Where do the children play?

In the US cars jockey for space with guns to claim the title of leading cause of dead kids.

But we often forget that cars kill kids at an astonishing rate -even though kids stopped playing outside-. In that light, the bloodbath that is American suburbia becomes much more clear. When pedestrian deaths go up even as miles walked (in aggregate) goes down, the situation is even more dire than it seems.

My kids play outside. But we moved to the Netherlands so they could. And even here, large SUVs and even -bafflingly- giant American Dodge Rams are becoming distressingly common.

This is an aside. Yesterday I was in a shopping centre (ie a mall) and a bunch of kids ran through the food court, maybe 10 of them all around the 9-12

A grumpy lady shouted at them "kids you shouldnt be running!"

I turned to whom I was eating with and our discussion could be summarised as "kids should be running. The problem isn't they're running, the problem isn't even directly where they're running. Where they're running is a symptom of them having no where else to run"

Sorry, but no. You shouldn't be running in crowded areas like food courts (or indoor areas not specifically created for athletics), and playing smug semantic arguments like that doesn't help.

The kids aren't running because they're unable to go outside. They're running because no one's been enforcing that they act within the standards of basic decency.

Kids should be screaming and singing sometimes, but you wouldn't tell someone in the library not to hush them.

> You shouldn't be running in crowded areas like food courts (or indoor areas not specifically created for athletics)

I guess this is a cultural thing, i.e. what is expected of kids. Among my age-group in Eastern Europe (25-30 y/o), we joke around that our parents didn't let us stay in home, which has a lot of truth to it. Once we were out in the city, they didn't even have a idea where we went, and we didn't have mobile phones either. We used to run around everywhere without exception - malls, forests - you name it. That is still expected of kids nowadays, but the kids themselves are far more drawn to the digital world nowadays