4 ms·

Shame I can't find it but I saw a study where a sociologist was monitoring a single town for decades and recording how far children would wander by themselves d

Shame I can't find it but I saw a study where a sociologist was monitoring a single town for decades and recording how far children would wander by themselves during the day. In the seventies it was around ten miles, with single-digit aged children wandering through the woods and into town and even doing errands for the family. Around 2010 I think it had declined to about 200 yards max. It's really extremely sad. I wouldn't want to be a kid now. I wouldn't want to have those memories of childhood. It's part of several reasons I don't think it would be ethical for me to reproduce at this time. People's fear is a sliding scale, and a child's safety is one of those things that the human psyche gives infinite value. That really screws up your ability to manage risk. People are even more afraid now, even though the causes of early death are the lowest they've ever been and we've marched ourselves into a joyless panopticon where nobody really decides their own destiny from an early age. These kids are going to absolutely hate us.

whatshisface 8y ago
>These kids are going to absolutely hate us. The decline has been going on constantly, over many generations. If the trend continues as it has, these kids will think we were too lenient and restrict the movement of their own children even further.
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  Parents have been investigated for allowing their children to play in the back yard: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/manitoba-cfs-will-not-erase-file-of-mother-who-lets-kids-play-in-backyard-1.2871900 https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/manitoba-cfs-will-not-erase-fi...
  - gowld 8y ago
    So? They were investigated become someone filed a complaint about small children alone, and the investigator found that the parent was home supervising the children and there was no problem. The rest of the article is FUD about CFS's refusal to expunge case files.
    - slavik81 8y ago
      That's a 'near-miss'. Something that shouldn't happen does happen, and you come closer to disaster than you were ever comfortable with. At that point, all it would take is a grouchy case worker to throw their entire family into disarray for months or years. Two years ago, an Ontario foster family had their children taken away solely for refusing to lie about the existence of the Easter Bunny[1]. The parents were planning on celebrating the holiday with the children, but when the Children's Aid Society of Hamilton discovered the parents were unwilling to lie if asked, they had the children immediately removed from the home. The caseworkers treated learning the truth about the Easter Bunny as if it were a serious immediate danger to the safety of the children. If that sounds ridiculous, it's because it is. The foster parents won a lawsuit over the matter in March of this year, but it's kind of too late to make things right. The lives of both the children and the parents have been permanently changed by the bad decisions by case workers. If I was that Manitoba parent, I'd be angry and scared too. Nothing happened this time, but if she continues letting her kids play in the backyard, she's rolling the dice again. All that needs to happen is for her same neighbour to make another complaint, and to get an unreasonable caseworker. Superficially, it might even seem reasonable, "children removed from home of woman after repeated complaints of neglect" is not a headline that sounds concerning. [1]: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/easter-bunny-edmonton-ontario-foster-children-hamilton-1.4569813 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/easter-bunny-edmonton...
      - Ma8ee 8y ago
        > Two years ago, an Ontario foster family had their children taken away solely for refusing to lie about the existence of the Easter Bunny. And people all over the world read about the case and started to worry that something similar might happen to them, even though it was one single case on another continent (from where I am) two years ago. Maybe we should treat it as the freak incident it was.
      - gowld 8y ago
        The complexity of the case is overlooked in the summary. At issue there was the extent to which foster parents are obligated to support the cultural and religous practices of the legal/biological parents who the children are intended to be reunited with. As with all common law in history, at the borders between clearly right and clearly wrong is a fuzzy area that is addressed messily over time, since it's impossible to know the correct answer for every case in advance. The problem here was an overzealous case worker -- which is a real issue that needs to be addressed, as you say. And it was addressed by the final ruling, sending a message to future case workers -- not an incorrect law about parenting responsibilities. Making a judgment about the merits of an investigation before the investigation means that you need to decide to not investigate anything. How often do case workers inappropriately cancel a foster-care arrangement, vs how often to foster parents actually harm foster children?
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > these kids will think we were too lenient and restrict the movement of their own children even further. Or will thank us for our lenience and be sad about what the society as large is forcing them to do to their kids. Kind of like my mom, which expresses her sadness over the bullshit paranoia my children will live in, and I totally agree with her on this. And the real reason parents go along with this and restrict the children further is a combination of media paranoia, complete failure to do basic maths instead of failing prey to availability herustic, and of course the presence of "do-gooders" who will happily call social service workers on you for any reason whatsoever. (Oh, and the fear of "do-gooders" also feeds into the general paranoia.)
gowld 8y ago
Now do another study about how far children range online and marvel at how children of the 70s must hate their parents. Yes, causes of early death are the lowest they've ever been, perhaps because we've gotten better at caring for children, while removing the joy of crippling injury and death?
- topmonk 8y ago
  If, as the article states, the cost for reducing an early death for a minuscule number of children is depression and anxiety for a much larger percentage of them when they become adults, is it still worth it?
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  Well if you actually used the evidence instead of an off-the-cuff correlation fallacy you'd notice that the death rate has lowered for unrelated reasons and the kids were safe enough before overly-restrictive parenting became the norm. Even ignoring that, let's say you're right. Where do you think would be a good balance of that? Surely kids would have even fewer early deaths if we just kept them in a single room except for going out in the backyard for mandatory exercise. Like a dog. And why stop at 18? Surely unnecessary adult deaths could be prevented too by not allowing movement or decision-making for anyone. But who would even want to be alive? Obviously that's absurd. So the answer isn't only to minimize risk of death and injury. The answer is to find a balance between control and chaos, where safety and freedom are acceptable. I'm of the opinion that we have strayed too far towards control. You're also falling for that risk management problem I mentioned earlier. Humans have an internal algorithm to manage risk. But like most algorithms, it tends to break down when you feed it values of infinity or zero. When we give anything an infinite value, any finite amount of risk is unacceptable. We'll take zero risk and as a result there can be no good outcome, because life without risk has no potential reward. An example of that is the stunted emotional development that kids have these days. We responded to obvious risks of early death and discounted less-obvious risks of failure to thrive later in life. It becomes easy to blame individuals for their own shortcomings at that point, even if it was perfectly possible for them to develop normally if we hadn't squelched them. And I think there is evidence of current and future generations having less opportunities, less wealth, a worse climate, even less sexual encounters than previous generations. I think that's sad. We dream of always giving a better life to our children, and now we're greedily taking that life from them. They will know when they grow up and look around them. They will understand what happened.
dzdt 8y ago
The research you're thinking of was by Roger Hart. There is a section about it midway thru this article about free-range parenting: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/358631/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article...
bloak 8y ago
It's hard to tell where the fear's coming from. It's definitely not always from the child's parents. When I was 12 or 13 I might cycle off, 10 or 20 miles, not necessarily telling anyone where I was going, and of course there were no mobile phones then. We've had to apply some mild pressure to get my similarly-aged daughter to cycle two miles to school in the company of other children. So perhaps her timidity comes from other children, who in turn get it from... television? No idea. I suppose when a middle-class mother is having a single child at age 40 the child is harder to replace than back in the old days when she'd had three by age 25 and could easily produce another three, as required, if some of an earlier batch got squashed by a lorry. Even if people aren't consciously reasoning like that perhaps it's a factor.
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  Really good points. Yes, I don't think it's always coming from the kid's parents. There's a lot of pressure from other parents. If you decide for yourself that you're going to have a free range kid and give them a 70s-style childhood where they practice their own agency from an early age and get to grow up learning their own limits and having adventures, then at some point some other worrying, busybody person is going to see your kid by themselves and call the police or CPS or whatever. It's a herd thing. We have difficulty choosing to do anything drastically differently from the rest of society, and raising children involves another being who doesn't necessarily have freedom to consent so society gets even more involved if what you are doing is deviant. But the drift of society has caused the norm to be something that decades ago would have been considered highly deviant. If you were a hovering parent like is common today in the 60s or 70s, you'd be an absolute freak and considered abusive. But today the opposite is true. I'm glad you mentioned that the kids are sometimes the ones who make the choice themselves. I guess we're putting so much fear around them that it's making them decide the wisest course of action is to do what is normal and practiced by all their peers, be in constant sight of their parents. Really a shame.
nickjj 8y ago
I do a lot of walking (adult) and you know what I've noticed? SO MANY parents sit with their kids in a car at the bus stop. I'm not just talking about 1st graders either. There's this one high school bus stop where no less than 7 or 8 parents are parked there with their kid sitting inside. Everyone is isolated from each other. These are 15-18 year olds in a normal high school in the suburbs in a reasonably safe neighborhood at a large public school district.
- jandrese 8y ago
  I still walk my second grader out to his bus stop, even though it hasn't been required since he was a kindergartener. It's a nice morning walk and I get to chat with the neighborhood parents.
  - nickjj 8y ago
    That's ok, he's in 2nd grade. But I see a ton of teenagers (middle / high school) being driven to the bus stop where the kid doesn't even leave the car until the bus is there. To me that seems a little off.

whatshisface 8y ago

>These kids are going to absolutely hate us. The decline has been going on constantly, over many generations. If the trend continues as it has, these kids will think we were too lenient and restrict the movement of their own children even further.

toomanybeersies 8y ago
Parents have been investigated for allowing their children to play in the back yard: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/manitoba-cfs-will-not-erase-file-of-mother-who-lets-kids-play-in-backyard-1.2871900 https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/manitoba-cfs-will-not-erase-fi...
- gowld 8y ago
  So? They were investigated become someone filed a complaint about small children alone, and the investigator found that the parent was home supervising the children and there was no problem. The rest of the article is FUD about CFS's refusal to expunge case files.
  - slavik81 8y ago
    That's a 'near-miss'. Something that shouldn't happen does happen, and you come closer to disaster than you were ever comfortable with. At that point, all it would take is a grouchy case worker to throw their entire family into disarray for months or years. Two years ago, an Ontario foster family had their children taken away solely for refusing to lie about the existence of the Easter Bunny[1]. The parents were planning on celebrating the holiday with the children, but when the Children's Aid Society of Hamilton discovered the parents were unwilling to lie if asked, they had the children immediately removed from the home. The caseworkers treated learning the truth about the Easter Bunny as if it were a serious immediate danger to the safety of the children. If that sounds ridiculous, it's because it is. The foster parents won a lawsuit over the matter in March of this year, but it's kind of too late to make things right. The lives of both the children and the parents have been permanently changed by the bad decisions by case workers. If I was that Manitoba parent, I'd be angry and scared too. Nothing happened this time, but if she continues letting her kids play in the backyard, she's rolling the dice again. All that needs to happen is for her same neighbour to make another complaint, and to get an unreasonable caseworker. Superficially, it might even seem reasonable, "children removed from home of woman after repeated complaints of neglect" is not a headline that sounds concerning. [1]: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/easter-bunny-edmonton-ontario-foster-children-hamilton-1.4569813 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/easter-bunny-edmonton...
    - Ma8ee 8y ago
      > Two years ago, an Ontario foster family had their children taken away solely for refusing to lie about the existence of the Easter Bunny. And people all over the world read about the case and started to worry that something similar might happen to them, even though it was one single case on another continent (from where I am) two years ago. Maybe we should treat it as the freak incident it was.
    - gowld 8y ago
      The complexity of the case is overlooked in the summary. At issue there was the extent to which foster parents are obligated to support the cultural and religous practices of the legal/biological parents who the children are intended to be reunited with. As with all common law in history, at the borders between clearly right and clearly wrong is a fuzzy area that is addressed messily over time, since it's impossible to know the correct answer for every case in advance. The problem here was an overzealous case worker -- which is a real issue that needs to be addressed, as you say. And it was addressed by the final ruling, sending a message to future case workers -- not an incorrect law about parenting responsibilities. Making a judgment about the merits of an investigation before the investigation means that you need to decide to not investigate anything. How often do case workers inappropriately cancel a foster-care arrangement, vs how often to foster parents actually harm foster children?
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> these kids will think we were too lenient and restrict the movement of their own children even further. Or will thank us for our lenience and be sad about what the society as large is forcing them to do to their kids. Kind of like my mom, which expresses her sadness over the bullshit paranoia my children will live in, and I totally agree with her on this. And the real reason parents go along with this and restrict the children further is a combination of media paranoia, complete failure to do basic maths instead of failing prey to availability herustic, and of course the presence of "do-gooders" who will happily call social service workers on you for any reason whatsoever. (Oh, and the fear of "do-gooders" also feeds into the general paranoia.)

gowld 8y ago

Now do another study about how far children range online and marvel at how children of the 70s must hate their parents. Yes, causes of early death are the lowest they've ever been, perhaps because we've gotten better at caring for children, while removing the joy of crippling injury and death?

topmonk 8y ago
If, as the article states, the cost for reducing an early death for a minuscule number of children is depression and anxiety for a much larger percentage of them when they become adults, is it still worth it?
vertexFarm 8y ago
Well if you actually used the evidence instead of an off-the-cuff correlation fallacy you'd notice that the death rate has lowered for unrelated reasons and the kids were safe enough before overly-restrictive parenting became the norm. Even ignoring that, let's say you're right. Where do you think would be a good balance of that? Surely kids would have even fewer early deaths if we just kept them in a single room except for going out in the backyard for mandatory exercise. Like a dog. And why stop at 18? Surely unnecessary adult deaths could be prevented too by not allowing movement or decision-making for anyone. But who would even want to be alive? Obviously that's absurd. So the answer isn't only to minimize risk of death and injury. The answer is to find a balance between control and chaos, where safety and freedom are acceptable. I'm of the opinion that we have strayed too far towards control. You're also falling for that risk management problem I mentioned earlier. Humans have an internal algorithm to manage risk. But like most algorithms, it tends to break down when you feed it values of infinity or zero. When we give anything an infinite value, any finite amount of risk is unacceptable. We'll take zero risk and as a result there can be no good outcome, because life without risk has no potential reward. An example of that is the stunted emotional development that kids have these days. We responded to obvious risks of early death and discounted less-obvious risks of failure to thrive later in life. It becomes easy to blame individuals for their own shortcomings at that point, even if it was perfectly possible for them to develop normally if we hadn't squelched them. And I think there is evidence of current and future generations having less opportunities, less wealth, a worse climate, even less sexual encounters than previous generations. I think that's sad. We dream of always giving a better life to our children, and now we're greedily taking that life from them. They will know when they grow up and look around them. They will understand what happened.

dzdt 8y ago

The research you're thinking of was by Roger Hart. There is a section about it midway thru this article about free-range parenting: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/358631/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article...

bloak 8y ago

It's hard to tell where the fear's coming from. It's definitely not always from the child's parents. When I was 12 or 13 I might cycle off, 10 or 20 miles, not necessarily telling anyone where I was going, and of course there were no mobile phones then. We've had to apply some mild pressure to get my similarly-aged daughter to cycle two miles to school in the company of other children. So perhaps her timidity comes from other children, who in turn get it from... television? No idea. I suppose when a middle-class mother is having a single child at age 40 the child is harder to replace than back in the old days when she'd had three by age 25 and could easily produce another three, as required, if some of an earlier batch got squashed by a lorry. Even if people aren't consciously reasoning like that perhaps it's a factor.

vertexFarm 8y ago
Really good points. Yes, I don't think it's always coming from the kid's parents. There's a lot of pressure from other parents. If you decide for yourself that you're going to have a free range kid and give them a 70s-style childhood where they practice their own agency from an early age and get to grow up learning their own limits and having adventures, then at some point some other worrying, busybody person is going to see your kid by themselves and call the police or CPS or whatever. It's a herd thing. We have difficulty choosing to do anything drastically differently from the rest of society, and raising children involves another being who doesn't necessarily have freedom to consent so society gets even more involved if what you are doing is deviant. But the drift of society has caused the norm to be something that decades ago would have been considered highly deviant. If you were a hovering parent like is common today in the 60s or 70s, you'd be an absolute freak and considered abusive. But today the opposite is true. I'm glad you mentioned that the kids are sometimes the ones who make the choice themselves. I guess we're putting so much fear around them that it's making them decide the wisest course of action is to do what is normal and practiced by all their peers, be in constant sight of their parents. Really a shame.

nickjj 8y ago

I do a lot of walking (adult) and you know what I've noticed? SO MANY parents sit with their kids in a car at the bus stop. I'm not just talking about 1st graders either. There's this one high school bus stop where no less than 7 or 8 parents are parked there with their kid sitting inside. Everyone is isolated from each other. These are 15-18 year olds in a normal high school in the suburbs in a reasonably safe neighborhood at a large public school district.

jandrese 8y ago
I still walk my second grader out to his bus stop, even though it hasn't been required since he was a kindergartener. It's a nice morning walk and I get to chat with the neighborhood parents.
- nickjj 8y ago
  That's ok, he's in 2nd grade. But I see a ton of teenagers (middle / high school) being driven to the bus stop where the kid doesn't even leave the car until the bus is there. To me that seems a little off.