Why Japanese Kids Can Walk to School Alone
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I submitted this exact story a week or so ago - from a different website. Opening is word for word, different image.
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/09/why-are-little-kids-i... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10320944
I can't imagine The Atlantic steals stories; obviously, this must have been re-sold. Just interesting to see it.
We've been seeing more of this cross-publishing lately, without links back to originals. I fear it will move the needle towards more dupes on HN (actual dupes, where we've already had a significant thread about the story in the last year or so).
Didn't know that - was surprised the author would have rights to resell his work, and in such a short timespan. That explains!
This is not by choice. It is enforced by society and law. Consider what would happen if you sent a three-year-old out on an errand as is done in Japan. A child that age, alone on the street, will attract attention, primarily of the concerned and meddling kind. The child will be asked where their parents are and promptly returned to them. The parents will be chewed out for reckless child endangerment as a bare minimum.
While one can argue today's child-associated paranoia is a result of fear-mongering by the media, the real problem is that it's backed up by the law. Parents who are too trusting and permissive will soon find themselves in court. That has to change.
Most accidents happen in the home. Most people do a poor job of making their home safe for infants. (EG look at the number of people in the UK who buy socket covers but who don't bolt their TVs to the wall)
Perhaps I misunderstand what you mean by "leave a 5 year old unsupervised" - does this mean "parent in the home but in different room"? Or "parent pops out to the local shop for half an hour"?
Because five year old children are far too young to be left unsupervised for anything over short lengths of time, and if a parent is regularly doing that they probably need a chat from child protection social services.
Kids being at home for an hour or 2 at that age is no issue either.
It’s not something special – everyone does it.
From 5 on, as with 6 we had to walk to school for 1.4 kilometer, and back, so there was no alternative.
And with 10, when many kids go to secondary school, we have to use public transit to get to school anyway, so many kids started at that age to take bus/metro/etc to go to other places, too.
But, maybe not. Poe's law rears its head once again.
Where?
Depends on where the family lives, how far the grocery store is and on the kid maturity.
Please , don't make general statements like that. Some 5 y.o. are mature enough to do that, some aren't. I wouldn't let my kid go to the grocery store alone if I lived in a crime ridden ghetto with shootings everyday and prostitution+Joes on the corner of my house, and neither would you.
But that does not happen. We kids walked a kilometer or two to the library, stores, bakery, etc. Always. As far as I can remember. With like 10 we started taking the bus halfway across the city to sports clubs or stuff.
That's my problem with your message ,because it is not true ,and it is not something that should be encouraged before it is made sure the environment in which the kid will evolve alone IS safe.
In fact, in my country, doing that can be used against parents in child neglect cases.
So no everyone does not do that and everyone should not do that.
Also, how do you suppose a child is going to go to school? Parents will be both at work already, how’s the kid going to go to primary school if not alone?
If two parents left for work and let their 6-year-old walk to school, they'd be risking serious legal trouble and/or the possible confiscation of their child by the government.
Parents can’t afford to waste time (or money) taking their kids to school when those can go to school perfectly safe anyway.
So it makes sense that children age 10 would be able to use the bus and go into the city and buy stuff themselves.
Anyway, in the United States, most school districts operate their own bus systems and, in most areas, these buses pick up and drop off the children very near to their house, if not right in front of their house.
Still, many children are driven directly to/from school each day by a parent. Most people that I know who do this have work schedules that are flexible enough to accommodate this.
We agree that the state sometimes oversteps the role (one or two cases of children who walked to school being aggressively pursued by child protection social workers per year) but it's frustrating that you ignore the hundreds of deaths (4 per day) caused by abusive or neglectful parents, and the many thousands of deaths caused by carelessness.
In 2008 about 1,700 children died as a result of abuse or neglect.
https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/systemwide/statistics/ca...
Still, children walking to school is not neglect. Children of age 10 walking and taking bus halfway across town is not neglect either.
There are some major through-roads in my city where it's common to see prostitutes, and of course there are apartments and houses just off the main roads.
Why should then we ever hear any kind of chatter from them?
According to Wikipedia, 100 years ago, there were about 100 lynchings per year in the US. [2] Therefore, lynching is a big deal.
I love this meme about the media. Quick question: for you, personally, when was the last time you saw a media story about an abducted child? When was the last time you saw a media story about paranoid helicopter parents, etc, repeating the ideas you see above? In my experience, the ratio is 1:10 if not 1:20.
There's a very straightforward reason why parents keep their kids indoors: the same parents, while outdoors, regularly encounter human beings that they wouldn't trust their kids around. Deinstitutionalization anyone? Free-range mental patients or free-range children: pick one. [3]
[1] http://www.freerangekids.com/over-700-children-are-abducted-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_psychiatric_institu...
Perinatal mental illness is a significant cause of death of women - in the UK suicide is the third leading cause of perinatal death.
Many women experience mental illness during or after pregnancy. Ignorant, stigmatising views like yours about mental illness make it harder for women to seek help for their mental health problems.
And your wider point is wrong. There's no evidence that people with a mental illness pose a risk of harm to other people or to children.
https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/pdf/perinatal_web.pdf
Rates of perinatal mental health problems
post-partum psychosis is about 2 women per 1,000 maternities;
chronic serious MI is 2:1000;
severe depressive illness 30:1000;
mild-moderate depressive illness and anxiety state 100-150:1000;
PTSD 30:1000;
adjustment disorders and distress 150:1000
Of course not. The cause of helicopter parenting is irrational parents who perceive, obviously due to media stereotypes, that people with a mental illness cause a risk of harm to other people or to children.
I love you, Weimerica. Don't ever change.
From outside, this thread looks like a set of mocking, contemptuous dismissals of anyone who doesn't agree with that ideological monoculture. Even without any dissenting thoughts, it remains a flamewar; just a flamewar with only one side. Perhaps I'm alone in finding that a little creepy.
What's the evidence that causes you to believe that there is an "ideological monoculture"[1] here? I don't know how close to a majority it is, but I'd guess there are many people that would agree with you. I for example 'vouched' for your top comment in this thread, since I thought it was wrongly flagged. But I cringed when I saw your 'Weimerica', because that's just not a useful means of discourse, and will cause people to dismiss your earlier (worthwhile) content.
I'd guess that Dan's response to you came from the same sentiment: you started well, but then veered off into "sheeple" territory[2]. Consider: is he more likely to offer corrective advice on "tone" to people with ideas he wants to see more of, or to those whose ideas themselves are unwelcome? Rather than concluding that your ideas aren't welcome here, consider that the problem might simply be the tone.
[1] Speaking of monoculture, did you know that Dan isn't American? Happy Thanksgiving, Dan!
[2] Regardless of the aptness of the term, I find "sheeple" a reliable indicator of a failed argument.
It is one phenomenon when everyone agrees. Probably everyone is right. When everyone who speaks agrees, and everyone who doesn't agree doesn't speak, that's quite a different pattern.
As I noted above, I agree: I think the problem is the tone. In combination with this pattern, of course.
(I should have just noted that it seems possible that the reason American parents find their children less safe in public is that they're right. Parents are worried about assaults and kidnapping. I couldn't find statistics on child assault and/or kidnapping, but the Japanese rape rate is roughly 27x (not 27%) lower than the American [1]. Given this fact, it's not immediately obvious why one should search for an additional cause of the disparity.)
Wherever our moderator is from, his perspective is an American perspective. This is an objective factual statement, like the fact that English is an Indo-European language. Probably in the same geographic region 100 years ago, there was a living pre-American intellectual tradition. But it hasn't existed since 1945 at the latest.
(The most concentrated remaining geographic locus of pre-American ideology is -- by no coincidence -- the subject of this article. Nippon Kaigi anyone? But I don't believe Dan is Japanese. And even Japan isn't exactly what it once was.)
[1] http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Japan/Unite... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nippon_Kaigi
You don't think the incoherence of the following posts proves the flaggers correct?
(Edit: are you saying happy thanks giving to me (not a mod) or dang (a mod)? Either way: Happy Thanksgiving!)
I lack certainty, but I think the post I vouched for is still a useful addition to the conversation. Generally, I try to flag (and recently, unflag) individual posts rather than expected user behavior.
That said, I probably wouldn't have tried to recover it if I'd read the Weimerica comment first. The later posts have some oblique insights. I can why one might downvote them (I didn't), but (unless I missed something) they don't seem flagworthy.
> are you saying happy thanks giving to me (not a mod) or dang (a mod)?
I was saying Happy Thanksgiving to the moderator Dan Gackle, since Monday is the Thanksgiving holiday in Canada. I hoped this was clear since he's the author of the grandparent comment, but I suppose other Dan's can share the goodwill!
If I were moderating a site like HN, I think I'd have explicit guidelines for anyone wanting to present a perspective which is a minority view or in any way otherwise controversial.
My guidelines would recommend special care in keeping your presentation with a completely neutral tone and an absolute absence of snark.
And in particular, the poster should be explicitly informed that his or her opponents will not, cannot, and probably even should not be held to anything remotely like the same high bar. Because that's life, kid.
In my opinion, someone with a contrarian view has an added responsibility: the responsibility of one who possesses more truth than others, since that is what having a minority view feels like (and maybe is). One has a duty to consider others' difficulty in hearing that truth. If you use the truth as a weapon, you trigger resistance and discredit it, which deprives others of it for longer. This harms them and sets back the cause of the truth, even while expressing it. The greater the truth, the more harm in that case.
When one knows one's view is unpopular there's a temptation to be pre-emptively defensive. One laces comments with snark, ridicules the conventional, and so on, as a way to flip the dullards the bird in advance, since you know they will reject your truth anyhow. It's like a Dostoevsky character who can't help tweaking the nose of the person he's talking to. Some even cultivate the art of packing as much snark into their language as possible, having given up on persuasion. I think it's fear of being rejected that causes it, plus a desire to show off: see what a contrarian I am.
What happens of course is that people react badly to being provoked, except for a few who identify with your side and join in the provoking. To us this feels like the dullards rejecting the truth; to them it feels like we're fanatics and assholes. Then we get a loop of anger and noise. Such discussions are all the same and learning is no longer possible.
The principle that the one who sees more (or thinks he does) has more responsibility is a way of keeping open a discussion in which people can still learn things and figure the truth out together. When one isn't up to this responsibility, maybe one should be silent until one is, not as a matter of censorship but of continence.
And yet I keep hearing about this need to prevent the mentally-ill from acquiring firearms. Is that just more ignorance? I'd be genuinely interested in hearing your take on that.
1) It's mostly ignorance. When we look at mass shooters we see histories of violence, or of drug and alcohol addiction, or sometimes mental illness. The drug and alcohol addictions and previous history of violence are better predictors of future violent behaviours.
2) Reducing access to means and methods is an important part of suicide prevention. People who complete suicide are more likely to have a mental health problem than the general population. Reducing access to guns would help those people. This does not need to be done through law. The taboo around suicide doesn't seem to stop people doing it, but does it does stop people seeking help. Ideally people would work together with their clinicians and carers to identify and ameliorate risk.
3) Some politicians seem to suggest that if you stop mentally ill people having guns you stop all mass shootings. That's clearly not true. You stop some of them. But when we talk about mental illness it's not clear what those politicians means. Do they mean serious, life long, psychotic style illness (rate about 2 people per 100)? Or the subset of that group who have command-hallucinations? Or do they mean everyone who's had a diagnosable mental illness? (Where diagnosable would be defined by DSM 5) - someone who was treated for depression two years ago? Someone with hoarding? Someone with OCD that was treated four years ago? It's odd to see people who are pro-gun using this argument, because their calling for about 1 in four people to be prevented from gun ownership. And not all mass-shooters use their own guns. Harper-Mercer (killed 9 people) used a mix of guns owned by him and his family; Lanza used guns bought by his mother.
4) Looking at mass shooters we see sometimes see failed checks: people with histories of violence are allowed to buy guns; people are prevented from buying some guns (eg rifles) but allowed to buy others (eg shotguns). Wong's background check took longer than 3 days, so he was allowed to buy a gun. He went on to kill 13 people.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/03/us/how-mass-sh...
And I think that is completely fair - some towns are safer than others, some children are more self sufficient than others, and every parent needs to make their own decisions. Hopefully educated and wise decisions.
No doubt. Co-worker let kids (probably 5-6 years old), play outside, in a cul-de-sac. While they were inside watching. Sure enough, anonymous neighbor called cops. CPS and cops got involved. Embarasing calls at work, monitoring from CPS (regular visits to "check" on them for a period of time), headaches, lost time.
Heck, the neighbor might have just not liked the color of their lawn and they knew that calling CPS and cops about kids will ensure maximum punishment for minimum risk to them ("Hey, I was just thinking about the safety of the children").
Once those in power act irrationally about anything. That will always be exploited. It was exploited many years ago in the Soviet Union. Neighbors would have spats about goats eating grass on the wrong side of the fence. Then one of them would denounce the others as "enemies of the people" and bam! family sent to Siberia in no time.
My family was completely ripped apart and destroyed by the child protection services in the UK.
Or maybe he was annoyed the the noise of kids playing outside. (I am not saying kids shouldn't play outside, just speculating on the motivation.)
The one thing that all foreigners could agree on, from dozens of nationalities around the globe, was that it was completely normal for a school-aged child to get home from school by themselves and spend the afternoon and/or early evening alone, calling on neighbours or others on hand if they needed help. Practically, many of these graduate students struggled to survive on tiny stipends, and took (sometimes not so legal) jobs to make ends meet. They also had to work harder than any American to try to have a chance of staying in America after their studies were complete.
Indiana state law and campus law enforcement did not take kindly to this. I was probably the only child of ex-Soviet extraction that was not at some point kidnapped by the university's security and turned over to an American foster family for two or three days while they sabre-rattled the parents with child neglect charges. These poor students had no money, no understanding of the US legal system, and they were helpless and scared. Many of them had to go through the "welcome to America, here's your middle finger!" experience. It was almost an established hazing ritual to be harassed by CPS/social services.
This harassment was a routine occurrence, and after a while, I learned that university security were not our friends, subconsciously souring me on police for life when I otherwise had no traumatic experiences on which to base that. They were always watching us, profiling us, trying to identify patterns such as seeing a child out after dark (which is like 4:30 PM in the winter in northern Indiana) routinely. Did they not have anything better to do? It was absolutely bewildering for almost all of the residents to learn that US state law considered it child neglect to leave a child unattended until age twelve; this would be unthinkable in most places around the globe.
I was around 9 or 10 when I started riding public transport. Tons of kids my age on the bus too.
Not 100% familiar with schools in the US, but in old movies you could see kids walking to school in all suburban settings -- up until the mid-nineties or so. That or school buses.
After that, in most movies there's a parent taking his kid(s) to school now (typically in a SUV), or the school bus.
This is a typical U.S. center mentality. US is an outlier in many aspects in day-to-day life. And when American travels abroad they deem many difference they encountered as exotic things unique to that place. I heard an American tourist comment when an Italian restaurant heated the milk before serving her child - "what an interesting Italian tradition", well, people all over the world avoid giving their children milk of fridge temperature.
I think what makes Japan the outlier is their shockingly low violent crime rate, crime rate against children (abductions, etc) and one of the lowest drug use in first world countries.
I remember during the 80s, one of the big things being pushed for by politicians was a low crime rate and low drug use (same time D.A.R.E came into the world). Looks like Japan discovered that utopia. Japan certainly has it's cultural problems (which country doesn't?) but I'd love to have their problems instead of our own. It would be nice to be worrying about working 12 hour days instead of worrying about being shot on my way to work every day (last year, a bullet ricocheted of the concrete near me kicking up a piece or a rock which hit me in my leg, requiring stitches).
I'm looking at society in general - I'm looking at the bigger picture. Japan completely eliminated shooting deaths via guns thanks to their ban on guns (source:http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/a-l...). They also have the lowest crime rate in the world. Orders of magnitude less than America's. In a way, it really is a utopia compared to what we're living in.
Would I trade some free time and a little freedom at work (both of which, are being addressed by Japanese companies and are "fixable" so they may only be a temporary problem) in order to save thousands of lives every single year, reduce the crime rate an order of magnitude, and make our country objectively safer and nicer? And also raise our quality of life (Japan is ranked higher on the "where-to-be-born" index) Why yes, yes I most certainly would.
I was mugged once walking on Halloween when I was 6-8 or so by a group of teenagers who took my candy and pushed me to the ground. They then continued to walk down the street (toward my house) and I ran home crying, told my dad, he confronted the teens, identified their parents (not sure how) and called them. In the end I got something of the candy back and I don't know what happened to the teens. I don't think I ever liked Halloween much after that experience.
And as kids, even just 5, we walked to the bakery and bought bread rolls for the family breakfast.
And when they start to have to use public transit to get to secondary school with 10 every day, it makes sense that they start by going shopping or similar places with 8/9 by bus/metro/etc.
I was driven to school, though I walked 250m to a neighbours house half the time for the lift. Walking to school would have taken over half an hour at a good, adult pace.
(The fear was probably traffic more than strangers.)
From 10 on I had to go to a secondary school which was 4.5km away, so I usually used the bike, but walked sometimes. At that age I also started using the bus to get to the other side of the city, or to take the bike and go to a cinema 12km away with friends, etc.
We obviously had almost no traffic here – except for busses and bikes. And construction vehicles.
I'm not sure if the data exists for that period, but violent crimes against children in the US are declining sharply. Assault is down 33% between 2003 and 2011, rape down 43%. Matches up with the broader collapse in violent crime in the US.
Now you asked about the 60s, and for murder as a whole (other violent crime follows the same trend), the 30s and 80s were peaks, and the 60s and right now are valleys; if we assume violence against children tracks violence as a whole, it's probable that the the crime rate against children right now is roughly the same now as it was in the 60s (ie, tied for the lowest level since the great depression).
Conversely, I think it's pretty clear that the imagined crime rate (for everything, including children) is basically at an all time high. Polls routinely show that overwhelming majorities of people believe crime is getting worse, even as we settle in for another decade of collapsing crime rates.
So in short, while I'm not aware of any research that answers your question exactly, the answer is very clearly "yes".
Media has 24 hours to cover things today as opposed to an hour or two back in the day. We hear about everything today and ratings are made by scaring the crap out of us. Welcome to the shutin world for children.
Those kind of risk are hard to evaluate.
I thought of this while I was watching the video. Japanese suburban fabric is much more compact, fine grain, mixed-use and more spatially coherent than North American equivelents. These contribute to the'eyes on a street'[1] condition in which neighborhood stores and residences look out onto public streets and reinforce communal saftey. The cul-de-sacs and degenerate grids of North American suburbs not only make walking incredibly inefficient[2], but also increase the isolation and community-orientation of the streets.
[1] Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities [2] http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/10/bad-habits-of-north-a...
Multiculturalism destroys social trust. America is the most culturally diverse western nation, ergo it has the lowest public trust. As America continues to diversify, and in as much as Europe does so, we can expect social trust to continue to decline.
All of the above anglo-saxon countries are multicultural. Continental Europe has been mostly homogeneous (until recently, but still).
This sounds more of a question how the bureaucracy works and its traditions.
Doctors putting fancy papers with ceremonial seals on their walls sounds like a US popular TV thing, for example. Do they really do that?
Like what and like where, specifically? (Dutch here, can't really confirm or come up with examples that'd match that).
> All of the above anglo-saxon countries are multicultural. Continental Europe has been mostly homogeneous
The generalisations are too broad, putting say France in the same category as Poland makes no sense. Canada/US/Australia are of course in a diversity category of their own as de facto lands of immigrants (although that overstates diversity, I think. Dutch and British heritage in Canada is a pretty meaningless difference nowadays as a proxy of heterogeneity of society), but I feel GB's diversity is pretty similar to various European countries. It's hard to make exact comparisons due to different data points. It seems outside of the anglo-saxon world, most governments (urged by sociologists) have let go of defining demographics in terms of 'race' (whatever that means) or skin color, but rather based on ethnicity or heritage. So in GB you get things like white and black and asian (with the latter data often split into India/Pakistani) and in the Netherlands or France you'll get things like 'parents both French born, one parent foreign born, parents both foreign born', with all kinds of splits for nationality. It's hard to compare but I feel GB's multiculturalism is pretty similar to say France or the Netherlands just to take an example.
in the first grade i took the public bus halfway across town and then walked a few blocks
someone offered me candy and a ride one time, i declined
has something changed?
I live opposite a primary school. Everyday I see children who must be 6 or 7 years old walk to it.
I guess that it is all to do with the level of criminality in the general community. The USA does have a homicide rate and a violent crime rate that is significantly higher than than of many other rich nations.
I mostly blame cable news for helicopter parenting. The data shows that there is much less violent crime than there was 40 years ago, but when something bad does happen and cable news jumps all over the story, it creates a false impression of the world being a very dangerous place.
As they mention, young children are involved early on with community work. They also have instilled compliance from an early age --ever notice all the voice commands everywhere? In school, at the subway, at the combini, at the depato, at the escalator. It's pervasive and it results in a society homogenous in many aspects. Of course, there are dissidents and outcasts and otaku and non-conformists, but most observe core attitudes.
I think this contributes to the way they can have a degree of dependability on others. That's not to say there aren't deviants and people who take advantage of the norms. But to borrow from their vocabulary, they are unique, in some ways, and I don't think it's transplantable.
Kids who had their parents walk them to school were made fun of, which is why I think its a cultural thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWW4xzlrOWQ
I've heard reactions from Canadians who go to Korea or Japan and they are puzzled that nobody would steal, even if wallet was bulging with cash and the guy was passed out on the streets, he doesn't have to worry.
To me this is the success of a homogenous neo-confucius brings order in society. Self reflection and honor prevents a cesspool of cultures ready to rip each others throats from forming.
I ponder if Western societies can continue to function if they just keep letting anyone of any background and culture in especially when they choose not to integrate and shout 'racism' when they have to do something that requires the slightest bit of thinking and respect.
Sometimes I look at my city, shootings, the violence, gangs, mental illnesses and ponder what life would've been like in Korea or Japan.
I was 18, it was the day after I finished my final high school exams, I had partied with a few girls, most went home, 2 of us – me and a friend – were trying to find a place to drink something. We ended up at some gas station, as all other stores were closed, and tried to buy alcohol.
Some people were standing there, too, waiting in a queue, some of them migrants, some obviously homeless, some kinda nice dressed.
A friend of mine tried to pay with her EC card, and was too drunk to use it or enter her PIN – so she asked if someone of the other crowd would be able to help her (I, myself, was also quite drunk). So she gave this guy her wallet, told him to "take out the yellow EC card, PIN is 2814"[1], and indeed, he did this.
They – also wanting to buy alcohol – asked us if we wanted to follow them to a nearby party. We did, and ended up having a fun night playing singstar with them.
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It’s not ethnicity, or social class, or homogenity that leads or prevents crime.
We’ve done similar things not once, but several times. And you know what? Never was anything stolen.
Once I forgot a jacket, and couldn’t remember where anymore – next morning someone had posted the jacket onto a facebook group of the city with 60k users and I was able to get it back.
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