Don’t teach kids to fear the world
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
By the time I was 10 I was allowed to be unsupervised and to get on a bus to a railway station, purchase a ticket for an intercity train that took me the better part of 100 miles away to another city then alight there at a major railway junction with many platforms and from there catch a suburban train to my final destination where my grandmother lived. However, before I could get to see her I had to walk several miles to her home and this involved crossing a very busy four-lane arterial highway.
I was no exception, as this was the norm for kids of my age. Moreover, such things were never a big deal for us kids, it was just the way things were back then. We gave such concerns little thought if any at all.
This - unlike millions of today's kids - is why my generation were and still are a much more resilient lot and not afraid of the world than is the present younger generation.
In my estimation, overprotecting kids rates on a much higher scale of child abuse than some[1] matters which are normally associated with it.
If you are a modern-day parent and overprotecting your children then you need to think twice about the damage and harm that you are causing them. It is very difficult to acquire resilience if it's not acquired very early on in one's life, and those who don't are often forever handicapped.
_
[1] Of course, that excludes any form of sexual abuse, it's inexcusable and unacceptable under any circumstance.
The Coddling of the American Mind
> (...) ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life.
> Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. (...)
https://www.amazon.com/Coddling-American-Mind-Intentions-Gen...
Even with more polarized political parties today, the world is a lot more complicated than "Republicans Evil." If the teens of today can't grasp that, it's at least a failure of society to develop their emotional resilience (or cynically - it's the fault of an economy that is breeding & preying on their lack of resilience and nuance).
When I was 9 I walked a mile to school with my 6-year old sister, unsupervised (and stayed at home alone for an hour after school until my parents got home).
At 12 I commuted to school on a city bus for an hour (with a transfer downtown).
At 14.. jeez, I'm pretty sure at 14 my parents left me alone in the house for a long weekend.
Funnily enough, I still remember all the very stupid and dangerous thinks we did when we were kids, which makes me afraid when I think about my own daughter... How do you deal with this problem?
It still exists, and there are policies around it.
Amtrak does the same but starts at 12: https://www.amtrak.com/unaccompanied-minors-policy
It's a bygone era.
Care to explain?
Overall, the whole article is so surreal - is this actual reality in US? Where I live, and lived, which means some parts of Europe, kids are much more self-sufficient, its expected from them and they are happy to deliver. I recall the joy and pride I felt when I begged my parents into letting me go alone for the first time on public transport from aunt home, and they let me and it was at the end simple ride with bunch of stops. The idea anybody can protect their kids 100% is completely ridiculous, just let it go. Teach them to be smart when interacting with strangers, not fearful. Are you also afraid by default when stranger approaches you ie with a question? (that would explain a lot).
Whatever inner problem you have, it can be worked on by specialists, just don't close yourself since you drag your closest family down that hole and young ones have no good defenses for messed up parents.
As with almost everything, it depends on where you are in the US, but there has been a general trend towards overprotection of kids. The GP is an extreme example, but I've definitely met parents with that same attitude.
You're right. I think one significant difference between my parents generation and those of us who came later, is that they lived through the depression and WWII. They knew this fact if not consciously then subconsciously for the very reason that from an early age they were often confronted with things and circumstances well outside their control. War for instance, being conscripted into the military was just a fact of life and that one had to accept it, everyone was well aware that it was essentially futile to do otherwise.
To a large extent their attitude of resignation and acceptance of fate passed onto way they treated us, their children. Like other aspects of their lives, they accepted the fact that they couldn't control everything we did, even if we were just kids.
That was a great blessing for my generation, the babyboomers. We had almost none of the major restrictions that governed our parents' lives, and it's largely the reason for why we had so much freedom and autonomy as kids.
Nevertheless, we became a bratish generation, we did what we wanted and we got what we wanted. Compared with our parents we were undisciplined and from there we eventually developed into the 'control freak' generation. As babyboomers, we were now getting just about everything denied to our parents, but when something was denied to us we became overly pushy and overbearing until we'd gotten what we wanted. After all, for us, it was a logical extension of what was already happening.
Same with the kids, babyboomers felt the need to control their lives and had no compunction or regret in doing so. Later, that fact was not lost on more recent generations and they've since honed the practice into a fine art.
Clearly, this is a grossly simplified explanation of what is a long and rich set of facts but you'll get the gist.
Nevertheless, we babyboomers should not blame our parents for seemingly the sins they endowed us with, for after the bad times and wars they'd experienced they wanted us kids to have a better life and they only did what they thought best for us.
Bless them.
Within my bubble, I would say yes. Most parents I know seems to not let their kids go unsupervised (by them or some other parent) until around 13-16. I also grew up in this kind of dynamic, but I also didn't ever feel the need/want to be in unsupervised scenarios, so I didn't notice the oddity of it until later in life.
I don't know the underlying cause, but part of it seems to be that people misunderstand and overestimate the the likelyhood of certain bad events happening, while simultaneously ignoring all of the daily risks they take and are completely fine with.
One example I hear within family is the worry about child abductions, and how there are such terrible people out there that would do such things. The misunderstanding that seems to be in play when these things come up is that 90% of child abductions are by a family member, not some random joe/jane on the street. Another non-zero amount are by care-takers, so people that parents trust enough to supervise their children. Finally there is the last few percent that people have some more valid reason to worry about. This seems like an awfully small chance event to spent a lot of time worrying about.
You think that we should hide the world from children? You are mistaken. Danger is real, the only safe way to live within it is with due caution, not fear but caution.
If you jump from a cliff you will die. If you fall over backwards on that climbing frame you could well hurt yourself seriously. It is not a parents job to shield children from the world but to teach them the skills to navigate it. In the first years of life we nurture and protect, as they become more capable we release them little by little into the world.
This seems to be getting painted by a lot of you as a bad thing. The views presented here don't represent the views of the Atlantic. They represent the views of the writer. And other writers also published by the Atlantic disagree. Some of them think you should be afraid. Some of them think you should not be afraid. That isn't hypocrisy or "rich." It's a publication showing you a range of views from people who disagree on subjects that are far from settled. How is this supposed to be a bad thing? Do you want the editorial board to instead only publish takes that all agree and present only one side of any subject?
Pfff, when I was 7 or 8 I took the local bus to the intercity bus station and then took that 200km to get to my grandparents. I had to figure out what bus to get on to and when to get off. I remember nobody even asked me for ticket money, just asked me where I was going. I was super happy because I got to pocket the money - but then I lost somewhere on my way there :(
But I was one of 4 children in a poor family (at the time, eventually we got up to 6). I can't see myself risking my son on something as stupid, the amount of near death experiences I've had as a child, it freaks me out when I think about my son doing something like that, and I can't really say I'm better off for it either - I was just bored, poor and didn't have anything better to do.
I marvel at this logic. Who raised the present younger generation?
Children didn't make the rules that they can't buy train tickets. They weren't born afraid. Their resiliency hasn't been molded yet.
The question isn't "why are kids this way?" The question is "why are we raising children this way when we weren't raised this way ourselves?"
I feel like the investment into individual children is much much higher than it used to be (time/resources/emotions). When you have 5 kids it's not that you don't care, but you literally can't be as protective about them as you can when you're only raising one or two. And then as people have less children the norms gradually change.
The same number of kids were probably abused in a variety of ways 50 years ago. Maybe more than today, even. But what most people knew about the news was what was in the local paper and maybe they watched 30 minutes of national news on TV.
They didn't have a device in their pocket alerting them in real-time about a kidnapping story in another state.
People are not good at assessing probability of risk. If they hear about something, they think it's likely. So they get more and more afraid.
https://www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/kidnappings/etan-p...
What I worry about is CPS and police officers claiming child endangerment. In my state you can be charged with child endangerment just for leaving the kid strapped into the seat on a moderate day while you walk in to pay the gas station attendant. You could potentially be arrested and charged for letting a 7 year old play alone at the park for a bit.
The kidnappers are real. But they're the CPS and police, and they can't wait to put your kids into a brutal kids-for-cash foster care system. They draw their salary under the guise of "safety" while victimizing children and sapping their independence. And busybodies everywhere have a device at the ready in their pocket, that allows them to invite months of scrutiny into your life based on 30 seconds of effort on their own part, after which the law prevents you from finding their identity or facing your accuser.
There were definite benefits to the Boomer outlook at the time: smog was curtailed, health-conscious diet and regular exercise became a popular idea(albeit heavily fad-driven). But it also created a more litigious, low-trust climate, which has only driven in the alienation further. Today's political climate is a sort of crescendo on all those concerns, and I see in the current working-age generations much greater willingness to change the deal.
And the greatest risk isn't the stranger, it's people you know and trust. The vast, vast majority of people aren't going to harm a kid--you teach kids that if they need help they should go up to an adult and ask. That reduces the risk much further.
2021 missing-person stats:
- 94.5% (231k) runaway
- 1% (2,555) abducted by non-custodial parent
- 0.1% (331) abducted by stranger
- 4.3% (10k) adult
Our era is just different.
Your time investment is even greater value (to you) since you have less out-of-work time overall.
Why, and is this important and or a problem? BTW, I don't claim to have an answer.
How many times have you seen someone saying they were afraid walking down the sidewalk because... someone else was also walking down the sidewalk?
People fear flying for psychological reasons of control/helplessness, not for logical statistical reasons. Fear of 'scary' death is like the negative version of the inaccurate and over-optimistic math that causes people to buy lottery tickets.
It's OK to feel nervous if you run into someone unexpected outside, everyone gets that way sometimes. It's how you handle that feeling.
Hard times create strong people
Strong people create good times
Good times create weak people
Weak people create hard timesCould you share a link or something on that topic? I'm curious.
Certainly, the concept long-predates the internet. A bit like the yin/yang symbol, where there's a little "dot" of one color inside the other, symbolizing a similar cyclical concept of one arising from the other.
Though I suppose I like it this way — kinda like the updated Star Trek "To boldly go..." for TNG (:
Because CPS will come and you'll be charged with child endangerment if you let your kid have "too much" independence. And naturally the kids will ask questions about why they can't do this or that, and many people will know "because CPS would take you away" is a bad answer (or one the kid will ignore) so they lie about the dangers. It's a shit sandwich situation to be in.
How often does that actually happen?
If you search for something as simple as "charged for leaving child at park" there's no shortage of anecdata, and many if not most aren't something crazy like abandonment.
The laws in my state are vague enough that parents can and have been criminally charged for merely letting a confident 7 y/o play at the park while they briefly ran an errand. Unfortunately the state doesn't keep statistics like "how often did we frivolously charge parents."
Okay so you don't know and if we look at the numbers this is just fear mongering.
You've made the assertion "if we look at the numbers this is just fear mongering." Now it's time to show your proof, what is the numbers. I'm very curious because my own state keeps no statistics on what percent of their charges are frivelous.
Of the 73M children in america - Of which 7.9 million children went through CPS - Of which 16% were substantiated (1.2M) and received services - 22.9 percent of those (275k) were removed from their home.
Unfortunately, again, you were unable to provide what percent of charges (or in your presentation, removals) are actually frivolous. You counter a very small chance of stranger kidnapping (less than 1k a year) with "legitimate" CPS kidnapping at 275k a year. Orders of magnitude more relevant -- Wow!
So you have really no data to present here, other than a ceiling of roughly 5% chance at the worst, which is absolutely bone-chillingly large. Plenty significant enough to take it seriously when you see people being charged for letting their kid play at the park. People take precautions about pools and guns, etc, both of which have a lower percent chance than our possible CPS ceiling here of unexpectedly removing the child from your arms.
The CDC reports that between 140,000 – 710,000 hospitalizations per year are due to the flu. No one out there is saying that it's "sky high".
> Of course CPS will claim basically all those removals are valid, but we have very little independent third party verification to see if that is actually the case.
This is actually just nonsense.
> "legitimate" CPS kidnapping
This is just a deranged position to take.
> So you have really no data to present here, other than a ceiling of roughly 5% chance at the worst, which is absolutely bone-chillingly large.
While we're here I would also like to talk about how many of those 275k a year are sacrificed to the God of the Deepest Waters, Lord of Whales (and Wales), The Evercrescent. A vast number I'm sure!
Look we know when this stuff happens, they've got records and the CPS has been taken to court (and they've lost!). But unless you're talking about black or native american families, the amount is so minimal as to not warrant this fear mongering.
Not OP, I don't think it's fear mongering. The actual numbers are immaterial, all that matters is whether parents are scared that this might happen. If they're scared, they'll avoid leaving their children unattended. As a former educator I can confirm that many parents are scared, and that this fear is likely to continue so long as stories of these laws being enforced hit the news once every few years. We can average 1-2 cases every few years and as long as they get the right broadcast, that's all it takes.
This is the definition of fear mongering.
https://imprintnews.org/child-welfare-2/nearly-half-of-child...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-range_parenting#Legal_pro...
And I totally agree with you. Same with the "everyone gets a participation trophy" bullshit - it's not the kids, it is the parents. Kids don't have control over that.
The answer is "the media." There's a saying in media, "If it bleeds, it leads." Meaning horrible stories are the best stories. And so, with the advent of the 1980s and cable, then with internet exploding media channels in 2000, the world is awash with bad stories. And it seeps into society.
People get in actual trouble now if they let their child walk 1 mile to school and if it is elementary school. Police car trouble.
The actual crime rate is way, way declined over time, across the board. However, the perception of crime rate is it is going up.
So parents want to protect their children against all these manufactured bad things.
Starting around age 6 or 7 I was going into the woods playing with a friend and by 11 or so my parents had no problem with me riding my bike whwrever I wanted to around town, well before I had a cell phone.
Our one year old could walk to the kitchen and extract things from the fridge, though she would have difficulty opening some of them.
She absolutely cannot go to the supermarket to buy anything, and she cannot cross the street either.
A 3 year old doing all those things... I'm willing to believe some can, but it's definitely not the norm, and not because we don't let them. They just can't.
My dad also worked a bunch of jobs, one of which was selling firewood. At a young age I wasn't strong enough to move the logs around, but I could run the hydraulic splitter while he did the heavy lifting. I hated it at the time, but looking back at it fondly now because it was time with my dad teaching me about hard work by example. I ended up helping him with many of his jobs often late into the evening.
Are kids too protected today? IDK. Times are different. For example, using guns other than for hunting wasn't much of a thing. If you had a problem with another kid, you threw a few punches in the soccer field and then were friends again the next day. Zero social media meant when I was teased a school and went home, it didn't follow me. So while maybe kids are too protected now, the dangers have changed.
This is an incredibly romanticized view of the past. Gun violence from 1992-2019 was significantly lower than the previous 30 years.
And to the original post, there's also an income inequality component. More well off parents probably felt (rightly or wrongly) they could move to a safer place. That feeling has been eroded through school shootings, no matter how statistically insignificant they are.
When I was a teenager, if my parents wanted to find me on weekends, they'd have to resort to calling other parents until they tracked me down.
> Between 1960 and 1990 the death rate for children aged five to 14 fell 48 percent ... a growing share of the accelerating reduction in child mortality arises from a sharp drop in deaths from unintentional injury or accident.
Source: https://www.nber.org/digest/dec99/reducing-accidents-key-low...
The freedoms you describe did not come without significant cost. Some families paid the ultimate price.
The environment can be made safer for kids - and everyone for that matter - and the fact that that it is happening is a very good thing and only to be welcomed. Very, few would ever deny that.
If we were to revert back to attitudes of the 1950s and '60s and give today's kids the same freedoms and autonomy that kids had in that past era (except perhaps for some extreme cases at the margins), then where would that leave us?
No doubt, the mortality rate would rise for the aforementioned age groups but by how much? Those stats of 48% have to be carefully examined and broken down by location then state by state and then country by country (which would require additional data) if we are to gain accurate and meaningful figures. All else being equal, it may be that the actual freedoms and autonomy afforded to kids have to be scaled by location and circumstance - what's applicable in, say, NYC would likely be quite different to those for a town in outback Australia.
I don't know the answer to that question and I've not seen any figures to indicate that anyone else knows them with any level or degree of certainty. Only further research will provide accurate answers.
What I'm about to say next troubles me the most. I have an overactive amygdala and any discussion of metrics concerning kids' lives horrifies me but perhaps we may have to eventually confront the issue no matter how uncomfortable it may be (the death of any kid upsets me terribly and it's something that I'd personally much rather not confront).
As a society, like it or not, we may be confronted with the situation were we have to weigh up the mental health and suicide statistics for kids against the risks and dangers of providing them with additional freedoms to explore the world in ways they see fit - either singly by themselves and or with their mates. That's not saying adults shouldn't provide guidance, of course they should.
As I said, I don't the answers, but what I do know is that eventually we will have to confront the issue head-on.
I think it fitting to finish by saying that in hindsight and after witnessing the increasing rates of psychological problems and distress in kids today, that I've come to realize that the autonomy and freedoms that I had as a kid were near the most important developmental aspects of my childhood.
Frankly, the thought of growing up in today's society with its mixed and conflicting ethics and the strictures placed on kids' freedoms by both parents and society at large simply horrifies me.
There's also a secondary issue with overprotecting kids--they don't learn to be wary of the things they do need to be wary of. I'm thinking of a case here many years back, 13 year old only looks one (the wrong) way before walking through the school zone--2 minutes before the lights came on. She stepped out right in front of a truck. And I routinely see it in the wilderness--20's, 30's out there with no thought of what might go wrong. Just Sunday I saved a guy from a very unpleasant night--his phone was dead, he took the wrong fork and didn't realize it. I had talked to him earlier, encountered him again and realized he was on the right trail but going the wrong way. (He was parked at a different trailhead than I was.) No phone = no call for help and almost certainly no light--note that this was the day after a new moon--and even if he realized which branch to take at the next junction it still would have put him back in civilization several miles from his car. And if he took the wrong one--the trail name says "loop" but that will take you over an almost 12k summit, a total of nearly 20 miles.
I would distract the 7-11 clerk while my accomplice filled his backpack with candy, which he would then sell at elementary school at a 100 to 200 percent markup to the supervised children.
We would also rob the fifth grade school supplies store, which we were supposedly working at, and again, he would sell everything we stole for more than the people we stole from were selling it for. This is a good business tactic if you can make it work! This is not legal advice!
The last time I saw my accomplice would have been 89 or 90, I was in court to support a friend who had a minor criminal charge for some porch theft she had done, he was going down for possession of LSD with intent to sell. I think that's what the charges were, it was a long time ago. This was in the south, and in the early 90's in the south, I'm sure he did some time for that. I don't know what happened to him.
He did have his memories of a completely unsupervised youth to fall back on, as do I.
What would the parents have said, were they there? Only a 50% markup on stolen goods kids, don't be greedy?
How do you bring up the boogeyman out of nowhere when explaining that we believe in way too many boogeymen?
interesting.. this is roughly the milestones we've used for our kids. Not because that was told to us or we read it anywhere. Just because thats how we judged the kids capabilities and confidance levels.
My son (the oldest) hit the milestones a bit earlier then my daughter.
I remember being 4-years-old and unsupervised a lot. By 6 years old for sure. By 8...."Get out of the house and out from under my feet and don't come back until dinnertime! Now get out!"
It's a different world.
I don't know around half of my closest neighbours
It's not that I don't want to get to know them, it's that everyone are so busy (me included) that I don't simply have time to align with them to learn more about them better.
Also, tons of people are moving in and moving out all the time.
It wasn't the case in my home village - I knew a lot of people and even more people (my parent friends that I didn't know) knew who I was. I could bet at that time that if something bad was going on for me, there would be someone who will help me without any struggle.
In my current place is different. Even my relatives who stayed in my home town can agree that even there a lot of people are moving in and out and they don't know all of the townspeople anymore.
When we became parents my wife and I agreed that we wanted to let our kids explore the world with a similar level of freedom we had as a kids.
When my 3yo was about 2, he pushed through a defective locked gate and fell down a flight of stairs, losing a tooth. Then about three weeks ago he got distracted in the bathroom and fell off a stool with a toothbrush in his mouth. I'll spare you the details.
These accidents weren't directly caused by our goal of giving our kids more independence, but they had the effect of making that goal all but impossible, at least for now. I catch myself telling him he can't do things he could before, or saying "<childname> slow down!" about 100 times per day. Seeing him on a playground gives me terrible anxiety.
He's fine. He's not afraid of anything. He's so bloody resilient despite all his trauma. But I'm failing him because the risks feel so real and paralyzing. To love what death can touch...
One difference, I think, is that I am lucky enough to not be affected by the historical taboo of mental health. I'm seeking therapy for this, which I'm also not afraid to admit out loud. And I'm hopeful that it will help me face this.
sped down a giant incline right into a wall of concrete+rebar and had neighborhood kids literally carry me back home, stapled myself burnt myself on soldering irons cuts bruises so on... that kind of stuff I dont think even affects me physically, what sticks with me was the freedom to experiment with anything (I was also a bit of a rule breaker, breaking into unoccupied apartments in our building as a kid)
3 is a little young to have much independence anyways, I would think closer to 1st grade is when kids can start having bit more
This is very much a cultural and setting thing.
In Japan there’s a tradition of having kids, at around 3 years old, go out by themselves to run errands. There’s a whole tv show about it.
If you are curious about other cultures as well, there’s a pretty good documentary on Apple tv about the first 5 years of life of kids from all around the world, including kids in rural areas, big cities and even small remote tribes.
Regarding the setting, there are some places (like some resorts or big estates), where young kids can be very safe and that allows them to be on their own a lot and build their independence.
Young children do do things at a much younger age independently in japan than america, but it's not like the show.
edit: not to imply the show is fake or anything. It's just a special situation the show is filming.
Of course I don't always let the kid do it, but I try to keep an open mind for what they're capable of.
Because otherwise they're going to silently sit and watch and wait, and then one night grab the car keys and put the car in neutral and roll down the driveway into the neighbor's yard.
At least so I've heard.
I certainly did my fair share of independent acting out in my teen years (the car example is right on the nose for me) but we've got a lot of groundwork to lay before we get to that point. As far as I can tell the next target is learning how to use a doorknob, which will bring its own set of challenges.
Remember that… sticks are sharp, your sister is standing right next to you, rocks are heavy.
Notice how… these rocks are slippery, the glass is filled up to the top, that branch is strong.
What’s your plan… with that big stick, if you climb up that tree?
Do you feel… stable on that rock, balanced on that step, the heat from the fire?
How will you… get down, go up, get across?
Can you see… the toys on the floor, the end of the path, that big rock over there?
Can you hear… the rushing water, the wind, the other kids playing?
Try using your… hands, feet, arms, legs.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/stop-telling-kids-careful-in...
Earlier this summer we had our family holiday in Italy. In week one I had a bike accident which necessitated a visit to the local emergency room and I was wearing a dressing on my arm for the entire holiday. In week two my daughter had an unlucky fall and cut her forehead which necessitated a(nother) visit to the local emergency room, she needed stitches. In week three our eldest was stung by a jellyfish while swimming in the sea. Huge weals all down his body but (fortunately) no trip to ... the emergency room.
We have three kids and you would not believe the number of times I've had to drop everything to take one or other of them to the doctor and/or the hospital.
> the risks feel so real and paralyzing
Seriously: please don't give up on your wish to let your kids explore the world!
What parents can perceive as trauma is a really cool story for a kid.
This would cost most families (without gold plated healthcare subsidies from being a government employee or other generous employer in the US) $10k to ~$17.5k per year, and those ranges go up every year.
A single doctor visit is usually $200 to $300, and emergency room visit might as well be your annual out of pocket maximum ($10k to $17k).
I grew up before out of pocket maximums were a thing, and I remember my dad distinctly telling me to be careful not to injure myself because it could derail the whole family’s future. This was because my parents were immigrants who were building a small business, so they had equity to lose, but not enough cash flow to purchase healthcare. I also thought about impacts to my sister’s future, who is 6 years younger.
I never did participate in sports and never needed to go to the doctor or dentist.
Today, I earn enough to not have to worry about healthcare expenses, but I would not have had kids if I did not have the ability to pay for two calendar years’ worth of out of pocket expenses (~$34k, in case injury occurs on Dec 31).
Maybe the parent poster does not live in the US ;-)
In the spirit of sharing data from a very different system:
Emergency room visit was €40 for me (checkup/cleaning/dressing), €55 for my daughter (stitches apparently cost extra).
A simple follow-up doctor/clinic visit in Italy was €15 (first time) / €10 (repeat), I paid this a few times each time I had my wounds cleaned and dressed, and again for my daughter when she had her stitches taken out and a check-up a few days later.
These days "media", meaning news and social media, seem to act as more as an anxiety pipeline than an information service. I also feel it forms a violence feedback loop by fueling peoples fears until the mentally unstable among us feel so cornered they lash out violently like a trapped animal. Of course this is on purpose because information is boring and they needs advertising revenue. Anxiety makes more money. Seems coincidentally the perfect time to decriminalize weed.
This subject is a political football and the individual views and biases of researchers often taint the data. We won't make significant progress until we find ways of minimizing this problem.
Why do folks have so much issues with letting life just unravel, and desperately trying to control every aspect of it, yet consistently being reminded how they are failing? I don't have any mental issues so its very hard for me to imagine what it causes. What I describe is natural to me, and seems almost impossible to force upon yourself for you.
Good luck with help, your kids need it.
There are probably other factors too. I wonder if there was a kind of overcompensation from "latchkey kids" when they became parents.
After cutting the cord when our first daughter was born, we were often surprised to come down from a hotel room to get breakfast in the lobby to find that some horrific things were happening, cities were burning, people being murdered, a world spinning out of control.
Oh yeah, I had to remind myself, cable news was like that. So we grabbed coffee to go and headed out to the National Park to hike with the kids.
I don't know why more gyms don't show sports on the TVs. It seems like a much more natural fit.
Me too.
With that being said, as a parent now, the #1 fear I have with my children playing outside unsupervised isn't kidnapping or violence or anything that would appear on Unsolved Mysteries or America's Most Wanted.
It's cars. My fear is cars.
My boys are 7 & 5 years old and they are both very inattentive. No matter how hard I try to put the fear of the road into them, they both have a tendency to mindlessly wander into it without looking. My older one is autistic, so I'm sure that has something to do with it, but my younger one is not and he is even worse.
I live in a suburb in Maryland named Columbia. Its residential areas were thoughtfully planned-out with very few "busy roads" running through them, but I regularly see people (teenagers?) flooring 50+mph down sleepy tree-lined 25mph streets.
I have no doubt in my mind that, if left unattended, both of my boys would be run over by one of these insane drivers within a week.
Edit: Yes, we and others have complained to the city. Yes, there are speed cameras and the like, but this behavior has only gotten worse post-COVID.
Edit 2: Looks like I'm not alone in thinking this way… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32679858
Nor do they help against drivers looking down at their phones.
Yes, kids brains are underdeveloped, but streets accommodate that there, it's not a death sentence.
It's absolutely unreal how far America seems to have fallen behind, compared to just 10-15 years ago, and how far ahead new traffic calming measures have gotten there in that same timeframe. That's the main thing that strikes us on our return. The absolute complete solipsism on this issue, how trashy and violent the public realm is here.
There was a saying "It takes a village to raise a child" but in modern America each family is closer to being an island to themselves trying to raise their children - there almost certainly are a dozen or so other parents you've met at parks and other things that you trust but those parents might live quite far away from you.
Living in a car oriented culture comes with serious societal issues.
The car was part of a total private technology revolution that fundamentally reduced socialization for work and play.
In retrospect, could we have done this through social events or aggressive reach-outs - sure. But the apathy and distraction provided by using a car to go somewhere was a constant saboteur.
The saddest thing to me that the window is so small to fix it. If my city dawdles another 5-10 years to make our streets safer, my kids will be old enough for it not to matter anymore.
It's a really hard choice. How long are we waiting around until we just pack up and move to somewhere that is safe, to a place where our kids can have independent mobility.
America is so way behind, not only the major centers, even worse in all the 2nd and 3rd tier cities where people still get an aneurysm when somebody dares to suggest to install a bikelane.
Instead we get nearly identical developments repeated over and over and over again.
Signs and warnings rank very low in the hierachy of engineering controls.
The safest option would be to physically prevent vehicles able to travel at greater than 15mph from being in areas with children.
The next safest would be to redesign the street to prevent high-powered vehicles from being able to travel at greater than 15mph.
Stop sign planning usually says to avoid 4 way stops and to give give preference to one of the streets (usually the busier), meaning that if those are used one street at any interspection will probably be one with few stops, allowing cars to build up speed.
Roundabouts (preferably with a physical center median) are the right choice for residential streets, but in most of the US they are still considered "weird", so subdivision developers don't make much use of them.
And the neighbor across something similar, that narrow gap between them slows people down naturally.
Here's a nearby example road: https://www.google.com/maps/search/39.20251909603638,+-76.82...
We have regular speed bumps. They drive 50+mph, slow down, go over them, and then accelerate back up to 50+mph like it's NASCAR or something.
Where I grew up a .22 was considered a kid rifle. Yes, FL, but I think it was common in other places.
They have .20ga shotguns, too, but don't get nearly as much use out of those.
We currently live in a neighborhood, and my biggest fear in letting them run around is other people calling the police on them for just being unattended. I've already had that happen once, while they were in my own front yard.
We're in the process of looking for a bigger property, further away from other people, where our kids can actually be kids. We'll be able to keep some livestock, and they can ride four-wheelers, gokarts, and dirt bikes. Today they can only do those things when we take them somewhere there's room to do it.
Serial killers are extremely rare, exceptionally few people will ever know somebody who knows somebody who knew a victim of one. Everybody today knows that serial killers exist, but most people only know it because they heard about it from mass media, not because they have some sort of personal experience with it. I think this surely leads people to overestimate the risk.
I always think the gangs and crack epidemic were major contributors too. This was also the era of drive by shootings and gangster rap/culture infiltrating the middle class and WASP folks homes via their children and popular media of all kinds. I also remember teenage pregnancy seemed like a bigger issue then and a reason parents controlled their daughters more closely. The nightly news was reporting on this stuff and many inner city areas were severely depressed. I think in a lot of those areas that have since been gentrified we probably forget just how bad it was for a time.
Having just read his recent book and both the books he mentions in the article, I actually started to understand what is being said here.
On the first page of the Tao Te Ching (Stephen Mitchell translation), it talks about the true source of understanding is darkness.
> Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
> Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
> Yet mystery and manifestations
> arise from the same source.
> This source is called darkness.
> Darkness within darkness.
> The gateway to all understanding.
We can't teach kids nor ourselves to fear the world. We have to step into the darkness to gain clarity of who we are and what we are here to do. That's the only way to learn. This somewhat adds onto Scott Barry Kaufman's new ideas of self-actualization.
Kaufman uses a sailboat as a metaphor in which the hull is security and the sail is growth.
https://scottbarrykaufman.com/sailboat-metaphor/
Which reminds me of the famous quote:
> A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.
I assume it paid pretty well. I also assume it's pretty easy to be nice and easygoing and thoughtful when you don't have to worry about where your kids next meal or health insurance payment is coming from.
Yes! This is my issue as well. Drivers on residential streets have gotten so much worse since I was a kid in the '80/90s.
I read a really great book about this recently -- no vested interest beyond just really liking it. Check it here [1]
And in suburbs across the US, it is very normal to have numerous arterial roads (40mph speed limit) cut through suburbs that are 4, 6, 7, and even 8 lanes wide.
How even a healthy, mobile adult is expected to cross these 60ft+ wide intersections without being scared, I do not know.
There will be 3 lanes going straight through, and a right turn lane and a left turn lane. And half the people will be in SUV/pickup trucks sitting so high they will not see you in front of them, and their giant A pillar will prevent them from seeing you on the side of them.
For me:
1> My kindergarten was adjacent to my subdivision. My Catholic elementary school was less that one mile away and very walkable. The public Jr. High and High Schools I went to were a bit over a mile. None of these required crossing busy four lane roads ("Stroads" in Strong Towns parlance). The one exception was my Pre-K that was more like 3 or 4 miles and would involve crossing a busy four lane road.
My kids went to private schools that all required getting on an interstate to get to. Even if they went to public school, the nearest build is 2.8 miles and involve walking along parts without sidewalks.
2> Growing up, I had a big public park adjacent to my subdivision (on the opposite side as the kindergarten) I had most of my soccer and baseball practices there and I walked to them.
Similar parks would be 3-5 miles drive across very busy four lane highways where I live now.
3> Nearest grocery store was 1.2 miles from my childhood home.
Now, it is 4 miles up and across a very busy four lane highway.
Of course a lot of this is just where I happen to be buy my house as an adult and I was fortunate to grow up in a flatter part of town, but it would not be surprising that sprawl has increased the distances on average of these and other basic amenities.
I like the idea of not allowing highway vehicles near people. Park your interstate cruiser on the edge of town and then drive a golf cart to your house.
Bonus: driving a golf cart is fun and feels fast at low speeds.
Snark aside, the key point is that the statistics that you are worried are still increasing are still nonetheless Black Swan events on an individual scale. Their increase should absolutely be a concern at the political, urban planning, and public health levels, but it should never be a reason to discourage or forbid activities that in all regards are healthier and more formative as a person than their avoidance.
You’re right, of course - I would much rather my kid have the same feeling of independence that I did than be stuck at home or tethered to their parents. I’ve just moved to one of the only remaining reasonably walkable/bikeable suburbs in my area for that reason. Doesn’t mean it won’t still be hard though given the rising risks.
(I’ve also been trying to get involved in safe streets advocacy lately for the same reason. Who knows if that’ll ever have an impact but I have to try.)
A suboptimal but creative solution I saw recently was neighbors working together to remove their backyard fences to create a large and safe play area for children in the suburbs.
I don’t know what the solution is but it is frightening how society at large just accepts the deaths and injuries. And in my neighborhood how people drive fast around blind corners knowing there is an elementary school 5 blocks away and kids everywhere on all manner of bike/board/walk.
This is something I would love to do, but still feels so impossible. I see some homes compromise and put gates in the fence. Where I am, I see probably 70%+ of homes with backyards using them as bathrooms for their dogs, and I imagine that many people would have a problem just with the basic social contract of who cleans dog poop.
Particularly due to COVID, I've begun to appreciate just how severely the suburban structure negatively impacts all aspects of our lives. You have HOAs that invest in common playgrounds, cities that have invested in parks, and virtually everyone reports extremely high satisfaction with these things. Yet my own feelings of isolation tells me that we need much much more. I'm at the point that I would seriously seek out and move to a place with a walk-able kid-friendly setup. But it just doesn't exist.
The rub is that they make driving less convenient, so it’s hard to get people to support them. But between making our streets safer for kids and making driving a little easier I will always choose safety.
This assumes that maniacs and teenagers won't work their ass off to make those traffic calming methods ineffective.
My neighborhood has regular speedbumps, curvy roads, and a speed limit of 25mph. The local crazies accelerate to 50+mph right after they drive over the speed bump.
Beyond that, yes, even with traffic calming some people will be reckless. That’s when enforcement comes into play, but it only works effectively on neighborhood streets in concert with traffic calming. (Otherwise you’ll waste your resources and make people mad because everyone will be speeding!)
We worked hard canvassing and educating and “only” got a 52% turnout and a 100% yes vote for traffic calming. So the vote failed.
I wrote a 10 page report on all of the ballot design failings, administrative issues, equity issues, etc and they are reforming the program and introducing digital ballots. Still working on that 67% requirement though (a recent 9 figure school bond passed with a 37% turnout).
As someone involved in election systems to some degree it was eye opening seeing something so poorly designed and executed.
That said traffic calming isn’t necessary if the roads are designed to prioritize pedestrians from the beginning. It is a patch to a bad design- or at least a design that prioritizes the wrong thing.
I feel it messed me up a lot.
For instance, there's a non-zero chance you could lose your life every time you get into a car. However, almost everybody still hops into cars because the chance of a life-altering accident (if the driver not drinking and/or driving like a maniac) is relatively low and the benefits to cars in your life are high.
Where I think this ability for normal people to make sensible choices gets warped is when the media's business model of driving emotional and catchy stories interferes with peoples' actual perceptions of risk. For example, there are healthy young people still utterly scared to death of Covid because their preferred media tells them to be afraid. You can apply this to almost any hot button issue that the media has adopted and find people who have had their sense of the actual risk warped.
1. https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...
To be clear, virtually every human activity is technically dangerous and there's a non-zero risk in almost any human activity. By the dictionary definition, owning a pool is technically dangerous because people drown and get hurt all of the time. Hell, a bucket causes a non-zero number of drowning deaths. People can die from blender accidents or shitting too hard or swallowing quarters or tripping to death on a power cord. Everything is technically dangerous.
Almost no one is punching in the numbers on their risk profile, checking, hm, 2.5 million injuries per year, 35,000 fatalities per year, 15,000 miles driven, advantages of independent mobility, how much will this trip to hang out with Jim affect my overall quality of life... No, they're assuming "I'm a good driver, I actually have quick reflexes and a safe car, nothing's going to happen". Or they're assuming that the roads are a jungle and you're almost certain to get into a crash eventually, holding negative primals about the safety of car-oriented culture.
Likewise, I suspect that some of the negative outcomes described in the article:
> As much as we hope the dangerous-world belief will help our kids, the evidence indicates that it does exactly the opposite. In the same paper, Clifton and Meindl show that people holding negative primals are less healthy than their peers, more often sad, more likely to be depressed, and less satisfied with their lives. They also tend to dislike their jobs and perform worse than their more positive counterparts.
are more appropriate given the reality of the situation. What if your job - statistically, you're probably pushing data from one silo to another to help add another decimal place to some executive's net worth - is not actually likeable? Would you rather plaster an ignorant smile to your face and be proud of your attention to detail on those TPS reports, and happy that IT brought you a new, slightly larger monitor? Perhaps you'd call yourself depressed or sad when you consider the probable state of the global climate at your eventual retirement date (if you ever get a retirement date, that assumes social security still exists, your company doesn't discharge your pension through bankruptcy, and your investments outperform rabid inflation rates).
My stated caveat is that risk assessment works "fairly well for normal life tasks". People decide to travel in cars and fly and do all sorts of things involving non-zero risk and make fairly reasonable decisions.
It's once media influence arrives (Covid!, climate change!, guns!, etc) that peoples' perceptions about actual risk for hot button issues can be warped.
There's also tribal knowledge within a group of kids. When you're old enough to join the group, you learn from others how to safely cross a busy intersection, how to run when you encounter a deranged homeless person, how to help a friend that fell off their bike 5 miles from home without a phone in your pocket, etc. There's no support group to join so your kids would be figuring all that stuff out on their own.
The trouble is fear is increasing each year. We have more and more restrictions, security checks, protocols, warning signs & labels, negative news than ever.
You're going to have to take some risks and go against the status quo. You may even be wrong. but it's worth the risk to raise a capable generation.
How to raise kids who give back to the world
Optimism, not despair, is the way to inspire kids to help the future.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/8/25/23318194/childr...
I agree with the idea in general I guess, but there's nothing here to convince a parent.
Just my data point, my kids are freaking crazy and are slowly becoming less suicidal as they hit elementary school.
We try to educate them about things that are legitimately unsafe, but they would need to fear consequences to actually do what they're told, and we don't really want them acting out of fear.
Who knows what the real numbers are, but I wouldn't try to claim my kids are safer.
I wonder if some of it is because we haven't had wars, famines, etc. in the US recently so not a good reference point for what's truly life threatening.
/my kids are 12 and 10
In Canada same 7 year old is not allowed to walk home 8 mins away. With friends, over 1 intersection that has a crossing guard. Wtf
Half the people in the class would get in trouble with the family services(fucking joke) because we allow kids to play in park unsupervised.
It is not just people’s perception it is also idiotic bureaucrats and politicians creating more regulations to grow the beast
I like teachers in our school I think most know how stupid this is, but do they want to lose their job and career over it..?
Of course there are also idiotic parents but they are minority.
Like the ones that don’t allow their kids to use matches when they are 9.. or use sharp knife at same age poor kid had his eye pop out when he saw my younger daughter(6) cut a steak with a knife. Blows my mind.
It's probably been since the 50s that you can't find such playground equipment in the U.S.
They meet friends along the way, play games, take detours, catch lizards, but also learn how to manage their time. It’s very good for them.
Not reading all that.
I'd have more fear for kids in teenage and young adult years, as either foolishness or being too trusting can lead to ostracization or even jail time.
> "In 2020, there were 618,399 victims of child abuse in the United States. This is a decrease from the previous year, when there were 656,251 victims of child abuse, and is the lowest number of victims since 2012." (Statista)
Now there are an estimated 70,000,000 children (age 0-17) in the USA, but it's likely that child abuse is significantly underreported.
So, do you tell kids that child abuse is insignificant, that there aren't dangerous people (actual child abusers) and that they don't need to even think about it? What should they do then, if they learn that one of their friends is a victim of child abuse?
The whole article seems a bit Pollyanish. Kids can handle learning about things like wars, resource exhaustion, economic instability, etc. They can also learn that cars are dangerous and that they shouldn't run into the street without looking, all without going into a state of debilitating fearfulness.
It's just a matter of balance - for example, it's a good idea to tell kids that media outlets tend to cover the worst stories, not the best, so blind faith in media - i.e. the belief that reading the newspaper or watching a news show means you have a broad picture of the world - is unwise.
You can't really give parents advice on what to teach kids if the parents themselves are the problem.
They're going to do the same for the kids...
I think we need to start with everyone.
Lots of childhood warnings about drugs or razor blades in Halloween candy.
There were never any drugs in our Halloween candy.
I am in the same situation, but I would not come to same conclusion. Although we were in very dangerous situations as kids, surprisingly little happened. None of my friends have died or been badly injured. I think you have to look at the risks and make a realistic assessment. I am horrified to imagine my own daughter in some of the situations I was facing, but still I do not want to supervise her all the time when she gets older.
Actually, I have a slightly different problem: I grew up in a very small village on the country side in Austria, but now I am living in a big city (Vienna). The country side comes with its own kind of risks (free-running dogs, dangerous country roads, forests, mountains, lakes), but they are completely different than the ones you would face in a city. Since I have no experience what it's like to grow up in a city, I'm not sure how I should raise my daughter. I guess I just have to look at what my friends are doing with their kids :-)
I forget if it was this book or somewhere else I heard it, but they had a pretty pithy comment that's stuck with me since - something along the lines of "The objective of parenting isn't to raise good kids, your job as a parent is to raise good adults".
'Kids these days. I walked 10km to school everyday barefoot on a dirt road with a racoon for a hat. Didn't hear me complaining...'
For anyone who hasn’t watched Old Enough, go watch it. It’s a documentary on how in Japanese culture it common to give extremely young kids large responsibilities.
A 2-year old literally walks over a mile alone across busy roads to go grocery shopping for his family.
I'm not necessarily against syncretism or reading e.g. Buddhist 慈悲 compassion as a form of love to make a Christian-Buddhist hybrid thought, but in the specific case of Laozi, I cannot believe that any of what Laozi is saying has gotten through to someone who thinks you can use "love" in this passage.
btw, i wished my parents were a bit harsh when i was at my early 20s working as a bicycle courier to get money for a bicycle touring trip around South America... maybe if they told me i could got involved in an accident and get f#$%&! or dead i would have this insight 3 years sooner than by my own
— Fred Rogers
How about that?
Essentially, this is a new playbook by the wealthy of owning nothing, slaving away and being happy doing it.
There's no better illustration of this than the widespread confusion about vaccines, not just among "the hesitant". Responding to lopsided risk vs reward ratios, like safe vaccines for dire diseases, should be a slam dunk (polio, smallpox, typhoid). And if you're in a vulnerable subclass (old, immuno-compromised, etc) the same clarity should hold for more modest diseases because they can be mortal for you. SUCH TRADEOFFS SHOULD BE OBVIOUS. It's only the low-reward moderate-risk choices that deserve closer scrutiny (like flu vaccination for kids).
Somehow we all need to learn the two essentials: 1) the basics of probability and how to properly balance risk vs reward, and 2) what are the necessary/sufficient facts -- what do we really know, and how confident should we be in using that knowledge? This really should be taught in every pubic school math class. For 90% of the population, it's much more valuable a skill than typical math courses like geometry, trig, and calculus.
Properly understanding risk is also central to basic reasoning skills. Unlike what's taught in academia, the truths of the world are rarely binary/propositional. When thinking rationally, one needs to be clear in choosing the relevant value proposition (the measure of success/failure) and whether the proposed course of action will achieve it (likelihood of a plan's success/failure). That's a continuous probability, not a binary choice, and we need to develop intuition for how to weigh outcomes against our plans for achieving them.
Minimizing risk should be an engineered response, where we can explain why we believe as we do. The sooner we can all be clear headed about what we know, what we want, and the real risk of success/failure, the better we will be at dealing with all probable worlds.
My parents had no idea where I was, whom I was with and what I was doing. I learned how to use my body and its limits. I learned to make friends as well as enemies. We played creatively with whatever environment we encountered in ways positive and negative (setting small things on fire and such). Play. Experiment. Screw up. Learn.
All of this in an environment far less safe than today, in a pretty dysfunctional neighborhood.
One day I came home crying, as a much larger kid hit me in the face. I found little emotional support as my dad said to just hit him back. As I explained that the kid was much older and larger..."well, get a piece of wood then".
Crude. Today's parents may even find it neglectful or abusive. But it wasn't. It's one of several experiences that have shaped me for the better.
As I did get that piece of wood and walked towards my attacker, he could see me coming. I was scared as hell, this wood would do very little in the hands of a significantly weaker kid. Yet he made a run for it, and as word got around, nobody ever messed with me again. Because I was strong? No. Because I came back.
I solved a seemingly impossible problem all by myself. It's made me a problem solver for life. I learned that negative experiences are inevitably part of life, and thus ordinary. This affords me to take a hit (physically, financially, otherwise) without getting into a state of existential panic. Nor would I waste much time complaining about it. I just calmly accept it and solve it.
Another example were the few years where we were really poor. The family was under regular threat of repossession. Sometimes my dad told me to hide my toys. Half of those toys were fake. My dad's attempts to mimic A-brand toys by replicating them with cardboard and tape.
Traumatic? No. I simply learned to detach myself from objects. As they're just that: objects. I still got fed, had clothes, and with an outdoor play lifestyle, I needed little else to be happy. I carry this with me to this day: I appreciate luxuries, but don't depend on them emotionally.
The point of all this is that this unshielded, unmanaged childhood is life itself. By experiencing its highs and lows, you develop skills and character, useful for your entire life. Plus it's just a whole lot more fun compared to a golden prison.
"A ship is most safe in the harbor, but that's not what ships are for".
Oh, also...stop grinding kids by overloading them with tasks and rules. Fuck "responsibility". They're kids. They can grind for 50 years once they're adults, now is the time for irresponsibility :)
The best thing to teach your kid is to clearly show them how the media and politicians lie and manipulate by showing their contradtory talking vs behaviour vs what they actually do side-by-side meme style.
In my experience this also works for impressionable adults but you have to keep them close
> This kind if title is rich coming from the fear mongering media. Particularly as the story right above this in the most popular stories section is "America’s Fall Booster Plan Has a Fatal Paradox"
and
> The best thing to teach your kid is to clearly show them how the media and politicians lie and manipulate by showing their contradtory talking vs behaviour vs what they actually do side-by-side meme style.
Don't have much substance at all. One has an anecdote of the form "the same website has another article with a hyperbolic title!" (This is a classic sort of "disagreement implies deceit" argument as is always brought up when scientists disagree on things, or consensus changes.) The other has a claim of "what [the media] says and does is different" in a way that suggests this is distinctive/meaningfully different in that way than in terms of any other human's behavior without any supporting substance, you're just supposed to accept it on faith that "the media" are intentionally manipulative hypocrites. Even if this is correct, it's not actually a substantial argument as presented, it will only possibly work on the already-converted.
Where was the nuance when almost the entire media was towing the line to cover up the Hunter Biden laptop leak articles as "Russian Disinformation"? It was a complete lie. That's not just one article, it was dozens with no nuance to be found.
Calling it a coverup is quite an accusation; do you have any evidence for that?
I also remember it differently, with that being one theory expressed at the time, and it is certainly in line with what Russia has gotten up to in the past. I wondered how it turned out. From Wikipedia, on what independent analysts hired by the Washington Post found:
"One of the analysts characterized the data as a 'disaster' from a forensics standpoint. The analysts found that people other than Biden had repeatedly accessed and copied data for nearly three years; they also found evidence others had written files to the drive both before and after the October 2020 New York Post reports. In September 2020, someone created six new folders on the drive, including with the names 'Biden Burisma,' 'Salacious Pics Package' and Hunter. Burisma Documents.'"
But none of that addresses my actual question, which is asking for evidence that it's a coverup.
As for evidence that it was a coverup, Mark Zuckerberg stated publicly that FB algorithmically suppressed the story because the FBI came to them warning that it was Russian disinformation (of course they used the phrase "has all the hallmarks of" so they can deny that they lied about it later). Of course he could be lying, but I don't think he is, and you just asked for evidence, not outright proof.
Given that you and the other poster seem to be indulging in low-fact speculation, I think I'm done here.
Now how, exactly, would someone provide "evidence" that there was a coverup?
In Watergate, Leon Jaworski went to elaborate lengths to prove it with conversations, statements by collaborators, written documents, etc. Do you expect ordinary people to have that?
So we're left with extremely strict standards from "fact checkers" when Trump says anything, and "hey, what the hell, he meant well" when Biden says something blatantly wrong. For example:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-ar-15-bullet-gun/
So they rate this a "correct attribution" even though they say "the President's claim is false."
I'm glad you're done here. Otherwise, you'd have to go to even more insane contortions now.
I expect people not to make factual claims when they have no facts. If you want to say, "I have no proof but I believe in my heart it was a coverup", that's fine. If you want, feel free to build your worldview around vibes or whatever. Just don't pretend otherwise.
If someone says "all sheep are white" disproof comes from just one black sheep. So if we say "the establishment media covered up this story" you can disprove it with one, or preferably several references where it was covered fairly and prominently. But you can't, can you?
The fact that 50 "retired intelligence officers" said it had "all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation" when none of them had examined it -- do you want a citation for that?
How about that Zuckerberg said, and the FBI admitted, that they warned him about a "Russian document dump"?
How if you give us citations? Show us all the NYT and WaPo stories about the laptop before the election, and what page they ran on. Especially highlight the ones that talked about its content, or showed the pictures of Hunter?
As to the first point, assuming for the moment that whatever you're quoting is a good source, the easy explanation is that what was disclosed at the time did indeed have the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. That being something that is well studied by intelligence officers, and something that Russia produces quite a lot of.
You are demanding I prove a negative: that it was deliberately covered up. No, you need to show how it was NOT covered up. That only takes a reference or two.
As is your second paragraph: to only say "other disinformation looks like this, so we're just going to go with that and ignore it, instead of digging deeper into it" is what a press outlet that's in the tank does. It's not what an objective outlet does.
That is actually a positive. You're saying people did particular things. That's a positive assertion. Asking me to show that there was no conspiracy is the request to prove a negative. Which you are correct to think impossible.
In some small way, the FBI itself is admitting fault and cleaning house ([1], [2])
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/fbi-officials-told-agents-not-1249421...
[2] https://dailycaller.com/2022/08/25/hunter-biden-laptop-fbi-2...
Mark Zuckerberg says they downplayed the story at FBI direction:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532
So what's your next line of retreat?
OK, I'll give you FBI and Facebook. But you still haven't proven the other media!
Those are all questionable sites
This sentiment is... exactly the opposite. It is completely possible for there to be problems in the media, and for there also to be content it produces that is good and makes sense.
Could the media be better? Sure. Does your almost comically negative comment really serve to help anyone? No.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/10/reading-t...
"Reading Too Much Political News Is Bad for Your Well-Being"
> For example, Dutch researchers in 2017 conducted a study on how hard news that tends to provide a political perspective affects well-being. They found that on average, well-being falls 6.1 percent for every additional television hard news program watched a week. They explained this by noting the dominance of negative stories on such programs, and the powerlessness viewers might feel in the face of all that bad news. It’s difficult to imagine that stories about political news in America would have any less of a negative impact—especially given how fraught and contentious United States politics is now.
Prescribed remedy is to avoid such media:
> 2. Ration your consumption of politics and limit the time you spend discussing it.
> 3. Turn off ultra-partisan news sources, especially on your own side.
Some people become truly obsessed with flamebait political news but there is more constructive criticism to be made about our free press that, though not perfect, is better than the alternatives. It should be respectfully criticized but cherished.
The shallow drive-by bomb throwing is getting a bit much around here as of late.
This gave me a good chuckle. I can't rebut it.
Anyway, I don't think this is best considered as a free vs nonfree press issue. The press in America are motivated by profit. If people are taught and encouraged to reduce their consumption of fear mongering media, the free press will adjust to suit the new demand.
I definitely agree that people need to reduce consumption of fear mongering media but I'm not holding my breath! Is this just established news media trying and failing to compete with social media where the sky is on fire and falling 24/7?
GP's comment was impulsive.
I’d change the link title to “Miserable, childless misanthrope and establishment propagandist chides you for concerns over your childrens’ safety and affirms that to be fashionable you must pretend not to notice the ruling strata has deliberately undermined public safety and social cohesion for decades for cynical personal financial gain and service to the progressive pseudo-religion”
Now it’s comically negative in a “it’s funny because it’s true” kind of way.
The cycle is meant to continue forever, increasing in velocity, until all the paperclips are belong to us :)
Depending on which part of "the media" you look at, you'll get very different takes on various issues, some with significantly more substance behind them than others.
I checked, and it looks like it’s coming from “Arthur C. Brooks”, a 58 year old Harvard professor from Spokane, Washington, who has a spouse and three kids. He’s a real person, with a real life.
I don't know about credibility, but he's not a fear monger.
Other people with the same job, who he doesn't know or control, wrote different opinions, so he's not allowed to have/express his without being called a hypocrite?
I guess now the length constraints are less, unless there's also a print edition. But in any case, it's still probably the job of someone other than the writer.
The complaint isn’t about the vaccine, but the “deadly paradox” where vaccines become more effective the more people who take them. Further suggesting the policy to only hand it out to the fully vaccinated is a mistake.
And they die in car accidents on their way to get a lottery ticket. And people are horrible about comparing such small probabilities.
On the other hand you'll inevitably 100% die and very likely leave your child to live in the world (s)he is scared of.
Odds of winning the lottery: one out of 302,575,350; Odds of your child being kidnapped in a year: three out of 250
https://www.creditdonkey.com/kidnapping-statistics.html
205 kids per year are abducted by strangers in US. More people per year win some kind of significant lottery.
Also, there are 80M kids, if 205 kids per year get kidnapped that's still better odds than winning the lottery.
And you can look at the raw incidence in various way to get various probabilities.
And even 205 in 80M is small enough so that people are unable to reason about it. Which you clearly display.
https://youtu.be/eF-E40pxxbI?t=4445
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Meditations on Moloch is a great write up.
And if you know what the elites do at Bohemian Grove (worship an effigy of Molech) it will help you see the truth behind the bullshit system of evil we actual live under.
And if youre new to this ancient concept - then please dont give me "conspiracy theory" bullshit, it will only show that you need to read up on this.
Seriously, this is a fantastic summary of Molech and how it represents capitalism.
<<Teaching your kids that the world is dangerous can also make them less tolerant of others.
Should kids be taught that the world is not dangerous to make kids less likely to be tolerant ( I attempted to retain the qualifiers )?
Edit: I decided to remove the rest of the comment. The argument I presented for dangerous/safe world seemed off after I re-read it.
If my kids fear that anyone who is not in their group is out to harm them,then they will become less tolerant of anyone not in their group. Dunno why you put it on the head like that?
Second part is more personal, would I be willing to sacrifice my kids safety in the name of tolerance? I know how I answer that question. I am all but certain most people answer it the same way.
To put it simply, as values come: kids > tolerance.
Teaching intolerance to children? Yeah, that's a bad thing.
Intolerance itself is amoral. Intolerance of bad things is good. Intolerance of good things is bad. Part of raising a kid is teaching them which things should be tolerated and which things not to tolerate. Absolute tolerance isn't virtuous, it makes you a wet noodle with no spine.
The problem you're running into is mistaking statistics for personal actions.
you can get tetanus from a rusty nail, the solution is more care around rusty nails, not to refuse to work around them. Or disallow your children from working around them. In fact, disallowing that harms them in the long run as they never learn how to work around them with more care.
At the end of day being alive implies risk, teaching your children how to manage that risk is a part of your job as a parent.
I do want to point out that the moment you call everything racist, nothing is racist. Same applies to most labels used to attempt to shut down discussions based on merits/data/statistics rather than emotions and rallying flag keywords. In the old country, my parents did not let me play with other white kids for reasons other than race. Were their intolerance so different, because it did touch the color of the skin? It is not a bait. It is a real question.
<< At the end of day being alive implies risk, teaching your children how to manage that risk is a part of your job as a parent.
We are in agreement.
<< Or disallow your children from working around them. In fact, disallowing that harms them in the long run as they never learn how to work around them with more care.
Depends on the kid temperament really. I was somewhat obedient. My sister was not.
You did not really answer the question about intolerance. Is racism tolerable? Should you not "not to refuse to work around them" based on your own argument?
What was actually said is that if your criteria applies to racist actions there's a problem with your criteria, in the same way that if your behavior results in someones death, there's a problem with your behavior.
statistically speaking, most murders are perpetrated by black men. So statistically speaking, your garden variety racist is right to distrust their black neighbor.
^ that the above is true speaks clearly to the flaw in your thinking.
Could you elaborate a little bit? I do not want to put words in your mouth.
What is the problem with my criteria? Are the criteria applied inherently racist? Am I racist the moment if I apply them even if they are not inherently racist?
<<statistically speaking, most murders are perpetrated by black men. So statistically speaking, your garden variety racist is right to distrust their black neighbor.
Well, duh. You don't have to convince me. As any city-dweller will tell you, as you approach a stranger on a sidewalk at night, you run an internal calculus of expected danger. You typically develop sharp senses rather fast as a result^ that the above is true speaks clearly to the flaw in your thinking. . I am thinking Chicago/New York ( but I would assume it applies to any bigger city really ).
We can talk about whether it is fair or not, but that is the reality of our current existence. You want to change it, change the proportions and start putting more whities in jail ( I am all for increasing accountability; maybe things will improve in general if the laws are applied across the board ). Alternatively, we can try seeing what can be done to ensure less crimes are committed in urban areas so that whites don't flee to suburbs.
<<^ that the above is true speaks clearly to the flaw in your thinking.
What is that flaw?
And you're still asking what the flaw in your thinking is.
<< and not because you're in a bad neighborhood
You just assumed quite a lot about a hypothetical that I purposefully left open-ended. Note that I did not say black or bad neighborhood in it.
<< And you're still asking what the flaw in your thinking is.
What is that flaw ( ideally, please refrain from saying I am evidently racist; it kinda undermines the argument with circular logic )?
Note that this is the 2nd time I am asking that very question. If you won't offer something to work with, I will discontinue this conversation.
In short, I no longer believe you engaged in good faith discussion. Fare well.
They don't happen to sometimes misfire. They are a very poor predictor of the behavior of individuals within the group you're stereotyping. And in your day-to-day life, you're pretty much always dealing with individuals rather than an entire class of people.
This is significantly complicated when considering that stereotypes weren't created in a vacuum, either. Sometimes they are the result of some statistical phenomenon (which still doesn't mean they are good predictors of individual behavior), but often they are the result of historical prejudice. One easy example is that there are lots of stereotypes about Jewish people, many of which involve money or some sort of secret societal control. Those are categorically false, and have been tied to age-old antisemitic sentiments and humans' natural fear of groups of "others".
Some are also self-fulfilling. If 50 years ago a bunch of the population believed that a certain class of people were more likely to commit crimes, and as a result more of those people tended to be arrested, then looking at those statistics today in isolation seems to "prove" the point that this segment is more dangerous. Whereas in reality the reason the statistics are this way is largely because of the prejudiced belief.
<<This is significantly complicated when considering that stereotypes weren't created in a vacuum, either.
Absolutely correct, they exist as a result of observed facts and carried down as memes throughout society at large. You can question their accuracy, but there is a reason they exist and thrive.
<< which still doesn't mean they are good predictors of individual behavior
They are good enough for an individual predictions, which is all an individual is concerned with. The issue starts when it is being used more broadly.
<< If 50 years ago a bunch of the population believed that a certain class of people were more likely to commit crimes, and as a result more of those people tended to be arrested, then looking at those statistics today in isolation seems to "prove" the point that this segment is more dangerous.
Ok. Lets say we forget history for a moment. There is indeed an argument to be made that data may not be.. accurate ( but that also opens the question of.. is that accuracy zero ?). What about current statistics of shooting incidents in Chicago? Are those also biased, because they happen to show similar pattern ( I think we can agree shooting people is a bad thing and likely dangerous and those involved likely belong in prison -- self defense and similar being excluded )?
OTOH, being prepared is not the same as being fearful.
I've seen posts by women describing how they were _fearful_ of men until they were 18-20 and realized most men aren't a razors edge away from raping them. And their relationship with men completely changed.
That doesn't mean women should be ignorant of the possibility, but it does mean they shouldn't be _fearful_. Rather they should learn to recognize situations where the possibility is higher and avoid them.
Years ago I read a story about 3 young women who were paid to entertain some men in a boat that sat in international waters. At some point they were asked for sex, refused, got raped, then dropped off at the airport without the money they were promised.
In a perfect world things like this would never happen. But our world isn't perfect and there's a certain level of naivete in the actions of those young women, they could have avoided all of that by recognizing the danger and refusing.