She was walking right behind her parents, but the driver could not see her because the vehicle was too high, so thought the road was free when the parents had passed through.
The court decided that the driver was at no fault as it was impossible to see the girl from his position.
I hope that means that the vehicle manufacturer is on a murder trial then. But I do not have illusions that this will lead to actual change.
Edit: Basically any car from Suzuki would be a hit in the US: https://www.suzukiauto.co.za/new-cars
They are perfectly legal to sell. There's just little demand and most manufacturers have discontinued sales.
I own a not-quite-that small car and the manufacturer discontinued US sales for the same reason - the lack thereof. That's why the Smart Fortwo discontinued sales in the US in 2019. The US market for good or for bad just does not want small cars. Many manufacturers are even dropping their sedans for sales reasons; e.g., Ford dropped the Fusion and Focus.
I didn't much care either way, but I do still consider this when comparing new vehicles.
This is blatantly false. See: the Mitsubishi Mirage as just one example.
(I don't know about erikw's claims about small cars being illegal in the US. So I don't want to express an opinion on that.)
WTF !
Pedestrian mirrors (allowing lorry drivers to see any pedestrians immediately in front and to the side) have been a legal requirement for years in Blighty.
https://tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/images/safer-lorries-schem...
I hate them.
I dream of the day, when proper night vision gear with the result displayed to the front window will be standard in cars, so all the cars can have no, or very soft lights to drive around savely at night.
Also, why not heat vision to better spot humans (and animals)? For the AI as well as the humans.
Is the tech military restricted?
Probably partly.
digital is controlled but more widely made, but also barely worth it.
the real issue is how to display it. for head-mounted setups it's essentially full field of view, and in monocular use combination is subconscious, but it's still rather awkward and requires practice. you can't achieve the same effect on a windshield, even with HUD.
cadillac had this feature in the 90s, though.
Unfortunately, yes. I know that there are various sci-fi solutions in the labs already, of projecting the image directly into the eye, or correctly on the windshield while taking the head position of the driver into account, but it probably takes a long time till they are a) reliable b) affordable c) standard in every car
https://hudway.co/blog/history-of-automotive-heads-up-displa...
If it was ~20 years ago it wasn't even that big compared to today!
In the 1990s, I had a sweet little Honda Civic hatchback that got great mileage and handled beautifully.
But towards the end of the decade, the roads in my area were filled with aggressive drivers in Ford and Jeep SUVs who just were obnoxious. I felt forced to switch to a larger car just to feel safe on the road.
And I don't mean the driver was an asshole, it simply wouldn't have fit in otherwise.
So, bad driving skills and realizing it via lack of self-trust, being compensated with degradation of roads and parking for everybody else, or just throwing money at the problem (without fixing underlying issue, but feeling less shitty about it).
All could be easily solved by proportional taxation. Swiss folks figured it like many other things already, each canton has their own car tax rules but most are some formula with horse powers and car weight combined. No chance this decade for anything similar in the US I believe.
Ridiculous vehicle.
Well...
In the former soviet block, you don't "find somewhere else" to park your car. You grab the first spot where you fit because you don't know if there is another free anywhere else.
Incidentally, that's why i like 4 meter cars. On streets with parallel parking, they fit in more places than the 4.5 m or more.
> Well...
Okay he could have been an asshole for other reasons, including for importing the F-150 here.
But the parking spots were at 45 degree angle and while it was narrow enough to fit in two if parked at 45, it was too long and it would have blocked the access lane with the tip. So it was parallel parked on 3 which was the only way to not block anyone.
Bam, SUVs are really unattractive.
As you can see, those requirements just get gamed.
Instead of complicated rules, just tax fuel (or emissions etc), and consumers will institute their own personal fuel efficiency requirements.
That's not likely to succeed, because:
1. People — individuals and companies — try to game the tax system at least as much as they do pollution regulations, and probably much more so because tax obligations are largely self-reported with only sporadic auditing to catch cheaters and gamers.
2. Certain political elements are always trying to defund the tax auditors (e.g., the IRS). We might well ask why that is.
3. Politically, tax hikes are always harder to get through Congress — and to keep in force — than sensible standards for products and behaviors that voters can see are beneficial to them (e.g., pollution prohibitions).
> 2. Certain political elements are always trying to defund the tax auditors (e.g., the IRS). We might well ask why that is.
Tax the petrol itself. That works reasonably well in most of the world. No need for complicated individual audits etc.
> 3. Politically, tax hikes are always harder to get through Congress — and to keep in force — than sensible standards for products and behaviors that voters can see are beneficial to them (e.g., pollution prohibitions).
I don't know. We kicked off the whole discussion because the standards you have are NOT sensible.
True — but see my #3 above (political problems), and then add 3.1: Special-interest groups, which donate heavily to politicians' campaigns, always lobby for tax breaks of various kinds, e.g., tax deductions (at the federal level) for state- and local sales- and property taxes.
At a high enough tax rate, the would-be gas guzzlers' contribution to the fisc outweighs their probabilistic homicide.
No, because that harm small fun sports cars. The problem is big cars. Just ban big cars.
More fuel you consume more emissions you produce, more distance you go, more road your wear occurs.
Do you want to get 8l V8 engine? Fine, just pay your fuel taxes.
Pinning fuel use seems to be the way to go, rather than penalizing engine geometry, for this reason.
It's important to remember, though, that semi-trucks get 5-8 miles to the gallon due to their weight/purpose. Perhaps these new fuel taxes should only affect classes other than A, B, and C to avoid knock-on effects.
What's interesting here is that semi-trucks cause exponentially more wear and tear on the roads than consumer vehicles, while not paying the corresponding fuel tax — they're being subsidized by everyday drivers.
Also the knock on effects may not be completely negative, it could mean that it isn't economical to drive a truck door-to-door filled with low value merchandise (And give retail a fighting chance).
What I was worried about was trucks used to transport groceries, not delivery trucks.
Last thing the poor need right now is the cost of food going even higher. They're already struggling to get by as it is.
Basically, tax fuel and tax the car.
But no need for outright bans. Almost any externality you can think of from (big) cars is finite, and thus a finite tax is appropriate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
Which makes importing smaller trucks like you see in other countries cost prohibitive
Weird that the more unsafe (to everyone else) and wasteful and polluting but also more profitable to industry modern trucks and SUVs are legal in their place!
We've got the Maverick hybird which does 99% of the farm stuff.
And we also have a tow equipped expedition that we use when we need to haul horses or the big trailer. The expedition also comes in handy when we regularly haul 6+ people.
I've had the need for a gooseneck trailer maybe once in the last decade.
My Subaru has almost zero free space under the hood and there are all kinds of repairs I wouldn't attempt because you have to disassemble half the engine to get to anything.
"I remember wanting it to feel very locomotive - like a massive fist moving through the air"
I suppose it appeals to a kind of selfish stupidity.
I always wonder if cars that are particularly top heavy could be flipped over while parked by particularly strong pedestrians
I've never felt it hindered me at all, except for a longing at times to live rurally. I've worked in different countries around a wide array of people in tech, both in project management and software engineering roles. My kids now have the same experience as you - they can walk outside at any given moment and have someone to play with in our subdivision, and they seem to really like it. But of course we are constantly going back to where I grew up to land my family owns, hunting, riding 4 wheelers, etc...
I think it's probably dependent on the person, but balance always seems like a good starting point.
Let this happen to enough people constantly coming and going and moving…the community is gone. It’s just a cumulative effect.
Some of this is undoubtedly going where opportunities exist; my graduating high school class (late 00s) for example all moved away from the area I grew up in simply because there’s nothing out there except for a handful of dead end minimum wage jobs, with prospects declining further as time goes on. The prior two generations by comparison largely stayed put, with moves being very local in nature and mostly driven by finding suitable housing (e.g. apartment became too small for family or keeping rent down).
I also believe that people who’ve had to move around a lot for career are more likely to continue to move regularly because they’ve grown accustomed to not having deep roots anywhere which the resulting reset less of a big deal, which multiplies the impact of needing to move for work opportunities.
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2016/10/what-c... has more recent data. The headline of 'What Caused the Decline in Interstate Migration in the United States?' might be telling.
See also https://www.brookings.edu/articles/u-s-migration-still-at-hi...
> Annual movement within the U.S. is stuck at a postwar low rate of 11 percent. This 2016-2017 rate is not statistically different than the 11.2 percent rate of 2015-2016, the lowest mobility rate in any year since this annual series began in 1947-48 (see Figure 1). The decline in annual mobility rates, from over 20 percent during some years in the 1950s and 1960s down to almost half that today, is the result of long term trends, such as the aging of the population (older people move less than younger people) and rises in homeownership (owners move less than renters). Yet the downward mobility trend of the last decade can certainly be tied to the lasting effects of the Great Recession and housing bust which occurred over the 2007-2009 period.
Depends where in Japan; I live in a small city, and it is the worst urban sprawl that you could ever imagine. You absolutely need a car for everything, but at the same time the streets are really narrow and dark, and without sidewalks. It is not fun, to put it mildly.
Still, driving through a dark and narrow street or road, especially at night (coming back from work), with pedestrians wearing dark clothes (some people are smart enough to wear reflecting bands, but they are few and far between), is quite stressful. Many times I have been surprised by a pedestrian appearing out of the shadows only a few meters in front of me.
Likewise, being the pedestrian is also stressful. People don't believe me when I say I feel unsafe walking out at night here. Sure, I don't have to fear criminals, but I fear the cars.
If you think driving in those dark streets being surprised by pedestrians is stressful, imagine how it feels for the people walking outside your vehicle when you barely miss them and their children.
If you can't see your neighbors, slow your vehicle down to a safe speed. You are driving too fast for the conditions. It is entirely under your control and you continue to choose to put your neighbors in danger.
You are the one operating heavy machinery and introducing danger into a situation where there would be none if it wasn't for your disregard for their safety.
I've learned from HN discussions that there is a vast difference in what people think of as a "suburb".
Some will say it takes over 30 minutes by car from a suburb to the nearest store. To me that's very rural, I'd never consider that a suburb. But some do. So we get these disconnected discussion on how you can/can't do such and such thing in a suburb.
I've nearly always lived in what I consider suburbs. Places with single family homes and parks and playgrounds where I can very easily walk to just about every store or service nearby. The middle schools is an easy walk away for kids. High school is a bit farther but still an easy bike ride for high-school age kids (about 15 minutes).
In Australian English, “suburb” roughly means “neighbourhood”. So to us, downtown (or the CBD as we call it), is a “suburb”. In the Australian sense of the term, the Financial District and the Upper East Side are suburbs of New York City.
That's the idea if used in the North American sense. Suburbs are effectively rural areas, except with a higher population density. You will see rows of houses instead of rows of corn, but otherwise no different.
> Places with single family homes and parks and playgrounds where I can very easily walk to just about every store or service nearby.
What's a town, then?
Usually, yes, but I know of settlements "out in the middle of nowhere" that are nothing but rows of houses. No businesses, schools, or anything of that sort found within the immediate community. One needs to drive through the vast corn fields to another town to access such amenities. It doesn't seem that bizarre.
> (and within a few minutes of stores)
For those at the nearest edge, no doubt. Those at the furthest edge could be quite a distance away. Although, even in a small suburb, often you find the craziest road systems. It might take a half an hour just to drive to a store only a mile away.
Personally I just hate the aesthetic of suburbs, so I'll never live in one, but I think some people in this thread are getting a bit hyperbolic about how inconvenient they are. The suburb in my town takes no more than five minutes to drive across and is directly adjacent to the grocery store. From what I've seen this is typical. The worst I've seen are those in the DC metro area, but even then they have stores all over the place. The real pain in the ass in that region is needing to use/cross multilane roads to get anywhere.
Well, me neither. I grew up on a production farm with actual rows of corn as far as the eye can seen – in what I am quite sure everyone would agree was decidedly rural – and there were still several different towns with stores within a 5-10 minute driving radius.
> I think some people in this thread are getting a bit hyperbolic about how inconvenient they are.
No doubt, but that doesn't really have much to do with the conversation. The conversation is about what we call the places that are just rows upon rows of housing without a shared and vibrant mixture of businesses, hospitals, schools, etc. They're not exactly rural, there are too many people living there to be considered rural, but they aren't like towns or cities either. They are more like rural than anything else.
Suburb seems to be the prevailing term.
A town is a collection of suburbs and the parks, amenities and businesses that are intertwined with them.
I have lived in suburbs near enough to schools that you can walk on 2 occasions in both NC and AZ but this was a very lucky quality, not the norm AT ALL, highly desirable, and you could walk to practically nothing other than the school. Leaving the neighborhood on foot was not a good place to be walking.
Either way, some Americans will hear people talk about Europe or Japan or whatever and tell themself "I totally have that too where I live in the US" yet it's not even close.
Conversely, I have traveled to Europe and Japan. At least in the areas I went to, it didn't really seem any safer for kids to play outside than many parts of America. Yes, public transit was much better, but there were still lots of cars on the streets, and there were areas that weren't very pedestrian friendly. And in some cities it was quite difficult to find playgrounds. I don't doubt that there are places in Europe and Japan where kids can play outside without worrying about cars. But such conditions are not universal.
That said, my kid rode a bike to school from 5-10th grades in Arizona. She was the only kid that did that.
There are about 7 grocery stores within 5 miles of my suburban house. I have never seen anyone walk/bike to any of them. (I look.) If you tried to you would spend quite a bit of time navigating parking/road infrastructure where the drivers clearly believe is their entire right of way.
In Mexico you would think it would be much worse, but it is light years better. Kids take care of getting themselves to school in Paris, from what we have seen.
This idea that "unless universal, the claim false" is... not helpful. As a family in suburban US we did the bike thing. It fucking sucked.
I have 2 (soon to be 3) grocery stores within a 8-12 minute walk of my very suburban home in my master planned community full of tract homes. I see some people walking to and from the store occasionally and I’ll walk there on occasion in the winter when the weather is nice. I just don’t understand why I would spend 20 minutes doing something that can take me 3.
If we swapped some of this cope energy with a push to change things, maybe we wouldn't have to burn our vacation time to fly across the world to walk to a cafe on a pedestrianized street.
Assholes exist everywhere in the world but I would walk across an ungoverned street intersection in Mexico sooner than cross your average 2+lanes each fully lighted intersection in the US.
Edit: and so I now add, that that's what it means to bump around with your neighbors, near daily. Humans seem to need the street life of a busy neighborhood with pedestrian traffic toward the local suppliers of the banal things of daily life, before they retain the idea of the sanctity of humans when they are thinking more abstractly.
The contradiction of course is WW1 and WW2, which happened in countries all adhering more or less to these characteristics.
So I dunno. Maybe we're all fucked in the end, and I at least will indulge my family in the residual beauty before the inevitable next societal upheaval.
I've also lived in a few American cities, and it's a completely different experience. Even from downtown Philly it was inconvenient to get anywhere without a car.
In my experience, if you live in a suburb you do usually have to drive to get to things like stores, restaurants, movie theaters, etc. But what is close are schools and playgrounds. In the suburb I currently live, all three levels of schools and over half a dozen playgrounds are within walking distance.
On the other hand, if i need groceries I just take a backpack and walk 5-10 minutes to one of the 5 different stores. I can even afford to be picky and get my butter from one, bread from the other etc :)
I guess our strategy is we just don't let her have any screens. They make her absolutely insane. So instead she leaves the house as soon as she can and goes out and plays. Even her 5 year old sister who is wheelchair bound goes with her a lot of the time, in the $1200 Thule buggy super stroller we bought (used). I guess we just lucked out, but we also insisted on it and kept letting her go out even after some woman called CPS on us for letting our kid be unsupervised. We live in a middle class neighborhood with people from dozens of countries and every major religions living together, and all our kids play together. I'm sure it's someone's mental image of the ideal childhood.
I live near kids like this where there parents aren't around they just roam. They get into trouble. How much parenting are you dumping on others.
One group decided it would be fun to smash glass bottles in the parking lot. So I have to do the job if the parent and either tell them to behave, stop and clean it up or clean up after them myself so I don't ruin my tires. Why aren't the real parents doing this?
Or the kids liter, get stuck in trees,lose their stuff, pee on stuff etc. All problems their real parents should be dealing with but instead others have to deal with it. Randoms like me get the negatives of the unsupervised kids.
Im sure their parents think they had a pleasant day playing tag all day though.
If 6pm and no knowledge was ok, almost 9pm with streetlights still off is too.
“Bye, have fun, come in when the street lights come on” is entirely appropriate for a 9-year-old when school’s not in session. It’s playing outside, not playing fortnight or drooling to the YouTube algo. It’s ok for that to run a little late in the summer.
Do you home school? Because if you don't home school, surprise! "Bad" kids are everywhere, including in any school that exists.
The best you can do is talk about bad influence. Peer pressure. Tailoring that conversation to the child's personality.
My thoughts on this are, the time to teach self-control and responsibility is when young. It won't take completely when young, as the brain is literally not fully developed in that capacity yet, but the lessons can stick, and be known when older.
Those lessons are action->consequence outcomes, and in a sense, borking up responsibility at times becomes a leaning moment. Put another way, mistakes are how we learn, and small mistakes when young, are better than massive mistakes when 20.
Yes, bad habits are a worry. I don't think there is any simple answer here, except independence is important for any adult mind, and that flows from independence in youth.
And of course, this all depends upon the child too. Some have more sense at 5, than others at 50.
For fucks sake, she's 9 years old, let a kid be a kid and not a productivity machine, she will have her whole life to worry about that later... At that age the worse that can happen academically speaking is taking a bit longer to learn how to multiply and divide numbers.
At that age is easy to pick up bad habits and also easy to let them go, OP seems to be a good enough parent to nudge their kid into better habits if they deem necessary.
(Not actually 'bad', but trendsetters that helped some of the other kinds come out to play more.)
So yeah, your gauge of what 9pm means might not be accurate for the situation! I doubt you were imagining 9pm being bright and an hour or two before its too dark for a young person to be out riding a bike, but that could well be the case
Then she realized we can now call her and tell her to come home when she's out.
"I'll leave the phone at home, daddy, I'm afraid I'll break it while playing."
No joke; the children’s crossing now terminates on the “island” of the petrol station, with entry and exit for the vehicles of the station either side of the island.
It boggles my mind, truly. I fear it’s only a matter of time before someone gets hurt.
So.. not hard to relate with your post.
I can’t help but notice how poorly people treat eachother in the bigger cities, too. To the point I get constantly complemented for just being a decent person, or aggressively attacked for the same.
Not sure what the answer for any of these problems is..
The biggest cities of Europe (Paris, Amsterdam, etc.) are pretty historical and thus are walkable. However, where I live - Finland that is - much of the country has been built in the past century and is designed for cars. However, in the past decade or two the trend has changed again and the very new neighbourhoods again feel like 100+ year old neighbourhoods in terms of walkability.
Even back then kids weren't clamoring to play outside in the street. Or ride bikes etc (there was a clique at school who were skateboarders but not a widespread thing). I think it very much depends on the kids temperament, my experience as a kid didn't involve a lot of outdoors activities.
However my parents were pretty big on making sure I had exercise I played sport on the weekend (cricket in the summer and soccer in the winter) and it was non-negotiable my parents insisted on it. If not for sport I don't think I'd have spent any time outdoors at all.
I think Weekend Sport might be an Australian cultural thing does the US have weekend kids sports?
Personally, I believe the loss of trust in institutions (major sex scandals in every church, Boy Scouts of America etc.) made parents uneasy about sending their kids somewhere without one of them as a chaperone.
Here in Texas, I also did not trust many of the volunteer coaches. Many of them simply did not know how dangerous heat stroke was. There was also this bizarre old school theory that you shouldn't drink water when exercising in the heat. Instead, they repeat old stories like this...
https://www.espn.com/classic/s/dent_junction_08/02/01.html <excerpt>Out along the edge of the Texas Hill Country, with temperatures soaring beyond 110 degrees, the Texas A&M Aggies gathered that summer in 1954.... ten days of misery forty-seven years ago when players quit the team in droves to avoid the four-hour practices that did not include water breaks or even a kind word from Bryant. It was a miracle that no one died.</excerpt>
(context: suburban CO)
> Not necessarily because of cars but significant crime.
And I agree it's usually about racism.
If you live in Europe, just look at the EU Parliament elections and see how the far right did. Or follow the political discourse in pretty much any European country.
If you're not hearing it, your not paying attention to pretty much any political reporting.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...
"Don't believe me go to Europe and Japan where kids are still allowed to walk"
This is the top rated comment here, the line by itself is about as ridiculous as any other. Every kid in Europe is allowed to walk to school? How is this any different that than the US?
As far as I can tell, American Internet mostly wants you to think that their own culture war is important and relevant universally, including for you. And that their own particular division of issues between their political poles is also somehow universal and important; and that you should get riled up about it.
Crime has decreased pretty much everywhere over the last three decades. I am sure there are pockets in the world where it hasn't, but those would be the exception.
[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rates-across-wes...]
…Except the 40 000 who do die by car, every single year, in the US alone. Countless more injured and permanently disabled. Meanwhile criminals are indeed a whole different problem. (an imaginary one)
Some other interesting statistics: 25% of pedestrians killed were drunk, while only 19% of the time the driver was (these overlap, both drunk, in 6% of cases.) 3/4ths of pedestrian fatalities occur at night. 2/3rds don't occur in a crosswalk.
Take away: kids who don't drink, don't stay out at night and use crosswalks are significantly less likely to be hit.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/pedestr...
https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Ped-Spotli...
Criminals bring 0 value and all risk. Criminals also do more than just murder.
(And what kind of crime? We don’t really have lots of drive-by-shootings here, kids aren’t exactly a prime target for robberies either)
I would say one off the biggest threat for pedestrians in European city are electric scooters.
How many deaths have they caused? How do those stats compare to the deaths caused by motor vehicles? Which one is more dangerous based on that data?
I have looked at local pedestrian casualty statistics and motor vehicles are by far the largest cause of injury and death in the large city where I live. I haven't even been able to find what was the last time that a cyclist or e-scooter rider killed a pedestrian. Meanwhile, cars and trucks have killed four cyclists this year alone.
this is bullshit, cars kill and injure orders of magnitude more people in Europe than scooters do. That's not to say there's 0 issues with scooters, because there are, but focus should remain on cars, not scooters.
The crime that has been *falling* throughout the entire western world after peaking in the mid 1990's ?
crime=/=crime
The park were we hung out as kids is now inhabited by drug dealers. Obviously no place for kids, or families or basically anyone else, I will try to avoid if I reasonably can. And of course there was no increase in statistical crime, as it just is not getting prosecuted, although it is clear as day that it is happening.
Crime stats are hugely misleading if you want to figure out what a social environment looks like.
I live in Europe and I see groups of kids hanging out by themselves all the time in many, many major cities across the continent.
People talk about the dangerous cars but they were there 40 years ago and my friends and I would bike to school, the mall, or into the hills surrounding us.
My 9 year old's friend lives just two blocks from us and her parents don't let her walk here alone. When I was that age we were riding our bikes for miles in car infested San Jose.
Some of those roads you biked on have probably been widened. Cars have gotten faster, larger, and heavier. Speed limits have increased.
I'm not saying it's guaranteed to be dramatically different but I think there probably is some kind of difference.
Just look at the pedestrian deaths chart for the past 5-10 years or so.
The town I grew up in has a lot of areas that are conducive to children roaming; low traffic speeds and volume, separated sidewalks, parks, green spaces. As kids we ran around freely. The traffic volume and patterns haven't really changed at all and as a whole the community drives pretty slowly, nobody seems to be in a hurry. Yet you never see kids out anymore. Where did they go?
Car dependent design is the problem that prevents children from being able to play with friends, because they are dependent on an adult to bring them somewhere.
Car dependent design also has negative feedback loops for community in other ways. Local shops can't compete with big box chains in the suburbs due to economies of scale and are forced to close, further increasing the need to drive further for basic necessities. Cars are dangerous, further decreasing our base level of trust for interaction with our local community.
These are just the surface of the iceberg though - take an open minded approach to reading up on the second and third order effects of car dependent community development before being so quick to dismiss the topic.
These statements as facts aren't helpful because it implies car dependence is the only thing. There is so much history and nuance here. OP is right, making every discussion essentially '/r/fuckcars' doesn't get us anywhere.
Anecdote: I grew up in a small suburb, 100% car dependence. However I still walked to grade school and rode my bike on roads/sidewalks where cars are the same now as they were in the 90s.
I think back to my childhood and roaming the streets. There wasn't any formal community venue or organisation. No one then or now was going to church. No one was going to a community centre or youth drop-in facility. I don't remember parents coordinating much. We rode bikes on the street, kicked a football and walked to the school basketball court or ovals. Parents generally felt safer about their kids doing that, so it was trivial to walk out front and find another kid to socialise with.
Just as a hint, Europeans love their cars as well. They drive them a lot and outside of large cities public infrastructure is sparse at best and almost never an actually viable alternative.
If they post pictures it is almost always of the few square kilometers of the city where millionaires and shops for millionaires are located. The rest of the city is full of streets and cars are everywhere. The one difference is that there are trains, which usually are awful places but get you from A to B.
In a huuuuge share of the US, this is not the case. There are no sidewalks, you have to travel extremely far to get to anything, and cross highways or even freeways doing it. There's no transit. There's no village center or train station around a natural focal point, just giant strip malls that are few and far between. So EVERYONE. MUST. DRIVE. It is the ONLY option for every trip and errand, there is no alternative. This is insane.
Because it distracts from the parts that many people don't like to talk about because it goes against their personal beliefs (such as religious conservatives being more connected with their communities and overall happier than everyone else)
HN is heavily biased towards tech centers (SF, NYC, Seattle, etc...). These places skew liberal, agnostic, pro-public transport, pro-dense housing.
Conversations will always shift towards these talking points, the few of us that don't fit into one or more of these boxes get drowned out as out-of-touch.
In more religious countries, are the religious conservatives the ones that are freely roaming streets and socialising more than their peers in a "play-based childhood"?
The obvious changes to me, as a parent now, and someone who still visits the street they grew up on in the 80s, relate to cars.
And even Europe, eg Germany, has seen a relative rise in helicopter parenting compared to recent decades.
Have you actually experienced Japanese drivers? They make American drivers look absolutely noble (and truthfully, we are) by comparison.
For starters, and this applies to both individual and professional drivers:
* They don't give way to emergency vehicles blaring the sirens.
* They don't wait for people to finish crossing intersections.
* They don't let other drivers into their lane.
* They drive absurdly fast.
* Most roads are very narrow.
Some particularly busy intersections require dedicated police officer supervision to shepherd the drivers because they're so unruly and disrespectful of pedestrians and other drivers.
There are many reasons Japan is more accepting of letting children be children, but most of that is social factors and motivators that are decidedly different from American ones. Cars are ultimately just a really small part, if any.
Japan: > Road fatalities per 100 000 population: 2.6
USA: > Road fatalities per 100 000 population: 13.8
[0]https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/japan-road-safe... [1]https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...
There is no point debating on US car stats, we are the best and worst at everything car related.
If people are driving fewer miles in Japan that means that the built environment is better.
Is there higher usage of mass transit, cycling, and walking in Japan? You bet there is.
And don't give me that "America is oh so big and spread out, Japan is on an island" nonsense. 80%+ of Americans live in urban areas. It once had the largest passenger rail network in the world. This is a matter of intentional city planning and deliberate choices. Not every island nation is as transit-oriented as Japan (just look at the Carribbean or even the UK).
When divided highways were first being introduced globally, Japan's government made an intentional choice to invest in the Shinkansen instead of roadways. That was not an inevitability as there were voices there that preferred road investment.
You can see it in the stats too,
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
Places like MA and NY are, I think, known for their rude drivers but the fatalities per distance: anomalously low.
My theory is that Japanese drivers are our brothers in attentive, intentional driving.
An alternative theory is that population dense areas like cities promote aggressive driving, but also tend to host slower-speed collisions just by virtue of all the traffic. However, this seems unlikely, because it is far too simple and straightforward. Also wouldn’t justify a great long ramble about the superiority of my local driving culture, so I can’t bear for it to be true.
However I suspect there are less road accidents there per capita than here in Australia since everybody there has to pay attention and is patient with other drivers. Australian drivers either tune out or are too aggressive (road rage) and cause more accidents.
Sydney has this weird thing where cars drive full speed to red lights and break at the last minute which is pretty frightening when crossing.
I have driven tens of thousands of kilometres in the US on roadtrips, and the driving there is quite insane - speeding and dangerous, aggressive manoeuvres. Doing 10-20km over the limit is standard and anyone sticking to the limit is the outlier.
I've never seen dedicated police supervision. I have seen directors around road construction. That's no different than in the states.
In America, it is literally against the law to enter an intersection unless you can completely cross it without stopping. That means if a pedestrian is crossing, you wait outside of the intersection for them to finish crossing first.
In Japan? With pedestrians crossing? You enter the intersection and hopefully you stop inches from the crosswalk in the middle of the intersection while you wait for the road to clear and then go through if there is space.
Yes, even professional drivers do it. It's fucking insane if you ask me. How much time do you save? Seconds? And you risk a higher chance of running someone over?
Japan is world renowned for their hospitality, but Japanese drivers are by far some of the biggest assholes I have ever seen in my life.
This is false: it depends on the state. In Arizona, it is the law that you can enter the intersection to turn, and then if the light turns red, everyone has to wait until you complete your turn before they can enter the intersection.
xD
If it is of any consolation, all the gaijin in my office agree with you.
> Some particularly busy intersections require dedicated police officer supervision to shepherd the drivers because they're so unruly and disrespectful of pedestrians and other drivers.
So like any intersection in New York.
> There are many reasons Japan is more accepting of letting children be children, but most of that is social factors and motivators that are decidedly different from American ones. Cars are ultimately just a really small part, if any.
Nah. It's cars, more specifically street parking.
This is NOT at all my experience here in Tokyo. Drivers are generally very careful around crosswalks, and for good reason: if a driver hits a pedestrian (or cyclist), it's automatically the driver's fault, with almost no exceptions.
The only really bad drivers I normally see here are some taxi drivers, driving too fast on narrow streets in the city. Everyone else is generally careful.
But don't forget: here in Tokyo, most drivers are professionals (delivery trucks or taxis usually), not private individuals. Your experience in more rural or car-centric parts of Japan are likely to be very different.
The thing is, you get used to it. Living in an eastern european country that hasn't caught up on infrastructure, I'm used to driving on narrow winding roads.
What happened when I first drove a couple hundred km on a freeway[1]? I had to ask everyone else in the car to keep me talking because I was literally falling asleep.
[1] Or whatever the US term is for the roads with at least 2 lanes, directions separated by a fence and grade separated intersections.
- Stopping in the middle of the road whenever they feel like it. Just turn on the blinkers and boom, the road became a parking slot! And they don't care if it is a straight segment or the middle of a curve.
- Overtaking other cars on the left at an intersection. I don't know here, but in my home country that is illegal, because it is very dangerous. I have seen many near misses because of it.
- They don't turn on the lights as long as there is a tiny sliver of light in the sky. Every day I see people driving with the lights off after sunset, or during heavy rain or snow! Seriously, who drives with the lights off during a fucking blizzard with less than 10 meters of visibility?!?
Taxis and occasionally even limousine buses are notoriously guilty of this...
For example, in my romanian road code you are not permitted to turn right at a red light unless there is a separate green blinking arrow pointing that way (and no, the blinking green isn't always there). I know that in the US the default is you can turn.
How about stopping on the side of the road? Here it's permitted anywhere it's not explicitly forbidden. And I think taxis have an exception and they can really stop anywhere for a few moments to pick up/drop people. They may get cursed at but it's legal.
Here's a little mind twister:
In the US there are Right Arrow signals. A Red signal indicates you can turn right if it's safe just like ordinary Red signals. A Green signal indicates you can turn right, obviously.
Wait, what?
You see, this Right Arrow signal exists alongside ordinary signals at an intersection. Specifically when the ordinary signals are Green (so you can go straight ahead or turn as appropriate) but the Right Arrow signal is Red, you cannot turn right. Usually this is because someone is crossing the intersection and you would risk running them over.
This specific arrangement is very rare.
Never saw single red lights. Just the blinking green when it's permitted. Btw blinking green implies yield to other cars, pedestrians or anything else that's in your way.
Sure, better than falling asleep and crashing, but come on, all the konbinis around here have parking slots big enough for trucks.
There's plenty of shit drivers there as everywhere but the physical environment (not the least of which street parking not being a thing) enables people to exist a lot more safely and conveniently outside of a car than in the US and the data bears that out. Eg narrow roads improves safety for motorists, pedestrians and bicyclists alike.
Bullshit. Almost 6 years in Aomori, and rare is the month that I don't see a car crashed on the side of the road, even on sunny summer days. Meanwhile in my home region (Extremadura, Spain, also a rural region) I could go years without seeing a single crash. I am sure that the design and maintenance of the roads has something to do with it.
A very common theme when talking to people in the US is "this neighborhood used to have so many more kids out and about!" Even in the neighborhood I grew up in, where my parents still live, there are far fewer kids around, even though the neighborhood's design and car traffic haven't changed at all.
Where are they? Are their parents driving them from place to place? Are they staying inside staring at screens? Or are there simply fewer kids due to falling birthrates?
I mean it's better here than where I grew up (California) but I still wouldn't call it "good".
This is where opportunistic roving tow trucks start to sound like a good idea.
With trolleys, it'd be even better if the tracks themselves had some kind of AI technology to detect parked cars and call the tow truck to remove the car before it causes a delay.
That's how it's like in the suburbs. There are very few cars, and kids can play and bike on the roads, and go anywhere on their bikes.
It's only urban areas that are very car centric and kids can't do that, although they can go on the subway or a bus. The suburbs are much nicer and safer for kids.
Sad stuff, the collapse of the public realm. Compound living is the only thing we can manage still.
The discussion is about suburbs, so by definition it is away from the city core.
Here in our (US, California) suburb it is wonderfully walkable for kids and adults alike. For kids, there is very little traffic since only local neighborhood traffic is present unlike in cities. There are bike/walk trails around and across. Multiple playgrounds, sports fields, all connected by bike trails. Stores, restaurants, school, assorted services, theaters, all within a ~10 minute walk radius. This is what suburb means to me.
Where are these magical subdivisions with city-like access to amenities?
If you are really interested in this type of living, look for newer master planned communities in the south. They are immensely popular and aforadable compared to coastal cities.
There’s decent choice when house shopping, at least the places I’ve lived. If someone chooses a suburb surrounded by 2 miles of other suburbs, that’s their choice. There’s plenty of “old city” suburbs (what used to be the edge of town 25 years or 50 years back) that now have sidewalks and stuff nearby. HN trends wealthy though, so I imagine many people only look at housing on the current city edges.
When I got older and rode my bike everywhere there was not a SINGLE bike lane anywhere in my entire town, and the sidewalks were disused and crappy.
And yet: we were outside playing CONSTANTLY.
But now there is so much more everywhere I look. Skateparks everywhere, kid friendly pools and parks. More bike friendly roads. My daughter is still too young now but it seems like the outdoor resources are better than ever.
Must be light trucks! What a fine example of Occam’s butterknife at work.
Of course I went to the houses of my friends by foot/bike after school. Unsurprisingly there were roads with cars everywhere, which do exist here in Europe. Blaming "road centric infrastructure" is delusional, road centric infrastructure has been the norm for at least 60 years and if that were the cause you would have noticed a degradation then and no degradation after. Clearly not the case.
I find it quite offensive to suggest that "European cities" are somehow this extremely car unfriendly place. We Europeans like cars as well, we like to drive them a lot and like to live in places with good car connections. Places like Germany, where I live, also have very good car infrastructure. Outside of large cities cars are the only way to get around as other modes of transportation are very unreliable and not serviced often. None of this has prevented me from going outside with my friends or biking to school alone.
If I had to guess why kids are playing less outside than they used to, maybe it is because the park we hung out is now inhibited by drug dealers. Or because of the girl who got raped there.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/05/19/a-crosswalk-too-far-v...
"In the Boston suburb of Burlington, Massachusetts, the AMC movie theater is right across the street from the Burlington Mall. But if you're planning to travel between these two destinations on foot, you're in for quite a hike. The closest crosswalk is more than half a mile down the Middlesex Turnpike. That means crossing the road -- if you're going to do it 'the safe way' -- requires a 1.2-mile journey, and it's definitely not going to be a pleasant one. Local resident David Chase reports that only one side of the street has a sidewalk."
Seriously, what a dumb example. The problem has already been solved. My city is full of cars, but there are also enough traffic lights triggered by pedestrian s, hardly a miracle of modern engineering.
The people living there?
> The problem has already been solved.
Yes, that's why the poster said "in the US they would be roadkill". It's very much a solved problem; the US is notable for not implementing the solutions.
NYC was all ready to implement a congestion fee, with years of buildup and $15B in revenue scheduled for use... and the state governor nixed the entire at the eleventh hour by fiat, because out-of-NYC voters who shouldn't have a say don't like the concept.
If local governments fail at basic duties missing traffic lights are not the thing you should be worrying about.
This does not ring true at all.
Random kidnappings of children (i.e. by a stranger, not a parent, relative, or other acquaintance) are vanishingly rare in the US, to the extent that they typically make national news when they do occur. Random violence against children (again, by a stranger), even more so.
where do you think kids are safest, in public where people look out for them or by themselves in a deserted area?
There is no need to move them if you create the spaces, like courtyards, gardens and backyards.
There is no discussion of confounders, no control groups or paired studies, and there are million things correlated with the last 50 of societal development years besides the topics mentioned here. The mention of phones and other influences in teen behavior is completely unrelated to the main point in the discussion and just serves to provide credibility by association.
All in all, this is not science, it is just a reductionist oped presented as fact using classic internet hooks.
It's not trying to be. The intended audience is not peers reading a research journal, it's normal folks and policy makers who don't know what a confounding variable is but still want to make modern life suck less.
source:5 kids. source:15 years scout leader. source:10 years youth leader, other.
Being in physical proximity is just a fundamentally different experience. I remember rather fondly the days of LAN parties, and a small part of me wishes we had kept the networking without going all the way to the Internet.
Yes, the irony of this post, and my career as primarily a developer of websites, is not lost on me.
Why not?
As a microcosm of community breakdown and virtual replacing physical space, just look at the psychological and social impacts of virtual schooling during COVID-19 lockdowns. Obviously, the existential dread of illness, stress of family finances and restricted freedom are all confounding here, so the extent to which physical versus virtual played a role is debatable. Even so, I don't think there's much debate at all that Zoom meetings are in any way a viable substitute for in person classroom teaching and social development.
If you think that isn't healthy, then you are acknowledging that virtual groups are not a replacement for physical interaction, even if you disagree with others on how much physical interaction is required.
It's what adults have (mostly) left for (most US) kids to do - when adults replaced free roaming areas with roads and private property.
ref: https://i.redd.it/32yuwrnvgi491.jpg
As a child, I could walk in any direction and either find area to explore (safe from interfering adults) or find other kids. Same as my parents, g-parents, ancestors going back 10s x 1000s of years.
My kids had nowhere to go. Same for their peers all over.
I'm fine with taking away their ~only practical method of connecting as long as we return the spaces kids had for connecting (thruout history).
My son is playing with other kids. I wander off. When I check back, all the kids are watching a screen. I say “what’s going on?” And some parent says “the kids were getting roudy, so I put on a show to calm them down”.
Like, they all managed to raise children into moderately functional adults without heavy use of smartphones, and have had explicit instructions not to do that. Why do they think it's the thing to do?
If you try to encourage non-screen time socially, their friends stop coming over.
At best, your kid will just want to leave the house to go watch tv/play video games over at the friend's house, but just as likely is that the kid stops having a friend because they're not mindshared in anymore.
Ooof this is me on Sundays - the only day allowed screen time, but man yea, if our girls are by themselves then a screen for them and a screen for me and we're all happy.
I suspect most of this time just moved from streets and parks to bedrooms in front of a screen.
A quick read through of the site shows it's a conservative-leaning group, and I'd be willing to bet that sooner-or-later they'll be pushing "a return to traditional values" as the cure for all our ills.
While there's nothing wrong with being conservative, the group's founder is a self-described Democrat.
> I'd be willing to bet that sooner-or-later they'll be pushing "a return to traditional values" as the cure for all our ills
If "growing up in close-knit communities" (from the article) is a traditional value, then yes, they are saying that would be a good thing.
this is neat, using guilt by association to support a comment alleging the fallacy of guilt by association
This is fairly common in modern rhetoric. Even among scientists—they’ll write a rigorous paper with narrowly drawn conclusions and then give a much broader science-y interview about it.
It's conservative-leaning because...?
What you're missing is that they've already published the papers and books with all of the citations, these are accessible articles for the masses reviewing their conclusions.
Also known as "motivated reasoning."
For what it's worth, it doesn't match what I see here in flyover country. Helicopter parenting came first, then loss of community; loss of kids in the neighborhood playing. I think the helicopter parenting was due to lots of pressure to "protect" the kids. I've even heard of police responding to calls about children walking without adults!
The article seems to want to blame tech for a social problem. I guess that gets clicks.
Some people complain about something not because it is lacking, but because they struggle internally with the results. "You didn't run tests 50 times, you run them only 20". I see some parts mentioning religion, and I can guarantee that some people with have problem with only that, as it can often be as a red flag for a bull.
I do not also need complex studies to see effect of games, TV on my kids. I can simply observe them.
What is happening here is some of the initial discussion of important emerging phenomena that we do not yet understand.
Possibly there IS no way to prove their assertions. I can tell you that I see kids biking past my house on the way to school every day, and the crossing guards guide many, many kids across the street. What are the numbers? Couldn't tell you. .
Always has been.
My immigrant grandparents came here seeking asylum from persecution in their home country. The other side all came seeking jobs.
How is that different?
Every one of those waves saw the second and third generation speak English and be heavily Americanized. It always happens.
Societies regulate the influx of strangers to protect their culture — and the rapid influx of people who don’t share cultural values has damaged American culture.
Going by this chart (the first thing in google), the percent of immigrants between 1850 and 1930 was about the same as 2000-on, with a dip in the middle.
Eg, this. [0]
Why are people surprised by a similar outcome this time?
[0] - https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-a...
If not, what was different between 1850 and 1900?
Americans have only ever been afraid of "uncontrolled immigration" when it was non-white immigrants. It was for racist reasons that we passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, and it's for racist reasons now.
This is racist revisionism.
There was plenty of dislike of white migrants as well, eg, Irish, German, Polish, Italian, etc all received ethnic hatred at various periods.
> it's for racist reasons now
Believing that all nationalism is racism is ideological nonsense meant to poison the well, rather than address serious challenges to your ideology and the impact it has on cultures and human flourishing.
White skinned, but critically, not WASP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Anglo-Saxon_Protestants
Sure, that would be a ridiculous thing to say, which is why I didn't. If I meant "every person who is opposed to immigration is fuelled by racial hatred," I would have said that. I thought that a good-faith reading was one of the rules of HN?
If you look at the times when anti-immigrant sentiment is highest, whether via popular opinion or governmental action, it directly corresponds to when Americans were the most racist about the arriving immigrants.
Irish and Italians in my area would beg to differ. I'll grant it wasn't federal policy, at least.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
“Most people” who dispute the idea that there’s a purposeful undermining of social cohesion via permissive immigration policy are disputing it because they are willing to uproot their entire lives to switch countries?!
Holy smokes.
I have noticed that community organisations now are far more dependant on retired peopke than they were a few decades ago.
I had one working parent and I had a community because I had places to go.
My 5 kids had 1 parent at home full time and zero community. For most hours they were trapped in a building with adults. Sometimes they were contained in some highly limited adult-made program. And that was what they had. Also most every other kid.
Your 1-parent childhood may still have benefited from having many other stay-at-home parents keeping an eye out the window an ear to street for kids who need attention, and likewise your kids childhood may have been more isolated for the lack of that, even with a parent staying at home for them individually.
Sometimes, it's not about the circumstances of one's own home so much as about the prevailing circumstances (and expectations) of the community as a whole.
We lived that community "norm" as part of a very immersive and busy religious life. We also lived it in modern times where kids moved from one adult-constructed environment to another.
The author's theoretical mental health magic didn't materialize. These kids weren't surrounded with spaces to go with their peers and develop the critical skills that arise when adults aren't available.
This is exactly it. The mental health we're looking for is the byproduct of a childhood spent with regular access to hours-long, adult-free peer time. It also reduces parenting from the stupidly impossible amount of hours we have now.
The community part we're trying to replace with religious spaces was when kids grew up surrounded by multi-generational households. Until the 1st ½ of 1900s, it was what we could count on neighborhoods, villages, settlements, etc being built out of.
Religion can't replace that. I know because my kids grew up in the ideal the author is has in his head.
if two parents worked 20-30 hours a week each, probably not as big a deal.
(I doubt it's a big deal. But we could get the data to at least look for correlations.)
Jon Haidt really gives too much credit to television. It's an easy thing to reach for when mobile phones and social media are are the present day forces we content with. But there's a deeper story. I'm reminded by Thatcher's 1987 quote:
> You know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.
Maybe it wasn't true then, but people believed them and in their belief they made it true. In a world where men, women, and families exist, there isn't room for community. It was dismantled by disbelief.
In the same way we don't have the ability to reach the moon anymore, I wonder if we don't have the ability to reconstitute communities, like lost and ancient knowledge, eventually they will fade from living memory.
My kindergartner is now at the point where he can walk into a random town event and find somebody he already knows. He's had 3 consecutive weekends of birthday parties, with largely the same cast of characters at the last 2 (the third was a pre-school friend who lives in a different city). He knows all his friends' parents, and a bunch of them apparently know me ("Hi, ___'s dad!") even though I can't remember their names. There's an interlocking web of social relationships in the city that we've somehow become part of, where people know other people through other contexts.
This didn't happen automatically, and it's been fascinating to watch the work that my wife and other (frankly) women have done in building the village. It's a slow, year-by-year process of doing favors for other people, putting yourself out there, spending time with other people, having your kids spend time with other people, opening up, and building trust. We tried carpooling for the first time last spring - it worked out great, and we have a much closer relationship with the other family now, but it can be nerve-wracking entrusting your small child to another driver. But that is how you build trust, and trust is how you build the village.
The community I live in is not at all what the article would predict. We are a secular liberal family. Our friends are mostly secular liberal with some religious liberal families mixed in. The community is 30% foreign-born, and 35% speak a language other than English at home. It is racially mixed, < 30% white, and about 1/3 multiracial in my son's grade. All of the polemical discourse in America would say that such a heterogenous grouping is destructive to social cohesion.
But the most important ingredient to having community is that you have to want community, and value it, and be willing to put in the effort to build it. And it has a critical mass of people who value community, enough that if you are one of them, you can find your people.
Unfortunately, I think it would be hard to form a men's group these days especially for secular people. But I encourage you anyway because otherwise it puts all the pressure on the women.
I have had several moms express gratitude to my guys for doing the work we do in the community because we also do things that the women would just never organize themselves. Which is fine... Everyone should play to their strengths.
I don't think that we want to try to turn the clock back, as much as trying to find ways to combine the good parts of past and present norms, while excising the bad parts.
I'm a parent of 4 small children in a smallish town (16k, single school at each grade level), and I'm cherishing the sense of community much more than I expected. There's something to having shared context with almost every person I run into in town. I only wish I felt like it were safe for my kids to explore on foot.
We also live by my wife's entire extended family, and that, too, has been incredibly helpful.
I was raised in a tight knit Baptist church, and while I don't miss the theology, I do think the sense of community, service, values, and culture is something that I don't have a full substitute for, as much as I have the town and family communities. I'm considering seeking out a non-creedal group to belong to, like the Unitarian Universalists.
Why do you feel it's unsafe?
I used to hate the idea of automated red light cameras, but I've come around to thinking they're better than not having them. Also, cameras for people not stopping for pedestrians in crosswalks.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/cousins-decline-canada-1.7103...
However talking to other parents about what it was like when their kids were growing up... The streets were filled with kids. Now we have couples who don't have any...
I hope they do.
Luckily our neighbors are nice and have a kid and hopefully another.
It could have decades ago, when kids still had places to go. Not now.
I had 5 who spent their childhood persistently locked away in one adult construct or another - because there was/is no local community. Within their reach were roads and private property and that's about it. They were in the same boat as most other US kids.
Doubt that. The majority of kids in the US are living in suburbs or cities, both places with lots of community. What you're describing sounds distinctly rural.
The competitiveness has to go away -- the feeling that your kids have to be 100% occupied in order to give them a fighting chance in the future.
Schools need to back off on homework.
Parents “above” that set let the legacy admissions advantage and golfs-with-Ivy-admissions-officers prep school counselor sort it out.
Kids seriously looking to get into highly-selective schools are a minority.
This does mean you’re opting your kids out of elite schools by not playing that game from an early age, but hey, you and everybody (the colloquial “everybody”—most folks) else.
With rents going up and switching jobs more frequently than past generations it becomes harder to stuck around in one place long enough for strong communities to form.
The reality is that we just don't talk to each other much. If you want to look for the decline of one institution that provided some degree of community cohesion, then the answer is going to be pretty unpopular: we don't go to church anymore.
Strictly true, but if people aren't strongly compelled to show up somewhere, they aren't apt to. Historically, the "fear of God" ensured that people went to church, effectively forcing them to gather, meet each other, so on and so forth.
The only thing I see that comes close to that these days is youth sports leagues, where parents have a fear of failing their children if not heavily involved in such activities. While this does seem to establish some kind of community amongst parents of children of similar ages, it does not seem to expand out into parents with children of dissimilar ages even within the same sport, let alone an even larger community. Which is not terribly surprising as there is not much reason for someone unrelated to a participating child to show up.
I might even go as far as to say that because parents get stuck in those narrowly isolated communities, it contributes a fracturing to any larger community that might have otherwise been able to form. It is difficult to have a general community of only 20-somethings and the elderly with little in-between.
https://www.ft.com/content/96cb501d-b188-4e50-af21-ca7115878...
Frankly, it's hard for me to imagine what could possibly create a community in my neighborhood today. Half the properties here are AirBNB party houses. The average tenure of a neighbor who actually lives in their own property feels like maybe three years. Hard to make any kind of lasting connections, with or without a church.
For replies going to accuse me of intellectual hypocrisy: I do believe all technology is evil. You can accuse me of practical hypocrisy instead, since I'm a software dev.
I blame very different trends from that era...
- The Drug War and "tough on crime" policies that generated a massive amount of fear among parents and created a hostile relationship between police and youth (and continues to, to this day).
- Christian fear-mongering over Satanism and witchcraft, creating even more reasons to keep a close watch on your kids.
- Racial integration of schools and neighborhoods which gave white parents an urgent reason to restrict and monitor which kids their kids played with.
It wasn't distractions and technology or the lack of a global war that lead to reduced trust and cohesion. It was the spectacular and enduring success of professional fear-mongers.
It's heresy to say that social relations are valuable for their own sake, instead we have to give it a term that suggests monetary value and potential to enter some accountants balance sheet - "social capital".
it's just not the case that all value can enter into monetary terms or be quantified or exploited, bought and sold - but the stupidity and ignorance of the age is we even have to suggest like ethics or holding values has some "value" in the sense of money for it to be "ok" in our dominant social norms that structure society - the corporation and workplaces under capitalism
It's as if it's not ok to hold values that are not monetary or capital - that is the message of our social relations in workplaces and in the culture at current - what are called "capitalist social relations"
It's heresy to say ... It's ok to have values that are not money. There are things we should value outside of some cost.
it's gotten to this point.
even "progressive" arguments for like "hey maybe kids playing together in community is ok" has to be quantified into some imagination "social capital"
There are a million negative effects of vehicle centered urban design, and this is one of them.
Sure, buddy.
My gut tells me social scientists have “shown” no such thing, but am open to hearing the case.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
No.
We should make cars safer.
We should make guns safer.
But not the parks? Those need to be drug dens and open air homeless shelters?
Like, parks always have had vagrants, but there's a difference between the loveable wino napping away his hangover or skulking junkies trying to score. i don't think they're necessarily dangerous, but children are seeing things they shouldn't at their age.
btw - i still think it's cars, mostly, but it all depends on the details. it's sadly and and and and..
It’s not true in most parts of most US cities.
