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Where do the children play?

(unpublishablepapers.substack.com)
409 points casca | 1 comments | 16 Nov 25 13:45 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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emil-lp ◴[17 Nov 25 07:37 UTC] No.45951580[source]▶
> Consider some statistics on the American childhood, drawn from children aged 8-12: 62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult

This is really not representative for other Western countries. Where I'm from, I would say that 75% of 6 year olds walk/bike to school alone, and 100% of older kids do.

> In physical space, Western children are almost comically sheltered.

I think the author should stick with "kids in the USA" when he means that.

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CalRobert ◴[17 Nov 25 08:00 UTC] No.45951679[source]▶
Where are you from? I would say that seems accurate for Ireland, for instance.
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317070 ◴[17 Nov 25 08:33 UTC] No.45951815[source]▶
In Figure 13, there are some Western countries listed for how much children can roam, and Ireland is indeed near the bottom.

But the Netherlands, Nordics and Germany are still very much on the other side of the spectrum in these studies.

See for instance the books "The Happiest Kids in the World", "Achtung Baby" and "There is No Such Thing as Bad Weather" about raising children in the Netherlands, Berlin and Sweden respectively.

Those places are very much not like the USA yet. Though as the article points out, they are definitely going in that direction.

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1. unwind ◴[17 Nov 25 10:30 UTC] No.45952382[source]▶
By the way the rest of the (actual) saying that is the title for the Swedish book is "Only Bad Clothes". In Swedish it rhymes [1] which of course increases its power. I know it from when I was a kid 40+ years ago, and I think both my kids would recognize it or at least get the meaning.

That being said, obviously mobile phones etc are huge and (in my opinion) problematic among kids here, too.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Svenska/comments/vj2630/no_such_thi...