How Fact-Free Parenting Policies Rob Kids' Independence
5kids1condo.com
5kids1condo.com
Of course if you're six and eight and not really into chess, nothing could be more boring. So we asked Dad if we could do something else. He gave us a few nickels and quarters and said "sure, how about riding the cable cars and go see the town?"
So we did! It was the most awesomest thing ever. We rode every cable car we could find, walked around town and saw the sights. The best part was when we found a street with our last name on it!
Everyone was nice. The cable car operators saw that we were a couple of kids riding around on our own, so they showed us how the grip and the brakes worked, pointed out interesting things to see, and made sure we knew how to ride safely - even when we were sitting on the outside of the cable car kicking our feet.
We forgot to ask for lunch money, so when we got back to the chess club as Dad was finishing his games, he took us out for a bite to eat and we told him all the stories of our adventure.
What a great day!
It's the same reason why politicians say nothing of substance anymore. In the olden days, the occasional slip-up would slide. These days if you say the wrong thing, you can spend weeks or months defending it, and it can even cost you your job.
It's not just a case of 'bureaucracy gone crazy', but also of 'we demand too much of them'. The stereotypical example is that teachers used to just teach, and now they need to be nurses and social workers as well.
I think Trump is proving you wrong.
But I get your point, the risk is really because a few people are idiots with too much powers to break things.
We see the same things with the medical personal: they get very cautious and conservative because they are held accountable when something goes wrong, whether it's their fault or not.
But then forbidding idiots to have power would not be very democratic wouldn't it ?
Trump doesn't care about keeping his job or doing his job and he effectively can't be fired (which is rare for most positions). If you don't care about those kinds of ramifications, then you don't need to defend your slip-ups. He really is an atypical case here.
Not in my experience.
I France we have politicians lying, cheating and even being condemned coming back all the time.
The implication in the comment above is that he's already in France. So going to RI or NJ would be going further.
Are you saying though, that France has not seen politicians and other positions of authority say less of substance than in past decades? That they're not watching their tongues any more than they used to? That errant comments aren't taken out of context by the public and used to vilify the person who said it? Well, more power to you; the rest of us should be so lucky - all over the anglo world, this pattern has been noted, rising with the 24-hour news cycle (which rewards 'gotcha!' journalism).
Milan at 8.30 AM is like a battle field of screaming moms and nannies trying to get kids off these giant tank-like-cars but the car is parked in the middle of the street or on the sidewalk
Edit: I think the school recommends that parents walk with the first graders for a certain time (those that are in walking distance) until they feel that the kid knows the way and the rules and feels safe.
The social expectation is that every kid walks or takes public transportation (unless that is not possible). There are usually no dedicated school buses, but the public buses have extra timeslots. You meet your friends on the way to school, which is an important experience. Everything is safe, especially because it is the social norm.
I have the opportunity to live either in the US or Germany, and the increasing craziness and hysteria around how children are treated is the major reason for me to stay with my family in Germany.
In bigger cities, I've seen kindergarten trips take the S-Bahn. I guess that also counts as a kind of preparation.
What we have here is the terror of the police state. Anonymous tips, petty bureaucrats making life changing rulings on a whim with no clear laws to establish legal behavior. I would love to see the whole thing challenged as unconstitutional and abolished and folded into the much more functional justice system.
The social workers then put all the information together and take it to their lawyers, who'll either say it's not strong enough to go to court, or ask him if he really does want to ignore the advice because they think they have a good case.
At that point I assume they go to court, and then the state has to persuade the judge that he's an unfit parent and that removing the children is the only option - that nothing else will do. He doesn't have to prove he's a good parent; the onus is on the state to make their case.
The court has to respect his parenting choices, unless those choices are harmful or neglectful or put the children at risk of significant harm.
The court also has to take into account the views of the children, and it's likely these children will be happy about the travel arrangements, and will be persuasive to a judge.
This (quite old) report includes information on Canadian parents allowing children to engage in risky activity (11 year olds taking cannabis, for example) and Canada ranks 17th, which is pretty poor.
Also, in many countries, child protection services can preemtively declare you an unfit parent and place your children in foster care, pending a decision from a judge, which may well take months.
Which countries allow this?
It doesn't happen in England.
Good luck if you're male and working, and the other parent is female and on social welfare. The mother can simply claim you're violent, or otherwise unfit to be a parent, and hey-presto you're fucked. She gets legal aid, the guy has to spend 5+ years and $35,000+ of his own money getting nowhere because the Family Court of Australia is extremely reluctant to force the female parent to comply.
> in many countries, child protection services can preemtively declare you an unfit parent and place your children in foster care, pending a decision from a judge,
For a child to be placed in foster care in Australia either the parent has to agree or a judge makes a decision. It's not possible for a child to be placed in foster care without either of those.
I don't think that's how it works, in this day and age.
As Adrian mentions in the article:
Being a divorced, single dad who has his kids 50% of the time, I have little recourse to challenge the Ministry’s decision. Disobeying it even in the slightest (i.e. allowing a trip to the corner store by my 9.75 year old), could result in the Ministry stripping me of equal custody of my children, a remarkably draconian outcome I would never risk.
This is very similar to how it would work in Australia. The cards are especially stacked against you if you're unfortunate enough to be the bearer of a Y chromosome during a separation involving children.
It's not true though.
The ministry can't strip him of equal custody rights, they can only go to court. A judge is the only person who can strip his rights away.
THe claim is:
> Disobeying it even in the slightest (i.e. allowing a trip to the corner store by my 9.75 year old), could result in the Ministry stripping me of equal custody of my children
And that claim is just bullshit. Show me any case in Canada where this has happened.
In Australia men don't have a 50% custody right. The mother can just cease participating in the shared parenting plan. She could say "he lets them roam the streets unsupervised". Then it goes back to court, the courts tell the mother "you have to participate", and then she "forgets" or her "car breaks down" or she "doesn't have enough money for petrol". This can also, though rarely, work with the genders reversed.
The result is the same: The Government strips you of custody because someone claimed you stepped out of line.
I don't meant to sound like I have an axe to grind, but I do, so that's how it comes across.
OP isn't talking about a mother frustrating the will of the court (and I agree that's a problem); OP is talking about an agent of the state removing children from a parent.
If anything your argument just supports my point: she's violating her child's convention right to a family life with its father, but the courts can't do much about it.
If this "the state can just take your children" argument held any water the state, after the court cases, would see the mother breaking the court order and take the child off her. They don't, because it's very hard to do.
Most judges are doing to hear "child endangerment" and do exactly what they recommend, or what is called for. People performing assessments have broad discretion in many types of determinations. When you suffer from a serious medical malady like a stroke, the social workers/discharge planners in hospitals and rehab facilities have even greater power with less accountability.
Maybe that's true in the US, but it just isn't true for Canada (which uses forced adoption rarely).
It's not even true in England, which is criticised for using forced adoption quite heavily.
There's a suspicion that judges just rubber stamp these applications. It's bizarre to think that they do.
Here are a few cases from England.
In this one the local authority gets a kicking from the judge: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWFC/HCJ/2014/22.html
And another: http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWFC/...
That last one is useful here. The parents were misusing alcohol; were violent; had neglected their child. Their child had gone into foster care. The local authority is applying to have the children adopted. The judge rejects that because the judge thinks the child should maintain contact with the parents. (And eventually go back to the father).
There's also talk about judges separating children from fathers, but that's not true either. This case, written so the children will understand, nicely illustrates that:
http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWFC/HCJ/2016/9.html
The judge ordered that the children should continue to have contact with their father, even though he was a violent and aggressive man. After that order was made the father was arrested, charged, and convicted of firearms offences, and got a prison sentence.
Considering that forcibly removing children from their parents is a highly traumatic situation, I can understand how someone might not want to do what you suggest.
Also, at no point is a jury involved in the disposition of the children; it's a single judge and a 3+ party trial (parent(s), child, state, &c.).
We need to be ever vigilant to stop petty bureaucrats everywhere from making arbitrary rules and taking away valuable freedoms and discretion. Do what you can at work and in your personal life to maintain freedoms.
EDIT: One simple thing we can do is make a donation to the legal fighting fund established by the writer of this article to fight this draconian Canadian regulation. There are links to the legal fund donation page in the linked article.
Basically you'd need to know how common crime against children traveling unsupervised on buses in a similar scenario.
The closest example presented is kids in New York riding the subway, so presenting stats on that would be useful.
I'd also like more details on the Japanese example, it's honestly not uncommon to hear news reports of kids being abducted in Japan. I'd personally be interested in the stats, but as a comparison point it doesn't make sense unless you can normalize for the overall lower crime rate that Japan has.
If anyone has good data against "Helicopter parenting", I'd be curious to see it.
> And the odds of your child being kidnapped by a stranger on the bus? Incredibly long. A 2003 study in Canada found just one case nationwide of a stranger abducting a child, in the entire two years prior.
I personally found the article very compelling. This kind of mindless fear, in direct contradiction of clear evidence, makes my blood boil.
Usually losing a kid is due untreatable diseases and bad parenting (like driving them to school without taking proper safety measures and suffer the consequences of an accident)
There's no evidence that going to school alone is more dangerous than staying home with grandpa's guns
Without knowing if, and how many children rode the bus alone, this information is not meaningful.
Are you suggesting chasing accuracy in a fraction of a fraction?
> One incident in two years, out of a population of tens of millions
I'm pointing out that overall population is not relevant.
The "fraction of a fraction" is the ratio of children who ride the bus alone, and get abducted. It seems that is relevant information when trying to contextualize the danger in allowing a child to ride a bus alone.
So the population of unsupervised children riding buses might be 10? or 100? or 1000000? we don't know.
1 in 10 would be high, though given the limited size of the dataset, possibly not very statistically relevant.
It seems doubtful that this is a very useful dataset.
It's an old article, from 2013. It states that:
"Police statistics show 25 children of the 46,718 reported missing in 2011 listed as "abducted by stranger."
And then goes on to show that in the majority of cases that the abductor was known to the parents.
So, the useful dataset would be.
* How many of the children were abducted with unsupervised?
* In the Canadian population how many children in total are left unsupervised regularly.
From that we could calculate:
Percentage of children left unsupervised regularly who are abducted.
Percentage of children not left unsupervised regularly who are abducted.
Of course, correlation != causation. But if there is no difference between the two populations then that would tell us something. However, there isn't enough data in the article to make this assertion.
If no (or very few) children are left unsupervised in Canada, then the statistic isn't relevant to calculating the probability of unsupervised (or lone traveling) children being abducted is it?
Or a lack of unsupervised children?
I don't know. I think you're probably correct. But really the assertion would be might stronger if there was more than anecdotal evidence to back it up.
This is what I'm trying to say the data presented in the article, is on the level of anecdotal evidence. Which, tends to weaken the argument rather than strengthen it.
Robbery much harder and often unreported or reported as bullying.
Robbery/theft/assault etc. seems like the ones you'd actually care about. Murders and kidnappings of children by strangers are so rare that any data about them is essentially meaningless.
Or maybe they try something stupid (we all did stupid things as kids and I don't expect my kids to be smarter than I was) and wind up drowning in the river or falling off something.
But why?
Is it common for them to be hit by cars?
Is it safer for them to go to school with parents?
And if someone hits you while you are trying to protect your kid, is it less traumatic?
And if while you take them to school you hit someone else's kid, is it less traumatic?
Is it common for kids to drown or fall and die while parents are not there?
From what I see it is common for adults to drown while they're trying to save someone else (usually not kids, but other adults)
If you start thinking about everything that _could_ happen, you wouldn't let your kids go out
Kids spend a lot of time alone and still they manage to survive
Why going to school should be any different?
2) Compare say multiple person being in a vehicular accidents when one is a child. Also make sure to include a reduction in car crashes including a child as some of those would become pedestrians. (Data is also available, but no idea how many kids would walk.) School busses exist and work.
3, 4) Stats are not readily available.
5) Stats are available, most of those happen near the parents anyway. Essentially negligence with very small kids or stupidity like having kids near unguarded aquifers or drops. Such areas are rare in cities.
Fear of your kid being hit by a car is just perception
driving them to school with the false sense of security that when they are with their parents kids are safer is more dangerous
However, driving the kids to school is probably no better than them just going on their own looking at stats of car crashes with kids involved.
Anyway, as expected, parents tend to behave highly irrationally when safety of their own children is involved.
According to CDC it's the second most common cause of accidental injury death among children aged 5-14 (after being in a car crash)
In actual cities the rates should be lower as roads are not mixed with recreational or pedestrian areas as much, at least in Europe. It is still the leading cause though. (WHO has good data.)
Quite a few accidents are also caused by biking...
The post I was replying to specifically said he's scared that his kid could be hit by a car when going to school on his own
It's fairly obvious that accidents are the most common cause of death for kids My point is that parent supervision don't protect them from being hit or end up in a car crash or fall down from a bridge
p.s.: main cause doesn't mean it is common I believe it's not very common, it's catastrophic for their young body when it happens, but not common
This is precisely where are now.
http://southpark.wikia.com/wiki/Child_Abduction_is_Not_Funny
>Or maybe they try something stupid
that's the fastest way to become smart in my experience. humans are remarkably adept at not dying and even ballsy kids can judge their competence well enough if they're given the opportunity to learn their limits.
Is the risk of robbery intolerably awful, or have we become unreasonably timid? I think that America (and to a significant extent Canada) is still in the throes of zero tolerance culture, where any risk is intolerable and any action to mitigate risk is justified.
Two kids get into a scuffle at school? Expel them both. Don't worry about what happens to those kids, don't worry about who started the fight, don't worry about the chilling effect on normal childhood behaviour, because we have zero tolerance for violence. The war on drugs, the war on terror, the broken window theory, mandatory minimum sentences, three-strike laws, the criminalization of poverty, the school-to-prison pipeline. When the only acceptable rate of crime is zero, the ends always justify the means.
https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/crime-trends1990-2...
Which commonly takes the form of "If you can't afford X then you shouldn't be doing Y"
Obviously, if you're using it to set policy, some kind of study would be valuable.
I personally would agree with author of the post. However, the author is saying "it's not dangerous to do this", as opposed to "it is a basic human right to do this". He is also asserting that the opposing view is not supported by the facts (it's "fact free").
That's all fine. But then the author presents statistics he's gathered, none of which really strongly support his case. And in fact, I would not be surprised if you could cherry pick statistics to support either case.
It would be better to either:
1. Find better statistics. 2. Not present poor statistics, and then say "look here this supports my argument", when it doesn't.
Or at least, apply caveats to the data...
But if you are suggesting that the decision should be fact based and present an argument with supporting statistics. Then those statistics should be relevant to your argument.
The statistics presented in the article were not relevant. If it is not dangerous, it should be possible to show this with data... the data presented in the article is poor and doesn't support his case well.
I used to walk to school at the age of what, 8? There was one really quite busy road I had to cross on my own, the rest was residential. But learning to cross the road is something that was dogmatically addressed from a very young age. "Stop. Look. Listen." I remember learning about that aged 5ish? My parents knew I could cross the road, they'd taught me, the schools had taught me. It was tested in the crucible of parental observation and then I was trusted to continue.
Of course someone could come along and kidnap me as I blithely wandered along the pavement. But frankly if we're going to spend our lives obsessing about extreme tail risks then we've already lost.
Yes. And the tail risks are asymmetrical here. Bureaucrats take on responsibility for thousands or hundreds-of-thousands of children in their district. They look bad however few of these kids are harmed or killed. So what might be a perfectly acceptable risk for an individual family is not acceptable to the local government.
The more they interfere and assume responsibility for children the more additional responsibilities their offices will be loaded with when things go wrong. Which will cause further problems, et cetera, because although parents love and provide for their children, institutions don't know how to (and can't afford to).
In a typical setting, there are options A & B. As an example, let A be the option to allow young kids to ride independently on a bus and B the option to legislate against letting young kids ride independently on a bus.
The cost of A seems high to human emotions and the lazy thinker, typically involving rare but high-impact events (something really bad happening to the well-trained kid taking a bus) that get cherry-picked as important to consider.
The cost of B seems low to human emotions and the lazy thinker, typically involving diverse continual low-impact events (all kids affected by legislation losing out on chance to learn independence, environmental impact of using a car instead of public transport) that get neglected because of their low emotional appeal and more complicated accounting. (It may be hard to prove that lots of low-impact things add up to a big thing -- there are too many things and causal relationships to point to.)
In many cases, the cost of A is actually objectively lower than the cost of B, so A is the better option. In such cases, whereas all options and their consequences should be considered together with their probabilities, in reality, option B is often deemed to be the better choice, and A a bad choice, because the cost of A appeals more strongly to emotional. Consequently, someone who picked A (law-maker or bureaucrat) gets blamed but someone who picked B doesn't get blamed and is harder to blame, including in court. To protect themselves, they pick the inferior option.
I think this sort of pathological risk assessment is the root of the cover-your-ass culture that permeates society.
As a point of comparison, school kids in Austria typically walk to school or use public transit on their own from first grade (6-7 years old).
In the beginning of the school year, older students watch zebra crossings and block traffic when kids need to cross.
Because, you know, having that much children, you are probably a bad parent.
Of course, it's not a bad thing that they ensure that there is, in fact, no obvious problem home. It's important to watch for the children, they are the future of your country.
But in his case, a wealthy entrepreneur, his wife is a nurse, with the biggest house I've ever been in, and one of the happiest family I know, they still visits every couple of months, seamingly looking for a reason to piss them off.
It looks like (and it's just my opinion) they can't accept different form of life standards.
But on a semi related subject, my wife and I decided to not put our kids in school this year and do home schooling.
To be well prepared, we asked people already doing it, joined Facebook groups of homeschooling parents nearby, etc...
The most frequent advice we had is to watch out when government will send someone to check out if everything is ok, as it's badly accepted in France to do homeschool. And they're known to try to corner you to get the kids back to school.
And a lot of parents think you're doing bad for your kids making this choice, so may be there is jealousy/angry involved.
But again, it's in France not Canada or US so it might be different.
I have heard that homeschooling is not as accepted in France as it is in the U.S., it seems like there quite a few individual liberties Americans assume that are not protected in France.
France is hiding behind terrorism to prevent parents to do homeschooling, arguing it will help radicalization.
Of course it's completely irrelevant, but governments hate to lose control on people.
I would agree that with Islamic radicalization (probably the only kind of radicalization being considered) in Europe, education at home by parents is not a significant source of radicalized youths.
But in France, that's really irrelevant. All the recent terror attacks have been perpetrated by persons with a public school education.
So short sighted politicians could also claim that it's the fault of the public schooling system ! And that also be irrelevant.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrested-so...
I'm curious though in Japan whether this is part of a general trend combating helicopter parenting, or if it's just a one-off social norm.
Not sure if they're common/representative, but two interesting things the mother demonstrated (2:14):
1. She can track the kid via GPS
2. When asked, she said she would never let her son walk alone to school in the United States
My wife, who went to school in Japan, says it's seen as a good thing, to encourage independence.
There's a popular TV show, where they follow small kids (maybe 4 or 5?) on their first "trip alone" to do a chore, obviously they're being followed by a camera crew. But the TV show promotes kids taking responsibility for themselves (and it's cute of course).
The US is just seen as a much more dangerous country than Japan. I mean, it actually does have a higher crime rate.
Sorry, this is all purely anecdotal. But I believe it to be the general case (would as always love to see data).
I would say (but don't have data to show) that there's is a slow trend against it. Possibly because of recent high profile abductions...
So this quote
> the Ministry had checked with their lawyers “across the country” and the Attorney General, and determined that children under 10 years old could not be unsupervised in or outside the home, for any amount of time
has me really like WTF.
Edit: A bit more background now that I'm thinking about it. It's completely normal for kids in Kindergarten to go there alone, the first day each kid gets a reflector thingy(?)[0] they wear to walk there so they can be seen easily while crossing streets. Every morning you see a bunch of little kids toddling to Kindergarten, I've never really thought about this being different anywhere else.
[0] https://www.max-der-dachs.ch/files/shopimage/photo/8/vga_leu...
Though there was a difference if you as a Central European visited France for example. The kids were way behind us in being relaxed and confident without parents around.
Usually my mom would just say: 'home when the lights turn on'.
This was pre kids-have-phones era...
Society has gotten more legalistic. The bus driver or a random adult passenger doesn't have legally defined authority to discipline the author's kids, which means they don't have the authority at all.
But basic human decency demands you intervene if you see little kids fighting or doing something dangerous (even if you'd just roll your eyes if it was a couple of drunk guys).
This tension propagates through the system until somebody basically rules kids can't ride the bus unsupervised until they're old enough to be unsympathetic.
This goes hand in hand with another commenter where no-one wants to take the responsibility for being wrong and always defers to an "authority figure". Because nobody got blamed for buying IBM.
I wonder if computer use is helping. I used to see kids struggling under enough backpack for a weekend campout. The backpacks seem to be much smaller now. Maybe more content is on tablets and laptops.
The current climate of "over-protecting" kids may be the cause of the lower rates of child-related crimes. Check out some graphs of the kidnap rates falling. Maybe the "woefully ignorant" public policy makers actually have the right answer?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/14/there...
Nowhere in his article does Crook mention any specific names of government workers he interacted with, specific dates when he met with caseworkers, or specific actions or enforcements the government would take regarding his case.
In an article full of links to specific stats and empathy inducing images of his children, he does not show a single government correspondence.
I hope my assumption is just misguided cynicism, and that there actually is a concrete reason to give this man money.
"In a June 23 letter that Mr. Crook provided to The Globe and Mail, the ministry said it looked into concerns that "you were pulling the children's ears and allowing them to take transit unsupervised." Asked about the ear-pulling, Mr. Crook said it was treated as an afterthought in the investigation and follow-up, and that the main focus was the bus trips.
The letter says there are no child-protection concerns and that the children are safe in their father's care."
Can you imagine having to kiss some distant bureaucrat bottom, accepting they invade your life, endangering your reputation, making you question your choices, threatening you to loose your kids, making them look at you differently, all that __even before any decision is taken__ ?
This is madness.
Again, the state can't do anything without going to court, and when they go to court they have to prove their case, he doesn't have to prove anything.
No he isn't. Children have a right to be with their parents, and it's important that fathers are involved with their children.
It would still need to go in front of a court.
Do you have evidence that Canadian courts ignore those rights?
Good night... glad I live in America.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/13/living/feat-maryland-free-rang...