251–260 of 531 posts
A big perpetrator of this is the designed environment surrounding car culture. I moved somewhere where there's plenty of foot traffic, specifically so my kid will walk/bike to school and that is seen as completely normal. Most Americans do not understand how horrible car dependence is for personal independence, yet defend it to the end for some reason. It's really a shame.
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I made the same observation when I moved to the US, it was so weird to me that SF the city is pretty much devoid of children. They're all effectively locked up and prohibited from roaming. No-one trusts children, no-one trusts adults around children, no-one trusts strangers. But I went skiing in Lake Tahoe one weekend, and suddenly all of that disappeared. Suddenly, you have children freely interacting with strangers…
I lived in the Bay Area for two years. It’s a shit hole. It’s dirty, dangerous, and expensive. I’ve lived in NYC (the Bronx), Seattle, and Saint Louis. Never felt anywhere close to the terror I felt living in San Jose and commuting to Los Gatos and San Francisco. We fled from San Jose to Phoenix a year after having our daughter. Kids walk to school in our neighborhood. A bunch meet up at the corner near our house and…
Terror in Los Gatos?
Los Gatos is pretty damn close to Mayberry (of The Andy Griffith Show fame), imho.
Certainly parts of San Jose are horrible, but you don’t have to live there.
Is there a reason you didn’t chose to live in Los Gatos? It’s expensive, but much higher QoL if cities are scary.
A friend was going to drop off a package at UPS, when his kid fell asleep in the car on the way. Although there are parking spaces 10 feet from the UPS store (which has huge glass windows, so he could have seen the kid the whole time), he chose not to go inside. He had googled and discovered that it is illegal to leave a child unattended in a car in CA for any period of time. It would have taken 30 seconds in the sto…
The law is there because children cook for parents thinking “I’ll just be 30 seconds”
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> a high crime area What exactly do you expect to happen to your 6 year old? They’re not a very useful target for anything I can think of.
Such extreme privilege right here. Kids that young will be pressured into using drugs and committing crimes, mostly vandalism and theft, but sometimes worse. That’s around the age when kids started dealing drugs where I grew up. I knew kids who threw bricks through windows and huffed paint when left alone. Bad areas are bad.
This entire article is about rebuffing the "it happened once somewhere so it might happen anywhere" scare tactic that people use to prosecute well-meaning parents for letting their children experience independence.
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I am really surprised every time I see this vehement hatred of cars. I lived in NYC my whole life and didn't have a car, but now we got kids so we happily moved for the house-and-car-in-the-burbs life and it's absolutely better. People make this choice for a reason. Just curious, do you have a family and do you shlep them by bus everywhere?
Better how? You don’t actually say why you prefer your new lifestyle. Clearly lots of people prefer to live without a car. Have you ever bothered having a conversation with them? Maybe if you did, you’d be less surprised!
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> a high crime area What exactly do you expect to happen to your 6 year old? They’re not a very useful target for anything I can think of.
Such extreme privilege right here. Kids that young will be pressured into using drugs and committing crimes, mostly vandalism and theft, but sometimes worse. That’s around the age when kids started dealing drugs where I grew up. I knew kids who threw bricks through windows and huffed paint when left alone. Bad areas are bad.
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Mostly kidnapped by the parent that doesn't have custody. Once in a while other aunts or uncles who don't approve of the way their brother/sister is raising kids.
In China they might get kidnapped for adoption, at least that is what my (Chinese) wife thinks.
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Most schools have lunch accounts these days, stealing lunch money is no longer possible. We have a lot of unhoused neighbors in our neighborhood. When they are on bad fent trips, they can get pretty irrationally violent, though I've never heard of a kid being attacked before.
Is “unhoused neighbors” your term for homeless people?
"neighbors" are people who live nearby, in the neighborhood.
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> a high crime area What exactly do you expect to happen to your 6 year old? They’re not a very useful target for anything I can think of.
Mostly pedophilia and ransom would be my main concern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sexual_abuse#United_Stat...