The UK Bible Students Website History Corner
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(London: Quartet Books; 1999), pp. 253, 254.
The ebbing of wartime solidarity, the increasing mobility of people so that neighbours changed more often, the way in which almost everyone became car-borne and never left home or arrived there on foot all these things reduce the opportunity for contact.
In the affluent 1980s, as millions of children acquired their own televisions and computer games, the house became a self-contained unit with almost no outside needs. Parents, scared either of dangerous traffic or of sexual predators, were afraid to let their children wander physically, so they allowed them to wander mentally instead. They swapped the old dispensation moral authority, power over ideas and the development of the imagination for the merely physical power to limit movement. The liberation of children's minds was, in part at least, the price for their loss of physical freedom.
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