When Did the World Get Dangerous for Kids?

I was done with my visit to my Mom who is in the hospital and had made it back to my car in the parking garage. My car faced out toward the main street that ran past the hospital and the decorative garage structure used a kind of grill thing between floors so if you are inside the garage, you can see out.

As I sat inside my car and shut the door, I noticed the children's playground across the street. It was part of an apartment complex which had a tall fence around the property (the fence was made of metal poles so you could see through it). There were about three kids playing on the merry-go-round and as many mothers standing there, supervising their play. Any injury would be instantly attended (as if risky playing would ever happen in the presence of that many adults). No stranger would ever dare intrude with the intent to do harm to any of those children.

These children were safe within the safe world created for them by the adults in their lives. And that is, or should be, standard operating procedure in today's world.

Then a random memory pierced my thoughts: In the 1960's, the public park a few miles from our home always opened their large swimming pool to the public during the summer. My Mom would take me and my brother there as often as we were able to pay our own way in and we did earn our own money. She'd drop us off in the parking lot and we'd go stand in line then go off to separate Boy and Girl changing rooms and meet up again by the pool. I couldn't swim very well so I always stayed in the shallow end. My little brother swam like a fish and loved the high dive. He wanted to train to be an Olympic diver when he was seven years old. He never made the Olympics, but his diving was spectacular. And in the beginning, when he first strode up to the high dive ladder, the Lifeguard shooed him away, thinking such a little kid had no business there. We got my Mom to come in the next time to give her consent.

We'd spend hours at the public pool and when we had enough, we'd call home and my Mom would come back to the parking lot to pick us up as we stood there on the curb, waiting.

And we'd be completely on our own that entire time from drop-off to pick-up. Once in a while, my Mom would take a seat in the public bleacher section and watch us go through our tricks. But for the most part, we were two independent little adventurers. There were dozens of kids at the pool in the same circumstance. No parents present.

Being kids, it never occurred to us to wonder, what if we drown and our Mom's not here? And I guess it never occurred to the Parks Department, either. There were parks all over Los Angeles County where kids were dropped off to play games or swim and do all kinds of activities and the parents didn't have to be there.

And not once did my little brother and I ever have to deal with some perverted freak who preyed on children. The worst danger we ever faced were rambunctious teenagers who couldn't be bothered to watch out for the little kids.

In all the many times over the years that we swam in the Northridge Pool, there was only one incident that came close to being "odd" from my child's-eye point of view.

As we left to wait out in the parking lot for our Mom to pick us up, my little brother recognized a man in the parking lot as the husband of one of the teachers at his private school which was also housed in that large public park area. But this was summer and the school building was closed up tight. The man was leaning against a light pole, standing, maybe smoking a cigarette. He was alone (my brother's teacher nowhere in sight). The man saw us and started to approach.

When the man started to cross the parking lot toward us, my brother became afraid. He didn't want to talk to this man. I didn't need to ask questions, all I needed to know was that my brother didn't want to be near this man.

When the man got close enough to start talking, I told him to go back, to go away, leave us alone, we weren't allowed to talk to him. He tried to argue me out of it, to make me feel foolish or bad for not being nice. That was the first clue, I guess, that this guy was a creep. No decent adult would try to talk a child out of what that child's parents had instructed them to do.

This guy said, and it was true, that he wasn't exactly a stranger if he was Miss Sherry's husband. Even if the rules didn't apply to him, it was enough for me to know my brother didn't like this man.

I told him to stop talking to us and it was about that time my Mom's car pulled into the lot. We were eager to get into it. I told my Mom the man was trying to talk to us even after I told him not to but she didn't do anything at that moment, with us in the car. I think it was soon after that, when school started again in September, that my Mom took my brother out of the private school and put him in the same public school I attended.

I don't really remember it exactly, but I think we didn't go to the public pool again, at least not without my Mom or my older sister there with us all the time.

The incident with the man in the parking lot was an anomaly. Things like that just didn't happen. Not back then. And when they DID happen, as when a man in a car tried to get a girl at our elementary school to talk to him as she walked home, it became HUGE news in the neighborhood because it was so unusual.

Nowadays, behavior and incidents like that seem to happen somewhere on a daily basis. Or is the media just reporting them more now? Hasn't the world always been a dangerous place or did it just get that way in recent years?

Why does it seem as if the world I knew as a child was my playground for adventuring with no restriction or paranoia about who might be lurking around the next corner and yet today's world seems to demand high fences and constant parental supervision?

We've always had present in our society those elements that would hurt children and other innocents. Logically, I can't say the world was a safer place when I was a child. It just feels that way. I wonder why that is.