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Since we're already off topic: My sister and I have spoken about the fact that when I was five years old, in 1965, I started walking to school and back totally unsupervised. I just now looked up the distance between where we lived and the school, and it's only half a mile. However, it required walking to the end of our street, which was already well out of sight of our house, turning left onto another street, right onto another, and left onto yet another. There was a crossing guard to assist children across the one semi-busy intersection on the route.

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And it wasn't just me. All of the kids walked to school unsupervised. There were no busses and no parents lined up in cars to drop off and pick up. The only time parents would drive their kids was when it was raining, and even then, some didn't drive, but instead put the kids in raincoats and gave them umbrellas and they walked as usual.

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Nevertheless, my sister and I, by the time we became mothers in the 1970s and 1980s, would never have allowed this.

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I don't know if the dangers have actually increased or if it's just our perceptions of possible dangers that increased, perhaps unrealistically. We just know that we could never allow this as our parents did.