[HN Gopher] A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on r...
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A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV
Author : JTbane
Score : 227 points
Date : 2022-04-20 14:36 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| rafiki6 wrote:
| A lot of the comments make great points but honestly I think the
| biggest problem no one has addressed is the massive expansion in
| population since the 70s.
|
| This has lead to much larger "towns" and suburbs where the sense
| of community is essentially gone. At best you might know a few
| neighbors on your street. So risk tolerance has gone down for a
| good reason. And when you see a strange kid out playing and you
| don't know who's kid they are, you're going to naturally worry
| about them and just assume the worst.
|
| Another factor too astutely mentioned by someone below is the car
| dependent nature of most non urban environments, especially in
| North America. I see lots of kids playing near their homes on
| their own in the neighborhoods I live in. Parents aren't too far
| away and they're with the other kids of the neighborhood. Maybe
| the safe distance a kid can travel on their own hasn't changed,
| it's what you could actually accomplish in that distance that has
| changed.
|
| Today's society, especially western society, is much less
| community focused. So now, not only do I not know what strange
| adults exist in my 200 home open air neighborhood with a single
| playground, none of the adults there know me either nor my family
| and therefore a perceived sense of risk and maybe even actual
| risk is higher that my kids are in danger.
|
| That's what happens when population explodes and population
| density increases. All that's happening is the West is finally
| experiencing what many Asian and Middle Eastern Countries already
| knew.
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| Meanwhile my parents went into meltdown whenever I wanted to go
| for even a walk. When I was 19.
| asdff wrote:
| Once in high school I was at a friends house in a subdivision
| that didn't even have sidewalks. We wanted to go out for a walk
| but the dad gave us a warning that the neighbors would probably
| call the police because people don't ever walk in this
| neighborhood.
| everyone wrote:
| Check out Jared Diamonds book 'The world until yesterday' Looking
| at how some other non-industrialised societies do stuff and is
| there anything useful we can take from them. There's a chapter on
| childrearing
| musicale wrote:
| > In some places, parents who allow young children to run errands
| or go places without adult supervision may violate local laws.
|
| Is this because some cities are no longer safe for children to go
| outside? I wonder how things got so dangerous and if anything can
| be done.
|
| Edit: Another post noted that there seems to be a general decline
| in walkability and pedestrian safety in US cities. This seems
| like something we could try to fix by improving both environments
| and vehicles.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's not dangerous. The middle-class suburban "zero tolerance"
| mentality took over and any possibility of injury became
| equivalent to child neglect. We (and I) also tend to blame this
| on individuals, but this sea change was also enforced by the
| state.
| billfor wrote:
| We used to send 4 year olds to the bar to pick up a pail of beer.
| https://www.glass-jug.com/growlers
| killjoywashere wrote:
| In the 80s my mom would give me dollar to go buy milk from the
| store two blocks away. Then I was taught to use a pay phone and
| go to the local grocer 3 blocks away. Then I walked to school a
| mile away. Then I learned to use the bus and I would take myself
| to the municipal library to read, I have no idea how far it was,
| but I needed a quarter. The bus driver would change me a dime and
| a nickel, so I used the dime to get home. We moved out of Omaha
| in the fall of my fifth grade year. I checked, their crime rate
| was 3x higher at the time than where we raised our kids. They
| were barely allowed to walk the six doors to school. Crazy.
| VLM wrote:
| "And on the flipside: Wow, American society is really holding
| kids back."
|
| Naw, not just kids, its everybody.
| overgard wrote:
| It's sad/funny, there are all these reports about the younger
| generations having increased anxiety and depression. Social media
| is the boogie man and I'm sure it's not psychologically good for
| young people, but we all but ignore the fact that kids and
| teenagers now have essentially zero autonomy and unsupervised
| time. Should we really be shocked they feel anxious about being
| able to solve their own problems when we've never given them the
| practice time to learn on their own?
|
| The Karens that call CPS are the worst. If the kids aren't in any
| danger and aren't neglected it's just nobody else's business how
| they're raised.
| thatsamonad wrote:
| We recently started letting our 9 year-old walk down to a nearby
| park alone to meet and play with friends. It's helping them build
| independence and confidence and I have no concerns about
| kidnapping, etc, because it's only a couple of blocks away and we
| live in a safe neighborhood (they also have a phone they take
| with them and know to call/text us when they change their plans
| and go to another nearby park).
|
| What I DO have concerns about, however, is overzealous adults who
| see a kid playing alone at a park and decide to call the police
| or child protective services.
| patmcc wrote:
| >>>What I DO have concerns about, however, is overzealous
| adults who see a kid playing alone at a park and decide to call
| the police or child protective services.
|
| Ding ding ding! This is exactly it. I'm not worried about my
| 6-year-old walking around the neighbourhood alone, or staying
| in the car (in proper weather) while I do an errand, or going
| into a store and grabbing something. I'm not worried about
| kidnapping and murder and all that stuff, since it's so
| vanishingly rare that it's worth worrying about as much as
| lightning.
|
| What I _am_ worried about is some busybody calling CPS because
| they think kids are stolen and sold if they 're left
| unsupervised for 5 minutes.
| bombcar wrote:
| That last part is WAY more common and likely than anything
| else.
|
| > Fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted
| by strangers in the United States per year between 2010-2017.
|
| > According to the NWS Storm Data, over the last 30 years
| (1989-2018) the U.S. has averaged 43 reported lightning
| fatalities per year.
|
| So letting kids walk to the park is _way less risky_ than a
| thunderstorm (though perhaps they shouldn 't walk to the park
| IN a thunderstorm).
|
| > In 2019, 608 child passengers age 12 and younger died in
| motor vehicle crashes, and more than 91,000 were injured. Of
| the children 12 and younger who died in a crash (for whom
| restraint use was known), 38% were not buckled up.
|
| I haven't done the numbers, but driving a kid to the park when
| not buckled up may be _more_ dangerous than letting them walk.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| Along these lines I am curious about the number of innocent
| families affected by the harassment of overzealous adults (my
| son has had this happen twice) or CPS (zero, fortunately).
| Given the somewhat subjective nature of "innocent" it's
| probably not quantifiable, but I sometimes wonder what the
| risk actually is. Being struck by lightning is unlikely, but
| the potential effects are serious enough to warrant taking
| precautions-- I wonder how similar the analogy truly is.
| foobarian wrote:
| I wonder if it used to be a lot more common before the
| culture got so paranoid. In which case maybe the shift was
| warranted.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Annual under 21 abductions by strangers are 8 times more
| likely than death by lightning strike for all groups.
|
| But there's lots of confounding variables there. A kid that's
| not outside won't be abducted by a stranger and you won't be
| struck by lightning if you're inside as well. Thunderstorms
| don't happen everyday but a kid may walk alone twice a day.
| So what's the right equivalence? Is walking alone through a
| bad neighborhood the same as going into the lightning storm
| and grabbing a flag pole?
| gwd wrote:
| > Fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been
| abducted by strangers in the United States per year between
| 2010-2017.
|
| But 2010 is long after the end of the "free range children"
| era. Is that number so low _because_ we don 't let kinds go
| around by themselves any more?
| asdff wrote:
| It's only the end of the free range era among the whites.
| Other populations in my city have no issues letting their
| children range around. It's common to be on the bus and
| hear school aged children talking in various languages
| around me on the bus.
| V__ wrote:
| A lot of interesting discussions are taking place here, but one
| thing I wonder the most is this: Why is the U.S. and Canada
| seemingly the only country where this shift took place?
|
| Sure, in Europe nowadays more people drive their children to
| school than before, for whatever reasons, but I have never heard
| a child or parent get in trouble for being outside by themselves.
| Macha wrote:
| It feels like it's happening here too, just some years behind
| the US. Certainly kids today have much less freedom than I did
| 25 years ago, even if we're not at the point of protective
| services taking custody for playing on the street without
| adults.
| maestroia wrote:
| I grew up on a farm in the US Midwest. When I was 4 (early
| 1970s), I was given my chores of watering livestock. I also
| started bottle feeding my first orphan lambs, and started getting
| other orphans from neighbors. It became quite an income stream.
|
| When I was 5, I started driving an older tractor. When I was 6,
| we were fixing a pasture fence when my dad told me to go drive
| the pickup the 50 yards or so to where we were at. He verbally
| walked me through it, and let me go get it. I remember that
| moment like it was yesterday.
|
| And that was not a unique experience, for farm kids at least.
|
| Now, parents would be criminally charged with something.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| A 4-year-old on reality TV is being followed by a camera crew,
| and is therefore by definition _not alone._
|
| That being said, it is common in urban areas (at least in LA) to
| see relatively young children commuting or running errands by
| themselves. But I never see that when I go back to surburbia.
| It's not an issue of neighborhood safety; the suburban areas are
| far safer. It's a parental risk tolerance issue.
| mamcx wrote:
| Now imagine letting 7-8 years old buy groceries in a zone with
| actual gun fights -sometimes weekly-, bombs -one 2 or 3, blocks
| away, not worry- and gangs -next door live some people rumored to
| do fast-kidnap!. And go to school hanging from the doors of the
| bus.
|
| I think I end ok!
|
| P.D: I walk with friends (10-15 old) from city center, detouring
| from an attempt to reach some small mountain after the zone get
| red, so we decide find other place and end in a close park
| [Aprox. route here](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/La+Milagrosa,
| +Medell%C3%ADn,...), kilometers away...
|
| P.D.2: This not about being badass. Normal stuff by a nerd guy.
| Actual crazy stuff I avoided. Too dangerous!
| sloreti wrote:
| Disappointing that an article like this wouldn't mention one of
| the main reasons children are given less autonomy in the US: our
| built environment. The vast majority of our children grow up in
| neighborhoods in which one can't easily be a pedestrian at _any_
| age. Low density communities, in which almost all trips have to
| be taken in cars, are of course not friendly to non-drivers.
|
| Japan builds dense, mixed use neighborhoods. As a result,
| children are empowered to walk to the store or a friend's house.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| You said that mixed-use neighborhoods lead to empowered
| children. Really? If that were the case, there'd be empowered
| children in mixed-use neighborhoods all over the world,
| including in the US. But that clearly isn't the case.
|
| Most of Japan is rural. It's not uncommon to walk or bike up to
| an hour away to get to the nearest store. Yet children are
| still given responsibility and agency. In fact, it may be much
| more common in rural areas around the world rather than in
| dense mixed-use neighborhoods.
|
| But that's not the reason either. It's clear that both urban
| mixed-use neighborhoods and rural communities have nearly the
| same consideration about children, within a single
| country/culture. If a society perceives it as safe and a good
| idea (or even necessary) for a child to run errands, then
| that's what happens. If the society perceives it as unsafe or
| irresponsible, then they don't. It's nothing more than a
| culture meme.
| kazinator wrote:
| Low density is not the reason you have to walk a long way to
| get to a house that it would take you seconds to get to if you
| climbed a backyard fence. It's just the stupid tree-of-cul-de-
| sacs layout.
|
| Most of Japan isn't dense; it's single-family, detached
| dwellings. Those neighborhoods are walkable in spite of that.
| In metropolitan areas like around Tokyo, sure the houses are on
| small plots and close together; but houses are houses. It's
| still pretty low density.
| livueta wrote:
| Yeah, this is a good point. IME (living in Dong Cun Shan Shi
| , which I think is a good match for what you're talking
| about), a lot of it is due to the interconnectedness of
| neighborhoods at the level of small streets. It's easy to
| walk very long distances without ever needing to walk along
| anything but low-traffic residential streets, and crossing
| major roads is often made easy by overpasses, tunnels and
| other grade-separated walkways. So even if there's not a
| store or whatever right in your mostly single-family detached
| residential choume, it's still pretty easy to walk to
| worthwhile places.
|
| This is in contrast to a lot of the US suburbs I'm familiar
| with that are collections of large, planned developments with
| decent internal connectivity but poor non-car external
| connectivity: you might be able to walk to the (small)
| neighborhood park, but going anywhere interesting means
| you're stuck walking along a high-speed high-traffic road,
| probably without meaningful grade separation.
| alistairSH wrote:
| It feels like a mix of both.
|
| Even in my relatively walkable suburb (Reston, VA), it's not
| really walkable by a child. And things are far enough that a
| bike is better.
|
| But, just around the beltway in Silver Spring, there was a
| family that made the news a few years ago because they let
| their kids walk to/from the playground. This was a few city
| blocks, in an urban area. Somebody saw the kids, went full
| Karen and called the police, and child protective services got
| involved. It was a mess.
| burlesona wrote:
| Afterwards Texas and Oklahoma both passed laws that parents
| are allowed to let their kids play outside unsupervised.
|
| Kinda sad that was necessary.
| jandrese wrote:
| Reston is hit and miss for pedestrians. It was built during
| the height of automobile centered development, but the
| primary constituents were artists who cared about aesthetics.
| It has a lot of housing developments that are fully equipped
| with sidewalks, but are also not near much of anything. You
| can walk, but not really go anywhere.
|
| At least it's not Tysons Corner. They're going to be spending
| decades trying to undo the damage done by the car centric
| design.
| DamnYuppie wrote:
| I don't really agree with that. I grew up in a small rural town
| where things were quite spread out. I would run and ride my
| bike all over the "neighborhood", which would encompass an area
| of well over 4 square miles. We had small dirt roads with no
| shoulders or sidewalks and we would ride our bikes down them,
| if someone came up behind you would get out of the way. It was
| not at all uncommon to have a groups of 5 and 6 year olds out
| and about.
|
| I think the biggest thing is parents have embraced fear over
| reason and are terrified something bad might happen to their
| child.
| agentwiggles wrote:
| I grew up in a small rural town as well, and this post gave
| me major nostalgia. When I was 7 or so, my parents limited me
| to a pretty small area (it was our "block", but that had a
| pretty different meaning from what most city folk would think
| of when they hear "block").
|
| At some point, my limits were updated, and I was allowed to
| go anywhere that did not involve crossing the main street in
| the town (which at the time was a reasonably busy section of
| OH SR 30.) I'd ride to my grandma's house for a Coke or some
| ice cream and chat with her for hours at a time. There was a
| local playground near her house with the old school kind of
| swings that really let you get high up in the air.
|
| I remember vividly the day when I discovered that I could
| ride my bike to the local Dollar General via a back route
| without crossing that street and the sense of freedom that
| gave me. I could also make the 2 mile ride to my best
| friend's house.
|
| When I was a bit less than 10, the restriction on crossing
| that street was lifted, and the whole town was open to me. My
| friends and I rode our bikes absolutely everywhere and
| explored creeks, parks, and country roads like there was no
| tomorrow.
|
| Now I live in a medium sized city, and every once in a while,
| I think about the proximity to family and the freedom to roam
| that I enjoyed growing up. More than anything else about
| home, I miss these things, and I have to wonder if I'm
| denying something to my kids by living in the city. Sadly,
| there aren't many software dev gigs in rural Ohio, and now
| that my kids are entrenched in the local schools (which, to
| be fair, are miles ahead of what exists back home), their
| upbringing as city kids seems to be written in stone.
|
| Anyway, sorry for the rant - waxed nostalgic for a bit there.
| saulrh wrote:
| > small dirt roads with no shoulders
|
| ...on which cars are limited to very low speeds and make a
| great deal of noise. Bicycles are barely safe on asphalt even
| when they have bike lanes.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Absolutely correct. The USA worships the car's speed above the
| child's freedom.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > Absolutely correct. The USA worships the car's speed above
| the child's freedom.
|
| To be honest, this was never really a consideration in my
| calculus growing up, and I did so during the age of the super
| car going into hypercar era in SoCal and the presence of
| those cars around us would become a large part of our 'tuner'
| culture as it's literately the car mod capital of the World.
|
| Never once did that deter us from hitting the street on
| skateboards, rollerblades etc.., in fact I like to believe I
| was part of a large collection of 90s kids who invented
| street luging on hills where lots of sports cars were hitting
| the canyons.
|
| Honestly, this is peak over-regulation trying to pawn off the
| horrendous outcomes on cars because that is the convenient
| target de jure: I went from having a modest car and
| motorcycle collection to now simply having 3 must-haves and I
| honestly I've ridden 10000s more miles via public
| transportation this year (planes included) whereas I've only
| driven like 200 miles via car. And I did for environmental
| reasons as an environmental activist that traveled all over
| the World for projects where I could see first hand the
| damage of climate change, I didn't need some app or social
| media brigrading to change my mind as I was capable of seeing
| what government, petrol companies and Auto makers collusion
| can do: I worked at VW during Dieselgate.
|
| The problem stems from parents deferring their
| responsibilities to the State when it comes to every facet of
| Life, and that is why these kids are soft and need safe
| spaces and feel threatened by anything that is against their
| idealized narratives. Universities pander to these clients
| because they often have the most resources as opposed to
| those who simply made their way up the hard way--excluding
| SATS was a red herring, most of the kids who got into
| Prestigious/Ivy Leagues didn't need them in the first place
| as legacy admissions plays a big part, and where that fails
| they'll just bribe them as we've ween before [0].
|
| This is what happens when you allow and standardize nepotism,
| and it always back fires as the following generations are
| simply not capable of enduring anything after being sheltered
| their whole life.
|
| This is one of the reasons that Silicon Valley is the
| cesspool that it is now, it's culture went from rugged
| entrepreneurialism in the 50s-90s when it was mainly an
| extension of Californian culture that changed the World to
| what is now a woke dystopia that caters and panders to the
| least capable form the right schools but is none the less
| optimized using lemmings to do the busy leg work for vulture
| capitalists with deep ties to VC that seek to mine your data
| as a business model.
|
| Honestly, this is why I have no sympathy for what is
| happening in the Valley right now, you made your own hell now
| fix it if you really think you're so bright and deserve the
| acclaim that you think you're entitled to.
|
| Sure, you've collectively made a feudal lords (FAANG)
| immensely wealthy beyond comprehension, but beyond that
| you've done nothing to' make the 'World a better place.'
|
| In fact you're the useful idiot you speak down to here, but
| are oblivious to the fact you're the worst of the worst when
| it comes to that.
|
| The sad thing is, it's mainly transplants that made it this
| way.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_brib
| er...
| elliekelly wrote:
| This reminds me of "The Sacred Rat" short story (fair
| warning, this site is a bit of an eyesore):
| http://www.drabruzzi.com/sacred_rac.html
| kiliantics wrote:
| This is hilarious, thank you
| malkia wrote:
| I grew up in Bulgaria, but my experience as a kid (80s-90s)
| seems like similar to what my (future) boss (in Los Angeles)
| when he was growing up in SF Valley (60s-70s) - get on the
| bike, go places, school, etc.
|
| We had much smaller amount of cars. For one we had these self-
| made wood carts with ball-bearings as "tires", and we would
| slide with them on the streets while other cars were driving.
| Ok, not on the main street, but somewhere on a hill. If I get
| bloodied, my gramma would be - yaaah it's fine. Go to the
| doctor (by myself, 2nd grade) and get tetanous shot (I vividly
| remember this when I stepped on a rusty nail). They were still
| worried, but I guess due to lack of phones (even land line
| wasn't covered well), that's the best they can do.
|
| One day, I was 4, maybe 5, me and my cousin (year older)
| decided (well it was my decision apparently, lol) that we need
| our plastic toy truck from my grandparents, and decided to take
| it. So we took off from a small city (Tzhernomortez) nearby my
| home city (Burgas) - and decide to walk it - I haven't checked
| - but the distance is 20-30km. So we walk, put some signs down,
| ate some really bad grassy looking thing, a bus of
| janitors/workers picked us up and left us somewhere, so
| probably from 9:00AM somewhere to 2, 3pm was our "trip". And we
| end up knocking on my grandparents door - we need our truck! :)
| - Well, yes everyone was spooked (normal), but that was it. It
| was later just told as funny story. Now many years later, in
| US, with my son (~15 soon) I'm still spooked where he goes, we
| have the tracker (he's okay with it) and track each other in
| case something happens. I wish I had less available
| information...
|
| But also the streets in the US, even in neighbourhoods where
| people live, not work are just too damn wide :) - and cars,
| while observing most of the time the speed limits, when comes
| traffic time and they look for shortcuts, some of them go way
| too fast (and yes, I probably did the same in other places,
| when in a hurry). We had our neighbour's two dogs killed,
| because someone was swerving too fast, where you should slow
| down to a crawl really.
|
| But it is, what it is.
| Cipater wrote:
| You have a tracker on your 15 year old son?
|
| Isn't that extreme?
| malkia wrote:
| We all agreed to have it on. It's helpful if he's with
| friends, and I need to pick him up, I don't need to call
| him. Or the opposite.
|
| He can turn it off anytime too.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > Isn't that extreme?
|
| What do you think smart phones are? That's exactly what
| they're optimized for, in addition to mass distraction and
| aimless and feckless doom scrolling for dopamine that is.
|
| I can't post because i triggered the algo:
|
| > My wife and I use Apple's "Find My" feature to keep tabs
| on when each other will be home. Makes it easy to time
| dinner so it's hot for everyone.
|
| The Silicon Valley TV series was great not just because it
| called out the Valley's BS tropes and made fun of it's
| absurdity, but because Judge really had the best material
| write itself: this is a prime example of what I could see
| an episode's plot being based on.
|
| A (smart) phone being used not to actually call each other,
| but as the spy device that it is.
|
| Sadly, in it's latter seasons it went into a territory it's
| writers neither understood or articulated well but appealed
| to the lowest common denominator: Bitcoin and
| cryptocurrency.
| Cipater wrote:
| Billions of people have smartphones. How many of them use
| them to keep track of their loved one's movements?
| greedo wrote:
| My wife and I use Apple's "Find My" feature to keep tabs
| on when each other will be home. Makes it easy to time
| dinner so it's hot for everyone.
| brewdad wrote:
| I personally know of at least 2 families. My guess would
| be millions.
| brabel wrote:
| > For one we had these self-made wood carts with ball-
| bearings as "tires", and we would slide with them on the
| streets while other cars were driving.
|
| HA, I thought that was only in my country we had those :D. In
| Brazil it's called "carrinho de rolema"!
| malkia wrote:
| Awesome!!! It's "lagerna kolichka" (lager=ballbearing,
| kolichka=car/cart) - https://www.google.com/search?q=%D0%BB
| %D0%B0%D0%B3%D0%B5%D1%... ("lagerna kolichka") search to
| show them :)
| robonerd wrote:
| I don't think this is the main reason. It fails to explain why
| neighborhoods that kids played freely in decades ago now keep
| their kids inside. I'm talking about suburban neighborhoods in
| modest towns that haven't seen population growth or urban
| development.
|
| I used to walk to school frequently, every time I missed the
| bus it was a two mile walk down country roads. If the weather
| was nice, sometimes I'd choose to walk without even missing the
| bus. My mother retired from that school district last year, and
| she tells me things are very different. She would be required
| to report any kid who was walking to school, it simply isn't
| allowed anymore. So what changed? Did the town get bigger?
| Nope, it actually shrunk a bit since the plant was sold. Did
| the roads get narrower? Twistier? Nope, they're the same as
| they ever were. The school? Still the same place they ever
| were. The only thing that changed was people became more
| fearful.
| rsync wrote:
| "She would be required to report any kid who was walking to
| school, it simply isn't allowed anymore."
|
| With apologies, I don't believe this is true.
|
| Where does this requirement come from and to whom would she
| deliver these reports ?
| Larrikin wrote:
| There are multiple news stories of busy body neighbors and
| passerbyers calling the cops when they see children walking
| to places like parks and schools if they don't immediately
| see a parent, often times with major consequences for the
| parents
|
| https://nationalpost.com/news/world/child-protection-
| aervice...
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-
| arrested-s...
| ryandrake wrote:
| What we really need is some kind of Mind Your Own
| Business law to punish these busy body neighbors. There
| should be civil or criminal penalties for someone calling
| the cops on someone else doing nothing wrong. Or enforce
| existing laws. There must be some kind of Abuse Of Public
| Services law that can be used to deter these nosey
| ninnies. Make people think twice and be 100% sure before
| they stick their nose into other people's lives.
|
| I know this would severely reduce the content on
| NextDoor, r/PublicFreakout and r/byebyejob, but it's a
| price we should be willing to pay.
| rsync wrote:
| That was not my question.
|
| My parent commenter stated that she was _required_ to
| _report_.
|
| Where does the requirement come from and to whom would
| she report ?
| robonerd wrote:
| School teachers are 'mandatory reporters', they are
| required _by law_ to report any evidence of abuse or
| neglect. Teachers in her district were all told that a
| child walking to school by themself was evidence of
| neglect.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_reporting_in_the_Un
| i...
| rsync wrote:
| Thanks - appreciated.
|
| However, if I understand correctly, the _law_ is the
| mandatory reporting of abuse or neglect ... but the
| _directive_ she received, that " ... a child walking to
| school by themself was evidence of neglect ..." is not a
| law.
|
| What school district is this, by the way ? What ages are
| we talking about ?
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Is it an elementary school?
|
| In our rural school district, you're probably not even going
| to be on the school bus schedule if you live within a mile
| unless you're still in elementary school. In middle
| school/high school you can have up to a 1 mile walk to the
| bus before they will add a new stop. Elementary school kids
| have to be farther than 1/4 mile from the bus stop before
| they add a new stop.
|
| Bear in mind though, that a lot of these rules are because it
| gets so cold here and they don't want 6 year-olds walking a
| mile to school in a blizzard when it's -20F.
| robonerd wrote:
| Elementary school through highschool. All those schools
| were within about a mile radius of each other and were
| served by the same school buses for all grades.
| nradov wrote:
| Many people trace the inflection point back to the kidnapping
| of Etan Patz in 1979. The case was highly publicized and made
| many parents afraid of child predators in a way they really
| hadn't been before. That case and a few others led to putting
| pictures of missing children on milk cartons so then the fear
| was in their faces every day.
|
| https://crimereads.com/how-the-disappearance-of-etan-patz-
| ch...
| daanlo wrote:
| And today's parents were kids then. So they grew up with
| pics of missing kids on their milk cartons.
| kirsebaer wrote:
| As a child in the US in the 1980s we were told over and
| over by the TV and school to never talk to strangers, to
| run away from people offering us candy or asking us to
| help them find their lost puppy. But there was
| essentially no education about how to avoid abuse by
| teachers, sports coaches, and family.
| ericmay wrote:
| I think it's hard to get a read on this and it really
| depends. For example, where I live there's an elementary
| school in the neighborhood, low traffic (even though it is
| the suburbs), and there's a walking path and a playground at
| the school. When the weather is halfway decent, there are
| kids streaming through there all day. During the pandemic it
| was just a party back there, in a good way.
|
| But not all suburbs are like this, and I do think that low
| density and focusing on cars over people makes kids unlikely
| to go outside. Where I live, yea the school is nice, but I've
| seen kids standing in the middle of 5 lanes of traffic (they
| are standing in the turning lane) trying to pass and standing
| there with, say, a skateboard.
|
| This is definitely a problem.
|
| On the other hand, I think kids are just staying inside and
| playing with electronics more too. But why are they doing
| that? Is the neighborhood not stimulating enough? Is there
| anything to do outside? Again in the suburbs I'm in, what is
| a kid to do? You can't really walk to any store, park
| (besides the school area), or anywhere else. You can't even
| bike anywhere. You'd definitely get hit by a car at some
| point.
|
| So I think it's a bit of a cultural shift, sure, but I think
| that doesn't account for poor urban planning. Most likely in
| the past kids were just so damn bored that they'd overcome
| crappy neighborhoods because there was literally nothing else
| to do. Now? Why risk riding down a country road on your bike
| and getting hit by a car when you can just sit at home and
| text your friends?
| robonerd wrote:
| > _I think kids are just staying inside and playing with
| electronics more too. But why are they doing that? Is the
| neighborhood not stimulating enough?_
|
| Well, that one is easy: their parents permit it. The rule
| in my home was simple: if you start a video game, you also
| start a 30 minute egg timer. If you forgot the timer and
| got caught, you lost the privilege for a week. The egg
| timer could be upgraded to an hour if I was getting good
| grades, but the thought of playing games for several hours
| a day was almost inconceivable. I only got away with that
| when I was home alone.
|
| Sometimes when I was feeling mopey and started complaining
| about being bored my mother would get sick of it and yell
| at me _" GO BE BORED OUTSIDE"_
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| IanCal wrote:
| > On the other hand, I think kids are just staying inside
| and playing with electronics more too. But why are they
| doing that? Is the neighborhood not stimulating enough?
|
| Taking for granted this is true for the discussion:
|
| Electronics are way more prevalent, stimulating and social
| than ever before.
| ghaff wrote:
| Growing up, my indoor entertainment options were
| basically reading books, reading comics, watching four
| channels of often rather snowy TV, or doing other random
| indoor activities like drawing poorly or playing various
| physical toys/games depending on age. So things like
| climbing trees were often more interesting even without
| usually having other people around--I grew up in the
| country. (Not that I disliked reading in particular.)
| jeffbee wrote:
| Well, that's not the only thing that has changed. 40 years
| ago when I was walking to elementary school nobody,
| absolutely nobody, was driving a pick-up truck except to a
| farm or job site. Now the majority of people are driving
| vehicles that are much larger than a 1982-model work pickup,
| and with 5-10x the engine power. Although I admit up-front
| that the national statistics are badly skewed by the fact
| that Florida is the most dangerous place on earth for
| pedestrians, the national pedestrian fatality rate doubled in
| the 20 years to 2020. Part of this is the built environment
| and part is what that built environment enabled: people
| barreling down roads that are far too wide in cars that are
| far too large, and doing it while browsing Instagram with one
| hand and both eyes.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| 40 years ago, memories of the 1970s fuel shortages were
| fresh in everyones' minds.
| UglyToad wrote:
| Yeah this is an overlooked factor, people may not be
| driving actual tanks as sibling comment mentions but they
| are driving death machines almost perfectly designed to
| cause maximum injury to children [0].
|
| I think a combination of increased vehicle size and number
| of vehicles per capita probably explains why parents would
| feel less comfortable having their children walk down
| country roads to school.
|
| [0]: https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/new-study-suggests-
| todays-s...
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| > Now the majority of people are driving vehicles that are
| much larger than a 1982-model work pickup, and with 5-10x
| the engine power.
|
| The 1982 F-150 had around 200 horsepower, depending on the
| configuration. If you believe the majority of people are
| driving between 1,000 to 2,000 hp cars today you are badly
| mistaken. An Abrams tank has around 1,500 hp but not too
| many of my neighbors drive those to work.
|
| https://itstillruns.com/1982-ford-f150-specifications-75981
| 7...
| kube-system wrote:
| The '82 F150 only had that much power if you got a loaded
| truck with a V8. The base V6 engine was 130hp.
|
| You could also get pickups with 52 horsepower in 1982 as
| well:
|
| http://vwtruckforsale.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2014/05/specs-s...
|
| A 2021 Ram TRX has 13.5 times that amount of power.
| (702hp)
|
| The smallest pickups you can get in the US today, the
| Maverick and the Santa Cruz both start at 3.7 times that
| amount of power (191hp).
| gompertz wrote:
| And the new electric Hummer (now branded as GMC) is
| ~20x!=]
| renewiltord wrote:
| Hmm, do they? I believe everyone has tales like this but I
| was visiting Grover Beach a couple of months ago sitting on
| my friend's porch and you know what happened? A small group
| of kids came flying down the road on electric scooters. I saw
| them a mile away later when I went to get a haircut with no
| sign that they were going back. No helmets or anything. One
| of them said to the other "I think mine is in low speed or
| something" and the other said "Why would you do that" and
| then disappeared over the hill screaming "I AM SPEEEED!". It
| reminded me of my childhood and that maybe 5% of these kids
| are going to die of traumatic brain injuries and the rest are
| going to have incredibly fun memories of childhood.
|
| Fascinating to me.
|
| I wouldn't want a child of mine doing that without a helmet,
| and I'd prefer a bicycle, but if he's going to break a bone
| doing a jump over a little hump on the side of the road,
| haha, more power to you little fellow. Go break that bone.
| Learn the limits of your power. And I think I could do that
| in Grover Beach if I wanted.
| wahern wrote:
| > The only thing that changed was people became more fearful.
|
| People absolutely drive considerably faster. There are many
| reasons for that, but they do. When I was a kid roaming
| around on my own in the 1980s and 1990s, the roads simply
| weren't as dangerous as they are now.
|
| People not only drive faster, but driver visibility is much
| worse--because A frames, because SUVs, etc.
|
| I agree fear has grown considerably. But not all that extra
| fear is irrational--at least some of it is justified.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| > The only thing that changed was people became more fearful.
|
| Because they got richer and all their "real problems"
| evaporated.
|
| Kids play in the street where I live. But I live in the kind
| of place that makes HN demographics hand wring about violent
| crime and bad schools.
| gwd wrote:
| > The only thing that changed was people became more fearful.
|
| Well for one thing this happened; and received a lot of
| national news:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jacob_Wetterling
| tshaddox wrote:
| > It fails to explain why neighborhoods that kids played
| freely in decades ago now keep their kids inside. I'm talking
| about suburban neighborhoods in modest towns that haven't
| seen population growth or urban development.
|
| This is a good point, although I would like to see some data
| to know whether this is actually common, or whether it's
| merely a common perception. If you actually control for
| things like population density, demographics (most notably
| age distribution), traffic, road design, city design
| (distance to schools, playgrounds, etc.) do you see a clear
| pattern of reduction in the number of children playing freely
| outside?
|
| I have no doubt that there are plenty of places where this
| has happened, but I also have anecdotes of places where this
| _hasn 't_ happened (at least in the area I grew up in since I
| was a kid in the 90s).
| gunfighthacksaw wrote:
| In my city in Canada I noticed a lot of kids playing
| outside last summer. However, they were all East African or
| Arabs: I assume refugees from Eritrea and Syria. They were
| doing the stuff I did (playing with sticks, climbing the
| sand piles, widening the fence holes) and stuff I didn't
| (parking lot soccer).
|
| I've started seeing more white kids out in my neighborhood
| this spring though, maybe things are going back?
| germinalphrase wrote:
| As a teacher, my anecdotal opinion that is kids have much
| more available - and higher quality - indoor entertainment.
| As a kid in the 90's, I _didnt want_ to be inside. It was
| boring.
|
| I also do believe kids are over-scheduled and that youth
| sports require _wildly excessive_ investment compared to my
| era.
| andi999 wrote:
| I think it is two factors: admins in full cya mode and the
| perceived value of a child increased (going from a necessary
| nuisance of society to planed single child (not finding the
| 100% right word here))
| dleslie wrote:
| > She would be required to report any kid who was walking to
| school, it simply isn't allowed anymore.
|
| This is definitely true, here in BC. Kids under the age of 11
| should not be unsupervised at any time; the rules aren't
| clear, but the case precedent make it not worth the risk.
|
| https://www.crossroadslaw.ca/blog/what-age-can-you-leave-
| a-c...
|
| https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/bc-to-
| par...
|
| https://cwrp.ca/sites/default/files/publications/Legal%20Age.
| ..
| r00fus wrote:
| Michael Moore's _Bowling for Columbine_ really hit home on
| the fear factory that major news networks promote on nonstop
| 24h basis.
|
| In addition to buying more guns, people also fear everyone
| else. CPS gone wild is a direct result of that.
| tejohnso wrote:
| > CPS gone wild is a direct result of that.
|
| I read somewhere that some states are passing laws now
| specifically to protect parents from prosecution for
| letting 9 year olds play in parks unsupervised. I guess
| people see kids playing without parents now and think it's
| some kind of child abuse.
| knicholes wrote:
| Utah did the same!
| https://www.npr.org/2018/04/01/598630200/utah-passes-
| free-ra...
|
| Please don't upvote if you found this helpful. I want to
| get back down to 777.
| nimajneb wrote:
| Ithaca, NY did this, they declared themselves a "free
| range kid city"
|
| https://ithacavoice.com/2018/11/city-proclaims-ithacas-
| kids-...
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| ozfive wrote:
| I think another part of it is that people don't know their
| neighbors as well as they used to. Here in Seattle there is a
| problem called the Seattle freeze and when you encounter other
| people who won't even say hello back to you in passing let
| alone can have a conversation with you become weary of who they
| are in private and how they could be a threat to your children.
| yu-carm-kror wrote:
| Agreed. I sometimes feel tense crossing big box parking lots
| where mostly no space has been designated to walking. Imagine a
| small person surrounded by pickup trucks and SUV's from which
| they're completely invisible.
| hemreldop wrote:
| Nonsense, kids have met up in car centric suburbs in the US for
| decades now. The problem is a combination of stranger danger,
| nosy, entitled neighbors and the incredible powers of CPS and
| the internet/video game indoor culture.
| gumby wrote:
| Is the HN median age too low to remember being handed some money
| and told to run down to the corner shop and buy cigarettes?
| trgn wrote:
| It's not. There are a ton of comments about people reminiscing
| about doing exactly that.
|
| The problem is the corner shop no longer exists. And if it
| does, it's a chain, and the rotating staff won't recognize the
| toddler as being yours. Or going there will get your kid run
| over by an SUV. Mainly the latter.
| asdff wrote:
| Not everyone lives in a stroadburb. Those corner shop suburbs
| haven't gone anywhere luckily.
| gumby wrote:
| I checked with my kid and shops no longer let little kids by
| cigarettes or beer. How customer unfriendly!
| Macha wrote:
| The "cigarettes" part was gone by the time I was a kid, but
| being sent down to the shop for milk or something was still a
| thing.
| goodpoint wrote:
| It is.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| Not in the US they can't.
|
| "officials placed two brothers into foster care after one, 11,
| was found playing basketball alone in his own yard."
|
| He'd gotten home early from school and his parents came 90
| minutes later. He was in his own yard. The family lost their
| children to foster care. Ironically in foster care ACTUAL abuse
| rates are pretty darn high!
|
| "When Cindy and Fred arrived home they were arrested for child
| neglect -- then fingerprinted, strip searched, and held in jail
| overnight.Their kids, meanwhile, including their 4-year-old boy,
| were removed from the home and from their parents' custody"
|
| Mom worked in the school district ironically.
|
| "We still do not have our children, we are fighting for our own
| freedom and due to the nature of my employment I am no longer
| employed," she wrote. "My son was in his own yard playing
| basketball, not in the street or at the park. The authorities
| claim he had no access to water or shelter. We have an open shed
| in the back yard and 2 working sinks and 2 hoses. They said he
| had no food. He ate his snacks already. He had no bathroom, but
| the responding officer found our yard good enough to relieve
| himself in while our son sat in a police car alone."
|
| Being accused of child abuse / neglect is a career ender. The
| idea of my 4 year old being taken is beyond belief. What is so
| ironic is so many real / terrible things are happening (crime of
| all sorts / abuse in the traditional sense / financial fraud
| online) where nothing happens. But your kid shoots some hoops in
| their own yard, you lose custody. You are jailed and strip
| searched. You lose your job.
|
| I realize big government is here to protect us, I just wish they
| would focus on the harder problems.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _I realize big government is here to protect us_
|
| Created by people who mean well perhaps, but subsequently
| captured by another sort.
|
| > _Pournelle 's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any
| bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
| First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the
| organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an
| educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch
| technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural
| scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective
| farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated
| to the organization itself. Examples are many of the
| administrators in the education system, many professors of
| education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA
| headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case
| the second group will gain and keep control of the
| organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions
| within the organization._
| jandrese wrote:
| Isn't that just "management" vs. "production staff"?
|
| You can't do both, each are full time jobs.
| greedo wrote:
| Pournelle's thesis is that the "managers" will corrupt the
| intent and goals of the bureaucracy.
| underwater wrote:
| No. As a manager I embrace process that aids my team in
| achieving our goals, and eschew process that hinders it.
| For me the process is a means to an end.
|
| I meet lots of bureaucrats who literally only care that the
| processes they oversee are carried out. For them the
| process is the goal.
| sacrosancty wrote:
| >due to the nature of my employment I am no longer employed
|
| This is an overlooked problem. Lack of employment protection.
| Nobody should be able to be fired for being arrested. That
| doesn't mean they committed a crime. It's not their fault they
| can't show up to work. There should be employment protection
| for that. In my country, even schoolteachers being investigated
| for sexual abuse aren't fired. They aren't allowed to go to
| work but they still get paid while the justice is being worked
| out, because they might turn out to be innocent!
| jandrese wrote:
| I have a strong suspicion that "Cindy and Fred" are in fact
| minorities and this is just plain vanilla southern racism at
| play. This is the state terrorizing minority communities to
| remind them who is in charge. That's usually what is going on
| when you see gross miscarriages of justice like this in the
| south.
| sethammons wrote:
| I know a white couple that something similar happened to in
| Colorado. Instead of imagining racism everywhere, do you have
| anything that supports the claim here?
| greedo wrote:
| https://reason.com/2015/06/11/11-year-old-boy-played-in-his-...
| goodpoint wrote:
| > Mom worked in the school district ironically.
|
| Where's the irony?
| evv wrote:
| Child abducted by CPS- I did not see the plot twist coming.
| dionidium wrote:
| That's a horrible story that resulted in the Maryland CPS
| issuing the following statement clarifying that what those
| parents did was not neglect:
|
| > _And in fact, as Donna St. George reported in yesterday 's
| Washington Post, Maryland's CPS has just issued new guidelines,
| saying, "Children playing outside or walking unsupervised does
| not meet the criteria for a CPS response absent specific
| information supporting the conclusion that the child has been
| harmed or is at substantial risk of harm if they continue to be
| unsupervised."_
|
| This is a big country and that was a rare and particularly
| egregious case; it's not the norm.
|
| Source: https://reason.com/2015/06/12/kidnapped-by-the-state-
| trouble...
| mrinterweb wrote:
| Even if it is not the norm, people hear about situations like
| this, and become fearful. Fear of CPS taking kids is enough
| to make many parents not willing to allow their children
| freedom.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| more context on the situation:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150526230348/http://www.washin...
| (the actual washington post site keeps giving me an error)
| Zigurd wrote:
| I am fortunate to have raised kids in a town where they could
| bike to friends' houses at an early age and even take boats out
| on a pond. We gave them mobile phones so they could stay in
| touch. But they could be miles away on their own.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I feel like a natural parent-brain thing is that the brain just
| sits there in the background kind of brainstorming worst-case
| scenarios and then you make efforts to protect against the ones
| you've thought about the most, because they're giving you the
| most anxiety and you want to stop thinking about them.
|
| Protecting against that one thing doesn't stop this brainstorming
| process; it's a creative endeavor limited only by the
| imagination.
|
| Meanwhile, yes, the more constant the news is the more it fuels
| our imagination, and the more global it is, the more we're
| feeding it with statistical outliers.
| dibujante wrote:
| 4-year-olds can't drive, so in most of the United States, this is
| not true.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| johnzim wrote:
| As a parent, none of the risks are as profound as that of some
| other member of the public calling the police to inform on your
| "dangerous parenting".
|
| I've deliberately chosen to live in a walkable part of the Bay
| Area in the hopes that my kids can be more independent when they
| get older, but I'm more worried about the social pushback than I
| am about their safety.
| gregjor wrote:
| I let my three kids walk to school, the park, around the corner
| to friend's houses. Neighbors complained to my face multiple
| times, and threatened to call CPS twice. My children all
| survived to adulthood.
|
| I was walking to school with other kids when I was four, no one
| had a problem with it then. Teaching kids to fear everyone and
| the world they live in doesn't do them any good -- it just
| causes anxiety.
| gregjor wrote:
| One of our neighbors screamed at my wife and me because our
| six year old son wasn't wearing a helmet on his Razer scooter
| to (slowly) go around the corner. That same neighbor let her
| dog run around off-leash at the park, assuring the parents
| there that the dog didn't bite, though it did like to jump on
| the children. We raised our kids in Portland, where dogs have
| more rights and freedom than children.
| anm89 wrote:
| This risk doesn't seem worth it. You are playing CPS
| roulette. Even if 9/10 CPS agents are going to make the
| right decisions, that's a 10% chance of having some kind of
| issue with CPS. If I recall correctly, people have had
| their kids taken over stuff like this.
|
| I think if this is such a big deal ( I think it is too) you
| should move out of the city. That's just too big to gamble
| with.
| gregjor wrote:
| I understand the risk of busybody adults and CPS. We
| chose to let our kids have some freedom of movement. I
| have lawyers in my family so we were less worried than
| other parents we knew. In Portland specifically CPS
| overreach got a lot of negative press and pushback from
| parent's groups -- there's strength in numbers.
|
| Texas, Oklahoma, and Utah have enacted so-called "free
| range" laws to allow kids to do unthinkable things like
| walk to the corner store or park without a security
| detail and body armor. Oregon will probably be among the
| last states to ease up -- dogs will get the right to
| vegan CBD-infused meals there first. I no longer live
| there.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Even if 9/10 CPS agents are going to make the right
| decisions
|
| That is _extremely_ optimistic.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| The thing that gets me is that people do this stuff all
| the time and it's not a problem until CPS gets dragged
| into it, while at the same time the system is massively
| overburdened. They should be punishing the people calling
| in mundane issues and wasting their time. But! That might
| dissuade someone from reporting something, and the first
| time a bad case is missed the outrage and subsequent
| overcorrection lands us back to where we are now.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That, and the fact that like any institution it exists in
| part to keep itself and its budget justified, if there
| aren't enough problems then you can always make some
| 'easy' cases (legally easy but morally more than a little
| bit ambiguous) so they can serve as a chunk of that
| justification.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| When I was in 5th grade, I had a friend with bent legs, who
| walked with supports attached to his arms. (Well, gripped in
| his hands, but with a partial ring that went around the arm;
| I assume to make them easier to hold on to.)
|
| The school considered us bad influences on each other - we
| got in trouble a lot, which hadn't been true before we knew
| each other. But his mother thought I was great, because one
| of the activities we did together was go for long walks
| around the neighborhood. She thought the exercise was
| beneficial, given his condition.
|
| I can only imagine how she would have responded if someone
| had complained to the police that she was letting her son
| walk around unsupervised.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The Bay Area is not immune to anti-walking nonsense. At the
| elementary school that was formerly close to my home (which my
| children did not attend, specifically due to said nonsense) the
| children who were walking home had to stay at school for 45
| minutes while "pick-up time", i.e. parents with cars picking up
| children, was conducted. This was deemed a safety measure.
| gensym wrote:
| Yep. I used to be park of a park advisory council in Chicago.
| At one meeting, police were there to field questions about park
| safety. One of the attendees mentioned their concern for the
| times they saw "unsupervised 10-year-olds" playing in the
| neighborhood park. The cop encouraged the person to call 911
| when they observed that happening!
|
| In Chicago, it's pretty much illegal to be a kid without an
| adult present in most places. In the Southern California suburb
| I live in now, it's better in that respect. Unfortunately, it's
| not walkable or bikeable outside of the housing development.
| OmahaBoy69 wrote:
| >In Chicago, it's pretty much illegal to be a kid without an
| adult present in most places
|
| Funny story about this. In highschool I had a teacher who
| lived with her 12 year old daughter in Chicago, where the
| legal age for leaving your child home alone is 13. If she
| needed to run errands alone she'd just leave her daughter to
| do a loop on the L train (which doesn't have as tight age
| restrictions). Bizarre.
| selectodude wrote:
| Could've fooled me. I was taking the subway to school by
| myself at 11 years old. And this wasn't even that long ago.
| robhh wrote:
| As a new dad, who also moved to the Bay Area from Europe, I
| would be interested what parts of the Bay Area would provide
| such a walkable environment?
| enra wrote:
| Noe Valley/Bernal Heights is quite good. There is also
| schools in Noe but I guess SF is some kind of lottery system
| so it's not guaranteed your kids can go that school.
| rsync wrote:
| Much of suburban Marin County is a paradise in this regard -
| the Ross Valley cities of Ross, Larkspur (not larkspur
| landing), Kentfield, San Anselmo and Fairfax[1] are full of
| kids of all ages riding their bikes and walking to school
| every day.
|
| [1] Listed in ascending order of affordability.
| david927 wrote:
| Lafayette and, much further out, Martinez are two places that
| have that, for example.
| floren wrote:
| If you're outside SF itself, look for the old parts of a
| town, with houses built in the 20s or earlier. There's
| probably a "main street"/downtown area near by, and because
| it's an old part of town, the streets are narrower and
| traffic moves slower.
| gkop wrote:
| Walkscore.com could be helpful. There are many wonderful
| walkable neighborhoods in the bay.
| robhh wrote:
| Thanks for the link. This goes in the right direction, but
| so far I have not been able to identify truly walkable
| neighborhoods through websites. The main problem is that
| the metrics usually being used, do not reflect the type of
| walkability that would be beneficial for raising children.
|
| As an example, I randomly picked a particular address on
| walkscore.com (https://walk.sc/37yZciv) which gets a walk
| score of 91 (walker's paradise), but that particular
| address is on a large 7-lane street with not a lot of
| walking infrastructure around. I'm guessing the score might
| mostly be driven by proximity to stores, which doesn't
| necessarily matter in this case. Better metrics may be such
| things as amount of car traffic, noise levels, size of
| sidewalks (in comparison with size of streets), amount of
| small streets and distance to larger roads, etc..
|
| I wonder if a website exists that puts more emphasis on how
| nice it is to walk in a neighborhood vs. mere practicality?
| yandrypozo wrote:
| I was about to make the same comment, that's indeed my biggest
| fear, this video makes good points about it
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYsE7T2hXe8
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >As a parent, none of the risks are as profound as that of some
| other member of the public calling the police to inform on your
| "dangerous parenting".
|
| And even when these events are rare they get reported on which
| increases the chilling effect.
| Spellman wrote:
| In CA there's laws specifically against leaving a child in the
| car due to risk of overheating.
|
| There's no laws about leaving them at home alone.
|
| That being said, there have been lots of horror stories of
| other adults calling the cops out of concern for child
| "neglect." And this creates a huge hassle for the parents. Try
| to figure out our neighborhood's feelings on the topic, and
| obviously look into the Free Range Kids movement for resources.
| bombcar wrote:
| A huge part of it is talking to neighbors, even if just a
| little bit. If you see "Suzy's kid" walking down the street
| you're much less likely to freak out than if you see "unknown
| kid".
|
| But the easiest is to just move to somewhere where people
| aren't as freaked out.
| rafale wrote:
| Politically speaking, it's also good to push back on any
| legislation or system where parents lose power on their kids
| education and upbringing, even in the name of their well-
| being. It's important as a society that we have autonomy and
| diversity in the upbringing of the next generation.
| gernb wrote:
| Unfortunately vocal people on both sides of the spectrum
| hate that. The people calling CPS hate it because they
| think parents are being negectful. Certain people hate it
| because they imagine kids getting indoctrinated into
| religions they don't like. I have several friends and
| families that were raised via home schooling or raised
| their kids homeschooled. All the kids are amazing, none of
| them had any religion involvment.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Please keep in mind that the kids who didn't survive because of a
| horrific accident are not here to convey their stories. I've
| never been a fan of stories from people who present "anecdotal
| evidence as ideal solutions".
|
| As a parent, I do think children need some level of autonomy, but
| this doesn't need to be an all-or-nothing issue. Parents can
| apply various degrees in various situations.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| A large component here is simply risk tolerance.
|
| Society's risk tolerance, especially for kids, has fallen pretty
| dramatically. This is probably related to just how many fewer
| kids US society has in general (births per woman has fallen in
| half since 1960, and it takes a culture some time to catch up).
| If you have fewer, then the individual ones become that much more
| valuable. Your attention and time is divided much less.
|
| A hot metal playground slide was no big deal in the 1970s, nor
| was a merry-go-round, and kids could get injured relatively
| easily. But our tolerance of such risk has completely
| disappeared.
| gkop wrote:
| +1 for the playground merry-go-round (a small manual carousel)
| as a "litmus test" here. It's exactly the right level of danger
| that kids should encounter.
| jimmyjazz14 wrote:
| Its not just personal risk tolerance that plays into it either.
| I would let my kids largely run free but I know I would
| probably have to deal with CPS if I did so.
| elliekelly wrote:
| This seems like a bit of an urban myth? Or at least hugely
| overblown. How often does this really happen?
| iso1631 wrote:
| 437,283 American children were removed from their parents
| last year. Meanwhile fewer than 350 people under the age of
| 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per
| year between 2010-2017
|
| Now of course CPS handle actual cases of child neglect in
| that 430k, but it certainly seems that the most likely
| people to take a child are either
|
| 1) The other parent
|
| 2) CPS
|
| 3) Death from Road traffic, Firearms, Suffocation/Drowning,
| Drug overdoses
|
| And way down the list is abduction
| monocasa wrote:
| It was a several months long ordeal when a neighbor
| reported me and my siblings playing "unsupervised" in our
| own front lawn when I was a kid. Looking back on it, the
| caseworker was very obviously trying to seperate us from
| our parents. The kicker: I was old enough to be a
| babysitter at the time.
| flakiness wrote:
| It's also about some collective trust/fantasy, in addition to
| the tolerance.
|
| For example, I don't think Tokyo is particularly safer than a
| (walkable) US city. But since people there collectively believe
| Japan is a safe country and are proud of it, they let their
| child go out.
|
| But I agree that the risk tolerance points too. I have talked
| to a handful of Japanese parents and none of them let their
| small kids go out without the supervision anymore. So the lower
| risk tolerance isn't a US-only problem. I guess it's a symptom
| of modernized society in general (although would love to be
| proven wrong.)
| jerkstate wrote:
| > For example, I don't think Tokyo is particularly safer than
| a (walkable) US city
|
| on what do you base this opinion? I looked up a couple of
| crime stats sites and the assault and murder rates per capita
| in the US are like, 10x higher in the US than in Japan.
| seabird wrote:
| Average assault and murder rates are massively inflated by
| a handful of exceptional cities. St. Louis (usually highest
| murder rate in the US or close to it) is pushing 70 murders
| per 100k. That is roughly double the rate of Cleveland
| (rank 5). Cleveland has a murder rate over 10 times higher
| than a city of around ~40k people that I live fairly close
| to. However, another city (population ~45k) that is about a
| 20 minute drive away from the one I'm near has a murder
| rate over _15 times_ higher than the city I live near.
|
| Crime is experienced incredibly unevenly in the US. I won't
| say much more past that because it's where the politics
| starts to kick in and I don't think that will add anything
| to the conversation.
| jerkstate wrote:
| based on rough calculation, your 40k city has a murder
| rate of 3.5 per 100,000; Tokyo has a murder rate of 0.26
| per 100,000.
|
| In Miyazaki prefecture, the most violent in Japan
| according to [1], the murder rate is 0.9 per 100,000
|
| [1] https://nbakki.hatenablog.com/entry/Murder_Rate_Numbe
| r_of_Ac...
| seabird wrote:
| That 3.5 is almost without exception crime-related. Your
| odds of being a victim of extreme violence even if you
| weren't involved in what started it are effectively zero.
| Miyazaki prefecture probably experiences this same
| phenomenon. If even that is too much for you to risk,
| there's a city a couple of hours away with a population
| of 100k and a murder rate of 0.00. We haven't even
| mentioned the Japanese tendency to only prosecute slam
| dunk cases.
|
| The major point is that although Tokyo might be "safer"
| on paper, the risk profile of letting your kid walk
| around Tokyo vs. letting your kid walk around the city I
| mentioned is pretty much the same in practice, and this
| goes for thousands of American cities. There are millions
| of Americans who could let their kids walk around their
| community and not have to worry about them being murdered
| or seriously assaulted.
| flakiness wrote:
| Huh. I should've done some research first. Thanks for the
| catch!
|
| It was based on my personal experience but looking at [1],
| I realized that I'm in the one of the safest county in the
| US. The murder rate is very comparable (2x) to Tokyo here.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cit
| ies_b...
| ars wrote:
| It's explained with
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory - people
| have fewer kids now, and are more careful with each.
| jancsika wrote:
| > A large component here is simply risk tolerance.
|
| Cheap, hand-held TVs delivering _custom-tailored_ traumatic
| word-salad clickbait videos to kids would have created so much
| paranoia among suburban moms in the 80s they would have
| forgotten to be terrified about crack /cocaine.
| lostmsu wrote:
| That makes sense. What does not is that there's no data
| available to make an informed decision.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| I think the "Stranger Danger" panic that accelerated in the
| 80's is probably more responsible for people thinking that a
| 4-year old is incapable of running errands. It's not so much
| the lack of mental capacity as it is decades of cultural
| inculcation that you should not _dare_ to let any child under
| the age of ___ wander the streets alone, or they will be
| immediately abducted, assaulted, and decapitated by dark
| forces.
|
| America has never really recovered from Adam Walsh's murder,
| IMO.
| chomp wrote:
| Well, and now the Internet - it doesn't help when Nextdoor is
| full of "suspicious person alerts" aka "there was a solicitor
| and I didn't like it", and a non-stop barrage of crime
| related stories.
|
| I live in a city whose broader region is almost 10000 square
| miles, and the crime feeds report all crime in this area as
| occurring in "Houston", even though this region is larger
| than some US states. I feel like this contributes to panic
| because people feel like the crime is in their backyard. My
| local news station targets me on Facebook with stories
| because I'm in this MSA, but the story they hit me with could
| be a shooting that's easily a 1.5 hour drive from me.
|
| Heck, here in Texas, my phone has buzzed from what they are
| calling "Blue Alerts" now, which is a riff off of Amber
| Alerts, where I've gotten notified that an officer was shot
| at, literally over 4 hours away from me, almost 300 miles
| away. It's not surprising that our society is inundated with
| panic.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Nextdoor is very revealing. I had no idea how racist my
| neighbors were until I read the Nextdoor post about a
| suspicious cherrypicker truck driver in the neighborhood,
| who suspiciously claimed to work for the power company.
| chomp wrote:
| Nextdoor post in my neighborhood complained about a
| "suspicious car" that "scouts the area" around 11pm at
| night. Whipped enough people into a frenzy to where
| someone decided to block the car and confront the driver
| one night. They wound up being a neighbor who gets off
| late every night, driving straight to their house. The
| driver made a post chastising the community for targeting
| them, but it got removed because it was too "political".
| rackjack wrote:
| It's funny because you'd think this watchfulness +
| technology like Nextdoor would let kids be more
| independent, e.g. if anybody tried to snatch your kid
| they'd be reported by half a dozen busybodies watching
| through their windows.
| greedo wrote:
| This assumes that most users of Nextdoor or have video
| cameras dotting their house are interested in protecting
| kids. Nextdoor is a cesspool of racism, and everyone I
| know who has "security" cameras is afraid of people
| stealing their stuff. Despite crime in our area being at
| an all time low and property theft very uncommon.
| bombcar wrote:
| I suspect more has been spent on anti-theft for houses
| than total thefts.
|
| Places where theft really IS common don't put up cameras
| (they'd get stolen), they put up bars.
| robonerd wrote:
| I think it has much less to do with any particular murder,
| and is actually related to the rise of cable news that needed
| to find some way to fill an entire day, every day of the
| week, with national news. There just isn't that much national
| news, not the sort that keeps people tuning in. So instead
| they started taking local news stories that had some
| sensational elements and presenting them as national news
| stories. Stories about serial killers, kids getting hurt,
| etc.
| xeromal wrote:
| I think their point is that Adam Walsh's murder kickstarted
| the fear mongering on the news you're talking about.
|
| It might be the columbine to school shooters. Everything
| else is derived from it.
| bombcar wrote:
| I've seen three names so far in response to "when it
| started" and they're all different.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| yu-carm-kror wrote:
| We know for a fact that pedophiles, kidnappers, and murders
| exist. I think we just always thought we could sniff them out
| by knowing our community. That was probably a false sense of
| security all along. Now we mostly live in communities too
| plentiful to know everyone so our fear is unchecked.
| jjeaff wrote:
| I grew up in a small community, and while a few people were
| usually thought of as not to be trusted, they didn't turn
| out to be the dangerous ones. So I agree that there is a
| false sense of security in small communities. At the same
| time, I'm sure that overall, like shark attacks, we very
| much overestimate the danger.
| greedo wrote:
| Read about the BTK serial killer. Dude was a "pillar" of
| his community. Look at all the priests the Catholic
| Church continually protects when they commit abuse.
| Besides, most abuse (like most murders) is committed by
| someone the victim knew.
| Aloha wrote:
| I mean - I grew up in the 90's and had this level of freedom.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| "stranger danger" isn't just a delusion of over-protective
| parents...my own daughter has told me numerous times over the
| years of being followed and approached by males she did not
| know (a car following her slowly, a middle-aged man "asking
| her out" _repeatedly_ in a park, etc)
|
| we didn't respond to these instances by locking her up, but
| I'm not going to dismiss parents who are protective
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| I don't doubt for a moment that your daughter encountered
| creeps in public spaces. I'm just not sure that the
| solution that was impressed upon my generation (I was born
| at the tail-end of the 80s) really helped. The default
| behavior shifted from "View some people with suspicion" to
| "View _everyone_ you are likely to encounter as a potential
| serial rapist-pedophile-murderer. " And don't think just
| avoiding contact is enough, because you could just be
| walking down an empty street by yourself when Mr. Serial
| Killer pulls up beside you in his car, jumps out, pulls you
| into the vehicle, and we won't hear from you again until
| your severed head is found in a well.
|
| Could it happen? Sure. Is it _likely_ to happen? Probably
| not. Is it worth keeping your children unable to leave the
| house without an escort until they 're 18?
| dqpb wrote:
| If I let my child go out on his own, he would get hit by a car
| almost immediately.
| losvedir wrote:
| Should probably teach him how to avoid that...
| trgn wrote:
| Yes, of course.
|
| It's and/and. Should also teach that driver to slow down, and
| be prepared to come to an emergency stop at any given time.
| Or have streets that naturally slow down traffic by their
| design, if that's too hard for the driver.
|
| Your comment comes from a value system which I find
| sociopathic. I think it's much more important that the public
| realm is safe for all, which includes toddlers running
| errands alone, than that cars should be able to travel at
| high speed. And beyond that, when piloting 3-ton heavy
| machinery, one has more responsibility. It's something
| drivers seem unwilling to accept, rather let's blame the
| child on foot instead.
| jhugo wrote:
| Didn't sound like blame to me. The reality we live in has
| too many cars, too fast cars, too large cars. The kid lives
| in that reality now and probably won't get a chance to be a
| kid in a different reality. Therefore, it would be a good
| idea to help them to learn to safely explore their world,
| with some independence, in the reality that they actually
| live in.
| 14 wrote:
| I would love to let my kids free range and as they got older I
| did but not my smaller kids. Even though statistically small
| compared to other risks a child faces I would be too concerned
| about a kidnapping or possible rape. When I was a kid we free
| ranged. Then one day a kid named Michael Dunahee, on May 12 1986,
| was kidnapped to never be seen again. We live on an island and no
| one felt safe. He was just a little boy. That changes everything.
| Parents stopped letting their kids go so far and everyone was
| worried. We still look for Michael to this day. Then in 1996
| another little girl by the name of Jessica States went missing.
| She was later found murdered. It was too much for parents to
| accept and again kids were not left to roam the way they used to.
| Again I know the statistics are small but I think it is a very
| parent emotion to not want to let your kids wander too far. The
| world just has too many creeps and it's not a risk a lot of
| parents could bear to live with.
| nradov wrote:
| My wife grew up in eastern Europe. At that age when her parents
| had visitors over they used to send her to the store to buy beer.
| She was too small to carry enough so had to make two trips.
| dqpb wrote:
| Off topic: Are there any countries more hostile to pedestrians
| than the US?
| asdff wrote:
| Plenty of countries just model their suburbs after the U.S..
| Canada is just like the U.S. most modern suburbs in europe are
| built with stroads and highways like modern suburbs in orange
| county, too. American style suburbs are found all over the
| world to be honest. You can find pockets of huge homes and
| stroads from Indonesia to Pakistan.
| floren wrote:
| India sure felt like it... no such thing as a sidewalk, and the
| street is a nightmare of cars, tuktuks dodging around the cars,
| and motorcycles dodging around the tuktuks and cars. But I was
| just visiting; maybe if you live there it feels safe, I don't
| know.
| bombcar wrote:
| Amusingly as the cars approach infinity they become slower
| and slower and it becomes relatively easier to navigate them.
| jhugo wrote:
| Although by the numbers the roads in India are certainly much
| less safe than e.g. the US, it's not as unsafe as it looks
| for people who are used to it. Along with other countries
| with 'chaotic' roads, staying safe on the road in India comes
| more from drivers (and pedestrians) generally having very
| good situational awareness, rather than from strict adherance
| to a set of rules.
| [deleted]
| ukyrgf wrote:
| Holy cow. I was just thinking about all the crazy people in my
| neighborhood, drug dealers, etc. and how I probably wouldn't want
| my kid walking around alone. And then I realized that there is a
| middle school down the street and there are dozens of kids
| walking home from it, playing in the field, cussing up a storm.
| Kids come by and ask if we need yard work done. We just moved
| there last year and I genuinely teared up when the first trick or
| treater came to our door, every other place I've lived in the
| parents drove their kids to rich neighborhoods.
| chasing wrote:
| I might trust my kid.
|
| I do not trust people in cars.
| trgn wrote:
| That's really it. The stranger danger is a dodge.
|
| The real reason people don't let their young children outside
| is because they might get killed by an inattentive driver. It's
| the most tangible, innately felt thing out in America's public
| realm, how crazy dangerous it is on foot, constantly having to
| be on the lookout for cars. And of course getting blamed if
| they do happen to be struck. A kid got killed in an apartment
| complex parking lot in my city by a driver. The comments were
| horrifying, people felt sorry for the driver, blamed the
| parents.
| w0rkaround wrote:
| Absolutely need to plug Not Just Bikes, a youtube channel done by
| a Canadian living in The Netherlands about urban planning using
| Dutch infrastructure as the gold standard. Key points he makes
| are how bad North American environments are for child freedom.
| Its almost entirely due to NA urban planning prioritizing cars
| over everything else, making it just dangerous for anyone to try
| and walk anywhere, let alone children. A general difference is
| that Dutch urban planning prioritizes pedestrians, bikes,
| transit, then cars, in that order. Whereas in NA cars are really
| the only thing prioritized.
|
| My favorite video of his is about this exact topic, Why I Won't
| Raise My Kids in Suburbia [0]. This video completely changed my
| own life, motivating my family and I to move to a city from the
| suburbs, and fingers-crossed, eventually to The Netherlands.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| This image from a daily mail article of all places shows the
| trend over multiple generations in a family very well:
| https://i.imgur.com/YcjjsiI.jpg
|
| It's from the UK but it's probably even worse in the US (I think
| in the US now most kids aren't allowed out of the yard of their
| house on their own until they're old enough to drive basically.)
| bencollier49 wrote:
| That's a great graphic.
|
| I can't figure out what it is doing this - I'm UK-based too,
| and I know logically that everything is now safer - I used to
| walk two miles to the woods with friends at the age of eight or
| nine, but I wouldn't trust my own children to walk to the
| bottom of the hill here.
|
| I don't really understand what has changed. Why were my own
| parents less paranoid? There are lots of people giving lots of
| reasons on here. The most credible is the constant "stranger
| danger" message pumped out in news, but I honestly wonder if
| there's been a baseline increase in people's general paranoia -
| my concerns are more around them doing something stupid and
| getting into trouble.
| robonerd wrote:
| By all means, let the kid run around town and have fun. I think
| most of us realize that by the numbers, 'stranger danger'
| precaution went too far years ago. But errands? They'll have a
| lifetime of errands when they're older; four years is too young,
| let them have at least a few years of fun first. Maybe the
| occasional errand is fun for kids, but I think I know how this
| ends. Before long it's no longer an adventure and becomes a
| chore, an obligation. The excitement of buying tomatoes subsides
| and the kid starts to get scolded for playing before getting his
| chores done.
|
| Here's my idea: give kids bikes and tell them to be back before
| dinner.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| Eh, I think it's okay to give kids chores to do from time to
| time. They can pickup something fun for themselves too.
| jimmyjazz14 wrote:
| The thing is, errands make kids happy, on the most part kids
| want responsibility and to feel useful. I agree not every
| adventure should be an errand though.
| function_seven wrote:
| The difference between "the occasional errand is fun for kids"
| and "becomes a chore, an obligation" cannot be emphasized
| enough!
|
| I vividly remember watching my dad mow the front lawn one
| afternoon. I was 11 I think? It looked so fun pushing this loud
| machine over the messy grass and leaving a path of perfectly
| neat turf behind.
|
| I asked him if I could try it out. He hesitated for a bit, then
| said, "Sure." So I did, and it _was_ fun.
|
| And it was now my obligation once a week for the next 8 years.
|
| The fun was short-lived, but the chore remained. And the
| mechanism was identical to how I assumed vacuuming duty at the
| age of 8, which means I didn't learn my lesson from that fiasco
| either :)
| robonerd wrote:
| For me, the first of these _adventures-turned-chores_ was
| washing the car. It was great fun in the summer; we didn 't
| have air conditioning then so any excuse to go outside and
| spray the hose was great as far as I was concerned. But
| before too long that chore extended into the fall and spring
| when it was chilly and not remotely fun. It only ended when I
| was 16 and had the idea to drive the car to the local carwash
| instead.
| bitwize wrote:
| What are kids for but to serve as extra hands for all the
| necessary work in the house? :)
| tootie wrote:
| Risks number 1 by far is cars. They get more than enough
| adults. Even if kids practice waiting for lights or looking
| both ways, drivers are nuts and toddlers are not very visible.
| beej71 wrote:
| I don't have any kids, so I don't really feel comfortable telling
| folks how to raise theirs.
|
| But I will tell you my perspective.
|
| As someone who grew up in the "be back home in time for supper"
| 1970s, today's world seems completely foreign. When I started
| kindergarten, Mom walked me to school on the first day so that
| I'd know the route. And after that I walked to school on my own
| until I learned to ride a bike.
|
| I rode to junior high, where there was parking for hundreds of
| bikes. Recently I drove by that school, and the bike racks were
| gone. This whole concept of waiting in traffic to pick up or drop
| off your kid wasn't even a thing.
|
| And I'm so supremely grateful that I was raised that way. I'm
| absolutely certain that early autonomy paid off later in life in
| countless ways.
|
| I'd encourage you, if you're raising kids, to consider the
| upsides of so-called "free range". Or, as we called it in the
| 70s, "being a regular kid".
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| A major difference between when I grew up and now is the
| prevalence of the severely mentally ill living on city streets.
| Would you send your 5 year old self down the streets of San
| Francisco or Seattle? As a 45 year old I'm frightened often
| enough - I can't imagine my daughter being forced to navigate
| those situations alone. The assault and murder rates due to the
| untreated mentally ill in the cities I've lived in is high and
| visible.
|
| In the 70's and 80's we still had a functional mental public
| health system an a relatively small population living on the
| streets.
|
| Case in point a clearly disturbed person walked into my
| daughters school grounds and began exposing himself last week.
| The teachers corralled him and the police took him to jail, but
| they said more or less he will be back in a week or two and to
| be more careful securing the school grounds.
|
| If that's the environment at school, what about the sidewalks
| and streets between home and school?
| throwaway-blaze wrote:
| (Using throwaway, because people can't have rational
| discussions anymore).
|
| 47yr old with 12yr old twins. Live in a million dollar
| neighborhood in Capitol Hill Seattle. Kids go to private
| school about a mile south of home. When the school year
| started, they wanted to walk to and from school alone.
|
| We had to stop this in the last month and accompany them on
| the walks. My daughter saw multiple fentanyl od's on the
| street, my son asked me what that guy he saw was doing with
| the torch under the aluminum foil.
|
| I grew up in the 80s in NYC and took the subway from Queens
| to Manhattan for HS (Stuyvesant). Plenty of homeless but
| mostly alcoholics, occasional mentally ill. The havoc from
| meth, fentanyl, heroin is too much for us to let our kids
| stay as independent as we want.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| > 70's and 80's
|
| The murder and violent crime rates were far higher in the 70s
| and 80s.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Seattle?
|
| Nearby Tacoma is now giving out free crack pipes.
|
| Yesterday's Seattle Times:
| https://cdn.newseum.org/dfp/jpg19/lg/WA_ST.jpg
|
| To be clear, drugs ought to be legalized. But not enabled.
| chrischen wrote:
| More kids probably live in suburbia than in urban
| environments, given the extra space in the US. I think the
| point is moot because even in well-to-do neighborhoods people
| stop walking to school, even if they can (that is, the route
| is close enough to be walkable).
| clsec wrote:
| When I first moved to San Francisco I walked from 10th &
| Mission to Bessie Carmichael School at 7th & Folsom then took
| MUNI to Commodore Stockton Elementary in Chinatown every
| weekday. That was in first grade in 1972. At the time SOMA
| was an extremely bad place, the TL was the same and HP was a
| place you didn't go if you had light skin (except for MLB &
| NFL games).
|
| I find that having that autonomy as a child is what has lead
| me to not be fearful of most things.
|
| btw - not that it's ok, but people exposing themselves has
| been around for a long time. I've experienced it myself as a
| child.
| clsec wrote:
| I should add that my parents bought me my first bike while
| we lived in SF. The reason they say we moved to Marin when
| I started second grade was because my parents had nowhere
| in The City to teach me how to ride it.
| gernb wrote:
| I feel like the Richmond and Sunset districts of SF are
| pretty safe places to ride bikes. Plus both of them are
| near Golden Gate Park. I ride in those areas on weekends
| and except for a few hot spots there aren't that many
| cars and streets are quiet
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| My point wasn't about seediness or drug use, but about
| the number of severely mentally ill living on the
| streets. That has objectively gotten worse since the
| barriers to commitment went up substantially in the early
| 1980s and the Reagan dismantling of the national public
| mental health system and subsequent collapse at the state
| level. I feel less worried about drug dealers who have a
| rational economic reason for what they do than an
| untreated and unhoused paranoid schizophrenic with
| violent tendencies. IMO, that's the really big change in
| at least the urban landscape. (N.b., I see this in NYC,
| Seattle, SF,and a number of other cities I've lived in).
|
| Folks have noted the helicopter behavior permeates even
| suburbia, but I wonder if that's more because of sprawl
| and lack of meaningful pedestrian infrastructure than
| anxiety.
| freyr wrote:
| > Would you send your 5 year old self down the streets of San
| Francisco or Seattle
|
| No.
|
| And I would avoid raising my kids there to begin with. Those
| two cities in particular have done everything within their
| means to alienate families.
|
| I get that some parents believe that exposing their kids to
| people living in squalor on the street due to mental illness
| or addiction is an enriching cultural experience, and maybe
| it is. But I'm going to pass on that.
| analog31 wrote:
| I don't think real danger completely explains it. I live in a
| completely tame neighborhood. Kids definitely walk and bike
| to school. Yet, there is also a much higher prevalence of
| kids being driven to school than when I was a kid.
|
| And I grew up in true car culture: The coolest kid had a
| Cobra jacket, which meant his dad worked for Ford. That kid
| walked to school.
|
| One difference is that there's a lot more car traffic in
| neighborhoods today.
| bombcar wrote:
| Those things existing 30 years ago, but ... not in the areas
| I was walking around as a kid. People moved _away_ from those
| places back then.
| uranium wrote:
| "Would you send your 5 year old self down the streets of San
| Francisco or Seattle?"
|
| Yes.
|
| We live in San Francisco, and our kids went to a daycare in
| the Civic Center. We walked [with the kids] by many homeless
| people every weekday for years. Our interactions with them
| were almost universally positive; they'd clear the sidewalk
| to let kids through, try to keep kids from seeing drug use,
| chat and share candy, etc. On cold days when our kids would
| refuse to wear shirts [love that young metabolism], homeless
| folks would yell out, "Put a jacket on that kid!".
|
| Most homeless people are just people in terrible situations,
| not boogiemen to be afraid of. Sure, some of them are
| mentally ill--if they weren't when they became homeless, it
| can make you so--but that doesn't make them dangerous.
|
| Every assault makes the news, but cities are safer than
| they've ever been, and I'm very glad to be raising my kids in
| SF. The public transit and density of services will give them
| much greater autonomy than if we lived somewhere where you
| need a car to get anywhere.
|
| My older kid's first errand was at age 5.5, to get a loaf of
| bread IIRC, from a market 1 block away, crossing 1 street. He
| was stopped by the police. The cop told him to tell his
| parents that he was too young to be out alone. No CPS, no
| arrest, fortunately, and he let my kid complete his errand
| alone, but that's the biggest danger around our neighborhood,
| not the homeless. We're not in the Civic Center, granted, but
| we're still in SF proper.
| newfriend wrote:
| It sounds to me like you're purposely downplaying the
| dangers of overwhelmingly mentally-ill, drug-addicted,
| societal outcasts just so you can post about how
| enlightened you are.
|
| Normal people do not want to put their kids into dangerous
| situations. And doing so does not make you a good person.
| sealaska wrote:
| It sounds to me like you're purposely upplaying the
| dangers of people who live outside, many of whom have
| substance abuse issues.
|
| I'll refrain from guessing how enlightened you are.
| mplewis wrote:
| You're afraid of a parent choosing to walk with their kid
| down a public sidewalk? Get a grip.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| As a parent, I wouldn't do this in busy areas. I've seen
| people get hit from drivers running stop signs and red
| lights. I have to look at drivers turning right on red to
| make sure they see me, not sure that all children are tall
| enough to do this. Too much of a risk.
|
| It doesn't take too much searching to find examples of
| horrible accidents:
|
| https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/kids-hit-by-car-while-
| wa...
| livinginfear wrote:
| Sesame Street clearly had a big influence on you.
|
| Would you walk on Kensington Ave with your children?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi1Kf-1qd6Y
| Mvhsz wrote:
| A few friends of mine have bought houses in the
| gentrifying parts of port richmond over the years, and
| I've biked through several of the intersections in that
| video. Yeah parts of Kensington Ave are open air drug
| markets, you avoid those spots. The surrounding
| neighborhood is run down and pretty low income, but
| mostly quiet and residential. I assume SF is similar in
| that outside of downtown you can find a path to anywhere
| you want to go that avoids the most obvious dangers.
| Similar to the parent comment, the grocery store I walk
| to in west philly always has a homeless woman out front
| and the interactions aren't scary. She says hello to me
| and my dog who she recognizes and asks for change, I
| typically say "no but have a nice day" she says "god
| bless" and that's that.
|
| Speaking as a non-parent, if I had a kid near kensington
| ave and they walked to school (which they mostly do) I
| would just tell them to walk down Frankford Ave a few
| blocks south, which is much less scary. Teaching kids
| those basic "street smarts" is one of the objectives of
| having "free range" kids. Although I would also add that
| living a little ways away from the street infamous for
| being a drug market is within the means of the majority
| of the Philadelphians, and the vast majority of the
| hacker news crowd.
| arcticfox wrote:
| > Our interactions with them were almost universally
| positive; they'd clear the sidewalk to let kids through,
| try to keep kids from seeing drug use, chat and share
| candy, etc.
|
| With an adult present, sure, but holy moly would I not
| leave my kid alone around drug users offering candy and a
| chat. Hell, I might be one of those hypothetical CPS
| callers that everyone is worried about if I saw that taking
| place!
| dave78 wrote:
| > Our interactions with them were almost universally
| positive ... [they'd] try to keep kids from seeing drug use
|
| As someone with kids and living in the Midwest, I just
| don't even have the words to describe my reaction to this.
| Wow.
| bombcar wrote:
| I guess we can translate it to "try not to look at the
| other sport team's fans" or something
| DFHippie wrote:
| This. The cities are actually _safer_.
|
| The chief difference is that the segment of the media
| dedicated to keeping people fearful, particularly of their
| neighbors, is enormous now. It was always the case that
| media liked stories of conflict, but this was moderated by
| a sense of propriety and responsibility to the community.
| Now, certain voices have enormous megaphones and no
| restraints and the paranoia and anger they are actively
| promoting against their own society has taken root
| generally.
| a2tech wrote:
| My wife grew up in the city, and I grew up in the country
| (not the pretend 'doctors commute to the city and have 10
| acres they pretend to farm and raise horses on' but
| 'white trash, holy shit there's no work' county) and my
| wife is HORRIFIED by how much violence and random crime
| there is where I come from. My family still asks how we
| can live in the city since its so dangerous while meth
| heads are stealing anhydrous ammonia from fertilizer
| tanks and will shoot you without blinking if you get in
| their way just down the street from them.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| Safer than what? Suburbs with nice sidewalks and tree
| lined streets and friendly neighbors who know each other?
| Safer than rural areas where everyone knows everyone and
| there's enough law enforcement to work on a 1:1 basis?
| I'm sorry but this just seems like an absolute nonsense
| claim.
| lovich wrote:
| To reply to anecdata with anecdata my experiences with
| suburbs have been a complete lack of sidewalks in favor
| of cars and neighbors not talking to each other except in
| the form of HOA violation notices. For the country, where
| I grew up, everyone did know everyone else, but that was
| only a benefit if you were friends with the town sheriff.
| Good luck taking a walk anywhere when the local hooligans
| would charge at you with their lifted pickups or roll
| coal right next to you, and the sheriff threateningly
| asking you if you are starting a problem when you try and
| file a complaint
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| The comment said cities are safer now than they were
| before, which is true.
|
| > Suburbs with nice sidewalks and tree lined streets and
| friendly neighbors who know each other? Safer than rural
| areas where everyone knows everyone and there's enough
| law enforcement to work on a 1:1 basis?
|
| No, no real place can possibly be safer than a fantasy
| land.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > cities are safer than they've ever been
|
| Seattle has seen a large rise in violent crime, and it's
| hottest around the homeless camps. The fire dept responds
| to fires in those camps daily.
| Volrath89 wrote:
| I grew up in a 3rd world country (now I live in Europe) in
| a city that by HN comments seems similar to SF (big and
| full of harmless homeless people/drug addicts everywhere).
| I remember when I was a kid and I was with my mother I
| stared to a homeless man for some time. Of course he just
| seemed peculiar to me, I was a little kid, but this guy got
| mad and screamed "Do I owe you money or what? why do you
| keep looking at me?"
|
| My mother grabbed me in her arms and we just went away
| quickly. She told me to not look at homeless people for so
| much time. Of course I was very scared, I don't remember
| exactly how old I was but I still remember the episode some
| decades later.
| DFHippie wrote:
| If you stare at anyone long enough they will get mad. I
| don't recommend this experiment.
| cercatrova wrote:
| It's like a primal reaction among apes and other animals
| in general. No wonder humans get mad too at being stared
| at.
| welder wrote:
| > but that doesn't make them dangerous.
|
| Sometimes it does. I like not needing a car in SF too, but
| I do notice my kids being affected negatively after seeing
| a violent deranged person. I bike the long way to school
| instead of walking because it was impacting their mood so
| much. Maybe your kids deal with it better than mine, or
| maybe you're just not noticing how it's affecting them?
| pessimizer wrote:
| > The assault and murder rates due to the untreated mentally
| ill in the cities I've lived in is high and visible.
|
| And far lower than it was when children generally roamed
| freely. The late 70s to the early 90s are when US violence
| _peaked_ , so in the spirit of spurious correlations, a
| functional mental health system must have caused violence:)
|
| edit:
|
| > Case in point a clearly disturbed person walked into my
| daughters school grounds and began exposing himself last
| week.
|
| This happens when you live in a place that has men in it. It
| certainly happened when I was a kid. The only way to keep
| occasional masturbators from cruising the streets doing their
| thing is to ban men.
| bombcar wrote:
| Nearly 50% around here are men but we have zero exposure at
| our schools.
| beej71 wrote:
| I know SF in the last decade has gotten pretty bad, but dad
| also didn't let me walk around SF in the 70s, either. (We
| didn't live there, we just visited.)
|
| Big city life has always been a bit different, so I'd grant
| an out there for a little more helicoptering.
|
| But most of the country isn't SF. (And most of SF isn't SF--
| if that makes any sense. Sunset isn't the Tenderloin.) In the
| town I live in now, things are easily as safe as they were in
| the town I grew up in. And yet--lines of cars in the schools
| every day.
|
| If it's necessary to protect your kid, do it. But I think
| what we're seeing here is a lot of additional protection
| being applied in circumstances that have not changed
| appreciably in the last 50 years.
| chrischen wrote:
| I know the city has gotten a lot of bad press lately, but
| I'm pretty sure SF was _more_ dangerous prior to the rich
| people moving in. It 's just that more rich people started
| complaining after they came. My Uber driver's was always
| talking about how the high school near Dolores park used to
| be a gang hotspot or something.
| asdff wrote:
| To be perfectly honest a lot of peoples perceptions about
| cities back then was highly rooted in race. It was a time
| when white people literally sold their homes and moved if a
| black person moved in on the street, or they even threw
| stones at black people they saw walking around who in their
| head they villified, or worse. Anytime someone has an
| anecdote where they have some adversion to the city,
| especially back then, I can't help but imagine a lot of
| that has to do with racial biases rather than lived
| experiences and actual perspective on how much crime is
| really happening.
| nitrogen wrote:
| I spent my first few years of life living in a city near
| a downtown. My friends were a mix of colors, nth-
| generation residents, immigrants, and refugees. Race had
| nothing to do with why my parents left. It had everything
| to do with the serial rapist attacking our neighbor and
| still on the loose, the markets down the street getting
| repeated drive-by shootings, etc.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I have a lot of trouble accepting this. One of my more vivid
| memories of the late 80s and early 90s is the nightly news
| always having some girl buying ice cream caught in gang
| crossfire. It was _always_ the ice cream truck. We were
| banned from wearing blue, red, or Raiders jerseys because
| supposedly kids were getting shot walking home from school.
| We had smog days pretty regularly where we weren 't allowed
| to play outside because the air quality was so bad.
|
| I'm pretty sure in every real, quantifiable way, children are
| much safer on city streets today than they were 30 years ago.
| We're just also more afraid. It's not like skid row and
| homelessness didn't already exist back then, along with much
| worse drug and gang problems.
|
| I'm sorry your daughter had a naked man wander onto the
| school grounds, but my middle school was shot at during
| recess by drive bys three separate times in the three years I
| was there. Things have not gotten worse.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| My point was more that the rate of severely mentally ill
| living on the streets leads to a very different dynamic. In
| the 70's and 80's we had a functional public health system
| for the mentally ill. That was dismantled and the situation
| today is very different. The difference between a hobo and
| a paranoid schizophrenic is immense. Seedy areas are often
| simply where poor people live, and poor people have kids
| and families - they're just poor, not dangerous. Folks with
| serious mental Illnesses are frankly considerably more
| scary for a kid than seeing drug dealers on the corner, and
| are by nature erratic and unpredictable.
|
| The story of the disturbed man exposing himself wasn't
| particularly about him exposing himself, but about the fact
| there's no where for him to go to receive help, or if he's
| untreatable, somewhere for him to live where his tendencies
| don't hurt society at large. The only place for him today
| is untreated and on the streets - and that changed in the
| late 80's and accelerated through the early 1990's.
| dleslie wrote:
| I now live in the neighbourhood that I grew up in; when I was
| a child there were no transients, no unhoused drug abusers
| living in the bushes that lined the path to the school.
|
| Now there is.
|
| It's _not_ the same; and based on the stats here in BC,
| Canada: I can safely state it's not the same as it was
| anywhere in this province.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Please accept my apologies in advance. I don't mean to sound
| crass. But, after the incident at your daughter's school,
| she's still alive, right? Are you suddenly worried she's
| scarred for life and gonna grow up to be a meth-head? Like I
| said, sorry to be insensitive, but as a fellow Gen-Xer, it
| kinda disappointments me that we've adopted this attitude
| that kids should be protected from, well, *everything*. We
| all saw shit as kids, and we all lived through it.
| Loughla wrote:
| To add to that - the way we do sports and extracurricular
| activities is absolutely mind blowingly different now, too.
|
| Back in my day, neighborhood kids played baseball and football
| and basketball together as they could. Now everything is
| structured and scheduled. There are travel teams for
| kindergartners. There is a coaching structure for 5 year olds.
| Kids play for competition, winning, and opportunity, not just
| for fun.
|
| Maybe this is just me being old, but it's very depressing. It
| adds a layer of pressure to childrens' lives that just doesn't
| need to exist. Parents complain about it, I can't imagine it's
| healthy for kids, but it still exists.
|
| It's so bleak.
| jandrese wrote:
| They aren't going to make that High School sports team if
| they aren't practicing while still in diapers.
|
| In the old days schools were small enough that pretty much
| everybody who bothered to show up could make the team. These
| days they have to turn away most of the kids and the level of
| play is much higher. Academics are the same way, if you want
| your kids in the good school they need to be hounded
| throughout their entire childhood. If you want to see this in
| action, just check out the parents who were apoplectic over
| the change in admissions policy at Thomas Jefferson High
| School. They kept their kid under huge pressure for 15 years
| and suddenly some slackers that even played outside in
| unstructured activities might make it instead?
| twiddling wrote:
| High School sports team?
|
| Nah, they need to be on the Gold Travel Squad for the
| Select club
| floren wrote:
| Getting the kids into structured, college-application-fodder
| activities early enough, so that the kids can get into
| Stanford and get a job that pays enough so _they_ can repeat
| the cycle of abuse, err, pattern of success with _their_
| kids.
| dionidium wrote:
| These societal changes extend _far_ beyond the cohort that
| will attend Ivy League schools.
| trophycase wrote:
| I think the point was more about it being an arms race
| where nobody ends up better off but just has to work
| harder and is more stressed.
| lb1lf wrote:
| There are exceptions, though. I wound up being a track and
| field coach for kids aged 6-9 in the local athletic union.
|
| Much to my surprise and delight, the culture from the
| national association and down is that kids this young will
| NOT compete in the traditional sense - sure, they may join
| local games, but the results will not be published in ranked
| order, and everybody gets a medal.
|
| During training, coaches are encouraged to focus on the
| competition with oneself - 'Good, you long jumped 3" longer
| than you've ever done before!' Rather than 'Wow, Anna jumped
| longer than everybody else!'
|
| It can get serious later on. When they're kids, let them be
| kids and have fun.
|
| (This, though, is in egalitarian to a tee Scandinavia)
| [deleted]
| tpoacher wrote:
| When I was a kid, people would leave the engine running on the
| car with the keys on, while they popped in the convenience
| store to buy a quick item.
|
| We used to leave the doors and windows wide open at home while
| taking a nap, to "air the house".
|
| Different times.
| grecy wrote:
| I live in Canada, both of those examples are extremely common
| today
| Macha wrote:
| Ireland:
|
| The first certainly happens rurally, but would be extremely
| ill advised in the cities
|
| The second is totally normal here too. Even in Dublin. Even
| in the not particularly great neighbourhood I live in.
| throwaway-blaze wrote:
| Guessing you don't live in a major city. These things would
| be fine in rural places all over the world.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| This still happens outside the US. We've managed to become
| paranoid to the point of delusional about the dangers to kids
| here.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98
| Pr0ject217 wrote:
| It was this way for me in late 90's and early 2000's
| Johnny555 wrote:
| _I rode to junior high, where there was parking for hundreds of
| bikes. Recently I drove by that school, and the bike racks were
| gone. This whole concept of waiting in traffic to pick up or
| drop off your kid wasn 't even a thing._
|
| When I was in elementary school (in the 1970's), I thought the
| school was far away - I rode the bus to school and if my
| parents had to take me to school or come to school for any
| reason, they always drove.
|
| It wasn't until I was grown that I realized that the school was
| only about half a mile from home -- I could have walked there
| in less time than it took to walk to the bus stop and wait for
| the bus. There was a 4 lane road between me and the school, but
| it had a traffic light and a crossing guard could have helped
| ensure safety.
| zargon wrote:
| A big difference is that today every kid has a mobile phone. So
| besides the fact that the world is a much safer place than in
| the '70s, kids have unprecedented communications for emergency
| situations as well.
| ericpruitt wrote:
| I was a kid in the 90s, and I had similar upbringing. Although
| I got to school using a bus up until highschool, I was
| generally allowed to roam around outside as much as I wanted,
| and most of my close friends had the same liberties. I have
| fond memories of dragging my friends into the woods for
| adventures, catching lizards and picking berries. I'm happy I
| wasn't a victim of the "it's too dangerous to let children be
| alone outside" approach to parenting that seems to be getting
| more and more popular, and I lament the lack of freedom many
| children have these days.
| Pr0ject217 wrote:
| Same
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| Agree this is mostly dead in America. It's one of the reasons
| my family settled down where we did.
|
| Phoenix Arizona has many master planned communities designed
| around this lifestyle. Our neighborhood has an "interior"
| grassy/park like section with trails that wind and twist for 22
| miles connecting all of the streets. In the center of that is
| our local school. Most houses are within two blocks of an
| entrance to the trails, and you'll see kids out running and
| playing all day. In the mornings you see the kiddos all
| commuting by foot to school - many wait on the corner to meet
| up with their friends before starting off on the walk.
|
| I know of at least two other master planned communities that
| have the same setup with a central school. Wish more of
| suburbia was built like this.
|
| It's a way of life that is worth more than the value of my home
| to me.
| treeman79 wrote:
| People will absolutely call child services on kids that free
| range. You can be arrested and have your kids permanently taken
| away. Rare, but it happens.
|
| I have an adult daughter who thought I was stupid for my
| constant talks about walking to car in groups, Etc.
|
| She moved back home after a kidnap attempt in a parking lot. At
| work, She now deals with teenagers that think her lectures are
| stupid.
| clsec wrote:
| I know this sounds scary to most, but I was doing local
| hitchhiking to go fishing, or bring our bikes up Mt Tam,
| starting at 7-8 yrs old. I walked, rode a bike, or took the bus
| everywhere else.
|
| My parents rarely took me anywhere that didn't involve them.
| And I was always told to be home when the streetlights came on.
|
| I too am very grateful that I was raised way in the 70's.
| dionidium wrote:
| > _Recently I drove by that school, and the bike racks were
| gone._
|
| This is the thing: the bike racks are gone because so are the
| kids walking/biking to school. If you let your kid do it,
| they'll be the only one. I walked to school in the 80s and
| there were lots of kids in my neighborhood walking to school at
| the same time. That's a very different experience. I also lived
| in a neighborhood that was laid out in the early 1900s. How
| many more kids are in car-centric culs-de-sac today? Some of
| these streets don't even have sidewalks. They're not even safe
| for adults to walk on.
|
| You can't combat this enormous societal change by making an
| individual effort to let your kids do more by themselves. Their
| physical and social environment is very different from what it
| was like when kids did that.
| vollmond wrote:
| We have a 5yo and 8yo. Most of the time, the question for
| whether they can handle something is less "are they capable?"
| and more "will someone call CPS?"
| WalterBright wrote:
| If you want a pretty accurate description of what suburban
| family/kid life was like in the 1960s, see the movie "Apollo 10
| 1/2".
| matthewaveryusa wrote:
| FYI check your local law before attempting this. A few states in
| the US have legal minimums for allowing your kids to roam/be
| alone and they vary, but many do not!
| Spellman wrote:
| Helpful map and catalogue of relevant laws in the US:
| https://letgrow.org/resources/state-policy-maps
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| It was 1968 during what was called (at the time) the Hong Kong
| flu outbreak. I was 5 years old. I was the only person in the
| house who was not stricken by it - my parents, uncle, sister,
| cousin all had it and it seemed to hit them pretty hard. But I
| was fine. I recall several days where I was pretty much on my own
| as the adults who had it were bed-ridden. At one point my mom
| sent me to the store about 1/2 mile away with a note I was to
| hand to the grocer and $5 for milk, eggs, bread and soup. I was
| able to complete the mission.
| jcutrell wrote:
| While the most prevalent narrative in threads like this sounds
| something like, "back in my day, we weren't so scared!", there's
| a few assumptions being made. The primary one: people are
| overestimating the risks associated with autonomy we had "back in
| the day" as kids.
|
| It's also just as possible that we are adopting a lower tolerance
| for that risk, _or_ that the risk is better clarified than it
| once was.
|
| When I was growing up, I was allowed to roam the neighborhood. I
| lived on a military base in my youngest years, but later I lived
| in a suburb of a small town.
|
| Nothing seriously bad ever happened to me, but that's anecdotal.
|
| I wonder what is more likely: my parents were more risk tolerant,
| risk ignorant, or the world has become more dangerous. Both are
| possible, but I think the former two are broadly more likely than
| the latter.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >my parents were more risk tolerant, risk ignorant, or the
| world has become more dangerous
|
| almost certainly not the latter given that a significant drop
| in crime since the 80s and 90s is an almost global phenomenon
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop). Drunk driving
| fatalities are down 90% since the 80s despite miles travelled
| having doubled etc. I mean just remember the culture a few
| decades ago, people did not give a fuck about anything.
|
| People really have become comically anxious even though many
| places are considerably safer and cleaner. Maybe because of it.
| a3w wrote:
| https://text.npr.org/1093153651 Link that actually loads in the
| EU. Also, as a german citizen: isn't that public knowledge? When
| seven years old I walked to my school and visited neighbors
| afterwards without telling anyone where I was going, as long as
| that I was not delayed too much.
|
| (When 27 years old and moving back in with my parents, that
| actually changed, but after a few years I trained them to let me
| live my own life again.)
| tetris11 wrote:
| The difference is that you likely grew up in a strong permanent
| community, where your neighbours weren't constantly moving
| in/out.
|
| In Mediterranean cultures its completely normal for kids to
| stay up late playing with their friends and staying over at
| each others houses without any parental coordination required
| at all.
|
| When you have a strong community, trust is more easily built.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| The US has small towns, many of which don't have people
| moving often.
|
| And I'd argue that moving often is a side effect of not
| having a robust enough safety net that allows folks to avoid
| this sort of upheaval.
| kbrannigan wrote:
| My country. You see little kids walking to school by themselves.
|
| Taking public transportation. Running errands.
|
| It was a shock when I saw how parents helicoptered their children
| here.
| civilized wrote:
| I have two young kids and I'm very sympathetic to the philosophy
| of free range parenting. But jeez, when it comes to actually
| letting my 6-year old walk to the grocery store alone? It's...
| really scary... just being honest here. Maybe I can get over
| that? I don't know.
| bombcar wrote:
| The key is you work up to it, and allow it when the time is
| right. The article talks about the kid learning to not run into
| the street, learning to safely cross the street, going to the
| store, etc.
|
| Heck, with modern phones and watches it's even easier to keep
| track of what's happening.
| lazyweb wrote:
| Just as note, but the Japanese show mentioned in the article
| ("Old Enough") is absolutely delightful. Episodes are usually
| between 10-20 minutes (the longest being the one with the fish /
| apple disaster). AFAIK there are currently 20 subtitled episodes
| available on netflix.
| jamier1978 wrote:
| As a someone living in the UK I find a lot of these comments by
| people in the US mind blowing. People calling CPS / police
| because they see kids playing alone in the park? What the hell is
| going on over there!
| lupire wrote:
| A 4 yr old can also get distracted and walk in front of a car, or
| climb over a railing and fall of a bridge.
| awhitby wrote:
| And 4 yr olds are harder to see for drivers. I guess rear
| cameras have probably made suburbia safer for unaccompanied
| small children (less reversing out of drive risk) but the
| growth in large trucks with poor visibility [0] has probably
| otherwise made roads less safe.
|
| [0] https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/the-hidden-
| danger...
| kemayo wrote:
| > But, and this is key, I didn't simply hand Rosy some money, a
| grocery bag, close my eyes and send her to the market up the
| street.
|
| The article does note that there was a whole process leading up
| to sending the kid out on an errand. Lots of out-and-about
| skill acquisition in gradually more-independent settings,
| culminating in the trip to the store. One assumes that if the
| child was particularly prone to distractions like that, it'd
| have come up and been worked on.
| a3w wrote:
| Having seen 1 though 5 year old children in save indoor spaces
| at a nursery and the woodlands with rusty fences: the latter
| group moves more up a muddy hill with bolders then the
| protected group walks over a carpet.
|
| But okay, the amount of bruises increases in the wilderness.
| The amount of crying over that decreases by 99 percent.
| aequitas wrote:
| The article describes the child was already engaging in
| dangerous behaviour (climbing the roof) and pushing boundaries.
| By giving errands you are (gradually) setting new boundaries
| for the child you have at least some control over, instead of
| them suddenly discovering they can go into the neighbourhood or
| wherever that you don't know about. At least that is what I
| understand from it. The alternative would be more/stricter
| boundaries I think. But that would just lead to more undesired
| and dangerous behaviour from the child to break those
| boundaries.
| nottorp wrote:
| > The article describes the child was already engaging in
| dangerous behaviour (climbing the roof)
|
| I spent a good part of my summer holidays as a kid on the
| roof of a shed. Or in the tree near it, a bit higher.
| Different country though.
| kingcharles wrote:
| A large number of adults get distracted by their phones and get
| run over. The child is probably more aware of its environment
| than most adults.
| tomrod wrote:
| Depends on the kid. Kids tend to have more variability in
| their attention spans and recognition of danger.
| edge17 wrote:
| I think the point is, if it's generally accepted culture in the
| community then others will be mindful as well because they know
| what's going on.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Netflix has a Japanese show called Old Enough. It shows Japanese
| children doing their first errand. Example: walking a kilometer
| to the store (including crossing a busy street), buying 3 items
| and bringing them back.
|
| Age? 2 years, 9 months.
|
| It's wild.
|
| I grew up at a time and a place where I had a lot of
| independence. I rode a bike everywhere. I'd do things by myself
| and with friends. I actually feel sad for kids nowadays. Being a
| kid now seems to be being at home or getting shuttled from
| preplanned activity to preplanned activity in a car.
|
| Almost everywhere in the US, it's really not possible to do it
| any other way because the entire infrastructure is predicated on
| car ownership.
|
| Fears of abduction and worse are real of course but the risks are
| overstated. I actually think these risks are made worse by the
| ubiquity of cars. I mean think about it: it becomes a lot more
| difficult to abduct someone without a private vehicle.
| usrn wrote:
| Japan has a _far_ lower crime rate than most US cities.
| asdff wrote:
| Even still the crime rates in the US are extremely low.
| charcircuit wrote:
| The show is actually called hazimetenootsukai and it has been
| around for a long time, even before Netflix existed.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I actually think these risks are made worse by the ubiquity
| of cars.
|
| But this isn't new.
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