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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

#271

Post by ummonk »

sfpotter wrote: post #234
xkcd-sucks wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like this infrastructural risk is media driven to the extent of "pedophile kidnappers" or "razor blades in apples". For example I grew up in an Eastern MA "suburb" in the mid 90s - early 2000s, characterized by narrow winding roads, fast drivers, and no streetlights. Everyone too young or unconnected to have car access bicycled or walked everywhere; parents were a bit fearful but ultimately acquiescent ("bet…

I feel you, but this is clearly a “correlation is not causation” type situation. Infrastructure should be people-centric, and there’s nothing wrong with doing things to reduce car speed and make the built environment safe. It is unlikely that improved infrastructure resulted in people walking and biking less, which is what the wording of your post suggests. (Also, love your username… I thought I was the only one. ;-)…

The wording of their comment did not suggest that.

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

#272

Post by Gigachad »

eweise wrote: post #256
sfpotter wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Its easy to go places like the beach, camping, skiing, fishing, golfing, etc. Basically all the things I like to do except biking and hiking which I can do from my house.

These are all occasional things. Day to day life is better car free. And then when you want to go out you can rent a car. Or even own one. You don’t have to use a car for every single activity just because you sometimes go skiing.

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

#273

Post by medler »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #212
andrepd wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, a reasonable risk is tolerable. But, for instance, car-centric infrastructure has *intensely* exacerbated those risks: space is completely surrendered to cars, sidewalks are non-existent, crosswalks go across 8 lanes of 60+mph traffic. All of this, plus terrible public transport, makes it impossible to travel anyway except by car. This leads to lack of independence for children, and sedentarism.

It feels like this infrastructural risk is media driven to the extent of "pedophile kidnappers" or "razor blades in apples". For example I grew up in an Eastern MA "suburb" in the mid 90s - early 2000s, characterized by narrow winding roads, fast drivers, and no streetlights. Everyone too young or unconnected to have car access bicycled or walked everywhere; parents were a bit fearful but ultimately acquiescent ("bet…

Dunno about that city in particular but in general car deaths have been increasing over the past decades, presumably because cars keep getting bigger and heavier. It’s a lot safer for kids to cross the street when everyone’s driving a Taurus than when everyone’s driving a modern Toyota Tundra

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

#274

Post by ummonk »

jehb wrote: post #265
Aeolun wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The use of the phrase "high crime area" in this context, when just referencing child safety, is itself problematic. Everyone who is reading that phrase right now is forming a mental picture of what it means, and I guarantee it's not a picture of illegally burning garbage in the yard while drinking raw milk, sitting on an unpermitted deck, listening to an illegally downloaded MP3 while making a trade on their phone ba…

There is nothing problematic about having a phrase for areas with high risk of crime that negatively impacts the quality of life of local residents and visitors. (And that includes neighbors illegally burning garbage in their yard)

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

#275

Post by ummonk »

trpv wrote: post #236
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It’s a term for street homeless because the homelessness industrial complex decided to inflate the stats by conflating couchsurfing people with the visibly homeless.

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

#276

Post by jehb »

ummonk wrote: post #274
jehb wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of the phrase "high crime area" in this context, when just referencing child safety, is itself problematic. Everyone who is reading that phrase right now is forming a mental picture of what it means, and I guarantee it's not a picture of illegally burning garbage in the yard while drinking raw milk, sitting on an unpermitted deck, listening to an illegally downloaded MP3 while making a trade on their phone ba…

There is nothing problematic about having a phrase for areas with high risk of crime that negatively impacts the quality of life of local residents and visitors. (And that includes neighbors illegally burning garbage in their yard)

I'm objecting to the parent comment where this originated, where the author juxtaposed the safety of a child growing up in a "suburban or rural" setting with living "near a highway though, or a high crime area."

Crime is not an urban phenomenon, and when we describe it as one, we're flaming stereotypes. I don't think it was intentional and my point was not to denigrate the parent comment, but to encourage us to avoid accidental constructs like this.

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

#277

Post by Falkon1313 »

myself248 wrote: post #81
fl0ps wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is a low trust society because we're told not to trust people through highly negative news stories. The result is the US being primed to think there are child murderers and rapists under every bush, etc, etc. Ancedent to this unintentional effect was the incentivised "if it bleeds it reads" motivation for promotion of the highly negative.

Both of these things can be true at the same time. The news can overemphasize the worst, AND we can have an epidemic of drug problems, mental illness, and the crimes that those bring.

Yet oddly, when I was a kid, and the crime rate was roughly double what it is now, we didn't have this problem.

There were drugs, oh you betchya, cocaine and crack and all these other cool things the D.A.R.E. officers were telling us about. There was crime, about twice as much of it as today. But us kids were out there riding our bikes around and playing till the streetlights came on.

This is something different entirely.

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

#278

Post by claytongulick »

vore wrote: post #243
jasonfarnon wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Fortunately?

It is indeed fortunate that certain groups of people have not been successful in equating spanking with abuse, from a legal standpoint.

Reasonable and clearly defined punishments that include spanking as the "nuclear option" are part of a parent's toolkit.

Child rearing is hard. I've been doing it for 24 years straight now with four kids.

Kids are different and don't respond the same to punishments. What works for one may not work for another.

Barring cases of abuse, I believe it's wrong to armchair quarterback parents raising their kids in the best way they know how.

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

#279

Post by geomark »

danjoredd wrote: post #100
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…

Its been a genuine problem. I have heard people actually say that if a kid is playing outside by themselves, then the parent should be charged with child neglect because the kid could get hurt. Any time a kid gets hurt on YouTube the comments are filled with people blaming the parent for not being outside with them. Thing is, playing outside by yourself gives you a strong sense of independence. The kid might get hurt…

It's even in the YouTube algorithm. I've had a couple of videos taken down due to "potential child endangerment". They were videos of me and my kid doing things that are, realistically, safer than riding a bicycle. It's pathetic how fragile kids are being made these days.

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

#280

Post by 45453836 »

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…

Imo there's two factors at play only one of which seems to get much attention. There's the legality (and burden of compliance even when abiding the law) of leaving your children unsupervised but there's also the complete lack of penalty for being wrong. A person reporting abuse incorrectly is for all intents and purposes, an attacker. Why is attacking someone else with only a brief observation of the situation cost free? Sure there's a balance to be maintained so that people still report actual abuse but why is there no burden upon the attacker to be correct or defensibly confused when the stakes are so high for the defender? If this was a game the imbalance would be an obvious point of dialogue.
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