I does annoy me that whenever someone asks why kids donāt go outside these days that people immediately jump to how āeverything is built around cars these days. You realize that cars werenāt invented in the 80s right?
The reason kids donāt go outside as much is a fun three way collision between Reagan era stranger danger, Clinton era crimejerking, and the bush era explosion in the availability of cell phones. Honorable mention to post-9/11 paranoia.
Kids stay indoors and play video games because the incentive to go outside (controlled escape from supervision, a relatively open commons) are gone when mom and dad keep you on a silicon leash and track you by GPS while cops get called if youāre in the vicinity of a 7/11 for more than 30 seconds.
Everyone wants the kids to go outside until theyāre kids outside, then itās āwhere are your parents?ā Because Americans police the time of youth so completely itās a wonder that kids manage to have any kind of life at all.
Not having walkeable neighborhoods/things to do without a car is definitely part of it, but mostly because back in the day having kids just aimlessly wandering around the neighborhood without a specific goal in mind was socially acceptable to parents, and now it's not. Even when I was a kid, my friends and I would go trespassing through neighbors' yards, exploring in the woods, going to the corner store, etc. and it didn't matter because all our parents wanted was for us to be enjoying ourselves not inside the house. Once the concept of "outside the house" became stigmatized as unsafe, as you mentioned, the necessity to drive kids to a specific trackable location became the new norm.
also, once everyone elseās kids are not outside, the motivation and safety of yours being outside goes down. kids in a pack are safer than one or two kids outside by themselves
I think this also has to be contextualized with the socioeconomic sneetch-star-machine that is American parenting culture.
Upper middle class parents, terrified of their children's potential downward mobility under late capitalism, believe they can recession-proof their children through relentless cognitive Optimization: The competitive preschool and the extracurricular activities and the tutoring and the organic diets and the mental health and the social-emotional learning (because Forbes says soft skills are key to the 21st-century workplace!). There's no time for outdoor free play; you need to be studying for your 3rd grade placement exam before soccer practice!
Then the only kids getting unstructured outdoor free time are poor kids whose parents can't afford to Optimize them.
Then, because public policy is based on the myth that generational poverty is caused by Bad Parenting rather than the systemic inequality inherent to capitalism, liberal policy initiatives propose to "Close The Gap" by offering more Optimization to poor kids -- but in harsher, more punitive form, because as we all know, poor kids are more predisposed to Badness and need more Strict Control.
So then richer kids have to spend all their after-school time in Competitive STEAM Club to win college scholarships, and poorer kids have to spend all their after-school time in No-Excuses Boot Camp getting yelled at and punished for going to the bathroom.
