One month ago I started removing the constraints on my 8 years old daughter's outside activity. I just gave a wristwatch with the alarm set before dinner time and told her "when the alarm goes off then come home". I'm against her having a phone.
When she comes home and she tells us what she and her friends did (I don't ask, she just wants to share) it is hilarious and I usually think "It was better if I didn't know this and that". But then I think about the 8 years old version of me "bombing" the toy soldiers together with a friend of mine by spraying alcohol on them and by setting everything on fire, and I relax...
My company is in the process of launching a screen-free, non-phone LTE device (think unlimited range walkie-talkie with extra features) intended to let kids stay safe while having more freedom. I'm genuinely curious - how would you feel about something like that?
I thought about the walkie-talkie, but I think that all those devices are more of a pacifier for parents than something that keeps the child safe.
If I'd give her the walkie-talkie then my wife would call her every 10 minutes and ask her where is she. Tracking her with a GPS would keep me calm but I don't think it will help my daughter.
The only time I freaked out was when she removed the watch and she didn't come home on time: I went out to look for her and in the meantime, she went home. Realizing that she may go home on another path I went back home and found her watching TV. Honestly I think that those devices are meant to keep the parents calm, not for the sake of the children.
Thanks for the feedback. I think that's fair. One of the things I remember most from my sociology classes in college is that America has, in general, been getting safer for decades now, even though everybody thinks it's been getting less and less safe.
I think you're absolutely right that our product may do more to help parents feel secure letting their kids roam, rather than actually making them safer. Still, if it gets kids out more and helps parents feel more comfortable, I think that's a win.
Devil's advocate opinion: we can't objectively say society is 'safer', only that crime rates are down. Maybe crime rates are going down because people are more likely to stay hiding in their living rooms.
Exactly. I’m not sure I believe this, and definitely don’t have any evidence to back it up.
If kids are safer because they are staying at home, then we can’t criticise parents for not letting them out to play by themselves. That would be like saying Donald Trump doesn’t need bodyguards since very few presidents have been attacked.
More accidents happen at home than anywhere else, so perhaps kids are safer outside. As an example, my brother broke his arm in a pillow fight when he got knocked off the bed.
As a parent, when my kid was 8 years old I let her play in the local woods with a walky talky. Pacifier for me? Probably. But she wouldn't have been out all morning without a means of contact.
Snark: It's nice for the helicopter parent who also doesn't want their kids exposed to a phone, so it'll probably sell just fine.
I suppose because I'm not a parent, I don't have that built in level of worry / paranoia, though I "fondly" remember how fearful my own mother was, but I don't get it. Isn't the point of letting your kid venture out to help them establish and explore freedom and boundaries?
You tell your child not to stay out past the street lights, not venture past certain landmarks, and then let them roam. If they comply, great! If not, they learn actions have consequences.
If I were a kid, I'd make sure to conveniently forget / power off / not charge / lose that thing as much as possible.
I was born in 1995, so I was a young child in the early 2000's, in a low income neighborhood with a single mother. One of the mothers in that neighborhood was an addict to some hard drug I can't remember. Probably crack. The surrounding neighborhood was decent-- the age and size of the houses puts them at around 200-300K at the time. We had a huge open field area in back of the house. (Descriptions are to give an idea of the safety level inherent to the neighborhood). As I got older (7, on) my mother loosened the reigns a bit, and eventually my friends and I would go on day-long adventures exploring the open field and wooded areas. We sometimes came across bedding and other supplies, and one time almost stumbled on a homeless guy waking up.
My mom was often worried, but she set just a few hard rules: Come back inside when the streetlights go on, don't talk to anyone you see while out, don't go anywhere further than the parking lot alone. And that was fine, and we got smart because of it. We were vigilant and carefree at the same time. We crossed roads looking both ways to get to parks we'd never been to. And we pushed the boundaries a little to see what would happen.
Me and my female friend were once approached by a guy "looking for a dog". He wanted us to come with him to the dog park to help him look for it. Understanding what it could mean, we said no and ran inside-- as we'd been taught. Since we were given the freedom to make such decisions, and since we'd seen danger before, we knew the "right thing" to do and we chose to do it.
I didn't have a cell phone back then. I'm sure if I was given one I'd promptly "lose it" just as you say. In suburbia it's just not necessary to be in constant contact with your kid. They're not gonna call you unless you've raised them to be as docile and paranoid as yourself. They won't need to.
Before I had kids of my own, I shared your view. After having kids, I can easily see how people become irrational about child safety. I fight it myself, constantly. I think a lot of it is due the sensational, salacious media coverage the bad stuff, makes it seem more prominent now than in the past.
I think it's also due to the fact that the authorities are charging parents with neglect for simply letting their kids do the exact same things I was allowed to do as a kid without consequence. Even parents that want to let their kids roam safely cannot do so any longer due to some overreacting busybodies.
"It's nice for the helicopter parent who also doesn't want their kids exposed to a phone..."
First of all, the dangers of modern phones to emotional health, for adults as well as children, I think is very well established by now.
So this device seems like a decent compromise for overly concerned parents (this is a redundant phrase).
I think there are also benefits for the child. In earlier generations, children would need to run home to ask permission to stay out longer or engage in a new activity. Now they can make those requests with less interruption to their current activities.
"If they comply, great! If not, they learn actions have consequences."
The key is to figure out what level of consequences they are ready to handle at different points in their development.
> If they comply, great! If not, they learn actions have consequences.
Or they die, which kinda sucks.
Look, I'm generally in favour of kids wandering about the place like I did when I was a kid, but even back then we had a tragically high number of kids getting themselves crushed under farm equipment, falling from heights and landing hard, getting exposed to hazardous materials, or drowning in pits full of animal shit.
It's simply disingenuous to act as if the worst that can happen is a wee scrape and a lesson learned.
Ireland, actually. I'd be curious to see the stats, but suffice to say enough families were losing children that there were major changes to farm safety regulation.
Ireland here as well, and that had a lot to do with poverty and families needing their kids to work at a young age. The same was true in the US before child labor laws. I think a general “ambient” risk and a culture of,having your 9 year old work on the farm or in a mill are fundamentally separate issues.
> It's simply disingenuous to act as if the worst that can happen is a wee scrape and a lesson learned.
> but even back then we had a tragically high number of kids getting themselves crushed under farm equipment, falling from heights and landing hard, getting exposed to hazardous materials, or drowning in pits full of animal shit.
I think it's a bit odd to act as if kids are routinely parading around industrial zones. It sounds as if you and I grew up in vastly different parts of the world.
Uhm, how is "everyone is looking for a child whole night" not problem? You have inconvenienced multiple people a lot. Not just the kid. This happen twice and the kid is not going out alone next year.
Similar with bullying and worry about potential bad influence group.
We can't just stop letting folks live life because something bad might happen. Otherwise we'll just say "Think of the children" and ban everything.
Why don't we put pads on the kids, helmets, head gear and mouth pieces
Then we could pad the floor and walls, put cameras inside bathroom stalls
NOFX - Separation of Church and Skate[0]
Well, I certainly never suggested letting ones kids "do anything," only noting that the point of letting kids roam is to afford them some freedom as individuals.
On the other hand ... as a kid I roamed around, but I always had a quarter for the payphone just in case of emergency. Cell phone is the modern equivalent.
What a great device. It could also be interesting if it would provide an optional "only kid can initiate a call" mode.
For example, in the online account management section, where one can set up the channel (I'm just guessing how it works, I don't know how it gets set up), an option can be toggled to enable/disable the parents getting the capability to initiate a call or not, and this option is protected by a second password which only the kid knows, so that parent and kid set up this property together, in an agreement, and the parents can't override the agreement unless the kid also agrees and enters the password.
This would help chronic helicopter parents to not be able to constantly call their kids and possibly tell them to send them the gps coordinates or bug them otherwise.
The same should go for GPS access, that only kids can send position updates to the parents, and optionally, if both agree (again, protected with the kids password), let the parents poll the GPS data.
As a parent of a high functioning ASD child -- consider adding a way to attach that to clothing (or a way to attach a generic tether, which could then be used to attached to a belt or a necklace, etc) and you have a whole new market.
[edited] I know you market yourself as tetherless, but I'm referring to something as simple (and optional) as the mechanism Roku does for their wrist straps on remotes (and Nintendo Wii, etc):
Yeah, on the website, it shows a child carrying this widget in her pants' pocket, and I can immediately picture it falling out of the pocket unnoticed. A wrist band would probably be ideal.
I can't help but picture a house arrest ankle bracelet. Sadly, given the current state of parent-paranoia, I agree with the others here that this device would probably sell very well.
I concur. All I'd really want actually is a rugged watch with a a) reliable beacon, b) timer and c) possibly limited texting function (which could function as an alert) - in order of priority.
It's important to let kids be bored and ignored from time to time, so they actually have the space to think for themselves and realize how many opportunities they have out there and how fun it is to explore them.
Of course, every kid is a different universe, but in general I feel we are missing quite a bit of that.
I wonder if lack of spontaneity is part of the blame. It seems to me that there is too much structured time for kids. Particularly in suburbia. When I lived in a suburb I rarely saw kids out playing in a park without an adult hovering over them. Never saw kids playing in the street or wandering the neighborhood.
> Particularly in suburbia. When I lived in a suburb I rarely saw kids out playing in a park without an adult hovering over them.
A significant part of this, I think, is a design failure instead of a parenting one. Suburbs are bad at almost everything they do, except creating neighborhoods with big houses, grassy yards, and decent schools. In particular, they're poison for both children's play and parents' peace of mind.
As for kids - empty lawns, identical houses, and artificial boundaries don't support energy or imagination. There's nothing to look at, nowhere to go, and not much to do. when I was a kid the only suburban house where we played outside was one where the neighbors had given permission for us to play games across 3+ yards. Meanwhile at more rural houses, there were trees to climb, places to hide, and forests to explore. And in mixed density condos and apartments, there were sidewalks along the roads, shops to look into, town parks with soccer fields to play on.
As for parents - suburbs are honestly one of the worse environments I can think of to turn kids loose into, after serious wilderness and dense cities. Many suburbs have no sidewalks and most have wide roads with long distances to travel and lots of vision-hiding curves; perfect conditions for kids to get hit by cars, whether they're walking, biking, or playing street games. There are enough people and cars around to worry about someone with ill-intent, unlike a rural setting, but not enough to trust in bystanders or authority figures like an urban or mixed-density setting. There are neighbors to get mad at your kids, but if you want someone watching them it falls entirely on you. And there's so little to do that it raises fears of vandalism, bullying, or any other badness you might get from idle hands. For a younger kid, the sheer uniformity of suburbs can raise questions about finding their way home.
There are almost no redeeming features to suburbs, but I regularly hear "at least it's a good place to raise a family". I don't think it's true; suburbs are superficially clean and inviting, but they lack the stuff that makes unstructured life healthy and inviting for kids.
I think the question needs to be "how universal is the suburban space"? I've lived in multiple suburban areas, and the kid fun spaces were always the wild spaces at the edges of the suburban areas. If the houses are interspersed with somewhat-wild spaces, it works okay. If it's 100% homes, that's the curse.
This is an amazing comment. As someone who grew up in a very rural part of America (the nearest other house was about a mile away), I didn't realize until later in life, when I moved into a suburb, how much kids are missing by not having "unstructured" play spaces.
We live in an urban environment, with one teenager in high school and another starting high school in the fall. Both walk to school.
There are a lot of restaurants and coffee shops and such around, so there are a lot of opportunities to walk somewhere with friends after school and hang out, or walk to someone's house and hang out or play music or something.
We also have a community pool and basketball courts where they could walk and be with friends when they were younger, especially during the summer.
I think that could be much harder in suburban environments, where it's almost impossible to get from point A to point B without a parent driving.
I would say many things are more structured nowadays. And maybe it's normal, since we are exposed to more information and a more "complex" world. This can definitely be an issue, yes. But your comment also reminded me from a talk I attended to a few years ago at a community center where they discussed how it seems like streets nowadays don't play the role of "public spaces" anymore. Now they are spaces for transit. This might hint at a bigger problem, but to me it explains this change of mentality. Today we see a kid on the street without supervision, and we often think "where are his parents?", instead of "he's just playing around". And it's kind of a vicious circle in social perception. If there are no kids around on the streets, I'm less likely to let my own kids wander outside in a "uncontrolled" environment.
Shame I can't find it but I saw a study where a sociologist was monitoring a single town for decades and recording how far children would wander by themselves during the day. In the seventies it was around ten miles, with single-digit aged children wandering through the woods and into town and even doing errands for the family.
Around 2010 I think it had declined to about 200 yards max. It's really extremely sad. I wouldn't want to be a kid now. I wouldn't want to have those memories of childhood. It's part of several reasons I don't think it would be ethical for me to reproduce at this time.
People's fear is a sliding scale, and a child's safety is one of those things that the human psyche gives infinite value. That really screws up your ability to manage risk. People are even more afraid now, even though the causes of early death are the lowest they've ever been and we've marched ourselves into a joyless panopticon where nobody really decides their own destiny from an early age.
It's hard to tell where the fear's coming from. It's definitely not always from the child's parents. When I was 12 or 13 I might cycle off, 10 or 20 miles, not necessarily telling anyone where I was going, and of course there were no mobile phones then. We've had to apply some mild pressure to get my similarly-aged daughter to cycle two miles to school in the company of other children. So perhaps her timidity comes from other children, who in turn get it from... television? No idea.
I suppose when a middle-class mother is having a single child at age 40 the child is harder to replace than back in the old days when she'd had three by age 25 and could easily produce another three, as required, if some of an earlier batch got squashed by a lorry. Even if people aren't consciously reasoning like that perhaps it's a factor.
Really good points. Yes, I don't think it's always coming from the kid's parents. There's a lot of pressure from other parents. If you decide for yourself that you're going to have a free range kid and give them a 70s-style childhood where they practice their own agency from an early age and get to grow up learning their own limits and having adventures, then at some point some other worrying, busybody person is going to see your kid by themselves and call the police or CPS or whatever.
It's a herd thing. We have difficulty choosing to do anything drastically differently from the rest of society, and raising children involves another being who doesn't necessarily have freedom to consent so society gets even more involved if what you are doing is deviant. But the drift of society has caused the norm to be something that decades ago would have been considered highly deviant. If you were a hovering parent like is common today in the 60s or 70s, you'd be an absolute freak and considered abusive. But today the opposite is true.
I'm glad you mentioned that the kids are sometimes the ones who make the choice themselves. I guess we're putting so much fear around them that it's making them decide the wisest course of action is to do what is normal and practiced by all their peers, be in constant sight of their parents. Really a shame.
I do a lot of walking (adult) and you know what I've noticed?
SO MANY parents sit with their kids in a car at the bus stop. I'm not just talking about 1st graders either.
There's this one high school bus stop where no less than 7 or 8 parents are parked there with their kid sitting inside. Everyone is isolated from each other.
These are 15-18 year olds in a normal high school in the suburbs in a reasonably safe neighborhood at a large public school district.
I still walk my second grader out to his bus stop, even though it hasn't been required since he was a kindergartener. It's a nice morning walk and I get to chat with the neighborhood parents.
But I see a ton of teenagers (middle / high school) being driven to the bus stop where the kid doesn't even leave the car until the bus is there. To me that seems a little off.
The decline has been going on constantly, over many generations. If the trend continues as it has, these kids will think we were too lenient and restrict the movement of their own children even further.
So? They were investigated become someone filed a complaint about small children alone, and the investigator found that the parent was home supervising the children and there was no problem. The rest of the article is FUD about CFS's refusal to expunge case files.
That's a 'near-miss'. Something that shouldn't happen does happen, and you come closer to disaster than you were ever comfortable with. At that point, all it would take is a grouchy case worker to throw their entire family into disarray for months or years.
Two years ago, an Ontario foster family had their children taken away solely for refusing to lie about the existence of the Easter Bunny[1]. The parents were planning on celebrating the holiday with the children, but when the Children's Aid Society of Hamilton discovered the parents were unwilling to lie if asked, they had the children immediately removed from the home. The caseworkers treated learning the truth about the Easter Bunny as if it were a serious immediate danger to the safety of the children. If that sounds ridiculous, it's because it is.
The foster parents won a lawsuit over the matter in March of this year, but it's kind of too late to make things right. The lives of both the children and the parents have been permanently changed by the bad decisions by case workers.
If I was that Manitoba parent, I'd be angry and scared too. Nothing happened this time, but if she continues letting her kids play in the backyard, she's rolling the dice again. All that needs to happen is for her same neighbour to make another complaint, and to get an unreasonable caseworker. Superficially, it might even seem reasonable, "children removed from home of woman after repeated complaints of neglect" is not a headline that sounds concerning.
> Two years ago, an Ontario foster family had their children taken away solely for refusing to lie about the existence of the Easter Bunny.
And people all over the world read about the case and started to worry that something similar might happen to them, even though it was one single case on another continent (from where I am) two years ago. Maybe we should treat it as the freak incident it was.
The complexity of the case is overlooked in the summary. At issue there was the extent to which foster parents are obligated to support the cultural and religous practices of the legal/biological parents who the children are intended to be reunited with. As with all common law in history, at the borders between clearly right and clearly wrong is a fuzzy area that is addressed messily over time, since it's impossible to know the correct answer for every case in advance.
The problem here was an overzealous case worker -- which is a real issue that needs to be addressed, as you say. And it was addressed by the final ruling, sending a message to future case workers -- not an incorrect law about parenting responsibilities. Making a judgment about the merits of an investigation before the investigation means that you need to decide to not investigate anything.
How often do case workers inappropriately cancel a foster-care arrangement, vs how often to foster parents actually harm foster children?
> these kids will think we were too lenient and restrict the movement of their own children even further.
Or will thank us for our lenience and be sad about what the society as large is forcing them to do to their kids. Kind of like my mom, which expresses her sadness over the bullshit paranoia my children will live in, and I totally agree with her on this.
And the real reason parents go along with this and restrict the children further is a combination of media paranoia, complete failure to do basic maths instead of failing prey to availability herustic, and of course the presence of "do-gooders" who will happily call social service workers on you for any reason whatsoever.
(Oh, and the fear of "do-gooders" also feeds into the general paranoia.)
Now do another study about how far children range online and marvel at how children of the 70s must hate their parents.
Yes, causes of early death are the lowest they've ever been, perhaps because we've gotten better at caring for children, while removing the joy of crippling injury and death?
If, as the article states, the cost for reducing an early death for a minuscule number of children is depression and anxiety for a much larger percentage of them when they become adults, is it still worth it?
Well if you actually used the evidence instead of an off-the-cuff correlation fallacy you'd notice that the death rate has lowered for unrelated reasons and the kids were safe enough before overly-restrictive parenting became the norm.
Even ignoring that, let's say you're right. Where do you think would be a good balance of that? Surely kids would have even fewer early deaths if we just kept them in a single room except for going out in the backyard for mandatory exercise. Like a dog. And why stop at 18? Surely unnecessary adult deaths could be prevented too by not allowing movement or decision-making for anyone. But who would even want to be alive?
Obviously that's absurd. So the answer isn't only to minimize risk of death and injury. The answer is to find a balance between control and chaos, where safety and freedom are acceptable. I'm of the opinion that we have strayed too far towards control.
You're also falling for that risk management problem I mentioned earlier. Humans have an internal algorithm to manage risk. But like most algorithms, it tends to break down when you feed it values of infinity or zero. When we give anything an infinite value, any finite amount of risk is unacceptable. We'll take zero risk and as a result there can be no good outcome, because life without risk has no potential reward.
An example of that is the stunted emotional development that kids have these days. We responded to obvious risks of early death and discounted less-obvious risks of failure to thrive later in life. It becomes easy to blame individuals for their own shortcomings at that point, even if it was perfectly possible for them to develop normally if we hadn't squelched them.
And I think there is evidence of current and future generations having less opportunities, less wealth, a worse climate, even less sexual encounters than previous generations. I think that's sad. We dream of always giving a better life to our children, and now we're greedily taking that life from them. They will know when they grow up and look around them. They will understand what happened.
Since the introduction of all-age mandatory bicycle helmet laws in Australia back on the early 90s, cycle participation rates in relation to population has been in consistent decline (all while pedestrian safety and driver safety - but not cycle safety - at the same time has improved).
Bike racks at schools used to be filled - that is no longer the case. By comparison, this is what it looks like in Netherlands: https://youtu.be/8NUgB_xkIvU
You simply cannot compare the scale of the Netherlands' use of bicycles with Australia. The nations are so far apart - literally - on the scales of distances involved, that its just not sensible. The Dutch are used to living within 20 minutes of everything - Australians have vastly greater distances to scale. A Dutch city was made for humans, a few hundred years ago - most Australian cities were made for automobiles, within the last 100 years.
>Personally I don't understand why you'd want to drive more than 10 minutes by car to work, it's such a waste of your lifetime.
By choosing to drive 40 minutes to work, you can live 10 minutes from a national park or a beach or the rest of your family or a golf course or whatever works for you in your off hours.
Because, simplisticly, you probably only get to do the 10 minute journey twice a fortnight but you have to do the 40 minute journey 10 times in that same period. So it's 140mins vs 410mins; you in theory save 3h30m per fortnight by living closer to work.
It's actually choosing not to orient your life around work that causes the decision to live closer, thus saving commuting time and overall spending less time on work related activity.
Do you have time and energy to spend time in those places after work on weekdays? I, for the most part, don't. It makes more sense to drive to them once or twice a week on weekends vs living close to them, but having a long commute on weekdays.
>Do you have time and energy to spend time in those places after work on weekdays? I, for the most part, don't.
If you don't live somewhere where it's easy you definitely won't. Make the things you /want/ to do easy. You'll do the things you /must/ do whether it's easy or hard, but if the things you want to do are hard as well you won't do them ever.
The price of real estate in Australia more than 10 minutes drive from many people's work is often hundreds of thousands of dollars less than close to their work.
we have this real estate problem even in the Australia without roos (talking Austria here) and I wonder: why won't "work" move. How important is it for you to be physically at a certain place when you (and your team and manager) might just as well be 30 minutes closer to "home"?
Probably big cities need to be punished for attracting to many companies with a lot of staff. Believe it or not, Linz, the city I live in, has more workplaces that inhabitants. Something's clearly wrong here and I don't mean the work-daily rush hour.
To be fair, I want to do it (~30 min commute) because it allows me to live in a halfway decent place with stuff to do and still work in a laid back environment in BFE
UK has no helmets and I very rarely see kids cycling to school, especially by themselves. Cycling in London is a very recent development and the infrastructure only recently started to appear. Even then it is designed around cycle superhighways for commuters rather than local journeys which can involve crossing many busy roads.
Yes it is. In fact a pretty thorough study was carried out in Denmark which showed that forcing bicycle helmets has such a big impact on the number of people cycling, that it overall increases the healthcare spending in the country. They did the math, and overall the nation is healthier with lots of people cycling and some getting injured, than forced helmets and no one cycling.
Reminds me of the safety laws for lumber here in germany. The kevlar clothing that you are supossed to wear is super heavy and hot, making you so fatigued that it actually increases the total risk at work.
Its like system designers who are afraid to get theire hands "dirty" and base there whole product on interview-questions and available documentation. Also- remember its most important that he/she who designed the rules has no trace of responsibility left.
The problem is, these kind of failure-designers have on paper tryied to make the world better and can shift all blame towards the victims of theire bad solutions.
He/She did not wear the trousers of doom and had a chainsaw accident- insurence claim denied. No wonder policy designers are among the most hated people in the world- but that sort of rightous widespread anger leads to them having even less reality contact and even more reality diverging safety-dance-rules.
So always try to be friendly, no matter how insane, out of this world and damaging the rules coming from bureaucratic centralia are.
I would never, ever use a chainsaw without a full-face shield and kevlar chaps or trousers. No matter how skilled the operator, there is always a risk of kickback. With just a slight error in bar placement, the saw will violently launch itself towards the operator. A kickback can cause life-changing injuries in a fraction of a second. Chainsaw protective clothing is hot and heavy, but it's the only good option for protecting yourself against kickback.
I do not deny the danger of kickbacks- i claim that they are more often happening, if you are fatigued and exausted stumbling around a fallen tree with a runing chainsaw.
There is alternative protection gear by now with better properties (knee/shin guards made from plastic, and plastic guards with passive cooling mechanisms).
TL,DR; Im not generically claiming that protection is the root of all evil. Im claiming that the most used safety gear at the moment is lousy- and that domagtic safety procedures are creating the accidents they prevent. Because people will wear them to exaustion, and then strip them off with no replacement.
Analogy to several existing computer safety solutions intended.
I think that's unfair (talking about the helmets). The policy makes a lot of untuitive sense and it's only with the benefit of hindsight we can say that disadvantages were too big. And this law may not even be universal, it's a product of the society we are in. In a different place or time the result may be different.
Such laws are not a product of any discussion or knowledge or research.
They are a product of responsibilty avoidance metrics in large processes in goverments and companys. The pros and cons are not even evaluated.
It gets worser still- alot of these laws are used as hooks for a state-driven mafia- aka selling unneeded goods to people who would have never bought them in the first place without the laws.
Take the splitting up of the germans driver licenses for various small scale vehicle classes or various other safety laws, which are basically buisness generation for safety measures and consultant services. There is something particular perverse if police is forced to enact and enforce mafia created laws.
The evidence is very mixed. Wearing a helmet does significantly reduce the risk of head injury in a crash, but riders who wear helmets appear to be at significantly higher risk of crashing. This may simply be selection bias (frequent cyclists engaged in risky types of riding are more likely to wear helmets) or it may represent risk-compensation by cyclists or other road users.
This is for the US, the country that appears to be almost fanatically opposed to making safe cycling paths. Of course you're going to have more terrible accidents then (with or without a helmet).
I am not sure why you are being downvotes, I agreed with your sentiment at first. Although when I really think about it I can see how it would deter many people who can easily replace their biking with walking.
I really feel like there must be other factors at play here though...
I live in Toronto and bike to my university on a daily basis. If helmets were mandatory here I wouldn't, and if I wasn't I probably wouldn't even own a bike. I also bike recreationally to nice parks and stuff - stuff I wouldn't be doing since I wouldn't have purchased a good bike in the first place.
I've tried to explain why below, but the real point is just "from personal experience I can't image it isn't detering people from riding bikes".
The main reason a helmet is such a problem is just convenience. A bike, like a car, I can just lock up wherever I go. The helmet I would have to carry around with me all day. That makes whole day just slightly more inconvenient, and it's honestly just not worth it to me.
The second is that wearing a helmet makes me feel substantially less safe. There are two direct reasons that I can articulate for this, but I'm not sure they fully explain the effect. There are also statistics that support me, showing that wearing a helmet is correlated with a increase in collisions.
The first reason is wearing a helmet substantialy impedes my hearing. This is probably a bit foreign to people who are use to driving, but hearing is incredibly useful for knowing when a car/truck/bus/etc is coming up behind me. A helmet increases wind noises to the point where the signal is much less useful, I'm not confident I will always hear a car in time to react with one on, and I'm worse at pinpointing the location. Incidentally I find the lack of sound when driving fairly disturbing and scary, since I'm so used to being able to use it.
The second is that the extra weight on my head seems to make looking around take more psychological effort, so I end up doing it best, so I end up having less awarness of cars around me. This is a rather surprising (to me) effect, but I'm certain it's real. Of course it's not the end of the world because I do still make substantial effort to look around, it's just epsilon less often which makes me epsilon less safe.
A lot of those convenience problems are solved with airbag helmets since they do not affect hearing, sit on the neck, weight less and take significant less space when carried around. They do however cost about the same as a whole (on the cheaper end) brand new bike. If/When those drop to the cost of regular helmets then I can see how mandatory helmets make more sense.
What kind of helmet have you been wearing that causes loss of hearing and wind noise? That's news to me - I've been cycling with a helmet for 15+ years and have never had a helmet (gone through a bunch of them) that's made any noise. Quite the opposite of you, if I'm on a bike without a helmet I don't feel safe. Been biking in Austria, Poland, London for years.
“My question is, you are covered from head to toe in protective padding. So why don’t you wear a helmet?”
“The suit’s got a cervical airbag that blows up when you fall off the board, so you can bounce on your head. Besides, helmets feel weird. They say it doesn’t affect your hearing, but it does.”
“You use your hearing quite a bit in your line of work?”
“Definitely, yeah.”
Uncle Enzo is nodding. “That’s what I suspected. We felt the same way, the boys in my unit in Vietnam.”
[…]
“Our job was to go through the jungle making trouble for some slippery gentlemen carrying guns bigger than they were. Stealthy guys. And we depended on our hearing, too—just like you do. And you know what? We never wore helmets.”
“Same reason?”
“Exactly. Even though they didn’t cover the ears, really, they did something to your sense of hearing. I still think I owe my life to going bareheaded.”
It's not total hearing loss, but it catches the wind which makes noise once you're going a reasonable speed. Similar to the noise you experience if you orient your head the wrong way when there is a reasonable amount of wind going by you, but you can't get rid of it by turning your head. I also find I'm much worse at pinpointing direction all the time with it on (presumably because of sound bouncing off of it... since ear's generally pinpoints sound via echo).
I've found other people who agree with me on this, and other people who don't notice it. My best guess is that the people who don't notice it just never learnt to use sound as such an important queue while biking, particularly with respect to direction, but I don't know.
I felt similar until I got hit by a car while riding my bike. Now I don't really mind dealing with the helmet at all as I ride around. I also got older, and don't really mind looking "lame" caring a helmet with me.
- Rain (possibly solvable with a bag of some sort, but this becomes increasingly complex, consider locking).
- Locked bikes are annoyingly often bashed slightly. My bike can take the abuse, but a bashed up helmet becomes even more useless, sometimes without even showing it.
- Makes locking the bike substantially harder. If I don't want my helmet stolen I'd have to lock it through the actual helmet and not the straps. That would be a pain in the ass with a ulock (and other lock types are considered even less secure for the bike).
I’ve locked a helmet up with my bike all my life, in several different cities; It’s a complete non issue to me. What is the concern; that someone will use a blade to cut the helmet strap so that they can steal your broken helmet? It’s effortless to leave your helmet attached to your bike.
Edit - I’m not saying I support laws enforcing helmets for adults; I just don’t think that helmet theft is a big concern.
This really depends on which city you're in and where in the city you leave your bike+helmet.
I've had the ultra-cheap lights on my bike stolen. I've seen plenty of other bikes stripped of everything except the frame itself.
This is why I always take my helmet (and my lights) with me, lock my bike and the front wheel with a good lock, and chain lock my seat down for good measure. Haven't had anything stolen since -- even in some sketchy areas.
I agree with your presentation - the issue boils down to it not mattering how easy it is, it's the perception of how easy it is. Once people see they can leave their helmet with the bike and it won't get messed with or stolen then it can become normalised and the perception falls away. But the inhibition is in the perception that requiring a helmet makes it difficult.
Unrelated anecdote: the first time I went out with a helmet was the first time I banged my head, I ducked under a branch as I normally would, only I'd not allowed the extra room, banged my head hard and came off my bike (gently). I still wear and encourage helmet use.
This sort of assumes that people put biking as highest priority in their daily activities which is rarely the case. People who slightly prefer biking are less likely to do so when it is slightly more inconvenient.
Part of effect is that helmet campaigns paint cycling as much more dangerous as it really is. So, more risk averse people are putt off bikes entirely and less likely to use them. It makes people associate bike with picture of accident instead of pleasure.
Part of effect is that kids cant use bikes on playground "normally" how they would without helmet - they cant chase, hop on bike, go 10 meters and hop down.
Part of effect is that you cant use bike as transport device when you need your hair to look reasonably good afterwards.
Part of effect is that helmet is one more thing you have to carry with you and it might make difference between "yeah kiddo take it" and "nah, it stays home".
As a teenager I never even bothered to get a helmet because I would have to ask parents to spend money on it, and it would be inconvenient to carry around all the time. It interfered with the flexibility and fun of a bike. If I were forced to use it (and God forbid, elbow and knee protectors), it'd probably cut my bike usage in half, because what was just a matter of hopping on and riding away would become a whole dress-up game.
I'm a cyclist. I race mountain bikes, used to race on pavement, and still avidly train several days/week on local roads and bike paths.
I wear a helmet when I'm training or traveling a long distance at speed. On roads with cars, higher speeds = higher risk for major accident.
I don't wear a helmet when I'm cruising to the pub for a drink. Yeah, I can still fall. But, I'm on the mountain bike (relatively easy to hop off, compared to a road race bike), at slower speeds, and generally not on roads with cars.
I do wonder if part of the problem is the type of bikes popular in some counties. The US has a large number of road race bikes relative to townie/dutch-style bikes. The townie/dutch bike is slower, lower to the ground, has a step through, and more upright seated position (better visibility). All should lead to fewer major accidents.
Don't underestimate people's preference for convenience
The popularity of the iPhone and the willingness of people to give their data to data collecting entities that provide convenient services is a testament to that.
I'd have cracked my skull open from a low speed fall if I weren't wearing a helmet. As it was, my head hit the ground so hard that my glasses flattened out. IMHO, all of those people in the Netherlands are making poor choices by not wearing helmets.
I had the hybrid tires where they were smooth on the bottom for street, but knobby on the sides for traction when they partially sunk into soft ground such as trails. I was riding on the street, and there was a concave concrete drainage strip between the street and a driveway. When I hit the incline of the strip at about 8-10 mph, the knobs had no traction and the bike slid out from under me sideways, so I started falling on my side. I reached out with my hands to stop my fall, but realized those were my money makers and pulled them back to my side (I had mentally practiced this maneuver for years). I hit the ground shoulder first, but since I was moving forward as well as sideways, my body rolled and my head smacked the ground hard (this was all very vivid thanks to time dilation). I ended up breaking my right shoulder, and despite my best efforts, my left hand got caught in the brake lever, and I broke my pointer knuckle as well. It was two weeks before I could go back to work, since I couldn't use either hand for a while (right in sling and left in splint). I may have never made it back to work without the helmet.
A far simpler observation is that Australian cities and populations have grown, and with them suburban sprawl, roads and commute time. Families are pushed further and further out in order to afford homes, where there are few cycling facilities (or many other facilities worth cycling to), and cycling on the road here is a borderline suicide pact.
As you allude, pedestrian safety has likely improved as pedestrians simply disappear from the increased number of roads, and in those few inner city areas where there is pedestrian density, this has pushed back both against cars and bicycles. In my neighborhood and city for example, speed limits are dropping and cars are being excluded from some streets.
Driver safety has likely improved due to concerted efforts, car improvements and everyone increasingly being stuck in gridlock.
Furthermore, if this theory is correct, it may also explain increase cycling fatality rates, as those remaining cyclists are presumably cycling further and sharing roads with traffic.
Indeed, the best place to look to try to figure this out in Australian terms is probably Canberra. It's the only vaguely populated Australian city with relatively small commutes and a complex network of actual bicycle paths.
But as far as I know, Canberra has had relatively steady bicycle use, and relatively high rates amongst children.
You would also need to explain why your hypothesised cause results in a steady continued decline, as opposed to a sudden once-off effect or rate shift as often happens with many such policy implementations, whereas my explanation does fit such data (assuming that the data is as you say).
In short, I just don't think the evidence for your hypothesis that it's the helmet laws as opposed to continued geographic/demographic shift holds up under scrutiny.
The earlier discussion of this article mentions Legos as a good toy for free-form play. I'd like to add another: plasticine clay.
It's even more free-form than Legos, as it's not limited to any kind of pre-made shapes. It never hardens, and can be endlessly re-shaped in to new forms. It's a great way to get kids exercising their own imaginations.
Nice, where can I get plasticine clay avengers characters for my kids?
edit: The point I am trying to make is that kids don't want the toy that are good for them. They want "cool" stuff. And the market are really good at making new crap.
"where can I get plasticine clay avengers characters for my kids?"
Buying pre-made toys defeats the purpose of the clay, which is for kids to make their own toys out of.
It's like recommending you buy your kids some paints and paint brushes only to hear someone ask, "great, where can I buy them a painting of their favorite character?" You don't. That's not the point. If the kids want a painting of their favorite character, the paints and brushes empower them to paint their own. Same with clay.
The results might not be up to the high standards of adults, but usually kids don't care, have a lot of fun with the materials anyway, and actually learn to be creative instead of mere consumers of someone else's creativity.
"kids don't want the toy that are good for them. They want "cool" stuff"
Cool stuff that they get bored with 5 minutes after they got it. Clay gives them an inexhaustible material that they can shape in to whatever they desire (including the cool stuff that they make themselves), and if they're bored with one thing they just mash it up and make something else.
I speak from personal experience -- having spent endless amounts of time playing with clay as a kid while many of my other toys languished. Of course it's not the ultimate toy, and kids will eventually get bored with it too and move on to something else. But it'll always be waiting there for whatever new thing their imagination conjures up next, instead of needing yet another trip to the toy store.
> Cool stuff that they get bored with 5 minutes after they got it.
Er, yes, that’s exactly what they want.
I think you’re talking past the GP; they weren’t making an argument about what toys kids will retrospectively agree they enjoyed, but rather what toys kids will demand.
(Also, something you may not have considered: frequently the toys kids want are not about playing with them themselves, so much as they’re about making other kids more interested in playing with them, and thereby becoming friends.)
Only properly educated children knows how to play with good toys.
Grew up in 90s china, clay was actually really popular because they were cost effective to provide entertainment. On the other hand, even back then there were tons of companies making shitty toys around popular cartoons.
Right now company are smart enough to make shitty "educational toys" as they figured out they need to sell to the parents.
Kids are meant to be educated. Without good art and technology education, They would just consume crappy toys like junk food.
I was lucky enough to discover the fun of dissembling and repairing electronics for my parents. But not all children are like that.
It all comes down to how we educated young kids. Primary school teachers are not the best educated and they are paid lowest. Better education will mean smarter toy industry and more educated adult in the future.
It requires specialised education to guide free play into a constructive activity. There's a big difference between "Here's a lump of clay. Smash it with your fist until you're bored." and "Here's a lump of clay. Let's try and mold it into something together, like a flower, or a bowl."
Also, depending on the child there can be a lot of learning in the "smash it until you're bored" phase. Then you can show a technique, or help them make something they can be proud of and help, a little, to show they can produce artefacts they are proud of if they seek to learn and apply that learning.
There's also much therapy in smashing clay, it doesn't hurt it as I remind every person I instruct on making pottery.
Sarcastic but within it still lies a really good point. You can go for the 'fast food' toy options - Premade, pre-themed with little scope for emergent play. Or you can go for free-form play materials with no initial set theme, but you should also layer on some scene-setting (aka 'parenting') to help your child get into the creative play mindset. Just plonking the materials down doesn't work if kids are currently primed for the fast food toy stuff.
So a direct answer to "where can I get plasticine clay avengers characters for my kids?" is 'from raw plasticine and maybe half an hour of parenting assistance'. Then you leave them to it.
Parent assistance, while doubtlessly well-intentioned, is really tricky, as it could unintentionally act to inhibit creativity instead of foster it, as the child tries to copy the parent and work within the often unconscious parameters and restrictions the parent sets rather than going wherever their own vision and desire leads them.
I'm not sure if I'd plop a pile of clay in front of a child as an answer to their desire for some action figure, even with my own guidance to help them make it. I'd give clay as its own completely independent gift, perhaps with the only guidance being that they can "make anything with it" and only if the kid struggles to do anything, asks for help, or just forgets about the clay for a long time would I even consider trying to give more guidance than that.
Well, you buy the plastine clay and make the characters. It's not necessarily easy, but it's fun. Better still start to free them from the franchise and use it as a launching point - what Avenger would you add, can you make a mash-up of 2 avengers. If AntHulk gets angry does he grow or shrink?
Source: 20 years as a volunteer with children's clubs.
In your kids room. I used to do my own, then they will fight and I'll typically end with a multicoloured blob of plasticine with arms and legs of two characters protruding. It was a lot of fun.
All clay bars get dirt or turned psychedelic or brown after a few rounds so is not a totally renewable material.
When I was a kid I found Erector sets to be a little too fiddly compared to Lego. My dumb kid hands struggled with the tiny screws/bolts and miniature tools. Plus the kit always wanted the fasteners installed in inner corners where the wrench didn't quite fit.
Mississauga, CANADA: Lots of parks but almost all are empty throughout the year even during Summer time.
Karachi, PAKISTAN: Severe lack of parks but even the ones which are there are usually empty even during winter times.
Culprit in both cases: technology such as mobile phones, video games and TV. And also, paranoid parents who don't let kids go out and enjoy (and are probably too lazy to just sit quietly in the park to watch the kids).
I'm sure those are contributing factors. However, in the 90s I had video consoles and satellite TV, but still spent a lot of time unsupervised playing football (soccer). TV and video games were for rainy, cold days.
Part of me struggles to believe that kids don't want to play outside unsupervised – at least once they're outside.
My suspicion is that children just aren't allowed to be out alone as much today.
Parents would be almost seen as negligent if their children weren't supervised within earshot. Not in all cases of course, but my guess would be the parents have changed far quicker than children or the distractions available to them.
>Parents would be almost seen as negligent if their children weren't supervised within earshot.
One asshole calling CPS will put a little voice in the back of everyone's head telling them to be slightly more restrictive with their kids.
>art of me struggles to believe that kids don't want to play outside unsupervised – at least once they're outside.
Kid's don't want to play outside in the first place. They'd rather watch TV or whatever. If you make them play outside they'll stop whining and do it in fairly short order.
Combine the up front whining with the little voice and you see why "go play outside until mommy is done making dinner" is much less common.
It's been open to everyone 13 and up since 2006. I would know, I was a teenager at the time. And I looked it up before commenting. And age restrictions online are, well, easily ignored.
That is still pretty stupid. Either the website shouldn't be responsible for controlling access or they should have to take steps that are actually effective for controlling access. The idea that they have the responsibility to control access to their website but can fulfill that responsibility by doing something that they know is completely ineffective is pretty stupid.
It's interesting watching the pendulum swing back so hard towards the kind of "free range parenting" that most of us grew up with in the 70s and 80s.
Looking at the comments here, it seems everyone thinks that it's tantamount to child abuse to not let a kid of any age roam free in any environment. Of course, I notice that many people expressing that don't seem to have kids of their own yet :)
I am amused by nostalgic comments about dangerous things that we all did decades ago and how: 1) we were fine, so how dangerous could it have been? and 2) look how much safer things are today, so it's no big deal.
Many apparently have never considered that maybe things are safer today because we don't do those things, or that survivorship bias means that asking people who never wore seatbelts as a kid about whether it was dangerous may not be the best approach.
I grew up in the 80s and looking back now, I honestly probably roamed a little bit more freely than was healthy. I would ride my bike around town alone for hours when I was 6 or 7, including across major streets with heavy traffic. On at least one occasion some stranger tried to get me to get into their car. Now, I was taught to be careful but I doubt I had the maturity to understand the gravity of some of these situations.
I have a 3-year-old now and I'm going to work hard to not be paranoid and to let her explore and gain independence as she gets older, but I'm also not interested in making a statement or pushing back against societal trends or recreating my own childhood. I want to make sure she gets as much freedom as possible within the boundaries of a reasonable degree of safety, and I'll just use some common sense and balance to figure out what's best for her. Her childhood will look different from mine, and that's perfectly OK.
I have two of my own, now 12 and 14. My wife was very paranoid, very overprotective, very helicopter parent. We continue to fight about this, because I grew up roaming outside in the 80's whereas she insists that "the world is different than it was back then". More than anything else, I worry about the potential health problems my kids might develop from having spent 90% of their lives indoors, sitting in front of a TV or a computer (and the people who say, "well you should just restrict your kids screen time" are the ones who don't have kids of their own).
Could the points outlined in the article be the reason why Minecraft is so popular with kids? It seems to offer freedom that is similar to what free play does.
Growing up in the 80s I had to deal with so much violence and abuse that I didn't get much play time. But I got my first writing published in an academic journal at 14. The violance, abuse and chaos around me caused me to hyper focus on reading and writing as an escape. I wasn't required to read 300 pages a day but the library was the only space I found free from violence as a child in the 80s.
That's great for you, but "I was surrounded by so much violence that I published my first academic article as a teenager" definitely isn't the typical case.
Man the 80s really were horrible, weren't they? I did the same, except I was afforded a Nintendo and learned how to code at 9 using BASIC books from the school library. When the 90s came around, my parents bought a PC at great expense to encourage me.
We're not a "really fucked up species". Humans are not naturally good or evil. They're naturally unskilled-- ignorant, deluded, and often incompetent, but not evil. The purpose of civilization is to maintain the knowledge that helps people do the right thing. Unfortunately, societies become corrupt rapidly and develop elites that have defined themselves by doing the wrong thing, and then those wrong things begin to define the social tone and corruption sets in. Civilization is a storehouse of knowledge that helps people figure out what the right thing to do is, but societies are incentive systems that usually encourage doing the wrong thing.
I seem to recall a piece on burnout in mathematicians (academics). Decades spent on ppotentially unsolvable problems, unbalanced reward/discouragement.
I see middle-school kids biking home from school in my suburb and when approaching the intersection (not a very busy one, mind you), they all dismount their bikes and walk across the street. I know that's what you're supposed to do, but c'mon, they're kids.. When I was that age my friends and I would race across the street without helmets flipping the bird to the crossing guard, so it's a bit unsettling to see them all obediently get off their bikes and single-file across the street, even when there are no crossing guards in sight.
When she comes home and she tells us what she and her friends did (I don't ask, she just wants to share) it is hilarious and I usually think "It was better if I didn't know this and that". But then I think about the 8 years old version of me "bombing" the toy soldiers together with a friend of mine by spraying alcohol on them and by setting everything on fire, and I relax...