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Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

I've written about this here before, but the social forces that incentivize parents to restrict autonomy is intense. I live in a massive California suburb, median in almost every way.

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.

View on HN

I don't known if more laws and regulations are the answer here, or if it'd have undesirable secondary effects in certain situations where it really matters, but I feel like this behaviour as you describe it should itself be unlawful.

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?

>You should not be permitted to deliberately harass people you don't know doing nothing wrong in this way

I doubt that most people who call the police about kids playing outside are trying to harass anyone. I think they are just misguided.

Sufficiently advanced misguidance is indistinguishable from harassment.

The process as I understand is that the police are compelled to follow up on the report whether or not it initially appears to have merit or not. The incentive understandably is that false positives are perceived to have less negative impact than false negatives[1].

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.

The police are liable if they don't follow-up on the report, and reports are often tailored to be vague by the neighbor to ensure a confrontation with police.

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.

>The police are liable if they don't follow-up on the report

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.

I think its time to start giving tickets for misuse of city resources (law enforcement).

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.

> Since when?

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?

> 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.

That is certainly not the case everywhere, least of all the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonzale....

> Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled, 7–2, that a town and its police department could not be sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for failing to enforce a restraining order, which had led to the murders of a woman's three children by her estranged husband.

Perhaps you'd like to rewrite what you said.

Any rational person reading your response is going to assume you either didn't read what I said, or worse were using malign influence tactics to push something that 'wasn't said' as 'something that was said' (as a troll would).

Notably, I never said it was everywhere, in fact I said the opposite (if you go back and review). You left an important sentence out of my quoted response.

We want to keep discussions clean, if you have something to add make sure to keep it accurate. Cherry-picking and putting words in other people's mouth isn't an acceptable form of rational discourse.

We don't want people reading this misunderstanding your intent or what you are trying to communicate.

Regardless of you saying it happens "in many areas" I am saying it doesn't happen "everywhere" as a separate point. Yes, it happens in many areas, and in many other areas it doesn't happen. These things aren't mutually exclusive. Fuck, tell me more about people "misunderstanding intent".

I would have said everywhere if I intended everywhere, I didn't, so the point you tried to make seems to be moot, it certainly didn't look separate with how you structured your response.

Everyone knows almost nothing happens everywhere. Its why the first thing they teach in argumentation, debate, and logic is to never use absolute language like 'all' and 'every' unless you know its absolute (and can't be misinterpreted).

Miscommunications happen, hopefully you understand how it happened now and will be more careful moving forward.

I’ll give it one more shot.

> > > The police are liable if they don't follow-up on the report

> > Since when?

> Its what the courts in many areas have generally ruled.

Really, if you want to insist that this was what you were saying the entire time, either start with it or acknowledge that you failed to start with it. Indeed, miscommunications happen. Consider that you come across as unwilling to believe your part in this happening.

Likewise, I hope you can see how you erred so that you may do better in the future.

> 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.

It isn't just about legal liability, it is also about politics.

Suppose a child is abducted/murdered/etc. Turns out some concerned bystander saw something suspicious and called the police, but the police decided not to follow up. Even if the police aren't legally liable, once the media and politicians are done with the story, the general public will be so outraged, decent odds the chief of police will be forced to resign. You can say this is a very rare scenario and almost never happens, but government culture encourages risk-aversion – especially when it comes to children – so they'll worry about the risk, they'll overestimate it – and then they'll craft policies based on it.

>non-emergency service should be capable of handling events of this sort

This is literally what "defund the police" was all about

Cali is a nanny state. The government has set the example and now some of its constituents feel empowered to do the same because Save The Children.

Yes! When I watch movies with my kids from the 80s and 90s, you see all the kids riding their bikes everywhere.

You’d probably be arrested if you let your kids have that type of freedom today.

Meanwhile, here in Japan, this is perfectly normal to see. Kids ride their bikes (even at night), take the subway to other parts of the city, etc., all by themselves. I can't imagine raising a kid in America these days.

I am wondering what has changed? Hasn't the US actually become safer over the last decades? I am from Europe btw, so this whole issue seems completely crazy to me.

Yes, exactly. Doesn’t stop the calls.

The US has become safer, but also a lot more afraid.

The media and parts of the government sell a narrative that the us has become more dangerous, even though it's safer. This narrative has taken hold and allows the American public to be rallied against imaginary threats and keeps crooked people in power.

Are those strangers truly concerned about their safety or are they actually egoists that want to use the police to get the outdoors for themselves and other adults?

We may never know. It is frustrating as a parent to be held to the social expectations of those at the most extreme ends of normative conviction. It speaks volumes that we mediate these interactions through police rather than through mutual dialogue.

Yeah, that's the part of your story I find most disturbing.

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?

> It speaks volumes that we mediate these interactions through police rather than through mutual dialogue.

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).

The examples in the article are

> 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?

If I were to attribute negative motivations to it, it would probably be one more of resentment or jealousy. There are a lot of folks who are going to be growing older with no children. This often sounds great when you're young to "young", but decidedly less great as one ages. I've always wondered how society, at large, was going to deal with this.

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-...

Isn't that just a nice way of saying mentally ill?

Healthy and well-adjusted adults don't do these things.

Due to stigma, people will dance around the relationship of mental illness and socially maladjusted behaviors all day

> 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

"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."

Just wait until this becomes politicized into a culture war issue where you are accused of supporting the "other side" if you let your kids play outside.

Why are people doing this? Why are the police even reacting to it?

I know the cops in my town would never show up. They don't show up for grand larceny at least not usually the same day.

He, in Sweden you only call the police for grand larceny, because the insurance company will ask for a police report number.

(Edit: crime in action, they might come.)

In my country, it's mandatory for the police to show up if you make a registered eponymous (not anonymous) complaint.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

Is there an epidemic of abandoned children? Why on earth would anyone even consider that a possibility

Remind me of the "free-range" kids (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/free-range-kids-and-our...)

The sad fact is, there is a truly real evil going on when it comes to many rights. Parental rights are just the most recent battleground, and no one does a thing to curb it.

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.

> totalitarian and fascist societies

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."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Freedom

Just came in here to say that Fromm is great. Highly recommended.

As an outside observer, the single most disturbing trend in the US is the fact that everybody seemingly feels totally entitled to police each other's lives.

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.

It’s the Protestant Puritanism of American culture getting stronger. It’s the same with the so called woke religion, it’s just a repackaging of Puritanism.

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.

It’s all paternalistic authoritarianism… but the logic is consistent- if the majority of people think we should police how adults act and think, well, children should absolutely, unconditionally be micromanaged! The poor little fools might get hurt and then someone will get sued.

Don't get me wrong here, but I don't think what you (perhaps sarcastically?) state here is a good idea.

If all adults agree to build mechanized genocidal murder factories that will remain a stain on humanity for centuries it is still wrong to do so.

Some rights are non-negotiable to my eyes. Even (or maybe especially) when a democratic majority decides to break them. Legality doesn't matter here. The concentration camps next to where I grew up were also legal during Nazi reign. That doesn't make them right, not back then, not now and not in the future.

I'd highly advise against a petty "let's se where that gets them"-stance when it comes to human rights issues, because those paying the price are not those who commit the atrocities.

Thanks for the recommendation.

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.

Thank you for sharing this.

I have experienced this cycling without a helmet (as is my right) from aggressive motorists.

Now I have a term for the phenomenon!

> 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 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.

> This is such a non-statement

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.

What GP means (I imagine, anyway) is that your post has a whole bunch of words in it without really saying what you think. Because you haven't really staked out an opinion, after throwing up some serious-sounding phrases, the whole thing comes off as vaguely "both sides-y" and thus not very helpful?

I was confused about your post, too. What did you mean?

> thus not very helpful

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 just want to let you know that even if you believe in the words you are saying, these kind of hollow empty platitudes have historically been weaponized by bad faith agitators to either perpetuate or propagate abuse.

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.

Iirc, there is a small book "The Grand Inquisitor" that shows this problem in a hypothetical dialogue between imprisoned Jesus and the chief church inquisitor who claims that freedom and moral choice is too much to bear and what people need instead is "freedom from choice."

It is one chapter (a story-within-a-story) in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

I really don't like the phrase "parental rights." As authority figures, parents don't have rights, they have responsibilities. Parenting is a form of government and should be treated as such.

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.

That's a very irrational line of flawed circular thought.

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

I just counter it by telling such parents that over managing a child is in itself child abuse and that I refuse to partake in it.

Authorities are governed by laws and politicians. If police would even take a car to a call saying “a 9 year old is playing outside alone” then those norms and laws just need to be changed. It’s as simple as that.

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.

>biking on the sidewalk in front of the house should be a low risk activity for a 2nd and 4th grader if done together

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.

Have you talked about how they should respond to someone engaging them that way? Is don't talk to strangers a workable strategy?

Nosy nancy doesn't care. She will still call the cops. I've seen this myself.

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.

Those forces only exist in certain areas. California is a great example of everyone being a nosy fuck.

I've lived in various cities from wealthy to poor, more urban to rural. It's literally everywhere. Though rich places are worse.

Moving is far from an easy solution, but there are some places that take the opposite approach. We lived in Utah for years and they actually have laws on the books to guarantee parental rights (I think they call them free range parenting or something like that?). In the more city dense areas you'll still have people who do that kind of stuff, but it's much, much less socially acceptable to interfere than in many coastal areas, and if somebody does call the police, there's a strong chance the police will tell them you're in the right and they are in the wrong. There are tons of tech opportunities for work there too so definitely worth a look if it's important to you.

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!

Free range parenting laws are also being passed to codify the right to spank and physically disciplined children.

That's why you find them being passed in conservative and ultra-religious states: Utah, Texas, Oklahoma

And to force schools to disclose information that their children don't feel safe revealing to them (like LGBTQ status), knowing that it could cause their religious parents to completely destroy their lives through things that are banned in most of the civilized world but not in the US (conversion therapy, etc)

It's a tough balance.

> It's a tough balance.

Sarcasm? We have both privacy and free roam rights for children in germany.

Talk about sane legislature!

Agreed. As an American raising a child in Europe, it's also strange that what I believe to be perfectly reasonable positions like "My child should have the right to play outside unbothered by police or busy-bodies", are not only opposed, but opposed because of other unrelated culture-war reasons. The reasoning seems to be that because (e.g.) some states allow parents to hit their children or otherwise do things that (I agree) are reprehensible, therefore parents should not have the right to allow their children outside. Baffling.

And yet home schooling is completely illegal in Germany, something that would be a complete deal breaker for me. But perhaps that speaks more to how bad public school is in the US, maybe it's freaking amazing in Germany?

I'm with you on this. Maybe it speaks a bit to opinions on public schools in the US, but even free access to the best public school in the world doesn't (imo) give someone the right to force it on others.

This is the most bizarre thing that I will never understand about the US. Everything is about protecting the children from imagined harm, even if the "protection" is causing much more harm, but beating kids is totally fine. CPS may take away your kids if you let them play outside, but not if you beat them.

Spanking a child and beating a child are two completely unrelated things.

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.

Spanking a child and beating a child are two completely unrelated things.

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.

I guess folks have different definitions of the words?

To me, a "spank" is usually a mild to moderate slap on the rear, a part of the body particularly well cushioned that can handle it just fine without physical trauma, not to mention psychological trauma.

When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool, and usually with visible bruising and possible laceration and bleeding.

If you've ever been a parent, regardless of whether you think spanking is OK, you know that there is a huge difference between these two activities. I personally avoid physical discipline myself, but I can understand a parent who decides to give their kid a spank on the rump after the child did something where they didn't understand how seriously negative the implications were.

For example, if 5 year old runs out into traffic on a busy road and you pull them back, which form of discipline is more likely to negatively incentivize the impulse to dash into the street to get a penny? I can see why someone would think that the short – but sharp – pain of a quick spank is more effective at protecting the child's short and long term health.

When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool, and usually with visible bruising and possible laceration and bleeding.

"Spanking" can definitely include implements, though that's less common nowadays as people have started to view the act in a less positive light overall.

And the "without psychological trauma" is one aspect where it isn't really that clear if there is a level of spanking that avoids that whole issue.

> it isn't really that clear if there is a level of spanking that avoids that whole issue

Exactly, which is why I myself choose to play it safe.

But it's kinda like the, "No evidence that parachutes save lives" thing, where because you don't have a double-blind randomized controlled study, we have to end up relying on our intuition.

And – unlike with parachutes – everyone has a different intuition as to whether spanking is actually going to result in trauma. Lots of, "I'll never hit my child" going up against, "I was spanked as a child and I'm just fine" so its all back to personal judgment.

My oldest son once accidentally ran out in traffic, and he was practically traumatised just by the way I shouted "stop!" at him. He never did it again.

I think by using violence, the main thing you teach kids is that using violence is an option. I prefer to discourage violence. I'm not saying I never grabbed or held them a bit too roughly, but I think they learn a lot more from me talking to them and explaining why it's wrong, than from pain.

> When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool

I see people talk about belts far too often. I would consider that immediate grounds for losing custody over your child.

The trouble is, you are describing different points on a scale with no clear boundary. As anyone into BDSM can tell you, an open handed slap on a bare buttocks is quite capable of inflicting severe pain - and therefore, psychological trauma. Imagine being made to wait for the spank, in a vulnerable and humiliating position. Imagine if it were accompanied by mind games. In short, imagine what a sadist hell bent on inflicting trauma on a child could do if you permitted them to strike their victim, provided they left no permanent marks.

It is true that a malicious parent is capable of mentally damaging their child without recourse to violence, but it does not follow from that that we should shrug and permit it. Violence is an overwhelming force multiplier in an abuser's toolkit, and also strictly unnecessary for good parenting.

> For example, if 5 year old runs out into traffic on a busy road and you pull them back, which form of discipline is more likely to negatively incentivize the impulse to dash into the street to get a penny?

I'm glad that you brought up this example because it's the one context in which I think spanking can be acceptable (needing to shock a child from something they were about to do that could have endangered themselves or others). I'm not a parent and not sure I wouldn't try to find some other approach but I can see the strength of the argument here (where I can't see it for other uses of corporal punishment of children).

Spanking and beating your employees are two entirely different things.

Lots of people believe that not using physical discipline is ultimately harmful to kids. Their brains aren’t fully developed until age 25, so it can’t be assumed that children can learn proper behaviors entirely through reasoning.

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.

> 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?

The empirical evidence of efficacy of corporal punishment is also mixed, so between the two, I think I'd recommend the strategy that minimizes violence.

> 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.

We've been through this before. The empirical evidence is not mixed: there is weak evidence that it is effective at securing compliance in the short term, and strong evidence that it leads to bad long term outcomes. The high-performing Asian families you alluded to in the last thread about this issue are some of the least likely in America to physically abuse their kids. That's because hitting kids is, among other things, stupid.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34471156

What are the “bad long term outcomes?” Civilization as we know it is the product of societies that practiced corporal punishment. Most of those civilizations have declined since they abandoned it. Look at the British. They were famous for the strict discipline in their schools. Now they’re a shadow of their former selves. I’m not as ready as you to abandon received wisdom and a track record for some academic studies.

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.

In the previous thread, you attempted to construct the argument that high-status Asian families somehow endorsed corporal punishment; in fact, they are among the least likely cohorts to do so. That there is a huge diversity of different Asians doesn't do anything to rehabilitate your argument.

Nobody should hit kids. This is a bad contrarian hill to die on.

You pointed to a survey that asked people to agree or disagree with the assertion that sometimes, children need a "good hard spanking." As I said in that thread, that evidence is unpersuasive, because it relies on a confusing English idiom. As used in America, the term "good hard spanking" just means "spanking." But if you're one of the 71% of Asian American adults born in another country, that qualifier "hard" implies something more extreme than an ordinary spanking.

We know for a fact that corporal punishment is widely used in Asia. Surveys show that 60-70% of parents in India, China, and Japan spank their kids or approve of spanking: e.g. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2014-06/03/content_175.... It's possible that all those Asian immigrants come to American and adopt western attitudes against corporal punishment, but I'm going to need more than a poorly worded survey to believe that.

> Nobody should hit kids. This is a bad contrarian hill to die on.

You're the contrarian here! The same survey you relied on in the other thread shows that the vast majority of asian American parents (73%) spank their kids.

> America as you know it today, with all its prosperity, was created by people who were spanked as children.

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-...

It’s not an incidental correlation—something that happened to exist at the same time as contemporary societies were being built. Cultures all over the world came to the conclusion that physical discipline produced better behaved kids. Europeans only changed their view in the last generation or so, and in Asia, it’s still the dominant view.

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.

How's that lakebed dust doing?

Any tech jobs outside of SLC?

Thank goodness we’ve had record breaking snow this year, so the lake lives to see another day!

I suppose it depends on how narrowly you define "SLC." Lehi and Utah County is brimming with tech jobs, but if you consider that part of SLC then no, not really many tech jobs outside. Further north into Davis County and Ogden, and even Logan there are some, but it's not like like SLC/Lehi.

Lakebed is indeed sadness.

Be careful. 1983 is coming.

(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.

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