"When America’s missing children are featured in popular culture, it is usually the cases of stereotypical kidnappings, which happen to be very rare. […] The third NISMART study found that approximately 105 stereotypical kidnappings occur every year in the United States (Wolak et al. 2016). That is still 105 too many. The general public may estimate a much higher number of this type of case, based on how often they are portrayed in fiction. […]
The rare kidnapping cases may be the most known of missing children cases, but are the smallest category in number. Looking at the broader nature of the missing child problem and considering the full spectrum of the missing, including endangered runaways, children taken by family members, lost and injured children, children thrown out of their homes, and children separated from their families by natural disasters and catastrophes, the number of families having a missing person increases exponentially. In 2018, there were 424,066 new reports of missing children entered into the National Crime Information Center, the computerized index of missing persons and criminal justice information (NCIC 1984, para. 1), which works out to about 1,162 new cases of missing children every day (NCMEC 2019c, para. 4). […]
Despite what many people believe, a child can be in real danger when abducted by a family member. Family abductions are cases in which a family member absconds with the child, preventing the other parent from knowing the child’s location."
Regardless of the danger or not of getting in a strangers car (and in comparison to getting into a known person's car), children are taught to not do it.
I mean, yeah? There's a qualitative difference between your Uber driver showing up to the specified location where you're waiting and someone who could be an Uber driver stopping you while you're walking down the road to offer a ride.
The person could simply have asked the child if they were OK or they need help, if they maybe need a phone to call their parents. Their attitude was more like seeing a stray animal out in the wild and calling animal control. They are fucking insane, there's no excuse.
When I was 8? I think, I used to take a bus to go get a VHS tape from the local rental shop. It's important for kids to have autonomy. In Japan, its pretty common to send even younger kids out on errands.
When I was growing up in the 70s, it was totally normal for a dad to give their under 10 year old kid some money and send them to the corner store to buy a pack of cigarettes for dad.
Japan namely. While I cannot say whether or not a store would sell beer to a 5 year old, no longer can anyone just buy beer or cigarettes (and more) from vending machines.
Yeah, but wouldn't the sheriff making the comment be own goaling the situation. Wouldn't her scenarios imply that she's shite at her job so that crimes like these are prevalent?
No no, you see, the tremendous crime rate in the city is why voters should support giving the sheriff loads more unchecked power, and loads more money to buy MRAPs and AR-15s.
After witnessing the past decade, do you think even immediate logical contraditions matter in the least? Especially for the kind of people that think that society should be some kind of authority hierarchy, which is essentially a prerequisite of being a cop?
It's precisely that lack of awareness on their part that makes Cartman's "respect my authority" funny or any other trope as well like Tackelberry from Police Academy work (for the old farts) or Farva from Super Troopers (for those slightly less old).
This is American policing, I've been pulled over or even detained for just walking several times. I think it's a combination of power tripping, nothing better to do with large police forces and many vehicles, and a fundamental distrust of any transport that isn't a car. And of course the legal and moral framework that allows for random abuses of rights and an overall acceptance of a papers-please force.
Hate to ask but are you a person of color? My brown friends have been pulled over and stopped while just walking around many more times than me (plain white dude). I have been pulled over one time in my life and never so much as had more more than a “hi how are you doing?”from a cop on the street.
FWIW I had my car get totaled while I was a freshman in college and walked to it the day after. Cops stopped me 3 times on approx a 6mi walk, wouldn't leave me the fuck alone until I pulled out ID. I'm white and this was in NJ, we are not a stop and identify state. Apparently teen walking down the road with a backpack in middle of day is suspicious.
This was around 17 years ago, cant imagine how ridiculous it is now.
IANAL but I doubt it. There are school districts in GA that require kids to walk up to a mile and a half each way before bussing in mandated. Additionally, no jury of your rural peers would ever agree with those charges. I am stunned myself at the lunacy. I live in a rural area and given the size of their property I assume they do as well. My next door neighbor lives almost a mile from us. Granted I don't live in GA but I can't imagine any rural sheriff being re-elected on a platform that kids can't be trusted to walk to their neighbors house or to their little town.
The busybodies don't realize that they are themselves a threat to kids' wellbeing. Nine times out of ten kids are better off with bad parents than with no parents.
When I was five years old I would walk along a path and take a bridge across a river to visit my friend to play board games. By the time I was nine I was bicycling forty-five minutes to school on a 80 km/h road. The level of paranoia that's infected people around keeping kids near their parents is insane.
For all of the happy survivor stories like yours (and mine), the reality is that the rate of child accidental deaths has steadily decreases over the past few decades as parents (and society) became more protective. That isn't to say I agree with over-parenting and eliminating independence -- I don't -- but there needs to be rationality applied as well as personal values.
In Central European cities kids will walk unsupervised to school from age 5, even today in 2024. Parents are even actively discouraged from taking children to school. If what you suggest is true, then statistically we should see Swiss children dying at a higher rate than American children?
Yes, but. It's not "happy survivor stories", as if 20% of all children died on their way to school thirty years ago. It's overwhelmingly normal stories, and child deaths were always exceedingly rare.
Yes, while childhood suicide, depression and obesity rates have all been increasing. If you look at all the factors, I'm not sure there's a net benefit.
Edit: I decided to look up the CDC statistics to see if there is any net benefit, but total childhood mortality rates have been increasing in the US. Measuring accidental deaths is extremely flawed, if that were a good target then we should keep all children indoors. No bike riding, no swimming, no tree climbing, just keep them inside on a screen all day long and accidental deaths will continue to drop.
Don't forget that there are a lot fewer kids today.
One only need to look at how a single kid is parented vs four.
I had a hilarious example at the park where the single child had constant supervision while the fourth kid of the same age was left alone to do whatever until she hurt herself and started crying. In between she ate dirt, sand, jumped in a puddle, threw stones at the local wild life, ate the single kids snacks, and finally fell off a ladder and busted her nose.
It's not that parents in the 70s were hands off, it's that they had their hands full and couldn't do any more.
Why single out "more protective" as if it were a relevant factor? Surely that's a personal value, without a strong rational justification.
It's also decreased as the amount of environmental lead has decreased.
It's also decreased as the number of computer screens has increased.
It's also decreased as sugar consumption has increased. (Are parents actually being protective as they feed more sugar to their kids?)
As has our consumption of GMOs.
It's also decreased as government-mandated product, automobile, and housing safety standards have increased (which is different from parents becoming more protective!).
A rational response would be to hold off on highlighting any specific correlation until establishing that it's more meaningful than other alternatives.
> the reality is that the rate of child accidental deaths has steadily decreases over the past few decades as parents (and society) became more protective
While accidental deaths are down, I wouldn’t be so quick to conclude this is because of parents/ becoming more protective so much as society collectively implementing regulations and safety standards that target specific things that are known to be highly dangerous. The list of these targeted changes is extremely long, but some top mentions:
- Safer car and booster seats. Cribs, toys, and other household items.
- Advances in healthcare and access to vaccinations.
- Better education for caregivers around drowning prevention, safe sleeping practices, etc.
- Childproofed products like wall outlets, cabinet locks, baby gates, etc.
- Stricter rules and education on smoke and carbon monoxide detection.
- Road safety initiatives ranging from seatbelt and child restraints laws to anti-DUI programs.
- Improved consumer protections and communication of product recalls.
Please use Google Street View on the roads coming in to Mineral Bluffs, Ga, USA. No bike lines, and we're not even keen on emergency shoulder for cars and trucks!
Please use Google street view in any small town around the world and notice the prevalence of foot traffic. Even on roads with no shoulder, bike lane, sidewalk or similar. I've walked to school since I was 6 on roads not too dissimilar.
1. Study the width of the oversize vehicle here[1].
2. Study the lack of shoulder next to this guard rail[2].
No parent in their right mind is going to be comfortable letting a six year-old walk that, in any decade. And no municipality is going to let school buses drop kids at arbitrary parts of that highway, unless the driver is dumping them into a residential side-street.
I'm glad you survived walking on streets like this when you were six, but that's not relevant to these highways being dangerous places for regular (or irregular) foot traffic.
That would definitely not been unusual in Germany in the 80s. Actually many rural German roads didn't even have that small shoulder, you really had to walk either on the street or on the grass. Kids learned how to handle this. There are even popular children's songs from that decade about how to do this, which is to walk on the left side of the road (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La129TFxCGE).
Too big of a liability and not enough ROI, or negative ROI from what I've seen with others who have children. How does having a child help me diversify my portfolio? All I see is a bad risk.
This is a huge reason for me. I don't want to explain to someone that the world used to be free, but now everything is limited and "locked down" because safety.
Could you please explain why you believe this to be the case? One of the major advocates of 'free-range parenting' (and who allowed her child to ride the New York Subway unaccompanied) is a frequent contributor to a leading libertarian magazine (Reason). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenore_Skenazy
There is a wide gap between the people who understand what freedom means and value it and the ones loudly proclaiming freedom. "Reason" may actually fall into the secondary category. The way this works is by undermining the rule of regulations by finding the most ridiculous example of excess (note how the author of the article wastes no effort on finding examples where sanity prevailed stoking emotions of the reader against this extreme but rare overreach). It is important to realize the total absence of regulation promoted implicitly often leads to rule setting by the strongest and most ruthless.
I was thinking it's the generation of people who have been normalized to "lockdowns" in school, who think the solution to everything is to make a new law, and expect the government to feed, teach, and care for their children. How can a stray child find its way alone, without a government chaperone?
There's something extremely sick about the modern attitudes to children in the US (and maybe elsewhere). These people are fucking crazy. They can't imagine a world where children actually exist out in the real world and live their life like every other country instead of only in supervised jail schools. Anything approaching affection or concern for other children is seen with suspicion as if its pedophilia. Everyone hates babies or children existing or making noise in public, we don't accomodate parents or children in any way, while watching population growth collapse. Boomers who lament never having grandchildren are called monsters. We are completely losing the fucking plot on the most important responsibility of humanity. There is nothing without children, no future, only immigration which will eventually run dry or extinction. None of these attitudes towards children exist in other places, it doesn't have to be this way.
Fortunately for the rest of the Western world, I don't think most of it has to deal with the artificial community concern about children walking on their own that the US experiences.
When I hear about police getting involved simply because a person is out walking, the story almost always turns out to be about somewhere in the south.
Well, Maryland is indeed south of the Mason-Dixon line, but Montgomery County is pretty generic mid-Atlantic suburban, and the first "free range kids" story I remember hearing was from Silver Spring.
The county referenced in the article is in Georgia. I'm not surprised that it's happening all over though. When I was younger, a neighbor called the police about a suspicious man in a hoodie wandering through a backyard. The suspicious person turned out to be me leaving through my parents' back gate to go on a walk.
my mom was taken into "adult protection custody" , for jwalking, this is happening now, and she is held in the hospital in bridgewater ns, on.the locked ward and has
now had her cell phone taken for obsessivly calling and trying to be released
she does have alzhiemrs but canadas constituion specifies that people are allowed to take there own risks
held incomunicado for her own saftey
I got banned from the hospital grounds for
"acting up", no threats or foul language
the only reason trump got voted in, is because you have to bring your own pen
to write in putin and nobody thought of that in time
If she's meandering through traffic and doesn't know where she is, that's absolutely a case for taking her in. If she got hit by a car you could just as easy blame the government for "inaction".
> A few days later, DFCS presented Patterson with a "safety plan" for her to sign. It would require her to delegate a "safety person" to be a "knowing participant and guardian" and watch over the children whenever she leaves home. The plan would also require Patterson to download an app onto her son's phone allowing for his location to be monitored.
It's wild to me that the fact that he has his own phone isn't considered security enough. Surely by 10 or 11 years old, the kid knows how to call for help if he needs it.
Good old USA of course. There was another body cam footage of an eldery woman who was arrested for merely walking along the road.
I don't blame anyone in the story, this is yet another symptom of the US sprawl, car centric culture, and capitalism that leaves people desperate without any safety net.
Take care of people's basic needs and you might see crime drop.
Meh. Were it not for [reason.com] I have come to assume this kind of nanny-state behavior in Australia and the UK; certainly not in a place like rural Georgia.
I don’t know what is up with the USA and its obsession that kids cannot have autonomy.
I think many of us grew up where our parents didn’t know our location at all times. My parents used to tell me to be home by a certain time, but I used to roam the neighborhood, go get candy at the gas station, explore the forest.
Maybe it is a sign of the eroding social trust in the USA where people do not believe that others in the community are decent people as well. It kind of makes sense if you never actually go out into the community and meet others. The USA lifestyle is you drive everywhere in your big SUV, all interactions are transactional, you don’t talk to your neighbours and instead watch netflix and binge social media where you are sold the idea that everything is horrible and the world is a bad place.
It's not equally distributed. In Boston, MA area kids have as much autonomy as their parents wish to give them AFAIK. It's not uncommon to see 10 year olds in my town nearby they are doing all sorts of biz around town on their own.
Literally any very low income area of any larger city in the US is the same. You see kids all the time walking around without adults. If they're very young (like 6 or whatever) they're typically an older kid, sometimes like around 10 to 12, but again this happens everywhere.
It's only middle class neighborhoods and above where people start to have strong reactions to this in a "won't somebody think of the children!!!" sort of way
I think a lot of it has to do with constant fear mongering on the news and its effect after 40+ years of it. Also the phenomenon of (I forgot what it's called) but where people are afraid of flying but not driving because they see constant news coverage of crashed planes.
> I don’t know what is up with the USA and its obsession that kids cannot have autonomy.
This is a news story and a controversy because it's a weird thing that happened.
The US is a big place. Societal norms and law enforcement practices vary widely from location to location. This appears to be one sheriff pushing a personal agenda.
This appears to be one sheriff pushing a personal agenda.
Unfortunately it's not - there's a whole "child safety" department behind them, ready with a "safety plan" and even an app that they're going force the poor kid to install. This kind of stuff doesn't happen without the coordination of external bodies, and decades of societal shift in favor of this kind of control-oriented parenting (and blind faith in technical solutions toward this end), also at institutional levels:
A few days later, DFCS presented Patterson with a "safety plan" for her to sign. It would require her to delegate a "safety person" to be a "knowing participant and guardian" and watch over the children whenever she leaves home. The plan would also require Patterson to download an app onto her son's phone allowing for his location to be monitored. (The day when it will be illegal not to track one's kids is rapidly approaching.)
Against this backdrop - it's quite likely the Sheriff wasn't pushing her own agenda at all, but simply following the procedures provided by her department.
I don't know if that's true. the assistant DA refused to drop the charge, and the compromise that they offered was some CPS-based safety plan.
but the ADA who owns the case could drop the charge tomorrow and it all goes away.
and Sheriffs don't prosecute or dismiss charges, they simply take them to the DAs and supply evidence. someone called them and said there was a kid walking alone and they looked abused, and the sheriff took it to the courts and DAs.
>This is a news story and a controversy because it's a weird thing that happened.
How often do you read a news story that says "sun rose in the morning"? The news doesn't report it if it's a normal, non-controversial thing.
That's not to say that this proves anything one way or the other - just that the existence of n=5 cases where this happened over 10 years is not proof of a wider phenomenon.
See, the USA has 350 million people, and fifty states with materially different local norms. With this scale and amount of variety, "one in a million" freak incidents ought to be registered all the time. But, being freak incidents, they get amplified and thus seem to represent the entire country in the eyes of distant observers, foreigners, or just people from far enough away within the US.
Ironically, this is the same mechanism that magnifies every freak incident in daily life and gives it disproportionate news coverage. It's sometimes useful to draw attention to a rare problem, but more often it's just to pump up the audience's emotions and thus drive up "engagement" (views, coincident ad impressions, contextual ad clicks). This magnification, if not dampened by some rational thought, leads to people, including officials, mortally afraid that "anything could happen" with an unattended child on the street, and over-reacting; jail time for a parent is definitely worse for a kid that walking alone on the streets for some time.
But again, talking about "the USA lifestyle" is about as productive as speaking about "the European cuisine". The lifestyle is highly varied; I myself is not a fan of transactional suburban SUV lifestyle, hence mine, and that of my neighbors, is vastly different.
> With this scale and amount of variety, "one in a million" freak incidents ought to be registered all the time.
I’m not sure “one in a million” and “freak incident” is the right mental model with this case.
What is noteworthy that a whole series of people, most of them professionals, thought an unatended child walking is noteworthy and they should do something about it. The busybody who thought they should report it, then the sherif who thought they should respond to that report then further thought they should do something about it and then further thought to go back and arrest the parrent, then the other officer who didn’t say “hey what are you doing, are you ok?”, then the child protection services who recommended the tracking app, and then the prosecutor who provides the legal muscle to back this insanity.
Yes it might be a one in a million freak event that all these people assembled themselves into a conga line of crazyness. But they had these beliefs even before the boy started walking. How many others have similar ideas to them? You think these 5 are the only ones?
I agree that the idea that streets are dangerous for kids before 12 is not very sane, and much more widespread than I would like it to be. It depends though; now the police in NYC is efficient, and the crime level reasonably low, but 20 years ago the situation was different. IDK how things are in Georgia.
What I refer to as a "freak accident" is the jail time. I would expect issuing an official warning at most.
The problem is that this state of mind is that of the voters. It's not imposed by some oppressive authoritarian ruler, it's self-inflicted. Democracy, sadly, makes the unwholesome traits in people as visible as the most virtuous traits. E.g. Switzerland, the poster child of the most real democracy on this planet, only gave women voting rights in 1950s-70s, completely democratically.
It’s not an obsession with “USA” but with government agencies. The police but also child protective services (called different things in different locations) create these kind of sham protections. It ends up creating a chilling effect by scaring parents into acting differently and depriving their children of much needed independence that is critical to their development. But worse, when a parent gets into trouble for it, they end up being shamed and humiliated in ways that really affect their happiness and psychology. Imagine if you are told that some person from a random agency, usually of low intelligence and low empathy, will come check in on your children every week and humiliate you by forcing you to report to them. It is an inhumane deprivation of parental rights, but also an excess of government. As a taxpayer, I absolutely hate that we waste money on this type of thing when we’re in debt.
Probably it is not (only) eroding trust but eroding nerves with the overbearing sense that someone must look over everything and protect for anything and everything, including themselves, in other words meddle with each other's lives to the level of forcing them against their will.
In other hand despite the US has never been the role model of safety or courteousness towards each other yet the seemingly increasing trend of gun and drug related violence could cause short circuit in the head of those overloaded, especially when they are responsible and scrutinised by a litigious society for any and every tiny mishap with inflated theoretical consequences that should have been precluded with tenths of seconds reaction time and infallible divination.
I don't know if you can can say the entire USA has an "obsession" with preventing children from being autonomous based on this one incident. That's too much of a generalization. There are obviously people who do think that way. But there are also a lot who do not, including the mother, who said "I was not panicking as I know the roads and know he is mature enough to walk there without incident."
This situation is ridiculous, of course. But the USA is huge, and you can probably find pretty much any or every attitude and approach to life here.
It's not based on this incident, it's based on this incident happening and on the fact that there are laws making this possible, plus zero checks on the people doing it. Nobody saying "this is insane, stop it". This was voted in, in theory, by the majority of the US population.
Oh, and of course that they're doing it. After all, they're not doing this of their own volition. They're paid by the government. In other words, by the majority of the US population.
Well, the mother who was arrested doesn't agree with the policy. I wouldn't be surprised if she is saying it's insane, and it should be stopped. She got a lawyer to help push back against the charges.
This was voted in, in theory, by the majority of the US population.
The laws vary state by state, and probably by region within states. So this seems to be a law in Fannin County, Georgia. It might not even apply to all of Georgia, much less the entire country. It certainly does not apply in the city I live in. It might apply in other parts of the state I live in.
And it would not have been put to the entire country for a vote.
yep, we're old fogies now. at age 9 my best friend and i would ride our bikes about 5 miles to the beach. no cell phones. no arrests. no problems. we'd ride our gas-powered scooters to the gas station for slushies. we too played in the woods.
i don't understand what changed or why kids today can't do anything on their own. it does not seem good for their development, which in turn does not seem good for the future of our country.
i'm in my mid 30s now, and I remember as soon as i was old enough to ride a bike well, i would ride it over a mile away from home all by myself, probably around age 7 or 8. i got lost one time and was really flustered, starting crying, knocked on a literal random door, and a very nice old lady let me use her phone to call my mom, who was slightly embarrassed, lol. this was in a large city in texas for context.
another random andecdote: my older brother, probably 11 or 12 at the time, got in a lot of trouble with my mom and they had a big fight. my mom just straight up kicked him out of the house with no shoes, and literally walked barefoot over several miles to his friend's house.
reflecting on that gives me a lot of introspection to the nature of the parenting i received.
It could be that mass perception of crime levels is higher than it actually is (statistics say it has only gotten better over the years), possibly due to the number of negative media stories produced all day every day.
Keep in mind that the "majority of people" are not informed skeptics like you and me, they can barely use a computer and largely believe what biased mass media tells them to believe.
At least that's how I feel about it, you don't have to agree.
I feel the same. Constatnt agenda of fear in news slowly changes our trust in society, even though statistically criminality lowering.
I was kid in 90’s which was quite crazy in our country. I went to school with mine parents just once - first day. I cannot imagine mine kids with same approach today.
There’s elements at play where adults with childhood neglect and/or sexual trauma sublimate their understandably strong emotions into current safety initiatives for children.
People pile on with their ideas, like some sort of perverse “yes, and …” improv exercise. Nobody disagrees because “won’t somebody think of the children”.
Other folks in power blindly see it as their sole duty, without context, to implement and execute said initiatives which creates a positive feedback loop with no relief.
I think the problem with the US is slow eroding of the rights of youth. We're not treating them as young adults who are fully capable of making their own decisions one day. Instead we're treating them as incapable infants until they leave the nest.
The movie industry is a good example of this. If you're a child in certain places in the US, you'll grow up with violence around you (in real life). There was a movie "The Eighth Grade" that got an "R" rating not because of the violence, but because of the language. PG-13 was in 2018 limited to one "fuck" per film.
The US isn't even treating adults like young adults. Everyone is an infant these days. There was a YouTube video about the 10 commandments that said "Thou shall not kill" and it was demonetized because it "involved violence" and never corrected even once YouTube knew the problem. There is a list of thousands of words you cannot say or talk about without getting your channel banned or demonetized. YouTube is not alone in this either, its everywhere. Banks, PayPal, Patreon, they are all blackballing people. In fact most of the large tech companies use the same third party moderation and will end up banning the same person across all channels at once if you end up on their shit list.
So what we see here are the very real ramifications of a media-driven crime hysteria. The deputy noted that the child could be "kidnapped". You will see claims like "800,000 children are kidnapped every year". The media loves to drum up fear. The vast majority of these cases are custody disputes. Actual cases of children being kidnapped by strangers? Fewer than 100 per year, probably a lot fewer [1].
This is a small rural town. That makes it less likely just because there are fewer strangers. Not that there aren't dangers from known people and family members but that's a risk regardless. It really has nothing to do with walking a mile down a road. This isn't a major road either. The article notes it has a 25mph speed limit.
Compre that to firearm-related deaths, which are in the thousands [2]
One side note for any non-American: you may expect there to be sidewalks on roads. For most roads in the US, this is not the case. There might be a shoulder. There might not. There often won't even be a curb. So you're walking on uneven ground. So you could get hit by a car but this isn't a high speed road.
Common sense should rule here. Like don't the police have better things to do? And the DA? Or DCFS?
In a town of 370 people, I'm surprised the driver didn't know the kid, his family for three or four generations, where he lived, and maybe even what he had for breakfast.
There are a few components to this that I can see being frustrating.
One is that many people here likely had a more free roam childhood and this kind of behaviour from law enforcement and society in general is quite peculiar and off-putting. Being socially outcast because I let my child walk to the store is one thing. Being actually arrested and threatening to remove the parent of a child in the name of their safety is another.
Another part is the data / justification for this behaviour. From 1999 to 2010 at least, it seems that motor vehicle accidents are the number one cause of teenagers dying. Then it's homicide and suicide. Homicides are mostly committed by people the person knows. I don't have a full complete data set here but ~85% of homicides against youth are committed by family members or people that know the family. Not strangers. It's not to say you should't protect your kids from strangers, just that... walking to the store isn't that.
I only just read the article linked below, before checking HN. The contrast between the two is just jarring. O' what money can buy, freedom in the land of the free, for those with the resources to purchase it.
When I was 9 back in 1991, we lived in the Keflavik Navy Station, and my 12 year old sister and I would ride our bikes all over the base. We'd frequently ride to the youth center which was over a mile from our apartment.
The next year, we moved back to Virginia Beach, and I'd frequently ride my bike by myself to the video rental store about 3/4 a mile away.
Are kidnappings really more common now than then? Aren't most kidnappings actually done by close relatives? I knew not to trust strangers.
What really bothers me is how the generation that grew up with the least supervision is now the generation that's calling the cops for children being unsupervised, while also wearing their lack of supervision as a badge of honor.
That is really ironic how many scold parents for being helicopter parents whilst saying kids today are weak because they didn't do shit they themselves did.
But, it could also be an age-old thing where people who were neglected as kids has some kind of savior complex. The Swedish character Pippi Longstocking in the TV series (probably also in the books from 1945) was hounded by a "nanny" character that wanted to put her into a childrens home since she was living on her own, so perhaps these occurrences aren't new.
This is utterly absurd. I really hope the mother sues and wins a lot of money. DFCS is like most government agencies: They will never, and can never, admit when they are wrong because it undermines their authority.
""A few days later, DFCS presented Patterson with a "safety plan" for her to sign. It would require her to delegate a "safety person" to be a "knowing participant and guardian" and watch over the children whenever she leaves home. The plan would also require Patterson to download an app onto her son's phone allowing for his location to be monitored. (The day when it will be illegal not to track one's kids is rapidly approaching.)""
I'm liberal Democrat. But sometimes I think maybe we should just have a beer watch the world burn.
202 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] threadThe rare kidnapping cases may be the most known of missing children cases, but are the smallest category in number. Looking at the broader nature of the missing child problem and considering the full spectrum of the missing, including endangered runaways, children taken by family members, lost and injured children, children thrown out of their homes, and children separated from their families by natural disasters and catastrophes, the number of families having a missing person increases exponentially. In 2018, there were 424,066 new reports of missing children entered into the National Crime Information Center, the computerized index of missing persons and criminal justice information (NCIC 1984, para. 1), which works out to about 1,162 new cases of missing children every day (NCMEC 2019c, para. 4). […]
Despite what many people believe, a child can be in real danger when abducted by a family member. Family abductions are cases in which a family member absconds with the child, preventing the other parent from knowing the child’s location."
quoted from: Handbook of Interpersonal Violence and Abuse Across the Lifespan https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-89999-2
I gather things are different now over there...
Update: I kicked in $50 anyway. This story really infuriated me and I felt strongly enough to fill it out manually.
This is weird. Is the crime so bad in the town? Even the good-for-nothing cops in my (developing) country do not come up with such nonsense.
This was around 17 years ago, cant imagine how ridiculous it is now.
From the article, apparently it's "reckless conduct"
There's something missing about this story somewhere.
For all of the happy survivor stories like yours (and mine), the reality is that the rate of child accidental deaths has steadily decreases over the past few decades as parents (and society) became more protective. That isn't to say I agree with over-parenting and eliminating independence -- I don't -- but there needs to be rationality applied as well as personal values.
Edit: I decided to look up the CDC statistics to see if there is any net benefit, but total childhood mortality rates have been increasing in the US. Measuring accidental deaths is extremely flawed, if that were a good target then we should keep all children indoors. No bike riding, no swimming, no tree climbing, just keep them inside on a screen all day long and accidental deaths will continue to drop.
One only need to look at how a single kid is parented vs four.
I had a hilarious example at the park where the single child had constant supervision while the fourth kid of the same age was left alone to do whatever until she hurt herself and started crying. In between she ate dirt, sand, jumped in a puddle, threw stones at the local wild life, ate the single kids snacks, and finally fell off a ladder and busted her nose.
It's not that parents in the 70s were hands off, it's that they had their hands full and couldn't do any more.
It's also decreased as the amount of environmental lead has decreased.
It's also decreased as the number of computer screens has increased.
It's also decreased as sugar consumption has increased. (Are parents actually being protective as they feed more sugar to their kids?)
As has our consumption of GMOs.
It's also decreased as government-mandated product, automobile, and housing safety standards have increased (which is different from parents becoming more protective!).
A rational response would be to hold off on highlighting any specific correlation until establishing that it's more meaningful than other alternatives.
While accidental deaths are down, I wouldn’t be so quick to conclude this is because of parents/ becoming more protective so much as society collectively implementing regulations and safety standards that target specific things that are known to be highly dangerous. The list of these targeted changes is extremely long, but some top mentions:
- Safer car and booster seats. Cribs, toys, and other household items.
- Advances in healthcare and access to vaccinations.
- Better education for caregivers around drowning prevention, safe sleeping practices, etc.
- Childproofed products like wall outlets, cabinet locks, baby gates, etc.
- Stricter rules and education on smoke and carbon monoxide detection.
- Road safety initiatives ranging from seatbelt and child restraints laws to anti-DUI programs.
- Improved consumer protections and communication of product recalls.
And the list goes on.
Non-American detected
Please use Google Street View on the roads coming in to Mineral Bluffs, Ga, USA. No bike lines, and we're not even keen on emergency shoulder for cars and trucks!
1. Study the width of the oversize vehicle here[1].
2. Study the lack of shoulder next to this guard rail[2].
No parent in their right mind is going to be comfortable letting a six year-old walk that, in any decade. And no municipality is going to let school buses drop kids at arbitrary parts of that highway, unless the driver is dumping them into a residential side-street.
I'm glad you survived walking on streets like this when you were six, but that's not relevant to these highways being dangerous places for regular (or irregular) foot traffic.
1: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.9150284,-84.2767414,3a,75y,2...
2: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.91672,-84.2760891,3a,75y,317...
Those appear to be normal streets like those kids all over the world walk on the side of?
Edit: The author is truly specialized on such stories as can be seen here: https://reason.com/people/lenore-skenazy/
It was an addition to the previous post, although it might still happen here and there.
I coach kids sports, tons of kids in our neighborhood, take my kids to places, etc. It’s all good.
held incomunicado for her own saftey I got banned from the hospital grounds for "acting up", no threats or foul language
the only reason trump got voted in, is because you have to bring your own pen to write in putin and nobody thought of that in time
Monitored by whom? This is insane.
I don't blame anyone in the story, this is yet another symptom of the US sprawl, car centric culture, and capitalism that leaves people desperate without any safety net.
Take care of people's basic needs and you might see crime drop.
I would replace needs with 'rights' (what ever that might mean)
Maybe it is a sign of the eroding social trust in the USA where people do not believe that others in the community are decent people as well. It kind of makes sense if you never actually go out into the community and meet others. The USA lifestyle is you drive everywhere in your big SUV, all interactions are transactional, you don’t talk to your neighbours and instead watch netflix and binge social media where you are sold the idea that everything is horrible and the world is a bad place.
It's only middle class neighborhoods and above where people start to have strong reactions to this in a "won't somebody think of the children!!!" sort of way
Now there's a cable channel that's literally Dateline 24 x 7 x 365...
This is a news story and a controversy because it's a weird thing that happened.
The US is a big place. Societal norms and law enforcement practices vary widely from location to location. This appears to be one sheriff pushing a personal agenda.
- the busybody who called the cops in the first place
- the sheriff
- the Assistant District Attorney
- the Department of Family and Child Services
Unfortunately it's not - there's a whole "child safety" department behind them, ready with a "safety plan" and even an app that they're going force the poor kid to install. This kind of stuff doesn't happen without the coordination of external bodies, and decades of societal shift in favor of this kind of control-oriented parenting (and blind faith in technical solutions toward this end), also at institutional levels:
Against this backdrop - it's quite likely the Sheriff wasn't pushing her own agenda at all, but simply following the procedures provided by her department.but the ADA who owns the case could drop the charge tomorrow and it all goes away.
and Sheriffs don't prosecute or dismiss charges, they simply take them to the DAs and supply evidence. someone called them and said there was a kid walking alone and they looked abused, and the sheriff took it to the courts and DAs.
This kind of thing has been going on for decades now, e.g.
Florida mom arrested after allowing 7-year-old son to walk to park alone (2014): https://fox4kc.com/news/florida-mom-arrested-after-allowing-...
Maryland family under investigation for letting their kids walk home alone (2015): https://www.fox43.com/article/news/local/contests/maryland-f...
11-Year-Old Boy Played in His Yard. CPS Took Him, Felony Charge for Parents (2015): https://reason.com/2015/06/11/11-year-old-boy-played-in-his-...
Mom Arrested for Letting Child, 10, Shop Alone at Lego Store (2017): https://www.freerangekids.com/mom-arrested-for-letting-child...
>This is a news story and a controversy because it's a weird thing that happened.
How often do you read a news story that says "sun rose in the morning"? The news doesn't report it if it's a normal, non-controversial thing.
That's not to say that this proves anything one way or the other - just that the existence of n=5 cases where this happened over 10 years is not proof of a wider phenomenon.
How high should N be before we care to plug such legal holes?
That Assanges are rare doesn't mean there shouldn't be outcries about it.
Ironically, this is the same mechanism that magnifies every freak incident in daily life and gives it disproportionate news coverage. It's sometimes useful to draw attention to a rare problem, but more often it's just to pump up the audience's emotions and thus drive up "engagement" (views, coincident ad impressions, contextual ad clicks). This magnification, if not dampened by some rational thought, leads to people, including officials, mortally afraid that "anything could happen" with an unattended child on the street, and over-reacting; jail time for a parent is definitely worse for a kid that walking alone on the streets for some time.
But again, talking about "the USA lifestyle" is about as productive as speaking about "the European cuisine". The lifestyle is highly varied; I myself is not a fan of transactional suburban SUV lifestyle, hence mine, and that of my neighbors, is vastly different.
I’m not sure “one in a million” and “freak incident” is the right mental model with this case.
What is noteworthy that a whole series of people, most of them professionals, thought an unatended child walking is noteworthy and they should do something about it. The busybody who thought they should report it, then the sherif who thought they should respond to that report then further thought they should do something about it and then further thought to go back and arrest the parrent, then the other officer who didn’t say “hey what are you doing, are you ok?”, then the child protection services who recommended the tracking app, and then the prosecutor who provides the legal muscle to back this insanity.
Yes it might be a one in a million freak event that all these people assembled themselves into a conga line of crazyness. But they had these beliefs even before the boy started walking. How many others have similar ideas to them? You think these 5 are the only ones?
What I refer to as a "freak accident" is the jail time. I would expect issuing an official warning at most.
The problem is that this state of mind is that of the voters. It's not imposed by some oppressive authoritarian ruler, it's self-inflicted. Democracy, sadly, makes the unwholesome traits in people as visible as the most virtuous traits. E.g. Switzerland, the poster child of the most real democracy on this planet, only gave women voting rights in 1950s-70s, completely democratically.
In other hand despite the US has never been the role model of safety or courteousness towards each other yet the seemingly increasing trend of gun and drug related violence could cause short circuit in the head of those overloaded, especially when they are responsible and scrutinised by a litigious society for any and every tiny mishap with inflated theoretical consequences that should have been precluded with tenths of seconds reaction time and infallible divination.
This situation is ridiculous, of course. But the USA is huge, and you can probably find pretty much any or every attitude and approach to life here.
Oh, and of course that they're doing it. After all, they're not doing this of their own volition. They're paid by the government. In other words, by the majority of the US population.
This was voted in, in theory, by the majority of the US population.
The laws vary state by state, and probably by region within states. So this seems to be a law in Fannin County, Georgia. It might not even apply to all of Georgia, much less the entire country. It certainly does not apply in the city I live in. It might apply in other parts of the state I live in.
And it would not have been put to the entire country for a vote.
i don't understand what changed or why kids today can't do anything on their own. it does not seem good for their development, which in turn does not seem good for the future of our country.
another random andecdote: my older brother, probably 11 or 12 at the time, got in a lot of trouble with my mom and they had a big fight. my mom just straight up kicked him out of the house with no shoes, and literally walked barefoot over several miles to his friend's house.
reflecting on that gives me a lot of introspection to the nature of the parenting i received.
Keep in mind that the "majority of people" are not informed skeptics like you and me, they can barely use a computer and largely believe what biased mass media tells them to believe.
At least that's how I feel about it, you don't have to agree.
I was kid in 90’s which was quite crazy in our country. I went to school with mine parents just once - first day. I cannot imagine mine kids with same approach today.
People pile on with their ideas, like some sort of perverse “yes, and …” improv exercise. Nobody disagrees because “won’t somebody think of the children”.
Other folks in power blindly see it as their sole duty, without context, to implement and execute said initiatives which creates a positive feedback loop with no relief.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-crime-rates...
The movie industry is a good example of this. If you're a child in certain places in the US, you'll grow up with violence around you (in real life). There was a movie "The Eighth Grade" that got an "R" rating not because of the violence, but because of the language. PG-13 was in 2018 limited to one "fuck" per film.
https://www.themarysue.com/eighth-grade-is-rated-r/
This is a small rural town. That makes it less likely just because there are fewer strangers. Not that there aren't dangers from known people and family members but that's a risk regardless. It really has nothing to do with walking a mile down a road. This isn't a major road either. The article notes it has a 25mph speed limit.
Compre that to firearm-related deaths, which are in the thousands [2]
One side note for any non-American: you may expect there to be sidewalks on roads. For most roads in the US, this is not the case. There might be a shoulder. There might not. There often won't even be a curb. So you're walking on uneven ground. So you could get hit by a car but this isn't a high speed road.
Common sense should rule here. Like don't the police have better things to do? And the DA? Or DCFS?
[1]: https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/child-abductions-str...
[2]: https://www.kff.org/mental-health/issue-brief/the-impact-of-...
Another part is the data / justification for this behaviour. From 1999 to 2010 at least, it seems that motor vehicle accidents are the number one cause of teenagers dying. Then it's homicide and suicide. Homicides are mostly committed by people the person knows. I don't have a full complete data set here but ~85% of homicides against youth are committed by family members or people that know the family. Not strangers. It's not to say you should't protect your kids from strangers, just that... walking to the store isn't that.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-13/donald-trump-moves-to...
The next year, we moved back to Virginia Beach, and I'd frequently ride my bike by myself to the video rental store about 3/4 a mile away.
Are kidnappings really more common now than then? Aren't most kidnappings actually done by close relatives? I knew not to trust strangers.
What really bothers me is how the generation that grew up with the least supervision is now the generation that's calling the cops for children being unsupervised, while also wearing their lack of supervision as a badge of honor.
But, it could also be an age-old thing where people who were neglected as kids has some kind of savior complex. The Swedish character Pippi Longstocking in the TV series (probably also in the books from 1945) was hounded by a "nanny" character that wanted to put her into a childrens home since she was living on her own, so perhaps these occurrences aren't new.
Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children...
I'm liberal Democrat. But sometimes I think maybe we should just have a beer watch the world burn.