What I see in my deep suburbia is just far less interest in wandering past the front yard, because there's nothing to do: House after house where no front yard has anything for anyone, and quite long distances before you get somewhere you might be welcome, or have a chair.
When my son, a pre-teen at the time went to Spain with me, things were quite different: A small town that even had stores targeting kids, places to sit everywhere, things to see, other people walking too. He could even go to the beach and be fine, as there's lifeguards. By the second week of the summer, you'd see group of new friends hanging out with no parents, just going back home for meals and sleep.
Build environments where children can be independent, and they might even want to be. But it's amazing how much modern-ish suburbia just has no place for you to even exist without a car.
100% this. Every time someone visits me in my city home, they comment on how nice it must be able to walk to school, the ice cream shop, the library, the playground full of other kids who walked or biked there, or just see other people out and about. But, they say, they could never live in the city. It's too dangerous. Cars are dangerous. No sidewalks on 50mph roads are dangerous. Loneliness is dangerous. And yes, there are bad parts of town where the people are dangerous too. But life is full of safety vs. living tradeoffs. We made ours. They made theirs.
I live in walking distance of all these things, and the farthest I’ve gotten my kid to do things alone is to walk to and from school (a whole 8 minutes). But even in my dense neighborhood, it’s not dense enough, kids are hardly at the playground unless it’s nice out, the ice cream shop is a bit too expensive for kids on their own, the 7-11 is probably the sketchiest place they could go to. I’m not really sure what we are missing, but it’s way different compared to when we are in China and there is a whole mall next door.
Even in the early 2000s people were forced to be outside because the inside was boring. This was supercharged in the 70s. That’s no longer the case. People have endless, on demand entertainment inside now.
You just listed some of the reasons why I moved from San Francisco to Venice, Italy. I have a young kid and I hope he'll enjoy the village-like, car-free environment here.
Isn't Venice as problematic/artificial as suburbia in its own way? If you're saying car-free then I assume you mean the centre, where the real population is tiny (compared to San Francisco at <50k), aging, declining amd dwarfed by tourists. My understanding is that it's increasingly meeting needs of tens of millions of ultra short term visitors rather than real communities. It feels like there must be a wide range of happy medium places in between.
Prior to the rise of the internet, suburbia was a lot more communal: block bbqs, kids playing at the neighbours house, checking out the newest game-station/toy/pool etc.
Towns and cities with less car dependency more gracefully transitioned into the post-internet world, where 3rd places and community are easy to maintain since the library/bar/office/school is a 5 min walk away.
> Build environments where children can be independent, and they might even want to be.
We _have_ built these environments, you just choose not to live in them. Move to a city or other urban center. Your house might be smaller, and you might have to take public transit sometimes, but you will be happier and there will be no shortage of places for your kid to walk.
Yes, it's exactly these (not necessarily wrong, but exaggerated) preconceptions about big cities that drive people to not let their kids outside. Thanks for providing a sample that supports the article's point!
Rural people are absurdly scared of own imagination. And if urban people talked about rural areas the way they talk about cities, we would get 234 think pieces about how inappropriate and out of touch it is.
Idk, I’ve seen Deliverance, plus all those horror movies that start out on some desolate road in the woods at night. Seems likely a fair depiction of country living.
No thank you, I’ll stay in Manhattan and not get kidnapped and murdered by monsters tyvm.
If you actually look at US statistics, per capital crime rates are often higher in rural areas than urban one. Just, you know, more people in cities so bigger numbers.
It’s not just innocent ignorance of statistics. There’s also deliberate lying in mass media, both for partisan political goals and simply because sensationalism attracts eyeballs.
There are major US cities where this is not the cae. Atlanta is an example. I've lived there without a car, but as a single man in my early 30s. It was not easy even for someone committed to the task. Even in the most "urban" parts of the city there are very few stores within walking distance, very few people on the street, and the distances are huge. Public transport (how kids in cities get around) is terrible. A kid might be able to walk to a park were he/she to live near one bit almost no one does.
Yeah I get that, the point I trying to (snarkily) make was that we have control over where we live and raise our families. People often opine about the wonders of urbanism but then move to the suburbs!
But yeah I've heard that about Atlanta and a few other cities (mostly in Texas).
While Spain does sound lovely, I don’t think “having anything to do” was really in my generation/demographic’s mindset while we roamed around the neighborhood. This was small town Midwest in the 90s. We just roamed around doing nothing.
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.
> Like my dad biked around the same block so why not let me and there was not much more thought given to it.
I’m convinced that’s more of the explanation than we realize. Adults in a lot of places move about almost entirely by car and often look down on other modes of transportation, to the extent that having your kid walk or bike while you have a car in the driveway seems wrong, like if you shopped at Whole Foods for yourself and fed your kids on gruel.
From the age of 5 in my town everyone would just let all us kids out to play and we'd just come home when it was getting dark. There were no cell phones. We didn't even have a landline until I was 12. I'd walk the mile or so each way to school. Some days I'd get treated to the bus fare but I usually just spent it on candy and walked home anyway :D
Another aspect for sure is that parents did not think as much before too. Kids were given much more freedom while parents should probably have kept an eye on them a little more. I knew of countless domestic accidents that would probably not happen nowadays. Sure that made kids experiment more and all but we ended up with more dead kids too.
I say it every time on this topic, but the situation hasn't changed in 10 years so it holds true IMO. I agree, the big change is absolutely cars and street parking. My parents have lived in the same house for 40+ years (South Australia), in an area where every home has a driveway and garage/carport that can fit 2-3 cars combined.
When I was young, that block had maybe 1-2 cars parked on the street, visibility was good and you could kick a football and ride bikes out there safely. When I visit now, there are so many cars that it's sometimes hard to find a park. I would guess the bulk of it is residents who don't want to shuffle cars in the driveway or have their garage full of other stuff rather than the cars.
I would not want my kids playing out there unsupervised.
Is it not more people living per house? I can’t really imagine voluntarily street parking on a busy street to avoid car shuffling. Are there more cars per person now than in the 90s? I feel like parents had one car each back then and teens got cars at around the same rates they do now? But with housing prices going up like crazy everywhere it wouldn’t be surprising to me if there were more people per house than there used to be.
In Australia, the pattern over time is definitely more cars per person, and fewer occupants per household. Rate of change seems to be slowing on both counts but it's still getting worse, not better unfortunately.
I agree. I'm in Sydney and certainly the next phase of development going through my suburb is duplexes. Suddenly you've doubled the amount of cars on the same block, and the garage is 50/50 used for one of the cars or not.
I think that at least partly it's the consequence of the very same safetyism. If I look at my generation (in my sixties), we still start conversations with strangers, especially if they are our neighbours and things happen between us. But it doesn happen't between people in their thirties any more. And if I look at my students (highschool and college level), then for them it's very alien and even afraid of situation where they have to. Why? I guess they were not allowed to practice and explore this.
I grew up in a suburb like yours. I'm raising my kids in a suburb that's by and large the same.
The biggest difference, imo, is the number of families.
I lived on a small street with a cul-de-sac. Maybe 35 houses or so. At least half had kids aged 0-15.
I now live on a street about the same size with my kids. There is one house with ~7-10 year olds, two houses with 3-5, one house with a couple of teens, one house with a baby.
Nothing else really matters, you can't expect kid communities to self generate at these densities.
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.
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".
> It won't increase their visibility, obviously. It will make them think twice before going on that crosswalk.
Meanwhile in Shanghai, it tends to be a little too difficult to cross an entire street at once, so the way you cross is lane by lane, as if you were playing Frogger. (Except that you'll rest on lane dividers as opposed to right in the middle of a lane.)
Pedestrians getting run over while doing this is not a noticeable problem.
When I was in China I got nearly run over walking on green light because someone decided they were in a rush and run a red. It's apparently socially acceptable if you have enough money to afford the fines and you honk your horn while doing it. Unregulated crossings are another level of rolling the dice.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Had to jump in here to say: Don’t show children gore videos if you can help it. They’ll remember the horror more than the lesson. All it’ll do is make them calloused (or scared).
If you want something with a gut punch related to car safety, check out British vehicle PSA advertisements. Holy moly are those grim! They’re memorable, focused, and unflinching.
Personally, I’d go with some mini-documentaries or after-the-fact breakdowns put out by local American TV stations. They take it slow, film on location, and try to have a takeaway lesson.
I walked the mile or so each way to school from the age of 5. I'd usually never see another soul on the sidewalk, even though it was all rows of houses. There were plenty of cars about, and I had to cross a bunch of intersections, but I had some sense about me. All the kids had some vague story about knowing someone who had been run down by a car because they didn't look properly when crossing.
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.
> Its presence would likely lower the insurance premium significantly, due to a much lower chance of hitting someone right ahead of the vehicle.
Why? It's not like drivers have to pay up when they hit someone, as long as they weren't drunk. And in the unlikely event that a driver does get made to pay the big risk is medical bills, so the incentive is to make sure the car is set up to always kill anyone they hit.
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.
Agreed. I have a model 3 and a Lightning, and I’ve had more visibility issues on the model 3. Height is never the issue, it’s the ginormous A-pillars modern cars have.
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 hope you live in an area without nosy neighbors. The main issue is not that parents are willingly choosing to helicopter their kids. The main issue is that completely unrelated people are seeing kids in public alone, assuming neglect, and calling police. So, parents are helicoptering their kids under duress.
No wonder kids are being made to make do with alone time on digital devices. That's all we have left (and they're trying to control that too, for good and bad reasons).
I'm lobbying my city to make it safer to walk to school. But Traffic Engineers care only about the 85 percentile speed of car drivers and not equity in movement. Non-car users are not important in the United States to the only role cities have for managing road design.
"Safe Routes to School" are programs in the US and there's one here in Washington; Seattle has their own partial adoption of this, and I'm hoping to lobby my suburb into adopting it as well.
The school principal won't allow my son to walk home alone because of the traffic, but the traffic is only present because so many parents drive their kids to school.
> But Traffic Engineers care only about the 85 percentile speed of car drivers and not equity in movement.
i don't know how true this is. residents care about the speed of cars. the trend in government is more holistic public land allocation (ie street design) in almost all growing communities.
Transportation land area is something like 98% for automobiles, it's not like you could trend more to cars.
Here's things our traffic engineer told me:
1. It doesn't matter how fast the fastest cars are going or how many cars go by a certain point, only the 85pct is used in deciding whether to intervene "and that's the same as Shoreline, and Bothell, and Bellevue, and..."
2. A bunch of people will get pissed and raise hell if you dare take away some street parking to make it safer for people actually using the road. (I saw this around 35th Ave NE in Seattle) And they tend to get their way.
3. The whole city's budget for traffic safety is $10k.
4. In the last four years, the traffic safety program has resulted in a new stop sign.
5. Public roads are for everyone who drives and the people in the neighborhood get no say in it until the 85pct speed is more than 5 over the speed limit.
My biggest problem with number one is obviously 250 extra cars driving past my kid walking to school is 25x more dangerous than 10 cars, but because of 5 the city will do nothing to reduce people from all across the district driving through my little neighborhood to take a shortcut. Expect they'll spend some of that $10k buying signs for our yard which say "kids live here". Wow, thanks.
Seattle here, Ballard is ok but we still do a lot of dumb sh*t because of our car culture. We just aren’t very honest about speed, traffic density, and kid obscuring onstreet parking.
> 40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches
> 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 not sure that height matters for a young kid and, 40 years ago, there weren't abs and sensors that will brake for you. Plus, drunk driving rates were much, much higher and the vehicles were significantly heavier.
I don't have any insight on the answer but I'd be curious if the rates of kids dying as pedestrians/cyclists have gone up (per mile, which would be hard to track down and sway the numbers significantly).
Small nitpick, abs isn't there to reduce braking distance, it just prevent someone who panic brakes from losing the ability to steer. Technically it even increases minimum braking distance a bit, but if someone is locking their brakes up anyways they were already incapable of achieving that peak braking performance because you need to maintain about 10% wheel slip and most drivers are not practised race car drivers.
Our local school is right across the street from a busy arterial and we lost our only crossing guard a few years ago (he retired, as a retiree already, and no one wanted the min wage job). I still let him cross alone because he is 9 now (8 when he started walking alone) and there are lots of kids and adults around when school starts and ends, and we aren’t known for lots of SUVs (although delivery and work trucks aren’t uncommon). It still puts me on nerve a bit.
It’s too bad the district no longer lets middle school or high school students do crossing guard jobs anymore.
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 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.
I remember one vacation to Paris as a kid, maybe 12 years old. There was a science museum I wanted to see, so my parents stuffed a bunch of Francs into my hands and wished me luck and shuffled me out of the hotel room. You have to learn these skills at some point. I had a thoroughly lovely day pressing random buttons on random exhibits and I can still remember it all clearly now over 30 years later.
I'm loathe to imagine what kind of trouble they might get into now for that.
One of the most underrated things about living in a Western country compared to say India is that your 13 year old daughter can ride a bicycle to field hockey practice without ending up in a snuff movie.
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.
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.
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.
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!
When I was a child, bullying happened, but it was infrequent. Teachers would punish it severely if reported, but snitching was considered rather shameful, so it was more frequent that bullying was handled by the weaker bullied children teaming against the stronger bully.
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 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.
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.
I think you’re a great grandparent and gave my son the same thing at 10 plus encouraged my daughter to practice knife skills whenever she can with appropriately sized blades and powerful shears. I can’t imagine nerfing the world for kids that age and then expecting them to learn how to gauge risk appropriately a few years later when they start driving and taking on major decisions. I do understand keeping the knives out of school, but that seems like a simple oversight that should have no police involved unless actual danger occurred.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
I think parents just have more time and energy to devote to an only child. Consequently they pour all of it into that child. Three kids? If they don't die or end up in prison, you've succeeded. (that last part is a joke, but the overall idea holds I think).
I can't help but think that thee's some sort of tragedy of the commons type thing going on here. Probably the wrong metaphor. But: it seems like a lot of what the article is getting at is that we can all intuitively agree that the population of children in society being more independent is good for a healthy society (or not just intuitively I suppose, he backs it up with mental health data). Any given parent can know this. But even if you know it, can you knowingly accept doing something that causes a 1% chance of losing your child in exchange for a 99% chance that they'll grow up better off? It seems most parents can't.
Definitely some truth to this. I'm the oldest of five. Most of my friends when I was little seemed to have older siblings and they could do what they liked while my parents hovered over me a bit more. By the time my youngest sibling was born that completely changed. My little brother was allowed out with us pretty much as soon as he could walk!
But, Japanese, Germans and Polis are not that overprotective and dont have many children. If it was about fertility, you would see countries with low fertility all move toward overprotectiveness.
But, that overprotectiveness is very much an American phenomenon - exported a little but not that much yet.
Modern establishments (businesses/governments) work by making people afraid. It is truly, the age of fear.
Let me quote M.I.B
>There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT!
At some point we figured that there is good money to be made by making the people perpetually aware of how they or their loved one are going to die 24x7!
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.
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.
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.
OK I did some searching and found I'm no expert and I didn't understand the numbers: I think I put the 100K+ "unaccompanied children" at border each year together with the FBI raid cadence and thought it was all trafficking. Quick searching indicates: there's maybe 85K "lost contact" children after placement from border, which also doesn't mean what I thought; and FBI/LE recovered maybe 1000s of trafficked children in last decade. Still unimaginably large but not the numbers I thought I'd heard.
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.
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 :)
It's not necessary, but it might be necessary for the child to believe that's a possibility. It's like armies. The presence and the possibility do most of the work. My grandfather didn't beat his children, but e.g. spanks and being hit on the butt by a belt were permissible by society. He didn't do that AFAIK, but the children knew it was possible, and a single look from him sufficed to get them to stop misbehaving.
He's very loved by them, BTW. I didn't meet him, but they always talk with admiration of him.
This still happens in most European countries, kids go to school on their own, you see them all over the place on public transports, play with their friends somewhere back home and then are eventually back.
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.
I had some friends within half a mile or we'd meet at a park. But in high school, my friends were a few miles away and across a few highways. We needed to drive. Idk if this counts but my parents did let my older brother with a license take me places in his car.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, my friends were within a 2 block radius, so about 300 yards. Tack on another block each year and that was the standard walking distance to a friend's house.
And of course in high school there was the standard minimum of one student death per year per school, usually related to driving. So teen deaths seemed more prevalent than younger ages.
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.
Is not rocket science, if everyone has enough, then everyone has something to contribute, then a nicer environment flourishes. Why do you think the finland example is there. Inequality create problems
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.
> But the kindest thing I can do, the thing that will actually make my daughters resilient, is to let the small problems happen.
I live in an average California suburb. Average priced homes, relatively quiet street, not really any disorder or even appearance of disorder. When I let my kids play in the front yard - minding themselves - neighbors call the cops. I've written about this before, and it's not simply a matter of choosing to let your own kids have more freedom.
There are simply no kids outside anymore so if yours are, they stand out. Kids playing outside is now so outside the norm and neighbors on edge that they will call the police. The police will not ignore it, and you or your kids will have to contend with a police encounter. This has the effect of making parents perform a calculus every time their kids ask to play outside.
If there's a way to get neighbors to feel that kids playing in yards is normal, I'm all ears.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
> You're still as likely to leave half of your face on the obstacle [when wearing a bicycle helmet], so either don't bother or wear something that would prevent that.
With surgical assistance, I can heal from leaving half of my face on an obstacle. Healing from leaving a big chunk of my brain on an obstacle [0] is -at best- quite a bit more involved.
People use helmets because they are forced to. Not because they actually believe they are doing something dangerous while casually biking to work. People who got convinced casual biking is dangerous just drive while listening to audio book.
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.
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.
> 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.
> Bike helmets mitigate one of the most serious and common forms of injury while riding bikes.
A form that is still extremely rare. No-one seriously advocates helmets for car passengers, for example, even though the injury rates are very similar.
> be hit by a car
Cars don't hit people, drivers hit people.
> They don't prevent you from doing anything you would otherwise do.
They're annoying enough that they do, in practice if not in theory. To say nothing of the fact that drivers pass you closer and more dangerously if you're wearing a helmet.
> helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE, not overactive safetyism.
What I see in my deep suburbia is just far less interest in wandering past the front yard, because there's nothing to do: House after house where no front yard has anything for anyone, and quite long distances before you get somewhere you might be welcome, or have a chair.
When my son, a pre-teen at the time went to Spain with me, things were quite different: A small town that even had stores targeting kids, places to sit everywhere, things to see, other people walking too. He could even go to the beach and be fine, as there's lifeguards. By the second week of the summer, you'd see group of new friends hanging out with no parents, just going back home for meals and sleep.
Build environments where children can be independent, and they might even want to be. But it's amazing how much modern-ish suburbia just has no place for you to even exist without a car.
100% this. Every time someone visits me in my city home, they comment on how nice it must be able to walk to school, the ice cream shop, the library, the playground full of other kids who walked or biked there, or just see other people out and about. But, they say, they could never live in the city. It's too dangerous. Cars are dangerous. No sidewalks on 50mph roads are dangerous. Loneliness is dangerous. And yes, there are bad parts of town where the people are dangerous too. But life is full of safety vs. living tradeoffs. We made ours. They made theirs.
I live in walking distance of all these things, and the farthest I’ve gotten my kid to do things alone is to walk to and from school (a whole 8 minutes). But even in my dense neighborhood, it’s not dense enough, kids are hardly at the playground unless it’s nice out, the ice cream shop is a bit too expensive for kids on their own, the 7-11 is probably the sketchiest place they could go to. I’m not really sure what we are missing, but it’s way different compared to when we are in China and there is a whole mall next door.
Is go shopping in malls what kids should do?
Even in the early 2000s people were forced to be outside because the inside was boring. This was supercharged in the 70s. That’s no longer the case. People have endless, on demand entertainment inside now.
You just listed some of the reasons why I moved from San Francisco to Venice, Italy. I have a young kid and I hope he'll enjoy the village-like, car-free environment here.
Isn't Venice as problematic/artificial as suburbia in its own way? If you're saying car-free then I assume you mean the centre, where the real population is tiny (compared to San Francisco at <50k), aging, declining amd dwarfed by tourists. My understanding is that it's increasingly meeting needs of tens of millions of ultra short term visitors rather than real communities. It feels like there must be a wide range of happy medium places in between.
Prior to the rise of the internet, suburbia was a lot more communal: block bbqs, kids playing at the neighbours house, checking out the newest game-station/toy/pool etc.
Towns and cities with less car dependency more gracefully transitioned into the post-internet world, where 3rd places and community are easy to maintain since the library/bar/office/school is a 5 min walk away.
> Build environments where children can be independent, and they might even want to be.
We _have_ built these environments, you just choose not to live in them. Move to a city or other urban center. Your house might be smaller, and you might have to take public transit sometimes, but you will be happier and there will be no shortage of places for your kid to walk.
Happier? In a city? Have you been to big US cities? Angry people, crime, homeless, mentally ill people, lack of police.
>Have you been to big US cities?
Yes, I live in one, and it's a city that often gets used as the poster child for urban crime.
I don't feel in danger. What I am most worried about when walking with my kids outside is them getting hit by a car.
Yes, it's exactly these (not necessarily wrong, but exaggerated) preconceptions about big cities that drive people to not let their kids outside. Thanks for providing a sample that supports the article's point!
Rural people are absurdly scared of own imagination. And if urban people talked about rural areas the way they talk about cities, we would get 234 think pieces about how inappropriate and out of touch it is.
Idk, I’ve seen Deliverance, plus all those horror movies that start out on some desolate road in the woods at night. Seems likely a fair depiction of country living.
No thank you, I’ll stay in Manhattan and not get kidnapped and murdered by monsters tyvm.
No one wants to live in cities any more. They’re too crowded, housing is too expensive, and the traffic is too bad.
If you actually look at US statistics, per capital crime rates are often higher in rural areas than urban one. Just, you know, more people in cities so bigger numbers.
It’s not just innocent ignorance of statistics. There’s also deliberate lying in mass media, both for partisan political goals and simply because sensationalism attracts eyeballs.
There are major US cities where this is not the cae. Atlanta is an example. I've lived there without a car, but as a single man in my early 30s. It was not easy even for someone committed to the task. Even in the most "urban" parts of the city there are very few stores within walking distance, very few people on the street, and the distances are huge. Public transport (how kids in cities get around) is terrible. A kid might be able to walk to a park were he/she to live near one bit almost no one does.
Yeah I get that, the point I trying to (snarkily) make was that we have control over where we live and raise our families. People often opine about the wonders of urbanism but then move to the suburbs!
But yeah I've heard that about Atlanta and a few other cities (mostly in Texas).
Americans used to drop off their kids at the mall but apparently even that's gone?
Spain sounds like a child's paradise. Too bad their birth rates are one of the lowest in Europe (and in the world) at around 1.1 births per woman.
While Spain does sound lovely, I don’t think “having anything to do” was really in my generation/demographic’s mindset while we roamed around the neighborhood. This was small town Midwest in the 90s. We just roamed around doing nothing.
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.
> Like my dad biked around the same block so why not let me and there was not much more thought given to it.
I’m convinced that’s more of the explanation than we realize. Adults in a lot of places move about almost entirely by car and often look down on other modes of transportation, to the extent that having your kid walk or bike while you have a car in the driveway seems wrong, like if you shopped at Whole Foods for yourself and fed your kids on gruel.
From the age of 5 in my town everyone would just let all us kids out to play and we'd just come home when it was getting dark. There were no cell phones. We didn't even have a landline until I was 12. I'd walk the mile or so each way to school. Some days I'd get treated to the bus fare but I usually just spent it on candy and walked home anyway :D
Another aspect for sure is that parents did not think as much before too. Kids were given much more freedom while parents should probably have kept an eye on them a little more. I knew of countless domestic accidents that would probably not happen nowadays. Sure that made kids experiment more and all but we ended up with more dead kids too.
I say it every time on this topic, but the situation hasn't changed in 10 years so it holds true IMO. I agree, the big change is absolutely cars and street parking. My parents have lived in the same house for 40+ years (South Australia), in an area where every home has a driveway and garage/carport that can fit 2-3 cars combined.
When I was young, that block had maybe 1-2 cars parked on the street, visibility was good and you could kick a football and ride bikes out there safely. When I visit now, there are so many cars that it's sometimes hard to find a park. I would guess the bulk of it is residents who don't want to shuffle cars in the driveway or have their garage full of other stuff rather than the cars.
I would not want my kids playing out there unsupervised.
Is it not more people living per house? I can’t really imagine voluntarily street parking on a busy street to avoid car shuffling. Are there more cars per person now than in the 90s? I feel like parents had one car each back then and teens got cars at around the same rates they do now? But with housing prices going up like crazy everywhere it wouldn’t be surprising to me if there were more people per house than there used to be.
In Australia, the pattern over time is definitely more cars per person, and fewer occupants per household. Rate of change seems to be slowing on both counts but it's still getting worse, not better unfortunately.
It's more cars per person yeah - more people working per household, more car dependency, and cars becoming cheaper.
I agree. I'm in Sydney and certainly the next phase of development going through my suburb is duplexes. Suddenly you've doubled the amount of cars on the same block, and the garage is 50/50 used for one of the cars or not.
I think that at least partly it's the consequence of the very same safetyism. If I look at my generation (in my sixties), we still start conversations with strangers, especially if they are our neighbours and things happen between us. But it doesn happen't between people in their thirties any more. And if I look at my students (highschool and college level), then for them it's very alien and even afraid of situation where they have to. Why? I guess they were not allowed to practice and explore this.
I grew up in a suburb like yours. I'm raising my kids in a suburb that's by and large the same.
The biggest difference, imo, is the number of families.
I lived on a small street with a cul-de-sac. Maybe 35 houses or so. At least half had kids aged 0-15.
I now live on a street about the same size with my kids. There is one house with ~7-10 year olds, two houses with 3-5, one house with a couple of teens, one house with a baby.
Nothing else really matters, you can't expect kid communities to self generate at these densities.
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:
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.
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 don't really understand how being scared/traumatized by videos of bike accidents will increase that child's visibility.
The onus here is on municipal and federal governments to make roads and cars safer.
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".
> It won't increase their visibility, obviously. It will make them think twice before going on that crosswalk.
Meanwhile in Shanghai, it tends to be a little too difficult to cross an entire street at once, so the way you cross is lane by lane, as if you were playing Frogger. (Except that you'll rest on lane dividers as opposed to right in the middle of a lane.)
Pedestrians getting run over while doing this is not a noticeable problem.
When I was in China I got nearly run over walking on green light because someone decided they were in a rush and run a red. It's apparently socially acceptable if you have enough money to afford the fines and you honk your horn while doing it. Unregulated crossings are another level of rolling the dice.
i agree with your latter point but i must state that kids probably should be scared of being squashed by american blimp trucks
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?
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
Or drivers could look where they're going.
And slow down too.
Yes, but as a pedestrian, do you want to bet your life on that?
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...
Where I live, overtaking at a crosswalk is illegal because of that risk.
If every driver abided by traffic laws at all times we would have a lot fewer accidents.
If you’re breaking the law it’s harder to call it an accident.
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.
In my experience, the practice of eye contact is natural and generally pretty effective. "I see you, you see me. Acknowledged."
or maybe drivers should stop being reckless and dangerous
Suggestions should remain in the realm of the possible.
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.
Drivers will still hit people who make eye contact. But besides that, this doesn’t help much if your kid is a runner.
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.
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.
Maybe show that to drivers, too, every time they have to renew their license.
Had to jump in here to say: Don’t show children gore videos if you can help it. They’ll remember the horror more than the lesson. All it’ll do is make them calloused (or scared).
If you want something with a gut punch related to car safety, check out British vehicle PSA advertisements. Holy moly are those grim! They’re memorable, focused, and unflinching.
Personally, I’d go with some mini-documentaries or after-the-fact breakdowns put out by local American TV stations. They take it slow, film on location, and try to have a takeaway lesson.
I walked the mile or so each way to school from the age of 5. I'd usually never see another soul on the sidewalk, even though it was all rows of houses. There were plenty of cars about, and I had to cross a bunch of intersections, but I had some sense about me. All the kids had some vague story about knowing someone who had been run down by a car because they didn't look properly when crossing.
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.
That would be a good start. Also they should put screens on the outside of the vehicle, so that the kids can see past the giant hood.
They need to just be banned on public roads. Require what Europe requires for pedestrian safety and visibility. They still have trucks.
> Its presence would likely lower the insurance premium significantly, due to a much lower chance of hitting someone right ahead of the vehicle.
Why? It's not like drivers have to pay up when they hit someone, as long as they weren't drunk. And in the unlikely event that a driver does get made to pay the big risk is medical bills, so the incentive is to make sure the car is set up to always kill anyone they hit.
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.
Agreed. I have a model 3 and a Lightning, and I’ve had more visibility issues on the model 3. Height is never the issue, it’s the ginormous A-pillars modern cars have.
Thats the ubfortunate side effect of cafe standards. They have had to make what people want bigger each year to keep it exempted
You might see if he would be OK with a flag on a stick attached to the back wheel.
> Specifically pickup trucks and SUVs
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.
Most popular vehicle for DUIs incidentally.
Unsurprising. Where I live, the Dodge Ram is the answer to the question "how can I signal to everyone else that I'm a piece of shit?"
All the tradies around here are mostly driving Fords and Tacomas.
I hope you live in an area without nosy neighbors. The main issue is not that parents are willingly choosing to helicopter their kids. The main issue is that completely unrelated people are seeing kids in public alone, assuming neglect, and calling police. So, parents are helicoptering their kids under duress.
No wonder kids are being made to make do with alone time on digital devices. That's all we have left (and they're trying to control that too, for good and bad reasons).
I'm lobbying my city to make it safer to walk to school. But Traffic Engineers care only about the 85 percentile speed of car drivers and not equity in movement. Non-car users are not important in the United States to the only role cities have for managing road design.
"Safe Routes to School" are programs in the US and there's one here in Washington; Seattle has their own partial adoption of this, and I'm hoping to lobby my suburb into adopting it as well.
The school principal won't allow my son to walk home alone because of the traffic, but the traffic is only present because so many parents drive their kids to school.
> But Traffic Engineers care only about the 85 percentile speed of car drivers and not equity in movement.
i don't know how true this is. residents care about the speed of cars. the trend in government is more holistic public land allocation (ie street design) in almost all growing communities.
Transportation land area is something like 98% for automobiles, it's not like you could trend more to cars.
Here's things our traffic engineer told me:
1. It doesn't matter how fast the fastest cars are going or how many cars go by a certain point, only the 85pct is used in deciding whether to intervene "and that's the same as Shoreline, and Bothell, and Bellevue, and..."
2. A bunch of people will get pissed and raise hell if you dare take away some street parking to make it safer for people actually using the road. (I saw this around 35th Ave NE in Seattle) And they tend to get their way.
3. The whole city's budget for traffic safety is $10k.
4. In the last four years, the traffic safety program has resulted in a new stop sign.
5. Public roads are for everyone who drives and the people in the neighborhood get no say in it until the 85pct speed is more than 5 over the speed limit.
My biggest problem with number one is obviously 250 extra cars driving past my kid walking to school is 25x more dangerous than 10 cars, but because of 5 the city will do nothing to reduce people from all across the district driving through my little neighborhood to take a shortcut. Expect they'll spend some of that $10k buying signs for our yard which say "kids live here". Wow, thanks.
Seattle here, Ballard is ok but we still do a lot of dumb sh*t because of our car culture. We just aren’t very honest about speed, traffic density, and kid obscuring onstreet parking.
> 40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches
> 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 not sure that height matters for a young kid and, 40 years ago, there weren't abs and sensors that will brake for you. Plus, drunk driving rates were much, much higher and the vehicles were significantly heavier.
I don't have any insight on the answer but I'd be curious if the rates of kids dying as pedestrians/cyclists have gone up (per mile, which would be hard to track down and sway the numbers significantly).
Obviously they haven’t gone up, all rates are massively down. They’re just a worrier.
It’s a perfect example from the article. “I totally would let my kid leave the house, but [made up danger]”
Small nitpick, abs isn't there to reduce braking distance, it just prevent someone who panic brakes from losing the ability to steer. Technically it even increases minimum braking distance a bit, but if someone is locking their brakes up anyways they were already incapable of achieving that peak braking performance because you need to maintain about 10% wheel slip and most drivers are not practised race car drivers.
Our local school is right across the street from a busy arterial and we lost our only crossing guard a few years ago (he retired, as a retiree already, and no one wanted the min wage job). I still let him cross alone because he is 9 now (8 when he started walking alone) and there are lots of kids and adults around when school starts and ends, and we aren’t known for lots of SUVs (although delivery and work trucks aren’t uncommon). It still puts me on nerve a bit.
It’s too bad the district no longer lets middle school or high school students do crossing guard jobs anymore.
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.
Damn, I'm glad I got to grow up then.
Do you have kids? Did you let them grow up the same way?
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.
I remember one vacation to Paris as a kid, maybe 12 years old. There was a science museum I wanted to see, so my parents stuffed a bunch of Francs into my hands and wished me luck and shuffled me out of the hotel room. You have to learn these skills at some point. I had a thoroughly lovely day pressing random buttons on random exhibits and I can still remember it all clearly now over 30 years later.
I'm loathe to imagine what kind of trouble they might get into now for that.
One of the most underrated things about living in a Western country compared to say India is that your 13 year old daughter can ride a bicycle to field hockey practice without ending up in a snuff movie.
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.
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.
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.
Sad.
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.
>colleagues
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!
Yeah, European.
When I was a child, bullying happened, but it was infrequent. Teachers would punish it severely if reported, but snitching was considered rather shameful, so it was more frequent that bullying was handled by the weaker bullied children teaming against the stronger bully.
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.
Good for you!
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.
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.
I think you’re a great grandparent and gave my son the same thing at 10 plus encouraged my daughter to practice knife skills whenever she can with appropriately sized blades and powerful shears. I can’t imagine nerfing the world for kids that age and then expecting them to learn how to gauge risk appropriately a few years later when they start driving and taking on major decisions. I do understand keeping the knives out of school, but that seems like a simple oversight that should have no police involved unless actual danger occurred.
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.
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.
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.
They are wired by biology to think like that, consciously or not
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 ;)
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.
Which parts are not a joke? If someone asked you who your main child was you’d be able to answer?
The classic phrase is "the heir and the spare".[1] That's why Prince Harry's bio was titled "Spare".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heir_and_spare
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.
I think parents just have more time and energy to devote to an only child. Consequently they pour all of it into that child. Three kids? If they don't die or end up in prison, you've succeeded. (that last part is a joke, but the overall idea holds I think).
I can't help but think that thee's some sort of tragedy of the commons type thing going on here. Probably the wrong metaphor. But: it seems like a lot of what the article is getting at is that we can all intuitively agree that the population of children in society being more independent is good for a healthy society (or not just intuitively I suppose, he backs it up with mental health data). Any given parent can know this. But even if you know it, can you knowingly accept doing something that causes a 1% chance of losing your child in exchange for a 99% chance that they'll grow up better off? It seems most parents can't.
Definitely some truth to this. I'm the oldest of five. Most of my friends when I was little seemed to have older siblings and they could do what they liked while my parents hovered over me a bit more. By the time my youngest sibling was born that completely changed. My little brother was allowed out with us pretty much as soon as he could walk!
But, Japanese, Germans and Polis are not that overprotective and dont have many children. If it was about fertility, you would see countries with low fertility all move toward overprotectiveness.
But, that overprotectiveness is very much an American phenomenon - exported a little but not that much yet.
We lost grownups.
Modern establishments (businesses/governments) work by making people afraid. It is truly, the age of fear.
Let me quote M.I.B
>There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT!
At some point we figured that there is good money to be made by making the people perpetually aware of how they or their loved one are going to die 24x7!
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.
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.
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.
Consider the many millions who are unable to call the cops when this happens. Please don't make me explain why
OK I did some searching and found I'm no expert and I didn't understand the numbers: I think I put the 100K+ "unaccompanied children" at border each year together with the FBI raid cadence and thought it was all trafficking. Quick searching indicates: there's maybe 85K "lost contact" children after placement from border, which also doesn't mean what I thought; and FBI/LE recovered maybe 1000s of trafficked children in last decade. Still unimaginably large but not the numbers I thought I'd heard.
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.
> second only to Gladwell
Ghislaine Maxwell, I suppose you meant.
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 :)
> 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.
By beating the child?
It's not necessary, but it might be necessary for the child to believe that's a possibility. It's like armies. The presence and the possibility do most of the work. My grandfather didn't beat his children, but e.g. spanks and being hit on the butt by a belt were permissible by society. He didn't do that AFAIK, but the children knew it was possible, and a single look from him sufficed to get them to stop misbehaving.
He's very loved by them, BTW. I didn't meet him, but they always talk with admiration of him.
This still happens in most European countries, kids go to school on their own, you see them all over the place on public transports, play with their friends somewhere back home and then are eventually back.
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.
I used to live a kilometer away from school and would walk/ride there myself from 9 or so years.
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.
I had some friends within half a mile or we'd meet at a park. But in high school, my friends were a few miles away and across a few highways. We needed to drive. Idk if this counts but my parents did let my older brother with a license take me places in his car.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, my friends were within a 2 block radius, so about 300 yards. Tack on another block each year and that was the standard walking distance to a friend's house.
And of course in high school there was the standard minimum of one student death per year per school, usually related to driving. So teen deaths seemed more prevalent than younger ages.
This popped up on my feed, and I thought it was fitting :)
TV interview with parents taking their little kids to see Alien (1979):
https://x.com/TheCinesthetic/status/2058998742506954766
https://xcancel.com/TheCinesthetic/status/205899874250695476...
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.
Is not rocket science, if everyone has enough, then everyone has something to contribute, then a nicer environment flourishes. Why do you think the finland example is there. Inequality create problems
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.
> But the kindest thing I can do, the thing that will actually make my daughters resilient, is to let the small problems happen.
I live in an average California suburb. Average priced homes, relatively quiet street, not really any disorder or even appearance of disorder. When I let my kids play in the front yard - minding themselves - neighbors call the cops. I've written about this before, and it's not simply a matter of choosing to let your own kids have more freedom.
There are simply no kids outside anymore so if yours are, they stand out. Kids playing outside is now so outside the norm and neighbors on edge that they will call the police. The police will not ignore it, and you or your kids will have to contend with a police encounter. This has the effect of making parents perform a calculus every time their kids ask to play outside.
If there's a way to get neighbors to feel that kids playing in yards is normal, I'm all ears.
I was a lot more permissive parent when my children were imaginary.
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.
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.
Maybe it's a local thing. I often see random kids roaming on the streets.
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.
The world didn’t get more dangerous. We got more afraid.
The people in my life who consume conservative media are afraid. They all say the world is so different now. It is. It's safer.
The people in my life who don't consume conservative media aren't so afraid...
History Channel has a good series about what gen X and baby boomers grew up with: https://www.history.com/shows/hazardous-history-with-henry-w...
In general there is excessive alarmism, and the internet makes it possible.
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.
And ppl on this very site "trying to interest my 3yo for programming by building fun little gagdets for her".
Ppl are so stupid, they need online courses for locating their wiener when peeing outside their regular zone...
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.
As a commuter cyclist of over 20 years, my favorite recent trend are is wearing a bike helmet and giant noise-cancelling headphones at the same time.
I’ve also seen this. It’s completely insane. Especially when I consider how many times a sound alerted me to a danger while I was on my bike.
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.
> You're still as likely to leave half of your face on the obstacle [when wearing a bicycle helmet], so either don't bother or wear something that would prevent that.
With surgical assistance, I can heal from leaving half of my face on an obstacle. Healing from leaving a big chunk of my brain on an obstacle [0] is -at best- quite a bit more involved.
[0] ...or a chunk of an obstacle in my brain...
People use helmets because they are forced to. Not because they actually believe they are doing something dangerous while casually biking to work. People who got convinced casual biking is dangerous just drive while listening to audio book.
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.
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.
> 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.
> but helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE, not overactive safetyism.
Especially with E-bikes, which are operated at higher average speeds.
> Bike helmets mitigate one of the most serious and common forms of injury while riding bikes.
A form that is still extremely rare. No-one seriously advocates helmets for car passengers, for example, even though the injury rates are very similar.
> be hit by a car
Cars don't hit people, drivers hit people.
> They don't prevent you from doing anything you would otherwise do.
They're annoying enough that they do, in practice if not in theory. To say nothing of the fact that drivers pass you closer and more dangerously if you're wearing a helmet.
> helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE, not overactive safetyism.
Quite the opposite.