> How many people feel comfortable taking children on public transportation or allowing to roam the middle of cities?

Public transit? Most everyone in cities that really depend on it like NYC.

Would you let your four year old take public transit in NYC by himself? Because they do that in Japan.

Maybe not a 4 year old, but NYC kids grow up way more independent than in many places in the US.

Middle school kids taking public transit by themselves is pretty normal.

I was taking two busses to school every day at 12 year old just 15 years ago in Chicago. Today my mother would probably go to jail.

It was rare enough that allowing a kid to do that made Lenore Skenazy [0] famous not that long ago...

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenore_Skenazy

This is almost exclusively a Millenial/Homelander thing (with Boomer or Gen-X parents). My mom took the elevator train in from Jackson Heights to Manhattan every day for school from the time she turned 12. That's a 50 minute train ride with 2 connections. This was in the early 60s.

I feel like there's basically a two-generation swath where kids were treated like they'd break if you breathed on them, which coincides with the first generation that's never known real deprivation (Boomers) raising kids in an environment where their leaders are trying their hardest to create an environment of fear to maintain social control in the absence of war and real deprivation. It's slowly reversing itself as Millenials are themselves having kids and realizing all the ways that they were screwed over by not being forced to face risk & adversity in their formative years. (There's a big selection bias, too, in that Millenials who buy into the culture of fear are just not having kids because they think the world is hopeless, meaning everyone who has a next generation tends towards the un-anxious population.)

From my reading of your link, it looks like the incident that brought her fame/infamy happened in 2008. That's right during America's obsession with helicopter parenting, so the timeline makes sense.

If you go back to the 1980s, what she did wouldn't have been that remarkable. In that time, kids like me were gone from home for hours, walking or riding bikes for miles away from home, and we didn't have cellphones for our parents to keep tabs on us. Statistics show that crime rates were much higher (they peaked in the mid-70s, and have been falling since); the difference is that Americans just weren't paranoid back then the way they are now.

Ummm I took the bus by myself at 9, and that was before cell phones.

Big difference between a four and a 12 year old.

The problem, of course, is that in America a driver will kill your four year old, and it will somehow be your fault for letting your kid walk to the metro station.

Or a creep. It’s not just drivers who make our cities bad.

Sure. But drivers are the leading cause of dead children in the US.

(Also stranger danger is overstated, most victims know their assailant, etc. etc.)

At the worst, public transportation and city centers are biohazards (needles, urine, feces), with mentally-ill people (who are unable to get help) screaming at the top of their lungs. I'm not sure which is worse, when they're screaming at somebody, or when they're screaming at something we can't see.

There are various historical factors that have resulted in that abysmal situation in the US. Assigning it all to a four-word summary of Japanese culture is a bit reductive. The dangers in the city are different than they in the 80's, and they'll change again. The important part is to believe we can do better.

> How many people feel comfortable taking children on public transportation

In major American cities, kids are taken on public transportation all the time. Often big groups of school kids are in transit for a museum field trip downtown.

Americans cry child neglect when 10 years old play alone outside in residential are with no traffic and last crime 20 years ago. People being uncomfortable with 7 years old playing on playground without direct supervision is literally a thing.

Homogenity has little to do with it. Same paranoia is applied to playground structures, when the child can stay alone home for 1 hour, to everything.

People hate BART and I see absolute bloody armies of kids on it often enough that I recall them.