I dug into this statistic for my city recently and found the majority of reported "scooter accidents" were actually occurrences of car drivers crashing into someone on a scooter.

Actual solo-scooter serious crashes were rare.

> But now they have the resources to go after parents that let their 10 year olds walk 2 blocks to a park? Did we start pumping funding into CPS or something?

CPS will hop to if the case might get them bad press. Most of these cases are some pain in the ass neighborhood busybody. A suburban Karen calling in a complaint is practically the walking definition of bad press, however. Ergo, CPS will immediately respond for a case it should 100% ignore.

Cool, stop everyone else from being a nanny then. You pull the stuff you and I did as kids in most places now and you'll have the police and CPS show up.

Also nothing says survivor bias as statements like:

  And yet every single one of my friends managed to survive this now-impossible freedom

However, I agree with you. Kids raised in dangerous rural areas do learn. I had my fair share of close calls as a child in my city! I feel lucky to have had so much freedom. 30 years later I was told one guy I knew as a child was convicted of pedophilia: I still remember his awesome basement but I don't recall any bad close call with him (perhaps I was ugly : sorry sicko).

We don't notice many dangerous close calls. Hopefully we learn from from other close calls we did notice... I remember hammering a blank gun cartridge (ramset) until it exploded and thinking I shouldn't do that again. I also did a lot things with fire that I shouldn't have!

Some high risk activities are difficult to learn from. Philip K Dick writing about the dangers of the drugs he took: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29642422

till you are with that kid that is a bit too brave and a bit too eager and they do drop in some hole and break a leg or worse. That's what parents are afraid of, they remember some "close" accident in their childhood and want to make their kids not get chance to do a mistake.

Now ideally parents would just keep an eye on them, teach the kids, and maybe even "help" in potentially dangerous-yet-fun-for-kid stuff to make it not dangerous

...but parents now don't want to spend time just like parents back then didn't wanted to spend time and let kids alone to their own devices. Only difference before parents kicked kids outside while now parents give them ipad...

> On the contrary, that unimaginably dangerous activity in our childhood raised responsibility in us better than any supervision.

I have no reason to believe that. The issue with 2 out of 3 activities you listed is also the danger or damage to OTHERS and their property. Which you do not even noticed, clocked or cared about. The only thing you care about is you feeling some pain, presumably.

That "things were better in the old days, all this safety culture is pointless" overlooks the tragedies we became inured to back in those days?

I cannot count the number of times I've heard "we never bothered with that" with things like refrigerating leftovers, and its unspoken rider of "and it was fine" is never followed up with "look how foodborne illnesses are rising, or at least not dropping". Very curious.