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Comment by treyfitty | Hacker News Reader

Ever since I became a father (2 months ago), I've been seeing the world as a dangerous and an ugly place. This is confounded with the fact that, a month ago, I came to find out that my brother was bullied in HS and was never the same.

My brother has been out of high school for about 9 years now, but It took me 6 whole years to consider the possibility that something was wrong. I was in undergrad and focused on my studies, and then moved to NYC, so my time wasn't really spent at home with my brother, which should never be an excuse when it comes to family. But I let it be. Until my child was born.

9 years ago, my brother dropped out of high school and started seeing a therapist with the help and support of my dad. Both of them hid this from me until a month ago. The details of his high school days weren't revealed, but my brother has spent 9 full years dreading human interaction. I scolded him a year ago for not wanting to come to my wedding, and a month ago, begged him to come celebrate Christmas with my in-laws so that he can meet his nephew. He didn't end up coming, and that's when my dad finally revealed the details of the past 9 years.

It doesn't have to come to death to point out our primal fears as fathers. I used to be ambitious for the sake of being ambitious, but the arrival of my son, confounded with the revelation of my brother, has lead to a change in perspective. Everything can change in an instant, and contrary to the popular opinions of HN, the largest changes in our lives are beyond our control. The utter powerlessness of not being able to rewind to 9 years ago to be there for my brother gets at me. As does my fear and uncertainty of the life my son will be subjected to.

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Hi, please don't take this the wrong way, but as a father and stepfather to 4, I find this so sad. Have you considered therapy? It may help with this anxiety so that you can learn to let go a little and enjoy the ride. I know this is just a single comment you made on a website, but if this response of anxiety and fear really your view on raising your child at the point of 2 months experience, I can tell you it only gets more challenging as they grow. Good luck to you and your family.

Some general advice to fight the pressure to be a perfect parent to a perfect child -

1. Forget the term "playdate". Don't schedule your kids' time to play with other children. I know it sounds strange, but adults used to have adult lives and people would just go visit each other. Their kids would play together while the adults did their thing.

2. Don't post pictures of your kid all the time on social media. No one really cares. Sorry. Send those pictures to your parents or friends directly. Better yet, go over to visit them and show them pictures in person. If you can, drop social media as much as you can stand, and just enjoy the fact that you love your child as much as every parent without turning parenting into social signalling and narcissistic indulgence.

3. Remember that your kids will leave you. They will go away to preschool, grade school, maybe college. And then one day, they will leave for the last time to set out on their own. Yes, you need to protect them, but if you are fearful and see the world as ugly, your kids will sense that growing up and most likely feel the same way. Do you want to send them out to the wide world with a viewpoint that the world is a scary place? Is the world a scary place? Why did the world turn ugly and scary when you had a child?

These are just my opinions, and there is no wrong way to do it. There's all sorts of ways of living. I just hope you find something that gives you some faith in your ability to raise a child that will turn out just fine. Because he or she will.

> 2. Don't post pictures of your kid all the time on social media. No one really cares. Sorry. Send those pictures to your parents or friends directly.

For many people, social media is how you send things to parents and friends. It's more straightforward than managing an email list, and needn't be any less real a connection.

I don't deny that ubiquitous social media is deforming our interactions, but I think a lot of people don't understand why Facebook et al got so popular in the first place. It's not just email for idiots. It's a tremendously useful tool for maintaining connections with a large and changing group.

Facebook is notorious for making those connections impossible when they are truly needed most. It's a marketing tool with aggressive filtering, not a family message board.

Agreed. I wish that I could get my family and close friends to join a Mattermost server I host, but so far, FB has a stranglehold on everyone it seems.

XMPP had federation. Sadly it didn't last long at the big providers.

Unfortunately, it's both. Wal-Mart is a good comparison--their policies are awful and they blight the communities around them, but they provide real value to individual users. It's how they maintain their hold.

Use whatever app or medium you choose, my advice was simply that sending directly to specific people is a better than flooding your IG or FB with photos of junior every day.

90% of my Instagram content is my kid. Though I use it as a way to record highlights for me and my wife, rather than for outside consumption.

I'm not sure why. My sister has an Instagram where she takes a couple of pictures of her kids a day, and has for the past five or six years, and I quite enjoy it. I know many of my family members do too. I visit a URL that just shows me her posts once a week or so, and just scroll to see what my niece and nephew have been up to.

How often do you call or visit your sister? Or your nephews? Just saying that I think we lost something when we could just become low-effort voyeurs.

How is emailing photos to specific people materially different than posting photos to a Facebook account followed by the same people? (Particularly if the account is otherwise private.)

How many people really care? Seriously? I love my kids as much as the next guy, but unless you are talking about a small group of people, yeah, in my opinion that amounts to narcissistic oversharing. I mean if you catch something hilarious, sure, share it. But it seems to me that those kind of posts should be few and far between. We've entered an age where voyuerism == friendship. No one really cares. Do you care about some high school pal's post of their kids activities?

I personally think there is a significant difference. The birthday messages I get on FB are worthless, but if someone sends me an email or a card that is worth something.

The connection via Facebook is so trivial and transient but it is better than no connection to people I'd have no contact with otherwise.

The people I email photos too will probably look at them a few times and may want to print them and will send an email response. Via FB it's all seen and then forgotten in 30s

I actually enjoy all the birthday messages I get on FB. Not because they say happy birthday, but because I actually respond to every single one of them, and catch up with people who actually made the slightest effort to wish me a happy birthday.

Fair point, I enjoy them too. But the amount of thought it takes to say Happy Birthday via Facebook is so trivial. FB reminds you, puts it at the top of your feed and reminds you the day after.

For me to send a birthday card to my friends I have a reminder that goes off a week before their birthday so that I find the time to go out get a relevant card. Then writing something of purpose inside the card and sending it with enough time to get there. So it's a week's worth of remembering their birthday vs the 30s that occurs in FB before reading all the other news.

So not worthless, but certainly worth less, to almost zero.

Yes,I have three kids, and I'm rarely on Facebook because I find it a toxic place.

But I was recently at a wedding, and was prompted to post a few photos up (more to share the photos with the bride/groom in a way that can also be seen by their friends too). It surprised me the number of messages I got saying how people loved seeing pictures of the kids and how they'd grown etc etc.

I don't have time to keep up with a lot of these old friends (many live far away) so I count this as a positive interaction on facebook.

I think that the lesson of the article is not that weirdos or strangers make the world a dangerous and ugly place, but that we, the regular people who vote for and move to areas with zoning densities that make public transit impractical, who commute long distances in cars, make the world a dangerous and ugly place.

Every time we get into a car, we are choosing to take a risk not only with our own life, but with the lives of everyone else near the road. I mean, we kind of choose that by continuing to live in areas where our density makes public transit less practical, but there's a lot to be said for just taking the responsibility of driving a lot more seriously, and treating driving as something risky, and taking steps to drive less.

I don't think this is the argument the author of the article was trying to send at all. This accident could have just as easily happened in a dense urban core, as it could have in suburbia.

The message was something else - sometimes, bad things just happen to people, and there is little you can do about it other than move on, and learn from the experiences.

The likelihood of death is proportional to speed [1], and the speed is lower in the urban cores. The math is super simple, and let's stop trying to justify bad urbanistic (essentially, political) decisions blaming it on the bad fate instead. [1] http://www.copenhagenize.com/2012/11/the-85th-percentile-fol...

Speed is the most quantifiable factor in a collision.

It is also very controllable.

That is why it gets the focus that it does.

The trouble is, it's easy to get distracted by speed as a coefficient in collision intensity, and not pay attention to what causes that collision in the first place.

People often think that because speed is such an important factor that they shouldn't drive faster to help traffic flow, or even that they should block faster traffic. Those actions are very likely to cause collisions, which is more important than the factor they are trying to minimize.

The likelihood of a collision causing death is just as proportional to mass. A semi hauling a trailer cannot stop in a short enough distance to prevent some collisions, and can be deadly even at very low speed. Even so, we realize the impracticality of reducing mass, so we focus on speed instead.

The real problem we need to focus on is collision prevention, not collision mitigation. Let's stop ignoring the reality of "bad fate", and do real work to minimize it's occurrence instead.

Reducing speeds is a form of collision prevention, is it not? A typical car can just about stop on a dime at 15mph, and a pedestrian has more time to react.

There's a whole slew of other pedestrian-friendly street design that we could & should adopt as well, but that doesn't make speed any less of a valid approach.

Speed, in of itself, is not dangerous. What is more dangerous on highways is differential speed. i.e. if you're driving 60 mph when the traffic around you is doing 80 mph, you're the problem. Probably exponentially so if you're driving slowly in the "fast" lane. While rarely enforced, most states in the US have laws that require you to pull to the right if you're impeding traffic (usually defined as holding up +2 vehicles behind you) - even if you're doing the speed limit. Yet, these laws are rarely enforced, just like "No Trucks Left 2 Lanes" is never enforced in & around Chicago, despite being posted every mile or so on I 294.

I'd wager, also, that speed itself is rarely the direct cause of an accident. High speed, though, will make an accident more severe. My bet is that distracted driving is the #1 cause of accidents. On my daily 2-hour round trip on Chicagoland highways, I usually see 4-6 accidents each involving >2 cars. The shear amount of people I see on their phones is staggering. Hard to tell if it's social media or texting, but you can always tell because their head is staring at their lap, or they're holding their phones at the top of the steering wheel for all to see. I also see people with their phones mounted on their dashes watching movies or TV shows. Playing with your phone while driving is far more dangerous than paying attention & speeding.

>What is more dangerous on highways is differential speed.

That sounds like an extraordinary statement to me, by which I mean that you need to support it.

First, let me make a distinction between crashes where drivers lose control after the collision, either due to shock to the driver or damage to the car, and crashes where they don't. In the latter case, I agree with you; a freeway scrape where both cars can slow in a controlled manner is probably pretty safe. And you are more likely to have that sort of accident when you are going at similar speeds in the same direction. But it's not a certain thing;

Cars are complex systems, and designed to operate without colliding with other vehicles. Cars are also much more likely to lose control when they are operating closer to their speed design envelope.

However, in the case where either the car or the driver is incapable of continuing to control the vehicle, at that point the car continues to hit other things until it's stopped (and is often hit then by traffic that isn't stopped.) At that point, total speed matters a lot.

There is just a whole lot more energy involved when you are moving fast than when you are moving slowly, and when energy is dispersed in an uncontrolled manner near people, those people tend to get hurt.

Speed, in of itself, is not dangerous

Certainly! Falling from great height isn't dangerous either, you know.

"It's not the pace of life I mind, it's the sudden stop at the end."

As long as you safely slow down before you approach the ground, it's not.

Reducing speeds in some places makes sense, but in county roads out in the country, it just creates a reason for bottleneck, which clumps traffic together, making collisions more likely.

For example, a 4-lane road that I drive on to get to the city will usually have two cars in the front driving practically the same speed, and slower than the traffic behind them. To fix this situation, the car on the left should speed up and get over, so that traffic can flow around it and spread out. Unfortunately, there is so much educational focus and enforcement on speed limits that the driver on the left believes [s]he is driving correctly.

Naturally, a lone country road designed for speed is fine. It's when you've got a high speed road with lots of on-street parking and pedestrians right next to traffic, even house fronts, where you've got a major clash of functionalities and a safety problem.

This is simply wrong in the general case. While the speeds might be lower, they are still high enough to kill.

In addition the density of the traffic can be so high that just a single wrong step can decide your destiny every minute.

Do you have some numbers to support your claims?

Yes,

From CDC:

> In large central metro areas, those aged 35–44 years (2.08), 45–54 years (2.60), 55–64 years (2.60), 65–74 years (3.36), 75–84 years (5.19), and ≥85 years (5.24) had statistically higher death rates than those in the same age groups at other urbanization levels. [1]

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6215a1.htm

most US metros don't have workable public transit; most people drive to get from point a to point b even in our dense metros. Perhaps because even our metros are not dense enough, perhaps for other reasons. I would be open to data that showed there were more traffic deaths in dense areas where most people took public transit, but this isn't it.

Does this hold adjusted for miles driven?

Well, my claim was mostly that the speed is not the only factor but also the traffic density.

Even if your claim is true it's still not the point of the article.

The point of the article is wrong, though. Anyone could have done it. All of us drivers could have killed Brian. We just weren't the unlucky ones. But it is not just the author's fault, it is all of our faults.

The road system is designed with inherent danger. The street she was driving had a high speed limit with children near the road. If we design better systems, then no one has to live with needless guilt. And, even better, less people die.

Super agreed on the gist - speed limits and policy matter, if we want to reduce fatalities. But, just to clarify and double down on speed reduction -- likelihood of death is proportional to the square of velocity. Every doubling of speed is 4x more damage in a collision!

Sure, that is the message they want to give over.

However, the message I take away from this is that somehow we have accepted into society this incredibly dangerous thing which while convenient it not necessary at all. While we make everything else in society safe, we seem to ignore the most dangerous thing around us, that kills around 1.3 million people every single year.

It's amazing how much death and disease we're willing to suffer for the sake of convenience, isn't it.

We treat automobiles as a necessity of modern life in all places, but it wasn't always this way. In the 1910s and 20s, many writers excoriated all of the roads bringing dangerous cars into places where people live and play. It turns out they were right, but we just became blind to the danger.

More people died in those years of horse and cart related deaths proportionate to per capita than they do today by auto-mobiles. Both indirectly and directly.

Read Super Freakonomics for the interesting data that they observe between the two.

but we tolerated a lot more (early) death from all causes in those days, in part be cause we didn't have technology to mitigate those risks. The argument I am trying to make is that we have technology (public transit) that would mitigate those risks now, but we choose not to use it.

(My assertion is that if we had a place where we had US standard driving safety requirements but more than half the miles traveled were via public transit, we would have fewer per capita injuries. Or more generally, that the per capita injuries goes up with miles driven in cars. I have so far failed to provide statistical evidence of this.)

In the latest season of Black Mirror, the most dangerous technology is cars: https://medium.com/@galencro/whats-up-with-car-accidents-and...

I had a glancing blow at 70 mph with a car doing a similar speed coming the other way. I was in the last mile of a cross country drive and was thinking of getting to the pub. It was the bit of road I knew best.

I drove a couple of times after that, but the screaming kids in the back of the other car was enough for me.

Now I cycle everywhere. Or get the train. I was not prosecuted or anything but I didn't want to almost kill anyone (and their family) ever again.

I consider myself lucky.

Point being: cycling is good too.

Not to tell you your reaction is wrong, but it's important to remember that cycling is generally more dangerous, and that while you aren't taking action dangerous to those around you, you are likely taking action that makes everyone around you dangerous to you yourself.

Even so, cycling is wonderful. I certainly recommend it.

Health benefits offset the traffic risks in most studies, see eg. http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d4521 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar... https://archive.org/details/pubmed-PMC3831097

It's possible that local traffic circumstances invalidate these for many locations, but at least the "generally" part of your claim seems to be reaching too far.

> cycling is generally more dangerous

Out of interest, do you have a citation for that in European countries?

It is not more dangerous to other people on the road.

That's what I said.

Danger goes both ways. If you are on a bicycle rather than in a car, you are more susceptible to the danger created by the cars around you. In effect, all of the cars around you are more dangerous than they were before, because there is a cyclist (you) on the road.

right. but... some people feel it is more ethical to take chances with their own lives than with the lives of others.

Ironically, I had the same thing happen with cycling (at a lower speed). Got in a bike vs. car accident ten years ago and since then almost never ride on the street, but driving is fine.

I agree that the message was about how humans deal with tragedy, and as a technical community we often neglect that - but it is also correct to have the technical discussion.

Two things greatly increased the probability of a fatal incident in this case:

1. Mailbox across the street from the home: If the mailbox was on the same side of the street as the home, there would be less cause to cross the street.

2. High speed roadway in a residential area: 45 mph is much too high for a residential neighborhood; 25 mph is generally regarded as safe.

"The road started out as freeway but quickly became a rural highway, one lane in each direction. The speed limit was 45 or 50mph, fairly fast for that kind of road, it was quite busy and I was in a line of cars doing the speed limit."

I'd be hard pressed to call a rural area a residential neighborhood.

> "I passed a little outpost of houses whose mailboxes were on the opposite side of the street."

I used to live on a road like this, it's not exactly a neighborhood like in most cities (so "residential neighborhood" may not have been accurate) - it's a linear neighborhood along the road. We were lucky enough to have our mailbox at the end of our driveway, not across the street; if our mailbox had been across the street, it would have been unsafe to walk and get the mail.

I live on a street like this with my mailbox on the opposite side of the street. In the winter, I always get my mail a day late since I refuse to retrieve it in the dark. Speed limit is 25mph but average speed is closer to 40mph. City can't be bothered to enforce the limit no matter how much we demand it. Sidewalks are being considered and might finally go in sometime before 2030.

I agree, it's a very poor design, likely dating from an era when high speed was a big noisy horse drawn carriage.

The proper engineering solution to this is to have an angled turn-off on to a side road (either perpendicular or parallel) which /is/ limited to a "safe residential speed".

You're right that this wasn't the author's argument, but it is a very important lesson to take away. There will always be accidents where the driver is not at fault, but it's worth taking the opportunity to think about how road design and car culture make those accidents more likely, and what we as a society can do to reduce them.

To be clear, my mentioning of dense urban cores was only because they make public transit more practical. Many dense urban cores in America don't choose public transit.

You may be correct about the authors intent; I maybe should have attached this to one of the threads where fathers talk about their vigilance in protecting their young, but I usually avoid talking directly about children and how they should be raised, because being someone who doesn't have or want children, my words often sound more offensive than I intend.

The lesson of this article is that unfortunate things, that come with a lifetime of grief, happen to good people. And perhaps more importantly, that empathy and understanding are incredibly powerful.

It is true that we should take "the responsibility of driving a lot more seriously, and treating driving as something risky" but treating this as a story about driving less broadly misses the point.

-s- This is America, where Uncle Bob can legally teach me how to drive, and you can keep your dang ugly government driver's ed schools and regulations outta my life. And I don't have to actually be that competent because insurance makes all wrongs right. -s-

It's seriously this stupid. There's no driving test after you're initially licensed, nor any recurrence training required. All you have to do in most states is pay a fee to get a license renewed, and you can do it online. They just want the money. Some states will want your vision retested, in my state that's only once every 10 years.

My elderly aunt could teach me how to drive, start to finish, exclusively. That's legal. Her view is that driving is a right, not a privilege. The government's role is only to prove that you're incompetent to hold a license, otherwise it's between you and your insurance company.

I don't see this worldview changing very soon. I'm not confident autonomous vehicles will take over any time soon, but whenever I think of the reality of car driver incompetency it makes me wish it could happen much sooner.

I personally think that the most realistic way to fix this is to just increase insurance minimums up to a reasonable level, enough to cover a car full of statistical lives.

This, if enforced, would internalize the externality of injury into the cost of driving, and probably would make driving dramatically more expensive, which would hopefully create demand for alternate systems.

I can relate to your story, but from your brothers side. Being bullied changes you, forever, and for the negative. Children can, and are, cruel to each other, and adults don't always step in. It can easily become a tolerated form of torture.

I learned from that. I won't tolerate no amount of bullying, shaming, or excluding of an individual of groups I take care of or am part of. If they'd care it is not difficult for adults to stop bullying of kids by kids.

Even in your peer group it isn't always difficult to block bullying. If you are open, direct, loud, and confrontential enough against the transgressors, they usually stop. Though, care must be taken to not bully themselves.

I think that those that bully have themselves been hurt before or have other issues, and bullying is just a way to deal with. So, having that in mind can make it easier to deescalate these situations.

It becomes even more difficult if you finally decide to open up about how hurt you are, and you are brushed away, and not taken seriously.

As weird as it sounds, it helps to read a comment like yours to see that there are people that care, so thank you for sharing.

How did you learn to cope? My brother has lost all desire to fix the part inside him that will get to the coping stage.

I agree with you that bullies themselves have been hurt and bullying is a way to deal with it. Ever since I found out my brother was bullied, I came to the realization that this social interaction may be a situation where your best defense against bullies is actually being a bully. I don’t want to believe that, but deterrence is a real thing. For me personally, I simply laughed off the bullies when I was young, and that worked. But that was my genuine reaction to the bullies, and I just happened to have it in me to just laugh.

How did I learn to cope? How did I learn to cope with being bullied, having been bullied or how to deal with such situations as a bystander? Maybe I'll just answer all of them.

I'm not bullied any more, and can effectively defend myself now.

I'm not sure I learned to cope with having been bullied, or if I ever will. It is an invisible scar that shows itself in counterintuitive, suprising, and sometimes creeping ways. I don't know how to generically deal with it. Self-chosen social isolation is an intuitive way to deal with it, though I don't want it for myself.

I'm quite stubborn and don't easily give in to social pressure, so that might have made it easier for me. I'm also curious and want to try out new things, so I try to benignly ignore social conventions to see what happens and learn from that. This has made me in some aspects very social, because consciously refusing or experimenting with implicit social norms can lead to behaviour that is not often seen. For example, a coffeehouse is not for people to drink coffee even though that is the implicit convention; It is much easier, cheaper and more comfortable to drink a coffee at home. People go to coffeehouses for social interaction. I realize that and act accordingly. I just go to people I'd like to talk with and ask them if they feel like chatting. My experience with that has been astonishingly positive, so I assume my understanding is correct. But doing that is not easy for everyone because the fear of rejection is so strong, even when the decision to try it was made very consciously. Humans are masters at unconscious interpretation of behaviour and social situations. We know when and who to talk to about what because we dread social punishment so much. This is just one example, and I don't understand psychology very well including my own, but hey, at least I can share my experience. :)

I learnt how to act as a bystander from many experiences. There is a good german explanatory video that gives an introduction[0]. Key to stop bullying is to understand that passive bystanders make the situation for the victim significantly more painful. Those around can easily and effectively stop most bullying. If you are bullied it can help to call out passive bystanders directly and individually.

Deterrence absolutely works, and it is not necessary to bully others to build up deterrence. For instance adults can easily seem like demigods for children; unsurmountably strong, more knowledgeable and experienced, larger and heavier, with deeper lower voice and unmatchable social standing. This is why children don't often pick on adults.

[0] https://www1.wdr.de/mediathek/video/sendungen/quarks-und-co/...

For me, that happened when I became the father of two little girls.

My radar is up whenever I am in public with my daughters. I notice if strangers look for too long in their direction or if I see someone hanging out where children are, without a child of their own.

Occasionally, I'll spot another father like me. We'll lock eyes for a moment and it's clear that we recognize each other (for what we are, not necessarily who we are) and then go back to scanning the area.

I'm sorry to hear about what happened to your brother. Kids can be horrible to each other. I don't say that to minimize his experience but to say that I understand.

This heightened awareness that you feel, it comforts me to know that there are others out there. Obviously, there are no guarantees in life but your vigilance will give your son a better shot at safely reaching adulthood than many other boys who don't have someone looking out for them like that.

Is that kind of paranoia productive? Especially considering we are at historically low crime rates.

A very young child needs supervision and precautions to prevent them from hurting themselves, as this article sadly shows, and even then, its blind bad luck sometimes.

But otherwise I can’t think any of my family (two young kids, 1 year and 8 years) or friends (many kids of various ages) being super cautious about their kids in public. I don’t live in the USA, mind you.

We let daycare staff care for the little ones, which includes daily walks through the downtown core. We let kids walk to school on their own when they turned 10, we let them play unsupervised outside around age 7, or go for a bike ride with neighbor kids, etc. It’s not that different from when I was growing up. Hanging out and playing the at the park is probably less of a thing, perhaps, but that’s more because of iPads and Xboxes than safety.

The paranoia is counterproductive, it actually makes the world more dangerous. Ten or fifteen years ago this story made the rounds in Britain (writing from memory, can't be bothered to search for it in the BBC archive):

A small boy had wandered off and was found dead in a pond, he had fallen in and drowned because he could not swim. It turned out that the child had been seen by a labourer cleaning a ditch, but he had no cellphone and did not intervene because he feared the pedophile hysteria and did not want to be seen with a child that wasn't his.

It's understandable if you remember what Rupert Murdoch's Sun was like.

Excellent points. There was an article where the author interviewed a bunch of kids a few decades back and examined how they played and then revisited them 20 years later to see how their kids played.

The original group of kids played across a very large area (something like a couple square miles of woodland) and roamed across their hometowns with little oversight.

Two decades later their children by comparison were very closely monitored and played in controlled areas or fenced yards only.

The reasoning of the parents being that crime and abduction have risen when in fact they’ve fallen by a huge amount.

There’s no real sane reason behind it - I’m a parent and there’s no way I’d let my kids play in the local woods alone despite doing so myself as a kid. The world ‘feels’ less safe and it’s very hard to overcome our feelings even when we know they’re irrational.

My parents also placed perceived (by them) safety above everything else when I was a teenager. I missed out on a lot of things in life and am still missing out on things due to never having learned essential life skills and never having had essential experiences. I still resent them for that and so does my sister. Sometimes, I think parents only think of themselves, as strange as that might sound in this context. It's extremely selfish, IMO, to hold back a child from their full potential because the parents have their own irrational issues that they're not dealing with.

I think you hit the nail on the head. So much of today's parenting zeitgeist feels driven by narcissism. I feel like this is another effect of the rise of social media.

> It's extremely selfish, IMO, to hold back a child from their full potential because the parents have their own irrational issues that they're not dealing with.

This really resonates. My kid for example has wanted one of these little scooters which you see toddlers riding around everywhere. I've been refusing up until recently when I realized that by denying her access not only am I excluding her from a valuable social experience with her friends who own scooters but I'm quite possibly harming her ability to master and safely ride the thing.

It's important to realize that sometimes when you're saying to your kid "I don't think you're ready" you're really talking about yourself as a parent.

> I missed out on a lot of things in life and am still missing out on things due to never having learned essential life skills and never having had essential experiences.

New father here...do you feel comfortable talking about what life skills / experiences you missed?, so I can (try to) avoid making the same mistakes?

Mostly everything that teenagers do. Hang out, date, make friends, learn to socialize and not be constantly anxious around other people. Things like that, things that involve socializing. I tried to make up for it in college too by partying and doing plenty of irresponsible shit (because I felt entitled to having the teenage years I was robbed of). I had no problems graduating, but no one else who tried to keep up actually graduated. I'd say learning to socialize and be around people is more valuable than anything else I did learn as a teenager, by far.

Part of it is society, too. If you were to let your (young) children play in the woods at a mile from your house... and something happened to them, there's a fair chance that society would blame you nowadays. Heck, I'd venture to guess that there's a fair chance the court could take away your parental rights in a situation like that. What is considered acceptable by society has changed a LOT over the years.

I would say 100% of it is society, to be honest. I grew up roaming the neighborhood, just like a lot of kids back in the 70s and 80s. It's not that our free-roaming childhood turned us into paranoid parents, it's that the very culture of the USA became vastly more paranoid.

I would probably blame the sensational news coverage nowadays, we didnt have this 20 years ago. Back then news would contain sports/world events and bigger stuff. You hear about so many bad things happening you never think about the probability of it actually happening to you. Like all we read is "Child kidnapped" not "First child kidnapping in a year with lowest kidnap rate ever and in a place so far away that its not relevant to you".

> I would probably blame the sensational news coverage nowadays, we didnt have this 20 years ago.

Yes, we did, and the media-driven false perception was already well-established 20 years ago; I saw papers about the media-driven false perception in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

Media sensationalism isn't new. Even the heightened form driven by the 24-hour news cycle is older than that (CNN, the 24-hour news network that drove the 24-hour news cycle, is 37 years old. Fox News and MSNBC, the two competing general 24-hour news networks that made that cycle competitive were each founded 21+ years ago in 1996.)

Not sure if this is the same article, but this one has stuck in my mind for the past 10+ years: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-...

Obviously with little kids in an urban environment we kept them pretty close to home. Once they were in 7th and 8th grade then the ranges got longer. And honestly, it was a challenge dealing with my spouse and other families who insisted on hover-parenting or refusing to let their kids walk 3 blocks to our house. To a certain degree, that is to their detriment because it doesn't allow kids to learn and explore.

Of course, my argument, along with the article above, was "They sneak out at night and wander all over multiple neighborhoods, so why do you feel the need to keep them in your sight at all times?" But that leads to lots of other parenting stories that I'm not going into here.

>Is that kind of paranoia productive? Especially considering we are at historically low crime rates.

I balance the likelihood with the potential consequences when making my decision.

For example, logically, I know that there's no danger of contracting anything from sitting on a public toilet seat but I still make a bird's nest when I have to poop in a public place.

Intellectually, I know that the world is now statistically safer than it was when I was a child but I still do not allow my children to roam unsupervised in public places.

Your first paragraph seems to directly contradict your second and third.

Extremely low likelihood versus maximum severity of consequence versus moderate likelihood with low severity of consequence.

I choose to guard spend more time being vigilant against the former.

That's fair. Another way to look at it is "Fat tail risk".

Having you head on a swivel for would-be child snatchers at all times seems like irrational paranoia.

I imagine it's the deceptively mundane that is the true danger, automobiles being the most obvious.

This is true. The number of child abductions by strangers in the U.S. is extraordinarily low—in the neighborhood of 100 per year [1, 2]. There are lots of abductions, of course, but nearly all of them are by family members, acquaintances of the family, or other non-strangers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-mis... http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/31/kidnapping-stats

The same is true for murders. The objectively statistically most dangerous people are those around you that you know relatively well, not some random stranger passing by or sitting on the next bench. This irriational fear of danger of strangers stops us from bonding with new people.

Have a look at the Megan's Law registry. Tell me how close the nearest violent sexual predator is to you.

A few months ago, I discovered that one lived on my street. He has since been arrested and is no longer in the neighborhood.

But, it's not just out-of-place perverts. I am also on the lookout for under supervised children who "play" too violently.

I knew that I would be concerned about vehicles, so I was sure to buy a house with a large, fenced in, backyard. It's away from the street and even adjacent to a small patch of woods. They can have outdoor adventures and I can have peace of mind.

Children are sexually abused by family members, then by adults at schools and clubs they visit. Abuse by strangers is rare.

True - my molester was a long time friend of the family, close enough that me going on a vacation trip to his state park campground trailer wasn't an unusual summer thing. Took me 25 years to remember exactly what had gone on, and a couple of years of therapy to get back to somewhat steady on my emotional feet. Never 100% sure of that anymore, but I try.

True. My position as a sheepdog isn't limited to strangers. My children aren't unsupervised with many relatives or family friends either.

They're also not left unsupervised with clergy.

Research is tricky, but at the moment we think the person most likely to abuse a child is their sibling.

I have no proof of this but I would suspect that this happens more often when the sibling had been a victim of abuse.

>Occasionally, I'll spot another father like me.

Can you expand? What type of father are you?

Honestly, you'd do better to be more vigilant of bees and mosquitoes, both of which are much more likely to kill or harm your child than a stranger abducting them.

Try not to worry so much. ;)

By "father like me", I mean one who is on the lookout for threats to his children.

Do you feel most other fathers aren't?

I’m very much like this.

BTW if you want to give your kids the best chance at later childhood, select their school not based on hearsay or image, but based on how resilient, motivated and kind/warm their teacher-to-be is. Those teachers keep bullying at a minimum, and let kids keep their natural curiosity. Spending 4-5h every day in class can make or break you at 6-8y old.

I feel for your brother and understand your fatherly fears. I have three sons. They are all fine now, but ... One got hit by a drunken driver, one broke his neck, and the other fell onto a wrought iron fence which stabbed through his skull and into his brain. All three are healthy and active. Each came so close to death. As you say, many of the largest changes are quite beyond our control. I frequently find myself having to choke back the terror to keep focus and keep moving.

Jesus. That’s a lot.

The utter powerlessness of not being able to rewind to 9 years ago to be there for my brother gets at me. As does my fear and uncertainty of the life my son will be subjected to.

Everything I know suggests to me these two things are profoundly interrelated and that if you can sort out how it is you did not see your brother's distress and/or did not understand that it had to come from somewhere, you will feel more comfortable as a father.

That isn't a personal attack. I was molested as a child and I knew how to protect my sons from the same. I did not live with the kind of fear as a parent that you describe.

I never seem to know how to say such things properly. When I try to comment on it, it is frequently taken as an accusation and that is not remotely my intent. My hope is to help you find a constructive path forward so you can make your peace with the past and make your way more confidently into the future as a parent.

Best.

Thank you for sharing your experience.

I don't want to have children, and very large part of that is the fact that I don't want to cause someone to hurt as intensely as many do growing up. I know I and my siblings had a very difficult time.

In other words, it's out of love. I am keeping someone safe.

I very much respect anyone who has chosen to have children and is dedicated to protecting them and keeping them safe. The world needs more people like you.

You should make sure your kids can defend and counter attack. Not only physically, but using their brain and resources such as authority figures and the police.

Maybe you view the world as peaceful and rosy, and that's a good view to have, but always have a fallback.

Speak softly but carry a big stick, you know.

The one thing I resented the most about my peers growing up was that they always tattled and brought their problems to someone else. Kids should learn how to deal with conflict on their own. Deferring to authority and police is a sure fire way to perpetuate the notion of “don’t worry. You’re special. There’s people to take care of you.”

People get bullied all the time. Even as adults, just in different forms. Resorting to authority early on is not the best solution.

Being bullied sucks. I will teach my kids to use any tools available to stop them being bullied. If resorting to authority solves the problem, then thats great. That's how you deal with bullies, by using whatever works; not by following some arbitrary code about doing things yourself, or not tattling etc. (Note though I live in Ireland where involving the police sounds pretty bizarre/extreme).

That is exactly my point - kids need to learn to fight back, and if a punch won't do it, calling everyone from the parents to the principal to the police sure will. Bullies need to learn this isn't an ape tribe, the earlier the better.

And as adults, every day can be a battle, if you can't hold your own, you have societal resources to back you up.

Of course, this needs to be taught as being a last resort, otherwise they may grow up to be bullies themselves. Having children is hard.

Your approach prevents children seeking help when they're being abused.

> my brother was bullied in HS and was never the same.

> the largest changes in our lives are beyond our control.

My brother and I started a very small humanist school in Hungary to give my nephew a better education and yes, to shelter my nephew from being bullied. Yes, quite a lot of things in our lives is beyond our control but with a lot of perseverance you can wrestle back control. Although the necessity to do this is exactly beyond our control...

Life is a miracle, I've accepted that a long time ago.

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