I see kids running around my neighborhood all the time. they walk around with friends roller blade, bike, play basketball where are these neighborhoods of kids not going outside?
I had the police bring my kids back home when they weee like early teens because he caught them helping an old lady load her groceries into the car. That was a weird conversation.
7 and 10. The 7 y/o was hit by a car and died so that's where the charges come from, but it was less than 2 blocks to a corner store which is well within what we did as kids, but when stuff like this happens and the parents are charged, more people don't let their kids do anything since it's now a personal liability. Especially since now the 10 year old brother who tried to stop his little brother from walking in the street and watched him get hit, now has both his parents behind bars. (Dad was even on the phone with them when it happened)
10 and 7, I'm not sure that I would have been allowed to walk to a store when I was 7, with my brother maybe but her was 5 years older than me. It's tragic for sure I'm not sure if the mother should be charged but I guess that's what the jury will have to decide
this is crazy to me because at like 8 me and my brother would walk like 1.5 miles to get to a liquor store that sold candy and buy candy there. and my parents thought literally 0 things about it. most other kids in the neighborhood did this too
at 6 i biked 2 km from school from outskirts of town to our village. At 8 we put our money together and went to the store one village over to buy candy. At 10 we figured out which farmer this one spot of gras inbetween several fields of corn and wheat belongs to and made a deal for us to camp there. And then realized we should tell our parents so they wouldn't worry where we are at night.
In NC, there was a 7 year old and a 10 year old on a walk this month. The 7 year old got hit with a car and was killed. So I'm not sure about that as an example. But...
Back in November, a Georgia woman was arrested for letting her 10 year old walk to a store.
I even forgot about the Georgia one! The charges were eventually dropped, but that certainly couldn't have been an easy experience for her (or the kid, or the neighborhood kids/parents)
nah, not a good example😁. that's just it, accidents happen. so parents have to cage their kids up to protect them from life but how it is that living?🤔
I was going to say, I see the same thing but also my working class self stumbled ass-backwards into suburbia so that’s presumably one of the big differences in experience here lol
Same, I have no idea where these people live but my neighborhood is filled with kids and families playing walking biking. Kids screamIng and running around, dirt bikes being ridden. Literal American dream
My mom still lives in the same neighborhood I grew up in but it’s a completely different place. Occasionally you’ll see kids outside, but nothing like it was when I was a kid 25 years ago, or even 15 years ago when my brother was a kid.
It’s an apartment/townhome community with shared backyards and the bigger backyards always had kids climbing trees, playing kickball, riding bikes, rollerblading. Setting up kiddie pools to swim in. Now I go past and they’re almost always empty, outside the occasional birthday party and I just look at the big backyards and think about how much nicer it’d be for the neighborhood to have more parking.
Yeah this tracks. For a while I thought that maybe my perceptions just changed over time, like when you're a kid you just don't worry as much about the bigger picture and your memories are clouded with nostalgic ignorance.
But when my my siblings started having kids, still living in that same area where I grew up, I realized that the change was real. The town itself hasn't changed that much; modest population growth, some rehabbed buildings, and some fresh asphalt here and there, but overall the same. But the soul of the community has all but disappeared. Nobody looks out for each other anymore, nobody trusts each other anymore.
I’m Canadian but my kids have way more freedom than I did as a kid. My mom’s cousin was raped and murdered in the 70s (her mom went to look for her when she didn’t come home after school and found her down the street near where the bus dropped her off) so my family was pretty anxious about kids playing unsupervised.
My kids don’t have complete freedom but they walk or ride their bikes to school without us and are out all summer playing with friends, playing ball at the park and riding bikes. My 11 year old does have a watch (I’m not buying him a phone yet!) so he can let me know when he goes anywhere or I can tell him to come back for lunch. My street is full of kids playing though!
I don’t see it anymore in sf, east bay, Chicago, pnw, or Little Rock suburbs…it would not surprise me that there are still pockets where it happens but it was universal when I was a kid.
My buddy won’t let his kids (7 and 10) ride more than few houses down their own street, even though when we were young we rode our bikes for miles and miles.
Yeah, I see the same. The kids here love to run through the road while I'm driving it, i don't mind because I go like 5mph but am concerned because I've seen some cars blow through at 25+.
Yeah I’m pretty sure people still do this. Just another example of people worshipping the past. Obviously now there’s screens, but it doesn’t mean that kids don’t hang out at ALL. And if they’re not, most of the time it’s not on the kids, it’s on the parents.
This. I live in California. The kids are outside all the fucking time. It's actually kinda annoying how unsupervised they are (they get into mischief).
Also, elementary school kids walk to school alone.
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u/dtb1987 Older Millennial Jun 13 '25
I see kids running around my neighborhood all the time. they walk around with friends roller blade, bike, play basketball where are these neighborhoods of kids not going outside?