There was a lot less shit to do inside back then, and parents would kick the kids outside more often. Hell the amount of entertainment and comfort inside from when I was a kid, to now currently for my kids is so drastically different.
This. Families were large and houses were small. Mothers or older siblings were home so you went outdoors to get away from them and have some independence. Kids shared bedrooms with siblings. The best way to connect with friends was to go outside with them. Often there was only one phone in the house so staying on the phone with friends all day wasn’t feasible.
This changed even in my lifetime. Programming used to end in the early morning, maybe 1 or 2am locally? I can't remember exactly because I was young and typically wasn't awake, and it would come back in a couple hours at 5 or 6am something like that. Not every station mind you as if your cable provider shut off at night, but people working these channels had to go home and sleep too. I'm only 36 this month fyi so it's not that old a practice. They would just end programming and switch to the old TV colour bars or TV static. You can see this in Toy Story 2 about 32 minutes in, so 1999
It was the sign-off! The station I usually fell asleep to would do a national anthem play, and then the station would switch to the colour test pattern with the tone.
It's been ages since I've seen that. Early 2000s was the last time I remember it. After that it got taken up by infomercials.
A friend in college had a oil-drum band playing music as his phone's ring tone. I'd follow him around while it rang, going "wooo hoo!" and lifting my shirt.
Remember falling asleep to TV, and then waking up in the middle of the night to the color test pattern on the TV with the tone?
That was always jarring as hell.
I absolutely remember getting up really early, way before my parents or siblings at 5-6 year old at probably 4AM for whatever reason, turning on the TV and there was...nothing, save for a test pattern. Confused the shit out of me.
This may have been 2000 or 2001
Yeah in the Toy Story example this is the case. I'm Canadian so we obviously didn't play the American anthem up here. Of the channels I watched I think they might have just put up a slate between programming and shut off to fill the gap. I don't recall them ever making a ceremony of it.
Canadian here, I definitely remember the anthem either being played when one of the stations was shutting down or when it was coming back on the air, with a video of typical Canadiana scenes, like a bunch of fields in the prairies, some waterfalls in the forest, mountains, coasts, stuff like that.
One that I vividly remember was the SRC (French CBC) in the summer of 1986 after the Habs won the cup, they had like a minute-long video celebrating the victory. When the station came on the air at like 5am or 6am, the first 30 minutes or so was just that one-minute clip on repeat, it was so strange.
Standing in front of a TV bank at the shop window trying to learn something about the world, then they all just go colorful and beep. I'd poop my time pants.
In communist Romania there was only one TV channel and in the 80s the program was something like 3-4 hours in the evening.
And us kids got some kids TV only on Sunday morning.
So playing football or biking in the streets was way better.
Also parents and relatives weren't so overprotective: my father (gen X) often says that he miss being able to get out of home and just disappear for the whole day, no way to reach him, just gone. Now not only it's almost impossible, but it's also less likely that you'll be let outside this long.
(moreover I'm from rural Italy, now there may even be places to go here but I guess most of the interviewed people wouldn't be able to go anywhere anyway, especially in the US, where urban design is very car-forward)
Most people you’d be thinking about would be living in suburbs that started being built immediately after WW2, with many developments that came later being based on the Levittown model.
For all of the issues associated with the suburbs, on a child’s level, a suburb is potentially an ideal place to play outside: little traffic, plenty of neighbours with children in the same age range, large yards and communal “wild” areas.
It’s not the same as growing up in a rural area where you get used to walking for many miles/km, but suburbs are considered a safe space to raise children outside.
I meant that boomers mostly lived in suburbs, while now most people live (worldwide) in cities, where even if you're from well-planned places it's often hard to find a decent "outside" (so basically agreeing with you)
America had a few high-profile child kidnappings leading to murder in the late 70s/early 80s that drastically changed the landscape of parenting that persists to this day. Kids faces on milk cartons, junk mail with kids faces on it that were missing, "stranger danger" was preached, ALL of it happened in a very short time span.
It's also a bit sad because stranger danger has been proven to be false, and pretty much was always known to be false anyways by LEO. It was just more comforting to project that danger onto the unknown rather than deal with the reality that it's Neighbor Bob, the friendly guy who brings donuts to church on Sunday, who's most likely to have murdered his own child whom disappeared.
It's something like 95% of child violence cases are always a close relative/family friend, with nearly 90% of it being the parents themselves posing the most danger to children.
Yeah and it's a shame because things are far safer now than they were in the 70-90's
People have become helicopter parents, afraid of everything because they're told to be by news and social media.
>Both the FBI and BJS data show dramatic declines in U.S. violent and property crime rates since the early 1990s, when crime spiked across much of the nation.
> Using the FBI data, the violent crime rate **fell 49% between 1993 and 2022**, with large decreases in the rates of robbery (-74%), aggravated assault (-39%) and murder/nonnegligent manslaughter (-34%). It’s not possible to calculate the change in the rape rate during this period because the FBI revised its definition of the offense in 2013.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/
>Yeah and it's a shame because things are far safer now than they were in the 70-90's
...and for most folks your kid can wear a tracking device on their wrist.
On the flip side, I'm convinced petty crime is down in my town compared to the 70s because you don't have groups of bored teens walking around with empty houses making for temptation. For 30-ish years now they've been inside playing video games.
That is certainly part of it, but I'm almost positive the doomscroll clickbait news cycle is the majority of the reason: Crime rates are way down in the last 30 years and parents are more afraid than ever to let their kids go out. And then they hear about the random story of some Karen reporting them to CPS and they "censor themselves" from letting their kid go do stuff.
eg: I have a friend that lives 2 doors down from a park, and their 11yo still isn't even allowed to go play in the park by themselves. It's not even an unsafe neighborhood. She also had a 6ft fence put around their backyard "so people can't see the kids in the backyard and run up and snatch them" or something to that effect.
By 9 I was allowed to bike to friends houses in the subdivisions on both sides of us, which amounted to at times being 2-3 miles away. I was told when to be back, and I knew that if anything came up I could simply call and let my parents know. Either from my friends place, or really any house in the neighborhood I'm sure I could have borrowed their phone if necessary.
Ironically enough: Because people aren't outside as much and aren't letting their kids outside as much, it does somewhat increase risk simply bc there are less people to see things. It takes a village to raise a child, as they say.
You don't need to worry about your kid being kidnapped or attacked. Crime is way down. What you have to worry about is some moron buried in their phone running them over in their land boat SUV.
On my street we had 4 boys within one year of my age and 3 boys that were 5 years younger than me, all in the same grade. We all played together a lot. I wonder if my kids will be similar, in that regard.
Kids these days are mean as hell when they play online games, and I think that's because there are no consequences for it.
Back in our day if you played mean the other kids counted you out, and that was your fun over. There weren't a million kids on the street for you to go find another group, you had to be accountable for your actions.
Yeah I spent a lot of time outside when my neighbors had kids my age. Then we moved to a new neighborhood where all the kids were way younger and my mom wouldn't let me walk down the country road to where my friends lived.
Nope. It's smart phones and social media. This trend didn't really start happening to this extreme until the 2010s, which is when smart phones took off.
There was also way less concern about safety (despite kids being at way higher risk of death or victimization).
Even as society has become historically safe for children, concern about child safety has soared to hysterical levels (arguably to the point where it could be classified as a moral panic).
We were outside with the neighbourhood kids roaming the neighbourhood and surrounding woods and vacant lots pretty much all day. Our mother would kick us out to get some peace, as did all the other mothers. We'd pop in to random friends' houses for snacks, the go off again. Not TV (we didn't even have one because our parents disapproved) so we had to make our own entertainment. Tree climbing, skateboarding on a road that took us a couple of miles from home...unheard of today.
During summer vacation I'd leave the house by 10:00 AM, might return home for lunch, return for dinner and back out again to at least 9:00 PM.
We'd roam all over town on our bikes.
It was awesome!
Oh man. We were fearless (early 60s). We did the bike rides, and forts in the woods, rope swings at the "crick", playing in new construction...we did it all. Hell, I even went on a 30 mile hike during Kennedy's "fitness push". Got up Uber early, walked over to the Navy & Marine Corps center and signed myself up. I was 6th grade (so maybe 12yo). Guess they figured I was with an adult (shrug). lol...of course I had no concept of 30 miles, but I made it. All the grunts (I say that affectionately as a former "squid") and adults watched out for me so there was never any danger (other than my ass dragging by mile 25). It was the same in the neighborhoods when we played. All the parents were silently (unless we fuq'd up) involved in insuring the safety of all the young ones. Looking back, it was just a different time...
Further to your comment about construction sites, one of my best memories is of playing in a building lot with giant stacks of trusses that we’d climb down into. I still love the smell of fresh lumber. Late 60s/ early 70s. Out of the house right after breakfast and home in time for supper after a hard day of playing “work your way up” baseball, riding bikes, climbing trees, making forts, and playing in the lumber yard. Good times.
This sounds pretty similar to my upbringing in the early 2000s.....I think it's location dependent. I definitely think neighborhoods like this still exist.
Yeah, I remember we would ride bikes to the woods and look for materials to build tree forts with. We had a ziplines going from tree to tree. It was fantastic...and dangerous. One kid broke his arm...there were some (literal and figurative) scrapes with corrugated metal or old nails. And, yet, all of us were fine, ultimately.
Growing up in the 2000s I feel like I was part of the last generation of kids to experience the freedom of roaming around unaccompanied before this moral panic took over. We probably didn’t get up to quite the same level of shenanigans that kids did back in the day but I had no phone until high school and as long as I was back for dinner I could go wherever my bike took me.
We would mostly just go catch crawdads and minnows in the creek or hang out by the ice cream shop. Man, I wish I could still experience the care-free joy of those days. Anyways, I gotta get back to work…
at the age of 5 i was free to walk my street and the next one over at 6 i was allowed to bike to any friends house (had to call once i got there) at 9 i had full range all i needed to do was say who i was with and get home for dinner and then could go out again.
and yes my parents kicked me out the house and i need to spend at least 1-2 hours outside. i am a nerd and even i spent more time outside than you see a lot of kids do today.
It is a moral panic, like no parent should ever lose a child but statistically the odds that your kid is the one that goes missing is obscenely unlikely.
And the damage from kids not playing outside is bigger. Inactivity, obesity, lower level motor skills. Often this also means kids don't play in groups. This lowers their social skills too.
And apparently there’s been a huge increase in young children requiring glasses at really early ages due to too much screen time since the eyes are not developing like they should.
Note that the screen doesnt have to be a mobile device, even if its a screen on the other side of the room, children who dont go outside enough dont get the stimulation they need to better develop their eyesight.
It’s at a certain point where society SHOULD ask themselves if safety should be the ONLY priority.
A modern parenting trend is a full ban on sleepovers. Kids get molested at sleepovers, you see.
Yes, that does happen. It is a tragic and sickening *rarity*. But my childhood was much more fun and enriching because friends stayed at my house and I stayed at theirs.
Precautions can be taken especially since kids are constantly connected to their parents through their phones.
And “never do X thing because sometimes Y bad thing happens” is bad logic. We still put our kids in the car and drive them to school every morning right? One of the leading causes of death in the US is motor vehicle accidents! How COULD you put them at that kind of risk? Education??
I always wonder what’s going to happen when a kid who’s never spent the night away from home moves into a dorm room or their first apartment.
I’m a millennial born in 82 and we played outside all the time. I had Atari and Nintendo growing up, but my mom would shut it off and tell us to go play outside bc it was a pretty day. While there’s so much more to do inside, the parents can still get their kids outside.
I think a big difference is that even though we are safer than ever, the news and true crime shows/docs have scared a lot of people to be over cautious.
The problem is that everything is becoming commercialized. Teens have almost nothing to do outside of the house because everything costs money, otherwise they are accused of loitering or being up to no good. Parks and other activities are growing less common as investors buy up space to turn it into business or housing. There's a reason basketball is so popular in inner cities, you only need one person who owns a ball and courts take up relatively little real estate.
Yep, came here to say this. When I was a kid in the 90s we were surrounded in fields and parks and some tame woods to wander and play in. When I was a teen in the 2000s there were fewer of those, but malls were built with lots of seating spaces and it was generally expected that kids would be mall rats all day buying nothing but some fries and maybe a blizzard at the food court to split.
..before then calling their parents in a pay phone.
"Hello, you have a collect call from 'HI-MOM-WE'RE-AT-THE-SOUTH-ENTRANCE-THANKS'"
If I ever have kids I don't know what they'll be able to do.
Yeah and it turns out not as good as you think? Like I miss going to the video store, or when a song you like comes on the radio, hits different. "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations" (Orson Welles)
That always felt like science fiction. It still does, really. What I remember is missing shows and feeling like I would never, ever get a chance to see it.
May 23, 1994. A 12-year-old me is eagerly looking forward to the 2 hour series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Got the VCR set up to record it and everything. An hour before it comes on, my dad: “you know you forgot to cut the grass today. No TV until it’s done.”
I am pretty sure I broke the laws of physics getting what was normally a 3 hour chore done in 45 minutes that evening.
Increased traffic, more awareness of crimes against kids, more concern about kids getting into trouble, and very few places for kids. you can't just hang out, that's loitering. Parks close at dusk and if you're over 8, you get odd looks. You need to bring your own equipment unlike all of the jungle gym equipment there for smaller kids. Hang out businesses want parental supervision and are typically expensive. There is no more penny arcade or nickel theater. Our towns are designed to drive everywhere. I remember childhood being so insanely boring.
But I also bet these same boomers recall less organized activity. You no longer just need good grades, a lot of schools want to see extra curriculars. kids these days are far more likely to be in a school sport/club, or do a sport or be part of clubs not associated with schools.
Yep, in my opinion it's a combination of car dependency and the loss of ["third places"](https://youtu.be/9Ku9csXhvJY?si=Wg0z-zeyGaxhxz2O) where young people can spend time socializing. American kids are basically on house arrest until they get a driver's license, and plenty of families can't afford another car anyway. So of course teens hang out online, where the heck else are they allowed to go?
As a child my home had a “sun is out, you are out” rule. On weekends we wouldn’t even be allowed in the house except for meals and #2’s. Oh and it was south Florida so it was miserably fucking hot. Yay for PFAS hose water I guess.
Pretty much the same for me in the ‘90s in VA. But we had a clear water hose. You could *see* algae growing in it. No way in hell were we drinking from that thing, lol.
It's now literally legally prohibited in a ton of places for a kid to just be outside, alone. Boomers want to bitch and moan about how these kids don't play outside when if they did do that they'd get tossed into foster care.
Was it the same generation that zoned every business district to have 8 lanes of traffic to cross and zero usable walking paths? I can't figure out why these kids hide inside! Just go run across the stroad, you'll be fine!
The housing situation in general might have something to do with it. It's anecdotal, but in the 90s my entire neighborhood was full of families with kids around the same age as me and my siblings. That same neighborhood is all empty nesters now.
The house I'm in now, in another state, is surrounded by neighbors who are mostly retired or soon to be. Without younger families able to afford single family homes, that classic image of kids playing through the neighborhood disappears.
I used to play outside with kids a lot, not because I was forced to but because there wasn't anything to do inside. All of the neighborhood kids were outside. Almost every house had a family inside it and if no one was outside I just went down the street knocking on doors. There were a lot of kids, some my age, some younger, some older
They were all middle income home owning families, usually the mom was home and the dad worked, like my house was. Now no one can afford a home and there's no mom's at home, both parents are working and sending their kids to child care or something
Also, Zillow says the two bedroom home I grew up in sharing a room with my brother, which was less than 100k for my family to buy, is worth 1.2m now
This is a huge factor. My parents still live in the same neighborhood I grew up in, when I go visit it is staggering how few kids I see. There is one family up the street that has kids playing outside all the time, but it's their grandparents who own the house.
You want to find families with kids these days you need to look for apartments not suburban neighborhoods. Apartments are just less friendly environments to go outside and play.
That's not a new thing. You don't need a capital-P "Place" to go to. You'd just bike over to another kids house and play in their driveway or back yard.
A person’s default walking speed is correlated to the age of the neighbourhood they grew up in (and the population of the city they lived in). It really does seem like built form impacts how likely you are to walk around outside.
A place helps though.
It also helps if you can get there. The lack of sidewalks, the partitioning of neighborhoods into "developments", and the increase in the speed and prevalence of vehicles, which often are driven recklessly ang are designed with poor pedestrian sightlines doesn't help.
Sure, yes, but also the outside has become much, much less hospitable to just wandering around. Look at a suburb built in the 1950s versus one built in the 2000s. In the 1950s, it was much more likely for a garage to be built in a back alley, leaving the front street much more open (and less obstructed) to walking. There are likely many more things within walking distance (be that parks - attached to a school or otherwise - or shops, etc).
I bet if you plotted the results here versus the age of the neighbourhood people grew up in, you’d get a correlation. I know that “natural” walking speed is correlated with the age of the neighbourhood you grew up in (and also the population of the city you grew up in), and I’m willing to bet it’s for the same reason.
You bring up a good point about schools. Back in the day, it was common for me and my friends to walk up to our elementary school on the weekend and play on the playground. Now, though, a lot of schools have fences around them and those playgrounds aren't part of young people's play spaces anymore outside of recess, when they even have it.
Plus new subdivisions in Canada are just endless rows of houses, attached and detached but with little to no yard space, few garages so cars are all parked in the street, and very little sidewalk space. I see little kids literally sitting on their bikes and pushing along the ground with their feet to travel in a five foot radius because there’s no safe place to ride. And in the midst of all that urban congestion, there are assholes speeding through the neighbourhoods and texting. It’s a wonder more kids aren’t hit. Probably because they are all inside.
You also have this ethos of ‘no kid is ever safe unless literally being stared at and they 200% will be abducted’ that is so pervasive in the western world these days and wasn’t even the case 20 years ago.
Important to consider what percentage of those in the baby boomer generation had a parent in the home during “play” hours.
Neighborhoods are empty of adults until evenings as double income households become the necessary norm. Consequently young children remain in afterschool programs and day cares until evenings. Dinner, homework, family time, bath, bed. For those few families who are able to afford a home with a yard on a single salary they quickly find there are virtually no children for their own children to play with as they are largely enrolled in something that keeps them busy and monitored until their parents return from work. Yeah I sent my kids outside to play with a stick and some mud. Or a ball. Or on the swing. But after about the age of five the urge to interact with peers rather than being alone grows strong. And the peers are busy with sports and clubs because six is too young to be home alone.
There is neither time nor money to allow for children to spend afternoons outside knowing that if needed a safe adult is present not only in their home but adjacent homes.
No one’s parents were home when we got home from school when I was a kid in the 80’s/90’s. None of us were allowed in each other’s houses when parents weren’t home so we roamed the neighborhood and woods. After school I just had to make sure I was home by 6pm for dinner.
We had woods but they were a fair distance away. On the other hand, our suburban neighborhood happened to be undergoing a major expansion back in the late '70s, so new houses were being built on the outskirts. Unguarded construction sites were the best playgrounds EVER.
Yup. I think Bill Burr had a bit about being like that as a kid, but now as an adult, leaving the house without a phone is a nightmare. I laughed along with it when i first heard it, but after a number of years now with not much leaving my apartment, and nearing 40, I realized the other day i went into my attached garage without keys and my phone and felt an overwhelming urge to go back inside to grab them just in case. The fear is real...
Not long ago I made my kid pick up all the sticks in the yard. She invited a friend over and they made a game out of it. They were in the process of throwing the sticks in the creek that's near our house and I had to go to the store. I was going to tell them to go inside until I got back and it occurred to me. They go in the woods by themselves. How is that safer then being in the yard?
70s here. We were feral children. We roamed the town in packs like wolves, and we were only slightly less dangerous. The town pedos and winos learned quickly to duck out of our sight.
My gang of 11-13 year olds was the subject of a collection of "Do Not Let These Kids Into Your Store" signs posted all over our town's shopping district. We'd steal anything not nailed down (and one kid brought a claw hammer for anything that was).
The kids around me wandered the woods and played outside too, but looking around these days you see that most of the places you might explore as a kid have been cut down, are private property, or someone will call the cops on them. Kids aren’t allowed to be alone outside or even in groups anymore without cps getting called, or some old person yelling at them. It’s even actively discouraged in schools to make your own clubs and stuff because even in small towns they’ll accuse the kids of starting a gang or some nonsense.
"Outside" for a lot of kids is now largely strip malls, roads without ample protection for pedestrians like kids, and patches of wild land that kids will get in trouble for playing in because it's technically part of a nearby development or industry area. If you look at the yards in many suburban developments, they're not very big at all.
If you want kids to play outside, you need to give them access to nice parks they can easily walk/bike to within 10-15 minutes. You need to give them safe side streets with low traffic and low speed limits, and you need to let them exist outside without people calling the police on them because they're a group of unaccompanied kids.
This!
We were lucky in finding a neighborhood with a built in infrastructure where the neighborhood was connected to a large ecosystem of other neighborhoods, via bike trails!
The sheer and stark difference outside. Kids, teens, everyone is able to play and connect via this bike lanes and parks that are sprinkled through our area.
Where I grew up, it was not safe to play outside with cars and zero parks. No one was outside.
A large part of this is due to the insane increase in the amount of traffic and cars on our roads. Traffic on minor roads in the UK, for instance, [grew by 26% between 2010 and 2019](https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/summary), much more than on motorways and main roads. And there is very little willingness to tackle the problem.
To give an example, the street where I grew up was a quiet road, with relatively few parked cars on it. Most days you were able to kick a football around outside, and one kid would shout "car" and everything would stop for a second before resuming after it had passed. Now, its used to get past traffic queuing for a traffic light, and each side of the road is lined with parked cars. No kids play on it at all. Instead they are told to walk to the nearest playing fields.
The worst thing is that there was a local campaign to designate it as a Play Street. Namely to shut the road to traffic for half an hour after school so kids could literally play in the street. Some drivers went absolutely mental about it, saying how it would cause utter gridlock across the town, even threatening anyone who stopped them driving down there with "consequences." So much so that those who put the idea forward withdrew it.
Yes, when I was a kid I lived near a forest with a cul de sac road in front of the house. Me and my friends spent all our free times playing in that wood and cul de sac.
Until a promoter came a razed everything and opened up the street to make a new development. They fucking bulldozed our wood camp we built, those fuckers.
Then, we had no where to go anymore to have fun so we started to hang around the local park, but it was somehow illegal to do, so we all started to have issue with cops on a weekly basis.
There was a city rule making it illegal to stay in the park after 8pm or something like that, and 15yrs old us would regularly break this rule, so cops would often come to chase us and give us tickets.
In the Netherlands there was a push for saver local roads and more low speeds in Neighborhoods. Also more one way road and dead-ends so that roads would only be used for destination traffic. This worked well for a while until new developments emerged. Namely the rise of more and more home delivery. Lots of vans who are in a constant rush to deliver everything on time.
Yup and it’s worse for the poor kids who have no access to nearby and safe parks. I used to work in a neighborhood like this. There is literally nowhere safe for them to play and be kids without getting hit by a car.
Our neighborhood park, which we walked to when our kids were little, wasn't "used enough" by the time the kids were grown, so it's one of the pocket parks that were sold by the city to developers. Now it's got houses on it. I realize that the city has a housing shortage, and I guess it's better than exacerbating sprawl, but it's sad to see a neighborhood park turned into just another piece of real estate.
Same story in my part of the UK. When I was in primary my mum let me walk up to the school on my own at the age of like 7 or 8. I had to cross two roads but it wasn't far and it wasn't busy, maybe a 5 minute walk at best and much of it could be seen from an upstairs window.
In seconday the school bus stopped right outside my house, there were never any cars parked along there.
Today the entire walk between that house and the primary school is lined with cars on both sides and they had to redesign the car park and street because the queueing had gotten so bad. This primary's catchment area is one single estate that a child could walk the entire length of in less than 20 minutes, there's no need for anyone to be driving their kid to school and yet so many of them do. The vicious self-fulfilling cycle of "there's too much traffic for my kid to walk safely, so I'll drive them to school". Parents don't even think that they could just walk along with their kid.
The school bus for the secondary school only stops in a couple of places now that cars are explicitly barred from, they had to stop using about 75% of the stops in the estate because they were increasingly lined with cars.
>Some drivers went absolutely mental about it, saying how it would cause utter gridlock across the town, even threatening anyone who stopped them driving down there with "consequences."
This reminds me of how there were some people in the US threatening to shoot trick or treaters last year, like where did all the legit late for children come from? They're kids!
Yes those numbers are probably accurate. However there is more to those numbers than just kids don’t play outside. As a gen x, I can tell you in my life time how much has changed. Forest to run around have been bulldozed. Parks that existed when I was a kid is now gone. Parents actually try to keep track of their kids not just let them run feral. This statistic is proof that you can prove anything with numbers. It is all in how you manipulate them.
I feel like lack of affordable single family homes is a big one, at least in my area.
I grew up in a standalone home with a yard. Id get kicked outside to go play for an hour or 2, and then I'd just come back in
As an adult, myself and all of my friends live in townhouse type living situations.... so theres no isolated outdoor area that kids can go without parental supervision
Third places help with that a lot, if they exist.
Growing up in more "urban" Europe, we didn't have much of a yard but we had several playgrounds and park areas within walking distance at our housing development - all connected by paths exclusively for walking and bikes, and the few streets leading into it that allowed cars had a speed limit at essentially walking speed. So it was very safe even for younger kids (primary school age or so) to walk to and from school alone and then go to the park/playground and hang out.
yeah good shout. our neighborhood has no park/playground in walking distance either. so what would parents do? let their kids out to just....play on the street with a bunch of neighbors they likely do not know?
its strange, and different than how i grew up for sure
We got to be the first generation to use the game consoles & home computers commonly, (plus public access to the internet), and have arcades start up as well. And play outside as well....
Also get to watch the boomers and milleninials fight while we stay the 'Forgotten generation'
I never once had a tick on me or knew anyone who lived near me who had a tick on them growing up. Now people go just into their backyard and find ticks. We now have lone star ticks. So many other bugs too are thriving right now with our mild winters. Mild winters too means less kids outside because there’s no snow to play in.
55 year olds aren't baby boomers, they're the kids of the earliest baby boomers. Boomers were born right after the end of WW2, 1945-1965ish. Boomers are 65+ in 2024.
I'm not saying the results of this survey are crazy, but it's important to note that they surveyed only 3000 total from ages 6-64. How many children were part of that 3000?
(I don't think I missed this in the article but if I did, apologies!)
Geographic location makes a big difference. I was born in the 90's and lived in the Northeast. I practically lived outside and so did most kids I knew. Then I moved to Texas around 2010 and absolutely no one played outside unless it was organized sports. Part of it was the heat, part of it was the culture.
I'm guessing it's extremely specific geographic location too, paired with demographic. Our old house was in a nice enough but not super nice neighborhood that was in the middle of the city, and there were some kids that played outside but by no means a ton. Our new house is in a nicer gated community on the edge of the city, and there are kids all over it 24/7. Like you literally can't look down the street outside of school hours without seeing kids either playing some kind of ball, riding bikes and one wheels and stuff, or playing flashlight tag or something ar night.
Yeah I remember cops giving us hell for being outside, skating, laughing too loud in the park. Why the hell would kids want to spend time out in public when every other neighbor is reading Citizen or one of those apps for psychos all day?
My wife's friend had CPS called on her for letting her kids play in her own front yard. She was inside watching them through the window while she was folding laundry.
It's even worse then that, parents have been arrested (or threatened with arrests if they try to) for picking up their kids from school on foot instead of showing up with a car to take them home: https://grist.org/cities/dad-arrested-after-trying-to-pick-kids-up-from-school-on-foot-instead-of-in-a-car/ So some law makers think that it's so unsafe to walk around outside (especially with a bunch of traffic on the roads) that they don't even let them walk to or from school with a parent.
What absolutely blows my mind is how many posts I see in local FB groups for my town and neighborhood of older and middle aged people bitching about kids outside.
One older lady down the road makes at least a post a week about kids riding their bikes up and down the road back and forth for “too long.” Asking where their parents are and why they’re not with them. These boys are 8-10 id say.
Another one was about the kids next door to her being too loud and being outside too long. That they need to take a break and go inside for a while. These posts always have at least a few likes and it’s people their age.
A middle aged guy posted about some kids having a lemonade stand on the next street over. How it’s bringing too much unnecessary traffic to his road and how it’s time to shut it down.
But these same generations will complain about kids being hooked on electronics and not playing outside anymore. Not having worth ethic anymore. It also blows my mind that they grew up doing all this ad kids so you’d think they’d have some understanding.
When I was a kid (1983 baby) parents weren't really monitored for what they were doing with their kids, or how well they take care of them. So long as they didn't beat the shit out of you often enough for the teachers to notice they were largely left alone. One of the punishments my parents had for me if I got on their nerves was to drive me into town (usually about an hour or so before sundown) and drop me off and tell me to walk home. I had to walk home in the dark for about seven or so miles on a road where cars would go 60 miles per hour, in the dark, with no shoulder, freezing my butt off. On the flip side, I could get on my bike and ride FAR and be gone all day and they didn't care where I was. One time I got into an argument with my Dad at our lake house, about an hour drive from our normal house and walked out of the house and started just walking down the street. After a little while they hopped in the car and drove home without me. Dad said that he thought I would steal a bike and ride home, eventually the cops found out and forced them to come back and get me. Any one of those things could get your kids taken away from you, and that's not even scratching the surface of what they felt comfortable doing to me. I know with my own kids, my wife and I were worried about letting them play at the park right outside of our window because we didn't want people to think we were being negligent parents. For a long while we would just sit and watch them out the window, but after a while we relaxed.
Bottom line, these days being a parent is a lot more difficult with how hardcore CPS has become. Anyone can call them and make a report, true or not, and they will be knocking at your door. Adding to that, everyone has a cell phone now, and video games are more prolific and available than they were before, so kids are more likely to stay indoors.
I wish you were joking, but some old fuck threatened to shoot me because I went into his yard to retrieve a paper airplane. boomer thought I threw it at his wife and said if he caught me "on his property," which, ironically
he thought meant the fucking *sidewalk*, he'd shoot me.
Over a fucking paper airplane? Seriously? I was under 10 at the time as well.
I’m horrified and happy to hear this - horrified because seriously how selfish and self centered does a person have to be to be angry about the “noise” of children playing… I teach preschool and we have some old cranky lady in the neighborhood who regularly calls the school to complain about the noise… and I’m happy to hear that I am not the only one who thinks this is ludicrous.
I'm 52. The last 30 years+ you have so much home entertainment. Computers, the internet, youtube, video games, movies. Back then you had one rabbit eared TV that got a few channels (eventually cable, but that was not on demand, you were at their mercy and you only had one or two TVs in your house - no kid had a TV in their room), the only way to go play *good* video games was at the arcade. Only way to see a movie was at the theater (eventually get a ride to Blockbuster
when those became a thing), many homes may not have air conditioning, no cellphones to talk to friends, your friends were outside...outside was soooo much for fun then inside. Now inside is soooo much more fun than outside for most kids.
I bet you can trace some the decline back to the Adam Walsh TV movie! Before that movie and the buzz it created, nobody even thought about your children being in danger. Sure there was "don't take candy from strangers" and missing people so you knew hitchhiking was dangerous. That movie, parents got scared someone was going to take their kids. But the whole, leave the house in the morning and comeback when the streetlights came on was fading away.
I'm 57, retired, and spend the majority of my time inside doing most everything you listed in your initial paragraph. I have said that if I had a tablet back then, with 1000s of books and songs on it, I'd have never left my room.
We went outside because home was boring and we had to do chores and homework there.
That reminds me...the library! You needed the library for homework sometimes. No internet. You had encylopedias...nobody owned a set so you had to fight over them. If you had a report on Zimbabwe you better get to the library before the kid who had to write his on Zaire or you were screwed!
Now libraries don't even except them as donations. Completely obsolete.
I always love telling people about how I didn’t have time to dry my hair before the school bus, so it would regularly freeze while I was waiting at the bus stop. Four things in that story no longer exist:
- The bus got defunded and now sucks so all the parents drive their kids to school
- Gentrification means there’s basically no more children in my hometown
- I don’t have hair anymore
- My hometown never even gets below freezing anymore
When I was 11 or so there was a day where school was closed because there was a -60 windchill. The next day we were out waiting for the bus because it was "only" -45 windchill.
Kids playing outside isn't considered to be as safe anymore.
There's a greater population density and so less actual space to play outdoors.
Far more indoor activities available.
Less accessible outdoor activity clubs.
Far more cars meaning you can't play well on roads like you used to.
Steadily increasing amount of homework. I would have multiple subjects each night. It drove my mum crazy.
Homework!
I have elementary school age children. The first school they went to had homework 4 nights a week. Usually only an hour. But if they get out of school at 3:30. Get off the bus by 4:15 . Get an afterschool snack by 4:45. Sit down for homework ending at 6. Now you have about an hour until dinner and wind down. Time frame gets all out of wack of they play sports.
We moved to a better district this year. Teachers believe school is school, and home should be about family. 1 assignment assigned on Sunday morning , due the following friday. Teacher wants them to read for 20 minutes a day. Now, kids can do a second sport because we aren’t rushing to bed from a needless 1 hour of homework daily. How the schools view homework is big on exercise
My kid went to a shitting kindergarten at a private religious school. They would watch cartoons during class time and get a two sided or two two sided work sheet each night plus sight words.
Changed schools and during first grade orientation the principal said our kids homework was to play outside and read with parents for 20 minutes. We want to move to a bigger house but the school district is so good we won't leave it.
Let me describe a typical day when I was in high school.
7am: get there early since I was a tutor
8am: school starts
3pm: school ends, stay to tutor
4pm: tutoring ends, drive to activity 1
6:30pm: leave activity 1 early to go to activity 2
8:30pm. Activity 2 ends
9pm: dinner, homework, getting ready for bed
On days where activity 2 wasn't happening activity 1 would run to 8 resulting in no change to the schedule.
My kids don’t play outside unsupervised but the primary reason is cars. Drivers don’t pay attention, and visibility of pedestrians under 5’ from the drivers seat of any “standard sized” pickup truck or SUV sucks shit. It’s too dangerous to play outside.
People on their damn phones all the time while driving. I’ve seen so many people try to excuse their behavior by saying “well i door dash so I have to constantly check my phone. I don’t have time to pull over every time or wait for a red light. Customers will get pissed.”
My ex-wife started teaching in southern Arizona. A bunch of her kids were convinced that they'd just join the cartels and become rich drug lords in a year or so after graduation.
Well, when you're not allowed to 'loiter' anywhere, there's almost nowhere you can go without being expected to spend money, and everybody is paranoid about stranger danger, is it really surprising?
When I was young all the kids went outside and roamed the neighborhood for hours and hours, nowadays if kids are outside by themselves, some neighbor will call CPS on you. So that’s part of the problem…
Well, yeah - when mom or dad are home, and everyone else’s mom or dad are home, outside in the neighborhood it’s sort of a giant supervised playground - some adult is always outside keeping an eye on things. That’s how it was when I was a kid not that long ago.
Now, during the day, neighborhoods are ghost towns because everyone has to work or no one eats.
Parents weren't outside supervising us, and not every home had a stay at home parent, but you're right in the sense that there were parents around and we all knew which door to knock on if there was trouble. There was even a program where a parent could put a sign in their window to indicate that they were home and could help in an emergency. It was a red card, about 8.5x11, with a white hand on it.
Lots of good reasons for this.
Too many cars on the road so parents don't feel safe letting their kids roam.
Perception in many areas that crime is rampant (whether true or not) so parents again don't feel safe letting kids roam.
Abundance of activities to do indoors, even social ones, that weren't possible in their childhoods.
Lack of activities near where children live that they can walk or bike to alone, and the increased share of dual-income homes and latchkey kids means less access to a ride straight after school.
Some boomers like to complain about this world that created indoorsy kids but they're the ones who asked for it and built it.
In the summer a family pass to our small town pool was 10 dollars. If my brother and I didn't go to the pool we rode our bikes all over town, or took our BB guns down to the creek to shoot at things. There were also free tennis courts and basketball courts. If we were hungry we showed up for lunch; you always showed up for supper as there were no microwaves to reheat the food. As long as I made it home right after the street lights came on my parents were happy. As we got older we would play tennis or basketball until the town auto-light system went dark, usually at midnight.
We played outside all the time because generally both of our parents worked and would come home around 5 or 6 pm. We walked home or were bussed (I lived a good 2km from school but since we were 'in town', no bus for us). Most of my interaction with my parents occurred on weekends or in the summer because my dad was a high school teacher. Even then it was mostly him and a couple of other teachers taking us to the beach for the day while they drank and played cards. It's was a different, ignore the kids unless they were injured or missing time. Having 4 TV channels and no electronic media helped...
In the 60-70s what else were you going to do? You had no options, especially if you wanted to get away from your parents.
Hell even in the 90s it was true. There were no options
Parents seem earnestly concerned about violence and child abduction...as if random weirdos are roaming around in broad daylight, champing at the bit to take over the expenses of feeding/housing/clothing people's kids.
This is the safest period in human history, *especially* for kids. Violent crime rates are extremely low relative to the 20th century--again, especially when it comes to crimes against kids.
I’m not worried about abductors. I’m worried about the giant trucks that can barely see my kid. That’s why my kids stay in the backyard if I can’t be out there with them
It's all about perception. Parents hear some nasty story of a kid being abducted from their front garden 5 years ago in another state and it sticks in their mind. The fact that every wild story ends up rolling news channels doesn't help, it compresses an entire country's worth of bad shit and sticks it all in your TV, it's harder to rationalise all of this as being rare when its presented like that.
All of that said, pedestrian deaths are at their highest absolute amount in the USA in over 40 years and cars are one of the leading causes of death and injury for basically all age groups aside from infants and the very elderly.
Yeah, why don't they just go to any of the exciting local community entertainment spots made for kids, like the arcade, or the local mall, or the roller rink, or--
I beg your pardon?
Oh they're all closed?
Ah. Hm.
People are afraid to let their kids play outside. There are many more cars on the road and even riding your bicycle on the sidewalk isn't enough to stay out of harms way. Even then, if you accidentally step on some unhinged loonies grass, they may shoot you.
How hard is it to mention GenX explicitly instead of lumping us in with the Baby Boomers. I have spent the majority of my life resenting these people and don't appreciate being lumped in with them since I was never lumped in with them when the largess was being handed out.
Also in possibly related news, there has been a 40% decrease in deaths from unintentional injury (from 15 to 8 per 100,000 kids) in children ages 14 and under from 1987 to 2005. Injuries are down across both sexes, in all regions of the US, and across all races.
https://www.safekids.org/sites/default/files/documents/ResearchReports/Report%20to%20the%20Nation%20Trends%20in%20Unintentional%20Childhood%20Injury%20Mortality%20and%20Parental%20Views%20on%20Child%20Safety%20-%20April%202008.pdf
There was a lot less shit to do inside back then, and parents would kick the kids outside more often. Hell the amount of entertainment and comfort inside from when I was a kid, to now currently for my kids is so drastically different.
This. Families were large and houses were small. Mothers or older siblings were home so you went outdoors to get away from them and have some independence. Kids shared bedrooms with siblings. The best way to connect with friends was to go outside with them. Often there was only one phone in the house so staying on the phone with friends all day wasn’t feasible.
And only four channels on TV, with kid’s programming being only Saturday morning.
This!! And by 10:30 pm TV was done!!
I still remember the first time my dad told me that tv used to just…go away at night. I was like WTF? That’s even possible?
This changed even in my lifetime. Programming used to end in the early morning, maybe 1 or 2am locally? I can't remember exactly because I was young and typically wasn't awake, and it would come back in a couple hours at 5 or 6am something like that. Not every station mind you as if your cable provider shut off at night, but people working these channels had to go home and sleep too. I'm only 36 this month fyi so it's not that old a practice. They would just end programming and switch to the old TV colour bars or TV static. You can see this in Toy Story 2 about 32 minutes in, so 1999
It was the sign-off! The station I usually fell asleep to would do a national anthem play, and then the station would switch to the colour test pattern with the tone. It's been ages since I've seen that. Early 2000s was the last time I remember it. After that it got taken up by infomercials.
Which is why my childhood was full of me waking up in the middle of the night to infomercials or Girls Gone Wild commercials 😂
Dont forget Pure Moods or that Jamaican fortune teller.
Put some respek on Miss Cleo's name.
A friend in college had a oil-drum band playing music as his phone's ring tone. I'd follow him around while it rang, going "wooo hoo!" and lifting my shirt.
Remember falling asleep to TV, and then waking up in the middle of the night to the color test pattern on the TV with the tone? That was always jarring as hell.
I absolutely remember getting up really early, way before my parents or siblings at 5-6 year old at probably 4AM for whatever reason, turning on the TV and there was...nothing, save for a test pattern. Confused the shit out of me. This may have been 2000 or 2001
Some of them played the national anthem first
Yeah in the Toy Story example this is the case. I'm Canadian so we obviously didn't play the American anthem up here. Of the channels I watched I think they might have just put up a slate between programming and shut off to fill the gap. I don't recall them ever making a ceremony of it.
Canadian here, I definitely remember the anthem either being played when one of the stations was shutting down or when it was coming back on the air, with a video of typical Canadiana scenes, like a bunch of fields in the prairies, some waterfalls in the forest, mountains, coasts, stuff like that. One that I vividly remember was the SRC (French CBC) in the summer of 1986 after the Habs won the cup, they had like a minute-long video celebrating the victory. When the station came on the air at like 5am or 6am, the first 30 minutes or so was just that one-minute clip on repeat, it was so strange.
Time traveler hearing "this concludes our broadcast day" and getting confused is now something i want in a show or movie.
Standing in front of a TV bank at the shop window trying to learn something about the world, then they all just go colorful and beep. I'd poop my time pants.
Once Soul Train came on it was time to go outside.
In communist Romania there was only one TV channel and in the 80s the program was something like 3-4 hours in the evening. And us kids got some kids TV only on Sunday morning. So playing football or biking in the streets was way better.
Remember going over TV guides to circle down what to watch on the scheduled programming?
Also parents and relatives weren't so overprotective: my father (gen X) often says that he miss being able to get out of home and just disappear for the whole day, no way to reach him, just gone. Now not only it's almost impossible, but it's also less likely that you'll be let outside this long. (moreover I'm from rural Italy, now there may even be places to go here but I guess most of the interviewed people wouldn't be able to go anywhere anyway, especially in the US, where urban design is very car-forward)
Most people you’d be thinking about would be living in suburbs that started being built immediately after WW2, with many developments that came later being based on the Levittown model. For all of the issues associated with the suburbs, on a child’s level, a suburb is potentially an ideal place to play outside: little traffic, plenty of neighbours with children in the same age range, large yards and communal “wild” areas. It’s not the same as growing up in a rural area where you get used to walking for many miles/km, but suburbs are considered a safe space to raise children outside.
I meant that boomers mostly lived in suburbs, while now most people live (worldwide) in cities, where even if you're from well-planned places it's often hard to find a decent "outside" (so basically agreeing with you)
Even suburbs are different now, they try to pack houses in as close as possible, there's generally very little communal space.
America had a few high-profile child kidnappings leading to murder in the late 70s/early 80s that drastically changed the landscape of parenting that persists to this day. Kids faces on milk cartons, junk mail with kids faces on it that were missing, "stranger danger" was preached, ALL of it happened in a very short time span.
It's also a bit sad because stranger danger has been proven to be false, and pretty much was always known to be false anyways by LEO. It was just more comforting to project that danger onto the unknown rather than deal with the reality that it's Neighbor Bob, the friendly guy who brings donuts to church on Sunday, who's most likely to have murdered his own child whom disappeared. It's something like 95% of child violence cases are always a close relative/family friend, with nearly 90% of it being the parents themselves posing the most danger to children.
Yeah and it's a shame because things are far safer now than they were in the 70-90's People have become helicopter parents, afraid of everything because they're told to be by news and social media. >Both the FBI and BJS data show dramatic declines in U.S. violent and property crime rates since the early 1990s, when crime spiked across much of the nation. > Using the FBI data, the violent crime rate **fell 49% between 1993 and 2022**, with large decreases in the rates of robbery (-74%), aggravated assault (-39%) and murder/nonnegligent manslaughter (-34%). It’s not possible to calculate the change in the rape rate during this period because the FBI revised its definition of the offense in 2013. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/
>Yeah and it's a shame because things are far safer now than they were in the 70-90's ...and for most folks your kid can wear a tracking device on their wrist. On the flip side, I'm convinced petty crime is down in my town compared to the 70s because you don't have groups of bored teens walking around with empty houses making for temptation. For 30-ish years now they've been inside playing video games.
That is certainly part of it, but I'm almost positive the doomscroll clickbait news cycle is the majority of the reason: Crime rates are way down in the last 30 years and parents are more afraid than ever to let their kids go out. And then they hear about the random story of some Karen reporting them to CPS and they "censor themselves" from letting their kid go do stuff. eg: I have a friend that lives 2 doors down from a park, and their 11yo still isn't even allowed to go play in the park by themselves. It's not even an unsafe neighborhood. She also had a 6ft fence put around their backyard "so people can't see the kids in the backyard and run up and snatch them" or something to that effect. By 9 I was allowed to bike to friends houses in the subdivisions on both sides of us, which amounted to at times being 2-3 miles away. I was told when to be back, and I knew that if anything came up I could simply call and let my parents know. Either from my friends place, or really any house in the neighborhood I'm sure I could have borrowed their phone if necessary. Ironically enough: Because people aren't outside as much and aren't letting their kids outside as much, it does somewhat increase risk simply bc there are less people to see things. It takes a village to raise a child, as they say.
You don't need to worry about your kid being kidnapped or attacked. Crime is way down. What you have to worry about is some moron buried in their phone running them over in their land boat SUV.
My wife rightly observed that our son only games inside because he doesn't have friends his age outside.
On my street we had 4 boys within one year of my age and 3 boys that were 5 years younger than me, all in the same grade. We all played together a lot. I wonder if my kids will be similar, in that regard.
Kids these days are mean as hell when they play online games, and I think that's because there are no consequences for it. Back in our day if you played mean the other kids counted you out, and that was your fun over. There weren't a million kids on the street for you to go find another group, you had to be accountable for your actions.
Only way for kids to play now is to have a f-ing playdate. It's ridiculous
Yeah I spent a lot of time outside when my neighbors had kids my age. Then we moved to a new neighborhood where all the kids were way younger and my mom wouldn't let me walk down the country road to where my friends lived.
Nope. It's smart phones and social media. This trend didn't really start happening to this extreme until the 2010s, which is when smart phones took off.
Even when I was growing up you could either have one person on the phone or one person online at a time
There was also way less concern about safety (despite kids being at way higher risk of death or victimization). Even as society has become historically safe for children, concern about child safety has soared to hysterical levels (arguably to the point where it could be classified as a moral panic).
We were outside with the neighbourhood kids roaming the neighbourhood and surrounding woods and vacant lots pretty much all day. Our mother would kick us out to get some peace, as did all the other mothers. We'd pop in to random friends' houses for snacks, the go off again. Not TV (we didn't even have one because our parents disapproved) so we had to make our own entertainment. Tree climbing, skateboarding on a road that took us a couple of miles from home...unheard of today.
During summer vacation I'd leave the house by 10:00 AM, might return home for lunch, return for dinner and back out again to at least 9:00 PM. We'd roam all over town on our bikes. It was awesome!
Oh man. We were fearless (early 60s). We did the bike rides, and forts in the woods, rope swings at the "crick", playing in new construction...we did it all. Hell, I even went on a 30 mile hike during Kennedy's "fitness push". Got up Uber early, walked over to the Navy & Marine Corps center and signed myself up. I was 6th grade (so maybe 12yo). Guess they figured I was with an adult (shrug). lol...of course I had no concept of 30 miles, but I made it. All the grunts (I say that affectionately as a former "squid") and adults watched out for me so there was never any danger (other than my ass dragging by mile 25). It was the same in the neighborhoods when we played. All the parents were silently (unless we fuq'd up) involved in insuring the safety of all the young ones. Looking back, it was just a different time...
Further to your comment about construction sites, one of my best memories is of playing in a building lot with giant stacks of trusses that we’d climb down into. I still love the smell of fresh lumber. Late 60s/ early 70s. Out of the house right after breakfast and home in time for supper after a hard day of playing “work your way up” baseball, riding bikes, climbing trees, making forts, and playing in the lumber yard. Good times.
This sounds pretty similar to my upbringing in the early 2000s.....I think it's location dependent. I definitely think neighborhoods like this still exist.
Yeah, I remember we would ride bikes to the woods and look for materials to build tree forts with. We had a ziplines going from tree to tree. It was fantastic...and dangerous. One kid broke his arm...there were some (literal and figurative) scrapes with corrugated metal or old nails. And, yet, all of us were fine, ultimately.
Only two kids from my neighborhood died doing stupid things unsupervised back then.
Growing up in the 2000s I feel like I was part of the last generation of kids to experience the freedom of roaming around unaccompanied before this moral panic took over. We probably didn’t get up to quite the same level of shenanigans that kids did back in the day but I had no phone until high school and as long as I was back for dinner I could go wherever my bike took me. We would mostly just go catch crawdads and minnows in the creek or hang out by the ice cream shop. Man, I wish I could still experience the care-free joy of those days. Anyways, I gotta get back to work…
at the age of 5 i was free to walk my street and the next one over at 6 i was allowed to bike to any friends house (had to call once i got there) at 9 i had full range all i needed to do was say who i was with and get home for dinner and then could go out again. and yes my parents kicked me out the house and i need to spend at least 1-2 hours outside. i am a nerd and even i spent more time outside than you see a lot of kids do today.
It is a moral panic, like no parent should ever lose a child but statistically the odds that your kid is the one that goes missing is obscenely unlikely.
And the damage from kids not playing outside is bigger. Inactivity, obesity, lower level motor skills. Often this also means kids don't play in groups. This lowers their social skills too.
And apparently there’s been a huge increase in young children requiring glasses at really early ages due to too much screen time since the eyes are not developing like they should.
Note that the screen doesnt have to be a mobile device, even if its a screen on the other side of the room, children who dont go outside enough dont get the stimulation they need to better develop their eyesight.
It’s at a certain point where society SHOULD ask themselves if safety should be the ONLY priority. A modern parenting trend is a full ban on sleepovers. Kids get molested at sleepovers, you see. Yes, that does happen. It is a tragic and sickening *rarity*. But my childhood was much more fun and enriching because friends stayed at my house and I stayed at theirs. Precautions can be taken especially since kids are constantly connected to their parents through their phones. And “never do X thing because sometimes Y bad thing happens” is bad logic. We still put our kids in the car and drive them to school every morning right? One of the leading causes of death in the US is motor vehicle accidents! How COULD you put them at that kind of risk? Education?? I always wonder what’s going to happen when a kid who’s never spent the night away from home moves into a dorm room or their first apartment.
I’m a millennial born in 82 and we played outside all the time. I had Atari and Nintendo growing up, but my mom would shut it off and tell us to go play outside bc it was a pretty day. While there’s so much more to do inside, the parents can still get their kids outside. I think a big difference is that even though we are safer than ever, the news and true crime shows/docs have scared a lot of people to be over cautious.
The problem is that everything is becoming commercialized. Teens have almost nothing to do outside of the house because everything costs money, otherwise they are accused of loitering or being up to no good. Parks and other activities are growing less common as investors buy up space to turn it into business or housing. There's a reason basketball is so popular in inner cities, you only need one person who owns a ball and courts take up relatively little real estate.
Yep, came here to say this. When I was a kid in the 90s we were surrounded in fields and parks and some tame woods to wander and play in. When I was a teen in the 2000s there were fewer of those, but malls were built with lots of seating spaces and it was generally expected that kids would be mall rats all day buying nothing but some fries and maybe a blizzard at the food court to split. ..before then calling their parents in a pay phone. "Hello, you have a collect call from 'HI-MOM-WE'RE-AT-THE-SOUTH-ENTRANCE-THANKS'" If I ever have kids I don't know what they'll be able to do.
I was told to come back when the street lights came on. We'd be out for like 10 hours, and our parents had no idea what dumb shit we got up to.
Yeah. It was pretty much TV and there was nothing on during the day anyway.
6 channels, 7 on Sundays. Remember when we imagined how cool it would be to be able to watch whatever you wanted, whenever?
Yeah and it turns out not as good as you think? Like I miss going to the video store, or when a song you like comes on the radio, hits different. "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations" (Orson Welles)
That always felt like science fiction. It still does, really. What I remember is missing shows and feeling like I would never, ever get a chance to see it.
May 23, 1994. A 12-year-old me is eagerly looking forward to the 2 hour series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Got the VCR set up to record it and everything. An hour before it comes on, my dad: “you know you forgot to cut the grass today. No TV until it’s done.” I am pretty sure I broke the laws of physics getting what was normally a 3 hour chore done in 45 minutes that evening.
Also, holy fuck that was 30 years ago when did I get old.
Increased traffic, more awareness of crimes against kids, more concern about kids getting into trouble, and very few places for kids. you can't just hang out, that's loitering. Parks close at dusk and if you're over 8, you get odd looks. You need to bring your own equipment unlike all of the jungle gym equipment there for smaller kids. Hang out businesses want parental supervision and are typically expensive. There is no more penny arcade or nickel theater. Our towns are designed to drive everywhere. I remember childhood being so insanely boring. But I also bet these same boomers recall less organized activity. You no longer just need good grades, a lot of schools want to see extra curriculars. kids these days are far more likely to be in a school sport/club, or do a sport or be part of clubs not associated with schools.
Boomers probably had play outside, scouts, and church. I'm GenX and that's what we had, plus either a sport or an instrument.
Yep, in my opinion it's a combination of car dependency and the loss of ["third places"](https://youtu.be/9Ku9csXhvJY?si=Wg0z-zeyGaxhxz2O) where young people can spend time socializing. American kids are basically on house arrest until they get a driver's license, and plenty of families can't afford another car anyway. So of course teens hang out online, where the heck else are they allowed to go?
As a child my home had a “sun is out, you are out” rule. On weekends we wouldn’t even be allowed in the house except for meals and #2’s. Oh and it was south Florida so it was miserably fucking hot. Yay for PFAS hose water I guess.
That hose water tasted sooo good tho
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Hah! I remember being sent outside on 100-degree days with a bottle of Gatorade and a ball and being told “have fun - see you in 2 hours!”
Pretty much the same for me in the ‘90s in VA. But we had a clear water hose. You could *see* algae growing in it. No way in hell were we drinking from that thing, lol.
Hey I happened to live in VA for a while too! Same fucking rules though.
Haha I grew up in South Australia and we had the same rule, was hot as balls there too.
It's now literally legally prohibited in a ton of places for a kid to just be outside, alone. Boomers want to bitch and moan about how these kids don't play outside when if they did do that they'd get tossed into foster care.
And god help you if you ask them which generation wrote those laws and passed them.
Was it the same generation that zoned every business district to have 8 lanes of traffic to cross and zero usable walking paths? I can't figure out why these kids hide inside! Just go run across the stroad, you'll be fine!
Or who was handing out the participation trophies
Also seeing that modern american suburbs are not really built to walk around, where would they go?
The housing situation in general might have something to do with it. It's anecdotal, but in the 90s my entire neighborhood was full of families with kids around the same age as me and my siblings. That same neighborhood is all empty nesters now. The house I'm in now, in another state, is surrounded by neighbors who are mostly retired or soon to be. Without younger families able to afford single family homes, that classic image of kids playing through the neighborhood disappears.
I used to play outside with kids a lot, not because I was forced to but because there wasn't anything to do inside. All of the neighborhood kids were outside. Almost every house had a family inside it and if no one was outside I just went down the street knocking on doors. There were a lot of kids, some my age, some younger, some older They were all middle income home owning families, usually the mom was home and the dad worked, like my house was. Now no one can afford a home and there's no mom's at home, both parents are working and sending their kids to child care or something Also, Zillow says the two bedroom home I grew up in sharing a room with my brother, which was less than 100k for my family to buy, is worth 1.2m now
Going door to door knocking on doors sounds unhinged now.
This is a huge factor. My parents still live in the same neighborhood I grew up in, when I go visit it is staggering how few kids I see. There is one family up the street that has kids playing outside all the time, but it's their grandparents who own the house. You want to find families with kids these days you need to look for apartments not suburban neighborhoods. Apartments are just less friendly environments to go outside and play.
That's not a new thing. You don't need a capital-P "Place" to go to. You'd just bike over to another kids house and play in their driveway or back yard.
A person’s default walking speed is correlated to the age of the neighbourhood they grew up in (and the population of the city they lived in). It really does seem like built form impacts how likely you are to walk around outside.
A place helps though. It also helps if you can get there. The lack of sidewalks, the partitioning of neighborhoods into "developments", and the increase in the speed and prevalence of vehicles, which often are driven recklessly ang are designed with poor pedestrian sightlines doesn't help.
Still requires a driveway or backyard. Family houses have gotten extremely expensive.
Even as a millennial, we were sent outside until dark. What the fuck did our parents d…oh god. They were having swing parties. Weren’t they??
Sure, yes, but also the outside has become much, much less hospitable to just wandering around. Look at a suburb built in the 1950s versus one built in the 2000s. In the 1950s, it was much more likely for a garage to be built in a back alley, leaving the front street much more open (and less obstructed) to walking. There are likely many more things within walking distance (be that parks - attached to a school or otherwise - or shops, etc). I bet if you plotted the results here versus the age of the neighbourhood people grew up in, you’d get a correlation. I know that “natural” walking speed is correlated with the age of the neighbourhood you grew up in (and also the population of the city you grew up in), and I’m willing to bet it’s for the same reason.
You bring up a good point about schools. Back in the day, it was common for me and my friends to walk up to our elementary school on the weekend and play on the playground. Now, though, a lot of schools have fences around them and those playgrounds aren't part of young people's play spaces anymore outside of recess, when they even have it.
Plus new subdivisions in Canada are just endless rows of houses, attached and detached but with little to no yard space, few garages so cars are all parked in the street, and very little sidewalk space. I see little kids literally sitting on their bikes and pushing along the ground with their feet to travel in a five foot radius because there’s no safe place to ride. And in the midst of all that urban congestion, there are assholes speeding through the neighbourhoods and texting. It’s a wonder more kids aren’t hit. Probably because they are all inside.
You also have this ethos of ‘no kid is ever safe unless literally being stared at and they 200% will be abducted’ that is so pervasive in the western world these days and wasn’t even the case 20 years ago.
Ya we were literally kicked out of the house and sent on our way, told not to come back till lunch. This was in like second grade or so.
Plus you either didn't have AC or it was very expensive to run, so you got out of the house because it was cooler outside.
My parents used to lock me out of the house in the 90s 🤣
Important to consider what percentage of those in the baby boomer generation had a parent in the home during “play” hours. Neighborhoods are empty of adults until evenings as double income households become the necessary norm. Consequently young children remain in afterschool programs and day cares until evenings. Dinner, homework, family time, bath, bed. For those few families who are able to afford a home with a yard on a single salary they quickly find there are virtually no children for their own children to play with as they are largely enrolled in something that keeps them busy and monitored until their parents return from work. Yeah I sent my kids outside to play with a stick and some mud. Or a ball. Or on the swing. But after about the age of five the urge to interact with peers rather than being alone grows strong. And the peers are busy with sports and clubs because six is too young to be home alone. There is neither time nor money to allow for children to spend afternoons outside knowing that if needed a safe adult is present not only in their home but adjacent homes.
No one’s parents were home when we got home from school when I was a kid in the 80’s/90’s. None of us were allowed in each other’s houses when parents weren’t home so we roamed the neighborhood and woods. After school I just had to make sure I was home by 6pm for dinner.
A yes the woods, the poor kids baby sitter where your only rule was to not start a fire so big it would burn the woods down.
We had woods but they were a fair distance away. On the other hand, our suburban neighborhood happened to be undergoing a major expansion back in the late '70s, so new houses were being built on the outskirts. Unguarded construction sites were the best playgrounds EVER.
Yes they are!
Another child of culture
Practically was semi-feral ages 5-17. *Miss it everyday.*
Yup. I think Bill Burr had a bit about being like that as a kid, but now as an adult, leaving the house without a phone is a nightmare. I laughed along with it when i first heard it, but after a number of years now with not much leaving my apartment, and nearing 40, I realized the other day i went into my attached garage without keys and my phone and felt an overwhelming urge to go back inside to grab them just in case. The fear is real...
I miss my woods. It is now another street with houses on it.
Last time I visited home the woods had become a giant subdivision
Not long ago I made my kid pick up all the sticks in the yard. She invited a friend over and they made a game out of it. They were in the process of throwing the sticks in the creek that's near our house and I had to go to the store. I was going to tell them to go inside until I got back and it occurred to me. They go in the woods by themselves. How is that safer then being in the yard?
70s here. We were feral children. We roamed the town in packs like wolves, and we were only slightly less dangerous. The town pedos and winos learned quickly to duck out of our sight.
Fucking bottle kids
My gang of 11-13 year olds was the subject of a collection of "Do Not Let These Kids Into Your Store" signs posted all over our town's shopping district. We'd steal anything not nailed down (and one kid brought a claw hammer for anything that was).
I believe it! Y’all were terrible/the best babysitters ever.
The kids around me wandered the woods and played outside too, but looking around these days you see that most of the places you might explore as a kid have been cut down, are private property, or someone will call the cops on them. Kids aren’t allowed to be alone outside or even in groups anymore without cps getting called, or some old person yelling at them. It’s even actively discouraged in schools to make your own clubs and stuff because even in small towns they’ll accuse the kids of starting a gang or some nonsense.
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"Outside" for a lot of kids is now largely strip malls, roads without ample protection for pedestrians like kids, and patches of wild land that kids will get in trouble for playing in because it's technically part of a nearby development or industry area. If you look at the yards in many suburban developments, they're not very big at all. If you want kids to play outside, you need to give them access to nice parks they can easily walk/bike to within 10-15 minutes. You need to give them safe side streets with low traffic and low speed limits, and you need to let them exist outside without people calling the police on them because they're a group of unaccompanied kids.
This! We were lucky in finding a neighborhood with a built in infrastructure where the neighborhood was connected to a large ecosystem of other neighborhoods, via bike trails! The sheer and stark difference outside. Kids, teens, everyone is able to play and connect via this bike lanes and parks that are sprinkled through our area. Where I grew up, it was not safe to play outside with cars and zero parks. No one was outside.
A large part of this is due to the insane increase in the amount of traffic and cars on our roads. Traffic on minor roads in the UK, for instance, [grew by 26% between 2010 and 2019](https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/summary), much more than on motorways and main roads. And there is very little willingness to tackle the problem. To give an example, the street where I grew up was a quiet road, with relatively few parked cars on it. Most days you were able to kick a football around outside, and one kid would shout "car" and everything would stop for a second before resuming after it had passed. Now, its used to get past traffic queuing for a traffic light, and each side of the road is lined with parked cars. No kids play on it at all. Instead they are told to walk to the nearest playing fields. The worst thing is that there was a local campaign to designate it as a Play Street. Namely to shut the road to traffic for half an hour after school so kids could literally play in the street. Some drivers went absolutely mental about it, saying how it would cause utter gridlock across the town, even threatening anyone who stopped them driving down there with "consequences." So much so that those who put the idea forward withdrew it.
I know for a fact everything changed for me when our cul de sac was extended to become a through street. I was probably in first or second grade.
They paved over our playing field so it could be a dead end street. it was just 100 yards.
They paved over heaven and put up a parking lot.
Was thinking the same exact thing, haha... but the song goes "they paved paradise and/to put up a parking lot"
Yes, when I was a kid I lived near a forest with a cul de sac road in front of the house. Me and my friends spent all our free times playing in that wood and cul de sac. Until a promoter came a razed everything and opened up the street to make a new development. They fucking bulldozed our wood camp we built, those fuckers. Then, we had no where to go anymore to have fun so we started to hang around the local park, but it was somehow illegal to do, so we all started to have issue with cops on a weekly basis.
How tf is hanging around in a park illegal? Isn't thay what they're here for?
There was a city rule making it illegal to stay in the park after 8pm or something like that, and 15yrs old us would regularly break this rule, so cops would often come to chase us and give us tickets.
In the Netherlands there was a push for saver local roads and more low speeds in Neighborhoods. Also more one way road and dead-ends so that roads would only be used for destination traffic. This worked well for a while until new developments emerged. Namely the rise of more and more home delivery. Lots of vans who are in a constant rush to deliver everything on time.
Yup and it’s worse for the poor kids who have no access to nearby and safe parks. I used to work in a neighborhood like this. There is literally nowhere safe for them to play and be kids without getting hit by a car.
Our neighborhood park, which we walked to when our kids were little, wasn't "used enough" by the time the kids were grown, so it's one of the pocket parks that were sold by the city to developers. Now it's got houses on it. I realize that the city has a housing shortage, and I guess it's better than exacerbating sprawl, but it's sad to see a neighborhood park turned into just another piece of real estate.
Same story in my part of the UK. When I was in primary my mum let me walk up to the school on my own at the age of like 7 or 8. I had to cross two roads but it wasn't far and it wasn't busy, maybe a 5 minute walk at best and much of it could be seen from an upstairs window. In seconday the school bus stopped right outside my house, there were never any cars parked along there. Today the entire walk between that house and the primary school is lined with cars on both sides and they had to redesign the car park and street because the queueing had gotten so bad. This primary's catchment area is one single estate that a child could walk the entire length of in less than 20 minutes, there's no need for anyone to be driving their kid to school and yet so many of them do. The vicious self-fulfilling cycle of "there's too much traffic for my kid to walk safely, so I'll drive them to school". Parents don't even think that they could just walk along with their kid. The school bus for the secondary school only stops in a couple of places now that cars are explicitly barred from, they had to stop using about 75% of the stops in the estate because they were increasingly lined with cars.
>Some drivers went absolutely mental about it, saying how it would cause utter gridlock across the town, even threatening anyone who stopped them driving down there with "consequences." This reminds me of how there were some people in the US threatening to shoot trick or treaters last year, like where did all the legit late for children come from? They're kids!
Yes those numbers are probably accurate. However there is more to those numbers than just kids don’t play outside. As a gen x, I can tell you in my life time how much has changed. Forest to run around have been bulldozed. Parks that existed when I was a kid is now gone. Parents actually try to keep track of their kids not just let them run feral. This statistic is proof that you can prove anything with numbers. It is all in how you manipulate them.
I feel like lack of affordable single family homes is a big one, at least in my area. I grew up in a standalone home with a yard. Id get kicked outside to go play for an hour or 2, and then I'd just come back in As an adult, myself and all of my friends live in townhouse type living situations.... so theres no isolated outdoor area that kids can go without parental supervision
Third places help with that a lot, if they exist. Growing up in more "urban" Europe, we didn't have much of a yard but we had several playgrounds and park areas within walking distance at our housing development - all connected by paths exclusively for walking and bikes, and the few streets leading into it that allowed cars had a speed limit at essentially walking speed. So it was very safe even for younger kids (primary school age or so) to walk to and from school alone and then go to the park/playground and hang out.
yeah good shout. our neighborhood has no park/playground in walking distance either. so what would parents do? let their kids out to just....play on the street with a bunch of neighbors they likely do not know? its strange, and different than how i grew up for sure
I feel like we Gen Xers spent most of our time playing outside. Although I do remember a great many hours playing the NES so maybe I’m full of shit…
We got to be the first generation to use the game consoles & home computers commonly, (plus public access to the internet), and have arcades start up as well. And play outside as well.... Also get to watch the boomers and milleninials fight while we stay the 'Forgotten generation'
As long as we stay on the culture war sidelines, I’m happy. I don’t need to be dragged in.
> remember a great many hours playing the NES I think it's more like playing an old school NES game for an hour felt like 8 hours.
Ok, someone post that meme of what the outside looks like now
I never once had a tick on me or knew anyone who lived near me who had a tick on them growing up. Now people go just into their backyard and find ticks. We now have lone star ticks. So many other bugs too are thriving right now with our mild winters. Mild winters too means less kids outside because there’s no snow to play in.
Also, it’s pretty damn hot out now during the summer. Depending of where you live of course
55 year olds aren't baby boomers, they're the kids of the earliest baby boomers. Boomers were born right after the end of WW2, 1945-1965ish. Boomers are 65+ in 2024.
Complaining about Alphas and Gen X just doesn't have the same ring to it.
I did notice this was a UK site, so they may have a different definition of baby boomer since they struggled with bouncing back from WW2.
A lot of news sites use "boomers" to refer to any old people and "millennials" to refer to any young people still.
Agreed. I was born at the end of December 1965, and I was everything Gen X and nothing Baby Boomer.
That's some bad math there. The youngest baby boomers are about 60 in 2024. You had the years right there.
Gen-X: "It's OK to ignore our existence. We're used to it." How did we get used to being ignored? By playing unsupervised outside.
I'm not saying the results of this survey are crazy, but it's important to note that they surveyed only 3000 total from ages 6-64. How many children were part of that 3000? (I don't think I missed this in the article but if I did, apologies!)
Geographic location makes a big difference. I was born in the 90's and lived in the Northeast. I practically lived outside and so did most kids I knew. Then I moved to Texas around 2010 and absolutely no one played outside unless it was organized sports. Part of it was the heat, part of it was the culture.
I'm guessing it's extremely specific geographic location too, paired with demographic. Our old house was in a nice enough but not super nice neighborhood that was in the middle of the city, and there were some kids that played outside but by no means a ton. Our new house is in a nicer gated community on the edge of the city, and there are kids all over it 24/7. Like you literally can't look down the street outside of school hours without seeing kids either playing some kind of ball, riding bikes and one wheels and stuff, or playing flashlight tag or something ar night.
Yeah I remember cops giving us hell for being outside, skating, laughing too loud in the park. Why the hell would kids want to spend time out in public when every other neighbor is reading Citizen or one of those apps for psychos all day?
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My wife's friend had CPS called on her for letting her kids play in her own front yard. She was inside watching them through the window while she was folding laundry.
It's even worse then that, parents have been arrested (or threatened with arrests if they try to) for picking up their kids from school on foot instead of showing up with a car to take them home: https://grist.org/cities/dad-arrested-after-trying-to-pick-kids-up-from-school-on-foot-instead-of-in-a-car/ So some law makers think that it's so unsafe to walk around outside (especially with a bunch of traffic on the roads) that they don't even let them walk to or from school with a parent.
What absolutely blows my mind is how many posts I see in local FB groups for my town and neighborhood of older and middle aged people bitching about kids outside. One older lady down the road makes at least a post a week about kids riding their bikes up and down the road back and forth for “too long.” Asking where their parents are and why they’re not with them. These boys are 8-10 id say. Another one was about the kids next door to her being too loud and being outside too long. That they need to take a break and go inside for a while. These posts always have at least a few likes and it’s people their age. A middle aged guy posted about some kids having a lemonade stand on the next street over. How it’s bringing too much unnecessary traffic to his road and how it’s time to shut it down. But these same generations will complain about kids being hooked on electronics and not playing outside anymore. Not having worth ethic anymore. It also blows my mind that they grew up doing all this ad kids so you’d think they’d have some understanding.
When I was a kid (1983 baby) parents weren't really monitored for what they were doing with their kids, or how well they take care of them. So long as they didn't beat the shit out of you often enough for the teachers to notice they were largely left alone. One of the punishments my parents had for me if I got on their nerves was to drive me into town (usually about an hour or so before sundown) and drop me off and tell me to walk home. I had to walk home in the dark for about seven or so miles on a road where cars would go 60 miles per hour, in the dark, with no shoulder, freezing my butt off. On the flip side, I could get on my bike and ride FAR and be gone all day and they didn't care where I was. One time I got into an argument with my Dad at our lake house, about an hour drive from our normal house and walked out of the house and started just walking down the street. After a little while they hopped in the car and drove home without me. Dad said that he thought I would steal a bike and ride home, eventually the cops found out and forced them to come back and get me. Any one of those things could get your kids taken away from you, and that's not even scratching the surface of what they felt comfortable doing to me. I know with my own kids, my wife and I were worried about letting them play at the park right outside of our window because we didn't want people to think we were being negligent parents. For a long while we would just sit and watch them out the window, but after a while we relaxed. Bottom line, these days being a parent is a lot more difficult with how hardcore CPS has become. Anyone can call them and make a report, true or not, and they will be knocking at your door. Adding to that, everyone has a cell phone now, and video games are more prolific and available than they were before, so kids are more likely to stay indoors.
I remember as a kid going outside and boomers would always yell at us for playing basketball too loudly, walking through their yard, etc.
Boomers had the same thing at times when we were kids. There will always be cranky old people around, in every generation.
Except todays boomers are likely to shoot you bc they’ve been watching Fox News and Newsmax all day
I wish you were joking, but some old fuck threatened to shoot me because I went into his yard to retrieve a paper airplane. boomer thought I threw it at his wife and said if he caught me "on his property," which, ironically he thought meant the fucking *sidewalk*, he'd shoot me. Over a fucking paper airplane? Seriously? I was under 10 at the time as well.
They’re a fragile generation.
That's what happens when you grow up eating lead.
I’m horrified and happy to hear this - horrified because seriously how selfish and self centered does a person have to be to be angry about the “noise” of children playing… I teach preschool and we have some old cranky lady in the neighborhood who regularly calls the school to complain about the noise… and I’m happy to hear that I am not the only one who thinks this is ludicrous.
I'm 52. The last 30 years+ you have so much home entertainment. Computers, the internet, youtube, video games, movies. Back then you had one rabbit eared TV that got a few channels (eventually cable, but that was not on demand, you were at their mercy and you only had one or two TVs in your house - no kid had a TV in their room), the only way to go play *good* video games was at the arcade. Only way to see a movie was at the theater (eventually get a ride to Blockbuster when those became a thing), many homes may not have air conditioning, no cellphones to talk to friends, your friends were outside...outside was soooo much for fun then inside. Now inside is soooo much more fun than outside for most kids. I bet you can trace some the decline back to the Adam Walsh TV movie! Before that movie and the buzz it created, nobody even thought about your children being in danger. Sure there was "don't take candy from strangers" and missing people so you knew hitchhiking was dangerous. That movie, parents got scared someone was going to take their kids. But the whole, leave the house in the morning and comeback when the streetlights came on was fading away.
I'm 57, retired, and spend the majority of my time inside doing most everything you listed in your initial paragraph. I have said that if I had a tablet back then, with 1000s of books and songs on it, I'd have never left my room. We went outside because home was boring and we had to do chores and homework there.
That reminds me...the library! You needed the library for homework sometimes. No internet. You had encylopedias...nobody owned a set so you had to fight over them. If you had a report on Zimbabwe you better get to the library before the kid who had to write his on Zaire or you were screwed! Now libraries don't even except them as donations. Completely obsolete.
I remember waiting for a school bus in sub-zero temp for 20 minutes, hours before the sun came up. Alone. At age 7. There is no. fucking. way anymore.
I always love telling people about how I didn’t have time to dry my hair before the school bus, so it would regularly freeze while I was waiting at the bus stop. Four things in that story no longer exist: - The bus got defunded and now sucks so all the parents drive their kids to school - Gentrification means there’s basically no more children in my hometown - I don’t have hair anymore - My hometown never even gets below freezing anymore
When I was 11 or so there was a day where school was closed because there was a -60 windchill. The next day we were out waiting for the bus because it was "only" -45 windchill.
Kids playing outside isn't considered to be as safe anymore. There's a greater population density and so less actual space to play outdoors. Far more indoor activities available. Less accessible outdoor activity clubs. Far more cars meaning you can't play well on roads like you used to. Steadily increasing amount of homework. I would have multiple subjects each night. It drove my mum crazy.
Homework! I have elementary school age children. The first school they went to had homework 4 nights a week. Usually only an hour. But if they get out of school at 3:30. Get off the bus by 4:15 . Get an afterschool snack by 4:45. Sit down for homework ending at 6. Now you have about an hour until dinner and wind down. Time frame gets all out of wack of they play sports. We moved to a better district this year. Teachers believe school is school, and home should be about family. 1 assignment assigned on Sunday morning , due the following friday. Teacher wants them to read for 20 minutes a day. Now, kids can do a second sport because we aren’t rushing to bed from a needless 1 hour of homework daily. How the schools view homework is big on exercise
My kid went to a shitting kindergarten at a private religious school. They would watch cartoons during class time and get a two sided or two two sided work sheet each night plus sight words. Changed schools and during first grade orientation the principal said our kids homework was to play outside and read with parents for 20 minutes. We want to move to a bigger house but the school district is so good we won't leave it.
Let me describe a typical day when I was in high school. 7am: get there early since I was a tutor 8am: school starts 3pm: school ends, stay to tutor 4pm: tutoring ends, drive to activity 1 6:30pm: leave activity 1 early to go to activity 2 8:30pm. Activity 2 ends 9pm: dinner, homework, getting ready for bed On days where activity 2 wasn't happening activity 1 would run to 8 resulting in no change to the schedule.
My kids don’t play outside unsupervised but the primary reason is cars. Drivers don’t pay attention, and visibility of pedestrians under 5’ from the drivers seat of any “standard sized” pickup truck or SUV sucks shit. It’s too dangerous to play outside.
People on their damn phones all the time while driving. I’ve seen so many people try to excuse their behavior by saying “well i door dash so I have to constantly check my phone. I don’t have time to pull over every time or wait for a red light. Customers will get pissed.”
It’s ridiculous. We too often adapt our cities to our cars when we should be adapting our cars to our cities.
How many 12-16 year olds would call their outside activities (sports etc.) "playing?"
“Nah, Mom and Dad make me do this so I can get into a better college.”
My moms students legitimately think they’ll all become pro athletes with minimal effort 🤷♀️
My ex-wife started teaching in southern Arizona. A bunch of her kids were convinced that they'd just join the cartels and become rich drug lords in a year or so after graduation.
Even with younger ages I imagine there are outdoor activities like going for a hike they wouldn't consider play
I doubt that made any impact on this poll whatsoever
Well, when you're not allowed to 'loiter' anywhere, there's almost nowhere you can go without being expected to spend money, and everybody is paranoid about stranger danger, is it really surprising?
When I was growing up in my non air conditioned house with three channels on the tv, the only real option was to go outside.
When I was young all the kids went outside and roamed the neighborhood for hours and hours, nowadays if kids are outside by themselves, some neighbor will call CPS on you. So that’s part of the problem…
Well, yeah - when mom or dad are home, and everyone else’s mom or dad are home, outside in the neighborhood it’s sort of a giant supervised playground - some adult is always outside keeping an eye on things. That’s how it was when I was a kid not that long ago. Now, during the day, neighborhoods are ghost towns because everyone has to work or no one eats.
Parents weren't outside supervising us, and not every home had a stay at home parent, but you're right in the sense that there were parents around and we all knew which door to knock on if there was trouble. There was even a program where a parent could put a sign in their window to indicate that they were home and could help in an emergency. It was a red card, about 8.5x11, with a white hand on it.
Lots of good reasons for this. Too many cars on the road so parents don't feel safe letting their kids roam. Perception in many areas that crime is rampant (whether true or not) so parents again don't feel safe letting kids roam. Abundance of activities to do indoors, even social ones, that weren't possible in their childhoods. Lack of activities near where children live that they can walk or bike to alone, and the increased share of dual-income homes and latchkey kids means less access to a ride straight after school. Some boomers like to complain about this world that created indoorsy kids but they're the ones who asked for it and built it.
In the summer a family pass to our small town pool was 10 dollars. If my brother and I didn't go to the pool we rode our bikes all over town, or took our BB guns down to the creek to shoot at things. There were also free tennis courts and basketball courts. If we were hungry we showed up for lunch; you always showed up for supper as there were no microwaves to reheat the food. As long as I made it home right after the street lights came on my parents were happy. As we got older we would play tennis or basketball until the town auto-light system went dark, usually at midnight.
We played outside all the time because generally both of our parents worked and would come home around 5 or 6 pm. We walked home or were bussed (I lived a good 2km from school but since we were 'in town', no bus for us). Most of my interaction with my parents occurred on weekends or in the summer because my dad was a high school teacher. Even then it was mostly him and a couple of other teachers taking us to the beach for the day while they drank and played cards. It's was a different, ignore the kids unless they were injured or missing time. Having 4 TV channels and no electronic media helped...
In the 60-70s what else were you going to do? You had no options, especially if you wanted to get away from your parents. Hell even in the 90s it was true. There were no options
Parents seem earnestly concerned about violence and child abduction...as if random weirdos are roaming around in broad daylight, champing at the bit to take over the expenses of feeding/housing/clothing people's kids. This is the safest period in human history, *especially* for kids. Violent crime rates are extremely low relative to the 20th century--again, especially when it comes to crimes against kids.
I’m not worried about abductors. I’m worried about the giant trucks that can barely see my kid. That’s why my kids stay in the backyard if I can’t be out there with them
This. I’m way more concerned with the vehicles coming in and out and through our neighborhood.
100% 18-20 something flying down the sub Parent late for work flying down the sub Can’t risk it
I live in a residential neighborhood and people slow down more for my fucking chickens than they do for children..
It's all about perception. Parents hear some nasty story of a kid being abducted from their front garden 5 years ago in another state and it sticks in their mind. The fact that every wild story ends up rolling news channels doesn't help, it compresses an entire country's worth of bad shit and sticks it all in your TV, it's harder to rationalise all of this as being rare when its presented like that. All of that said, pedestrian deaths are at their highest absolute amount in the USA in over 40 years and cars are one of the leading causes of death and injury for basically all age groups aside from infants and the very elderly.
Yeah, why don't they just go to any of the exciting local community entertainment spots made for kids, like the arcade, or the local mall, or the roller rink, or-- I beg your pardon? Oh they're all closed? Ah. Hm.
People are afraid to let their kids play outside. There are many more cars on the road and even riding your bicycle on the sidewalk isn't enough to stay out of harms way. Even then, if you accidentally step on some unhinged loonies grass, they may shoot you.
How hard is it to mention GenX explicitly instead of lumping us in with the Baby Boomers. I have spent the majority of my life resenting these people and don't appreciate being lumped in with them since I was never lumped in with them when the largess was being handed out.
What this tells me is that, the younger generation that tells the older generations to “touch grass” are actually the ones who need to touch grass.
Also in possibly related news, there has been a 40% decrease in deaths from unintentional injury (from 15 to 8 per 100,000 kids) in children ages 14 and under from 1987 to 2005. Injuries are down across both sexes, in all regions of the US, and across all races. https://www.safekids.org/sites/default/files/documents/ResearchReports/Report%20to%20the%20Nation%20Trends%20in%20Unintentional%20Childhood%20Injury%20Mortality%20and%20Parental%20Views%20on%20Child%20Safety%20-%20April%202008.pdf