When did kids stop having so much freedom?

People treat you like your very presence outside is suspicious.

I especially agree with this point.

On Facebook, I'll see people my age (40s) posting memes that say the usual Boomer-adjacent crap like "when I was a kid, we didn't look at screens, we rode our bikes outside with our friends until the streetlights came on!"

Then they'll look out of their window, see a bunch of kids go by on their bikes, hanging out with their friends and not on screens...and that same person will say "what are they doing out there? Probably up to no good. I'm calling the cops."

Kids today are fucked.

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epidemicsaints@reddit

I am a photographer and still use a regular camera, I can't do it in town anymore because people storm out of their house at you like you are a burglar, even when I am in a city intersection 60 feet from their house in broad daylight. I like doing panorama shots of intersections but it's too scary, I quit. They walked past 5 hidden street cameras to come yell at a hobbyist enjoying the city they live in.

-Plantibodies-@reddit

Cops don't see victims. They see reasons to cite or arrest someone.

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TruthEnvironmental24@reddit

Their job isn't to prevent crime but to punish it. They have minimum quotas on arrests and tickets.

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Mnementh121@reddit

I asked my cousin who is a cop about quotas on Thanksgiving. She said not true and not legal. So I asked her if she gets told her stats on arrests and tickets. Yes. I asked if someone who consistently has low arrest stats would be fired, she said they probably at least wouldn't be promoted. I asked if that was a quota, suddenly the answer is not "no" it was "not the same thing"

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TruthEnvironmental24@reddit

Quotas are quotas!

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-Plantibodies-@reddit

As I said.

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epidemicsaints@reddit

Too hard, it's easier to do this.

It's pretty appropriate for a cop to make sure a lone ten year old is okay, and he might even need to be taken home, which they did. But then they spent a whole lot more time returning for the arrest.

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dudly825@reddit

I live in a small city of 50k in the mid Atlantic. I let my 8 year old walk to the food coop less than half a mile from my house. We were deliberately working on independence and confidence. He had a short grocery list and money. I got three calls/texts in the 20 minutes he was gone.

He was fine by the way. Came home with everything I asked him to get and the change.

People ask how I have such responsible and mature children. It’s because I allow them to be.

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OilAdministrative681@reddit

So much this. My MIL lives 2 streets over. I walk the kids over there all the time, we talk about street sense like, "don't walk behind a car backing out of it's driveway. Stop and wait until the driver looks at you and tells you to go, then go" once I figure they aren't complete idiots I'll make an excuse for them to take something down to grandma's by themselves. Grandma knows they're coming. 5 kids I've done this small thing with, and every time that 6 or 7 year old gets home with the biggest smile and excitement that they accomplished x. Send them to the corner store with $5 to get bread. Little things are big things to little people.

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dudly825@reddit

100%

Mine are thrilled when they come back from the bread trip or whatever other errand.

My kid is 7,5 years old, walks to school with his friends every day (15 min walk). They often go to the park 5 min from our home by themselves. He wears a kids smart watch so he can call me, i can call him, and track his location.

At his age i had even more freedom, but traffic is much more intense these days. This is why for now, he's allowed to ride his bike only with his dad. Drivers can be real idiots here

Adding: When we were kids, if someone pulled out a weapon it turned into a very big deal. Threating unarmed kids with firearms resulted in strong public shaming.

Now it's so depressing I'm not evening typing it out. So I'll answer the original question.

Treyvon Martin. That's when it changed, when a kid could be murdered and the resulting shitshow could mean you're just stuck with a dead kid and half the country hating you for stupid or deplorable reasons.

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DrunkensAndDragons@reddit

I used to follow the creek in the neighbor hood for miles at that age exploring. 90s though.

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moldy_fruitcake2@reddit

Wow. At 10 years old my friends and I were walking or biking everywhere by ourselves. It was so fun to go on little adventures. So sad kids are denied that now.

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epidemicsaints@reddit

Alone was rare but yeah me too. I live in the country where houses can be a half mile or more apart, so any time I see a kid walking by it's quite a ways. I don't think anything of it. "Walking around the block" out here is 3 miles in a lot of cases.

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kg51113@reddit

I grew up living in a house in a neighborhood with multiple families who had kids of a similar age and slightly older. The parents often took turns keeping an eye on us until we were old enough to be outside without direct supervision. With multiple kids the same age and some slightly older, we had more freedom to walk or ride bikes to the park, store, etc. Safety in numbers and the older ones helped keep an eye on us.

My kid grew up living in an apartment/townhouse complex. We didn't move out of there until my kid was in middle school. I was a single parent for most of those years and didn't have the built-in network that my parents had when I was a kid.

I concur, we played on the streets, anytime we wanted. I remember in the late eighties my sister and I and friends would sneak out to buy candy at the local AMPM at 1am to buy candy. We had to cross a busy street which was against the rules. Store clerk didn’t even make a fuss. Then we would go hop on the roof of our elementary school where we built a hideout and ate said candy.

CreatrixAnima@reddit

No… That case made national headlines. I was an adult by then, and we were fully aware of the Polly Klass case. Her father was very vocal and became a bit of a national spokesperson. As I recall, he did some media appearances with Elizabeth Smarts Father.

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Allaplgy@reddit

I lived in the Bay Area. It was definitely a thing locally. Seemed like national news too, but that could have just been my perception.

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owlthebeer97@reddit

I was a kid in FL at the time but remember hearing about her

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Columbine was the year I graduated, so I never really felt the lasting effects of that one, but you make an excellent point.

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jepherz@reddit

Weird. I'm from MN, and thought about this right when I opened this thread and saw your reply.

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zoominzacks@reddit

That happened like an hr away from where I grew up. Pretty much had free rein of our small town before that. After that, I wasn’t allowed on the other side of the hwy from my parents house…..which is where all my friends lived

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Chickwithknives@reddit

Quote from Patty Wetterling in the NYT 4/29/90:

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mackelnuts@reddit

Season 2 of that podcast about Curtis flowers is the best investigative journalism I've seen.

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Northern_Lights_2@reddit

Season 2 was excellent. For me, Jacob’s was personal. In my childhood there was a before Jacob went missing and after. Afterwards the parents were much more on guard.

Disastrous-Panda5530@reddit

I was born in 84 and me and my siblings (born 83 and 89) were all free range. My dad was stationed in Japan so we lived on the military base when we were younger. Like elementary school young. And even then we were free range all over the base. And even off of the base. We walked off base to down town all the time. Walking several miles a day. Then moved to the US when I was in the 6th grade and we were still pretty much free range in the neighborhood. Although we moved again when I was in 7th grade after our house was done being built. It was a different neighborhood. But this one had a baseball field behind our house with wooded area in between along with a creek and a lake.

That's exactly when.

But that started in 85. Kids still had a lot more freedom in the 90's. Honestly, I think a lot of it has to do with neighbors not knowing each other well, not knowing friends kids parents.

Doesn't help though that if I let my kids walk down the street to the playground I can have CPS called on me.

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Flux_My_Capacitor@reddit

For real. My mom had kidnapping drills when I was a pre schooler, and yet she gave me tons of freedom to roam around the town as a kid. As a teen I just had to say what friends house I’d be at and that was that. My solidly millennial siblings had a lot of freedom, too.

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SidFinch99@reddit

Tell your kids to kick em in the nuts. Seriously.

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critic2029@reddit

This is 100% the case. While what happened to Adam Walsh was tragic. John Walsh’s crusade to bring awareness to kidnapping gave the impression that it was common or even likely; when in fact it’s really rare. Almost all child kidnappings are by someone the they know, and are usually part of a domestic dispute.

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flamingknifepenis@reddit

Remember those fingerprinting kits that they used to hang out so that parents could fingerprint their kids and give them to the police “in case we got kidnapped.”

My grandparents tried to do that on us, and my dad flipped his lid when he found out. He thanked grandma and grandpa for caring but told them that if they ever tried to put us in some government database ever again that he’d make sure they didn’t see us for a long time.

Yeah, there was a ton of things that ramped up parents fears.

You know why everyone in the country has been checking their kids Halloween candy for the past 35 or so years? Because this shmuck used Halloween candy to poison his own kid (and a few friends) for insurance money.

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dragonard@reddit

Yeah — ruined my chance to trick or treat just when I was old enough to really range out and enjoy it.

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Dimmer_switchin@reddit

Wow, 42 and I never knew why my parents insisted on checking my trick or treat bag before I had access. I guess I’m a lot more laid back with my kids.

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windowschick@reddit

That asshole is the reason I was never allowed to trick or treat except at grandma's house. It was ok because I had to wear a winter coat over my costume anyway.

HeyBlinkinAbeLincoln@reddit

Fantastic book. Worth the read. It’s everything you sort of already know but haven’t had the presence of mind to piece together like he does. I recommend it to all parents to children under 15 really.

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JudyMcJudgey@reddit

The Kid on the Milk Carton. Stranger Danger.

I see kids doing the same things I did. There just seems to be much less of them.

Riding bikes with friends, in stores around the neighborhood, lugging games over for sleep overs.

My brother and I could go 2 blocks away from home in 2nd grade, and when we moved in 3rd grade we could cross the street and go to the surrounding subdivisions.

They had like 3 buses filled with elementary kids in our two neighborhoods.

So it was just a huge mob of kids all outside every day.

We had a neighborhood park, it was awesome.

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SecurityCorrect6944@reddit

My youngest brother was born in 99 I don't remember him ever having the same freedom I had until he got car I was born in 89 and had all the freedom I could handle

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Unlikely_Traffic6541@reddit

I have a theory that it is because older millennials and gen xers had almost zero oversight. Boomers were raised in homes with Sahm's and raised us with the same freedoms they had in a world that was hidden through lack of understanding or Internet.

We now understand that kids need more structure so we over compensated and became helicopter parents and since many of us have homes without a sahp the kids spend the majority of their time in schools, hobbies, and sadly the Internet.

That is just the theory of this xennial though.

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delibertine@reddit

I'm from a place where it's still common to see kids swarming parts of the city on their own and on their way to school miles from where they live. I did see video a while ago that explained it was a mix of fear based media, city planning and suburbanization that led to where we are now. I'm sure it's that plus the rise of social media

Cool thing is my wife and I see a family of kids playing outside our window almost every day. At first we thought they didn't have smartphones but the older siblings do, they just rarely ever use them. They chase each other, climb trees, play remote control cars and stuff. It's super cool. No idea where exactly they live but rain or shine they're out there. They just seem to "appear". We call them the Bush Children

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terminusagent@reddit (OP)

Man, talk to their parents and find out what they are doing different and report back!

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delibertine@reddit

We've actually wanted to! We never see their parents though. We just look out the window and boom - they're playing. Hence, Bush Children haha. There are literal bushes right where the seem to materialize

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1block@reddit

I'll tell you how we did it with our four. Youngest is 11 so she and her gang still run around the neighborhood (rest are 17, 18, 27 so not applicable any more).

Get to know the neighbors. Chat them up briefly when you see them until the neighborhood is friendly and no one thinks you're a deadbeat parent.
Let your kids use the whole block's worth of sidewalk space.
Find 1 other parent who isn't a helicopter and have the kids play outside together.
Wait. The other kids will start bitching to their parents to let them play with the other kids outside. Those parents will feel like the odd ones. They will cave. It might take a few weeks. But kids are good at annoying their parents.
Now you have a small mob of 7 yr olds and even the helicopter parents feel like there's safety in numbers.
With mob intact, they start having to let the little siblings come along. Older one's come out too. They all just take care of each other. Sometimes they fight or get hurt, but they sort it out themselves.

Our neighborhood got to where they run around all day. We'd write a time on their hands, and whomever's house they were at, we'd kick them home at that time. Two of the older retired neighbors turn on the sprinklers sometimes to get them to run through the yard.

Plus now all the adults know each other, so sometimes we throw a firepit on the driveway and have some beers while the kids run around.

It's amazing. So amazing. I helped my neighbor's 22 yr old move apartments the other day. We still have a painting she did on my now 18 yr old's bedroom wall four years ago. A 6 yr old boy walks over for guitar lessons from my teenager once a week.

We trust each other to discipline if needed. Never had a problem.

It's still possible!

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dacelikethefish@reddit

this is the way.

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Efficient-Log-4425@reddit

My son's friends have phones (9 or 10 yrs old) but I tell my kids that they can't sit there with them when they are on them. So my kids just walk away and start playing basketball or tag or something and eventually the phone kids get up and play with them. I think they can see how much fun the non-phone kids are having and just have to join.

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Last-Management-3457@reddit

I live in a suburban neighborhood in the US and my kids as well as the neighborhood kids all play outside constantly and go between each others houses. They all have phones and video game consoles, too. I think it’s more common than people realize.

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minicpst@reddit

Same here.

In fact, a friend of my teen’s just locked themself out of their apartment building.

They know they’re always welcome here. So they’re putting themselves on a bus and they should be here in an hour.

They and my teen take themselves out to dinner, go to activities all over town, and they just take the bus.

I was talking to my teen the other day telling them I envied their freedom. When I was a teen I had no where to go. I could ride my bike to the gas station and that was it. I had to be back by dark, but there was nothing to do.

Whereas my child is allowed out basically during all normal hours (it gets dark here early in the winter, if I said they couldn’t be out in the dark they’d have trouble getting to and from school). I can track their phone, and if their phone is dying they make sure they know where they are and let me know their phone is dying and the number of anyone they’re with so I can reach someone, or they can reach me. I trust them.

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Ok-Macaroon-4835@reddit

It really depends on how walkable your town/city is and how safe it is.

My town is safe and very, very walkable/bike-friendly.

It’s encouraged. There is a bike path that connects the town square, where most of the houses are, and downtown where the shops and schools are. The high school is in the town square since it’s a very, very old town and an old school.

This makes everything so easy to access for everyone. The kids bike to school every single day and most start when they can ride their bikes and keep going through middle school. When they hit high school, they walk.

It’s so common to see kids out and about all the time. Heck, the adults are out walking their dogs or going for a run.

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PetulantPersimmon@reddit

I'm fortunate to still live in a place where I regularly see packs of preteens through teens roaming the alleys and parks. I'm delighted every time I see them.

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SunnySummerFarm@reddit

My own parents only got weird about it after we got kidnapped.

When 24 hour news and Nextdoor/facebook met bored old ladies.

Now they call the police when your ten year old is playing with a stick unsupervised in the yard.

Worse yet, the police may actually take them seriously

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69FireChicken@reddit

So many kids have such rigid and structured lives now. We're recent empty nesters and grew up free range kids in the 80s like most of our peers. We mostly free ranged our daughter while watching our peers micro manage their children's lives and hear them bitch about it the whole time. We had friends who literally went bankrupt trying to turn their daughter into an Olympic gymnast, she was marginally talented, hated gymnastics and quit as soon as she could. Others spend ALL their free time arranging their kids sporting activities, every weekend some sports tournament, often hours away requiring travel and hotel stays etc. Our daughter graduated college, has a job and her first apartment, my friends kids are all living at home still. Was just at one of their houses and the parents are planning an addition to their home to expand their adult child's living space! My question of "why, aren't they moving out soon?" Was met with a confused look. Parents are doing it to themselves.

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sbotzek@reddit

One of the big impediments towards freedom for kids is the lack of a phone. Everyone had a house phone and as a child I could call my friends to arrange something anytime I wanted.

I’m not an expert but I have some theories. I believe there are a number of factors. I seem to remember it starting with the abduction of Adam Walsh. The movie about his abduction and murder came out in the early to mid-eighties and it seems like it was aired multiple times. Stores started having ‘Code Adam’ alerts and that is when I remember parents starting to dial back the freedoms of school age children, but not so much on teenagers.

Then all the children who had so much freedom in the 80’s became parents and some of them remembered their own close calls or semi-traumatic events which could have been avoided with a little more supervision.

Childcare infrastructure for children who needed after-school care developed so that parents no longer had to rely on latchkey arrangements, and with that came judgement on parents who failed to supervise their kids, or arrange for someone else to supervise them.

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spiritussima@reddit

Then all the children who had so much freedom in the 80’s became parents and some of them remembered their own close calls or semi-traumatic events which could have been avoided with a little more supervision.

This is it for me. I grew up in the 90s in a city of \~1M people, super safe neighborhood, but even then kids were not running around unsupervised and parents who let their kids walk home alone unsupervised were gossiped about. We did have certain places we could go without parents and the whole "two adults at all times"/safe environment rules in activities wasn't a thing.

I see people talking about how wonderful it was in the 90s and I'm like...what? I know a boy who was raped at a movie theatre we all hung out at alone and it destroyed his whole family. I know boys who were raped by priests and boy scout leaders their parents trusted, two of whom developed awful drug habits and one of which died from an OD later. I also know they're not alone, I know there are more, and I know it is not talked about nearly as much as it happened.

My parents were legitimate latch-key kids and they have so many horror stories about sexual abuse, near-kidnapping, and other things that truly haunt me.

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Girl77879@reddit

^ this.

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writtenbyrabbits_@reddit

The freedom I had as a child and teen was due to my parents not caring much about where I was or what I was doing. It wasn't helpful to me, it led to me engaging in seriously unhealthy risky behavior. I care deeply about where my kids are and what they are doing, and I would never ever raise them the way I was raised. It isn't about freedom. It's about being a parent.

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No_Tomatillo1553@reddit

Well, in the 90s I was able to run free most of the time. I saw a man get stabbed for the $17 in his pocket, routinely hung out with the resident drug dealer, and had a few people try to lure me away with promises of puppies or Nintendo or whatever. I was 7 when we finally moved out of that neighborhood. Then we moved to the country and like everybody there was some religiously oppressed closeted mess that diddled kids. Like, it wasn't just a few here or there we had teachers plural in our 300 kid district that were busted for molesting kids. One counselor had racked up 23 victims before someone finally came forward.

My kid does not get to be unsupervised. So, when we became parents, apparently.

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CapOnFoam@reddit

It really escalated in the 90s.

The rise of helicopter parenting coincided with two social shifts. The first was the comparatively booming economy of the 1990s, with low unemployment and higher disposable income. The second was the public perception of increased child endangerment, a perception which free-range parenting advocate Lenore Skenazy described as “rooted in paranoia”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_parent

I'd summarize this as part of the outcome of all the scare tactics of the 80s we grew up with, and that manifested in an over protective parenting style when 80s kids grew up. (Example, all the kidnapping scares)

Another facet is likely that college became somewhat of a perceived requirement for success, so parents wanted to make sure their kids had every chance of getting into a good school. Cue more control and oversight of their time and hobbies.

Plus, there's been a huge shift in kids being more of a parent's identity vs parents in the 70s and 80s. Not sure why.

I'm sure mobile phones also play a huge role here but the above are my guesses.

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pretenditscherrylube@reddit

I went to an elite college in the 2000s. All the upper middle class kids were helicopter parented in the 80s and 90s, too. What's changed is that helicopter/intensive parenting ended up becoming gentrified. Now middle class and even some poor parents mimic this upper class style of parenting to give their kids a "leg up".

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burrerfly@reddit

I wasn't allowed to free range until around 12, and I had to have our large dog or a friend with me.

In my families case I know why mom helicoptered us, while the news may have contributed my mother was repeatedly sexually harassed and molested and abused by both other kids and community adults while she free ranged as her mother had no choice as a working single mom in the 60s and 70s. Her own mother either accused her of lying or told her she misunderstood what happened repeatedly. My mom wasn't too worried someone would kidnap us but that someone would molest or rape an unattended child. She was very careful who if anyone she left us with and sleepovers, etc, were rare.

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Floopydoopypoopy@reddit

Wow. I'm reading a lot of criticism about close parenting. People talking about "fear mongering" cynically.

I wonder if people started realizing that leaving their children unattended and unaccounted for led to rampant child sexual abuse.

The amount of childhood sexual abuse decreased 43% from 1993 to 2006.

Still, 20% of girls and 5% of boys will be a victim of child sexual abuse.

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terminusagent@reddit (OP)

Yeah I guess there are a lot of negative things that aren’t happening as much. I mean there were kids who died due to no helmets and seatbelts

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Boring_Pace5158@reddit

A lot of it has to do with how we plan neighborhoods, or should I say NOT plan. Over the past 20 years, new housing developments are centered around the car. Not only you cannot go anywhere without a car, but going out of the house without a car is essentially a death with. There's a lack of sidewalks and the streets are designed to encourage cars to go fast. Parents will say these kinds of neighborhoods are good for kids, but they're not. Kids who have to be driven everywhere don't develop a sense of direction and they're not good at walking. It doesn't matter what physical shape they're in, they get tired out after 3 blocks.

Our parents couldn't just buy smart phones and tablets to put in our hands to get us to shut up and stop being annoying. So they just sent us outside.

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CaptianBrasiliano@reddit

gif

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shrikeskull@reddit

In New Jersey, I think the murder of Megan Kanka had a huge impact on that. She was raped and killed by a neighbor in 1994. Three years later the federal Megan's Law was passed, which requires information about sex offenders to be made public; Kanka's murderer was a convicted child molester.

Kanka's murder was every parent's nightmare: the molester next door watching and stalking your young children, waiting for the moment to strike. It made parents afraid of their own neighborhoods. And coverage of that case, trial and the creation of Megan's law were everywhere for almost four years.

So you take that, Columbine and then 9/11, and it felt like a whole new world - darkness everywhere, an unknown to be feared.

Less dramatic: after the Gen X generation you had a rise of ubiquitous video games, both parents in the workplace, and the collapse of many work/life boundaries that existed when we were kids.

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aws-ome@reddit

The Internet and 9/11 killed it.

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Last-Management-3457@reddit

I always have to chime in on these threads. I know I’m weird but I feel like my kids have more freedom than I did. I was raised in a very “satanic-panic” church and household. (Not to mention lived in the state where Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped) I lived in out the country so i was able to be outside since we had no neighbors, but I was never allowed to go to a friends house and just run around with other kids. I was very much taught that everyone was a kidnapper or satanist and people were out to get me. My dad romanticized his life of freedom as a kid in the 50s-60s.

I was talking to another parent about this. My gen z/gen alpha kids sit at home and don't want to go out at all. Getting them to do anything outside (even Disney) eventually turns into 'when are we going home.'

Anyway the other parent said it's because where we live we have a nice house, he and I grew up lower middle class without all these distractions so we were always itching to go out and explore.

The teen doesn't even seem interested in driving and I'd imagine the most exotic place he'd take himself if the McDonalds within walking distance in my suburban hellscape.

There was an article here yesterday about how this generation is the most risk-averse one and thus misses out on a lot of experiences we might take for granted.

Older article I just searched for, but it tracks with the experience I have with my kids:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/aug/19/generation-sensible-risk-missing-out-life-experiences-therapists

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everythingsasandwich@reddit

Honestly, I think 9/11 is the line of demarcation. That changed a LOT of perspectives, everyone leaning just a little more toward fear

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imafatbikeroadie@reddit

Great topic!

It is fascinating to me to see this current helicopter society versus when I was a child and adults literally didn't get overly concerned about much as long as we were not dead.

As someone mentioned here, Media has really turned out to be Public Enemy number 1. I don't understand how so many people are drawn into gloom and doom! Even my own wife and adult kids are always texting some sad story about a child's death, in a different State, or some other tragedy involving a car accident, etc. I just ignore them. I've been plagued with graphic, evil nightmares my entire life, why the hell would I want any more of that input in my brain? So yes, Media has played a Large role in our messed up gloom and doom seeking society.

Then we have the helicopter parenting which has reached the point of perversion if you ask me. It can't be entirely healthy for parents and their children to constantly cling to each other as if they are in a friggin life boat.

I don't understand why a kid would WANT to hang out with adults. When I was a kid I wanted to hang out with my buddies, not some boring adults, at least not my parents and their friends. Currently we can't even have a family get together without the kids thinking they have to be "on stage" all the time and have every bit of attention.

I suggest that the adults are afraid of freedom, and they teach their children the same thing. Some sort of guilt complex hanging over them.

I was a latchkey kid and school crossing guard in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades. So '92 to '95. I walked myself to and from school, a mile through '70s housing development suburbia.

If I had tried to let my 11 yo spawn walk themself to school, I'd be charged with neglect.

Our school situation is weird af, we have kinder to 4th at the elementary school, the 5th/6th center, 7th and 8th at the middle school, and 9th through 12th at the high school.

I'm looking at getting a job less than 1/4 mile from the 5th/6th center at the county library and school rules state that my spawn is not allowed to walk to the library after school. The bus would have to drop my kid off.

From my understanding, it's because children are disrespectful shit heads and cause too much property damage AND adults are self absorbed assholes who won't stop to let a group of kids cross the road or even look and wait for kids on sidewalks in front of shops.

There are several episodes, every few years I binge listen to the podcast. I listened right from the beginning mid 90's every Friday on my way home from work.

It's like going through a time capsule.

My top list of shows to listen to.

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jackfaire@reddit

It waxes and wanes and never completely goes away. In the neighborhood I lived in before this one kids had lots of freedom and you saw them all over the place.

This one? We live next to the highway.

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abirdreads@reddit

I think we also have to factor in the Satanic Panic bullshit. That had a knock on, ripple effect even after it was disproved.

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MowgeeCrone@reddit

November 1999. It was a Tuesday. We'd had rain for 14 days straight.

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0mni0wl@reddit

I think that the end of freedom for kids happened around the beginning of the 21st century for three reasons that don't have anything to do specifically with cases of kidnapped children or accidents caused by being unsupervised:

The Columbine Massacre in 1999.
Knowing that your kids aren't even safe in school because other kids might kill them, senselessly and randomly, put parents on high alert and caused children to begin distrusting people and places that previously felt safe. There was this push for parents to watch for warning signs that their kid might be the next school shooter and for everyone to report suspicious activity.
9/11 and the wars that followed in 2001.
Everything changed after September 11th - it can be defined as the pivot point for our generation and country. After that there was a heightened sense of alarm that permeated so many aspects of our lives. Terrorists could kill you while you are sitting at your desk in the office, the mail might deliver an envelope of anthrax, and the news was grim for many years... which leads me to...
The rise of the Internet & Endless News Cycle, circa 21st Century.
Once we were all online and being fed constant stories about the dangers of the world, fear of "the outside" and strangers became heightened. We no longer received our news filtered through the false, reassuring smile of the trusted journalist whose faced graced our tv screens, we were getting it in real time, straight from the source, and capable of discussing it and sharing it ourselves.
This is also the point when the children themselves started wanting to stay indoors, to be on the internet (or a variety of other newfangled electronic gadgets)! They no longer needed to leave home to chat with a friend, go to the library to learn something, or find something to do outside in order to quell their boredom - everything could be satisfied behind the screen & keyboard.

My coworker was hit by a car as a kid and didn’t break anything but hurt his knee pretty badly. The guy drove off and he didn’t tell his parents because he didn’t want them to freak out. He still has knee issues to this day.

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_A-Q@reddit

I once fell out of a tree so hard the impact was so loud my stoner older brother poked his head out his window to see what that noise was.

I just stood up super fast with no air in my lungs and shrugged.

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I can actually remember it happening in New Zealand. A little six year old girl named Teresa Cormack was abducted while walking to school and murdered. She was born in 1981 so she was one of us. This was shocking news in New Zealand and parents got really worked up about stranger danger, despite the facts showing that a child is most at risk of being murdered by a member of their own household

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BohemiaDrinker@reddit

Children in the 90s did not have a much freedom as children in the 80s (I have 15 years younger brother) even though teens in the 90s had as much freedom as always.

By the 2000s, teens were already more contained than we were.

That's my take.

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nottomelvinbrag@reddit

Whenever I go back to my old home town, I always have a walk round to see what everything is like now. I don't see any kids playing in the park without parents, kids hanging outside shops/generally loitering/ hanging out cos there's nowhere to go.

The stuff I learnt from just being a kid with other kids and no adults was shitty at times but also an invaluable part of growing up.

I guess they're doing it online now but the old man in me worries that they're missing something vital not doing it in person.

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Oh INTERESTING—I had no idea this shift also occurred in Europe!

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jacqueline_daytona@reddit

I think part of it is that, but part of it is that there are just fewer kids now, at least in the US. Mine would have to walk about a mile and cross several busy roads to get to their nearest friends' house and we live in a city.

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DaimoMusic@reddit

Yeah probably

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cbih@reddit

No, it was after that. If put it at around 2007-2010, when Facebook and iPhones really took off.

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BraveLittleToaster8@reddit

I think the internet brought incidents of kidnapping and crime to a wider audience so it “seemed” more prevalent, but I also think it coincides with the overscheduling of activities. We had activities but they were a lot more local and there was typically a “season” for each activity. Little league, soccer practice, dance lessons at the local studio, scouts, after school programs at the Y etc. were all things we could walk or ride our bikes to, or take the local bus to, because they right in our town and generally only a few days a week. So even getting there we were more independent, and we had more time to just play and hang out with friends.

Now if kids play a sport, there’s really not much of an “off season” if they want to keep up with the other kids. There’s the school or town team season, the regional club team season, the winter practices at some indoor facility in another town, the private lessons, the summer skills camps. Parents need to drive the kids because the activities are scattered all over the place and too far to be walkable. So many kids spend most of their free time in the car with an adult or at said scheduled activities, and that became the “normal” childhood for a lot of middle class kids, every day a practice or game or activity. Downtime and just going to the park or hanging around the neighborhood with friends is seen by some parents as a chance for the kids to “get in trouble.” (Probably because they remember what we were up to when out roaming and sometimes it did get a little stupid and dangerous lol)

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champagneformyrealfr@reddit

idk we used to be able to ride our bikes around the whole neighborhood, like a mile away from home as long as we didn't cross any busy streets without a parent. then we moved and busy streets were a lot closer, and the neighborhoods got smaller so there were less kids. then amber hagerman was killed and found in the woods behind my friends' house and that was basically the end of it. if we wanted to go rolling (toilet paper someone's house), someone's mom was following us in a car in stealth-mode. we weren't allowed to just wander around unsupervised anymore.

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Friendly_Award7273@reddit

lol between ages like 12-14 or so, we used to disappear for entire weekends to go camping and half the time barely told our parents any details, sometimes it was not close to home either, and as long as we made it back for church (only went when I was very young) or in time for dinner on Sunday, no one cared. Good times, nice question OP, took a little stroll down memory lane.

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alberthere@reddit

Growing up in LA county during the 80s-90s, my family thought the riots was everywhere.

But we lived in the Valley where there were little to no activity.

Then, Northridge quake happened. Not too long after, Internet activities blew up. So we stayed indoors more often afterwards.

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Successful-Term-9441@reddit

I think it had to with the shift toward having two parents in the workplace and the pressure middle and upper middle class parents felt to optimize childhood as college got more competitive and expensive. I blame capitalism!

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LuisMataPop@reddit

Cars, more and more cars

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Possible-Tangelo9344@reddit

The internet and sex offender registries really ended it because now people are able to see a sex offender is like.. everywhere.

And, some of them are cuz the person pissed behind a school at night and the law doesn't care about that, and some are cuz the dude kidnapped and raped a little girl. The details don't matter, people see a sex offender in their neighborhood and the kids aren't going out unsupervised

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xzelldx@reddit

They made it so a person can't get off the registry without a lawyer and some serious time between the crime and removal. The list started (roughly) in 2000. So every "dot" is someone who's committed a sex crime, ANY sex crime, and/or been released after that window.

Some states show "threat" status and that IMO is even more ridiculous if you look at it this way:

ShaperLord777@reddit

1995

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GrumpyKaeKae@reddit

The kids who grew up during peak child kidnapping years, are now the parents and know how easy it is for a stranger to just snatch your kids and take them away forever. That's probably one of the biggest reasons. I k ow it would be mine if I had kids.

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remoteworker9@reddit

I agree. The times we grew up in weren’t safe and I hate to see them romanticized. We were lucky.

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HarloldBallardLives@reddit

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When TV news shifted to a more fear based model to maximize viewership.

I try to not be like so many of the parents of my generation and feel I do a good job of teaching independence, but Jesus Christ is the world scary.

Or at least that's what the propaganda that we have been blasted for the past 40+ years would tell us.

I can literally hear the Unsolved Mysteries music in my head righr now.....

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My sister told me she can’t let her kids do things in their own because people will call the cops.

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Bay-Area-Tanners@reddit

Personally, both of my parents had traumatic childhoods. It’s too much to go into detail, but I wonder if having more access to media made them realize that what they were through was not normal and as a result, they became overprotective.

I am overprotective as well but I try my hardest to give my kids freedom despite my discomfort.

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OrganizeThePuppies@reddit

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sator-2D-rotas@reddit

I loved my great grandma, but she tried to instill worry in me about everything. Thankfully for me (and my nephews), most didn’t stick. I’ll bet others weren’t so lucky.

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MLDaffy@reddit

I got this knife when I was 6. Wasn't nobody kidnapping me 😂

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bemoreoh@reddit

When kids began meeting adults online pretty much shut it down for lots if parents.

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lookinguplately@reddit

I think in time, the damage we’re doing to ourselves and our children with screen time, the internet and our addiction to its dopamine is going to come out. I have a really strong feeling about this. Nobody gets bored anymore. Just mindless scrolling and I’m just as guilty as anyone. It’s so hard to control. Try to not look at your phone or tablet for just one day and you’ll see what I’m talking about. It actually scared me when I tried to stop for just one day.

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Zardozin@reddit

I blame the renewed obsession with children that occurred once the majority of boomers started having kids. All of a sudden, schools mattered and daycare mattered.

Yes I’m still bitter that ten years After I graduated from a run down school, they built a giant state of the art new one, with an indoor pool.

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Neon_1984@reddit

A lot of people blame it on the adoption of cable and a shift towards a 24/7 news cycle where scary cases like child abductions were highlighted constantly. Crime rates didn’t necessarily change, but awareness of national small town crimes went up. I think a lot of it had to do with people moving a lot more and neighborhoods being less close knit than they used to be, and I would imagine the spike in households with two working parents contributed as well. I knew tons of people growing up who didn’t lock their doors at night and that’s gone too. Sadly trust has fallen off a lot.

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SenSw0rd@reddit

Fear is profitable.

Think of all the sedentary ipad kids that's going to need mental health from being a checked out zombie with no social skills and emotional intelligence.

The amount of teen murders is just fkkng nuts!!!

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I was just pondering this. Now, as a parent, I wonder why we don't really let our kids free range. This is partly due to the things I was exposed to as a child left to my own devices and wanting to keep my kids from that. Also, there's sort of a fear of judgment/ tattle tail. There are so many stories of CPS or some Karen on the neighborhood Facebook shaming "where are the parents." Probably technology and the way kids interact is a big factor too. Things are just different. There's definitely some benefits to both sides I suppose.

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therog08@reddit

There was a drunk driving accident with high school kids near me this year, one of the kids died. The party 20+ kids from my neighborhood were at took place a half hour from where we live and you need to take the highway to get there. Never would we have driven that far away, on a highway as teenagers. Kids have plenty of freedom now. It may be very different now with younger kids, but so many parents drop all that when their kids become teens. Atleast I see a that.

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sticky_applesauce07@reddit

Everyone calls the cops. I feel so lucky to live in a small town where this doesn't happen. Part of the reason I moved.

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New-Anacansintta@reddit

It started in the 90s, imo. I remember seeing it in how our playgrounds looked.

We were just in-between the stages of corporal school punishment/jungle gyms over concrete vs. all plastic kiddie structures over foam/over-worried parents.

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Due-Set5398@reddit

Yeah we had the cool wooden maze playgrounds. The world was a little kinder and less violent but not the overprotective bubble society of today.

Really the best time to grow up. Largely analog but with the early tech like console video games. The positivity of the Berlin Wall coming down and the economy booming.

birdieponderinglife@reddit

I dunno but my 19y/o nephew stayed at my place for maybe 6 weeks and once he wanted his friend (19y/o) to stay the weekend so they could play video games and stuff. To get here his friend would ride a ferry that his mom could drop him off to and I would be waiting to pick him up. Takes an hour, no stops. As the crow flies, he’d be about 18 miles from home. He’s got a phone to stay in communication with her most of the way. Barring the ship sinking, there’s almost no risk and definitely something a 19y/o should be able to do? His mom said no. His mom has met me several times, has met my mother and has our numbers. Meanwhile, at that age, I’d get in my car and drive 4.5 hrs away on a whim without telling anyone and no cell phone. Wild.

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creepygurl83@reddit

I think it happened as we became more aware of predators towards children. these days you can get in a lot of trouble if you are not nearby to children of younger ages. I saw a post on reddit about how a woman was arrested because her 10 year old had walked a mile away from home alone. All I could think about was how I used to ride my bike freely in interurban areas growing up and getting home by dark when I was this age.

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Numerous-Loquat-1161@reddit

It’s been happening with each subsequent generation. Boomers talk about walking to school, playing outside all day and going from friends house to friends house without supervision. No play dates, no cell phone gps, make yourself lunch when you get home. I know an older adult who were basically sold(adopted) to families in the Midwest for additional farm labor. Women and children were chattel. The more information we now have access to the more we are sold insecurity. Raising children has also become a contest starting prenatal to post on instagram and as wealth increases people have more free time to watch and invest in their children. This is also why kids have so much anxiety. They can’t trust anyone ever for any reason and for all the means and methods promoted they have more insecurities than ever.

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ExternalSignal2770@reddit

When our parents started white flighting en masse to suburban subdivisions where even if there were sidewalks it was almost impossible to walk anywhere, so we became completely car dependent