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"Stay in shape so you can outrun my estranged brother, Sir B. Erus."

Hell, I regularly walked to and from school as a kid, and that was in Australia, a country that most adults are afraid to enter. Many of us also thought it perfectly normal to walk alone to any local parks, playgrounds, or haunted pet cemeteries. But it turns out that our childhood hikes were not only apparently unapproved by Health E. Hound, they were also evidence of severe child neglect. Yes, walked-alone-as-a-child person, it's only due to sheer luck and your parents' regular sacrifices to a pagan road deity that you are not dead right now. I know this because ...

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What It's Like Today

Kids walking places alone is currently considered so dangerous that in many places it's punishable by arrest. Take the example of Danielle and Sasha Meitiv, a Maryland couple who earlier this year had their children, aged 6 and 10, taken into custody after they dared to let them walk home from a nearby park. After picking up the children on their dangerous trek home, cops then failed to call the parents to let them know where their offspring were, instead allowing the kids to sit in a squad car for two and a half hours, so that presumably the poor couple started to believe that their road-deity sacrifice hadn't worked after all and they'd wasted all those chickens on nothing.