Originally Posted by
livedarklions
You're making my point for me--it's now normal to organize a kid's time for them to an extent unheard of a generation or two ago. You have the alternatives as riding around vs. organized sport. Kids used to organize their own games with the neighborhood kids, adults not invited. The notion of adults telling us where it was safe to ride would have been laughable.
I think we have a winner!
Back in the day
it was normal to go run around the neighborhood and do what we wanted, within reason, until it got dark. Sometimes we did things that were dangerous, and everybody and their brother broke their arm at some point. One day, everyone in the neighborhood got bike helmets. We put them on to appease our parents, then left them on the sidewalk and proceeded to rip down the hill at 25MPH without them.
My generation had a bit of an attitude. We figured out what we needed to do in order to be reasonably safe, and if adults made arbitrary rules, we figured out how to break them. I recall telling our parents we were going to the "candy store" but really riding around places we weren't supposed to be, or "playing in my friend's yard" turning into walking around the woods looking for abandoned crap.
Bikes were a big part of that. They were an easy way to escape adult supervision - once you're down the block, nobody knows where you are! Kids now do not have that freedom; some of my
college students are still GPS tracked by their parents.
It seems to me that kids now - and that extends into college-aged young adults - do not possess the aptitude, not to mention the motivation, to schedule their own activities, or exist unscheduled, or generally do things on their own. Bikes provide freedom (even for me, as an adult!), but if nobody is seeking freedom from supervision, the only kids on bikes will be those whose parents are determined to get their kids on bikes.