I marvel at this logic. Who raised the present younger generation?

Children didn't make the rules that they can't buy train tickets. They weren't born afraid. Their resiliency hasn't been molded yet.

The question isn't "why are kids this way?" The question is "why are we raising children this way when we weren't raised this way ourselves?"

I feel like the investment into individual children is much much higher than it used to be (time/resources/emotions). When you have 5 kids it's not that you don't care, but you literally can't be as protective about them as you can when you're only raising one or two. And then as people have less children the norms gradually change.

The same number of kids were probably abused in a variety of ways 50 years ago. Maybe more than today, even. But what most people knew about the news was what was in the local paper and maybe they watched 30 minutes of national news on TV.

They didn't have a device in their pocket alerting them in real-time about a kidnapping story in another state.

People are not good at assessing probability of risk. If they hear about something, they think it's likely. So they get more and more afraid.

And the greatest risk isn't the stranger, it's people you know and trust. The vast, vast majority of people aren't going to harm a kid--you teach kids that if they need help they should go up to an adult and ask. That reduces the risk much further.

2021 missing-person stats:

- 94.5% (231k) runaway

- 1% (2,555) abducted by non-custodial parent

- 0.1% (331) abducted by stranger

- 4.3% (10k) adult

https://www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/kidnappings/etan-p...

What I worry about is CPS and police officers claiming child endangerment. In my state you can be charged with child endangerment just for leaving the kid strapped into the seat on a moderate day while you walk in to pay the gas station attendant. You could potentially be arrested and charged for letting a 7 year old play alone at the park for a bit.

The kidnappers are real. But they're the CPS and police, and they can't wait to put your kids into a brutal kids-for-cash foster care system. They draw their salary under the guise of "safety" while victimizing children and sapping their independence. And busybodies everywhere have a device at the ready in their pocket, that allows them to invite months of scrutiny into your life based on 30 seconds of effort on their own part, after which the law prevents you from finding their identity or facing your accuser.

There were definite benefits to the Boomer outlook at the time: smog was curtailed, health-conscious diet and regular exercise became a popular idea(albeit heavily fad-driven). But it also created a more litigious, low-trust climate, which has only driven in the alienation further. Today's political climate is a sort of crescendo on all those concerns, and I see in the current working-age generations much greater willingness to change the deal.

Our era is just different.

Your time investment is even greater value (to you) since you have less out-of-work time overall.

Why, and is this important and or a problem? BTW, I don't claim to have an answer.

How many times have you seen someone saying they were afraid walking down the sidewalk because... someone else was also walking down the sidewalk?

People fear flying for psychological reasons of control/helplessness, not for logical statistical reasons. Fear of 'scary' death is like the negative version of the inaccurate and over-optimistic math that causes people to buy lottery tickets.

It's OK to feel nervous if you run into someone unexpected outside, everyone gets that way sometimes. It's how you handle that feeling.

Because CPS will come and you'll be charged with child endangerment if you let your kid have "too much" independence. And naturally the kids will ask questions about why they can't do this or that, and many people will know "because CPS would take you away" is a bad answer (or one the kid will ignore) so they lie about the dangers. It's a shit sandwich situation to be in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-range_parenting#Legal_pro...

How often does that actually happen?

If you search for something as simple as "charged for leaving child at park" there's no shortage of anecdata, and many if not most aren't something crazy like abandonment.

The laws in my state are vague enough that parents can and have been criminally charged for merely letting a confident 7 y/o play at the park while they briefly ran an errand. Unfortunately the state doesn't keep statistics like "how often did we frivolously charge parents."

Okay so you don't know and if we look at the numbers this is just fear mongering.

Not OP, I don't think it's fear mongering. The actual numbers are immaterial, all that matters is whether parents are scared that this might happen. If they're scared, they'll avoid leaving their children unattended. As a former educator I can confirm that many parents are scared, and that this fear is likely to continue so long as stories of these laws being enforced hit the news once every few years. We can average 1-2 cases every few years and as long as they get the right broadcast, that's all it takes.

This is the definition of fear mongering.

https://imprintnews.org/child-welfare-2/nearly-half-of-child...

You've made the assertion "if we look at the numbers this is just fear mongering." Now it's time to show your proof, what is the numbers. I'm very curious because my own state keeps no statistics on what percent of their charges are frivelous.

Of the 73M children in america - Of which 7.9 million children went through CPS - Of which 16% were substantiated (1.2M) and received services - 22.9 percent of those (275k) were removed from their home.

Unfortunately, again, you were unable to provide what percent of charges (or in your presentation, removals) are actually frivolous. You counter a very small chance of stranger kidnapping (less than 1k a year) with "legitimate" CPS kidnapping at 275k a year. Orders of magnitude more relevant -- Wow!

So you have really no data to present here, other than a ceiling of roughly 5% chance at the worst, which is absolutely bone-chillingly large. Plenty significant enough to take it seriously when you see people being charged for letting their kid play at the park. People take precautions about pools and guns, etc, both of which have a lower percent chance than our possible CPS ceiling here of unexpectedly removing the child from your arms.

The CDC reports that between 140,000 – 710,000 hospitalizations per year are due to the flu. No one out there is saying that it's "sky high".

> Of course CPS will claim basically all those removals are valid, but we have very little independent third party verification to see if that is actually the case.

This is actually just nonsense.

> "legitimate" CPS kidnapping

This is just a deranged position to take.

> So you have really no data to present here, other than a ceiling of roughly 5% chance at the worst, which is absolutely bone-chillingly large.

While we're here I would also like to talk about how many of those 275k a year are sacrificed to the God of the Deepest Waters, Lord of Whales (and Wales), The Evercrescent. A vast number I'm sure!

Look we know when this stuff happens, they've got records and the CPS has been taken to court (and they've lost!). But unless you're talking about black or native american families, the amount is so minimal as to not warrant this fear mongering.

  Hard times create strong people
  Strong people create good times
  Good times create weak people
  Weak people create hard times

Could you share a link or something on that topic? I'm curious.

Certainly, the concept long-predates the internet. A bit like the yin/yang symbol, where there's a little "dot" of one color inside the other, symbolizing a similar cyclical concept of one arising from the other.

Though I suppose I like it this way — kinda like the updated Star Trek "To boldly go..." for TNG (:

And I totally agree with you. Same with the "everyone gets a participation trophy" bullshit - it's not the kids, it is the parents. Kids don't have control over that.

The answer is "the media." There's a saying in media, "If it bleeds, it leads." Meaning horrible stories are the best stories. And so, with the advent of the 1980s and cable, then with internet exploding media channels in 2000, the world is awash with bad stories. And it seeps into society.

People get in actual trouble now if they let their child walk 1 mile to school and if it is elementary school. Police car trouble.

The actual crime rate is way, way declined over time, across the board. However, the perception of crime rate is it is going up.

So parents want to protect their children against all these manufactured bad things.

This seems to be getting painted by a lot of you as a bad thing. The views presented here don't represent the views of the Atlantic. They represent the views of the writer. And other writers also published by the Atlantic disagree. Some of them think you should be afraid. Some of them think you should not be afraid. That isn't hypocrisy or "rich." It's a publication showing you a range of views from people who disagree on subjects that are far from settled. How is this supposed to be a bad thing? Do you want the editorial board to instead only publish takes that all agree and present only one side of any subject?

Overall, the whole article is so surreal - is this actual reality in US? Where I live, and lived, which means some parts of Europe, kids are much more self-sufficient, its expected from them and they are happy to deliver. I recall the joy and pride I felt when I begged my parents into letting me go alone for the first time on public transport from aunt home, and they let me and it was at the end simple ride with bunch of stops. The idea anybody can protect their kids 100% is completely ridiculous, just let it go. Teach them to be smart when interacting with strangers, not fearful. Are you also afraid by default when stranger approaches you ie with a question? (that would explain a lot).

Whatever inner problem you have, it can be worked on by specialists, just don't close yourself since you drag your closest family down that hole and young ones have no good defenses for messed up parents.

Within my bubble, I would say yes. Most parents I know seems to not let their kids go unsupervised (by them or some other parent) until around 13-16. I also grew up in this kind of dynamic, but I also didn't ever feel the need/want to be in unsupervised scenarios, so I didn't notice the oddity of it until later in life.

I don't know the underlying cause, but part of it seems to be that people misunderstand and overestimate the the likelyhood of certain bad events happening, while simultaneously ignoring all of the daily risks they take and are completely fine with.

One example I hear within family is the worry about child abductions, and how there are such terrible people out there that would do such things. The misunderstanding that seems to be in play when these things come up is that 90% of child abductions are by a family member, not some random joe/jane on the street. Another non-zero amount are by care-takers, so people that parents trust enough to supervise their children. Finally there is the last few percent that people have some more valid reason to worry about. This seems like an awfully small chance event to spent a lot of time worrying about.

You think that we should hide the world from children? You are mistaken. Danger is real, the only safe way to live within it is with due caution, not fear but caution.

If you jump from a cliff you will die. If you fall over backwards on that climbing frame you could well hurt yourself seriously. It is not a parents job to shield children from the world but to teach them the skills to navigate it. In the first years of life we nurture and protect, as they become more capable we release them little by little into the world.

As with almost everything, it depends on where you are in the US, but there has been a general trend towards overprotection of kids. The GP is an extreme example, but I've definitely met parents with that same attitude.

You're right. I think one significant difference between my parents generation and those of us who came later, is that they lived through the depression and WWII. They knew this fact if not consciously then subconsciously for the very reason that from an early age they were often confronted with things and circumstances well outside their control. War for instance, being conscripted into the military was just a fact of life and that one had to accept it, everyone was well aware that it was essentially futile to do otherwise.

To a large extent their attitude of resignation and acceptance of fate passed onto way they treated us, their children. Like other aspects of their lives, they accepted the fact that they couldn't control everything we did, even if we were just kids.

That was a great blessing for my generation, the babyboomers. We had almost none of the major restrictions that governed our parents' lives, and it's largely the reason for why we had so much freedom and autonomy as kids.

Nevertheless, we became a bratish generation, we did what we wanted and we got what we wanted. Compared with our parents we were undisciplined and from there we eventually developed into the 'control freak' generation. As babyboomers, we were now getting just about everything denied to our parents, but when something was denied to us we became overly pushy and overbearing until we'd gotten what we wanted. After all, for us, it was a logical extension of what was already happening.

Same with the kids, babyboomers felt the need to control their lives and had no compunction or regret in doing so. Later, that fact was not lost on more recent generations and they've since honed the practice into a fine art.

Clearly, this is a grossly simplified explanation of what is a long and rich set of facts but you'll get the gist.

Nevertheless, we babyboomers should not blame our parents for seemingly the sins they endowed us with, for after the bad times and wars they'd experienced they wanted us kids to have a better life and they only did what they thought best for us.

Bless them.

Care to explain?

Is the plan to kidnap the child and... raise them as a member of one's own family? Try to blackmail the parents? Something worse?

This whole situation is hard for me to understand, your confidence about white vans in particular.

My dad also worked a bunch of jobs, one of which was selling firewood. At a young age I wasn't strong enough to move the logs around, but I could run the hydraulic splitter while he did the heavy lifting. I hated it at the time, but looking back at it fondly now because it was time with my dad teaching me about hard work by example. I ended up helping him with many of his jobs often late into the evening.

Are kids too protected today? IDK. Times are different. For example, using guns other than for hunting wasn't much of a thing. If you had a problem with another kid, you threw a few punches in the soccer field and then were friends again the next day. Zero social media meant when I was teased a school and went home, it didn't follow me. So while maybe kids are too protected now, the dangers have changed.

This is an incredibly romanticized view of the past. Gun violence from 1992-2019 was significantly lower than the previous 30 years.

And to the original post, there's also an income inequality component. More well off parents probably felt (rightly or wrongly) they could move to a safer place. That feeling has been eroded through school shootings, no matter how statistically insignificant they are.

The Coddling of the American Mind

> (...) ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life.

> Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. (...)

https://www.amazon.com/Coddling-American-Mind-Intentions-Gen...

Even with more polarized political parties today, the world is a lot more complicated than "Republicans Evil." If the teens of today can't grasp that, it's at least a failure of society to develop their emotional resilience (or cynically - it's the fault of an economy that is breeding & preying on their lack of resilience and nuance).

When I was 9 I walked a mile to school with my 6-year old sister, unsupervised (and stayed at home alone for an hour after school until my parents got home).

At 12 I commuted to school on a city bus for an hour (with a transfer downtown).

At 14.. jeez, I'm pretty sure at 14 my parents left me alone in the house for a long weekend.

Funnily enough, I still remember all the very stupid and dangerous thinks we did when we were kids, which makes me afraid when I think about my own daughter... How do you deal with this problem?

I would distract the 7-11 clerk while my accomplice filled his backpack with candy, which he would then sell at elementary school at a 100 to 200 percent markup to the supervised children.

We would also rob the fifth grade school supplies store, which we were supposedly working at, and again, he would sell everything we stole for more than the people we stole from were selling it for. This is a good business tactic if you can make it work! This is not legal advice!

The last time I saw my accomplice would have been 89 or 90, I was in court to support a friend who had a minor criminal charge for some porch theft she had done, he was going down for possession of LSD with intent to sell. I think that's what the charges were, it was a long time ago. This was in the south, and in the early 90's in the south, I'm sure he did some time for that. I don't know what happened to him.

He did have his memories of a completely unsupervised youth to fall back on, as do I.

What would the parents have said, were they there? Only a 50% markup on stolen goods kids, don't be greedy?

There's also a secondary issue with overprotecting kids--they don't learn to be wary of the things they do need to be wary of. I'm thinking of a case here many years back, 13 year old only looks one (the wrong) way before walking through the school zone--2 minutes before the lights came on. She stepped out right in front of a truck. And I routinely see it in the wilderness--20's, 30's out there with no thought of what might go wrong. Just Sunday I saved a guy from a very unpleasant night--his phone was dead, he took the wrong fork and didn't realize it. I had talked to him earlier, encountered him again and realized he was on the right trail but going the wrong way. (He was parked at a different trailhead than I was.) No phone = no call for help and almost certainly no light--note that this was the day after a new moon--and even if he realized which branch to take at the next junction it still would have put him back in civilization several miles from his car. And if he took the wrong one--the trail name says "loop" but that will take you over an almost 12k summit, a total of nearly 20 miles.

I don't know around half of my closest neighbours

It's not that I don't want to get to know them, it's that everyone are so busy (me included) that I don't simply have time to align with them to learn more about them better.

Also, tons of people are moving in and moving out all the time.

It wasn't the case in my home village - I knew a lot of people and even more people (my parent friends that I didn't know) knew who I was. I could bet at that time that if something bad was going on for me, there would be someone who will help me without any struggle.

In my current place is different. Even my relatives who stayed in my home town can agree that even there a lot of people are moving in and out and they don't know all of the townspeople anymore.

I remember being 4-years-old and unsupervised a lot. By 6 years old for sure. By 8...."Get out of the house and out from under my feet and don't come back until dinnertime! Now get out!"

It's a different world.

Starting around age 6 or 7 I was going into the woods playing with a friend and by 11 or so my parents had no problem with me riding my bike whwrever I wanted to around town, well before I had a cell phone.

Our one year old could walk to the kitchen and extract things from the fridge, though she would have difficulty opening some of them.

She absolutely cannot go to the supermarket to buy anything, and she cannot cross the street either.

A 3 year old doing all those things... I'm willing to believe some can, but it's definitely not the norm, and not because we don't let them. They just can't.

> Between 1960 and 1990 the death rate for children aged five to 14 fell 48 percent ... a growing share of the accelerating reduction in child mortality arises from a sharp drop in deaths from unintentional injury or accident.

Source: https://www.nber.org/digest/dec99/reducing-accidents-key-low...

The freedoms you describe did not come without significant cost. Some families paid the ultimate price.

The environment can be made safer for kids - and everyone for that matter - and the fact that that it is happening is a very good thing and only to be welcomed. Very, few would ever deny that.

If we were to revert back to attitudes of the 1950s and '60s and give today's kids the same freedoms and autonomy that kids had in that past era (except perhaps for some extreme cases at the margins), then where would that leave us?

No doubt, the mortality rate would rise for the aforementioned age groups but by how much? Those stats of 48% have to be carefully examined and broken down by location then state by state and then country by country (which would require additional data) if we are to gain accurate and meaningful figures. All else being equal, it may be that the actual freedoms and autonomy afforded to kids have to be scaled by location and circumstance - what's applicable in, say, NYC would likely be quite different to those for a town in outback Australia.

I don't know the answer to that question and I've not seen any figures to indicate that anyone else knows them with any level or degree of certainty. Only further research will provide accurate answers.

What I'm about to say next troubles me the most. I have an overactive amygdala and any discussion of metrics concerning kids' lives horrifies me but perhaps we may have to eventually confront the issue no matter how uncomfortable it may be (the death of any kid upsets me terribly and it's something that I'd personally much rather not confront).

As a society, like it or not, we may be confronted with the situation were we have to weigh up the mental health and suicide statistics for kids against the risks and dangers of providing them with additional freedoms to explore the world in ways they see fit - either singly by themselves and or with their mates. That's not saying adults shouldn't provide guidance, of course they should.

As I said, I don't the answers, but what I do know is that eventually we will have to confront the issue head-on.

I think it fitting to finish by saying that in hindsight and after witnessing the increasing rates of psychological problems and distress in kids today, that I've come to realize that the autonomy and freedoms that I had as a kid were near the most important developmental aspects of my childhood.

Frankly, the thought of growing up in today's society with its mixed and conflicting ethics and the strictures placed on kids' freedoms by both parents and society at large simply horrifies me.

interesting.. this is roughly the milestones we've used for our kids. Not because that was told to us or we read it anywhere. Just because thats how we judged the kids capabilities and confidance levels.

My son (the oldest) hit the milestones a bit earlier then my daughter.

When I was a teenager, if my parents wanted to find me on weekends, they'd have to resort to calling other parents until they tracked me down.

Pfff, when I was 7 or 8 I took the local bus to the intercity bus station and then took that 200km to get to my grandparents. I had to figure out what bus to get on to and when to get off. I remember nobody even asked me for ticket money, just asked me where I was going. I was super happy because I got to pocket the money - but then I lost somewhere on my way there :(

But I was one of 4 children in a poor family (at the time, eventually we got up to 6). I can't see myself risking my son on something as stupid, the amount of near death experiences I've had as a child, it freaks me out when I think about my son doing something like that, and I can't really say I'm better off for it either - I was just bored, poor and didn't have anything better to do.

How do you bring up the boogeyman out of nowhere when explaining that we believe in way too many boogeymen?

It still exists, and there are policies around it.

Amtrak does the same but starts at 12: https://www.amtrak.com/unaccompanied-minors-policy

It's a bygone era.