Letting kids be kids seems more and more important to me over time. Our safetyism and paranoia about children is catastrophic on way more levels than most people realize. I believe all these effects are very large:

It raises the time, money and experiential costs of having children so much that many choose not to have children, or to have less children than they would want.
It hurts the lived experience of children.
It hurts children's ability to grow and develop.
It de facto forces children to use screens quite a lot.
It instills a very harmful style of paranoia in all concerned.

This should be thought of as part of the Cost of Thriving Index discussion, and the fertility discussions as well. Before I return to the more general debate, I wanted to take care of this aspect first. It's [...]