"Grown-ups have taken all the fun out of being a kid just to save a few thousand lives."
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/04/06/george-carlin-you-a...
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/04/06/george-carlin-you-a...
One can certainly argue that we've gone too far in the direction of removing all risk of injury. But saving lives? Absolutely the right thing to do! One preventable death is one death too many.
The goal here should be "controlled risk". Not no risk at all, but controlled risk in well-understood conditions to ensure that kids can still experiment and have fun without risking death or permanent injury. This article mentions kids having access to hammers and nails and planks to build stuff. That's controlled risk; they could hurt themselves, but they're not going to kill themselves (at least, not by accident). But you wouldn't give them a nail gun.
I'm suddenly reminded of the game SOMA and every other "the ends justify the means" AI story where unspeakable horrors come from mottos like "save all lives at all costs."
The problem is right here, what is the society acceptable definition of preventable? Keeping all children in hermetic bubbles would prevent all child deaths due to disease, but weaken their immune system so much that the minute they come out they would get sick and die as an adult. In effect all these safety efforts are creating mental hermetic bubbles that fucks their future mental state when they finally achieve independence.
To me that's kind of a facious slippery slope argument. Of course it isn't worth it to completely lock down a person's life in the name "safety" or "their own good", but when you can take measures that guarantee a greater degree of safety with only a thin, marginal reduction in freedom, "living", or whatever you wish to call it (if any reducation at all) - of course it is worth it.
To me this would be something like restricting people's right to drive on public roads when we have a fully autonomious network of vehicles (however long that will take). Sure people are a bit more restricted in their freedom to man a vehicle, but on the other hand you could (and this is what I am wagering) completely eliminate the ~95% of vehicle accidents and deaths caused by humans.
When are we banning cars?
Kids might have more fun in the car not wearing seatbelts, for example. I know as a kid I was especially resistant to putting on a seatbelt because why should it restrict my movement? But I would hope we can all understand that seatbelts are a necessity for safety.
We accept that cars in the US are necessary for our daily lives, and take action to prevent as much death or injury as we can. This is why we have regulations on speed, stop signs, lights and more. We've created an entire regulatory system for the sake of making driving safer.
In this case, is it really any different from regulatory agencies ensuring that playgrounds don't have things that could cause clearly preventable injuries?
To put it another way, lightning strikes are one of the rarest forms of death in the country, and yet still kill more people in the US than the size of my family's big holiday dinner
1 in a 1,000? 6 in 10,000? 13 in 10,000? 1 in 100,000?
Drowning? Also down by a similar ratio. Generic accidents? Same, same.
Sure, there has never been as safe a time to be a kid as today. Big question is, does being wrapped in cotton throughout your formative years make for a safer life as an adult, or did you miss some lessons in risk assessment which makes you more prone to getting it good and hard later in life?