The Core Knowledge Blog

School’s out! Long, languorous summer days playing in the street with your friends, with no adults in sight? “No so much,” writes Eve Pearlman in the San Jose Mercury News. “Most kids are kept on much tighter reins than they were in days of yore.

“The difference we’ve imposed on ourselves compared to how we ourselves were raised is really quite striking,” says Peter Stearns, a George Mason University professor who studies fear in our society. Media coverage of accidents and crimes has created an outsize sense of the risks children actually face. Plus, says Stearns, more and more parents have developed a phobia about taking any risk at all.

Kids used to break their arms and we’d say, ‘Oh well’ and sign the cast. But now when they do, we assume as a society that if things had just been properly organized this bad thing wouldn’t have happened….Most of our middle class kids are quite safe. We just need to think about the consequences of fussing over them quite as much as we do. Really, it’s just a matter of moderating our worries and becoming a little more tolerant.