Name: Why Kids Never Go Outside Anymore
Uploaded: 2024-04-19T03:20:13.000Z
Duration: 15 min 14 s
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Adverbs of degree

Kids don't play outside anymore. A recent survey found that only 27% of children learn, explore and find their independence outside of the house. Just 50 years ago it was 80%.

Modal verbs - B1

People give a variety of different reasons for this, but everyone agrees that it isn't healthy and it's really dystopian and freaky. I mean kids are missing out on their playtime, of actually exploring the world, understanding how it works, seeing the sights of nature, coming together with groups of other children and learning social dynamics. They're missing out on some of the best moments of their childhoods and it has a bunch of negative effects later down the line. Things which you might recognise in your own experiences.

Adverbs of manner

Which is why society is drifting into a deep loneliness epidemic. People, especially in

Generation Z and Generation Alpha, are becoming more and more alienated from their communities, nobody knows their neighbours, nobody feels a part of a society. But it wasn't always this way.

And so to understand why this is happening and why kids don't play outside anymore, we need to understand a different period, 50 years ago back in time, and see what went so horribly wrong and how we can fix this.

Going back 50 years, for the kids growing up in the 70s or the 80s, life was a completely different story. It was the opposite from today. Kids weren't cooped up inside playing Fortnite and watching gamers, instead they were actively pushed out of the house and their parents would only call them back for dinner hours later. Most of the time, kids didn't have any guidance or supervision, they had to make their own fun, build their own relationships with other kids and create their own memories. The process of being bored then creating an answer for your own boredom is key, but today it's been numbed so much that it's incredibly rare. All of the skills that kids learned during these formative years gave them what they needed to succeed later on. Plus, it gave lots of kids a much needed break from their home life. Kids with rough childhoods could find a few precious hours of freedom. They could come together with their friends, learn how to navigate social dynamics, and in turn, learn how to be functioning adults. But the first nail in the coffin came when the boomers took charge and started raising the next generation. The 1980s

This was the decade of Stranger Danger. It was the first time that serial killers were now widely known across America. People were terrified of these names like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy.

Bundy was being sought for questioning and the deaths of at least 38 women from Seattle, Washington to Tallahassee, Florida and was just last week placed on the FBI's 10 most wanted list. And with the Stranger Danger campaign, it told kids across the US and the rest of the West to be intimately afraid of being whisked away in a white van from a man offering candy. You've taught your children to be polite and friendly, but have you taught them when not to be? Hi there! Do you live around here? Uh-huh. You going to school? Yes. Well, I could give you a ride. Last year, 50,000 children disappeared, many of them from nice safe neighbourhoods.

It's a ridiculous idea once you actually look at the statistics. One study actually looked at nearly 800,000 cases of missing children and found that only 1 in 10,000 were cases of stereotypical kidnapping. 99.9% of the time, the kids were with another family member, had run away by themselves or there was some other explanation. Of course, this didn't stop the 80s news media taking the story of a kidnapping epidemic and running with it.

Often they take one isolated story and blow it up into a nationwide frenzy. In 1982,

CBS told their audience of parents that 50,000 kids were being kidnapped by strangers every single year, which is an outrageous claim that was disproven multiple times, but the message was already out. The stranger danger hysteria was everywhere and it wasn't too long before it reached the highest levels of government. President Reagan put together a special task force specifically dedicated to warning people about the malevolent forces outside of the house.

Talk to your children about not talking to strangers and do it today. A message for your child's safety from the American Medical Association, warning parents to keep a close eye on their children. Ironically, the whole craze had probably a lot of negative effects on the health and well-being of thousands of children, if not hundreds of thousands. Either it locked them inside with the people who were actually hurting them or they got lost or put in a bad situation and were too afraid to ask random people for help. One 11-year-old boy scout who got lost was too afraid of the people searching for him because they were strangers and so he actively hid from them. Even today though, you can trace the need to keep children under lock and key to these measures. It's gotten so bad that multiple people have been arrested for simply letting their kids walk alone to school or play alone outside. In 2022, one mum was arrested for child endangerment for letting her kids play alone at the park. It didn't matter that she had left them in the care of a family friend, she was added to the Central Registry, which in Arizona means that she could be barred from working with children for the next 25 years. Stories like this highlighted how crazy the US and the rest of the West have gotten about safeguarding children to the point that they've completely lost their independence. Breeding this fear of strangers and therefore of the outside world changed a whole generation's perspective. That fear of the unknown directly interferes with that crucial process of discovery and exploration that kids need to experience early on in their lives. Without it, they could be left scarred and afraid for the rest of their life. It's no wonder anxiety levels have skyrocketed. At the end of the day though, this still doesn't really explain the massive changes we've seen in how kids play. Tons of kids won't have ever listened to the stranger danger nonsense. Instead, physical changes that you can see with your own eyes are the ones that made the real difference. The way previous generations have made the world hostile to children is the number one reason they don't play outside anymore, and it was during the 1990s that these changes really came into effect.

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Ever since the 20s, the world has slowly adapted to accommodate cars. In a lot of ways though,

North America was the perfect place for them to really put the pedal to the metal.

The huge distances between cities and states, the fact that America itself and Canada were so new, and entire cities could be built just a hundred years ago, compared to Europe, where cities were constructed for thousands of years, combined with a bunch of poor coverage of railway lines, meant that this land was ripe for highways and road networks. And if the country's cities weren't built yet, most cities weren't very large by the time cars were coming along.

And all these cities' prosperity came at the same time as the rise of the automobile.

Think of LA, the entire city is built by roads, and LA's boom came too with the boom of cars in the 50s. But then fast forward to the 90s, cars, and all the suffocating infrastructure they needed, were deeply in place. City planners knew that accommodating them above everything else was the best way to ensure growth and boost the local economy. Instead of the dense, close-together cities that you can find in Europe, Japan, or most of the old world, American cities became far more spread out. They were built around a small central hub where people travelled to work, surrounded by miles and miles of suburbs and highways. It was in the 1990s that these kinds of cities grew the fastest, laying the concrete bedrock for the country that we recognise today.

But you don't just need roads, you need parking spaces as well. Local American governments became so obsessed with giving cars everything they needed, they wrote minimum parking requirements into the planning and zoning laws. Blocks of flats would need at least one parking spot per apartment.

Businesses would need a certain amount of parking spaces based on the size of the building.

Even churches were required to build one parking space for every five seats. Today, the highest estimates say there are over 2 billion parking spots in the USA. Tons of roads in the US don't even bother adding sidewalks, why bother if everyone's driving anyway? All of these roads and parking spaces are plain ugly and depressing to live around. It's what makes European cities look like this, and American cities look like this. But most importantly, these changes were awful for kids. The most obvious problem is how dangerous they are if you're not in a car.

Having the majority of your world dominated by fast-moving death machines made walking around hazardous, not to mention full of pollution that you're breathing in everywhere you go. I mean, the rise of asthma is just one point, but even ignoring that, it makes the whole outside world so much more boring anyway. Any kid wanting to play outside can only find the same grey roads, green lawns, for miles in any direction. That's if they were even allowed to explore outside by themselves. Kids also lost their independence because of this. If you grew up in the countryside, you could walk for miles in any direction. In a city, public transport would give you pretty much unlimited access beyond where your own two legs could take you. But the majority of kids in America grew up in cookie-cutter car cities that became so common in the 90s. These suburban kids were either driven by their parents or they didn't get out at all. It was kind of alright for those lucky few with parents rich enough in money and time to take them places, but the next decade would make sure that rarely applied. The 2000s. You see, the 2000s didn't just continue the trends we've been talking about. They took them to the next level. Instead of just cars, we saw the rise of the SUV.

It wasn't enough for Americans to just own a normal car anymore. Everyone started buying much larger, more dangerous cars which took up entire roads by themselves. Cities responded by widening lanes, making bigger parking spaces and generally giving cars even more room than they were already taking up. SUVs take more fuel as well because they're moving way more metal than necessary, so the US needed more gas stations and oil as well. When you think of an American mom taking their kids to soccer practice, you instinctively imagine them cruising along in an

SUV. Today, there's so many of them that they're already cancelling out all the eco-friendly changes that car manufacturers have made to vehicles over the past few decades. Meanwhile, the stranger danger craze was still going strong. Kids lost even more of their independence to misguided ideas about health and safety. Today, with all of the mental health issues we're seeing, it clearly shows how wrong that was. It's much more dangerous in the long run to leave your kid unprepared for the world by suffocating their development and forcing them inside, looking at screens. But it was in the late 2000s that the worst change for kids came.

The economic recession of 2008 forced a change that had been coming for years, the death of the stay-at-home mom. As tens of millions of fathers lost their jobs and their savings, it became truly impossible for normal families to support themselves on one income.

While the news might have framed this as empowering, you can doubt that kids saw it in the same way. With millions more families needing both parents to work, nobody was left to drive their kids anywhere that wasn't school in the morning. The last lifeline that tons of kids had to the outside world disappeared, and their lives became a grind of boring schoolwork and an even more boring time at home. This is saying that it takes a village to raise a child.

Mum and dad can't be there all the time, so who's left to step in and fill the gap when they aren't there? And unfortunately for many families, this is no longer a viable option.

The cities that people live in today aren't built with that in mind, as they lost the usual gathering places like churches or parks which were swallowed up by car infrastructure. Starbucks,

McDonalds, and so only places like malls and giant chain stores were left. Slowly each lost refuge for children was blocked off. Towns installed spikes and bolts everywhere, putting an end to skateboarding and fun, or even just for humans to exist in those spaces at all. Shops and other businesses even installed special alarms which make high-pitched noises that only kids can hear. The websites selling these literally call them teenager repellents. When the malls finally died with the advent of online shopping, it was the final nail in the coffin. As depressing as it was, the mall was the last social gathering spot for millions of children around the world. Now, it's in the virtual space. People shut in in their bedrooms, windows closed, isolated from their communities. No free play, no exploring, no social dynamics, just consuming content and being yet another iPad kid. I mean, never mind that these measures were only put in place because society had destroyed pretty much every other outlook for kids. Things like video games and social media might have felt like a saviour for kids. Finally, it gave them some form of interaction with the outside world. In reality though, it's probably been the most destructive and damaging development for kids in history. We saw social media really take off in the early 2010s, which was precisely the same time that the mental health issues in young people shot up. Without any other outlets to explore and learn about the world and themselves, young people were almost forced into relying on social media. Everyone knows that social media gives a much more negative view of things than you'd get from talking to people in real life. The algorithms just push whatever gets the most engagement so they can show people more ads. This constant stream of negativity warps their mindsets. They start comparing themselves to others, getting lost in a world of visualised social standing and appearances, but they're never good enough. Their lives are boring and isolated. If there's any justice, the number one thing that Mark Zuckerberg will be known for, amongst all the other tech giant elites, are their crimes against the next generation of kids.

The iPad kids. The effects of this are plain to see. Since 2010, there's been a 145% increase in teenage depression for girls and a 161% increase in boys. Anxiety is through the roof, nearly doubling in US adults aged between 18 and 25, and it's not really that hard to see why.

Stripped of the crucial development kids need to face the world, they're left unprepared for its many challenges. And of course, we can't ignore the elephant in the room. Kids today are going through an existential crisis, so it makes sense that they'd be showing the symptoms of it.

 As they grow up, they're bombarded with the fact that their lives probably won't be as good as their parents. They probably won't be able to afford a house. They will have a much harder time building a family or even finding people to connect with. The social contract that previous generations bought into has disappeared. It's easy to treat the mental health problems that we see today as their own isolated issue, but in many ways, they're the natural response to what kids are facing. At this point, it might feel a little bit hopeless, but the light at the end of the tunnel is that we're all catching on to these mistakes. We're slowly realising that you don't need to make your kids terrified of strangers. It took decades for people to finally question that absurd narrative. People are waking up to the dangers of social media, the lack of free play in kids, and how addictive and destructive it is to keep kids isolated in a safe little box in their room, staring at a screen endlessly for hours every single day. I mean, how many young people today, how many of your friends that you know, would actually let their children become heavy technology users? Even with cars, despite how embedded they've become, the pendulum is slowly swinging the other way. Young people who've travelled and experienced life in cities that aren't dominated by them know the difference that it can make. We're not going to instantly solve the many challenges that young people face because of the mistakes of the past, but before too long, the generation that grew up with these problems and actually understands them will be in the driving seat, and hopefully, by some miracle, they'll be able to actually fix them and know the value of making their kids' lives better than their own.