It's a cultural shift. Your peers are now way more aware of child abuse, kidnappings, murders, than your parents were. Not that yours were necessarily bad parents for that time but there is way more information today of the issues with the world. I certainly wouldn't let my kid walk home alone in the woods at night: are we really sure this degree of freedom is so developmentally important to be worth the risk?
I'd also say it's more likely that your peers are more personally present than parents of the 80s/90s, when parents would often just leave children alone and don't really talk to them. That in itself has been shown to provide good outcomes for children. So it's not all bad.
> Your peers are now way more aware of child abuse, kidnappings, murders, than your parents were.
They’re technically more aware of those risks, sure, but any of those crimes are less likely than ever before. This increase in awareness and anxiety isn’t based in data, it’s based on sensational lies and myths. Those lies cause strong feelings and get eyeballs and clicks, and so they spread really well through our fractured media ecosystem.
Nearly all child kidnappings are performed by one of the parents, and there’s no confirmed case of a child ever dying from poisoned Halloween candy.
To be fair, one of the reasons for the decrease in crime may be the steps taken by average people to minimize it, due to anxiety.
Yeah, I wonder if you plotted crime rate vs time spent outside or something like that (car accident rates are usually reported as an average of an accident / # of miles, since how much you drive changes your likelihood of being in an accident)
They are more aware but bad at putting it in perspective. This is the classic "fear leads to bad decisions".
Granted, depends on where you live, but statistically woods are probably a lot safer than a city with a lot of traffic. Sure, regionally that is not true, you might meet a Grizzly and/or Canadian.
> are we really sure this degree of freedom is so developmentally important to be worth the risk?
Absolutely. A child has to grow up and detach from it parents at some point. It doesn't at all mean having a bad relationship, just being independent. Helps if you aren't a complete beginner by the time it inevitably happens.
This idea that parents who let their kids play without 3 layers of bubble wrap and parental hovercraft mode don’t also talk with their kids and aren’t present is not just insulting, it’s far from true. Over coddling causes more problems than it prevents, it’s especially obvious when you compare the maturity levels, mental health situation and general early adulthood outcomes for non-Anglo kids in other developed nations.
I like how contemporary parents are either overly involved or lazy having forgotten how to parent ... whatever is needed to blame them for the moment.
There's just no discussion that modern parents are more personally involved in their kids development than parents in the 70s/80s. That's just a fact, not an insult.
I never said you can't raise kids without all the overprotection and also be present.
The issue of over parenting seems to be a developed nation issue, I agree. I'm not in one and here kids don't do mountains of activities, but violence rates are very significant. There's just no point exposing my son to it in the hopes he comes out the other side unscathed, when even I don't want to be out alone at night. That's "vibe parenting", not an intelligent way of raising children.
You're making a different argument, throughout these threads.
The article is about the US. You say you are "not in [a developed nation like the US]", but instead somewhere that "violence rates are very significant".
That is just not the US. Headlines are scary, but the statistics don't support the fear. The worries you describe are absolutely irrational for 99+% of US parents.
I don't know where you are and I don't know the statistics for your area -- things might be worse there! But your comments sound like irrational US parent fears, without including that context.
No, it’s specifically an Anglo country phenomenon. It’s not really an issue in places like Denmark, France, Spain, Russia, China, Chile. There’s several books on the topic if you are open to recommendations.
I'm curious about book recommendations on this (as someone raising kids in the US but originally from Russia)
Bringing Up Bebe, The Danish Way Of Parenting, The Coddling of the American Mind. These are pretty similar to Soviet style, but perhaps a bit less structured.
We are basically raising our daughter Soviet-style to the extent that we can; so far so good. It's difficult in a culture where ADHD American style of child raising is prevalent.
From a very young age when I wondered around the rural midwest, I had a gun. Usually a 20ga shotgun or a .22 rifle. Don't think my parents were too worried about me getting kidnapped or murdered. I used it for hunting but I knew what to do in the case of self defense.
Another one of those things that aren't allowed now.
Not sure if 'aware' is the right word. More like anxious.
Kidnappings and murders are exceedingly rare, even more so by strangers. Abuse primarily occurs at home, with acquaintances and at places of education. Moving a child from free form play to structured classes is moving risk around, but isn't reducing it.
When there is a big community of kids, there's safety in numbers. Highly supervised play reduces the kids involved, and takes away safety in numbers in exchange for constant vigilance.
An aware person would see the numbers and Calibrate risk accordingly. There is risk involved in everything and helicopter parenting has done little to reduce it.
It's an anxiety spiral.
How are the rates of murder, kidnappings, and child sex abuse compared to a few decades ago during the free range parenting golden age?
> the risk
What is the risk really? I mean put in numbers.
Do you have children? Would you point them a loaded gun that's only, say, 0.5% likely to go off and shoot them? 1 in 100k cancers also disappear spontaneously, should I wait and see for my kid and not treat them?
When it comes to your own children the only number that matters is 1. The 1 time it happens their lives, your life, is over.
That's not really an answer though.
My kid walks home from his friend's houses in the woods at night alone all the time. He has never once been eaten or kidnapped.
Statistically your children are more likely to be victimized by you than a stranger. So by your logic, you should probably keep them away from you. Right?
Nominally I agree with you, but your example is classic survivorship bias.
The chances of getting kidnapped are and always were far, far, far less than automobile related injuries and deaths, yet we just see that as a normal risk of modern life.
I have been wondering if the fact that the current generation of 20-somethings isn't going out as much is because of this "over parenting" that they received. I'm sure it's also TikTok, living costs, and avoiding other vice related behaviour (drinking, sex) at such high rates, but it does make me think...
That's a useless statistic in this context. Statistically you're more likely to be killed by yourself than someone else. So, do you kill yourself to get it over with? Do you let a shooter shoot you because statistically it's better that the gun is on their hands than yours? Ridiculous, right?
It's just a zero insight use of numbers.
That's literally my point. I did exactly what you did, just in a different context to point out the absurdity of the statement.
i see it as blatantly ignoring risks because they don't align to your worldview
The risk they die from drug overdose or something because they are maladjusted from being hovered over may be orders of magnitude greater. We live in a far safer time than people think with regard to violent crime (see graph below) and a far more dangerous time with regard to mental health and depression. Also obesity. Most people die from heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. All made more prevalent by shuttling your kid around constantly instead of them using their own two legs like nature intended.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/31/violent-c...
It is precisely this anxiety that is the issue being discussed. Parents are terrified of what might happen to their kids, so too little happens to their kids (both good and bad)
Do you let your children ride in cars? The risk of death in a passenger vehicle is over 100x that of being kidnapped.
I wrote a long winded thing about my personal experience but deleted it because it was too personal and too depressing to think about.
The summary is that the risk of a CPS investigation of a kid playing or walking independently is probably 10-100x that of suffering a car accident. And the average car accident is way less traumatic than being ripped away from your family, tossed in a foster home, and feeling like your parents have abandoned you forever because they could not protect you from the state.
That's terrible.
What's the solution though? Stop letting kids play outside? I think the solution should be to reform CPS so it's not so traumatizing, and have more governmental awareness campaigns of the benefits of kids playing outside. I see government billboards all the time about anti-smoking, eating healthy, prediabetes screening. There can similarly be billboards promoting kids playing outside.
1) Childhood independence protection
2) At the bare minimum, victims of CPS reports should be able to face their accuser. Currently laws anonymize reporters, this is not compatible with an open and balanced justice system. Also, needs to be heavy penalties and liabilities for abusing CPS reporting -- asymmetrical risks would end up with just getting the same result over and over again.
3) Cultural change. People that curtail child independence of others' children should be shamed, publicly. People that let their kids have independence, left the hell alone.
there would not be any issue with anonymous reports if CPS would look for actual evidence before doing anything else, and reject any anonymous report as baseless if no evidence is found. innocent until proven guilty must hold here too.
Your analogy is missing something. Not letting a child explore the world has an opportunity cost. They miss out on opportunities to develop independence and psychological resilience. The book "The Anxious Generation" covers this in detail.
I work at a college, and can tell you that (while everyone views their childhoods with rose colored glasses), at my institution, statistically kids today are less able to cope with difficulty than they were when I started my career.
When I started, the top three reasons for students leaving the institution were a) family priorities (work), b) transportation, and c) grades (overall GPA less than 1.5).
For the 2024-25 academic year, the reasons were a) anxiety, b) grades (overall GPA between 2.5 and 3, with less than 2 'd' or 'f' grades for the final semester), and c) unstated reason related to interactions with faculty or staff (difficult conversations about study habits, or realistic major/timeline conversations).
In other words, they hit one small barrier, or have to shift gears even slightly, and everything goes to pieces.
We don't let them make decisions when they're kids and the stakes are low, and then don't understand why they can't make decisions when they're adults. . . Or, there are a minority of parents that seem to enjoy making every decision for their kids. It's not great.
The chances of your kid being abducted by a stranger because you let them walk home from school are so many orders of magnitude lower than 0.5% that the analogy doesn't make any sense. You're probably more likely to kill them by handing them a plate of food or some other benign every day factor that isn't nearly as dramatic as anything the national news covers.
That sounds like maladaptive anxiety.
1 in 100k cancers also disappear spontaneously, should I wait and see for my kid and not treat them?
As a parent, a cancer survivor, and the child of a high anxiety parent, Yes, yes you should wait and see. Every doctor's visit is a chance to catch something worse.
That said, if you're a chill parent reading this, you should probably be more proactive about it. There is a middle ground, overreacting is usually worse than under reacting, but it is important that you react.
> Your peers are now way more aware of child abuse, kidnappings, murders, than your parents were
does being more aware of these things mean you necessarily make better decisions overall for you children? Are humans good at translating news they see into accurate risk assessments?