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Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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