I'm atheist but I like that saying. I'm amazed I survived my 1970s childhood intact. Plenty didn't.

I have come to realise that there's quite a survivor bias in childhood experience, too, whenever someone suggest that today's kids are pampered and parents are hysterical and after all, when we were kids we did all these fun things you cannot do anymore because safety - but yet we survived just fine, didn't we?

I looked up the stats going back a few decades - in the sixties, an average hundred kids died in traffic each year here in Norway. Now? Two or three. Yet we drive more and the population is significantly larger, too.

Drowning (the other biggie) is down by a similar factor.

Generic accidents? Also down by at least an order of magnitude.

We may sigh all we want that kids today are glued to their playstations while we were out building tree huts, conducting -ahem- applied pyrotechnics experiments and similar - but the fact of the matter is that kids today survive childhood. We didn't. :/

They don't have to be glued to anything ever.

The main difference is being supervised by a reasonable adult or not and how streets near homes have changed.

Kids can only be left to free roam in a very safe environment - and even that is not entirely without risks. Alternatively only kids who are shown to be reasonable can do that - it takes parental sensitivity.