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Comment by __turbobrew__ | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know what is up with the USA and its obsession that kids cannot have autonomy. I think many of us grew up where our parents didn’t know our location at all times. My parents used to tell me to be home by a certain time, but I used to roam the neighborhood, go get candy at the gas station, explore the forest.

Maybe it is a sign of the eroding social trust in the USA where people do not believe that others in the community are decent people as well. It kind of makes sense if you never actually go out into the community and meet others. The USA lifestyle is you drive everywhere in your big SUV, all interactions are transactional, you don’t talk to your neighbours and instead watch netflix and binge social media where you are sold the idea that everything is horrible and the world is a bad place.

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> I don’t know what is up with the USA and its obsession that kids cannot have autonomy.

This is a news story and a controversy because it's a weird thing that happened.

The US is a big place. Societal norms and law enforcement practices vary widely from location to location. This appears to be one sheriff pushing a personal agenda.

This appears to be one sheriff pushing a personal agenda.

Unfortunately it's not - there's a whole "child safety" department behind them, ready with a "safety plan" and even an app that they're going force the poor kid to install. This kind of stuff doesn't happen without the coordination of external bodies, and decades of societal shift in favor of this kind of control-oriented parenting (and blind faith in technical solutions toward this end), also at institutional levels:

  A few days later, DFCS presented Patterson with a "safety plan" for her to sign. It would require her to delegate a "safety person" to be a "knowing participant and guardian" and watch over the children whenever she leaves home. The plan would also require Patterson to download an app onto her son's phone allowing for his location to be monitored. (The day when it will be illegal not to track one's kids is rapidly approaching.)

Against this backdrop - it's quite likely the Sheriff wasn't pushing her own agenda at all, but simply following the procedures provided by her department.

I don't know if that's true. the assistant DA refused to drop the charge, and the compromise that they offered was some CPS-based safety plan.

but the ADA who owns the case could drop the charge tomorrow and it all goes away.

and Sheriffs don't prosecute or dismiss charges, they simply take them to the DAs and supply evidence. someone called them and said there was a kid walking alone and they looked abused, and the sheriff took it to the courts and DAs.

> This is a news story and a controversy because it's a weird thing that happened.

This kind of thing has been going on for decades now, e.g.

Florida mom arrested after allowing 7-year-old son to walk to park alone (2014): https://fox4kc.com/news/florida-mom-arrested-after-allowing-...

Maryland family under investigation for letting their kids walk home alone (2015): https://www.fox43.com/article/news/local/contests/maryland-f...

11-Year-Old Boy Played in His Yard. CPS Took Him, Felony Charge for Parents (2015): https://reason.com/2015/06/11/11-year-old-boy-played-in-his-...

Mom Arrested for Letting Child, 10, Shop Alone at Lego Store (2017): https://www.freerangekids.com/mom-arrested-for-letting-child...

And the parent's statement is still true:

>This is a news story and a controversy because it's a weird thing that happened.

How often do you read a news story that says "sun rose in the morning"? The news doesn't report it if it's a normal, non-controversial thing.

That's not to say that this proves anything one way or the other - just that the existence of n=5 cases where this happened over 10 years is not proof of a wider phenomenon.

It's proof that there's a legal framework that allows this abuse, let alone promotes it, and that it's leading to real-world harm.

How high should N be before we care to plug such legal holes?

That Assanges are rare doesn't mean there shouldn't be outcries about it.

If it were one sheriff, the person driving by in their SUV wouldn't have called the cops. This is a wider phenomenon than you're letting on here

It's not just one sheriff, it's:

- the busybody who called the cops in the first place

- the sheriff

- the Assistant District Attorney

- the Department of Family and Child Services

The latter 3 all know it’s wrong, but also don’t to be liable at all.

There's an old saying about how difficult it is to convince someone differently when their paycheck depends on it...

There are other stories like this, so the issue is at the least a common attack vector for law enforcement officials pushing agendas.

I think the problem with the US is slow eroding of the rights of youth. We're not treating them as young adults who are fully capable of making their own decisions one day. Instead we're treating them as incapable infants until they leave the nest.

The movie industry is a good example of this. If you're a child in certain places in the US, you'll grow up with violence around you (in real life). There was a movie "The Eighth Grade" that got an "R" rating not because of the violence, but because of the language. PG-13 was in 2018 limited to one "fuck" per film.

https://www.themarysue.com/eighth-grade-is-rated-r/

The US isn't even treating adults like young adults. Everyone is an infant these days. There was a YouTube video about the 10 commandments that said "Thou shall not kill" and it was demonetized because it "involved violence" and never corrected even once YouTube knew the problem. There is a list of thousands of words you cannot say or talk about without getting your channel banned or demonetized. YouTube is not alone in this either, its everywhere. Banks, PayPal, Patreon, they are all blackballing people. In fact most of the large tech companies use the same third party moderation and will end up banning the same person across all channels at once if you end up on their shit list.

It's not equally distributed. In Boston, MA area kids have as much autonomy as their parents wish to give them AFAIK. It's not uncommon to see 10 year olds in my town nearby they are doing all sorts of biz around town on their own.

Literally any very low income area of any larger city in the US is the same. You see kids all the time walking around without adults. If they're very young (like 6 or whatever) they're typically an older kid, sometimes like around 10 to 12, but again this happens everywhere.

It's only middle class neighborhoods and above where people start to have strong reactions to this in a "won't somebody think of the children!!!" sort of way

It’s not an obsession with “USA” but with government agencies. The police but also child protective services (called different things in different locations) create these kind of sham protections. It ends up creating a chilling effect by scaring parents into acting differently and depriving their children of much needed independence that is critical to their development. But worse, when a parent gets into trouble for it, they end up being shamed and humiliated in ways that really affect their happiness and psychology. Imagine if you are told that some person from a random agency, usually of low intelligence and low empathy, will come check in on your children every week and humiliate you by forcing you to report to them. It is an inhumane deprivation of parental rights, but also an excess of government. As a taxpayer, I absolutely hate that we waste money on this type of thing when we’re in debt.

Probably it is not (only) eroding trust but eroding nerves with the overbearing sense that someone must look over everything and protect for anything and everything, including themselves, in other words meddle with each other's lives to the level of forcing them against their will.

In other hand despite the US has never been the role model of safety or courteousness towards each other yet the seemingly increasing trend of gun and drug related violence could cause short circuit in the head of those overloaded, especially when they are responsible and scrutinised by a litigious society for any and every tiny mishap with inflated theoretical consequences that should have been precluded with tenths of seconds reaction time and infallible divination.

yep, we're old fogies now. at age 9 my best friend and i would ride our bikes about 5 miles to the beach. no cell phones. no arrests. no problems. we'd ride our gas-powered scooters to the gas station for slushies. we too played in the woods.

i don't understand what changed or why kids today can't do anything on their own. it does not seem good for their development, which in turn does not seem good for the future of our country.

It could be that mass perception of crime levels is higher than it actually is (statistics say it has only gotten better over the years), possibly due to the number of negative media stories produced all day every day.

Keep in mind that the "majority of people" are not informed skeptics like you and me, they can barely use a computer and largely believe what biased mass media tells them to believe.

At least that's how I feel about it, you don't have to agree.

I feel the same. Constatnt agenda of fear in news slowly changes our trust in society, even though statistically criminality lowering.

I was kid in 90’s which was quite crazy in our country. I went to school with mine parents just once - first day. I cannot imagine mine kids with same approach today.

i'm in my mid 30s now, and I remember as soon as i was old enough to ride a bike well, i would ride it over a mile away from home all by myself, probably around age 7 or 8. i got lost one time and was really flustered, starting crying, knocked on a literal random door, and a very nice old lady let me use her phone to call my mom, who was slightly embarrassed, lol. this was in a large city in texas for context.

another random andecdote: my older brother, probably 11 or 12 at the time, got in a lot of trouble with my mom and they had a big fight. my mom just straight up kicked him out of the house with no shoes, and literally walked barefoot over several miles to his friend's house.

reflecting on that gives me a lot of introspection to the nature of the parenting i received.

I don't know if you can can say the entire USA has an "obsession" with preventing children from being autonomous based on this one incident. That's too much of a generalization. There are obviously people who do think that way. But there are also a lot who do not, including the mother, who said "I was not panicking as I know the roads and know he is mature enough to walk there without incident."

This situation is ridiculous, of course. But the USA is huge, and you can probably find pretty much any or every attitude and approach to life here.

It's not based on this incident, it's based on this incident happening and on the fact that there are laws making this possible, plus zero checks on the people doing it. Nobody saying "this is insane, stop it". This was voted in, in theory, by the majority of the US population.

Oh, and of course that they're doing it. After all, they're not doing this of their own volition. They're paid by the government. In other words, by the majority of the US population.

Well, the mother who was arrested doesn't agree with the policy. I wouldn't be surprised if she is saying it's insane, and it should be stopped. She got a lawyer to help push back against the charges.

This was voted in, in theory, by the majority of the US population.

The laws vary state by state, and probably by region within states. So this seems to be a law in Fannin County, Georgia. It might not even apply to all of Georgia, much less the entire country. It certainly does not apply in the city I live in. It might apply in other parts of the state I live in.

And it would not have been put to the entire country for a vote.

See, the USA has 350 million people, and fifty states with materially different local norms. With this scale and amount of variety, "one in a million" freak incidents ought to be registered all the time. But, being freak incidents, they get amplified and thus seem to represent the entire country in the eyes of distant observers, foreigners, or just people from far enough away within the US.

Ironically, this is the same mechanism that magnifies every freak incident in daily life and gives it disproportionate news coverage. It's sometimes useful to draw attention to a rare problem, but more often it's just to pump up the audience's emotions and thus drive up "engagement" (views, coincident ad impressions, contextual ad clicks). This magnification, if not dampened by some rational thought, leads to people, including officials, mortally afraid that "anything could happen" with an unattended child on the street, and over-reacting; jail time for a parent is definitely worse for a kid that walking alone on the streets for some time.

But again, talking about "the USA lifestyle" is about as productive as speaking about "the European cuisine". The lifestyle is highly varied; I myself is not a fan of transactional suburban SUV lifestyle, hence mine, and that of my neighbors, is vastly different.

> With this scale and amount of variety, "one in a million" freak incidents ought to be registered all the time.

I’m not sure “one in a million” and “freak incident” is the right mental model with this case.

What is noteworthy that a whole series of people, most of them professionals, thought an unatended child walking is noteworthy and they should do something about it. The busybody who thought they should report it, then the sherif who thought they should respond to that report then further thought they should do something about it and then further thought to go back and arrest the parrent, then the other officer who didn’t say “hey what are you doing, are you ok?”, then the child protection services who recommended the tracking app, and then the prosecutor who provides the legal muscle to back this insanity.

Yes it might be a one in a million freak event that all these people assembled themselves into a conga line of crazyness. But they had these beliefs even before the boy started walking. How many others have similar ideas to them? You think these 5 are the only ones?

I agree that the idea that streets are dangerous for kids before 12 is not very sane, and much more widespread than I would like it to be. It depends though; now the police in NYC is efficient, and the crime level reasonably low, but 20 years ago the situation was different. IDK how things are in Georgia.

What I refer to as a "freak accident" is the jail time. I would expect issuing an official warning at most.

The problem is that this state of mind is that of the voters. It's not imposed by some oppressive authoritarian ruler, it's self-inflicted. Democracy, sadly, makes the unwholesome traits in people as visible as the most virtuous traits. E.g. Switzerland, the poster child of the most real democracy on this planet, only gave women voting rights in 1950s-70s, completely democratically.

This mechanism is the source of fear for foreigners who believe they will be the victims of a mass shooting if they visit the USA.

I think a lot of it has to do with constant fear mongering on the news and its effect after 40+ years of it. Also the phenomenon of (I forgot what it's called) but where people are afraid of flying but not driving because they see constant news coverage of crashed planes.

Fear and rage drives higher engagement which results in more ad revenue.

Dateline used to be on NBC 1x per week...

Now there's a cable channel that's literally Dateline 24 x 7 x 365...

Suburban paranoia and it it bleeds it leads.

There’s elements at play where adults with childhood neglect and/or sexual trauma sublimate their understandably strong emotions into current safety initiatives for children.

People pile on with their ideas, like some sort of perverse “yes, and …” improv exercise. Nobody disagrees because “won’t somebody think of the children”.

Other folks in power blindly see it as their sole duty, without context, to implement and execute said initiatives which creates a positive feedback loop with no relief.

USA is actually way more dangerous than Europe.

Can you provide a source for that claim? Mine says the total crime rate in Europe is actually much higher:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-crime-rates...

Have you considered that the US has giant vehicles and a critical lack of sidewalks and other pedestrian coded cat infrastructure?

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