I made the same observation when I moved to the US, it was so weird to me that SF the city is pretty much devoid of children. They're all effectively locked up and prohibited from roaming. No-one trusts children, no-one trusts adults around children, no-one trusts strangers.
But I went skiing in Lake Tahoe one weekend, and suddenly all of that disappeared. Suddenly, you have children freely interacting with strangers, there's much less adult supervision, and a whole lot of trust in others again.
It's such a contrast, and you can experience it by simply driving for a couple of hours.
The kinds of strangers you are likely to meet in SF are not to be trusted. It's not irrational on an individual level, it's just a societal madness in the USA.
I lived in LA, and would not let my wife walk around after dark let alone my daughters. There were a few individuals who lived under bridges that would regularly assault women. And we lived in a "good" area. We moved to an even better area and within a couple months there was a shooting, high speed chase, and a drunk driver rolled his car into our neighbor's yard.
I lived in the Bay Area for two years. It’s a shit hole. It’s dirty, dangerous, and expensive.
I’ve lived in NYC (the Bronx), Seattle, and Saint Louis. Never felt anywhere close to the terror I felt living in San Jose and commuting to Los Gatos and San Francisco.
We fled from San Jose to Phoenix a year after having our daughter. Kids walk to school in our neighborhood. A bunch meet up at the corner near our house and all scooter together to the local school.
SF is actually a city that is devoid of children. They're not hidden, they just don't exist because housing is too expensive. People with kids mostly leave.
It's been a common pattern for a very long time in the US for new graduates to often live in a city especially if that's where their job is and then move out when they start a family. That was the pattern with essentially everyone I knew who went into finance in Manhattan.
SF is full of mentally ill homeless people and drug addicts. Some literally camping in the doorways of homes. It's also covered in vomit and human feces. No way I would let my kids run around unsupervised there
Historically, people teach their kids how to navigate their local environment safely.
In rural environments, that can include wildlife dangers and natural hazards and in urban environments, it can include human dangers and industrial/sanitary hazards.
Environmental danger is not new. The culture of isolating kids rather than educating them is. Whether the new strategy is better for the kids is an open question, but seems crazy to some of us.
I let my 11 year old ride his bike to the park, 7-11 etc on his own or with friends. I don't live in SF though. I think it's a little different when the danger is another human and they are mentally ill or addicted to drugs. You can tell the kids to stay away from them but the kids are kids they can't necessarily outsmart an adult looking to cause them harm.
Adults are killed by homeless people in SF. They are an irrational danger that is difficult to prepare for. There are also a lot of them. It's one thing to say if you see a homeless person stay away but it's another when there are dozens of them camped on the sidewalk. Telling my kids to instead walk in the road is not a great option either.
You are not wrong and 99% of the time doing as you suggest is valid. Hordes of crazy people are a danger of a different breed.
>Historically, people teach their kids how to navigate their local environment safely.
And historically, society would drive insane and homeless people out of nice areas. Middle and upper middle class people weren't letting their kids hang out with drifters in the past.
As someone who plans to teach their kid to bike to school, walk to friends' houses, watch for cars, play safely in the yard, climb trees etc... Who has also lived in SF... There's no way I'd expose a kid to the dangers of walking around that city!
We left because my wife was terrified to be alone outside of our apartment. She would be followed, harassed, threatened. Because we saw crimes occur in broad daylight and experienced the indifference of police when we called.
Comparing the environmental danger of avoiding snakes and not diving into water where you can't see the bottom to navigating the streets of San Francisco as a small, alone human is ludicrous.
Historically a city would be run with order in mind but SF no longer is. It’s a lawless place without defined borders of what’s safe and what’s not. If SF could clean up its act then maybe it would be different. But it’s the same reason as the 1970s when parents in cities began having to shelter their kids more. We’ve just allowed to streets to be taken over by the mentally ill, drug addicted, and creeps and everything that comes with that.
It can even vary from one suburban neighborhood to another, without much difference in actual safety between the neighborhoods. Our last neighborhood had roving bands of kids wandering about and picking up and losing members here and there all day long in the Summer, just like it was 1975, everyone was totally chill about it. It was great. Our new one like two miles away is a "kid plays in the yard" neighborhood and we've had people come by more than once to make sure we're aware our kids are on their bikes on the other side of the neighborhood (yeah, we know).
SF is devoid of kids because it is a super expensive place to raise kids in SF, and the schools are so messed up you need to go private or move. Also, a lot of same sex couples don't adopt.
Really strange to hear what life for US urban kids and pedestrians has become like. Can't have been always like that. As a proof, there's an episode of The streets of San Francisco where three boys break into a supposedly abandoned mansion in their neighborhood (looking like those SF hills but what do I know).
I remember watching 'The Phantom Tollbooth', which is set in San Francisco and has the main boy walking home from school through the city, and feeling how odd that seems now.
We have a whole media industry unrestrained by responsible regulation peddling fear.
Look at the court disclosures about Fox News personalities retaliating against Fox reporters actually reporting the truth. They knew the election fraud story was bullshit, but these folks have no higher purpose and want grandma to be scared.
But I went skiing in Lake Tahoe one weekend, and suddenly all of that disappeared. Suddenly, you have children freely interacting with strangers, there's much less adult supervision, and a whole lot of trust in others again.
It's such a contrast, and you can experience it by simply driving for a couple of hours.