I often get the heebie-jeebies when I walk alone in the dark.

We cannot walk alone.

Talk to your children about not talking to strangers and do it today. A message for your child's safety from the American Medical Association, warning parents to keep a close eye on their children. Ironically, the whole craze had probably a lot of negative effects on the health and well-being of thousands of children, if not hundreds of thousands. Either it locked them inside with the people who were actually hurting them or they got lost or put in a bad situation and were too afraid to ask random people for help. One 11-year-old boy scout who got lost was too afraid of the people searching for him because they were strangers and so he actively hid from them. Even today though, you can trace the need to keep children under lock and key to these measures. It's gotten so bad that multiple people have been arrested for simply letting their kids walk alone to school or play alone outside. In 2022, one mum was arrested for child endangerment for letting her kids play alone at the park. It didn't matter that she had left them in the care of a family friend, she was added to the Central Registry, which in Arizona means that she could be barred from working with children for the next 25 years. Stories like this highlighted how crazy the US and the rest of the West have gotten about safeguarding children to the point that they've completely lost their independence. Breeding this fear of strangers and therefore of the outside world changed a whole generation's perspective. That fear of the unknown directly interferes with that crucial process of discovery and exploration that kids need to experience early on in their lives. Without it, they could be left scarred and afraid for the rest of their life. It's no wonder anxiety levels have skyrocketed. At the end of the day though, this still doesn't really explain the massive changes we've seen in how kids play. Tons of kids won't have ever listened to the stranger danger nonsense. Instead, physical changes that you can see with your own eyes are the ones that made the real difference. The way previous generations have made the world hostile to children is the number one reason they don't play outside anymore, and it was during the 1990s that these changes really came into effect.

Well, there are not so many people And then no one has even looked at me Let alone talked to you Yeah So I can comfortably walk alone So I can give it a 5 Alright, there's one last thing that I want to try for today Let's call it one last challenge Before we wrap up So it's getting more and more crowded As we get closer to the last train And since it's so close to that last train There's always these guys who wait outside the station To target girls who are waiting for friends Or coming out and all of that Let's go see I'm just going to act like I'm waiting for a friend So I just overheard guys talking And they're not here for pick-ups They're here for scouting Like kebakura or something And they are aiming for specific type of girls Actually, I think I just ran into one right now Okay So it's kind of a different zone So you mean the guys were like Yeah, right there I think I heard him talking This is one of the guys here And this girl is literally running Trying to escape him Okay, I also kind of want to get you out of this area Because they can get pretty aggressive too I just watched a guy chase down a girl Who had to do a literal spin move Just to get away from him So are you good to get out of this area now?

You can walk alone to think, or walk with a friend to talk.

Having said that, they're more than willing to kill a spider for a girl - or walk her to the car at night when she doesn't want to walk alone.

Sometimes I walk alone at night

and Elizabeth continued her walk alone, crossing field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing over puddles with impatient activity,

I promise you you'll never walk alone.

I dream of home, on my own Through the sands, I walk alone