Where do the children play?

As a society we find violence or harm against children to be extremely shocking and tragic. As a society we would do almost anything to prevent it.

Giving children the kinds of freedoms discussed in this article would lead to some harm coming to them. Accidents, violence, kidnap, etc.

Therefore, society won't give them those freedoms.

This tendency has been exagerated by mass media in the modern era. Every single case, every piece of anecdata, makes massive headlines and instills the fear into parents everywhere.

It's impossible for society to reverse course because that would mean acknowledging, implicitly or explicitly, that some level of harm for some children is justified by the developmental benefits to all children of increased freedom.

Well, this doesn’t exactly check out when you compare to countries and cultures who already give children these freedoms and have the built environment to support it (transport, walkability, parks/spaces to play, etc). They are not only “just fine”, but their children are generally much more mature and confident (as in skilled), than their Anglo counterparts.

>As a society we find violence or harm against children to be extremely shocking and tragic. As a society we would do almost anything to prevent it

The moment Sandy Hook happened and US society just shrugged at it, we relinquished our ability to use this dynamic for anything serious.

We can't pretend to care about kids while treating their murders as an inevitability of life and not something to reform over.

> Giving children the kinds of freedoms discussed in this article would lead to some harm coming to them. Accidents, violence, kidnap, etc.

Not really most of the violence against children originates from adults within and near the family.

The American public has allowed some rare stories that made it to the news and the Satanic panic of the 80s to form their world view.

A survey in 2021 found that 15% of Americans that's 31 million people believed the government was run by Satan-worshiping pedophiles.

To sum up children do face risks of violence and sexual abuse but it's mostly from trusted people in their environment, the risk of some random person kidnapping a child of the street is rather low.

Now given that society has decided to keep children locked away, letting your kid run around is not really a viable option it's a collective action problem.

There have always been people who went into schools to kill children. In 1927, a guy blew up a school in Bath, Michigan, killing 38 kids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster

The fact that you think heaven and earth have to be moved over a single school shooting (as terrible as it was) is a symptom. School is the safest place where children are. They're more likely to be murdered and abused at home.

I'm 50, but when I was a kid I took the bus by myself: when I was 12, on the South Side of Chicago, which had an order of magnitude more violence than your kids will ever be exposed to. I ran around with my friends within a block or two, we were big into BMX bikes. Kids got hurt periodically, but sometimes kids will get hurt; sometimes kids will die. A few hundred years ago, most kids would die. Now we (not we, but mostly a certain demographic whose aesthetic is imposed on everyone else) find it unacceptable to hear about kids dying on television, nowhere near us.

It was bad when 50% of kids died, but I've had the belief that whatever the number it now is too few. We need the number of kids who die through "death by misadventure" to go up. Raising kids in a box leaves them dumb and unsocialized. Kids need independence, and to be allowed the ability to make some bad decisions with real consequences. They need to be able to fall off the monkey bars.

I think you're onto something here. We do a lot to protect children, but we've outsourced that protection to institutions—police, laws, politicians—rather than building it into our communities. If we had stronger communal networks where neighbors actively looked out for each other's kids, parents would feel comfortable letting them roam. Without that social fabric, we're stuck with a binary choice: either rely on law enforcement to intervene after something goes wrong, or keep kids sheltered at home.

Care to list a few examples that aren't Anglo?

France, Netherlands, Denmark, former commie block come to mind. It was one of the things that really stuck out to me: how mature/well behaved and independent/confident the children were there (for the most part). There's even books on the topic (Raising Bebe, The Danish Secret to Happy Kids) which I was not aware of until after spending a lot of time in those places. At lot of it has to due with the built environment - kids can literally walk out the front door to parks and stuff unlike in suburban places, but also culture.

We're close to the same age and I grew up on the south side of Chicago, so I'm cheekily going to ask if by "a bus on the south side" you meant Hyde Park or Beverly. :)

>The fact that you think heaven and earth have to be moved over a single school shooting (as terrible as it was) is a symptom.

no, the symptom is that kids have to normalize lockdown drills and how to barricade a door to protect from shooters. I had earthquake and fire drills as a kid, but it wasn't culturalized to accept that school shootings are a thing.

Now we can map out mass shootings by year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

Now we can expect 4-5 school shottings a year, documented by year. Trying to make this equivalent to "well kids get hurt" completely misses the point. But I'm not surprised at this point.