Clive Thompson at Wired has a piece debunking the notion that the time kids are spending so much time on social media that they are losing their social skills:
If kids can’t socialize, who should parents blame? Simple: They should blame themselves. This is the argument advanced in It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, by Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd. Boyd—full disclosure, a friend of mine—has spent a decade interviewing hundreds of teens about their online lives.
What she has found, over and over, is that teenagers would love to socialize face-to-face with their friends. But adult society won’t let them. “Teens aren’t addicted to social media. They’re addicted to each other,” Boyd says. “They’re not allowed to hang out the way you and I did, so they’ve moved it online.”
Kids live in suburbs with very few gathering areas, and the areas that exist aren’t within walking distance of most houses. So you need some kind of wheeled transportation to get to those places. But it’s “too dangerous” for the kids to ride their bikes by themselves, so they’re isolated in their big suburban houses every day after school. In the late 90’s, they used AOL instant messenger, then they transitioned to texting, then Facebook, then Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram. They don’t use those tools because they are some kind of fucked-up devil spawn, but because their opportunities to socialize are limited by car culture and fear.
Botsplainer
And a lot of that fear inspired suburban living in the first place. Fear of other classes and ethnicities, fear of alternative information. It led to even heavier religious and racial polarization due to the urban/suburban divide.
FlipYrWhig
When did kids ever have social skills?
MattF
It’s also true that the mall-rat culture is dying out because the malls are dying out. I hadn’t thought of it before, but, these days, a teen in the ‘burbs is truly stuck in the middle of nowhere
El Tiburon
I agree. Back in high school in the 80s I could spend all day w my girlfriend then talk on the phone w her all that night.
Now in my 40s I’d be happy to never talk on the phone again. But I can text and Facebook all day.
My gripe, and adults do this as much as anyone, including me, is constantly looking at ur smartphone in social settings. But teens can get totally lost in the phones.
JordanRules
Interesting. It’s not immediately ringing true to me. The social media all just seems like an add-on.
Botsplainer
@El Tiburon:
I despise the phone. I have to repeat myself, and even then, the other party will screw up what I said.
MattF
@Botsplainer: And yesterday evening I got a call from a representative of the ‘Global Maintenance Department,’ which wanted, very badly, to fix my PC. I said ‘No thanks’, and later thought of several other things I could have said.
c u n d gulag
Are there no malls?
Are there no video arcades?
Joking aside, when I was growing up in the 70’s in Upstate NY, the tennis courts had lines waiting to play. The baseball fields had guys waiting to play the winners of the last game – the outfield doubled as football fields, in the late fall, and winter..
The basketball courts were mostly empty in the summer – but busy in the fall, spring, and when the snow was cleared, in the winter.
Ponds, in the winter, were used by both figure skaters and hockey players.
I drive by those same places some 35-40 years later, and there’s nobody there!
All of the fields are empty.
I don’t remember the last time I saw anyone playing on the tennis courts.
The ponds are not as frozen, and not frozen for as long as before. And they’re empty, too.
It’s like a teenage neutron bomb went off, and the fields are still there, but the kids are gone.
dpm (dread pirate mistermix)
@Botsplainer:
So it’s only on the phone that repeating yourself is a problem? Because around here it doesn’t seem to bother you.
greennotGreen
Perhaps in general kids aren’t losing their social skills because they spend so much time on the phone or other electronic media, but you’d be hard pressed to prove that looking at my sister’s family. My niece is with her friends 51 weeks of the year, so for one week you’d think she could interact with the people in front of her rather than spend all her time texting. I suspect that while social media may not inhibit social development in most teens, some may be susceptible to harm.
cmorenc
I was long a Luddite and refused to get on-board with texting, but since I finally upgraded to a capable, well-designed smartphone (iPhone 5), I’ve had far more frequent, pleasing, and useful interactions with my two young adult daughters (24 and 29yo respectively), both living considerable distance away (I’m in Raleigh, they’re in D.C. and Colorado) than I ever did when my non-face-to-face interaction was limited to phone calls and email. For short, to the point conversations and coordination, it’s superior to both voice and email – less technical overhead than email, although the latter still works far better for more extended, involved communications, and the voice works better when extended real-time interaction is needed. But for taking instant photos of what we’re each doing or seeing -right now, and providing brief commentary and sending it back and forth, smartphones can’t be beat.
FlipYrWhig
@greennotGreen: teenagers have always been horrible at interacting with the people in front of them. It’s just that now they have a device to make it even easier to suck at it.
Bill E Pilgrim
This makes so much more sense. The Italians were among the earliest adopters of cell phones, first for talking and then all the other ways of interacting on them, sms, emailing, etc, and they’re the most social people I’ve ever experienced. In fact they tend to be in less isolated environments, many in cities in a country where our whole white flight phenomenon never really happened, and they blab and chatter and text on phones non-stop as well as interacting in person.
I guess I’d put it slightly differently, not that the isolation in the US “caused” the social media explosion, but just that kids want to interact socially, and will do it whatever way is available. In other words back before young people in the US were as isolated in the suburbs, if you gave them social media then they would have used it also. But the idea that one replaces the other, that digital is making people less social, is wrong, as shown by cultures where both ways of interacting are booming.
Shawn in ShowMe
This is easy hypothesis to test. Those of you who have moved back to the city from the suburbs, have your kids social skills improved? Or if you don’t have kids, are the ones in your city neighborhood more sociable than the neighborhood you left?
chopper
Doesn’t help that houses are massive estates compared to those of yesteryear, and things like TV and video games are far and away more entertaining for kids. Half the reason I’d hop on the bike and head out around the neighborhood as a kid was because the three crappy channels we had and the atari 2600 could only go so far.
eric
it is all how you use it. my 9 year old daughter just got an itouch and she and i text each other all the time when we are right next to each other because it is is silly. But, what i have noticed is that her langauge skills are more advanced than I hear in conversation because she creates clever turns of phrase. yes, yes….most of the texts are us being silly, but if you think about what you are writing, then there is no better skill than saying exactly what you mean in fewer words. Doing anything unthinkingly is bad, but communicated done well is a gift to nurture.
chopper
@c u n d gulag:
I notice that in my old home town when I visit too. I know some of it is me glorifying the halcyon days of youth but I remember my neighborhood being a sea of kids playing and riding bikes. I guess parents are just too scared to let their kids out if their sight these days.
Three-nineteen
@greennotGreen: When I was a kid, I stuck a book in front of my face to keep from interacting with my relatives. Still do sometimes.
Insomniac
I don’t think it’s so much that kids are losing their social skills, but more that they are socializing with their peers differently than their parents did with theirs.
WereBear
My parents tended to save money in our frequent moves by getting a house out in the middle of nowhere. It lent itself to advancing our imagination and atrophying our social skills.
The real sufferers now are the young ladies from the hermetically sealed environments of fundamentalist religions. They are kept busy with child keeping and household chores and any teen interactions are rigidly monitored. Those who escape… call it that.
the Conster
Social media has been a huge boon to socializing – my brother, a friend, and a couple of family friends who are all olds, don’t participate in FB or any online commenting or texting, and they’re so out of the social stream that when we all get together, there’s a perceptible gap between those of us who are and aren’t on social media. I know what’s going on in my kids and their friends’ lives, and the old folks have been left behind. They hear about things and email things that are months or years old, and have been debunked or meme’d into the ground way before they become aware of it, and it leads to those of us who are up to speed to treat them dismissively. I thought I’d be the last person in America to be on FB, but because I spend so much time alone, it’s been a net positive. If there’s a problem with kids and texting and social media, it’s that it has negatively affected grammar and spelling, and the inability of kids to fully comprehend how a lapse in judgment or an indiscretion posted online can follow you for your natural life – not that it’s affecting socializing skills.
Violet
@c u n d gulag: Some of that is generational. The neighborhood I live in now for awhile didn’t have very many little kids, then eventually the older generation moved on, younger families bought the houses and now there are lots of little kids. The park used to be mostly empty–now it’s used all the time but especially packed on weekends. The tennis court is almost never empty. Neighborhood demographics change.
Schlemizel
I grew up in a city of a couple hundred thousand at the height of the baby boom. My elementary school was only a block away and the 150 or so kids in it lived probably no more than 10 blocks away from that spot. There were 4 other kids my age on the block I lived and another 10-12 that were within a year or two.
I don’t think anything like that exists any more even in the cities. The numbers are not there even in town. We raised our kids in a first rinf burb, we have sidewalks and a neighborhood school of about 400 who mostly are bussed in because they are so scattered. My kids childhood friends were just as scattered but I think that has as much to do with the numbers as the location.
Aimai
@greennotGreen: Why do you think its socially healthy to cut off your daily friends in order to socialize with comparative strangers who happen to be family? Assiciating with your age cohort is really typical in lots of cultures. You have more in common with them. And maybe you are supporting each other through the difficulties of family holidays. Should people stop calling thrir shrink for support too?
chopper
@WereBear:
One thing different today is that suburbs aren’t quite the same – a lot of this effect is in the exurbs, much more the middle of nowhere you describe. In the exurbs you really need a car to get around.
if your kid wants to ride their bike to their friend’s house they have to go two frickin miles and cross a highway.
Violet
Got into this discussion over Christmas with family and friends. How we used to walk home or ride bikes to/from school but now it’s “too dangerous.” I don’t agree with that. I doubt it’s any more dangerous than it used to be, but when things happen they are publicized more and parents get more and more protective.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@Shawn in ShowMe:
We live in the middle of our (medium sized) city, and my son is constantly out at the bike park or the dirt jumps riding with large groups of friends. In the winter he skis, and sometimes in the summer, after gathering carloads of zamboni “snow” he and his friends will ski park at a friend’s house.
David Brooks (not that one)
If Clive Thompson is a personal friend of my colleague danah boyd, why does he spell her name wrong? Maybe some auto-correct software did: I just had to fix this entry by hand, after all..
satby
Well, I have seen this in real life: I have been watching the children of friends raise their children and the refusal to let the little (age appropriate) dears walk even a block without parental supervision is freaking amazing to me. I hear all the time how scary it is “out there”, from 30-somethings in white bread suburbia where crime rates are practically negative values. Point out that crime is at a lower rate than it has been for decades and no one believes that, because the media tells them otherwise. Kids want to be with their peers: it’s a developmental need, not just a social one; and the Fox-NRA contributions to society have broken down way more than our ability to have coherent political discussions.
chopper
@satby:
people in their 40s have had about three decades of ‘stranger danger’ shit and tv stories of kids being taken by child killers in windowless white vans drilled into their heads. It’s a whole generation that’s been scarred by the media and scared into not letting their kids out of their sight.
drew42
I don’t understand this argument at all — are you confusing “suburb” with “rural”? I grew up in a suburban housing development, and had a couple dozen friends who lived within walking distance. We hung out at each others’ homes (playing Atari, then Nintendo) and played backyard sports and driveway basketball all the time. My kids do the same.
WereBear
Precisely. These places were not laid out for the needs of children. And parents have also changed, in that they are not thinking of that, either.
I was astonished as the tales that come back from a friend’s visit to a Florida gated community. The three school-aged children don’t even play in their own yard, such is their parents’ paranoia. And when my friend suggested the children could go over to someone else’s house, to play inside, the parents acted as though they would be thrown to wolves.
And, in addition, they knew none of their neighbors, or anything of their family composition.
I think it is because the kids belong to a wingnut family; this is the world wingnuts live in.
drkrick
@Aimai: That’s kind of a tendetious way of describing his point. It’s not an either/or situation, but if the kids are really entirely passing on the once-a-year opportunity to interact with family as described it’s kind of a shame. Chances are that at least some of those “comparative strangers who happen to be family” will be part of their life long after the daily friends have become distant, if fond, memories. Especially if they bother to build the relationships.
SatanicPanic
This is a great insight. I’d also point out that part of the problem is that teens don’t want to talk to adults, especially adults who treat them like morons. The fact that a teenager is grunting at you doesn’t mean they’re grunting at everyone.
Violet
@chopper: Yep. Without going into too much detail, I had something happen at my school when I was a kid that would definitely make the news today. It happened very close to me, but I was fine, as was the kid who was directly involved. Well, fine physically–it was scary. The principal and assistant principal talked to all of us, and then we all went back to class. No parents were notified. My parents didn’t find out until I mentioned it in passing as an adult and their jaws dropped.
My guess is stuff like that happened way more than anyone knew but because the news media wasn’t notified, letters weren’t sent home from school and the school wasn’t shut down people think it was “safer” then. Uh huh.
I’m not advocating the not-telling-anyone style of dealing with things that schools probably followed back in the dark ages. Just putting it out there as an example of how stuff has always happened; it’s how we deal with it that has changed.
Tripod
The myth of “the suburbs” is as deeply embedded in GenX as “the sixties” is in the Boomers.
It’s self serving bullshit.
The refusal to let youth congregate has a long history, and is based in old people fear, you never know what those kids are up to, what with their baggy pants, and hippin’ and a hoppin’, and tweekin’ and twerkin’….
Redshift
@chopper: Yep. When our friends’ kids were growing up, they wouldn’t let them walk through the neighborhood to visit their friends (“play dates” only), because “it’s so much more dangerous now.” I tried to tell them that really it’s less dangerous (look it up!), but since I didn’t have kids, I couldn’t possibly understand the reality.
I can’t argue that amber alerts and missing children reports are a good thing in the cars where it actually happened, but they have really contributed to the culture of fear. Stranger abduction is and has always been incredibly rare, but because it’s rare, when it happens, it’s news.
Shawn in ShowMe
@GHayduke (formerly lojasmo):
Thanks for the feedback. Anybody else got any city success stories?
Here in the Show Me State, parts of St. Louis city are gentrifying partly because of the influx of county residents. There aren’t many kids in tow, unfortunately, because the St. Louis city schools are a train wreck. College-age hipsters are the youngest people I see, in any significant numbers.
Violet
@greennotGreen:
Some of that is parenting and some is personality. I’ve got kids that age in my family and their parents don’t allow them to spend all their time texting during family get togethers. They’ve never been allowed to watch a ton of TV and are kind of bored by it. They’re great, fun, interesting, smart, well-rounded kids who participate in sports and music and have a lot of friends. They definitely are on Facebook and Twitter, but don’t spend all their time with their noses in their phones when we have family gatherings.
drkrick
@chopper: This is a change I’ve noticed. I grew up in a suburb with a grid street pattern. There lots of routes from any point A to most point B’s. Now it’s all development with one or maybe two entrances dumping traffic on just a few necessarily busy relatively high speed limit streets. It’s a pattern that just doesn’t work well for anything but cars
Citizen_X
@MattF:
Oooohhh. Clever, NSA goons. But not clever enough!
shelly
Is there anything we CAN’T blame on the Suburbs?
satby
@Violet: How we deal with it has changed, but so has the ramping up of nuttiness. Contrast the slaying of children at Newton and the lack of any real attempts to prevent future slaughters with the draconian attempts to control and eliminate “sex offenders”: the definition keeps broadening, the restrictions get wider, and vigilantism is almost encouraged; none of which actually keep children safer. I’ve heard people say crazy sh*t like it would be better if a sex offender killed the victim, the trauma is so insurmountable. But no one recovers from dead, so to me that’s just crazy talk (not to minimize the threat of offenders, just to point out that all that paranoia has not actually made things safer).
Children are at most risk from family and people already known to them, but that’s ugly reality and we need to distract ourselves with scary imaginary boogiemen instead. Crippling entire generations with unreasonable fear.
chopper
@drkrick:
I was lucky, my area was a large unincorporated town full of twisty residential streets. Fantasyland for a kid on a bike. You could go visit anyone without going near a main road.
My wife, OTOH, spent a nice chunk if her youth in a big house on a big lot on a 45mph road commecting two highways, a road which didn’t even have a sidewalk for half its length.
RSR
Atrios is often intrigued by the falling use of cars (and obtaining drivers licenses) by teens and young adults. I wonder about a chicken-and-egg scenario with cars and social media and the details in the study.
Do kids use social media to replace the vehicles they don’t have? Or are they willing to give up having a car or accept less frequent use of a shared family-vehicle, because they can supplement face time with Facetime ™?
And social media use is certainly very prevalent among city kids who live in dense areas and have access to mass transit.
maya
Back in the mid-70s I managed a family apt complex in SoCal. 350 units. It was a newer construction intelligently designed for young families with fairly spacious apts (2-3 bdrs) on a 20acre greenbelt. Two large pools and small playgrounds near every building. 19 in all. There were probably anywhere from 750 (min) to 1000 kids living there at any given time within, in many cases, single parent families. Most tenants worked at the many Ca state jobs that were in large abundance in the general area. Not a welfare park. While this helped to create the infamous “latchkey kid” era, the kids were fine with it because there was never any lack of companionship until mom or dad came home.
There was an elementary school across the street which we provided a major part of its enrollment. I remember the ballfields there always filled with kids playing. Girls softball teams were the major draw. It was always fun to watch their games.I liked that job because it was nice to see all the kids around – Dog, how I hate the idea of Senior Parks – and the best part was that the whole place closed up after about 9 pm every night. Everyone went to bed. (I had previously run an all adult amenities complex of 790 units that was a freakin’ zoo when the sun went down.)
I checked out the place via google earth recently and while the complex is still there it added several more buildings -less greenbelt – and the elementary school has turned into some sort of industrial research park. Have no idea who inhabits those apts now but obviously there are a lot less kids. Demographics have changed all right and I would imagine most of those kids from the 70s have gravitated to the farther burbs with their (probably) smaller families.
It’s a different world all right.
satby
@Violet: And I agree with this: the first people to teach socializing are the parents, and if they don’t enforce basic manners you get kids who don’t have them. My sons were expected to enter a gathering, greet the people there (especially the hosts) and after 5 minutes of “politeness” were allowed to escape to wherever the other kids were lurking. And since they grew up with that expectation, by the time they were teens that 5 “polite minutes” often became brief conversations that everyone enjoyed. Everyone thought I had such nice socialble kids, they were really just well trained.
raven
yo
satby
@raven: OK, which?
Villago Delenda Est
@dpm (dread pirate mistermix):
OK, I LOLd at that.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@raven:
Oy
Redshift
@drew42: There is a lot of variety in suburbs, it’s true. The suburb I grew up in was a lot like the one you describe (though it was the tail end of the baby boom and there were a lot more kids then.) A lot of the newer suburbs and especially exurbs are built with little consideration for anything but cars and big houses. My county has to establish zoning regulations that developments had to have at least two exits to existing radios, because developers were building agglomerations with one link to a highway or major road. If you’re a kid in one of those subdivisions, and your friends don’t live in it, you’re screwed.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@Botsplainer:
Sometimes we do that ourselves, no?
Villago Delenda Est
@Citizen_X:
Well, the guy who called me and told me I had just downloaded malware to my computer had some sort of Indian accent. So the NSA is getting clever!
Bill E Pilgrim
@RSR:I think your last point says it. I don’t think kids use it to “replace” anything.
I think of a youngish Italian colleague, sitting her desk with four or five conversations going on at once, three on the in-house SMS software, one on AOL IM, one on her cell phone, and then an in-person conversation with me all at the same time. Her face time interaction easily matched anyone else I’ve ever known however, coffee breaks, lunch, and so on.
They just want to be social, and will do it all ways at once. If you gave her another form of social interaction, say telepathic chatting with aliens on Omicron Persei 8, she’d do that too.
My point is that though American kids may use social media instead of face time conversation, because it’s all that’s available at least in some cases — they’d also use it even if that weren’t the case. As I wrote earlier, just look at other countries. In-person mingling doesn’t diminish social media, if anything it’s the opposite.
Villago Delenda Est
@drkrick:
I noticed that sort of development in SoCal back in the late 80’s, but it’s spread northward to Oregon, where little burbclaves are isolated from each other by high speed access streets.
Quite different from what was built in the 50’s and 60’s, in the sort of neighborhoods I grew up in.
Bill E Pilgrim
@dpm (dread pirate mistermix): Hah.
WereBear
Remember when the only criteria for a friend was that they were your age and lived next door? As our children grow, friend criteria gets more tailored to personality and common interests. This has only ramped up in the Internet age, where access has hugely expanded.
And Facebook has been a boon to my shut-in husband. While we have friends who come over and he gets occasional outings, Facebook has let him make friends, who share his interests, all over the world.
Villago Delenda Est
@Violet:
The root cause of this is media sensationalism driven by the need to score ratings, which makes it, yet again, all about the benjamins.
I remember one of the Seattle network affiliates back in the 80s running an entire heavily promoted series of alarming reports on “Satanist activity” in the Puget Sound area during…yes, you guessed it, November. A “sweeps” month.
The reports were utterly ridiculous, jumping to conclusions and simply designed to attract eyeballs.
Our media culture is utterly corrupt.
Villago Delenda Est
@chopper:
And we had to get up off the couch, cross the room, and turn a dial to change the channel!
And fight off dinosaurs on the way to and from the teevee!
SatanicPanic
@Villago Delenda Est:
:)
Gex
And often places where kids would hang out are starting to have some stringent rules designed to discourage them from doing so. Mall of America being an example.
jeffreyw
@Villago Delenda Est: I asked the same guy if my computer was contagious with the virus and if it was I would take it out and bury it in the yard. I thanked him for calling and asked him to talk for a while because I was lonely but somewhere along in there he hung up so we didn’t really get to know each other well.
liberal
@El Tiburon: heh. Hanging out now at my sister’s, and my wife gripes that I’m on my phone too much.
WereBear
This holiday period has been an extraordinary window into exactly that.
As the House Geek, I’d have gone to internet-only years ago, as I have a cell phone. But my disabled, shut-in-husband is slow to adapt to such changes. For a while we did “have to” have a local landline phone so his grandmother could call us, but when she passed away the last reason for our current cable bundle vanished with her, as far as I was concerned.
As part of my Conversion Program, his stocking stuffer this year was a Chromecast gadget that would let him watch Hulu & Netflix & Youtube on our bedroom TV when he doesn’t feel well. (Letting him explore these on his Mac was part of my fiendish plan! As well as my own preferred viewing.) I like it very much. We both have iTouch which acts as a remote.
I remember when “television” showed actual documentaries and long term dramas and there were science shows. Now, it’s wall to wall rednecks pillaging storage units and catching fish with their bare hands and lots of the fake Bible scholarship that filled my Southern Baptist youth groups.
Where are the shows we used to watch? They are on Hulu and Netflix and Amazon Prime. My husband discovered that fundamentalist Christian groups have used their tax-free profits to take over whole blocks of cable programming, and filled it with ’50’s reruns and white trash glorification.
My point is that it’s about more than the Benjamins: MythBusters was the Discovery channel’s most popular show ever, and it has been killed because what we’re supposed to discover now is that Noah’s Ark was actually found.
So what we’ve been discussing lately is that they aren’t chasing ratings so much as they are propped-up propaganda channels. He might be ready to join me…
Bill E Pilgrim
@Villago Delenda Est: Oh, we used to dream of havin “channels”. Looxury!
liberal
@chopper: as a parent of kids who are going to be of bike age in a few years, I’m not thrilled about bikes given the number of idiots driving around on their cell phones.
liberal
@drkrick: doesn’t work too well for cars either; too many choke points.
JoyfulA
At age 11, I moved from a small town where I could walk everywhere and socialize with other kids and also with the olds sitting on their front porches to a “suburb” 30 miles closer to my father’s job. Isolation. No sidewalks, closest kid my age a quarter of a mile away, and another one the same distance. School buses, overcrowded to the point of dangerous. Through roads with fast traffic that made biking not a good idea.
So as soon as I could, I moved to Philly, which is much more like the small town of my childhood. Lots of people walking, with places to go.
jefft452
@Redshift: “I tried to tell them that really it’s less dangerous (look it up!), but since I didn’t have kids, I couldn’t possibly understand the reality.”
You are fighting a losing battle there
They don’t restrict their kids movements because of fear of danger, they use fear of danger as an excuse to restrict their kids movements
Case in point – from 1955 to 1965 I must have heard thousands of lectures about “not talking to strangers” “don’t take candy from strangers”, but not one about wearing seatbelts – so unreasonable fear of stranger abduction existed then too
But our parents wanted us out of the house, so out in the fresh air we went, “stranger danger” be damned
Mike in NC
Why won’t all these dern kids just get off my lawn already?
jefft452
@drkrick: “It’s a pattern that just doesn’t work well for anything but cars”
It dosent even work well for cars, block one road with an accident, water main break, etc and the whole thing is bottled up
With a grid you can go around
Ridnik Chrome
@jeffreyw: I got a similar call from some people who claimed to be Microsoft Tech Support. Apparently it’s a pretty common scam. They call you up, tell you there are horrible, bad things wrong with your computer, and try to get you to send them money for “fixing” the problem.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@Botsplainer:
I third this sentiment. The phone is an agonizing chore for me. I prefer interaction in person. Second place is TXT or email or FB. Phone is a distant last place yet some people insist on answering an email by calling me up to converse.
Over the Christmas holiday the weather disaster here caused a mess of ad hoc plans and last minute changes. 4 different families trying to meet up and find places that had power & heat. We kept in touch on the fly in a FB invitation chat thread so everyone knew what was happening simultaneously, in real time. The phone never world have worked for that.
Speaking of phone, I just got a call and suddenly have to go spend 3 days going to Mexico and back. Well, the Sea of Cortez has better weather than Michigan in December, so there’s that.
Violet
@Ridnik Chrome: I got those calls awhile back. As I mentioned here before, I had big fun pretending to be the dumbest computer user ever. “Power button? I don’t see anything called that.” “What’s a browser?” Etc. Thanking them profusely for calling me because I definitely needed help with x, y or z and then pretending to do that thing for awhile as they waited. Eventually the guy hung up on me. I figure the more time of his I waste, the less time he wastes of someone else.
Jewish Steel
I would have never let me do the things I did when I was a kid. I could never have stopped me either.
GregB
@Villago Delenda Est:
Back when I did college security one of the classes was on satanic cults. The instructor pronounced it sa-tonic.
Anyhow, it was one of the biggest loads of self serving bullshit I ever saw. Just really ponderous. Boo, scare, anti-Christ gibberish that shed no light and offered only heat.
I still haven’t recovered from the media hype of killer bees back in the 70’s. Now I hear the killer bees play the knockout game and are working for Columbian druglords and Islamic terrorists.
Ridnik Chrome
And, on topic, I grew up in Chicago in the 70s and early 80s, as a latchkey kid, and most of my friends, who were also latchkey kids, lived on the same block as me. We had no parks anywhere close by, but we did have a very large vacant lot that was directly behind my house. That was usually where we went to play ball. There was also part of the neighborhood that was mostly industrial, and we would sometimes play in the street there. There would be a strike zone spray painted on a factory wall, the batter would stand in front of it, and we would play fast pitch or bounce or fly. Or if nobody else was around I’d go down there with my baseball glove and a spaldeen and spend an hour or two just bouncing the ball off a wall and catching it. I’d make up rules and keep score in my head — if I caught the ball, it was an out, if it got past me it was a base hit, if it went all the way to the other side of the street it was a double, or a triple or whatever. But the neighborhood is completely gentrified now, and you never see kids on the streets there anymore. Also, most of the factories have been torn down and replaced with condos…
greennotGreen
@FlipYrWhig: Yeah, but my niece is 22.
Jamey
Mistermix: Interesting theory about the lack of meeting places and safe transit options.
Are you a parent? Do you live in the suburbs? What’s your experience in this arena?
Tommy
@Jewish Steel: Amen to that. As I read through this tread I think of all the things I did as a kid in the 70s and 80s. I used to blow shit up. Jump off of things. I did things that I am pretty sure now by parents would be put in jail over today. It was amazing. I was told to go “outside.”
Kay (not the front-pager)
@greennotGreen:Ha ha! Like I deigned to communicate with my adult family members when I was a teen back in the dark ages (1960’s). Also I grew up in suburbia at least 5 miles from my friends and didn’t drive, so not much different from the kids in the study. I worked around the problem by climbing out the window at night and walking to their neighborhood. Come to think of it maybe that’s why I fell asleep in French class, not low blood sugar.
Ridnik Chrome
@Tommy: My childhood exactly. And my parents’ childhoods, too. As a kid my mom fell off a garage roof and broke her arm while playing Follow the Leader.
Davis X. Machina
If you made the movie “Stand By Me” today, it’d be eight minutes long.
Tommy
@Jamey: I Live in a very rural area. Heck outside my front door is like a 5,000 acre field. I lived in DC for 15+ years before I moved back here. I am a walker. Got used to that living there. Yesterday I went for a walk. Folks don’t walk around here much. Did yesterday and ran into like a 13 year old girl. She was walking. We talked and walked.
Tommy
@Ridnik Chrome: Heck I feel like I might be getting to the age where I yell “get off my yard.” Not really but I hope you get my point.
I joke there is a bus stop two blocks from my house. Folks, I am not making this up, drive like two blocks to pick up their kids. Two blocks and somehow they can’t walk. As a kid I walked to school each day … about a mile each way.
Ruckus
@Ridnik Chrome:
The answer is to pull a reverse Nigerian scam on them. Tell them to send you money so that you can get to the bank to get a cashiers check to send them money. Say something on the order of $5000. Have to fix the Bentley or some such. Let them know you will be anxiously awaiting the funds so that you can help them out.
Or you can just tell them to fuck off.
Ridnik Chrome
@jefft452: I ran into more than a few creepy strangers when I was growing up (the 70s and early 80s). One time a guy in a car pulled up in front of a lawn where me and some friends were playing football, and asked us if we wanted to make some money helping him with some job or another. I was ready to go with the guy, until my friends stopped me. I still get a chill when I think about it. So the fear was not completely unreasonable…
glory b
My siblings and cousins talk all the time about how our parents would be arrested for neglect today, but we had great childhoods!
We’d go out on weekend and summer mornings and only come back for meals and to go to bed when the streetlights came on. By the way, thus was also an inner city african american neighborhood.
Tommy
@Ruckus: Steven Johnson has an amazing book: Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. My parents didn’t understand me playing video games, but alas not something that didn’t teach me things. Johnson uses an example. In 1970 the most popular show on TV was Green Acres. When he wrote the book, Lost. Compare those two shows and the cogitative thinking that goes into each!
Kay (not the front-pager)
@SatanicPanic: Bingo! Combine adults treating kids like morons and kids thinking adults are morons and you have a perfect storm of non communication.
raven
@Ridnik Chrome: You should have hitchiked around the country in those days.
Tommy
@glory b: What you said. Pretty sure my parents would be in jail in these times for what they let me do. I’d leave my household for the entire day and did shit. I don’t have any kids myself, but I do have this wonderful niece. It pains me she is so protected. I want to yell let her be a kid! She is going to fall down. Bruise her knee. Like we did. Nothing to worry about.
Ruckus
@Tommy:
Lived for a while at a friends in a very wealthy area. Everyday the line to pick up kids at a local high school caused a massive traffic jam. And a huge amount of the cars went 3 blocks and turned into a gated community of multi million dollar homes. The most the kids would have to walk was about a mile. I walk twice that far to the supermarket 2-3 days a week and from the looks of it I live in a very unsavory neighborhood.
Violet
@greennotGreen: Is she an introvert and family gatherings are too much for her so she hides in her phone? That’s the general age that mental illnesses such as schizophrenia tend to appear–any signs of any instability like that? What was she like as a kid? Was she sociable and interacted with others? Is this a new development? Did something happen in her life–breakup, failing at work or school–where she feels down and isolated and embarrassed?
There could be many reasons for her hiding in her phone and not wanting to talk to people that have nothing to do with her being rude and self-centered and have more to do with what’s going on with her.
Ridnik Chrome
@glory b: My neighborhood was mostly working class white and Latino folks, but pretty much the same as yours when it came to how much supervision the kids had. But the older kids would look out for the younger kids (see my post at 88 for an example), and that was pretty much how it worked in every neighborhood…
greennotGreen
@Violet: I think you’ve got it exactly. My brother-in-law is extremely anti-social and spends his time with his nose in a hand-held video game, so my niece and nephew have a role model for this. Yes, keeping in touch with far-away friends over the holidays is great, but it’s not necessary or even appropriate to have a running conversation with them while in a joint activity with other people, family or not. And when my niece isn’t here, my sister will interrupt her dinner or whatever else she’s doing to talk to her or have a text conversation with her. It’s a question of balance.
Social media can be a boon or at least a pleasure, but like anything else, it can be abused.
geg6
I grew up in one of those “idyllic” suburbs during the 60s and 70s. There were tons of kids all around (tail end of the Baby Boom, after all), we rode our bikes everywhere, we walked everywhere (my suburb actually had sidewalks, so it was easy to do), we were outside most of the year as many hours as it was daylight and sometimes well after sunset. We roamed all over, exploring woods and creeks and meadows. It was what everyone in America wanted.
And it fucking sucked. I couldn’t get out fast enough. Why would anyone yearn for that crappy social life? It was horrible and stifling and rigid and gossipy and conventional and uniform. I’m amazed I still had an ounce of rebellion and creativity left in me by the time I fled for my life to college. And I didn’t have to go far, just 35 miles down the road to the city. Best place I ever lived. The second best was a small town that wasn’t completely gentrified, but was quirky and full of life. The love of my life has now forced me to live back in a ‘burb, which I hate. But we’re tentatively talking about getting out of this hellhole and back to a small but quirky town. I’d love to end my days back in the city (and who knows, maybe I will) but I’d love to get back to my beloved New Brighton or another town like it.
As for the idea that today’s kids are somehow all that different from the kid I was or that they don’t socialize well because of social media, that’s the most laughable thing I’ve ever heard. I’ve worked with young adults in post-secondary education for more than twenty years. I may not have kids, but I have two nieces with whom I am very close and 900 kids every year with whom I work every day. These kids are not only socializing more than I evfer did at their ages, but they are smarter, kinder and more intellectually curious than I and any of my friends were when we were young.
In short, the kids are all right.
Tommy
@Ridnik Chrome: There was one thing, maybe two in my household. Dinner was at 5:30 PM. You had to be home and have your hands washed sitting at the kitchen table. The rest of the day, well you were supposed to be out doing stuff.
Ridnik Chrome
@raven: Debby Harry from Blondie has a story about accepting a ride from a guy in New York City, sometime in the early Seventies. Once she got in the car she saw that the guy had removed the inside handles from the door on the passenger side. She only managed to get out by reaching through the window, which was cracked open, and opening the door from the outside. And then she had to jump out of the car while it was moving. Fortunately they weren’t going very fast. Seriously disturbing story…
Another Holocene Human
It’s not just the car culture, the distances (in those house farms, where corn once grew), or the bike bans (which I well remember, my mother had one). It’s the fact that when the kids do congregate, the adult world freaks out. Hooligans! Loiterers! Break it up! You’re up to something, I haven’t figured it out yet, but I will!
I grew up in a burb where you could walk to central locations but the good citizens would call the police unless the congregatory spot was actually in somebody’s house (and then, you’d better keep it fairly discreet).
Yeah.
Another Holocene Human
Come to think of it, that might explain why we spent hour after idle hour playing in the woods.
Monala
@chopper: @Shawn in ShowMe: It’s not just a suburban thing. I grew up in the city, literally next door to a park. We spent so much time playing there as kids that the grass was always worn down.
These days, the grass in that park is lush and full. My mom, who still lives next door, says she never sees kids playing there.
Ruckus
@Tommy:
If you are using the show Green Acres and the idea of cognitive thought in the same sentence I don’t believe you have an understanding of the term.
But yes you have a point.
Demographics has a part to play in this. There were more kids and less to do inside in the 50s-70s, and probably even the 80s. Our parents were more used to being outdoors, many of them grew up without cars in the family. How many of us now have parents that didn’t have a car or two? The media doesn’t help and in fact contributes to the fear. But where I live now few kids get picked up at the local schools and the kids play outside till dinner/dark, like when I was a kid. But this is not an affluent area and I see few kids with their faces in a smartphone.
Violet
@greennotGreen:
Unless there’s an urgent situation like someone’s in the hospital or a disaster, that’s just rude. Sounds like the niece has learned that she’s the center of the universe and her parents will drop everything to pay attention to her when she demands it. No wonder she does what she wants and pays no attention to anyone else’s needs. That’s what she’s learned.
Not all kids and young adults are that way. Sure, they love their phones but they can interact with people of all ages too. Your niece is going to have a steep learning curve when she begins to find out she’s not the center of everyone’s universe.
Another Holocene Human
@geg6:
QFT.
Tommy
@Ridnik Chrome: Sad. I noted in another comment I went for a walk yesterday. Ran into a young lady. 13. She told me she was going to Maple Park (my town has a lot of parks). I was walking that way. She started the conversation with me, but still think she found it strange. I find that sad.
raven
@Ridnik Chrome: Myself and two Rodgers Park buddies hitched from Champaign to West Palm Thanksgiving 1969 for a rock festival. We were in North Florida on A-1-A and got picked up by this fat dude. There was another guy crouched in the back of the station wagon and after while I noticed a couple of rifles. I had just come home from Vietnam so I was a touch on the hyper-vigilant side. The dude pulled off the highway on this unlit road and drove to a weird looking house. He let the other dude out and drove back the highway. My buddies thought it was all sort of funny but I was getting increasingly worried. When he got back on the road he floored it and got up in the plus 80’s. I told him to stop and pull over and he, and my silly ass friends, just laughed and laughed. I finally said I’m counting to three and I’m going to start smashing your fucking face in. He finally pulled over and let us out. He then flew back by as a couple of times and tried to run us down on the side of the road. I’ll never forget telling my one friends mom about what happened. “Thank god you were there”!!!!
Monala
@satby: I understand that fear. We live in a inner-ring suburb that is fairly safe, and compact enough that kids can get around on foot or by bike. I have let my 8-year-old walk or ride her bike to visit friends within a 3-block radius, and her friends’ parents and I have let them walk or ride as a group to the nearby 7-11 or Baskin-Robbins.
And every time I do, I freak out a little bit once she’s out of my sight. I know that it’s unlikely that something will happen to her, but if it did, I could never forgive myself.
FYI – my little suburb applied for and received a federal “Safe Routes to School” grant and has been adding sidewalks and other features to help kids walk in the community more safely.
Ridnik Chrome
@geg6: There was a lot of stuff I hated about the time and place where I grew up, too. It was violent, for one thing. There were street gangs, not so much on my block, but on most of the surrounding blocks. And the general lack of supervision meant that kids were free to do a lot of evil shit to each other, too.
Another Holocene Human
@Violet: I prefer the term “rude awakening” as in people will literally be rude to her “for no reason” until she finally figures out that when you need something from somebody you need to give them a little sugar first.
I have a coworker who calls you when SHE needs something, and gets around to answering you, rolling her eyes, when YOU need something. I only find it mildly annoying–in fact, with her small stature and the kind of (human) animals she has to deal with on her job, I feel kind of relieved she has an enormous attitude (but not a “let’s pick a fight” attitude, that would be terrible–it’s more a “my boundaries are made of six inch steel” attitude). However, some other people on the job have now made it their mission in life to say “NO” to any request she makes, no matter how justified. (And they’re pissing me off because that personal shit has no place on the job. Yet I am a bit amused by the instant karma. Someday she’ll catch on that some mild ass-kissing is a useful survival skill.)
? Martin
@Villago Delenda Est:
There’s a balance, and a lot of developers get it wrong. My burbclave is sort of the standard by which all burbclaves are modeled as it was one of the first and remains one of the largest (10,000 homes). It was conceived in the 70s and is almost fully self-contained. We have our own schools, our own pools and parks, our own stores, etc. But the developers devoted a LOT more acreage to recreation/socializing than the grid I grew up in which was developed postwar. There’s a dollar theater that the kids and families flock to (seriously, saturday night they sell out most shows), there are mom and pop toy stores and candy stores. There are family restaurants, and taekwondo schools, and tutoring and dance and music and art studios all within easy walking distance (no street crossings) as well as a boys and girls club, lots of sports fields. Everyone has a community pool within 100 yards of their house. It’s legitimately easy for kids to get to each other and some things to do. It’s not perfect, but there’s a LOT of people out and about all the time.
But what I’ve noticed is that kids interests remain ahead of what we have. We have lots of lit and well maintained baseball fields but no skateboard park (lots of skateboarding here). Bikes have held up okay, but we have a lot of surfing and skiing – and those aren’t walking distance. Lots of kids come up in tech households (Blizzard is just down the road, among many others) so there’s a lot of interest in electronics and programming but no place really for them to do that socially other than the schools. Movies have held up as an activity but only because the theater is so cheap. Put a regular theater there, and kids can’t afford the $12.50 to see a movie they could just as easily get off of the internet – and $12.50 is too high a cost for a few hours of socializing.
The schools largely remain the center of social activity, and ours has held up pretty well, but a lot of the ones around here haven’t. They’ve cut music and sports programs, dances, and other extracurricular activities. Those are really important and I’m thankful my son’s school still does all of that. Academics is very important here, and that cuts into a lot of the social time. Most of the kids have 2-3 hours of homework or practice per night, so there’s not a lot of time for after school social activity unless it’s related to school. Football games are therefore important social events. So are dances and other things on Friday nights and weekends. I think the academics have pushed out a lot of the dating culture here – there’s very little of it. The marching band pushes the members to go to the dances and other social events and the drum majors operate at matchmakers – they put a couple together that they see get along well so the pressure of finding a date to the dance is off everyone – and your only obligation is to make sure your date doesn’t feel excluded. It’s a very different social dynamic than I had as a kid.
So we have most of the opportunities, and kids do take advantage of them if provided, but social relationships are much different. School is #1 always. Not a lot of time for best friends and girlfriends so social groups tend to be looser and more resilient to someone having to back out in order to complete an assignment or study for the SATs. And I think that as much as the structure of neighborhoods has contributed to the changes in how they socialize. And social media is quite simply complimentary to that need for looser and more resilient social structures. Physical meetups require a commitment that adds stress and rigidity that a lot of kids just don’t have a lot of room for. Now that may point to an entirely different problem, but it’s a problem that is beyond their ability to solve. College is increasingly important and seats at good colleges are increasingly rare. Econ 101 says that parents are going to push their kids out of the kinds of social structures we were afforded as kids.
Tommy
@raven: I’ve done a lot of strange things in my life. Hitching a ride is not one of them.
BTW: What rock concert did you attend? I was born in 1969 and I have traveled large parts of this nation to see a band play.
geg6
@Tommy:
I think she only found it strange because, as you mentioned, people don’t walk where you live and she didn’t know you, which means she’d been brought up to think you were a probably predator.
I only moved to my current home about five years ago. It’s like that here. Nobody knows or interacts with their neighbors and nobody walks (there are not sidewalks, so it’s not easy). But my previous place of residence, a small town, was a place where you knew, at least, the faces of everyone in town, if not their names. Kids talked to me on my daily walks around town and I saw tons of kids outside playing, weather permitting. It’s all about the norm where you live. To her, you were an anomaly. As she was to you.
KG
We moved to a wealthy OC town when I was starting junior high, early 90s. Met a friend or two on the bus. We would ride our bikes a couple miles to the nearest pizza place. Then California passed the stupid kids helmet law and I stopped riding my bike. Then I hit high school and between karate, water polo, and swimming, I didn’t have a whole lot of hanging out time. Most of my friends were my team mates, we were pretty well spread out but by 16 most all of us got cars (wealthy area, but nobody got brand new cars), and then we were off and running. Oh, and a few of us had beepers
Monala
@SatanicPanic: Interesting point. My dad died when I was 16. I used to be really embarrassed when friends came over, because he was always trying to engage them in conversations about politics or social issues. (Note: he was not a wingnut – so these were just conversations, not diatribes). Anyway, I always assumed my friends thought he was weird.
About a year after he died, one of my friends said, “I really miss your dad. He always talked to me like I was an adult, not a kid.” My other friends who were present said they agreed with her.
Ruckus
@Another Holocene Human:
My mom’s bike rule was one mile. I believe I violated that almost every day. Some days by 20-30 miles. If something broke or I had a flat I had to fix it. No phone to call to come get me and of course I wouldn’t have called anyway.
@geg6:
I agree that kids are as OK as ever. We had very social kids, we had introverts. We had smart kids, we had dumb kids. We had early and late bloomers. We had jocks and not jocks. We had studious and fuck offs. I doubt that is any different. As for kids being smarter in general, I doubt that. Being more informed, sure, but able to think better as a group? I doubt it. We’re human, we don’t change/evolve that rapidly.
Monala
@Redshift: The Amber alerts I have actually heard have almost always been a non-custodial parent taking off with the kids.
Another Holocene Human
@Tommy: Sad? I still remember my teenage conversations with strange men. Wanting to be treated like an equal, scared about something bad happening, skeeved out when it circles back around to my putative sexual availability/desirability.
I was 13 and walking to the park once and an elderly female neighbor who I didn’t know recognized me, knew my name–now, that isn’t so odd to me now but I was totally flustered then. My parents had few friends in the neighborhood so the thought that the neighbors were watching and keeping tabs was kind of unsettling. (I didn’t feel looked-out-for because shit was going on and they’d done nothing, not that the shit in question was always visible from the street. However, in retrospect that might have been a welfare check and I didn’t realize it.)
WereBear
As a very early teen, I used to ride my bike through my partially developed development: roads through the palmetto wilderness, basically. Miles and miles.
Then this twenty-something guy showed up in a station wagon, chatting with all the tween-age girls. Something about him scared me so badly I never went out there again.
And a good thing, too. Children has self-defense mechanisms; if “obedience to authority” hasn’t messed them up.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
When I was a suburban kid, my friends and I thought my parents were the most overprotective, annoying parents EVAH! and yet I was still allowed to bike or walk wherever I wanted. As a young teenager, I was even allowed to take the train to downtown Chicago to meet my friends and hang out. Of course, we were all nerds whose idea of an awesome time in the city was going to the Art Institute, so my parents knew there wasn’t that much to worry about.
But, as other people have said, that had at least something to do with the layout of our town — yes, there were a couple of busy streets, but it was very easy to take side streets either walking or on your bike to get anywhere but the mall. (Weirdly, the mall was hard to get to without a car.)
Also, I feel like my mom and I have gotten closer now that she’s discovered texting – we can send short messages whenever we want to keep in touch and she doesn’t feel like I don’t care because I don’t call. Texting rules.
Another Holocene Human
@Ruckus: Let me tell you about a little environmental contaminant called Plumbum. You may know it as Lead….
Also, too, additionally: IQs are rising worldwide. It may be due to universal education. Anyway, training that brain does have an effect! That’s because children have a high degree of neural plasticity. They may lose the potential to hunt antelope in the bush with the best of them due to this process, but developing good social skills, high openness, and working on that frontal lobe stuff will prepare them for today’s world. A safer, more peaceful, and hopefully kinder world.
? Martin
@Monala:
John Walsh did a lot of unintentional damage to this country. He was well intentioned, but that kind of concentrated laser-focus on bad acts that the media jumped onto freaked everyone the fuck out.
Another Holocene Human
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): What Metra line were you on?
geg6
@Another Holocene Human:
This.
greennotGreen
@Violet: Yes, I’m afraid you’re right about the rude awakening.
Please don’t anyone think I’m dissing young people! I work with people in their early twenties on a regular basis, and most know that a $105/hour training session is no place for a phone, but I have run into students who have trouble putting it down. The smart phone is a blessing for most people, a black hole for others.
greennotGreen
Oh, and speaking of black hole, I have work to do, so I’m leaving the keyboard now!
Tommy
@Another Holocene Human: I know most kids in my area. I try to know them, I want their parents to know I got their back.. I didn’t know this young lady. I put a TARDIS on my front door the other day. Kids come up and ask about it. Not trying to reach out to kids.
WereBear
And you know what? I never blamed him… because the amazingly unlikely had actually happened to him.
That takes a decade or so to process.
geg6
@? Martin:
And this, too. He played out his own personal drama on teevee for how many years and was one of the catalysts for all this stupid crime paranoia we see today. Crime is decreasing at an unprecedented rate for modern times. I have concluded that many parents have a sort of mass mental illness that has led to all this overprotective garbage and helicopter parenting and hysteria about crime. Actual evidence does not penetrate with these people, much like it does not penetrate with my brother who suffers from a severe bipolar disorder.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@WereBear:
Yep. I had a guy drive up to me one time and offer me a ride. He claimed he was a friend of one of my brothers, but I was getting a weird vibe from him and I knew that brother had some sketchy friends, so I said no.
When I was in grade school, a small group of us liked to hang out with our bus driver, who was a young guy (probably in his early to mid-20s as I remember it from my 8-year-old perspective). As far as I know, it was all totally innocent on everyone’s part, but the poor guy would probably be arrested or fired today.
Another Holocene Human
@? Martin: I doubt it was John Walsh. More likely it was the plummet in birth rates. It places much more value on each individual child. For the parent and society.
My mother has horror story after horror story of lightly-supervised boomer kids killed in accidents in the 1950s (she was nearly one–poured herself a glass of bleach out of a milk jug being used as a bleach container at her cousins’ house, apparently never noticed the odor?). Never once in those stories did the police get involved. Today they send parents to jail for less. (And I don’t think it’s jail motivating the parents–they’re very attached to their children, unlike parents in times when infant mortality was high and attachment was withheld for fear of losing the ability to function when the child died.)
A young Florida mother was putting a load of laundry in when her 3 year old child escaped from the trailer home, did a runner for the gate, unlocked the gate and went into the retention pond on the other side and drowned. They took her to jail, do not pass GO.
I’ve supervised many a 3 year old in my day and I think that was wrong, but being poor might as well be a crime here.
More notorious is the case not in Florida where parents were accused of shaking their baby when in fact their toddler died of a traumatic brain injury. The kid jumped off of a sofa and his head hit the side of a coffee table (granted, I wouldn’t have had a table like that in a house with kids but not every parent makes that choice). It was an accident but the prosecutor pulled in some fake experts to testify it was Shaken Baby Syndrome. There are people who shake babies to death (at least that’s what they say they did, no proof they didn’t do something worse). I mean it’s plausible with that spinal cord only protected by cartilage that you could cause an aneurysm, or you could cause brain trauma if it’s violent enough. HOWEVER, there are no scientific diagnostic criteria for this condition so once again we run into legal pseudoscience, which is a great way to throw the innocent in prison (and relieve the guilty of culpability–oh, Bobo just shook the baby, he didn’t know any better, he didn’t repeatedly slam the baby’s head against the floor trying to kill it).
Dave
Man, this NAILED my childhood.
When my friends lived within a reasonable distance of me, I played with them almost every day. And sure, we played video games plenty, but we also went outside a lot.
When they lived further away, separated by winding roads with no sidewalks or shoulders, the only chances I had to see them were in school or if a parent drove us.
What was I going to do? It was the mid-to-late 90’s, so of course, I was on the Internet a lot.
Violet
@greennotGreen: Smartphones, like any technology or any anything, really, can exacerbate issues that were there already. Someone’s an introvert? Smartphone really helps them keep from interacting with people. Someone’s self-centered? Grab the phone and interrupt whatever else is happening. Etc. They’re a tool, not the problem.
Definitely agree that the kids are alright.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Another Holocene Human:
I had to look it up, because all I remembered was “the one in our town.” It was Milwaukee District/North (MD-N) — dark orange.
Ruckus
@Another Holocene Human:
I don’t disagree with this I just think that overall kids really still are kids. In some ways they have more chances today than in my day and in some ways less. But if you took yesterdays kids(us!) and set them down today they would adapt like kids of today have. And vice versa. We are a product of our times. For example science and medicine have both changed from when we were kids. A kid today has a better chance of learning more about either than you or I did as kids because the world has changed. I don’t think the kids ability to see that and understand it has changed. I am talking in general. Do kids have a larger, more educationally challenging world than we did? Sure. But so did we over our parents/grandparents. Do you think you were smarter than them?
gvg
I grew up in a suburb. It was loads better than the countryside my parents up in which both found very lonely. They made the deliberate choice to live in a neighborhood for me 60’s thru about 79. We had sidewalks, lots of kids, I rode a bus to school and walked to High school which was actually closer.
No city we lived in would have been more kid friendly. Apartment complexes might be. However as an adult I’ve noticed not all suburb neighborhoods are equal. Kids don’t seem to be as thick on the ground but better here in florida than up north in the midwest relatives area’s which have actually lost population.
Gainesville is much better than Orlando where I grew up for kids. Parks here get voted tax increases and are full of kids both poor and rich. Schools are OK. Orlando was always stingy on paying for things like parks.
My sister and I moved to the country 7 years ago. It suited us. then we fostered and adopted. Kid is in kindegarten and friends parents have never had time to bring their kids out, it’s always us that go to town. Not neighborhood or sidewalks. We intend to move into town as soon as we can but this last year health issues ate up all our time.
Modern road development is not conducive to kids freedom. Stranger danger may be overstated but getting hit by cars is a real danger. I actually was hit by a car as a kid on my way to summer band camp so maybe that’s why I notice the lousy designed neighborhoods….but they aren’t all equally bad even in one city. I don’t know about the study conclusions….might be too broad and not always be equally valid. I’m sure though that designs could be smarter if people generally knew to care.
raven
@Tommy: 1969 Palm Beach Pop Festival Stones, Janis, Johnny Winter, Chambers and many more. Cold and wet but killer gig.
We thumbed everywhere in those days. I hitched all over the west coast and Arizona as well as NYC up to Boston and New Hampshire. I have some crazy stories about that shit.
WereBear
A wonderful guide to the World-Before-Us is Diana Serra Cary and her books on the Child Star Phenomenon.
Between tribes coming together in agricultural civilization, to around the 1900’s, there was incredibly high child mortality. Imagine a modern family having a 30-50% infant mortality rate. We might have noticed the maternal mental health status if she hadn’t died giving birth to yet another child.
My own father grew up pre-antibiotics/vaccinations/public health. They used to do things like play with farm machinery (you didn’t need those limbs anyway!) and jump into haylofts without checking for pitchforks. No wonder my parents let us ride our bikes until dark.
raven
I also hitched up from Ft Lewis to the Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair over Labor Day weekend, 1968. It was a month before I shipped out, dosed up and rocked out at the first multi-day, multi-band festival. It was a year before Woodstock.
Villago Delenda Est
@WereBear:
Walsh had a valid point in that it was easier to trace an automobile that was missing than it was to trace a child.
Because things that can be monetized are FAR MORE IMPORTANT than actual human beings in this fucked up Mammon worshiping society of ours.
? Martin
@geg6:
That’s half of it. The other half is that income inequality has made growing up a much more high stakes game than it was. If you don’t get that college degree, you’re pretty fucked. And because of that, parents not only don’t want their kids to fuck it up, but the rules to get into that good college are utterly opaque – particularly to a teenager, so mom and dad feel like they need to keep their foot in there all the way to the end. And if you do fuck it up, we afford fewer options for recovery. That used to be the heart of the American Way – that was what ‘land of opportunity’ meant – the opportunity to fail and be able to recover. That’s not what it used to be.
raven
@? Martin: That’s right, you could get kicked out of high school, go to Vietnam, come home and take 10 years to get a degree and rock the fuck on.
Ruckus
@WereBear:
I grew up pre-antibiotics/vaccinations/public health like it is today. And because many of us have discussed our ages, I know that many of the rest of us did as well. We also grew up with lead paint, lead in gasoline, smog that would choke any living thing, cars without seat belts, guns/hunting, roads without sidewalks, cars with crappy tires/brakes/no air bags, need I go on? Kids were different, so were adults, so was the world. We know more, kids know more, are we smarter? We as generations may have screwed up the world but we also helped to fix some of it. And by our own stories we have shown that our worlds are still screwed up, just differently than they were. Will our kids generation make things better? Their kids? I hope so and I want them to, but I won’t be around to know.
srv
Society is moving more and more towards virtual entertainment. The trend is social & economically based (virutal is cheaper than reality). Social kds will remain social in new ways, unsocial kids will have new ways to be social or unsocial.
In a few years, you will give your niece her “First iDevice” and she’ll pick a variety of real and imaginary (bots) friends to interatact with like they pick skins.
raven
@Ruckus: And lead poisoning from those AK’s!
David in NY
I am so glad we raised our kids in New York City. They had the internet (10 to 20 years ago), but most importantly they had the subway. After about age 12, they could go pretty much anywhere they wanted to.
WereBear
@? Martin: True, except that frankly, it wasn’t that forgiving with those famous “minorities.” I had a classmate who came from a low-income family, (like me) and got shepherded to a National Merit scholarship because he made good grades (like me.)
I got dumped on a community college and he went to an Ivy school on a full scholarship.
But he had a Y chromosome, and I didn’t.
Another Holocene Human
@Violet:
People knew. They just didn’t like to think about it. Or they thought it was just a hazard of having lots of kids around. Read some sociology or criminology from the 50s/60s. Actually, things were getting way worse real fast but the profession thought it was just a factor of the baby boom cranking up. And I think people still believed the myth about cities causing crime (rather than cities make crime easier to stop, because there are more witnesses, more police, and less places to hide), so rapid industrialization was still to blame in the public consciousness (it had been blamed for the late 19th century crime spike, after all).
Everything changed when the baby boom echo failed to initiate a massive crime wave. All the models were … wrong.
MikeJ
I remember reading a developer saying that they go out of their way to have an elementary school in every new development they build, but they would rather have a prison than a high school.
Ruckus
@raven:
And punji sticks, and friendly fire….. hell even just waiting for that letter giving you a who gives a fuck attitude could be dangerous.
Yea I left off a few things. Going for the more universal american growing up life, not the male 17-22 year old experience of the 60-70s. Even though that was about as real as it gets for those of us so equipped.
raven
@Ruckus: :)
raven
They’re depraved on accounta they deprived. . .
realbtl
@raven:
Um, Monterrey Pop Festival, 3 days and definitely multiple bands.
raven
@realbtl:
“Quick question: Where was America’s first outdoor, multiday hippie rock festival on an undeveloped site?
If you answered “Woodstock,” you’re wrong. It was in Snohomish County.”
realbtl
@raven:
Ah, you didn’t mention “undeveloped” in your first post. Monterrey was held at the county fairgrounds. :)
Another Holocene Human
@gvg: Gainesville, Florida is very special in terms of layout and population density. It’s one of the densest and most walkable cities in the entire Southeast. There used to be a phosphor mining industry and then there were chicken rendering plants and of course there was Rosewood and all those refugees. There are still hundreds of homes that were built by hand by the people who lived in them generations ago and land use patterns that have been anathema since the 1950s at least.
Dig into American Community Survey sometime and compare how Hogtown commutes compared to other Florida cities. Quite instructive.
As for voting for parks, I suspect it’s one of those ‘uplift’ things that the university-connected bigwigs who run this damn town vote for because they perceive it as money spent on themselves. Which it often is… many of these “public parks” are only accessible via private property.
http://www.cityofgainesville.org/RESIDENT/ParksRecreationCulturalAffairs/tabid/415/Default.aspx
Although they did built Kone park, I’ll give them that.
Ruckus
@Another Holocene Human:
Every once in a while the semi smart ones throw a little something
toat us underlings to keep the sharp pikes and axes at bay.Another Holocene Human
@Ruckus:
What do you mean by smarter? I know we got a better education than my mother did, growing up in Oklahoma in the 50s and 60s. That’s just an objective fact. She threw in the towel trying to help us with math homework in junior high.
My mother is no dummy but she has emotional problems she’s never addressed that pretty much run her life (and ours, until we escaped). No one person can figure out everything in one lifetime, that’s why humans pass knowledge on.
It takes a totally different cognitive toolbag to deal with a scientific world than an authoritarian religious one, for one thing.
Why do you think the holy rollers fought the introduction of “critical thinking skills” into elementary curricula in the 70s and 80s with such ferocity?
PS: my elementary school was big on sensitivity training (about other cultures, disabilities, etc), not to mention it was culturally heterogenous and we learned to celebrate our differences; my mother went to a school where race and religion were battlefields, most of what she knew about ‘the jews’ came from her racist mom, and her history class was taught by a Southern Baptist of the “The King’s English was good enough for Jesus and it’s good enough for me” school.
FlipYrWhig
@Another Holocene Human:
Or watch Rebel Without a Cause or West Side Story. Juvenile delinquents, the lot of ’em!
Another Holocene Human
@Ruckus: That’s precisely it. As long as I’ve lived here there’s always been One (1) of Teh Blackseses on the City Commission and One (1) on the County Commission. Note: County Commission seats are all At-Large. It is to appease the hordes who might suspect they are being ripped off otherwise. (Note: said hordes are not actually fooled, but are pleased to let you think you got the better half of the deal, since one seat is better than zero, the prior status
crowquo.)raven
@FlipYrWhig: Yea cuz all the gang banger pranced around like Russ Tamblyn. Try the Wanderers.
schrodinger's cat
Caturday thread needs Caturday Kittehs.
cckids
@Violet:
Another factor is that, even if the media was notified, it usually just hit the local papers/TV (depending on the year). Now, it is nationwide, if not farther, 24/7 on some channels. It magnifies the fear, makes it seem more prevalent than it is.
I found out, as an adult, that a neighbor girl had been raped, repeatedly, as a young teenager, by a father on our street who she babysat for. Who myself & my sisters also babysat for. When her parents found out, they didn’t call the police, they didn’t even tell other parents of girls who were in the guy’s house regularly. And her mother was my mother’s best friend.
Ruckus
@Another Holocene Human:
You just described my mom, only different. But that isn’t what my argument is about. The question started about social media and ran right into being about smarts. Being smarter is not about knowing stuff it’s about understanding stuff. I went to school with kids who could study a math book and do the equations. But ask them to explain the theories? That blank stare looked like the undead on a bender. Understanding things so you can improve(or not) things is smart, knowing how to use a smart phone is like learning to type. We all seem to do that to some degree, we’re here. But how many of us can actually write, put words together in a pleasing manner? That old people don’t want to learn new things is nothing that has not happened for eons, that kids will learn new things that olds didn’t know is not any younger. But the question was are kids smarter? Can they find better answers, can they use the information better? And I don’t think so. There are many things that have changed in our lifetimes and there are more than in lifetimes before ours. And I suspect there will be more changes in the next generations to come but that is not smarts, that is change.
geg6
@? Martin:
There is some truth in this, but I think some of it is college anxiety and some of it is simply hyped up hysteria. College guarantees nothing and the trades are still fine ways to make a very lucrative living. I think all the emphasis on college is stupid and is one of the many things that have created this insane economy we live in in the US today. You can be quite successful without a college degree. Now, post-secondary education may still be required, but it doesn’t have to lead to a degree. As a financial aid officer, I see students every day who would be much more suited to something that requires the specialized skills that a vocational program or technical program build. And I see them and their parents paying ridiculous amounts of money for a degree for which the student really doesn’t have the interest or aptitude in. This is especially true with my students on the lower economic scales. They’ve been told that they will never get out of the grinding life of poverty or working class status if they don’t go to college. So they drain themselves, their parents (and often they are single parents) and their grandparents of all of their assets and credit to get that degree. Many get lackluster grades (whether because they aren’t that interested or inability or immaturity or their cash-starved high schools’ preparation or all of these) or flunk out. Of course, there are many who also succeed, but the ones who don’t aren’t stupid or they wouldn’t have been accepted at my institution. So that tells me they could have found some other calling in life (and many will) that would be just as likely to lead to a job or building a successful business (or even more likely in lot of those cases) as a college degree and that would have cost a lot less.
And let me be clear, I see plenty of upper middle and upper class kids who should pursue things other than a college degree. But I really don’t concern myself with them because it’s not hurting anyone if their parents want to waste their money.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@cckids:
In those days, though, the question probably would have been Why did this slutty slut seduce the neighbor’s husband? rather than an investigation into the crime, so unfortunately I’m not that surprised the girl’s parents decided to keep quiet. It was also in the days before people realized that predators like that will attack multiple vulnerable victims, so they probably figured the other girls were safe.
Not really defending them, just pointing out that times have changed and they were ignorant.
Aimai
@Violet: whats with the hate for the niece? You dont have a reason to believe *she* is behind her mother or father’s behavior. The mother may be keeping the niece on a short leash when the mother interrupts grown up dinner to text her own daughter. Maybe the niece finds that useful, or intrusive, but she isnt responsible for what the mother does at dinner.
karen
I was born in 1965 which makes me a Baby Buster or Generation Xer. I grew up in Queens and lived there until I was 11. I lived in a garden apartment and all the kids played alone in the court. I could walk to someone’s house several courts away, cross the street and all the kids in the neighborhood hung out with each other. Our parents had BBQs and the kids played in the court while the parents played volleyball. My sister and I walked to the store and to the playground ourselves. My mom could look from her bedroom window and check on us but she wasn’t watching us the whole time.
I don’t have kids so I’m sure I’ll be told I don’t know what I’m talking about but it seems like there are more helicopter parents. Maybe it’s more dangerous now but I was taking the bus with my friends to go to the movies when I was 9 and 10 and this was in Queens, NY. If kids did that now the parent would be accused of child abuse. I think that the kids love social media because it’s the one place that they can congregate on their own without their mother hovering over them. I think parents should be active in their child’s life. But independence is an important trait for a child to have and I don’t think they are. *ducks from the tomatoes being thrown at her*
aimai
@karen: I was born in 1960, grew up in a walkable community, and travelled all over by foot. I went to a local public school and all my friends and I walked to school and back every day together, and played together as much as we were allowed to. Weekends were considered “family time” and people stayed home with their families. I am raising two kids in the exact same neighborhood. The one difference is that they went to a private school that was across several enormously busy streets and which would have been a 40 minute walk away. So I ended up driving them every day and their friends ended up living all over the place so they never had playdates unless the other mothers and I arranged them and made them happen. There are very few kids on our street and when they were little there was basically no street life on the street. Its a pleasant , safe, place but its not like you’d bump into anyone for blocks if your five year old was out by herself.
Years ago this neighborhood was filled with enormous italian and irish families. The same houses that are filled with two income no kids people, or elderly grandparents, are now empty of children where they used to cram 9 or 12 into the top floor apartment. People literally couldn’t stay indoors in those days because the bedrooms were like dormitories. Privacy and personal space was something you found outside the home. And the streets were safe because, as Jane Jacobs would say, there were “eyes on the street”–in fact everyone was on the street. Mothers were at home, neighbors minded each others business.
Things are different. They aren’t worse or better, they are just different. I wish we’d stop blaming either children or parents for these things.
ETA: this is linked to Karen’s post not because I disagree, exactly–I agree that kids need to be independent and etc.. But because I had the same upbringing in the same neighborhood as my children and yet their lives are different. And one reason their lives are different is that they don’t have a gang of friends, like I did, who live next door and can go with them places. There was safety in numbers that no longer exists for kids who must travel, largely alone, in communities where there just isn’t a critical mass of kids.
I should add that when they hit highschool both my daughters headed off to school in a neighboring city, getting themselves in and out on public transportation and taking care of everything w/r/t that very competently. What you do at 9 doesn’t determine what you do at 15. Nor should it.
? Martin
@geg6:
I don’t think you’re acknowledging just how competitive universities have become. This isn’t the average suburban kid here struggling to get in. Our median admitted student 5 years ago wouldn’t get in today – at a public university most people have never heard of. I’m turning down straight A students because we simply don’t have the seats. That’s new and maybe that’s just Cali, but that’s worthy of legitimate anxiety.
James E Powell
I teach high school in the city – not the ‘hood but definitely the city. My students are almost constantly on their phones. Even when they are sitting together eating lunch, they have one eye and one hand on the phone. I don’t know what or why, but it isn’t suburban living.
aimai
@? Martin: I agree with you, Martin. And I’d also like to say that just because the rat race has gotten worse, and the stakes have gotten higher, and the rewards arent’ guaranteed, doesn’t mean that people who are gambling that a college degree is a better bet than no college degree are stupid or misled. Its basically the only game in town. Trade schools cost money, too. There aren’t as many of them as there were. And they pay off is not any more certain. Sure, ideally, a plumber or an electrician can make a lot of money in some locations at some times. But he or she doesn’t (necessarily) make more money more securely than an accountant or a doctor or lawyer. The recession and the economic crash have crushed lots of people–but the trades are included in that as well as college graduates. Parents and students are taking an enormous gamble but they are choosing to pay to play, basically.
Fair Economist
@gvg:
This is my concern. I’m not suckered in by the stranger danger nonsense, but traffic is a real and very serious danger. I live in a 220-house gated community but just beyond the gate is a six-lane boulevard with traffic going 50 mph and, in places, sidewalks so narrow people walking opposite ways literally have to turn sideways to get past each other. One small rock and my skateboarding son is a statistic.
When I was a kid I was allowed and even encouraged to walk unsupervised over a mile to a friend’s house as young as age 4. However, cars weren’t a danger because it was on trails and sleepy culdesacs. When my nephew was being raised in the same house – still safe from traffic, he wasn’t allowed to go anywhere without supervision. My brother and his wife, sadly, have been sucked into the stranger danger/house invasion nonsense spewed by TV. When I visited recently he showed me the guns he keeps *loaded and unlocked* next to his bed and discussed his various fantasies of repelling house invaders. I tried to get across how incredibly rare that kind of thing is and pointed out that his guns are about 20 times as likely to kill somebody in his family as any intruder. He at least seemed to listen – I can hope. At least my now-teen nephew is allowed to walk around outside now.
Violet
@Aimai: I don’t have hate for the niece. Where did you get that idea?
Fuzzy
@WereBear: Yea but you couldn’t be drafted. My birthday was in the first 65 so I joined the Navy to sail away from Nam.
mclaren
Classic example of bungled incompetent basic English.
What you mean to say is: They use those tools not because they are some kind of fucked-up devil spawn, but rather because their opportunities to socialize are limited by car culture and fear.
You should also stop using the passive voice. It would read even better as:
They use those tools not because they are some kind of fucked-up devil spawn, but rather because adults have removed their opportunities to socialize using car culture and fear.
Jamey
@karen: Jackson Heights? It’s still like that; my friends’ kids enjoy roaming the backalleys of the Georgian Terrace-type townhouses that line the streets of that nabe.
I think the premise of this posting is flawed, as my kids both socialize on their own and bike/walk to and from school, the town pool, day camp, etc in our quintessentially suburban NNJ burg. They’re not over scheduled or under stimulated; they’re not the proto-Droogs or social misfits that DPMistermix posits as the norm. They text. They stream. They chat. They play video games. They interface IRT and IRL with other, similar kids. I know what my kids are doing much of the time, but not all or every thing (I knock before I enter their rooms, as the courtesy I pay to people whom I trust.) I may be a helicopter parent in that respect (that I know what’s going on in my kids lives), but I hover far enough away to give them some space to exercise their free will and right to judgement.
In short, their lives are filled with options that we never had–but like us, they manage to weave these options and distractions into the fabric of their lives and still somehow manage to be “normal.” And they are the rule, not the exception thereto. But my kids story isn’t as sexy and headline-worthy as the one DPM is glomming on to…
steverino
Regarding kids roaming the neighborhood, check out Free Range Kids — and what is the top post as I write? About the Clive Thompson article on kids and social media.
Locally, I think it’s a generational thing as well– I had a half-dozen kids at my grade level within a block or two, and the rest within an easy walk (by definition: we all walked to school: suburb with sidewalks and “safety patrol”). I was born in 62, so the tail of the boomers, class sizes about 30. Now, not so many kids around and the schools in my old town have consolidated a bit.
Where I live now, again not so many kids, and everyone is bused to school. The nearest parks are a long bike ride away. A sidewalk was just extended from our area (with sidewalks) through an older, no-sidewalk area, to the business area, so we can walk a mile and be on the main drag with supermarket and fast food and clothing stores, etc. The neighbor’s kid was driven to the skateboard park about three miles away. Other than that, I don’t see much hanging out.
I, also, was given wide latitude to roam that I don’t see from my neighbors. I don’t have my own kids, but as I host my grand-nieces for weekends and longer, I try to get them out doing things. Problem is, they don’t know what to do with themselves. Yard (with rocks to climb)? Woods? Right there! Quiet streets, with sidewalks? They don’t know any of the old games; jumping rope a mystery; afraid to explore the woods– there are sticker bushes! I have a lot of work to do with them. And they live in the same area I grew up in, with kids around and a park not too far away. Go figure.
vheidi
@Villago Delenda Est: Grrrrr. Mr VH fell for it after a stressful month.
Chaz
McLaren:
Your correction is bungled, possibly because you are incompetent. Car culture is not a tool which adults “use”. Your precious active voice sentence should read, “car culture and fear limit their opportunities to socialize,” or “car culture and fear have driven adults to limit their activities to socialize.”
Sandblaster
My younger students are encountering this frustration right now. I recently spent a full half hour talking down a group of 5th grade girls who were frustrated at their inability to get together outside of school. Each had a story about being overscheduled and oversupervised. One young lady said that if she asked for a Saturday morning with friends her mom would want to spend “an hour” talking about her emotional experiences and making sure she was okay. These girls are in soccer, Girl Scouts and choir together, but they desperately want some time to be alone together and unwatched.
Original Lee
@Violet: In our area, I think it is more dangerous to ride bikes than it used to be. Two neighbors have been hit by cars when riding their bikes to work in the last year, for instance, and we’ve had a number of pedestrians hit by cars.
Our house is also only a few blocks away from a bar, and many of the customers use our street to avoid the traffic camera, so there are periods of the day when nobody on our street walks their dogs or goes for a run, because it’s too dangerous. The traffic camera has helped somewhat, because before we had lots of people going 55-60 on a road with a speed limit of 35, and now the median speed is down around 40. OTOH, because of the traffic camera and budget cuts, we have a reduced police presence on the street, which means less chance of getting caught for relatively minor traffic offenses.
And texting! After dark, I can see all these people with their phones in their hands while they are driving, which certainly wasn’t an issue 30 years ago. I just don’t remember so many speed demons during normal periods of the day when I was young. This seems to be true in a lot of different areas, not just locally.
Bottom line: even though my daughter has friends who live not too far away, our local area has too many crazy drivers for it to be safe for her to ride her bike here. I don’t think I’m being overly paranoid on this.
Wayne Garmil
I recently drove around the town I grew up in. The rocky beach that was at the end of my street was now walled off and the beach filled in (so there is no longer a beach there if you hop over the wall). The playground that was two blocks away from my house was now gone (although it was still an open park area). The elementary school I walked almost a mile to each day is also gone, closed due to not enough kids attending it (they are now bused to another area of the town for a combined elementary school instead of individual large neighborhood area ones). All the kid-friendly stores in the strip mall at the center of town (which is within walking distance of the combined elementary school and junior high school) are gone, replaced by stores only adults want to go into. The hang-outs I remember there are now gone.
In the town I live in now, there are no sidewalks, so no kid walks to school, it is all car or bus. My dead-end street empties onto a very busy major road, so it is not safe for a kid (or an adult) to bike on it. There are neighborhoods near me that are closer to what I grew up in, but the only local park I know if is only accessible by car (mind you, it is a BIG park with playground equipment and meant for kids to play in, but it is not something a kid can get to on their own). Other than waiting for the bus in the morning and coming home from the bus stop in the afternoon, I rarely see kids out and about.
Times have changed, and so have the neighborhoods. It does not make me happy to think about.
BroD
I think you’re right on. We live in a city neighborhood where kids are few & far between and most of my daughter’s school-mates live in suburbs. Before she got her driver’s license, she’d have had a pretty impoverished social life without social media.
Fax Paladin
@WereBear: Um, last I checked, Mythbusters was still having its season premiere this Saturday…
Kaleberg
@Ridnik Chrome:
I have a friend who used to hitchhike everywhere, and in retrospect she realized that some guy could have picked her up, taken her somewhere and done something horrible to her, but she said that the guys who picked her up were usually middle aged men who said she reminded them of her daughter(s) and felt that they should pick her up and give her a ride so no one else would pick her up, take her somewhere and do something horrible to her. It’s actually kind of comforting.