8 ms·

As a Swiss with a small child, this is the main reason why I couldn't move to the US or UK. Your 70ies examples are still common enough in Switzerland. 6 year o

As a Swiss with a small child, this is the main reason why I couldn't move to the US or UK. Your 70ies examples are still common enough in Switzerland. 6 year olds are sent to Kindergarden on their own (after a bit of training with their parents). Put the visibility triangle on and off you go. Parents are discouraged by the school authorities to bring by car. Today looking back at this I can see the value. Maybe it has to do with Switzerland being small enough for horrible child abduction stories to be very rare, and if they happen outside Switzerland we tend to think as something that happens to other people - as nationalistic as that sounds, but that's just how most people's minds work, for better or worse, in this instance probably for the better.

rconti 10y ago
I think you're right. Kids being randomly abducted is vanishingly rare, but the faster and further news spreads, the more 'real' it seems. A smaller country would be less likely to see it as a problem that "happens here". I was born in 1981 and from the age of 7 or 8 I remember walking to school (1.5mi and parts of it along a busy street). My friends and I would play in the drainage culvert under the road, walking back and forth, the far side actually was basically a cliff, but we didn't want to fall, so we took care. I remember at age 10 wanting to ride my bicycle to a friend's house across town, but it was "too far" according to my parents. It actually was quite far though; at least 6 miles and mostly on very busy streets, no cycling infrastructure. By 11 or 12 I was riding my bike dozens of miles from home. My friends and I went all over the place unsupervised, all summer long, and this was just in the mid 90s. It was just your average middle class suburban American town. I definitely hope people takes these stories to heart and it encourages folks to let their kids roam. But it's hardly a memory of generations past.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  I was born in the early 80s as well. I was way out in the suburbs and took the bus to school, but there were plenty of kids that walked. (Occasionally a teacher would forget to unlock the back gate and you'd see them all standing there in the morning when the first bell rang ... usually followed by an announcement of how none of the walkers should be counted late). I walked everywhere, which even then, wasn't all that common. It was ~2 miles (4km) to church, and there were several times when other parents would stop and offer me rides. In the mid-2000s I was in Cincinnati, and noticed a lot of the neighbourhoods close to the city usually had squares with the usual restaurants, ice cream shops, bars, etc. It was refreshing to see teenagers out in the evening in the weekend. They had places that were easily walk-able to meet up with friends (even though the bus there is less than ideal). I would have much rather grown up in that kind of environment that way out in the suburbs where you needed rides eveywhere and few of your friends were in walking distance.
- developer2 10y ago
  >> Kids being randomly abducted is vanishingly rare, but the faster and further news spreads, the more 'real' it seems The problem is that a single abduction is touted by the media as though 1,000,000 children were taken. It's the exact same propaganda as terrorism - one attack by a foreigner that kills 10 people is treated as though the entire nation of 319 million people were wiped out. When the police and child services can now pick your child off the street and put them into a foster home because they were "not under the supervision of a parent at all times", you have no chance. The U.S. has given away their freedom, simple as that.
NamTaf 10y ago
To be fair, in a recent brief visit to Switzerland I stayed with some friends in a small village near Zug and saw examples of this sort of attitude throughout more aspects of life than just child-raising. For example, many farmers were leaving produce out with price tags on and relying on an honour system for payment. Some did a 'pay what you want' system for their produce and just relied on people to do the right thing when valuing the items. It was really nice and refreshing and had a very positive community feel to it. It wouldn't surprise me if it's an attitude conditioned through exposure to it in all kinds of different aspects of life. I hope it stays around.
- m_mueller 10y ago
  Forget farms, this is even how the supermarket produce section works in Switzerland. You pick your stuff, you weigh it yourself, you choose the right tag (without anyone looking over your shoulder) and then you go to a (nowadays potentially automated) cashier. Heck, it's how the tax system works as well. Government has no way of knowing how much is actually on your bank account, well at least not officially (gov was probably quite happy about the US breaking our banking secrecy). So everyone is supposed to be responsible enough to fill out their taxes and hand in all the information needed. At the end it all works out fine - turns out you can mostly trust people to be honest and the system keeps working for everyone, at least it did so for the last 170 or so years.
  - usaphp 10y ago
    > "You pick your stuff, you weigh it yourself, you choose the right tag" How is that different from self checkout in most of the big food stores in USA?
    - m_mueller 10y ago
      I haven't been to too many US supermarkets, but don't you get the vegetables in already weighed and tagged portions? IMO if you do that yourself, and there isn't even a cashier doing a bit of sanity checking, there's just more opportunity to cheat. With self checkout alone you can just not scan something, but it would seem a bit more obvious to catch (which I could see the chains doing with security cams). Almost certainly noone is going to notice if people print the tag for cheap Apples and put it on a bag of expensive ones.
culturestate 10y ago
This is essentially how it works in Japan as well; once the kids are old enough, the parents will walk with them to school a couple of times - to ensure they learn the route and to introduce them to neighbors they might meet on the way - and then the kids are on their own. Japan's cultural safety net (by which I mean the overarching concept that everyone is more or less working together for the common good) is one of my favorite things about the country, and one of the most startling to me after moving to Asia.
- m_mueller 10y ago
  Yes, I live in Japan now and I see that every day. One note though: In cities there's actually a watch organised, every street corner there's a different parent or grand parent waiting at a specific time for the children to arrive. Also, older kids are officially tasked with guiding the younger ones on the way to school.
- jplahn 10y ago
  I was just going to mention this exact same observation from my visit to Japan in October. I stayed in an Airbnb north of Shibuya and morning and night we saw little kids walking to and from school. It was awesome. That, coupled with everybody leaving their bikes unlocked, was such a stark contrast to what I'm used to here in the US.
  - ehnto 10y ago
    The concept of "us vs everyone else" or "other people are dangerous and untrustworthy" is probably the most clear difference in US TV shows when I compare it to where I live. It always seems to be the exception rather than the rule, that people might be willing to co-operate. The idea of "only we are sane" is another. Assuming everyone else is crazy or disagreeable seems to be common. I wonder if that is something reflected by US media correctly or if it is something skewed.
    - RonanTheGrey 10y ago
      I've wondered the same thing. It concerns me that there are more police dramas than any other genre on American television.... and even more that they are so popular. It says alot about a cultural mindset. One the one hand you can argue the shows are being pushed.. but they wouldn't continue to do so if people didn't eat them up. It's a gut fear that is being appealed to, and simultaneously teaching people exactly "us vs everyone else" and "other people are dangerous and untrustworthy." Even your neighbor. Even your friends. Makes me sad. It didn't used to be that way in the US. It's certainly gotten worse.
cowsandmilk 10y ago
Does Switzerland publish where sex offenders live? One piece of information present now is that I can see all the child molesters within a mile of where I live. You see that half a mile away there is someone convicted of "Rape of child with force" and it messes with you.
- m_mueller 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure it doesn't have such a public registry. Some of the legal system in the US are very foreign to Swiss (and probably most continental Europeans for that matter), for example the way court proceedings are published and the accused can be named in the media before conviction. In almost every case, Swiss law enforcement and their corrective measures are meant to be that - corrective, not revengeful. This can sometimes lead to bad results (with quite a few people getting angry when crimes go with no or only light punishments), but overall most people probably think it's better to go too soft rather than too harsh, because the latter makes the government into a bully that everyone needs to fear, which people really don't want (and which a very active direct democracy hopefully somewhat protects against).
JabavuAdams 10y ago
My main concern would be traffic. I live in an affluent neighbourhood with a lot of stressed people driving SUVs. I've had a car run over my foot. On one occasion, my kids had to be yanked out of the way by their mother to avoid being hit by a left-turning car that didn't see them. My impression is that the Swiss are more fastidious about following traffic regulations. Is this outdated?
- m_mueller 10y ago
  It probably depends on the location in the US, but every time I go there I find Americans amazingly relaxed when driving. Swiss are probably some of the more careful drivers in continental Europe (which is to say they're slow), but I think it's still way more nervous than in the US. However, one of the issues is probably the sheer size of US roads, it's just much harder to cross I think. And from my own experience, kids who are tasked to look after themselves, after a certain age will actually learn to be careful very quickly. Plus, near school there's lots of warning signs and drivers are generally careful there. Generally it's not an issue, but I can see how US suburbia could be ill fitted for such a system.
  - rumcajz 10y ago
    I've also seen lots of hand-made signs like "Attention! Kids! Voluntary 30km/h!" in Switzerland.
    - drozycki 10y ago
      Parents put "Drive like your kids live here" signs in some parts of Palo Alto. I think the clever phrasing makes it more likely to be taken seriously by a driver.
  - JabavuAdams 10y ago
    This is in Toronto, Canada, but we share a lot of US behaviours.
- vacri 10y ago
  US drivers seem particularly hostile to pedestrians. I spent only a couple of months there, but there were two times (one each in TX, CA) that I was crossing with the 'walk' sign and had to literally stop because a car was turning right in front of me and I would have walked into the side of it. And I'm a 6'6" guy with broad shoulders, not hard to see. There were other close shaves and pedestrian-hostile behaviour as well, but actually having to literally stop walking stuck with me. Oddly, despite the reputation, I actually felt safer to cross the road in NYC than most other places.
Reason077 10y ago
As a Swiss with a small child, this is the main reason why I couldn't move to the US or UK. There always seems to be plenty of children, of various ages, running around my London neighbourhood unsupervised. The noisy little blighters!
- m_mueller 10y ago
  That's good to hear. Some of the things I hear from the UK sound at least as authoritarian as the US, so I thought that CPS has similarly harsh measures - apparently it's not that big of an issue?
  - Symbiote 10y ago
    Working class and upper class children seem to have this freedom in London, having lived in both to press of area. When I lived in Richmond there were often children alone on the bus or train with expensive belongings like musical instruments or sports equipment. My middle class parents would never have allowed that - but they would expect me to get to school on public transport alone. Also, there are no rules or laws against this. It's cultural. See http://www.btp.police.uk/advice_and_information/travelling_safely/unaccompanied_children.aspx http://www.btp.police.uk/advice_and_information/travelling_s... for one example - there's no minimum age to travel alone on a train.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    There were a couple of highly publicised cases which I suspect may not be accurately reported in the newspapers, but generally UK child protection is under-funded and errs on the side of non-intervention. Which has tragic consequences of its own: Victoria Climbie, "Baby P" and so on.
oddstorms 10y ago
They're still common here in the US too. Nothing has changed except typical irrational emotional kneejerk reactionary people who want us to believe that this well intentioned nanny state is taking away our rights. It's a mixture of typical conservative stupidity and obnoxious condescension. Even though productivity is at an all time high, for example, these traitors still want us to believe that people used to work so much harder and dressed so much nicer. These are huge deals to these worthless dumbfucks, who will also tell you that just about everything is worse than it used to be. They're too stupid to think for themselves so they go for these comfort zone lies without even checking. Why is this? Society is a lot more civilized than it used to be. People have a lot more freedom to be who they are and the conservative traitors cannot handle it. These lies about people being more slovenly or helicopter parenting and all this other stuff is primarily an invention of the conservative/treasonous/poisoned mind. Don't believe the bullshit, people will tell you endless "back in my day" trash.
- xiaoma 10y ago
  This is a gratuitously polarizing and flamewar-baiting comment. The issue described in the article is not a directly partisan one and parents are not "traitors" for having a different idea than you do about how independently their children should be allowed to explore their surroundings.
WildGreenLeave 10y ago
As a Dutch guy visiting Switzerland regularly for skiing and just regular recreational purposes, I was surprised how many young children are getting on the bus for the slopes without a parent. Seeing a young child sitting/skiing/snowboarding on their own wasn't anything unusual.

rconti 10y ago

I think you're right. Kids being randomly abducted is vanishingly rare, but the faster and further news spreads, the more 'real' it seems. A smaller country would be less likely to see it as a problem that "happens here". I was born in 1981 and from the age of 7 or 8 I remember walking to school (1.5mi and parts of it along a busy street). My friends and I would play in the drainage culvert under the road, walking back and forth, the far side actually was basically a cliff, but we didn't want to fall, so we took care. I remember at age 10 wanting to ride my bicycle to a friend's house across town, but it was "too far" according to my parents. It actually was quite far though; at least 6 miles and mostly on very busy streets, no cycling infrastructure. By 11 or 12 I was riding my bike dozens of miles from home. My friends and I went all over the place unsupervised, all summer long, and this was just in the mid 90s. It was just your average middle class suburban American town. I definitely hope people takes these stories to heart and it encourages folks to let their kids roam. But it's hardly a memory of generations past.

djsumdog 10y ago
I was born in the early 80s as well. I was way out in the suburbs and took the bus to school, but there were plenty of kids that walked. (Occasionally a teacher would forget to unlock the back gate and you'd see them all standing there in the morning when the first bell rang ... usually followed by an announcement of how none of the walkers should be counted late). I walked everywhere, which even then, wasn't all that common. It was ~2 miles (4km) to church, and there were several times when other parents would stop and offer me rides. In the mid-2000s I was in Cincinnati, and noticed a lot of the neighbourhoods close to the city usually had squares with the usual restaurants, ice cream shops, bars, etc. It was refreshing to see teenagers out in the evening in the weekend. They had places that were easily walk-able to meet up with friends (even though the bus there is less than ideal). I would have much rather grown up in that kind of environment that way out in the suburbs where you needed rides eveywhere and few of your friends were in walking distance.
developer2 10y ago
>> Kids being randomly abducted is vanishingly rare, but the faster and further news spreads, the more 'real' it seems The problem is that a single abduction is touted by the media as though 1,000,000 children were taken. It's the exact same propaganda as terrorism - one attack by a foreigner that kills 10 people is treated as though the entire nation of 319 million people were wiped out. When the police and child services can now pick your child off the street and put them into a foster home because they were "not under the supervision of a parent at all times", you have no chance. The U.S. has given away their freedom, simple as that.

NamTaf 10y ago

To be fair, in a recent brief visit to Switzerland I stayed with some friends in a small village near Zug and saw examples of this sort of attitude throughout more aspects of life than just child-raising. For example, many farmers were leaving produce out with price tags on and relying on an honour system for payment. Some did a 'pay what you want' system for their produce and just relied on people to do the right thing when valuing the items. It was really nice and refreshing and had a very positive community feel to it. It wouldn't surprise me if it's an attitude conditioned through exposure to it in all kinds of different aspects of life. I hope it stays around.

m_mueller 10y ago
Forget farms, this is even how the supermarket produce section works in Switzerland. You pick your stuff, you weigh it yourself, you choose the right tag (without anyone looking over your shoulder) and then you go to a (nowadays potentially automated) cashier. Heck, it's how the tax system works as well. Government has no way of knowing how much is actually on your bank account, well at least not officially (gov was probably quite happy about the US breaking our banking secrecy). So everyone is supposed to be responsible enough to fill out their taxes and hand in all the information needed. At the end it all works out fine - turns out you can mostly trust people to be honest and the system keeps working for everyone, at least it did so for the last 170 or so years.
- usaphp 10y ago
  > "You pick your stuff, you weigh it yourself, you choose the right tag" How is that different from self checkout in most of the big food stores in USA?
  - m_mueller 10y ago
    I haven't been to too many US supermarkets, but don't you get the vegetables in already weighed and tagged portions? IMO if you do that yourself, and there isn't even a cashier doing a bit of sanity checking, there's just more opportunity to cheat. With self checkout alone you can just not scan something, but it would seem a bit more obvious to catch (which I could see the chains doing with security cams). Almost certainly noone is going to notice if people print the tag for cheap Apples and put it on a bag of expensive ones.

culturestate 10y ago

This is essentially how it works in Japan as well; once the kids are old enough, the parents will walk with them to school a couple of times - to ensure they learn the route and to introduce them to neighbors they might meet on the way - and then the kids are on their own. Japan's cultural safety net (by which I mean the overarching concept that everyone is more or less working together for the common good) is one of my favorite things about the country, and one of the most startling to me after moving to Asia.

m_mueller 10y ago
Yes, I live in Japan now and I see that every day. One note though: In cities there's actually a watch organised, every street corner there's a different parent or grand parent waiting at a specific time for the children to arrive. Also, older kids are officially tasked with guiding the younger ones on the way to school.
jplahn 10y ago
I was just going to mention this exact same observation from my visit to Japan in October. I stayed in an Airbnb north of Shibuya and morning and night we saw little kids walking to and from school. It was awesome. That, coupled with everybody leaving their bikes unlocked, was such a stark contrast to what I'm used to here in the US.
- ehnto 10y ago
  The concept of "us vs everyone else" or "other people are dangerous and untrustworthy" is probably the most clear difference in US TV shows when I compare it to where I live. It always seems to be the exception rather than the rule, that people might be willing to co-operate. The idea of "only we are sane" is another. Assuming everyone else is crazy or disagreeable seems to be common. I wonder if that is something reflected by US media correctly or if it is something skewed.
  - RonanTheGrey 10y ago
    I've wondered the same thing. It concerns me that there are more police dramas than any other genre on American television.... and even more that they are so popular. It says alot about a cultural mindset. One the one hand you can argue the shows are being pushed.. but they wouldn't continue to do so if people didn't eat them up. It's a gut fear that is being appealed to, and simultaneously teaching people exactly "us vs everyone else" and "other people are dangerous and untrustworthy." Even your neighbor. Even your friends. Makes me sad. It didn't used to be that way in the US. It's certainly gotten worse.

cowsandmilk 10y ago

Does Switzerland publish where sex offenders live? One piece of information present now is that I can see all the child molesters within a mile of where I live. You see that half a mile away there is someone convicted of "Rape of child with force" and it messes with you.

m_mueller 10y ago
I'm pretty sure it doesn't have such a public registry. Some of the legal system in the US are very foreign to Swiss (and probably most continental Europeans for that matter), for example the way court proceedings are published and the accused can be named in the media before conviction. In almost every case, Swiss law enforcement and their corrective measures are meant to be that - corrective, not revengeful. This can sometimes lead to bad results (with quite a few people getting angry when crimes go with no or only light punishments), but overall most people probably think it's better to go too soft rather than too harsh, because the latter makes the government into a bully that everyone needs to fear, which people really don't want (and which a very active direct democracy hopefully somewhat protects against).

JabavuAdams 10y ago

My main concern would be traffic. I live in an affluent neighbourhood with a lot of stressed people driving SUVs. I've had a car run over my foot. On one occasion, my kids had to be yanked out of the way by their mother to avoid being hit by a left-turning car that didn't see them. My impression is that the Swiss are more fastidious about following traffic regulations. Is this outdated?

m_mueller 10y ago
It probably depends on the location in the US, but every time I go there I find Americans amazingly relaxed when driving. Swiss are probably some of the more careful drivers in continental Europe (which is to say they're slow), but I think it's still way more nervous than in the US. However, one of the issues is probably the sheer size of US roads, it's just much harder to cross I think. And from my own experience, kids who are tasked to look after themselves, after a certain age will actually learn to be careful very quickly. Plus, near school there's lots of warning signs and drivers are generally careful there. Generally it's not an issue, but I can see how US suburbia could be ill fitted for such a system.
- rumcajz 10y ago
  I've also seen lots of hand-made signs like "Attention! Kids! Voluntary 30km/h!" in Switzerland.
  - drozycki 10y ago
    Parents put "Drive like your kids live here" signs in some parts of Palo Alto. I think the clever phrasing makes it more likely to be taken seriously by a driver.
- JabavuAdams 10y ago
  This is in Toronto, Canada, but we share a lot of US behaviours.
vacri 10y ago
US drivers seem particularly hostile to pedestrians. I spent only a couple of months there, but there were two times (one each in TX, CA) that I was crossing with the 'walk' sign and had to literally stop because a car was turning right in front of me and I would have walked into the side of it. And I'm a 6'6" guy with broad shoulders, not hard to see. There were other close shaves and pedestrian-hostile behaviour as well, but actually having to literally stop walking stuck with me. Oddly, despite the reputation, I actually felt safer to cross the road in NYC than most other places.

Reason077 10y ago

As a Swiss with a small child, this is the main reason why I couldn't move to the US or UK. There always seems to be plenty of children, of various ages, running around my London neighbourhood unsupervised. The noisy little blighters!

m_mueller 10y ago
That's good to hear. Some of the things I hear from the UK sound at least as authoritarian as the US, so I thought that CPS has similarly harsh measures - apparently it's not that big of an issue?
- Symbiote 10y ago
  Working class and upper class children seem to have this freedom in London, having lived in both to press of area. When I lived in Richmond there were often children alone on the bus or train with expensive belongings like musical instruments or sports equipment. My middle class parents would never have allowed that - but they would expect me to get to school on public transport alone. Also, there are no rules or laws against this. It's cultural. See http://www.btp.police.uk/advice_and_information/travelling_safely/unaccompanied_children.aspx http://www.btp.police.uk/advice_and_information/travelling_s... for one example - there's no minimum age to travel alone on a train.
- pjc50 10y ago
  There were a couple of highly publicised cases which I suspect may not be accurately reported in the newspapers, but generally UK child protection is under-funded and errs on the side of non-intervention. Which has tragic consequences of its own: Victoria Climbie, "Baby P" and so on.

oddstorms 10y ago

They're still common here in the US too. Nothing has changed except typical irrational emotional kneejerk reactionary people who want us to believe that this well intentioned nanny state is taking away our rights. It's a mixture of typical conservative stupidity and obnoxious condescension. Even though productivity is at an all time high, for example, these traitors still want us to believe that people used to work so much harder and dressed so much nicer. These are huge deals to these worthless dumbfucks, who will also tell you that just about everything is worse than it used to be. They're too stupid to think for themselves so they go for these comfort zone lies without even checking. Why is this? Society is a lot more civilized than it used to be. People have a lot more freedom to be who they are and the conservative traitors cannot handle it. These lies about people being more slovenly or helicopter parenting and all this other stuff is primarily an invention of the conservative/treasonous/poisoned mind. Don't believe the bullshit, people will tell you endless "back in my day" trash.

xiaoma 10y ago
This is a gratuitously polarizing and flamewar-baiting comment. The issue described in the article is not a directly partisan one and parents are not "traitors" for having a different idea than you do about how independently their children should be allowed to explore their surroundings.

WildGreenLeave 10y ago

As a Dutch guy visiting Switzerland regularly for skiing and just regular recreational purposes, I was surprised how many young children are getting on the bus for the slopes without a parent. Seeing a young child sitting/skiing/snowboarding on their own wasn't anything unusual.