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Having grown up in the late 80s in an East Block country, this article resonated very strongly. Growing up in that place and time was akin to 50s America - no c

Having grown up in the late 80s in an East Block country, this article resonated very strongly. Growing up in that place and time was akin to 50s America - no cable, consoles, arcades, VCRs or handhelds. We had TV, but it only had the single state broadcast channel which played only one cartoon. The only thing to do was play which we did prodigiously - I was part of a large mix-aged group (6-12 kids, 5 years age difference) and we would play everything (sports, house, building things, demolishing things, raising stray animals, foraging fruit, fighting other kids). It was a great childhood and neither I nor my childhood friends (most of us are still friends, even across continents) would trade it for anything. Interestingly, it was almost the same childhood my mom and dad had. My sister (the de-facto leader of our group) now has children and their childhood could not be any different - constantly shuttled from home to school to organized activity. Play only for a bit under heavily supervised conditions (ie, birthday party at another kids house) and filled to the brim with tablets, phones, computers etc. I feel very bad for my nephew's effective lack of childhood, even more so because it seems that doing something differently is a big social taboo. My mom, siter and I have talked about this, and my sister described being almost powerless - who would they play with? Where? What are other parents going to think? etc etc. When I go to places like rural Belize or small-town Costa Rica I see kids still playing and I wonder if that's not the best place to raise a small kid (4-10 years old).

LaGrange 13y ago
Oh, I grew up in the same times, in the same general area, with just a little whee bit of difference: I'm aspergers, I'm socially anxious, and I quite clearly remember that most of the fun groups like you mention had were actually at the expense of the kids like me. Ooops. Also, while I didn't spend that much time among modern kids, I do see them having lots of fun (yes, with the eeevil tablets too, sometimes), and then going to organized activities that they often pick themselves and seem to enjoy more than kicking a brick or bullying (sorry, was I meant to say "fighting"? Well, I won't) another group of kids. And then they get a bit older, and find sports or creative or technical activities that were completely out of reach of most kids growing up in the magical eighties. It's just part "our times were different", part golden age mythology. In reality, the entire concept of childhood as we modernly understand it is fairly young, and the idea that kids play and adults don't is ridiculous. Furthermore, it's just us adults judging kids to not having played enough without putting their health in danger or at least getting uncomfortably dirty. Modern kids play. A lot. Just because they play in a way that's different from yours or bucolic paintings doesn't mean they don't actually have more fun than you did.
- martythemaniak 13y ago
  > most of the fun groups like you mention had were actually at the expense of the kids like me. I'm sorry for your experience, but that's absolutely not what I meant, nor what happened. "Fighting" as I said there was actually things like snowball fights in the winter or paper-cone-in-tube or soft/rotten-fruit-in-sligshot fights in the summer, and always in a group-vs-group setting. I am in fact your fairly typical shy introverted bookish geek and the reason I think so highly of this type of play is precisely because it allowed me to overcome these tendencies and be a normal kid. My real worry here isn't that kids today aren't doing the exact same things I did. It's that they don't have the option to do certain things anymore - things which may in fact be extremely valuable. What I described in my OP wasn't false, but it wasn't complete - I also spent much time playing Legos, reading books, "technical activities" with my dad's tools. Better or worse, one thing I can definitely say is my nephew has far fewer options and choices than I did at his age.
  - LaGrange 13y ago
    > "Fighting" as I said there was actually things like snowball fights in the winter or paper-cone-in-tube or soft/rotten-fruit-in-sligshot fights in the summer, and always in a group-vs-group setting. That was always what the less lucky kids were told when they complained. And then painted as spoil-sports until they stopped complaining to avoid embarrassment. > It's that they don't have the option to do certain things anymore - things which may in fact be extremely valuable. I don't know about your specific family, but in general, they have far, far more options, up to and including extreme sports. Pretty sure I didn't know any kid that could try climbing or spelunking in the eighties.
    - pyre 13y ago
      Maybe we're talking about the difference between "generalist" and "specialist" here? It seems like if a child decides to participate in such narrowly focused activities, it could be at the expense of being exposed to different sorts of people and getting a more all-encompassing world view.
bsullivan01 13y ago
I agree 100% with you. Not to go off-topic too much, and I am no doctor but I wonder if this is a reason for a stunning increase in autism cases. Maybe sitting alone, in front of the TV, game console does a trick on you when very young?
- LaGrange 13y ago
  The reason? Like, higher diagnosis rate? Also, autism can be diagnosed by the age of 2, and practically a significant portion of cases gets identified by the age of 5-7. So, um, no, it's not video games.
  - roc 13y ago
    Maybe it's regional, but it's been more than a decade since I've been around a 2-7 year old that wasn't spending a significant portion of their time with dvds and games. I wouldn't be so quick to rule out such social factors.
    - cantankerous 13y ago
      Autistic behavior can sometimes be identified before a baby is a year old. Signs like the avoidance of eye-contact can be big indicators. I suppose babies "play", but not in the same sense that a 5-7 year old would "play". I'm skeptical of pointing the finger at television and video games for the spike in autism rates. Video games and television have been around quite a bit longer than the increase in diagnoses of autism-spectrum disorders.
      - jbooth 13y ago
        If someone's identifiable as autism SPECTRUM based on their eye movements at 1, maybe they'd still be better served to hang out with other kids and be the 'weird kid', learn how to work with other kids while maybe being picked on a little, than to not hang out with anyone and be complaining on an internet forum that they're "aspie" and can't form relationships 20 years later.
chez17 13y ago
I always find it interesting that nobody mentions this. Your generation, and the ones before you, destroyed and defunded parks, they built malls over open land, they made 100% safe unfun playgrounds, they turned America in the the most litigious country in the history of mankind scaring anyone from allowing anyone ever to make a mistake or get slightly hurt, you buy your kids more screens than books, and then at the end of the day you wonder aloud why kids don't play as much? * That was a proverbial you, no you specifically OP.
- 001sky 13y ago
  Your generation, and the ones before you, destroyed and defunded parks, they built malls over open land, they made 100% safe unfun playgrounds This comment is bad math, bad history, and bad analysis. Please. Try. Harder. [NB: GP was <10yrs old in 1990. He was not the parks comissioner of New York City in the 1990s. Etc.]
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan. “I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.” His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/science/19tierney.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/science/19tierney.html?_r=...
    - 001sky 13y ago
      His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, Right. We can infer in 1990 that in the power structures of NYC, people were motivated to de-risk playgrounds. Agreed. The larger point is that the earlier post was written by someone who was ~10 in 1990, and still in middle school or so during this quote. The people "in the power structures" in NYC and the ~young kids (in the schools out in the country side), are non-intersecting sets in a venn diagram. As a point of history, The destruction of playgrounds was a byproduct of Urban politics, and then became a political/cultural issue that was a holy-cow of school administrators. Again, this is a venn-diagram (urban, teachers) that is not overlapping with the accused (rural, student).
mixmastamyk 13y ago
> I feel very bad for my nephew's effective lack of childhood, even more so because it seems that doing something differently is a big social taboo. I don't quite understand this, could you expand it? I have a daughter and we go to the park a lot and don't own a TV and haven't noticed anyone bothered by either. In fact they are generally pleasantly surprised.
- martythemaniak 13y ago
  That was probably too strongly worded. What I meant was that he does not have the option of playing outside, unsupervised with his peer group (5-9 year olds). Even if you see the value in that, as the author or my family does, you would likely find it practically very hard or impossible to do, mostly because it depends heavily on other kids/parents way of thinking and expectations.
enraged_camel 13y ago
I was born in 1984 in Turkey. We lived in an apartment building in a major downtown area. My childhood memories consist of playing with other kids in the same apartment building or the neighboring buildings. These games were almost always improvised on the spot, where someone would throw out an idea and the others in the group would build upon it. There would be rule-making and negotiation, and lots of arguments. And then we would play. Even when we played well-known games, they had at least some element of improvisation. For example, if we couldn't pool enough money to buy a rubber soccer ball, we would find a soda can, crush it on the ground and use it as the ball. There would be rules with that, such as wearing close-toed shoes and keeping the can on the ground at all times (if it took into the air it became a sharp and dangerous projectile). The interesting thing is that these rules were invented on the spot by us kids. Parents had no involvement. One of the major differences I noticed when I came to America for college was that, in social settings, people were utterly incapable of improvising a game from scratch. We always had to play a game that someone else had invented, such as a board game or a well-known drinking game - both of which had strict rules. And if the board game was missing a piece? It was deemed unplayable. No one tried to improvise a solution because it required outside-the-box thinking. One weekend, the guy who had all the board games went back home to visit his parents, and his door was locked. So I found a large piece of cardboard from the trashcans behind the dormitory, and some supplies, and spent an hour or so creating a board game. When I presented it to the group, people were stunned. We played for hours and I became the god damn hero. The interesting thing is that I notice the same patterns in the workplace. But I don't want to turn this into work talk!
- 001sky 13y ago
  One of the major differences I noticed when I came to America for college was that, in social settings, people were utterly incapable of improvising a game from scratch. We always had to play a game that someone else had invented, such as a board game or a well-known drinking game - both of which had strict rules. And if the board game was missing a piece? It was deemed unplayable. No one tried to improvise a solution because it required outside-the-box thinking. Playing the system. Its the new, new thing.
Casseres 13y ago
> When I go to places like rural Belize or small-town Costa Rica I see kids still playing and I wonder if that's not the best place to raise a small kid (4-10 years old). Interesting Idea. I'm a bit far off from having kids, but I always think about the future and how I would raise them when I do have kids. That would also be great for cultural exposure. I know I want to raise my kids to be multilingual.
Dewie 13y ago
Having "play" was great in my experience, and I've never been fond of the idea of a busy schedule of organized activities, but... It seems that every time childhood comes up, people talk about how they're childhood was great and now because the kids are doing this and that, they are worse off. Of course, their childhood was the true forger of character and personhood, while the brains of kids today are just turning into slush while they hover over their iPad's (even though they themselves spent hours in front of the VCR). The author seems a good example of that (though probably more informed than average). (Sometimes people talk about how their childhood was bad, but then they blame it on themselves, their parents, or something that is not society wide.)
- Tichy 13y ago
  The problem is not kids hovering over their iPads. I was pestered by parents to go outside instead of playing computer games all the time (in the 80ies). But I know how important computer games where to me, so I'll fight to allow my kid to play games (most parents are actually afraid their kids get brain damage if they are exposed to computers - certainly nobody was interested in having a computer at the kindergarden of my son). The issue is that kids don't have much spare time to do whatever they want. Their time is filled up with scheduled activities.
  - AJ007 13y ago
    The iPad issue is something I've been thinking about. I've seen toddlers and even babies playing with them. The first few times observing this was quite surreal, because I thought back to what I was doing at that age (certain distant memories are strong.) I had no television growing up, for better or worse. I did have a computer. I did play a phenomenal amount of computer games. However I also messed around with those games. I edited configuration files, changed textures, and even did outright level design. And then, I became and adult and grew out of it. I had two sets of friends, those that played a lot of computer games and those that played a lot of video games. One thing I noticed was that the kids who played a lot of computer games tended to be a bit sharper back then. You had to navigate DOS directories, spend hours troubleshooting networking, spend perhaps months trying to get damn hardware card working, and so on. The video game players inserted a cartridge. When it didn't work they blew on it. Computer games now are pretty much plug and play. Tablet games require about two finger touches. Games themselves can increase cognitive functions and teach new skills. But, when the game is un-hackable it becomes a confined box. Every possibility outside that box is non existent. Inside that game's box you build a mental model and then conquer it. You may not have won the game, but you have a pretty damn good idea whats going to happen. Major props to Notch for making Minecraft an incredibly hackable game both inside and out of that box. If we are going to live in a box, that box should be incredible deep and wide, be it Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress -- or in the original stories' case, your entire neighborhood. It may be very interesting to see how kids who grew up with tablets think. I should be a lot better than those that grew up with 5 channels of broadcast television. Beyond that, I don't know.
hrktb 13y ago
This would be a case of "people doing things different don't know what they miss". Some kids (future violinists or pianists for instance) spend huge amount of their childhood training and training, but there's usually enough to enjoy and enough to learn to not fall into the article's problem. Playing under supervision is not so different, as for any group of more than a few kids, the supervisor won't be there directing every minute thing the kid does. IMO the problem the article states is less a lack of freedom than the quality of what the child does. And I don't mean quality in some elitist sense, but just in how much the kid gets from what he is doing (i.e. building towers in lego or teasing the house cat is chalenging and satisfying)
Pxtl 13y ago
It's actually a relatively new problem. I live in a dense university neighborhood in Hamilton, Ontario (basically Canada's Pittsburgh) and I grew up being able to run free with my friends. I mean, there wasn't much in the way of raising stray animals or amateur carpentry, but the rest of that stuff we did. Lots of unsupervised mayhem running around the area. I watched too much TV, and the mayhem was mostly confined to our local neighborhood and the ravine nearby, but we still played. The thing is about my area is that it was built in the '30s. Before two-car homes. This city is so dense that a kid can walk anywhere, even though it's a pretty big city. But now, living in the same neighborhood with my own kids, the culture has changed. I'd never dream of sending my 6-year-old son out to walk to school on his own and there isn't a mob of similar kids hiking to school for him to go with, and his friends aren't really playing out front on the street - it's all scheduled playdates. Part of the problem is dual-income homes. It's only three blocks to school, but I drive my kids there anyways because I'm on my way to work... my wife is already at her job by then. And this is the best-case scenario for Canada - a dense, pedestrian-friendly, close-to-school, close-to-the park house where kids can walk to anything. It's an affluent area with no crime to speak of other than drunken students. It is quite possibly the ideal place for kids to roam free... and they still don't do it. And compare that to the rest of Southern Ontario that is one vast ocean of suburban tract housing where there is nothing in walking distance and all the houses and shops are in an ocean of parking and wide streets that makes even your neighbor feel a little further.
- henrikschroder 13y ago
  > It's only three blocks to school, but I drive my kids there anyways because > It is quite possibly the ideal place for kids to roam free... and they still don't do it. I agree that 6 is a bit young to walk on your own, but why don't you walk with him occasionally? You can walk back, and then drive to school. When he's 7 or 8, he should be able to walk on his own. But only if you teach him how.
jimmaswell 13y ago
I'm not sure about that. I was raised with the opportunity to do stuff outside with other kids and all that but it felt boring to me. Particularly it bugged me how they seemed to not stay on one thing for long or not stick to the structure of whatever we were doing. If it was up to me what to do I came up blank and just walked around until I was allowed to go back in - I couldn't think of anything interesting to do besides sometimes try to imitate stuff from the video games. In contrast at that age I found video games like Spyro the Dragon or Crash Bandicoot much more interesting and fulfilling due to how they were consistent and had more tangible rewards. I was also greatly interested in computers but didn't get one until third grade. I have doubts random physical meandering is better than technology for kids.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

LaGrange 13y ago

Oh, I grew up in the same times, in the same general area, with just a little whee bit of difference: I'm aspergers, I'm socially anxious, and I quite clearly remember that most of the fun groups like you mention had were actually at the expense of the kids like me. Ooops. Also, while I didn't spend that much time among modern kids, I do see them having lots of fun (yes, with the eeevil tablets too, sometimes), and then going to organized activities that they often pick themselves and seem to enjoy more than kicking a brick or bullying (sorry, was I meant to say "fighting"? Well, I won't) another group of kids. And then they get a bit older, and find sports or creative or technical activities that were completely out of reach of most kids growing up in the magical eighties. It's just part "our times were different", part golden age mythology. In reality, the entire concept of childhood as we modernly understand it is fairly young, and the idea that kids play and adults don't is ridiculous. Furthermore, it's just us adults judging kids to not having played enough without putting their health in danger or at least getting uncomfortably dirty. Modern kids play. A lot. Just because they play in a way that's different from yours or bucolic paintings doesn't mean they don't actually have more fun than you did.

martythemaniak 13y ago
> most of the fun groups like you mention had were actually at the expense of the kids like me. I'm sorry for your experience, but that's absolutely not what I meant, nor what happened. "Fighting" as I said there was actually things like snowball fights in the winter or paper-cone-in-tube or soft/rotten-fruit-in-sligshot fights in the summer, and always in a group-vs-group setting. I am in fact your fairly typical shy introverted bookish geek and the reason I think so highly of this type of play is precisely because it allowed me to overcome these tendencies and be a normal kid. My real worry here isn't that kids today aren't doing the exact same things I did. It's that they don't have the option to do certain things anymore - things which may in fact be extremely valuable. What I described in my OP wasn't false, but it wasn't complete - I also spent much time playing Legos, reading books, "technical activities" with my dad's tools. Better or worse, one thing I can definitely say is my nephew has far fewer options and choices than I did at his age.
- LaGrange 13y ago
  > "Fighting" as I said there was actually things like snowball fights in the winter or paper-cone-in-tube or soft/rotten-fruit-in-sligshot fights in the summer, and always in a group-vs-group setting. That was always what the less lucky kids were told when they complained. And then painted as spoil-sports until they stopped complaining to avoid embarrassment. > It's that they don't have the option to do certain things anymore - things which may in fact be extremely valuable. I don't know about your specific family, but in general, they have far, far more options, up to and including extreme sports. Pretty sure I didn't know any kid that could try climbing or spelunking in the eighties.
  - pyre 13y ago
    Maybe we're talking about the difference between "generalist" and "specialist" here? It seems like if a child decides to participate in such narrowly focused activities, it could be at the expense of being exposed to different sorts of people and getting a more all-encompassing world view.

bsullivan01 13y ago

I agree 100% with you. Not to go off-topic too much, and I am no doctor but I wonder if this is a reason for a stunning increase in autism cases. Maybe sitting alone, in front of the TV, game console does a trick on you when very young?

LaGrange 13y ago
The reason? Like, higher diagnosis rate? Also, autism can be diagnosed by the age of 2, and practically a significant portion of cases gets identified by the age of 5-7. So, um, no, it's not video games.
- roc 13y ago
  Maybe it's regional, but it's been more than a decade since I've been around a 2-7 year old that wasn't spending a significant portion of their time with dvds and games. I wouldn't be so quick to rule out such social factors.
  - cantankerous 13y ago
    Autistic behavior can sometimes be identified before a baby is a year old. Signs like the avoidance of eye-contact can be big indicators. I suppose babies "play", but not in the same sense that a 5-7 year old would "play". I'm skeptical of pointing the finger at television and video games for the spike in autism rates. Video games and television have been around quite a bit longer than the increase in diagnoses of autism-spectrum disorders.
    - jbooth 13y ago
      If someone's identifiable as autism SPECTRUM based on their eye movements at 1, maybe they'd still be better served to hang out with other kids and be the 'weird kid', learn how to work with other kids while maybe being picked on a little, than to not hang out with anyone and be complaining on an internet forum that they're "aspie" and can't form relationships 20 years later.

chez17 13y ago

I always find it interesting that nobody mentions this. Your generation, and the ones before you, destroyed and defunded parks, they built malls over open land, they made 100% safe unfun playgrounds, they turned America in the the most litigious country in the history of mankind scaring anyone from allowing anyone ever to make a mistake or get slightly hurt, you buy your kids more screens than books, and then at the end of the day you wonder aloud why kids don't play as much? * That was a proverbial you, no you specifically OP.

001sky 13y ago
Your generation, and the ones before you, destroyed and defunded parks, they built malls over open land, they made 100% safe unfun playgrounds This comment is bad math, bad history, and bad analysis. Please. Try. Harder. [NB: GP was <10yrs old in 1990. He was not the parks comissioner of New York City in the 1990s. Etc.]
- jlgreco 13y ago
  When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan. “I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.” His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/science/19tierney.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/science/19tierney.html?_r=...
  - 001sky 13y ago
    His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, Right. We can infer in 1990 that in the power structures of NYC, people were motivated to de-risk playgrounds. Agreed. The larger point is that the earlier post was written by someone who was ~10 in 1990, and still in middle school or so during this quote. The people "in the power structures" in NYC and the ~young kids (in the schools out in the country side), are non-intersecting sets in a venn diagram. As a point of history, The destruction of playgrounds was a byproduct of Urban politics, and then became a political/cultural issue that was a holy-cow of school administrators. Again, this is a venn-diagram (urban, teachers) that is not overlapping with the accused (rural, student).

mixmastamyk 13y ago

> I feel very bad for my nephew's effective lack of childhood, even more so because it seems that doing something differently is a big social taboo. I don't quite understand this, could you expand it? I have a daughter and we go to the park a lot and don't own a TV and haven't noticed anyone bothered by either. In fact they are generally pleasantly surprised.

martythemaniak 13y ago
That was probably too strongly worded. What I meant was that he does not have the option of playing outside, unsupervised with his peer group (5-9 year olds). Even if you see the value in that, as the author or my family does, you would likely find it practically very hard or impossible to do, mostly because it depends heavily on other kids/parents way of thinking and expectations.

enraged_camel 13y ago

I was born in 1984 in Turkey. We lived in an apartment building in a major downtown area. My childhood memories consist of playing with other kids in the same apartment building or the neighboring buildings. These games were almost always improvised on the spot, where someone would throw out an idea and the others in the group would build upon it. There would be rule-making and negotiation, and lots of arguments. And then we would play. Even when we played well-known games, they had at least some element of improvisation. For example, if we couldn't pool enough money to buy a rubber soccer ball, we would find a soda can, crush it on the ground and use it as the ball. There would be rules with that, such as wearing close-toed shoes and keeping the can on the ground at all times (if it took into the air it became a sharp and dangerous projectile). The interesting thing is that these rules were invented on the spot by us kids. Parents had no involvement. One of the major differences I noticed when I came to America for college was that, in social settings, people were utterly incapable of improvising a game from scratch. We always had to play a game that someone else had invented, such as a board game or a well-known drinking game - both of which had strict rules. And if the board game was missing a piece? It was deemed unplayable. No one tried to improvise a solution because it required outside-the-box thinking. One weekend, the guy who had all the board games went back home to visit his parents, and his door was locked. So I found a large piece of cardboard from the trashcans behind the dormitory, and some supplies, and spent an hour or so creating a board game. When I presented it to the group, people were stunned. We played for hours and I became the god damn hero. The interesting thing is that I notice the same patterns in the workplace. But I don't want to turn this into work talk!

001sky 13y ago
One of the major differences I noticed when I came to America for college was that, in social settings, people were utterly incapable of improvising a game from scratch. We always had to play a game that someone else had invented, such as a board game or a well-known drinking game - both of which had strict rules. And if the board game was missing a piece? It was deemed unplayable. No one tried to improvise a solution because it required outside-the-box thinking. Playing the system. Its the new, new thing.

Casseres 13y ago

> When I go to places like rural Belize or small-town Costa Rica I see kids still playing and I wonder if that's not the best place to raise a small kid (4-10 years old). Interesting Idea. I'm a bit far off from having kids, but I always think about the future and how I would raise them when I do have kids. That would also be great for cultural exposure. I know I want to raise my kids to be multilingual.

Dewie 13y ago

Having "play" was great in my experience, and I've never been fond of the idea of a busy schedule of organized activities, but... It seems that every time childhood comes up, people talk about how they're childhood was great and now because the kids are doing this and that, they are worse off. Of course, their childhood was the true forger of character and personhood, while the brains of kids today are just turning into slush while they hover over their iPad's (even though they themselves spent hours in front of the VCR). The author seems a good example of that (though probably more informed than average). (Sometimes people talk about how their childhood was bad, but then they blame it on themselves, their parents, or something that is not society wide.)

Tichy 13y ago
The problem is not kids hovering over their iPads. I was pestered by parents to go outside instead of playing computer games all the time (in the 80ies). But I know how important computer games where to me, so I'll fight to allow my kid to play games (most parents are actually afraid their kids get brain damage if they are exposed to computers - certainly nobody was interested in having a computer at the kindergarden of my son). The issue is that kids don't have much spare time to do whatever they want. Their time is filled up with scheduled activities.
- AJ007 13y ago
  The iPad issue is something I've been thinking about. I've seen toddlers and even babies playing with them. The first few times observing this was quite surreal, because I thought back to what I was doing at that age (certain distant memories are strong.) I had no television growing up, for better or worse. I did have a computer. I did play a phenomenal amount of computer games. However I also messed around with those games. I edited configuration files, changed textures, and even did outright level design. And then, I became and adult and grew out of it. I had two sets of friends, those that played a lot of computer games and those that played a lot of video games. One thing I noticed was that the kids who played a lot of computer games tended to be a bit sharper back then. You had to navigate DOS directories, spend hours troubleshooting networking, spend perhaps months trying to get damn hardware card working, and so on. The video game players inserted a cartridge. When it didn't work they blew on it. Computer games now are pretty much plug and play. Tablet games require about two finger touches. Games themselves can increase cognitive functions and teach new skills. But, when the game is un-hackable it becomes a confined box. Every possibility outside that box is non existent. Inside that game's box you build a mental model and then conquer it. You may not have won the game, but you have a pretty damn good idea whats going to happen. Major props to Notch for making Minecraft an incredibly hackable game both inside and out of that box. If we are going to live in a box, that box should be incredible deep and wide, be it Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress -- or in the original stories' case, your entire neighborhood. It may be very interesting to see how kids who grew up with tablets think. I should be a lot better than those that grew up with 5 channels of broadcast television. Beyond that, I don't know.

hrktb 13y ago

This would be a case of "people doing things different don't know what they miss". Some kids (future violinists or pianists for instance) spend huge amount of their childhood training and training, but there's usually enough to enjoy and enough to learn to not fall into the article's problem. Playing under supervision is not so different, as for any group of more than a few kids, the supervisor won't be there directing every minute thing the kid does. IMO the problem the article states is less a lack of freedom than the quality of what the child does. And I don't mean quality in some elitist sense, but just in how much the kid gets from what he is doing (i.e. building towers in lego or teasing the house cat is chalenging and satisfying)

Pxtl 13y ago

It's actually a relatively new problem. I live in a dense university neighborhood in Hamilton, Ontario (basically Canada's Pittsburgh) and I grew up being able to run free with my friends. I mean, there wasn't much in the way of raising stray animals or amateur carpentry, but the rest of that stuff we did. Lots of unsupervised mayhem running around the area. I watched too much TV, and the mayhem was mostly confined to our local neighborhood and the ravine nearby, but we still played. The thing is about my area is that it was built in the '30s. Before two-car homes. This city is so dense that a kid can walk anywhere, even though it's a pretty big city. But now, living in the same neighborhood with my own kids, the culture has changed. I'd never dream of sending my 6-year-old son out to walk to school on his own and there isn't a mob of similar kids hiking to school for him to go with, and his friends aren't really playing out front on the street - it's all scheduled playdates. Part of the problem is dual-income homes. It's only three blocks to school, but I drive my kids there anyways because I'm on my way to work... my wife is already at her job by then. And this is the best-case scenario for Canada - a dense, pedestrian-friendly, close-to-school, close-to-the park house where kids can walk to anything. It's an affluent area with no crime to speak of other than drunken students. It is quite possibly the ideal place for kids to roam free... and they still don't do it. And compare that to the rest of Southern Ontario that is one vast ocean of suburban tract housing where there is nothing in walking distance and all the houses and shops are in an ocean of parking and wide streets that makes even your neighbor feel a little further.

henrikschroder 13y ago
> It's only three blocks to school, but I drive my kids there anyways because > It is quite possibly the ideal place for kids to roam free... and they still don't do it. I agree that 6 is a bit young to walk on your own, but why don't you walk with him occasionally? You can walk back, and then drive to school. When he's 7 or 8, he should be able to walk on his own. But only if you teach him how.

jimmaswell 13y ago

I'm not sure about that. I was raised with the opportunity to do stuff outside with other kids and all that but it felt boring to me. Particularly it bugged me how they seemed to not stay on one thing for long or not stick to the structure of whatever we were doing. If it was up to me what to do I came up blank and just walked around until I was allowed to go back in - I couldn't think of anything interesting to do besides sometimes try to imitate stuff from the video games. In contrast at that age I found video games like Spyro the Dragon or Crash Bandicoot much more interesting and fulfilling due to how they were consistent and had more tangible rewards. I was also greatly interested in computers but didn't get one until third grade. I have doubts random physical meandering is better than technology for kids.

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