I can think of so many reasons but the biggest I think is the reduction of community. - When I was a kid mums worked part time or not at all. We had school fates and lots more community gatherings. - Dads didn't work as hard. Half of them would be at your soccer practice at 6pm to hang out - Parents were on local sports teams together or other social groups as well - You did most of your shopping at the local shops, you knew the people that lived in the suburb. You ran into them picking up the newspaper or at the local video rental place. - My mum always joked that I couldn't get away with anything because someone would see me and it would get back to her some how. - There were some wierdos around sure. But the whole suburb was on the look out for the kids roaming around Then there were other things like just that cars were smaller. A kid on a pushie would be as high or higher than a person driving around in small sedan. I don't think I would let my kid play on the same street I spent 90% of my time riding my bike or playing with the other kids in the street these days. They'd end up underneath a giant landcruiser or ford ranger/hilux in no time (and they are smaller that the larger trucks that are in the USA which are scary big) I know some nordic countries are still a bit like this. But I'm talking about a car centric Sydney (Australia) suburb in the late 80s early 90s
I grew up in a suburb like yours. I'm raising my kids in a suburb that's by and large the same.
The biggest difference, imo, is the number of families.
I lived on a small street with a cul-de-sac. Maybe 35 houses or so. At least half had kids aged 0-15.
I now live on a street about the same size with my kids. There is one house with ~7-10 year olds, two houses with 3-5, one house with a couple of teens, one house with a baby.
Nothing else really matters, you can't expect kid communities to self generate at these densities.
This is my current experience, too. There are a lot of "empty nest" houses on my street. Wouldn't it figure that those people are all upset about the apartments that are being built in the neighborhood which are all being scooped up by young families ...
How old were the homes when you were a kid?
They were all new-ish builds at the time, built a couple years before I was born.
- When I was a kid mums worked part time or not at all.
This is a big factor. Although the gender side of things is kind of loaded, it used to be broadly the case that a two-parent household would often have one primary breadwinner and one home-maker. Nowadays, both parents need to make money which means that the 'home-making' needs to be done after both parents have finished work. So at 6pm, you're cooking, not hanging out at soccer practice. After that, you need to do the washing up, hang out the clothes, etc. There's just less time for leisure. On top of that, there's a lot of folks (probably some of them reading this comment) paid very well to keep folks indoors consuming, instead of outside meeting people.
So, going even deeper, maybe there's need for two incomes nowadays to be able to keep up with the lifestyle of a house in the suburbs?
Absolutely yes, but there's a bit more nuance than it seems. For example, 40 years ago, most families had one car, no computer, no mobile phones, no Netflix, DoorDash, etc. Houses are bigger, foreign holidays, expensive white goods, etc.
On the other hand, property costs have definitely increased massively. Folks are having kids later and less frequently, so there's a higher percentage of dual income couples looking for houses. Lenders are prepared to offer more to dual income couples, then house prices adjust, and suddenly, you need to have two incomes to buy a house. Then when it does come time to have children, you need the second income to pay for child care, and there's not much left over afterwards.
Higher household income doesn't necessarily have to mean higher property prices. It's a factor, but that's only one half of the demand/supply equation. Long term, the price of housing is driven by how much it costs to build more.
Good point. Building more housing is indeed part of a possible solution, although it’s hard to convince folks whose mortgages are baselined on inflated prices not to oppose building more.
Realistically, I don't think most people think that way. ("Don't build that apartment! The resulting increase in the local supply of housing will decrease my property value.") It's more that they don't want to live next to whatever is being built or don't want the character of the neighborhood they live in to change.
Which is somewhat understandable, but there's a balance here between the rights of existing residents vs the property rights of the owner of the property being developed (and future residents thereof). There are also regulatory burdens associated with any legal processes intended to give more rights to existing residents.
I think you’re mostly right that people don’t think in those terms exactly, but “oh if they build more housing traffic will be a nightmare” or “it’s already hard enough to get into the good schools” or “I can’t even get a doctor’s appointment before you build a hundred new houses” and so on: not directly about cost, but I think they do think about all of the things that drive value (and therefore cost) in the existing housing stock.
Salaries are the lowest they have ever been proportionally to tributes demanded.
Those tributes being mortgages, income taxes, and sales taxes, among other things.
Theres is only one system of government in the industrialized world: feudalism.
I say it every time on this topic, but the situation hasn't changed in 10 years so it holds true IMO. I agree, the big change is absolutely cars and street parking. My parents have lived in the same house for 40+ years (South Australia), in an area where every home has a driveway and garage/carport that can fit 2-3 cars combined.
When I was young, that block had maybe 1-2 cars parked on the street, visibility was good and you could kick a football and ride bikes out there safely. When I visit now, there are so many cars that it's sometimes hard to find a park. I would guess the bulk of it is residents who don't want to shuffle cars in the driveway or have their garage full of other stuff rather than the cars.
I would not want my kids playing out there unsupervised.
I agree. I'm in Sydney and certainly the next phase of development going through my suburb is duplexes. Suddenly you've doubled the amount of cars on the same block, and the garage is 50/50 used for one of the cars or not.
Same here on all counts.
Garages in duplexes typically are not big enough to fit an average car comfortably.
Is it not more people living per house? I can’t really imagine voluntarily street parking on a busy street to avoid car shuffling. Are there more cars per person now than in the 90s? I feel like parents had one car each back then and teens got cars at around the same rates they do now? But with housing prices going up like crazy everywhere it wouldn’t be surprising to me if there were more people per house than there used to be.
In Australia, the pattern over time is definitely more cars per person, and fewer occupants per household. Rate of change seems to be slowing on both counts but it's still getting worse, not better unfortunately.
It's more cars per person yeah - more people working per household, more car dependency, and cars becoming cheaper.
I think that at least partly it's the consequence of the very same safetyism. If I look at my generation (in my sixties), we still start conversations with strangers, especially if they are our neighbours and things happen between us. But it doesn happen't between people in their thirties any more. And if I look at my students (highschool and college level), then for them it's very alien and even afraid of situation where they have to. Why? I guess they were not allowed to practice and explore this.
> Why?
In addition to not having practice as you said, my thoughts:
1. Camera phones and social media have trained all young people to be aware that anything they say or do could be reported on
2. A lot more overt moralizing about power, gender, and race dynamics by young people makes people hesitant to interact outside of their group
3. Racial and cultural diversity have increased, and people don't reach out across those barriers as freely and easily as within their own homogeneous culture(s)
Speaking for myself there is one other factor that plays a huge part:
4: Nearly every time a stranger tries to talk to me it is to beg for money or sell me something (which is also begging)
In fact I'd say this is by far the prime reason I don't interact with people I don't know. I'm not a kid, however.
Probably these too, but if I compare mu childhood (sixties) and society today, the experience kids got/have are in especially sharp contrast. When I was young I was often dumped into large family gatherings which lasted days (birthdays of (grand)grandparents, funerals, weddings etc). I had to practice handling cousins etc who might had very different family backgrounds than me since very early age. We had to find things we had in common and accept our differences. We learned that differences are manageable.
It's not common nowadays. Many people don't have relationships with relatives at all and kids don't meet another kids with different background until school. And even then distance is kept often because of overprotective parenting. If I look at my students (highschool and college level), most of them are absolutely terrified to interact with people very different than they themselves. A single difference is enough to keep distance, dump relationship at all. They are not used to it at all.
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> the larger trucks that are in the USA which are scary big
Yeah, big trucks have started showing up in Norway too unfortunately, it's making it much harder to keep our environment of freedom and responsibility :(
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Where I lived we knew a few neighbors but didn’t really interact every day or feel like they would watch out for other people’s kids.
That didn’t stop me from biking and exploring all over from age 6-7, which seems unthinkable now. I think it was mostly just more risk tolerance and less flashy warnings about danger. Like my dad biked around the same block so why not let me and there was not much more thought given to it.
Your suburb sounds nice but I guess Im just saying that level of community wasn’t necessary for kids to have freedom.
> Like my dad biked around the same block so why not let me and there was not much more thought given to it.
I’m convinced that’s more of the explanation than we realize. Adults in a lot of places move about almost entirely by car and often look down on other modes of transportation, to the extent that having your kid walk or bike while you have a car in the driveway seems wrong, like if you shopped at Whole Foods for yourself and fed your kids on gruel.
From the age of 5 in my town everyone would just let all us kids out to play and we'd just come home when it was getting dark. There were no cell phones. We didn't even have a landline until I was 12. I'd walk the mile or so each way to school. Some days I'd get treated to the bus fare but I usually just spent it on candy and walked home anyway :D
Another aspect for sure is that parents did not think as much before too. Kids were given much more freedom while parents should probably have kept an eye on them a little more. I knew of countless domestic accidents that would probably not happen nowadays. Sure that made kids experiment more and all but we ended up with more dead kids too.
The data doesn't necessarily bear that out. Yes, childhood accidents have declined, over a similar time period that childhood freedom has declined.
However a hefty portion of that accident reduction is attributable to other safety improvements. Cars are far safer now than in the 70s, so are kitchen appliances, electrical outlets, playground design, etc.
And at the same time, child suicide rates are way up, which research attributes directly to the decline in independence.
What data measures "childhood freedom"? That sounds more like conjecture.
You can lookup the studies on loss of 3rd spaces and the relation to mental health in adolescents (and adults, albeit to a lesser degree). This is pretty well-trod science
Well trod doesn't mean good. Social science is notorious for bunk. How many can actually support a causal relationship?
> However a hefty portion of that accident reduction is attributable to other safety improvements.
very hard to differentiate between product safety improvement and attitude change of parents, because both are co-factors. There is no good way to dissociate one from the other.
> child suicide rates are way up, which research attributes directly to the decline in independence.
and brainwashing
> and brainwashing
Kids are brainwashed to commit suicide at scale? Could you elaborate?