Why Do We Judge Parents for Putting Kids at Perceived But Unreal Risk?
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I wouldn't let my kid do it here in US. Not because I wouldn't trust them or think it is dangerous. But because I am afraid what neighbors, school, CPS would do.
My co-worker let his kids play in the cul-de-sac for an hour while they watched from the house. An anonymous neighbor reported them to police, and a sequence of embarrassing calls at work ensued, statements to police, follow up visits from police, etc.
And this is not some dangerous part of the city. This is suburbs, as safe as they come.
But apparently you are never safe from neighbors with an agenda.
And the thing is, there is nothing you can say or do, even if you knew this neighbor. "Well I was worried for the children!". Unless they openly confessed it was because you cut the lawn wrong or they don't like the color of your house, there is nothing you can do to them (well maybe turn evil and report them for other irrational fears -- terrorism "but I was worried about this country's safety, swear heard them talk about buying a lot of fertilizer").
The interesting thing is, once those in power act irrationally about something. There will always be people to exploit that element. I heard from my grandparents how neighbors would rat on each other imaginary things during Stalin's times. The results were usually the neighbors family would be taken in the middle the night and sent to Siberia never to be seen again. This is of course, an extreme example but it illustrates, how irrationality can and will be exploited.
Go up a few blocks to Park Slope, an extremely safe and cleaned up place, and there's no kids in sight.
Or maybe just because they've always lived there - more and more folks are living near (or with) family these days.
Which isn't the only reason to live in the suburbs, but it's a major reason for a rather significant number of people. I mean, a suburban town not far from me got started to get away from the blacks (the way the honest locals phrased it, not proudly), and that was just 50 years ago. Fear drives a lot of suburban movement.
Speaking of "perceived but unreal risk"....
> One afternoon this past April, a Florida mom and dad I'll call Cindy and Fred could not get home in time to let their 11-year-old son into the house. The boy didn't have a key, so he played basketball in the yard. He was alone for 90 minutes. A neighbor called the cops, and when the parents arrived—having been delayed by traffic and rain—they were arrested for negligence.
> "My older one was the so-called 'victim,'" she said during a phone interview. But since she and her husband were charged with felony neglect, the younger boy had to be removed from the home, too.
If you are not liked by your neighbors, it seems like a very real risk.
That's pretty much what you just did.
There are two claims someone might make. "X is common, and it poses a meaningful risk", or "X exists, and it poses a non-zero risk". Anecdotes do not help much with the first claim, but they do help with the second.
So perhaps we can agree that child abductions CAN happen, and that CPS overreach DOES occur. Then we can review the real risks of both.
I've seen data on the real risk of child abductions. I have never seen data on the real risks of CPS overreach. (And it would be difficult to define "overreach".) Does anyone know of any such data?
(Because also, in the complete absence of actual data, anecdotes are better than nothing.)
Seriously, once you see the parallels between how parents afraid of criminals and parents afraid of CPS talk about the risks you can't un-see them.
Number of kids investigated by the CPS 3.2 million.
Are you telling me that even though you, like me, don't know the exact percentage of the time that CPS is mistaken, you expect it to be less that 0.0036%?
First we see from the data that CPS declared 2.5 million of those 3.2 as "non-victims" so we can eliminate type 1 errors from almost 80% of the population right there.
Of the remaining 700k it's not inconceivable at all that in a big percentage of cases there were actually significant parental problems. Frankly I bet that type 2 errors are much more common that type 1 for this population.
> 2.5 million of those kids were declared 'non-victims.' Another 686,000 were 'abused' or 'neglected.' And an estimated 1,640 kids died as a result.
Their error rate on non-victims is a helluva alot higher than that.
I don't have faith their error rate for victims is much better given we don't have data for that.
That is what I responded to.
> You know how if you talk to an overprotective parent about how it's really ok to let their kids wander around outside on their own a little they're always at the ready with a link to a news story about something horrible happening? And you know how that news story is always anecdote and not data?
You implied the extent of the risk was a couple uncomfortable conversations based on an anecdote. Hypocrisy much?
Based on personal experience, I don't have much faith in the quality of CPS investigations.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/in-a-yea...
> One statistic that stood out in the report: since 2008, the number of referrals to child protective service agencies (hereafter CPS) has increased by 8.3 percent, even as overall rates of actual child victimization declined by 3.3 percent during the same period. There is no system that can totally avoid putting parents who don't deserve it through investigations, despite the fact that even the best moms and dads would regard the ordeal as nightmarish. Over time, however, the number of undeserving parents so burdened seems to be increasing–and the number is large (note that "screened out" referrals are the ones deemed not even worth investigating):
The numbers are clearly moving in the wrong direction for the rate of reporting.
> He goes on to explain that while taking kids from parents in this fashion is only permitted in emergencies as a matter of law, the way things play out in practice is very different. "According to statistics published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, more than 100,000 children who were removed in 2001–more than one in three–were later found not to have been maltreated at all,"
Given CPS investigates gets ~3.4 million complaints a year and there are ~74 million kids, a substantial number of these complaints are screened out because they are basically random/irrelevant.
I'm not in the habit of ignoring 1 in 20 odds, especially if I've got a 1 in 5 shot at it being something serious.
That is alot higher than the risk of terrorism, for instance, affecting me personally.
But when it comes to your own individual life, you can either live your life in fear of the boogeyman or you can live your life the way you want to live it. Let your kids live their lives the way you think they should.
And if CPS shows up one day when they shouldn't, you lawyer up and fight.
That's what a grownup does.
And that's ignoring the huge cost involved.
> That's what a grownup does.
The sheer condescension and lack of empathy you packed into a single comment is quite sad, tbh.
I tell you I have personal experience with CPS...and your response is I am terrified of a monster under my bed that isn't real.
K.
> And if CPS shows up one day when they shouldn't, you lawyer up and fight.
Most people can't afford $50k legal bills to fight the government. Are you really this isolated and ignorant that this doesn't even occur to you?
Look, Harry, you say things like this:
> Yes, I do think it's less than 0.0036%.
I show you the false negative rate is a helluva alot higher than that and you still spout when you clearly have no clue what you are talking about.
Just walk away before you continue to embarrass yourself.
In order to fix this we've gotta be a little defiant. If one person acts differently they're gonna be the oddball and the system is going to knock them down. Maybe it's CPS. Maybe it's a nosey neighbor. Who knows. This gets better when A LOT of people start acting differently.
Sure. If you're poor or otherwise not in a position to fight the system I don't expect you to be first in line. But I've got a dollar that says that doesn't apply to you or DanBC or some of the others in this thread. The median Hacker News reader is a white engineer with a good salary and is, more that almost anyone, in a position to stand up to the system if it causes them problems. I'm in that group too. It's our responsibility to make things better, not just for ourselves but also for the people that aren't in a position to do so on their own.
That's what I think.
Making blanket statements with numbers that in no way reflect reality doesn't embarrass you? Making statements about other people's life experiences from a position of clear ignorance of how the system works doesn't embarrass you?
I'm honestly concerned for you at that point because you remind me of that family friend my parents had that lived out in the desert and believed in conspiracy theories because he "felt" they were real.
> There is a lot of research literature that makes me pretty convinced that the way Americans raise their kids has gotten worse. We are, as a society, overprotective.
I'm waiting for your evidence that the risk is less than 0.0036% as you previously stated you "felt" it was.
> That's what I think.
I care about facts that can be reinforced by actual evidence on some level. You clearly do not have any in regards to the topic at hand.
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The rest of it is a tangent about your opinion on "solutions" that are, ultimately, irrelevant, unless you have evidence you've succeeded with these tactics on some level politically. Do you have such evidence?
Are you even aware the burden of proof is a preponderance of evidence in many states (for instance NY?) Or that they allow hearsay which is little more than gossip?
http://www.jdbar.com/Articles/Child-Neglect/child-neglect.ht...
> For a disposition hearing, evidence need only be material and relevant, meaning that hearsay is permitted. In addition, any new facts occurring up to the date of the dispositional hearing may be considered by the court at a dispositional hearing.
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Look, if you can't back up BOTH of your opinions with clear citations showing it is true you need to stop.
> The suspect then held the boy as the mom took a phone call, according to investigators. The suspect then walked out of the mall cradling the boy in her arms, police said.
If you ever answer your phone, it seems like a very real risk somebody will snatch up your baby.
Then all of a sudden the teenage boy (about 15-16 years old) runs out of the house over to her and starts talking to her. The mother runs out soon after. I walk over there and they are talking to her and looking concerned at me. I walk up and the mom is yelling at me about letting my daughter outside alone. I explain to her that I was here the whole time watching. She then says that some stranger could have come up to her in which I reply, "I know. It's a good thing I was here."
My daughter said she was afraid to go in the front yard after that because she said the creepy neighbors are probably watching her. Thank goodness they moved away a few months ago.
Now maybe I had a charmed childhood, but I'm in my mid twenties, so it's not like I'm talking about growing up in the 50's here. My parents are older though, they did grow up in the 50s, and I I know they view independence as an important individual trait. I'm sure overprotective parents are not a recent phenomenon. One of my (younger) brother's friends was accompanied to and from school by his mother well in to High School. Walk, drive, riding a bike, you name it, she was there.
My mom asked her about this once, and she was like "Oh, [Declanomous's Mother], you have [Declanomous] and [Son #2]. I just have [her son]. I don't know what I'd do if anything happened to him." My mom thought this point was kind of ridiculous, because it's not as if one child is a backup for another child. She just let my brother and I run around because she wanted us to learn to do things on our own.
Personally I think the current environment vis-a-vis child rearing reflects a larger trend towards fear in overall society. Part of this is a result of a larger focus on danger in childhood development, but I feel like a whole culture around existential fear really developed after 9/11. It seems like we started viewing the entire world as dangerous, rather than being ripe for exploration. I feel like this is really noticeable when watching media from different eras. Popular TV shows before 9/11 were Seinfeld, Friends, and Fraiser. After 9/11 shows like CSI, 24, etc. became very popular.
I could be completely wrong. I know shows like Law and Order and ER were very popular before 9/11. I recall them being less existentially terrifying though. This could just be because I was very young at the time though.
Paranoia has risen because so few people have full-sized families these days. Losing one kid has become a tragedy.
It makes people uncomfortable to think about people in economic terms(1) but that doesn't mean those uncomfortable people are right.
1. We see this in many areas of society from health care funding to liability laws.
I'm also curious if calls to CPS, etc. are more common today because suburban dwellers know their neighbors less than in the past?
Imagine having to sit through a serious conversation in which every aspect of your home life is inspected. For example, a (former) family friend reported that in our 100-year-old house, there were some ants in our kitchen. Not thousands of ants, but a handful. Imagine having to defend this as if it was a serious threat to your children's safety by someone who could legally remove them.
Strictly speaking, AFAIK, in most jurisdictions they actually don't have the power to do so, even temporarily, on their own judgement -- they either need a warrant issued by a judge on a finding of probable cause, or law enforcement action in an emergency situation where a warrant isn't practical. So, really, the police and/or courts have the power to take your children away.
One thinks of Homeowner Associations and the way they place fines and pseudo-legal orders on people, a concept which is utterly anathema to the english. The two cultures have very different ideas of privacy.
On the other hand, this protectiveness of our personal standard of parenting means that in order to enforce our standards, we must see the kids and people must defer to the parents for discipline. It almost means that because we don't allow others to impose their judgements on our kids, that they then impose their judgements on the parents.
The challenge is that, if someone sees behavior that isn't the norm in their experience, and that they personally consider (rightly or wrongly) to be insanely dangerous, what are they really to do? OK, they probably shouldn't raise a stink if some kid is riding a bike without a helmet. What if they're playing with firecrackers?
Unlike other places I've lived in, here there is a real fear that someone will dislike the way you raise your children and report you, creating much more serious problems for you than they might do elsewhere, at least not with the same ease.
I think it has a lot to do with what @stinkytaco said in his reply. It's a breakdown in communication and the same thing happens in other aspects of our lives, not just the child-rearing. I believe that this is what happens when there's so much emphasis on personal, individual freedom at the expense of larger communities those individuals form part of, all the way to the largest community -- the society itself.
It is {thing} the parent would never in a million years let their kids do (generally due to a perceived risk) and therefore other parents are actively endangering their kids if they let their kid do {thing}. Whether or not the risk exists and whether or not some small amount of risk is "better for the development of the child" (eg: independence/navigational skills developed by being able to walk to/from school unattended)
My own mother is one of those overprotective judging types. She'd never report to CPS unless it was clear-cut endangering the child (eg: physically beating them/doing hard drugs). But she still looks down on the neighbors for letting their kids play in the front lawn. The street being dangerous - kids should only play in the back yard! And only under adult supervision. My mother refuses to use a babysitter (even family) lest they let her children do something she would consider "too dangerous" or "stupid". I've gotten into a few arguments with her how I think that is doing more harm than good but they're not my kids so I don't have a say in it.
E:
And what CodeMage said. 100% agree there as well.
IRL, anecdotally, I've found the opposite to be the case. It is almost always parents who feel something is wrong with the other person's parenting style.
I've also found it depends to be a culture desire to passive aggressively impose your will/lifestyle on other people.
1. Mothers 2. Childless women 3. Fathers 4. Childless men
In other words, the ones who know the most about child rearing (in our culture, that is mothers), are the worst at assessing risk.
Leaving aside the dubious connection to knowledge about child rearing, including the suggestion that childless women have more knowledge than fathers on that point, "most prone to overestimate risks in low-risk situations" is not the same as "worst at assessing risk".
I suspect if a ranking was produced of those most likely to underestimate risk in high-risk situations, you'd get exactly the reverse ordering.
1) Mothers 2) Fathers 3) Childless women 4) Childless men
(Childless woman here, defending our honor)
Yes, the English idea of privacy is that you, the commoner, should leave well enough alone while the State surveils you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politeness_theory#Negative_pol...
I suspect that -- like the reports of crimes against children that spur them -- the frequency of such excessive, busybody complaints is far less than it appears from the frequency with which one hears about them.
And yes, there may be the crazy one that will still call them, but the neighbourhood will agree _he_ is the crazy one.
> "Well I was worried for the children!". Unless they openly confessed it was because you cut the lawn wrong or they don't like the color of your house, there is nothing you can do to them
My initial thought is that I'd rather have the asshole who hates the way I cut my lawn. I can turn him into a friend. Hell, I can just start cutting my lawn the way he wants.
But the person who is convinced that rapists lurk behind every parked car will be incredibly difficult to convert. They might never agree with me that my kid is as safe riding their bike home from school as they are riding in a car with me.
Pardon potential classist/racial undertones of this, but seems that it could be the beginning of H.G. Wells Eloi and Morlocks. Where the Eloi are fragile and afraid and the Morlocks have freedom of movement.
Suburban children get so protected that they actually become a danger to their own progression.
Children growing up in many neighborhoods in NYC seem more autonomous. Of course, that's technology too -- they have access to public transit and a dense bikable/walkable environment, while suburban kids are stuck living with outdated misplanned car-centric infrastructure and basically live like prisoners reliant on their parents to ferry them everywhere until they turn 16, or even much later depending on their access to driver's education.
Just one example, I'm sure there's suburbs in the US where CPS would be called if someone was biking around with their child in the back of the bike [1] but that's perfectly commonplace and OK in NYC.
[1] Here's an example of something just as bad if not worse (and doubly tragic) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radley-balko/raquel-nelson-jai...
Also in Bushwick my neighbors were very vigilant over their children, but they also knew all their neighbors as well. It's nice when the community is actually a community.
I think 99pi did a story on this about green lawns. They commented that a green lawn wasn't really a status symbol for yourself, but rather your neighbors. If you let your yard grow unruly, neighbors would come and tend it for you.
The idea is that owning a home and land was the american dream, this land was where you could do what you will. The ultimate self determination. However, the reality is, that your neighbors and the HOA just want to tell you how you will manicure your home. So in reality, people who proclaim self determination are enacting a socialist policy.
Actually, it's that they want to enforce some basic standards to ensure property values aren't diminished because of the negligence of a home owner.
There are plenty of neighborhoods in the US that don't have neighborhood Associations nor HOA's.
It does, indirectly. It is perceived that a pattern of packages being left outside attracts thieves to the neighborhood, increasing neighborhood crime rate, decreasing property values.
(That's not to say that individual HOA actions in this area are reasonable or proportional, just that there is a nexus with property values.)
When I was young, we moved into a house my dad built new on an odd shaped lot. A triangular section of what had been our lot had been purchased by the neighbor, in hopes that no one would move in and conflict with the landscaping. This neighbor came over and told my dad how the landscaping should be done, so as not to conflict with his.
My dad proceeded to do everything the opposite of what this neighbor said.
I don't have kids but if I did, this is exactly the kind of nasty thing that would make me think twice about moving to the suburbs, extra space and yards be damned.
Dense cities give me the creeps.
I do however have some level of knowledge here. I have spoken with people involved in child protection about questions like this. I have been told that if this person saw a parent allowing their 11-year-old child to cross the street to play on a playground unsupervised that they would have to write it up. They backed this up with citations of specific laws (Maryland - which does, indeed, have absurd laws on this subject). So while statistics might convince me that this is an anomaly, I do have personal experience that suggests the CPS risk is real.
I wouldn't let my kid do it here in US. Not because I wouldn't trust them or think it is dangerous. But because I am afraid what neighbors, school, CPS would do.
In grade school, my sister and I and our friend would sometimes spend the entire day in the woods in the dead of winter. The real danger in this country isn't the criminal and the bogeyman. The real danger in this country is the evaporation of real community and a broken pseudo-society of mutual disdain suspicion. Who is your real community? If you had a pet, who could you ask to watch your pet for a week? Who would you ask to watch your kids for an afternoon for no payment? That's your real community. Large numbers of Americans have no real community at all.
But apparently you are never safe from neighbors with an agenda.
Because they are "neighbors" and you are not in real community with them.
it kind of harkens to reeducation camps, etc. It means diverging their thought process from their parents' way of thinking. This applies to Appalachia, Detroit, Volgograd or Lagos.
It's clearly not just the parents. It's the community in which people find themselves living in. Look at the examples of people who manage to raise their class standing. They usually do it by making contacts outside of their community.
This story doesn't add up. 1 hour playing in front of their house resulted in a thorough investigation conducted by the police? I'm sorry, but I don't buy it.
The society is sick. It has the moral equivalent of cancer, or some auto-immune disease, eating it from inside.
There needs to be some way of walking this back, but I can't think what that might be except literally trying to get a law in place giving parents broad immunity. I can't even really imagine how such a law would be worded without completely gutting CPS and related organizations in other countries.
Child Services makes use of broad powers and would indeed be "gutted" if they couldn't act until neglectful parents were tried or pled guilty. I think that is a good tradeoff. Similarly, I don't mind that civil forfeiture reform lets drug dealers continue to drive sometimes. This is a major political controversy, though.
Alternatively, it may be that we want to take the same 'rational' look at risk that we want the courts/child services to take. Maybe the few kids that get taken away 'unreasonably' are actually just the cost of having an otherwise sane system. Lest that come off as callous, I just mean that if you have a country of 300 million, you'll get some pretty far out scenarios played out. You don't necessarily want to add process to protect those very few scenarios that are outrageous because it may cost more (by e.g. tying CPS' hands so that they can't take actually at-risk children out of homes).
I guess I'm suggesting that this might, in the end, be much ado about nothing. It's hard to say without numbers and analysis.
But if you talk with "regular people", you'll notice that media coverage gives people an unwarranted fear of outlier events: terrorism, mass shootings, plane crashes, etc.
In reality, almost everyone in the US should fear the real killers: obesity, cancer, stroke, etc.
In fact, I would not be surprised if people were so stressed out about these rare things they can not control that they developed habits like binge eating, drinking, and smoking - that had a much higher chance of leading to their early demise.
News media today is not about investigative reporting, or real news. It's about selling ads and getting eyeballs. So they report rare events as if they happen every day and you need to keep watching so you know what to do about it.
The news media today is toxic. You could do little more to improve your outlook on life and the future than simply not watching it. At all. I haven't watched a news program on any major network or any cable news in several years, and I don't miss it at all.
That's your problem. There has always been a major step down in quality from print to TV (precisely because of the need to fill airtime and hold people's attention to it).
That step is smaller now as papers get more desperate to stay alive, but there are still print media doing good work. Drastically better than cable news, anyway.
I've stopped watching the news and just read it whenever I hear of something going on that piques my interest on the Internet. It's pointless for me to watch 24-hour news coverage of a shooting or kidnapping that is just going to make me think less of the world I live in.
> How much risk was there of some harm coming to the child while the parents were gone?
As a parent to young children, I would say pretty damn high, actually. Kids do stupid things all the time, and if you aren't there, and they know you aren't there, there is no limit to the stupid things a 2 year old can do. It's a normal part of growing up, but that doesn't make it safe to do it alone in the slightest.
That said, I agree with the gist of the article overall.
For example, going outside and down the street half-a-block for five minutes while your child is watching their favorite show is quite a bit different than leaving them working in the kitchen with knives laying around.
I remember years ago about a women who had the police escort a kid to her house because she'd let him bicycle to school (wearing a helmet and it was < 2 miles). That is kinda crazy. When I went to elementary school (early 90s), there was a whole group of kids who walked to school. Sometimes the teacher in charge of the gate would forgot to unlock it and we'd see them all pile up while in homeroom (huge fence, took like 15 min to walk around so most kids would just wait).
You overestimate 7 & 8 year olds. I know I definitely did. Ran into the side of a moving car.
At one point my parents got worried that maybe it was to much, and got me a child minder. I proceeded to boycott her by dropping my school bag, leaving to play outside and not coming back until my parents would be there to pick me up - after a couple of weeks of that they decided it was pointless and let me be at home by myself again instead.
To the bigger point, even a supervising parent is not going to be able to prevent a lot of these "kids do dumb things" examples.
My daughter is much better (at 7). Kids are all crazy.
Then I had another kid. He'll turn the drawers into stairs and have climbed halfway to the counter in the time it takes you to run to the mailbox.
Point being, kids are all very different from one another, even within the same family. Something that's risky to your kid might not be risky to mine, and vice-versa. Some things are globally risky (pools, hot cars) but you might be surprised at the range of risk any particular child has.
I'm pretty sure the only way to keep me safe in that house would've been to not have objects.
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It doesn't say if the 2-year-old was asleep (does it? skimmed the article) - if it was asleep in a crib then it was probably in very little danger. When we lived in an apartment we would sometimes put the baby down and when we were sure he was asleep we'd go to the apartment hot tub. The hot tub was right under our room, we could see our front entryway and the baby's window. We would also start a phone call and leave one phone in the baby's room and take the other with us on mute as a longer distance baby-monitor. I don't think this was putting our son in danger.
>According to the Pinal County Sheriff's Office, a neighbor found the 2-year-old boy outside his home in the 700 block of East Payton Street Thursday night and called authorities.
>Deputies arrived and found the child screaming and crying, attempting to get into the residence. They said the boy was barefoot and wearing only a diaper and a T-shirt. The child was reportedly red-faced, sweaty and dirty.
He rode down that hill until it was time to go home and even fell a couple of times (though no bones broken). Mission accomplished.
Emotionally, no way.
She's had the police and the neighborhood watch called repeatedly because our children were playing in our own yard.
It's not a world I recognize and I'm increasingly disturbed by people's strange ideas about children.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually illegal to make frivolous complaints of this nature.
For a year or so I had a habit of taking a long daily walk in my neighborhood -- sometimes I would take my baby boy out and wear him in on my back in a baby carrier. That gave my wife a break and after a hundred yards or so he would inevitably fall asleep.
Someone apparently called the police saying I was carrying a dead baby around the neighborhood in a backpack, and I had an officer stop and ask if he could talk to me and verify that the backpack was actually a child carrier. He was apologetic and friendly about the whole thing but it really makes me wonder WTF my neighbors think about us...
IMO the sooner you're given responsibilities the sooner you learn to be responsible.
As when there was talk of raising the driving age because 'all these teens are dying' - it's inexperience, not so much the age which matters.
Although I'm not super-excited about putting teenagers behind the wheels of cars until their brains have caught up with their bodies and they don't think they are immortal any more...
I think the fact a lot of people's first car is normally old, cheap and crappy has a lot to do with it. It's commonly believed it's an inevitability young drivers will wreck and then we put them in the most unsafe vehicles available...
Sounds easily exploitable too. Want to advertise something dangerous? Just show people doing it in morally good situations.
Here's a chain of correlations: parents who leave their children alone at random (rather than in a structured and pre-planned way) are probably more impulsive. Trait-impulsivity is hereditary. Thus, leaving a (blood-related) child alone is predictive of that child taking more risks and being the kind of child who can't be left alone safely.
(On the other hand, leaving a child you're the adoptive parent or guardian of alone isn't predictive of anything.)
To think that I would be forced to raise children to be deficient per social rules is unsettling at best, and disturbing when considering that this is happening everywhere in the US.
What could the future hold in store? How much more extreme can this get?
Actually a lot of the crazy shit you might associate with "USA" is only relevant for certain communities.
For instance a parent that would leave a 2-year old alone to go play pokemon probably has other terrible parenting judgement/skills and most likely the environment they leave the kid in IS actually more dangerous than someone who accidentally leaves their kid alone.
They are standardizing risk assessment across all environments, but that's statistics not reality. Certainly some peoples moral assessments have gone overboard (it's crazy that kids can't go to the park unattended when they reach a general maturity). But I don't think it's unreal to assess the risk to a child as higher if you also think their parents are amoral and likely bad parents. Those kids ARE probably at higher risk in my opinion, either from their parents not being as cautious at establishing a healthy environment or in not being good enough parents to teach their kids how to behave in a safe manner when left alone.
I don't know how much context was put into the actual study, and I agree that we make a lot of moral judgements without all the facts. But it seemed like the jist of the research was that our moral judgements of the parents should have no basis in our assessment of the perceived risks to a child. I refute that to an extent.
> Letting children play is dangerous, being negligent is safe
Very 1984.
My point is that the parent who is accidentally negligent most likely is providing their child with a safer environment than the parents who intentionally leave their child alone.
BTW have you even had a 2-year old? I doubt very much there was ever a point in history where 2-year olds were left with zero supervision. Sure it might be an older sibling or some other community member watching them, but I can't imagine how someone feels leaving a 2-year old alone at home is a reasonable thing.
In Denmark today 0-2 year olds are regularly left outside in a baby stroller to nap while their parents are inside.
Edit: I think a lot of people in this thread are getting the idea that I'm advocating parents need to helicoptor parent their 2-year olds 24/7. Not at all what I'm saying. I don't think you are greatly increasing risks to your child in that scenario.
In both cases you usually don't see whether the parents left their child intentionally or not.
Whatever the real reason, harassing the parents is quite a judgement based on a statistics with sample size 1.
Point I'm making is directed at the study, which contends that our moral judgements should have no impact on how we assess the risk to a child. Even though I think our morals are heavily skewed and unnecessary, I bet they at least point in the correct direction of what the risk to a specific child is as compared to the average statistical risk to all children.
Your comment seems culturally biased. See the movie Babies? The Mongolian baby Bayar was often left alone for hours.
Shows a toddler in Mongolia--probably younger than two--tethered to a bed in a tent all day while her parents work in the field. She gets checked up on at lunch time when her parents come back (and probably other times).
Such actions are routine in other cultures.
Here's a mother who left young children (oldest was four) to fend for themselves for a day while she went off on a drink and drug "binge": https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/nov/17/binge-mother-drug...
Plenty of deaths feel preventable. Her's a mother who didn't supervise her children and they ran into traffic. That event caused social services to take interest in her, and they advised her to cover a garden pond. She didn't, and one day while she was not paying attention to her children one of them died. That's a tragedy for that family.
I was under the impression that child-safe pool fences (legal requirement in Australia) have reduced the number of children drowning in the family pool.
I was also under the impression that the various ad champagnes over the decades about not leaving children unattended in the bath have also reduced the number of kids drowning in the bath.
I was also under the impression that requiring all new homes to have RDCs (Residual Current Device) installed has reduced the number of electrocutions of children and non-children.
I was also under the impression that providing various first aid techniques can and does save lives.
As far as I'm aware requiring all occupants of a motor vehicle (except buses, for some reason) to wear a seat belt, and requiring all new motor vehicles to be fitting with airbags, has reduced the number of children being injured or dying in motor vehicle accidents.
Also see: traction control; ABS braking; smoke detectors; PDFs (Personal Flotation Devices); food safety regulations; bicycle helmets / skate helmets / etc; bicycle lighting; step barrier / balustrades & handrails; exit signs and fire escapes.
I could go on.
As someone who leans a little left of centre (but only a tiny bit, I'm a closet right-wing), I think some regulation is a good thing. But maybe that stance just encourages the weak to thrive, thereby diminishing the viability of the entire species. Only time will tell.
I imagine the vast majority of people reading this don't have a problem with requiring houses to have smoke/CO detectors, for example.
Where you get into arguments is when some behavior is only somewhat common or where, as discussed here, the safety benefits seem to be more a matter of perception than statistics. And "the children" complicates things because it's not a clear case of exercising personal responsibility as is the case with adult behaviors.
Metal, glass, ceramic, stone... there is no need for alarms if you avoid building a house with firewood. Note that this includes the roof support, roof exterior, studs (metal is standard for commercial construction), insulation, cabinets, and flooring. Do things right, and the alarm becomes pointless. All it does is annoy you when you stir-fry or make toast.
In case of government regulation, each regulation ends up imposing significant cost on the entire society to prevent handful of deaths which is a massive waste of resources. I am pretty sure destruction wealth also results in some human misery.
Consider USA:
Total deaths caused by unintentional injury in 2014 for children below 14 is 3857 [1]. For a population of 300M it is pretty insignificant. Even if we just look at population below the age of 14 (30M) it is merely 0.00012856666. This is just pure noise.
Sure you can come up with a regulation that imposes a very heavy cost on entire society to eliminate one cause of unintentional injury but I really wonder if it has any impact on the overall number at all.
Unfortunately I don't have more data to backup this claim but if I had to put my money on whether these rules will bring down child mortality I would bet it wont make a difference.
I also think that child mortality will go down over time even if we don't pass a lot of laws and people themselves will figure out solutions to avoid these deaths. A good data point to verify is this OSHA's impact on worksplace safety in USA.
I turns out that workplace safety was getting better even before OSHA and the giant regulation made absolutely no difference what so ever to the decline in worksplace deaths but put a significant cost on businesses. [2]
[1] http://www.cdc.gov/injury/images/lc-charts/leading_causes_of... [2] http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/workplacefatalities5...
The risk to the child for a specific situation does not change based on the reason why a parent put the child in a situation, the same way that the probability of getting hit by a landmine doesn't change based on whether you're walking across a minefield to cheat on your spouse or to save a baby.
The researchers wasn't asking "how good of a parent do you think they are", they were asking "how risky do you think this behaviour is", and it is irrational to be changing your estimation of the risk in a situation based on the reasons for being put in that situation (but what else is new when it comes to human psychology).
I'm not saying the reason itself changes the risk. I'm saying the reason gives me insight into the kind of parent a person is and the likelihood of their being higher risks in the child's environment. Or to use your analogy, there's probably a lot more 'land-mines' in the house of a parent who leaves to play pokemon than in the house of a parent who left their child alone due to an accident or unforeseen circumstances.
If you can't see that than you are blinded by your own sense of rationality.
Isn't it more likely that the drug-addicted parents are more likely to leave drug related paraphernalia around. I'm talking about mostly-empty baggies of cocaine, methamphetamine, weed, whatever. Needles, bongs, half empty bottles of booze.
Isn't the drug-addicted parent more likely to not be aware or not care or not notice all sorts of other safety related issues.
Probably the working-parent shouldn't leave a child under a certain age unattended. But it seems perfectly reasonable that people should judge the drug-addict house as more dangerous.
I don't claim to have full knowledge of every situation, but as someone who spent the better part of a decade injecting meth on a very regular basis I feel my opinion ought to carry some authority.
Do you still feel the child is in more danger if left unattended by the drug-addict parent leaving to buy drugs versus the working parent leaving to work? How about the drug-addict parent leaving to work versus the working parent leaving to buy drugs?
For those circumstances where that is the case then ok.
Now that the people really answered a different question that they were actually asked is another thing. Not uncommon with humans in psychological studies.
This research is saying we shouldn't change our assessment of the risks to a child in a situation based on our moral assessment of their parents. I'm saying the fact that the parents are drug addicts or willfully negligent is likely indicative that the child IS at higher risk that the statistical average.
Not sure how I can make this any clearer in any of my responses.
But that statistic is based on general population. My contention is that our moral judgement can be used to heighten perceived risk to a child, even though it might blow it well out of proportion. So just because the average child is at a perceived risk of being injured at x% when left alone, I don't think it's wrong to say a child of parent I judge to be amoral or willfully negligent is most likely at an increased risk of being injured.
It seems likely to me that the respondents deviated from the question strictly asked using at least in part that reasoning.
They may not have asked that question, but that seems to be the question people were answering. Isn't it somewhat obvious that we almost never answer the literal question?
If I consider the situation where the parent left their 2 year old alone to go meet a lover vs going to work to put food on the table, I'll judge the former situation more harshly. To explain myself, I'd say both situations put the child at the same risk, but the first situation is not a responsible reason to assume that risk.
In short, when you present these scenarios, you're not asking me, "mathematically, which situation is more dangerous for the child?". You're implicitly asking me, "is this parent making a responsible decision?".
My problem with those kind of statements is that you don't quantify the risk. Sure, "probably" at a "higher" risk. How much higher and does it really matter that is slightly higher? we do riskier activities all the time in exchange of convenience, fun, perceived necessity, etc. Sure, my kid is at a higher risk of injury by playing in the backyard (even if supervised) than by staying indoors in his room with padded walls, but at what cost? what about enjoying life a little more?
Furthermore, you're judging just on the probability (not on the reality of the circumstances for those parents) that allowing one activity you don't agree with (playing pokemon leaving child unsupervised) implies a lot of other "bad parenting" habits. Even if that were true (and I'd like to see real concrete numbers), judging people that way is a nasty habit IMO.
Your judgment of morality should not be allowed to impact your judgment of the risk to a child, because that impact is based on your own assumptions. Those assumptions are highly unreliable, unlike factual risk assessment.
If you need a reminder of why assumptions like yours are unreliable, here's a very short read that drives the point home: https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/66889970151/...
Maybe you agree with this already, but it wasn't clear in your comment.
I think in that instance our moral judgement of the parents is pointing us in the general right direction of the risk to the child. Though our moral judgement IMO massively overinflates that risk.
Yet, how does society morally look down on a parent that places their children at such a huge risk?
I am looking for a career in IT, so coming to the Valley might be something I am going to do in my career.
But I would want my kids to grow up in a different, more independent way. Like I did in my home country.
(If I was in America now and thinking about getting children, this article would be a 100% reason to go back to my home country, it totally gave me the creeps.)
http://www.freerangekids.com/laws/
Moral judgements from people in your community can be bad enough, but it's a whole different ball game when you run the risk of getting arrested!
I'm not sure how much it's changed in small towns, but now I live in SF and notice that it is closer to small town behavior than the 'burbs. I routinely see 10 to 12 year old kids walking around in groups to school or taking the bus. They are rarely alone but aren't accompanied by an adult. It is much different than my childhood, but they seem to have good sense of independence which seems way better than a car-based childhood in the suburbs.
I guess that's all a decade in the past, but I would wager that it's media portrayal that's more likely to have done most of the recent changing, not crazy people. There have always been crazy people, but it seems like they all organized to abuse CPS together suddenly over the last 10 years.
Doing dangerous things is risky though. A child is NOT guaranteed to get hurt everytime but if you allow them to explore the work and engage in risky behavior they will get hurt eventually. It is my goal as a parent to let them do dangerous things from an early age even when it scares me.
At one that means letting them walk without a walker anad without being there to catch them all the time. At two-four it means letting them climb the stairs on their own and letting them swing and go down the slide without hand holding. At 5+ it means letting them build a fire, swim in the creek, shoot a bow and arrow and climb trees. By giving them freedom (and responsibility - but that's another topic) early they learn what their limits are and, I hope, learn to judge for themselves what is safe for them. This may be different for each of my kids and is almost certainly different than what I believe is safe and or appropriate. Of course I am there to veto really misinformed decisions (we are going to build a diving board into this 2 feet pool in the brook!) and to provide direction and guidance.
Putting this into practice has resulted in one broken arm, three staples and numerous small home-treatable cuts and bruises. I don't always like where this philosophy puts me as a father. I many times say yes and then quietly follow from a distance out of my own fear for their safety.
But because I know what a struggle it is to decide how to raise my children, even if the ultimate decision is that I am not raising them so much as watching them develop and prodding them occasionally, I try very hard not to judge parents who have made different decisions and different trade-offs.
The article doesn't go into much detail about why people judge parents so harshly but mostly focuses on changing social norms. I understand though. I have to actively remind myself NOT to judge parents who make different decisions than I do and I'm only aware of that because I have made decisions that are different than most of my peers and acquaintances.
It is okay to send your kids to play soccer or the hand-football americans play where they can possibly receive life threatening injuries but it is not okay to let them walk back home from school because all it takes a evil guy with a van and candies to kidnap that kid.
The article mentions Norway, which has a population of 5M. Even if the rate of child abduction is the same as the USA, there will be far fewer scary stories.
1) How many foreign cases does the Norwegian media report?
2) Are Norwegians worried about them? I'd think "oh, America" and move on, but I'd guess that if I lived in Idaho and the case was in Michigan I wouldn't be so dismissive.
http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2016/08/23/ladders-to-help-ch...
It's a complete inversion of the previous straightforward pre-20c mindset, which was: adults take longer to make, are stronger, and they know more stuff, so they're more important. Also, religiously, that babies are born fundamentally broken, and need to gain understanding of the world before they have any chance to fix themselves. Dead babies go to Hell, or at best an endless purgatory.
IMO 80% of the character of its current expression comes from spoiled Baby Boomers having a combination of condescension and hate towards their parents. They were perfect, ruined by the world, and endangered by their parents cynical reasoning about why we should be in Vietnam and hate communism (something about sharing being evil and assuming the worst about everybody.)
Myself, I'd argue that the way we've built towns has lent itself to destroying community and wealth. We put people in cars so they don't interact with their surroundings. We put the cars on massive road networks we can't afford to maintain (to say nothing of the sewer and water out to the edges of towns.) Then a downturn cones and we cut services because the maintenance is crushing us. We build places that aren't meant to last, and then only the rich can afford to move to the next generation's good suburbs. Everyone left behind was too poor to get out, and now they'll suffer decreased services and accessibility as the local government spends on the new growth areas. Given such a miserable setting, people are unable, by fact of their patterns of life, to look out for one another. Culture breaks down, because there's no community maintaining it. The earth-conquering strength of human teamwork is not utilized in these places; the new suburbs are full of people wealthy enough to overcome that, but the aging ones have no such strength.
It would be very interesting to compare with cultures where having lots of kids is still the norm.
https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=532307546952426&id...
We judge everything on the basis of perception, not reality. That's just... how this works.
And this is far from the most worrying thing Americans have a dramatically detatched perception of danger about, right now. If you want to really address this issue, and a few others besides, I'd stop worrying about how people relate to kids or parents and start worrying about how they relate to reality.
Contrasted with our outrageously inverted reaction to the real and fictional (respectively) threats of climate change and terrorism, it's hard for me to muster up too much outrage. Fix this without fixing them, it's hard for me to clap too hard.
In order to fix a problem, you need to fix the cause, not the effect. Many of the causes of the poor decisions we make are due to conditioning of our childhood. While adults cannot blame their bad decisions on their parents, they certainly can see a root cause of much of their poor choices -- if they can see it at all.
People seem much more opportunistic and are proud of it when I point out it's not a compliment to be called such a thing.
Overall maturity seems really low I mean these days people act immature compared to when I was a kid. I don't think I'd see adults in their 20, 30 or 40s chasing Pokemons in the 1970s.
These days people swear every second word around kids, seniors, just in public gatherings as if it's nothing I'm sure I'll be mocked for thinking that's wrong. Then again breasts are censored on TV but not when I was a kid. Although contrasting that every now TV show didn't have "this show may have words or situations that may offend someone" warnings after commercial break.
Then you have the "everyone is a winner" or "you can do anything" drilled into kids in school I think that stunts maturity. If kids are going to be left alone they need to know sometimes they can screw up big time and it's their fault.
(Not to mention, how could she afford the child care?)
We judge people when their behavior hints at a risk estimate which differs from ours. Anyone who estimates a risk lower than you do is reckless; anyone who estimates it higher is a wimp.
Sometimes, estimates of risk are just culturally enshrined B.S., not founded in anything. If you don't protect yourself from a certain risk in a certain culturally endorsed, widely practiced manner, then you're an ignorant or crazy cultural outsider. Likewise if you go too far in protecting yourself from something.
"Real risk" in conversation is usually just an intensifier which means "risk significantly greater than zero percent" implying that it's high enough to be considered on its own, or ahead of other risks. That's already more or less given by the 50% figure.
In this sense there is "no real risk" that the coin will land on its edge. There is a probability attached which is too small to bother with; and possibly lower than the probability that a crow will swoop from the sky and snatch the coin before it lands.
The participants know their own ignorance of the exact circumstances of each situation, and so they use their judgement of the parent's character to fill in the gaps.
For example, when the parent leaves for an "immoral" reason, it reflects badly on their character, so the participant would have less reason to believe that they've thought about the child's safety.
On the other hand, when a parent whom the participant has judged to be of good character leaves the child, they assume that the parent them-self has thought through the safety implications and has judged it to be safe. Since the parent would have more information than the participant, the participant is trusting their judgement, and is able to determine that the situation is safer.
In essence, the stories told to the participants actually do have different amounts of information in about the child's safety.
On the other hand, we don't judge parents for driving their kids all over the place, or living far away from things so that they're forced to drive many miles with their kids. But that's a highly risky behavior.
If you live in a place that's walkable for your kids, you've probably sheltered them from far more danger than child predators ever pose.
I dropped my 7 year old off at a new day camp (in the centre of the city) last week. They asked me if she was allowed to leave on her own at the end of the day.
Here are the rules for kids riding on the subway system:
"Children under four years of age may only use public transport if they are accompanied by a person who is at least six years of age."
That said, you don't see a lot of little kids travelling alone but it seems that the discretion is with the parents.
Children that grow up this way will be better suited for a virtual life, where the number of variables is controlled.
Mind explaining this? I'm having trouble grokking it.
>Not having so many kids on the streets may also cause the crimes to be less.
The article accounted for this.
>Children wear less clothes than they used to and there seems to be more pedophiles, if those little kids were left alone, more may be taken advantage of.
What? Do you have any more information on any of these claims? It's coming across as pure conjecture on your part.
It's the car alarm problem -- if it's deterring theft, theft stats would go down, making us wonder if we need the alarm in the first place!
The likelihood of each is quite low, though - at least in western societies.
Numbers are made up.
Perception is not reality.
Another example: Trayvon Martin was a dark-skinned young male wearing a hoodie. Perception: he is a criminal casing the houses in order to commit a future crime. Reality: he was a kid walking home to his house.
Other examples: * Perception of the likelihood of terrorist attack, vs likelihood of dying in a fatal traffic crash.
* Perception that vaccinations cause autism, vs reality that vaccinations prevent fatal disease.
E.g. number of kids falling and breaking their arm will be larger, but the population is larger and medical care is better, now. So, overall, I think the risks are actually lower than when I was a kid running around unsupervised.
I don't know about the number of pedophile predators per capita, but I imagine that may be a roughly fixed proportion of the population. Kids now also have cellphones, so that's a lifeline kids never had in the past. So, I'd imagine that percentage would not really rise, either.
OTOH, when I look at how my ex has raised our kids I'm terrified that when they become independent they are going to get themselves into trouble and not have the experience to stay calm and get themselves out of it.
To put it differently, what if I point an unloaded gun at someone an pull the trigger? No harm is done, but if I believed the gun was loaded, the moral calculus would change. The reality that no one was harmed or even in danger is not necessarily decisive. What I believe to be true at that moment is the difference between a prank and attempted murder.
From the viewpoint of US law, you have almost certainly committed a serious crime, unless the other party is playing along, and also believes the gun is unloaded (and there has been at least one recent tragic training fatality where the gun indeed turned out to be loaded).
1) Yes, child abduction/predation is unlikely ... because we've adopted a huge number of countermeasures that close of this vector. That doesn't (by itself) mean you can just stop doing those measures and act like the risk is still low.
2) The risk of death by bathtub is not 75%.
3) Terrorists ramp up efforts against any vector they've found to be weak. While they currently account for a very small percentage of deaths, that doesn't mean we should have just shrugged our shoulders and done nothing, even basic measures like locked cockpit doors and ending the recommendation of passenger compliance.
4) Trayvon Martin was acting suspiciously and similarly to burglars -- peering into houses around the time there had been other burglaries and reports of similar behavior [1]. OBVIOUSLY he didn't deserve what happened (let's count how many people miss this clause!), but we don't know, as you're implying, that Martin was somehow merely walking home and not casing houses during a spate of robberies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Trayvon_Martin#Bac...
Actually, most of the social "countermeasures" were adopted after high-profile single incidents in the 1990s (perhaps largely because the larger 1960s-1980s crime wave that had been the pretext for expanding government powers in the law enforcement arena previously was ending, and a new pretext was needed) and later, when the overall rate of incidents had been dropping for decades (since, IIRC, the 1950s or 1960s), but media attention to them -- and hence public perception of the prevalence of incidents -- had, at the same time, been increasing.
AFAIK, there is little-to-no evidence that any of the "countermeasures" have had any significant effect on the prevalence of child abduction/predation.
Say someone cracks a major bank account by guessing "password" as the password. The bank changes the password.
I claim that the weak password was a security risk, and changing it was the right response.
Someone comes a long and gives me a data-intense lecture about "well, electronic bank theft was already declining, and it accounts for only a tiny fraction of financial losses, so changing the password was a waste of time, and was in the context of the IT department using a bunch of pretexts to order people around".
How would you refute that, given all the evidence on their side?
Mind trying again with a different example?
If you agree with that, then you agree with my general point and it's just an issue of which specific countermeasures survive a CBA.
[1] In fact, I chose a small change specifically to highly the absurdity of being bound by low/declining attack rates.
Your argument seemed to me to imply that terrorism is small fraction of deaths because we as a society have implemented countermeasures keeping their kill rates low. This article argues that we have few deaths from terrorism not because society is great at preventing terrorism deaths but because terrorists just aren't that motivated in causing large death tolls.
The argument I'm criticizing -- that you should change nothing merely because terrorism is a low fraction of deaths -- is actually rejected by the frequently-cited Bruce Schneier in the essay you linked. He advocated -- as I do -- that we change something in response to 9/11, specifically the cockpit doors and the hijacking compliance policy.
Next time, it might help if you put the argument your own words; when you only link to a massive document, I don't know which point you're criticizing and it shifts an enormous burden over to me without making it easier to identify the point of contention. Also, the headline is "terrorism is not effective", which is hard to reconcile with the several mass-kill attacks, and which doesn't appear to be related to the point you were using from it (that countermeasures are irrelevant in light of lack of motivation).
So I ask again, what are you criticizing? I agree that terrorist attacks are a small fraction of deaths, and most don't succeed. I am claiming it does not follow that nothing should be changed after an attack. If you have an argument against that, please explain why, as that would justify reversing the cockpit-door and passenger-noncompliance policies.
If you agree with those post-9/11 policy changes, you were agreeing with me the whole time.
I was just linking to what I thought was an interesting and related document that argues that terrorists are not kill maximizing agents.
We probably both agree that because of certain policy changes like a cockpit door there are a few less deaths. We probably also agree had we done nothing, terrorism deaths would not be anywhere near the magnitude of other things that kill us like bodies of water, cars, cancer, and heart disease.
I'm not arguing that all countermeasures have no effect. My intuition says how terrorists decide to go about terrorism has a larger effect on number of people killed than post 9/11 policy changes, but who knows.
Also I don't know who said we should change nothing in response to 9/11 but it definitely wasn't me.
>>Terrorists ramp up efforts against any vector they've found to be weak. While they currently account for a very small percentage of deaths, that doesn't mean we should have just shrugged our shoulders and done nothing, even basic measures like locked cockpit doors and ending the recommendation of passenger compliance.
There is no reason to think that the elasticity of crime is enormous and in ranges like 10 or 100. You can see this just by considering the tight range of crime across the US, and the considerable random variation over time, despite the huge differences in policing budgets and local factors which influence crime such as poverty. If everyone stopped caring about pedophiles, the rate of child abduction would be... very similar to what it is now, because there is not a huge population of pedophiles slavering at the fences and going 'darn! if only people would let their kids spend a few more minutes outside and take down that pesky 'neighborhood watch' sign, I would be able to kidnap hundreds of kids!'
Yes, there is -- people are fickle like that. Society often leaves methaphorical unlocked doors for a long time, that no one thinks to enter through -- but then once it becomes "a thing", you're an easy target if you don't secure it.
Do you lock your (literal) doors? If so, then I guess you must have mistaken beliefs about crime rates and the elasticity of crime with respect to door-bypass-difficulty?
See also my reply to dragonwriter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12346586
It's an important distinction because it's impossible to have a discussion about how to manage risk without first having a true understanding about what the real risks are.
Ask people you know if they know anyone who's been involved in a plane crash, however minor. Most people are at least two degrees away from such an event even if they know a lot of people. It's rare to know someone who knows someone who's been involved in a plane crash because as traumatic as these events are, they impact a very small number of people, under 1000 per year world-wide. There are significantly more people that win over $1M in the lottery in the same time period, and most would agree that's a huge long-shot.
Now ask the same people if they've personally been involved in a collision. Most people over 30 have been involved in at least one, and it's not uncommon to know someone who's been involved in two or three. You probably know at least one person who's lost a friend or relative to a car crash.
The need for seat belts and air bags is absolutely real. You'd know this if you did even a cursory amount of research.
Risk is different - it's about what isn't even perceived to have happened in a given situation. If I walk in the street, there is a risk a piano may have fallen out of an airplane and be falling towards me.
If I perceive that as a risk, I may take countermeasures, in this example entering an underground garage would stop the (for me as a part of the example) hypothetical piano.
If I often take exaggerated countermeasures as a parent, I may cause harm to the child. The safest child would be the one locked in a bomb shelter on a healthy diet. It would protect against falling pianos, falling bombs, freezing to death, drowning, transportation accidents, school bullies, sexually abusive authority figures, house fires, sun burns - everything except an attack on the bomb shelter ventilation system.
The prohibitive costs excluded, no reasonable parent would do such a thing. (If air raid sirens go off, of course it still becomes reasonable to take the child to such a shelter - until the 'all clear').
If the child is never given a chance to be unsupervised, when will it learn to tell situations and behaviours that carry risk from those that don't? When will they develop their independent sense of judgement?
Anyways, to answer your -hopefully rhetorical - question: Transportation by car is risky on a population level. Playing in the forest or park is not even close. It may also be argued that allowing children a steadily developing autonomy from an early age leads to a lower risk over the course of a lifetime - since the child then steadily increases its ability to handle a risky world.
Therefore, I claim that unreasonable protection is the true neglect of the child.
[EDIT: Spelling]
1. If you try talking to kid while the kid is alone you might be charged as a sex offender, attempt to kidnap and what not. 2. If you dont try to help and if something happens to the kid may be later you might face some charges or come under suspicion.
This is absolutely nothing to with what you feel and think. The risks for not calling cops are simply very high.
I see lots of kids in my neighborhood walking around, no issues yet. If we used your apparent definition of 'very high' the odds of winning the lottery are simply guaranteed.
If something did happen to the kid, every person who happened to see that kid and didn't flip their shit and call the cops is not morally or even legally responsible in any sense.
If I saw a kid get snatched into a van, I'd call the cops and do everything in my power to make sure that the kid was returned to his normal life, but holy shit, do not call the cops because you saw a kid outside!