[gambiting]

At 7 years old my parents would leave for work before I had to go to school, so I had to eat breakfast, dress myself and go to school, locking the door behind me - the walk was across few busy streets which I was told how to cross. Then I would come back before they were home so likewise, I had to let myself in and just wait for them to come back.

I think nowadays if I did that with my son I would have child services called on me.

[83457]

I can't tell if you are advocating for that to still be common. Regardless, I just want to point out the survivor bias in anyone saying this should still be done based on stories like this one. The children in similar circumstances who were killed aren't here to talk about it. (Not trying to be rude)

[gambiting]

My point is that everyone did that, not just me. Likewise no one brought their kids to school by car, you walked or you took public transport.

It's not really survivorship bias when the "survivors" are pretty much everyone.

[insane_dreamer]

Has there been a large drop in child mortality rates or kidnapping rates since we switched to paranoia mode?

I also don’t think this is survivor bias; it’s just the way things generally were back then.

[mitthrowaway2]

Survivor bias is not as powerful an effect as the HN contrarians who always bring it up seem to think. Here's an example of why: Each kid reports not only their own experience, but also those of the people they know. Kids with active social lives grow up knowing 20~100 other kids. The death of a friend is a memorable event. There's no world in which kids were dying a lot from playing outside but we just never hear their perspectives, because in that world, every surviving kid would be talking about their three or four childhood friends who all died from lethal accidents on the playground or crossing the street.

Those things did happen and still do, but they were rare and impactful occurrences that had lasting influence on the lives of the people in the victims' social circles. If anything, each one will have been overrepresented in the self-reported stories of random commenters.

[1659447091]

That story was much more common than ever hearing about anyone in school that got run over crossing a street.

Pearl clutching story incoming.

My elementary school was located on an "island", so you always had to cross a street to get to it walking. We also had a "Safety Patrol" program. 5th graders (10-11 y/o), and soon to be 5th graders, could take a street Safety/rules test and scoring a 100 got you in the program as a "trainee". The trainees would go through a before school program to learn all the things to do to cross a street, plus other walking road rules (when/how etc). We also did things like putting the flag up on the main flag pole and taking it down/folding it each day and some other duties (mostly by sergeants, who were also subs for corner crossing). We had to be at school about 2 hours before it started and ~2 hours after ended.

Once we got through training we were assigned to one of the schools 4 street corners where there was 2-3 other 5th grade safety patrolers (maybe a 4th/5th grade trainee) and a 5th grader lieutenant who was the main one responsible for proper safety on that one corner. As in, our job was to help other kids walking to school cross the street properly, they were to wait until we walked out across the street and escorted them across. Which they did or were reported and got in trouble. There are no adults anywhere at this point except for the occasional drive by check from the adult in charge of the program. The main supervisor was a 5th grader Safety Patrol Captain that made the rounds between the 4 corners making sure all was well.

I ended the year as a lieutenant. There was not a single child run over by a car; seeing a parent that walked their kid to the corner where we picked them up to escort across was a rare sight.

[jeffbee]

Do you think there was widespread death of latchkey kids in the 80s? Get a grip.

[83457]

Don't pretend there weren't problems.

[insane_dreamer]

Of course there were. But has the number of problems greatly reduced?

[throw0101a]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latchkey_kid