How about we just be more like the US was before about the 90s? As a kid who grew up in the 70s there's really a lot of truth to the "70's mom" memes/jokes. I could go with my buddies night fishing down on a pier on the bay about a mile away when I was 10 - we just had to be back by 10PM. That wouldn't happen now.

Didn't get the message? US is scary after dark.

Something went wrong in the US after 911. I don’t think it’s just the government. The entire capitalist machine realised just how profitable fear can be, and that’s been one of the big marketing angles in the 2000s. Especially in media, but elsewhere like supplements and drugs too.

But the society wide impact of that has been a much more fearful people, obviously making parents more protective too.

The seeds were planted long before 9/11. I was born in the 80s, and even I saw something wasn't right. The Nancy Reagan War on Drugs and Stranger Danger were there already.

Yeah, the culture around stranger danger and satanic panic really had a lot to do with it. Part of the freedom my generation had also came from the lack of tech to keep track of us, but the culture itself really changed. My parents occasionally decided we'd spent too much time indoors and kicked us out of the house until dark and had little idea where we were a lot of the time. I was a latchkey kid too and I'm pretty sure today leaving a kid unattended at home for hours would be considered illegal now (or at least risk a visit from CPS)

I see three comments saying it was there before 9/11, but really, the fear dial was amped to 11 then. It was a milestone in that sense. Furthermore, journalism changed dramatically. Instead of more open ended questions, especially TV interviews started treating guests like enemies for example “Why didn’t you do X?” to a guest, instead of saying “Can you tell us what you did?”

Also more subtle changes in how media reports things in general. I haven’t seen a study on this, but it would be an interesting subject.

> I see three comments saying it was there before 9/11, but really, the fear dial was amped to 11 then.

If you look for security reasons, you'll find security reasons, for everything. It's like like applying a caricature of scientific method to gaslight someone.

I'd place the journalism shark-jump more at the OJ trial than at 9/11.

Yeah, I place that in the same time frame. It was a warm up for what was to come.

> Something went wrong in the US after 911.

Well before then. I got one of the last chemistry sets around 1970, when they were all emasculated.

> The entire capitalist machine realised just how profitable fear can be

Oh come on. A huge driver of this problem is the legal system which encourages jackpot lawsuits, along with our culture of it's always someone else's fault (usually the party with money that becomes worthwhile to sue).

What I see is mutually interlocking and supporting drivers:

1. Profiteering media based on a 24/7/365 fixation on fear and violence: "if it bleeds it leads", and encouraging our worst tendencies toward moral panic (e.g. the 80s satanic ritual abuse panic, which recapitulated in some ways the Salem witch trials)

2. A people who easily go along with the media-driven culture of fear, and learn e.g. that their kids can't go anywhere without falling into pedophile clutches

3. The hyper-punitive systems of US law and child protective services

Honestly I'm dubious it's any of those. I blame more cars on the road.

The book Where is my Flying Car traces a lot of different developments back to the late 60s/early 70s explosion in number of pages of federal regulations and lawyers per capita. The massive cultural obsession with danger and liability is relatively young and can essentially be blamed on Richard Nixon.

> Something went wrong in the US after 911

To be fair, the media landscape changed pretty drastically since the 80s or so. First, cable (and talk radio?) let us start forming bubbles. Then ubiquitous Internet made more bubbles and pushed people apart more.

And what's great for forming bubbles and, coincidentally, marketing demographics? Nothing new: fear.

The thing is . . . the media landscape hadn't been so mainstream, pine-scented, and vanilla-flavored until really recently: probably traceable to the rise of radio in the early 20th century. Before that, every big city had many newspapers, most of whom claiming some of the others were lying. "Yellow journalism" dates to the last century.

Radio and broadcast television were highly regulated. The idea was that use of those things should be for the public good. And people who voted D and people who voted R both had reasons to want that enforced. And their politicians found something to agree about beyond scrabbling for donor money.

In these days of corporate capture of politics, regulating anything for the public good is only going to happen if it profits the biggest gorilla in the room.

I think American history tinges its culture, as this has almost always been a state driven by fear of boogeymen, whether those boogeymen were witches, sin, foreigners, minorities, communists, satanists, terrorists, etc.

I agree with your premise that it certainly was recognized and capitalized upon at that time again that fear, hysteria, crises, etc were good ways to get what you want out of people.

Your mom would get arrested now. Even if she wanted to let you.

I've a 12 year old... Last year I was reading at a table in the library, and he was less than 20 feet away from me in the children's section reading quietly on a couch. A security guard came up to me and told me I had to have him always in my sight.

When I do groceries I typically give my kids one half of the list and a cart, and they go off. I can't count how many times they've been asked where their parent is. I've trained them to ask the asker "Where is your parent?"

> Your mom would get arrested now. Even if she wanted to let you.

Instead children's development is being arrested, apparently. Albeit in a different sense.

I think so-called "free-range parenting" may be what they have in mind.

I would love to do this but I live in a major city. Our neighborhood is relatively quiet but there is the random stranger and speeding car to think about. For me it’s delaying and limiting how much range my children get in their youth

Speeding cars aren't too much of an issue you've taught your kids how to cross the street safely and they're older than toddlers. Random strangers aren't much of a threat either unless you're in an area with lots of crime/gangs. These days kids have cell phones in their pockets and can dial 911, give location updates to friends and parents, or even start recording suspicious behavior before it escalates which weren't options kids had in the past.

Crime and homelessness spill into my neighborhood. Cars drive down my 25mph street at 45+. I have stopped neighbors kids several times from runnning out after an errant ball. A neighbor’s child had an abduction attempt against her just two days ago.

Every city is different, it’s not a one size fits all approach. I’ll accept the downvotes for protecting my 5 year old. In two years this entire story will be different

Yeah, but they tend to get outraged over ridiculous stuff periodically. I stopped caring about that group for this reason.

I mean, there were articles and think pieces about complete nothing burgers. Like someone seen a mom put blanket on grass and cut cucumber and give it to kid. There was whole think piece about overprotection and fear and fatness, all of those purely projected on woman that just ... cut cucumber.