Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

letgrow.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 531 posts

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

#421

Post by Reason077 »

aidos wrote: post #200
Reason077 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

It’s the catch22 of it I suppose. Also grew up in rural Nz where walking / cycling alone from a fairly young age was normal. Now my kids are at that age they cycle a bit on their own, but even in our village there is a street they need to cross on the way to school where they need supervision. Really we should start a community lollipop person schedule and sort it out.

> ”Really we should start a community lollipop person schedule and sort it out.”

Ahh yes! My primary school in NZ had two nearby crossings over a “busy” road (but probably not that busy by today’s standards)

I remember doing lollipop duty on it a few times. As a kid. A very prestigious assignment and we got some special high-vis to wear and everything. I assume there must have been some volunteer parents involved as well, but I really don’t remember now. Would have been too caught up in the excitement, haha.

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

#422

Post by em-bee »

mtrower wrote: post #393
SwetDrems wrote: post #94

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.

Could you expound upon this? Specifically, why cars are bad for personal independence, but bicycles are just fine?

it's that everything is designed around cars. as a 15 year old i traveled through multiple countries in europe on my bike, alone.

as a 17 year old in the US i was not able to go anywhere without getting a ride in a car. any interesting places to go to were to far away to even reach conveniently by bike. everything was designed around and dependent on cars.

as a very independent youth i considered this experience an interesting lesson on what it means to be dependent, but most certainly growing up there would have been different. i have seen other youth struggling with the sudden change when they turned 18 and were expected to act like independent adults instead of the dependent youth they were until then.

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

#423

Post by iLoveOncall »

geomark wrote: post #391
gsk22 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what were the videos? The algorithm (advertisers?) is certainly picky...

The most recent was when my kid did a review of two different multitools. Within five minutes of uploading it YouTube had taken it down due to "potential child endangerment."

Yeah, it's child endangerment to put your kid on YouTube.

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

#424

Post by carabiner »

geomark wrote: post #279
danjoredd wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ugh. The sanitized humanity of googlers will ruin the world.

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

#425

Post by notch898a »

alwayslikethis wrote: post #419
gowld wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Benefits how? If your kid doesn't waste money, why does it matter whether the money is your account or theirs?

You are forced to give it. If you lose your job or somehow cannot manage your cashflow for a moment, you go to jail.

Or if you just get hijacked by terrorists while ironically working the job to come up with money for the child support [0].

[0] https://greensboro.com/ex-hostage-jailed-in-child-support-ca...

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

#426

Post by cesaref »

notch898a wrote: post #348
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> active shooter drills What the fuck

It gets better.... they do the drill but then don't even practice the most important and highest priority of the 3 option which is to RUN. It turns out, running is too inconvenient for the teachers to deal with, because it's a lot of work to round up kids that have run away (and probably not the safest thing to begin with anyway for just a drill). So instead they drill for them to hide, which should be done only if y…

> The advice I have for my kid is to not give a damn what the teacher says, to grab the nearest long durable object and smash out the windows and run away.

Meanwhile, here in the UK, the advice I gave my son was to look both ways when crossing the road, not to mess around with plug sockets, and not to run when carrying a pair of scissors.

I honestly don't know how the US has got itself into such a messed up state that such drills are considered necessary and routine, or how it is that the people are ok with this. I'm guessing it's a boiling a frog type scenario as it doesn't make sense otherwise.

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

#427

Post by badcppdev »

Gigachad wrote: post #269
kungfooey wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Large parts of the US seem like a nightmare society. I can’t imagine how limiting life must be when your basic freedoms like walking are so restricted.

And so many stories about people shouting at strangers.

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

#428

Post by favaq »

analog31 wrote: post #174
favaq wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very unfair to compare Norway to the US, you just have to look at the racial composition of both societies to see why

There's no reason why a multi-racial society can't let their kids go out to play. Being multi-racial doesn't mean a country has to turn itself into a shit hole. Moreover, if it's because the races hate each other, then stop encouraging the hate.

>Being multi-racial doesn't mean a country has to turn itself into a shit hole.

It doesn't? Do you have any examples where this hasn't happened?

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

#429

Post by badcppdev »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #227
henrikschroder wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

SF is devoid of kids because it is a super expensive place to raise kids in SF, and the schools are so messed up you need to go private or move. Also, a lot of same sex couples don't adopt. https://www.aaastateofplay.com/the-u-s-cities-with-the-most-...

Nitpick: approx. half of same sex couples don't need to adopt. Sorry for digression

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

#430

Post by stdbrouw »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #318
makeitdouble wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a general rule, parents seem to be blamed for anything happening to a kid under any specific setting. Kids playing outside is one of them, kids talking to strangers, kids browsing the internet will also be seen the same...and then kids using voice chat in online games, kids talking to strangers in VR, kids just playing in VR, kids watching youtube etc. It seem well accepted that pervert/criminal will go after kids…

>I think there is a real issue on what people perceive as society's role and what parent's role is. Not only that, but you a society has become obsessed with risk mitigation over the last several decades. The problem is that people are poorly equipped to estimate risk with very low occurrences against low or unclear cost. You see it in all facets of society with a platitude of better safe than sorry. It shows up in i…

I'd be wary of putting all of these examples into the same box, though.

If kids can't play outside anymore because of overprotective parents or an overprotective society, that feels to me like a net negative. If newspapers are afraid to publish because they are fearful of libel suits, then we might miss fact-checked stories that are in the public interest, and it's not clear that that's a good trade-off.

On the other hand, zero traffic death policies usually result in fairly cheap and only mildly inconvenient interventions (if inconvenient at all) to improve the legibility of key intersections and dangerous roads. Drives to reduce medical error usually rely on increased training or the introduction of fixed procedures or checklists, quick wins. Safety regulations in construction require proper dust extraction and safety at heights, and really the cost in better ladders, scaffolding, safety harnesses, vacuums and so on is completely negligible compared against the occupational hazards and chronic illnesses often suffered by older construction workers.

(And sometimes it's debatable. I feel like NASA could take a bigger risk on some manned missions if the astronauts agree, but on the other hand there's so much money and effort involved in these missions that it's not so strange that they want to get everything right, and that feels like the right culture and attitude. I feel like you should probably be allowed to swim anywhere you want even in still water or when there's algae, at your own peril, but really it's not that much of an inconvenience to go to a safer spot with a lifeguard.)

My impression is that what really ails Western societies is not necessarily risk averseness but rather gridlock, where a small amount of people can block a lot of progress for the rest of us. Gridlock has made governments averse to big infrastructure projects (e.g. high speed trains) and big changes in regulations that could move the needle (e.g. land value taxation) but they're not really averse to the risk, they're averse to getting swamped by interest groups and influential people with a vested interest in the status quo.

Post reply on HN