Interesting article. I feel this is more a problem in the US. I live in Switzerland and you often see kids walking alone or in pairs going to and from school all by themselves - and yet no kids seem to be kidnapped or exposed to inappropriate behavior.
That's how it was in the US until fairly recently. It changed in the last decade or two. I'm not sure why. Crime hasn't gotten any worse, as far as I know.
It started in the 80s, related to the Satanic Panic, particularly the McMartin preschool trials.
Before that, it was expected that even very young children could be outside alone even in urban settings.
The kids who were raised in that era grew up, had kids, and passed the generational trauma down the line. We'll grow past it eventually, but it takes time for people to heal and the trauma to filter out of the population.
Don't take this for granted. I suspect this behavior is actually caused by an inherent anxiety in some subset of the population. When they don't have real (and likely) dangers to worry about, they will find some kind of tiny risk and overamplify it as something to focus their anxiety on.
Removing all things dangerous from the environment will only serve to amplify their tendency to do so. A mum in a high risk high crime neighbourhood is probably more likely to let her kids roam free (and less worried) than mums in upper-middle-class neighbourhoods where there is virtually zero crime.
My hypothesis is that the solution is to let children experience activities that are moderately dangerous (ideally through risk of pain, minor injury or some social stress, with risk of death or permanent injury kept minimal). This helps (I think) callibrate their ability to estimate risk as they grow up.
This would allow them to ignore imaginary risks like the one discussed here, and may help them identify situations that come with real danger.
The people who were the driving force behind all the "Satanic Panic" stuff are still around, too. And some of them still pose as experts on "recovered memories" and other stuff like that.
This too was a media driven hysteria. You can see how the news amplifying a few rare kidnapping and molestation cases, if it bleeds it leads style, is directly correlated to the public intrigue. A lot of movies and tv shows took on these themes as well. Much like the red scare and more recent mass hysterias driven by an unscrupulous news industry political complex.
The problem we have in the US is we tend to placate to the vocal minority, rather than realizing that they are in fact just a vocal minority.
Say you have 10 parents that let their kids play outside. No one has a problem with this until an 11th parent shows up and it mortified, think the kids will all get hurt if they are allowed to be outside like this.
That parent makes a stink, take it to the city council, and a rule is put in place that you can't let your kids go outside without supervision. The folks making the rules think to themselves "well we had to act, there was such an outcry". Meanwhile the outcry is really just the outsized screams of one parent, and you've just screwed the other 10 parents.
I think it's more subtle than that. If you are the city council member, doing something about it is a lot easier than not. Saying "I don't think we should make our children safer" is politically difficult. So the rules slowly ratchet up.
> The problem we have in the US is we tend to placate to the vocal minority, rather than realizing that they are in fact just a vocal minority.
I think it's related to trauma fetishization combined with child worship.
Trauma fetishization: The person who is most traumatized by a thing should be the one who dictates policy about that thing. People who have lost children qualify, and we literally name the laws after their dead children.
Child worship: Children are without trauma, and therefore without neurosis. When you traumatize them or through inaction allow them to be traumatized, you have created neurosis, which is the source of all problems in society.
There was a post about an abortion rights rally, with the poster saying "Keep our women safe". Someone came in and said, essentially, "I appreciate the message and the support, but can we drop the possessive 'our'"? It was called out that the "our" was itself supportive and indicative of community. The person replied "I came from a small town where men used 'our women' as a signal of ownership and I shudder when I hear it".
My internal response: Okay? You're asking everyone to change a good-faith saying because it triggered a bad memory for you? Get over it.
It’s so true - even for little, unimportant things. A group of friends and myself made a parody video that went a bit viral about 11 years ago (only like 400K views but this was a different time) got on some shows (state-wide) - breakfast, current affairs etc.
It was a comedy music video about council workers (I wish it was still on YouTube, unfortunately I didn’t log into the account for a few years, and the channel seems to have been automatically terminated and I couldn’t find any way to restore it). The current affairs show had obviously tried to create some controversy that workers might be offended, and they interviewed a bunch, literally asking multiple questions to try and get them to say something negative, but they all loved it and thought it was funny. They even got an interview with the mayor and he liked it.
But they were still pushing the line. The piece ended with “but at least this time, no one was offended”. It was hilarious just the extent they were trying to manufacture controversy and drama from literally nothing, and how much they failed but still tried to push it! It was so bizarre, absolutely nothing about our song was mean spirited!
Because people got super freaked over the risk of pedophiles, though they should worry more about their family members perpetuating sexual abuse than a random stranger.
To some degree perhaps aggravated by people having less kids, therefore the kids they do have are extremely valuable to them, driving demands that the world be nerfed up.
I'm not sure it works that way. It's not like you care less about your first child after having a second. They're all the most loved thing you have in life.
It's all anecdote, but I believe I've witnessed it many times - families with four kids don't love them any less, but they are less attentive to any one, less photos are taken, by kids 3 & 4 things aren't really "new" and scary like they are with kid 1. Couples with a single kid, particularly after trying for a while, have come across as highly protective and hyper-focused. I'm just speculating here - I recognize I don't know nuffin about it, ultimately.
You're right, in that it's not that you care any less about your later kids, but you tend to be more pragmatic about child rearing. Better at recognizing the important events and problems, while shrugging off and ignoring the trivial stuff. You learn that you don't need to worry about a kid eating a crayon, and you recognize that certain pain cries mean "I'm not really hurt." You realize that sometimes the best thing you can do for a kid is ignore them and let them figure stuff out themselves.
Conversely - it'd be interesting to investigate whether other statistics have improved over the past decade with parents being increasingly responsible for their kids after school - reduced shoplifting, reduced graffiti, reduced smoking/drug use, reduced teen pregnancy, etc.
Its quite possible that increased organized sports and after school activities (particularly robotics, math, computer science) could actually improve the capabilities of society as compared to just leaving the kids unattended after school.
I'd suspect quite the opposite; kids who have their time filled with organised activities and have no time to come up with their own may be less likely to develop important skills like creativity, self-reliance, and be more reliant on structure and authority.
Watch the local news or get on your nextdoor group and it is all packed full of crime stories. A lot of people are addicted to feeling scared all the time, and the media is feeding them.
As mentioned in the article, people don't care about facts. Kidnapping is at an all time low in the US. The only instances are family members during a nasty divorce or things like that.
"Think of the children" is the main weapon politics have to push regulations and more control. It is important that everybody thinks that kids are in danger at all time otherwise it would stop working.
> As mentioned in the article, people don't care about facts. Kidnapping is at an all time low in the US. The only instances are family members during a nasty divorce or things like that.
I agree that kidnapping is probably at an all-time low, but it's an unbelievable claim that it's all "family members during a nasty divorce or things like that." I personally know a family who's kid was kidnapped (briefly) by a non-family member.
> "Think of the children" is the main weapon politics have to push regulations and more control. It is important that everybody thinks that kids are in danger at all time otherwise it would stop working.
That's not what's going on here. It's a cultural issue. You've got a longstanding issue with crime, especially particularly "worst fear"-type crime, getting disproportionate attention in the media, creating false impressions and seeds for fear-fantasies. Now, added to that is new cultural obsession with abuse and victim-hood; and the idea of completely stamping that out is possible, and it should be achieved whatever the cost.
You might have a politicians exploiting this cultural issue to accomplish other things, but they certainly didn't create the phenomenon of hyper-vigalent school paraprofessionals.
> I personally know a family who's kid was kidnapped (briefly) by a non-family member.
Sorry to read that, but it's still a statistically small percent that happens to. One can say "but even one is too much", and I appreciate the sentiment, but optimizing for the .1% isn't always a good path.
> they certainly didn't create the phenomenon of hyper-vigalent school paraprofessionals.
"they" probably contributed to the culture that produced the current school paraprofessionals.
EDIT: Some interesting numbers at https://www.missingkids.org/theissues/nonfamily - of abductions reported to them, 1% are by non-family members, meaning... 99% of reported cases (to their org) are by family members. That may not line up with 'law enforcement' numbers exactly - there's not a clear indication as to what gets reported to them. But the ~1% matches up with other numbers I've seen in the past on missing children. It's almost always a family member or someone known to the child.
>>> "Think of the children" is the main weapon politics have to push regulations and more control.
>> they certainly didn't create the phenomenon of hyper-vigalent school paraprofessionals.
> "they" probably contributed to the culture that produced the current school paraprofessionals.
The point I'm making is that it's not politicians who are driving this. They certainly participate, but they're responding to the incentives and concerns of their constituents. "Think of the children" implies they consciously created this and/or are the main drivers, which is false.
The media has an incentive to produce emotion inducing content and politician will naturally leverage those emotions because American politics are pure pathos.
If you cannot see how that leads to gloom and doom oriented media and politicians that lean on eschatological themes, you aren’t woke.
>> "Think of the children" implies they consciously created this and/or are the main drivers, which is false.
> The media has an incentive to produce emotion inducing content and politician will naturally leverage those emotions because American politics are pure pathos.
Yeah, that's true, but it doesn't contradict my point. This is a hard problem, because there isn't some malevolent agent acting consciously at the center of it. It's a bunch of different people acting naturally and responding to their environment and incentives.
This sibling comment probably has it part right (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31355482). The true cause of this overprotective hypervigilance is probably weakened communities, which itself is most likely an unintended side effect of a bunch of different things.
Maybe the problem is that communities are weak. Imagine saying "We don't need stronger restrictions. I am OK if my kid is kidnapped as a result because the community will be stronger for it overall due to free range kids etc." You really need to care about your community to do that.
> Maybe the problem is that communities are weak. Imagine saying "We don't need stronger restrictions. I am OK if my kid is kidnapped as a result because the community will be stronger for it overall due to free range kids etc." You really need to care about your community to do that.
I think that's partly correct. I think the problem is due to weakened communities, but I don't think anyone, ever will think "I am OK if my kid is kidnapped b/c free range kids are good." If the community was stronger, people with more likely think things like "I am OK with my kind being free range b/c I trust the community not to kidnap and abuse them."
Right, because every case like that is going to be written about in an article that gets shared a ton because it is so shocking, and then covered on the news, and discussed on forums, and turned into a TV movie.
The story is crazy and scary and disturbed, so of COURSE it is going to be shared and people are going to remember it. The details get seared into your memory. It is a nightmare scenario.
The same day that happened, in the US ~90 people were killed in car accidents and ~550 kids were kidnapped by a family member. Those events won't be seared in our mind, though.
Same for me. I live in Berlin (biggest city in Germany) & have 2 kids of my own and haven't seen anything remotely as paranoid here as what you read about US cities.
I'm not saying there aren't bad things in the US, but the things in the news are not normal everywhere in the US. But for big cities? I think I'll take my chances in Berlin.
As a parent in the US, here is how it feels. If I let my young kids roam and something happens to them, there is a high likelihood that some goody-goody-holier-than-thou prosecutor will decide to make an example out of my "neglect".
Switzerland is so much more heavily controlled than the US, which is part of what leads to that outcome. Most Americans would flip out if anyone told them what weekend to plant their flower box or that they aren't allowed to hoard ammo for their guns at home.
Switzerland banned reservists from storing issued ammo for their assault rifle at home 15 years ago.
However, this only applies to issued ammo (and IIRC the identical govt-subsidized stuff you buy at the range). You can still store your own ammo just fine. Most of those in US who saw that story didn't understand this distinction and believed that it applies to all ammo storage at home. Which is how we got all those memes about Swiss being "heavily regulated" in that regard unlike US.
I can't find the exact article I was thinking of that was posted here a year or two back about young Japanese children being set free out into the world, almost as a right of passage, to run errands etc., but this Bloomberg captures a lot of what I remembered.
Personally, I believe there is a compounding net good for society allowing children a decent amount of independence at a young age. Japan is certainly different to many other countries in terms of public safety, but I don't believe the outside world is the awful, scary, dangerous place the media constantly paints it out to be. It breaks my heart that I rarely see children playing outside in the streets anymore in the UK, when my youth in the 80s was basically spent largely outside without adult supervision.
The school can't force someone to, but they can call the police who most likely would side with the school and threaten to charge them with loitering if they didn't move.
California takes loitering near a school very seriously.
Loitering at or near a school is a misdemeanor that is punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 court fine. If the defendant is a person who is required to register as a sex offender under California Penal Code Section 290 PC, the maximum fine amount on a first conviction for loitering at or around a school increases to $2,000. If the defendant is required to register as a sex offender and has a previous conviction under California Penal Code Section 653b PC, he or she must serve a minimum of 10 days in jail. And if the defendant is required to register as a sex offender and has two or more prior convictions for loitering in or around a school, that person must serve a minimum of 90 days in jail custody.
Uh.... realistically, in the real world, where people aren't being obtuse, police exceed their legal authority periodically.
Police have a wide range of latitude to determine that a situation is an emergency and can do a number of things to prevent the emergency from getting worse. Things have changed significantly now that many police are required to wear recording devices- it's now clear that some police abuse their authority.
It’s even worse than that. This stuff can show up in background checks. Just being arrested, regardless of guilt, shows up and possibly prevent you from getting a job.
It's the standard and formulaic contraction for shall not, as well as part of the title of one of my favorite albums by contemporary chap-hop artist, Mr. B. and it's worth a listen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCAVTtDxvC8
In many US jurisdictions, police will show up if they get called with a complaint. They'll harrass the person the complaint was about, and if they don't like how the person responds, they'll escalate the situation. The number of people charged for nothing except "resisting arrest" (regardless that the arrest was unreasonable) is astounding.
And there's no "right" way to act in those situations. Charles Kinsey got shot, lying on the ground with his empty hands on the air, because the police were afraid when they responded to a complaint. The shooter kept his job, retired, and got 100 hours of community service and had to write a letter of apology.
They walk up to you and ask a bunch of aggressive and threatening questions. You will obviously react in some way, either by getting nervous or upset at their questions. It doesn't matter which reaction you have, they will then say that your reaction made you suspicious, so they detained you.
The police can arrest you and take you to jail for a day. Then they can release you without pressing charges. That's perfectly legal. There's a time limit when they have to press charges or release you. They just release you before that time limit is reached. That's how the police prevent you from doing anything they don't want you doing whether what you're doing is against the law or not.
Out of curiosity, do you not live in the US? This line of questioning is indicative of a lack of familiarity with US policing.
That being said, there are lots of crimes which could start with loitering outside a school, even if the locality doesn't have a law specifically against loitering in front of schools (which many do), loitering with intent to commit a crime is against the law, and the police only need "probable cause" to arrest you. "Looked suspicious and refused to move on when asked" could very well be enough to establish probable cause.
In New York, where this incident took place, loitering is illegal in certain circumstances including near a school. Section 240.35 of the NY penal code.
"5. Loiters or remains in or about school grounds, a college or
university building or grounds or a children's overnight camp as defined
in section one thousand three hundred ninety-two of the public health
law or a summer day camp as defined in section one thousand three
hundred ninety-two of the public health law, or loiters, remains in or
enters a school bus as defined in section one hundred forty-two of the
vehicle and traffic law, not having any reason or relationship involving
custody of or responsibility for a pupil or student, or any other
specific, legitimate reason for being there, and not having written
permission from anyone authorized to grant the same or loiters or
remains in or about such children's overnight camp or summer day camp in
violation of conspicuously posted rules or regulations governing entry
and use thereof; or"
Yes. In many municipalities loitering is illegal - and has been for several decades. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. Too be honest I'm not sure why you find that so surprising seeing as how it wasn't all that long ago your skin color affected what parts of town you could be present in (to some extent this still persists, but you're not likely to be jailed for it - unless the police engagement invokes a negative reaction on your part.)
The school doesn't have that, but in california "loitering near a school" is illegal and you can go to jail. Even so, how you act in the situation determines the outcome. You have several options, including arguing with the school staff (guaranteed police visit), arguing with the police (likely will make the police less likely to sympathize even if you're not doing something illegal), behaving suspiciously (IE, not making eye contact, not following direct orders from cops, slumping, wearing clothes that cover your face, being a member of a minority that cops believe are prone to being criminal) will get you beaten up, arrested, sent to jail, etc.
How you act in public situations makes all the difference. For example, you could set up in front of the school with a protest sign that says ("Fund police and schools"), you're not going to get the police called on you.
I found that surprising. According to the first Google result[1], it is true that loitering near a school is illegal, BUT loitering doesn't mean just being there. It means being there with an unlawful purpose; they give an example of someone waiting to abduct a child. Watching kids play isn't otherwise a crime, so wouldn't qualify.
I definitely sympathize with the author. As a male, I would expect an even stronger reaction to hanging around watching kids with no clear intent. As others have pointed out, even if you're not committing a crime you can be in for an unpleasant response. It's sad that there are creeps out there. It's sad that as a result, certain innocent behaviors make others nervous (rationally or irrationally). It also gives me a small taste of what it's like to be judged by my category/appearance.
Do you understand that the interpretation of unlawful purpose is left to the enforcement agency at the moment of possible infraction? Note that many municipalities in the US openly publish the names of people who are arrested, and what for, but then don't publish that people got off because they weren't guilty.
I totally agree that police at the moment would not likely respect the finer points of that law and may well detain you. I would not advise testing them. However, it's not likely that the DA would eventually be able to convict you. I was sharing what I found interesting about the actual law in question, which was a different impression than when I first read the claim that loitering at a school was illegal (which is technically true!) It's not actually illegal to watch kids play (with no other criminal purpose), even if we both agree that in practice you're likely to get a negative response.
Whether or not you will eventually win the case will have little bearing on how your day goes that day. If everyone tried just hanging around a school and asserting their rights to do so the number of folks that would be the rightest person in the morgue would not be 0.
This is very true. There was a period I had to live in a tent on some un-used land that was accessed through a residential neighborhood and I managed to live there for several months without any problems or complaints. I came and went as I wished and whenever I saw anyone whether walking a dog or driving a car I smiled at them, waved, made direct eye contact, and said "hello" or "good morning" if we passed close enough for conversation.
I tried to keep myself clean, but even on my poorly groomed days people just assumed I was some random neighbor taking a walk and moved on without suspicion. Most people don't want to talk to their neighbors so if you look friendly they will avoid you.
This story sound either exaggerated, misrepresented, or possibly wholly made up. Not that it is that hard for me to believe in overeager security at a school, but it is just a little bit too convenient an incident for somebody with such a large preexisting interest in the subject. I would suspect that she was looking for a confrontation, even though she claims to not be confrontational.
I live across the street from a school. I'd walk my kid in through a side door, the only one that was unlocked, early in the morning. I asked if the front door could be opened at that hour- nope, for "security reasons" they could only have one door open (oddly, that door was completely unobserved, while the front door had cameras, and was next to the main office).
Even though I live literally next door and standing in my yard, I can see kids playing, I am exceptionally cautious. In particular, I introduced myself to the staff (they park in front of my house every day) so they knew who I was, smiled and made direct eye contact, and acted in a non-aggressive way. This greatly improved my ability to move about my yard without suspicion. They never did unlock the front gate, though. Security through theatre.
I live immediately next door to a school (~6 foot sub-street walkway between my building and the school building).
I've lived here for >25 years and am often outside my building smoking cigarettes(!). The "play area" for the kids is on the other side of my (and one other, total ~100 feet distance) building and classes are brought in and out most of the day.
No one has ever even looked at me (AFAIK) as a potential threat, and no one (school staff, parents or police) has ever asked me to "move along," or wanted to know why I was hanging around next to a school.
And living in NYC, it's not like folks will recognize me as one of the people who live in one of the 20 apartments in my building either.
In fact, I've only had positive interactions with school-related adults despite the "suspicious" behavior I display as an adult male "hanging around" an elementary/middle school "watching" the kids.
I can't say whether my experience is more common than that of TFA's author.
I do note that many parents (not that it's a bad thing necessarily) drop off/pick up their kids at school (this is NYC, so mostly not in cars, but to walk them home/wherever they need to go) at ages (8+) when I (and most of my classmates) walked to/from school (my elementary school and and this one are less than a mile apart, but 40+ years distance in time) all by ourselves with no issues.
In fact, we'd usually just go straight out to the park and play until dark, then go home.
Back then (mid-late 1970s), NYC was much more dangerous too.
As such, it seems to me that these changes are less about "keeping kids safe" and more about "security theater" to appease helicopter parents.
I could be wrong, but it seems like that's the most likely driver.
How much expereince do you have dealing with the modern educations sytem in America? I graduated from the public school system just over half a decade ago, and even then this wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. I went to a very small, rural school. The "town" consisted of the school, a single gas station, and a few churches. We had multiple armed resource officers, lockdown drills, locked entrances at all times, strict vistitor rules, etc. If someone had stopped to watch the playground I have no doubt they would end up in a discussion with an officer and asked to move along. Whether I agree with that or not is beside the point, but to me, this doesn't seem like an implausible situation for anyone to end up in.
It seems wierd to me where society has gone. In my dad's high school, they literally brought rifles to school. There was a gun range at the school. Yes, it had to be bagged up and unloaded but you literally brought a 22 with rounds to school.
My era? Zero tolerance for mean words. I got suspended 1 day because I told people I got a highlighter. They thought I said lighter and tattled on me. Teachers never found the lighter but I was suspended no less. I got suspended once because a friend of mine was planning to come to my house after school. Asked me to carry his bag. Unbeknowst to me he was running off to try to get into a fight off school premises. Never actually got into a fight. But I was suspended for zero tolerance helping/assisting a fight.
Now we are in the era where schools have metal detectors, police on staff and actively walking around in the schools, and harassing people over literally nothing.
Isn't it similar to the "Nobody was ever fired for buying IBM". If there is any kind of concern over safety, any incident affecting any school, some well-meaning supplier/council/school admin suggests adding security whether fences, ID badges, maglocks, security guards etc. Why not? Anything is better than nothing?
The problem is that no-one would get away with saying, "maybe we don't need the fence anymore, it separates children from the community". "Maybe we don't need to repair the metal detector when it breaks" etc. Sad really. The idea that somehow ID cards are a proportionate measure for some kind of security at a high school is very worrying.
tattling used to be followed up by a fistfight in the school yard. Snitches get stitches. It was one way that children used to learn good boundaries. I wonder whether kids are better off today, in our anti-bullying world where even a harsh word can be punished with detention or suspension, whereas snitching is encouraged. What kind of adults are we producing? So far, the results don't look too good.
>tattling used to be followed up by a fistfight in the school yard. Snitches get stitches. It was one way that children used to learn good boundaries. I wonder whether kids are better off today, in our anti-bullying world where even a harsh word can be punished with detention or suspension, whereas snitching is encouraged. What kind of adults are we producing? So far, the results don't look too good.
So the context of that kid, he learnt that stuff at home. His parents were famous for calling the police and city on their neighbours. The peak of it was July 1st, people were firing off fireworks. They called the police to say someone was shooting/bombing their house. The police obviously show up in force big time. They closed blocks of the neighbourhood only to later find out they had a history of false police reports. False firefighter stuff saying open pit fires of their neighbours were illegal. etc.
After the tattle involving me. Me and my friend were taken aside and were very explicitly explained to what we should do. This is our fathers and teachers in the same room. They knew we would want to fight but they said no, you simply never talk or be near that kid again. Complete social ostracizing, never touch the kid. Except after we started doing that... we'd be playing foot hockey and if he'd ask to join, we'd immediately stop playing and say we were done and walk away from him. A few times he ran to steal our tennis ball and demand to be included. The whole class got in on it. Literally nobody would talk to him or talk near him.
My brother in a younger grade did the same knowing he might tattle on them. Older grades did the same. After a couple weeks of literally no one talking to him, he would spend recess standing next to the teacher. Then he disappeared for a couple weeks. He ended up in the hospital with what I would expect to be psychiatric issues. Can you imagine being socially isolated in elementary school?
When he got back? We were all evil and should be punished blah blah. His new job was to ensure the teachers knew about every infraction anyone did. He doubled down on it, didn't work out when he went after a 2 grades older bully and got quite injured. Nothing major, serious bruising. The teachers were even hesitant to help him. Then one day he comes up to me like first thing in the morning saying his parents want me and my friend to come to his house. I was like hell to the no.
Then few days later I didnt even do anything wrong and teacher demanded us and our parents be at the school for a meeting. We were expecting suspension but ended up they wanted to make peace. His parents were very concerned but were so angry when I explained what happened. I refused to agree to any peace, that I had done nothing wrong. Which got most of the room chuckling... but after that day he sure stopped his tattling.
I can't tell who's worse in this story. Shame all around.
More on topic, you'd expect false reports of threats to children to be evenly distributed across the population. If so, that's a mass media issue. If the reports come repeatedly from just a few people, it's those people whose behavior needs correction.
Always is a strong word. I know someone who had a caring family and friend group, yet it was a stranger that tried to assault them. This was during that idealized era before all the modern safety practices. Thankfully they were smart enough to escape to a neighbor's house.
Statistics may indicate greatest risk is people you know, but that's an average. Ultimately it's best to take reasonable precautions and teach kids what behavior to watch for, healthy boundaries, and how to react.
Lenore paused. She stared wistfully out the window and thought of the third graders she watched earlier in the day, "What would it take to give every one of them a nice, sharp pin?"
> And so I was shooed along, collateral damage in the quest to wrap every child in a bubble of perfect safety. Now I sit at my computer, wondering: What would it take to give every one of them a nice, sharp pin?
Obviously the pin is to pop the confining bubble "every child" has been placed in, thus improving their lives. She follows up:
> (Though some authority would no doubt accuse me of distributing weapons to children)
I got the metaphor; it's a dumb metaphor. Ignoring the r/thathappened premise of the article, what, specifically, is the wall were tearing down here? We should let adults watch children for recreation because society imposes too many restrictions on child development out of an irrational fear of their safety? The dots don't connect.
Maybe it's that we shouldn't let fear of a bogeyman be used as a justification to weaponize law enforcement and collapse social trust in the name of "think of the children"?
As a parent, the answer is yes. I have literally, on multiple occasions, had middle-aged women stop their vehicles and ask my children in a panicked voice where their mother is. This, despite me being ~30 feet away in the front year overhearing the whole thing. My neighbor has shoed them off on our behalf. It startles my kids. They're asking to ride their bikes in the neighborhood and my main concern is that someone will call the police to "save" them from whatever fantasy they dream up.
This doesn't comprise 100% of our experience of life, but it definitely impacts my children's freedoms and my friends have conveyed similar experiences. A person wistfully contemplating their own childhood experience is different than "watching children for recreation" and the punishment thereof is a symptom of a greater problem with (U.S.) society.
Following the author's "How many men have exposed themselves this year?" logic, if nobody's called the police on your kids, why are you worried about it?
I know you want to roll your eyes at the middle-aged woman as being a hand-wringing looky-loo, but maybe that's just what the social safety net that makes free range kids a possibility looks like.
My elementary school-age kids walk to school. They know they might get approached by an adult asking where they live; they know how to answer: "I live up the street. No, I don't need help." NBD.
A counter example, I pulled over on my drive home from work to ask a five year old in pajamas wandering the streets near dark what he was doing out. I walked him home. Mom was horrified to realize the little dude had wandered out of the house.
One final thought on the original article, I think the author is willfully ignoring the banal reality of the situation to make their point. I'm sure the school representative wanted to say, "Listen lady, I've got 30 kids I need to monitor at recess and while you're probably a nice person you're another variable I need to keep in the corner of my eye. Take a walk."
I'm sure that framing your comment as a narrative is due more to pretension, but part of me wants to see it as a brilliant stroke of irony. I mean, sure, you're grossly mischaracterizing her quote, but at least it's presented as fiction.
Assuming this was an American school this really surprising?
America has school shootings regularly. Children have to perform regular active shooter drills in American schools. Like a fire drill.
There are also significant pressures put on a shrinking number of underpaid teachers and staff to care for an increasing number of children. More kids being cared for by fewer adults.
With this mindset why would school staff not err on the side of caution and ask an unknown person to move along?
It's a sad state of affairs, but it is not the fault of the teacher or school staff that America got here.
It’s even less the fault of the kids, who bear the brunt of this monumental stupidity— particularly if their parents face consequences that separates them.
No they’re not. Neither are police officers. Police have no duty to respond to emergency calls. Teachers are not held to a higher legal standard than police officers.
> With this mindset why would school staff not err on the side of caution and ask an unknown person to move along?
Because instilling this type of paranoia in children is likely to cause more harm to the mental health of their generation (in total), than those very few bad events that this behavior stops?
Also, it seems to me that this has been going on for a generation already, as more and more young adults are now hyper-fragile, calling for authoritarian responses to anything that scares them. The end result may very well be that those children will place a "strong leader" in power when they grow up, someone like Putin or Chavez.
> Because instilling this type of paranoia in children is likely to cause more harm to the mental health of their generation (in total), than those very few bad events that this behavior stops?
Nobody gets a finger pointed at them for the slow institutionalization of instilling paranoia in children.
But have it come out that you saw the stranger who shot up the school and didn't call security...?
That would be dumb unless all mammals are potentially involved in school shootings. If you think statistics are easy to manipulate, I'm not sure that the smarter alternative is to ignore them entirely and operate through prejudice and fear.
Maybe it is not 'regular' if you find a good criteria so that it cannot be classified as 'regular', but it is shokingly often, also leading case now, and a strong upward trend while all else stagnates or goes down (except overdose and poisoning, which also increases recently)
Gun deaths and deaths by school shooting are separate things. Idiots who don’t store their guns in a gun safe or don’t otherwise follow proper gun safety or suicide from improperly secured guns are not school shootings.
None of those shootings resulted in more than 2 deaths, and half of them resulted in no deaths. They would barely qualify as a large casualty rate if they all happened at the same school.
Just wondering, were there any shootings at your school? Because there was one at my high school, the year before my freshman year. It was extremely disruptive, and many teachers and students carried that trauma for years. Death is just a number, until it's close to you.
We had a student get beaten to death over drug money stuff and another student hang themselves over it shortly thereafter.
Death is still a number when it's close to you. Just because it's close to you doesn't make it common. If nobody got rare forms of cancer we wouldn't have those rare forms of cancer but just because those people have families who (presumably) care doesn't mean those rare cancers should be considered big problems. You might get away with running a village on emotion like that but you need to run a country by the numbers.
Thank you for sharing this story - I feel extremely sad for you but also respect your bravery for sharing something so brutal. I'm so sorry that happened at your school.
Gotta be honest, it was pretty weird. Thanks for the effort, but totally unnecessary.
If you read closely, you might notice that I wasn't directly impacted by it. I'm an empathetic person, and I noticed how it impacted teachers, students, and school policies. It was awful, for them. The only direct impact on my life was the annoyance of elevated security.
Sorry, what? Terribly sorry to hear about it, but you didn't bring your own trauma into this until just now, so I'm not sure how you'd think I was mocking it. I said that I don't need the consolation.
Please talk to a therapist about your trauma. The internet is not kind.
Please don’t normalize treating people as if they’re fragile, delicate creatures who may break at any moment. That encourages people to act like they’re broken for attention and reduces their ability to function. It’s harmful to them and to society generally to encourage people to follow such social scripts.
I grew up as a black kid on the south side of Chicago in the 80s and 90s. I experienced no shooting incidents within school buildings, more than two on the street outside of school, and a dozen when not in school. There was one kid who went around one morning extending his hand for a handshake, and when they took it, he would slice their wrist open with his knife. He got me. I was not permanently traumatized (although I was upset for the rest of the day.) I also think that arguments should depend on reason and cost-benefits, not appeals to emotion and assumptions about the experiences of the people you're having the discussions with.
Schools are almost the safest place people ever are. People are in far more danger from the commute to and from school than from anything within the school. The odds of getting killed by a school shooting are far lower than the odds of being struck by lightning, and multiple orders of magnitude lower than being murdered by your parents.
United States 288
Mexico 8
South Africa 6
India 5
Nigeria 4
Pakistan 4
Afghanistan 3
Canada 2
France 2
Brazil 2
Estonia 1
Hungary 1
Azerbaijan 1
Greece 1
Kenya 1
Germany 1
Turkey 1
Russia 1
China 1
Your link says 288, in the US, for 2022. A sibling's link to Wikipedia says 14, in the US, for 2022.
(And I'm going to trust Wikipedia more than a site running scam ads for "Liberals Are Furious That Trump Supporters Get This Trump Wrist Watch For Free!"…)
Ah yes, the classic "I'm gonna compare the entire US to Europe but I'm gonna exclude the parts of Europe that make the comparison not favorable to the point I'm trying to make" slight of hand."
When it's social attitudes, there is no Europe east of the Oder.
When it's about effective government, half the nations on the Mediterranean don't count.
When it's about nice infrastructure only the rich western and northern bits are "Europe".
Nobody is fooled by these dishonest comparisons anymore than they would be fooled by a definition of the US that excludes the flyover states or the Detroits and Baltimores.
>When it's about effective government, half the nations on the Mediterranean don't count.
I'm from Spain, you don't know shit.
First, Spain it's highly decentralized. The North, the South, the Mediterranean, the Castilles, Madrid and the two archipelagos have NOTHING to do with each other.
Think of Spain as "the United Autonomous Contuies of Spain", something akin to USA-lite.
The rough mountainous surface of Spain makes the provinces VERY diverse from each other, from freezing cold winters, chilly rains with more rain than the UK (no kidding again) to plain deserts, tundras, rough coasts, sunny coasts, wheat fields and so on.
Don't let me start on culture, we still have a working pre-Roman language there. The French in the South-West too.
The Basque Country, Valencia, Catalonia and Madrid have a better life on average than the US by large.
We the Basques have been trading with the UK since... the Industrial Revolution. And before that, we have been casting iron since the fucking ROMANS.
Oh, yes, what a shithole do we live. For sure /s. Ask Mondragón or Zamudio for IT HQs for a LOT of companies on how bad are they doing.
The Castilles are doing ok but these are regions with a HIGHLY sparse and separated population, where you have less people per squared km than Lapland, so they have a good excuse to not being as developed (overall) as Madrid or Barcelona. Yet, they aren't a 3r would country by no means.
Are you gonna to lecture us in which supposed shithole do we live? Because you would be chastened by the experience.
Oh, and on "the Northern European Countries", yes, oh, wow, so developed, so rich, so powerful, yet they fucked around with the Covid like hell by being careless idiots and yet they called us lazy fucks and such when we had one of the most STRICT lockdowns in Europe.
The irony.
Hollywood and the stereotypes did a great damage on the Southern Europe thanks to that Anglo-Saxon malice and inferiority complex against the Roman legacy.
Let me tell you something, you, the so "superior race" against us, the inferior and drunkard South Europeans: at least we don't stay beer-roasted at work like a lot of places in Germany. We did our best, and yes, we have corruption, but they have too and worse, they avoid to shout out their crap publicly as if nothing happened.
One day I'll post what the shithole it's Iceland on some of the energy and industry policies overseas and you'll shit bricks on the so-called "North European Efficiency".
I haven't dug in, but I've looked into this before and you get very different results depending on how you define "school shooting". Everyone thinks of Sandy Hook or Columbine or something like that, but some stats also count "drug dealer shot once at other drug dealer and one of them was standing on the corner of the school parking lot", or (less dubiously, but still not exactly what one thinks when one hears "school shooting") a targeted killing, often of a teacher by another adult (think: bad break-up). Or a suicide with a gun at school (as in Pearl Jam's "Jeremy"). Or one student very specifically targeting one other student with no intent of hurting anyone else (bullying, gang stuff, boyfriend/girlfriend drama gone way too far)
All those other things are bad, but stats that include them can be misleading if you've got the wrong idea about what they're counting as a "school shooting".
That exact trick is used for broader stats about 'gun violence'. More than half of the deaths counted as 'gun violence' are suicides, not murders.
Counting suicides as gun violence is convenient for a narrative, because areas with friendlier gun laws, and thus, more guns per capita, tend to have more suicides by gun. It's a common hack move to plot those two numbers and show a correlation.
I suggest you look up the actual statistics for school shootings. And I mean actual school shootings, not the kind of stuff that's defined as, "somebody fired a gun somewhere on school property at any time, and somebody died as a result" (which famously included a case of a guard suiciding with his duty handgun in a school parking lot at night).
It really is a problem that is blown up out of all proportion to the actual threat. The threat is there, sure; but a kid in US is more likely to be killed in a car accident on their way to school, than by an armed spree killer in that school. Those active shooter drills, in particular, save some lives, but they traumatize several orders of magnitude more. The notion that you have to be wary of a stranger who isn't even on school grounds for this reason is absurd.
> And I mean actual school shootings, not the kind of stuff that's defined as, "somebody fired a gun somewhere on school property at any time, and somebody died as a result"
It'll keep happening so long as this country continues to ignore the well-being its own population.
It also still remains true that it's a very minor threat compared to many others that we face in our day-to-day lives. I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything about it. I'm saying that we should always be aware of the true scope of the problem, and prioritize various measures accordingly.
I suspect that the single biggest policy change that would drastically improve matters is universal healthcare, and particularly prophylactic treatment of mental health. It would also solve a lot of other problems. "Active shooter drills", on the other hand, create mental health problems without solving anything.
I still blame John Walsh for this. He scared an entire generation of parents and now everyone lives thinking everyone is a murdering pedo. Look, what happened to him and his family, his son, is awful and I can't imagine what that was like, but he fucked America up.
Friend of mine runs a local eatery. She told her 9-year old son to walk across the street - literally to the candy shop where she knows the owner, and told the kid to do some homework for an hour. Police brought her son back and threatened to charge her with endangerment or abandonment or something similar. This was... 2018 IIRC.
They live about 1.5 miles from the eatery. She would let her 9 year old walk home sometimes in good weather - low crime with actual tree-lined suburban streets. Police apparently threatened her over that as well - that's somehow endangering the child too much, and she might be charged with some misdemeanor.
I don't get it. Really. As someone who grew up in the 70s/80s... I can't say 'nothing bad ever happened'. Obviously it did. But the pendulum has swung far too much the other way now.
Picturesque small town America. The sort of place with a general store still selling picture postcards of the downtown area. 15th-safest city in the state of around 10 million.
This behavior of police seems to me as a lazy way to do their job. Even a way to not do their job. To make place safe for children they need to keep an eye on kids, not to to round them up.
There's an actual law for that? Or was this an empty sort of threat?
I live in NYC and when my son was a 9-year old I would let him play out at the park and on the sidewalk. I had some anxiety about it at times but never thought there would be any legal trouble from letting him be a 9-year old.
> 1. He or she knowingly acts in a manner likely to be injurious to the
physical, mental or moral welfare of a child less than seventeen years
old or directs or authorizes such child to engage in an occupation
involving a substantial risk of danger to his or her life or health; or
Whether something is "likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child" is fairly subjective, since it's a balance of odds.
The worst part is such laws as written would be straightforwardly applicable to the police and prosecutors that see fit to harass parents and children, but yet again they're above the law they purport to uphold.
> "substantial risk of danger"
Such vague and objective measures shouldn't be in law. I started to drive around Montana's unposted "reasonable and prudent" speed limit came back and was later deemed unconstitutional because "reasonable and prudent" was too subjective for an individual to know when or not they are in compliance.
My friends and I rode our bikes in a several mile radius around my suburban home when I was ~10 in the mid 2000’s. I never see kids doing stuff like that anymore. Makes me really sad that they’re missing out on something that I still cherish the memory of today. But also maybe kids just enjoy different things nowadays
I did the same thing, and we would go miles just to see if other friends were home and increase the size of our bike group before going to Dairy Queen or a local pizza shop and hanging out there.
> But also maybe kids just enjoy different things nowadays
I think this may be true, but also I think parents might find it easier to let their kid play video games in their room where they think they are safe compared to letting them roam around unsupervised. I had friends whose parents thought we were bad kids because we wouldn't know where would go that day, so when they asked "where are you going" and we said "idk, to the creek or pizza or wherever we find interesting" they would think we were up to no good since we didn't have a plan.
Likewise - Similar age, time, and place. My parent were vocally concerned about the danger of cars, as it's a Northeast US town with narrow winding roads, but the only rule was to be back before dark or call them to pick me up.
The funny thing is back then there were no sidewalks or shoulders at all, and kids biked everywhere until old and lucky enough to drive. Now, there are extensive sidewalks on all the main roads, but the only people using them are middle aged dog walkers.
Our instructed range limit was a couple of km's, but the practical limit was a calculated "when the streetlights come on, can I ride home fast enough that mom won't suspect".
Sadly never crossed my mind to figure out what time the lights turned on, and expand my radius further.
As someone who grew up in the 2000s I still don’t get it. I grew up in a time when this was totally fine and normal. I cannot imagine being so restricted as a child.
America changed after Iraq war and 9/11 - the US administration found it useful to keep their population in fear to achieve their goals in foreign soils without criticism. Fresh immigrants to the US are trained by the media and system to fear the police and never confront them (the police can shoot you) and not deviate from American culture and rules (the system can snatch your kids away from you, the system can deny access to your resources using forfeiture laws). Policing and searching in school (now allowed because of the school shooting) psychologically teaches kids (especially those of immigrants) to fear and listen to the police / authority.
Osama may be dead, but the erosion of rights that US has seen because of 9/11 did strike a big blow to US democracy and he partly achieved his goals.
We've had moral panics around Dungeons and Dragons, Satanic cults, the war on drugs, etc going back longer.
I could totally see the trend being accelerated by a lot of things. Sure, 9/11, is one possible trigger, but it could also be news sources getting better at optimizing for sensational takes and - more recently - the common person using the internet/social media to amplify troublesome anecdotes to the point where they seem like pervasive trends.
> […] and - more recently - the common person using the internet/social media to amplify troublesome anecdotes to the point where they seem like pervasive trends
Which, of course, describes this entire thread of discussion kicked off on one person’s anecdote…
I’m not sure i understand the take here. Are you claiming that the iraq war and 9/11 struck enough fear into parents to prevent them from allowing their children to bike to school?
I would argue that the reaction to 9/11 empowered the state to terrorize parents for just about anything. The risk of a confrontation with police has escalated in the past two decades, such that any report is taken seriously and without any real consequences for making false reports. Couple that with an increase from meddling by busybodies that can report free ranging kids using their now ubiquitous cellphones, and parents quickly realize that it is safer to keep them at home.
No. I am saying it's part of the pattern that points to how American citizen's have given in to anxiety and fear (created by politicians), that they are willing to compromise on their hard won democratic rights. In this case, the pervasive fear for the safety of American kids allows American politicians to manipulate American parents to compromise on their rights for the "safety of our children". (Demand for Apple to scan all iMessages for Child Sexual Abuse Material is an extreme and good example of this).
The training of fresh immigrants is true. As a Master's student we were trained to be afraid of the cops and that they can shoot you if you make any unwanted movements.
America lives in constant fear of everything and it only seems to be getting worse.
I don't get it either. I've had the police called three times on my 3rd grade son because he has been playing in our front yard. We live in a bland Californian suburban neighborhood built in the 1990s. He doesn't get outside much anymore. The plastic holds we put on the tree in the front go unused - bleached by the 258 beautiful sunny days we have each year. Instead he's learned to occupy his time on screens, but I hear people complain about that too.
We were house-hunting. At one house, we were there just a couple minutes when an older man started knocking at the door. The realtor answered, and they guy started talking about how he was some muckety-muck in the local HOA, and we were parked partly off the driveway in the gravel, and had to move our car.
We said we were just inspecting the house, and would be gone in ten minutes, but he just kept repeating that we were breaking the rules, and needed to move our car over.
The realtor looked at us and said "ok, you're not interested in this place, right?" "Nope".
I’ve witnessed a neighbor scream bloody murder at a pair of teenage boys for using the pool, because the age limit is 16 and these boys were only 13. Quite the offense. The same man will speed around every speed bump in the neighborhood, swerving into the parking spaces narrowly dodging parked cars and, on occasion, pedestrians and pets.
Retired carpetbaggers with nothing to do and no check-and-balance to their behavior. Ever since that fateful day I’ve pondered just how to setup an HOA to counter such behavior.
There is likely a bylaws provision for amending the bylaws. It may take a bit of politicking and organizing, but if everyone indeed dislikes this person, there's a chance someone could succeed in amending them to counter this behavior, and that person could be you.
That's just grumpy old man syndrome. My dad had it. My neighbor has it too - our neighborhood doesn't have an HOA, but he still loves to do all sorts of goofy stuff, including put traffic cones on the street parking infront of his house.
I guess the problem with HOAs is they empower these sorts of people with authority.
There's a pair of kids that roam around our neighborhood looking for bugs and lizards and just generally having an adventure.
It's a safe neighborhood and my first instinct was, "Why don't those parents monitor their children" but then I thought for a minute and remembered my own childhood where me and my brothers would walk to the park, look for worms, ride our bikes, go on adventures.
Those kids are welcome to look for bugs and lizards now, everyone keeps an eye out for them, one fell and scrapped his knee and was crying outside our house so I went to check on him and carried him back to his house to get cleaned up. My wife is worried we will get sued at some point if they get injured on our property, but I guess that's the risk I'll have to take so that 2 kids can just play outside and have fun.
I hate to say this, but having lived in a place with a lot of cultural diversity:
1) If a little black boy or girl came along I felt fine fixing their bicycle or whatever.
2) If a poor looking white kid I felt fine that their parents wouldn't accuse me of some bullshit if they were on my property or whatever.
3) Middle class or better seeming white kids. No fucking chance in hell. Won't talk to them. Won't willingly let them on my property. Won't engage or look at them. Scared to hell parents will accuse me of something or sue.
Engaging children can be nourishing to the soul of those who enjoy it. But the calculus is definitely different from adults.
From a cold calculating standpoint, engaging an affluent adult can come with significant upsides: jobs, access to political power, commerce, international interface, mobility. An affluent adult can fuck you in a lot of ways, but you can also trade with them in ways that can really help you.
On the other hand, the relationship with children is asymmetric. A poor / minority child isn't going to offer you anything (from a selfish viewpoint), but neither is an affluent one. However an affluent family can absolutely crush you if they misinterpret some engagement with their children. The poor / minority family may be less likely to have the power to make a misunderstanding turn into a significant legal hassle for you. Therefore the calculus for engaging an affluent child look pretty bad, while that of engaging a poor child look more like neutral.
For adults I find it more of a wash, with the upsides typically higher than the downsides for engaging most any sane adult.
Lets assume poors/minorities are equally as likely as anyone else to accuse you of something improperly (although that's probably a poor assumption, as those of higher social class tend to have better access or confidence to access formal government systems, especially when you consider things like illegal immigrants probably won't approach police under any conditions).
Now imagine thye go to police, or to the court. Which parents do you think garners the best odds and rapport with the legal and enforcement systems in the US:
1) The black factory workers
2) White single mom in the trailer park.
3) White business owner of the local dentist office.
The legal system discriminates. Then I pick to minimize my chances of being the victim of a discriminating legal system. Sadly there's not much chance the cops are going to believe the black factory worker or trailer park mom in the place I lived, false accusation or no. Hell in that same city they shoot black guys just for having a CCW and telling the cops they're legally carrying. I simply had nothing to worry about.
The axiom that the rich tend to get away with more in the US is sadly a true one. The other end of that is that the rich also tend to be able to garner much more social capital to pursue claims against you, whether they are true or not. My fear is not so much the false claims alone (which can come from anyone of any race/class), but people who may make a false claim and also be on the upper end of the spectrum of holder of social capital to actually execute that claim.
My risk tolerance being what it is, I could choose to ignore ALL children and thus not discriminate. Instead I choose to discriminate and will engage children if I think that someone who makes some bogus claim won't be taken seriously by the justice system. If the justice system / police treated poor blacks as well as affluent whites, I would choose to not engage children at all ever. If this makes me a bad person, so be it, but it's a measured response to the sad realities we live in.
Discriminations original meaning is to tell the difference between things. Op is recognising the difference between things that are unlikely to cause them a problem, and things that are going to cause them a problem. This is just common sense actually, though in the world of wokeness plain common sense is not common enough.
I want to know what happened to the people calling the police. There needs to be consequences for people who call the cops on someone to falsely report a crime. Start holding people accountable for their nosiness and people will start minding their own business. An encounter gone wrong with our militarized police can end an innocent life, result in significant injury, cause them to lose their job, and needlessly involve them in the expensive legal system. People ought to err on the side of not inflicting this on each other unless it's obvious that urgent violent intervention is necessary.
Brah you're not even allowed to know who called CPS on you. It's anonymous and it's illegal for them to tell you the identity of the caller.
Not only are there no consequences, but the system is set up to ensure that one can make any accusation they like, that CPS will be administratively required to investigate it, and that the pain will always be asymmetric. Also CPS investigations typically aren't 'criminal' investigations so it's doubtful you could argue that any false accusations as 'falsely reporting a crime.' You may be told that it's not a criminal but child welfare case.
It's practically the perfect system for a vindictive neighbor / ex-spouse / whatever.
And why is "child alone outside" something that needs to be reported to the police? People calling 911 with such bullshit should be fined for unnecessarily blocking the line for those with real emergencies.
I rode my bike all over town as a 8-12 year old in the 80’s and 90’s. My parents would send me to the grocery store and hardware store a mile or two away on my bike for random things they forgot during their main shopping trips.
But it just goes back to the same question: has the world gotten more dangerous or are we just more aware of dangers that were always there?
Safer in which way ? I was playing football on the street as a kid with a lot of kids from my neighborhoud. Now you see rarely kids on the streets because they risk being hit by cars or kidnapped.
There is something to said about the risks of being run over especially given the popularity of SUVs which are so high up, but kidnapping is and has always been an incredibly rare crime for at least the past century. People are freaked out these days because of "Amber alerts" but these are nearly always cases of disputed custody between divorced/separated partners taking the kid against the wishes of the other parent, not strangers.
Well, probably not, no. There's about 286 thousand years of anatomically modern humans running around pre-historically (unless you're meaning very literal history), and numerous illiterate societies which left us mundane archaeological records. Your conclusion is invariably cherry picked. Not to mention the goalposts for the concept of criminal have shifted drastically as has the means to enforce law.
Much of that 286 thousand years (or whatever) was spent in band-level hunter-gather societies. These societies have a number of nice features: People tend to be healthy, and in good times they may only work 20 hours per week.
But according to my anthropology professors, these societies tend to have very high death rates. For men, the lifetime risk of being murdered or killed in intergroup fighting runs about 10 to 20%.
So there's a real possibility that the modern era is very safe by historical standards.
Why should crimes of passion be exempted from the general murder rates? A society where it's more acceptable or common to kill someone who upsets you is a more dangerous society.
Because they're decontextualized. I'd posit that in the context of small organizations most of those murders are a product of deliberate and known risk. Given that, one could liken it to mutual combat at the ethical and social levels. That isn't the whole scope of the matter but the aggregate data would, I suspect, reflect a considerably different picture if it was investigated at such a resolution. Of particular interest would be infidelity and how that fits into the context of a given social order.
Conflating two wildly different things seems like it should be a formal fallacy. “I don’t go out without an umbrella because of the risk of it raining or an asteroid wiping out my town.” for example.
Car drivers kill thousands of people walking on the street every year. Kidnappers don’t.
> Now you see rarely kids on the streets because they risk being hit by cars or kidnapped.
"Stranger" kidnappings are exceedingly rare. The majority of Amber Alerts occur due to custodial disputes between divorced parents when one parent takes the kid when they are not supposed to[1].
> Children (and parents) are often conditioned to be wary of strangers. However, in reality, only a small fraction of child abduction cases – around 0.1 percent – involve kidnappings by strangers or slight acquaintances.
They’re less rare in certain communities. Something like 20% of abductions in the US are hispanic girls despite that demo being roughly 10% of the US population of children.
The idea of stranger danger is largely a myth, as most almost all crimes committed towards children are by those closest to them: parent, relatives and people in positions of trust.
Devils advocate: The reason statistics is down is that people are taking less risk. If you were to live like before the risk would be the same or higher.
Don't know if it's actually true, but it's worth examining.
I suspect the reduced number of malicious acts by adults has been more than balanced out by the increased rate of children killing themselves as we cripple their development more and more over time.
AFAIK at least the stranger danger phenomenon was always blown up by the media. Sexual abuse of children for example typically happens by people who know the children. It's extremely rare for a stranger to do that.
So did I, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1970s, when the murder rate was 1,000/year. Things have gotten less dangerous but people have gotten more fearful.
Even if we stipulate that this article from Quatar state media is accurate, it does not imply that conditions are more dangerous now than in the time frame I was describing. You do understand that, I hope.
As the chance of all-cause premature death goes down, (war, famine, vehicle accident, disease), there is more value in reducing the avoidable risks.
Like sending your kid to the shop. There's also the fact that we don't need to do that anymore. Very often there's a late (or all) night shop open not too far away. So the urgency is just not there.
That's only two options. "Awareness" is important, but so is "assessment". A third option may be that we now regularly over- or under-estimate the risks of things whose actual prevalence hasn't changed much, if at all.
In the summers of my childhood I would leave the house around 10am with a packed lunch and walk alone everywhere until 8pm or so (before cell phone era). As an adult I’ve driven on some of the sidewalkless rural roads I used to walk and thought “it’s an absolute miracle that I didn’t get hit by a car.” I was a dumb kid with no sense of risk, and it’s sheer luck that I got through it unscathed, tbh.
Sending your kid to a store for babysitting is not good parenting.
Does the store owner have a license for child care? Did she discuss child care with them? Was she expecting her kid to sit at a candy store and do homework for an hour absent an agreement with the owner for child care?
Seems like pawning her kids off on unwilling people who have no responsibility for them.
What we need is an app that mints tokens on the blockchain for anyone who happens to be near your kid. They can claim their tokens by scanning the or code on his/her shirt.
From the guidelines:
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
There's a difference between good faith and inventing things the person hasn't said. They said they knew the store owner. They did not say the store owner agreed to care for their child who was too young to be out on their own, legally. Good faith does not require me to make up facts that haven't been said to make their argument stronger. If they had a child care agreement with a store owner, that would be a whole different kettle of fish. But you and I both know that was never the case - they just sent their child who is too young to be out on their own to be someone else's problem, because that person owns a store, and 'they know them'.
I guess we need to change the phrase “like a kid in a candy store” to “like a kid in a candy store, with a parent or guardian, and a legal waiver, and a lawyer present”
> I can't say 'nothing bad ever happened'. Obviously it did. But the pendulum has swung far too much the other way now.
My counterintuitive mildly-offensive party conversation starter is that I think that the ideal number for childhood deaths by misadventure or accident is a balance between protecting children from stupid accidents and making children stupid and timid by restricting them from doing anything that could result in an accident. If kids are getting into too few fatal accidents, protections for children should be reduced until we get the numbers back up.
I make a similar argument for train travel: since the death rate is ~10% that of other forms of transport, if trains could be made cheaper by compromising safety to say 50% of other modes, that would be a net positive as cheaper trains would move people off other, still more dangerous forms of transport.
And you could certainly make the same argument about airliners, which have a death rate <10% that of trains (and <1% that of cars).
But if you try to make that argument on HN, a bunch of people will yell at you about how Boeing and the FAA are evil for putting cost savings over safety.
The Safety cost and even the hull cost is simply not a major contributor to the cost of your ticket. It’s mostly fuel gate fees maintenance and overhead
Keep in mind, if you compromise maintenance for costs, you'll make up the costs in crew wages as they obviously have 1-2 orders of magnitude more risk exposure than the average passenger and won't be willing to fly for anything less than massive hazard pay.
Scheduled maintenance is done with semi slave labor in the 3rd world. Routine is more expense local labor but the routine stuff can’t be deferred anyway
Airliners are much safer than other modes of transportation per mile traveled. The difference vanishes (mostly, or reverses) when interpreted per mile on the vehicle or per trip.
If airliners were only as safe as walking, nobody would use them, because you'd expect to have at least a minor accident (like a sprained ankle) when walking 2000 miles. A similar argument can be made for cars and trains (just a magnitude less distance per trip and consequently a smaller chance of injury).
It's a novel idea in terms of emissions avoidance, though: couple the externalities to personal risk.
People who currently are forced to commute daily with cars could be much safer doing so on a more robust train system. You wouldn’t get the same benefit from cheaper flights.
Did we both interpret the MCAS incident with Boeing differently? Because I saw this as regulatory capture putting it's metaphorical testicles where it felt comfortable.
Safety Assurance is a big part of rail transit design but I wouldn't say it is a significant cost. Building and operating rail wouldn't cost half as much if we stripped some of the safety assurance process out of it. Maybe a couple of percentage points of cost for orders of magnitude more fatal accidents. The systems would mostly all still be there, unless you wanted to do something as drastic as removing all interlocking/train protection and rely entirely on drivers and timed signals - basically treat it like a road network - but that would have huge operational impacts - train headways have to be much larger if you can't know what sections have trains in them - as well as being extremely unsafe.
Frankly, these precautions exist for a reason, and it is because many many people died in the early days of rail. Many people who work in rail, particularly in ops/sigs/assurance are proud of how safe rail transport now is.
(I work in Engineering Assurance on rail infrastructure projects).
Fair enough, thanks for sharing. It's not really serious proposal but interesting to learn it wouldn't work. I guess the ongoing cost of rails and rolling stock are killer.
Much of the infrastructure cost is boring stuff like earthworks and retaining walls and moving existing services that are in the way. The shift to in-cab signalling saves/will save a bunch of money on lineside equipment maintenance (because you don't need it).
I was thinking about your comment and one way to save considerable infrastructure costs is more level crossing and less overpasses/bridges, but train vs pedestrian or train vs car are common and messy. Plus level crossings wreck traffic flow on the surrounding road network.
I don't think there is a correlation between being allowed to run around without supervision and deaths of children. For example, if you build dangerous roads everywhere and lots of kids die in car accidents, maybe something could be done about the roads, not the free roaming kids.
> if you build dangerous roads everywhere and lots of kids die in car accidents, maybe something could be done about the roads, not the free roaming kids.
That is accepted that pedestrians need to behave so that cars can drive around at relatively high speeds in very public and shared spaces is an unbelievable accomplishment by the automobile industry.
Just yesterday, we were standing 30m downwind of somebody idling their mangy Vespa, and we could smell the stink from their partial combustion. As you do. At the same time, it's totally unacceptable for somebody themselves to stink like that.
I guess it's similar with car noise. People would go nuts if everybody was, I don't know, humming all the time outside. But car noises are normal.
It very much does. I have actually offensive party conversation starters that work even better. You don't have to enjoy talking with everyone.
edit: shouldn't party conversation be a little spicy? At least I'm not talking about party politics, sports events, or television shows. Or the weather, or how we all individually got to the party.
But anyone who knows the topic well will explain to you that bike helmets and seat belts are the only things that really move the needle. The rest are on the order of measurement error.
(And I assume you’re not advocating dropping either of those.)
To each their own of course, but given the binary choice between a boring topic and a topic that will inevitably cause me to think about my own kids dying in an accident, bring on the boredom.
On the contrary, I’d love to talk about a spicy topic. Only if the person isn’t too invested/serious about it though. E.g they can disagree gracefully and can entertain all angles
>Only if the person isn’t too invested/serious about it though
. Wow, I'm the opposite. I don't mind discussing a spicy topic, but only if the person actually gives a shit about it. I have no desire to be trolled IRL by someone wanting to be edgy. If someone is serious and polite about it, I'll discuss any topic.
I agree that talking to people who don’t give a shit at all aren’t fun talking to.
I wanted to say I don’t like discussing spicy topics with people who give too much shit and are inflexible because at that point discussion can turn personal or can feel like them venting.
Same goes for bullying. If you get a generation that is so different from the previous generation that they are unable to live/work with one another, then not enough was done to reinforce some shared cultural values. Change can and should happen, but it should be gradual enough that one generation recognizes, respects, and can empathize with the other.
I think you're actually onto something. Parents were (and are) far more lenient when they are not permanently aware of the potential danger their kids are in and are not used to having them reachable 24/7.
In Colorado a law was recently passed to deal with this. According to [0]:
"During its initial committee hearing, sponsoring state Rep. Mary Young, D-Greeley, said allegations of neglect or lack of supervision have been on the rise in Colorado, even as the number of substantiated cases are dropping. In 2019, there were 3,854 allegations of lack of supervision; 82%, or 3,169, were unfounded, she said."
Not to toot our Colorado horn too loudly here but I really feel like this state, my home state, is one of the few sane places left in the US (but seriously please don't move here haha).
It’s bittersweet, don’t you think? On the one hand, it’s good that such a law was supported at the highest levels. However, in truly sane places, there are no such laws because the police would never think to involve themselves in such a matter in the first place.
Some social norms have clearly disintegrated, but now there is a law to patch it up.
The reasons why the social norm disintegrated in the first place remain unresolved.
A few other states passed similar laws, including Oklahoma and Texas. Seems absurd that we need to pass laws that let children play outside unsupervised.
Our kid bikes to and from school each way, a little over a mile away. She is always hanging out with other neighborhood kids, going to the pool or park, and nobody has called the cops yet thankfully.
When I was 6 I walked all over Amsterdam, Ferdinand Bol straat in de Pijp all the way to Amsterdam West, Grieseldestraat where my childhood friend lived that had moved. Parents were a bit surprised but no real problem, strangers on the way there were also a bit surprised because we're talking about quite a distance and yet nobody called the police or panicked they just gave me directions and sent me on my way.
I slept there overnight and walked back the next day...
Overnight is quite an adventure. My mom would tell us dinner's at 7:00pm and we would play pretty much anywhere in the neighborhood till that time. In summers, a bunch of lake side boulders some 2-3 miles from our house would become our starship. I remember 3 of kids getting struck in another lake on a boat and eventually figuring out how to safely row back to the shore. Such beautiful days are unfortunately gone.
Oh that triggers another memory: on a family holiday in the South of France lac Biscarosse+, I finally managed to get the hang of a borrowed wind surfing board and promptly sailed across the lake because I was too afraid to let go. Totally cramped and had to walk back dragging the board because I didn't understand how to tack yet. That was a very long day with lots of people worried because I could barely swim (pretty rare for a Dutch kid to be a bad swimmer).
All is well that ends well...
+highly recommended, beautiful area and very nice campings.
At this point I'm decided that if I have children, I will not raise them in the U.S. Maybe a few cities are amenable to how I would like to raise children, like Cambridge, MA. But I would like for them to grow up in a healthy, independent environment.
In 2nd grade, around 1990, I was allowed to walk home alone, just mapped it and it's about half a mile. My mother would have been at work and wouldn't get home for 2-3 hours after me. Very simple rules. Don't stop and talk to anyone who isn't a family member or a police officer. Once home, lock the door (I would literally wear a key around my neck) and don't answer it for anyone but the police or a family member. Never use the stove (probably a special requirement for me since I was already cooking at that age).
The next year we moved and my walk home was a bit longer, my grandfather was home which was nice since I didn't come home to an empty house. I'm not sure if it was that year, or a year or two later, but I was allowed to basically bike wherever I wanted in town as long as I didn't go past some pre-defined boundaries. Just doing some math on that now it's roughly 1.5 miles in any direction and I mostly followed that restriction. The only rule was that I had to be home before the streetlights came on.
I didn't have a cell phone. I didn't have any way to call the police if someone tried to abduct me.
By all statistical crime measures children are safer today than they were when I was a kid.
Today you're able to give your child a device which you can use to constantly GPS track them, they can call/text you or the police at any time.
And, yet, somehow we've infantilized children and removed their agency and I don't know why but I really fear for the consequences of it.
I used to ride my bike to my friends house, 1 mile away. This probably started in about 3rd grade. The compromise I reached with my mom was that I'd call my friend, we would leave at the same time, and ride to one of our houses together (so 1/2 the time riding alone).
There was one time where a guy in a truck slowed down and was lagging behind us a bit. We turned down a side street and he kept following us. We were on sidewalks, so we just turned around quicker than he did and raced away. In retrospect that was legitimately scary.
In middle school, I could ride wherever I wanted. I'd ride to garage sales, buy used puzzles, then spend hours completing them at home. To think that those opportunities wouldn't be available is sad.
>And, yet, somehow we've infantilized children and removed their agency and I don't know why but I really fear for the consequences of it.
In grad school I worked with a fellow from China. At the age of 3, he would go to the nearby market to buy some groceries for the family, cook food, and hang out at home alone all day. He was shocked at the attitudes in the US.
My brother and I also played outside until the streetlights turned on, sometimes walking quite a few miles in the general area. Visiting friends from 4th grade, biking three miles to/from school, etc.
Once a red Volvo 240 stopped and tried getting my brother to approach for some candy. I pulled him away and we went inside, because I'd heard rumours about some dude in the area trying to nab kids. I was about eight and he was six.
Because we had learned to not talk to strangers that weren't our parents or relatives or public officials like police, medics and fire crew in uniform or in uniformed vehicles. If someone stops while we're waiting for the school bus and offers to drive us home it's not OK to get in the car unless our parents had asked our teacher to tell us that one specific family member would pick us up.
I cherish my childhood memories roaming around with my friends, either on our bikes or public transport all over the place. My favourite trip was as an 11 year old going from Sydney to Gosford (about 40 miles) with my best friend just because we could, and the trains were free that day. I don’t think we were even stopped once by a train guard or the police.
the worst thing that happened to me was when I was like 10 once I was walking home from school and a homeless guy asked me where he could take a shit, and I ran away
second worse thing I was doing my paper route and almost
mauled by a dog but a nearby neighbor convinced it to go away
ah, another time when I was 17 I was almost abducted but that's what I get for walking down an industrial road at 2am on new years alone, I was saved by the fact I had a cell phone (seeing it caused the predator to retreat)
I am extremely glad I don't have kids and super disappointed that the world has come to this.
if we're really lucky humans will stop reproducing
Oh god, paper routes! I had one when I was 10-11. It was great money for that age - about $200 per month, in the early 90s.
My papers were dropped off really early, and I had to be there for them - alone - around 4am. And my route was about half a mile away from my house.
I got chased by a dog a couple times. One time it bit and punctured my tire.
I flipped my bike with all the papers in it a couple of times.
Some older kids dropped by once - I was afraid they were gonna fuck with me, but instead they just asked me to scream some stuff.
And of course collecting. I got chased off by a couple dogs then too. Come to think of it, maybe I should be more afraid of dogs than people.
Eventually I got a route for the apartments that were across the street from my house. That was a much nicer experience. More money, less distance, less area to cover, and no dogs.
Hah, I was terrified of all dogs on a route where I distributed flyers and got bitten by one dog. However, I stopped doing my route because of a magpie. Someone had tamed it enough that it had lost all fear of humans. It would try to attack my head and fly to mailboxes and try to pull the flyers out. The stupid bird would follow me along the entire route. At some point it got stuck in the huge, curly hair of a girl who lived nextdoor. That's all so ridiculous in hindsight. Feels like a different life
Netflix recently got rights to Old Enough, about very young kids' trips to the store etc. It's cute and wholesome.
One counter point is cities have started adding 'danger' back into playgrounds (not actually that dangerous, more like risk in the mind of the child). So hopefully we'll see some progress.
Kids are pretty capable and most people are pretty supportive/helpful.
I didn't check the name of the author before reading and was surprised when I realized she was a woman and had to deal with that. Had she been a man, I can assume the police would have been called without first approaching her.
It surprised me that it was a woman. Usually people are more lenient to them than man.
I was discussing that, some time ago, with a female friend (I am a male) who also loves doing street photography. We talked about how difficult it is for a man to do street photography, specially around places with a lot of kids, as you will always receive strange looks or even threats. If you're a woman taking photos? Probably a mother or mother-to-be, if you're a man? Pedophile.
I wonder if there are that many people exposing themselves to kids as the security lady said in the article. Seems like an excuse to justify the action, or something that happened once and they are overreacting to it...
I suspect there is an element of survivorship bias. If a man is treated like she was, it would not be news.
Most (normal) men also know that they may be seen as a threat, and would move along quickly if asked to. (If they call security over a woman, they may call the police over a man.)
I guess it similar for people of color. They know that they may be seen as a threat and thus they normally act accordingly. Otherwise people may call the police.
I agree, especially if the color is "black". Similarly, I suppose you will find that people with traits of low social class or people that are physically large/muscular, especially if they're not good-looking will experience this.
So, a black guy on 190+cm, large and muscular with a hoodie + some gang-related tatoos and a lower-class behaviour may experience it more than a petite female white upper middle class lawyer in an expensive dress suit.
Times have changed. I have a male friend working as a teacher in elementary school. Things that used to be normal 20 years ago are a great taboo now. Younger kids long for human touch, but this is absolutely unthinkable and the teacher needs to get away to avoid any kind of touch. They prefer not to stay in the classroom with individual kids (and ask a female teacher to accompany them if necessary).
On the other hand, maybe it's better to be safe than sorry.
It is the case for any one-on-one interaction, including business meetings, boss/subordinate meetings, etc. It's considered unwise, at best, if not forbidden.
Absolutely unwise. Ask anyone who has been the victim of malicious prosecution after someone made false accusations against them. If it is one person’s word against the other, discrimination wins the day. Every time.
It's not really allowed, it's about the situation when the class ends, all the kids already left but one of them wants to talk. This is still possible when the others are packing up their things, but once everyone else has left, he feels uncomfortable even though the door is wide open and asks the kid to step outside. Younger kids simply don't understand why and of course you can't tell them except "these are school rules."
When I read the headline, there was no doubt in my mind that it was a man. I'm quite surprised, too. I guess the over-protectiveness has just continued advancing. Not a huge surprise.
Big surprise. I'm a man, living in the UK, and I would never stop to watch kids playing in a school like this if I was on my own. But I am pretty surprised they would treat a woman in this way. Is that bad of me? Is it bad that I'm slightly glad that they would treat women equally, in this way? I dunno, the whole thing seems ridiculous though.
I didn't notice that author was a woman until I read this comment.
As a foster and adoptive parent, I have definitely gotten some comments when I play with those of my kids that look very different from me; I could feel the tension evaporate when one of them calls me "dad" and everyone realizes the relationship. Never had the police called on me either.
I did have a 12 year old daughter get stopped by a concerned adult while bicycling through a nearby neighborhood ("where are you going" "where are your parents" &c.). That turned her off from bicycling ever since.
Fight fire with fire. Track that person down, write a complaint. You may well be watching her using some tech gadget, none of their business, they are clearly harassing your child. Why are you stopping my child and talking to her, are you a perv or procuring children for such, etc.
A few years ago...maybe "several" now...I was having a rough day at work and decided to take an hour or two off and go for a walk. I ended up near our city's zoo, and I remembered that my company got discounted admission, so I decided to visit. So I got there, and basically every visitor (mid-day on a sunny weekday) was a mother pushing a pram. I had a wife and a kid and a house and a job, so it's not like I wasn't in the demographic range of people that would visit there, but just being the only "unaccompanied male" was enough to make me turn around and walk the other way.
I was jogging on the bike trail and passed by a class of kindergarteners the teacher was taking out into the park from the nearby Waldorf school. A friend of mine's daughter was at that school and I thought she might be amongst the kids. However I knew better than to slow down and scrutinize them, looking for her. I just averted my eyes and ran on by.
It's sad that we have to be like this, but it feels necessary, in a world seemingly full of child molesting creeps.
The other day I was walking my dog and saw a pack of kids on a walk from their daycare, and I thought my friend's kid might be among them.
I slowed down and started looking through the kids, till the proctor(?) woman noticed, at which point I said my friend's kid goes to your daycare and then we found him in the group and introduced ourselves, joked around a bit with her, and I took some pics of his kid to show my friend, said goodbye, and went home.
The world isn't really full of child molesters. And sadly a big majority of molesting happens by people the child knows, like family and friends, not strangers. So this extreme reaction to strangers and people walking on eggs around schools is all for very little benefit.
I didn't notice the author until she mentioned founding the "free-range kids" movement. For those who are unfamiliar with her, she was labeled "America's Worst Mom" in 2008 for a column she wrote about letting her son ride the subway alone when he was 9. She has been on a crusade against overprotected children since then [1].
I always found her advice extremely reasonable, but then again, I don't have children.
The desire to control and to punish those who don't comply is strong. Used to be religious element of society that did this. Now social control doesn't wear the mask of religion anymore.
“Old Enough!” is a cute, amusing, and quite surprising show. It follows 3 and 4 year olds as they run their first errand for their parents. The kids are generally clueless about the cameras, and they’re wired with a microphone. They are usually sent on a surprisingly long journey, although along a familiar route, involving several tasks. FWIW, we’re childless & in our fifties, and really enjoyed the season.
It appears you can use public transport alone even if you’re just four years old, and six years is merely the minimum age to be a “guardian” for under four year olds.
> Children under four years of age may only use public transportation if they are accompanied by an individual who is at least six years of age.
I've witnessed the opposite problem in Berlin. Parents, and the general public, seem underprotective of youth.
I used to live across the street from a primary school and the kids (no older than 10) would come out and smoke at recess in front of my building. Nobody batted an eye. Just yesterday I was walking behind some kids who couldn't have been older than 12 drinking and smoking, and that was in a nicer Berlin "suburb". Nobody cared.
I do have children, and from that perspective: She is not crazy. What she's describing is what we would call normal life in most of Europe. I'm sure it's also normal in more small town US. The kind of crazy incident she describes sounds like a New York, or other big city kind of thing.
It’s difficult to detect a consistent trend in the US: most of the anecdotes in this thread are about people being accused of endangering their children in small, suburban communities.
As a personal anecdote: I grew up in NYC, and was riding the subway alone by the time I was 8 or 9. I believe there’s also around when my school gave me a free metrocard to travel on my own, and I believe that program is still in place. Most of my NYC friends had similar experiences.
I was shocked when she revealed who she was. Maybe writing an article will do more than calling the police and making a stand and big stink, but if she, the leader, is easily shoo'd away, what are normal people in this position (and god help us, males) supposed to do? Raise awareness? Share the article? I guess so.
The way I see it, if they didn't want people to look through the fence, then they should replace the fence with something that can't be looked through. Change it to a solid fence type, put up a wall, or even just put inserts through the chainlink to block the view.
Just last week there was a local news story about police investigating a possible child luring incident near a school. The news story and Facebook posts had a picture of a white van from surveillance video. The teachers saw what was happening and made sure the girl was safe. The story was light on details, and there has been no follow-up, so it makes you wonder if the interaction turns out to be innocuous. The idea of "bad guy with white van" is so ingrained in our culture, that maybe we see danger that is not always present.
I faced this a year back, same thing but this time a cop showed up and not the school teacher :P, I just spoke calmly with the officer, that I was just having lunch while in the car.... she left.
I've seen so few people be successful who are grown in a safe bubble within perfect control of their families.
Children need to be (controlledly) exposed to the truths of the world instead of being raised like Polyannas. There is good and bad in this world and if we show them only the good, they will have very hard time as grown up adults.
We host a German foreign exchange student from Hannover.
He talks a lot about meeting friends after school, that the late afternoon is his (not taken up by sports or clubs like in the U.S.).
That everyone rides bikes or public transit, and it doesn't sound like there's much parental oversight (not a judgement, just my observations from our conversations).
I went on exchange to a small town in Thueringen, and can confirm that elementary school aged children got to school on their own, including Gymnasium students (starts at age 10) who had to take public transit to the next town (there was no Gymnasium in this town).
Well at least some people in the world are still allowed to grow up with some measure of independence intact. This sounds a lot like my environment growing up in suburban Indianapolis in the 80s and early 90s (though probably with a lot less public transit); I'm not sure what kind of person I would be today without the freedom to roam unsupervised for much of the day. I wonder what kind of adults we're ultimately producing in the US today...
Finland: children are permitted (sometimes even required) to be able to walk/cycle from school to afterschool daycare through city from 1st grade. There are some trainings done for that and also for other life situations though.
Parts of the U.S. are providing parents protection against this sort of thing.
Texas became the third state after Oklahoma and Utah to pass a free-range parenting bill [1] called the Reasonable Childhood Independence act.
So far this movement seems to be led by traditionally "conservative" states, while the most egregious abuses seem to be reported in traditionally "blue" states, like New York and California.
It'll be interesting to see if the trend continues, and how the issue influences politics.
I know there are a ton of examples like this but our kids were free to roam when they were like 8 or 10 and not a single thing happened, ever. There are probably many more cases like mine.
Been letting mine roam the neighborhood, unaccompanied, on foot and on bikes since the oldest was 7, I think. Youngest will be coming up on six, this Summer, when I let 'em join the others and roam (only with their older siblings—next Summer they can go out solo, if they want).
No cop visits yet. Probably only a couple years left before they're old enough that no-one's likely to bother us about it. Hoping we make it out without trouble. So far, so good. We have had neighbors from other streets come over a couple times to "make sure we know" our kids are way off in the neighborhood, but they've not made a thing of it past that, so I think they're chill-enough and really were just wanting to make sure we were aware.
The author is a long time free ranger kids person and a leader in the movement. That she chose not to fight this particular battle is a perfectly reasonable thing to do she has done far more than most on this score.
Picking your battles wisely is hardly contributing yo the problem.
I’m not sure you read the whole thing but she did go back and talk to “security”. Also, this author specifically is known for her activism. At any rate, I wouldn’t judge her if she didn’t…
I did read that part. She went back and talked to security, they told her to leave, she left.
Had she stuck around and talked with the police, security and the childcare would have learned that the author was allowed to watch the kids.
I’m not judging her as a bad person or anything. But I think she’s part of the reason society has these behaviors. Because she’s not willing to fight stupid policies when the cost is just to wait politely.
If people were more stringent to try to help others learn right and wrong we’d be in a better place.
It’s quite possible that this security guard does think it’s illegal and wrong to watch kids. No one is willing to teach them what’s correct. If not people like the author, then who?
The state of the country right now is such that encounters with the police are potentially volatile and can escalate in bizarre and ridiculous ways. IMO it's not worth the risk for something like this and she's much better off going away quietly and writing a blog post on the subject later on.
In South Park in San Francisco there's a little playground that has a sign saying adults are not allowed without children, which if anything feels backwards to me. It's a nice place to sit, eat and chat, and I've never seen anybody complain about adults being there, but I imagine there has to be some busybody who thought a rule like that would be a good idea. Maybe they have the rule so they can selectively enforce it against people?
I live in Sweden and it’s forbidden for me (or them) to take pictures of my kid at school, ever. I have all these great pictures of me and my friends in the 80s doing theater plays and christmas singing and whatnot from when I was a kid. My children will get none of that. Actually, they do send me pictures sometimes: of headless bodies, hands or arms in weird angles apparently doing something fun (I can’t really tell). Are people simply too lazy to deal with the responsibility of living in human society?
I do understand where you're coming from, but I was growing up in the 2000s and the (primary & later secondary) school took photos that were shared first on official blogs/sites and then later posted on facebook/twitter without asking for permission.
It's not the photos that are the problem, it's that people don't really understand or respect others' privacy in the internet age.
February before covid, I was at a college in Manchester and was pleasantly surprised when they asked us to complete consent forms on where the photos that were to be taken were going to be uploaded. I was very happy to check the "I don't consent to photos of me shared on social media", consequently they took some photos with me & some without me. No pressure to be part of the group & not be left out.
Is there an actual expectation of privacy when enrolled at a public school? There certainly isn’t when out in truly public places (in the US). And students certainly don’t have any/much right to privacy with their bags and lockers (school employees are allowed to search them, in the US). Between the two, I can’t see there being a compelling legal argument to disallow photos for things that are in full few of tens or hundreds of other people already.
How about "expectation of impermanence"? In the past, people had film, and the farthest any photo got was that person's album. Now every last ass on earth can post their photo in Facebook for all the world to enjoy and it won't ever get taken down. US law needs to catch up.
While I understand the sentiment attached to "expectation of impermanence", as far as I know, that hasn’t been codified federally (or in most/any states) in the US. Administrators don’t get to make rules like this up without a legal basis to do so (well, they can try, but they’ll lose in court). There very may well be some other legal basis for “no photos of kids in public” but I’m not aware of it.
> I can’t see there being a compelling legal argument to disallow photos
> that hasn’t been codified federally
The world is moving faster than law, I'd even go as far as to say that it almost always has been. What gets put into law has to have a common sentiment behind it first.
And not everything that's law means that's how things should be. Even in the US I think some states have the death penalty, others don't. The law does not show some absolute truth.
Your thinking is happening on a plane of law and legal enforcement: "the school can't enforce these rules, they can't stop me from taking photos, it's all legal".
Were it legal to kick a kid and the school had a rule prohibiting it, would you say the same? My thinking isn't about the law at all. It's about what I view as problematic and how I believe things should be; the sentiment that precedes law. I don't have to wait for the law to say that kicking kids shouldn't be happening.
And it's not just the expectation of impermanence. Those photos are forever and for everyone as you say. Reachable by anyone, anytime for whatever reason.
> Is there an actual expectation of privacy when enrolled at a public school?
No. Children in schools don’t have rights, the same way as prisoners don’t have rights. Public and private schools are not different in this respect. As institutions built on dominance and the implied use of force schools could not function in anything resembling a normal fashion if children had rights.
I mean, prisoners also have limited rights to free speech, I guess? Think GP meant "rights" to mean "the full spectrum of civil rights private, adult citizens enjoy"
Sure, publishing is one thing, but not even taking the pictures and/or allowing parents to take them is the problem. It is lazy blame-avoidance backed by some kind of hysteria (if you ask me). Of course they need some consent form if they’re going to post it publicly, but the parent group should not be considered “public” in my opinion.
Thinking of myself as a parent I'd be quite angry if photos of my children ended up on Instagram (private profiles or not) or any company's servers.
So in your place, knowing how brazen everyone is with privacy I'd actually be ok with this measure. It's not like you can't take photos/videos of your children and their friends (with their parents' consent) outside of school & during your time together.
Some 200 years ago photography hadn't even be invented, and only the last ~50 years has it been mainstream. Not every moment has to be recorded, relax, have fun and take a few photos so you can reminisce when older.
Recently was biking down a city street and saw a pack of tiny kids supervised by two adults, walking down the sidewalk. All the kids wore identical tiny day-glo safety vests, just like adult safety vests but kindergarten-sized. It was the cutest thing and I wanted a photo for my elderly mother-in-law, who would have absolutely loved it. Was late afternoon and the light was perfect, the day-glo was electric.
Then reality hit: I could get in big trouble and my benign motive would be a useless defense. I biked past, lamenting the loss of a terrific photo.
Not sure where your kids attend but where we have ours it’s ok for them to take pictures and upload to a private portfolio only available to individual kids parents.
Then there’s a blog where pictures are allowed for kids where the parents pre-approved that they could upload to the blog (available to all parents).
However, yes - parents aren’t allowed to take pictures - of kids other than yours.
He’s in allmänförskola and he’s been in two different schools (Småland) and both were the same. The instagram account is full of headless bodies, arms, and backs.
Our modern societies have decided that the most important thing when dealing with any problem (real or perceived) is assigning blame. If you can't assign blame to the actual perpetrator, then you assign it to whoever "allowed" them to do whatever bad thing they did. And now it became a better-safe-than-sorry game, where absolutely ludicrous decisions - some of which actually hurt the very people we're supposedly trying to protect - are made solely to minimize one's chance of getting blamed and held liable.
What do you think the kings and queens of old did other than assigning blame when a problem came up? Have you not read about the hemming and hawing of royal advisors, trying to avoid stepping into a problem and at best losing their position and at worse being executed?
Enough with characterizing millenia-long human behavior as "our modern societies"!
>I'm not sure that the wives of Henry VIII would really agree with this
And neither would Vicky Weaver.
Henry VIII's wives and Thomas more got murdered for political reasons. We still do that shit today, but in less quantity. We prefer to just ruin people's careers which is basically just a modern equivalent of exile.
What happened to the advisors and commanders of the Spanish Armada who's mistakes lost them a fleet? Pretty much nothing because everyone was like "welp, can't predict the weather".
It may be millennia-long, but as many people in this discussion have remarked, we certainly didn't have this degree of paranoia 40 years ago - and many countries don't have it today.
That is exactly the point: avoid blame in the absolute rare case where something could potentially happen. I won’t rant about Sweden (I could, believe me) but it’s the kind of place where (1) nothing will ever really happen, (2) since nothing ever happens, people will turn even the tiniest thing into a blame war and a nationwide philosophical policy debate. The greatest part is that, when actual pedophiles are caught, they get away with almost nothing.
My guess would be that parents are constantly taking photos and getting in the way of kids playing, or their performance, and it's to encourage parents to just enjoy their kids. This sounds like a pretty good rule to me. I'd have to guess that during their childhood your children will have multiple orders of magnitude more photos taken of them. I'd only worry memories will be lost by an overwhelming amount of media being saved about them.
I think that a general law against posting pictures of kids on the internet could just work. It's not just perverts, kids cannot consent to having their images stored in photographic databases forever and being IDed off facial recognition.
This annoys me so much. At my 18mo nursery they tell me how she interacts with other children but they can't send picture or video of it, only the random bland picture of her alone doing nothing special or some activity. And after covid is worse, since before we could see them when dropping or picking up, and now have to wait outside... Since I don't know people with children of the same age its hard to see those interactions
But they tell me how she had a boy friend, they would spend all day together, running after one another, call their each other's name, and "talk" a lot
Also a girl friend that sit next to her at lunch, and they spend the entire meal giggling, and trying to feed each other
My dog gets sent to a "doggy day care" occasionally, and they always manage to capture the "nonsense" that the dogs get up to - from speaking to others who live around us they say the same about their dogs there. It's crazy that I have a better window into my dogs social life than you do into your child's.
I kind of see an argument here: kids can't consent, and once the pic of them doing something stupid gets online, it will never be deleted.
There are notorious "Instagram parents" who post their kids doing embarrasing things and getting pranked. When the kids grow up, what if they don't like those pictures and the attention it gives them?
Even if you're not one of those parents, and have perfectly good intentions, you never know what goes viral. Maybe the picture of your kid gets used as a stock photo by some shady company, it gets millions of views, and now random other kids and adults are harassing them.
That being said, the blanket policy "no pictures, ever" is still ridiculous. They should at least mandate that no pictures should be posted publicly online (which may actually be legally mandated in some places). And even then, the days of viral videos like "charlie bit my finger" are over, the odds of your kid's photo posted in some random facebook group actually becoming viral are exceedingly small.
It would be funny if a social media company had the long term plan to become a legal service for the children of their users. They could sue their parents and the company would get a cut.
Not sure if I understood you correctly, but the idea of a policy that protects children from their own parents seems really far-fetched (?). From the other parents, sure; yeah, there is social media and sharing will happen. But when exactly do we go from “a person shared a photo with me in the background in a pose I didn’t like” to “let’s preemptively stop human beings from doing something stupid by prohibiting everything”? Should we really assume that it’s more likely for someone to be shamed by another human being (because of a photo they took) than not? Or, in other words, that the probability of shaming happening is so high it deserves preemptive prohibition? I think we should assume parents are responsible and that the pictures will be a positive memory (then deal with it when it doesn’t happen) than assuming that everyone is a pervert and thus making everyone pay for that.
This is Sweden, people are constantly waiting to make a big fuss about anything that’s irrelevant. I would get yelled at and it would be very uncomfortable, at the very least.
You get a creepy feeling when a person might be a threat but you aren't sure yet. Often triggered by noticing something incongruent about the person's demeanor, appearance, or location, which suggests that they may be concealing their intent from you, for possibly malicious ends.
It's a valuable survival behavior but like most pre-crime strategies is easily confused by racism, neuro-discrimination, or other (un)conscious bigotry.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 351 ms ] threadDon't take this for granted. I suspect this behavior is actually caused by an inherent anxiety in some subset of the population. When they don't have real (and likely) dangers to worry about, they will find some kind of tiny risk and overamplify it as something to focus their anxiety on.
Removing all things dangerous from the environment will only serve to amplify their tendency to do so. A mum in a high risk high crime neighbourhood is probably more likely to let her kids roam free (and less worried) than mums in upper-middle-class neighbourhoods where there is virtually zero crime.
My hypothesis is that the solution is to let children experience activities that are moderately dangerous (ideally through risk of pain, minor injury or some social stress, with risk of death or permanent injury kept minimal). This helps (I think) callibrate their ability to estimate risk as they grow up.
This would allow them to ignore imaginary risks like the one discussed here, and may help them identify situations that come with real danger.
Say you have 10 parents that let their kids play outside. No one has a problem with this until an 11th parent shows up and it mortified, think the kids will all get hurt if they are allowed to be outside like this.
That parent makes a stink, take it to the city council, and a rule is put in place that you can't let your kids go outside without supervision. The folks making the rules think to themselves "well we had to act, there was such an outcry". Meanwhile the outcry is really just the outsized screams of one parent, and you've just screwed the other 10 parents.
I think it's related to trauma fetishization combined with child worship.
Trauma fetishization: The person who is most traumatized by a thing should be the one who dictates policy about that thing. People who have lost children qualify, and we literally name the laws after their dead children.
Child worship: Children are without trauma, and therefore without neurosis. When you traumatize them or through inaction allow them to be traumatized, you have created neurosis, which is the source of all problems in society.
My internal response: Okay? You're asking everyone to change a good-faith saying because it triggered a bad memory for you? Get over it.
Then of course once the rules change they will pump up how ridiculous they are.
People think they can win, but they are really just fueling the media.
It was a comedy music video about council workers (I wish it was still on YouTube, unfortunately I didn’t log into the account for a few years, and the channel seems to have been automatically terminated and I couldn’t find any way to restore it). The current affairs show had obviously tried to create some controversy that workers might be offended, and they interviewed a bunch, literally asking multiple questions to try and get them to say something negative, but they all loved it and thought it was funny. They even got an interview with the mayor and he liked it.
But they were still pushing the line. The piece ended with “but at least this time, no one was offended”. It was hilarious just the extent they were trying to manufacture controversy and drama from literally nothing, and how much they failed but still tried to push it! It was so bizarre, absolutely nothing about our song was mean spirited!
Sometimes it even gets just a little annoying - how come my youngest sibling gets to do things at a much younger age then I was allowed to? :)
You're right, in that it's not that you care any less about your later kids, but you tend to be more pragmatic about child rearing. Better at recognizing the important events and problems, while shrugging off and ignoring the trivial stuff. You learn that you don't need to worry about a kid eating a crayon, and you recognize that certain pain cries mean "I'm not really hurt." You realize that sometimes the best thing you can do for a kid is ignore them and let them figure stuff out themselves.
Its quite possible that increased organized sports and after school activities (particularly robotics, math, computer science) could actually improve the capabilities of society as compared to just leaving the kids unattended after school.
"Think of the children" is the main weapon politics have to push regulations and more control. It is important that everybody thinks that kids are in danger at all time otherwise it would stop working.
I agree that kidnapping is probably at an all-time low, but it's an unbelievable claim that it's all "family members during a nasty divorce or things like that." I personally know a family who's kid was kidnapped (briefly) by a non-family member.
> "Think of the children" is the main weapon politics have to push regulations and more control. It is important that everybody thinks that kids are in danger at all time otherwise it would stop working.
That's not what's going on here. It's a cultural issue. You've got a longstanding issue with crime, especially particularly "worst fear"-type crime, getting disproportionate attention in the media, creating false impressions and seeds for fear-fantasies. Now, added to that is new cultural obsession with abuse and victim-hood; and the idea of completely stamping that out is possible, and it should be achieved whatever the cost.
You might have a politicians exploiting this cultural issue to accomplish other things, but they certainly didn't create the phenomenon of hyper-vigalent school paraprofessionals.
Sorry to read that, but it's still a statistically small percent that happens to. One can say "but even one is too much", and I appreciate the sentiment, but optimizing for the .1% isn't always a good path.
> they certainly didn't create the phenomenon of hyper-vigalent school paraprofessionals.
"they" probably contributed to the culture that produced the current school paraprofessionals.
EDIT: Some interesting numbers at https://www.missingkids.org/theissues/nonfamily - of abductions reported to them, 1% are by non-family members, meaning... 99% of reported cases (to their org) are by family members. That may not line up with 'law enforcement' numbers exactly - there's not a clear indication as to what gets reported to them. But the ~1% matches up with other numbers I've seen in the past on missing children. It's almost always a family member or someone known to the child.
>> they certainly didn't create the phenomenon of hyper-vigalent school paraprofessionals.
> "they" probably contributed to the culture that produced the current school paraprofessionals.
The point I'm making is that it's not politicians who are driving this. They certainly participate, but they're responding to the incentives and concerns of their constituents. "Think of the children" implies they consciously created this and/or are the main drivers, which is false.
The media has an incentive to produce emotion inducing content and politician will naturally leverage those emotions because American politics are pure pathos.
If you cannot see how that leads to gloom and doom oriented media and politicians that lean on eschatological themes, you aren’t woke.
> The media has an incentive to produce emotion inducing content and politician will naturally leverage those emotions because American politics are pure pathos.
Yeah, that's true, but it doesn't contradict my point. This is a hard problem, because there isn't some malevolent agent acting consciously at the center of it. It's a bunch of different people acting naturally and responding to their environment and incentives.
This sibling comment probably has it part right (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31355482). The true cause of this overprotective hypervigilance is probably weakened communities, which itself is most likely an unintended side effect of a bunch of different things.
I think that's partly correct. I think the problem is due to weakened communities, but I don't think anyone, ever will think "I am OK if my kid is kidnapped b/c free range kids are good." If the community was stronger, people with more likely think things like "I am OK with my kind being free range b/c I trust the community not to kidnap and abuse them."
The story is crazy and scary and disturbed, so of COURSE it is going to be shared and people are going to remember it. The details get seared into your memory. It is a nightmare scenario.
The same day that happened, in the US ~90 people were killed in car accidents and ~550 kids were kidnapped by a family member. Those events won't be seared in our mind, though.
Also, many Americans live in HOA communities with regulations that make Switzerland look like libertarian utopia.
However, this only applies to issued ammo (and IIRC the identical govt-subsidized stuff you buy at the range). You can still store your own ammo just fine. Most of those in US who saw that story didn't understand this distinction and believed that it applies to all ammo storage at home. Which is how we got all those memes about Swiss being "heavily regulated" in that regard unlike US.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-28/in-japan-...
Personally, I believe there is a compounding net good for society allowing children a decent amount of independence at a young age. Japan is certainly different to many other countries in terms of public safety, but I don't believe the outside world is the awful, scary, dangerous place the media constantly paints it out to be. It breaks my heart that I rarely see children playing outside in the streets anymore in the UK, when my youth in the 80s was basically spent largely outside without adult supervision.
Loitering at or near a school is a misdemeanor that is punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 court fine. If the defendant is a person who is required to register as a sex offender under California Penal Code Section 290 PC, the maximum fine amount on a first conviction for loitering at or around a school increases to $2,000. If the defendant is required to register as a sex offender and has a previous conviction under California Penal Code Section 653b PC, he or she must serve a minimum of 10 days in jail. And if the defendant is required to register as a sex offender and has two or more prior convictions for loitering in or around a school, that person must serve a minimum of 90 days in jail custody.
Police have a wide range of latitude to determine that a situation is an emergency and can do a number of things to prevent the emergency from getting worse. Things have changed significantly now that many police are required to wear recording devices- it's now clear that some police abuse their authority.
They also shan't use the word "shan't".
The last time I heard "shan't" spoken was by a leprechaun some twenty-odd St. Patrick's Days ago.
And there's no "right" way to act in those situations. Charles Kinsey got shot, lying on the ground with his empty hands on the air, because the police were afraid when they responded to a complaint. The shooter kept his job, retired, and got 100 hours of community service and had to write a letter of apology.
That being said, there are lots of crimes which could start with loitering outside a school, even if the locality doesn't have a law specifically against loitering in front of schools (which many do), loitering with intent to commit a crime is against the law, and the police only need "probable cause" to arrest you. "Looked suspicious and refused to move on when asked" could very well be enough to establish probable cause.
"5. Loiters or remains in or about school grounds, a college or university building or grounds or a children's overnight camp as defined in section one thousand three hundred ninety-two of the public health law or a summer day camp as defined in section one thousand three hundred ninety-two of the public health law, or loiters, remains in or enters a school bus as defined in section one hundred forty-two of the vehicle and traffic law, not having any reason or relationship involving custody of or responsibility for a pupil or student, or any other specific, legitimate reason for being there, and not having written permission from anyone authorized to grant the same or loiters or remains in or about such children's overnight camp or summer day camp in violation of conspicuously posted rules or regulations governing entry and use thereof; or"
The school doesn't have that, but in california "loitering near a school" is illegal and you can go to jail. Even so, how you act in the situation determines the outcome. You have several options, including arguing with the school staff (guaranteed police visit), arguing with the police (likely will make the police less likely to sympathize even if you're not doing something illegal), behaving suspiciously (IE, not making eye contact, not following direct orders from cops, slumping, wearing clothes that cover your face, being a member of a minority that cops believe are prone to being criminal) will get you beaten up, arrested, sent to jail, etc.
How you act in public situations makes all the difference. For example, you could set up in front of the school with a protest sign that says ("Fund police and schools"), you're not going to get the police called on you.
I definitely sympathize with the author. As a male, I would expect an even stronger reaction to hanging around watching kids with no clear intent. As others have pointed out, even if you're not committing a crime you can be in for an unpleasant response. It's sad that there are creeps out there. It's sad that as a result, certain innocent behaviors make others nervous (rationally or irrationally). It also gives me a small taste of what it's like to be judged by my category/appearance.
[1]https://www.losangelescriminallawyer.pro/california-penal-co...
It does appear to matter in the law, and the day you show up in court (if you're foolish/stubborn enough to test it).
I tried to keep myself clean, but even on my poorly groomed days people just assumed I was some random neighbor taking a walk and moved on without suspicion. Most people don't want to talk to their neighbors so if you look friendly they will avoid you.
This story sound either exaggerated, misrepresented, or possibly wholly made up. Not that it is that hard for me to believe in overeager security at a school, but it is just a little bit too convenient an incident for somebody with such a large preexisting interest in the subject. I would suspect that she was looking for a confrontation, even though she claims to not be confrontational.
Even though I live literally next door and standing in my yard, I can see kids playing, I am exceptionally cautious. In particular, I introduced myself to the staff (they park in front of my house every day) so they knew who I was, smiled and made direct eye contact, and acted in a non-aggressive way. This greatly improved my ability to move about my yard without suspicion. They never did unlock the front gate, though. Security through theatre.
I've lived here for >25 years and am often outside my building smoking cigarettes(!). The "play area" for the kids is on the other side of my (and one other, total ~100 feet distance) building and classes are brought in and out most of the day.
No one has ever even looked at me (AFAIK) as a potential threat, and no one (school staff, parents or police) has ever asked me to "move along," or wanted to know why I was hanging around next to a school.
And living in NYC, it's not like folks will recognize me as one of the people who live in one of the 20 apartments in my building either.
In fact, I've only had positive interactions with school-related adults despite the "suspicious" behavior I display as an adult male "hanging around" an elementary/middle school "watching" the kids.
I can't say whether my experience is more common than that of TFA's author.
I do note that many parents (not that it's a bad thing necessarily) drop off/pick up their kids at school (this is NYC, so mostly not in cars, but to walk them home/wherever they need to go) at ages (8+) when I (and most of my classmates) walked to/from school (my elementary school and and this one are less than a mile apart, but 40+ years distance in time) all by ourselves with no issues.
In fact, we'd usually just go straight out to the park and play until dark, then go home.
Back then (mid-late 1970s), NYC was much more dangerous too.
As such, it seems to me that these changes are less about "keeping kids safe" and more about "security theater" to appease helicopter parents.
I could be wrong, but it seems like that's the most likely driver.
Tell me more about your mind reading technology
You're not allowed to use a playground unless you're with a child (new york): https://c2.staticflickr.com/2/1128/705238326_dd2bad6ea5_b.jp...
There's plenty of stories of men being yelled at for taking pictures of their own kids, e.g. https://www.arlnow.com/2022/04/13/acpd-woman-pepper-sprayed-...
British Airways wont seat an unaccompanied minor next to a man traveling alone: https://www.bbc.com/news/10401416
If you look like a dude, and are relatively near children, you're a suspect.
It’s a very convenient anecdote to have happened to someone who just happens to have a barrow to push in that exact direction.
My era? Zero tolerance for mean words. I got suspended 1 day because I told people I got a highlighter. They thought I said lighter and tattled on me. Teachers never found the lighter but I was suspended no less. I got suspended once because a friend of mine was planning to come to my house after school. Asked me to carry his bag. Unbeknowst to me he was running off to try to get into a fight off school premises. Never actually got into a fight. But I was suspended for zero tolerance helping/assisting a fight.
Now we are in the era where schools have metal detectors, police on staff and actively walking around in the schools, and harassing people over literally nothing.
It's interesting to me. Obviously lots of science have determined all of this was bad. https://supportiveschooldiscipline.org/zero-tolerance-policy
But instead of admitting there was a mistake... they just doubled down on bad policies? Idiots.
The problem is that no-one would get away with saying, "maybe we don't need the fence anymore, it separates children from the community". "Maybe we don't need to repair the metal detector when it breaks" etc. Sad really. The idea that somehow ID cards are a proportionate measure for some kind of security at a high school is very worrying.
The saying goes though, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
We proactively need to defund the road to hell.
So the context of that kid, he learnt that stuff at home. His parents were famous for calling the police and city on their neighbours. The peak of it was July 1st, people were firing off fireworks. They called the police to say someone was shooting/bombing their house. The police obviously show up in force big time. They closed blocks of the neighbourhood only to later find out they had a history of false police reports. False firefighter stuff saying open pit fires of their neighbours were illegal. etc.
After the tattle involving me. Me and my friend were taken aside and were very explicitly explained to what we should do. This is our fathers and teachers in the same room. They knew we would want to fight but they said no, you simply never talk or be near that kid again. Complete social ostracizing, never touch the kid. Except after we started doing that... we'd be playing foot hockey and if he'd ask to join, we'd immediately stop playing and say we were done and walk away from him. A few times he ran to steal our tennis ball and demand to be included. The whole class got in on it. Literally nobody would talk to him or talk near him.
My brother in a younger grade did the same knowing he might tattle on them. Older grades did the same. After a couple weeks of literally no one talking to him, he would spend recess standing next to the teacher. Then he disappeared for a couple weeks. He ended up in the hospital with what I would expect to be psychiatric issues. Can you imagine being socially isolated in elementary school?
When he got back? We were all evil and should be punished blah blah. His new job was to ensure the teachers knew about every infraction anyone did. He doubled down on it, didn't work out when he went after a 2 grades older bully and got quite injured. Nothing major, serious bruising. The teachers were even hesitant to help him. Then one day he comes up to me like first thing in the morning saying his parents want me and my friend to come to his house. I was like hell to the no.
Then few days later I didnt even do anything wrong and teacher demanded us and our parents be at the school for a meeting. We were expecting suspension but ended up they wanted to make peace. His parents were very concerned but were so angry when I explained what happened. I refused to agree to any peace, that I had done nothing wrong. Which got most of the room chuckling... but after that day he sure stopped his tattling.
More on topic, you'd expect false reports of threats to children to be evenly distributed across the population. If so, that's a mass media issue. If the reports come repeatedly from just a few people, it's those people whose behavior needs correction.
I'm probably the worst. Definite shame on me.
Statistics may indicate greatest risk is people you know, but that's an average. Ultimately it's best to take reasonable precautions and teach kids what behavior to watch for, healthy boundaries, and how to react.
Yeah, maybe shoo her away from the playground.
> And so I was shooed along, collateral damage in the quest to wrap every child in a bubble of perfect safety. Now I sit at my computer, wondering: What would it take to give every one of them a nice, sharp pin?
Obviously the pin is to pop the confining bubble "every child" has been placed in, thus improving their lives. She follows up:
> (Though some authority would no doubt accuse me of distributing weapons to children)
This doesn't comprise 100% of our experience of life, but it definitely impacts my children's freedoms and my friends have conveyed similar experiences. A person wistfully contemplating their own childhood experience is different than "watching children for recreation" and the punishment thereof is a symptom of a greater problem with (U.S.) society.
I know you want to roll your eyes at the middle-aged woman as being a hand-wringing looky-loo, but maybe that's just what the social safety net that makes free range kids a possibility looks like.
My elementary school-age kids walk to school. They know they might get approached by an adult asking where they live; they know how to answer: "I live up the street. No, I don't need help." NBD.
A counter example, I pulled over on my drive home from work to ask a five year old in pajamas wandering the streets near dark what he was doing out. I walked him home. Mom was horrified to realize the little dude had wandered out of the house.
One final thought on the original article, I think the author is willfully ignoring the banal reality of the situation to make their point. I'm sure the school representative wanted to say, "Listen lady, I've got 30 kids I need to monitor at recess and while you're probably a nice person you're another variable I need to keep in the corner of my eye. Take a walk."
Don't you guys (in the US) still have child beauty pageants?
America has school shootings regularly. Children have to perform regular active shooter drills in American schools. Like a fire drill.
There are also significant pressures put on a shrinking number of underpaid teachers and staff to care for an increasing number of children. More kids being cared for by fewer adults.
With this mindset why would school staff not err on the side of caution and ask an unknown person to move along?
It's a sad state of affairs, but it is not the fault of the teacher or school staff that America got here.
Edit: spelling
Because instilling this type of paranoia in children is likely to cause more harm to the mental health of their generation (in total), than those very few bad events that this behavior stops?
Also, it seems to me that this has been going on for a generation already, as more and more young adults are now hyper-fragile, calling for authoritarian responses to anything that scares them. The end result may very well be that those children will place a "strong leader" in power when they grow up, someone like Putin or Chavez.
Nobody gets a finger pointed at them for the slow institutionalization of instilling paranoia in children.
But have it come out that you saw the stranger who shot up the school and didn't call security...?
It's pure CYA.
Get out of your filter bubble. This isn't true anywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
Oh fun, I can do gymnastics with these numbers too. Let's go ahead and switch "people" for "mammals".
Only 1 incident per year, per 18 billion mammals.
Leading Causes of Death among Children and Adolescents in the United States, 1999 through 2020.: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761
Maybe it is not 'regular' if you find a good criteria so that it cannot be classified as 'regular', but it is shokingly often, also leading case now, and a strong upward trend while all else stagnates or goes down (except overdose and poisoning, which also increases recently)
Death is still a number when it's close to you. Just because it's close to you doesn't make it common. If nobody got rare forms of cancer we wouldn't have those rare forms of cancer but just because those people have families who (presumably) care doesn't mean those rare cancers should be considered big problems. You might get away with running a village on emotion like that but you need to run a country by the numbers.
If you read closely, you might notice that I wasn't directly impacted by it. I'm an empathetic person, and I noticed how it impacted teachers, students, and school policies. It was awful, for them. The only direct impact on my life was the annoyance of elevated security.
Sometimes people have feelings. You may not agree but I don’t think they need to be mocked. You just mocked my own trauma. Good for you.
Please talk to a therapist about your trauma. The internet is not kind.
Schools are almost the safest place people ever are. People are in far more danger from the commute to and from school than from anything within the school. The odds of getting killed by a school shooting are far lower than the odds of being struck by lightning, and multiple orders of magnitude lower than being murdered by your parents.
(And I'm going to trust Wikipedia more than a site running scam ads for "Liberals Are Furious That Trump Supporters Get This Trump Wrist Watch For Free!"…)
When it's social attitudes, there is no Europe east of the Oder.
When it's about effective government, half the nations on the Mediterranean don't count.
When it's about nice infrastructure only the rich western and northern bits are "Europe".
Nobody is fooled by these dishonest comparisons anymore than they would be fooled by a definition of the US that excludes the flyover states or the Detroits and Baltimores.
>When it's about effective government, half the nations on the Mediterranean don't count.
I'm from Spain, you don't know shit.
First, Spain it's highly decentralized. The North, the South, the Mediterranean, the Castilles, Madrid and the two archipelagos have NOTHING to do with each other. Think of Spain as "the United Autonomous Contuies of Spain", something akin to USA-lite.
The rough mountainous surface of Spain makes the provinces VERY diverse from each other, from freezing cold winters, chilly rains with more rain than the UK (no kidding again) to plain deserts, tundras, rough coasts, sunny coasts, wheat fields and so on.
Don't let me start on culture, we still have a working pre-Roman language there. The French in the South-West too.
The Basque Country, Valencia, Catalonia and Madrid have a better life on average than the US by large. We the Basques have been trading with the UK since... the Industrial Revolution. And before that, we have been casting iron since the fucking ROMANS.
Oh, yes, what a shithole do we live. For sure /s. Ask Mondragón or Zamudio for IT HQs for a LOT of companies on how bad are they doing.
The Castilles are doing ok but these are regions with a HIGHLY sparse and separated population, where you have less people per squared km than Lapland, so they have a good excuse to not being as developed (overall) as Madrid or Barcelona. Yet, they aren't a 3r would country by no means.
Are you gonna to lecture us in which supposed shithole do we live? Because you would be chastened by the experience.
Oh, and on "the Northern European Countries", yes, oh, wow, so developed, so rich, so powerful, yet they fucked around with the Covid like hell by being careless idiots and yet they called us lazy fucks and such when we had one of the most STRICT lockdowns in Europe.
The irony.
Hollywood and the stereotypes did a great damage on the Southern Europe thanks to that Anglo-Saxon malice and inferiority complex against the Roman legacy.
Let me tell you something, you, the so "superior race" against us, the inferior and drunkard South Europeans: at least we don't stay beer-roasted at work like a lot of places in Germany. We did our best, and yes, we have corruption, but they have too and worse, they avoid to shout out their crap publicly as if nothing happened.
One day I'll post what the shithole it's Iceland on some of the energy and industry policies overseas and you'll shit bricks on the so-called "North European Efficiency".
All those other things are bad, but stats that include them can be misleading if you've got the wrong idea about what they're counting as a "school shooting".
Counting suicides as gun violence is convenient for a narrative, because areas with friendlier gun laws, and thus, more guns per capita, tend to have more suicides by gun. It's a common hack move to plot those two numbers and show a correlation.
It really is a problem that is blown up out of all proportion to the actual threat. The threat is there, sure; but a kid in US is more likely to be killed in a car accident on their way to school, than by an armed spree killer in that school. Those active shooter drills, in particular, save some lives, but they traumatize several orders of magnitude more. The notion that you have to be wary of a stranger who isn't even on school grounds for this reason is absurd.
sigh
It also still remains true that it's a very minor threat compared to many others that we face in our day-to-day lives. I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything about it. I'm saying that we should always be aware of the true scope of the problem, and prioritize various measures accordingly.
I suspect that the single biggest policy change that would drastically improve matters is universal healthcare, and particularly prophylactic treatment of mental health. It would also solve a lot of other problems. "Active shooter drills", on the other hand, create mental health problems without solving anything.
They live about 1.5 miles from the eatery. She would let her 9 year old walk home sometimes in good weather - low crime with actual tree-lined suburban streets. Police apparently threatened her over that as well - that's somehow endangering the child too much, and she might be charged with some misdemeanor.
I don't get it. Really. As someone who grew up in the 70s/80s... I can't say 'nothing bad ever happened'. Obviously it did. But the pendulum has swung far too much the other way now.
Re 'candy shop' - it was about 400 feet from the restaurant.
I take it's not a "daycare is a cash only business and cops know what real crime looks like" type place.
I live in NYC and when my son was a 9-year old I would let him play out at the park and on the sidewalk. I had some anxiety about it at times but never thought there would be any legal trouble from letting him be a 9-year old.
This is New York's, for example:
> 1. He or she knowingly acts in a manner likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child less than seventeen years old or directs or authorizes such child to engage in an occupation involving a substantial risk of danger to his or her life or health; or
Whether something is "likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child" is fairly subjective, since it's a balance of odds.
> But also maybe kids just enjoy different things nowadays
I think this may be true, but also I think parents might find it easier to let their kid play video games in their room where they think they are safe compared to letting them roam around unsupervised. I had friends whose parents thought we were bad kids because we wouldn't know where would go that day, so when they asked "where are you going" and we said "idk, to the creek or pizza or wherever we find interesting" they would think we were up to no good since we didn't have a plan.
The funny thing is back then there were no sidewalks or shoulders at all, and kids biked everywhere until old and lucky enough to drive. Now, there are extensive sidewalks on all the main roads, but the only people using them are middle aged dog walkers.
Sadly never crossed my mind to figure out what time the lights turned on, and expand my radius further.
Osama may be dead, but the erosion of rights that US has seen because of 9/11 did strike a big blow to US democracy and he partly achieved his goals.
I could totally see the trend being accelerated by a lot of things. Sure, 9/11, is one possible trigger, but it could also be news sources getting better at optimizing for sensational takes and - more recently - the common person using the internet/social media to amplify troublesome anecdotes to the point where they seem like pervasive trends.
Which, of course, describes this entire thread of discussion kicked off on one person’s anecdote…
America lives in constant fear of everything and it only seems to be getting worse.
We said we were just inspecting the house, and would be gone in ten minutes, but he just kept repeating that we were breaking the rules, and needed to move our car over.
The realtor looked at us and said "ok, you're not interested in this place, right?" "Nope".
Retired carpetbaggers with nothing to do and no check-and-balance to their behavior. Ever since that fateful day I’ve pondered just how to setup an HOA to counter such behavior.
I guess the problem with HOAs is they empower these sorts of people with authority.
It's a safe neighborhood and my first instinct was, "Why don't those parents monitor their children" but then I thought for a minute and remembered my own childhood where me and my brothers would walk to the park, look for worms, ride our bikes, go on adventures.
Those kids are welcome to look for bugs and lizards now, everyone keeps an eye out for them, one fell and scrapped his knee and was crying outside our house so I went to check on him and carried him back to his house to get cleaned up. My wife is worried we will get sued at some point if they get injured on our property, but I guess that's the risk I'll have to take so that 2 kids can just play outside and have fun.
1) If a little black boy or girl came along I felt fine fixing their bicycle or whatever.
2) If a poor looking white kid I felt fine that their parents wouldn't accuse me of some bullshit if they were on my property or whatever.
3) Middle class or better seeming white kids. No fucking chance in hell. Won't talk to them. Won't willingly let them on my property. Won't engage or look at them. Scared to hell parents will accuse me of something or sue.
From a cold calculating standpoint, engaging an affluent adult can come with significant upsides: jobs, access to political power, commerce, international interface, mobility. An affluent adult can fuck you in a lot of ways, but you can also trade with them in ways that can really help you.
On the other hand, the relationship with children is asymmetric. A poor / minority child isn't going to offer you anything (from a selfish viewpoint), but neither is an affluent one. However an affluent family can absolutely crush you if they misinterpret some engagement with their children. The poor / minority family may be less likely to have the power to make a misunderstanding turn into a significant legal hassle for you. Therefore the calculus for engaging an affluent child look pretty bad, while that of engaging a poor child look more like neutral.
For adults I find it more of a wash, with the upsides typically higher than the downsides for engaging most any sane adult.
I'm well aware of the benefits of having people with resources on good terms with me.
Lets assume poors/minorities are equally as likely as anyone else to accuse you of something improperly (although that's probably a poor assumption, as those of higher social class tend to have better access or confidence to access formal government systems, especially when you consider things like illegal immigrants probably won't approach police under any conditions).
Now imagine thye go to police, or to the court. Which parents do you think garners the best odds and rapport with the legal and enforcement systems in the US:
1) The black factory workers
2) White single mom in the trailer park.
3) White business owner of the local dentist office.
The legal system discriminates. Then I pick to minimize my chances of being the victim of a discriminating legal system. Sadly there's not much chance the cops are going to believe the black factory worker or trailer park mom in the place I lived, false accusation or no. Hell in that same city they shoot black guys just for having a CCW and telling the cops they're legally carrying. I simply had nothing to worry about.
The axiom that the rich tend to get away with more in the US is sadly a true one. The other end of that is that the rich also tend to be able to garner much more social capital to pursue claims against you, whether they are true or not. My fear is not so much the false claims alone (which can come from anyone of any race/class), but people who may make a false claim and also be on the upper end of the spectrum of holder of social capital to actually execute that claim.
My risk tolerance being what it is, I could choose to ignore ALL children and thus not discriminate. Instead I choose to discriminate and will engage children if I think that someone who makes some bogus claim won't be taken seriously by the justice system. If the justice system / police treated poor blacks as well as affluent whites, I would choose to not engage children at all ever. If this makes me a bad person, so be it, but it's a measured response to the sad realities we live in.
Not only are there no consequences, but the system is set up to ensure that one can make any accusation they like, that CPS will be administratively required to investigate it, and that the pain will always be asymmetric. Also CPS investigations typically aren't 'criminal' investigations so it's doubtful you could argue that any false accusations as 'falsely reporting a crime.' You may be told that it's not a criminal but child welfare case.
It's practically the perfect system for a vindictive neighbor / ex-spouse / whatever.
But it just goes back to the same question: has the world gotten more dangerous or are we just more aware of dangers that were always there?
This is the safest period in human history, more so if you live in a high income country.
But according to my anthropology professors, these societies tend to have very high death rates. For men, the lifetime risk of being murdered or killed in intergroup fighting runs about 10 to 20%.
So there's a real possibility that the modern era is very safe by historical standards.
That makes being born in western Russia in 1905 look like a peaceful life
Crimes of passion should also be exempted from the general murder rates.
Car drivers kill thousands of people walking on the street every year. Kidnappers don’t.
"Stranger" kidnappings are exceedingly rare. The majority of Amber Alerts occur due to custodial disputes between divorced parents when one parent takes the kid when they are not supposed to[1].
> Children (and parents) are often conditioned to be wary of strangers. However, in reality, only a small fraction of child abduction cases – around 0.1 percent – involve kidnappings by strangers or slight acquaintances.
[1] https://www.protection1.com/amber-alerts/
Don't know if it's actually true, but it's worth examining.
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2021/11/3/hld-surge-in-us...
The homicide rate in 2021 was almost half of the homicide rate in the early 1990s.
Like sending your kid to the shop. There's also the fact that we don't need to do that anymore. Very often there's a late (or all) night shop open not too far away. So the urgency is just not there.
Does the store owner have a license for child care? Did she discuss child care with them? Was she expecting her kid to sit at a candy store and do homework for an hour absent an agreement with the owner for child care?
Seems like pawning her kids off on unwilling people who have no responsibility for them.
Read.
Maybe think along with reading
No, it seems like someone (read: you) making a lot of assumptions and jumping to conclusions.
Edit: Oh man, the absolute irony of you telling someone to "think" further down in this thread...
My counterintuitive mildly-offensive party conversation starter is that I think that the ideal number for childhood deaths by misadventure or accident is a balance between protecting children from stupid accidents and making children stupid and timid by restricting them from doing anything that could result in an accident. If kids are getting into too few fatal accidents, protections for children should be reduced until we get the numbers back up.
But if you try to make that argument on HN, a bunch of people will yell at you about how Boeing and the FAA are evil for putting cost savings over safety.
You can, but it's not a fair comparison. 99.9% of deaths of railroad transport is people killed while crossing rails - e.g. pedestrians.
If you consider rail passengers only, it is far lower than airlines and cars, something on the scale of 2-3 people/year.
Airplanes are cheating in the sense that there are no pedestrians in the air to collide with.
0: https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/air-safety-institut...
Interesting stat.
"you don't need fuel for the descent though"
If airliners were only as safe as walking, nobody would use them, because you'd expect to have at least a minor accident (like a sprained ankle) when walking 2000 miles. A similar argument can be made for cars and trains (just a magnitude less distance per trip and consequently a smaller chance of injury).
It's a novel idea in terms of emissions avoidance, though: couple the externalities to personal risk.
Frankly, these precautions exist for a reason, and it is because many many people died in the early days of rail. Many people who work in rail, particularly in ops/sigs/assurance are proud of how safe rail transport now is.
(I work in Engineering Assurance on rail infrastructure projects).
I was thinking about your comment and one way to save considerable infrastructure costs is more level crossing and less overpasses/bridges, but train vs pedestrian or train vs car are common and messy. Plus level crossings wreck traffic flow on the surrounding road network.
That sounds like a good case against supervising children at all, but I don't believe it's true.
That is accepted that pedestrians need to behave so that cars can drive around at relatively high speeds in very public and shared spaces is an unbelievable accomplishment by the automobile industry.
I guess it's similar with car noise. People would go nuts if everybody was, I don't know, humming all the time outside. But car noises are normal.
edit: shouldn't party conversation be a little spicy? At least I'm not talking about party politics, sports events, or television shows. Or the weather, or how we all individually got to the party.
(And I assume you’re not advocating dropping either of those.)
. Wow, I'm the opposite. I don't mind discussing a spicy topic, but only if the person actually gives a shit about it. I have no desire to be trolled IRL by someone wanting to be edgy. If someone is serious and polite about it, I'll discuss any topic.
I wanted to say I don’t like discussing spicy topics with people who give too much shit and are inflexible because at that point discussion can turn personal or can feel like them venting.
Although I allow friends to vent inflexibly. But that's a different type of conversation done for their benefit.
Things really were better before them. (Said as part of the last generation to experience that world)
When constantly having your kid reachable was impossible, no one judged parents for not doing it.
Now? All the judging.
"During its initial committee hearing, sponsoring state Rep. Mary Young, D-Greeley, said allegations of neglect or lack of supervision have been on the rise in Colorado, even as the number of substantiated cases are dropping. In 2019, there were 3,854 allegations of lack of supervision; 82%, or 3,169, were unfounded, she said."
[0] https://www.denverpost.com/2022/03/31/colorado-reasonable-in...
edit: more context to quote
Some social norms have clearly disintegrated, but now there is a law to patch it up.
The reasons why the social norm disintegrated in the first place remain unresolved.
*compulsively scratches neck*
"can we get some of that sanity"
https://reason.com/2021/04/29/reasonable-childhood-independe...
Our kid bikes to and from school each way, a little over a mile away. She is always hanging out with other neighborhood kids, going to the pool or park, and nobody has called the cops yet thankfully.
I slept there overnight and walked back the next day...
All is well that ends well...
+highly recommended, beautiful area and very nice campings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98
At this point I'm decided that if I have children, I will not raise them in the U.S. Maybe a few cities are amenable to how I would like to raise children, like Cambridge, MA. But I would like for them to grow up in a healthy, independent environment.
The next year we moved and my walk home was a bit longer, my grandfather was home which was nice since I didn't come home to an empty house. I'm not sure if it was that year, or a year or two later, but I was allowed to basically bike wherever I wanted in town as long as I didn't go past some pre-defined boundaries. Just doing some math on that now it's roughly 1.5 miles in any direction and I mostly followed that restriction. The only rule was that I had to be home before the streetlights came on.
I didn't have a cell phone. I didn't have any way to call the police if someone tried to abduct me.
By all statistical crime measures children are safer today than they were when I was a kid.
Today you're able to give your child a device which you can use to constantly GPS track them, they can call/text you or the police at any time.
And, yet, somehow we've infantilized children and removed their agency and I don't know why but I really fear for the consequences of it.
There was one time where a guy in a truck slowed down and was lagging behind us a bit. We turned down a side street and he kept following us. We were on sidewalks, so we just turned around quicker than he did and raced away. In retrospect that was legitimately scary.
In middle school, I could ride wherever I wanted. I'd ride to garage sales, buy used puzzles, then spend hours completing them at home. To think that those opportunities wouldn't be available is sad.
>And, yet, somehow we've infantilized children and removed their agency and I don't know why but I really fear for the consequences of it.
In grad school I worked with a fellow from China. At the age of 3, he would go to the nearby market to buy some groceries for the family, cook food, and hang out at home alone all day. He was shocked at the attitudes in the US.
Once a red Volvo 240 stopped and tried getting my brother to approach for some candy. I pulled him away and we went inside, because I'd heard rumours about some dude in the area trying to nab kids. I was about eight and he was six.
Because we had learned to not talk to strangers that weren't our parents or relatives or public officials like police, medics and fire crew in uniform or in uniformed vehicles. If someone stops while we're waiting for the school bus and offers to drive us home it's not OK to get in the car unless our parents had asked our teacher to tell us that one specific family member would pick us up.
Basic good upbringing, really...
second worse thing I was doing my paper route and almost mauled by a dog but a nearby neighbor convinced it to go away
ah, another time when I was 17 I was almost abducted but that's what I get for walking down an industrial road at 2am on new years alone, I was saved by the fact I had a cell phone (seeing it caused the predator to retreat)
I am extremely glad I don't have kids and super disappointed that the world has come to this.
if we're really lucky humans will stop reproducing
it won't hurt me at all
My papers were dropped off really early, and I had to be there for them - alone - around 4am. And my route was about half a mile away from my house.
I got chased by a dog a couple times. One time it bit and punctured my tire.
I flipped my bike with all the papers in it a couple of times.
Some older kids dropped by once - I was afraid they were gonna fuck with me, but instead they just asked me to scream some stuff.
And of course collecting. I got chased off by a couple dogs then too. Come to think of it, maybe I should be more afraid of dogs than people.
Eventually I got a route for the apartments that were across the street from my house. That was a much nicer experience. More money, less distance, less area to cover, and no dogs.
One counter point is cities have started adding 'danger' back into playgrounds (not actually that dangerous, more like risk in the mind of the child). So hopefully we'll see some progress.
Kids are pretty capable and most people are pretty supportive/helpful.
I was discussing that, some time ago, with a female friend (I am a male) who also loves doing street photography. We talked about how difficult it is for a man to do street photography, specially around places with a lot of kids, as you will always receive strange looks or even threats. If you're a woman taking photos? Probably a mother or mother-to-be, if you're a man? Pedophile.
I wonder if there are that many people exposing themselves to kids as the security lady said in the article. Seems like an excuse to justify the action, or something that happened once and they are overreacting to it...
Most (normal) men also know that they may be seen as a threat, and would move along quickly if asked to. (If they call security over a woman, they may call the police over a man.)
So, a black guy on 190+cm, large and muscular with a hoodie + some gang-related tatoos and a lower-class behaviour may experience it more than a petite female white upper middle class lawyer in an expensive dress suit.
No surprises here.
On the other hand, maybe it's better to be safe than sorry.
Just wondering, is it the case for college professors in the US? should they be careful not to be alone in a room with a student or is that a myth?
I’m shocked they’re allowed to be in a room alone with a single child unless they have clear visibility from the hall. My school has that and cameras.
I know a then 14-year-old guy from a game store where I’d played D&D with his mom for two years. I was 30~32 at the time.
Some people I know thought it was creepy as hell I went with his mom to see a high-school play he was in. His acting wasn’t great but we all had fun.
I don’t get it. I really don’t. The people I was with and quite a few of my friends didn’t understand that reaction either.
Plenty of teenagers need a good father figure or mentor.
As a foster and adoptive parent, I have definitely gotten some comments when I play with those of my kids that look very different from me; I could feel the tension evaporate when one of them calls me "dad" and everyone realizes the relationship. Never had the police called on me either.
I did have a 12 year old daughter get stopped by a concerned adult while bicycling through a nearby neighborhood ("where are you going" "where are your parents" &c.). That turned her off from bicycling ever since.
That's... incredibly sad. I'm sorry to hear that.
It's sad that we have to be like this, but it feels necessary, in a world seemingly full of child molesting creeps.
I slowed down and started looking through the kids, till the proctor(?) woman noticed, at which point I said my friend's kid goes to your daycare and then we found him in the group and introduced ourselves, joked around a bit with her, and I took some pics of his kid to show my friend, said goodbye, and went home.
I always found her advice extremely reasonable, but then again, I don't have children.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenore_Skenazy
And 14 years later America is now watching "Old Enough!" on Netflix.
The new religion is "safety."
https://www.bvg.de/en/tickets-tariffs/conditions-of-carriage
> Children under four years of age may only use public transportation if they are accompanied by an individual who is at least six years of age.
(edit: unfortunately not, for in the German it is more specific, "nur in Begleitung einer Person …".)
- actually navigate to the intended destination
- Communicate and find help from adults in the case of any issues
I used to live across the street from a primary school and the kids (no older than 10) would come out and smoke at recess in front of my building. Nobody batted an eye. Just yesterday I was walking behind some kids who couldn't have been older than 12 drinking and smoking, and that was in a nicer Berlin "suburb". Nobody cared.
As a personal anecdote: I grew up in NYC, and was riding the subway alone by the time I was 8 or 9. I believe there’s also around when my school gave me a free metrocard to travel on my own, and I believe that program is still in place. Most of my NYC friends had similar experiences.
I don’t think it’s healthy to raise children in this environment.
Children need to be (controlledly) exposed to the truths of the world instead of being raised like Polyannas. There is good and bad in this world and if we show them only the good, they will have very hard time as grown up adults.
He talks a lot about meeting friends after school, that the late afternoon is his (not taken up by sports or clubs like in the U.S.).
That everyone rides bikes or public transit, and it doesn't sound like there's much parental oversight (not a judgement, just my observations from our conversations).
Texas became the third state after Oklahoma and Utah to pass a free-range parenting bill [1] called the Reasonable Childhood Independence act.
So far this movement seems to be led by traditionally "conservative" states, while the most egregious abuses seem to be reported in traditionally "blue" states, like New York and California.
It'll be interesting to see if the trend continues, and how the issue influences politics.
[1] https://www.freerangekids.com/texas-goes-free-range-reasonab...
And once I was 10 and went to another school I even took a commuter train all by myself every single day.
That was very normal and everyone in my class did it to some extent.
No cop visits yet. Probably only a couple years left before they're old enough that no-one's likely to bother us about it. Hoping we make it out without trouble. So far, so good. We have had neighbors from other streets come over a couple times to "make sure we know" our kids are way off in the neighborhood, but they've not made a thing of it past that, so I think they're chill-enough and really were just wanting to make sure we were aware.
I think part of the solution is standing up to these kind of light idiocies.
If she had time, she should have just let them call the cops and been polite about wanting to just watch the kids.
Picking your battles wisely is hardly contributing yo the problem.
Had she stuck around and talked with the police, security and the childcare would have learned that the author was allowed to watch the kids.
I’m not judging her as a bad person or anything. But I think she’s part of the reason society has these behaviors. Because she’s not willing to fight stupid policies when the cost is just to wait politely.
If people were more stringent to try to help others learn right and wrong we’d be in a better place.
It’s quite possible that this security guard does think it’s illegal and wrong to watch kids. No one is willing to teach them what’s correct. If not people like the author, then who?
It's not the photos that are the problem, it's that people don't really understand or respect others' privacy in the internet age.
February before covid, I was at a college in Manchester and was pleasantly surprised when they asked us to complete consent forms on where the photos that were to be taken were going to be uploaded. I was very happy to check the "I don't consent to photos of me shared on social media", consequently they took some photos with me & some without me. No pressure to be part of the group & not be left out.
> that hasn’t been codified federally
The world is moving faster than law, I'd even go as far as to say that it almost always has been. What gets put into law has to have a common sentiment behind it first.
And not everything that's law means that's how things should be. Even in the US I think some states have the death penalty, others don't. The law does not show some absolute truth.
Your thinking is happening on a plane of law and legal enforcement: "the school can't enforce these rules, they can't stop me from taking photos, it's all legal".
Were it legal to kick a kid and the school had a rule prohibiting it, would you say the same? My thinking isn't about the law at all. It's about what I view as problematic and how I believe things should be; the sentiment that precedes law. I don't have to wait for the law to say that kicking kids shouldn't be happening.
No. Children in schools don’t have rights, the same way as prisoners don’t have rights. Public and private schools are not different in this respect. As institutions built on dominance and the implied use of force schools could not function in anything resembling a normal fashion if children had rights.
Tinker would like a word.
So in your place, knowing how brazen everyone is with privacy I'd actually be ok with this measure. It's not like you can't take photos/videos of your children and their friends (with their parents' consent) outside of school & during your time together.
Some 200 years ago photography hadn't even be invented, and only the last ~50 years has it been mainstream. Not every moment has to be recorded, relax, have fun and take a few photos so you can reminisce when older.
Then reality hit: I could get in big trouble and my benign motive would be a useless defense. I biked past, lamenting the loss of a terrific photo.
Then there’s a blog where pictures are allowed for kids where the parents pre-approved that they could upload to the blog (available to all parents).
However, yes - parents aren’t allowed to take pictures - of kids other than yours.
Enough with characterizing millenia-long human behavior as "our modern societies"!
When rare unforeseeable stuff happened they chalked up to god.
Violence was reserved for the people who genuinely screwed up.
And neither would Vicky Weaver.
Henry VIII's wives and Thomas more got murdered for political reasons. We still do that shit today, but in less quantity. We prefer to just ruin people's careers which is basically just a modern equivalent of exile.
What happened to the advisors and commanders of the Spanish Armada who's mistakes lost them a fleet? Pretty much nothing because everyone was like "welp, can't predict the weather".
My guess would be that parents are constantly taking photos and getting in the way of kids playing, or their performance, and it's to encourage parents to just enjoy their kids. This sounds like a pretty good rule to me. I'd have to guess that during their childhood your children will have multiple orders of magnitude more photos taken of them. I'd only worry memories will be lost by an overwhelming amount of media being saved about them.
But they tell me how she had a boy friend, they would spend all day together, running after one another, call their each other's name, and "talk" a lot
Also a girl friend that sit next to her at lunch, and they spend the entire meal giggling, and trying to feed each other
There are notorious "Instagram parents" who post their kids doing embarrasing things and getting pranked. When the kids grow up, what if they don't like those pictures and the attention it gives them?
Even if you're not one of those parents, and have perfectly good intentions, you never know what goes viral. Maybe the picture of your kid gets used as a stock photo by some shady company, it gets millions of views, and now random other kids and adults are harassing them.
That being said, the blanket policy "no pictures, ever" is still ridiculous. They should at least mandate that no pictures should be posted publicly online (which may actually be legally mandated in some places). And even then, the days of viral videos like "charlie bit my finger" are over, the odds of your kid's photo posted in some random facebook group actually becoming viral are exceedingly small.
What are they going to do? Kick your kid out? Call the cops? Unlikely in my part of the world, at least.
What would have happened afterwards is hard to say, but once the police get involved... well, bad things have certainly been known to happen.
It's a valuable survival behavior but like most pre-crime strategies is easily confused by racism, neuro-discrimination, or other (un)conscious bigotry.
It sounds like a thin cover for busybody neighborhood watch-type behavior. Or worse.