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I was entertaining the theory the other day that when families first emigrate they carry over customs from the farms or inner city neighbourhoods they came from

I was entertaining the theory the other day that when families first emigrate they carry over customs from the farms or inner city neighbourhoods they came from, but following generations lose touch with those customs as the new built environment is no longer facilitates them. I was on a Sunday evening bike ride in the summer, in an older but still suburban style neighbourhood with lots of immigrants. The kids were all out playing, the neighbours were hanging out on their front porches and mingling with other neighbours doing the same. I was like 'wow, this is like the idyllic 1950's vision of the suburbs except everyone is brown.' Then you get out to the newer outer ring suburbs where all the white people live and nobody is outside. There are things like getting exercise and talking to your neighbours that are essential for a person's health and happiness, but when their circumstances make these things unessecary there is a tendency not to do them. We're suffering because of it. The whole uptopian notion of the mechanized garden city that America embraced as the standard model for modernity was poorly thought out. Now it's like a paperclip maximizing AI: Mindless and unstoppable.

geebee 9y ago
That's interesting - but it seems like the absence of kids playing outside is very recent in US culture. I grew in, in SF west of twin peaks, and all kids played outside unsupervised for hours. This had been true for generations, going way back, through wave after wave of families, both immigrant from overseas, relocated from other parts the US, or born and bred in SF. This really doesn't happen where I live in SF neighborhood (with two kids), nowhere near to the same extent. And it still is a very immigrant heavy neighborhood, and unusually diverse in terms of country of origin, even by SF's (perhaps diminishing) standards. Part of the reason, I think, is critical mass. of kids I'd happily allow my kids to play outside, but there isn't a giant mass of kids already out there, which was the case when I was younger. This may partly be due to the collapse in the child age population in SF (not a collapse, it seems, in infant or toddler ages, it's stroller bumper cars around, but people often move when their kids get older). In my time (early 70s to today), it's gone from like 25% to below 14%, which in such a short time does represent a kind of collapse. But even that doesn't seem to explain it, since the less expensive SFH neighborhoods south of 280 are still the parts of SF with percentages of under 18 residents similar to the more remote 'burbs. But it got to the point where I enrolled my kid in the YMCA school after-care program, because it seems like that is where most of the after school socializing goes on now. It is somewhat unstructured, schoolyard play, but there's an authority figure around to appeal to. I don't want to overly nostalgize the lack of any supervision when I was a kid, there actually was some bad shit, but no doubt, kids are growing up in an environment that is different from the zero supervision environment I had when I was a kid. Something is probably lost in all this as well.

geebee 9y ago

That's interesting - but it seems like the absence of kids playing outside is very recent in US culture. I grew in, in SF west of twin peaks, and all kids played outside unsupervised for hours. This had been true for generations, going way back, through wave after wave of families, both immigrant from overseas, relocated from other parts the US, or born and bred in SF. This really doesn't happen where I live in SF neighborhood (with two kids), nowhere near to the same extent. And it still is a very immigrant heavy neighborhood, and unusually diverse in terms of country of origin, even by SF's (perhaps diminishing) standards. Part of the reason, I think, is critical mass. of kids I'd happily allow my kids to play outside, but there isn't a giant mass of kids already out there, which was the case when I was younger. This may partly be due to the collapse in the child age population in SF (not a collapse, it seems, in infant or toddler ages, it's stroller bumper cars around, but people often move when their kids get older). In my time (early 70s to today), it's gone from like 25% to below 14%, which in such a short time does represent a kind of collapse. But even that doesn't seem to explain it, since the less expensive SFH neighborhoods south of 280 are still the parts of SF with percentages of under 18 residents similar to the more remote 'burbs. But it got to the point where I enrolled my kid in the YMCA school after-care program, because it seems like that is where most of the after school socializing goes on now. It is somewhat unstructured, schoolyard play, but there's an authority figure around to appeal to. I don't want to overly nostalgize the lack of any supervision when I was a kid, there actually was some bad shit, but no doubt, kids are growing up in an environment that is different from the zero supervision environment I had when I was a kid. Something is probably lost in all this as well.