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I live in the US and my kids walk and bike to school. You're making wide generalizations across a large country.
by rootusrootus 2y ago
I live in the US and my kids walk and bike to school. You're making wide generalizations across a large country.
- grugagag 2y agoDo they still play outside like previous generations used to?
- wincy 2y agoMy daughter has been playing outside since she was 4 years old, unsupervised. She's 9 now. A lot of the other neighborhood kids have followed suit (I really suspect our "benign neglect" made the other parents thing "well if nothing bad happened to her our kids will be fine" and we have about 8-10 kids around the same age on the block that are constantly going to each other's houses and hanging out doing whatever it is they're doing (I don't really know, that's part of what makes it so great). It's almost 9pm right now, I have no idea where she is. She comes home when the street lights come on. The other day I gave her a $20 bill and she rode her bike to the Walmart nearby (no major streets on the way there). She bought her friends ice cream and was a hero. Sure there were hiccups, one time she stole the neighbors solar powered lanterns from his front yard, but we made her return them and apologize. I guess our strategy is we just don't let her have any screens. They make her absolutely insane. So instead she leaves the house as soon as she can and goes out and plays. Even her 5 year old sister who is wheelchair bound goes with her a lot of the time, in the $1200 Thule buggy super stroller we bought (used). I guess we just lucked out, but we also insisted on it and kept letting her go out even after some woman called CPS on us for letting our kid be unsupervised. We live in a middle class neighborhood with people from dozens of countries and every major religions living together, and all our kids play together. I'm sure it's someone's mental image of the ideal childhood.
- akdor1154 2y agoOut of interest, how did the interaction with CPS go?
- dyauspitr 2y ago9pm and you don’t know where your 9 year old is? That going too far in the other direction in my opinion. How is she doing academically? I feel like that much freedom, that early, makes it easy to pick up bad habits with the “bad” kids.
- namibj 2y ago9pm is just a number; street lights are obvious and well-timed for when it's time to stop being outside. If 6pm and no knowledge was ok, almost 9pm with streetlights still off is too.
- _dark_matter_ 2y agoI mean this happens with my 9 year old. We have a parent group chat and just ask who knows where the crew is
- Rediscover 2y agoSuch a great use of group chat. Thanks!
- hosh 2y agoThat’s technology working to bring people together rather than driving them apart
- wincy 2y agoYep, we have a neighborhood group chat and send over a note with phone numbers when a new person moves in. Works great. She also has an Apple Watch with cellular service in case we need to get ahold of her. I’m happy to say she came home right on time this evening without so much as a phone call though.
- nottorp 2y agoSo, my kid lobbied for her own cell phone for a year or so when she was in primary school. We finally caved in and got her one. Then she realized we can now call her and tell her to come home when she's out. "I'll leave the phone at home, daddy, I'm afraid I'll break it while playing."
- grugagag 2y agoThanks for sharing your story, it’s wonderful, seems very similar to how we grew up. We have a 6 yo who does get daily outdoor time but that is supervised because it wouldn’t be possible otherwise, we live in NYC. My son does get screen time only 2 hours on weekends, at this point the cat’s out of the bag. We’ll just try to keep the screen time limited to 2 hours per week.
- tayo42 2y agoYou don't also know what is actually happening. I live near kids like this where there parents aren't around they just roam. They get into trouble. How much parenting are you dumping on others. One group decided it would be fun to smash glass bottles in the parking lot. So I have to do the job if the parent and either tell them to behave, stop and clean it up or clean up after them myself so I don't ruin my tires. Why aren't the real parents doing this? Or the kids liter, get stuck in trees,lose their stuff, pee on stuff etc. All problems their real parents should be dealing with but instead others have to deal with it. Randoms like me get the negatives of the unsupervised kids. Im sure their parents think they had a pleasant day playing tag all day though.
- tcfhgj 2y agoWhere is this?
- nextos 2y agoAlso interested to know, sounds like a nice region.
- ars 2y agoMost suburbs are like this.
- fzeroracer 2y agoMost suburbs? What suburbs are you referring to, exactly? The 'burbs I grew up in there was nothing nearby in a two mile radius. The only access to school was via bus or having my parents drive.
- whoodle 2y agoI’ve lived in OH, PA, and NC outside of major cities and none were like that
- hombre_fatal 2y agoMaybe a tiny part of a suburb where you're not just near both the school and grocery store but it's nice to walk there and you're not crossing major roads. So, a tiny fraction of the US population. Either way, some Americans will hear people talk about Europe or Japan or whatever and tell themself "I totally have that too where I live in the US" yet it's not even close.
- jjav 2y ago> I live in the US and my kids walk and bike to school. You're making wide generalizations across a large country. I've learned from HN discussions that there is a vast difference in what people think of as a "suburb". Some will say it takes over 30 minutes by car from a suburb to the nearest store. To me that's very rural, I'd never consider that a suburb. But some do. So we get these disconnected discussion on how you can/can't do such and such thing in a suburb. I've nearly always lived in what I consider suburbs. Places with single family homes and parks and playgrounds where I can very easily walk to just about every store or service nearby. The middle schools is an easy walk away for kids. High school is a bit farther but still an easy bike ride for high-school age kids (about 15 minutes).
- skissane 2y ago> I've learned from HN discussions that there is a vast difference in what people think of as a "suburb". In Australian English, “suburb” roughly means “neighbourhood”. So to us, downtown (or the CBD as we call it), is a “suburb”. In the Australian sense of the term, the Financial District and the Upper East Side are suburbs of New York City.
- randomdata 2y ago> To me that's very rural That's the idea if used in the North American sense. Suburbs are effectively rural areas, except with a higher population density. You will see rows of houses instead of rows of corn, but otherwise no different. > Places with single family homes and parks and playgrounds where I can very easily walk to just about every store or service nearby. What's a town, then?
- nottorp 2y agoYep, but on the other hand aren't there regions where you'd get arrested for letting your kids go to school alone?
- bluGill 2y agoNormally you are not arrested, but a cps visit when you are reported is annoying. There are a lot of mandatory reporters who will be in trouble if they don' report so you will be. It wasts cps's time from real cases of neglict in most cases, but those exceptions get a kid help sooner.
- whitakerch 2y agoI would LOVE to know where this is?? If it's more walkable that JUST the school. I have lived in suburbs near enough to schools that you can walk on 2 occasions in both NC and AZ but this was a very lucky quality, not the norm AT ALL, highly desirable, and you could walk to practically nothing other than the school. Leaving the neighborhood on foot was not a good place to be walking.
- nobodywasishere 2y agoThis is true for a lot of families in Somerville/Cambridge MA, one of the major reasons I live here. I can exist without a car