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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

#111

Post by q1w2 »

tristor wrote: post #77

I recently moved from a very low average income city to a very high average income city. In my former city it was nearly unheard of for children to unsupervised, despite most people having large families, because there was a very real concern about kidnapping/human trafficking and other issues (and this concern wasn't unfounded, this city made national news for masked men in a van grabbing multiple children while the…

It's not socio-economics - it's Crime. They are correlated, but where they are not, children walk to school despite the poor neighborhood.

When I grew up in India, we were dirt poor and we literally hitchhiked to and from school each day from the age of maybe 7.

Students would get out of school, walk to the nearest busy intersection, and ask people to let us ride on the back of their motorbikes to get home. No helmets, no traffic lights, no sidewalks, no cell phones.

This wasn't in some rural area - this was in central Mumbai decades ago where people were poorer than the poorest US neighborhoods. ...yet the danger of being kidnapped or assaulted was effectively zero. It was far more common to be attacked by a stray dog than by any of the millions of dirt poor people in the city.

One factor (my guess - I observe anecdotally) is the high rate of drug use in the US. Drug use among the poor in India was extremely uncommon. However in the US (at least these days), it seems to be common among most people arrested (just my observation).

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

#112

Post by yamtaddle »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #73

America just seems like the weirdest fucking place. You're all going on about being the only truly free country in the world, but you can be jailed for letting your child play in your garden. What the fuck, guys?

Our relationship to actual, in-practice freedom has always been kind of... weird, considering how obsessed with freedom we seem to be. We seem more concerned with high-level theoretical freedom than with actual liberty we experience in the day-to-day, which is indeed sub-par compared to many of our peer states. And we didn't credibly try to even extend that much freedom to ~every US adult until the last quarter or 30% of our country's existence.

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

#113

Post by s1artibartfast »

acuozzo wrote: post #76
kwhitefoot wrote: post #26

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…

> The US seems to be the only country that has this problem. Here's my take on the issue from 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32680201 Summary: We don't have safe roads and in most American suburbs traveling by car is often the only reasonable option available.

That seems like a very unrelated issue to someone being an investigated for letting their children do homework on the front lawn

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

#114

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #26

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…

It wasn't always like this. I'm 35 and growing up in the US involved adventures that took me and my other 6-yr old pals several miles from home.

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

#115

Post by RandomTisk »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #73

America just seems like the weirdest fucking place. You're all going on about being the only truly free country in the world, but you can be jailed for letting your child play in your garden. What the fuck, guys?

America is an extremely peaceful place for many millions of families. There are thousands of smaller communities throughout the vast country where crime is background noise and kids can and do run around outside if they want, even today.

Some places are running untested, never before seen dev code in production trying to improve the justice system, and they virtually always make things much worse, like California is doing and certain metros around the country.

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

#116

Post by andrepd »

kungfooey wrote: post #109
bcrosby95 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I walk my kids to school in the US, but I definitely see kids as young as 6 walking without a parent. I choose to walk with my kids because I enjoy it, and it's easy exercise. That said, a lot of parents still drive their kids - the vast majority I would say. Even people who live within walking distance. It definitely is faster if you look at it in a vacuum: you save 10 minutes round trip! And when casually discussin…

I live about a half mile from my kid's school and we walk most days, or I bike. However, it has been... eye opening. We live in a fairly urban area of Nashville, but my street doesn't have sidewalks. We've been yelled at multiple times (me, my wife, and our kindergartner) by drivers to "Get out of the road!" (This is on a 25 mph street.) There are ditches and uneven ground on both sides of the road. Even the sidewalk…

Car-centric infrastructure and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

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

#117

Post by [deleted] »

rhino369 wrote: post #84
swatcoder wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, people teach their kids how to navigate their local environment safely. In rural environments, that can include wildlife dangers and natural hazards and in urban environments, it can include human dangers and industrial/sanitary hazards. Environmental danger is not new. The culture of isolating kids rather than educating them is. Whether the new strategy is better for the kids is an open question, but s…

>Historically, people teach their kids how to navigate their local environment safely. And historically, society would drive insane and homeless people out of nice areas. Middle and upper middle class people weren't letting their kids hang out with drifters in the past.

[deleted]

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

#118

Post by s1artibartfast »

satvikpendem wrote: post #90
pilarphosol wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is a low trust society, because of all the poverty. You really notice the difference if you travel to Europe. It turns out that having half of the population be economically unsafe makes everyone and everything unsafe.

I grew up in India, a much poorer nation than the US, and I played outside all the time, walking to relatives' houses and going to hang out with friends. I highly doubt it's the poverty causing this kind of thing in the US. Seems more to me the high amount of media "stranger danger" affecting people's viewpoints.

I think this is a key perspective. In the US you will have rich neighborhoods where kids play freely outside and poor neighborhoods where kids play freely outside. It is in the mixed neighborhoods there is an overwhelming fear of children playing

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

#119

Post by qup »

vuln wrote: post #101
swatcoder wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I can’t think of a worse way to assess the state of society than by consuming viral videos circulated online. This is a really disturbing way to form or justify opinions.

Really? You don't think social media, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, OnlyFans, 4chan, et al, is a mirror image of the current society as a whole? How do you assess the state of society? Without looking at the content said society produces?

I go out into said society and judge it for myself.

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

#120

Post by andrepd »

gitpusher wrote: post #93
acuozzo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US seems to be the only country that has this problem. Here's my take on the issue from 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32680201 Summary: We don't have safe roads and in most American suburbs traveling by car is often the only reasonable option available.

Related – this video does a nice job of articulating that argument: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw

I didn't open it and I knew it was a NotJustBikes video.

I actually hate that channel because it made me aware of how broken the car-centric infrastructure where I live is. I was living I such blissful ignorance, now I can't unsee it!

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