Children got safer. Childhood got smaller.
Children are safer than they used to be. That does not mean childhood is working better.
Finkelhor and Jones found declines of as much as 40 to 70 per cent in several forms of child victimisation in the United States between 1993 and 2004. Real gains, worth defending.
Something else was happening too. In 1971, 55 per cent of English children under 10 were allowed to travel alone to places within walking distance of home. By 2010, almost none were.
Safer, and smaller. My question is what the second one cost.
I am not claiming one bought the other. The retreat from independence started earlier and has its own causes. But childhood was reorganised around risk, and that reorganisation took out more than risk. Unsupervised time. Mixed-age contact. Small responsibilities. Adults nearby but not directing.
Bronfenbrenner called proximal processes the engine of development. Regular, increasingly complex, reciprocal interaction between a developing person and the people, objects and symbols in their immediate environment. It is not a metaphor. It has conditions. Complexity, reciprocity, duration.
And they are hard to pin down. Of 18 studies citing Bronfenbrenner's mature model, Tudge and colleagues found only two that properly described and tested all four elements. If the model is that difficult to specify in a journal, every claim to deliver it in a school hall deserves scrutiny. Mine included.
So I build sessions designed to meet those conditions rather than resemble them, and I keep putting that design in front of researchers working on the same problem.
Every version gets better. That is the work.