5 ms·

What are urban kids supposed to do, play in traffic? There is no outside.

• topspin 1y ago
  > There is no outside. And if there were, whatever they might dream up to do with outside would be rapidly banned.
• II2II 1y ago
  In traffic, no, but on the streets, why not? Things like street hockey and basketball are real. Kids ought to be able to be able to play in a field and fetch their ball from the street without ending up as roadkill. Of course, there are far too many drivers who view anything that impedes high speed travel as a nuisance, or worse. I regularly see drivers who run stop signs in front of a school, drivers passing unloading school busses with their stop signs extended, and impatient drivers try to push through crossing guards as children are crossing. I have also known crossing guards who were struck by motorists. Things like traffic calming measures don't work, since it typically ends up with drivers being more reckless. Very little seems to be done about it, aside from periodic campaigns (typically at the start of school years). And, of course, punishing children by limiting the spaces they can use and independence. People often claim that the cycling culture of the Netherlands was a product of trying to protect children from traffic. Most of the rest of the world, including England with it's "no ball game" signs took the opposite approach: rather than addressing the problem, they punished the victims.
• HPsquared 1y ago
  People used to do a whole lot of nothing. EDIT: But daily life provided enough social micronutrients to get by. Less so with the phones.
  • Gigachad 1y ago
    The "nothing" being wandering around outside, digging holes, and talking to people rather than sitting around watching paint dry.
• ruined 1y ago
  ban cars
  • mouse_ 1y ago
    the correct yet wildly unpopular solution
• mslansn 1y ago
  Cars have existed for multiple generations. Kids are glued to their screens, which is why parks are empty.
• losvedir 1y ago
  It's not radically different from, say 20 years ago, when there weren't all these phones.
• AsmaraHolding 1y ago
  I would be willing to bet that 80% of urban kids in the UK live within a 10-minute bike ride of a park.
  • Fluorescence 1y ago
    Yup. Cities often have lots of impressive public green spaces so I expect this a massive underestimate. It may be worse for a rural kid. All that countryside that surrounds you is private farmland. Of course, now and again, you trespass and earn stories of being chased off by dogs and puce-faced-shotgun-wielding arses but it's not your daily hang-out. Truly public land (not just a public pathway) will be concentrated in nature-reserves and odds are it will be out of reach except for special adventures. The village-kid hang-out is typically "The Village Rec" (recreation ground) but if you live in something less than a village, i.e. random splats of houses between villages, you end up living half your life at a bus stop waiting for the mercurial 2-hourly bus service before you can even see another human face.
• OJFord 1y ago
  American comments on UK news. No such issue here, sure a lot of areas are more built up, but children under 10 walk to school, it's not America.
• Meekro 1y ago
  That's definitely true, and it's a bad thing, but I don't think it's the core problem. If it was, you'd see massive differences between cities and the research would read like this: "City A is too car-centric, and all the kids are sedentary and obese. City B has great public transportation, lots of parks, and the kids are doing great." Instead, we see the same problem everywhere, including places in Europe and Japan where the outside is just fine.
• lanfeust6 1y ago
  That's a lie. But one of the pressures is that suburban parents overschedule their kids with extracurriculars instead of letting them waste more time on their bikes, in the parks, etc. When our parents were kids, everyone drove but all the kids played outside.
  • eszed 1y ago
    That's a chicken / egg problem, because if their peers are in scheduled activities there won't be any kids hanging around to play with. There are also location-specific effects. The happiest few years of my childhood - I'm a generation older than the over-scheduling thing; we were latchkey kids, as they said then - were spent on a block with three other families whose kids were +/- three years of me and my sister. We were on our bikes, or building forts, or playing football in someone's yard every single day. Then, the course of a year or so, the other families all moved away, and... Well, I was sedentary, reading books, and lonely for the next few years. (A lovely coda: a few years ago I happened to visit the city where my favorite friends from that period had settled, and looked them up. We literally had not seen each other in twenty-five years. I thought it might be awkward, and maybe for thirty seconds it was, but we immediately recaptured the tenor of our ancient friendship, and it was magical. I see them every couple of years, now, and am so happy they're back in my life.) To pull those two points together, when there were enough young families (and higher population density) that there were kids on every block parents didn't need to schedule their kids social lives. Now that the fertility rate has dropped, and housing sprawled, that's often necessary - and even when strictly-speaking not, it's become a cultural default that's difficult to overcome.
    • lanfeust6 1y ago
      Yes there is something of an arms-race social pressure to enroll kids in increasingly competitive sports leagues at the expense of everything else. I'm not going to do that, unless they explicitly ask. Would rather multi-sport and have them try other things including music.
• octo888 1y ago
  We have paths ("sidewalks") in the UK that children can walk/cycle on to get to parks etc, even in suburban and many rural areas. Even if there is a motorway in the way there is often a bridge or some kind of underpass. In urban areas there is usually a park/playing field 5-15 minutes away