Where have all the kids gone?

[I like Skol]

Something that I have been thinking for a while was made more obvious than ever when I went for a family ride yesterday. Where are all the kids and what are they doing in their spare time?
While riding the 7-8 miles along the canal with another family some of the older kids wanted a bit of action that was more exciting than the canal towpath. I used to do loads of cycling in the area as a teenager and in my early twenties and there were always dozens of well used unofficial trails in the area so we diverted off the main towpath to ride some of these. What a disaster, most of them fizzled out to unrideable jungle with brambles, nettles and assorted other undergrowth blocking the track. At one point there was a small area that has at some point in history been quarried for stone, probably to build features on the canal. This was always worn bare by kids on bikes whizzing up and down the lumps and bumps that remain and climbing on the exposed rocks. Now it is virtually impenetrable and all that remains of the multiple tracks that crisscrossed it's features is a single path that is also disappearing into the greenery.
So, back to my question, where are all the kids? All the middle aged men that used to be the kids that used these tracks back in the 80s and 90's are now driving their bikes to dedicated trail centres and largely have shunned the terrain that is local to them where they cut their teeth as youngsters.
Is it true that kids just don't play out anymore? Are the children of this decade really so sedentary that they can't be bothered to go out and explore their locality (the way I found all theses places back in the day!).
What does the future hold for this lost generation of youngsters. The health implications are worrying because when they reach their 40s and 50s what state will they be in? Mentally how will they be able to cope with life? The lack of imagination that will come from relying on the internet and social media to be fed entertainment and information makes me wonder how they will be able to look after themselves without someone else telling them what to do?

Am I just turning into an old codger and the kids are doing just fine, or am I right and we are creating a society of lazy, inactive and unimaginative individuals that collectively are destined to struggle with life and work?

 

[swee'pea99]

Am I just turning into an old codger and the kids are doing just fine, or am I right and we are creating a society of lazy, inactive and unimaginative individuals that collectively are destined to struggle with life and work?

Bit of both. You are an old codger, but you're also right that we are creating a society of lazy, inactive and unimaginative individuals destined to struggle with life and work.

 

[Cuchilo]

On my road there are a few hundred houses . The only kids I see playing out on the street are from the two rented houses to social housing . Make of that what you will .
They come and ask me for offcuts of wood to make ramps for the bikes

 

[Markymark]

Parks, playgrounds and greens are all full of kids near me.

 

[derrick]

I went up to the Gosling sports ground in Welwyn garden city on Friday evening. Was to watch a mate race. There were plenty of youngsters up there, and some of them were really quick. Maybe you are just going to the wrong places. It's all about track racing.

 

[Jayaly]

Would kids have to negotiate roads to get from the kind of places they are likely to live to the trails you're talking about?

I think we get the kids we build for, and we are a lot more afraid of roads and strangers. A traffic safety officer I worked with once said that one of their main educational targets was secondary school age kids because they were no longer getting any road experience as younger children and when they suddenly wanted to make their own way to secondary school, they had a lot of accidents as pedestrians.

I am lucky enough to live on an estate where there are large green spaces separated from the cul de sac roads and the whole area is criss crossed by footpaths, again designed to be nowhere near the roads. My son was able to go out unsupervised at a much younger age than many and did lots of den building and independent games, much the same way that I did when I was small. When the kids are younger they are allowed to play anywhere overlooked by one of the group's parents until they are old enough to roam further. This winter, they spent much of the winter playing hide and seek in bushes in the dark with torches. If we lived somewhere with constant traffic at the end of the front path, I would have been afraid to let him out until he was much older.

A woodland I know elsewhere is accessible to lots of housing via a park and relatively traffic free routes, and it is filled with home made ramps and ditches for mountain bikes. If kids aren't allowed out when they are small and grow up expecting play to be supervised and organised, I'm not sure it would even cross their minds to suddenly start once they're old enough to negotiate roads and be allowed to roam. Get rid of the cars and I suspect we'd get free range kids back.

 

[swee'pea99]

Get rid of the cars and I suspect we'd get free range kids back.

Sadly I think the rot really set in when the tabloids were in their paedophile frenzy a few years back - a whole generation of idiot parents got the idea that their kids were at risk, and wrapped them in cotton wool. All part of a general, almost neurotic, level of risk-aversion, which I suspect, echoing the OP, risks turning us into a nation of screen-tied blobs.

 

[Cuchilo]

Sadly I think the rot really set in when the tabloids were in their paedophile frenzy a few years back - a whole generation of idiot parents got the idea that their kids were at risk, and wrapped them in cotton wool. All part of a general, almost neurotic, level of risk-aversion, which I suspect, echoing the OP, risks turning us into a nation of screen-tied blobs.

unlike the generation before that enjoyed watching Jim'll fix it and listening to Gary Glitter and his DJ friends

 

[sight-pin]

They're all at home playing Xbox etc,

 

[Crackle]

I imagine it's a bit of both. There are a lot more organised activities for kids, in fact it's astonishing what they do and have the opportunity to do nowadays. Visit my local park in the evening and there are lots there playing tennis and football or just scratting around. On the other hand, those who don't do any of that have lots to lure them into not going out, such as gaming and the computers and if you combine that with the the kind of food which makes for a bad diet, which was not so prevalent a generation ago, you potentially have a greater problem than previously existed. So it depends where you cast your eye, kids seem to have gravitated to either extreme of super fit or super unfit.

 

[KneesUp]

Would kids have to negotiate roads to get from the kind of places they are likely to live to the trails you're talking about?

I don't know the trails in question, of course, but I imagine so - and roads are a lot busier than they used to be.

DD is an only child, and I worry about her going to play out when she's older (she's too young now really) - and then I remember that even though I had a brother I used to cycle off to my mates house to play street cricket on my own most nights (get it in the Witch's garden and it's 6 and out - all that business).

Anyway - the route from my house to my mate's house was all down residential streets, and at the time I did it there was no traffic really - most household's still had one car, and usually one of the parents was at work with it, so there was room to play in the street, and although of course we had to shout "CAR!" every now and again, there wasn't much traffic until about tea time when people came home from work, by which time I had to go and get my tea.

My parents still live in the same house that I grew up in, so I know that the same street now has cars parked all over the place all the time, so you couldn't play cricket there even if you wanted to, and besides that there is way more traffic because the households now have two cars, and the local shops were put out of busin ess by the Tesco a mile and a half away, so whereas, for example, my mum would nip up to Spar and the green grocer on her Raleigh Shopper if we needed anything (or get me to go on the way back from cricket) people are now driving to Tesco making what once were quiet streets into really quite busy ones.

In one generation we've gone from roads that parents are - if not happy, then reluctantly willing - to let their 9 year olds cycle about on their own, to roads that are too busy for that. It doesn't help that those same roads now feel narrower because cars are fatter and are more often parked on the road (because the houses have one-car-sized drives)

 

[Hacienda71]

Half of the little buggers are staring at screens in their spare time.
Places change over time. I took my kids riding through some local woods the other day. As teenagers we would ride our tracker bikes down there along well worn paths. We tried to ride the same route but found that the path was pretty overgrown and eventually became unpassable due to large fallen trees, we had to turn back and ride across the nearby open grassland. Saying that going riding with the kids has shown me plenty of local bridleways that I didn't know existed locally as a kid so maybe it is swings and roundabouts.

 

[User10119]

Roads genuinely are a bigger hazard to negotiate than when I was a nipper, and the plague that is on-street parking means that you can't kick a ball about or play cricket or launch rockets in most residential areas - we're quite fortunate that (other than around bin day and a few weeks in the summer when all the student lets are being mucked out) the back alley isn't actually grim, so the kids on our street (13, 7-but-very-nearly-8, 7 and 5 at the moment) play there. The rules are that if one goes in the others have to make sure that they really do go in and their grown up knows it, and if you're the last one playing out you have to check with your grown up if they are happy for you to be out on your own. There's a park round the corner that I would happily let my two go to without me because the amount and type of roads to negotiate are well within their capacity - except for the fact that there have been several occasions when I've found either broken glass or needles in the play area.

Another factor, I think, is that it is much more common for families to have two working parents and no full time stay-at-home parent which adds a whole level of childcare complexity for primary-aged children. Our after-school club gets fully booked very quickly...

 

[Rafferty]

I wish some kids would STAY indoors, especially my near neighbour's feral grandchildren!

 

[sight-pin]

Made me think of this song for some reason,

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1yaDuHHxec