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Comment by johnzim | Hacker News Reader

As a parent, none of the risks are as profound as that of some other member of the public calling the police to inform on your “dangerous parenting”.

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.

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I let my three kids walk to school, the park, around the corner to friend’s houses. Neighbors complained to my face multiple times, and threatened to call CPS twice. My children all survived to adulthood.

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.

One of our neighbors screamed at my wife and me because our six year old son wasn’t wearing a helmet on his Razer scooter to (slowly) go around the corner. That same neighbor let her dog run around off-leash at the park, assuring the parents there that the dog didn’t bite, though it did like to jump on the children. We raised our kids in Portland, where dogs have more rights and freedom than children.

This risk doesn't seem worth it. You are playing CPS roulette. Even if 9/10 CPS agents are going to make the right decisions, that's a 10% chance of having some kind of issue with CPS. If I recall correctly, people have had their kids taken over stuff like this.

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.

I understand the risk of busybody adults and CPS. We chose to let our kids have some freedom of movement. I have lawyers in my family so we were less worried than other parents we knew. In Portland specifically CPS overreach got a lot of negative press and pushback from parent’s groups — there’s strength in numbers.

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.

> Even if 9/10 CPS agents are going to make the right decisions

That is extremely optimistic.

The thing that gets me is that people do this stuff all the time and it's not a problem until CPS gets dragged into it, while at the same time the system is massively overburdened. They should be punishing the people calling in mundane issues and wasting their time. But! That might dissuade someone from reporting something, and the first time a bad case is missed the outrage and subsequent overcorrection lands us back to where we are now.

That, and the fact that like any institution it exists in part to keep itself and its budget justified, if there aren't enough problems then you can always make some 'easy' cases (legally easy but morally more than a little bit ambiguous) so they can serve as a chunk of that justification.

When I was in 5th grade, I had a friend with bent legs, who walked with supports attached to his arms. (Well, gripped in his hands, but with a partial ring that went around the arm; I assume to make them easier to hold on to.)

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.

Yep. I used to be park of a park advisory council in Chicago. At one meeting, police were there to field questions about park safety. One of the attendees mentioned their concern for the times they saw "unsupervised 10-year-olds" playing in the neighborhood park. The cop encouraged the person to call 911 when they observed that happening!

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.

>In Chicago, it's pretty much illegal to be a kid without an adult present in most places

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.

Could've fooled me. I was taking the subway to school by myself at 11 years old. And this wasn't even that long ago.

> The cop encouraged the person to call 911 when they observed that happening

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.

In CA there's laws specifically against leaving a child in the car due to risk of overheating.

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.

A huge part of it is talking to neighbors, even if just a little bit. If you see "Suzy's kid" walking down the street you're much less likely to freak out than if you see "unknown kid".

But the easiest is to just move to somewhere where people aren't as freaked out.

Politically speaking, it's also good to push back on any legislation or system where parents lose power on their kids education and upbringing, even in the name of their well-being. It's important as a society that we have autonomy and diversity in the upbringing of the next generation.

Unfortunately vocal people on both sides of the spectrum hate that. The people calling CPS hate it because they think parents are being negectful. Certain people hate it because they imagine kids getting indoctrinated into religions they don't like. I have several friends and families that were raised via home schooling or raised their kids homeschooled. All the kids are amazing, none of them had any religion involvment.

I had home schooling myself. My parents took me out after the school wanted to put me in special ed due to my autism. (Of course, they tried Ritalin first.)

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.

I guess you will need to find another avenue for her to socialize with her peers. Maybe extracurricular activities like sports or music or something. Socialization and social kills are super important, especially for introverts who need to "work out" that muscle.

>> Free Range Kids movement

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.

The Bay Area is not immune to anti-walking nonsense. At the elementary school that was formerly close to my home (which my children did not attend, specifically due to said nonsense) the children who were walking home had to stay at school for 45 minutes while "pick-up time", i.e. parents with cars picking up children, was conducted. This was deemed a safety measure.

I was about to make the same comment, that's indeed my biggest fear, this video makes good points about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYsE7T2hXe8

As a new dad, who also moved to the Bay Area from Europe, I would be interested what parts of the Bay Area would provide such a walkable environment?

If you're outside SF itself, look for the old parts of a town, with houses built in the 20s or earlier. There's probably a "main street"/downtown area near by, and because it's an old part of town, the streets are narrower and traffic moves slower.

Walkscore.com could be helpful. There are many wonderful walkable neighborhoods in the bay.

Thanks for the link. This goes in the right direction, but so far I have not been able to identify truly walkable neighborhoods through websites. The main problem is that the metrics usually being used, do not reflect the type of walkability that would be beneficial for raising children.

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?

Milpitas really is not walkable, although you can somewhat decently navigate it with a bike. Walkability mostly is a function of density, which you can just glean by eye from a satellite picture. Unfortunately, many otherwise pedestrian-friendly places in the Bay Area have homeless camps set up on them, which might be a deterrent.

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.

Much of suburban Marin County is a paradise in this regard - the Ross Valley cities of Ross, Larkspur (not larkspur landing), Kentfield, San Anselmo and Fairfax[1] are full of kids of all ages riding their bikes and walking to school every day.

[1] Listed in ascending order of affordability.

Noe Valley/Bernal Heights is quite good. There is also schools in Noe but I guess SF is some kind of lottery system so it's not guaranteed your kids can go that school.

Lafayette and, much further out, Martinez are two places that have that, for example.

Berkeley and Albany. My neighbors told me they can't get their teenager to finish his drivers ed course because he just doesn't care that much about driving. His school, the park and his friends are all walking and biking distance away.

>As a parent, none of the risks are as profound as that of some other member of the public calling the police to inform on your “dangerous parenting”.

And even when these events are rare they get reported on which increases the chilling effect.

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