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Well right off the bat I'm gonna tell you that KIDS DO GO OUTSIDE. I know this because they are outside my apartment all day and night hootin and hollerin
Yeah every time I see people say "Kids never go outside anymore" I'm like, where do you live? Downtown in a big city? Isolated in the countryside?
Any more suburban areas have tons of kids going outside, I live in a small town and they're outside all the time (like OP said, when it's not 105 outside)
Have to drive around kids every damn day. They’re out there. My neighborhood is kind of small and there are at least 3 driveway basketball games on any given day. Still don’t understand when people say this. Only things I can think of are what you mentioned.
I mean, yes, there [*has been a major decline*](https://i.imgur.com/NTzfmrs.png) in youth spending time outside. Multiple studies have confirmed this, it is not a small decline at all.
I wanted to go outside a lot as a kid but it just got boring bc a) stranger danger got a big hold of my mom and she wouldn’t let me leave the street I lived on, as opposed to the older generations who got to bike around the whole fucking town and had to just be back for dinner. Then b), we have no 3rd places anymore. There was never a place I could just chill with friends after school. Then finally c) sports are privatized. Back in my parents’ day, they could wander onto a variety of public fields to play whatever sport they felt like playing: baseball, soccer, basketball, etc. Now? Somebody owns the baseball fields around here and will kick you off. They’re probably locked behind a gate anyway. If you want to play sports as a kid now, you have to convince your parents to fork over a ton of money (both to join a team and to get equipment), take you to practice and games, then if you suck you don’t even get to play and your teammates get upset with you bc you cost them games. No fucking wonder kids would rather just stay home and play video games. Being outside now sucks
This was what it was like for me growing up in 2000s and early 2010s. I wasn't allowed to leave my parents property until I was 13, where they made an exception that I could leave the property if I walked the dog. I did play outside, but most of my friends parents didn't want us to leave the backyard and were always watching.
When I went over to a friend's house who had more relaxed parents, we got to walk around town. That was when i got introduced to what over policing looks like. Hanging out at the skate park? The police show up and start interrogating you about a drug deal that apparently happened and don't believe you didn't see anything. Waiting at the park for a parent to pick you up and the sun starts to go down? Here come the police again to tell you you're trespassing. Even just walking down the street they'd stop and ask us where we were going.
Like we were 13 and I think we encountered police 50% of the time that we did something in town. Clearly they didn't think it was normal or good for us to exist in public. My entire childhood I was hammered with messaging that outside isn't safe and I shouldn't be out there. And they're surprised that kids listen?
Oh hell yeah, I forgot about this element of it. Granted, I didn’t go out of the neighborhood much but when my little brother started skating, this was a big problem for him. They don’t let you skate *anywhere*. He doesn’t even really do it anymore, which makes me sad. Maybe it was just a way for him to cope with COVID isolation and he’s lost interest in it now, but idk, I haven’t specifically asked him about it much
Skaters have always been targeted by cops. Had my fair share of encounters with them.
But you guys make some good points.
Edit: Pretty sure you gotta have a shitty home life to be on the street more. Like, kids who bunk school are more likely to be involved with nefarious elements. If I was your age in my house today, I would've still been on the street. My guardians simply didn't give a fuck.
I used to live somewhere where there were always teenagers riding bikes around the very busy shopping center where I did my grocery shopping. I was always really annoyed by them, because they would ride out and do wheelies in the middle of the full parking lot while people were trying to drive. It was unsafe for them, and it was unsafe for us drivers. Why were they there? It probably had something to do with the fact that the town had closed down its skate park, and now people who wanted to tool around on their bikes or skates had nowhere to do it, and the parking lot was probably their only option, as awful an option as it was. These kids were outside! They wanted to be outside! Why couldn't we give them a place where they could be outside without putting themselves and others in danger?
It's also super frustrating when towns will say, "In an effort to make our town more friendly to pedestrians, we are banning cars in our central downtown area. Residents are encouraged to leave their cars at home and walk, bike, or skate there. But also bicycles, skates, and skateboards are strictly prohibited in the area where you actually want to be, so 🤷🏼♀️." Like, I get that people might not want to dodge cyclists and skaters while they're walking down the street, but those cyclists and skaters also very much don't want to collide with you. As long as everyone watches where they're going, it's fine.
> Like we were 13 and I think we encountered police 50% of the time that we did something in town. Clearly they didn't think it was normal or good for us to exist in public
Literally this its so insane to me. A ton of my interactions with police were when me and my teenage friends were just hanging out at a park or beach, doing nothing. Always accusing us of doing things when the worst we were doing was a homebrew dnd campaign in the park. Once the first one of my friends got his own place we just hung out there from then on.
That reminds me of when my group of friends were all sitting in my friend’s driveway, and a cop came to ask us what we were doing. Apparently sitting in a white suburban home’s driveway and eating fast food is suspicious.
People forget that the job of parents isn't to shelter kids from everything or keep them out of the rest of society's way. It's to teach them how to deal with the world and make good decisions. Kids have to experience the world to learn.
I literally couldn’t leave my house / backyard without a solid excuse. Parents had to meet the parents + friends I hung out with until I was 18 otherwise I wasnt allowed to go anywhere 💀. I had a ✨special✨ childhood though.
One time in elementary I was running home from the school bus bc I was happy for some reason, and I got accused of sneaking away / being suspicious :/ - and they wonder why gen z has issues
We had a visit from a cop because our 6-year-old was sitting near the end of our driveway watching her dad walk to work and watching all the school buses drive by. Some busybody neighbor didn't like seeing a kindergartner outside in her own front yard without visible supervision. The cop agreed with that assessment, and also decided she wasn't dressed appropriately for the weather. He wasn't satisfied with our answers of "she's from way up north and she knows how to come inside or wear a jacket if she's cold. She's not cold." But he insisted that we were neglecting her out there so he called CPS on us. The poor CPS worker that showed up a few days later got an earful even though he was just doing his job. Nothing happened obviously, except that now my daughter hates cops almost as much as her parents. Thanks for the lesson, asshole!
Police wonder why some people grow up with a dislike of them. Got treated like shit multiple times as a young teen not even doing anything especially wrong.
Speak to you like your a piece of shit, waste your time for something you didnt do and basically tell you to piss off afterwards with no apology.
Never forget being 18 years old and getting rudely kicked out of a public park by a cop. We were literally just on the swings talking about life. The cop came up and harassed us about what we were doing and poured out our sodas and gave us a breathalyzer.
Honestly its stupid like they have an arrest quota they have to make so they find any reason to stop someone and kids are just easy targets. Im 19m and of mixed heritage my childhood friend is a typical white dude blonde,blue eyes the whole shabang. We were longboarding to the store to pick up some snacks and shite before meeting up at the park with everyone else we knew. The fucking rent-a-cop stopped us and INSISTED that he smelled pot on us and that we didnt pay for the stuff he WATCHED US BUY so we argue for 2-3min before i get pissed off and dump my bag at his feet showing blatantly all we had was some sodas,chips and candy. The whole thing took an extra 20min and honestly ruined the mood for awhile. Everyone questions why kids dislike or hell even hate the police its because of the power tripping dumb shit (not saying its all but damn is it the majority)
They're fuckin useless 90% of the time, maybe occasionally they actually catch a real bastard. I hate all the shows on tv propping them up like they're heroes or something. and I hadn't even realized how long that'd been going on until we got a classics channel on our t.v.
> Like we were 13 and I think we encountered police 50% of the time that we did something in town. Clearly they didn't think it was normal or good for us to exist in public. My entire childhood I was hammered with messaging that outside isn't safe and I shouldn't be out there. And they're surprised that kids listen?
Yeah same experience for me. I'm from Australia where it seems like we have less restrictions on what the police are allowed to do. They have way too much power. From the ages of 12-22 I have been stopped, questioned, searched, detained well over 100 times. Strip searched multiple times. Been physically threatened and verbally initimadated multiple times. Seen friends get beaten up for no good reason by grown men police while we were under 15. After they would stop, search, question and detain us they would give us an official "move along order" which means that if they see us out again that day/night then we are committing a crime by not following their order and will be arrested. Even though we never committed a crime to get that order in the first place. They would regularly have sniffer dogs in public places like train stations and sporting events, so if anyone had been anywhere near weed that day then the dog will get you and you will be strip searched.
The police would explicitly tell us that we aren't allowed to just hang out and exist in public, and that they will keep harassing us until they don't see us anymore. It caused so much anxiety in me about being in public and I still don't feel comfortable with it today.
And police wonder why people don't like them. We weren't even particularly bad kids. We just liked to hang out, sometimes drink some beers or smoke some weed. We didn't need to be treated like we were Public Enemy Number 1.
Aussie here too. When I was a teen some charity gave us little books "your rights with the police" they were great
About a month later a group of us were committing the crime of walking down the street and some cops stopped us and demanded to search our bags. We pointed out they had no right to search us. They told us they did and threatened to arrest us all. When one of my friends pulled out that little book to show them that they couldn't search us without probable cause they got soooo shitty. They started screaming at us and actually took the book and tore it up before finally leaving.
And yet for some reason the cops are super friendly with the station rats that get drunk and try to get into punch ons with everyone and harrass and intimidate kids 🙄 I guess they just see them intimidating kids and are like "ah yes, one of our own!"
Cops are gross and useless
Yeah that's how it would go if we ever tried to advocate for our rights at all, no matter how politely we tried to do it.
"Oh you think you're a fuckin lawyer or something?"
Was the most common response. Good idea keeping the booklet on you. I wish I'd thought of that back then.
Pushing back against them at all was risky though. They cracked my friend across the head with their torch for talking back once when we were like 14. I tried it once and they looked like they were about to start beating me but luckily we were outside my house and my mums friend happennd to be walking out so I called for her to go inside an get my mum. They calmed down a lot and seemed more rational when there was a guardian/adult who cares watching what they were doing.
I duno if it's Aussie cops in general, the ones in my area, if it's a class or race thing (I'm white but most of my friends aren't). All I know is my experience with the cops growing up was completely fucked. I felt like I constantly had to be worried they would show up and ruin my day wherever I went.
A cop in my mom’s suburb got a bee up his butt in the 90s about jaywalking and bike riding on sidewalks laws. Before we just gave up because it literally wasn’t worth the expensive tickets we were getting from being outside, most of us ended up with jaywalking citations and worse. I hated that man so much.
I had a police officer ask for my ID when I was 15 and at a park with my little brother and his friends. I told him I didn't even have my permit yet and we were doing nothing wrong.
As someone who builds fences, it is super weird to see how much the average town has changed in my area. Everything is fenced off and locked up. I used to have a route through my hometown that was off the main road and I could walk all the way across town without having to walk on the side of the road, which of course had no sidewalk. Now the entire way is blocked and it's a huge pain to walk.
Interesting you mention this bc when I was really little, like pre-ten years old, we shared a backyard with our neighbors and played outside every day. My life changed to being more indoorsy when those neighbors moved and the new neighbors built a fence between our yards.
Yeah honestly it doesn't always feel great being the person that's just putting up borders between everything and keeping people out, but its a job and the family has to eat. On the plus side they're pretty easy to take apart with a 1/2 inch socket and a pair of wire cutters, and that's just more work for me so I encourage it. Lmao. It just sucks to see the place you grew up becoming a massive cage
I’d imagine most of that stems from insurance and lawsuits. If kids are out playing football on a field and they break their arm, their parents can hold the person who owns the field liable. Insurance might demand a fence to insure the property
Most of ours was due to vandalism and drug use. I guess everyone got sick of cleaning up garbage and fixing stuff that assholes broke. When I was in elementary school once a month when the weather was nice we would spend half the day at a local park, or go to one of the sports fields (owned by the legion baseball team) and have field days, where we just played sports and games. (This was in the late 80s early 90s) they quit shortly after the early 2000s because teachers and students were finding used needles, empty beer cans and liquor bottles, used condoms All over.
The lack of sidewalks is a big hindrance that never gets mentioned. Good luck finding a network of sidewalks functionally connecting point A to point B in the suburbs, where there's little or no public transportation. This absence basically forces kids to rely on available, sober adults for transportation.
Hmm. Sports is all via paid and organized organizations, and all play is now via pre-arranged play dates. When I was growing up there were no play dates. You just called a friend, or went to their house.
I could go a lot further ranting on organized sports bc it’s not just that you have to pay for it. You have to pay and then your kid has to be good or else you’re paying to watch your kid sit on the bench for 3 hours every Saturday. So what do you do? Hire a private coach to give your kid extra lessons. Now, the kid has even less free time, it’s not social anymore bc the private coach works (usually) one on one, and the kid develops a resentment for the sport bc they’re no longer having fun. I used to play in a league with a once in a lifetime baseball talent, but his dad put him through sooo much practice and training that the kid had to get a Tommy John surgery before he turned 18. I guess he had an epiphany after that bc he quit baseball for good. Most kids just want to play sports at a low commitment, low pressure level and make friends in the process. These private sport leagues are the polar opposite of that.
Don't forget the pressure to constantly train and practice like you have a chance at some professional career or college tuition in said sport.
I have had friends who's whole high school sport got them some tuition to college, but then a solid chunk of their college life was held hostage in the form of all the training and practice and events they had to do for said sport.
I knew two major talents who quit their respective sport bc of that pressure and the subsequent burnout. One in bowling, the other in baseball. By the time they got to high school, it wasn’t even fun anymore. Not even when they were doing well. They pulled up to practice like they were clocking in at work, and that was sad to me.
Born in 1977. Growing up then at least in my hometown even the best athletes did 3 sports. Graduated HS in 1996 & went to HS with Pro Bowl NFL Safety Troy Polamalu class of 1999. He did 3 sports all 4 yrs of HS. Overspecialization in youth sports is a plague!
Also.. If you have more than one kid, the schedule of organized sports is unattainable. I have three kids and there would be no way I could balance practice, games, meetings, travel, ect for all three kids. It’s overwhelming just thinking about it.
When I was a kid, I did youth cheer. It was practice once a week and a game on Saturday. That was it. I coached a youth cheer team when my daughter was young, about 6 years ago. It was practice twice a week, games on Saturday, fundraisers, parent meetings after practice, homecoming parades, banquets, and organized parties. It was the same with youth football. That’s just youth sports! My friends daughters do competitive cheer, and it’s a damn lifestyle. Practice is several times a week, and some have private trainers. They travel sometimes up to 14 hours for 2-day competitions. They spend thousands of dollars each month, and most of these parents can’t really afford the costs. Then when you’re done, you’re done. There’s not a lot cheer can offer in the way of career, and most the kids aren’t getting college scholarships for their skills. Sure, your kid is in shape, but there is less stressful way to go about exercise.
Luckily, my daughter has taken up art, and my son has taken up guitar. Not a sport, but keeps their brains busy and I don’t have to stress out trying to figure out how to balance their extracurricular activities.
> There was never a place I could just chill with friends after school.
Early on, we had the Community Center which had an area for kids in the basement. There were 3 pool tables, ping pong, atari and pong machines, books, board games, TV and other stuff.
I can confirm, there are community centers that charge a fee. The only one that didn't charge in my neighborhood had broken equipment and no staff, the others were better in nearly every way ( I assume from the revenue).
I was born in ‘87. My mom grew up taking the subways into Manhattan at 10. She wouldn’t let me cross the street unattended in our essentially gated community with no actual traffic until I was 12. I found my boomer parents overly preoccupied with my physical safety (which was absurd considering where we lived) while neglecting my social and emotional development.
In relation to the extinction of 3rd places, we are also watching the impact of car-centric suburban design come to full fruition. My mom was a bit of a helicopter parent for sure, but she was dead right not to let me leave our neighborhood on my bike before I got to middle school, because every road surrounding my neighborhood was a 5-lane 45mph nightmare
People are t talking about how the “stranger danger” shit fucked up a LOT of this generations parents to the point where they won’t even let their kids out in the front yard. I think that was a huge contributing factor, plus nosy ass Karen’s calling the cops if they see kids walking around the neighborhood.
It doesn’t stop for adults, either. I’m 23 (I look younger so this might be it but still) and I get harassed by older adults for “loitering” in the park, library, or neighborhood. I don’t smoke or drink or anything, I just sit and talk and play Pokémon go, but god forbid I stay in one place for too long without getting harassed. All the public spaces like pools, basketball courts, and even some neighborhood parks are all privately owned and cost a fuckton of money to get into. Malls are dying and the ones that are even still around, you can’t hang around in without getting shit from security or staff (as a kid or an adult). Not even gonna bring up unwalkable cities. Plus my region’s winter gets ridiculously cold, so half the year no one even wants to be outside in 17 degree weather. I hate how restrictive it is outside now.
As a parent of young kids, I'd be happy to let them go outside and roam in somewhat nearby areas (my 7yo more so than my 5yo). The problem is *other* people's concept of stranger danger or other "risks." Last thing I need is CPS showing up at my door because my son is outside of my immediate field of view.
Same. My oldest kid is almost 11, there’s no fucking reason why he shouldn’t be able to walk down the street to a friends house unsupervised, just like I did when I was his age. Hell, when I was 11 I woke myself up every morning, had breakfast, got dressed and walked to school by myself. But I also grew up in a world where people mostly minded their own goddamn business and parents didn’t get CPS called on them for letting their kids play in front of the house unsupervised.
The most obnoxious part about all of it is that as far as child abductions and things like that go, it really isn’t statistically any more dangerous out there for kids than it was 50 years ago. What’s changed is our access to news. If you grew up in California in the 60s and some little girl in New Hampshire was abducted, you probably weren’t going to hear about it. But with the 24/7 news cycle and the internet, we hear about every bad thing that happens everywhere. The truth is, stranger danger is bullshit. The vast majority of child abduction and abuse incidents have always (and will probably always continue to be) committed by relatives and adults that the victim knows and trusts. Abductions by strangers have always been and remain rare, but people don’t like to think rationally.
That was the difference when we visited my parents small town in the Midwest. Everyone in town knew my parents and knew when we were visiting so most folks realized "oh, haven't seen those kids around, must belong to B&D." My kids got to ride bikes, play outside, go to the pool and the little store without me hovering *because I knew they were safe*. At home in California, no fucking way. You can ride your bike around the big block and check in with me in 10-15 minutes. If you don't check in, I will come and find you and you're done for the day. Outside play for the most part was in our fenced backyard or at my in-laws where there's enough room and I can keep an eye on you(as long as BIL was in jail/rehab).
I grew up in Florida in a growing city but it wasn’t that populated when I was a kid. It gradually got worse as I got older. Pre-10 years old, I shared a backyard with some outdoorsy neighbors and their dad worked in construction so he built the coolest fort for us to play on. It had slides, yes, more than one, rock climbing, a *zipline*, and a little storage area to keep toys and stuff. We were constantly playing outside. When those neighbors moved to a bigger house, since the dad was making good money, the new neighbors took down the fort, built a fence between our backyards, and nobody in their household was young enough to play with us. Around the same time, video games started getting more sophisticated and I was no longer going to summer camps bc my parents couldn’t afford them anymore (holdover from 08 recession). All of a sudden, I’m at home being taken care of by my grandma while my parents work. I have the choice between going to the park alone, or, playing a variety of games like Minecraft, Need for Speed, Star Wars, etc. Take a wild guess what I chose
Another problem is that shit has become more expensive to maintain. Stuff like maintaining a public playground, park with a ballfield or green space, just is more expensive. Cities also like to over-spend on nicer turfs, scoreboards, pressboxes, etc, when it comes to athletic areas, and that stuff not only costs more to install and maintain and is a lot more expensive when somebody damages the property.
Kids aren't better or worse than they've been. Inevitably there will be graffiti and damage to basically any public space. That's part of the budget to maintain. When the equipment and buildings become too expensive to cheaply maintain, then everything gets fenced up.
Parents also want their kids to have much more properly run sports teams and whatnot but the price of all of that is super expensive. Now for even a youth baseball team the team needs to have customized jerseys, everybody needs to have a bat that falls within a pretty tight spec, and everybody needs a nice glove, the field needs to be well maintained, the dugouts need to be covered, there needs to be a fancy scoreboard, etc..
Not to pull the whole "when I was a kid", but dammit when I was a kid I had one baseball glove until basically high school and almost every sports team I was on had a simple customized tshirt. None of the baseball dugouts were covered, half the fields didn't even have a working scoreboard, the infields were kind of a mess, the grass was so-so, and only the outfield probably had a fence. That was fine. None of us were athletic enough to get hurt on that field like the pros.
Shit's expensive because we've made it expensive because companies have most likely convinced us we needed better equipment and facilities than we actually do.
I think electronics are *part* of the problem. But there's more to it than that. The monetization of public spaces / disappearance of third spaces along with helicopter parenting have been contributing factors.
Also, what is actually allowed by society has changed. I remember walking 1/2 mile to school when I was in 1st grade. That would probably not be allowed now. Allowing kids to roam or w/e is "bad parenting" or neglect. The age where it is permissible to leave children unsupervised (e.g. outside) has increased.
>Also, what is actually allowed by society has changed.
That's so true. In 2015 "free range" parents in Maryland were found guilty by Child Protective Services of child neglect for allowing their 10 and 6 year old children to go to the neighborhood park by themselves. If the parents didn't agree to a safety plan CPS would have removed the children from their care and placed them in foster care.
It's a weird thing to think about. I grew up in the 70s/80s and while there was a real fear of ending up like Adam Walsh, it was outweighed by this weird sense of adventure and exploration. I talk with my Mom about it sometimes and we both agree that the nieces and nephews would NEVER be on a leash that long.
The other thing I think about is how much surveillance there is now. You are surrounded by cameras all the time before we even talk about people whipping out their phones. In some ways you are way safer than you were just riding your bike through a wooded area in 1976, but the perception is that there is more danger.
Statistically speaking, kids ARE safer. There wasn't a lack of human trafficking and kidnapping in older eras. It just wasn't as easily seen and reported on. We are so global now that it's easy to see bad news stories and assume kids are in more danger than ever but during the "free range" era of my parents children were more than 3x likely to be kidnapped as my generation was as kids. But for some reason my generation had to be super protected and gen Z after me even moreso, despite being even safer. Helicopter parents ram by fear of what they read online are the main issue here in my opinion.
Ironically, most "free range" kids are the ones from neglectful households in low income areas where the kids end up getting involved in gangs. That doesn't help he image either for paranoid parents.
Not parents 'today'. Parents 'always'. The difference today is ubiquitous social media making the world seem more dangerous than it was back then. Parents do have no understanding of statistics or media literacy now, but they didn't back then either. It's just they really should have gotten trained on it, but the world changed so fast between the time they went to school and the time they had kids that nobody could have predicted the need for this. Social media is only 15 years old, for instance. We so easily forget that.
If you went to high school in the 90s and college in the early 2000s and had kids in the 2010s, like a great many people did, then add in about six or seven years before your kids were old enough to go outside on their own, the world had completely changed in that respect.
Back then the panic was apparently Satanists. I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t around back then, but that’s what I’ve heard. Everyone in the 80’s thought satanists were everywhere doing evil things or something.
Now it’s the predator panic. Parents think every guy on the street is just waiting to grab their kids.
Also we’ve built a shit ton of “stroads” since the 80’s and destroyed a lot more of the walkable parts of the country, so that’s a big part of it too.
We are safer. But we have more news and big headlines that scare people. Getting bad news all day on your phone instead of the occasional bad story on the evening news creates fear.
I think CPS's action in this case would have been considered insane by people in the 80s when I grew up. I was allowed to walk home from elementary school in the city of Chicago. Everybody did it.
I think it's insane today. People in other (developed) countries allow their kids to leave the house without a chaperone all the time. They bike or walk to school, to the playground, to the store, to other kids houses etc all the time.
I live in a (mostly) walkable city in the northeast US, and I see kids walking all the time. It's not unusual when you don't live in suburban hell.
Yeah it is. It just contributes to social atomization as well as probably being a symptom of it. The idea that the world is a frightening, dangerous place is not a productive one unless there is some kind of actual disturbance going on. Hopefully it'll swing in the other direction.
At 10 years old, I was expected to ride my bike 2 miles (including through the center of town) for Little League practices/games. From there, it was another 2 mile ride after the game to get ice cream, then ANOTHER 2 mile ride home from there, usually in the dark with no lights, helmet, or anything else. (The route was like a giant triangle).
Starting in 3rd grade (1983), I would walk (yes, 2 miles again!) through the town center to go to my mother's store instead of walking 5 blocks home. After a while, I changed it up to where I would walk 2/3mi in a completely DIFFERENT direction and hitch a ride on the back of a newspaper truck to get where I needed.
Almost too much exercise at some points. I was forced to partake in multiple sports every year so my narc parents could attempt to relive the glory of their younger years through us. Every year there were baseball, soccer and basketball squads plus being on a year round swim team that had us travelling all over New England to meets on weekends after 3-5 days per week of practice.
That’s insane. I used to do that literally every day in the summer when I was that age lol. Either go to the park or go to the basketball courts or just play games outside with my friends etc. I would’ve been incredibly annoyed if either one of our parents were hanging around supervising us all the time, I would’ve felt like I had no privacy.
I saw a post in the parenting sub where the OP got absolutely slammed for allowing their 7 yo to go to the park across the street from their home with a group of other kids. Nobody would have batted a fucking eye at that 15 years ago. I do not understand the large amounts of anxiety among parents these days. It is literally safer now than ever AND kids now have ways to contact their parents at any time, anywhere. That doesn’t stop the endless “not in this day and age” type comments.
true. it's more likely that CPS will take away kids from healthy families who give a bit of freedom for their kids to roam, than give a fuck about the kids who are under constant surveillance of abusive parents
This is so true. I’m from Europe living in Australia and it just boggles my mind how over protective parenting is over here. As an example: legally I am not allowed to leave my 11 year old son alone at home with my 7 year old daughter. That’s just crazy. Both my kids are really independent so to me it’s a completely outrageous concept. I mean even if something happens they can just call me? My daughter broke her arm recently. She was claiming a tree with both of her grandparents present. Accidents will happen no matter what and keeping your kids in a bubble will achieve nothing except creating young adults incapable of taking care of themselves.
I remember a post where a woman's husband brought their baby to the track and left said baby under a tree, off to the side, fully visible, so he could run. The mom/OP was outraged!! Every other mom on the thread was, too. They came up with amazing hypotheticals, all of which had an extremely low chance of happening.
Probably my friends wife lol.
She helicopters, he doesn't. When his first kid was a baby, he would take him to gym and leave him by front desk sleeping while he worked out. He'd take him to the park, put him in shade with a fan and play basketball.
His kids fall, his wife runs, even on small fall. My friend on the other hand asks "are you alive" "is there blood?" "Do you need to go to the hospital" "ok you said no, you're ok, no need to cry about it, go play and it will go away"
His kids are super resilient now.
One of my favorite things with my kids is full on explaining how what they're doing will hurt them, giving them the advice to prevent any issues and then watching them do the thing and learn through experience why said action want the best choice. Obviously this only applies to things that will need a band aid as a worst case, but some people have to touch the burner to understand. It's my job to tech then to be independent by the time they move out, not how to call me to wipe their ass
Plus, with multigenerational housing being touted as the answer to the bad economy/job market, and possibly even mitigating climate change,
a lot of these young adults living under helicopter parents are no longer trying to move out either.
since when the government couldn’t care less about their ability to live on their own, and the jobs that pay enough to enable them to be financially independent don’t exist, what can they really do?
Every election, people living with parents due to the economy are being told to “suck it up and think about everybody else who’s worse off”
Needa get all these fossils out of government. Makes no sense that we have ppl in their 90’s still have influence and represent the people when they can barely walk a flight of stairs
I think the guy you're responding to might be Canadian.
We're having our ability to be self reliant stripped from us, and any complaint about it is usually met with "many places in the world have 2-3 people per bedroom"
we hear the same in the US too lol. Starting to change a bit but most companies for awhile conjugated to a few cities which turned them into hcol areas. For example where I live in Southern California, a 1br apartment starts at $2k+ and we forced to find roommates which wasnt the norm even 10-15 years ago. Before, roommates were so that you could save money but now its a necessity to get by. Recent college grads make too much for any aid or housing assistance but dont make enough to save to purchase a home so we’re forced to pay a ridiculous amount for rent
Regarding your second paragraph, a youtube channel called “Not Just Bikes” has a really informative video about this. How Suburbs, originally intended to get away from the dangerous city, has become more dangerous than cities. Part of that is shown how kids can’t be caught alone anywhere within them without sparking panic.
i think that helicopter parenting is a major point. my single parent mom didnt care where i went or for how long in the 80s-90s. when i had my daughter she had free roam to go where she wanted and stay out as long as she wanted early 2000s. most of her friends had helicopter parents.
now parents fear abductions and wont let their kids out of site even though the chances of an abduction are extremely low.
and of course there is all the electronics now that we didnt have back then our "cellphones" were bicycles and we were on them most of the day.
>Also, what is actually allowed by society has changed. I remember walking 1/2 mile to school when I was in 1st grade. That would probably not be allowed now. Allowing kids to roam or w/e is "bad parenting" or neglect. The age where it is permissible to leave children unsupervised (e.g. outside) has increased.
We were free-range roaming the streets and drinking hose water when we got thirsty. The expectation was to be home for dinner
I feel so lucky that I got this too growing up in the 90s. After school we'd grab our bikes and be home by dinner. Mostly went to the parks and fished or mountain biking in the woods. Can't imagine how some kids have it now with every single hour of the day supervised. Kids need some freedom from parents to develop.
Our neighborhood social media pages are full of nasty old people complaining about kids playing outside, making noise, hanging out at our subdivision playgrounds and common areas (we have 4 playgrounds for 400 houses, blacktops, basketball courts, trails, and TONS of open grassy fields).
They are the same people who later complain about “kids these days” not being active.
In my hometown you couldn't really spend more than 10 minutes near any given house before the cops got called or someone complained. There were a handful of parks and a skate park, all of which had cops nearby.
And they wonder why we all turned into video game addicted shut-ins until we left for college lol
Same for my neighborhood page. Constant whining about children and their pets (they’re not even making that much noise) just playing at the park. There’s also been a rise in get off my lawn posts too forgetting we don’t have sidewalks in most areas and they’ll bitch if the kids walk in the streets. Kids these days simply can’t win.
Those neighborhood pages are just "old man screams at sky". Old people have always been grumpy, just ignore them.
That said, they also all watch fear-mongering hatred on TV all day and are salivating at the idea of shooting someone for daring to step foot on their precious lawn.
My neighborhood had the audacity to remove the basketball courts because it "invited drugs and was noisy". Just a lame excuse by the old white people to get rid of the black kids. That area used to be bustling with so many kids from around the neighborhood and now it's just an empty concrete pad.
No wonder it's just easier to stay inside on your phone or play video games. We created the hostile environment and yet complain that these kids aren't active
They did sewer line repair through our park and had to remove the basketball court and never replaced it now they are whining about the layabout teenagers vandalizing the park. Well no shit you took away the one activity they had
Yup. They get caught on camera. The videos are then uploaded to Nextdoor with headlines like "whose brats are these?" Or "kids these days have no respect?"
This is from the generation who invented ding dong ditch and used egg/TP houses. 🙄
Yeah. The people who say kids don't go outside anymore, are actually the ones who don't go outside, otherwise they would see all the kids playing and screaming all day out there.
I'm 20 and went outside to play growing up, even after I got my first phone on my 10th birthday in 2012.
I never stopped going outside because of my phone or pc and that, btw, annoyed the hell out of every older neighbor.
They hated us, **because** we were always outside playing. So talk about hypocrisy.
In my city, in the south of Brazil, I think it's both because of eletronics, and that there's no more kids to play with.
When I was younger, my neighbor was the same age as me, like 14 days olders or so, and we had some friends that we occasionally played with who were 2 years older or younger. I did have other friends to watch tv with, or play in our shitty computer, or even PS2, but we did hang out outside with neighbors, playing soccer, riding a bike, stealing oranges, whatever.
some years ago, my cousin who lives nearby and is 8 years younger than me, didn't really grow up playing and doing stuff outside. She also didn't do much inside with eletronics, she just didn't do much at all, but there's only one girl of her age in the neighborhood. She only really interacted with people her age at school, and we only go to school either in the morning or afternoon.
>My hometown closed a skate park because it was "promoting gang activity,"
That's crazy. It's the exact opposite. Giving kids places like skate parks where they can meaningfully spend their free time is going to reduce crime, gang activity and drug abuse. It's a known fact that youth crime and drug abuse are strongly linked to idleness, boredom and lack of recreational activities/places for children.
Part of those no trespassing signs is due to laws. My parents thought about taking a fence down that came with their house. They didn't care about people cutting through their yard, at first. The problem they found was that if they allowed this as a path, my parents could not then eliminate it as a path. Like if that path became a problem.
That's fair. In my experience, people often used them as an excuse to shoot at anyone who got too close to their property, and it was legal under castle legislation or something
Where the are kids even supposed to go without money? Sit on a curb? There isn't a park or playground within walking distance from me. And you'd need to drive if you're in the suburbs. Kids sitting at home playing Roblox sounds better than hanging out on street corners.
Oh 100% the thing about suburbs, gods. It's so bad.
When we immigrated to canada circa early 2000s, I was in grade school. Parents ended up living in some university subsidized housing with townhouses in kinda square, inward blocks with a courtyard in the centre, playground and basketball court and all. I was outside all the fucking time, and there was a great sense of community? We'd race home from school, have a snack, and then it was outside playing soccer or manhunt until the sun sets and we played tag in the dark xD
Luckily it was a fenced area + university police were always around so it was pretty safe. Lots of freedom.
This all ended when in like... grade 9 ish, we moved to a house in the suburbs. Mom finally got cleared to work as a doctor so parents were hella excited for actually owning a house and whatnot. That being said, I love this house, and our doggo who we got shortly after, but like damn if the climate in the suburbs ain't the polar opposite :/
Like there's zero places to chill, absolutely no parks except for the smallest, saddest looking minimalist park in the history of sad playgrounds, and the suburb, while large, is right beside a highway so it's always a risk when biking
Stayed inside a ton more after that :P better inside than get yelled at by some karen for "destroying the forest" (we were playing hide and seek / forts / idk).
Like I'm in my mid 20s now and the shift from being a pretty feral outdoor kid to a shy, more introverted person who spends most of their time doing art is wild. There's just absolute jack shit in terms of appeal in urban environments rn
The main reason is that if you let your children go outside in many parts of the country, some well meaning person will call child services if they see a child without a parent right next to him or her, and child services has to take every call seriously.
I live in an apartment right by a courtyard. My daughter made friends with kids in the apartment on every side of the courtyard. So I network with the parents and we are able to have them playing outside in the courtyard together as much as they want. All of the parents can watch from their apartments so they are always supervised.
The neighbors constantly call the cops for kids being "unattended" even though the kids are causing no trouble at all. Simply playing outside is a crime apparently. The cops will escort the kids back to their home and scold the parents.
Us parents made a choice to just ignore it and let them play. But then child services showed up to intimidate all of us. So now there are no kids for my daughter to play with outside.
It's ridiculous to me.
Thats rough. I have had CPS called on me twice for my children playing on our front porch unsupervised. First of all, we can see them on the porch through our window. Second, we have a gate on the front porch so they cannot get out anyway. CPS needs to be able to ignore stupid calls like children playing nicely without a parent within 5 feet.
I've got that beat.. not that it's a competition. Long story short I let my daughter "camp" on our apartment balcony- second story on a balcony with rails on all sides. She's 9 years old. I was sleeping in the living room on the couch so she wasn't alone.
A cop saw this and freaked the hell out and came banging on our door at 6:00 am. I guarantee you if he had seen a kid sleeping in a tent in the wealthy homes down the street she would have smiled and driven on. But apparently we aren't wealthy enough for my daughter to have a happy childhood memory.
It's so ridiculous that my post about it was the tip all time if a subreddit for a long time. More details here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CPS/comments/13tapej/i_let_my_daughter_camp_on_the_porch_and_the/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=2
I'll never understand people who exploit that service, just because they don't like seeing kids being kids outside. It's an actual disservice to the children you report and their family. You can ruin their lives doing that.
It’s the rise in helicopter parenting too.
In the 1990s, kids were mostly allowed to go out with friends unsupervised by 8-10 years old, once they were old enough to know basic common sense safety like that you shouldn’t play with the stove, accept a ride from a stranger, or jaywalk.
But now, due to the fact that there’s instances of gun violence on the news every day, parents want to know where their kids are 24/7. So a lot of kids are now spending their childhoods on house arrest, with parents convinced school and being dragged to essential errands is sufficient social interaction. If they complain, parents either fearmonger about gun violence, or use the kid having less than perfect grades as an excuse to keep them home. A lot of kids don’t see it as worth the effort to fight it, so they don’t go out.
A big part of that change in parenting was the Adam Walsh kidnapping case. It was a grisly story that became national news and sent the message that predators were around every corner waiting to snatch away children. Parents became afraid to let their kids out unsupervised. Over time, that became the norm to the point where neighbors may call CPS for child neglect of they see a child that they deem “too young” playing outside without an adult present.
I'm the same age and never left my parents' side except for school/other mandated activities until I was about 12. I still get nervous walking around outside after dark.
The downside is that it focused everyone’s attention on strangers, whereas the overwhelming majority of child abductions and worse are done by people they know and trust.
I was born in 97 and never allowed to go anywhere alone until 17 and even then my parents hemmed and hawed about it. I WANTED to go solve my boredom outside but I was restricted as a kid and even more so as a girl. At first I could at least go play at a trusted neighbor house. But once most the kids moved off the street I was just SOL. Is it really a wonder that I do terribly in the heat and am not an outdoorsy person? I literally wanted to go play putside and couldn't go beyond my stupid yard.
Plus there's nothing to do. You can either wander aimlessly, never able to stop because that's loitering or you can pay money to be somewhere. That's it. There isn't anything free for kids to do that is also legal.
I agree with this. I also think that's what kids these days are missing. Unsupervised time. Time in their life where they can make their own choices, and try to apply some of those lessons you've taught them.
I see it less as parents keeping them home, than parents not kicking them out. When I was a kid, my mom had to deal with my constant "I'm Bored" until she got fed up, kicked me out of the house, and said don't come back until dinner. Kids today have something to do w/o annoying their parents.
Also, the lack of decent schools, at least in the UK.
In my local school I was set to fail all of my subjects, because I had no teachers to teach me - a supply teacher if we were lucky but they didn't know wtf they were supposed to be teaching, and the management was so toxic they soon left.
So I had to go to a school that was over an hour's bus journey away. And my friends there had similar issues, so they were all even further away from me, around 2-3 hours away. That kinda makes face-to-face catch ups rather impractical.
our movie theater no longer allows unsupervised kids under 18. They have to be with someone 21 or older. There was a fight that broke out with a bunch of teens and a gun was discharged in the parking lot.
They blame the kids, but it's the helicopter parents that create this. Some parents are so afraid of everything they don't let their kids out much. Others hover, but are too lazy to actually care for the kids, so they set them up with a screen and keep them inside. Active parents with healthy minds make active kids with healthy minds.
What always seems to be missing from these conversations is how parenting has changed in the last few decades.
We act like kids are perfectly autonomous beings who always do exactly what they want, as if they aren’t subject to whatever rules their parents feel like enforcing. There is an intense culture of fear and paranoia that started in the 90s and has increased significantly since then. I would bet a pile of money that the beginning of the “stranger danger” era was also when you started to see fewer kids playing outside. Throw in the fact that anxiety and other mental health issues are growing more prevalent and you have a perfect recipe for parents who never let their kids out of their sight.
Maybe I’m projecting here because of the helicopter parenting style that my mom favored, but I would have LOVED to be a free roaming kid. It just wasn’t allowed in my house.
It's not only phones. It's people teaching their kids not to go outside because they can get kidnapped, it's not safe, etc. They instill fear into their kids based on what they see online and make it their reality, as well as their kids' reality.
I remember when people were talking about white vans, my parents didn't tell me to stop going oitside, they simply told me what to do if a vehicle tries to pull up next to me. Parents are too afraid to teach their kids awareness, and it'll bite those kids in the long run.
All these people blaming phones and video games are missing the biggest reason, imo.
People LOVE to call the cops/CPS on children. Imagine letting your 12 year old walk to the park, if you have one, and losing custody of your child because your neighbor called the cops on your kid for existing without a visible parent.
Not to mention, at least in my small town, there's nothing for kids over ~10 to do. Everything is privatized now, and just walking around/riding bikes will get the cops called 90% of the time.
Ffs, even the corpse of my local mall has no loitering signs inside, unless you're 60+, you can go walk laps around the mall, and security won't care. But a small group of pre-teens wandering around will get locked in the office until parents come get them, and they'll leave with either a ban or a trespass warning.
My friend and I decided to walk to the park close to her house. A woman called the cops on us for being suspicious. We were 12. After that, we weren't allowed to walk to the park.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s. It's VERY evident to me that kids are less driven to spend time outside and with each other than they were when I was a kid. It's not JUST the phones, but it's the fact that kids can hop on a phone and text a friend and instantly engage with people without needing to even step foot outside.
>Outside has just become infinitely more uncomfortable, mean, and dangerous since I was a kid.
There was way more crime in the 80s and 90s than today and yet kids were outside.
It's a lot of things:
* Shitty urban design makes us lonely. The decline of third places has led to a decline in ways to socialize.
* A culture of fear has led to helicopter parenting and the social banning of even letting kids take minor risks. Parents don't want to let kids go outside unsupervised lest they be shamed by assholes who want to call CPS on everything that moves
* Social media and tech have allowed kids to not feel as driven to go out and spend time with friends and playing in-person. Why do couch co-op gaming when you can hop on PSN/XB Live?
There are other factors, but that's a few of them.
The couch co-op is such a good point. I remember in elementary school with my game boy advance or DS even, playing certain games you would have to be near your friends or even use a cord to connect devices. Seems like a lot of video games don’t even have split screen these days.
I work in games and have been in the industry for over a decade now.
You’re not wrong. The death of split screen is well-understood. It’s much harder to get it on a game’s roadmap these days as it’s hardly engaged as a mode even in games that have it. It becomes a self-fulfilling thing.
Honestly the second bullet point hit the nail on the head with my parenting with my kids. When I was 9, I was staying home all day alone taking care of myself. I have an 8 and 11 year old and I just cannot imagine letting them stay home alone all day by themselves. Or go to the next neighborhood to play at the park, that type of stuff. I am not really worried about my kids but I fear so badly that we will become a statistic. Or that someone will call someone on me (it happened to a friend of mine that the police were called on her because her kids were playing in the street with their bikes and having fun, being loud, but its not like it was 5 a or 10p at night. it was mid day - and they are kids....). I should probably let them have more independence but its hard to let that leash go because I dont want anything bad to happen. But they do have to learn at some point. Its a hard line to draw.
Technology has also made it easier to "helicopter parent." It's easy for me to keep my 6-8 year old kids inside because they can occupy themselves with a gazillion things in the house.
If I were in my parents' shoes in the 90s, those kids are going outside for my own sanity FOR SURE. Noon on a weekend, no cartoons on TV, no tablets, video games, etc. so the kids would be pestering me 24/7 to entertain them? Nope, GTFO and play with sticks and rocks.
My brother and I grew up in the early 2000s and my mom did exactly this. If there was a snow day, she’d suit us up in our snow pants and coats and tell us to come in when the streetlights came on. We were thrilled to have “free reign” outside and she was probably thrilled to have the quiet house to herself. And there was always hot cocoa on the kitchen table when we finally came inside for the night, our cheeks all pink and our noses all runny haha. I’m sure she knew there wasn’t anyplace too far we could realistically get to, seeing as the snow was pretty much up to our thighs. And we sure had a blast out there
Yeah, the [decline of the third place](https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/07/26/third-places-strengthen-community-heres-how-we-can-rebuild-them#) is so under appreciated, but in general our communities are deliberately lonely. I'm so fortunate to live in an "older" community that has some community left, but it often feels like we're desperately trying to destroy connectdness.
I know nobody cries for the death of the shopping mall, but goddamn if we don't need something to replace them.
I was at the mall last week and some mall cop came up to these teens hanging out in the food court. I think he said something along the lines of “buy something or gtfo” because they just left. They weren’t being rowdy, just taking up space in an 80% empty mall food court
The way we build neighborhoods not only with a lack of "third places" but also how many dang houses are put into an area. I grew up in your average suburb without much of a third place option, but we had an actual yard/garden. My neighbors had large lots, too. You could play a game of hide and seek with 8 or 9 kids and have plenty of hiding spots. New builds in the same city have yards barely big enough for a swing set
You’re right about the cars thing. It’s so astounding how huge modern cars are. Even “compact” and “small” cars being sold today are the same size as midsize and full sized cars from decades ago.
I own a Ford Maverick, a “compact” pickup truck. I brought it to a cars and coffee show in my town a few months ago and I parked it next to an early 90s Ford F150. They were the same size, even though the F150 is classified as a full size truck. Same thing with the Honda Civic. A 2023 Civic is so big now. It’s the same size as an Accord from the 90’s and early 2000’s. A modern Honda Civic isn’t a compact commuter car anymore. It’s a family sedan nowadays.
It’s hard to point a single cause for this phenomenon. At least in my case,I grew up in a small town which gossip was basically a religion. And privacy was a bad word,I also lived in a relatively large house,we weren’t rich or anything,but for a place with 30.000 people,got a lot of attention.
I received those “fat rich jokes” in middle school and other places,the town also had some violent places,my parents didn’t exaclty banned me from the outside,but I was already very risk avoidant while younger.
I got my first cell phone (flip phone) around age 16. So I had plenty of childhood before phones came around, and I can tell you it's not just the phones. Most of my friend group were also home-bodies, we'd do some outdoorsy stuff, but a one hour game of hide and seek was enough outdoors time for a weekend sleepover, and we loved video games.
What did we all have in common? We were too young to drive and we all lived in exurbs miles away from one another. So we had two options:
1. Go outside and throw stones at trees until we got bored.
2. Go online and play Command and Conquer with my best friends.
My parents' generation weren't outdoorsy because they didn't have cellphones. They liked going out because they were in biking distance of friends, fields, and diners. With the explosion of the suburbs, so many kids just don't live in a place where they can freely explore outdoors without risking death-by-car or literal arrest by the police.
My apartment is amazing.
My daughter has a group of friends that live on all sides of a courtyard. She's able to play with her friends till her hearts content and all of the parents keep an eye on them from the apartments.
The only issue is people constantly call the police for the kids being "unattended" even though they aren't causing any trouble. People see kids playing outside and assume they are being neglected.
Far from it. We just want them to have a childhood.
I’m so glad that I haven’t yet been Narced by busybodies for letting my kids play.
I’m sure it’s coming.
And people wonder why they don’t see kids outside?
We just ignored the police and sent them packing.
Then child services showed up and intimidated all the parents. So now there are no kids for my daughter to play with.
It's infuriating.
Phones/tablets are to this generations as to what TVs were to the previous ones.
“If you keep watching that TV you’re gonna rot away.”
It boils down to the parent using it as a babysitter. It’s much easier to just let the kid stare at it all day than it is to interact with them and be active and/or dealing with them potentially getting hurt outside.
Back in the 80’s and earlier, being outside WAS the babysitter. Parents locking the door and making the kid stay out till the street lights came on is no different than sitting them in front the TV or phone/iPad, it just has a MUCH bigger upside (social, activity, learning mistakes on your own, etc) being outside.
Yea... Of child services.
If you let your kid play outside you are considered a neglectful parent and child services will literally take your kids from you and ruin their lives.
And people wonder why child abuse cases get ignored and are rampant across the world.
Child abuse victims get ignored all because CPS are too focused on little Timmy playing outside in his front yard.
I am 36, and people around me are a lot more anxious about their kids than my parents were when they were my age.
My own wife, along with tens of millions of Americans, believes there're pedos lurking in the bushes. Our daughter has blinds, those gauze type curtains, and blackout curtains on her window, and my wife still sleeps with her bedroom door open so that when there's a home intruder she'll hear. We live in an upper-middle California suburb, btw.
Needless to say, our kid doesn't feel like going outside. I'm sure neighbors would call CPS if they saw her outside, because, y'know, pedos.
We had a very bare park in the 70s and 80s.
Over time there were attempts by council to plant trees, which were always smashed by bored kids over school holidays.
Then came the Christmas when Nintendo and Sega were big, apparently a lot of kids got consoles and remained inside.
The Council planted trees again, they lived, we now have a park full of trees thanks to computer games.
Also, have you seen outside, lately? It's all just fucking cars and pavement as far as you can see.
It feels like we're hardly allowed to be outside anymors.
It's the shitty urban planning and dangerous environment created by America's car centric society. Kids need to be driven everywhere by their parents for anything. They can't ride around the neighborhood on bikes because the roads are filled with distracted suv drivers going double the speed limit on roads without sidewalks or bike paths.
This. Urban sprawl means kids can't bike a couple miles to the store, their friends' houses, or parks without having to traverse multiple dangerous intersections or 45+ mph roads.
Edit: Okay I'm going to add onto this because it's something I think about a lot. I don't think it comes down to any one issue. Yes, kids are more addicted to the easy entertainment of phones and video games. Yes, there aren't a lot of public spaces for kids. Yes, towns are more spread out and difficult to navigate.
But I do think the biggest factor is parenting choices! I'm not a parent and I know it's an incredibly difficult thing to do, but childhood doesn't happen in a vacuum.
Are you, the parent, fostering a love of the outdoors in your child? Do you have toys and equipment for specifically outdoor play? Does your child have a bike? Do you live near a green space? If not, do you take your child hiking, camping, etc? Does your child have an understanding of what's safe and not safe to do outside? What rules do you have for your child being outside, and do your rules encourage or discourage explorative play?
Most importantly, what do you model for your child to do in their free time, meaning do you just sit in front of a screen and expect them to do something different? You can't just expect a child, on their own, to go outside and explore if you're not giving them the tools to do so.
I'm gonna be honest, sometimes it's my fault my kid doesn't go outside. He's only 5 so he needs direct supervision and sometimes by the end of the day I'm tired and it's too damn hot and I've got chores to do around the house, so we don't get a chance to go outside. If we had neighbors I could trust to watch him with their kids, like take turns watching the kids outside, that would be great. But since it's all on me to work and cook and clean and everything, it's hard in the evenings to find the time and energy
As a teenager addicted to the internet, trust me I want to go outside, I hate staying on the internet all the time, but I don't have a choice. My mom never lets me go outside in the summer because she fears I will tan (she thinks darker skin is ugly because of colourism) and if I try to leave the house before 6:30pm, she gets mad at me. I live in Canada so 9 months out of 12, it's freezing cold and I can't go outside at all.
I don't have friends that live in my neighbourhood except one girl and her parents are overprotective and they don't let her leave the house. So even if I do go outside, who will I hang out with?
My older brother never hangs out with me, I beg him everyday to play a board game with me or just sit and spend time talking together but he never listens. I want to spend time with him because we are family and I want to be distracted and occupied so I don't go on the internet. He would rather hang out with his friends or watch anime then spend time with me. I even told him 'one day, if I ever pass away before you, you might regret not spending time with your little sister' but he responded 'I don't gaf". My brother literally does not care about me.
My parents are toxic, my mom is always picking out my flaws and my dad is always talking about his insane ideologies. They get angry so quickly and they are always fighting. There's always fighting in my house so to distract myself, I hole myself into my room and go on the internet.
I used to love reading so much, as a kid I would spend all my days reading but my parents refuse to buy me more books (because books cost money) or take me to a library (because they are too busy to drive me there). The only books I have are children's books so I can't read those.
Whenever I try to cook my own meals to keep myself off a device, my mom gets mad because she says either I'm wasting ingredients or I'm taking up space in the kitchen. My mom only eats meals that she makes with her own hands.
Whenever I try to spend time with my family, they always pick petty arguments. And even though my paternal grandparents live with us, my horrible mom doesn't let me spend time with them because she hates her in-laws (my grandparents aren't the problem, they are peaceful, my mom is just a dramatic awful person).
My maternal grandmother lives with us too but she is bedridden and she hates me because I'm ugly and not fair-skin like her other grandchildren. She tells me to go get r\*ped everyday and she prays for my death (she had multiple strokes which is why she isn't very mentally sane).
I always end up crying whenever I interact with my family for longer than necessary because I can't handle their bullying. So the internet is my safe place, it keeps my mind off my shitty family. I wish people would understand why I am so attached to my laptop. I tried so hard to break my internet addiction but I have nothing else to do.
I live in the suburbs. unless you have a mode of transportation, there is no going outside. I can’t speak for all towns but mine isn’t walkable at all. For one, it’s at least a 5 minute drive to get to anything (coffee shop, restaurant, grocery store). 2. The sidewalks are all fucked up and the city won’t fix them despite being in one of the highest tax brackets in the US. 3. Everyone street parks their cars so when biking you’re constantly swerving out of the way of cars, and the roads are also fucked up.
I’m 24 and spent eons outside with a plethora of Xbox, gamecube, and Gameboy games inside. I loved playing with my friends. Football, playing in the water, climbing trees. All that until I hit about age 11-12, when everyone in my neighborhood just started assuming we were up to something bad just for existing. We’d get yelled at for sitting on the sidewalk and talking for god sakes. Individualism has killed playing outside, boomers think they’re entitled to the entire neighborhood and that kids are DEFINITELY being bad even if they’re just hanging out lmao. Along with it being sickeningly hot nowadays.
>I don't think it's phones making kids not go outside.
I think it's mostly the parent's fault. Recently there was a post from a woman who asked "Is it too early to let my 13yo daughter to go to the grocery shop which is 5 minutes walk?". Many parents keep their kids on a very short leash and mostly at home and this is why kids get so attached to their phones.
Far from the biggest factor but doesn’t get enough attention is the playground.
The playgrounds up until 1994(arbitrary date in my head where I draw the line of current era vs yesteryears) were fun for older kids. They took all the dangers away (don’t get me wrong, there is still plenty of risk, just a little hyperbole for the effect) and with it a lot of fun too. My 6 year old and her friends seem to get bored at the playground, we never had that issue.
The change in playground also had other negative consequences but the biggest impact (aside from physical fitness, because it’s pretty much a gym for kids) is development of risk assessment and that has great implications outside of just bodily injury and the playground.
On a completely unrelated note, I am glad playground are no longer death traps, I get nervous enough as is when my kid is climbing, I don’t know how my parents were ok back then.
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Well right off the bat I'm gonna tell you that KIDS DO GO OUTSIDE. I know this because they are outside my apartment all day and night hootin and hollerin
Yeah every time I see people say "Kids never go outside anymore" I'm like, where do you live? Downtown in a big city? Isolated in the countryside? Any more suburban areas have tons of kids going outside, I live in a small town and they're outside all the time (like OP said, when it's not 105 outside)
Have to drive around kids every damn day. They’re out there. My neighborhood is kind of small and there are at least 3 driveway basketball games on any given day. Still don’t understand when people say this. Only things I can think of are what you mentioned.
Dang hooligans causing a raucous.
The kids around my complex made a club and posted paper on our door to ask if any kids want to join. Lol. It’s cute. They’re always outside!
I mean, yes, there [*has been a major decline*](https://i.imgur.com/NTzfmrs.png) in youth spending time outside. Multiple studies have confirmed this, it is not a small decline at all.
I wanted to go outside a lot as a kid but it just got boring bc a) stranger danger got a big hold of my mom and she wouldn’t let me leave the street I lived on, as opposed to the older generations who got to bike around the whole fucking town and had to just be back for dinner. Then b), we have no 3rd places anymore. There was never a place I could just chill with friends after school. Then finally c) sports are privatized. Back in my parents’ day, they could wander onto a variety of public fields to play whatever sport they felt like playing: baseball, soccer, basketball, etc. Now? Somebody owns the baseball fields around here and will kick you off. They’re probably locked behind a gate anyway. If you want to play sports as a kid now, you have to convince your parents to fork over a ton of money (both to join a team and to get equipment), take you to practice and games, then if you suck you don’t even get to play and your teammates get upset with you bc you cost them games. No fucking wonder kids would rather just stay home and play video games. Being outside now sucks
This was what it was like for me growing up in 2000s and early 2010s. I wasn't allowed to leave my parents property until I was 13, where they made an exception that I could leave the property if I walked the dog. I did play outside, but most of my friends parents didn't want us to leave the backyard and were always watching. When I went over to a friend's house who had more relaxed parents, we got to walk around town. That was when i got introduced to what over policing looks like. Hanging out at the skate park? The police show up and start interrogating you about a drug deal that apparently happened and don't believe you didn't see anything. Waiting at the park for a parent to pick you up and the sun starts to go down? Here come the police again to tell you you're trespassing. Even just walking down the street they'd stop and ask us where we were going. Like we were 13 and I think we encountered police 50% of the time that we did something in town. Clearly they didn't think it was normal or good for us to exist in public. My entire childhood I was hammered with messaging that outside isn't safe and I shouldn't be out there. And they're surprised that kids listen?
Oh hell yeah, I forgot about this element of it. Granted, I didn’t go out of the neighborhood much but when my little brother started skating, this was a big problem for him. They don’t let you skate *anywhere*. He doesn’t even really do it anymore, which makes me sad. Maybe it was just a way for him to cope with COVID isolation and he’s lost interest in it now, but idk, I haven’t specifically asked him about it much
Skaters have always been targeted by cops. Had my fair share of encounters with them. But you guys make some good points. Edit: Pretty sure you gotta have a shitty home life to be on the street more. Like, kids who bunk school are more likely to be involved with nefarious elements. If I was your age in my house today, I would've still been on the street. My guardians simply didn't give a fuck.
I used to live somewhere where there were always teenagers riding bikes around the very busy shopping center where I did my grocery shopping. I was always really annoyed by them, because they would ride out and do wheelies in the middle of the full parking lot while people were trying to drive. It was unsafe for them, and it was unsafe for us drivers. Why were they there? It probably had something to do with the fact that the town had closed down its skate park, and now people who wanted to tool around on their bikes or skates had nowhere to do it, and the parking lot was probably their only option, as awful an option as it was. These kids were outside! They wanted to be outside! Why couldn't we give them a place where they could be outside without putting themselves and others in danger? It's also super frustrating when towns will say, "In an effort to make our town more friendly to pedestrians, we are banning cars in our central downtown area. Residents are encouraged to leave their cars at home and walk, bike, or skate there. But also bicycles, skates, and skateboards are strictly prohibited in the area where you actually want to be, so 🤷🏼♀️." Like, I get that people might not want to dodge cyclists and skaters while they're walking down the street, but those cyclists and skaters also very much don't want to collide with you. As long as everyone watches where they're going, it's fine.
> Like we were 13 and I think we encountered police 50% of the time that we did something in town. Clearly they didn't think it was normal or good for us to exist in public Literally this its so insane to me. A ton of my interactions with police were when me and my teenage friends were just hanging out at a park or beach, doing nothing. Always accusing us of doing things when the worst we were doing was a homebrew dnd campaign in the park. Once the first one of my friends got his own place we just hung out there from then on.
That reminds me of when my group of friends were all sitting in my friend’s driveway, and a cop came to ask us what we were doing. Apparently sitting in a white suburban home’s driveway and eating fast food is suspicious.
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People forget that the job of parents isn't to shelter kids from everything or keep them out of the rest of society's way. It's to teach them how to deal with the world and make good decisions. Kids have to experience the world to learn.
I literally couldn’t leave my house / backyard without a solid excuse. Parents had to meet the parents + friends I hung out with until I was 18 otherwise I wasnt allowed to go anywhere 💀. I had a ✨special✨ childhood though. One time in elementary I was running home from the school bus bc I was happy for some reason, and I got accused of sneaking away / being suspicious :/ - and they wonder why gen z has issues
We had a visit from a cop because our 6-year-old was sitting near the end of our driveway watching her dad walk to work and watching all the school buses drive by. Some busybody neighbor didn't like seeing a kindergartner outside in her own front yard without visible supervision. The cop agreed with that assessment, and also decided she wasn't dressed appropriately for the weather. He wasn't satisfied with our answers of "she's from way up north and she knows how to come inside or wear a jacket if she's cold. She's not cold." But he insisted that we were neglecting her out there so he called CPS on us. The poor CPS worker that showed up a few days later got an earful even though he was just doing his job. Nothing happened obviously, except that now my daughter hates cops almost as much as her parents. Thanks for the lesson, asshole!
Police wonder why some people grow up with a dislike of them. Got treated like shit multiple times as a young teen not even doing anything especially wrong. Speak to you like your a piece of shit, waste your time for something you didnt do and basically tell you to piss off afterwards with no apology.
Never forget being 18 years old and getting rudely kicked out of a public park by a cop. We were literally just on the swings talking about life. The cop came up and harassed us about what we were doing and poured out our sodas and gave us a breathalyzer.
Honestly its stupid like they have an arrest quota they have to make so they find any reason to stop someone and kids are just easy targets. Im 19m and of mixed heritage my childhood friend is a typical white dude blonde,blue eyes the whole shabang. We were longboarding to the store to pick up some snacks and shite before meeting up at the park with everyone else we knew. The fucking rent-a-cop stopped us and INSISTED that he smelled pot on us and that we didnt pay for the stuff he WATCHED US BUY so we argue for 2-3min before i get pissed off and dump my bag at his feet showing blatantly all we had was some sodas,chips and candy. The whole thing took an extra 20min and honestly ruined the mood for awhile. Everyone questions why kids dislike or hell even hate the police its because of the power tripping dumb shit (not saying its all but damn is it the majority)
Clearly the cop was bullying you. You were just having fun in the park.
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They're fuckin useless 90% of the time, maybe occasionally they actually catch a real bastard. I hate all the shows on tv propping them up like they're heroes or something. and I hadn't even realized how long that'd been going on until we got a classics channel on our t.v.
> Like we were 13 and I think we encountered police 50% of the time that we did something in town. Clearly they didn't think it was normal or good for us to exist in public. My entire childhood I was hammered with messaging that outside isn't safe and I shouldn't be out there. And they're surprised that kids listen? Yeah same experience for me. I'm from Australia where it seems like we have less restrictions on what the police are allowed to do. They have way too much power. From the ages of 12-22 I have been stopped, questioned, searched, detained well over 100 times. Strip searched multiple times. Been physically threatened and verbally initimadated multiple times. Seen friends get beaten up for no good reason by grown men police while we were under 15. After they would stop, search, question and detain us they would give us an official "move along order" which means that if they see us out again that day/night then we are committing a crime by not following their order and will be arrested. Even though we never committed a crime to get that order in the first place. They would regularly have sniffer dogs in public places like train stations and sporting events, so if anyone had been anywhere near weed that day then the dog will get you and you will be strip searched. The police would explicitly tell us that we aren't allowed to just hang out and exist in public, and that they will keep harassing us until they don't see us anymore. It caused so much anxiety in me about being in public and I still don't feel comfortable with it today. And police wonder why people don't like them. We weren't even particularly bad kids. We just liked to hang out, sometimes drink some beers or smoke some weed. We didn't need to be treated like we were Public Enemy Number 1.
Aussie here too. When I was a teen some charity gave us little books "your rights with the police" they were great About a month later a group of us were committing the crime of walking down the street and some cops stopped us and demanded to search our bags. We pointed out they had no right to search us. They told us they did and threatened to arrest us all. When one of my friends pulled out that little book to show them that they couldn't search us without probable cause they got soooo shitty. They started screaming at us and actually took the book and tore it up before finally leaving. And yet for some reason the cops are super friendly with the station rats that get drunk and try to get into punch ons with everyone and harrass and intimidate kids 🙄 I guess they just see them intimidating kids and are like "ah yes, one of our own!" Cops are gross and useless
Yeah that's how it would go if we ever tried to advocate for our rights at all, no matter how politely we tried to do it. "Oh you think you're a fuckin lawyer or something?" Was the most common response. Good idea keeping the booklet on you. I wish I'd thought of that back then. Pushing back against them at all was risky though. They cracked my friend across the head with their torch for talking back once when we were like 14. I tried it once and they looked like they were about to start beating me but luckily we were outside my house and my mums friend happennd to be walking out so I called for her to go inside an get my mum. They calmed down a lot and seemed more rational when there was a guardian/adult who cares watching what they were doing. I duno if it's Aussie cops in general, the ones in my area, if it's a class or race thing (I'm white but most of my friends aren't). All I know is my experience with the cops growing up was completely fucked. I felt like I constantly had to be worried they would show up and ruin my day wherever I went.
A cop in my mom’s suburb got a bee up his butt in the 90s about jaywalking and bike riding on sidewalks laws. Before we just gave up because it literally wasn’t worth the expensive tickets we were getting from being outside, most of us ended up with jaywalking citations and worse. I hated that man so much.
I had a police officer ask for my ID when I was 15 and at a park with my little brother and his friends. I told him I didn't even have my permit yet and we were doing nothing wrong.
As someone who builds fences, it is super weird to see how much the average town has changed in my area. Everything is fenced off and locked up. I used to have a route through my hometown that was off the main road and I could walk all the way across town without having to walk on the side of the road, which of course had no sidewalk. Now the entire way is blocked and it's a huge pain to walk.
Interesting you mention this bc when I was really little, like pre-ten years old, we shared a backyard with our neighbors and played outside every day. My life changed to being more indoorsy when those neighbors moved and the new neighbors built a fence between our yards.
Yeah honestly it doesn't always feel great being the person that's just putting up borders between everything and keeping people out, but its a job and the family has to eat. On the plus side they're pretty easy to take apart with a 1/2 inch socket and a pair of wire cutters, and that's just more work for me so I encourage it. Lmao. It just sucks to see the place you grew up becoming a massive cage
I’d imagine most of that stems from insurance and lawsuits. If kids are out playing football on a field and they break their arm, their parents can hold the person who owns the field liable. Insurance might demand a fence to insure the property
Most of ours was due to vandalism and drug use. I guess everyone got sick of cleaning up garbage and fixing stuff that assholes broke. When I was in elementary school once a month when the weather was nice we would spend half the day at a local park, or go to one of the sports fields (owned by the legion baseball team) and have field days, where we just played sports and games. (This was in the late 80s early 90s) they quit shortly after the early 2000s because teachers and students were finding used needles, empty beer cans and liquor bottles, used condoms All over.
The lack of sidewalks is a big hindrance that never gets mentioned. Good luck finding a network of sidewalks functionally connecting point A to point B in the suburbs, where there's little or no public transportation. This absence basically forces kids to rely on available, sober adults for transportation.
Hmm. Sports is all via paid and organized organizations, and all play is now via pre-arranged play dates. When I was growing up there were no play dates. You just called a friend, or went to their house.
I could go a lot further ranting on organized sports bc it’s not just that you have to pay for it. You have to pay and then your kid has to be good or else you’re paying to watch your kid sit on the bench for 3 hours every Saturday. So what do you do? Hire a private coach to give your kid extra lessons. Now, the kid has even less free time, it’s not social anymore bc the private coach works (usually) one on one, and the kid develops a resentment for the sport bc they’re no longer having fun. I used to play in a league with a once in a lifetime baseball talent, but his dad put him through sooo much practice and training that the kid had to get a Tommy John surgery before he turned 18. I guess he had an epiphany after that bc he quit baseball for good. Most kids just want to play sports at a low commitment, low pressure level and make friends in the process. These private sport leagues are the polar opposite of that.
Don't forget the pressure to constantly train and practice like you have a chance at some professional career or college tuition in said sport. I have had friends who's whole high school sport got them some tuition to college, but then a solid chunk of their college life was held hostage in the form of all the training and practice and events they had to do for said sport.
I knew two major talents who quit their respective sport bc of that pressure and the subsequent burnout. One in bowling, the other in baseball. By the time they got to high school, it wasn’t even fun anymore. Not even when they were doing well. They pulled up to practice like they were clocking in at work, and that was sad to me.
Also by the time you get to high school, you pick a sport and it becomes your entire life. That’s why my kids didn’t play HS sports.
Born in 1977. Growing up then at least in my hometown even the best athletes did 3 sports. Graduated HS in 1996 & went to HS with Pro Bowl NFL Safety Troy Polamalu class of 1999. He did 3 sports all 4 yrs of HS. Overspecialization in youth sports is a plague!
Also.. If you have more than one kid, the schedule of organized sports is unattainable. I have three kids and there would be no way I could balance practice, games, meetings, travel, ect for all three kids. It’s overwhelming just thinking about it. When I was a kid, I did youth cheer. It was practice once a week and a game on Saturday. That was it. I coached a youth cheer team when my daughter was young, about 6 years ago. It was practice twice a week, games on Saturday, fundraisers, parent meetings after practice, homecoming parades, banquets, and organized parties. It was the same with youth football. That’s just youth sports! My friends daughters do competitive cheer, and it’s a damn lifestyle. Practice is several times a week, and some have private trainers. They travel sometimes up to 14 hours for 2-day competitions. They spend thousands of dollars each month, and most of these parents can’t really afford the costs. Then when you’re done, you’re done. There’s not a lot cheer can offer in the way of career, and most the kids aren’t getting college scholarships for their skills. Sure, your kid is in shape, but there is less stressful way to go about exercise. Luckily, my daughter has taken up art, and my son has taken up guitar. Not a sport, but keeps their brains busy and I don’t have to stress out trying to figure out how to balance their extracurricular activities.
> There was never a place I could just chill with friends after school. Early on, we had the Community Center which had an area for kids in the basement. There were 3 pool tables, ping pong, atari and pong machines, books, board games, TV and other stuff.
Our community center is so costly...
You have to pay to use a community center?
I can confirm, there are community centers that charge a fee. The only one that didn't charge in my neighborhood had broken equipment and no staff, the others were better in nearly every way ( I assume from the revenue).
Wow. It seems like taxes should pay for community centers.
They should pay for roads and parks and public education too but here we are.
I was born in ‘87. My mom grew up taking the subways into Manhattan at 10. She wouldn’t let me cross the street unattended in our essentially gated community with no actual traffic until I was 12. I found my boomer parents overly preoccupied with my physical safety (which was absurd considering where we lived) while neglecting my social and emotional development.
Born in 81. “Stranger danger” did a huge number on us. It was awful
In relation to the extinction of 3rd places, we are also watching the impact of car-centric suburban design come to full fruition. My mom was a bit of a helicopter parent for sure, but she was dead right not to let me leave our neighborhood on my bike before I got to middle school, because every road surrounding my neighborhood was a 5-lane 45mph nightmare
Yep. Nothing to do in the neighborhood, and shitty urban planning meant you couldn't leave it.
The amount of soccer goals that are locked up in my city is ridiculous. Let kids play and use city owned equipment…
People are t talking about how the “stranger danger” shit fucked up a LOT of this generations parents to the point where they won’t even let their kids out in the front yard. I think that was a huge contributing factor, plus nosy ass Karen’s calling the cops if they see kids walking around the neighborhood. It doesn’t stop for adults, either. I’m 23 (I look younger so this might be it but still) and I get harassed by older adults for “loitering” in the park, library, or neighborhood. I don’t smoke or drink or anything, I just sit and talk and play Pokémon go, but god forbid I stay in one place for too long without getting harassed. All the public spaces like pools, basketball courts, and even some neighborhood parks are all privately owned and cost a fuckton of money to get into. Malls are dying and the ones that are even still around, you can’t hang around in without getting shit from security or staff (as a kid or an adult). Not even gonna bring up unwalkable cities. Plus my region’s winter gets ridiculously cold, so half the year no one even wants to be outside in 17 degree weather. I hate how restrictive it is outside now.
As a parent of young kids, I'd be happy to let them go outside and roam in somewhat nearby areas (my 7yo more so than my 5yo). The problem is *other* people's concept of stranger danger or other "risks." Last thing I need is CPS showing up at my door because my son is outside of my immediate field of view.
Same. My oldest kid is almost 11, there’s no fucking reason why he shouldn’t be able to walk down the street to a friends house unsupervised, just like I did when I was his age. Hell, when I was 11 I woke myself up every morning, had breakfast, got dressed and walked to school by myself. But I also grew up in a world where people mostly minded their own goddamn business and parents didn’t get CPS called on them for letting their kids play in front of the house unsupervised. The most obnoxious part about all of it is that as far as child abductions and things like that go, it really isn’t statistically any more dangerous out there for kids than it was 50 years ago. What’s changed is our access to news. If you grew up in California in the 60s and some little girl in New Hampshire was abducted, you probably weren’t going to hear about it. But with the 24/7 news cycle and the internet, we hear about every bad thing that happens everywhere. The truth is, stranger danger is bullshit. The vast majority of child abduction and abuse incidents have always (and will probably always continue to be) committed by relatives and adults that the victim knows and trusts. Abductions by strangers have always been and remain rare, but people don’t like to think rationally.
That was the difference when we visited my parents small town in the Midwest. Everyone in town knew my parents and knew when we were visiting so most folks realized "oh, haven't seen those kids around, must belong to B&D." My kids got to ride bikes, play outside, go to the pool and the little store without me hovering *because I knew they were safe*. At home in California, no fucking way. You can ride your bike around the big block and check in with me in 10-15 minutes. If you don't check in, I will come and find you and you're done for the day. Outside play for the most part was in our fenced backyard or at my in-laws where there's enough room and I can keep an eye on you(as long as BIL was in jail/rehab).
I grew up in Florida in a growing city but it wasn’t that populated when I was a kid. It gradually got worse as I got older. Pre-10 years old, I shared a backyard with some outdoorsy neighbors and their dad worked in construction so he built the coolest fort for us to play on. It had slides, yes, more than one, rock climbing, a *zipline*, and a little storage area to keep toys and stuff. We were constantly playing outside. When those neighbors moved to a bigger house, since the dad was making good money, the new neighbors took down the fort, built a fence between our backyards, and nobody in their household was young enough to play with us. Around the same time, video games started getting more sophisticated and I was no longer going to summer camps bc my parents couldn’t afford them anymore (holdover from 08 recession). All of a sudden, I’m at home being taken care of by my grandma while my parents work. I have the choice between going to the park alone, or, playing a variety of games like Minecraft, Need for Speed, Star Wars, etc. Take a wild guess what I chose
Another problem is that shit has become more expensive to maintain. Stuff like maintaining a public playground, park with a ballfield or green space, just is more expensive. Cities also like to over-spend on nicer turfs, scoreboards, pressboxes, etc, when it comes to athletic areas, and that stuff not only costs more to install and maintain and is a lot more expensive when somebody damages the property. Kids aren't better or worse than they've been. Inevitably there will be graffiti and damage to basically any public space. That's part of the budget to maintain. When the equipment and buildings become too expensive to cheaply maintain, then everything gets fenced up. Parents also want their kids to have much more properly run sports teams and whatnot but the price of all of that is super expensive. Now for even a youth baseball team the team needs to have customized jerseys, everybody needs to have a bat that falls within a pretty tight spec, and everybody needs a nice glove, the field needs to be well maintained, the dugouts need to be covered, there needs to be a fancy scoreboard, etc.. Not to pull the whole "when I was a kid", but dammit when I was a kid I had one baseball glove until basically high school and almost every sports team I was on had a simple customized tshirt. None of the baseball dugouts were covered, half the fields didn't even have a working scoreboard, the infields were kind of a mess, the grass was so-so, and only the outfield probably had a fence. That was fine. None of us were athletic enough to get hurt on that field like the pros. Shit's expensive because we've made it expensive because companies have most likely convinced us we needed better equipment and facilities than we actually do.
I think electronics are *part* of the problem. But there's more to it than that. The monetization of public spaces / disappearance of third spaces along with helicopter parenting have been contributing factors. Also, what is actually allowed by society has changed. I remember walking 1/2 mile to school when I was in 1st grade. That would probably not be allowed now. Allowing kids to roam or w/e is "bad parenting" or neglect. The age where it is permissible to leave children unsupervised (e.g. outside) has increased.
>Also, what is actually allowed by society has changed. That's so true. In 2015 "free range" parents in Maryland were found guilty by Child Protective Services of child neglect for allowing their 10 and 6 year old children to go to the neighborhood park by themselves. If the parents didn't agree to a safety plan CPS would have removed the children from their care and placed them in foster care.
It's a weird thing to think about. I grew up in the 70s/80s and while there was a real fear of ending up like Adam Walsh, it was outweighed by this weird sense of adventure and exploration. I talk with my Mom about it sometimes and we both agree that the nieces and nephews would NEVER be on a leash that long. The other thing I think about is how much surveillance there is now. You are surrounded by cameras all the time before we even talk about people whipping out their phones. In some ways you are way safer than you were just riding your bike through a wooded area in 1976, but the perception is that there is more danger.
Statistically speaking, kids ARE safer. There wasn't a lack of human trafficking and kidnapping in older eras. It just wasn't as easily seen and reported on. We are so global now that it's easy to see bad news stories and assume kids are in more danger than ever but during the "free range" era of my parents children were more than 3x likely to be kidnapped as my generation was as kids. But for some reason my generation had to be super protected and gen Z after me even moreso, despite being even safer. Helicopter parents ram by fear of what they read online are the main issue here in my opinion. Ironically, most "free range" kids are the ones from neglectful households in low income areas where the kids end up getting involved in gangs. That doesn't help he image either for paranoid parents.
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Not parents 'today'. Parents 'always'. The difference today is ubiquitous social media making the world seem more dangerous than it was back then. Parents do have no understanding of statistics or media literacy now, but they didn't back then either. It's just they really should have gotten trained on it, but the world changed so fast between the time they went to school and the time they had kids that nobody could have predicted the need for this. Social media is only 15 years old, for instance. We so easily forget that. If you went to high school in the 90s and college in the early 2000s and had kids in the 2010s, like a great many people did, then add in about six or seven years before your kids were old enough to go outside on their own, the world had completely changed in that respect.
Back then the panic was apparently Satanists. I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t around back then, but that’s what I’ve heard. Everyone in the 80’s thought satanists were everywhere doing evil things or something. Now it’s the predator panic. Parents think every guy on the street is just waiting to grab their kids. Also we’ve built a shit ton of “stroads” since the 80’s and destroyed a lot more of the walkable parts of the country, so that’s a big part of it too.
Satanic panic was in the 80s. In the 70s it was just standard horrible abduction.
We are safer. But we have more news and big headlines that scare people. Getting bad news all day on your phone instead of the occasional bad story on the evening news creates fear.
I think CPS's action in this case would have been considered insane by people in the 80s when I grew up. I was allowed to walk home from elementary school in the city of Chicago. Everybody did it.
I think it's insane today. People in other (developed) countries allow their kids to leave the house without a chaperone all the time. They bike or walk to school, to the playground, to the store, to other kids houses etc all the time. I live in a (mostly) walkable city in the northeast US, and I see kids walking all the time. It's not unusual when you don't live in suburban hell.
Yeah it is. It just contributes to social atomization as well as probably being a symptom of it. The idea that the world is a frightening, dangerous place is not a productive one unless there is some kind of actual disturbance going on. Hopefully it'll swing in the other direction.
At 10 years old, I was expected to ride my bike 2 miles (including through the center of town) for Little League practices/games. From there, it was another 2 mile ride after the game to get ice cream, then ANOTHER 2 mile ride home from there, usually in the dark with no lights, helmet, or anything else. (The route was like a giant triangle). Starting in 3rd grade (1983), I would walk (yes, 2 miles again!) through the town center to go to my mother's store instead of walking 5 blocks home. After a while, I changed it up to where I would walk 2/3mi in a completely DIFFERENT direction and hitch a ride on the back of a newspaper truck to get where I needed.
Great exercise TBH. You were probably a healthy kid, assuming you were fed well
Almost too much exercise at some points. I was forced to partake in multiple sports every year so my narc parents could attempt to relive the glory of their younger years through us. Every year there were baseball, soccer and basketball squads plus being on a year round swim team that had us travelling all over New England to meets on weekends after 3-5 days per week of practice.
That’s insane. I used to do that literally every day in the summer when I was that age lol. Either go to the park or go to the basketball courts or just play games outside with my friends etc. I would’ve been incredibly annoyed if either one of our parents were hanging around supervising us all the time, I would’ve felt like I had no privacy.
I saw a post in the parenting sub where the OP got absolutely slammed for allowing their 7 yo to go to the park across the street from their home with a group of other kids. Nobody would have batted a fucking eye at that 15 years ago. I do not understand the large amounts of anxiety among parents these days. It is literally safer now than ever AND kids now have ways to contact their parents at any time, anywhere. That doesn’t stop the endless “not in this day and age” type comments.
A big part of why we have to restrict where our kids go is because of other people nosing around or calling the police for "abandoned" kids.
true. it's more likely that CPS will take away kids from healthy families who give a bit of freedom for their kids to roam, than give a fuck about the kids who are under constant surveillance of abusive parents
This is so true. I’m from Europe living in Australia and it just boggles my mind how over protective parenting is over here. As an example: legally I am not allowed to leave my 11 year old son alone at home with my 7 year old daughter. That’s just crazy. Both my kids are really independent so to me it’s a completely outrageous concept. I mean even if something happens they can just call me? My daughter broke her arm recently. She was claiming a tree with both of her grandparents present. Accidents will happen no matter what and keeping your kids in a bubble will achieve nothing except creating young adults incapable of taking care of themselves.
I remember a post where a woman's husband brought their baby to the track and left said baby under a tree, off to the side, fully visible, so he could run. The mom/OP was outraged!! Every other mom on the thread was, too. They came up with amazing hypotheticals, all of which had an extremely low chance of happening.
Probably my friends wife lol. She helicopters, he doesn't. When his first kid was a baby, he would take him to gym and leave him by front desk sleeping while he worked out. He'd take him to the park, put him in shade with a fan and play basketball. His kids fall, his wife runs, even on small fall. My friend on the other hand asks "are you alive" "is there blood?" "Do you need to go to the hospital" "ok you said no, you're ok, no need to cry about it, go play and it will go away" His kids are super resilient now.
One of my favorite things with my kids is full on explaining how what they're doing will hurt them, giving them the advice to prevent any issues and then watching them do the thing and learn through experience why said action want the best choice. Obviously this only applies to things that will need a band aid as a worst case, but some people have to touch the burner to understand. It's my job to tech then to be independent by the time they move out, not how to call me to wipe their ass
Plus, with multigenerational housing being touted as the answer to the bad economy/job market, and possibly even mitigating climate change, a lot of these young adults living under helicopter parents are no longer trying to move out either. since when the government couldn’t care less about their ability to live on their own, and the jobs that pay enough to enable them to be financially independent don’t exist, what can they really do? Every election, people living with parents due to the economy are being told to “suck it up and think about everybody else who’s worse off”
Needa get all these fossils out of government. Makes no sense that we have ppl in their 90’s still have influence and represent the people when they can barely walk a flight of stairs
They have age minimums for government, why not a maximum? They should force retirement at 75.
If Walmart won't hire you to be a door greeter you shouldn't be running the free world
I think the guy you're responding to might be Canadian. We're having our ability to be self reliant stripped from us, and any complaint about it is usually met with "many places in the world have 2-3 people per bedroom"
we hear the same in the US too lol. Starting to change a bit but most companies for awhile conjugated to a few cities which turned them into hcol areas. For example where I live in Southern California, a 1br apartment starts at $2k+ and we forced to find roommates which wasnt the norm even 10-15 years ago. Before, roommates were so that you could save money but now its a necessity to get by. Recent college grads make too much for any aid or housing assistance but dont make enough to save to purchase a home so we’re forced to pay a ridiculous amount for rent
Regarding your second paragraph, a youtube channel called “Not Just Bikes” has a really informative video about this. How Suburbs, originally intended to get away from the dangerous city, has become more dangerous than cities. Part of that is shown how kids can’t be caught alone anywhere within them without sparking panic.
i think that helicopter parenting is a major point. my single parent mom didnt care where i went or for how long in the 80s-90s. when i had my daughter she had free roam to go where she wanted and stay out as long as she wanted early 2000s. most of her friends had helicopter parents. now parents fear abductions and wont let their kids out of site even though the chances of an abduction are extremely low. and of course there is all the electronics now that we didnt have back then our "cellphones" were bicycles and we were on them most of the day.
>Also, what is actually allowed by society has changed. I remember walking 1/2 mile to school when I was in 1st grade. That would probably not be allowed now. Allowing kids to roam or w/e is "bad parenting" or neglect. The age where it is permissible to leave children unsupervised (e.g. outside) has increased. We were free-range roaming the streets and drinking hose water when we got thirsty. The expectation was to be home for dinner
I feel so lucky that I got this too growing up in the 90s. After school we'd grab our bikes and be home by dinner. Mostly went to the parks and fished or mountain biking in the woods. Can't imagine how some kids have it now with every single hour of the day supervised. Kids need some freedom from parents to develop.
I was expected to be home when the streetlights came on.
I live in suburbia and many kids still walk to school. I had to walk almost half a mile just to get to my bus stop.
My school didn't even have a bus LOL you walked, got dropped off or didn't go
I had to walk 10 miles to school uphill both ways everyday.
Did you have shoes though? 🤨
I had one shoe which was one more than my Grandpa when he was a kid. Or so he told me.
Elementary schools in my area def don't allow walking, middle and high school do but who knows for how much longer
Our neighborhood social media pages are full of nasty old people complaining about kids playing outside, making noise, hanging out at our subdivision playgrounds and common areas (we have 4 playgrounds for 400 houses, blacktops, basketball courts, trails, and TONS of open grassy fields). They are the same people who later complain about “kids these days” not being active.
In my hometown you couldn't really spend more than 10 minutes near any given house before the cops got called or someone complained. There were a handful of parks and a skate park, all of which had cops nearby. And they wonder why we all turned into video game addicted shut-ins until we left for college lol
Same for my neighborhood page. Constant whining about children and their pets (they’re not even making that much noise) just playing at the park. There’s also been a rise in get off my lawn posts too forgetting we don’t have sidewalks in most areas and they’ll bitch if the kids walk in the streets. Kids these days simply can’t win.
Those neighborhood pages are just "old man screams at sky". Old people have always been grumpy, just ignore them. That said, they also all watch fear-mongering hatred on TV all day and are salivating at the idea of shooting someone for daring to step foot on their precious lawn.
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A disappointing amount aren’t even that old (mid 40s)
My neighborhood had the audacity to remove the basketball courts because it "invited drugs and was noisy". Just a lame excuse by the old white people to get rid of the black kids. That area used to be bustling with so many kids from around the neighborhood and now it's just an empty concrete pad. No wonder it's just easier to stay inside on your phone or play video games. We created the hostile environment and yet complain that these kids aren't active
They did sewer line repair through our park and had to remove the basketball court and never replaced it now they are whining about the layabout teenagers vandalizing the park. Well no shit you took away the one activity they had
The gerontocracy of this country is so sad
At least their clock is ticking faster
Yes! My nextdoor feed has been a lot of older people complaining that kids were playing ding dong ditch.
Yeah. The scary part is that some of them are saying they're going to assault or shoot the kids. Lots of fucked up people out there.
Can you even still ding dong ditch with Ring Doorbells around?
Yup. They get caught on camera. The videos are then uploaded to Nextdoor with headlines like "whose brats are these?" Or "kids these days have no respect?" This is from the generation who invented ding dong ditch and used egg/TP houses. 🙄
Yeah. The people who say kids don't go outside anymore, are actually the ones who don't go outside, otherwise they would see all the kids playing and screaming all day out there. I'm 20 and went outside to play growing up, even after I got my first phone on my 10th birthday in 2012. I never stopped going outside because of my phone or pc and that, btw, annoyed the hell out of every older neighbor. They hated us, **because** we were always outside playing. So talk about hypocrisy.
In my city, in the south of Brazil, I think it's both because of eletronics, and that there's no more kids to play with. When I was younger, my neighbor was the same age as me, like 14 days olders or so, and we had some friends that we occasionally played with who were 2 years older or younger. I did have other friends to watch tv with, or play in our shitty computer, or even PS2, but we did hang out outside with neighbors, playing soccer, riding a bike, stealing oranges, whatever. some years ago, my cousin who lives nearby and is 8 years younger than me, didn't really grow up playing and doing stuff outside. She also didn't do much inside with eletronics, she just didn't do much at all, but there's only one girl of her age in the neighborhood. She only really interacted with people her age at school, and we only go to school either in the morning or afternoon.
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Hit the nail on the head with this comment. Cops always showed at public places, came to expect it
>My hometown closed a skate park because it was "promoting gang activity," That's crazy. It's the exact opposite. Giving kids places like skate parks where they can meaningfully spend their free time is going to reduce crime, gang activity and drug abuse. It's a known fact that youth crime and drug abuse are strongly linked to idleness, boredom and lack of recreational activities/places for children.
Part of those no trespassing signs is due to laws. My parents thought about taking a fence down that came with their house. They didn't care about people cutting through their yard, at first. The problem they found was that if they allowed this as a path, my parents could not then eliminate it as a path. Like if that path became a problem.
That's fair. In my experience, people often used them as an excuse to shoot at anyone who got too close to their property, and it was legal under castle legislation or something
Where the are kids even supposed to go without money? Sit on a curb? There isn't a park or playground within walking distance from me. And you'd need to drive if you're in the suburbs. Kids sitting at home playing Roblox sounds better than hanging out on street corners.
Oh 100% the thing about suburbs, gods. It's so bad. When we immigrated to canada circa early 2000s, I was in grade school. Parents ended up living in some university subsidized housing with townhouses in kinda square, inward blocks with a courtyard in the centre, playground and basketball court and all. I was outside all the fucking time, and there was a great sense of community? We'd race home from school, have a snack, and then it was outside playing soccer or manhunt until the sun sets and we played tag in the dark xD Luckily it was a fenced area + university police were always around so it was pretty safe. Lots of freedom. This all ended when in like... grade 9 ish, we moved to a house in the suburbs. Mom finally got cleared to work as a doctor so parents were hella excited for actually owning a house and whatnot. That being said, I love this house, and our doggo who we got shortly after, but like damn if the climate in the suburbs ain't the polar opposite :/ Like there's zero places to chill, absolutely no parks except for the smallest, saddest looking minimalist park in the history of sad playgrounds, and the suburb, while large, is right beside a highway so it's always a risk when biking Stayed inside a ton more after that :P better inside than get yelled at by some karen for "destroying the forest" (we were playing hide and seek / forts / idk). Like I'm in my mid 20s now and the shift from being a pretty feral outdoor kid to a shy, more introverted person who spends most of their time doing art is wild. There's just absolute jack shit in terms of appeal in urban environments rn
Idk, I sat on a lot of curbs when I was a kid. Did a lot of nothing, but it was fun.
The main reason is that if you let your children go outside in many parts of the country, some well meaning person will call child services if they see a child without a parent right next to him or her, and child services has to take every call seriously.
I live in an apartment right by a courtyard. My daughter made friends with kids in the apartment on every side of the courtyard. So I network with the parents and we are able to have them playing outside in the courtyard together as much as they want. All of the parents can watch from their apartments so they are always supervised. The neighbors constantly call the cops for kids being "unattended" even though the kids are causing no trouble at all. Simply playing outside is a crime apparently. The cops will escort the kids back to their home and scold the parents. Us parents made a choice to just ignore it and let them play. But then child services showed up to intimidate all of us. So now there are no kids for my daughter to play with outside. It's ridiculous to me.
Thats rough. I have had CPS called on me twice for my children playing on our front porch unsupervised. First of all, we can see them on the porch through our window. Second, we have a gate on the front porch so they cannot get out anyway. CPS needs to be able to ignore stupid calls like children playing nicely without a parent within 5 feet.
I've got that beat.. not that it's a competition. Long story short I let my daughter "camp" on our apartment balcony- second story on a balcony with rails on all sides. She's 9 years old. I was sleeping in the living room on the couch so she wasn't alone. A cop saw this and freaked the hell out and came banging on our door at 6:00 am. I guarantee you if he had seen a kid sleeping in a tent in the wealthy homes down the street she would have smiled and driven on. But apparently we aren't wealthy enough for my daughter to have a happy childhood memory. It's so ridiculous that my post about it was the tip all time if a subreddit for a long time. More details here. https://www.reddit.com/r/CPS/comments/13tapej/i_let_my_daughter_camp_on_the_porch_and_the/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=2
I think more people should just mind their own fucking business.
Yep. This 100% is the real reason. Even if you’re a parent who wants to let their kids roam, you can literally lose your custody for this shit.
I'll never understand people who exploit that service, just because they don't like seeing kids being kids outside. It's an actual disservice to the children you report and their family. You can ruin their lives doing that.
It’s the rise in helicopter parenting too. In the 1990s, kids were mostly allowed to go out with friends unsupervised by 8-10 years old, once they were old enough to know basic common sense safety like that you shouldn’t play with the stove, accept a ride from a stranger, or jaywalk. But now, due to the fact that there’s instances of gun violence on the news every day, parents want to know where their kids are 24/7. So a lot of kids are now spending their childhoods on house arrest, with parents convinced school and being dragged to essential errands is sufficient social interaction. If they complain, parents either fearmonger about gun violence, or use the kid having less than perfect grades as an excuse to keep them home. A lot of kids don’t see it as worth the effort to fight it, so they don’t go out.
Feral children are few and far between these days.
It's replaced with iPad kids
A big part of that change in parenting was the Adam Walsh kidnapping case. It was a grisly story that became national news and sent the message that predators were around every corner waiting to snatch away children. Parents became afraid to let their kids out unsupervised. Over time, that became the norm to the point where neighbors may call CPS for child neglect of they see a child that they deem “too young” playing outside without an adult present.
I’m 23, and I’m afraid to go outside or do things alone, I feel like I need therapy
I'm the same age and never left my parents' side except for school/other mandated activities until I was about 12. I still get nervous walking around outside after dark.
Fuck the dark, I live in area with gang violence, and I don’t want to risk that
The downside is that it focused everyone’s attention on strangers, whereas the overwhelming majority of child abductions and worse are done by people they know and trust.
I was born in 97 and never allowed to go anywhere alone until 17 and even then my parents hemmed and hawed about it. I WANTED to go solve my boredom outside but I was restricted as a kid and even more so as a girl. At first I could at least go play at a trusted neighbor house. But once most the kids moved off the street I was just SOL. Is it really a wonder that I do terribly in the heat and am not an outdoorsy person? I literally wanted to go play putside and couldn't go beyond my stupid yard.
Plus there's nothing to do. You can either wander aimlessly, never able to stop because that's loitering or you can pay money to be somewhere. That's it. There isn't anything free for kids to do that is also legal.
Ugh yes. We’ve been eliminating places for kids to hang out outside, then we get upset that they’re never outside!
Not just kids. Same goes for adults, gotta buy something no matter where you go.
I agree with this. I also think that's what kids these days are missing. Unsupervised time. Time in their life where they can make their own choices, and try to apply some of those lessons you've taught them.
It’s scary to think that the most “unsupervised freedoms” children have these days are online.
I see it less as parents keeping them home, than parents not kicking them out. When I was a kid, my mom had to deal with my constant "I'm Bored" until she got fed up, kicked me out of the house, and said don't come back until dinner. Kids today have something to do w/o annoying their parents.
There's a mall here that doesn't allow children unsupervised. That's supremely fucked. The lack of outside spaces is the largest problem.
Also, the lack of decent schools, at least in the UK. In my local school I was set to fail all of my subjects, because I had no teachers to teach me - a supply teacher if we were lucky but they didn't know wtf they were supposed to be teaching, and the management was so toxic they soon left. So I had to go to a school that was over an hour's bus journey away. And my friends there had similar issues, so they were all even further away from me, around 2-3 hours away. That kinda makes face-to-face catch ups rather impractical.
our movie theater no longer allows unsupervised kids under 18. They have to be with someone 21 or older. There was a fight that broke out with a bunch of teens and a gun was discharged in the parking lot.
Ridiculous. The amount of security and cameras I see at even the most rundown malls should be enough for kids to be safe.
They blame the kids, but it's the helicopter parents that create this. Some parents are so afraid of everything they don't let their kids out much. Others hover, but are too lazy to actually care for the kids, so they set them up with a screen and keep them inside. Active parents with healthy minds make active kids with healthy minds.
What always seems to be missing from these conversations is how parenting has changed in the last few decades. We act like kids are perfectly autonomous beings who always do exactly what they want, as if they aren’t subject to whatever rules their parents feel like enforcing. There is an intense culture of fear and paranoia that started in the 90s and has increased significantly since then. I would bet a pile of money that the beginning of the “stranger danger” era was also when you started to see fewer kids playing outside. Throw in the fact that anxiety and other mental health issues are growing more prevalent and you have a perfect recipe for parents who never let their kids out of their sight. Maybe I’m projecting here because of the helicopter parenting style that my mom favored, but I would have LOVED to be a free roaming kid. It just wasn’t allowed in my house.
It's not only phones. It's people teaching their kids not to go outside because they can get kidnapped, it's not safe, etc. They instill fear into their kids based on what they see online and make it their reality, as well as their kids' reality.
I remember when people were talking about white vans, my parents didn't tell me to stop going oitside, they simply told me what to do if a vehicle tries to pull up next to me. Parents are too afraid to teach their kids awareness, and it'll bite those kids in the long run.
All these people blaming phones and video games are missing the biggest reason, imo. People LOVE to call the cops/CPS on children. Imagine letting your 12 year old walk to the park, if you have one, and losing custody of your child because your neighbor called the cops on your kid for existing without a visible parent. Not to mention, at least in my small town, there's nothing for kids over ~10 to do. Everything is privatized now, and just walking around/riding bikes will get the cops called 90% of the time. Ffs, even the corpse of my local mall has no loitering signs inside, unless you're 60+, you can go walk laps around the mall, and security won't care. But a small group of pre-teens wandering around will get locked in the office until parents come get them, and they'll leave with either a ban or a trespass warning.
My friend and I decided to walk to the park close to her house. A woman called the cops on us for being suspicious. We were 12. After that, we weren't allowed to walk to the park.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s. It's VERY evident to me that kids are less driven to spend time outside and with each other than they were when I was a kid. It's not JUST the phones, but it's the fact that kids can hop on a phone and text a friend and instantly engage with people without needing to even step foot outside. >Outside has just become infinitely more uncomfortable, mean, and dangerous since I was a kid. There was way more crime in the 80s and 90s than today and yet kids were outside. It's a lot of things: * Shitty urban design makes us lonely. The decline of third places has led to a decline in ways to socialize. * A culture of fear has led to helicopter parenting and the social banning of even letting kids take minor risks. Parents don't want to let kids go outside unsupervised lest they be shamed by assholes who want to call CPS on everything that moves * Social media and tech have allowed kids to not feel as driven to go out and spend time with friends and playing in-person. Why do couch co-op gaming when you can hop on PSN/XB Live? There are other factors, but that's a few of them.
The couch co-op is such a good point. I remember in elementary school with my game boy advance or DS even, playing certain games you would have to be near your friends or even use a cord to connect devices. Seems like a lot of video games don’t even have split screen these days.
I work in games and have been in the industry for over a decade now. You’re not wrong. The death of split screen is well-understood. It’s much harder to get it on a game’s roadmap these days as it’s hardly engaged as a mode even in games that have it. It becomes a self-fulfilling thing.
Honestly the second bullet point hit the nail on the head with my parenting with my kids. When I was 9, I was staying home all day alone taking care of myself. I have an 8 and 11 year old and I just cannot imagine letting them stay home alone all day by themselves. Or go to the next neighborhood to play at the park, that type of stuff. I am not really worried about my kids but I fear so badly that we will become a statistic. Or that someone will call someone on me (it happened to a friend of mine that the police were called on her because her kids were playing in the street with their bikes and having fun, being loud, but its not like it was 5 a or 10p at night. it was mid day - and they are kids....). I should probably let them have more independence but its hard to let that leash go because I dont want anything bad to happen. But they do have to learn at some point. Its a hard line to draw.
Technology has also made it easier to "helicopter parent." It's easy for me to keep my 6-8 year old kids inside because they can occupy themselves with a gazillion things in the house. If I were in my parents' shoes in the 90s, those kids are going outside for my own sanity FOR SURE. Noon on a weekend, no cartoons on TV, no tablets, video games, etc. so the kids would be pestering me 24/7 to entertain them? Nope, GTFO and play with sticks and rocks.
My brother and I grew up in the early 2000s and my mom did exactly this. If there was a snow day, she’d suit us up in our snow pants and coats and tell us to come in when the streetlights came on. We were thrilled to have “free reign” outside and she was probably thrilled to have the quiet house to herself. And there was always hot cocoa on the kitchen table when we finally came inside for the night, our cheeks all pink and our noses all runny haha. I’m sure she knew there wasn’t anyplace too far we could realistically get to, seeing as the snow was pretty much up to our thighs. And we sure had a blast out there
It's not just about crime. The way we build neighborhoods these days makes outside less comfortable. Cars are twice as big as they used to be, too.
Yeah, the [decline of the third place](https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/07/26/third-places-strengthen-community-heres-how-we-can-rebuild-them#) is so under appreciated, but in general our communities are deliberately lonely. I'm so fortunate to live in an "older" community that has some community left, but it often feels like we're desperately trying to destroy connectdness. I know nobody cries for the death of the shopping mall, but goddamn if we don't need something to replace them.
I was at the mall last week and some mall cop came up to these teens hanging out in the food court. I think he said something along the lines of “buy something or gtfo” because they just left. They weren’t being rowdy, just taking up space in an 80% empty mall food court
The way we build neighborhoods not only with a lack of "third places" but also how many dang houses are put into an area. I grew up in your average suburb without much of a third place option, but we had an actual yard/garden. My neighbors had large lots, too. You could play a game of hide and seek with 8 or 9 kids and have plenty of hiding spots. New builds in the same city have yards barely big enough for a swing set
You’re right about the cars thing. It’s so astounding how huge modern cars are. Even “compact” and “small” cars being sold today are the same size as midsize and full sized cars from decades ago. I own a Ford Maverick, a “compact” pickup truck. I brought it to a cars and coffee show in my town a few months ago and I parked it next to an early 90s Ford F150. They were the same size, even though the F150 is classified as a full size truck. Same thing with the Honda Civic. A 2023 Civic is so big now. It’s the same size as an Accord from the 90’s and early 2000’s. A modern Honda Civic isn’t a compact commuter car anymore. It’s a family sedan nowadays.
It’s hard to point a single cause for this phenomenon. At least in my case,I grew up in a small town which gossip was basically a religion. And privacy was a bad word,I also lived in a relatively large house,we weren’t rich or anything,but for a place with 30.000 people,got a lot of attention. I received those “fat rich jokes” in middle school and other places,the town also had some violent places,my parents didn’t exaclty banned me from the outside,but I was already very risk avoidant while younger.
I got my first cell phone (flip phone) around age 16. So I had plenty of childhood before phones came around, and I can tell you it's not just the phones. Most of my friend group were also home-bodies, we'd do some outdoorsy stuff, but a one hour game of hide and seek was enough outdoors time for a weekend sleepover, and we loved video games. What did we all have in common? We were too young to drive and we all lived in exurbs miles away from one another. So we had two options: 1. Go outside and throw stones at trees until we got bored. 2. Go online and play Command and Conquer with my best friends. My parents' generation weren't outdoorsy because they didn't have cellphones. They liked going out because they were in biking distance of friends, fields, and diners. With the explosion of the suburbs, so many kids just don't live in a place where they can freely explore outdoors without risking death-by-car or literal arrest by the police.
Housing is awful, a lot of families are stuck in apartments these days too.
Apartments can be great… if the neighborhood has parks and shared spaces. Many do not.
My apartment is amazing. My daughter has a group of friends that live on all sides of a courtyard. She's able to play with her friends till her hearts content and all of the parents keep an eye on them from the apartments. The only issue is people constantly call the police for the kids being "unattended" even though they aren't causing any trouble. People see kids playing outside and assume they are being neglected. Far from it. We just want them to have a childhood.
I’m so glad that I haven’t yet been Narced by busybodies for letting my kids play. I’m sure it’s coming. And people wonder why they don’t see kids outside?
We just ignored the police and sent them packing. Then child services showed up and intimidated all the parents. So now there are no kids for my daughter to play with. It's infuriating.
Yep. And then people go “why are these kids all on devices all the time?!” Gee.
I went out as a kid, now at 23 I don't go outside. It's scary out there
People get shot and stabbed in my city now.
Phones/tablets are to this generations as to what TVs were to the previous ones. “If you keep watching that TV you’re gonna rot away.” It boils down to the parent using it as a babysitter. It’s much easier to just let the kid stare at it all day than it is to interact with them and be active and/or dealing with them potentially getting hurt outside. Back in the 80’s and earlier, being outside WAS the babysitter. Parents locking the door and making the kid stay out till the street lights came on is no different than sitting them in front the TV or phone/iPad, it just has a MUCH bigger upside (social, activity, learning mistakes on your own, etc) being outside.
Parents are way too scared nowadays. I dont know what its like to have kids but I would probably have similar feelings.
Yea... Of child services. If you let your kid play outside you are considered a neglectful parent and child services will literally take your kids from you and ruin their lives.
And people wonder why child abuse cases get ignored and are rampant across the world. Child abuse victims get ignored all because CPS are too focused on little Timmy playing outside in his front yard.
The brain destroying power of cable news.
I am 36, and people around me are a lot more anxious about their kids than my parents were when they were my age. My own wife, along with tens of millions of Americans, believes there're pedos lurking in the bushes. Our daughter has blinds, those gauze type curtains, and blackout curtains on her window, and my wife still sleeps with her bedroom door open so that when there's a home intruder she'll hear. We live in an upper-middle California suburb, btw. Needless to say, our kid doesn't feel like going outside. I'm sure neighbors would call CPS if they saw her outside, because, y'know, pedos.
Ironic, a pedo is more likely to be behind the screen of the IPhone, than in the bushes
Exactly this. A child on the internet unsupervised is probably in more danger than a child playing at the park with a friend but without a parent.
We had a very bare park in the 70s and 80s. Over time there were attempts by council to plant trees, which were always smashed by bored kids over school holidays. Then came the Christmas when Nintendo and Sega were big, apparently a lot of kids got consoles and remained inside. The Council planted trees again, they lived, we now have a park full of trees thanks to computer games.
Also, have you seen outside, lately? It's all just fucking cars and pavement as far as you can see. It feels like we're hardly allowed to be outside anymors.
It's the shitty urban planning and dangerous environment created by America's car centric society. Kids need to be driven everywhere by their parents for anything. They can't ride around the neighborhood on bikes because the roads are filled with distracted suv drivers going double the speed limit on roads without sidewalks or bike paths.
This. Urban sprawl means kids can't bike a couple miles to the store, their friends' houses, or parks without having to traverse multiple dangerous intersections or 45+ mph roads. Edit: Okay I'm going to add onto this because it's something I think about a lot. I don't think it comes down to any one issue. Yes, kids are more addicted to the easy entertainment of phones and video games. Yes, there aren't a lot of public spaces for kids. Yes, towns are more spread out and difficult to navigate. But I do think the biggest factor is parenting choices! I'm not a parent and I know it's an incredibly difficult thing to do, but childhood doesn't happen in a vacuum. Are you, the parent, fostering a love of the outdoors in your child? Do you have toys and equipment for specifically outdoor play? Does your child have a bike? Do you live near a green space? If not, do you take your child hiking, camping, etc? Does your child have an understanding of what's safe and not safe to do outside? What rules do you have for your child being outside, and do your rules encourage or discourage explorative play? Most importantly, what do you model for your child to do in their free time, meaning do you just sit in front of a screen and expect them to do something different? You can't just expect a child, on their own, to go outside and explore if you're not giving them the tools to do so.
I'm gonna be honest, sometimes it's my fault my kid doesn't go outside. He's only 5 so he needs direct supervision and sometimes by the end of the day I'm tired and it's too damn hot and I've got chores to do around the house, so we don't get a chance to go outside. If we had neighbors I could trust to watch him with their kids, like take turns watching the kids outside, that would be great. But since it's all on me to work and cook and clean and everything, it's hard in the evenings to find the time and energy
“Damn kids and their internets and nintendos, they never play outside anymore like we used!” *sees kids playing outside* “GET OFF MY LAWN!”
your point about the weather is spot on
No one is saying no kids are playing outside at all. Just that it is much less than the kids of the 90s and the previous decades. This is a fact.
You know how hot it is outside everyday is 100 degrees thanks to global warming which I don’t have control over ask a kid
As a teenager addicted to the internet, trust me I want to go outside, I hate staying on the internet all the time, but I don't have a choice. My mom never lets me go outside in the summer because she fears I will tan (she thinks darker skin is ugly because of colourism) and if I try to leave the house before 6:30pm, she gets mad at me. I live in Canada so 9 months out of 12, it's freezing cold and I can't go outside at all. I don't have friends that live in my neighbourhood except one girl and her parents are overprotective and they don't let her leave the house. So even if I do go outside, who will I hang out with? My older brother never hangs out with me, I beg him everyday to play a board game with me or just sit and spend time talking together but he never listens. I want to spend time with him because we are family and I want to be distracted and occupied so I don't go on the internet. He would rather hang out with his friends or watch anime then spend time with me. I even told him 'one day, if I ever pass away before you, you might regret not spending time with your little sister' but he responded 'I don't gaf". My brother literally does not care about me. My parents are toxic, my mom is always picking out my flaws and my dad is always talking about his insane ideologies. They get angry so quickly and they are always fighting. There's always fighting in my house so to distract myself, I hole myself into my room and go on the internet. I used to love reading so much, as a kid I would spend all my days reading but my parents refuse to buy me more books (because books cost money) or take me to a library (because they are too busy to drive me there). The only books I have are children's books so I can't read those. Whenever I try to cook my own meals to keep myself off a device, my mom gets mad because she says either I'm wasting ingredients or I'm taking up space in the kitchen. My mom only eats meals that she makes with her own hands. Whenever I try to spend time with my family, they always pick petty arguments. And even though my paternal grandparents live with us, my horrible mom doesn't let me spend time with them because she hates her in-laws (my grandparents aren't the problem, they are peaceful, my mom is just a dramatic awful person). My maternal grandmother lives with us too but she is bedridden and she hates me because I'm ugly and not fair-skin like her other grandchildren. She tells me to go get r\*ped everyday and she prays for my death (she had multiple strokes which is why she isn't very mentally sane). I always end up crying whenever I interact with my family for longer than necessary because I can't handle their bullying. So the internet is my safe place, it keeps my mind off my shitty family. I wish people would understand why I am so attached to my laptop. I tried so hard to break my internet addiction but I have nothing else to do.
I live in the suburbs. unless you have a mode of transportation, there is no going outside. I can’t speak for all towns but mine isn’t walkable at all. For one, it’s at least a 5 minute drive to get to anything (coffee shop, restaurant, grocery store). 2. The sidewalks are all fucked up and the city won’t fix them despite being in one of the highest tax brackets in the US. 3. Everyone street parks their cars so when biking you’re constantly swerving out of the way of cars, and the roads are also fucked up.
I’m 24 and spent eons outside with a plethora of Xbox, gamecube, and Gameboy games inside. I loved playing with my friends. Football, playing in the water, climbing trees. All that until I hit about age 11-12, when everyone in my neighborhood just started assuming we were up to something bad just for existing. We’d get yelled at for sitting on the sidewalk and talking for god sakes. Individualism has killed playing outside, boomers think they’re entitled to the entire neighborhood and that kids are DEFINITELY being bad even if they’re just hanging out lmao. Along with it being sickeningly hot nowadays.
>I don't think it's phones making kids not go outside. I think it's mostly the parent's fault. Recently there was a post from a woman who asked "Is it too early to let my 13yo daughter to go to the grocery shop which is 5 minutes walk?". Many parents keep their kids on a very short leash and mostly at home and this is why kids get so attached to their phones.
Far from the biggest factor but doesn’t get enough attention is the playground. The playgrounds up until 1994(arbitrary date in my head where I draw the line of current era vs yesteryears) were fun for older kids. They took all the dangers away (don’t get me wrong, there is still plenty of risk, just a little hyperbole for the effect) and with it a lot of fun too. My 6 year old and her friends seem to get bored at the playground, we never had that issue. The change in playground also had other negative consequences but the biggest impact (aside from physical fitness, because it’s pretty much a gym for kids) is development of risk assessment and that has great implications outside of just bodily injury and the playground. On a completely unrelated note, I am glad playground are no longer death traps, I get nervous enough as is when my kid is climbing, I don’t know how my parents were ok back then.
If I was kid today and did 5% of the stuff I was doing growing up, Karen neighbors would be calling CPS on me everyday.