There were tons of cars in the 80s and 90s and playing in the street was still very normal. You'd simply move out of the way when a car was coming. You taught your kids that the streets weren't safe, since streets are made for cars to drive over and not for kids to play in and didn't let them do that until they could do it relatively safely.

We see posts here about someone calling the cops on the neighbor kids over and over for simply being outside. That's the dot to connect. It's a societal change toward being batshit crazy, whether helicopter parents who must oversee every moment of their children's lives to make sure they're as safe as possible or obsessively controlling neighbors who think that's the proper way to parent and that any time they see anyone under 18 without a parent they decide it must be child abandonment, or abuse, or runaways, or roving gangs of criminal kids and call the cops over it.

In a lot of places in the US cops will now ask groups of kids why they're playing at a park. Kid's aren't going outside because no one will leave them alone to be kids outside.

Yeah but the cars are 3 times larger now. They are so high up you can't see a kid in front of you if they are shorter than your hood. That's why their parents don't let them do those things anymore.

I got hit by a car on my bike as a kid. A small coupe. Everything now is an suv. Imagine an suv hitting me. I would have died

Hey man, I did too, but children got killed by cars quite often. Pretty sure that and drowning accounts for the majority of child deaths back in the '70s-'90s

There is a 1% of motorists who I feel did not meaningfully exist before like the early 2000s. They have some kind of mass psychosis. I have been intentionally hit, run off the road, had things thrown at me, from motorists who take it as a personal insult that I am using the same road as them. There is a tribe who feel a militant entitlement and are quite willing to use violence to enforce what they see as their natural right over vulnerable road users. It's fucking insane. This did not happen when I was a kid, and I rarely have an excursion today without someone at least hanging out their car window and heckling me.

Think about all of those near misses when you were a kid. Think about how much danger you put yourself in. That's what they're thinking about when they lock their kids inside. Growing up in the 90s was fun, dangerous and crime was much higher back then. You're not going to turn into your dad if you give your kids the freedom they desperately need to develop their brains properly. You're not putting your kids in danger if you're smart about it and make sure they're smart about it.

Not helicopter parents. They are part of the problem, but that’s not it. I have kids, and the reason they’re not outside is that most everything can be done inside now to meet with friends. Video calls, gaming with Discord, etc. They regularly just phone up and hang out. For us “old people” we had a household landline, that’s it, and meeting up with bicycles or stickball in the street or whatever was the only way we could hang out.

That’s why. Times change.