45
votes
What are some ideas for what can or should be done to facilitate kids’ independence and social life?
I'm GenX. I've participated in numerous conversations about how we used to spend large amounts of time outside either alone or with groups of friends, using bikes, skates, skateboards and other ways to goof off and have a good time, but that doesn't happen as much in the US today.
@hobofarmer talked about the trouble his kids have finding friends to spend time with.
The Japanese tv series Old Enough highlights a real cultural difference. https://www.netflix.com/title/81506279
This news article is about parents using air tags to keep track of their kids. If the kids are airtagged, do they then get more freedom to roam? https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/26/tracking-kids-airtags/
archive https://archive.li/Zg353
I think cars are a big part: there’s more of them now then there used to, they go faster, and infrastructure has totally evolved around them, with little regard to pedestrian safety. In fact due to this, in some cities it’s illegal for minors to be without parental supervision (in Canada unsure about the US). Here’s a great video explaining some of this.
Honestly, the fact a majority of the US is built around vehicular infrastructure is a massive problem. The good old suburbs tend to be lacking in places you can visit without a car. My house is half a mile from the neighborhood entrance, and from there the nearest places potentially in biking distance are a small park, a small strip mall area with a grocery store and pharmacy, and what I like to call "car dealership central". And there aren't sidewalks connecting to anywhere but the park, you have to cross fairly busy roads.
Basically, you'd have to go out of your way to leave to find something to do that isn't playing on the street. Can't just hop on your bike, you need to have a very specific destination. A recent conversation with a friend who doesn't live in the US really made me realize how isolated suburbs and neighborhoods are. If you're lucky, your neighborhood will have a clubhouse and/or pool. Mine is fairly nice, but doesn't have either.
Yes, driving kids around everywhere destroys their sense of indipendance. In a lot of places there is no options for good transit or walking, but in places that do, allowing kids the freedom of their own indipendance at a reasonable age does wonders for their sense of spatial awareness and mental health.
What is weird about this is that Gen Z seems to have little interest in getting their license, and in turn making themselves independent from their parents. In the US, infrastructure has been car obsessed for at least 70 years, and it isn't going to change anytime soon, and yet less teenagers are going for a license when they are eligible.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/02/13/gen-z-driving-less-uber/
I am in public, so I didnt watch your video. My apologies if this topic is covered in your link.
This, in my opinion, is a huge part of it. And it’s not just the danger from cars themselves (which are quite dangerous for pedestrians and bicyclists).
It’s also that parents are aware (subconsciously or fully) that there is no neighborly presence they can count on to watch their kids in any way either, since car-centric suburban infrastructure means there’s a distinct lack of windows, shop fronts, or front porches where old grandmothers, friendly shopkeepers, and other neighborly adults help keep an eye on things. (Jane Jacobs talks about this aspect of urbanism in her book “The Death & Life of Great American Cities”)
It might be slight hyperbole, but I think eventually we’ll look back at the past century of development centered around the automobile as an unmitigated social, environmental, health, and even ultimately economic disaster.
It's not directly on topic, but regarding the article from the Washington Post, instead of getting kids Airtags, just get them an Apple Watch without an iPhone. Apple Watch's can now be set up in "kids mode" where they are paired with their parents iPhone and have much more limited capabilities. In addition to the GPS tracking, they can also send text messages to only contacts you have previously approved.
Airtags are much more limited in what they can do, and easily drop off the grid if the child is nowhere near someone's iPhone.
Setting up a child's Apple Watch is more reliable, and officially supported by Apple for doing so:
https://support.apple.com/guide/watch/set-up-a-family-members-apple-watch-apd54d0a51fb/watchos
But back to your original question -
I have family members who have done almost exactly what is shown in the Japanese Old Enough show - they send their kids on short errands alone to stores in their town, in a more limited fashion. A girl who is 7 is given a short shopping list for the grocery store that is part of a large shopping complex. The mother drives into the shopping area, hands her kid the written list and tells her to meet her back at Starbucks when she is done. She's not that far away, and the environment is somewhat controlled. She also happens to know some of the mall employees so there are some adults who keep an eye out and are used to her doing this, but the child is not really aware of these safety measure that are set up.
The entire experience lasts less than 15 minutes but to a 7 year old that's a long time to feel independent.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’m in my mid-30’s, I have a toddler, and I had a ton of freedom as a kid — riding my bike to nearby restaurants, skateboarding around the neighborhood, etc. It goes without saying that kids back then didn’t have phones, of course, so it was up to me to communicate with my parents where I was going ahead of time. If, for whatever reason, plans changed, I would use a payphone or the phone of a business to let them know. The obvious difference now is that there are no more payphones, and chances are that any given business probably won’t be likely to let kids use their landline.
I’ve been thinking for a while about how I would track him once he gets a bit older. It wasn’t until recently that I considered how tracking him, while helpful for my peace of mind, would effectively erode his own independence and blossoming autonomy. I think it would also hinder the building of trust between us; if I never give him a chance to be “alone,” will I ever give myself a chance to actually trust him?
I don’t have a good solution. Maybe an Apple Watch, but you know how kids are… who knows how long it would stay on his wrist, if it would survive a year, and so on. Also, you have to pay for an extra line for the watch. His safety is definitely worth the cost of an extra line, of course, but I wonder if the whole principle of tracking him in the first place does more harm than good.
I think there's a negative feedback loop between better tracking and lower confidence. The world was arguably much more dangerous in the 80s, and we gave kids quite a bit more freedom back then.
I wouldn't want to regress back to simply recreating older conditions, because that ignores all the differences we have between then and now. Real-time tracking is possible, phones can go anywhere, and people communicate more easily than ever before.
Personally it helps me to reframe the idea of a tracker - it's easy to think of this as limiting and controlling, when really it gives the child freedom and security. I would suggest using a two-way system where everybody can see the whole family on a map and post things like ETAs to each other.
I love this way of looking at it. When I think of what kind of world I want to help create for those who come after us, words like “safe” and “comfortable” come to mind.
Like you said it’s very easy to think of trackers as controlling but if you’re open with your kids about wanting to use them in an emergency, and framed correctly, they can be seen as a security blanket more than an eye in the sky.
Did you know you can permanently share your location with people on Google Maps?
After dragging through a bunch of scammy and generally terrible GPS logging apps, I was very pleased to see that Maps could do exactly what I was trying to achieve.
That said, I still feel very strongly that the most basic of check-in activities, the "Message [PERSON] that my ETA to [LOCATION] is [TIME]" is still sorely lacking. Maybe they don't want to encourage texting while driving, but I'm stunned that nobody has made this a function yet.
My fiancée and I have this turned on natively in iOS.
Try a club or recurring activity. I work with older elementary students and joining a sports league or Boy or Girl Scouts has done a lot to help them make friends and spark their independence. Some public libraries also have weekly kid hangout groups.
There are devices that contain features like a "check in" so that when the kid arrives to where they're supposed to be, they check in and a notification gets sent to your phone. If they don't check in, you can send a reminder to their watch. It might be a good middle ground to tracking them constantly.
The Garmin Bounce is one of them, but it collects a lot of data on your kid as well.
I have a very precocious and capable 8 year old, and I would like to give her ore freedom. But if I send her to the other end of the grocery aisle, I get people coming around the corner asking where her parents are.
Since the request was for suggestions, one thing that has worked well for us is that if she wants to hang out with a friend after school, we're generally able to coordinate for her to ride her friend's bus home. That's pretty good for getting us out of the loop, even if its pretty heavily mediated by other adults.
I've had the opposite experience with my boy when he was 8.
He roamed around happily by himself in the supermarket or hardware store. I was prepared for a reaction, but no one ever said a thing.
He is a few years older now, and I pushed his boundaries a little and sent him into the grocery store by himself with a $20 for three items he wanted. He was nervous, so I simply stood outside. He was sure the checkout person was going to challenge him on why he was alone, but no one cared.
Maybe its living in the 'burbs.
I like the idea of waiting outside while she goes in. Thanks!
Before sending him in alone, I've had him roam around and pick up whatever items he needs for his cooking. He knows where everything is. I have also had him pay for things before.
Yet he was convinced he was not allowed to shop alone. I had to show him that ChatGPT thought it was OK before he believed me. He trusts ChatGPT more than he trusts his dad... Ayyyyye!
This conversation got me thinking, so I sent her on an errand today while I was in another part of the store. It went great. Thanks!
Just a nitpick but Old Enough is not really supposed to be funny so much as it’s supposed to be heartwarming. They’re not there to make fun of the kids, they’re trying to capture the moment to appreciate their struggles. It’s moe; satisfaction from watching them grow up.
(The English title also bugs me because I feel it turns it into a spectacle of how young the kids are. In Japan it’s normal for kids at that age to do these kinds of things. The Japanese title is はじめてのおつかい which translates to something like “My First Errand”)
Should I have used cute, instead of funny? It's both to me, but thanks for the clarification. I'm surprised and impressed if three year olds are truly going to the market by themselves, but I am ignorant of the facts behind the program.
I'm also GenX and this whole thread is really interesting. I never, in a million years, thought when I was young that we would morph into a society with technology that could track our every movement. The height of technology at the time, in my friend group, was the Walkman!
We had so much independence and freedom, especially in working class households. Your mother wanted you out of the house and from under her feet. If you didn't turn up for lunch (spoiler - there wouldn't be any!) then you were expected at dinner.
I can't imagine tracking children to the extent that's possible now. And, full disclosure, I'm childfree but the thought of tracking any loved one or dear friend to this level is just - weird.
Maybe I'm a dinosaur, and I have a purely UK working class childood mindset, but the thought of my mother tracking where I was when I was 'out of sight' is truly awful. The places we went and the things that we did - it is part of what shaped who I am now, and I wouldn't change that for anything.
I mean, the US had 400 mass shootings in the first 200 days of 2023. I don't necessarily think the airtags are a symptom of paranoia over what the kids are going to do.
I'm child-free but I'd have my kids wearing airtags any time they went to a mall or a venue, and from there it's quite easy to imagine just stitching the airtags into their backpacks or whatever. Disneyworld? Airtagged. School trip? Airtagged. I'm worried about a kid getting lost or kidnapped. I'd want to be able to locate my kid if there's a shooting.
I'm 43 so I remember parents passing out beepers, and then cell phones, for the same reason. Were there some dicks who used a beeper to treat their kids like parolees? Of course, but those people exist and will be bullies no matter what.
I could not find murder rates for just kids, but the overall murder rate in the US is about half what it was when I was a kid.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/asher-ucr-2016-0922-1-corrected.png?w=1150
I would guess that unless you live in a horrible neighborhood, a child has a higher chance of getting murdered at school compared to hanging out with friends after school. So I don't think airtags are going to help.
Mass shooting numbers that high generally don't mean the kind of random spree shooting we've been trained to think of, either. It's a mix of gang violence in a handful of cities and, what's been making the news the most recently, the occasional targeted murder-suicide that kills maybe four people.
Your kids are way more likely to get run over by a car than killed in a mass shooting unless they're a gangbanger or they've somehow managed to become an asshole boss who screwed over an employee hard enough to push them over the edge despite also being a child.
Hell, they might even be more likely to be struck by lightning.
I was speaking more to the other commenter's "when we've reached the point where we're tracking our kids like they're a felon we really need to do some soul searching."
My point isn't that an airtag will be of use during a shooting, but that parents who use them aren't necessarily practicing orwellian surveillance on their families. Murders might be down, but mass murders are sure as hell up, and they happen at venues like clubs and concerts and shopping centers where teens are also likely to be.
Slapping airtags on your kids' shit isn't helicoptering, is all I'm saying.
With all do respect, I think that you need to reevaluate every one of your assumptions here. I won't restate everything that owyn_merrilin said above but they pretty much nailed what all of the statistics actually show. The blanket term of mass shootings does a disservice to the actual picture of what's happening in the US and, frankly, the paranoia about violence in your comment is the exact mass delusion that is affecting parents accross the US and, in my opinion, this mass delusion is having drastically damaging effects on society as a whole.
Arguing that geo-tracking your kids is not orwellian I find extreme. I couldn't think of anything more orwellian and beyond helicoptering and all in the service of the fear of an event that is incredibly unlikely to ever affect your hypothetical children. And that's without even touching the implications to the child-parent relationship. I know that at a certain age neither myself or my friends would stand to have an airtag tracking us, what sort of lies and malfeasence does that breed when kids start evading the tracking?
I have to overwhelmingly agree with literallytwisted, that we need to look at what over-parenting and over-infantalising children has done to people over the last twenty or thirty years and seriously consider walking back a lot of parenting culture to instill in children more independence and other critical life skills that are learned by just being "left alone"
I mean, there is a discussion to be had about what age to allow what freedom, but I think I mostly agree with you.
On the other hand, one of my formative childhood memories was being about three and a neighbor friend of the same age walked up and knocked on the door in the nude. He had escaped, just prior to having a bath, and his mother screaming Joey! up and down the street until she located him is a memory that I won't lose unless I lose all my marbles.
Kids are safer from being kidnapped, sure, but the danger of being hit and killed by a car goes up every year (in the US). There are dangers other than other people that parents want to protect their children from.
In the US, last time I checked, guns were still the number one cause of death for people under 18, so there is some reason to worry there as well.