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 ...
This was early 60s-early 70s .. then again, we always lived among civilized people, mainly in the midwest.
This was in Houston, BTW. All the neighborhood kids walked to school. It wasn't dangerous.
When I was five, my mom was going shopping with my two year old brother. She put him in the front seat and started the car. Realizing she forgot something, she ran in the house leaving the door open. A few seconds later, she comes out to fnd the car gone and a car door laying in the driveway. He shifted into reverse and the door hit the house. He also ran over my tricycle.
We lived in Houston in the 50s. I went to Holy Ghost grade school.
Yep. Frag grenades on a string. :-)
Growing up in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, I used to get into Mud-clod fights (throwing a mud clod with a stick made it faster and go farther). We used to hang out in the woods, digging holes for bicycle jumps (Snake River Canyon and Grand Canyon). We used to play “pull the purse” at night (have a purse with a string attached to it, then when a car stopped we’d pull the purse and run). We’d play “Hubcap!” (where we’d throw a hubcap behind a car and yell, HUBCAP!, then run if the car stopped). We had bottle-rocket wars. We’d explore in the woods, construct makeshift forts, played football, basketball, baseball, soccer, maybe even hockey (just so we could hit each other with baseball bats). Those were the days.
Lol, wut?! Killer priests!!!
The lawn darts were killing people left and right in the 70s. That really skews the numbers.
Lawn Dart Tag built character dang it!
I loved the Merry-Go-Round which was a big flat disk on a turn table with metal pipes to hold onto.
The bigger kids would get the thing spinning while the littler ones held on for dear life.
Good times!
I lived off S. Main St. & Almeda Rd. In the summer my aunt would come to visit with my cousins and we would walk thru the neighborhood to the movie theatre on S. Main near Sears. For the past 60 years that would have gotten us robbed and/or killed!
We lived in Belaire. In the late 50s my dad managed the Houston bus terminal. He integrated it and the post house.
I moved out of Houston to a small town after the war. I still walked to school...2 blocks! LOL!
Right in one.
Fighting that battle with WBill Jr., right now.
I'm not going to have him be like those kids who sit around at every event twiddling with one of those dammed handheld (ipad/iPhone/DS/whatever) devices.
Look around and live life, I tell him. Naturally, I'm completely unfair, the worst dad since Atilla the Hun, and I just don't understand, because all of the other kids have one. Whatever, I can live with that. :-)
Later, when he is in the midst of camping / scouting / fishing / building a tree fort or any other manner of extremely dangerous (/sarcasm) activities ..... he'll be making memories that he'll tell his kids about, and have no idea what he might have missed out on.
I won't even discuss the target range we have set up. Something as lethal as a BB gun would put any liberal lurkers on the thread into fits of apoplexy. :-)
I’d like to have my childhood, with my kid’s toys. :-) Can I have my cake and eat it too?
Just amazing. I can see kids being dummies, because...some of us, that is how we learn not to be one.
But adults? Shameful.
That’s what we would do. Four of us would get on, facing in the same direction, one leg tucked under us, the other hanging off the side, and we would begin pushing off in unison with our free leg!
We would get the thing spinning so fast we couldn’t even hold on, and would go tumbling off...:)
LOL...we used to play chicken with them. Frickking crazy kids.
One reason it's "safer" for kids now is that they mostly don't go outside and play. And most never get to go into the woods and experience what it's like with no human around them, just nature. Most of these urban kids would probably find solitude in the woods terrifying. It's a fact I'm counting on for the coming collapse.
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