[...] Play time is in short supply for children these days and the lifelong consequences for developing children can be more serious than many people realize.
An article in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Play details not only how much children's play time has declined, but how this lack of play affects emotional development, leading to the rise of anxiety, depression, and problems of attention and self control.
[...] Gray describes this kind of unstructured, freely-chosen play as a testing ground for life. It provides critical life experiences without which young children cannot develop into confident and competent adults. Gray's article is meant to serve as a wake-up call regarding the effects of lost play, and he believes that lack of childhood free play time is a huge loss that must be addressed for the sake of our children and society.
Parents who hover over and intrude on their children's play are a big part of the problem, according to Gray. "It is hard to find groups of children outdoors at all, and, if you do find them, they are likely to be wearing uniforms and following the directions of coaches while their parents dutifully watch and cheer." He cites a study which assessed the way 6- to 8-year-olds spent their time in 1981 and again in 1997.
(Score: 4, Informative) by black6host on Saturday May 12 2018, @04:20PM (3 children)
Ok, since the summary article just refers to another article I'm proving a link (PDF) to the original article.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ985541.pdf [ed.gov]
Please note that the summary article and the original article are from 2011. Just FYI.
(Score: 2) by black6host on Saturday May 12 2018, @04:20PM
Providing, not proving.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 12 2018, @04:28PM (1 child)
A woman was relaxing on her couch in the middle of the day when she heard a knock on her front door. The woman got up and looked out of the peephole in her door, but she saw no one. Figuring that it was just a package delivery, the woman opened the door. When she did so, a man's face forced it open and peered at her.
Deformed and hideous, the face was highly unusual. No, describing the face in such terms was a massive understatement; this man's face was monstrous. Just as the woman was about to scream, the man spoke, "I am tired of fuck dead body is look alike as well. I am tired of fuck dead body is look alike as well. I am tired of fuck dead body is look alike as well. I am tired of fuck dead body is look alike as well. I am tired of fuck dead body is look alike as well. I am tired of fuck dead body is look alike as well..."
Weeks later, the woman's rotting corpse would be found in her living room. But anyone could tell that that corpse, that wretched woman's corpse, fully comprehended men's rights.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 13 2018, @03:08AM
Fake news! That wasn't a man, it was a Kandarian demon [blogspot.com]!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday May 12 2018, @04:27PM (6 children)
Of course you can't supervise and dictate every moment of a child's life and have them grow into a well functioning adult. You've put off things they should have learned as children until their twenties.
Likewise, of course you can't treat a human being like a knowledge sponge whose desires are meaningless and not fuck them up horribly.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Informative) by frojack on Saturday May 12 2018, @06:34PM (3 children)
As a child, I was given a bike, a small backpack, a pocket knife, and a a couple of brothers and a few neighbor kids to play with.
We were instructed to stay off the highway, except to cross it, but every street county road, field, woodland, creek, river, gravel-pit were considered in-bounds. Our range was limited only by our leg power, and the admonishment: Be home for dinner.
We'd pack lunches (sometimes), fill the canteen, grab buckets for berry picking, or fishing rods, or bats and balls, and disappear.
We got minor burns, scrapes, cuts road-rash, bruises. But none got seriously hurt, although a neighbor kid got a baseball come-backer hit squarely in the face, and I vaguely remember someone with an arm in a cast.
These days, the parents would get arrested.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday May 12 2018, @09:01PM
Yup. That is some pathetic truth you speak.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Sunday May 13 2018, @05:30AM
On the other hand, childhood mortality rates have declined by a significant factor since the 1950s. I found this document, which compared 1984 with 2014 in UK
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105170808/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lifetables/past-and-projected-data-from-the-period-and-cohort-life-tables/2014-based/stb-2014-past-and-projected.html [nationalarchives.gov.uk]
(click on "download pdf"). Looking at Fig. 3, factor 3 decline in childhood mortality. It doesn't break down by cause of death (improved healthcare for example might explain the change, rather than generic lifestyle factors).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 13 2018, @03:49PM
Sounds like the worst game of Fuck, Marry, Kill I've ever heard of.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Sunday May 13 2018, @05:19AM (1 child)
Unfortunately, raising an independent child these days will get you arrested and the kids taken away. Well-meaning idiots have been pretty effective at ruining our lives with unintended consequences from their idiotic laws.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday May 13 2018, @10:45AM
Thus is the nature of well-meaning idiots, yep. It can be quite frustrating dealing with them without thinking the world would be a better place if they were removed from it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 12 2018, @04:38PM
http://www.museumofplay.org/about/history [museumofplay.org]
I'm only about an hour away from Rochester, NY. I've heard about the Strong Museum (old name) forever, but had no idea it was such a big deal, looks like I'm going to have to make some time to visit.
Also there has to be some humor in here somewhere, the fortune that started the museum came (in part) from buggy-whip making!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 12 2018, @05:36PM (13 children)
My kids were playing around in their own backyard. A friend of a neighbor takes a picture of one carrying the other, then sends it to the police with the claim that there was some major violence. That causes an investigation with social workers demanding entry into my home to do stuff like -- not kidding -- examine the interior of my refrigerator. Tip: make them go to court, then show up with a $500/hour lawyer to challenge the constitutionality of their interpretation of the law. They'll dismiss their own case unless your lawyer is ready for a same-day ruling.
I had a kid bicycle around the block. A postal worker questioned him, and he wouldn't talk. Later the cops show up at our house to investigate, accusing the kid of being autistic.
If my kids go to the library, they have to remember to get out before closing time. At closing time, social workers are called to remove any remaining kids.
The "wearing uniforms and following the directions of coaches" thing doesn't go well either. I got a kid reported to social workers for a supposed burn on the lip, not that I or the kid knew of any burn. That too led to them demanding entry into my home.
Even just shopping can set it off. A kid got briefly separated from my wife at a medium-sized stand-alone clothing store. Staff took him up front, then called out the wrong name over the PA system. When my wife didn't immediately respond to the wrong name, they called cops, and then we had social workers demanding entry into our home.
What I'm getting is this: children at all times must be in the home while being directly observed by an alert parent. I hate this world.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 12 2018, @06:23PM (1 child)
Same things happened to me when some friends were visiting and let their kids play in my back yard - neighbors called the police. Friends are originally from Germany so didn't know any better.
Contrast this to my neighbor at my other house who let her kids roam unattended all day over dozens of square miles of forest adjacent to our property.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Sunday May 13 2018, @05:32AM
I don't believe you, AC.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by Thexalon on Saturday May 12 2018, @06:33PM (7 children)
Just curious: Why don't you want to let social services walk into your home and open the fridge?
I've hung out with social workers. They usually don't want to take somebody's kid away, in no small part because that's a lot of really unpleasant work they'd have to do. They do want to make damn sure that kids aren't being neglected or abused. By repeatedly fighting them and making it impossible for them to check on your place, you're raising their suspicions that you're doing something you shouldn't be doing. The first report could easily be dismissed as "nutty friend of a neighbor". The second, third, and fourth reports now make things look like your household has something to hide.
Alternately, you have people in town who have it out for you for reasons unrelated to your treatment of children. You might want to look into why you might have that kind of reputation.
I know what over-zealous social workers look like, too: A couple of my friends is trying to get regular playtime with their grandchildren, and their (deceased) daughter's ex has hired a Christian-warrior lawyer to make all sorts of false allegations about them because they aren't Christian (e.g. Satanic panic kinds of claims). The solution has been to cooperate completely with the investigations: Each time, the investigators come back saying my friends are great and the Christian-warrior lawyer is full of it. Now that lawyer is facing sanctions for repeatedly suborning perjury.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 12 2018, @07:14PM (3 children)
On some previous occasions I was less stubborn. The privacy invasion is tiring. They have no right to it. You are making the "nothing to hide" argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument [wikipedia.org]
During one visit they spotted thick exposed wires in my home, sticking out of the wall. They didn't ask about the wires, but they wrote it down. Later, I'm getting accused of an electrical hazard. They were disconnected speaker wires, high up by the ceiling. They were out of reach. Even if still operational, which was not the case, they would be low voltage. I still got more trouble from it.
So it is a fishing expedition. I don't wish to worry about what some barely-educated dummy might misinterpret in my nerdy home.
The neighbor's friend does have an obsession with me. She knows that I have 11 thin children, so in her demented mind she presumes I can't feed them. I have reason to believe she has called the cops many more times, but they ignore her when she doesn't have any evidence beyond "lots of thin children". FYI, they are fed, to the tune of roughly $50,000 per year. Both parents were very skinny as children, so that is in the DNA. The kids are active and are not fed junk food.
I didn't even mention all the reports. There were a few more. One was my wife clueless enough to call 911 when a kid was in the yard unbeknownst to her and a neighbor suggested an abduction. I could forgetting one or two. If you look at the per-child rate, it's like a typical family getting just 1 report. I do have 5 times as many kids as normal. I'm still pissed; not one of these should have resulted in people trying to enter my home. Not once did any allegation relate to the interior of my home. I feel like I'm living in East Germany or North Korea with all these inspections of my private home.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 13 2018, @12:31AM (1 child)
Makes me wonder what the other half of the story is to reports of white idiots calling the cops on black people for no reason at all.
With police violence, we see that while black people are disproportionately victimized, by headcount, more white people are victimized. The common thread is that they're working class, not to mention Hispanic immigrants.
Now I wonder how many white people get cops called on them for no reason. Same story as police violence? Proportionately victimizing more blacks and Hispanic immigrants but by headcount more white with the common thread of being in the working class.
Otoh, if you're feeding 11 children, you're probably not working class, unless you're doing so with my tax dollars, which is fine. Perhaps we'll find that proxy harassment by CPS is what the remaining middle class faces.
It's a generation of soy boys and incels, and for whatever reason the D team, after spending so many resources on shaping that generation into failures, is now determined to completely alienate them from ever supporting the D team again. Polls show that incels and soy boys are overwhelmingly R team. Ridicule the alt-right all you want. The more you ridicule it, the stronger it will get....
N.B. I don't want the alt-right. I'm just making an observation. What "alt-right" means has changed a lot since Moldbug. It's increasingly including more and more people who are livid with the status quo and frankly just flat out tired of this shit.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 13 2018, @02:11AM
Finances for a large family are weird. You can feel sort of well-off and poor at the same time. On a per-person basis, I sometimes qualify for government assistance, though I don't want any government workers in my life so that is a "NO" from me. I get all my taxes refunded, and usually a bit more. I guess that makes me poor? On the other hand, I'm earning about 5x the median income and I'm above the 90th percentile. My wife is obviously staying at home. I can afford things that are per-family, but not things that are per-person.
Proxy harassment by CPS is frightfully common. I resist dishing it out, even to people I hate, but I can see the temptation. It's easy, normally anonymous, and effective. I only know about the neighbor's friend because she bragged to somebody and that made it back to me.
I can give you the other side of my experience calling cops on black people. I saw them after dark, entering a home that had been foreclosed upon and was then bank-owned. They also seemed to be taking pictures of my kids, which was creepy. My continued observation (after the cops were already called) makes me think they were probably a family business contracted by the bank to neaten things up, and that the flashes of light from cell phones were just to see better in the dark. The cops sent them away, but without arrest, so I guess the black people had a half-good excuse as far as the cops were concerned.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Sunday May 13 2018, @03:44PM
The difference here between "I'm investigating random citizens" and what you're experiencing is that in these cases the authorities have cause to believe you are committing a crime. A stupid reason, namely reports from stupid people, but a reason nonetheless.
Think about the flip side here: CPS receives 6 reports about a household, but didn't investigate any of them and/or is stonewalled by the parents, and it turns out that these kids are abused, hungry, and getting shocked regularly with loose electrical wiring. That's a problem too. And the key point is that CPS has no idea which of those two situations (an unjustly accused set of parents, or a serious problem) they're looking at until they investigate.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 13 2018, @12:58AM
Because it's none of their business and they should frankly have much less power than they do. Supposedly saving children is not an excuse to ignore due process or the notion of innocent unless proven guilty. But it seems that, when it comes to children, people shut their brains off (if they have brains to begin with, and I'm frankly not sure that authoritarians do) and will allow any atrocity to take place in the name of protecting them.
Nothing to hide, nothing to fear. That doesn't work as an argument for mass surveillance, and it doesn't work here, either.
If people can use CPS that way, then maybe CPS has too much power to begin with. It is unjust to use such methods to destroy someone's life, even if their reputation is bad.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by crafoo on Sunday May 13 2018, @05:24AM
Why don't we just stand aside and let the government goons inspect our homes over completely ridiculous non-issues? Are you serious? Fuck that. Show real evidence of wrong-doing or criminal behaviour or GTFO.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 13 2018, @04:02PM
Well, we can start with the Fourth Amendment and go from there. Agents of the government are not bringing Publisher's Clearinghouse checks when they come knocking on your door.
Nothing can be gained by letting these people into your home, especially if they believe letting children play in the yard is worthy of a home inspection.
I'm sure the social workers you know are fine people and mean no harm. But the same cannot be said for all social workers. Some see themselves as police without badges and guns, and believe their right to dictate how you raise your children is sovereign.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday May 12 2018, @06:36PM (1 child)
You seem to have a lot of social workers showing up at your home.
I quite honestly have never seen this, never happened with our kids, never happened with the neighbors, (some of which actually needed intervention), nor anybody else that I know.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mhajicek on Sunday May 13 2018, @05:26AM
I made the mistake of letting our kids play in our suburban back yard while watching them from in the house. A neighbor anonymously called the cops, who are legally required to call CPS, who are legally required to do an investigation, which includes going to the kids school and announcing to everyone who they are and who they're investigating. Thought it was a freak incident, until the exact same thing next week. Turns out the neighbor can do this anonymously once a week, and the government is required by law to go through the whole thing. They don't have the option of not investigating.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Informative) by Kilo110 on Saturday May 12 2018, @06:37PM
I know of a movement called 'free range parenting' that has been gaining traction over the past few years.
They scored a big win just a few days ago. https://qz.com/1275970/utahs-free-range-parenting-bill-puts-a-national-movement-in-the-spotlight/ [qz.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday May 12 2018, @08:35PM (5 children)
Since I was 5 I was permitted to go anywhere I pleased provided I was home for dinner
Today's kids are tomorrow's adults. We will lose a war someday
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 12 2018, @10:09PM (2 children)
Which war will we lose? The war on drugs? The war on poverty? The war against obesity? The war in Syria? Iran? North Korea? Russia? China? So many enemies! How about trade wars with Canada and Mexico and...? Won't have many allies at this rate, either.
(Score: 2, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday May 13 2018, @12:24AM
We’re definitely paying too much for NATO. NATO members must finally contribute their fair share and meet their financial obligations. Many of the 28 member nations are still not paying what they should be paying and what they’re supposed to be paying for their defense. As to whether or not it’s obsolete, I’ll make that determination.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 13 2018, @04:08PM
We've always been at war with East Asia. I think that's the war he's referring to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 13 2018, @01:19AM
Didn't we already lose in Vietnam? And it wasn't because our soldiers didn't have enough freedom growing up.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by legont on Sunday May 13 2018, @01:42AM
We already lost our war - the war for our freedom. The world is pretty much a one big prison - the most advanced being the USA - and it's only natural that children are trained to be good inmates; tt'll make life easier for them.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Sunday May 13 2018, @02:06AM (1 child)
In recent years, I've often heard of Child Protective Services going overboard. They've gotten a pretty bad rep for heavy handed interference and wild interpretations of innocent actions and things as dangers to children.
It's not only CPS and "think of the children" arguments. That's a reflection of a whole society grown more fearful of everything. Consider the ridiculous measures taken at the airports in the name of security. Also indicative are car safety measures. Mexican cars can't be sold in the US as is because they don't meet the much higher safety standards, they have to be beefed up with so many expensive modifications, such as strengthening the b pillars, that it's simply not worth doing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by terrab0t on Sunday May 13 2018, @12:00PM
It’s not just fearfulness. It’s a willingness of adults to accept overzealous authority.
That’s why society enforcing helicopter parenting is a dangerous thing. Those kids will grow up used to the idea that they have no personal freedom or privacy because their parents weren’t even allowed to give it to them. 15 years from now, when you try to explain to someone from this generation of children that the police should not be able to search your home without a warrant they will look at you in complete confusion.