[dchftcs]

You can learn to take good risks and handle hardship without taking stupid unnecessary risks. One important life lesson is that the only risks worth taking are those that offer corresponding upside - else the expected outcome is ruin. Education wise this means you give them necessary or low-impact risks to take - and let them endure outcomes such as failing a difficult but important project, failing to find love, losing a basketball match, or losing friendships. Of course, sometimes you may need to do something even if there is no upside for yourself directly, but that is outside the scope of this topic.

[BobbyJo]

> You can learn to take good risks and handle hardship without taking stupid unnecessary risks.

How do you know what risks are stupid and unnecessary?

Kids spent a lot of time outside getting hurt for almost all of human history, and "ruin" wasn't something anyone worried about.

[watwut]

Yes 5 years old used to herd gooses unsupervised. Relatedly, deadly accidents of kids were much more frequent.

[BobbyJo]

We obviously aren't going to achieve 0 unless we lock every kid on earth up in a padded room, which we aren't doing, so "more" or "less" is fine if the reward is worth the risk. Which is exactly the discussion being had right now.

[watwut]

I am not saying current US tradeoff is necessary ideal. But, when people argue by "human history" they should not ignore what actually happened during that history. Because as of now, kids ARE better off then they generally were for majority of human history.

The gooses thing was memory of my grandmother. It is not some kind of distant medieval history, it was the norm around WWII.

[BobbyJo]

No one here is saying the 1880's are the goal. We're discussing if kids not going outside and messing around and getting hurt sometimes is good or bad.

I brought up "human history" as the logical extreme of the counter argument, not to argue that's the goal.

[watwut]

Right after WWII is not 1880s. It is much closer.

The problem with that logical extreme is that kids died a lot by our standards. They also had no protection against abuse. You had more of them due to non existent anticonception, which made their "value" go down.

[VMG]

Kids survival was actually pretty poor for most of human history. Probably why the families were much larger

[raxxorraxor]

Yes, but that was less because of accidents and more about malnutrition or other health problems.

[medvezhenok]

It was actually both. The accident rate was significantly higher, it was just dwarfed by the other health problems so it didn’t seem so bad in comparison