I live in walking distance of all these things, and the farthest I’ve gotten my kid to do things alone is to walk to and from school (a whole 8 minutes). But even in my dense neighborhood, it’s not dense enough, kids are hardly at the playground unless it’s nice out, the ice cream shop is a bit too expensive for kids on their own, the 7-11 is probably the sketchiest place they could go to. I’m not really sure what we are missing, but it’s way different compared to when we are in China and there is a whole mall next door.
Even in the early 2000s people were forced to be outside because the inside was boring. This was supercharged in the 70s. That’s no longer the case. People have endless, on demand entertainment inside now.
This. I do remeber as a kid in the 90s, who was among the first who got a confuser at home - at age 5..6 I remember actually being pulled to my apartment, to play all those DOS games I had (didn't have game console, but a pentium PC, with windows 95/DOS). At some moment, I remember even being thrilled to spend my time playing jazz jack rabbit or something of sorts, instead of going downstairs to my apartment block yard (was living in ex-ussr space) which at the time was full of kids playing. It is not anymore.
This memory makes me sad now, what a waste of childhood. At least, I got to experience, playing with sticks and stones with other kids, and navigating DOS file system as a 6 year old.
I think back of my childhood and playing the usual games like hide and seek with at least 10-12 other kids around my building and occasionally I'll slip into the "kids these days" thoughts. And then I realize I had something no kid these days has: massive amounts of boredom.
There was nothing in the house to make me want to stay in. Nothing like a console or PC, best thing were books on days when going out would be deadly (exceptionally hot or cold). I was going out by necessity, initially knowing and as I grew up hoping that some other kids will be doing the same. And from that large pool of "random" kids I'd get very close to a few, become friends and then have some more on-demand negotiated fun instead of opportunistic. This lead us on hundreds of adventures anywhere we could physically go for it.
Before we even consider how walkable or dense a city is, how safe, how permissive modern laws are of letting kids just be, etc. the questions is, how many kids or parents stop short of running into any of these problems because the kids have all they think they need inside some type of electronic device?
So how do we get out of this mess? Because now, as an adult, I see no value in those electronic gadgets, videogames, especially at ages <16yo. Do we create laws and ban all of this? The democrats among us will scream and shout. Leave it to "each family's consideration" and we'll get the lowest common denominator scenario.
As to continue my anecdotal story, I could safely say that all of my interactions with computers up until the age of 14 were purely gaming with occasional drawing in ms paint. Even so, at the age of 14, I did manage to create a simple html web page, and install a php based web engine, those actions were barely conscious, just following some tutorials in my mother tongue. Only at the age of 17 I made some first real steps into using computer to compute, write first simple programs, and began to be able to understand how it actually works. I'm pretty sure, that all of the time I spent with computers before 14 contributed less than 0.1% into "getting into STEM" and that learning English, reading actual books, spending time in extracurricular classes did way, way more. But then again, that's just my personal experience. Though I believe, it's of many.
You are not giving your 14 year old self the credit they deserve. Creating simple HTML webpages is beyond capabilities of most adults even when following tutorials. I personally witnessed many 14 year olds who failed at literally that. In school setting. Where they had a human teacher they could ask for help with anything, so much better than just a tutorial. Without PHP, just static HTML files saved on desktop.
Years of gaming let you internalize a huge number of UX idioms that you rely on everyday, like left and right mouse clicks, hierarchical menus, hotkeys, text input, active and inactive UI elements, navigating documents larger than the viewport (drag/scroll wheel/scroll bars), and so on and so forth. Imagine how much harder it would be for your 14 year old self to install and run XAMPP or whatever if they knew none of these things. Imagine how much harder it would be for your 17 year old self to begin their programming journey if they didn't already know what a file is.
Looking back from the end of the road, those 0.1% might look tiny and insignificant. But there's a high chance you'd never go into programming at all if you didn't play video games as a child. Not because of the games themselves, but because they gave you early exposure to computers. If all you did was browse Facebook instead, the effect would be much the same.
I heard that the biggest struggle current CS professors have with college freshmen is teaching them about files and directories. It takes a full year before it clicks for most people.
This was true but accidental when "we" were growing up, because if I wanted to play a game on the family computer, I had to figure out the right drivers and suchwith to make it work.
"Acquainted with computers" is closer to endlessly strolling tiktoc now.
Even doomscrolling gives you dozens of skills that never get talked about because they're just so obvious to anyone with those skills - but someone who's not even doomscrolling would literally not have, and it would bite them big time in office setting. Things like navigating touch menus, recognizing interactive and non-interactive UI elements, telling apart user-submitted content from ads, likely how to type, likely how to use multiple apps, likely how to send links and attachments to other people, likely what an account is and why remembering passwords is important.
I used to work in a phone store where almost all customers were 50+. Explaining how to call a saved contact was a daily occurence to us, nevermind creating new contacts. While I do understand why this happens and have nothing but sympathy for these people, I wouldn't want my daughter to be like that at 18.
I had similar experiences (post-communist country), but I was a bit older, got my first computer at age of 9 (Atari 65XE, replaced with C64 2 years later).
So I got a bit of childhood before receiving those (pretty scary stuff if I think about it - exploring holes that looked like trenches, that were dig up by workers to put water pipes in them, or exploring an old, ruined house) - living in a typical communist-era block of flats community.
But a year or so after receiving computer I started spending less and less time outside and more on computers, basically making me socially isolated except my two closest colleagues. Nowadays my two daughters are more social than I am, but I like computers too much.
As a child in the late 1970s/early 1980s, I was FORCED outside by my parents. The same was true for other kids in the neighborhood. We were told that chilling indoors was not an option, so get outside and be back by the time streetlights come on or at least call to say where we were.
My friends and I got yelled at for doing anything fun outside, and we couldn't go beyond our yards. Then the neighbor kid chased my friend with a knife and we really couldn't go anywhere until the little perp got committed.
> Even in the early 2000s people were forced to be outside because the inside was boring.
The inside wasn't boring so much as parents didn't want their kids inside and requiring attention or supervision. TVs, tables and gaming consoles means they can be inside without this burden, so it became an easy default.
Me and my friend in the 90s dug a fucking HOLE in the back yard because we were so bored. We got it down to about 5 feet, probably just enough to be dangerous.
This was still in the era of SNES and Sega, but even those got boring after a while.
There are a lot less kids as a % of the population. My mom growing up in the baby boom had to stand in the aisle of her school bus (something safety doesn't allow anymore), but if she got on the bus just 4 blocks sooner she could have got an empty seat! These massive numbers of kids don't exist and so there isn't much to play with.
My kids are happy that the corn fields around our how turned into a subdivision just after we moved in because now there are kids to play with. However only about 1 in 10 houses have a kid (some have grandkids over on weekends - I didn't count that, and others were the kids live with the other parent half the time get counted half).
My suburban neighborhood has ~100 houses, and only two of them (besides mine) have children in them. Lots of grandparents, though, who briefly have children over around holidays. The landscape is dotted with parks but they're all pretty much always empty, except for the occasional adult exercising or walking their dogs. Our local school district is spread out over a huge swath of suburban land, likely because there are just not enough kids.
It's probably different in the city, where presumably more people are parent-aged. Almost all homeowners I know out by me are over 45 and their children are adults by now.
there is hardly anything kids can do in China, one of the main reasons why I moved away after my kid was born (besides dangerous toxic food and air)
while here in Europe I have within 10 minutes walk like 3-5 playgrounds for kids to play, in China I would have 0 even if we walked for half an hour, there are literally no playgrounds for kids at all, you will find exercise equipment for adults/old people in parks, but NOTHING for children and then they are surprised why people don't have kids in China
the fun with kids in China is meant to go to mall, pay fee for some amusement park and let kids play there, same with any other kid oriented facility, come, pay ticket so kid can play, but no public playgrounds, heck it's even difficult to find public football/basketball playgrounds, again in Europe I have at least 2-3 basketball courts around 10 minutes walk from home, in China impossible
been there last summer already with bigger kids and they had literally nothing to do when visiting in-laws in their miniscule 600-900K town (Beijing suburbs), we found some kids amusement park in walking distance at the end of trip, but nothing to do anywhere, they could walk to park where there was nothing to do for kids, so only time they could do something interesting was walking around Beijing, checking sights, maybe playing pingpong
Same, although we left before our kid was born due to Beijing's pollution level at the time (it is better now, but still bad).
We found stuff to do last year when we visited Beijing, but we were closer to center city and ya, no playgrounds outside of a few higher end apartment communities. We have a trip planned this summer but the kid is spending 2 weeks in a Chengdu summer camp that is pretty activity loaded.
I spent so much time hanging out at the mall in middle school. My friends and I would play in the arcade, wander around exploring book stores, game stores, walk around and bump into other people. Then we would make a collect call to one of our parents and give the name “come pick us up” before hanging up real quick to avoid charges.
It was a good time. The arcade especially because if you were good at a game you could keep playing without putting in more money, so we got really good. You can’t do that with arcade games now.
It's not a choice between A and B. Right now we're predominantly going with C - you have little direct contact with friends, you have no mall, you exist primarily on social media developing mental illness through all the algorithmic maladies and the ones associated with constant social performance. Or D - isolated entirely from anyone but parents, socialized secondhand through media/games.
Oh well, not for me. I am/was a UK project manager who spent far too much time in the malls around Princeton NJ, where we were working. I had no choice because I don't drive, so I depended on bossing my lead developer about to get me places (sometimes worked) - and god how she could shop. I just prayed that the malls would have a bar - mostly not. But I would still hate malls for their horrible atmosphere.
