8-year-old boy killed

[katydidKD]

It is a nightmare. You think something so gruesome and cruel would only happen in a bad horror movie. Praying for his family/the community.

[christiangirl]

Originally Posted by DrPhil

That didn't prevent things from happen: We had wild dogs who terrorized us at the bus stop; we seriously injured ourselves while swinging from those harsh metal monkey bars that should've never been created; there were kids who thought they were going to use and sell drugs and get away with it;....

I realize that this is wildly off-topic, but how did you get seriously injured on monkey bars?

Originally Posted by katydidKD

It is a nightmare. You think something so gruesome and cruel would only happen in a bad horror movie. Praying for his family/the community.

That was my first thought--this sounds like the plot of a slasher film. This is so awful it makes my stomach turn.

[ASUADPi]

It is so sad that this is the world we are in and going to raise our children in. I remember being able to walk or ride my bike places around my neighborhood by myself or with one other friend and it wasn't a worry. I remember being able to go to the mall with my parents and my brothers and I would ride up and down the escalators while my parents were in a store shopping. And everything was okay. Times they have a changed.

[Munchkin03]

Originally Posted by ASUADPi

It is so sad that this is the world we are in and going to raise our children in. I remember being able to walk or ride my bike places around my neighborhood by myself or with one other friend and it wasn't a worry. I remember being able to go to the mall with my parents and my brothers and I would ride up and down the escalators while my parents were in a store shopping. And everything was okay. Times they have a changed.

But the times really haven't changed THAT much. Kids' faces on milk cartons wasn't an occurrence of recent years. Because of the 24-hour news cycle and the Internet, we find out about things that happen all over the place and not just in our immediate surroundings. I've read that kids will report strange men or molestation experiences WAY more than they did 30 or 40 years ago.

About 30 years ago, a little boy here in NYC was walking home on his first day of being able to do and was kidnapped. His body was never found, but he was declared legally dead about 10 years ago. Again, terrible stuff happened--it's just that knowledge of it wasn't as widespread.

[DrPhil]

Originally Posted by christiangirl

I realize that this is wildly off-topic, but how did you get seriously injured on monkey bars?

For the monkey bars that are entirely made of metal, we used each other as backpacks and lost our grip sometimes resulting in limbs, heads, or faces hitting the metal bars and nails. Blood, lots of blood. Children do dumb and potentially dangerous things and metal monkey bars are still metal. This stuff has also happened with nonmetal monkey bars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_gym

*********

The children of the 1970s and 1980s (as with the children of previous decades) encountered a lot of potentially dangerous things prior to the child safety advocates of the 1990s-2000s (i.e., Safe Kids wasn't founded until 1987 and didn't get much attention until the 1990s). Hell, I had a principal who smoked in our elementary school. He used to smoke in his office, in the hallways, and in our classrooms. That wouldn't be allowed today. I say all of this to say that life hasn't gotten more dangerous and childhood is not in danger.

Co-sign Munchkin03.

[Munchkin03]

Originally Posted by DrPhil

The children of the 1970s and 1980s (as with the children of previous decades) encountered a lot of potentially dangerous things prior to the child safety advocates of the 1990s-2000s (i.e., Safe Kids wasn't founded until 1987 and didn't get much attention until the 1990s). Hell, I had a principal who smoked in our elementary school. He used to smoke in his office, in the hallways, and in our classrooms. That wouldn't be allowed today. I say all of this to say that life hasn't gotten more dangerous and childhood is not in danger.

Co-sign Munchkin03.

Thank ya!

Have you ever heard about any correlation between the rise of child safety advocacy and the rise in assisted reproductive technology? I've heard a few people talk about it--because people are having kids when they get older and, in many cases, it takes a lot more to have a kid, people are much more protective than they were a few generations before, when it wasn't a big deal to have a kid?