7 ms·

I've noticed how casually people say, "that should be illegal" nowadays. Usually it's half-joking, but it expresses a real sentiment about how even mild transg

I've noticed how casually people say, "that should be illegal" nowadays. Usually it's half-joking, but it expresses a real sentiment about how even mild transgressions are seen as legal matters. I have no doubt if you took a poll asking people if it should be illegal to leave a kid in a car for any amount of time you'd get overwhelming support. And, of course, that's how people like the woman in the article end up fearing prosecution after leaving her child alone for a few minutes. > Women are being harassed and even arrested for making perfectly rational parenting decisions. By the way, this may be even more true for men, who are routinely viewed with a skeptical eye when it comes to parenting decisions. The glee at which our current culture laughs at the perceived incompetence of men with regards to parenting has taught us all to expect fathers to be completely boneheaded at all times.

magduf 8y ago
It should be illegal to harass or prosecute parents for leaving their child alone for a few minutes.... What really astounds me is that I'm not that old, and I clearly remember being able to run around or ride my bike around town for miles without any adult supervision, at the age of 8 or so. Things have really changed in this country.
- zrail 8y ago
  I'm 34 and I remember being left alone in the car all the time while my mom ran errands or whatever. I specifically remember a time when I discovered how the cigarette lighter (remember those?) worked when I burned the tip of my finger on it while my mom was in the post office. I rode my bike all over town. Several times my friends and I walked across town to the video store by ourselves, rented a Sega Genesis and a few games, and hauled it all back to someone's house and stayed up all night. I was probably around 12.
- api 8y ago
  I did those kinds of things too and a lot more. Crime rates were much higher back then and there were no cell phones or other easy communication devices that would allow the kid themselves or a random pedestrian or motorist to rapidly notify authorities if something is wrong. The safer our society gets the more afraid we become and the less tolerant we seem to become of risk. I wonder if it's a cognitive analog of the hygiene hypothesis for allergies. There's a part of our brain that is built for a world of conflict, danger, and scarcity and in an abundant modern developed nation it just has nothing to do but declare war on phantoms and crusade against minute or non-existent risks. I've had debates with people recently about how bad crime is becoming and how dangerous things are. I show them graphs of crime and violence for the past 30 years. I often get total unironic disbelief -- as in they don't believe it and think the sources are biased and there's some kind of conspiracy to suppress the real statistics on crime. Things were much more dangerous in the 60s through the early 90s and people felt a lot safer.
  - simonbyrne 8y ago
    I've recently moved to the US from the UK, and I've had several Americans mention that they would like to visit Europe but are worried about the danger of terrorism. I tried to explain that any increased risk of terrorism is massively outweighed by the large decrease in risk of dying in a car accident, but that wasn't terribly successful.
    - blattimwind 8y ago
      If you're visting Kabul you've got a legit reason to be afraid of terrorism — if you're afraid of terrorism in Munich, Berlin, Hamburg or Hanover you're simply a propaganda victim.
      - paulddraper 8y ago
        > massively outweighed by the large decrease in risk of dying in a car accident Death by car is kind of the concern.... > simply a propaganda victim Last 3 years: [1] * Car attack by the Islamic State in Barcelona (24 killed, 152 injured) * Car + knife attack by the Islamic State in London (11 killed, 48 injured) * Bombing by the Islamic State in Manchester (23 killed, 250 injured) * Car attack by the Islamic State in Berlin (12 killed, 56 injured) * Car attack by the Islamic State in Nice, France (87 killed, 434 injured) * Bombing by the Islamic State in Brussels (35 killed, 340 injured) * Shooting and bombing by the Islamic State in Paris (137 killed, 368 injured) Yes, you're right....a dozen here and hundred there means nothing in the overall picture of Western Europe. But it doesn't exactly take a propaganda machine for that to have a significant physiological effect. Especially when looking at the details: these weren't back-alley muggings, bad-part-of-town shootings, or gang turf struggles. They were in tourist-friendly, public places in broad daylight, with substantial law enforcement presence. (Four unarmed police officers died trying to stop the stabbers on London Bridge.) The story of the few seems to naturally have a large effect on the human mind. HN top 20 currently has a story of a mishandled justice for a single person https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17625385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17625385 See the comments for extrapolation onto the judgment of the US justice system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Europe#Deadliest_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Europe#Deadliest_...
- JeanMarcS 8y ago
  That’s just a supposition but I guess 9/11 was the big trauma that sets new standards. You can be hit at home, going to work or else. Of course crime existed before, but the enormity of that tragedy moved the cursor I think.
- yontherubicon 8y ago
  I'm in my 20's. I remember the same
- bvc35 8y ago
  No. If I see a kid in a car, I don't know how long he or she has been in there. Temperature in closed cars rises dramatically and unpredictably, in ways that affect children and infants more quickly than adults (in some cases, it might hurt a child or infant in literally a few minutes). If taking a child with you for a few minutes is too much for someone to handle, I seriously doubt if they have the fortitude to be a non-negligent parent.
zrail 8y ago
> By the way, this may be even more true for men, who are routinely viewed with a skeptical eye when it comes to parenting decisions. Strongly disagree. > The glee at which our current culture laughs at the perceived incompetence of men with regards to parenting has taught us all to expect fathers to be completely boneheaded at all times. Exactly. I, as a father, can get away with all kinds of things because according to society I don't know any better, whereas my wife, as a mother, is expected to be perfect all the time and when she does something that doesn't measure up to someone's unvoiced, unwarranted expectations she's harshly judged for it. This is true not just for mothers but for all women in the US, all the time, basically from birth, doubly so if they're POC.
- ACow_Adonis 8y ago
  POC?
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    Persons of color. In USA, a lot of things that annoy white people are worse for people who aren't white. E.g. dealing with police, CPS, the courts, etc.
- rwcarlsen 8y ago
  I think there are two things going on here - "a child being treated in X manner" and "how we view parent X (mother or father) treating their child". Fathers culturally often get the dad pass for why something happened while society still frowns on the thing that happened to the kids the same. I (as a father) am just as afraid of getting in trouble for leaving my kids in the car for a few minutes as my wife - because the legal issues of how society responds to that happening to kids even if there is less cultural mud-slinging at me because I am male. All this to say that I am much more interested in the direct topic of this article - which is the fear I and my wife operate under of our getting in trouble for not raising our kids "right" - rather than have the discussion get derailed into a gender rabbit hole.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > I, as a father, can get away with all kinds of things because according to society I don't know any better, whereas my wife, as a mother, is expected to be perfect all the time and when she does something that doesn't measure up to someone's unvoiced, unwarranted expectations she's harshly judged for it. The problem is the other side to this coin, which is that because males are presumed to be incompetent, their interactions with children are restricted ahead of time. Children aren't allowed to be alone with an adult male because the presumption is that he'll allow them to solo pilot a homemade single-passenger rocket ship with no safety equipment, if not literally rape and murder them. And then, for example, little girls can't learn about tech because qualified adult women to teach them are scarce and they're not allowed to be unsupervised around adult men.
pboutros 8y ago
Totally agreed on your first point. The article actually explicitly addresses the last thing you said. >Dr. Sarnecka, the cognitive scientist, has an answer to this. Her study found that subjects were far less judgmental of fathers. When participants were told a father had left his child for a few minutes to run into work, they estimated the level of risk to the child as about equal to when he left because of circumstances beyond his control. > >I love the way this finding makes plain something we all know but aren’t supposed to say: A father who is distracted by his interests and obligations in the adult world is being, well, a father; a mother who does the same is failing her children.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
onetimemanytime 8y ago
Police must justify their jobs...and people have to feel better by pointing the finger at "bad parent" of the week.
eksemplar 8y ago
> I've noticed how casually people say, "that should be illegal" nowadays. Usually it's half-joking, but it expresses a real sentiment about how even mild transgressions are seen as legal matters. It’s because civilization had to break down our social norms that guided humankind for thousands of years, so that we could build vast and functional social structures outside our local society and families. A company of 1000 people is an insane achievement in human history. Ancient Rome may have had a senate, an emperor and a few generals to run the army, but in realty, there wasn’t a single sociopolitical structure larger than a few hundred people, and there really hasn’t been, until after modern times. To do this we gave up the importance of local community, family and such, and devoted ourselves to the modern nation state. Sure there have been countries for a long time, but they used to really just be about taxes and security, and not really local security because nobody gave a rats ass if a town burned an alleged witch. In return we got individualism and freedom. 300 years ago you would have become whatever profession your dad had, if you were a man and married if you were a woman. Today you’re free to build your own way through life. This meant that the state suddenly became responsible for a lot of things that families and communities used to take care of though, like determining what is and isn’t allowed. Which is perfectly fine by the way, in a democratic society that values that freedom and that individuality. The people you talk about, don’t value their freedom though, they have just really gotten used to the state being their mommy/daddy. Which is incredible dangerous but it’s also the inevitable outcome when we increasingly let radical leftists and right wingers and their identify politics dictate our public discourse. Freedom is provocative, because not everyone agrees, and that’s just fine, but today, we’re have both leftist and right wingers wanting to use legalization to dictate virtually everything based on their identity politics. It’s really quite terrible.
- yontherubicon 8y ago
  > Ancient Rome may have had a senate, an emperor and a few generals to run the army, but in realty, there wasn’t a single sociopolitical structure larger than a few hundred people, and there really hasn’t been, until after modern times. > few generals to run the army. > the army The army was rather a bit bigger than 1000 people.
  - 8y ago
zaptheimpaler 8y ago
Good point. I think its yet another symptom of the collapse of societal/communal values in the west in favor of individualism. Criticism/gossip within a society are a good way of punishing these minor transgressions, and its usually how its done around the world. With no society left and all decisions up to the individual, the only way left is to leave everything up to the law.

magduf 8y ago

It should be illegal to harass or prosecute parents for leaving their child alone for a few minutes.... What really astounds me is that I'm not that old, and I clearly remember being able to run around or ride my bike around town for miles without any adult supervision, at the age of 8 or so. Things have really changed in this country.

zrail 8y ago
I'm 34 and I remember being left alone in the car all the time while my mom ran errands or whatever. I specifically remember a time when I discovered how the cigarette lighter (remember those?) worked when I burned the tip of my finger on it while my mom was in the post office. I rode my bike all over town. Several times my friends and I walked across town to the video store by ourselves, rented a Sega Genesis and a few games, and hauled it all back to someone's house and stayed up all night. I was probably around 12.
api 8y ago
I did those kinds of things too and a lot more. Crime rates were much higher back then and there were no cell phones or other easy communication devices that would allow the kid themselves or a random pedestrian or motorist to rapidly notify authorities if something is wrong. The safer our society gets the more afraid we become and the less tolerant we seem to become of risk. I wonder if it's a cognitive analog of the hygiene hypothesis for allergies. There's a part of our brain that is built for a world of conflict, danger, and scarcity and in an abundant modern developed nation it just has nothing to do but declare war on phantoms and crusade against minute or non-existent risks. I've had debates with people recently about how bad crime is becoming and how dangerous things are. I show them graphs of crime and violence for the past 30 years. I often get total unironic disbelief -- as in they don't believe it and think the sources are biased and there's some kind of conspiracy to suppress the real statistics on crime. Things were much more dangerous in the 60s through the early 90s and people felt a lot safer.
- simonbyrne 8y ago
  I've recently moved to the US from the UK, and I've had several Americans mention that they would like to visit Europe but are worried about the danger of terrorism. I tried to explain that any increased risk of terrorism is massively outweighed by the large decrease in risk of dying in a car accident, but that wasn't terribly successful.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    If you're visting Kabul you've got a legit reason to be afraid of terrorism — if you're afraid of terrorism in Munich, Berlin, Hamburg or Hanover you're simply a propaganda victim.
    - paulddraper 8y ago
      > massively outweighed by the large decrease in risk of dying in a car accident Death by car is kind of the concern.... > simply a propaganda victim Last 3 years: [1] * Car attack by the Islamic State in Barcelona (24 killed, 152 injured) * Car + knife attack by the Islamic State in London (11 killed, 48 injured) * Bombing by the Islamic State in Manchester (23 killed, 250 injured) * Car attack by the Islamic State in Berlin (12 killed, 56 injured) * Car attack by the Islamic State in Nice, France (87 killed, 434 injured) * Bombing by the Islamic State in Brussels (35 killed, 340 injured) * Shooting and bombing by the Islamic State in Paris (137 killed, 368 injured) Yes, you're right....a dozen here and hundred there means nothing in the overall picture of Western Europe. But it doesn't exactly take a propaganda machine for that to have a significant physiological effect. Especially when looking at the details: these weren't back-alley muggings, bad-part-of-town shootings, or gang turf struggles. They were in tourist-friendly, public places in broad daylight, with substantial law enforcement presence. (Four unarmed police officers died trying to stop the stabbers on London Bridge.) The story of the few seems to naturally have a large effect on the human mind. HN top 20 currently has a story of a mishandled justice for a single person https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17625385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17625385 See the comments for extrapolation onto the judgment of the US justice system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Europe#Deadliest_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Europe#Deadliest_...
JeanMarcS 8y ago
That’s just a supposition but I guess 9/11 was the big trauma that sets new standards. You can be hit at home, going to work or else. Of course crime existed before, but the enormity of that tragedy moved the cursor I think.
yontherubicon 8y ago
I'm in my 20's. I remember the same
bvc35 8y ago
No. If I see a kid in a car, I don't know how long he or she has been in there. Temperature in closed cars rises dramatically and unpredictably, in ways that affect children and infants more quickly than adults (in some cases, it might hurt a child or infant in literally a few minutes). If taking a child with you for a few minutes is too much for someone to handle, I seriously doubt if they have the fortitude to be a non-negligent parent.

zrail 8y ago

> By the way, this may be even more true for men, who are routinely viewed with a skeptical eye when it comes to parenting decisions. Strongly disagree. > The glee at which our current culture laughs at the perceived incompetence of men with regards to parenting has taught us all to expect fathers to be completely boneheaded at all times. Exactly. I, as a father, can get away with all kinds of things because according to society I don't know any better, whereas my wife, as a mother, is expected to be perfect all the time and when she does something that doesn't measure up to someone's unvoiced, unwarranted expectations she's harshly judged for it. This is true not just for mothers but for all women in the US, all the time, basically from birth, doubly so if they're POC.

ACow_Adonis 8y ago
POC?
- jessaustin 8y ago
  Persons of color. In USA, a lot of things that annoy white people are worse for people who aren't white. E.g. dealing with police, CPS, the courts, etc.
rwcarlsen 8y ago
I think there are two things going on here - "a child being treated in X manner" and "how we view parent X (mother or father) treating their child". Fathers culturally often get the dad pass for why something happened while society still frowns on the thing that happened to the kids the same. I (as a father) am just as afraid of getting in trouble for leaving my kids in the car for a few minutes as my wife - because the legal issues of how society responds to that happening to kids even if there is less cultural mud-slinging at me because I am male. All this to say that I am much more interested in the direct topic of this article - which is the fear I and my wife operate under of our getting in trouble for not raising our kids "right" - rather than have the discussion get derailed into a gender rabbit hole.
AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> I, as a father, can get away with all kinds of things because according to society I don't know any better, whereas my wife, as a mother, is expected to be perfect all the time and when she does something that doesn't measure up to someone's unvoiced, unwarranted expectations she's harshly judged for it. The problem is the other side to this coin, which is that because males are presumed to be incompetent, their interactions with children are restricted ahead of time. Children aren't allowed to be alone with an adult male because the presumption is that he'll allow them to solo pilot a homemade single-passenger rocket ship with no safety equipment, if not literally rape and murder them. And then, for example, little girls can't learn about tech because qualified adult women to teach them are scarce and they're not allowed to be unsupervised around adult men.

pboutros 8y ago

Totally agreed on your first point. The article actually explicitly addresses the last thing you said. >Dr. Sarnecka, the cognitive scientist, has an answer to this. Her study found that subjects were far less judgmental of fathers. When participants were told a father had left his child for a few minutes to run into work, they estimated the level of risk to the child as about equal to when he left because of circumstances beyond his control. > >I love the way this finding makes plain something we all know but aren’t supposed to say: A father who is distracted by his interests and obligations in the adult world is being, well, a father; a mother who does the same is failing her children.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

onetimemanytime 8y ago

Police must justify their jobs...and people have to feel better by pointing the finger at "bad parent" of the week.

eksemplar 8y ago

> I've noticed how casually people say, "that should be illegal" nowadays. Usually it's half-joking, but it expresses a real sentiment about how even mild transgressions are seen as legal matters. It’s because civilization had to break down our social norms that guided humankind for thousands of years, so that we could build vast and functional social structures outside our local society and families. A company of 1000 people is an insane achievement in human history. Ancient Rome may have had a senate, an emperor and a few generals to run the army, but in realty, there wasn’t a single sociopolitical structure larger than a few hundred people, and there really hasn’t been, until after modern times. To do this we gave up the importance of local community, family and such, and devoted ourselves to the modern nation state. Sure there have been countries for a long time, but they used to really just be about taxes and security, and not really local security because nobody gave a rats ass if a town burned an alleged witch. In return we got individualism and freedom. 300 years ago you would have become whatever profession your dad had, if you were a man and married if you were a woman. Today you’re free to build your own way through life. This meant that the state suddenly became responsible for a lot of things that families and communities used to take care of though, like determining what is and isn’t allowed. Which is perfectly fine by the way, in a democratic society that values that freedom and that individuality. The people you talk about, don’t value their freedom though, they have just really gotten used to the state being their mommy/daddy. Which is incredible dangerous but it’s also the inevitable outcome when we increasingly let radical leftists and right wingers and their identify politics dictate our public discourse. Freedom is provocative, because not everyone agrees, and that’s just fine, but today, we’re have both leftist and right wingers wanting to use legalization to dictate virtually everything based on their identity politics. It’s really quite terrible.

yontherubicon 8y ago
> Ancient Rome may have had a senate, an emperor and a few generals to run the army, but in realty, there wasn’t a single sociopolitical structure larger than a few hundred people, and there really hasn’t been, until after modern times. > few generals to run the army. > the army The army was rather a bit bigger than 1000 people.
- 8y ago

zaptheimpaler 8y ago

Good point. I think its yet another symptom of the collapse of societal/communal values in the west in favor of individualism. Criticism/gossip within a society are a good way of punishing these minor transgressions, and its usually how its done around the world. With no society left and all decisions up to the individual, the only way left is to leave everything up to the law.