I'm almost 2 meters tall and was crossing a street at a crosswalk with my bike yesterday, walking and pushing it at normal walking speeds, like the law requires. There was a car about to turn left from the lanes going left. There was a car from the lanes going right (the closest lanes to me) that slowed down as I started crossing the street. I assumed they saw me and that's why they were slowing down. Nope - they almost hit me but managed to hit the brakes very hard at the last possible second. Apparently they slowed down to make sure the car that would turn left would wait for them. If I was as tall as a 5 year old, maybe the car that almost hit me wouldn't have even seen me. If I got hit, I'd take it better than a 5 year old due to physics - my mass is bigger and the point where it would've hit me would've been my thighs instead of my torso. That car wasn't even with a tall hood or anything obstructing its view, just a regular car.

In another comment a few days ago I reminisced about how I was let running alone for hours on end when I was very young, and how that was normal.

It's a bit hard to reconcile both events now. I gained a lot of independence and had real unrestricted fun, but in hindsight I might've died a few times.

My idea, even if it might be traumatic, is to show the kid a few clips of people being hit by a car and getting mangled, with all the gore visible. Especially people following the laws and being careful. I miss /r/watchpeopledie as it was actually very educational.

Yeah, as an only child it's a weird burden to be the guy who makes or breaks the whole bloodline. No pressure right ;)

But that pressure is on the parents too. There's this weird two-way feedback loop.

Single child household has made parenting culture neurotic. Because if you screw it up it ends your entire bloodline.

But the neurotic attitude makes child rearing feel like such a burden, people can hardly imagine doing it more than once...

I am told this attitude does not produce beneficial outcomes in the children either. Apparently people grow up healthier when their parents are relaxed.

Which parts are not a joke? If someone asked you who your main child was you’d be able to answer?

This article may not address this, but many articles of this type by Lenore Skazeny and others do address it. IIRC the findings:

- stranger danger was worse in the 70s than it is now. - safety in numbers was better in the 70s -- if all kids are outside it's more likely to be somebody else's kid that is snatched. If your kid is the only one, ... - car danger was worse in the 70s. Cars are bigger/faster now, but there were more drunk drivers then. This varies widely by jurisdiction.

It's hard to balance the factors -- it's not clear whether or not it was safer to let your kids outside today than it was in the 70's.

     Don't get me started with bike helmets

Bike helmets mitigate one of the most serious and common forms of injury while riding bikes. You can fall or be hit by a car/tree branch anywhere. They don't prevent you from doing anything you would otherwise do.

I'm someone who advocates for rolling back helmet laws because they decrease ridership, but helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE, not overactive safetyism.

As a commuter cyclist of over 20 years, my favorite recent trend are is wearing a bike helmet and giant noise-cancelling headphones at the same time.

In Norway my children sometimes came home from primary school (ages five to twelve) with notes saying things like:

"We've planned a trip to the woods for next week, it's expected to be minus twenty Celsius so please make sure they have appropriate clothing, hats, gloves, boots. Also we will have a fire so make sure they bring some sausages and a hunting knife so they can cut sticks for the fire and to hold the sausages over the fire."

No. 2 son came home with a plaster on his arm after one such excursion, I think when he was about ten, and explained that one of his friends had been careless with his knife. There was no drama, the teacher carries a first aid kit for precisely this scenario, his friend was firmly told to not be so stupid, and the teacher used it to explain to the class why knives need to be properly handled.

Sad.

When I was a child, I always had with me a multi-tool Swiss army knife, including at school, because I was very frequently building various things, or disassembling others to see how they were made. That early experience was very influential in becoming a successful engineer.

Decades later, as an adult, I was astonished to learn about the so-called "no tolerance" policies of many US schools, where the possession of even a small knife or even of less dangerous tools may be a reason for severe punishment.

Obviously, as a child, starting with the second day of school when 6-year old, I have always gone to the school and back, every day, alone, even if initially that was about a half hour of walking and then the later schools required long commuting by public transportation. Also none of my colleagues have ever been brought to school by someone else, and like me they did not have any contact with their parents since morning till late in the afternoon. All this was considered normal at that time.

That has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with "safety" being a magic word that gets way to many people to turn off their brains so the school is using as a pretext to enforce capricious rules and basically teach the kinds "do what the system says, however stupid, or else".

200yr ago they'd have used some Victorian morals bullshit or religion to the same end.

I'm father of three daughters and they grew up almost like this in nineties. My grandchildren don't have this chance any more. It's a little bit about changing times, but mostly because of public – it's just not acceptable for others to do all these things and parents would get into real trouble. When I was 10, I drove tractor, had already several scars from knife and axe and visited my grandmother more than hundred km away alone. My daughters would be arrested if they would let their kids to do any of it.