I can think of so many reasons but the biggest I think is the reduction of community.
- When I was a kid mums worked part time or not at all. We had school fates and lots more community gatherings.
- Dads didn't work as hard. Half of them would be at your soccer practice at 6pm to hang out
- Parents were on local sports teams together or other social groups as well
- You did most of your shopping at the local shops, you knew the people that lived in the suburb. You ran into them picking up the newspaper or at the local video rental place.
- My mum always joked that I couldn't get away with anything because someone would see me and it would get back to her some how.
- There were some wierdos around sure. But the whole suburb was on the look out for the kids roaming around
Then there were other things like just that cars were smaller. A kid on a pushie would be as high or higher than a person driving around in small sedan. I don't think I would let my kid play on the same street I spent 90% of my time riding my bike or playing with the other kids in the street these days. They'd end up underneath a giant landcruiser or ford ranger/hilux in no time (and they are smaller that the larger trucks that are in the USA which are scary big)
I know some nordic countries are still a bit like this. But I'm talking about a car centric Sydney (Australia) suburb in the late 80s early 90s
Where I lived we knew a few neighbors but didn’t really interact every day or feel like they would watch out for other people’s kids.
That didn’t stop me from biking and exploring all over from age 6-7, which seems unthinkable now. I think it was mostly just more risk tolerance and less flashy warnings about danger. Like my dad biked around the same block so why not let me and there was not much more thought given to it.
Your suburb sounds nice but I guess Im just saying that level of community wasn’t necessary for kids to have freedom.
I want to let my kids walk wherever they want to. It’s great for them.
My 5 year old bikes to school, accompanied by an adult. It’s a bit more than half a mile away from the house.
I’d like to tell him he can do this on his own next year, but there’s a single intersection he has to cross that makes this difficult.
I’m not worried about him getting lost, abducted by a stranger or any host of movie plot scenarios. I’m worried about vehicles. Specifically pickup trucks and SUVs.
40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches. Today there are large numbers of vehicles twice that high, where even an adult can’t look the driver in the eye at close distances.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says:
Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities.
I'm almost 2 meters tall and was crossing a street at a crosswalk with my bike yesterday, walking and pushing it at normal walking speeds, like the law requires. There was a car about to turn left from the lanes going left. There was a car from the lanes going right (the closest lanes to me) that slowed down as I started crossing the street. I assumed they saw me and that's why they were slowing down. Nope - they almost hit me but managed to hit the brakes very hard at the last possible second. Apparently they slowed down to make sure the car that would turn left would wait for them. If I was as tall as a 5 year old, maybe the car that almost hit me wouldn't have even seen me. If I got hit, I'd take it better than a 5 year old due to physics - my mass is bigger and the point where it would've hit me would've been my thighs instead of my torso. That car wasn't even with a tall hood or anything obstructing its view, just a regular car.
In another comment a few days ago I reminisced about how I was let running alone for hours on end when I was very young, and how that was normal.
It's a bit hard to reconcile both events now. I gained a lot of independence and had real unrestricted fun, but in hindsight I might've died a few times.
My idea, even if it might be traumatic, is to show the kid a few clips of people being hit by a car and getting mangled, with all the gore visible. Especially people following the laws and being careful. I miss /r/watchpeopledie as it was actually very educational.
I gained a lot of independence and had real unrestricted fun, but in hindsight I might've died a few times.
Yeah, that's called living! I definitely got myself into one or two dangerous situations growing up. I couldn't imagine a childhood where everything is safety railings and padded walls.
Living isn't putting your childhood self or your kids into mortal danger on the regular. There's quite a gap between unsupervised kids doing reckless stuff and knowing putting your kids out into a world not built for adult pedestrians, much less child pedestrians.
My kids still roam, albeit with check-ins, and a lot of training about streets, driveways, and people.
I don't fault parents who reach for trackers or are uncomfortable with letting young kids out of sight. Even back in the day a lot of horrible things happened that weren't reported widely. A family member of mine was nearly abducted off their bike as a teen, if not for a nearby neighbor opening the door when she knocked looking for help.
It won't increase their visibility, obviously. It will make them think twice before going on that crosswalk. Maybe they'll wait for a car that slows down after they've taken only 1 step on the crosswalk, maybe they'll wait for their eyes to meet the driver's or to see the driver making a "go, go" sign with their hand.
Governments should make roads safer but until they do, we should care for ourselves.
Imagine a sidewalk where the ground is crooked, full of holes and parts of the pavement sticking up. Should we blindly go on the sidewalk saying "the government should make it better" or should we exercise caution not to trip and fall?
The same logic applies to most dangerous things. Should the government make sure the food and supplements that are imported is safe? Of course. Does that mean you should order food and supplements from any shady site from a random 3rd world country with no reviews? Absolutely not.
> Should we blindly go on the sidewalk saying "the government should make it better" or should we exercise caution not to trip and fall?
The answer isn't binary. It's both. Governments are us, and we use that tool to manage collective resources like roads and sidewalks.
Obviously we do what we can in the moment. That doesn't mean those given power are free to neglect our collective property, or even sell out to the interests of those who would profit from pedestrian hostile "solutions".
I don't think you need to show videos, but definitely discuss street safety with your children when they are young. Possibly several times at different ages.
When I was young my dad took me out to the curb and warned me about the dangers of being on the street. He pointed out how fast cars were going, how being hit could be really damaging, how animals not infrequently died from being hit. He also warned about getting excited while playing games and inadvertently running into the street. Even bicycles were a danger. Everything changes at the curb. Having a good imagination, I took the lesson to heart.
Maybe, instead of trying to scare (scar?) children you should just teach them to make eye contact with the driver so you are sure they have seen you before you put yourself in the path of their car?
How much of our "safety" culture around kids is because people don't have basic life skills and aren't passing them on to kids?
I would live for this to be the answer - it’s definitely helpful, but I know a number of people who have made eye contact with a driver who has then proceeded to drive directly into them. I’ve had near misses like this too. It’s hard to imagine until you’ve experienced it, but incredibly scary to see someone who is looking directly at you and still somehow not reacting.
So many scenarios where this doesn't save you. SUV driver makes eye contact, stops, kid starts crossing the street, impatient driver behind them (who can't see past their big rear) gets tired of waiting and floors it around them into the open lane, not realizing that the driver in front was stopped for a valid reason...
You can only mitigate risk so much. At some point life is for living and there is a risk involved in it. Sequestering oneself or one's kids to home seems outright inhumane to me.
Making eye contact and waiting for a vehicle to actually respond to the conditions at hand will eliminate the vast majority of "assumed" mistakes. Trying to be 100% aware of traffic and understanding that folks can be even bigger aggressive idiots is also part of it, but not perfect.
You just have to accept that in some rare instances the swiss cheese holes will line up regardless of what you do. And be at peace with it.
I suppose since this seems to logical and "not a big deal" to me means that I am extreme outlier on the subject.
Both scar(r)ing them AND telling them to make eye contact seems better to me. People don't appreciate low-likelihood or abstract risks. I bet children appreciate them even less than grown-ups. They've never witnessed someone being hit by a car but they've witnessed thousands of people NOT being hit by a car. How do you think they would really internalize the rule to make eye contact without any evidence? Hell, even I'm more likely to make eye contact with the driver after yesterday's spike in my heart rate, and I'm not 5 years old
As far as visibility is concerned, the only problems I've encountered in a big truck are to do with the driver-side A-pillar obscuring pedestrians about to cross the street on the other side of an intersection. It's the perfect width, and in just the right spot that I've had to stop in the middle of an intersection a few times now because I didn't see somebody as they just started to cross. I'm building the habit of moving my head around at intersections, but I'd spent decades before they changed regulations not having to do this (and it doesn't actually seem that big, but it really obscures a big chunk of arc, especially at "other side of the intersection" distances and greater).
In practice, if somebody is right in front of my grill where I can't see them, they were close enough for me to notice them before they got there without me having to be on high alert for people.
I'm not putting this here as a truck-vs-car thing or whatever, I'm just trying to people a realistic idea of where the blind spits are that actually cause trouble in my experience.
I wonder why all these trucks (with the size, these are not cars) don't have forward-looking cameras mounted somewhere near headlights and feeding a screen on the dashboard, which would offer a "window" through the motor compartment. It should be trivially simple to produce, and most vehicles already have a screen for the camera on the back. Its presence would likely lower the insurance premium significantly, due to a much lower chance of hitting someone right ahead of the vehicle.
This is a big one for me. Not that long ago I just about got into a fistfight with some asswipe who drove his Ram through a crosswalk in a school zone, while children were crossing. With a crossing guard.
And somehow he thought I was the jerk for flipping him the bird as he went through.
I'm 55. Growing up in Florida in the 70's and 80's, I was outside for hours at a time. I would wander in the woods, following streams to their source and actually mapping the entire forest (I still have the map). I rode my bicycle all over town, by myself and with my equally adventurous friends, getting into all sorts of dangerous things. I went fishing by myself, literally dodging moccasins and alligators. I'd clean the fish with a very sharp knife when I got back. I still have scars all over my body reminding me of all the trouble I got into.
I'm in my sixties and my experience is same. But now we live in the world, where my granddaughter (12) got into real trouble because a birthday present I gave her – a real Leatherman (pink of course). Of course she brought it to the school, it was confiscated, she, her parents and I was questioned by police etc.
In Norway my children sometimes came home from primary school (ages five to twelve) with notes saying things like:
"We've planned a trip to the woods for next week, it's expected to be minus twenty Celsius so please make sure they have appropriate clothing, hats, gloves, boots. Also we will have a fire so make sure they bring some sausages and a hunting knife so they can cut sticks for the fire and to hold the sausages over the fire."
No. 2 son came home with a plaster on his arm after one such excursion, I think when he was about ten, and explained that one of his friends had been careless with his knife. There was no drama, the teacher carries a first aid kit for precisely this scenario, his friend was firmly told to not be so stupid, and the teacher used it to explain to the class why knives need to be properly handled.
In the 90s I was taught knife safety before being given blades. Had to pass a test before we were given them. Seems pretty reasonable to require that to handle something that could kill another person so quickly, easily, and even by accident.
Also much cheaper than casts, physical therapy, and possibly permanent damage. An ounce of prevention and all that.
> In the 90s I was taught knife safety before being given blades. Had to pass a test before we were given them.
You can teach kids how to safely handle and use blades. This reduces -but does not prevent- accidents... and some kids will handle them carelessly despite the training. [0]
In other words, the fact that a kid on the trip was cut by his friend doesn't mean that there was no blade safety training prior to the trip.
[0] Source: In another life, I used to teach kids these sorts of safety courses.
When I was a child, I always had with me a multi-tool Swiss army knife, including at school, because I was very frequently building various things, or disassembling others to see how they were made. That early experience was very influential in becoming a successful engineer.
Decades later, as an adult, I was astonished to learn about the so-called "no tolerance" policies of many US schools, where the possession of even a small knife or even of less dangerous tools may be a reason for severe punishment.
Obviously, as a child, starting with the second day of school when 6-year old, I have always gone to the school and back, every day, alone, even if initially that was about a half hour of walking and then the later schools required long commuting by public transportation. Also none of my colleagues have ever been brought to school by someone else, and like me they did not have any contact with their parents since morning till late in the afternoon. All this was considered normal at that time.
Imho school admins need to have skin in the bullying game. Bullying seems to be a natural (=inevitable) outcome of kids exploring social status outside the normative system of rules. I have always been fascinated with how bullies justify (sometimes "subconsciously") their own behaviour, and how these justifications mirror those "adult" rules..
An administration that shows the kids it's willing to place _its own status_ at risk might earn their loyalty.
(By contrast, the American edu system you speak of prioritises maximising its own safety hence the -ism suffix)
I'm hunting for real world examples of such. It seems that you might have encountered them!
I accidentally had a pocket knife in my backpack after a camping trip when I was a kid 20 years or so ago. Being a good/naive kid, I told the teacher. Luckily the teacher was cool and said just leave it alone and we never had this conversation. That could have ended very differently with no tolerance policies starting around then.
In high school, many kids had rifles and shotguns in their cars to go hunting after school. Then we were old enough to keep our mouths shut haha.
When I was a boy I wanted a pocket knife b/c a friend got one and I saw it as useful. My Dad vetoed that until....I joined the Boy Scouts! Mom paid for a new official BSA knife along with the uniform. I promptly cut myself once with the knife, despite warnings from Dad. Doing so is a rite of passage for a knife-owner, I believe.
Fast forward to today. I've almost always carried a pocket knife and found it enormously useful. For my ~30th birthday my Dad finally bought me an Uncle Henry's 3-blade pocket knife about 3" long. It is finely made, always sharp, but difficult to fiddle with and not really very practical. I think of it as his acknowledgment that I am ready to carry a knife!8-) I'm glad I didn't have to ask him for a penis, though!
That little knife always sits atop my file cabinet. Someday I'll pass it along to someone else to perplex them. And I carry a folder of my own choice in my pocket.
That has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with "safety" being a magic word that gets way to many people to turn off their brains so the school is using as a pretext to enforce capricious rules and basically teach the kinds "do what the system says, however stupid, or else".
200yr ago they'd have used some Victorian morals bullshit or religion to the same end.
I'm father of three daughters and they grew up almost like this in nineties. My grandchildren don't have this chance any more. It's a little bit about changing times, but mostly because of public – it's just not acceptable for others to do all these things and parents would get into real trouble. When I was 10, I drove tractor, had already several scars from knife and axe and visited my grandmother more than hundred km away alone. My daughters would be arrested if they would let their kids to do any of it.
> My daughters would be arrested if they would let their kids to do any of it.
Yea, the problem isn't that we don't want to give kids the freedom we had as kids. The problem is the nosy public that won't mind their own business and instead call the cops when they see someone out just playing. Not willing to risk involvement with poorly-trained, amped-up, armed law enforcement.
> My daughters would be arrested if they would let their kids to do any of it.
Don't know where you're from, but where I am people love to state this but it's almost never true. Much like how everyone thinks there was some kidnapping epidemic in the US in the 90's which started the whole stranger danger junk.
I was told my kid would have CPS called on me, the cops arresting me, etc. due to the freedom I gave him at a young age. Sure the cops came around once in a while to check on things due to a busybody neighbor but not much came of it. I always knew where he generally was, had reasonable explanations over why I was letting him do what he was doing, was never high or drunk when the cops showed, etc. Yet if you asked any of the other parents in his classrooms? They would have bet money in the other direction and would have been aghast at what he did on a daily basis alone.
Yes, there are horror stories here and there when everything goes off the rails. I was prepared for such a fight if needed.
Luckily there were a couple kids in the neighborhood who had parents who were either not present or somewhat like minded. So he still had a few compatriots not utterly cowed by the Karens of the world to go get into (and out of!) trouble with.
Two daughters, both born in the 90's. Yes, I encouraged the same kind of freedom, but they weren't quite as adventurous as their dad. I thought they were a bit more adventurous than most of their friends, though.
A large part of the protectiveness of children is about the fertility trend. Parents with four children think about safety very differently than parents with probably ever only one. I saw this on my home street growing up. The girl next door was an only child who her parents hovered over relentlessly. When I was ten, with three brothers, and told mom I was going exploring, she made sure I had a quarter to phone home if my bike got a flat and told me to have fun.
We joke about having a main child and an emergency backup child, but deep down it's not a joke, it changes our behavior.
Eh, I don't think that's it. I come from a two-child household, and our parents weren't particularly precious about our safety in the neighborhood in the 80s and 90s. I knew plenty of other two- and one-child families that were the same.
Yeah, as an only child it's a weird burden to be the guy who makes or breaks the whole bloodline. No pressure right ;)
But that pressure is on the parents too. There's this weird two-way feedback loop.
Single child household has made parenting culture neurotic. Because if you screw it up it ends your entire bloodline.
But the neurotic attitude makes child rearing feel like such a burden, people can hardly imagine doing it more than once...
I am told this attitude does not produce beneficial outcomes in the children either. Apparently people grow up healthier when their parents are relaxed.
I'm not sure if single child households have done this to parenting culture as much as neurotic culture/economic incentives have pushed single child households. When everyone is competing it makes sense to focus on one child as you don't want your child to be at a disadvantage vs those who can spend on tutors/extra curriculars/.... It's a problem in Italy and some eastern countries, a bad and anti-social evolution in my opinion but I doubt it's going to change.
This feels like assigning intent where economics is more correct: your priority is your children, but if you have three then by necessity you didn't multiply your attention or time in proportion.
Even going from one child to two.. suddenly you don't have numbers on your side in dealing with things.
people still think about bloodline when having kids or when caring about safety? I would think that would be the last thing to worry about with kids safety.
Well they tried to minimize the number of kids until they hit middle age and suddenly want to maximize the number of grandkids. Unfortunately it doesn't work like that ;)
For those who grew up in a time and place where you were able to wander without supervision, how far away were your friends? Follow up, how much traveling did you do on your own?
For me growing up in 2000's suburbia, the closest kids around my age that I knew of were about one mile and major road crossing away, but to get to a friend it could be a lot more. I think kids out in a group doesn't feel like a safety concern to most people even now, but if they have to travel 5+ miles solo just to meet up with one other person, that's where the issue might lie.
The article is confused. The opinion is, it's so much safer _now_ than it was in the 1970s, it makes no sense to restrict children's wanderings.
But the article doesn't consider whether restricting children's wanderings is the REASON it is so much safer for children now.
"We have so many fire-safety rules in the building codes in Seattle. But get this: we haven't had any major fires since 1889! It's obvious we don't need these rules!"
It's true there is a cost to restricting children. But let's be a bit more realistic about the tradeoffs.
Tangential to risks raised in the article I guess, but I cannot understand something that's happening in the US: it's crazy how many demented people there are. That there is a market that captures children in order to traffick them for sex; that there are hundreds of people doing this regularly being wrapped up by LE raids, and dozens of children freed; that these raids happen on the frequency of weeks, or months; that the numbers on this in the United States are in the order of 100,000s per year (at least of missing/unaccounted I think). How can it be like this?
I just can't conceive it - how is this even a thing? What is the psychology of these adults doing this? How is the morality of this lacking? And how can there be so many people involved? Where is all this insanity coming from? How did it develop? How did it slip through the idea of safety in the neighborhood we used to have?
I don't understand how this is real, the scale is inconceivable (how can so many people be so totally demented) it's the craziest thing I cannot comprehend.
100,000/yr is insane, where are you getting that stat? Best I could find is ~250 abducted per year in the US, not specifically for trafficking. There are 200-300,000 reported missing per year but >90% are runaways and return.
There will be many sick people in a nation of hundreds of millions.
Stigmatizing mental help drives a lot of problems underground. So does our awkward immigration system that keeps all kinds of migrants in precarious positions, even legal agricultural laborers.
Our president has the strongest personal ties to the most prolific sex trafficker in recent decades, second only to Gladwell. Yet he has suffered no legal consequences for his association, nor even serious investigation. Epstein himself seemed afraid to name him under oath, and yet privately called him "the dog that hasn't barked". This leader of the nation bragged to journalists of sexually assauting people, and over 20 victims say it's true. And roughly half of the voting public still checks the box with his name on it.
This article may not address this, but many articles of this type by Lenore Skazeny and others do address it. IIRC the findings:
- stranger danger was worse in the 70s than it is now.
- safety in numbers was better in the 70s -- if all kids are outside it's more likely to be somebody else's kid that is snatched. If your kid is the only one, ...
- car danger was worse in the 70s. Cars are bigger/faster now, but there were more drunk drivers then. This varies widely by jurisdiction.
It's hard to balance the factors -- it's not clear whether or not it was safer to let your kids outside today than it was in the 70's.
I'm in my sixties and reflect sometimes on how much freedom I had as a kid, and why things have changed so much in terms of risks parents are willing to accept.
One correlation with "safetyism" this article doesn't mention: the rise of the two income household (https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2014/04/08/after-d... for the US; the UK appears to be similar.) In reality when we kids were running wild about the town, someone was watching us out their windows. If we got into (or more likely caused :) ) a problem, adults, usually a housewife, would show up quickly from somewhere. Even when we were off in the woods there was a sense that we could find a house where a grown-up would help us if needed (like if some kid's little brother ruptured his spleen on a dare, which actually happened.)
Nobody would call Child Protective Services - you knew it was little Billy who threw that rock that hit Jimmy, so-and-so's kid. You would tell Billy's dad, who would make sure he didn't ever do _that_ again, and that would be the end of it. Now I imagine police and lawyers would be involved. It seems we don't have the informal social connections any more, which were largely driven by someone just being around.
The above link BTW shows that "only" 50% of mom's were stay-at-home in the 1970's. In my specific time and place, many of the moms who did work outside the home had jobs that revolved around the school schedule (i.e., working at the school, or some work schedule that allowed them to be home when the kids were not in school.) The ones with full time jobs like my single mother, supporting three kids through full-time work, were a rarity back then. Maybe my brothers and I had excessive freedom because there simply wasn't anyone to watch over us - fortunately we all turned out more or less OK :)
I have concerns in this area myself but I find the attempt to create an opposing ideology "safetyism" and then attribute unrelated stuff like trigger warnings to that ideology to be unnecessarily reductive.
I call this "Shitarticlism" and it includes OP's article and also a bunch of clickbait I read. And Microsoft Learn.
If I work from home I see tons of unaccompanied kids going to school in the morning. I live in what is statistically the most crime ridden area in my city. My toddler has a drive for independence that will probably lead to him doing this himself in a few short years just need to impress road safety on him a bit more.
I won't criticise actual parents - these are their children, their decision, their responsibility and their either regrets or appreciation later. That is a trade-off and they will see in about 20 years whether it was worthwhile. Even not having children I know parenting is difficult (I just remember how hard it was for my parents). However I definitely appreciate that I was allowed to wander through my town (in central Europe) when I was a child/teenager. Moreover - I regret being so afraid of everything and not exploring more. Maybe it was a time to have that fear so that I could overcome it in later stages of life. Maybe.
To be a devil's advocate - maybe lower frequency of crimes against children is a result of that red tape? Or maybe not. I don't know.
The point of the article is that children have less independence now even though cities are statistically safer.
Yet a lot of the comments here suggest that kids would have more independence if cities were safer (particularly from cars).
IMHO, the answer is to improve safety by teaching children how to navigate dangers. Teach children how to cross the road; teach children to be aware of distracted drivers; teach children about situations to avoid (e.g., being in a blind spot).
Waiting for cities to be sanitized theme parks before letting kids out of the house is how we got into this mess.
This is not a isolated phenomenon. Security measures for software products, for example, kept increasing making good old working software to be highly vulnerable in today's world. There are some islands that have un-contacted tribes. They can't survive if they move out of the island. In my childhood, there were some popular movie songs and stories which advised people to stay in villages, not to venture out to town-side and showed the scary stories of what happened to people who ventured out.
It's the context around you that is changing. Also, the digital divide is so strong that many old people and village folks see anything related to technology or complex online processes as alien things that they can't dare to deal with. They are basically living in the non-digital islands. The logins, MFA, password recovery, OTP, finding the correct web portal, filling in the right information - it's a nightmare for a common human.
The notion that children are not allowed to play outside within a couple of blocks of their home seems like a mass delusion to me.
However, I'm GenX and having all my friends and I roam the neighborhood from the time we got out of school until our parents got home from work with no supervision seems perfectly normal.
"Come home when the street lights come on" and television PSAs asking "It's nine o'clock, do you know where your children are?" were the norm in the 70's.
I have seen the opposite argument, such as kids having too much autonomy in so far as social media usage .Or just go on Instagram and you will see tons of examples of young adults taking steroids and other stuff. I'm sure the parents are aware of this, but meh.
Is likely due to how humans react to issues. They fix it or make a big deal to over fix it when someone gets hurt. The baseline risk shifts and people will get scared looking back doing a mental calculation: lower risk better then higher risk.
Stuff like training wheels, bike helmets when you are just doing leisure rides. Don't get me started with bike helmets, people wear them and do risker things, drivers drive less careful around them, and you get a false sense of superiority instead of being more careful. If you're on the road/off roading, sure, but now you can get fined in some place for not wearing is one small example of safetyism taking over.
Bike helmets mitigate one of the most serious and common forms of injury while riding bikes. You can fall or be hit by a car/tree branch anywhere. They don't prevent you from doing anything you would otherwise do.
I'm someone who advocates for rolling back helmet laws because they decrease ridership, but helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE, not overactive safetyism.
> but helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE
Sure. They should be widely available, cheap or free for kids, public awareness campaigns funded, etc.
> not overactive safetyism.
Not once they devolve into laws. That would be overactive safetyism with the second order effects worse than the cure - as you note earlier in your comment.
I know I simply stopped riding my bike altogether once my mom decided (as a young teen) out of the blue helmets were now required. That or I'd bike a block away, stash it in the bushes, and grab it on the way back home.
And for me it was simply comfort (sweaty!) and the fact I'd forget the damn thing everywhere and be forced to go back to get it/pay for one out of my allowance if I lost it.
Consider the risk compensation theory where people take bigger risks when they feel safer. Not sure how true it is with regards to bike helmets, though. I saw there are a few studies but don't have the time to read them.
I usually wear a helmet but am opposed to such laws not because they decrease ridership but because they decrease our freedom to do stupid shit.
To be fair, good noise cancelling headphones nowadays have "transparent" or "ambient aware" modes that actually electronically pipe the outside noise in.
(Whether the cyclists in question are actually using that feature, who knows?)
No idea about bicycle, but for motorcycles, integrated helmet headphones are a thing for long time. It maybe helps that a typical motorcycle helmet is quite noise-cancelling by itself, so one relies mostly on moving faster than traffic and if that fails, on mirrors and not on sound.
Besides being an mc person I always considered bicycle helmets a useless compromise in that they don't provide true protection like full-face motorcycle helmets do. You're still as likely to leave half of your face on the obstacle, so either don't bother or wear something that would prevent that.
That didn’t stop me from biking and exploring all over from age 6-7, which seems unthinkable now. I think it was mostly just more risk tolerance and less flashy warnings about danger. Like my dad biked around the same block so why not let me and there was not much more thought given to it.
Your suburb sounds nice but I guess Im just saying that level of community wasn’t necessary for kids to have freedom.
My 5 year old bikes to school, accompanied by an adult. It’s a bit more than half a mile away from the house.
I’d like to tell him he can do this on his own next year, but there’s a single intersection he has to cross that makes this difficult.
I’m not worried about him getting lost, abducted by a stranger or any host of movie plot scenarios. I’m worried about vehicles. Specifically pickup trucks and SUVs.
40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches. Today there are large numbers of vehicles twice that high, where even an adult can’t look the driver in the eye at close distances.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says:
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/vehicles-with-higher-more-v...I’ll probably let him bike alone anyway. But it’s a different equation because of the cars.
In another comment a few days ago I reminisced about how I was let running alone for hours on end when I was very young, and how that was normal.
It's a bit hard to reconcile both events now. I gained a lot of independence and had real unrestricted fun, but in hindsight I might've died a few times.
My idea, even if it might be traumatic, is to show the kid a few clips of people being hit by a car and getting mangled, with all the gore visible. Especially people following the laws and being careful. I miss /r/watchpeopledie as it was actually very educational.
Yeah, that's called living! I definitely got myself into one or two dangerous situations growing up. I couldn't imagine a childhood where everything is safety railings and padded walls.
My kids still roam, albeit with check-ins, and a lot of training about streets, driveways, and people.
I don't fault parents who reach for trackers or are uncomfortable with letting young kids out of sight. Even back in the day a lot of horrible things happened that weren't reported widely. A family member of mine was nearly abducted off their bike as a teen, if not for a nearby neighbor opening the door when she knocked looking for help.
The onus here is on municipal and federal governments to make roads and cars safer.
Governments should make roads safer but until they do, we should care for ourselves.
Imagine a sidewalk where the ground is crooked, full of holes and parts of the pavement sticking up. Should we blindly go on the sidewalk saying "the government should make it better" or should we exercise caution not to trip and fall?
The same logic applies to most dangerous things. Should the government make sure the food and supplements that are imported is safe? Of course. Does that mean you should order food and supplements from any shady site from a random 3rd world country with no reviews? Absolutely not.
The answer isn't binary. It's both. Governments are us, and we use that tool to manage collective resources like roads and sidewalks.
Obviously we do what we can in the moment. That doesn't mean those given power are free to neglect our collective property, or even sell out to the interests of those who would profit from pedestrian hostile "solutions".
When I was young my dad took me out to the curb and warned me about the dangers of being on the street. He pointed out how fast cars were going, how being hit could be really damaging, how animals not infrequently died from being hit. He also warned about getting excited while playing games and inadvertently running into the street. Even bicycles were a danger. Everything changes at the curb. Having a good imagination, I took the lesson to heart.
How much of our "safety" culture around kids is because people don't have basic life skills and aren't passing them on to kids?
Making eye contact and waiting for a vehicle to actually respond to the conditions at hand will eliminate the vast majority of "assumed" mistakes. Trying to be 100% aware of traffic and understanding that folks can be even bigger aggressive idiots is also part of it, but not perfect.
You just have to accept that in some rare instances the swiss cheese holes will line up regardless of what you do. And be at peace with it.
I suppose since this seems to logical and "not a big deal" to me means that I am extreme outlier on the subject.
In practice, if somebody is right in front of my grill where I can't see them, they were close enough for me to notice them before they got there without me having to be on high alert for people.
I'm not putting this here as a truck-vs-car thing or whatever, I'm just trying to people a realistic idea of where the blind spits are that actually cause trouble in my experience.
This is a big one for me. Not that long ago I just about got into a fistfight with some asswipe who drove his Ram through a crosswalk in a school zone, while children were crossing. With a crossing guard.
And somehow he thought I was the jerk for flipping him the bird as he went through.
Damn, I'm glad I got to grow up then.
"We've planned a trip to the woods for next week, it's expected to be minus twenty Celsius so please make sure they have appropriate clothing, hats, gloves, boots. Also we will have a fire so make sure they bring some sausages and a hunting knife so they can cut sticks for the fire and to hold the sausages over the fire."
No. 2 son came home with a plaster on his arm after one such excursion, I think when he was about ten, and explained that one of his friends had been careless with his knife. There was no drama, the teacher carries a first aid kit for precisely this scenario, his friend was firmly told to not be so stupid, and the teacher used it to explain to the class why knives need to be properly handled.
Also much cheaper than casts, physical therapy, and possibly permanent damage. An ounce of prevention and all that.
You can teach kids how to safely handle and use blades. This reduces -but does not prevent- accidents... and some kids will handle them carelessly despite the training. [0]
In other words, the fact that a kid on the trip was cut by his friend doesn't mean that there was no blade safety training prior to the trip.
[0] Source: In another life, I used to teach kids these sorts of safety courses.
When I was a child, I always had with me a multi-tool Swiss army knife, including at school, because I was very frequently building various things, or disassembling others to see how they were made. That early experience was very influential in becoming a successful engineer.
Decades later, as an adult, I was astonished to learn about the so-called "no tolerance" policies of many US schools, where the possession of even a small knife or even of less dangerous tools may be a reason for severe punishment.
Obviously, as a child, starting with the second day of school when 6-year old, I have always gone to the school and back, every day, alone, even if initially that was about a half hour of walking and then the later schools required long commuting by public transportation. Also none of my colleagues have ever been brought to school by someone else, and like me they did not have any contact with their parents since morning till late in the afternoon. All this was considered normal at that time.
Northern Spain? (Maybe francophone Swiss? Southern France? Belgium?)
(Pardon me for being presumptuous)
Imho school admins need to have skin in the bullying game. Bullying seems to be a natural (=inevitable) outcome of kids exploring social status outside the normative system of rules. I have always been fascinated with how bullies justify (sometimes "subconsciously") their own behaviour, and how these justifications mirror those "adult" rules..
An administration that shows the kids it's willing to place _its own status_ at risk might earn their loyalty.
(By contrast, the American edu system you speak of prioritises maximising its own safety hence the -ism suffix)
I'm hunting for real world examples of such. It seems that you might have encountered them!
In high school, many kids had rifles and shotguns in their cars to go hunting after school. Then we were old enough to keep our mouths shut haha.
When I was a boy I wanted a pocket knife b/c a friend got one and I saw it as useful. My Dad vetoed that until....I joined the Boy Scouts! Mom paid for a new official BSA knife along with the uniform. I promptly cut myself once with the knife, despite warnings from Dad. Doing so is a rite of passage for a knife-owner, I believe.
Fast forward to today. I've almost always carried a pocket knife and found it enormously useful. For my ~30th birthday my Dad finally bought me an Uncle Henry's 3-blade pocket knife about 3" long. It is finely made, always sharp, but difficult to fiddle with and not really very practical. I think of it as his acknowledgment that I am ready to carry a knife!8-) I'm glad I didn't have to ask him for a penis, though!
That little knife always sits atop my file cabinet. Someday I'll pass it along to someone else to perplex them. And I carry a folder of my own choice in my pocket.
200yr ago they'd have used some Victorian morals bullshit or religion to the same end.
Yea, the problem isn't that we don't want to give kids the freedom we had as kids. The problem is the nosy public that won't mind their own business and instead call the cops when they see someone out just playing. Not willing to risk involvement with poorly-trained, amped-up, armed law enforcement.
Don't know where you're from, but where I am people love to state this but it's almost never true. Much like how everyone thinks there was some kidnapping epidemic in the US in the 90's which started the whole stranger danger junk.
I was told my kid would have CPS called on me, the cops arresting me, etc. due to the freedom I gave him at a young age. Sure the cops came around once in a while to check on things due to a busybody neighbor but not much came of it. I always knew where he generally was, had reasonable explanations over why I was letting him do what he was doing, was never high or drunk when the cops showed, etc. Yet if you asked any of the other parents in his classrooms? They would have bet money in the other direction and would have been aghast at what he did on a daily basis alone.
Yes, there are horror stories here and there when everything goes off the rails. I was prepared for such a fight if needed.
Luckily there were a couple kids in the neighborhood who had parents who were either not present or somewhat like minded. So he still had a few compatriots not utterly cowed by the Karens of the world to go get into (and out of!) trouble with.
We joke about having a main child and an emergency backup child, but deep down it's not a joke, it changes our behavior.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heir_and_spare
But that pressure is on the parents too. There's this weird two-way feedback loop.
Single child household has made parenting culture neurotic. Because if you screw it up it ends your entire bloodline.
But the neurotic attitude makes child rearing feel like such a burden, people can hardly imagine doing it more than once...
I am told this attitude does not produce beneficial outcomes in the children either. Apparently people grow up healthier when their parents are relaxed.
Even going from one child to two.. suddenly you don't have numbers on your side in dealing with things.
For me growing up in 2000's suburbia, the closest kids around my age that I knew of were about one mile and major road crossing away, but to get to a friend it could be a lot more. I think kids out in a group doesn't feel like a safety concern to most people even now, but if they have to travel 5+ miles solo just to meet up with one other person, that's where the issue might lie.
Then when I was ~12 we moved further away. Probably 3-4 kilometers and I would still ride in.
I had friends scattered all over the area between my place and school but I never needed any assistance from them.
But the article doesn't consider whether restricting children's wanderings is the REASON it is so much safer for children now.
"We have so many fire-safety rules in the building codes in Seattle. But get this: we haven't had any major fires since 1889! It's obvious we don't need these rules!"
It's true there is a cost to restricting children. But let's be a bit more realistic about the tradeoffs.
I just can't conceive it - how is this even a thing? What is the psychology of these adults doing this? How is the morality of this lacking? And how can there be so many people involved? Where is all this insanity coming from? How did it develop? How did it slip through the idea of safety in the neighborhood we used to have?
I don't understand how this is real, the scale is inconceivable (how can so many people be so totally demented) it's the craziest thing I cannot comprehend.
Stigmatizing mental help drives a lot of problems underground. So does our awkward immigration system that keeps all kinds of migrants in precarious positions, even legal agricultural laborers.
Our president has the strongest personal ties to the most prolific sex trafficker in recent decades, second only to Gladwell. Yet he has suffered no legal consequences for his association, nor even serious investigation. Epstein himself seemed afraid to name him under oath, and yet privately called him "the dog that hasn't barked". This leader of the nation bragged to journalists of sexually assauting people, and over 20 victims say it's true. And roughly half of the voting public still checks the box with his name on it.
Ghislaine Maxwell, I suppose you meant.
- stranger danger was worse in the 70s than it is now. - safety in numbers was better in the 70s -- if all kids are outside it's more likely to be somebody else's kid that is snatched. If your kid is the only one, ... - car danger was worse in the 70s. Cars are bigger/faster now, but there were more drunk drivers then. This varies widely by jurisdiction.
It's hard to balance the factors -- it's not clear whether or not it was safer to let your kids outside today than it was in the 70's.
One correlation with "safetyism" this article doesn't mention: the rise of the two income household (https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2014/04/08/after-d... for the US; the UK appears to be similar.) In reality when we kids were running wild about the town, someone was watching us out their windows. If we got into (or more likely caused :) ) a problem, adults, usually a housewife, would show up quickly from somewhere. Even when we were off in the woods there was a sense that we could find a house where a grown-up would help us if needed (like if some kid's little brother ruptured his spleen on a dare, which actually happened.)
Nobody would call Child Protective Services - you knew it was little Billy who threw that rock that hit Jimmy, so-and-so's kid. You would tell Billy's dad, who would make sure he didn't ever do _that_ again, and that would be the end of it. Now I imagine police and lawyers would be involved. It seems we don't have the informal social connections any more, which were largely driven by someone just being around.
The above link BTW shows that "only" 50% of mom's were stay-at-home in the 1970's. In my specific time and place, many of the moms who did work outside the home had jobs that revolved around the school schedule (i.e., working at the school, or some work schedule that allowed them to be home when the kids were not in school.) The ones with full time jobs like my single mother, supporting three kids through full-time work, were a rarity back then. Maybe my brothers and I had excessive freedom because there simply wasn't anyone to watch over us - fortunately we all turned out more or less OK :)
By beating the child?
I call this "Shitarticlism" and it includes OP's article and also a bunch of clickbait I read. And Microsoft Learn.
If I work from home I see tons of unaccompanied kids going to school in the morning. I live in what is statistically the most crime ridden area in my city. My toddler has a drive for independence that will probably lead to him doing this himself in a few short years just need to impress road safety on him a bit more.
To be a devil's advocate - maybe lower frequency of crimes against children is a result of that red tape? Or maybe not. I don't know.
Yet a lot of the comments here suggest that kids would have more independence if cities were safer (particularly from cars).
IMHO, the answer is to improve safety by teaching children how to navigate dangers. Teach children how to cross the road; teach children to be aware of distracted drivers; teach children about situations to avoid (e.g., being in a blind spot).
Waiting for cities to be sanitized theme parks before letting kids out of the house is how we got into this mess.
It's the context around you that is changing. Also, the digital divide is so strong that many old people and village folks see anything related to technology or complex online processes as alien things that they can't dare to deal with. They are basically living in the non-digital islands. The logins, MFA, password recovery, OTP, finding the correct web portal, filling in the right information - it's a nightmare for a common human.
However, I'm GenX and having all my friends and I roam the neighborhood from the time we got out of school until our parents got home from work with no supervision seems perfectly normal.
"Come home when the street lights come on" and television PSAs asking "It's nine o'clock, do you know where your children are?" were the norm in the 70's.
In general there is excessive alarmism, and the internet makes it possible.
Stuff like training wheels, bike helmets when you are just doing leisure rides. Don't get me started with bike helmets, people wear them and do risker things, drivers drive less careful around them, and you get a false sense of superiority instead of being more careful. If you're on the road/off roading, sure, but now you can get fined in some place for not wearing is one small example of safetyism taking over.
I'm someone who advocates for rolling back helmet laws because they decrease ridership, but helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE, not overactive safetyism.
Especially with E-bikes, which are operated at higher average speeds.
Sure. They should be widely available, cheap or free for kids, public awareness campaigns funded, etc.
> not overactive safetyism.
Not once they devolve into laws. That would be overactive safetyism with the second order effects worse than the cure - as you note earlier in your comment.
I know I simply stopped riding my bike altogether once my mom decided (as a young teen) out of the blue helmets were now required. That or I'd bike a block away, stash it in the bushes, and grab it on the way back home.
And for me it was simply comfort (sweaty!) and the fact I'd forget the damn thing everywhere and be forced to go back to get it/pay for one out of my allowance if I lost it.
I usually wear a helmet but am opposed to such laws not because they decrease ridership but because they decrease our freedom to do stupid shit.
Besides being an mc person I always considered bicycle helmets a useless compromise in that they don't provide true protection like full-face motorcycle helmets do. You're still as likely to leave half of your face on the obstacle, so either don't bother or wear something that would prevent that.