> I live in the US and my kids walk and bike to school. You're making wide generalizations across a large country.
I've learned from HN discussions that there is a vast difference in what people think of as a "suburb".
Some will say it takes over 30 minutes by car from a suburb to the nearest store. To me that's very rural, I'd never consider that a suburb. But some do. So we get these disconnected discussion on how you can/can't do such and such thing in a suburb.
I've nearly always lived in what I consider suburbs. Places with single family homes and parks and playgrounds where I can very easily walk to just about every store or service nearby. The middle schools is an easy walk away for kids. High school is a bit farther but still an easy bike ride for high-school age kids (about 15 minutes).
> I've learned from HN discussions that there is a vast difference in what people think of as a "suburb".
In Australian English, “suburb” roughly means “neighbourhood”. So to us, downtown (or the CBD as we call it), is a “suburb”. In the Australian sense of the term, the Financial District and the Upper East Side are suburbs of New York City.
That's the idea if used in the North American sense. Suburbs are effectively rural areas, except with a higher population density. You will see rows of houses instead of rows of corn, but otherwise no different.
> Places with single family homes and parks and playgrounds where I can very easily walk to just about every store or service nearby.
> Suburbs are usually [...] would just be bizarre.
Usually, yes, but I know of settlements "out in the middle of nowhere" that are nothing but rows of houses. No businesses, schools, or anything of that sort found within the immediate community. One needs to drive through the vast corn fields to another town to access such amenities. It doesn't seem that bizarre.
> (and within a few minutes of stores)
For those at the nearest edge, no doubt. Those at the furthest edge could be quite a distance away. Although, even in a small suburb, often you find the craziest road systems. It might take a half an hour just to drive to a store only a mile away.
Suburbs surely do have crazy road systems, all meandering and looping back into themselves instead of connecting to the rest of the world. But you are greatly exaggerating how much this adds to trip times, I've never seen nor heard of cases where it might take 30 minutes to escape and reach a store. If you have any specific examples in mind, I'd love to gawk at them.
Personally I just hate the aesthetic of suburbs, so I'll never live in one, but I think some people in this thread are getting a bit hyperbolic about how inconvenient they are. The suburb in my town takes no more than five minutes to drive across and is directly adjacent to the grocery store. From what I've seen this is typical. The worst I've seen are those in the DC metro area, but even then they have stores all over the place. The real pain in the ass in that region is needing to use/cross multilane roads to get anywhere.
> I've never seen nor heard of cases where it might take 30 minutes to escape and reach a store.
Well, me neither. I grew up on a production farm with actual rows of corn as far as the eye can seen – in what I am quite sure everyone would agree was decidedly rural – and there were still several different towns with stores within a 5-10 minute driving radius.
> I think some people in this thread are getting a bit hyperbolic about how inconvenient they are.
No doubt, but that doesn't really have much to do with the conversation. The conversation is about what we call the places that are just rows upon rows of housing without a shared and vibrant mixture of businesses, hospitals, schools, etc. They're not exactly rural, there are too many people living there to be considered rural, but they aren't like towns or cities either. They are more like rural than anything else.
I would LOVE to know where this is?? If it's more walkable that JUST the school.
I have lived in suburbs near enough to schools that you can walk on 2 occasions in both NC and AZ but this was a very lucky quality, not the norm AT ALL, highly desirable, and you could walk to practically nothing other than the school. Leaving the neighborhood on foot was not a good place to be walking.
Maybe a tiny part of a suburb where you're not just near both the school and grocery store but it's nice to walk there and you're not crossing major roads. So, a tiny fraction of the US population.
Either way, some Americans will hear people talk about Europe or Japan or whatever and tell themself "I totally have that too where I live in the US" yet it's not even close.
I don't know what the percentage is, but having a school within walking or biking distance is definitely not uncommon in US suburbs. At least in the areas I've lived (in multiple parts of the country), schools are generally built close to large neighborhoods, and have dedicated infrastructure to help kids walk to school. Grocery stores are less likely to be within walking distance. But then, even if I could walk to a grocery store, I'm not sure I'd want to, because I would be limited by how much I can carry back, which means I'd have to go shopping more often.
Conversely, I have traveled to Europe and Japan. At least in the areas I went to, it didn't really seem any safer for kids to play outside than many parts of America. Yes, public transit was much better, but there were still lots of cars on the streets, and there were areas that weren't very pedestrian friendly. And in some cities it was quite difficult to find playgrounds. I don't doubt that there are places in Europe and Japan where kids can play outside without worrying about cars. But such conditions are not universal.
None of the US comments are true in the large areas of Georgia and Arizona that I'm familiar with. Sidewalks are very uncommon. One side of street only, if even there. Which is problematic at multilane intersections. Then the kid has to cross twice on each side. I actually managed to get a crossing light installed on my kid's bike route to school by complaining to a city council member. There are traffic jams at every school for drop-off/pick-up. Drive through the quite nice looking housing developments on weekends/holidays and there are zero children out and about. My wife and I think that's very sad.
That said, my kid rode a bike to school from 5-10th grades in Arizona. She was the only kid that did that.
There are about 7 grocery stores within 5 miles of my suburban house. I have never seen anyone walk/bike to any of them. (I look.) If you tried to you would spend quite a bit of time navigating parking/road infrastructure where the drivers clearly believe is their entire right of way.
In Mexico you would think it would be much worse, but it is light years better. Kids take care of getting themselves to school in Paris, from what we have seen.
This idea that "unless universal, the claim false" is... not helpful. As a family in suburban US we did the bike thing. It fucking sucked.
> There are about 7 grocery stores within 5 miles of my suburban house.
I have 2 (soon to be 3) grocery stores within a 8-12 minute walk of my very suburban home in my master planned community full of tract homes. I see some people walking to and from the store occasionally and I’ll walk there on occasion in the winter when the weather is nice. I just don’t understand why I would spend 20 minutes doing something that can take me 3.
Yeah, the American comments here seem to boil down to "technically I could walk to a school/store/cafe if I wanted to (but it's quite shit so nobody does) so it's basically Europe and Japan" and think that's comparable to a town of people who walk around daily and bump into neighbors while fetching milk from the local shop. Even Mexico is like that.
If we swapped some of this cope energy with a push to change things, maybe we wouldn't have to burn our vacation time to fly across the world to walk to a cafe on a pedestrianized street.
I've driven around a lot of dogs sleeping in the street in Mexico. Everybody else does too, claro que si. Now imagine a child. No one is going to threaten that child.
Assholes exist everywhere in the world but I would walk across an ungoverned street intersection in Mexico sooner than cross your average 2+lanes each fully lighted intersection in the US.
Edit: and so I now add, that that's what it means to bump around with your neighbors, near daily. Humans seem to need the street life of a busy neighborhood with pedestrian traffic toward the local suppliers of the banal things of daily life, before they retain the idea of the sanctity of humans when they are thinking more abstractly.
The contradiction of course is WW1 and WW2, which happened in countries all adhering more or less to these characteristics.
So I dunno. Maybe we're all fucked in the end, and I at least will indulge my family in the residual beauty before the inevitable next societal upheaval.
Yup, in every European or Japanese town or city I've lived in (with the exception of one very small and isolated town), I never bothered getting a car. Everything was close enough to walk to (usually 2-5 minutes walk), and for things that were too far, I'd take the tram or train.
I've also lived in a few American cities, and it's a completely different experience. Even from downtown Philly it was inconvenient to get anywhere without a car.
There's a big difference between "Everything was close enough to walk to" and the schools is close enough to walk to.
In my experience, if you live in a suburb you do usually have to drive to get to things like stores, restaurants, movie theaters, etc. But what is close are schools and playgrounds. In the suburb I currently live, all three levels of schools and over half a dozen playgrounds are within walking distance.
Funny enough, I drove my kid to school for 8 years in Eastern Europe. But that's because she wanted that school that was far away.
On the other hand, if i need groceries I just take a backpack and walk 5-10 minutes to one of the 5 different stores. I can even afford to be picky and get my butter from one, bread from the other etc :)
Most suburbs? What suburbs are you referring to, exactly? The 'burbs I grew up in there was nothing nearby in a two mile radius. The only access to school was via bus or having my parents drive.
Normally you are not arrested, but a cps visit when you are reported is annoying. There are a lot of mandatory reporters who will be in trouble if they don' report so you will be. It wasts cps's time from real cases of neglict in most cases, but those exceptions get a kid help sooner.
My daughter has been playing outside since she was 4 years old, unsupervised. She's 9 now. A lot of the other neighborhood kids have followed suit (I really suspect our "benign neglect" made the other parents thing "well if nothing bad happened to her our kids will be fine" and we have about 8-10 kids around the same age on the block that are constantly going to each other's houses and hanging out doing whatever it is they're doing (I don't really know, that's part of what makes it so great). It's almost 9pm right now, I have no idea where she is. She comes home when the street lights come on. The other day I gave her a $20 bill and she rode her bike to the Walmart nearby (no major streets on the way there). She bought her friends ice cream and was a hero. Sure there were hiccups, one time she stole the neighbors solar powered lanterns from his front yard, but we made her return them and apologize.
I guess our strategy is we just don't let her have any screens. They make her absolutely insane. So instead she leaves the house as soon as she can and goes out and plays. Even her 5 year old sister who is wheelchair bound goes with her a lot of the time, in the $1200 Thule buggy super stroller we bought (used). I guess we just lucked out, but we also insisted on it and kept letting her go out even after some woman called CPS on us for letting our kid be unsupervised. We live in a middle class neighborhood with people from dozens of countries and every major religions living together, and all our kids play together. I'm sure it's someone's mental image of the ideal childhood.
Thanks for sharing your story, it’s wonderful, seems very similar to how we grew up. We have a 6 yo who does get daily outdoor time but that is supervised because it wouldn’t be possible otherwise, we live in NYC. My son does get screen time only 2 hours on weekends, at this point the cat’s out of the bag. We’ll just try to keep the screen time limited to 2 hours per week.
I live near kids like this where there parents aren't around they just roam. They get into trouble. How much parenting are you dumping on others.
One group decided it would be fun to smash glass bottles in the parking lot. So I have to do the job if the parent and either tell them to behave, stop and clean it up or clean up after them myself so I don't ruin my tires. Why aren't the real parents doing this?
Or the kids liter, get stuck in trees,lose their stuff, pee on stuff etc. All problems their real parents should be dealing with but instead others have to deal with it. Randoms like me get the negatives of the unsupervised kids.
Im sure their parents think they had a pleasant day playing tag all day though.
9pm and you don’t know where your 9 year old is? That going too far in the other direction in my opinion. How is she doing academically? I feel like that much freedom, that early, makes it easy to pick up bad habits with the “bad” kids.
It’s summer (no school) and it’s not dark until a little after 9PM, in my mid-latitude part of the continental US.
“Bye, have fun, come in when the street lights come on” is entirely appropriate for a 9-year-old when school’s not in session. It’s playing outside, not playing fortnight or drooling to the YouTube algo. It’s ok for that to run a little late in the summer.
Do you home school? Because if you don't home school, surprise! "Bad" kids are everywhere, including in any school that exists.
The best you can do is talk about bad influence. Peer pressure. Tailoring that conversation to the child's personality.
My thoughts on this are, the time to teach self-control and responsibility is when young. It won't take completely when young, as the brain is literally not fully developed in that capacity yet, but the lessons can stick, and be known when older.
Those lessons are action->consequence outcomes, and in a sense, borking up responsibility at times becomes a leaning moment. Put another way, mistakes are how we learn, and small mistakes when young, are better than massive mistakes when 20.
Yes, bad habits are a worry. I don't think there is any simple answer here, except independence is important for any adult mind, and that flows from independence in youth.
And of course, this all depends upon the child too. Some have more sense at 5, than others at 50.
> How is she doing academically? I feel like that much freedom, that early, makes it easy to pick up bad habits with the “bad” kids.
For fucks sake, she's 9 years old, let a kid be a kid and not a productivity machine, she will have her whole life to worry about that later... At that age the worse that can happen academically speaking is taking a bit longer to learn how to multiply and divide numbers.
At that age is easy to pick up bad habits and also easy to let them go, OP seems to be a good enough parent to nudge their kid into better habits if they deem necessary.
This one might have a regional element to it based on how late the days are. For example where I'm at it won't quite be sunset at 9pm, and each phase of twilight will have around an hour to itself. Around now would be about an appropriate time for a young person to make their way home so they get back before dark. In comparison it looks like Houston will be about halfway through nautical twilight and basically be completely dark by 9pm (nautical twilight ends at 920 there).
So yeah, your gauge of what 9pm means might not be accurate for the situation! I doubt you were imagining 9pm being bright and an hour or two before its too dark for a young person to be out riding a bike, but that could well be the case
Yep, we have a neighborhood group chat and send over a note with phone numbers when a new person moves in. Works great. She also has an Apple Watch with cellular service in case we need to get ahold of her. I’m happy to say she came home right on time this evening without so much as a phone call though.
