Scott Alexander

G.K.

Chesterton wrote about the phrase, quote, The simple and obvious answer is, quote,

clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour.

In the same way, society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.

There is another proverb, as you have made your bed so you must lie on it, which again is simply a lie.

If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God, I will make it again.

We could restore the heptarchy or the stagecoaches if we chose.

It might take some time to do, and it might be very inadvisable to do it, but certainly it is not impossible, as bringing back last Friday is impossible.

This is, as I say, the first freedom that I claim, the freedom to restore."

So could you, today, kick your child out the door at 9am on a Saturday and tell them to be back by dinner?

Ryan worries that most parents refuse to do this because they think the world is less safe than in their parents' and grandparents' generation.

He says that's wrong.

Modern death rates for children are a quarter what they were in the golden age of outside kids.

Most of the improvement comes from less disease, which is only slightly relevant to this question.

But deaths from accidents, including car accidents, are down even more.

Five times.

Deaths from homicide are up slightly, but realistically it doesn't matter given how rare homicides were to begin with, and most child homicide victims are unfortunately killed by family members.

You could think of this improvement in two ways, either as proof that coddling kids works really well, or that coddling kids is unnecessary.

Kaplan chooses the latter, at great length, although when I read the several pages he devoted to this question I cannot figure out his exact argument disproving the former.

One potential argument is that child trends mostly mirror adult trends.