I grew up in car-centric suburbia. I played outside everyday. Rode around on my bike with my friends. We'd play wall-ball, stick ball, street hockey. Hang out at the neighborhood pool. Make bike jumps out of stuff. Play in the park. The problem is not having the imagination to make something out of not much. And today suburbia has many more parks and resources. Eg. We never had a skatepark. We'd skate in parking lots or on shoddily homebuilt ramps. But now there are 3 in biking distance from me.
Right, stereotypical suburbia is actually pretty good for walking and biking around, hanging out at the park, etc.
What's not so good is "rural" suburbia, where every road is either a stroad or a country through-road with no shoulder and 35+ MPH traffic.
Equally bad is "urban-ish" suburbia where you have high density housing neighborhoods with few parks or other amenities, sliced up by stroads and through-roads.
>> I grew up in car-centric suburbia. I [ed: did things in parks, streets that were safe to play in, places without risk of acquiring an arrest record].
> Right, stereotypical suburbia is actually pretty good for walking and biking around, hanging out at the park, etc...What's not so good is "rural" suburbia [ed: neighborhoods built in recent generations]
My generation had cool places to play. We had streets without heightened risk of dying. We had countless places to go without worrying about life-changing arrest records (when minor transgressions were handled and then fully forgotten).
My kids generation did not have those things.
In the face of this, modern adults seem divided into two camps:
1) Blaming kids for having their development world wiped out and
2) Taking away the few tools kids have - for coping with having their development world wiped out.
I saw your other message in this thread. Life changing arrests? Are we discussing the same topic? My previous statement stands. There are definitely more parks geared towards kids in suburbia today vs. 30-40 years ago.
> There are definitely more parks geared towards kids in suburbia today vs. 30-40 years ago.
And more houses built too far to be within casual walking distance from them.
There's also the thing where one reachable park is a poor replacement for the ~360° of direction I (all of us) could set out in, reaching hundreds of possible destinations. Most of that travel had low risk of adult interference. Most of those options were available to us kids, beginning at a young age.
All of that was unavailable to my kids and their generation.
