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There is plenty of middle ground between the homogeneous high-social-cohesion society of Japan, and a high-PETTY-crime urban American city.

Just because your cell phone would be stolen doesn't mean your child would be.

Most of the cities and places listed in the article is still full of pickpockets and scams. But that's a different story than fearing for the lives or even just the safety of children...

Spot on; unfortunately our little lizard brains don't do so well with rational discrimination between threat levels. It's not like people enjoy being anxious and borderline paranoid all the time. If they thought about it, they'd realize it was an unpleasant feeling that was shading their life with negativity. But it's mostly unconscious, unnoticed, a natural reaction. Like a constantly whirring fan that you don't hear anymore, until it turns off and you realize how annoying it was.

> But it's easy to criticize from afar if you've never lived in a low-trust society.

You are part of the society you live in, and how trusty, or not trusty, said society is, isn't some fixed value.

Do you think this whole "War on Terror/Trust, nobody,/Report everything suspicious" episode, that's still going on, might have something to do with US American parents being so paranoid?

Because what I've witnessed in Germany, is that a whole lot of parents are just irrationally paranoid in response to press reports pushing certain agendas.

These people are utterly convinced that everything is worse now, that their kids are in constant danger everywhere. Even when you cite those people local crime statistics and how crime has steadily declined, these people will insist on "everything having gotten worse, statistics are faked".

At this point, most kids carry around their very personal tracking device, yet parents are still scared of letting them do anything on their own. Has the world really become such a much more dangerous place? And if that's actually true, why would you bring children into this, supposedly, much worse place?

Petty crimes like stealing phones and wallets are relatively rare in US cities like San Francisco.[1]

Pickpocketing is a major issue in Paris and in other major European cities[2], yet children are trusted to do activities alone and independently.

The issue of child independence is is unrelated to actual crime and culturally based.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2011/02/the_lo...

[2] http://www.traveller.com.au/worlds-top-10-worst-cities-for-p...

Paris has the same behavior as sf towards thievery for objects and belongings. But children are still free to roam. I don't think trust has to be uniform for every matters.

It’s great that kids feel safe in Tokyo. And I understand the reaction against helicopter parenting generally. But the arguments against helicopter parenting never discuss how safe things really are, or if the rates of child abuse have declined (or are under-reported).

Recently I saw a report on Chikans (gropers on trains in Japan). The report suggested that almost every young woman experienced this (in particular high school girls).

Couldn’t believe it. I essentially thought it was bullshit.

So I asked the Japanese women who I know well enough if this was the case.

They confirmed that it happens to everyone once or twice (though uncommon).

It’s almost never reported to the police.

I’ve left phones or laptops in Starbucks or whatever while I went to the bathroom in the us and they were fine. You’re not surrounded by people waiting for a chance to rob you most of the time.

You wouldn't do that in many parts of the world, though.

I agree with you but then again the US is a massive country; it cannot be the same all over. So something gives the parents the idea they need to be (over?)protective or we just do not hear from the regions where that is not needed because it is not newsworthy?

I suspect there are places where you wouldn’t and shouldn’t leave your 5yo alone in the playground a short walk from home. And I assume that the culture will spread within a country (shared news etc) so that people in areas where this would be perfectly safe don’t do that either. I’m not sure what to do about that their than encourage people to make their own judgements and also see the cost of overprotecting. I think that’s a key here: parents think that watching over kids is invariably best, and don’t assign a value to independence.

> suspect there are places where you wouldn’t and shouldn’t leave your 5yo alone in the playground a short walk from home.

You have that almost everywhere; sometimes depending, unfortunately, on color of skin or social standing. But I am just surprised because of the size of the US; in the Netherlands, which is miniscule, ‘people in the south’ think Amsterdam and Rotterdam are Sodom and Gomorrah which is mostly not true. I thought it was because it is such a small country that people would have such ideas about cities which are basically less than 2 hours drive from them, but then you see this in massive countries too. The tabloid press seems to do a lot of harm really.

There's been an irrational fear of child kidnappings in the US for decades now, fueled by sensationalist fearmongering news reports. When I was young, a young girl went missing in the area (still unsolved, 25 years later) and it was huge news for years, and justification in many parents' minds (though not my own) for never letting their children do anything unsupervised.

But...while that was a scary and tragic case, the reason it made so much news is that it was, and remains, very rare. The notion that some kidnapper or pedophile is going to make off with your child, targeted at random on the street, has always been an almost absurdly unlikely one. And yet many places in the US would see a parent arrested for negligence for allowing their child to walk a block or two on their own.

So, yes, something gives parents the idea they need to be overprotective. It's a sensationalist media and a culture of fear spread by people with a poor understanding of risk.

But what are you going to steal from a child?

I'd be worried about children stepping on used needles or human feces, or being attacked by one of the aggressive, drugged out homeless.

...yeah, that’s a couple of things you probably need to fix as well.

Personally I’d aim for the $1,000 iPhone, but I’d definitely consider the Apple Watch too.