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Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond

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Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond

#261

Post by x-complexity »

WarmWash wrote: post #114
neaden wrote: post #2

This is one of those frustrating things. You're just not allowed to not be scared with kids. If you aren't scared of letting your kid walk to a pond, you get punished for it. If you're not scared of the kidnappers, you have to be scared of the police. None of it is rational, it's different how many of us were raised, yet if you try to opt out the law gets involved.

I swear human brains are programmed to have a "fear bank" of things to be scared of, and an allocation of fear that must be spent on items in the fear bank. As society has weeded out all the things to fear over time, more and more far flung things get put into the bank, and more and more fear is allocated to the dwindling amount of things to be scared of.

Following this hypothesis, it would be rationally beneficial to release a wild bear every 6 months or so, just to make sure that the 'fear bank' is occupied by things that warrant actual fear.

Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond

#262

Post by Fizz43 »

comrade1234 wrote: post #29

Here in Switzerland children start walking to school at around 5-years. Parents aren't allowed to bring them to school. If a parent escorts their children to school they'll be told not to. If they keep doing it they'll get a letter from the school and probably a police visit. And if they continue (I never heard of it getting to this stage) they may be fined. It's funny in the morning. One child walks to another child…

In NZ we call it the walking school bus.

Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond

#264

Post by DangitBobby »

x-complexity wrote: post #261
WarmWash wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear human brains are programmed to have a "fear bank" of things to be scared of, and an allocation of fear that must be spent on items in the fear bank. As society has weeded out all the things to fear over time, more and more far flung things get put into the bank, and more and more fear is allocated to the dwindling amount of things to be scared of.

Following this hypothesis, it would be rationally beneficial to release a wild bear every 6 months or so, just to make sure that the 'fear bank' is occupied by things that warrant actual fear.

We do have this whole global climate crisis going on. Maybe people could try being afraid of that

Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond

#265

Post by elgertam »

This happened in my neighborhood, and I've met the "perpetrator." She's a sweet person, and I'm convinced she was absolutely acting in the best interests of her child as she saw it. Kids as young as elementary school age in our neighborhood frequently go to the various ponds for fishing, watching the wildlife or even sailing remote control boats. Five years old without a buddy might be on the younger end, but it's hardly criminally negligent. And given the several close calls I've had with elementary & middle school-aged kids on e-bikes and scooters this summer, I hardly think this is even close to the most serious youth safety problem here.

Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond

#266

Post by elgertam »

thewillowcat wrote: post #48
armchairhacker wrote: post #16

How does this happen? There’s no silver lining which makes this conviction reasonable. If they can’t appeal, I hope they use Streisand to get the town or state of Virginia to vacate everything.

It happened because a neighbor was so disturbed by a child walking alone to report it, the police thought it was serious enough to refer for prosecution, and a prosecutor decided it needed to be charged using their office's limited resources. All insane. The part that really gets to me is that the neighbor was so "concerned" about the child's safety that they called the police, but for some reason, in their urgent co…

I live in the neighborhood in question. While my immediate neighbors are all really awesome people, the neighborhood as a whole has a LOT of retired people whose sole activity in life is to report their neighbors to The Authorities. Usually that's the HOA management or the security office, but sometimes they'll call the actual police.

Many of us find it frustrating, though exposure is almost random. Someone who used to live on our street used to get very upset about trash cans being visible from the street, for instance. I think this person moved in the last two or three years because the passive aggressive HOA letters about this apparently heinous nuisance have stopped. But among groups of affluent people, I find that a small percentage never outgrew the tattle-tale phase and still behave in such a way into their sixties, seventies and eighties.

Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond

#267

Post by elgertam »

morkalork wrote: post #185
marticode wrote: post #62

It blows my mind that a bunch of adults, prosecutors, CPS employees, etc all decided the fair, reasonable and best thing to do was prosecute and punish this mother.

Sounds like there is very little crime happening in their precious gated community that they've got to trump up everything they can to justify the budget wasted on them

I live in this neighborhood. I was just kvetching to my wife this morning about how our HOA wastes so much money on excess. That had me in the wrong (or right?) mood to read this.

I will say, we have a LOT of elderly retired people who live here. It's not uncommon to hear sirens because someone is having a medical episode, and the security office is helpful with responding to those and helping with EMS. They are also helpful for doing well checks on the elderly when they haven't been responsive to others.

That being said, a lot of what they do is run radar and evidently do absolutely atrocious behavior like this. One of the flip sides of the retired population is that many of them devote their lives to reporting their neighbors to The Authorities – generally the HOA or security office. In this case, I guess the informant went straight to the cops.

Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond

#268

Post by FireBeyond »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #100
teekert wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is extremely car focused, which they often don't really realize. Things that are normal here (like everybody has a bike) conflicts with their cyclers vs drivers culture. Such a distinction simply does not exist here. Instead we have roads that are red with signs "Cars are guests". Or indeed city centers where cars aren't allowed. When I go to the US I'm often surprised that you can't get to things that are onl…

On holiday in the Florida we walked to the gated entrance to the community to ask whether delivery drivers got access or we needed to pick it up at the gate. The way they looked at us, you would think we had two heads for arriving on foot.

I got into an argument with a security guard at a gated community who tried to demand we give him a name, address, and "what's going on?" before he'd let us in.

Fixed that when I asked if he personally called 911 and when he said no, "So, before we make this a lot more formal, are you understanding that you are now obstructing emergency services personnel in the performance of duty?"

Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond

#269

Post by FireBeyond »

shaftway wrote: post #243
GJim wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you automatically assume somebody approaching a child is a kidde fiddler (!) then your society has problems.

There is zero chance I would approach a kid on their own that isn't mine. Because there is a very non-zero chance that someone would accuse me of that. If it gets to charges, even if I do successfully defend myself, then my name is mud and it costs me a ton. I'd call security too. Not my monkey, not my circus.

Yes. In my "other life" I work in fire and EMS, and in uniform regularly have parents stop us and point us out to their kids - "If you're ever hurt or in trouble, you can ALWAYS go to these people, they're safe.", or the look of absolute trust when someone thrusts their sick child at you, hoping for you to make it better. And that, somewhat unsurprisingly, sometimes include seeing that child in undress.

Take off my uniform.

My partner spent several years in childcare, both at centers and as a nanny. We're out in public and she sees a crying child? She goes to it, talks to it, hugs it perhaps, reassures.

Me? Not a chance. For better or worse, societal conditioning is that that is something I as a male /do/ /not/ /do/. Because it's nefarious that I'd even want to.

Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond

#270

Post by FireBeyond »

KPGv2 wrote: post #14
ragazzina wrote: post #6

In the US a kid cannot walk half a mile on their own inside a gated community patrolled by security guards? This sounds more dystopian than all the AI talk. "I told [the authorities] that kids need to be able to take reasonable risks," he says, "in order to grow up non-anxious." I guess the system prefers to breed anxiety.

The article really glosses over the fact that the kid was 5yo walking to a pond. It mentions it at the very start and then never brings it up again. That's the part that got me: the mom gave her 5yo permission to go to a large body of water unsupervised. I'm a parent of three and strongly believe in letting your kids roam around (indeed, I live on acreage and taught my kids about the venomous snakes and spiders in ou…

I walked home along a river (path) as a 5 and 6 year old, home from school in the UK.
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