In Figure 13, there are some Western countries listed for how much children can roam, and Ireland is indeed near the bottom.
But the Netherlands, Nordics and Germany are still very much on the other side of the spectrum in these studies.
See for instance the books "The Happiest Kids in the World", "Achtung Baby" and "There is No Such Thing as Bad Weather" about raising children in the Netherlands, Berlin and Sweden respectively.
Those places are very much not like the USA yet. Though as the article points out, they are definitely going in that direction.
By the way the rest of the (actual) saying that is the title for the Swedish book is "Only Bad Clothes". In Swedish it rhymes [1] which of course increases its power. I know it from when I was a kid 40+ years ago, and I think both my kids would recognize it or at least get the meaning.
That being said, obviously mobile phones etc are huge and (in my opinion) problematic among kids here, too.
> Those places are very much not like the USA yet. Though as the article points out, they are definitely going in that direction.
In the Netherlands, some things are trending in that direction (e.g. car sizes/hood heights), but I wouldn't call it a general trend; infrastructure, for one, is still massively improving. Where it was bicycle-friendly twenty years ago, it's way more so today, and bound to be even more so tomorrow.
It’s not a foregone conclusion though, in addition to higher and blunter hoods there’s just more cars (over ten million now), and the EU may recognise US safety standards in trade negotiations. Not that the latter matters when you can import violating vehicles (like Dodge Rams) under individual vehicle approval.
The Netherlands is in danger of resting on its laurels and getting complacent. Some places (Hilversum comes to mind) are still quite mediocre.
No, I indeed wouldn't say it's bound to end up in a good place - just that it's too pessimistic a view to think that it's generally trending in the wrong direction. We're seeing all the bad signs we're seeing elsewhere, but also many of the good ones, such as entire new car-free neighbourhoods being built.
