There are probably other factors too. I wonder if there was a kind of overcompensation from "latchkey kids" when they became parents.
Me too.
With that being said, as a parent now, the #1 fear I have with my children playing outside unsupervised isn't kidnapping or violence or anything that would appear on Unsolved Mysteries or America's Most Wanted.
It's cars. My fear is cars.
My boys are 7 & 5 years old and they are both very inattentive. No matter how hard I try to put the fear of the road into them, they both have a tendency to mindlessly wander into it without looking. My older one is autistic, so I'm sure that has something to do with it, but my younger one is not and he is even worse.
I live in a suburb in Maryland named Columbia. Its residential areas were thoughtfully planned-out with very few "busy roads" running through them, but I regularly see people (teenagers?) flooring 50+mph down sleepy tree-lined 25mph streets.
I have no doubt in my mind that, if left unattended, both of my boys would be run over by one of these insane drivers within a week.
Edit: Yes, we and others have complained to the city. Yes, there are speed cameras and the like, but this behavior has only gotten worse post-COVID.
Edit 2: Looks like I'm not alone in thinking this way… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32679858
Nor do they help against drivers looking down at their phones.
Yes, kids brains are underdeveloped, but streets accommodate that there, it's not a death sentence.
It's absolutely unreal how far America seems to have fallen behind, compared to just 10-15 years ago, and how far ahead new traffic calming measures have gotten there in that same timeframe. That's the main thing that strikes us on our return. The absolute complete solipsism on this issue, how trashy and violent the public realm is here.
There was a saying "It takes a village to raise a child" but in modern America each family is closer to being an island to themselves trying to raise their children - there almost certainly are a dozen or so other parents you've met at parks and other things that you trust but those parents might live quite far away from you.
Living in a car oriented culture comes with serious societal issues.
The car was part of a total private technology revolution that fundamentally reduced socialization for work and play.
In retrospect, could we have done this through social events or aggressive reach-outs - sure. But the apathy and distraction provided by using a car to go somewhere was a constant saboteur.
The saddest thing to me that the window is so small to fix it. If my city dawdles another 5-10 years to make our streets safer, my kids will be old enough for it not to matter anymore.
It's a really hard choice. How long are we waiting around until we just pack up and move to somewhere that is safe, to a place where our kids can have independent mobility.
America is so way behind, not only the major centers, even worse in all the 2nd and 3rd tier cities where people still get an aneurysm when somebody dares to suggest to install a bikelane.
Instead we get nearly identical developments repeated over and over and over again.
Signs and warnings rank very low in the hierachy of engineering controls.
The safest option would be to physically prevent vehicles able to travel at greater than 15mph from being in areas with children.
The next safest would be to redesign the street to prevent high-powered vehicles from being able to travel at greater than 15mph.
Stop sign planning usually says to avoid 4 way stops and to give give preference to one of the streets (usually the busier), meaning that if those are used one street at any interspection will probably be one with few stops, allowing cars to build up speed.
Roundabouts (preferably with a physical center median) are the right choice for residential streets, but in most of the US they are still considered "weird", so subdivision developers don't make much use of them.
And the neighbor across something similar, that narrow gap between them slows people down naturally.
Here's a nearby example road: https://www.google.com/maps/search/39.20251909603638,+-76.82...
We have regular speed bumps. They drive 50+mph, slow down, go over them, and then accelerate back up to 50+mph like it's NASCAR or something.
After cutting the cord when our first daughter was born, we were often surprised to come down from a hotel room to get breakfast in the lobby to find that some horrific things were happening, cities were burning, people being murdered, a world spinning out of control.
Oh yeah, I had to remind myself, cable news was like that. So we grabbed coffee to go and headed out to the National Park to hike with the kids.
I don't know why more gyms don't show sports on the TVs. It seems like a much more natural fit.
I always think the gangs and crack epidemic were major contributors too. This was also the era of drive by shootings and gangster rap/culture infiltrating the middle class and WASP folks homes via their children and popular media of all kinds. I also remember teenage pregnancy seemed like a bigger issue then and a reason parents controlled their daughters more closely. The nightly news was reporting on this stuff and many inner city areas were severely depressed. I think in a lot of those areas that have since been gentrified we probably forget just how bad it was for a time.
Where I grew up a .22 was considered a kid rifle. Yes, FL, but I think it was common in other places.
They have .20ga shotguns, too, but don't get nearly as much use out of those.
We currently live in a neighborhood, and my biggest fear in letting them run around is other people calling the police on them for just being unattended. I've already had that happen once, while they were in my own front yard.
We're in the process of looking for a bigger property, further away from other people, where our kids can actually be kids. We'll be able to keep some livestock, and they can ride four-wheelers, gokarts, and dirt bikes. Today they can only do those things when we take them somewhere there's room to do it.
Serial killers are extremely rare, exceptionally few people will ever know somebody who knows somebody who knew a victim of one. Everybody today knows that serial killers exist, but most people only know it because they heard about it from mass media, not because they have some sort of personal experience with it. I think this surely leads people to overestimate the risk.