China. Two strong influences: an idolization of western parenting plus the one child policy. Take your caricature of a dependent US kid and add the pressure and coddling of six parents.
And yet, you’ll see first graders walking alone or in adult free groups to the convenience store during lunch to get something to eat. It’s only really the black Audi crowd that super coddle their children.
My hunanese wife had free reign of the city since elementary school, things are not that different now.
I'm observing a massive decline in children independence in Russia as well compared to the "good old Soviet times" and early (pretty violent though) 90s.
It is a helpless feeling that emerged is the age of kidnappers, organ harvesting etc. Or has nothing really changed since then and it is just that we're exposed to massive amounts of FUD in the new era of mass media?
Edit: to answer the actual question: I don't think (that's really subjective and I don't have kids) Russia has reached yet the "typical level of overparenting" in the US.
I think it's a lot more fear, uncertainty/doubt. Kids are most likely to be a victim of crime at home by family members. That's where most abuse happens. The random kidnapping is more in the movies that reality.
In South Africa you get a mix. Upper middle class and rich driven to school with some parents even walking children into class. Poor and working-class kids catch public transport. They have no other option. Unfortunately, we have a fair amount of violent crime and the result is kids have less freedom to roam.
Good grief; must every thread devolve into “are there any countries [worse] than the US?”
I live in France (I am American) and my 6 year old has walked to the store by himself and his French classmate’s parents think that’s insane. It’s a scandle when my 3 year old plays on playground equipment designed my 6 year olds. I took my kids rock climbing in Chamonix when they were 3 and 4 years old and had them properly harnessed and roped and you would have thunk I pushed them out of an airplane. Our Italian guide was having a great time while the French families were clucking disapproval between bouts of amazement.
I know plenty of UK parents in France that keep their kids on tighter leashes than even the French.
This idea that “American kids are less independent than others” is just nonsense. It’s all situational — a suburban kid might have to walk 3 miles to get to a shop or a school — that’s a much different context than some kid walking in a neighborhood where everything is a block or two away. When I am in Cupertino, I see elementary school kids riding their scooters to school unattended and when I was in Korea, there were plenty of teenagers getting picked up by their parents to walk theee blocks home.
Let’s stop generalizing so much. All of this depends on the relative safety of an area and not the nationalities involved.
> Japan has a very low crime rate, which is surely a key reason parents feel confident about sending their kids out alone.
I grew up in a relatively high crime area but still walked to school and sometimes took public transport. The only thing that made it somewhat unsafe was the bullying by other school kids. Of course there is an overlap there as yesterday's bullies are tomorrow's criminals, but still it wasn't enough to have parents escort me. Sometimes strangers intervened to save me from a few attacks by groups of older kids. So maybe there is an element there as well of people not minding asking kids what's happening, why are they pushing this one kid to the ground.
Now living in US in a much safer area I would think very well before sending my kids to school by themselves at the age when I was going to school by myself. The reason is neighbors who could report me to the police for "child endangerment or neglect". It happened to a co-worker. One of the neighbors reported them to the police while kids were playing out in the front by themselves. It issue was resolved but not without embarrassing calls to work and home visits.
That's not entirely true. IANAL, nor am I familiar with this particular area of the law, but many places of the law include the concept of a "reasonable person". That is, whether you have acted as a reasonable person would act.
In a place where the law is clearly defined, you're correct, that wouldn't help. However, when the law is vague, a documented conversation like that is definitely good evidence that one was acting reasonably.
Well, if someone says your irresponsible and a social worker comes along, it will give a good impression of responsable thinking. Not everything must/can be legally validated.
In the same reasoning, that's why a judge can have a jury
Common sense could not be erradicated anyway: it's not the same to allow them to be alone for 5 hours in the neighborhood, in Times Square or somewhere in a high crime area.
The problem is, US law has long eradicated "common sense" as a legal category. That's why you can get a compensation from a microwave manufacturer when you kill your dog , trying to dry it in microwave after bath, because microwave manual does not explicitly forbid putting live animals inside. Appealing to common sense in the court of law is a lost cause.
It seriously pisses me off that people think the law and rulings made by judges and juries are absurd without knowing anything about the cases or rulings in question. It seriously smacks of arrogance, because these people are your peers, so you are implicitly claiming that you are smarter than all of them. I assure you, that's probably not the case, and in that same situation, you probably would have reached the same conclusion.
There are always exceptions, but check your facts before assuming you're less of an idiot than others.
Thank you. Anecdotal reports from counter-intuitive court rulings are subject to heavy survivor bias.
I.e. there might be a million cases where justice (correctly) deemed absurd to prosecute a parent for letting the kids play outside. But they'll never make the news.
>It seriously pisses me off that people think the law and rulings made by judges and juries are absurd without knowing anything about the cases or rulings in question.
It might piss you off, but there's a point to these stories. Italian's say "se non e vero, e ben trovato" (Even if it is not true, it is a good story).
This is not about it being an entertaining story -- it's about it expressing a real fault in the legal system and its attitude, despite doing it using a non-factual case.
In other words, the US legal system might not have THAT law, but the story remains true in a deeper level, in the sense that it is indeed the kind of system were such a law could be conceived or be remotely possible.
I might. Don't know who see is, not an American, had to google her.
Do you have anything that can be considered an argument?
Because my point, that a story doesn't have to be factually correct to still be indicative of a larger truth (and vise versa: a factually correct story might just be an outlier that doesn't prove anything universal of what it suggests) has been known since time immemorial.
> Because my point, that a story doesn't have to be factually correct to still be indicative of a larger truth
At the moment, American Politics is all F'd up because Mr. Trump and his Press Team (led by Huckabee Sanders at the moment) relies on this.
They plant false ideas like "The Crowd Size at the last rally was huge" into the American Public's mind, and then MAKE UP the larger truth in such a way that most benefits them.
False stories are the bread-and-butter of Mr. Trump's press strategy right now.
But the defense of the lie is indistinguishable from the maxim of representational truth, when the truth is in question (or purposefully misrepresented).
The latter case is the problem, and currently a large one.
The logic that goes into thinking factually untrue stories can contain truth is mind boggling to me. If you are talking about fables it parables, sure. Presenting fake stories as true? How is that useful?
If something exists, it is useful in some way and to some people (useful being different than "doing good work") -- or, to be it better, it has some rational explanation for existing. If something is popular, it means even more so, that it serves some kind of purpose.
Now, sure one can have a knee-jerk a priori reaction that something true is always better than something false.
Is it so though?
As a utilitarian I prefer to see the effects (and not just the first order effects).
Instead of taking an "it's evil/bad/don't wanna know about it" moral stance, I prefer an investigative stance. What does such stories exist and what role to they serve? Could it even be a positive role? I don't feel there's anything "mind boggling" to asking those questions.
To get to the point, I believe that:
1) A factually untrue story could contain (and encapsulate nicely in story form) a larger truth about a situation. Most people will easily accept it for art, literature, movies, parables, etc ("this story is fictional, but it expresses what goes on very accurately"). Well, the same thing can happen with an untrue new story that people believe is true.
That (happening) depends more on the content of the story, not to whether it was promoted as art or as news. If a movie gives a very true to life picture of 50s racism, then it still gives that whether someone believes it a fictional hollywood story or mistakenly believes it to be based on true facts. So what would be the real difference to the latter case if it was an untrue news story being misperceived as true?
2) Conversely, a true story could be an outlier, used out of context, promoted for more that it amounts to, and thus serve to lie about a situation.
A true news story about a kind slave owner in the 1840s South would be less true in conveying the horror of what was going on at the time than a made-up story about a person that beat and raped their slaves.
Representativeness matters more than mere accuracy. That's why people, and especially politicians and advertisers, are able to mislead with otherwise real statistics and facts all the time.
And that's how a work of art can be truer than some straight-to-the-fact reported news story.
So, two ways my approach is not "mind boggling" is to look at it from a utilitarian perspective, and to look at it from a representativeness perspective.
As for the final question: "presenting false stories as true? How is that useful?".
First of all, I was not talking about consciously presenting them (e.g. knowing that they are not).
What I said is that such stories as they circulate can still capture a larger truth, and thus be beneficial to the cause of truth, even if untrue themselves. In other words, modern cultures still can make their myths and believe in them, and some of those (based on their representativeness and content) can be huge forces for change and progress. It's hardly the most difficult or first paradox in how societies function.
E.g. imagine a made-up news story about a very racist cop towards some immigrant family. This circulates widely (because its powerful) and ends up causing mass protests, and affecting real change.
Wouldn't that be a case where a false story being presented as true became useful? History is full of such examples.
(A false story presented as true could also, or even more possibly, be harmful. Hence what I said about representativeness being necessary. I didn't say "false news stories are great we should have more of them". I said that they can potentially do good.).
You seem to be aiming for small inaccuracies in a story not being a problem. In large, I can agree, in that I don't expect really high precision in stories.
However, there is a difference between stories that are simply imprecise and stories that are fabricated. Similarly, there are differences between stories created to convey emotions, and stories that are fabricated to encite emotional responses.
Probably easier if I just said that I can understand the value of fiction. However, it is best presented as such. False narratives are not fiction if presented as true. Specifically, the story that prompted this thread is one where it only has value if it is a true narrative. Otherwise, might as well have a story about how a corporation convinced a susceptible population that they should dry their animals off in a microwave that was the size of a person. Because... stories that purport to originate from real events don't have to be true. Right?
> Wouldn't that be a case where a false story being presented as true became useful?
Only if the false story was actually representative of some underlying truth, despite the specific details being untrue. You keep presenting your original post as representing some underlying truth, despite the specifics being untrue.
I think I clearly stated in my first reply that not only were the specifics untrue, but your underlying premise was also completely false despite having being commonly accepted. And this is where actual facts are needed to discern the actual truth, so make your case.
>Only if the false story was actually representative of some underlying truth, despite the specific details being untrue. You keep presenting your original post as representing some underlying truth, despite the specifics being untrue.
Well, if the underlying truth is: "the US has a crazily invasive legal system and is too litigicious", then I think the (untrue) story conveys that well.
Amusingly, I just saw a video about the famous McDonald's case regarding coffee. That is one where the common narrative is complete shit, because people have bought into the idea that America is full of frivolous suits. Largely from a smear campaign resulting from that lawsuit.
False narratives like this move people from reasonable open mindedness to closed viewpoints. They do not help.
> Well, if the underlying truth is: "the US has a crazily invasive legal system and is too litigicious", then I think the (untrue) story conveys that well.
Except you haven't established that underlying truth to begin with, hence why false stories are just hurting your case. In fact, I'd even say that truth is probably false.
I was pointing out that your translated quote might not resonate as you intend, today.
Sara(h) Huckabee Sanders used similar logic to defend the posting of known-false videos as evidence to support the policies and proclamations of her boss.
You can argue that some concepts require extrapolation to be persuasive. We're dealing with a lot of abuse of that right now, and I don't think it works here.
Re: the luxury of non-Americans to be unfamiliar with the absurdity represented by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, all I can say is "enjoy it!" ... but do take warning: these things have a way of propagating. :(
> it's about it expressing a real fault in the legal system and its attitude, despite doing it using a non-factual case.
If you want to point out an actual flaw instead of a non-factual/non-existent flaw, then use facts not fables.
> In other words, the US legal system might not have THAT law, but the story remains true in a deeper level, in the sense that it is indeed the kind of system were such a law could be conceived or be remotely possible
Except you would need a factual argument to demonstrate this possibility. Your arguments so far do not qualify. The fact that you can imagine this possibility entails facts about you and your understanding of law, and does not entail anything about the law itself.
>If you want to point out an actual flaw instead of a non-factual/non-existent flaw, then use facts not fables.
If I want it, then yes, I'll take that advice in mind.
My concern is not what I want though, but what happens in real life, how some things can be more complicated than the naive first order view (factually false = useless), and how some narratives (both good and bad) are transmitted in society through such methods.
The biggest risk in Times Square used to be vehicle traffic. That's true of most places, but it was especially so in Times Square. However, now that it's been turned into a pedestrian plaza, I'd say your biggest risk is being detained by the police for being an unaccompanied minor. There's always lots of police there, and a young child that was perceived to be alone or lost would quickly be put in custody.
Other than that, it's just full of tourists from other parts of the US and abroad, mostly families. Can't see any real risks to children there now that the vehicles are gone.
The problem here is not the law, it is the people who think the fact that one person (out of over 100 million families in America) got arrested for doing a thing that sounds reasonable is a reason to change your behavior.
We need a reasonable threshold below which we do not worry about an event. Figuratively speaking: "If it makes front page news, it's not how I'm gonna die."
The threshold is going to vary from person to person; for me? if it's less likely than me dying or becoming disabled in a transport accident today, then the effort to prevent that thing is most likely better spent preventing transport accidents.
I mean, my point here is that you want the best return possible on your "prevent bad things from happening to me and mine" efforts, and there are a lot of low-hanging fruit that you can grab in the area where there is the most danger. Transportation and health are huge killers, much bigger than terrorist and crazies.
I think this might be the biggest problem with America today; this idea that systemic action needs to be taken for a 1 in 100 million chance seems like the systemic problem with our society. Systemic action should be reserved for things that happen frequently.
Even in America, the biggest danger to children is transport accidents; the chances of getting killed or disfigured are so much higher in a car than in a train that it almost certainly makes up for any "stranger danger" on the train.
In the end "rulers" are just afraid of being expelled for "bad service" so they reduce risk as much as they can: mass media might pick a particular case (that 1 in 100 million) and distort it until society perceives it as 1 in 10.
I understand your angle.
That approach is very shortsighted, the inefficiencies created going after such black swan event risk prevention opens up gaps in other services that basically makes society go to hell in a handbasket
Of course, the goal is to reduce risk of bad outcomes as much as possible.[1] I'm just saying, with the same level of effort, you could save a lot more lives by solving transportation problems than by preventing the more rare kinds of crime.
I submit that learning how to evaluate these sorts of statistics, and this sort of risk management is an important part of the basic education that is essential to all citizens of a democracy.
[1]And nobody has brought it up, but it's possible that the average person just thinks that a child being kidnapped by a stranger is an outcome that is thousands of times worse than that same child dying or being mutilated for life in a transportation accident. In that case, maybe society isn't acting irrationally; they just place a lot more value on 'manner of death' than I do.
The problem here is not the law, it is the people who think the fact that one person (out of over 100 million families in America) got arrested for doing a thing that sounds reasonable is a reason to change your behavior.
actually it is the law. We can't expect parents to gamble their parenthood and their lives - even if the odds are 1 in 100 million. And i suspect the odds are not that small, just in this thread there are multiple stories of social services being called for what used to be common place attitudes towards children and their autonomy. There's even a person fully admitting they would also put in a report if they witnessed such a thing.
I'm not saying your arguments are bad. In fact, they are on point. But perceived danger vs Actual danger is, from looking at the whole anti-vaccer movement, the big contributor here. But if parents are getting put in handcuffs for having their kids play outside then yeah, they need to be protected from a systemic standpoint.
>We can't expect parents to gamble their parenthood and their lives - even if the odds are 1 in 100 million
Every day when you strap your kid into your car seat, you are rolling those dice, at odds considerably worse than 1 in 100 million.
You can't face risk by saying "we need to stamp it out, no matter how small the chance or how great the cost" It doesn't help me if you protect me from meteors if I'm millions of times more likely to be killed by a traffic accident, and the same resources could drastically reduce the chance of that death.
You need to look at what resources you are willing to spend on risk mitigation, and then look at where you can spend those resources to most effectively mitigate risk.
You're basing your argument entirely on probability, and assuming all risk must be mitigated. Or I'm taking you too literally, in which case I apologise. However. Risk exposure is more than probability - it's probability multiplied by impact. And only then does one consider an approach - accept, transfer, manage, and so on.
In this case if one chose to manage the risk, the mitigation would require (one possibility) enshrining something in law, so that parents of these kids DON'T get prosecuted. That's a one-off, and possibly no more expensive than the cost of a single prosecution/incident.
Given that, doesn't it make sense to do this, making it just go away, and giving people that peace of mind? Regardless of the low probability? Cost is clearly less than protecting a populace against meteors.
It's pointless to discuss if it makes sense mathematically because humans don't function that way, we're just not very good in probability. Everyone is looking at eliminating the risks with the simplest possible solution. When you strap kids in your car seat you use special kid seats to insure that they'll be protected as much as possible. If there's a chance that you loose your kid because you've let it go play on its own outside, you will not let it go anymore. It's as simple as that, perfectly normal human reasoning.
The problem is helicopter parents who constructed their identity around supervision get a vision of beeing superfluous or even harmful. Your unsupervised self reliant youngsters are a attack on their lifestyle.
I keep seeing arguments that it's "rare", but I don't think that's actually the case. When I read about multiple cases in the news, _and_ 1 parent (out of only 12) in my cub scout den had to deal with someone calling the police on his kid playing alone, it certainly seems like a real threat. It's going to have a chilling effect.
The problem isn't that you're going to go to jail, it's that once you're on the radar of a state agency, it's scary, and you end up in the position to prove that your home and family are safe for your kids. It's embarrassing and deliberately intimidating, and you ultimately have no power to stop at least a small disruption in your kids' lives.
Exactly. If a thing gets reported in the news media, it is generally (by definition) newsworthy and therefore a rare or unusual event. So the news being reported about 'someone reported to the police for letting their children play outside' shows that such events are rare and nothing to be worried about...
The big unstated assumption in your position is that getting trouble for letting one's kid unsupervised in the streets is unlikely given that one actually lets their kids unsupervised in the streets.
In could be true, but another plausible alternative is that it's rare to get in trouble that way because no one is letting their kids unsupervised in the streets.
An analogy: death by actively jumping off a plane without a parachute, if it exists, is extremely rare. Doesn't make it safe.
> The only thing that made it somewhat unsafe was the bullying by other school kids. Of course there is an overlap there as yesterday's bullies are tomorrow's criminals
Do you have a source on this? I could see there being perhaps some correlation, but it's far from an obvious fact to me that bullies just turn out to become criminals. Most of the bullies I'm aware of from school simply grew out of it as they got older and were never at risk of not becoming productive members of society, they just developed more empathy and/or became less mean. I'd be curious to know if someone's run a longitudinal study to measure correlation between bullying at younger ages and violent criminality at older ages.
Do you mind sharing in what state you live? I wonder if there’s a cultural difference between the West Coast and other parts of the country when it comes to calling CPS on people.
We live in WA and our 9 year old daughter walks back from the school bus stop alone everyday, then stays alone at home for 3-4 hours until we come back from work (we let her because we deem her mature enough for that, before age 9 she went to an after school program). A few of our neighbors and even the building management people know about it, and don’t seem to take issue with it. The building administrator actually said something like “ooh she’s a big girl now! :)” when we requested an extra key for our daughter.
So there’s that, and also that every CPS story I’ve heard or read on the news seems to have happened in the Midwest or the East Coast.
I live in upstate NY and I think that here if my 9 year old walked home alone everyday and then stayed in our house alone everyday some people might call CPS is they knew about it or noticed it.
I wish I understood why. Perhaps it is economics related? I should research this more because it would be interesting to understand.
I'd often seen kids on the tram in Melbourne. Rarely on their own though, almost always in groups. In Wellington, you'd see them occasionally too in the mornings. They had dedicated school buses (city buses with the "School" sign on the front), but if kids were running late and missed their bus, you'd often see them on regular public transport.
One of the big problems is the lack of public transport in the US. Even with cities with good transit, the minimum age for kids on buses/trains is usually 12 (wasn't there an article on HN earlier about a New York man who's kids rode the bus in a group of three and how social services said he couldn't do that any more until one of them turned 13? I can't seem to find it now..)
Crime is more perception then a real issue. You're always most likely to be a victim of a crime by a family member at home. Actual child abductions are more hollywood and rarely real life. When it does happens, it's usually someone who knows the child via family.
I feel like this is yet another problem that could be solved via real transit and which will just be made worse by self-driving cars.
We need to make a clear distinction here between crime rates in general and crimes where a child is involved and the perpetrator(s) and strangers.
As far as I'm aware the biggest dangers to children are their cohabitating relatives followed closely by non-resident family and friends.
The solution to this issue for me was to move away from the big city I was in to a much smaller one, where the kids next door and a few houses down play in the street and my neighbors talk to me.
I bet if there exists statistics on how much time children spend alone outside you will see it decrease as car use increase.
Cars are my biggest fear when the kids go outside alone. Soon the oldest will begin school and I want her to go by her self, but the amount of cars on the road is scary. Especially around the school it's mayhem caused by parents driving their kids 400 meters to school.
Yeah, kids walk more when adults walk more. It makes sense: more pedestrian infrastructure, and people are more used to pedestrians. When drivers aren't used to pedestrians, they don't look for them.
A lot of places in the US people are wary of adult pedestrians. They see someone walking and assume something is wrong--a car broke down, or the pedestrian is somehow up to no good. If people have the attitude that walking is weird and a cause for alarm, they won't want their kids doing it.
Plus, in lots of suburban areas, there's nowhere for kids to walk to. Wooded areas, if they exist, generally belong to somebody who doesn't want strangers messing around on their land. If there are Main Street shops, that could work, but a lot of Main Streets now are either pawn shops and check cashing outlets or high end restaurants and boutiques, with nothing really there for kids. And it seems less pleasant to send kids to a corporate store like CVS than to a mom and pop business.
I also think there are fewer kids in lots of suburban neighborhoods than there used to be, with family sizes shrinking and fewer retirees leaving the neighborhoods where they raised their kids. And kids seem to form cliques around interests earlier and earlier, which means their friends could be halfway across town. Adults don't automatically hang out with their neighbors much anymore, and neither do kids.
I don't know if this is the article you're thinking of - it is a similar situation with a family in Vancouver, BC that I believe was discussed here recently:
I missed the discussion back then, but just having read the article, I can only shake my head. I know that the times are always changing, but if I think back what children were doing one or two generations ago on a daily basis...
"the Ministry had [...] determined that children under 10 years old could not be unsupervised in or outside the home, for any amount of time." -- even myself, growing up, we were a bunch of kids who all lived in a cul-de-sac. I don't think our parents saw much of us from the age of six onwards or so, at least not during the summer months, except for the meals.
The source seems to be 79 (3) of the Child and Family Services Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. C.11 [1]. I'm not a lawyer, but from my reading, it seems like specifying an age actually narrows the law. It's more like a maximum than a minimum:
---
Leaving child unattended
(3) No person having charge of a child less than sixteen years of age shall leave the child without making provision for his or her supervision and care that is reasonable in the circumstances.
----
Having read through a bunch of this stuff to find the law in question, things actually look pretty reasonable. If there's a problem, it seems it would be with the application or interpretation of the law by the bureaucracy or the courts. Legislation can correct those things, but I guess my point is that it looks reasonable, so there's no obvious easy fix.
"that is reasonable in the circumstances" may be ambiguous and in the eye of the beholder. But it certainly suggests that a normal 16 year old doesn't need to be automatically under constant adult supervision at all times.
ADDED: This may or may not be the correct reading, but I take that as saying you can't kick your 15 year old out of the house and tell them you're on your own.
Perhaps the lack of public transport is a significant factor ("if you-the-parent are driving the kids around anyway, what do you do at destination? Hovering like a helicopter is the easiest option") - I got a traffic pass, a watch and a time of curfew when starting 3rd grade, and that was it (no cellphones back then). Most of my classmates had a similar arrangement, what with 5-20 minutes of public transport commute; in a city where public transit is both cheap and plentiful, it would not make sense to even own a car for most people, other than a status symbol.
It seems that the Seattle public school district gives out public transit cards to kids in middle and high school, depending on circumstances and school bus availability. I’m not sure how the system works, but I’m about to find out since I’m moving there next year and have a kid going to school.
I walked to school at 5 in New Zealand, took the bus to town at 10 to go to the library or the pool.
My son at 11 took the BART to and from school from Berkeley/Oakland to El Cerito, other parents were horrified - we moved back to NZ a couple of years later, handed both kids a bus timetable and a phone and sent them off to town to explore.
One of our main goals as a parent is to create independent kids who can function alone in the world - we don't want them still living in the basement at 30
> One of our main goals as a parent is to create independent kids who can function alone in the world - we don't want them still living in the basement at 30
FYI this is a cultural thing. Not every culture's parents kicks out their children when they turn 18. So if it doesn't work out this way for whatever reason, don't view it as right or wrong unless you feel it's wrong to go against the culture (which also isn't inherently wrong either).
Oh we didn't kick them out, they left when they wanted to go, and have come back at times when it has made sense (after college for a while to save money for example).
American culture is the ultra-contradiction of both expecting kids to be independent at 18 (or 22 with well-to-do families) AND kids not being able to develop that independence at all growing up.
EDIT: The expectation of independence at 18 is not just between parents and the kid, but sometimes the kid's older SO, or society, or some other people who constantly repeat "once you're 18 you can do what you want", except they have no idea how to do it responsibly.
One of our main goals as a parent is to create independent kids who can function alone in the world - we don't want them still living in the basement at 30
Thank you. I can never understand how often this aspect is completely ignored when debating what is or isn't safe for a child to do unsupervised. How is a child ever supposed to mature if they have no opportunity to develop? Of course as a parent you have a responsibility to introduce your child to new ideas and behaviours at reasonable times when they are able to cope with them, but if you just wrap them in a cocoon forever and never let them see the real world, how can they possibly learn to look after themselves and integrate into our wider society as adults?
In Poland, when I was 7 years old, by the time I had to go to school my parents have already gone to work,so I had to make myself some food, lock the door behind me, and walk for 15 minutes to school. But we also had kids taking buses to school, and they were normal public buses, not a dedicated school bus(never heard of such concept in Poland to be honest).
To comment on this - also living in Poland. The concept exists in Poland, but only in a few private schools, mainly those marked as "American schools".
I think the main reason is that public transit is magnitudes better and more widespread here, than in the US.
School buses are the real thing in Poland, my father has been driving one for the last 15 years :) It's just that they are more popular in rural areas (you know, grabbing kids from all those small villages and driving them to school in the nearby town).
In big cities, like Warsaw there actually aren't any, as schools are usually within walking distance, and if they aren't then the normal public transport is supposed to fill in.
In nothern Finland, I've seen kids dropped off by the bus in the middle of the snow covered woods. Younger ones had someone picking them up, but kids around 10 just started walking with the sun already setting off to a house that was absolutely nowhere in sight. They do have sisu!
Come on, it was just normal. Besides wolves - which were hunted down until recent years - what danger would there be? If you have proper clothing, there's nothing to fear in snow covered woods.
(I'd guess kids use a kick-sled, though, instead of just walking.)
The end results of monoculturalism, aversion to immigration, and high work ethics. Kudos to the Japanese for creating such a safe and trusting society.
Wow, you were very quick at turning correlations into causations there. Canada also has a very low crime rate but has a very multicultural society, same thing with Singapore.
Rethoric like that could also get your case into trouble. By your logic, their monoculturalism, aversion to immigration and high work ethics created a decade of poor economic growth and deflation.
I should add that I took public transportation around Gothenburg all the time from 10 years old. Is Sweden a monocultural country with high aversion to immigration and good work ethics?
Invoking Japanese culture as an exemplar of a successful society based on the enforcement of ethnic purity and homogeneity has become a bit of a rhetorical hobbyhorse for right and alt-right wingers, of which there are many on HN.
I don't know much about Canada as to whether your suggestions are true or not (statistics are so easy to manipulate) but Singapore is a terrible example to give in just about any context. Singapore did manage to lower crime in a multicultural aka multiconflictual society. It did so by destroying an individual's freedom and enforcing the rule of law the most brutal way possible. We are talking about a country that puts you in jail for blaspheming religion or even just littering. Singapore also banned homosexuality. Actually I wouldn't mind if we were to follow Singapore's example of enforced social harmony, go ahead, it will be funny to watch the left in the west go crazy over freedom issues like when Singapore banned foreign preachers from entering their territory. The only, single thing that is similar between a leftist wet dream and Singapore is multiculturalism. Everything else about Singapore is not a leftist dream but their very nightmare. And it's that "everything else" that allowed multiculturalism to even work there. Heck, Singapore only exists as a city state because they found it impossible to coexist with the muslim majority country. You should read up some history on the founding of that very young country.
I'm nowhere near interested enough to try to look up things about a boring country like Canada but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't end all that well for it if I were to. Because so far, every single time I've seen leftist multuculturalism defenders talk about countries I do know something about, it has been a really good joke.
I pointed out that just looking at multiculturalism and crime rate of a single country is very bad research, you are the one drawing parallels to ”leftist multiculturalism” propaganda. It’s a discussion about bad and simplistic deduction, i.e the ”correlation is causation” fallacy.
But, just for the record: yes, I’m very well aware of the conflicts and race riots during the founding of Singapore (and the fact that they were not a developed economy or deomcracy yet either) but the statement of the GP was basically ”Japan has low multiculturalism and low crime rate, thus multiculturalism causes crime”. That’s why I said that by that logic monoculturalism causes deflation and low economic growth.
I have relatives who lives in Malmö, they did the same thing when they were 10.
Gothenburg is larger than Malmö, but Malmö is admittedly more multicultural (about 40% are foreign born compared to Gothenburg’s 25%). However, the island of Hisingen in Gothenburg is very high up on the list of shootings per capita.
I see kids alone in the subway in Berlin all the time. Berlin is a high-immigrant diverse city with low work and high party ethics.
It seems to me that this is more a function of having a somewhat reliable public transport network.
When I explored Berlin myself as a kid, all I had to remember was the color of the subway and the stop
I had to get off to return home. When I got lost anywhere in the city, all I had to do was find the next subway station, look at the plan and I’d find my way.
I don't know where people keep getting this idea that China is monocultural, but it's helpful when they do because really demonstrates their ignorance of the country. China is also by and far safer than America. Odd crimes/accidents only appear more common because they've got a population greater than the USA, Europe, Canada, and Australia combined.
Japans’s criminal justice system has a conviction rate in excess of 99%. Over 95% of those arrested sign confessions. The system has been attacked by organisations like Amnesty International. There is, as I understand it, a pervasive view that all crime is committed by foreigners, which contributes to pervasive xenophobia. This compounds the issues of an aging and eventually shrinking population. The high work ethic also comes with its problems, like the number of deaths from overwork, and high rates of suicide and alcoholism.
Crime in Japan is obviously low, and I’ve never felt safer anywhere in the world. But it’s too easy to just look at the surface like that; in reality, it’s complicated.
Japan also famously has a very low incidence of rape, though I wonder to what extent that is due to very low levels of reporting it.
No doubt different ways of organising society come with trade-offs; and path dependent optimisation means it's not always possible to "switch" to a different local optimum.
Nevertheless, I think
* looking at how other countries do things and
* realising how contingent some domestic norms are
I've learned over the last few years that rape reporting is not something which can be reliably compared between countries.
If a woman reports to the police that her husband has raped her ever other day for a year, then is that 0 counts of rape (because marriage means permanent consent for sex), 1 count of rape (because it was reported once), or 180 counts of rape (because of each reported occurrence). (I say it was 180 counts of rape.)
Different countries have different standards. According to https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2014/12/08/voices/for... , the definition of rape in Japan excludes things rape requires violence or threats. That article goes into more about some of the differences, including low levels of reporting it.
As CityLab pointed out in the article, "The persistent problem of women and girls being groped, for example, led to the introduction of women-only cars on select lines starting in 2000."
What...?! This has nothing to do with monoculturalism or xenophobia. Probably not high work ethics either.
Here's a bit of US history to show how things have changed. The TV show "Sesame Street" started in the late 1960s as a way to provide pre-school education to low-income and disadvantaged families. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Sesame_Street .
One of the early clips is "Loaf of Bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im4GwUD1UY8 . In it, the mother sends her young daughter out, alone, to buy those three items from the local store.
That account takes place in New York in the 1970s, a diverse city with many immigrants. While fiction, it's meant to educate children about what they might be expected to do.
If you read books about children in NYC in the mid-1900s, you'll see that this was not uncommon. Kids, including young ones, would go on their own to Central Park, or the library, etc. Or on hot days just hop on an elevated line to enjoy the breeze.
There are other free-range parents. There may be a local group. That Let Grow site says part of it mission is to be "where parents who want to Let Grow can find others in their neighborhood".
These days, in Queensland, it's illegal for children under 12 to walk to school on their own. (Although, for better or worse, both the letter of the law and its enforcement are unclear.)
Yes, I remember when that law was introduced. I vaguely remember that it was in response to a child being murdered after being picked up while waiting for a bus.
It's certainly a different world now. But I have a 10-year-old, and he goes to the shops around the corner to buy milk and/or bread. There'd be no way I could trust him to make public transport decisions at this stage though. Maybe a year or two more.
A study from 2015, "Children’s Independent Mobility: An International Comparison" [1] and the actual report [2]. Report covers 16 countries, US was not included.
Unfortunately I could not find any summary articles (except in Finnish). The charts summarizing the results seem to start on the report page 14.
From the comments there it seems that it's not about (perceived) risks at all, it's more about peer pressure. If no other parents in your group would let their kids go about on their own, you surely won't want to be the only one.
Good, but too bad Japan does not let kids be as free to think for themselves at school a little more. If you limit autonomy to walking to school, it won't bring much benefits in the end.
In Germany, we had cycling safety classes in primary school (and you got a badge at the end, yay!), so we could cycle to school (or anywhere else, really).
In many countries in Asia, kids with parents can just go to a restaurant (for example) and let the kids roam - everyone else (waiters, other patrons) will take care of the kids collectively.
We had this in the US as well in elementary school. They had it every year, and I think all kids could participate (grades 1-6). It was a combination of safety instruction and some skills tests (riding in a figure 8, using turn signals properly etc.)
Public transport in most US cities is nearly unusable for the purpose of getting from most homes to most elementary schools. Downtown to the airport is usually viable, but can be a much worse experience than the average European might expect.
In Germany (at least in they cities that I have lived in) they have a "Vehrkerskindergarten" (Traffic Kindergarden)[1] in addition to the cycling classes. Basically its a miniature town (streets with traffic signs, traffic lights etc.) where kids go around in pedal cars and bikes. They are run by the Verkehrswacht and the local police. You also get a badge for completing this and the proud picture of your class will be published in the local paper.
Live in Burundi (Africa) which has been plagued by insecurity since 90s. We used to go by public transport even at age of 10. My little bro and sisters still doing so.
I personally think it's related to culture. How the community like to make kids mature earlier.
I've also lived in Tanzania where communism had made in the 90s, pupils not pay public transportation. So even little kids were riding buses.
The other day I accidentally left my son at a busy station in Tokyo. He was more annoyed than upset. He just found the right platform to go home and planned to email me when he got back to say where he was.
We underestimate children's ability to navigate, which is silly because if they were really bad at it our species would have died out long ago.
There were 8 of us because my daughter's old school friend's family was here on holidays. They speak a Chinese dialect that I don't speak well.
Anyway it was like herding sheep to get them anywhere. In the rush to get them onboard a train where we taking them back to their hotel from a shopping trip... well... I kinda left my youngest on the platform.
Sounds foolproof, right? Well, let me introduce you to my town, where each of the tourist groups had this very same bright (sorry) idea. As the textile is mass-produced and apparently highly standardized, this results in streets being awash in ~8 hues of nigh-identical neon t-shirts (yellow, green, orange x2 each, red, blue). Now, which one, out of the sea of identical SCREAMING colors was yours? Yup, Red Queen Principle - back to square 1.
Agreed. I talk to my 2 y.o. son in a normal tone with full sentences, respect, and he seems to appreciate it. I can tell when my mom talks to him like a baby that he gets annoyed, it’s unfortunately amusing.
"What accounts for this unusual degree of independence? Not self-sufficiency, in fact, but “group reliance,” according to Dwayne Dixon, a cultural anthropologist who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Japanese youth. “[Japanese] kids learn early on that, ideally, any member of the community can be called on to serve or help others,” he says."
Probably the same pretty much anywhere in the world. I have a hard time imagining a kid asking an adult for help and the adult refusing, even if it's a stranger.
I have a hard time imagining a kid asking an adult for help. "Never talk to strangers," was the takeaway I got from elementary school. "Never tell an adult who you don't know where you live unless they know your codeword your parents shared with you" (in this case, the password was 'skateboard'.)
If the kid is too shy to ask for help or has been taught never to talk to strangers, then they would never even attempt to approach a stranger. Seems like that's the main difference: that Japanese children are taught to trust the community they live in.
Yes, it's completely normal and expected (and indeed charming) to walk around children as they go about their day going to schools and other activities in Zürich. It's a very safe city, of course, but also must be something in the culture. Another thing I noticed is that playgrounds are not "safe" - the kids can climb tall structures, play with animals, etc. Kids are expected to progressively develop the ability to independently take care of themselves and of each other. I have not heard of any catastrophes.
> Another thing I noticed is that playgrounds are not "safe" - the kids can climb tall structures, play with animals, etc. Kids are expected to progressively develop the ability to independently take care of themselves
My sister talked to a playground designer in Germany once.
He explained that they deliberately make the toys slightly dangerous -- if you fell off a structure, you wouldn't need to go to hospital, but it would hurt enough to teach a lesson.
They explicitly want to school kids' sense of risk, and at the same time, self-reliance. And offer a sense of achievement if you dare and master, say, a "dangerous" climb.
In Singapore my kids take the school bus. They could technically take the MRT / Bus by themselves, but I don't trust Singapore's traffic. When I grew up, I walked to school. But German drivers are really well educated (mostly).
I started using the public buses alone at the age of 5/6. Usually, to go visit my grandparents who lived about 20 minutes away. I started cycling alone at the age of about 8/10. And not short pleasure rides but to actually go from one place to another. School, gymnastics classes etc. etc.
And getting groceries (from the corner or kirana store) wasn't even considered "going out alone". Everyone did that as soon as we learnt to properly count money. Mostly even before that, since the kirana stores could be trusted not to give incorrect change and steal from a kid. I'd have a list of items from my parents, hand it over to the storekeeper with the money, and he'd give me the stuff in a bag along with the change.
There's another interesting story from when I was 4/5. I wanted a new toy and refused to sleep until my parents agreed to buy it for me the next day. They kept refusing so I threatened my parents that I'd run away from home if they didn't buy it for me. Their response was to simply tell me that I could runaway if I wanted, but I wasn't getting that toy (and remember, I'd been throwing this tantrum past bedtime, sonit was about 10/11 at night). I packed a little bag with some toys and clothes and left home. My parents idea of keeping me safe at this time was to ask my 6/7 year old brother to secretly follow me, which he did, but I had no idea about. Getting back to me, I left my apartment, walked out to the main road, walked for a bit, didn't know where to go, so I caught a bus and went to my grandparents house. They were quite happy to get a surprise visit from me. Though I asked them not to tell my parents I was there (I was 5, but didn't want my parents to think I was an idiot) they called my parents and let them know I would be staying over at their place. The next day I found out my brother had caught a cab and followed the bus, saw I went to my grandparents place and returned home in that same cab.
Lastly, in India, every public transport service, offers a half price ticket for children. Even if travelling alone. Also, kids studying in government schools, get a card which allows them to travel from home to school by bus/train for free. It's actually very common to see kids traveling via public transport alone. In trains and buses it's also quite common to offer or see others offering their seats to small kids that can't reach the over head handles while standing.
This is very interesting. I can't imagine a 6/7 yo following on cab much less a 4/5 year old catching a bus late night anywhere in New Delhi! Which city was this in?
I’m also letting my 10 year old daughter use the MRT in Singapore on her own, but also really only in Singapore, any other country I’d be worried too much. There is MRT staff everywhere who help everyone and after I explained to her that the police helps everyone here, so she asked a patrol when she wanted to try a new route. The streets might be cleaner in Tokyo, but I think the sense of community is similar
Japan also has something called the "Kids 911 home" (こども110の家) which are signs on police stations, convenience stores, shops, taxis etc that show where children can go for help if they feel threatened
Living in Germany, I've walked to the kindergarten alone (I think when I was four years old) and after knowing the way to school, I was walking there with my friends and without parents. We spent hours outside without our parents knowing where we are because we knew where we were allowed to go and what we where allowed to do (This didn't mean we listened, though).
The same parents that were okay with me going to kindergarten by myself and sometimes cooking partial meals alone, now are horrified that such things happened (with their consent).
I think it speaks a lot to how much society has changed, their current mindset would not accept the same behavior they themselves had a few decades ago.
I remember being stopped by strangers asking "where are you going? School? Ok, watch out when crossing the streets". Nowadays nobody would intervene directly... They would probably call the police and take me into custody.
"Practical Wisdom" (Barry Schwartz) is a good book about this.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] threadMy hunanese wife had free reign of the city since elementary school, things are not that different now.
It is a helpless feeling that emerged is the age of kidnappers, organ harvesting etc. Or has nothing really changed since then and it is just that we're exposed to massive amounts of FUD in the new era of mass media?
I live in France (I am American) and my 6 year old has walked to the store by himself and his French classmate’s parents think that’s insane. It’s a scandle when my 3 year old plays on playground equipment designed my 6 year olds. I took my kids rock climbing in Chamonix when they were 3 and 4 years old and had them properly harnessed and roped and you would have thunk I pushed them out of an airplane. Our Italian guide was having a great time while the French families were clucking disapproval between bouts of amazement.
I know plenty of UK parents in France that keep their kids on tighter leashes than even the French.
This idea that “American kids are less independent than others” is just nonsense. It’s all situational — a suburban kid might have to walk 3 miles to get to a shop or a school — that’s a much different context than some kid walking in a neighborhood where everything is a block or two away. When I am in Cupertino, I see elementary school kids riding their scooters to school unattended and when I was in Korea, there were plenty of teenagers getting picked up by their parents to walk theee blocks home.
Let’s stop generalizing so much. All of this depends on the relative safety of an area and not the nationalities involved.
I grew up in a relatively high crime area but still walked to school and sometimes took public transport. The only thing that made it somewhat unsafe was the bullying by other school kids. Of course there is an overlap there as yesterday's bullies are tomorrow's criminals, but still it wasn't enough to have parents escort me. Sometimes strangers intervened to save me from a few attacks by groups of older kids. So maybe there is an element there as well of people not minding asking kids what's happening, why are they pushing this one kid to the ground.
Now living in US in a much safer area I would think very well before sending my kids to school by themselves at the age when I was going to school by myself. The reason is neighbors who could report me to the police for "child endangerment or neglect". It happened to a co-worker. One of the neighbors reported them to the police while kids were playing out in the front by themselves. It issue was resolved but not without embarrassing calls to work and home visits.
In a place where the law is clearly defined, you're correct, that wouldn't help. However, when the law is vague, a documented conversation like that is definitely good evidence that one was acting reasonably.
In the same reasoning, that's why a judge can have a jury
So, the obvious first step to fixing this problem in the U.S. would be to make it explicitly legal.
Something like "letting children unsupervised in public space for less than 5 hours shall not, by itself, be construed as child abuse or neglect."
Plausible? Any downsides?
Can any town do it by itself, or is an act of Congress needed?
It seriously pisses me off that people think the law and rulings made by judges and juries are absurd without knowing anything about the cases or rulings in question. It seriously smacks of arrogance, because these people are your peers, so you are implicitly claiming that you are smarter than all of them. I assure you, that's probably not the case, and in that same situation, you probably would have reached the same conclusion.
There are always exceptions, but check your facts before assuming you're less of an idiot than others.
I.e. there might be a million cases where justice (correctly) deemed absurd to prosecute a parent for letting the kids play outside. But they'll never make the news.
It might piss you off, but there's a point to these stories. Italian's say "se non e vero, e ben trovato" (Even if it is not true, it is a good story).
This is not about it being an entertaining story -- it's about it expressing a real fault in the legal system and its attitude, despite doing it using a non-factual case.
In other words, the US legal system might not have THAT law, but the story remains true in a deeper level, in the sense that it is indeed the kind of system were such a law could be conceived or be remotely possible.
Do you have anything that can be considered an argument?
Because my point, that a story doesn't have to be factually correct to still be indicative of a larger truth (and vise versa: a factually correct story might just be an outlier that doesn't prove anything universal of what it suggests) has been known since time immemorial.
At the moment, American Politics is all F'd up because Mr. Trump and his Press Team (led by Huckabee Sanders at the moment) relies on this.
They plant false ideas like "The Crowd Size at the last rally was huge" into the American Public's mind, and then MAKE UP the larger truth in such a way that most benefits them.
False stories are the bread-and-butter of Mr. Trump's press strategy right now.
I really doubt that they rely on non-true but otherwise representative of the truth stories.
For one, they'll never admit those stories are not factually true.
And even if they did so, those stories would still have to be representative of a larger truth, which they're not.
So, no, false stories as pure lies are not the same as what I was talking about. We had those since the beginning of time too.
The latter case is the problem, and currently a large one.
If something exists, it is useful in some way and to some people (useful being different than "doing good work") -- or, to be it better, it has some rational explanation for existing. If something is popular, it means even more so, that it serves some kind of purpose.
Now, sure one can have a knee-jerk a priori reaction that something true is always better than something false.
Is it so though?
As a utilitarian I prefer to see the effects (and not just the first order effects).
Instead of taking an "it's evil/bad/don't wanna know about it" moral stance, I prefer an investigative stance. What does such stories exist and what role to they serve? Could it even be a positive role? I don't feel there's anything "mind boggling" to asking those questions.
To get to the point, I believe that:
1) A factually untrue story could contain (and encapsulate nicely in story form) a larger truth about a situation. Most people will easily accept it for art, literature, movies, parables, etc ("this story is fictional, but it expresses what goes on very accurately"). Well, the same thing can happen with an untrue new story that people believe is true.
That (happening) depends more on the content of the story, not to whether it was promoted as art or as news. If a movie gives a very true to life picture of 50s racism, then it still gives that whether someone believes it a fictional hollywood story or mistakenly believes it to be based on true facts. So what would be the real difference to the latter case if it was an untrue news story being misperceived as true?
2) Conversely, a true story could be an outlier, used out of context, promoted for more that it amounts to, and thus serve to lie about a situation.
A true news story about a kind slave owner in the 1840s South would be less true in conveying the horror of what was going on at the time than a made-up story about a person that beat and raped their slaves.
Representativeness matters more than mere accuracy. That's why people, and especially politicians and advertisers, are able to mislead with otherwise real statistics and facts all the time.
And that's how a work of art can be truer than some straight-to-the-fact reported news story.
So, two ways my approach is not "mind boggling" is to look at it from a utilitarian perspective, and to look at it from a representativeness perspective.
As for the final question: "presenting false stories as true? How is that useful?".
First of all, I was not talking about consciously presenting them (e.g. knowing that they are not).
What I said is that such stories as they circulate can still capture a larger truth, and thus be beneficial to the cause of truth, even if untrue themselves. In other words, modern cultures still can make their myths and believe in them, and some of those (based on their representativeness and content) can be huge forces for change and progress. It's hardly the most difficult or first paradox in how societies function.
E.g. imagine a made-up news story about a very racist cop towards some immigrant family. This circulates widely (because its powerful) and ends up causing mass protests, and affecting real change.
Wouldn't that be a case where a false story being presented as true became useful? History is full of such examples.
(A false story presented as true could also, or even more possibly, be harmful. Hence what I said about representativeness being necessary. I didn't say "false news stories are great we should have more of them". I said that they can potentially do good.).
However, there is a difference between stories that are simply imprecise and stories that are fabricated. Similarly, there are differences between stories created to convey emotions, and stories that are fabricated to encite emotional responses.
Probably easier if I just said that I can understand the value of fiction. However, it is best presented as such. False narratives are not fiction if presented as true. Specifically, the story that prompted this thread is one where it only has value if it is a true narrative. Otherwise, might as well have a story about how a corporation convinced a susceptible population that they should dry their animals off in a microwave that was the size of a person. Because... stories that purport to originate from real events don't have to be true. Right?
Only if the false story was actually representative of some underlying truth, despite the specific details being untrue. You keep presenting your original post as representing some underlying truth, despite the specifics being untrue.
I think I clearly stated in my first reply that not only were the specifics untrue, but your underlying premise was also completely false despite having being commonly accepted. And this is where actual facts are needed to discern the actual truth, so make your case.
Well, if the underlying truth is: "the US has a crazily invasive legal system and is too litigicious", then I think the (untrue) story conveys that well.
False narratives like this move people from reasonable open mindedness to closed viewpoints. They do not help.
Except you haven't established that underlying truth to begin with, hence why false stories are just hurting your case. In fact, I'd even say that truth is probably false.
I was pointing out that your translated quote might not resonate as you intend, today.
Sara(h) Huckabee Sanders used similar logic to defend the posting of known-false videos as evidence to support the policies and proclamations of her boss.
You can argue that some concepts require extrapolation to be persuasive. We're dealing with a lot of abuse of that right now, and I don't think it works here.
Re: the luxury of non-Americans to be unfamiliar with the absurdity represented by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, all I can say is "enjoy it!" ... but do take warning: these things have a way of propagating. :(
If you want to point out an actual flaw instead of a non-factual/non-existent flaw, then use facts not fables.
> In other words, the US legal system might not have THAT law, but the story remains true in a deeper level, in the sense that it is indeed the kind of system were such a law could be conceived or be remotely possible
Except you would need a factual argument to demonstrate this possibility. Your arguments so far do not qualify. The fact that you can imagine this possibility entails facts about you and your understanding of law, and does not entail anything about the law itself.
If I want it, then yes, I'll take that advice in mind.
My concern is not what I want though, but what happens in real life, how some things can be more complicated than the naive first order view (factually false = useless), and how some narratives (both good and bad) are transmitted in society through such methods.
Facts are pertinent to real life. Fiction is not.
> how some things can be more complicated than the naive first order view (factually false = useless)
1. Facts are not first order, but applicable at arbitrarily higher orders as well.
2. Factually false claims aren't useless, they quite clearly identify the biases of the people who perpetuate them.
Other than that, it's just full of tourists from other parts of the US and abroad, mostly families. Can't see any real risks to children there now that the vehicles are gone.
We need a reasonable threshold below which we do not worry about an event. Figuratively speaking: "If it makes front page news, it's not how I'm gonna die."
The threshold is going to vary from person to person; for me? if it's less likely than me dying or becoming disabled in a transport accident today, then the effort to prevent that thing is most likely better spent preventing transport accidents.
I mean, my point here is that you want the best return possible on your "prevent bad things from happening to me and mine" efforts, and there are a lot of low-hanging fruit that you can grab in the area where there is the most danger. Transportation and health are huge killers, much bigger than terrorist and crazies.
I think this might be the biggest problem with America today; this idea that systemic action needs to be taken for a 1 in 100 million chance seems like the systemic problem with our society. Systemic action should be reserved for things that happen frequently.
Even in America, the biggest danger to children is transport accidents; the chances of getting killed or disfigured are so much higher in a car than in a train that it almost certainly makes up for any "stranger danger" on the train.
I submit that learning how to evaluate these sorts of statistics, and this sort of risk management is an important part of the basic education that is essential to all citizens of a democracy.
[1]And nobody has brought it up, but it's possible that the average person just thinks that a child being kidnapped by a stranger is an outcome that is thousands of times worse than that same child dying or being mutilated for life in a transportation accident. In that case, maybe society isn't acting irrationally; they just place a lot more value on 'manner of death' than I do.
I'm not saying your arguments are bad. In fact, they are on point. But perceived danger vs Actual danger is, from looking at the whole anti-vaccer movement, the big contributor here. But if parents are getting put in handcuffs for having their kids play outside then yeah, they need to be protected from a systemic standpoint.
Every day when you strap your kid into your car seat, you are rolling those dice, at odds considerably worse than 1 in 100 million.
You can't face risk by saying "we need to stamp it out, no matter how small the chance or how great the cost" It doesn't help me if you protect me from meteors if I'm millions of times more likely to be killed by a traffic accident, and the same resources could drastically reduce the chance of that death.
You need to look at what resources you are willing to spend on risk mitigation, and then look at where you can spend those resources to most effectively mitigate risk.
In this case if one chose to manage the risk, the mitigation would require (one possibility) enshrining something in law, so that parents of these kids DON'T get prosecuted. That's a one-off, and possibly no more expensive than the cost of a single prosecution/incident.
Given that, doesn't it make sense to do this, making it just go away, and giving people that peace of mind? Regardless of the low probability? Cost is clearly less than protecting a populace against meteors.
Further, these bad outcomes are not evenly distributed so a farmer in Iowa has a very different risk profile.
Good luck defending with law against that
The problem isn't that you're going to go to jail, it's that once you're on the radar of a state agency, it's scary, and you end up in the position to prove that your home and family are safe for your kids. It's embarrassing and deliberately intimidating, and you ultimately have no power to stop at least a small disruption in your kids' lives.
In could be true, but another plausible alternative is that it's rare to get in trouble that way because no one is letting their kids unsupervised in the streets.
An analogy: death by actively jumping off a plane without a parachute, if it exists, is extremely rare. Doesn't make it safe.
Anything above 5 hours might then automatically be seen as neglect.
I would also report neglectment if children are still on their own after this. Done by one whose job is to protect the children, no less.
Criminals can act anywhere and at any time. It's not a good enough reason to hurt your Childs development.
I walked to kindergarden by my own when I was 4 or something and after that was never accompanied by my parents again.
Do you have a source on this? I could see there being perhaps some correlation, but it's far from an obvious fact to me that bullies just turn out to become criminals. Most of the bullies I'm aware of from school simply grew out of it as they got older and were never at risk of not becoming productive members of society, they just developed more empathy and/or became less mean. I'd be curious to know if someone's run a longitudinal study to measure correlation between bullying at younger ages and violent criminality at older ages.
We live in WA and our 9 year old daughter walks back from the school bus stop alone everyday, then stays alone at home for 3-4 hours until we come back from work (we let her because we deem her mature enough for that, before age 9 she went to an after school program). A few of our neighbors and even the building management people know about it, and don’t seem to take issue with it. The building administrator actually said something like “ooh she’s a big girl now! :)” when we requested an extra key for our daughter.
So there’s that, and also that every CPS story I’ve heard or read on the news seems to have happened in the Midwest or the East Coast.
I wish I understood why. Perhaps it is economics related? I should research this more because it would be interesting to understand.
One of the big problems is the lack of public transport in the US. Even with cities with good transit, the minimum age for kids on buses/trains is usually 12 (wasn't there an article on HN earlier about a New York man who's kids rode the bus in a group of three and how social services said he couldn't do that any more until one of them turned 13? I can't seem to find it now..)
Crime is more perception then a real issue. You're always most likely to be a victim of a crime by a family member at home. Actual child abductions are more hollywood and rarely real life. When it does happens, it's usually someone who knows the child via family.
I feel like this is yet another problem that could be solved via real transit and which will just be made worse by self-driving cars.
As far as I'm aware the biggest dangers to children are their cohabitating relatives followed closely by non-resident family and friends.
The solution to this issue for me was to move away from the big city I was in to a much smaller one, where the kids next door and a few houses down play in the street and my neighbors talk to me.
Or getting hit by a car. Driven by a stranger or otherwise.
Based on my anecdotal experience, prevalence of car culture seems to influence whether kids can roam quite a lot.
Cars are my biggest fear when the kids go outside alone. Soon the oldest will begin school and I want her to go by her self, but the amount of cars on the road is scary. Especially around the school it's mayhem caused by parents driving their kids 400 meters to school.
A lot of places in the US people are wary of adult pedestrians. They see someone walking and assume something is wrong--a car broke down, or the pedestrian is somehow up to no good. If people have the attitude that walking is weird and a cause for alarm, they won't want their kids doing it.
Plus, in lots of suburban areas, there's nowhere for kids to walk to. Wooded areas, if they exist, generally belong to somebody who doesn't want strangers messing around on their land. If there are Main Street shops, that could work, but a lot of Main Streets now are either pawn shops and check cashing outlets or high end restaurants and boutiques, with nothing really there for kids. And it seems less pleasant to send kids to a corporate store like CVS than to a mom and pop business.
I also think there are fewer kids in lots of suburban neighborhoods than there used to be, with family sizes shrinking and fewer retirees leaving the neighborhoods where they raised their kids. And kids seem to form cliques around interests earlier and earlier, which means their friends could be halfway across town. Adults don't automatically hang out with their neighbors much anymore, and neither do kids.
http://5kids1condo.com/very-superstitious-how-fact-free-pare...
"the Ministry had [...] determined that children under 10 years old could not be unsupervised in or outside the home, for any amount of time." -- even myself, growing up, we were a bunch of kids who all lived in a cul-de-sac. I don't think our parents saw much of us from the age of six onwards or so, at least not during the summer months, except for the meals.
Certainly, it would be pretty ridiculous in general if it were. That would have been a problem with my going off to college :-)
---
Leaving child unattended
(3) No person having charge of a child less than sixteen years of age shall leave the child without making provision for his or her supervision and care that is reasonable in the circumstances.
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Having read through a bunch of this stuff to find the law in question, things actually look pretty reasonable. If there's a problem, it seems it would be with the application or interpretation of the law by the bureaucracy or the courts. Legislation can correct those things, but I guess my point is that it looks reasonable, so there's no obvious easy fix.
[1] https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90c11
"that is reasonable in the circumstances" may be ambiguous and in the eye of the beholder. But it certainly suggests that a normal 16 year old doesn't need to be automatically under constant adult supervision at all times.
ADDED: This may or may not be the correct reading, but I take that as saying you can't kick your 15 year old out of the house and tell them you're on your own.
Playgrounds always had more parents hovering than kids playing.
Where I live everyone goes to school in their area. Dense population means kids can walk or at the most cycle to school. At least in primary.
My son at 11 took the BART to and from school from Berkeley/Oakland to El Cerito, other parents were horrified - we moved back to NZ a couple of years later, handed both kids a bus timetable and a phone and sent them off to town to explore.
One of our main goals as a parent is to create independent kids who can function alone in the world - we don't want them still living in the basement at 30
FYI this is a cultural thing. Not every culture's parents kicks out their children when they turn 18. So if it doesn't work out this way for whatever reason, don't view it as right or wrong unless you feel it's wrong to go against the culture (which also isn't inherently wrong either).
EDIT: The expectation of independence at 18 is not just between parents and the kid, but sometimes the kid's older SO, or society, or some other people who constantly repeat "once you're 18 you can do what you want", except they have no idea how to do it responsibly.
Thank you. I can never understand how often this aspect is completely ignored when debating what is or isn't safe for a child to do unsupervised. How is a child ever supposed to mature if they have no opportunity to develop? Of course as a parent you have a responsibility to introduce your child to new ideas and behaviours at reasonable times when they are able to cope with them, but if you just wrap them in a cocoon forever and never let them see the real world, how can they possibly learn to look after themselves and integrate into our wider society as adults?
(Worth noting for others that children start "proper" school at 7 in Finland. Something that surprised me when I moved here.)
I think the main reason is that public transit is magnitudes better and more widespread here, than in the US.
In big cities, like Warsaw there actually aren't any, as schools are usually within walking distance, and if they aren't then the normal public transport is supposed to fill in.
(I'd guess kids use a kick-sled, though, instead of just walking.)
Rethoric like that could also get your case into trouble. By your logic, their monoculturalism, aversion to immigration and high work ethics created a decade of poor economic growth and deflation.
I should add that I took public transportation around Gothenburg all the time from 10 years old. Is Sweden a monocultural country with high aversion to immigration and good work ethics?
I don't know much about Canada as to whether your suggestions are true or not (statistics are so easy to manipulate) but Singapore is a terrible example to give in just about any context. Singapore did manage to lower crime in a multicultural aka multiconflictual society. It did so by destroying an individual's freedom and enforcing the rule of law the most brutal way possible. We are talking about a country that puts you in jail for blaspheming religion or even just littering. Singapore also banned homosexuality. Actually I wouldn't mind if we were to follow Singapore's example of enforced social harmony, go ahead, it will be funny to watch the left in the west go crazy over freedom issues like when Singapore banned foreign preachers from entering their territory. The only, single thing that is similar between a leftist wet dream and Singapore is multiculturalism. Everything else about Singapore is not a leftist dream but their very nightmare. And it's that "everything else" that allowed multiculturalism to even work there. Heck, Singapore only exists as a city state because they found it impossible to coexist with the muslim majority country. You should read up some history on the founding of that very young country.
I'm nowhere near interested enough to try to look up things about a boring country like Canada but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't end all that well for it if I were to. Because so far, every single time I've seen leftist multuculturalism defenders talk about countries I do know something about, it has been a really good joke.
But, just for the record: yes, I’m very well aware of the conflicts and race riots during the founding of Singapore (and the fact that they were not a developed economy or deomcracy yet either) but the statement of the GP was basically ”Japan has low multiculturalism and low crime rate, thus multiculturalism causes crime”. That’s why I said that by that logic monoculturalism causes deflation and low economic growth.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/sweden/1210...
Gothenburg is larger than Malmö, but Malmö is admittedly more multicultural (about 40% are foreign born compared to Gothenburg’s 25%). However, the island of Hisingen in Gothenburg is very high up on the list of shootings per capita.
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vast/lista-over-samtliga-s...
It seems to me that this is more a function of having a somewhat reliable public transport network. When I explored Berlin myself as a kid, all I had to remember was the color of the subway and the stop I had to get off to return home. When I got lost anywhere in the city, all I had to do was find the next subway station, look at the plan and I’d find my way.
Japans’s criminal justice system has a conviction rate in excess of 99%. Over 95% of those arrested sign confessions. The system has been attacked by organisations like Amnesty International. There is, as I understand it, a pervasive view that all crime is committed by foreigners, which contributes to pervasive xenophobia. This compounds the issues of an aging and eventually shrinking population. The high work ethic also comes with its problems, like the number of deaths from overwork, and high rates of suicide and alcoholism.
Crime in Japan is obviously low, and I’ve never felt safer anywhere in the world. But it’s too easy to just look at the surface like that; in reality, it’s complicated.
No doubt different ways of organising society come with trade-offs; and path dependent optimisation means it's not always possible to "switch" to a different local optimum.
Nevertheless, I think
* looking at how other countries do things and
* realising how contingent some domestic norms are
is rather educational and edifying.
If a woman reports to the police that her husband has raped her ever other day for a year, then is that 0 counts of rape (because marriage means permanent consent for sex), 1 count of rape (because it was reported once), or 180 counts of rape (because of each reported occurrence). (I say it was 180 counts of rape.)
Different countries have different standards. According to https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2014/12/08/voices/for... , the definition of rape in Japan excludes things rape requires violence or threats. That article goes into more about some of the differences, including low levels of reporting it.
As CityLab pointed out in the article, "The persistent problem of women and girls being groped, for example, led to the introduction of women-only cars on select lines starting in 2000."
Here's a bit of US history to show how things have changed. The TV show "Sesame Street" started in the late 1960s as a way to provide pre-school education to low-income and disadvantaged families. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Sesame_Street .
One of the early clips is "Loaf of Bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im4GwUD1UY8 . In it, the mother sends her young daughter out, alone, to buy those three items from the local store.
That account takes place in New York in the 1970s, a diverse city with many immigrants. While fiction, it's meant to educate children about what they might be expected to do.
If you read books about children in NYC in the mid-1900s, you'll see that this was not uncommon. Kids, including young ones, would go on their own to Central Park, or the library, etc. Or on hot days just hop on an elevated line to enjoy the breeze.
There are other free-range parents. There may be a local group. That Let Grow site says part of it mission is to be "where parents who want to Let Grow can find others in their neighborhood".
I have no experience with the Let Grow site.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-09/how-long-is-too-long-t...
It's certainly a different world now. But I have a 10-year-old, and he goes to the shops around the corner to buy milk and/or bread. There'd be no way I could trust him to make public transport decisions at this stage though. Maybe a year or two more.
What do you see as the relevant differences?
Unfortunately I could not find any summary articles (except in Finnish). The charts summarizing the results seem to start on the report page 14.
[1] http://www.psi.org.uk/children_mobility [2] http://www.psi.org.uk/docs/7350_PSI_Report_CIM_final.pdf
From the comments there it seems that it's not about (perceived) risks at all, it's more about peer pressure. If no other parents in your group would let their kids go about on their own, you surely won't want to be the only one.
Must be a great country to live in.
In many countries in Asia, kids with parents can just go to a restaurant (for example) and let the kids roam - everyone else (waiters, other patrons) will take care of the kids collectively.
In Germany, public transport would be considered even somewhat safer than cycling (which has its risks, even with bicycle paths etc.), I'd think.
[1] - http://www.shpol.ch/fileadmin/Redaktoren/Bilder/Verkehrsinst...
I do remember it was more for 2nd/3rd grade though.
I personally think it's related to culture. How the community like to make kids mature earlier.
I've also lived in Tanzania where communism had made in the 90s, pupils not pay public transportation. So even little kids were riding buses.
We underestimate children's ability to navigate, which is silly because if they were really bad at it our species would have died out long ago.
Anyway it was like herding sheep to get them anywhere. In the rush to get them onboard a train where we taking them back to their hotel from a shopping trip... well... I kinda left my youngest on the platform.
You won't even have to look at their dirty, disgusting faces, just count them like cattle.
In a large city like NYC, neon-green would stands out very nicely.
My sister talked to a playground designer in Germany once.
He explained that they deliberately make the toys slightly dangerous -- if you fell off a structure, you wouldn't need to go to hospital, but it would hurt enough to teach a lesson.
They explicitly want to school kids' sense of risk, and at the same time, self-reliance. And offer a sense of achievement if you dare and master, say, a "dangerous" climb.
And getting groceries (from the corner or kirana store) wasn't even considered "going out alone". Everyone did that as soon as we learnt to properly count money. Mostly even before that, since the kirana stores could be trusted not to give incorrect change and steal from a kid. I'd have a list of items from my parents, hand it over to the storekeeper with the money, and he'd give me the stuff in a bag along with the change.
There's another interesting story from when I was 4/5. I wanted a new toy and refused to sleep until my parents agreed to buy it for me the next day. They kept refusing so I threatened my parents that I'd run away from home if they didn't buy it for me. Their response was to simply tell me that I could runaway if I wanted, but I wasn't getting that toy (and remember, I'd been throwing this tantrum past bedtime, sonit was about 10/11 at night). I packed a little bag with some toys and clothes and left home. My parents idea of keeping me safe at this time was to ask my 6/7 year old brother to secretly follow me, which he did, but I had no idea about. Getting back to me, I left my apartment, walked out to the main road, walked for a bit, didn't know where to go, so I caught a bus and went to my grandparents house. They were quite happy to get a surprise visit from me. Though I asked them not to tell my parents I was there (I was 5, but didn't want my parents to think I was an idiot) they called my parents and let them know I would be staying over at their place. The next day I found out my brother had caught a cab and followed the bus, saw I went to my grandparents place and returned home in that same cab.
Lastly, in India, every public transport service, offers a half price ticket for children. Even if travelling alone. Also, kids studying in government schools, get a card which allows them to travel from home to school by bus/train for free. It's actually very common to see kids traveling via public transport alone. In trains and buses it's also quite common to offer or see others offering their seats to small kids that can't reach the over head handles while standing.
You might like this article about what we do in Germany: https://www.wsj.com/articles/german-kindergarten-campouts-te...
The same parents that were okay with me going to kindergarten by myself and sometimes cooking partial meals alone, now are horrified that such things happened (with their consent).
I think it speaks a lot to how much society has changed, their current mindset would not accept the same behavior they themselves had a few decades ago.
I remember being stopped by strangers asking "where are you going? School? Ok, watch out when crossing the streets". Nowadays nobody would intervene directly... They would probably call the police and take me into custody.
"Practical Wisdom" (Barry Schwartz) is a good book about this.