The Anti-Helicopter Parent’s Plea: Let Kids Play | Hacker News Reader

The Anti-Helicopter Parent’s Plea: Let Kids Play

nytimes.com

394 pointsmhb391 comments

There's a big problem here: Parents are judged poorly no matter how they oversee their children. You watch over your children and make sure they're safe and supported? You're a helicopter parent. Took your eyes off your child for five seconds and he jumped into a cage with a gorrilla at the zoo? You're a horrible neglectful mother. Spoke to the principal of your kid's school concerning a bully or about putting some padding over the concrete at the playground? You're creating a "safe space" for your child and raising them to be a sissy. Being a parent is a no-win scenario in the eyes of public perception.

People always talk about "back in my day" when things were tougher and how that made them resilient. Well, back in those days, kids got impaled on steering wheels sitting in their parents laps while they drove, got skull fractures from falling on playground concrete or teeth knocked out from see-saws, or they committed suicide because school administrators saw bullying as a natural means of letting kids establish a pecking-order. Following science-informed safety measures is too often dismissed as coddling our children.

I'm all for letting kids roam and giving them responsibilities. But there's a rational, measured way to provide for such freedom and responsibility. Because if anything bad happens to your child while giving them such freedom, you will face the wrath of social media. I watch time and again as the same people complaining about sissification of our children are also the first to rage against the parents when the news reports on a child coming into any kind of harm. If people would empathize with parents instead of leaping to judgement of them, the world would be a better place.

Hmm, reading your post makes me wonder if the problem is people not having enough children. What I mean is, back in "the day" people were too busy trying to keep up with their own kids to worry about what other people were doing with their kids. But now that people have few or no kids they have plenty of time to tell other people how they are doing it wrong. I sometimes wonder if so much of the partisanship, outrage over seemingly little things, rude comments on discussion boards etc. is just people having too much time on their hands. Were people happier back when they had to struggle each day to survive? Anyway, I need to get back to commenting on what the Kardashians are doing today.

I think your theory has merit. I have grown kids, 18 and 24. I tried to instill reflection and decision making skills. I cheered the loses and the wins. What doesn't kill u makes us stronger. But as a parent it scares the devil out of us.

I'm critical of all wisdom sayings.

What doesn't kill you may go on to make you chronically ill or permanently disabled.

A wise man once said: When you have one child it's a tragedy. When you have ten children the other nine will help the disabled one, or drown him in the pool.

> I'm critical of all wisdom sayings.

Wisdom is knowing which saying applies to the situation.

"Many hands make light work" but "too many cooks spoil the soup".

Off topic, but those two do not contradict each other. The former concerns menial labour, the latter is about decision making.

Excellent distinction... how about these:

"Birds of a feather flock together" but "opposites attract".

"Respect your elders" but "wisdom comes not from age, but from education and learning".

"Failing to prepare is preparing to fail" but "cross that bridge when you get to it".

(perhaps the most balanced aphorism on the virtues of preparation: "plans are useless, but planning is indispensable".)

I've always preferred "let's burn that bridge when we get to it". It more accurately describes what usually happens :)

That awesome, goes well with: if you leave it till the last minute it will only take a minute to do.

> What doesn't kill you makes you stronger

Except smallpox.

Also severe joint damage. It never gets back to 100℅

Given overpopulation, maybe China had it almost right. Have as many kids as you want, but only let N survive to adulthood? "Play" weeds them out? Die having fun, better than starvation, better than never to have existed?

(I have two kids, love both dearly, but maybe in 50 years do we reach the stage where an individual life is not this gospel thing but a pragmatic one?)

(Granted how well you do on mile-high monkey bars doesn't predict your usefulness in subsiding global warming, but something along these lines. Perhaps it's time to start the conversation.)

(Granted why should "continuing some random genetic code" be considered "pragmatic" for anything but "continuing some random genetic code"?)

Maybe it's time for a change of Weltanschauung. Instead of having two kids and protecting the hell out of them, have a hundred kids and decide the two you want to keep. Wouldn't this be far more proactive than assuming the two fastest sperm (yours or your partner's) are a-priori the most useful kids you'll ever have?

I guess retroactively in a world of finite resources this is going to happen anyway.

Overpopulation is kind of a myth. Population growth rates are plummeting globally and below replacement in some places. Global population is expected to peak then decline well before hitting the Earth's carrying capacity.

> below replacement in some places

And in other places, the total fertility rate is over 8x.

> Global population is expected to peak then decline

ORLY, "expected" by whom? Is it the same people who expected mosquitoes to be extinct by the end of the 20th century because people don't ride horses anymore?

What's this about horses? Google isn't finding relevant links (except that mosquitos and horses are correlated)

As I recall, the argument was that the main breeding grounds for mosquitoes were horse stables and swamps. The horses would be replaced by cars, and the swamps would be drained to make room for highways and factories, thus leading to the mosquito's extinction.

Expected by the UN, as the demographic transition spreads. See the following as a starting point:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_dearth

You're a little out of date. "new analysis suggests that the world’s population will keep rising through 2100, and not flatten around 2050 as has been widely assumed".

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530866/un-predicts-new-gl...

There's a lot of problems in your old analysis, including the fact that sub-replacement fertility trends that affected Europe and East Asia aren't catching on in other parts of the world.

Earth's carrying capacity was hit a long time ago.

> Global population is expected to peak then decline

On what timescale? That's the most important question here that you conveniently glossed over.

You're grossly misinformed.

Carrying Capacity refers to an ecosystem's capacity to support a certain population size. It can hardly be said that their earth's ecosystems are sustainably supporting the current human population. We've had to essentially destroy and replace working ecosystems with a regime that now relies on petroleum-based technology (fertilizer, herbicide, mechanization, transport) to raise productivity. We are on borrowed time and now have to rely on new technology to save us before we either run out of fossil fuels or cook the planet.

We've been relying on technology for our salvation since the advent of agriculture, every day trying to fight back our inevitable doom at the hands of one out of a million causes. We may have remodeled our ecosystem(s), but it is still an ecosystem. The term Carrying Capacity wholly applies.

I guess I glossed over the most important bit, which is that it implies a sustainable system. Ingenuity may keep disaster at bay or it may not. Natural resources that took millions of years to develop like fossil fuels, aquifers, and healthy soils are being strained or drawn down by human population growth.

> maybe in 50 years do we reach the stage where an individual life is not this gospel thing but a pragmatic one

This was most of human history until recently. Disease, famine, war, and general lack of control over our environment and each other.

> too much time on their hands

I'm pretty sure this is a root cause of so much conflict anymore. At the end of the day, almost all social media is inconsequential "goings-on".

> But now that people have few or no kids they have plenty of time to tell other people how they are doing it wrong

These people honestly havent a fucking clue what they are talking about. As a father of three, I politely smile whenever someone like this tries to give me some advice. There might be some truth there, but there is a whole bunch of naiveté and ignorance as well. A battle-hardened parent actually does know whats best for their child, not some arm-chair person.

Agreed. My wife and I have 5 kids. One thing our friends with 1 or 2 kids will never understand: we can't possibly keep an eye on all of them all the time. The reality is, the kids have ample opportunity for dangerous accidents. The solution in our household is have high standards of expected conduct, and play "whack-a-mole" with whoever needs attention (positive or negative). Looking back to when we only had 2, I actually think this is producing more responsible, content kiddos.

Exactly this. Our second daughter has had so many cuts and bruises because we couldn't be all over her when looking after the first one in her terrible twos - and that way she's a much more relaxed and courageous child FWIW. I guess after the third you're happy when none of the kamikaze kids have any serious injuries at the end of the day.

Having more than one child changes you in a very interesting way - you get a little more relaxed. Parents of only children IMHO are much more prone to getting helicopter parents.

Well, there are methods that can help to avoid raising "kamikaze kids". None is a silver bullet and kids have a lot of variability by themselves, but still:

- Start early to forbid things. My third don't talk yet but understands very well that I do not agree with him smashing his elder sister in the head with anything he found around. When this happens and I'm near enough to react immediately, the little thing will be slapped back, softly but enough for him to know that it is annoying.

- Be more often in the calmer mode than in the exiter mode with them. I need to work more on this because when I get home and hug the little third, I'm too quick to tickle his belly and throw him in the air. He it nice to sit often together and read a book or play lego for a while. This show them.

- Pick only a few rules and hold on them. I make no drama if one of them did not wash them teeth for one night. However, there's never a toy on the eating table. It happened to me to have forbidden something but thought the second after that it should have been ok. Then you can't revert easily. Less rules, but enforced, makes kid life safer than thousand of useless "be careful".

And if you have more children, the prospect of losing one is less daunting, so we don't need to spent ever-increasing sums to eliminate risk.

RAID is not just for computers...

Childhood mortality is far lower now than even 50 years ago, falling by 2/3 in the US in that time period.[1] The risks are lower, the consequences proportionally higher in response to that pressure - less replacements, as it were.

[1]https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality/

You clearly don't have children do you?

My grandfather was one of thirteen children in his family. Only seven lived into their twenties. Life could be brutal and fleeting back then.

It's not that children weren't loved as much back then, but when you had events like the Spanish Flu and World War II that claimed millions of lives, events well beyond your control, protecting kids from trivial risks probably didn't seem as big a deal.

Kids are tougher than we give them credit for, but they're also prone to do things that are more dangerous than they realize. I'm not sure as a society we've ever found a balance between letting them run wild and keeping them on a tight leash, we seem to flop from one extreme to another.

I do, and he's right. You clearly don't have more than a half dozen children, with both boys and girls.

It might be taboo to say this, but "I have spares" really makes a difference. People who lose their only son or only daughter seem to fall apart, especially if replacement is no longer an option.

It might be less "I have spares" and more "well, I've got these other kids who still need functioning adult parents, can't fall apart just yet", and then you muddle through for another 10-20 years until those kids are adults, and by that time you've had time to deal with the loss without completely losing your shit.

Human beings are not fungible components.

Tell that to my boss.

People with no kids... As a parent, I find these individuals to be the most aggravating.

I tell them that commenting on someone's parenting, as though you have any experience or wisdom in the matter, is a bit like a white person telling a black person how to cope with racism.

Edit: oh look, here they come to give me their abundant wisdom.

Except we've all had parents... I dunno anyone who has swapped races.

Not everyone is a parent. That's the analogy.

Having parents and being a parent are slightly more similar than having a dog and being a dog.

You're implying that having a child magically imbues you with parenting knowledge.

No, but as with everything else in life, experience counts.

In this case it's difficult to say. Experience counts, but experience also distorts perception, especially when we're talking about parental hormones.

> No, but as with everything else in life, experience counts.

Experience did not make me a better programmer or mathematician. Diving deep into the details to get a much better knowledge did.

but... but that's what experience is.

Experience is not something you get until just after you need it.

Actually, as with everything else in life, experience doesn't count at all. More accurately, not all experience counts equally. We know for a fact that the ten thousand hours of practice myth is just a myth. It takes targeted training to get better at something. I'd wager that most parents are just going through the motions because let's be honest — we have no clue what we're doing.

Update typo

Indeed, I'm as likely to ignore the advice of other parents as I am to ignore non-parents. A lot of parenting advice from parents is survivor bias or outright bragging.

In fact, I'm actually skeptical about the effect of parenting in general, versus the influence of genetics.

It doesn't imbue with parenting knowledge, but it does imbue you with parenting experience, which is certainly more than non-parents have.

Are you implying that a childless teacher, that has been in the profession for 25 years, has less experience raising children than the parents of a single toddler?

It's apples and oranges. A teacher is not "raising" children; they are teaching them in a controlled environment with certain expectations and structures. Also, a teacher is likely to focus on a certain age group and become expert in working with children in a relatively limited age range. A parent must work with their children over the entire span of their life.

The teacher is not up in the middle of the night with the child when they have strep throat. The teacher is not up in the middle of the night when their child has a nightmare. These are the sorts of things that only happen when you are a parent.

Also, a teacher is likely to focus on a certain age group and become expert in working with children in a relatively limited age range. A parent must work with their children over the entire span of their life.

I understand your what you're saying, but this argument works against the argument that parents are automatically qualified by virtue of experience: a mother of a 2-year-old has no experience raising a 3-year-old either.

Dude, my childless step-mother in-law is this!

A childless teacher is a pseudo-parent 8-3:30, 5 days a week, 9 months a year. They honestly havent got a clue. They can head home and chill. While parenting is an endless grind.

Kids will wedge into every spare moment and literally consume all the space, physical and mental energy.

Try spending all night up with 3 kids with the stomach flu then having your boss push you to meet a deadline the next day.

These teachers, including my mother in-law can keep their `advice`.

No but it should imbue you with a sense of perspective about how much control you really have over kids, and how kids are all different requiring different ways of handling, and to not leap to judge other parents because you've been through enough shit yourself as well.

> People with no kids... As a parent, I find these individuals to be the most aggravating.

Also aggravating: parents who call childless couples selfish. Like not spitting one out is somehow cheating life, and having kids makes you a kinder person. Both sides are equally self-interested, neither are totally selfless or selfish.

I'll concede that a lot of parents will shift their energy from themselves to their child's well-being, but that's where the selflessness ends and they often become a sinkhole for other people's energy. They're gifting no one except their own inner circle, which is fine - that's how life works for most people.

"Selfish" isn't fair, but some else's kids are paying future taxes, performing future surgeries, and fighting future wars.

Existing social and fiscal expectations have a certain birth rate built in.

New members of society add value. They will do a lifetime worth of work. New members of society have a cost. They will use a lifetime worth of services. On average, those will be about the same.

There is probably an ideal population count, but without actually figuring out what that count is and showing we're below it, that's not a worthwhile discussion.

That birth rate depends on there not being too many kids too.

School districts benefit from childless residents who pay taxes to support schools but don't impose any costs.

Also, there are many ways to contribute to the development of young generations other than simply having biological children. Even aside from adopting, lots of childless people I've known have been great mentors and teachers.

(Not that you'd necessarily disagree, just your post could kind of be interpreted that way).

Did I say anything about selfishness?

Regardless, consider that your future comfort relies on someone else having a child. When you're old and everyone who cares for you is younger than you, thank those who had children and raised them well enough to be able to care for you.

Your present comfort to some extent relies on people not having tons of kids. We'd be overcrowded and resource-constrained.

It's great that you have kids but it's not like a it's a public service you're performing. Unless you adopted a bunch or something. We can always get younger immigrants to come fulfil those jobs.

Idk what makes a service "public", but it certainly is a service.

My parents have served me more than any other human.

I'm be sure to thank the robots.

It's not like we have a shortage of people though.

I'm so glad people bring up new offsprings all the time. Thanks to them, despite our supposedly declining demography as a sad ageing country, we destroy one extra percent of my country's land every 8 years, just for housing (and that's a much bigger percentage of the truly usable land). Since my mother's youth, the available surface by inhabitant has decreased from 3.5 to 2 acres, and the usable ratio of this 'available' surface has dropped too. Infrastructure can't follow, it is a rat race with public spending that can never catch up with the population increase and concentration, that create exponential problems.

I am so glad our African neighbours still fuck like rabbits, in order to produce an extra +20 million people every year, on a land (and a society political organisation) that cannot support half of them, destabilising all countries there by internal migrations; and another million or so having to move to Europe every year, destabilising the social systems there which are not designed to accommodate such influx.

I'm so glad that people keep pretending the demographic problem is a supposed decrease in population when it is actually always increasing, and the continuous increase is the problem. I'm so glad they use 2-century old rhetoric on demographics and do not notice that there has been a small change in productivity per human being since those days.

I always found this aggravating. I had a child because I was selfish, I wanted to reproduce - to put another life on this planet that will consume resources, and eventually die - she had no choice in the matter of whether she was born or not, I did.

People who don't have kids are no less selfish than I am, either - there's a reason any individual chooses to have kids or not, and the only moderately selfless reason (population control) is still selfish because you are making the choice for your own convictions.

The decision to have children or not is selfish period, everyone should stop giving a fuck about what choice they made, because none of them are "correct".

I think you mean "non-altruistic", not "selfish". In my book, at least, "selfish" is thinking ONLY of oneself. If you think it'd be nice for your child to enjoy life, why not give them the blessing of existence? Sure, it puts a smile on your face too so-to-speak, but that's a far cry from "selfish".

You might be selfish, and you might not be selfish. Consider your answer to these two questions:

1. Do you produce kids?

2. Given your qualities as a potential parent, are your kids likely to produce more for society than they take?

If you answer those in the same way, you are not selfish. If your answers don't match, then you are.

That's a strange way to evaluate selfishness.

Question 2 has virtually infinite factors impacting it, making it useless in any practical sense.

How about those who participate in activities that enrich the lives of others, such as volunteering, teaching, or giving aid?

What if their country has an overpopulation problem resulting in major constraints on resources and infrastructure?

In a game theory setting, i.e. highly constrained and not tainted by that annoyingly complex and unintuitive stuff that is reality, you'd be correct.

It also ignores the fact that the vast majority of people don't make new humans as a selfless public service, thus "selfish" takes on a new definition which can be translated as "doing what people do", at which point it loses all meaning.

In poor countries making new humans is a necessity, in rich countries it's a natural desire, and in all cases it's a fundamental human right even if the offspring take more than they give as everyone is a product of circumstance. Exercising the option to not make any is equally valid.

> People with no kids... As a parent, I find these individuals to be the most aggravating.

I have no kids (and I don't want any), but I'm radically pro-freedom for the kids. So the boundary is not to be parents vs. not-parents, but people who desire safety vs. people who desire freedom.

Well, I am a parent, and I still think I did understand a lot of what I was getting into back when I had no kids. I think that my advice and thoughts then were sound. Furthermore, I think that I am now sleep-deprived enough to often have trouble making the best judgment in spur-of-the-moment situations. I also have times where I'm emotionally drained because of all the challenges of parenting. I honestly think a thoughtful non-parent could come around and probably give me some good coaching and advice because they would be more objective.

So, I fundamentally think that all the parents who hate how others give advice are potentially just hypersensitive. Okay, really? Most of the non-parents are probably giving crappy thoughtless advice. I haven;'t experienced that too much myself, but I'm sure it happens.

In my case, I've always been very thoughtful about these things and I have lots of experience teaching young kids, so I knew far more than average about raising kids prior to having my own.

Still, I don't agree with the claim that non-parents have no wisdom here.

There are always exceptions.

I'm not a pilot, but if I see a helicopter upside down in a tree I'm pretty sure someone fucked up.

Great example! Without context and potentially experience, you might not understand that the helicopter you see upside down in that tree experienced critical mechanical failures, and the pilot saved the lives of himself and the crew by getting it stuck upside down in a tree instead of just crashing into the ground at full speed.

In other words, yeah, not being a pilot and lacking contextual knowledge of the helicopter DOES mean, at the very least, that you don"t know WHO fucked up - the pilot, the mechanic, the manufacturer, the designer, or whether the poor sucker just got shot down.

> Great example! Without context and potentially experience, you might not understand that the helicopter you see upside down in that tree experienced critical mechanical failures, and the pilot saved the lives of himself and the crew by getting it stuck upside down in a tree instead of just crashing into the ground at full speed.

This is everything that's wrong with software today, and I mean that seriously.

What the poster said is "someone fucked up". He didn't say "the pilot fucked up".

If there is a mechanical failure on that helicopter while it's in flight, someone MOST DEFINITELY FUCKED UP. There are processes in place surrounding that helicopter specifically to make sure that pilot never has to make the decision of putting said helicopter upside down in a tree.

In otherwords, someone dun fucked up, and you don't have to be a helicopter pilot or helicopter mechanic, or a helicopter engineer, or anything related to any of it, to be able to identify that someone somewhere fucked up.

I also said "pretty sure". I'm not ruling out a freak occurrence that got the helicopter there (or a genuinely phsyco kid), but odds are there is blame to be placed.

Starting anything with "As a parent..." or "As a mother..." etc is a sure fire way to get my heckles up. As a parent is puzzles my why that would make someone an authority on anything.

What about "as someone who has had several years of repeatedly dealing with a set of problems and stressors"?

With a very specific set of problems and stressors. Try being the oldest child in a beyond broken marriage -- that's a whole different set of problems and stressors, but they still involve carrying responsibility for children.

Is a parent of a single 2-year old really more qualified or experienced than someone who has 15 years of experience caring for siblings?

Also, all kids are different. Sometimes I get judgemental against some parents putting their kids in front of an iPad in the restaurant or wherever. But maybe that's the only way for them to ever get out and eat at all, what if their kids have some concentration issues, I have no idea.

I think you're overestimating the risk of humiliation for both parenting approaches.

How often are parents accused of being helicopter parents for supervising their play? The term made into pop culture from parents who were physically showing up to college classes and arguing with lecturers on behalf of their children.

It's possible your circle of Facebook friends is extremely critical of parents in general. More likely, it's a few dramatic individuals clouding your perception of the population writ large.

Note that the immense coverage of the Maryland "free range children" episode was because of mass surprise and outrage that the parents were treated so harshly by police.

> The term made into pop culture from parents who were physically showing up to college classes and arguing with lecturers on behalf of their children.

No, it came from a huge variety of behavior. I've never even heard of the above story before, but I certainly associate it with parents who got their kids into a good school by any means necessary, INCLUDING hand-shaping their children's social life and extracurriculars. I'd say babysitting your kids 24/7 definitely qualifies if the motivation is to control your child, as it almost always is.

Perhaps the increasing difficulty of parenting is nature's feedback cycle to slow global warming. Theoretically plausible if DNA came from outer space and had already encoded some weird mechanism there. However assuming thus, unlikely given Fermi paradox.

Or maybe it's nature feedback cycle to slow down the growth economy when it reaches absurd levels. Note that the strongest relationship found for number of children people have is the inverse correlation with wealth.

Reference of last statement? Most at top of the Forbes list have kids. Still, quoting someone else's sarcasm, "I don't know what the meaning of life is, but if it's not 'increasing shareholder value', we're all screwed".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

On average level, the reacher the nation, the less kids they have.

Btw you can google that, it is so widely known almost anything relevant you put into the search bar will return dozens of results.

But i guess it is easier to say "reference?" to every single little fact... /rant

The quote was that it was "the strongest relationship" though. Strongest with respect to what? That's what I was asking reference for.

> Note that the strongest relationship found for number of children people have is the inverse correlation with wealth.

That is incorrect and is an often-repeated myth. There's an inverse correlation with education, not wealth. To my knowledge, there have been no good studies for the western societies that isolate education from wealth for total fertility rates.

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/282/1806/2015...

From results: educational capital and market integration are generally negatively associated with fertility, whereas farming and non-farming wealth are generally positively associated with fertility.

Here's another one: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/REST_a_00257

For the cross-section of non-Hispanic white married couples in the United States, we show that when we restrict comparisons to similarly educated women living in similarly expensive locations, completed fertility is positively correlated with the husband's income. The empirical evidence is consistent with children being “normal.”

Hmmm....

Regardless of how many kids are had, families will optimize to maximize the total economic spending on their offspring, so lowering fertility comes at the cost of growth of total ecological impact of the fewer kids.

Another thing is we don't have much practice as parents over our life time. A quick google says US has 1.87 children per family. So we end up having ~2 kicks at the can, raising our children the best we can, with the results only coming years later and obfuscated by different cultures, wealth, etc.

We end up relying on "back in my day" anecdotal experiences. Often just based on our ideals and preferences which will be different from one family to the next. Yes, empathy without judging would go a long way. Crazy to think that my way is the best for everyone.

This is good. When people had 6 kids over 25 years, the older children learned how to raise kids by raising their younger siblings, and the younger children learned how to raise kids by watching their older siblings have kids.

I come from a chaotic family tree. I'm the youngest of 5 spread across ~30 years. On the upside, yeah, I think I can attest to a lot of what you're saying.

On the downside, most people can't relate and you have an odd mix of "old" and "young" behaviors...

I spent a lot of my life optimizing for adult relationships, and now I've got kids with behaviors that are normal for kids but in adults would be self-destructive, irrational, psychotic, and like a drug addict.

> you will face the wrath of social media

Bring it on.

Don't log in, problem solved

But what if Oprah says ima bad parent?? Or Joey Salads?

I'm not entirely certain normalizing hyperbole makes sense here. There's a massive difference between ensuring children are safe and supported, and never letting them do anything without supervision or face any consequences up to and including when they go to college or join the workforce. There's an equally vast gap between taking eyes off a child for a few seconds, and outright neglect. Likewise, there's a universe of difference between basic precautions and the equivalent of a Safe Space (tm).

Yeah, I get that people are going to naturally jump to conclusions. Yet glossing over the minutiae is exactly how we got into the situation where everyone is jumping at shadows in the first place. Everyone's a rapist! Children are being mowed down in the streets! Drugs are everywhere! Never go outside! Anything else is literal child abuse! How dare you!

How does catering to social media because it might overreact fix that? How is that encouraging empathy? What makes this a "big problem?" Isn't relaxing our iron grip just a tiny fragment and rolling some of this hysteria back slightly do exactly that? Empathy for the situation instead of zealous indignation?

I don't really care if someone disapproves of the way I'm raising my children, but it's a real hassle if they call CPS. Throughout history there have been people on both ends of the spectrum who are more than willing to tell you that you're doing it wrong, but it seems like lately they've been feeling more empowered to call in the state to enforce their beliefs.

It doesn't help that people read about a few extreme cases in the newspaper or online and suddenly think children are made out of fine china. Go to Youtube on any "funny pratfalls" video and you'll see comments about how thousands of children die every year because they trip and fall over while running and omg how can that parent be so bad they need to have their children taken away immediately, blah blah blah...

Parents know that is a load of hogwash, but other people read that and maybe even believe it and suddenly playground swings are like public enemy number one.

People just need to empathize in general. There's so much polarizing armchair bullshit once anything goes wrong for someone else, it's crazy.

Modern interconnectivity is seemingly creating networks of assholes to an extent that wouldn't exist in the past because you just didn't really know everyone's business all the time.

> People just need to empathize in general. There's so much polarizing armchair bullshit once anything goes wrong for someone else, it's crazy.

We don't need more empathizing, but we need science to find objective facts instead of opinions.

Empathizing means understanding other people's point of view. Why wouldn't we need more of that?

In my experience often understanding how stupid the points of other people are makes me hate them much more than if I simply would not understand them. Is this what you evangelize?

Are you sure you're actually truly understanding people in that case? I've only seen that kind of reaction from a very shallow application.

Generally understanding other people's points of view makes them seem less stupid, not more so.

You might be confusing people's opinions with their points of view.

No, I am pretty confident in what I wrote.

Not understanding someone means that I can ignore him/her, because I have to admit that I don't know enough to connect the dots.

Once I understand him/her, two things can happen:

1. I can see that there exists also some completely different, but also very rational, point of view from which one can see the whole facts and get a much better impression of him/her. I might still disagree, but now I have a better impression.

2. I can see how stupid the conclusions really are from which the other persons are. While before I could be ignorant (I knew neither enough that that this makes a good nor a bad impression on me), once I understood I can not anymore. In this case the impression can also become much worse.

So understanding (empathizing) is a very two-sided sword.

Empathizing doesn't mean understanding someone's argument and deciding that it is really stupid. That is pretty much the opposite of empathy.

Empathizing means understanding the person well enough to see how they came to be someone who reached that conclusion, even if it is illogical from your point of view.

You don't need to understand their stupid points, you need to understand why they feel a certain way about them. As this election cycle clearly shows, emotion isn't dictated by fact.

Empathy isn't "liking/hating" someone, it's being able to relate to their emotional state.

I don't agree with someone who supports Donald Trump as president... but I can understand being afraid and desperate to a point of irrationality.

I am not worried about my neighbors judging me. I am worried about governmental agencies paying me visit. It rarely matters if people are racist towards me, it makes big difference if the cops treat me differently because of my skin color. Rules of the game (in theory and practice) as a bigger impact on parenting.

I take my kids to India just so that they can travel alone, play alone, climb trees and sit on the front seats etc.

> Being a parent is a no-win scenario in the eyes of public perception.

The only winning move is not to play (in other words: not give birth to children).

No not that. Do anything to me, anything but being ridiculed by social media!

This has helped me become a better parent. http://www.freerangekids.com/

> There's a big problem here: Parents are judged poorly no matter how they oversee their children. You watch over your children and make sure they're safe and supported? You're a helicopter parent. Took your eyes off your child for five seconds and he jumped into a cage with a gorrilla at the zoo? You're a horrible neglectful mother. Spoke to the principal of your kid's school concerning a bully or about putting some padding over the concrete at the playground? You're creating a "safe space" for your child and raising them to be a sissy. Being a parent is a no-win scenario in the eyes of public perception.

Replace "parents" with "people" and "oversee their children" with "live", and you get the problem on the higher level.

True, but the special case of "being responsible for the wellbeing of another person while simultaneously needing to respect their autonomy to some degree" is significantly more fraught than just "people gonna judge how you live".

This also applies to other situations, like the government's role in dealing with indigenous populations. The government can't force them to attend school, study, work, create healthy family environments, moderate substance use etc. because that impinges on their rights. The government is then taken to task for the indigenous population's lack of education and employment, their living conditions, problems with substance abuse, and so on. There's no way to win.

Let them judge. I did. Gave two shits too.

Result: my kids did a lot of stuff that I also did, and I did a bunch of it with them too. Might as well.

My parents were hands off to a high degree. I value this extremely highly. I balanced it by sharing the good stuff, while allowing them to be kids and roam, explore.

I also encouraged them to bring it back to me. Share.

If it somehow goes bad, you want us and our kids. Those judging?

Left as exercise for the reader.

Social media these days... Let's just say I curate what I share, and it's not much, and for sure not the good stuff. And the kids knew the rule too. Lots of stuff doesn't go on social media.

Out in the woods, built lean to, fire, explored the hills, made a small dam, cooked what we killed?

FB: Oh, just an action movie with Dad.

Harsh, I know. But, I also know the value of those experiences too.

Judgement of parenting from a single event is arbitrary at best and criminal at worst. Child Protection Services investigated my mother and accused her of burning me with a cigarette (it was a mosquito bite, I'm allergic to their anticoagulant) but years later turned me in to her custody, told me 'back in my day' stories and treated me as a trouble making 'runaway' after witnesses described her physically attacking me with punches, threatening me with a handgun, and swinging a stoneware coffee mug at my head. My great grandmother however was kind, had 14 kids, 7 survived. That was farm life then... I wonder how she'd have been judged today? Investigated for abuse, neglect, or murder? My mother's A-OK though apparently. We don't speak.

I agree with this 100%! I grew up free to explore the woods, build forts, climb trees, jump off rocks, swim unsupervised, ride mt. bikes down steep hills, drive dirt bikes from age 10 on, drive snowmobiles, carry a pocket knife, whittle, etc... Yes, I cut myself on occasion, even broke a couple bones, but it was completely worth it and helped me grow up to be self sufficient, self confident, and know my limits, strengths, and weaknesses.

I really do feel badly for most of the kids today, who are so hampered and restrained.

Don't let you kid fall into a bonfire, but DO let them burn themselves on the stove (after you tell them - that is hot). Inform but let them learn from their own mistakes. There's nothing wrong with a few cuts, bruises, scrapes, burns, etc...

That's very literally survivor bias.

How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home?

They're not here to tell the tale about how it "worked fine for them".

I'm not saying that things haven't gone too far the other way, but anecdotes about how things were fine aren't good data.

> That's very literally survivor bias. How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home?

According to this guy, very few:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201404/ri...

> From an evolutionary perspective, the obvious question about risky play is this: Why does it exist? It can cause injury (though serious injury is rare) and even (very rarely) death, so why hasn’t natural selection weeded it out? The fact that it hasn’t been weeded out is evidence that the benefits must outweigh the risks. What are the benefits? Laboratory studies with animals give us some clues.

While I don't disagree with his premise, that gives almost no data, and seems like a weak argument. Why hasn't war been weeded out? It must not really be all that risky.

Societal behaviour like war differs from individual behaviour like 'risky play'. War, as a societal behaviour, emerges from the individual behaviour of fighting others for resources in a world of scarcity. That was a beneficial behaviour in many situations, as it prevented starvation. It would take much longer than our time within complex society has allowed to weed this behaviour out of our DNA on account of emergent behaviour.

That's not the correct way to look at it. Those who won wars ended up more prosperous (up until very very recently) and where able to reproduce more.

Have you read the whole article? He goes on to describe research on rats who are prevented from playing as pups and develops his argument from there.

All an evolutionary argument tells us is that the benefits outweighed the risks in the ancestral environment.

For that to make sense you'd have to have credible evidence that evolution moves at a glacial pace. It doesn't.

It responds very quickly to a changing environment.

http://allafrica.com/stories/201501280875.html

It's very silly to draw such a broad conclusion about evolution in general from a single adaptation (most likely involving a single mutation) by a single species.

I was referring to this part of his argument:

>It can cause injury (though serious injury is rare) and even (very rarely) death

keywords: "rare" and "very rarely", although it would be better argument to look at statistics on accidental deaths during risky play, now and in years past if I had time.

The ancestral environment was way more dangerous though

If you want to argue against anecdote, it's best to provide actual facts instead of your own questions. For example, only 1 in 5 drowning deaths are children, and there's no reason to assume a significant portion of those are unsupervised [1]. Should we be helicopter-observing adults instead, or do their lives matter less? Traffic accidents are the largest cumulative killer of children [2]. If you want to go the route of "how many aren't here to tell us about it" you should really be arguing that parents should avoid putting kids in or near cars as much as possible.

Children die, and that sucks a lot, but if you start making emotional appeals based on preventing all possible child deaths you're going to end up espousing that we keep all kids in padded rooms until they're adults.

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/wa...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_inj...

"Drowning was the leading cause injury death for those 1 to 4 years of age." via http://www.cdc.gov/safechild/child_injury_data.html

Unfortunately they don't separate out whether the drowning happened in a swimming pool or a bathtub.

Go ahead and helicopter-observe adults if that is how you interpret that data. I will surely be vigilantly watching my young children when they are near water.

You could, you know, teach them how to swim? The reason so many children die of drowning is that so many don't know how to swim. MIT literally has a swim test requirement to graduate college for exactly this reason.

Absolutely, all kids should be taught to swim. But until they are able to, parents need to be extra mindful.

This. Seriously. It's completely different from letting older kids play unsupervised in the backyard. Toddlers easily drown in a garden pond, let alone a swimming pool. Leaving a toddler alone near a body of water, even for five minutes is asking for a catastrophe.

MIT has a swim test requirement for to 21-year-old students to graduate in order to prevent children from drowning? Am I parsing your sentence correctly?

It was originally instituted because a student drowned in the Charles river because he didn't know how to swim. Age might be different, but the majority of people who drown don't know how to swim. Teach your kids to swim, they are WAY less likely to drown.

Yes... and then the adults are the ones that will die because weren't exposed to small dangers nor did learn how to deal with it.

Being an adult isn't just completing 18 years (or any other arbitrary number). There's even discussion about when you really leave your childhood (teenagehood ?) behind. And I think it's when you acquire enough knowledge to avoid most risky situations while still enjoying life. And when you know that nobody will looking after you, because it came the time that you're the one that should be looking after others (children, elderly, spouse, you choose it).

Comparing drowning deaths between adults and children is pointless. It is obvious that more adults die of any cause (except maybe SIDS). What would be more relevant is of all the dead children, how many die because of the lack of supervision.

>>For example, only 1 in 5 drowning deaths are children, and there's no reason to assume a significant portion of those are unsupervised

That's probably because people spend 5+ times as much time in adulthood than they do being children.

I think the factual counter-argument is that child mortality has declined both from accidental drowning[1] and all causes[2]. I still think it is open to interpretation if helicopter parenting is causative or justified.

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/figures%5Cm6115a5f....

[2] http://www.childtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/63_fig...

> How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home?

Very few. Those who have a tendency to do things that get them killed ... get killed and eliminated from the gene pool.

Everybody who is around now mostly knows how to judge risk. Yeah, we'll have some cuts, bruises, broken bones, etc. but it's very rare that someone does something so profoundly stupid that they get themselves killed.

Just because you heard about it on the news doesn't mean it's common. If one kid out of 10,000 gets himself killed this way, you'd get a dozen kids nationally offing themselves daily, but in reality that's a very small number and in truth, the real number is probably much less.

There's a spectrum of risk here that IMO we don't like to acknowledge. It's uncomfortable to say that accepting a certain quantity of seriously injured or even killed children actually does come with benefits to those who aren't hurt. But I think we shouldn't shy away from this calculus, we should rather be clear-eyed about the fact that we have chosen to minimise risk, and have accepted the trade-off of reduced independence, joy, and adventure.

I think we've moved in this direction organically. We have much fewer children much later in life than we used to, we do not accept child mortality, and every child is a much bigger investment (education and economic dependency into the mid twenties or later), so every life literally becomes more valuable, so we naturally hedge more and more against any risk to this life. The more we move into a high-education and EQ driven economy, the more investment each child demands, and the further this cycle perpetuates.

Personally, I would not make this tradeoff, but I understand how hard it is to make this argument when faced with grieving parents who have suffered a huge loss, both emotionally and materially.

> I'm not saying that things haven't gone too far the other way

Right now I don't think we can have the conversation about having gone too far—people always reply "what's the harm in being too overprotective?" To have this conversation—which I think we absolutely need to have—we first need to recognize and admit that there's real, actual harm in being too overprotective.

>How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home?

Very very few.

If anything this is "overblowing the danger" bias.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12745272:

We might accept a few more phobias in our children in exchange for fewer injuries. But the final irony is that our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have. According to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which monitors hospital visits, the frequency of emergency-room visits related to playground equipment, including home equipment, in 1980 was 156,000, or one visit per 1,452 Americans. In 2012, it was 271,475, or one per 1,156 Americans.

The number of deaths hasn’t changed much either. From 2001 through 2008, the Consumer Product Safety Commission reported 100 deaths associated with playground equipment—an average of 13 a year, or 10 fewer than were reported in 1980. Head injuries, runaway motorcycles, a fatal fall onto a rock—most of the horrors Sweeney and Frost described all those years ago turn out to be freakishly rare, unexpected tragedies that no amount of safety-proofing can prevent.

Injuries decreased 20% from 1980 to 2012 according those numbers.. seems significant no?

You have to be careful with those sorts of numbers.

It says that monitored hospital visits (not injuries) have gone down, but those hospital visits have got a lot more expensive for most people too - one possible confounding factor.

Agreed. If anything, I'm questioning the quote referencing that exact data point: "our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have"

I think playground equipment is quite a bit safer! I'm pretty sure supervision has little to do with it.

Increased, not decreased! Though I suspect a big part of the change was decrease in severity of injuries meriting a hospital visit.

Isn't the opposite then a negative selection bias? If we have N children killed per year doing an activity A, and N anecdotes of children being perfectly okay, neither matter without knowing the denominator of the number of child-activities per year.

The bias can't be larger than child mortality though, which is 0.59% in the US according the us CIA factbook.

Me too, and I so want this for my boy, but there is a reason to be genuinely scared of other people and social services. I mean people get arrested for letting their kids go to the park or play in their own backyards, for god's sake.

Honest question: what is the objective, per-child risk of that happening? I don't have data for that, but I would be shocked if it was anything except exceedingly low, on the order of getting killed in a commercial aircraft crash.

Of what happening? Having CPS called on you? I don't know, but I am as terrified of it, as your average helicopter mom would be of having their child scrape their knee, or be abducted by a stranger. I really hope the risk is as low as being abducted, though.

I hear you and my wife and I struggle with similar feelings! But taking a step back, I think it's plain that the actual risk from CPS over-reach is extremely low.

I posted my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12744241 at the top level FYI.

Well, the issue is the media reporting.

Most of the time, if a child is abducted, it is the other parent in a post-divorce situation, rather than a kidnapper / molester. But we do see stories about those occasionally in the national news, so most people are "aware of the danger".

Ditto, I suppose, for CPS getting called by an over-reactive neighbor upon seeing a child wandering around without supervision. These types of stories also make the national news, for whatever reason, so most people are "aware of the danger".

And thus, we live in a climate of fear. Yay!

For the record, I spent some parts of my childhood wandering around in the woods alone (or with friends) where I could have: fallen down a hill, drown in a stream, fallen out of a tree, etc., etc., etc. without a reasonable possibility of timely rescue (no mobile phones back then). And I somehow survived. It is a shame that most kids in urban or suburban areas won't get a chance to do this anymore.

The movie M by Fritz Lang has one of the most fascinatingly alien endings of any movie I've ever seen. A serial killer who preys on children is brought to trial. Before the final sentence is announced, the shot cuts to the mothers of the children crying. One says "One has to keep closer watch over the children. -- All of you"

The moral is basically "You can't depend on people not to murder your children. You can't bring back dead children, we all need to protect our children." Watching M for the first time was incredibly strange. M was filmed in 1931 and the plot could have been written yesterday. I'm a huge proponent of letting kids explore the world (both literally and figuratively) without adult supervision.

I'm extremely thankful that my parents instilled such a strong sense of self-reliance in me. So many people who I grew up with are afraid to do anything without somebody there holding their hand. When I was a child I was allowed to go pretty much anywhere as long as my parents knew where I was going, when I'd be back, and if there was an adult I could contact in an emergency.

Other parent's used to ask my mom why she let us ride our bikes to school alone. (Always my mom, never my dad.) They'd ask "aren't you afraid of what could happen?" My mom was always insulted by these exchanges, and rightfully so -- the implication always seemed to be she didn't love us enough to protect us. Nothing could be further from the truth. My mom is pretty neurotic, and I know for a fact she was incredibly restless anytime my brother or I were out and about without supervision. She let us go because she wanted us to do more than live, she wanted us to thrive.

> I could have: fallen down a hill, drown in a stream, fallen out of a tree, etc., etc., etc. without a reasonable possibility of timely rescue (no mobile phones back then). And I somehow survived.

Just made me think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Among my cohort, no one died in childhood due to an accident. The closest was an older guy due to an ATV accident... after he graduated high school.

Among children / classmates close to my age in my hometown, I'm not aware of anyone who died, due to accidents or otherwise. So our mortality rate was somewhere below 1%, and I don't see anything to indicate we were unusual in that regard.

Huh, did you go to my school? I had the same thing happen. The summer of graduation, even. There were crazy rumors of it not even being an accident. He was actually a fairly close friend of mine and I was away at boot camp.

I also had an aquantance of mine die in 5th grade. Him and two of his brothers drown when the ice broke on a pond they were playing on[0]. But that's it, out of all of the people I know from school and church, all the way growing up, not just my age peers. At least, those that I heard of.

[0] - http://articles.latimes.com/1988-03-06/news/mn-708_1_young-b...

I think I remember the number of non-related kidnappings of children to be something like 115 a year. out of around ~70 million kids. Throw in assaults and the number is still likely really low. Something to take into account, but hardly the kind of risk that say, traffic, presents.

I know two people to whose place police have been called by neighbors "trying to help children" when they suspected (correctly) that a 7 and a 10yo were alone at home. The parents were normal, reasonable people (not born in the US); kids were never in danger.

When I was between 7 and 9 I often came home from school and was alone for a while, warmed up food or cooked something simple (using a gas stove that required a match to light), went outside to play with friends if I wanted, etc.

It is sad the society today will jump in to protect my kids from me if it catches me letting them do anything like that.

What was the result of the police call?

Nothing serious. In both cases the parents were told to stop doing it. AFAIK they apologized and complied (or instructed their kids to act as if there were an adult in the house).

> or instructed their kids to act as if there were an adult in the house

So I gather that somehow these two kids were, when alone, acting in such a way that allowed the person who called the police to believe they were alone? It feels like there's some more context here. What were the kids up to? (:

Never underestimate the nosiness of curtain-twitching busybody neighbors.

I am not sure if you are serious. I assume you are -- I think the old lady, who was always bored, was tracking who was going where and when. I heard (but not sure) she even peeked into the windows from the outside to find out who was inside. Those were two separate incidents btw.

The difference is that a plane crash is largely out of your hands. Sending your child out to play unsupervised is a conscious decision. Parents are also not entirely rational. Don't underestimate the personal experiences of the parents either - I've seen multiple kids get kid by cars (and been hit by one myself) and also nearly drowned on multiple occasions so definitely pay a little extra attention when my kids are near a busy road or body of water. Obviously there is a spectrum though - it's possible to be a little more vigilant in some circumstances without being a "helicopter" parent.

I'm not sure that incorrectly assessing risk is limited to just parents either - look at our collective response to terrorism and mass shootings. I'm sure it's already been mentioned somewhere in these comments but the role of the media sensationalizing tragic but rare events is probably significant in this.

> The difference is that a plane crash is largely out of your hands. Sending your child out to play unsupervised is a conscious decision.

There is no difference there. Sending your child out to play unsupervised and getting on a plane each have X risk of Y outcome so your decision is based on those variables.

GP was simply suggesting that the risk of one's child being abducted (by social services or others) is probably similar to the risk of being on a plane that crashes (e.g. so low that most people do not even think about it).

Well summarized, thank you.

I understand that - I don't disagree that the risk of serious issues is overestimated. My point was more that sending your child outside to play is a routine decision with many more possible outcomes than a plane crash.

Sending them out unsupervised exposes them to the possibility that they could get lost, they could get hurt, they could get bullied, or they could be a victim of a serious crime. Of course they could also have a great time which is why parents do it despite the (minimal) risks.

If something bad happened to your child, plenty of parents would question their decision and that experience would likely influence their future decisions. There is a reason we have fences around pools, marked locations to cross busy roads, teach kids not to chase a ball out onto a road etc - they are situations that children encounter on a routine basis. Being involved in a plane crash as an unsupervised minor is far less likely to happen and probably has fewer possible outcomes.

> My point was more that sending your child outside to play is a routine decision with many more possible outcomes than a plane crash.

You are comparing a decision to an outcome, so that doesn't really mean much. You would have to consider "sending a child out unsupervised" vs. "taking a trip on a plane" (two decisions) -

Potential outcomes for sending a child out unsupervised:

- Abduction

- Bullying

- Getting hit by a car

- Stabbing

- etc.

Potential outcomes for taking a trip on a plane:

- Plane crash

- Grounding

- Diversion

- Hijacking

- etc.

If something bad happened (on their plane ride), plenty of (people) would question their decision and that experience would likely influence their future decisions.

Any number of outcomes are possible in both situations and the level of control the person experiencing the outcome has will varying greatly depending on any number of circumstances. None of this is relevant to the very simple comparison GP was making.

There's so few children abducted by strangers that worrying about it is going to take your focus off of the real risks: Drugs, sex, peer pressure, and abuse at the hands of other children. Later on you have to deal with teen drivers and all the risks that come with that.

If you educate your kids about the risks, give them the tools to protect themselves, and give them advice on how to handle their often difficult social situations, you'll do much better than never letting them out for fear of them being molested, stabbed, or robbed.

GP made the comment that the risk of child services getting involved was comparable to the risk of being in a plane crash. When you send a child outside you are ultimately accountable for that decision if something happens to them (did you adequately supervise the child if they needed it, did they have a safe environment to play in, did you know who they were playing with etc) but if you put your child on a plane that subsequently crashes then no one will ask whether you adequately assessed the risk.

In the book 'free range kids' they talk about how your are 20,000 times more likely to have your kid die in a car accident than to be kidnapped by a stranger, yet how many of us put kids in the car seat every day, but teach them all about 'stranger danger' and keep a overbearing eye on them? The objective risk doesn't matter, its that parents feel a lack of control over kidnapping, which gets covered in the news, compared to driving..

The risk of your child abduction is very, very, very high in America these days. All you have to do is read news stories about what happens when parents let their kids go somewhere without supervision: the cops are called, CPS is called, and the kids are seized (or threatened to be seized).

Yes, there is a huge danger of your children being abducted, if you are not a helicopter parent. It's not some shadowy molester however, it's the government which will abduct your child.

When I was a kid, we ran around our neighborhood as a pack every day after school, and all summer. We would explore the woods, explore new construction houses near us after the workers left, play sports, and thousands of other activities.

Unfortunately, the environment has changed for my kids in ways that makes this difficult to duplicate:

1. Other kids aren't home anymore, they are all at structured activities. There is no neighborhood pack to play with.

2. Parents aren't home either, they are working. When I was a kid, if you got a splinter or scrape, you just went to the nearest house and someone's mom patched you up. All those houses are empty now.

3. If you keep your kid home to play freely, they miss out on all the social stuff going on in the structured activities. Much as I dislike all the structure, it is where the other kids are.

I agree it sounds great to let your kids roam free as we did, but I think in practice the environment has changed in ways that make it difficult.

Well I grew up in the mountains of Vermont, and that environment hasn't changed really. But I see your point, although I feel that the only way to combat that shift, is to actively push against it (like the dad in the article did).

2 is a big one. Yet another consequence of high land prices as now both partners are forced to work.

Another is the break up of wider family. Before people could live locally and they would have their grandparents local too, and aunts etc. Now that land rents are so high and work is god, together with low job security, people are forced to move to other parts of urban areas or even to different cities in order to find work.

Still everyone seems pretty happy with capital gains on their home that can never be realised because all other homes also went up in price, so perhaps it's worth the utter destruction of life as we know it!

Well you can always just move to a small town where the rent is cheap.

Oh wait, there's no decent-paying jobs there...

Rent is a function of wages. Land prices are a function of credit * wages. That's the point, the system scales up credit to absorb all productivity.

> I agree it sounds great to let your kids roam free as we did, but I think in practice the environment has changed in ways that make it difficult

I agree, both with this and the premise that overprotective parenting is a real phenomenon. You can't place all of the blame on the parents for their increased vigilance because the environment of growing up has literally changed.

Like many of you, when I was young, I played all over my neighbourhood with other kids my age, completely unsupervised. Free to wander quite far from my home with the understanding that I would be home for supper. However, I grew up in a small town (pop. ~20k).

Today, most people live in cities, and many in large ones (us included). When my kids are older, I will do my best to give them freedom to play, but there are just some realities today that are different from when I was younger. I remember reading somewhere that there are roughly 3x the amount of vehicles on the road as there were in the 80s (when I was growing up). My biggest safety fear for my kids is traffic. We live in a city. There are a lot of parks around, but getting to and from places involves navigating traffic and a lot of it. I'll do my best to educate them and give them trust to do so, but you can't help but be a bit concerned. We all know you can be involved in a traffic accident these days through no fault of your own.

To clarify: I'm not saying that the world is actually more dangerous for kids today than it was a generation ago, but I think for many parents it's not difficult to see how they could have that perception (true or not) and thus parent in a more protective way. Not only has the world changed, but so has the beholder (from carefree child to responsible parent).

I live in Brooklyn and there's kids roaming around after school all over. Unless they're toddlers they know how to not get hit by a car.

I'm not saying kids can't handle it. My point was not that it's not entirely reasonable to expect parents of today to act in the same ways as their parents did when when they were growing up, because the world now looks a lot different from what they experienced as children. The danger could be real or perceived, but the end result is the same.

I wouldn't be surprised if our parents' generation were also considered over-protective by previous standards. This just feels like a "when I was your age" type of thing.

I think there is real difference between saying the reality is different, and the perception is different, though I agree the outcome is the same. If teh reality is different, then teh outcome may be justified. But if the perception is different (which I think is the truth), then guys like Mika Lanza are fighting the good fight, and all parents should be working to change the perception that free play is dangerous.

I completely agree. It's something I consciously try to change within myself on a regular basis as a parent. My point being, it is a struggle and an understandable one. It's not as easy as saying "You're being a helicopter! Stop being so silly." as if the parent is behaving irrationally. It's something I feel I have to actively unlearn, even though it wasn't explicitly taught to me.

And, of course, there are many degrees of protectiveness. It is a spectrum. I see some parents where their protectiveness is much greater than mine and it seems obvious to me. At the same time, I'm sure other parents look at me and say the same thing. It's not a one size fits all situation. Parenting, as a whole is, of course a matter of personal values.

Brooklyn is one of very few places in America where kids can roam around all over. It's a highly walkable, pedestrian friendly place with excellent public transit options. Most of America is not like that at all.

I think the problem is more complex than more cars. If you have more cars but road size stays the same, after a point traffic is slower moving. I imagine the graph to be like a bell curve.

But if you widen roads and make other improvements to accommodate traffic then the graph would be more linear.

I grew up in a relatively large town (~300k at the time, regional capital), on a block that mostly consisted of densely packed 5-story and 8-story apartment buildings.

We all played all over the neighborhood together. There were playgrounds between the buildings, but we didn't really stick to them once we were old enough to go to school. When I was 10, I was riding the bike all over the place, within about 5km radius from home, and so were all the other kids.

I didn't personally know anyone who had a serious accident, traffic or otherwise. The worst I remember is one kid falling off the garage roof and breaking an arm, and another kid riding the bike into an uncovered manhole and falling down there. As far as the rumor mill went, the most extreme that I can recall was a story of a kid in the area who lost an eye in an incident involving live ammo being thrown into fire.

5 and 8 story apartment buildings is not a typical American environment by far. I grew up in exactly the same environment as you did -- pedestrian friendly, highly available public transit, protected courtyard playgrounds, wide sidewalks on both sides of the streets, where kids riding bikes are not forced onto the road, etc.

This is a very different environment from most of America.

I wouldn't call our playgrounds protected. They had driveways between the actual buildings and the playground, and cars went there occasionally. But the drivers were generally well aware that there'd be kids around, and drive carefully there.

Sidewalks, yeah, I'll grant you that. It's still the thing that amazes me most about US - that so many roads here plainly don't have any sidewalks. I'm used to seeing them on literally every road that is in a populated area. Even villages usually had them!

I was more alluding to the fact that these courtyard playgrounds are easily accessible for kids directly from their apartments, and don't have to be driven to by adults.

As far as cars, it was almost impossible to get up to higher than 10mph in there, and if you did, you'd probably be hunted down next time by neighbors and old ladies.

>2. Parents aren't home either, they are working.

Even worse, at least half of them are working in "bullshit jobs", doing nothing productive except wasting time there justifying their paycheck.

I strongly believe that that's not true for most folks. And even if it were - the paycheck is why they're there so they can make ends meet for their family.

Yes, but that doesn't mean the work they're doing is meaningful or useful. There's been a bunch of articles about this. Most office workers are just doing "bullshit jobs": their work isn't really needed, or their productivity is horrifically low.

I firmly believe we could switch to 20-hour work weeks and see almost no drop in productivity. Most workers spend much of their time surfing the web, sitting around chatting, etc.

http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

https://www.rt.com/uk/312365-people-think-jobs-useless

#1 is the #1 problem. My kids still go around the neighborhood knocking on doors but the other kids are _never_ home.

It seems like (2) is a good cause of (1), quite separate from helicopter parenting: working parents need a supervised place to store their kids.

When I was a kid, I could roam the neighbourhood in a pack exploring woods and feeding horses, because I was sent to an (illegal) child-minder. This was just the house of an auntie who had finished raising five kids and was still not sick of it.

Being illegal was the best part: had it been an official daycare centre, we would have been trapped inside a palisade and hovered over by nice 20-somethings with proffesional training and no kids. No Hulk-Hogan reinactments would not have been possible then.

That's how I think and try to act. I think that we do know what causes real hurts and scars that would make a kid regret later, in life. But there are small dangers that will just teach on how to react, avoid or deal with. And even creativity only comes from learning, trying and dealing with outcomes.

In the trade-off of security vs knowledge and discover, the parenting function is not to go to only one side.

I've had a similar childhood, but I think we all have the survivorship bias here. For the record, I've electrocuted myself, drank kerosene, burnt myself among other things. Each of which could have easily ended my life. Just because I survived, you hear from me. There may be other kids who have had worse luck and they might not be here to tell their story.

We say we had a free childhood and we turned out just fine because we survived. There are others who were not lucky. So basing how we raise our children on the premise that everything was okay and is still the same is incorrect.

The statistics say that ALMOST EVERYONE survived. That's the point here. It's very much like terrorism.. hardly anyone dies from terrorism statistically, but some people live in fear of it for no reason.

Then in the important thing to think of is, would you want your kid to be the few that did not survive. I agree you need to give kids freedom and all that, but I can't blame parents for trying their best to not put their kids in harm that can be avoided.

Then in the important thing to think of is, would you want your kid to be the few that did not survive

Do you also not board planes, in case yours is one of the few that doesn't make it to its destination?

I do, but I also don't blame people who don't board planes because of those odds.

> I grew up free to explore

Same here. But back in that day there was so much less to keep occupied with. That is at least part of the reason you did those things. You typically weren't allowed to watch TV for a long time at least and you had to find something interesting to do. Today the things that some kids can do are way more exciting than taking apart an old lawn mower and seeing what makes it tick.

As a counter point to your anecdote, I did all those things as a kid and went on to be an injecting drug user (meth and Heroin, whatever else was laying around) for all of my 20's, assaulted a few people, and got charged with drug trafficking.

So it's no guarantee.

At 35 I have a good job now, and am part of the wealthy property owning class (read: mortgagee), and am building a business with my wife, so maybe it worked out ok?

Isn't there some confirmation bias here? Meaning, you survived, and so you're still here to tell us that it all worked out fine.

My nine year old is very anxious to be far from an adult (more than 20 feet) in public places, even very safe ones like residential streets, parks and grocery stores.

Why? Because other "helpful" adults come up to him and ask him if he is OK. Does he know where his parents are? Once a small group of adults gathered around him when my wife was getting the car from down the street. Concerned adults see other concerned adults and they gather like a flock, producing great anxiety in my child. Now he is very nervous to be far from a parent in any public place.

This rings incredibly true for me. I'm certainly the type of parent that lets my kids wander farther than normal (by today's ridiculous standard of normal anyway, which means within 5 feet) and I see constant looks of concern from all sorts of adults. My 4 year old is perfectly capable of being a half block ahead of me as we walk down the street and doesn't need an adult stopping him to check in. My last walk through the airport with two kids, both always well within eyesight, resulted in multiple concerned adults stopping in their tracks, ready to leap into action.

If a kid is clearly lost, crying, or distressed then please, by all means try to help. But if a kid is confidently walking without a parent within 5 feet don't jump to the conclusion that something's wrong.

This is my ethos. I have two young boys--one 4 year-old and one 18 months--and this is how they are growing up. My four year old was riding without training wheels by two and on skate ramps by three [1]. My wife was initially against it but through my stubborn insistence, she's come around. As I mentioned in another comment, my sister and I grew up doing all sorts of dangerous shit and I will forever be grateful to my parents for not raising pansies. We build a rickety tree fort high in a tree and threw balls of mud and rocks at each other and the other neighborhood kids who played with us. We rode our bikes across major streets, we made homemade fireworks, and we had a trampoline in the neighbors' yard and a skate ramp in the driveway. It was an amazing childhood and it's exactly what I want for my boys. When we moved out here to small-town Kansas from the Seattle area, we spent time looking for the right street and we found it. Packs of kids roam unsupervised and there are few backyard fences. It's perfect. I hope that "playborhood" does become a thing again because there's no better way, IMHO, to raise kids.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/BHNBJqmhM5T/?taken-by=christophe...

Good for you!

Where did you find a bike that fit a two year old? I have a balance bike for my kid but he can't stand over it yet

The bike in the Instagram video is a Diamondback Mini Viper. He got a balance bike (the Strider) for his second birthday and like your son, he also had a tough time standing over it. But, he grew and was able to get up on it pretty quickly. First, we practiced locomotion and later, coasting with his feet up on the stays behind the seat. Once he was flying around on that bike, we switched to the pedal bike. We had the same problem--he wasn't quite tall enough--but he grew again and could straddle it, sort of. The actual transition from balance bike to pedal bike went really quickly. Main thing they have to learn is the coaster brake.

Good luck.

Why on earth would you move to Kansas from Seattle if you want your kids to be able to go outside and play? The PacNW has a far superior climate, where you can go outside just about any time of year. The Midwest, by contrast, has hot summers and brutal winters. I get that Seattle may be too urban, but there's plenty of parts of the area that aren't nearly as built-up.

I am convinced there are benefits to letting your children roam and learn about the world on their own (within reasonable limits, of course). I grew up in Chicago in the 90s and once I was old enough to understand the seriousness of being careful around traffic and crossing the street safely I was allowed to walk to the home of friends who lived a few blocks away on my own. I learned how to navigate the city: oh my usual route is blocked by construction, I have to find a different way.

By the time I was 12 I was taking the El home from school, a consequence of my decision to participate in after-school Jazz band. But that's the thing, it was my choice. If I wanted to be in the band, then I'd have to take the train as my parents couldn't pick me up at that time.

By the time I got to college, it was painfully clear which of my fellow students in the dorms had never had to do anything for themselves before. They were very nearly incapable of caring for themselves, be it their living spaces or navigating life in a new city.

Would you let your child roam about Chicago these days?

I think most of the major cities were actually worse when we were children

Seriously? I don't have the words... especially for Chicago.

http://heyjackass.com/ <- This is a serious website BTW

Well, there's been clearly a decline:

http://heyjackass.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/yearly_homi...

Your own link shows that Chicago had almost twice as many shootings in the 1970's and early 1990's than it has today. Sounds safer to me.

Look at 1989 to 2011 homicides... most by far. Also, 608 killings so far this year... Trend for homicides is SKYROCKETING.

Are you talking about the table under "Yearly Murder Trend"? Of course the 1989 entry is the highest; it's the longest period. The only other period on that table of comparable length is 1955 - 1976, with about 3700 less homicides but also a much smaller city.

The line chart above the table clearly backs up the statement you were replying to. From 1968 through 2001 Chicago never had a year with less than 600 homicides. Yes, this year has seen a sharp uptick for some reason. It is still the first time in 15 years Chicago has broken that 600 threshold. This year notwithstanding Chicago has been significantly safer this millennium than it was when most of the people on this site were kids.

This is in very specific neighborhoods due to gang activity for the most part. It's hardly an indicator of safety over the city in general.

Almost every year between 1970 and 1996 had more homicides then are there have been + that there are projected to be in 2016.

I think the the world is becoming much safer, while at the same time, seems a lot scarier because social media has given massive exposure to any sort of danger / problems in society. Things that shock us now were the norm 30 years ago, and the really awful stuff (racial homicides, police corruption) is becoming more rare.

You don't have to think the world is becoming safer, it absolutely is. And not just safer, but more prosperous and wealth is more distributed then ever. Here is just a single article going over many of these things: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/12/goo...

Personally, I don't find such topline metrics that helpful. If India improves by some margin (noting that it is a country with relatively more space to grow than a developed nation) then the averages for the whole World would improve, given that India represents 1/6th the global population. This would mask any relative declines in pockets/cities in a country like the US.

NB I only very quickly skimmed the article, and base this opinion on the usage of broad terminology like "the World is...". It may be objectively true but is not really pertinent to the discussion of whether Chicago is or is not getting safer...

Look at the distribution of homicides in the city. Some neighborhoods haven't had a single homicide for many years.

Having lived there and assuming they had an upbringing similar to the OP, then yes, I would. Like any city, there are parts that are safer than others. As long as I felt my children could understand the difference and were informed enough not to do anything too stupid, I'd be comfortable with them roaming around the city on their own for some things.

I would. 75% of Chicago is very safe. Stay out of the bad areas and it is fine.

How old are your kids?

2 and 11. Obviously not the 2 yet.

I roamed free in Chicago (city) once I was 10. Still in Chicago. Never been shot. Neither have any of my friends. One is dead of a heroin overdose though...

Yes. I did when I was middle school aged. I loved the science museum, but I also wandered around other places downtown. Other than some security guards harassing me when I tried to use the bathroom in their lobby and some homeless people asking me for stuff I don't recall any incidents. And from what I understand seems are safer now then they were in the mid-80s when I was wandering Chicago.

Ironically, the more urban, working class, and "rough" an area is, the more kids you see outside playing by themselves or being home alone without their parents.

Maybe not the best argument in favor of continuing the practice since those areas also tend to have higher levels of gang membership and drug use.

Which stem from poverty.

Which begets the vicious cycle...

Yes, without a doubt. The violence in Chicago is confined to a couple of small areas and are a result of racist policies that will unfortunately take years to fix. Most of the city is as safe as the average town in America.

Yes, probably. Most of Chicago is very safe. My neighborhood ranks as one of the safest in the city. Kids are very likely in my very near future so I'll find out soon enough.

I grew up in Chicago in the 90s and once I was old enough to understand the seriousness of being careful around traffic and crossing the street safely I was allowed to walk to the home of friends who lived a few blocks away on my own. I learned how to navigate the city: oh my usual route is blocked by construction, I have to find a different way.

I see so many children nowadays who are oblivious to their environment! I have to step out of their way, as they run straight toward me on collision courses! They don't make eye contact, and they don't interact as if I'm a person. I remember this happening in malls, in parks, and on the street.

I've been in classes, where we're playing a multiplayer game, and you can't tell a kid to "figure it out." Many kids just freeze until you lead them through what to do, then they just robotically do exactly what you showed them -- no generalization and no independent thought, and if you never show them what to do, they just sit there and do nothing.

I'll post this as a top-level comment because I think it's a relevant reply to a number of other comments.

In response to, for example, this line from goodJobWalrus:

> I mean people get arrested for letting their kids go to the park or play in their own backyards, for god's sake.

Honest question: what is the objective, per-child risk of that happening? I don't have data for that handy, but I would be shocked if it was anything except exceedingly low, on the order of getting killed in a commercial aircraft crash.

My wife and I frequently struggle with the this vague fear of people turning us in to social services, because we've read a number of articles about that happening to families who were raising their kids in a way that was completely normal a couple of decades ago.

But even with all of the general societal paranoia we are saddled with, I'm almost certain that we are still statistically safe from such over-reach.

As with everything else I hear on the Internet, I remind myself that it wouldn't be talked about if it were not newsworthy.

Ehh, I disagree. Hysteria and FUD can take on lives of their own, living inside the minds of people who let them in even a little. Just because a number of people are upset by something (or believe they should be upset by something) doesn't actually mean it's worth being upset about. The news/media takes these small concerns and blows them out of proportion to sell ad space, which compounds the hysteria.

Example: terrorism. It's a nice trigger word in the USA, but how many people are killed by terrorism vs car crashes or unhealthy habits? Yes, terrorism should be reported on, but it's certainly not as important to anyone's everyday life as not eating shit food and texting like an asshole while driving.

Kids just don't get kidnapped or molested by strangers enough to be statistically significant. Kids are almost always molested by relatives, in a private setting. Kidnapping by stranger is even more rare. Sure, it can happen. Just like a comet could hit Earth. Should we sit around worrying about it, while our children re doomed to have us constantly looking over their shoulders until they're 18 and have no sense of self-purpose?

> general societal paranoia

It's more than that, apparently risk assessment is now an issue of moral judgment.

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/why-are-we-so-af...

Well said, and thank you for the link. It rings true.

I'm not OK to play the odds if all it takes is one nosy neighbor to get my kids taken away and me arrested.

http://insider.foxnews.com/2015/06/14/florida-parents-charge...

You see the irony in this, right? All the parents that don’t let their kids off the leash even for a second use the same reasoning. “It not OK to play the odds if all it takes is one kidnapping to take my kid away for ever”

I’d say that OP’s point is the odds are so low, that it is OK to play them.

http://www.pollyklaas.org/about/national-child-kidnapping.ht...

> 99.8% of the children who go missing do come home.

> Only about 100 children (a fraction of 1%) are kidnapped each year in the stereotypical stranger abductions you hear about in the news.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/in-a-yea...

> In a Year, Child-Protective Services Checked Up on 3.2 Million Children

> 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.

To be fair, one of these has a much higher rate of incident than the other.

Personally, I'm more concerned with the quality and accuracy of CPS than I am about child abduction simply because a 10% improvement in CPS would save more lives than a 100% reduction in child abductions.

Then again, I feel that way about medical errors vs. terrorism and the value of spending money to save lives. A 10% reduction of medical errors would save more lies than a 100% reduction in terrorism. :/

Thanks for digging up this data, which is something my long anecdotal comments were lacking.

Regarding a 100% reduction in terrorism, in the long run, that shit might have some very significant knock-on effects. Especially the massive reduction of wars.

I do agree that the risk of terrorism is massively overrated. I think this is because terrorism requires 'agency' and thus feels both worse and more preventable.

> Regarding a 100% reduction in terrorism

It was meant to represent the impossible goal of 100% success, not that I actually meant it was achievable. I don't think we can substantially reduce terrorism below current levels.

There is always going to be some group of people who are angry and violent as long as humanity hasn't achieved the Singularity imo.

My wife and I have had this conversation before, and we are aware of the particular case you linked too.

I don't want to come across as crass, but, with respect, I will make this short observation:

You trust your child's life to hundreds of strangers every time you drive them somewhere. The chance of your child being hurt by a careless/bored/insane stranger on a per trip basis is very, very low. I assert that the risk of child services becoming involved after you let your child play on a trampoline (or whatever) is even less.

Here is a bunch of data from the UK Social Services.

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/childrens-social-c...

And if I'm reading this correctly, in hte USA in 2014 there were 3.2 million reports of "child maltreatment" (amongst a population of 74 million under 18s).

http://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cb/cm2014.pdf#pag...

http://www.hhs.gov/answers/research/where-can-i-find-social-...

Thanks for the links! I don't have time to go through them at the moment though.

It's almost certain that one of those 3.2 million incidents has our name on it.

In 2014, at a time when our son, who has high functional autism, was going down a mental rabbit hole about what foods he would eat. When the list got down to three foods, we told him that it could not go down any further, period.

So he asked for one of those foods for dinner, and we served it, and he decided that he didn't want it, that he would only eat one of the other two foods on his 'list'.

We refused to accommodate and reminded him that he wasn't allowed to go below three foods. That the food in front of him was on his list, and that he had specifically asked for it. So he would not be served anything different for dinner.

So he ate a little bit of it, and went to bed hungry and unhappy.

The next day at school, he told a teacher that we were starving him, that we were refusing to feed him.

This generated a mandatory CPS incident.

We received a call, and my wife went to the school and talked to someone and contextualized the situation.

The incident was subsequently closed without prejudice.

So, given that rather in-depth bit of "anecdata": of that 3.2 million, based on our direct experience with the reporting requirements schools have to follow, most of them are specious.

Of the ones that aren't, I suspect only a tiny fraction are in any way related to 'free range parenting'.

In short: I strongly suspect that the danger of inappropriate child services intervention associated with various 'free range parenting' activities is vanishingly small, even though it feels like a constant and potent danger.

PS: I'm 110% open and willing to answer any questions about anything mentioned here, including the autism, the 'food list', the seemingly strange behaviour, whatever. I feel that there are a lot of misconceptions surrounding the realities of parenting autistic children, and I am more than happy to help with that. Direct e-mail is fine too: diederich@gmail.com

I know this is presumptive but next time you take your kid to a playground, let them play on the playground with you barely in sight. Stay 200+ feet away. Watch your kid play, and then wait for some other parent to intervene in your child's play. That parent will soon be looking around for you. When they can't find someone who has their eyes fixated on your child, they will ask your child where their parents are. That person is the person who will turn you in to CPS.

I'm not kidding in the slightest when I say this literally happens at least once every single time I take my kid to the park. My kid is pretty advanced physically and takes parkour classes and gymnastics classes. He's very capable of handling situations that other parents freak out at. And he knows his limits probably better than those parents know their own. But they still act like they need to save my kid from himself, and you wouldn't believe the looks of disgust I get from them when I actually reveal myself. I really do not have to worry about him jumping off the monkey bars, but unfortunately I truly believe I can't let him do it on his own without a significant risk of CPS getting called.

Yup! We approached that iteratively, until our son was properly 'free range.' We noted cases where other adults ask our son where his parents were. He didn't know; we were watching from afar. That happened a couple of times.

Beyond a couple of judgmental parents, no action was taken. One parent asked our son for his name, first and last. Our son, per instructions, refused to give his last name.

At that point, the parent has a difficult decision to make. Do they call 911? The answer is 'no'. There is no emergency.

I want to make it clear that I feel what you are describing. My wife and I have felt it, and we still feel it.

But objectively, the risk is very low.

Engineer the situation such that a 'hover-parent' has no choice but to call 911.

Our son carried a cheap pre-paid cell phone from a relatively early age too. He had only to open it and push the 'send' button twice and we would be there. So even in the extremely unlikely event of cops showing up, we would be there minutes later.

This thing that feels so strongly like a risk really isn't.

> Engineer the situation such that a 'hover-parent' has no choice but to call 911.

Sounds like you were using your kid as a prop in a social experiment with the goal to push your own particular agenda through "teaching moments" on strangers.

What did you intend to accomplish?

Huh, I guess you could read my account as such, but that's a pretty narrow perspective.

Our primary goal was to ease all of us (our son, my wife and myself) into being comfortable with our son becoming 'free range'.

Mostly it was my wife and I confirming what we suspected: that he would be safe, primarily from other over-reactive parents. We'd already objectively accepted that he would be physically safe, even though emotionally it was challenging for us.

We secretly shadowed him at the park six or seven times before letting him go full solo. My account of other adult interactions with him were from those experiences.

So he became fully 'free range' at the age of 9, and has been ever since, with absolutely no problems.

So was it a social experiment? I guess that could be accurate, as a side effect. Were we trying to give strangers "teaching moments"? Far from it, though I suppose its possible somebody else learning something, I don't know, and don't much care.

I guess you could say we were pushing our own 'particular agenda'...we were pushing it on our son and ourselves. And we are all three better off for it.

I wonder if you can expand on your implication?

I'll freely admit that I probably misread your intent, as I half suspected.

If all your goals in this situation had your kid's well being in mind, then I misunderstood you and I apologize for that.

From your wording (specially the "engineer the situation" bit) it sounded to me like you behaved differently in those situations because other adults were around. The assumption I made was that you did so to teach them a lesson, so to speak.

If your method towards overseeing your child is the same whether there were other adults around or not, then I obviously misunderstood you and I apologize for that.

I originally understood "engineer the situation" as "provoke a misunderstanding - where none would have taken place otherwise - with the goal of making other adults uncomfortable and so they may understand their mistaken view".

It seems obvious now that this was the wrong reading, but would mind explaining further what you meant by "engineering the situation"?

[EDIT] I have one other question:

> Our son, per instructions, refused to give his last name.

May I ask why? If my son got lost, or needed to ask for help from other adults, or was caught in an emergency situation at school, I would want them to be armed with as much information as possible in order to enable an adult to contact me as soon as possible.

Sure, no worries. Text is a very sub-optimal medium to transmit the intent behind potentially emotionally charged questions.

To be clear, we certainly were behaving differently because there were adults around. We were worried that they might over-react, and so preemptively guard against such entanglements.

The 'engineering' was pretty simple: 1. Instruct our son to not release any information that someone could use to file a complaint against us. Specifically, last name, address or phone number. There are, of course, other good reasons to not release such data!

2. This would force someone who wanted to take official action to call 911, or otherwise contact the police. A non-911 police contact would not pose much of a problem since they lacked any contact information.

3. This would serve to give them pause: is this situation really an emergency? Of course it's not! But the final point was...

4. Make sure our son had a functional cell phone, make sure he would be able to call us at need. So if the police were summoned, or the adult pushed him too hard, he'd call us. We live 5 minutes away, so we'd be there right away.

I'm not sure this is 'engineering' per se, but in my brain mental steps felt similar to the engineering I do in my profession.

Thanks for the explanation.

> other good reasons to not release such data!

What other good reasons? I can't find any outside of thinking that some adult intends to kidnap your child, which could be in gross contradiction with the impression I got earlier from you as a "laissez faire" rationalist type parent. Surely you are aware that the possibility of your kid being kidnapped or hurt by a stranger is infinitesimally smaller than the possibility of them getting hurt by enviromental factors while unsupervised (drowning / sudden seizure / previously undeteced allergy / wild animals... basically any non-human factor). I'd appreciate if you could explain this.

Could I ask you a hypothetical? (based on a real life experience of myself)

Imagine you are hanging out in your yard with friends at 9PM, when suddenly a shoeless, 3 year old girl you don't recognize appears out of nowhere. Upon asking her name, you only receive her first name. She seems barely able to communicate and you aren't able to get clear information about who she is or where her parents are after a few questions. What would you do?

- Send her away without a second thought

- Keep her in your house until someone shows up claiming her

- Stop what you are doing and focus on helping her find her parents (although its not clear whether she's lost or not)

- Call 911

- Call child protection services

I will gladly share with you what I did :)

I'm not Diederich but I'll deconstruct your hypothetical in order to contrast it with her/his example.

* 9pm. Late, approaching curfew for children in many municipalities.

* 3-year-old. I have yet to meet a 3-year-old who can handle being free-range.

* Your yard. This is your neighborhood and you don't recognize this child. This is vastly different from being at a public playground where there are many unfamiliar children.

* Trouble communicating. A typical 3-year-old should be able to communicate. If not, she most likely can't handle being alone.

* Shoeless. I'm not sure this is relevant unless weather conditions are austere or your neighborhood contains broken glass.

The cumulative of these elements leads to an out-of-the-ordinary situation. It implies neglect. A search for the parents or if you're too busy, a phone call to police non-emergency is probably the appropriate response.

Hah, I'll take 'rationalist type' any day! And I don't mind laissez faire ("a policy or attitude of letting things take their own course, without interfering") much either.

My example revolved around strangers because that was the general topic. Strangers in the form of meddling, hyper-protective adults. True blue 'stranger danger' is, as you say, extremely rare.

Our son has almost always been very deliberate in action, especially with respect to his own safety.

So, the only real situation we had to guard against was the possibility of other adults freaking out that he was alone at the age of 9.

Regarding your hypothetical: as noted elsewhere, 3 years is very young. To be more illustrative, I'll disregard the specifics you mentioned, because our actual decision in such a situation would depend on so many more considerations.

My general approach would be to ensure the child is safe while minimizing my own exposure to possible unforeseen repercussions.

If the child was physically ok, I would tend toward relatively low-grade engagement. If she wandered off, I'd probably follow at a distance as long as needed.

The guiding principle is minimal intervention/interference with a baseline of protecting the child from environmental/possible human dangers.

If people arrived or she went toward people that posed a possible danger, than I would not hesitate to involve the authorities, because that is clearly moving toward an 'emergency' threshold.

These are conceptual guidelines, which might all go out the window depending on the actual specifics of a situation as I saw it.

I read it as him 'engineering' the situation to avoid over concerned parents from calling the cops / calling CPS / freaking out the child by telling him this is dangerous.

I can't answer for the above poster, but I can say I would much rather my kid call me than tell a stranger his/her last name. Kids are much more manipulable than adults, and giving out identity information might be dangerous. I'd instruct my kid to call me if another adult insists on identification. I think this is age-dependent. If I trust my kid with a cell phone, then this is reasonable. If the kid is too young, and it's a school incident or something, then sure, it's reasonable to tell a teacher or school administrator your last name. Some rando in the park, though? No.

> Some rando in the park, though? No.

Why not? What's the fear here?

I'm sorry, why did you instruct him not to give his last name? I didn't get it.

Given a first and last name, it's possible that judgmental parents who were worried about a 9 year old being at the park could file some kind of official complaint against us.

Given only a first name, their only course would be to call the police if they wanted to take any kind of official action. That's decision is about giving them pause to consider: is this child playing in the park without parents nearby actually an emergency? When I call the police, and they come, will I be able to defend my decision?

I my city in we had a little Robert Moses in the parks and rec department who designed amazing, unique and challenging playgrounds in every new neighbourhood that went up in the late 70s and early 80s during a time of rapid growth for the city. From 6-12 I lived in my local playground during the summers, it was a full time job, I wanted to be a stuntman when grew up.

Those playgrounds have since all been replaced by the common kit playgrounds that are so crippled by draconian safety regulations that they aren't any fun at all for any developmentally normal kid over the age of 6.

But weirdly, next to where my old playground used to be, they've put in a fancy new skatepark. Among other concrete forms it features an 11 foot high quarterpipe kids are encouraged to drop in on while standing on a little board with wheels under it. The ambulance pays a visit every other day during the summers. Thank heaven for universal health care.

Nature finds a way, sometimes.

That phenomenon is ADA related as well. You need to provide ground accessible equipment, "sensory" activities for specific age ranges at specific heights, limited slope ramps and other features now. Our local parks department actually has a court-mandated compliance officer because they were sued a few years ago for having a non-compliant playground.

Having connecting ramps and bridges reduces some of that burden, which is one of the reasons why many playgrounds consist of a sprawling elevated ramp system with a few slides, wheels and other random crap.

The skatepark is ironically easier to build, until someone manages to win a lawsuit, despite the obvious safety hazards.

Very interesting article.

I'm an example by-product of the opposite extreme. My parents kept me from my neighbors, other kids in school and other people in church (I can count on one hand the number of guests that came over to hang out with me throughout my childhood). I also had no access to TV, the internet, the library, etc. I was isolated to such an extreme that the only thing I think I really developed was an active imagination. I guess my parents were a little more extreme than typical "helicopter" parents, but also unable to afford any structured activities for me, so I was closely watched and kept indoors all the time.

By my teenage years, the home-schooling program my parents were putting me through was so isolating and so obviously worthless on its own that I started to spiral into depression and contemplated suicide. By that point, I was convinced that I was wasting away mentally and physically such that when I would attempt to enter the adult world, that I would fall on my face and simply never be able to "catch up" with my peers who had two decades of normal development.

Things did get orders of magnitude better when I was in college the next year and working multiple jobs. I managed to move out somewhere after I turned 18 with nice roommates and cheap rent. I think I managed to close most of the mental/social/physical gap that I had perceived in my teenage years, but I would be lying if I said that I was a completely normal 25-year old. I have the strangest deficiencies that crop up now and again in my life, and I have a strong suspicion that kids who come from "helicopter" households will share these problems (such as difficulty reading people's emotions, difficulty in executive function, strange worries, low self-esteem).

So when I consider the possibility of having kids, I really like the idea of letting them socialize with other people, explore, and solve problems on their own without my constant interference. That's much better than my experience of growing up, with only fantasies of being outside and doing stuff. But if that's culturally unacceptable, then there will be a generation or two of people like me, who struggle daily with the little things I never had a chance to deal with growing up.

The sad thing is that, unlike many other areas, parenting in the U.S. is getting worse, not better. Millennials are leading the way in increasing acceptance of LGBT individuals, legalizing drugs, etc., but most of the millennial parents I know are absolutely nuts. They make my own "overprotective asian mother" seem like a proponent of "free-range kids."

I can't speak for everywhere, but at least in Seattle, most of the helicopter parents I see and know are not millenials but genX. I'm on the upper edge of what is called a millennial, and almost everybody I know that is younger than me is very intentionally hands off.

Curious, do you have kids & if so, are you doing the hands off thing?

I live in Seattle (within city limits) and would love to chat with someone about how the hands-off/free-range thing is working in practice within this city.

I don't see any evidence that free play is increasing as new parents are coming on line. Things look even more structured and over protected than ever.

Wait, do you want to let children be, or intervene in their lives? Or is it that you only want to intervene when your sensibilities are offended?

The article makes a testable statement: "Think about your own 10 best memories of childhood, and chances are most of them involve free play outdoors [...] How many of them took place with a grown-up around?"

Yup, that is correct for me. And I was a bookish, introverted child. Still unsupervised exploration of forrests, abandoned factories, houses under construction, rivers, caves, tunnels ... was awesome.

Same here. I think my favorite unsupervised childhood memory was the time when (I was about ~10 years old) the day after a big rainstorm, that turned a nearby creek into more or less a river, we took a couple of inflatable rafts and went for a little boat ride. We ended up miles and miles away from any of our parents' houses and once it started to get dark, we hopped out of the stream, went and knocked on some random person's door and asked to use the phone.

Our parents weren't thrilled at having to pick us up, but we had a great time.

I did this exact same thing as a teenager when our creek turned into a torrent, but because I had thoroughly explored the forest as a free-range kid, I knew where the creek would take us, so we arranged to have someone meet us at a faraway bridge with a car.

Ours was more spur of the moment and done without our parent's permission. We spent hours on the boats, and none of us had traced this particular creek that far (and the water was moving at a nice clip).

Same thing here, and I was one of those kids who got regularly taunted by playmates for being a bookworm.

I recall we were also pretty cavalier about getting messy - dirty water, actual dirt, clay, even animal poop. I wonder whether exposure to all that stuff has any benefits for the immune system later.

I went into this article expecting to cheer it on: I'm grateful for everyone who's pushing back against our modern insistence on overprotective parenting, all too often backed by the brute force of law.

But barely a page into it (by the end of paragraph 6, and heavily reinforced in paragraph 7), I'm already barreled over by what looks like some seriously intense sexism. Maybe the article misrepresents him, but Mike Lanza appears to place the blame for overprotective parenting primarily on moms ("mom philosophy", he calls it, though the article's author tries to shelter him by generalizing the term) dominating "passive dads". He describes the fun and freedom that he advocates as "masculine experiences". While the article does mention and show some girls, most of the quotes from Lanza are about boys and what they need. (The article even politely specifies that "his focus is on boys", without comment.)

I'm not okay with any of that. I could express that as anger on behalf of my wife (who doesn't buy into overprotective parenting any more than I do) or on behalf of my daughter (who was begging me just this week to lift her into a tree again and again). But honestly I'd be just as annoyed if they weren't in my life. It ought to be obvious in this day and age that "I blame moms!" is an embarrassing (and harmful) way to ground an argument.

Calling for revival of the term "sissy" and normalizing bullying as "normal, boyish aggression" in paragraph 9 was just one step too much for me. Sorry: I'm out. There are plenty of people advocating similar "free range kids" philosophies who aren't also assholes.

I also had a visceral response to this article. As Mike Lanza is explaining his childhood experience to the journalist (Melanie Thernstrom), she quotes him:

  Since they didn’t want to “stoop all the way to girls,” he says, giving me a smile.

To be fair, the guy is in his 50s. 40someodd years ago was a different world and he's just describing the attitudes of the time. Boys played with boys and girls played with girls. I interpreted as Lanza merely walking us through the thought process boys from the 70s had, not as saying it's an attitude boys today should have. It's easy to picture that smile as indicating self-awareness of the outdatedness of the attitude.

I am a parent of 2 teenage boys (16 and 18) and this is similar to the philosophy under which they were raised. Contrary to what people are saying in the posts, it is not difficult to raise your children this way, nor more dangerous. The worst injuries either boy has sustained have all been at organized activities. The benefits, and I can't overemphasize this, outweigh whatever the hazards.

The problem isn't the kids of course, but parents, who are extremely overprotective of their children. I blame our media, which focuses on the violence and dangers in our society to make money while ignoring we're living in literally the safest time in history. They've scared the parents into thinking the world is too dangerous for their children.

It's the kids who suffer. They don't get the learn autonomy, or how to use their imagination, or how to set their own boundaries. And most of all, how to productively manage boredom. I see how they're doing that these days - they've got their noses in phones.

For me at least, I know that if I didn't have my nose in my phone, I would have my nose in a book instead. Either way, I manage boredom through reading.

As an anecdote, in 2006 I was in grad school and helped a friend with her summer camp for nerdy teens. I still remember the brother and sister (16ish years old) who were deathly afraid to be outside at dusk during the summer because of the West Nile Virus, which at that point was a concern but nothing DEET couldn't prevent. They'd read about it in the newpaper, I think.

I don't think it's the parents who are solely at fault for the safety paranoia.

I am surprised this guy's homeowners insurance hasn't dropped him. A few years ago I had to switch companies or be dropped for having a trampoline -- with a full net -- in my fenced backyard. Insurance companies hate anything with any risk, especially of injury to outside visitors.

> A few years ago I had to switch companies or be dropped for having a trampoline -- with a full net -- in my fenced backyard

Seriously? Wow, as a non-American I find that outrageous.

I wonder when they'll threaten to drop people for having coke in their fridge or water in their bathtub. After all, those things kill people every day! They're extremely dangerous.

Insurance isn't about helping people cover expenses, it's about collecting as much premium as possible while paying out as little as possible.

nowadays commercials of Insurance companies actually tout that they pay the settlements.

It would be like me, a Developer, touting that I actually finish apps, I don't just take the money.

Taken to it's logical conclusion you can argue that every business is going to try and cut every possible cost and service to maximise profit.

Insurance is not about helping people cover expenses though, it is about pooling risk for the benefit of the group. This does mean that if you are a stunt helicopter pilot then other people in a low risk pool may tell you that they don't want you in it anymore.

America has a whole bunch of weirdness around insurance law etc. so I can't really speak much as I'm foreign - but there are good reasons that insurers don't cover Skiing on default travel insurance for example - and it isn't to screw the consumer.

> it is about pooling risk for the benefit of the group.

AND making obscene profit for the insurance company.

I wish we had more things like this that were non-profit. An insurance non-profit could charge the same premiums as a company does today, then whatever "profit" they have left at the end of the year after expenses they just refund back to all customers as a percentage of their premiums.

Everyone would pay way less, all the employees still get paid the same, and we'd still have the benefit of pooling the risk.

I'd love to see more on the obscene profit side of this. Honestly - I've done some work on pricing, reserving, etc in insurance and spoken to practicing GI actuaries - the margins are just not that large.

Are you specifically pointing to US medical insurers (I cannot comment at all on that tbh beyond the fact that the whole system is problematic)?

In fairness, it's my understanding trampolines are really honestly fairly hazardous, despite their pedestrian appearance & our fond memories.

More than 1 million people went to emergency departments for trampoline-related injuries between 2002 and 2011, with nearly 300,000 of those injuries involving broken bones

approximately 900,000 consumer trampolines sold each year

Doing some extremely crude correlation- For every ten trampolines sold a year, one person will visit the ER that year, and for every thirty trampolines sold, one person will break a bone. Yeah, I can see why insurance doesn't like them.

They aren't saying you can't have one, they just don't want to cover them.

http://theweek.com/articles/472062/dangers-owning-home-tramp...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/29/trampoline-injuries...

What? That sounds crazy to a non-US person. Are you saying that if someone came to visit and hurt themselves on the trampoline they would charge your insurance for it?

They could sue you, and it would fall through to your insurance.

No, an injured guest could sue you and your insurance company would be required under the policy to defend you and pay any bodily injury against you.

I guess you live some place with free-at-the-point-of-use healthcare.

Insurance settlements in personal injury cases go well beyond just medical bills.

Absolutely. I just opened my home policy online and I have $300,000 coverage for Personal Liability in addition to coverage of home, property, etc. The description for the Personal Liability insurance says:

"If a claim is made or a suit is brought against an insured for damages because of bodily injury or property damage caused by an occurrence to which this coverage applies, we will:

* Pay up to our limit of liability for the damages for which the insured is legally liable. Damages include prejudgment interest awarded against the insured; and

* Provide a defense at our expense by counsel of our choice, even if the suit is groundless, false or fraudulent. We may investigate and settle any claim or suit that we decide is appropriate. Our duty to settle or defend ends when the amount we pay for damages resulting from the occurrence equals our limit of liability."

Some people also take out a personal umbrella policy which covers personal liability beyond home or auto. For example, a former employer's daughter and a friend were in an auto accident. The parents of the friend sued my boss for personal injury on her behalf, and my boss had to pay about two million dollars. Her auto policy probably covered $100-500k of that, and the rest was covered by the umbrella policy.

In fact, the day the company I worked for went public, I was advised to get such an umbrella policy because I was now a target for such law suits. We could either stop having neighborhood kids in our house or get it added to our home insurance, but leaving things as they were was perceived as too risky. I don't have any way to quantify the risk, and obviously it's in the insurance company's interests for me to buy more insurance, but it definitely brought home how litigious a society we live in.

I wonder if the parent talked about in the article has a major umbrella policy. Jumping from the roof of that play house onto a trampoline seems kind of insane. Letting young children play on the roof of your house also seems crazy. Letting your kid beat up on my kid out of an attachment to your parenting philosophy is definitely not ok in my book.

I'm older than most people posting here, and I never did any of that as a child. I did do construction in the summers as a much older kid (the article describes 4 year olds on the roof of his house), and got hurt enough to go to the hospital three times, but these were the risks of the job.

Finally, this guy seems pretty sexist. It's ok for me to keep my little girls from bullying other children, but boys have to learn to defend themselves? Let me guess, is that because girls are expected to ask permission and behave nicely, but boys aren't?

"Boys will be boys" is usually the justification for excusing what would be considered battery, assault or harassment if the perpetrator was 18 or over.

What part are you referring to in your last paragraph? I can't find it.

"Non-us" is awful broad- where exactly? Are you claiming that there are no non-US jurisdictions that have similar liability laws?

I lived in a few EU countries so far, all of them with national health insurance. If someone got hurt in your backyard, then they would be taken to a hospital and....no bill would ever be produced. No one would even bother asking if you have house insurance, because any cost of treatment would be covered by the national health cover. I don't think my house insurance even includes coverage for things like this because it's so unheard of. Someone could still sue you for damage to their health, but first of all - court could order at most payment for any extra treatment(that's not already paid for by national health insurance) or maybe perceived loss of income. Multi-million-dollar cases where the actual loss is nowhere near that are not really a thing outside of US.

Thanks for the details. In the US, typical judgments go beyond just medical expenses. (pain and suffering, loss of work, etc) I think it will vary a lot between different states, too. I think a lot of the reason for this is because of insurance- I bet people that don't have insurance are far less likely to be sued for these types of incidents. But with the advent of insurance, has come an attitude of "oh well, they have insurance, so it won't cost them anything, it'll just be the insurance company that pays for it!". The insurance companies in turn use these large settlements/judgments to support their case for why you NEED their product. That is my theory, any way.

The US is more difficult because you no national health insurance.

Accident liability for healthcare are bucketed with health insurance, general liability insurance, auto insurance or workers compensation. If you hit a certain threshold with certain conditions, the insurance companies will try to pin the blame on somebody else.

When I had back surgery ($$$), they had investigators look into my background and called under various guises in an attempt to get me to say that I was injured in a minor car accident a few years earlier. Fortunately while I was present at the accident, I wasn't in the car (some dope slammed into my car in a parking lot). In the meantime, I was at risk of having care cutoff, as they refused to pay claims.

I'm from Finland. First, if someone came to jump on my trampoline and got hurt, the last thing they would do is to sue me. Secondly, if I did not intentionally and actively try to harm them it's quite hard to imagine a situation where I would have to pay damages - and in the unlikely case I had to the payment would be probably be a couple of thousands of euros (based on my cursory and anecdotal experience).

The only way to clock in millions of euros as penalty here would be some mini-enron like financial crime.

It would also be pretty insane to predatorily sue me for millions of euros. There is nowhere that money could come from.

Generally public healthcare would pick up the tab on most medical costs (sans some mostly insignificant fees).

> Generally public healthcare would pick up the tab on most medical costs (sans some mostly insignificant fees).

This gets to the heart of the problem. In the US this is not an option, so even people who generally are not litigious can need to sue in order to make sure medical bills are payed appropriately.

Even with that, personal injury settlements that clock into the millions of euros would be extreme outliers in the USA. It would involve severe death and dismemberment as well as punitive action by the civil court process.

Or was roller-skating in their driveway and fell & broke their arm.

Personally, I think this is the greater cultural danger - that it's always someone else's fault.

All basically a consequence of private healthcare. Injured party will seek treatment in a hospital; hospital will seek to recover costs of treatment from their health insurance; their health insurer will seek to find someone else who could be held liable for the costs... which points back to the homeowner who will then pass it on to their home insurer. They then sue the trampoline manufacturer, the manufacturer countersue the injured party, the upshot is everyone has to pay higher insurance costs in order to cover all the legal fees. It's so much better than a single payer healthcare system.

Insurance companies want nothing to do with attractive nuisances; they'd much prefer you live in a padded cell, drawing a paycheck and paying your bills. In short, they are scum.

A successful entrepreneur who had sold businesses could theoretically just self insure. If you have paid off your house, you don't technically need home insurance (though this guy would be silly not to have it).

Love this guy. Am this guy. Want to be this guy's friend. Want my kids to be friends with this guy's kids.

I wish there were more people like this because just like him, I am an outlier where I live. My kids don't want supervision, and I don't want to constantly supervise them. I will offer them endless amounts of advice if they want/need it, feed them, clothe them, keep a roof over their heads, love them, but I want my kids to be kids and spend time discovering themselves. I fully approve of his parenting style and tactics. I am with him.

Kudos, truly!

All except playing on the roof. That's just silly.

I never fell off the roof... or the 80 ft trees we used to climb. That's not to say that the likelihood of that being zero, however, of the approximately 50 people in my circle of friends that did those things, I only have recollection of 1 falling out of a tree and breaking an arm. I once trod on a nail and had it go through my foot... compared to the countless numbers of sprained wrists, ankles, broken ankles, legs and arms occurring in organized sports. I realize the fallacy of statistics, but anecdotally, 1 broken arm from falling out of a tree in a pool of approximately 50 test subjects vs. more than a dozen in a test pool of similar size for organized sports. I realize that not allowing your kids to do anything is much safer, but at a much greater cost to their happiness.

The degree to which people in this country, in this time feel entitled to impose their neurotic crap on other people's kids, is disgusting. Ironically, it's one of the of the few reasons to, "Think of kids".

I think it's the opposite. People used to raise children more communally. People knew each others children and would scold them if they misbehaved while out in the street etc.

Nowadays, people are fearful to give misbehaving children feedback for fear of the parent getting aggressively offended.

There's an element of that, but it exists in combination with the air of hysteria and constant panic influencing the decisions of police and other public officials. It becomes a crime to leave a child unattended for minuscule periods, that kind of thing. It's an odd combination of extreme societal neglect, punctuated with equally extreme hysteria.

Yes, very true. It's unfortunate. It seems people have moved away from being normally concerned an offering a helping hand to becoming parenting vigilantes.

I think the fear instilled by "stranger danger" and litigiousness has had a big influence in how people behave toward other people's children. Since they can only interact from a distance, it's now through official channels where there is no leeway, common sense judgement. It's all black or white.

'Helicopter parenting' is misleading: it's not the degree of parental involvement and oversight that's the problem, it's the degree of unwelcome interference. True, if I'm going to err I'd rather err on the side of benign neglect. Yet blaming 'overprotective' parents is unfair. It only takes phone call or two and children can be temporarily removed by social services. The mere prospect of which is a major heartache.

Let's be clear: this is an issue only in the world's sole superidiocracy. (I share your concern, because my children and I are citizens.)

There are (many) other problems in other countries, but not that specific problem.

Perhaps helicopter (extreme risk-averse) parenting is a rational reaction to the recent trend of having many fewer children much later in life.

For most of human evolutionary history, women had their first child in their teens. That means even if your child died, you would have many more chances to reproduce.

The average age of first child is now closer to 25. If a 10-year-old kid dies from an accident, the mother may have a lot of difficulty conceiving and bringing another child to term.

This might also explain why the author thinks moms are more likely to helicopter parent -- men's reproductive ability declines with age much more slowly than women.

> The average age of first child is now closer to 25.

Probably closer to 35 among the women talked about in the article (wealthy Silicon Valley types), so the effect is even more amplified.

One thing which really frustrates and surprises me is that techology should be helping to free children, not constraining them.

Parents universally have cell phones and many kids do as well these days. These should be a huge enabler for freedom—if something happens while you're roaming or home alone, you can easily call a parent. It seems unequivocally safer to leave children alone today than it was 20-30 years ago.

This isn't even including the fact that crime rates are substantially lower today. It's really hard to find any empirical justification for the tide of over-protective parenting.

“What are the chances of falling off the roof?” he argued vociferously when we tried previously to hash it out. Have I ever known anyone who has fallen off a roof? Anyway, he said, it’s not as if he doesn’t give his kids any limits: They are not allowed to play ball or tag up there."

Yes, but most kids are not allowed or encouraged to play on their roofs. If they were, the rate of injury would likely be much higher.

> Yes, but most kids are not allowed or encouraged to play on their roofs. If they were, the rate of injury would likely be much higher.

I used to play on the roof of our shed. I have no idea what I did up there but I think it was mostly being deliberately up high. I dangled and jumped many times and jumped at least once before deciding that kind of hurt and deciding not to do it again. You overestimate the stupidity of children who are familiar with the concept of consequences. I also had my thumbnails fall off multiple times after hitting them with hammers and burned off the skin on my little finger once on a stovetop seeing exactly what these burns were that were so scary. I never even broke a bone and I have less than five wounds that should have received stitches. I had a boring, safe childhood.

Same. I spent lots of time on the roof of our house. I'd jump off into the snow, sometimes, or sometimes just onto the dirt.

Loved it. I hope my kids get a similar experience.

Sounds like your roof was not all that high. In the article I think they said the roof was 25 feet, which would very severely injure you (at least) if you fell off.

As a kid, me and my friends would climb any roof we could. Of course adults would chase us down if they saw us, but we would just do it again when they were gone. This was rural Sweden in the 80s.

You don't want to raise conformist children, you want to raise rebels.

> You don't want to raise conformist children, you want to raise rebels.

I disagree. I want my kids to be smart enough to know when to conform and when to rebel. Time and place :)

You don't raise a rebel by telling them it's okay to play on the roof.

You raise a rebel by telling them "I don't want to see you on that motherfucking roof!"

Then, when they are ready, they will go to the roof.

You provide the back pressure and their job is to overcome it.

How much back pressure? That's an exercise left to the parent.

For my money, I want the few rebels who survive helicopter parents.

These kids may be milquetoast with no sense of evaluating risk.

Speaking of kids and playing, here's something I'd love to see: my kids are stuck on this 'Animal Jam' computer game, and while I try and be a good parent and set limits and stuff, I've also thought a technical solution might be fun: "The Great Firewall of Games". It would act like the Chinese thing: rather than simply deny access, it progressively degrades the experience so that the user puts the blame on the game itself, rather than whoever is denying the access.

That seems technically over-complicated and personally dishonest...

Why not simply set a hard time limit, and optionally enforce it with existing parental control software?

Surely you don't need to deface a product to manipulate children when you could simply say "no, you've had enough, go (play outside/read a book/help your sister set the table)" and deny access to the game?

I'd feel terrible if someone grew up thinking the games (or movies, or books) I'd made were low quality/broken just because someone was intentionally degrading the experience for them.

Eh, the hard limits get tiresome after a while. Sometimes parents need some other things in their arsenal, as long as they don't become a crutch.

Little secret for the non parents: parenting is not always about complete and total honesty. Sorry to burst your bubble.

Sorry. I have to disagree. Vehemently. I'm a parent of three. I don't always tell my children everything, because they are not always capable of handling everything, but I am always honest with them. We're not perfect, but we try very hard never to manipulate our children.

Hard limits get tiresome, sure. Explaining yourself in terms they can understand gets very tiresome. Little secret: parenting gets tiring. There is no silver bullet. Sorry to burst your bubble.

I'm sure you "manipulate" your children - in the sense of getting them to do what you want - in a variety of ways, directly or indirectly. It's part of being a parent. You do it because you love them and want to guide them in the right way.

I hope you're less judgmental with them than with other random people on the internet.

My response was crafted to match the tone of yours. So...

As far as manipulation, no. We do exert our will and sometimes force them to do what we want, for the reasons that you name. In that you are right, it is part of being a parent. However, the key is that we do our very best to be transparent with them and accountable to them about what we are doing. That is the difference and what makes it not manipulation.

That dishonesty is what I took issue with in your original comment and the reason I replied the way I did. Like I said, I disagree vehemently about being dishonest or manipulative with my children because it is too easy for that to leave lasting issues or teach lessons counter-productive to their best interest.

Using manipulation as a parenting tool is a great way to raise rebellious teenagers. My children do not always agree with my parenting choices and rules, but they understand why they are there. They understand explicitly that our actions are for their best interest, and I allow them to hold us accountable to that!

I am accountable to them for how I use my authority. I respect them as people and respect their free will. This makes me feel extremely careful about how I subjugate their free will. We are surely not perfect in this, but we explicitly give them permission to call out inconsistencies in our parenting, to question our judgement. I apologize to my children when I fall short of my own stated goals.

Openness, honesty, transparency, accountability. I am modeling to them the way I believe authority should be wielded in general. Look at our society today. I believe one of the biggest problems threatening our democracy is authority wielded without transparent responsibility, accountability, and honesty towards those being governed.

Dishonesty with my children is reprehensible. I stand by my earlier statements.

Only tangentially related, but I think this is part of the draw/success of Stranger Things on Netflix. Gen-Xers like me (who are now parents) get nostalgic about the days we could freely roam town on our bikes. Well after dark. Without a helmet. And explore without supervision. (Yes, I know helmets save lives).

I'm very much an anti-helicopter parent similar to the article. I wonder if deep down most parents know its better–but for whatever reason (peer pressure, media, etc.) they hover.

My wife is a hover-er. I am always battling with her to try and give our 2-year-old son a little more space. Unfortunately, he fell down a few stairs when he was 18 months or so (scraped up a bit but otherwise ok) and now she won't let him walk down stairs without holding his hand. Sigh.

lol my wife is the same. We should start a club.

This sounds a good idea. But one of the highest reader-rated comments of the article is intriguing to me:

    Anna - Pittsburgh 11 hours ago

    ... But, this whole article just oozed misogyny. The casual
    dismissal of mothers and the harsh declaration that the female
    sex and their worrying is ruining today's young men is, in a 
    word, offensive. Worrying about boys growing up to be sissies---
    who even says that anymore outside the men's rights movement?
    It sounds to me that this guy wants to create a world for his 
    boys where girls are not allowed or, at best, are merely tolerated.
    Which sort of reminds me of Silicon Valley, actually.

I think they are more a troll than anything else.

He never called anyone a sissy.

> was putting my son at risk of turning into what used to be called a sissy

He was specifically making a commentary how the word is no longer used.

Taking the article as an entirety, it was written by a woman and ends with

> I held Kieran’s hand tightly and decided never to play there again.

But I think the writer as a female knew the story she was telling. It added to the tale told.

FORMER Residence Director at a college: US Law helps with this. I would get dozens of phone calls about how little Johnny or Little Jenny are doing. They wanted the numbers I would then tell them it violated US Law for me to tell them, unless in some circumstances. They never asked what those circumstances were, which were they your dependent :)

The sad thing is the helicoptered kids don't know how to make decisions for themselves and so they go to town because they never got to learn self-discipline or consequences to making the lazy choice.

Teach your kids self-discipline and learn the consequences and rewards for their decisions. To many parents try to take away the consequences or shorten them.

While it definitely looks like Mike doesn't discriminate against girls(since several were present in the story and pictures) I find the focus on boys less than ideal. "Tomboys" exist, and even girls who tend more to the "traditional" female gender roles like to play outside and be rambunctious. To me, he should be focusing on all kids not a particular gender.

Edit: I also think encouraging kids to segregate less by gender might help with our other discrimination/segregation issues as well but that's pure conjecture.

> I find the focus on boys less than ideal...To me, he should be focusing on all kids not a particular gender.

He has sons, not daughters, so he's focussing on what's best for his sons. I wouldn't be surprised if his approach might change if he ever has a daughter, but he doesn't have any obligation to worry about what's best for other people's kids.

Right, and in my opinion part of what would be best for his sons is for them to be playing with girls as well as boys. Therefore, in my opinion Mike shouldn't be marketing this specifically for boys.

> in my opinion part of what would be best for his sons is for them to be playing with girls as well as boys

Except they are - right in your comment you say:

> it definitely looks like Mike doesn't discriminate against girls(since several were present in the story and pictures)

I think the freedom to play and experiment is a good thing. Talking to your children about "risks" so -they- learn risk analysis is a very good thing.

However, from the article, Mike Lanza sounds a bit of a male chauvinist. I don't like the tone of males vs females and his anecdotes. At young ages, especially before puberty, there isn't that much of a gap between girl and boy athletic capabilities. There is a huge gap in parental and society expectations and norms.

I'm absolutely a free-range parent. My kids have the same freedom I had in the 80s to play outside with friends and roam the neighborhood and walk to the store. But come on, man. If I had wandered out on the roof at the age of 5, my parents would have read me the Riot Act and boarded up the window. Giving your kids a normal childhood doesn't mean throwing all caution to the winds.

My wife and I are not "helicopter parents", but that doesn't mean we don't believe in healthy boundaries. Mike talked about wanting to believe that his kids would respect his trust, well part of that respect can also be earned in demonstrating that you do, in fact, "know better" about some things by virtue of your age/experience/wisdom. As a parent I don't use my "wisdom" as an excuse to prevent them from learning things for themselves, but in the case of playing on the roof for example, I would put a limit. C'mmon man, don't kill your kids for an ideal.

Having fallen off a roof before, I feel like going straight to the 'kill your kids' is a little extreme. I would guess that most falls that result in death are from either a higher than average roof height or onto ground harder than dirt.

Also, how will a child learn about the dangers of heights if they never fall and hurt themselves? You can teach them, and that might work for some, but some children have / need to learn the hard way and that's okay.

They can certainly have fun & play, and learn about falling, without falling off a roof.

The same way they can learn about the hazards of sharp things without playing on a table saw.

Just to point out (because hey, why not :P)

Table saws are a bad example in some cases.

My saw stop will stop the blade in <5 milliseconds of contact. It equates to basically scratching your finger or better (blades move at 3000-3600rpm, so it calculates out to about 1/4 revolution of the blade, max.)

As far as i'm aware, they've literally never had a brake activation failure.

It's pretty much the safest thing in my shop.

Of all the things i'd never let kids play with in the shop, it'd probably be chisels.

Which is ironic, because people think they are a good way to introduce kids to woodworking, when they are probably the sharpest and least safe thing due to how sharp and easy to cause severe injury.

I have only used old table saws. How does the saw stop tell a finger from a board?

Conductivity. You're not supposed to use them with damp boards or metals (I guess you can, but then you're replacing the saw after it brakes)

s/saw/saw blade/

;)

I actually miter cut aluminum the other day and it didn't trigger, it depends on how electrically isolated your metal is.

It's a corporate site, but should give you an idea: http://www.sawstop.com/why-sawstop/the-technology/

Summary: kind of like how your capacitive touchscreen can tell that a finger is touching it.

I have 2 kids and have consciously tried to avoid the helicopter-parent mindset and let them play on their own. But now as they approach adolescence I find myself more interested in how they spend their free time. Not so much hovering but making sure they are busy, gentle encouraging team sports & activities as an alternative to just "hanging out."

I believe the audience here skews younger but for those of you that have raised kids to adulthood, any advice? And for you more recent adolescents, how did you experience parenting at that age? When I look back it seems to me that the smartphone has changed everything.

Why do you want them to do something besides "just hanging out?" What is wrong with just hanging out?

Because the simple act of "hanging out" on the streets might earn them an arrest for "loitering" or whatever, which in turn greatly diminishes employment when you got a record full of arrests.

As a German, it was absolutely normal for me to be outside on a public place and drink beers! From what I see on parenting-related HN posts, in US drinking beers in public is illegal in most places, and minimum age for a f..ing beer is 21.

I didn't spend all my youth drinking beer though, but just hanging out with friends at a park was daytime activity after school until I was 18 and had a driver's license - we ended up with driving around town, spending all money we had on gas, and generally having fun. Also, it was perfectly acceptable to grab a phone, drum up your friends for a spontaneous LAN party and basically spend the entire day with gaming and watching 240p porn downloaded via eMule.

My sister is a bit younger than me, and even then I saw the great difference in available time after school between her and me. Thanks to the G8 reform (instead of 9 years highschool after 4y basic school, they shrunk it down to 8y in Bavaria) not only the school days were longer, but the amount of homework and learning were massively higher.

If all your time gets eaten up by school, when are kids supposed to play or take part in outside-of-school activities like politics, sports, music, ...?

Indeed - their precious supply of "just hanging out" time will begin to evaporate quickly as they get older. There's plenty of time to be busy (shudder) when they are adults.

I think this is really great but there is a difference between "boy-ish behavior" and bullying. Just hand-waving away bullying as "boys will be boys" is reckless and irresponsible.

If a boy wants to shove around someone else, fine. But if your son starts beating up and harassing children, maybe it is time for a talk with him.

This is awesome. I think this is much needed for boys and children today.

The American Academy of Pediatrics advises against children using trampolines unsupervised due to high rated of injury.

https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/pages...

There's a lot of activities that the AAP recommends against and we did almost every one of them as a kid. I'm eternally grateful to my parents that I enjoyed an amazing childhood full of trampolines, dangerously unstable and high tree forts, homemade fireworks, driveway skateramps, pocketknives (and plenty of sliced fingers), and all of the other cool shit that parents don't let their kids do anymore.

The only blade-related injury I have ever seen was actually caused by a hatchet, while splitting small-diameter firewood for a campfire. Some topical antibiotic ointment and butterfly bandages took care of it for the four days it took us to reach the pick-up point. She didn't have permission to use the hatchet unsupervised, and was not following the family-approved safe-use technique. Needless to say, she was not allowed to do anything fun for the rest of the trip.

It made a nice scar, though. People can ask her how she got it, and she can say, "oh, that's from a hatchet, a four day journey away from the nearest hospital." My most interesting scar is from the underside of the dashboard on a Honda Civic while installing an aftermarket stereo, and you can barely even see it.

I have never seen a pocketknife injury, though. Nor any from archery equipment, or firearms. I'd probably be most worried about barbed treble-fishhooks and swimming in warm freshwater lakes and rivers. Not really because of drowning, so much as slips and falls from mud or algae-coated rocks, or infectious parasites in the water.

My spouse, on the other hand, never got to do anything fun as a kid, and freaks out about everything even remotely dangerous, like my sharp, pointy tweezers. The only people more unreasonably intolerant of minute risks work for the TSA.

Trampolines, though. Those things are deathtraps. I'd rather have a swimming pool drained of water and refilled with rattlesnakes in my back yard. Also, no [American] football.

"In children younger than 14 years, rates of swimming injuries were similar to those for trampoline".

"Injury rates attributable to bicycling and use of playground equipment were higher [than trampoline injury rates in comparable age groups]"

Sounds a bit overblown.

The American Academy of Pediatrics says a lot of things based on pseudo-science and speculation. Basically, they fail to ever do any cost-benefit analysis. They recommend against doing anything that involves risk, without offsetting the risk against the potential benefits of engaging in the activity.

The picture of Mike's backyard shows that the trampoline is mounted in the ground and has the springs very well covered. This is a thoughtful design.

I'm sure there are some interesting points in the article but I can't get past the sexist overtones in this piece.

By all means, lets normalize bullying again as healthy male behavior. And normalize all their miserable victims as the losers they obviously are. Where have I heard this recently ?

Alan Dean Foster had a great book "Sentenced to Prism", one of the premises of which is a society that evolved from such a helicopter mindset, to the point where all adults wouldn't leave home without a protective body enclosing suit, containing various amenities, and guaranteeing safety from most accidents, even highly unlikely ones.

One of the main takeaways of that story was that this mindset breeds complacency. If nothing bad ever happened to you that you didn't have to deal with the hard way, you start to believe that you're invulnerable; and thus, more likely to wade into dangerous situations without fully realizing just how dangerous they are.

I can't imagine growing up, and not spending my summers building forts, trekking through the woods, jumping off ramps with bikes, and beating up my body on a skateboard. Sounds like a horrible childhood these kids have to deal with.

Would it be better to take these kids back inside to teach them to code? Honest question. I've seen viewpoints for both more and less screen time vociferously defended on HN, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12250500.

Other societies without helicopter parenting (read: most of them) don't have a wealth of maimed and dead kids. Instead, parents are involved with their child's development and they teach them to keep themselves safe - though their societies are not unoften more safe than the USA, anyway.

We could do things like reduce the incidence of gun and car related injuries and fatailities and provide more opportunities to encourage parents playing with their children outdoors. Or we could create more protective laws and further cushion the playgrounds we essentially "walk" our kids in, and more organized sports leagues for children where the parents act like an unruly mob.

This whole article is so insanely closed in view and experience that it's not worth reading unless you're an upper middle class white American in the suburbs. Talk about first world problems.

Raising a kid is a project not a concept.

The second you understand that your whole approach to parenting changes drastically and you can finally start thinking about it rationally allowing your kids to build their own life with the support of their parents.

They call this "helicopter parenting" - but it's not at all, it's that both parents usually work, people have less kids, and the fear of lawsuits.

I like this blog of a couple that has been traveling the world for many years: http://www.bumfuzzle.com/

They had kids a few years ago and they strongly advocate giving kids freedom to play, explore etc.

Not advocating for anything but just wanted to share an example of one of the ends of the spectrum...

When I was told that Skittles were not sold in the high school vending machines any longer and that a bottle of vanilla in your children's bedroom was another sign I knew Parenting was just like my career -if I didn't keep up on the latest I would fall behind.

Parenting is like version control and awareness.

Are people reading the whole article (which is great) - but i was horrified by the last sentence, which as a parent I found crushing.

* I saw the animation in the boys’ slender bodies: the power of making the grown-up world momentarily bend around them.

I held Kieran’s hand tightly and decided never to play there again.

I don't know what treatment the photographer applied to his pictures. They look fake to me: the lighting is weird, the colours are weird. (I don't mean that they are are fake, not at all, I just mean that they look so).

Agree, it looks like they used some sharpening filter that makes everything look eerily hyper-real.

my wife's response: http://ahedgehoginthefog.weebly.com/hedgehogs-adventures/-fe...

Could not agree more. That's why my wife's preschool is play-based: http://www.petitefrance.xyz
Sure, there is academic stuff and learning. And as a licensed preschool, we have full-time supervision. But the helicopter parent as a concept is absent in French upbringing. Instead, my wife focuses on building kids inner-confidence through play and social interactions.

I like to think of myself as more of a VTOL parent instead of a Helicopter parent.

Kinda amusing that it looks like the girl in flight is about to slam hard!

I'm pretty sure she is jumping from the railing on the porch of the house and will land well onto the trampoline.

Why is this on HN?

Libertarian Silicon Valley entrepreneur man tells you how best to raise your child, of course it's on HN.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com