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As a 12 year old in a city you can walk to a park or get on the metro/bus and visit some friends or go see a movie etc. If some "concerned citizen" doesn't rep
by protomyth 8y ago
As a 12 year old in a city you can walk to a park or get on the metro/bus and visit some friends or go see a movie etc.
If some "concerned citizen" doesn't report the 12 year old to child protective services. Looking at how children are pushed into so much fear it is no wonder how many of them escape into the virtual.
- throwaway287391 8y agoI could be wrong, but my impression is that those CPS calls are a chiefly suburban phenomenon.
- wcunning 8y agoThe original story of that was a 12 year old being allowed to ride the New York subway by himself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenore_Skenazy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenore_Skenazy
- throwaway287391 8y agoFrom your link, (1) it was a 9 year old, and (2) I don't see anything about CPS calls or any similar panic. > Skenazy's April 1, 2008 column in The New York Sun, "Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone," described her making the controversial decision to let her son take the New York City Subway home alone, which was completed without incident.
- bookofjoe 8y agoI recall my mother telling me that when I was 8, I used to take my 5 year-old-brother places — just the two of us — on the electric streetcar. I handled the money to pay our fares. This was in Milwaukee in the mid-50s. No big deal.
- bunderbunder 8y agoCor, if people started doing that in my city, forget about kids going out to have fun, school attendance would drop like a stone on account of it becoming de facto illegal for you to let your kids transport themselves to school. That sounds more to me like a thing that happens in the suburbs, where kids need to be chauffeured around in cars everywhere and the streets are too fast and too packed with cars for bikes to be safe, so parents don't even get the opportunity to contemplate letting their kids out of their sight.
- protomyth 8y agoI'm pretty sure its a city and suburbs issue (just from news articles), but I am at a loss as to how to get the statistics to prove either case.
- bookofjoe 8y agoSpot on. In Upper St. Clair, Pa., where my daughter/son-in-law/grandson live, any child walking alone who doesn't appear to be a teenager will be stopped and interrogated by a police officer in a patrol car.
- thebiss 8y agoOnly takes a few reports like this one, where a 10 y/o and 6 y/o are referred to CPS a half mile from home, for parents to keep kids in. https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/national-international/Md-Free-Range-Parents-Found-Negligent-for-Child-Neglect-Meitiv-294729761.html https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/national-international/M...