I think there may have been the obverse, as well: kids got hurt, and that was part of life. You brush it off, you put a cast on it, and you got back on the horse…sometimes literally.
Today a skinned knee will bring a flock of mothers with hand sanitizer and band-aids, and a broken bone on a playground is call for a lawsuit and a press conference and a redesign of the “unsafe” equipment. So put some blame on our litigious/safety obsessed culture as well.
To parents today, even a slightly damaged child is a failure of something - a failure of design, a failure of safety features, a failure of supervision…and if they can’t find something/one else to blame, it’s a failure of parenting. That’s a lot of pressure motivating parents to make sure nothing bad ever happens to a kid, and the easiest way to do that is to make sure they’re never out of the sight of an adult.
I rewatched the Movie ET for the first time in years. There’s a scene where the mother leaves her 6 year old home alone while she runs out. That is probably more Science Fiction now than an alien getting stranded on Earth.
Not to mention leaving a kid home alone with a fever (although he was faking but she didn’t know that) and kids Trick or Treating alone. All normal back then.
I know you are talking about American but I’m saying that Australia provides a good counter example because the same change in parenting behaviour has occurred here as there yet Australia wasn’t religious then or now.
I grew up in seventies middle class suburbia that wouldn’t be significantly different in either density or crime rate to seventies middle class suburbia in a mid size city in the US. The crime wave in the US in the seventies wasn’t geographically uniform.
The house that I grew up bordered the University of Kentucky athletic complex. A high chain link fence separated our back yard from the track, and another fence separated the track from the baseball field. My brother and I and other neighborhood kids would go through a hole in the fence, across the track, through another hole in the second fence, and play baseball on the University’s field when it wasn’t being used.
One day a repairman came to repair the hole in the fence. My Mom saw him starting to work on the other of the fence from our back yard. She went out and ask him to leave a large enough gap under the fence so that we kids could still crawl through it. He did.
I agree that whether or not there ARE other kids in the neighborhood to play with is a part of it. Like you, there are no other kids my sons age living nearby. When their was, yes they played with them.
Plus where would they play? When I was growing up there were undeveloped areas and creeks nearby but now those are all built over.
I want to add to this that letting your kids roam free also had its drawbacks. I remember alot of semi-gang activity occurred and there was alot of bullying. Also some sexual activity that should not have occurred (like two 13 year olds losing their virginity in a treehouse).
In the original Miracle on 34th street, the single mother has sent her 6 year old daughter to watch the parade alone in their apartment. When she gets home she finds the daughter is in the apartment of a single man she has never met before. She is grateful to the stranger for watching her daughter.
When my parents were growing up (I’m 48, they grew up in the 1950s), each one of them lost a few classmates or relatives. My mother’s cousin fell out of the haybarn. My father’s cousin drowned. A kid in school died of measles. A friend had a bike accident.
These deaths were not ordinary or expected, but they were tragic and understood. Some people died. Some kids didn’t make it to adulthood. It was the reality they grew up with, their parents grew up with, and their grandparents grew up with. And it was the reality of their lives as adults as well - you knew someone who lost a child. You had compassion because chances were good you supported a sister or brother or friend through the loss of a child. And having supported them, you wouldn’t dream of blaming them - you learned empathy.
Now we are so afraid of it, and when it happens, we want to believe it can’t possibly happen to us or our kids. So we look for something to be wrong…“they didn’t watch their kids closely enough.” We’ve lost compassion for the parents of the tragedy and want to blame them because it makes us feel safe. But for that emotional ball of twine to work, we then need to take action, and parent our own kids closer - both because we want to believe that will save them, and because we don’t want the blame if it doesn’t.
There’s no doubt kids are safer today. All sorts of rare-but-not-that-rare accidents are nearly unheard of today. My grandfather’s brother died when he was left in a baby carriage outside a ship his mother used. A passerby lit a cigarette and carelessly flicked the match, and the the bedding in in the carriage set aflame. That just wouldn’t happen today. Kids drowned, fell off stuff, were abducted by strangers and all that. Of course, kids weren’t usually hit by cars back in the day, or killed in car crashes, which are the leading causes of childhood death in the US today. (Last I looked, Manhattan was one of the safest places to rear a child in terms of “survival to adulthood” just because Manhattan kids aren’t in cars much.)
But yes, the really big causes of childhood mortality are down (mostly infectious disease) and people have fewer kids, and worry more about those rare accident events.
I don’t buy the religion argument. My parents were atheists and let us run around with little-to-no supervision in the 60s.
There’s no doubt kids are safer today. All sorts of rare-but-not-that-rare accidents are nearly unheard of today. My grandfather’s brother died when he was left in a baby carriage outside a shop his mother used. A passerby lit a cigarette and carelessly flicked the match, and the the bedding in in the carriage set aflame. That just wouldn’t happen today.
Kids drowned, fell off stuff, were abducted by strangers and all that. Of course, kids weren’t usually hit by cars back in the day, or killed in car crashes, which are the leading causes of childhood death in the US today. (Last I looked, Manhattan was one of the safest places to rear a child in terms of “survival to adulthood” just because Manhattan kids aren’t in cars much.) But overall childhood mortality was much higher.
We make work to fill time. For a certain part of the population, they have very little to do other than helicopter parent. Their spouse makes good money, they stay home and watch the kids. Houses take little effort to clean compared to what it took 50 years ago. Dinner takes little time to put on the table when your dinner prep does not involve scratch made biscuits and shucking peas and you peel potatoes for three or four people and not twelve.
When you couldn’t keep an eagle eye on your kids because it was necessary to weed the garden and do the laundry via a mangle and clothesline and you baked your own bread and had to darn socks to get another six months out of them and take care of your 80 year old grandmother because there were no nursing homes - that was your reality. Being able to helicopter parents is like so much of the nonsense we prioritize today (GMO foods - really, starvation would have been a bigger concern for most of human history) - its a luxury we’ve created to worry about to fill the gap in time and stress and feel like we are doing something important.
(We started this with parenting in the 1950s - when women stayed home after the war and we made a cult of motherhood because modern household advances (dryers! vacuum cleaners! convenience foods!) made housework take less time. Even the language has evolved to shift the priority - my grandmother was a housewife. When I spent my year at home, I was a stay at home mom).
I would argue that this population is a very small population, though, with far more means than most of us. I don’t disagree with you that helicopter parenting is almost a badge of honor for that particular group.
As I mentioned upthread, most households are now dual-earner households. In my experience, the moms that do work (self included) have precious little time to spend with their kids; when I get home from work, it’s homework, dinner, bed, ideally with some “quality time” worked in there (because I love my children and also because my children will clearly never be self-actualized individuals if I don’t make them my highest priority - yes, some snark included) and if my kids are lucky, some limited time with a friend or two (mostly unsupervised, granted). The ones who have moms who stay at home are the ones who tend to have more free time with friends in my small circle due to the simple fact that they have more time period.
But, the kids who come from families of more means than mine tend to have more carefully selected companions and more extracirriculars for their resume (do you guys remember having a “resume” when growing up??). Maybe it’s a class thing, with all of us aspiring to the “ideal” parenting style of the upper eschelons who can afford to do that? Maybe it’s us trying to fit in with the Joneses? I don’t know. I do hate the internal struggle of parenting that my mom never seemed to experience.