Blog: Nostalgia Masks Unnecessary Tragedies

I am addicted to nostalgia. I daydream often of my childhood on a hobby farm in rural Minnesota. Our house sat on 7 mostly wooded acres and was surrounded by cornfields and dirt roads. It was a life of climbing trees, building forts, and mosquito bites. Until I became a father, a small part of me always thought I would go back to that place, that no other place could ever really be Home. My own kids changed that, though. Home is wherever they are.

When I get together with old friends, much of our conversation and ensuing laughter is rooted in nostalgia about our past, and reliving the highlights. “Remember the time when...” I’ve been lucky enough to hold onto my friends for a long time, some of them since elementary school. We have a lot to relive. I used to think this was kind of sad, but as we get older and some of us had children, we talk more about the future than we did before. We talk about our kids growing up together, going on vacation with our families, and what we’ll do when we retire. We are attaining a balance. Honoring our shared past experiences as well as celebrating the present and a future that has more substance than it used to.

I’m not alone in my addiction to nostalgia. How many times have you heard someone talking about “simpler times,” or saying “we didn’t have [BLANK] when I was growing up and we turned out alright.” I do not exempt myself either. I am just as guilty as anyone. You hear these things a lot when it comes to children and parenthood, especially:

“We left the house in the morning and didn’t come home until suppertime and our parents didn’t know where we were or what we were doing.”

“We didn’t have car seats or seat belts when I was growing up.”

The nostalgia about unsupervised kids roaming the city or countryside all day seems especially pernicious when you take a look at the statistics.  Accident and disease mortality among children has seen a rapid decline in the last 60 years.

In 1950, accident mortality for children ages 5-14 was 22.7 per 100,000 and 6.2 per 100,000 in 2005.  Auto accident mortality for children ages 5-14 was 9 per 100,000 in 1950 and 4 per 100,000 in 2005. Additionally, disease mortality is also much lower. Disease mortality rates for children were 36.6 per 1000 in 1950 and a startling 8.6 per 100,000 in 2005.

I’ve heard many people argue that today’s parents are paranoid “over-worriers,” and in some cases that may be true. Stranger abductions are still incredibly rare, and the amount of anxiety generated by the specter of stranger abduction is surely not proportional. But in other areas, whether it is due to more parental supervision, safer toys, car seats, or advances in health care for children, our kids are not dying at anywhere near the rate they were in the 1950s and many families have been saved from tragedy.

So the next time you hear someone waxing nostalgic about “swimming in the creek with their friends” without parental supervision, remember, they are the ones that didn’t drown and there were many more children that died unnecessarily in 1950 than there are dying today.