In this kind of place, humans receive cars two years before they receive personhood (16 to drive vs. 18 to be the sole signer on a bank account). Thinking of drivers and people in general as separate categories is nonsensical. If a place isn't easy to drive to and park at, then it isn't designed for the human beings who live in American suburbia.
Mainstream American culture holds that it is apartment buildings and street life which are the true menaces to children. From the Street View, this place would be considered ideal to raise a family, because there's plenty of room for huge houses and huge yards/open nature areas between them.
That children can't transport themselves beyond the closed-world snow-globe of your immediate subdivision is considered a feature, as it limits the trouble they can get into. The most they should be doing without your accompaniment (in this mindset) is playing with other neighborhood kids in parks or in each other's houses.
Not only do we kill thousands of people a year with our vehicles, and get away with it, we stole the outdoors from our children. For every child a driver kills, hundreds — thousands — more are told to stay away from the road, to play in the backyard, not the front, and that no, they can't walk or bike to school, maybe when they're older (but of course "older" basically means "when you can drive").
Then we wonder why kids seem so insecure, anxious, and to lack independence. And why adults are so lonely. Where we used to have humans we now have steel beasts hurtling along at terrifying speeds. Our streets are places of violence.
We're moving the the Netherlands this summer because the US has gone absolutely, mind-bendingly insane. Mechs slaughter our children and far too many think the kids are the problem.
Demonstrably incorrect on my street, which has hotly contested on-street parking that narrows the roadway to a single lane. Cars have to stop and reverse into parking spaces to pass each other. Yet children play ball games in the street, and stop to move out of the way of the cars, with the cars barely needing to brake.
Children are not mindless suicide machines; they learn at a tremendous rate from their environment. The children you see around you might not survive on my street, but that's because they haven't lived there for all of their lives.
> Sorry, you don't have kids so you just don't get it.
I know you prefaced this with "sorry" but this is incredibly condescending. You're literally starting your argument with "it is impossible for you to empathize" -- but I have plenty of friends and family members with children and very much understand your struggle. Have a little more faith.
Your "very basic example" is exactly the kind of niche case trip where I would suggest you SHOULD use a car because of American infrastructure.
I'm mostly talking about daily errands and recreation in your home city. Going to the park, or the beach, or visiting some shops, or having dinner, or going to the doctor, or going to school shouldn't require a big SUV. If they do, I suspect you're transporting a lot more crap with you than you truly need for your kid. And you're ignoring the negative externality of imprisoning your child in a car-centric world where they have no freedom whatsoever.
If only kids (g) were exposed to something they thought was fun (h), perhaps they'd better learn to respect other's privacy (e) in public, and they might even learn reasonable consumption habits (f).
e) There are scientific papers published hypothesizing that suburbs and private transportation are increasing isolation and therefore depression and isolation.
f) Theft from cars is a real thing (and a big thing during Christmas at the mall near me). Similarly, given in the U.S. we have high grocery waste; suggestions include making more trips with smaller loads.
g) driving is much more dangerous, especially with young kids serving as distractions.
h) as with e, while some people have fun, a lot of people experience a lot of stress while driving; In the U.S. your risk of heart attack increases significantly with traffic. Cognitive load is also increased. Road Rage is also a thing where the worst cases result in shootings and intentional collisions.
I know the article focuses on the UK and what I'm about to state has little to do with the UK, but as a suburban US dad with three children I feel compelled to share that drivers are what keep me from feeling comfortable letting my seven and four year old play outside unsupervised.
I've seen so many incidents of (young?) drivers tearing through sleepy suburban streets at highway speeds here in Maryland that I specifically chose a house on a dead-end street full of retirees in order to lessen the danger of one of my children impulsively running into the street after a ball.
It's nuts. I grew up in an NJ suburb in the '90s and I don't have memories of insanity like what I've seen here.
The real reason people don't let their young children outside is because they might get killed by an inattentive driver. It's the most tangible, innately felt thing out in America's public realm, how crazy dangerous it is on foot, constantly having to be on the lookout for cars. And of course getting blamed if they do happen to be struck. A kid got killed in an apartment complex parking lot in my city by a driver. The comments were horrifying, people felt sorry for the driver, blamed the parents.
I feel really bad for the children who seem to grow up in the backseat of some monstrous luxury SUV. I can't imagine it leads to the best types of citizens.
Being dependent on adults to drive cars is the crippling component.
If there were free taxi services (or other transit), kids would be fine.
And honestly, most of the evil comes from overly-empowering parents. "I don't think you should go there / do that / hang out with those friends" is toxic.
Healthier, as kids mature, for them to be able to do things that parents disapprove of... but can't stop. While still allowing prevention of serious choices.
Making kids dependent on parents' cars increases parents' power from "I can speak out about things I disagree with" to "My agreement is required for anything to happen."
And that's really not healthy, for the kid or the parent.
You can't talk about this without talking about car culture. In many cases, there's simply nowhere for kids to actually go on their own without being driven there. This also leads to streets being designed 100% for car convenience to the point of making them unusuable, dangerous and/or hugely inconvenient to anyone else.
Another issue is the compltely overblown fear or crimes such as abduction. The #1 and #2 causes of child death in the US are firearms related and automobile related (respectively). Those are completely normalized.
Reading this I'm intrigued if only because it's a place a kid could play in the street, or equivalent, and not get killed by a driver. We have too few refuges from cars.
Incidentally, the regularity of pedestrians being killed by drivers - to the extent that many folks (sorry, anecdata) blame the pedestrian more than the driver because walking is seen as the aberration, is my biggest fear about letting a kid run about. Funny enough people move their families to the suburbs for "safety', thereby increasing their miles driven and increasing the kid's risk of getting killed by a car.
> I _hate_ the fact that I'm too terrified to let my kids cycle on city streets, or suburban streets, or country roads, and they're completely trapped on a small patch of land surrounded by asphalt ribbons of death on all sides.
This is an irrational fear. In 2016, there were about 245 children under 14 killed by cars as pedestrians in the entire year: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/.... There are about 75 million children under 18, so let's say 40 million between ages 5 and 14. That's 0.6 child pedestrian deaths per 100,000 ambulatory children. That's about 1/5 as likely as the risk of a white person being killed in a homicide in any given year.
Moreover, about 332 children ages 5-14 were the victims of homicide in 2017: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html. Us urbanists ridicule suburban parents for worrying that their kid will be shot if they live in an urban neighborhood. Your child being killed by a car while playing in the street is even less likely, and having any special anxiety about it--apart from the general terror of parenthood--is equally irrational.
We could certainly do better on this front. I'm pretty lucky to live in a pre-zoning code suburb with narrow little streets and houses close together, where I can let my seven year old play outside with my one year old as long as they're more or less within visual range. Neighborhoods like mine are illegal to build today. But, I grew up in a standard suburb, and we played on standard suburban streets starting at age 6+. It's pretty common outside big cities and pearl-clutching millennial parents.
I'll offer a perspective. I'm a father of 3 young kids (4 year old twins, 20 month old). I often find myself in situations where I also need my children to stop whatever they're currently doing and pay attention to me.
You mention this happened on a sidewalk. Cars drive next to sidewalks. The American culture of cars is the number one cause of anxiety in my life as a parent to young children. I do not want to feel this anxiety, I do not like how it makes me react towards my children, who just want to play and have fun and explore the world and try to understand it. But cars exist. And today they are a much bigger problem than they were when I was their age, for a whole variety of reasons that are very well understood and articulated by people far more intelligent and capable than I am. And my children are, practically every single day, within 4-6 feet of cars that are a) much larger than they have any right to be, and b) driving much faster than they have any reason to, to the point that if they are careless about where they are, or what they are doing, they run a very serious risk of being killed.
That is why I sometimes respond to my children the way that I do, in line with what you've observed here. I don't like it, either, but it is what it is.
Now, I go out of my way to get my kids into big, wide, safe open spaces on a daily basis, and I will deliberately ignore them (within reason -- I keep tabs on where they are, etc.) so that they can go off and find interesting ways to play, hurt themselves, whatever. But I still have to engage with the automobile problem multiple times almost every single day of our lives.
Mainstream American culture holds that it is apartment buildings and street life which are the true menaces to children. From the Street View, this place would be considered ideal to raise a family, because there's plenty of room for huge houses and huge yards/open nature areas between them.
That children can't transport themselves beyond the closed-world snow-globe of your immediate subdivision is considered a feature, as it limits the trouble they can get into. The most they should be doing without your accompaniment (in this mindset) is playing with other neighborhood kids in parks or in each other's houses.
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