5 ms·

I don't know. Maybe this is going away in some places, maybe I just have my own anecdata, but my kids play outside unsupervised all the time, as do all the kids

I don't know. Maybe this is going away in some places, maybe I just have my own anecdata, but my kids play outside unsupervised all the time, as do all the kids in my neighborhood. I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of small Metro. Nothing special about it at all. Every time I see one of these articles I always wonder who they're talking about. I always feel like this is just one of those news headlines that won't go away, but isn't quite tethered to reality, but people really like to feel bad about modern life and so we keep talking about it as if it's real. I suspect the real reason kids aren't playing outside, if there is one, is not because they can't, it's because they choose not to. Just as adults are no longer choosing to go to third spaces. Screens came for everyone.

rayiner 6mo ago
This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie places reporters live. I dropped my daughter off at the mall to hang out with their friends and one of the moms followed them around the whole time. They're all 13!
- garbawarb 6mo ago
  Do journalists live in bougie places? It's not a particularly well-paying job.
  - rayiner 6mo ago
    It's a job that requires strong credentials and is gated by unpaid internships. So it disproportionately attracts people from relatively affluent backgrounds: https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/the-costs-of-becoming-a-journalist/ https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/the-cos.... And those folks live near and, more importantly, travel in social circles with affluent people. It's also not particularly expensive to live in a bougie place. I grew up in Mclean, VA. My dad ran into Dick Cheney at the CVS once. But you can get an apartment in Mclean on a journalist's salary, especially if your parents paid for college and you have no debt. You can’t afford to raise a family there, but you can live there, near your social circle. Conversely, you'll see lots of trades people, cops, etc., living in places that aren't bougie at all, despite making more money than the lower end of the professional class. People find ways to congregate around others in their social class, income notwithstanding.
  - pessimizer 6mo ago
    Yes. Journalists don't make a living from journalism, they live on family money. That's why working class journalists have disappeared along with working class perspectives. It was once a job where many if not most of the practitioners didn't have a college degree, now it is the most expensive graduate school program you can do. I think the median price is something like $250K. If you don't pay writers, you eliminate all of the writers who have to work for a living.
    - ghaff 6mo ago
      Don't disagree with the general point but I'm not sure J-School was ever a particularly good entree into journalism. Most of the journalists I know and knew didn't have the grad degree.
    - NicuCalcea 6mo ago
      TIL I and my friends and colleagues live on family money.
      - Jensson 6mo ago
        Could be a husband that pays for the home etc as well, that is also living on family money. Regardless since journalists aren't well paid but a lot of them live in expensive areas the money has to come from somewhere.
        NicuCalcea 6mo ago
        So your argument is that journalists must be wealthy because otherwise they'd be poor? Have you considered the alternative, that we just live modest lifestyles, like most other working class people?
    - watwut 6mo ago
      Plenty of journalists I know about (because I read them a lot and they sometimes talk about self) did mot wemt to j-school. Also, they dont live in parents houses. You are making stuff up about lives of journalistals to invalidate their claims.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- mikestew 6mo ago
  This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie places reporters live. I live in Redmond, WA. Bougie? My rube Midwestern ass thinks so. And there are feral kids all over my neighborhood. Plenty of kids walking to school in groups, or solo. Neighbor kids talk about riding the bus/train to places. Granted, there are a lot of immigrant families around here (hello, Microsoft, et al.), and I'm sure that skews things.
  - com2kid 6mo ago
    Whenever these conversations come up, I've always noted that they don't really seem to apply to the PNW. My neighborhood (in Seattle proper) has lots of kids running around as well. Neighborhood kids will stop by to pickup my son and whisk him off to some adventure down the block. Getting your kid back involves listening for the correct sounding screams of joy as you walk around and figure out whose yard they are in. Seattle also has a pretty decent policy around the radius for kids walking to school, so there are always gaggles of kids walking together to and from school for elementary and even some middle schoolers. The high schools are spaced far enough out that kids use buses at that age. My coworkers in lower CoL areas seem mystified why I'm paying an arm and a leg to live in Seattle to raise a kid. And yeah there are some serious downsides (20-30k a year daycare, restaurants are too expensive to go out to often, even take out is insane), but there are kids playing soccer in the streets after school and kids setting up lemonade stands in the park. That's what I'm paying for - A city that is built for people to live in, not just for cars to drive around.
    - brailsafe 6mo ago
      That's why I'm quite happy to live in Vancouver BC as well. No kids (and I'll never own a home), but if I did, I can't think of a better place to raise them compared to other car-dependent hellscapes where nobody trusts each other.
      - rangestransform 6mo ago
        I love explaining to Americans how Vancouver suburbia is slightly better than American suburbia in so many ways that matter like trees, real traffic calming, and walkability
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- pessimizer 6mo ago
  From the mall story, you also seem to be living in a "bougie" place. What makes you think that places other than where you live are different? One would expect that after your first sentence, the second sentence would be a counterexample.
  - rayiner 6mo ago
    That’s a fair question. My wife is cheap and I’m indulgent with my kids. So we compromised by sending our kids to private school with yacht club people, but not living around them. Our neighborhood is mostly well-off non-white-collar people: nurses, cops, navy enlisted, guys who did well in trades, etc.
- JuniperMesos 6mo ago
  https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/shoot-the-messenger https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/shoot-the-messenger > But I actually find ideological bias to be less concerning than the more fundamental problem that the class of people who determine the boundaries of debate share a set of demographic and experiential traits that they don’t recognize as distinctive. > This class of people includes journalists, yes, but also people who work in the tech industry, academics, nonprofit leaders, influencers, and those who work in politics. From now on, I’ll refer to this group broadly as “the messenger class.” > The messenger class’s distinctive experiences — like living in downtown Washington, D.C., or living in one of the parts of New York highlighted in red — shape the boundaries of normal in ways harder to counteract than pure ideological or partisan bias. > The messenger class plays a fundamental role in any democracy. Democratic self-governance requires not just fair procedures for making decisions but an accurate and shared picture of social reality to reason about. That picture is revealed through the communicated experiences of citizens, filtered through the messenger class, which decides which experiences are urgent and require intervention.
- ekropotin 6mo ago
  Was the mom Asian? Asking because my pre-teen daughter has a lot of Asian friends and I clearly see a pattern of hyper vigilance among their moms.
amazingamazing 6mo ago
> my kids play outside unsupervised all the time, as do all the kids in my neighborhood. I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood Your kids are hardly free-range. Let me guess, there's no way for them to actually meaningfully leave the area (no train, bus, etc)? It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and saying they can do whatever they want. hardly free-range in the way described in the article. Presumably you live in a suburb for the reasons the person in the article checked in on the free-range kid. my personal litmus test is if you'd let your 13 year kid explore Manhattan alone during the day. Many say no because it's dangerous, and yet Manhattan is safer than most American suburbs. just FUD all the way down sadly.
- ghaff 6mo ago
  The usual contrast being drawn is kids wandering around a suburban area, walking to school, playing with kids in a nearby rural property. It's not hopping onto a bus to the city a few tens of miles away. You do see schoolchildren in Japan on the train by themselves but I'm not sure that's ever been very common in the US.
  - amazingamazing 6mo ago
    there's really no reason American kids in metro areas like SF, Boston, DC, NYC couldn't take a bus 5 miles away by themselves. when one comes up of an actual reason to why, it contradicts real statistics. the biggest things parents should worry about is their kid being bullied by other kids during school, a supposedly safe place, and other family. strangers just aren't the major source of violence towards children.
    - ButlerianJihad 6mo ago
      Welp this week we in Phoenix are dealing with a report of a 17-year-old high school girl who boarded a light rail train (the one with security cameras and guards) and she was harassed and assaulted by a mob of boys on the train, presumably in front of human onlookers; she disembarked, and was assaulted some more. She is now in a neck brace, and her mother is absolutely distraught, saying this is something she cannot fix for her beloved daughter. I am distraught as well that this could happen to anyone at all on the same train that I ride every week.
bdangubic 6mo ago
I live in suburb of a metro area, as safe as it gets (my front door is unlocked overnight often and almost never locked during the day, my garage is also frequently open). my 12-year old (5’8” 125lbs) went to walk the dog to the park about 1/2 mile from my house, someone called the police and I had to deal with social services…
- jditu 6mo ago
  [dead]
guelo 6mo ago
I do know. No kids play outside in my neighborhood. The story resonates because your personal annecdote is not very common. (Not as the sibbling comment says, that reporters all out of touch elites).
insane_dreamer 6mo ago
> my kids play outside unsupervised all the time "free range kids" doesn't mean playing outside in a suburban cul-de-sac; it's the ability to go outside the immediate neighborhood on their own (walking, cycling, or public transport) -- stuff I did all the time as a 11-13 year old that is pretty rare these days. I don't think I've ever seen a preteen on the local city transport alone
belZaah 6mo ago
My kids walk/bike to school, take public transport and are pretty free-range. But that’s absolutely nothing compared to my childhood. I was born in 1975. We dug up literal explosives from WWII and made our own small bombs (some matches, two large bolts…). Access to all sorts of chemicals was easy and we would set things on fire or just mix stuff to see what happens. Playing around on construction sites. Taking someones boat out to go fishing. Making bows and arrows, that would go straight through plywood. All _that_ is definitely gone. Some of it for good - kids loosing their fingers or worse was a common occurrence. So there definitely is a trend in case of me and my friends.
- watwut 6mo ago
  Free range and kids dig boms are two different things. We dont need to match accident mortality.
aaron695 6mo ago
[dead]
renewiltord 6mo ago
This is a bit of a shift of the Overton Window surely. Because that doesn’t sound free-range: which involves perhaps miles of travel unsupervised.

rayiner 6mo ago

This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie places reporters live. I dropped my daughter off at the mall to hang out with their friends and one of the moms followed them around the whole time. They're all 13!

garbawarb 6mo ago
Do journalists live in bougie places? It's not a particularly well-paying job.
- rayiner 6mo ago
  It's a job that requires strong credentials and is gated by unpaid internships. So it disproportionately attracts people from relatively affluent backgrounds: https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/the-costs-of-becoming-a-journalist/ https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/the-cos.... And those folks live near and, more importantly, travel in social circles with affluent people. It's also not particularly expensive to live in a bougie place. I grew up in Mclean, VA. My dad ran into Dick Cheney at the CVS once. But you can get an apartment in Mclean on a journalist's salary, especially if your parents paid for college and you have no debt. You can’t afford to raise a family there, but you can live there, near your social circle. Conversely, you'll see lots of trades people, cops, etc., living in places that aren't bougie at all, despite making more money than the lower end of the professional class. People find ways to congregate around others in their social class, income notwithstanding.
- pessimizer 6mo ago
  Yes. Journalists don't make a living from journalism, they live on family money. That's why working class journalists have disappeared along with working class perspectives. It was once a job where many if not most of the practitioners didn't have a college degree, now it is the most expensive graduate school program you can do. I think the median price is something like $250K. If you don't pay writers, you eliminate all of the writers who have to work for a living.
  - ghaff 6mo ago
    Don't disagree with the general point but I'm not sure J-School was ever a particularly good entree into journalism. Most of the journalists I know and knew didn't have the grad degree.
  - NicuCalcea 6mo ago
    TIL I and my friends and colleagues live on family money.
    - Jensson 6mo ago
      Could be a husband that pays for the home etc as well, that is also living on family money. Regardless since journalists aren't well paid but a lot of them live in expensive areas the money has to come from somewhere.
      - NicuCalcea 6mo ago
        So your argument is that journalists must be wealthy because otherwise they'd be poor? Have you considered the alternative, that we just live modest lifestyles, like most other working class people?
  - watwut 6mo ago
    Plenty of journalists I know about (because I read them a lot and they sometimes talk about self) did mot wemt to j-school. Also, they dont live in parents houses. You are making stuff up about lives of journalistals to invalidate their claims.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
mikestew 6mo ago
This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie places reporters live. I live in Redmond, WA. Bougie? My rube Midwestern ass thinks so. And there are feral kids all over my neighborhood. Plenty of kids walking to school in groups, or solo. Neighbor kids talk about riding the bus/train to places. Granted, there are a lot of immigrant families around here (hello, Microsoft, et al.), and I'm sure that skews things.
- com2kid 6mo ago
  Whenever these conversations come up, I've always noted that they don't really seem to apply to the PNW. My neighborhood (in Seattle proper) has lots of kids running around as well. Neighborhood kids will stop by to pickup my son and whisk him off to some adventure down the block. Getting your kid back involves listening for the correct sounding screams of joy as you walk around and figure out whose yard they are in. Seattle also has a pretty decent policy around the radius for kids walking to school, so there are always gaggles of kids walking together to and from school for elementary and even some middle schoolers. The high schools are spaced far enough out that kids use buses at that age. My coworkers in lower CoL areas seem mystified why I'm paying an arm and a leg to live in Seattle to raise a kid. And yeah there are some serious downsides (20-30k a year daycare, restaurants are too expensive to go out to often, even take out is insane), but there are kids playing soccer in the streets after school and kids setting up lemonade stands in the park. That's what I'm paying for - A city that is built for people to live in, not just for cars to drive around.
  - brailsafe 6mo ago
    That's why I'm quite happy to live in Vancouver BC as well. No kids (and I'll never own a home), but if I did, I can't think of a better place to raise them compared to other car-dependent hellscapes where nobody trusts each other.
    - rangestransform 6mo ago
      I love explaining to Americans how Vancouver suburbia is slightly better than American suburbia in so many ways that matter like trees, real traffic calming, and walkability
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
pessimizer 6mo ago
From the mall story, you also seem to be living in a "bougie" place. What makes you think that places other than where you live are different? One would expect that after your first sentence, the second sentence would be a counterexample.
- rayiner 6mo ago
  That’s a fair question. My wife is cheap and I’m indulgent with my kids. So we compromised by sending our kids to private school with yacht club people, but not living around them. Our neighborhood is mostly well-off non-white-collar people: nurses, cops, navy enlisted, guys who did well in trades, etc.
JuniperMesos 6mo ago
https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/shoot-the-messenger https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/shoot-the-messenger > But I actually find ideological bias to be less concerning than the more fundamental problem that the class of people who determine the boundaries of debate share a set of demographic and experiential traits that they don’t recognize as distinctive. > This class of people includes journalists, yes, but also people who work in the tech industry, academics, nonprofit leaders, influencers, and those who work in politics. From now on, I’ll refer to this group broadly as “the messenger class.” > The messenger class’s distinctive experiences — like living in downtown Washington, D.C., or living in one of the parts of New York highlighted in red — shape the boundaries of normal in ways harder to counteract than pure ideological or partisan bias. > The messenger class plays a fundamental role in any democracy. Democratic self-governance requires not just fair procedures for making decisions but an accurate and shared picture of social reality to reason about. That picture is revealed through the communicated experiences of citizens, filtered through the messenger class, which decides which experiences are urgent and require intervention.
ekropotin 6mo ago
Was the mom Asian? Asking because my pre-teen daughter has a lot of Asian friends and I clearly see a pattern of hyper vigilance among their moms.

amazingamazing 6mo ago

> my kids play outside unsupervised all the time, as do all the kids in my neighborhood. I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood Your kids are hardly free-range. Let me guess, there's no way for them to actually meaningfully leave the area (no train, bus, etc)? It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and saying they can do whatever they want. hardly free-range in the way described in the article. Presumably you live in a suburb for the reasons the person in the article checked in on the free-range kid. my personal litmus test is if you'd let your 13 year kid explore Manhattan alone during the day. Many say no because it's dangerous, and yet Manhattan is safer than most American suburbs. just FUD all the way down sadly.

ghaff 6mo ago
The usual contrast being drawn is kids wandering around a suburban area, walking to school, playing with kids in a nearby rural property. It's not hopping onto a bus to the city a few tens of miles away. You do see schoolchildren in Japan on the train by themselves but I'm not sure that's ever been very common in the US.
- amazingamazing 6mo ago
  there's really no reason American kids in metro areas like SF, Boston, DC, NYC couldn't take a bus 5 miles away by themselves. when one comes up of an actual reason to why, it contradicts real statistics. the biggest things parents should worry about is their kid being bullied by other kids during school, a supposedly safe place, and other family. strangers just aren't the major source of violence towards children.
  - ButlerianJihad 6mo ago
    Welp this week we in Phoenix are dealing with a report of a 17-year-old high school girl who boarded a light rail train (the one with security cameras and guards) and she was harassed and assaulted by a mob of boys on the train, presumably in front of human onlookers; she disembarked, and was assaulted some more. She is now in a neck brace, and her mother is absolutely distraught, saying this is something she cannot fix for her beloved daughter. I am distraught as well that this could happen to anyone at all on the same train that I ride every week.

bdangubic 6mo ago

I live in suburb of a metro area, as safe as it gets (my front door is unlocked overnight often and almost never locked during the day, my garage is also frequently open). my 12-year old (5’8” 125lbs) went to walk the dog to the park about 1/2 mile from my house, someone called the police and I had to deal with social services…

jditu 6mo ago
[dead]

guelo 6mo ago

I do know. No kids play outside in my neighborhood. The story resonates because your personal annecdote is not very common. (Not as the sibbling comment says, that reporters all out of touch elites).

insane_dreamer 6mo ago

> my kids play outside unsupervised all the time "free range kids" doesn't mean playing outside in a suburban cul-de-sac; it's the ability to go outside the immediate neighborhood on their own (walking, cycling, or public transport) -- stuff I did all the time as a 11-13 year old that is pretty rare these days. I don't think I've ever seen a preteen on the local city transport alone

belZaah 6mo ago

My kids walk/bike to school, take public transport and are pretty free-range. But that’s absolutely nothing compared to my childhood. I was born in 1975. We dug up literal explosives from WWII and made our own small bombs (some matches, two large bolts…). Access to all sorts of chemicals was easy and we would set things on fire or just mix stuff to see what happens. Playing around on construction sites. Taking someones boat out to go fishing. Making bows and arrows, that would go straight through plywood. All _that_ is definitely gone. Some of it for good - kids loosing their fingers or worse was a common occurrence. So there definitely is a trend in case of me and my friends.

watwut 6mo ago
Free range and kids dig boms are two different things. We dont need to match accident mortality.

aaron695 6mo ago

[dead]

renewiltord 6mo ago

This is a bit of a shift of the Overton Window surely. Because that doesn’t sound free-range: which involves perhaps miles of travel unsupervised.