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Mom jailed for letting 10-year-old walk alone to town

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Re: Mom jailed for letting 10-year-old walk alone to town

#71

Post by __turbobrew__ »

Clubber wrote: post #43
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #31

I don’t know what is up with the USA and its obsession that kids cannot have autonomy. I think many of us grew up where our parents didn’t know our location at all times. My parents used to tell me to be home by a certain time, but I used to roam the neighborhood, go get candy at the gas station, explore the forest. Maybe it is a sign of the eroding social trust in the USA where people do not believe that others in t…

I think a lot of it has to do with constant fear mongering on the news and its effect after 40+ years of it. Also the phenomenon of (I forgot what it's called) but where people are afraid of flying but not driving because they see constant news coverage of crashed planes.

Fear and rage drives higher engagement which results in more ad revenue.

Re: Mom jailed for letting 10-year-old walk alone to town

#72

Post by Culonavirus »

iamleppert wrote: post #28
mouse_ wrote: post #9

"Why aren't people having kids?"

Too big of a liability and not enough ROI, or negative ROI from what I've seen with others who have children. How does having a child help me diversify my portfolio? All I see is a bad risk.

If you see children like that, you're not ready (some people will never be ready, it's ok).

Re: Mom jailed for letting 10-year-old walk alone to town

#75

Post by nine_k »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #31

I don’t know what is up with the USA and its obsession that kids cannot have autonomy. I think many of us grew up where our parents didn’t know our location at all times. My parents used to tell me to be home by a certain time, but I used to roam the neighborhood, go get candy at the gas station, explore the forest. Maybe it is a sign of the eroding social trust in the USA where people do not believe that others in t…

See, the USA has 350 million people, and fifty states with materially different local norms. With this scale and amount of variety, "one in a million" freak incidents ought to be registered all the time. But, being freak incidents, they get amplified and thus seem to represent the entire country in the eyes of distant observers, foreigners, or just people from far enough away within the US.

Ironically, this is the same mechanism that magnifies every freak incident in daily life and gives it disproportionate news coverage. It's sometimes useful to draw attention to a rare problem, but more often it's just to pump up the audience's emotions and thus drive up "engagement" (views, coincident ad impressions, contextual ad clicks). This magnification, if not dampened by some rational thought, leads to people, including officials, mortally afraid that "anything could happen" with an unattended child on the street, and over-reacting; jail time for a parent is definitely worse for a kid that walking alone on the streets for some time.

But again, talking about "the USA lifestyle" is about as productive as speaking about "the European cuisine". The lifestyle is highly varied; I myself is not a fan of transactional suburban SUV lifestyle, hence mine, and that of my neighbors, is vastly different.

Re: Mom jailed for letting 10-year-old walk alone to town

#76

Post by mindslight »

The fundamental dynamic underlying all of this is that there are absolutely zero downsides or repercussions for the professional bureaucrats persecuting their victims in this way. At the very least, the civil damages of legal expenses, emotional pain and suffering for the mother plus her four kids, physical harm from being held in poor jails, straight up wasted time, etc should be coming out of the budgets of the organizations perpetrating these attacks. Instead, in the worst case they simply get told "no" after a long arduous battle on the part of the parents (that the bureaucrats even get paid to engage in!), and are free to try again. This creates absolutely zero incentive to exercise judgement whether to actually persecute individual cases. Essentially, sovereign immunity being applied to every penny-ante government employee strikes again.

Re: Mom jailed for letting 10-year-old walk alone to town

#77

Post by rbanffy »

ridiculous_leke wrote: post #7

> She (the Sheriff) kept mentioning how he could have been run over, or kidnapped or 'anything' could have happened, This is weird. Is the crime so bad in the town? Even the good-for-nothing cops in my (developing) country do not come up with such nonsense.

They need to justify their military-level gear. If the city is nice and calm, they won’t get armored vehicles.

Re: Mom jailed for letting 10-year-old walk alone to town

#78

Post by llm_trw »

calibas wrote: post #69
eitally wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but. For all of the happy survivor stories like yours (and mine), the reality is that the rate of child accidental deaths has steadily decreases over the past few decades as parents (and society) became more protective. That isn't to say I agree with over-parenting and eliminating independence -- I don't -- but there needs to be rationality applied as well as personal values.

Yes, while childhood suicide, depression and obesity rates have all been increasing. If you look at all the factors, I'm not sure there's a net benefit. Edit: I decided to look up the CDC statistics to see if there is any net benefit, but total childhood mortality rates have been increasing in the US. Measuring accidental deaths is extremely flawed, if that were a good target then we should keep all children indoors.…

Don't forget that there are a lot fewer kids today.

One only need to look at how a single kid is parented vs four.

I had a hilarious example at the park where the single child had constant supervision while the fourth kid of the same age was left alone to do whatever until she hurt herself and started crying. In between she ate dirt, sand, jumped in a puddle, threw stones at the local wild life, ate the single kids snacks, and finally fell off a ladder and busted her nose.

It's not that parents in the 70s were hands off, it's that they had their hands full and couldn't do any more.

Re: Mom jailed for letting 10-year-old walk alone to town

#79

Post by Brian_K_White »

Town of only 370 people only a mile away?

There is no way this sherrif did not know both the kid and the mom at least indirectly, and no way MOST kids in the area don't travel a mile on their own routinely, many every day, and no way this sherriff is not aware of this norm, and this is some personal and/or brown/yellow-people bs.

Maybe or maybe not driven by the sherrif directly but like a neighbor wants the property they live on or something. This has "make someone go away" (for whatever reason) smell. Though they are just as guilty for being willing to perform even if it was someone else's direction.

Like when a business just mysteriously can't get a normal permit in a tiny town where the entire staff of the department is Frank, the brother in law of the guy that owns half the town or the competing business across town, or their personal house near by and they just don't want the view. All impossible to prove and no one to complain to to even try.

I grew up in a comparative metropolis of ZOMG SIX THOUSAND(1) people and kids younger than 11 routinely travelled a hell of a lot further than a single mile by themselves, in the US. This is not crazy or dangerous or abnormal in the slightest in such a setting. In fact it's practically unavoidable in that setting. But Hey we were white and in the north-east version of rural instead of Mexipino-looking in the south-east version of rural.

(I seem to remember a figure more like 10-12k when I was there, but the census figures on wikipedia and say just under 6k for that time frame. Maybe these rural people avoid cooperating with the census, maybe the figure I heard included more of the general area than strictly the borders of the town, maybe I just never heard any such figure since we are talking late 70s and me only 7 to 12.)

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