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I don't get it either, especially because I don't know any parents who act like this. All the kids in my neighborhood just roam around, including mine. I wonde
by jeffbee 1y ago
I don't get it either, especially because I don't know any parents who act like this. All the kids in my neighborhood just roam around, including mine.
I wonder if this is another coastal/inland, liberal/conservative rift where the conservatives are for some reason afraid of everything.
- erikerikson 1y agoOur experience of Seattle, conservative hotbed that it is, is that everything is as described in the article. We've been discussing moving somewhere else for this exact reason. Doesn't matter if we would let our kid out if there's no one to play with.
- busterarm 1y agoLive in the Carolinas. All of the neighborhood kids play together outside every afternoon. The teenagers are all too busy to loiter around because they're so involved in sports.
- jeffbee 1y agoMaybe it's yet another Berkeley bubble. Kids' independence is pretty much taken for granted here. Nobody would bat an eye at a 10-year-old wandering around in the grocery store. There's a playground at the marina that is built by and continually remodeled by children (there is some overall supervision there of course).
- CalRobert 1y agoThis is why we moved to the Netherlands. It’s great. Some kids even bike themselves to and from daycare.
- dcow 1y agoOver parenting and hyper-paranoia are liberal traits in my experience.
- tstrimple 1y agoYep. It's the liberals who are taking over school boards to restrict book access because their precious little snowflakes might learn something outside the strict bounds of what they are allowed to know and understand. Could you imagine the absolute travesty it would be if little Billy knew that gay people existed and were actually just people?! Preposterous!
- yonaguska 1y agoI see it as less political, more "crunchy" vs standard- it's just that recently the crunchy crowd has shifted conservative as opposed to liberal.
- jeffbee 1y agoWell, I haven't observed that. Research this century has tended to suggest that conservatism is associated with physiological hyper-fixation on negative stimuli. E.g. Carraro L, Castelli L, Macchiella C. The automatic conservative: ideology-based attentional asymmetries in the processing of valenced information. PLoS One. 2011
- inglor_cz 1y agoIt might be a correlation to city size. Big cities in the US skew overwhelmingly liberal/left, and big cities are the place where trust between strangers, neighbors etc. tends to be very low. People probably feel safer to let their kids go outside if the local drug-and-homeless community is small or nonexistent.
- bandofthehawk 1y agoI think it might be less about left/right and more about suburban and car culture vs. urban or rural. People living in the suburbs tend to drive everywhere anyway and perceive things outside of the car as dangerous.
- jeffbee 1y agoI feel like the two things are in a causal loop.
- bpt3 1y agoReporting from the conservative stronghold of the inner DC suburbs, kids are generally not allowed to wander unsupervised until they are in high school. In my experience, kids have very little unscheduled/unsupervised time in more liberal areas, but I think that has little to nothing to do with political leanings and much more to do with parental expectations and availability of disposable income and leisure time. Maybe you should try viewing things outside of a political lens, especially one where the other side is unexplainably but unquestionably wrong by default, and see how things look.