I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of small Metro. Nothing special about it at all.
Every time I see one of these articles I always wonder who they're talking about.
I always feel like this is just one of those news headlines that won't go away, but isn't quite tethered to reality, but people really like to feel bad about modern life and so we keep talking about it as if it's real. I suspect the real reason kids aren't playing outside, if there is one, is not because they can't, it's because they choose not to. Just as adults are no longer choosing to go to third spaces. Screens came for everyone.
I live in Redmond, WA. Bougie? My rube Midwestern ass thinks so. And there are feral kids all over my neighborhood. Plenty of kids walking to school in groups, or solo. Neighbor kids talk about riding the bus/train to places. Granted, there are a lot of immigrant families around here (hello, Microsoft, et al.), and I'm sure that skews things.
Seattle also has a pretty decent policy around the radius for kids walking to school, so there are always gaggles of kids walking together to and from school for elementary and even some middle schoolers. The high schools are spaced far enough out that kids use buses at that age.
My coworkers in lower CoL areas seem mystified why I'm paying an arm and a leg to live in Seattle to raise a kid. And yeah there are some serious downsides (20-30k a year daycare, restaurants are too expensive to go out to often, even take out is insane), but there are kids playing soccer in the streets after school and kids setting up lemonade stands in the park.
That's what I'm paying for - A city that is built for people to live in, not just for cars to drive around.
I don't know what it is about rich white people and freaky helicopter parenting. I also notice it with homeschooling and those crazy borderline eating disorder diets. There seems to be an association there between rich white people and pushing self-destructive behavior on kids.
> But I actually find ideological bias to be less concerning than the more fundamental problem that the class of people who determine the boundaries of debate share a set of demographic and experiential traits that they don’t recognize as distinctive.
> This class of people includes journalists, yes, but also people who work in the tech industry, academics, nonprofit leaders, influencers, and those who work in politics. From now on, I’ll refer to this group broadly as “the messenger class.”
> The messenger class’s distinctive experiences — like living in downtown Washington, D.C., or living in one of the parts of New York highlighted in red — shape the boundaries of normal in ways harder to counteract than pure ideological or partisan bias.
> The messenger class plays a fundamental role in any democracy. Democratic self-governance requires not just fair procedures for making decisions but an accurate and shared picture of social reality to reason about. That picture is revealed through the communicated experiences of citizens, filtered through the messenger class, which decides which experiences are urgent and require intervention.
It's also not particularly expensive to live in a bougie place. I grew up in Mclean, VA. My dad ran into Dick Cheney at the CVS once. But you can get an apartment in Mclean on a journalist's salary, especially if your parents paid for college and you have no debt. You can’t afford to raise a family there, but you can live there, near your social circle. Conversely, you'll see lots of trades people, cops, etc., living in places that aren't bougie at all, despite making more money than the lower end of the professional class. People find ways to congregate around others in their social class, income notwithstanding.
It was once a job where many if not most of the practitioners didn't have a college degree, now it is the most expensive graduate school program you can do. I think the median price is something like $250K.
If you don't pay writers, you eliminate all of the writers who have to work for a living.
One would expect that after your first sentence, the second sentence would be a counterexample.
"free range kids" doesn't mean playing outside in a suburban cul-de-sac; it's the ability to go outside the immediate neighborhood on their own (walking, cycling, or public transport) -- stuff I did all the time as a 11-13 year old that is pretty rare these days. I don't think I've ever seen a preteen on the local city transport alone
Your kids are hardly free-range. Let me guess, there's no way for them to actually meaningfully leave the area (no train, bus, etc)? It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and saying they can do whatever they want. hardly free-range in the way described in the article.
Presumably you live in a suburb for the reasons the person in the article checked in on the free-range kid.
my personal litmus test is if you'd let your 13 year kid explore Manhattan alone during the day. Many say no because it's dangerous, and yet Manhattan is safer than most American suburbs. just FUD all the way down sadly.
I also let him play at the park on his own occasionally. I will get calls from well meaning but extremely overprotective friends to let me know that “they can’t watch him anymore.” He is ten! The library, connected to the park, has a phone which he can use to reach us.
People called my parents hover parents, but at ten I could have played at the neighborhood park by myself.
it is, and we do:
https://www.offthegridnews.com/current-events/mom-charged-wi...
https://reason.com/2025/08/09/child-protective-services-inve...
https://reason.com/2026/01/16/she-let-her-6-year-old-ride-to...
https://edition.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrest...
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/parents-investig...
https://nationalpost.com/news/growing-up-independent-is-ille...
https://www.todaysparent.com/blogs/mom-arrested-leaving-daug...
https://legalclarity.org/is-it-illegal-to-let-your-kid-play-...
those are all from the first page of a search for "parents charged for letting kids alone on the playground"
there are probably many more such stories.
the biggest things parents should worry about is their kid being bullied by other kids during school, a supposedly safe place, and other family. strangers just aren't the major source of violence towards children.
My parents let me (14) and my brother (9) explore central Paris on our own when my Dad was working at the Paris air show for the RAF. No problems at all even though this was just after the student protests in the 60s, and so things were a little tense.
I think Manhattan would be OK too, though I've only been there as an adjust. Certainly, you see kids running around London.
This depends on the area. In more urban areas exploring can be done on foot or bike. I live in Seattle, which has some fantastic bike trails that can go on and on for miles and cross into multiple adjacent cities.
In some cities parents are fighting to let their kids play in their own front yard unsupervised. Not an issue in Seattle, where kids are required to walk to and from their neighborhood school by the school district.
But denser areas also have lots of stuff to do within the neighborhood. Within 2 or so miles there is a massive shopping area, multiple bakeries, tons of restaurants, a slew of parks (Seattle has an obscene density of parks, it is one of the best aspects of living here), a lakefront beach (lots of bodies of water in Seattle), 2 swimming pools, tennis courts, and a bunch of other stuff I am probably forgetting right now.
So define free range. If a gaggle of kids travel to the local grocery store together to buy lemons and sugar, then self organize selling lemonade to people passing by on a hot day, is that free range? I'd argue yes.
What do you mean it's like dumping kids on a farm? Are the suburbs really THAT lethally dangerous?
Source [22 minutes]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLAfDrFUBkA
[something traumatic happens and 50 people run for their safety]
see and as proven, only 1 person was assaulted!
I think a future society that counts trauma and mental health disruptions instead of just the crime stats will reach different conclusions on areas considered safe
I don't see child welfare agencies personally as a particular threat when it comes to this topic. Maybe they ARE more likely to get involved in cases of more free range parenting where before they weren't, but it doesn't register as a real worry.
The major difference I see between when I was growing up and now is that when I went out onto the streets, there were other kids on the streets. My parents didn't know exactly what they were sending me out to, but they knew that there as a general crowd of kids that would be out on the street until some point in the evening, and that they would all go home at around the same time, and that's also when you were expected home.
The draw of smartphones and video games as indoor entertainment can't be understated, but I can exercise some parental tyranny here and always kick him out of the house to go play like my folks used to do.
But there are no other kids out there. I'm sending him out into streets empty of kids.
To mitigate this I'm trying to nudge things in the direction of him and his friends forming some sort of after-school crew that finds outside activities to do together, undirected. There are other like minded parents that I've found that are also interested in enabling something like this.
On the subject of risks - I strongly believe that the role of parenthood is to mediate a child's exposure to the real trauma of a hostile, often absurd reality that they will grow up into. Controlled exposure to risk, to self-directed decision making in times where they feel like someone won't be there to help them out and they need to figure things out on their own, these are critical requirements in parenting IMHO. And all risk comes with some small chance of tragedy, and that's a burden we as parents have to bear: to expose ourselves to the emotional trauma of the possibility of our children getting hurt, however small the chance, so that they are able to grow into healthy well-adjusted adults.
I feel like I have to work a lot harder than my parents did to enable that exposure.
This. It's a number's "game".
My father, born in rural Romania, had 8 siblings, one of them died of an accident in his childhood (yeah, during "free range stuff"). I was born in a town and have 2 brothers. Live in a city and have one kid.
I can't send my kid out carelessly because I don't have a backup.
I don't understand this reasoning. Are you saying you're knowingly stunting the growth of your child because you would have to deal with your emotions if something terrible happened?
I understand the emotional pull of it, but I don't understand being able to identify it, put it into words, and then continue to do it.
He's not chained to a tree. He goes to private school in a country where public schools are free and excellent. Visits his friends and play in the public park or the private yard. Spends vacations in the countryside unsupervised by me because unlike the city, chances of being run over by a retard driving a car are much lower. Still, I advise him not to wander around freely as I did in my childhood because the world has become much shittier. One thing, there are bears everywhere, thanks to the animal rights lobbyists. I feared dogs and bulls when wandering across countryside as a kid, now I have to add bears too for my kid.
At the ski hill kids 5+ roam free- it’s always fun getting on the chairlift and a little kid says “ can you help me get on?” And you have to physically pick them up onto the moving (fixed grip) chairlift. There’s no cell service.
Mountain bike trails around town are full of groups of kids 5+.
My advice: move to a small town, it’s like going back in time in a very good way.
That said, "move to a small town" is easier said than done when you have a family and kid :)
I have a family and a kid
I was freerange growing up in rural england, so I have no problem with the youth roving about. My wife is horrified by the idea, so our kids are somewhat coddled.
In the UK at least, children are objectively safer in every metric apart from getting fat. Kidnap, abuse, getting lost, car accidents are all way way down.
The interesting thing is that here you wouldn't be threatened with child services, You'd have to be pretty abusive or get your kid picked up by the police for the state to get involved. Mostly its pure classism, nice middle class kids aren't allowed to walk about on their own until they are 16, at least.
So while kids might appear to be slightly safer in their childhood, the reality is that those other dangers were never a serious statistical danger to begin with, but not creating health habits is a contributing factor to the most likely cause of death when they’re older.
I think people vastly underestimate how dangerous living an inactive lifestyle is. I’m not saying this because I grew up super active and now I’m judging people who live their life differently to me, I’m saying it because those are the statistics, and because I DIDN’T grow up being active.
Deaths from inactivity are going to show up in 40s and 50s after long and expensive periods of medical treatment. THats a problem because we are only really going to see significant issues around about now. But that trend of inactivity isn't equally distributed over time.
This part. I’m not going to assume what that person meant, but there’s always a few people about in these conversations lamenting that when they were six, they were certainly never hit by a car, and really you have to let your children take a few risks etc…
I arrived at the school just as it was getting out for the day. I did not see a single student of any age leave without an adult.
Like so many people of my generation, I can only wonder at the cost, and be grateful that I was born when I was.
Growing up in the former Soviet space in the 90s, unsupervised childhood was simply the default – not a parenting philosophy. Kids walked to school alone at 6, spent entire days outside with no adult in sight. Nobody called it "free-range", it was just... childhood.
What strikes me about the American situation is that the risk perception seems almost entirely detached from actual statistics. The article mentions stranger abduction fears driving this, yet abduction rates are extremely low. Meanwhile the documented harms from over-supervision – anxiety, depression, inability to handle conflict independently – are well-documented.
The Georgia mother arrested for letting her 10-year-old walk a mile into town is a remarkable data point. A mile at 10 would have been considered a short distance where I grew up.
I wonder how much of this is specifically American vs. a broader trend in wealthy countries. Anyone from Western Europe seeing similar patterns?
"On average, fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year since 2010, the FBI says. From 2010 through 2017, the most recent data available, the number has ranged from a low of 303 in 2016 to a high of 384 in 2011 with no clear directional trend." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wisconsin-missinggirl-dat...
I would say that abduction by stranger rates are very low.
Also, for some reason "abducted by strangers" is not the only alternative to "parental abductions", this document, for example [1], differentiate "non-family" and "strangers" for whatever reason. And "non-family" abductions were ~60K in 1999! Pay for a better LLM, don't use the free stuff for your botting.
1. https://childfindofamerica.org/resources/facts-and-stats-mis...
lol
> A shifting baseline (also known as a sliding baseline) is a type of change to how a system is measured, usually against previous reference points (baselines), which themselves may represent significant changes from an even earlier state of the system that fails to be considered or remembered.
[0]: Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline.
[1]: Earth.org article that reads nicer: https://earth.org/shifting-baseline-syndrome/
The average person ability to make and fix their own tools. Build and fix their shelter.
Free range childhood.
Average person getting dirt under their fingernails.
Being in sync with sunlight cycle.
Stargazing at night.
These are off the top of my head (I'm not op).
“acquire food from nature (farm, hunt, gather) and cook it for themselves.”
Or
“make and fix their own tools. Build and fix their shelter.”
(Culturally, those tasks often specialize by vocation, gender etc.)
Growing up, I think many girls had ended their babysitting careers by 13.
It turns out that Cedric, being superfluous to the "Resurrection Ritual" and Voldemort's plan of revenge, is actually a spare. In fact it was unexpected that two boys get through the whole thing with the Portkey and all. Harry was the only one who was supposed to end up there with the Death Eaters in the first place, so Cedric's appearance was quite unfortunate for everyone involved.
But Cedric's "spareness" certainly didn't have to do with expendability as far as his Dad was concerned, which you can clearly understand once his Dad gets going in the mourning for his death.
When you walk, you go in the opposite direction of cars and can see them coming and, if necessary, move off to the side more.
I know it's survivorship bias, but it worked for me.
Now I get that population density is increasing, and probably so is traffic. Though so are automatic safety features that cause cars to brake rather than hit things.
Are there statistics on vehicular fatalities in suburbs?
Quote from CDC
During 2013–2022, U.S. traffic-related death rates increased a relative 50.0% for pedestrians and 22.5% overall, compared with those in 27 other high-income countries, where they declined a median of 24.7% and 19.4%, respectively. Across countries, U.S. pedestrian death rates were highest overall and among persons aged 15–24 and 25–64 years.
Wasn't there a trend in the US away from pompous SUVs and towards smaller cars, people even starting to re-evaluate some European-favored "city" cars more?
Also aren't cars also getting ligther, with less heavy / metallic exterior over time?
Cars on the roads in the '80s were very low to the ground. Even a child standing on the sidewalk could easily see over the hood of a car parked on the road. Now, hoods have gotten so tall that neither can the child see past it to what's on the other side, nor can the drivers see the children.
It is frightening once they learn to drive, isn't it?
The lion's share of loving a child is intervening in proportion to actual risk.
As a society, that means, more than any other single reform, relieving our cities of the burden of maintaining lethal, taxpayer-funded compatibility with the auto industry's machinery.
I largely blame cell phones for the Karens being able to impose their will. When I was a kid we were all out about and/or doing dumb shit, but anyone who wanted to call the authorities had to go home to find a telephone. By that time we were long gone. As long as we didn't go near houses, no one could touch us. Now they will just follow the kid with their cellphone until the rat-fuckers from CPS or the police arrive.
Thankfully this never happened to me as a child, I don't even know what I'd do.
It's disgusting that this has become a casual attitude and admission by the tech worker class. No one should be getting this free pass.
"I am actively harming children and society with my livelihood (except my own, because I am so smart). Here I am proudly and smugly stating this in a news article."
The only differences as far as I can see are in buying- a child could technically buy a phone for themself if they had the money and create an account on Instagram for free, and in cultural recognition of social media as a vice, which I believe is starting to change.
The overall point is, the law should assume that adults are reasonably intelligent and responsible people, and that parents should be the ones responsible for parenting their own children their own way.
We want to make money.
> The overall point is, the law should assume that adults are reasonably intelligent and responsible people,
Over cigarettes and alcohol. The most inconsequential stuff.
But don’t say the words “direct democracy”.[1] Then people being reasonably intelligent and responsible gets forgotten. By the hive mind at least.
But people should be assumed to be reasonably intelligent and responsible. If that narrative allows us to make money off them. Not when it comes to democracy and political autonomy, of course. Shudders.
Where’s the option for people who are weak willed when it comes to something? Can they ban themselves from buying these goods? If not, where are the heroes that are working on that?
> and that parents should be the ones responsible for parenting their own children their own way.
There are whole studies of psychology weaponized against children to make them act as consumer proxies for their parents. To optimize nagging.
But every pair of parent for themselves. Against all of marketing. “Responsibility.” Because that makes money.
Software is eating the world they say but they can’t get an honest do-no-evil CRUD job apparently.
Low key looks like some sketchy that-happened journalistic rage bait though. I casually found some unscrupulous nerd that is making YOU doomscroll
Depends on your risk appetite and your systems tolerance for the inevitable consequences of errors...
A 5 year old free range kid on a scooter died outside a nearby school a few months ago.
Hit by a SUV
Was riding back from primary school on a scooter, without the mother.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-14/islah-metcalfe-rouse-...
A massive investigation, police, social services, traffic consultants, a million plus spent on upgrading safety, mother and father demonised in the community,etc ...
Teachers involved who responded or gave CPR ( I know some of them) given counselling.
The mother is likely to have lost custody of her other children.
This is really the problem.
Everybody is an island. I don't know what has caused this, but it seems like it's happening in most 1st world countries. Anyone have insights about this?
1. Historically women were largely responsible for community building. As they joined the workforce, they had less time to community build and so there became less community.
2. Technology allowing home entertainment. People can now stream movies instead of going to theaters. Play computer games instead of go to arcades. Check Facebook instead of call friends to catch up. Use a Keurig for convenient coffee instead of go to a cafe.
This very individualistic society can only critique itself in terms of individual failings. Which leads to the catch-22, anti-communal, ankle-deep critiques: people are on their phones, people are asocial, why don’t “people” all get a clue individually and fix this via some spontaneous autoenlightenment.
So if your streets are deserted, ask the locals their views on parenting. Paranoid parents will talk up the safety factor, but it's overblown.
I hear that risk-tolerance normalization and freedom of kids in the 70's was even greater, so this trend appears to be a multi-decade decline.
What I miss most though is cool stuff like interactive art installations and improvised playground features made for kids that were ripped out in the 90's and 00's. Decommissioned Korean war jets, telephone pole obstacle courses, and a myriad of other things without so much as a web page anywhere lost to history.
I let my 13 year old go out by himself, walk to places, take the street car; he has a phone so he can contact us if he needs help, and we can see where he is if we're concerned. It's ironic that parents are more worried today when technology makes it much _easier_ to track/communicate with your child (back in the day at that age, when I was out of the house my parents had no way of reaching me).
e.g. at 10 years old, my cousins and I were running around in the woods at my gradparents' home in rural Pennsylvania. I was the oldest of the group with my youngest cousin probably being 6. No cell phones. No Apple watches etc. We were outside of that house around 9am and would come back for lunch and then dinner when my grandmother rang the bell.
My oldest has an Apple watch and is both reachable able trackable yet the above still feels little strange to me.
You will see lots of kids free-ranging in Lakewood, NJ. A lot of families there have banned TV from the home.
I think the clubs suck the fun out of it. Even with the expense, American players perform much worse than players in other countries where the kids have just been playing for fun for years until they start getting paid.
One has to think if a state wanted to eliminate individualism in society this application of surveillance and restraint to children would be entirely by design...
The only thing that presents a persistent risk to children, I think, is motor vehicles and the way they’re driven. Children make mistakes and San Francisco’s tolerance for traffic fatalities is very high.
The number of pre-teen traffic fatalities is the only concern I have when I’m thinking of letting my children walk around because I think the other risks are relatively overblown. Sure we have an occasional Bill Gene Hobbs and the like but I think only traffic fatalities are near certainty.
These are for accompanied children, so leaving a 5 year old to wander is way different than when I was 5 years old. In SF, I’d rate the chance of survival to 12 at under 90% for unaccompanied 5 year olds walking around the city along the range that I used to at that time.
Teens are pretty self-capable in decision making but pre-teens just don’t have judgment yet. I feel like this is a pretty reasonable statistic to match.
> Stranger kidnappings are exceptionally rare. They occur roughly 100 times per year, which works out to a 1-in-720,000 annual risk of a child being kidnapped — less likely than being struck by lightning at some point in their life.
> A Pew Research Center survey from 2022 found that about 60% of U.S. parents were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about their children being kidnapped,
Thats... displeasing to hear.
So, we were sort of carpetbaggers from the beginning. We were enrolled in a parochial school in the next parish over, which was a 10+ minute drive for Mom. Of course we could never walk or ride bicycles or public transit that far!
As a child, while I was granted roller skates and bicycles, me and my sister were both forbidden from straying beyond the block where we lived. And neighborhood peers were few and far between. We had few playmates, and nearly none from school. Our classmates were in different socioeconomic classes, and often of different ethnicities and cultures. At least 1/3rd of them were bused in from North County, where new Catholics were settling, but no schools were available yet.
Our neighborhood was a sleepy suburb surrounded by dead-end streets and canyons. There were no city parks or playgrounds. There was exactly one city bus line that was about 7 minutes' walk away, which we never ever rode. Grandma, on the other hand, took us on walking/shopping tours all over her neighborhood, which was completely amazing, and also to every shopping mall we could reach by city bus, which was doubly amazing. Grandma's neighborhood had a full-fledged recreational center and a park with a playground, where I could fly kites or do whatever.
Here is the paradoxical contrast: though we could have no physical contact with neighbors or friends, I could own any book, watch any TV channel and program, and listen to any radio station whatsoever. That included "border blasters" from Mexico that were intent on corrupting American values. Literally any book we wanted, we could read it or discard it into our voluminous bookshelves. Later, Mom and Dad were reluctant to hook us up with a modem, because they knew what that would mean, but college opened up the entire Internet to us, and it was game over.
You can physically shelter your kids all you want, but if you have a TV, a radio, and computers in the home, you're constantly inviting a parade of strangers, scammers, and perverts inside your securely-locked doors. Think about that. It is far kinder to allow your children to mix with neighborhood friends and freely explore this world, than to let them dive unsupervised into cyberspace.
The funny thing is it'd be safer: Kids have cell phones now by like 7 or 8 in a lot of cases and can call for help! Back when I was that age if I got injured or something I might've had to knock on strangers' doors!
once my friend get arrested in LA by police when he jogging. they say they arrest him for his own safety because he shouldnt be out jogging in "this neighborhood"
turns out people in america get murdered and attacked in the street all the time for... no reason. yes literally, no motive.
it isn't. Crime is highly concentrated and the vast majority of, at least median affluent America, is about as safe as it gets. Same goes for any big cities, usually you can count risky streets on one hand, where 90% of the violence happens.
Not to mention, developing countries are if anything the only places where kids still run around and play on the street. I've spend a fair amount of time in Latin American countries with much higher violent crime rates than most of the world and you don't see much helicopter parenting
if anything in the first world this style of parenting is a result of excess safety, not lack of it. The world has seen a secular decline in violent crime over the last few decades, and yet this paranoia is distinctly new.
I'm also quite certain that in much of Latin America anyone fucking with a child would not go through a trial and handled with kid gloves, but rather there are plenty of videos of the internet of such people being held down while Rottweilers literally rip their balls off. Probably not an ideal version of justice but also perhaps more effective at pursuading people not to fuck with children.
The danger to children is largely the police and CPS, who rip apart families for hallucinations or levels of parenting sin that are far more benign than the emotional cost to children of authorities bearing down on them.
now, if your child is too playful for Ms. Karen, they will give them a shit load of adderal as well
you may consider paying for a private school to avoid Karens drugging your children
There's a huge set of initiatives for a maximum control of any individual since childhood under all children-safety laws.
Is that really for freedom or democracy? Or is that for something else?
Its it survivor bias? I grew up in a small village/city during communism. I was basically unsupervised from morning to night since I have memories about me walking around in that village.
We were doing a lot of dangerous things while playing. And there are kids that got injured for life or lost their lives: falling from trees, drawn in a river, leg lost due to a horse injury, losing an eye during a game with some pipes, jumping from high places like 1st floor or more, ... I managed to not get hurt but the examples I gave are real.
I am not even talking about any of the fights between kids verbal or physical there were happening that todays will be labeled trauma.
So I do wonder if this free range thing that we desire is really what we want and we can accept the consequences?
I am not sure in all cases, depending of course of kids age and ability to reason, for each individual child this total liberty is the right path. I do understand the benefit for the society.
It misses the point entirely to seek control over whether your kids are "free range" enough. That style of parenting worked so well in the past (it didn't really, but I digress) because they left well enough alone. They weren't trying to contrive anything. Your kids absorb everything from you. Don't let your insecurities be part of it.
What I would argue is much more important is keeping things fresh with new opportunities. That's your main job as a parent. Keep them thinking and engaged with their mostly self-directed path in life. The goal is to open their eyes and help them understand the world. Respect their intelligence and let them decide things on their own.
Many of those so called free range childhoods of the past were actually just empty and boring. That's when they got into trouble. That's not something to be nostalgic about. When I hear about trends like this I have to wonder if some parents are just looking for excuses to be lazy.
> “We work in tech,” she says. “Our kids [aren’t] getting any cell phones, no smartphones, no Instagrams. I write the algorithms. I don’t want my kids to touch those algorithms.”
Yeah it's ok for the rest of us, but not your kids. Who the fuck do you guys thing you are? You shouldn't be making society worse.
Maybe, back in the days, it was just a different time? A more high trust society that worked well?
Nowadays, we have news stories, where 70 year olds get stabbed by youngsters because they got lectures on their bad behaviour. When I was young, I had respect towards a 70 year old. Big time. Never would we have thought to pull out a knife…
Life changed a lot in recent years and not for the better on all dimensions.
Europe is still pretty save though. At least if you trust the statistics
Plus, now, basically every kid is running around with a phone that gives them access to talk to the police or their parents at any time. So it's going to be a lot riskier for someone to try anything against them. Even then, between 80-90% of sexual assaults are performed by people the victims already know, and around 30% of those are relatives of the victim.
You should flip through some newspaper archives from when you were a kid. I don’t know where you are, but I can almost certainly guarantee that there were kids attacking people back then too. Just because you and most you know would never have pulled a knife, doesn’t mean that there weren’t those that would. After all, you say the teens today attack old people with knives, but I really don’t think your teen daughters are stabbing people with knives.
How can you reasonably let your teen daughters out alone? Well, be reasonable. Find out if your fears are amped up by sensationalist press. Go meet your refugee neighbours. Quite honestly it sounds like YOU spend too much time inside.
Edit: I just saw your comment about importing men from countries where rape is natural. I can’t imagine that we have the same definition of reasonable.
Where I live my neighbors have chickens and one has a horse and they never get hassled, the kids roam through the neighborhood under the age of ten without getting picked up by the authorities (well, one time one got lost and a helpful cop brought him home, but that was the end of it), if your dog wanders off animal control will call you to come pick it up (first time they waive the fee), you can collect shells, rocks, driftwood and seaweed for fertilizer off the beach. We have euthanasia but it is a carefully controlled process that involves multiple independent doctors and a lucid patient, and the supermajority (84%) of people approve of it!
Canada sounds like a terrible place, but you are more than welcome in the country I call home; Canada. Oh wait…
There's a kid (7-8 years old I think) a few houses down that carries a walkie-talkie with him during the summer. He'll be out for several hours (probably not farther than 10 houses away from his own house), and his mom checks on him every now and then using the walkie-talkie. I'll buy a set for own kids this summer for the exact same purpose.
The only thing I'm kind of scared of are the cars, because they tend to drive too fast (for my taste) and kids tend to not always look when they cross the street when they're too excited playing their games.
Edit: I just remembered that a few years ago, the cops showed up because there was a complaint about our kids being left unsupervised. They were playing in the backyard, which is completely fenced off, while we were inside cooking supper. Our kitchen window faces the yard so we could see them, and the window was open so we could hear them. At least the cops realized that the complaint was BS and didn't even come inside to check for anything. We live in Canada.
