I feel sorry for my son... gone are the "good old days". :(

[tRidiot]

It's far more sane to put your kid in a cage so nothing can happen to them.

Who said anything about a cage? Other than you? Hyperbole... says more about you than it does me.

http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/PageServlet?LanguageCountry=en_US&PageId=2810#1


So really your kid is more likely to die in a car wreck than have the paranoid abduction delusion play out. But nobody here would stop driving "For the children"... no, that's insane.

I feel sorry for the kids, because the parents are crippled mentally by fear.

If you're one of the families affected by the abduction of a child, the numbers seem pretty damned significant...

I feel sorry for kids whose parents are crippled by stupidity, too.

 

[tiasman]

I feel the same way and do the same things with my kids......BUT

I think the stats show that the world is no more dangerous than it was back then, it's just that in our CSI, CRIMINAL MINDS twisted society, combined with the 24 hour news cycle and internet, we hear about every little thing that in the past was not reported past the local community or state level.

Now we hear about every bad thing that happens, because that is what sells in our sick society. Empathy and compassion have been lost due to the cultural poisening that has occurred to the U.S. and the world. I have not watched any newscast on TV for 8 + years and I am a much happier person for it. If my neighborhood is about to slide off the earth, I figure someone will tell me.

 

[ignerntbend]

The FBI wants me to think that the murder rate is about half what it was in the 1970's.
I watch cable news around the clock so I know otherwise.

 

[LightningCrash]

Who said anything about a cage? Other than you? Hyperbole... says more about you than it does me.

If you're one of the families affected by the abduction of a child, the numbers seem pretty damned significant...

Complains about hyperbole, makes up some hyperbole.

You're not bringing your A game today good sir.

You complain about your backyard cage not being secure enough for him because you can't lock it. You admit that you are seized by anxiety and paranoia.

The problem isn't the world... it's you. Seek counseling.

 

[RidgeHunter]

So if it's clearly no more dangerous than it was 10, 20, 20, 30 or 40 years ago...what's changed? And if it's even LESS dangerous than it was back in the good ole days of your childhood, why do you worry more than your parents did? Were your parents insane?

It's weird what changing societal norms do to us, me included. When I was a kid we lived off bicycles in the summertime. If nobody was around that day I'd go anyways; I thought nothing of taking off on my bike miles for miles, alone, with no phone as a lifeline. Neither did my parents or grandparents. Now as an adult I won't leave my house for a couple mile jog without carrying my cell phone. What if I get hurt and need to call for help? I would actually feel uncomfortable leaving my house without it, and I'm an adult male. As a 10 year old kid I, and my parents and grandparents, thought nothing of me being alone on the road. Why? Odds are nothing will happen. Go be a kid. If it does, well, that's terrible. But so is not being a kid. If I get hurt, I could yell to a house, or wait for a car to drive by and flag them down. 2-3 minutes probably, and odds are they would be glad to help and wouldn't rape and murder me. Nope. I'm still taking my phone jogging.

You have to make a conscious decision to look at things objectively otherwise it's easy for your views of reality to be distorted.

I was sitting in a gas station parking lot after arriving early to meet an OSA'r for a deal earlier this summer, and it made me happy to see all the latchkey kids riding up on BMX bikes and skateboards for slushies and candy. No doubt on their way to play with fireworks or trespass at a construction site to see if there is anything cool to ride off of. Those kids will be on a message board in 30 years talking about the "good ole days of 2011" where they rode around all day and nothing bad happened to them, and how you just can't do that in 2041.

 

[HMFIC]

I don't know tr, I have the same feelings.

I'm not sure that there is any way to conclusively prove one way or the other if it's safer or not.

One thing, back in those days when we were gone all day, the moms were still all around the neighboorhood and keeping an eye open whether we realized it or not. Back then, most women were homemakers still and so there was an active element in the neighboorhood, not a jackpot full of empty houses for looting or kids home alone like it is now.

 

[NikatKimber]

It's hard to believe, but I'm alive today. And I rode my bike to my friends house 2 miles away in Denver, and then we would spend hours riding around the neighborhoods, parks and greenbelts within a 2 mile radius. *gasp* No phones! *gasp* By ourselves!

That was 10-15 years ago.

My brother would take his BB gun, SAS Survival guide, and a canteen and disappear all day on the 200 acres behind us in Shawnee OK. All by himself, no phone! We just figured he'd show up if he got hungry enough.

That was 5-10 years ago.

Pretty sure my kids (Lord willing we have them) will be out running around on our land, or land behind us, or *gasp* the AR river is only 2 miles from us. Just imagine the fun (trouble?) a kid could get into?!?!?

 

[donner]

i can't remember the exact statistics, but i caught a good discussion about this one day on NPR. The guest had done lots of studies on these ideas and the two things that stuck in my memory were this. First, most people are worried about their kids, but the idea of something bad happening while they are responsible is actually a bigger fear. Second, from a statistics standpoint, a kid would have to play outside for something like 125,000 years to guarantee an abduction.

I'll see if i can find the story because it was interesting.

I'm not trying to disparage any parents either, but it was an interesting look at how our fears transfer to our actions.

 

[RidgeHunter]

Simple paranoia

You should all read this:

http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/why-i-let-my-9-year-old-ride-the-subway-alone/

This kid will be light-years ahead of his peers when he moves out and has to start doing things on his own. It's amazing how many of my friends didn't/don't know how to do a variety of simple daily tasks required of an adult, because their parents have always done everything for them. And many of their parents still do every singe thing for them up through college, then turn a 24 year old baby loose into the world.

My friend called me incredulous one night because he had several friends over and they were in an argument about city blocks. Apparently one of them said "I wish house numbers had some kind of system so they are easier to find instead of just being random". My friend said "They do, it's a grid layout and they are called hundred blocks."

Nobody in the room believed him, they thought streets were laid out randomly. He finally got them to understand it on the north-south streets in Tulsa (named). "4100 S. Memorial is 41st and Memorial, right?" They said they were with him. "Now, the east-west (named) streets are numbered too. In a city block grid layout pattern. You can locate yourself by these numbers and tell where you are on said east-west street. They are not random, they run in a pattern." They could not grasp that. They had to just be random numbers. "How can you have a house number and the house next to it not be in sequential order?" Sigh.

He called me and said "Hey, if I say hundred block what am I talking about?"
"Street layouts?"
"YES!!! THANK YOU! Are house numbers random or is there a gridded layout for the block numbers?"
"Uhh...how could they be random? Of course there is a layout."
"RIGHT!!!?"

My friends dad used to give him a highway map on road trips when he was a kid and say "Get us back home; I'll go where you tell me." He was blown away to learn that everybody can't navigate a city based on block numbers.

 

[donner]

I just found this. Not what i was looking for, but again, provides an interesting look at things.

FROM NPR
Shoomp shoomp shoomp. Hear that?

That’s the sound of helicopter parents hovering over their children, worrying every second of the day that terrorists could strike Johnny's school or a stranger will snatch Jane from the bus stop.

Scary stuff. But it turns out most parents are worrying about all the wrong things.

"These worries that we have are so rare," says Christie Barnes, mother of four and author of The Paranoid Parents Guide. "It’s like packing a snow shovel in case it snows in Las Vegas."


Based on surveys Barnes collected, the top five worries of parents are, in order:

Kidnapping
School snipers
Terrorists
Dangerous strangers
Drugs

But how do children really get hurt or killed?

Car accidents
Homicide (usually committed by a person who knows the child, not a stranger)
Abuse
Suicide
Drowning

Why such a big discrepancy between worries and reality? Barnes says parents fixate on rare events because they internalize horrific stories they hear on the news or from a friend without stopping to think about the odds the same thing could happen to their children.

"I’d love it if every news story came with a little warning at the bottom that said, 'Even though this is very tragic, this is 1 in 10 million, 1 in a million or 1 in 20', " says Barnes.

This unnecessary worrying, she argues, is detrimental to parents. The stress worry-wracked parents endure can harm their health and their relationships with other adults. Also, focusing on rare dangers distracts parents from the dangers that matter.

As for children, Barnes says that overprotectiveness will hurt them in the long run by making them less resilient. "We’re teaching them to be helpless," she says. "And because we’re so afraid of the world, we’re teaching them to be afraid of the world."

So, what’s a worried parent to do? Barnes has a simple prescription: helmets and seatbelts. Yup, that’s right, helmets and seatbelts. "I know it sounds boring," she says, but according to her research, making kids wear protective gear and buckle up in the car cuts kids' chances of death by 90 percent and their chances of serious injury by 78 percent.

"We think worry means that we love our kids," Barnes says. "So we’re kind of fooling ourselves to think that all this research and all this worry we’re doing is actually love… because it isn’t."