Also, lots of plot points are ruined if people can just text each other, take photos, or record video as needed.
The reason why free range parenting has gone down so much can be seen in the series.
There was a believable scene in which one kid bullied another into taking an almost certainly fatal jump into the quarry, and was only saved by paranormal means.
A world in which more free-range parenting is the norm inherently implies a world in which kids more often pay the consequences of their actions, which can be death or maiming.
We, as a society, do not seem to have a stomach for this, to the point where free-range parenting has been equated with neglect.
I watched it last night so it's fresh in my mind. It was paranormal events that setup this scene and made the bully go to such extremes to begin with.
It was also one of the worst, least believable scenes in the series. The fact that he was so willing to jump, the threats the bully was giving, etc. It was just weak writing in an attempt to create a dramatic reunion. When your 11 years old it takes some time to build up the courage to make a safe jump from something like a bridge, let alone a possible fatal jump.
In the US one of the big problems is a culture of legal liability for every possible thing, and a general culture of fearfulness, excuse-making, and ass-covering instead of allowing moderate informed risks and dealing responsibly with the consequences. If you have too steep a slide, some kid is going to fall off and the parents will sue and bankrupt your town. If you let kids ride the bus by themselves, 1 kid in a million is going to get kidnapped and the parents will sue. Etc.
But there are surely other contributing factors: more families with 2 working parents (and more single parents) and in general less adults “hanging out” with an eye on their neighborhoods, a general degradation of community relationships and civic institutions, smaller family sizes (it’s much easier to chaperone 1 kid than 6), more middle-class angst about maximizing children’s future earning potential, more media attention on rare tragedies, communication improvements leading to less spontaneous social gatherings and more virtual socialization, increasing reliance on car transport and inaccessibility of unsupervised play spaces (especially undeveloped land), etc.
The video comes from FEE though, so it's obviously got a political bias behind it that explains it's opposition to safe spaces. People on the more socially conservative end of the spectrum don't seem to understand safe spaces and how they are actually a rejection of authority, rather than an appeal to authority. The notion of authority used is simply more subtle.
Some marginalised groups have made a very valid claim that there is a built-in hierarchy in many social norms that constitute acceptable behaviour in mainstream society. And that they tend to be on the shittier end of the deal in that hierarchy. Therefore, rather than acquiesce to the ordinary way of doing things and just accepting the negative effects of living in a world that doesn't value them as it does others, they have decided to carve out a space where they can assert their own version of what should be culturally acceptable. And they ask that others respect their desire for such a space and not enter it without also changing their behaviour and rejecting the toxic standard practices.
It's quite simple, it's like the cultural equivalent of libertarians trying to carve out a piece of land where they can keep the government out and live in their hyper-capitalist utopias. It's inherently anti-authoritarian. Anyone who goes into a safe space is voluntarily choosing to abide by its standards, no one is forcing them to.
