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Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

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Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#21

Post by kyoob »

hosh wrote: post #16
kyoob wrote: post #4

I think it's smart to frame this as an anti-poverty issue. People often imagine "suburban" families falling victim to overreaching child neglect laws and enforcement. In fact poor children are separated from their families for reasons of child welfare far more often than non-poor kids. (Of course, this ends up affecting black families disproportionately.) Families are being broken up in the US for the crime of being…

The Let Grow organization that wrote this article and help advance legislation protecting parents, advocates for a parenting style that lets kids grow into resilient, independently-thinking adults. This is more than just protecting parents or preventing unnecessary breakup of families. From that lens, the question I have is, how does this kind of parenting style help poor families?

Advocating for laws that promote reasonable childhood independence benefits families where all the adults have to work more hours to get by, leaving their kids in safe but unsupervised situations more often.

Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#22

Post by crazygringo »

ZainRiz wrote: post #8
kyoob wrote: post #4

I think it's smart to frame this as an anti-poverty issue. People often imagine "suburban" families falling victim to overreaching child neglect laws and enforcement. In fact poor children are separated from their families for reasons of child welfare far more often than non-poor kids. (Of course, this ends up affecting black families disproportionately.) Families are being broken up in the US for the crime of being…

> Over 50 percent of Black children in the U.S. will experience a child welfare investigation before their eighteenth birthday (nearly double the rate of white children). Nearly 10 percent of Black children will be removed from their parents and placed into foster care (double the rate of white children) While the numbers above sound horrendous (and they really are!) I wish they normalized the data to only consider p…

EDIT: dang fixed it, thanks! Orig comment below

----

What/who are you replying to?

Your quoted text isn't in the article and also isn't in any of the comments on this page.

Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#23

Post by rootusrootus »

jollyllama wrote: post #7

There's some other fundamental problem if cops and CPS were pulling these stunts anyway. Maybe some better mechanism for recourse against overreach is needed?

First I'd like to know the incidence rate. We tend to see a few specific examples regurgitated repeatedly for several years after they occur, which leads me to suspect that it perhaps doesn't happen that often. This is a nation of 330 million people, after all, so it's unrealistic to expect stupidity will happen zero times.

Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#24

Post by syrrim »

wonderwonder wrote: post #20

I remember reading a news story about a poor single mom who was renting a room in an extended stay and working in a pizzarea across the street from it. She left her 9? year old alone in the room so she could work. Cops show up and take her kid and arrest her for child endangerment. They made it illegal to be a poor single working mom.

They made it illegal to be a single mom and not provide adequate childcare. Many families have both parents working, so the situation of needing to find someone to look after your child is not unique to single parents. That said, this is one of the reasons raising children on your own is more difficult.

Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#25

Post by Jtsummers »

crazygringo wrote: post #22
ZainRiz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over 50 percent of Black children in the U.S. will experience a child welfare investigation before their eighteenth birthday (nearly double the rate of white children). Nearly 10 percent of Black children will be removed from their parents and placed into foster care (double the rate of white children) While the numbers above sound horrendous (and they really are!) I wish they normalized the data to only consider p…

EDIT: dang fixed it, thanks! Orig comment below ---- What/who are you replying to? Your quoted text isn't in the article and also isn't in any of the comments on this page.

They're responding to the article kyoob linked in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34916150

Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#26

Post by kwhitefoot »

The US seems to be the only country that has this problem. Children here (Norway) walk to school on their own at the age of five or six, some of them take buses.

"Ashley Smith, a foster dad, testified about being investigated for neglect because one afternoon his daughter, 8, was doing her homework on the front lawn. A passerby reported an “unsupervised” child (not knowing Ashley was actually inside). The upshot: “We went through a period of eight weeks of not knowing if we would continue being able to keep our children,” said Ashley."

That's just astonishing!

Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#27

Post by vuln »

This law will not give "poor kids more independence", it absolves the parent or guardian of legal responsibility for their children being unsupervised.

I can't be the only one that's seen the hundreds if not THOUSANDS of children (under 18) fighting, causing mayhem, attacking innocent people, and property destruction videos that circulate all over the internet.

Will this help edge cases? The mom working at the pizza shop across the parking lot of a hotel where her child is staying? Sure.

Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#28

Post by Robotbeat »

joe_the_user wrote: post #9
ZainRiz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over 50 percent of Black children in the U.S. will experience a child welfare investigation before their eighteenth birthday (nearly double the rate of white children). Nearly 10 percent of Black children will be removed from their parents and placed into foster care (double the rate of white children) While the numbers above sound horrendous (and they really are!) I wish they normalized the data to only consider p…

Your quote isn't from the article but a link in a post by kyoob (currently below this) that you aren't even replying to (were you so eager to beat hn's post throttling you put this on the main thread?). Kyoob's post already acknowledges this is also a poverty issue so your complaint seems a bit off the topic at hand.

It doesn’t sound like complaining. I think it could be a good faith point (and not someone just trying to find a way to downplay modern racism), although kyoob acknowledged it.

Obvious confounding factors should also be controlled for (or at least controlled in a side note).

Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#29

Post by raydiatian »

Part of the issue is that roads and American autophilia make the world unsafe and inaccessible without transportation. Conspiracy theorists want to say that the “push for 15 minute spheres is the state trying to control us” but that is just so braindead it hurts to look at.

Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#30

Post by kwhitefoot »

ZainRiz wrote: post #8
kyoob wrote: post #4

I think it's smart to frame this as an anti-poverty issue. People often imagine "suburban" families falling victim to overreaching child neglect laws and enforcement. In fact poor children are separated from their families for reasons of child welfare far more often than non-poor kids. (Of course, this ends up affecting black families disproportionately.) Families are being broken up in the US for the crime of being…

> Over 50 percent of Black children in the U.S. will experience a child welfare investigation before their eighteenth birthday (nearly double the rate of white children). Nearly 10 percent of Black children will be removed from their parents and placed into foster care (double the rate of white children) While the numbers above sound horrendous (and they really are!) I wish they normalized the data to only consider p…

>> Over 50 percent of Black children in the U.S. will experience a child welfare investigation before their eighteenth birthday (nearly double the rate of white children).

So more than 25% of all children experience a child welfare investigation?

That's mind boggling.

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