Giving kids no autonomy at all has become a parenting norm
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It's my perception that letting kiddo play outside, climbing trees, biking on the sidewalk in front of the house should be a low risk activity for a 2nd and 4th grader if done together. Not in the perception of neighbors. Every time I say yes to them asking to play in public, I'm taking a risk that someone will call the cops for the simple act of a child playing outside without a parent. How do I know? It's happened three times already.
There's a group of folks who see that as inherently dangerous and have no problem invoking the police to shut it down. They've also been approached by strangers asking where their parents are. They're obeying the laws, not being reckless or getting into trouble. They're minding their own business and because of that they are confronted for it.
It's these encounters that weigh on my mind when I'm deciding how to respond when they ask if they can play outside each day. Sometimes I say no, because I'm not prepared to deal with the possibility of that scenario occurring again.
You should not be permitted to deliberately harass people you don't know doing nothing wrong in this way, it's that simple. It's a question of individual liberty in the end.
I'd hope the police would actually have a private word with them to this effect to be honest, when they do 'report' it. I assume not, but do you know if any ever have?
The police serve as a firewall against all inquiries about reporters including asking if reporters could (for lack of better term) be "asked to behave like mature adults." The opacity of communication structure serves to fragment social cohesiveness rather than cultivate it. In a time where people yearn for community, having police block all communication between parties atomizes and alienates community members from each other even more.
If I were to turn this into an opportunity to imagine a better future, it would be twofold. One, a non-emergency service should be capable of handling events of this sort[2]. I don't need the same people arresting gang members and murderers doing house calls re: your kid was climbing a tree in your front yard.
Second, the persons reporting should be told something of the sort, "Thank you for your concern, your intentions were neighborly, but reporting kids for existing is not a valuable use of our time."
Instead I'm stuck with weighing letting my kids be kids and the possibility of guys with guns showing up at my quiet suburban home, and having the talk that starts with, "We know everything's probably fine, but someone called us..." again.
1. I suppose the socially de-incentivizing parents letting kiddos play outside is hard to quantify and "not really much of a concern to police", probably for a different set of biases from their perspective.
2. It's easy to imagine something like CPS getting involved. Maybe I'm naive for asking folks to imagine that a service "not as bad as CPS" could possibly exist. Idk, I'm a parent, not a social services engineer.
This is literally what "defund the police" was all about
That said, its not up to the police to decide the law, its up to the judge or CPS, so going to the lowest common denominator, you'll have to explain it to the judge or assigned case worker.
Most investigations are generally a guilty until proven innocent from what I've heard since the safety of the child is paramount.
All they have to do is prove there was some negligence which is a very low bar.
Since when?
The police have zero duty to protect anyone or otherwise enforce the law in any way; they already don't bother investigating a good chunk of smaller thefts and will just stand around while crowds torch buildings and shootings continue inside their perimeter.
They have a lot of discretion; I suggest they exercise it.
>All they have to do is prove there was some negligence which is a very low bar.
Most people are agreeable enough that their first response isn't a life-and-death dash to the nearest lawyer. This is generally a mistake, but they really don't know better.
>reports are often tailored to be vague by the neighbor to ensure a confrontation with police.
"Swatting" and more indirect cases of vexatious litigation are criminal offenses for a reason (even if nobody gets hurt). Karen is guilty of violating these laws; it's time to get serious about enforcing them.
Its what the courts in many areas have generally ruled.
If you make a report, and those reports are valid but ignored, they can be sued and the city or organization becomes liable because they were negligent. A judge decides damages which impact ongoing budgets.
> Karen is guilty of violating these laws.
Yes, but how difficult is it to prove intent. How often do defamation suits win? Will a prosecutor ever really go after someone that claims a plausible excuse?
Don't they have more important things to devote their resources towards?
What about the harms caused to the parents, and the children, very hard to quantify. A report is self-enforcing because the police have a duty of care to respond to reports.
Litigation would only ever actually occur civilly, and outside of extreme circumstances that demonstrate clear bad faith its a grey area that goes unenforced and unpunished.
So who in the end actually gets punished, and is that punishment coercive. The courts generally don't recognize it as such since the accused (the person reporting it) has good faith protection. Its very hard to prove they did it in bad faith. Litigation would only ever actually occur civilly, and outside of extreme circumstances that demonstrate clear bad faith its a grey area that goes unenforced and unpunished.
So who in the end actually gets punished?
People should think twice about reporting stuff they should know better about reporting, and police should have a way to use their judgement to decide if what someone reported constitutes a valid complaint, grey area, or a busybody with nothing better to do than waste tax payers' time.
I doubt that most people who call the police about kids playing outside are trying to harass anyone. I think they are just misguided.
You’d probably be arrested if you let your kids have that type of freedom today.
I wouldn't call the police on kids climbing trees.
But I'd attend a 3-hour timeshare pitch meeting at a Red Lobster before I'd have a 5 minute "mutual dialogue" with a parent about their kids' truly problematic behavior. (And I'm allergic to shellfish.)
Parents who can have mutual dialogues typically don't have kids who require them. And for the kids who desperately need them, community members seem to play a game of hot potato until somebody is finally forced to step in and confront the parents (typically after property damage).
> In the U.S. though, the police have been called, women arrested, and children taken into custody for finishing out a stroller nap in an enclosed backyard, using an iPad in a car for a few minutes, and playing in a park.
So, which ones of those are property damage to neighbors?
People will disagree on all kinds of issues, but would take a major crime for me to call the police on my neighbor. Imagine living next to someone after you did that?
The rise of these sort of things seems to correlate particularly well with the skyrocketing rate of single person households in the US, which increased more than 500% from 1960 to 2021 [1], even though the population in that time didn't even double.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/242022/number-of-single-...
Healthy and well-adjusted adults don't do these things.
"Dispatcher: Please state the nature of your emergency.
Caller: A 4th and 2nd grader appear to be playing some sort of game across the street in their own front yard.
Dispatcher: Are they armed?
Caller: Yes, with a wiffle bat and ball/projectile. A water pistol and/or balloons may have been sighted earlier.
Dispatcher: Thanks, we'll send in the SWAT team again."
(Edit: crime in action, they might come.)
People are doing this, because from their perspective children might be abandoned by their parents. The reason is that playing outside is not normalised enough at the moment.
If you read this comment without context is sounds completely insane.
Kids playing outside has been the <<norm>> for hundreds of thousands of years.
Yeah, well, stop it, and put them behind a screen all day like a normal person.
Also, I don't mean a cultural evil, as most people dismiss this as just being your cultural opinion. I mean the type of multi-cultural evil that strips people of their ability to respond (agency), tells them misleading lies, promotes flawed and self-defeating beliefs, causes loss in one form or another, and worse most of the time the people doing this are mentally ill but you still have to deal with the outcomes.
This is a real problem because if you conform, you are tacitly approving of those beliefs and your children will learn socially from your response to it. Unfortunately, in a world where you get CPS or the police called to charge you with child endangerment its a pretty mad world, and its happening more and more.
An interesting parallel are these philosophies that you can somehow make things safe, all ultimately fall into some form of socialist or fascist narrative where someone at the top decides what is or isn't safe because you as an individual are unimportant comapared to the group which is paramount.
These narratives are very common in totalitarian and fascist societies that use propaganda and political warfare to kill potentially disruptive thinking.
A few books helped me frame this stuff far better than I was able to before. This was the one I started with[0]. Framing isn't a fix or a prevention, but it has helped me to adjust actions and expectations much more tailored for the situation.
I am not looking forward to that crocodile remark: "I just want to be sure your child is safe."
My personal religious believe frowns uppon $X? That means $X should now be illegal for everybody.
I believe without evidence your kids are constantly unsafe: let me call the police on them.
It is okay not to like what your neighbours are doing. It is okay (and maybe even necessary) to discuss this with them. But it is not okay to call the police on them or force them by law to your believes.
And that in a nation where your cent piece had "Mind your business" written on it.
Just like any culture there are many parts of the American one, but the part that comes from adventure, exploration, freedom etc definitely has been on the decline since about the 70-80s. Control and Puritanism is what’s stronger now.
Personally I hope it swings back at some point.
I hadn't heard about this book, and I'm always looking for new books that help frame problems better.
Just based off what I saw regarding this, its probably not the best as a starter book.
It can really be tough with this type of material because if you don't have a solid practical or rigorous approach to both logic and argumentation, and can reasonably make parallels or see where it leads, you can easily fall into traps that are plausible but may be flawed/false.
You really have to approach this type of material critically and assume its false until you can find rational and reasonable support for what may be said. Reading material in this genre, like you would a leisure book would be a mistake, since most tend to internalize words/concepts like movies after speed picks up, and of course children that have not yet reached the age of reason shouldn't be reading this type of material since they would be developmentally incapable of recognizing any potential lies for what they might be.
Not having read the book yet I can't yet vouch for the content, but it definitely looks interesting, and worth a read, at least for me.
You really have to know the philosophy and tactics that are pushed in this area in order to recognize it enough to defend against it.
There was a very interesting recent publication in USMC University on Political Warfare which has some overlap.
I have experienced this cycling without a helmet (as is my right) from aggressive motorists.
Now I have a term for the phenomenon!
It's the children's rights, freedom and agency that are being infringed upon. Even if a parent was unjustly restricting their own child from going outside, instead of calling the police on someone else's child, that would be just as wrong.
On average, I think CPS interventions are usually good. A parent with unchecked power is the ultimate form of totalitarianism, and abuse is common.
You cannot have responsibilities without having the necessary rights needed to fulfill those responsibilities. Its two sides of the same coin. You have both, or you have neither regardless of what someone else may irrationally say or decide, and rational thought is all that matters.
Worse, that line of reasoning also leads to legitimizing and justifying coercion, corruption, compulsion, and a large number of other intolerable outcomes that have throughout history cyclically become self-destructive. There are plenty of examples in history, it was very common in years leading up the Nazi's rise to power before and during WW2.
You may want to further educate yourself from published statistics before pushing unbacked value statements like its 'usually good', and 'abuse is common' [0]. If you'd checked, you'd see what you said is not actually true and misleads.
Additionally, take a look at the pie chart broken down by category in the report, what percentage of false reports do they say they receive...
What percentage of reports, in aggregate, find some form of confirmation (based on how those categories are handled with respect to due process). Keep in mind, 'Unsubstantiated' doesn't mean what you might think it means [1].
Given police refer these issues to CPS for investigation instead of investigating themselves, and given statistics often follow a distribution curve not a binary choice, are either of those answers that are simple lookups from the report, likely, or expected, or rationally sound without there being some profound issue with the system being measured. [No].
Its really disheartening having to deal with people pushing irrational misinformation, and other limiting beliefs and narratives that will negatively impact others.
All this comment's done is add to the noise in a fundamentally negative way to muddy water.
Karma has a way of coming back to you three fold over time regardless of whether you believe in it or not. Please try to avoid pushing false noise in the future.
[0] https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubpdfs/canstats.pdf, Statistics [1] https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubpdfs/decisionmaking.pdf
This is such a non-statement that everyone can fill in with the ideology that they choose to categorize in this way.
You voiced a lot of super general concerns, but without specific examples it's difficult what you actually believe. Because so much language has been corrupted.
Both people that see peaceful transition of power of democracy in the US being threatened, and those that are against public health mandated COVID lockdowns call those that disagree with them "fascist".
So I genuinely don't know what you're talking about in this paragraph and I'm curious if you would be willing to share some examples.
Its not a statement, its a set of statements that compose a characterization, which is something commonly done by scientists, engineers, and rational people to communicate specific descriptions so they can be recognized again by others, this is primarily done when common words are not available to match specific common meanings in communications.
> can fill in with the ideology that they choose to categorize in this way
You'll have to further clarify what you mean, there are two potential meanings embedded with that single statement, and you've failed to communicate which one that is, it looks to me like you've misunderstood this as some ideology akin to philosophy such as consequentialism when its a description of behavior.
A characterization is just a description of the distinctive nature, elements, features, or composition of someone or something specific, in this case behavior. Behavior that leaves at least one party with a negative outcome while also negatively impacting all or most future outcomes related to that party.
Its important to understand and convey the correct and rational meaning of words, as you said many groups seek to corrupt language to prevent communication, to distract, disorient, and create disunity using a whole host of sordid and malign influence tactics to cause distorted reflected appraisal.
> Both people... and those that disagree with them.
We will not be going off into the weeds, talking about potentially irrational beliefs of others, or getting bogged down in unrelated controversial narratives as those only serve disunity and chaos.
You may also want to review the actual definition and elements of fascism. Regardless, what you mention here has no relevance to the current discussion.
I was confused about your post, too. What did you mean?
Its helpful to those that understood it and who understand what the stakes are, and also in giving the necessary words people need for a time when they will need them.
If you are unable to see anything wrong with where the behavior I describe leads inevitably, you deserve the outcomes that are coming.
Make no mistake death is not uncommon when these types of systems fail towards their logical conclusion, if left to propagate forward unabated, the outcome is an inevitable cascade. Its a part of a cycle that's happened many times in the past with the same conclusion.
This has happened before many times in history, and it will happen again until we learn our lessons as a people.
This time it will be much worse because so much of our population is wholly dependent on technological systems that will fail to deliver enough food when those societal failures do occur.
If you can't see where this path of coercion, compulsion, and other intolerable acts have led us in the past, no amount of words will convince you otherwise.
You would have to learn by experience, and the downsides firsthand, and by then it would be too late to do or be anything other than a victim of circumstance.
What odds do you give yourself or your children of survival when those failures occur and suddenly 8-12 billion have to subsist on practices available that can only at their theoretical maxima feed 2-4 billion.
I already gave you one example: reactionaries appropriated those criticizing Trump's policies as "fascist" to call those that disagree with public health lockdowns as the same.
Likewise, your original terms of "flawed and self-defeating beliefs" and "mentally ill" are currently being weaponized by the same people to brandish transgender people as harmful ideologues.
Just thought you should know, in the slim hope that you don't. Because if you do, you either don't care or are doing it on purpose. Both of which are harmful.
Ultimately, you sound like AI-generated. You say a lot of words that individually have meaning without saying anything at all.
Never mind the craziness that a neighbor would call the police when seeing a child outside (and that’s quite crazy) - if police answer that call they are reinforcing the idea that the child playing alone outside was wrong or dangerous.
This is still a conservative view compared to 30 years ago, when it was acceptable for a lone 5 year old to learn to ride a bike on a suburban sidewalk relatively unsupervised (yes, really!). You may be on the liberal end of the modern Overton window, but you've been dragged along just like the rest of us.
The looks i get for letting my kids scoot ahead of me on a sidewalk of a large city (while I walk behind them) are beyond belief.
We live in Idaho now and it's similar up here though I don't know about the laws. In our neighborhood kids will run around playing outside together unsupervised all day and nobody bats an eye. It's expected!
That's why you find them being passed in conservative and ultra-religious states: Utah, Texas, Oklahoma
The empirical evidence is mixed. The best behaved kids in the world are in east Asia, where physical discipline is still quite common. Physical discipline was widespread in the west during the very timeframe that contemporary civilizations developed. America as you know it today, with all its prosperity, was created by people who were spanked as children.
More likely by people who played outside as children. I'm pretty sure that's more universal than spanking.
Which is giving me an idea: are there societal problems among youths that correlate with either a lack of spanking or a lack of playing outside? Most of Europe has banned spanking but encourages playing outside, whereas in the US, spanking is legal but playing outside strongly discouraged. Which kids are doing better? Less violent? Less psychological problems?
I meant Asians in Asia. Also, as I mentioned in the thread you linked, I’m unpersuaded by your study of Asian Americans, especially because of the highly idiomatic phrasing of the polling questions. I’m also not even sure how you’d design a study to measure this to account for confounding factors. For example, how do you separate parents who use physical punishment because they have poor impulse control (which is quite heritable) from those that use physical punishment when it’s appropriate? And what’s the definition of success? E.g. what if teachers hitting low impulse control students doesn’t do much for the student, but reduces disruption so the rest of the students in class do better? That wouldn’t seem to count in the studies on this I’ve seen.
I mean, I guess it could have been worse- you could have said "America as you know it today, with all its prosperity, was created by people who burned witches" or "...who practiced chattel slavery."
Those same people also practiced bundling [1] as a courtship ritual, and used mercury as a treatment for melancholy [2]. Out of all the practices you could have cited, why on Earth would you pick beating kids as a factor in America's success, instead of something more benign?
You're smart enough to know the difference between correlation and causation. Do you have evidence that physical discipline was the reason America became the country it is today?
If you don't have such evidence, how do you know that we wouldn't have been even more prosperous without corporal punishment as a child-rearing method?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_(tradition)
2. https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2017/10/22/mercury-was-...
By contrast, cultures that stopped using physical discipline are almost universally in decline. On the European continent, for example, post-Christians who don’t use physical discipline are being outcompeted by Muslims who do.
> Physical discipline was widespread in the west during the very timeframe that contemporary civilizations developed.
I'd be real careful pushing that justification; it can be used to support all manner of unnecessary (and was-never-necessary) evil.
It's my understanding that spanking isn't the optimal way to discipline children and still shouldn't be done, but conflating it with beating a child is ridiculous and offensive.
Yes, striking your child to teach them a lesson is definitely completely unrelated to striking your child out of anger/frustration. Definitely no connections there at all.
It's a tough balance.
Sarcasm? We have both privacy and free roam rights for children in germany.
Talk about sane legislature!
Any tech jobs outside of SLC?
Lakebed is indeed sadness.
(Maybe... but it looks somewhat similar. And 1983 wasn't unique. It also happened sometime in the 1950s, though I forget the exact year.)
For those not in the know: In 1982, the lake was also sadness. There was talk of it drying up completely. Then the winter of 1982-83 was something like 200% of normal. Salt Lake wound up having to turn State Street into a river to handle all the extra water. From there to 1985 or -86, the lake rose dramatically, threatening to close railroads, and interstate 80.
Growing up in the 80s, we kicked a football on the street and towed each other on skateboards with bikes. I barely remember a car being parked out there; they were all in driveways. That same cul-de-sac now is choked with parked cars that are each household's second or third vehicle and left on the street because it's easier than shuffling cars in a narrow driveway. Now, you couldn't kick a ball without hitting someone's car. A car driving down that street will have terrible sightlines with seeing a kid chasing a ball out onto the street or even seeing someone short trying to cross the road from behind an SUV or 4x4.
Out camping in the bush, I'm comfortable letting my kids roam (as long as they watch out for snakes). Lots of other ways for them to get injured, but no cars. There's a difference between a "learning injury" and the bonnet of a 4x4 hitting their head/neck.
1. Obama-era CAFE fuel standard rules made required MPG go up over time for different classes of vehicle. Except if your vehicle had a larger footprint, it had more lenient standards. The simplest way to stay compliant was to make larger vehicles. I think if they wanted the actually-desired outcome they should have just raised the federal gasoline tax, which has not been raised since the 90's, but they probably assumed that was untenable so we are left with unintended consequences.
2. The IIHS produces crash test ratings that manufacturers tout here and does not score cars worse if they are more dangerous to pedestrians. Nor do they take into account the other car in the collision. So to get excellent ratings makes an arms race of bigger-ness. Automakers started adding a lot of weight to vehicles, and side/curtain airbags that made the A-pillar larger (Between door window and windshield). Even formerly small cars now feel huge. It's hard to buy a truly small truck anymore.
Even cars of the mid-2000s have this pillar sufficiently large to completely block the view of pedestrians and vehicles under certain conditions. This is, I'd argue, a contributing factor in the modern preference for taller vehicles- the visibility is equally poor, but being higher up lets people believe they can see more out front and they "win" in sightline contests with other cars.
>Automakers started adding a lot of weight to vehicles
Note also that electric cars in particular are significantly heavier than combustion ones; as such they take more effort to stop and are even more dangerous to other cars in crashes.
Oh, and since electric cars are inherently heavier, the roof has to be stronger to maintain the same rollover protection, which also means the A-pillars and blind spots will continue to get larger.
>they should have just raised the federal gasoline tax
If you do that you run into price-sensitive agricultural users. Other countries exempt those users with marked gas to detect tax fraud, but that requires legislative action (marked gas is illegal in the US) and new infrastructure to support it to the point where it might not have been worth it.
Also, the chicken tax means unless the light truck is domestically produced it's not worth it, so only a select few automakers could really make a run at it (especially in the context of safety requirements that don't scale).
Because of some historical accidents (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax) normal cars are regulated more tightly than SUVs in the US. That makes SUVs cheaper to produce.
So people, like families, that needed a big car moved from station wagons to SUVs.
The rest is more historical accidents and consumer preferences.
(Some of the regulations in question here are really silly. Especially the CAFE standards which are ostensibly supposed to regulate emissions. But they do it in a really round-about way. A sane way to regulate emissions is to tax emissions like a CO2, or something that directly correlates with producing more emissions (like a petrol tax).
Instead the US goes the insane route: CAFE standards take an average of the vehicles produced by a company, and give companies some incentives based on that average. Of course, they also add extra loopholes, like the SUV exemption.
SUVs also get exemptions for passenger and pedestrian safety standards.)
Wtf? What's the rationale behind this?
Basically, the originally justification was that stuff like farm trucks shouldn't be burdened by extra regulations. Public choice theory explains where it went from there.
They also tend to be more dangerous for family, and neighbors nearby.
Trucks roam the streets today, in their factory configuration, that make those lifted 4x4 trucks from 30-40 years ago seem like reduced scale toys. It's madness. The most cartoonish, distorted adolescent fantasy proportions have been mainstreamed and normalized over decades. It's a Truck Body Dysmorphic disorder.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
"Over the past ten years, pedestrian deaths in the first half of the year skyrocketed from 2,141 in 2013 to 3,434 in 2022 – a 60% increase..."
That said, pedestrian deaths for children under 13 looks to have decreased in the last 10-20+ years. Maybe fewer children walking is a factor there.
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...
More info here:
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/pedestr...
The car size thing is valid. Although I remember cars in the 80s, often of the 70s, were massive steel tanks and I doubt the braking distances were all that good.
One thing I've noticed is that at a school near me, the school zone signs about driving speed are often shadowed/obscured by parked parents and trees from above. Stops it from being front of mind. That school has been there and I've driven past it for decades, but as you said, often it takes seeing a family in the area to remind me that it's a school zone and in school hours, since I'm usually driving past at other times of day.
I participated in a citizen's panel for community road safety years back and thought that there should be a broader zone for a block or two surrounding schools. It wouldn't necessarily be as strict as 25km/h, but maybe 35km/h and rendered differently - coloured line markings, kerb colours, no hanging foliage or bushes higher than 300-500mm, more limitations on parking. Right now, parents compete to drop kids as close as possible to school, to minimise road crossings. Give them more confidence to drop kids further away. Limits congestion and builds autonomy in the kids.
In the drop off lines, the teachers assist to keep the cars moving so you really shouldn’t start unloading early and let them walk. I think it would be good as you mentioned but would be against the factory line they’ve created. I think they tried that in decades past but resolved on this as parents complained it was too slow to wait. Where I live it’s very car dependent and people really do want to drop their kid off at front door and get off to their day asap above all else.
I got one for my first job out of school that required me onsite at the opposite side of the sprawling stupid city I'm from, and it was a 30 min drive each way. Losing an hour a day just to driving, right from the start. It eventually broke down, and now that I've been without one for a few years, the prospect comes to mind every so often to get a used thing for getting to trailheads a little more frequently; supporting the various recreational things I do. But... it scares me. It's a trap. It's a financial trap, a lifestyle trap, and more of a burden than it could ever be a blessing. Thankfully the every day risks of getting hit by an idiot in a huge truck or something are non-optional and an ever-present aspect of life no matter how you get around.
For now, I'll just continue renting one when I need one, but it does put a barrier between me and the things I love doing, we'll see if that changes in time.
Definitely hear you about cars.
It is a concern for safety, or at least usually couched that way, but what I hear voiced most often is fear of other humans. From older bullying kids, to hoodlums, to drugs, to predators. In short, Stranger Danger. The "don't talk to strangers" refrain I remember hearing occasionally when I was kid in the 70s didn't seem to have much effect. We just kind of shrugged. Looking around today, I see it took deep root.
((Oh yes, pun intended. It's a beautiful thing when they also perfectly express the thought.))
The other part is that, unless one lives in the country, it has become much harder to find neighborhoods where kids can safely roam free. I lived in both a small rural town and a larger, more urban (but not "big city") city as a child, and was able to run around the neighborhood in both places without issue, back in the 80s. I've visited the larger city I spent the second half of my childhood in as a child recently: there simply isn't any space for kids to roam anymore there. Some might say my generation's parents were too extreme in the freedom they gave us. Perhaps, but the pendulum has swung too wide in the other direction, in my opinion.
I get the impression that this problem happens a lot less frequently than social media and our personal echo chambers would have us believe. I am skeptical the prevalence is actually significant because this situation sounds like an outrage tactic to members of the population that grew up more “free range.” This is something I would like to be proven wrong on, if the data supports it.
It seems to make headlines whenever it happens not because it’s happening all the time, but because it’s such a weird thing to happen.
A lot of people can no longer tell the difference between headlines for rare events and headlines for things that happen all the time. If they see a headline, they just assume it’s extremely common.
Social media has also amplified the idea that men can’t take kids to a park without people assuming they’re child predators. Prior to having kids, I thought taking my kids to the park was going to be a high risk activity and that I’d have to defend myself against paranoid moms who couldn’t understand why a man was at the kids park. Reddit circulated this meme like it was gospel. Then I finally had kids, went to the park, and nothing of the sort has ever happened. My local parks are almost a 50/50 split of moms and dads and everyone has always been friendly.
I had another shoot where I was covering someone's engagement that was near a playground. I had my wife with just to diffuse anybody worrying about a man with a long lens near a playground but clearly not photographing any children - and sure enough, she had to talk to a lady about it.
Another time I was going to photograph a high school senior at a playground the next day, so I scoped out my old elementary and middle school playgrounds (no camera equipment on me!). I made it all of 10 feet onto the elementary school playground before I had a woman essentially accuse me of being a creep. There were plenty of moms there. It didn't even seem to occur to her that I could have been a father, or just walking across the space to get to the baseball field or whatever.
For the record I'm a decent looking guy and I don't think I put out creep vibes in the least.
Any singular bad instance gets amplified and there's probably multiple of these happening each day, so it looks like it "always happens" despite most people being actually much more reasonable than that. It only needs to happen two or three times in your area for it to become "just what happens these days".
You don't need modern technology for that; the 1980s panic over child abductions (which was the precipitating event for this state of affairs) was overblown so hard that reasonable parents are far more at risk of their children being abducted and harassed by the State than they ever were at random. To claim social media is a root cause is incorrect, though technology does empower the hysterical and exacerbates their damage in other ways.
Because children aren't people, there's no human/legal rights concerns generated by taking away their right to free movement and quiet enjoyment of property (unlike, say, mass violence with a weapon vs. the human right to those weapons)- anything is fair game when it comes to public safety, after all.
Some US states have slowly been passing anti-hysterics laws with respect to movement and enjoyment of property rights for children (as in, not getting abducted off their front lawn or walking down the street by cOnCeRnEd PaReNtS), but it's very far from universal. But the fear of State violence [inherently at gunpoint] is still there in most of the world, and I understand the non-hysterical holding back out of fear, conflating legality and general don't-rock-the-boat Milgram-type obediance with morality, etc.... even though it's slowly killing their kids.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_white_woman_syndrome
This is not nearly as reassuring as you may think it is.
I would be concerned if I see a kid walking alone without any clear purpose/destination, but even then, an isolated incident is not going to be a call to CPS.
Do you realise how threatening this sounds? You are all but implying that if you, conversely, see a kid outside a few times and can't figure out their purpose/destination, you might just call CPS. I wouldn't trust most kids to manage to look unambiguously purposeful to adult strangers most of the time (when I myself was in 4th grade and going to a primary school in a neighbouring town, I would frequently get distracted by something and miss three or four once-in-30-minutes buses in a row), so you're essentially saying that you may CPS on a whim after seeing the same kid multiple times in a row. If I lived in the US and knew I had neighbours like that, I would not risk letting any kids go outside on their own.
You're damning yourself with faint praise, here. Giving kids independence means that they're regularly going to be outside alone (or with friends), and often without a clear purpose or destination. And it's sort of sounding like you'd be considering calling CPS over that.
Yeah, God fucking forbid they exercise their human right to movement in a way that offends your sensibilities.
It would seem there are in fact a handful of crazy CPS workers out there that think this is truly unacceptable, but there's a ridiculously tiny chance of you getting one of those and it is my understanding you can still fight them in court if the case ever gets that far.
And nobody should have to fight them in court: that's the whole point--the fact that it can get that far, or even as far as a single CPS visit for "some questions", is beyond absurd. It's a ridiculous stripping of autonomy and growth for children, and an humiliating and infuriating experience for parents.
It reduces down to: "I'm not going to do [perfectly legal and normal thing] because [person who doesn't like me] might report me to [authority figure]". By that logic, I shouldn't eat meat because my vegan neighbour might report me to the police for murder.
When I was a teen, me and my friends had the cops called on us me multiple times for things as absurd as sitting on the stairs in the building I lived in or rollerblading up and down the street, but every time, the cops kindly explained to the grumpy old pensioner that called them that this was perfectly legal, nobody was being harmed and to not call about nonsense like that again. People always have and always will try to report others for things they don't like. But that's like half of the cops' or CPS's job - to take those reports, figure out what actually counts as a crime, investigate whether it actually happened and only then charge the suspect.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children...
It’s a convenient trade off for many.
In a well-functioning city, your kid can walk places, ride a bike or take the bus or train.
About rules: there a lot more social rules in small towns than in cities, where no one cares who you are?
and public services don't make me dependent but they free me from having to take care of things myself.
Stranger danger is vastly overrated.
I knew my parents meant well when they made sure I studied and did well at extra curricular activities (going to math Olympiad at MIT during summers, playing classical instruments, etc) and that type of “helicopter parenting” yielded good performance… when I had to do something that was highly structured.
But it also meant I did not do well (or was always uncomfortable) when I had to do something that’s not highly structured (basically adulting) and I felt like I had to figure out who I really was at 30 which is not necessarily a good thing.
I’m still thankful that I had parents who cared and tried best they knew how so I don’t really hold it against them, though.
By the way, I think 30 is the perfect age to figure out who you really are.
We had kids standing around looking confused. They didn't know what to do. They asked for directions on what to do. We said to look at their grades and decide what to do. When they finally pulled up the gradebook on their laptops, they would point at it and say "what do you want me to do?"
Something. We want you to decide, on your own, to do something. Anything. Just make a choice.
Most kids did figure it out, though not always making the wise choices (but that's part of the reason we're giving them the freedome). But there was a minority who couldn't grasp the idea that they were personally able and responsible to decide what to do.
I've had limited teaching experience, all at a college level, but I would try to engage students with questions & get them to predict things they hadn't been taught yet. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it seemed like they wanted me to cut the crap and just tell them the answer, because they felt like I was setting them up to fail by asking them a question they didn't know (because it was new material).
I don't think it's necessarily a lack of critical thinking skills on their part as much as an unwillingness to engage with that style of teaching, which is fair. So I'm wondering if similarly it's an unwillingness to engage in independence in a context without the requisite trust, where they might be suspicious that you'll penalize them for picking "wrong" (regardless of whether that's the reality).
Please don't say safety because things are much much safer now than they were in the 70's, 80's and 90's.
Acceptance is repeating the mistakes of the past. Basically neglecting children and turning them into adults sooner than they're ready.
Rejection is making sure that does not happen at all. Doing the complete opposite of what was done to us.
They're both wrong. The answer is some weird blend of the two. Children need the autonomy to become adults but also need the safety net of having actual adults around.
I don't see the trade-off?
To pick up a few arguments. My neighbours are farmers, there are more ford raptors and guns than anywhere else in the country. Yet kids walk a hour to school by their own and play far from their parents vision.
That experience seemed normal to me at the time, but me and my friends may have been the tail end of that degree of freedom. Funnily enough I rarely exercised it. My parents encouraged me to explore more than I did. I was a very introverted and nerdy type who spent most of the time indoors. But I would spend my weekends and summers with my friends. And my parents wouldn't usually be willing to drive me once they considered me old enough to walk there or take the bus.
The "cars" angle feels more like a favorite boogeyman around here than an actual explanation for the change.
It is. Especially on the internet, once people find a cause to champion they'll try shoehorn it into everything, regardless of relevance. I'm only surprised someone isn't trying to pin this on a lack of nuclear energy power plants, which is another internet favorite go-to.
Depending on where you live, it's harder young people to get around compared to 40 years ago. Like this HN user's experience in this same thread[2].
By making society car centric we have made it difficult for children to exercise independence even if their parents allowed them to.
In a non metro area your options as a teen to go somewhere are to beg your parents to drive you somewhere or to walk for hours to a bus stop. These barriers and the rise in pedestrian fatalities do not incentivize autonomy.
[1] https://youtu.be/oHlpmxLTxpw Why we won't raise our kids in suburbia
I had a bike as a kid, and got my driver's license as soon as I turned 16. The bike isn't the fastest option, but it was just fine for getting to school, to friend's houses and to the local Walmart. And once I had a driver's license, I could and did borrow the family car, and many of my peers had a car that was specifically designated for the kids. Being able to drive a car used to be a symbol of independence for us, but today fewer and fewer teens are even getting a driver's license.
Yes, not every family has a car that's available to borrow, but most in suburbia do.
Both Pedestrian fatalities and injuries are rising.[1] While cars are getting safer for passengers, manufacturers are not required or tested on improving pedestrian safety. You can see this in the rise of % of fatalities from car accidents that are pedestrians (less people dying in car crashes inside cars, more people dying by being hit by cars).
This is despite the numbers improving drastically in the 00s[2].
I don't think cars are the primary driver though; I think it's the 24/7 news cycle and the various iterations of the dangers to children drilled into people's psyches. Random guy at the park? Paedophile. Kid makes up a story? Satanic panic. Kid hides near a weather balloon? National news sensation. You're constantly surrounded by evil and danger and you must do what you can at all costs to protect your child -- that's the message the media pushes. The people who grew up (as I did) with the primary directive of "come home when the streetlights come on" just weren't being exposed to that stuff then but were later on in life.
I also think video games and the sheer amount of media we can consume are also big factors. People just don't want to go outside as much anymore, so outside spaces in newer suburban neighbourhoods tend to be awful. Houses are larger and more tightly packed, so kids have to go to the park. More tightly packed homes with smaller property sizes means more people (and more cars).
There's probably a bunch of other factors I'm not thinking of as well. The short answer to the thread's question is essentially just "things are different."
[1]: (PDF) https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
[2]: (PDF) https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
All those statistics that show kids are safer today are at least partially the result of the changes in behavior we're talking about.
My 2nd grader started to walk home from school (~1km, two busier roads, one without crossing and bunch of smaller roads without crossing) by himself couple of weeks ago and he is still rarity in his class. Last week his class teacher refused to let him go without special paper despite he had no problem to leave from (after) school club for weeks already, where I specifically written he can go home by himself whole school year to not write paper almost every day. My mistake for writing in initial registration I am picking him up, now with younger kid joining the school she will have straight from 1st grade written in official documents she can go by herself and it will be only up to our agreement how she will get home without dumb teachers stopping us.
To be fair, the parental controls on modern devices feel like they were developed by a bunch of childless early 20-somethings.
I'm at a point with streaming services -- and this stems from the 24/7, 365 on-demand access we have to television and movies today that was not reality when I was a child -- where I'm ready to cancel everything and curate my our experience for myself and my kids with a NAS and torrents.
edit/ So I check Netflix to see what they offer. Viewing restrictions limits content based on parental guidelines ratings. That's really it. It's like someone else commented, it's as if these places are staffed by people who don't have children.
edit/ You'll have to pardon the evening Dad brain, I googled it. Thank you, kind stranger!
We just use it to remove shows as they start to annoy us. Not to pre-emptively control what the kid watches.
Can confirm, I know a few people who work in a social media "for kids" group and they fit this description to a tee and display significant naivety.
Apple let you press a button for ‘one more minute’ that seems impossible to disable.
Password management is horrible as a family, as is having to set up my fingerprint on all my kids’ devices to be able to help them with stuff without faff.
More generally, every time I have to set up any sort of account for my kids it’s absolute torture. Try to log in with Apple ID, can’t cos they’re a kid. Try to log in with a google account, remember Family Link doesn’t work for my normal account because it was set up for a domain, so log in as my other google account, set kid up, still doesn’t work.
Give me one place in my whole life to manage identity for my family, one that works, with permissions and downtime settings that integrate with every app and website in the world (including the half dozen each of my kids’ schools require us to use). I’ll pay loads of money for this.
Beyond that, there are some nice things you could do like a workflow for a kid to request new content and a parent to review and approve/deny it. But that's definitely a nice-to-have.
> The bills will give parents full access to their children's online accounts, including posts and private messages.
Where "children" is defined as anyone younger than 18. I can see the point of some of these controls, but legally disallowing a 17 year old from having privacy from their parents? Absolutely not.
On top of that, you need to supervise them, and even then, they should not be allowed to use social media, which ought to be 18+ anyways.
I understand this is all a lot to ask in our society. There is no "good" answer to this problem. But we should all try to do the best we can, and not forget that big tech puts hundreds of millions, if not billions, into making social media as addictive as possible. I'd say we're at a point where it's sensible to conclude it's now more addictive and harmful than tobacco, though our society has yet to come to terms with this fact. Even if we put a stop to it now (we won't), our current social media infrastructure will likely haunt us for centuries.
To put it into context: Facebook was founded in 2004. That is 19 years ago. Youtube was founded in 2005. That is 18 years ago. Twitter was founded in 2006. That is 17 years ago. Google was founded in 1998. That is 25 years ago. The World Wide Web (remember that name?) came to be in 1989. That is 34 years ago.
Social media is old enough to be in the history books, let alone the internet at large.
What the hell are the parents and would-be parents of today doing to be this fucking incompetent?
Likewise, you don't need an in-depth knowledge of computers to teach your kids how to handle the internet. Even moreso if you literally grew up with the thing, seeing both the absolute best and worst the internet has to offer.
Not setting restrictions because they will resist them doesn’t make sense. It seems like you started from the premise that parental controls are bad.
Not necessarily..
> They’re helicopter parenting the wrong areas of life.
Helicopter parenting is always a bad idea. Either you teach your kids ethics, morals, responsibility, self-respect, and assertiveness or they will fail as adults.
https://www.fastcompany.com/2681011/ethiopian-kids-hacked-th...
“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut.
No instruction, no human being.
I thought, the kids will play with the boxes!
Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box,
but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off
switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were
using 47 apps per child per day.
Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs
[in English] in the village. And within five months,
they had hacked Android.
Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had
disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a
camera, and they hacked Android.”They figured out the way to correct the problem.
The TikTok issues have never been about the health or safety of children. If it was, it the discussion would involve other social media.
It has always been about the TikTok’s governance structure, which legally and functionally enables espionage and/or psyops against a significant portion of people who do may be involved in things that are of a US national security interest. For example, you don’t want your government personnel doing important things while carrying a device that sends important contextual data to organizations which have CCP oversight.
The proposed solution to the TikTok problem is the RESTRICT Act, with language so broad and vague that it would make VPN usage a felony. It may just be incompetence on Sen. Warner's behalf, but otherwise, it's also about an opportunistic power grab by the US federal government.
Regardless, my point is that it definitely isn’t about the kids, and that is very clear in that bill.
My GFs hometown in Nakkon Si Thammarat (Southern Thailand, semi-rural) kids play outside just like we did when we were kids (90s, Australia).
The insane helicopter parenting seems to be US phenomena primarily but is also spreading to other Western-sphere countries like Australia.
I walked to school at those ages too. But we didn't all survive: one of my classmates in 7th grade was hit by a car crossing a busy road and died. It's long been dangerous for kids to be outside because of America's obsession with cars, but decades ago, having some kids get splattered on car hoods was considered OK and an acceptable sacrifice for a car-dependent society. Now, risk acceptance is lower so parents keep their kids inside all the time, while buying huge SUVs to protect their kids when they do go outside.
As a recent father I'm still pondering what I should do. I used to take trips to town on my own as young as eight and I soon gained a strong sense of independence which I value. But that was in New Zealand where what they call a city isn't remotely comparable to a metropolis like Tokyo. Safety wouldn't be a concern but it would be easy to get lost for hours.
I see kids by themselves on bikes all the time where I live in Tokyo.
Or maybe things aren’t more dangerous. I’m not sure, I just know violent crime has been trending down for 25 years and the news is increasingly sensationalist and negative.
To at least some degree, I feel like there is some self fulfilling paranoia.
People here in Singapore sometimes leave their wallets or phones on tables in food courts to reserve them. Unlocked bikes don't get stolen, either.
(Our police here in Singapore sometimes runs awareness campaigns on pickpocketing with the slogan "low crime doesn't mean no crime" to get people to watch out. It's not really necessary, though.)
When I was in Chiang Mai in Thailand last year, the locals also left stuff around and didn't seem particularly worried about petty theft.
What do you mean by this?
Cities are way safer today than in the 80s when I myself was growing up and as a 11 year old it was perfectly normal for me to commute by train and Tube from Reading, UK to Kensington, London for school with my 7 year old brother in tow. I aim to instill the same confidence in my daughter, albeit a year later.
A few years ago I let my 3 year old ride his bike with his older sister and brother (5 and 7 years old).
I walked with them, but allow them to get ahead of me, up to about 500m - 1km (~0.6mi). My instructions were always "wait at the next road so we can cross together."
Once, when they were out of sight for a while, I rounded the corner to find them surrounded by a concerned couple who proceeded to tell me off for allowing the youngest one out of my sight. I disagreed with them and continued to allow my youngest to ride many hundreds of times since. I got dirty looks from them a few times on subsequent walks.
Supervision is not an all-or-nothing thing. When someone calls the cops on your 10 year-old climbing a tree in your front yard or the neighborhood woods (let alone in your fenced-in back yard), that is ridiculous. But, there is a problem when you equivocate a toddler on a public road and a grade-schooler playing outside. One is able to stumble into problems and solve them while building confidence--the other just learned it's name and how to put on their shoes and pedal the bike.
Like, all 3-year-olds are different, perhaps his was closer to 4. Perhaps they were developmentally way ahead of their peers. Perhaps this was the most rural quiet and safe road ever. But without knowing that extra stuff, I think it is reasonable to voice your concern after finding a 3 year old on a road without real supervision.
I have a 5 and 2 year old and will definitely let them play unattended when they are older. We are just at the “you can play in the next room unattended while I cook dinner” stage. Yet, I can totally see the pressure from others with them seeing it as neglectful.
Cars and deep water. Those are my two biggest fears. And they scare me to no end because they are very real threats. To a lesser extent: trains.
When a parent only has one, it's both easier to control them from a time & energy perspective, and also more understandable biologically from a risk perspective, than if they had say five.
The second person in your example has more autonomy than the first. I know plenty of husbands who can't do laundry. So implying that you're somehow developmentally stunted if you live alone in the city is extremely weird.
Because you meant it as a testament to how little autonomy everyone has across the board. And then you used "not having kids" and "living in the city" as an example. You're describing someone with more autonomy than a person with kids and a mortgage has.
> Ownership begets autonomy. On the other end of the spectrum is renting/dependence on public services
Can you describe how being a homeowner makes you less dependent on public services?
Motivation is basically what makes us do stuff. Unsurprisingly, these three psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness) are also linked and are good predictors of the wellbeing, fullfilment, vitality and, for the lack of the better word, happiness in life. I see this as "motivation to live" essentially.
Studying SDT opened my eyes to the modern views on parenting, sports coaching and some other fields. It just all started to make sense, and I would say that SDT is one of those theories that can change your worldview.
When I was 12, I traveled around the country by train on my own for 4 days. Dutch railways had a special ticket for that: Tienertoer: 4 days of free train travel within a 10 day period, only for teenagers, and you got a booklet with all sorts of discounts for museums and other stuff to visit. At 12, I figured I was a teenager and therefore old enough to do this.
My son, almost 14 now, is not remotely interested in anything like this. Though he does claim to be old enough to stay home on his own for a weekend while we are away. But I don't trust him to actually come out from behind his (my, actually) PC if we do this.
I even remember taking a plane alone at 10 with a one of those UM tags.
Another issue is the compltely overblown fear or crimes such as abduction. The #1 and #2 causes of child death in the US are firearms related and automobile related (respectively). Those are completely normalized.
People can be very quick to judge when it comes to stuff like that. They hear stories about hot car deaths and see a kid that is in no real danger but they see a car and a kid and draw a thoughtless conclusion. I'm not sure how we can as a society improve this situation though. There do seem to be a lot of PSA commercials about stuff like that, but I don't think we need to decrease those. Or would it be better to add more detail to the PSAs to clarify when someone's not in danger? Seems like overcomplicating what should be common sense...
Sure, we could make them go outside or put away the screens but that's not really autonomy, is it?
Your move, progressive parenting advocates.
https://www.criticalthinking.org/
The two links above are good for raising children and teaching them to think with empathy and compassion. Schools should follow one or the other.
My father was a Drill Instructor Dad, always yelling at me, ordering me around. But he let me play outside with my friends in the streets and parks. Back then you didn't have to worry about pedophiles grabbing kids or school shooters. So I can see why some parents want to be helicopter parents. But you want your child to grow up independent from you so they can do their own thing. You don't want the dependence for the day you die, they won't know what to do.
This kind of thing doesn't really happen in the Netherlands; but you will get occasional "you should"s from people from time to time. I really bristle at those, and I can barely imagine the insane rage I would feel if a total stranger of an adult approached my kids at a playground to ask where I was, or if someone outright chastised my partner for a decision she made. Calling the cops or social services is unimaginable; I'd probably lose it and move to the woods like Captain Fantastic.
As soon as you get pregnant something clicks in busybody brains everywhere and they suddenly swarm. I don't know what weird cultural phenomenon is responsible for it, but it's insufferable. We have stuff like uBlock and Pi-hole for surveillance capitalism getting all up in our business; is there something out there for busybodies?
To be clear, I think that’s awesome.
So they depend on parents and managers more and take longer to be independent. Why does this matter? This is perfectly normal in Asian cultures for kids to be attached to their parents until their 30s, much more slowly but in a more stable and reliable fashion building their own lives.
As for someone’s 30’s, it’s just rather late in life to become independent. People are capable of it much sooner. You don’t want to hold back a grown adult.
I hope this trend does not catch on too much where I live. My kids took the bus at 9 and it was and still is not uncommon.
I have a four year old, and when she's six or seven, I hope she'll be walking to the park with friends on a regular basis. When she's ten, I'm hoping she'll be responsible enough to take her younger sister with her. What is unsafe about it? Dumb phones are cheap. If you invest in knowing your neighbors, they'll know people on each block.
I'm trying my best right now to let my kid manage himself and learn how to ask for help where needed. I want him to go through his own choices, both good and bad, and experience success and failure on his own. I try to teach him that the only value I care about is not being a burden to others. Raising people up is true success instead of winning by pushing others down. Those core beliefs are the only ones I hope I can pass on to him. But I want to do whatever I can to make it come from him and for him to learn it from me through example rather than control.
I know that no matter how strict my parents were, it never actually did anything to increase my performance. It never did anything to increase the obedience of my siblings. All of us just went underground over time because we couldn't trust our parents to be reasonable when we talked about our experiences at school and sports. If it wasn't up to their standards they would just make us feel like we weren't living up to their standards. I've heard this being referred to as "ego" parenting or something like that. But part of the reason we could go underground was because of physical freedom. I cycled to school and sports. I took public transport and was free to sort myself out from completely from teenage years.
Instead of addressing the bit though about making a safe space for kids and not chasing them underground, it feels like parents have taken the approach of encroaching on their physical space as well to ensure that they do not escape the boundaries of the standards they demand.
And now children are giving up on trying to find freedom in physical spaces. How could they when the parents are following them to every event and class that they go to? They can't even go to a mall with friends anymore without having parents around in some form or another. I feel like the desire to go underground in the digital spaces is a natural evolution although I have nothing but my own anecdotal experiences to share to support this.
This is a tangential sharing of experience and opinion in relation the article. I leave this as a thinking point because I think physical freedom is being dampened for more than just the reason of fears of safety. There's also a strong desire to control children and have them grow up in our image of "perfection". If we want to reverse this trend, it may take a lot of parents having to get really uncomfortable with themselves and understanding that there's a significant amount of their own ego that needs to be removed. Else the end is going to be a never ending unhealthy war to find ways to control children's spaces every time they find a new one to go underground in.