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Where do the children play?

(unpublishablepapers.substack.com)
409 points casca | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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Aeolun ◴[] No.45951478[source]
I think this heavily depends on location. At 7 my child can check nearly all the boxes for independent activities. My wife may not like it, but the surroundings are probably safer than anywhere else in the world. The only thing we don’t have is forests.

This is central Tokyo.

Kids still spend a lot of time on Roblox because everyone tends to be deathly afraid of letting them ring each other’s doorbells.

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djtango ◴[] No.45952634[source]
Seeing tiny tiny kids walking around is one of my favourite qualities of Japanese life, and on the flipside I sensed a quiet but shared responsibility/interest everyone took in making sure no harm befell the child on their journey. One the purest luxuries of living in such a high trust society
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1. elgenie ◴[] No.45958248[source]
That feeling of shared societal responsibility probably has at least something to do with the birth rate. Japan is down to just 686K babies born per year from a population of 123 million.
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2. mothballed ◴[] No.45958943[source]
This is why so many libraries, etc in US ban kids without parents. No one wants the slightest annoyance of even the possibility they could hypothetically be bothered to assist a child.