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Things Drivers Have Sacrificed for Kids
(thelemmy.club)
"Not driving ar maximum speed"
Um... In US car drivers have sacrificed lives of their own children....
Not sure it counts as a sacrifice if that's your preference.
Big Oil cares not where the blood comes from, only that it flows
to back this up, the Netherlands keep scoring highest in UNICEF's child well being reports: https://www.unicef.org/innocenti/reports/child-well-being-unpredictable-world
And it's not like there's no cars in the Netherlands either.
Yeah this post is bullshit. I grew up with cars (I'm in my 30s). I did all those things that kids apparently sacrificed for cars.
Know why kids can't/don't do any of those things anymore? Parents helicoptering over them. Parents freak out when they get worried about their kids, where as me growing up in the 90s and early 2000s I would leave in the morning and not come back until dinner. I'd go to the beach, play with friends, wander around town and just hang out.
It's not cars that ruined all these things for kids, it's over protective parents who feel better parking their kid on the couch with a tablet than let them go outside and explore, play street hockey, football in the park, or otherwise be a fucking kid.
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.
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 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.
Not that I disagree with you about helicopter parenting being an important part of it - but tons of kids were also killed by cars back in the day. It was a very real problem.
In the Netherlands, this was why they made their cities more bike- and pedestrian-friendly, and as a result, dutch kids move more freely than kids in other parts of the world.
Of course, that's definitely important. In the US most cities aren't designed to be walkable/bikeable at all. That's dangerous and of course city planning should account for all sorts of transportation from walking and people in motorized wheelchairs on up.
I do agree with George Carlin on the push for safety, though. It's not kind and cuddly to say, but I also believe natural selection has it's place.
A large scale environmental change generally correlates with a larger than normal amount of animals in that region dying as those with the adaptations that best fit the new reality are selected for. The birds that can't reach the seeds now die off and those with the longer beaks survive to pass on their genes and the species ends up with a longer beak than it had a few decades back.
Completely minimizing deaths in a radically different environment only causes more and more generations where the bulk of the population really isn't suited for this environment and often suffers in varying ways because of that. Accepting that not all members of a species will do great in the new environment and that there will be deaths as a result of that leads to much quicker adaptation where a much larger portion of the population doesn't have those issues.
Every aspect of human life has changed with an insane exponentially increasing pace over the last 200 or so years, so the environment almost all humans deal with every moment of every day now is almost nothing like what we evolved to deal with and handle. That alone will lead to deaths.
On the right column: "high speed limits near schools", that's their brave sacrifice
"sometimes slow down near schools"
* if they feel like it.
As if anyone obeys those signs.
Marquees Brownlee moment
When it's about cars, the "think of the children" machine suddenly breaks.
And ironically it's one of the few cases where it's a legitimate argument since the kids are actually being killed instead of merely exercising their autonomy in a way someone doesn't like.
Or guns in the ’Murica.
These fucking people always uses "think of the children", religion, and the Constitution for their own perspective but suddenly dismiss it when it comes to feeding children, children safety and freedom of speech of speech they don't like.
They are hypocrites and they don't care that they are.
Disarming the rich and powerful won't ever happen. Disarming queer then black then poor folk will.
Come on. Electing pedophile presidents ring a bell?
No, it just switches to “ten points each” mode.
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I can't let my child ride their bike on our street because of the assholes that speed down our road. I saw a biker almost get hit the other day by some idiot driver.
To the right column, I would add, "Occasionally getting stuck behind a school bus, and not being allowed to pass as the stop every block". It's not much, but I think having 1 thing in the right column is a little bit funnier.
This implies drivers stop for buses
https://www.trafficsafetymarketing.gov/safety-topics/school-bus-safety
Fair point. I don't even need to click the link, my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law both drive busses. I thought drivers blowing past would MAYBE happen every few years but apparently it happens to them at least every week.
Given the sheer size many trucks and SUVs have ballooned up into now, pedestrians should be armed with bricks crossing the street now.
Parent Drivers: Sacrificed their free time, because now they have to fucking drive their kids everywhere. Once kids above a certain age could roam wild (pros and cons there, but on the whole a good thing IMO) and just come back for dinner.
My kid’s school pays parents $50 a month to drive them to school because there’s not enough bus drivers
$50 / 4.33 weeks / 5 days = $2.31 per day.
The official mileage rate for Ontario (my province) is $0.655/km.
This only makes sense if the drive is < 3.5km per day total.
Assuming this is trip chained (no extra mileage because of the detou, like a drop and back) that's 1.75km per drop/pickup.
Minimum distance for bussing of gr 3+ in my area is 2.4km.
This scheme does not pay parents to drive children to school, it only reduces the burden.
Yes, it’s very stupid. I agree.
To be fair, kids are not allowed to do most of those things because people are scared of pedos, not cars. 40 years ago we already had cars but I was allowed to disappear for whole days without anyone complaining. Now kids can't go to the playground alone even if they don't have to cross any roads.
That too is caused by car-centric design, though. It's not as though there were no pedos before there were cars, of course, but when a city isn't primarily designed around cars, there tend to be a lot more people outside, making it much harder to drag a child into an unmarked van.
This has nothing to do with design or actual crimes. People are scared because the media is scarring them. The numbers of abductions are actually dropping but people are more and more scared because child predators were made into the bogeyman of the XXI century. It's a well known fact that crime perception in US does not align with actual crime statistics. Cars have nothing to do with it.
Jane Jacobs wrote about this in like the 1960s. More regular people on the street makes people feel safer. It probably actually makes people safer, too.
So, yes, car-first culture makes crime and fear worse. A local neighborhood with people walking about doing their business is safer than one where people just drive, park, and leave.
IMHO saying that "car culture -> less people walking -> more crime -> more fear -> less kids on the streets" is a bit of a stretch. I'm sure it can be true in some areas but is far from universal rule. European cities are very walkable yet no one lets small kids play outside alone. Many villages are way less walkable yet kids play outside alone without issues. This meme tries to imply that kids don't play outside because of cars yet it's only one of contributing factors and only in some places.
You can take it up with Jane Jacobs, I guess.
I don't think anyone's saying car dominance is the only factor, but it's a big one.
IMHO saying that “car culture -> less people walking -> more crime -> more fear -> less kids on the streets” is a bit of a stretch.
That's not the claim. The claim is “car culture -> less people walking -> ~~more crime~~ -> more fear -> less kids on the streets.” The perception matters; the reality doesn't.
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Sure, but the media can only scare people if they can imagine it being true. It's a lot easier to imagine someone who would do their children harm actually going through with it and succeeding when the kids are wondering around suburban cul-de-sac hell where the only other people are zooming past in a car.
EDIT: I'd like to add that the urban design also changes how people deal with this fear. For example, in Japan it's common for elementary schoolers to have a buzzer on them with a cord to pull in case of stranger danger. So clearly this fear exists there too, but you still see kids going around town without adult supervision. The reason why the buzzer can give peace of mind is because they can pretty much count on there always being people close by enough to hear the buzzer go off.
I was going to mention that none of the streets have changed where my parents live from when I grew up but it does seem much sketchier. There's more roaming homeless people from nearby freeway encampments, and cars appear to drive more dangerously or the drivers are distracted with their phones
It's all very anecdotal but where I lived you could get from my apartment building to the playground without crossing any streets. All kids were just running around unsupervised starting at 6-7yo (for me it was closer to 5yo). The entire playground was just communist style metal constructions. I cut myself on rusty nails, was hit by a metal swing and twisted my ankle while jumping off the top of a slide. Today the entire playground was replaced by wooden, safe toys and I can't imagine kids playing there unsupervised. Times have changed. It's simple as that.
What I had:
What kids have today:
In my country these fancier playgrounds are like a few per city, whereas the soviet ones were (are) much more common, so a side effect is that you could've gone to that top photo without crossing any streets, versus your parents would take you to the bottom one (either walk you there or go by car)
Not in my country. All the things on the left are still true, but predators isn’t really something parents are (or need to be) worried about. Also, there are a lot more cars now than 40 years ago.
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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
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