“Letting Kids Be Kids” by Zvi
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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:

• 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.

• It hurts the lived experience of children.

• It hurts children's ability to grow and develop.

• It de facto forces children to use screens quite a lot.

• 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 [...]

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

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).

Images from the article: )))))![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.](https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/mZ48pp2Y4YLvrPXHv/bzo8rjn4ddwngsymzina))) Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts), or another podcast app.