Do you know what the rates of accidental death were in the 1970s vs today?
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just interested if you know the data.
EDIT: indeed, most children killed in car accidents were inside the vehicles, so driving kids everywhere may be increasing their risk of death. And a decreasing death rate might just be better car safety features - better car seats; better seatbelts and seatbelt laws.
EDIT2: Something like 12,000 US children die each year from unintentional injury, and 29million have non fatal injuries. Most of these are preventable.
Now that's not a very good sample size for a low-probability event, but it's not entirely insignificant either. If children had to dodge death at every turn like one commenter suggested, zero out of several hundred would have been unlikely.
As for non-fatal injuries, that's different, we were CONSTANTLY injured. Not from cars, but from just being clumsy stupid little fucks. It was normal for a kid to have bloody knees or scabs on their knees in my childhood. But I don't consider that a problem.
Statistics about my situation (1992, Austria):
These are the statistics about traffic-accidents back then. Unfortunately there's no distinction whether the children were in the car or walking/cycling.
* Austria had 7.8 million inhabitants back then, 24% were 0-19 years old.
* There were 4.682 accidents involving children 0-14 years old
* 4.843 times a child was hurt
* 56 children were killed
Source: http://www.statistik.at/web_de/statistiken/energie_umwelt_in...
there will never be 100% safety, kids do stupid dangerous things, climb stuff that shouldn't be climbed, we all did. in past, people accepted that, accepted the risk of injury and death for their kids, it was part of growing up. we just grew weaker recently, became control freaks, with illusion that we can control everything, while losing so much more. freedom.
fck, i am so glad i grew up in exactly that period of experiencing many good old things, and be able to apreciate new cool stuff too.
The only large-scale problem was the anxiety suffered by parents who started obsessively worrying about their child, and maintaining tighter control over children is mainly medicine to alleviate their anxiety.