Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

letgrow.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 531 posts

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

#201

Post by geraldwhen »

Aeolun wrote: post #154
danjoredd wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also depends on where you live. If you are a suburban or rural kid, playing outside all you want is fine. Let them explore the neighborhood. If you live near a highway though, or a high crime area, then you might want to reconsider what you want to allow. You still need common sense. My main worry is people who live in relatively safe areas, like a suburban neighborhood, but with neighbors that will STILL call CPS…

> a high crime area What exactly do you expect to happen to your 6 year old? They’re not a very useful target for anything I can think of.

Such extreme privilege right here. Kids that young will be pressured into using drugs and committing crimes, mostly vandalism and theft, but sometimes worse.

That’s around the age when kids started dealing drugs where I grew up. I knew kids who threw bricks through windows and huffed paint when left alone.

Bad areas are bad.

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

#202

Post by gnicholas »

A friend was going to drop off a package at UPS, when his kid fell asleep in the car on the way. Although there are parking spaces 10 feet from the UPS store (which has huge glass windows, so he could have seen the kid the whole time), he chose not to go inside.

He had googled and discovered that it is illegal to leave a child unattended in a car in CA for any period of time. It would have taken 30 seconds in the store to drop off the package. But my buddy wanted to be law-abiding, so he waited until the kid woke up before going in to drop off the package.

When I looked it up I saw that it's an infraction (not a misdemeanor or felony), and the penalty is only $100. [1] But it could lead to CPS being called, which is a much, much bigger deal.

1: https://www.wklaw.com/charges-for-leaving-your-child-in-a-ca...

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

#203

Post by [deleted] »

ako wrote: post #156
xyzelement wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really surprised every time I see this vehement hatred of cars. I lived in NYC my whole life and didn't have a car, but now we got kids so we happily moved for the house-and-car-in-the-burbs life and it's absolutely better. People make this choice for a reason. Just curious, do you have a family and do you shlep them by bus everywhere?

We have two cars, but anything within walking or cycling distance I prefer to do walking or cycling. E.g., 10 minutes walk to school with the kids, 20 minutes cycling into the city to do shopping,

[deleted]

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

#204

Post by ryandrake »

itronitron wrote: post #46
ryanobjc wrote: post #2

"kids these days aren't independent" Oh look its literally illegal to be independent. If you have kids this is both a relief and the source of the problem isn't exactly a shock.

Instead of defunding the police we should just turn half the police force into traffic cops. Take away their squad cars, give them bicycles, and just have them run speed traps in every neighborhood.

No need for even speed traps. I think anywhere with a police force should be required to also set up and fund a parallel "Helper Force" of at least equal manpower, whose job is to assist people in trouble rather than shoot or arrest them. Whenever there is a situation where a deadly violent response is not needed, the Helper Force could be deployed instead of the police.

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

#205

Post by [deleted] »

gretch wrote: post #185
anigbrowl wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to believe either of you. What you offered was not responsive to his claim because it didn't address risks to children, which are the topic.

You can’t not believe either of us. He said a thing and I said it’s false. If you don’t believe him then you agree with me. This btw is the correct course of logic since the burden of proof is on the asserter.

[deleted]

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

#206

Post by analog31 »

Something that I've noticed, though I can't say whether it's a cause or an effect (or neither) is that today's kids (including my own to some extent) are much more busy than I ever was.

I never had homework in grade school, and if I was doing organized activities, they were pretty minimal (one afternoon per week of cello lessons, and a half hour a day of practicing). Today, kids have homework starting in the early grades, and multiple extracurriculars that involve being driven somewhere. There's no time to go outside.

Also, we're not in a baby boom, so the houses with kids are more scattered. When I was a kid, there were a couple dozen other kids up and down the street, so we weren't ever playing outside alone. And we were looking out for one another, even if not precisely in the way that our parents hoped.

It's also exhausting for the parents.

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

#207

Post by mvc »

Connor_Creegan wrote: post #99
acuozzo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the problem is very much downstream of the children-out-of-wedlock problem If this were the case then there would be similar issues with children of single parents in e.g. European countries, no?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/12/u-s-childre... The problem is very-much downstream, not wholly-determined. Obviously this issue criss-crosses with other issues, such as race, infrastructure, compulsory education, et cetera. But I would rank doctrine of sex as the brightest star in this constellation. It isn't a coincidence that the UK is second behind us. Its founding event was the invention of divor…

Yeah, everything was so much better when women just had to put up with their abusive husbands

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

#208

Post by insane_dreamer »

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…

> A passerby reported

this is a big part of the problem

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

#210

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

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…

In Japan, one of our buildings was right next to a girls' primary school.

When I took the train from Shinagawa to Nishi-Ohi, I would see these tiny little girls, basically knee-high, on the train, by themselves, on the way to school.

I've talked about growing up in Africa[0], and what kinds of things we had, slithering around.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34628812

Post reply on HN