When I was little, I regularly walked 3 or 4 miles to visit friends. I had to cross at least one "big" road on my way, where I just took extra care, because my parents had reminded me to.
The only large-scale problem was the anxiety suffered by parents who started obsessively worrying about their child, and maintaining tighter control over children is mainly medicine to alleviate their anxiety.
Do you know what the rates of accidental death were in the 1970s vs today?
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just interested if you know the data.
EDIT: indeed, most children killed in car accidents were inside the vehicles, so driving kids everywhere may be increasing their risk of death. And a decreasing death rate might just be better car safety features - better car seats; better seatbelts and seatbelt laws.
EDIT2: Something like 12,000 US children die each year from unintentional injury, and 29million have non fatal injuries. Most of these are preventable.
Now that's not a very good sample size for a low-probability event, but it's not entirely insignificant either. If children had to dodge death at every turn like one commenter suggested, zero out of several hundred would have been unlikely.
As for non-fatal injuries, that's different, we were CONSTANTLY injured. Not from cars, but from just being clumsy stupid little fucks. It was normal for a kid to have bloody knees or scabs on their knees in my childhood. But I don't consider that a problem.
there will never be 100% safety, kids do stupid dangerous things, climb stuff that shouldn't be climbed, we all did. in past, people accepted that, accepted the risk of injury and death for their kids, it was part of growing up. we just grew weaker recently, became control freaks, with illusion that we can control everything, while losing so much more. freedom.
fck, i am so glad i grew up in exactly that period of experiencing many good old things, and be able to apreciate new cool stuff too.
Statistics about my situation (1992, Austria):
These are the statistics about traffic-accidents back then. Unfortunately there's no distinction whether the children were in the car or walking/cycling.
* Austria had 7.8 million inhabitants back then, 24% were 0-19 years old.
* There were 4.682 accidents involving children 0-14 years old
* 4.843 times a child was hurt
* 56 children were killed
Source: http://www.statistik.at/web_de/statistiken/energie_umwelt_in...
Even adults screw up, we can't reasonably expect kids not to when the consequences can be fatal. We could easily make our streets safer and more tolerant of user error if we actually cared, look at Sweden or the Netherlands. We just have to make safety a higher priority than speed in road design.
Think about how insane it is that we're expecting kids to regularly navigate an environment where, if they make even a small mistake, they can die. In what universe is that reasonable? Why are expecting our children to regularly dodge death?
I posted some statistics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13549214
What price a life? What else would you block to save a life? Pen lids? Swimming pools? Marshmallows?
> if they make even a small mistake, they can die. In what universe is that reasonable?
This universe. It is nature's way. Nature is unemotionally brutal, and cares not for a slip-up. We just try to insulate ourselves from its brutality.
Edit to reply to Tullius (I've hit my comment limit): The whole origin of this discussion is the hit to quality of life that losing the 'right to roam' has given. Also, while pen lids and marshmallows are outliers, swimming pool deaths aren't - between 1 and 4yo, drowning is the leading cause of death in the US, and drowning is up there with traffic accidents up until the teen years.
Obviously there's some limit to the degree we can protect ourselves, however as it stands, traffic fatalities are one of the highest-ranked causes of death for kids and youth, and we know of plenty of things that could increase traffic safety while still satisfying our transportation needs. There's no need to debate some silly extreme when we can make vast improvements without compromising quality of life.
> This universe. It is nature's way. Nature is unemotionally brutal, and cares not for a slip-up. We just try to insulate ourselves from its brutality.
Yes, and we could insulate ourselves a lot better if we took up better traffic engineering principles.
These are the statistics about traffic-accidents back then. Unfortunately there's no distinction whether the children were in the car or walking/cycling.
* Austria had 7.8 million inhabitants back then, 24% were 0-19 years old.
* There were 4.682 accidents involving children 0-14 years old
* 4.843 times a child was hurt
* 56 children were killed
Source: http://www.statistik.at/web_de/statistiken/energie_umwelt_in...
I posted some statistics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13549214
Everyone's grandparents who survived just fine are exactly that: just fine, because they survived.
Nowadays, with parents having fewer children on average and with tragic childhood accidents being more exceptional, I would only expect modern parenting to favor greater restrictions.