Yes, the meaning of the gesture of holding hands is important. In the U.S., as far as I can tell it almost always indicates a romantic relationship (or adults chaperoning young children, obviously).
Even that is too frequently associated with romance by a small but vocal population in the US.
My boys get hugs and kisses regardless. Love shouldn't have to be defended from others, but alas PDA for children is a huge social issue in modern America - and England too, I have noticed. In some ways, our societies are terribly pornographic.
It's classical puritan pearl clutching with the sacred cows of the left instead of the right, totally annoying, and totally completely normal and well within the tradition of American moral panics.
I don't know if I could be as un-self-conscious with a daughter, at that age, in public. And that troubles me.
Good for you for not letting the SJWs get to you.
But from the reserved side of the exchange, I definitely tend hug my dad when I greet him or leave.
However. I have read in the news about parents being arrested for allowing their children -- 9- and 10-year-olds, not young children -- to play unsupervised, or (in one case) to hang out at a mall while their parent was at a job interview there, for what some busybody thought was too long. 50 years ago, one could never have imagined the police being called -- or if they had been called, actually arresting the parent -- in such a situation. Whatever label one puts on it, there has been a change in American culture that I think is not entirely salutary. Protecting children is important, but people are jumping to conclusions that are not actually warranted by the facts and nuances of the situation.
Ideally the "rule" is a guideline, and is only ever used as part of a package of information to protect children (who are by definition vulnerable).
So "left young children alone" gets at most a friendly chat with some advice about home safety, while "left children at home alone" combined with "arrested for drunk and disorderly" and "arrested for solicitation and drug possession" gets a friendly chats combined with targetted drug and alcohol rehab.
It's weird that CPS bother taken action in these cases. They're so busy with other cases where the need is unambiguously there.
Yes, it's absolutely terrible. But when you're a single mom and you have to go out and make a living it helps if you raise your kids in a way that teaches them to take responsibility from an early age.
My sister and I never thought this was 'dangerous', we walked hand-in-hand to school, crossed at the lights like were were taught to and never were late or went missing.
For sure the world was safer back then, today it may not be possible to live like this but I'm pretty happy that we had the experience of being trusted with some responsibility from an early age onward.
The survivor bias is non-existent, there were tons of kids like us back then and I don't recall any of them that didn't make it because of being unable to walk home from school or being home for an hour or two un-attended.
The world was more dangerous back then.
There was more crime. Products were less safe (eg cars were more likely to kill pedestrians in accidents) etc.
> The survivor bias is non-existent,
The person most likely to harm your child is your other child. While the numbers are tricky we think sibling sexual abuse is about 5 times more common than paternal sexual abuse in the US. (This is from reported figures. There's a lot of attention on paternal abuse, there's not much attention of sibling sexual abuse, so we think that sibling abuse is less reported than paternal abuse even though they're both under-reported).
In the UK one in twenty children have been sexually abused. http://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/child-abuse-and-neg... it's unfeasable that none of the tons of kids like you were unaffected by this, or were not neglected to the level of abuse.
I'm not a big fan of the nanny state, I think life is full of risks and if you arrange society in such a way that all the risks are gone you will squeeze the life out of it as well. It's a hard balance to get right but I feel that going overboard on the protective side is not the answer.
What do feminists have to do with this? A typical feminist position is that our society expects dads to be cold and distant and leave parenting to the women, and that this is a bad and sexist assumption. Feminists explicitly call for men to be more involved in parenting and childcare.
It would make just as much sense if he'd blamed this problem on communists.
That perception does exist, I personally experienced it at a park less than a week ago. It is an open question who is "responsible" for it.
I'm confused how someone would not want to ask those questions.
I think the issue is that it's hard to nail down what is "typical". I think you are certainly right, but there is "typical" (i.e. majority of feminists/people think this way) and there is "socially visible" (e.g. SRS/Tumblr, etc). When a person uses the SJW acronym they are definitely talking about the latter, but it's unfortunate if they conflate that with mainstream feminism: that men should be more affectionate and involved in parenting and not emotionally repressed in Western society, as opposed to the tripe that you find on the dumber parts of the web.
It's not like "TERF" or "anti-sex-worker" or other disparaging terms that nonetheless have specific meaning. There's simply no pattern to who gets called a SJW, other than that they pissed off gamergaters or MRAs.
The term may be more broadly applied in GamerGate/MRA circles or whatever, but who gives a shit? Those people are assholes, and they don't represent even a significant minority of anything, to say nothing of majority. Why should anyone care what they think, or what loaded and mangled terminology they use to describe their perceived enemies? None of those idiots would last long on HN, or any of the more reasonable communities on Reddit, much less anywhere in real life, unless they kept their outrageous and wrong opinions to themselves. Which is as it should be.
(I'm aware that there are people who claim to be fighting for social justice but are in reality weaponizing other people's struggles as ammo in their own private feuds. This is unfortunately a thing, but the right way to handle that is to recognize that they are not really SJWs, not to accept SJW as a bad thing.)
Still, I think the point of it is like calling someone a "morality crusader". Morality is good (if you don't mean "hating gays" by morality, mind you), but if someone called me a morality crusader, I'd get that they thought I was pompous, self-important and meddling in other people's business.
edit: For the record, I didn't downvote you.
Extreme logic alert...you say "as a father, I can't think of anything worse than some social entity claiming that my affection for my children has a nefarious intent." You can think of _nothing_ worse? Really? Where do you live I want to move there.
* emphasis mine