Posted on 01/01/2015 1:17:04 PM PST by the scotsman
'Young people in the United States are safer than in the 1970s or 1990s, according to a long-term study.
Duke University's Child Well-Being Index has been recording the state of childhood in the US since 1975.
Children and teenagers are less likely to be victims of violent crime, while risky behaviours like binge drinking and smoking cigarettes are in decline.
But researchers say safer lives could also reflect the fact children spend much more time indoors.
This could also be linked to another big trend, the rise in childhood obesity, now almost four times more prevalent than in the 1970s.'
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
I bet it’s far less safe for 7 yo living in small towns and suburbs.
Lots fewer being killed and maimed in vehicle crashes for sure. It’s forced the ambulance chasers around here to go heavy into SocSec disability trolling.
UNLESS you take a walk about Chicago.. or Detroit..
New York City is not all that either...
I doubt it but even so is it saying much? In the 70’s we had forced busing and predator priests.
A generation of digital bubble boys.
You can’t fall out a tree and break your arm sitting in your room playing video games.
The lawn darts were killing people left and right in the 70s. That really skews the numbers.
A few weeks after I started, they had their annual Christmas party. It was held at a pretty nice corporate meeting place.
So I'm sitting on this big couch with a bunch of other engineers, all shy, all not really knowing what to say.
Then my boss sits down on the sofa opposite, and says, addressing all of us: "so... what was the most dangerous thing you ever did with fire?"
That was that. Perfect ice-breaker for tongue-tied baby-boomer engineers.
I agree. Some see this as a positive thing, and while I don’t advocate kids getting hurt, I see this having a negative side.
Kids now are carted from event to event by their parents. Everything is planned and organized. It is pretty rare to see a bunch of neighborhood kids spontaneously getting a game of some kind going.
There is less exploring of their environment (sure...you won’t get hurt if you aren’t climbing a tree or running down a hill at breakneck speed playing “Capture The Flag”, but you also aren’t learning your boundaries.
But that is probably just me seeing it as a negative.
Hahahahahahahaha!
I was visiting my dad, and he and I were watching my little half brother, who was very, very young, lay down his rifle and sack lunch, to get through a barbed wire fence, then climb up the embankment of the railroad bridge over the river, to cross the railroad tracks, to disappear off into the wilds for a little hunting.
I asked my dad if he worried about him dying, and he said that you can’t become a man, without doing some growing up as a boy.
Makes sense, since kids have to wear a helmut to do everything but ride in the back seat of a car. And that’s coming soon, I’m sure.
My 74 year brother told me yesterday that when he was 4 our mother let him walk to kindergarten. He went to another school for 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade so he had to take the city bus and transfer one time. This is his story. Mr. Mercat claims he walked to school at that age too. I’m pretty sure I didn’t although by the time I was about five I remember ending up in a pasture full of stickers and I was barefoot. Since we didn’t live in the country I must have gone a long ways.
LOL...I set an entire field on fire one time when I lived in Japan, using a slingshot and a cherry bomb (They called them cherry bombs, but they were no such thing, they were just spherical with a fuse, and when you lit them, smoke the color of the cherry bomb would come out!)
I was putting them in the slingshot, lighting them, waiting until the smoke began coming out, and fired them in a looping arc across the road into a field with a playground. They left a wonderful trail of smoke...:)
What I didn’t take into account was, once the thing sputtered out, it emitted a brief shower of sparks before dying. As it rolled around and expired in the dry, brown grass, you can guess the rest.
I was petrified. I thought for sure the Shore Patrol was going to pound on the door of my house and take me away, even though nobody had seen me do it!
The Clackers did a number on kids, too.
Heh, I work with a really funny guy...young guy, computer genius. Really.
And he has a twisted sense of humor that I love...
He was house hunting recently, and the realtor showed him a house with a pool, and said “Of course, you will have to pay to have a fence put up around it because you have kids...”
He said with a completely straight face: “No I won’t. If they fall in and drown, it is Darwin at work, and my wife and I can make more.”
He said her mouth dropped open and she stared in horror at this monster of a client!
He is also fond of telling his little kids “If we get chased by a dog or a bear, I don’t have to run faster than the animal...I just have to run faster than you!”
Damn!!
That Atomic Energy Lab looks cool.
:-)
.
LOL, I had my arms all bruised to hell, but never put an eye out with the plastic shards!
Of course, we had the teeter totters that you could jump off when the other kid was up in the air, the things on the swing set that went back and forth with a kid on each end and could easily scissor your fingers off.
Not to mention rope swing we put over the road in front of my house, and we would time it so that when a bus went by (our house was on a much higher plateau) we would swing out over the road and spit directly down on the top of the bus.
My teen (at the time) son was visiting me and seemed to be inquiring about any possible inheritance.
I told him that I had some old Special Ops friends from the old days, that I had sworn to fulfill my will.
Upon my death, everything I owned was to be sold for cash, and the cash sent to a couple of my old sworn buddies, who would then hunt down all the people that I had ever loved, and kill them.
At the moment I thought it was very creative and funny for a spur of the moment joke, but he turned white.
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