Hacker News Reader

Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

This right here is the number one reason why I'd never take a job in the US. I'd be scared to either be forced to

* become a helicopter parent (and thus have less independent children).

* run the risk of loosing my children and/or go to jail.

How the hell did you people let it come that far? I.e. how do people keep voting for these moron politician with their war on XYZ narrative.

Me and my wife come from two countries where parents are actually pushed to make their children more independant - Switzerland and Japan. In Switzerland, children are usually sent to Kindergarden on their own, by foot, at least if the neighbourhood is safe (note: requires a city structure where a drive isn't necessary to get anywhere). All parents do is give them a lunchbox, a visibility triangle and a kiss on the head. [1]: This is how you'll meet them on the roads. There's signs and TV programs everywhere before first day of school to warn drivers of new children on the streets - after 1-2 weeks it's not necessary anymore and we don't have a higher number of child accidents to my knowledge.

In Japan, small children are accompanied not by their parents, but by older children, usually 3-4 years older. Their morning meetup is organized and supervised by elderly volunteers who keep watch at the meetup point. It both teaches responsibility to the 9+ year olds and first independance from adults to the youngest.

How come the US doesn't use studies from abroad when doing CP regulation? Boggles my mind.

[1] http://www.baselland.ch/fileadmin/baselland/pics/docs/uebrig...

View on HN

You wrote,

This right here is the number one reason why I'd never take a job in the US.

Your fear of coming to the United States, which is second only to France as an international tourist destination, and second to none as a net destination for immigration, is irrational. It is perfectly safe to live in the United States and walk about in public. My children do that all the time. (I say so in a comment in this thread that was posted earlier than your comment.) This news story is news because it is a rare event. But what the news story illustrates is that irrational fear can keep people from doing things that are perfectly safe--like letting their children walk about in public, as I do, or visiting other countries, as I have.

How can it be a rare event if it's based on a State law? Am I supposed to trust that the government is not starting to enforce laws I cannot live with?

Also, visiting a country and living there are two very different things. I often visit the US and I tend to enjoy it. But deciding to live somewhere (i.e. taking a job) requires a conscious decision by me to accept the overall societal and legal framework of a place - and I currently cannot do that for the US. In fact I question why there aren't more Americans who cannot accept it. Can something like the Sexual Revolution ever happen again (= a wide ranging transformation of society through a largely non violent movement). Is the grip by mass media and government too tight? Is it just not bad enough to warrant action?

Can something like the Sexual Revolution ever happen again

It's currently happening - the gradual expansion of non-heterosexual marriage. And drug legalisation is starting to get off the ground.

As a Brit who has visited the US a couple of times, I see it best as a big and very variable country with a lot of outliers. Georgia and Massachusetts are probably at least as different as two randomly chosen non-bordering EU countries. Some places in the US are police microstates. Some have a very great deal of freedom.

In some ways there is no "overall societal and legal framework of a place" for the US. It's just too varied and too dissenting. By comparison, even Switzerland with its four languages and ultra-local canton government isn't as diverse.

> How can it be a rare event if it's based on a State law?

Because like all laws, it is invoked and exercised with discretion by real, sensible, responsible people almost all the time.

You're kidding--right? So many state and local laws are fluff? If they sound good, and have no serious lobby interest these politicans will usually pass. In California, we have way too many "well meaning at the time" laws--that should be removed, or seriously modified.

I share one that irritated me. For years, in California anyone with a bachelors degree from a four year college, after taking eight required relate state courses could take the realestate brokers examination.

The Realestate Lobbiests decided to change the law and require every applicant work under a realeste broker for two years in order to sit for the broker's exam.

Gov. Schwarzenegger saw right through the bill. Knew there no probems with the current system, and didn't want to limit competition. He vetoed the bill.

A few years forward, Gov. Brown thought it sounded good and passed the law. The result is we have less competition, and the guys' who move a lot of property don't have the competition they used to have. Think about that when you try to haggle over that 3% commission.

Anyways, since I followed that bill I will never vote just on party lines. Back to state/local laws--we should be deleting laws every year after instead of holding competitions(Jarrod Huffman) for new bills? I heard California passes over 10,000 new laws/bylaws every year? (Too tired to look it up, but that was the case a few years ago.)

Sounds like a nicer way of saying: You break laws all the time, but we won't penalize you. At least we won't if you behave the way we deem good ... you will do that, will you? No more of your silly opposition against your betters? Good boy/girl.

You either break a law or you don't. The alternative is the begin of tyranny.

How exactly would you write a child endangerment statute that didn't require any discretion in administration?

Base it on scientific results regarding child health/endangerement: Your children do not get enough food? Congratulations, we have child endangerment. Your children get hit by you? Congratulations, we have child endangerment. Your children walk home from a park without supervision? Congratulations, we have ... nothing.

> Your children walk home from a park without supervision?

It depends on the specific context. Park full of crack heads? Park had a spate of child rapes this month? No lighting for pedestrians? Might be neglectful to let kids navigate alone. Nice, normal park? Kids in pairs? Not neglect by any reasonable judgement.

You can't encode the the subtleties and particulars in statute. Hence the statutes are, and must be, open to interpretation and somewhat selective application by people who are held accountable for their judgement.

Most people think child molesters are everywhere and no place is safe. That's why this dude was busted.

So you're going to enumerate every possible act? Make it illegal to be poor? What is "hitting?" Traditional discipline like spanking is out? In Bangladesh teachers discipline children by sticking a pencil between their fingers and squeezing. Is that "hitting?" Etc.

In find the the "white people" bias very disturbing.

How can you state such things talking about a place where it's a fact that laws are applied unequally based on skin color?

You make a very unwarranted assumption here that the persons commenting in this thread from the United States are white people. The majority of my family (all persons but me) are arguably not white people--they wouldn't have been classified that way under the rules of segregated states. My state has never, ever had any rule about "interracial" marriage, and I am a practitioner of interracial marriage. ☺

This story is about people who are acting to foment change. If they were cowed by the law chasing them, this wouldn't be in the news.

Around here, as a consequence of depopulation, a lot of schools have been closed. Door to door busing is as much a financial choice as anything else (Which sounds insane, but there you go).

I think the GP is correct - the United States is not the country to move to if you want to have your children grow up independent/free-ranging, at least not right now. For whatever reason, there is a tendency towards helicopter parenting that seems to be the rule, rather than the exception in the United States, and it's reflected in the Laws.

I grew in the late 70s with my 9-12 year old friends like a bunch of savages - our parents would kick us out of the house in the morning, and we wouldn't see them until dinner time - and looking at Google Maps - it looks like I routinely ranged about 1.5 - 2 Miles away from home - and never really thought much about it.

I'd be interesting in hearing more Japanese/Swiss parents feedback on whether their country really is more liberal than the United States when it comes to letting their younger children walk to school in the presence of only another child, not older than 12 years old.

> I'd be interesting in hearing more Japanese/Swiss parents feedback on whether their country really is more liberal than the United States when it comes to letting their younger children walk to school in the presence of only another child, not older than 12 years old.

This isn't at all what you asked for, but I'm going to share it anyway, just for the sake of some heady juxtaposition. It's apparently a common sight in Iceland to see babies in strollers left unattended, outdoors, in sub-zero temperatures[1]. That definitely falls under the "you can't make this shit up," category for me. It's almost comically Viking.

[1]: http://qz.com/351821/for-generations-icelandic-babies-have-n...

Having had three kids and living in an almost nordic country (Estonia) I can confirm that yes, indeed infants do sleep outside in winter temperatures. Mine did as well and they're fine and of regular health.

The trick with sleeping outside is that you have to make sure that they're warm and that there is no wind directly blowing at their face and there is blankets and stuff surrounding. In this case, breathing actually creates a zone of warmer air, so they don't breathe in the super-cold air all the time. The upside is that they get to sleep in fresh air and the parents get some free time. Win-win.

Regarding scool-age kids not being left left alone, I can't even imagine how this could possibly work. School for my eight year old is done by 12:45 - I work at least until 17:00, usually even a bit more, so does his mom. He comes home after school, warms up his meal (using a gas stove with an open flame - never had an accident or even a mishap with this btw) and on the days that he has swimming practice takes a bus to that. Trip from school to home is about 8km.

I'd actually kind of like to know, how do people manage work in the US, where I understand that this kind of behaviour is not allowed. If I were to pick him up after school and come home with him every day, it would mean that I could only have a half-time job maximum..

In the United States (and Canada), these types of kids were referred to as, "Latchkey Kids" - which I always thought had a positive spin, but apparently some considered it more typical of the lower socio-economic class, and therefore negative.

To answer your question, Daycare or After School activities are two of the mechanisms used to keep children safe when their parents are working - which can be a real problem if the Daycare costs more than the salary being made by the employee - this is a real problem in the United States, and results in situations in which the parents would end up losing money by working.

Usually what happens is the parent finds another stay-at-home parent, or unemployed parent, to take care of their children for a smaller amount of $$$. Ask yourself what you did with your eight year old before he was eight years old. Now extend that out another couple years.

a common sight in Iceland to see babies in strollers left unattended, outdoors, in sub-zero temperatures

It's fairly common in most of Scandinavia as well.

I have heard that this is common in Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Norway, although I haven't seen it - for example, Norway: http://relocation.no/archives/culture-shock-norway-outdoor-s...

What an awesome read. Thanks for linking.

Switzerland represent!

Yeah, I had a similar Upbringing. We went out and just did whatever outside. Then back for Lunch and then out again. Running around in the woods, building dams in the small stream, and so on. We were at the fringe of a small suburban town right next to some woods. I think we also ranged about 1-1.5 Miles away from home. We did have some boundaries set up by our parents, but that was really more to kind of limit the places they needed to check whether we fell asleep somewhere or something. The area was certainly big enough and exciting enough to tide us over.

And when I was 11, I was given a card for public transportation and we went to school in the "big" city (biggest city in CH). We took public transportation, switched modes 2 times (10 min walking to the train station, 15 min train ride, 12 min tram ride, 20 min bus ride). After the initial confusion over how public transport works, where all the info is located at the stations, no big deal. We usually rode in a group of 2-3, but if you missed a connection, you'd ride alone.

I feel that Switzerland has (had? I don't have kids... no real idea how it is 20 years later) a healthy attitude towards this stuff. Maybe that's just because I grew up there, but I feel that having an environment where we feel that children can roam around without getting murderized at every corner is something all societies should strive towards. And this absurd helicopter parenting I hear about sounds like it's trying to mitigate symptoms, not alleviate the root cause.

Here's an interesting discussion by English speaking parents in Switzerland [1]. The same for Japan can be found here [2]. These are largely the same as my observations.

[1] http://www.englishforum.ch/education/207982-kindergarten.htm...

[2] http://www.japan-guide.com/forum/quereadisplay.html?0+77744

Edit: See, even that you had to specify this stance as "independent/free-ranging" tells me that there's a cultural clash at work here. Where I and my wife come from, we dont' need to apply such adjectives to what we consider 'normal parenting'.

"Perfect safety" doesn't make sense, and correlating immigration and tourism with safety doesn't make sense either.

Skipping the general safety subject (every country is perfectly safe when implicitly compared to, say, Nigeria or Burma), this events needs to be put in context; specifically, this is not an entirely irrational fear, because there is an arrest-easy culture (to say the least), which is definitely something to fear, not only because of itself, but also because of the consequences (abuses of power, in abstract).

You surely missed this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8016756

While using "this" in specific, as "reason number one" is quite excessive, a fear of the culture is understandable.

Thank you. Yes, putting it as 'number one' might seem odd, but to me it makes sense in context. As you describe, my fear would be about being so easily arrested for trivial reasons in general, but the risk (even if it's tiny in comparison) of having my family taken apart, without me having any power to do anything, executed by the world's most powerful organisation, this is right up there with the worst possible outcomes for me personally - as in about equivalent with nuclear war, maybe second only to my wife being raped and murdered. And considering that I would be breaking several State laws with what is considered completely normal healthy behaviour in our culture, I find it completely reasonable to put this as number one reason not go live there, since everything else at the top of that list is both extremely unlikely, not influenced by our behaviour, and also possible outside the US.

Yeah, fear of landing in gaol/jail/prison, or your silly children landing in jail, is a pretty big thing. Consider also that jail in America is rather famous for being awful...

% of population of Germany in prison: 0.076%

% of population of US in prison: 0.707%

% of population of Canada in prison: 0.118%

source: http://www.prisonstudies.org/country/canada

Frankly, as a new parent who lives in the US I am worried that my family would be punished for an action such as what is described in the article. I think that the climate of irrational fear combined with exuberant supervision lead to an environment where decisions which would seem rational to a European could be construed to be dangerous to children in the US. Like walking home unattended. I don't think this fear of coming to live in the United States is unjustified if your values don't entirely match those of the local population. -- edit -- I also don't think that this kind of enforcement action is a rare event, and that this is why it is being covered in the media. In my opinion, it is being covered in the media because it is a significant example of an event which illustrates the divide in the US between what the majority believes (letting children walk home unsupervised is dangerous) and what a smaller number of parents challenging this establishment believe.

It's an important, but uncommon event. Be thankful for the fact she can come out and talk about it in the press. That right is your's as well here.

Maybe. I was warned off against talking about my incident to anyone. You really want to piss off the prosecutors and cops?

The kids are safe, but the parents are not.

You're not getting busted because you're in the right place... which is where, exactly?

Japan, currently. But the question where we should go work next and raise our newborn will only come up in 2-3 years, so I can't exactly speak from experience yet. Only thing I know is I would be too scared of US CPS, whether it's rare cases or not. If laws exist, the culture around it can swing towards heavy enforcement easily within 5-10 years. Just have a few more media scares and school shootings and watch what happens.

I know a number of people from Europe with young kids who moved to States to work and while non of them had any problems with the law, they all said they felt strong social pressure to change their parenting style and to teach their kids to behave differently to avoid problems.

TL;DR: Americans have no idea why they and their country are so terrifying to the rest of the world.

Hopefully the irony of people on HN freaking out about a rare event -- that is, the enforcement of a law designed to protect children from rare events -- is not lost on anyone.

It's certainly lost on me. In my eyes every law is supposed to protect a society from rare events - for everything else we have something called common sense and shouldn't need lawyers explaining to us what should and should not go. If there's too much of a mismatch between that and the law, well, you got a problem with your law. ~1% of population imprisoned certainly points towards that as well.

The irony is that it is rare for children to be snatched off the street, yet that is what these helicopter parents are afraid of.

Likewise, it is rare for parents to be found neglectful when allowing their children to walk alone, yet that is what we HNers are screeching about.

The linked news story is news because it is a rare event. Hundreds of thousdands of kids walk alone from/to school each day and don't get the cops called on them.

You make a point. However, I suggest that the two situations are not really parallel.

Suppose a child is snatched off the street. That's an outrageous thing to do. Say we find out who did it. We would expect charges, a trial, and punishment.

In this story we have government employees finding a couple to be a weird sort of semi-guilty for doing nothing wrong. Said government employees made a credible threat that they might, in the future, steal the couple's children. These are also outrageous actions. Have these people been investigated or punished? Have the policies that let them treat the couple this way been changed, or even officially questioned?

Both answers are most likely "no". It appears that these -- perhaps rare, but also outrageous -- actions are business as usual for the government.

The equivalent for the first situation above, might be a prosecutor failing to bring charges against a child abductor, and, when questioned about it, stating that such abductions were generally things he wanted to encourage. That, I think, would also be worthy of a new article.

We're talking about a level of rarity far beyond "1% of the population" here. We're talking about events that might not even have an incidence of one in ten million, based on the news stories.

Don't get me wrong. I think these cases ought not be prosecuted. But I'm not scared of being prosecuted in one of these cases, nor would I even consider avoiding travel or living somewhere else because this happened to one person in a city across the country from me.

Whether you should be scared depends crucially on whether you have (or plan to soon have) small kids and whether you intend to give them a reasonable amount of autonomy of the sort that we ourselves had when we were kids.

Anyone who wants to let their kid walk to school alone at age 5 or 6 or 8, or ride the bus or subway alone at 8-10, probably ought to be scared of these cases.

> But I'm not scared of being prosecuted in one of these cases

So you have a lot of free time and money to spend on lawyers?

You are completely missing the point. I have better chances of being struck by lightning than ever having to deal with this or for that matter knowing someone who has to deal with this. I don't need free time or lawyers because it is, to a fairly high degree of certainty, never going to happen to me.

In my view, America is much safer now than when I was a kid. But that safety comes at a cost - loss of things like freedom, risk-tolerance, independence, trust, self-confidence.

I would have preferred to raise my kids in a free-range culture. For sure, there are many great things about growing up here. But this cultural question would weigh heavily on my decision to bring kids to America.

If you and your spouse are united in your views about child rearing, I'm sure you could pull it off and have a great experience.

Actually I'd bet foreign parents could pull it off much better than native born. Because you'll already face so many cultural changes and can discuss which one's you'd like to adopt or reject.

Also note: culture in different parts of the country can differ wildly. But as a tech worker, you're probably going to land in a region filled with helicopter parents.

> How the hell did you people let it come that far? I.e. how do people keep voting for these moron politician with their war on XYZ narrative.

My generation (I'm 30) is incredibly paranoid when it comes to parenting, which is really saying something because my frame of reference is my own parents (over-protective asian immigrant boomers). When I was that age, not only would I walk home from school unsupervised, but they had 4-6th graders as "patrols" along the walking routes to keep an eye on the 1-3d graders. My parents thought nothing of letting me walk my brother home when we were about the same age as the kids in the article, and neither did anyone else.

That being said, it should be noted that the place in the article is a D.C. suburb, which means it's full of paranoid, uptight people to begin with. On top of that, like many D.C. suburbs, it has seen a heavy migration of hispanic immigrants in recent years, which has resulted in a lot of tensions. I wouldn't call it representative of the whole U.S.

> How the hell did you people let it come that far? I.e. how do people keep voting for these moron politician with their war on XYZ narrative.

I hate to say it, but… we don't really have a choice. You choose either the Republicans or the Democrats, neither of which actually care about the things that matter but instead have, as you mentioned, this odd form of bikeshedding that is intended to make people feel "safe". Not that it actually works, because now we are scared of the government. It's funny how we technically have more freedoms than people in other countries but we have to work so much harder to keep any of them.

Japan and Europe different from the US in lots of ways, but at least Europe in general seems to be less concerned about "safety" especially when it's so impractical.

And helicopter parenting seems to come easily, just as much a part of culture and social norms as it is necessitated by these laws. It's not something that's exactly forced on people but rather something that's accompanied naturally by the decisions of these "moron politicians".

> How come the US doesn't use studies from abroad when doing CP regulation? Boggles my mind.

The US doesn't care about studies from abroad. The US is too US-centric; it thinks it's too different from the rest of the world for those studies to apply.

Europe is absolutely concerned with safety... but actual safety. Look at the Netherlands/Sweden "vision zero" initiative - the goal is to get highway/traffic fatalities down to zero.

Compare vs. the USA where over 30,000 Americans die on the road every year. That's like if 9/11 happened 10 times per year, instead of once per century.

My kids don't walk to school alone... and it's not because of my worries about paedophiles lurking around every corner, it's the very real risk that they could be hit by a car - the leading cause of death for their age-bracket.

> Look at the Netherlands/Sweden "vision zero" initiative - the goal is to get highway/traffic fatalities down to zero.

> Compare vs. the USA where over 30,000 Americans die on the road every year.

That's a lot more complicated than you're making it sound. For starters, the US has over 320 million people—Netherlands has less than 20 million, and Sweden half of that.

In addition, the US has a lot of heavily used, very long distance roads. It's a lot bigger than both countries, and so a lot more driving is required to get around.

The number of driving deaths in the US is depressing, but trying to compare it to what's happening in countries a fraction of its size is not useful.

"In addition, the US has a lot of heavily used, very long distance roads. It's a lot bigger than both countries, and so a lot more driving is required to get around."

Nobody's commuting from Wyoming to Oregon. This fallacy is often presented as a reason people here need to drive more, as though having a larger country obliged people to drive across it routinely. Besides that, the EU is pretty sizable too.

People here drive so much because cities are HORRIBLY designed, so everything is spread out. Why is everything spread out? Because people drive so much that any new development is required to be primarily a giant parking lot with a building in the middle. But then everything is really spread out, so you have to drive even farther, meaning more cars on the road, meaning more road space is built, meaning things are even farther spread out, etc. etc. etc.

Why is this?

* Racist, classist suburbanites don't want "those people" taking the train to their neighborhood. Likewise, they abhor the thought of even being seen on the bus. * People think transit should pay for itself, nevermind the millions of untolled roads in the US (fuel taxes cover less than half the cost of construction/maintenance) * Design decisions made in the 30's-50's meant for convenience (zoning rules, parking minimums, Level-Of-Service dictated building rules) had horrible, horrible knock-on effects (people have to pay for parking spots they don't even need, it's illegal to build dense neighborhoods, and roads are widened to the terror and death of cyclists and pedestrians everywhere)

How can it be fixed?

* Get rid of parking minimums. Overpower the NIMBY's politically. Build transit. Raise fuel taxes. Change culture to respect walkers and cyclists.

It isn't more complicated. Just look at the numbers [1]. Sweden has between 2x and 3x less deadly road accidents, depending on whether you look at it per mile driven or per capita.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

edit: deadly

So let's ignore the numbers for while and just look at the difference in attitude. The US implicitly accepts road deaths as a reasonable price to pay for keeping their car based society, Netherlands and Sweden have explicitly stated that no road deaths are acceptable and are willing to pay the price necessary to work towards that goal.

Not only that, when I worked in LA people would joke about dead bicyclists. They knew I cycled to work. It was sickening.

By Europe, you aren't including the UK right?

Even in the UK this stuff varies by location. I went to school by train in Croydon about 20 years ago from age 13 and only had two very minor incidents (both caused by other kids from different schools). Lately I moved to Edinburgh and was surprised to see occasional kids that were clearly under 10 taking the bus on their own.

a. The vocative "you people" is accepted when spoken by irresistible authority, e.g. by a drill sergeant to military recruits. In other contexts, it is simply offensive.

b) There is a wide neutral ground between "helicopter parent" and the degree of freedom offered the Meitiv children. For various reasons, we drove our son to school but in no other ways resembled the helicopter parent.

c) The process you describe is much less electoral than bureaucratic, a rigorous and unthinking carrying out of premises that started off reasonable. The residents of Montgomery County, Maryland, are not that susceptible war on XYZ narratives, but they could have a greater than average acceptance of government regulation, so many of them being employed in the development and enforcement of the same.

d) Studies from abroad? If you repopulated close-in Montgomery County with Swiss or Japanese nationals, I'd be happy to see children younger than the Meitiv kids walking home long distances.

e) Of course the Meitivs are in the right. And he expression "responsible for unsubstantiated neglect" is revolting.

> How the hell did you people let it come that far?

The number of petty busybodies who think they know how other people should raise their children, even when (especially?) they don't have children of their own, is on the rise.

But hey, it takes a village, right?

> But hey, it takes a village, right?

You mean in Switzerland, to have children on the streets like that? Well we have cities too (albeit smaller ones) and our roads can be very busy as well. Everything tends to be very decentralized however, so each neighbourhood usually has their Kindergarden and primary school, in 15min walking distance from every home. At worst children have to cross one main road on their way, which will be trained with their parents beforehand.

No, it was a tongue-in-cheek reference to Hillary Clinton's book, "It Takes A Village," which is often cited, correctly or not, as a touchstone of government-knows-best parenting.

Apologies for the USA-centric reference :)

Thanks for explaining ;). So Hillary Clinton, even though being on the left side of the political spectrum, promotes government steered parenting (='liberal' in the US)? Now I know American liberal doesn't mean the same as European liberal (which is usually attributed to the right/centrist side there), but man - you people sure seem to have a badly infected case of governitis there. Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Based on personal experience, our "liberals" are very opposed to physical discipline and putting children in danger of any kind (driving tractors, shooting guns, living with smokers), in contrast with our "conservatives," who subscribe to the idea that getting hurt is part of growing up.

Both sides like big government enforcing their pet concerns.

I like that in a discussion about child safety we've started with 'go to the nearby park unsupervised' and arrived at 'shooting guns'.

That's an interesting range right there and potentially another clash of cultures for me (I assume I started with similar values as the thread starter, substitute CH with DE).

I admit to being facetious.

What I meant was, "shooting guns under competent adult supervision." Which, I'd rather have my kids do than walk to the park alone.

How about this for a culture clash:

When I was 14, my mom would drop me off at my high school so that I could participate in the rifle club.

We had a shooting range in the basement of the school. Guns and live ammo were kept in the school - in a locker - at all times. This was in like, the year 1994, in a medium-sized city - not some little farm town in the 50s. However, it was a private school. This could never happen at a public school.

Crazy, huh?

Well, speaking from Switzerland, the only thing 'crazy' about your story would be your mom dropping you off at your high school. That would turn quite a few heads there and lead to lots of 'mommy boy' teasing and such. Weapons? Maybe not at school, but there's enough shooting clubs for teenagers in Switzerland. The kind of rifle you get would be heavily regulated though.

Right, well when I lived in Zurich children all walked to school without adults. The problem here in the USA is most of our built environment is completely unsuitable for walking or bicycling, even by adults, so adults with life-long windshield perspectives are understandably ignorant of walking.

The problem here is not the condition of the sidewalk. IMO the problem is too much immunity on the part of the CPS agents. Threatening to abduct a child from their parents in this situation, if they don't sign some absurd contract to not let their children walk outside, should open them up to a lawsuit that should most certainly win, and the agent making the threat should lose their job. Instead, in the current legal environment the lawsuit would be dismissed and the CPS agent is praised for doing a good job!

There are two ways an agency can react when presented with a case like this. On the one hand, by interpreting the law absurdly broadly, you expand your own authority until some check-and-balance comes along and pushes you back in line, which could very well be never. On the other hand, the more you push the boundaries, the less you can focus on where the real problems are. An agency which can't evaluate a situation like this, and in an hour walk away with a 'Have a nice day,' is a broken agency. The bar must be higher than this.

Kids are incredibly safe in these neighborhoods, and the more kids that are out, the safer it gets. We need to be encouraging this behavior, not apply some seriously chilling effect. What can be more chilling than the threat of taking away the kids?!

The idea that this could reach to that level is I think the worst part of the whole ordeal. This is so far removed from 'we need to get the kids out of here' it is absolutely ridiculous that could even come up.

But I think, again, it's about the state trying to maintain 'easy access' to their biggest weapon, so they can use it easily when they need to. I think what there needs to be is a bright line test which assures parents their kids are not at immanent risk of being seized by the fucking state. For this, I think the answer is simple, you cannot ever remove children, you can merely arrest the parents. If you can't legally arrest the parents, then you shouldn't be taking the kids. I can't even imagine how traumatic that must be.

I mean... if I was actually working at an agency like this, if I got a call about those kids walking on their own with multiple residents calling the police, the reasonable thing to do is first establish the parents knew where the kids were, and then second ask a few basic questions of the kids, and see if the eldest knows the right answers. It's really no different than if you encounter a park ranger, some of the questions they might ask you to ensure you are safe. We/They are there for your protection. So it's hugely concerning for such a simple case to get this out of hand.

In my family it would result in them having to repeat the threat in front of the child, and having to listen to the child being given the "stranger danger" lecture with them as Exhibit A.

Then depending on whether they physically touched the kid or not, they could be allowed to go home with or without a quick beating.

What we've been having to teach to kids lately has been, is this person a friend of the family? okay. is this person not a friend of the family? not okay. is this person claiming to be from a school, government, anything like that? ignore that, see the two rules above.

(And yes if you look at our family picture, it looks like a Sopranos wrap-up party)

> How the hell did you people let it come that far?

That is a great question, but is IMHO too socially / politically sensitive for Americans to address seriously.

An honest and open discussion about root causes isn't going to happen - especially here on Hacker News.

Well, there is some discussion, I don't think the thread quality is too bad. What's interesting is the shifting voting behaviour though. First it went to 15 points, then (it was evening in the US) more and more people seem to not have liked the discussion much, so they downvoted me, and now the Europeans have come online and a few more upvotes trickle in. But other than that the discussion seems reasonable - I wouldn't want to try that on /r/politics and such.

Switzerland might be different, but let's be honest, many of the countries that surround it don't have political cultures that instill independence in its citizens...especially compared to the U.S.

I can't say too much about other European countries since I've never lived there for longer periods of time, but at least judging by what I read I don't quite get your argument. The way I see it there are two aspects of classic liberalism:

* liberal towards persons

* liberal towards organizations

These two often contradict each other, so IMO a place cannot be perfectly and absolutely liberal - it will at best be a balance between the two. The US from what I can judge is extremely liberal towards organizations - kick out tenants, fire employees, influence the government through legal bribery (PACs) - go ahead, no problem (keep your lawyers ready though). Towards persons the US seems to be pretty much the opposite of liberal - the government seems to want to regulate every aspect of people's lives, and if some fall outside the norm there's politicians declaring war on them and introducing more and harsher punishments. In France, Italy, Austria and Germany (=our large neighbours), the tendency is rather the opposite: Relatively liberal towards people, very restrictive towards organizations. Switzerland is a balance between the two, but with the general idea of not restricting anything if it's not really necessary. There's even a third level of liberalism: Towards local governments. Want your own tax regime, with Blackjack and Hookers? Build a new village in Switzerland and let it become an official commune, there you go.

It's a little more nuanced than that--different countries value different personal freedoms.

For instance, in Germany you can't homeschool you're children, in the US you can. In the UK it's very difficult to own a gun, in the US it's easy. Many hate speech laws in Europe would be unconstitutional in the US, and the US has broader protections for criminal defendants than many other developed countries.

However, on the other side, the US lacks universal healthcare, and has fewer consumer and privacy protections.

Yes, gun laws and freedom of speech is usually cited when comparing personal freedoms in the US and Europe - and I agree, it's one aspect of personal freedom (and Switzerland is somewhere in between there btw.). In my opinion however, the differences in these two areas are rather marginal when it comes to how life plays out. To me it comes down to this: Let's say I'm an Alien from outer space who tries to integrate into human society. How free am I to do whatever I'd like. Let's mount Maslow's pyramid.

* changing the atmosphere with the gas I like to breath didn't go over too well - got imprisoned for a while, will not repeat.

* eating a human was even worse! After decades of imprisonment and therapy in Europe they actually let me free again, my friend in Texas wasn't that lucky. Wouldn't recommend.

* Alright, I've learned that human life is sacred and that I shouldn't try to change the environment too much that humans like. Next I had to get was some food source. After searching through what humans throw away (tasty!), some humans came and brought me to a place with a roof. I talked to some other human with a suit who hooked me up with some idea of theirs, I think it's called a 'bank account'. I learned that I can use that to go to a 'store' and exchange that thing using some electrons with fresh food. Pretty neat!

* Good news! That suit guy even organized a home for me! Well, the thing is, other humans there didn't quite like my morning roaring rituals, so I had to give them up. Noise is not such a good idea here, especially when silly humans are 'sleeping' - whatever that is, noone could explain so far. Some guy even called in other humans that came in a dress with the word 'police' on it. Was a bit scared at first, but they just explained a bit and went away.

* Wanted to paint the outside a bit nicer in traditional Qrkzsu Green. Something strange happened, was sent to a guy that tried to teach me how to integrate. Alright, I got most of it now I think.

* It's 40 years later now, nothing much happened. Except I wanted to visit another place that's always in those moving pictures they show using many more electrons. Tried to drink human's version of Grigrog on my way to their own garbage facility. That wasn't a good idea, took a few days to get free again. Wanted to sleep on something they call a 'bench', but apparently it's only for sitting.

Ok maybe I've gone a bit far off there ... ;).

"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

What are you trying to say?

Not P, but comparing GP's claim that the US is "instilling independence in its citizens" with the fact that American children have to repeat this every day, does strike me as a contradiction.

Yeah. I was hoping that robotresearcher's post was intended as sarcasm.

Not sarcasm, just an example against the US being a bastion of the promotion of independent political thinking.

Ah, then we are in agreement!

Hey, at least since 1942 we eliminated the Nazi-like Bellamy salute.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com