Is It Normal To Let Your Kids Get Eaten By a Bear?

http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/09/is-it-normal-to-let-your-kids-get-eaten.html

My neighbor and I were discussing a favorite children's book the other day. The book is Robert McCloskey's classic _Blueberries for Sal_ in which a mother human and her daughter go blueberrying, and have a minor mix up with a mother bear and her cub. The book is charming and wonderful, and one of my own childhood favorites, now beloved of my 3 year old. My neighbor was telling me that she loves the book, but can never read it without a frisson of horror at what a neglectful mother the parent in the book is. And she's got a point. After all, the mother of a child who is clearly a toddler tells her daughter to go pick her own blueberries and leave mother alone to pick hers, on a wildlife rich hillside, where bears are known to be. Mother, the book tells us, wants to pick blueberries to can for winter. And given such parameters, she can't spend the whole day watching her daughter, who is left to take care of her own needs.

But, of course, the book is older - it dates back to my own childhood, was released in 1976 when I was four. And my neighbor and I both remember from our own childhoods that the kind of parenting illustrated in the book was normal. By four my sisters and I roamed our housing project with other children, playing in the woods behind it or on the gravelled hillside. We weren't allowed to cross streets, but otherwise, we were remarkably free. Living on a busy, urban street at 6, my five year old sister and I and several neighbors of roughly the same vintage crossed several busy streets walking, alone to school. And yet neither my neighbor nor I permit or children to walk long distances, cross streets along, or roam the neighborhood without supervision. Now some of that, in my case, has to do with having an disabled oldest child who cannot be trusted. But most of it has to do with higher parenting standards today. Letting your children roam is perceived as unsafe, and to some degree it is.

Children's death by accident rates have fallen significantly since 1970, mostly in a reduction of deaths in traffic accidents. In Britain, for example, such accidents fell by 75% from 1970 to 2000, while the population and number of cars grew http://www.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,2097858,00.html. On the other hand, absolute numbers of deaths on playground equipment and by child abduction are about the same - in 2005, 25 children died on playground equipment in the US, in 1970, 28 did, on the old "deathtrap" equipment we used to use and love. So in some areas our greater caution is providing real results - several hundred kids each year who aren't dying in car accidents, for example.

How old was Drew Barrymore in that movie, 4, 5?

Boring.
Oooooh, that slide has a vertical drop of all of two feet! Yippie!

And no merry-go-rounds or teeter-toters? Madness.
What is this bright blue plastic wall? What do you do with it?
And woodchips? What about dirt? Kids just clear away the woodchips to play in the dirt beneath anyways.

But *no way in hell* would I leave my kid to wander out of sight on a mountain or in a blueberry barren. Or anywhere in the woods out here.

The one on Main Street blew my mind. It is fairly new but reminds me of the playgrounds of my childhood, monkey bars, teeter totters, merry go round (I swear I saw blood stains and maybe a tooth in the dirt around it), climbing ropes, a huge slide, very high swings and then the topper...They have two Rolling Wheels of Death as I call them. They are two horizontally mounted rolling drums side by side that roll like logs in water when you walk, run or even try to stand on them. They have hand holds above so the kids can hold on and run on the drums. It must have been one sadistic SOB who dreamed this thing up.

My wife and I were taking a walk through the river front park and as we passed the playground we watched two young boys trying to balance on these things. Their mothers sat outside the fence by the river half watching and half chatting. As we walked by, one of the boys (maybe 5 years old) got the thing rolling as he ran backwards. He was running old school cartoon kind of fast trying to stay on the thing, both arms pinwheeling madly to help keep balance. It kind of looked like the Flintstones when one of the characters starts to run in mid-air only backwards. He maintained this speed, for about three seconds and then his feet shot out in front of him and he came down hard on the spinning drum on his rump. The momentum of the drum was sufficient enough to shoot him forward about four feet and onto his face. His friend laughed so hard he slipped off his drum and landed face first on it, apparently biting his lip because there was some blood. Both boys cried, moms came running over, checked them out, and blotted the bloody lip with some tissues. Being kids, they were fine and in less than 30 seconds we heard the one mom say, "Why don't you guys go spin each other on the merry go round instead...it's safer"?

Ah, that took me back...


*edited for spelling

At least if you're a fundie:

Sometimes God kills children for misbehaving.

And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them. -- 2 Kings 2:23-24
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/says_about/children.html

:nuke:

Could this be tied in with SEAT-BELTS and improvements in Car Safety? i.e. in the US Seat belts were first required in 1967, shoulder belt did not follow till the 1970s (With back seats having only seatbelts till the 1990s). At the same time, cars themselves went through a safety improvement, including improved design of interiors so that people inside a car will be less likely to suffer from harm in an accident even if NOT wearing a Seatbelt. At the same time people started to see safety seats for young children (and an ad campaign telling people it was impossible to hold onto a child in an accident if that child was in your car, and thus a growing tendency to put children in seat-belts and NOT in their mother's arms). Basically the overall safety of Cars have improved so much since the 1950s (with most improvements since 1970). This covers both ADULTS and Children.

Other then this improvement in Traffic deaths, I do NOT see any real difference is children death rates do to accidents. Cars were inherently dangerous, but like Railroads in the 1800s to much tied in with the upper middle class to be outlawed (And Horse drawn wagons were not much better when it came to safety, so no real push for safety till the 1950s and most laws only effective from the mid-1960s onward in the US).

I once knew a woman who owned a Volvo dealership in the 1950s. Volvo was one of the first companies to put seatbelt in their cars. She was ordered by the State of Pennsylvania to remove the Seat-belts as safety hazards, for that is what the then Pennsylvania Department of Highways considered them (I suspect do to lobbying by US car makers but the exact reason is unknown to me). This type of lobbying had a huge affect on accident rates PRIOR to the 1960s. Car makers did NOT want to make cars safer, they viewed such regulations as increasing the costs of Cars without increasing the demand for the cars themselves. Thus safer cars took time. Seatbelts in the 1967 for example (And it took decades for states to start to require the glass in cars be safety glass, some states appears to permit window glass in cars till the 1940s (Again do to lobbying by car makers for plate glass was cheaper then Safety Glass).

My point was until the Government imposed regulations to make cars safer, car makers made unsafe cars. When the Government started to to make safety rules, cars became safer and traffic deaths declined.

One last comment, starting in the 1950s the states started to build safer highways. Wider berms, paved roads, eliminate dangerous curves etc. This has also reduced auto accidents while permitting more cars on the roads. My point is that less children are dying today in traffic accidents do to increase safety of Cars and the Roads they operate on, more then a change of how parents watch their children.

I read it as a kid in the 60's. He has another book where a guy puts bandaids on whales.

When I was six, I finally got permission to ride my bike off our street. (And we didn't have helmets.) Summertime and I was riding my bike all over town. I'd go swimming in the lake and sometimes I wouldn't come home until supper time. My nephews are 12 and 9 and they aren't allowed to leave the street in front of their house unless mom or dad are with them.

No wonder so many of these kids want to be filmed flying off ramps and jumping off rooftops. They never had any thrills when they were young and bendable and losing teeth didn't require tooth implants.