What happened to all the kids?

[Somethingsomethingdarkslide]

When I was growing up, there were kids everywhere.

All weekend, all through the summer holidays. Even during the week, you’d finish school, dump your bag, and be straight out playing in the street. If your friends weren’t already outside, you’d knock on their door and ask if they were coming out.

Now, it feels completely different.

There just don’t seem to be many children nearby for my child to grow up with. No kids playing outside, no bikes left lying around, no knock at the door asking if they can come out.

And it’s not like we live in the middle of nowhere.

What changed?

Technology.

Loads of kids playing out near me. Making a right racket. BTW if you let your child kick a ball repeatedly against a fence, you’re a twat

I live on a new built housing estate with literally hundreds of families and there are always kids out playing. Love it.

Send your kids out. Show others it's still possible. Hopefully they'll join you.

Screen time definitely won’t be helping…

Children also make up a smaller percentage of the population than they used to 20 years ago. (although the raw numbers have been fairly stable afaik? But I might be wrong about that).

It’s still exactly like that around here.

Technology and helicopter parenting. Many kids now prefer to spend time on their xbox, and many parents let them.

There's also a perception that children are not as safe to go out to play on their own as they were. Social media and 24 hour news I think has a lot to do with this. Rare things such as child abduction are now fed into your house and therefore consciousness 24/7, in a way that just didn't happen in the days of newspapers and the 6 o'clock news, This gives a false impression that children are in much more danger than they were 40 years ago when I was a child.

Long gone are the days when your mum kicked you out of the house, told you not to talk to 'any weird men', and not to come back until dinner time.

i live on a main road, no one plays out around here

Yep, see the recent post of someone 'concerned' about 6-11 year olds cycling around together.

Look at all the threads on here where people won’t allow their kids to play out until they’re basically old enough to bypass that and go straight out for a pint.

They're all indoors looking at a screen.

My DS is 11 and likes to play outside, mostly football. He plays most days, either with his football club, or just casually after school.

When he plays with friends after school (usually a group of 3 or 4 of them) he is pretty regularly moaned at. He plays on a patch of grass with no walls of fencing around it, so he’s not banging balls against a wall or anything. It’s public land he plays on too. But still people seem to just eye his age group with automatic suspicion, it’s frustrating. I’d also bet money that the same people moaning about them playing outside are the same people that moan about kids and technology.

He quite often plays in friends gardens too, as people have trampolines and things these days, so maybe that’s why kids aren’t so visible. Lots of sports clubs (football, cheer, gymnastics) too that seem to be a lot more popular than when I was that age.

all the kids play out here non stop when the weather allows.

My dm had six dcs. I went to school with several families who had 4, 5, 6 children.

I had one dc when I was 45. No mum in his school year had more than two. My siblings have one or two.

Cost of housing,
career,
finding a man who was worth the bother

And if they do play outside, you get dreary neighbours whining about them screaming or bouncing a ball.

All the kids play out in my cul de sac. Must depend where you live.

We live in the middle of nowhere and this is what it’s like for us. Dc’s friends trek across a few fields or ride their bike over and knock. We have a WhatsApp group so we can find them. Youngest one has been off playing in the woods with friends since he was 4. They are 8 & 13 now. They come back for lunch and dinner. We are busy, so it isn’t every day. Eldest works 2-3 afternoons a week and trains in a competitive sport 3-4 days. But when the weather is nice, they are outside. I’d probably feel differently if we lived in a town or village, but living rurally, I’m happy for them to roam.

More working parents means kids are in after school clubs until 6.
Technology obviously has a part to play.
Parents are generally more protective.
Children do more structured after school activities.
Having said that, when mine were at primary school they literally all piled out of school to the local park, and the park is full of kids at the weekend.

I think there are fewer children out after school as more are in activities and after school clubs, as most households have two working parents. It also depends where you live we live in quite a built up area and the nearest place for ds to kick a ball around is about a ten minute walk and crosses a busy main road, he's 7 so he won't be doing that yet. There are also a lot more cars on the roads than when I grew up. We do have a large back garden and often have his friends over but you wouldn't see them on the street

I live very centrally in a big, global city and I hardly see any kids on the street or anywhere I frequent really.

Love it.

Kids are loud and the city is noisy enough as it is.

I was only saying yesterday that it was lovely to hear the local kids playing out all day.

But I live on the corner of a cul-de-sac so it's fairly safe traffic-wise.

Typically only if they scream/bounce excessively.

Lots of kids play out round where I live OP, I think it’s still very much a thing.

This is also a great point.

I’m one of 4 and it was utter chaos growing up. Not a moment’s peace in my house.

Consequently, as adults, we’ve gone the opposite way: two of us are child-free and two are one-and-done.

Children here used to play ball games in the road, pausing every 20 minutes or so as a car went by.
These days there's a stream of traffic.

We’d love to let our kids play out, but they’d be the only ones out there - so if there was a problem they would be more vulnerable. I grew up playing out, there’d usually be 20-30 kids out on the street so when one of us was hit by a car there were kids to run for help, there were kids to stay with her, me and my brother ran after the car to memorise the licence plate etc. And when a weird man approached a couple of the younger kids there were slightly older kids around to ask who he was and then he left. There is some safety in numbers. Unfortunately until I can convince all the other parents to send their kids out at the same time I can’t send mine out.

We’ve moved from a little close where there were loads of kids who played out together a lot, to a road where there’s barely any kids and you don’t ever see them play out. I love our house and we absolutely needed the space but I do feel sad for DD. We tend to do more organised play dates these days, or go to the park a few streets over where she invariably sees a couple of kids from school.