Yeah this post is bullshit. I grew up with cars (I’m in my 30s). I did all those things that kids apparently sacrificed for cars.
Know why kids can’t/don’t do any of those things anymore? Parents helicoptering over them. Parents freak out when they get worried about their kids, where as me growing up in the 90s and early 2000s I would leave in the morning and not come back until dinner. I’d go to the beach, play with friends, wander around town and just hang out.
It’s not cars that ruined all these things for kids, it’s over protective parents who feel better parking their kid on the couch with a tablet than let them go outside and explore, play street hockey, football in the park, or otherwise be a fucking kid.
Not helicopter parents. They are part of the problem, but that’s not it. I have kids, and the reason they’re not outside is that most everything can be done inside now to meet with friends. Video calls, gaming with Discord, etc. They regularly just phone up and hang out. For us “old people” we had a household landline, that’s it, and meeting up with bicycles or stickball in the street or whatever was the only way we could hang out.
It was fine to be told off by another parent or even a stranger, there was more social awareness towards eachother and eachother’s kids out in the street, and cirtainly not the least, especially in relation to safety, people drove somewhat normal cars.
Everybody needs SUV’s and pickup trucks now for some reason with absolutely trash visibility on what is directly in front of them.
But what helps particularly in the safety space is that the Netherlands does way more in terms of keeping people sperated from other forms of traffic with infrastructure choices.
Yeah but the cars are 3 times larger now. They are so high up you can’t see a kid in front of you if they are shorter than your hood. That’s why their parents don’t let them do those things anymore.
I got hit by a car on my bike as a kid. A small coupe. Everything now is an suv. Imagine an suv hitting me. I would have died
There were tons of cars in the 80s and 90s and playing in the street was still very normal. You’d simply move out of the way when a car was coming. You taught your kids that the streets weren’t safe, since streets are made for cars to drive over and not for kids to play in and didn’t let them do that until they could do it relatively safely.
We see posts here about someone calling the cops on the neighbor kids over and over for simply being outside. That’s the dot to connect. It’s a societal change toward being batshit crazy, whether helicopter parents who must oversee every moment of their children’s lives to make sure they’re as safe as possible or obsessively controlling neighbors who think that’s the proper way to parent and that any time they see anyone under 18 without a parent they decide it must be child abandonment, or abuse, or runaways, or roving gangs of criminal kids and call the cops over it.
In a lot of places in the US cops will now ask groups of kids why they’re playing at a park. Kid’s aren’t going outside because no one will leave them alone to be kids outside.
Not that I disagree with you about helicopter parenting being an important part of it - but tons of kids were also killed by cars back in the day. It was a very real problem.
In the Netherlands, this was why they made their cities more bike- and pedestrian-friendly, and as a result, dutch kids move more freely than kids in other parts of the world.
Of course, that’s definitely important. In the US most cities aren’t designed to be walkable/bikeable at all. That’s dangerous and of course city planning should account for all sorts of transportation from walking and people in motorized wheelchairs on up.
I do agree with George Carlin on the push for safety, though. It’s not kind and cuddly to say, but I also believe natural selection has it’s place.
A large scale environmental change generally correlates with a larger than normal amount of animals in that region dying as those with the adaptations that best fit the new reality are selected for. The birds that can’t reach the seeds now die off and those with the longer beaks survive to pass on their genes and the species ends up with a longer beak than it had a few decades back.
Completely minimizing deaths in a radically different environment only causes more and more generations where the bulk of the population really isn’t suited for this environment and often suffers in varying ways because of that. Accepting that not all members of a species will do great in the new environment and that there will be deaths as a result of that leads to much quicker adaptation where a much larger portion of the population doesn’t have those issues.
Every aspect of human life has changed with an insane exponentially increasing pace over the last 200 or so years, so the environment almost all humans deal with every moment of every day now is almost nothing like what we evolved to deal with and handle. That alone will lead to deaths.
Hey man, I did too, but children got killed by cars quite often. Pretty sure that and drowning accounts for the majority of child deaths back in the '70s-'90s
Think about all of those near misses when you were a kid. Think about how much danger you put yourself in. That’s what they’re thinking about when they lock their kids inside. Growing up in the 90s was fun, dangerous and crime was much higher back then. You’re not going to turn into your dad if you give your kids the freedom they desperately need to develop their brains properly. You’re not putting your kids in danger if you’re smart about it and make sure they’re smart about it.
Sure, if you compare the teen and child death rate now to that of the 1990s it looks worse then. But if you compare that same number from the 1990s to the 1890s it also looks worse then. The 1990s were not an especially dangerous time in world history, they were actually an exceptionally safe time.
I think the exponential growth of technology over the last century or two is starting to catch up with us. The oldest people alive lived through the vast majority of it. After millenia of evolution preparing us for a life and daily challenges and dangers completely unlike anything of today it makes sense that suddenly so many people are being diagnosed with ADHD and major depressive disorder and so many other things.
Parents are more neurotic because most of us are more neurotic and we’re just expressing and dealing with it in different ways.
Yeah this post is bullshit. I grew up with cars (I’m in my 30s). I did all those things that kids apparently sacrificed for cars.
Know why kids can’t/don’t do any of those things anymore? Parents helicoptering over them. Parents freak out when they get worried about their kids, where as me growing up in the 90s and early 2000s I would leave in the morning and not come back until dinner. I’d go to the beach, play with friends, wander around town and just hang out.
It’s not cars that ruined all these things for kids, it’s over protective parents who feel better parking their kid on the couch with a tablet than let them go outside and explore, play street hockey, football in the park, or otherwise be a fucking kid.
Not helicopter parents. They are part of the problem, but that’s not it. I have kids, and the reason they’re not outside is that most everything can be done inside now to meet with friends. Video calls, gaming with Discord, etc. They regularly just phone up and hang out. For us “old people” we had a household landline, that’s it, and meeting up with bicycles or stickball in the street or whatever was the only way we could hang out.
That’s why. Times change.
Well, it’s not entirely overprotective parenting.
Things were different in the 90s.
It was fine to be told off by another parent or even a stranger, there was more social awareness towards eachother and eachother’s kids out in the street, and cirtainly not the least, especially in relation to safety, people drove somewhat normal cars. Everybody needs SUV’s and pickup trucks now for some reason with absolutely trash visibility on what is directly in front of them.
But what helps particularly in the safety space is that the Netherlands does way more in terms of keeping people sperated from other forms of traffic with infrastructure choices.
Yeah but the cars are 3 times larger now. They are so high up you can’t see a kid in front of you if they are shorter than your hood. That’s why their parents don’t let them do those things anymore.
I got hit by a car on my bike as a kid. A small coupe. Everything now is an suv. Imagine an suv hitting me. I would have died
deleted by creator
There were tons of cars in the 80s and 90s and playing in the street was still very normal. You’d simply move out of the way when a car was coming. You taught your kids that the streets weren’t safe, since streets are made for cars to drive over and not for kids to play in and didn’t let them do that until they could do it relatively safely.
We see posts here about someone calling the cops on the neighbor kids over and over for simply being outside. That’s the dot to connect. It’s a societal change toward being batshit crazy, whether helicopter parents who must oversee every moment of their children’s lives to make sure they’re as safe as possible or obsessively controlling neighbors who think that’s the proper way to parent and that any time they see anyone under 18 without a parent they decide it must be child abandonment, or abuse, or runaways, or roving gangs of criminal kids and call the cops over it.
In a lot of places in the US cops will now ask groups of kids why they’re playing at a park. Kid’s aren’t going outside because no one will leave them alone to be kids outside.
Not that I disagree with you about helicopter parenting being an important part of it - but tons of kids were also killed by cars back in the day. It was a very real problem.
In the Netherlands, this was why they made their cities more bike- and pedestrian-friendly, and as a result, dutch kids move more freely than kids in other parts of the world.
Of course, that’s definitely important. In the US most cities aren’t designed to be walkable/bikeable at all. That’s dangerous and of course city planning should account for all sorts of transportation from walking and people in motorized wheelchairs on up.
I do agree with George Carlin on the push for safety, though. It’s not kind and cuddly to say, but I also believe natural selection has it’s place.
A large scale environmental change generally correlates with a larger than normal amount of animals in that region dying as those with the adaptations that best fit the new reality are selected for. The birds that can’t reach the seeds now die off and those with the longer beaks survive to pass on their genes and the species ends up with a longer beak than it had a few decades back.
Completely minimizing deaths in a radically different environment only causes more and more generations where the bulk of the population really isn’t suited for this environment and often suffers in varying ways because of that. Accepting that not all members of a species will do great in the new environment and that there will be deaths as a result of that leads to much quicker adaptation where a much larger portion of the population doesn’t have those issues.
Every aspect of human life has changed with an insane exponentially increasing pace over the last 200 or so years, so the environment almost all humans deal with every moment of every day now is almost nothing like what we evolved to deal with and handle. That alone will lead to deaths.
Hey man, I did too, but children got killed by cars quite often. Pretty sure that and drowning accounts for the majority of child deaths back in the '70s-'90s
Think about all of those near misses when you were a kid. Think about how much danger you put yourself in. That’s what they’re thinking about when they lock their kids inside. Growing up in the 90s was fun, dangerous and crime was much higher back then. You’re not going to turn into your dad if you give your kids the freedom they desperately need to develop their brains properly. You’re not putting your kids in danger if you’re smart about it and make sure they’re smart about it.
Sure, if you compare the teen and child death rate now to that of the 1990s it looks worse then. But if you compare that same number from the 1990s to the 1890s it also looks worse then. The 1990s were not an especially dangerous time in world history, they were actually an exceptionally safe time.
That’s true
I think the exponential growth of technology over the last century or two is starting to catch up with us. The oldest people alive lived through the vast majority of it. After millenia of evolution preparing us for a life and daily challenges and dangers completely unlike anything of today it makes sense that suddenly so many people are being diagnosed with ADHD and major depressive disorder and so many other things.
Parents are more neurotic because most of us are more neurotic and we’re just expressing and dealing with it in different ways.