What has changed between the time of Doug's childhood and now? Women have ever fewer children, and more women are employed in wage labor than ever. The fewer children you have, the more precious you feel each one is. The more time women spend working outside home, the more social anxiety arises regarding children's safety, unless there are strong feminist policy and culture to counter it. There is also a problem of the rise of psycho-therapeutic literature that suggests (erroneously, I believe) that sexual and other abuses suffered in childhood are more traumatic than those suffered in adulthood, scarring the abused for their entire lives. More generally, the more independent of procreation sexuality becomes, the larger sexuality -- including both positive and negative feelings about it -- looms in people's lives and their conceptions of their lives.
I found a very interesting article (research proposal, actually) on the subject of children's ability to play outside without adult supervision, according to which children's loss of freedom to move on their own is an international (rather than American suburban) trend (excepting the still strongly social democratic Nordic countries): Pia Björklid and Maria Nordström, "Children’s Outdoor Environment – A Reality with Different Interpretations. An International Comparative Study," <http://www2.humangeo.su.se/staff/MariaNordstrom/coe.pdf>.
Björklid and Nordström write (pp. 3, 4):
<blockquote>Several international studies have shown that children a few generations ago generally had much greater freedom to explore their neighbourhood than children have today. In the past children played alone outdoors more and also played in the street (Engwicht, 1992; Van der Spek & Noyon, 1995). Parents today watch over their children more and do so until the children are older (Gaster, 1991). In The Netherlands a changing pattern has been observed. Children today spend more time indoors than earlier (Karsten 2002). In parental questionnaire studies in four districts in Stockholm and suburbs (Björklid, 2002) one in three parents felt that they themselves as children had greater opportunities for getting to places and friends. A similar proportion also felt it was safer in the past with regard to both traffic and other dangers. In studies from Norway, however, more than 90% of the parents consider their children to have the same possibilities or better possibilities to stay and travel outdoors on their own than they used themselves as children (Olaussen Ryeng & Stølan Rostoft, 2002). In a recent study of 12 year-old children it was clear that children in the outer city spent more time outside on their own, knew the physical area better and had established a more personal relationship to the environment as a physical place than had the inner city children (Cele, 2001).
The assumption that children have lost their independent mobility and that this entails a threat to their quality of life is well supported in the literature (e.g. Berg & Medrich, 1980; Gaster, 1991; Roberts & Coggan, 1994; Björklid, 2002). The need for environmental changes whereby children can recover some of their lost freedom – particularly through controls of, and a reduction in, private car use – is something which is increasingly discussed today (cf. Roberts, 1995; Heine & Guski, 1998).
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A study of children’s mobility in Italy (Prezza et al. 2001) shows that only 20-30% of 10-year-olds walk to school alone or accompanied by friends; 44-48% of children have never been allowed to run errands on their own; less than 15% can play outside their home without supervision. Mobility is greater for older children and for boys. Also children with older siblings or more siblings have greater mobility. The situation for Finnish and Swedish children is that they have been allowed greater freedom of mobility but that today this pattern is changing, with the consequences that their mobility in the cities are becoming more restricted (cf. Kyttä 1995; Björklid, 2002). </blockquote>
Class differences in children's freedom are also visible internationally, too -- even in the liberal city of Amsterdam: "Karsten observes that it is in the affluent areas of Amsterdam that play gardens have disappeared while they still exist in areas populated by less affluent people. We see a tendency for this pattern to spread and alarming results of how the modern city constrains children’s everyday lives have been documented, especially by several Italian researchers (Prezza, 2002; Rissotto & Tonucci, 2002)" (Björklid and Nordström, p. 3).
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>