Bingo!!
My kids hate having to go into the store with us to go shopping, but after the last time we left them in the car, they have no choice, despite that fact that they’re 8 and 10. My wife let them stay in the car playing their DSs while she went into the store to shop, expecting to be gone 10 minutes. Parked in the shade and it was a cool day, so there was no danger of overheating. 5 minutes later she’s being paged over the store PA to come to customer service and is greeted by mall security and some irate social worker who happened to be walking through the parking lot and saw “a baby” left alone in a car. Um, that “baby” is 8 years old, knows how to use the cel phone left in the car so he can call Mom if there’s a problem, and knows how to lock and unlock the car doors, and not to talk to strangers tapping on the car window. The 10 year old wasn’t visible as he was under a blanket trying to reduce the glare on his DS screen and the 8 year old fell asleep.
Well, for what it’s worth, we once let one of our dogs race through piles of leaves at a public park. He had a blast, but when he came out, he had a big bleeding gash on one of his “heels”. He then had to go to the vet’s to get stitched up. We opined that some shitbiscuit left a broken bottle hidden in one of the piles. But I don’t condone close supervision of kids playing in leaves. Besides, even if you did hover over them, would it prevent them getting gashed by something in the leaves?
Then there is the revival of the Feminine Mystique. In the 1950s, in order to keep women outside the workforce, we encouraged “homemaking” to never before thought of reaches. Automation made a homemakers job easier, so we needed to fill her time on things like Jello salads.
Homemaking - which done well is really a career, an art, and a science - isn’t seen as vital - and the amount of effort it takes to run a home has decreased even more. But child raising…child raising (also done well, a career, an art and a science) that can fill in every moment of a parent’s day.
Underneath both the cult of the home of the 50s and the current cult of the child is the implication that if anything goes wrong - if your husband leaves you, if he doesn’t get promoted - it was because his collars weren’t white enough. And if your kid gets tetanus playing in the leaves - well, that is your fault (because you didn’t vaccinate him - that would have meant exposing him to autism risk!). Which mean those that buy into the cult take risk analysis to the extreme.
Or it could be that standards in regard to safety have simply changed all over, and not just with children.
See: wearing helmets, wearing seatbelts, smoking … the list goes on.
When I was growing up, it was perfectly acceptable for a fully grown adult to drive without a seatbelt if s/he wanted to, and ashtrays were in every office - because adults smoked in them. No-one wore a bike helmet.
Now, folks are not allowed to smoke even close to the entrance of an office building lest someone be exposed to second-hand smoke, you are required by law to buckle up, and pretty well every adult wears a bike helmet.
If we adults take such tender (and perhaps excessive) care of ourselves, why is it surprising that we take equal care of our children?
No “cult of the child” is necessary to explain this.
Dad let us ride on the back of the truck. Not the bed… Standing on the bumper while holding the tailgate. Not on the rode… If it was on the road we had to be in the bed, but we would put the tailgate down and hang our legs.
The guns were never locked up, but we only used them under supervision of dad, of of the oldest brother when he was around 10.
At 8 or 9, my new job was climbing up to the top of the grain elevator(125 feet of exposed ladder with no safety line) to grease the bearings/valves. I had actually climbed it when I was 5, at least according to grandma.
The ponds out back were for swimming. We were responsible for spotting snapping turtles and reporting them to dad for extermination. They can get pretty big!
We would go to town for scouts. After the meeting was over, we would go to the bar across the street, where we could order hamburgers and a soda and eat while we waited for dad to show up. Secondhand smoke abounded.
Ah… life has changed.
I think not letting people do things is silly eg the jumping on leaves thing. But using head safety equipment I cant really see the argument against it.
As in right now my sister-in-law is recovering from ongoing concussion problems from her skiing. Theres still plenty of bruises and scrapes to be had when you wear one after all, you’re just minimising brain damage. Whats the benefit in risking that?
Otara
While i do think that some of this stuff is overprotective, I do think that helmets for sledding and biking and so on are simply good sense. Breaking your arm is a lot less likely to do you permanent or fatal damage than breaking your skull.
In other words, in some ways modern people are (shocking I know) simply being better parents than the sainted parents of history.
Well, sometimes you DO need a helmet while sledding. 
For bicycles, I’d never, ever wear a helmet around my (Michigan) neighborhood. That would be, well, ridiculous. On the other hand when I go out on the trials, I certainly use a helmet.
As for sledding, I think again that I’d refuse to wear a helmet at the park where I grew up sledding. On the other hand, I really, really wish we’d all had helmets at Silver Trails during our whatever-we-called it all day sledding and tobogganing event. There were lots of scary hills out there.
Really, it all comes down to simple risk analysis. What’s the frequency of an activity? What are the chances something will happen? What’s the severity if it does happen?
And for those of you who didn’t have the luxury of a steel runner sled when growing up, get one for your kids. There’s nothing better, I promise!
Maybe it does sound kind of hypocritical that I wore a helmet on my bike but not sledding or maybe the philosophy my parents had was that snow is soft (usually) and concrete is hard. Of course my dad once split his helmet down the middle after flipping over the handlebars of his bike on a long ride, and I don’t recall any stories of my parents hurt themselves while sledding.
How about trampolines? I’ve already let my 20 month old play on a big one without the huge side “net,” but I was also on it. My wife had a trampoline when she was younger and did break her ankle . . . running through the back yard to get to it. I agree it can be important to have the springs covered, but what do you think of the netting to keep people on? Some neighbor kids have a blast throwing themselves against it and bouncing back.
Frankly, I think we have crossed a line with regards to the worship of human life and safety (and for kids doubly so).
While any tragedy is, well, tragic for those intimately involved, I could care less if a few kids die or are seriously injured every year from random activities that are ‘unsafe’.
A hundred or so kids get abducted (by strangers) each year in a country of 300 million people? I’d say we’ve just about achieved perfection. Less than 1% infant mortality rate? Let’s close the book on that chapter!
People die and get hurt. Kids die and get hurt. Bad shit happens. Most of it is worth trying to prevent to a certain extent, but there comes a point where continued prevention efforts stop making sense.
Really? It seems to me the risk of banging one’s head on hard pavement (roads, sidewalks) is at least as bad as anything that can happen while mountain biking. Add in stuff like kids/dogs/walkers/etc that are found on neighborhood streets and I find that riding in neighborhoods is at least as risky as mountain biking. In fact, some of my worst crashes have been in town, not on the trails.
I always wear a helmet while biking anywhere. It’s just habit to put it on before getting on the bike.
I recall our family driving over 3,000 miles the summer I turned 10 and I spend a good portion of it riding shotgun in our full size van. Of course there were no airbags! In case of a head on collision though I was too short for my face to eat dashboard, my head wouldn’t reach that far forward.
As a kid, I went face first through a farmer rock wall while sledding. Had to have a lot of stitches.
Helmets, not such a bad idea.
Like I said, it comes down to analysing the risk. I’ve (knock on wood) never gotten into a crash, anywhere on a bicycle in my adult life. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, though. If you let me make up some simple numbers from 1 to 10, where 1 is less and 10 is more, then we can make a nice little matrix of possibilities and severity. In my neighborhood, let’s say the chance is 3, and the severity is 5, whereas on the trail, the chance could be 8 and the severity 9. The products are 15 and 72 respectively. No helmet for the 15, and a helmet for 72.
I’d actually probably have to really rate the trails 10 and 10, due to the risk of a heart attack!
I would have loved it as a kid, I think it makes it more fun. It’s like a trampoline room!
Am I crazy for not planning to make my daughter wear a helmet when biking? I don’t think there is a law where I live, either.
I would not require it for sledding, either. My memories of sledding were huge hills covered in snows with few major obstacles and so forth. My friend once crashed into a tree and got injured, but his head was fine.
I think you’re off by at least a decade, probably closer to 15 years. I was born in 1981 and I never had a wear a helmet to do anything (except play baseball) and I got plenty of bumps and bruises to show for it.
Well…yeah. Why wouldn’t you? Just because it’s not illegal doesn’t mean wearing one is a bad idea. You only get one head after all.