By what metric? This is a normal everyday thing in some countries. I was running to the corner store and grabbing milk, cheese or beer, among other groceries, when I was under 10. This was Spain in the 80s/90s and afaik is still a thing. Or walking clear across town to hang out with friends or go to school. In what way is teaching kids independence and giving them your trust not beneficial?

I was leaving the house alone by 5 and 6. I'd go hours in the local forest, down by the lake, through the neighborhood, and to the city. My mom made sure I understood landmarks and what places that could help me looked like. Of all the trauma I experienced in my early life, none of it was from those activities. If anything they taught me a lot about getting along on my own.

It seems to have stopped being a thing in the US in the `90's, for whatever reason. I recall walking to and from school as a 1st grader, although everyone was doing it which made everyone inherently more likely to reach their destination.

If I was in charge, I would set the residential speed limits to 20mph and have the Police enforce those speed limits 24/7.

Life has many risks. Some risks can be recovered from, and others are life long damage. It’s the latter, catastrophic risks that parents should be curating the environment from.

Kids learn from failure. It’s letting them fail and learn that grows strong adults.

Some risks can be mitigated. Learning to tumble and take a fall, for example, mitigates risks of falling well into the elderly years.

And as for 5 or 7 year old, yes. Or flip to the other side— traditional society, including indigenous societies, start training their toddlers on chores. Toddlers already want to help, and these are often behaviors they are already doing, like pulling clothes from laundry baskets.

Five year old and seven year olds are capable. In Japan, two year olds are sent on errands.

And, I have heard at least one story of an American family where the mother had her 7 and 8 year old kid take over meal planning and prep for dinner, and paying the bills. (She didn’t just throw them into the deep end either).

Are you a parent? Part of a child growing up is developing independence in sometimes controlled, sometimes impromptu scenarios. Most 7 year olds are entirely capable of cruising around a couple houses where the adults all know each other.

If you put your child in a bubble you not only stunt their development you also rob them of so much joy.

What ifs could happen to anyone at any time.

What if I get HIV from a needle at a park bench? Do I need to inspect every park bench I sit on with UV light at night and leather gloves to be sure?

Where do you draw your line. Clearly your lines are different than others.

You should consider that their lines are based on rational investigation of the risk. Is yours?

Let Grow keeps a good mythbusting page on crime stats:

https://letgrow.org/crime-statistics/

The tl;dr is that helicopter parenting is relatively new — only something that's come into play in the last few decades — and in all the time before that kids had far more freedom to roam compared to today. Even factoring in an uptick in the murder rate in the last couple years that came about during Covid policy, it's still half of what is was in the early 90s or prior to that.

It seems like the world is more dangerous now because of the outsized attention crime gets in media, but objectively speaking, it's not.

And keeping kids at home on their screens is having definite negative consequences on their maturation and later ability to succeed in the world. Here's a good article on the subject:

https://reason.com/2017/10/26/the-fragile-generation/

I agree - Mean World Syndrome [0] is taking its toll on society.

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

Japan does fine with 3 year olds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eMZp8KsZ5k

Is Japan safer than the US on average? Yes. Is the US so unsafe that sending a 7-year old to the neighbouring kids' homes should be frown upon?

There was an article about a parent who tried to do exactly that, in America. But the parent did not throw the kid into the deep end. For at least a year, the child was taken on those errands, being familiarized with the rule of the road, introduced to store clerks.

Ideas this author generated include — sending an older child along; secretly following to observe without intervening on anything less than catastrophic risks; sending the kid to neighbors to borrow a cup of sugar (and acquaint them to the neighborhood), and so forth.

The vast majority of bad things that happen to children are because of adults close to the child abusing the child.

I’d argue that the incrrasing neuroticism and mental health issues of each succeeding generation after the Millennials is precisely because the lack of this kind of autonomy combined with usage of social medial.

Life is risky. Our job as parents are not to keep a child from any and all risk, but to curate environments where risks are not catastrophic. It’s this ability to freely explore that a child would exercise initiative and independent thinking.

It is this ability that allows a generation to know what they can do for leading society when you and I and every preceding generation are gone, and they have their own kids to raise.

I would argue to disagree with ascribing mental health issues after the Millennials due to whatever is also relatively new at the time like kids having more supervision. This essentially boxes your theory to apply to only one generation (gen Z), so what you're describing is only that Gen Z are more mentally ill than Millennials, which... are you sure you can neatly form causal relationships between one generation to one specific change? How are you doing that?

>incrrasing neuroticism and mental health issues

I would argue that previous generations had such issues as well but they just didn't get talked about as much. It would help explain some of the damn the long term all that matters is the next year / six months type of thinking.

They did have those issues, but I don’t think it was as bad. It also depends on circumstances unique to that generation.

MacLuhan of the “the medium is the message” watched with concern an entire generation of electrification and broadcast radio and TV. He watched as people become passive consumers of content, content which shaped and homoginized culture.

Another example is there if you read the history and the fictional literature of the Gilded Age (around 1890s). Automation of household tasks combined with a shift to industrial jobs outside of home lead to the rise of the movement for the right for women to vote … and also, the discontent and malaise from no longer being able to contribute meaningfully for the household outside of raising of children. That went on well in the 50s.

The ability for someone to be able to meaningfully contribute unique to them to something greater than themselves is a key to well-being for both the person and the community they belong to. The erosion of that ability has been going on for multiple generations.

When kids today are restricted from being able to meaningfully contribute (because it is not risk-free), they turn to other places. Social media are that place, but the social media companies are out to make a profit, not to enable meaningful engagement. Internet use is largely uncurated by parents. So we end up with a society where we have this veneer of keeping kids “safe” by keeping them off the streets, but letting them run wild on the internet. (Example: Roblox)

There is that, but TikTok has basically allowed the explosion of the “psych 101” effect where you learn a very surface level about psychology and start self-diagnosing.

At that age I was walking two blocks to school, and was going to friend's houses to see if they wanted to play. By age 12 I was riding my bike two miles to go buy ice cream & candy. In my early 20's I drove across the US (South Carolina to California) by myself over several days. No cell phone or other safety net.

Being overprotective means your kids don't develop a spirit of adventure and self-reliance. Is there a risk of their coming to harm? The statistics say chances are lower than ever. Violent crime peaked in 1991 and has trended downward (+/-) ever since (this site is run by the FBI):

https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/cri...

By 12 I would sometimes (through choice, or because I'd missed the daily bus) walk 4 miles to school along country roads, before cellphones were a thing.

I'd also go camping, alone or with friends, in the middle of nowhere, with my parents only knowing very roughly where I was (e.g. "we're camping on such-and-such estate, near the area with the wild boars" :)

Now, as a parent, I keep catching myself being a helicopter parent, and hate myself for it! Nothing catastrophic happened to me or my siblings, or anyone else I knew of. So I don't even know why I act this way now.

> but it also isn't amazingly beneficial.

The hell it isn’t! Kids learn a ton by being on their own, and not relying on a grownup 100% of the time.

I walked and biked miles from my house, alone, at that age. What's the harm? Kidnappers and childrapists aren't exactly common, and independence is a good thing.

How are kids gonna get to school otherwise? It's a good idea to travel in a group at that age, but not always practical.

Where I live (Canada) those are only for disabled children or those attending a school more than 1.5 km away from where they live. And after the age of 10, they take public transit.

This thread is making me realize how variable different locales are on this.

It really is. We don't generally have dedicated school buses here, just a public transit system that takes school scheduled into account. I took a public bus to school, on my own, on my very first day of school at age 6.

In my town, if you live within a mile of the school, you don’t get bus service. It’s assumed you will walk

Not all towns have bus service.

@dang

That doesn't work here, the way to contact mods is to email [email protected]

done

> it also isn't amazingly beneficial

You got a source for that?

Even if it isn't "amazingly beneficial", who the fuck cares? Chewing bubblegum or playing a gameboy isn't "amazingly beneficial" but we still let kids do that. What he hell kind of standard is that?

Edit: Wew this thread went from bizarre to disturbing in record time. No parting rage-quit response for me? I feel left out...

A single self-reported datapoint is not a "source." Sounds like you don't know what you might have been missing and don't care to find out. Good for you, I guess?

Edit: parent's dead reply is an incredibly clear illustration of how such an isolated, unenriched childhood can impact social development. My kid's out playing in our neighborhood, thanks.

> Edit: parent's dead reply is an incredibly clear illustration of how such an isolated, unenriched childhood can impact social development. My kid's out playing in our neighborhood, thanks.

They went completely off the rails. Strange, it didn't look quite like the average cheap troll account either.

But I don't think the behavior should be taken as "an incredibly clear illustration" of anything. Just like their initial claim, it is an unverified anecdote at best, not data.

But the outburst might have been childhood trauma causing a bad reaction to the topic and discussion. I hope they're okay...

Agree to disagree, I was pretty careful to not describe that as an inevitable consequence or "data."

Somebody who flees a conversation imploring everybody to "kill yourself" after mild disagreement has all the appearance of a grievously immature person, raised on gamer culture, lashing out in greatly disproportionate response to a narcissistic injury. The person I've got sympathy for in this situation is the poster's "loving wife." I was once married to a narcissist, too.

> Agree to disagree, I was pretty careful to not describe that as an inevitable consequence or "data."

It just wasn't the "incredibly clear illustration" that you claimed. We know almost nothing about the person, and narcissism and probably other kinds of behavioral issues they may have displayed are probably not caused by playing video games or having an isolated, unenriched childhood.

Anecdote, much? I ran around with other kids in the neighborhood without direct adult supervision all the time as a child. I now make well north of your 250k USD with a loving wife and a house.

Neither story means anything in the general case.

If you had gotten out of the house more, you might have learned that we live in an incredibly diverse world, and not everyone needs to grow up exactly like you did.

Are you also evidence that everything else you haven't done isn't beneficial?

We live in safer times then pretty much all of recorded history.

And frankly, the 7yr old has more to fear at school with 'assault drills' and the mass shootings of some foreig.... 'mentally instable white guy'.

> And frankly, the 7yr old has more to fear at school with 'assault drills' and the mass shootings of some foreig.... 'mentally instable white guy'.

This is an extreme exaggeration of the threat of mass shootings at public schools. Children have far more to fear at home or on the street than at school, which is the safest place they'll be all day.

A joke from the comedian Trevor Moore (rip):

> "What if governments learned from the MKUltra experiments in the 50's that trauma allows you to control people, so they purposely orchestrate disastrous events to keep their citizens afraid + dependent on them, and that's one of the reasons that mental illness has been rising? lol"

https://twitter.com/itrevormoore/status/1400158963748917249

When did I say the schools were safe?

If something bad happens to your kid while they walk down the road alone, what will the cops and CPS do to you then?

You didn't. But you were making blanket statements about unsafe neighborhoods, which are blatantly false... Except for schools.

It's funny how having a 7yr old in a small group wandering around together is some horrible thing (as you point out to mostly mythical violence), but sending kid to public school where bullying is routine and other terrible things are never considered child abuse.

If I sent my child to a building for 40h a week, and they suffered 8h abuse across the week, they'd be taken from me. But since it's called "School" it's acceptable.

This person's go-to responses to tell people to kill themselves. I think this is a violent potentially abusive person. Maybe someone should call the cops/CPS if they have kids.

Using social services as retribution for real or perceived slights, online or otherwise, is incredibly destructive to the system and to the victims it can affect. Don't call CPS on people who insult you on the internet.

It's clear that GP was making that comment to illustrate a point, not because they were going to call CPS on them.

Then you'dn't've had any trouble seeing that I made that comment to illustrate a point, not because I thought they were going to call CPS on them.

Nothing happens to children when they walk down roads alone. Almost all kidnappings are a result of people the child knows, trusts, and is otherwise close to.