The Nonlinear Library LW - What are the results of more parental supervision and less outdoor play? by juliawise
Nov 25, 2023
06:52
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What are the results of more parental supervision and less outdoor play?, published by juliawise on November 25, 2023 on LessWrong.
Parents supervise their children way more than they used to
The wild thing is that this is true even while the number of children per family has decreased and the amount of time mothers work outside the home has increased.
(What's happening in France? I wouldn't be surprised if it's measurement error somehow.)
More supervision means less outdoor play
Most of this supervision is indoors, but here I'll focus on outdoor play. Needing a parent to take you outside means that you spend less time outside, and that when you are outside you do different things.
It's surprisingly hard to find data on how much time children spend playing outside now vs. in past generations. Everyone seems to agree it's less now, and you can look at changing advice to parents, but in the past people didn't collect data about children's time use.
"A study conducted in Zurich, Switzerland, in the early 1990s . . . compared 5-year-olds living in neighborhoods where children of that age were still allowed to play unsupervised outdoors to 5-year-olds living in economically similar neighborhoods where, because of traffic, such freedom was denied. Parents in the latter group were much more likely than those in the former to take their children to parks, where they could play under parental supervision.
Adolescent mental health has worsened
This year's Youth Risk Behavior Survey looked pretty bad about the wellbeing of American adolescents.
People squint at correlations, and theories include:
Social media and phone use
Political messages of helplessness and despair
Not enough play and freedom
Play used to be more dangerous
My grandfather was a small-town newspaper reporter in the early 20th century. He wrote "I remember a newspaper story about a boy who suffered a broken arm when, as the account read, he 'fell or jumped' from a low shed roof. Nobody knew whether kids fell or jumped because they were usually doing one or the other."
Our next-door neighbor had a twin brother who drowned at age 6 in the river while playing boats with an older child (in 1950s Cambridge MA, not a remote rural area).
Our housemate grew up on a farm, where he and his friends would amuse themselves by cutting down trees while one of them was in the tree. "It was fun, but there were some scary times when I thought my friends had been killed."
Playground injuries are . . . up?
I was expecting that more supervision meant fewer injuries. This doesn't seem to be the case at playgrounds, at least over the last 30 years.
From a large study of US visits to emergency rooms related to playground equipment:
Maybe children are spending time at playgrounds if they're not playing in empty lots and such? But here's children injured at school playgrounds (which are presumably seeing similar use over time) in Victoria, Australia. I don't think this is just because of wider awareness of concussions or something, because even in the 80s you still got treated at a hospital if you broke your arm.
But deaths from accidents are down
US accidental deaths of children age 10-19:
UK in the 80s and 90s, aged 19 and under:
The types of accidents that kill children and teens are mostly cars and drowning.
Most of the motor vehicle deaths are while riding in cars, which is a different topic. What about while children are playing or walking around?
As parental supervision has increased, child pedestrian deaths have fallen. Some of this may be because of better pedestrian infrastructure like crosswalks and speed bumps. But I suspect much of it is an adult being physically present with children when they're near streets.
Trends in pedestrian death rates by year, United States, 1995-2010, children ages 19 and under. The article...
Parents supervise their children way more than they used to
The wild thing is that this is true even while the number of children per family has decreased and the amount of time mothers work outside the home has increased.
(What's happening in France? I wouldn't be surprised if it's measurement error somehow.)
More supervision means less outdoor play
Most of this supervision is indoors, but here I'll focus on outdoor play. Needing a parent to take you outside means that you spend less time outside, and that when you are outside you do different things.
It's surprisingly hard to find data on how much time children spend playing outside now vs. in past generations. Everyone seems to agree it's less now, and you can look at changing advice to parents, but in the past people didn't collect data about children's time use.
"A study conducted in Zurich, Switzerland, in the early 1990s . . . compared 5-year-olds living in neighborhoods where children of that age were still allowed to play unsupervised outdoors to 5-year-olds living in economically similar neighborhoods where, because of traffic, such freedom was denied. Parents in the latter group were much more likely than those in the former to take their children to parks, where they could play under parental supervision.
Adolescent mental health has worsened
This year's Youth Risk Behavior Survey looked pretty bad about the wellbeing of American adolescents.
People squint at correlations, and theories include:
Social media and phone use
Political messages of helplessness and despair
Not enough play and freedom
Play used to be more dangerous
My grandfather was a small-town newspaper reporter in the early 20th century. He wrote "I remember a newspaper story about a boy who suffered a broken arm when, as the account read, he 'fell or jumped' from a low shed roof. Nobody knew whether kids fell or jumped because they were usually doing one or the other."
Our next-door neighbor had a twin brother who drowned at age 6 in the river while playing boats with an older child (in 1950s Cambridge MA, not a remote rural area).
Our housemate grew up on a farm, where he and his friends would amuse themselves by cutting down trees while one of them was in the tree. "It was fun, but there were some scary times when I thought my friends had been killed."
Playground injuries are . . . up?
I was expecting that more supervision meant fewer injuries. This doesn't seem to be the case at playgrounds, at least over the last 30 years.
From a large study of US visits to emergency rooms related to playground equipment:
Maybe children are spending time at playgrounds if they're not playing in empty lots and such? But here's children injured at school playgrounds (which are presumably seeing similar use over time) in Victoria, Australia. I don't think this is just because of wider awareness of concussions or something, because even in the 80s you still got treated at a hospital if you broke your arm.
But deaths from accidents are down
US accidental deaths of children age 10-19:
UK in the 80s and 90s, aged 19 and under:
The types of accidents that kill children and teens are mostly cars and drowning.
Most of the motor vehicle deaths are while riding in cars, which is a different topic. What about while children are playing or walking around?
As parental supervision has increased, child pedestrian deaths have fallen. Some of this may be because of better pedestrian infrastructure like crosswalks and speed bumps. But I suspect much of it is an adult being physically present with children when they're near streets.
Trends in pedestrian death rates by year, United States, 1995-2010, children ages 19 and under. The article...