Horizon

Though handing out some leaflets about hopscotch to parents seems somehow the epitome of a hairbrained bureaucratic approach to reality, I was recently in a residential neighborhood on a hot summer afternoon and realized that I hadn't seen a single child playing. It was utterly silent. Apparently they were all indoors playing video games. When I was growing up we used to go out and harass each other and catch frogs.

Wonder what the next few generations will be like on account of this?

Yeah, but if you ask me the problem isn't kids not knowing how to play hopscotch, it's their parents being scared of crime and/or disapproving of the neighbor kids' families. The problem is really with persuading parents to trust their kids and their neighbors enough to let them go outside at all -- isn't it?

Without wishing to sound (too) patronizing: It's All Very Well To Say That Now, But It's Different When You Have Your Own Kids. I am fully aware at some level or other that much of the moral panic about crime today is irrational. But as a parent I don't imagine that I will behave much differently than anyone else when my child gets older, and I'm not going to berate other people for being as overprotective as I will probably be. You don't play social experiments when it's your son or daughter at stake.

For the record I think it's a shame, but I'll not tell anyone what to do. I would point out that when I was little and the first Atari system was an expensive commodity, there is just no way they could have kept me or most other kids in the house all day.

Incidentally, speaking of using your children as subjects for social experiments, I read that not long ago quite a few families from the hills (i.e., well off) in Oakland (which has an incredibly bad school system) enrolled their children en masse in some of the worst schools in the city. Don't recall all the details, but that, to me, was insane.

Yes, but it takes a village. I.e. the problem is not just overprotective parents, but parents reacting logically to a world in which people don't trust each other. It's everyone's fault that there's not enough mutual trust in public spaces.