> These days...there's traffic backing up all around the school, every single kid arrives by car, the thingy where you can lock up your bikes is completely empty. As a german this seems insane to me. For a long time I actually thought that driving the kids to the school was just something that is misrepresented in american media like films and tv shows. We went to school on our own, regardless of distance, either by public transport or by walking and biking.

peter_retief 10y ago

In the 70's I used to roam for miles on foot and on bike. My own children hardly venture outdoors. The fear of crime is much greater now. What did we give up to lose our freedom?

temp2093745 10y ago

When I grew up in Berlin in the 90s I was not really given restrictions on how far I could roam. I just had to leave a note or give a call if I wanted to stay out beyond a certain time. I remember being given keys to the apartment being a big deal since it meant freedom to me, less hassle for my parents - since they didn't have to fetch me from school or kindergarden every day - and they did a lot of emphasizing that I should never ever forget or lose them somewhere. And that was in a big city. Now I live in a bit more rural area where many kids cycle several kilometers to school every day and I also see them on bikeways during school vacations, so it seems like most parents here are fine with letting them roam.

robochat42 10y ago

I think that this has been largely caused by the media. Every time that a child was attacked or taken in the UK during my childhood, the press would go crazy for weeks. 'Stranger Danger' was a phrase that often came up. The resulting parental hysteria restricted the freedom of children and now it has become normalised. Now it is negligent to allow your kids to roam free and you might get in trouble for it.

daxfohl 10y ago

The strange thing is that CPS is considered the enemy here. It seems like CPS should be a group that listens to the needs of parents and helps build a community to cater to those needs, not some kind of self-important authority figure. Maybe it should be rebranded as Child Development Services or something.

daxfohl 10y ago

There's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma working here too. If you're the only family that lets their child wander, your child is far more likely to be the one that's abducted. Therefore nobody lets their kids wander, so everyone's kids have a substandard childhood.

scandox 10y ago

Another massive freedom kids have lost is the right to have independent friendships with adults. Given what we have collectively understood about the behaviour of some adults this is perhaps understandable. However it is a big loss for the majority cases. As a kid I spent whole days out on the farm with farmhands. Often just one on one. One of them in particular taught me to drive a tractor and all about plants and animals. Also I got all my ethics from him since my own father didn't do ethics. So I am sad for my kids that they will be very unlikely to have that experience.

CalRobert 10y ago
I don't even talk to kids because you never know which ones have hysterical moms. Recently I was on a camping trip with a friend and a kid (about 13) came over and chatted about fishing, etc. . We wanted to talk more, and their dad seemed affable enough, but there was a definite "OK, we're going to stand on the opposite side of the campground from you and have this conversation loudly" vibe.

vidoc 10y ago

Very interesting, irrational fears and obsession for safety affect so many things nowadays. Every-time I go snowboarding I'm stunned at how in just 20 years, we pretty much went from zero to something like 90%+ skiers wearing helmets.

ci5er 10y ago
That's funny. I didn't know that had happened. I can't think of any serious skiing accidents that have happened in/near my social circle, nor on the news, where a helmet would have been determinative to the outcome. In what percentage of serious skiing accidents would a helmet help. Or is it merely one of those "precautionary principle" things: why take a chance?
- vidoc 10y ago
  > In what percentage of serious skiing accidents would a helmet help. Or is it merely one of those "precautionary principle" things: why take a chance? I'm not quiet sure about the percentage, but I'm certain wearing a helmet does lessen the chances a bit. The problem really is that the majority of ski injuries are not exactly what we imagine - it's pretty natural to imagine smashing our skulls on a rock or on some ice, it's very graphic too, I'm not saying they don't exist, but I can tell you that spine/cervical injuries are way more common. In addition to avalanches of course where the helmet isn't particularly useful, another frequent (and graphic!) one is beeing traversed by a tree branch :P Just to be clear, I'm not saying helmets are useless tho, but I note that may give a false sense of security.

sgarrity 10y ago

It's cars, cars, cars. That's what I'm afraid of for my kids.

icu 10y ago

As a parent of a young child in London there is no way I'm letting my son wander around our area without being within eyesight. There are just too many degenerate members of British society to take a chance with my son's life and welfare. On the other hand, if we were to ever move to New Zealand where I lived most of my life, or to the town in Poland where my son's mother grew up, this would be an entirely different story. Anywhere in New Zealand is quite honestly Disneyland compared to the UK (and I am thinking of the 'hard' parts in New Zealand like Māngere or Ōtāhuhu)... and Radomsko in Poland still has some nice forest areas and a lake that is walking distance from the town. I think the author needs to take into account that there are just some places in the world where you must be on guard and be extra vigilant. This isn't limited to London, for example Cape Town in South Africa or Rio de Janeiro in Brazil spring to mind. I am however very much aware of the impact my decision to keep my family in London will have on my son's childhood and frankly I would rather move outside of the M25, to say the outer edges of Surrey, where I would feel slightly more at ease but still ever vigilant. Until I can afford to do that, holidays to Poland will have to suffice.

49531 10y ago

Anecdotally I was born in 1990, I spent the first 10 years of my life in Tacoma WA, USA where during summers I would leave in the morning and be gone all day, all of the neighborhood kids would do the same. When I was 10 we moved to San Diego, CA USA, where I lived until adulthood. During the summers had the same freedom, I would roam free with the neighborhood kids all day long. Now I'm married with children of my own (3 and 0) and think about the scariness of letting them roam free, but they're really young so I think that is normal. However, I also have 2 stepsons who are 13 and 11. During the summers they roam free, we have a field behind our backyard which butts up against a forest and an industrial park, and sometimes they're gone for the entire day. The only real difference is they have cell phones now, and can call us if there is an emergency.

OpenDrapery 10y ago

I saw it written somewhere that when we were young, we had freedom but no information. Today, kids have all the information, but no freedom. Proof once again that life is a series of tradeoffs.

cafard 10y ago

Every several months something like this is posted on HN, and I log in to post a couple of things: 1. During the baby boom, there was a lot of intermittent surveillance. Fewer mothers worked, and every ten or fifteen minutes one might give a look out the back window to see what was going on. This was not intrusive, but it kept down the mischief level on the one hand and the anxiety level on the other. 2. People on HN have a way of talking about suburbs as if they are all cul-de-sacs surrounded by highways. I grew up in a close-in suburb of a large Midwestern city. I was three blocks from school and library, two blocks from grocer, baker, and five-and-dime. In sixth grade, after a transfer, I did take the bus to and from school, though I could and sometimes did walk. Junior high was a mile and a quarter, usually reached by bike.

bootload 10y ago
"During the baby boom, there was a lot of intermittent surveillance. Fewer mothers worked, and every ten or fifteen minutes one might give a look out the back window to see what was going on." @cafard sort of applies to suburban areas. In semi-rural hilly country on bikes and foot, there is no houses for miles. My folks and others wouldn't have been able to see me or my friends, though we'd tell them where we'd been.

deleted 10y ago

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bamboozled 10y ago

This story fits amazingly well with the lyrics from "Where do the Children Play" by Cat Stevens, released back in 1970. [1] Just felt like it was worth mentioning because, let's face it, he's asking a great and important question :) Well I think it's fine, building jumbo planes. Or takin' a ride on a cosmic train. Switch on summer from a slot machine. Get what you want to if you want, Cause you can get anything. I know we've come a long way, We're changin' day to day, But tell me, Where do the children play? By Cat Stevens [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_vy-eWGKSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_vy-eWGKSk

SZJX 10y ago

Well one might also argue that there are much more unsafe factors out there nowadays than before though. I guess the increasing inequality and social segregation also has something to do with it. Generally, the modern life is just factually much different from the life 100 years ago. Though I definitely agree this shouldn't go too far. There was this article that I just read a few days ago, that stated that Iceland was able to drastically curb teenage drug/alcohol use with some measures, which included after school interest clubs etc. and especially, a law that prevented them from being outside after 0:00 (summer) or 22:00 (winter)... which I certainly find way too draconian. You'd definitely still want to give the teens much more freedom even if it entails a risk of them getting influenced by some negative factors. Still, it's their life and you need to let them learn stuffs and explore on their own.

forestriver 10y ago

Relevant: https://www.outsideonline.com/1928266/we-dont-need-no-education https://www.outsideonline.com/1928266/we-dont-need-no-educat...