There were tons of cars in the 80s and 90s and playing in the street was still very normal. You’d simply move out of the way when a car was coming. You taught your kids that the streets weren’t safe, since streets are made for cars to drive over and not for kids to play in and didn’t let them do that until they could do it relatively safely.
We see posts here about someone calling the cops on the neighbor kids over and over for simply being outside. That’s the dot to connect. It’s a societal change toward being batshit crazy, whether helicopter parents who must oversee every moment of their children’s lives to make sure they’re as safe as possible or obsessively controlling neighbors who think that’s the proper way to parent and that any time they see anyone under 18 without a parent they decide it must be child abandonment, or abuse, or runaways, or roving gangs of criminal kids and call the cops over it.
In a lot of places in the US cops will now ask groups of kids why they’re playing at a park. Kid’s aren’t going outside because no one will leave them alone to be kids outside.
Not that I disagree with you about helicopter parenting being an important part of it - but tons of kids were also killed by cars back in the day. It was a very real problem.
In the Netherlands, this was why they made their cities more bike- and pedestrian-friendly, and as a result, dutch kids move more freely than kids in other parts of the world.
Of course, that’s definitely important. In the US most cities aren’t designed to be walkable/bikeable at all. That’s dangerous and of course city planning should account for all sorts of transportation from walking and people in motorized wheelchairs on up.
I do agree with George Carlin on the push for safety, though. It’s not kind and cuddly to say, but I also believe natural selection has it’s place.
A large scale environmental change generally correlates with a larger than normal amount of animals in that region dying as those with the adaptations that best fit the new reality are selected for. The birds that can’t reach the seeds now die off and those with the longer beaks survive to pass on their genes and the species ends up with a longer beak than it had a few decades back.
Completely minimizing deaths in a radically different environment only causes more and more generations where the bulk of the population really isn’t suited for this environment and often suffers in varying ways because of that. Accepting that not all members of a species will do great in the new environment and that there will be deaths as a result of that leads to much quicker adaptation where a much larger portion of the population doesn’t have those issues.
Every aspect of human life has changed with an insane exponentially increasing pace over the last 200 or so years, so the environment almost all humans deal with every moment of every day now is almost nothing like what we evolved to deal with and handle. That alone will lead to deaths.
There were tons of cars in the 80s and 90s and playing in the street was still very normal. You’d simply move out of the way when a car was coming. You taught your kids that the streets weren’t safe, since streets are made for cars to drive over and not for kids to play in and didn’t let them do that until they could do it relatively safely.
We see posts here about someone calling the cops on the neighbor kids over and over for simply being outside. That’s the dot to connect. It’s a societal change toward being batshit crazy, whether helicopter parents who must oversee every moment of their children’s lives to make sure they’re as safe as possible or obsessively controlling neighbors who think that’s the proper way to parent and that any time they see anyone under 18 without a parent they decide it must be child abandonment, or abuse, or runaways, or roving gangs of criminal kids and call the cops over it.
In a lot of places in the US cops will now ask groups of kids why they’re playing at a park. Kid’s aren’t going outside because no one will leave them alone to be kids outside.
Not that I disagree with you about helicopter parenting being an important part of it - but tons of kids were also killed by cars back in the day. It was a very real problem.
In the Netherlands, this was why they made their cities more bike- and pedestrian-friendly, and as a result, dutch kids move more freely than kids in other parts of the world.
Of course, that’s definitely important. In the US most cities aren’t designed to be walkable/bikeable at all. That’s dangerous and of course city planning should account for all sorts of transportation from walking and people in motorized wheelchairs on up.
I do agree with George Carlin on the push for safety, though. It’s not kind and cuddly to say, but I also believe natural selection has it’s place.
A large scale environmental change generally correlates with a larger than normal amount of animals in that region dying as those with the adaptations that best fit the new reality are selected for. The birds that can’t reach the seeds now die off and those with the longer beaks survive to pass on their genes and the species ends up with a longer beak than it had a few decades back.
Completely minimizing deaths in a radically different environment only causes more and more generations where the bulk of the population really isn’t suited for this environment and often suffers in varying ways because of that. Accepting that not all members of a species will do great in the new environment and that there will be deaths as a result of that leads to much quicker adaptation where a much larger portion of the population doesn’t have those issues.
Every aspect of human life has changed with an insane exponentially increasing pace over the last 200 or so years, so the environment almost all humans deal with every moment of every day now is almost nothing like what we evolved to deal with and handle. That alone will lead to deaths.