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> I think kids have more ability to self regulate than we typically treat them as having. This "kids need adult supervision" is a relatively new thing, we used

• dfsegoat 6y ago
  Having grown up in the manner you describe, and being a parent of several young kids - I do find the prospect of them having a similar childhood pretty terrifying. I am forever thankful for a childhood like that - but letting my kids run amok in this day and age for hours brings me a lot of anxiety. It is an interesting paradox that makes me a bit sad. edit: for the record, we have them in wrestling / jiu jitsu - so their plate is still full re: physical activity and social interaction.
  • sjg007 6y ago
    What makes you anxious about it?
    • topkai22 6y ago
      Not the GP, but for me the answer is "cars." And child services coming after me for being neglectful. And rattlesnakes. But mostly cars. Even with statistics about danger being down across the board, in still pretty worried about my kids getting hit by an automobile. The raw statistics are even one area where danger is rising- fatality numbers are back over the mid 90s.
      • colejohnson66 6y ago
        ^ this. You can show someone who’s afraid of flying that it’s the safest form of travel all you want, but you’re not going to convince them. Anxiety usually isn’t rational, so rational means of convincing don’t work.
        • phdelightful 6y ago
          I disagree, I think the main purpose of reason is to overcome negative irrational behavior. Doesn't mean it's easy or automatic though :)
        • topkai22 6y ago
          Any chance you'd like to take a stab at convincing me I shouldn't worry about my (young) kids getting hit by cars? I feel like it's an unfortunately rational anxiety.
          • colejohnson66 6y ago
            I didn’t say you shouldn’t worry. I said that ignoring evidence showing a downwards trend is irrational and used airplanes as an example. I haven’t looked at the stats about children getting hit by cars. Please don’t read words from me that aren’t there.
            • topkai22 6y ago
              Sorry, just hoping you had evidence I didn't!
              • colejohnson66 6y ago
                No worries! I read your reply as antagonistic and went from there. My mistake.
      • heavyset_go 6y ago
        To add to the "cars" problem: these days there are many more people on the road who are incentivized to drive as a fast as possible to do their jobs. Amazon, UPS, FedEx etc delivery drivers are pushed to the brink to deliver as many packages as they can within a certain time frame, and there are thousands of untrained taxi drivers running around for Uber and Lyft and playing with their phones.
    • dfsegoat 6y ago
      Cars are one. Feeling like my kids aren't as 'street smart' is another - but that is on me. Anecdotally, I see a lot more obviously mentally ill people on the streets than when I was a kid. Crime in general is more prolific in my area than when I was a kid (Sonoma County, CA). I'm not saying my anxiety is rational, or that the stats back up my anecdotes - I am merely stating my perceptions.
  • alexfrydl 6y ago
    Unless you mean right now because of carona, I'm not sure what about “this day and age” is more dangerous than when you grew up.
    • rbosinger 6y ago
      There are more people around. More cars. Where I live, there's about 1000x more needles than when I grew up. Way more crazy people roaming around. Maybe statistically they aren't causing any problems, but they sure harass me enough. Especially when it comes to "playing in the woods". The woods around town are the worst place now. We used to find camps and places where teenagers would party here and there but now when I walk in the woods (unregulated, non-protected "parks", or outskirts of real parks) there's people camping out and smoking, drinking, doing whatever. Both my hometown and where I live now are like this. It's not my imagination. My parents see the same thing. I don't care if the statistics say it's better.
      • mlyle 6y ago
        > It's not my imagination. My parents see the same thing. I don't care if the statistics say it's better. Kind of strange, though, isn't it? We live in a safer time than any before (have regressed slightly in the past few years), but many, many people have an intrinsic gut reaction that things are getting worse. "Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires'. We, their sons, are more worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt." - Horace, ~20BC
      • Sodman 6y ago
        You should check out "Angels of our better nature" by Steven Pinker - it's a fascinating book about the decline of violence, both over the course of human history, and recently. The local woods by you may indeed be worse than it was during your childhood, but overall as a society we are doing better.
    • dfsegoat 6y ago
      Yea - I can’t say that I have a rational understanding for why I feel like the world is more dangerous than when i was a kid.
  • vmception 6y ago
    there is nothing different this day and age except awareness crime is lower across the board compared to 15-20 years ago ignorance was bliss, for you
    • AlecSchueler 6y ago
      Awareness also brings behavioural changes. Could be there's less crime because of all the extra precautions being taken.
      • vmception 6y ago
        No? A) There are easy marks everywhere. B) Which crimes did your mind gravitate towards? Were those crimes ever major parts of all crimes committed? Does the presence or absence of children materially change any of that?
        • giantg2 6y ago
          There's a pretty popular theory that the advances in forensics and the prevalence of surveillance cameras are a driving factor in the reduction of crime. Even stuff like kids having a cell phone to call police or track their location could be a mitigating factor. I do agree that there are still many easy marks. I think the advancement of the aforementioned technologies and the parent comment's point about parents in general being more cautious removes many of the opportunity for certain crimes, or at least to get away with them.
    • yostrovs 6y ago
      T
    • fogihujy 6y ago
      > there is nothing different this day and age except awareness And the fact that crime has dropped like a rock, with a ~20 year lag, after leaded fuel was phased out.
      • 6y ago
  • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    >I am forever thankful for a childhood like that - but letting my kids run amok in this day and age for hours brings me a lot of anxiety. It is an interesting paradox that makes me a bit sad. Anxiety because of what the kids may do or anxiety because of what other adults may do?
• abfan1127 6y ago
  I emphasize "work it out" so often with our kids. Funny story. my 4yo was playing with the neighborkids around the same age. the neighbor girl came to me to tattle, saying they weren't sharing. I told her you need to work it out with them, use your words and manners. Clearly not the result she was looking for, she turned and yelled "He said you have to share!" I clarified with the other kids "that's not what I said! Work it out!"
  • Waterluvian 6y ago
    Maybe that's her approach to working it out!
  • Dumblydorr 6y ago
    Haha! That's a good one. She heard what she wanted to hear, or she was testing out lying. Kids all test out lying around the pre-school age, some of them find it useful and keep doing it.
    • abfan1127 6y ago
      I'd lean towards the lying part. Her strategy of leveraging higher powers didn't pan out, so she went with plan B of illusion of leveraging higher powers.
      • giantg2 6y ago
        On the fast track to middle management or politics.
      • scotty79 6y ago
        She just went with the advice and used her (untrue) words and (authoritative) manners to get what she wants. But was immediately betrayed and shot down by her advisor.
        • giantg2 6y ago
          ... and consequently took notes for when she is leading others in a company so that she can use the pawns under her similarly.
• hindsightbias 6y ago
  And yet a generation raised that way turned out to be absolutely paranoid about raising their own kids.
  • giantg2 6y ago
    Maybe because we see how minor incidents in our childhood would be over-litigated (civilly and criminally) in today's society.
    • hshshs2 6y ago
      other parents are doing the suing and police reporting too, I think you’re looking for an answer that fits a personal bias
• watwut 6y ago
  I have seen "work it out" method with friends kids and it convinced me that I won't do it. In one case, it ended up with older boy consistently bullying smaller sibling. By the time parents started to intervene, it was habit and it took months to be stopped. The younger kids still somewhat dislike brother, altrought he treats her much better now. Other cases I have seen were roughly similar. Work it out may work out may not. But pretty often it amounts to enabling bullies - and even blaming the victim if the victim does not defend itself in perfect magical non noisy calculated way.
  • Pfhreak 6y ago
    I like work it out with guard rails. Observe, be prepared to talk about feelings, and ensure the lesson isn't "might is right", but otherwise give kids the opportunity to experiment with social interactions.
• giantg2 6y ago
  'Parents would let us "work it out" if there was a fight.' And now days the school calls the police for minor fights and kids end up with records that can drastically alter their lives in a negative way. I almost wonder if this zero tolerance mindset creates an all-or-nothing mentality in kids when they realize they aren't allowed to defend themselves. And if this mentality (equivocating criminal record and expulsion with the end of one's opportunities and life) leads to more extreme behavior - hey, if the cops are going to be called for punching my bully, why not take it further?
  • zeku 6y ago
    It does lead to issues. I'm a young enough to have gone through school with zero tolerance policies and heavy use of police calls. I got a record with my school for cursing in the 8th grade. That's right. I got suspended from a public school for 2 weeks and kicked off the football team and out of the school play for saying, "What the fuck?!" in shock after a kid poured something down the back of my shirt. This lead to me being punished more than normal for the rest of my public schooling. Once you have a "record" if you so much as dare to be 5minutes late to a class they just send you to "in school suspension" as a bad kid for the entire day. There I met kids doing much worse things than me, and almost all of it was escalated by administration getting police involved. Police would hang around these kids to arrest them again and again, never teaching them anything.
    • giantg2 6y ago
      Yeah, I was sort of at the beginning of those policies. I think there were still enough older teachers/administrators that thought it was BS, that many of the minor issues never resulted in anything extreme. I remember one teacher caught me and another kid in a bit of a scuffle (not really a fight) over a prank gone wrong. Basically, we both apologized to each other and discussed the mistake/misunderstanding. We didn't even get detention and still remained friends. Granted this was in a rural area, which seems to be a bit slower to adopt those newer policies. I mean, we still had kids bringing their guns to high school in their cars to go hunting in the evening.
• hshshs2 6y ago
  this is survivorship bias, I also knew an unsupervised child that accidentally lit himself on fire and suffered third degree burns over the majority of his body
• cortesoft 6y ago
  Kids did suffer injuries and deaths playing unsupervised before. Whether the risk is worth it or not is a fair question, but we can't just pretend there is no risk in letting your kids play without supervision. This is the same argument that anti-vaccine people make... we survived as a species for thousands of years without vaccines, we don't need them now! Yes, we survived as a species but a lot of individuals did not survive. Every safety and health improvement we make can suffer the same argument (we survived for years with lead paint! Asbestos has been used in a ton of buildings and we are still here!) Of course, not every safety improvement is worth it. Some risk is acceptable when the gains are high. I just think it is important to be realistic about the risks when we are talking about the benefits.
• THE_PUN_STOPS 6y ago
  Throughout the 1800s there were tens of thousands of homeless kids just running around New York City making ends meet. The data is unreliable but it’s interesting to wonder how their lives turned out.
• mleonhard 6y ago
  "Kids are harmed by daily emotional and physical abuse from other kids" is also a relatively new thing. The past was not a rosy place for everyone.
• stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Yep I sniped a lot of people with my wooden gun when growing up playing military games in the woods. I've never so much as been in a fist fight and have talked others out of it on a few occasions (mostly in college). These video games cause violent people is the same sort of ludditery we saw when novels became popular, when comic books became popular, when rated R movies became a regular thing, and on down through the annals of history.