My eastern friends find it incomprehensible that 70 years ago this kid, raised in the wet woods of Washington State, has his own .22 calibre rifle and ammunition at age five. In the country, this was not unusual, and our games included playing war with real, if smallish, bullets. One friend took a round through his hand doing this when he was 14.
Most of us survived childhood, however, under these hazardous condition imposed by ourselves rather than any criminal elements. We tended to die in greater numbers after hitting 18 and trying out booze and cars in injudicious combinations.
Play dates are for wimps and will probably generate more wimpishness.
I think we’re more aware of dangers for kids, and a bit more concerned for the lifetime burden some mistakes can carry for the young and unformed. As father of six, I believe kids have to skin their knees, make mud pies, and eat the occasional bug. However, I don’t think sending a youngster out to the woods with a lethal weapon and hoping he and his friends all come back in functional form is a great idea. (Or any equivalent.) Some safety bumpers on life is not “wimpishness” unless you regard 100% survival among your litter to mean some inferior ones survived. The process of learning to live in the real world should not include fatal grading.
World hunger is WAY down now, not near as many kids starve to death.
Medical practices are much much better today, no longer do we see the appalling rates of death-at-birth.
Cars are safer, that used to be the number one killer of children.
The Master has it right, incidents are just better reported today.
Good timing - I was thinking about this just the other day when reading about the parents who were in trouble for letting their kids (8 and 10 years old?) walk to a local park
At age 6 in the 50’s I walked a mile+ to school every day as did a lot of other kids. (No, not uphill both ways in the snow.)
But it was the suburbs, not the city, and before the 1960 benchmark Cecil listed.
I had similar freedom in the 1960s, rural-edged suburbia. My mother would be peeved if I wandered in well after dark, but not particularly worried.
I don’t think the world was any safer for children in the 1950s or 1960s, all things being equal about location and so forth. I live in small-town Nwingland, and near here in 1973, when it was truly rural, a 7-year-old girl was allowed to ride her bike to the far end of her street to collect a toy she had dropped - the first time she had ever been allowed such a privilege. She has never been seen since.
I think we tend to forget, and romanticize, and overlook dangers and injury to children in prior eras. What parent today would lay their baby on the front seat and drive around? That was common until the early 1970s, and nearly universal before about 1965. Car seats were for idiot parents terrified something might happen :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: to Junior.
I grew up as recently as the 90’s and even that late in the game I was pretty much able to do as I pleased. I walked barefoot through the neighborhood and the woods, I didn’t really have a bedtime per se. I would walk around the neighborhood sometimes with a .22 rifle in the way to shoot it, in the woods. All the kids in my neighborhood seemed to wander the streets without parental supervision. There does seem to be a difference between then and now, Even a little kid walking around with a fake gun might get shot by the cops, when I was a kid it seemed that people drove slower through neighborhoods, now it seems like they are all speed demons. Also back when I was a kid I knew who lived in almost every house in the neighborhood, I don’t even know the names of my current next door neighbors on either side.
I was born in 1935, and spent my childhood in New York City (well, Brooklyn, to be precise). My parents taught me to smile and say, “Hello,” to strangers; they let me ride busses and subways by myself when I was 9, and I don’t believe they ever worried about me. New York then was (in fact it still is) a fairly friendly place, despite sensationalist reports on how dangerous it is. I think some of the unfriendliness is due to visitors, who believing all the hype about the city, themselves become unfriendly toward strangers. I went to school in the Midwest, and my feeling was that I’d sooner approach a stranger (let’s say, ask for directions) in New York, where natives were used to being approached by strangers than in the Midwest, where people seemed more uncomfortable and reserved with strangers.
Several years ago one of the major BBC documentary shows did an in depth study of this question…they looked at multiple incidences of crime, such as robbery, theft, housebreaking, mugging, murder, child molestation and mugging. The general consensus was that no, things are not worse, just faster reported and we have more sensational coverage. There was a lot more. It was a fascinating show, sorry I could not find a link, but the BBC has amazing archives if someone has the time.
Obviously there has been a steady decline in crime and violence overall across the board in the last several decades but I wonder if it could be a combination of things. If there is less violence but also if parents in general don’t let younger children out of their sight the way they used to so there are probably less opportunities for a random kidnapper to snatch some kid off the street and throw them in their van. Also things like cell phones are ubiquitous now so if somebody does observe something they can call the cops immediately, take pictures, etc.
I think New York is a lot friendlier than the West Coast, for sure. People sure are smug out here. West Coast people are even more reserved than Midwesterners plus they have an arrogance that matches or exceeds the East Coast.
A short time ago, someone was driving about 50 MPH and rear-ended a stationary car, killing the rear passengers instantly. Ever since then, my wife always looks behind us when we come to a stop and urges me to move forward just a bit if she feels the car behind us is coming towards us too fast.
I think a similar thing is happening today: Although crime rates are down, we are more exposed to how horrific crime can be. This doesn’t have to be through real life (though there are obvioushorribleexamples), as TV gives us plenty of episodes about crimes against kids that our brains find plausible. So if I see that a girl has been kidnapped walking home and forced into sex slavery for multiple years, I’m going to be less likely to let my kids put themselves in a similar position.
And although crime rates are down, they accrue in our memories, especially the horrific ones. We don’t just dismiss these cases from our mind at 11:59pm on December 31st. Over a lifetime, those crimes pile up in our minds, making it feel like it’s less safe than when we were kids, and thus more likely that something similar will happen to our kids.
Sure, the odds against it are astronomical, something on the lines of winning the lottery or getting struck by lightning. But then… people do win the lottery and do get struck by lightning. So thus we take action against such things. And why wouldn’t we? We don’t want our kids to end up on the wrong side of the odds.
I had a similar experience, a generation later. I was born in Manhattan in 1967. Many of my playmates were cousins, and many of the rest were kids who lived in my building, whose parents were known to my parents. We hung out in packs, and wandered the streets, going to parks, to public pools, the museums, the movies; we played stoop ball, or kickball in an empty lot; and we took the bus or the subway, or sometimes rode bicycles along the wide sidewalks. Often the very youngest kids were only five or six, but the oldest might be 12 or 13, and no one really worried. Everyone had a dime they were instructed not to spend on anything but a phone call, and a few kids (whose parents were considered overprotective) had cab fare. As soon as you could tell time in the first grade, you got a watch as a gift for your next birthday or holiday; it was a big deal, and made you feel very grown up, but it also meant that you were responsible for being home by a particular time (or calling if you couldn’t make it for some reason). I didn’t get punished if I called, but being a no-call no-show meant a serious punishment, not so much because my parents were worried, but because it demonstrated a lack of responsibility.
We were taught never to go anywhere with strangers, or accept anything from strangers, and to ask only policemen for help (or occasionally store keepers for directions if we got lost). But we were certainly allowed to be friendly and greet strangers. If someone gave us a seat on the bus, we said “Thank you.” If we bumped into someone, we said “Excuse me.”
Sometimes tourists asked us for directions, because they probably felt safer asking a 12-13 year-old, who was with some younger kids, than another adult. We were always friendly and helpful.
I was very surprised to move to the Mid-west as a 14-year-old, and discover that as a New Yorker, I was regarded automatically as having a tendency to be rude and aloof.
Also, the country is scary. It can be beautiful, but it’s frightening, and still scares me sometimes, with its endless sameness, and its creepy silence. One of the most bizarre (beautiful and endlessly fascinating, but other-worldly) things is the county fair. I’ll never forget my first one, with my cousins, who had been in the Mid-west for several years. I find big cities cozy and reassuring, and feel perfectly safe walking downtown with my son, letting him run ahead or linger behind, but I feel less safe when we are at one of the state parks, with the huge trees, and canopies of leaves casting moving shadows everywhere. I want to hold his hand, and it embarrasses him.
All-in-all, I do not think the world is more dangerous. My son has a lot of freedom, so he knows how to handle it. The danger is really over-protected kids who suddenly find themselves on their own, and don’t know what to do, and either panic, or over-indulge in something.
But, my son also plays in multi-age groups of kids, like I used to, so there are little kids learning from bigger kids how to handle themselves, and getting to do things safely, because somebody older is looking out for them, meanwhile, the older kids are reigned in a little by the feeling of responsibility. I think kids play in those kind of groups less often than they used to, because more of their time is structured by adults. I think there’s a real loss of that kid-culture, and it’s very important.
The world is not more dangerous-- it might even be a little less dangerous; but I think there are a few more ill-prepared children than there used to be. It used to be very rare to have the over-protected child who didn’t know how to take care of himself. Now, I think this might be something like fully 20% of the child population. An awful lot of parents of 4th graders wait for their kids at the bus stop after school, in order to walk them home, and I don’t mean special ed. kids. I mean perfectly normal nine-year-olds whose parents think they can’t make it 150 feet to the apartment building by themselves.
Honestly sometimes I’m more scared of other children or teenagers harming my kids than some adult serial killer or molester. I always think of the British kid James Bulger, it reminds me of how exceptionally cruel even young children can be.
It only takes reading of Tom Sawyer, Penrod, The Bobbsey Twins (the original ones), etc., to see that the post-war era was not unusual in comparison to earlier times. Yes, they’re a long way from realistic, but, when they written, they were meant to be believable and to feel “homey”. As a child in the 1950s, I did not feel particularly different from children in the 1920s, the 1910s, or even the 1840s.
If you look at the data in the report I linked, it shows the unsurprising fact that intentional murder as a cause of death for children has always been very uncommon.
Polio, the flu, measles, and other vaccine-preventable illnesses used to kill children; now only those in vaccine-phobic idiot communities have to worry about that. Unintentional injury (riding in the back of a car with no antilock brakes or seatbelts, being kicked by a horse, having a 200-pound CRT television fall on you) is the other side of the “huge decline in childhood death” equation.
Born in 1982 in southern California. I spent all sorts of time ranging the area. Exploring is something little boys do naturally so I wasn’t the only one. My closest friend lived 2 miles away and most every Saturday I would walk or ride my bike to his place. Never felt scared, heck I was saying the same thing as the article said at the time convinced that the 1980s and 90s where as safe as ever and that the media was just scaremongering.