I am forever thankful for a childhood like that - but letting my kids run amok in this day and age for hours brings me a lot of anxiety. It is an interesting paradox that makes me a bit sad.
edit: for the record, we have them in wrestling / jiu jitsu - so their plate is still full re: physical activity and social interaction.
Kind of strange, though, isn't it? We live in a safer time than any before (have regressed slightly in the past few years), but many, many people have an intrinsic gut reaction that things are getting worse.
"Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires'. We, their sons, are more worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt." - Horace, ~20BC
The local woods by you may indeed be worse than it was during your childhood, but overall as a society we are doing better.
crime is lower across the board compared to 15-20 years ago
ignorance was bliss, for you
And the fact that crime has dropped like a rock, with a ~20 year lag, after leaded fuel was phased out.
I'm not trying to say the theory is wrong; just that correlations are really tricky to study, it's hard to control for all confounding variables, and it's hard to know for certain when a correlation is due to causation.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...
A) There are easy marks everywhere.
B) Which crimes did your mind gravitate towards? Were those crimes ever major parts of all crimes committed? Does the presence or absence of children materially change any of that?
Anxiety because of what the kids may do or anxiety because of what other adults may do?
Even with statistics about danger being down across the board, in still pretty worried about my kids getting hit by an automobile. The raw statistics are even one area where danger is rising- fatality numbers are back over the mid 90s.
Anecdotally, I see a lot more obviously mentally ill people on the streets than when I was a kid. Crime in general is more prolific in my area than when I was a kid (Sonoma County, CA).
I'm not saying my anxiety is rational, or that the stats back up my anecdotes - I am merely stating my perceptions.
