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Why Do We Judge Parents for Putting Kids at Perceived But Unreal Risk?

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Re: Why Do We Judge Parents for Putting Kids at Perceived But Unreal Risk?

#191

Post by x1798DE »

paulrpotts wrote: post #180

My wife has been yelled at by strangers for filling up the car with gas, then walking 25 feet from the gas pump to the payment window and paying for the gas... because our kids were in the car 25 feet away. She's had the police and the neighborhood watch called repeatedly because our children were playing in our own yard. It's not a world I recognize and I'm increasingly disturbed by people's strange ideas about chil…

Did the police actually do anything? Part of the responsibility here falls on the police to say, "It is not a crime to let children play unsupervised, mind your own business."

I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually illegal to make frivolous complaints of this nature.

Re: Why Do We Judge Parents for Putting Kids at Perceived But Unreal Risk?

#192

Post by superuser2 »

ams6110 wrote: post #185
nostromo wrote: post #20

The same is true for terrorism of course. Terrorism catches our attention because it's morally outrageous, not because it's statistically dangerous to people in Western countries. But if you talk with "regular people", you'll notice that media coverage gives people an unwarranted fear of outlier events: terrorism, mass shootings, plane crashes, etc. In reality, almost everyone in the US should fear the real killers:…

I think it's almost 100% news media sensationalism. News media today is not about investigative reporting, or real news. It's about selling ads and getting eyeballs. So they report rare events as if they happen every day and you need to keep watching so you know what to do about it. The news media today is toxic. You could do little more to improve your outlook on life and the future than simply not watching it. At a…

>watched

That's your problem. There has always been a major step down in quality from print to TV (precisely because of the need to fill airtime and hold people's attention to it).

That step is smaller now as papers get more desperate to stay alive, but there are still print media doing good work. Drastically better than cable news, anyway.

Re: Why Do We Judge Parents for Putting Kids at Perceived But Unreal Risk?

#193

Post by niccaluim »

rdtsc wrote: post #77

Even since I was 10 or so I would often come back to school on my own. Then let myself into our apartment. Eat some lunch, do homework, play until my parents came home in the evening. I was effectively often alone for about 4 or so hours. I wouldn't let my kid do it here in US. Not because I wouldn't trust them or think it is dangerous. But because I am afraid what neighbors, school, CPS would do. My co-worker let hi…

When I was little we used to play hide-and-seek outside at night. I can't even imagine how many busybodies that would set off nowadays.

Re: Why Do We Judge Parents for Putting Kids at Perceived But Unreal Risk?

#194

Post by b_t_s »

tn13 wrote: post #37

Bodies like CPS have to justify their existence and increase in budgets. If my job is to go to office everyday and find parents to arrest the best way is to lower the bar for "putting kids in danger". It is okay to send your kids to play soccer or the hand-football americans play where they can possibly receive life threatening injuries but it is not okay to let them walk back home from school because all it takes a…

Never attribute to malice... My mother was a CPS worker for a while so here's a little perspective from the inside. CPS is generally wildly underfunded, underpaid, and understaffed. It's staffed largely by bleeding hearts straight out of college, most of whom will burn/churn out in a year or two. They've never had kids; most are still kids themselves. There are a few lifers and first job in a second career people, but they're the minority. It's one of the more systematically dysfunctional branches of government.

Re: Why Do We Judge Parents for Putting Kids at Perceived But Unreal Risk?

#195

Post by Bjartr »

SilasX wrote: post #91
dragonwriter wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, child abduction/predation is unlikely ... because we've adopted a huge number of countermeasures that close of this vector. Actually, most of the social "countermeasures" were adopted after high-profile single incidents in the 1990s (perhaps largely because the larger 1960s-1980s crime wave that had been the pretext for expanding government powers in the law enforcement arena previously was ending, and a new p…

The problem in claiming "the evidence says..." in cases like this is that the body of potential perpetrators is intelligent and adaptive. Say someone cracks a major bank account by guessing "password" as the password. The bank changes the password. I claim that the weak password was a security risk, and changing it was the right response. Someone comes a long and gives me a data-intense lecture about "well, electroni…

I'm having trouble building an internally consistent response because of things like how "changing a password" is a trivial change, i.e. I'm struggling to take into account the hypothetical in a way consistent with your intent and with what reality would have to work like for the hypothetical, as given, to hold true.

Mind trying again with a different example?

Re: Why Do We Judge Parents for Putting Kids at Perceived But Unreal Risk?

#196

Post by Bjartr »

Domenic_S wrote: post #29
ionwake wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once read that for every 2 kids kidnapped by a stranger, someone is killed by a lightning strike. This was backed up by stats.

Is that because the danger is so low, or because we're so paranoid? It's the car alarm problem -- if it's deterring theft, theft stats would go down, making us wonder if we need the alarm in the first place!

The article explains that child related crimes have declined at a rate similar to all crime over several decades. I would expect to see a greater rate if the paranoia was effective.

Re: Why Do We Judge Parents for Putting Kids at Perceived But Unreal Risk?

#197

Post by lukeschlather »

Afton wrote: post #154
1123581321 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the struggle for civil forfeiture reform offers some suggestions. Child Services operates similarly to these programs in that they can size children and impose sanctions without a court finding any wrongdoing first. Child Services makes use of broad powers and would indeed be "gutted" if they couldn't act until neglectful parents were tried or pled guilty. I think that is a good tradeoff. Similarly, I don't m…

Can't really agree though. The issue with child services is that they can act faster than the criminal system. You might want to say that they couldn't act to remove or otherwise enforce parental restrictions until criminal charges are made (leaving other less adversarial actions available). An unintended consequence of this may be that charges are made much more easily for the purpose of unblocking child services. A…

Realistically, CPS is overloaded. I know people who've worked with CPS, and I think if you went and worked with CPS for a few months you would change your tune pretty quickly. They don't have the resources to take children and put them into foster care on a hunch.

Re: Why Do We Judge Parents for Putting Kids at Perceived But Unreal Risk?

#198

Post by stcredzero »

rdtsc wrote: post #77

Even since I was 10 or so I would often come back to school on my own. Then let myself into our apartment. Eat some lunch, do homework, play until my parents came home in the evening. I was effectively often alone for about 4 or so hours. I wouldn't let my kid do it here in US. Not because I wouldn't trust them or think it is dangerous. But because I am afraid what neighbors, school, CPS would do. My co-worker let hi…

Even since I was 10 or so I would often come back to school on my own. Then let myself into our apartment. Eat some lunch, do homework, play until my parents came home in the evening. I was effectively often alone for about 4 or so hours.

I wouldn't let my kid do it here in US. Not because I wouldn't trust them or think it is dangerous. But because I am afraid what neighbors, school, CPS would do.

In grade school, my sister and I and our friend would sometimes spend the entire day in the woods in the dead of winter. The real danger in this country isn't the criminal and the bogeyman. The real danger in this country is the evaporation of real community and a broken pseudo-society of mutual disdain suspicion. Who is your real community? If you had a pet, who could you ask to watch your pet for a week? Who would you ask to watch your kids for an afternoon for no payment? That's your real community. Large numbers of Americans have no real community at all.

But apparently you are never safe from neighbors with an agenda.

Because they are "neighbors" and you are not in real community with them.

Re: Why Do We Judge Parents for Putting Kids at Perceived But Unreal Risk?

#199

Post by balls187 »

frostirosti wrote: post #132
rdtsc wrote: post #77

Even since I was 10 or so I would often come back to school on my own. Then let myself into our apartment. Eat some lunch, do homework, play until my parents came home in the evening. I was effectively often alone for about 4 or so hours. I wouldn't let my kid do it here in US. Not because I wouldn't trust them or think it is dangerous. But because I am afraid what neighbors, school, CPS would do. My co-worker let hi…

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/lawn-order/ I think 99pi did a story on this about green lawns. They commented that a green lawn wasn't really a status symbol for yourself, but rather your neighbors. If you let your yard grow unruly, neighbors would come and tend it for you. The idea is that owning a home and land was the american dream, this land was where you could do what you will. The ultimate self determin…

> However, the reality is, that your neighbors and the HOA just want to tell you how you will manicure your home.

Actually, it's that they want to enforce some basic standards to ensure property values aren't diminished because of the negligence of a home owner.

There are plenty of neighborhoods in the US that don't have neighborhood Associations nor HOA's.

Re: Why Do We Judge Parents for Putting Kids at Perceived But Unreal Risk?

#200

Post by arprocter »

paulrpotts wrote: post #180

My wife has been yelled at by strangers for filling up the car with gas, then walking 25 feet from the gas pump to the payment window and paying for the gas... because our kids were in the car 25 feet away. She's had the police and the neighborhood watch called repeatedly because our children were playing in our own yard. It's not a world I recognize and I'm increasingly disturbed by people's strange ideas about chil…

When I was a kid my parents would let me pump their gas. I also ran errands in town by myself, and was left to look after younger siblings before my teens.

IMO the sooner you're given responsibilities the sooner you learn to be responsible.

As when there was talk of raising the driving age because 'all these teens are dying' - it's inexperience, not so much the age which matters.

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