The closing of this article is actually the key for me. I've been trying to teach my kids that if they have a problem, and I'm not around, they should pick an adult and ask for help. The odds that they will pick an adult that has malicious intention is astronomically small. The odds that things will get worse because they can't bring themselves to ask someone for help seem much higher.
"Stranger kidnappings" (where someone the child doesn't know kidnaps them) are incredibly rare, a child is at much more risk from traffic, guns, cancer, or swimming pools.
The reason why child kidnappings (non-stranger) are seemingly common is because the vast majority of these are by family members (e.g. parents during a custody dispute, grandparents, etc).
Child molesters are also very rare (although you can make them seem more common by massaging the statistics, as some charities/politicians/media like to do), and on average in a large retailer there won't even be a single one.
There are stories where kids have literally died both because they were scared to approach a stranger, or a stranger was scared to approach them.
I have a kid. I am going to teach them to approach any adult, with a slight bias towards people who work there (simply because they are more likely to know the procedure for lost child, not because they're inherently safer/less safe).
> "Stranger kidnappings" (where someone the child doesn't know kidnaps them) are incredibly rare, a child is at much more risk from traffic, guns, cancer, or swimming pools.
Agreed, I am a parent as well. But a word of warning, you'll get mean looks and talk behind your back from playground parents if you take that attitude.
I've seen moms and dads on playground who are way out there in assessing what is threatening and what is not. They'd see a man walking by the playground going by their business and start calling their children closer to them acting all scared. Or make comments about "hmm what are they doing, we haven't seen this person before". Mind you we were not in a crime ridden neighborhood, this is a quiet suburban area. Was going to say "lay of the news people, take it easy" but of course couldn't they'd think I am crazy.
Oh and co-worker's neighbor called CPS (child protective services) on them because they were playing by themselves in the cul-de-sac while the parents watched from inside the house. They of course don't know who did it, and even if they knew there no repercussion they could take against that person. They can always claim "they thought of the children", nobody can argue with that...
> "I've seen moms and dads on playground who are way out there in assessing what is threatening and what is not. They'd see a man walking by the playground going by their business and start calling their children closer to them acting all scared."
This happens to me all the time in the grocery store. In the past I was a teacher, and now I'm a stay-at-home dad. If I have my son with me, everyone thinks I'm awesome for being a man who takes responsibility for his kid; if he's at school and I'm at the store and happen to be within half a mile of a kid, people look at me like I'm a creeper.
Hrmm... maybe you are doing something you're not aware of? I go in to grocery stores all the time by myself and never get weird looks. Really, I'm pretty sure I'd notice after 20+ years of being an adult male in grocery stores (nearly all the time by myself).
Yes, but solitary men are mistrusted around children in public
Example: your at the grocery store when a young child wanders around the corner and starts pulling items off the shelf onto the floor right in front of you. A woman could stop the child, ask "where are your parents?" and carry the child to fjnd the parents. A man better back away and ignore the child lest somebody call the cops.
It may also have to do with specific circumstances -- like regional culture. In Seattle, everyone was always cold regardless. In patriarchal northern Utah (in the small town where friends of mine run safe-houses for people fleeing polygamy) I got different dirty looks for being alone than for having my child (wives are supposed to be watching the kids in that culture.) In my part of Denver, being white makes me stand out.
In any case, I have noticed different treatment when I'm with my son and when I'm alone.
I allow my kids to play in our cul-de-sac by themselves all the time. I've never really been worried about them.
When I was a kid I'd hop on my bike and my friends and I would ride into town, buy pizza, come home a few hours later. It was normal.
This trend toward having to stay within arms reach of your children at all times is, in my opinion, very unhealthy for a child as they don't have opportunities to build confidence and independence.
My parents let me play in the cul-de-sac all the time. It's why we moved to one!
One time as an adult, I got a cop called because my music was too loud. The next day, I went to all my adjacent neighbors and said, without malice, "If there are any issues, I'm receptive to being a good neighbor, let me know if I can help".
I would have done the same thing in the instance of CPS called on my kids. "Hello, I watch my children and they know how to handle themselves on our home street. If you see a dangerous situation, let me know immediately and we'll work to fix it."
Then, if they have any issue with that, we can have it out.
> But a word of warning, you'll get mean looks and talk behind your back from playground parents if you take that attitude.
You will never please everyone. Ignore strange looks. If you would be surrounded by anti-vaccine people would you avoid vaccination only because they give you weird looks?
This is not the interesting point of his comment, though. The interesting part is, even in a world where stranger kidnappings were more common - letting the child pick an adult to ask for help is extremely safe.
It's letting an adult choose to approach the kid first where the stranger kidnapping even becomes a statistical possibility.
I won't be teaching my kids that men are inherently dangerous/child molesters. But you're welcome to bring them up that way.
Any adult is fine. The chance of them being dangerous is incredibly low, regardless of gender. Plus the whole "men are bad" thing just mixes a simple message up, what if they spot a member of staff somewhere but they're male. Do they approach or do they not? What if a man is the only adult around?
To be honest the whole "men are dangerous" thing is very much a large part of the core problem. It is stranger danger all over again.
As a parent, I see the intent there more as Parent > Non-Parent, rather than woman > man.
If your child has a problem, chances are another parent will already have on their mind ways to help, or things they might need (water, band-aid, phone to call mom, change of pants), and at the very least might be inclined to help them more than others might be. They may be more likely to recognize child-related issues ("Bumped your head? let's check your eyes ...") than non-parents, simply because thinking about precautions, worst-case scenarios, and the like are something parents have to consider.
I never used to think about how to find the bathroom in a store, for example, as proactively as I now do once I have kids, and never used to carry water and snacks with me wherever I went. Nowadays I effectively carry emergency water, food, wipes, band-aids, and a change of clothes when we go to the park.
This is not to say that non-parents are bad to ask for help -- far from it! Merely that kids, who often are already anxious around strangers, may be disarmed a little more easily by the fact that someone else is clearly a parent.
Right. It's basic math. Even if 0.1% of men are going to molest a random kid and it's 0.01% for women, there is a 99.9% chance a random man is not a child molester. It's noise.
Similar reasoning applies to why you should ignore all the "X doubles the risk of [some rare Y]" stuff you read in the media.
No matter who you choose, when you inevitably lose the lottery, you will still only have lost one dollar either way. When a child chooses to not go to an adult at all because only men are around, they might be facing more dire consequences than simply losing a dollar. A valid response to playing the lottery is "don't play the lotto, 10x chance or not"... for a child, there are some things that only adults are equipped to handle, and a valid response isn't to tell a 5 year old "don't go to a man, but do go to a woman". How might that work out at a football/soccer game?
The parent clearly said that they suggested a _bias_ towards a female instead of a male and a bias towards a parent. You'd have to judge the advice based on your/the child some very young children clearly wouldn't understand advice based on a hierarchy of responses.
I've given this advice to my children giving "mother with children" > "store worker" > "other person with kids" > "policeman or someone in uniform or someone you think looks friendly" as the hierarchy.
You're right there is far more than money at stake - isn't that even more reason to push the odds in your favour as much as possible.
Perhaps a better analogue is that you can choose between two hospitals for your child's operation who are both very good but one has 10x the mortality rate of the other, you'd express a preference for the hospital with better outcomes regardless of the sex of the surgeons wouldn't you?
"You'd have to judge the advice based on your/the child some very young children clearly wouldn't understand advice based on a hierarchy of responses."
Except the risk reward outcomes are inverted and time is a factor. Say you're boarding a plane but are running a few minutes late. With a male agent, there is a 99.9% chance they'll give you a break and get on the flight in time. With a female agent, there is a 99.99% chance.
What do you do? You go to the first available agent.
... with a bias to a female agent. If both are available at the same time you'd choose the female agent or you'd choose political correctness over logic.
[FWIW I'm a male who works with kids almost daily and often appear to be discriminated against because of my sex.]
Statistically, you can expect to get into a car accident once every 18 years. So it's not a low probability event. If your lifetime odds of getting in a car crash were 1% I wouldn't wear a seat belt.
Woah, this isn't at all what the poster said, or even implied. In any case, men would statistically make up a higher percentage of child molesters, etc.
Saying to have a slight bias toward children approaching women than men is a far cry from 'men are bad.'
> Woah, this isn't at all what the poster said, or even implied.
Yes it was.
They said (paraphrasing): Women are ok. Men are not. "Mommies" (i.e. women with kids) are even better, dads are not.
If that isn't what they meant, that's fine, but that's definitely what they implied. There's no other way of reading it.
> In any case, men would statistically make up a higher percentage of child molesters, etc.
Perhaps, but we're talking astronomically small chances here.
Plus if you look at those offenses the number of child molesters who molested strangers is even tinier than the number who did it at all. The vast majority assaulted friends or family (which your advice does not protect them from).
The risk of a child getting lost and asking a child molester who is willing to kidnap them for help is near a rounding error in unlikeness.
All you teaching your kids to distrust men and male role models is doing is screwing them up, it isn't keeping them safe.
I forget where this advice came from, but the intent was if you find an parent actively in parent mode (stroller) you're likely to find a person sympathetic to a child in need.
> They said (paraphrasing): Women are ok. Men are not...There's no other way of reading it.
No, they said "bias towards female." Any reading which reads "bias towards x" as "x is ok, !x is not." is a complete violation of both the words and the intent of the statement.
Furthermore, biasing towards women doesn't remotely imply "men are bad." It's simply an established fact that women on average are more nurturing and empathetic, and those are qualities one should seek when one needs help.
> It's simply an established fact that women on average are more nurturing and empathetic, and those are qualities one should seek when one needs help.
I'd argue that most non-developmentally delayed adults are fully equipped to assist a lost or scared child.
This might come as a shock to modern society but men are fathers, grandpas, brothers, and uncles to little kids. They know how to interact with them.
All you're doing is repeating common gender tropes. There are plenty of women that are about as nurturing as a potato, and plenty of men that are extremely nurturing and comforting. But ultimately that is completely besides the point as we're talking about someone who has to take a little kid's hand and bring them to customer services/store security, we aren't asking them to adopt the child.
I'm disappointed in HN's voting here. You're tragically incorrect in your interpretation of the grandparent comment, and you shouldn't have been praised for it, nor should I have been downvoted for pointing this out. "There's no other way of reading it" would be laughably wrong if you weren't so seriously deluded by your focus on turning everything into an Men's Rights gender battle.
> I'd argue that most non-developmentally delayed adults are fully equipped to assist a lost or scared child.
No one said a fucking thing about being "fully equipped to assist." Those are your words: not mine, not the grandparent's, but yours. We're talking about a bias here, and biases express preferences. Even among a population of adults "fully equipped to assist" it's reasonable to have a preference for women. Most doctors are "fully equipped to assist" you when you get sick, but some are better than others, and if there were a statistically sound way to pick the better ones, you'd use that. It's the same exact thing here.
> [M]en are fathers, grandpas, brothers, and uncles to little kids. They know how to interact with them.
I know how to interact with them. I've got four children myself as well as a niece and a nephew. As far as I can tell, you're making things up as you go along; I'm actually one of those "fully equipped to assist" men who can and will happily help a lost or scared child. I'm friends with many other "fully equipped to assist" men and women who likewise would help a lost or scared child. As a parent who has to teach my four kids what to do if they're lost or scared, I not just reasoning in the abstract about this problem: I'm looking at the sum total of the people I've seen and making a sound, statistically based decision what to teach my kids.
Like you said, if a lost or scared kid approaches me and needs help, I'm going to make sure they're safely handed off to customer service or store security, then I'm going to go about my business. It's not complicated or hard, and I'm not going to let it impact my day too much: I'll hand off to an authority and move on. I've got things to do, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to spend more time than I must with someone's random lost kid.
Contrast that with what my wife would do if approached by a lost or scared kid. She'd probably first get the kid to calm down with hugs and tear-wiping. She'd introduce him to our kids, find out his name, find out the names of his mommy or daddy, and start tracking down his parents. She'd look far and wide to try to track his parents down before even going to the store employee, and if she couldn't find them, when she went to the store employee, she'd probably stay there and comfort the kid until his parents arrived to pick them up. She'd move heaven and earth to make sure that kid was reunited with his parents before she left.
And you know what? That difference would manifest in every single father/mother pair I know. In every case, I know that even though the father would be fully equipped to assist a lost or scared kid, the mom would be better at comforting the kid and would work harder at helping the kid than the dad would. Heck, one of my friends is a baby/kid/family photographer. His job is to entertain kids. Kids love him. But when I asked him, "Who would do more to help a lost, scared kid in a department store?" he answered without reservation, "My wife. I'd just drop the kid off at security."
> But ultimately that is completely besides the point as we're talking about someone who has to take a little kid's hand and bring them to customer services/store security, we aren't asking them to adopt the child.
That attitude is exactly why I tell my kids to prefer seeking help from women. Because statistically speaking they'll work harder to help the kid and do a better job of making the kid feel better. I don't care if you or anyone else thinks it's a "trope": it's reality, and reality is what I teach my kids.
Is your spouse cool with that line of thinking? It's legit, odds are nothing bad will happen but we live in a fear based society anymore...
I live in a fairly well-to-do bedroom community, it's a rural area a short drive from some bigger cities in Colorado. The neighborhood nextdoor.com info is an interesting read. The sheriff (we don't have town police, it's a small place, 5000ish people) is called for ringing and running, that's like the main offense. It seems like there are fears when there are work men of color in the area doing things (building new houses, etc..) it appears that their presence correlates to the crime of breaking in to cars in neighboring cities, at least in the minds of some. I can confess there is a slight feeling of isolation at times, like if you had a problem you couldn't solve, it could take 15-30minutes for a police officer to help you but in 8 years I'm unaware of such a problem happening in the town. For the most part it is insanely safe, like you could leave your doors unlocked and expect no issues.
When my son get's on the school bus, he has to swipe a badge. They can track where he get's on a bus and where he get's off. That's what we've come to. They have 4 different kinds of "drills." There is the fire drill we all grew up with. There is "lock down" where they all stay in their class rooms and lock the doors. There is a harder form of that where they stay in the class rooms, lock all the doors and windows and the try to hide. Then there is a drill where they go in the school basement, being that there are tornados in the area from time to time that's not too unreasonable but the staff is open with parents that it's for the event that there is some sort of a disturbance that is used to draw kids outside to attack in the open. The school itself (this is K-5) has locks on all doors, you have to buzz in, or swipe a badge at any time of day.
It's all in how you look at it, I guess. The technology is fairly inexpensive and if it helps with anything, then maybe it seems worth it. It's definitely playing in to the culture of fear that exists though. What's really shocking, at least to me, is how cool everyone seems to be with everything. We got emails from the school when the did some of the drills, just to let us know our kids might tell us about something odd that they did. I can't imagine how they'd possibly let middle-school or younger kids on public transportation around here.
Yikes, and I find the UK level of security over the top (basic locked school gates; parents/guardians or childminders must bring and pick up; children are not released otherwise). (EDIT: This is primary school)
My brothers kids are 7 and 5 and live in Norway where I'm from, and the older is allowed to leave school by himself (the school has no fences and no gates, granted this is a relatively rural school, but unlocked gates is the norm pretty much everywhere in Norway, and 6-7 years olds are generally allowed to go to/from school by themselves - when I was 7 I had a 30 minute walk to/from school every day).
He'll walk to the nearby nursery and pick up his 5 year old sister and they'll walk home together (10-15 minute walk).
This. I grew up in rural Norway, and our elementary school playground was (and still is) right on the edge of the forest, with no fences. And we're talking a proper 200 square mile forest, with mooses, deer, cliffs, marshes, lakes, rivers, the lot.
I ran away from school into the forest once; came back after a couple of hours. Got a stern talk and a note home.
> The school itself (this is K-5) has locks on all doors, you have to buzz in, or swipe a badge at any time of day.
> The technology is fairly inexpensive and if it helps with anything, then maybe it seems worth it.
I expect they realize that and solved this problem (I'm interested in knowing how), but one of the main thing that worries me with policies of locking everything up is fire safety. When you have a building with many people, there should always be a path from any point outside to the evacuation area that has as little obstructions as possible (preferably zero, but that's not always applicable - e.g. areas handling classified information or dangerous objects). I always cringe when I see locked doors on evacuation path - with a panicking crowd, it's a disaster waiting to happen.
What worries me is how hard it is to get in to rescue someone who got lost in the rush after everyone else was evacuated. It's not that easy to break through panes of glass.
My wife has those same pangs of concern from time to time. That balance of the logic vs those pangs of concern is interesting. I think it can be easy to let the concern outweigh the logic.
In the US there's about 100 child kidnappings by strangers every year [1]. So you're claiming that each year, there are fewer than 10000*100 = 1 million times in the US that a stranger talks to a child. There are 50 million children in the US under age 12 [2], so only one in fifty children would be approached by a stranger in each year. How many times did a stranger talk to you as a child? More than none? Were you kidnapped?
> How many times did a stranger talk to you as a child? More than none? Were you kidnapped?
Just to share anecdotes, I had a few memorable experiences as a kid (and probably many more that I don't remember).
A very nice person helped fix my bike chain when it slipped off the gears and got wedged against the frame. Without them, I'd have a long walk home with a stuck back wheel.
On another occasion, while I was playing outside my house, a man came by and invited me to attend his church. My parents weren't keen on that, and I was rather uninterested so we never took him up on the offer. I presume he was a Jehova's Witness or a Mormon.
This article (from 2007) has a map that stuck with me. It shows the decreasing range of permissible movement over the past century in Sheffield, England.
It would be very interesting to have a similar map across different countries and compare.
The thing is, most parents I know would agree this is troubling, but few of them actually allow their children to roam with anything close to actual freedom until high school age.
Remarkably, "During the 1600s, a shift in philosophical and social attitudes toward children and the notion of 'childhood' began in Europe." This seems to imply that the notion of childhood didn't even exist. Prior to this it explains that, "Children were often temporarily sent off as servants to relatives in need of help."
I know in my own family, my great-grandfather's many sisters and brothers (13 in total) had tremendous work responsibilities as children. We appear to have gone from one extreme to the other.
Don't forget that a couple of hundred years later, the teenager was invented. Prior to that, then pretty much at puberty you were deemed to be an adult, and you'd go off to work/marriage/both. (But it's important to remember that puberty now is way earlier than it was then, mostly due to better health and diet, IIRC.)
I do find myself wondering what the next social step will be, as social maturity diverges even further from physical maturity...
Well, that's kind of starting to happen with higher education going into the twenties and independent family life only beginning in people's thirties, sometimes even late thirties. In rich countries there is this new phase of partying, travelling, "finding yourself", living freely without much responsibility, still depending on parents for certain things etc.
It's getting more widespread though. But I'm from Central Europe, not the US. Nowadays the prestige of university/college is becoming similar to the prestige of secondary school some decades ago, i.e. it's almost a default requirement for an intellectual (non-physical) job. But while secondary school was finished at the age of about 18, university/college adds another ~5 years to that. Also marketing and the general zeitgeist makes people stay like children. I mean, I know people who just kind of drift along with time, beyond the age of 30 and they still feel a bit weird when thinking about themselves as adults.
Also life span was much shorter, productive years of life were much lesser and there was little incentive to spend time in things such as "learning". It made sense to prepare children of life's hard work right from the beginning. Just the way we currently burden little ones with learning alphabets, basic numbers and memorizing math tables. We don't see these things as burden today but may be 100 years later when human beings will have to work very little to achieve a lot some of the people would look back at future and say our ancestors forced their little Children to learn thing like math tables only to make them slaves at some corporate office.
My understanding is that puberty is earlier due to additives in food. Tofu, for example, has compounds that mimic female hormones. Compounds in soft plastics are thought to disrupt the hormones of young children, too.
As long as we're throwing out unproven but provocative theories along these lines -- I think I read something about how residual compounds from birth control passes through to urine and then into our water supply in trace amounts, triggering hormonal changes that lead to earlier puberty. I like that one, it has a lot of things going for it: tainted water supply, culpability of drug companies, punishment for our hubris in thinking we could control reproduction, etc.
That's an interesting theory- I don't think I've heard anyone claim that before. Do you have any sources off-hand? It kinda sounds pseudosciency, but I haven't looked into it at all.
I feel that the battle is kind of lost when you have ventured into this level of detail. If you have to discuss "legitimate way to give permission" to a child it has reached outside the realms of parenting common sense.
I think lot of these issues tie-in very closely to the fact that government is trying to control our lives with the assumption that government knows better than us. As an Indian immigrant to India I am extremely concerned to about my child here because I simply can not exercise my inherited parenting judgement anymore.
One thing liberty loving individuals could do here is learn a thing or two from NRA and completely deny any legislative space to the law makers on this issue. These small bills will not deter the government from what they are already doing.
I hate people calling normal parenting a "free range parenting movement." It's not. When I was a little kid in the early 1990's, even my overprotective asian parents let me walk to and from school. And I think even today the majority of parents would think nothing of it. Legislation like this is a response to a vocal minority of psychotic millenials. Because few of their peers have kids, and they've moved far from home in pursuit of their careers, they have no frame of reference for normal parenting.
Norms are not static and based on your experiences as a child. It's labeled "free range parenting" because it is no longer the norm.
Edit: I should have been more careful in my wording. Whether it is "the norm" is obviously very location dependent. The US is a large country with all sorts of different norms at the community level.
I happen to have grown up in a suburban Midwest community (incredibly safe) with large residential areas directly across the street from many schools. However, walking to school was prohibited. Any students caught walking were subject to suspension and the school threatened to report parents to law enforcement. Obviously my particular anecdote doesn't apply to everyone, but there are some communities with insane policies in the US.
In an affluent Maryland suburb? That should be the norm.
If you live east of the Anacostia in DC then yeah, the kids aren't as safe outside on their own, but that's more from a gang recruitment angle than a traditional "stranger danger".
Obviously people who live in crime ridden ghettos can't be quite as free as people who live in safe neighborhoods, and it's something we should fix in the long term, but it doesn't mean we should punish those people who live in safe areas with overly restrictive laws that hurt their children's development.
It's kind of sad that the kids who are already disadvantaged by being poor, having failing schools, and likely only a single parent are also the ones who don't get to be free and learn independence as children. It's yet another cog on the cycle of poverty.
Ironically, it's the other way around. In the last few years, my wife and I have lived in New Rochelle, NY; Wilmington, DE; and Baltimore, MD. These cities are poor and have a heavily minority population. But they are also full of kids running around without a parent in sight. It's the affluent Maryland suburbs where the yuppies are too paranoid to let their kids out of their sight.
To be fair, when my kids are out playing I keep an eye on them, but mostly because they are 2 and still don't always remember to look for cars before running out in the street (but getting better).
I mentioned it in my edit above, but I grew up in an affluent Midwest suburb where parents were threatened with criminal action if they let their kids walk to school. Even high school aged students were threatened with suspensions for walking. Whether this is the "norm" will depend on where you live, but there are certainly entire communities where letting kids walk to school is not the norm.
Initiating a legal battle is not for the faint of heart. Few want to tangle with authority, and the kind of people that would implement + enforce such a thing (e.g. school administrators) are notorious for being petty and inflexible. Moreover, they often have lots of legal backing for their actions (due to "in loco parentis" status) that are hard to pin down.
Most parents don't have the resources for such a suit (or defense), and most students probably don't want to risk getting suspended/expelled or sent to a different school for being the one who sticks up for their rights.
No "tangling" is needed, just someone to file the suit. I would be surprised if there was not a lawyer in the whole state interested in working on it at a reduced cost due to the subject. The local ACLU chapter would be a good place to look.
As others said, no one cared enough to get into a legal battle.
And to be honest, the buses weren't bad. Particularly in the winter. You would have been crazy to want walk instead of getting picked up outside your house and dropped off at school. You could get a school permit to drive to school at 14 too (I drove to school in 8th grade), so kids in high school really didn't care about walking.
I also never heard of anyone actually getting in trouble for walking. It was probably just an empty threat, but it was meaningful enough that no one ever tested it.
most likely because the local school transportation company owner was related to someone high enough in the school board (not sure what they are called in US) to pass such BS rules.
The only way this could possibly make sense is if it was somehow unsafe to walk near the schools...e.g. they are on major throughways without sidewalks. Otherwise how is walking from school to a nearby home different from walking home from a bus stop? Or do they stop at every house and verify the child actually enters?
We actually had a "campus" so the buses were able to get you incredibly close to your school. Any walking you did was on a path similar to what you might find on a typical university campus outside of major urban areas. In this regard, walking was a bit different given that you had no roads to cross when walking from the bus to your school. In the end, I think it all really came down to not wanting to hire people to maintain crosswalks.
I wouldn't have thought that statement controversial, but here's a reference if there's really someone out there that doesn't think that the availability bias plays into our perception of risk:
No its very much normal still. However due to shifts in parents its not as prevalent as it used to be ( Kids spending more time indoors, fewer "neighborhood" schools, many other things ). So you don't see it as much, but every parent I know is very comfortable letting their kids wander in their neighborhoods even if the kids don't do that as much.
I walked to and from school as an elementary student without incident. While there might be areas that are too dangerous for this to be appropriate, the idea that it might be considered by some as 'child abuse' is a bit scary in its own right.
Really, it only takes a small number of paranoid and politically active people to push through poorly conceived laws that turn their neuroses into felonies. All because we must "think of the children".
The worst part is that this feeds directly into "stranger danger" scare tactics that encourage helicopter parenting to thwart some exceedingly unlikely scenarios.
Can we stop falling into the long-standing [1] tradition of acting like this is all the fault of a particular generation.
It stems from a multitude of things, like a political climate that caters to the vocal minority, the PC movement that has everyone on edge, and the 24-hour news cycle that lives for a tragic story they can cycle over and over for an entire day/week.
I'd love to have hacker news without all the "rabble, rabble, rabble".
These pseudo 'generations' like Millenials, Gen-Y, Gen-X etc are really just marketing demographics that have become mainstream.
Probably 36 year olds shop similarly to 20 year olds.
Food for thought:
Some say capitalism distorts and invades our language. This is why church groups have annual general meetings, and why ministers wear suits. It's why terms like 'cost benefit analysis' creep into settings like child care and recreational activities. It's why teachers say to kids: 'Can you not hit people going forward?' It's why on the news 'people' are referred to as 'consumers' and so on.
It made a lot more sense to talk about 'boomers' which was (and still is) a large demographic bulge. It worked so well that people got used to the idea that there should be a term for each successive generation.
But obviously it's been extended beyond meaningful utility.
I'm not sure how true it is even from a marketing perspective. 36 year olds tend to be parents (anywhere from newborns to teenagers), whereas 20 year olds tend to be in college or living at home.
Exactly. I work as a developer for a company that could broadly be described as retail, so our company portal has articles targeted to individual locations. I see titles like "Should you hire millenials?" and wonder how they could possibly get around this.
My supervisor at the time was encouraged to take a class on managing millenials. He was born in the early 80s, married for a while, and has a kid in middle school. He thought it was very weird to take the class as a "millenial."
Of course it's not just millennials. I suspect there is a strong socioeconomic disparity in helicopter parenting, with it being much more common among the demographic that reads CityLab than the one that does not.
I'm really confused as to how your link associates this phenomenon with millenials. It doesn't contain that term, nor does it talk about children in any time period where millenials could be their parents. If anything it is talking about the parents of the millenials.
Making this about a particular generation is just silly in general, and the trend toward blaming everything on "the millenials" in particular is ugly and misguided.
I will say that though I let my child walk to school, most of the parents at that school who are driving their children are not what I would classify as "Millennial" (I'm assuming that mostly applies to college aged adults right now).
Even as an older parent myself, I will also say that I have some nervousness about letting children walk because I find that drivers are more distracted and careless than they were when I was walking to school. If you are walking at an intersection where a right turn on red is allowed, you better have your head on a swivel because there's a good chance no one is looking at you, at least not where I am. If they need to cross an especially busy street with fast moving traffic, I'm also concerned about drivers with cell phones not paying attention to the road. I'm not sure I trust my 8 year old to have the situational awareness to know that drivers are discourteous or distracted.
But... it's worth the risk for the independence, and it is fairly rare that there's a pedestrian involved accident, but not unheard of where I live.
My first gut reaction was, like many, that policing whether children can walk to school is effing retarded.
But, I remember when we had no seat belt laws or child seats, and that was a dumb idea, and got solved by government intrusion. My parents moved me and my siblings to Mexico for a year, and used to send us walking through the city on own. I was the oldest, at 7, my sister was 6, my brother 4. One time my brother was kicked in the head by a horse while we were wandering in a field petting the horses. In retrospect, my parents were lucky he lived, and a little more supervision may have been called for.
I have children, and usually encourage them to walk to school, a little under a mile. But, I'd never let them loose on their own in a foreign country.
I'm also white and have lived only in at least middle class, ridiculously safe neighborhoods, except for my year in Mexico, my whole life. I realize I've been really lucky, and that there are a wide variety of people and places and standards and ways kids can and do get hurt. So, who am I to judge?
I think I could accept policing being reasonable, if it turned out that it did on average prevent injuries or deaths, and that my feelings about what's too intrusive might be irrelevant, biased, or lacking data.
> I remember when we had no seat belt laws or child seats
There's really no downside to putting on a seat belt, or using a child seat. There's a big downside for being overly protective of children - both for their development and for busy parents.
I'd wager my personal preferences align with yours, but I'm playing devil's advocate as an exercise in trying to be open minded before deciding what I think about the new laws.
There was a lot of uproar about the downsides of seat belt laws when they were proposed. It took government action in the face of industry and some public opposition to make it happen. It doesn't seem like there are downsides now, but in fact there was a fight, and hindsight is 20/20.
Do we have proof and data that being over-protective has big downsides? Do we have proof that driving kids to school amounts to being overly protective? Is it really clear cut? Is it possible to be protective about physical safety and lax about social development? I don't know that, even if I suspect it.
I'm personally afraid of being over-protective of my children. And, like I said, I send my kids to school on foot. But I might be able to withhold my own incredulity toward the idea of this kind of policing until more evidence has stacked up. ;)
When you say that you're white and middle class, are you implying that perhaps non-white and lower class parents aren't as responsible, and therefore need the police to step in?
I have an issue with "if it turned out that it did on average prevent injuries or deaths" line of reasoning. With 380 M people, it's an easy standard to reach.
"8 year old Becky, with her irresponsible parents, would be alive today if there had been a law." That's going to be easy to say. But what you can't easily measure is something along the lines of "these hundred thousand children are not learning life skills because we codified fear of low risk situations into law."
The costs are disperse and hard to measure, the benefits easily identified. So we have a bias to "do something."
> When you say that you're white and middle class, are you implying that perhaps non-white and lower class parents aren't as responsible, and therefore need the police to step in?
No. I meant exactly what I said, that I feel lucky that my upbringing has involved environments that are safe for kids. The only parents I implied were irresponsible in my entire comment were my parents.
> these hundred thousand children are not learning life skills because we codified fear of low risk situations into law.
That's also easy to say. (And if true, should have some easily measurable effects.) But there are millions of parents already driving their kids to school, with or without any laws. If that is causing the kind of problems you suggest, that children are not learning life skills en masse, we're already there. Would you advocate requiring kids to walk to school, and enacting laws to make driving them illegal?
Preventing kids from walking down a public street is nearly as stupid as preventing mature women from doing so. Reminds me of Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.
I'm a strong proponent of what is now called 'free-range' parenting (I just call it "normal parenting"), and think that kids should be allowed to walk around. But your comparison is ludicrous.
Both are oppressive, both are ostensibly done to protect the oppressed target (from rape and violence), both undercut the decisions of mature adults (women, parents). Seems like it's valid on at least a few dimensions.
The major difference is that children grow up to be adults and are freed from the restrictions. If that is the most salient issue, then it's a bad analogy, but I don't think it's a "ludicrous" comparison.
The problem is mature women do not compare to children. It's like saying "forbidding children to vote is as stupid as forbidding women to vote".
Children do not have the same legal status as grown ups. They can't drive, should they drive because mature women can drive? They can't watch porn, should they be allowed to watch porn because mature women can?
Yes, kids not being allowed to walk down the street is stupid, but using the argument that mature women can do it so kids should be allowed to do it is not valid.
Is it? I wouldn't think so if I got picked up by police on the way home from school, and they arrested my Mom for letting me walk on my own. It would be a gross overreach by the state into the lives of its people.
There mere fact that there are legal battles around this issue in a country that calls itself "free" is mind-boggling and unsettling. More like, police state cum Idiocracy, with some avenues from venting.
My parents, and those of all my friends growing up, must have been complete and utter failures as parents because the ONLY restriction of our travels was be home before the streetlights came on.
Yep, that's how it was in the 70's. At 9 or 10 years old I was roaming the city on my BMX bike without a care in the world. No helmets of course. My mom would come out and yell for us when it was time for dinner.
I was a latchkey kid for most of school post 6th grade or so because both parents needed to work to keep us fed. I regularly made my own dinners (boxed macaroni, but still) and had to help out around the house too.
I credit this for giving me a solid work ethic and my self-reliance. I don't know what I would've turned out as without a lot of responsibilities as a kid (A lot by american kid standards anyways.)
I was raised in India. I walked half a mile till 4th grade and 2 miles from 5th grade to 10th grade. I remember I had to deal with a madman on the way who would keep running after the kids and throw stones on them. I remember once I slipped and fell into a small ravine where there was this huge f python (goosebumps on my hand right now just remembering that incident), once I was chased by a fox.
I never even bothered complaining to my parents because in one way it was fun. We ventured deep into woods, caught crabs, put traps for birds and squirrels etc. etc.
It was a wonderful part of my childhood, my kids may not experience the same but I dont want the government to restrict their experience either.
About 1967 I was one of seven or eight cousins in a Midwestern suburban park when one of the younger ones tripped and hit her head against a bench. She was not gravely hurt, but it tore the skin on her temple, and it bled a lot. A couple of utter strangers, a man and a women of probably 45 to 50, drove her and an older sister to the emergency room while the rest of us waited for my mother to get us.
It all worked out. We rounded up the cousins at the ER. The one who fell had no visible scar.
Sometimes I think about this and how odd it seems in the context of the last 25 years. If my wife and I showed up at the ER with two girls from a town 200 miles away I think that the staff would call the police. I also wonder what would be required in the way of release forms, payment assurance, and so on.
I am 14 years older than my sister, when I was in grade 3 I was walking myself to school, however as my parents got older and had my sister they became incredibly paranoid and she wasnt allowed to walk to school ever.
