17 ms·

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

243 points by mindfulgeek 10y ago

DougN7 10y ago
What's the difference between perceived and real? Someone preceiving it thinks it's plenty real. I've never been in a traffic accident - is the need for seat belts and air bags real?
- jrs235 10y ago
  The perceived danger is that a stranger will kidnap your children if you let them walk to and from the park. The real danger is they're more likely to be kidnapped if you leave them at home with friends or relatives.
  - ionwake 10y ago
    I once read that for every 2 kids kidnapped by a stranger, someone is killed by a lightning strike. This was backed up by stats.
    - marcoperaza 10y ago
      And I avoid being outside when there's a thunderstorm nearby.
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      Unless the person killed is the stranger, this senseless retribution must be stopped.
    - Domenic_S 10y ago
      Is that because the danger is so low, or because we're so paranoid? It's the car alarm problem -- if it's deterring theft, theft stats would go down, making us wonder if we need the alarm in the first place!
      - Bjartr 10y ago
        The article explains that child related crimes have declined at a rate similar to all crime over several decades. I would expect to see a greater rate if the paranoia was effective.
  - slavik81 10y ago
    Is that actually true for couples not currently in a legal dispute? Sometimes the average hides a lot of differences.
    - jrs235 10y ago
      Very recent and sad anecdata: http://www.kare11.com/news/crime/ertl-abduction-suspects-relationship-to-family/305295717 http://www.kare11.com/news/crime/ertl-abduction-suspects-rel...
  - johnnyhillbilly 10y ago
    Both are real risks. The aftermath of a stranger kidnapping the child is usually much worse. The likelihood of each is quite low, though - at least in western societies.
- duaneb 10y ago
  The difference is probability.
- drauh 10y ago
  Perception: there's a 75% chance my kid will be kidnapped by a pedophile. Reality: there's a 0.01% chance of the pedophile kidnap, but a 75% chance of drowning in the bathtub. Numbers are made up. Perception is not reality. Another example: Trayvon Martin was a dark-skinned young male wearing a hoodie. Perception: he is a criminal casing the houses in order to commit a future crime. Reality: he was a kid walking home to his house. Other examples: * Perception of the likelihood of terrorist attack, vs likelihood of dying in a fatal traffic crash. * Perception that vaccinations cause autism, vs reality that vaccinations prevent fatal disease.
  - sssilver 10y ago
    The question is, would the factual probability go up if the perceived probability goes down? ;)
    - drauh 10y ago
      Like all questions, the answer is "depends". :) E.g. number of kids falling and breaking their arm will be larger, but the population is larger and medical care is better, now. So, overall, I think the risks are actually lower than when I was a kid running around unsupervised. I don't know about the number of pedophile predators per capita, but I imagine that may be a roughly fixed proportion of the population. Kids now also have cellphones, so that's a lifeline kids never had in the past. So, I'd imagine that percentage would not really rise, either.
    - milesvp 10y ago
      I would argue it'd be negligible. We live in a world fueled by fear, primarily because it's now so easy to hear about the edge cases. I used to blame newspapers for this, but it's gotten so much worse with social media. Now even the most obscure topic that would have not warranted the cost of ink is being broadcast to people, made all the more persuasive because of the anecdotal nature of the medium.
    - yaur 10y ago
      what makes you think they would go up? I was a latch-key kid growing up and by the time real risks of adolescence like sex, drugs, and driving came up I already had years of experience managing risk. OTOH, when I look at how my ex has raised our kids I'm terrified that when they become independent they are going to get themselves into trouble and not have the experience to stay calm and get themselves out of it.
- b_t_s 10y ago
  statistics. statistics is the difference. Somebody's gut feeling(WAG) vs. actually observed frequency.
- Thriptic 10y ago
  The difference is one is true and backed by logic and statistics while the other is false and rooted in emotion? It's an important distinction because it's impossible to have a discussion about how to manage risk without first having a true understanding about what the real risks are.
- goodcanadian 10y ago
  I guess . . . read the article. The study showed the perceived risk varied depending on moral judgments about why the child was left alone even though the facts of the case were otherwise identical. Moreover, it showed significant tendency towards negative moral judgments even in cases where events were completely outside the parent's control.
- astrodust 10y ago
  Here's an interesting survey you can do to see how the statistics work. Ask people you know if they know anyone who's been involved in a plane crash, however minor. Most people are at least two degrees away from such an event even if they know a lot of people. It's rare to know someone who knows someone who's been involved in a plane crash because as traumatic as these events are, they impact a very small number of people, under 1000 per year world-wide. There are significantly more people that win over $1M in the lottery in the same time period, and most would agree that's a huge long-shot. Now ask the same people if they've personally been involved in a collision. Most people over 30 have been involved in at least one, and it's not uncommon to know someone who's been involved in two or three. You probably know at least one person who's lost a friend or relative to a car crash. The need for seat belts and air bags is absolutely real. You'd know this if you did even a cursory amount of research.
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    Also airbags and seat belts don't do much to restrict your personal liberty. Kids walking around and exploring their local environment is a safe and I believe necessary activity if you want to raise a well rounded independent child. Notice the recent trend of the nearly thirty somethings still living at home? I postulate they might of grown up too "safe".
- johnnyhillbilly 10y ago
  First of all, you are mixing dimensions. If I perceive a kidnapping as an actual occurrence, I will call the police and/or intervene. The situation may be real, or it could e.g. be a stag party. Risk is different - it's about what isn't even perceived to have happened in a given situation. If I walk in the street, there is a risk a piano may have fallen out of an airplane and be falling towards me. If I perceive that as a risk, I may take countermeasures, in this example entering an underground garage would stop the (for me as a part of the example) hypothetical piano. If I often take exaggerated countermeasures as a parent, I may cause harm to the child. The safest child would be the one locked in a bomb shelter on a healthy diet. It would protect against falling pianos, falling bombs, freezing to death, drowning, transportation accidents, school bullies, sexually abusive authority figures, house fires, sun burns - everything except an attack on the bomb shelter ventilation system. The prohibitive costs excluded, no reasonable parent would do such a thing. (If air raid sirens go off, of course it still becomes reasonable to take the child to such a shelter - until the 'all clear'). If the child is never given a chance to be unsupervised, when will it learn to tell situations and behaviours that carry risk from those that don't? When will they develop their independent sense of judgement? Anyways, to answer your -hopefully rhetorical - question: Transportation by car is risky on a population level. Playing in the forest or park is not even close. It may also be argued that allowing children a steadily developing autonomy from an early age leads to a lower risk over the course of a lifetime - since the child then steadily increases its ability to handle a risky world. Therefore, I claim that unreasonable protection is the true neglect of the child. [EDIT: Spelling]
  - mighty_atomic_c 10y ago
    Your view is in line with developmental psychologists. Children who are never given a chance to think and act independently will grow up stunted and incomplete. By overprotecting, you weaken the child.
    - johnnyhillbilly 10y ago
      The CPS should have a focus on parents that are unreasonable in their protection. Unfortunately, they have to be policy based. One child out of 500,000 that is snatched when alone creates much more attention than 50,000 children (out of 500,000) that never get the joy of developing into reasonable, competent and calm grown-ups...
- DougN7 10y ago
  Heh, I am a terrible communicator. What I meant is that to the individual, perception and reality are the same. The facts and stats don't back up perception, but a person will think their perception is correct, otherwise they would perceive differently. Which is why we judge parents - our perception is "it's dangerous out there", even though the data doesn't bare it out.
Afton 10y ago
I'm most interested in the enshrinement into law of these risk assessments, where if you disagree with the risk assessments you get flagged for CPS or criminal judgement. Even if you 'win', society just imposed a massive, massive cost on you (and your children) for disagreeing about the relative risk of an action. There needs to be some way of walking this back, but I can't think what that might be except literally trying to get a law in place giving parents broad immunity. I can't even really imagine how such a law would be worded without completely gutting CPS and related organizations in other countries.
- 1123581321 10y ago
  I think the struggle for civil forfeiture reform offers some suggestions. Child Services operates similarly to these programs in that they can size children and impose sanctions without a court finding any wrongdoing first. Child Services makes use of broad powers and would indeed be "gutted" if they couldn't act until neglectful parents were tried or pled guilty. I think that is a good tradeoff. Similarly, I don't mind that civil forfeiture reform lets drug dealers continue to drive sometimes. This is a major political controversy, though.
  - Afton 10y ago
    Can't really agree though. The issue with child services is that they can act faster than the criminal system. You might want to say that they couldn't act to remove or otherwise enforce parental restrictions until criminal charges are made (leaving other less adversarial actions available). An unintended consequence of this may be that charges are made much more easily for the purpose of unblocking child services. Alternatively, it may be that we want to take the same 'rational' look at risk that we want the courts/child services to take. Maybe the few kids that get taken away 'unreasonably' are actually just the cost of having an otherwise sane system. Lest that come off as callous, I just mean that if you have a country of 300 million, you'll get some pretty far out scenarios played out. You don't necessarily want to add process to protect those very few scenarios that are outrageous because it may cost more (by e.g. tying CPS' hands so that they can't take actually at-risk children out of homes). I guess I'm suggesting that this might, in the end, be much ado about nothing. It's hard to say without numbers and analysis.
platz 10y ago
you have to multiply by an outrage factor as well. bad outcomes do not all have unit '1'
larrik 10y ago
> A 2-year-old was found unattended after his parents allegedly left home to play Pokémon Go. > How much risk was there of some harm coming to the child while the parents were gone? As a parent to young children, I would say pretty damn high, actually. Kids do stupid things all the time, and if you aren't there, and they know you aren't there, there is no limit to the stupid things a 2 year old can do. It's a normal part of growing up, but that doesn't make it safe to do it alone in the slightest. That said, I agree with the gist of the article overall.
- compiler-guy 10y ago
  I don't think we can make that judgement without more data about how the house was set up, how close help was, and how far away the parents went. For example, going outside and down the street half-a-block for five minutes while your child is watching their favorite show is quite a bit different than leaving them working in the kitchen with knives laying around.
  - mindfulgeek 10y ago
    You're right, we can't make a wise judgment without more data. People all the time are making guesses and taking action based on it though. That's the scary part.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  I could see that. A two year old could easily run out into traffic. A 7 or 8 year old, not so much. I remember years ago about a women who had the police escort a kid to her house because she'd let him bicycle to school (wearing a helmet and it was < 2 miles). That is kinda crazy. When I went to elementary school (early 90s), there was a whole group of kids who walked to school. Sometimes the teacher in charge of the gate would forgot to unlock it and we'd see them all pile up while in homeroom (huge fence, took like 15 min to walk around so most kids would just wait).
  - fireflash38 10y ago
    > A two year old could easily run out into traffic. A 7 or 8 year old, not so much. You overestimate 7 & 8 year olds. I know I definitely did. Ran into the side of a moving car.
pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
uh... who is "we"? you're all idiots.
nostromo 10y ago
The same is true for terrorism of course. Terrorism catches our attention because it's morally outrageous, not because it's statistically dangerous to people in Western countries. But if you talk with "regular people", you'll notice that media coverage gives people an unwarranted fear of outlier events: terrorism, mass shootings, plane crashes, etc. In reality, almost everyone in the US should fear the real killers: obesity, cancer, stroke, etc.
- softawre 10y ago
  Well said. In fact, I would not be surprised if people were so stressed out about these rare things they can not control that they developed habits like binge eating, drinking, and smoking - that had a much higher chance of leading to their early demise.
- ams6110 10y ago
  I think it's almost 100% news media sensationalism. News media today is not about investigative reporting, or real news. It's about selling ads and getting eyeballs. So they report rare events as if they happen every day and you need to keep watching so you know what to do about it. The news media today is toxic. You could do little more to improve your outlook on life and the future than simply not watching it. At all. I haven't watched a news program on any major network or any cable news in several years, and I don't miss it at all.
  - superuser2 10y ago
    >watched That's your problem. There has always been a major step down in quality from print to TV (precisely because of the need to fill airtime and hold people's attention to it). That step is smaller now as papers get more desperate to stay alive, but there are still print media doing good work. Drastically better than cable news, anyway.
  - kayla210 10y ago
    I agree. It seems like everything on the news is blown out of proportion and beaten to death in an attempt to fill the day with "interesting" stuff. No, this is just making people scared to go outside and actually enjoy life. I've stopped watching the news and just read it whenever I hear of something going on that piques my interest on the Internet. It's pointless for me to watch 24-hour news coverage of a shooting or kidnapping that is just going to make me think less of the world I live in.
tillytal 10y ago
The research actually looks kind of cool, but this headline and the whole framing of the issue sounds like it was written by an alien. Uh, why? We judge everything on the basis of perception, not reality. That's just... how this works. And this is far from the most worrying thing Americans have a dramatically detatched perception of danger about, right now. If you want to really address this issue, and a few others besides, I'd stop worrying about how people relate to kids or parents and start worrying about how they relate to reality.
- mindfulgeek 10y ago
  While there are plenty of ways people are disconnected from reality, the impact on our culture when kids don't have independence and parents make decisions out of fear has a significant impact on our world.
  - tillytal 10y ago
    Count me as reeeeally leery of ascribing harm to an amorphous "cultural impact". Not that I think it's sensible or right that a child might not be allowed to walk around the block, but that in general, as with any other thing other people's parents seem to worry about, the kids are probably going to be fine. Contrasted with our outrageously inverted reaction to the real and fictional (respectively) threats of climate change and terrorism, it's hard for me to muster up too much outrage. Fix this without fixing them, it's hard for me to clap too hard.
    - mindfulgeek 10y ago
      In general, kids and young adults are more unhealthy in measurable ways -- cancer, depression, suicide rates -- all higher. While this is just one aspect of what is causing trouble, the lack of independence has been linked to kids making really, really bad choices when they are finally alone. You can also ask any college professor how the quality of problem solving and independence has changed in the past decade or so. In order to fix a problem, you need to fix the cause, not the effect. Many of the causes of the poor decisions we make are due to conditioning of our childhood. While adults cannot blame their bad decisions on their parents, they certainly can see a root cause of much of their poor choices -- if they can see it at all.
kazinator 10y ago
There is no such thing as "perceived but unreal risk". A risk is some sort of estimate that harm will occur: a likelihood. No risk is real; it is always perceived. There is only the question of how rationally founded is that estimate. Some risks can be established via measurement. If the statistics give some risk as 0.1%, but you perceive it subjectively as 30%, then there is a degree to which your perception of risk is unrealistically inflated. Neither the 0.1% nor the 30% are 'real' though; both are just a tool for guessing about the future. We judge people when their behavior hints at a risk estimate which differs from ours. Anyone who estimates a risk lower than you do is reckless; anyone who estimates it higher is a wimp. Sometimes, estimates of risk are just culturally enshrined B.S., not founded in anything. If you don't protect yourself from a certain risk in a certain culturally endorsed, widely practiced manner, then you're an ignorant or crazy cultural outsider. Likewise if you go too far in protecting yourself from something.
- mikeash 10y ago
  If I'm flipping a coin, would you not say that the real risk of a flip coming up heads is about 50%?
  - kazinator 10y ago
    If I said that, I could drop the word "real" and still say the same thing. "Real risk" in conversation is usually just an intensifier which means "risk significantly greater than zero percent" implying that it's high enough to be considered on its own, or ahead of other risks. That's already more or less given by the 50% figure. In this sense there is "no real risk" that the coin will land on its edge. There is a probability attached which is too small to bother with; and possibly lower than the probability that a crow will swoop from the sky and snatch the coin before it lands.
    - mikeash 10y ago
      I think you kind of lost the plot here. In this context, "real" means the actual fact-based risk, rather than an imagined risk. For example, if you've flipped 10 heads in a row, a human suffering from the Gambler's Fallacy might think the risk of a tail is 90%, while the real risk is still about 50%. We're not talking about "real risk" as a synonym to "significant risk."
BoppreH 10y ago
Interesting research. Looks like a cognitive bias related to the reverse-Halo Effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect ). The mother left for some morally bad reason, so the predicted events receive bad associations (larger risk). Sounds easily exploitable too. Want to advertise something dangerous? Just show people doing it in morally good situations.
- derefr 10y ago
  I started out thinking that, but after considering it some more, I'm not sure it's just a halo effect. Here's a chain of correlations: parents who leave their children alone at random (rather than in a structured and pre-planned way) are probably more impulsive. Trait-impulsivity is hereditary. Thus, leaving a (blood-related) child alone is predictive of that child taking more risks and being the kind of child who can't be left alone safely. (On the other hand, leaving a child you're the adoptive parent or guardian of alone isn't predictive of anything.)
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    If it has some sort of deep evolutionary roots, why has it arisen in the past like half-century?
gph 10y ago
I understand the overall thrust of this article, but I somewhat disagree with the suggestion that my judgement of morality should have no impact on my judgement of the risk to a child. For instance a parent that would leave a 2-year old alone to go play pokemon probably has other terrible parenting judgement/skills and most likely the environment they leave the kid in IS actually more dangerous than someone who accidentally leaves their kid alone. They are standardizing risk assessment across all environments, but that's statistics not reality. Certainly some peoples moral assessments have gone overboard (it's crazy that kids can't go to the park unattended when they reach a general maturity). But I don't think it's unreal to assess the risk to a child as higher if you also think their parents are amoral and likely bad parents. Those kids ARE probably at higher risk in my opinion, either from their parents not being as cautious at establishing a healthy environment or in not being good enough parents to teach their kids how to behave in a safe manner when left alone.
- mindfulgeek 10y ago
  If their kid was sleeping and they stayed in range of a baby monitor, what is the risk there? Yes, it makes sense to make the risk higher if you perceive a parent as less apt, however, we are fast to judge that aptitude without knowing much of the context.
  - gph 10y ago
    Did you read the article about the two-year old? The context is that they left him for over an hour and a neighbor found him wandering around outside. I don't know how much context was put into the actual study, and I agree that we make a lot of moral judgements without all the facts. But it seemed like the jist of the research was that our moral judgements of the parents should have no basis in our assessment of the perceived risks to a child. I refute that to an extent.
    - mindfulgeek 10y ago
      I didn't read the article about the two year old. Thank you for sharing the details! I think their research was in trying to understand why we've turned into a culture that is afraid to let their kids have freedoms that use to be common.
lazyant 10y ago
Captain Fantastic is a great movie to get you thinking about kids' education and safety.
tn13 10y ago
Bodies like CPS have to justify their existence and increase in budgets. If my job is to go to office everyday and find parents to arrest the best way is to lower the bar for "putting kids in danger". It is okay to send your kids to play soccer or the hand-football americans play where they can possibly receive life threatening injuries but it is not okay to let them walk back home from school because all it takes a evil guy with a van and candies to kidnap that kid.
- b_t_s 10y ago
  Never attribute to malice... My mother was a CPS worker for a while so here's a little perspective from the inside. CPS is generally wildly underfunded, underpaid, and understaffed. It's staffed largely by bleeding hearts straight out of college, most of whom will burn/churn out in a year or two. They've never had kids; most are still kids themselves. There are a few lifers and first job in a second career people, but they're the minority. It's one of the more systematically dysfunctional branches of government.
tn13 10y ago
If you ever see a kid alone outside the best course of action is to call cops. 1. If you try talking to kid while the kid is alone you might be charged as a sex offender, attempt to kidnap and what not. 2. If you dont try to help and if something happens to the kid may be later you might face some charges or come under suspicion. This is absolutely nothing to with what you feel and think. The risks for not calling cops are simply very high.
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  >The risks for not calling cops are simply very high.The risks for not calling cops are simply very high. I see lots of kids in my neighborhood walking around, no issues yet. If we used your apparent definition of 'very high' the odds of winning the lottery are simply guaranteed.
- orthecreedence 10y ago
  What?? If I see an 8 year old walking around outside by themself, my first and only reaction is to do absolutely nothing and let that child go about their business. If something did happen to the kid, every person who happened to see that kid and didn't flip their shit and call the cops is not morally or even legally responsible in any sense. If I saw a kid get snatched into a van, I'd call the cops and do everything in my power to make sure that the kid was returned to his normal life, but holy shit, do not call the cops because you saw a kid outside!
aviv 10y ago
I'm surprised they made no mention of http://www.freerangekids.com/ http://www.freerangekids.com/ or (owner/blogger) Lenore Skenazy, both of which typically come up in such discussions.
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  There is a mention of free range parenting, but not an explicit call out.
Symbiote 10y ago
Are perceived risks lower in smaller countries? The article mentions Norway, which has a population of 5M. Even if the rate of child abduction is the same as the USA, there will be far fewer scary stories. 1) How many foreign cases does the Norwegian media report? 2) Are Norwegians worried about them? I'd think "oh, America" and move on, but I'd guess that if I lived in Idaho and the case was in Michigan I wouldn't be so dismissive.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  Just watch news in the US. They indulge for hours in killings, child abductions and other stuff. It's a very fear-driven society.
rayiner 10y ago
The worst part of parenting is dealing with other parents. Yuppie millennial parents are the worst. I thought I grew up with overprotective Asian parents but they let me wander all around the town at 7-8, stuff that's apparently get them arrested in the Dame suburbs today.
rrggrr 10y ago
Divorced parents would have to answer to their formers spouse, their former spouse's attorney, a child's rep, the Court, etc. for any serious mishap. Its not worth the knee jerk tragic outcomes the Courts can produce. Therefore, a divorced parent is best served playing it ultra conservative and ignoring this article.
jamesb7276 10y ago
It's easy and lets us perceive ourselves as better than them.
mhb 10y ago
Ladders to help children get up to neck-breaking heights when climbing trees (in Denmark): http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2016/08/23/ladders-to-help-children-get-up-to-neck-breaking-heights-when-climbing-trees/ http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2016/08/23/ladders-to-help-ch...
mangeletti 10y ago
The minds and endocrine systems of children that at raised in safe and sterile environments, under the constant, close attention of guardians, are necessarily unprepared for the randomn inputs available in nature and society. Children that grow up this way will be better suited for a virtual life, where the number of variables is controlled.
rdtsc 10y ago
Even since I was 10 or so I would often come back to school on my own. Then let myself into our apartment. Eat some lunch, do homework, play until my parents came home in the evening. I was effectively often alone for about 4 or so hours. I wouldn't let my kid do it here in US. Not because I wouldn't trust them or think it is dangerous. But because I am afraid what neighbors, school, CPS would do. My co-worker let his kids play in the cul-de-sac for an hour while they watched from the house. An anonymous neighbor reported them to police, and a sequence of embarrassing calls at work ensued, statements to police, follow up visits from police, etc. And this is not some dangerous part of the city. This is suburbs, as safe as they come. But apparently you are never safe from neighbors with an agenda. And the thing is, there is nothing you can say or do, even if you knew this neighbor. "Well I was worried for the children!". Unless they openly confessed it was because you cut the lawn wrong or they don't like the color of your house, there is nothing you can do to them (well maybe turn evil and report them for other irrational fears -- terrorism "but I was worried about this country's safety, swear heard them talk about buying a lot of fertilizer"). The interesting thing is, once those in power act irrationally about something. There will always be people to exploit that element. I heard from my grandparents how neighbors would rat on each other imaginary things during Stalin's times. The results were usually the neighbors family would be taken in the middle the night and sent to Siberia never to be seen again. This is of course, an extreme example but it illustrates, how irrationality can and will be exploited.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  > My co-worker let his kids play in the cul-de-sac for an hour while they watched from the house. An anonymous neighbor reported them to police, and a sequence of embarrassing calls at work ensued, statements to police, follow up visits from police, etc. And this is not some dangerous part of the city. This is suburbs, as safe as they come. But apparently you are never safe from neighbors with an agenda. The society is sick. It has the moral equivalent of cancer, or some auto-immune disease, eating it from inside.
- sethhochberg 10y ago
  Ironically, the suburbs where it is "as safe as they come" seems to be the kind of place where these overzealous neighbor stories come from most often.
Radle 10y ago
Are there places in America where things are not this extreme? I am looking for a career in IT, so coming to the Valley might be something I am going to do in my career. But I would want my kids to grow up in a different, more independent way. Like I did in my home country. (If I was in America now and thinking about getting children, this article would be a 100% reason to go back to my home country, it totally gave me the creeps.)
- sotojuan 10y ago
  Working class immigrant neighborhoods.
- svantana 10y ago
  Well, to begin with, find a state where laws are more relaxed: http://www.freerangekids.com/laws/ http://www.freerangekids.com/laws/ Moral judgements from people in your community can be bad enough, but it's a whole different ball game when you run the risk of getting arrested!
- noddingham 10y ago
  My advice would be to look at smaller towns and neighborhoods. I grew up in a "city" of 30k, with many smaller towns of 500-10k within the county. We roamed every inch of the neighborhood. All the neighbors within 5-6 houses in any direction knew our families.
- lubujackson 10y ago
  Suburbs are the worst. I grew up in a small town and had pretty much free reign early, walking a mile home from school at 4th grade, do whatever in the summers, etc. My wife was driven from friend's house to friend's house and never was outside alone until she was 16 and could drive. I'm not sure how much it's changed in small towns, but now I live in SF and notice that it is closer to small town behavior than the 'burbs. I routinely see 10 to 12 year old kids walking around in groups to school or taking the bus. They are rarely alone but aren't accompanied by an adult. It is much different than my childhood, but they seem to have good sense of independence which seems way better than a car-based childhood in the suburbs.
- 10y ago
skizm 10y ago
Because info spreads more quickly now-a-days and even if 99% of people think it's okay to leave a kid unattended in a given situation, the 1% that care are more likely to see these situations and make a big stink out of them.
mighty_atomic_c 10y ago
This is a strong reason why I don't want to raise children in the U.S. I grew up in a very controlled environment with very controlling, paranoid parents and I am still dealing with the many consequences of that. To think that I would be forced to raise children to be deficient per social rules is unsettling at best, and disturbing when considering that this is happening everywhere in the US. What could the future hold in store? How much more extreme can this get?
ars 10y ago
I have my own theory. I think parents have gone so far in the r/K selection[1] toward the K direction that people have gone completely overboard in protecting children. It would be very interesting to compare with cultures where having lots of kids is still the norm. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
iamthepieman 10y ago
Children must be allowed to do dangerous things. Doing dangerous things does not guarantee injury. Children, despite our observations otherwise, do not have a death wish. They have a strong self-preservation instinct and purposefully risky behavior is usually due to ignorance because they don't understand how the world works yet. A child wants to touch the candle flame because they don't know it's hot, not because they want to get burned. Doing dangerous things is risky though. A child is NOT guaranteed to get hurt everytime but if you allow them to explore the work and engage in risky behavior they will get hurt eventually. It is my goal as a parent to let them do dangerous things from an early age even when it scares me. At one that means letting them walk without a walker anad without being there to catch them all the time. At two-four it means letting them climb the stairs on their own and letting them swing and go down the slide without hand holding. At 5+ it means letting them build a fire, swim in the creek, shoot a bow and arrow and climb trees. By giving them freedom (and responsibility - but that's another topic) early they learn what their limits are and, I hope, learn to judge for themselves what is safe for them. This may be different for each of my kids and is almost certainly different than what I believe is safe and or appropriate. Of course I am there to veto really misinformed decisions (we are going to build a diving board into this 2 feet pool in the brook!) and to provide direction and guidance. Putting this into practice has resulted in one broken arm, three staples and numerous small home-treatable cuts and bruises. I don't always like where this philosophy puts me as a father. I many times say yes and then quietly follow from a distance out of my own fear for their safety. But because I know what a struggle it is to decide how to raise my children, even if the ultimate decision is that I am not raising them so much as watching them develop and prodding them occasionally, I try very hard not to judge parents who have made different decisions and different trade-offs. The article doesn't go into much detail about why people judge parents so harshly but mostly focuses on changing social norms. I understand though. I have to actively remind myself NOT to judge parents who make different decisions than I do and I'm only aware of that because I have made decisions that are different than most of my peers and acquaintances.
dghughes 10y ago
I didn't read the entire article and I do not have kids but to me the world seems more hostile than when I was a kid but I guess that's expected. People seem much more opportunistic and are proud of it when I point out it's not a compliment to be called such a thing. Overall maturity seems really low I mean these days people act immature compared to when I was a kid. I don't think I'd see adults in their 20, 30 or 40s chasing Pokemons in the 1970s. These days people swear every second word around kids, seniors, just in public gatherings as if it's nothing I'm sure I'll be mocked for thinking that's wrong. Then again breasts are censored on TV but not when I was a kid. Although contrasting that every now TV show didn't have "this show may have words or situations that may offend someone" warnings after commercial break. Then you have the "everyone is a winner" or "you can do anything" drilled into kids in school I think that stunts maturity. If kids are going to be left alone they need to know sometimes they can screw up big time and it's their fault.
tvaughan 10y ago
I really wish people in the US would prefix these sort of statements with "In the US, we ..." The rest of the world isn't so crazy. Speaking as if what people in the US do is universal makes these sort of things seem as though they're the result of the passage of time, that some other solution just isn't possible, that the outcome was inevitable, and those people affected are somehow victims. When really it's a matter of deliberate choices some people made, in the US. Today's article on ADHD also suffers from the same myopic perspective.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  It's totally reasonable to want to distance yourself from this sort of thing. However, NPR is an explicitly American news organization, and the second sentence of TFA is prefaced with, "In the United States today..." Actually a lot of the crazy shit you might associate with "USA" is only relevant for certain communities.
B-Con 10y ago
Parenting is a 24/7 job. Parents make thousands of decisions balancing many ideal and pragmatic factors. Seeing one parenting decision is not sufficient for assessing their entire parental lifestyle. Putting aside the specifics of this topic, it is curious how many people are quick to condemn a parent the moment they make a single decision not up to the observer's standards.
nefitty 10y ago
If anyone else is interested in how Debra Harrell and her daughter's story turned out, here is a recent FB update from a person who helped crowdfund $47k to support them during the legal problems. Thankfully the charges were dropped with seemingly no media coverage whatsoever. Unfortunately, it sounds like the young girl is now experiencing anxiety issues from the trauma of being taken by Child Protective Services. https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=532307546952426&id=274254686091048 https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=532307546952426&id...
helthanatos 10y ago
People seem to confuse rates and percentages with figures. There may be less on average, but more in reality. Not having so many kids on the streets may also cause the crimes to be less. Children wear less clothes than they used to and there seems to be more pedophiles, if those little kids were left alone, more may be taken advantage of. The risk is real. Children don't know how to react when confronted with maybe a drunk driver or someone that offered them candy, so letting children on their own leaves real risk. However, whether it should be criminalized for a rather small risk is debatable.
- Bjartr 10y ago
  >There may be less on average, but more in reality. Mind explaining this? I'm having trouble grokking it. >Not having so many kids on the streets may also cause the crimes to be less. The article accounted for this. >Children wear less clothes than they used to and there seems to be more pedophiles, if those little kids were left alone, more may be taken advantage of. What? Do you have any more information on any of these claims? It's coming across as pure conjecture on your part.
  - helthanatos 10y ago
    1. Smaller percentage of a greater amount. 2. Oh well. 3. Children wear much smaller clothes than they used to.
Unbeliever69 10y ago
I judge parents that deny their children their childhood by "protecting" them from perceived but unreal risks.
paulrpotts 10y ago
My wife has been yelled at by strangers for filling up the car with gas, then walking 25 feet from the gas pump to the payment window and paying for the gas... because our kids were in the car 25 feet away. She's had the police and the neighborhood watch called repeatedly because our children were playing in our own yard. It's not a world I recognize and I'm increasingly disturbed by people's strange ideas about children.
- x1798DE 10y ago
  Did the police actually do anything? Part of the responsibility here falls on the police to say, "It is not a crime to let children play unsupervised, mind your own business." I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually illegal to make frivolous complaints of this nature.
  - paulrpotts 10y ago
    No, they've never actually come to talk to us. For a year or so I had a habit of taking a long daily walk in my neighborhood -- sometimes I would take my baby boy out and wear him in on my back in a baby carrier. That gave my wife a break and after a hundred yards or so he would inevitably fall asleep. Someone apparently called the police saying I was carrying a dead baby around the neighborhood in a backpack, and I had an officer stop and ask if he could talk to me and verify that the backpack was actually a child carrier. He was apologetic and friendly about the whole thing but it really makes me wonder WTF my neighbors think about us...
- arprocter 10y ago
  When I was a kid my parents would let me pump their gas. I also ran errands in town by myself, and was left to look after younger siblings before my teens. IMO the sooner you're given responsibilities the sooner you learn to be responsible. As when there was talk of raising the driving age because 'all these teens are dying' - it's inexperience, not so much the age which matters.
  - pyre 10y ago
efa 10y ago
Wish people (especially scientist) would just stick to the facts. In the McDonald's case people were not "angry at this woman for not being a full-time mom". They were angry that the child was left alone. No one has a problem with a mom working and a care giver watching a child. And of course we have to throw in a dig at evil McDonalds for not having childcare services.
- harmegido 10y ago
  But why would they be angry at her for leaving the kid alone? What danger is the kid in? What do they care what she does with her kid if the kid is in no danger? (Not to mention, how could she afford the child care?)
pkulak 10y ago
I agree with this, but I still have a hell of a time letting my kids outside unsupervised, not because of abduction or crime fears, but because of cars. At least in the States, people don't give a crap about anything while they are driving. Excessive speeding is the norm on all city streets, marked crosswalks are a mild suggestion, and unmarked crosswalks do not exist. If 50% of the land outside of my house were literal minefields I'm not sure it would be less dangerous. I don't think anyone was abducted in my city last year, but 10 pedestrians died. A teenager was just mowed down in a crosswalk over the weekend. That scares the shit out of me.
- tbihl 10y ago
  For that, I recommend living in older neighborhoods and trying to get involved in re striping streets narrower. Cars speeding are a clear sign that the speed limit doesn't match the road design. When you make drivers feel uncomfortable, they slow down and drive more carefully. When you make roads wide enough for firetrucks to do three-point turns and with highway safety margins, drivers will intuitively listen to the design language encouraging them to drive fast.
pessimizer 10y ago
It's the result of a bizarre American Protestant religious tenet that gradually evolved into existence over the 20th century, namely: People deserve health and happiness in life in inverse relationship to their degree of cynicism; Children are born in a perfect state, without cynicism, therefore any effort by a cynical (by definition) adult that could protect a child from anything that could possibly affect their health or happiness is mandatory. The most important thing a child needs to learn is to control themselves and to be optimistic, which will immunize them to the effects of adult cynicism, not how to handle themselves independently in the world, and especially not math. It's a complete inversion of the previous straightforward pre-20c mindset, which was: adults take longer to make, are stronger, and they know more stuff, so they're more important. Also, religiously, that babies are born fundamentally broken, and need to gain understanding of the world before they have any chance to fix themselves. Dead babies go to Hell, or at best an endless purgatory. IMO 80% of the character of its current expression comes from spoiled Baby Boomers having a combination of condescension and hate towards their parents. They were perfect, ruined by the world, and endangered by their parents cynical reasoning about why we should be in Vietnam and hate communism (something about sharing being evil and assuming the worst about everybody.)
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  That's an interesting thought.
- tbihl 10y ago
  I buy your argument that we value children too highly in relation to adults, but I think the connection to religion is under-formed at best. If nothing else you need greater specificity of blame: surely there's a common theme with higher correlation than whether people follow a church that split from Catholicism 500 years ago, given the huge variation within that category. Myself, I'd argue that the way we've built towns has lent itself to destroying community and wealth. We put people in cars so they don't interact with their surroundings. We put the cars on massive road networks we can't afford to maintain (to say nothing of the sewer and water out to the edges of towns.) Then a downturn cones and we cut services because the maintenance is crushing us. We build places that aren't meant to last, and then only the rich can afford to move to the next generation's good suburbs. Everyone left behind was too poor to get out, and now they'll suffer decreased services and accessibility as the local government spends on the new growth areas. Given such a miserable setting, people are unable, by fact of their patterns of life, to look out for one another. Culture breaks down, because there's no community maintaining it. The earth-conquering strength of human teamwork is not utilized in these places; the new suburbs are full of people wealthy enough to overcome that, but the aging ones have no such strength.
Diggsey 10y ago
The survey completely overlooks a very important possibility: The participants know their own ignorance of the exact circumstances of each situation, and so they use their judgement of the parent's character to fill in the gaps. For example, when the parent leaves for an "immoral" reason, it reflects badly on their character, so the participant would have less reason to believe that they've thought about the child's safety. On the other hand, when a parent whom the participant has judged to be of good character leaves the child, they assume that the parent them-self has thought through the safety implications and has judged it to be safe. Since the parent would have more information than the participant, the participant is trusting their judgement, and is able to determine that the situation is safer. In essence, the stories told to the participants actually do have different amounts of information in about the child's safety.
tbihl 10y ago
When I saw this title, the thing that jumped onto my head was child car seats. Beyond infant seats, child seats don't provide any significant benefit over sitting in the back with a seatbelt. The difference between those two is an often-perceived, but infinitesimal, risk. On the other hand, we don't judge parents for driving their kids all over the place, or living far away from things so that they're forced to drive many miles with their kids. But that's a highly risky behavior. If you live in a place that's walkable for your kids, you've probably sheltered them from far more danger than child predators ever pose.
redsparrow 10y ago
Here's a snapshot of what things are like in Berlin, Germany. I dropped my 7 year old off at a new day camp (in the centre of the city) last week. They asked me if she was allowed to leave on her own at the end of the day. Here are the rules for kids riding on the subway system: "Children under four years of age may only use public transport if they are accompanied by a person who is at least six years of age." That said, you don't see a lot of little kids travelling alone but it seems that the discretion is with the parents.

243 points by mindfulgeek 10y ago

What's the difference between perceived and real? Someone preceiving it thinks it's plenty real. I've never been in a traffic accident - is the need for seat belts and air bags real?

jrs235 10y ago
The perceived danger is that a stranger will kidnap your children if you let them walk to and from the park. The real danger is they're more likely to be kidnapped if you leave them at home with friends or relatives.
- ionwake 10y ago
  I once read that for every 2 kids kidnapped by a stranger, someone is killed by a lightning strike. This was backed up by stats.
  - marcoperaza 10y ago
    And I avoid being outside when there's a thunderstorm nearby.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    Unless the person killed is the stranger, this senseless retribution must be stopped.
  - Domenic_S 10y ago
    Is that because the danger is so low, or because we're so paranoid? It's the car alarm problem -- if it's deterring theft, theft stats would go down, making us wonder if we need the alarm in the first place!
    - Bjartr 10y ago
      The article explains that child related crimes have declined at a rate similar to all crime over several decades. I would expect to see a greater rate if the paranoia was effective.
- slavik81 10y ago
  Is that actually true for couples not currently in a legal dispute? Sometimes the average hides a lot of differences.
  - jrs235 10y ago
    Very recent and sad anecdata: http://www.kare11.com/news/crime/ertl-abduction-suspects-relationship-to-family/305295717 http://www.kare11.com/news/crime/ertl-abduction-suspects-rel...
- johnnyhillbilly 10y ago
  Both are real risks. The aftermath of a stranger kidnapping the child is usually much worse. The likelihood of each is quite low, though - at least in western societies.
duaneb 10y ago
The difference is probability.
drauh 10y ago
Perception: there's a 75% chance my kid will be kidnapped by a pedophile. Reality: there's a 0.01% chance of the pedophile kidnap, but a 75% chance of drowning in the bathtub. Numbers are made up. Perception is not reality. Another example: Trayvon Martin was a dark-skinned young male wearing a hoodie. Perception: he is a criminal casing the houses in order to commit a future crime. Reality: he was a kid walking home to his house. Other examples: * Perception of the likelihood of terrorist attack, vs likelihood of dying in a fatal traffic crash. * Perception that vaccinations cause autism, vs reality that vaccinations prevent fatal disease.
- sssilver 10y ago
  The question is, would the factual probability go up if the perceived probability goes down? ;)
  - drauh 10y ago
    Like all questions, the answer is "depends". :) E.g. number of kids falling and breaking their arm will be larger, but the population is larger and medical care is better, now. So, overall, I think the risks are actually lower than when I was a kid running around unsupervised. I don't know about the number of pedophile predators per capita, but I imagine that may be a roughly fixed proportion of the population. Kids now also have cellphones, so that's a lifeline kids never had in the past. So, I'd imagine that percentage would not really rise, either.
  - milesvp 10y ago
    I would argue it'd be negligible. We live in a world fueled by fear, primarily because it's now so easy to hear about the edge cases. I used to blame newspapers for this, but it's gotten so much worse with social media. Now even the most obscure topic that would have not warranted the cost of ink is being broadcast to people, made all the more persuasive because of the anecdotal nature of the medium.
  - yaur 10y ago
    what makes you think they would go up? I was a latch-key kid growing up and by the time real risks of adolescence like sex, drugs, and driving came up I already had years of experience managing risk. OTOH, when I look at how my ex has raised our kids I'm terrified that when they become independent they are going to get themselves into trouble and not have the experience to stay calm and get themselves out of it.
b_t_s 10y ago
statistics. statistics is the difference. Somebody's gut feeling(WAG) vs. actually observed frequency.
Thriptic 10y ago
The difference is one is true and backed by logic and statistics while the other is false and rooted in emotion? It's an important distinction because it's impossible to have a discussion about how to manage risk without first having a true understanding about what the real risks are.
goodcanadian 10y ago
I guess . . . read the article. The study showed the perceived risk varied depending on moral judgments about why the child was left alone even though the facts of the case were otherwise identical. Moreover, it showed significant tendency towards negative moral judgments even in cases where events were completely outside the parent's control.
astrodust 10y ago
Here's an interesting survey you can do to see how the statistics work. Ask people you know if they know anyone who's been involved in a plane crash, however minor. Most people are at least two degrees away from such an event even if they know a lot of people. It's rare to know someone who knows someone who's been involved in a plane crash because as traumatic as these events are, they impact a very small number of people, under 1000 per year world-wide. There are significantly more people that win over $1M in the lottery in the same time period, and most would agree that's a huge long-shot. Now ask the same people if they've personally been involved in a collision. Most people over 30 have been involved in at least one, and it's not uncommon to know someone who's been involved in two or three. You probably know at least one person who's lost a friend or relative to a car crash. The need for seat belts and air bags is absolutely real. You'd know this if you did even a cursory amount of research.
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  Also airbags and seat belts don't do much to restrict your personal liberty. Kids walking around and exploring their local environment is a safe and I believe necessary activity if you want to raise a well rounded independent child. Notice the recent trend of the nearly thirty somethings still living at home? I postulate they might of grown up too "safe".
johnnyhillbilly 10y ago
First of all, you are mixing dimensions. If I perceive a kidnapping as an actual occurrence, I will call the police and/or intervene. The situation may be real, or it could e.g. be a stag party. Risk is different - it's about what isn't even perceived to have happened in a given situation. If I walk in the street, there is a risk a piano may have fallen out of an airplane and be falling towards me. If I perceive that as a risk, I may take countermeasures, in this example entering an underground garage would stop the (for me as a part of the example) hypothetical piano. If I often take exaggerated countermeasures as a parent, I may cause harm to the child. The safest child would be the one locked in a bomb shelter on a healthy diet. It would protect against falling pianos, falling bombs, freezing to death, drowning, transportation accidents, school bullies, sexually abusive authority figures, house fires, sun burns - everything except an attack on the bomb shelter ventilation system. The prohibitive costs excluded, no reasonable parent would do such a thing. (If air raid sirens go off, of course it still becomes reasonable to take the child to such a shelter - until the 'all clear'). If the child is never given a chance to be unsupervised, when will it learn to tell situations and behaviours that carry risk from those that don't? When will they develop their independent sense of judgement? Anyways, to answer your -hopefully rhetorical - question: Transportation by car is risky on a population level. Playing in the forest or park is not even close. It may also be argued that allowing children a steadily developing autonomy from an early age leads to a lower risk over the course of a lifetime - since the child then steadily increases its ability to handle a risky world. Therefore, I claim that unreasonable protection is the true neglect of the child. [EDIT: Spelling]
- mighty_atomic_c 10y ago
  Your view is in line with developmental psychologists. Children who are never given a chance to think and act independently will grow up stunted and incomplete. By overprotecting, you weaken the child.
  - johnnyhillbilly 10y ago
    The CPS should have a focus on parents that are unreasonable in their protection. Unfortunately, they have to be policy based. One child out of 500,000 that is snatched when alone creates much more attention than 50,000 children (out of 500,000) that never get the joy of developing into reasonable, competent and calm grown-ups...
DougN7 10y ago
Heh, I am a terrible communicator. What I meant is that to the individual, perception and reality are the same. The facts and stats don't back up perception, but a person will think their perception is correct, otherwise they would perceive differently. Which is why we judge parents - our perception is "it's dangerous out there", even though the data doesn't bare it out.

Afton 10y ago

I'm most interested in the enshrinement into law of these risk assessments, where if you disagree with the risk assessments you get flagged for CPS or criminal judgement. Even if you 'win', society just imposed a massive, massive cost on you (and your children) for disagreeing about the relative risk of an action. There needs to be some way of walking this back, but I can't think what that might be except literally trying to get a law in place giving parents broad immunity. I can't even really imagine how such a law would be worded without completely gutting CPS and related organizations in other countries.

1123581321 10y ago
I think the struggle for civil forfeiture reform offers some suggestions. Child Services operates similarly to these programs in that they can size children and impose sanctions without a court finding any wrongdoing first. Child Services makes use of broad powers and would indeed be "gutted" if they couldn't act until neglectful parents were tried or pled guilty. I think that is a good tradeoff. Similarly, I don't mind that civil forfeiture reform lets drug dealers continue to drive sometimes. This is a major political controversy, though.
- Afton 10y ago
  Can't really agree though. The issue with child services is that they can act faster than the criminal system. You might want to say that they couldn't act to remove or otherwise enforce parental restrictions until criminal charges are made (leaving other less adversarial actions available). An unintended consequence of this may be that charges are made much more easily for the purpose of unblocking child services. Alternatively, it may be that we want to take the same 'rational' look at risk that we want the courts/child services to take. Maybe the few kids that get taken away 'unreasonably' are actually just the cost of having an otherwise sane system. Lest that come off as callous, I just mean that if you have a country of 300 million, you'll get some pretty far out scenarios played out. You don't necessarily want to add process to protect those very few scenarios that are outrageous because it may cost more (by e.g. tying CPS' hands so that they can't take actually at-risk children out of homes). I guess I'm suggesting that this might, in the end, be much ado about nothing. It's hard to say without numbers and analysis.

platz 10y ago

you have to multiply by an outrage factor as well. bad outcomes do not all have unit '1'

larrik 10y ago

> A 2-year-old was found unattended after his parents allegedly left home to play Pokémon Go. > How much risk was there of some harm coming to the child while the parents were gone? As a parent to young children, I would say pretty damn high, actually. Kids do stupid things all the time, and if you aren't there, and they know you aren't there, there is no limit to the stupid things a 2 year old can do. It's a normal part of growing up, but that doesn't make it safe to do it alone in the slightest. That said, I agree with the gist of the article overall.

compiler-guy 10y ago
I don't think we can make that judgement without more data about how the house was set up, how close help was, and how far away the parents went. For example, going outside and down the street half-a-block for five minutes while your child is watching their favorite show is quite a bit different than leaving them working in the kitchen with knives laying around.
- mindfulgeek 10y ago
  You're right, we can't make a wise judgment without more data. People all the time are making guesses and taking action based on it though. That's the scary part.
djsumdog 10y ago
I could see that. A two year old could easily run out into traffic. A 7 or 8 year old, not so much. I remember years ago about a women who had the police escort a kid to her house because she'd let him bicycle to school (wearing a helmet and it was < 2 miles). That is kinda crazy. When I went to elementary school (early 90s), there was a whole group of kids who walked to school. Sometimes the teacher in charge of the gate would forgot to unlock it and we'd see them all pile up while in homeroom (huge fence, took like 15 min to walk around so most kids would just wait).
- fireflash38 10y ago
  > A two year old could easily run out into traffic. A 7 or 8 year old, not so much. You overestimate 7 & 8 year olds. I know I definitely did. Ran into the side of a moving car.

pg_is_a_butt 10y ago

uh... who is "we"? you're all idiots.

nostromo 10y ago

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

softawre 10y ago
Well said. In fact, I would not be surprised if people were so stressed out about these rare things they can not control that they developed habits like binge eating, drinking, and smoking - that had a much higher chance of leading to their early demise.
ams6110 10y ago
I think it's almost 100% news media sensationalism. News media today is not about investigative reporting, or real news. It's about selling ads and getting eyeballs. So they report rare events as if they happen every day and you need to keep watching so you know what to do about it. The news media today is toxic. You could do little more to improve your outlook on life and the future than simply not watching it. At all. I haven't watched a news program on any major network or any cable news in several years, and I don't miss it at all.
- superuser2 10y ago
  >watched That's your problem. There has always been a major step down in quality from print to TV (precisely because of the need to fill airtime and hold people's attention to it). That step is smaller now as papers get more desperate to stay alive, but there are still print media doing good work. Drastically better than cable news, anyway.
- kayla210 10y ago
  I agree. It seems like everything on the news is blown out of proportion and beaten to death in an attempt to fill the day with "interesting" stuff. No, this is just making people scared to go outside and actually enjoy life. I've stopped watching the news and just read it whenever I hear of something going on that piques my interest on the Internet. It's pointless for me to watch 24-hour news coverage of a shooting or kidnapping that is just going to make me think less of the world I live in.

tillytal 10y ago

The research actually looks kind of cool, but this headline and the whole framing of the issue sounds like it was written by an alien. Uh, why? We judge everything on the basis of perception, not reality. That's just... how this works. And this is far from the most worrying thing Americans have a dramatically detatched perception of danger about, right now. If you want to really address this issue, and a few others besides, I'd stop worrying about how people relate to kids or parents and start worrying about how they relate to reality.

mindfulgeek 10y ago
While there are plenty of ways people are disconnected from reality, the impact on our culture when kids don't have independence and parents make decisions out of fear has a significant impact on our world.
- tillytal 10y ago
  Count me as reeeeally leery of ascribing harm to an amorphous "cultural impact". Not that I think it's sensible or right that a child might not be allowed to walk around the block, but that in general, as with any other thing other people's parents seem to worry about, the kids are probably going to be fine. Contrasted with our outrageously inverted reaction to the real and fictional (respectively) threats of climate change and terrorism, it's hard for me to muster up too much outrage. Fix this without fixing them, it's hard for me to clap too hard.
  - mindfulgeek 10y ago
    In general, kids and young adults are more unhealthy in measurable ways -- cancer, depression, suicide rates -- all higher. While this is just one aspect of what is causing trouble, the lack of independence has been linked to kids making really, really bad choices when they are finally alone. You can also ask any college professor how the quality of problem solving and independence has changed in the past decade or so. In order to fix a problem, you need to fix the cause, not the effect. Many of the causes of the poor decisions we make are due to conditioning of our childhood. While adults cannot blame their bad decisions on their parents, they certainly can see a root cause of much of their poor choices -- if they can see it at all.

kazinator 10y ago

There is no such thing as "perceived but unreal risk". A risk is some sort of estimate that harm will occur: a likelihood. No risk is real; it is always perceived. There is only the question of how rationally founded is that estimate. Some risks can be established via measurement. If the statistics give some risk as 0.1%, but you perceive it subjectively as 30%, then there is a degree to which your perception of risk is unrealistically inflated. Neither the 0.1% nor the 30% are 'real' though; both are just a tool for guessing about the future. We judge people when their behavior hints at a risk estimate which differs from ours. Anyone who estimates a risk lower than you do is reckless; anyone who estimates it higher is a wimp. Sometimes, estimates of risk are just culturally enshrined B.S., not founded in anything. If you don't protect yourself from a certain risk in a certain culturally endorsed, widely practiced manner, then you're an ignorant or crazy cultural outsider. Likewise if you go too far in protecting yourself from something.

mikeash 10y ago
If I'm flipping a coin, would you not say that the real risk of a flip coming up heads is about 50%?
- kazinator 10y ago
  If I said that, I could drop the word "real" and still say the same thing. "Real risk" in conversation is usually just an intensifier which means "risk significantly greater than zero percent" implying that it's high enough to be considered on its own, or ahead of other risks. That's already more or less given by the 50% figure. In this sense there is "no real risk" that the coin will land on its edge. There is a probability attached which is too small to bother with; and possibly lower than the probability that a crow will swoop from the sky and snatch the coin before it lands.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    I think you kind of lost the plot here. In this context, "real" means the actual fact-based risk, rather than an imagined risk. For example, if you've flipped 10 heads in a row, a human suffering from the Gambler's Fallacy might think the risk of a tail is 90%, while the real risk is still about 50%. We're not talking about "real risk" as a synonym to "significant risk."

BoppreH 10y ago

Interesting research. Looks like a cognitive bias related to the reverse-Halo Effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect ). The mother left for some morally bad reason, so the predicted events receive bad associations (larger risk). Sounds easily exploitable too. Want to advertise something dangerous? Just show people doing it in morally good situations.

derefr 10y ago
I started out thinking that, but after considering it some more, I'm not sure it's just a halo effect. Here's a chain of correlations: parents who leave their children alone at random (rather than in a structured and pre-planned way) are probably more impulsive. Trait-impulsivity is hereditary. Thus, leaving a (blood-related) child alone is predictive of that child taking more risks and being the kind of child who can't be left alone safely. (On the other hand, leaving a child you're the adoptive parent or guardian of alone isn't predictive of anything.)
- emodendroket 10y ago
  If it has some sort of deep evolutionary roots, why has it arisen in the past like half-century?

gph 10y ago

I understand the overall thrust of this article, but I somewhat disagree with the suggestion that my judgement of morality should have no impact on my judgement of the risk to a child. For instance a parent that would leave a 2-year old alone to go play pokemon probably has other terrible parenting judgement/skills and most likely the environment they leave the kid in IS actually more dangerous than someone who accidentally leaves their kid alone. They are standardizing risk assessment across all environments, but that's statistics not reality. Certainly some peoples moral assessments have gone overboard (it's crazy that kids can't go to the park unattended when they reach a general maturity). But I don't think it's unreal to assess the risk to a child as higher if you also think their parents are amoral and likely bad parents. Those kids ARE probably at higher risk in my opinion, either from their parents not being as cautious at establishing a healthy environment or in not being good enough parents to teach their kids how to behave in a safe manner when left alone.

mindfulgeek 10y ago
If their kid was sleeping and they stayed in range of a baby monitor, what is the risk there? Yes, it makes sense to make the risk higher if you perceive a parent as less apt, however, we are fast to judge that aptitude without knowing much of the context.
- gph 10y ago
  Did you read the article about the two-year old? The context is that they left him for over an hour and a neighbor found him wandering around outside. I don't know how much context was put into the actual study, and I agree that we make a lot of moral judgements without all the facts. But it seemed like the jist of the research was that our moral judgements of the parents should have no basis in our assessment of the perceived risks to a child. I refute that to an extent.
  - mindfulgeek 10y ago
    I didn't read the article about the two year old. Thank you for sharing the details! I think their research was in trying to understand why we've turned into a culture that is afraid to let their kids have freedoms that use to be common.

lazyant 10y ago

Captain Fantastic is a great movie to get you thinking about kids' education and safety.

tn13 10y ago

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

b_t_s 10y ago
Never attribute to malice... My mother was a CPS worker for a while so here's a little perspective from the inside. CPS is generally wildly underfunded, underpaid, and understaffed. It's staffed largely by bleeding hearts straight out of college, most of whom will burn/churn out in a year or two. They've never had kids; most are still kids themselves. There are a few lifers and first job in a second career people, but they're the minority. It's one of the more systematically dysfunctional branches of government.

tn13 10y ago

If you ever see a kid alone outside the best course of action is to call cops. 1. If you try talking to kid while the kid is alone you might be charged as a sex offender, attempt to kidnap and what not. 2. If you dont try to help and if something happens to the kid may be later you might face some charges or come under suspicion. This is absolutely nothing to with what you feel and think. The risks for not calling cops are simply very high.

cmdrfred 10y ago
>The risks for not calling cops are simply very high.The risks for not calling cops are simply very high. I see lots of kids in my neighborhood walking around, no issues yet. If we used your apparent definition of 'very high' the odds of winning the lottery are simply guaranteed.
orthecreedence 10y ago
What?? If I see an 8 year old walking around outside by themself, my first and only reaction is to do absolutely nothing and let that child go about their business. If something did happen to the kid, every person who happened to see that kid and didn't flip their shit and call the cops is not morally or even legally responsible in any sense. If I saw a kid get snatched into a van, I'd call the cops and do everything in my power to make sure that the kid was returned to his normal life, but holy shit, do not call the cops because you saw a kid outside!

aviv 10y ago

I'm surprised they made no mention of http://www.freerangekids.com/ http://www.freerangekids.com/ or (owner/blogger) Lenore Skenazy, both of which typically come up in such discussions.

bryanlarsen 10y ago
There is a mention of free range parenting, but not an explicit call out.

Symbiote 10y ago

Are perceived risks lower in smaller countries? The article mentions Norway, which has a population of 5M. Even if the rate of child abduction is the same as the USA, there will be far fewer scary stories. 1) How many foreign cases does the Norwegian media report? 2) Are Norwegians worried about them? I'd think "oh, America" and move on, but I'd guess that if I lived in Idaho and the case was in Michigan I wouldn't be so dismissive.

maxxxxx 10y ago
Just watch news in the US. They indulge for hours in killings, child abductions and other stuff. It's a very fear-driven society.

rayiner 10y ago

The worst part of parenting is dealing with other parents. Yuppie millennial parents are the worst. I thought I grew up with overprotective Asian parents but they let me wander all around the town at 7-8, stuff that's apparently get them arrested in the Dame suburbs today.

rrggrr 10y ago

Divorced parents would have to answer to their formers spouse, their former spouse's attorney, a child's rep, the Court, etc. for any serious mishap. Its not worth the knee jerk tragic outcomes the Courts can produce. Therefore, a divorced parent is best served playing it ultra conservative and ignoring this article.

jamesb7276 10y ago

It's easy and lets us perceive ourselves as better than them.

mhb 10y ago

Ladders to help children get up to neck-breaking heights when climbing trees (in Denmark): http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2016/08/23/ladders-to-help-children-get-up-to-neck-breaking-heights-when-climbing-trees/ http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2016/08/23/ladders-to-help-ch...

mangeletti 10y ago

The minds and endocrine systems of children that at raised in safe and sterile environments, under the constant, close attention of guardians, are necessarily unprepared for the randomn inputs available in nature and society. Children that grow up this way will be better suited for a virtual life, where the number of variables is controlled.

rdtsc 10y ago

Even since I was 10 or so I would often come back to school on my own. Then let myself into our apartment. Eat some lunch, do homework, play until my parents came home in the evening. I was effectively often alone for about 4 or so hours. I wouldn't let my kid do it here in US. Not because I wouldn't trust them or think it is dangerous. But because I am afraid what neighbors, school, CPS would do. My co-worker let his kids play in the cul-de-sac for an hour while they watched from the house. An anonymous neighbor reported them to police, and a sequence of embarrassing calls at work ensued, statements to police, follow up visits from police, etc. And this is not some dangerous part of the city. This is suburbs, as safe as they come. But apparently you are never safe from neighbors with an agenda. And the thing is, there is nothing you can say or do, even if you knew this neighbor. "Well I was worried for the children!". Unless they openly confessed it was because you cut the lawn wrong or they don't like the color of your house, there is nothing you can do to them (well maybe turn evil and report them for other irrational fears -- terrorism "but I was worried about this country's safety, swear heard them talk about buying a lot of fertilizer"). The interesting thing is, once those in power act irrationally about something. There will always be people to exploit that element. I heard from my grandparents how neighbors would rat on each other imaginary things during Stalin's times. The results were usually the neighbors family would be taken in the middle the night and sent to Siberia never to be seen again. This is of course, an extreme example but it illustrates, how irrationality can and will be exploited.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> My co-worker let his kids play in the cul-de-sac for an hour while they watched from the house. An anonymous neighbor reported them to police, and a sequence of embarrassing calls at work ensued, statements to police, follow up visits from police, etc. And this is not some dangerous part of the city. This is suburbs, as safe as they come. But apparently you are never safe from neighbors with an agenda. The society is sick. It has the moral equivalent of cancer, or some auto-immune disease, eating it from inside.
sethhochberg 10y ago
Ironically, the suburbs where it is "as safe as they come" seems to be the kind of place where these overzealous neighbor stories come from most often.

Radle 10y ago

Are there places in America where things are not this extreme? I am looking for a career in IT, so coming to the Valley might be something I am going to do in my career. But I would want my kids to grow up in a different, more independent way. Like I did in my home country. (If I was in America now and thinking about getting children, this article would be a 100% reason to go back to my home country, it totally gave me the creeps.)

sotojuan 10y ago
Working class immigrant neighborhoods.
svantana 10y ago
Well, to begin with, find a state where laws are more relaxed: http://www.freerangekids.com/laws/ http://www.freerangekids.com/laws/ Moral judgements from people in your community can be bad enough, but it's a whole different ball game when you run the risk of getting arrested!
noddingham 10y ago
My advice would be to look at smaller towns and neighborhoods. I grew up in a "city" of 30k, with many smaller towns of 500-10k within the county. We roamed every inch of the neighborhood. All the neighbors within 5-6 houses in any direction knew our families.
lubujackson 10y ago
Suburbs are the worst. I grew up in a small town and had pretty much free reign early, walking a mile home from school at 4th grade, do whatever in the summers, etc. My wife was driven from friend's house to friend's house and never was outside alone until she was 16 and could drive. I'm not sure how much it's changed in small towns, but now I live in SF and notice that it is closer to small town behavior than the 'burbs. I routinely see 10 to 12 year old kids walking around in groups to school or taking the bus. They are rarely alone but aren't accompanied by an adult. It is much different than my childhood, but they seem to have good sense of independence which seems way better than a car-based childhood in the suburbs.
10y ago

skizm 10y ago

Because info spreads more quickly now-a-days and even if 99% of people think it's okay to leave a kid unattended in a given situation, the 1% that care are more likely to see these situations and make a big stink out of them.

mighty_atomic_c 10y ago

This is a strong reason why I don't want to raise children in the U.S. I grew up in a very controlled environment with very controlling, paranoid parents and I am still dealing with the many consequences of that. To think that I would be forced to raise children to be deficient per social rules is unsettling at best, and disturbing when considering that this is happening everywhere in the US. What could the future hold in store? How much more extreme can this get?

ars 10y ago

I have my own theory. I think parents have gone so far in the r/K selection[1] toward the K direction that people have gone completely overboard in protecting children. It would be very interesting to compare with cultures where having lots of kids is still the norm. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

iamthepieman 10y ago

Children must be allowed to do dangerous things. Doing dangerous things does not guarantee injury. Children, despite our observations otherwise, do not have a death wish. They have a strong self-preservation instinct and purposefully risky behavior is usually due to ignorance because they don't understand how the world works yet. A child wants to touch the candle flame because they don't know it's hot, not because they want to get burned. Doing dangerous things is risky though. A child is NOT guaranteed to get hurt everytime but if you allow them to explore the work and engage in risky behavior they will get hurt eventually. It is my goal as a parent to let them do dangerous things from an early age even when it scares me. At one that means letting them walk without a walker anad without being there to catch them all the time. At two-four it means letting them climb the stairs on their own and letting them swing and go down the slide without hand holding. At 5+ it means letting them build a fire, swim in the creek, shoot a bow and arrow and climb trees. By giving them freedom (and responsibility - but that's another topic) early they learn what their limits are and, I hope, learn to judge for themselves what is safe for them. This may be different for each of my kids and is almost certainly different than what I believe is safe and or appropriate. Of course I am there to veto really misinformed decisions (we are going to build a diving board into this 2 feet pool in the brook!) and to provide direction and guidance. Putting this into practice has resulted in one broken arm, three staples and numerous small home-treatable cuts and bruises. I don't always like where this philosophy puts me as a father. I many times say yes and then quietly follow from a distance out of my own fear for their safety. But because I know what a struggle it is to decide how to raise my children, even if the ultimate decision is that I am not raising them so much as watching them develop and prodding them occasionally, I try very hard not to judge parents who have made different decisions and different trade-offs. The article doesn't go into much detail about why people judge parents so harshly but mostly focuses on changing social norms. I understand though. I have to actively remind myself NOT to judge parents who make different decisions than I do and I'm only aware of that because I have made decisions that are different than most of my peers and acquaintances.

dghughes 10y ago

I didn't read the entire article and I do not have kids but to me the world seems more hostile than when I was a kid but I guess that's expected. People seem much more opportunistic and are proud of it when I point out it's not a compliment to be called such a thing. Overall maturity seems really low I mean these days people act immature compared to when I was a kid. I don't think I'd see adults in their 20, 30 or 40s chasing Pokemons in the 1970s. These days people swear every second word around kids, seniors, just in public gatherings as if it's nothing I'm sure I'll be mocked for thinking that's wrong. Then again breasts are censored on TV but not when I was a kid. Although contrasting that every now TV show didn't have "this show may have words or situations that may offend someone" warnings after commercial break. Then you have the "everyone is a winner" or "you can do anything" drilled into kids in school I think that stunts maturity. If kids are going to be left alone they need to know sometimes they can screw up big time and it's their fault.

tvaughan 10y ago

I really wish people in the US would prefix these sort of statements with "In the US, we ..." The rest of the world isn't so crazy. Speaking as if what people in the US do is universal makes these sort of things seem as though they're the result of the passage of time, that some other solution just isn't possible, that the outcome was inevitable, and those people affected are somehow victims. When really it's a matter of deliberate choices some people made, in the US. Today's article on ADHD also suffers from the same myopic perspective.

jessaustin 10y ago
It's totally reasonable to want to distance yourself from this sort of thing. However, NPR is an explicitly American news organization, and the second sentence of TFA is prefaced with, "In the United States today..." Actually a lot of the crazy shit you might associate with "USA" is only relevant for certain communities.

B-Con 10y ago

Parenting is a 24/7 job. Parents make thousands of decisions balancing many ideal and pragmatic factors. Seeing one parenting decision is not sufficient for assessing their entire parental lifestyle. Putting aside the specifics of this topic, it is curious how many people are quick to condemn a parent the moment they make a single decision not up to the observer's standards.

nefitty 10y ago

If anyone else is interested in how Debra Harrell and her daughter's story turned out, here is a recent FB update from a person who helped crowdfund $47k to support them during the legal problems. Thankfully the charges were dropped with seemingly no media coverage whatsoever. Unfortunately, it sounds like the young girl is now experiencing anxiety issues from the trauma of being taken by Child Protective Services. https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=532307546952426&id=274254686091048 https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=532307546952426&id...

helthanatos 10y ago

People seem to confuse rates and percentages with figures. There may be less on average, but more in reality. Not having so many kids on the streets may also cause the crimes to be less. Children wear less clothes than they used to and there seems to be more pedophiles, if those little kids were left alone, more may be taken advantage of. The risk is real. Children don't know how to react when confronted with maybe a drunk driver or someone that offered them candy, so letting children on their own leaves real risk. However, whether it should be criminalized for a rather small risk is debatable.

Bjartr 10y ago
>There may be less on average, but more in reality. Mind explaining this? I'm having trouble grokking it. >Not having so many kids on the streets may also cause the crimes to be less. The article accounted for this. >Children wear less clothes than they used to and there seems to be more pedophiles, if those little kids were left alone, more may be taken advantage of. What? Do you have any more information on any of these claims? It's coming across as pure conjecture on your part.
- helthanatos 10y ago
  1. Smaller percentage of a greater amount. 2. Oh well. 3. Children wear much smaller clothes than they used to.

Unbeliever69 10y ago

I judge parents that deny their children their childhood by "protecting" them from perceived but unreal risks.

paulrpotts 10y ago

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

x1798DE 10y ago
Did the police actually do anything? Part of the responsibility here falls on the police to say, "It is not a crime to let children play unsupervised, mind your own business." I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually illegal to make frivolous complaints of this nature.
- paulrpotts 10y ago
  No, they've never actually come to talk to us. For a year or so I had a habit of taking a long daily walk in my neighborhood -- sometimes I would take my baby boy out and wear him in on my back in a baby carrier. That gave my wife a break and after a hundred yards or so he would inevitably fall asleep. Someone apparently called the police saying I was carrying a dead baby around the neighborhood in a backpack, and I had an officer stop and ask if he could talk to me and verify that the backpack was actually a child carrier. He was apologetic and friendly about the whole thing but it really makes me wonder WTF my neighbors think about us...
arprocter 10y ago
When I was a kid my parents would let me pump their gas. I also ran errands in town by myself, and was left to look after younger siblings before my teens. IMO the sooner you're given responsibilities the sooner you learn to be responsible. As when there was talk of raising the driving age because 'all these teens are dying' - it's inexperience, not so much the age which matters.
- pyre 10y ago

efa 10y ago

Wish people (especially scientist) would just stick to the facts. In the McDonald's case people were not "angry at this woman for not being a full-time mom". They were angry that the child was left alone. No one has a problem with a mom working and a care giver watching a child. And of course we have to throw in a dig at evil McDonalds for not having childcare services.

harmegido 10y ago
But why would they be angry at her for leaving the kid alone? What danger is the kid in? What do they care what she does with her kid if the kid is in no danger? (Not to mention, how could she afford the child care?)

pkulak 10y ago

I agree with this, but I still have a hell of a time letting my kids outside unsupervised, not because of abduction or crime fears, but because of cars. At least in the States, people don't give a crap about anything while they are driving. Excessive speeding is the norm on all city streets, marked crosswalks are a mild suggestion, and unmarked crosswalks do not exist. If 50% of the land outside of my house were literal minefields I'm not sure it would be less dangerous. I don't think anyone was abducted in my city last year, but 10 pedestrians died. A teenager was just mowed down in a crosswalk over the weekend. That scares the shit out of me.

tbihl 10y ago
For that, I recommend living in older neighborhoods and trying to get involved in re striping streets narrower. Cars speeding are a clear sign that the speed limit doesn't match the road design. When you make drivers feel uncomfortable, they slow down and drive more carefully. When you make roads wide enough for firetrucks to do three-point turns and with highway safety margins, drivers will intuitively listen to the design language encouraging them to drive fast.

pessimizer 10y ago

It's the result of a bizarre American Protestant religious tenet that gradually evolved into existence over the 20th century, namely: People deserve health and happiness in life in inverse relationship to their degree of cynicism; Children are born in a perfect state, without cynicism, therefore any effort by a cynical (by definition) adult that could protect a child from anything that could possibly affect their health or happiness is mandatory. The most important thing a child needs to learn is to control themselves and to be optimistic, which will immunize them to the effects of adult cynicism, not how to handle themselves independently in the world, and especially not math. It's a complete inversion of the previous straightforward pre-20c mindset, which was: adults take longer to make, are stronger, and they know more stuff, so they're more important. Also, religiously, that babies are born fundamentally broken, and need to gain understanding of the world before they have any chance to fix themselves. Dead babies go to Hell, or at best an endless purgatory. IMO 80% of the character of its current expression comes from spoiled Baby Boomers having a combination of condescension and hate towards their parents. They were perfect, ruined by the world, and endangered by their parents cynical reasoning about why we should be in Vietnam and hate communism (something about sharing being evil and assuming the worst about everybody.)

maxxxxx 10y ago
That's an interesting thought.
tbihl 10y ago
I buy your argument that we value children too highly in relation to adults, but I think the connection to religion is under-formed at best. If nothing else you need greater specificity of blame: surely there's a common theme with higher correlation than whether people follow a church that split from Catholicism 500 years ago, given the huge variation within that category. Myself, I'd argue that the way we've built towns has lent itself to destroying community and wealth. We put people in cars so they don't interact with their surroundings. We put the cars on massive road networks we can't afford to maintain (to say nothing of the sewer and water out to the edges of towns.) Then a downturn cones and we cut services because the maintenance is crushing us. We build places that aren't meant to last, and then only the rich can afford to move to the next generation's good suburbs. Everyone left behind was too poor to get out, and now they'll suffer decreased services and accessibility as the local government spends on the new growth areas. Given such a miserable setting, people are unable, by fact of their patterns of life, to look out for one another. Culture breaks down, because there's no community maintaining it. The earth-conquering strength of human teamwork is not utilized in these places; the new suburbs are full of people wealthy enough to overcome that, but the aging ones have no such strength.

Diggsey 10y ago

The survey completely overlooks a very important possibility: The participants know their own ignorance of the exact circumstances of each situation, and so they use their judgement of the parent's character to fill in the gaps. For example, when the parent leaves for an "immoral" reason, it reflects badly on their character, so the participant would have less reason to believe that they've thought about the child's safety. On the other hand, when a parent whom the participant has judged to be of good character leaves the child, they assume that the parent them-self has thought through the safety implications and has judged it to be safe. Since the parent would have more information than the participant, the participant is trusting their judgement, and is able to determine that the situation is safer. In essence, the stories told to the participants actually do have different amounts of information in about the child's safety.

tbihl 10y ago

When I saw this title, the thing that jumped onto my head was child car seats. Beyond infant seats, child seats don't provide any significant benefit over sitting in the back with a seatbelt. The difference between those two is an often-perceived, but infinitesimal, risk. On the other hand, we don't judge parents for driving their kids all over the place, or living far away from things so that they're forced to drive many miles with their kids. But that's a highly risky behavior. If you live in a place that's walkable for your kids, you've probably sheltered them from far more danger than child predators ever pose.

redsparrow 10y ago

Here's a snapshot of what things are like in Berlin, Germany. I dropped my 7 year old off at a new day camp (in the centre of the city) last week. They asked me if she was allowed to leave on her own at the end of the day. Here are the rules for kids riding on the subway system: "Children under four years of age may only use public transport if they are accompanied by a person who is at least six years of age." That said, you don't see a lot of little kids travelling alone but it seems that the discretion is with the parents.