I am surprised this guy's homeowners insurance hasn't dropped him. A few years ago I had to switch companies or be dropped for having a trampoline -- with a full net -- in my fenced backyard. Insurance companies hate anything with any risk, especially of injury to outside visitors.
> A few years ago I had to switch companies or be dropped for having a trampoline -- with a full net -- in my fenced backyard
Seriously? Wow, as a non-American I find that outrageous.
I wonder when they'll threaten to drop people for having coke in their fridge or water in their bathtub. After all, those things kill people every day! They're extremely dangerous.
Taken to it's logical conclusion you can argue that every business is going to try and cut every possible cost and service to maximise profit.
Insurance is not about helping people cover expenses though, it is about pooling risk for the benefit of the group. This does mean that if you are a stunt helicopter pilot then other people in a low risk pool may tell you that they don't want you in it anymore.
America has a whole bunch of weirdness around insurance law etc. so I can't really speak much as I'm foreign - but there are good reasons that insurers don't cover Skiing on default travel insurance for example - and it isn't to screw the consumer.
> it is about pooling risk for the benefit of the group.
AND making obscene profit for the insurance company.
I wish we had more things like this that were non-profit. An insurance non-profit could charge the same premiums as a company does today, then whatever "profit" they have left at the end of the year after expenses they just refund back to all customers as a percentage of their premiums.
Everyone would pay way less, all the employees still get paid the same, and we'd still have the benefit of pooling the risk.
I'd love to see more on the obscene profit side of this. Honestly - I've done some work on pricing, reserving, etc in insurance and spoken to practicing GI actuaries - the margins are just not that large.
Are you specifically pointing to US medical insurers (I cannot comment at all on that tbh beyond the fact that the whole system is problematic)?
In fairness, it's my understanding trampolines are really honestly fairly hazardous, despite their pedestrian appearance & our fond memories.
More than 1 million people went to emergency departments for trampoline-related injuries between 2002 and 2011, with nearly 300,000 of those injuries involving broken bones
approximately 900,000 consumer trampolines sold each year
Doing some extremely crude correlation- For every ten trampolines sold a year, one person will visit the ER that year, and for every thirty trampolines sold, one person will break a bone. Yeah, I can see why insurance doesn't like them.
They aren't saying you can't have one, they just don't want to cover them.
What? That sounds crazy to a non-US person. Are you saying that if someone came to visit and hurt themselves on the trampoline they would charge your insurance for it?
Absolutely. I just opened my home policy online and I have $300,000 coverage for Personal Liability in addition to coverage of home, property, etc. The description for the Personal Liability insurance says:
"If a claim is made or a suit is brought against an insured for damages because of bodily injury or property damage caused by an occurrence to which this coverage applies, we will:
* Pay up to our limit of liability for the damages for which the insured is legally liable. Damages include prejudgment interest awarded against the insured; and
* Provide a defense at our expense by counsel of our choice, even if the suit is groundless, false or fraudulent. We may investigate and settle any claim or suit that we decide is appropriate. Our duty to settle or defend ends when the amount we pay for damages resulting from the occurrence equals our limit of liability."
Some people also take out a personal umbrella policy which covers personal liability beyond home or auto. For example, a former employer's daughter and a friend were in an auto accident. The parents of the friend sued my boss for personal injury on her behalf, and my boss had to pay about two million dollars. Her auto policy probably covered $100-500k of that, and the rest was covered by the umbrella policy.
In fact, the day the company I worked for went public, I was advised to get such an umbrella policy because I was now a target for such law suits. We could either stop having neighborhood kids in our house or get it added to our home insurance, but leaving things as they were was perceived as too risky. I don't have any way to quantify the risk, and obviously it's in the insurance company's interests for me to buy more insurance, but it definitely brought home how litigious a society we live in.
I wonder if the parent talked about in the article has a major umbrella policy. Jumping from the roof of that play house onto a trampoline seems kind of insane. Letting young children play on the roof of your house also seems crazy. Letting your kid beat up on my kid out of an attachment to your parenting philosophy is definitely not ok in my book.
I'm older than most people posting here, and I never did any of that as a child. I did do construction in the summers as a much older kid (the article describes 4 year olds on the roof of his house), and got hurt enough to go to the hospital three times, but these were the risks of the job.
Finally, this guy seems pretty sexist. It's ok for me to keep my little girls from bullying other children, but boys have to learn to defend themselves? Let me guess, is that because girls are expected to ask permission and behave nicely, but boys aren't?
"Boys will be boys" is usually the justification for excusing what would be considered battery, assault or harassment if the perpetrator was 18 or over.
I lived in a few EU countries so far, all of them with national health insurance. If someone got hurt in your backyard, then they would be taken to a hospital and....no bill would ever be produced. No one would even bother asking if you have house insurance, because any cost of treatment would be covered by the national health cover. I don't think my house insurance even includes coverage for things like this because it's so unheard of. Someone could still sue you for damage to their health, but first of all - court could order at most payment for any extra treatment(that's not already paid for by national health insurance) or maybe perceived loss of income. Multi-million-dollar cases where the actual loss is nowhere near that are not really a thing outside of US.
Thanks for the details. In the US, typical judgments go beyond just medical expenses. (pain and suffering, loss of work, etc) I think it will vary a lot between different states, too. I think a lot of the reason for this is because of insurance- I bet people that don't have insurance are far less likely to be sued for these types of incidents. But with the advent of insurance, has come an attitude of "oh well, they have insurance, so it won't cost them anything, it'll just be the insurance company that pays for it!". The insurance companies in turn use these large settlements/judgments to support their case for why you NEED their product. That is my theory, any way.
The US is more difficult because you no national health insurance.
Accident liability for healthcare are bucketed with health insurance, general liability insurance, auto insurance or workers compensation. If you hit a certain threshold with certain conditions, the insurance companies will try to pin the blame on somebody else.
When I had back surgery ($$$), they had investigators look into my background and called under various guises in an attempt to get me to say that I was injured in a minor car accident a few years earlier. Fortunately while I was present at the accident, I wasn't in the car (some dope slammed into my car in a parking lot). In the meantime, I was at risk of having care cutoff, as they refused to pay claims.
I'm from Finland. First, if someone came to jump on my trampoline and got hurt, the last thing they would do is to sue me. Secondly, if I did not intentionally and actively try to harm them it's quite hard to imagine a situation where I would have to pay damages - and in the unlikely case I had to the payment would be probably be a couple of thousands of euros (based on my cursory and anecdotal experience).
The only way to clock in millions of euros as penalty here would be some mini-enron like financial crime.
It would also be pretty insane to predatorily sue me for millions of euros. There is nowhere that money could come from.
Generally public healthcare would pick up the tab on most medical costs (sans some mostly insignificant fees).
> Generally public healthcare would pick up the tab on most medical costs (sans some mostly insignificant fees).
This gets to the heart of the problem. In the US this is not an option, so even people who generally are not litigious can need to sue in order to make sure medical bills are payed appropriately.
Even with that, personal injury settlements that clock into the millions of euros would be extreme outliers in the USA. It would involve severe death and dismemberment as well as punitive action by the civil court process.
All basically a consequence of private healthcare. Injured party will seek treatment in a hospital; hospital will seek to recover costs of treatment from their health insurance; their health insurer will seek to find someone else who could be held liable for the costs... which points back to the homeowner who will then pass it on to their home insurer. They then sue the trampoline manufacturer, the manufacturer countersue the injured party, the upshot is everyone has to pay higher insurance costs in order to cover all the legal fees. It's so much better than a single payer healthcare system.
Insurance companies want nothing to do with attractive nuisances; they'd much prefer you live in a padded cell, drawing a paycheck and paying your bills. In short, they are scum.
A successful entrepreneur who had sold businesses could theoretically just self insure. If you have paid off your house, you don't technically need home insurance (though this guy would be silly not to have it).
The degree to which people in this country, in this time feel entitled to impose their neurotic crap on other people's kids, is disgusting. Ironically, it's one of the of the few reasons to, "Think of kids".
I think it's the opposite. People used to raise children more communally. People knew each others children and would scold them if they misbehaved while out in the street etc.
Nowadays, people are fearful to give misbehaving children feedback for fear of the parent getting aggressively offended.
There's an element of that, but it exists in combination with the air of hysteria and constant panic influencing the decisions of police and other public officials. It becomes a crime to leave a child unattended for minuscule periods, that kind of thing. It's an odd combination of extreme societal neglect, punctuated with equally extreme hysteria.
Yes, very true. It's unfortunate. It seems people have moved away from being normally concerned an offering a helping hand to becoming parenting vigilantes.
I think the fear instilled by "stranger danger" and litigiousness has had a big influence in how people behave toward other people's children. Since they can only interact from a distance, it's now through official channels where there is no leeway, common sense judgement. It's all black or white.
'Helicopter parenting' is misleading: it's not the degree of parental involvement and oversight that's the problem, it's the degree of unwelcome interference. True, if I'm going to err I'd rather err on the side of benign neglect. Yet blaming 'overprotective' parents is unfair. It only takes phone call or two and children can be temporarily removed by social services. The mere prospect of which is a major heartache.
There's a lot of activities that the AAP recommends against and we did almost every one of them as a kid. I'm eternally grateful to my parents that I enjoyed an amazing childhood full of trampolines, dangerously unstable and high tree forts, homemade fireworks, driveway skateramps, pocketknives (and plenty of sliced fingers), and all of the other cool shit that parents don't let their kids do anymore.
The only blade-related injury I have ever seen was actually caused by a hatchet, while splitting small-diameter firewood for a campfire. Some topical antibiotic ointment and butterfly bandages took care of it for the four days it took us to reach the pick-up point. She didn't have permission to use the hatchet unsupervised, and was not following the family-approved safe-use technique. Needless to say, she was not allowed to do anything fun for the rest of the trip.
It made a nice scar, though. People can ask her how she got it, and she can say, "oh, that's from a hatchet, a four day journey away from the nearest hospital." My most interesting scar is from the underside of the dashboard on a Honda Civic while installing an aftermarket stereo, and you can barely even see it.
I have never seen a pocketknife injury, though. Nor any from archery equipment, or firearms. I'd probably be most worried about barbed treble-fishhooks and swimming in warm freshwater lakes and rivers. Not really because of drowning, so much as slips and falls from mud or algae-coated rocks, or infectious parasites in the water.
My spouse, on the other hand, never got to do anything fun as a kid, and freaks out about everything even remotely dangerous, like my sharp, pointy tweezers. The only people more unreasonably intolerant of minute risks work for the TSA.
Trampolines, though. Those things are deathtraps. I'd rather have a swimming pool drained of water and refilled with rattlesnakes in my back yard. Also, no [American] football.
The American Academy of Pediatrics says a lot of things based on pseudo-science and speculation. Basically, they fail to ever do any cost-benefit analysis. They recommend against doing anything that involves risk, without offsetting the risk against the potential benefits of engaging in the activity.
I agree with this 100%! I grew up free to explore the woods, build forts, climb trees, jump off rocks, swim unsupervised, ride mt. bikes down steep hills, drive dirt bikes from age 10 on, drive snowmobiles, carry a pocket knife, whittle, etc... Yes, I cut myself on occasion, even broke a couple bones, but it was completely worth it and helped me grow up to be self sufficient, self confident, and know my limits, strengths, and weaknesses.
I really do feel badly for most of the kids today, who are so hampered and restrained.
Don't let you kid fall into a bonfire, but DO let them burn themselves on the stove (after you tell them - that is hot). Inform but let them learn from their own mistakes. There's nothing wrong with a few cuts, bruises, scrapes, burns, etc...
> From an evolutionary perspective, the obvious question about risky play is this: Why does it exist? It can cause injury (though serious injury is rare) and even (very rarely) death, so why hasn’t natural selection weeded it out? The fact that it hasn’t been weeded out is evidence that the benefits must outweigh the risks. What are the benefits? Laboratory studies with animals give us some clues.
While I don't disagree with his premise, that gives almost no data, and seems like a weak argument. Why hasn't war been weeded out? It must not really be all that risky.
Societal behaviour like war differs from individual behaviour like 'risky play'. War, as a societal behaviour, emerges from the individual behaviour of fighting others for resources in a world of scarcity. That was a beneficial behaviour in many situations, as it prevented starvation. It would take much longer than our time within complex society has allowed to weed this behaviour out of our DNA on account of emergent behaviour.
It's very silly to draw such a broad conclusion about evolution in general from a single adaptation (most likely involving a single mutation) by a single species.
>It can cause injury (though serious injury is rare) and even (very rarely) death
keywords: "rare" and "very rarely", although it would be better argument to look at statistics on accidental deaths during risky play, now and in years past if I had time.
If you want to argue against anecdote, it's best to provide actual facts instead of your own questions. For example, only 1 in 5 drowning deaths are children, and there's no reason to assume a significant portion of those are unsupervised [1]. Should we be helicopter-observing adults instead, or do their lives matter less? Traffic accidents are the largest cumulative killer of children [2]. If you want to go the route of "how many aren't here to tell us about it" you should really be arguing that parents should avoid putting kids in or near cars as much as possible.
Children die, and that sucks a lot, but if you start making emotional appeals based on preventing all possible child deaths you're going to end up espousing that we keep all kids in padded rooms until they're adults.
Go ahead and helicopter-observe adults if that is how you interpret that data. I will surely be vigilantly watching my young children when they are near water.
You could, you know, teach them how to swim? The reason so many children die of drowning is that so many don't know how to swim. MIT literally has a swim test requirement to graduate college for exactly this reason.
This. Seriously. It's completely different from letting older kids play unsupervised in the backyard. Toddlers easily drown in a garden pond, let alone a swimming pool. Leaving a toddler alone near a body of water, even for five minutes is asking for a catastrophe.
MIT has a swim test requirement for to 21-year-old students to graduate in order to prevent children from drowning? Am I parsing your sentence correctly?
It was originally instituted because a student drowned in the Charles river because he didn't know how to swim. Age might be different, but the majority of people who drown don't know how to swim. Teach your kids to swim, they are WAY less likely to drown.
Yes... and then the adults are the ones that will die because weren't exposed to small dangers nor did learn how to deal with it.
Being an adult isn't just completing 18 years (or any other arbitrary number). There's even discussion about when you really leave your childhood (teenagehood ?) behind. And I think it's when you acquire enough knowledge to avoid most risky situations while still enjoying life. And when you know that nobody will looking after you, because it came the time that you're the one that should be looking after others (children, elderly, spouse, you choose it).
Comparing drowning deaths between adults and children is pointless. It is obvious that more adults die of any cause (except maybe SIDS).
What would be more relevant is of all the dead children, how many die because of the lack of supervision.
I think the factual counter-argument is that child mortality has declined both from accidental drowning[1] and all causes[2]. I still think it is open to interpretation if helicopter parenting is causative or justified.
> How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home?
Very few. Those who have a tendency to do things that get them killed ... get killed and eliminated from the gene pool.
Everybody who is around now mostly knows how to judge risk. Yeah, we'll have some cuts, bruises, broken bones, etc. but it's very rare that someone does something so profoundly stupid that they get themselves killed.
Just because you heard about it on the news doesn't mean it's common. If one kid out of 10,000 gets himself killed this way, you'd get a dozen kids nationally offing themselves daily, but in reality that's a very small number and in truth, the real number is probably much less.
There's a spectrum of risk here that IMO we don't like to acknowledge. It's uncomfortable to say that accepting a certain quantity of seriously injured or even killed children actually does come with benefits to those who aren't hurt. But I think we shouldn't shy away from this calculus, we should rather be clear-eyed about the fact that we have chosen to minimise risk, and have accepted the trade-off of reduced independence, joy, and adventure.
I think we've moved in this direction organically. We have much fewer children much later in life than we used to, we do not accept child mortality, and every child is a much bigger investment (education and economic dependency into the mid twenties or later), so every life literally becomes more valuable, so we naturally hedge more and more against any risk to this life. The more we move into a high-education and EQ driven economy, the more investment each child demands, and the further this cycle perpetuates.
Personally, I would not make this tradeoff, but I understand how hard it is to make this argument when faced with grieving parents who have suffered a huge loss, both emotionally and materially.
> I'm not saying that things haven't gone too far the other way
Right now I don't think we can have the conversation about having gone too far—people always reply "what's the harm in being too overprotective?" To have this conversation—which I think we absolutely need to have—we first need to recognize and admit that there's real, actual harm in being too overprotective.
We might accept a few more phobias in our children in exchange for fewer injuries. But the final irony is that our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have. According to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which monitors hospital visits, the frequency of emergency-room visits related to playground equipment, including home equipment, in 1980 was 156,000, or one visit per 1,452 Americans. In 2012, it was 271,475, or one per 1,156 Americans.
The number of deaths hasn’t changed much either. From 2001 through 2008, the Consumer Product Safety Commission reported 100 deaths associated with playground equipment—an average of 13 a year, or 10 fewer than were reported in 1980. Head injuries, runaway motorcycles, a fatal fall onto a rock—most of the horrors Sweeney and Frost described all those years ago turn out to be freakishly rare, unexpected tragedies that no amount of safety-proofing can prevent.
You have to be careful with those sorts of numbers.
It says that monitored hospital visits (not injuries) have gone down, but those hospital visits have got a lot more expensive for most people too - one possible confounding factor.
Agreed. If anything, I'm questioning the quote referencing that exact data point: "our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have"
Isn't the opposite then a negative selection bias? If we have N children killed per year doing an activity A, and N anecdotes of children being perfectly okay, neither matter without knowing the denominator of the number of child-activities per year.
Me too, and I so want this for my boy, but there is a reason to be genuinely scared of other people and social services. I mean people get arrested for letting their kids go to the park or play in their own backyards, for god's sake.
Honest question: what is the objective, per-child risk of that happening? I don't have data for that, but I would be shocked if it was anything except exceedingly low, on the order of getting killed in a commercial aircraft crash.
Of what happening? Having CPS called on you? I don't know, but I am as terrified of it, as your average helicopter mom would be of having their child scrape their knee, or be abducted by a stranger. I really hope the risk is as low as being abducted, though.
I hear you and my wife and I struggle with similar feelings! But taking a step back, I think it's plain that the actual risk from CPS over-reach is extremely low.
Most of the time, if a child is abducted, it is the other parent in a post-divorce situation, rather than a kidnapper / molester. But we do see stories about those occasionally in the national news, so most people are "aware of the danger".
Ditto, I suppose, for CPS getting called by an over-reactive neighbor upon seeing a child wandering around without supervision. These types of stories also make the national news, for whatever reason, so most people are "aware of the danger".
And thus, we live in a climate of fear. Yay!
For the record, I spent some parts of my childhood wandering around in the woods alone (or with friends) where I could have: fallen down a hill, drown in a stream, fallen out of a tree, etc., etc., etc. without a reasonable possibility of timely rescue (no mobile phones back then). And I somehow survived. It is a shame that most kids in urban or suburban areas won't get a chance to do this anymore.
The movie M by Fritz Lang has one of the most fascinatingly alien endings of any movie I've ever seen. A serial killer who preys on children is brought to trial. Before the final sentence is announced, the shot cuts to the mothers of the children crying. One says "One has to keep closer watch over the children. -- All of you"
The moral is basically "You can't depend on people not to murder your children. You can't bring back dead children, we all need to protect our children." Watching M for the first time was incredibly strange. M was filmed in 1931 and the plot could have been written yesterday. I'm a huge proponent of letting kids explore the world (both literally and figuratively) without adult supervision.
I'm extremely thankful that my parents instilled such a strong sense of self-reliance in me. So many people who I grew up with are afraid to do anything without somebody there holding their hand. When I was a child I was allowed to go pretty much anywhere as long as my parents knew where I was going, when I'd be back, and if there was an adult I could contact in an emergency.
Other parent's used to ask my mom why she let us ride our bikes to school alone. (Always my mom, never my dad.) They'd ask "aren't you afraid of what could happen?" My mom was always insulted by these exchanges, and rightfully so -- the implication always seemed to be she didn't love us enough to protect us. Nothing could be further from the truth. My mom is pretty neurotic, and I know for a fact she was incredibly restless anytime my brother or I were out and about without supervision. She let us go because she wanted us to do more than live, she wanted us to thrive.
> I could have: fallen down a hill, drown in a stream, fallen out of a tree, etc., etc., etc. without a reasonable possibility of timely rescue (no mobile phones back then). And I somehow survived.
Among my cohort, no one died in childhood due to an accident. The closest was an older guy due to an ATV accident... after he graduated high school.
Among children / classmates close to my age in my hometown, I'm not aware of anyone who died, due to accidents or otherwise. So our mortality rate was somewhere below 1%, and I don't see anything to indicate we were unusual in that regard.
Huh, did you go to my school? I had the same thing happen. The summer of graduation, even. There were crazy rumors of it not even being an accident. He was actually a fairly close friend of mine and I was away at boot camp.
I also had an aquantance of mine die in 5th grade. Him and two of his brothers drown when the ice broke on a pond they were playing on[0]. But that's it, out of all of the people I know from school and church, all the way growing up, not just my age peers. At least, those that I heard of.
I think I remember the number of non-related kidnappings of children to be something like 115 a year. out of around ~70 million kids. Throw in assaults and the number is still likely really low. Something to take into account, but hardly the kind of risk that say, traffic, presents.
I know two people to whose place police have been called by neighbors "trying to help children" when they suspected (correctly) that a 7 and a 10yo were alone at home. The parents were normal, reasonable people (not born in the US); kids were never in danger.
When I was between 7 and 9 I often came home from school and was alone for a while, warmed up food or cooked something simple (using a gas stove that required a match to light), went outside to play with friends if I wanted, etc.
It is sad the society today will jump in to protect my kids from me if it catches me letting them do anything like that.
Nothing serious. In both cases the parents were told to stop doing it. AFAIK they apologized and complied (or instructed their kids to act as if there were an adult in the house).
> or instructed their kids to act as if there were an adult in the house
So I gather that somehow these two kids were, when alone, acting in such a way that allowed the person who called the police to believe they were alone? It feels like there's some more context here. What were the kids up to? (:
I am not sure if you are serious. I assume you are -- I think the old lady, who was always bored, was tracking who was going where and when. I heard (but not sure) she even peeked into the windows from the outside to find out who was inside. Those were two separate incidents btw.
The difference is that a plane crash is largely out of your hands. Sending your child out to play unsupervised is a conscious decision. Parents are also not entirely rational. Don't underestimate the personal experiences of the parents either - I've seen multiple kids get kid by cars (and been hit by one myself) and also nearly drowned on multiple occasions so definitely pay a little extra attention when my kids are near a busy road or body of water. Obviously there is a spectrum though - it's possible to be a little more vigilant in some circumstances without being a "helicopter" parent.
I'm not sure that incorrectly assessing risk is limited to just parents either - look at our collective response to terrorism and mass shootings. I'm sure it's already been mentioned somewhere in these comments but the role of the media sensationalizing tragic but rare events is probably significant in this.
> The difference is that a plane crash is largely out of your hands. Sending your child out to play unsupervised is a conscious decision.
There is no difference there. Sending your child out to play unsupervised and getting on a plane each have X risk of Y outcome so your decision is based on those variables.
GP was simply suggesting that the risk of one's child being abducted (by social services or others) is probably similar to the risk of being on a plane that crashes (e.g. so low that most people do not even think about it).
I understand that - I don't disagree that the risk of serious issues is overestimated. My point was more that sending your child outside to play is a routine decision with many more possible outcomes than a plane crash.
Sending them out unsupervised exposes them to the possibility that they could get lost, they could get hurt, they could get bullied, or they could be a victim of a serious crime. Of course they could also have a great time which is why parents do it despite the (minimal) risks.
If something bad happened to your child, plenty of parents would question their decision and that experience would likely influence their future decisions. There is a reason we have fences around pools, marked locations to cross busy roads, teach kids not to chase a ball out onto a road etc - they are situations that children encounter on a routine basis. Being involved in a plane crash as an unsupervised minor is far less likely to happen and probably has fewer possible outcomes.
> My point was more that sending your child outside to play is a routine decision with many more possible outcomes than a plane crash.
You are comparing a decision to an outcome, so that doesn't really mean much. You would have to consider "sending a child out unsupervised" vs. "taking a trip on a plane" (two decisions) -
Potential outcomes for sending a child out unsupervised:
- Abduction
- Bullying
- Getting hit by a car
- Stabbing
- etc.
Potential outcomes for taking a trip on a plane:
- Plane crash
- Grounding
- Diversion
- Hijacking
- etc.
If something bad happened (on their plane ride), plenty of (people) would question their decision and that experience would likely influence their future decisions.
Any number of outcomes are possible in both situations and the level of control the person experiencing the outcome has will varying greatly depending on any number of circumstances. None of this is relevant to the very simple comparison GP was making.
There's so few children abducted by strangers that worrying about it is going to take your focus off of the real risks: Drugs, sex, peer pressure, and abuse at the hands of other children. Later on you have to deal with teen drivers and all the risks that come with that.
If you educate your kids about the risks, give them the tools to protect themselves, and give them advice on how to handle their often difficult social situations, you'll do much better than never letting them out for fear of them being molested, stabbed, or robbed.
GP made the comment that the risk of child services getting involved was comparable to the risk of being in a plane crash. When you send a child outside you are ultimately accountable for that decision if something happens to them (did you adequately supervise the child if they needed it, did they have a safe environment to play in, did you know who they were playing with etc) but if you put your child on a plane that subsequently crashes then no one will ask whether you adequately assessed the risk.
In the book 'free range kids' they talk about how your are 20,000 times more likely to have your kid die in a car accident than to be kidnapped by a stranger, yet how many of us put kids in the car seat every day, but teach them all about 'stranger danger' and keep a overbearing eye on them? The objective risk doesn't matter, its that parents feel a lack of control over kidnapping, which gets covered in the news, compared to driving..
The risk of your child abduction is very, very, very high in America these days. All you have to do is read news stories about what happens when parents let their kids go somewhere without supervision: the cops are called, CPS is called, and the kids are seized (or threatened to be seized).
Yes, there is a huge danger of your children being abducted, if you are not a helicopter parent. It's not some shadowy molester however, it's the government which will abduct your child.
When I was a kid, we ran around our neighborhood as a pack every day after school, and all summer. We would explore the woods, explore new construction houses near us after the workers left, play sports, and thousands of other activities.
Unfortunately, the environment has changed for my kids in ways that makes this difficult to duplicate:
1. Other kids aren't home anymore, they are all at structured activities. There is no neighborhood pack to play with.
2. Parents aren't home either, they are working. When I was a kid, if you got a splinter or scrape, you just went to the nearest house and someone's mom patched you up. All those houses are empty now.
3. If you keep your kid home to play freely, they miss out on all the social stuff going on in the structured activities. Much as I dislike all the structure, it is where the other kids are.
I agree it sounds great to let your kids roam free as we did, but I think in practice the environment has changed in ways that make it difficult.
Well I grew up in the mountains of Vermont, and that environment hasn't changed really. But I see your point, although I feel that the only way to combat that shift, is to actively push against it (like the dad in the article did).
2 is a big one. Yet another consequence of high land prices as now both partners are forced to work.
Another is the break up of wider family. Before people could live locally and they would have their grandparents local too, and aunts etc. Now that land rents are so high and work is god, together with low job security, people are forced to move to other parts of urban areas or even to different cities in order to find work.
Still everyone seems pretty happy with capital gains on their home that can never be realised because all other homes also went up in price, so perhaps it's worth the utter destruction of life as we know it!
> I agree it sounds great to let your kids roam free as we did, but I think in practice the environment has changed in ways that make it difficult
I agree, both with this and the premise that overprotective parenting is a real phenomenon. You can't place all of the blame on the parents for their increased vigilance because the environment of growing up has literally changed.
Like many of you, when I was young, I played all over my neighbourhood with other kids my age, completely unsupervised. Free to wander quite far from my home with the understanding that I would be home for supper. However, I grew up in a small town (pop. ~20k).
Today, most people live in cities, and many in large ones (us included). When my kids are older, I will do my best to give them freedom to play, but there are just some realities today that are different from when I was younger. I remember reading somewhere that there are roughly 3x the amount of vehicles on the road as there were in the 80s (when I was growing up). My biggest safety fear for my kids is traffic. We live in a city. There are a lot of parks around, but getting to and from places involves navigating traffic and a lot of it. I'll do my best to educate them and give them trust to do so, but you can't help but be a bit concerned. We all know you can be involved in a traffic accident these days through no fault of your own.
To clarify: I'm not saying that the world is actually more dangerous for kids today than it was a generation ago, but I think for many parents it's not difficult to see how they could have that perception (true or not) and thus parent in a more protective way. Not only has the world changed, but so has the beholder (from carefree child to responsible parent).
I'm not saying kids can't handle it. My point was not that it's not entirely reasonable to expect parents of today to act in the same ways as their parents did when when they were growing up, because the world now looks a lot different from what they experienced as children. The danger could be real or perceived, but the end result is the same.
I wouldn't be surprised if our parents' generation were also considered over-protective by previous standards. This just feels like a "when I was your age" type of thing.
I think there is real difference between saying the reality is different, and the perception is different, though I agree the outcome is the same. If teh reality is different, then teh outcome may be justified. But if the perception is different (which I think is the truth), then guys like Mika Lanza are fighting the good fight, and all parents should be working to change the perception that free play is dangerous.
I completely agree. It's something I consciously try to change within myself on a regular basis as a parent. My point being, it is a struggle and an understandable one. It's not as easy as saying "You're being a helicopter! Stop being so silly." as if the parent is behaving irrationally. It's something I feel I have to actively unlearn, even though it wasn't explicitly taught to me.
And, of course, there are many degrees of protectiveness. It is a spectrum. I see some parents where their protectiveness is much greater than mine and it seems obvious to me. At the same time, I'm sure other parents look at me and say the same thing. It's not a one size fits all situation. Parenting, as a whole is, of course a matter of personal values.
Brooklyn is one of very few places in America where kids can roam around all over. It's a highly walkable, pedestrian friendly place with excellent public transit options. Most of America is not like that at all.
I think the problem is more complex than more cars. If you have more cars but road size stays the same, after a point traffic is slower moving. I imagine the graph to be like a bell curve.
But if you widen roads and make other improvements to accommodate traffic then the graph would be more linear.
I grew up in a relatively large town (~300k at the time, regional capital), on a block that mostly consisted of densely packed 5-story and 8-story apartment buildings.
We all played all over the neighborhood together. There were playgrounds between the buildings, but we didn't really stick to them once we were old enough to go to school. When I was 10, I was riding the bike all over the place, within about 5km radius from home, and so were all the other kids.
I didn't personally know anyone who had a serious accident, traffic or otherwise. The worst I remember is one kid falling off the garage roof and breaking an arm, and another kid riding the bike into an uncovered manhole and falling down there. As far as the rumor mill went, the most extreme that I can recall was a story of a kid in the area who lost an eye in an incident involving live ammo being thrown into fire.
5 and 8 story apartment buildings is not a typical American environment by far. I grew up in exactly the same environment as you did -- pedestrian friendly, highly available public transit, protected courtyard playgrounds, wide sidewalks on both sides of the streets, where kids riding bikes are not forced onto the road, etc.
This is a very different environment from most of America.
I wouldn't call our playgrounds protected. They had driveways between the actual buildings and the playground, and cars went there occasionally. But the drivers were generally well aware that there'd be kids around, and drive carefully there.
Sidewalks, yeah, I'll grant you that. It's still the thing that amazes me most about US - that so many roads here plainly don't have any sidewalks. I'm used to seeing them on literally every road that is in a populated area. Even villages usually had them!
I was more alluding to the fact that these courtyard playgrounds are easily accessible for kids directly from their apartments, and don't have to be driven to by adults.
As far as cars, it was almost impossible to get up to higher than 10mph in there, and if you did, you'd probably be hunted down next time by neighbors and old ladies.
I strongly believe that that's not true for most folks. And even if it were - the paycheck is why they're there so they can make ends meet for their family.
Yes, but that doesn't mean the work they're doing is meaningful or useful. There's been a bunch of articles about this. Most office workers are just doing "bullshit jobs": their work isn't really needed, or their productivity is horrifically low.
I firmly believe we could switch to 20-hour work weeks and see almost no drop in productivity. Most workers spend much of their time surfing the web, sitting around chatting, etc.
It seems like (2) is a good cause of (1), quite separate from helicopter parenting: working parents need a supervised place to store their kids.
When I was a kid, I could roam the neighbourhood in a pack exploring woods and feeding horses, because I was sent to an (illegal) child-minder. This was just the house of an auntie who had finished raising five kids and was still not sick of it.
Being illegal was the best part: had it been an official daycare centre, we would have been trapped inside a palisade and hovered over by nice 20-somethings with proffesional training and no kids. No Hulk-Hogan reinactments would not have been possible then.
That's how I think and try to act. I think that we do know what causes real hurts and scars that would make a kid regret later, in life. But there are small dangers that will just teach on how to react, avoid or deal with. And even creativity only comes from learning, trying and dealing with outcomes.
In the trade-off of security vs knowledge and discover, the parenting function is not to go to only one side.
I've had a similar childhood, but I think we all have the survivorship bias here. For the record, I've electrocuted myself, drank kerosene, burnt myself among other things. Each of which could have easily ended my life. Just because I survived, you hear from me. There may be other kids who have had worse luck and they might not be here to tell their story.
We say we had a free childhood and we turned out just fine because we survived. There are others who were not lucky. So basing how we raise our children on the premise that everything was okay and is still the same is incorrect.
The statistics say that ALMOST EVERYONE survived. That's the point here. It's very much like terrorism.. hardly anyone dies from terrorism statistically, but some people live in fear of it for no reason.
Then in the important thing to think of is, would you want your kid to be the few that did not survive. I agree you need to give kids freedom and all that, but I can't blame parents for trying their best to not put their kids in harm that can be avoided.
Same here. But back in that day there was so much less to keep occupied with. That is at least part of the reason you did those things. You typically weren't allowed to watch TV for a long time at least and you had to find something interesting to do. Today the things that some kids can do are way more exciting than taking apart an old lawn mower and seeing what makes it tick.
As a counter point to your anecdote, I did all those things as a kid and went on to be an injecting drug user (meth and Heroin, whatever else was laying around) for all of my 20's, assaulted a few people, and got charged with drug trafficking.
So it's no guarantee.
At 35 I have a good job now, and am part of the wealthy property owning class (read: mortgagee), and am building a business with my wife, so maybe it worked out ok?
My wife and I are not "helicopter parents", but that doesn't mean we don't believe in healthy boundaries. Mike talked about wanting to believe that his kids would respect his trust, well part of that respect can also be earned in demonstrating that you do, in fact, "know better" about some things by virtue of your age/experience/wisdom. As a parent I don't use my "wisdom" as an excuse to prevent them from learning things for themselves, but in the case of playing on the roof for example, I would put a limit. C'mmon man, don't kill your kids for an ideal.
Having fallen off a roof before, I feel like going straight to the 'kill your kids' is a little extreme. I would guess that most falls that result in death are from either a higher than average roof height or onto ground harder than dirt.
Also, how will a child learn about the dangers of heights if they never fall and hurt themselves? You can teach them, and that might work for some, but some children have / need to learn the hard way and that's okay.
My saw stop will stop the blade in <5 milliseconds of contact.
It equates to basically scratching your finger or better (blades move at 3000-3600rpm, so it calculates out to about 1/4 revolution of the blade, max.)
As far as i'm aware, they've literally never had a brake activation failure.
It's pretty much the safest thing in my shop.
Of all the things i'd never let kids play with in the shop, it'd probably be chisels.
Which is ironic, because people think they are a good way to introduce kids to woodworking, when they are probably the sharpest and least safe thing due to how sharp and easy to cause severe injury.
“What are the chances of falling off the roof?” he argued vociferously when we tried previously to hash it out. Have I ever known anyone who has fallen off a roof? Anyway, he said, it’s not as if he doesn’t give his kids any limits: They are not allowed to play ball or tag up there."
Yes, but most kids are not allowed or encouraged to play on their roofs. If they were, the rate of injury would likely be much higher.
> Yes, but most kids are not allowed or encouraged to play on their roofs. If they were, the rate of injury would likely be much higher.
I used to play on the roof of our shed. I have no idea what I did up there but I think it was mostly being deliberately up high. I dangled and jumped many times and jumped at least once before deciding that kind of hurt and deciding not to do it again. You overestimate the stupidity of children who are familiar with the concept of consequences. I also had my thumbnails fall off multiple times after hitting them with hammers and burned off the skin on my little finger once on a stovetop seeing exactly what these burns were that were so scary. I never even broke a bone and I have less than five wounds that should have received stitches. I had a boring, safe childhood.
Sounds like your roof was not all that high. In the article I think they said the roof was 25 feet, which would very severely injure you (at least) if you fell off.
As a kid, me and my friends would climb any roof we could. Of course adults would chase us down if they saw us, but we would just do it again when they were gone. This was rural Sweden in the 80s.
You don't want to raise conformist children, you want to raise rebels.
What was that old Dennis Leary monologue about how all kids' toys in the 1950s were actually a Darwinian means of weeding out the weak and stupid before they could reproduce?
This is my ethos. I have two young boys--one 4 year-old and one 18 months--and this is how they are growing up. My four year old was riding without training wheels by two and on skate ramps by three [1]. My wife was initially against it but through my stubborn insistence, she's come around. As I mentioned in another comment, my sister and I grew up doing all sorts of dangerous shit and I will forever be grateful to my parents for not raising pansies. We build a rickety tree fort high in a tree and threw balls of mud and rocks at each other and the other neighborhood kids who played with us. We rode our bikes across major streets, we made homemade fireworks, and we had a trampoline in the neighbors' yard and a skate ramp in the driveway. It was an amazing childhood and it's exactly what I want for my boys. When we moved out here to small-town Kansas from the Seattle area, we spent time looking for the right street and we found it. Packs of kids roam unsupervised and there are few backyard fences. It's perfect. I hope that "playborhood" does become a thing again because there's no better way, IMHO, to raise kids.
The bike in the Instagram video is a Diamondback Mini Viper. He got a balance bike (the Strider) for his second birthday and like your son, he also had a tough time standing over it. But, he grew and was able to get up on it pretty quickly. First, we practiced locomotion and later, coasting with his feet up on the stays behind the seat. Once he was flying around on that bike, we switched to the pedal bike. We had the same problem--he wasn't quite tall enough--but he grew again and could straddle it, sort of. The actual transition from balance bike to pedal bike went really quickly. Main thing they have to learn is the coaster brake.
Why on earth would you move to Kansas from Seattle if you want your kids to be able to go outside and play? The PacNW has a far superior climate, where you can go outside just about any time of year. The Midwest, by contrast, has hot summers and brutal winters. I get that Seattle may be too urban, but there's plenty of parts of the area that aren't nearly as built-up.
The sad thing is that, unlike many other areas, parenting in the U.S. is getting worse, not better. Millennials are leading the way in increasing acceptance of LGBT individuals, legalizing drugs, etc., but most of the millennial parents I know are absolutely nuts. They make my own "overprotective asian mother" seem like a proponent of "free-range kids."
I can't speak for everywhere, but at least in Seattle, most of the helicopter parents I see and know are not millenials but genX. I'm on the upper edge of what is called a millennial, and almost everybody I know that is younger than me is very intentionally hands off.
Curious, do you have kids & if so, are you doing the hands off thing?
I live in Seattle (within city limits) and would love to chat with someone about how the hands-off/free-range thing is working in practice within this city.
I don't see any evidence that free play is increasing as new parents are coming on line. Things look even more structured and over protected than ever.
I'll post this as a top-level comment because I think it's a relevant reply to a number of other comments.
In response to, for example, this line from goodJobWalrus:
> I mean people get arrested for letting their kids go to the park or play in their own backyards, for god's sake.
Honest question: what is the objective, per-child risk of that happening? I don't have data for that handy, but I would be shocked if it was anything except exceedingly low, on the order of getting killed in a commercial aircraft crash.
My wife and I frequently struggle with the this vague fear of people turning us in to social services, because we've read a number of articles about that happening to families who were raising their kids in a way that was completely normal a couple of decades ago.
But even with all of the general societal paranoia we are saddled with, I'm almost certain that we are still statistically safe from such over-reach.
Ehh, I disagree. Hysteria and FUD can take on lives of their own, living inside the minds of people who let them in even a little. Just because a number of people are upset by something (or believe they should be upset by something) doesn't actually mean it's worth being upset about. The news/media takes these small concerns and blows them out of proportion to sell ad space, which compounds the hysteria.
Example: terrorism. It's a nice trigger word in the USA, but how many people are killed by terrorism vs car crashes or unhealthy habits? Yes, terrorism should be reported on, but it's certainly not as important to anyone's everyday life as not eating shit food and texting like an asshole while driving.
Kids just don't get kidnapped or molested by strangers enough to be statistically significant. Kids are almost always molested by relatives, in a private setting. Kidnapping by stranger is even more rare. Sure, it can happen. Just like a comet could hit Earth. Should we sit around worrying about it, while our children re doomed to have us constantly looking over their shoulders until they're 18 and have no sense of self-purpose?
You see the irony in this, right? All the parents that don’t let their kids off the leash even for a second use the same reasoning. “It not OK to play the odds if all it takes is one kidnapping to take my kid away for ever”
I’d say that OP’s point is the odds are so low, that it is OK to play them.
> In a Year, Child-Protective Services Checked Up on 3.2 Million Children
> 2.5 million of those kids were declared 'non-victims.' Another 686,000 were 'abused' or 'neglected.' And an estimated 1,640 kids died as a result.
To be fair, one of these has a much higher rate of incident than the other.
Personally, I'm more concerned with the quality and accuracy of CPS than I am about child abduction simply because a 10% improvement in CPS would save more lives than a 100% reduction in child abductions.
Then again, I feel that way about medical errors vs. terrorism and the value of spending money to save lives. A 10% reduction of medical errors would save more lies than a 100% reduction in terrorism. :/
Regarding a 100% reduction in terrorism, in the long run, that shit might have some very significant knock-on effects. Especially the massive reduction of wars.
I do agree that the risk of terrorism is massively overrated. I think this is because terrorism requires 'agency' and thus feels both worse and more preventable.
It was meant to represent the impossible goal of 100% success, not that I actually meant it was achievable. I don't think we can substantially reduce terrorism below current levels.
There is always going to be some group of people who are angry and violent as long as humanity hasn't achieved the Singularity imo.
My wife and I have had this conversation before, and we are aware of the particular case you linked too.
I don't want to come across as crass, but, with respect, I will make this short observation:
You trust your child's life to hundreds of strangers every time you drive them somewhere. The chance of your child being hurt by a careless/bored/insane stranger on a per trip basis is very, very low. I assert that the risk of child services becoming involved after you let your child play on a trampoline (or whatever) is even less.
And if I'm reading this correctly, in hte USA in 2014 there were 3.2 million reports of "child maltreatment" (amongst a population of 74 million under 18s).
Thanks for the links! I don't have time to go through them at the moment though.
It's almost certain that one of those 3.2 million incidents has our name on it.
In 2014, at a time when our son, who has high functional autism, was going down a mental rabbit hole about what foods he would eat. When the list got down to three foods, we told him that it could not go down any further, period.
So he asked for one of those foods for dinner, and we served it, and he decided that he didn't want it, that he would only eat one of the other two foods on his 'list'.
We refused to accommodate and reminded him that he wasn't allowed to go below three foods. That the food in front of him was on his list, and that he had specifically asked for it. So he would not be served anything different for dinner.
So he ate a little bit of it, and went to bed hungry and unhappy.
The next day at school, he told a teacher that we were starving him, that we were refusing to feed him.
This generated a mandatory CPS incident.
We received a call, and my wife went to the school and talked to someone and contextualized the situation.
The incident was subsequently closed without prejudice.
So, given that rather in-depth bit of "anecdata": of that 3.2 million, based on our direct experience with the reporting requirements schools have to follow, most of them are specious.
Of the ones that aren't, I suspect only a tiny fraction are in any way related to 'free range parenting'.
In short: I strongly suspect that the danger of inappropriate child services intervention associated with various 'free range parenting' activities is vanishingly small, even though it feels like a constant and potent danger.
PS: I'm 110% open and willing to answer any questions about anything mentioned here, including the autism, the 'food list', the seemingly strange behaviour, whatever. I feel that there are a lot of misconceptions surrounding the realities of parenting autistic children, and I am more than happy to help with that. Direct e-mail is fine too: diederich@gmail.com
I know this is presumptive but next time you take your kid to a playground, let them play on the playground with you barely in sight. Stay 200+ feet away. Watch your kid play, and then wait for some other parent to intervene in your child's play. That parent will soon be looking around for you. When they can't find someone who has their eyes fixated on your child, they will ask your child where their parents are. That person is the person who will turn you in to CPS.
I'm not kidding in the slightest when I say this literally happens at least once every single time I take my kid to the park. My kid is pretty advanced physically and takes parkour classes and gymnastics classes. He's very capable of handling situations that other parents freak out at. And he knows his limits probably better than those parents know their own. But they still act like they need to save my kid from himself, and you wouldn't believe the looks of disgust I get from them when I actually reveal myself. I really do not have to worry about him jumping off the monkey bars, but unfortunately I truly believe I can't let him do it on his own without a significant risk of CPS getting called.
Yup! We approached that iteratively, until our son was properly 'free range.' We noted cases where other adults ask our son where his parents were. He didn't know; we were watching from afar. That happened a couple of times.
Beyond a couple of judgmental parents, no action was taken. One parent asked our son for his name, first and last. Our son, per instructions, refused to give his last name.
At that point, the parent has a difficult decision to make. Do they call 911? The answer is 'no'. There is no emergency.
I want to make it clear that I feel what you are describing. My wife and I have felt it, and we still feel it.
But objectively, the risk is very low.
Engineer the situation such that a 'hover-parent' has no choice but to call 911.
Our son carried a cheap pre-paid cell phone from a relatively early age too. He had only to open it and push the 'send' button twice and we would be there. So even in the extremely unlikely event of cops showing up, we would be there minutes later.
This thing that feels so strongly like a risk really isn't.
> Engineer the situation such that a 'hover-parent' has no choice but to call 911.
Sounds like you were using your kid as a prop in a social experiment with the goal to push your own particular agenda through "teaching moments" on strangers.
Huh, I guess you could read my account as such, but that's a pretty narrow perspective.
Our primary goal was to ease all of us (our son, my wife and myself) into being comfortable with our son becoming 'free range'.
Mostly it was my wife and I confirming what we suspected: that he would be safe, primarily from other over-reactive parents. We'd already objectively accepted that he would be physically safe, even though emotionally it was challenging for us.
We secretly shadowed him at the park six or seven times before letting him go full solo. My account of other adult interactions with him were from those experiences.
So he became fully 'free range' at the age of 9, and has been ever since, with absolutely no problems.
So was it a social experiment? I guess that could be accurate, as a side effect. Were we trying to give strangers "teaching moments"? Far from it, though I suppose its possible somebody else learning something, I don't know, and don't much care.
I guess you could say we were pushing our own 'particular agenda'...we were pushing it on our son and ourselves. And we are all three better off for it.
I'll freely admit that I probably misread your intent, as I half suspected.
If all your goals in this situation had your kid's well being in mind, then I misunderstood you and I apologize for that.
From your wording (specially the "engineer the situation" bit) it sounded to me like you behaved differently in those situations because other adults were around. The assumption I made was that you did so to teach them a lesson, so to speak.
If your method towards overseeing your child is the same whether there were other adults around or not, then I obviously misunderstood you and I apologize for that.
I originally understood "engineer the situation" as "provoke a misunderstanding - where none would have taken place otherwise - with the goal of making other adults uncomfortable and so they may understand their mistaken view".
It seems obvious now that this was the wrong reading, but would mind explaining further what you meant by "engineering the situation"?
[EDIT] I have one other question:
> Our son, per instructions, refused to give his last name.
May I ask why? If my son got lost, or needed to ask for help from other adults, or was caught in an emergency situation at school, I would want them to be armed with as much information as possible in order to enable an adult to contact me as soon as possible.
Sure, no worries. Text is a very sub-optimal medium to transmit the intent behind potentially emotionally charged questions.
To be clear, we certainly were behaving differently because there were adults around. We were worried that they might over-react, and so preemptively guard against such entanglements.
The 'engineering' was pretty simple:
1. Instruct our son to not release any information that someone could use to file a complaint against us. Specifically, last name, address or phone number. There are, of course, other good reasons to not release such data!
2. This would force someone who wanted to take official action to call 911, or otherwise contact the police. A non-911 police contact would not pose much of a problem since they lacked any contact information.
3. This would serve to give them pause: is this situation really an emergency? Of course it's not! But the final point was...
4. Make sure our son had a functional cell phone, make sure he would be able to call us at need. So if the police were summoned, or the adult pushed him too hard, he'd call us. We live 5 minutes away, so we'd be there right away.
I'm not sure this is 'engineering' per se, but in my brain mental steps felt similar to the engineering I do in my profession.
What other good reasons? I can't find any outside of thinking that some adult intends to kidnap your child, which could be in gross contradiction with the impression I got earlier from you as a "laissez faire" rationalist type parent. Surely you are aware that the possibility of your kid being kidnapped or hurt by a stranger is infinitesimally smaller than the possibility of them getting hurt by enviromental factors while unsupervised (drowning / sudden seizure / previously undeteced allergy / wild animals... basically any non-human factor). I'd appreciate if you could explain this.
Could I ask you a hypothetical? (based on a real life experience of myself)
Imagine you are hanging out in your yard with friends at 9PM, when suddenly a shoeless, 3 year old girl you don't recognize appears out of nowhere. Upon asking her name, you only receive her first name. She seems barely able to communicate and you aren't able to get clear information about who she is or where her parents are after a few questions. What would you do?
- Send her away without a second thought
- Keep her in your house until someone shows up claiming her
- Stop what you are doing and focus on helping her find her parents (although its not clear whether she's lost or not)
I'm not Diederich but I'll deconstruct your hypothetical in order to contrast it with her/his example.
* 9pm. Late, approaching curfew for children in many municipalities.
* 3-year-old. I have yet to meet a 3-year-old who can handle being free-range.
* Your yard. This is your neighborhood and you don't recognize this child. This is vastly different from being at a public playground where there are many unfamiliar children.
* Trouble communicating. A typical 3-year-old should be able to communicate. If not, she most likely can't handle being alone.
* Shoeless. I'm not sure this is relevant unless weather conditions are austere or your neighborhood contains broken glass.
The cumulative of these elements leads to an out-of-the-ordinary situation. It implies neglect. A search for the parents or if you're too busy, a phone call to police non-emergency is probably the appropriate response.
Hah, I'll take 'rationalist type' any day! And I don't mind laissez faire ("a policy or attitude of letting things take their own course, without interfering") much either.
My example revolved around strangers because that was the general topic. Strangers in the form of meddling, hyper-protective adults. True blue 'stranger danger' is, as you say, extremely rare.
Our son has almost always been very deliberate in action, especially with respect to his own safety.
So, the only real situation we had to guard against was the possibility of other adults freaking out that he was alone at the age of 9.
Regarding your hypothetical: as noted elsewhere, 3 years is very young. To be more illustrative, I'll disregard the specifics you mentioned, because our actual decision in such a situation would depend on so many more considerations.
My general approach would be to ensure the child is safe while minimizing my own exposure to possible unforeseen repercussions.
If the child was physically ok, I would tend toward relatively low-grade engagement. If she wandered off, I'd probably follow at a distance as long as needed.
The guiding principle is minimal intervention/interference with a baseline of protecting the child from environmental/possible human dangers.
If people arrived or she went toward people that posed a possible danger, than I would not hesitate to involve the authorities, because that is clearly moving toward an 'emergency' threshold.
These are conceptual guidelines, which might all go out the window depending on the actual specifics of a situation as I saw it.
I read it as him 'engineering' the situation to avoid over concerned parents from calling the cops / calling CPS / freaking out the child by telling him this is dangerous.
I can't answer for the above poster, but I can say I would much rather my kid call me than tell a stranger his/her last name. Kids are much more manipulable than adults, and giving out identity information might be dangerous. I'd instruct my kid to call me if another adult insists on identification.
I think this is age-dependent. If I trust my kid with a cell phone, then this is reasonable. If the kid is too young, and it's a school incident or something, then sure, it's reasonable to tell a teacher or school administrator your last name. Some rando in the park, though? No.
Given a first and last name, it's possible that judgmental parents who were worried about a 9 year old being at the park could file some kind of official complaint against us.
Given only a first name, their only course would be to call the police if they wanted to take any kind of official action. That's decision is about giving them pause to consider: is this child playing in the park without parents nearby actually an emergency? When I call the police, and they come, will I be able to defend my decision?
I have 2 kids and have consciously tried to avoid the helicopter-parent mindset and let them play on their own. But now as they approach adolescence I find myself more interested in how they spend their free time. Not so much hovering but making sure they are busy, gentle encouraging team sports & activities as an alternative to just "hanging out."
I believe the audience here skews younger but for those of you that have raised kids to adulthood, any advice? And for you more recent adolescents, how did you experience parenting at that age? When I look back it seems to me that the smartphone has changed everything.
Because the simple act of "hanging out" on the streets might earn them an arrest for "loitering" or whatever, which in turn greatly diminishes employment when you got a record full of arrests.
As a German, it was absolutely normal for me to be outside on a public place and drink beers! From what I see on parenting-related HN posts, in US drinking beers in public is illegal in most places, and minimum age for a f..ing beer is 21.
I didn't spend all my youth drinking beer though, but just hanging out with friends at a park was daytime activity after school until I was 18 and had a driver's license - we ended up with driving around town, spending all money we had on gas, and generally having fun. Also, it was perfectly acceptable to grab a phone, drum up your friends for a spontaneous LAN party and basically spend the entire day with gaming and watching 240p porn downloaded via eMule.
My sister is a bit younger than me, and even then I saw the great difference in available time after school between her and me. Thanks to the G8 reform (instead of 9 years highschool after 4y basic school, they shrunk it down to 8y in Bavaria) not only the school days were longer, but the amount of homework and learning were massively higher.
If all your time gets eaten up by school, when are kids supposed to play or take part in outside-of-school activities like politics, sports, music, ...?
Indeed - their precious supply of "just hanging out" time will begin to evaporate quickly as they get older. There's plenty of time to be busy (shudder) when they are adults.
I my city in we had a little Robert Moses in the parks and rec department who designed amazing, unique and challenging playgrounds in every new neighbourhood that went up in the late 70s and early 80s during a time of rapid growth for the city. From 6-12 I lived in my local playground during the summers, it was a full time job, I wanted to be a stuntman when grew up.
Those playgrounds have since all been replaced by the common kit playgrounds that are so crippled by draconian safety regulations that they aren't any fun at all for any developmentally normal kid over the age of 6.
But weirdly, next to where my old playground used to be, they've put in a fancy new skatepark. Among other concrete forms it features an 11 foot high quarterpipe kids are encouraged to drop in on while standing on a little board with wheels under it. The ambulance pays a visit every other day during the summers. Thank heaven for universal health care.
That phenomenon is ADA related as well. You need to provide ground accessible equipment, "sensory" activities for specific age ranges at specific heights, limited slope ramps and other features now. Our local parks department actually has a court-mandated compliance officer because they were sued a few years ago for having a non-compliant playground.
Having connecting ramps and bridges reduces some of that burden, which is one of the reasons why many playgrounds consist of a sprawling elevated ramp system with a few slides, wheels and other random crap.
The skatepark is ironically easier to build, until someone manages to win a lawsuit, despite the obvious safety hazards.
Nice to be rich! Imagine this setup in a poor / middle class neighborhood. The cops & city/town would shut them down ASAP.
The article is correct about one thing, letting children play freely. I've done this growing up in Queens NY, late 70s->80s. Funny thing. I wasn't allowed to cross the street until a certain age, I think around 8 years old.
I used to ride my bike, play tag, hide &seek etc... down the block, where there were other children. We'd run in backyards (if they didn't have a too high of a fence). Then when I was a little older 12+, I'd ride further down other streets & avenues.. Eventually I'd go places further, Green Acres Mall, Bayside and even ride my bike to Roosevelt Field Mall. Early 80s....
The article makes a testable statement: "Think about your own 10 best memories of childhood, and chances are
most of them involve free play outdoors [...] How many of them took place with a grown-up around?"
Yup, that is correct for me. And I was a bookish, introverted child. Still unsupervised exploration of forrests, abandoned factories, houses under construction, rivers, caves, tunnels ... was awesome.
Same here. I think my favorite unsupervised childhood memory was the time when (I was about ~10 years old) the day after a big rainstorm, that turned a nearby creek into more or less a river, we took a couple of inflatable rafts and went for a little boat ride. We ended up miles and miles away from any of our parents' houses and once it started to get dark, we hopped out of the stream, went and knocked on some random person's door and asked to use the phone.
Our parents weren't thrilled at having to pick us up, but we had a great time.
I did this exact same thing as a teenager when our creek turned into a torrent, but because I had thoroughly explored the forest as a free-range kid, I knew where the creek would take us, so we arranged to have someone meet us at a faraway bridge with a car.
Ours was more spur of the moment and done without our parent's permission. We spent hours on the boats, and none of us had traced this particular creek that far (and the water was moving at a nice clip).
Same thing here, and I was one of those kids who got regularly taunted by playmates for being a bookworm.
I recall we were also pretty cavalier about getting messy - dirty water, actual dirt, clay, even animal poop. I wonder whether exposure to all that stuff has any benefits for the immune system later.
Would it be better to take these kids back inside to teach them to code? Honest question. I've seen viewpoints for both more and less screen time vociferously defended on HN, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12250500.
I think this is really great but there is a difference between "boy-ish behavior" and bullying. Just hand-waving away bullying as "boys will be boys" is reckless and irresponsible.
If a boy wants to shove around someone else, fine. But if your son starts beating up and harassing children, maybe it is time for a talk with him.
I'm absolutely a free-range parent. My kids have the same freedom I had in the 80s to play outside with friends and roam the neighborhood and walk to the store. But come on, man. If I had wandered out on the roof at the age of 5, my parents would have read me the Riot Act and boarded up the window. Giving your kids a normal childhood doesn't mean throwing all caution to the winds.
I am a parent of 2 teenage boys (16 and 18) and this is similar to the philosophy under which they were raised. Contrary to what people are saying in the posts, it is not difficult to raise your children this way, nor more dangerous. The worst injuries either boy has sustained have all been at organized activities. The benefits, and I can't overemphasize this, outweigh whatever the hazards.
The problem isn't the kids of course, but parents, who are extremely overprotective of their children. I blame our media, which focuses on the violence and dangers in our society to make money while ignoring we're living in literally the safest time in history. They've scared the parents into thinking the world is too dangerous for their children.
It's the kids who suffer. They don't get the learn autonomy, or how to use their imagination, or how to set their own boundaries. And most of all, how to productively manage boredom. I see how they're doing that these days - they've got their noses in phones.
For me at least, I know that if I didn't have my nose in my phone, I would have my nose in a book instead. Either way, I manage boredom through reading.
As an anecdote, in 2006 I was in grad school and helped a friend with her summer camp for nerdy teens. I still remember the brother and sister (16ish years old) who were deathly afraid to be outside at dusk during the summer because of the West Nile Virus, which at that point was a concern but nothing DEET couldn't prevent. They'd read about it in the newpaper, I think.
I don't think it's the parents who are solely at fault for the safety paranoia.
While it definitely looks like Mike doesn't discriminate against girls(since several were present in the story and pictures) I find the focus on boys less than ideal. "Tomboys" exist, and even girls who tend more to the "traditional" female gender roles like to play outside and be rambunctious. To me, he should be focusing on all kids not a particular gender.
Edit: I also think encouraging kids to segregate less by gender might help with our other discrimination/segregation issues as well but that's pure conjecture.
> I find the focus on boys less than ideal...To me, he should be focusing on all kids not a particular gender.
He has sons, not daughters, so he's focussing on what's best for his sons. I wouldn't be surprised if his approach might change if he ever has a daughter, but he doesn't have any obligation to worry about what's best for other people's kids.
Right, and in my opinion part of what would be best for his sons is for them to be playing with girls as well as boys. Therefore, in my opinion Mike shouldn't be marketing this specifically for boys.
My nine year old is very anxious to be far from an adult (more than 20 feet) in public places, even very safe ones like residential streets, parks and grocery stores.
Why? Because other "helpful" adults come up to him and ask him if he is OK. Does he know where his parents are? Once a small group of adults gathered around him when my wife was getting the car from down the street. Concerned adults see other concerned adults and they gather like a flock, producing great anxiety in my child. Now he is very nervous to be far from a parent in any public place.
This rings incredibly true for me. I'm certainly the type of parent that lets my kids wander farther than normal (by today's ridiculous standard of normal anyway, which means within 5 feet) and I see constant looks of concern from all sorts of adults. My 4 year old is perfectly capable of being a half block ahead of me as we walk down the street and doesn't need an adult stopping him to check in. My last walk through the airport with two kids, both always well within eyesight, resulted in multiple concerned adults stopping in their tracks, ready to leap into action.
If a kid is clearly lost, crying, or distressed then please, by all means try to help. But if a kid is confidently walking without a parent within 5 feet don't jump to the conclusion that something's wrong.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 303 ms ] threadSeriously? Wow, as a non-American I find that outrageous.
I wonder when they'll threaten to drop people for having coke in their fridge or water in their bathtub. After all, those things kill people every day! They're extremely dangerous.
It would be like me, a Developer, touting that I actually finish apps, I don't just take the money.
Insurance is not about helping people cover expenses though, it is about pooling risk for the benefit of the group. This does mean that if you are a stunt helicopter pilot then other people in a low risk pool may tell you that they don't want you in it anymore.
America has a whole bunch of weirdness around insurance law etc. so I can't really speak much as I'm foreign - but there are good reasons that insurers don't cover Skiing on default travel insurance for example - and it isn't to screw the consumer.
AND making obscene profit for the insurance company.
I wish we had more things like this that were non-profit. An insurance non-profit could charge the same premiums as a company does today, then whatever "profit" they have left at the end of the year after expenses they just refund back to all customers as a percentage of their premiums.
Everyone would pay way less, all the employees still get paid the same, and we'd still have the benefit of pooling the risk.
Are you specifically pointing to US medical insurers (I cannot comment at all on that tbh beyond the fact that the whole system is problematic)?
More than 1 million people went to emergency departments for trampoline-related injuries between 2002 and 2011, with nearly 300,000 of those injuries involving broken bones
approximately 900,000 consumer trampolines sold each year
Doing some extremely crude correlation- For every ten trampolines sold a year, one person will visit the ER that year, and for every thirty trampolines sold, one person will break a bone. Yeah, I can see why insurance doesn't like them.
They aren't saying you can't have one, they just don't want to cover them.
http://theweek.com/articles/472062/dangers-owning-home-tramp...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/29/trampoline-injuries...
"If a claim is made or a suit is brought against an insured for damages because of bodily injury or property damage caused by an occurrence to which this coverage applies, we will:
* Pay up to our limit of liability for the damages for which the insured is legally liable. Damages include prejudgment interest awarded against the insured; and
* Provide a defense at our expense by counsel of our choice, even if the suit is groundless, false or fraudulent. We may investigate and settle any claim or suit that we decide is appropriate. Our duty to settle or defend ends when the amount we pay for damages resulting from the occurrence equals our limit of liability."
Some people also take out a personal umbrella policy which covers personal liability beyond home or auto. For example, a former employer's daughter and a friend were in an auto accident. The parents of the friend sued my boss for personal injury on her behalf, and my boss had to pay about two million dollars. Her auto policy probably covered $100-500k of that, and the rest was covered by the umbrella policy.
I wonder if the parent talked about in the article has a major umbrella policy. Jumping from the roof of that play house onto a trampoline seems kind of insane. Letting young children play on the roof of your house also seems crazy. Letting your kid beat up on my kid out of an attachment to your parenting philosophy is definitely not ok in my book.
I'm older than most people posting here, and I never did any of that as a child. I did do construction in the summers as a much older kid (the article describes 4 year olds on the roof of his house), and got hurt enough to go to the hospital three times, but these were the risks of the job.
Finally, this guy seems pretty sexist. It's ok for me to keep my little girls from bullying other children, but boys have to learn to defend themselves? Let me guess, is that because girls are expected to ask permission and behave nicely, but boys aren't?
Accident liability for healthcare are bucketed with health insurance, general liability insurance, auto insurance or workers compensation. If you hit a certain threshold with certain conditions, the insurance companies will try to pin the blame on somebody else.
When I had back surgery ($$$), they had investigators look into my background and called under various guises in an attempt to get me to say that I was injured in a minor car accident a few years earlier. Fortunately while I was present at the accident, I wasn't in the car (some dope slammed into my car in a parking lot). In the meantime, I was at risk of having care cutoff, as they refused to pay claims.
The only way to clock in millions of euros as penalty here would be some mini-enron like financial crime.
It would also be pretty insane to predatorily sue me for millions of euros. There is nowhere that money could come from.
Generally public healthcare would pick up the tab on most medical costs (sans some mostly insignificant fees).
This gets to the heart of the problem. In the US this is not an option, so even people who generally are not litigious can need to sue in order to make sure medical bills are payed appropriately.
Even with that, personal injury settlements that clock into the millions of euros would be extreme outliers in the USA. It would involve severe death and dismemberment as well as punitive action by the civil court process.
Personally, I think this is the greater cultural danger - that it's always someone else's fault.
Nowadays, people are fearful to give misbehaving children feedback for fear of the parent getting aggressively offended.
I think the fear instilled by "stranger danger" and litigiousness has had a big influence in how people behave toward other people's children. Since they can only interact from a distance, it's now through official channels where there is no leeway, common sense judgement. It's all black or white.
There are (many) other problems in other countries, but not that specific problem.
https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/pages...
It made a nice scar, though. People can ask her how she got it, and she can say, "oh, that's from a hatchet, a four day journey away from the nearest hospital." My most interesting scar is from the underside of the dashboard on a Honda Civic while installing an aftermarket stereo, and you can barely even see it.
I have never seen a pocketknife injury, though. Nor any from archery equipment, or firearms. I'd probably be most worried about barbed treble-fishhooks and swimming in warm freshwater lakes and rivers. Not really because of drowning, so much as slips and falls from mud or algae-coated rocks, or infectious parasites in the water.
My spouse, on the other hand, never got to do anything fun as a kid, and freaks out about everything even remotely dangerous, like my sharp, pointy tweezers. The only people more unreasonably intolerant of minute risks work for the TSA.
Trampolines, though. Those things are deathtraps. I'd rather have a swimming pool drained of water and refilled with rattlesnakes in my back yard. Also, no [American] football.
"Injury rates attributable to bicycling and use of playground equipment were higher [than trampoline injury rates in comparable age groups]"
Sounds a bit overblown.
I really do feel badly for most of the kids today, who are so hampered and restrained.
Don't let you kid fall into a bonfire, but DO let them burn themselves on the stove (after you tell them - that is hot). Inform but let them learn from their own mistakes. There's nothing wrong with a few cuts, bruises, scrapes, burns, etc...
How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home?
They're not here to tell the tale about how it "worked fine for them".
I'm not saying that things haven't gone too far the other way, but anecdotes about how things were fine aren't good data.
According to this guy, very few:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201404/ri...
> From an evolutionary perspective, the obvious question about risky play is this: Why does it exist? It can cause injury (though serious injury is rare) and even (very rarely) death, so why hasn’t natural selection weeded it out? The fact that it hasn’t been weeded out is evidence that the benefits must outweigh the risks. What are the benefits? Laboratory studies with animals give us some clues.
It responds very quickly to a changing environment.
http://allafrica.com/stories/201501280875.html
>It can cause injury (though serious injury is rare) and even (very rarely) death
keywords: "rare" and "very rarely", although it would be better argument to look at statistics on accidental deaths during risky play, now and in years past if I had time.
Children die, and that sucks a lot, but if you start making emotional appeals based on preventing all possible child deaths you're going to end up espousing that we keep all kids in padded rooms until they're adults.
[1] http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/wa...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_inj...
Being an adult isn't just completing 18 years (or any other arbitrary number). There's even discussion about when you really leave your childhood (teenagehood ?) behind. And I think it's when you acquire enough knowledge to avoid most risky situations while still enjoying life. And when you know that nobody will looking after you, because it came the time that you're the one that should be looking after others (children, elderly, spouse, you choose it).
That's probably because people spend 5+ times as much time in adulthood than they do being children.
[1] http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/figures%5Cm6115a5f....
[2] http://www.childtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/63_fig...
Very few. Those who have a tendency to do things that get them killed ... get killed and eliminated from the gene pool.
Everybody who is around now mostly knows how to judge risk. Yeah, we'll have some cuts, bruises, broken bones, etc. but it's very rare that someone does something so profoundly stupid that they get themselves killed.
Just because you heard about it on the news doesn't mean it's common. If one kid out of 10,000 gets himself killed this way, you'd get a dozen kids nationally offing themselves daily, but in reality that's a very small number and in truth, the real number is probably much less.
I think we've moved in this direction organically. We have much fewer children much later in life than we used to, we do not accept child mortality, and every child is a much bigger investment (education and economic dependency into the mid twenties or later), so every life literally becomes more valuable, so we naturally hedge more and more against any risk to this life. The more we move into a high-education and EQ driven economy, the more investment each child demands, and the further this cycle perpetuates.
Personally, I would not make this tradeoff, but I understand how hard it is to make this argument when faced with grieving parents who have suffered a huge loss, both emotionally and materially.
Right now I don't think we can have the conversation about having gone too far—people always reply "what's the harm in being too overprotective?" To have this conversation—which I think we absolutely need to have—we first need to recognize and admit that there's real, actual harm in being too overprotective.
Very very few.
If anything this is "overblowing the danger" bias.
We might accept a few more phobias in our children in exchange for fewer injuries. But the final irony is that our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have. According to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which monitors hospital visits, the frequency of emergency-room visits related to playground equipment, including home equipment, in 1980 was 156,000, or one visit per 1,452 Americans. In 2012, it was 271,475, or one per 1,156 Americans.
The number of deaths hasn’t changed much either. From 2001 through 2008, the Consumer Product Safety Commission reported 100 deaths associated with playground equipment—an average of 13 a year, or 10 fewer than were reported in 1980. Head injuries, runaway motorcycles, a fatal fall onto a rock—most of the horrors Sweeney and Frost described all those years ago turn out to be freakishly rare, unexpected tragedies that no amount of safety-proofing can prevent.
It says that monitored hospital visits (not injuries) have gone down, but those hospital visits have got a lot more expensive for most people too - one possible confounding factor.
I posted my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12744241 at the top level FYI.
Most of the time, if a child is abducted, it is the other parent in a post-divorce situation, rather than a kidnapper / molester. But we do see stories about those occasionally in the national news, so most people are "aware of the danger".
Ditto, I suppose, for CPS getting called by an over-reactive neighbor upon seeing a child wandering around without supervision. These types of stories also make the national news, for whatever reason, so most people are "aware of the danger".
And thus, we live in a climate of fear. Yay!
For the record, I spent some parts of my childhood wandering around in the woods alone (or with friends) where I could have: fallen down a hill, drown in a stream, fallen out of a tree, etc., etc., etc. without a reasonable possibility of timely rescue (no mobile phones back then). And I somehow survived. It is a shame that most kids in urban or suburban areas won't get a chance to do this anymore.
The moral is basically "You can't depend on people not to murder your children. You can't bring back dead children, we all need to protect our children." Watching M for the first time was incredibly strange. M was filmed in 1931 and the plot could have been written yesterday. I'm a huge proponent of letting kids explore the world (both literally and figuratively) without adult supervision.
I'm extremely thankful that my parents instilled such a strong sense of self-reliance in me. So many people who I grew up with are afraid to do anything without somebody there holding their hand. When I was a child I was allowed to go pretty much anywhere as long as my parents knew where I was going, when I'd be back, and if there was an adult I could contact in an emergency.
Other parent's used to ask my mom why she let us ride our bikes to school alone. (Always my mom, never my dad.) They'd ask "aren't you afraid of what could happen?" My mom was always insulted by these exchanges, and rightfully so -- the implication always seemed to be she didn't love us enough to protect us. Nothing could be further from the truth. My mom is pretty neurotic, and I know for a fact she was incredibly restless anytime my brother or I were out and about without supervision. She let us go because she wanted us to do more than live, she wanted us to thrive.
Just made me think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Among children / classmates close to my age in my hometown, I'm not aware of anyone who died, due to accidents or otherwise. So our mortality rate was somewhere below 1%, and I don't see anything to indicate we were unusual in that regard.
I also had an aquantance of mine die in 5th grade. Him and two of his brothers drown when the ice broke on a pond they were playing on[0]. But that's it, out of all of the people I know from school and church, all the way growing up, not just my age peers. At least, those that I heard of.
[0] - http://articles.latimes.com/1988-03-06/news/mn-708_1_young-b...
When I was between 7 and 9 I often came home from school and was alone for a while, warmed up food or cooked something simple (using a gas stove that required a match to light), went outside to play with friends if I wanted, etc.
It is sad the society today will jump in to protect my kids from me if it catches me letting them do anything like that.
So I gather that somehow these two kids were, when alone, acting in such a way that allowed the person who called the police to believe they were alone? It feels like there's some more context here. What were the kids up to? (:
I'm not sure that incorrectly assessing risk is limited to just parents either - look at our collective response to terrorism and mass shootings. I'm sure it's already been mentioned somewhere in these comments but the role of the media sensationalizing tragic but rare events is probably significant in this.
There is no difference there. Sending your child out to play unsupervised and getting on a plane each have X risk of Y outcome so your decision is based on those variables.
GP was simply suggesting that the risk of one's child being abducted (by social services or others) is probably similar to the risk of being on a plane that crashes (e.g. so low that most people do not even think about it).
Sending them out unsupervised exposes them to the possibility that they could get lost, they could get hurt, they could get bullied, or they could be a victim of a serious crime. Of course they could also have a great time which is why parents do it despite the (minimal) risks.
If something bad happened to your child, plenty of parents would question their decision and that experience would likely influence their future decisions. There is a reason we have fences around pools, marked locations to cross busy roads, teach kids not to chase a ball out onto a road etc - they are situations that children encounter on a routine basis. Being involved in a plane crash as an unsupervised minor is far less likely to happen and probably has fewer possible outcomes.
You are comparing a decision to an outcome, so that doesn't really mean much. You would have to consider "sending a child out unsupervised" vs. "taking a trip on a plane" (two decisions) -
Potential outcomes for sending a child out unsupervised:
- Abduction
- Bullying
- Getting hit by a car
- Stabbing
- etc.
Potential outcomes for taking a trip on a plane:
- Plane crash
- Grounding
- Diversion
- Hijacking
- etc.
If something bad happened (on their plane ride), plenty of (people) would question their decision and that experience would likely influence their future decisions.
Any number of outcomes are possible in both situations and the level of control the person experiencing the outcome has will varying greatly depending on any number of circumstances. None of this is relevant to the very simple comparison GP was making.
If you educate your kids about the risks, give them the tools to protect themselves, and give them advice on how to handle their often difficult social situations, you'll do much better than never letting them out for fear of them being molested, stabbed, or robbed.
Yes, there is a huge danger of your children being abducted, if you are not a helicopter parent. It's not some shadowy molester however, it's the government which will abduct your child.
Unfortunately, the environment has changed for my kids in ways that makes this difficult to duplicate:
1. Other kids aren't home anymore, they are all at structured activities. There is no neighborhood pack to play with.
2. Parents aren't home either, they are working. When I was a kid, if you got a splinter or scrape, you just went to the nearest house and someone's mom patched you up. All those houses are empty now.
3. If you keep your kid home to play freely, they miss out on all the social stuff going on in the structured activities. Much as I dislike all the structure, it is where the other kids are.
I agree it sounds great to let your kids roam free as we did, but I think in practice the environment has changed in ways that make it difficult.
Another is the break up of wider family. Before people could live locally and they would have their grandparents local too, and aunts etc. Now that land rents are so high and work is god, together with low job security, people are forced to move to other parts of urban areas or even to different cities in order to find work.
Still everyone seems pretty happy with capital gains on their home that can never be realised because all other homes also went up in price, so perhaps it's worth the utter destruction of life as we know it!
Oh wait, there's no decent-paying jobs there...
I agree, both with this and the premise that overprotective parenting is a real phenomenon. You can't place all of the blame on the parents for their increased vigilance because the environment of growing up has literally changed.
Like many of you, when I was young, I played all over my neighbourhood with other kids my age, completely unsupervised. Free to wander quite far from my home with the understanding that I would be home for supper. However, I grew up in a small town (pop. ~20k).
Today, most people live in cities, and many in large ones (us included). When my kids are older, I will do my best to give them freedom to play, but there are just some realities today that are different from when I was younger. I remember reading somewhere that there are roughly 3x the amount of vehicles on the road as there were in the 80s (when I was growing up). My biggest safety fear for my kids is traffic. We live in a city. There are a lot of parks around, but getting to and from places involves navigating traffic and a lot of it. I'll do my best to educate them and give them trust to do so, but you can't help but be a bit concerned. We all know you can be involved in a traffic accident these days through no fault of your own.
To clarify: I'm not saying that the world is actually more dangerous for kids today than it was a generation ago, but I think for many parents it's not difficult to see how they could have that perception (true or not) and thus parent in a more protective way. Not only has the world changed, but so has the beholder (from carefree child to responsible parent).
I wouldn't be surprised if our parents' generation were also considered over-protective by previous standards. This just feels like a "when I was your age" type of thing.
And, of course, there are many degrees of protectiveness. It is a spectrum. I see some parents where their protectiveness is much greater than mine and it seems obvious to me. At the same time, I'm sure other parents look at me and say the same thing. It's not a one size fits all situation. Parenting, as a whole is, of course a matter of personal values.
But if you widen roads and make other improvements to accommodate traffic then the graph would be more linear.
We all played all over the neighborhood together. There were playgrounds between the buildings, but we didn't really stick to them once we were old enough to go to school. When I was 10, I was riding the bike all over the place, within about 5km radius from home, and so were all the other kids.
I didn't personally know anyone who had a serious accident, traffic or otherwise. The worst I remember is one kid falling off the garage roof and breaking an arm, and another kid riding the bike into an uncovered manhole and falling down there. As far as the rumor mill went, the most extreme that I can recall was a story of a kid in the area who lost an eye in an incident involving live ammo being thrown into fire.
This is a very different environment from most of America.
Sidewalks, yeah, I'll grant you that. It's still the thing that amazes me most about US - that so many roads here plainly don't have any sidewalks. I'm used to seeing them on literally every road that is in a populated area. Even villages usually had them!
As far as cars, it was almost impossible to get up to higher than 10mph in there, and if you did, you'd probably be hunted down next time by neighbors and old ladies.
Even worse, at least half of them are working in "bullshit jobs", doing nothing productive except wasting time there justifying their paycheck.
I firmly believe we could switch to 20-hour work weeks and see almost no drop in productivity. Most workers spend much of their time surfing the web, sitting around chatting, etc.
http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
https://www.rt.com/uk/312365-people-think-jobs-useless
When I was a kid, I could roam the neighbourhood in a pack exploring woods and feeding horses, because I was sent to an (illegal) child-minder. This was just the house of an auntie who had finished raising five kids and was still not sick of it.
Being illegal was the best part: had it been an official daycare centre, we would have been trapped inside a palisade and hovered over by nice 20-somethings with proffesional training and no kids. No Hulk-Hogan reinactments would not have been possible then.
In the trade-off of security vs knowledge and discover, the parenting function is not to go to only one side.
We say we had a free childhood and we turned out just fine because we survived. There are others who were not lucky. So basing how we raise our children on the premise that everything was okay and is still the same is incorrect.
Do you also not board planes, in case yours is one of the few that doesn't make it to its destination?
Same here. But back in that day there was so much less to keep occupied with. That is at least part of the reason you did those things. You typically weren't allowed to watch TV for a long time at least and you had to find something interesting to do. Today the things that some kids can do are way more exciting than taking apart an old lawn mower and seeing what makes it tick.
So it's no guarantee.
At 35 I have a good job now, and am part of the wealthy property owning class (read: mortgagee), and am building a business with my wife, so maybe it worked out ok?
Also, how will a child learn about the dangers of heights if they never fall and hurt themselves? You can teach them, and that might work for some, but some children have / need to learn the hard way and that's okay.
The same way they can learn about the hazards of sharp things without playing on a table saw.
Table saws are a bad example in some cases.
My saw stop will stop the blade in <5 milliseconds of contact. It equates to basically scratching your finger or better (blades move at 3000-3600rpm, so it calculates out to about 1/4 revolution of the blade, max.)
As far as i'm aware, they've literally never had a brake activation failure.
It's pretty much the safest thing in my shop.
Of all the things i'd never let kids play with in the shop, it'd probably be chisels.
Which is ironic, because people think they are a good way to introduce kids to woodworking, when they are probably the sharpest and least safe thing due to how sharp and easy to cause severe injury.
;)
I actually miter cut aluminum the other day and it didn't trigger, it depends on how electrically isolated your metal is.
Summary: kind of like how your capacitive touchscreen can tell that a finger is touching it.
Yes, but most kids are not allowed or encouraged to play on their roofs. If they were, the rate of injury would likely be much higher.
I used to play on the roof of our shed. I have no idea what I did up there but I think it was mostly being deliberately up high. I dangled and jumped many times and jumped at least once before deciding that kind of hurt and deciding not to do it again. You overestimate the stupidity of children who are familiar with the concept of consequences. I also had my thumbnails fall off multiple times after hitting them with hammers and burned off the skin on my little finger once on a stovetop seeing exactly what these burns were that were so scary. I never even broke a bone and I have less than five wounds that should have received stitches. I had a boring, safe childhood.
Loved it. I hope my kids get a similar experience.
You don't want to raise conformist children, you want to raise rebels.
I disagree. I want my kids to be smart enough to know when to conform and when to rebel. Time and place :)
You raise a rebel by telling them "I don't want to see you on that motherfucking roof!"
Then, when they are ready, they will go to the roof.
You provide the back pressure and their job is to overcome it.
How much back pressure? That's an exercise left to the parent.
For my money, I want the few rebels who survive helicopter parents.
These kids may be milquetoast with no sense of evaluating risk.
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/BHNBJqmhM5T/?taken-by=christophe...
Good luck.
I live in Seattle (within city limits) and would love to chat with someone about how the hands-off/free-range thing is working in practice within this city.
In response to, for example, this line from goodJobWalrus:
> I mean people get arrested for letting their kids go to the park or play in their own backyards, for god's sake.
Honest question: what is the objective, per-child risk of that happening? I don't have data for that handy, but I would be shocked if it was anything except exceedingly low, on the order of getting killed in a commercial aircraft crash.
My wife and I frequently struggle with the this vague fear of people turning us in to social services, because we've read a number of articles about that happening to families who were raising their kids in a way that was completely normal a couple of decades ago.
But even with all of the general societal paranoia we are saddled with, I'm almost certain that we are still statistically safe from such over-reach.
Example: terrorism. It's a nice trigger word in the USA, but how many people are killed by terrorism vs car crashes or unhealthy habits? Yes, terrorism should be reported on, but it's certainly not as important to anyone's everyday life as not eating shit food and texting like an asshole while driving.
Kids just don't get kidnapped or molested by strangers enough to be statistically significant. Kids are almost always molested by relatives, in a private setting. Kidnapping by stranger is even more rare. Sure, it can happen. Just like a comet could hit Earth. Should we sit around worrying about it, while our children re doomed to have us constantly looking over their shoulders until they're 18 and have no sense of self-purpose?
It's more than that, apparently risk assessment is now an issue of moral judgment.
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/why-are-we-so-af...
http://insider.foxnews.com/2015/06/14/florida-parents-charge...
I’d say that OP’s point is the odds are so low, that it is OK to play them.
> 99.8% of the children who go missing do come home.
> Only about 100 children (a fraction of 1%) are kidnapped each year in the stereotypical stranger abductions you hear about in the news.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/in-a-yea...
> In a Year, Child-Protective Services Checked Up on 3.2 Million Children
> 2.5 million of those kids were declared 'non-victims.' Another 686,000 were 'abused' or 'neglected.' And an estimated 1,640 kids died as a result.
To be fair, one of these has a much higher rate of incident than the other.
Personally, I'm more concerned with the quality and accuracy of CPS than I am about child abduction simply because a 10% improvement in CPS would save more lives than a 100% reduction in child abductions.
Then again, I feel that way about medical errors vs. terrorism and the value of spending money to save lives. A 10% reduction of medical errors would save more lies than a 100% reduction in terrorism. :/
I do agree that the risk of terrorism is massively overrated. I think this is because terrorism requires 'agency' and thus feels both worse and more preventable.
It was meant to represent the impossible goal of 100% success, not that I actually meant it was achievable. I don't think we can substantially reduce terrorism below current levels.
There is always going to be some group of people who are angry and violent as long as humanity hasn't achieved the Singularity imo.
I don't want to come across as crass, but, with respect, I will make this short observation:
You trust your child's life to hundreds of strangers every time you drive them somewhere. The chance of your child being hurt by a careless/bored/insane stranger on a per trip basis is very, very low. I assert that the risk of child services becoming involved after you let your child play on a trampoline (or whatever) is even less.
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/childrens-social-c...
And if I'm reading this correctly, in hte USA in 2014 there were 3.2 million reports of "child maltreatment" (amongst a population of 74 million under 18s).
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cb/cm2014.pdf#pag...
http://www.hhs.gov/answers/research/where-can-i-find-social-...
It's almost certain that one of those 3.2 million incidents has our name on it.
In 2014, at a time when our son, who has high functional autism, was going down a mental rabbit hole about what foods he would eat. When the list got down to three foods, we told him that it could not go down any further, period.
So he asked for one of those foods for dinner, and we served it, and he decided that he didn't want it, that he would only eat one of the other two foods on his 'list'.
We refused to accommodate and reminded him that he wasn't allowed to go below three foods. That the food in front of him was on his list, and that he had specifically asked for it. So he would not be served anything different for dinner.
So he ate a little bit of it, and went to bed hungry and unhappy.
The next day at school, he told a teacher that we were starving him, that we were refusing to feed him.
This generated a mandatory CPS incident.
We received a call, and my wife went to the school and talked to someone and contextualized the situation.
The incident was subsequently closed without prejudice.
So, given that rather in-depth bit of "anecdata": of that 3.2 million, based on our direct experience with the reporting requirements schools have to follow, most of them are specious.
Of the ones that aren't, I suspect only a tiny fraction are in any way related to 'free range parenting'.
In short: I strongly suspect that the danger of inappropriate child services intervention associated with various 'free range parenting' activities is vanishingly small, even though it feels like a constant and potent danger.
PS: I'm 110% open and willing to answer any questions about anything mentioned here, including the autism, the 'food list', the seemingly strange behaviour, whatever. I feel that there are a lot of misconceptions surrounding the realities of parenting autistic children, and I am more than happy to help with that. Direct e-mail is fine too: diederich@gmail.com
I'm not kidding in the slightest when I say this literally happens at least once every single time I take my kid to the park. My kid is pretty advanced physically and takes parkour classes and gymnastics classes. He's very capable of handling situations that other parents freak out at. And he knows his limits probably better than those parents know their own. But they still act like they need to save my kid from himself, and you wouldn't believe the looks of disgust I get from them when I actually reveal myself. I really do not have to worry about him jumping off the monkey bars, but unfortunately I truly believe I can't let him do it on his own without a significant risk of CPS getting called.
Beyond a couple of judgmental parents, no action was taken. One parent asked our son for his name, first and last. Our son, per instructions, refused to give his last name.
At that point, the parent has a difficult decision to make. Do they call 911? The answer is 'no'. There is no emergency.
I want to make it clear that I feel what you are describing. My wife and I have felt it, and we still feel it.
But objectively, the risk is very low.
Engineer the situation such that a 'hover-parent' has no choice but to call 911.
Our son carried a cheap pre-paid cell phone from a relatively early age too. He had only to open it and push the 'send' button twice and we would be there. So even in the extremely unlikely event of cops showing up, we would be there minutes later.
This thing that feels so strongly like a risk really isn't.
Sounds like you were using your kid as a prop in a social experiment with the goal to push your own particular agenda through "teaching moments" on strangers.
What did you intend to accomplish?
Our primary goal was to ease all of us (our son, my wife and myself) into being comfortable with our son becoming 'free range'.
Mostly it was my wife and I confirming what we suspected: that he would be safe, primarily from other over-reactive parents. We'd already objectively accepted that he would be physically safe, even though emotionally it was challenging for us.
We secretly shadowed him at the park six or seven times before letting him go full solo. My account of other adult interactions with him were from those experiences.
So he became fully 'free range' at the age of 9, and has been ever since, with absolutely no problems.
So was it a social experiment? I guess that could be accurate, as a side effect. Were we trying to give strangers "teaching moments"? Far from it, though I suppose its possible somebody else learning something, I don't know, and don't much care.
I guess you could say we were pushing our own 'particular agenda'...we were pushing it on our son and ourselves. And we are all three better off for it.
I wonder if you can expand on your implication?
If all your goals in this situation had your kid's well being in mind, then I misunderstood you and I apologize for that.
From your wording (specially the "engineer the situation" bit) it sounded to me like you behaved differently in those situations because other adults were around. The assumption I made was that you did so to teach them a lesson, so to speak.
If your method towards overseeing your child is the same whether there were other adults around or not, then I obviously misunderstood you and I apologize for that.
I originally understood "engineer the situation" as "provoke a misunderstanding - where none would have taken place otherwise - with the goal of making other adults uncomfortable and so they may understand their mistaken view".
It seems obvious now that this was the wrong reading, but would mind explaining further what you meant by "engineering the situation"?
[EDIT] I have one other question:
> Our son, per instructions, refused to give his last name.
May I ask why? If my son got lost, or needed to ask for help from other adults, or was caught in an emergency situation at school, I would want them to be armed with as much information as possible in order to enable an adult to contact me as soon as possible.
To be clear, we certainly were behaving differently because there were adults around. We were worried that they might over-react, and so preemptively guard against such entanglements.
The 'engineering' was pretty simple: 1. Instruct our son to not release any information that someone could use to file a complaint against us. Specifically, last name, address or phone number. There are, of course, other good reasons to not release such data!
2. This would force someone who wanted to take official action to call 911, or otherwise contact the police. A non-911 police contact would not pose much of a problem since they lacked any contact information.
3. This would serve to give them pause: is this situation really an emergency? Of course it's not! But the final point was...
4. Make sure our son had a functional cell phone, make sure he would be able to call us at need. So if the police were summoned, or the adult pushed him too hard, he'd call us. We live 5 minutes away, so we'd be there right away.
I'm not sure this is 'engineering' per se, but in my brain mental steps felt similar to the engineering I do in my profession.
> other good reasons to not release such data!
What other good reasons? I can't find any outside of thinking that some adult intends to kidnap your child, which could be in gross contradiction with the impression I got earlier from you as a "laissez faire" rationalist type parent. Surely you are aware that the possibility of your kid being kidnapped or hurt by a stranger is infinitesimally smaller than the possibility of them getting hurt by enviromental factors while unsupervised (drowning / sudden seizure / previously undeteced allergy / wild animals... basically any non-human factor). I'd appreciate if you could explain this.
Could I ask you a hypothetical? (based on a real life experience of myself)
Imagine you are hanging out in your yard with friends at 9PM, when suddenly a shoeless, 3 year old girl you don't recognize appears out of nowhere. Upon asking her name, you only receive her first name. She seems barely able to communicate and you aren't able to get clear information about who she is or where her parents are after a few questions. What would you do?
- Send her away without a second thought
- Keep her in your house until someone shows up claiming her
- Stop what you are doing and focus on helping her find her parents (although its not clear whether she's lost or not)
- Call 911
- Call child protection services
I will gladly share with you what I did :)
* 9pm. Late, approaching curfew for children in many municipalities.
* 3-year-old. I have yet to meet a 3-year-old who can handle being free-range.
* Your yard. This is your neighborhood and you don't recognize this child. This is vastly different from being at a public playground where there are many unfamiliar children.
* Trouble communicating. A typical 3-year-old should be able to communicate. If not, she most likely can't handle being alone.
* Shoeless. I'm not sure this is relevant unless weather conditions are austere or your neighborhood contains broken glass.
The cumulative of these elements leads to an out-of-the-ordinary situation. It implies neglect. A search for the parents or if you're too busy, a phone call to police non-emergency is probably the appropriate response.
My example revolved around strangers because that was the general topic. Strangers in the form of meddling, hyper-protective adults. True blue 'stranger danger' is, as you say, extremely rare.
Our son has almost always been very deliberate in action, especially with respect to his own safety.
So, the only real situation we had to guard against was the possibility of other adults freaking out that he was alone at the age of 9.
Regarding your hypothetical: as noted elsewhere, 3 years is very young. To be more illustrative, I'll disregard the specifics you mentioned, because our actual decision in such a situation would depend on so many more considerations.
My general approach would be to ensure the child is safe while minimizing my own exposure to possible unforeseen repercussions.
If the child was physically ok, I would tend toward relatively low-grade engagement. If she wandered off, I'd probably follow at a distance as long as needed.
The guiding principle is minimal intervention/interference with a baseline of protecting the child from environmental/possible human dangers.
If people arrived or she went toward people that posed a possible danger, than I would not hesitate to involve the authorities, because that is clearly moving toward an 'emergency' threshold.
These are conceptual guidelines, which might all go out the window depending on the actual specifics of a situation as I saw it.
Why not? What's the fear here?
Given only a first name, their only course would be to call the police if they wanted to take any kind of official action. That's decision is about giving them pause to consider: is this child playing in the park without parents nearby actually an emergency? When I call the police, and they come, will I be able to defend my decision?
I believe the audience here skews younger but for those of you that have raised kids to adulthood, any advice? And for you more recent adolescents, how did you experience parenting at that age? When I look back it seems to me that the smartphone has changed everything.
As a German, it was absolutely normal for me to be outside on a public place and drink beers! From what I see on parenting-related HN posts, in US drinking beers in public is illegal in most places, and minimum age for a f..ing beer is 21.
I didn't spend all my youth drinking beer though, but just hanging out with friends at a park was daytime activity after school until I was 18 and had a driver's license - we ended up with driving around town, spending all money we had on gas, and generally having fun. Also, it was perfectly acceptable to grab a phone, drum up your friends for a spontaneous LAN party and basically spend the entire day with gaming and watching 240p porn downloaded via eMule.
My sister is a bit younger than me, and even then I saw the great difference in available time after school between her and me. Thanks to the G8 reform (instead of 9 years highschool after 4y basic school, they shrunk it down to 8y in Bavaria) not only the school days were longer, but the amount of homework and learning were massively higher.
If all your time gets eaten up by school, when are kids supposed to play or take part in outside-of-school activities like politics, sports, music, ...?
They had kids a few years ago and they strongly advocate giving kids freedom to play, explore etc.
Not advocating for anything but just wanted to share an example of one of the ends of the spectrum...
Those playgrounds have since all been replaced by the common kit playgrounds that are so crippled by draconian safety regulations that they aren't any fun at all for any developmentally normal kid over the age of 6.
But weirdly, next to where my old playground used to be, they've put in a fancy new skatepark. Among other concrete forms it features an 11 foot high quarterpipe kids are encouraged to drop in on while standing on a little board with wheels under it. The ambulance pays a visit every other day during the summers. Thank heaven for universal health care.
Nature finds a way, sometimes.
Having connecting ramps and bridges reduces some of that burden, which is one of the reasons why many playgrounds consist of a sprawling elevated ramp system with a few slides, wheels and other random crap.
The skatepark is ironically easier to build, until someone manages to win a lawsuit, despite the obvious safety hazards.
The article is correct about one thing, letting children play freely. I've done this growing up in Queens NY, late 70s->80s. Funny thing. I wasn't allowed to cross the street until a certain age, I think around 8 years old. I used to ride my bike, play tag, hide &seek etc... down the block, where there were other children. We'd run in backyards (if they didn't have a too high of a fence). Then when I was a little older 12+, I'd ride further down other streets & avenues.. Eventually I'd go places further, Green Acres Mall, Bayside and even ride my bike to Roosevelt Field Mall. Early 80s....
Yup, that is correct for me. And I was a bookish, introverted child. Still unsupervised exploration of forrests, abandoned factories, houses under construction, rivers, caves, tunnels ... was awesome.
Our parents weren't thrilled at having to pick us up, but we had a great time.
I recall we were also pretty cavalier about getting messy - dirty water, actual dirt, clay, even animal poop. I wonder whether exposure to all that stuff has any benefits for the immune system later.
If a boy wants to shove around someone else, fine. But if your son starts beating up and harassing children, maybe it is time for a talk with him.
The problem isn't the kids of course, but parents, who are extremely overprotective of their children. I blame our media, which focuses on the violence and dangers in our society to make money while ignoring we're living in literally the safest time in history. They've scared the parents into thinking the world is too dangerous for their children.
It's the kids who suffer. They don't get the learn autonomy, or how to use their imagination, or how to set their own boundaries. And most of all, how to productively manage boredom. I see how they're doing that these days - they've got their noses in phones.
I don't think it's the parents who are solely at fault for the safety paranoia.
Edit: I also think encouraging kids to segregate less by gender might help with our other discrimination/segregation issues as well but that's pure conjecture.
He has sons, not daughters, so he's focussing on what's best for his sons. I wouldn't be surprised if his approach might change if he ever has a daughter, but he doesn't have any obligation to worry about what's best for other people's kids.
Except they are - right in your comment you say:
> it definitely looks like Mike doesn't discriminate against girls(since several were present in the story and pictures)
Why? Because other "helpful" adults come up to him and ask him if he is OK. Does he know where his parents are? Once a small group of adults gathered around him when my wife was getting the car from down the street. Concerned adults see other concerned adults and they gather like a flock, producing great anxiety in my child. Now he is very nervous to be far from a parent in any public place.
If a kid is clearly lost, crying, or distressed then please, by all means try to help. But if a kid is confidently walking without a parent within 5 feet don't jump to the conclusion that something's wrong.