I remember being young when "kids don't play in the yard anymore, they just play on their phone/consoles/computer" started to be a big talking point. Even then I recognized that the reason I was on the computer so much was, at least in part, because it was so much easier to hang out with my friends online than it was to coordinate with my parents to try and get travel to their house, or to convince my parents to let a friend come over.
And I consider myself relatively lucky in that part of the US where I live, despite being in a relatively rural region, is remarkably walkable. As opposed to most places in the US, which are effectively micro islands when it comes to getting anywhere on foot.
Then lets also add on how loitering is treated as such a great offense. That traditional areas for young adults to just "hang" (cafe, bowling alley, arcade) have increasingly priced them out. That a teenager hanging out on their own is often suspected to be "up to something"
In a time before the cell phone, we apparently let kids wander unsupervised more than we do in an era where they can get a hold of their parents at almost any time? It's ludicrous.
My childhood was free range. Some of the greatest memories of my life (admittedly, also some not-so-great ones, but still) are from that time period.
Maybe I was lucky to not get severely injured or abducted, but I do feel it helped me become a more resilient and independent person. I moved out of my parents' house at 18 and never had to go back for more than a few weeks. I have persevered through a widely varied array of very difficult situations.
In some ways, I'm not sure I would've made it as far as I have without those experiences as a kid. Of course, maybe I could've done even better if I had stayed home and studied more, and maybe avoided some of those difficult situations? But I am glad to say I am okay with how things turned out.
I definitely believe overly sheltered kids are missing something important. There is a better balance we can strike, I think.
Mine was also free range in an older neighborhood/suburb with a highway on two sides and river on the other two. The only rule I had was not to cross the highway, but even that rule was eventually relaxed as there were better fishing ponds on the other side of the highway and I just had to tell parents/be careful. I was also a latchkey kid (along with all my friends) so I'd get home from school, drop my books and turn right around and head to my friend's houses.
Like you, it wasn't always easy, but I think made me a stronger person overall.
Perhaps those are your greatest memories because that is what you were doing as a child. Would your greatest memories of you grow up now be playing Minecraft online?
I don’t really know the answer. I grew up in the early 2000s with a mix of video games and ‘outside with friends on the woods’ time. I have many great memories of playing games, but by far my best are always the ones, in person, out in the woods. Even my best gaming memories were at lan parties. Being in-person with friends is just better.
>Maybe I was lucky to not get severely injured or abducted
When the statistics are vastly in one's favor, it isn't luck.
I keep telling my wife our son is literally more likely to be hit by lightning than to be snatched by some rando, but somehow that is hard to understand.
Not many movies are made on people getting hit by lightning. Perception beats stats and facts.
yes, feels and vibes beat rationality and science.
Is it any surprise the US is backsliding?
Can't tell if it's backsliding or reverting to the mean :(
probably the same thing, but mine has moral judgment.
I started trying doing for my kids what was done to me and quickly ran into a brick wall. Had school refuse to release child when I wasn't physically present at bus stop, had cops called at the park, and have had Karens roll up and interrogate my kid for walking "alone" on our property.
Only solution I found was to move in the middle of nowhere and buy acreage. No other kids but at least the Karens can be trespassed and the child snatchers are too underfunded / too far of a drive away for them to bother us over a sad faced Karen calling.
The other option that's really going to piss some people off when I say, but matches my reality, is living in a few ghetto neighborhoods when I was broke there were literally so many single moms that the child snatchers could not possibly punish all of them and the kids roamed because momma was at work and they were protected from the Karens/CPS by having critical mass.
When my first-born was six I walked around with her to all of the neighbor's houses and we introduced ourselves. We informed them that my daughter would likely be moving around the neighborhood independently, perhaps on occasion with her younger brother. I gave them my phone number and told them to call any time.
In addition to having no problems with Karens or the CPS we were able to identify the other houses that had kids in them and a band of independent neighborhood kids playing with and looking out for eachother quickly became the norm in our community.
Poor people often get a pass for various reasons. Many/most of those reasons may be bad or stupid ones, but I see it as a silver lining. There is often much more of a sense of community than in other places as well.
Giving kids access to a bunch of rural land to explore is a great middle ground for those who can do it.
>If there was hope, it must lie in the proles
>Maybe I was lucky to not get severely injured or abducted,
You fell for the trap that caused this whole issue, you were about as likely to get abducted as struck by lightning.
Good point about the proliferation of the absurd “crime” of loitering, which apparently just means “existing somewhere without spending money.” I remember being a teen in the 80s and what we did every day would be considered “loitering” today. There’s not much else for kids to do outside the home besides loiter.
> existing somewhere without spending money
Existing without spending money works a lot better when you perceive and comply with social norms. At a mall, you're unlikely to meet loitering enforcement for reading a book in the food court all afternoon while sipping a drink you brought from home. You can meeting your local walking club there too and walk for miles chatting without purchasing anything -- if you're not bowling over the shoppers.
But if you camp out in the entrance of the mall and roughhouse with your highschool buddies, your antisocial behavior will drive away customers. Perhaps you can't perceive this, or perhaps you do perceive it but don't care -- either way, once you're making shoppers uncomfortable, you're a strict liability.
This doesn't mean you can't be kicked out for other reasons. But you get a lot farther if you play to your audience.
"Antisocial behavior" You are describing teens being social. You dont get to define what antisocial means.
Well, you do to some extent, and having people define what antisocial is for them is how teens learn to be prosocial (inshallah).
Not a Karen -- it's about striking a balance.
So why were loitering laws introduced? I doubt it was purely a sadistic effort to ruin the lives of kids.
My guess is that combatting gang crime was a major reason.
Modern loitering laws in small-town America, post-Civil-War, were typically originally intended to enslave the entire population of black men remaining in town, or otherwise drive them out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA It took most of a century for the economy to really convert everything over to an hourly-pay model. This is not the only reason, but it is the dominant, proximate one that enshrined the practice.
Places with less black-white racial animus were comfortable adopting animus for other minorities, or for the poor in general. Post-Civil-Rights, loitering laws (and a panoply of other practices ranging from swimming pools to mortgage approvals to cul-de-sacs) were exploited not to enslave, but principally to simply eject categories of people.
For a take on the origins of the Anglo cultural tradition of persecuting the poor in general, this goes a lot further back - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ec9Al5ezYs
My understanding is that loitering laws are much older than that - the first versions of these laws seems to date to 1342 [1].
IMO what all these laws have in common is that they're designed to allow the police to legally ask questions to people (or straight up remove them) who look suspicious but haven't committed any crime. Why would anyone want to remove people who haven't done anything wrong is a more nuanced question that I'm not qualified to properly answer.
[1] https://eji.org/news/visual-history-loitering-laws/
Have an unmarked "free candy" type van park across your street from your house day in and day out, moving with just enough regularity to avoid parking too long, and you might begin to understand why "look suspicious but haven't committed any crime" starts to weird people out.
There's an inherent tension between protecting public spaces and protecting vulnerable but disruptive people.
Your link refers to an article which is very American and very 2018. Lots of large font size headings about race and sexuality and gender. I don't think it's a productive take on how to manage the tension. Racially homogenous societies still need to decide how to handle people who try to sleep at train stations and yell at the commuters.
Sleeping at train stations is fine (as is sleeping on trains), and yelling at commuters is disruptive / antisocial behaviour. (I don't like the word "antisocial" in laws, because it's too open to interpretation, and then you have a load of case law defining what precisely "antisocial" means, known only to legal experts, leaving everyone else ignorant of the law.) It seems to me that additional rules against loitering are not useful for the situation you described.
Why is sleeping at a train station fine? (Unless you're talking about infrequent long distance trains).
Trains are transportation infrastructure. Drivers don't have to put up with people setting up a queen bed in the middle of their lane on the highway. If a country doesn't protect its public transport infrastructure, then the rich and the middle class stop taking the train, the poor have to put up with things, and the mentally ill get an overpriced and noisy mobile homeless shelter. One that costs more and helps less than crisis accommodation.
Loitering laws have existed since english commonlaw, but in the modern era were adapted to penalize homelessness, unemployment, etc...
A reason I suspect (though, truly it is only a guess) is as a way to force people to spend money. Something akin to "either buy something or leave" to try and capture just that tiny bit of additional revenue.
"Buy something or leave" has become a kind of sinister, unwritten, yet overarching principle organizing and governing everyone's lives. Participation in the work-earn-spend economy has become less and less optional with each passing day.
I'm not sure that's actually true in a typical park. It may very well be true for a bunch of noisy kids in a shopping mall which exists and is paid for for the purpose of people, well, shopping.
have you looked at satellite maps of the US? there are plenty of places that are concrete jungles with little green space.
Its to drive homeless people away, shamefully enough
I would be surprised if loitering laws are even enforceable today. I can see trespassing if you're asked to leave and don't, but getting arrested for being in one place too long? Especially a public place like a park? I'd donate to that gofundme. Kids could learn something from first amendment auditors and just start filming themselves in public.
Very few children know enough and have the disposition to productively stand up to a cop (or any other seemingly legitimate authority) and try to defend their rights. Legally, whether they have the same rights as adults is also questionable.
Parks have operating hours. Cities have noise ordinances, etc., to give Cops options for booking who they want for whatever they want. Cops don't necessarily care what the laws are, anyway. I've taken a ride in paddy wagons to a station before for hanging out in a playground because a neighbor said we were causing trouble. We were just talking. No, we weren't processed, but we were left to figure out our own way back home. This was in the 90s. The same stuff happens today though.
The small rural Canadian town I grew up in (~2000 people) during the 1990s had a real estate agent that would call the cops if he saw any teenagers out after 9pm. He would literally lie to them, saying we were causing trouble if we were just walking to the convenience store. He was trying to keep the town "desirable" or something. This man fought anything that would keep teenagers occupied. Skate parks, benches, etc. My group would lay in the park during the dog days of summer just chatting and passing around a jug of orange juice, which he would tell the cops was spiked with vodka (which we did do, but never in the park).
Of course, we (as in the teens in general) probably fed into his paranoia - let's just say harassing the neighbourhood teenagers rarely ends well...
Compare how things were back then to now and this RE agent probably stroked out from the mannerisms of the recent newcomers
I agree that people don't give this explanation enough credit.
I was online in that age group by the late 80s. Just as in your story, that started me down a path of not going outside as much, even though the other kids would be outside doing outside things. Why would I go out and play basketball or something else I didn't like when I could instead be online talking to people with shared interests?
Me too, but I wasn't on AOL or anything long-distance, instead I called local chat systems / BBSes. And because they were local we met up physically as a group at least weekly (almost daily in the summertime).
The summer I was 16 I spent more time away from the computer, hanging out with other teenagers I met on the computer, than I would have otherwise.
> Have online worlds become the last free places for children?
> [...]This evidence tells us something important about human development: children want to explore together and build independent peer cultures that are partially distinct from the ways of adults. Yet since the early 1970s, many Western countries have increasingly limited the social and physical independence of children.
> In physical spaces, we restrict the movement of children and refuse to let them play and explore without us. But that doesn’t mean they won’t look for ways to escape.
> In the past two decades, children have found a new place to roam: the endless jungle of the internet.
https://psyche.co/ideas/have-online-worlds-become-the-last-f...
> it was so much easier to hang out with my friends online than it was to coordinate with my parents to try and get travel to their house
The norm in the 70's was for younger kids to have multiple groups of friends, at least until they were old enough to ride their bike across town.
When you spent time with larger groups of kids, like at school, you could make friends based on shared interests.
After school, your friend group was based on proximity.
I feel with larger school sizes and online capabilities we've lost the friendship of necessity - where you'd be friends with the kids on the block "because you had to" and there wasn't really any other option.
They might not be amazing friends, or life-long ones, but they were friends.
Learning to get along with people you don't completely "vibe with" is an important life skill.
> Then lets also add on how loitering is treated as such a great offense.
The Wikipedia page on Loitering [1] is wild. A surprisingly large number of places seem to have criminalised "just existing somewhere".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loitering
You hit on what I consider a paradox of parenting today: Kids have access to instant communication with their parents/guardians, yet they can't be left on their own in public because it's too dangerous. That never made sense to me. I've tried to convince parents that kids are actually safer today (primarily because of smart phones, but also because of Ring cameras on every damn house) than us Gen-Xers were, but no one buys it. I hear the same excuses: It's too risky these days. There's so many creeps out there. Have you seen the registered offender websites? And that's just the creeps we know about!
Came here to say what you already said: the built environment accounts for a great deal of this. It's simply not possible in a great many parts of Middle America to walk or bike over to a friend's house, and to the extent any social fabric exists, it is built entirely atop parents' willingness to drive you over for coordinated and time-boxed play-dates.
I have been arguing for almost my entire life, as a European immigrant, that built environment and automobile sprawl shapes relationships and cohesion. I was constantly dismissed and told that these are superficial differences, that people are just as lonely in dense, transportation-rich urban jungles, and that motivated people in the right cultural context can defeat any environmental obstacles to friendship and connection.
I hope the tide on that is starting to turn. Built environment isn't everything, but it's a lot.
Not to mention how parents might get in actual legal trouble now for not acting like this
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