Is it true that the world has become a more dangerous place for children than it was before?

Original author: Brett and Kate McKay
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Today’s parents, in my experience, are much less inclined to let their children single-handedly explore their environment, go to school, play on their own, and handle potentially dangerous instruments or weapons. Parents are more likely to watch everything their children do than just one generation ago.

The last time we have studied the possible reasons for such behavior and proposed a number of hypotheses about the source of the modern desire for excessive care of children.

We assumed that the essence of the problem can be traced to different fears: to the fear of prosecution, condemnation from the neighbors, to the fact that you do not spend enough time with the child to grow from it a successful and emotionally stable adult. Most of all, parents are afraid that something bad will happen to their children, and they will not grow to adulthood.

When parents were asked why today they care about children so much, much more than their own parents took care of them 30-40 years ago, many will say that the world has now become a more dangerous place than when they were children.

Is it so? Are today's children actually more at risk of being attacked, abducted or killed than a few decades ago?

We will understand the nuances of an unexpected answer to this question.

Has the world become more dangerous for children than it once was?


The article with the appropriate title "Being a child in America has never been so safe» [ There's for Never Been a Safer Time The to the Be a Kid in America ] newspaper The Washington Post offers useful graphs and statistics that will help us to assess was whether a dangerous game children without supervision than it was a few decades ago.

To begin with, the death rate of children in the US has steadily decreased over the past 25 years, and it has never been lower. The best medical care and the spread of vaccines partly explain this drop in infant mortality, but not the whole picture - mortality has decreased even in the last 10 years, although the practice of vaccinations has not changed during this time. In part, this reduction is due to a decrease in the number of accidents and crimes, since their statistics show a similar picture.

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According to the National Highway Traffic Association, from 1993 to 2013, the number of teenage pedestrians injured or killed by a car crash fell by almost 2/3 - a dramatic fall, considering that the US population and the number of cars on the roads this period has increased.

There is also a decrease in crimes related to children. From 1993 to 2004, the number of attacks on children decreased by 2/3 (the number of sexual offenses decreased even more). In 2008, the latter, for which data from the Bureau of Judicial Statistics are available, the number of murders of children is at record low levels.

In general, the number of crimes in most cases fell to the level of the 1970s or lower, and the risk of death of a child during a crime, accidents or natural causes, negligible 40 years ago, has now become even lower. As they write in the Washington Post, "for a child from 5 to 14 years old, the chances of premature death from any causes are about 1 per 10,000, or 0.01%."

But what about the mother of all parental anxieties: the chances of the disappearance of the child?

This number has also decreased - by 40% over the past two decades: It is worth remembering that the US population has increased by a third during this time, so the real number of disappeared people has fallen by more than 40%.

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It is also important to understand that even in cases of disappearances of children, a very small number can be attributed to the “classic abduction” - when a child is forcibly stolen by an outsider. Among missing children and adults, 96% find themselves fleeing themselves, and some are abducted by family members. Only 0.1% of all disappearances are abductions by strangers.

This percentage and the chance of being kidnapped remained at about 1 in 1.5 million for many decades. In the article " Free walking children, " Lenore Shkenazi sarcastically makes it clear how small this risk is:
The chances that any American child will be stolen and killed by a stranger are almost infinitely small: 0.00007%. Let us reformulate it using the words of Warwick Cairns, the British writer and author of the book “How to live is dangerous”: if you suddenly wanted your child to be kidnapped and kept in a stranger, how long would you have to keep him outside? probable from a statistical point of view? About 750,000 years old.

In general, today fewer children die from cars and murderers, and simply disappear, and the rarest chance of being abducted has been the same since you were children.

The world today has not become more dangerous than it was before.

But doesn’t crime go down because parents are better at protecting children?


You can argue with the data and the idea that it was never safer to let go of your children to walk freely and play. It can be said that the reasons for reducing the number of accidents and crimes against children are that parents began to behave more carefully. That is, cars do not knock down children because they are no longer sticking around; children are not killed because they do not leave safe yards; and although the number of abductions has not decreased, who knows, maybe it would have increased if the parents had not watched the children so carefully.

Will the return to the “free walks” of yesterday bring the child mortality rates back to the previous level?

Of course, it is possible that this hypothesis has some meaning, but it obviously cannot be proved or refuted. However, experts usually reject it. They point to factors that are more suitable for the role of the reasons why accidents and crimes occur less frequently: better safety measures in cars reduce the chance of their collision with children; potential killings and abductions are prevented by increasing the number of people going to prison and facilitating access to psychotic drugs for mentally ill people. The proliferation of mobile phones may be one of the reasons; not because they allow parents to be constantly in touch with children, but because the very possibility of their presence pushes off potential criminals who are able to assess risks.

Evidence that cultural and social factors that are not related to excessive parental care are behind the decrease in the number of crimes against children can be seen in the fact that this is not the only type of crime experiencing a decline. As these charts from the Pew Research Center show , since the early 1990s, the number of all crimes against children and adults has collapsed by 50-77%, depending on the data used.

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It is interesting to note the discrepancy between reality and its perception. Although the number of crimes decreased, people believe that it has increased - this phenomenon most likely arose due to the popularity of round-the-clock news broadcasting and the fact that modern channels and websites devote a disproportionate amount of time to coverage for crimes (especially against children).

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Another way to assess the effect of parental care on the safety of children is to see the number of wounds and bruises they received in playgrounds over the past few decades. Since the influence of various factors on changing playgrounds and their use was not as strong as the impact on the change in society as a whole, it is convenient to consider them as a test of the thesis that enhancing safety can significantly reduce the risks to a child.

Since the 1970s, city park departments have spent many millions of dollars reworking children's playgrounds and their equipment to minimize their danger. High metal structures, steep slides, ladders for walking on arms and swings without stabilizers - as well as asphalt and sawdust covering the surface of the grounds are gone. They were replaced by low plastic structures and devices standing on rubber mats.

But, despite the serious transformation of playgrounds, the number of injuries and deaths associated with them, almost did not change.

According to the national electronic tracking system for injuries, the number of visits to trauma centers related to the equipment of playgrounds (both home and public) in 1980 was 156,000 times, and in 2012 - 271,475 times. This may seem like a serious increase, if we forget that the population of the United States during this time has grown by a third. If we recount the figures per capita, then in 1980 there was one case of visiting a trauma center for 1,452 people, and in 2012 - one for 1,156 people, which indicates a decrease in their number by only 0.02%. [Here the authors are confused in their calculations. The initial figures are correct, and from 1980 to 2012 the US population increased by 39%, but the number of calls increased by 74%. So if you really count all the headache, and not by the inverse value - by the number of people per treatment, then it turns out that the number of visits to hospitals even increased by 26% - approx. trans. ]

In other words, intensive attempts to secure playgrounds and close observation of children on them did not have a significant impact on injury prevention. If vigilant tracking of children in such controlled objects as playgrounds is not able to reduce risks, then it makes sense to say that spying on children in general is unlikely to greatly reduce the number of crimes related to children.

From the above, we can draw the following conclusion:

• Today’s world is safer than the one in which modern parents were children, and this apparently has nothing to do with the emergence of excessive parental care.
• The fact that the number of abductions has not changed, and the number of injuries in playgrounds has fallen slightly, shows that no surveillance can prevent all tragedies and incidents. There is a degree of randomness in the world that cannot be controlled completely.
• Even if we make the unlikely conclusion that parental care has led to a decrease in the number of child deaths, the number of crimes against children without modern parental supervision will simply be at the level of the 70s and 80s, when it was already negligible. So we return to the fact that today's world is at least no more dangerous than it was when modern parents were children and when they were allowed freedom, inaccessible to today's children.

Well, well, this is a very interesting statistic, but what if this 1 child from 1.5 million is MY?


I hope that knowledge of the above statistics can change people's opinion and calm them down, proving that today's world has not become more dangerous than yesterday.

But this does not mean that today there are no risks for children. The chances of a child being abducted may be equal to 1 by 1.5 million, but this is still a real pink-cheeked child of flesh and blood. The joy and pride of some parents. Maybe you personally.

Even if excessive parental care helps prevent one serious injury or death, would it not be worth it? And even if the constant number of abductions shows that these things happen completely randomly and cannot be controlled, no matter how hard you try, won't the parents just feel better, knowing that they did everything they could to prevent it?

This question could be unequivocally answered in the affirmative, if excessive parental care could be turned without any harmful side effects.

Unfortunately, however, the more we try to eliminate the risk of accidents and crimes involving children, the more we increase the risk of damage to their body, mind, and spirit in other ways.

The next time we will look at the risk of a ban for children to engage in risky things.

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