Motherhood in the Age of Fear
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I have no doubt if you took a poll asking people if it should be illegal to leave a kid in a car for any amount of time you'd get overwhelming support. And, of course, that's how people like the woman in the article end up fearing prosecution after leaving her child alone for a few minutes.
> Women are being harassed and even arrested for making perfectly rational parenting decisions.
By the way, this may be even more true for men, who are routinely viewed with a skeptical eye when it comes to parenting decisions. The glee at which our current culture laughs at the perceived incompetence of men with regards to parenting has taught us all to expect fathers to be completely boneheaded at all times.
What really astounds me is that I'm not that old, and I clearly remember being able to run around or ride my bike around town for miles without any adult supervision, at the age of 8 or so. Things have really changed in this country.
I rode my bike all over town. Several times my friends and I walked across town to the video store by ourselves, rented a Sega Genesis and a few games, and hauled it all back to someone's house and stayed up all night. I was probably around 12.
Crime rates were much higher back then and there were no cell phones or other easy communication devices that would allow the kid themselves or a random pedestrian or motorist to rapidly notify authorities if something is wrong.
The safer our society gets the more afraid we become and the less tolerant we seem to become of risk.
I wonder if it's a cognitive analog of the hygiene hypothesis for allergies. There's a part of our brain that is built for a world of conflict, danger, and scarcity and in an abundant modern developed nation it just has nothing to do but declare war on phantoms and crusade against minute or non-existent risks.
I've had debates with people recently about how bad crime is becoming and how dangerous things are. I show them graphs of crime and violence for the past 30 years. I often get total unironic disbelief -- as in they don't believe it and think the sources are biased and there's some kind of conspiracy to suppress the real statistics on crime. Things were much more dangerous in the 60s through the early 90s and people felt a lot safer.
Death by car is kind of the concern....
> simply a propaganda victim
Last 3 years: [1]
* Car attack by the Islamic State in Barcelona (24 killed, 152 injured)
* Car + knife attack by the Islamic State in London (11 killed, 48 injured)
* Bombing by the Islamic State in Manchester (23 killed, 250 injured)
* Car attack by the Islamic State in Berlin (12 killed, 56 injured)
* Car attack by the Islamic State in Nice, France (87 killed, 434 injured)
* Bombing by the Islamic State in Brussels (35 killed, 340 injured)
* Shooting and bombing by the Islamic State in Paris (137 killed, 368 injured)
Yes, you're right....a dozen here and hundred there means nothing in the overall picture of Western Europe.
But it doesn't exactly take a propaganda machine for that to have a significant physiological effect. Especially when looking at the details: these weren't back-alley muggings, bad-part-of-town shootings, or gang turf struggles. They were in tourist-friendly, public places in broad daylight, with substantial law enforcement presence. (Four unarmed police officers died trying to stop the stabbers on London Bridge.)
The story of the few seems to naturally have a large effect on the human mind. HN top 20 currently has a story of a mishandled justice for a single person https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17625385 See the comments for extrapolation onto the judgment of the US justice system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Europe#Deadliest_...
Also not all countries in Europe are the same. E.g. France, UK and Belgium have more issues in general with islamists and thus more terrorism than e.g. Germany, Italy, Poland, ...
For example, in Germany the only significant islamic terrorist attack remains the Breitscheidplatz attack with 12 dead.
Indeed, following 9/11:
* Delta, Northwest, United, and US Airways filed for bankruptcy
* New York City lost $320m in tourism revenue
* New York City jobs were cut by 450,000 and wages by $2.8b over three months
* Even unrelated tourism was affected.. I lived near Orlando, FL, and the entertainment parks were near ghost towns for weeks.
Assuming Europe stops the regular cadence of large Islamist terror attacks, this fades from memory and in a decade everything is back to normal in the public mind.
You can watch, in hilarity, as propagandist YouTubers go into European "no-go zones"[1], where they're met with casual street traffic, children playing and, often times, absolute peace and tranquility[2]. These "no-go zones" are supposed dens of radical extremists that assault and kill anyone who is not from the Middle East or Muslim.
Or, you can read the hundreds, if not thousands, of attempts to paint Sweden as a den of sexual assault against natives by scary foreigners. They completely ignore that the rise in sexual assault numbers have to do with recent recategorizing of what are legally recognized as sex crimes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-go_area, do a quick Ctrl-F for Fox, CNN, etc and you'll see how widespread of an effort is being taken to paint Europe as dangerous to exist in if you are light-skinned or not Muslim.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pochreLwrQs
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2015/01/..., an op-ed piece complaining about the fact that CNN was quick to parrot the "no-go zone" talking point without first checking their facts
And while not Western Europe, a reporter was stopped (even without camera crew) from going the most Muslim part of Sydney, for fear she would offend the residents and they would commit crimes https://youtu.be/LqY4Z1fTrMc
The officer's words: "The local community walks around here without any fear, I walk around here without any fear."
She's a professional provocateur with a clear anti-Muslim agenda. The officer stopped her because he believed she was disturbing the peace, and I'd have to agree.
Try doing what she's doing at a New York City synagogue and see how long it takes until the cops are called.
Somehow, I don't believe, "I'm just trying to criticize International Jewry!" would fly in that situation.
This is another example of a neighborhood where there's casual street traffic, children playing and absolute peace and tranquility if we ignore the woman gawking at people while loudly decrying their presence, ethnicity and religion on camera. I'd call the police, too, if such a person was trying to make an example out of me while wholly disturbing the peace.
That's where Candid Camera did all their antics.
That YouTuber has been banned from entering the UK for inciting racial hatred. I don't believe it's wise to take anything she says or shows on her channel at face value.
I find it concerning that you're willing to put her brand of divisive hate on par with Candid Camera's pranks, as if what she's doing is just silly antics.
* Protest outside Christian Church, claiming they incite violence [1]
* Protest outside Mormon Temple, claiming Nazi agenda [2]
* Protest outside Jewish synagogue claiming subversive global influence [3]
* Protest outside Catholic Church claiming heretical views [4]
* Protest outside United Church of Christ claiming pedophilia [5]
...and many, many more full-on sign-waiving, chant-shouting, screaming protests.
Not a person traveling past a mosque who is well known for her criticism of Islam.
[1] http://ewn.co.za/2017/01/29/lgbti-members-demonstrate-outsid...
[2] https://www.hjnews.com/anti-lds-protesters-stake-out-prime-s...
[3] https://www.newsweek.com/charlottesville-police-refused-prot...
[4] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/catholics-protest-at-kaine...
[5] http://www.mauinews.com/news/local-news/2017/11/man-spewing-...
What's your agenda?
> But...surely you were joking about contrary opinions near religious centers?
Surely, you aren't trying to strawman a position that's literally one post above yours.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCla6APLHX6W3FeNLc8PYuvg/vid...
[Straight face]
There's no question she is an ardent critic of Islam. She said as much during her conversation with law enforcement, which said she couldn't freely go in the Muslim neighborhood.
As for comparison, yes, I believe her actions in Sydney were less antagonistic than the many examples I listed.
I completely disagree. Even with our crime rates being much lower than decades ago, the US is still nowhere near as safe as Japan, yet in Japan they're not remotely as risk-averse as we are (particularly in regards to kids being outside without their parents). It's very much part of their culture to have kids walk themselves to school at an early age.
I'm pretty sure it's similar in western European and Scandinavian countries: they're very safe too (particularly the Scandinavian ones), and don't treat kids and parents this way.
This is something unique to the US.
And this really touches on something I think Americans are really, really horrible at: thinking about the rest of the world. Instead of looking at our brains and trying to use psychology to figure this out, why not just look at what other humans in other countries are doing? Americans are not biologically unique. This is a cultural problem.
The urban crime wave of the 1970s - 1990s really was pretty awful.
Obviously.
> why not just look at what other humans in other countries are doing?
Like some sort of top-down policy...what exactly are you referring to?
---
api conjectured about the cause of the US culture shift over the past few decades, but never said that child protectionism had a univariate relationship.
I seriously think that the glut of sick and twisted TV shows and movies that depict the most horrific crimes imaginable are partly to blame.
When I go to my parents' house and they're watching primetime network TV, I'm shocked at the content. Blood and guts and torture and sex crimes all over the place.
There's a fairly decent BBC piece that explores this idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTg4qnyUGxg
It basically argues that people no longer buy into utopian political ideologies so politicians and political parties have pivoted toward using negative arguments (fear, hate) to motivate the people to follow them. It's not really an elaborate conspiracy theory per se... think of it as a marketing pivot.
You can be hit at home, going to work or else.
Of course crime existed before, but the enormity of that tragedy moved the cursor I think.
Strongly disagree.
> The glee at which our current culture laughs at the perceived incompetence of men with regards to parenting has taught us all to expect fathers to be completely boneheaded at all times.
Exactly. I, as a father, can get away with all kinds of things because according to society I don't know any better, whereas my wife, as a mother, is expected to be perfect all the time and when she does something that doesn't measure up to someone's unvoiced, unwarranted expectations she's harshly judged for it. This is true not just for mothers but for all women in the US, all the time, basically from birth, doubly so if they're POC.
All this to say that I am much more interested in the direct topic of this article - which is the fear I and my wife operate under of our getting in trouble for not raising our kids "right" - rather than have the discussion get derailed into a gender rabbit hole.
The problem is the other side to this coin, which is that because males are presumed to be incompetent, their interactions with children are restricted ahead of time. Children aren't allowed to be alone with an adult male because the presumption is that he'll allow them to solo pilot a homemade single-passenger rocket ship with no safety equipment, if not literally rape and murder them.
And then, for example, little girls can't learn about tech because qualified adult women to teach them are scarce and they're not allowed to be unsupervised around adult men.
This may change with the rise of ubiquitous surveillance. In fact if I'm alone with a teenage girl to whom I'm unrelated for more than a few minutes, I'll be much more comfortable if there is a recording. This may also change as deepfakes become more common...
Joe Random was never actually going to hurt your kids.
It's like school shootings. You hear about them because they're outrageous, not because you're ever likely to experience one.
And if someone is willing to lie about what happened when you were alone together, what stops them lying about the fact that you were alone together to begin with?
In USA, a lot of things that annoy white people are worse for people who aren't white. E.g. dealing with police, CPS, the courts, etc.
It is objectively a bad thing if men are perceived as incompetent parents, because they are men, let alone from any other stereotypes.
The very same prejudice hurts men in different contexts - when good and cool things they do with children are attributed to their wifes, when they want more time with children, when they don't get chance to learn how to deal with young relatives because everyone keeps them away. When they are shamed for wanting to work with young children or presumed incompetent.
>Dr. Sarnecka, the cognitive scientist, has an answer to this. Her study found that subjects were far less judgmental of fathers. When participants were told a father had left his child for a few minutes to run into work, they estimated the level of risk to the child as about equal to when he left because of circumstances beyond his control. > >I love the way this finding makes plain something we all know but aren’t supposed to say: A father who is distracted by his interests and obligations in the adult world is being, well, a father; a mother who does the same is failing her children.
It’s because civilization had to break down our social norms that guided humankind for thousands of years, so that we could build vast and functional social structures outside our local society and families.
A company of 1000 people is an insane achievement in human history. Ancient Rome may have had a senate, an emperor and a few generals to run the army, but in realty, there wasn’t a single sociopolitical structure larger than a few hundred people, and there really hasn’t been, until after modern times.
To do this we gave up the importance of local community, family and such, and devoted ourselves to the modern nation state. Sure there have been countries for a long time, but they used to really just be about taxes and security, and not really local security because nobody gave a rats ass if a town burned an alleged witch.
In return we got individualism and freedom. 300 years ago you would have become whatever profession your dad had, if you were a man and married if you were a woman. Today you’re free to build your own way through life.
This meant that the state suddenly became responsible for a lot of things that families and communities used to take care of though, like determining what is and isn’t allowed. Which is perfectly fine by the way, in a democratic society that values that freedom and that individuality.
The people you talk about, don’t value their freedom though, they have just really gotten used to the state being their mommy/daddy. Which is incredible dangerous but it’s also the inevitable outcome when we increasingly let radical leftists and right wingers and their identify politics dictate our public discourse.
Freedom is provocative, because not everyone agrees, and that’s just fine, but today, we’re have both leftist and right wingers wanting to use legalization to dictate virtually everything based on their identity politics.
It’s really quite terrible.
> few generals to run the army.
> the army
The army was rather a bit bigger than 1000 people.
Interestingly army structure haven’t really changed that much since then.
I think its yet another symptom of the collapse of societal/communal values in the west in favor of individualism. Criticism/gossip within a society are a good way of punishing these minor transgressions, and its usually how its done around the world. With no society left and all decisions up to the individual, the only way left is to leave everything up to the law.
I feel like this is all somehow a strange result of personal responsibility mutated monstrously - society doesn't care about whether you live or die, but it'll do everything in it's power to make sure you're shamed for the slightest screw up.
I've argued in other places that cutting funding to planned parenthood is likely to increase rather than decrease abortions due to the improved access to birth control that PP provides.
And I'm confused how "dying from complications directly caused by childbirth" would be reported differently in other countries. Maybe that's why Sweden has such a low murder rate, it's not "death by gunshot", it's "spontaneous exsanguination during a hospital stay".
Some deaths related to the childbirth happen after the birth is officially over. Think sepsis from c-section complications or untreated post-partum leading to suicide.
Giving birth in this country is extremely expensive (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/16/why-does-it-...) and we have a ton of people who are uninsured, underinsured, have high deductible plans, or simply aren't in stable enough financial situations to risk going to the doctor for prenatal/postnatal care when the $40 copayment or $300+ tests the doctor runs could delay their rent check that month.
When you talk about people coming into the hospital with comorbitieis, it's an easy next step to say "eh not our fault, that's on the patient, not on the medical system," but it kind of is on the medical system (or the insurance system, if you choose to differentiate the two) if the inability to afford healthcare is causing so many people to die of secondary causes when something serious enough to warrant it (in this case, pregnancy) forces them to go to a hospital.
"We do not think about the statistical probabilities or compare the likelihood of such events with far more present dangers, like increasing rates of childhood diabetes or depression. Statistically speaking, it would take 750,000 years for a child left alone in a public space to be snatched by a stranger. Statistically speaking, a child is far more likely to be killed in a car on the way to a store than waiting in one that is parked."
Once you get to the store, there is some amount of risk to leaving your kid in the car. As she points out, it is infinitesimal. The ideal comparison would be to say that there's more risk of the kid being hit by a car while walking from the parking lot to the store than to just sitting in the car. Given the stats she quoted, I wouldn't be surprised if this were true.
Fear is just such a useful tool to keep people moving in the general direction you want that politicians and plutocrats will not give it up, and niether will marketers. Meanwhile the media has generally embraced sensationalism and fear for a very very long time. People are inculcated into a culture of fear to sell shit, to control them, to siphon money from them, and who’s left to show them the way out?
The prototypical example is that so many people fear flying commercially, yet don’t blink at getting into their cars to drive.
It's no surprise that many communities have this dysfunction. Decades of carefully cultivating only one approved narrative, that you all must buy the same things and live the same way has been very good for marketers and the authoritarian plutocrats who employ them, but very bad for you. In an age of remarkable policy consensus (more war, more spending, more oppression, more, more, more), the heated political discourse often amounts to nothing deeper than, "They disagree with me! How dare they?!?" This doesn't leave much room for "Well, if Sally's parents let her play by the road, I guess you can too."
You don't have to live where mothers are harassed like this, but let's face it the job market is better there. Still, you can visit the rest of America. Just drive in any direction. If you get more than fifty miles from an Applebee's or Best Buy, you can probably stop right there, or keep driving, or whatever. If you see a park, drop the kids off. It's fine.
Hillary Clinton won this county (Lancaster). She won Douglas county too (where Omaha is).
It's nice.
Functionally, the passive form of watching just means being available to adjudicate disputes and administer first aid.
Contrast that with 30 years ago, when we had things like Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and regular Law & Order. Those shows featured murders committed because of robberies and affairs and the like. The more modern versions are basically all pedophiles and rapists.
Demon Haunted World
When I look back, for example at my summer holidays, we were biking for miles to spend the afternoon at a public swimming pool in a neighbouring village (approx. 40 min bike ride, maybe more). Or we were filming a lord of the rings-type movie deep in the woods, complete with building a small "castle". We also had a river in the woods my parents were always warning me that I can't get in there because I might drown, since it was more rapid than it looked like. So in elementary school I had nightmares for a few weeks of drowning inside the river, but that was all. I was still allowed to play there with my friends. For example, we once were building paper boats and see which one makes it the farthest.
Friends in the city were allowed to use the public transport (it's how every got to school...) to move around freely in the city.
Also, i clearly remember waiting in the car for my mom to get something.
I can't imagine growing up without being allowed to explore the world, be it nature or man-made.
Is this really different in the US?
That sums it up pretty well. We aren't in an age of fear so much as an age of self-righteousness. Everyone is constantly on the lookout for an opportunity to preen their moral superiority, and to condemn the failings of others, particularly in any situation involving children.
In Iceland they leave sleeping kids parked in strollers outside the coffeeshop. I can't tell how many times I've wanted to do that. But then I remember the friend of a friend whose kids were taken away for doing just that.
I also feel like I have read this exact article about 3 years ago.
EDIT: Oh, of course, I remembered this article by the same writer: https://www.salon.com/2014/06/03/the_day_i_left_my_son_in_th...
In some ways, I think the 4 year old article was better.
> Cops don't [...]. But [govt agency] can do whatever they want.
It seems to me as-if there aren't many real freedoms beyond the first one.
In Illinois, it's illegal it keep children ages 6 and under in a vehicle unattended for more than 10 minutes. Someone 14 years or older must either accompany or be within eyesight of them.
These laws largely exist because of advocacy groups such as Kids 'n Cars[1] whose founders often had children who died while unattended in vehicles and they want to "save" other parents.
As a parent myself, I think these rules are absolutely bonkers. Kids might be less safe these days in hot cars because windows are now automatic and not manual, but there's likely a technical solution to that problem that does not require jailing anyone or ripping families apart because they ran in to get a coffee.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/us/black-white-police.htm...
Imagine that we had an article that described the tyranny of high expectations at work for men? And how privileged women were because expectations were so low that something incompetent for a man would be fine for a woman? I worry that we got stuck on 'men are privileged' and are incapable of seeing anything else in any facet of life. Any gap between men and women is measured with the same male privilege yardstick.
The Information Age has given us much more access to information than before. We are not accurately assessing how dangerous something is.
Watching fearful content on tv can affect your subconscious mind that later leads to rational avoidance of “fear”.
Why couldn’t fear and violent content on tv affect the brain? A tv Programme could be like a computer program instructions. Then you have to consume the right type of content.
Micro mort the probability of dying from an activity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
Sometimes people make the decision to move to a place which is nice because of a homeowner association's strictness, then complain that the HOA is enforcing it's rules on them as well. Or the same really for living in a suburb with an eagle-eyed police force.
If you live in an area where people want you to watch your kids then you will have to watch your kids.
The real problem is children of very negligent parents who are not being protected, not yuppies who move to or travel to some uptight suburb and then complain the police enforce the law on them too.
I had to pretend I was as concerned as she was about it, and that it wasn't something he'd done a hundred times before in the backyard.
Hearing that similar types of "neglect" get legal action has made my wife paranoid for years. So far, I assume it's a very rare getting-bit-by-a-shark-like occurrence. I hope I'm right and she's wrong.
In Japan, kids are basically forced to walk themselves to school at the age of 7 or so, without their parents. Here, that would cause the parents to be thrown in jail.
Raising kids in this country is dangerous to your personal safety if you want to avoid jail time. Don't do it. This article isn't exaggerating.
From the end of the article: "Instead I worry about all the ways our country seems to be at war with children, even as we insist our greatest responsibility is to protect them." Exactly: we are at war with children, and parents too. The rational choice is to avoid the situation altogether. If you're reading on this board, you're probably affluent enough to head to greener pastures if/when you decide to have kids.
Or, you know, perhaps try to change the laws?
As they say, you can beat the charge, but you can't beat the ride.
I see no reason to believe that these laws are a result of a measured response. I see reason to believe the opposite.
(Not that that's an excuse for the abominable actions of law enforcement in the story. Shame on the police, prosecutors, and judges involved.)
The Stasi-like laws are real. Anonymous tips, school and medical required reporting laws, assumed guilt and state harassment are the status quo.
I’ve known too many families that get caught up by CPS. In poor communities the harassment is disturbing. Parenting while poor is apparently against the law.
Few parents know their limited rights - so they usually talk with CPS before consulting an attorney and get caught up in the system for years when they likely did nothing wrong.
Every CPS encounter is for the primary purpose of gathering evidence against the accused. Those conversations are twisted into the most negative light possible, editorialized and presented as evidence in court. I’ve read the cases.
There are 2.3M CPS cases a year(2014), and there are 3-4M children born each year. These statistics alone show a marked trend of state harassment against families.
I appreciate and understand that CPS has a role in protecting children. I just think the system is broken, wrong and often unjust. CPS is likely causing more harm than good for most children, even if they help a small minority.
When I was little I would take the shuttle bus after school to the school for slightly older kids (4th and 5th grade), and from there a pack of probably 5 of us would walk to our baby sitter's half a mile away (just checked on maps).
Happy to know there are at least some parts of the US that haven't given up on children being capable little humans.
I digress, in South Africa catching the bus to school is closely related to financial standing. The poorer folk who do not own cars really have no choice but to put their children on the bus. There is no judgement and all the kids catch the bus. The middle and upper-class folk drop their kids off. I can't help but wonder if the kids catching the bus will grow up to be more independent and more balanced. Not only do they catch the bus, often their parents cannot afford aftercare so they begin to cook and look after themselves at scandalously young ages. I use the word scandalous sarcastically because in my day there was no aftercare and we could make ourselves a sandwich from a pretty young age.
It's my genuine view that if one wants to improve this situation, the best thing they can do is forgo children and get involved in education and politics. People become hamstrung with familial obligations, and we could really use a generation of more adults focusing on our nation's hygiene rather than growth.
One way to counteract this is to make comments that are much more specific. Your second comment is a step in that direction.