Recently there was some interesting Twitter discourse around the perennial hot topic of todays overprotective parents, that basically revolved around the accusation that todays parents are hell bent on making themselves perennially miserable by keeping their kids too safe. This may be true – as a parent myself I’ve certainly seen many people go overboard. However, I think what’s often missing from these discussions is that a lot of overprotective parenting of the last few decades has….worked?

I was discussing this in person with an older acquaintance recently, who was shocked to hear that it was common to tell my sons age (13) not to use the oven when home alone. She was aghast at this, and mentioned that it never would have even occurred to her to limit her children in this manner. I pointed out that fire deaths among kids were down massively in the last few decades. She was certain that wasn’t true. It is.

Now, to be clear, I am not claiming that whole drop came because people stopped letting their tweens/early teens use ovens while in the house by themselves. However, this rule almost certainly gained popularity as part of wider fire safety pushes that improved conditions everywhere. Thus, using the data from the IHME, we see that in the US we are seeing about 1/5 the number of fire deaths in kids as we did back in 1980 when my acquaintance was raising her children:

Keep in mind these are raw numbers, and that during this time the US gained about 10 million extra children in that age range.

These sorts of drop offs are true for pretty much every type of accidental injury type death you can think of for kids. Here are some other causes of death:

Car seat culture is much maligned, but we see a similar pattern there:

Keep in mind that in addition to the population going up during this time, the number of miles driven ALSO went up.

This is not to say that any particular intervention was worth it or was necessary, or was justified. But I have noticed that when people critique overprotective parenting culture, they often are unaware of just how much safer things have gotten. The focus on safety was not just a meaningless endeavor that improved nothing, it actually led to some visible results.

Child death is a horrible tragedy, particularly when it was preventable. I have known two families who lost a child to a preventable accident: one young teen who fell through thin ice and drowned, one toddler who swallowed rat poison. I met both families decades after the fact, and the wounds were still raw. The fallout had never stopped.

I think this is good context when we talk about trade offs, because I want to emphasize again that there are trade offs for these safety measures. Kids need independence, room to grow, room to develop and room to fail. But we can’t forget what people were working to stop when they went down this path, or how much our lives have improved now that child death is a far rarer occurrence.