Hacker News Reader

I've heard a few things on this. One is that there were a few high profile but very bad cases in the 80s, kids getting kidnapped and trafficked with law enforcement not really willing to even look into it. The odds are infinitesimal, but the cost of the negative outcome is very, very high. Second is kids getting run over by cars. Comparatively that happens all the time. Third is a general breakdown of social connection with people in your neighborhood.

Do kids really get hit by cars at a level that would materially impact the “let them play in the park” calculus?

When I was a kid in the 90s, I knew multiple kids who were severely injured by cars. For whatever reason, this did not seem to have any impact on my mother's parenting and no new limits were placed on my freedom as a result. For the record though, one of the kids I knew who was hit was leaving the property of their school with plenty of adult supervision around at the time of the collision (and received a large settlement from the school).

Adam Walsh was 7yo and abducted from a Sears. His parents left him to play Atari while they shopped.

They made a movie about it in 1983. Politicians introduced new laws around it.

His father John Walsh went on to host Americas Most Wanted on TV for 24 seasons. Prime time TV whipped up a culture of fear for that entire generation.

Kids growing up with that culture are parents now. Not surprised to see these results.

> In many areas crime has been trending down but people seem to think things are more dangerous than ever, in general.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, or that I disagree that Stranger Danger is overblown.

But is it possible that part of the reason crime is down is because of Stranger Danger?

I’m not suggesting it is, just that I can’t say with certainty that it isn’t.

Yes, that is a good question. It is generally answered in longer form treatments, like Skenazy's "Free Range Kids" book.

The answer is that the rate of crime on kids committed outside by strangers is down, even after you adjust for less time outside.

Children are much more likely to be sexually assaulted by family members and trusted friends than strangers. We don't like to think about that though, so we redirect our fears to stranger danger.

> But is it possible that part of the reason crime is down is because of Stranger Danger?

Yes. This is a really soft question. Sure, part of the reason that crime is down could possibly be due to stranger danger.

On the flip side, over-parenting has negative consequences on kids who have no freedom. I believe the same poll had said that most kids had never walked down a grocery store aisle by themselves and weren't allowed to play outside in front of their house w/o a parent.

I reckon there's also a feedback loop where places have fewer kids running around for these reasons so you don't want to be among the first to release your kids there especially as a new parent.

Compared to moving in to a place that already has kids running around doing things.

> United States is so rare that a child would have to be outside unsupervised for, on average, 750,000 years before being snatched by a stranger.

Is this stat from 1980s or recent? If recent, what may be the likelihood that such stats are the outcome of parents' paranoia?

There are 300 kid abductions per year in the US, more or less the same amount of people who got struck by lightning or the same about of kids who drown in swimming pool. I don't see any hysteria around two of these topics though

Is that 300 kid abductions by strangers? Because just based on the amber alerts that I get where the police suspect a parent that number can not possibly be correct if not.

> Is that 300 kid abductions by strangers?

Correct. The number of abductions of children by their parents is three orders of magnitude higher.

I mean I certainly see a lot of talk about swimming pools being extremely dangerous for kids.

Gun ownership advocates in particular love to bring up the stat that it's more dangerous for a household with kids to have a swimming pool than a gun.

My son recently had to get rabies shots. Well, that was the recommendation because there was a bat in the sleeping quarters of his camp. The probability that the bat had rabies is vanishingly small. Just like the probability that the bat bit him with no marks.

But, you read about rabies (no cure, horrible death), and even if it is a 1-10 million chance and you can do something about it — well, he got the shot (over my protest!).

I think this is similar — child abducted and god knows what happens to them? And it’s your fault as a parent for not supervising? Even a 1-in-10 million chance seems like too much.

It’s not rational, but I think that’s the psychology. It is countered by mentioning the side effects of the vaccine —in this case, identifying the potential harms of over-supervision.

I get a similar response when talking with other parents about allowing phones in school. We know that there are 130k+ schools in the US, and that a school shooting is statistically very, very small, however they still want to have a way for their children to contact them (or for them to contact their kids) if this happens. The mothers, in particular, all agree on this in my circle.

Getting a rabies shot is a much less onerous protective measure than preventing kids from playing unsupervised for their entire childhoods.

> The probability that the bat had rabies is vanishingly small.

Not really, it's something like 5%. Usually if the bat can be captured and tested for rabies you can wait to get the vaccine, but if the bat couldn't be caught, it makes sense to vaccinate just in case.

I don't understand why you would want to take a chance on rabies. What are the side effects of the vaccine that are so harmful?

Post exposure vaccine is costly: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/7/16851134/ra...

I'm a child of the 80s and was a pretty independent kid from an early age growing up in NYC. I spent a lot of time in the city's libraries, arcades, etc. I went to and from school (and generally started navigating Manhattan) on my own starting in first grade.

From the time I was 6 until I turned about 14, pedophiles were all over me like flies on shit. They would follow me home from the library. They would come up behind me at Playland Arcade (in Times Square) and grope me or masturbate. I would just freeze and let this happen -- I had to be taught by someone to physically fight them off.

I think we both overestimate and underestimate the risk. Not intending to victim blame, but predators of a certain type tend to all find the same people to victimize. If you're the type of person that gets targeted, then this is a serious problem to worry about.

I don't get it either, especially because I don't know any parents who act like this. All the kids in my neighborhood just roam around, including mine.

I wonder if this is another coastal/inland, liberal/conservative rift where the conservatives are for some reason afraid of everything.

Our experience of Seattle, conservative hotbed that it is, is that everything is as described in the article. We've been discussing moving somewhere else for this exact reason. Doesn't matter if we would let our kid out if there's no one to play with.

Live in the Carolinas. All of the neighborhood kids play together outside every afternoon. The teenagers are all too busy to loiter around because they're so involved in sports.

This is why we moved to the Netherlands. It’s great. Some kids even bike themselves to and from daycare.

Maybe it's yet another Berkeley bubble. Kids' independence is pretty much taken for granted here. Nobody would bat an eye at a 10-year-old wandering around in the grocery store. There's a playground at the marina that is built by and continually remodeled by children (there is some overall supervision there of course).

Reporting from the conservative stronghold of the inner DC suburbs, kids are generally not allowed to wander unsupervised until they are in high school.

In my experience, kids have very little unscheduled/unsupervised time in more liberal areas, but I think that has little to nothing to do with political leanings and much more to do with parental expectations and availability of disposable income and leisure time.

Maybe you should try viewing things outside of a political lens, especially one where the other side is unexplainably but unquestionably wrong by default, and see how things look.

Over parenting and hyper-paranoia are liberal traits in my experience.

Well, I haven't observed that. Research this century has tended to suggest that conservatism is associated with physiological hyper-fixation on negative stimuli. E.g. Carraro L, Castelli L, Macchiella C. The automatic conservative: ideology-based attentional asymmetries in the processing of valenced information. PLoS One. 2011

It might be a correlation to city size. Big cities in the US skew overwhelmingly liberal/left, and big cities are the place where trust between strangers, neighbors etc. tends to be very low.

People probably feel safer to let their kids go outside if the local drug-and-homeless community is small or nonexistent.

I see it as less political, more "crunchy" vs standard- it's just that recently the crunchy crowd has shifted conservative as opposed to liberal.

Yep. It's the liberals who are taking over school boards to restrict book access because their precious little snowflakes might learn something outside the strict bounds of what they are allowed to know and understand. Could you imagine the absolute travesty it would be if little Billy knew that gay people existed and were actually just people?! Preposterous!

I think it might be less about left/right and more about suburban and car culture vs. urban or rural. People living in the suburbs tend to drive everywhere anyway and perceive things outside of the car as dangerous.

I feel like the two things are in a causal loop.