When I was five years old I would walk along a path and take a bridge across a river to visit my friend to play board games. By the time I was nine I was bicycling forty-five minutes to school on a 80 km/h road. The level of paranoia that's infected people around keeping kids near their parents is insane.
Please use Google Street View on the roads coming in to Mineral Bluffs, Ga, USA. No bike lines, and we're not even keen on emergency shoulder for cars and trucks!
Please use Google street view in any small town around the world and notice the prevalence of foot traffic. Even on roads with no shoulder, bike lane, sidewalk or similar. I've walked to school since I was 6 on roads not too dissimilar.
1. Study the width of the oversize vehicle here[1].
2. Study the lack of shoulder next to this guard rail[2].
No parent in their right mind is going to be comfortable letting a six year-old walk that, in any decade. And no municipality is going to let school buses drop kids at arbitrary parts of that highway, unless the driver is dumping them into a residential side-street.
I'm glad you survived walking on streets like this when you were six, but that's not relevant to these highways being dangerous places for regular (or irregular) foot traffic.
That would definitely not been unusual in Germany in the 80s. Actually many rural German roads didn't even have that small shoulder, you really had to walk either on the street or on the grass. Kids learned how to handle this. There are even popular children's songs from that decade about how to do this, which is to walk on the left side of the road (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La129TFxCGE).
For all of the happy survivor stories like yours (and mine), the reality is that the rate of child accidental deaths has steadily decreases over the past few decades as parents (and society) became more protective. That isn't to say I agree with over-parenting and eliminating independence -- I don't -- but there needs to be rationality applied as well as personal values.
Yes, while childhood suicide, depression and obesity rates have all been increasing. If you look at all the factors, I'm not sure there's a net benefit.
Edit: I decided to look up the CDC statistics to see if there is any net benefit, but total childhood mortality rates have been increasing in the US. Measuring accidental deaths is extremely flawed, if that were a good target then we should keep all children indoors. No bike riding, no swimming, no tree climbing, just keep them inside on a screen all day long and accidental deaths will continue to drop.
Don't forget that there are a lot fewer kids today.
One only need to look at how a single kid is parented vs four.
I had a hilarious example at the park where the single child had constant supervision while the fourth kid of the same age was left alone to do whatever until she hurt herself and started crying. In between she ate dirt, sand, jumped in a puddle, threw stones at the local wild life, ate the single kids snacks, and finally fell off a ladder and busted her nose.
It's not that parents in the 70s were hands off, it's that they had their hands full and couldn't do any more.
In Central European cities kids will walk unsupervised to school from age 5, even today in 2024. Parents are even actively discouraged from taking children to school. If what you suggest is true, then statistically we should see Swiss children dying at a higher rate than American children?
Yes, but. It's not "happy survivor stories", as if 20% of all children died on their way to school thirty years ago. It's overwhelmingly normal stories, and child deaths were always exceedingly rare.
Why single out "more protective" as if it were a relevant factor? Surely that's a personal value, without a strong rational justification.
It's also decreased as the amount of environmental lead has decreased.
It's also decreased as the number of computer screens has increased.
It's also decreased as sugar consumption has increased. (Are parents actually being protective as they feed more sugar to their kids?)
As has our consumption of GMOs.
It's also decreased as government-mandated product, automobile, and housing safety standards have increased (which is different from parents becoming more protective!).
A rational response would be to hold off on highlighting any specific correlation until establishing that it's more meaningful than other alternatives.
> the reality is that the rate of child accidental deaths has steadily decreases over the past few decades as parents (and society) became more protective
While accidental deaths are down, I wouldn’t be so quick to conclude this is because of parents/ becoming more protective so much as society collectively implementing regulations and safety standards that target specific things that are known to be highly dangerous. The list of these targeted changes is extremely long, but some top mentions:
- Safer car and booster seats. Cribs, toys, and other household items.
- Advances in healthcare and access to vaccinations.
- Better education for caregivers around drowning prevention, safe sleeping practices, etc.
- Childproofed products like wall outlets, cabinet locks, baby gates, etc.
- Stricter rules and education on smoke and carbon monoxide detection.
- Road safety initiatives ranging from seatbelt and child restraints laws to anti-DUI programs.
- Improved consumer protections and communication of product recalls.
