My 5 year old bikes to school, accompanied by an adult. It’s a bit more than half a mile away from the house.
I’d like to tell him he can do this on his own next year, but there’s a single intersection he has to cross that makes this difficult.
I’m not worried about him getting lost, abducted by a stranger or any host of movie plot scenarios. I’m worried about vehicles. Specifically pickup trucks and SUVs.
40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches. Today there are large numbers of vehicles twice that high, where even an adult can’t look the driver in the eye at close distances.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says:
Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities.
I’ll probably let him bike alone anyway. But it’s a different equation because of the cars.
In another comment a few days ago I reminisced about how I was let running alone for hours on end when I was very young, and how that was normal.
It's a bit hard to reconcile both events now. I gained a lot of independence and had real unrestricted fun, but in hindsight I might've died a few times.
My idea, even if it might be traumatic, is to show the kid a few clips of people being hit by a car and getting mangled, with all the gore visible. Especially people following the laws and being careful. I miss /r/watchpeopledie as it was actually very educational.
The onus here is on municipal and federal governments to make roads and cars safer.
Governments should make roads safer but until they do, we should care for ourselves.
Imagine a sidewalk where the ground is crooked, full of holes and parts of the pavement sticking up. Should we blindly go on the sidewalk saying "the government should make it better" or should we exercise caution not to trip and fall?
The same logic applies to most dangerous things. Should the government make sure the food and supplements that are imported is safe? Of course. Does that mean you should order food and supplements from any shady site from a random 3rd world country with no reviews? Absolutely not.
How much of our "safety" culture around kids is because people don't have basic life skills and aren't passing them on to kids?
In practice, if somebody is right in front of my grill where I can't see them, they were close enough for me to notice them before they got there without me having to be on high alert for people.
I'm not putting this here as a truck-vs-car thing or whatever, I'm just trying to people a realistic idea of where the blind spits are that actually cause trouble in my experience.
Damn, I'm glad I got to grow up then.
"We've planned a trip to the woods for next week, it's expected to be minus twenty Celsius so please make sure they have appropriate clothing, hats, gloves, boots. Also we will have a fire so make sure they bring some sausages and a hunting knife so they can cut sticks for the fire and to hold the sausages over the fire."
No. 2 son came home with a plaster on his arm after one such excursion, I think when he was about ten, and explained that one of his friends had been careless with his knife. There was no drama, the teacher carries a first aid kit for precisely this scenario, his friend was firmly told to not be so stupid, and the teacher used it to explain to the class why knives need to be properly handled.
When I was a child, I always had with me a multi-tool Swiss army knife, including at school, because I was very frequently building various things, or disassembling others to see how they were made. That early experience was very influential in becoming a successful engineer.
Decades later, as an adult, I was astonished to learn about the so-called "no tolerance" policies of many US schools, where the possession of even a small knife or even of less dangerous tools may be a reason for severe punishment.
Obviously, as a child, starting with the second day of school when 6-year old, I have always gone to the school and back, every day, alone, even if initially that was about a half hour of walking and then the later schools required long commuting by public transportation. Also none of my colleagues have ever been brought to school by someone else, and like me they did not have any contact with their parents since morning till late in the afternoon. All this was considered normal at that time.
200yr ago they'd have used some Victorian morals bullshit or religion to the same end.
Yea, the problem isn't that we don't want to give kids the freedom we had as kids. The problem is the nosy public that won't mind their own business and instead call the cops when they see someone out just playing. Not willing to risk involvement with poorly-trained, amped-up, armed law enforcement.
We joke about having a main child and an emergency backup child, but deep down it's not a joke, it changes our behavior.
But that pressure is on the parents too. There's this weird two-way feedback loop.
Single child household has made parenting culture neurotic. Because if you screw it up it ends your entire bloodline.
But the neurotic attitude makes child rearing feel like such a burden, people can hardly imagine doing it more than once...
I am told this attitude does not produce beneficial outcomes in the children either. Apparently people grow up healthier when their parents are relaxed.
Even going from one child to two.. suddenly you don't have numbers on your side in dealing with things.
It's the context around you that is changing. Also, the digital divide is so strong that many old people and village folks see anything related to technology or complex online processes as alien things that they can't dare to deal with. They are basically living in the non-digital islands. The logins, MFA, password recovery, OTP, finding the correct web portal, filling in the right information - it's a nightmare for a common human.
One correlation with "safetyism" this article doesn't mention: the rise of the two income household (https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2014/04/08/after-d... for the US; the UK appears to be similar.) In reality when we kids were running wild about the town, someone was watching us out their windows. If we got into (or more likely caused :) ) a problem, adults, usually a housewife, would show up quickly from somewhere. Even when we were off in the woods there was a sense that we could find a house where a grown-up would help us if needed (like if some kid's little brother ruptured his spleen on a dare, which actually happened.)
Nobody would call Child Protective Services - you knew it was little Billy who threw that rock that hit Jimmy, so-and-so's kid. You would tell Billy's dad, who would make sure he didn't ever do _that_ again, and that would be the end of it. Now I imagine police and lawyers would be involved. It seems we don't have the informal social connections any more, which were largely driven by someone just being around.
The above link BTW shows that "only" 50% of mom's were stay-at-home in the 1970's. In my specific time and place, many of the moms who did work outside the home had jobs that revolved around the school schedule (i.e., working at the school, or some work schedule that allowed them to be home when the kids were not in school.) The ones with full time jobs like my single mother, supporting three kids through full-time work, were a rarity back then. Maybe my brothers and I had excessive freedom because there simply wasn't anyone to watch over us - fortunately we all turned out more or less OK :)
But the article doesn't consider whether restricting children's wanderings is the REASON it is so much safer for children now.
"We have so many fire-safety rules in the building codes in Seattle. But get this: we haven't had any major fires since 1889! It's obvious we don't need these rules!"
It's true there is a cost to restricting children. But let's be a bit more realistic about the tradeoffs.
- stranger danger was worse in the 70s than it is now. - safety in numbers was better in the 70s -- if all kids are outside it's more likely to be somebody else's kid that is snatched. If your kid is the only one, ... - car danger was worse in the 70s. Cars are bigger/faster now, but there were more drunk drivers then. This varies widely by jurisdiction.
It's hard to balance the factors -- it's not clear whether or not it was safer to let your kids outside today than it was in the 70's.
Yet a lot of the comments here suggest that kids would have more independence if cities were safer (particularly from cars).
IMHO, the answer is to improve safety by teaching children how to navigate dangers. Teach children how to cross the road; teach children to be aware of distracted drivers; teach children about situations to avoid (e.g., being in a blind spot).
Waiting for cities to be sanitized theme parks before letting kids out of the house is how we got into this mess.
However, I'm GenX and having all my friends and I roam the neighborhood from the time we got out of school until our parents got home from work with no supervision seems perfectly normal.
"Come home when the street lights come on" and television PSAs asking "It's nine o'clock, do you know where your children are?" were the norm in the 70's.
In general there is excessive alarmism, and the internet makes it possible.
Stuff like training wheels, bike helmets when you are just doing leisure rides. Don't get me started with bike helmets, people wear them and do risker things, drivers drive less careful around them, and you get a false sense of superiority instead of being more careful. If you're on the road/off roading, sure, but now you can get fined in some place for not wearing is one small example of safetyism taking over.
Don't get me started with bike helmets
I'm someone who advocates for rolling back helmet laws because they decrease ridership, but helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE, not overactive safetyism.
I usually wear a helmet but am opposed to such laws not because they decrease ridership but because they decrease our freedom to do stupid shit.
Besides being an mc person I always considered bicycle helmets a useless compromise in that they don't provide true protection like full-face motorcycle helmets do. You're still as likely to leave half of your face on the obstacle, so either don't bother or wear something that would prevent that.