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I agree with this 100%! I grew up free to explore the woods, build forts, climb trees, jump off rocks, swim unsupervised, ride mt. bikes down steep hills, driv

• throwawayReply 10y ago
  That's very literally survivor bias. How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home? They're not here to tell the tale about how it "worked fine for them". I'm not saying that things haven't gone too far the other way, but anecdotes about how things were fine aren't good data.
  • goodJobWalrus 10y ago
    > That's very literally survivor bias. How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home? According to this guy, very few: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201404/risky-play-why-children-love-it-and-need-it https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201404/ri... > From an evolutionary perspective, the obvious question about risky play is this: Why does it exist? It can cause injury (though serious injury is rare) and even (very rarely) death, so why hasn’t natural selection weeded it out? The fact that it hasn’t been weeded out is evidence that the benefits must outweigh the risks. What are the benefits? Laboratory studies with animals give us some clues.
    • sliverstorm 10y ago
      While I don't disagree with his premise, that gives almost no data, and seems like a weak argument. Why hasn't war been weeded out? It must not really be all that risky.
      • burke 10y ago
        Societal behaviour like war differs from individual behaviour like 'risky play'. War, as a societal behaviour, emerges from the individual behaviour of fighting others for resources in a world of scarcity. That was a beneficial behaviour in many situations, as it prevented starvation. It would take much longer than our time within complex society has allowed to weed this behaviour out of our DNA on account of emergent behaviour.
      • gravypod 10y ago
        That's not the correct way to look at it. Those who won wars ended up more prosperous (up until very very recently) and where able to reproduce more.
      • goodJobWalrus 10y ago
        Have you read the whole article? He goes on to describe research on rats who are prevented from playing as pups and develops his argument from there.
    • lmm 10y ago
      All an evolutionary argument tells us is that the benefits outweighed the risks in the ancestral environment.
      • maratd 10y ago
        For that to make sense you'd have to have credible evidence that evolution moves at a glacial pace. It doesn't. It responds very quickly to a changing environment. http://allafrica.com/stories/201501280875.html http://allafrica.com/stories/201501280875.html
        • taco_emoji 10y ago
          It's very silly to draw such a broad conclusion about evolution in general from a single adaptation (most likely involving a single mutation) by a single species.
      • goodJobWalrus 10y ago
        I was referring to this part of his argument: >It can cause injury (though serious injury is rare) and even (very rarely) death keywords: "rare" and "very rarely", although it would be better argument to look at statistics on accidental deaths during risky play, now and in years past if I had time.
      • pantalaimon 10y ago
        The ancestral environment was way more dangerous though
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • mdorazio 10y ago
    If you want to argue against anecdote, it's best to provide actual facts instead of your own questions. For example, only 1 in 5 drowning deaths are children, and there's no reason to assume a significant portion of those are unsupervised [1]. Should we be helicopter-observing adults instead, or do their lives matter less? Traffic accidents are the largest cumulative killer of children [2]. If you want to go the route of "how many aren't here to tell us about it" you should really be arguing that parents should avoid putting kids in or near cars as much as possible. Children die, and that sucks a lot, but if you start making emotional appeals based on preventing all possible child deaths you're going to end up espousing that we keep all kids in padded rooms until they're adults. [1] http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/waterinjuries-factsheet.html http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/wa... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_injury_deaths_highlighting_unintentional_injury_2011-a.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_inj...
    • electriclove 10y ago
      "Drowning was the leading cause injury death for those 1 to 4 years of age." via http://www.cdc.gov/safechild/child_injury_data.html http://www.cdc.gov/safechild/child_injury_data.html
      • infinite8s 10y ago
        Unfortunately they don't separate out whether the drowning happened in a swimming pool or a bathtub.
    • electriclove 10y ago
      Go ahead and helicopter-observe adults if that is how you interpret that data. I will surely be vigilantly watching my young children when they are near water.
      • pilom 10y ago
        You could, you know, teach them how to swim? The reason so many children die of drowning is that so many don't know how to swim. MIT literally has a swim test requirement to graduate college for exactly this reason.
  • maratd 10y ago
    > How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home? Very few. Those who have a tendency to do things that get them killed ... get killed and eliminated from the gene pool. Everybody who is around now mostly knows how to judge risk. Yeah, we'll have some cuts, bruises, broken bones, etc. but it's very rare that someone does something so profoundly stupid that they get themselves killed. Just because you heard about it on the news doesn't mean it's common. If one kid out of 10,000 gets himself killed this way, you'd get a dozen kids nationally offing themselves daily, but in reality that's a very small number and in truth, the real number is probably much less.
  • m_fayer 10y ago
    There's a spectrum of risk here that IMO we don't like to acknowledge. It's uncomfortable to say that accepting a certain quantity of seriously injured or even killed children actually does come with benefits to those who aren't hurt. But I think we shouldn't shy away from this calculus, we should rather be clear-eyed about the fact that we have chosen to minimise risk, and have accepted the trade-off of reduced independence, joy, and adventure. I think we've moved in this direction organically. We have much fewer children much later in life than we used to, we do not accept child mortality, and every child is a much bigger investment (education and economic dependency into the mid twenties or later), so every life literally becomes more valuable, so we naturally hedge more and more against any risk to this life. The more we move into a high-education and EQ driven economy, the more investment each child demands, and the further this cycle perpetuates. Personally, I would not make this tradeoff, but I understand how hard it is to make this argument when faced with grieving parents who have suffered a huge loss, both emotionally and materially.
  • mcphage 10y ago
    > I'm not saying that things haven't gone too far the other way Right now I don't think we can have the conversation about having gone too far—people always reply "what's the harm in being too overprotective?" To have this conversation—which I think we absolutely need to have—we first need to recognize and admit that there's real, actual harm in being too overprotective.
  • coldtea 10y ago
    >How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home? Very very few. If anything this is "overblowing the danger" bias.
  • mhb 10y ago
    From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12745272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12745272: We might accept a few more phobias in our children in exchange for fewer injuries. But the final irony is that our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have. According to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which monitors hospital visits, the frequency of emergency-room visits related to playground equipment, including home equipment, in 1980 was 156,000, or one visit per 1,452 Americans. In 2012, it was 271,475, or one per 1,156 Americans. The number of deaths hasn’t changed much either. From 2001 through 2008, the Consumer Product Safety Commission reported 100 deaths associated with playground equipment—an average of 13 a year, or 10 fewer than were reported in 1980. Head injuries, runaway motorcycles, a fatal fall onto a rock—most of the horrors Sweeney and Frost described all those years ago turn out to be freakishly rare, unexpected tragedies that no amount of safety-proofing can prevent.
    • electriclove 10y ago
      Injuries decreased 20% from 1980 to 2012 according those numbers.. seems significant no?
      • ska 10y ago
        You have to be careful with those sorts of numbers. It says that monitored hospital visits (not injuries) have gone down, but those hospital visits have got a lot more expensive for most people too - one possible confounding factor.
        • electriclove 10y ago
          Agreed. If anything, I'm questioning the quote referencing that exact data point: "our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have"
      • Diederich 10y ago
        I think playground equipment is quite a bit safer! I'm pretty sure supervision has little to do with it.
  • 33W 10y ago
    Isn't the opposite then a negative selection bias? If we have N children killed per year doing an activity A, and N anecdotes of children being perfectly okay, neither matter without knowing the denominator of the number of child-activities per year.
  • rocqua 10y ago
    The bias can't be larger than child mortality though, which is 0.59% in the US according the us CIA factbook.
• goodJobWalrus 10y ago
  Me too, and I so want this for my boy, but there is a reason to be genuinely scared of other people and social services. I mean people get arrested for letting their kids go to the park or play in their own backyards, for god's sake.
  • Diederich 10y ago
    Honest question: what is the objective, per-child risk of that happening? I don't have data for that, but I would be shocked if it was anything except exceedingly low, on the order of getting killed in a commercial aircraft crash.
    • goodJobWalrus 10y ago
      Of what happening? Having CPS called on you? I don't know, but I am as terrified of it, as your average helicopter mom would be of having their child scrape their knee, or be abducted by a stranger. I really hope the risk is as low as being abducted, though.
      • Diederich 10y ago
        I hear you and my wife and I struggle with similar feelings! But taking a step back, I think it's plain that the actual risk from CPS over-reach is extremely low. I posted my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12744241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12744241 at the top level FYI.
    • ansible 10y ago
      Well, the issue is the media reporting. Most of the time, if a child is abducted, it is the other parent in a post-divorce situation, rather than a kidnapper / molester. But we do see stories about those occasionally in the national news, so most people are "aware of the danger". Ditto, I suppose, for CPS getting called by an over-reactive neighbor upon seeing a child wandering around without supervision. These types of stories also make the national news, for whatever reason, so most people are "aware of the danger". And thus, we live in a climate of fear. Yay! For the record, I spent some parts of my childhood wandering around in the woods alone (or with friends) where I could have: fallen down a hill, drown in a stream, fallen out of a tree, etc., etc., etc. without a reasonable possibility of timely rescue (no mobile phones back then). And I somehow survived. It is a shame that most kids in urban or suburban areas won't get a chance to do this anymore.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• ttcbj 10y ago
  When I was a kid, we ran around our neighborhood as a pack every day after school, and all summer. We would explore the woods, explore new construction houses near us after the workers left, play sports, and thousands of other activities. Unfortunately, the environment has changed for my kids in ways that makes this difficult to duplicate: 1. Other kids aren't home anymore, they are all at structured activities. There is no neighborhood pack to play with. 2. Parents aren't home either, they are working. When I was a kid, if you got a splinter or scrape, you just went to the nearest house and someone's mom patched you up. All those houses are empty now. 3. If you keep your kid home to play freely, they miss out on all the social stuff going on in the structured activities. Much as I dislike all the structure, it is where the other kids are. I agree it sounds great to let your kids roam free as we did, but I think in practice the environment has changed in ways that make it difficult.
  • modoc 10y ago
    Well I grew up in the mountains of Vermont, and that environment hasn't changed really. But I see your point, although I feel that the only way to combat that shift, is to actively push against it (like the dad in the article did).
  • branchless 10y ago
    2 is a big one. Yet another consequence of high land prices as now both partners are forced to work. Another is the break up of wider family. Before people could live locally and they would have their grandparents local too, and aunts etc. Now that land rents are so high and work is god, together with low job security, people are forced to move to other parts of urban areas or even to different cities in order to find work. Still everyone seems pretty happy with capital gains on their home that can never be realised because all other homes also went up in price, so perhaps it's worth the utter destruction of life as we know it!
    • Grishnakh 10y ago
      Well you can always just move to a small town where the rent is cheap. Oh wait, there's no decent-paying jobs there...
• woliveirajr 10y ago
  That's how I think and try to act. I think that we do know what causes real hurts and scars that would make a kid regret later, in life. But there are small dangers that will just teach on how to react, avoid or deal with. And even creativity only comes from learning, trying and dealing with outcomes. In the trade-off of security vs knowledge and discover, the parenting function is not to go to only one side.
• vaishaksuresh 10y ago
  I've had a similar childhood, but I think we all have the survivorship bias here. For the record, I've electrocuted myself, drank kerosene, burnt myself among other things. Each of which could have easily ended my life. Just because I survived, you hear from me. There may be other kids who have had worse luck and they might not be here to tell their story. We say we had a free childhood and we turned out just fine because we survived. There are others who were not lucky. So basing how we raise our children on the premise that everything was okay and is still the same is incorrect.
  • erobbins 10y ago
    The statistics say that ALMOST EVERYONE survived. That's the point here. It's very much like terrorism.. hardly anyone dies from terrorism statistically, but some people live in fear of it for no reason.
    • vaishaksuresh 10y ago
      Then in the important thing to think of is, would you want your kid to be the few that did not survive. I agree you need to give kids freedom and all that, but I can't blame parents for trying their best to not put their kids in harm that can be avoided.
      • tremon 10y ago
        Then in the important thing to think of is, would you want your kid to be the few that did not survive Do you also not board planes, in case yours is one of the few that doesn't make it to its destination?
        • vaishaksuresh 10y ago
          I do, but I also don't blame people who don't board planes because of those odds.
• gist 10y ago
  > I grew up free to explore Same here. But back in that day there was so much less to keep occupied with. That is at least part of the reason you did those things. You typically weren't allowed to watch TV for a long time at least and you had to find something interesting to do. Today the things that some kids can do are way more exciting than taking apart an old lawn mower and seeing what makes it tick.
• TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  As a counter point to your anecdote, I did all those things as a kid and went on to be an injecting drug user (meth and Heroin, whatever else was laying around) for all of my 20's, assaulted a few people, and got charged with drug trafficking. So it's no guarantee. At 35 I have a good job now, and am part of the wealthy property owning class (read: mortgagee), and am building a business with my wife, so maybe it worked out ok?
• dmalvarado 10y ago
  Isn't there some confirmation bias here? Meaning, you survived, and so you're still here to tell us that it all worked out fine.