6 ms·

Definitely agree with the conclusion that nowadays, "In other words, the only socially acceptable mom has become a mom who never takes her eyes off her kids".

by fma 10y ago

Definitely agree with the conclusion that nowadays, "In other words, the only socially acceptable mom has become a mom who never takes her eyes off her kids". When I was growing up in the 90's and took the bus to school, parents just dropped off the kids on the corner and parents go about the day. Now when I drive by school bus stops, I see a line of cars parked on the side of the road. Both parents and kids sitting in the car till the bus comes.

api 10y ago
A major unanswered question I have is why this happened. Where did this collective insanity come from?
- WalterBright 10y ago
  It comes from having solved the real problems that killed kids - I think around 1900 it was 30% didn't live to adulthood. So now we invent problems.
  - dgudkov 10y ago
    That's a very interesting hypothesis. It very much could be that the Western society has developed so powerful (and effective) problem solving "engine" that now it simply doesn't have enough problems to solve (or its focus is not aligned properly). I remember when I moved to Canada from a country with 3 times higher crime rate it struck me how big mindshare crime news occupy in minds of Canadians. Especially women are subject to it for some reason. If a stranger would read a regular news website it might look like criminals now totally dominate and good citizens barely survive.
- dmckeon 10y ago
  Partially from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_danger#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_danger#Criticism > The concept has been criticized for ignoring the fact that most child abductions and harm result not from strangers, but rather from someone the child knows.
- fma 10y ago
  Just speculating here...but I blame a lot of the social shift on social media and 24/7 news. A one off mother does something bad - therefore everyone might be that one off mother. Also a lost in sense of community. As the study shows, if you know the reasoning for why the mother left the kid in the car, people are less likely to judge the situation as dangerous. If you all knew your neighbors, and you see someone's kid running around, you'll know why that kid is by themselves and probably less likely to called Child Services. One of my coworkers had child services called on him. His son's school let out early. His son forgot his keys that day, so he climbed through an open window through the 2nd floor. Neighbor saw this...called Child Services.
  - jschwartzi 10y ago
    Both my brother and I had to do this on a couple of occasions. Apparently even in 2004 it wasn't a big deal.
- danharaj 10y ago
  The state has taken over all of the collective interests in the welfare of children. This leaves the parents and the government as the only beings who have a responsibility and authority over a child's life. This is more pronounced in the suburbs than in urban neighborhoods in my experience, having lived in a variety of both. I think it's a very unhealthy way of thinking about raising children. It takes a village and all that. When families live in areas where they naturally commingle they tend to be interested in the welfare of others around them. I think that's why it's more of an issue in the physically isolating suburbs.
- inanutshellus 10y ago
  Fear and social pressure. It's the same reason a new mom won't eat cheese or fish for the entirety of her pregnancy. For a small price (inconvenience), they avert assuage that fear. Secondly, social pressure. While it's entirely unlikely your child will be kidnapped at a playground if left unattended, it's extremely likely someone will call the cops if they see an unattended little kid.
  - fma 10y ago
    Not all cheese or fish. It's raw fish, or anything unpasteurized, which is only certain cheese/milk/fruit juices are.
    - mrfusion 10y ago
      More importantly any fish continuing high levels of mercury like tuna.
- matt4077 10y ago
  I'd add the disaster that happened to most US cities in the last 30 or so years to the list of reasons: urban sprawl and the factual abandonment of public transport. In large swaths of suburbia, people almost never walk anywhere. When they want to "go outside" they take a car to the park. The result is that the concept of "waiting on a sidewalk for the bus" is so foreign they don't even consider it an option. Let alone "walking to the bus stop". There are a few places where street life still exists – mostly really large cities and really small & old ones. It's a tragedy how the convenience of taking a car right to the front door of some megastore has gutted city life. Shopping used to mean a walk down Main St. with more, smaller owner-operated stores and a high probability of meeting someone and stopping for some coffee. But that took longer, and you needed to live close by (=smaller houses/properties). And sometimes it rained, and those shop were more expensive, and we decided a worthy human being is in the office 46h/week. (not that those aren't legitimate reasons. It's more a matter of taste, and most people apparently don't share mine).
  - jerf 10y ago
    I live in a suburb and I have kids. It isn't what you say it is. It is fear about children being unsafe and metafear that if you aren't seen as watching your children someone will call the cops. We all think this is stupid, except for the one or two busybodies who call the cops. It isn't something stupid about how inconceivable walking is or how foreign the idea of "standing outside" is. That's just you insulting a group of people that I presume you don't like. I think if we're going to see this end, we need institutional change; we need the police to be able to see a situation and tell off the person calling them for being stupid. As long as there's an extremely good chance CPS will take your kid away because some asshat called the cops for something stupid, we parents can not afford to act otherwise.
    - heymijo 10y ago
      "We all think this is stupid, except for the one or two busybodies who call the cops." Your comment reminded me of Taleb's "The Most Intolerant Wins." https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15#.z32ueeqto https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dic... Re-reading the article his idea of 're-normalizing' explains what is happening here with our society's view towards unattended children. It's different than the explanation from the parent study, but seems complementary not contradictory.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  Getting your picture of the world through media means getting it from examining the extreme outliers? I don't have data, only a suspicion, this is relevant if it can be shown that people get much more information about their world from media than they used to, and/or that the media has turned more global, meaning less local reports but fishing for extreme stories in the wider world. This could explain why (if) the image of the world, including the local world, has become more extreme, which could in turn explain more extreme and less relaxed attitude(s). In addition though, I think a contributing factor is cars, cars , cars everywhere. Having grown up in East Germany, I would be much more concerned about letting my kids (if I had any) roam around in the exact same area where I grew up in very freely. The roads are much more dangerous now for inattentive playing children. And as a local issue, a vastly increased number of ticks in the forests around my childhood home, but as I said, that's just a local issue.
- apatters 10y ago
  Even before the arrival of social media, the mass media was feeding people stories about the world which made it look far more dangerous than it actually was. So media isn't the reason. The reason is that the majority political philosophy in the US has shifted from libertarianism/classical liberalism to progressivism. The libertarian point of view is that people generally should be free to go about their own business in the manner they see fit. The progressive point of view is that we have a collective responsibility to police the wrongdoing of other people and fix it, using state power if necessary. In the video where the guy goes off at the mother for leaving her kid in the car, you can see the progressive power dynamic in play immediately. The guy thinks she's doing something wrong so he gets involved. (Who is he? Doesn't matter. It's everyone's job to right wrongs.) It takes maybe 15 seconds before someone mentions the police, because the only way such intrusive activism works is when a higher power (can be state, law, society, science, God, whatever) is used to identify and enforce a definition of what's right. Even though the activist doesn't explicitly threaten to call the cops, during the confrontation they are mentioned constantly because the threat of state power is the only reason the mother even has to give this guy the time of day. If you want to go a level deeper and ask why this political shift has occurred, it's likely that one contributing factor is urbanization which been underway in the US for some time--historically densely populated cities tend to be more authoritarian than rural areas because a crazy person can do more damage in a dense city (you don't see mass shootings happening in cornfields).
  - fma 10y ago
    I agree with most points, except for the urbanization part. I don't know if you refer specifically to the US or a general human behavior. But in Asia, children still go home by themselves, play by themselves and stay at home by themselves. The cities in Asia are much more dense than in the US.
    - cderwin 10y ago
      > If you want to go a level deeper and ask why this political shift has occurred, it's likely that one contributing factor is urbanization which been underway in the US for some time He was saying America has become more progressive because of urbanization, not that urbanization directly caused the intense scrutiny on child rearing. However I am left in want about what makes the US different than other places with regard to child rearing, even though I largely agree with the points above (though I might include authoritarianism with progressivism).
- csuwldcat 10y ago
  "Where did this collective insanity come from?" From the paternalistic insanity of authoritarian collectivism.
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    In that case wouldn't you see this stuff in Japan and China? edit: it almost seems to speak to a LOSS of collectivism in the US, when people lived in small communities that all shared the same values
    - csuwldcat 10y ago
      I think you're equating collectivism with community, and the two aren't inextricably linked. Collectivism is the philosophy that a central set of practices and behaviors be enforced across a group, placing the group's will (often via force-backed punishment) over individual beliefs and choices. That's quite a bit different that a close-knit community that features voluntary interaction for mutual benefit. The latter form of true community is great, but in the US we're gravitating more and more toward forcing views about safety, security, and social behavior on others through criminalization of once ordinary personal choices.
      - kalleboo 10y ago
        I struggling to see where "true community" as you describe it has existed outside of Ayn Rand novels. American and global communities have always ostracized people (which used to mean struggling if not death) who don't agree with the group's will (which traditionally has been based on religion but also other mores). I guess the difference now would be that the group has become bigger (state/national) rather than based on towns/neighborhoods.
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  Pet theory: it's competitive virtue signaling. Mom A doesn't just send the kids to the bus stop, she stands there with them. So mom B also begins standing. Then mom A starts meeting them at the bus in the afternoons.... There's no end to it. Parents say and do the "right" things because they are better parents -- or at least the optics looks like they are. So other parents are forced to follow suit. Given enough of this insanity, the next logical step is to start using the criminal justice system to enforce what being a good parent is. The internet and social media are just making this worse, btw.
- Clubber 10y ago
  The first off the top of my head is over the top DA's and police backed by a general authoritarian political class.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
sotojuan 10y ago
FWIW this doesn't happen in more urban neighborhoods as much. I live in Brooklyn and there are (well, "were" since summer ended) kids of all school ages roaming around and playing in the park with little to no supervision.
- Zach_the_Lizard 10y ago
  I live in Long Island City (a neighborhood in NYC for those not from the area - it's in Queens) and I see many children, but few that are unattended, despite the very low crime rate. Of course, LIC is full of well off yuppies, so perhaps the demographics are the reason.
  - sotojuan 10y ago
    I don't know much about Queens, but I mentioned Sunset Park because it's a working class, immigrant neighborhood. If LIC's demographics are similar to say, Brooklyn Heights, then I expect paranoid behavior from parents.
kylerpalmer 10y ago
Not going to have kids because it has become so hard...
- DonHopkins 10y ago
  Hear! Hear! Let's all join RMS in his anti-natalism pledge, and set a better example by making proud announcements that we don't plan to reproduce ourselves! [1] [1] http://www.art.net/studios/hackers/hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html http://www.art.net/studios/hackers/hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-d...
  - Gracana 10y ago
    Ouch, that's an unfair comment. The parent post is nothing like anything in that ridiculous flame fest.
DonHopkins 10y ago
That means Trump must be a good father, because he never takes his eyes off his daughter.

by fma 10y ago

api 10y ago

A major unanswered question I have is why this happened. Where did this collective insanity come from?

WalterBright 10y ago
It comes from having solved the real problems that killed kids - I think around 1900 it was 30% didn't live to adulthood. So now we invent problems.
- dgudkov 10y ago
  That's a very interesting hypothesis. It very much could be that the Western society has developed so powerful (and effective) problem solving "engine" that now it simply doesn't have enough problems to solve (or its focus is not aligned properly). I remember when I moved to Canada from a country with 3 times higher crime rate it struck me how big mindshare crime news occupy in minds of Canadians. Especially women are subject to it for some reason. If a stranger would read a regular news website it might look like criminals now totally dominate and good citizens barely survive.
dmckeon 10y ago
Partially from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_danger#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_danger#Criticism > The concept has been criticized for ignoring the fact that most child abductions and harm result not from strangers, but rather from someone the child knows.
fma 10y ago
Just speculating here...but I blame a lot of the social shift on social media and 24/7 news. A one off mother does something bad - therefore everyone might be that one off mother. Also a lost in sense of community. As the study shows, if you know the reasoning for why the mother left the kid in the car, people are less likely to judge the situation as dangerous. If you all knew your neighbors, and you see someone's kid running around, you'll know why that kid is by themselves and probably less likely to called Child Services. One of my coworkers had child services called on him. His son's school let out early. His son forgot his keys that day, so he climbed through an open window through the 2nd floor. Neighbor saw this...called Child Services.
- jschwartzi 10y ago
  Both my brother and I had to do this on a couple of occasions. Apparently even in 2004 it wasn't a big deal.
danharaj 10y ago
The state has taken over all of the collective interests in the welfare of children. This leaves the parents and the government as the only beings who have a responsibility and authority over a child's life. This is more pronounced in the suburbs than in urban neighborhoods in my experience, having lived in a variety of both. I think it's a very unhealthy way of thinking about raising children. It takes a village and all that. When families live in areas where they naturally commingle they tend to be interested in the welfare of others around them. I think that's why it's more of an issue in the physically isolating suburbs.
inanutshellus 10y ago
Fear and social pressure. It's the same reason a new mom won't eat cheese or fish for the entirety of her pregnancy. For a small price (inconvenience), they avert assuage that fear. Secondly, social pressure. While it's entirely unlikely your child will be kidnapped at a playground if left unattended, it's extremely likely someone will call the cops if they see an unattended little kid.
- fma 10y ago
  Not all cheese or fish. It's raw fish, or anything unpasteurized, which is only certain cheese/milk/fruit juices are.
  - mrfusion 10y ago
    More importantly any fish continuing high levels of mercury like tuna.
matt4077 10y ago
I'd add the disaster that happened to most US cities in the last 30 or so years to the list of reasons: urban sprawl and the factual abandonment of public transport. In large swaths of suburbia, people almost never walk anywhere. When they want to "go outside" they take a car to the park. The result is that the concept of "waiting on a sidewalk for the bus" is so foreign they don't even consider it an option. Let alone "walking to the bus stop". There are a few places where street life still exists – mostly really large cities and really small & old ones. It's a tragedy how the convenience of taking a car right to the front door of some megastore has gutted city life. Shopping used to mean a walk down Main St. with more, smaller owner-operated stores and a high probability of meeting someone and stopping for some coffee. But that took longer, and you needed to live close by (=smaller houses/properties). And sometimes it rained, and those shop were more expensive, and we decided a worthy human being is in the office 46h/week. (not that those aren't legitimate reasons. It's more a matter of taste, and most people apparently don't share mine).
- jerf 10y ago
  I live in a suburb and I have kids. It isn't what you say it is. It is fear about children being unsafe and metafear that if you aren't seen as watching your children someone will call the cops. We all think this is stupid, except for the one or two busybodies who call the cops. It isn't something stupid about how inconceivable walking is or how foreign the idea of "standing outside" is. That's just you insulting a group of people that I presume you don't like. I think if we're going to see this end, we need institutional change; we need the police to be able to see a situation and tell off the person calling them for being stupid. As long as there's an extremely good chance CPS will take your kid away because some asshat called the cops for something stupid, we parents can not afford to act otherwise.
  - heymijo 10y ago
    "We all think this is stupid, except for the one or two busybodies who call the cops." Your comment reminded me of Taleb's "The Most Intolerant Wins." https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15#.z32ueeqto https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dic... Re-reading the article his idea of 're-normalizing' explains what is happening here with our society's view towards unattended children. It's different than the explanation from the parent study, but seems complementary not contradictory.
Noseshine 10y ago
Getting your picture of the world through media means getting it from examining the extreme outliers? I don't have data, only a suspicion, this is relevant if it can be shown that people get much more information about their world from media than they used to, and/or that the media has turned more global, meaning less local reports but fishing for extreme stories in the wider world. This could explain why (if) the image of the world, including the local world, has become more extreme, which could in turn explain more extreme and less relaxed attitude(s). In addition though, I think a contributing factor is cars, cars , cars everywhere. Having grown up in East Germany, I would be much more concerned about letting my kids (if I had any) roam around in the exact same area where I grew up in very freely. The roads are much more dangerous now for inattentive playing children. And as a local issue, a vastly increased number of ticks in the forests around my childhood home, but as I said, that's just a local issue.
apatters 10y ago
Even before the arrival of social media, the mass media was feeding people stories about the world which made it look far more dangerous than it actually was. So media isn't the reason. The reason is that the majority political philosophy in the US has shifted from libertarianism/classical liberalism to progressivism. The libertarian point of view is that people generally should be free to go about their own business in the manner they see fit. The progressive point of view is that we have a collective responsibility to police the wrongdoing of other people and fix it, using state power if necessary. In the video where the guy goes off at the mother for leaving her kid in the car, you can see the progressive power dynamic in play immediately. The guy thinks she's doing something wrong so he gets involved. (Who is he? Doesn't matter. It's everyone's job to right wrongs.) It takes maybe 15 seconds before someone mentions the police, because the only way such intrusive activism works is when a higher power (can be state, law, society, science, God, whatever) is used to identify and enforce a definition of what's right. Even though the activist doesn't explicitly threaten to call the cops, during the confrontation they are mentioned constantly because the threat of state power is the only reason the mother even has to give this guy the time of day. If you want to go a level deeper and ask why this political shift has occurred, it's likely that one contributing factor is urbanization which been underway in the US for some time--historically densely populated cities tend to be more authoritarian than rural areas because a crazy person can do more damage in a dense city (you don't see mass shootings happening in cornfields).
- fma 10y ago
  I agree with most points, except for the urbanization part. I don't know if you refer specifically to the US or a general human behavior. But in Asia, children still go home by themselves, play by themselves and stay at home by themselves. The cities in Asia are much more dense than in the US.
  - cderwin 10y ago
    > If you want to go a level deeper and ask why this political shift has occurred, it's likely that one contributing factor is urbanization which been underway in the US for some time He was saying America has become more progressive because of urbanization, not that urbanization directly caused the intense scrutiny on child rearing. However I am left in want about what makes the US different than other places with regard to child rearing, even though I largely agree with the points above (though I might include authoritarianism with progressivism).
csuwldcat 10y ago
"Where did this collective insanity come from?" From the paternalistic insanity of authoritarian collectivism.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  In that case wouldn't you see this stuff in Japan and China? edit: it almost seems to speak to a LOSS of collectivism in the US, when people lived in small communities that all shared the same values
  - csuwldcat 10y ago
    I think you're equating collectivism with community, and the two aren't inextricably linked. Collectivism is the philosophy that a central set of practices and behaviors be enforced across a group, placing the group's will (often via force-backed punishment) over individual beliefs and choices. That's quite a bit different that a close-knit community that features voluntary interaction for mutual benefit. The latter form of true community is great, but in the US we're gravitating more and more toward forcing views about safety, security, and social behavior on others through criminalization of once ordinary personal choices.
    - kalleboo 10y ago
      I struggling to see where "true community" as you describe it has existed outside of Ayn Rand novels. American and global communities have always ostracized people (which used to mean struggling if not death) who don't agree with the group's will (which traditionally has been based on religion but also other mores). I guess the difference now would be that the group has become bigger (state/national) rather than based on towns/neighborhoods.
DanielBMarkham 10y ago
Pet theory: it's competitive virtue signaling. Mom A doesn't just send the kids to the bus stop, she stands there with them. So mom B also begins standing. Then mom A starts meeting them at the bus in the afternoons.... There's no end to it. Parents say and do the "right" things because they are better parents -- or at least the optics looks like they are. So other parents are forced to follow suit. Given enough of this insanity, the next logical step is to start using the criminal justice system to enforce what being a good parent is. The internet and social media are just making this worse, btw.
Clubber 10y ago
The first off the top of my head is over the top DA's and police backed by a general authoritarian political class.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

sotojuan 10y ago

FWIW this doesn't happen in more urban neighborhoods as much. I live in Brooklyn and there are (well, "were" since summer ended) kids of all school ages roaming around and playing in the park with little to no supervision.

Zach_the_Lizard 10y ago
I live in Long Island City (a neighborhood in NYC for those not from the area - it's in Queens) and I see many children, but few that are unattended, despite the very low crime rate. Of course, LIC is full of well off yuppies, so perhaps the demographics are the reason.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  I don't know much about Queens, but I mentioned Sunset Park because it's a working class, immigrant neighborhood. If LIC's demographics are similar to say, Brooklyn Heights, then I expect paranoid behavior from parents.

kylerpalmer 10y ago

Not going to have kids because it has become so hard...

DonHopkins 10y ago
Hear! Hear! Let's all join RMS in his anti-natalism pledge, and set a better example by making proud announcements that we don't plan to reproduce ourselves! [1] [1] http://www.art.net/studios/hackers/hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html http://www.art.net/studios/hackers/hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-d...
- Gracana 10y ago
  Ouch, that's an unfair comment. The parent post is nothing like anything in that ridiculous flame fest.

DonHopkins 10y ago

That means Trump must be a good father, because he never takes his eyes off his daughter.