Oct 27, 2026, 8:42 PMKid can't go anywhere on their own. The parents have to drive them
Everything is a car hellscape so they can't even walk or cycle anywhere without significant danger
No other kids live nearby
- Oct 27, 2026, 8:42 PM
Replies
- Oct 27, 2026, 8:45 PM
Just going off the examples of the two children personally closest to me. Six/seven years old. Obviously it can be super different depending on the exact geographic location
- Oct 27, 2026, 8:48 PM
I grew up in a town of 30,000 roughly. I walked to elementary school with my siblings or on my own. Then later, I used a bike to get everywhere. School, friends, shopping. I could walk five minutes to the nearest store to buy food. I could walk fifteen minutes to the train station and get to a city of half a million people.
Seeing those other situations makes me realize what a privileged childhood that was
Oct 27, 2026, 8:43 PM@schratze that depends on the countryside tbh
PalmAndNeedlePalmAndNeedle@norden.socialOct 27, 2026, 8:44 PM- Oct 27, 2026, 8:46 PM
@PalmAndNeedle @schratze I lived in a village for a while as a kid and there were half a dozen other kids in the same street, and a bus that came every hour and took ~40 minutes into the next proper city. Not optimal, but I was very much mobile without my parents.
Oct 27, 2026, 9:45 PM@schratze I grew up at the edge of a town of 60,000 so it was like a Kleinstadt but with much better Öffis. [edit… in Germany]
Getting moved to midwestern US suburbia in my childhood was… a culture shock. Like wdym my *parents* need to be involved in my activities and I can’t just GO somewhere???
Oct 27, 2026, 8:52 PM@schratze That’s the growing up experience in the countryside, yes. It was certainly mine in Australia. It wasn’t awful, just different.
Oct 27, 2026, 9:00 PM@schratze this is (and was) basically my situation
like it is technically possible to walk to the nearest train station in 20 minutes, but you've gotta navigate british country roads and there's sections with no pavement and i've been harassed and almost run over enough times that i just refuse to do that walk anymore
if i wanna get anywhere either i need a lift or to hope the one single bus is running, and there's basically no busses at weekends
and what pisses me off so much is that if i lived literally at the other end of that one shitty road less than half a mile away then i could trivially get to the canal path and be able to get around basically the entire built up part of the district on foot or cycling without having to interact with a single car. it'd be bliss
- Oct 27, 2026, 9:20 PM
@mi damn yeah that sucks :/
Oct 27, 2026, 9:24 PM@schratze for what it's worth, this was also my experience growing up in an extremely unwalkable, sprawling US city of about 80,000