I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of small Metro. Nothing special about it at all.
Every time I see one of these articles I always wonder who they're talking about.
I always feel like this is just one of those news headlines that won't go away, but isn't quite tethered to reality, but people really like to feel bad about modern life and so we keep talking about it as if it's real. I suspect the real reason kids aren't playing outside, if there is one, is not because they can't, it's because they choose not to. Just as adults are no longer choosing to go to third spaces. Screens came for everyone.
I live in Redmond, WA. Bougie? My rube Midwestern ass thinks so. And there are feral kids all over my neighborhood. Plenty of kids walking to school in groups, or solo. Neighbor kids talk about riding the bus/train to places. Granted, there are a lot of immigrant families around here (hello, Microsoft, et al.), and I'm sure that skews things.
It's also not particularly expensive to live in a bougie place. I grew up in Mclean, VA. My dad ran into Dick Cheney at the CVS once. But you can get an apartment in Mclean on a journalist's salary, especially if your parents paid for college and you have no debt. You can’t afford to raise a family there, but you can live there, near your social circle. Conversely, you'll see lots of trades people, cops, etc., living in places that aren't bougie at all, despite making more money than the lower end of the professional class. People find ways to congregate around others in their social class, income notwithstanding.
Your kids are hardly free-range. Let me guess, there's no way for them to actually meaningfully leave the area (no train, bus, etc)? It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and saying they can do whatever they want. hardly free-range in the way described in the article.
Presumably you live in a suburb for the reasons the person in the article checked in on the free-range kid.
my personal litmus test is if you'd let your 13 year kid explore Manhattan alone during the day. Many say no because it's dangerous, and yet Manhattan is safer than most American suburbs. just FUD all the way down sadly.
I also let him play at the park on his own occasionally. I will get calls from well meaning but extremely overprotective friends to let me know that “they can’t watch him anymore.” He is ten! The library, connected to the park, has a phone which he can use to reach us.
People called my parents hover parents, but at ten I could have played at the neighborhood park by myself.
the biggest things parents should worry about is their kid being bullied by other kids during school, a supposedly safe place, and other family. strangers just aren't the major source of violence towards children.
She is now in a neck brace, and her mother is absolutely distraught, saying this is something she cannot fix for her beloved daughter. I am distraught as well that this could happen to anyone at all on the same train that I ride every week.
I’ve noticed a trend of people attaching a sort of personal identification with headlines
Imagine that!
A lot of U.S. residents inure themselves to random acts of violence because they either feel helpless to change the societal contexts of that violence and/or because admitting that violence would require confronting the benefits of power exploitation vs. the drawbacks of racism, sexism, bullying, and bystanderism. That swarm of boys abusing a girl to enforce societal mores that benefit them to her detriment is a trope from Pleasantville. This isn’t some new or unknown thing. This is a standard-issue United States Lynch Mob that’s been known about for a century.
I’ve been upset about this for thirty years, which is when I first discovered this. Welcome to the shameful desert of the real. Sad that it took y’all so long to see it; but now you have a chance to decide a way forward. Circle the wagons and raise sheltered, and therefore weakened, children? Teach every family about this threat all the way down to the youngest that kids understand danger? Crossing guards that ride the buses and have safety whistles and self-defense training? Lobby your city government to shift policing dollars to transit safety officers? Lobby your regional government to shift road maintenance dollars to gang violence de-escalation efforts?
As you can see, it’s difficult to find a way forward that feels appropriately vengeful upon ‘those that hurt our budding flower’ while also having a meaningful impact on the quality of the future. Most regions would just try to defund bus service, which fucks over everyone except wealthy adults on time scales longer than ten years or so, because at least that ‘feels’ like an effective response.
Good luck.
Unless there's a big strict enforcer to keep everyone in line of course.
Philadelphia in 2025 had a higher murder rate than Belfast during the height of a civil war.
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_countries_result.jsp?co...
Crime in the USA is also extremely regional and local in pattern.
I don't know how your link gathers data (website only shows one dude, software engineer, not a professional survey statistician), but from personal experience I can surely say it's rankings are BS.
The closest in US are the "bad towns" like East Palo Alto or some neighborhoods of Oakland, with their respect for ex-cons and prison slang.
My parents let me (14) and my brother (9) explore central Paris on our own when my Dad was working at the Paris air show for the RAF. No problems at all even though this was just after the student protests in the 60s, and so things were a little tense.
I think Manhattan would be OK too, though I've only been there as an adjust. Certainly, you see kids running around London.
What do you mean it's like dumping kids on a farm? Are the suburbs really THAT lethally dangerous?
Source [22 minutes]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLAfDrFUBkA
[something traumatic happens and 50 people run for their safety]
see and as proven, only 1 person was assaulted!
I think a future society that counts trauma and mental health disruptions instead of just the crime stats will reach different conclusions on areas considered safe
I don't see child welfare agencies personally as a particular threat when it comes to this topic. Maybe they ARE more likely to get involved in cases of more free range parenting where before they weren't, but it doesn't register as a real worry.
The major difference I see between when I was growing up and now is that when I went out onto the streets, there were other kids on the streets. My parents didn't know exactly what they were sending me out to, but they knew that there as a general crowd of kids that would be out on the street until some point in the evening, and that they would all go home at around the same time, and that's also when you were expected home.
The draw of smartphones and video games as indoor entertainment can't be understated, but I can exercise some parental tyranny here and always kick him out of the house to go play like my folks used to do.
But there are no other kids out there. I'm sending him out into streets empty of kids.
To mitigate this I'm trying to nudge things in the direction of him and his friends forming some sort of after-school crew that finds outside activities to do together, undirected. There are other like minded parents that I've found that are also interested in enabling something like this.
On the subject of risks - I strongly believe that the role of parenthood is to mediate a child's exposure to the real trauma of a hostile, often absurd reality that they will grow up into. Controlled exposure to risk, to self-directed decision making in times where they feel like someone won't be there to help them out and they need to figure things out on their own, these are critical requirements in parenting IMHO. And all risk comes with some small chance of tragedy, and that's a burden we as parents have to bear: to expose ourselves to the emotional trauma of the possibility of our children getting hurt, however small the chance, so that they are able to grow into healthy well-adjusted adults.
I feel like I have to work a lot harder than my parents did to enable that exposure.
At the ski hill kids 5+ roam free- it’s always fun getting on the chairlift and a little kid says “ can you help me get on?” And you have to physically pick them up onto the moving (fixed grip) chairlift. There’s no cell service.
Mountain bike trails around town are full of groups of kids 5+.
My advice: move to a small town, it’s like going back in time in a very good way.
That said, "move to a small town" is easier said than done when you have a family and kid :)
This. It's a number's "game".
My father, born in rural Romania, had 8 siblings, one of them died of an accident in his childhood (yeah, during "free range stuff"). I was born in a town and have 2 brothers. Live in a city and have one kid.
I can't send my kid out carelessly because I don't have a backup.
I arrived at the school just as it was getting out for the day. I did not see a single student of any age leave without an adult.
Like so many people of my generation, I can only wonder at the cost, and be grateful that I was born when I was.
When you walk, you go in the opposite direction of cars and can see them coming and, if necessary, move off to the side more.
I know it's survivorship bias, but it worked for me.
Now I get that population density is increasing, and probably so is traffic. Though so are automatic safety features that cause cars to brake rather than hit things.
Are there statistics on vehicular fatalities in suburbs?
Quote from CDC
During 2013–2022, U.S. traffic-related death rates increased a relative 50.0% for pedestrians and 22.5% overall, compared with those in 27 other high-income countries, where they declined a median of 24.7% and 19.4%, respectively. Across countries, U.S. pedestrian death rates were highest overall and among persons aged 15–24 and 25–64 years.
Wasn't there a trend in the US away from pompous SUVs and towards smaller cars, people even starting to re-evaluate some European-favored "city" cars more?
Also aren't cars also getting ligther, with less heavy / metallic exterior over time?
Cars on the roads in the '80s were very low to the ground. Even a child standing on the sidewalk could easily see over the hood of a car parked on the road. Now, hoods have gotten so tall that neither can the child see past it to what's on the other side, nor can the drivers see the children.
The lion's share of loving a child is intervening in proportion to actual risk.
As a society, that means, more than any other single reform, relieving our cities of the burden of maintaining lethal, taxpayer-funded compatibility with the auto industry's machinery.
I largely blame cell phones for the Karens being able to impose their will. When I was a kid we were all out about and/or doing dumb shit, but anyone who wanted to call the authorities had to go home to find a telephone. By that time we were long gone. As long as we didn't go near houses, no one could touch us. Now they will just follow the kid with their cellphone until the rat-fuckers from CPS or the police arrive.
Thankfully this never happened to me as a child, I don't even know what I'd do.
once my friend get arrested in LA by police when he jogging. they say they arrest him for his own safety because he shouldnt be out jogging in "this neighborhood"
turns out people in america get murdered and attacked in the street all the time for... no reason. yes literally, no motive.
it isn't. Crime is highly concentrated and the vast majority of, at least median affluent America, is about as safe as it gets. Same goes for any big cities, usually you can count risky streets on one hand, where 90% of the violence happens.
Not to mention, developing countries are if anything the only places where kids still run around and play on the street. I've spend a fair amount of time in Latin American countries with much higher violent crime rates than most of the world and you don't see much helicopter parenting
if anything in the first world this style of parenting is a result of excess safety, not lack of it. The world has seen a secular decline in violent crime over the last few decades, and yet this paranoia is distinctly new.
I'm also quite certain that in much of Latin America anyone fucking with a child would not go through a trial and handled with kid gloves, but rather there are plenty of videos of the internet of such people being held down while Rottweilers literally rip their balls off. Probably not an ideal version of justice but also perhaps more effective at pursuading people not to fuck with children.
The danger to children is largely the police and CPS, who rip apart families for hallucinations or levels of parenting sin that are far more benign than the emotional cost to children of authorities bearing down on them.
now, if your child is too playful for Ms. Karen, they will give them a shit load of adderal as well
you may consider paying for a private school to avoid Karens drugging your children
It's disgusting that this has become a casual attitude and admission by the tech worker class. No one should be getting this free pass.
"I am actively harming children and society with my livelihood (except my own, because I am so smart). Here I am proudly and smugly stating this in a news article."
There's a kid (7-8 years old I think) a few houses down that carries a walkie-talkie with him during the summer. He'll be out for several hours (probably not farther than 10 houses away from his own house), and his mom checks on him every now and then using the walkie-talkie. I'll buy a set for own kids this summer for the exact same purpose.
The only thing I'm kind of scared of are the cars, because they tend to drive too fast (for my taste) and kids tend to not always look when they cross the street when they're too excited playing their games.
Edit: I just remembered that a few years ago, the cops showed up because there was a complaint about our kids being left unsupervised. They were playing in the backyard, which is completely fenced off, while we were inside cooking supper. Our kitchen window faces the yard so we could see them, and the window was open so we could hear them. At least the cops realized that the complaint was BS and didn't even come inside to check for anything. We live in Canada.
Everybody is an island. I don't know what has caused this, but it seems like it's happening in most 1st world countries. Anyone have insights about this?
1. Historically women were largely responsible for community building. As they joined the workforce, they had less time to community build and so there became less community.
2. Technology allowing home entertainment. People can now stream movies instead of going to theaters. Play computer games instead of go to arcades. Check Facebook instead of call friends to catch up. Use a Keurig for convenient coffee instead of go to a cafe.
This very individualistic society can only critique itself in terms of individual failings. Which leads to the catch-22, anti-communal, ankle-deep critiques: people are on their phones, people are asocial, why don’t “people” all get a clue individually and fix this via some spontaneous autoenlightenment.
So if your streets are deserted, ask the locals their views on parenting. Paranoid parents will talk up the safety factor, but it's overblown.
The funny thing is it'd be safer: Kids have cell phones now by like 7 or 8 in a lot of cases and can call for help! Back when I was that age if I got injured or something I might've had to knock on strangers' doors!
Maybe, back in the days, it was just a different time? A more high trust society that worked well?
Nowadays, we have news stories, where 70 year olds get stabbed by youngsters because they got lectures on their bad behaviour. When I was young, I had respect towards a 70 year old. Big time. Never would we have thought to pull out a knife…
Life changed a lot in recent years and not for the better on all dimensions.
Europe is still pretty save though. At least if you trust the statistics
Plus, now, basically every kid is running around with a phone that gives them access to talk to the police or their parents at any time. So it's going to be a lot riskier for someone to try anything against them. Even then, between 80-90% of sexual assaults are performed by people the victims already know, and around 30% of those are relatives of the victim.
I thought this kind of bigotry was only used by far right shit to manipulate feeble-minded people.
I'll be generous and assume this comment was not made by a human, but by a bot.
There was just a big debate in Parliament over an inquiry into the subjects raised.
You should flip through some newspaper archives from when you were a kid. I don’t know where you are, but I can almost certainly guarantee that there were kids attacking people back then too. Just because you and most you know would never have pulled a knife, doesn’t mean that there weren’t those that would. After all, you say the teens today attack old people with knives, but I really don’t think your teen daughters are stabbing people with knives.
How can you reasonably let your teen daughters out alone? Well, be reasonable. Find out if your fears are amped up by sensationalist press. Go meet your refugee neighbours. Quite honestly it sounds like YOU spend too much time inside.
Edit: I just saw your comment about importing men from countries where rape is natural. I can’t imagine that we have the same definition of reasonable.
It misses the point entirely to seek control over whether your kids are "free range" enough. That style of parenting worked so well in the past (it didn't really, but I digress) because they left well enough alone. They weren't trying to contrive anything. Your kids absorb everything from you. Don't let your insecurities be part of it.
What I would argue is much more important is keeping things fresh with new opportunities. That's your main job as a parent. Keep them thinking and engaged with their mostly self-directed path in life. The goal is to open their eyes and help them understand the world. Respect their intelligence and let them decide things on their own.
Many of those so called free range childhoods of the past were actually just empty and boring. That's when they got into trouble. That's not something to be nostalgic about. When I hear about trends like this I have to wonder if some parents are just looking for excuses to be lazy.
Where I live my neighbors have chickens and one has a horse and they never get hassled, the kids roam through the neighborhood under the age of ten without getting picked up by the authorities (well, one time one got lost and a helpful cop brought him home, but that was the end of it), if your dog wanders off animal control will call you to come pick it up (first time they waive the fee), you can collect shells, rocks, driftwood and seaweed for fertilizer off the beach. We have euthanasia but it is a carefully controlled process that involves multiple independent doctors and a lucid patient, and the supermajority (84%) of people approve of it!
Canada sounds like a terrible place, but you are more than welcome in the country I call home; Canada. Oh wait…