I don't know. Maybe this is going away in some places, maybe I just have my own anecdata, but my kids play outside unsupervised all the time, as do all the kids in my neighborhood.
I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of small Metro. Nothing special about it at all.
Every time I see one of these articles I always wonder who they're talking about.
I always feel like this is just one of those news headlines that won't go away, but isn't quite tethered to reality, but people really like to feel bad about modern life and so we keep talking about it as if it's real. I suspect the real reason kids aren't playing outside, if there is one, is not because they can't, it's because they choose not to. Just as adults are no longer choosing to go to third spaces. Screens came for everyone.
This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie places reporters live. I dropped my daughter off at the mall to hang out with their friends and one of the moms followed them around the whole time. They're all 13!
This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie places reporters live.
I live in Redmond, WA. Bougie? My rube Midwestern ass thinks so. And there are feral kids all over my neighborhood. Plenty of kids walking to school in groups, or solo. Neighbor kids talk about riding the bus/train to places. Granted, there are a lot of immigrant families around here (hello, Microsoft, et al.), and I'm sure that skews things.
Whenever these conversations come up, I've always noted that they don't really seem to apply to the PNW. My neighborhood (in Seattle proper) has lots of kids running around as well. Neighborhood kids will stop by to pickup my son and whisk him off to some adventure down the block. Getting your kid back involves listening for the correct sounding screams of joy as you walk around and figure out whose yard they are in.
Seattle also has a pretty decent policy around the radius for kids walking to school, so there are always gaggles of kids walking together to and from school for elementary and even some middle schoolers. The high schools are spaced far enough out that kids use buses at that age.
My coworkers in lower CoL areas seem mystified why I'm paying an arm and a leg to live in Seattle to raise a kid. And yeah there are some serious downsides (20-30k a year daycare, restaurants are too expensive to go out to often, even take out is insane), but there are kids playing soccer in the streets after school and kids setting up lemonade stands in the park.
That's what I'm paying for - A city that is built for people to live in, not just for cars to drive around.
It is a function of road design. If the neighborhood is just houses with all the places to go located on 40mph+ roads (meaning people are driving their high grill head height SUVs and pickup trucks at 50mph+ while looking at their phones), possibly without sidewalks, I’m not letting my kids go out there alone until they are teenagers.
Also, places are just too far due to the aforementioned 6 lane roads and 100ft+ wide intersections. And crossing those intersections on foot, in daytime, is daunting as an adult.
I have a family member in a new neighborhood in northern Indianapolis suburbs, and the housing development has 15k sq ft lots with 5k sq ft houses on them, and the backyard of the houses are not (yet) fenced in, and all the houses had various Costco playground sets with their own swings and trampolines and whatnot, at least 5 that I counted, with probably numerous more across the other houses in the neighborhood.
I asked my family member why they didn't just build one playground for all the kids, and they said the HOA voted against it (for whatever reason, ongoing costs, legal liability costs, etc). I look at that waste and can only laugh at the "efforts" to be green or pro environment as a joke to appease those who can be easily swayed.
That's why I'm quite happy to live in Vancouver BC as well. No kids (and I'll never own a home), but if I did, I can't think of a better place to raise them compared to other car-dependent hellscapes where nobody trusts each other.
I love explaining to Americans how Vancouver suburbia is slightly better than American suburbia in so many ways that matter like trees, real traffic calming, and walkability
People decry this as socialism but remember that gated communities with security guards also cost money.
Whenever I get angry about 40 percent of my paycheck going to the government I try to make a list of countries that are better and it's not a long list.
> The economic growth and so-called advanced economies (think Germany, The U.S, Japan, etc. What's been referred to as the “Global North”) relies by a large proportion on a significant net appropriation of resources and labor from the “Global South” (think Kenya, Peru, the Philippines, etc). This appropriation reaches astronomical levels. In 2015 alone, the north appropriated 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labor; worth [a total] $10.8 Trillion in northern prices. Enough to end extreme poverty 70x over.
The West steals $10-$12 Trillion/yr in embodied raw material equivalents, embodied land, embodied energy, and embodied labour.
And I will keep voting to benefit myself, my family, and my country in that order.
It’s their own fault that they do not have visionary leaders like Lee Kuan Yew or a dynasty like the CCP that’s willing to sacrifice entire generations for future generations.
To not allow a country to govern itself into oblivion is the peak of western paternalism.
I've noticed the less American and less wealthy people are, the more normal their kids interact with the world, i.e. "free range".
I don't know what it is about rich white people and freaky helicopter parenting. I also notice it with homeschooling and those crazy borderline eating disorder diets. There seems to be an association there between rich white people and pushing self-destructive behavior on kids.
I personally don’t see its being a case, based on my observation.
There is this town nearby where I live - super white, gives old money type of vibe, very expensive real estate. It’s full of free range kids running around on the streets.
It was shock to me to see it, after our diverse suburb, where kids pretty much either locked at home doing homework or at classes all the times.
So in my opinion there is definitely a cultural aspect of it.
'Feral' seems like an odd choice of word, given the activities you're describing. It sounds like they're just out and about doing totally normal stuff. I bet you wouldn't appreciate someone describing you as 'feral' if they saw you in public walking to the store or getting on a train.
I think it was the perfect adjective in the context of their comment.
The poster clearly meant it with a flavor of whimsy to it, not in a derogatory way. Maybe also as a tongue in cheek jab at how people they perceived as overly concerned about supervision would describe such kids.
I'll put my hand up as having been a joyfully feral kid once upon a time.
"in a wild or unsupervised state" seems like a particularly apt description of children. it does not seem to be derogatory: language really should be evocative as often as literal.
'Feral' seems like an odd choice of word, given the activities you're describing.
I never said the feral kids were participating in those activities. :-) Look, it was loose use of the word, you're placing way more judgement on the term than was ever intended. Yes, the children have homes and parent, of course they're not feral.
> But I actually find ideological bias to be less concerning than the more fundamental problem that the class of people who determine the boundaries of debate share a set of demographic and experiential traits that they don’t recognize as distinctive.
> This class of people includes journalists, yes, but also people who work in the tech industry, academics, nonprofit leaders, influencers, and those who work in politics. From now on, I’ll refer to this group broadly as “the messenger class.”
> The messenger class’s distinctive experiences — like living in downtown Washington, D.C., or living in one of the parts of New York highlighted in red — shape the boundaries of normal in ways harder to counteract than pure ideological or partisan bias.
> The messenger class plays a fundamental role in any democracy. Democratic self-governance requires not just fair procedures for making decisions but an accurate and shared picture of social reality to reason about. That picture is revealed through the communicated experiences of citizens, filtered through the messenger class, which decides which experiences are urgent and require intervention.
It's a job that requires strong credentials and is gated by unpaid internships. So it disproportionately attracts people from relatively affluent backgrounds: https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/the-cos.... And those folks live near and, more importantly, travel in social circles with affluent people.
It's also not particularly expensive to live in a bougie place. I grew up in Mclean, VA. My dad ran into Dick Cheney at the CVS once. But you can get an apartment in Mclean on a journalist's salary, especially if your parents paid for college and you have no debt. You can’t afford to raise a family there, but you can live there, near your social circle. Conversely, you'll see lots of trades people, cops, etc., living in places that aren't bougie at all, despite making more money than the lower end of the professional class. People find ways to congregate around others in their social class, income notwithstanding.
Yes. Journalists don't make a living from journalism, they live on family money. That's why working class journalists have disappeared along with working class perspectives.
It was once a job where many if not most of the practitioners didn't have a college degree, now it is the most expensive graduate school program you can do. I think the median price is something like $250K.
If you don't pay writers, you eliminate all of the writers who have to work for a living.
Don't disagree with the general point but I'm not sure J-School was ever a particularly good entree into journalism. Most of the journalists I know and knew didn't have the grad degree.
So your argument is that journalists must be wealthy because otherwise they'd be poor? Have you considered the alternative, that we just live modest lifestyles, like most other working class people?
That’s a fair question. My wife is cheap and I’m indulgent with my kids. So we compromised by sending our kids to private school with yacht club people, but not living around them. Our neighborhood is mostly well-off non-white-collar people: nurses, cops, navy enlisted, guys who did well in trades, etc.
I live in suburb of a metro area, as safe as it gets (my front door is unlocked overnight often and almost never locked during the day, my garage is also frequently open). my 12-year old (5’8” 125lbs) went to walk the dog to the park about 1/2 mile from my house, someone called the police and I had to deal with social services…
"free range kids" doesn't mean playing outside in a suburban cul-de-sac; it's the ability to go outside the immediate neighborhood on their own (walking, cycling, or public transport) -- stuff I did all the time as a 11-13 year old that is pretty rare these days. I don't think I've ever seen a preteen on the local city transport alone
My kids walk/bike to school, take public transport and are pretty free-range. But that’s absolutely nothing compared to my childhood. I was born in 1975. We dug up literal explosives from WWII and made our own small bombs (some matches, two large bolts…). Access to all sorts of chemicals was easy and we would set things on fire or just mix stuff to see what happens. Playing around on construction sites. Taking someones boat out to go fishing. Making bows and arrows, that would go straight through plywood. All _that_ is definitely gone. Some of it for good - kids loosing their fingers or worse was a common occurrence. So there definitely is a trend in case of me and my friends.
> my kids play outside unsupervised all the time, as do all the kids in my neighborhood. I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood
Your kids are hardly free-range. Let me guess, there's no way for them to actually meaningfully leave the area (no train, bus, etc)? It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and saying they can do whatever they want. hardly free-range in the way described in the article.
Presumably you live in a suburb for the reasons the person in the article checked in on the free-range kid.
my personal litmus test is if you'd let your 13 year kid explore Manhattan alone during the day. Many say no because it's dangerous, and yet Manhattan is safer than most American suburbs. just FUD all the way down sadly.
Yea, I always through "free range" meant the kid walking (or taking the bus/train) a few miles through the city to get to an actual "other place" destination. Not "playing across the street in the suburban park." If the latter is now considered unusual, we have some big problems!!
It is in SF. My son’s school would not let him walk 3 minutes to an aftercare program. They were actually willing to break federal law to stop him from walking a single block away.
I also let him play at the park on his own occasionally. I will get calls from well meaning but extremely overprotective friends to let me know that “they can’t watch him anymore.” He is ten! The library, connected to the park, has a phone which he can use to reach us.
People called my parents hover parents, but at ten I could have played at the neighborhood park by myself.
The usual contrast being drawn is kids wandering around a suburban area, walking to school, playing with kids in a nearby rural property. It's not hopping onto a bus to the city a few tens of miles away. You do see schoolchildren in Japan on the train by themselves but I'm not sure that's ever been very common in the US.
there's really no reason American kids in metro areas like SF, Boston, DC, NYC couldn't take a bus 5 miles away by themselves. when one comes up of an actual reason to why, it contradicts real statistics.
the biggest things parents should worry about is their kid being bullied by other kids during school, a supposedly safe place, and other family. strangers just aren't the major source of violence towards children.
Welp this week we in Phoenix are dealing with a report of a 17-year-old high school girl who boarded a light rail train (the one with security cameras and guards) and she was harassed and assaulted by a mob of boys on the train, presumably in front of human onlookers; she disembarked, and was assaulted some more.
She is now in a neck brace, and her mother is absolutely distraught, saying this is something she cannot fix for her beloved daughter. I am distraught as well that this could happen to anyone at all on the same train that I ride every week.
That's a sad story though getting a bit far afield from young kids taking public transit or otherwise traveling away from their homes. At 17 I was in college and taking urban transportation (and flights) all the time.
Multiple people died on the same stretch of road on the same afternoon that I drive on often about a month ago. One was just a teenager in a car that was following the law, it was the other car that was speeding.
Someone and their gang pulled a knife on me as a kid when I was riding the bus forty years ago in a university town, but that doesn’t make what they did normalized, it just makes an anecdote. As it happens, though, that is quite normalized in the U.S., especially if you’re not white.
A lot of U.S. residents inure themselves to random acts of violence because they either feel helpless to change the societal contexts of that violence and/or because admitting that violence would require confronting the benefits of power exploitation vs. the drawbacks of racism, sexism, bullying, and bystanderism. That swarm of boys abusing a girl to enforce societal mores that benefit them to her detriment is a trope from Pleasantville. This isn’t some new or unknown thing. This is a standard-issue United States Lynch Mob that’s been known about for a century.
I’ve been upset about this for thirty years, which is when I first discovered this. Welcome to the shameful desert of the real. Sad that it took y’all so long to see it; but now you have a chance to decide a way forward. Circle the wagons and raise sheltered, and therefore weakened, children? Teach every family about this threat all the way down to the youngest that kids understand danger? Crossing guards that ride the buses and have safety whistles and self-defense training? Lobby your city government to shift policing dollars to transit safety officers? Lobby your regional government to shift road maintenance dollars to gang violence de-escalation efforts?
As you can see, it’s difficult to find a way forward that feels appropriately vengeful upon ‘those that hurt our budding flower’ while also having a meaningful impact on the quality of the future. Most regions would just try to defund bus service, which fucks over everyone except wealthy adults on time scales longer than ten years or so, because at least that ‘feels’ like an effective response.
Completely normal. Trauma at a certain level, unlike other memories and emotions, doesn't seem impacted by time. I'm sorry to hear what happened to you.
> that is quite normalized in the U.S., especially if you’re not white. / A lot of U.S. residents inure themselves to random acts of violence
This part seems to universalize the experience, though. What is the basis for it? Crime is at generational lows. I've used public transit in cities uncounted times and I have never seen a crime; that's what is normal for me.
No, not traumatized for thirty years; that’s not a valid substitution here. Upset, in the way that people that want to effect societal change are upset at acceptance of the status quo. The alternative is apathy and hopelessness, and I refuse to adopt salves (such modern rationalism) that would let me stop caring about difficult ‘uphill’ battles.
> I'm sorry to hear
I refuse your apology; instead, exert your own form of societal pressure against, say, bullying. It’s a more approachable target than lynching and will help you switch your instincts from irrelevant sympathy to relevant action. (And if you already do, bully for you, pun intended :)
> I've used public transit in cities uncounted times and I have never seen a crime; that's what is normal for me.
Mixed-wealth U.S. cities, in daytime and at night? In exclusively downtown, college, and/or affluent neighborhoods? (So excluding for example Stanford, Palo Alto, and Mountain View, which are tilted quite high-wealth and thus low-crime, Brock Turners notwithstanding.)
Also: Are you a white man of middle-class or greater wealth? That generally matters greatly when evaluating anecdotes on this topic, independent of all other factors, and is strongly correlated with ‘I have no matching anecdotes from my own experience’ annotations.
I don't think that was the crux of the inquiry / objection. It's wonderful to feel such a bond with one's _community_, but it's a different thing to bind oneself to such a dramatic statistical outlier and make decisions ("dealing with") as if it's a common occurrence.
I mean, I don't know what "decisions" would be made but often people say we are "dealing with" emotions or stress related to something that comes out in the news.
The crux of my stress on this is that riding the light rail is a very common thing for me and millions of my neighbors. In fact we are shocked because we consider it so safe. The LRT should be the safest place in the city, given the cameras, the crowds, the security guards and the vigilant operators.
To think that a vulnerable, female high school student was attacked, broad daylight, onlookers looking, mob of boys (high school I would assume) is just beyond the pale. Nobody did nothing, and the attack continues after she disembarks? It's just unthinkable. There is a Jesuit Catholic boys' school just up the line from where she boarded. Were none of the Brophy boys on hand to step in, to say "stop it" or do anything about it?
And to watch the interview with the mother was just the last straw for me. How upset she is now. Her daughter means the world to her; she couldn't protect her, and she can't "fix this" for her. It's heartwrenching. It should've been safe, especially for a girl like her, so close to adulthood, but legally a child.
It is the difference in culture. In big cities, Japan doesn’t tolerate public deviance. Police are visible in every block. They are very strict about weapons; you can’t bring a knife in public for no reason etc.
They also have a culture of enduring things in silence for the greater collective good. For instance, most girls and women will have stories of harassment, especially by men on crowded trains but almost none of them will do anything about it.
To his point - I would say, it's a bug factor BECAUSE on average their culture seems more safe. But it's not because it's monocultural. Bad "monoculture" is bad, good one is good, nothing complex there. Simplifying, but that's pretty much what is said
Diversity doesn't make places more dangerous (if i understand the stats). But humans are naturally tribal and fear those who look and act significantly different.
That depends on an arbitrary perception of 'my tribe'. Irish and Italians used to riot against each other. Germans were hated (look up a quote from Benjamin Franklin). Protestants and Catholics used to riot. Every wave of immigrants seems to get the same treatment by some.
Within a few generations, their decendants marry each other.
Because humans are tribal they will also go on to attack and prey on those who are outside their tribe, making diversity more dangerous. Especially when diversity is not merely some people of different ethnic/racial backgrounds living and working together, but a population split into isolated cultures with different circumstances.
Unless there's a big strict enforcer to keep everyone in line of course.
This is something a lot of people seem to believe that is not borne out in the research. Plenty of specific counter examples like Queens NY, a densely populated and exceptionally diverse place with crime rates comparable or better than many much more homogenous places in America. Poverty and income inequality are much better predictors. I felt this reddit comment from a while ago did a pretty good job rolling up sources on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion/comments/1jxff...
I don't think numbeo can be a good source, it seems to be self reported metrics. I asked it for comparison of NZ to USA and it told me that NZ was about the same or worse on most numbers. But actual crime rates are lower in NZ. The murder rate is 5x lower.
Murder is a faulty good comparison as it’s unlikely to be a stat that gets manipulated much. Every other crime seems subject to political and social whims of various departments and political agendas.
I just looked it up, and found this in a Philadelphia newspaper:
"The numbers of homicides and shooting victims in Philadelphia have continued their sharp declines since the pandemic. There were 222 homicides last year, the fewest since 1966, and 935 shooting victims, the first time there had been under 1,000 since at least 2007."
Oh no, no way. Child violence on the streets and in school is WAY higher, it's ingrained in culture. It's also pretty rare if a Russian kid would tell his parents about it (only if property damage is involved).
I don't know how your link gathers data (website only shows one dude, software engineer, not a professional survey statistician), but from personal experience I can surely say it's rankings are BS.
The closest in US are the "bad towns" like East Palo Alto or some neighborhoods of Oakland, with their respect for ex-cons and prison slang.
1) Russia is generally very safe, and 2) I agree that the violence amongst children is crazy. It’s a great place to homeschool and free-range and I have not found a way to send children to school in a way that’s acceptable to us.
Larger cities have private schools. There are also embassy-affiliated schools (yes, even today).
In public schools there's this unofficial "letter grade system". Unlike the US, where kids homerooms are mixed around each year on purpose, in Russia a homeroom group sticks together through the entirety of their school career, grades 5-12. Of course some kids will move away, and new kids will join, but the core group remains. Many lifelong friendships are formed this way.
Now - and this part doesn't officially exist, but it certainly does in practice - these groups are not created equal. Let's say there are 3 teachers who are picking up a grade 5 homeroom. They will stick with these kids until they graduate. So, the teacher with the most seniority has their pick of the "best" graduating elementary students. These will be well-behaved and academically strong kids. Their new homeroom will be called 5A. Then the second most senior teacher has their pick. This homeroom will become 5B. And 5C onwards are the "leftovers". And these groups will stick together until they are 12A, B, and C.
If you want a good school experience for a nerdy shy kid - they have to be in "A". Of course, as a newbie who is unfamiliar with the system... your kid will likely be put in "C" ("ve"). And you probably know enough about how Russia works by now to understand how to go about changing that ;)
North Korea likely is extremely safe when things like street violence and bullying are concerned. It's only unsafe for dissidents.
And you know, you can also ask people. In software there is a large population that grew up in the ex-USSR. Many of us still regularly visit the old country and talk to friends and family that live there. And we aren't all bots, despite what many seem to believe.
Good morning from Russia, where I moved my large free-range family (from the US) with the topic of free-ranging children very high on the list of reasons why.
My children cross town by themselves to attend classes, it’s normal to see children walking or riding public transport by themselves once they turn about age 7.
There’s crime and bullying — we have always homeschooled successfully and have had negative experiences with classrooms here — but in my opinion it’s not as bad as the places I’ve lived in the US.
And the streets are definitely safer. There are some risks like gopniki enjoying causing random trouble like pepper spraying strangers, but I believe that type of danger is a threat mostly to young adult men and almost certainly not children. Our daughters can safely do what they need to do with appropriate precautions (that do not include staying within single-digit meters of a vigilant adult at all times else CPS!!!).
Russia isn't mono cultural thought.
It has muslim regions, buddhist regions, official jewish jurisdiction (it was created by USSR to segregate jews, so it basically has no jews left. But it's mostly because they moved to other regions). There is a duoreligion regions, where having two religions is a mundane thing.
And even christian regions are various in traditions.
I wanted to write that the requirements to teach in russian language in russian schools is relatively new one. But turns out, you could still do it. Not like in private schools, you can have a government school in another language.
It can be argued that there is unifying postsoviet culture, but since different regions were treated differently under Soviet regime, there is a lot of differences.
Why do you think Russia is fairly monocultural? Russia covers a gigantic amount of territory and has people from a large number of ethnic and linguistic groups living there, many of which are not particularly closely related.
It by no means is monocultural. As for safety, well, yes, pretty safe.
More important is that helicopter-style parenting is unthinkable there, people will just not understand if someone would attempt that. Also not much in insane laws (they have some, but..) and the police will tell you to bugger off if you try make them act on those that exist. So the situation in the article is impossible.
That “but..” is a big key to the difference between Russia and the US in this conversation. The US has a severe cultural propensity for rule-following and reporting things, but in Russia there’s an interesting mix of people seeing society as a commons, seeing personal responsibility as foremost, seeing laws as guidelines that may or may not correspond to reality, and seeing reporting something as fairly extreme behavior. And this includes people at all levels.
> my personal litmus test is if you'd let your 13 year kid explore Manhattan alone during the day
My parents let me (14) and my brother (9) explore central Paris on our own when my Dad was working at the Paris air show for the RAF. No problems at all even though this was just after the student protests in the 60s, and so things were a little tense.
I think Manhattan would be OK too, though I've only been there as an adjust. Certainly, you see kids running around London.
I let my then 13 yr old daughter go around Beijing by bus/subway when we lived there 10 years ago; she had a phone. Felt perfectly safe. Same thing in Tokyo. I'm not sure I would have allowed that had we been living in a big US city like LA, Chicago or NYC -- maybe it's just as safe, IDK, but the fact that anyone in the US can own/carry a weapon makes me feel much less safe than in other developed countries.
London and the bits of Pars I have seen are pleasant places to work around. London does have its bad areas, as do other cities. Small towns in the UK are fine, as is most public transport. Parents have got more protective but I still see plenty out by themselves where I live.
> Your kids are hardly free-range. Let me guess, there's no way for them to actually meaningfully leave the area (no train, bus, etc)? It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and saying they can do whatever they want. hardly free-range in the way described in the article.
This depends on the area. In more urban areas exploring can be done on foot or bike. I live in Seattle, which has some fantastic bike trails that can go on and on for miles and cross into multiple adjacent cities.
In some cities parents are fighting to let their kids play in their own front yard unsupervised. Not an issue in Seattle, where kids are required to walk to and from their neighborhood school by the school district.
But denser areas also have lots of stuff to do within the neighborhood. Within 2 or so miles there is a massive shopping area, multiple bakeries, tons of restaurants, a slew of parks (Seattle has an obscene density of parks, it is one of the best aspects of living here), a lakefront beach (lots of bodies of water in Seattle), 2 swimming pools, tennis courts, and a bunch of other stuff I am probably forgetting right now.
So define free range. If a gaggle of kids travel to the local grocery store together to buy lemons and sugar, then self organize selling lemonade to people passing by on a hot day, is that free range? I'd argue yes.
Redmond has decent (though not great) bus coverage and light rail stations to Seattle and points beyond in the core downtown area and next to a huge park.
> and yet Manhattan is safer than most American suburbs
[something traumatic happens and 50 people run for their safety]
see and as proven, only 1 person was assaulted!
I think a future society that counts trauma and mental health disruptions instead of just the crime stats will reach different conclusions on areas considered safe
I grew up in a neighborhood that had a drug den next to the 7-11 that all the kids went to buy slurpees at.
The dealers didn't bother the kids, and the kids knew not to go into that yard.
There were plenty of street walkers on a particular stretch of streets. They weren't talking to anyone who wasn't looking to buy.
Of course I had the advantage of being a broke kid at the time, so I wasn't a mark for crime. I was just another neighborhood kid who was walking through. It was a working class neighborhood with a few sketchy parts. There was the occasional shooting or drive by, and property theft was common (every bike I had as a kid was stolen from me at some point), but it wasn't unsafe in regards to violence.
I almost impaled myself on a rebar pole while jumping my bike over hills at an abandoned construction site. That was the most dangerous thing that ever happened to me growing up there. (well aside from the time I almost died falling into a sink hole and managed to grab onto a nearby tree root and pull myself up in time, but that was in the middle of nearby woods, so not gonna blame that on societal problems!)
I do know. No kids play outside in my neighborhood. The story resonates because your personal annecdote is not very common. (Not as the sibbling comment says, that reporters all out of touch elites).
I have a 10 year old boy and I'm facing these issues right now. I'm also in Canada so culturally adjacent to the US and similar enough with regards to this topic.
I don't see child welfare agencies personally as a particular threat when it comes to this topic. Maybe they ARE more likely to get involved in cases of more free range parenting where before they weren't, but it doesn't register as a real worry.
The major difference I see between when I was growing up and now is that when I went out onto the streets, there were other kids on the streets. My parents didn't know exactly what they were sending me out to, but they knew that there as a general crowd of kids that would be out on the street until some point in the evening, and that they would all go home at around the same time, and that's also when you were expected home.
The draw of smartphones and video games as indoor entertainment can't be understated, but I can exercise some parental tyranny here and always kick him out of the house to go play like my folks used to do.
But there are no other kids out there. I'm sending him out into streets empty of kids.
To mitigate this I'm trying to nudge things in the direction of him and his friends forming some sort of after-school crew that finds outside activities to do together, undirected. There are other like minded parents that I've found that are also interested in enabling something like this.
On the subject of risks - I strongly believe that the role of parenthood is to mediate a child's exposure to the real trauma of a hostile, often absurd reality that they will grow up into. Controlled exposure to risk, to self-directed decision making in times where they feel like someone won't be there to help them out and they need to figure things out on their own, these are critical requirements in parenting IMHO. And all risk comes with some small chance of tragedy, and that's a burden we as parents have to bear: to expose ourselves to the emotional trauma of the possibility of our children getting hurt, however small the chance, so that they are able to grow into healthy well-adjusted adults.
I feel like I have to work a lot harder than my parents did to enable that exposure.
>> But there are no other kids out there. I'm sending him out into streets empty of kids.
This. It's a number's "game".
My father, born in rural Romania, had 8 siblings, one of them died of an accident in his childhood (yeah, during "free range stuff"). I was born in a town and have 2 brothers. Live in a city and have one kid.
I can't send my kid out carelessly because I don't have a backup.
I am not sure what you mean. Most people in the world including every single one of your ancestors has managed to have kids - including the physical aspects.
People aren’t comparing today to the ancient past. They’re by and large, comparing life to when they grew up.
So on HN, that’s the 70s through the 90s.
Since then maternal mortality in the USA has only increased. The reasons vary, but this still supports your comment as less people ought to be willing to risk having more children.
I would add, that this stat also pairs with the prevalence of hard pregnancies in the USA, so people may become more protective of their children since they suffered more to have them.
Other countries don’t have this issue, and also have more free range child allowances (e.g. Japan with low mortality, low number of children, but highly independent children supported and watched by adults in general and not their parents).
If one in 8 has that kind of accident in America they will seize all the kids and you will lose all of them, so other than just spreading your DNA that approach won't work. There are many, many documented cases of people having all their kids seized because they had a child with a brittle bone disease, and after their brittle bones break (happens easily with such child) the government blames the parent and takes all the other children too.
3 means 3x the chance of them all being taken away when something goes wrong. 1 seems better if your goal is to have at least one child remaining in custody with you to age 18, since if anything goes wrong other than a provable unavoidable medical accident they're typically all seized.
It actually can't be determined if it's "overstated", because the child snatchers have intentionally hidden the data (under seal, "think of the children") so you can't determine the ratio of "overstating." It is illegal to pull the data, so instead you just have to rely on the many many articles you can pull up of people speaking up on their own accord despite the fact their adversary is usually using their children as leverage to keep them from speaking out.
That is part of the genius. They hide the data then declare "just show us the data" knowing damn well they hid it then try to hide under just being reasonable and why can't you prove it. It's quite sadistic actually and of course arguments such as yours play into this intentional subterfuge. Note that this hiding of evidence, when done by private actors, in a court of law usually means it is entered in evidence in favor of the other side as hiding means the worst case scenario of that is contributed towards the burden of proof ("spoliation of evidence.") You don't get to play the fuck-fuck game of simply asking for additional burden of proof when you've intentionally induced spoliation of the evidence.
> I can't send my kid out carelessly because I don't have a backup.
I don't understand this reasoning. Are you saying you're knowingly stunting the growth of your child because you would have to deal with your emotions if something terrible happened?
I understand the emotional pull of it, but I don't understand being able to identify it, put it into words, and then continue to do it.
I don't understand the "knowingly stunting the growth of your child" attack. What makes you conclude I'm stunting the growth of my child?
He's not chained to a tree. He goes to private school in a country where public schools are free and excellent. Visits his friends and play in the public park or the private yard. Spends vacations in the countryside unsupervised by me because unlike the city, chances of being run over by a retard driving a car are much lower. Still, I advise him not to wander around freely as I did in my childhood because the world has become much shittier. One thing, there are bears everywhere, thanks to the animal rights lobbyists. I feared dogs and bulls when wandering across countryside as a kid, now I have to add bears too for my kid.
Small town Canada here. In winter all the kids above school toboggan and slide down the roads (GT racers). All the kids below trudge up carrying their slider of choice. In the afternoon the roles are reversed.
Not an adult in sight.
At the ski hill kids 5+ roam free- it’s always fun getting on the chairlift and a little kid says “ can you help me get on?” And you have to physically pick them up onto the moving (fixed grip) chairlift. There’s no cell service.
Mountain bike trails around town are full of groups of kids 5+.
My advice: move to a small town, it’s like going back in time in a very good way.
I learned to snowboard in Wapiti Valley which is a little river valley skislope setup way out in the middle of nowhere saskatchewan. I know what you're talking about. I took the lift up with both 6 year olds and 86 year olds and both would offer advice to a new learner. I drove 3 hours in from "big city" Saskatoon but most of the attendees were kids and adults from the nearby towns. Loved the literal 30-second wait times to catch a lift back up - it was a really great environment to learn in.
That said, "move to a small town" is easier said than done when you have a family and kid :)
Great point. Intuitively it makes sense that sending kids out when you expect a bunch of their peers to be there is different from sending them out into empty streets. Thinking a little more about why this intuition holds: it's because once upon a time you were sending them out into a community, where they would learn the tried and tested practices by example. Once the link of cultural transmission is severed, it's hard to bootstrap it back again, even if you had a bunch of families that wanted to try.
Where I am in the UK its the "problem" kids that are seen out and about on their own.
I was freerange growing up in rural england, so I have no problem with the youth roving about. My wife is horrified by the idea, so our kids are somewhat coddled.
In the UK at least, children are objectively safer in every metric apart from getting fat. Kidnap, abuse, getting lost, car accidents are all way way down.
The interesting thing is that here you wouldn't be threatened with child services, You'd have to be pretty abusive or get your kid picked up by the police for the state to get involved. Mostly its pure classism, nice middle class kids aren't allowed to walk about on their own until they are 16, at least.
I think mentioning those safety metrics is really important because for any person, not just in the UK but in many countries like it, the thing that will most likely kill them are diseases related to being unfit and overweight.
So while kids might appear to be slightly safer in their childhood, the reality is that those other dangers were never a serious statistical danger to begin with, but not creating health habits is a contributing factor to the most likely cause of death when they’re older.
I think people vastly underestimate how dangerous living an inactive lifestyle is. I’m not saying this because I grew up super active and now I’m judging people who live their life differently to me, I’m saying it because those are the statistics, and because I DIDN’T grow up being active.
I definitely agree that child inactivity is something that is really bad in multiple ways.
Deaths from inactivity are going to show up in 40s and 50s after long and expensive periods of medical treatment. THats a problem because we are only really going to see significant issues around about now. But that trend of inactivity isn't equally distributed over time.
Totally onboard with some managed risk of injury being ok. Very much not onboard with the parents who trust their six year olds to face mortal peril alone and make good choices.
This part. I’m not going to assume what that person meant, but there’s always a few people about in these conversations lamenting that when they were six, they were certainly never hit by a car, and really you have to let your children take a few risks etc…
Every time someone drives their child somewhere, they are being put into a position of a small chance of tragedy. The chance of tragedy doesn't go away, only our perceptions of it. People seem to be more okay with dying with their child than their child dying away from them, so I guess that makes sense.
I recently revisited my childhood town and walked from my childhood home to my school. I hadn't done that for nearly 50 years. It was shorter than I remember, of course, but it was still several blocks. The last time I walked it, I was five. I also learned to ride a bicycle when I was five, so that took the place of walking for the latter part of the kindergarten school year.
I arrived at the school just as it was getting out for the day. I did not see a single student of any age leave without an adult.
Like so many people of my generation, I can only wonder at the cost, and be grateful that I was born when I was.
When my child was an infant, my wife parked in a parking lot and starting chatting with a friend about 10 yards away. Minutes later a woman came by and starting claiming the child was not safe and was going to call protective services. This freaked both of us out that a stranger could potentially have the power to cause the government to become involved with our family.
Fortunately, we didn't let that experience prevent us from letting our kids wander freely. But it does just take one over-concerned parent, to get you into trouble.
I had something like that happen I was out of town and forgot most places in America have a way more fascist child snatchers than where I live. The police contacted a national database check, their local child services, and my hometown child services. Thankfully my hometown child services told them to go fuck themselves (the place I live in now thankfully doesn't usually get involved unless there is serious abuse) and the ones in the place I was at didn't have time to deal with it before I left, but they certainly would have if I were a resident there.
I’m reasonably convinced this explains basically everything currently attributed to social media, for children at least, and likely can also help explain some concern around birth rates and child rearing costs. Starting with the satanic panic the US has slowly closed down children’s lives because of concern that terrible things will happen to children if not continually under supervision. And the true is that yes sometimes bad things happen and have always happened. But if you look to many other countries they do not have the same extreme expectations of parents or the state to keep children’s lives locked down.
It's not isolated phenomenon.If we look at the larger scale of, say, 100 years, a lot of things are rapidly disappearing. It's actually some sort of extinction that is underway, but you don't feel it on a smaller scale of time. Similar to how Romans wouldn't have been aware of the Fall of Roman empire while it was happening, because it was too slow to notice.
I think OP is talking about Shifting Baseline Syndrome[0].
> A shifting baseline (also known as a sliding baseline) is a type of change to how a system is measured, usually against previous reference points (baselines), which themselves may represent significant changes from an even earlier state of the system that fails to be considered or remembered.
Learnt how to balance and ride a cycle on my own when I was a kid, and I used to 'run away from home' for 12 hours with other kids, I learnt how to swim after drowning, twice, ate whatever was around, green almonds from trees, grapes from vineyards, but raw corn was painful, I would not advise trying. We tried to hunt with arrows and sometimes used gun powder in a primitive red-loading rifle, but we sucked at it. we got chased by dogs in farms we raided and chased by an armed man who claimed we caused his wife's abortion while we were playing football in the street. Another armed man chased us brandishing his gun after we attacked him with stones after we caught him staring at our neighbor's daughter while she was on the balcony. This was in 1969 to 1973 before we moved to an apartment building and all that ended. Now I joke telling my family that I wish for once the police would call me for something my son has done, but no luck with that:) . Here some photos I wish you could recognize that dude on my shirt https://imgur.com/a/JCFMgap
They absolutely could. A quarter of Americans’ primary job was agriculture in the 1920s. While job specialization was certainly a thing that didn’t mean people outsourced all of these tasks the way people do today.
That’s different from solo gather and cook and repair which is the artificially inflated bar being set here. I know people from multiple parts of the world who grew up on family working farms - specializing very real (esp. gender based)
I'm saying that the number of people doing these things are disappearing relative to the past. Seems to me like you are the one making up and moving bars around.
You said 50%, you said 15-20, you are speaking in absolute terms.
I don't know about "globally" but I would be surprised if 50% of American males couldn't do this in 1926. These were skills taught to most young males and the country was far more rural. It was far less universal among females though some did learn these skills.
While unstructured, this kind of standard life knowledge was intentionally and systematically passed down to most boys in every community I lived even when in elementary school. It was expected that you knew how to do these things and men would go out of their way to teach you if you didn't.
Kids did fishing, trapping, hunting, building out camp sites, etc for fun when I was growing up and it was generally encouraged. Learned helplessness wasn't really a thing.
This started to die out decades ago. Most zoomers I know didn't have anything like this experience.
I think Maryland deserves a special shoutout. It's illegal, and not just in a CPS-steamrolls-your-rights-and-family sort of way, for an 8 year old to be left with children <13.
Growing up, I think many girls had ended their babysitting careers by 13.
I had to go look it up, because in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Voldemort orders Cedric's murder with: "Kill the Spare!"
It turns out that Cedric, being superfluous to the "Resurrection Ritual" and Voldemort's plan of revenge, is actually a spare. In fact it was unexpected that two boys get through the whole thing with the Portkey and all. Harry was the only one who was supposed to end up there with the Death Eaters in the first place, so Cedric's appearance was quite unfortunate for everyone involved.
But Cedric's "spareness" certainly didn't have to do with expendability as far as his Dad was concerned, which you can clearly understand once his Dad gets going in the mourning for his death.
I don’t know if you’re being serious, but I wanted at least two so they had another kid to play with at home, and hopefully be on good terms with a family member they can relate to into their old age.
Children are human beings, and are the full range of what humans are. When small, the fun of it is seeing them unfold into that fully formed version- sometimes painfully, sometimes joyfully.
I think I’m between the comments here. I think it’s funny to say we have a spare but I also think it’s not as funny to say “oh you have a spare”. It’s like a fat guy can joke about his fatness but you can’t.
When I was a kid I was taught not to walk in the street.
When you walk, you go in the opposite direction of cars and can see them coming and, if necessary, move off to the side more.
I know it's survivorship bias, but it worked for me.
Now I get that population density is increasing, and probably so is traffic. Though so are automatic safety features that cause cars to brake rather than hit things.
Are there statistics on vehicular fatalities in suburbs?
Pedestrian traffic deaths are going down again after peaking in 2022.
Accidents are less survivable in the US due to bigger cars and higher hoods.
Quote from CDC
During 2013–2022, U.S. traffic-related death rates increased a relative 50.0% for pedestrians and 22.5% overall, compared with those in 27 other high-income countries, where they declined a median of 24.7% and 19.4%, respectively. Across countries, U.S. pedestrian death rates were highest overall and among persons aged 15–24 and 25–64 years.
The cars are getting bigger. That means that the impact is more deadly, and the line of sight is higher - making it easy to overlook a child. The sensors often won't react at low speeds which are common for residential neighborhoods, and at high speeds they are late anyway.
Wasn't there a trend in the US away from pompous SUVs and towards smaller cars, people even starting to re-evaluate some European-favored "city" cars more?
Also aren't cars also getting ligther, with less heavy / metallic exterior over time?
There is some bimodal distribution. I routinely encounter trucks where I cannot see over the hood. I suspect most of these vehicles have never carried so much as a 2x4 in the bed.
This is not true at all. People who buy cars were willing to pay higher prices for cars where they sit higher up and take up more space, even specifically as a defensive maneuver to be safer in the event of a collision.
Obviously, as a business, you have to give customers what they want or else you will go out of business.
The government is, however, very lax on prioritizing the safety of people outside of vehicles (which would mean limiting vehicle size and speed and enforcing harsh penalties for unsafe driving).
It's not even "in the street" I'm worried about -- it's the lunatics who drive like they are the main character in a single-player RPG. Not looking for bikes or pedestrians, crashing into parked cars and houses.
I don't think roads were ever considered a safe area to play. Even in cities in 80 the bugger roads were too busy. This is why cities need spaces for people including youth and teens not just playgrounds for toddlers. Yes traffic is more dense and faster, cars get bigger etc. but aren't cars also safer? I have heard the cars in the USA are crazy big which has larger dead angles particularly bad for smaller humans.
Cars are safer for those inside of them. For those outside of them, well, it's their fault for not having crumple zones!
Cars on the roads in the '80s were very low to the ground. Even a child standing on the sidewalk could easily see over the hood of a car parked on the road. Now, hoods have gotten so tall that neither can the child see past it to what's on the other side, nor can the drivers see the children.
This is so true. It’s much harder for drivers to see pedestrians these days. And walkers now have to deal with E-bikes and electric scooters flying down the sidewalks at high speed and silently. I’ve nearly been hit many times even as a very visible adult.
Of course; that's the only reasonable conclusion from a straightforward reading of the risk profile for children after they age out of drowning and before they age into opioid overdose.
The lion's share of loving a child is intervening in proportion to actual risk.
As a society, that means, more than any other single reform, relieving our cities of the burden of maintaining lethal, taxpayer-funded compatibility with the auto industry's machinery.
For real. Way too many people drive around our neighborhood way too fast and looking at their phone the whole time. Of course they’re also driving their enormous pedestrian-crusher trucks.
As a parent you feel the push and pull of not ignoring your child while also not mollycoddling them. For me let the kid do what they want - if your kid wants to stay home let them, if they want to climb trees and go off on their bike let them. Help them learn what is safe (which rods can they cross), what are their boundaries. Hopefully they get it, maybe they don’t. Don’t restrict access to devices or screens too harshly. Encourage games of any kind. Wear sunscreen.
> “We work in tech,” she says. “Our kids [aren’t] getting any cell phones, no smartphones, no Instagrams. I write the algorithms. I don’t want my kids to touch those algorithms.”
It's disgusting that this has become a casual attitude and admission by the tech worker class. No one should be getting this free pass.
"I am actively harming children and society with my livelihood (except my own, because I am so smart). Here I am proudly and smugly stating this in a news article."
I disagree- I think it's not much different than working at a distillery or cigar company (wrappery?). Social media is a vice not very different than whiskey or cigars- they're addictive, feel good in the short term, and are problematic to have too much or to do habitually. But we still let people indulge in them because they're fine in small quantities for responsible adults, and we expect that parents will not let their kids have access to them.
The only differences as far as I can see are in buying- a child could technically buy a phone for themself if they had the money and create an account on Instagram for free, and in cultural recognition of social media as a vice, which I believe is starting to change.
The overall point is, the law should assume that adults are reasonably intelligent and responsible people, and that parents should be the ones responsible for parenting their own children their own way.
> The overall point is, the law should assume that adults are reasonably intelligent and responsible people,
Over cigarettes and alcohol. The most inconsequential stuff.
But don’t say the words “direct democracy”.[1] Then people being reasonably intelligent and responsible gets forgotten. By the hive mind at least.
But people should be assumed to be reasonably intelligent and responsible. If that narrative allows us to make money off them. Not when it comes to democracy and political autonomy, of course. Shudders.
Where’s the option for people who are weak willed when it comes to something? Can they ban themselves from buying these goods? If not, where are the heroes that are working on that?
> and that parents should be the ones responsible for parenting their own children their own way.
There are whole studies of psychology weaponized against children to make them act as consumer proxies for their parents. To optimize nagging.
But every pair of parent for themselves. Against all of marketing. “Responsibility.” Because that makes money.
It work on the dirt-bike tier e-bikes because they can get away. IF they are walking my child has been harassed by Karens asking "why they are out on their own." I look forward to the day they are old enough to ride a fast enough e-bike to escape people with cell phones that will rat them out for being out and about.
I largely blame cell phones for the Karens being able to impose their will. When I was a kid we were all out about and/or doing dumb shit, but anyone who wanted to call the authorities had to go home to find a telephone. By that time we were long gone. As long as we didn't go near houses, no one could touch us. Now they will just follow the kid with their cellphone until the rat-fuckers from CPS or the police arrive.
We tell children not to talk to strangers but if a random adult goes up to a child and says something like "Why are you out on your own," what are they supposed to do?
Thankfully this never happened to me as a child, I don't even know what I'd do.
A massive investigation, police, social services, traffic consultants, a million plus spent on upgrading safety, mother and father demonised in the community,etc ...
Teachers involved who responded or gave CPR ( I know some of them) given counselling.
The mother is likely to have lost custody of her other children.
There was no support in the link for your assertion that the mother is likely to lose custody. Money was raised in support of the parents. Your link says two other children were struck at the same intersection before this, and the municipality didn't take notice. Yet you blame the parents for not driving to school instead of the driver of the truck, and the traffic situation?
As a counter example, I witnessed 3 months ago a similar scene in my neighborhood, where a kid on a bike, crossing on pedestrian stripes, was hit by a taxi. It was a bad accident but luckily he didn't die. His dad was following right behind him. I'm leaning to think that "shit happens" in any case, but overprotection adds on top another layer of subtle, long term risks.
Correct. There are no communities anymore, just groups of houses. You see it in the death of social and civic organizations, churches, and other community groups.
Everybody is an island. I don't know what has caused this, but it seems like it's happening in most 1st world countries. Anyone have insights about this?
There's a book called "Bowling Alone" that explores a lot of ideas around this. Iirc the conclusion is two fold:
1. Historically women were largely responsible for community building. As they joined the workforce, they had less time to community build and so there became less community.
2. Technology allowing home entertainment. People can now stream movies instead of going to theaters. Play computer games instead of go to arcades. Check Facebook instead of call friends to catch up. Use a Keurig for convenient coffee instead of go to a cafe.
Bourgeoisie society. Not values, not culture, not mindset. It’s rooted in how society is structured. But values, culture, and mindset reinforce it.
This very individualistic society can only critique itself in terms of individual failings. Which leads to the catch-22, anti-communal, ankle-deep critiques: people are on their phones, people are asocial, why don’t “people” all get a clue individually and fix this via some spontaneous autoenlightenment.
I think it depends on the locale. I moved from SF, which is career oriented, to OH, which is family oriented and, as I expected, I found more kids roaming the streets.
So if your streets are deserted, ask the locals their views on parenting. Paranoid parents will talk up the safety factor, but it's overblown.
Technology has caused this. Once a society becomes highly developed, it fuses itself with technology that eventually replaces human culture with efficiency, productivity and similar crap.
and yet everybody is one discoord channel away from everybody else hundreds if not thousands of km away, eager to talk, voice their opinions etc… crossing the street, meet your neighbor, too much hassle
My free range childhood friends and I would have been all _get bent_ to that lady—even at 6 yro. I can tell you this because I was also getting a whooping at home from da for saying the same to my ma. I was a dreadful child.
Blame a litigious culture where agencies have far too much power to "fix" other people. People in many places in America live with a fear of losing their children or getting sued and losing everything.
As a kid in the 80's and 90's, I biked up and down deserted, steep mountain fire roads before cell phones were widespread.
I hear that risk-tolerance normalization and freedom of kids in the 70's was even greater, so this trend appears to be a multi-decade decline.
What I miss most though is cool stuff like interactive art installations and improvised playground features made for kids that were ripped out in the 90's and 00's. Decommissioned Korean war jets, telephone pole obstacle courses, and a myriad of other things without so much as a web page anywhere lost to history.
As a relatively "free range" child in my youth and now the parent of children, even I find it hard to reconcile how I feel differently that my parents.
e.g. at 10 years old, my cousins and I were running around in the woods at my gradparents' home in rural Pennsylvania. I was the oldest of the group with my youngest cousin probably being 6. No cell phones. No Apple watches etc. We were outside of that house around 9am and would come back for lunch and then dinner when my grandmother rang the bell.
My oldest has an Apple watch and is both reachable able trackable yet the above still feels little strange to me.
This has to be a limited area where this idea of “free range” is a problem. Where I live is middle to upper middle class and there are kids everywhere. Electric motorized bicycles have made them even more mobile.
In the late 70s early 80s I went to school in another town from ages 11-13 and would take a train + bus to get there. Was perfectly normal. This was in France though, not US.
I let my 13 year old go out by himself, walk to places, take the street car; he has a phone so he can contact us if he needs help, and we can see where he is if we're concerned. It's ironic that parents are more worried today when technology makes it much _easier_ to track/communicate with your child (back in the day at that age, when I was out of the house my parents had no way of reaching me).
>What changed? In a 2023 article for Psychology Today, Gray proposed some factors that began reshaping parents’ attitudes and children’s behavior around the middle of the century: “the arrival of television, the rise of adult-directed kids’ sports, the gradual exclusion of kids from public spaces, the declining opportunities for gainful employment or meaningful contributions to the family economy, and, finally, the increased mandate that kids must be constantly monitored and protected.”
You will see lots of kids free-ranging in Lakewood, NJ. A lot of families there have banned TV from the home.
The takeover of US kids soccer by club soccer is disturbing to me. Generally kids who play are either well off or extremely talented (called "scholarship"?).
I think the clubs suck the fun out of it. Even with the expense, American players perform much worse than players in other countries where the kids have just been playing for fun for years until they start getting paid.
That paragraph bothered me. It gives a strong “assuming the conclusion” vibe. Oh, a factor reshaping parents attitudes is a “mandate that kids must be constantly monitored and protected” (in other words, parents’ attitudes)? You don’t say.
No, the mandate is enforced by the government coming and taking away your children by force, for some indeterminate period of time, until your lawyer goes in front of a judge and (hopefully) the judge rules that the government is stupid and should give you your kids back. But by then the damage is done.
One has to think if a state wanted to eliminate individualism in society this application of surveillance and restraint to children would be entirely by design...
Social media, and instant news media (scary news sells), amplify the perception of danger, where the numbers don't back it up.
> Stranger kidnappings are exceptionally rare. They occur roughly 100 times per year, which works out to a 1-in-720,000 annual risk of a child being kidnapped — less likely than being struck by lightning at some point in their life.
> A Pew Research Center survey from 2022 found that about 60% of U.S. parents were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about their children being kidnapped,
We recently lived in Taiwan for a month and I was struck by the fact that from 2022-2024 Taipei had zero pre-teen traffic fatalities. My own San Francisco neighborhood has had more within the last two months!
The only thing that presents a persistent risk to children, I think, is motor vehicles and the way they’re driven. Children make mistakes and San Francisco’s tolerance for traffic fatalities is very high.
I actually don’t think there’s a single year where San Francisco has seen zero pre-teen traffic deaths. I think even my neighborhood is positive for the last two years. Taipei has more people, more children, and even by a percentage.
The number of pre-teen traffic fatalities is the only concern I have when I’m thinking of letting my children walk around because I think the other risks are relatively overblown. Sure we have an occasional Bill Gene Hobbs and the like but I think only traffic fatalities are near certainty.
These are for accompanied children, so leaving a 5 year old to wander is way different than when I was 5 years old. In SF, I’d rate the chance of survival to 12 at under 90% for unaccompanied 5 year olds walking around the city along the range that I used to at that time.
Teens are pretty self-capable in decision making but pre-teens just don’t have judgment yet. I feel like this is a pretty reasonable statistic to match.
I remember when I was a kid I would bike to a park around a half mile away by myself, definitely before I was 13, and I admit it feels weird to suggest a kid can go to the park down just a single block alone today.
The funny thing is it'd be safer: Kids have cell phones now by like 7 or 8 in a lot of cases and can call for help! Back when I was that age if I got injured or something I might've had to knock on strangers' doors!
Being exposed to many bad news daily from all around the world, unfortunately, all parents are forced to limit their children. And we do it even though we know we are limiting their development as well. Of course there are many neighborhoods that kids still play freely but the ratio is undeniably going down :(
america is more dangerous than many 3rd world and developing countries on the street
once my friend get arrested in LA by police when he jogging. they say they arrest him for his own safety because he shouldnt be out jogging in "this neighborhood"
turns out people in america get murdered and attacked in the street all the time for... no reason. yes literally, no motive.
it isn't. Crime is highly concentrated and the vast majority of, at least median affluent America, is about as safe as it gets. Same goes for any big cities, usually you can count risky streets on one hand, where 90% of the violence happens.
Not to mention, developing countries are if anything the only places where kids still run around and play on the street. I've spend a fair amount of time in Latin American countries with much higher violent crime rates than most of the world and you don't see much helicopter parenting
if anything in the first world this style of parenting is a result of excess safety, not lack of it. The world has seen a secular decline in violent crime over the last few decades, and yet this paranoia is distinctly new.
Well we also view children as completely disempowered unlike before. Starting around age 7 my parents gave me a gun and ammunition and I would roam the countryside all day long. It was mostly for hunting but if someone tried to inflict mortal bodily injury upon me my father gave me the instructions to aim between their eyeballs.
I'm also quite certain that in much of Latin America anyone fucking with a child would not go through a trial and handled with kid gloves, but rather there are plenty of videos of the internet of such people being held down while Rottweilers literally rip their balls off. Probably not an ideal version of justice but also perhaps more effective at pursuading people not to fuck with children.
Me and my child were detained by the police in a park because my child is a different race and some Karen called it in as suspicious and I was detained as a "kidnapper." I ended up buying acreage in the country just to escape all the pieces of shit that would harass me and my child for playing outside.
The danger to children is largely the police and CPS, who rip apart families for hallucinations or levels of parenting sin that are far more benign than the emotional cost to children of authorities bearing down on them.
Also so conditioned to this warzone levels of violence, that many consider them normal, or will cite stats with 5x-10x the violence of an equivalent sized city in the rest of the West and East saying "that's good odds, just X of 100K murdered last year".
In my childhood, my Mom said "we were the first Democrats in the neighborhood" as part of a new wave of young families. But we were also next door to the gayest neighborhood in San Diego (Hillcrest) and so our neighbors were mostly childless, and our Catholic parish had no school attached, for obvious reasons.
So, we were sort of carpetbaggers from the beginning. We were enrolled in a parochial school in the next parish over, which was a 10+ minute drive for Mom. Of course we could never walk or ride bicycles or public transit that far!
As a child, while I was granted roller skates and bicycles, me and my sister were both forbidden from straying beyond the block where we lived. And neighborhood peers were few and far between. We had few playmates, and nearly none from school. Our classmates were in different socioeconomic classes, and often of different ethnicities and cultures. At least 1/3rd of them were bused in from North County, where new Catholics were settling, but no schools were available yet.
Our neighborhood was a sleepy suburb surrounded by dead-end streets and canyons. There were no city parks or playgrounds. There was exactly one city bus line that was about 7 minutes' walk away, which we never ever rode. Grandma, on the other hand, took us on walking/shopping tours all over her neighborhood, which was completely amazing, and also to every shopping mall we could reach by city bus, which was doubly amazing. Grandma's neighborhood had a full-fledged recreational center and a park with a playground, where I could fly kites or do whatever.
Here is the paradoxical contrast: though we could have no physical contact with neighbors or friends, I could own any book, watch any TV channel and program, and listen to any radio station whatsoever. That included "border blasters" from Mexico that were intent on corrupting American values. Literally any book we wanted, we could read it or discard it into our voluminous bookshelves. Later, Mom and Dad were reluctant to hook us up with a modem, because they knew what that would mean, but college opened up the entire Internet to us, and it was game over.
You can physically shelter your kids all you want, but if you have a TV, a radio, and computers in the home, you're constantly inviting a parade of strangers, scammers, and perverts inside your securely-locked doors. Think about that. It is far kinder to allow your children to mix with neighborhood friends and freely explore this world, than to let them dive unsupervised into cyberspace.
The lower density culture of the US is problematic for children freedom. In Europe the situation is better but still worse than 30-40 years earlier. Time passes and things change. After 30-40 years there might not be kids anymore to stay locked at home.
Gen X was the last free range children. They ran wild after school without the tethering cell phones, playing in sand and drinking from garden hoses. The silent generation turned out to be a great generation building most of modern technologies.
> We work in tech,” she says. “Our kids [aren’t] getting any cell phones, no smartphones, no Instagrams. I write the algorithms. I don’t want my kids to touch those algorithms.”
This is what happens when you create a government agency to solve a problem. It eventually turns into a jobs program that cannot be shut down even after the original problem is mostly resolved. So the bureaucrats just shift the goal posts and the whole thing metastases is into a cancer upon society.
Whenever I read these kind articles and some of the comments here I always wonder:
Its it survivor bias? I grew up in a small village/city during communism. I was basically unsupervised from morning to night since I have memories about me walking around in that village.
We were doing a lot of dangerous things while playing. And there are kids that got injured for life or lost their lives: falling from trees, drawn in a river, leg lost due to a horse injury, losing an eye during a game with some pipes, jumping from high places like 1st floor or more, ... I managed to not get hurt but the examples I gave are real.
I am not even talking about any of the fights between kids verbal or physical there were happening that todays will be labeled trauma.
So I do wonder if this free range thing that we desire is really what we want and we can accept the consequences?
I am not sure in all cases, depending of course of kids age and ability to reason, for each individual child this total liberty is the right path. I do understand the benefit for the society.
I do get that it's stressful to raise a family. You're being held accountable for many things you don't have much control over, but I don't think this is a big deal either way. This is a false dichotomy like all the other nonsense aimed at parents.
It misses the point entirely to seek control over whether your kids are "free range" enough. That style of parenting worked so well in the past (it didn't really, but I digress) because they left well enough alone. They weren't trying to contrive anything. Your kids absorb everything from you. Don't let your insecurities be part of it.
What I would argue is much more important is keeping things fresh with new opportunities. That's your main job as a parent. Keep them thinking and engaged with their mostly self-directed path in life. The goal is to open their eyes and help them understand the world. Respect their intelligence and let them decide things on their own.
Many of those so called free range childhoods of the past were actually just empty and boring. That's when they got into trouble. That's not something to be nostalgic about. When I hear about trends like this I have to wonder if some parents are just looking for excuses to be lazy.
For another perspective, see Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff. She looked at indigenous cultures alive today and makes the compelling argument that the Western boomers were the outlier - not their kids. 'Free range' meant having no meaningful responsibilities or expectations within the tribe, other than 'do what you like all day'.
A delicate topic with many perspectives. Our small families make it possible to devote so much energy to our kids. However autonomy is all so important to become a strong adult later. We deliberately need let go more than we do now.
> “We work in tech,” she says. “Our kids [aren’t] getting any cell phones, no smartphones, no Instagrams. I write the algorithms. I don’t want my kids to touch those algorithms.”
Yeah it's ok for the rest of us, but not your kids. Who the fuck do you guys thing you are? You shouldn't be making society worse.
How are abduction rates extremely low? Where did you get the rates?
I could only find FBI NCIC reports, which do not differentiate the reason, but it shows 300K+ missing children in 2025. That's quite a lot. It does not say what fraction of those are abductions, but I doubt it makes a big difference for the parents looking for the missing child if the reason for the child missing is an abduction or something else. Also, AMBER alerts go off so often that everyone I know turns off alerts on their phones. Still see them on highway displays all the time.
Certainly the differences matter. If the vast majority of the abductions are 'Parental child abduction' and very few children are abducted by strangers.
"On average, fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year since 2010, the FBI says. From 2010 through 2017, the most recent data available, the number has ranged from a low of 303 in 2016 to a high of 384 in 2011 with no clear directional trend."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wisconsin-missinggirl-dat...
I would say that abduction by stranger rates are very low.
It's bizarre, I have people responding with outdated or anachronistic statistics again on HN. Is this because LLMs get trained to a certain date? 2017 was almost 10 years ago.
Also, for some reason "abducted by strangers" is not the only alternative to "parental abductions", this document, for example [1], differentiate "non-family" and "strangers" for whatever reason. And "non-family" abductions were ~60K in 1999! Pay for a better LLM, don't use the free stuff for your botting.
I believe you wanted to say that the NISMART is the source, not the pamphlet you referenced, right? Because my source does not reference your pamphlet. Still looking for statistics of abductions, from people who claimed they are very rare yet cannot show the numbers. NISMART-3 is from 2013, 13 years ago.
2nd Paragraph. The following figures on missing children have been pulled from the 1999 NISMART study. Updated commentary on these initial figures are outlined in subsequent studies in 2002 and 2013. (2002 and 2013 are hyperlinks)
this resonates a lot. I am not sure how to handle this though. Next to our house (500m), the city government established a camp for “asylum seekers”. 100 men. Men only. How can I reasonable let my pre-teen daughters roam freely now? Id love to, but my gut feeling doesnt allow me to.
Maybe, back in the days, it was just a different time? A more high trust society that worked well?
Nowadays, we have news stories, where 70 year olds get stabbed by youngsters because they got lectures on their bad behaviour. When I was young, I had respect towards a 70 year old. Big time. Never would we have thought to pull out a knife…
Life changed a lot in recent years and not for the better on all dimensions.
Europe is still pretty save though. At least if you trust the statistics
Statistically, we live in the safest society we ever have. We see a lot of bad stuff happening because news reporting travels further and faster than ever before, amplifying the perception the world is going to shit.
Plus, now, basically every kid is running around with a phone that gives them access to talk to the police or their parents at any time. So it's going to be a lot riskier for someone to try anything against them. Even then, between 80-90% of sexual assaults are performed by people the victims already know, and around 30% of those are relatives of the victim.
This place has gotten wild in the last few years. Open stormfront-esque comments without any shame whatsoever. It is absolutely nuts the extent to which bigotry has gotten totally normalized.
People hold beliefs based on information they've received from sources they perceive as trustworthy. Maybe the sources they're basing their beliefs on are not so trust worthy or maybe they have a different perspective on events. I'm inclined to say its an issue of trustworthiness because the source is likely news and media and those are created for the sole purpose of pushing specific agendas and narratives.
Do you have any evidence or are you just basing your fears on feelings? Has there been a rise in sex attacks associated with this particular refugee housing?
You should flip through some newspaper archives from when you were a kid. I don’t know where you are, but I can almost certainly guarantee that there were kids attacking people back then too. Just because you and most you know would never have pulled a knife, doesn’t mean that there weren’t those that would. After all, you say the teens today attack old people with knives, but I really don’t think your teen daughters are stabbing people with knives.
How can you reasonably let your teen daughters out alone? Well, be reasonable. Find out if your fears are amped up by sensationalist press. Go meet your refugee neighbours. Quite honestly it sounds like YOU spend too much time inside.
Edit: I just saw your comment about importing men from countries where rape is natural. I can’t imagine that we have the same definition of reasonable.
It's interesting how much some of you expect us to ignore gut feelings and statistics to avoid the appearance of bigotry. We should at the very least be able to acknowledge statistical reality then we can debate what is an appropriate response. Hell, I don't even need to know the backgrounds of the immigrants. We know that males engage in almost all the violent/forcible sexual assaults. We know that a lack of community engagement increases the chance for anti-social behavior. We know that access is a prerequisite for interpersonal crime. That itself is enough to warrant heightened concern.
here in Canada, social service
"baby snatchers" have destroyed basic community cohesion and along with many other wildly out of control beurocratic policing forces, such as the spca making having animals a huge liability, litteral special subdivisions, chicken police, horse police, and an enacted rock police to prevent the totaly illegal practice of picking rocks off a beach, but hey
it is legal to pack granma into the back of a motor home and drive her to the government
canabis store, get her wrecked, and then take her in so she can ask to be euthanized.
cant make this shit up as they say.
Where I live my neighbors have chickens and one has a horse and they never get hassled, the kids roam through the neighborhood under the age of ten without getting picked up by the authorities (well, one time one got lost and a helpful cop brought him home, but that was the end of it), if your dog wanders off animal control will call you to come pick it up (first time they waive the fee), you can collect shells, rocks, driftwood and seaweed for fertilizer off the beach. We have euthanasia but it is a carefully controlled process that involves multiple independent doctors and a lucid patient, and the supermajority (84%) of people approve of it!
Canada sounds like a terrible place, but you are more than welcome in the country I call home; Canada. Oh wait…
I do feel like we as a society are moving in the direction discussed by the article, as a general trend. But this is not my personal experience. We live in typical suburbs, and we are lucky enough that our street has a bunch of like-minded young families that let their kids play outside. Our street really feels like what you would imagine if you were thinking of a typical street in the 1960s. Kids aged 5 to around 10 playing ball in the street, going in each other's yards/houses, etc. There's a Catholic church less than 1km away, and at 6pm every day the bells ring. All the kids go back to their houses for supper when they hear the bells. It's great.
There's a kid (7-8 years old I think) a few houses down that carries a walkie-talkie with him during the summer. He'll be out for several hours (probably not farther than 10 houses away from his own house), and his mom checks on him every now and then using the walkie-talkie. I'll buy a set for own kids this summer for the exact same purpose.
The only thing I'm kind of scared of are the cars, because they tend to drive too fast (for my taste) and kids tend to not always look when they cross the street when they're too excited playing their games.
Edit: I just remembered that a few years ago, the cops showed up because there was a complaint about our kids being left unsupervised. They were playing in the backyard, which is completely fenced off, while we were inside cooking supper. Our kitchen window faces the yard so we could see them, and the window was open so we could hear them. At least the cops realized that the complaint was BS and didn't even come inside to check for anything. We live in Canada.
I have to keep telling my kids that "this is not the USA", all the things they see or hear are so dominated by USA views and experiences that the kids need to be reminded that this should not be transferred to where we live without consideration.
This is a constant effort to review concerns and angst that might arise. E.g. school shootings and metal detectors on school entrances. Sure there are socioeconomic issues around when looking at high schools here but not like that.
Personally I think we need to ground ourselves and not get shit crazy or paralysed by fear.
I don't know. Maybe this is going away in some places, maybe I just have my own anecdata, but my kids play outside unsupervised all the time, as do all the kids in my neighborhood.
I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of small Metro. Nothing special about it at all.
Every time I see one of these articles I always wonder who they're talking about.
I always feel like this is just one of those news headlines that won't go away, but isn't quite tethered to reality, but people really like to feel bad about modern life and so we keep talking about it as if it's real. I suspect the real reason kids aren't playing outside, if there is one, is not because they can't, it's because they choose not to. Just as adults are no longer choosing to go to third spaces. Screens came for everyone.
This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie places reporters live. I dropped my daughter off at the mall to hang out with their friends and one of the moms followed them around the whole time. They're all 13!
This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie places reporters live.
I live in Redmond, WA. Bougie? My rube Midwestern ass thinks so. And there are feral kids all over my neighborhood. Plenty of kids walking to school in groups, or solo. Neighbor kids talk about riding the bus/train to places. Granted, there are a lot of immigrant families around here (hello, Microsoft, et al.), and I'm sure that skews things.
Whenever these conversations come up, I've always noted that they don't really seem to apply to the PNW. My neighborhood (in Seattle proper) has lots of kids running around as well. Neighborhood kids will stop by to pickup my son and whisk him off to some adventure down the block. Getting your kid back involves listening for the correct sounding screams of joy as you walk around and figure out whose yard they are in.
Seattle also has a pretty decent policy around the radius for kids walking to school, so there are always gaggles of kids walking together to and from school for elementary and even some middle schoolers. The high schools are spaced far enough out that kids use buses at that age.
My coworkers in lower CoL areas seem mystified why I'm paying an arm and a leg to live in Seattle to raise a kid. And yeah there are some serious downsides (20-30k a year daycare, restaurants are too expensive to go out to often, even take out is insane), but there are kids playing soccer in the streets after school and kids setting up lemonade stands in the park.
That's what I'm paying for - A city that is built for people to live in, not just for cars to drive around.
It is a function of road design. If the neighborhood is just houses with all the places to go located on 40mph+ roads (meaning people are driving their high grill head height SUVs and pickup trucks at 50mph+ while looking at their phones), possibly without sidewalks, I’m not letting my kids go out there alone until they are teenagers.
Also, places are just too far due to the aforementioned 6 lane roads and 100ft+ wide intersections. And crossing those intersections on foot, in daytime, is daunting as an adult.
Suburbs are places where people refuse to pay taxes to build parks and instead have giant yards and everyone builds their own private park. :/
I have a family member in a new neighborhood in northern Indianapolis suburbs, and the housing development has 15k sq ft lots with 5k sq ft houses on them, and the backyard of the houses are not (yet) fenced in, and all the houses had various Costco playground sets with their own swings and trampolines and whatnot, at least 5 that I counted, with probably numerous more across the other houses in the neighborhood.
I asked my family member why they didn't just build one playground for all the kids, and they said the HOA voted against it (for whatever reason, ongoing costs, legal liability costs, etc). I look at that waste and can only laugh at the "efforts" to be green or pro environment as a joke to appease those who can be easily swayed.
That's why I'm quite happy to live in Vancouver BC as well. No kids (and I'll never own a home), but if I did, I can't think of a better place to raise them compared to other car-dependent hellscapes where nobody trusts each other.
I love explaining to Americans how Vancouver suburbia is slightly better than American suburbia in so many ways that matter like trees, real traffic calming, and walkability
People decry this as socialism but remember that gated communities with security guards also cost money.
Whenever I get angry about 40 percent of my paycheck going to the government I try to make a list of countries that are better and it's not a long list.
where do you think all our money comes from?
> The economic growth and so-called advanced economies (think Germany, The U.S, Japan, etc. What's been referred to as the “Global North”) relies by a large proportion on a significant net appropriation of resources and labor from the “Global South” (think Kenya, Peru, the Philippines, etc). This appropriation reaches astronomical levels. In 2015 alone, the north appropriated 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labor; worth [a total] $10.8 Trillion in northern prices. Enough to end extreme poverty 70x over.
The West steals $10-$12 Trillion/yr in embodied raw material equivalents, embodied land, embodied energy, and embodied labour.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...
And I will keep voting to benefit myself, my family, and my country in that order.
It’s their own fault that they do not have visionary leaders like Lee Kuan Yew or a dynasty like the CCP that’s willing to sacrifice entire generations for future generations.
To not allow a country to govern itself into oblivion is the peak of western paternalism.
I've noticed the less American and less wealthy people are, the more normal their kids interact with the world, i.e. "free range".
I don't know what it is about rich white people and freaky helicopter parenting. I also notice it with homeschooling and those crazy borderline eating disorder diets. There seems to be an association there between rich white people and pushing self-destructive behavior on kids.
Might be different in Australia vs the US, but the white kids here are definitely more "free range" than the Asians.
That's not too say they're not helicoptered too, but Chinese parents are a whole other level.
Think strapping a 3-4 year old into a high chair and handfeeding them, or scheduling every waking moment of a primary school kid's life.
Upper middle class Indian parents in India can be complete control freak helicopter parents too. Much more than the less wealthy ones.
I have seen and experienced some real extremes there.
I personally don’t see its being a case, based on my observation.
There is this town nearby where I live - super white, gives old money type of vibe, very expensive real estate. It’s full of free range kids running around on the streets.
It was shock to me to see it, after our diverse suburb, where kids pretty much either locked at home doing homework or at classes all the times.
So in my opinion there is definitely a cultural aspect of it.
That's because they know their kids will be set no matter what they do in life.
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'Feral' seems like an odd choice of word, given the activities you're describing. It sounds like they're just out and about doing totally normal stuff. I bet you wouldn't appreciate someone describing you as 'feral' if they saw you in public walking to the store or getting on a train.
I think it was the perfect adjective in the context of their comment.
The poster clearly meant it with a flavor of whimsy to it, not in a derogatory way. Maybe also as a tongue in cheek jab at how people they perceived as overly concerned about supervision would describe such kids.
I'll put my hand up as having been a joyfully feral kid once upon a time.
"in a wild or unsupervised state" seems like a particularly apt description of children. it does not seem to be derogatory: language really should be evocative as often as literal.
That seems like a slightly off definition to me: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/feral And feral certainly is a term with negative connotations in English.
Are you in a "wild and unsupervised" state when you leave your house and go to work?
'Feral' seems like an odd choice of word, given the activities you're describing.
I never said the feral kids were participating in those activities. :-) Look, it was loose use of the word, you're placing way more judgement on the term than was ever intended. Yes, the children have homes and parent, of course they're not feral.
https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/shoot-the-messenger
> But I actually find ideological bias to be less concerning than the more fundamental problem that the class of people who determine the boundaries of debate share a set of demographic and experiential traits that they don’t recognize as distinctive.
> This class of people includes journalists, yes, but also people who work in the tech industry, academics, nonprofit leaders, influencers, and those who work in politics. From now on, I’ll refer to this group broadly as “the messenger class.”
> The messenger class’s distinctive experiences — like living in downtown Washington, D.C., or living in one of the parts of New York highlighted in red — shape the boundaries of normal in ways harder to counteract than pure ideological or partisan bias.
> The messenger class plays a fundamental role in any democracy. Democratic self-governance requires not just fair procedures for making decisions but an accurate and shared picture of social reality to reason about. That picture is revealed through the communicated experiences of citizens, filtered through the messenger class, which decides which experiences are urgent and require intervention.
Do journalists live in bougie places? It's not a particularly well-paying job.
It's a job that requires strong credentials and is gated by unpaid internships. So it disproportionately attracts people from relatively affluent backgrounds: https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/the-cos.... And those folks live near and, more importantly, travel in social circles with affluent people.
It's also not particularly expensive to live in a bougie place. I grew up in Mclean, VA. My dad ran into Dick Cheney at the CVS once. But you can get an apartment in Mclean on a journalist's salary, especially if your parents paid for college and you have no debt. You can’t afford to raise a family there, but you can live there, near your social circle. Conversely, you'll see lots of trades people, cops, etc., living in places that aren't bougie at all, despite making more money than the lower end of the professional class. People find ways to congregate around others in their social class, income notwithstanding.
Yes. Journalists don't make a living from journalism, they live on family money. That's why working class journalists have disappeared along with working class perspectives.
It was once a job where many if not most of the practitioners didn't have a college degree, now it is the most expensive graduate school program you can do. I think the median price is something like $250K.
If you don't pay writers, you eliminate all of the writers who have to work for a living.
Plenty of journalists I know about (because I read them a lot and they sometimes talk about self) did mot wemt to j-school.
Also, they dont live in parents houses.
You are making stuff up about lives of journalistals to invalidate their claims.
Don't disagree with the general point but I'm not sure J-School was ever a particularly good entree into journalism. Most of the journalists I know and knew didn't have the grad degree.
TIL I and my friends and colleagues live on family money.
Could be a husband that pays for the home etc as well, that is also living on family money.
Regardless since journalists aren't well paid but a lot of them live in expensive areas the money has to come from somewhere.
So your argument is that journalists must be wealthy because otherwise they'd be poor? Have you considered the alternative, that we just live modest lifestyles, like most other working class people?
Was the mom Asian? Asking because my pre-teen daughter has a lot of Asian friends and I clearly see a pattern of hyper vigilance among their moms.
From the mall story, you also seem to be living in a "bougie" place. What makes you think that places other than where you live are different?
One would expect that after your first sentence, the second sentence would be a counterexample.
That’s a fair question. My wife is cheap and I’m indulgent with my kids. So we compromised by sending our kids to private school with yacht club people, but not living around them. Our neighborhood is mostly well-off non-white-collar people: nurses, cops, navy enlisted, guys who did well in trades, etc.
I live in suburb of a metro area, as safe as it gets (my front door is unlocked overnight often and almost never locked during the day, my garage is also frequently open). my 12-year old (5’8” 125lbs) went to walk the dog to the park about 1/2 mile from my house, someone called the police and I had to deal with social services…
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> my kids play outside unsupervised all the time
"free range kids" doesn't mean playing outside in a suburban cul-de-sac; it's the ability to go outside the immediate neighborhood on their own (walking, cycling, or public transport) -- stuff I did all the time as a 11-13 year old that is pretty rare these days. I don't think I've ever seen a preteen on the local city transport alone
My kids walk/bike to school, take public transport and are pretty free-range. But that’s absolutely nothing compared to my childhood. I was born in 1975. We dug up literal explosives from WWII and made our own small bombs (some matches, two large bolts…). Access to all sorts of chemicals was easy and we would set things on fire or just mix stuff to see what happens. Playing around on construction sites. Taking someones boat out to go fishing. Making bows and arrows, that would go straight through plywood. All _that_ is definitely gone. Some of it for good - kids loosing their fingers or worse was a common occurrence. So there definitely is a trend in case of me and my friends.
Free range and kids dig boms are two different things. We dont need to match accident mortality.
> my kids play outside unsupervised all the time, as do all the kids in my neighborhood. I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood
Your kids are hardly free-range. Let me guess, there's no way for them to actually meaningfully leave the area (no train, bus, etc)? It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and saying they can do whatever they want. hardly free-range in the way described in the article.
Presumably you live in a suburb for the reasons the person in the article checked in on the free-range kid.
my personal litmus test is if you'd let your 13 year kid explore Manhattan alone during the day. Many say no because it's dangerous, and yet Manhattan is safer than most American suburbs. just FUD all the way down sadly.
Yea, I always through "free range" meant the kid walking (or taking the bus/train) a few miles through the city to get to an actual "other place" destination. Not "playing across the street in the suburban park." If the latter is now considered unusual, we have some big problems!!
It is in SF. My son’s school would not let him walk 3 minutes to an aftercare program. They were actually willing to break federal law to stop him from walking a single block away.
I also let him play at the park on his own occasionally. I will get calls from well meaning but extremely overprotective friends to let me know that “they can’t watch him anymore.” He is ten! The library, connected to the park, has a phone which he can use to reach us.
People called my parents hover parents, but at ten I could have played at the neighborhood park by myself.
If the latter is now considered unusual, we have some big problems!!
it is, and we do:
https://www.offthegridnews.com/current-events/mom-charged-wi...
https://reason.com/2025/08/09/child-protective-services-inve...
https://reason.com/2026/01/16/she-let-her-6-year-old-ride-to...
https://edition.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrest...
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/parents-investig...
https://nationalpost.com/news/growing-up-independent-is-ille...
https://www.todaysparent.com/blogs/mom-arrested-leaving-daug...
https://legalclarity.org/is-it-illegal-to-let-your-kid-play-...
those are all from the first page of a search for "parents charged for letting kids alone on the playground"
there are probably many more such stories.
The usual contrast being drawn is kids wandering around a suburban area, walking to school, playing with kids in a nearby rural property. It's not hopping onto a bus to the city a few tens of miles away. You do see schoolchildren in Japan on the train by themselves but I'm not sure that's ever been very common in the US.
there's really no reason American kids in metro areas like SF, Boston, DC, NYC couldn't take a bus 5 miles away by themselves. when one comes up of an actual reason to why, it contradicts real statistics.
the biggest things parents should worry about is their kid being bullied by other kids during school, a supposedly safe place, and other family. strangers just aren't the major source of violence towards children.
Welp this week we in Phoenix are dealing with a report of a 17-year-old high school girl who boarded a light rail train (the one with security cameras and guards) and she was harassed and assaulted by a mob of boys on the train, presumably in front of human onlookers; she disembarked, and was assaulted some more.
She is now in a neck brace, and her mother is absolutely distraught, saying this is something she cannot fix for her beloved daughter. I am distraught as well that this could happen to anyone at all on the same train that I ride every week.
That's a sad story though getting a bit far afield from young kids taking public transit or otherwise traveling away from their homes. At 17 I was in college and taking urban transportation (and flights) all the time.
Multiple people died on the same stretch of road on the same afternoon that I drive on often about a month ago. One was just a teenager in a car that was following the law, it was the other car that was speeding.
I've seen lots of death on the roads around me.
But sure, it's the train that's unsafe.
Someone and their gang pulled a knife on me as a kid when I was riding the bus forty years ago in a university town, but that doesn’t make what they did normalized, it just makes an anecdote. As it happens, though, that is quite normalized in the U.S., especially if you’re not white.
A lot of U.S. residents inure themselves to random acts of violence because they either feel helpless to change the societal contexts of that violence and/or because admitting that violence would require confronting the benefits of power exploitation vs. the drawbacks of racism, sexism, bullying, and bystanderism. That swarm of boys abusing a girl to enforce societal mores that benefit them to her detriment is a trope from Pleasantville. This isn’t some new or unknown thing. This is a standard-issue United States Lynch Mob that’s been known about for a century.
I’ve been upset about this for thirty years, which is when I first discovered this. Welcome to the shameful desert of the real. Sad that it took y’all so long to see it; but now you have a chance to decide a way forward. Circle the wagons and raise sheltered, and therefore weakened, children? Teach every family about this threat all the way down to the youngest that kids understand danger? Crossing guards that ride the buses and have safety whistles and self-defense training? Lobby your city government to shift policing dollars to transit safety officers? Lobby your regional government to shift road maintenance dollars to gang violence de-escalation efforts?
As you can see, it’s difficult to find a way forward that feels appropriately vengeful upon ‘those that hurt our budding flower’ while also having a meaningful impact on the quality of the future. Most regions would just try to defund bus service, which fucks over everyone except wealthy adults on time scales longer than ten years or so, because at least that ‘feels’ like an effective response.
Good luck.
> I’ve been upset about this for thirty years
Completely normal. Trauma at a certain level, unlike other memories and emotions, doesn't seem impacted by time. I'm sorry to hear what happened to you.
> that is quite normalized in the U.S., especially if you’re not white. / A lot of U.S. residents inure themselves to random acts of violence
This part seems to universalize the experience, though. What is the basis for it? Crime is at generational lows. I've used public transit in cities uncounted times and I have never seen a crime; that's what is normal for me.
> Trauma at a certain level
No, not traumatized for thirty years; that’s not a valid substitution here. Upset, in the way that people that want to effect societal change are upset at acceptance of the status quo. The alternative is apathy and hopelessness, and I refuse to adopt salves (such modern rationalism) that would let me stop caring about difficult ‘uphill’ battles.
> I'm sorry to hear
I refuse your apology; instead, exert your own form of societal pressure against, say, bullying. It’s a more approachable target than lynching and will help you switch your instincts from irrelevant sympathy to relevant action. (And if you already do, bully for you, pun intended :)
> I've used public transit in cities uncounted times and I have never seen a crime; that's what is normal for me.
Mixed-wealth U.S. cities, in daytime and at night? In exclusively downtown, college, and/or affluent neighborhoods? (So excluding for example Stanford, Palo Alto, and Mountain View, which are tilted quite high-wealth and thus low-crime, Brock Turners notwithstanding.)
Also: Are you a white man of middle-class or greater wealth? That generally matters greatly when evaluating anecdotes on this topic, independent of all other factors, and is strongly correlated with ‘I have no matching anecdotes from my own experience’ annotations.
This was of course the trains fault
I’m also curious why you write “we in Phoenix are dealing with…”
I’ve noticed a trend of people attaching a sort of personal identification with headlines
Perhaps they don't identify as a passive news consumer about irrelevant people, but as a resident with a bond to their city and wider community.
Imagine that!
I don't think that was the crux of the inquiry / objection. It's wonderful to feel such a bond with one's _community_, but it's a different thing to bind oneself to such a dramatic statistical outlier and make decisions ("dealing with") as if it's a common occurrence.
I mean, I don't know what "decisions" would be made but often people say we are "dealing with" emotions or stress related to something that comes out in the news.
The crux of my stress on this is that riding the light rail is a very common thing for me and millions of my neighbors. In fact we are shocked because we consider it so safe. The LRT should be the safest place in the city, given the cameras, the crowds, the security guards and the vigilant operators.
To think that a vulnerable, female high school student was attacked, broad daylight, onlookers looking, mob of boys (high school I would assume) is just beyond the pale. Nobody did nothing, and the attack continues after she disembarks? It's just unthinkable. There is a Jesuit Catholic boys' school just up the line from where she boarded. Were none of the Brophy boys on hand to step in, to say "stop it" or do anything about it?
And to watch the interview with the mother was just the last straw for me. How upset she is now. Her daughter means the world to her; she couldn't protect her, and she can't "fix this" for her. It's heartwrenching. It should've been safe, especially for a girl like her, so close to adulthood, but legally a child.
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Japan is a monocultural civilisational state. That is a big factor.
American children are in more danger because the country's more diverse?
It is the difference in culture. In big cities, Japan doesn’t tolerate public deviance. Police are visible in every block. They are very strict about weapons; you can’t bring a knife in public for no reason etc.
They also have a culture of enduring things in silence for the greater collective good. For instance, most girls and women will have stories of harassment, especially by men on crowded trains but almost none of them will do anything about it.
To his point - I would say, it's a bug factor BECAUSE on average their culture seems more safe. But it's not because it's monocultural. Bad "monoculture" is bad, good one is good, nothing complex there. Simplifying, but that's pretty much what is said
You're missing the more important word.
Yes
Diversity doesn't make places more dangerous (if i understand the stats). But humans are naturally tribal and fear those who look and act significantly different.
That depends on an arbitrary perception of 'my tribe'. Irish and Italians used to riot against each other. Germans were hated (look up a quote from Benjamin Franklin). Protestants and Catholics used to riot. Every wave of immigrants seems to get the same treatment by some.
Within a few generations, their decendants marry each other.
Because humans are tribal they will also go on to attack and prey on those who are outside their tribe, making diversity more dangerous. Especially when diversity is not merely some people of different ethnic/racial backgrounds living and working together, but a population split into isolated cultures with different circumstances.
Unless there's a big strict enforcer to keep everyone in line of course.
This is something a lot of people seem to believe that is not borne out in the research. Plenty of specific counter examples like Queens NY, a densely populated and exceptionally diverse place with crime rates comparable or better than many much more homogenous places in America. Poverty and income inequality are much better predictors. I felt this reddit comment from a while ago did a pretty good job rolling up sources on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion/comments/1jxff...
monoculture has nothing to do with it, as if more diversity creates a less safe environment
but Japan is much safer than the US, in no small part because they have the sense to not allow people to own weapons
Russia is fairly mono cultural too. Is it safe?
Yes. Russia is inarguably safer in terms of street crime than the USA.
Philadelphia in 2025 had a higher murder rate than Belfast during the height of a civil war.
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_countries_result.jsp?co...
Crime in the USA is also extremely regional and local in pattern.
I don't think numbeo can be a good source, it seems to be self reported metrics. I asked it for comparison of NZ to USA and it told me that NZ was about the same or worse on most numbers. But actual crime rates are lower in NZ. The murder rate is 5x lower.
Murder is a faulty good comparison as it’s unlikely to be a stat that gets manipulated much. Every other crime seems subject to political and social whims of various departments and political agendas.
> Philadelphia in 2025 had a higher murder rate than Belfast during the height of a civil war.
Do you have a cite? In American cities crime is at generational lows, including / especially murder.
I just looked it up, and found this in a Philadelphia newspaper:
"The numbers of homicides and shooting victims in Philadelphia have continued their sharp declines since the pandemic. There were 222 homicides last year, the fewest since 1966, and 935 shooting victims, the first time there had been under 1,000 since at least 2007."
https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/pew-state-of-city...
Oh no, no way. Child violence on the streets and in school is WAY higher, it's ingrained in culture. It's also pretty rare if a Russian kid would tell his parents about it (only if property damage is involved).
I don't know how your link gathers data (website only shows one dude, software engineer, not a professional survey statistician), but from personal experience I can surely say it's rankings are BS.
The closest in US are the "bad towns" like East Palo Alto or some neighborhoods of Oakland, with their respect for ex-cons and prison slang.
1) Russia is generally very safe, and 2) I agree that the violence amongst children is crazy. It’s a great place to homeschool and free-range and I have not found a way to send children to school in a way that’s acceptable to us.
Larger cities have private schools. There are also embassy-affiliated schools (yes, even today).
In public schools there's this unofficial "letter grade system". Unlike the US, where kids homerooms are mixed around each year on purpose, in Russia a homeroom group sticks together through the entirety of their school career, grades 5-12. Of course some kids will move away, and new kids will join, but the core group remains. Many lifelong friendships are formed this way.
Now - and this part doesn't officially exist, but it certainly does in practice - these groups are not created equal. Let's say there are 3 teachers who are picking up a grade 5 homeroom. They will stick with these kids until they graduate. So, the teacher with the most seniority has their pick of the "best" graduating elementary students. These will be well-behaved and academically strong kids. Their new homeroom will be called 5A. Then the second most senior teacher has their pick. This homeroom will become 5B. And 5C onwards are the "leftovers". And these groups will stick together until they are 12A, B, and C.
If you want a good school experience for a nerdy shy kid - they have to be in "A". Of course, as a newbie who is unfamiliar with the system... your kid will likely be put in "C" ("ve"). And you probably know enough about how Russia works by now to understand how to go about changing that ;)
Russia doesn't have reliablr statistics on anything. It like saying North Korea is safe.
North Korea likely is extremely safe when things like street violence and bullying are concerned. It's only unsafe for dissidents.
And you know, you can also ask people. In software there is a large population that grew up in the ex-USSR. Many of us still regularly visit the old country and talk to friends and family that live there. And we aren't all bots, despite what many seem to believe.
The Third Reich was only unsafe for Jews, Roma, Catholics, Homosexuals and everyone who was against Hitler. Other than that it was extremely safe.
Maybe you should stop believing those bullshit sites.
Good morning from Russia, where I moved my large free-range family (from the US) with the topic of free-ranging children very high on the list of reasons why.
My children cross town by themselves to attend classes, it’s normal to see children walking or riding public transport by themselves once they turn about age 7.
There’s crime and bullying — we have always homeschooled successfully and have had negative experiences with classrooms here — but in my opinion it’s not as bad as the places I’ve lived in the US.
And the streets are definitely safer. There are some risks like gopniki enjoying causing random trouble like pepper spraying strangers, but I believe that type of danger is a threat mostly to young adult men and almost certainly not children. Our daughters can safely do what they need to do with appropriate precautions (that do not include staying within single-digit meters of a vigilant adult at all times else CPS!!!).
Russia has higher incarceration rates and higher criminality then EU and USA.
Also, French, German, Swesish, you name it do all the stuff alone. And third, they have less bullying in schools.
The US is 5th, Russia is 33rd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
Seems like they dropped after they startes Ukrainian war. They used to be higher then USA in those rates.
Not sure "sending them to be killed by Ukrainians" is better then incarceration. But, probably costs less money.
Russia isn't mono cultural thought. It has muslim regions, buddhist regions, official jewish jurisdiction (it was created by USSR to segregate jews, so it basically has no jews left. But it's mostly because they moved to other regions). There is a duoreligion regions, where having two religions is a mundane thing. And even christian regions are various in traditions.
I wanted to write that the requirements to teach in russian language in russian schools is relatively new one. But turns out, you could still do it. Not like in private schools, you can have a government school in another language.
It can be argued that there is unifying postsoviet culture, but since different regions were treated differently under Soviet regime, there is a lot of differences.
Why do you think Russia is fairly monocultural? Russia covers a gigantic amount of territory and has people from a large number of ethnic and linguistic groups living there, many of which are not particularly closely related.
It by no means is monocultural. As for safety, well, yes, pretty safe.
More important is that helicopter-style parenting is unthinkable there, people will just not understand if someone would attempt that. Also not much in insane laws (they have some, but..) and the police will tell you to bugger off if you try make them act on those that exist. So the situation in the article is impossible.
That “but..” is a big key to the difference between Russia and the US in this conversation. The US has a severe cultural propensity for rule-following and reporting things, but in Russia there’s an interesting mix of people seeing society as a commons, seeing personal responsibility as foremost, seeing laws as guidelines that may or may not correspond to reality, and seeing reporting something as fairly extreme behavior. And this includes people at all levels.
Big cities like Moscow or St Pete are anything but monocultural.
> my personal litmus test is if you'd let your 13 year kid explore Manhattan alone during the day
My parents let me (14) and my brother (9) explore central Paris on our own when my Dad was working at the Paris air show for the RAF. No problems at all even though this was just after the student protests in the 60s, and so things were a little tense.
I think Manhattan would be OK too, though I've only been there as an adjust. Certainly, you see kids running around London.
I let my then 13 yr old daughter go around Beijing by bus/subway when we lived there 10 years ago; she had a phone. Felt perfectly safe. Same thing in Tokyo. I'm not sure I would have allowed that had we been living in a big US city like LA, Chicago or NYC -- maybe it's just as safe, IDK, but the fact that anyone in the US can own/carry a weapon makes me feel much less safe than in other developed countries.
13??? I’m shocked that it’s even a question. Of course a 13 year old should be allowed to do that.
London and the bits of Pars I have seen are pleasant places to work around. London does have its bad areas, as do other cities. Small towns in the UK are fine, as is most public transport. Parents have got more protective but I still see plenty out by themselves where I live.
s/adjust/adult/
> Your kids are hardly free-range. Let me guess, there's no way for them to actually meaningfully leave the area (no train, bus, etc)? It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and saying they can do whatever they want. hardly free-range in the way described in the article.
This depends on the area. In more urban areas exploring can be done on foot or bike. I live in Seattle, which has some fantastic bike trails that can go on and on for miles and cross into multiple adjacent cities.
In some cities parents are fighting to let their kids play in their own front yard unsupervised. Not an issue in Seattle, where kids are required to walk to and from their neighborhood school by the school district.
But denser areas also have lots of stuff to do within the neighborhood. Within 2 or so miles there is a massive shopping area, multiple bakeries, tons of restaurants, a slew of parks (Seattle has an obscene density of parks, it is one of the best aspects of living here), a lakefront beach (lots of bodies of water in Seattle), 2 swimming pools, tennis courts, and a bunch of other stuff I am probably forgetting right now.
So define free range. If a gaggle of kids travel to the local grocery store together to buy lemons and sugar, then self organize selling lemonade to people passing by on a hot day, is that free range? I'd argue yes.
I grew up in the 70s in a town of 30,000 and consider that time free-range. There was no public transit, only bicycles.
Manhattan is one thing, but I would never let my kids go to the 70s unsupervised.
This is the helicopter parenting the article is condemning. Children made it through the 70's just fine.
I'm pretty sure the data shows the opposite actually, that compared to today some percentage more of them didn't make it out.
> It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and saying they can do whatever they want.
What do you mean it's like dumping kids on a farm? Are the suburbs really THAT lethally dangerous?
Source [22 minutes]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLAfDrFUBkA
Redmond has decent (though not great) bus coverage and light rail stations to Seattle and points beyond in the core downtown area and next to a huge park.
> and yet Manhattan is safer than most American suburbs
[something traumatic happens and 50 people run for their safety]
see and as proven, only 1 person was assaulted!
I think a future society that counts trauma and mental health disruptions instead of just the crime stats will reach different conclusions on areas considered safe
Plenty of trouble for a 13 year old in Manhattan. Even if it's not dangerous, you can find your own problems easily enough.
You can find your own problems on an abandoned farm too. A kid can always choose to get into trouble, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
The type of trouble is different. Your not going to get robbed trying to buy drugs on a farm.
I grew up in a neighborhood that had a drug den next to the 7-11 that all the kids went to buy slurpees at.
The dealers didn't bother the kids, and the kids knew not to go into that yard.
There were plenty of street walkers on a particular stretch of streets. They weren't talking to anyone who wasn't looking to buy.
Of course I had the advantage of being a broke kid at the time, so I wasn't a mark for crime. I was just another neighborhood kid who was walking through. It was a working class neighborhood with a few sketchy parts. There was the occasional shooting or drive by, and property theft was common (every bike I had as a kid was stolen from me at some point), but it wasn't unsafe in regards to violence.
I almost impaled myself on a rebar pole while jumping my bike over hills at an abandoned construction site. That was the most dangerous thing that ever happened to me growing up there. (well aside from the time I almost died falling into a sink hole and managed to grab onto a nearby tree root and pull myself up in time, but that was in the middle of nearby woods, so not gonna blame that on societal problems!)
Humboldt County would like a word.
I mean by that standard there’s plenty of trouble everywhere for everyone.
I do know. No kids play outside in my neighborhood. The story resonates because your personal annecdote is not very common. (Not as the sibbling comment says, that reporters all out of touch elites).
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This is a bit of a shift of the Overton Window surely. Because that doesn’t sound free-range: which involves perhaps miles of travel unsupervised.
I have a 10 year old boy and I'm facing these issues right now. I'm also in Canada so culturally adjacent to the US and similar enough with regards to this topic.
I don't see child welfare agencies personally as a particular threat when it comes to this topic. Maybe they ARE more likely to get involved in cases of more free range parenting where before they weren't, but it doesn't register as a real worry.
The major difference I see between when I was growing up and now is that when I went out onto the streets, there were other kids on the streets. My parents didn't know exactly what they were sending me out to, but they knew that there as a general crowd of kids that would be out on the street until some point in the evening, and that they would all go home at around the same time, and that's also when you were expected home.
The draw of smartphones and video games as indoor entertainment can't be understated, but I can exercise some parental tyranny here and always kick him out of the house to go play like my folks used to do.
But there are no other kids out there. I'm sending him out into streets empty of kids.
To mitigate this I'm trying to nudge things in the direction of him and his friends forming some sort of after-school crew that finds outside activities to do together, undirected. There are other like minded parents that I've found that are also interested in enabling something like this.
On the subject of risks - I strongly believe that the role of parenthood is to mediate a child's exposure to the real trauma of a hostile, often absurd reality that they will grow up into. Controlled exposure to risk, to self-directed decision making in times where they feel like someone won't be there to help them out and they need to figure things out on their own, these are critical requirements in parenting IMHO. And all risk comes with some small chance of tragedy, and that's a burden we as parents have to bear: to expose ourselves to the emotional trauma of the possibility of our children getting hurt, however small the chance, so that they are able to grow into healthy well-adjusted adults.
I feel like I have to work a lot harder than my parents did to enable that exposure.
>> But there are no other kids out there. I'm sending him out into streets empty of kids.
This. It's a number's "game".
My father, born in rural Romania, had 8 siblings, one of them died of an accident in his childhood (yeah, during "free range stuff"). I was born in a town and have 2 brothers. Live in a city and have one kid.
I can't send my kid out carelessly because I don't have a backup.
One of the many reasons you should have more kids.
Easier said than done when you don’t have to suffer the physical consequences of having them.
I am not sure what you mean. Most people in the world including every single one of your ancestors has managed to have kids - including the physical aspects.
My wife gave birth by C-section. That would have killed her up until very modern times.
She may theoretically birth another child but there's a substantial risk.
There are "physical aspects", just because it's all theoretical and principles to you doesn't make them go away.
People aren’t comparing today to the ancient past. They’re by and large, comparing life to when they grew up.
So on HN, that’s the 70s through the 90s.
Since then maternal mortality in the USA has only increased. The reasons vary, but this still supports your comment as less people ought to be willing to risk having more children.
I would add, that this stat also pairs with the prevalence of hard pregnancies in the USA, so people may become more protective of their children since they suffered more to have them.
Other countries don’t have this issue, and also have more free range child allowances (e.g. Japan with low mortality, low number of children, but highly independent children supported and watched by adults in general and not their parents).
If one in 8 has that kind of accident in America they will seize all the kids and you will lose all of them, so other than just spreading your DNA that approach won't work. There are many, many documented cases of people having all their kids seized because they had a child with a brittle bone disease, and after their brittle bones break (happens easily with such child) the government blames the parent and takes all the other children too.
Ok I am not sure what exact point you are making or arguing with. The op grew up as 1 of 3 and I think that's better than 1 of 1 :)
3 means 3x the chance of them all being taken away when something goes wrong. 1 seems better if your goal is to have at least one child remaining in custody with you to age 18, since if anything goes wrong other than a provable unavoidable medical accident they're typically all seized.
This seems like an absolutely insane thing to optimize for but if this is anything like personal experience for you I am really sorry.
Many, many seems like overstating a rare corner case that can easily be proven.
It actually can't be determined if it's "overstated", because the child snatchers have intentionally hidden the data (under seal, "think of the children") so you can't determine the ratio of "overstating." It is illegal to pull the data, so instead you just have to rely on the many many articles you can pull up of people speaking up on their own accord despite the fact their adversary is usually using their children as leverage to keep them from speaking out.
That is part of the genius. They hide the data then declare "just show us the data" knowing damn well they hid it then try to hide under just being reasonable and why can't you prove it. It's quite sadistic actually and of course arguments such as yours play into this intentional subterfuge. Note that this hiding of evidence, when done by private actors, in a court of law usually means it is entered in evidence in favor of the other side as hiding means the worst case scenario of that is contributed towards the burden of proof ("spoliation of evidence.") You don't get to play the fuck-fuck game of simply asking for additional burden of proof when you've intentionally induced spoliation of the evidence.
Missing kids statistics exist.
statistically you'd only need about 0.0002 additional children to counter the risk of accidental deaths prior generations of children experienced.
> I can't send my kid out carelessly because I don't have a backup.
I don't understand this reasoning. Are you saying you're knowingly stunting the growth of your child because you would have to deal with your emotions if something terrible happened?
I understand the emotional pull of it, but I don't understand being able to identify it, put it into words, and then continue to do it.
I don't understand the "knowingly stunting the growth of your child" attack. What makes you conclude I'm stunting the growth of my child?
He's not chained to a tree. He goes to private school in a country where public schools are free and excellent. Visits his friends and play in the public park or the private yard. Spends vacations in the countryside unsupervised by me because unlike the city, chances of being run over by a retard driving a car are much lower. Still, I advise him not to wander around freely as I did in my childhood because the world has become much shittier. One thing, there are bears everywhere, thanks to the animal rights lobbyists. I feared dogs and bulls when wandering across countryside as a kid, now I have to add bears too for my kid.
Small town Canada here. In winter all the kids above school toboggan and slide down the roads (GT racers). All the kids below trudge up carrying their slider of choice. In the afternoon the roles are reversed. Not an adult in sight.
At the ski hill kids 5+ roam free- it’s always fun getting on the chairlift and a little kid says “ can you help me get on?” And you have to physically pick them up onto the moving (fixed grip) chairlift. There’s no cell service.
Mountain bike trails around town are full of groups of kids 5+.
My advice: move to a small town, it’s like going back in time in a very good way.
I learned to snowboard in Wapiti Valley which is a little river valley skislope setup way out in the middle of nowhere saskatchewan. I know what you're talking about. I took the lift up with both 6 year olds and 86 year olds and both would offer advice to a new learner. I drove 3 hours in from "big city" Saskatoon but most of the attendees were kids and adults from the nearby towns. Loved the literal 30-second wait times to catch a lift back up - it was a really great environment to learn in.
That said, "move to a small town" is easier said than done when you have a family and kid :)
It’s still like that today, and it doesn’t have to be Saskatchewan either.
I have a family and a kid
Great point. Intuitively it makes sense that sending kids out when you expect a bunch of their peers to be there is different from sending them out into empty streets. Thinking a little more about why this intuition holds: it's because once upon a time you were sending them out into a community, where they would learn the tried and tested practices by example. Once the link of cultural transmission is severed, it's hard to bootstrap it back again, even if you had a bunch of families that wanted to try.
Where I am in the UK its the "problem" kids that are seen out and about on their own.
I was freerange growing up in rural england, so I have no problem with the youth roving about. My wife is horrified by the idea, so our kids are somewhat coddled.
In the UK at least, children are objectively safer in every metric apart from getting fat. Kidnap, abuse, getting lost, car accidents are all way way down.
The interesting thing is that here you wouldn't be threatened with child services, You'd have to be pretty abusive or get your kid picked up by the police for the state to get involved. Mostly its pure classism, nice middle class kids aren't allowed to walk about on their own until they are 16, at least.
I think mentioning those safety metrics is really important because for any person, not just in the UK but in many countries like it, the thing that will most likely kill them are diseases related to being unfit and overweight.
So while kids might appear to be slightly safer in their childhood, the reality is that those other dangers were never a serious statistical danger to begin with, but not creating health habits is a contributing factor to the most likely cause of death when they’re older.
I think people vastly underestimate how dangerous living an inactive lifestyle is. I’m not saying this because I grew up super active and now I’m judging people who live their life differently to me, I’m saying it because those are the statistics, and because I DIDN’T grow up being active.
I definitely agree that child inactivity is something that is really bad in multiple ways.
Deaths from inactivity are going to show up in 40s and 50s after long and expensive periods of medical treatment. THats a problem because we are only really going to see significant issues around about now. But that trend of inactivity isn't equally distributed over time.
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Totally onboard with some managed risk of injury being ok. Very much not onboard with the parents who trust their six year olds to face mortal peril alone and make good choices.
I read through the comment you replied to multiple times and I’m not seeing any mortal peril referenced. What are you referring to?
all risk comes with some small chance of tragedy
This part. I’m not going to assume what that person meant, but there’s always a few people about in these conversations lamenting that when they were six, they were certainly never hit by a car, and really you have to let your children take a few risks etc…
Every time someone drives their child somewhere, they are being put into a position of a small chance of tragedy. The chance of tragedy doesn't go away, only our perceptions of it. People seem to be more okay with dying with their child than their child dying away from them, so I guess that makes sense.
I recently revisited my childhood town and walked from my childhood home to my school. I hadn't done that for nearly 50 years. It was shorter than I remember, of course, but it was still several blocks. The last time I walked it, I was five. I also learned to ride a bicycle when I was five, so that took the place of walking for the latter part of the kindergarten school year.
I arrived at the school just as it was getting out for the day. I did not see a single student of any age leave without an adult.
Like so many people of my generation, I can only wonder at the cost, and be grateful that I was born when I was.
When my child was an infant, my wife parked in a parking lot and starting chatting with a friend about 10 yards away. Minutes later a woman came by and starting claiming the child was not safe and was going to call protective services. This freaked both of us out that a stranger could potentially have the power to cause the government to become involved with our family. Fortunately, we didn't let that experience prevent us from letting our kids wander freely. But it does just take one over-concerned parent, to get you into trouble.
A friend of mine was outside with his kids. He read a book and a woman who drove by yelled at him to always watch the kids and not read a book.
I had something like that happen I was out of town and forgot most places in America have a way more fascist child snatchers than where I live. The police contacted a national database check, their local child services, and my hometown child services. Thankfully my hometown child services told them to go fuck themselves (the place I live in now thankfully doesn't usually get involved unless there is serious abuse) and the ones in the place I was at didn't have time to deal with it before I left, but they certainly would have if I were a resident there.
> fascist child snatchers
lol
I’m reasonably convinced this explains basically everything currently attributed to social media, for children at least, and likely can also help explain some concern around birth rates and child rearing costs. Starting with the satanic panic the US has slowly closed down children’s lives because of concern that terrible things will happen to children if not continually under supervision. And the true is that yes sometimes bad things happen and have always happened. But if you look to many other countries they do not have the same extreme expectations of parents or the state to keep children’s lives locked down.
Does the term "satanic panic" also apply to the EU restricting internet access for the youth?
Satanic panic was a very specific phenomenon in the US.
No, that's plain old security state motivation hidden behind plain old moral panic justifications nobody buys.
It's not isolated phenomenon.If we look at the larger scale of, say, 100 years, a lot of things are rapidly disappearing. It's actually some sort of extinction that is underway, but you don't feel it on a smaller scale of time. Similar to how Romans wouldn't have been aware of the Fall of Roman empire while it was happening, because it was too slow to notice.
Can you give some examples of things rapidly disappearing?
I think OP is talking about Shifting Baseline Syndrome[0].
> A shifting baseline (also known as a sliding baseline) is a type of change to how a system is measured, usually against previous reference points (baselines), which themselves may represent significant changes from an even earlier state of the system that fails to be considered or remembered.
[0]: Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline.
[1]: Earth.org article that reads nicer: https://earth.org/shifting-baseline-syndrome/
The average person's ability to acquire food from nature (farm, hunt, gather) and cook it for themselves.
The average person ability to make and fix their own tools. Build and fix their shelter.
Free range childhood.
Average person getting dirt under their fingernails.
Being in sync with sunlight cycle.
Stargazing at night.
These are off the top of my head (I'm not op).
Learnt how to balance and ride a cycle on my own when I was a kid, and I used to 'run away from home' for 12 hours with other kids, I learnt how to swim after drowning, twice, ate whatever was around, green almonds from trees, grapes from vineyards, but raw corn was painful, I would not advise trying. We tried to hunt with arrows and sometimes used gun powder in a primitive red-loading rifle, but we sucked at it. we got chased by dogs in farms we raided and chased by an armed man who claimed we caused his wife's abortion while we were playing football in the street. Another armed man chased us brandishing his gun after we attacked him with stones after we caught him staring at our neighbor's daughter while she was on the balcony. This was in 1969 to 1973 before we moved to an apartment building and all that ended. Now I joke telling my family that I wish for once the police would call me for something my son has done, but no luck with that:) . Here some photos I wish you could recognize that dude on my shirt https://imgur.com/a/JCFMgap
The dude on your shirt is Mork from the show Mork & Mindy, played by Robin Williams.
Thank you, I was bullied all the time because of it.
I don’t think in 1926 more than 50% of global 15-20 year olds could:
“acquire food from nature (farm, hunt, gather) and cook it for themselves.”
Or
“make and fix their own tools. Build and fix their shelter.”
(Culturally, those tasks often specialize by vocation, gender etc.)
They absolutely could. A quarter of Americans’ primary job was agriculture in the 1920s. While job specialization was certainly a thing that didn’t mean people outsourced all of these tasks the way people do today.
That’s different from solo gather and cook and repair which is the artificially inflated bar being set here. I know people from multiple parts of the world who grew up on family working farms - specializing very real (esp. gender based)
I'm saying that the number of people doing these things are disappearing relative to the past. Seems to me like you are the one making up and moving bars around.
You said 50%, you said 15-20, you are speaking in absolute terms.
I'm pointing at trends.
Do you deny the trends?
I found that you’re basically arguing against the wall at this level of threading so I would just give it up.
I don't know about "globally" but I would be surprised if 50% of American males couldn't do this in 1926. These were skills taught to most young males and the country was far more rural. It was far less universal among females though some did learn these skills.
While unstructured, this kind of standard life knowledge was intentionally and systematically passed down to most boys in every community I lived even when in elementary school. It was expected that you knew how to do these things and men would go out of their way to teach you if you didn't.
Kids did fishing, trapping, hunting, building out camp sites, etc for fun when I was growing up and it was generally encouraged. Learned helplessness wasn't really a thing.
This started to die out decades ago. Most zoomers I know didn't have anything like this experience.
Being able to see stars in the night sky
Sure, here's one!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47815127
I think Maryland deserves a special shoutout. It's illegal, and not just in a CPS-steamrolls-your-rights-and-family sort of way, for an 8 year old to be left with children <13.
Growing up, I think many girls had ended their babysitting careers by 13.
My biggest fear of letting my young kid play alone outside is getting hit by a car.
That's why you have an emergency backup child for redundancy in case of failure of the main child.
Remember, they're cattle, not pets.
Ah, the Spare. You must be British royalty.
I had to go look it up, because in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Voldemort orders Cedric's murder with: "Kill the Spare!"
It turns out that Cedric, being superfluous to the "Resurrection Ritual" and Voldemort's plan of revenge, is actually a spare. In fact it was unexpected that two boys get through the whole thing with the Portkey and all. Harry was the only one who was supposed to end up there with the Death Eaters in the first place, so Cedric's appearance was quite unfortunate for everyone involved.
But Cedric's "spareness" certainly didn't have to do with expendability as far as his Dad was concerned, which you can clearly understand once his Dad gets going in the mourning for his death.
Riight! I was wondering why some people had more than one. Like, I wonder that every single ever-loving day
I don’t know if you’re being serious, but I wanted at least two so they had another kid to play with at home, and hopefully be on good terms with a family member they can relate to into their old age.
only slightly serious. children are a joy! right? right??
Children are human beings, and are the full range of what humans are. When small, the fun of it is seeing them unfold into that fully formed version- sometimes painfully, sometimes joyfully.
The only people who find this joke funny don’t have any children.
Six kids here, I use the “we needed some backups” joke all the time.
Sounds like a game of Paranoia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)
My dad told it to me. I was the second backup.
There's a star trek fan who has a primary dog and an emergency backup dog. There's also the british 'heir and a spare'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72rU64yq-zU
Third string
You can have humour and children at the same time...
Or people who have a sense of black humor. Never heard dads make dark puns and jokes of similar nature?
As a father, this is false.
10000% false (another father) :)))
I think I’m between the comments here. I think it’s funny to say we have a spare but I also think it’s not as funny to say “oh you have a spare”. It’s like a fat guy can joke about his fatness but you can’t.
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Congrats you just invented someone for you to be mad at. Maybe lay off the rage bait for a little bit?
>reddit
Please go back.
When I was a kid I was taught not to walk in the street.
When you walk, you go in the opposite direction of cars and can see them coming and, if necessary, move off to the side more.
I know it's survivorship bias, but it worked for me.
Now I get that population density is increasing, and probably so is traffic. Though so are automatic safety features that cause cars to brake rather than hit things.
Are there statistics on vehicular fatalities in suburbs?
Pedestrian traffic deaths are going down again after peaking in 2022. Accidents are less survivable in the US due to bigger cars and higher hoods.
Quote from CDC
During 2013–2022, U.S. traffic-related death rates increased a relative 50.0% for pedestrians and 22.5% overall, compared with those in 27 other high-income countries, where they declined a median of 24.7% and 19.4%, respectively. Across countries, U.S. pedestrian death rates were highest overall and among persons aged 15–24 and 25–64 years.
The cars are getting bigger. That means that the impact is more deadly, and the line of sight is higher - making it easy to overlook a child. The sensors often won't react at low speeds which are common for residential neighborhoods, and at high speeds they are late anyway.
>The cars are getting bigger
Wasn't there a trend in the US away from pompous SUVs and towards smaller cars, people even starting to re-evaluate some European-favored "city" cars more?
Also aren't cars also getting ligther, with less heavy / metallic exterior over time?
There is some bimodal distribution. I routinely encounter trucks where I cannot see over the hood. I suspect most of these vehicles have never carried so much as a 2x4 in the bed.
We have a regulatory regime that requires that SUVs be bigger each year. It saves the environment that way.
This is not true at all. People who buy cars were willing to pay higher prices for cars where they sit higher up and take up more space, even specifically as a defensive maneuver to be safer in the event of a collision.
Obviously, as a business, you have to give customers what they want or else you will go out of business.
The government is, however, very lax on prioritizing the safety of people outside of vehicles (which would mean limiting vehicle size and speed and enforcing harsh penalties for unsafe driving).
It's not even "in the street" I'm worried about -- it's the lunatics who drive like they are the main character in a single-player RPG. Not looking for bikes or pedestrians, crashing into parked cars and houses.
I don't think roads were ever considered a safe area to play. Even in cities in 80 the bugger roads were too busy. This is why cities need spaces for people including youth and teens not just playgrounds for toddlers. Yes traffic is more dense and faster, cars get bigger etc. but aren't cars also safer? I have heard the cars in the USA are crazy big which has larger dead angles particularly bad for smaller humans.
Cars are safer for those inside of them. For those outside of them, well, it's their fault for not having crumple zones!
Cars on the roads in the '80s were very low to the ground. Even a child standing on the sidewalk could easily see over the hood of a car parked on the road. Now, hoods have gotten so tall that neither can the child see past it to what's on the other side, nor can the drivers see the children.
This is so true. It’s much harder for drivers to see pedestrians these days. And walkers now have to deal with E-bikes and electric scooters flying down the sidewalks at high speed and silently. I’ve nearly been hit many times even as a very visible adult.
Of course; that's the only reasonable conclusion from a straightforward reading of the risk profile for children after they age out of drowning and before they age into opioid overdose.
The lion's share of loving a child is intervening in proportion to actual risk.
As a society, that means, more than any other single reform, relieving our cities of the burden of maintaining lethal, taxpayer-funded compatibility with the auto industry's machinery.
For real. Way too many people drive around our neighborhood way too fast and looking at their phone the whole time. Of course they’re also driving their enormous pedestrian-crusher trucks.
> My biggest fear of letting my young kid play alone outside is getting hit by a car.
It is frightening once they learn to drive, isn't it?
As a parent you feel the push and pull of not ignoring your child while also not mollycoddling them. For me let the kid do what they want - if your kid wants to stay home let them, if they want to climb trees and go off on their bike let them. Help them learn what is safe (which rods can they cross), what are their boundaries. Hopefully they get it, maybe they don’t. Don’t restrict access to devices or screens too harshly. Encourage games of any kind. Wear sunscreen.
> “We work in tech,” she says. “Our kids [aren’t] getting any cell phones, no smartphones, no Instagrams. I write the algorithms. I don’t want my kids to touch those algorithms.”
It's disgusting that this has become a casual attitude and admission by the tech worker class. No one should be getting this free pass.
"I am actively harming children and society with my livelihood (except my own, because I am so smart). Here I am proudly and smugly stating this in a news article."
I disagree- I think it's not much different than working at a distillery or cigar company (wrappery?). Social media is a vice not very different than whiskey or cigars- they're addictive, feel good in the short term, and are problematic to have too much or to do habitually. But we still let people indulge in them because they're fine in small quantities for responsible adults, and we expect that parents will not let their kids have access to them.
The only differences as far as I can see are in buying- a child could technically buy a phone for themself if they had the money and create an account on Instagram for free, and in cultural recognition of social media as a vice, which I believe is starting to change.
The overall point is, the law should assume that adults are reasonably intelligent and responsible people, and that parents should be the ones responsible for parenting their own children their own way.
> But we still let people indulge in them because
We want to make money.
> The overall point is, the law should assume that adults are reasonably intelligent and responsible people,
Over cigarettes and alcohol. The most inconsequential stuff.
But don’t say the words “direct democracy”.[1] Then people being reasonably intelligent and responsible gets forgotten. By the hive mind at least.
But people should be assumed to be reasonably intelligent and responsible. If that narrative allows us to make money off them. Not when it comes to democracy and political autonomy, of course. Shudders.
Where’s the option for people who are weak willed when it comes to something? Can they ban themselves from buying these goods? If not, where are the heroes that are working on that?
> and that parents should be the ones responsible for parenting their own children their own way.
There are whole studies of psychology weaponized against children to make them act as consumer proxies for their parents. To optimize nagging.
But every pair of parent for themselves. Against all of marketing. “Responsibility.” Because that makes money.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=b65e8bee43c2ed0
Don't get high on your own supply. Famous advice.
Weird. I was told by HN that it’s not the worker’s fault. They have kids to feed. Oh my gosh the Bay Area rent/mortgage. Blah blah blah.
Software is eating the world they say but they can’t get an honest do-no-evil CRUD job apparently.
Low key looks like some sketchy that-happened journalistic rage bait though. I casually found some unscrupulous nerd that is making YOU doomscroll
Don't know why you were downvoted -- I scoffed at that part too. The least we in tech can do is have some self-awareness
Yeah. Not seeing it. The local neighbourhood here in Arizona is infested with 12 year olds on e-bikes. It's great.
It work on the dirt-bike tier e-bikes because they can get away. IF they are walking my child has been harassed by Karens asking "why they are out on their own." I look forward to the day they are old enough to ride a fast enough e-bike to escape people with cell phones that will rat them out for being out and about.
I largely blame cell phones for the Karens being able to impose their will. When I was a kid we were all out about and/or doing dumb shit, but anyone who wanted to call the authorities had to go home to find a telephone. By that time we were long gone. As long as we didn't go near houses, no one could touch us. Now they will just follow the kid with their cellphone until the rat-fuckers from CPS or the police arrive.
We tell children not to talk to strangers but if a random adult goes up to a child and says something like "Why are you out on your own," what are they supposed to do?
Thankfully this never happened to me as a child, I don't even know what I'd do.
"Nothing at all until you groped me, Karen. Don't make me call the cops on you, pedo"
On the other hand, stuff happens.
Depends on your risk appetite and your systems tolerance for the inevitable consequences of errors...
A 5 year old free range kid on a scooter died outside a nearby school a few months ago.
Hit by a SUV
Was riding back from primary school on a scooter, without the mother.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-14/islah-metcalfe-rouse-...
A massive investigation, police, social services, traffic consultants, a million plus spent on upgrading safety, mother and father demonised in the community,etc ...
Teachers involved who responded or gave CPR ( I know some of them) given counselling.
The mother is likely to have lost custody of her other children.
There was no support in the link for your assertion that the mother is likely to lose custody. Money was raised in support of the parents. Your link says two other children were struck at the same intersection before this, and the municipality didn't take notice. Yet you blame the parents for not driving to school instead of the driver of the truck, and the traffic situation?
This is really the problem.
As a counter example, I witnessed 3 months ago a similar scene in my neighborhood, where a kid on a bike, crossing on pedestrian stripes, was hit by a taxi. It was a bad accident but luckily he didn't die. His dad was following right behind him. I'm leaning to think that "shit happens" in any case, but overprotection adds on top another layer of subtle, long term risks.
I think this is more a data point towards the quiet disappearnce of community / the steady march towards pervasive isolation
Correct. There are no communities anymore, just groups of houses. You see it in the death of social and civic organizations, churches, and other community groups.
Everybody is an island. I don't know what has caused this, but it seems like it's happening in most 1st world countries. Anyone have insights about this?
There's a book called "Bowling Alone" that explores a lot of ideas around this. Iirc the conclusion is two fold:
1. Historically women were largely responsible for community building. As they joined the workforce, they had less time to community build and so there became less community.
2. Technology allowing home entertainment. People can now stream movies instead of going to theaters. Play computer games instead of go to arcades. Check Facebook instead of call friends to catch up. Use a Keurig for convenient coffee instead of go to a cafe.
Bourgeoisie society. Not values, not culture, not mindset. It’s rooted in how society is structured. But values, culture, and mindset reinforce it.
This very individualistic society can only critique itself in terms of individual failings. Which leads to the catch-22, anti-communal, ankle-deep critiques: people are on their phones, people are asocial, why don’t “people” all get a clue individually and fix this via some spontaneous autoenlightenment.
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I think it depends on the locale. I moved from SF, which is career oriented, to OH, which is family oriented and, as I expected, I found more kids roaming the streets.
So if your streets are deserted, ask the locals their views on parenting. Paranoid parents will talk up the safety factor, but it's overblown.
Technology has caused this. Once a society becomes highly developed, it fuses itself with technology that eventually replaces human culture with efficiency, productivity and similar crap.
and yet everybody is one discoord channel away from everybody else hundreds if not thousands of km away, eager to talk, voice their opinions etc… crossing the street, meet your neighbor, too much hassle
My free range childhood friends and I would have been all _get bent_ to that lady—even at 6 yro. I can tell you this because I was also getting a whooping at home from da for saying the same to my ma. I was a dreadful child.
Blame a litigious culture where agencies have far too much power to "fix" other people. People in many places in America live with a fear of losing their children or getting sued and losing everything.
As a kid in the 80's and 90's, I biked up and down deserted, steep mountain fire roads before cell phones were widespread.
I hear that risk-tolerance normalization and freedom of kids in the 70's was even greater, so this trend appears to be a multi-decade decline.
What I miss most though is cool stuff like interactive art installations and improvised playground features made for kids that were ripped out in the 90's and 00's. Decommissioned Korean war jets, telephone pole obstacle courses, and a myriad of other things without so much as a web page anywhere lost to history.
As a relatively "free range" child in my youth and now the parent of children, even I find it hard to reconcile how I feel differently that my parents.
e.g. at 10 years old, my cousins and I were running around in the woods at my gradparents' home in rural Pennsylvania. I was the oldest of the group with my youngest cousin probably being 6. No cell phones. No Apple watches etc. We were outside of that house around 9am and would come back for lunch and then dinner when my grandmother rang the bell.
My oldest has an Apple watch and is both reachable able trackable yet the above still feels little strange to me.
This has to be a limited area where this idea of “free range” is a problem. Where I live is middle to upper middle class and there are kids everywhere. Electric motorized bicycles have made them even more mobile.
In the late 70s early 80s I went to school in another town from ages 11-13 and would take a train + bus to get there. Was perfectly normal. This was in France though, not US.
I let my 13 year old go out by himself, walk to places, take the street car; he has a phone so he can contact us if he needs help, and we can see where he is if we're concerned. It's ironic that parents are more worried today when technology makes it much _easier_ to track/communicate with your child (back in the day at that age, when I was out of the house my parents had no way of reaching me).
>What changed? In a 2023 article for Psychology Today, Gray proposed some factors that began reshaping parents’ attitudes and children’s behavior around the middle of the century: “the arrival of television, the rise of adult-directed kids’ sports, the gradual exclusion of kids from public spaces, the declining opportunities for gainful employment or meaningful contributions to the family economy, and, finally, the increased mandate that kids must be constantly monitored and protected.”
You will see lots of kids free-ranging in Lakewood, NJ. A lot of families there have banned TV from the home.
The takeover of US kids soccer by club soccer is disturbing to me. Generally kids who play are either well off or extremely talented (called "scholarship"?).
I think the clubs suck the fun out of it. Even with the expense, American players perform much worse than players in other countries where the kids have just been playing for fun for years until they start getting paid.
That paragraph bothered me. It gives a strong “assuming the conclusion” vibe. Oh, a factor reshaping parents attitudes is a “mandate that kids must be constantly monitored and protected” (in other words, parents’ attitudes)? You don’t say.
No, the mandate is enforced by the government coming and taking away your children by force, for some indeterminate period of time, until your lawyer goes in front of a judge and (hopefully) the judge rules that the government is stupid and should give you your kids back. But by then the damage is done.
One has to think if a state wanted to eliminate individualism in society this application of surveillance and restraint to children would be entirely by design...
Lakewood is a fascinating place, to be sure!
Social media, and instant news media (scary news sells), amplify the perception of danger, where the numbers don't back it up.
> Stranger kidnappings are exceptionally rare. They occur roughly 100 times per year, which works out to a 1-in-720,000 annual risk of a child being kidnapped — less likely than being struck by lightning at some point in their life.
> A Pew Research Center survey from 2022 found that about 60% of U.S. parents were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about their children being kidnapped,
We recently lived in Taiwan for a month and I was struck by the fact that from 2022-2024 Taipei had zero pre-teen traffic fatalities. My own San Francisco neighborhood has had more within the last two months!
The only thing that presents a persistent risk to children, I think, is motor vehicles and the way they’re driven. Children make mistakes and San Francisco’s tolerance for traffic fatalities is very high.
To be fair, you're cherry picking traffic fatality data. It's topical now but it's not common.
I actually don’t think there’s a single year where San Francisco has seen zero pre-teen traffic deaths. I think even my neighborhood is positive for the last two years. Taipei has more people, more children, and even by a percentage.
The number of pre-teen traffic fatalities is the only concern I have when I’m thinking of letting my children walk around because I think the other risks are relatively overblown. Sure we have an occasional Bill Gene Hobbs and the like but I think only traffic fatalities are near certainty.
These are for accompanied children, so leaving a 5 year old to wander is way different than when I was 5 years old. In SF, I’d rate the chance of survival to 12 at under 90% for unaccompanied 5 year olds walking around the city along the range that I used to at that time.
Teens are pretty self-capable in decision making but pre-teens just don’t have judgment yet. I feel like this is a pretty reasonable statistic to match.
There's no need to cherry pick data. The US's traffic fatality record is bad pretty much over the entire country.
I remember when I was a kid I would bike to a park around a half mile away by myself, definitely before I was 13, and I admit it feels weird to suggest a kid can go to the park down just a single block alone today.
The funny thing is it'd be safer: Kids have cell phones now by like 7 or 8 in a lot of cases and can call for help! Back when I was that age if I got injured or something I might've had to knock on strangers' doors!
Being exposed to many bad news daily from all around the world, unfortunately, all parents are forced to limit their children. And we do it even though we know we are limiting their development as well. Of course there are many neighborhoods that kids still play freely but the ratio is undeniably going down :(
america is more dangerous than many 3rd world and developing countries on the street
once my friend get arrested in LA by police when he jogging. they say they arrest him for his own safety because he shouldnt be out jogging in "this neighborhood"
turns out people in america get murdered and attacked in the street all the time for... no reason. yes literally, no motive.
>america is more dangerous than many 3rd world
it isn't. Crime is highly concentrated and the vast majority of, at least median affluent America, is about as safe as it gets. Same goes for any big cities, usually you can count risky streets on one hand, where 90% of the violence happens.
Not to mention, developing countries are if anything the only places where kids still run around and play on the street. I've spend a fair amount of time in Latin American countries with much higher violent crime rates than most of the world and you don't see much helicopter parenting
if anything in the first world this style of parenting is a result of excess safety, not lack of it. The world has seen a secular decline in violent crime over the last few decades, and yet this paranoia is distinctly new.
Well we also view children as completely disempowered unlike before. Starting around age 7 my parents gave me a gun and ammunition and I would roam the countryside all day long. It was mostly for hunting but if someone tried to inflict mortal bodily injury upon me my father gave me the instructions to aim between their eyeballs.
I'm also quite certain that in much of Latin America anyone fucking with a child would not go through a trial and handled with kid gloves, but rather there are plenty of videos of the internet of such people being held down while Rottweilers literally rip their balls off. Probably not an ideal version of justice but also perhaps more effective at pursuading people not to fuck with children.
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Me and my child were detained by the police in a park because my child is a different race and some Karen called it in as suspicious and I was detained as a "kidnapper." I ended up buying acreage in the country just to escape all the pieces of shit that would harass me and my child for playing outside.
The danger to children is largely the police and CPS, who rip apart families for hallucinations or levels of parenting sin that are far more benign than the emotional cost to children of authorities bearing down on them.
you are a real american now, you play outside in your private land that you drive to. there is peace in the universe again
now, if your child is too playful for Ms. Karen, they will give them a shit load of adderal as well
you may consider paying for a private school to avoid Karens drugging your children
Also so conditioned to this warzone levels of violence, that many consider them normal, or will cite stats with 5x-10x the violence of an equivalent sized city in the rest of the West and East saying "that's good odds, just X of 100K murdered last year".
In my childhood, my Mom said "we were the first Democrats in the neighborhood" as part of a new wave of young families. But we were also next door to the gayest neighborhood in San Diego (Hillcrest) and so our neighbors were mostly childless, and our Catholic parish had no school attached, for obvious reasons.
So, we were sort of carpetbaggers from the beginning. We were enrolled in a parochial school in the next parish over, which was a 10+ minute drive for Mom. Of course we could never walk or ride bicycles or public transit that far!
As a child, while I was granted roller skates and bicycles, me and my sister were both forbidden from straying beyond the block where we lived. And neighborhood peers were few and far between. We had few playmates, and nearly none from school. Our classmates were in different socioeconomic classes, and often of different ethnicities and cultures. At least 1/3rd of them were bused in from North County, where new Catholics were settling, but no schools were available yet.
Our neighborhood was a sleepy suburb surrounded by dead-end streets and canyons. There were no city parks or playgrounds. There was exactly one city bus line that was about 7 minutes' walk away, which we never ever rode. Grandma, on the other hand, took us on walking/shopping tours all over her neighborhood, which was completely amazing, and also to every shopping mall we could reach by city bus, which was doubly amazing. Grandma's neighborhood had a full-fledged recreational center and a park with a playground, where I could fly kites or do whatever.
Here is the paradoxical contrast: though we could have no physical contact with neighbors or friends, I could own any book, watch any TV channel and program, and listen to any radio station whatsoever. That included "border blasters" from Mexico that were intent on corrupting American values. Literally any book we wanted, we could read it or discard it into our voluminous bookshelves. Later, Mom and Dad were reluctant to hook us up with a modem, because they knew what that would mean, but college opened up the entire Internet to us, and it was game over.
You can physically shelter your kids all you want, but if you have a TV, a radio, and computers in the home, you're constantly inviting a parade of strangers, scammers, and perverts inside your securely-locked doors. Think about that. It is far kinder to allow your children to mix with neighborhood friends and freely explore this world, than to let them dive unsupervised into cyberspace.
The lower density culture of the US is problematic for children freedom. In Europe the situation is better but still worse than 30-40 years earlier. Time passes and things change. After 30-40 years there might not be kids anymore to stay locked at home.
This reads like the worst case of the "1984" out in the wild.
There's a huge set of initiatives for a maximum control of any individual since childhood under all children-safety laws.
Is that really for freedom or democracy? Or is that for something else?
Gen X was the last free range children. They ran wild after school without the tethering cell phones, playing in sand and drinking from garden hoses. The silent generation turned out to be a great generation building most of modern technologies.
> We work in tech,” she says. “Our kids [aren’t] getting any cell phones, no smartphones, no Instagrams. I write the algorithms. I don’t want my kids to touch those algorithms.”
Thats... displeasing to hear.
Related: 2017 (but based on a 2007 DailyMail article), 520 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13547089
This is what happens when you create a government agency to solve a problem. It eventually turns into a jobs program that cannot be shut down even after the original problem is mostly resolved. So the bureaucrats just shift the goal posts and the whole thing metastases is into a cancer upon society.
It’s easier to let kids play around the neighborhood when you know who the neighbors are.
most acts of abuse to family members are by other family members. ironically strangers are more likely to leave your kid alone than extended family.
That's a problem of access not familiarity.
Know which of your neighbors have unsecured firearms lying around. Sadly all to common where I am.
Whenever I read these kind articles and some of the comments here I always wonder:
Its it survivor bias? I grew up in a small village/city during communism. I was basically unsupervised from morning to night since I have memories about me walking around in that village.
We were doing a lot of dangerous things while playing. And there are kids that got injured for life or lost their lives: falling from trees, drawn in a river, leg lost due to a horse injury, losing an eye during a game with some pipes, jumping from high places like 1st floor or more, ... I managed to not get hurt but the examples I gave are real.
I am not even talking about any of the fights between kids verbal or physical there were happening that todays will be labeled trauma.
So I do wonder if this free range thing that we desire is really what we want and we can accept the consequences?
I am not sure in all cases, depending of course of kids age and ability to reason, for each individual child this total liberty is the right path. I do understand the benefit for the society.
I do get that it's stressful to raise a family. You're being held accountable for many things you don't have much control over, but I don't think this is a big deal either way. This is a false dichotomy like all the other nonsense aimed at parents.
It misses the point entirely to seek control over whether your kids are "free range" enough. That style of parenting worked so well in the past (it didn't really, but I digress) because they left well enough alone. They weren't trying to contrive anything. Your kids absorb everything from you. Don't let your insecurities be part of it.
What I would argue is much more important is keeping things fresh with new opportunities. That's your main job as a parent. Keep them thinking and engaged with their mostly self-directed path in life. The goal is to open their eyes and help them understand the world. Respect their intelligence and let them decide things on their own.
Many of those so called free range childhoods of the past were actually just empty and boring. That's when they got into trouble. That's not something to be nostalgic about. When I hear about trends like this I have to wonder if some parents are just looking for excuses to be lazy.
For another perspective, see Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff. She looked at indigenous cultures alive today and makes the compelling argument that the Western boomers were the outlier - not their kids. 'Free range' meant having no meaningful responsibilities or expectations within the tribe, other than 'do what you like all day'.
A delicate topic with many perspectives. Our small families make it possible to devote so much energy to our kids. However autonomy is all so important to become a strong adult later. We deliberately need let go more than we do now.
This is the kind of shit that pisses me off:
> “We work in tech,” she says. “Our kids [aren’t] getting any cell phones, no smartphones, no Instagrams. I write the algorithms. I don’t want my kids to touch those algorithms.”
Yeah it's ok for the rest of us, but not your kids. Who the fuck do you guys thing you are? You shouldn't be making society worse.
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How are abduction rates extremely low? Where did you get the rates? I could only find FBI NCIC reports, which do not differentiate the reason, but it shows 300K+ missing children in 2025. That's quite a lot. It does not say what fraction of those are abductions, but I doubt it makes a big difference for the parents looking for the missing child if the reason for the child missing is an abduction or something else. Also, AMBER alerts go off so often that everyone I know turns off alerts on their phones. Still see them on highway displays all the time.
Certainly the differences matter. If the vast majority of the abductions are 'Parental child abduction' and very few children are abducted by strangers.
"On average, fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year since 2010, the FBI says. From 2010 through 2017, the most recent data available, the number has ranged from a low of 303 in 2016 to a high of 384 in 2011 with no clear directional trend." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wisconsin-missinggirl-dat...
I would say that abduction by stranger rates are very low.
It's bizarre, I have people responding with outdated or anachronistic statistics again on HN. Is this because LLMs get trained to a certain date? 2017 was almost 10 years ago.
Also, for some reason "abducted by strangers" is not the only alternative to "parental abductions", this document, for example [1], differentiate "non-family" and "strangers" for whatever reason. And "non-family" abductions were ~60K in 1999! Pay for a better LLM, don't use the free stuff for your botting.
1. https://childfindofamerica.org/resources/facts-and-stats-mis...
Examples of nonfamily abduction episodes are omitted because NISMART–3 identified too few to analyze. Source: https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh176/files/pubs/250... which is the source of what you cited as your source.
I believe you wanted to say that the NISMART is the source, not the pamphlet you referenced, right? Because my source does not reference your pamphlet. Still looking for statistics of abductions, from people who claimed they are very rare yet cannot show the numbers. NISMART-3 is from 2013, 13 years ago.
2nd Paragraph. The following figures on missing children have been pulled from the 1999 NISMART study. Updated commentary on these initial figures are outlined in subsequent studies in 2002 and 2013. (2002 and 2013 are hyperlinks)
I am sorry, can you rephrase so I could understand what you are trying to say now?
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this resonates a lot. I am not sure how to handle this though. Next to our house (500m), the city government established a camp for “asylum seekers”. 100 men. Men only. How can I reasonable let my pre-teen daughters roam freely now? Id love to, but my gut feeling doesnt allow me to.
Maybe, back in the days, it was just a different time? A more high trust society that worked well?
Nowadays, we have news stories, where 70 year olds get stabbed by youngsters because they got lectures on their bad behaviour. When I was young, I had respect towards a 70 year old. Big time. Never would we have thought to pull out a knife…
Life changed a lot in recent years and not for the better on all dimensions.
Europe is still pretty save though. At least if you trust the statistics
Statistically, we live in the safest society we ever have. We see a lot of bad stuff happening because news reporting travels further and faster than ever before, amplifying the perception the world is going to shit.
Plus, now, basically every kid is running around with a phone that gives them access to talk to the police or their parents at any time. So it's going to be a lot riskier for someone to try anything against them. Even then, between 80-90% of sexual assaults are performed by people the victims already know, and around 30% of those are relatives of the victim.
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Wow. Are you for real?
I thought this kind of bigotry was only used by far right shit to manipulate feeble-minded people.
I'll be generous and assume this comment was not made by a human, but by a bot.
This place has gotten wild in the last few years. Open stormfront-esque comments without any shame whatsoever. It is absolutely nuts the extent to which bigotry has gotten totally normalized.
I'll be generous and assume you don't read British news and are unaware of the existence of Rotherham.
There was just a big debate in Parliament over an inquiry into the subjects raised.
People hold beliefs based on information they've received from sources they perceive as trustworthy. Maybe the sources they're basing their beliefs on are not so trust worthy or maybe they have a different perspective on events. I'm inclined to say its an issue of trustworthiness because the source is likely news and media and those are created for the sole purpose of pushing specific agendas and narratives.
Do you have any evidence or are you just basing your fears on feelings? Has there been a rise in sex attacks associated with this particular refugee housing?
You should flip through some newspaper archives from when you were a kid. I don’t know where you are, but I can almost certainly guarantee that there were kids attacking people back then too. Just because you and most you know would never have pulled a knife, doesn’t mean that there weren’t those that would. After all, you say the teens today attack old people with knives, but I really don’t think your teen daughters are stabbing people with knives.
How can you reasonably let your teen daughters out alone? Well, be reasonable. Find out if your fears are amped up by sensationalist press. Go meet your refugee neighbours. Quite honestly it sounds like YOU spend too much time inside.
Edit: I just saw your comment about importing men from countries where rape is natural. I can’t imagine that we have the same definition of reasonable.
This is bigotry dressed up as concern. It’s also not something widespread. Seems like you just think immigrants are rapists.
It's interesting how much some of you expect us to ignore gut feelings and statistics to avoid the appearance of bigotry. We should at the very least be able to acknowledge statistical reality then we can debate what is an appropriate response. Hell, I don't even need to know the backgrounds of the immigrants. We know that males engage in almost all the violent/forcible sexual assaults. We know that a lack of community engagement increases the chance for anti-social behavior. We know that access is a prerequisite for interpersonal crime. That itself is enough to warrant heightened concern.
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here in Canada, social service "baby snatchers" have destroyed basic community cohesion and along with many other wildly out of control beurocratic policing forces, such as the spca making having animals a huge liability, litteral special subdivisions, chicken police, horse police, and an enacted rock police to prevent the totaly illegal practice of picking rocks off a beach, but hey it is legal to pack granma into the back of a motor home and drive her to the government canabis store, get her wrecked, and then take her in so she can ask to be euthanized. cant make this shit up as they say.
Wow!
Where I live my neighbors have chickens and one has a horse and they never get hassled, the kids roam through the neighborhood under the age of ten without getting picked up by the authorities (well, one time one got lost and a helpful cop brought him home, but that was the end of it), if your dog wanders off animal control will call you to come pick it up (first time they waive the fee), you can collect shells, rocks, driftwood and seaweed for fertilizer off the beach. We have euthanasia but it is a carefully controlled process that involves multiple independent doctors and a lucid patient, and the supermajority (84%) of people approve of it!
Canada sounds like a terrible place, but you are more than welcome in the country I call home; Canada. Oh wait…
I do feel like we as a society are moving in the direction discussed by the article, as a general trend. But this is not my personal experience. We live in typical suburbs, and we are lucky enough that our street has a bunch of like-minded young families that let their kids play outside. Our street really feels like what you would imagine if you were thinking of a typical street in the 1960s. Kids aged 5 to around 10 playing ball in the street, going in each other's yards/houses, etc. There's a Catholic church less than 1km away, and at 6pm every day the bells ring. All the kids go back to their houses for supper when they hear the bells. It's great.
There's a kid (7-8 years old I think) a few houses down that carries a walkie-talkie with him during the summer. He'll be out for several hours (probably not farther than 10 houses away from his own house), and his mom checks on him every now and then using the walkie-talkie. I'll buy a set for own kids this summer for the exact same purpose.
The only thing I'm kind of scared of are the cars, because they tend to drive too fast (for my taste) and kids tend to not always look when they cross the street when they're too excited playing their games.
Edit: I just remembered that a few years ago, the cops showed up because there was a complaint about our kids being left unsupervised. They were playing in the backyard, which is completely fenced off, while we were inside cooking supper. Our kitchen window faces the yard so we could see them, and the window was open so we could hear them. At least the cops realized that the complaint was BS and didn't even come inside to check for anything. We live in Canada.
Judging by this comment thread, this is just not something HN is capable of having a reasonable discussion on.
I have to keep telling my kids that "this is not the USA", all the things they see or hear are so dominated by USA views and experiences that the kids need to be reminded that this should not be transferred to where we live without consideration. This is a constant effort to review concerns and angst that might arise. E.g. school shootings and metal detectors on school entrances. Sure there are socioeconomic issues around when looking at high schools here but not like that. Personally I think we need to ground ourselves and not get shit crazy or paralysed by fear.