30 ms·

Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

405 points by throwup238 2y ago

tmaly 2y ago
I would have thought that two parents working and not technology would have been the major contributor to loss of the community in early periods.
- graemep 2y ago
  Non working parents were major contributors to local communities. I have noticed that community organisations now are far more dependant on retired peopke than they were a few decades ago.
- throwway120385 2y ago
  I think it's a complex system, where it's not so much any one factor but rather the presence of so many different factors that each have a small impact and which together combine to have a big impact. So you could be right at the same time the article is right. Technology has become a great atomizing force in our society, from automobiles keeping us from talking to each other in traffic to cell phones keeping us from talking to each other at the store. Even online shopping atomizes us. And in the mean time, both parents basically have to be working all the time to keep paying for their lifestyle. All of this combined leads to isolated childhoods, and because we tend to keep the habits we learn as children, isolated adulthoods.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > I would have thought that two parents working and not technology would have been the major contributor to loss of the community in early periods. I had one working parent and I had a community because I had places to go. My 5 kids had 1 parent at home full time and zero community. For most hours they were trapped in a building with adults. Sometimes they were contained in some highly limited adult-made program. And that was what they had. Also most every other kid.
  - swatcoder 2y ago
    FWIW, that doesn't counter the GP's suggestion that changes to the community norm might have impacted the experience for everyone. Your 1-parent childhood may still have benefited from having many other stay-at-home parents keeping an eye out the window an ear to street for kids who need attention, and likewise your kids childhood may have been more isolated for the lack of that, even with a parent staying at home for them individually. Sometimes, it's not about the circumstances of one's own home so much as about the prevailing circumstances (and expectations) of the community as a whole.
    - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
      > that doesn't counter the GP's suggestion that changes to the community norm might have impacted the experience for everyone. We lived that community "norm" as part of a very immersive and busy religious life. We also lived it in modern times where kids moved from one adult-constructed environment to another. The author's theoretical mental health magic didn't materialize. These kids weren't surrounded with spaces to go with their peers and develop the critical skills that arise when adults aren't available.
  - scarby2 2y ago
    I had 2 working parents and a community. The perceived safety and walkability of an area has a lot to do with it. My parents weren't worried if they didn't see me from morning until dinner time (and obviously they had no way of getting in contact with me other than maybe phoning all the other parents - assuming we weren't off in a field somewhere).
    - inanutshellus 2y ago
      If you had two working parents, but had "community", frankly I'd have to assume it was comprised of kids with homemaker parents, which doesn't count as a counterpoint.
      - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
- doubloon 2y ago
  two parents working 40-60 hours a week. if two parents worked 20-30 hours a week each, probably not as big a deal.
- Moldoteck 2y ago
  Two parents working doesn't matter when the environment is safe. When I was a kid both of my parents did work but I was walking alone/with friends to my school and back and didn't need to ask permission to go outside play with others. And mind you, that was a time when kid kidnapping was stil a thing. Imo what changed is abundance of cars- look how many ppl a killed by them, how big the cars got, how many spacy these take, look how far away is everything in suburbs- you basically need a car to meet with someone, it's even worse than a village due to the lack of a grid design. Also, because of spreading many third places became unprofitable, others were buldozed to create parkings esp in us with parking requirements. The zoning played a big role too- a lot of businesses that attract ppl, make the environment safer with social regulation and creating social bounds- can no longer be created bc of zoning. When tech did appear - it's natural ppl switched, bc these did offer more options to socialize safely compared to real world
- eru 2y ago
  That's actually testable! Especially across countries and across time. (I doubt it's a big deal. But we could get the data to at least look for correlations.)
ajma 2y ago
Does families having fewer number of children contribute to this? The most local community would be children that live under the same roof.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > Does families having fewer number of children contribute to this? It could have decades ago, when kids still had places to go. Not now. I had 5 who spent their childhood persistently locked away in one adult construct or another - because there was/is no local community. Within their reach were roads and private property and that's about it. They were in the same boat as most other US kids.
  - thimkerbell 2y ago
    How would you (could one) change this, Waron? Just throwing something out there, not a carefully thought out How.
    - analog31 2y ago
      My kids faced the same situation, though at least the neighbors also had kids. I think that parents have to revolt en masse against saturating their kids with extracurriculars. One family going it alone is going to have lonesome kids. The competitiveness has to go away -- the feeling that your kids have to be 100% occupied in order to give them a fighting chance in the future. Schools need to back off on homework.
      - lmm 2y ago
        The problem there is college. You'd have to either make college admissions much less "holistic", or make sure there are non-college paths to success (something people have been trying hard for many years with little success), or both.
        ksplicer 2y ago
chris_va 2y ago
Apologies for being critical, but this reads like the author had a conclusion they wanted to reach and worked backward to some flashy graphs to make it work (the right side of the "lies, damn lies, and statistics" spectrum). There is no discussion of confounders, no control groups or paired studies, and there are million things correlated with the last 50 of societal development years besides the topics mentioned here. The mention of phones and other influences in teen behavior is completely unrelated to the main point in the discussion and just serves to provide credibility by association. All in all, this is not science, it is just a reductionist oped presented as fact using classic internet hooks.
- WorkerBee28474 2y ago
  > All in all, this is not science It's not trying to be. The intended audience is not peers reading a research journal, it's normal folks and policy makers who don't know what a confounding variable is but still want to make modern life suck less.
  - potatoman22 2y ago
    Since the audience isn't technical enough to realize the author excluded confounders, doesn't that make it even worse?
    - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
      Confounders or not, kids don't have crap for communities. They have 24/7 adulting, most of it spent in one building or another. source:5 kids. source:15 years scout leader. source:10 years youth leader, other.
      - jasonfarnon 2y ago
        I hear a lot about excessive parenting on here but I wonder if it's just a segment of society. Can anyone but wealthy parents have time to occupy their kids 24-7? The freedom I and friends had as a kid was not a decision of my parents so much as a necessity. Parents dont get home from work until 6, school lets out at 2, we get at least 4 free hours of undisturbed freedom. Why would that be different now?
jc6 2y ago
Is this what Zgmunt Bauman called the transition from Solid Modernity to Liquid Modernity? With rents going up and switching jobs more frequently than past generations it becomes harder to stuck around in one place long enough for strong communities to form.
- doe_eyes 2y ago
  The rate of work-related moves is half of what it used to be in the 1960s. By all accounts, mobility is decreasing, not increasing. The reality is that we just don't talk to each other much. If you want to look for the decline of one institution that provided some degree of community cohesion, then the answer is going to be pretty unpopular: we don't go to church anymore.
  - a1o 2y ago
    It doesn't have to be churches, local school with parents association making events, libraries that have spaces for the kids to hangout with others and work on projects together, open sports areas, parks and small festivities, farmers market that have a set periodicity. But it has to have one space where people can start to meet each other so they can talk and desire more things so they can build these other spaces or have some unified way to demand it from their local mayor.
    - randomdata 2y ago
      > It doesn't have to be churches Strictly true, but if people aren't strongly compelled to show up somewhere, they aren't apt to. Historically, the "fear of God" ensured that people went to church, effectively forcing them to gather, meet each other, so on and so forth. The only thing I see that comes close to that these days is youth sports leagues, where parents have a fear of failing their children if not heavily involved in such activities. While this does seem to establish some kind of community amongst parents of children of similar ages, it does not seem to expand out into parents with children of dissimilar ages even within the same sport, let alone an even larger community. Which is not terribly surprising as there is not much reason for someone unrelated to a participating child to show up. I might even go as far as to say that because parents get stuck in those narrowly isolated communities, it contributes a fracturing to any larger community that might have otherwise been able to form. It is difficult to have a general community of only 20-somethings and the elderly with little in-between.
deleted 2y ago
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throwaway48476 2y ago
America is transitioning from a high trust society to a low trust society. This is one of the many consequences.
- peepeepoopoo75 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - bedobi 2y ago
    are you seriously implying that immigration is responsible for a sudden reduction in public trust? american immigration has been a thing for 300 years
    - peepeepoopoo75 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - Lammy 2y ago
        In the future only money will have freedom of movement, never humans. You are serving your intended role in the consent-manufacture machine working to ensure that outcome. If you actually still believe in the idea of nations as anything besides a means to divide and conquer Us from Them, I would encourage you to learn about the death and posthumous citizenship of Raoul Wallenberg. The US State Department FOIA cables would be a great place to start.
      - vsuperpower2020 2y ago
        [flagged]
        llamaimperative 2y ago
        That’s a super bonkers theory amigo. “Most people” who dispute the idea that there’s a purposeful undermining of social cohesion via permissive immigration policy are disputing it because they are willing to uproot their entire lives to switch countries?! Holy smokes.
mihaaly 2y ago
Are liberal and secular teenagers more willing/open to admit problems or seek help for unusual troublesome matters set them apart form others than religious peers perhaps? Human culture of the past several centuries are full of art and documents showing the repressive nature of religious or other prescribed expectation oriented groups. There are countless movements to counteract with the oppressive side of prescribed behaviour and group habits too.
- o11c 2y ago
  That's painting a very strange brush against religious folks, which does not at all match my observations (religious people can very easily talk about all sorts of things with other religious people (at least, those of vaguely similar religiosities), whereas conversations where at least one party is secular flicker and stagnate due to lack of known shared background)
  - the_gipsy 2y ago
    > religious people can very easily talk about all sorts of things Sure, buddy.
standardUser 2y ago
I think it's an important topic but I reject these explanations entirely. Television may have stolen time from other activities, but during that era television was itself a unifying activity, generating a previously undreamt of amount of shared cultural experiences. I'd argue excessive television-watching was a result of reduced social cohesion and community, not a cause. I blame very different trends from that era... - The Drug War and "tough on crime" policies that generated a massive amount of fear among parents and created a hostile relationship between police and youth (and continues to, to this day). - Christian fear-mongering over Satanism and witchcraft, creating even more reasons to keep a close watch on your kids. - Racial integration of schools and neighborhoods which gave white parents an urgent reason to restrict and monitor which kids their kids played with. It wasn't distractions and technology or the lack of a global war that lead to reduced trust and cohesion. It was the spectacular and enduring success of professional fear-mongers.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
bedobi 2y ago
The design of the physical environment is in no small part responsible for this. Don't believe me go to Europe and Japan where kids are still allowed to walk and bike to school, to friends places and just in general play and exist outside unattended to a much higher degree than in the US. Because in the US they would be roadkill, and even if they somehow survived outside of a car, car centric design means there's nowhere for them to go on foot or by bike anyway. Everything is too far.
- alfalfasprout 2y ago
  You're also putting Europe on a pedestal. In many urban areas (where the majority of the population lives) it's no longer safe for kids to walk + bike to school freely. Not necessarily because of cars but significant crime.
  - jasonfarnon 2y ago
    Is it no longer safe there? Because in the states parents have been restricting kids a lot more severely just as crime in cities plummeted (mid 90s--present). So I imagine it's either perceptions about safety, or parents just being more careful.
    - immibis 2y ago
      It isn't no longer safe for kids to walk to school. What happened is that American internet arrived here, and it has political reasons to want everyone to think it is.
      - wincy 2y ago
        I walked to the gas station with my dog and two kids, and had a guy yell at me that my kids were going to get kidnapped while I went inside for 5 minutes to buy us some waters and snacks. The biggest hurdle for us letting our children be free range and able to do things on their own has definitely been paranoid parents and busybodies who watched Sound of Freedom and think that every girl is going to immediately get sex trafficked to Guatemalan drug lords (or whatever, I didn't watch the movie) if she leaves her parent's sight for a second.
kelseyfrog 2y ago
> In 1995, in the initial academic essay that became the book, Putnam described the social-capital-destroying effects of the rise of television [...] Jon Haidt really gives too much credit to television. It's an easy thing to reach for when mobile phones and social media are are the present day forces we content with. But there's a deeper story. I'm reminded by Thatcher's 1987 quote: > You know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. Maybe it wasn't true then, but people believed them and in their belief they made it true. In a world where men, women, and families exist, there isn't room for community. It was dismantled by disbelief. In the same way we don't have the ability to reach the moon anymore, I wonder if we don't have the ability to reconstitute communities, like lost and ancient knowledge, eventually they will fade from living memory.
downrightmike 2y ago
Moral panic, people said the same thing about books, newspapers, radio etc. People like things and get into them, that is normal. Before all this is was just farm work. To quote a meme "The children yearn for the mines"
- pessimizer 2y ago
  Literally no one ever said that children weren't socializing because they were spending all day on their books, newspapers, and radios. You're making that up. Horror comic books are a moral panic. Children who don't know anyone but their parents and spend 10 hours a day on their phones is cause for a real panic.
  - downrightmike 2y ago
    That's farm life for all of history minus the phones
- Aerbil313 2y ago
  Every single time Haidt posts something someone surely screams here: "But people said the same thing about books too!". Since I couldn't find the comments from the past thread, let me scream the usual reply: And they were right. Books, newspapers, radio, television, smartphones. All of them weakened the social bonds between people, gradually moving us away from the way of living which we were biologically designed for. The social bonds are instead got replaced by bonds with institutions and technological gadgets. But they are exactly like junk food: They appear to satisfy the desire, but are never a substitute, and always lack the critical nutrients we need. For replies going to accuse me of intellectual hypocrisy: I do believe all technology is evil. You can accuse me of practical hypocrisy instead, since I'm a software dev.
nostrademons 2y ago
As someone who lives in a small Bay Area suburb that you wouldn't expect a strong sense of community to arise in, it's been fascinating and a little heartwarming watching the village form around my kids. My kindergartner is now at the point where he can walk into a random town event and find somebody he already knows. He's had 3 consecutive weekends of birthday parties, with largely the same cast of characters at the last 2 (the third was a pre-school friend who lives in a different city). He knows all his friends' parents, and a bunch of them apparently know me ("Hi, ___'s dad!") even though I can't remember their names. There's an interlocking web of social relationships in the city that we've somehow become part of, where people know other people through other contexts. This didn't happen automatically, and it's been fascinating to watch the work that my wife and other (frankly) women have done in building the village. It's a slow, year-by-year process of doing favors for other people, putting yourself out there, spending time with other people, having your kids spend time with other people, opening up, and building trust. We tried carpooling for the first time last spring - it worked out great, and we have a much closer relationship with the other family now, but it can be nerve-wracking entrusting your small child to another driver. But that is how you build trust, and trust is how you build the village. The community I live in is not at all what the article would predict. We are a secular liberal family. Our friends are mostly secular liberal with some religious liberal families mixed in. The community is 30% foreign-born, and 35% speak a language other than English at home. It is racially mixed, < 30% white, and about 1/3 multiracial in my son's grade. All of the polemical discourse in America would say that such a heterogenous grouping is destructive to social cohesion. But the most important ingredient to having community is that you have to want community, and value it, and be willing to put in the effort to build it. And it has a critical mass of people who value community, enough that if you are one of them, you can find your people.
- Moldoteck 2y ago
  Sounds like your suburb is designed better compared to most subs in the us
- anon291 2y ago
  Unfortunately a lot of fraternal societies have disbanded and a lot of community organizing falls to women. Men and women community organize differently and traditionally men have had great luck in formal settings. For me, in our church (I know you're not religious), I lead our men's group (chapter of a larger organization), and there's a bunch of men who are the last people you'd expect to organize community but they're all doing it happily. But we're very hierarchical (even if jokingly so) and very formal (meetings, Roberts rules, elected positions, ceremonies). It's goofy, but I fundamentally believe men do well in this. Unfortunately, I think it would be hard to form a men's group these days especially for secular people. But I encourage you anyway because otherwise it puts all the pressure on the women. I have had several moms express gratitude to my guys for doing the work we do in the community because we also do things that the women would just never organize themselves. Which is fine... Everyone should play to their strengths.
thepasswordis 2y ago
[flagged]
- dalyons 2y ago
  That might be true for you, and that sucks. but it is not so for the vast majority of the US who’s parks are just fine
  - thepasswordis 2y ago
    In what city in the US is this not true?
    - vundercind 2y ago
      It’s true in some parts of lots of US cities. It’s not true in most parts of most US cities.
    - squigz 2y ago
      Are you suggesting that every single park in every single city in the US is inundated with drug addicts?
      - thepasswordis 2y ago
        No I’m asking what city the person responded to me is talking about.
  - trgn 2y ago
    OP is right, these neighborhoods exists. it's so hard to put your finger on, but you recognize it when you see it. it's not necessarily downtown vs suburb, some suburbs are just kind of foul too. Just this weekend, me and my kids saw somebody trying to put a syringe in his thigh (being tactful here). we thought he was releaving himself and were making jokes about it, until we actually got closer. It's bad out there. Like, parks always have had vagrants, but there's a difference between the loveable wino napping away his hangover or skulking junkies trying to score. i don't think they're necessarily dangerous, but children are seeing things they shouldn't at their age. btw - i still think it's cars, mostly, but it all depends on the details. it's sadly and and and and..
derrida 2y ago
What are they calling "social capital?" It's heresy to say that social relations are valuable for their own sake, instead we have to give it a term that suggests monetary value and potential to enter some accountants balance sheet - "social capital". it's just not the case that all value can enter into monetary terms or be quantified or exploited, bought and sold - but the stupidity and ignorance of the age is we even have to suggest like ethics or holding values has some "value" in the sense of money for it to be "ok" in our dominant social norms that structure society - the corporation and workplaces under capitalism It's as if it's not ok to hold values that are not monetary or capital - that is the message of our social relations in workplaces and in the culture at current - what are called "capitalist social relations" It's heresy to say ... It's ok to have values that are not money. There are things we should value outside of some cost. it's gotten to this point. even "progressive" arguments for like "hey maybe kids playing together in community is ok" has to be quantified into some imagination "social capital"
blendo 2y ago
“Social scientists have shown — for as long as we have been collecting data — that conservatives have better mental health than liberals, and religious people have better mental health than their secular peers.” My gut tells me social scientists have “shown” no such thing, but am open to hearing the case.
- acjohnson55 2y ago
  I think it's worth considering how the causation runs. Being in a conservative environment but unable to conform could cause poor mental health and disaffection with the ideology. In a very broad stroke, this describes my personal experience.
- anon291 2y ago
  Why does your gut tell you that? Perhaps you're using the worst examples of a side you don't like to inform your view?
- kaibee 2y ago
  Ignorance is bliss right? If you don't believe that climate change is real, etc.
- feedforward 2y ago
  Obviously people who believe people can magically turn water into wine, or that virgins give birth, or that they can walk on water etc. have better "mental health" than those who are skeptical of all of this.
  - Aerbil313 2y ago
    Obviously the studies doesn't define religion as mental illness. You might want to spread your hate elsewhere, as per the site guidelines[1]. > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
tacocataco 2y ago
It's hard to be a part of the community when I have to move every year because my rent keeps going up.
- nineteen999 2y ago
  Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps into a house! Easy.
acjohnson55 2y ago
The article rings true to me. I don't think that we want to try to turn the clock back, as much as trying to find ways to combine the good parts of past and present norms, while excising the bad parts. I'm a parent of 4 small children in a smallish town (16k, single school at each grade level), and I'm cherishing the sense of community much more than I expected. There's something to having shared context with almost every person I run into in town. I only wish I felt like it were safe for my kids to explore on foot. We also live by my wife's entire extended family, and that, too, has been incredibly helpful. I was raised in a tight knit Baptist church, and while I don't miss the theology, I do think the sense of community, service, values, and culture is something that I don't have a full substitute for, as much as I have the town and family communities. I'm considering seeking out a non-creedal group to belong to, like the Unitarian Universalists.
- naasking 2y ago
  > I only wish I felt like it were safe for my kids to explore on foot. Why do you feel it's unsafe?
  - acjohnson55 2y ago
    Because people drive through my town like maniacs, speeding and running traffic lights. There aren't routes for pedestrians and cyclists to get around town without having to cross major streets at unprotected intersections. A lot could be done to improve the bikability and walkability, but the county and state own our major roads, and are historically more concerned with car throughput than pedestrian safety. This may be starting to shift, but that's the status quo.
    - naasking 2y ago
      Sounds like the local police should be pushed into enforcing the law. Reckless driving would definitely make cycling or even walking the streets dangerous for everyone, not just kids.
      - 2y ago
EGreg 2y ago
Tech is responsible, and open source tech can fix it https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
GoToRO 2y ago
Local community? the deterioration of everything has happened. Somehow all the rich people figured out that if you keep them isolated, then the people are easier to control. This happened intentional or just by measuring "what works" (for them).
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
When I was a kid, there was a park near my house in California with a jumping maze of telephone pole segments of various heights in a sand pit. And, a park by my aunt had a decommissioned Korea War-era fighter jet in the sand pit and a steel plate and open diamond grate vertical 2D crawling maze for kids. Today, I checked on Google Maps, it only has some boring, circus-colored, perfectly-safe(-and-boring) play set you already know kids avoid. Not all change is positive progress.
bparsons 2y ago
People are surprised when kids don't want to go out and play on the street, but their street is as wide as a highway and has no sidewalks. There are a million negative effects of vehicle centered urban design, and this is one of them.
Anotheroneagain 2y ago
The cause is that they started poisoning food with iron according to the wrong numbers haphazardly patched together for the war effort (and uncritically copied everywhere else). Actual iron deficiency is virtually nonexistent, there is always enough.
cauliflower99 2y ago
Haidt appeared on the Huberman podcast a few days ago talking about this. Highly recommend: https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/dr-jonathan-haidt-how-smartphones-social-media-impact-mental-health-the-realistic-solutions https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/dr-jonathan-haidt-how-sm...

405 points by throwup238 2y ago

I would have thought that two parents working and not technology would have been the major contributor to loss of the community in early periods.

graemep 2y ago
Non working parents were major contributors to local communities. I have noticed that community organisations now are far more dependant on retired peopke than they were a few decades ago.
throwway120385 2y ago
I think it's a complex system, where it's not so much any one factor but rather the presence of so many different factors that each have a small impact and which together combine to have a big impact. So you could be right at the same time the article is right. Technology has become a great atomizing force in our society, from automobiles keeping us from talking to each other in traffic to cell phones keeping us from talking to each other at the store. Even online shopping atomizes us. And in the mean time, both parents basically have to be working all the time to keep paying for their lifestyle. All of this combined leads to isolated childhoods, and because we tend to keep the habits we learn as children, isolated adulthoods.
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
> I would have thought that two parents working and not technology would have been the major contributor to loss of the community in early periods. I had one working parent and I had a community because I had places to go. My 5 kids had 1 parent at home full time and zero community. For most hours they were trapped in a building with adults. Sometimes they were contained in some highly limited adult-made program. And that was what they had. Also most every other kid.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  FWIW, that doesn't counter the GP's suggestion that changes to the community norm might have impacted the experience for everyone. Your 1-parent childhood may still have benefited from having many other stay-at-home parents keeping an eye out the window an ear to street for kids who need attention, and likewise your kids childhood may have been more isolated for the lack of that, even with a parent staying at home for them individually. Sometimes, it's not about the circumstances of one's own home so much as about the prevailing circumstances (and expectations) of the community as a whole.
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    > that doesn't counter the GP's suggestion that changes to the community norm might have impacted the experience for everyone. We lived that community "norm" as part of a very immersive and busy religious life. We also lived it in modern times where kids moved from one adult-constructed environment to another. The author's theoretical mental health magic didn't materialize. These kids weren't surrounded with spaces to go with their peers and develop the critical skills that arise when adults aren't available.
- scarby2 2y ago
  I had 2 working parents and a community. The perceived safety and walkability of an area has a lot to do with it. My parents weren't worried if they didn't see me from morning until dinner time (and obviously they had no way of getting in contact with me other than maybe phoning all the other parents - assuming we weren't off in a field somewhere).
  - inanutshellus 2y ago
    If you had two working parents, but had "community", frankly I'd have to assume it was comprised of kids with homemaker parents, which doesn't count as a counterpoint.
    - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
doubloon 2y ago
two parents working 40-60 hours a week. if two parents worked 20-30 hours a week each, probably not as big a deal.
Moldoteck 2y ago
Two parents working doesn't matter when the environment is safe. When I was a kid both of my parents did work but I was walking alone/with friends to my school and back and didn't need to ask permission to go outside play with others. And mind you, that was a time when kid kidnapping was stil a thing. Imo what changed is abundance of cars- look how many ppl a killed by them, how big the cars got, how many spacy these take, look how far away is everything in suburbs- you basically need a car to meet with someone, it's even worse than a village due to the lack of a grid design. Also, because of spreading many third places became unprofitable, others were buldozed to create parkings esp in us with parking requirements. The zoning played a big role too- a lot of businesses that attract ppl, make the environment safer with social regulation and creating social bounds- can no longer be created bc of zoning. When tech did appear - it's natural ppl switched, bc these did offer more options to socialize safely compared to real world
eru 2y ago
That's actually testable! Especially across countries and across time. (I doubt it's a big deal. But we could get the data to at least look for correlations.)

ajma 2y ago

Does families having fewer number of children contribute to this? The most local community would be children that live under the same roof.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
> Does families having fewer number of children contribute to this? It could have decades ago, when kids still had places to go. Not now. I had 5 who spent their childhood persistently locked away in one adult construct or another - because there was/is no local community. Within their reach were roads and private property and that's about it. They were in the same boat as most other US kids.
- thimkerbell 2y ago
  How would you (could one) change this, Waron? Just throwing something out there, not a carefully thought out How.
  - analog31 2y ago
    My kids faced the same situation, though at least the neighbors also had kids. I think that parents have to revolt en masse against saturating their kids with extracurriculars. One family going it alone is going to have lonesome kids. The competitiveness has to go away -- the feeling that your kids have to be 100% occupied in order to give them a fighting chance in the future. Schools need to back off on homework.
    - lmm 2y ago
      The problem there is college. You'd have to either make college admissions much less "holistic", or make sure there are non-college paths to success (something people have been trying hard for many years with little success), or both.
      - ksplicer 2y ago

chris_va 2y ago

Apologies for being critical, but this reads like the author had a conclusion they wanted to reach and worked backward to some flashy graphs to make it work (the right side of the "lies, damn lies, and statistics" spectrum). There is no discussion of confounders, no control groups or paired studies, and there are million things correlated with the last 50 of societal development years besides the topics mentioned here. The mention of phones and other influences in teen behavior is completely unrelated to the main point in the discussion and just serves to provide credibility by association. All in all, this is not science, it is just a reductionist oped presented as fact using classic internet hooks.

WorkerBee28474 2y ago
> All in all, this is not science It's not trying to be. The intended audience is not peers reading a research journal, it's normal folks and policy makers who don't know what a confounding variable is but still want to make modern life suck less.
- potatoman22 2y ago
  Since the audience isn't technical enough to realize the author excluded confounders, doesn't that make it even worse?
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    Confounders or not, kids don't have crap for communities. They have 24/7 adulting, most of it spent in one building or another. source:5 kids. source:15 years scout leader. source:10 years youth leader, other.
    - jasonfarnon 2y ago
      I hear a lot about excessive parenting on here but I wonder if it's just a segment of society. Can anyone but wealthy parents have time to occupy their kids 24-7? The freedom I and friends had as a kid was not a decision of my parents so much as a necessity. Parents dont get home from work until 6, school lets out at 2, we get at least 4 free hours of undisturbed freedom. Why would that be different now?

jc6 2y ago

Is this what Zgmunt Bauman called the transition from Solid Modernity to Liquid Modernity? With rents going up and switching jobs more frequently than past generations it becomes harder to stuck around in one place long enough for strong communities to form.

doe_eyes 2y ago
The rate of work-related moves is half of what it used to be in the 1960s. By all accounts, mobility is decreasing, not increasing. The reality is that we just don't talk to each other much. If you want to look for the decline of one institution that provided some degree of community cohesion, then the answer is going to be pretty unpopular: we don't go to church anymore.
- a1o 2y ago
  It doesn't have to be churches, local school with parents association making events, libraries that have spaces for the kids to hangout with others and work on projects together, open sports areas, parks and small festivities, farmers market that have a set periodicity. But it has to have one space where people can start to meet each other so they can talk and desire more things so they can build these other spaces or have some unified way to demand it from their local mayor.
  - randomdata 2y ago
    > It doesn't have to be churches Strictly true, but if people aren't strongly compelled to show up somewhere, they aren't apt to. Historically, the "fear of God" ensured that people went to church, effectively forcing them to gather, meet each other, so on and so forth. The only thing I see that comes close to that these days is youth sports leagues, where parents have a fear of failing their children if not heavily involved in such activities. While this does seem to establish some kind of community amongst parents of children of similar ages, it does not seem to expand out into parents with children of dissimilar ages even within the same sport, let alone an even larger community. Which is not terribly surprising as there is not much reason for someone unrelated to a participating child to show up. I might even go as far as to say that because parents get stuck in those narrowly isolated communities, it contributes a fracturing to any larger community that might have otherwise been able to form. It is difficult to have a general community of only 20-somethings and the elderly with little in-between.

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throwaway48476 2y ago

America is transitioning from a high trust society to a low trust society. This is one of the many consequences.

peepeepoopoo75 2y ago
[flagged]
- bedobi 2y ago
  are you seriously implying that immigration is responsible for a sudden reduction in public trust? american immigration has been a thing for 300 years
  - peepeepoopoo75 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - Lammy 2y ago
      In the future only money will have freedom of movement, never humans. You are serving your intended role in the consent-manufacture machine working to ensure that outcome. If you actually still believe in the idea of nations as anything besides a means to divide and conquer Us from Them, I would encourage you to learn about the death and posthumous citizenship of Raoul Wallenberg. The US State Department FOIA cables would be a great place to start.
    - vsuperpower2020 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - llamaimperative 2y ago
        That’s a super bonkers theory amigo. “Most people” who dispute the idea that there’s a purposeful undermining of social cohesion via permissive immigration policy are disputing it because they are willing to uproot their entire lives to switch countries?! Holy smokes.

mihaaly 2y ago

Are liberal and secular teenagers more willing/open to admit problems or seek help for unusual troublesome matters set them apart form others than religious peers perhaps? Human culture of the past several centuries are full of art and documents showing the repressive nature of religious or other prescribed expectation oriented groups. There are countless movements to counteract with the oppressive side of prescribed behaviour and group habits too.

o11c 2y ago
That's painting a very strange brush against religious folks, which does not at all match my observations (religious people can very easily talk about all sorts of things with other religious people (at least, those of vaguely similar religiosities), whereas conversations where at least one party is secular flicker and stagnate due to lack of known shared background)
- the_gipsy 2y ago
  > religious people can very easily talk about all sorts of things Sure, buddy.

standardUser 2y ago

I think it's an important topic but I reject these explanations entirely. Television may have stolen time from other activities, but during that era television was itself a unifying activity, generating a previously undreamt of amount of shared cultural experiences. I'd argue excessive television-watching was a result of reduced social cohesion and community, not a cause. I blame very different trends from that era... - The Drug War and "tough on crime" policies that generated a massive amount of fear among parents and created a hostile relationship between police and youth (and continues to, to this day). - Christian fear-mongering over Satanism and witchcraft, creating even more reasons to keep a close watch on your kids. - Racial integration of schools and neighborhoods which gave white parents an urgent reason to restrict and monitor which kids their kids played with. It wasn't distractions and technology or the lack of a global war that lead to reduced trust and cohesion. It was the spectacular and enduring success of professional fear-mongers.

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bedobi 2y ago

The design of the physical environment is in no small part responsible for this. Don't believe me go to Europe and Japan where kids are still allowed to walk and bike to school, to friends places and just in general play and exist outside unattended to a much higher degree than in the US. Because in the US they would be roadkill, and even if they somehow survived outside of a car, car centric design means there's nowhere for them to go on foot or by bike anyway. Everything is too far.

alfalfasprout 2y ago
You're also putting Europe on a pedestal. In many urban areas (where the majority of the population lives) it's no longer safe for kids to walk + bike to school freely. Not necessarily because of cars but significant crime.
- jasonfarnon 2y ago
  Is it no longer safe there? Because in the states parents have been restricting kids a lot more severely just as crime in cities plummeted (mid 90s--present). So I imagine it's either perceptions about safety, or parents just being more careful.
  - immibis 2y ago
    It isn't no longer safe for kids to walk to school. What happened is that American internet arrived here, and it has political reasons to want everyone to think it is.
    - wincy 2y ago
      I walked to the gas station with my dog and two kids, and had a guy yell at me that my kids were going to get kidnapped while I went inside for 5 minutes to buy us some waters and snacks. The biggest hurdle for us letting our children be free range and able to do things on their own has definitely been paranoid parents and busybodies who watched Sound of Freedom and think that every girl is going to immediately get sex trafficked to Guatemalan drug lords (or whatever, I didn't watch the movie) if she leaves her parent's sight for a second.

kelseyfrog 2y ago

> In 1995, in the initial academic essay that became the book, Putnam described the social-capital-destroying effects of the rise of television [...] Jon Haidt really gives too much credit to television. It's an easy thing to reach for when mobile phones and social media are are the present day forces we content with. But there's a deeper story. I'm reminded by Thatcher's 1987 quote: > You know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. Maybe it wasn't true then, but people believed them and in their belief they made it true. In a world where men, women, and families exist, there isn't room for community. It was dismantled by disbelief. In the same way we don't have the ability to reach the moon anymore, I wonder if we don't have the ability to reconstitute communities, like lost and ancient knowledge, eventually they will fade from living memory.

downrightmike 2y ago

Moral panic, people said the same thing about books, newspapers, radio etc. People like things and get into them, that is normal. Before all this is was just farm work. To quote a meme "The children yearn for the mines"

pessimizer 2y ago
Literally no one ever said that children weren't socializing because they were spending all day on their books, newspapers, and radios. You're making that up. Horror comic books are a moral panic. Children who don't know anyone but their parents and spend 10 hours a day on their phones is cause for a real panic.
- downrightmike 2y ago
  That's farm life for all of history minus the phones
Aerbil313 2y ago
Every single time Haidt posts something someone surely screams here: "But people said the same thing about books too!". Since I couldn't find the comments from the past thread, let me scream the usual reply: And they were right. Books, newspapers, radio, television, smartphones. All of them weakened the social bonds between people, gradually moving us away from the way of living which we were biologically designed for. The social bonds are instead got replaced by bonds with institutions and technological gadgets. But they are exactly like junk food: They appear to satisfy the desire, but are never a substitute, and always lack the critical nutrients we need. For replies going to accuse me of intellectual hypocrisy: I do believe all technology is evil. You can accuse me of practical hypocrisy instead, since I'm a software dev.

nostrademons 2y ago

As someone who lives in a small Bay Area suburb that you wouldn't expect a strong sense of community to arise in, it's been fascinating and a little heartwarming watching the village form around my kids. My kindergartner is now at the point where he can walk into a random town event and find somebody he already knows. He's had 3 consecutive weekends of birthday parties, with largely the same cast of characters at the last 2 (the third was a pre-school friend who lives in a different city). He knows all his friends' parents, and a bunch of them apparently know me ("Hi, ___'s dad!") even though I can't remember their names. There's an interlocking web of social relationships in the city that we've somehow become part of, where people know other people through other contexts. This didn't happen automatically, and it's been fascinating to watch the work that my wife and other (frankly) women have done in building the village. It's a slow, year-by-year process of doing favors for other people, putting yourself out there, spending time with other people, having your kids spend time with other people, opening up, and building trust. We tried carpooling for the first time last spring - it worked out great, and we have a much closer relationship with the other family now, but it can be nerve-wracking entrusting your small child to another driver. But that is how you build trust, and trust is how you build the village. The community I live in is not at all what the article would predict. We are a secular liberal family. Our friends are mostly secular liberal with some religious liberal families mixed in. The community is 30% foreign-born, and 35% speak a language other than English at home. It is racially mixed, < 30% white, and about 1/3 multiracial in my son's grade. All of the polemical discourse in America would say that such a heterogenous grouping is destructive to social cohesion. But the most important ingredient to having community is that you have to want community, and value it, and be willing to put in the effort to build it. And it has a critical mass of people who value community, enough that if you are one of them, you can find your people.

Moldoteck 2y ago
Sounds like your suburb is designed better compared to most subs in the us
anon291 2y ago
Unfortunately a lot of fraternal societies have disbanded and a lot of community organizing falls to women. Men and women community organize differently and traditionally men have had great luck in formal settings. For me, in our church (I know you're not religious), I lead our men's group (chapter of a larger organization), and there's a bunch of men who are the last people you'd expect to organize community but they're all doing it happily. But we're very hierarchical (even if jokingly so) and very formal (meetings, Roberts rules, elected positions, ceremonies). It's goofy, but I fundamentally believe men do well in this. Unfortunately, I think it would be hard to form a men's group these days especially for secular people. But I encourage you anyway because otherwise it puts all the pressure on the women. I have had several moms express gratitude to my guys for doing the work we do in the community because we also do things that the women would just never organize themselves. Which is fine... Everyone should play to their strengths.

thepasswordis 2y ago

[flagged]

dalyons 2y ago
That might be true for you, and that sucks. but it is not so for the vast majority of the US who’s parks are just fine
- thepasswordis 2y ago
  In what city in the US is this not true?
  - vundercind 2y ago
    It’s true in some parts of lots of US cities. It’s not true in most parts of most US cities.
  - squigz 2y ago
    Are you suggesting that every single park in every single city in the US is inundated with drug addicts?
    - thepasswordis 2y ago
      No I’m asking what city the person responded to me is talking about.
- trgn 2y ago
  OP is right, these neighborhoods exists. it's so hard to put your finger on, but you recognize it when you see it. it's not necessarily downtown vs suburb, some suburbs are just kind of foul too. Just this weekend, me and my kids saw somebody trying to put a syringe in his thigh (being tactful here). we thought he was releaving himself and were making jokes about it, until we actually got closer. It's bad out there. Like, parks always have had vagrants, but there's a difference between the loveable wino napping away his hangover or skulking junkies trying to score. i don't think they're necessarily dangerous, but children are seeing things they shouldn't at their age. btw - i still think it's cars, mostly, but it all depends on the details. it's sadly and and and and..

derrida 2y ago

What are they calling "social capital?" It's heresy to say that social relations are valuable for their own sake, instead we have to give it a term that suggests monetary value and potential to enter some accountants balance sheet - "social capital". it's just not the case that all value can enter into monetary terms or be quantified or exploited, bought and sold - but the stupidity and ignorance of the age is we even have to suggest like ethics or holding values has some "value" in the sense of money for it to be "ok" in our dominant social norms that structure society - the corporation and workplaces under capitalism It's as if it's not ok to hold values that are not monetary or capital - that is the message of our social relations in workplaces and in the culture at current - what are called "capitalist social relations" It's heresy to say ... It's ok to have values that are not money. There are things we should value outside of some cost. it's gotten to this point. even "progressive" arguments for like "hey maybe kids playing together in community is ok" has to be quantified into some imagination "social capital"

blendo 2y ago

“Social scientists have shown — for as long as we have been collecting data — that conservatives have better mental health than liberals, and religious people have better mental health than their secular peers.” My gut tells me social scientists have “shown” no such thing, but am open to hearing the case.

acjohnson55 2y ago
I think it's worth considering how the causation runs. Being in a conservative environment but unable to conform could cause poor mental health and disaffection with the ideology. In a very broad stroke, this describes my personal experience.
anon291 2y ago
Why does your gut tell you that? Perhaps you're using the worst examples of a side you don't like to inform your view?
kaibee 2y ago
Ignorance is bliss right? If you don't believe that climate change is real, etc.
feedforward 2y ago
Obviously people who believe people can magically turn water into wine, or that virgins give birth, or that they can walk on water etc. have better "mental health" than those who are skeptical of all of this.
- Aerbil313 2y ago
  Obviously the studies doesn't define religion as mental illness. You might want to spread your hate elsewhere, as per the site guidelines[1]. > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tacocataco 2y ago

It's hard to be a part of the community when I have to move every year because my rent keeps going up.

nineteen999 2y ago
Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps into a house! Easy.

acjohnson55 2y ago

The article rings true to me. I don't think that we want to try to turn the clock back, as much as trying to find ways to combine the good parts of past and present norms, while excising the bad parts. I'm a parent of 4 small children in a smallish town (16k, single school at each grade level), and I'm cherishing the sense of community much more than I expected. There's something to having shared context with almost every person I run into in town. I only wish I felt like it were safe for my kids to explore on foot. We also live by my wife's entire extended family, and that, too, has been incredibly helpful. I was raised in a tight knit Baptist church, and while I don't miss the theology, I do think the sense of community, service, values, and culture is something that I don't have a full substitute for, as much as I have the town and family communities. I'm considering seeking out a non-creedal group to belong to, like the Unitarian Universalists.

naasking 2y ago
> I only wish I felt like it were safe for my kids to explore on foot. Why do you feel it's unsafe?
- acjohnson55 2y ago
  Because people drive through my town like maniacs, speeding and running traffic lights. There aren't routes for pedestrians and cyclists to get around town without having to cross major streets at unprotected intersections. A lot could be done to improve the bikability and walkability, but the county and state own our major roads, and are historically more concerned with car throughput than pedestrian safety. This may be starting to shift, but that's the status quo.
  - naasking 2y ago
    Sounds like the local police should be pushed into enforcing the law. Reckless driving would definitely make cycling or even walking the streets dangerous for everyone, not just kids.
    - 2y ago

EGreg 2y ago

Tech is responsible, and open source tech can fix it https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

GoToRO 2y ago

Local community? the deterioration of everything has happened. Somehow all the rich people figured out that if you keep them isolated, then the people are easier to control. This happened intentional or just by measuring "what works" (for them).

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

When I was a kid, there was a park near my house in California with a jumping maze of telephone pole segments of various heights in a sand pit. And, a park by my aunt had a decommissioned Korea War-era fighter jet in the sand pit and a steel plate and open diamond grate vertical 2D crawling maze for kids. Today, I checked on Google Maps, it only has some boring, circus-colored, perfectly-safe(-and-boring) play set you already know kids avoid. Not all change is positive progress.

bparsons 2y ago

People are surprised when kids don't want to go out and play on the street, but their street is as wide as a highway and has no sidewalks. There are a million negative effects of vehicle centered urban design, and this is one of them.

Anotheroneagain 2y ago

The cause is that they started poisoning food with iron according to the wrong numbers haphazardly patched together for the war effort (and uncritically copied everywhere else). Actual iron deficiency is virtually nonexistent, there is always enough.

cauliflower99 2y ago

Haidt appeared on the Huberman podcast a few days ago talking about this. Highly recommend: https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/dr-jonathan-haidt-how-smartphones-social-media-impact-mental-health-the-realistic-solutions https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/dr-jonathan-haidt-how-sm...