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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

This is something that free range parenting advocates have been talking about for a long time. See https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/03/6412565....

For me one of the most compelling data points wasn't even a parenting reference. It was https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Surprising-Amer.... First published in the mid-1990s, the chapters on the children of millionaires found that the more support millionaires gave to their children, the worse that those children turned out. Armed with that theory, I've always doubted the wisdom of extreme helicopter parenting that has become popular since.

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One important thing that the NPR story completely glosses over is the component of race and class that permeates this issue. It’s not an accident that the prototypical mom of the “free range kid” movement is white and lives in a relatively wealthy neighborhood like the one mentioned in the story.

Poor black and brown women are disproportionately targeted by child welfare authorities starting literally from birth. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7372952/ This makes it particularly important that we actually change the laws around what constitutes neglect or endangerment, not just create a culture shift.

This happens everywhere, it doesn't have to do with race. I have a family member who has children in very posh and upscale neighborhood in a suburban area of NoVa. She has had neighbors call child welfare several times for her 10 year old skateboarding around town, or playing at a playground unattended with friends (literally a block away from their home). I get the vibe that alot of older residents don't want children running around because they value peace and quiet, so they call the cops/DCF when they see kids hanging w/o adults.

Sociology departments in America are captured by the current moral fashion (identity politics). If it were me, I'd think twice before believing the research that you linked to.

If it is moral fashion to acknowledge and measure the obvious racial and economic discrimination in America then that’s a fashion which is morally good.

That is assuming that the moral fashion is actually doing that. Unfortunately, the moral fashion is more about starting with a predefined set of conclusions, then working backwards to justify those conclusions. I don't think we need to sell out our integrity to achieve a better society, or make false equivalence between liberal social justice and critical social justice, of which the latter is the current moral fashion.

It is actively harmful if they're measuring the wrong things and in the wrong way to come to an exact predefined conclusion instead of the one that is actually maximally good for children.

Hard not to when antisocial policies are intentionally used to disadvantage minorities after the 60s.

We might agree they're focused on a symptom, not a disease, but conservative policy objectives are definitely causing disparities that now even poor white people are finally feeling.

Conservatives shut down public pools in reaction to integration and then proceeded to shut down socialism.

There’s no conflict here. Laws don’t usually change until after the culture shift. They often lag the culture by years or decades.

All too frequently laws in the US are completely out of step with the culture. For instance despite broad support for many reforms (abortion rights, term limits in Congress, marijuana legalization) nothing happens just because the culture has evolved.

In a real socialist society, neglect would need to be explicitly determined by parents.

Helicopter parenting was never born of wisdom. It's driven by anxiety.

I’m not a parent so I don’t know what I’m talking about.

However, I have a lot of friends with children and some of their takes are completely irrational to me.

“Let the kids WALK three blocks to school? Not anymore, things aren’t like what we grew up with. It’s scary out there!”

Exactly. Violent crime, etc has been on a general and significant downward trend since we were kids (80s and 90s). It’s not what we grew up with - it’s significantly safer. The media drives a tremendous amount of anxiety and it’s extremely detrimental to parents, kids, and society overall.

It used to be “sex sells” (still does) but more and more it’s “fear sells”.

"Let the kids WALK three blocks to school? Not anymore, things aren’t like what we grew up with."

One truth in this regard: people will straight up call the cops, or worse, CPS, on unattended children. In their perception that things are scary, people manifest their fear and become villains with "good intentions."

And, to the hilarious dead response to my first comment, I'm just gonna repeat this back to you: "You're one of billions of ultimately meaningless voices."

>One truth in this regard: people will straight up call the cops, or worse, CPS, on unattended children

And there will never be any meaningful consequences leveled against those people, empowering bad actors far beyond any meaningful social sanction they could ever have generated by themselves.

Making sure concern trolls and the hysterical can't fuck up a working community is something poorer societies (SE Asia, Continental Europe) inherently do better than richer ones (UK, US), mainly because the former simply can't afford to indulge it.

I'd love to read the papers cited there without having to buy that book.

I wonder if what is defined as "support" is actually, meddling, undermining, and pressurzing children into fulfilling the parents needs.

The book wasn't a compilation of independent research papers. It was produced out of a compilation of interviews done to better understand millionaires.

Support was defined by the wealthy parent providing financial support, whether through a stipend, gifts, or whatever. It turned out that, despite the best of intentions, such support almost inevitably wound up with destructive emotional dynamics.

> It turned out that, despite the best of intentions, such support almost inevitably wound up with destructive emotional dynamics

See the list of "self made" billionaires who started with a small loan of a couple 100 mil from their parents for examples.

What’s an example? I thought the family safety net was a bigger factor in children from wealthy families starting riskier ventures earlier in life and perhaps serially. I’ve never heard of a company starting like you describe so I assume it isn’t that common, but maybe people just don’t talk about it much? Or maybe you are just exaggerating the loan magnitude by quite a lot?

A few people turning out well does not negate all the ones that failed. The US has a ton of millionaires, but only a few successes.

But presumably it is also possible that some children were smart and successful, so therefore the parents didn't feel the need to provide so much support.

Whereas others were perhaps struggling with everything so the parents gave much more support.

Everyday example: the parents of disabled people dedicate almost everything they've got to help their children, and often end up poor and with a poor quality of life themselves as a result.

"Financial" was the key missing word.

https://archive.org/details/1996-the-millionaire-next-door

Here you go.

Well, it comes a lot of from the good stuff that involved parenting does.

In other words, even taking kids to school in a car instead them walking (or at least on the bike, but their own feet still involved, therefore they are themselves 100% in control in going to school) is the support that is not the in the list of "support" but will be in the long run. I should mention, I do recognize the time constraints of current society.

> without having to buy that book

You can get the book for $2.74:

https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Surprising-Amer...

Unless there is some other reason you don't want to buy it?

Check the local library or their ebook app.

Epigenetics suggests that unnecessary stressors in the current generation reduce biological fitness, which competes with struggle for the sake of struggle when its not necessary

hope someone finds the happy medium of allowing growth without unnecessary stress

As opposed to necessary stressors in previous generations (hot and cold wars)? If not all stressors are bad, which ones are good?

The wars of the 20th century were pretty extreme outliers in terms of how many people in the societies were significantly affected by the wars. I believe that for most of human history post tribal era, most of the population wouldn’t have been nearly as affected by wars. You might have to pay taxes to someone else after it’s over.

Some centuries in Central Europe were full of war, wiping out 30% of the population in some countries (30yr war, for example). So there were definitely large populations affected by war previously.

On what evidence do you believe that?

What I've read of history shows it to have been full of wars with things like genocide and mass rape. We didn't even have a name for genocide until after WW 2 - it was just a standard thing that happened regularly.

And pillaging was just taken for granted as a standard solution to the problem of supplying an army in the field. It was much easier to take whatever the local peasants had and then move on than to have a good supply chain. The fact that the peasants often starved as a result was just one of the costs of war. Better them than us, and we have the weapons.

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