There was a time when we generally accepted that kids shouldn't play in the street. (I hope that's still true, tbh. It seems to be, in most places, due to parents not wanting their kids to get hit by cars and most drivers not wanting to hit people with their cars.)
When I was growing up in 19[redacted], parents let us play freely outside in the surrounding area once we were old enough to understand 1) don't play in the street, 2) don't talk to/go with strangers, and 3) this is how you get help from a trustworthy adult if you need it. (The age when we earned this privilege was often several years below "10.")
Inevitably, a lot of kids had stories about how they had a close call with a car at some point — and usually not even a "real" close call, but they were playing in the ditch or on a sidewalk close to the street and a car drove by and spooked them.
Sometimes we told our parents about these incidents — mostly we didn't. It depended on whether any parents witnessed it and what kind of parents you had, I guess. Most, like mine, would blame it on the kid — you should have known better than to play close to/in the street, we told you and you didn't listen, think about what could have happened, this was all your fault, you're grounded, etc. If you were lucky enough to have parents who, in hindsight, were probably better suited to being parents than most of the people in my neighborhood, their priority was making sure the spooked kid was okay, talking through why they were scared and what they might do differently so that they don't get scared again (or hurt), and trusting that the experience taught the kid a lesson more thoroughly than any previous rules (or potential yelling about it) could have.
In neither case did drivers ever take heat for a spooked child who was playing close to the road.
(Yes, if any of them had ever hit a kid, there'd be the expected legal consequences — but a driver going safely down the neighborhood roads at 25 mph? They're fine. No parent would be yelling at them; they'd be yelling at the kid. Because again: Kids shouldn't be playing in the street. It was a social contract we all knew and accepted.)
I've seen neighborhoods in my very suburban area actually petition to have "no driving hours" on residential streets (!) during the summer because that's when kids are most likely to be playing outside. (I guess everyone else should just be trapped in their houses, or out somewhere, for a few hours instead of those kids being told not to play in the road.)
I regularly go only 10-15 mph down my own street, even when there are no kids in sight, because of all the people here who live to start drama and call the cops on each other, and will absolutely complain about any car they personally feel is going too fast or too slowly past their house. Just the other day coming home from work, I got an absolutely evil glare from a mom who was out walking next to her kids, when I was going literally 5 mph and practically driving on people's grass on the other side of our very broad road to give them as wide a berth as physically possible. (Let's be clear — there was no close call here. At all. I guess, in her mind, I should have either not been driving on the road that was in fact built for cars or just stopped completely until they were out of sight behind me. The concept of them walking on the sidewalk, or at least her telling her kids to stick to their side of the road and not to, like, feel comfortable veering toward the center crossline that marks oncoming traffic, was unthinkable.)
I don't know, man. It's just such a weird thing to me, to see this shift within 30-ish years from "hey, kids, don't play in the street" to "how fucking dare people drive here when my kids want to play in the street."
This post is also about internet censorship, btw.
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