A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV • Hacker News Board

Re: A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV

#251

Post by jccalhoun » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 10:07 PM UTC

tempnow987 wrote: post #67

Not in the US they can't. "officials placed two brothers into foster care after one, 11, was found playing basketball alone in his own yard." He'd gotten home early from school and his parents came 90 minutes later. He was in his own yard. The family lost their children to foster care. Ironically in foster care ACTUAL abuse rates are pretty darn high! "When Cindy and Fred arrived home they were arrested for child neg…

more context on the situation: https://web.archive.org/web/20150526230348/http://www.washin... (the actual washington post site keeps giving me an error)

Re: A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV

#252

Post by bombcar » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 10:07 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #145

fnordpiglet wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major difference between when I grew up and now is the prevalence of the severely mentally ill living on city streets. Would you send your 5 year old self down the streets of San Francisco or Seattle? As a 45 year old I’m frightened often enough - I can’t imagine my daughter being forced to navigate those situations alone. The assault and murder rates due to the untreated mentally ill in the cities I’ve lived in is…

> The assault and murder rates due to the untreated mentally ill in the cities I’ve lived in is high and visible. And far lower than it was when children generally roamed freely. The late 70s to the early 90s are when US violence peaked , so in the spirit of spurious correlations, a functional mental health system must have caused violence:) edit: > Case in point a clearly disturbed person walked into my daughters sc…

Nearly 50% around here are men but we have zero exposure at our schools.

Re: A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV

#253

Post by asdff » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 10:08 PM UTC

gwd wrote: post #168

bombcar wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last part is WAY more common and likely than anything else. > Fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year between 2010–2017. > According to the NWS Storm Data, over the last 30 years (1989-2018) the U.S. has averaged 43 reported lightning fatalities per year. So letting kids walk to the park is way less risky than a thunderstorm (though perhaps they sho…

> Fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year between 2010–2017. But 2010 is long after the end of the "free range children" era. Is that number so low because we don't let kinds go around by themselves any more?

It's only the end of the free range era among the whites. Other populations in my city have no issues letting their children range around. It's common to be on the bus and hear school aged children talking in various languages around me on the bus.

Re: A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV

#254

Post by seabird » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 10:10 PM UTC

jerkstate wrote: post #133

seabird wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average assault and murder rates are massively inflated by a handful of exceptional cities. St. Louis (usually highest murder rate in the US or close to it) is pushing 70 murders per 100k. That is roughly double the rate of Cleveland (rank 5). Cleveland has a murder rate over 10 times higher than a city of around ~40k people that I live fairly close to. However, another city (population ~45k) that is about a 20 minut…

based on rough calculation, your 40k city has a murder rate of 3.5 per 100,000; Tokyo has a murder rate of 0.26 per 100,000. In Miyazaki prefecture, the most violent in Japan according to [1], the murder rate is 0.9 per 100,000 [1] https://nbakki.hatenablog.com/entry/Murder_Rate_Number_of_Ac...

That 3.5 is almost without exception crime-related. Your odds of being a victim of extreme violence even if you weren't involved in what started it are effectively zero. Miyazaki prefecture probably experiences this same phenomenon. If even that is too much for you to risk, there's a city a couple of hours away with a population of 100k and a murder rate of 0.00. We haven't even mentioned the Japanese tendency to only prosecute slam dunk cases.

The major point is that although Tokyo might be "safer" on paper, the risk profile of letting your kid walk around Tokyo vs. letting your kid walk around the city I mentioned is pretty much the same in practice, and this goes for thousands of American cities. There are millions of Americans who could let their kids walk around their community and not have to worry about them being murdered or seriously assaulted.

Re: A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV

#255

Post by asdff » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 10:10 PM UTC

usrn wrote: post #151

jmyeet wrote: post #124

Netflix has a Japanese show called Old Enough. It shows Japanese children doing their first errand. Example: walking a kilometer to the store (including crossing a busy street), buying 3 items and bringing them back. Age? 2 years, 9 months. It's wild. I grew up at a time and a place where I had a lot of independence. I rode a bike everywhere. I'd do things by myself and with friends. I actually feel sad for kids nowa…

Japan has a far lower crime rate than most US cities.

Even still the crime rates in the US are extremely low.

Re: A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV

#256

Post by asdff » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 10:11 PM UTC

trgn wrote: post #225

gumby wrote: post #93

Is the HN median age too low to remember being handed some money and told to run down to the corner shop and buy cigarettes?

It's not. There are a ton of comments about people reminiscing about doing exactly that. The problem is the corner shop no longer exists. And if it does, it's a chain, and the rotating staff won't recognize the toddler as being yours. Or going there will get your kid run over by an SUV. Mainly the latter.

Not everyone lives in a stroadburb. Those corner shop suburbs haven't gone anywhere luckily.

Re: A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV

#257

Post by throwaway-blaze » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 10:11 PM UTC

fnordpiglet wrote: post #51

beej71 wrote: post #47

I don't have any kids, so I don't really feel comfortable telling folks how to raise theirs. But I will tell you my perspective. As someone who grew up in the "be back home in time for supper" 1970s, today's world seems completely foreign. When I started kindergarten, Mom walked me to school on the first day so that I'd know the route. And after that I walked to school on my own until I learned to ride a bike. I rode…

A major difference between when I grew up and now is the prevalence of the severely mentally ill living on city streets. Would you send your 5 year old self down the streets of San Francisco or Seattle? As a 45 year old I’m frightened often enough - I can’t imagine my daughter being forced to navigate those situations alone. The assault and murder rates due to the untreated mentally ill in the cities I’ve lived in is…

(Using throwaway, because people can't have rational discussions anymore).

47yr old with 12yr old twins. Live in a million dollar neighborhood in Capitol Hill Seattle. Kids go to private school about a mile south of home. When the school year started, they wanted to walk to and from school alone.

We had to stop this in the last month and accompany them on the walks. My daughter saw multiple fentanyl od's on the street, my son asked me what that guy he saw was doing with the torch under the aluminum foil.

I grew up in the 80s in NYC and took the subway from Queens to Manhattan for HS (Stuyvesant). Plenty of homeless but mostly alcoholics, occasional mentally ill. The havoc from meth, fentanyl, heroin is too much for us to let our kids stay as independent as we want.

Re: A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV

#258

Post by asdff » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 10:12 PM UTC

Claude_Shannon wrote: post #62

Meanwhile my parents went into meltdown whenever I wanted to go for even a walk. When I was 19.

Once in high school I was at a friends house in a subdivision that didn't even have sidewalks. We wanted to go out for a walk but the dad gave us a warning that the neighbors would probably call the police because people don't ever walk in this neighborhood.

Re: A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV

#259

Post by adamredwoods » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 10:14 PM UTC

uranium wrote: post #116

fnordpiglet wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major difference between when I grew up and now is the prevalence of the severely mentally ill living on city streets. Would you send your 5 year old self down the streets of San Francisco or Seattle? As a 45 year old I’m frightened often enough - I can’t imagine my daughter being forced to navigate those situations alone. The assault and murder rates due to the untreated mentally ill in the cities I’ve lived in is…

"Would you send your 5 year old self down the streets of San Francisco or Seattle?" Yes. We live in San Francisco, and our kids went to a daycare in the Civic Center. We walked [with the kids] by many homeless people every weekday for years. Our interactions with them were almost universally positive; they'd clear the sidewalk to let kids through, try to keep kids from seeing drug use, chat and share candy, etc. On c…

As a parent, I wouldn't do this in busy areas. I've seen people get hit from drivers running stop signs and red lights. I have to look at drivers turning right on red to make sure they see me, not sure that all children are tall enough to do this. Too much of a risk.

It doesn't take too much searching to find examples of horrible accidents:

https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/kids-hit-by-car-while-wa...

Re: A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV

#260

Post by 0xbadcafebee » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 10:14 PM UTC

sloreti wrote: post #27

Disappointing that an article like this wouldn’t mention one of the main reasons children are given less autonomy in the US: our built environment. The vast majority of our children grow up in neighborhoods in which one can’t easily be a pedestrian at any age. Low density communities, in which almost all trips have to be taken in cars, are of course not friendly to non-drivers. Japan builds dense, mixed use neighborh…

You said that mixed-use neighborhoods lead to empowered children. Really? If that were the case, there'd be empowered children in mixed-use neighborhoods all over the world, including in the US. But that clearly isn't the case.

Most of Japan is rural. It's not uncommon to walk or bike up to an hour away to get to the nearest store. Yet children are still given responsibility and agency. In fact, it may be much more common in rural areas around the world rather than in dense mixed-use neighborhoods.

But that's not the reason either. It's clear that both urban mixed-use neighborhoods and rural communities have nearly the same consideration about children, within a single country/culture. If a society perceives it as safe and a good idea (or even necessary) for a child to run errands, then that's what happens. If the society perceives it as unsafe or irresponsible, then they don't. It's nothing more than a culture meme.