Children’s ability to "roam" has been destroyed, and they congregate on social media sites

From the the NYTimes:

Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft and an assistant professor at New York University: “Children’s ability to roam has basically been destroyed. Letting your child out to bike around the neighborhood is seen as terrifying now, even though by all measures, life is safer for kids today.”

Children naturally congregate on social media sites for the relatively unsupervised conversations, flirtations, immature humor and social exchanges that are the normal stuff of teenage hanging-out, she said.

Moreover, grown-ups’ panic about teenage online behavior distracts from the potential benefits.

Let kids be kids - unstructured play time may be more important than homework, suggests a childhood psychologist. "Children have lost 8 hours per week of free, unstructured, and spontaneous play over the last 2 decades due to homework. Decrease in unstructured play time is in part responsible for slowing kids’ cognitive and emotional development. Today’s 5-year-olds had the self-regulation capability of a 3-year-old in the 1940s; the critical factor seems to have been not discipline, but play."

Video: A life cycle in 90 seconds:



References:

Cracking Teenagers’ Online Codes. NYTimes, 2012.

Image source: OpenClipArt.org, public domain.

In your neighborhood? WSJ lists locations of Cold War-era nuclear manufacturing and research sites

WSJ's John Emshwiller and Jeremy Singer-Vine detail their year-long investigation into the fate of hundreds of Cold War-era nuclear manufacturing and research sites. some of them near homes, parks and malls:



During the build-up to the Cold War, the U.S. government called upon hundreds of factories and research centers to help develop nuclear weapons and other forms of atomic energy. At many sites, this work left behind residual radioactive contamination requiring government cleanups, some of which are still going on.

The Department of Energy says it has protected the public health, and studies about radiation harm aren’t definitive. But with the government's own records about many of the sites unclear, the Journal has compiled a database that draws on thousands of public records and other sources to trace this historic atomic development effort and its consequences.

Find out if there is a former nuclear site in your neighborhood on the map here:

http://projects.wsj.com/waste-lands/state/IL

References:

http://projects.wsj.com/waste-lands