My two cents? I think there is too much fear among parents to let their kids just run outside and play, or even walk to school. Instead, kids have organized playdates where they sit inside, and are forbidden from doing anything physical. When I was growing up, we ran free all over the neighborhood all summer, rode bikes all over town, and absolutely walked to school- all of which would be considered child endangerment now.When I was in the first grade, the neighborhood kids and I routinely climbed down the side of a steep wooded gully across the street from our school, at the bottom of which there was floor of pungent muddy sludge and the greatest toy a kid could ever want: an abandoned railroad car. It sat at maybe a 20-degree angle to plumb; was coated top-to-bottom in rust that would flake off and powder your hands, clothes, face, and hair; in many places had corroded entirely through (leaving jagged holes); had cool ladder rungs so that you could go all the way to the top and then jump off; and for reasons at which we could only then guess was furnished with an anachronistic floral-print mattress. I can count pretty high -- several numbers past the fingers and toes I have, not to brag or anything -- but I cannot count the number of horrors my friends and I could have suffered during an afternoon playing on the abandoned rusty disintegrating razor-edged train car/mattress at the bottom of the steep muddy dark secluded gully. And this is to say nothing of our adventures with beehives, with sledding hills that emptied into main streets, or with two-mile walks to school. I turned out okay (so, I assume, did my friends), but like hell I'm going to send the Spaceboys into the gully for an unsupervised afternoon with the death train of hobo sex.
I don't really have a point here; just thought I'd mention that.
ETA: While we're on the topic, do you have any favorite childhood safety hazards?
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