LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Letting Kids Be Kids” by Zvi

38 min • 30 maj 2025

Letting kids be kids seems more and more important to me over time. Our safetyism and paranoia about children is catastrophic on way more levels than most people realize. I believe all these effects are very large:

  1. It raises the time, money and experiential costs of having children so much that many choose not to have children, or to have less children than they would want.
  2. It hurts the lived experience of children.
  3. It hurts children's ability to grow and develop.
  4. It de facto forces children to use screens quite a lot.
  5. It instills a very harmful style of paranoia in all concerned.

This should be thought of as part of the Cost of Thriving Index discussion, and the fertility discussions as well. Before I return to the more general debate, I wanted to take care of this aspect first. It's [...]

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Outline:

(02:31) Current Insanity Levels

(09:50) The Result of This

(12:15) Some Progress on Letting Kids Be Kids

(13:10) CPS Cares

(19:52) Panopticon

(22:37) They Even Close Playgrounds

(24:08) How Did Things Get This Bad?

(28:11) Let Kids be Adults

(30:12) Treat Kids Like People

(32:00) Lowering the Burden

(35:05) Screens

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First published:
May 30th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mZ48pp2Y4YLvrPXHv/letting-kids-be-kids

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Google Maps view of Glenville, West Virginia with directional arrows marked.
Instagram post showing yellow billboard about modern working mothers vs stay-at-home mothers.
Warning message about appropriate boundaries and conduct with minors.
Graph showing parental time with children in US from 1965-2010, comparing education levels.
Satellite map showing decreasing roaming distances allowed for children across generations.
Four graphs showing parent-child time patterns from ages 0-18 for mothers and fathers.

The graphs track:
(a) Total Time
(b) One-on-one Time
(c) Reading Time
(d) Playing Time

All metrics show declining trends as children age.
banwe11 tweets:

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