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Nicole Baker's avatar

I believe most of the problems with children not having unsupervised time come from the Boomer generation generally having no idea where their children were (Gen X) and then an overcorrection from the latter. If you were given too much freedom, you know all that a child can get into.

Also, where you live is highly dependent on where you live. I used to live very close to Tacoma, WA. No, I'm not letting my children go unsupervised with high rates of crime, violent and property crime, homeless/drug addiction problems.

2024 is a lot different than it was in the past, depending on geographical location.

We reduce tech usage, as much as possible. My children are also toddler age and below. Around 13/14 was when I was allowed to be unsupervised here and there. But I also grew up in a town of 2000 people and it was in the country, with more cornfields than people.

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Geoff Olynyk's avatar

With all due respect, I have to disagree with the premise of this article. The abduction fear, the “stranger danger”, Paul Bernardo, etc. — most parents know that those worst-case scenarios, while horrifying, aren’t a major risk. Everyone knows most abductions and sexual assaults are committed by men the child knows already. We aren’t really scared of the one-in-a-million abduction, and that isn’t why our kids aren’t out roaming the streets.

In 2024, in the real world of this year as actually lived by parents of small children and tweens, it’s random small assaults and dangerous behaviour. It’s probably 10x what it was in 2018. No, there aren’t stats: when you’re on the streetcar and someone screams at someone and moves threateningly, do you report it to police? These things are never recorded.

(My 10x might be an underestimate — there’s been a documented 524% increase in car theft from 2018-2023 by insurance companies, ie 6.25x higher now than six year ago, and small crimes of incivility have gone up more than the major ones, driven mostly by the drug epidemic…)

Haidt and Rausch have lately pivoted their writing away from just “don’t let your tweens get smartphones” toward understanding the societal infrastructure that lets kids play freely. There’s a reason 5 year olds still go to corner stores alone in Japan. It’s a much bleaker, much harder picture. We have a lot of work to do to bring things back to even where we were in 2018, let alone to a point where we can truly restore the play-based childhood, institute European parenting, etc.

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