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Where do the children play?

(unpublishablepapers.substack.com)
409 points casca | 6 comments | 16 Nov 25 13:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.211s | source | bottom
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retube ◴[17 Nov 25 08:49 UTC] No.45951914[source]▶
As a parent, I relate to all this. Great piece.

When the kids were babies we had the standard debate of move to the countryside for fresh air and gambolling in the fields etc. But so glad we stayed in London, the kids have so much freedom with public transport they can organise their own meet ups and activities and go running around all over town without any parental assistance or intervention at all. Whereas elsewhere we'd need to drive them everywhere, they'd be stuck at home way more, they'd have no real agency in their lives - I grew up like that and hated it.

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reeredfdfdf ◴[17 Nov 25 09:46 UTC] No.45952183[source]▶
There's a middle-ground between a big city and full countryside.

I lived my childhood in a place with about 4000 people in it. School, friends and everything else I needed was within walking, or at least biking distance. My parents didn't have to drive me everywhere. Obviously there weren't as many possible hobbies and events as in big cities, but mobility wasn't an issue.

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1. rayiner ◴[17 Nov 25 21:00 UTC] No.45958226[source]▶
Right. Most people in "rural" places live in small towns. My wife went to high school in a rural Iowa town with 2,000 people. You can walk from the high school to anywhere in town in 30 minutes.
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2. resoluteteeth ◴[17 Nov 25 22:55 UTC] No.45959370[source]▶
A lot of older small towns are good but newer stuff tends to be built along highways with no other connecting roads, and more spread out

Also, a lot of the "rural" population in census data is actually living in outer suburbs and newer suburbs tend to be pretty unsafe for kids to walk/bike around

3. hombre_fatal ◴[18 Nov 25 00:36 UTC] No.45960101[source]▶
All the rural towns I've been to in Texas are just farm roads that you'd never want to walk down and towns with no real centers/plazas to hang out at (and you'd have to drive there anyways).

Then I moved to Mexico and they were on to something there: small towns have central plazas that are heavily used for social activities, young men and women can walk around meeting each other, and they build densely enough to where you can walk around the town.

So I envy anyone whose rural US upbringing is like your wife's. I didn't think we had that as an option anywhere in the US except for movies.

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4. pavel_lishin ◴[18 Nov 25 00:58 UTC] No.45960226[source]▶
Samesies. It wasn't until my friend group in rural Texas got enough licenses that we could actually drive somewhere to hang out that spending time together outside of school became plausible.
5. ghc ◴[18 Nov 25 01:31 UTC] No.45960398[source]▶
Most small towns in New England are laid out like those towns in Mexico. I wonder if it's a question of age? The pressure to create town squares must have been a lot higher before the automobile came around.
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6. kelipso ◴[18 Nov 25 04:55 UTC] No.45961538{3}[source]▶
I think in the western US, the government gave people parcels of land but the land may have been far away from population centers.