You survived, but others didn't. Deaths from accidents are decreasing over time (data from 2012).

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-kids-accidental-death-rates...

But mental illness is skyrocketing.

What do you mean?

I mean death from accidents may have declined, but childhood (and adult) mental illness is prevalent at heretofore unknown levels, and not just because of an awakening to diagnosis. So 10 children are alive but 100,000 are anxious, depressed, etc. Was it worth it?

One other theory put forward by Tim Noakes is that the US dietary guidelines that was introduced in 1977 which recommended to eat lots of carbohydrates is responsible for the huge increase in obesity and mental illnesses that exploded in the 80s.

A high carbohydrate diet was never scientifically proven or tested. One guy (Ancel Keys) had a theory, cherry picked some countries that showed a very small correlation. But political things were afoot in America and Nixon went with his plan and enacted the US diet regulations in 1977 that promoted grains which helped US farmers especially the corn industry. The other countries soon adopted it since US leads the way.

But if you look at the graph of when diseases like obesity, mental illness, depression, heart disease really explodes from 1980s, right when the dietary guidelines are taken up.

Of course correlation doesn't equal causation (which is one of the flaws in the Ancel study). But it's definitely something we should do studies on.

Or are we just getting better about diagnosing diseases that were there already but untreated?

^ is also a factor; kids get diagnosed with ADHD and autism (and helped) instead of just being labeled a difficult child.

As someone with an Adult ADHD diagnosis, this has definitely been my experience. Adults weren't even being diagnosed with ADHD when I was a child and it was never brought up when I showed the signs in school. Now I'm receiving treatment and thankful for it, and my kids will be screened.

That's not to say the rate of mental illness is going up or down or staying the same. But measuring the per capita diagnosis rate won't tell you anything about that.

> As someone with an Adult ADHD diagnosis, this has definitely been my experience. Adults weren't even being diagnosed with ADHD when I was a child and it was never brought up when I showed the signs in school. Now I'm receiving treatment and thankful for it, and my kids will be screened.

Same here in all respects.

> But measuring the per capita diagnosis rate won't tell you anything about that.

I believe that some of the increase in diagnosis rates is because of increasing diagnosis in historically under-diagnosed groups, especially in the US where access to healthcare hasn't been available to everyone.

https://www.additudemag.com/race-and-adhd-how-people-of-colo...

Absolutely. A generation or two ago you didn't have depression, you were just a mean drunk.

> and not just because of an awakening to diagnosis

You can control for rising diagnosis all day, but find me anorexic people 100 years ago. They basically didn’t exist.

1.) Anorexic people 1918 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2051151

2.) Afaik, anorexiction rates are going down. It is less of problem then it used to be in previous generation.

When I was 9, parents moved from a suburb to the country. There was a large dangerous canyon not 4 minutes walk from my house. At the bottom was a fast, dangerous river. I never tempted fate.

I did get all manner of small injuries from doing things that kids used to do, though.

When I was 10 (decades ago), a classmate drowned in our neighborhood park (he was playing in a drainage ditch after a rainstorm and the flow of water trapped him against an intake screen covering a pipe).

The park wasn't closed, no one was banned from the park, us kids were all strongly warned by our parents from playing near the ditch in the rain.

Problem solved, no one died there in the remaining decade we lived near the park. They did put up bigger warning signs, but other than that, no changes were made until quite recently when the park was redeveloped and the drainage was moved completely underground.

Though I guess this is an argument both for and against "free range parenting" -- kids will do stupid stuff when they are not supervised and sometimes that stuff can get them killed or injured, but also they are able to look after themselves if they know the dangers out there. I only remember 2 other deaths in my school classmates - one died in a traffic accident on vacation with his parents, the other died after complications during wisdom tooth extraction (that one happened 2 weeks before my own wisdom tooth extraction, I was pretty worried).

In contrast to today's risk adverse society, a couple years ago a child injured himself on a wooden play structure (cut his arm on some split wood badly enough to need stitches). The city fenced off the structure for a year until they replaced it with a "safe" plastic structure.

I think that most serious dangers are pre-wired into us, most kids will avoid them.

From my perspective of raising kids, they aren't pre-wired but learned, with most kids learning them somewhere between the ages of 5 and 10.

Few months ago two boys playing alone outside drowned in cold river (in my locality). Nobody knows what happened, their bikes were found near river and bodies downstream.

River is not in bottom or dangerous canyon and look like normal river. Which is dangerous in cold weather, despite not looking dangerous.

Isn’t this survivor bias? Plenty of kids were killed or died gruesome deaths in older days.

Yes, accidents happen. But this is precisely the type of thinking that got us where we are today. Millions of kids playing in the forest and a few get hurt so we keep them inside now.

Survival rates are higher now. Rates of serious injuries and deaths due to accident are lower now. Much lower. Not saying that right now is necessary the ideal equilibrum, but kids in past died of accidents and it was not unusual event. It was not mere theoretical construction that might happen to someone else.

Similar to how millions of kids go to school without being shot or killed yet people want to pull back as many guns as possible.

I think the other ~100k deaths and injuries sustained by firearms every year might also come into play there.

The deaths you're speaking of are also not accidental.

With guns on all the racks in the trucks in the lot. It's a tired trope, but it's true.

This should be fun.

> Plenty of kids were killed or died gruesome deaths in older days.

How "old" are you talking about here?

Probably referring to the Black Forest of medieval Germany.

Please provide evidence of this. The overwhelming, staggering, majority, didn't die gruesome deaths because they played unsupervised.

Some, sure, but there was hardly an epidemic.

Meanwhile, there were literal epidemics of children dying when my mother was a kid.

probably. Note that my laugh goes bothways. I'm annoyed by the over paranoid life of today, but I realize that we were too candid back in the days. Society oscillates/

Hansel and Gretel, for instance.