A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV
npr.org
npr.org
But I will tell you my perspective.
As someone who grew up in the "be back home in time for supper" 1970s, today's world seems completely foreign. When I started kindergarten, Mom walked me to school on the first day so that I'd know the route. And after that I walked to school on my own until I learned to ride a bike.
I rode to junior high, where there was parking for hundreds of bikes. Recently I drove by that school, and the bike racks were gone. This whole concept of waiting in traffic to pick up or drop off your kid wasn't even a thing.
And I'm so supremely grateful that I was raised that way. I'm absolutely certain that early autonomy paid off later in life in countless ways.
I'd encourage you, if you're raising kids, to consider the upsides of so-called "free range". Or, as we called it in the 70s, "being a regular kid".
In the 70’s and 80’s we still had a functional mental public health system an a relatively small population living on the streets.
Case in point a clearly disturbed person walked into my daughters school grounds and began exposing himself last week. The teachers corralled him and the police took him to jail, but they said more or less he will be back in a week or two and to be more careful securing the school grounds.
If that’s the environment at school, what about the sidewalks and streets between home and school?
Big city life has always been a bit different, so I'd grant an out there for a little more helicoptering.
But most of the country isn't SF. (And most of SF isn't SF--if that makes any sense. Sunset isn't the Tenderloin.) In the town I live in now, things are easily as safe as they were in the town I grew up in. And yet--lines of cars in the schools every day.
If it's necessary to protect your kid, do it. But I think what we're seeing here is a lot of additional protection being applied in circumstances that have not changed appreciably in the last 50 years.
I find that having that autonomy as a child is what has lead me to not be fearful of most things.
btw - not that it's ok, but people exposing themselves has been around for a long time. I've experienced it myself as a child.
Folks have noted the helicopter behavior permeates even suburbia, but I wonder if that’s more because of sprawl and lack of meaningful pedestrian infrastructure than anxiety.
That was 40 years ago!
> I feel less worried about drug dealers who have a rational economic reason for what they do than an untreated and unhoused paranoid schizophrenic with violent tendencies.
I've spent a lot of time on city streets and I've never seen these putative people. The good news is that these bogey-people are unicorns. I've seen some people acting unhinged, but they are very easy to avoid - much easier than cars and unwanted aquaintences. Just cross the street, or if the sidewalk is broad enough, just walk around them. Better, get them some help. They are completely lost in their own world, and are not able to follow, much less chase or assault someone. They are, in fact, very vulnerable, the weakest people out there.
You should worry more about the drug dealers, who are not making rational decisions (thus their jobs), and may have guns (gun crime being the only kind that is increasing). And even they will be perfectly friendly if you don't have business with them.
Which just means the homeless population had 40 years to be - for the lack of a better word - 'enriched' with people who should have gotten psychiatric help (and them being on the street is unlikely to have made them become better).
> They are, in fact, very vulnerable, the weakest people out there.
I agree, and I think they ought to get the help they need, and what happens to them in the US is criminal. That still doesn't mean I would let my kid run unsupervised in an open-air forensic psychiatric ward.
I wouldn't like that either and thankfully, that's not the reality. Do you have any direct experience? As many people here who have experience, and have said, that is not at all an accurate description.
well that is the harm many parents are trying to avoid. you can say it hasn't had a negative effect on you, but that's subject to debate. nothing personal.
speaking for myself, I would say there is nothing good, and some definite bad habits, that came directly out of what I saw as a middle schooler in my city's local red light district.
I'm pretty sure in every real, quantifiable way, children are much safer on city streets today than they were 30 years ago. We're just also more afraid. It's not like skid row and homelessness didn't already exist back then, along with much worse drug and gang problems.
I'm sorry your daughter had a naked man wander onto the school grounds, but my middle school was shot at during recess by drive bys three separate times in the three years I was there. Things have not gotten worse.
The story of the disturbed man exposing himself wasn’t particularly about him exposing himself, but about the fact there’s no where for him to go to receive help, or if he’s untreatable, somewhere for him to live where his tendencies don’t hurt society at large. The only place for him today is untreated and on the streets - and that changed in the late 80’s and accelerated through the early 1990’s.
Yes.
We live in San Francisco, and our kids went to a daycare in the Civic Center. We walked [with the kids] by many homeless people every weekday for years. Our interactions with them were almost universally positive; they'd clear the sidewalk to let kids through, try to keep kids from seeing drug use, chat and share candy, etc. On cold days when our kids would refuse to wear shirts [love that young metabolism], homeless folks would yell out, "Put a jacket on that kid!".
Most homeless people are just people in terrible situations, not boogiemen to be afraid of. Sure, some of them are mentally ill--if they weren't when they became homeless, it can make you so--but that doesn't make them dangerous.
Every assault makes the news, but cities are safer than they've ever been, and I'm very glad to be raising my kids in SF. The public transit and density of services will give them much greater autonomy than if we lived somewhere where you need a car to get anywhere.
My older kid's first errand was at age 5.5, to get a loaf of bread IIRC, from a market 1 block away, crossing 1 street. He was stopped by the police. The cop told him to tell his parents that he was too young to be out alone. No CPS, no arrest, fortunately, and he let my kid complete his errand alone, but that's the biggest danger around our neighborhood, not the homeless. We're not in the Civic Center, granted, but we're still in SF proper.
As someone with kids and living in the Midwest, I just don't even have the words to describe my reaction to this. Wow.
What could possibly be the issue? If anything, it demonstrates Midwestern values pretty well: Freedom, and a moral, not legal, code that people voluntarily follow to prevent kids from being exposed to potentially-harmful things, without any government needed to enforce it!
If anything, it's more considerate than where I live, where people will openly smoke in front of children, which is arguably more harmful, because smoking has second-hand effects, unlike intravenous drug usage.
I'm not sure what you mean: Do you live in a large Midwestern city, like Chicago, and have different experiences? Do you live in a suburban or rural environment and are surprised to hear it?
Personally I spend lots of time in cities and I'm not surprised. If you don't have experience there, realize that the horror stories fit a long-term political campaign to denigrate cities in 'blue states' (note that you don't hear anything about crime in Miami, Houston, etc.), which are a political power base of a one party.
My mother grabbed me in her arms and we just went away quickly. She told me to not look at homeless people for so much time. Of course I was very scared, I don't remember exactly how old I was but I still remember the episode some decades later.
Well, yes, but decent and functional human beings don't react that way to children.
(A teenager or adult is different, but the story above was a kid small enough for their mother to grab them in her arms.)
With an adult present, sure, but holy moly would I not leave my kid alone around drug users offering candy and a chat. Hell, I might be one of those hypothetical CPS callers that everyone is worried about if I saw that taking place!
Normal people do not want to put their kids into dangerous situations. And doing so does not make you a good person.
I think it’s reasonable to question that decision based on what they described happening on that street. Your response acts as if the question is whether it’s fine to take your child with you down that street, but that’s not what is under discussion.
But the thought of letting my kids (5 and 2.5) run errands by themselves (in a city like Berlin with its abundant number of homeless and mentally-ill people everywhere) gave me goosebumps.
"It's only one block away" and "most homeless people are harmless" would never be words of consolation in case of any calamity.
This is extremist thinking and frankly quite useless without considering the actual level of risk involved.
Imagine a game of Russian Roulette with one bullet in a gigantic chamber (N slots) where you get to win a small prize every time the gun doesn't fire. Is there any sense in asking if there is a N large enough to make you consider playing this game consistently for 2-3 years, when the gun is pointed at your kids?
Mind you, I am not defending helicopter parenting and I do believe that we should err on the side of autonomy vs safety. But I can think of other ways to exercise this autonomy (e.g, drop the kid at the door of a local supermarket and say "here is 10€, can you please go get X, Y and Z while I am outside looking for something else?") without worrying about is the worst possible thing that could happen.
Extremist thinking does not improve the likelihood of your children's survival.
> Imagine a game of Russian Roulette with one bullet in a gigantic chamber (N slots) where you get to win a small prize every time the gun doesn't fire. Is there any sense in asking if there is a N large enough to make you consider playing this game consistently for 2-3 years, when the gun is pointed at your kids?
You do this all the time when you take your kids for a drive, on a plane, outside, when you feed them, etc. Hell in your supermarket example, someone inside the store could just kill them there after you dropped them off.
The idea is to avoid things where the upside (even if highly likely) is small but the downside is (even if highly unlikely) catastrophic.
> You do this all the time when you take your kids for a drive, on a plane, outside, when you feed them, etc.
Kids need to go outside, occasionally get on a car or plane and they certainly need to be fed. These are all things were the upside is significant, so of course they need to be done and we do it without wondering about the downsides.
Going on the streets of Berlin by themselves at age 5 is an unnecessary, avoidable risk with very little benefit. It doesn't need to be done, so we don't. It's simple as that.
I think we also need to consider other, less obvious bullets here, namely suicide, or even just a less happy and fulfilling life. Kids have been getting less happy year over year in America and while there are likely many reasons, I strongly believe the inability to be independent is one. I won’t claim to know the best age to let kids wander a city street (and it likely depends on the neighborhood), but when you let them out on their own, you also potentially prevent suicide, something that’s far more likely to kill a kid than a stranger.
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/04/amer...
My point though is that there are ways to develop kids' sense of autonomy without putting them in unnecessary risk, and also that while the benefit of letting them walk by themselves depends on many repetitions of the event (i.e, doing it once a year is not really that helpful), it takes only one single dangerous/malicious person to cause irreversible damage.
And yes, of course this depends on the neighborhood. I wouldn't object the kids roaming around if we lived in a smaller city or a generally nicer area of Berlin, but I could not in good conscience say that any parent should feel totally fine in letting 5 year-olds by themselves in any area full of homeless people and mentally unstable people, and justify it with "most homeless people are just people in terrible situations".
I'll refrain from guessing how enlightened you are.
Sometimes it does. I like not needing a car in SF too, but I do notice my kids being affected negatively after seeing a violent deranged person. I bike the long way to school instead of walking because it was impacting their mood so much. Maybe your kids deal with it better than mine, or maybe you're just not noticing how it's affecting them?
Would you walk on Kensington Ave with your children? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi1Kf-1qd6Y
Speaking as a non-parent, if I had a kid near kensington ave and they walked to school (which they mostly do) I would just tell them to walk down Frankford Ave a few blocks south, which is much less scary. Teaching kids those basic "street smarts" is one of the objectives of having "free range" kids. Although I would also add that living a little ways away from the street infamous for being a drug market is within the means of the majority of the Philadelphians, and the vast majority of the hacker news crowd.
The chief difference is that the segment of the media dedicated to keeping people fearful, particularly of their neighbors, is enormous now. It was always the case that media liked stories of conflict, but this was moderated by a sense of propriety and responsibility to the community. Now, certain voices have enormous megaphones and no restraints and the paranoia and anger they are actively promoting against their own society has taken root generally.
As an adult I realize why they always wanted me to stay over was he wouldn't lay into them while I was there. He'd just leave and go to brothers house. Or as we found out later, his girlfriends.
I know more than a few people in my small town who got arrested for burglaries and robberies. I know a lot of victims too. Rape basically isn't reported because if the neighbor's boy gets in trouble, that'll ruin the relations between half the town. There are the town drunks who got pulled over more times than you can count and eventually killed someone in a car accident.
You're passing by hundreds if not thousands of people in a few hours in a city. A methhead dancing naked on the street corner is going to catch your eye. The thousands of normal people won't.
In a small town, you're not seeing anyone at all some days. Maybe you're just passing by 5 cars. The opportunity to witness anything is lower.
Of course, plenty of small towns are nice and safe. But the ones that have any problems are proportionally going to be way worse, due to lower population.
> Suburbs with nice sidewalks and tree lined streets and friendly neighbors who know each other? Safer than rural areas where everyone knows everyone and there’s enough law enforcement to work on a 1:1 basis?
No, no real place can possibly be safer than a fantasy land.
I've been living here for 10 years, and I've seen 2 on-duty police cars so far, one was on the first day of school several years ago, when they stopped every car on the way to school/day-care to make sure seats were safe, and one was due to a traffic accident where an electric scooter had hit a car.
My third grade daughter has been walking/cycling (depending on weather) the 2km trip to school for over a year, with a friend, but no adults. The benefits are considerable, both socially, physically and emotionally. 4km/day on top of normal playtime and sports is a nice exercise boost. Spending time away from adult supervision strengthens friendships and boosts self confidence and mental stamina.
Sometimes I miss the city, but for the freedom of my kids, living where I do is night and day in terms of safety and health compared to where I lived before.
Here is a hint: it’s cars.
I remember talking to one farmer who said he had a gun because, where he's from, the police are only there to clean up. They can't get to a crime scene in time unless they are lucky to be nearby, and have very few resources for investigations or other operations.
In general, I worry more about crime when I'm in the country, than when I'm in a city.
Are you saying this tongue-in-cheek?
A considerable amount of heroin addicts in the US are also in rural areas.
Drug use is rampant in rural areas, but it doesn't get the press that it does in cities, because it doesn't present the same way. You don't have to walk over junkies in rural areas.
Because from those links it sure doesn't look like rural areas are likely to have more than half the people on meth, or that you've managed to find any actual towns where everybody is on meth.
That was years ago. Seems heroin is more of a problem.
The articles I linked mention ~34% of the testing in a state showing positivity for meth, so I'm not sure why you'd be surprised that entire towns in that state may be addicted.
Also, there is the Citizen app. I wonder if it's driving perception more than anything else. When I've talked to people in safe cities who nonetheless were ranting to me about crime, I've asked them if they have Citizen, and very many do. Not strong data, but I would love to see some research.
Look up the Fast Company article describing them.
Seattle has seen a large rise in violent crime, and it's hottest around the homeless camps. The fire dept responds to fires in those camps daily.
2008-modernity: https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/23/72/75/21999466/3/rawImage.j...
Graph that includes pre-2008 levels: https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*llD-nfzEV_nV-hISBQIRCQ.jpe...
I walked through Cap Hill and DT Seattle to catch a bus at 2am back in 2003. No worries at all.
A lot of crime isn't reported now days, e.g. my mothers truck just got stolen and she is not going to report it because the police are likely not going to even bother talking to her about it. I've had plenty of friends with stolen cars where the police told them "well you should be more careful with your car" and up and leave.
That sort of attitude sure makes the crime stats look good though.
It is a 1992 ford ranger, in theory worth a fair bit in the current used truck market, but insurance will value it at next to nothing, so I presume she'll eat the loss.
The reason is pretty simple. The comprehensive insurance premium adds up to more than the car is worth.
Also, the way insurance works, is your rates go up to reimburse the company for payouts to you. Insurance is only worthwhile for losses you cannot cover yourself.
This is why downtown businesses have largely stopped reporting shoplifting to their insurance companies. It just makes the losses more expensive.
That's why my remark was on violent crime levels.
https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/us/wa/seattle/crime-rate-...
so while its not good, its vastly oess apocalyptic than folks seem to portray.
It doesn't take too much searching to find examples of horrible accidents:
https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/kids-hit-by-car-while-wa...
But I would make sure my kids know not to just trust the lights.
> It doesn't take too much searching to find examples of horrible accidents:
It doesn't take too much searching to find examples of being hit by lightning or winning the lottery. Anecdotes are meaningless in that context.
I'm not nearly as terrified of strangers or homeless drug users as the legion of SUV drivers scrolling on their cell phones. Distracted drivers are several orders of magnitude more dangerous and several orders of magnitude more common.
[1] from 2016 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6637963/
Yep, 20% of something that almost never happens. .025% of adolescents die each year, .005% of them due to motor vehicle crashes. Further, the paper suggests most of adolescent vehicle deaths happen as passengers and/or drivers.
(I would be interested in statistics that break out bystander vs occupant and injuries as well if you know of any.)
Finally, I'm not quite sure what your point is with respect to the overall fatality rate of adolescents. It should not be particularly surprising that the vast majority of children survive into adulthood in modern times, but that doesn't mean it's not worth continuing to take precautions against the most common sources of injury and death.
I've been involved in various "free-range kids" groups and kid-friendly maker spaces where children can learn to responsibly use power tools. But I've never met a parent who decided not to bother protecting their kids from the most common sources of injury or death just because childhood deaths "almost never happen". Frankly I'm not sure I'd let someone with such an interpretation of statistics anywhere near either kids or power tools.
By saying "20% of adolescent fatalities are to vehicles" you make it seem like a terrifying threat. It's not. Certainly not worth keeping your child from walking outside.
You're involved in groups that teach kids to use power tools safely. As in you let them use power tools despite there still being a risk after taking such a class. Do the same with regards to vehicles. Teach them how to stay safe as a pedestrian, passenger, and driver.
Reminds me of one of my favorite pieces of data.[0] Pew tracks both crime rates and perception of crime rates. There's been an overwhelming declining trend crime (especially violent) in the past 30 years. But if you look at perceptions of crime, people think year over year it is on the rise. There's even a bias that it is on the rise more nationally rather than locally. What I like about this is how it shows the biases that we develop. You're right that _every_ assault makes the news (also there's 350m people in the US, even a 1 in 10k event is likely to occur frequently at the national level). Also, pareto plays a role. Most crime is limited to a few states, and really just a few cities in those states, and even more so specific areas within those cities (pareto is fractal in this way). We humans are typically bad at risk analysis.
I should add to this that I grew up and walked to school in the 90's. So it is safe to say that me walking to school as a kid was statistically substantially more dangerous than it is for kids to walk to school today.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about...
> Most crime is limited to a few states, and really just a few cities in those states, and even more so specific areas within those cities (pareto is fractal in this way).
What is that based on? Some tangential data leans in the other direction: The most recent FBI/DoJ report (that I'm aware of) said recent increases in gun crime were spread pretty evenly, urban and rural, across the country - though that's just one kind of crime, and only the increases. Another report said crime is worse in 'red states' than 'blue states', and the latter tend to have larger cities (I think). Hardly conclusive data, I know, and I'd love to see some.
Nothing I've stated is really that controversial and is pretty well known by anyone that looks at crime statistics. I think it is also relatively easy for the average person to buy because everyone knows where "the bad part of town" is. Really that's all I've said. That "the bad part of town" exists fractally. There's the "bad states," "bad cities," "bad counties," "bad towns," and "bad parts of towns." I think this all should be rather unsurprising.
To clarify on your FBI/DOJ statement, this doesn't have to be in disagreement with what I said. You can have increases in violent crime over the last year (or even 5) and a dramatic decline in the last 30. The Pew study that I cited does specifically look at violent crime and uses FBI statistics. But let's add more. Here's a DOJ 1993-2011 showing a large decrease in both fatal and non-fatal gun violence[3]. Here's a Reuters article that shows homicides (and the pareto effect I mentioned above) from 1980 to 2019[4]. Notice the trend towards declining (I never said it _strictly_ declined).
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Violent_...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/crime-rates...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Crime-heat-map-and-overv...
[3] https://info.publicintelligence.net/DoJ-GunViolence1993-2011...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-plans-new-steps-comba...
> Nothing I've stated is really that controversial and is pretty well known by anyone that looks at crime statistics. I think it is also relatively easy for the average person to buy because everyone knows where "the bad part of town" is.
'What everyone knows' is not knowledge; that's why we need data, research, etc (which you have amply provided). Look at what BS people 'know' about all sorts of things. IME the 'bad part of town' is usually not so bad, if at all, and it's often conflated with race.
I was recently chatting with a friend who (like me) grew up in the 90s and they were reminiscing on how great walking to school was because “you could do that back in the day.” They then went on to say that they would NEVER allow that for their children “these days”.
I pulled up the Pew study and it blew their minds. That said the news cycle, perception, parental instinct, etc is too powerful and fear (however irrational) is extremely powerful. After the initial shock they thoughtfully considered it and essentially said “Well, whatever. The kids are still never going to just walk around outside.”
Those kids are never going to be out “in the wild” even though it’s substantially safer today than it was in the 90s when we were doing it.
Unless it’s a clearly serious felony like a murder or burglary, you aren’t really getting any information.
I would say that what people worry about is random freakshow people and the petty crime form other kids or teens. Folks are more aware of the freaks, and the evidence of in front of them that there are consequences for most petty crime.
We walked to school about 12 blocks in those days. It was fine. I live in a small city today; my kid won’t bike to school alone until about 12, mostly due to traffic issues and idiots riding ATVs in the afternoon.
Good news! The numbers reported in my citation are specifically about: Larceny/Theft, Burglary, Aggraveted Assault, Motor Vehicle Theft, Robbery, Rape, and Murder/Non-Negligent Manslaughter. Every single one of these has drastically decreased since the 90's (90's increased in crime since the 80's but current levels are below that).
I don't mean to sound sarcastic, but I can't but help but feel that this could have better been resolved by clicking on the citation I included.
Those are index felonies, and have nothing to do with walking to school. Quality of life crime, non-criminal bad behavior, sidewalks, and traffic hazards all have more impact and aren’t measured in a uniform way.
In fact, I’d argue that there’s an increase in petty street crime as policy has changed and we no longer pursue most minor stuff as it makes stats look better and pts lip service to various social goals.
(Related but not exactly a reply - I think this is a fairly uniquely North American phenomenon, my experience in the UK in the 00's matches these American 70's etc. experiences, and I see no sign that it's changed here. More evidence that it's to do with the way towns are structured I suppose. Or 'towns' - you don't really have them and that's the problem.)
Here in Canada, it's hard to trust any crime stats because of this:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/more-crimes-going-unreported-...
https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/is-crime-in-canada-really-declin...
No one cares about averages, and this is not a game of statistics where I'd be interested in playing out the game just because the odds are in my favor.
We don't need to care about the state of "most" strangers when all it takes is one outlier that turns out to be a psychotic.
That was a one-time event, on the Muni, with both parents there, and with the giver asking our permission to give our son a sealed lollypop. I don't recommend kids take candy from strangers without parents there, but I do talk to strangers in front of my kids, and encourage them to also.
I don't tell my kids that all strangers are dangerous. First, because it leads to a culture of fear and disrespect. Second, because I obviously don't act as if they are, so it would lead to distrusting my advice.
They have to learn the difference between "stranger who seems reasonable and nonthreatening with whom you can casually chat" and "stranger telling at clouds whom you should avoid". They figure that out pretty young, if you let them.
That said, I still worry more about car traffic and reckless drivers than the homeless. But having aggressive people on drugs yelling at passers by is not an ideal or safe environment for kids to be in. For one thing, it distracts the people in cars. . .
Sure. But I can't make them social recluses just so they never encounter that high-risk group. That does not mean I need to encourage them seeking out another high-risk group on top of that.
Not wanting your kid to walk alone through Skid Row does not mean you are hiding the issue of homelessness - you can still talk about that at other opportunities.
And far lower than it was when children generally roamed freely. The late 70s to the early 90s are when US violence peaked, so in the spirit of spurious correlations, a functional mental health system must have caused violence:)
edit:
> Case in point a clearly disturbed person walked into my daughters school grounds and began exposing himself last week.
This happens when you live in a place that has men in it. It certainly happened when I was a kid. The only way to keep occasional masturbators from cruising the streets doing their thing is to ban men.
Now there is.
It's _not_ the same; and based on the stats here in BC, Canada: I can safely state it's not the same as it was anywhere in this province.
The murder and violent crime rates were far higher in the 70s and 80s.
Nearby Tacoma is now giving out free crack pipes.
Yesterday's Seattle Times: https://cdn.newseum.org/dfp/jpg19/lg/WA_ST.jpg
To be clear, drugs ought to be legalized. But not enabled.
47yr old with 12yr old twins. Live in a million dollar neighborhood in Capitol Hill Seattle. Kids go to private school about a mile south of home. When the school year started, they wanted to walk to and from school alone.
We had to stop this in the last month and accompany them on the walks. My daughter saw multiple fentanyl od's on the street, my son asked me what that guy he saw was doing with the torch under the aluminum foil.
I grew up in the 80s in NYC and took the subway from Queens to Manhattan for HS (Stuyvesant). Plenty of homeless but mostly alcoholics, occasional mentally ill. The havoc from meth, fentanyl, heroin is too much for us to let our kids stay as independent as we want.
You didn't see drug users in 1980s NYC? And when did crack show up there?
No.
And I would avoid raising my kids there to begin with. Those two cities in particular have done everything within their means to alienate families.
I get that some parents believe that exposing their kids to people living in squalor on the street due to mental illness or addiction is an enriching cultural experience, and maybe it is. But I’m going to pass on that.
WTF are you talking about.
And I grew up in true car culture: The coolest kid had a Cobra jacket, which meant his dad worked for Ford. That kid walked to school.
One difference is that there's a lot more car traffic in neighborhoods today.
Could you point to data that support that? I've heard it, but in many, many interactions over many years with people who appear to be homeless, including people showing signs of mental illness, I've never had problems. They are like everyone else on the street, friendly if you are friendly. They're just people, like you and me - really, no exaggeration.
I hypothesize that generally (I don't know the parent commenter at all) these stories come from fear of the unknown - a natural human reaction, but so is compassion. Just try overcoming alarm and treating them like normal people, and you'll soon learn the reality. I'd be much more worried about a-holes driving SUVs and using their phones, running over my child in an intersection.
> A major difference between when I grew up and now is the prevalence of the severely mentally ill living on city streets.
It seems to me like there were many more in Manhattan, at least, in the past. City streets used to be far more dangerous - I remember my parents teaching me how to walk, not look like a target, not look people in the eye, etc. All things I don't need to worry about now.
Back in my day, neighborhood kids played baseball and football and basketball together as they could. Now everything is structured and scheduled. There are travel teams for kindergartners. There is a coaching structure for 5 year olds. Kids play for competition, winning, and opportunity, not just for fun.
Maybe this is just me being old, but it's very depressing. It adds a layer of pressure to childrens' lives that just doesn't need to exist. Parents complain about it, I can't imagine it's healthy for kids, but it still exists.
It's so bleak.
Those of us who grew up poor are eager to make sure our kids are on a path for success.
Working hard at the rat race sucks, but it sucks a lot less than the alternative.
In the old days schools were small enough that pretty much everybody who bothered to show up could make the team. These days they have to turn away most of the kids and the level of play is much higher. Academics are the same way, if you want your kids in the good school they need to be hounded throughout their entire childhood. If you want to see this in action, just check out the parents who were apoplectic over the change in admissions policy at Thomas Jefferson High School. They kept their kid under huge pressure for 15 years and suddenly some slackers that even played outside in unstructured activities might make it instead?
Nah, they need to be on the Gold Travel Squad for the Select club
Much to my surprise and delight, the culture from the national association and down is that kids this young will NOT compete in the traditional sense - sure, they may join local games, but the results will not be published in ranked order, and everybody gets a medal.
During training, coaches are encouraged to focus on the competition with oneself - 'Good, you long jumped 3" longer than you've ever done before!' Rather than 'Wow, Anna jumped longer than everybody else!'
It can get serious later on. When they're kids, let them be kids and have fun.
(This, though, is in egalitarian to a tee Scandinavia)
I agree that kids should just be kids and focus on self improvement. It’s why I’ve always liked golf.
What balance we've struck is that coaches keep track of their results - say, to the nearest 4 inches in the long jump pit, we've labeled the edge in 4" increments and see how they fare without making a fuss of it.
Then, at the close of the season, we typically note that everybody has made significant progress, and then it's time for 'Listen, Ken, when we first started outdoor season, you jumped here - and now (big stride!) - now you jump HERE.'
I would be most surprised if any kid felt under pressure to improve from their previous best; however, kids, like adults, tend to like both to make progress and to know that others notice, too.
My parents rarely took me anywhere that didn't involve them. And I was always told to be home when the streetlights came on.
I too am very grateful that I was raised way in the 70's.
Even around 1980 an incident comes to mind--like 3am, walking down the street with a backpack on. The idea of getting my father up to take me to the rendezvous for the backpack trip didn't even occur to me. Now, what would happen? (I was IIRC 15 at the time.)
This is the thing: the bike racks are gone because so are the kids walking/biking to school. If you let your kid do it, they'll be the only one. I walked to school in the 80s and there were lots of kids in my neighborhood walking to school at the same time. That's a very different experience. I also lived in a neighborhood that was laid out in the early 1900s. How many more kids are in car-centric culs-de-sac today? Some of these streets don't even have sidewalks. They're not even safe for adults to walk on.
You can't combat this enormous societal change by making an individual effort to let your kids do more by themselves. Their physical and social environment is very different from what it was like when kids did that.
Sure you can. Might not make much cultural difference, but it will make a big difference for your kids.
1. Don't walk under the influence. 2. Don't walk at night. 3. Only cross at an intersection.
[0]: https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Ped-Spotli....
Children also have different risk factors, for example many trucks and SUV drivers have poor visibility and cannot see sufficiently short road users that are close to the front of the vehicle, for example when stopped at a stop sign or traffic light.
The local high school where I grew up was not exactly walkable. There were multiple uncontrolled crossings (with speed limits over 30mph) and missing sidewalks all over the place that force you to walk on the shoulder/in the gutter.
https://eyeonhousing.org/2018/08/half-of-us-homes-built-befo...
High growth Tech areas like Seattle, San Jose, Austin, Phoenix are ~10x bigger than they were ~40 years ago. So those are much more likely to have this low density housing than Boston, SF, NYC.
What I find weird is that even completely walkable schools/neighborhoods have parents that almost all drive kids to school every day. Parents legitimately worry about being labeled as endangering their kids, if they don't drive them. Interestingly for me this is more acute for immigrant families, who are worried about fitting in, than local families who will tell the vice principal to "shove it" when warned about the dangers of walking to school.
An immigrant trying to fit in will try to confirm to the average.
An individual native who doesn't care will not care about the average.
Immigrants are statistically the most law abiding and often times, even conservative, members of a a community and it probably is one measure of long-term survival (esp. in the U.S. while living under the microscope of a work visa) so they need to go to great lengths to fit in and avoid even the appearance of impropriety - something the natives (and in all likelihood their children, if raised there) would take for granted. Meanwhile local citizens gather on the street corner protesting mask wearing or whatever nonsense they feel like.
What does this mean? My dumb brain goes straight to “even more alcoholism and fighting” but that might just be on account of being Irish diaspora myself.
This is arguably the earliest historical roots of the Northern Ireland conflict, although with various other layers added on top – the introduction of a religious dimension to what was originally a purely cultural/ethnic/linguistic/political conflict due to the Protestant Reformation; further waves of settlement from Britain; the Irish theatre of the English Civil War and the later Jacobite-Williamite War in which many Irish (especially, but not exclusively, Catholics and Irish-speakers) supported the deposed King James II against the regime of William of Orange.
I don't know how much sense the phrase has in the context of immigrants to contemporary Ireland. I suppose some users of it must have found some way to connect it to contemporary affairs–probably there is some immigrant somewhere who is obsessed with teaching their children to speak Irish when the majority of Irish people don't make much of an effort to do so themselves–but I think some use of it may also be motivated by its long history and memorable phrasing rather than genuine contemporary applicability.
He had quite a few friends who were the children of immigrants who arrived from India a generation earlier.
When my friend’s parents visited (from India where they still lived) they were shocked when these 2nd generation American-India kids greeted them in a super formal way that had disappeared in India decades ago.
Basically the immigrants to the US held onto old customs more strongly than the ones who never left India. And they passed that onto their kids. So they were “more Indian than people from India”.
Speaking the old language and maintaining a 1700s lifestyle, for the most part.
Outsiders (after a few years) are more aware of in-group rules since they don't feel natural, and for those there by choice — whether it be immigrants to a different country, or the newly-religious — presumably they're there because they want to be a part of the group, rather than taking it for granted. So they're often both hyper-aware of the rules, and place a higher value on them.
The second generation - children of first gen migrants - go to school, the local language is the one they're more proficient with. Perhaps its true that this generation feels the weight of anti-immigrant feeling more than any other. Mainly because inside, they don't feel that different. They grew up here, went to school here, understand the local culture. They straddle a cultural divide. They bear the weight of anti-immigrant feeling as well as the parental expectations to stay within their original cultural norms. This is rarely achievable. This generation often achieves well due to the over-emphasis on "Get an education! We never had the chance! You have opportunity! Don't squander it!" They feel the burden to do better than their folks very acutely. For those that can't achieve academically, or in business, or in sport - they are easy prey for ethnically aligned gangs. They can "retreat" into their origin culture and use anti-immigrant sentiment to justify bad behaviour.
By the third generation (e.g. my kids), a lot of the anti-immigrant feeling has moved on... to the new groups of migrants. My parents came from Southern Europe to Australia in the 60s. They were the "wogs" and "dagos" of the era. I remember being told in primary school to "go back where you came from!", which confused the hell out of me because I was born in Australia. Now, people from my ethnic origins are considered part of the wallpaper here. No one thinks of them as anything other than Australian (ok, maybe a handful of hardcore racists). In the 70s, the southern Europeans were replaced as the anti-immigrant bogeyman by the Vietnamese. Then the Lebanese. Then the Somalis. Then the Syrians. With each wave, the crime wave moves to a new group. Within a generation (or at most 2), any such spikes have dissipated.
It plays out in the way you describe in a lot of places.
The only other weird thing is how immigrants can pick on each other as much as any racist aussie seems to. I would have thought having gone through it would make people more sensitive to flinging that crap. But I guess the "product of environment + competitive social pressures" gets to us all.
I think the frustration of "competitive social pressures" combined with a desire for "simple solutions" is an achilles heel that gets ruthlessly exploited by fear mongers and outrage merchants, who use racist dog whistles to translate the resulting fear/anger into political capital. It appeals to the reptilian/emotive parts of our brain, and is very, very hard to shift via appeals to reason.(Don't know about you, but I can't wait for this election to be over just so I don't have to see another UAP billboard or cop another UAP robocall).
With UAP, irksome as they are, I take consolation knowing the money they spent to reach me is money wasted and not spent reaching someone else. Somewhat spiteful I guess, and not healthy but is what it is.
you can't just say something like that without any supporting facts.
Judging from my own anecdotal experiences as someone who "doesn't look like a German", i'm willing to take a wild guess why: Because everything they do is under a microscope.
I got my bags searched, because i "walked suspiciously through the isles" in a store (woman thought i'm a foreigner) and i got a false accusation by a police officer who said he "knew people like me".
Also the German BKA crime statistic, as an example, shows reported crimes. It doesn't exactly show how many where actually convicted. So i guess i'm also somewhere in the stats from a few years ago.
And that when you progressively restrict what people can do in a society, or everybody feels watched and judged 24/7, at some point you will start to encourage perverted conducts of escape.
In the city, I see kids walking places on their own. Most places they would go are within a quarter to half mile, all of the schools that they could go to from age 3-18 are within a third of a mile.
Maybe not, but you can do things like:
* Live downtown instead of in a suburb
* Ask your school / DOT to close the street in front of the school during dropoff and pickup hours
* Walk with your kid to school instead of driving them
* Support higher-density development in your area
I grew up in a fairly large and fairly dense (by suburb standards) suburban city of Boston and it was quite walkable as a child (and also had the benefit of having a few MBTA stops). I live in the middle of downtown Boston now and while I find it fantastic as a somewhat immature adult, I wouldn't say it's especially child-friendly.
That being said, I have seen many other suburbs (looking at you, various places in Connecticut) that don't even have sidewalks. That cannot be good for anyone. And Boston certainly has more child-friendly neighborhoods as well.
However you can choose where to live. there are still plenty of walkable neighborhoods in cities, suburbs, small towns, etc. The issue is that you will have to find them and then you will have to pay more for the privilege of living there.
With respect to finding them, we used national commuting mode share and various websites to pick a handful of regions that had a reputation for walkability, spent a bit of time on Google Maps, called the schools to inquire about their mode share (e.g. percent of children who walk/bike minus the percent driven by parents), chatted with the folks who run the state's Safe Routes to School program, and rented an apartment while we spent a couple months biking around the candidate neighborhoods/towns, especially during rush hour.
With respect to cost we were priced out of the really walkable areas but were able to find something where many kids walk or bike to school on their own in our price range. Based on price premium for walkable areas it seems that a lot of home buyers prioritize the same things we do but not a lot of new neighborhoods are built to prioritize walking. It felt like there were a lot of people competing for a relatively fixed pool of (typically old) neighborhoods.
I imagine people slowly started driving their kids to school because they could, which led to other people driving their kids to school because walking/biking was unsafe due to all cars on the road.
My childhood in the 90s kinda sucked by comparison because I was in small neighborhood with no kids my age locked in by a busy road that was too unsafe for me too cross on my own.
We used to leave the doors and windows wide open at home while taking a nap, to "air the house".
Different times.
The first certainly happens rurally, but would be extremely ill advised in the cities
The second is totally normal here too. Even in Dublin. Even in the not particularly great neighbourhood I live in.
I have an adult daughter who thought I was stupid for my constant talks about walking to car in groups, Etc.
She moved back home after a kidnap attempt in a parking lot. At work, She now deals with teenagers that think her lectures are stupid.
Phoenix Arizona has many master planned communities designed around this lifestyle. Our neighborhood has an "interior" grassy/park like section with trails that wind and twist for 22 miles connecting all of the streets. In the center of that is our local school. Most houses are within two blocks of an entrance to the trails, and you'll see kids out running and playing all day. In the mornings you see the kiddos all commuting by foot to school - many wait on the corner to meet up with their friends before starting off on the walk.
I know of at least two other master planned communities that have the same setup with a central school. Wish more of suburbia was built like this.
It's a way of life that is worth more than the value of my home to me.
When I was in elementary school (in the 1970's), I thought the school was far away - I rode the bus to school and if my parents had to take me to school or come to school for any reason, they always drove.
It wasn't until I was grown that I realized that the school was only about half a mile from home -- I could have walked there in less time than it took to walk to the bus stop and wait for the bus. There was a 4 lane road between me and the school, but it had a traffic light and a crossing guard could have helped ensure safety.
What happened?
"And I'm so supremely grateful that I was raised that way. I'm absolutely certain that early autonomy paid off later in life in countless ways."
I'm holding back tears to know others are grieving like me.
It's so terribly sad.
The negative news cycle, violent tv and movies paint a world that is different than things really are.
Hardly anyone knows their neighbors anymore and everyone is stressed trying to pay the bills. People live far away from their extended families and even the local babysitters are $$. We want credentialed babysitters etc…
Desirable places to live with job centers are expensively unaffordable and require long commutes.
Then with the internet and cell phones your job never really ever ends. It’s a blessing and a curse that you can work from anywhere at any time.
You can see why France banned emails after work.
There’s data out there, much has been written on the subject. Here’s one example from a quick google search (I’m not going so far as to claim it’s representative): https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/new-study-suggests-todays-s...
My mother gave us the 'free-range' approach; but with every adult knowing to report back whatever we were doing. heh. More like CIA free-range. Looking back, I think she made the right choice overall; but maybe could have dialed it back on the community watch part. Not that we didn't get away with anything we shouldn't have, but rather her 'eyes and ears' were really quite bad at passing along what actually happened due to the outside observer effect.
So we would get these situations from time to time where adults needed to be corrected, and of course adults always take corrections from children really well. Always. lol. (Sarcasm for those who are missing it)
Long story short, if you are going to let your kids be free-range, actually let them be free-range. And if you are going to take 'hints' from the neighbors; make sure those neighbors aren't lying asshats.
Just my two cents as the eldest of ... 11? Pretty sure it's 11.
you can't. It's basically illegal in USA and Canada, and your neighbours and school will report you and child services will have a nice chat first time, less nice next time.
In my province of Ontario, the statutory limit for leaving a child without adequate supervision is... sixteen years old. Fine of up to $5000 and up to 12 months in jail.
Which is insane to me, having walked to school since age 6, taking buses solo since age 11 or 12, lived through civil war at age 12 and flying unspervised over three airlines and four countries to another continent at age 15. But there you have it.
So a suggestion to raise kids free range is just not an option where I am, unfortunately :(
---- Edit A background of Canadian legislation framework: https://cwrp.ca/sites/default/files/publications/Legal%20Age...
What does this mean?
Back in the day, you explored the area around yourself by foot or bike. Your model of your surroundings grew in concentric circles, which included more and more places of interest. Your friend's house, school, the library, and so on.
Nowadays, you drive everywhere, by train or car, and it is like warping to that location. The way is just a wait, which you spend on your phone, or sometimes driving (but really (auto-)piloted by your navigation system).
My Dad got my a US Atlas for Christmas around my 16th birthday and told me to always trace out the route is was going by hand and understand in absolutes where I was going. Eventually it all clicked now and I find it odd that people sometimes compliment me on my navigation of cities and ability to use maps—but I'm not sure how people do it otherwise without being glued to a phone. Getting slightly lost has always been the fun part.
My biggest concern with how much freedom to give my son has not been his safety out in public on his own, but the potential risk of interference from other people who might think he'd be at risk.
We live two doors down from his primary school, which did not even allow children to leave without being picked up until year 5, and only then with signed consent.
Meanwhile, I had a half hour walk to and from school from my second day of school onwards.
I can understand it in a large cities though, traffic has indeed become more dangerous because the density increased massively. Not from the US, but the usual horror story you hear is that you cannot leave your kids running around or risk getting called CPS on you.
It's really depressing as I am all for the free range parenting. But our location is just the wrong match of things to do around and number of kids :( In hindsight I would've moved elsewhere, although my wife moved when she as a kid and she is still scarred by that experience.
Our son is 13 now and we need to keep him in camps because the only other option is for him to sit at home and screens all day - last summer he had almost no camps, and we tried to get him outside, but he'd go house-to-house and see if he could get friends to go do anything, and it basically never worked. And if it did, they'd go sit on some swings at the school, chat for 30 minutes, and then the friends would leave.
Depressing as all hell. Pandemic didn't help the situation. When I was a kid, it was "out of the house" after breakfast, and then maybe stop by for lunch, and then "be home when the streetlights come on or if Dad whistles".
Before I had my kids, I was same way. Or maybe even worse. I would bring up statistics and showed my friends with kids that odds of kidnapping are so much lower than many other bad things.
Then I had my kid.
I am not worried about neighbors judging me like some other commenters are. But my perspective has changed a bit. When it is not your kid, it is very easy to make logical decisions based on statistics and probabilities. But when it is your kid, emotions get in the way. You think of worst case scenario.
It is the same reason why many people make money when paper trading but lose when using real money.
"officials placed two brothers into foster care after one, 11, was found playing basketball alone in his own yard."
He'd gotten home early from school and his parents came 90 minutes later. He was in his own yard. The family lost their children to foster care. Ironically in foster care ACTUAL abuse rates are pretty darn high!
"When Cindy and Fred arrived home they were arrested for child neglect — then fingerprinted, strip searched, and held in jail overnight.Their kids, meanwhile, including their 4-year-old boy, were removed from the home and from their parents’ custody"
Mom worked in the school district ironically.
"We still do not have our children, we are fighting for our own freedom and due to the nature of my employment I am no longer employed,” she wrote. “My son was in his own yard playing basketball, not in the street or at the park. The authorities claim he had no access to water or shelter. We have an open shed in the back yard and 2 working sinks and 2 hoses. They said he had no food. He ate his snacks already. He had no bathroom, but the responding officer found our yard good enough to relieve himself in while our son sat in a police car alone."
Being accused of child abuse / neglect is a career ender. The idea of my 4 year old being taken is beyond belief. What is so ironic is so many real / terrible things are happening (crime of all sorts / abuse in the traditional sense / financial fraud online) where nothing happens. But your kid shoots some hoops in their own yard, you lose custody. You are jailed and strip searched. You lose your job.
I realize big government is here to protect us, I just wish they would focus on the harder problems.
Created by people who mean well perhaps, but subsequently captured by another sort.
> Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
You can't do both, each are full time jobs.
I meet lots of bureaucrats who literally only care that the processes they oversee are carried out. For them the process is the goal.
Where's the irony?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_Maryland
> And in fact, as Donna St. George reported in yesterday's Washington Post, Maryland's CPS has just issued new guidelines, saying, "Children playing outside or walking unsupervised does not meet the criteria for a CPS response absent specific information supporting the conclusion that the child has been harmed or is at substantial risk of harm if they continue to be unsupervised."
This is a big country and that was a rare and particularly egregious case; it's not the norm.
Source: https://reason.com/2015/06/12/kidnapped-by-the-state-trouble...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/parents-under-investigation-after...
There are actually a surprising amount of these.
I sort of understand that someone might call something in.
My issues is the govt, arresting, strip searching parents, take away a young child from them and putting them in foster care, getting folks fired.
What are they trying to accomplish here. There is insane abuse IN the foster care system. What is the great harm to an 11 year old child playing outside in their own yard that requires this govt response.
This is an overlooked problem. Lack of employment protection. Nobody should be able to be fired for being arrested. That doesn't mean they committed a crime. It's not their fault they can't show up to work. There should be employment protection for that. In my country, even schoolteachers being investigated for sexual abuse aren't fired. They aren't allowed to go to work but they still get paid while the justice is being worked out, because they might turn out to be innocent!
Also, you're describing a situation where bad behavior becomes a protected class as soon as you get arrested for it.
In my high school, a teacher was caught raping one of his teenage students. He was fired for it.
In your opinion, if he had been arrested, he should have had his paycheck legally protected until his trial ended.
That's absolutely, totally insane. I don't know what country you live in, but I'm glad to live in the US where I can fire someone I know has committed a crime. It is possible to know things before the criminal justice system decides they are true.
There are plenty of cases of trials over rape or assault allegations which were entirely fictitious.
This isn't even really the point being discussed. It's more that someone could be fired for an arrest over a an offence which has absolutely nothing to do with their job.
People are not entitled to due process to keep their jobs. Where do you draw the line? Should it be illegal to fire someone for failing a drug test (which are not 100% reliable) until a jury finds them guilty?
> There are plenty of cases of trials over rape or assault allegations which were entirely fictitious.
There are very, very few[1]. You're just more likely to hear about the false ones.
This makes logical sense. It is personally costly to the accuser to accuse someone of rape, even when the accusation is completely true.
The accuser is subject to people calling them a slut, liar, etc.
> In my country, even schoolteachers being investigated for sexual abuse aren't fired.
> It's more that someone could be fired for an arrest over a an offence which has absolutely nothing to do with their job.
So you're moving the goalposts. First, you said that even a teacher accused of sexual abuse (which is very much related to their job) shouldn't be fired. Now you're saying that should only be true if the crime is related to the job.
Does that mean I shouldn't be allowed to fire someone for being filmed murdering someone on camera? That person hasn't been convicted yet. The legal system considers them innocent.
You say you want a blanket ban on firing people for accusations of crimes, but then you don't address what we should do for the edge cases. Nothing you're asking for makes any legal sense.
I should be able to fire someone for any reason that isn't my own prejudice. Freedom of association is important.
Not "very very few" in this context at all. It's extremely high!
Due process doesn't have to be 100% infallible but it should certainly be resistant to hostile corruption like those 2-10% of rape accusations.
> I'm glad to live in the US where I can fire someone I know has committed a crime. It is possible to know things before the criminal justice system decides they are true.
That's the opposite of what the constitution sets out to provide.
The Constitution does not include "accused criminals" as a protected class. Please point to the exact section of the Constitution that includes them.
I'm going to be charitable and assume you meant that presumption of innocence is in the Constitution, which it actually isn't[1]. As set forth elsewhere and respected in the US, presumption of innocence applies only to the legal system. You do not have a right to the presumption of innocence by your fellow citizens.
And as I asked in another comment: if I witness someone committing a crime and decide to fire them, should the government force me to wait until they are convicted of the crime?
What if the victim doesn't want to press charges? What if the criminal abuses to legal system or repeatedly appeals, resulting in a delay of multiple years before they are convicted?
This is the most ludicrous thing I have ever heard. No one should be forced to keep someone on payroll that they have good reason to suspect is dangerous or dishonest.
1. https://www.lawinfo.com/resources/criminal-defense/is-the-pr...
Should've started and ended with that and I might've believed you, but
> This is the most ludicrous thing I have ever heard.
It seems fitting to place those quotes next to each other.
To your charitable assumptions and questions:
> The Constitution does not include "accused criminals" as a protected class. Please point to the exact section of the Constitution that includes them.
As you wish. The 5th and 14th amendments[1] provide a right to due process. The "protected class" you're looking for is “All persons within the territory of the United States are entitled to its protection, including corporations, aliens, and presumptively citizens seeking readmission to the United States”.
> if I witness someone committing a crime and decide to fire them, should the government force me to wait until they are convicted of the crime?
No, and I certainly wasn't suggesting that. Was anyone? I made sure to put the most important objection in the very first line of my response:
> That's an argument for a speedier judicial process
and I continued with its de facto opposite, the one that you appeared and appear eager to support:
> allowing a lack of employment protection to act like a non-judicial punitive action
because you were arguing this:
> If they're paid while the justice is being worked out and their trial takes years, that is potentially a burden that the employer can't bear.
They're turning up to work, right? The employer could bear it the day before their arrest so they can the day after.
> Also, you're describing a situation where bad behavior becomes a protected class as soon as you get arrested for it.
Your strange fantasy about being able to fire a rapist that you know did it when you were surely also the one that hired this reprobate is at once amusingly ironic and the setup for one of the worst straw man arguments I think I'll have the misfortune to witness for a good long while.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt5_4_1/
Yes, a rapist should be protected before his trial is over. If you're so sure he's guilty, why even have a trial? Just do summary justice. There's a reason we have due process and countries like Russia and China that don't are seen as human rights violators.
But I think the majority of people, of any age, would describe what your parents did as neglect.
I’ve deliberately chosen to live in a walkable part of the Bay Area in the hopes that my kids can be more independent when they get older, but I’m more worried about the social pushback than I am about their safety.
I was walking to school with other kids when I was four, no one had a problem with it then. Teaching kids to fear everyone and the world they live in doesn’t do them any good — it just causes anxiety.
I think if this is such a big deal ( I think it is too) you should move out of the city. That's just too big to gamble with.
Texas, Oklahoma, and Utah have enacted so-called “free range” laws to allow kids to do unthinkable things like walk to the corner store or park without a security detail and body armor. Oregon will probably be among the last states to ease up — dogs will get the right to vegan CBD-infused meals there first. I no longer live there.
That is extremely optimistic.
The school considered us bad influences on each other - we got in trouble a lot, which hadn't been true before we knew each other. But his mother thought I was great, because one of the activities we did together was go for long walks around the neighborhood. She thought the exercise was beneficial, given his condition.
I can only imagine how she would have responded if someone had complained to the police that she was letting her son walk around unsupervised.
There's no laws about leaving them at home alone.
That being said, there have been lots of horror stories of other adults calling the cops out of concern for child "neglect." And this creates a huge hassle for the parents. Try to figure out our neighborhood's feelings on the topic, and obviously look into the Free Range Kids movement for resources.
But the easiest is to just move to somewhere where people aren't as freaked out.
After being taken out of school, there weren’t any actual problems. My parents let me spend the day programming and biking, and deal with the standardized tests myself. It was one of their best parenting decisions.
I don’t have autism.
Lately I’m letting my daughter try home schooling, after they started doing six hours a day of Zoom meetings. It’s not going as well, but I think the main thing is she knows I’m on her side.
So basically a normal childhood? Just wondering, because as a European I find this whole discussion enlightening (learning something new) and bizarre at the same time. Heck, our kids are picking up groceries and bread at the two shops near by every week-end. Which is great, because it means us parents can sleep in longer. Just thinking about someone calling CPS or the cops for that, I think they would be laughed out. At least I hope that cops would even refuse to show up in such cases, because honestly, if the caller sounds worried enough they just could.
That being said, we have a community youth center and sports / playground right across the street. There, kids and teenagers of all sorts are hanging out well into the night. I just wished I could motivate my elder son to do so as well, because that would be so much better than spending his time indoors. There is only so much screen time limiting you can do.
In Chicago, it's pretty much illegal to be a kid without an adult present in most places. In the Southern California suburb I live in now, it's better in that respect. Unfortunately, it's not walkable or bikeable outside of the housing development.
Funny story about this. In highschool I had a teacher who lived with her 12 year old daughter in Chicago, where the legal age for leaving your child home alone is 13. If she needed to run errands alone she'd just leave her daughter to do a loop on the L train (which doesn't have as tight age restrictions). Bizarre.
The optimist in me thinks that's just the cops way of dissuading the crazy person from getting personally involved, encouraging them to instead call the adults.
As an example, I randomly picked a particular address on walkscore.com (https://walk.sc/37yZciv) which gets a walk score of 91 (walker's paradise), but that particular address is on a large 7-lane street with not a lot of walking infrastructure around. I'm guessing the score might mostly be driven by proximity to stores, which doesn't necessarily matter in this case. Better metrics may be such things as amount of car traffic, noise levels, size of sidewalks (in comparison with size of streets), amount of small streets and distance to larger roads, etc..
I wonder if a website exists that puts more emphasis on how nice it is to walk in a neighborhood vs. mere practicality?
Anything south of Oakland/SF is mostly strip mall hell, but parts of Alameda County, Contra Costa County, Marin County and San Francisco might be what you're looking for.
[1] Listed in ascending order of affordability.
And even when these events are rare they get reported on which increases the chilling effect.
What I DO have concerns about, however, is overzealous adults who see a kid playing alone at a park and decide to call the police or child protective services.
> Fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year between 2010–2017.
> According to the NWS Storm Data, over the last 30 years (1989-2018) the U.S. has averaged 43 reported lightning fatalities per year.
So letting kids walk to the park is way less risky than a thunderstorm (though perhaps they shouldn't walk to the park IN a thunderstorm).
> In 2019, 608 child passengers age 12 and younger died in motor vehicle crashes, and more than 91,000 were injured. Of the children 12 and younger who died in a crash (for whom restraint use was known), 38% were not buckled up.
I haven't done the numbers, but driving a kid to the park when not buckled up may be more dangerous than letting them walk.
But 2010 is long after the end of the "free range children" era. Is that number so low because we don't let kinds go around by themselves any more?
But there’s lots of confounding variables there. A kid that’s not outside won’t be abducted by a stranger and you won’t be struck by lightning if you’re inside as well. Thunderstorms don’t happen everyday but a kid may walk alone twice a day. So what’s the right equivalence? Is walking alone through a bad neighborhood the same as going into the lightning storm and grabbing a flag pole?
Ding ding ding! This is exactly it. I'm not worried about my 6-year-old walking around the neighbourhood alone, or staying in the car (in proper weather) while I do an errand, or going into a store and grabbing something. I'm not worried about kidnapping and murder and all that stuff, since it's so vanishingly rare that it's worth worrying about as much as lightning.
What I am worried about is some busybody calling CPS because they think kids are stolen and sold if they're left unsupervised for 5 minutes.
My favorite video of his is about this exact topic, Why I Won't Raise My Kids in Suburbia [0]. This video completely changed my own life, motivating my family and I to move to a city from the suburbs, and fingers-crossed, eventually to The Netherlands.
I don't think it's really a "gold standard"; it's more that everything else is so unbelievably atrocious that it looks like a "gold standard", but it's still incredibly car-dominated. I watched the video and it's not wrong: it's extremely common for children to cycle to elementary school on their own and it's mostly safe, but it doesn't really "prioritize pedestrians, bikes, transit, then cars, in that order"; cars are still very central in most traffic.
Things are very slowly beginning to change, in some areas, sometimes. But it's very slow progress.
Accidents are rare, but we can always do better. All accidents are documented and safety statistics are freely available here: https://swov.nl/nl/verkeersveiligheidscijfers
Society's risk tolerance, especially for kids, has fallen pretty dramatically. This is probably related to just how many fewer kids US society has in general (births per woman has fallen in half since 1960, and it takes a culture some time to catch up). If you have fewer, then the individual ones become that much more valuable. Your attention and time is divided much less.
A hot metal playground slide was no big deal in the 1970s, nor was a merry-go-round, and kids could get injured relatively easily. But our tolerance of such risk has completely disappeared.
America has never really recovered from Adam Walsh's murder, IMO.
I live in a city whose broader region is almost 10000 square miles, and the crime feeds report all crime in this area as occurring in "Houston", even though this region is larger than some US states. I feel like this contributes to panic because people feel like the crime is in their backyard. My local news station targets me on Facebook with stories because I'm in this MSA, but the story they hit me with could be a shooting that's easily a 1.5 hour drive from me.
Heck, here in Texas, my phone has buzzed from what they are calling "Blue Alerts" now, which is a riff off of Amber Alerts, where I've gotten notified that an officer was shot at, literally over 4 hours away from me, almost 300 miles away. It's not surprising that our society is inundated with panic.
Places where theft really IS common don’t put up cameras (they’d get stolen), they put up bars.
It might be the columbine to school shooters. Everything else is derived from it.
we didn't respond to these instances by locking her up, but I'm not going to dismiss parents who are protective
Could it happen? Sure. Is it likely to happen? Probably not. Is it worth keeping your children unable to leave the house without an escort until they're 18?
Now of course CPS handle actual cases of child neglect in that 430k, but it certainly seems that the most likely people to take a child are either
1) The other parent
2) CPS
3) Death from Road traffic, Firearms, Suffocation/Drowning, Drug overdoses
And way down the list is abduction
Cheap, hand-held TVs delivering custom-tailored traumatic word-salad clickbait videos to kids would have created so much paranoia among suburban moms in the 80s they would have forgotten to be terrified about crack/cocaine.
For example, I don't think Tokyo is particularly safer than a (walkable) US city. But since people there collectively believe Japan is a safe country and are proud of it, they let their child go out.
But I agree that the risk tolerance points too. I have talked to a handful of Japanese parents and none of them let their small kids go out without the supervision anymore. So the lower risk tolerance isn't a US-only problem. I guess it's a symptom of modernized society in general (although would love to be proven wrong.)
on what do you base this opinion? I looked up a couple of crime stats sites and the assault and murder rates per capita in the US are like, 10x higher in the US than in Japan.
Crime is experienced incredibly unevenly in the US. I won't say much more past that because it's where the politics starts to kick in and I don't think that will add anything to the conversation.
In Miyazaki prefecture, the most violent in Japan according to [1], the murder rate is 0.9 per 100,000
[1] https://nbakki.hatenablog.com/entry/Murder_Rate_Number_of_Ac...
The major point is that although Tokyo might be "safer" on paper, the risk profile of letting your kid walk around Tokyo vs. letting your kid walk around the city I mentioned is pretty much the same in practice, and this goes for thousands of American cities. There are millions of Americans who could let their kids walk around their community and not have to worry about them being murdered or seriously assaulted.
The safest US city in that respect is Irvine with ~20 per 100k (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...). Irvine is indeed a very safe city, and I doubt parents would be concerned too much with letting their kids walk to school (if only the school was within a walking distance away).
Tokyo reported 224 robberies for 14m residents (https://knowledge.insight-lab.co.jp/tableau/opendata-crime-t...), or ~1.6 per 100k. So 10 times less than Irvine, the place that everyone considers to be basically completely safe.
Now move out of Irvine. Pick a city. San Francisco is ~360, NYC is ~160, Seattle is ~210. Even Mountain View, near Apple, Google, and many other high tech companies is ~60.
And btw, people in Tokyo generally do very little protect themselves from violent crime, since it's so rare. They walk around late, alone, often drunk, paying no attention to their surroundings. I'm pretty sure if people behaved like that in SF, the robbery rate would jump significantly.
It was based on my personal experience but looking at [1], I realized that I'm in the one of the safest county in the US. The murder rate is very comparable (2x) to Tokyo here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
In over a decade of living in Japan I've only encountered aggressive begging/panhandling once. Street violence is very rare, muggings too. One week in London and I'll see more than in 10 years in Japan.
Pure anecdote: I was jogging on my regular running route and I saw a wallet on the ground with 5000 yen hanging out of it. It was wet so I picked it up and put on a visible dry spot on a nearby wall. I ran past it the next day and it was still there, same spot, same cash sticking out. Finally on the third day it was gone. Maybe the owner came back for it, maybe it was stolen, maybe it was handed to the police. I don't think visible cash on the street would have lasted so long in most places.
Japan builds dense, mixed use neighborhoods. As a result, children are empowered to walk to the store or a friend’s house.
We had much smaller amount of cars. For one we had these self-made wood carts with ball-bearings as "tires", and we would slide with them on the streets while other cars were driving. Ok, not on the main street, but somewhere on a hill. If I get bloodied, my gramma would be - yaaah it's fine. Go to the doctor (by myself, 2nd grade) and get tetanous shot (I vividly remember this when I stepped on a rusty nail). They were still worried, but I guess due to lack of phones (even land line wasn't covered well), that's the best they can do.
One day, I was 4, maybe 5, me and my cousin (year older) decided (well it was my decision apparently, lol) that we need our plastic toy truck from my grandparents, and decided to take it. So we took off from a small city (Tzhernomortez) nearby my home city (Burgas) - and decide to walk it - I haven't checked - but the distance is 20-30km. So we walk, put some signs down, ate some really bad grassy looking thing, a bus of janitors/workers picked us up and left us somewhere, so probably from 9:00AM somewhere to 2, 3pm was our "trip". And we end up knocking on my grandparents door - we need our truck! :) - Well, yes everyone was spooked (normal), but that was it. It was later just told as funny story. Now many years later, in US, with my son (~15 soon) I'm still spooked where he goes, we have the tracker (he's okay with it) and track each other in case something happens. I wish I had less available information...
But also the streets in the US, even in neighbourhoods where people live, not work are just too damn wide :) - and cars, while observing most of the time the speed limits, when comes traffic time and they look for shortcuts, some of them go way too fast (and yes, I probably did the same in other places, when in a hurry). We had our neighbour's two dogs killed, because someone was swerving too fast, where you should slow down to a crawl really.
But it is, what it is.
Isn't that extreme?
What do you think smart phones are? That's exactly what they're optimized for, in addition to mass distraction and aimless and feckless doom scrolling for dopamine that is.
I can't post because i triggered the algo:
> My wife and I use Apple's "Find My" feature to keep tabs on when each other will be home. Makes it easy to time dinner so it's hot for everyone.
The Silicon Valley TV series was great not just because it called out the Valley's BS tropes and made fun of it's absurdity, but because Judge really had the best material write itself: this is a prime example of what I could see an episode's plot being based on.
A (smart) phone being used not to actually call each other, but as the spy device that it is.
Sadly, in it's latter seasons it went into a territory it's writers neither understood or articulated well but appealed to the lowest common denominator: Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.
He can turn it off anytime too.
HA, I thought that was only in my country we had those :D. In Brazil it's called "carrinho de rolemã"!
You wish you had less available information? So turn the the tracker off?
I used to walk to school frequently, every time I missed the bus it was a two mile walk down country roads. If the weather was nice, sometimes I'd choose to walk without even missing the bus. My mother retired from that school district last year, and she tells me things are very different. She would be required to report any kid who was walking to school, it simply isn't allowed anymore. So what changed? Did the town get bigger? Nope, it actually shrunk a bit since the plant was sold. Did the roads get narrower? Twistier? Nope, they're the same as they ever were. The school? Still the same place they ever were. The only thing that changed was people became more fearful.
In our rural school district, you're probably not even going to be on the school bus schedule if you live within a mile unless you're still in elementary school. In middle school/high school you can have up to a 1 mile walk to the bus before they will add a new stop. Elementary school kids have to be farther than 1/4 mile from the bus stop before they add a new stop.
Bear in mind though, that a lot of these rules are because it gets so cold here and they don't want 6 year-olds walking a mile to school in a blizzard when it's -20F.
But not all suburbs are like this, and I do think that low density and focusing on cars over people makes kids unlikely to go outside. Where I live, yea the school is nice, but I've seen kids standing in the middle of 5 lanes of traffic (they are standing in the turning lane) trying to pass and standing there with, say, a skateboard.
This is definitely a problem.
On the other hand, I think kids are just staying inside and playing with electronics more too. But why are they doing that? Is the neighborhood not stimulating enough? Is there anything to do outside? Again in the suburbs I'm in, what is a kid to do? You can't really walk to any store, park (besides the school area), or anywhere else. You can't even bike anywhere. You'd definitely get hit by a car at some point.
So I think it's a bit of a cultural shift, sure, but I think that doesn't account for poor urban planning. Most likely in the past kids were just so damn bored that they'd overcome crappy neighborhoods because there was literally nothing else to do. Now? Why risk riding down a country road on your bike and getting hit by a car when you can just sit at home and text your friends?
Well, that one is easy: their parents permit it. The rule in my home was simple: if you start a video game, you also start a 30 minute egg timer. If you forgot the timer and got caught, you lost the privilege for a week. The egg timer could be upgraded to an hour if I was getting good grades, but the thought of playing games for several hours a day was almost inconceivable. I only got away with that when I was home alone.
Sometimes when I was feeling mopey and started complaining about being bored my mother would get sick of it and yell at me "GO BE BORED OUTSIDE"
Taking for granted this is true for the discussion:
Electronics are way more prevalent, stimulating and social than ever before.
The 1982 F-150 had around 200 horsepower, depending on the configuration. If you believe the majority of people are driving between 1,000 to 2,000 hp cars today you are badly mistaken. An Abrams tank has around 1,500 hp but not too many of my neighbors drive those to work.
https://itstillruns.com/1982-ford-f150-specifications-759817...
You could also get pickups with 52 horsepower in 1982 as well:
http://vwtruckforsale.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/specs-s...
A 2021 Ram TRX has 13.5 times that amount of power. (702hp)
The smallest pickups you can get in the US today, the Maverick and the Santa Cruz both start at 3.7 times that amount of power (191hp).
I think a combination of increased vehicle size and number of vehicles per capita probably explains why parents would feel less comfortable having their children walk down country roads to school.
[0]: https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/new-study-suggests-todays-s...
In addition to buying more guns, people also fear everyone else. CPS gone wild is a direct result of that.
I read somewhere that some states are passing laws now specifically to protect parents from prosecution for letting 9 year olds play in parks unsupervised. I guess people see kids playing without parents now and think it's some kind of child abuse.
https://ithacavoice.com/2018/11/city-proclaims-ithacas-kids-...
Please don't upvote if you found this helpful. I want to get back down to 777.
https://crimereads.com/how-the-disappearance-of-etan-patz-ch...
This is a good point, although I would like to see some data to know whether this is actually common, or whether it's merely a common perception. If you actually control for things like population density, demographics (most notably age distribution), traffic, road design, city design (distance to schools, playgrounds, etc.) do you see a clear pattern of reduction in the number of children playing freely outside?
I have no doubt that there are plenty of places where this has happened, but I also have anecdotes of places where this hasn't happened (at least in the area I grew up in since I was a kid in the 90s).
I’ve started seeing more white kids out in my neighborhood this spring though, maybe things are going back?
I also do believe kids are over-scheduled and that youth sports require wildly excessive investment compared to my era.
Exactly. We had Super Nintendo, which was great, but you were limited by the carts you owned or rented. You had to sit down in front of the TV at a specific time each day to catch the show you liked, and that was it—one episode, now go find something else to do.
The Internet is an infinite supply of everything. You can watch an entire season of your favorite show nonstop in one sitting, or download ROMs of every SNES game ever created and play through them one by one. And as soon as a kid figures this out, it’s game over.
Fascinating to me.
I wouldn't want a child of mine doing that without a helmet, and I'd prefer a bicycle, but if he's going to break a bone doing a jump over a little hump on the side of the road, haha, more power to you little fellow. Go break that bone. Learn the limits of your power. And I think I could do that in Grover Beach if I wanted.
Because they got richer and all their "real problems" evaporated.
Kids play in the street where I live. But I live in the kind of place that makes HN demographics hand wring about violent crime and bad schools.
With apologies, I don't believe this is true.
Where does this requirement come from and to whom would she deliver these reports ?
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/child-protection-aervice...
https://www.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrested-s...
My parent commenter stated that she was required to report.
Where does the requirement come from and to whom would she report ?
I know this would severely reduce the content on NextDoor, r/PublicFreakout and r/byebyejob, but it’s a price we should be willing to pay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_reporting_in_the_Uni...
However, if I understand correctly, the law is the mandatory reporting of abuse or neglect ... but the directive she received, that " ... a child walking to school by themself was evidence of neglect ..." is not a law.
What school district is this, by the way ? What ages are we talking about ?
Well for one thing this happened; and received a lot of national news:
This is definitely true, here in BC. Kids under the age of 11 should not be unsupervised at any time; the rules aren't clear, but the case precedent make it not worth the risk.
https://www.crossroadslaw.ca/blog/what-age-can-you-leave-a-c...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/bc-to-par...
https://cwrp.ca/sites/default/files/publications/Legal%20Age...
People absolutely drive considerably faster. There are many reasons for that, but they do. When I was a kid roaming around on my own in the 1980s and 1990s, the roads simply weren't as dangerous as they are now.
People not only drive faster, but driver visibility is much worse--because A frames, because SUVs, etc.
I agree fear has grown considerably. But not all that extra fear is irrational--at least some of it is justified.
Every morning and afternoon there's a crowd of parents waiting with their kids in the morning or for their kids in the afternoon.
I don't know why. The kids are old enough to walk to and from. In elementary school I walked home, middle school I waited at the bus stop with only other students, no parents and it was only a few of us on the corner.
I also get a kick of parents driving there on a perfectly good day and blocking the roads...a whooping 30 second drive.
I feel if I have my kids walk the few minutes by themselves I'll be labeled a bad parent.
To be honest, this was never really a consideration in my calculus growing up, and I did so during the age of the super car going into hypercar era in SoCal and the presence of those cars around us would become a large part of our 'tuner' culture as it's literately the car mod capital of the World.
Never once did that deter us from hitting the street on skateboards, rollerblades etc.., in fact I like to believe I was part of a large collection of 90s kids who invented street luging on hills where lots of sports cars were hitting the canyons.
Honestly, this is peak over-regulation trying to pawn off the horrendous outcomes on cars because that is the convenient target de jure: I went from having a modest car and motorcycle collection to now simply having 3 must-haves and I honestly I've ridden 10000s more miles via public transportation this year (planes included) whereas I've only driven like 200 miles via car. And I did for environmental reasons as an environmental activist that traveled all over the World for projects where I could see first hand the damage of climate change, I didn't need some app or social media brigrading to change my mind as I was capable of seeing what government, petrol companies and Auto makers collusion can do: I worked at VW during Dieselgate.
The problem stems from parents deferring their responsibilities to the State when it comes to every facet of Life, and that is why these kids are soft and need safe spaces and feel threatened by anything that is against their idealized narratives. Universities pander to these clients because they often have the most resources as opposed to those who simply made their way up the hard way--excluding SATS was a red herring, most of the kids who got into Prestigious/Ivy Leagues didn't need them in the first place as legacy admissions plays a big part, and where that fails they'll just bribe them as we've ween before [0].
This is what happens when you allow and standardize nepotism, and it always back fires as the following generations are simply not capable of enduring anything after being sheltered their whole life.
This is one of the reasons that Silicon Valley is the cesspool that it is now, it's culture went from rugged entrepreneurialism in the 50s-90s when it was mainly an extension of Californian culture that changed the World to what is now a woke dystopia that caters and panders to the least capable form the right schools but is none the less optimized using lemmings to do the busy leg work for vulture capitalists with deep ties to VC that seek to mine your data as a business model.
Honestly, this is why I have no sympathy for what is happening in the Valley right now, you made your own hell now fix it if you really think you're so bright and deserve the acclaim that you think you're entitled to.
Sure, you've collectively made a feudal lords (FAANG) immensely wealthy beyond comprehension, but beyond that you've done nothing to' make the 'World a better place.'
In fact you're the useful idiot you speak down to here, but are oblivious to the fact you're the worst of the worst when it comes to that.
The sad thing is, it's mainly transplants that made it this way.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_briber...
Gotta love this comment under article and issue of overparenting literally about parents putting in more work so that kids don't go alone.
Even in my relatively walkable suburb (Reston, VA), it's not really walkable by a child. And things are far enough that a bike is better.
But, just around the beltway in Silver Spring, there was a family that made the news a few years ago because they let their kids walk to/from the playground. This was a few city blocks, in an urban area. Somebody saw the kids, went full Karen and called the police, and child protective services got involved. It was a mess.
Kinda sad that was necessary.
At least it's not Tysons Corner. They're going to be spending decades trying to undo the damage done by the car centric design.
Yeah, not as bad as Ashburn, but not as good as Ballston or Clarendon (both of which now qualify as fully urban).
They added bike lanes to the major road outside my subdivision. Great, except they stop for 2 blocks near the school complex (ES, MS, HS on same big plot) because they needed extra turn lanes for cars. And then stopped the bike lanes again for 2 blocks near the shopping center for the same reason. So, the two places you'd want to ride a bike aren't connected. Massive failure. I sometimes wonder if VDOT/Fairfax planners half-ass these things on purpose just to prove "but nobody uses the bike lanes, see, empty!"
I think the biggest thing is parents have embraced fear over reason and are terrified something bad might happen to their child.
...on which cars are limited to very low speeds and make a great deal of noise. Bicycles are barely safe on asphalt even when they have bike lanes.
At some point, my limits were updated, and I was allowed to go anywhere that did not involve crossing the main street in the town (which at the time was a reasonably busy section of OH SR 30.) I'd ride to my grandma's house for a Coke or some ice cream and chat with her for hours at a time. There was a local playground near her house with the old school kind of swings that really let you get high up in the air.
I remember vividly the day when I discovered that I could ride my bike to the local Dollar General via a back route without crossing that street and the sense of freedom that gave me. I could also make the 2 mile ride to my best friend's house.
When I was a bit less than 10, the restriction on crossing that street was lifted, and the whole town was open to me. My friends and I rode our bikes absolutely everywhere and explored creeks, parks, and country roads like there was no tomorrow.
Now I live in a medium sized city, and every once in a while, I think about the proximity to family and the freedom to roam that I enjoyed growing up. More than anything else about home, I miss these things, and I have to wonder if I'm denying something to my kids by living in the city. Sadly, there aren't many software dev gigs in rural Ohio, and now that my kids are entrenched in the local schools (which, to be fair, are miles ahead of what exists back home), their upbringing as city kids seems to be written in stone.
Anyway, sorry for the rant - waxed nostalgic for a bit there.
Most of Japan isn't dense; it's single-family, detached dwellings. Those neighborhoods are walkable in spite of that. In metropolitan areas like around Tokyo, sure the houses are on small plots and close together; but houses are houses. It's still pretty low density.
Most of Japan is rural. It's not uncommon to walk or bike up to an hour away to get to the nearest store. Yet children are still given responsibility and agency. In fact, it may be much more common in rural areas around the world rather than in dense mixed-use neighborhoods.
But that's not the reason either. It's clear that both urban mixed-use neighborhoods and rural communities have nearly the same consideration about children, within a single country/culture. If a society perceives it as safe and a good idea (or even necessary) for a child to run errands, then that's what happens. If the society perceives it as unsafe or irresponsible, then they don't. It's nothing more than a culture meme.
This is exaggerated. There are some people live in such rural area, but definitely not majority in every prefecture. I agree latter part, since such rural area is very few risk.
This is true, but it’s not like they have an alternative. The population density and mountainous terrain pretty much dictates the urban design.
I’d say the UK is a better comparison, I was quite surprised to see tightly packed row houses even out in the countryside where open space appeared to be plentiful.
This has lead to much larger "towns" and suburbs where the sense of community is essentially gone. At best you might know a few neighbors on your street. So risk tolerance has gone down for a good reason. And when you see a strange kid out playing and you don't know who's kid they are, you're going to naturally worry about them and just assume the worst.
Another factor too astutely mentioned by someone below is the car dependent nature of most non urban environments, especially in North America. I see lots of kids playing near their homes on their own in the neighborhoods I live in. Parents aren't too far away and they're with the other kids of the neighborhood. Maybe the safe distance a kid can travel on their own hasn't changed, it's what you could actually accomplish in that distance that has changed.
Today's society, especially western society, is much less community focused. So now, not only do I not know what strange adults exist in my 200 home open air neighborhood with a single playground, none of the adults there know me either nor my family and therefore a perceived sense of risk and maybe even actual risk is higher that my kids are in danger.
That's what happens when population explodes and population density increases. All that's happening is the West is finally experiencing what many Asian and Middle Eastern Countries already knew.
Sometimes I also catch threads/tiktoks/comments talking about sex trafficking in the US as well. Where there's an ever present fear their child is going to get abducted and sold into prostitution? And I can't tell if that's a genuine fear or a completely manufactured one. Seems implausible to me.
The Karens that call CPS are the worst. If the kids aren't in any danger and aren't neglected it's just nobody else's business how they're raised.
Age? 2 years, 9 months.
It's wild.
I grew up at a time and a place where I had a lot of independence. I rode a bike everywhere. I'd do things by myself and with friends. I actually feel sad for kids nowadays. Being a kid now seems to be being at home or getting shuttled from preplanned activity to preplanned activity in a car.
Almost everywhere in the US, it's really not possible to do it any other way because the entire infrastructure is predicated on car ownership.
Fears of abduction and worse are real of course but the risks are overstated. I actually think these risks are made worse by the ubiquity of cars. I mean think about it: it becomes a lot more difficult to abduct someone without a private vehicle.
But this isn't new.
You shouldn't send your kids out in thunderstorms and you probably shouldn't send them on errands through US cities.
- Most of the kids live in quiet country towns or rural areas
- Most of the errands avoid crossing roads, or:
- If they do, then the assistants are checking for and controlling traffic
- It shows kids doing their first ever errand, it's not their everyday lifeThis show likely does help prevent accidents (and yes 2 year olds aren't running errands every day) but the main point still stands, kids are living more autonomously in some ways in their every day life.
Sure, we can see young children take the train and walk to school - but it is not common to see that. In 12 years of living in Tokyo (Nakano-ku mostly), I didn't see that very often. It might be more common in smaller parts of the country or for very specific use cases.
My two elder daughters went to kindergarten while I lived there. Their teacher walked to a spot near our house, where we took the kids, and then they walked together to school. They always had adult supervision. (Some parents would also take their kids by bike to school).
Japanese people have their own security concerns. Japanese schools have large walls and closed off school yards because the locals have their own safety concerns for children. (I believe there was a famous stabbing incident that led to that, but don't recall the details)
It should be clear that Japanese parks (at least in Tokyo) are actively hostile to children. Playing with balls, for example, is completely banned in many parks in Tokyo. Free parks are more for the old and enfeebled than for the young; silver democracy at its worst.
In my case, at least, my children are more free in Calgary than they were in Tokyo.
It seems we've had completely different experiences. Through shibuya/yoyogi area, I pass a half dozen parks (kids are playing double dutch, soccer, pitching baseballs), 2 rec sports field and countless kids of all ages walking alone or with friends. Not to mention the preschool children being wheeled around in those huge laundry carts.
Often topics on here and reddit become "Which place is best?" but I don't think that way. I'm happy for you and your family's move to Calgary, and have no doubt it's better for your kids.
Compared to when I lived in the bay area (and then rural America before that), it's a stark contrast and I appreciate any city that where most people can feel safe walking around just about anywhere, whether that's Calgary or Tokyo.
I usually chime in with Tokyo talk not say "yay Japan is the best!" but rather "America deserve at least a little better than it's getting."
(When 27 years old and moving back in with my parents, that actually changed, but after a few years I trained them to let me live my own life again.)
In Mediterranean cultures its completely normal for kids to stay up late playing with their friends and staying over at each others houses without any parental coordination required at all.
When you have a strong community, trust is more easily built.
And I'd argue that moving often is a side effect of not having a robust enough safety net that allows folks to avoid this sort of upheaval.
Naw, not just kids, its everybody.
It's from the UK but it's probably even worse in the US (I think in the US now most kids aren't allowed out of the yard of their house on their own until they're old enough to drive basically.)
I can't figure out what it is doing this - I'm UK-based too, and I know logically that everything is now safer - I used to walk two miles to the woods with friends at the age of eight or nine, but I wouldn't trust my own children to walk to the bottom of the hill here.
I don't really understand what has changed. Why were my own parents less paranoid? There are lots of people giving lots of reasons on here. The most credible is the constant "stranger danger" message pumped out in news, but I honestly wonder if there's been a baseline increase in people's general paranoia - my concerns are more around them doing something stupid and getting into trouble.
The UK in particular is somewhat obsessed with "health and safety", which is probably #2 on the favourite thing to complain about (after the weather, of course) but at the same time people gleefully participate in it too.
I lived in England for a while (as a Dutch person) and my English girlfriend was always paranoid about things I didn't see as a problem, for example I was perfectly comfterable carrying stuff from the car to the house and leaving the car unattended on the (enclosed!) parking lot for a minute, but she'd insist on locking it. N=1 of course, but I observed a number of other similar things over the years I lived there with different people. When it snowed for a bit the British were in a state of near-panic, and things like the Met announcing "there may be power cuts and shortages" didn't exactly help calm fears. It's 5cm of snow people, announced a week beforehand. We don't get snow that often in NL either, but I've never seen it anywhere near as chaotic as in England.
I guess I'm rambling a bit here, but my point is I think the problem is wider than just "kids". Partly, I think that's good: we're more aware of risks and deal with them a bit more consciously, but you can go too far in this; a risk-free life is a boring life hardly worth living.
"It's dangerous" or "it's a risk that [..] will happen" is almost always true in a sense and hard to argue against; "yes but no life can be without risk" comes of as weak, especially when it concerns something like your children.
But like you, I don't think I'd be happy with my kids doing things like that (my kids aren't quite old enough yet anyway).
I think part of it is realising that some of the things I did were pretty fucking stupid, and could have ended very badly. For example, I recall exploring a dilapidated house that was falling to pieces - in the middle of nowhere in rural Scotland. I could very easily have died if something had gone wrong.
I'm certain the media is a large part of it too - the overwhelming focus on doom and gloom feels very unhealthy for society as a whole.
That doesn't explain all of it though; I realise we live in safe times, but still find myself being overprotective, sometimes seemingly irrationally.
(The shopkeeper was not amused.)
Similarly, she took me to see Kill Bill when I was 11. That was during a trip to Croatia, of course. In the Netherlands such a thing would have been illegal—and worse, immoral!
Now that Croatia's in the EU, the country is essentially being financially bribed to pretend to care about such issues.
Taking public transportation. Running errands.
It was a shock when I saw how parents helicoptered their children here.
Sure, in Europe nowadays more people drive their children to school than before, for whatever reasons, but I have never heard a child or parent get in trouble for being outside by themselves.
When I was 5, I started driving an older tractor. When I was 6, we were fixing a pasture fence when my dad told me to go drive the pickup the 50 yards or so to where we were at. He verbally walked me through it, and let me go get it. I remember that moment like it was yesterday.
And that was not a unique experience, for farm kids at least.
Now, parents would be criminally charged with something.
That being said, it is common in urban areas (at least in LA) to see relatively young children commuting or running errands by themselves. But I never see that when I go back to surburbia. It's not an issue of neighborhood safety; the suburban areas are far safer. It's a parental risk tolerance issue.
I do not trust people in cars.
The real reason people don't let their young children outside is because they might get killed by an inattentive driver. It's the most tangible, innately felt thing out in America's public realm, how crazy dangerous it is on foot, constantly having to be on the lookout for cars. And of course getting blamed if they do happen to be struck. A kid got killed in an apartment complex parking lot in my city by a driver. The comments were horrifying, people felt sorry for the driver, blamed the parents.
The problem is the corner shop no longer exists. And if it does, it's a chain, and the rotating staff won't recognize the toddler as being yours. Or going there will get your kid run over by an SUV. Mainly the latter.
My mom asked me to pick up prescriptions at the local pharmacy starting I was 6-7 (we lived a few blocks away). The pharmacists gave them to me because she knew me and my parents. Blanket laws are easy to enforce, but they remove precisely this individual agency.
She did say that culture has changed since then and few parents would allow a 4 year old to do an errand like that alone anymore.
Nowadays with far more 1- and 2-child families the risk we're willing to accept is far lower. Population density is higher which directly multiplies the chances of your kid encountering someone who will hurt them. Traffic is busier and drivers are more distracted, increasing the risk of accidents. Distances are greater, there's no "5-minute walk down to the corner shop".
All of these factors combine to make the expected cost of letting your kid loose unsupervised much higher and the expected benefit much lower. A 10-year-old would be fine. A 4-year old? Hell no.
It's also just as possible that we are adopting a lower tolerance for that risk, or that the risk is better clarified than it once was.
When I was growing up, I was allowed to roam the neighborhood. I lived on a military base in my youngest years, but later I lived in a suburb of a small town.
Nothing seriously bad ever happened to me, but that's anecdotal.
I wonder what is more likely: my parents were more risk tolerant, risk ignorant, or the world has become more dangerous. Both are possible, but I think the former two are broadly more likely than the latter.
almost certainly not the latter given that a significant drop in crime since the 80s and 90s is an almost global phenomenon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop). Drunk driving fatalities are down 90% since the 80s despite miles travelled having doubled etc. I mean just remember the culture a few decades ago, people did not give a fuck about anything.
People really have become comically anxious even though many places are considerably safer and cleaner. Maybe because of it.
Heck, with modern phones and watches it’s even easier to keep track of what’s happening.
Here's my idea: give kids bikes and tell them to be back before dinner.
I vividly remember watching my dad mow the front lawn one afternoon. I was 11 I think? It looked so fun pushing this loud machine over the messy grass and leaving a path of perfectly neat turf behind.
I asked him if I could try it out. He hesitated for a bit, then said, "Sure." So I did, and it was fun.
And it was now my obligation once a week for the next 8 years.
The fun was short-lived, but the chore remained. And the mechanism was identical to how I assumed vacuuming duty at the age of 8, which means I didn't learn my lesson from that fiasco either :)
Protecting against that one thing doesn't stop this brainstorming process; it's a creative endeavor limited only by the imagination.
Meanwhile, yes, the more constant the news is the more it fuels our imagination, and the more global it is, the more we're feeding it with statistical outliers.
We also had to pass a cycling proficiency test in order to ride our bikes to school, and had to pass swimming tests in order to get in the deep end of the local pool. Maybe there're aren't many formal safety campaigns any more?
Turns out it wasn't just something I experienced. A lot of my friends who grew up in different towns had the same experience.
The whole purpose was to teach your child to interact appropriately in public but your child ends up being molested by these monsters, it's just so traumatic. Take care of your kids!
Is this because some cities are no longer safe for children to go outside? I wonder how things got so dangerous and if anything can be done.
Edit: Another post noted that there seems to be a general decline in walkability and pedestrian safety in US cities. This seems like something we could try to fix by improving both environments and vehicles.
* Playing on the sidewalk near our house (4y)
* Playing at the playground (5y, walkie talkie for backup)
* Crossing small neighborhood streets (7y)
* Walking to school (7y)
* Going to the corner store (8y)
As a parent, I do think children need some level of autonomy, but this doesn't need to be an all-or-nothing issue. Parents can apply various degrees in various situations.
I managed to somehow fuck up the straight line trip home, and returned nearly 2 hours later to my mother in hysterics on the phone to the police.
I think that was the end of my independence and parent's faith in me.
I think I end ok!
P.D: I walk with friends (10-15 old) from city center, detouring from an attempt to reach some small mountain after the zone get red, so we decide find other place and end in a close park [Aprox. route here](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/La+Milagrosa,+Medell%C3%ADn,...), kilometers away...
P.D.2: This not about being badass. Normal stuff by a nerd guy. Actual crazy stuff I avoided. Too dangerous!
Hats off to anyone that can survive or thrive in such environments
It's and/and. Should also teach that driver to slow down, and be prepared to come to an emergency stop at any given time. Or have streets that naturally slow down traffic by their design, if that's too hard for the driver.
Your comment comes from a value system which I find sociopathic. I think it's much more important that the public realm is safe for all, which includes toddlers running errands alone, than that cars should be able to travel at high speed. And beyond that, when piloting 3-ton heavy machinery, one has more responsibility. It's something drivers seem unwilling to accept, rather let's blame the child on foot instead.
But no matter how well you teach that toddler to be careful, there are few places in the US where it would be safe from inattentive drives to send them out on an errand. That's the problem.
I spent a good part of my summer holidays as a kid on the roof of a shed. Or in the tree near it, a bit higher. Different country though.
The article does note that there was a whole process leading up to sending the kid out on an errand. Lots of out-and-about skill acquisition in gradually more-independent settings, culminating in the trip to the store. One assumes that if the child was particularly prone to distractions like that, it'd have come up and been worked on.
But okay, the amount of bruises increases in the wilderness. The amount of crying over that decreases by 99 percent.
[0] https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/the-hidden-danger...