Originally Posted by
JeffS
Because you wore one when you were a kid? Were your parents negligent for not requiring it?
The knee-jerk reaction is going to be "time have changes", but in this regard the only thing that's changed is the level of fear people have.
I'm curious to hear why others think our behavior as a group has changed. Parents now who require helmets, won't let kids walk to school, have safety locks on everything in the house are basically the same people as their parents who did none of these things.
It's not the level of fear that's changed, it's the level of awareness.
Children know bicycles are dangerous. They're frightened by them and require LOTS of peer pressure from older kids and their parents just to learn to ride them with training wheels. Riding often desensitizes them to the danger of cycling much like you don't fear driving, even though it's a leading cause of death for adults worldwide. There are volumes of statistics available to modern parents that people 20 years ago could only dream of having.
Stereotyping parents who can perform a reasonable risk-assessment into a group of neurotic parents who don't let their children have any freedom is entirely unfair. A bicycle
is freedom, but with that freedom comes responsibility, and one of those responsibilities is cycling
safely.