"Think of the children" is the main weapon politics have to push regulations and more control. It is important that everybody thinks that kids are in danger at all time otherwise it would stop working.
I agree that kidnapping is probably at an all-time low, but it's an unbelievable claim that it's all "family members during a nasty divorce or things like that." I personally know a family who's kid was kidnapped (briefly) by a non-family member.
> "Think of the children" is the main weapon politics have to push regulations and more control. It is important that everybody thinks that kids are in danger at all time otherwise it would stop working.
That's not what's going on here. It's a cultural issue. You've got a longstanding issue with crime, especially particularly "worst fear"-type crime, getting disproportionate attention in the media, creating false impressions and seeds for fear-fantasies. Now, added to that is new cultural obsession with abuse and victim-hood; and the idea of completely stamping that out is possible, and it should be achieved whatever the cost.
You might have a politicians exploiting this cultural issue to accomplish other things, but they certainly didn't create the phenomenon of hyper-vigalent school paraprofessionals.
Sorry to read that, but it's still a statistically small percent that happens to. One can say "but even one is too much", and I appreciate the sentiment, but optimizing for the .1% isn't always a good path.
> they certainly didn't create the phenomenon of hyper-vigalent school paraprofessionals.
"they" probably contributed to the culture that produced the current school paraprofessionals.
EDIT: Some interesting numbers at https://www.missingkids.org/theissues/nonfamily - of abductions reported to them, 1% are by non-family members, meaning... 99% of reported cases (to their org) are by family members. That may not line up with 'law enforcement' numbers exactly - there's not a clear indication as to what gets reported to them. But the ~1% matches up with other numbers I've seen in the past on missing children. It's almost always a family member or someone known to the child.
>> they certainly didn't create the phenomenon of hyper-vigalent school paraprofessionals.
> "they" probably contributed to the culture that produced the current school paraprofessionals.
The point I'm making is that it's not politicians who are driving this. They certainly participate, but they're responding to the incentives and concerns of their constituents. "Think of the children" implies they consciously created this and/or are the main drivers, which is false.
The media has an incentive to produce emotion inducing content and politician will naturally leverage those emotions because American politics are pure pathos.
If you cannot see how that leads to gloom and doom oriented media and politicians that lean on eschatological themes, you aren’t woke.
> The media has an incentive to produce emotion inducing content and politician will naturally leverage those emotions because American politics are pure pathos.
Yeah, that's true, but it doesn't contradict my point. This is a hard problem, because there isn't some malevolent agent acting consciously at the center of it. It's a bunch of different people acting naturally and responding to their environment and incentives.
This sibling comment probably has it part right (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31355482). The true cause of this overprotective hypervigilance is probably weakened communities, which itself is most likely an unintended side effect of a bunch of different things.
I think that's partly correct. I think the problem is due to weakened communities, but I don't think anyone, ever will think "I am OK if my kid is kidnapped b/c free range kids are good." If the community was stronger, people with more likely think things like "I am OK with my kind being free range b/c I trust the community not to kidnap and abuse them."
The story is crazy and scary and disturbed, so of COURSE it is going to be shared and people are going to remember it. The details get seared into your memory. It is a nightmare scenario.
The same day that happened, in the US ~90 people were killed in car accidents and ~550 kids were kidnapped by a family member. Those events won't be seared in our mind, though.
Don't take this for granted. I suspect this behavior is actually caused by an inherent anxiety in some subset of the population. When they don't have real (and likely) dangers to worry about, they will find some kind of tiny risk and overamplify it as something to focus their anxiety on.
Removing all things dangerous from the environment will only serve to amplify their tendency to do so. A mum in a high risk high crime neighbourhood is probably more likely to let her kids roam free (and less worried) than mums in upper-middle-class neighbourhoods where there is virtually zero crime.
My hypothesis is that the solution is to let children experience activities that are moderately dangerous (ideally through risk of pain, minor injury or some social stress, with risk of death or permanent injury kept minimal). This helps (I think) callibrate their ability to estimate risk as they grow up.
This would allow them to ignore imaginary risks like the one discussed here, and may help them identify situations that come with real danger.
Say you have 10 parents that let their kids play outside. No one has a problem with this until an 11th parent shows up and it mortified, think the kids will all get hurt if they are allowed to be outside like this.
That parent makes a stink, take it to the city council, and a rule is put in place that you can't let your kids go outside without supervision. The folks making the rules think to themselves "well we had to act, there was such an outcry". Meanwhile the outcry is really just the outsized screams of one parent, and you've just screwed the other 10 parents.
I think it's related to trauma fetishization combined with child worship.
Trauma fetishization: The person who is most traumatized by a thing should be the one who dictates policy about that thing. People who have lost children qualify, and we literally name the laws after their dead children.
Child worship: Children are without trauma, and therefore without neurosis. When you traumatize them or through inaction allow them to be traumatized, you have created neurosis, which is the source of all problems in society.
My internal response: Okay? You're asking everyone to change a good-faith saying because it triggered a bad memory for you? Get over it.
Then of course once the rules change they will pump up how ridiculous they are.
People think they can win, but they are really just fueling the media.
It was a comedy music video about council workers (I wish it was still on YouTube, unfortunately I didn’t log into the account for a few years, and the channel seems to have been automatically terminated and I couldn’t find any way to restore it). The current affairs show had obviously tried to create some controversy that workers might be offended, and they interviewed a bunch, literally asking multiple questions to try and get them to say something negative, but they all loved it and thought it was funny. They even got an interview with the mayor and he liked it.
But they were still pushing the line. The piece ended with “but at least this time, no one was offended”. It was hilarious just the extent they were trying to manufacture controversy and drama from literally nothing, and how much they failed but still tried to push it! It was so bizarre, absolutely nothing about our song was mean spirited!
Sometimes it even gets just a little annoying - how come my youngest sibling gets to do things at a much younger age then I was allowed to? :)
You're right, in that it's not that you care any less about your later kids, but you tend to be more pragmatic about child rearing. Better at recognizing the important events and problems, while shrugging off and ignoring the trivial stuff. You learn that you don't need to worry about a kid eating a crayon, and you recognize that certain pain cries mean "I'm not really hurt." You realize that sometimes the best thing you can do for a kid is ignore them and let them figure stuff out themselves.
Its quite possible that increased organized sports and after school activities (particularly robotics, math, computer science) could actually improve the capabilities of society as compared to just leaving the kids unattended after school.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-28/in-japan-...
Personally, I believe there is a compounding net good for society allowing children a decent amount of independence at a young age. Japan is certainly different to many other countries in terms of public safety, but I don't believe the outside world is the awful, scary, dangerous place the media constantly paints it out to be. It breaks my heart that I rarely see children playing outside in the streets anymore in the UK, when my youth in the 80s was basically spent largely outside without adult supervision.
Also, many Americans live in HOA communities with regulations that make Switzerland look like libertarian utopia.
However, this only applies to issued ammo (and IIRC the identical govt-subsidized stuff you buy at the range). You can still store your own ammo just fine. Most of those in US who saw that story didn't understand this distinction and believed that it applies to all ammo storage at home. Which is how we got all those memes about Swiss being "heavily regulated" in that regard unlike US.