During summer vacation when I was 10 (early 90s) I'd leave the house in the morning and head down to the local park to play basketball or roam the neighborhood with the other kids. We'd ride our bikes to wherever we wanted, and aside from stopping back to eat lunch and dinner, I'd be out until the streetlights went on. I don't recall any major injuries, aside from getting scraped or bumped up from time to time.
Today, I hear a lot of complaining about kids being inside all the time as opposed to prior generations. However, this is anecdotal and maybe my neighborhood is unique, I always see kids out on bikes with basketballs, fishing rods, etc. We are slowly letting our kid on their bike around the neighborhood with friends, and my big fear is getting hit by a car, especially while in a group and everyone pays less attention.
On a happy note, we were out eating at a cafeteria type restaurant, but we were sitting outside sort of picnicing about a 3 minute walk away. My son wanted another slice of pizza, but I didn’t really want to go inside and get it for him, so I decided to give him some money and let him get it himself. He came back with the slice of pizza on a plate, on a tray, with the right change and absolutely beaming and he talked about it for days.
https://edition.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrest...
The US is seeming more bonkers day after day. These sorts of stories just don't make sense to me. We have issues in Ireland with children and teenagers going around engaging in anti-social behaviour but there is a balance to be found between these two extremes.
1) The US was rebuilt after WW2 to be highly car-centric, with disastrous results for pedestrian safety. It is actually more dangerous for children to move in public because of this automobile centricity in >95% of US spaces, which drives cultural shifts
2) US media is highly sensationalist; Fox News is popular and generally serves to make viewers frightened of the world
3) The US has 340M people to Ireland’s 5.6M people, so from a base rate, we’d expect ~60x more lurid headlines to come out of the US
I think nowadays if I did that with my son I would have child services called on me.
I will also mention I experienced periods of absolutely crushing boredom at times during the summer when I did not have friends or parents around and had nothing to do but watch daytime television. But I learned from the boredom. It is sad to me that so many today are instead being fed from the drip of constant personalized entertainment that makes it harder to get to the place of complete boredom that ultimately can spark creativity instead of succumbing to learned helplessness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_genocide_in_th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treatment_of_slaves_in_the_Uni...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porvenir_massacre_(1918)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre
etc etc etc
What would not be survivor bias is you telling us what happened to the kids around you.
Because whatever you think it is, that's probably much too high. Because it almost never happened. There were a very few highly-publicized cases of children disappearing (eg, JonBenet Ramsey, or in my area Sarah Ann Wood), but a) those were always incredibly rare, and b) such occurrences have been getting steadily rarer for many decades.
Oh they all died because adults weren't around.
No but seriously, everyone was fine. Kids died drunk driving in high school, but not playing soccer at the local park.
Edit: I misremembered. The kid I'm thinking of who died drunk driving got into that accident our sophomore year of college. So he would have been around 19 or 20 at the time.
This is probably a uniquely US problem because after we moved to Europe, we noticed that we see kids without their parents nearby all the time. But, this does not automatically imply that children here spend less time on their phones, we often talk with other parents about it and almost everyone thinks that their kids have too much screen time.
> These intuitions don’t even begin to resemble reality. According to Warwick Cairns, the author of How to Live Dangerously, kidnapping in the United States is so rare that a child would have to be outside unsupervised for, on average, 750,000 years before being snatched by a stranger.
I wonder how we ended up in a situation where people think Stranger Danger is this bad. Is it just from TV and the internet inflating the danger to drive views/clicks?
In many areas crime has been trending down but people seem to think things are more dangerous than ever, in general. It baffles me.
They made a movie about it in 1983. Politicians introduced new laws around it.
His father John Walsh went on to host Americas Most Wanted on TV for 24 seasons. Prime time TV whipped up a culture of fear for that entire generation.
Kids growing up with that culture are parents now. Not surprised to see these results.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, or that I disagree that Stranger Danger is overblown.
But is it possible that part of the reason crime is down is because of Stranger Danger?
I’m not suggesting it is, just that I can’t say with certainty that it isn’t.
The answer is that the rate of crime on kids committed outside by strangers is down, even after you adjust for less time outside.
Yes. This is a really soft question. Sure, part of the reason that crime is down could possibly be due to stranger danger.
On the flip side, over-parenting has negative consequences on kids who have no freedom. I believe the same poll had said that most kids had never walked down a grocery store aisle by themselves and weren't allowed to play outside in front of their house w/o a parent.
Compared to moving in to a place that already has kids running around doing things.
Is this stat from 1980s or recent? If recent, what may be the likelihood that such stats are the outcome of parents' paranoia?
But, you read about rabies (no cure, horrible death), and even if it is a 1-10 million chance and you can do something about it — well, he got the shot (over my protest!).
I think this is similar — child abducted and god knows what happens to them? And it’s your fault as a parent for not supervising? Even a 1-in-10 million chance seems like too much.
It’s not rational, but I think that’s the psychology. It is countered by mentioning the side effects of the vaccine —in this case, identifying the potential harms of over-supervision.
Not really, it's something like 5%. Usually if the bat can be captured and tested for rabies you can wait to get the vaccine, but if the bat couldn't be caught, it makes sense to vaccinate just in case.
I don't understand why you would want to take a chance on rabies. What are the side effects of the vaccine that are so harmful?
I wonder if this is another coastal/inland, liberal/conservative rift where the conservatives are for some reason afraid of everything.
In my experience, kids have very little unscheduled/unsupervised time in more liberal areas, but I think that has little to nothing to do with political leanings and much more to do with parental expectations and availability of disposable income and leisure time.
Maybe you should try viewing things outside of a political lens, especially one where the other side is unexplainably but unquestionably wrong by default, and see how things look.
In the UK it's kind of like - kids don't wander about alone because they might run into baddies, and now adults are afraid to interact with kids because they might be seen as a baddy, and this kind of loops around until no-one is interacting.
Basically, it's like any adult man is seen as a potential child predator, when in reality it's some tiny tiny fraction and in an ideal world we would be able to assume that they get sectioned / locked up quickly so we don't have to worry about it.
Meanwhile I can travel around many parts of Asia, for example, and parents and children alike have no issue interacting with strangers.
That this was a family gathering I was invited to for honoring my close relative who passed away just made me very sad.
It's horrifying when you find out. It's 1 in 20 children get sexually abused in the UK at the moment for example, and we have loads of checks and safe guards.
And waiting until they get sectioned/locked up, that means someone else has to suffer potentially life-long trauma.
This only applies to men though, as if all men are predators by default. There are cases where a single adult man was refused entry into a park, mom calling the cops on a single adult man in a park who was minding his own business etc. As you pointed out, this doesn't seem like an issue in Asia, at least not yet.
No wonder men do not want to become teachers. Why risk your freedom, reputation?
I'd blame the media (especially right wing media) whose entire business model is fear mongering about everything/everyone
There's nothing specifically 'American' about this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_you_know_where_your_childre...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/v8cyi7/map_compar...
This is probably quite negative for the kids though.
Really? Is this just an American thing?
It also has the added benefit that he interacts with a lot of strangers while we're about 10ft away. It's good for him to learn that people are usually good.
While I agree there’s a problem with how helicopter-y society is with kids these days, I think it’s ridiculous to expect kids to resist a device that is designed to be addictive. Teams of tens of thousands of the most highly skilled people in the world are laser focused on squeezing every second of attention out of _adults_ let alone kids. We need regulation, full stop. I don’t know what that looks like, but if you’ve ever seen a toddler scrolling TikTok like a zombie you should know what’s at stake.
I'm pretty sure it will be able satisfy almost every desire. But I think there's quite a confusion about desire, even deep desire, and deep needs and what's ultimately good for us.
Capitalism makes the same mistake.
