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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 b

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.

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.