"The average 2-5 year old is spending over 1,600 hours a year watching television."
This seems nuts to me. That is 4.5 hours a day! For a 2 year old? Who are these parents...
This seems nuts to me. That is 4.5 hours a day! For a 2 year old? Who are these parents...
No it's not.
Second one, leaving your 9 year old at a park all day while you are not there. I can see why that is a problem.
The third one is maybe where the is controversy. It would be nice if a 6 year old could play on the street by themselves. I think there is some discretion here and it depends what your street and suburb is like to some extent.
The last one is tragic and totally unfair to the family. Looks like another nail in the coffin for people without a lot of money in the US (who can't call a babysitter on short notice) and who use common sense. Then they get a criminal record, lose their jobs etc, can't get a new one etc. F'd.
I know, anecdata and all that, but it's really crazy out there.
That and the fact that "oh and then the charges were dropped and in some cases local laws changed" is inevitably (I think purposefully) left out.
Reason.com went on a year-long bender of self-promotion and half-truthing about 3 years ago when three women were arrested in three states, claiming that "jack-booted big gubmint was comin to take yer kerdz" and plastered people's pictures and stories on fundraising materials and tried to get people to buy their "free range kids" books, as though three incidents in a country of 300 million was an epidemic.
Of course, the most confusing thing about all of this is that a Venn diagram of "people who think that the government is rounding up mothers all over the country" and "people who immediately, vocally, and vociferously criticize the government for NOT protecting the welfare of children" is a perfect circle.
My personal experience as a parent is that my kids don't get nearly the amount of independence that I did at their age. A reasonable part of this is that I am afraid that my kids will get taken away. My preference is towards the free(r)-range style of parenting, so the ex-post stats don't convey the full effect that the small sample size of reported "big gubmint takeaways" has.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/05/26/free-range-kids-the-u...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/04/13/parent...
> In December, the couple was accused of neglect for allowing the children to walk around their suburban Washington neighborhood together unaccompanied by an adult. In one instance, Rafi and Dvora were walking from a playground two blocks from home; in another, the park was about a mile away.
They are two people, each of whom works at a job (Which is necessary for most families), who don't live with their retired parents (Who would watch, and play with grandkids for free), and can't afford a nanny. (Or, as rich engineers call them, an aupair.)
In short - normal 21st century people.
(And if they are single parents, this equation becomes even more screwed up. The problem with being a single parent, is that you have to live with whatever life decisions lead you up to that point, for the next 18 years.)
That said, I see working involved parents that hand their kids an iPad the minute they get home from daycare so I suppose it isn't out of the realm of possibility.
I'm still a bit shocked that the distribution would result in 4.5 hrs on average. The bullet points from the referred page were actually more interesting:
"TV viewing among kids is at an eight-year high. On average, children ages 2-5 spend 32 hours a week in front of a TV—watching television, DVDs, DVR and videos, and using a game console." [http://www.med.umich.edu/yourchild/topics/tv]
I think this implies that kids playing video games (which at that age is mostly shape matching, colors, words, vocabulary) is included in television.
Not that I'm complaining... Honest, I'm not.
> Who are these parents...
Remember "It takes a village"? Well, in all honesty, it does. And if you don't have a support system in place, you'll have a hard go of it.
New findings from The Nielsen Company show kids aged 2-5 now spend more than 32 hours a week on average in front of a TV screen.