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.
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.
I don't really the follow the alleged chain of causality here.
By 2018 parents were already not letting their kids have freedom. It was not "pre-2018: freedom, post-2018: no freedom". After all Lenore Skenazy's Free-Range Parenting dates back to 2008 and she thought it was already completely entrenched by that point. By 2004 kids had already stopped walking to school (a University of Michigan study that year found that only 13% still walked to school). Maryland made it illegal for children under 13 to ever be left alone in 2005.
So any alleged change in anti-social behaviour between 2018-2024 seems irrelevant, since parents were already doing it well before that change would have occurred.
I agree with that. The original “phase 0 of the phone-based childhood” (the end of free play) was done out of ignorance.
I guess I meant it more as what’s preventing us from now correcting the mistake. We know things now that we didn’t in 2018, but the on-the-ground crime and social disorder situation is different from 2018.
I am truly open to having my mind changed about this stuff — to be convinced that nothing is different from 2018 in terms of the safety of letting your kids out in the streets to play. But I do strongly believe that the published headline crime stats aren’t really reflective of what’s going on. Does anybody actually report to police the day-to-day threatening gestures, the leering, the screaming, the just _sense of danger_ on the street? Not really. These things don’t make it into any kind of police blotter anymore, and so aren’t in any kind of “official” statistics.
Sure, I probably agree somewhat with that. We can't turn back the clock. Another thing I point to in these discussions is how cars are just genuinely more dangerous for kids than they were in the 1990s. Bigger cars, pedestrian fatalities at all time highs, distracted driving, etc, subdivision design that encourages driving at 35-40mph in residential areas and makes streets super wide & hard to cross for kids. That alone makes me hesitant to let my kids roam freely.
You could probably add a dozen other similar factors. Maybe no single one is the major reason but they all add up. And that's also why it is so hard to fix.
So spot on. What an irony that our attempts at physical safety are creating a nightmare list of long-term issues for kids - both physical and mental. In becoming a risk adverse society we are missing so much of what it means to be human and alive!
Of my four grandchildren, one has absolutely no fear, and another one is totally risk averse. Guess which one loves to spend as much time as possible on his tablet ?
As my parents had said "if a child is quiet in their room that means that they are doing some mischeif". Cue in my brother being quiet for too long and when my parents checked it out - they saw a feltliner (at that time unwashable) line from paper, through the rug, through the wall, through the cabinet, onto the tv.
I now have to "fight" constant anxieties as my grandma always said "what if [insert worst case scenario, usually ending in death] happens!" whenever we told her about something we were doing or where planning to do. And repeatedly hearing thise thoughts for decades made me start to thibk those thoughts and it sucks. Also, we stopped telling her things (or lied about what we were doing), which makes her angry/sad that we don't tell her things.
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.
*it's highly dependent on where you live edit
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.
I don't really the follow the alleged chain of causality here.
By 2018 parents were already not letting their kids have freedom. It was not "pre-2018: freedom, post-2018: no freedom". After all Lenore Skenazy's Free-Range Parenting dates back to 2008 and she thought it was already completely entrenched by that point. By 2004 kids had already stopped walking to school (a University of Michigan study that year found that only 13% still walked to school). Maryland made it illegal for children under 13 to ever be left alone in 2005.
So any alleged change in anti-social behaviour between 2018-2024 seems irrelevant, since parents were already doing it well before that change would have occurred.
I agree with that. The original “phase 0 of the phone-based childhood” (the end of free play) was done out of ignorance.
I guess I meant it more as what’s preventing us from now correcting the mistake. We know things now that we didn’t in 2018, but the on-the-ground crime and social disorder situation is different from 2018.
I am truly open to having my mind changed about this stuff — to be convinced that nothing is different from 2018 in terms of the safety of letting your kids out in the streets to play. But I do strongly believe that the published headline crime stats aren’t really reflective of what’s going on. Does anybody actually report to police the day-to-day threatening gestures, the leering, the screaming, the just _sense of danger_ on the street? Not really. These things don’t make it into any kind of police blotter anymore, and so aren’t in any kind of “official” statistics.
Sure, I probably agree somewhat with that. We can't turn back the clock. Another thing I point to in these discussions is how cars are just genuinely more dangerous for kids than they were in the 1990s. Bigger cars, pedestrian fatalities at all time highs, distracted driving, etc, subdivision design that encourages driving at 35-40mph in residential areas and makes streets super wide & hard to cross for kids. That alone makes me hesitant to let my kids roam freely.
You could probably add a dozen other similar factors. Maybe no single one is the major reason but they all add up. And that's also why it is so hard to fix.
So spot on. What an irony that our attempts at physical safety are creating a nightmare list of long-term issues for kids - both physical and mental. In becoming a risk adverse society we are missing so much of what it means to be human and alive!
Couldn't agree more with your points here!
I would much rather set my kid loose in the woods than on Youtube.
Of my four grandchildren, one has absolutely no fear, and another one is totally risk averse. Guess which one loves to spend as much time as possible on his tablet ?
As my parents had said "if a child is quiet in their room that means that they are doing some mischeif". Cue in my brother being quiet for too long and when my parents checked it out - they saw a feltliner (at that time unwashable) line from paper, through the rug, through the wall, through the cabinet, onto the tv.
I now have to "fight" constant anxieties as my grandma always said "what if [insert worst case scenario, usually ending in death] happens!" whenever we told her about something we were doing or where planning to do. And repeatedly hearing thise thoughts for decades made me start to thibk those thoughts and it sucks. Also, we stopped telling her things (or lied about what we were doing), which makes her angry/sad that we don't tell her things.