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Originally Posted by Ripplinger
I completely agree with everything you said. The devices are leading to kids staying inside more, but there's more to it than just that. There's also the current crime rates, fear of kidnapping, etc., at least within bigger cities, leading to parents not letting kids out of their sight like they used to.
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I'd put it more as escalating fear of crime rather than the crime rates themselves. Violent crime has been decreasing for several decades, and there is no epidemic of kidnapping. There is, in some countries, an epidemic of excessive parent-blaming and even parent-criminalisation for unsupervised kids, and on top of that, reduced numbers of children in public leads to perceptions that things are less safe.
(I have a teenager, and have tended toward fairly free-range parenting myself since he was eight or nine, albeit with him keeping a smartphone on his person. Very happy with that decision, as it turns out.)