No autonomy except when it comes to devices and the internet. Far too many parents are either ignorant of or too lazy to set up parental controls on new phones, tablets, and computers before handing them to kids. The TikTok ban debate would have never been needed if there were basic parental awareness. They instead resort to manual snooping and device taking after the damage is done. They’re helicopter parenting the wrong areas of life.
> Far too many parents are either ignorant of or too lazy to set up parental controls on new phones, tablets, and computers before handing them to kids.
To be fair, the parental controls on modern devices feel like they were developed by a bunch of childless early 20-somethings.
Templated, reusable schedules so I don’t have to set up downtime for each kid individually. Allow overrides for holidays etc.
Apple let you press a button for ‘one more minute’ that seems impossible to disable.
Password management is horrible as a family, as is having to set up my fingerprint on all my kids’ devices to be able to help them with stuff without faff.
More generally, every time I have to set up any sort of account for my kids it’s absolute torture. Try to log in with Apple ID, can’t cos they’re a kid. Try to log in with a google account, remember Family Link doesn’t work for my normal account because it was set up for a domain, so log in as my other google account, set kid up, still doesn’t work.
Give me one place in my whole life to manage identity for my family, one that works, with permissions and downtime settings that integrate with every app and website in the world (including the half dozen each of my kids’ schools require us to use). I’ll pay loads of money for this.
The ability to make all content opt-in instead of opt-out would get you 90% of the way there. Very few services that I know of offer this. Most of them offer gating by age range into all content the service considers appropriate for that age, and most allow you to block specific content as well, but all I really want for my young kids is to know exactly what content is available to them because I have added it specifically.
Beyond that, there are some nice things you could do like a workflow for a kid to request new content and a parent to review and approve/deny it. But that's definitely a nice-to-have.
This. There is some fantastic stuff for kids on YouTube (most of it though is actually made for adults and is not available on YouTube kids). However, there is a tremendous amount of trash, and the recommender loves it. I wish I could add a bunch of good channels and let the kids pick their own content, but only from that list.
Streaming services in particular are driving me crazy. They don't have parental controls. Not really. You can make a kids account or whatever but you can't dictate what can or can't be seen.
I'm at a point with streaming services -- and this stems from the 24/7, 365 on-demand access we have to television and movies today that was not reality when I was a child -- where I'm ready to cancel everything and curate my our experience for myself and my kids with a NAS and torrents.
edit/ So I check Netflix to see what they offer. Viewing restrictions limits content based on parental guidelines ratings. That's really it. It's like someone else commented, it's as if these places are staffed by people who don't have children.
I had to look that up on the web recently, too. To remove some shows that have recently seen heavy rotation, or are otherwise too annoying for the parents.
I see. I don't have kids but from what friends have told me, something like "only allow Peppa Pig and Sesame Street" sounds kinda useful. Guess it depends on the age.
For us, it's the opposite. We specifically want to ban Peppa Pig, because that piglet is damn annoying to listen to (and mean, especially to her dad). Same goes for Cocomelon.
Youtube Kids lets you set a whitelist, but I found that too much of a hassle. I don't mind if the toddler finds new things to watch. But she's also under light supervision when using the phone. (Ie in the same room, but not being constantly hovered over.)
Parental control software is counterproductive, and will generally only lead to them trying to outsmart you, which is a bad precedent. If you really want to keep your kids safe online, the most important thing to do is establish trust and understanding with them that the boundaries you set are important and reasonable. You need to respect them as people, and they need to understand and appreciate why you set the limits that you do.
On top of that, you need to supervise them, and even then, they should not be allowed to use social media, which ought to be 18+ anyways.
I understand this is all a lot to ask in our society. There is no "good" answer to this problem. But we should all try to do the best we can, and not forget that big tech puts hundreds of millions, if not billions, into making social media as addictive as possible. I'd say we're at a point where it's sensible to conclude it's now more addictive and harmful than tobacco, though our society has yet to come to terms with this fact. Even if we put a stop to it now (we won't), our current social media infrastructure will likely haunt us for centuries.
What's sad is parents today all grew up with the internet. They should know how children should interact with it.
To put it into context: Facebook was founded in 2004. That is 19 years ago. Youtube was founded in 2005. That is 18 years ago. Twitter was founded in 2006. That is 17 years ago. Google was founded in 1998. That is 25 years ago. The World Wide Web (remember that name?) came to be in 1989. That is 34 years ago.
Social media is old enough to be in the history books, let alone the internet at large.
What the hell are the parents and would-be parents of today doing to be this fucking incompetent?
You're very much overestimating the average persons knowledge or ability to care about the internet beyond their relatively narrow use of it. It's hard to think critically about things that one takes for granted, and non-tech people frequently just take tech for granted. Tech people frequently do the same thing and appear completely out of touch with the average person's needs, but we call those "disruptive startups" instead.
You don't need an in-depth knowledge of cars to teach your kids how to drive a car.
Likewise, you don't need an in-depth knowledge of computers to teach your kids how to handle the internet. Even moreso if you literally grew up with the thing, seeing both the absolute best and worst the internet has to offer.
That still seems like a number of assumptions to make about the general population that just doesn't ring true in my experience. I have quite a handful of friends that grew up on the internet same as me and yet are just not all that internet savvy. They just don't really care enough. It's not uncommon and it's not even bad, some folks just don't think about it.
It works pretty well for young age ranges, especially in the 'time limits' and other more objective controls. You have the bias of the average HNer who is into computers and was into them since they were children. There is also a good chunk of kids that just wont bother and go do something else, like read a book or play with sibilings. And a partial low labor solution is better than no solution or a high labor one that takes time from other higher value things for the parents.
The TikTok ban isn't about teenage responsibility on the internet. It's just that it's a Chinese owned communications network in an era of increased tension with US gov.
> They’re helicopter parenting the wrong areas of life.
Helicopter parenting is always a bad idea. Either you teach your kids ethics, morals, responsibility, self-respect, and assertiveness or they will fail as adults.
“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut.
No instruction, no human being.
I thought, the kids will play with the boxes!
Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box,
but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off
switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were
using 47 apps per child per day.
Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs
[in English] in the village. And within five months,
they had hacked Android.
Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had
disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a
camera, and they hacked Android.”
> The TikTok ban debate would have never been needed if there were basic parental awareness.
The TikTok issues have never been about the health or safety of children. If it was, it the discussion would involve other social media.
It has always been about the TikTok’s governance structure, which legally and functionally enables espionage and/or psyops against a significant portion of people who do may be involved in things that are of a US national security interest. For example, you don’t want your government personnel doing important things while carrying a device that sends important contextual data to organizations which have CCP oversight.
> It has always been about the TikTok’s governance structure, which [...] enables espionage and/or psyops [...]
The proposed solution to the TikTok problem is the RESTRICT Act, with language so broad and vague that it would make VPN usage a felony. It may just be incompetence on Sen. Warner's behalf, but otherwise, it's also about an opportunistic power grab by the US federal government.
That bill surely has problems, but the way it is worded throughout, it seems fairly apparent that any impact it might have on VPNs was not the intended target. (Presuming that the language actually would ban VPNs, which is not entirely clear)
Regardless, my point is that it definitely isn’t about the kids, and that is very clear in that bill.
Well, if the recent Utah thing is any sign, they're ready to overdo it when it comes to the internet, too.
> The bills will give parents full access to their children's online accounts, including posts and private messages.
Where "children" is defined as anyone younger than 18. I can see the point of some of these controls, but legally disallowing a 17 year old from having privacy from their parents? Absolutely not.
This writing kind of confirms what I’ve experienced as a 1st-gen Korean American growing up in New England (so n=1).
I knew my parents meant well when they made sure I studied and did well at extra curricular activities (going to math Olympiad at MIT during summers, playing classical instruments, etc) and that type of “helicopter parenting” yielded good performance… when I had to do something that was highly structured.
But it also meant I did not do well (or was always uncomfortable) when I had to do something that’s not highly structured (basically adulting) and I felt like I had to figure out who I really was at 30 which is not necessarily a good thing.
I’m still thankful that I had parents who cared and tried best they knew how so I don’t really hold it against them, though.
Thanks for sharing this comment. I’ve had similar feelings recently, and I came to the realization that all parents will fail to teach their children certain things. Life has a funny way of revealing those areas to us as we age. Part of adulthood is the painful process of discovery and learning for ourselves.
By the way, I think 30 is the perfect age to figure out who you really are.
We gave high school kids some time for self-directed activities, like go see teachers for help, make up work, get a snack, hang out with friends if you have your work done.
We had kids standing around looking confused. They didn't know what to do. They asked for directions on what to do. We said to look at their grades and decide what to do. When they finally pulled up the gradebook on their laptops, they would point at it and say "what do you want me to do?"
Something. We want you to decide, on your own, to do something. Anything. Just make a choice.
Most kids did figure it out, though not always making the wise choices (but that's part of the reason we're giving them the freedome). But there was a minority who couldn't grasp the idea that they were personally able and responsible to decide what to do.
Almost need to give them a flowchart or a list or more strongly link the sessions to an outcome (improving at something, working towards a line of work, etc). It would be great if 6-12 year olds were stronger at this also.
Having them determine what their desired outcome is and then learning how to draw up a plan to get there is more valuable for them long term than the outcome itself. A flow cart is just more hand holding.
Is it possible they didn't believe you? Eg, they thought you had something particular in mind, and they wanted you to drop the pretence and make the expectations clear?
I've had limited teaching experience, all at a college level, but I would try to engage students with questions & get them to predict things they hadn't been taught yet. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it seemed like they wanted me to cut the crap and just tell them the answer, because they felt like I was setting them up to fail by asking them a question they didn't know (because it was new material).
I don't think it's necessarily a lack of critical thinking skills on their part as much as an unwillingness to engage with that style of teaching, which is fair. So I'm wondering if similarly it's an unwillingness to engage in independence in a context without the requisite trust, where they might be suspicious that you'll penalize them for picking "wrong" (regardless of whether that's the reality).
That’s very interesting. Considering they didn’t understand, then they figured it out, it sounds like it was very productive. I think we underestimate the impact of simply raising expectations.
That is of good intent but i can think of two reason why this didnt work for some:
- Kids will know what to do if they like the material. When we condition them to "chase a carrot for no reason", they look confused because they may have few reasons for doing the work
- kind of the same as above : starting very early, we remove independence from kids. They must do what adults say, without questioning. There's nothing special about high school that will introduce self direction to them, it must come gradually
It’s also far less common to own a house, car, or have a child, dog, etc. Pretty normal to move to a big city, rent, not have kids, and play with whatever you want. And that’s the well adjusted case.
This reads like propaganda. There's nothing wrong with not having kids or living in the city in your 20's. Buying a house as a single person in this current market would be financially irresponsible.
The second person in your example has more autonomy than the first. I know plenty of husbands who can't do laundry. So implying that you're somehow developmentally stunted if you live alone in the city is extremely weird.
Because you meant it as a testament to how little autonomy everyone has across the board. And then you used "not having kids" and "living in the city" as an example. You're describing someone with more autonomy than a person with kids and a mortgage has.
> Ownership begets autonomy. On the other end of the spectrum is renting/dependence on public services
Can you describe how being a homeowner makes you less dependent on public services?
Part of this simply has to do with nosy busy-bodies ready to pounce on the phone to call Child Protective Services (or equivalent) whenever they see a child out and about on their own. I'm not afraid to send my kids to the park (few blocks down the street) alone, ride their bikes alone or instruct them to go outside after breakfast on the weekend on not come back before lunch, or hell even dinner (not that it matters for socializing--I see hardly any kids their age, pre-teens, outside, even though there are plenty around). I am afraid of what my neighbors would do.
The other part is that, unless one lives in the country, it has become much harder to find neighborhoods where kids can safely roam free. I lived in both a small rural town and a larger, more urban (but not "big city") city as a child, and was able to run around the neighborhood in both places without issue, back in the 80s. I've visited the larger city I spent the second half of my childhood in as a child recently: there simply isn't any space for kids to roam anymore there. Some might say my generation's parents were too extreme in the freedom they gave us. Perhaps, but the pendulum has swung too wide in the other direction, in my opinion.
i strongly disagree with that claim. short of living in the wilderness far from everyone else where you can do what you want, i don't believe that this is true.
and public services don't make me dependent but they free me from having to take care of things myself.
> Part of this simply has to do with nosy busy-bodies ready to pounce on the phone to call Child Protective Services (or equivalent) whenever they see a child out and about on their own.
I get the impression that this problem happens a lot less frequently than social media and our personal echo chambers would have us believe. I am skeptical the prevalence is actually significant because this situation sounds like an outrage tactic to members of the population that grew up more “free range.” This is something I would like to be proven wrong on, if the data supports it.
"If you do this and someone objects, you will have your kids taken away. But don't worry, people very rarely object! You don't have anyone in your neighborhood that really doesn't like you, right?"
This is not nearly as reassuring as you may think it is.
I suppose it’s hard for me to really understand this situation. I live in a mixed-income neighborhood within a major US city and there are tons of kids that walk around in transit to/from school, the park, the bus stop, with younger kid always accompanied by older ones (10 and up). My neighborhood is fairly tight knit and if a kid goes “missing”, it’s usually because their phone died or something and the parent overreacted after not being able to reach them.
I would be concerned if I see a kid walking alone without any clear purpose/destination, but even then, an isolated incident is not going to be a call to CPS.
> I would be concerned if I see a kid walking alone without any clear purpose/destination, but even then, an isolated incident is not going to be a call to CPS.
You're damning yourself with faint praise, here. Giving kids independence means that they're regularly going to be outside alone (or with friends), and often without a clear purpose or destination. And it's sort of sounding like you'd be considering calling CPS over that.
The situation I was trying to describe is when a kid is clearly lost, not just playing around. This is a concern I would have if I saw an adult in the situation with a similar remedy: ask if they need help.
> I would be concerned if I see a kid walking alone without any clear purpose/destination, but even then, an isolated incident is not going to be a call to CPS.
Do you realise how threatening this sounds? You are all but implying that if you, conversely, see a kid outside a few times and can't figure out their purpose/destination, you might just call CPS. I wouldn't trust most kids to manage to look unambiguously purposeful to adult strangers most of the time (when I myself was in 4th grade and going to a primary school in a neighbouring town, I would frequently get distracted by something and miss three or four once-in-30-minutes buses in a row), so you're essentially saying that you may CPS on a whim after seeing the same kid multiple times in a row. If I lived in the US and knew I had neighbours like that, I would not risk letting any kids go outside on their own.
I think this is a logically unsound, or at best uncharitable interpretation. My read of it is simply that calling CPS would hypothetically be an exaggerated reaction, even in circumstances that are unusual in their day to day context, and would require at least a higher bar if not much higher bar, and presumably other measures having been taken, like talking to them
The objection here isn't "I don't have neighbours that would do that", it's "even if they do, CPS would laugh in their face because this is a normal thing for a child to be doing". At worst, they might come by to ask some questions the first time.
It would seem there are in fact a handful of crazy CPS workers out there that think this is truly unacceptable, but there's a ridiculously tiny chance of you getting one of those and it is my understanding you can still fight them in court if the case ever gets that far.
It likely varies by region and social standards within different communities. I personally know people who have had CPS called on them because they let their kids (young teens, around 13 or so) walk to the store (~0.5 miles) alone. It's not a "ridiculously tiny chance", where I live.
And nobody should have to fight them in court: that's the whole point--the fact that it can get that far, or even as far as a single CPS visit for "some questions", is beyond absurd. It's a ridiculous stripping of autonomy and growth for children, and an humiliating and infuriating experience for parents.
My whole point was that while CPS might get called by some idiot neighbour, the chance of them doing anything is basically nonexistent, especially not something as drastic as taking away custody.
It reduces down to: "I'm not going to do [perfectly legal and normal thing] because [person who doesn't like me] might report me to [authority figure]". By that logic, I shouldn't eat meat because my vegan neighbour might report me to the police for murder.
When I was a teen, me and my friends had the cops called on us me multiple times for things as absurd as sitting on the stairs in the building I lived in or rollerblading up and down the street, but every time, the cops kindly explained to the grumpy old pensioner that called them that this was perfectly legal, nobody was being harmed and to not call about nonsense like that again. People always have and always will try to report others for things they don't like. But that's like half of the cops' or CPS's job - to take those reports, figure out what actually counts as a crime, investigate whether it actually happened and only then charge the suspect.
> I get the impression that this problem happens a lot less frequently than social media and our personal echo chambers would have us believe.
It seems to make headlines whenever it happens not because it’s happening all the time, but because it’s such a weird thing to happen.
A lot of people can no longer tell the difference between headlines for rare events and headlines for things that happen all the time. If they see a headline, they just assume it’s extremely common.
Social media has also amplified the idea that men can’t take kids to a park without people assuming they’re child predators. Prior to having kids, I thought taking my kids to the park was going to be a high risk activity and that I’d have to defend myself against paranoid moms who couldn’t understand why a man was at the kids park. Reddit circulated this meme like it was gospel. Then I finally had kids, went to the park, and nothing of the sort has ever happened. My local parks are almost a 50/50 split of moms and dads and everyone has always been friendly.
I know a few women personally who have blatantly told me that they are suspicious of any man they see near their kid's park. They haven't ever mentioned confronting anyone, but they've both said that they watch them.
I was hired for a photoshoot of a teacher at an elementary school. As I was setting up a tripod, a light with a big softbox and the like outside the front of the school I had a resident busybody come up to me and "just make sure" none of the kids outside in the playground would be in the shot. Of course, I could have legally done so as they were outside in a public place...and the earlier part of the shoot was in the teacher's classroom with her students.
I had another shoot where I was covering someone's engagement that was near a playground. I had my wife with just to diffuse anybody worrying about a man with a long lens near a playground but clearly not photographing any children - and sure enough, she had to talk to a lady about it.
Another time I was going to photograph a high school senior at a playground the next day, so I scoped out my old elementary and middle school playgrounds (no camera equipment on me!). I made it all of 10 feet onto the elementary school playground before I had a woman essentially accuse me of being a creep. There were plenty of moms there. It didn't even seem to occur to her that I could have been a father, or just walking across the space to get to the baseball field or whatever.
For the record I'm a decent looking guy and I don't think I put out creep vibes in the least.
Social media is just doing the same thing as traditional media about less important topics.
Any singular bad instance gets amplified and there's probably multiple of these happening each day, so it looks like it "always happens" despite most people being actually much more reasonable than that. It only needs to happen two or three times in your area for it to become "just what happens these days".
>I get the impression that this problem happens a lot less frequently than social media and our personal echo chambers would have us believe.
You don't need modern technology for that; the 1980s panic over child abductions (which was the precipitating event for this state of affairs) was overblown so hard that reasonable parents are far more at risk of their children being abducted and harassed by the State than they ever were at random. To claim social media is a root cause is incorrect, though technology does empower the hysterical and exacerbates their damage in other ways.
Because children aren't people, there's no human/legal rights concerns generated by taking away their right to free movement and quiet enjoyment of property (unlike, say, mass violence with a weapon vs. the human right to those weapons)- anything is fair game when it comes to public safety, after all.
Some US states have slowly been passing anti-hysterics laws with respect to movement and enjoyment of property rights for children (as in, not getting abducted off their front lawn or walking down the street by cOnCeRnEd PaReNtS), but it's very far from universal. But the fear of State violence [inherently at gunpoint] is still there in most of the world, and I understand the non-hysterical holding back out of fear, conflating legality and general don't-rock-the-boat Milgram-type obediance with morality, etc.... even though it's slowly killing their kids.
The 1980s and particularly 90s stranger danger panic was driven by national for-profit news organizations generally, and the programming demands of cable news specifically. There is only so much real national news to go around, certainly not enough to fill 24/7 television programming, so these orgs turned to blowing up local crime stories to the national news market. On a national level there's always another missing child story so a national news org can keep these stories coming on a regular basis, creating a false impression of how common these crimes are.
Personally this has happened to me once. I was visiting my parents and the town I grew up in. I went for a walk by my old elementary school and walked onto the grounds. It was late in the afternoon, well after classes were done and most of the students and teachers would have left. A hundred yards away, some children were playing soccer. I stopped to watch for a bit. It was only a few seconds before a woman came up to me and very curtly asked, "what do you think you're doing here?" I said I used to go to school here, and I was on a walk. She said, "you need to leave." I asked her why and she repeated that I needed to leave. Just super hostile. I didn't want a big confrontation, so I left.
I think a major change over time has been about vehicles, and there are no relevant mentions of "car" or similar in the article. They're larger, often faster, there are more of them and sightlines are poorer. Drivers potentially on their phones too. As a parent of a 10yo, vehicles are my major concern with out-of-home autonomy.
Growing up in the 80s, we kicked a football on the street and towed each other on skateboards with bikes. I barely remember a car being parked out there; they were all in driveways. That same cul-de-sac now is choked with parked cars that are each household's second or third vehicle and left on the street because it's easier than shuffling cars in a narrow driveway. Now, you couldn't kick a ball without hitting someone's car. A car driving down that street will have terrible sightlines with seeing a kid chasing a ball out onto the street or even seeing someone short trying to cross the road from behind an SUV or 4x4.
Out camping in the bush, I'm comfortable letting my kids roam (as long as they watch out for snakes). Lots of other ways for them to get injured, but no cars. There's a difference between a "learning injury" and the bonnet of a 4x4 hitting their head/neck.
On that note, there's the video essay "These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo, which includes various statistics and some striking visual examples of the absolutely absurd grill heights of modern production vehicles.
To add to what others said, it used to be that the absurd pickup trucks were all customized. Someone would take a truck as produced and sold by the manufacturer and add "lift-kits", maybe modify fenders, and add huge wheels and tires for some off-road purpose. Or just for the image of some off-road purpose. These would not always be street-legal but there wasn't much enforcement and it wasn't a high percentage of all the vehicles on the road.
Trucks roam the streets today, in their factory configuration, that make those lifted 4x4 trucks from 30-40 years ago seem like reduced scale toys. It's madness. The most cartoonish, distorted adolescent fantasy proportions have been mainstreamed and normalized over decades. It's a Truck Body Dysmorphic disorder.
I think this is mostly a problem in the united states. I'm from Europe, and everytime I visit USA I am struck by how huge most of the cars are. Like, why?
I'm in Australia and older car formats like sedans and station wagons seem unfashionable now. SUVs and 4WDs seem much more common and are enough to present a risk to children and sightlines, IMO. There are some of the very large US-style trucks, but nowhere near as many as in the US.
I'm also in Australia, and it's gotten a bit ridiculous. There are now utes the size of American Ford F350s everywhere. Our streets and parking infrastructure are just not designed for it. It's become an arms race. You're now much safer if you drive a bigger car and you can see the road ahead much better than if you drive a Corolla.
In Melbourne they have taken to calling them Emotional Support Vehicles. I think it's a pretty apt name for a vehicle that has no practical purpose in a city.
Lots of people will blame consumers for wanting to feel macho or whatever but I think probably a bit more institutional than that:
1. Obama-era CAFE fuel standard rules made required MPG go up over time for different classes of vehicle. Except if your vehicle had a larger footprint, it had more lenient standards. The simplest way to stay compliant was to make larger vehicles. I think if they wanted the actually-desired outcome they should have just raised the federal gasoline tax, which has not been raised since the 90's, but they probably assumed that was untenable so we are left with unintended consequences.
2. The IIHS produces crash test ratings that manufacturers tout here and does not score cars worse if they are more dangerous to pedestrians. Nor do they take into account the other car in the collision. So to get excellent ratings makes an arms race of bigger-ness. Automakers started adding a lot of weight to vehicles, and side/curtain airbags that made the A-pillar larger (Between door window and windshield). Even formerly small cars now feel huge. It's hard to buy a truly small truck anymore.
>side/curtain airbags that made the A-pillar larger
Even cars of the mid-2000s have this pillar sufficiently large to completely block the view of pedestrians and vehicles under certain conditions. This is, I'd argue, a contributing factor in the modern preference for taller vehicles- the visibility is equally poor, but being higher up lets people believe they can see more out front and they "win" in sightline contests with other cars.
>Automakers started adding a lot of weight to vehicles
Note also that electric cars in particular are significantly heavier than combustion ones; as such they take more effort to stop and are even more dangerous to other cars in crashes.
Oh, and since electric cars are inherently heavier, the roof has to be stronger to maintain the same rollover protection, which also means the A-pillars and blind spots will continue to get larger.
>they should have just raised the federal gasoline tax
If you do that you run into price-sensitive agricultural users. Other countries exempt those users with marked gas to detect tax fraud, but that requires legislative action (marked gas is illegal in the US) and new infrastructure to support it to the point where it might not have been worth it.
Also, the chicken tax means unless the light truck is domestically produced it's not worth it, so only a select few automakers could really make a run at it (especially in the context of safety requirements that don't scale).
Because of some historical accidents (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax) normal cars are regulated more tightly than SUVs in the US. That makes SUVs cheaper to produce.
So people, like families, that needed a big car moved from station wagons to SUVs.
The rest is more historical accidents and consumer preferences.
(Some of the regulations in question here are really silly. Especially the CAFE standards which are ostensibly supposed to regulate emissions. But they do it in a really round-about way. A sane way to regulate emissions is to tax emissions like a CO2, or something that directly correlates with producing more emissions (like a petrol tax).
Instead the US goes the insane route: CAFE standards take an average of the vehicles produced by a company, and give companies some incentives based on that average. Of course, they also add extra loopholes, like the SUV exemption.
SUVs also get exemptions for passenger and pedestrian safety standards.)
Basically, the originally justification was that stuff like farm trucks shouldn't be burdened by extra regulations. Public choice theory explains where it went from there.
Because in the 90s in California, body-on-frame small trucks were immune from some emissions and safety requirements, making it the only way to get a powerful v8 as well as a great way for GM and Ford to save a few bucks. Follow that up with 30 years of monkey-see-monkey-buy, and here we are.
Traffic is definitely problem in Europe as well and main reason I am affraid to let my kids roam free, you don't need to have large pick up truck to kill kid driving faster than speed limit or not paying attention to driving.
It's infuriating that there aren't even small trucks available to buy anymore. The closest thing is a Maverick but they're backordered a year at 50 percent markup.
My wife and I moved to a smaller city to raise our family. It’s been years and we still have moments of, “can you believe this is the largest road in the city?”
It doesn't seem clear to me that there is actually a greater risk from cars now than our generation grew up with, considering that traffic deaths have actually steadily been going down in the US since the '70s [1]. The same way that media (social and otherwise) keeps getting better at keeping everyone anxious about kidnappers and neglectful parents all the time, it's quite conceivable that it achieves the same thing for vehicle-induced accidents. In its quest for eyeballs, it naturally provides everyone with the message that resonates best with their biases - law-and-order types readily accept anything that confirms the dangers of crime, gender roles types readily accept anything that confirms the dangers of irresponsible mothers, and urbanist technocrat types readily accept anything that confirms the dangers of selfish individual motorists.
Pedestrian deaths are way up in the last decade. This is not just a media panic like you suggest - it’s a predictable outcome of policy which incentivizes larger and larger vehicles.
I’d hypothesize that people drive more recklessly as a byproduct of less pedestrian activity especially children. I see many cars speed through school zones and it makes sense why, because there are never any pedestrians observed over years of my commute I’ve never seen a kid walk to school. The car pool line is longer than ever but it’s also usually off street in a parking lot area of the schools (where I am). Also as a dad of a 4 year old, I commonly witness other drivers quickly adjust their driving style when the spot my kid. It’s as if they realize kids are erratic and May jump out in the road so they become more defensive. If kids out playing was normal still, I think people would still drive closer to that as default.
The car size thing is valid. Although I remember cars in the 80s, often of the 70s, were massive steel tanks and I doubt the braking distances were all that good.
I'd agree with that about driving behaviour around visible children. It's considered to be something that would improve cycling safety too: more cyclists creates greater awareness in general, and safety for further cyclists.
One thing I've noticed is that at a school near me, the school zone signs about driving speed are often shadowed/obscured by parked parents and trees from above. Stops it from being front of mind. That school has been there and I've driven past it for decades, but as you said, often it takes seeing a family in the area to remind me that it's a school zone and in school hours, since I'm usually driving past at other times of day.
I participated in a citizen's panel for community road safety years back and thought that there should be a broader zone for a block or two surrounding schools. It wouldn't necessarily be as strict as 25km/h, but maybe 35km/h and rendered differently - coloured line markings, kerb colours, no hanging foliage or bushes higher than 300-500mm, more limitations on parking. Right now, parents compete to drop kids as close as possible to school, to minimise road crossings. Give them more confidence to drop kids further away. Limits congestion and builds autonomy in the kids.
Interesting. Where I am they signs are blinky traffic lights above and below the large “school zone 20 mph” sign. However the school is often a massive property and the actual drop zone is probably 100s of yards from road traffic. It’s in case of a kid crossing the street but as I mentioned no pedestrians exist. It’s common to have school zones in all direction of school property for a quarter mile radius. Some places where a school is next to a highway, the school zone extends onto the highway. No pedestrian much less a kid is on the highway (the school zone law just isn’t detailed enough to specify what to do in this situation).
In the drop off lines, the teachers assist to keep the cars moving so you really shouldn’t start unloading early and let them walk. I think it would be good as you mentioned but would be against the factory line they’ve created. I think they tried that in decades past but resolved on this as parents complained it was too slow to wait. Where I live it’s very car dependent and people really do want to drop their kid off at front door and get off to their day asap above all else.
What you say is true, our neighbourhood streets are more crowded and no longer suitable for kick the can and soccer and what have you, but I don't think it's the driving factor.*
It is a concern for safety, or at least usually couched that way, but what I hear voiced most often is fear of other humans. From older bullying kids, to hoodlums, to drugs, to predators. In short, Stranger Danger. The "don't talk to strangers" refrain I remember hearing occasionally when I was kid in the 70s didn't seem to have much effect. We just kind of shrugged. Looking around today, I see it took deep root.
((Oh yes, pun intended. It's a beautiful thing when they also perfectly express the thought.))
It's kind of insane to me that since the 50s, they just kept fucking doubling down on car sprawl and material wealth signalling to the point where obviously most people now live in a place where everyone needs their own stupid car and nobody can function with or without one.
I got one for my first job out of school that required me onsite at the opposite side of the sprawling stupid city I'm from, and it was a 30 min drive each way. Losing an hour a day just to driving, right from the start. It eventually broke down, and now that I've been without one for a few years, the prospect comes to mind every so often to get a used thing for getting to trailheads a little more frequently; supporting the various recreational things I do. But... it scares me. It's a trap. It's a financial trap, a lifestyle trap, and more of a burden than it could ever be a blessing. Thankfully the every day risks of getting hit by an idiot in a huge truck or something are non-optional and an ever-present aspect of life no matter how you get around.
For now, I'll just continue renting one when I need one, but it does put a barrier between me and the things I love doing, we'll see if that changes in time.
This was almost exactly what I was thinking. I worry about my kids on the walk to school and back (with a parent). I end up having to take a very restrictive and disciplinary tone and am not comfortable with it. 95% of drivers are looking where they are going and not going too fast, so if a child is the road the driver just stops with no issue and we walk round (I live in a rural location and the walk involves roads in a small village with no pavement). Trouble is it only takes one driver gong too fast and not paying attention for something awful to happen. I hate taking this tone, but it's just true - the stakes are high.
Yet somehow kids are surviving and thriving into adulthood. I don’t buy that kids are so fragile they have to be raised by the 1985 norm, even if it makes great episodes of Stranger Things. Human beings were been reared in concentration camps or horrific refugee camps and went on to live rewarding and happy lives. Likewise kids have been raised pampered as royalty and went in to live rewarding and happy lives. There are a lot of things you can do to screw up your kids, but paying close attention to them is probably not the worst thing.
I personally think the no autonomy of kids is increasing the obesity epidemic. I know as a kid I rarely wanted to do anything proposed by my parents. So whenever I went outside to explore the world with a friend, it was either my idea or my friends' idea. The norm seems to blame smart phones or tablets as the culprit but my intuition will always lean towards lack of autonomy as the main cause.
Me neither. I was pretty much an “indoor kid” growing up at least until high school. My parents didn’t drink soda, eat chips, or other snacky junk food or keep any of that in the house so I guess that (along with metabolism) was why I was a 5’9” 110 lb 7th grader.
I'm in the Philippines. I was down the sari-sari store yesterday (the Filipino version of a bodega, but not walk-in...more like a storefront with a little door where you push your money through and the owner pushes items out in return). Little kids run around unsupervised here all the time, and nobody bats an eye. Anyway while I was there laid out on a bamboo bench drinking a beer, there must have been five or six kids under four years old who came down there alone with change to buy something for their parents. So different from the helicopter parenting I'm used to seeing back home.
Those kids were probably from relatively poor families. The neighborhood I live in, the kids of person who is probably the most well off hardly leave the house. When they do, they are closely watched by the helper.
That's a single exception tho. In general it's pretty obvious that the general child has way more freedom nearly everywhere than the typical child in the US.
Pretty similar in Thailand. I normally live in Bangkok and even the rich kids that attend the expensive International School nearby frequent the malls and park nearby with no supervision. There is definitely still some overly-sheltered children but it seems far from the default.
My GFs hometown in Nakkon Si Thammarat (Southern Thailand, semi-rural) kids play outside just like we did when we were kids (90s, Australia).
The insane helicopter parenting seems to be US phenomena primarily but is also spreading to other Western-sphere countries like Australia.
In Japan kids as young as elementary regularly walk by themselves to school, stores, ride the train, go hang out with friends, etc. Doubt it would ever work in the US because everywhere is just plain dangerous, among other reasons.
Not so much about the danger, but Japanese culture is much different from the US; being a collectivist society there is immense pressure on each person to do the right thing. Anyone who doesn't fit in can suffer immense social consequences. This is instilled at a societal level, so that is one reason that everything is so clean, there is not as much danger, etc., but it comes with its own downsides.
Things may be legitimately more dangerous but I also wonder how much our expectations have slipped. Both in terms of expecting children to be responsible, and people to not be shit.
Or maybe things aren’t more dangerous. I’m not sure, I just know violent crime has been trending down for 25 years and the news is increasingly sensationalist and negative.
To at least some degree, I feel like there is some self fulfilling paranoia.
There's a joke that if something isn't nailed down, it'll be stolen. Whereas in some countries the crime rate is so low you can leave your bag somewhere and come back days later and it will still be there.
Quite a few countries. Definitely in Singapore and Japan.
People here in Singapore sometimes leave their wallets or phones on tables in food courts to reserve them. Unlocked bikes don't get stolen, either.
(Our police here in Singapore sometimes runs awareness campaigns on pickpocketing with the slogan "low crime doesn't mean no crime" to get people to watch out. It's not really necessary, though.)
When I was in Chiang Mai in Thailand last year, the locals also left stuff around and didn't seem particularly worried about petty theft.
Can confirm the Chiang Mai thing. Just like here in Switzerland some shops in Chiang Mai often just close door and keep everything outside over night. Haven't seen that anywhere else before tho.
"Old Enough" on Netflix popularised that idea. Based on my own experience living in Japan it's more common in smaller communities and I certainly haven't seen it much here in Tokyo.
As a recent father I'm still pondering what I should do. I used to take trips to town on my own as young as eight and I soon gained a strong sense of independence which I value. But that was in New Zealand where what they call a city isn't remotely comparable to a metropolis like Tokyo. Safety wouldn't be a concern but it would be easy to get lost for hours.
And why are virtues like “resilience” valuable over actual achievement (like being at Stanford)?
So they depend on parents and managers more and take longer to be independent. Why does this matter? This is perfectly normal in Asian cultures for kids to be attached to their parents until their 30s, much more slowly but in a more stable and reliable fashion building their own lives.
The “soft life skill” like resilience are very important for any adult. Achievement is great but is meaningless if all you got out of it was trivial knowledge. Being resilient, for example, allows a young adult to take difficult situations in stride knowing that they can get through this.
Until their 30s? In many places they live with them their entire lives. It’s more about economic conditions than ideal child development.
As for someone’s 30’s, it’s just rather late in life to become independent. People are capable of it much sooner. You don’t want to hold back a grown adult.
Independence is really the only way to have a good chance at achieving what you want, rather than only what others want or expect of you. There's surely some value in being able to branch out which requires lots of skills related to resilience.
I live in what I’m imagining you would consider an “unwalkable neighborhood”. It is very safe and suburban. There are 2 parks in about a 3 minute walk and 2 more in less than 10 minutes. There is also a canal a few minutes walk away and a McDonalds within 10 minutes. This is the kind of stuff kids like to do yet I see no reason why my 10 or 5 year old have any business doing it on their own.
If you can walk to the park on sidewalks, then it's a walkable neighborhood.
I have a four year old, and when she's six or seven, I hope she'll be walking to the park with friends on a regular basis. When she's ten, I'm hoping she'll be responsible enough to take her younger sister with her. What is unsafe about it? Dumb phones are cheap. If you invest in knowing your neighbors, they'll know people on each block.
Hm, this seems a bit contrary to my personal anecdotal experiences. I've generally seen more coddling of kids, and that has been accompanied with lax rules / letting kids have what they want. Especially when it comes to digital tech / roaming the web. Perhaps both extremes of parenting - giving autonomy and helicopter parenting - are both becoming more common?
That’s an interesting point. Kids definitely do have more autonomy with those things and it’s not helping. Generally I think it’s because it’s easier on the parent (which is no slight to parents).
Millennial here that grew up in that exact same situation. I eventually ran away from home @ 16 and moved in with my uncle. I don't talk to my dad except on major holidays. I expect him to die alone and frankly thats none of my fucking business.
So X'ers what happened to us? If you are a "kid today" your parents are either X'ers or Millenials. As X'ers we've made it a point of pride that we played till the street lights came on, we walked to school, we walked where ever we wanted. We had jobs and started adulting at a much younger age, living at home with mommy at 25 wasn't cool it made you a joke. So what happened? Why did we raise these kids and never let them out of our site? Why did we drive them to school? Why did we invite fully employed adults to live in their childs room instead of letting them grow up? Who thought this was a good idea? I think we fucked up a whole generation of kids.
Please don't say safety because things are much much safer now than they were in the 70's, 80's and 90's.
Not sure this is a generational thing or perhaps a how you were raised thing? I’m an X’er and I don’t think I ever went in the front yard (or beyond) unattended until I was in late junior high out perhaps even high school. I just hung out playing video games or dicked around inside or played in the backyard.
My guess is that the people of my generation who were adventurous kids probably have more adventurous kids now.
I'm a millenial. At 7, I was allowed to cross the street and walk within one block (quiet suburb). At 12 I went to a school outside my immediate area, and I took the city bus there on my own. At 14 or so, I was allowed to travel anywhere in the city, provided my parents approved. Went to a concert with friends around that age. I took my first overnight trip away from home on my own at 16 to go visit a friend who had moved.
That experience seemed normal to me at the time, but me and my friends may have been the tail end of that degree of freedom. Funnily enough I rarely exercised it. My parents encouraged me to explore more than I did. I was a very introverted and nerdy type who spent most of the time indoors. But I would spend my weekends and summers with my friends. And my parents wouldn't usually be willing to drive me once they considered me old enough to walk there or take the bus.
Millennial here. By grade 6 (11-12 yrs. old) everyone I can remember walked to and from school. Often with groups of friends. In the evenings my friends and I were free to do whatever we liked unsupervised as long as we were home by sun down. Typically we’d never venture out more than maybe a 15 minute walk from home though.
Every generation gets fucked up in new and interesting ways. We all grow up with our own traumas. How we lived our lives informs how we view life. And we respond to all of that in two major ways: acceptance or rejection.
Acceptance is repeating the mistakes of the past. Basically neglecting children and turning them into adults sooner than they're ready.
Rejection is making sure that does not happen at all. Doing the complete opposite of what was done to us.
They're both wrong. The answer is some weird blend of the two. Children need the autonomy to become adults but also need the safety net of having actual adults around.
There are always people who blame cars every time this topic comes up, but my life is no more automobile-dependent today than it was growing up as a millennial. I live in the same metro area, on a very similar street, and yet the parents in my neighborhood today generally give their kids a fraction of the freedom I had growing up.
The "cars" angle feels more like a favorite boogeyman around here than an actual explanation for the change.
>The "cars" angle feels more like a favorite boogeyman around here than an actual explanation for the change.
It is. Especially on the internet, once people find a cause to champion they'll try shoehorn it into everything, regardless of relevance. I'm only surprised someone isn't trying to pin this on a lack of nuclear energy power plants, which is another internet favorite go-to.
Cars are absolutely one factor but not the only factor.
Both Pedestrian fatalities and injuries are rising.[1] While cars are getting safer for passengers, manufacturers are not required or tested on improving pedestrian safety. You can see this in the rise of % of fatalities from car accidents that are pedestrians (less people dying in car crashes inside cars, more people dying by being hit by cars).
This is despite the numbers improving drastically in the 00s[2].
I don't think cars are the primary driver though; I think it's the 24/7 news cycle and the various iterations of the dangers to children drilled into people's psyches. Random guy at the park? Paedophile. Kid makes up a story? Satanic panic. Kid hides near a weather balloon? National news sensation. You're constantly surrounded by evil and danger and you must do what you can at all costs to protect your child -- that's the message the media pushes. The people who grew up (as I did) with the primary directive of "come home when the streetlights come on" just weren't being exposed to that stuff then but were later on in life.
I also think video games and the sheer amount of media we can consume are also big factors. People just don't want to go outside as much anymore, so outside spaces in newer suburban neighbourhoods tend to be awful. Houses are larger and more tightly packed, so kids have to go to the park. More tightly packed homes with smaller property sizes means more people (and more cars).
There's probably a bunch of other factors I'm not thinking of as well. The short answer to the thread's question is essentially just "things are different."
There is a correlation with urban sprawl and the autonomy of children[1].
Depending on where you live, it's harder young people to get around compared to 40 years ago.
Like this HN user's experience in this same thread[2].
By making society car centric we have made it difficult for children to exercise independence even if their parents allowed them to.
In a non metro area your options as a teen to go somewhere are to beg your parents to drive you somewhere or to walk for hours to a bus stop.
These barriers and the rise in pedestrian fatalities do not incentivize autonomy.
A city planned for humans is automatically difficult to access with private cars (gotta have narrower pedestrian-only streets, public transport), which are required to get away unseen smoothly in case of legitimate kidnappings. A city planned for humans is dense, walking anywhere alone your kid is seen by a neighboring grandma, the likely existence of whom in any of the hundreds of flats within earshot also acts as a deterrent. In a city optimized for cars, easy access by a car means easy way of transporting a number of large firearms without being seen.
> In a non metro area your options as a teen to go somewhere are to beg your parents to drive you somewhere or to walk for hours to a bus stop.
I had a bike as a kid, and got my driver's license as soon as I turned 16. The bike isn't the fastest option, but it was just fine for getting to school, to friend's houses and to the local Walmart. And once I had a driver's license, I could and did borrow the family car, and many of my peers had a car that was specifically designated for the kids. Being able to drive a car used to be a symbol of independence for us, but today fewer and fewer teens are even getting a driver's license.
Yes, not every family has a car that's available to borrow, but most in suburbia do.
Cars are a part of it, along with greater urbanization (I roamed around a lot as a kid, but I lived in smaller towns and cities at those ages), but a much bigger one is simply that Americans became far more paranoid in the 21st century.
I live across the street from a grade school, nobody that goes to this school lives more than 3/4 of a mile from the school. There is one street that might be considered busy but there is a stop light and a crossing guard. Further there are sidewalks all the way and crime for all practical purposes doesn't exist and yet every morning there is a line of giant SUVs dropping kids off at school and picking them up every night. Honestly there's no excuse no to walk but the majority are driven.
If safety were an argument how comes all the other western countries where kids still roam freely don't have increased or at least statistically visible issues.
To pick up a few arguments. My neighbours are farmers, there are more ford raptors and guns than anywhere else in the country. Yet kids walk a hour to school by their own and play far from their parents vision.
As Xennial father of 2 kids - cars happened, when I was growing up in 80s families had at max 1 car, some didn't have car at all or used it rarely only on weekends, now many families have two cars, which they use on daily basis + same thing happened in companies which could do without cars back then. Back then I was riding bike 8-9yo to the other side of the town 2-3km and played there in forest or next to river with friend who lived there.
My 2nd grader started to walk home from school (~1km, two busier roads, one without crossing and bunch of smaller roads without crossing) by himself couple of weeks ago and he is still rarity in his class. Last week his class teacher refused to let him go without special paper despite he had no problem to leave from (after) school club for weeks already, where I specifically written he can go home by himself whole school year to not write paper almost every day. My mistake for writing in initial registration I am picking him up, now with younger kid joining the school she will have straight from 1st grade written in official documents she can go by herself and it will be only up to our agreement how she will get home without dumb teachers stopping us.
Our parents were emotionally absent. Now we swing the opposite way and interfere too much in fear or being the wrong type of parent. Our fear of traumatising our children causes trauma due to too much constraining.
I had to laugh reading this because it hits home. My parents were absent and my millennial friends and family that are parents are extremely on the far end of being very afraid of messing up their kids.
This extends to a lot of areas outside of physical freedom. There seems to be a lot of pressure kids face to just do well and perform from an absurdly young age. I don't think that this starts with the current generation of parents either. I know that growing up there were a lot of children, myself included, who were made to feel worthless if we were incapable of winning at our sport of choice or performing at a top 10 range in the classroom in the subjects of "importance". Science, Math, that kind of stuff.
I'm trying my best right now to let my kid manage himself and learn how to ask for help where needed. I want him to go through his own choices, both good and bad, and experience success and failure on his own. I try to teach him that the only value I care about is not being a burden to others. Raising people up is true success instead of winning by pushing others down. Those core beliefs are the only ones I hope I can pass on to him. But I want to do whatever I can to make it come from him and for him to learn it from me through example rather than control.
I know that no matter how strict my parents were, it never actually did anything to increase my performance. It never did anything to increase the obedience of my siblings. All of us just went underground over time because we couldn't trust our parents to be reasonable when we talked about our experiences at school and sports. If it wasn't up to their standards they would just make us feel like we weren't living up to their standards. I've heard this being referred to as "ego" parenting or something like that. But part of the reason we could go underground was because of physical freedom. I cycled to school and sports. I took public transport and was free to sort myself out from completely from teenage years.
Instead of addressing the bit though about making a safe space for kids and not chasing them underground, it feels like parents have taken the approach of encroaching on their physical space as well to ensure that they do not escape the boundaries of the standards they demand.
And now children are giving up on trying to find freedom in physical spaces. How could they when the parents are following them to every event and class that they go to? They can't even go to a mall with friends anymore without having parents around in some form or another. I feel like the desire to go underground in the digital spaces is a natural evolution although I have nothing but my own anecdotal experiences to share to support this.
This is a tangential sharing of experience and opinion in relation the article. I leave this as a thinking point because I think physical freedom is being dampened for more than just the reason of fears of safety. There's also a strong desire to control children and have them grow up in our image of "perfection". If we want to reverse this trend, it may take a lot of parents having to get really uncomfortable with themselves and understanding that there's a significant amount of their own ego that needs to be removed. Else the end is going to be a never ending unhealthy war to find ways to control children's spaces every time they find a new one to go underground in.
I've written about this here before, but the social forces that incentivize parents to restrict autonomy is intense. I live in a massive California suburb, median in almost every way.
It's my perception that letting kiddo play outside, climbing trees, biking on the sidewalk in front of the house should be a low risk activity for a 2nd and 4th grader if done together. Not in the perception of neighbors. Every time I say yes to them asking to play in public, I'm taking a risk that someone will call the cops for the simple act of a child playing outside without a parent. How do I know? It's happened three times already.
There's a group of folks who see that as inherently dangerous and have no problem invoking the police to shut it down. They've also been approached by strangers asking where their parents are. They're obeying the laws, not being reckless or getting into trouble. They're minding their own business and because of that they are confronted for it.
It's these encounters that weigh on my mind when I'm deciding how to respond when they ask if they can play outside each day. Sometimes I say no, because I'm not prepared to deal with the possibility of that scenario occurring again.
I don't known if more laws and regulations are the answer here, or if it'd have undesirable secondary effects in certain situations where it really matters, but I feel like this behaviour as you describe it should itself be unlawful.
You should not be permitted to deliberately harass people you don't know doing nothing wrong in this way, it's that simple. It's a question of individual liberty in the end.
I'd hope the police would actually have a private word with them to this effect to be honest, when they do 'report' it. I assume not, but do you know if any ever have?
The process as I understand is that the police are compelled to follow up on the report whether or not it initially appears to have merit or not. The incentive understandably is that false positives are perceived to have less negative impact than false negatives[1].
The police serve as a firewall against all inquiries about reporters including asking if reporters could (for lack of better term) be "asked to behave like mature adults." The opacity of communication structure serves to fragment social cohesiveness rather than cultivate it. In a time where people yearn for community, having police block all communication between parties atomizes and alienates community members from each other even more.
If I were to turn this into an opportunity to imagine a better future, it would be twofold. One, a non-emergency service should be capable of handling events of this sort[2]. I don't need the same people arresting gang members and murderers doing house calls re: your kid was climbing a tree in your front yard.
Second, the persons reporting should be told something of the sort, "Thank you for your concern, your intentions were neighborly, but reporting kids for existing is not a valuable use of our time."
Instead I'm stuck with weighing letting my kids be kids and the possibility of guys with guns showing up at my quiet suburban home, and having the talk that starts with, "We know everything's probably fine, but someone called us..." again.
1. I suppose the socially de-incentivizing parents letting kiddos play outside is hard to quantify and "not really much of a concern to police", probably for a different set of biases from their perspective.
2. It's easy to imagine something like CPS getting involved. Maybe I'm naive for asking folks to imagine that a service "not as bad as CPS" could possibly exist. Idk, I'm a parent, not a social services engineer.
The police are liable if they don't follow-up on the report, and reports are often tailored to be vague by the neighbor to ensure a confrontation with police.
That said, its not up to the police to decide the law, its up to the judge or CPS, so going to the lowest common denominator, you'll have to explain it to the judge or assigned case worker.
Most investigations are generally a guilty until proven innocent from what I've heard since the safety of the child is paramount.
All they have to do is prove there was some negligence which is a very low bar.
>The police are liable if they don't follow-up on the report
Since when?
The police have zero duty to protect anyone or otherwise enforce the law in any way; they already don't bother investigating a good chunk of smaller thefts and will just stand around while crowds torch buildings and shootings continue inside their perimeter.
They have a lot of discretion; I suggest they exercise it.
>All they have to do is prove there was some negligence which is a very low bar.
Most people are agreeable enough that their first response isn't a life-and-death dash to the nearest lawyer. This is generally a mistake, but they really don't know better.
>reports are often tailored to be vague by the neighbor to ensure a confrontation with police.
"Swatting" and more indirect cases of vexatious litigation are criminal offenses for a reason (even if nobody gets hurt).
Karen is guilty of violating these laws; it's time to get serious about enforcing them.
I think its time to start giving tickets for misuse of city resources (law enforcement).
People should think twice about reporting stuff they should know better about reporting, and police should have a way to use their judgement to decide if what someone reported constitutes a valid complaint, grey area, or a busybody with nothing better to do than waste tax payers' time.
Its what the courts in many areas have generally ruled.
If you make a report, and those reports are valid but ignored, they can be sued and the city or organization becomes liable because they were negligent. A judge decides damages which impact ongoing budgets.
> Karen is guilty of violating these laws.
Yes, but how difficult is it to prove intent. How often do defamation suits win? Will a prosecutor ever really go after someone that claims a plausible excuse?
Don't they have more important things to devote their resources towards?
What about the harms caused to the parents, and the children, very hard to quantify. A report is self-enforcing because the police have a duty of care to respond to reports.
Litigation would only ever actually occur civilly, and outside of extreme circumstances that demonstrate clear bad faith its a grey area that goes unenforced and unpunished.
So who in the end actually gets punished, and is that punishment coercive. The courts generally don't recognize it as such since the accused (the person reporting it) has good faith protection. Its very hard to prove they did it in bad faith.
Litigation would only ever actually occur civilly, and outside of extreme circumstances that demonstrate clear bad faith its a grey area that goes unenforced and unpunished.
> If you make a report, and those reports are valid but ignored, they can be sued and the city or organization becomes liable because they were negligent.
> Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled, 7–2, that a town and its police department could not be sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for failing to enforce a restraining order, which had led to the murders of a woman's three children by her estranged husband.
Any rational person reading your response is going to assume you either didn't read what I said, or worse were using malign influence tactics to push something that 'wasn't said' as 'something that was said' (as a troll would).
Notably, I never said it was everywhere, in fact I said the opposite (if you go back and review). You left an important sentence out of my quoted response.
We want to keep discussions clean, if you have something to add make sure to keep it accurate. Cherry-picking and putting words in other people's mouth isn't an acceptable form of rational discourse.
We don't want people reading this misunderstanding your intent or what you are trying to communicate.
Regardless of you saying it happens "in many areas" I am saying it doesn't happen "everywhere" as a separate point. Yes, it happens in many areas, and in many other areas it doesn't happen. These things aren't mutually exclusive. Fuck, tell me more about people "misunderstanding intent".
I would have said everywhere if I intended everywhere, I didn't, so the point you tried to make seems to be moot, it certainly didn't look separate with how you structured your response.
Everyone knows almost nothing happens everywhere. Its why the first thing they teach in argumentation, debate, and logic is to never use absolute language like 'all' and 'every' unless you know its absolute (and can't be misinterpreted).
Miscommunications happen, hopefully you understand how it happened now and will be more careful moving forward.
> > > The police are liable if they don't follow-up on the report
> > Since when?
> Its what the courts in many areas have generally ruled.
Really, if you want to insist that this was what you were saying the entire time, either start with it or acknowledge that you failed to start with it. Indeed, miscommunications happen. Consider that you come across as unwilling to believe your part in this happening.
Likewise, I hope you can see how you erred so that you may do better in the future.
> If you make a report, and those reports are valid but ignored, they can be sued and the city or organization becomes liable because they were negligent. A judge decides damages which impact ongoing budgets.
It isn't just about legal liability, it is also about politics.
Suppose a child is abducted/murdered/etc. Turns out some concerned bystander saw something suspicious and called the police, but the police decided not to follow up. Even if the police aren't legally liable, once the media and politicians are done with the story, the general public will be so outraged, decent odds the chief of police will be forced to resign. You can say this is a very rare scenario and almost never happens, but government culture encourages risk-aversion – especially when it comes to children – so they'll worry about the risk, they'll overestimate it – and then they'll craft policies based on it.
The sad fact is, there is a truly real evil going on when it comes to many rights. Parental rights are just the most recent battleground, and no one does a thing to curb it.
Also, I don't mean a cultural evil, as most people dismiss this as just being your cultural opinion. I mean the type of multi-cultural evil that strips people of their ability to respond (agency), tells them misleading lies, promotes flawed and self-defeating beliefs, causes loss in one form or another, and worse most of the time the people doing this are mentally ill but you still have to deal with the outcomes.
This is a real problem because if you conform, you are tacitly approving of those beliefs and your children will learn socially from your response to it. Unfortunately, in a world where you get CPS or the police called to charge you with child endangerment its a pretty mad world, and its happening more and more.
An interesting parallel are these philosophies that you can somehow make things safe, all ultimately fall into some form of socialist or fascist narrative where someone at the top decides what is or isn't safe because you as an individual are unimportant comapared to the group which is paramount.
These narratives are very common in totalitarian and fascist societies that use propaganda and political warfare to kill potentially disruptive thinking.
A few books helped me frame this stuff far better than I was able to before. This was the one I started with[0]. Framing isn't a fix or a prevention, but it has helped me to adjust actions and expectations much more tailored for the situation.
I am not looking forward to that crocodile remark: "I just want to be sure your child is safe."
As an outside observer, the single most disturbing trend in the US is the fact that everybody seemingly feels totally entitled to police each other's lives.
My personal religious believe frowns uppon $X? That means $X should now be illegal for everybody.
I believe without evidence your kids are constantly unsafe: let me call the police on them.
It is okay not to like what your neighbours are doing. It is okay (and maybe even necessary) to discuss this with them. But it is not okay to call the police on them or force them by law to your believes.
And that in a nation where your cent piece had "Mind your business" written on it.
It’s the Protestant Puritanism of American culture getting stronger. It’s the same with the so called woke religion, it’s just a repackaging of Puritanism.
Just like any culture there are many parts of the American one, but the part that comes from adventure, exploration, freedom etc definitely has been on the decline since about the 70-80s. Control and Puritanism is what’s stronger now.
It’s all paternalistic authoritarianism… but the logic is consistent- if the majority of people think we should police how adults act and think, well, children should absolutely, unconditionally be micromanaged! The poor little fools might get hurt and then someone will get sued.
Don't get me wrong here, but I don't think what you (perhaps sarcastically?) state here is a good idea.
If all adults agree to build mechanized genocidal murder factories that will remain a stain on humanity for centuries it is still wrong to do so.
Some rights are non-negotiable to my eyes. Even (or maybe especially) when a democratic majority decides to break them. Legality doesn't matter here. The concentration camps next to where I grew up were also legal during Nazi reign. That doesn't make them right, not back then, not now and not in the future.
I'd highly advise against a petty "let's se where that gets them"-stance when it comes to human rights issues, because those paying the price are not those who commit the atrocities.
I hadn't heard about this book, and I'm always looking for new books that help frame problems better.
Just based off what I saw regarding this, its probably not the best as a starter book.
It can really be tough with this type of material because if you don't have a solid practical or rigorous approach to both logic and argumentation, and can reasonably make parallels or see where it leads, you can easily fall into traps that are plausible but may be flawed/false.
You really have to approach this type of material critically and assume its false until you can find rational and reasonable support for what may be said. Reading material in this genre, like you would a leisure book would be a mistake, since most tend to internalize words/concepts like movies after speed picks up, and of course children that have not yet reached the age of reason shouldn't be reading this type of material since they would be developmentally incapable of recognizing any potential lies for what they might be.
Not having read the book yet I can't yet vouch for the content, but it definitely looks interesting, and worth a read, at least for me.
You really have to know the philosophy and tactics that are pushed in this area in order to recognize it enough to defend against it.
There was a very interesting recent publication in USMC University on Political Warfare which has some overlap.
> I mean the type of multi-cultural evil that strips people of their ability to respond (agency), tells them misleading lies, promotes flawed and self-defeating beliefs, causes loss in one form or another, and worse most of the time the people doing this are mentally ill but you still have to deal with the outcomes.
This is such a non-statement that everyone can fill in with the ideology that they choose to categorize in this way.
You voiced a lot of super general concerns, but without specific examples it's difficult what you actually believe. Because so much language has been corrupted.
Both people that see peaceful transition of power of democracy in the US being threatened, and those that are against public health mandated COVID lockdowns call those that disagree with them "fascist".
So I genuinely don't know what you're talking about in this paragraph and I'm curious if you would be willing to share some examples.
Its not a statement, its a set of statements that compose a characterization, which is something commonly done by scientists, engineers, and rational people to communicate specific descriptions so they can be recognized again by others, this is primarily done when common words are not available to match specific common meanings in communications.
> can fill in with the ideology that they choose to categorize in this way
You'll have to further clarify what you mean, there are two potential meanings embedded with that single statement, and you've failed to communicate which one that is, it looks to me like you've misunderstood this as some ideology akin to philosophy such as consequentialism when its a description of behavior.
A characterization is just a description of the distinctive nature, elements, features, or composition of someone or something specific, in this case behavior. Behavior that leaves at least one party with a negative outcome while also negatively impacting all or most future outcomes related to that party.
Its important to understand and convey the correct and rational meaning of words, as you said many groups seek to corrupt language to prevent communication, to distract, disorient, and create disunity using a whole host of sordid and malign influence tactics to cause distorted reflected appraisal.
> Both people... and those that disagree with them.
We will not be going off into the weeds, talking about potentially irrational beliefs of others, or getting bogged down in unrelated controversial narratives as those only serve disunity and chaos.
You may also want to review the actual definition and elements of fascism. Regardless, what you mention here has no relevance to the current discussion.
What GP means (I imagine, anyway) is that your post has a whole bunch of words in it without really saying what you think. Because you haven't really staked out an opinion, after throwing up some serious-sounding phrases, the whole thing comes off as vaguely "both sides-y" and thus not very helpful?
I was confused about your post, too. What did you mean?
Its helpful to those that understood it and who understand what the stakes are, and also in giving the necessary words people need for a time when they will need them.
If you are unable to see anything wrong with where the behavior I describe leads inevitably, you deserve the outcomes that are coming.
Make no mistake death is not uncommon when these types of systems fail towards their logical conclusion, if left to propagate forward unabated, the outcome is an inevitable cascade. Its a part of a cycle that's happened many times in the past with the same conclusion.
This has happened before many times in history, and it will happen again until we learn our lessons as a people.
This time it will be much worse because so much of our population is wholly dependent on technological systems that will fail to deliver enough food when those societal failures do occur.
If you can't see where this path of coercion, compulsion, and other intolerable acts have led us in the past, no amount of words will convince you otherwise.
You would have to learn by experience, and the downsides firsthand, and by then it would be too late to do or be anything other than a victim of circumstance.
What odds do you give yourself or your children of survival when those failures occur and suddenly 8-12 billion have to subsist on practices available that can only at their theoretical maxima feed 2-4 billion.
I just want to let you know that even if you believe in the words you are saying, these kind of hollow empty platitudes have historically been weaponized by bad faith agitators to either perpetuate or propagate abuse.
I already gave you one example: reactionaries appropriated those criticizing Trump's policies as "fascist" to call those that disagree with public health lockdowns as the same.
Likewise, your original terms of "flawed and self-defeating beliefs" and "mentally ill" are currently being weaponized by the same people to brandish transgender people as harmful ideologues.
Just thought you should know, in the slim hope that you don't. Because if you do, you either don't care or are doing it on purpose. Both of which are harmful.
Ultimately, you sound like AI-generated. You say a lot of words that individually have meaning without saying anything at all.
Iirc, there is a small book "The Grand Inquisitor" that shows this problem in a hypothetical dialogue between imprisoned Jesus and the chief church inquisitor who claims that freedom and moral choice is too much to bear and what people need instead is "freedom from choice."
I really don't like the phrase "parental rights." As authority figures, parents don't have rights, they have responsibilities. Parenting is a form of government and should be treated as such.
It's the children's rights, freedom and agency that are being infringed upon. Even if a parent was unjustly restricting their own child from going outside, instead of calling the police on someone else's child, that would be just as wrong.
On average, I think CPS interventions are usually good. A parent with unchecked power is the ultimate form of totalitarianism, and abuse is common.
That's a very irrational line of flawed circular thought.
You cannot have responsibilities without having the necessary rights needed to fulfill those responsibilities. Its two sides of the same coin. You have both, or you have neither regardless of what someone else may irrationally say or decide, and rational thought is all that matters.
Worse, that line of reasoning also leads to legitimizing and justifying coercion, corruption, compulsion, and a large number of other intolerable outcomes that have throughout history cyclically become self-destructive. There are plenty of examples in history, it was very common in years leading up the Nazi's rise to power before and during WW2.
You may want to further educate yourself from published statistics before pushing unbacked value statements like its 'usually good', and 'abuse is common' [0]. If you'd checked, you'd see what you said is not actually true and misleads.
Additionally, take a look at the pie chart broken down by category in the report, what percentage of false reports do they say they receive...
What percentage of reports, in aggregate, find some form of confirmation (based on how those categories are handled with respect to due process). Keep in mind, 'Unsubstantiated' doesn't mean what you might think it means [1].
Given police refer these issues to CPS for investigation instead of investigating themselves, and given statistics often follow a distribution curve not a binary choice, are either of those answers that are simple lookups from the report, likely, or expected, or rationally sound without there being some profound issue with the system being measured. [No].
Its really disheartening having to deal with people pushing irrational misinformation, and other limiting beliefs and narratives that will negatively impact others.
All this comment's done is add to the noise in a fundamentally negative way to muddy water.
Karma has a way of coming back to you three fold over time regardless of whether you believe in it or not. Please try to avoid pushing false noise in the future.
Are those strangers truly concerned about their safety or are they actually egoists that want to use the police to get the outdoors for themselves and other adults?
We may never know. It is frustrating as a parent to be held to the social expectations of those at the most extreme ends of normative conviction. It speaks volumes that we mediate these interactions through police rather than through mutual dialogue.
Yeah, that's the part of your story I find most disturbing.
People will disagree on all kinds of issues, but would take a major crime for me to call the police on my neighbor. Imagine living next to someone after you did that?
> It speaks volumes that we mediate these interactions through police rather than through mutual dialogue.
I wouldn't call the police on kids climbing trees.
But I'd attend a 3-hour timeshare pitch meeting at a Red Lobster before I'd have a 5 minute "mutual dialogue" with a parent about their kids' truly problematic behavior. (And I'm allergic to shellfish.)
Parents who can have mutual dialogues typically don't have kids who require them. And for the kids who desperately need them, community members seem to play a game of hot potato until somebody is finally forced to step in and confront the parents (typically after property damage).
> In the U.S. though, the police have been called, women arrested, and children taken into custody for finishing out a stroller nap in an enclosed backyard, using an iPad in a car for a few minutes, and playing in a park.
So, which ones of those are property damage to neighbors?
If I were to attribute negative motivations to it, it would probably be one more of resentment or jealousy. There are a lot of folks who are going to be growing older with no children. This often sounds great when you're young to "young", but decidedly less great as one ages. I've always wondered how society, at large, was going to deal with this.
The rise of these sort of things seems to correlate particularly well with the skyrocketing rate of single person households in the US, which increased more than 500% from 1960 to 2021 [1], even though the population in that time didn't even double.
In my country, it's mandatory for the police to show up if you make a registered eponymous (not anonymous) complaint.
People are doing this, because from their perspective children might be abandoned by their parents. The reason is that playing outside is not normalised enough at the moment.
Moving is far from an easy solution, but there are some places that take the opposite approach. We lived in Utah for years and they actually have laws on the books to guarantee parental rights (I think they call them free range parenting or something like that?). In the more city dense areas you'll still have people who do that kind of stuff, but it's much, much less socially acceptable to interfere than in many coastal areas, and if somebody does call the police, there's a strong chance the police will tell them you're in the right and they are in the wrong. There are tons of tech opportunities for work there too so definitely worth a look if it's important to you.
We live in Idaho now and it's similar up here though I don't know about the laws. In our neighborhood kids will run around playing outside together unsupervised all day and nobody bats an eye. It's expected!
And to force schools to disclose information that their children don't feel safe revealing to them (like LGBTQ status), knowing that it could cause their religious parents to completely destroy their lives through things that are banned in most of the civilized world but not in the US (conversion therapy, etc)
Agreed. As an American raising a child in Europe, it's also strange that what I believe to be perfectly reasonable positions like "My child should have the right to play outside unbothered by police or busy-bodies", are not only opposed, but opposed because of other unrelated culture-war reasons. The reasoning seems to be that because (e.g.) some states allow parents to hit their children or otherwise do things that (I agree) are reprehensible, therefore parents should not have the right to allow their children outside. Baffling.
And yet home schooling is completely illegal in Germany, something that would be a complete deal breaker for me. But perhaps that speaks more to how bad public school is in the US, maybe it's freaking amazing in Germany?
I'm with you on this. Maybe it speaks a bit to opinions on public schools in the US, but even free access to the best public school in the world doesn't (imo) give someone the right to force it on others.
Conversion therapy is the process of industrial scale bullying LGBT children into presenting as straight, with many such places going miles past the line of child abuse.
It's nothing to do with SRS, which is not offered to children anyway, so your dislike of that is irrelevant.
Conversion therapy is a form of torture usually based in Christianity that uses coercion and psychological pressure to force queer people to "fix" themselves and identify as cisgender heterosexual.
This is the most bizarre thing that I will never understand about the US. Everything is about protecting the children from imagined harm, even if the "protection" is causing much more harm, but beating kids is totally fine. CPS may take away your kids if you let them play outside, but not if you beat them.
Spanking a child and beating a child are two completely unrelated things.
It's my understanding that spanking isn't the optimal way to discipline children and still shouldn't be done, but conflating it with beating a child is ridiculous and offensive.
Spanking a child and beating a child are two completely unrelated things.
Yes, striking your child to teach them a lesson is definitely completely unrelated to striking your child out of anger/frustration. Definitely no connections there at all.
I guess folks have different definitions of the words?
To me, a "spank" is usually a mild to moderate slap on the rear, a part of the body particularly well cushioned that can handle it just fine without physical trauma, not to mention psychological trauma.
When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool, and usually with visible bruising and possible laceration and bleeding.
If you've ever been a parent, regardless of whether you think spanking is OK, you know that there is a huge difference between these two activities. I personally avoid physical discipline myself, but I can understand a parent who decides to give their kid a spank on the rump after the child did something where they didn't understand how seriously negative the implications were.
For example, if 5 year old runs out into traffic on a busy road and you pull them back, which form of discipline is more likely to negatively incentivize the impulse to dash into the street to get a penny? I can see why someone would think that the short – but sharp – pain of a quick spank is more effective at protecting the child's short and long term health.
To me, a "spank" is usually a mild to moderate slap on the rear, a part of the body particularly well cushioned that can handle it just fine without physical trauma, not to mention psychological trauma.
When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool, and usually with visible bruising and possible laceration and bleeding.
"Spanking" can definitely include implements, though that's less common nowadays as people have started to view the act in a less positive light overall.
And the "without psychological trauma" is one aspect where it isn't really that clear if there is a level of spanking that avoids that whole issue.
> it isn't really that clear if there is a level of spanking that avoids that whole issue
Exactly, which is why I myself choose to play it safe.
But it's kinda like the, "No evidence that parachutes save lives" thing, where because you don't have a double-blind randomized controlled study, we have to end up relying on our intuition.
And – unlike with parachutes – everyone has a different intuition as to whether spanking is actually going to result in trauma. Lots of, "I'll never hit my child" going up against, "I was spanked as a child and I'm just fine" so its all back to personal judgment.
My oldest son once accidentally ran out in traffic, and he was practically traumatised just by the way I shouted "stop!" at him. He never did it again.
I think by using violence, the main thing you teach kids is that using violence is an option. I prefer to discourage violence. I'm not saying I never grabbed or held them a bit too roughly, but I think they learn a lot more from me talking to them and explaining why it's wrong, than from pain.
> When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool
I see people talk about belts far too often. I would consider that immediate grounds for losing custody over your child.
The trouble is, you are describing different points on a scale with no clear boundary. As anyone into BDSM can tell you, an open handed slap on a bare buttocks is quite capable of inflicting severe pain - and therefore, psychological trauma. Imagine being made to wait for the spank, in a vulnerable and humiliating position. Imagine if it were accompanied by mind games. In short, imagine what a sadist hell bent on inflicting trauma on a child could do if you permitted them to strike their victim, provided they left no permanent marks.
It is true that a malicious parent is capable of mentally damaging their child without recourse to violence, but it does not follow from that that we should shrug and permit it. Violence is an overwhelming force multiplier in an abuser's toolkit, and also strictly unnecessary for good parenting.
> For example, if 5 year old runs out into traffic on a busy road and you pull them back, which form of discipline is more likely to negatively incentivize the impulse to dash into the street to get a penny?
I'm glad that you brought up this example because it's the one context in which I think spanking can be acceptable (needing to shock a child from something they were about to do that could have endangered themselves or others). I'm not a parent and not sure I wouldn't try to find some other approach but I can see the strength of the argument here (where I can't see it for other uses of corporal punishment of children).
Lots of people believe that not using physical discipline is ultimately harmful to kids. Their brains aren’t fully developed until age 25, so it can’t be assumed that children can learn proper behaviors entirely through reasoning.
The empirical evidence is mixed. The best behaved kids in the world are in east Asia, where physical discipline is still quite common. Physical discipline was widespread in the west during the very timeframe that contemporary civilizations developed. America as you know it today, with all its prosperity, was created by people who were spanked as children.
> America as you know it today, with all its prosperity, was created by people who were spanked as children.
More likely by people who played outside as children. I'm pretty sure that's more universal than spanking.
Which is giving me an idea: are there societal problems among youths that correlate with either a lack of spanking or a lack of playing outside? Most of Europe has banned spanking but encourages playing outside, whereas in the US, spanking is legal but playing outside strongly discouraged. Which kids are doing better? Less violent? Less psychological problems?
The empirical evidence of efficacy of corporal punishment is also mixed, so between the two, I think I'd recommend the strategy that minimizes violence.
> Physical discipline was widespread in the west during the very timeframe that contemporary civilizations developed.
I'd be real careful pushing that justification; it can be used to support all manner of unnecessary (and was-never-necessary) evil.
We've been through this before. The empirical evidence is not mixed: there is weak evidence that it is effective at securing compliance in the short term, and strong evidence that it leads to bad long term outcomes. The high-performing Asian families you alluded to in the last thread about this issue are some of the least likely in America to physically abuse their kids. That's because hitting kids is, among other things, stupid.
What are the “bad long term outcomes?” Civilization as we know it is the product of societies that practiced corporal punishment. Most of those civilizations have declined since they abandoned it. Look at the British. They were famous for the strict discipline in their schools. Now they’re a shadow of their former selves. I’m not as ready as you to abandon received wisdom and a track record for some academic studies.
I meant Asians in Asia. Also, as I mentioned in the thread you linked, I’m unpersuaded by your study of Asian Americans, especially because of the highly idiomatic phrasing of the polling questions. I’m also not even sure how you’d design a study to measure this to account for confounding factors. For example, how do you separate parents who use physical punishment because they have poor impulse control (which is quite heritable) from those that use physical punishment when it’s appropriate? And what’s the definition of success? E.g. what if teachers hitting low impulse control students doesn’t do much for the student, but reduces disruption so the rest of the students in class do better? That wouldn’t seem to count in the studies on this I’ve seen.
In the previous thread, you attempted to construct the argument that high-status Asian families somehow endorsed corporal punishment; in fact, they are among the least likely cohorts to do so. That there is a huge diversity of different Asians doesn't do anything to rehabilitate your argument.
Nobody should hit kids. This is a bad contrarian hill to die on.
You pointed to a survey that asked people to agree or disagree with the assertion that sometimes, children need a "good hard spanking." As I said in that thread, that evidence is unpersuasive, because it relies on a confusing English idiom. As used in America, the term "good hard spanking" just means "spanking." But if you're one of the 71% of Asian American adults born in another country, that qualifier "hard" implies something more extreme than an ordinary spanking.
We know for a fact that corporal punishment is widely used in Asia. Surveys show that 60-70% of parents in India, China, and Japan spank their kids or approve of spanking: e.g. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2014-06/03/content_175.... It's possible that all those Asian immigrants come to American and adopt western attitudes against corporal punishment, but I'm going to need more than a poorly worded survey to believe that.
> Nobody should hit kids. This is a bad contrarian hill to die on.
You're the contrarian here! The same survey you relied on in the other thread shows that the vast majority of asian American parents (73%) spank their kids.
> America as you know it today, with all its prosperity, was created by people who were spanked as children.
I mean, I guess it could have been worse- you could have said "America as you know it today, with all its prosperity, was created by people who burned witches" or "...who practiced chattel slavery."
Those same people also practiced bundling [1] as a courtship ritual, and used mercury as a treatment for melancholy [2]. Out of all the practices you could have cited, why on Earth would you pick beating kids as a factor in America's success, instead of something more benign?
You're smart enough to know the difference between correlation and causation. Do you have evidence that physical discipline was the reason America became the country it is today?
If you don't have such evidence, how do you know that we wouldn't have been even more prosperous without corporal punishment as a child-rearing method?
It’s not an incidental correlation—something that happened to exist at the same time as contemporary societies were being built. Cultures all over the world came to the conclusion that physical discipline produced better behaved kids. Europeans only changed their view in the last generation or so, and in Asia, it’s still the dominant view.
By contrast, cultures that stopped using physical discipline are almost universally in decline. On the European continent, for example, post-Christians who don’t use physical discipline are being outcompeted by Muslims who do.
I suppose it depends on how narrowly you define "SLC." Lehi and Utah County is brimming with tech jobs, but if you consider that part of SLC then no, not really many tech jobs outside. Further north into Davis County and Ogden, and even Logan there are some, but it's not like like SLC/Lehi.
(Maybe... but it looks somewhat similar. And 1983 wasn't unique. It also happened sometime in the 1950s, though I forget the exact year.)
For those not in the know: In 1982, the lake was also sadness. There was talk of it drying up completely. Then the winter of 1982-83 was something like 200% of normal. Salt Lake wound up having to turn State Street into a river to handle all the extra water. From there to 1985 or -86, the lake rose dramatically, threatening to close railroads, and interstate 80.
Meanwhile, here in Japan, this is perfectly normal to see. Kids ride their bikes (even at night), take the subway to other parts of the city, etc., all by themselves. I can't imagine raising a kid in America these days.
I am wondering what has changed? Hasn't the US actually become safer over the last decades? I am from Europe btw, so this whole issue seems completely crazy to me.
The media and parts of the government sell a narrative that the us has become more dangerous, even though it's safer. This narrative has taken hold and allows the American public to be rallied against imaginary threats and keeps crooked people in power.
Just wait until this becomes politicized into a culture war issue where you are accused of supporting the "other side" if you let your kids play outside.
> Adults can't confront others kids about their behavior directly without getting shit for it them selves. What else are you supposed to do?
The US is truly and utterly deranged. Kids should make their own experiences throughout their neighbourhood. And neighbours should scold them if they behave like shit. This is literally how it has been for most of humanity.
Because that's not what the police report was about?
The police don't get summoned because kids are causing problems. They are getting summoned simply because there is no adult visible.
The OP isn't making some outlandish claim that requires massive amounts of evidence for us to accept. There are thousands of stories attesting to this kind of thing.
I'd expect the police would say, "Please have your kids not piss people off." Instead the police say, "We got a report of kids playing outside. We know this is fine, but we have to check up anyways." If my kiddos are pissing people off then the people reporting it are doing a very poor job explaining their perspective.
Not that my kids would do it (I get always praise how well behaved they are, I'd be actually happier especially if my son was more wild), but pissing people off is completely legal and not police business. Just because you don't like something doesn't make it illegal.
For instance buying apartment next to basketball playground and then complaining about kids playing there basketball and making noise is not police business but idiots call police on kids having fun, apparently they should be better staring at phones at home, so old people can then complain kids nowadays don't spend enough time outdoors.
shitty kids that needs to be spoken to listen to you or reason with you? or now your the guy yelling at kids? kids dont even totally developed empathy. and parents are totally reasonable about their kids?
Not talking to people is rarely the solution for resolving conflicts. You also have made some assumptions that someone pissing you off is now a shitty person. You've also set an unreasonably high bar of totally reasonable. I think most people are mostly reasonable about their kids. If you start off with "Hi, your shitty kid is pissing me off" then sure, you're not likely to get far, but if you explain legitimate concerns then most people are likely to respond reasonably.
Im talking from experience of dealing with shitty kids. Kids that break things, 10 year olds using the n word. You think these parents are going to be reasonable? I can tell you, no they're not. Maybe your kids are well behaved, maybe your a reasonable empathetic person and know how to live in a dense society. But it takes nothing to have kids and their are plenty of people that don't care about anyone else or what their kids do.
Authorities are governed by laws and politicians. If police would even take a car to a call saying “a 9 year old is playing outside alone” then those norms and laws just need to be changed. It’s as simple as that.
Never mind the craziness that a neighbor would call the police when seeing a child outside (and that’s quite crazy) - if police answer that call they are reinforcing the idea that the child playing alone outside was wrong or dangerous.
>biking on the sidewalk in front of the house should be a low risk activity for a 2nd and 4th grader if done together
This is still a conservative view compared to 30 years ago, when it was acceptable for a lone 5 year old to learn to ride a bike on a suburban sidewalk relatively unsupervised (yes, really!). You may be on the liberal end of the modern Overton window, but you've been dragged along just like the rest of us.
You can't talk about this without talking about car culture. In many cases, there's simply nowhere for kids to actually go on their own without being driven there. This also leads to streets being designed 100% for car convenience to the point of making them unusuable, dangerous and/or hugely inconvenient to anyone else.
Another issue is the compltely overblown fear or crimes such as abduction. The #1 and #2 causes of child death in the US are firearms related and automobile related (respectively). Those are completely normalized.
I'm a fan of this non-profit organization Let Grow https://letgrow.org/ co-founded by Jonathan Haidt. In part, they've fought legislation that would make it a prosecutable offense to leave a child unsupervised in a public park.
I wonder if there may be a simpler underlying reason, such as having few kids.
When a parent only has one, it's both easier to control them from a time & energy perspective, and also more understandable biologically from a risk perspective, than if they had say five.
Scrolled way down to find this answer. I also think this is the primary cause. If you have one kid you’ll be way more protective than if you have four.
This was my thought as well, but fertility rates in much of Europe are even lower than in the US and they don't seem to be experiencing this issue to the same degree.
I regularly see kids aged 8-13 playing outside on our block. I always look to make sure they are OK, not hurting anyone or anything, and I’m reminded of my childhood of roaming the suburbs of Minneapolis.
I have a 5 and 2 year old and will definitely let them play unattended when they are older. We are just at the “you can play in the next room unattended while I cook dinner” stage. Yet, I can totally see the pressure from others with them seeing it as neglectful.
Cars and deep water. Those are my two biggest fears. And they scare me to no end because they are very real threats. To a lesser extent: trains.
The two links above are good for raising children and teaching them to think with empathy and compassion. Schools should follow one or the other.
My father was a Drill Instructor Dad, always yelling at me, ordering me around. But he let me play outside with my friends in the streets and parks. Back then you didn't have to worry about pedophiles grabbing kids or school shooters. So I can see why some parents want to be helicopter parents. But you want your child to grow up independent from you so they can do their own thing. You don't want the dependence for the day you die, they won't know what to do.
I actually know the author (my daughter went to pre-school with two of hers) and she is a perfectly grounded and no-nonsense parent.
Cities are way safer today than in the 80s when I myself was growing up and as a 11 year old it was perfectly normal for me to commute by train and Tube from Reading, UK to Kensington, London for school with my 7 year old brother in tow. I aim to instill the same confidence in my daughter, albeit a year later.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 325 ms ] threadTo be fair, the parental controls on modern devices feel like they were developed by a bunch of childless early 20-somethings.
Apple let you press a button for ‘one more minute’ that seems impossible to disable.
Password management is horrible as a family, as is having to set up my fingerprint on all my kids’ devices to be able to help them with stuff without faff.
More generally, every time I have to set up any sort of account for my kids it’s absolute torture. Try to log in with Apple ID, can’t cos they’re a kid. Try to log in with a google account, remember Family Link doesn’t work for my normal account because it was set up for a domain, so log in as my other google account, set kid up, still doesn’t work.
Give me one place in my whole life to manage identity for my family, one that works, with permissions and downtime settings that integrate with every app and website in the world (including the half dozen each of my kids’ schools require us to use). I’ll pay loads of money for this.
Beyond that, there are some nice things you could do like a workflow for a kid to request new content and a parent to review and approve/deny it. But that's definitely a nice-to-have.
Can confirm, I know a few people who work in a social media "for kids" group and they fit this description to a tee and display significant naivety.
I'm at a point with streaming services -- and this stems from the 24/7, 365 on-demand access we have to television and movies today that was not reality when I was a child -- where I'm ready to cancel everything and curate my our experience for myself and my kids with a NAS and torrents.
edit/ So I check Netflix to see what they offer. Viewing restrictions limits content based on parental guidelines ratings. That's really it. It's like someone else commented, it's as if these places are staffed by people who don't have children.
edit/ You'll have to pardon the evening Dad brain, I googled it. Thank you, kind stranger!
We just use it to remove shows as they start to annoy us. Not to pre-emptively control what the kid watches.
Youtube Kids lets you set a whitelist, but I found that too much of a hassle. I don't mind if the toddler finds new things to watch. But she's also under light supervision when using the phone. (Ie in the same room, but not being constantly hovered over.)
On top of that, you need to supervise them, and even then, they should not be allowed to use social media, which ought to be 18+ anyways.
I understand this is all a lot to ask in our society. There is no "good" answer to this problem. But we should all try to do the best we can, and not forget that big tech puts hundreds of millions, if not billions, into making social media as addictive as possible. I'd say we're at a point where it's sensible to conclude it's now more addictive and harmful than tobacco, though our society has yet to come to terms with this fact. Even if we put a stop to it now (we won't), our current social media infrastructure will likely haunt us for centuries.
To put it into context: Facebook was founded in 2004. That is 19 years ago. Youtube was founded in 2005. That is 18 years ago. Twitter was founded in 2006. That is 17 years ago. Google was founded in 1998. That is 25 years ago. The World Wide Web (remember that name?) came to be in 1989. That is 34 years ago.
Social media is old enough to be in the history books, let alone the internet at large.
What the hell are the parents and would-be parents of today doing to be this fucking incompetent?
Likewise, you don't need an in-depth knowledge of computers to teach your kids how to handle the internet. Even moreso if you literally grew up with the thing, seeing both the absolute best and worst the internet has to offer.
Not setting restrictions because they will resist them doesn’t make sense. It seems like you started from the premise that parental controls are bad.
Not necessarily..
> They’re helicopter parenting the wrong areas of life.
Helicopter parenting is always a bad idea. Either you teach your kids ethics, morals, responsibility, self-respect, and assertiveness or they will fail as adults.
https://www.fastcompany.com/2681011/ethiopian-kids-hacked-th...
They figured out the way to correct the problem.
The TikTok issues have never been about the health or safety of children. If it was, it the discussion would involve other social media.
It has always been about the TikTok’s governance structure, which legally and functionally enables espionage and/or psyops against a significant portion of people who do may be involved in things that are of a US national security interest. For example, you don’t want your government personnel doing important things while carrying a device that sends important contextual data to organizations which have CCP oversight.
The proposed solution to the TikTok problem is the RESTRICT Act, with language so broad and vague that it would make VPN usage a felony. It may just be incompetence on Sen. Warner's behalf, but otherwise, it's also about an opportunistic power grab by the US federal government.
Regardless, my point is that it definitely isn’t about the kids, and that is very clear in that bill.
> The bills will give parents full access to their children's online accounts, including posts and private messages.
Where "children" is defined as anyone younger than 18. I can see the point of some of these controls, but legally disallowing a 17 year old from having privacy from their parents? Absolutely not.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65060733
I knew my parents meant well when they made sure I studied and did well at extra curricular activities (going to math Olympiad at MIT during summers, playing classical instruments, etc) and that type of “helicopter parenting” yielded good performance… when I had to do something that was highly structured.
But it also meant I did not do well (or was always uncomfortable) when I had to do something that’s not highly structured (basically adulting) and I felt like I had to figure out who I really was at 30 which is not necessarily a good thing.
I’m still thankful that I had parents who cared and tried best they knew how so I don’t really hold it against them, though.
By the way, I think 30 is the perfect age to figure out who you really are.
We had kids standing around looking confused. They didn't know what to do. They asked for directions on what to do. We said to look at their grades and decide what to do. When they finally pulled up the gradebook on their laptops, they would point at it and say "what do you want me to do?"
Something. We want you to decide, on your own, to do something. Anything. Just make a choice.
Most kids did figure it out, though not always making the wise choices (but that's part of the reason we're giving them the freedome). But there was a minority who couldn't grasp the idea that they were personally able and responsible to decide what to do.
I've had limited teaching experience, all at a college level, but I would try to engage students with questions & get them to predict things they hadn't been taught yet. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it seemed like they wanted me to cut the crap and just tell them the answer, because they felt like I was setting them up to fail by asking them a question they didn't know (because it was new material).
I don't think it's necessarily a lack of critical thinking skills on their part as much as an unwillingness to engage with that style of teaching, which is fair. So I'm wondering if similarly it's an unwillingness to engage in independence in a context without the requisite trust, where they might be suspicious that you'll penalize them for picking "wrong" (regardless of whether that's the reality).
The second person in your example has more autonomy than the first. I know plenty of husbands who can't do laundry. So implying that you're somehow developmentally stunted if you live alone in the city is extremely weird.
Because you meant it as a testament to how little autonomy everyone has across the board. And then you used "not having kids" and "living in the city" as an example. You're describing someone with more autonomy than a person with kids and a mortgage has.
> Ownership begets autonomy. On the other end of the spectrum is renting/dependence on public services
Can you describe how being a homeowner makes you less dependent on public services?
The other part is that, unless one lives in the country, it has become much harder to find neighborhoods where kids can safely roam free. I lived in both a small rural town and a larger, more urban (but not "big city") city as a child, and was able to run around the neighborhood in both places without issue, back in the 80s. I've visited the larger city I spent the second half of my childhood in as a child recently: there simply isn't any space for kids to roam anymore there. Some might say my generation's parents were too extreme in the freedom they gave us. Perhaps, but the pendulum has swung too wide in the other direction, in my opinion.
It’s a convenient trade off for many.
In a well-functioning city, your kid can walk places, ride a bike or take the bus or train.
About rules: there a lot more social rules in small towns than in cities, where no one cares who you are?
and public services don't make me dependent but they free me from having to take care of things myself.
I get the impression that this problem happens a lot less frequently than social media and our personal echo chambers would have us believe. I am skeptical the prevalence is actually significant because this situation sounds like an outrage tactic to members of the population that grew up more “free range.” This is something I would like to be proven wrong on, if the data supports it.
This is not nearly as reassuring as you may think it is.
I would be concerned if I see a kid walking alone without any clear purpose/destination, but even then, an isolated incident is not going to be a call to CPS.
You're damning yourself with faint praise, here. Giving kids independence means that they're regularly going to be outside alone (or with friends), and often without a clear purpose or destination. And it's sort of sounding like you'd be considering calling CPS over that.
Do you realise how threatening this sounds? You are all but implying that if you, conversely, see a kid outside a few times and can't figure out their purpose/destination, you might just call CPS. I wouldn't trust most kids to manage to look unambiguously purposeful to adult strangers most of the time (when I myself was in 4th grade and going to a primary school in a neighbouring town, I would frequently get distracted by something and miss three or four once-in-30-minutes buses in a row), so you're essentially saying that you may CPS on a whim after seeing the same kid multiple times in a row. If I lived in the US and knew I had neighbours like that, I would not risk letting any kids go outside on their own.
Yeah, God fucking forbid they exercise their human right to movement in a way that offends your sensibilities.
It would seem there are in fact a handful of crazy CPS workers out there that think this is truly unacceptable, but there's a ridiculously tiny chance of you getting one of those and it is my understanding you can still fight them in court if the case ever gets that far.
And nobody should have to fight them in court: that's the whole point--the fact that it can get that far, or even as far as a single CPS visit for "some questions", is beyond absurd. It's a ridiculous stripping of autonomy and growth for children, and an humiliating and infuriating experience for parents.
It reduces down to: "I'm not going to do [perfectly legal and normal thing] because [person who doesn't like me] might report me to [authority figure]". By that logic, I shouldn't eat meat because my vegan neighbour might report me to the police for murder.
When I was a teen, me and my friends had the cops called on us me multiple times for things as absurd as sitting on the stairs in the building I lived in or rollerblading up and down the street, but every time, the cops kindly explained to the grumpy old pensioner that called them that this was perfectly legal, nobody was being harmed and to not call about nonsense like that again. People always have and always will try to report others for things they don't like. But that's like half of the cops' or CPS's job - to take those reports, figure out what actually counts as a crime, investigate whether it actually happened and only then charge the suspect.
It seems to make headlines whenever it happens not because it’s happening all the time, but because it’s such a weird thing to happen.
A lot of people can no longer tell the difference between headlines for rare events and headlines for things that happen all the time. If they see a headline, they just assume it’s extremely common.
Social media has also amplified the idea that men can’t take kids to a park without people assuming they’re child predators. Prior to having kids, I thought taking my kids to the park was going to be a high risk activity and that I’d have to defend myself against paranoid moms who couldn’t understand why a man was at the kids park. Reddit circulated this meme like it was gospel. Then I finally had kids, went to the park, and nothing of the sort has ever happened. My local parks are almost a 50/50 split of moms and dads and everyone has always been friendly.
I had another shoot where I was covering someone's engagement that was near a playground. I had my wife with just to diffuse anybody worrying about a man with a long lens near a playground but clearly not photographing any children - and sure enough, she had to talk to a lady about it.
Another time I was going to photograph a high school senior at a playground the next day, so I scoped out my old elementary and middle school playgrounds (no camera equipment on me!). I made it all of 10 feet onto the elementary school playground before I had a woman essentially accuse me of being a creep. There were plenty of moms there. It didn't even seem to occur to her that I could have been a father, or just walking across the space to get to the baseball field or whatever.
For the record I'm a decent looking guy and I don't think I put out creep vibes in the least.
Any singular bad instance gets amplified and there's probably multiple of these happening each day, so it looks like it "always happens" despite most people being actually much more reasonable than that. It only needs to happen two or three times in your area for it to become "just what happens these days".
You don't need modern technology for that; the 1980s panic over child abductions (which was the precipitating event for this state of affairs) was overblown so hard that reasonable parents are far more at risk of their children being abducted and harassed by the State than they ever were at random. To claim social media is a root cause is incorrect, though technology does empower the hysterical and exacerbates their damage in other ways.
Because children aren't people, there's no human/legal rights concerns generated by taking away their right to free movement and quiet enjoyment of property (unlike, say, mass violence with a weapon vs. the human right to those weapons)- anything is fair game when it comes to public safety, after all.
Some US states have slowly been passing anti-hysterics laws with respect to movement and enjoyment of property rights for children (as in, not getting abducted off their front lawn or walking down the street by cOnCeRnEd PaReNtS), but it's very far from universal. But the fear of State violence [inherently at gunpoint] is still there in most of the world, and I understand the non-hysterical holding back out of fear, conflating legality and general don't-rock-the-boat Milgram-type obediance with morality, etc.... even though it's slowly killing their kids.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_white_woman_syndrome
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children...
Stranger danger is vastly overrated.
Growing up in the 80s, we kicked a football on the street and towed each other on skateboards with bikes. I barely remember a car being parked out there; they were all in driveways. That same cul-de-sac now is choked with parked cars that are each household's second or third vehicle and left on the street because it's easier than shuffling cars in a narrow driveway. Now, you couldn't kick a ball without hitting someone's car. A car driving down that street will have terrible sightlines with seeing a kid chasing a ball out onto the street or even seeing someone short trying to cross the road from behind an SUV or 4x4.
Out camping in the bush, I'm comfortable letting my kids roam (as long as they watch out for snakes). Lots of other ways for them to get injured, but no cars. There's a difference between a "learning injury" and the bonnet of a 4x4 hitting their head/neck.
https://www.oka-atv.com/
Trucks roam the streets today, in their factory configuration, that make those lifted 4x4 trucks from 30-40 years ago seem like reduced scale toys. It's madness. The most cartoonish, distorted adolescent fantasy proportions have been mainstreamed and normalized over decades. It's a Truck Body Dysmorphic disorder.
They also tend to be more dangerous for family, and neighbors nearby.
1. Obama-era CAFE fuel standard rules made required MPG go up over time for different classes of vehicle. Except if your vehicle had a larger footprint, it had more lenient standards. The simplest way to stay compliant was to make larger vehicles. I think if they wanted the actually-desired outcome they should have just raised the federal gasoline tax, which has not been raised since the 90's, but they probably assumed that was untenable so we are left with unintended consequences.
2. The IIHS produces crash test ratings that manufacturers tout here and does not score cars worse if they are more dangerous to pedestrians. Nor do they take into account the other car in the collision. So to get excellent ratings makes an arms race of bigger-ness. Automakers started adding a lot of weight to vehicles, and side/curtain airbags that made the A-pillar larger (Between door window and windshield). Even formerly small cars now feel huge. It's hard to buy a truly small truck anymore.
Even cars of the mid-2000s have this pillar sufficiently large to completely block the view of pedestrians and vehicles under certain conditions. This is, I'd argue, a contributing factor in the modern preference for taller vehicles- the visibility is equally poor, but being higher up lets people believe they can see more out front and they "win" in sightline contests with other cars.
>Automakers started adding a lot of weight to vehicles
Note also that electric cars in particular are significantly heavier than combustion ones; as such they take more effort to stop and are even more dangerous to other cars in crashes.
Oh, and since electric cars are inherently heavier, the roof has to be stronger to maintain the same rollover protection, which also means the A-pillars and blind spots will continue to get larger.
>they should have just raised the federal gasoline tax
If you do that you run into price-sensitive agricultural users. Other countries exempt those users with marked gas to detect tax fraud, but that requires legislative action (marked gas is illegal in the US) and new infrastructure to support it to the point where it might not have been worth it.
Also, the chicken tax means unless the light truck is domestically produced it's not worth it, so only a select few automakers could really make a run at it (especially in the context of safety requirements that don't scale).
Because of some historical accidents (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax) normal cars are regulated more tightly than SUVs in the US. That makes SUVs cheaper to produce.
So people, like families, that needed a big car moved from station wagons to SUVs.
The rest is more historical accidents and consumer preferences.
(Some of the regulations in question here are really silly. Especially the CAFE standards which are ostensibly supposed to regulate emissions. But they do it in a really round-about way. A sane way to regulate emissions is to tax emissions like a CO2, or something that directly correlates with producing more emissions (like a petrol tax).
Instead the US goes the insane route: CAFE standards take an average of the vehicles produced by a company, and give companies some incentives based on that average. Of course, they also add extra loopholes, like the SUV exemption.
SUVs also get exemptions for passenger and pedestrian safety standards.)
Wtf? What's the rationale behind this?
Basically, the originally justification was that stuff like farm trucks shouldn't be burdened by extra regulations. Public choice theory explains where it went from there.
Definitely hear you about cars.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
"Over the past ten years, pedestrian deaths in the first half of the year skyrocketed from 2,141 in 2013 to 3,434 in 2022 – a 60% increase..."
That said, pedestrian deaths for children under 13 looks to have decreased in the last 10-20+ years. Maybe fewer children walking is a factor there.
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...
More info here:
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/pedestr...
The car size thing is valid. Although I remember cars in the 80s, often of the 70s, were massive steel tanks and I doubt the braking distances were all that good.
One thing I've noticed is that at a school near me, the school zone signs about driving speed are often shadowed/obscured by parked parents and trees from above. Stops it from being front of mind. That school has been there and I've driven past it for decades, but as you said, often it takes seeing a family in the area to remind me that it's a school zone and in school hours, since I'm usually driving past at other times of day.
I participated in a citizen's panel for community road safety years back and thought that there should be a broader zone for a block or two surrounding schools. It wouldn't necessarily be as strict as 25km/h, but maybe 35km/h and rendered differently - coloured line markings, kerb colours, no hanging foliage or bushes higher than 300-500mm, more limitations on parking. Right now, parents compete to drop kids as close as possible to school, to minimise road crossings. Give them more confidence to drop kids further away. Limits congestion and builds autonomy in the kids.
In the drop off lines, the teachers assist to keep the cars moving so you really shouldn’t start unloading early and let them walk. I think it would be good as you mentioned but would be against the factory line they’ve created. I think they tried that in decades past but resolved on this as parents complained it was too slow to wait. Where I live it’s very car dependent and people really do want to drop their kid off at front door and get off to their day asap above all else.
It is a concern for safety, or at least usually couched that way, but what I hear voiced most often is fear of other humans. From older bullying kids, to hoodlums, to drugs, to predators. In short, Stranger Danger. The "don't talk to strangers" refrain I remember hearing occasionally when I was kid in the 70s didn't seem to have much effect. We just kind of shrugged. Looking around today, I see it took deep root.
((Oh yes, pun intended. It's a beautiful thing when they also perfectly express the thought.))
I got one for my first job out of school that required me onsite at the opposite side of the sprawling stupid city I'm from, and it was a 30 min drive each way. Losing an hour a day just to driving, right from the start. It eventually broke down, and now that I've been without one for a few years, the prospect comes to mind every so often to get a used thing for getting to trailheads a little more frequently; supporting the various recreational things I do. But... it scares me. It's a trap. It's a financial trap, a lifestyle trap, and more of a burden than it could ever be a blessing. Thankfully the every day risks of getting hit by an idiot in a huge truck or something are non-optional and an ever-present aspect of life no matter how you get around.
For now, I'll just continue renting one when I need one, but it does put a barrier between me and the things I love doing, we'll see if that changes in time.
My GFs hometown in Nakkon Si Thammarat (Southern Thailand, semi-rural) kids play outside just like we did when we were kids (90s, Australia).
The insane helicopter parenting seems to be US phenomena primarily but is also spreading to other Western-sphere countries like Australia.
What do you mean by this?
Or maybe things aren’t more dangerous. I’m not sure, I just know violent crime has been trending down for 25 years and the news is increasingly sensationalist and negative.
To at least some degree, I feel like there is some self fulfilling paranoia.
People here in Singapore sometimes leave their wallets or phones on tables in food courts to reserve them. Unlocked bikes don't get stolen, either.
(Our police here in Singapore sometimes runs awareness campaigns on pickpocketing with the slogan "low crime doesn't mean no crime" to get people to watch out. It's not really necessary, though.)
When I was in Chiang Mai in Thailand last year, the locals also left stuff around and didn't seem particularly worried about petty theft.
As a recent father I'm still pondering what I should do. I used to take trips to town on my own as young as eight and I soon gained a strong sense of independence which I value. But that was in New Zealand where what they call a city isn't remotely comparable to a metropolis like Tokyo. Safety wouldn't be a concern but it would be easy to get lost for hours.
I see kids by themselves on bikes all the time where I live in Tokyo.
So they depend on parents and managers more and take longer to be independent. Why does this matter? This is perfectly normal in Asian cultures for kids to be attached to their parents until their 30s, much more slowly but in a more stable and reliable fashion building their own lives.
As for someone’s 30’s, it’s just rather late in life to become independent. People are capable of it much sooner. You don’t want to hold back a grown adult.
I have a four year old, and when she's six or seven, I hope she'll be walking to the park with friends on a regular basis. When she's ten, I'm hoping she'll be responsible enough to take her younger sister with her. What is unsafe about it? Dumb phones are cheap. If you invest in knowing your neighbors, they'll know people on each block.
Please don't say safety because things are much much safer now than they were in the 70's, 80's and 90's.
That experience seemed normal to me at the time, but me and my friends may have been the tail end of that degree of freedom. Funnily enough I rarely exercised it. My parents encouraged me to explore more than I did. I was a very introverted and nerdy type who spent most of the time indoors. But I would spend my weekends and summers with my friends. And my parents wouldn't usually be willing to drive me once they considered me old enough to walk there or take the bus.
Acceptance is repeating the mistakes of the past. Basically neglecting children and turning them into adults sooner than they're ready.
Rejection is making sure that does not happen at all. Doing the complete opposite of what was done to us.
They're both wrong. The answer is some weird blend of the two. Children need the autonomy to become adults but also need the safety net of having actual adults around.
I don't see the trade-off?
The "cars" angle feels more like a favorite boogeyman around here than an actual explanation for the change.
It is. Especially on the internet, once people find a cause to champion they'll try shoehorn it into everything, regardless of relevance. I'm only surprised someone isn't trying to pin this on a lack of nuclear energy power plants, which is another internet favorite go-to.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35419097
Both Pedestrian fatalities and injuries are rising.[1] While cars are getting safer for passengers, manufacturers are not required or tested on improving pedestrian safety. You can see this in the rise of % of fatalities from car accidents that are pedestrians (less people dying in car crashes inside cars, more people dying by being hit by cars).
This is despite the numbers improving drastically in the 00s[2].
I don't think cars are the primary driver though; I think it's the 24/7 news cycle and the various iterations of the dangers to children drilled into people's psyches. Random guy at the park? Paedophile. Kid makes up a story? Satanic panic. Kid hides near a weather balloon? National news sensation. You're constantly surrounded by evil and danger and you must do what you can at all costs to protect your child -- that's the message the media pushes. The people who grew up (as I did) with the primary directive of "come home when the streetlights come on" just weren't being exposed to that stuff then but were later on in life.
I also think video games and the sheer amount of media we can consume are also big factors. People just don't want to go outside as much anymore, so outside spaces in newer suburban neighbourhoods tend to be awful. Houses are larger and more tightly packed, so kids have to go to the park. More tightly packed homes with smaller property sizes means more people (and more cars).
There's probably a bunch of other factors I'm not thinking of as well. The short answer to the thread's question is essentially just "things are different."
[1]: (PDF) https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
[2]: (PDF) https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
Depending on where you live, it's harder young people to get around compared to 40 years ago. Like this HN user's experience in this same thread[2].
By making society car centric we have made it difficult for children to exercise independence even if their parents allowed them to.
In a non metro area your options as a teen to go somewhere are to beg your parents to drive you somewhere or to walk for hours to a bus stop. These barriers and the rise in pedestrian fatalities do not incentivize autonomy.
[1] https://youtu.be/oHlpmxLTxpw Why we won't raise our kids in suburbia
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35417776
I had a bike as a kid, and got my driver's license as soon as I turned 16. The bike isn't the fastest option, but it was just fine for getting to school, to friend's houses and to the local Walmart. And once I had a driver's license, I could and did borrow the family car, and many of my peers had a car that was specifically designated for the kids. Being able to drive a car used to be a symbol of independence for us, but today fewer and fewer teens are even getting a driver's license.
Yes, not every family has a car that's available to borrow, but most in suburbia do.
To pick up a few arguments. My neighbours are farmers, there are more ford raptors and guns than anywhere else in the country. Yet kids walk a hour to school by their own and play far from their parents vision.
My 2nd grader started to walk home from school (~1km, two busier roads, one without crossing and bunch of smaller roads without crossing) by himself couple of weeks ago and he is still rarity in his class. Last week his class teacher refused to let him go without special paper despite he had no problem to leave from (after) school club for weeks already, where I specifically written he can go home by himself whole school year to not write paper almost every day. My mistake for writing in initial registration I am picking him up, now with younger kid joining the school she will have straight from 1st grade written in official documents she can go by herself and it will be only up to our agreement how she will get home without dumb teachers stopping us.
All those statistics that show kids are safer today are at least partially the result of the changes in behavior we're talking about.
I'm trying my best right now to let my kid manage himself and learn how to ask for help where needed. I want him to go through his own choices, both good and bad, and experience success and failure on his own. I try to teach him that the only value I care about is not being a burden to others. Raising people up is true success instead of winning by pushing others down. Those core beliefs are the only ones I hope I can pass on to him. But I want to do whatever I can to make it come from him and for him to learn it from me through example rather than control.
I know that no matter how strict my parents were, it never actually did anything to increase my performance. It never did anything to increase the obedience of my siblings. All of us just went underground over time because we couldn't trust our parents to be reasonable when we talked about our experiences at school and sports. If it wasn't up to their standards they would just make us feel like we weren't living up to their standards. I've heard this being referred to as "ego" parenting or something like that. But part of the reason we could go underground was because of physical freedom. I cycled to school and sports. I took public transport and was free to sort myself out from completely from teenage years.
Instead of addressing the bit though about making a safe space for kids and not chasing them underground, it feels like parents have taken the approach of encroaching on their physical space as well to ensure that they do not escape the boundaries of the standards they demand.
And now children are giving up on trying to find freedom in physical spaces. How could they when the parents are following them to every event and class that they go to? They can't even go to a mall with friends anymore without having parents around in some form or another. I feel like the desire to go underground in the digital spaces is a natural evolution although I have nothing but my own anecdotal experiences to share to support this.
This is a tangential sharing of experience and opinion in relation the article. I leave this as a thinking point because I think physical freedom is being dampened for more than just the reason of fears of safety. There's also a strong desire to control children and have them grow up in our image of "perfection". If we want to reverse this trend, it may take a lot of parents having to get really uncomfortable with themselves and understanding that there's a significant amount of their own ego that needs to be removed. Else the end is going to be a never ending unhealthy war to find ways to control children's spaces every time they find a new one to go underground in.
It's my perception that letting kiddo play outside, climbing trees, biking on the sidewalk in front of the house should be a low risk activity for a 2nd and 4th grader if done together. Not in the perception of neighbors. Every time I say yes to them asking to play in public, I'm taking a risk that someone will call the cops for the simple act of a child playing outside without a parent. How do I know? It's happened three times already.
There's a group of folks who see that as inherently dangerous and have no problem invoking the police to shut it down. They've also been approached by strangers asking where their parents are. They're obeying the laws, not being reckless or getting into trouble. They're minding their own business and because of that they are confronted for it.
It's these encounters that weigh on my mind when I'm deciding how to respond when they ask if they can play outside each day. Sometimes I say no, because I'm not prepared to deal with the possibility of that scenario occurring again.
The looks i get for letting my kids scoot ahead of me on a sidewalk of a large city (while I walk behind them) are beyond belief.
You should not be permitted to deliberately harass people you don't know doing nothing wrong in this way, it's that simple. It's a question of individual liberty in the end.
I'd hope the police would actually have a private word with them to this effect to be honest, when they do 'report' it. I assume not, but do you know if any ever have?
I doubt that most people who call the police about kids playing outside are trying to harass anyone. I think they are just misguided.
The police serve as a firewall against all inquiries about reporters including asking if reporters could (for lack of better term) be "asked to behave like mature adults." The opacity of communication structure serves to fragment social cohesiveness rather than cultivate it. In a time where people yearn for community, having police block all communication between parties atomizes and alienates community members from each other even more.
If I were to turn this into an opportunity to imagine a better future, it would be twofold. One, a non-emergency service should be capable of handling events of this sort[2]. I don't need the same people arresting gang members and murderers doing house calls re: your kid was climbing a tree in your front yard.
Second, the persons reporting should be told something of the sort, "Thank you for your concern, your intentions were neighborly, but reporting kids for existing is not a valuable use of our time."
Instead I'm stuck with weighing letting my kids be kids and the possibility of guys with guns showing up at my quiet suburban home, and having the talk that starts with, "We know everything's probably fine, but someone called us..." again.
1. I suppose the socially de-incentivizing parents letting kiddos play outside is hard to quantify and "not really much of a concern to police", probably for a different set of biases from their perspective.
2. It's easy to imagine something like CPS getting involved. Maybe I'm naive for asking folks to imagine that a service "not as bad as CPS" could possibly exist. Idk, I'm a parent, not a social services engineer.
That said, its not up to the police to decide the law, its up to the judge or CPS, so going to the lowest common denominator, you'll have to explain it to the judge or assigned case worker.
Most investigations are generally a guilty until proven innocent from what I've heard since the safety of the child is paramount.
All they have to do is prove there was some negligence which is a very low bar.
Since when?
The police have zero duty to protect anyone or otherwise enforce the law in any way; they already don't bother investigating a good chunk of smaller thefts and will just stand around while crowds torch buildings and shootings continue inside their perimeter.
They have a lot of discretion; I suggest they exercise it.
>All they have to do is prove there was some negligence which is a very low bar.
Most people are agreeable enough that their first response isn't a life-and-death dash to the nearest lawyer. This is generally a mistake, but they really don't know better.
>reports are often tailored to be vague by the neighbor to ensure a confrontation with police.
"Swatting" and more indirect cases of vexatious litigation are criminal offenses for a reason (even if nobody gets hurt). Karen is guilty of violating these laws; it's time to get serious about enforcing them.
People should think twice about reporting stuff they should know better about reporting, and police should have a way to use their judgement to decide if what someone reported constitutes a valid complaint, grey area, or a busybody with nothing better to do than waste tax payers' time.
Its what the courts in many areas have generally ruled.
If you make a report, and those reports are valid but ignored, they can be sued and the city or organization becomes liable because they were negligent. A judge decides damages which impact ongoing budgets.
> Karen is guilty of violating these laws.
Yes, but how difficult is it to prove intent. How often do defamation suits win? Will a prosecutor ever really go after someone that claims a plausible excuse?
Don't they have more important things to devote their resources towards?
What about the harms caused to the parents, and the children, very hard to quantify. A report is self-enforcing because the police have a duty of care to respond to reports.
Litigation would only ever actually occur civilly, and outside of extreme circumstances that demonstrate clear bad faith its a grey area that goes unenforced and unpunished.
So who in the end actually gets punished, and is that punishment coercive. The courts generally don't recognize it as such since the accused (the person reporting it) has good faith protection. Its very hard to prove they did it in bad faith. Litigation would only ever actually occur civilly, and outside of extreme circumstances that demonstrate clear bad faith its a grey area that goes unenforced and unpunished.
So who in the end actually gets punished?
That is certainly not the case everywhere, least of all the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonzale....
> Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled, 7–2, that a town and its police department could not be sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for failing to enforce a restraining order, which had led to the murders of a woman's three children by her estranged husband.
Any rational person reading your response is going to assume you either didn't read what I said, or worse were using malign influence tactics to push something that 'wasn't said' as 'something that was said' (as a troll would).
Notably, I never said it was everywhere, in fact I said the opposite (if you go back and review). You left an important sentence out of my quoted response.
We want to keep discussions clean, if you have something to add make sure to keep it accurate. Cherry-picking and putting words in other people's mouth isn't an acceptable form of rational discourse.
We don't want people reading this misunderstanding your intent or what you are trying to communicate.
Everyone knows almost nothing happens everywhere. Its why the first thing they teach in argumentation, debate, and logic is to never use absolute language like 'all' and 'every' unless you know its absolute (and can't be misinterpreted).
Miscommunications happen, hopefully you understand how it happened now and will be more careful moving forward.
> > > The police are liable if they don't follow-up on the report
> > Since when?
> Its what the courts in many areas have generally ruled.
Really, if you want to insist that this was what you were saying the entire time, either start with it or acknowledge that you failed to start with it. Indeed, miscommunications happen. Consider that you come across as unwilling to believe your part in this happening.
Likewise, I hope you can see how you erred so that you may do better in the future.
It isn't just about legal liability, it is also about politics.
Suppose a child is abducted/murdered/etc. Turns out some concerned bystander saw something suspicious and called the police, but the police decided not to follow up. Even if the police aren't legally liable, once the media and politicians are done with the story, the general public will be so outraged, decent odds the chief of police will be forced to resign. You can say this is a very rare scenario and almost never happens, but government culture encourages risk-aversion – especially when it comes to children – so they'll worry about the risk, they'll overestimate it – and then they'll craft policies based on it.
This is literally what "defund the police" was all about
Also, I don't mean a cultural evil, as most people dismiss this as just being your cultural opinion. I mean the type of multi-cultural evil that strips people of their ability to respond (agency), tells them misleading lies, promotes flawed and self-defeating beliefs, causes loss in one form or another, and worse most of the time the people doing this are mentally ill but you still have to deal with the outcomes.
This is a real problem because if you conform, you are tacitly approving of those beliefs and your children will learn socially from your response to it. Unfortunately, in a world where you get CPS or the police called to charge you with child endangerment its a pretty mad world, and its happening more and more.
An interesting parallel are these philosophies that you can somehow make things safe, all ultimately fall into some form of socialist or fascist narrative where someone at the top decides what is or isn't safe because you as an individual are unimportant comapared to the group which is paramount.
These narratives are very common in totalitarian and fascist societies that use propaganda and political warfare to kill potentially disruptive thinking.
A few books helped me frame this stuff far better than I was able to before. This was the one I started with[0]. Framing isn't a fix or a prevention, but it has helped me to adjust actions and expectations much more tailored for the situation.
I am not looking forward to that crocodile remark: "I just want to be sure your child is safe."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Freedom
My personal religious believe frowns uppon $X? That means $X should now be illegal for everybody.
I believe without evidence your kids are constantly unsafe: let me call the police on them.
It is okay not to like what your neighbours are doing. It is okay (and maybe even necessary) to discuss this with them. But it is not okay to call the police on them or force them by law to your believes.
And that in a nation where your cent piece had "Mind your business" written on it.
Just like any culture there are many parts of the American one, but the part that comes from adventure, exploration, freedom etc definitely has been on the decline since about the 70-80s. Control and Puritanism is what’s stronger now.
Personally I hope it swings back at some point.
If all adults agree to build mechanized genocidal murder factories that will remain a stain on humanity for centuries it is still wrong to do so.
Some rights are non-negotiable to my eyes. Even (or maybe especially) when a democratic majority decides to break them. Legality doesn't matter here. The concentration camps next to where I grew up were also legal during Nazi reign. That doesn't make them right, not back then, not now and not in the future.
I'd highly advise against a petty "let's se where that gets them"-stance when it comes to human rights issues, because those paying the price are not those who commit the atrocities.
I hadn't heard about this book, and I'm always looking for new books that help frame problems better.
Just based off what I saw regarding this, its probably not the best as a starter book.
It can really be tough with this type of material because if you don't have a solid practical or rigorous approach to both logic and argumentation, and can reasonably make parallels or see where it leads, you can easily fall into traps that are plausible but may be flawed/false.
You really have to approach this type of material critically and assume its false until you can find rational and reasonable support for what may be said. Reading material in this genre, like you would a leisure book would be a mistake, since most tend to internalize words/concepts like movies after speed picks up, and of course children that have not yet reached the age of reason shouldn't be reading this type of material since they would be developmentally incapable of recognizing any potential lies for what they might be.
Not having read the book yet I can't yet vouch for the content, but it definitely looks interesting, and worth a read, at least for me.
You really have to know the philosophy and tactics that are pushed in this area in order to recognize it enough to defend against it.
There was a very interesting recent publication in USMC University on Political Warfare which has some overlap.
I have experienced this cycling without a helmet (as is my right) from aggressive motorists.
Now I have a term for the phenomenon!
This is such a non-statement that everyone can fill in with the ideology that they choose to categorize in this way.
You voiced a lot of super general concerns, but without specific examples it's difficult what you actually believe. Because so much language has been corrupted.
Both people that see peaceful transition of power of democracy in the US being threatened, and those that are against public health mandated COVID lockdowns call those that disagree with them "fascist".
So I genuinely don't know what you're talking about in this paragraph and I'm curious if you would be willing to share some examples.
Its not a statement, its a set of statements that compose a characterization, which is something commonly done by scientists, engineers, and rational people to communicate specific descriptions so they can be recognized again by others, this is primarily done when common words are not available to match specific common meanings in communications.
> can fill in with the ideology that they choose to categorize in this way
You'll have to further clarify what you mean, there are two potential meanings embedded with that single statement, and you've failed to communicate which one that is, it looks to me like you've misunderstood this as some ideology akin to philosophy such as consequentialism when its a description of behavior.
A characterization is just a description of the distinctive nature, elements, features, or composition of someone or something specific, in this case behavior. Behavior that leaves at least one party with a negative outcome while also negatively impacting all or most future outcomes related to that party.
Its important to understand and convey the correct and rational meaning of words, as you said many groups seek to corrupt language to prevent communication, to distract, disorient, and create disunity using a whole host of sordid and malign influence tactics to cause distorted reflected appraisal.
> Both people... and those that disagree with them.
We will not be going off into the weeds, talking about potentially irrational beliefs of others, or getting bogged down in unrelated controversial narratives as those only serve disunity and chaos.
You may also want to review the actual definition and elements of fascism. Regardless, what you mention here has no relevance to the current discussion.
I was confused about your post, too. What did you mean?
Its helpful to those that understood it and who understand what the stakes are, and also in giving the necessary words people need for a time when they will need them.
If you are unable to see anything wrong with where the behavior I describe leads inevitably, you deserve the outcomes that are coming.
Make no mistake death is not uncommon when these types of systems fail towards their logical conclusion, if left to propagate forward unabated, the outcome is an inevitable cascade. Its a part of a cycle that's happened many times in the past with the same conclusion.
This has happened before many times in history, and it will happen again until we learn our lessons as a people.
This time it will be much worse because so much of our population is wholly dependent on technological systems that will fail to deliver enough food when those societal failures do occur.
If you can't see where this path of coercion, compulsion, and other intolerable acts have led us in the past, no amount of words will convince you otherwise.
You would have to learn by experience, and the downsides firsthand, and by then it would be too late to do or be anything other than a victim of circumstance.
What odds do you give yourself or your children of survival when those failures occur and suddenly 8-12 billion have to subsist on practices available that can only at their theoretical maxima feed 2-4 billion.
I already gave you one example: reactionaries appropriated those criticizing Trump's policies as "fascist" to call those that disagree with public health lockdowns as the same.
Likewise, your original terms of "flawed and self-defeating beliefs" and "mentally ill" are currently being weaponized by the same people to brandish transgender people as harmful ideologues.
Just thought you should know, in the slim hope that you don't. Because if you do, you either don't care or are doing it on purpose. Both of which are harmful.
Ultimately, you sound like AI-generated. You say a lot of words that individually have meaning without saying anything at all.
It's the children's rights, freedom and agency that are being infringed upon. Even if a parent was unjustly restricting their own child from going outside, instead of calling the police on someone else's child, that would be just as wrong.
On average, I think CPS interventions are usually good. A parent with unchecked power is the ultimate form of totalitarianism, and abuse is common.
You cannot have responsibilities without having the necessary rights needed to fulfill those responsibilities. Its two sides of the same coin. You have both, or you have neither regardless of what someone else may irrationally say or decide, and rational thought is all that matters.
Worse, that line of reasoning also leads to legitimizing and justifying coercion, corruption, compulsion, and a large number of other intolerable outcomes that have throughout history cyclically become self-destructive. There are plenty of examples in history, it was very common in years leading up the Nazi's rise to power before and during WW2.
You may want to further educate yourself from published statistics before pushing unbacked value statements like its 'usually good', and 'abuse is common' [0]. If you'd checked, you'd see what you said is not actually true and misleads.
Additionally, take a look at the pie chart broken down by category in the report, what percentage of false reports do they say they receive...
What percentage of reports, in aggregate, find some form of confirmation (based on how those categories are handled with respect to due process). Keep in mind, 'Unsubstantiated' doesn't mean what you might think it means [1].
Given police refer these issues to CPS for investigation instead of investigating themselves, and given statistics often follow a distribution curve not a binary choice, are either of those answers that are simple lookups from the report, likely, or expected, or rationally sound without there being some profound issue with the system being measured. [No].
Its really disheartening having to deal with people pushing irrational misinformation, and other limiting beliefs and narratives that will negatively impact others.
All this comment's done is add to the noise in a fundamentally negative way to muddy water.
Karma has a way of coming back to you three fold over time regardless of whether you believe in it or not. Please try to avoid pushing false noise in the future.
[0] https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubpdfs/canstats.pdf, Statistics [1] https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubpdfs/decisionmaking.pdf
People will disagree on all kinds of issues, but would take a major crime for me to call the police on my neighbor. Imagine living next to someone after you did that?
I wouldn't call the police on kids climbing trees.
But I'd attend a 3-hour timeshare pitch meeting at a Red Lobster before I'd have a 5 minute "mutual dialogue" with a parent about their kids' truly problematic behavior. (And I'm allergic to shellfish.)
Parents who can have mutual dialogues typically don't have kids who require them. And for the kids who desperately need them, community members seem to play a game of hot potato until somebody is finally forced to step in and confront the parents (typically after property damage).
> In the U.S. though, the police have been called, women arrested, and children taken into custody for finishing out a stroller nap in an enclosed backyard, using an iPad in a car for a few minutes, and playing in a park.
So, which ones of those are property damage to neighbors?
The rise of these sort of things seems to correlate particularly well with the skyrocketing rate of single person households in the US, which increased more than 500% from 1960 to 2021 [1], even though the population in that time didn't even double.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/242022/number-of-single-...
Healthy and well-adjusted adults don't do these things.
(Edit: crime in action, they might come.)
People are doing this, because from their perspective children might be abandoned by their parents. The reason is that playing outside is not normalised enough at the moment.
If you read this comment without context is sounds completely insane.
Kids playing outside has been the <<norm>> for hundreds of thousands of years.
Yeah, well, stop it, and put them behind a screen all day like a normal person.
We live in Idaho now and it's similar up here though I don't know about the laws. In our neighborhood kids will run around playing outside together unsupervised all day and nobody bats an eye. It's expected!
That's why you find them being passed in conservative and ultra-religious states: Utah, Texas, Oklahoma
It's a tough balance.
Sarcasm? We have both privacy and free roam rights for children in germany.
Talk about sane legislature!
It's nothing to do with SRS, which is not offered to children anyway, so your dislike of that is irrelevant.
It's my understanding that spanking isn't the optimal way to discipline children and still shouldn't be done, but conflating it with beating a child is ridiculous and offensive.
Yes, striking your child to teach them a lesson is definitely completely unrelated to striking your child out of anger/frustration. Definitely no connections there at all.
To me, a "spank" is usually a mild to moderate slap on the rear, a part of the body particularly well cushioned that can handle it just fine without physical trauma, not to mention psychological trauma.
When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool, and usually with visible bruising and possible laceration and bleeding.
If you've ever been a parent, regardless of whether you think spanking is OK, you know that there is a huge difference between these two activities. I personally avoid physical discipline myself, but I can understand a parent who decides to give their kid a spank on the rump after the child did something where they didn't understand how seriously negative the implications were.
For example, if 5 year old runs out into traffic on a busy road and you pull them back, which form of discipline is more likely to negatively incentivize the impulse to dash into the street to get a penny? I can see why someone would think that the short – but sharp – pain of a quick spank is more effective at protecting the child's short and long term health.
When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool, and usually with visible bruising and possible laceration and bleeding.
"Spanking" can definitely include implements, though that's less common nowadays as people have started to view the act in a less positive light overall.
And the "without psychological trauma" is one aspect where it isn't really that clear if there is a level of spanking that avoids that whole issue.
Exactly, which is why I myself choose to play it safe.
But it's kinda like the, "No evidence that parachutes save lives" thing, where because you don't have a double-blind randomized controlled study, we have to end up relying on our intuition.
And – unlike with parachutes – everyone has a different intuition as to whether spanking is actually going to result in trauma. Lots of, "I'll never hit my child" going up against, "I was spanked as a child and I'm just fine" so its all back to personal judgment.
I think by using violence, the main thing you teach kids is that using violence is an option. I prefer to discourage violence. I'm not saying I never grabbed or held them a bit too roughly, but I think they learn a lot more from me talking to them and explaining why it's wrong, than from pain.
> When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool
I see people talk about belts far too often. I would consider that immediate grounds for losing custody over your child.
It is true that a malicious parent is capable of mentally damaging their child without recourse to violence, but it does not follow from that that we should shrug and permit it. Violence is an overwhelming force multiplier in an abuser's toolkit, and also strictly unnecessary for good parenting.
I'm glad that you brought up this example because it's the one context in which I think spanking can be acceptable (needing to shock a child from something they were about to do that could have endangered themselves or others). I'm not a parent and not sure I wouldn't try to find some other approach but I can see the strength of the argument here (where I can't see it for other uses of corporal punishment of children).
The empirical evidence is mixed. The best behaved kids in the world are in east Asia, where physical discipline is still quite common. Physical discipline was widespread in the west during the very timeframe that contemporary civilizations developed. America as you know it today, with all its prosperity, was created by people who were spanked as children.
More likely by people who played outside as children. I'm pretty sure that's more universal than spanking.
Which is giving me an idea: are there societal problems among youths that correlate with either a lack of spanking or a lack of playing outside? Most of Europe has banned spanking but encourages playing outside, whereas in the US, spanking is legal but playing outside strongly discouraged. Which kids are doing better? Less violent? Less psychological problems?
> Physical discipline was widespread in the west during the very timeframe that contemporary civilizations developed.
I'd be real careful pushing that justification; it can be used to support all manner of unnecessary (and was-never-necessary) evil.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34471156
I meant Asians in Asia. Also, as I mentioned in the thread you linked, I’m unpersuaded by your study of Asian Americans, especially because of the highly idiomatic phrasing of the polling questions. I’m also not even sure how you’d design a study to measure this to account for confounding factors. For example, how do you separate parents who use physical punishment because they have poor impulse control (which is quite heritable) from those that use physical punishment when it’s appropriate? And what’s the definition of success? E.g. what if teachers hitting low impulse control students doesn’t do much for the student, but reduces disruption so the rest of the students in class do better? That wouldn’t seem to count in the studies on this I’ve seen.
Nobody should hit kids. This is a bad contrarian hill to die on.
We know for a fact that corporal punishment is widely used in Asia. Surveys show that 60-70% of parents in India, China, and Japan spank their kids or approve of spanking: e.g. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2014-06/03/content_175.... It's possible that all those Asian immigrants come to American and adopt western attitudes against corporal punishment, but I'm going to need more than a poorly worded survey to believe that.
> Nobody should hit kids. This is a bad contrarian hill to die on.
You're the contrarian here! The same survey you relied on in the other thread shows that the vast majority of asian American parents (73%) spank their kids.
I mean, I guess it could have been worse- you could have said "America as you know it today, with all its prosperity, was created by people who burned witches" or "...who practiced chattel slavery."
Those same people also practiced bundling [1] as a courtship ritual, and used mercury as a treatment for melancholy [2]. Out of all the practices you could have cited, why on Earth would you pick beating kids as a factor in America's success, instead of something more benign?
You're smart enough to know the difference between correlation and causation. Do you have evidence that physical discipline was the reason America became the country it is today?
If you don't have such evidence, how do you know that we wouldn't have been even more prosperous without corporal punishment as a child-rearing method?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_(tradition)
2. https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2017/10/22/mercury-was-...
By contrast, cultures that stopped using physical discipline are almost universally in decline. On the European continent, for example, post-Christians who don’t use physical discipline are being outcompeted by Muslims who do.
Any tech jobs outside of SLC?
Lakebed is indeed sadness.
(Maybe... but it looks somewhat similar. And 1983 wasn't unique. It also happened sometime in the 1950s, though I forget the exact year.)
For those not in the know: In 1982, the lake was also sadness. There was talk of it drying up completely. Then the winter of 1982-83 was something like 200% of normal. Salt Lake wound up having to turn State Street into a river to handle all the extra water. From there to 1985 or -86, the lake rose dramatically, threatening to close railroads, and interstate 80.
You’d probably be arrested if you let your kids have that type of freedom today.
The US is truly and utterly deranged. Kids should make their own experiences throughout their neighbourhood. And neighbours should scold them if they behave like shit. This is literally how it has been for most of humanity.
Because that's not what the police report was about?
The police don't get summoned because kids are causing problems. They are getting summoned simply because there is no adult visible.
The OP isn't making some outlandish claim that requires massive amounts of evidence for us to accept. There are thousands of stories attesting to this kind of thing.
I see kids out side on their own all the time, even in suburban California like some other comment suggested is an issue
For instance buying apartment next to basketball playground and then complaining about kids playing there basketball and making noise is not police business but idiots call police on kids having fun, apparently they should be better staring at phones at home, so old people can then complain kids nowadays don't spend enough time outdoors.
Then now add the scenario where it's probably socially unacceptable to interact with other people's kids
"What else are you supposed to do?" Focus on something else. The cops are for enforcing the law, not for making you feel better.
So what are you supposed to do?
Never mind the craziness that a neighbor would call the police when seeing a child outside (and that’s quite crazy) - if police answer that call they are reinforcing the idea that the child playing alone outside was wrong or dangerous.
This is still a conservative view compared to 30 years ago, when it was acceptable for a lone 5 year old to learn to ride a bike on a suburban sidewalk relatively unsupervised (yes, really!). You may be on the liberal end of the modern Overton window, but you've been dragged along just like the rest of us.
"Dispatcher: Please state the nature of your emergency.
Caller: A 4th and 2nd grader appear to be playing some sort of game across the street in their own front yard.
Dispatcher: Are they armed?
Caller: Yes, with a wiffle bat and ball/projectile. A water pistol and/or balloons may have been sighted earlier.
Dispatcher: Thanks, we'll send in the SWAT team again."
Another issue is the compltely overblown fear or crimes such as abduction. The #1 and #2 causes of child death in the US are firearms related and automobile related (respectively). Those are completely normalized.
When a parent only has one, it's both easier to control them from a time & energy perspective, and also more understandable biologically from a risk perspective, than if they had say five.
I have a 5 and 2 year old and will definitely let them play unattended when they are older. We are just at the “you can play in the next room unattended while I cook dinner” stage. Yet, I can totally see the pressure from others with them seeing it as neglectful.
Cars and deep water. Those are my two biggest fears. And they scare me to no end because they are very real threats. To a lesser extent: trains.
https://www.criticalthinking.org/
The two links above are good for raising children and teaching them to think with empathy and compassion. Schools should follow one or the other.
My father was a Drill Instructor Dad, always yelling at me, ordering me around. But he let me play outside with my friends in the streets and parks. Back then you didn't have to worry about pedophiles grabbing kids or school shooters. So I can see why some parents want to be helicopter parents. But you want your child to grow up independent from you so they can do their own thing. You don't want the dependence for the day you die, they won't know what to do.
Cities are way safer today than in the 80s when I myself was growing up and as a 11 year old it was perfectly normal for me to commute by train and Tube from Reading, UK to Kensington, London for school with my 7 year old brother in tow. I aim to instill the same confidence in my daughter, albeit a year later.