Lori Falce: The truth about surviving childhood

Almost every day on Facebook or Twitter or some other social media outlet, I see a version of it.

Sometimes it’s just a quick one-liner from a friend. Sometimes it is dressed in a funny meme. Often it is a long passage shared by a relative who I know does not mean it harshly. There probably wasn’t much thought behind it at all beyond a little nostalgia and a lot of ribbing of millennials.

It’s the list of things that Gen Xers or baby boomers used to do back in the day. The refrain is “we survived.”

Back in the day we didn’t wear bike helmets. We didn’t wear seat belts. We were kicked out of the house after breakfast and didn’t come home until the street lights came on. We drank from the hose and ran barefoot and played on yards and streets and in the woods. And we survived.

The sometimes overt and sometimes sly critique is that today’s kids are soft and today’s parents are overly protective. We had it tough and we survived.

The problem is that the math says otherwise. The numbers show that death of minors has dropped dramatically over the last 60-plus years. Decades of laws governing seat belts, helmets, car seats, water treatment, product safety and child neglect have cut child mortality in half. The people sharing the memes survived. A lot of other kids didn’t.

But the nostalgic, judgmental scoffing can also come off as hollow right now. There are so many things our kids can’t do that we did without thinking because the one glaring survival risk in our world is gun violence. Movie theaters, churches, Walmart, Christmas parades, birthday parties, music festivals and, of course, schools have all been the place where kids have lost their lives in a sudden, terrifying haze of violence.

Kids can’t walk home, shop in a store, play in a park. They can’t even sit in a car with their mother in Downtown Pittsburgh.

And now? Now they aren’t even safe knocking on a door.

Ralph Yarl, 16, was shot April 13 by an 84-year-old man in Kansas City, Mo., when he got lost going to pick up his twin brothers and knocked at the wrong home. He was shot in the head through the glass. He was shot again as he lay on the ground.

But that’s just a fluke, right? Except that it wasn’t for Kaylin Gillis, 20, who was gunned down Saturday when she pulled into the wrong driveway in Hebron, N.Y. Two cheerleaders were shot Tuesday in a grocery store parking lot in Elgin, Texas, when one girl got into the wrong car.

Three incidents happened in less than a week where people died or were grievously injured over confusion. Regardless of your stance on gun crimes, can’t we all agree you shouldn’t shoot first and ask questions later when someone knocks on your door?

With 60 years of looking at what worked and what didn’t and what we could fix, we made our world safer for our kids.

But I’m tired of Facebook posts telling me I should worry less because I survived my childhood. I’m too busy trying to make sure my son survives his.