Would you?

Weirdly defensive. "Wholly" and "entirely" mean the same thing btw. One will do.

Obviously children's brains aren't fully developed. Adults being dumb-asses doesn't change that. And fewer children are hit by cars because they're not allowed out on the road, they don't get drunk, they don't have headphones on.

Relax - nobody's having a go at your personal parenting style.

whisky_galore

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122618928#Comment_122618928

Well, Irish society been licking America's arse for probably a century or more and look where that's gotten us. We've picked up the worst traits of their culture, mainly "I'm alright Jack" self-interest, the accumulation of wealth, car centrism, media spread 24/7 Perma-fear, conspiracy nuttery, compo culture, their crap food and lifestyle.

(Thankfully) not the gun fetish though.

whisky_galore

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122618975#Comment_122618975

Parents here nearly need to set a bomb under their kids beds to get them out of it in the mornings.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122620427#Comment_122620427

How obese was said goon?

endacl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122617137#Comment_122617137

Sounds like mine, born 1973. Out the door in the morning. Went home with the sunset. Dropped in earlier if hungry or hurt. Strange to see something so ordinary presented as revolutionary.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122621244#Comment_122621244

What do you actually think is going to happen?

Give your child some independence, it'll stand to them instead of being molly coddled.

CelticRambler

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122623361#Comment_122623361

Obviously children's brains aren't fully developed. Adults being dumb-asses doesn't change that. 

No, children's brains aren't fully developed, but - in common with pretty much all other under-developed mammals - through timidly exploring the world within the limits of their physical capabilities, they learn to properly appreciate risk and danger and make more rational assessments later on. If they are not allowed "get into trouble" in one way or another during that learning phase, that significantly impairs their judgement later on … and any trouble they then do get into tends to be much worse. You could almost say that over-protective parents make them into dumb-ass adults.

Dan Steely

The "Childrens" Referendum and Tusla. So no.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122623430#Comment_122623430

Or overly cautious. My parents were extremely over-protective, always worried out of their minds about us (and I'm not saying that's a good thing) which just made me afraid of risk too.

taxAHcruel

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122623211#Comment_122623211

Not sure if this supports what you are saying, or the opposite but I also wonder if there is a lot more to it than just sense of danger. Is there also things like a sense of familiarity and habit that adults have that kids do not.

There was something I heard a few years back from a few sources and I keep meaning to look it up and see if it's true or not. But I heard that we have relatively recently discovered that putting Zebra Crossings on roads actually causes more accidents and deaths than it reduces.

The reason being that pedestrians are so confident in the meaning of the Zebra - and the right of way they assume it gives them - that they simply walk across the road either without looking at all - or they look and assume the oncoming cars will respond correctly. And so they walk confidently out into disaster.

A Boards user who lives in Gemany was also telling me his small town had a Zebra (since removed and replaced with lights) where a car drove right through it nearly hitting the people crossing. So they yelled out and gesticulated angrily. At which point the driver hit the brakes, went into reverse, and intentionally out of rage ran over the pedestrians. Was all over the local papers at the time and the driver I believe is now spending some prison time.

So I wonder if it is not just a sense of danger but also when you are an adult you are more likely to switch off the brain and cross on auto pilot whereas kids are still in the "everything is new" phase and so are more alert and attentive.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122621696#Comment_122621696

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122623426#Comment_122623426

I entirely agree with downtheroad here. But I do have quite a lot of empathy and sympathy for esker's position. Because I know how the human brain works.

It only takes 3 or 4 reports of some dangerous or awful event - even if the reports are from other countries like the US - to build up a pattern the human brain can obsess and be paranoid over. One can hear a couple of reports about child abduction that do not even have to be here in Ireland - and the brain gets scared of it happening to our own children and suddenly we do not want them playing in the street anywhere that is "out of sight" of the house. Which tends not to be all that useful anyway because your attention is not on them constantly - or even all that much - when they are in front of the house.

A similar effect can be seen in threads on Boards like "mass shooting" or stabbings in places like Germany. 3 or 4 such reports and people are suddenly posting that it's happening all the time, that it's the norm, that its a social cataclysm we all need to be concerned about. This over reaction to something that is barely a pattern is why terrorism works too. It only takes a couple of terror attacks to set a society on edge. But even if 50 mass shootings were happening every day in the US - given the population of the US - it is a statistical non entity.

The reality is that if you look at the statistical causes of accident/death/horror over an entire society then you realise the chances of being shot, stabbed or abducted tend in the direction of numbers like being struck by lightning or at times struck by a meteorite. And yet the same people will play the Lotto with a genuine hope of winning despite the probabilities being 1000s of times less likely than a child being abducted. The human brain simply is not good at probabilities of things happening.

The human brain is often failing us and not always making us alert to the ACTUAL dangers our children are statistically likely to endure.

So we can end up curtailing our children's freedoms and independence and autonomy with all the right intentions and our heart in the right place - but deluded by our brains over reaction to total statistical anomalies. Our brains are pattern seeking machines influenced by emotional salience. So they find patterns where none really exist.

Whereas I prefer to look at the things non-intuitive statistics tell me are most likely to be issues they may face and I seek to find ways to maximise their autonomy and independence while A) finding ways to also reduce the probability of those bad things happening and B) making them more likely to have the tools to deal with those bad things themselves if and when it does happen and C) allow me to be a hands on parent just long enough to foster a hands off approach overall.

CelticRambler

For those who might be interested, here's a variation on the theme from almost almost a decade ago. It's not all bad on the other side of the Atlantic.

Let kids play!(NY Times, 2016)

Relevant to some of the points raised above:

Like many places, Silicon Valley is sports-crazy, with kids participating in year-round travel clubs and working with private coaches. But Mike feels that organized team sports fail to teach the critical life skills that he and his friends learned in pickup games they had to referee themselves. They were forced to resolve their own disputes, because if they didn’t, the game would end. Their focus was not on winning and losing, as when adults are in charge, he says, but simply on keeping the game going.

Silicon Valley may have the densest concentration in the country of former engineers, executives and other highly educated women who have renounced work in favor of what they call uber-parenting — and they want results. Just as Silicon Valley leads the way in smartphones, Silicon Valley parents think they should be producing model kids, optimized kids, kids with extra capacity and cool features: kids who have start-ups (or at least work at one); do environmental work in the Galápagos; speak multiple languages; demonstrate a repeatable golf swing; or sing arias. To a comical extent, parents here justify the perverted ambition through appeals to research (enlarging the language center of the brain and so forth) while ignoring research on the negative effects on children of being micromanaged.

“What strikes me is that there is this extraordinary level of anxiety,” Mike told me. “Parents don’t have fundamental faith in their offspring.” He dislikes the vast expansion of the role of parenting into every aspect of children’s lives, including curating their children’s hobbies with excruciating care, and he says he aspires to be “the opposite of a tiger parent.” “As a libertarian, one of the biggest problems we have in American society is that children don’t have enough freedom” — children thrive on benign neglect. 

Strumms

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122618484#Comment_122618484

the question the poster asked me…. “ a child being attacked “… not abducted

Princess Consuela Bananahammock

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122625471#Comment_122625471

Fair point, my apologies - misread the post.

That said, even just being attacked on the way to school would make at least local headlines.