I hope this “free range” fad burns out fast, before too many kids die.
It’s true that the current societal norms about supervision of kids (which are much stricter than they were a few decades ago) may have come about due to an overhyped fear of abduction by strangers. But it has nonetheless had the very welcome side effect of drastically reducing the number of kids killed by drowning, falls, fires, and being hit by cars. See Figure 9 in this PDF. Also note what the National Bureau of Economic Research has to say.
So all this pining for the “good old days” of the '60s and '70s when kids just roamed around without adult supervision for hours and hours? Stop it. Those days were not good, and returning to them will get a lot of kids killed.
I didn’t see anything in your links about the changes having to do with reduced freedom for kids. Lots of other differences between the '60s and '70s and now. No car seats back then, for one thing. Emergency medical care has greatly improved, so that accidents that would have been fatal then no longer are. Ambulances used to be basically station wagons that drove you to the hospital. Window guards were unheard of when I was a kid. Unfenced pools were common then, I don’t see them anymore. No childproof bottles- no child-proof anything really. Playground equipment didn’t have padding underneath, etc, etc. Plenty of those kids died in accidents when their parents were right there.
It seems that for the parents practicing free range parenting the glory days would be the eighties and early 90s since that would be when they were kids with maybe a bit of the late 70 for those who started late or have older kids.
I don’t see a dramatic decline in child mortality between the present and those glory days and I certainly spent my time as a latch key kid in the late 80s. So on the face of it your premise seems to be false freedom for kids doesn’t change their chance of dieing.
How many people (kids and adults) get killed by parents driving around kids?
Perhaps it would be better to let kids out of the house on their own before puberty, when they still listen to what their parents tell them to a certain degree. It’s insane how high school kids behave on their bicycles here.
Surely there is a happy medium between letting children roam wild so they can kill themselves and locking them in a tiny room with only computer games as company… so they can slowly kill themselves.
The OP mentions kids getting killed. I agree we need to avoid romanticizing the “good ole days”…when every family experienced a “freak accident” taking away a loved one. However, every medicine exacts its cost. If children who are raised to take risks, explore their environments, and create their own fun turn out to be stronger and smarter individuals than those who are not raised this way, and they also go on to live healthier and longer lives, then the shrieking about dead children isn’t that compelling.
Survelliance technology is such that children can be allowed to operate under an illusion of freedom while still being kept safe. With security systems being the way they are now, a typical nine-year-old can be trusted to do the latch-key kid thing for a couple of hours every day, with parents watching remotely from their work computers. They can even remotely unlock the door for the kid just in case he loses the key. Really, with all the technology we have at our disposal, there is no good reason to fret more about kids today than back in the day.
Maybe. But there is necessarily a point where it’s better to have some kids killed than to protect them further. We could have them in bubble wrap all day, in a sterilized envirnment, not allowed to leave a secured room, and with a 24/7 staff to watch them over. It would hardly be a good thing, even if accidental deaths fall to zero. So, where do you put this point where we accept some small risks?
I enjoyed my free-roaming childhood, hours and hours without supervision, a lot. The idea of a childhood with helicopter parents looks like a nightmare to me. Yes, probably some kids my age were killed because, say, they rode bicycles without helmet, crossed a road without supervision, fell while climbing on something dangerous, drown in a river, etc…(I fell many time from bicycle, was hit by a car, climbed in an abandoned quarry, played in a river…that’s why I picked these examples). I still think the increased hapiness and freedom was worth the risk. Of course you can’t tell that to the parent who lost his child in such an accident, but you can’t have your cake and eat it.
(Regarding sexual predators, I’m convinced the improvement comes from a greater awareness of the issue, not from the current stranger-danger paranoia. There is less danger because it’s less likely that the father or priest will get away with it, not because police is called when a stranger looks in the general direction of a child. So, I don’t believe helicopter parents are an noticeable improvement. Allowing children to speak up is)
In addition to the already-mentioned gaps in the OP’s logic, physicians have become better at keeping people alive when they’re hurt, as discussed in this thread: Is the recent drop in violent crime due to banning lead in gasoline? - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board. Have unintentional injuries decreased appreciably? Most non-fatal injuries are due to falls and being struck, with overexertion coming in a distant 3rd and motorvehicle occupant 4th. (CDC PDF)
But the vast majority of unintentional injury deaths of children are transportation related. So maybe these helicopter parents who drive their kids around all the time are killing their kids.
Fortunately, driving has become much safer. 2000-2009 saw a 40% decrease in MV deaths. (CDC). Still, a car is the easiest way to end up with a dead kid. Drowning, which usually occurs in someone’s backyard, is rare. And it only decreased 28% over the same period. The rates of suffocation and poisoning went up.
Do we have any real data on changes in unsupervised time over the years? The OP mentions roaming free in the 60s and 70s, but I know this occurred in the 80s and 90s.
This is where I spent my childhood. I lived near the end of the ‘peninsula’ south of Balboa. My elementary school is the big field on the other side of the canyon. Starting from kindergarten (IIRC – could have been 1st grade) I’d walk east to Mt. Everest, south to Mt. Blanca, west to Mt. Brundage, down to Mt. Ararat, and then to the school – a distance of 1.2 miles. Or I could take the trail down to the plateau on the north side of the canyon, hike/slip/slide down the hill, and scramble up the other side. This was strictly verboten, and I received a spanking for playing in the canyon once. I would have had to take the long route if I’d had helicopter parents. (To be honest, before I started riding a bicycle there, I wouldn’t have minded being driven to and from school.)
As I’ve said in other threads, I was a ‘latchkey’ kid. I’d call my mom when I got home from school. Other than the check-in, I was free to roam. I was never approached by strangers. Did I get hurt? Well, there was that time I tried to ride my bike down the deeply-rutted slope of the plateau and my bollocks had a painful encounter with my gear shift. There was the time a friend said ‘Look at me!’ as he rode his bike with his hands off, and I ran into a car while I was looking. I remember two fat lips as the result of skateboarding. I got a slice on my wrist when a friend and I tried to slide down a hill in the canyon on a piece of sheet metal. That one was scary and nasty. But my worst injury was when I was ten years old in the supervised environment of the school. I broke my arm. As a 15-year-old living in the Mojave Desert, I spent a lot of my free time riding an Enduro across miles and miles of empty space, far away from help if anything should have happened. And visiting dad for five years before that, I did the same.
Every kid I knew roamed freely. Aside from my wrist injury, none of us were seriously injured – or come to think of it, injured at all beyond the typical cuts and scrapes that are common to childhood. And none of us were ever abducted.
Maybe at the same time, children will learn to make their own self-protective decisions, which will save their lives someday when they are 20 and almost old enough to be trusted with a can of beer, and mommy is not holding their hand.
Let’s see. Growing up in the 40s and 50s, I went through about a thousand school-mates, and I never heard of a single one dying from misadventure. Sure, there were a few broken arms, but they set, even with the primitive orthopedics of the time. You get over poison ivy, and mosquitoes don’t carry malaria any more in this country, and you can’t get killed in a BB-gun war, and we knew who all the dangerous weirdos were, and just stood across the street and laughed at them. There were a few kids banged around in car crashes, but their parents were driving. They’d have been safer playing by themselves.
This. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, we were largely left to our own devices. We would head out in the morning, bop around to different friend’s houses, ride bikes and skateboards and Big Wheels [sup]TM[/sup] down way too steep hills, and play in the local attractive nuisance (construction sites, mostly frozen ponds or exposed drainage culverts). Once it starts getting dark, we head home for dinner.
Heck, we even had a Thunderdomein elementary school.
Other than a few scrapes and bruises and skinned knees, not too many serious injuries.
The problem is that when kids don’t to experience risks themselves, they often grow up without the ability to accurately assess and mitigate risks later on.
I wonder if there is any indication that Millennials are stunted compared to their earlier counterparts. It sure seems like being raised in a highly structured and protected environment would be correlated with negative traits in adulthood. But I wonder if the science actually bears this out.
It’s also interesting that we don’t ever hear from helicopter-parented Dopers in threads like this. Everyone who has opined here seems to have experienced the benefits of “free range parenting”. I wonder what this is all about it. Do helicopter-parented Dopers not exist? Are they too embarrassed to come forward? Or is it that everyone assumes they were raised “free range”, including those who weren’t. Inquiring minds want to know.
Surely we haven’t seen any examples of that around these parts, although I had initially pinned that on inadequate statistics education in high school.
