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Interesting. I do wonder though if the environment is actually safer, or if kids in urban areas just stay inside more. (Aware of threats, the homeless, etc) I never lived in an urban area as a child, but can tell you that I was allowed to (and did) roam freely in the rural areas, the woods, etc.
I grew up in a rural area, small town in western PA. Woods existed, but you couldn't use them. Firstly, how could I get there? There were no sidewalks, and riding a bike anywhere on the road with all the hills and blind corners would be suicide. Any fields nearby were fenced off. Any woods nearby were forbidden by great big NO TRESPASSING notices every 50 feet, and I didn't put it past them to shoot a child for trespassing. Every other property had an unleashed dog waiting to pounce on you for getting within sniffing distance of the property line. Thus I spent all of my time indoors playing Civ 4. In my experience, rural areas are designed for cars and are populated by people who wish they didn't have neighbors.
Good response. Definitely had a different experience down in rural Tennessee. Lived in several different towns but always had access to the woods through some mechanism (friends house, neighbors land, etc) never had more than a half acre ourselves but sure spent most of my free time outside. I appreciate your point, but obviously, we are both just spewing anecdotes, which still makes me wonder which environment outside of the home is actually safer.
I don't know if it is because you were in a different area than I, or if it was because you grew up 20 years after I did (based on your Civ 4 comment. I was playing a lot of Ultima 3 in my day.) But my growing up in a rural area, small town in central MA, I spend almost all of my time outside, often in the woods. Nobody was going to shoot me for trespassing, as all us kids knew all the local farmers and land owners. We went to church with them, and we all pitched in at harvest times to help on the farms and make a few bucks to spend at the local general store, which we got to by riding our bikes through trails we'd made in the woods. And traffic on the roads was always pretty light, so we never much worried about getting hit.
