I would guess that even in northern Europe there has probably been a substantial reduction of kids’ roaming distance and time spent unsupervised compared to 2 or 3 generations ago. This seems to be a worldwide trend (if not to the same extent in every place).

In the US one of the big problems is a culture of legal liability for every possible thing, and a general culture of fearfulness, excuse-making, and ass-covering instead of allowing moderate informed risks and dealing responsibly with the consequences. If you have too steep a slide, some kid is going to fall off and the parents will sue and bankrupt your town. If you let kids ride the bus by themselves, 1 kid in a million is going to get kidnapped and the parents will sue. Etc.

But there are surely other contributing factors: more families with 2 working parents (and more single parents) and in general less adults “hanging out” with an eye on their neighborhoods, a general degradation of community relationships and civic institutions, smaller family sizes (it’s much easier to chaperone 1 kid than 6), more middle-class angst about maximizing children’s future earning potential, more media attention on rare tragedies, communication improvements leading to less spontaneous social gatherings and more virtual socialization, increasing reliance on car transport and inaccessibility of unsupervised play spaces (especially undeveloped land), etc.

> more media attention on rare tragedies

I think this is a big one, and not just rare tragedies but distant ones. 40 years ago you heard about the bad things in your village, now the 24 hour news cycle feeds a constant stream of fear from all over the world.

>This seems to be a worldwide trend

Yes there is a trend to 'protect' kids from everything. But in my country there is a clear counter-culture advocating agianst what they call 'rubber stone' society where everything is done to avoid possible danger.

There are now ads running on TV saying 'let boys be boys', let them climb trees, go out and explore etc...

We in the US didn't a few decades ago, either. Politicians and the media (with different motivations) deliberately creating false impressions of increasing risks mostly did that in.

What is a homogeneous culture, Trebek.

I grew up in them Scandinavian countries, and my brother and I often spent the entire weekend outside out of sight from my parents. My earliest memory of that is when I was 7 years old.

I now live in the US and have kids about the same age.

The issue is not homogeneous culture or any other thing people with no brains come up with, but traffic density, at least in my case.

Where I used to live we could roam without having to cross dangerous streets. Where I live now, there's traffic everywhere and cars don't give a shit about people on foot, so my kids do not roam.

When I was a kid, we used to have vast areas to play safely. I just looked on Google Maps and the cross-country ski route we used to regularly take on weekends is 4 miles long. We had to cross ONE street. I used to bike about 10 miles one way, by myself, when I was a little older and keep on bike lanes the entire trip.

We also used to have large play areas in the backyard of every home I ever had. The bigger ones were the size of a typical New York borough block. We didn't have to leave our homes to get to a playground, or a park...we had one right outside of our door.

Obviously this sort of thing is easier to do / plan for when the entire country has less people than the city of New York.

My single greatest fear for letting my kid walk free when she's old enough to is that she'll be killed by a driver. This is compounded by the fact that as long as you say "Sorry mate didn't see you" it's OK to kill people with your car

(weird really - can you do that for killing people by any other means?)

My wife and I have semi-seriously considered moving to northern Scandinavia for both this reason and its comparative likelihood of remaining a decent (well, bearable, if only just) place to live in a clathrate-gun scenario.

That's what really gets me.

There was a case not far from where I live where a driver turning right mowed down a 4-year-old child walking with his grandmother on a CROSSWALK. He wasn't running or anything like that, just crossing the street. The child died. They didn't even charge the driver. Fucking ridiculous. It was 100% the driver's fault. New York Times published an article written by the child's mother who questioned the logic of first of all call it an accident and second of all how the driver wasn't charged with anything, not even reckless driving.

I don't know how to change the mindset. A kid in san diego was killed in a bike lane while I lived there and everyone poured sympathy on the DRIVER, ffs, and blamed the kid for being there. It makes one weep, especially because people (Americans, at least) accept it.

Forgive me, but it seems that you're taking a common argument (X policy that works in Scandinavia won't work in the US because the US isn't homogeneous) and extending it to some sort of xenophobic dog-whistle (i.e. kids in the US can't roam because the US isn't homogeneous). Is there a more charitable way to interpret your comment?

The US is pretty homogeneously hostile to walking, so there's that...

The US hasn't become substantially less homogenous in the last few decades, so that's not it.