"...children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in their own front yard, 12 years old to stay home alone for an hour, and 14 to be unsupervised at a public park."
By the time I was 10 I was allowed to be unsupervised and to get on a bus to a railway station, purchase a ticket for an intercity train that took me the better part of 100 miles away to another city then alight there at a major railway junction with many platforms and from there catch a suburban train to my final destination where my grandmother lived. However, before I could get to see her I had to walk several miles to her home and this involved crossing a very busy four-lane arterial highway.
I was no exception, as this was the norm for kids of my age. Moreover, such things were never a big deal for us kids, it was just the way things were back then. We gave such concerns little thought if any at all.
This - unlike millions of today's kids - is why my generation were and still are a much more resilient lot and not afraid of the world than is the present younger generation.
In my estimation, overprotecting kids rates on a much higher scale of child abuse than some[1] matters which are normally associated with it.
If you are a modern-day parent and overprotecting your children then you need to think twice about the damage and harm that you are causing them. It is very difficult to acquire resilience if it's not acquired very early on in one's life, and those who don't are often forever handicapped.
_
[1] Of course, that excludes any form of sexual abuse, it's inexcusable and unacceptable under any circumstance.
> This - unlike millions of today's kids - is why my generation were and still are a much more resilient lot and not afraid of the world than is the present younger generation.
I marvel at this logic. Who raised the present younger generation?
Children didn't make the rules that they can't buy train tickets. They weren't born afraid. Their resiliency hasn't been molded yet.
The question isn't "why are kids this way?" The question is "why are we raising children this way when we weren't raised this way ourselves?"
>The question is "why are we raising children this way when we weren't raised this way ourselves?"
I feel like the investment into individual children is much much higher than it used to be (time/resources/emotions). When you have 5 kids it's not that you don't care, but you literally can't be as protective about them as you can when you're only raising one or two. And then as people have less children the norms gradually change.
Because literally every form of media today constantly tells people that they need to be afraid of going outside, and most people buy it, even though our society (at least here in the US) is almost certainly safer than when they were growing up.
How many times have you seen someone saying they were afraid walking down the sidewalk because... someone else was also walking down the sidewalk?
>"why are we raising children this way when we weren't raised this way ourselves?"
Because CPS will come and you'll be charged with child endangerment if you let your kid have "too much" independence. And naturally the kids will ask questions about why they can't do this or that, and many people will know "because CPS would take you away" is a bad answer (or one the kid will ignore) so they lie about the dangers. It's a shit sandwich situation to be in.
I believe that there was much less violence in the past than there is now. Or at least that's the perception, hence, we want to avoid that our kids get into real trouble. Not that it wasn't the case 30 years ago, however, things have changed and I think in most places didn't change for the better. But it clearly depends on where you live.
They were raised on addictive electronic forms of media and TV sitcoms of the 90’s that filled in absentee parents fighting their own demons (substance abuse, divorce, jail, broken homes, sexual abuse, poverty, etc.)
I was raised prior generation (I'm Boomer/Gen X cusp) and pretty much on my own during the day at 4-years-old. Just around the block thing.
And I totally agree with you. Same with the "everyone gets a participation trophy" bullshit - it's not the kids, it is the parents. Kids don't have control over that.
The answer is "the media." There's a saying in media, "If it bleeds, it leads." Meaning horrible stories are the best stories. And so, with the advent of the 1980s and cable, then with internet exploding media channels in 2000, the world is awash with bad stories. And it seeps into society.
People get in actual trouble now if they let their child walk 1 mile to school and if it is elementary school. Police car trouble.
The actual crime rate is way, way declined over time, across the board. However, the perception of crime rate is it is going up.
So parents want to protect their children against all these manufactured bad things.
I'm with you on overprotecting kids being a bad thing, but it's pretty rich for The Atlantic to be telling parents not to teach their kids to fear the world, when their stock in trade, like that of practically all media outlets, is to constantly teach parents to fear the world.
I really don't get this reaction, and it seems very common. I don't really read the Atlantic much any more, haven't for a long time, but that's because I don't read much of any news periodicals. Nonetheless, for a periodical, they have always presented a pretty broad range of views, and the range tends to always be somewhat middle of the road. So no extreme takes on any particular subject, but within the range of what they publish, it's very common for one writer to disagree with another.
This seems to be getting painted by a lot of you as a bad thing. The views presented here don't represent the views of the Atlantic. They represent the views of the writer. And other writers also published by the Atlantic disagree. Some of them think you should be afraid. Some of them think you should not be afraid. That isn't hypocrisy or "rich." It's a publication showing you a range of views from people who disagree on subjects that are far from settled. How is this supposed to be a bad thing? Do you want the editorial board to instead only publish takes that all agree and present only one side of any subject?
It's entirely on brand. They are playing into parent's fear of being too afraid. It's fear inception. Fuck off, I'm keeping my kids in the house until at least 10yo and that white van that has been seen prowling around is a serious threat and they should know about it. Strangers are potentially dangerous, high things are dangerous. The world will mess you up in a moment if you don't use your whole being, your gut and your head, to move intelligently within it. Being carefree and ignorant is not an optimal strategy, nor is it the path to a life lived in truth. And ultimately a life lived beautifully. Vacuous joy is not the goal here.
I was latchkey kid, born in the late 70s. I don't remember the exact ages, but I was always alone or with friends from a very young age. My neighborhood had a 4 lane highway on one side and rivers on the other 2. The only rule was don't cross the highway. We spent most days in the rivers fishing, water skiing and generally being idiots, and I'll readily admit that I look back at those times and wonder how no one drowned.
My dad also worked a bunch of jobs, one of which was selling firewood. At a young age I wasn't strong enough to move the logs around, but I could run the hydraulic splitter while he did the heavy lifting. I hated it at the time, but looking back at it fondly now because it was time with my dad teaching me about hard work by example. I ended up helping him with many of his jobs often late into the evening.
Are kids too protected today? IDK. Times are different. For example, using guns other than for hunting wasn't much of a thing. If you had a problem with another kid, you threw a few punches in the soccer field and then were friends again the next day. Zero social media meant when I was teased a school and went home, it didn't follow me. So while maybe kids are too protected now, the dangers have changed.
> Times are different. For example, using guns other than for hunting wasn't much of a thing. If you had a problem with another kid, you threw a few punches in the soccer field and then were friends again the next day.
This is an incredibly romanticized view of the past. Gun violence from 1992-2019 was significantly lower than the previous 30 years.
I'm guessing from the rivers thing you probably didn't live anywhere near a major city. Kids getting shot isn't even remotely a new thing. In fact, it's quite a bit less common now than in the 80s and early 90s. I wasn't exactly inner city, just LA suburbs, but my middle school still experienced three drive-bys while I was there. I knew four kids who were murdered before we graduated and another who shot himself when we were 12. We were banned from wearing red, blue, or Raiders jerseys because the school district was so paranoid we'd get shot. Guns being used for something other than hunting has been around a long time. The 70s were really when it first started to take off, largely because that was when street gangs started taking over domestic drug trade and they suddenly became much better funded and better armed.
Related to this, deeply focused on the American experience:
The Coddling of the American Mind
> (...) ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life.
> Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. (...)
Blaming that last one on education seems like a stretch to me. It's hard for kids these days not to default to "good vs evil" when there's a major political party dedicated to actively rolling back what they've grown up with as rights.
To add another datapoint: I'm not even that old (born in the mid-80s).
When I was 9 I walked a mile to school with my 6-year old sister, unsupervised (and stayed at home alone for an hour after school until my parents got home).
At 12 I commuted to school on a city bus for an hour (with a transfer downtown).
At 14.. jeez, I'm pretty sure at 14 my parents left me alone in the house for a long weekend.
Born in the late 80s in Austria, we were playing outdoors without supervision since elementary school. Walking around in villages, building tree houses, going to the lake, exploring the forests. Me and my sister would sometimes spend 2 weeks home alone while my parents where on holidays, with only my grandma living across our house and cooking for us. I grew up on the country side, I'm sure my life would have been very different if had been raised in a city.
Funnily enough, I still remember all the very stupid and dangerous thinks we did when we were kids, which makes me afraid when I think about my own daughter... How do you deal with this problem?
Yep, born in 1993, I didn't get to stay home alone or walk to school regularly (til high school), but I certainly spent hours and hours outside unsupervised (especially during summer vacation), pretty much from the time I started school. And so did most of my classmates...
By the time I was 10 I was also completely unsupervised.
I would distract the 7-11 clerk while my accomplice filled his backpack with candy, which he would then sell at elementary school at a 100 to 200 percent markup to the supervised children.
We would also rob the fifth grade school supplies store, which we were supposedly working at, and again, he would sell everything we stole for more than the people we stole from were selling it for. This is a good business tactic if you can make it work! This is not legal advice!
The last time I saw my accomplice would have been 89 or 90, I was in court to support a friend who had a minor criminal charge for some porch theft she had done, he was going down for possession of LSD with intent to sell. I think that's what the charges were, it was a long time ago. This was in the south, and in the early 90's in the south, I'm sure he did some time for that. I don't know what happened to him.
He did have his memories of a completely unsupervised youth to fall back on, as do I.
This. Inter-city trains weren't even an option where I grew up but I went to my grandmother's on my own (city bus, crossing major streets) at I'm sure 8 and perhaps 7. We attempted to use public transit to get me to private school at IIRC 8, it didn't work only because too often the bus didn't stop for me. At 10 I was taking one class off campus--and getting there by public transit.
There's also a secondary issue with overprotecting kids--they don't learn to be wary of the things they do need to be wary of. I'm thinking of a case here many years back, 13 year old only looks one (the wrong) way before walking through the school zone--2 minutes before the lights came on. She stepped out right in front of a truck. And I routinely see it in the wilderness--20's, 30's out there with no thought of what might go wrong. Just Sunday I saved a guy from a very unpleasant night--his phone was dead, he took the wrong fork and didn't realize it. I had talked to him earlier, encountered him again and realized he was on the right trail but going the wrong way. (He was parked at a different trailhead than I was.) No phone = no call for help and almost certainly no light--note that this was the day after a new moon--and even if he realized which branch to take at the next junction it still would have put him back in civilization several miles from his car. And if he took the wrong one--the trail name says "loop" but that will take you over an almost 12k summit, a total of nearly 20 miles.
yeah I was raised in similar manner, but as a father of 2 right now I see - in my personal case - the biggest difference that makes me afraid about my kids:
I don't know around half of my closest neighbours
It's not that I don't want to get to know them, it's that everyone are so busy (me included) that I don't simply have time to align with them to learn more about them better.
Also, tons of people are moving in and moving out all the time.
It wasn't the case in my home village - I knew a lot of people and even more people (my parent friends that I didn't know) knew who I was. I could bet at that time that if something bad was going on for me, there would be someone who will help me without any struggle.
In my current place is different. Even my relatives who stayed in my home town can agree that even there a lot of people are moving in and out and they don't know all of the townspeople anymore.
I remember being 4-years-old and unsupervised a lot. By 6 years old for sure. By 8...."Get out of the house and out from under my feet and don't come back until dinnertime! Now get out!"
A coworker in grad school was from China and talked about at age 3 needing to go to the market to buy some basic groceries, fix his own food, and he was alone in the apartment while his parents worked. It was an eye opening conversation to have just a handful of years ago.
Starting around age 6 or 7 I was going into the woods playing with a friend and by 11 or so my parents had no problem with me riding my bike whwrever I wanted to around town, well before I had a cell phone.
Wow. At age 3 some children cannot fully verbalize what they want or need, and some still are not potty trained. I'm ready to accept some 3 year olds can do this, but I think it's unreasonable to expect most children at age 3 to be able to go to the supermarket to buy groceries and fix their own food...
It should be noted that rate of accidental deaths in childhood has fallen drastically since then:
> Between 1960 and 1990 the death rate for children aged five to 14 fell 48 percent ... a growing share of the accelerating reduction in child mortality arises from a sharp drop in deaths from unintentional injury or accident.
No doubt that's very true. However, making the world a safer place by assessing the data and then making changes is not the same as nuking kids' autonomy.
The environment can be made safer for kids - and everyone for that matter - and the fact that that it is happening is a very good thing and only to be welcomed. Very, few would ever deny that.
If we were to revert back to attitudes of the 1950s and '60s and give today's kids the same freedoms and autonomy that kids had in that past era (except perhaps for some extreme cases at the margins), then where would that leave us?
No doubt, the mortality rate would rise for the aforementioned age groups but by how much? Those stats of 48% have to be carefully examined and broken down by location then state by state and then country by country (which would require additional data) if we are to gain accurate and meaningful figures. All else being equal, it may be that the actual freedoms and autonomy afforded to kids have to be scaled by location and circumstance - what's applicable in, say, NYC would likely be quite different to those for a town in outback Australia.
I don't know the answer to that question and I've not seen any figures to indicate that anyone else knows them with any level or degree of certainty. Only further research will provide accurate answers.
What I'm about to say next troubles me the most. I have an overactive amygdala and any discussion of metrics concerning kids' lives horrifies me but perhaps we may have to eventually confront the issue no matter how uncomfortable it may be (the death of any kid upsets me terribly and it's something that I'd personally much rather not confront).
As a society, like it or not, we may be confronted with the situation were we have to weigh up the mental health and suicide statistics for kids against the risks and dangers of providing them with additional freedoms to explore the world in ways they see fit - either singly by themselves and or with their mates. That's not saying adults shouldn't provide guidance, of course they should.
As I said, I don't the answers, but what I do know is that eventually we will have to confront the issue head-on.
I think it fitting to finish by saying that in hindsight and after witnessing the increasing rates of psychological problems and distress in kids today, that I've come to realize that the autonomy and freedoms that I had as a kid were near the most important developmental aspects of my childhood.
Frankly, the thought of growing up in today's society with its mixed and conflicting ethics and the strictures placed on kids' freedoms by both parents and society at large simply horrifies me.
>"...children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in their own front yard, 12 years old to stay home alone for an hour, and 14 to be unsupervised at a public park."
interesting.. this is roughly the milestones we've used for our kids. Not because that was told to us or we read it anywhere. Just because thats how we judged the kids capabilities and confidance levels.
My son (the oldest) hit the milestones a bit earlier then my daughter.
And today's kids can easily have a device that communicates with satellites every few seconds to determine their position on the globe, and can update servers with that position instantly, along with communication with nearly anyone on earth.
When I was a teenager, if my parents wanted to find me on weekends, they'd have to resort to calling other parents until they tracked me down.
The issue is the busybodies also have that device and the opportunity cost for them to make false claims about your child's safety that result in weeks to months of harassment by authorities is practically nill for them. And thanks to the way the CPS reporting laws are written, literally illegal to find out who the busybody was or face your accuser.
>By the time I was 10 I was allowed to be unsupervised and to get on a bus to a railway station, purchase a ticket for an intercity train that took me the better part of 100 miles away to another city then alight there at a major railway junction with many platforms and from there catch a suburban train to my final destination where my grandmother lived.
Pfff, when I was 7 or 8 I took the local bus to the intercity bus station and then took that 200km to get to my grandparents. I had to figure out what bus to get on to and when to get off. I remember nobody even asked me for ticket money, just asked me where I was going. I was super happy because I got to pocket the money - but then I lost somewhere on my way there :(
But I was one of 4 children in a poor family (at the time, eventually we got up to 6). I can't see myself risking my son on something as stupid, the amount of near death experiences I've had as a child, it freaks me out when I think about my son doing something like that, and I can't really say I'm better off for it either - I was just bored, poor and didn't have anything better to do.
Depends on where you come from, I guess. I remember that we teased the kid who still got picked up by his parents from school when he was 9. I walked to and from preschool alone when I was 6. Usually took the shortcut through the woods. During the winter it was almost pitch black. It was scary.
What he said is true in large part of world, bith in western countries and non-western ones. In particular, 9 years old being unable to play alone in own back yard is deeeply ridiculous.
Also at 10, my parents put me on a cross-country flight by myself from PDX to Atlanta (to visit family). Note, this was in 1999, not some bygone era. I imagine there would be an Amber Alert nowadays if someone noticed me sitting by myself on an airplane.
Airlines literally have a special thing that costs a ton extra and results in the kid being monitored constantly by an airline employee. (I got to see the jet bridge being "driven" up to the airplane because the guy who was watching me never had his relief show up!) https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/special-assistance/unacc...
My parents divorced when I was very young and my dad ended up getting a job in a different state. So by age 4-5 I was flying alone between parents semi-regularly. This was in the late 80s to early 90s.
When we became parents my wife and I agreed that we wanted to let our kids explore the world with a similar level of freedom we had as a kids.
When my 3yo was about 2, he pushed through a defective locked gate and fell down a flight of stairs, losing a tooth. Then about three weeks ago he got distracted in the bathroom and fell off a stool with a toothbrush in his mouth. I'll spare you the details.
These accidents weren't directly caused by our goal of giving our kids more independence, but they had the effect of making that goal all but impossible, at least for now. I catch myself telling him he can't do things he could before, or saying "<childname> slow down!" about 100 times per day. Seeing him on a playground gives me terrible anxiety.
He's fine. He's not afraid of anything. He's so bloody resilient despite all his trauma. But I'm failing him because the risks feel so real and paralyzing. To love what death can touch...
One difference, I think, is that I am lucky enough to not be affected by the historical taboo of mental health. I'm seeking therapy for this, which I'm also not afraid to admit out loud. And I'm hopeful that it will help me face this.
> Then about three weeks ago he got distracted in the bathroom and fell off a stool with a toothbrush in his mouth. I'll spare you the details. These accidents weren't directly caused by our goal of giving our kids more independence, but they had the effect of making that goal all but impossible, at least for now.
Earlier this summer we had our family holiday in Italy. In week one I had a bike accident which necessitated a visit to the local emergency room and I was wearing a dressing on my arm for the entire holiday. In week two my daughter had an unlucky fall and cut her forehead which necessitated a(nother) visit to the local emergency room, she needed stitches. In week three our eldest was stung by a jellyfish while swimming in the sea. Huge weals all down his body but (fortunately) no trip to ... the emergency room.
We have three kids and you would not believe the number of times I've had to drop everything to take one or other of them to the doctor and/or the hospital.
> the risks feel so real and paralyzing
Seriously: please don't give up on your wish to let your kids explore the world!
> We have three kids and you would not believe the number of times I've had to drop everything to take one or other of them to the doctor and/or the hospital.
This would cost most families (without gold plated healthcare subsidies from being a government employee or other generous employer in the US) $10k to ~$17.5k per year, and those ranges go up every year.
A single doctor visit is usually $200 to $300, and emergency room visit might as well be your annual out of pocket maximum ($10k to $17k).
I grew up before out of pocket maximums were a thing, and I remember my dad distinctly telling me to be careful not to injure myself because it could derail the whole family’s future. This was because my parents were immigrants who were building a small business, so they had equity to lose, but not enough cash flow to purchase healthcare. I also thought about impacts to my sister’s future, who is 6 years younger.
I never did participate in sports and never needed to go to the doctor or dentist.
Today, I earn enough to not have to worry about healthcare expenses, but I would not have had kids if I did not have the ability to pay for two calendar years’ worth of out of pocket expenses (~$34k, in case injury occurs on Dec 31).
I had similar level of accident prone-ness as a kid and still a lot of freedom,
sped down a giant incline right into a wall of concrete+rebar and had neighborhood kids literally carry me back home, stapled myself burnt myself on soldering irons cuts bruises so on... that kind of stuff I dont think even affects me physically, what sticks with me was the freedom to experiment with anything (I was also a bit of a rule breaker, breaking into unoccupied apartments in our building as a kid)
Sounds like you are self aware and can realize when you might be going overboard. Just sent my son to college. I made tons of mistakes. He overcame them. People are resilient - so is your child.
The thing is why are we more scared these days? Did our parents care less for our health and safety? Or, perhaps they were more ignorant of the world as a whole and blissfully raised a family? Cuts, bruises and maybe broken bones are part of growing up and learning.
These days "media", meaning news and social media, seem to act as more as an anxiety pipeline than an information service. I also feel it forms a violence feedback loop by fueling peoples fears until the mentally unstable among us feel so cornered they lash out violently like a trapped animal. Of course this is on purpose because information is boring and they needs advertising revenue. Anxiety makes more money. Seems coincidentally the perfect time to decriminalize weed.
I don't buy the media blame thing on its own. It feels like there should be epidemiological research into it. For example, how is this generation's coffee intake different to the last one? Use of psychotropic medications? Different air pollution, less lead?
In Japan there’s a tradition of having kids, at around 3 years old, go out by themselves to run errands. There’s a whole tv show about it.
If you are curious about other cultures as well, there’s a pretty good documentary on Apple tv about the first 5 years of life of kids from all around the world, including kids in rural areas, big cities and even small remote tribes.
Regarding the setting, there are some places (like some resorts or big estates), where young kids can be very safe and that allows them to be on their own a lot and build their independence.
Don't drag your kid into pit hole of your own mental issues. Does he have some permanent damage, or just few teeth that would anyway fell out and maybe some light scars? That's 0 price to pay to have true freedom at most important time of life.
Why do folks have so much issues with letting life just unravel, and desperately trying to control every aspect of it, yet consistently being reminded how they are failing? I don't have any mental issues so its very hard for me to imagine what it causes. What I describe is natural to me, and seems almost impossible to force upon yourself for you.
I suspect that hit TV shows like "America's Most Wanted" did a great deal of damage to the American psyche. The 1990s seemed to be when parental attitudes started to take a turn. When I grew up before then, kids were generally allowed to roam wherever they wanted unsupervised, as long as they were home in time for dinner.
There are probably other factors too. I wonder if there was a kind of overcompensation from "latchkey kids" when they became parents.
> When I grew up before then, kids were generally allowed to roam wherever they wanted unsupervised, as long as they were home in time for dinner.
Me too.
With that being said, as a parent now, the #1 fear I have with my children playing outside unsupervised isn't kidnapping or violence or anything that would appear on Unsolved Mysteries or America's Most Wanted.
It's cars. My fear is cars.
My boys are 7 & 5 years old and they are both very inattentive. No matter how hard I try to put the fear of the road into them, they both have a tendency to mindlessly wander into it without looking. My older one is autistic, so I'm sure that has something to do with it, but my younger one is not and he is even worse.
I live in a suburb in Maryland named Columbia. Its residential areas were thoughtfully planned-out with very few "busy roads" running through them, but I regularly see people (teenagers?) flooring 50+mph down sleepy tree-lined 25mph streets.
I have no doubt in my mind that, if left unattended, both of my boys would be run over by one of these insane drivers within a week.
Edit: Yes, we and others have complained to the city. Yes, there are speed cameras and the like, but this behavior has only gotten worse post-COVID.
It's an interesting point and actually feeds back into the America's Most Wanted issues. As America has gotten more focused on cars for the majority of transportation the neighborhood has broken down, people who never walk in their community never meet their neighbors and it's much easier to cultivate fear about neighbors you've never met along with being harder to trust those mystery neighbors to intervene if they see something wrong.
There was a saying "It takes a village to raise a child" but in modern America each family is closer to being an island to themselves trying to raise their children - there almost certainly are a dozen or so other parents you've met at parks and other things that you trust but those parents might live quite far away from you.
Living in a car oriented culture comes with serious societal issues.
If you can physically drive 50+ mph down a street signed for 25 mph then whoever built the road may have been thoughtful but they certainly weren't thinking about safety.
Signs and warnings rank very low in the hierachy of engineering controls.
The safest option would be to physically prevent vehicles able to travel at greater than 15mph from being in areas with children.
The next safest would be to redesign the street to prevent high-powered vehicles from being able to travel at greater than 15mph.
Ironically, I live in the notoriously high-crime city to your north, with kids basically the same age. The older one has free reign of our neighborhood at this point. We live in a walkable neighborhood with streets narrow enough that cars can't pick up any significant speed. Everyone agrees that Columbia is "safer," but I'm way less worried about my kids up here.
I recently moved from Brooklyn to Phoenix. I'd have an easier time of letting my 4-year-old walk on the sidewalks of Brooklyn than anywhere in Phoenix. The driving is so much worse and so much faster here. Cars are also my biggest fear going into her more independent years. People flying out of our condo complex, a 7-lane road adjacent to it, everyone rageful and in a hurry constantly. I'm far more worried about inattentive drivers than playground falls or kidnappers.
I’m not an expert on brain development but I’m pretty sure kids just simply do not have a lot of spatial awareness. I know I tend to watch out for them even just walking around them because they don’t pay attention to where they are going.
The saddest thing to me that the window is so small to fix it. If my city dawdles another 5-10 years to make our streets safer, my kids will be old enough for it not to matter anymore.
It's a really hard choice. How long are we waiting around until we just pack up and move to somewhere that is safe, to a place where our kids can have independent mobility.
America is so way behind, not only the major centers, even worse in all the 2nd and 3rd tier cities where people still get an aneurysm when somebody dares to suggest to install a bikelane.
After cutting the cord when our first daughter was born, we were often surprised to come down from a hotel room to get breakfast in the lobby to find that some horrific things were happening, cities were burning, people being murdered, a world spinning out of control.
Oh yeah, I had to remind myself, cable news was like that. So we grabbed coffee to go and headed out to the National Park to hike with the kids.
Similarly, it's terrible that the default thing on TV at airports and gyms is cable news. It's especially absurd at the gym - going to be healthy and feel some nice endorphins, and then you're subjected to the worst things happening in the world. Comical, really.
I always think the gangs and crack epidemic were major contributors too. This was also the era of drive by shootings and gangster rap/culture infiltrating the middle class and WASP folks homes via their children and popular media of all kinds. I also remember teenage pregnancy seemed like a bigger issue then and a reason parents controlled their daughters more closely. The nightly news was reporting on this stuff and many inner city areas were severely depressed. I think in a lot of those areas that have since been gentrified we probably forget just how bad it was for a time.
My daughters both have their own .22s - they're 8 and 14.
They have .20ga shotguns, too, but don't get nearly as much use out of those.
We currently live in a neighborhood, and my biggest fear in letting them run around is other people calling the police on them for just being unattended. I've already had that happen once, while they were in my own front yard.
We're in the process of looking for a bigger property, further away from other people, where our kids can actually be kids. We'll be able to keep some livestock, and they can ride four-wheelers, gokarts, and dirt bikes. Today they can only do those things when we take them somewhere there's room to do it.
Not just TV shows in the 90s, but netflix documentaries and fictional shows about serial killers today. These seem to be insanely popular.
Serial killers are extremely rare, exceptionally few people will ever know somebody who knows somebody who knew a victim of one. Everybody today knows that serial killers exist, but most people only know it because they heard about it from mass media, not because they have some sort of personal experience with it. I think this surely leads people to overestimate the risk.
I like Arthur Brooks. He seems to be a voice of reason in this crazy world.
Having just read his recent book and both the books he mentions in the article, I actually started to understand what is being said here.
On the first page of the Tao Te Ching (Stephen Mitchell translation), it talks about the true source of understanding is darkness.
> Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
> Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
> Yet mystery and manifestations
> arise from the same source.
> This source is called darkness.
> Darkness within darkness.
> The gateway to all understanding.
We can't teach kids nor ourselves to fear the world. We have to step into the darkness to gain clarity of who we are and what we are here to do. That's the only way to learn. This somewhat adds onto Scott Barry Kaufman's new ideas of self-actualization.
Kaufman uses a sailboat as a metaphor in which the hull is security and the sail is growth.
I think knowing the darkness helps you know the "light" too. when I was a teenager I sought out the unfiltered truth of what humans were capable of, so I could properly understand what humanity "is". I found a lot of disturbing stuff (because I sought it out) and it helped me grow as a person and know how to interface with the world and get a better sense of what the full spectrum is. It didn't cause me to be fearful or anything, just aware. Anyway, maybe not 100% on-topic but what you said reminded me of that.
Arthur Brooks strikes me as a genuinely nice and interesting person. But I wonder, how much did he get paid to run a billionaire funded thinktank (and that tank of thoughts seemed mostly full of "give tax cuts to billionaires")?
I assume it paid pretty well. I also assume it's pretty easy to be nice and easygoing and thoughtful when you don't have to worry about where your kids next meal or health insurance payment is coming from.
I broadly agree with this, but it’s going to be hard if by the time I have kids pedestrian fatalities are still on the rise. The article mentions some statistics that are dropping, but the ones I worry about more are the ones that actually are still increasing, like the chance of my kid getting hit by a car while they’re walking around the neighborhood.
100% as a parent the issue is cars interacting with children.
A suboptimal but creative solution I saw recently was neighbors working together to remove their backyard fences to create a large and safe play area for children in the suburbs.
I don’t know what the solution is but it is frightening how society at large just accepts the deaths and injuries. And in my neighborhood how people drive fast around blind corners knowing there is an elementary school 5 blocks away and kids everywhere on all manner of bike/board/walk.
> suboptimal but creative solution I saw recently was neighbors working together to remove their backyard fences to create a large and safe play area for children in the suburbs.
This is something I would love to do, but still feels so impossible. I see some homes compromise and put gates in the fence. Where I am, I see probably 70%+ of homes with backyards using them as bathrooms for their dogs, and I imagine that many people would have a problem just with the basic social contract of who cleans dog poop.
Particularly due to COVID, I've begun to appreciate just how severely the suburban structure negatively impacts all aspects of our lives. You have HOAs that invest in common playgrounds, cities that have invested in parks, and virtually everyone reports extremely high satisfaction with these things. Yet my own feelings of isolation tells me that we need much much more. I'm at the point that I would seriously seek out and move to a place with a walk-able kid-friendly setup. But it just doesn't exist.
The solution is to make the streets safer. There are well-documented traffic calming methods that work. On neighborhood streets like the one you may be describing that could include things like chicanes and mini roundabouts.
The rub is that they make driving less convenient, so it’s hard to get people to support them. But between making our streets safer for kids and making driving a little easier I will always choose safety.
> but the ones I worry about more are the ones that actually are still increasing, like the chance of my kid getting hit by a car while they’re walking around the neighborhood
Yes! This is my issue as well. Drivers on residential streets have gotten so much worse since I was a kid in the '80/90s.
Streets themselves have also gotten much worse! The vast difference in car deaths in the US and other countries is more a question of our infrastructure and what it encourages than anything else.
I read a really great book about this recently -- no vested interest beyond just really liking it. Check it here [1]
Part of the problem is cars have gotten better/safer/faster and more boring.
I like the idea of not allowing highway vehicles near people. Park your interstate cruiser on the edge of town and then drive a golf cart to your house.
Bonus: driving a golf cart is fun and feels fast at low speeds.
What about the increasing statistics of mental health issues among children and the increase in childhood inactivity and obesity? Don't those encourage you to let your kid to freely walk around the neighbourhood?
Snark aside, the key point is that the statistics that you are worried are still increasing are still nonetheless Black Swan events on an individual scale. Their increase should absolutely be a concern at the political, urban planning, and public health levels, but it should never be a reason to discourage or forbid activities that in all regards are healthier and more formative as a person than their avoidance.
Maybe, but it was the leading cause of death for school-aged children in the US until recently. (Now that’s guns.) That feels like it’s worth worrying about.
You’re right, of course - I would much rather my kid have the same feeling of independence that I did than be stuck at home or tethered to their parents. I’ve just moved to one of the only remaining reasonably walkable/bikeable suburbs in my area for that reason. Doesn’t mean it won’t still be hard though given the rising risks.
(I’ve also been trying to get involved in safe streets advocacy lately for the same reason. Who knows if that’ll ever have an impact but I have to try.)
I think a lot of healthy life choices stem from proper risk management and cost-benefit analysis, which humans can do on their own fairly well for normal life tasks.
For instance, there's a non-zero chance you could lose your life every time you get into a car. However, almost everybody still hops into cars because the chance of a life-altering accident (if the driver not drinking and/or driving like a maniac) is relatively low and the benefits to cars in your life are high.
Where I think this ability for normal people to make sensible choices gets warped is when the media's business model of driving emotional and catchy stories interferes with peoples' actual perceptions of risk. For example, there are healthy young people still utterly scared to death of Covid because their preferred media tells them to be afraid. You can apply this to almost any hot button issue that the media has adopted and find people who have had their sense of the actual risk warped.
Getting into a car isn't the dangerous part where I live, it's being near the road. It's safer to be in a car, near the road, than on foot or on bicycle.
I think it's a stretch to say that humans can do fairly well at risk management and cost-benefit analyses; humans are deeply irrational creatures who can do some math but whose subconscious prefers to conserve calories and work with simple, easy to understand absolutes.
Almost no one is punching in the numbers on their risk profile, checking, hm, 2.5 million injuries per year, 35,000 fatalities per year, 15,000 miles driven, advantages of independent mobility, how much will this trip to hang out with Jim affect my overall quality of life... No, they're assuming "I'm a good driver, I actually have quick reflexes and a safe car, nothing's going to happen". Or they're assuming that the roads are a jungle and you're almost certain to get into a crash eventually, holding negative primals about the safety of car-oriented culture.
Likewise, I suspect that some of the negative outcomes described in the article:
> As much as we hope the dangerous-world belief will help our kids, the evidence indicates that it does exactly the opposite. In the same paper, Clifton and Meindl show that people holding negative primals are less healthy than their peers, more often sad, more likely to be depressed, and less satisfied with their lives. They also tend to dislike their jobs and perform worse than their more positive counterparts.
are more appropriate given the reality of the situation. What if your job - statistically, you're probably pushing data from one silo to another to help add another decimal place to some executive's net worth - is not actually likeable? Would you rather plaster an ignorant smile to your face and be proud of your attention to detail on those TPS reports, and happy that IT brought you a new, slightly larger monitor? Perhaps you'd call yourself depressed or sad when you consider the probable state of the global climate at your eventual retirement date (if you ever get a retirement date, that assumes social security still exists, your company doesn't discharge your pension through bankruptcy, and your investments outperform rabid inflation rates).
> I think it's a stretch to say that humans can do fairly well at risk management and cost-benefit analyses;
My stated caveat is that risk assessment works "fairly well for normal life tasks". People decide to travel in cars and fly and do all sorts of things involving non-zero risk and make fairly reasonable decisions.
It's once media influence arrives (Covid!, climate change!, guns!, etc) that peoples' perceptions about actual risk for hot button issues can be warped.
Readit News
By the time I was 10 I was allowed to be unsupervised and to get on a bus to a railway station, purchase a ticket for an intercity train that took me the better part of 100 miles away to another city then alight there at a major railway junction with many platforms and from there catch a suburban train to my final destination where my grandmother lived. However, before I could get to see her I had to walk several miles to her home and this involved crossing a very busy four-lane arterial highway.
I was no exception, as this was the norm for kids of my age. Moreover, such things were never a big deal for us kids, it was just the way things were back then. We gave such concerns little thought if any at all.
This - unlike millions of today's kids - is why my generation were and still are a much more resilient lot and not afraid of the world than is the present younger generation.
In my estimation, overprotecting kids rates on a much higher scale of child abuse than some[1] matters which are normally associated with it.
If you are a modern-day parent and overprotecting your children then you need to think twice about the damage and harm that you are causing them. It is very difficult to acquire resilience if it's not acquired very early on in one's life, and those who don't are often forever handicapped.
_
[1] Of course, that excludes any form of sexual abuse, it's inexcusable and unacceptable under any circumstance.
I marvel at this logic. Who raised the present younger generation?
Children didn't make the rules that they can't buy train tickets. They weren't born afraid. Their resiliency hasn't been molded yet.
The question isn't "why are kids this way?" The question is "why are we raising children this way when we weren't raised this way ourselves?"
I feel like the investment into individual children is much much higher than it used to be (time/resources/emotions). When you have 5 kids it's not that you don't care, but you literally can't be as protective about them as you can when you're only raising one or two. And then as people have less children the norms gradually change.
How many times have you seen someone saying they were afraid walking down the sidewalk because... someone else was also walking down the sidewalk?
Because CPS will come and you'll be charged with child endangerment if you let your kid have "too much" independence. And naturally the kids will ask questions about why they can't do this or that, and many people will know "because CPS would take you away" is a bad answer (or one the kid will ignore) so they lie about the dangers. It's a shit sandwich situation to be in.
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And I totally agree with you. Same with the "everyone gets a participation trophy" bullshit - it's not the kids, it is the parents. Kids don't have control over that.
The answer is "the media." There's a saying in media, "If it bleeds, it leads." Meaning horrible stories are the best stories. And so, with the advent of the 1980s and cable, then with internet exploding media channels in 2000, the world is awash with bad stories. And it seeps into society.
People get in actual trouble now if they let their child walk 1 mile to school and if it is elementary school. Police car trouble.
The actual crime rate is way, way declined over time, across the board. However, the perception of crime rate is it is going up.
So parents want to protect their children against all these manufactured bad things.
This seems to be getting painted by a lot of you as a bad thing. The views presented here don't represent the views of the Atlantic. They represent the views of the writer. And other writers also published by the Atlantic disagree. Some of them think you should be afraid. Some of them think you should not be afraid. That isn't hypocrisy or "rich." It's a publication showing you a range of views from people who disagree on subjects that are far from settled. How is this supposed to be a bad thing? Do you want the editorial board to instead only publish takes that all agree and present only one side of any subject?
My dad also worked a bunch of jobs, one of which was selling firewood. At a young age I wasn't strong enough to move the logs around, but I could run the hydraulic splitter while he did the heavy lifting. I hated it at the time, but looking back at it fondly now because it was time with my dad teaching me about hard work by example. I ended up helping him with many of his jobs often late into the evening.
Are kids too protected today? IDK. Times are different. For example, using guns other than for hunting wasn't much of a thing. If you had a problem with another kid, you threw a few punches in the soccer field and then were friends again the next day. Zero social media meant when I was teased a school and went home, it didn't follow me. So while maybe kids are too protected now, the dangers have changed.
This is an incredibly romanticized view of the past. Gun violence from 1992-2019 was significantly lower than the previous 30 years.
The Coddling of the American Mind
> (...) ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life.
> Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. (...)
https://www.amazon.com/Coddling-American-Mind-Intentions-Gen...
When I was 9 I walked a mile to school with my 6-year old sister, unsupervised (and stayed at home alone for an hour after school until my parents got home).
At 12 I commuted to school on a city bus for an hour (with a transfer downtown).
At 14.. jeez, I'm pretty sure at 14 my parents left me alone in the house for a long weekend.
Funnily enough, I still remember all the very stupid and dangerous thinks we did when we were kids, which makes me afraid when I think about my own daughter... How do you deal with this problem?
I would distract the 7-11 clerk while my accomplice filled his backpack with candy, which he would then sell at elementary school at a 100 to 200 percent markup to the supervised children.
We would also rob the fifth grade school supplies store, which we were supposedly working at, and again, he would sell everything we stole for more than the people we stole from were selling it for. This is a good business tactic if you can make it work! This is not legal advice!
The last time I saw my accomplice would have been 89 or 90, I was in court to support a friend who had a minor criminal charge for some porch theft she had done, he was going down for possession of LSD with intent to sell. I think that's what the charges were, it was a long time ago. This was in the south, and in the early 90's in the south, I'm sure he did some time for that. I don't know what happened to him.
He did have his memories of a completely unsupervised youth to fall back on, as do I.
There's also a secondary issue with overprotecting kids--they don't learn to be wary of the things they do need to be wary of. I'm thinking of a case here many years back, 13 year old only looks one (the wrong) way before walking through the school zone--2 minutes before the lights came on. She stepped out right in front of a truck. And I routinely see it in the wilderness--20's, 30's out there with no thought of what might go wrong. Just Sunday I saved a guy from a very unpleasant night--his phone was dead, he took the wrong fork and didn't realize it. I had talked to him earlier, encountered him again and realized he was on the right trail but going the wrong way. (He was parked at a different trailhead than I was.) No phone = no call for help and almost certainly no light--note that this was the day after a new moon--and even if he realized which branch to take at the next junction it still would have put him back in civilization several miles from his car. And if he took the wrong one--the trail name says "loop" but that will take you over an almost 12k summit, a total of nearly 20 miles.
I don't know around half of my closest neighbours
It's not that I don't want to get to know them, it's that everyone are so busy (me included) that I don't simply have time to align with them to learn more about them better.
Also, tons of people are moving in and moving out all the time.
It wasn't the case in my home village - I knew a lot of people and even more people (my parent friends that I didn't know) knew who I was. I could bet at that time that if something bad was going on for me, there would be someone who will help me without any struggle.
In my current place is different. Even my relatives who stayed in my home town can agree that even there a lot of people are moving in and out and they don't know all of the townspeople anymore.
I remember being 4-years-old and unsupervised a lot. By 6 years old for sure. By 8...."Get out of the house and out from under my feet and don't come back until dinnertime! Now get out!"
It's a different world.
Starting around age 6 or 7 I was going into the woods playing with a friend and by 11 or so my parents had no problem with me riding my bike whwrever I wanted to around town, well before I had a cell phone.
> Between 1960 and 1990 the death rate for children aged five to 14 fell 48 percent ... a growing share of the accelerating reduction in child mortality arises from a sharp drop in deaths from unintentional injury or accident.
Source: https://www.nber.org/digest/dec99/reducing-accidents-key-low...
The freedoms you describe did not come without significant cost. Some families paid the ultimate price.
The environment can be made safer for kids - and everyone for that matter - and the fact that that it is happening is a very good thing and only to be welcomed. Very, few would ever deny that.
If we were to revert back to attitudes of the 1950s and '60s and give today's kids the same freedoms and autonomy that kids had in that past era (except perhaps for some extreme cases at the margins), then where would that leave us?
No doubt, the mortality rate would rise for the aforementioned age groups but by how much? Those stats of 48% have to be carefully examined and broken down by location then state by state and then country by country (which would require additional data) if we are to gain accurate and meaningful figures. All else being equal, it may be that the actual freedoms and autonomy afforded to kids have to be scaled by location and circumstance - what's applicable in, say, NYC would likely be quite different to those for a town in outback Australia.
I don't know the answer to that question and I've not seen any figures to indicate that anyone else knows them with any level or degree of certainty. Only further research will provide accurate answers.
What I'm about to say next troubles me the most. I have an overactive amygdala and any discussion of metrics concerning kids' lives horrifies me but perhaps we may have to eventually confront the issue no matter how uncomfortable it may be (the death of any kid upsets me terribly and it's something that I'd personally much rather not confront).
As a society, like it or not, we may be confronted with the situation were we have to weigh up the mental health and suicide statistics for kids against the risks and dangers of providing them with additional freedoms to explore the world in ways they see fit - either singly by themselves and or with their mates. That's not saying adults shouldn't provide guidance, of course they should.
As I said, I don't the answers, but what I do know is that eventually we will have to confront the issue head-on.
I think it fitting to finish by saying that in hindsight and after witnessing the increasing rates of psychological problems and distress in kids today, that I've come to realize that the autonomy and freedoms that I had as a kid were near the most important developmental aspects of my childhood.
Frankly, the thought of growing up in today's society with its mixed and conflicting ethics and the strictures placed on kids' freedoms by both parents and society at large simply horrifies me.
interesting.. this is roughly the milestones we've used for our kids. Not because that was told to us or we read it anywhere. Just because thats how we judged the kids capabilities and confidance levels.
My son (the oldest) hit the milestones a bit earlier then my daughter.
When I was a teenager, if my parents wanted to find me on weekends, they'd have to resort to calling other parents until they tracked me down.
Pfff, when I was 7 or 8 I took the local bus to the intercity bus station and then took that 200km to get to my grandparents. I had to figure out what bus to get on to and when to get off. I remember nobody even asked me for ticket money, just asked me where I was going. I was super happy because I got to pocket the money - but then I lost somewhere on my way there :(
But I was one of 4 children in a poor family (at the time, eventually we got up to 6). I can't see myself risking my son on something as stupid, the amount of near death experiences I've had as a child, it freaks me out when I think about my son doing something like that, and I can't really say I'm better off for it either - I was just bored, poor and didn't have anything better to do.
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How do you bring up the boogeyman out of nowhere when explaining that we believe in way too many boogeymen?
It still exists, and there are policies around it.
Amtrak does the same but starts at 12: https://www.amtrak.com/unaccompanied-minors-policy
It's a bygone era.
When we became parents my wife and I agreed that we wanted to let our kids explore the world with a similar level of freedom we had as a kids.
When my 3yo was about 2, he pushed through a defective locked gate and fell down a flight of stairs, losing a tooth. Then about three weeks ago he got distracted in the bathroom and fell off a stool with a toothbrush in his mouth. I'll spare you the details.
These accidents weren't directly caused by our goal of giving our kids more independence, but they had the effect of making that goal all but impossible, at least for now. I catch myself telling him he can't do things he could before, or saying "<childname> slow down!" about 100 times per day. Seeing him on a playground gives me terrible anxiety.
He's fine. He's not afraid of anything. He's so bloody resilient despite all his trauma. But I'm failing him because the risks feel so real and paralyzing. To love what death can touch...
One difference, I think, is that I am lucky enough to not be affected by the historical taboo of mental health. I'm seeking therapy for this, which I'm also not afraid to admit out loud. And I'm hopeful that it will help me face this.
Remember that… sticks are sharp, your sister is standing right next to you, rocks are heavy.
Notice how… these rocks are slippery, the glass is filled up to the top, that branch is strong.
What’s your plan… with that big stick, if you climb up that tree?
Do you feel… stable on that rock, balanced on that step, the heat from the fire?
How will you… get down, go up, get across?
Can you see… the toys on the floor, the end of the path, that big rock over there?
Can you hear… the rushing water, the wind, the other kids playing?
Try using your… hands, feet, arms, legs.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/stop-telling-kids-careful-in...
Earlier this summer we had our family holiday in Italy. In week one I had a bike accident which necessitated a visit to the local emergency room and I was wearing a dressing on my arm for the entire holiday. In week two my daughter had an unlucky fall and cut her forehead which necessitated a(nother) visit to the local emergency room, she needed stitches. In week three our eldest was stung by a jellyfish while swimming in the sea. Huge weals all down his body but (fortunately) no trip to ... the emergency room.
We have three kids and you would not believe the number of times I've had to drop everything to take one or other of them to the doctor and/or the hospital.
> the risks feel so real and paralyzing
Seriously: please don't give up on your wish to let your kids explore the world!
This would cost most families (without gold plated healthcare subsidies from being a government employee or other generous employer in the US) $10k to ~$17.5k per year, and those ranges go up every year.
A single doctor visit is usually $200 to $300, and emergency room visit might as well be your annual out of pocket maximum ($10k to $17k).
I grew up before out of pocket maximums were a thing, and I remember my dad distinctly telling me to be careful not to injure myself because it could derail the whole family’s future. This was because my parents were immigrants who were building a small business, so they had equity to lose, but not enough cash flow to purchase healthcare. I also thought about impacts to my sister’s future, who is 6 years younger.
I never did participate in sports and never needed to go to the doctor or dentist.
Today, I earn enough to not have to worry about healthcare expenses, but I would not have had kids if I did not have the ability to pay for two calendar years’ worth of out of pocket expenses (~$34k, in case injury occurs on Dec 31).
What parents can perceive as trauma is a really cool story for a kid.
sped down a giant incline right into a wall of concrete+rebar and had neighborhood kids literally carry me back home, stapled myself burnt myself on soldering irons cuts bruises so on... that kind of stuff I dont think even affects me physically, what sticks with me was the freedom to experiment with anything (I was also a bit of a rule breaker, breaking into unoccupied apartments in our building as a kid)
These days "media", meaning news and social media, seem to act as more as an anxiety pipeline than an information service. I also feel it forms a violence feedback loop by fueling peoples fears until the mentally unstable among us feel so cornered they lash out violently like a trapped animal. Of course this is on purpose because information is boring and they needs advertising revenue. Anxiety makes more money. Seems coincidentally the perfect time to decriminalize weed.
3 is a little young to have much independence anyways, I would think closer to 1st grade is when kids can start having bit more
This is very much a cultural and setting thing.
In Japan there’s a tradition of having kids, at around 3 years old, go out by themselves to run errands. There’s a whole tv show about it.
If you are curious about other cultures as well, there’s a pretty good documentary on Apple tv about the first 5 years of life of kids from all around the world, including kids in rural areas, big cities and even small remote tribes.
Regarding the setting, there are some places (like some resorts or big estates), where young kids can be very safe and that allows them to be on their own a lot and build their independence.
Of course I don't always let the kid do it, but I try to keep an open mind for what they're capable of.
Why do folks have so much issues with letting life just unravel, and desperately trying to control every aspect of it, yet consistently being reminded how they are failing? I don't have any mental issues so its very hard for me to imagine what it causes. What I describe is natural to me, and seems almost impossible to force upon yourself for you.
Good luck with help, your kids need it.
There are probably other factors too. I wonder if there was a kind of overcompensation from "latchkey kids" when they became parents.
Me too.
With that being said, as a parent now, the #1 fear I have with my children playing outside unsupervised isn't kidnapping or violence or anything that would appear on Unsolved Mysteries or America's Most Wanted.
It's cars. My fear is cars.
My boys are 7 & 5 years old and they are both very inattentive. No matter how hard I try to put the fear of the road into them, they both have a tendency to mindlessly wander into it without looking. My older one is autistic, so I'm sure that has something to do with it, but my younger one is not and he is even worse.
I live in a suburb in Maryland named Columbia. Its residential areas were thoughtfully planned-out with very few "busy roads" running through them, but I regularly see people (teenagers?) flooring 50+mph down sleepy tree-lined 25mph streets.
I have no doubt in my mind that, if left unattended, both of my boys would be run over by one of these insane drivers within a week.
Edit: Yes, we and others have complained to the city. Yes, there are speed cameras and the like, but this behavior has only gotten worse post-COVID.
Edit 2: Looks like I'm not alone in thinking this way… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32679858
There was a saying "It takes a village to raise a child" but in modern America each family is closer to being an island to themselves trying to raise their children - there almost certainly are a dozen or so other parents you've met at parks and other things that you trust but those parents might live quite far away from you.
Living in a car oriented culture comes with serious societal issues.
Signs and warnings rank very low in the hierachy of engineering controls.
The safest option would be to physically prevent vehicles able to travel at greater than 15mph from being in areas with children.
The next safest would be to redesign the street to prevent high-powered vehicles from being able to travel at greater than 15mph.
The saddest thing to me that the window is so small to fix it. If my city dawdles another 5-10 years to make our streets safer, my kids will be old enough for it not to matter anymore.
It's a really hard choice. How long are we waiting around until we just pack up and move to somewhere that is safe, to a place where our kids can have independent mobility.
America is so way behind, not only the major centers, even worse in all the 2nd and 3rd tier cities where people still get an aneurysm when somebody dares to suggest to install a bikelane.
After cutting the cord when our first daughter was born, we were often surprised to come down from a hotel room to get breakfast in the lobby to find that some horrific things were happening, cities were burning, people being murdered, a world spinning out of control.
Oh yeah, I had to remind myself, cable news was like that. So we grabbed coffee to go and headed out to the National Park to hike with the kids.
I always think the gangs and crack epidemic were major contributors too. This was also the era of drive by shootings and gangster rap/culture infiltrating the middle class and WASP folks homes via their children and popular media of all kinds. I also remember teenage pregnancy seemed like a bigger issue then and a reason parents controlled their daughters more closely. The nightly news was reporting on this stuff and many inner city areas were severely depressed. I think in a lot of those areas that have since been gentrified we probably forget just how bad it was for a time.
Where I grew up a .22 was considered a kid rifle. Yes, FL, but I think it was common in other places.
They have .20ga shotguns, too, but don't get nearly as much use out of those.
We currently live in a neighborhood, and my biggest fear in letting them run around is other people calling the police on them for just being unattended. I've already had that happen once, while they were in my own front yard.
We're in the process of looking for a bigger property, further away from other people, where our kids can actually be kids. We'll be able to keep some livestock, and they can ride four-wheelers, gokarts, and dirt bikes. Today they can only do those things when we take them somewhere there's room to do it.
Serial killers are extremely rare, exceptionally few people will ever know somebody who knows somebody who knew a victim of one. Everybody today knows that serial killers exist, but most people only know it because they heard about it from mass media, not because they have some sort of personal experience with it. I think this surely leads people to overestimate the risk.
Having just read his recent book and both the books he mentions in the article, I actually started to understand what is being said here.
On the first page of the Tao Te Ching (Stephen Mitchell translation), it talks about the true source of understanding is darkness.
> Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
> Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
> Yet mystery and manifestations
> arise from the same source.
> This source is called darkness.
> Darkness within darkness.
> The gateway to all understanding.
We can't teach kids nor ourselves to fear the world. We have to step into the darkness to gain clarity of who we are and what we are here to do. That's the only way to learn. This somewhat adds onto Scott Barry Kaufman's new ideas of self-actualization.
Kaufman uses a sailboat as a metaphor in which the hull is security and the sail is growth.
https://scottbarrykaufman.com/sailboat-metaphor/
Which reminds me of the famous quote:
> A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67896.Tao_Te_Ching
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49625550-transcend
I assume it paid pretty well. I also assume it's pretty easy to be nice and easygoing and thoughtful when you don't have to worry about where your kids next meal or health insurance payment is coming from.
A suboptimal but creative solution I saw recently was neighbors working together to remove their backyard fences to create a large and safe play area for children in the suburbs.
I don’t know what the solution is but it is frightening how society at large just accepts the deaths and injuries. And in my neighborhood how people drive fast around blind corners knowing there is an elementary school 5 blocks away and kids everywhere on all manner of bike/board/walk.
This is something I would love to do, but still feels so impossible. I see some homes compromise and put gates in the fence. Where I am, I see probably 70%+ of homes with backyards using them as bathrooms for their dogs, and I imagine that many people would have a problem just with the basic social contract of who cleans dog poop.
Particularly due to COVID, I've begun to appreciate just how severely the suburban structure negatively impacts all aspects of our lives. You have HOAs that invest in common playgrounds, cities that have invested in parks, and virtually everyone reports extremely high satisfaction with these things. Yet my own feelings of isolation tells me that we need much much more. I'm at the point that I would seriously seek out and move to a place with a walk-able kid-friendly setup. But it just doesn't exist.
The rub is that they make driving less convenient, so it’s hard to get people to support them. But between making our streets safer for kids and making driving a little easier I will always choose safety.
Yes! This is my issue as well. Drivers on residential streets have gotten so much worse since I was a kid in the '80/90s.
I read a really great book about this recently -- no vested interest beyond just really liking it. Check it here [1]
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/book
I like the idea of not allowing highway vehicles near people. Park your interstate cruiser on the edge of town and then drive a golf cart to your house.
Bonus: driving a golf cart is fun and feels fast at low speeds.
Snark aside, the key point is that the statistics that you are worried are still increasing are still nonetheless Black Swan events on an individual scale. Their increase should absolutely be a concern at the political, urban planning, and public health levels, but it should never be a reason to discourage or forbid activities that in all regards are healthier and more formative as a person than their avoidance.
You’re right, of course - I would much rather my kid have the same feeling of independence that I did than be stuck at home or tethered to their parents. I’ve just moved to one of the only remaining reasonably walkable/bikeable suburbs in my area for that reason. Doesn’t mean it won’t still be hard though given the rising risks.
(I’ve also been trying to get involved in safe streets advocacy lately for the same reason. Who knows if that’ll ever have an impact but I have to try.)
I feel it messed me up a lot.
For instance, there's a non-zero chance you could lose your life every time you get into a car. However, almost everybody still hops into cars because the chance of a life-altering accident (if the driver not drinking and/or driving like a maniac) is relatively low and the benefits to cars in your life are high.
Where I think this ability for normal people to make sensible choices gets warped is when the media's business model of driving emotional and catchy stories interferes with peoples' actual perceptions of risk. For example, there are healthy young people still utterly scared to death of Covid because their preferred media tells them to be afraid. You can apply this to almost any hot button issue that the media has adopted and find people who have had their sense of the actual risk warped.
1. https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...
Almost no one is punching in the numbers on their risk profile, checking, hm, 2.5 million injuries per year, 35,000 fatalities per year, 15,000 miles driven, advantages of independent mobility, how much will this trip to hang out with Jim affect my overall quality of life... No, they're assuming "I'm a good driver, I actually have quick reflexes and a safe car, nothing's going to happen". Or they're assuming that the roads are a jungle and you're almost certain to get into a crash eventually, holding negative primals about the safety of car-oriented culture.
Likewise, I suspect that some of the negative outcomes described in the article:
> As much as we hope the dangerous-world belief will help our kids, the evidence indicates that it does exactly the opposite. In the same paper, Clifton and Meindl show that people holding negative primals are less healthy than their peers, more often sad, more likely to be depressed, and less satisfied with their lives. They also tend to dislike their jobs and perform worse than their more positive counterparts.
are more appropriate given the reality of the situation. What if your job - statistically, you're probably pushing data from one silo to another to help add another decimal place to some executive's net worth - is not actually likeable? Would you rather plaster an ignorant smile to your face and be proud of your attention to detail on those TPS reports, and happy that IT brought you a new, slightly larger monitor? Perhaps you'd call yourself depressed or sad when you consider the probable state of the global climate at your eventual retirement date (if you ever get a retirement date, that assumes social security still exists, your company doesn't discharge your pension through bankruptcy, and your investments outperform rabid inflation rates).
My stated caveat is that risk assessment works "fairly well for normal life tasks". People decide to travel in cars and fly and do all sorts of things involving non-zero risk and make fairly reasonable decisions.
It's once media influence arrives (Covid!, climate change!, guns!, etc) that peoples' perceptions about actual risk for hot button issues can be warped.