3 ms·

I agree with you but then again the US is a massive country; it cannot be the same all over. So something gives the parents the idea they need to be (over?)prot

I agree with you but then again the US is a massive country; it cannot be the same all over. So something gives the parents the idea they need to be (over?)protective or we just do not hear from the regions where that is not needed because it is not newsworthy?

alkonaut 8y ago
I suspect there are places where you wouldn’t and shouldn’t leave your 5yo alone in the playground a short walk from home. And I assume that the culture will spread within a country (shared news etc) so that people in areas where this would be perfectly safe don’t do that either. I’m not sure what to do about that their than encourage people to make their own judgements and also see the cost of overprotecting. I think that’s a key here: parents think that watching over kids is invariably best, and don’t assign a value to independence.
- tluyben2 8y ago
  > suspect there are places where you wouldn’t and shouldn’t leave your 5yo alone in the playground a short walk from home. You have that almost everywhere; sometimes depending, unfortunately, on color of skin or social standing. But I am just surprised because of the size of the US; in the Netherlands, which is miniscule, ‘people in the south’ think Amsterdam and Rotterdam are Sodom and Gomorrah which is mostly not true. I thought it was because it is such a small country that people would have such ideas about cities which are basically less than 2 hours drive from them, but then you see this in massive countries too. The tabloid press seems to do a lot of harm really.
danaris 8y ago
There's been an irrational fear of child kidnappings in the US for decades now, fueled by sensationalist fearmongering news reports. When I was young, a young girl went missing in the area (still unsolved, 25 years later) and it was huge news for years, and justification in many parents' minds (though not my own) for never letting their children do anything unsupervised. But...while that was a scary and tragic case, the reason it made so much news is that it was, and remains, very rare. The notion that some kidnapper or pedophile is going to make off with your child, targeted at random on the street, has always been an almost absurdly unlikely one. And yet many places in the US would see a parent arrested for negligence for allowing their child to walk a block or two on their own. So, yes, something gives parents the idea they need to be overprotective. It's a sensationalist media and a culture of fear spread by people with a poor understanding of risk.

alkonaut 8y ago

I suspect there are places where you wouldn’t and shouldn’t leave your 5yo alone in the playground a short walk from home. And I assume that the culture will spread within a country (shared news etc) so that people in areas where this would be perfectly safe don’t do that either. I’m not sure what to do about that their than encourage people to make their own judgements and also see the cost of overprotecting. I think that’s a key here: parents think that watching over kids is invariably best, and don’t assign a value to independence.

tluyben2 8y ago
> suspect there are places where you wouldn’t and shouldn’t leave your 5yo alone in the playground a short walk from home. You have that almost everywhere; sometimes depending, unfortunately, on color of skin or social standing. But I am just surprised because of the size of the US; in the Netherlands, which is miniscule, ‘people in the south’ think Amsterdam and Rotterdam are Sodom and Gomorrah which is mostly not true. I thought it was because it is such a small country that people would have such ideas about cities which are basically less than 2 hours drive from them, but then you see this in massive countries too. The tabloid press seems to do a lot of harm really.

danaris 8y ago

There's been an irrational fear of child kidnappings in the US for decades now, fueled by sensationalist fearmongering news reports. When I was young, a young girl went missing in the area (still unsolved, 25 years later) and it was huge news for years, and justification in many parents' minds (though not my own) for never letting their children do anything unsupervised. But...while that was a scary and tragic case, the reason it made so much news is that it was, and remains, very rare. The notion that some kidnapper or pedophile is going to make off with your child, targeted at random on the street, has always been an almost absurdly unlikely one. And yet many places in the US would see a parent arrested for negligence for allowing their child to walk a block or two on their own. So, yes, something gives parents the idea they need to be overprotective. It's a sensationalist media and a culture of fear spread by people with a poor understanding of risk.