02-19-2004, 09:53 PM
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#5 (permalink)
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| Guest | Re: Article on kids' safety
On Fri, 20 Feb 2004 00:19:39 -0500, "Eric S. Sande" <esande@erols.com>
wrote:
>>Here's an interesting article, vaguely related to the recent "Young
>>Cyclist Killed" thread. Cycling is only part of it, of course, but
>>it's in there. Note the bit about neighborhood design, near the end.
>
>It wasn't considered unusual when I was a kid to be outdoors for
>most of a vacation day, ranging around and basically doing whatever.
>
>But we did know that what we did had consequences, and we were
>regularly reminded by our WWII era parents (who all knew each other)
>that if we got in trouble there would be consequences.
>
>There weren't many TVs, and mostly no air conditioning, so unless
>you were a reader there wasn't any alternative to the great outdoors.
>
>The question that has to be asked (in the context of the article) is
>does the bemoaned lifestyle derive from a failure of parental ideology
>or simply the fact that the world has changed.
>
>I'd argue that the world has changed, significantly.
Birthrates have fallen in the first world, as well, which boils down
to much fewer kids on the block. It's tough to get a pickup game of
baseball started.
I'm routinely surprised at how much freedom I used to have as compared
to my younger brothers.
When I was little, we lived in a nice neighbourhood of Tegucigalpa, in
Honduras, and I and the neighbourhood kids would go riding our bikes
around and generally hang out. We'd ride our bikes in construction
sites--best time was when they'd dug foundations but hadn't put in the
forms for pouring yet. This is where I first learned how to descend a
very steep slope--after crashing a few times. No helmets in those
days, of course.
My younger brothers have grown up in the States, and something has
changed. My mother and father, who were quite happy to let me go and
play with the neighborhood kids and go riding my bike wherever, are
extremely wary of my younger brothers straying very far from home
without supervision. Net result: neither of them know how to ride a
bicycle very well. They can do it, but they cant' do any of the usual
kid tricks, like wheelies, bunnyhops, curbsurfing, bike tag....
I'm the loony in the family; I ride my bicycle for ridiculous
distances just to ride my bicycle. My parents are even nervous about
me being out on the public roads. (I can't even take my Dad riding
with me, he's so scared of the roads, but maybe that's another issue
altogether).
I guess the answer is that this is a far more anonymous place (NoVA)
that we live in than we used to when I was a little kid. There are
other kids on the block that I see playing, but they don't play with
my brothers, and my brothers don't play with them. I don't know those
kids other than by face (and sometimes bicycle). I don't say hello (I
do wave every now and then) --is it because I'm afraid of being
misconstrued? At the end of the day, one of those kids could well
vanish, and I wouldn't know or notice--just as one of my brothers
could vanish, and they wouldn't notice either.
-Luigi
"Under neon loneliness,
Motorcycle emptiness..."
-Manic Street Preachers
www.livejournal.com/users/ouij
Photos, rants, raves
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