It’s fascinating to track which cultures will be absolutely annihilated by the introduction of endless entertainment in a rectangle. (Annihilated in the demographic sense).
ericmay · 2h ago
Isn’t it basically all of them? I mean is there a culture as you say, which I interpret to mean a civilization or country, where iPhones* are affordable and isn’t facing this issue?
mensetmanusman · 1h ago
The US has many sub cultures, it’s too early to tell which survive since smartphones are so new…
alephnerd · 1h ago
They've been around for almost 20 years now, and 2.5 generations (later millenials, Z, Alpha) have all spent formative years using smartphones.
The subcultures have already formed, died out, and formed into new subcultures multiple times already.
alephnerd · 1h ago
I've seen similar issues in villages in developing countries like India and Vietnam as well. Parenting is hard, and smartphones reduce the amount of effort it takes anyone to get a dopamine rush, disincentivizing creativity.
Smartphones are extremely powerful, but I strongly feel they shouldn't be in the hands of children at least until their adolescence - that way some amount of creativity is forced.
Ironically, Steve Jobs was himself a major proponent of how boredom begets curiosity and creativity.
TikTok/Douyin isn't alone in impacting a mindset (though it does play a role).
I see plenty of parents (even amongst Chinese families) handing a smartphone to their kids to essentially sedate them instead of engaging with them.
Honor of Kings, Arena of Valor, and MLBB have similar dopamine rush cycles.
Heck, even a bland, aggravating, obnoxious, and stick-up-their-butt social media site like HN can induce similar cycles.
FirmwareBurner · 2h ago
Entertainment is an effect, not the main cause.
It's not the fault of availability of McDonalds that a person chooses to destroy their health eating only burgers, fries and Coke. Healthy options still exist, just that some people choose not to use them.
So why do people choose endless entertainment instead of the "healthy options"?
justjico · 1h ago
Well, isn’t this just the old paradox of free will.
You are free to do whatever you desire. But you are not free to choose your desires.
nielsbot · 1h ago
Then it’s equally valid to ask “but what if McDonald’s didn’t exist?”
bloqs · 1h ago
dopamine
aspenmayer · 1h ago
I’m reminded of the intentional usage of whisky, rum, and other alcoholic spirits as an intentional policy of genocide against Native Americans. Also interesting is that during this same period of history, payment of taxes in whisky was common in some states in the western US, and these were federal taxes for debts left over from the Revolutionary War. These adjacent topics are reminiscent of modern national cryptocurrency stockpiles and stablecoin interest.
It's been going on forever. "Stop looking at the cave art and take the garbage out."
throw_lfnsooemd · 1h ago
There is a big gap in outdoor activities for children between the ages of 12 and 18.
That's when kids start to do things without their parents, but don't have the means to engage in most activities. There are plenty of parks and public spaces in the UK, but there is only so much football one can do before getting bored. Most of them can't afford activities, and they are unable to partake in the British national sport (going to the pub). The only thing left is to roam around and be up to no good. In the end, staying indoors and exploring the digital world is the only way for them to experience the world on an equal footing.
It's a tough world for teens.
martinald · 1h ago
I think we are romanticising what teens used to do (much more at least) to pass their boredom. Articles like this make it sound like pre smartphone everyone was doing endless sport, drama and other artistic and social endeavours. At least what I remember was a lot of underage drinking and antisocial behaviour.
I can remember in the early 2000s children being made out as feral animals roaming the streets in the UK. Now they're being demonized for scrolling their phones.
darepublic · 4m ago
It's like the Simpsons episode from season 2 in which Marge crusades against violence in itchy and scratchy. And then, to Beethoven's ninth symphony, all the children start exploring nature and engaging in wholesome idyllic play.
stephenbez · 56m ago
There are plenty of things I did outside when growing up that kids could still do: invent sports (we had one involving a hockey net and a koosh ball), bike around the neighborhood, have a water fight, go to the pool, play capture the flag, ghost in the graveyard, jump on a trampoline, go to the ride scooters, play basketball, play with sidewalk chalk, etc
martinald · 1h ago
I find it odd that this is has became such a pandamoniom now.
As an elder millennial I can remember everyone being absolutely glued to MSN Messenger in secondary school. This was back in the dialup days so it was stopping your parents making phone calls!
Regardless, I feel that it the debate needs to be about what children are doing. Probably like many here I spent a lot of my childhood devouring technical content on the internet, which I would say has given me the chance to work on incredibly interesting projects (and make friends with people across the world). If I had been time restricted on my computer (and a lot of my friends were) it would have significantly altered my career trajectory.
If you are scrolling endless garbage tiktok or YouTube videos for hours a day, yes the utility is pretty low (though again, watching hours of trashy cable TV back in the day doesn't feel that different to me).
That doesn't mean that many won't learn and find out about their passions in a way that was unthinkable a few decades ago.
alephnerd · 1h ago
> As an elder millennial I can remember everyone being absolutely glued to MSN Messenger in secondary school. This was back in the dialup days so it was stopping your parents making phone calls!
Computers were nowhere near as accessible (physically or UX wise) in the 1990s or 2000s compared to smartphones today.
A $70 Android smartphone today would have been the equivalent of buying a top-of-the-line workstation in the 2000s for $40, so it is much easier to access a computer device at a much earlier age.
On top of that, UX research has enhanced massively since the 2000s with an enhanced understanding into user reward mechanisms and psychology, and this kind of reward mechanism is being added in every kind of application (from enterprise B2B to social media)
We shouldn't be Luddites, but limiting access to high sensitivity media (be it TV or smartphones) for those who are pre-adolescence should be an important part of parenting.
ryao · 1h ago
The point of the article is to say that this is a bad thing, but to someone who was bullied as a child, the idea of being “sedentary, scrolling and alone” sounds like the ideal childhood. I remember adults saying socialization was a good thing when I was a child, and to me, that effectively claimed that my daily beating from 5 to 6 of my classmates was a good thing. It does not matter how much time passes; nothing will convince me that was a good thing.
jonnybgood · 1h ago
I don't follow. How does claiming socializing is good effectively claiming bullying is good?
lanfeust6 · 1h ago
Let's be clear: these kids still attend school, like you did. Susceptibility to bullying has not disappeared. What the article is discussing specifically is leisure time, and it was just as possible to spend that sedentary and alone 30 years ago.
Having a social life vs not being bullied is a false dichotomy.
riehwvfbk · 1h ago
Let's be clear: invalidating someone's life experience based on your misrepresentation of something they said is not cool.
Even if bullying remains a fixture in one's life, having something to look forward to after the hell they call school is much better than having nothing. And the "something" can be learning to program, tinkering with Linux, or talking to friends from around the world online. Having screen time vs having a social or intellectual life is a false dichotomy.
refulgentis · 1h ago
Getting beaten by a gang of classmates daily is genuinely awful & would leave some deep scars, I'm very sorry to hear that and wish you the best.
bobxmax · 1h ago
The public school system is absurd and the biggest culprit in the vast majority of our modern problems. The idea that we would take children and put them in an environment that is essentially the same as a prison for 18 years, is ABSURD.
When in human history would teenagers spend most of their time surrounded by other teenagers?
Yet another thing we can credit to Christian expansionism. We have never put our kids in school- no bullying, just balanced happy healthy kiddos.
ahazred8ta · 1h ago
The Aztecs had mandatory boarding schools which were basically military academies. Plenty of nonwestern societies had mandatory training for children who lived apart from the rest of the community.
Well obviously schools have existed in any part of society. But schools have always had a purpose - whether it's training future scholars at madrasas, training sons of nobility for war, etc.
The institutionalized mass factory-farmed education system was a direct result of western Christian imperialism and the desire to enforce and spread biblical teachings.
skissane · 1h ago
> Yet another thing we can credit to Christian expansionism.
Yeshivahs and madrassas are nothing new; in Bhutan, there monasteries brimming with young boys spending their days studying voluminous Tibetan Buddhist scriptures.
The biggest factor in the growth of schooling in modern period hasn't been any religion – it is the idea that education is a universal right for every child, as opposed to a privilege for the children of the elite.
bobxmax · 1h ago
That's incorrect.
Public schooling can be directly traced back to protestants - the idea of state-wide mandated education was to ensure the Bible was taught and spread.
Education and public schooling are different things.
skissane · 1h ago
I don't know why all this focus on "public schools".
Of my 13 years of K-12 education, I spent 2 years in a public school, the other 11 in three different Catholic schools. Whatever the merits of your complaints about school systems, I think many of them would apply to many private schools too
There are at least four countries/territories worldwide (Aruba, Bangladesh, Sint Maarten, and Macau) where over 90% of secondary students attend private schools, public schools enrol less than 10% of secondary students – you think none of the private school students in those countries would sympathise with any of your criticisms?
> Public schooling can be directly traced back to protestants
You think Catholic majority countries don't have public education systems? In Brazil 86% of secondary students attend public school; in Portugal, 81%; in Argentina and France it is 74%; in Spain 69%; by contrast, Australia, a country in which historically Protestants have outnumbered Catholics by as much as 3:1, the percent of secondary students in public education is only 53%.
As an aside, although Australia's Protestant:Catholic ratio was around 3:1 in the first half of the 20th century (and I believe through the 19th century too, although I don't have hard figures handy on that), nowadays there are only slightly more Protestants in Australia than Catholics – this is because, while both branches of Christianity have lost huge numbers of followers to secularisation, Catholicism has always partly compensated for that by immigration from Catholic majority countries (most recently the Philippines), Australia's post-1950 immigration patterns have left Protestants at a comparative demographic disadvantage – which I believe is true of the rest of the Anglosphere too
bobxmax · 50m ago
I think you misunderstand my comment. When I say "public" school I don't mean in distinction from private.
I am referring to the broad modern standard of putting every child in school... which is traced back directly to protestants wanting to have the state enforce bible study to every child.
skissane · 8m ago
Okay, but that's not what "public school" standardly means in English.
In American English, and most other English dialects, "public school" means "school run by the government". However, in British English (and also I believe Indian, maybe Irish too), "public school" has a rather opposite meaning – "expensive private school for the children of rich". In no major dialect of English does "public school" mean "the broad modern standard of putting every child in school"
What you are really talking about is compulsory education – laws that oblige parent to send their children to a school, whether government-run or private.
Are Protestants responsible for compulsory education? It is true, that historically speaking, Luther and other Reformers did play an important role in promoting the idea in the early modern period - but they didn't invent it. It existed in ancient Sparta, for boys. Plato, in his Republic, advocated compulsory state-run education – not just for boys, but for girls too.
It is true the first few states in modern Europe were to enact it were Protestant, but Catholic Europe soon copied the idea – Protestant Prussia introduced it in 1763, but Catholic Austria followed suit only 11 years later (1774), while it took Protestant Sweden another 68 years (1842). The Ottoman Empire made education compulsory in Istanbul in 1824 (they planned to gradually roll it out empire-wide, but that took far longer to achieve than they'd initially anticipated); at that point, no US state had yet done so, the first being Massachusetts in 1852. (Although publicly funded education was established in Massachusetts over two centuries earlier, it wasn't compulsory, there was no legal obligation on parents to send their children to school until then.)
So, while certainly Protestants played an important role in promoting the idea at in the modern period, they didn't invent it, and some Catholic and Muslim jurisdictions introduced it before many Protestant jurisdictions had.
OgsyedIE · 1h ago
It's all well and good telling parents to do better, but this situation could only have arose in the first place because there is some kind of systemic reason for parents to not really care about the wellbeing of their offspring.
Is this parental nihilism downstream of ideology, or the other way around?
geerlingguy · 1h ago
I think it's because parenting is hard (always has been, some aspects like having to be a helicopter parent to not have CPS called on you in the US maybe make it harder).
And screens are easy.
bobxmax · 1h ago
It's the anxiety generation. Parents are now terrified of paedophiles and traumas. My generation needed TV commercials reminding our parents we exist.
nielsbot · 1h ago
Do you have any theories about those “systemic reasons”? Curious what they might be.
Secondly—Do you always take the stairs when available or the elevator?
mschuster91 · 1h ago
> this situation could only have arose in the first place because there is some kind of systemic reason for parents to not really care about the wellbeing of their offspring.
Yeah, guess what, like needing to work 2 full-time 40 hour jobs and having to deal with commute and chores on top of that, not to mention overtime or on-call. Modern capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with raising children, but by the time it crashes down it will be too late.
But hey, the current generation of Boomers enjoys a stonks-go-up portfolio.
mouse_ · 3h ago
What are urban kids supposed to do, play in traffic?
There is no outside.
II2II · 2h ago
In traffic, no, but on the streets, why not? Things like street hockey and basketball are real. Kids ought to be able to be able to play in a field and fetch their ball from the street without ending up as roadkill.
Of course, there are far too many drivers who view anything that impedes high speed travel as a nuisance, or worse. I regularly see drivers who run stop signs in front of a school, drivers passing unloading school busses with their stop signs extended, and impatient drivers try to push through crossing guards as children are crossing. I have also known crossing guards who were struck by motorists. Things like traffic calming measures don't work, since it typically ends up with drivers being more reckless. Very little seems to be done about it, aside from periodic campaigns (typically at the start of school years). And, of course, punishing children by limiting the spaces they can use and independence.
People often claim that the cycling culture of the Netherlands was a product of trying to protect children from traffic. Most of the rest of the world, including England with it's "no ball game" signs took the opposite approach: rather than addressing the problem, they punished the victims.
Meekro · 1h ago
That's definitely true, and it's a bad thing, but I don't think it's the core problem. If it was, you'd see massive differences between cities and the research would read like this: "City A is too car-centric, and all the kids are sedentary and obese. City B has great public transportation, lots of parks, and the kids are doing great."
Instead, we see the same problem everywhere, including places in Europe and Japan where the outside is just fine.
AsmaraHolding · 2h ago
I would be willing to bet that 80% of urban kids in the UK live within a 10-minute bike ride of a park.
OJFord · 2h ago
American comments on UK news. No such issue here, sure a lot of areas are more built up, but children under 10 walk to school, it's not America.
HPsquared · 2h ago
People used to do a whole lot of nothing. EDIT: But daily life provided enough social micronutrients to get by. Less so with the phones.
Gigachad · 2h ago
The "nothing" being wandering around outside, digging holes, and talking to people rather than sitting around watching paint dry.
mslansn · 2h ago
Cars have existed for multiple generations. Kids are glued to their screens, which is why parks are empty.
topspin · 2h ago
> There is no outside.
And if there were, whatever they might dream up to do with outside would be rapidly banned.
losvedir · 2h ago
It's not radically different from, say 20 years ago, when there weren't all these phones.
lanfeust6 · 1h ago
That's a lie. But one of the pressures is that suburban parents overschedule their kids with extracurriculars instead of letting them waste more time on their bikes, in the parks, etc.
When our parents were kids, everyone drove but all the kids played outside.
eszed · 31m ago
That's a chicken / egg problem, because if their peers are in scheduled activities there won't be any kids hanging around to play with.
There are also location-specific effects. The happiest few years of my childhood - I'm a generation older than the over-scheduling thing; we were latchkey kids, as they said then - were spent on a block with three other families whose kids were +/- three years of me and my sister. We were on our bikes, or building forts, or playing football in someone's yard every single day. Then, the course of a year or so, the other families all moved away, and... Well, I was sedentary, reading books, and lonely for the next few years.
(A lovely coda: a few years ago I happened to visit the city where my favorite friends from that period had settled, and looked them up. We literally had not seen each other in twenty-five years. I thought it might be awkward, and maybe for thirty seconds it was, but we immediately recaptured the tenor of our ancient friendship, and it was magical. I see them every couple of years, now, and am so happy they're back in my life.)
To pull those two points together, when there were enough young families (and higher population density) that there were kids on every block parents didn't need to schedule their kids social lives. Now that the fertility rate has dropped, and housing sprawled, that's often necessary - and even when strictly-speaking not, it's become a cultural default that's difficult to overcome.
ruined · 2h ago
ban cars
theyknowitsxmas · 3h ago
Kids don’t play Red Ass anymore?
lanfeust6 · 1h ago
Wasn't that only in the schoolyard? Against the wall.
mschuster91 · 1h ago
One thing to add I find missing in many such articles: the rise of helicopter parenting, correlating with the rise of families that can only afford to have one child.
Basically, up until a few decades ago, it was the norm to have a lot of children - there was a lack of contraceptive options, access to abortions was highly questionable (and deadly on top of it, given the circumstances of back-alley "angel makers"), and most importantly it was the norm that quite a lot of these children would die from some sort of accident, pest or war.
Nowadays, financial and housing insecurity plus the demands of modern capitalism (aka, have a full school education plus an academic degree, so you enter the workforce at 25, not 15, any more) drive people to start later and later with finding partners, much less having children, so the "room for errors" is much less than it used to be.
And on top of that you got the horror stories of "child snatchers", pedophile gangs and knife-wielding immigrants that now make national headlines out of very individual crimes. It's hard to attempt to raise your child in the open when every newspaper shouts at you that THEY are out there to GET YOUR CHILD. The rabid fearmongering has gone completely out of control.
markus_zhang · 2h ago
It's PK. After a couple of generations everyone will get used to the new norm.
hn_throwaway_99 · 2h ago
What is PK?
Also, obesity is apparently the new norm, and I guess we got used to that, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have huge negative impacts.
The subcultures have already formed, died out, and formed into new subcultures multiple times already.
Smartphones are extremely powerful, but I strongly feel they shouldn't be in the hands of children at least until their adolescence - that way some amount of creativity is forced.
Ironically, Steve Jobs was himself a major proponent of how boredom begets curiosity and creativity.
[0] https://washingtonmorning.com/2025/06/19/how-differently-tik...
I see plenty of parents (even amongst Chinese families) handing a smartphone to their kids to essentially sedate them instead of engaging with them.
Honor of Kings, Arena of Valor, and MLBB have similar dopamine rush cycles.
Heck, even a bland, aggravating, obnoxious, and stick-up-their-butt social media site like HN can induce similar cycles.
It's not the fault of availability of McDonalds that a person chooses to destroy their health eating only burgers, fries and Coke. Healthy options still exist, just that some people choose not to use them.
So why do people choose endless entertainment instead of the "healthy options"?
You are free to do whatever you desire. But you are not free to choose your desires.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_Native_Americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Forty-Three_G...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion
That's when kids start to do things without their parents, but don't have the means to engage in most activities. There are plenty of parks and public spaces in the UK, but there is only so much football one can do before getting bored. Most of them can't afford activities, and they are unable to partake in the British national sport (going to the pub). The only thing left is to roam around and be up to no good. In the end, staying indoors and exploring the digital world is the only way for them to experience the world on an equal footing.
It's a tough world for teens.
I can remember in the early 2000s children being made out as feral animals roaming the streets in the UK. Now they're being demonized for scrolling their phones.
As an elder millennial I can remember everyone being absolutely glued to MSN Messenger in secondary school. This was back in the dialup days so it was stopping your parents making phone calls!
Regardless, I feel that it the debate needs to be about what children are doing. Probably like many here I spent a lot of my childhood devouring technical content on the internet, which I would say has given me the chance to work on incredibly interesting projects (and make friends with people across the world). If I had been time restricted on my computer (and a lot of my friends were) it would have significantly altered my career trajectory.
If you are scrolling endless garbage tiktok or YouTube videos for hours a day, yes the utility is pretty low (though again, watching hours of trashy cable TV back in the day doesn't feel that different to me).
That doesn't mean that many won't learn and find out about their passions in a way that was unthinkable a few decades ago.
Computers were nowhere near as accessible (physically or UX wise) in the 1990s or 2000s compared to smartphones today.
A $70 Android smartphone today would have been the equivalent of buying a top-of-the-line workstation in the 2000s for $40, so it is much easier to access a computer device at a much earlier age.
On top of that, UX research has enhanced massively since the 2000s with an enhanced understanding into user reward mechanisms and psychology, and this kind of reward mechanism is being added in every kind of application (from enterprise B2B to social media)
We shouldn't be Luddites, but limiting access to high sensitivity media (be it TV or smartphones) for those who are pre-adolescence should be an important part of parenting.
Having a social life vs not being bullied is a false dichotomy.
Even if bullying remains a fixture in one's life, having something to look forward to after the hell they call school is much better than having nothing. And the "something" can be learning to program, tinkering with Linux, or talking to friends from around the world online. Having screen time vs having a social or intellectual life is a false dichotomy.
When in human history would teenagers spend most of their time surrounded by other teenagers?
Yet another thing we can credit to Christian expansionism. We have never put our kids in school- no bullying, just balanced happy healthy kiddos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calmecac
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C4%93lpochcalli
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_education#By_countr...
The institutionalized mass factory-farmed education system was a direct result of western Christian imperialism and the desire to enforce and spread biblical teachings.
Yeshivahs and madrassas are nothing new; in Bhutan, there monasteries brimming with young boys spending their days studying voluminous Tibetan Buddhist scriptures.
The biggest factor in the growth of schooling in modern period hasn't been any religion – it is the idea that education is a universal right for every child, as opposed to a privilege for the children of the elite.
Public schooling can be directly traced back to protestants - the idea of state-wide mandated education was to ensure the Bible was taught and spread.
Education and public schooling are different things.
Of my 13 years of K-12 education, I spent 2 years in a public school, the other 11 in three different Catholic schools. Whatever the merits of your complaints about school systems, I think many of them would apply to many private schools too
There are at least four countries/territories worldwide (Aruba, Bangladesh, Sint Maarten, and Macau) where over 90% of secondary students attend private schools, public schools enrol less than 10% of secondary students – you think none of the private school students in those countries would sympathise with any of your criticisms?
> Public schooling can be directly traced back to protestants
You think Catholic majority countries don't have public education systems? In Brazil 86% of secondary students attend public school; in Portugal, 81%; in Argentina and France it is 74%; in Spain 69%; by contrast, Australia, a country in which historically Protestants have outnumbered Catholics by as much as 3:1, the percent of secondary students in public education is only 53%.
Sources:
- Public education rates worldwide: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.SEC.PRIV.ZS?most_rec... (okay, that's percent private, but subtract from 100 to get percent public)
- Australia historical religious affiliation statistics: https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/2f762f95845417aeca2...
As an aside, although Australia's Protestant:Catholic ratio was around 3:1 in the first half of the 20th century (and I believe through the 19th century too, although I don't have hard figures handy on that), nowadays there are only slightly more Protestants in Australia than Catholics – this is because, while both branches of Christianity have lost huge numbers of followers to secularisation, Catholicism has always partly compensated for that by immigration from Catholic majority countries (most recently the Philippines), Australia's post-1950 immigration patterns have left Protestants at a comparative demographic disadvantage – which I believe is true of the rest of the Anglosphere too
I am referring to the broad modern standard of putting every child in school... which is traced back directly to protestants wanting to have the state enforce bible study to every child.
In American English, and most other English dialects, "public school" means "school run by the government". However, in British English (and also I believe Indian, maybe Irish too), "public school" has a rather opposite meaning – "expensive private school for the children of rich". In no major dialect of English does "public school" mean "the broad modern standard of putting every child in school"
What you are really talking about is compulsory education – laws that oblige parent to send their children to a school, whether government-run or private.
Are Protestants responsible for compulsory education? It is true, that historically speaking, Luther and other Reformers did play an important role in promoting the idea in the early modern period - but they didn't invent it. It existed in ancient Sparta, for boys. Plato, in his Republic, advocated compulsory state-run education – not just for boys, but for girls too.
It is true the first few states in modern Europe were to enact it were Protestant, but Catholic Europe soon copied the idea – Protestant Prussia introduced it in 1763, but Catholic Austria followed suit only 11 years later (1774), while it took Protestant Sweden another 68 years (1842). The Ottoman Empire made education compulsory in Istanbul in 1824 (they planned to gradually roll it out empire-wide, but that took far longer to achieve than they'd initially anticipated); at that point, no US state had yet done so, the first being Massachusetts in 1852. (Although publicly funded education was established in Massachusetts over two centuries earlier, it wasn't compulsory, there was no legal obligation on parents to send their children to school until then.)
So, while certainly Protestants played an important role in promoting the idea at in the modern period, they didn't invent it, and some Catholic and Muslim jurisdictions introduced it before many Protestant jurisdictions had.
Is this parental nihilism downstream of ideology, or the other way around?
And screens are easy.
Secondly—Do you always take the stairs when available or the elevator?
Yeah, guess what, like needing to work 2 full-time 40 hour jobs and having to deal with commute and chores on top of that, not to mention overtime or on-call. Modern capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with raising children, but by the time it crashes down it will be too late.
But hey, the current generation of Boomers enjoys a stonks-go-up portfolio.
There is no outside.
Of course, there are far too many drivers who view anything that impedes high speed travel as a nuisance, or worse. I regularly see drivers who run stop signs in front of a school, drivers passing unloading school busses with their stop signs extended, and impatient drivers try to push through crossing guards as children are crossing. I have also known crossing guards who were struck by motorists. Things like traffic calming measures don't work, since it typically ends up with drivers being more reckless. Very little seems to be done about it, aside from periodic campaigns (typically at the start of school years). And, of course, punishing children by limiting the spaces they can use and independence.
People often claim that the cycling culture of the Netherlands was a product of trying to protect children from traffic. Most of the rest of the world, including England with it's "no ball game" signs took the opposite approach: rather than addressing the problem, they punished the victims.
Instead, we see the same problem everywhere, including places in Europe and Japan where the outside is just fine.
And if there were, whatever they might dream up to do with outside would be rapidly banned.
When our parents were kids, everyone drove but all the kids played outside.
There are also location-specific effects. The happiest few years of my childhood - I'm a generation older than the over-scheduling thing; we were latchkey kids, as they said then - were spent on a block with three other families whose kids were +/- three years of me and my sister. We were on our bikes, or building forts, or playing football in someone's yard every single day. Then, the course of a year or so, the other families all moved away, and... Well, I was sedentary, reading books, and lonely for the next few years.
(A lovely coda: a few years ago I happened to visit the city where my favorite friends from that period had settled, and looked them up. We literally had not seen each other in twenty-five years. I thought it might be awkward, and maybe for thirty seconds it was, but we immediately recaptured the tenor of our ancient friendship, and it was magical. I see them every couple of years, now, and am so happy they're back in my life.)
To pull those two points together, when there were enough young families (and higher population density) that there were kids on every block parents didn't need to schedule their kids social lives. Now that the fertility rate has dropped, and housing sprawled, that's often necessary - and even when strictly-speaking not, it's become a cultural default that's difficult to overcome.
Basically, up until a few decades ago, it was the norm to have a lot of children - there was a lack of contraceptive options, access to abortions was highly questionable (and deadly on top of it, given the circumstances of back-alley "angel makers"), and most importantly it was the norm that quite a lot of these children would die from some sort of accident, pest or war.
Nowadays, financial and housing insecurity plus the demands of modern capitalism (aka, have a full school education plus an academic degree, so you enter the workforce at 25, not 15, any more) drive people to start later and later with finding partners, much less having children, so the "room for errors" is much less than it used to be.
And on top of that you got the horror stories of "child snatchers", pedophile gangs and knife-wielding immigrants that now make national headlines out of very individual crimes. It's hard to attempt to raise your child in the open when every newspaper shouts at you that THEY are out there to GET YOUR CHILD. The rabid fearmongering has gone completely out of control.
Also, obesity is apparently the new norm, and I guess we got used to that, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have huge negative impacts.