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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

#431

Post by beeforpork »

Aha! I think it is a glimpse into the future of the country here (Germany).

When I was young, I walked to school starting at age 6, and I walked to kindergarten even earlier. (And I played naked in the garden, in a small swimming pool with neighbour's kids (all genders).) It was also no problem to be sent to buy cigarettes, which in hindsight, I find less OK...

Today, parents drive their children to school by car, in walking distance. I don't know how they have time for that, but they cause traffic jams they then complain about.

From here, I am sure we will get a situation like in the US where parents may get into trouble if they give their children some independence.

And from there, the US now gets laws that make it reasonable again to give some independence. Which will follow here, too, I am sure.

It is very interesting!

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

#432

Post by chx »

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…

> . It shows up in new parents who don't introduce their children to family for risk of covid.

This is asinine.

Just because politics tells you everything is normal, everything is decidedly not normal. COVID is still an endemic and very serious disease.

Dropping mask mandates were a seriously and deadly mistake.

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

#433

Post by JumpCrisscross »

cesaref wrote: post #426
notch898a wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

> don't know how the US has got itself into such a messed up state that such drills are considered necessary

As the comment above you says, they’re between counterproductive and unnecessary, and purely creatures of posturing and appeasing scared parents.

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

#434

Post by activitypea »

beeforpork wrote: post #431

Aha! I think it is a glimpse into the future of the country here (Germany). When I was young, I walked to school starting at age 6, and I walked to kindergarten even earlier. (And I played naked in the garden, in a small swimming pool with neighbour's kids (all genders).) It was also no problem to be sent to buy cigarettes, which in hindsight, I find less OK... Today, parents drive their children to school by car, in…

> It was also no problem to be sent to buy cigarettes

Man what a nostalgia hit. Never smoked in my life, but I could never get the cashiers to let me buy cigs for my parents :')

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

#435

Post by makeitdouble »

ethbr0 wrote: post #313
devtul wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charge $5 bucks for some type of reports, it's a small annoyance which should be nothing for someone truly concerned.

I'm convinced the internet would have been better if we had charged $0.05 per email. Making something free definitely has its costs.

I get your point, and it was a pretty serious discussion in the early days I think.

Now, introducing micro-transactions into people‘s communication looks like a straight ticket to hell to me. Reminds me of the early days of SMS when only porn sites, scams and businesses that made you pay for their SMS bills would send you messages.

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

#436

Post by herbst »

didip wrote: post #161
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…

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?

Swiss here. We also have a lot of guns and cars. Yet we have swarms of children going alone to school and playing alone in nature.

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

#437

Post by eloisant »

favaq wrote: post #428
analog31 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I live in a French neighborhood with multiple races (mostly white+arabic+black) and it's very safe, children play outside be themselves and no parent or neighbor ever care.

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

#438

Post by pacija »

chx wrote: post #432
s1artibartfast wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> . It shows up in new parents who don't introduce their children to family for risk of covid. This is asinine. Just because politics tells you everything is normal, everything is decidedly not normal. COVID is still an endemic and very serious disease. Dropping mask mandates were a seriously and deadly mistake.

Chicken

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

#439

Post by geomark »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #423
geomark wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As long as it's something sterile like playing video games it's fine. But as soon as a kid does something with a bit of substance it becomes child endangerment.

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

#440

Post by eru »

medler wrote: post #273
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…

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

> [...] but in general car deaths have been increasing over the past decades, [...]

Are you sure about that? What's your source?

Some quick searching gave me https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit... which even looks like a decrease per capita over the past decades.

No clue whether that source of data is any good, and what the rates outside of the Us are. Just FYI, I don't like car centric places either, and that's part of the reason I probably couldn't live in the US.

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