here in Canada, social service
"baby snatchers" have destroyed basic community cohesion and along with many other wildly out of control beurocratic policing forces, such as the spca making having animals a huge liability, litteral special subdivisions, chicken police, horse police, and an enacted rock police to prevent the totaly illegal practice of picking rocks off a beach, but hey
it is legal to pack granma into the back of a motor home and drive her to the government
canabis store, get her wrecked, and then take her in so she can ask to be euthanized.
cant make this shit up as they say.
The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
11–20 of 303 posts
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#12My biggest fear of letting my young kid play alone outside is getting hit by a car.
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#13this resonates a lot. I am not sure how to handle this though. Next to our house (500m), the city government established a camp for “asylum seekers”. 100 men. Men only. How can I reasonable let my pre-teen daughters roam freely now? Id love to, but my gut feeling doesnt allow me to. Maybe, back in the days, it was just a different time? A more high trust society that worked well? Nowadays, we have news stories, where…
Statistically, we live in the safest society we ever have. We see a lot of bad stuff happening because news reporting travels further and faster than ever before, amplifying the perception the world is going to shit.
Plus, now, basically every kid is running around with a phone that gives them access to talk to the police or their parents at any time. So it's going to be a lot riskier for someone to try anything against them. Even then, between 80-90% of sexual assaults are performed by people the victims already know, and around 30% of those are relatives of the victim.
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#14I think this is more a data point towards the quiet disappearnce of community / the steady march towards pervasive isolation
Correct. There are no communities anymore, just groups of houses. You see it in the death of social and civic organizations, churches, and other community groups.
Everybody is an island. I don't know what has caused this, but it seems like it's happening in most 1st world countries. Anyone have insights about this?
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#15this resonates a lot. I am not sure how to handle this though. Next to our house (500m), the city government established a camp for “asylum seekers”. 100 men. Men only. How can I reasonable let my pre-teen daughters roam freely now? Id love to, but my gut feeling doesnt allow me to. Maybe, back in the days, it was just a different time? A more high trust society that worked well? Nowadays, we have news stories, where…
Statistically, we live in the safest society we ever have. We see a lot of bad stuff happening because news reporting travels further and faster than ever before, amplifying the perception the world is going to shit. Plus, now, basically every kid is running around with a phone that gives them access to talk to the police or their parents at any time. So it's going to be a lot riskier for someone to try anything agai…
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Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#16I remember when I was a kid I would bike to a park around a half mile away by myself, definitely before I was 13, and I admit it feels weird to suggest a kid can go to the park down just a single block alone today.
The funny thing is it'd be safer: Kids have cell phones now by like 7 or 8 in a lot of cases and can call for help! Back when I was that age if I got injured or something I might've had to knock on strangers' doors!
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#17My biggest fear of letting my young kid play alone outside is getting hit by a car.
When I was a kid I was taught not to walk in the street.
When you walk, you go in the opposite direction of cars and can see them coming and, if necessary, move off to the side more.
I know it's survivorship bias, but it worked for me.
Now I get that population density is increasing, and probably so is traffic. Though so are automatic safety features that cause cars to brake rather than hit things.
Are there statistics on vehicular fatalities in suburbs?
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#18My biggest fear of letting my young kid play alone outside is getting hit by a car.
That's why you have an emergency backup child for redundancy in case of failure of the main child.
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#19I’m reasonably convinced this explains basically everything currently attributed to social media, for children at least, and likely can also help explain some concern around birth rates and child rearing costs. Starting with the satanic panic the US has slowly closed down children’s lives because of concern that terrible things will happen to children if not continually under supervision. And the true is that yes som…
Does the term "satanic panic" also apply to the EU restricting internet access for the youth?
Satanic panic was a very specific phenomenon in the US.
Re: The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
#20I don't know. Maybe this is going away in some places, maybe I just have my own anecdata, but my kids play outside unsupervised all the time, as do all the kids in my neighborhood. I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of small Metro. Nothing special about it at all. Every time I see one of these articles I always wonder who they're talking about. I always feel like this is just one of those…
> my kids play outside unsupervised all the time, as do all the kids in my neighborhood. I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood
Your kids are hardly free-range. Let me guess, there's no way for them to actually meaningfully leave the area (no train, bus, etc)? It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and saying they can do whatever they want. hardly free-range in the way described in the article.
Presumably you live in a suburb for the reasons the person in the article checked in on the free-range kid.
my personal litmus test is if you'd let your 13 year kid explore Manhattan alone during the day. Many say no because it's dangerous, and yet Manhattan is safer than most American suburbs. just FUD all the way down sadly.