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Has anyone considered that, like many things, maybe childraising knowledge has improved over time, and maybe it is true that it's dangerous and a bad idea to le

Has anyone considered that, like many things, maybe childraising knowledge has improved over time, and maybe it is true that it's dangerous and a bad idea to let them roam around far away unsupervised? It always seemed reasonable to me, even when I was that age myself. An anecdote is that the only bone injury I had as a kid resulted from riding bikes with some other kids who had a "fun idea" of biking down this steeply sloped road, which wouldn't have been allowed had an adult been present, and I ended up with a crushed wrist and internal bruising, and I was lucky I even lived - could have easily hit my head for example. The aftermath of that incident is probably largely to blame for the weight problem I developed at the time. My proposed alternative is good video games with open exploration (something like the original Spyro the Dragon games has a great sense of exploration and adventure) or that are otherwise engaging. I always found them a lot more intellectually stimulating/interesting than meandering around outside as a kid anyway. Local multiplayer is a good social activity. Continuing the tangent on other benefits, I remember being motivated to read faster as a kid to keep up with certain text boxes that would disappear quickly, and achieving it. With all this balanced with other stuff like encouraging playing musical instruments or art and such, I don't see a need for unsupervised "roaming," especially a need outweighing the risks.

djsumdog 10y ago
I really feel that proposing video games over being outside does a huge disservice to us as people. Maybe I'm centennial, but there's something visceral and amazing about being outside. I think we have made some changes for the better. I remember as a teenager I noticed all the metal jungle jims at playgrounds were gone. It made me said, but I realized it was probably because falling from one could injure or kill a kid; and today we see that many of them have come back, but in the much safer rope based variety with that cool recycled rubber matting under them. There is something about risk that is important in helping people develop: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2008/aug/06/children.play https://www.theguardian.com/society/2008/aug/06/children.pla... Your own stories show you learned from your mistakes. Yes, you could have died, but you didn't. That action and memory create a different reality for you, and the way you view it deeply impacts the opinion you've presented here.
- slacka 10y ago
  > I really feel that proposing video games over being outside does a huge disservice to us as people. This. Growing up, I was only allowed 1 hr of video games or TV per day. And on nice days, I was ordered to play outside. I grew up with a love of outdoors, sports, and have always been in good shape. My cousins were encouraged to stay in and play video games and never allowed out alone. We are similar age and genetics, yet they are both overweight and unhealthy. Whereas my sister and I are healthy. I know it's anecdotal, but my families experience sure matches your centennial common sense.
  - jimmaswell 10y ago
    Exercise is overwhelmingly dwarfed by calorie consumption, in terms of weight. Not eating an apple is about equivalent to running an entire mile. Most likely your cousins just had a worse diet. Exercise as a weight loss solution is essentially a lie sold by con artists - you can't outrun a bad diet, as they say.
    - E6300 10y ago
      You can if you just do truly massive amounts of exercise. At one point last year I was doing 12 hours of cycling per week and my maintenance caloric intake was approximately 3000 kcal, or that of one and a half normal people.
    - whiskers08xmt 10y ago
      Weight is not the primary concern of being in good shape. Being thin, but in bad shape, is almost as detrimental to your health as being over weight and in bad-shape.
    - Faaak 10y ago
      Maybe if you spend all your time outside, you've got less temptation/time to snack and thus consume less calories ?
    - chimprich 10y ago
      Sounds like someone thinking of an excuse not to exercise :) A quick Google suggests running a mile burns about 100 calories and an apple is about 50. In a more general sense, you can't really compare the two. You can't say exercise is "dwarfed" by consumption because they're not on the same scale; unless you're talking about, say, perceived willpower of eating less versus exercising more.
akira2501 10y ago
> and maybe it is true that it's dangerous to let them roam around far away unsupervised? ...and maybe there are unseen benefits that outweigh those risk factors? It's true that in the past few years childhood mortality has lowered, and that the highest risk factor for anyone up to age 44 is "unintentional injuries;" however, other statistics may be more troubling. For example, the teen suicide rate was steadily declining throughout 1985 to 2000, but since then, there has been a steady uptick in the suicide rate for children under 18. It's the second leading cause of death for people 10 to 34 in the united states, out-ranking even murder and cancer for these groups.
- jimmaswell 10y ago
  Is there any evidence that that correlation is causal? You could just as easily point to any of the other myriad things that have changed since then.
johngalt 10y ago
> I ended up with a crushed wrist and internal bruising, and I was lucky I even lived. And I bet you wear a seat belt every day in your car as an adult. Invincibility is one of those myths you want to dispel when kids are young and the stakes aren't as high.
- jimmaswell 10y ago
  I wore my seat belt every day before that anyway, not even because I had to but because I wanted to. The only thing that really changed after that point was I didn't want to ride bikes anymore. I really can't be the only one who thinks brushes with death are not a good thing to have just because they can teach you a lesson when you're fortunate enough to walk away from them. Would you also say Russian Roulette is a good thing to try out because you might learn to value life more afterwards?
  - cthalupa 10y ago
    What are the odds of dying due to a mountain biking accident? What are the odds of dying while playing Russian Roulette? The fact that the chance of a negative outcome exists does not mean that we should avoid the activity. Measure the reward vs. the risk.
  - jon-wood 10y ago
    I can't help but think you're drastically overstating the danger of riding a bike, even in less than safe conditions. I was heavily into downhill mountain biking during my invincible teenage years and only even heard of someone doing major damage to themselves second hand (they managed to impact their spine flying head first off their bike into a tree trunk). Scrapes, bruises, cuts, and even bones heal relatively easily in children. At least for me learning that things will probably be OK was a valuable thing which has made me more comfortable taking calculated risks later in life, and the times things weren't quite OK taught me a healthy level of caution in calculating those risks.
    - CalRobert 10y ago
      "I was heavily into downhill mountain biking during my invincible teenage years " But those mountains probably didn't pose the risk of getting crushed by two tons of steel when somebody decides they'd rather look at their phone than the road.
robbrown451 10y ago
"My proposed alternative is good video games with open exploration" I don't even know what to say to that. Seriously?
- jimmaswell 10y ago
  I never really liked outside much as a kid and found those kinds of games a lot more fun and "adventurous" than outside. To recall my exact feelings at the time, in Spyro I was working towards goals and finding cool stuff like fairies and treasure, while trees and rocks outside were just "there." Nowadays I can appreciate nature just fine (lately I watched a particular great blue heron occasionally throughout a semester that hangs around campus waiting to see if I could watch it catch a fish from the pond and it eventually did, cool thing to see) but at the time it kind of felt like a chore having to go outside. In addition to satisfying the criteria of exploration, I think the right kinds of video games are very beneficial with regards to reading/coordination/other skills at a young age, like with my reading anecdote, but I haven't read any actual studies on it. For stuff like building treehouses and other more creative ventures there's Minecraft et al. All without losing real limbs, falling down real wells, or getting stung by real bees a real mile from home and learning you have a real bee allergy.
  - baddox 10y ago
    There's a big difference between letting a kid play in the way they want to play (with limits, of course), and forcing or strongly encouraging playing video games instead of playing outside.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    That sounds much less like a genuine lack on the part of reality, and much more like your reward system being tuned so strongly to favor shiny polygons popping out from under polygonal rocks that, when you turn over a real one, their absence disappoints you. Your other examples are just as flawed. When you build a treehouse in your backyard, you end up with a treehouse - and the knowledge that you built a treehouse, and that you can build a treehouse. When you build a treehouse in Minecraft, you end up with nothing. It's an arrangement of bytes that's rendered by an imaginary machine into an arrangement of pixels that corresponds roughly with some abstract idea of what a treehouse might be. There is nothing in the slightest about it which is real, and that includes the feeling it might give of having accomplished anything. I get that, in an industry which revolves around building imaginary machines, it's easy for us to get confused and forget that's what we are doing. That it's easy is no excuse to let it betray you into sloppy thinking, though, and that's what I see here. Imaginary machines appear to have satisfied you well enough as a kid, which is reasonable. Assuming from this that imaginary machines are good enough for every kid is not reasonable at all. What you found to enrich your life would've intolerably impoverished mine, and those of almost all the people with whom I grew up. As such, I find your prescriptivism uninformed, premature, and faintly arrogant in a way I don't think you've reflected upon or even recognized.
losteric 10y ago
I doubt it. There's a difference between playing and exploring the real world, and sitting in a room. My parents took the easy route of indoor parenting, with video games / books / school / instrument practice... be safe all the time. I was consistently at the top of my class and reasonably successful socially... but that upbringing did a lot of damage mentally. It's like being raised in a glass cage. I plan to go the other way with my kids. Buy 10 acres out in the country or woods near some other families, far from the concrete jungle... Let the kids run free and explore, sit and learn, play video games, whatever. My parenting mentality is to provide freedom, and advice on using that freedom (living). If they ignore my advice and do stupid stuff, the pain will teach them the value of advice.
- jimmaswell 10y ago
  How did the mental damage express itself, more specifically? Not necessarily doubting it, but I'm curious what you feel the effects were on you.
  - losteric 10y ago
    I never visited a psych so I don't know the right terms, but it was probably some form of derealization. Reality always felt shallow, every experience lacked detail and substance... that served as the foundation for other problems. Mechanically, I suspect the derealization resulted from under-trained neurons/networks that couldn't accurately feed forward perceptions of the world. Once I got to college, I spent the vast majority of my time outside and offline... after a month I distinctly remember noticing how everything felt so real. After a year I'd realized and unwound most of the neurosis on my own.
throwanem 10y ago
One of the two bones I broke as a kid had a similar cause. That might sound like an endorsement of your claim, except first that it gave me powerfully to understand the value of forethought on the subject of not being a damn fool, and second that the other broken bone resulted from jumping up and down on an ordinary floor - not even jumping off anything. Are floors a problem? I have a scar at the base of each thumb. One came from carelessness with the Boy Scout folder whose purchase price I'd years earlier worked hard to earn. It wasn't the first time I'd hurt myself through carelessness with that knife, either. It was the last, though, with any. Are pocketknives a problem? The other scar I earned through waving a stick around. It wasn't really an instance of culpable carelessness on my part, in that if the stick hadn't had a twig stump where it did, or had I held it differently, it wouldn't have gouged me. I found a lesson there about unintended consequences that's served me well in life. Are sticks a problem? In rough terms, I spent half my pre-adolescent childhood running around barefoot climbing trees and derelict farm equipment, and the other half indoors reading and playing NES games and writing Applesoft BASIC. I found both enjoyable, and a worthwhile way to spend time. I would not have attempted to replace either with the other. To make the attempt would have struck me as arrant foolishness, even at such a callow age, and I cannot say the idea seems any more sensible from a perspective more heavily weighted with years.

djsumdog 10y ago

I really feel that proposing video games over being outside does a huge disservice to us as people. Maybe I'm centennial, but there's something visceral and amazing about being outside. I think we have made some changes for the better. I remember as a teenager I noticed all the metal jungle jims at playgrounds were gone. It made me said, but I realized it was probably because falling from one could injure or kill a kid; and today we see that many of them have come back, but in the much safer rope based variety with that cool recycled rubber matting under them. There is something about risk that is important in helping people develop: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2008/aug/06/children.play https://www.theguardian.com/society/2008/aug/06/children.pla... Your own stories show you learned from your mistakes. Yes, you could have died, but you didn't. That action and memory create a different reality for you, and the way you view it deeply impacts the opinion you've presented here.

slacka 10y ago
> I really feel that proposing video games over being outside does a huge disservice to us as people. This. Growing up, I was only allowed 1 hr of video games or TV per day. And on nice days, I was ordered to play outside. I grew up with a love of outdoors, sports, and have always been in good shape. My cousins were encouraged to stay in and play video games and never allowed out alone. We are similar age and genetics, yet they are both overweight and unhealthy. Whereas my sister and I are healthy. I know it's anecdotal, but my families experience sure matches your centennial common sense.
- jimmaswell 10y ago
  Exercise is overwhelmingly dwarfed by calorie consumption, in terms of weight. Not eating an apple is about equivalent to running an entire mile. Most likely your cousins just had a worse diet. Exercise as a weight loss solution is essentially a lie sold by con artists - you can't outrun a bad diet, as they say.
  - E6300 10y ago
    You can if you just do truly massive amounts of exercise. At one point last year I was doing 12 hours of cycling per week and my maintenance caloric intake was approximately 3000 kcal, or that of one and a half normal people.
  - whiskers08xmt 10y ago
    Weight is not the primary concern of being in good shape. Being thin, but in bad shape, is almost as detrimental to your health as being over weight and in bad-shape.
  - Faaak 10y ago
    Maybe if you spend all your time outside, you've got less temptation/time to snack and thus consume less calories ?
  - chimprich 10y ago
    Sounds like someone thinking of an excuse not to exercise :) A quick Google suggests running a mile burns about 100 calories and an apple is about 50. In a more general sense, you can't really compare the two. You can't say exercise is "dwarfed" by consumption because they're not on the same scale; unless you're talking about, say, perceived willpower of eating less versus exercising more.

akira2501 10y ago

> and maybe it is true that it's dangerous to let them roam around far away unsupervised? ...and maybe there are unseen benefits that outweigh those risk factors? It's true that in the past few years childhood mortality has lowered, and that the highest risk factor for anyone up to age 44 is "unintentional injuries;" however, other statistics may be more troubling. For example, the teen suicide rate was steadily declining throughout 1985 to 2000, but since then, there has been a steady uptick in the suicide rate for children under 18. It's the second leading cause of death for people 10 to 34 in the united states, out-ranking even murder and cancer for these groups.

jimmaswell 10y ago
Is there any evidence that that correlation is causal? You could just as easily point to any of the other myriad things that have changed since then.

johngalt 10y ago

> I ended up with a crushed wrist and internal bruising, and I was lucky I even lived. And I bet you wear a seat belt every day in your car as an adult. Invincibility is one of those myths you want to dispel when kids are young and the stakes aren't as high.

jimmaswell 10y ago
I wore my seat belt every day before that anyway, not even because I had to but because I wanted to. The only thing that really changed after that point was I didn't want to ride bikes anymore. I really can't be the only one who thinks brushes with death are not a good thing to have just because they can teach you a lesson when you're fortunate enough to walk away from them. Would you also say Russian Roulette is a good thing to try out because you might learn to value life more afterwards?
- cthalupa 10y ago
  What are the odds of dying due to a mountain biking accident? What are the odds of dying while playing Russian Roulette? The fact that the chance of a negative outcome exists does not mean that we should avoid the activity. Measure the reward vs. the risk.
- jon-wood 10y ago
  I can't help but think you're drastically overstating the danger of riding a bike, even in less than safe conditions. I was heavily into downhill mountain biking during my invincible teenage years and only even heard of someone doing major damage to themselves second hand (they managed to impact their spine flying head first off their bike into a tree trunk). Scrapes, bruises, cuts, and even bones heal relatively easily in children. At least for me learning that things will probably be OK was a valuable thing which has made me more comfortable taking calculated risks later in life, and the times things weren't quite OK taught me a healthy level of caution in calculating those risks.
  - CalRobert 10y ago
    "I was heavily into downhill mountain biking during my invincible teenage years " But those mountains probably didn't pose the risk of getting crushed by two tons of steel when somebody decides they'd rather look at their phone than the road.

robbrown451 10y ago

"My proposed alternative is good video games with open exploration" I don't even know what to say to that. Seriously?

jimmaswell 10y ago
I never really liked outside much as a kid and found those kinds of games a lot more fun and "adventurous" than outside. To recall my exact feelings at the time, in Spyro I was working towards goals and finding cool stuff like fairies and treasure, while trees and rocks outside were just "there." Nowadays I can appreciate nature just fine (lately I watched a particular great blue heron occasionally throughout a semester that hangs around campus waiting to see if I could watch it catch a fish from the pond and it eventually did, cool thing to see) but at the time it kind of felt like a chore having to go outside. In addition to satisfying the criteria of exploration, I think the right kinds of video games are very beneficial with regards to reading/coordination/other skills at a young age, like with my reading anecdote, but I haven't read any actual studies on it. For stuff like building treehouses and other more creative ventures there's Minecraft et al. All without losing real limbs, falling down real wells, or getting stung by real bees a real mile from home and learning you have a real bee allergy.
- baddox 10y ago
  There's a big difference between letting a kid play in the way they want to play (with limits, of course), and forcing or strongly encouraging playing video games instead of playing outside.
- throwanem 10y ago
  That sounds much less like a genuine lack on the part of reality, and much more like your reward system being tuned so strongly to favor shiny polygons popping out from under polygonal rocks that, when you turn over a real one, their absence disappoints you. Your other examples are just as flawed. When you build a treehouse in your backyard, you end up with a treehouse - and the knowledge that you built a treehouse, and that you can build a treehouse. When you build a treehouse in Minecraft, you end up with nothing. It's an arrangement of bytes that's rendered by an imaginary machine into an arrangement of pixels that corresponds roughly with some abstract idea of what a treehouse might be. There is nothing in the slightest about it which is real, and that includes the feeling it might give of having accomplished anything. I get that, in an industry which revolves around building imaginary machines, it's easy for us to get confused and forget that's what we are doing. That it's easy is no excuse to let it betray you into sloppy thinking, though, and that's what I see here. Imaginary machines appear to have satisfied you well enough as a kid, which is reasonable. Assuming from this that imaginary machines are good enough for every kid is not reasonable at all. What you found to enrich your life would've intolerably impoverished mine, and those of almost all the people with whom I grew up. As such, I find your prescriptivism uninformed, premature, and faintly arrogant in a way I don't think you've reflected upon or even recognized.

losteric 10y ago

I doubt it. There's a difference between playing and exploring the real world, and sitting in a room. My parents took the easy route of indoor parenting, with video games / books / school / instrument practice... be safe all the time. I was consistently at the top of my class and reasonably successful socially... but that upbringing did a lot of damage mentally. It's like being raised in a glass cage. I plan to go the other way with my kids. Buy 10 acres out in the country or woods near some other families, far from the concrete jungle... Let the kids run free and explore, sit and learn, play video games, whatever. My parenting mentality is to provide freedom, and advice on using that freedom (living). If they ignore my advice and do stupid stuff, the pain will teach them the value of advice.

jimmaswell 10y ago
How did the mental damage express itself, more specifically? Not necessarily doubting it, but I'm curious what you feel the effects were on you.
- losteric 10y ago
  I never visited a psych so I don't know the right terms, but it was probably some form of derealization. Reality always felt shallow, every experience lacked detail and substance... that served as the foundation for other problems. Mechanically, I suspect the derealization resulted from under-trained neurons/networks that couldn't accurately feed forward perceptions of the world. Once I got to college, I spent the vast majority of my time outside and offline... after a month I distinctly remember noticing how everything felt so real. After a year I'd realized and unwound most of the neurosis on my own.

throwanem 10y ago

One of the two bones I broke as a kid had a similar cause. That might sound like an endorsement of your claim, except first that it gave me powerfully to understand the value of forethought on the subject of not being a damn fool, and second that the other broken bone resulted from jumping up and down on an ordinary floor - not even jumping off anything. Are floors a problem? I have a scar at the base of each thumb. One came from carelessness with the Boy Scout folder whose purchase price I'd years earlier worked hard to earn. It wasn't the first time I'd hurt myself through carelessness with that knife, either. It was the last, though, with any. Are pocketknives a problem? The other scar I earned through waving a stick around. It wasn't really an instance of culpable carelessness on my part, in that if the stick hadn't had a twig stump where it did, or had I held it differently, it wouldn't have gouged me. I found a lesson there about unintended consequences that's served me well in life. Are sticks a problem? In rough terms, I spent half my pre-adolescent childhood running around barefoot climbing trees and derelict farm equipment, and the other half indoors reading and playing NES games and writing Applesoft BASIC. I found both enjoyable, and a worthwhile way to spend time. I would not have attempted to replace either with the other. To make the attempt would have struck me as arrant foolishness, even at such a callow age, and I cannot say the idea seems any more sensible from a perspective more heavily weighted with years.