BY WILL DOIG, Salon
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One study diagrammed the shrinking distances that four generations of one family’s kids were allowed to stray from home: six miles in 1919, one mile in 1950, half a mile in 1979, and 300 yards today.
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She says the “Popsicle test” is a convenient way to use free-roaming kids to gauge a city’s health. “If an 8-year-old child can go get a Popsicle from the store by themselves and finish it before they get home, that city is probably thriving,” says Skenazy. Such an act is possible only in a walkable, reasonably safe environment that has a good pedestrian infrastructure and where retail and residences are relatively intermixed.
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Compare that to the U.S., … the Pittsburgh dad who was charged with child endangerment for letting his 9- and 6-year-olds play in a park; the Florida community that banned anyone under 18 from being outdoors without a chaperone.
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It says something that we perceive walking down the street to be a greater risk to kids than speeding along in two tons of steel and glass, when in actuality, four-fifths of kids killed by cars are in those cars. No parent, however, is going to be accused of endangering their child by driving them to school, but the parent who lets them walk might be
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https://www.salon.com/2012/07/21/paranoid_parents_kill_cities/
Biking in Baltimore