Honestly a lot of it is the cost of medical care these days. I don’t mind if my kid is in a cast but I’m out 15k + if they break a bone.
As you say, stuff where you balance quite high up, but usually with a softer material on the ground than asphalt so that a fall isn't lethal. I never saw kids fall and hurt themselves, so I don't know what would happen if they fell from the maximum height, but they wouldn't die.
I had my (then) 10 and 12yr olds go for it, because I had no idea where else they'd ever get the chance to try.
(OTOH, I tried the 1m springboard and got water in my ear that took days to get out. I'm not as young as I once was)
I remember the 3m springboard taken out of my pool in the states in the 80's, and I can't remember ever seeing a diving board in use at a pool in Ireland.
I don't see this in pools. 3m spring boards are still pretty common at pools in the US. My "nothing special" high school had 3m springs.
It's true that the 5m,7m,10m platforms are usually only found in sportsplex-type pools. They typically come as a package. But as you mentioned in an earlier comment, 5m+ starts the get actually dangerous. Flopping from 10m or even 7m without an agitator can do serious permanent damage. IMO a platform tower above 3m (or maybe 5m) is more "expensive sports equipment" than "general public recreational equipment".
I maybe could see a 5m platform as "general public recreational equipment", but 7 and 10 are definitely not. And there are just better ways to use time/money than building a 5m platform when you already have 3m spring boards.
American pools are moving away from exercise and toward recreation/amusement (i.e., switching out swimming lanes for "water playgrounds" and switching out diving boards for water slides). But that's a totally different phenomenon from "bubble wrap culture"; IMO those water playgrounds are way more dangerous than traditional pools (I've seen more than one kid injure themselves pretty seriously jumping off of the water playground into ~2ft water; that would never happen in a lane-swimming pool). And personally, I've had more injuries on water slides than on 1m or 3m spring boards.
So there's something annoying going on with American swimming pools, but it's not bubble wrap culture.
I know many, many just-below-olympic level divers. Of those, one suffered "minor" injuries (deep bruising basically everywhere on their body and a burst ear drum) and one suffered major life-threatening internal injuries (collapsed lung) after landing on their belly/back from 10m.
The person with the less severe injuries flopped with the aerator on, which is probably the only reason the injuries weren't more serious.
Diving from 10m is absolutely dangerous, even for professionals, especially without an aerator.
> but I don't know how open the facilities in the US are to the public/minors.
In the USA, at the places I know of, untrained children are allowed to dive off of 10m platforms during "free swimming" times. But only straight dives, and only after they demonstrate straight dives off of 5m and 7m.
Which seems like a sensible compromise, given the risks.
(Exceptions are always possible. If you are training for platform diving, you can simply tell the life guard and they will let you do fancier dives from 10m.)
> giving 3.3 million inhabitants per tower, compared to 5.3 for the whole US
"conurbation vs. entire population" not a fair comparison -- a huge portion of the US population lives in rural areas that couldn't support a diving tower even if they wanted to.
All of the USA cities whose diving infrastructure I know about have between 1 million to 2 million inhabitants per tower. According to that metric, the USA is less risk averse about diving (but actually, it's really just a matter of wealth and interest, because diving is an expensive sport and platforms are actually specialized sports equipment).
Edit: Also, the wiki list of 10m platforms in the usa is out of date or just wrong. None of the 10m platforms I've used on a regular basis are on that list...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/well/family/utah-passes-f...
I walk two of my kids to school daily.
Why? It isn't really the kids I worry about, it's the idiot adults. Around their school there are:
-- School zone signs, indicating the 20MPH speed reduction area. -- Flashing yellow lights that only activate during school hours -- Middle-of-the-road barriers that indicate there is a school zone ahead -- Painted crosswalks -- Adults with crossing flags to indicate the crosswalk. Sometimes they even wear orange safety vests. -- The speed limit within a half-mile in all directions is 25MPH
Guess what? Cars still blow through in excess of 40MPH, even with kids present. I've been nearly run over on multiple occasions.
This is in a rural ("family values") community. It's pure anarchy, that's why I don't let my kids walk to school alone.
Last year there was a fatal car accident. The driver was going so fast down a narrow, one lane road that when he hit a car pulling out of the driveway, the car flipped over. Imagine how pedestrians feel about that or parents feel about that to their kids.
Which puts the per capita likelihood at 3.8, 0.2, 0.015, 0.0024% respectively, per year.
Parents have a right to their own decisions, but retarding a child's growth because of a fear of something that's only 20x as likely as getting struck by lightning?
Personally, that seems literally insane.
If my child were to be killed by a driver, I would mourn for the rest of my life, but at least I'd know they lived in the time they had on this Earth.
Being struck by lightening is a poor comparison since that is almost entirely avoidable with actions that most people follow subconsciously: they don’t want to walk through a field in the pooring rain. Chance of death from being run over by a cruise ship is also low. People generally don’t want to go swimming where they are transiting. Do you encourage your kids the jump of the pier when the ship is docking?
Chance of death from being hit by a TVG is pretty low. They only run on tracks with protected right of way, so it’s difficult to find oneself on their tracks. Do you encourage your kids to climb that fence and walk those tracks?
Death from traffic is not quite the same, but similar.
Abductors don't need to be everywhere. They just have to be a plausible threat to affect the thought process of a parent that's deciding whether or not they are going to leave their child completely unsupervised and unattended.
Maybe if the media didn't have a fetish for covering the incidents that do happen. Maybe if there wasn't a vocal subculture that crucifies parents for leaving their children to their own devices. Maybe if the thought of having the center of your world being beaten, violated and murdered at the hands of a stranger wasn't so mind-numbingly horrific. Maybe then this trend would start going the other way.
Or not? Sure parents used to let their kids roam free. They also let them ride in the back of pickup trucks and beat their asses when they did something wrong. There's probably a healthy middle ground.
What I would suggest then is that, those that are left to roam are in more danger than those who aren't, because there aren't as many alternate targets. There are also fewer witnesses now too. So even if you think it is a big scare, there is less, to use a vaccination analogue (incorrectly I know), herd immunity.
Historically, someone might've had 5-10 children and it acted as a form of redundancy. I think that feeling has changed significantly!
Conversely, I think there is a greater emphasis on extra-curricular activities now. These days, there is a feeling that you're selling your kid short or failing to set them up well if you don't have them enrolled in swimming lessons from maybe two years of age, in dance or sports or kinder-gym classes around 3-5 years of age, and then in after-school sports programs once they start school.
Something else had to have happened.
I'd hazard that on the whole Americans are less tolerant of risk than they were 60 years ago.
As an explanation, I'd tenuously tie it to a decrease in "real world physics" employment (e.g. farming, manufacturing). When 50% of the population works in farming (circa 1870), they have one way of evaluating risk and human capabilities. When that number drops to 2%, it's easy to forget how robust humans are.
Obviously, we're increasingly aware of the risks (usually without any appreciation of the odds). Previously, you heard through close circles. Now, by the time you're a parent, you've heard of hundreds of ways your child might die through news, movies, etc.
I'm a parent of three, and I actively work to minimise risk amongst my kids where I think it's appropriate, but I'm always conscious of when I'm doing it and try to balance it.
If news is optimized for clicks / views, negative stories are more engaging, and the availability heuristic is accurate (aka we assign greater importance to things we can immediately recall), then viewing profit-on-engagement news fundamentally reshapes our opinion of the world.