alt Hacker NewsThe quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
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I have a 10 year old boy and I'm facing these issues right now. I'm also in Canada so culturally adjacent to the US and similar enough with regards to this topic.
I don't see child welfare agencies personally as a particular threat when it comes to this topic. Maybe they ARE more likely to get involved in cases of more free range parenting where before they weren't, but it doesn't register as a real worry.
The major difference I see between when I was growing up and now is that when I went out onto the streets, there were other kids on the streets. My parents didn't know exactly what they were sending me out to, but they knew that there as a general crowd of kids that would be out on the street until some point in the evening, and that they would all go home at around the same time, and that's also when you were expected home.
The draw of smartphones and video games as indoor entertainment can't be understated, but I can exercise some parental tyranny here and always kick him out of the house to go play like my folks used to do.
But there are no other kids out there. I'm sending him out into streets empty of kids.
To mitigate this I'm trying to nudge things in the direction of him and his friends forming some sort of after-school crew that finds outside activities to do together, undirected. There are other like minded parents that I've found that are also interested in enabling something like this.
On the subject of risks - I strongly believe that the role of parenthood is to mediate a child's exposure to the real trauma of a hostile, often absurd reality that they will grow up into. Controlled exposure to risk, to self-directed decision making in times where they feel like someone won't be there to help them out and they need to figure things out on their own, these are critical requirements in parenting IMHO. And all risk comes with some small chance of tragedy, and that's a burden we as parents have to bear: to expose ourselves to the emotional trauma of the possibility of our children getting hurt, however small the chance, so that they are able to grow into healthy well-adjusted adults.
I feel like I have to work a lot harder than my parents did to enable that exposure.
It's not isolated phenomenon.If we look at the larger scale of, say, 100 years, a lot of things are rapidly disappearing. It's actually some sort of extinction that is underway, but you don't feel it on a smaller scale of time. Similar to how Romans wouldn't have been aware of the Fall of Roman empire while it was happening, because it was too slow to notice.
I recently revisited my childhood town and walked from my childhood home to my school. I hadn't done that for nearly 50 years. It was shorter than I remember, of course, but it was still several blocks. The last time I walked it, I was five. I also learned to ride a bicycle when I was five, so that took the place of walking for the latter part of the kindergarten school year.
I arrived at the school just as it was getting out for the day. I did not see a single student of any age leave without an adult.
Like so many people of my generation, I can only wonder at the cost, and be grateful that I was born when I was.
When my child was an infant, my wife parked in a parking lot and starting chatting with a friend about 10 yards away. Minutes later a woman came by and starting claiming the child was not safe and was going to call protective services. This freaked both of us out that a stranger could potentially have the power to cause the government to become involved with our family. Fortunately, we didn't let that experience prevent us from letting our kids wander freely. But it does just take one over-concerned parent, to get you into trouble.
I think Maryland deserves a special shoutout. It's illegal, and not just in a CPS-steamrolls-your-rights-and-family sort of way, for an 8 year old to be left with children <13.
Growing up, I think many girls had ended their babysitting careers by 13.
I’m reasonably convinced this explains basically everything currently attributed to social media, for children at least, and likely can also help explain some concern around birth rates and child rearing costs. Starting with the satanic panic the US has slowly closed down children’s lives because of concern that terrible things will happen to children if not continually under supervision. And the true is that yes sometimes bad things happen and have always happened. But if you look to many other countries they do not have the same extreme expectations of parents or the state to keep children’s lives locked down.
My biggest fear of letting my young kid play alone outside is getting hit by a car.
On the other hand, stuff happens.
Depends on your risk appetite and your systems tolerance for the inevitable consequences of errors...
A 5 year old free range kid on a scooter died outside a nearby school a few months ago.
Hit by a SUV
Was riding back from primary school on a scooter, without the mother.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-14/islah-metcalfe-rouse-...
A massive investigation, police, social services, traffic consultants, a million plus spent on upgrading safety, mother and father demonised in the community,etc ...
Teachers involved who responded or gave CPR ( I know some of them) given counselling.
The mother is likely to have lost custody of her other children.
As a relatively "free range" child in my youth and now the parent of children, even I find it hard to reconcile how I feel differently that my parents.
e.g. at 10 years old, my cousins and I were running around in the woods at my gradparents' home in rural Pennsylvania. I was the oldest of the group with my youngest cousin probably being 6. No cell phones. No Apple watches etc. We were outside of that house around 9am and would come back for lunch and then dinner when my grandmother rang the bell.
My oldest has an Apple watch and is both reachable able trackable yet the above still feels little strange to me.
Interesting to read this from outside the US.
Growing up in the former Soviet space in the 90s, unsupervised childhood was simply the default – not a parenting philosophy. Kids walked to school alone at 6, spent entire days outside with no adult in sight. Nobody called it "free-range", it was just... childhood.
What strikes me about the American situation is that the risk perception seems almost entirely detached from actual statistics. The article mentions stranger abduction fears driving this, yet abduction rates are extremely low. Meanwhile the documented harms from over-supervision – anxiety, depression, inability to handle conflict independently – are well-documented.
The Georgia mother arrested for letting her 10-year-old walk a mile into town is a remarkable data point. A mile at 10 would have been considered a short distance where I grew up.
I wonder how much of this is specifically American vs. a broader trend in wealthy countries. Anyone from Western Europe seeing similar patterns?
As a parent you feel the push and pull of not ignoring your child while also not mollycoddling them. For me let the kid do what they want - if your kid wants to stay home let them, if they want to climb trees and go off on their bike let them. Help them learn what is safe (which rods can they cross), what are their boundaries. Hopefully they get it, maybe they don’t. Don’t restrict access to devices or screens too harshly. Encourage games of any kind. Wear sunscreen.
Yeah. Not seeing it. The local neighbourhood here in Arizona is infested with 12 year olds on e-bikes. It's great.
Blame a litigious culture where agencies have far too much power to "fix" other people. People in many places in America live with a fear of losing their children or getting sued and losing everything.
> “We work in tech,” she says. “Our kids [aren’t] getting any cell phones, no smartphones, no Instagrams. I write the algorithms. I don’t want my kids to touch those algorithms.”
It's disgusting that this has become a casual attitude and admission by the tech worker class. No one should be getting this free pass.
"I am actively harming children and society with my livelihood (except my own, because I am so smart). Here I am proudly and smugly stating this in a news article."
My free range childhood friends and I would have been all _get bent_ to that lady—even at 6 yro. I can tell you this because I was also getting a whooping at home from da for saying the same to my ma. I was a dreadful child.
Related: 2017 (but based on a 2007 DailyMail article), 520 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13547089
Gen X was the last free range children. They ran wild after school without the tethering cell phones, playing in sand and drinking from garden hoses. The silent generation turned out to be a great generation building most of modern technologies.
It’s easier to let kids play around the neighborhood when you know who the neighbors are.
america is more dangerous than many 3rd world and developing countries on the street
once my friend get arrested in LA by police when he jogging. they say they arrest him for his own safety because he shouldnt be out jogging in "this neighborhood"
turns out people in america get murdered and attacked in the street all the time for... no reason. yes literally, no motive.
I think this is more a data point towards the quiet disappearnce of community / the steady march towards pervasive isolation
Judging by this comment thread, this is just not something HN is capable of having a reasonable discussion on.
A delicate topic with many perspectives. Our small families make it possible to devote so much energy to our kids. However autonomy is all so important to become a strong adult later. We deliberately need let go more than we do now.
>What changed? In a 2023 article for Psychology Today, Gray proposed some factors that began reshaping parents’ attitudes and children’s behavior around the middle of the century: “the arrival of television, the rise of adult-directed kids’ sports, the gradual exclusion of kids from public spaces, the declining opportunities for gainful employment or meaningful contributions to the family economy, and, finally, the increased mandate that kids must be constantly monitored and protected.”
You will see lots of kids free-ranging in Lakewood, NJ. A lot of families there have banned TV from the home.
I remember when I was a kid I would bike to a park around a half mile away by myself, definitely before I was 13, and I admit it feels weird to suggest a kid can go to the park down just a single block alone today.
The funny thing is it'd be safer: Kids have cell phones now by like 7 or 8 in a lot of cases and can call for help! Back when I was that age if I got injured or something I might've had to knock on strangers' doors!
I do get that it's stressful to raise a family. You're being held accountable for many things you don't have much control over, but I don't think this is a big deal either way. This is a false dichotomy like all the other nonsense aimed at parents.
It misses the point entirely to seek control over whether your kids are "free range" enough. That style of parenting worked so well in the past (it didn't really, but I digress) because they left well enough alone. They weren't trying to contrive anything. Your kids absorb everything from you. Don't let your insecurities be part of it.
What I would argue is much more important is keeping things fresh with new opportunities. That's your main job as a parent. Keep them thinking and engaged with their mostly self-directed path in life. The goal is to open their eyes and help them understand the world. Respect their intelligence and let them decide things on their own.
Many of those so called free range childhoods of the past were actually just empty and boring. That's when they got into trouble. That's not something to be nostalgic about. When I hear about trends like this I have to wonder if some parents are just looking for excuses to be lazy.
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here in Canada, social service "baby snatchers" have destroyed basic community cohesion and along with many other wildly out of control beurocratic policing forces, such as the spca making having animals a huge liability, litteral special subdivisions, chicken police, horse police, and an enacted rock police to prevent the totaly illegal practice of picking rocks off a beach, but hey it is legal to pack granma into the back of a motor home and drive her to the government canabis store, get her wrecked, and then take her in so she can ask to be euthanized. cant make this shit up as they say.
this resonates a lot. I am not sure how to handle this though. Next to our house (500m), the city government established a camp for “asylum seekers”. 100 men. Men only. How can I reasonable let my pre-teen daughters roam freely now? Id love to, but my gut feeling doesnt allow me to.
Maybe, back in the days, it was just a different time? A more high trust society that worked well?
Nowadays, we have news stories, where 70 year olds get stabbed by youngsters because they got lectures on their bad behaviour. When I was young, I had respect towards a 70 year old. Big time. Never would we have thought to pull out a knife…
Life changed a lot in recent years and not for the better on all dimensions.
Europe is still pretty save though. At least if you trust the statistics
I do feel like we as a society are moving in the direction discussed by the article, as a general trend. But this is not my personal experience. We live in typical suburbs, and we are lucky enough that our street has a bunch of like-minded young families that let their kids play outside. Our street really feels like what you would imagine if you were thinking of a typical street in the 1960s. Kids aged 5 to around 10 playing ball in the street, going in each other's yards/houses, etc. There's a Catholic church less than 1km away, and at 6pm every day the bells ring. All the kids go back to their houses for supper when they hear the bells. It's great.
There's a kid (7-8 years old I think) a few houses down that carries a walkie-talkie with him during the summer. He'll be out for several hours (probably not farther than 10 houses away from his own house), and his mom checks on him every now and then using the walkie-talkie. I'll buy a set for own kids this summer for the exact same purpose.
The only thing I'm kind of scared of are the cars, because they tend to drive too fast (for my taste) and kids tend to not always look when they cross the street when they're too excited playing their games.
Edit: I just remembered that a few years ago, the cops showed up because there was a complaint about our kids being left unsupervised. They were playing in the backyard, which is completely fenced off, while we were inside cooking supper. Our kitchen window faces the yard so we could see them, and the window was open so we could hear them. At least the cops realized that the complaint was BS and didn't even come inside to check for anything. We live in Canada.
I have to keep telling my kids that "this is not the USA", all the things they see or hear are so dominated by USA views and experiences that the kids need to be reminded that this should not be transferred to where we live without consideration. This is a constant effort to review concerns and angst that might arise. E.g. school shootings and metal detectors on school entrances. Sure there are socioeconomic issues around when looking at high schools here but not like that. Personally I think we need to ground ourselves and not get shit crazy or paralysed by fear.
I don't know. Maybe this is going away in some places, maybe I just have my own anecdata, but my kids play outside unsupervised all the time, as do all the kids in my neighborhood.
I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of small Metro. Nothing special about it at all.
Every time I see one of these articles I always wonder who they're talking about.
I always feel like this is just one of those news headlines that won't go away, but isn't quite tethered to reality, but people really like to feel bad about modern life and so we keep talking about it as if it's real. I suspect the real reason kids aren't playing outside, if there is one, is not because they can't, it's because they choose not to. Just as adults are no longer choosing to go to third spaces. Screens came for everyone.