Easy to come across interesting articles and rage-inducing articles, but rare to come across one that is both of those and so goddam important. The kids in my neighborhood aren't even allowed to wait for the bus by themselves--to get bussed to a school that is 0.7 miles away. Sick.As one mother put it to me, “I don’t know if I’m afraid for my kids, or if I’m afraid other people will be afraid and will judge me for my lack of fear.” In other words, risk assessment and moral judgment are intertwined.
If you haven't read Free Range Kids yet, you probably should. Before she was a firebrand for letting those horrible entitled Millennials abandon their children all over America she was a columnist with an MA in Journalism from Columbia. She basically lays the entire culture of overprotection at John Walsh's feet.
On the Media did a feature on child abductions a number of years ago and they came to a similar conclusion. Apparently the conventional wisdom that was pushed by America's Most Wanted and then even the FBI was that 50,000 kids were being abducted every year in the 80s. Then finally in the 90s some rogue FBI agent was like, "Ummm, shouldn't we actually study this?" And they found out the actual number was closer to 200.
https://letgrow.org/resources/really/ Fortunately, a 2010 study published in Forensic Science, Medicine, and Pathology looked at the actual circumstances surrounding the deaths of kids in non-moving cars. (Recall that the most dangerous place for a child in America is a MOVING car. In 2007, 36 children died of heatstroke in cars, while 905 died in crashes. Maybe we should criminalize driving?)As a country, we have been warned to never let a child wait in the car, as if merely waiting briefly in a parked car leads to death.