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

71–80 of 531 posts

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

#71

Post by at_a_remove »

jollyllama wrote: post #7

There's some other fundamental problem if cops and CPS were pulling these stunts anyway. Maybe some better mechanism for recourse against overreach is needed?

You've got basically four avenues for this, leading to some kind of CPS and police overreach.

1) Cops just seeing a kid walking. It happens.

2) CPS hearing rumors, whatever.

3) Vindictive exes and people "in house."

4) Busybody neighbors, the nosy Karens.

Both police and CPS probably have some "duty" to begin some sort of action upon reporting, but I think separating the reporting from the action is important. And false reporting ought to be penalized, as in, let's not weaponize our systems.

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

#72

Post by anigbrowl »

gretch wrote: post #59
notch898a wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people living in poverty very very rarely hurt a stranger's children. It's the cops who show up and take them, absolutely destroying their sense of security and growing independence.

This is very false. National studies show more violent crime happens in poor areas: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf

You need to cite more specifically, I'm not reading the whole study looking for the bit you think was relevant to the other poster's point.

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

#74

Post by valleyer »

hn_version_0023 wrote: post #47
HDThoreaun wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US is a low trust society because of a culture that reveres individualism and independence to the detriment of everything else, especially community and freedom from being abused in favor of freedom to abuse. Every man for themselves means kids need to constantly be supervised.

That culture is created by a media environment manufactured by companies whose employee base are well represented on this site. This line is pushed on us, ad nauseam. Unsurprisingly, most of us are sick from it.

An alternative view is that our individualistic culture is simply an evolution of the American idea of "rugged individualism" -- an idea which somewhat predates the tech industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugged_individualism#Influence...

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

#76

Post by acuozzo »

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…

> The US seems to be the only country that has this problem.

Here's my take on the issue from 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32680201

Summary: We don't have safe roads and in most American suburbs traveling by car is often the only reasonable option available.

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

#77

Post by tristor »

I recently moved from a very low average income city to a very high average income city. In my former city it was nearly unheard of for children to unsupervised, despite most people having large families, because there was a very real concern about kidnapping/human trafficking and other issues (and this concern wasn't unfounded, this city made national news for masked men in a van grabbing multiple children while their parents were holding their hands in a Walmart parking lot and bailing).

In my new city, I see 7-8 year old kids outdoors playing without any significant supervision in the neighborhood and allowed to walk to school on their own or walk/scooter to a friends house. It's a stark difference. There are complex issues here, and a lot of nuance, but on its face this made a statistical truth really obvious to me, which is that socioeconomic status nearly directly correlates to physical safety and crime rates. The simple truth is that the high average income city is just a much much much safer place for anyone to exist in, to walk in, and this includes children.

I feel like every time this issue gets discussed, there's always people ignoring the socioeconomic factor, and worse, pointing it out is taken as a blanket attack on poor people.

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

#78

Post by yamtaddle »

henrikschroder wrote: post #42
pilarphosol wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is a low trust society, because of all the poverty. You really notice the difference if you travel to Europe. It turns out that having half of the population be economically unsafe makes everyone and everything unsafe.

I made the same observation when I moved to the US, it was so weird to me that SF the city is pretty much devoid of children. They're all effectively locked up and prohibited from roaming. No-one trusts children, no-one trusts adults around children, no-one trusts strangers. But I went skiing in Lake Tahoe one weekend, and suddenly all of that disappeared. Suddenly, you have children freely interacting with strangers…

It can even vary from one suburban neighborhood to another, without much difference in actual safety between the neighborhoods. Our last neighborhood had roving bands of kids wandering about and picking up and losing members here and there all day long in the Summer, just like it was 1975, everyone was totally chill about it. It was great. Our new one like two miles away is a "kid plays in the yard" neighborhood and we've had people come by more than once to make sure we're aware our kids are on their bikes on the other side of the neighborhood (yeah, we know).

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

#79

Post by acuozzo »

Connor_Creegan wrote: post #69

This is neat and all, but the problem is very much downstream of the children-out-of-wedlock problem, which is downstream of so-called "sexual liberation" (a misuse of both the term "sexual" and the term "liberation"), which is downstream of an inconsistent sexual education, which is downstream of an inconsistent ethics of sex, which is downstream of the Fall (save for a few unmentioned steps).

> 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?

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

#80

Post by lolinder »

vuln wrote: post #70
lolinder wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left out all the examples because they are "including but not limited to"—the text I included is the main bit that defines what the principle of the law actually is, the bullets are given by way of example and to spell out specific cases that should never be left to a judge to interpret. If a parent could reasonably decide that a child should be allowed to roam free, taking into account that child's maturity, this…

_A REASONABLE AND PRUDENT PARENT_ can decide that their child should be allowed to roam free at _HOME_ or _A SAFE LOCATION_. Now who gets to decide what a _reasonable and prudent parent_ is?

No, you're restricting it more than the law calls for. A child is not neglected when they are allowed to participate in any activities that a reasonable and prudent parent would judge to be within their capabilities. You're getting too fixated on that one example, and there are a lot of places in the US where a child of a certain age can and should be allowed to roam pretty much anywhere.

You're correct the language does leave it up to judicial interpretation, and I find that to be a weakness in the law, because it leaves too much room for police and CPS to claim that they thought they were doing the right thing.

Post reply on HN