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Comment by specialist | Hacker News Reader

It happens.

My son threw a conniption fit in public. Leaving the zoo, heading back to the car. I had him under one arm (kicking & screaming) and my "dad bag" under the other.

A thoughtful neighbor yelled down at me "Stop beating your kid! I've called the police!" Okay then. I put my kid the car (leaving door open), sat on the curb, and waited for the cop.

Last thing I want is an AMBER alert and then get pulled over. Then I'd be late for the parent handoff, and then the fur really flies.

Older (experienced) cop shows up. My son's still grumpy. Cop sizes up situation and sends us on our way. The 15 minutes served as a pretty good cool down.

In general, abused kids do not throw tantrums in public, normal parents keep their cool when their kids just need a nap.

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Anyone who would call the cops when a kid is kicking and screaming must have zero experience with kids. That's just what kids do.

It would be nice if there were some way to penalize the person wasting the cop's (and your) time. As with spam, it's easy to do because the cost is zero.

It's an offence in the UK ("Wasting police time"). I'm not sure how often it's prosecuted and I very much doubt that this particular case would meet the standard.

That would be all sorts of counterproductive, starting with the simple fact that maybe the person had a reasonable 20%-likelihood guess and considered that high enough to bring police into it. Move just one step up and you've got people who are almost certain, but have a doubt, and since they'll get fined/punished if they're wrong then they don't call anyone, so the kid keeps being beaten and no cops ever know about it. Move another step up, and you've got more parents who would otherwise not have beaten their kids start falling down the slippery slope because no one is willing to face the potential consequences if they wrongly report a kid-beater.

That's just the first three nodes of a N>10^8 causal graph.

Wasting police time is an issue, yes. It would be even more of a waste of time trying to establish whether this person had reasonable cause to call the police or was just trolling. Not to mention the other consequences I touch on above.

Well, what if the cost if one is wrong is small enough to not be a large loss, and there is a reward if one is right to account for the risk?

Suppose you want to incentivize people to report if they are at least 5% confident that there is a problem.

If you choose some small cost (say, $5 for example) if one is wrong, then if you assign a reward which is at least 19 times the cost if one is wrong, then the expected monetary value of reporting (in addition to the benefit from/of being altruistic) is positive when one is at least 5% confident that there is a problem.

(The ratio, where p is the minimum level of confidence you want people to report if they have, between the cost and reward, is (1-p)/p .)

One might question whether creating a monetary incentive scheme like this would still cause problems (akin to the expiraments about kids being monetarily rewarded for quality of artwork in schools decreases motivation or something like that), and that does seem like something that could be the case,

But one can set up a system that doesn't just disincentivize reporting when one has any doubt (as a simple fine for false reports would do), but still disince tivizes sufficiently uncertain reports.

That doesn't mean it would be a good idea though. I don't know if it would be.

Yeah, some talented thinkers could come up with some pretty good schemes.

The real problem lies in the numbers: To put it simply, the cost (salaries + funding) to research this issue and evaluate a good scheme and then implement it could be much higher than several years' worth of "noisy" police calls. Add this up with the opportunity costs (what those thinkers/researchers aren't doing while they're busy with this) and it's probably all the way down to "Will Do This Only If My Next Election Depends On It".

When you bring in the police, you don't know what will happen.

I've had someone call the cops on me because my son had a meltdown. I'm white so I just had a nice conversation with the cop, and I didn't get shot. But there are certainly people for whom even a random encounter with the cops has a good chance of turning out very badly.

> That's just what kids do.

No, it isn't. It's a parenting fail if you can't control a situation to the point where your child is experiencing emotional distress to the point of kicking and screaming.

That's them trying to communicate and a parent failing to understand what the child is trying to say.

(Unless the child has some kind of neuro-diversity)

EDIT: But calling the police is totally wrong in that situation.

It's a parenting fail if you can't control a situation to the point where your child is experiencing emotional distress to the point of kicking and screaming.

This is an incredibly broad and judgemental comment. Kids experience "emotional distress" all the time, without it being a "parenting fail". Many kids go through a "kicking and screaming" phase, and it takes time to work through this phase.

You don't think small kids (5 and under) can go from 0 to 60 in two seconds because of some "emotional distress" such as being denied ice cream at the zoo?

In my experience, children attempt to manipulate parents by throwing fits from the ages of about 2-5, no matter what. If you don't spoil your child, they will grow out of it. But, they're going to do it.

And, especially for new parents, failing is very common. I wouldn't judge them too harshly.

And the attitude among some strangers that "I should keep my kids under control" just gives the tantrum-throwing child more power.

They might try to manipulate the paret by throwing a fit. But that's still a parenting fail: the parents have failed to teach the child that such tactics do not work, and so the child does it because it works.

I can guarantee you that it does not work in my house, and yet my kids still do it.

Yes, when you see a child having a tantrum in public, you are witnessing parents not giving in.

Whereas parents who give in instantly to stop the tantrum are never noticed and tsked by busybodies.

"the parents have failed to teach the child that such tactics do not work"

How many times are the children allowed to try it during the process of learning that it doesn't work?

Or rather, how is a parent to teach their children it doesn't work after the first (and only in your unrealistic view) time?

It's only a parenting fail if they continue the behavior beyond a generalized age of say 5 years old. And how can you, as a passerby determine if "this" time is a first/early attempt at manipulation or just the result of learning that it works?

I've learned not to be so judgmental of other parents after becoming a parent. I hope you do too.

Toddlers are little sociopath terrorists (my daughter is two). What they're trying to communicate is "I want that cookie." Absolutely nothing wrong with hauling them away while they're kicking and screaming.

I mostly agree. But circumstances.

The time leading up to the parent hand off was always difficult. If I could have let him calm down on his own timeline, I would have.

That said, every person (kid, teenager, adult) is going to have a melt down now and again.

I'm not sure, but you seem to think that (1) all children are the same, and (2) all children are simply small adults.

I know it's hard to believe, and I didn't fully grasp this until I had some of my own, but children are remarkably varied in many different ways -- compared to other kids, compared to adults, and compared to themselves (even on a minute-to-minute or hour-by-hour basis).

As far as children being like small adults -- I think it's closer to the truth to consider them as small, temporarily insane adults-to-be.

I rather someone call the police than let this happen. What if a child is kicking and screaming because it is not their parent that is holding them and taking them away? Better safe than sorry. Children will kick and scream and be upset, of course, but I rather have good citizen keeping an eye out when don't look normal.

If someone is genuinely worried a child is being kidnapped, fine. But that wasn't the case here, they were worried that the kicking and screaming was because of "abuse", which is ridiculous.

> What if a child is kicking and screaming because it is not their parent that is holding them and taking them away?

Haven't you read TFA? This happens so seldom that defending against it causes more harm than good.

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