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?
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Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills
291–300 of 531 posts
Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills
#292I 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 helmet…
In almost all of the West, crime is associated to poverty. If you commit a robbery, being a poor is an "explanation". Individuals are rarely blamed, your circumstances determine your behaviour not your values.
This assumption breaks down once you leave almost any inner-city area, see levels of poverty that are at least as high in rural areas and there are very little crimes against people (although things like drugs are often common).
Drugs are part of it, culture, attitudes towards poverty, police behaviour, sentencing, social policy (i.e. welfare state, healthcare)...but yes, crime is basically out of control in societies with virtually non-existent levels of poverty.
Also, this doesn't have much to do with the subject. In the US, there have been cases of children walking through residential neighbourhood, a neighbour calls the police, the parents are arrested and then have to give up their children (there was one case where the parents actually lost their jobs too because they had jobs working with children, and they put on a register for child abusers)...suburban people have a fetish for crimes against children, crimes like this get treated very harshly but they let shoplifters or robbers walk free because of inequality, police in the US have no capacity for working with the community, it is completely unrelated to reality.
Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills
#293I'm a recent immigrant to the US, and when talking to locals I need to bite my tongue to not say "for the land of the free, you sure have an awful lot of rules". As much as America prides itself on their freedoms, they have rules that would baffle most developed countries. And at the same time they are incredibly loose in other contexts, such as safety and quality control e.g. substances that are banned in the EU are…
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It's not the corporations, it's the rich people. Corporations are (rich) people too.
Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills
#294A 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…
As plenty of people will take 30 seconds to drop off the package and 15 minutes chatting with someone they run into or grabbing stuff of shelvea. The law is there because children cook for parents thinking “I’ll just be 30 seconds”
So why not make the law something reasonable, related to how long the child is actually left in the vehicle, and whether the parent is creating a risk to the life of the child (based on temperature, for example)? It seems like the people who are likely to be influenced by this law are those who are sensitive/compliant enough to even know it exists, and people who would consider leaving their kids in the car and forgetting for 15 minutes would be completely unaffected.
Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills
#295The 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…
Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture is making our society to be like this. Also, most states defund mental health institutions. Finally, the 24/7 news cycle covers a lot of crazy behaviors, encouraging copycats to one-up the crime even more. Is it a surprise if Americans are more paranoid than ever?
> Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture is making our society to be like this
This can't possibly be the cause. The US has been filled to the brim with cars for decades - yet this is a modern phenomenon.
Similarly, bad guy have had loads of guns in the US since even before the US was a thing... yet again, this is a modern phenomenon.
> Finally, the 24/7 news cycle covers a lot of crazy behaviors, encouraging copycats to one-up the crime even more.
I'm in complete agreement here. The media goes wall-to-wall with every mass shooter every time, turning them into some sort of sick idol for all the other mentally unstable wannabe's. Sometimes the media even reads these people's manifestos on air... it's just insane behavior.
> Is it a surprise if Americans are more paranoid than ever?
Paranoid, but also mentally diseased. We've constructed a society where it's totally acceptable to be mentally ill and entirely on your own. Today, even small cities have homeless camps filled to the brim with mentally ill that desperately need help - yet our policies give them free needles to enable them to continue doing drugs and ruin their lives.
It's horror disguised as compassion - compassion that ends up killing people.
Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills
#296Earlier 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 also depends on where you live. If you are a suburban or rural kid, playing outside all you want is fine. Let them explore the neighborhood. If you live near a highway though, or a high crime area, then you might want to reconsider what you want to allow. You still need common sense. My main worry is people who live in relatively safe areas, like a suburban neighborhood, but with neighbors that will STILL call CPS…
There is irony here in that a "high crime" urban area is much more likely to have kids walking around with relative freedom than a "low crime" suburban area.
Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills
#297The 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…
Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture is making our society to be like this. Also, most states defund mental health institutions. Finally, the 24/7 news cycle covers a lot of crazy behaviors, encouraging copycats to one-up the crime even more. Is it a surprise if Americans are more paranoid than ever?
> Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture is making our society to be like this.
The US has been car centric and gun centric for more than 70 years. Unsupervised kids bring frowned upon is a much more recent development.
Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills
#298The 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. Children here (Norway) walk to school on their own at the age of five or six, some of them take buses." I grew up in New Zealand, and when I was a kid it was pretty normal to walk to school also. I spent my whole childhood walking 20-30 mins every morning and afternoon! Eventually I got a bike which saved a bit of time. But now days, I think it's not as co…
Over here in Australia I remember the same, kids walking to school at 5 years old. In fact one time my mum forgot to pick me up, so I walked to my friend's house. Turns out it was the wrong day, oops.
But now I see cars lined up at the school near me, around the block. They'd rather sit in a line in their car blocking traffic for half an hour, instead of just parking one block away and walking with their kids (there is plenty of untimed parking, it's residential). Or, god forbid, asking their kid to meet them at a convenient corner each day. So I don't think it's just a safety thing, some parents are a little lazy too and would rather just sit in their car instead of walking or meeting other parents.
This might be a country vs city thing too, since I'm in Sydney now.
Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 on…
If I (non-consensually) spank an adult, that's abuse. If I spank an animal, that's also abuse. But if I spank a child, that's somehow magically not abuse? Most of Europe has been getting along fine without physically hitting their children for discipline. Parents should not be teaching their children that pain compliance is an acceptable method for getting what they want.
Your analogy makes no sense. If I ground my child, preventing them from leaving the house, that's a reasonable punishment. If I prevent an adult from leaving my house, that's kidnapping. There are some things you can do to your child that you cannot do to another adult. And that's normal and good.
Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I hate to say this, but this is an amazing lack of imagination over what could happen ( based merely on what did happen before and not coming up with wild scenarios ). I am saying this as a likely free range parent ( still internally debating, but a lot will depend on how my kid handles things ).
The underlying problem is the same as the lottery: the human brain adjusts probability on the basis of severity.
Terrible things happen. They aren't likely to happen.