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He argues as if living on the outskirts is mostly about affording a yard that you don't really need, but there's so much more benefit than that for kids living

He argues as if living on the outskirts is mostly about affording a yard that you don't really need, but there's so much more benefit than that for kids living in a rural area. When I was a preteen in the late 60s and early 70s I got to explore and be independent in a way that is rare today, though I lived in a vast densely populated suburb. At age ten I would hop on my little stingray bike and explore for a dozen miles in any direction. Today that would be an invitation to have your children seized by child protective services. It's still like that in rural areas. A kid can explore the wilderness with her dog on a Saturday and not be expected until dinner. Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people. The air is cleaner, the night sky is darker, wildlife is all around. If she skins her knee or gets lost, she gets to deal with it herself rather than having an adult on tap. This breeds more independent people with hard earned self confidence. She can watch and help her parents do a bazillion things around the house that they'd dial up a contractor for in the city. Yeah, it's harder to get a ride share, and you can't work in an office in the city without a very long commute. But there are higher priorities than those, like growing better humans.

kgermino 6y ago
> But it's still like that in rural areas. A kid can explore the wilderness with her dog on a Saturday and not be expected until dinner. Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people. The air is cleaner, the sky is darker, wildlife is all around. If she skins her knee or gets lost, she gets to deal with it herself rather than having an adult on tap. This breeds more independent people with hard earned self confidence. She can watch and help her parents do a bazillion things around the house that they'd dial up a contractor for in the city. In my experience this is very common in cities too. It's the suburbs that prevent it. I don't have kids yet, but in my (very urban) neighborhood it's extremely common to have kids out and about on their own. It's generally seen as being very safe. When I talk to coworkers with kids in the suburbs they're much more worried about letting their kids run around without adults. To be fair, it makes some sense: cars are one of the biggest killers of kids, and they're a much bigger risk in the suburbs (where most streets are wide and fast) than the city.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  I live in an urbanized suburb (SFH, but 5 miles from a city core) and kids are out all the time. We have a few helicopter parents that feel the need to monitor their kids constantly, but for the most part, the parks, buses, restaurants, convenience stores, etc are all full of kids/teens. They don't even really cause trouble either. You'd think a group of teenage boys would be assholes, but nope, they just kind of mind their own business. Once you get to the cookie-cutter subdivisions in the far suburbs, that's when the kids all disappear. Part of it might be helicopter parenting, but I think it's caused mostly by a lack of any outdoor activities. Riding your bike means going to the next subdivision over. Repeat that a half-dozen times and you get to a heavily trafficked road that can be followed for a few miles to a strip mall with a Target. Even all of the nice parks in these places are only accessible via car -- surrounded on all sized by 4-6 lane traffic going 45+MPH.
  - sharadov 6y ago
    Where is this, I want to move there!
    - departure 6y ago
      It happens in my single-family home and duplex filled neighboorhood in urban Austin TX.
      - zrules 6y ago
        Can you say which neighborhood it is? If you’d rather not, can you recommend some neighborhoods? I’m considering moving the family to Austin but have mostly been only looking at the new suburb developments in the south- and northwest.
      - sharadov 6y ago
        Lovely, if you don't mind can you share the name of the neighborhood, looking at Austin as a potential place to move to.
    - 6y ago
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
This is the guy that lets his kids free-range in the city. I don't think you can accuse him of mollycoddling his kids. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skaoQy04EjU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skaoQy04EjU
taurath 6y ago
You also are dependent on parents to go see most friends, and the amount of kids nearby will be fewer. That independence doesn’t really start until 16 when you get a car. All this to say is everything comes with trade offs.
clairity 6y ago
i grew up in a rural area and appreciated the freedoms that entailed, but in no way is that the only, or best, way to develop independence in children. what you're describing is more an indictment of poor risk assessment, that parents are paranoid and over-protective for no good reason, than some inherent difference of rural vs urban living. crime is not a serious concern anywhere, just like getting eaten by a bear is not a serious concern anywhere.
- klyrs 6y ago
  > just like getting eaten by a bear is not a serious concern anywhere. You must not live in Grizzly country. It's a serious concern.
  - clairity 6y ago
    no, that's exactly the point, it's not. the risk is overblown, even considering bear country. the worldwide risk is on the order a few dozen attacks (not deaths) per year, primarily to defend their cubs, with extreme hunger being a secondary cause (bears understandably don't risk fights without good reason).
  - packet_nerd 6y ago
    I grew up in grizzly country in Northwest Montana, spent loads of time out in the wilderness on my own or with my younger brothers, and even saw a mamma grizzly with two cubs in the wild once. They are absolutely not a serious concern.[1] We used to make fun of outsiders who feared just getting out of the car without their guns and pepper spray. :-) [1] That being said, please don't be stupid: keep your distance and show them all due respect.
    - klyrs 6y ago
      Yeah, I'd laugh at those outsiders, too. Campsites are different. Idiots leave food around, which grizzlies find, and come to expect. Then the next idiot comes around, wipes salmon grease on his pants, goes to sleep wearing those same pants, and gets eaten. I agree with your [1] -- where you're taking the concern seriously.
PHGamer 6y ago
sounds to me like thats a reason for CPS to be shut down.
prions 6y ago
When people talk about raising kids right, it always pans back to growing up in a rural area away from most people. Besides the dark skies/wilderness why is growing up in a rural area better than in a city for children? Given that the majority of people live in a city/metropolitan area, I'll assert that my subjective opinion that growing up in a city would be better for a child than your subjective opinion that rural areas are better.
- therealmarv 6y ago
  also: kids are not always staying kids. I was happy when I was a teenager that I could explore the city on my own and independent and with friends and not stuck in a (for teenager boring) rural area.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mattzito 6y ago
I agree with you - I think that rural life is quite empowering, but can be quite isolating as well. I also think that cities can inspire a sense of independence and self-reliance - in NYC, many middle schoolers ride the subway alone. In my apartment, we fix things ourselves, and my 6 year old already has a working understanding of plumbing and electrical. She's also been exposed to a diversity of cultures and ideas, not all of them pleasant, but all educational. Overall, I find the suburbs to be the worst of both worlds - overprotective parents shuffling their kids in cars from scheduled activity to activity with other kids of a similar ethnic and socioeconomic background
codemac 6y ago
> Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people. Crime in rural areas today is rampant due to the opioid crisis. I don't know of a small town that hasn't been absolutely torn apart. Ironically while small town crime is way up due to opioids & heroin, it's down in large cities, about as low as rural towns in the 70s. > If she skins her knee or gets lost, she gets to deal with it herself rather than having an adult on tap. Tell me which kids don't have cellphones these days? All my friend's kids in rural (very rural) areas have them for "safety", and 2g-3g reaches pretty much every hollow. Your description does not match the experiences I've had in the last 10 years, and as someone who grew up in a very rural area (~1k people/sq mi) and now lives in a very urban area (~18k people/sq mi).
- hirundo 6y ago
  Where I live in New Mexico it's closer to 10 people/sq mi. There is poor cell phone reception on some high points and none elsewhere. So I hike with a PLB. This area does have a serious drug problem but there are so few people that the threat is low. Where I typically hike I've seen maybe a half dozen people, at a distance, in a dozen years.
- epa 6y ago
  ~1k people/sq mi is not "very rural"
  - codemac 6y ago
    Just went with wikipedia's number for my hometown. The city pop is 3k, but the county is only 16k, for an area of 450 square miles. I did not grow up in city limits, and the area was less than half the population back then. Just was trying to give some very conservative numbers. More than happy to meet more yokels like me :)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
tropdrop 6y ago
Echoing kgermino's statement, I also live in a (small but dense) city on the East Coast, in a very walkable neighborhood where the train station is a ten minute walk away from my house. There are kids bicycling and playing outside, lots of families with dogs, all enabled because the roads are smaller and we're still a walking distance from food, hardware store, etc. Do not confuse the singe-zoned, panopticon-esque tracts of land with nothing around but houses with small yards and not a single shred of grocery stores, points of interest or wildlife-allocated land for dozens of square miles (necessitating car travel) [1] with "living in cities." Additionally, crime goes down not just with a fewer number of people, but also with people taking ownership over their community – as you'll see in loved neighborhoods of bigger cities like New York – rather than barricading themselves inside their house and watching with suspicion any person that walks past their shuttered blinds, because in places so hostile to travel on foot, no one in their right mind walks. In an era of continuously increasing human footprint on the planet, we should not be talking about the (environmentally and fiscally) expensive expansion of humans to the corners of the planet that remain "rural" and a respite for our Earth's natural resources. We should consider how to use properly the space we have already colonized, and we should begin with elimination of single-zoned tracts of land. 1 - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/7/7/abolish-single-family-zoning https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/7/7/abolish-single-...
- pdonis 6y ago
  > we should begin with elimination of single-zoned tracts of land Not everyone's needs and preferences are the same. It's great that your city meets your needs and preferences. That doesn't give you the right to impose your preferred solution on everybody else.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    Hilarious. What do you think zoning is, if not "imposing <someone's> preferred solution on everyone else [ who might develop it ]" ? Zoning is explicitly how communities act to stop people from doing things in with property there that a sufficiently powerful subset (hopefully a majority, but only hopefully) of the people already there don't like.
ianmobbs 6y ago
> But there are higher priorities than those, like growing better humans. I grew up in a suburban bordering on semi-rural area, and while I do think living in a rural region certainly has it's benefits (like the ones you describe), implying it by default "grows better humans" than those living in an urban area is ridiculous.
staticassertion 6y ago
Growing up in NYC I walked home alone, took the subway to meet friends, walked around all of manhattan a million times, etc. Most of that started around age 13-14, and as a preteen I would have my slightly older sister along with me. At 15 I started to bike everywhere. I took my bike to the Hudson river path and I could get anywhere I wanted in 10-20 minutes - visiting a friend who lived downtown, or head up to Central Park to meet up and bike around with others, try out some diners uptown, etc. At 16 my friends and I would walk around the east side, walking for miles in the middle of the night. I don't think it was negligent at all, but I felt extremely independent because I could get anywhere as a kid without needing a car. I've always found that growing up in a city that felt safe and had great public transportation made me extremely independent at an early age.
- woodruffw 6y ago
  For even more context to this: when you're a child in NYC, the public school system gives you a free MetroCard as soon as you start elementary school. They're meant to be for commuting, but they have a small enough eligibility radius and extra rides to make them generally useful. Once I got one (I was maybe 8 or 9) I was more or less independent, as were all of my childhood friends. This is in stark contrast to people I befriended in college, who were (1) largely reliant on their parents for socialization and exploration until they were old enough to drive, and (2) incapable of handling the general mishegass that happens in urban environments without me as their tour guide. This doesn't make them bad people or dependent in some profoundly handicapping way; it just goes to show that a frontiersman's notion of "independence" is perhaps not the most interesting one in 2020.
  - staticassertion 6y ago
    Oh hell yeah. Those cards were like little slices of plastic magic. Every once in a while someone would lose one, or claim to lose it, and you could snag the extra and get yourself anywhere from an extra 3 to 6 rides, and with free transfers that basically meant you could be anywhere any time for free. I went to school upstate and it was impossible to get around without a car. Everyone was totally reliant on them, and I guess as kids you were always beholden to whoever was licensed/ had a car. To me that's insane, we could get anywhere for free, whenever.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
I grew up in Africa. One of my favorite games was to catch African chameleons, and run around with them on my finger, pointing them at flies. That's a game that you won't find too easily in the US. But it was really dangerous. We had some very nasty snakes, thereabout, half the bugs could give you bites that would take a month to heal, and violent crime was quite prevalent. I learned to be quite careful. I survived. Not sure I'd want to put my kids through the same risks, but my parents didn't seem to have a problem with it (good or bad? I dunno. They were quite fascinating people, in their own right). It did give me a unique perspective, though. In my mind, I'm glad to have had it.
- brnt 6y ago
  A finger mounted tonguegun? Kid me would've loved it! (Adult me too!) Best thing I could manage was a two handed digger (holding a Guinea pig just above the ground).
- ip26 6y ago
  But it was really dangerous My wife & I talk occasionally about an interview we read of some tribal group, I believe in Africa. A kid is exploring a machete. The westerner asks a woman why she isn't stopping the kid. She explains machetes are quite sharp, so the kid will either quickly learn to be careful- or be removed from the gene pool (paraphrasing). It answered a lot of questions we hadn't been able to answer previously. (Mainly revolving around how difficult parenting still is, even with all our modern miracles)
astura 6y ago
>Yeah, it's harder to get a ride share, and you can't work in an office in the city without a very long commute. But there are higher priorities than those, like growing better humans Pretty ridiculous statement here. So, the kids I knew in college who grew up in rural areas all said a lot of their peers (and sometime them) got (sometimes heavily) involved in drugs/alcohol because "there was nothing else to do." >Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people. Disagree completely, I believe there is safety in numbers and the community mostly watches out for kids. (Personal experience here)
triceratops 6y ago
> At age ten I would hop on my little stingray bike and explore for a dozen miles in any direction. My experience was very different, my subdivision was hemmed in by freeways and expressways on most sides. Going anywhere required a ride from an adult.
agumonkey 6y ago
This is the kind of subtle change in society that I can't describe. As a kid, at my uncle place in the country side, we used to take bikes with my cousin and go whatever. Far away, unattended, no phone (hell, I don't think that house had a landline at the time). Nowadays it feels a fantasy novel about another galaxy.
watwut 6y ago
I grew up in the city and explored the city freely. The issue here is not the landscape, it is that definition of "acceptable parenting" moved on absurdly. And frankly, rural kids are not more independent. Also, the "skins her knee" thing is strawman. Kids who are small enough to need that adult on tap are not exploring forest alone (say 5 years old). And at the age where rural kids explore forest with dog alone and it is fine for them to get lost, they don't get taps in city either. I mean the independence thing very seriously, even you see the same age kid going in city alone as unfanthomable, but even now, they actually do.
adrianN 6y ago
Even you encourage everyone to move to the countryside (as you do for example by subsidizing car use), you destroy the very things you like about the country: cleaner air, dark skies, wilderness all around.

kgermino 6y ago

> But it's still like that in rural areas. A kid can explore the wilderness with her dog on a Saturday and not be expected until dinner. Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people. The air is cleaner, the sky is darker, wildlife is all around. If she skins her knee or gets lost, she gets to deal with it herself rather than having an adult on tap. This breeds more independent people with hard earned self confidence. She can watch and help her parents do a bazillion things around the house that they'd dial up a contractor for in the city. In my experience this is very common in cities too. It's the suburbs that prevent it. I don't have kids yet, but in my (very urban) neighborhood it's extremely common to have kids out and about on their own. It's generally seen as being very safe. When I talk to coworkers with kids in the suburbs they're much more worried about letting their kids run around without adults. To be fair, it makes some sense: cars are one of the biggest killers of kids, and they're a much bigger risk in the suburbs (where most streets are wide and fast) than the city.

mywittyname 6y ago
I live in an urbanized suburb (SFH, but 5 miles from a city core) and kids are out all the time. We have a few helicopter parents that feel the need to monitor their kids constantly, but for the most part, the parks, buses, restaurants, convenience stores, etc are all full of kids/teens. They don't even really cause trouble either. You'd think a group of teenage boys would be assholes, but nope, they just kind of mind their own business. Once you get to the cookie-cutter subdivisions in the far suburbs, that's when the kids all disappear. Part of it might be helicopter parenting, but I think it's caused mostly by a lack of any outdoor activities. Riding your bike means going to the next subdivision over. Repeat that a half-dozen times and you get to a heavily trafficked road that can be followed for a few miles to a strip mall with a Target. Even all of the nice parks in these places are only accessible via car -- surrounded on all sized by 4-6 lane traffic going 45+MPH.
- sharadov 6y ago
  Where is this, I want to move there!
  - departure 6y ago
    It happens in my single-family home and duplex filled neighboorhood in urban Austin TX.
    - zrules 6y ago
      Can you say which neighborhood it is? If you’d rather not, can you recommend some neighborhoods? I’m considering moving the family to Austin but have mostly been only looking at the new suburb developments in the south- and northwest.
    - sharadov 6y ago
      Lovely, if you don't mind can you share the name of the neighborhood, looking at Austin as a potential place to move to.
  - 6y ago

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

This is the guy that lets his kids free-range in the city. I don't think you can accuse him of mollycoddling his kids. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skaoQy04EjU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skaoQy04EjU

taurath 6y ago

You also are dependent on parents to go see most friends, and the amount of kids nearby will be fewer. That independence doesn’t really start until 16 when you get a car. All this to say is everything comes with trade offs.

clairity 6y ago

i grew up in a rural area and appreciated the freedoms that entailed, but in no way is that the only, or best, way to develop independence in children. what you're describing is more an indictment of poor risk assessment, that parents are paranoid and over-protective for no good reason, than some inherent difference of rural vs urban living. crime is not a serious concern anywhere, just like getting eaten by a bear is not a serious concern anywhere.

klyrs 6y ago
> just like getting eaten by a bear is not a serious concern anywhere. You must not live in Grizzly country. It's a serious concern.
- clairity 6y ago
  no, that's exactly the point, it's not. the risk is overblown, even considering bear country. the worldwide risk is on the order a few dozen attacks (not deaths) per year, primarily to defend their cubs, with extreme hunger being a secondary cause (bears understandably don't risk fights without good reason).
- packet_nerd 6y ago
  I grew up in grizzly country in Northwest Montana, spent loads of time out in the wilderness on my own or with my younger brothers, and even saw a mamma grizzly with two cubs in the wild once. They are absolutely not a serious concern.[1] We used to make fun of outsiders who feared just getting out of the car without their guns and pepper spray. :-) [1] That being said, please don't be stupid: keep your distance and show them all due respect.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    Yeah, I'd laugh at those outsiders, too. Campsites are different. Idiots leave food around, which grizzlies find, and come to expect. Then the next idiot comes around, wipes salmon grease on his pants, goes to sleep wearing those same pants, and gets eaten. I agree with your [1] -- where you're taking the concern seriously.

PHGamer 6y ago

sounds to me like thats a reason for CPS to be shut down.

prions 6y ago

When people talk about raising kids right, it always pans back to growing up in a rural area away from most people. Besides the dark skies/wilderness why is growing up in a rural area better than in a city for children? Given that the majority of people live in a city/metropolitan area, I'll assert that my subjective opinion that growing up in a city would be better for a child than your subjective opinion that rural areas are better.

therealmarv 6y ago
also: kids are not always staying kids. I was happy when I was a teenager that I could explore the city on my own and independent and with friends and not stuck in a (for teenager boring) rural area.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mattzito 6y ago

I agree with you - I think that rural life is quite empowering, but can be quite isolating as well. I also think that cities can inspire a sense of independence and self-reliance - in NYC, many middle schoolers ride the subway alone. In my apartment, we fix things ourselves, and my 6 year old already has a working understanding of plumbing and electrical. She's also been exposed to a diversity of cultures and ideas, not all of them pleasant, but all educational. Overall, I find the suburbs to be the worst of both worlds - overprotective parents shuffling their kids in cars from scheduled activity to activity with other kids of a similar ethnic and socioeconomic background

codemac 6y ago

> Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people. Crime in rural areas today is rampant due to the opioid crisis. I don't know of a small town that hasn't been absolutely torn apart. Ironically while small town crime is way up due to opioids & heroin, it's down in large cities, about as low as rural towns in the 70s. > If she skins her knee or gets lost, she gets to deal with it herself rather than having an adult on tap. Tell me which kids don't have cellphones these days? All my friend's kids in rural (very rural) areas have them for "safety", and 2g-3g reaches pretty much every hollow. Your description does not match the experiences I've had in the last 10 years, and as someone who grew up in a very rural area (~1k people/sq mi) and now lives in a very urban area (~18k people/sq mi).

hirundo 6y ago
Where I live in New Mexico it's closer to 10 people/sq mi. There is poor cell phone reception on some high points and none elsewhere. So I hike with a PLB. This area does have a serious drug problem but there are so few people that the threat is low. Where I typically hike I've seen maybe a half dozen people, at a distance, in a dozen years.
epa 6y ago
~1k people/sq mi is not "very rural"
- codemac 6y ago
  Just went with wikipedia's number for my hometown. The city pop is 3k, but the county is only 16k, for an area of 450 square miles. I did not grow up in city limits, and the area was less than half the population back then. Just was trying to give some very conservative numbers. More than happy to meet more yokels like me :)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

tropdrop 6y ago

Echoing kgermino's statement, I also live in a (small but dense) city on the East Coast, in a very walkable neighborhood where the train station is a ten minute walk away from my house. There are kids bicycling and playing outside, lots of families with dogs, all enabled because the roads are smaller and we're still a walking distance from food, hardware store, etc. Do not confuse the singe-zoned, panopticon-esque tracts of land with nothing around but houses with small yards and not a single shred of grocery stores, points of interest or wildlife-allocated land for dozens of square miles (necessitating car travel) [1] with "living in cities." Additionally, crime goes down not just with a fewer number of people, but also with people taking ownership over their community – as you'll see in loved neighborhoods of bigger cities like New York – rather than barricading themselves inside their house and watching with suspicion any person that walks past their shuttered blinds, because in places so hostile to travel on foot, no one in their right mind walks. In an era of continuously increasing human footprint on the planet, we should not be talking about the (environmentally and fiscally) expensive expansion of humans to the corners of the planet that remain "rural" and a respite for our Earth's natural resources. We should consider how to use properly the space we have already colonized, and we should begin with elimination of single-zoned tracts of land. 1 - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/7/7/abolish-single-family-zoning https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/7/7/abolish-single-...

pdonis 6y ago
> we should begin with elimination of single-zoned tracts of land Not everyone's needs and preferences are the same. It's great that your city meets your needs and preferences. That doesn't give you the right to impose your preferred solution on everybody else.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  Hilarious. What do you think zoning is, if not "imposing <someone's> preferred solution on everyone else [ who might develop it ]" ? Zoning is explicitly how communities act to stop people from doing things in with property there that a sufficiently powerful subset (hopefully a majority, but only hopefully) of the people already there don't like.

ianmobbs 6y ago

> But there are higher priorities than those, like growing better humans. I grew up in a suburban bordering on semi-rural area, and while I do think living in a rural region certainly has it's benefits (like the ones you describe), implying it by default "grows better humans" than those living in an urban area is ridiculous.

staticassertion 6y ago

Growing up in NYC I walked home alone, took the subway to meet friends, walked around all of manhattan a million times, etc. Most of that started around age 13-14, and as a preteen I would have my slightly older sister along with me. At 15 I started to bike everywhere. I took my bike to the Hudson river path and I could get anywhere I wanted in 10-20 minutes - visiting a friend who lived downtown, or head up to Central Park to meet up and bike around with others, try out some diners uptown, etc. At 16 my friends and I would walk around the east side, walking for miles in the middle of the night. I don't think it was negligent at all, but I felt extremely independent because I could get anywhere as a kid without needing a car. I've always found that growing up in a city that felt safe and had great public transportation made me extremely independent at an early age.

woodruffw 6y ago
For even more context to this: when you're a child in NYC, the public school system gives you a free MetroCard as soon as you start elementary school. They're meant to be for commuting, but they have a small enough eligibility radius and extra rides to make them generally useful. Once I got one (I was maybe 8 or 9) I was more or less independent, as were all of my childhood friends. This is in stark contrast to people I befriended in college, who were (1) largely reliant on their parents for socialization and exploration until they were old enough to drive, and (2) incapable of handling the general mishegass that happens in urban environments without me as their tour guide. This doesn't make them bad people or dependent in some profoundly handicapping way; it just goes to show that a frontiersman's notion of "independence" is perhaps not the most interesting one in 2020.
- staticassertion 6y ago
  Oh hell yeah. Those cards were like little slices of plastic magic. Every once in a while someone would lose one, or claim to lose it, and you could snag the extra and get yourself anywhere from an extra 3 to 6 rides, and with free transfers that basically meant you could be anywhere any time for free. I went to school upstate and it was impossible to get around without a car. Everyone was totally reliant on them, and I guess as kids you were always beholden to whoever was licensed/ had a car. To me that's insane, we could get anywhere for free, whenever.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

I grew up in Africa. One of my favorite games was to catch African chameleons, and run around with them on my finger, pointing them at flies. That's a game that you won't find too easily in the US. But it was really dangerous. We had some very nasty snakes, thereabout, half the bugs could give you bites that would take a month to heal, and violent crime was quite prevalent. I learned to be quite careful. I survived. Not sure I'd want to put my kids through the same risks, but my parents didn't seem to have a problem with it (good or bad? I dunno. They were quite fascinating people, in their own right). It did give me a unique perspective, though. In my mind, I'm glad to have had it.

brnt 6y ago
A finger mounted tonguegun? Kid me would've loved it! (Adult me too!) Best thing I could manage was a two handed digger (holding a Guinea pig just above the ground).
ip26 6y ago
But it was really dangerous My wife & I talk occasionally about an interview we read of some tribal group, I believe in Africa. A kid is exploring a machete. The westerner asks a woman why she isn't stopping the kid. She explains machetes are quite sharp, so the kid will either quickly learn to be careful- or be removed from the gene pool (paraphrasing). It answered a lot of questions we hadn't been able to answer previously. (Mainly revolving around how difficult parenting still is, even with all our modern miracles)

astura 6y ago

>Yeah, it's harder to get a ride share, and you can't work in an office in the city without a very long commute. But there are higher priorities than those, like growing better humans Pretty ridiculous statement here. So, the kids I knew in college who grew up in rural areas all said a lot of their peers (and sometime them) got (sometimes heavily) involved in drugs/alcohol because "there was nothing else to do." >Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people. Disagree completely, I believe there is safety in numbers and the community mostly watches out for kids. (Personal experience here)

triceratops 6y ago

> At age ten I would hop on my little stingray bike and explore for a dozen miles in any direction. My experience was very different, my subdivision was hemmed in by freeways and expressways on most sides. Going anywhere required a ride from an adult.

agumonkey 6y ago

This is the kind of subtle change in society that I can't describe. As a kid, at my uncle place in the country side, we used to take bikes with my cousin and go whatever. Far away, unattended, no phone (hell, I don't think that house had a landline at the time). Nowadays it feels a fantasy novel about another galaxy.

watwut 6y ago

I grew up in the city and explored the city freely. The issue here is not the landscape, it is that definition of "acceptable parenting" moved on absurdly. And frankly, rural kids are not more independent. Also, the "skins her knee" thing is strawman. Kids who are small enough to need that adult on tap are not exploring forest alone (say 5 years old). And at the age where rural kids explore forest with dog alone and it is fine for them to get lost, they don't get taps in city either. I mean the independence thing very seriously, even you see the same age kid going in city alone as unfanthomable, but even now, they actually do.

adrianN 6y ago

Even you encourage everyone to move to the countryside (as you do for example by subsidizing car use), you destroy the very things you like about the country: cleaner air, dark skies, wilderness all around.