33 ms·

A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV

• lupire 5y ago
  A 4 yr old can also get distracted and walk in front of a car, or climb over a railing and fall of a bridge.
  • edge17 5y ago
    I think the point is, if it's generally accepted culture in the community then others will be mindful as well because they know what's going on.
  • aequitas 5y ago
    The article describes the child was already engaging in dangerous behaviour (climbing the roof) and pushing boundaries. By giving errands you are (gradually) setting new boundaries for the child you have at least some control over, instead of them suddenly discovering they can go into the neighbourhood or wherever that you don't know about. At least that is what I understand from it. The alternative would be more/stricter boundaries I think. But that would just lead to more undesired and dangerous behaviour from the child to break those boundaries.
    • nottorp 5y ago
      > The article describes the child was already engaging in dangerous behaviour (climbing the roof) I spent a good part of my summer holidays as a kid on the roof of a shed. Or in the tree near it, a bit higher. Different country though.
  • kingcharles 5y ago
    A large number of adults get distracted by their phones and get run over. The child is probably more aware of its environment than most adults.
    • tomrod 5y ago
      Depends on the kid. Kids tend to have more variability in their attention spans and recognition of danger.
  • kemayo 5y ago
    > But, and this is key, I didn't simply hand Rosy some money, a grocery bag, close my eyes and send her to the market up the street. The article does note that there was a whole process leading up to sending the kid out on an errand. Lots of out-and-about skill acquisition in gradually more-independent settings, culminating in the trip to the store. One assumes that if the child was particularly prone to distractions like that, it'd have come up and been worked on.
  • a3w 5y ago
    Having seen 1 though 5 year old children in save indoor spaces at a nursery and the woodlands with rusty fences: the latter group moves more up a muddy hill with bolders then the protected group walks over a carpet. But okay, the amount of bruises increases in the wilderness. The amount of crying over that decreases by 99 percent.
  • awhitby 5y ago
    And 4 yr olds are harder to see for drivers. I guess rear cameras have probably made suburbia safer for unaccompanied small children (less reversing out of drive risk) but the growth in large trucks with poor visibility [0] has probably otherwise made roads less safe. [0] https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/the-hidden-dangers-of-big-trucks/ https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/the-hidden-danger...
• jamier1978 5y ago
  As a someone living in the UK I find a lot of these comments by people in the US mind blowing. People calling CPS / police because they see kids playing alone in the park? What the hell is going on over there!
  • JimTheMan 5y ago
    I completely agree, it's wild to hear as an Australian as well. I've never ever heard of anyone having any issues with social services being called on them. If anything, it's really hard to separate children from their parents... Sometimes I also catch threads/tiktoks/comments talking about sex trafficking in the US as well. Where there's an ever present fear their child is going to get abducted and sold into prostitution? And I can't tell if that's a genuine fear or a completely manufactured one. Seems implausible to me.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• VLM 5y ago
  "And on the flipside: Wow, American society is really holding kids back." Naw, not just kids, its everybody.
• compiler-guy 5y ago
  A large component here is simply risk tolerance. Society's risk tolerance, especially for kids, has fallen pretty dramatically. This is probably related to just how many fewer kids US society has in general (births per woman has fallen in half since 1960, and it takes a culture some time to catch up). If you have fewer, then the individual ones become that much more valuable. Your attention and time is divided much less. A hot metal playground slide was no big deal in the 1970s, nor was a merry-go-round, and kids could get injured relatively easily. But our tolerance of such risk has completely disappeared.
  • AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
    I think the "Stranger Danger" panic that accelerated in the 80's is probably more responsible for people thinking that a 4-year old is incapable of running errands. It's not so much the lack of mental capacity as it is decades of cultural inculcation that you should not dare to let any child under the age of ___ wander the streets alone, or they will be immediately abducted, assaulted, and decapitated by dark forces. America has never really recovered from Adam Walsh's murder, IMO.
    • chomp 5y ago
      Well, and now the Internet - it doesn't help when Nextdoor is full of "suspicious person alerts" aka "there was a solicitor and I didn't like it", and a non-stop barrage of crime related stories. I live in a city whose broader region is almost 10000 square miles, and the crime feeds report all crime in this area as occurring in "Houston", even though this region is larger than some US states. I feel like this contributes to panic because people feel like the crime is in their backyard. My local news station targets me on Facebook with stories because I'm in this MSA, but the story they hit me with could be a shooting that's easily a 1.5 hour drive from me. Heck, here in Texas, my phone has buzzed from what they are calling "Blue Alerts" now, which is a riff off of Amber Alerts, where I've gotten notified that an officer was shot at, literally over 4 hours away from me, almost 300 miles away. It's not surprising that our society is inundated with panic.
      • 5y ago
• robonerd 5y ago
  By all means, let the kid run around town and have fun. I think most of us realize that by the numbers, 'stranger danger' precaution went too far years ago. But errands? They'll have a lifetime of errands when they're older; four years is too young, let them have at least a few years of fun first. Maybe the occasional errand is fun for kids, but I think I know how this ends. Before long it's no longer an adventure and becomes a chore, an obligation. The excitement of buying tomatoes subsides and the kid starts to get scolded for playing before getting his chores done. Here's my idea: give kids bikes and tell them to be back before dinner.
  • wollsmoth 5y ago
    Eh, I think it's okay to give kids chores to do from time to time. They can pickup something fun for themselves too.
  • jimmyjazz14 5y ago
    The thing is, errands make kids happy, on the most part kids want responsibility and to feel useful. I agree not every adventure should be an errand though.
  • function_seven 5y ago
    The difference between "the occasional errand is fun for kids" and "becomes a chore, an obligation" cannot be emphasized enough! I vividly remember watching my dad mow the front lawn one afternoon. I was 11 I think? It looked so fun pushing this loud machine over the messy grass and leaving a path of perfectly neat turf behind. I asked him if I could try it out. He hesitated for a bit, then said, "Sure." So I did, and it was fun. And it was now my obligation once a week for the next 8 years. The fun was short-lived, but the chore remained. And the mechanism was identical to how I assumed vacuuming duty at the age of 8, which means I didn't learn my lesson from that fiasco either :)
    • robonerd 5y ago
      For me, the first of these adventures-turned-chores was washing the car. It was great fun in the summer; we didn't have air conditioning then so any excuse to go outside and spray the hose was great as far as I was concerned. But before too long that chore extended into the fall and spring when it was chilly and not remotely fun. It only ended when I was 16 and had the idea to drive the car to the local carwash instead.
• a3w 5y ago
  https://text.npr.org/1093153651 https://text.npr.org/1093153651 Link that actually loads in the EU. Also, as a german citizen: isn't that public knowledge? When seven years old I walked to my school and visited neighbors afterwards without telling anyone where I was going, as long as that I was not delayed too much. (When 27 years old and moving back in with my parents, that actually changed, but after a few years I trained them to let me live my own life again.)
  • tetris11 5y ago
    The difference is that you likely grew up in a strong permanent community, where your neighbours weren't constantly moving in/out. In Mediterranean cultures its completely normal for kids to stay up late playing with their friends and staying over at each others houses without any parental coordination required at all. When you have a strong community, trust is more easily built.
    • Broken_Hippo 5y ago
      The US has small towns, many of which don't have people moving often. And I'd argue that moving often is a side effect of not having a robust enough safety net that allows folks to avoid this sort of upheaval.
• thatsamonad 5y ago
  We recently started letting our 9 year-old walk down to a nearby park alone to meet and play with friends. It’s helping them build independence and confidence and I have no concerns about kidnapping, etc, because it’s only a couple of blocks away and we live in a safe neighborhood (they also have a phone they take with them and know to call/text us when they change their plans and go to another nearby park). What I DO have concerns about, however, is overzealous adults who see a kid playing alone at a park and decide to call the police or child protective services.
  • bombcar 5y ago
    That last part is WAY more common and likely than anything else. > Fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year between 2010–2017. > According to the NWS Storm Data, over the last 30 years (1989-2018) the U.S. has averaged 43 reported lightning fatalities per year. So letting kids walk to the park is way less risky than a thunderstorm (though perhaps they shouldn't walk to the park IN a thunderstorm). > In 2019, 608 child passengers age 12 and younger died in motor vehicle crashes, and more than 91,000 were injured. Of the children 12 and younger who died in a crash (for whom restraint use was known), 38% were not buckled up. I haven't done the numbers, but driving a kid to the park when not buckled up may be more dangerous than letting them walk.
    • foobarian 5y ago
      I wonder if it used to be a lot more common before the culture got so paranoid. In which case maybe the shift was warranted.
    • ultrarunner 5y ago
      Along these lines I am curious about the number of innocent families affected by the harassment of overzealous adults (my son has had this happen twice) or CPS (zero, fortunately). Given the somewhat subjective nature of "innocent" it's probably not quantifiable, but I sometimes wonder what the risk actually is. Being struck by lightning is unlikely, but the potential effects are serious enough to warrant taking precautions— I wonder how similar the analogy truly is.
• johnzim 5y ago
  As a parent, none of the risks are as profound as that of some other member of the public calling the police to inform on your “dangerous parenting”. I’ve deliberately chosen to live in a walkable part of the Bay Area in the hopes that my kids can be more independent when they get older, but I’m more worried about the social pushback than I am about their safety.
  • gregjor 5y ago
    I let my three kids walk to school, the park, around the corner to friend’s houses. Neighbors complained to my face multiple times, and threatened to call CPS twice. My children all survived to adulthood. I was walking to school with other kids when I was four, no one had a problem with it then. Teaching kids to fear everyone and the world they live in doesn’t do them any good — it just causes anxiety.
    • gregjor 5y ago
      One of our neighbors screamed at my wife and me because our six year old son wasn’t wearing a helmet on his Razer scooter to (slowly) go around the corner. That same neighbor let her dog run around off-leash at the park, assuring the parents there that the dog didn’t bite, though it did like to jump on the children. We raised our kids in Portland, where dogs have more rights and freedom than children.
      • anm89 5y ago
        This risk doesn't seem worth it. You are playing CPS roulette. Even if 9/10 CPS agents are going to make the right decisions, that's a 10% chance of having some kind of issue with CPS. If I recall correctly, people have had their kids taken over stuff like this. I think if this is such a big deal ( I think it is too) you should move out of the city. That's just too big to gamble with.
        • gregjor 5y ago
          I understand the risk of busybody adults and CPS. We chose to let our kids have some freedom of movement. I have lawyers in my family so we were less worried than other parents we knew. In Portland specifically CPS overreach got a lot of negative press and pushback from parent’s groups — there’s strength in numbers. Texas, Oklahoma, and Utah have enacted so-called “free range” laws to allow kids to do unthinkable things like walk to the corner store or park without a security detail and body armor. Oregon will probably be among the last states to ease up — dogs will get the right to vegan CBD-infused meals there first. I no longer live there.
• kbrannigan 5y ago
  My country. You see little kids walking to school by themselves. Taking public transportation. Running errands. It was a shock when I saw how parents helicoptered their children here.
  • seizethecheese 5y ago
    What country?
• sloreti 5y ago
  Disappointing that an article like this wouldn’t mention one of the main reasons children are given less autonomy in the US: our built environment. The vast majority of our children grow up in neighborhoods in which one can’t easily be a pedestrian at any age. Low density communities, in which almost all trips have to be taken in cars, are of course not friendly to non-drivers. Japan builds dense, mixed use neighborhoods. As a result, children are empowered to walk to the store or a friend’s house.
  • yu-carm-kror 5y ago
    Agreed. I sometimes feel tense crossing big box parking lots where mostly no space has been designated to walking. Imagine a small person surrounded by pickup trucks and SUV’s from which they’re completely invisible.
  • malkia 5y ago
    I grew up in Bulgaria, but my experience as a kid (80s-90s) seems like similar to what my (future) boss (in Los Angeles) when he was growing up in SF Valley (60s-70s) - get on the bike, go places, school, etc. We had much smaller amount of cars. For one we had these self-made wood carts with ball-bearings as "tires", and we would slide with them on the streets while other cars were driving. Ok, not on the main street, but somewhere on a hill. If I get bloodied, my gramma would be - yaaah it's fine. Go to the doctor (by myself, 2nd grade) and get tetanous shot (I vividly remember this when I stepped on a rusty nail). They were still worried, but I guess due to lack of phones (even land line wasn't covered well), that's the best they can do. One day, I was 4, maybe 5, me and my cousin (year older) decided (well it was my decision apparently, lol) that we need our plastic toy truck from my grandparents, and decided to take it. So we took off from a small city (Tzhernomortez) nearby my home city (Burgas) - and decide to walk it - I haven't checked - but the distance is 20-30km. So we walk, put some signs down, ate some really bad grassy looking thing, a bus of janitors/workers picked us up and left us somewhere, so probably from 9:00AM somewhere to 2, 3pm was our "trip". And we end up knocking on my grandparents door - we need our truck! :) - Well, yes everyone was spooked (normal), but that was it. It was later just told as funny story. Now many years later, in US, with my son (~15 soon) I'm still spooked where he goes, we have the tracker (he's okay with it) and track each other in case something happens. I wish I had less available information... But also the streets in the US, even in neighbourhoods where people live, not work are just too damn wide :) - and cars, while observing most of the time the speed limits, when comes traffic time and they look for shortcuts, some of them go way too fast (and yes, I probably did the same in other places, when in a hurry). We had our neighbour's two dogs killed, because someone was swerving too fast, where you should slow down to a crawl really. But it is, what it is.
• matthewaveryusa 5y ago
  FYI check your local law before attempting this. A few states in the US have legal minimums for allowing your kids to roam/be alone and they vary, but many do not!
  • Spellman 5y ago
    Helpful map and catalogue of relevant laws in the US: https://letgrow.org/resources/state-policy-maps https://letgrow.org/resources/state-policy-maps
• UncleOxidant 5y ago
  It was 1968 during what was called (at the time) the Hong Kong flu outbreak. I was 5 years old. I was the only person in the house who was not stricken by it - my parents, uncle, sister, cousin all had it and it seemed to hit them pretty hard. But I was fine. I recall several days where I was pretty much on my own as the adults who had it were bed-ridden. At one point my mom sent me to the store about 1/2 mile away with a note I was to hand to the grocer and $5 for milk, eggs, bread and soup. I was able to complete the mission.
• musicale 5y ago
  > In some places, parents who allow young children to run errands or go places without adult supervision may violate local laws. Is this because some cities are no longer safe for children to go outside? I wonder how things got so dangerous and if anything can be done. Edit: Another post noted that there seems to be a general decline in walkability and pedestrian safety in US cities. This seems like something we could try to fix by improving both environments and vehicles.
  • pessimizer 5y ago
    It's not dangerous. The middle-class suburban "zero tolerance" mentality took over and any possibility of injury became equivalent to child neglect. We (and I) also tend to blame this on individuals, but this sea change was also enforced by the state.
• newaccount2021 5y ago
• beej71 5y ago
  I don't have any kids, so I don't really feel comfortable telling folks how to raise theirs. But I will tell you my perspective. As someone who grew up in the "be back home in time for supper" 1970s, today's world seems completely foreign. When I started kindergarten, Mom walked me to school on the first day so that I'd know the route. And after that I walked to school on my own until I learned to ride a bike. I rode to junior high, where there was parking for hundreds of bikes. Recently I drove by that school, and the bike racks were gone. This whole concept of waiting in traffic to pick up or drop off your kid wasn't even a thing. And I'm so supremely grateful that I was raised that way. I'm absolutely certain that early autonomy paid off later in life in countless ways. I'd encourage you, if you're raising kids, to consider the upsides of so-called "free range". Or, as we called it in the 70s, "being a regular kid".
  • Pr0ject217 5y ago
    It was this way for me in late 90's and early 2000's
  • CalRobert 5y ago
    Where can I do this without drivers who will kill my kid? Cars (or SUV's and trucks, really) are faster, heavier, taller, more numerous, and driven far more miles now. They are why my kid can't walk/cycle to school.
    • kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      A place where crossing guards are used to protect kids on their way to a neighborhood school.
    • bootlooped 5y ago
      Is there data on this though? I'm against the out of control car culture in the US, but cars have generally gotten safer for both drivers and bystanders, right? Yes a giant SUV is bad for pedestrians, but so was a rigid metal box like cars used to be. And drinking and driving is more socially unacceptable than ever.
• mamcx 5y ago
  Now imagine letting 7-8 years old buy groceries in a zone with actual gun fights -sometimes weekly-, bombs -one 2 or 3, blocks away, not worry- and gangs -next door live some people rumored to do fast-kidnap!. And go to school hanging from the doors of the bus. I think I end ok! P.D: I walk with friends (10-15 old) from city center, detouring from an attempt to reach some small mountain after the zone get red, so we decide find other place and end in a close park [Aprox. route here](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/La+Milagrosa,+Medell%C3%ADn,+Antioquia/El+Salado,+Envigado,+Antioquia/@6.1981189,-75.5642866,13z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m13!4m12!1m5!1m1!1s0x8e44284214bfdc4b:0x7e633b1c87c11f22!2m2!1d-75.5524157!2d6.2338014!1m5!1m1!1s0x8e469cdd0a8c80d1:0x1f141d75b40481ca!2m2!1d-75.50599!2d6.15636 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/La+Milagrosa,+Medell%C3%ADn,...), kilometers away... P.D.2: This not about being badass. Normal stuff by a nerd guy. Actual crazy stuff I avoided. Too dangerous!
• Claude_Shannon 5y ago
  Meanwhile my parents went into meltdown whenever I wanted to go for even a walk. When I was 19.
  • asdff 5y ago
    Once in high school I was at a friends house in a subdivision that didn't even have sidewalks. We wanted to go out for a walk but the dad gave us a warning that the neighbors would probably call the police because people don't ever walk in this neighborhood.
    • Claude_Shannon 5y ago
      I'm in Poland, so that wouldn't be an issue.
• tempnow987 5y ago
  Not in the US they can't. "officials placed two brothers into foster care after one, 11, was found playing basketball alone in his own yard." He'd gotten home early from school and his parents came 90 minutes later. He was in his own yard. The family lost their children to foster care. Ironically in foster care ACTUAL abuse rates are pretty darn high! "When Cindy and Fred arrived home they were arrested for child neglect — then fingerprinted, strip searched, and held in jail overnight.Their kids, meanwhile, including their 4-year-old boy, were removed from the home and from their parents’ custody" Mom worked in the school district ironically. "We still do not have our children, we are fighting for our own freedom and due to the nature of my employment I am no longer employed,” she wrote. “My son was in his own yard playing basketball, not in the street or at the park. The authorities claim he had no access to water or shelter. We have an open shed in the back yard and 2 working sinks and 2 hoses. They said he had no food. He ate his snacks already. He had no bathroom, but the responding officer found our yard good enough to relieve himself in while our son sat in a police car alone." Being accused of child abuse / neglect is a career ender. The idea of my 4 year old being taken is beyond belief. What is so ironic is so many real / terrible things are happening (crime of all sorts / abuse in the traditional sense / financial fraud online) where nothing happens. But your kid shoots some hoops in their own yard, you lose custody. You are jailed and strip searched. You lose your job. I realize big government is here to protect us, I just wish they would focus on the harder problems.
  • robonerd 5y ago
    > I realize big government is here to protect us Created by people who mean well perhaps, but subsequently captured by another sort. > Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• chasing 5y ago
  I might trust my kid. I do not trust people in cars.
  • trgn 5y ago
    That's really it. The stranger danger is a dodge. The real reason people don't let their young children outside is because they might get killed by an inattentive driver. It's the most tangible, innately felt thing out in America's public realm, how crazy dangerous it is on foot, constantly having to be on the lookout for cars. And of course getting blamed if they do happen to be struck. A kid got killed in an apartment complex parking lot in my city by a driver. The comments were horrifying, people felt sorry for the driver, blamed the parents.
• w0rkaround 5y ago
  Absolutely need to plug Not Just Bikes, a youtube channel done by a Canadian living in The Netherlands about urban planning using Dutch infrastructure as the gold standard. Key points he makes are how bad North American environments are for child freedom. Its almost entirely due to NA urban planning prioritizing cars over everything else, making it just dangerous for anyone to try and walk anywhere, let alone children. A general difference is that Dutch urban planning prioritizes pedestrians, bikes, transit, then cars, in that order. Whereas in NA cars are really the only thing prioritized. My favorite video of his is about this exact topic, Why I Won't Raise My Kids in Suburbia [0]. This video completely changed my own life, motivating my family and I to move to a city from the suburbs, and fingers-crossed, eventually to The Netherlands. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98
  • Beltalowda 5y ago
    > Dutch infrastructure as the gold standard I don't think it's really a "gold standard"; it's more that everything else is so unbelievably atrocious that it looks like a "gold standard", but it's still incredibly car-dominated. I watched the video and it's not wrong: it's extremely common for children to cycle to elementary school on their own and it's mostly safe, but it doesn't really "prioritize pedestrians, bikes, transit, then cars, in that order"; cars are still very central in most traffic. Things are very slowly beginning to change, in some areas, sometimes. But it's very slow progress.
    • spiderfarmer 5y ago
      I live near one of the cities shown in the video (Assen). Look it up on Google streetview. Most streets are dominated by bikes and pedestrians, not cars. Cars are mostly routed through streets are designed to accommodate them. Accidents are rare, but we can always do better. All accidents are documented and safety statistics are freely available here: https://swov.nl/nl/verkeersveiligheidscijfers https://swov.nl/nl/verkeersveiligheidscijfers
• jcutrell 5y ago
  While the most prevalent narrative in threads like this sounds something like, "back in my day, we weren't so scared!", there's a few assumptions being made. The primary one: people are overestimating the risks associated with autonomy we had "back in the day" as kids. It's also just as possible that we are adopting a lower tolerance for that risk, or that the risk is better clarified than it once was. When I was growing up, I was allowed to roam the neighborhood. I lived on a military base in my youngest years, but later I lived in a suburb of a small town. Nothing seriously bad ever happened to me, but that's anecdotal. I wonder what is more likely: my parents were more risk tolerant, risk ignorant, or the world has become more dangerous. Both are possible, but I think the former two are broadly more likely than the latter.
  • Barrin92 5y ago
    >my parents were more risk tolerant, risk ignorant, or the world has become more dangerous almost certainly not the latter given that a significant drop in crime since the 80s and 90s is an almost global phenomenon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop). Drunk driving fatalities are down 90% since the 80s despite miles travelled having doubled etc. I mean just remember the culture a few decades ago, people did not give a fuck about anything. People really have become comically anxious even though many places are considerably safer and cleaner. Maybe because of it.
• nradov 5y ago
  My wife grew up in eastern Europe. At that age when her parents had visitors over they used to send her to the store to buy beer. She was too small to carry enough so had to make two trips.
• gamblor956 5y ago
  A 4-year-old on reality TV is being followed by a camera crew, and is therefore by definition not alone. That being said, it is common in urban areas (at least in LA) to see relatively young children commuting or running errands by themselves. But I never see that when I go back to surburbia. It's not an issue of neighborhood safety; the suburban areas are far safer. It's a parental risk tolerance issue.
• gumby 5y ago
  Is the HN median age too low to remember being handed some money and told to run down to the corner shop and buy cigarettes?
  • goodpoint 5y ago
    It is.
  • trgn 5y ago
    It's not. There are a ton of comments about people reminiscing about doing exactly that. The problem is the corner shop no longer exists. And if it does, it's a chain, and the rotating staff won't recognize the toddler as being yours. Or going there will get your kid run over by an SUV. Mainly the latter.
    • asdff 5y ago
      Not everyone lives in a stroadburb. Those corner shop suburbs haven't gone anywhere luckily.
    • gumby 5y ago
      I checked with my kid and shops no longer let little kids by cigarettes or beer. How customer unfriendly!
      • trgn 5y ago
        It really is. Because it's man adapting to the measure and not the other way around. The 5 year old isn't going to drink that beer. It's gangly teenagers up to no good. The shopkeeper should totally give the wine bottle to the little kid running an errand for their parents, but not to the teenager looking to impress their friends. My mom asked me to pick up prescriptions at the local pharmacy starting I was 6-7 (we lived a few blocks away). The pharmacists gave them to me because she knew me and my parents. Blanket laws are easy to enforce, but they remove precisely this individual agency.
  • Macha 5y ago
    The "cigarettes" part was gone by the time I was a kid, but being sent down to the shop for milk or something was still a thing.
• furyofantares 5y ago
  I feel like a natural parent-brain thing is that the brain just sits there in the background kind of brainstorming worst-case scenarios and then you make efforts to protect against the ones you've thought about the most, because they're giving you the most anxiety and you want to stop thinking about them. Protecting against that one thing doesn't stop this brainstorming process; it's a creative endeavor limited only by the imagination. Meanwhile, yes, the more constant the news is the more it fuels our imagination, and the more global it is, the more we're feeding it with statistical outliers.
• resoluteteeth 5y ago
  This image from a daily mail article of all places shows the trend over multiple generations in a family very well: https://i.imgur.com/YcjjsiI.jpg https://i.imgur.com/YcjjsiI.jpg It's from the UK but it's probably even worse in the US (I think in the US now most kids aren't allowed out of the yard of their house on their own until they're old enough to drive basically.)
  • bencollier49 5y ago
    That's a great graphic. I can't figure out what it is doing this - I'm UK-based too, and I know logically that everything is now safer - I used to walk two miles to the woods with friends at the age of eight or nine, but I wouldn't trust my own children to walk to the bottom of the hill here. I don't really understand what has changed. Why were my own parents less paranoid? There are lots of people giving lots of reasons on here. The most credible is the constant "stranger danger" message pumped out in news, but I honestly wonder if there's been a baseline increase in people's general paranoia - my concerns are more around them doing something stupid and getting into trouble.
    • Beltalowda 5y ago
      I think standards of what is or isn't considered "safe" have shifted quite a bit too, and I don't think that's entirely a bad thing too. I lived in Asia for a while and some of the things I saw people do there... Yikes! From entire families (wife, husband, 2 young children) on a single scooter without helmet to the guy repairing my roof by stacking a chair on a wonky table and standing on top of that. They think it's perfectly fine though. The UK in particular is somewhat obsessed with "health and safety", which is probably #2 on the favourite thing to complain about (after the weather, of course) but at the same time people gleefully participate in it too. I lived in England for a while (as a Dutch person) and my English girlfriend was always paranoid about things I didn't see as a problem, for example I was perfectly comfterable carrying stuff from the car to the house and leaving the car unattended on the (enclosed!) parking lot for a minute, but she'd insist on locking it. N=1 of course, but I observed a number of other similar things over the years I lived there with different people. When it snowed for a bit the British were in a state of near-panic, and things like the Met announcing "there may be power cuts and shortages" didn't exactly help calm fears. It's 5cm of snow people, announced a week beforehand. We don't get snow that often in NL either, but I've never seen it anywhere near as chaotic as in England. I guess I'm rambling a bit here, but my point is I think the problem is wider than just "kids". Partly, I think that's good: we're more aware of risks and deal with them a bit more consciously, but you can go too far in this; a risk-free life is a boring life hardly worth living. "It's dangerous" or "it's a risk that [..] will happen" is almost always true in a sense and hard to argue against; "yes but no life can be without risk" comes of as weak, especially when it concerns something like your children.
• rafiki6 5y ago
  A lot of the comments make great points but honestly I think the biggest problem no one has addressed is the massive expansion in population since the 70s. This has lead to much larger "towns" and suburbs where the sense of community is essentially gone. At best you might know a few neighbors on your street. So risk tolerance has gone down for a good reason. And when you see a strange kid out playing and you don't know who's kid they are, you're going to naturally worry about them and just assume the worst. Another factor too astutely mentioned by someone below is the car dependent nature of most non urban environments, especially in North America. I see lots of kids playing near their homes on their own in the neighborhoods I live in. Parents aren't too far away and they're with the other kids of the neighborhood. Maybe the safe distance a kid can travel on their own hasn't changed, it's what you could actually accomplish in that distance that has changed. Today's society, especially western society, is much less community focused. So now, not only do I not know what strange adults exist in my 200 home open air neighborhood with a single playground, none of the adults there know me either nor my family and therefore a perceived sense of risk and maybe even actual risk is higher that my kids are in danger. That's what happens when population explodes and population density increases. All that's happening is the West is finally experiencing what many Asian and Middle Eastern Countries already knew.
• killjoywashere 5y ago
  In the 80s my mom would give me dollar to go buy milk from the store two blocks away. Then I was taught to use a pay phone and go to the local grocer 3 blocks away. Then I walked to school a mile away. Then I learned to use the bus and I would take myself to the municipal library to read, I have no idea how far it was, but I needed a quarter. The bus driver would change me a dime and a nickel, so I used the dime to get home. We moved out of Omaha in the fall of my fifth grade year. I checked, their crime rate was 3x higher at the time than where we raised our kids. They were barely allowed to walk the six doors to school. Crazy.
• lazyweb 5y ago
  Just as note, but the Japanese show mentioned in the article ("Old Enough") is absolutely delightful. Episodes are usually between 10-20 minutes (the longest being the one with the fish / apple disaster). AFAIK there are currently 20 subtitled episodes available on netflix.
• jmyeet 5y ago
  Netflix has a Japanese show called Old Enough. It shows Japanese children doing their first errand. Example: walking a kilometer to the store (including crossing a busy street), buying 3 items and bringing them back. Age? 2 years, 9 months. It's wild. I grew up at a time and a place where I had a lot of independence. I rode a bike everywhere. I'd do things by myself and with friends. I actually feel sad for kids nowadays. Being a kid now seems to be being at home or getting shuttled from preplanned activity to preplanned activity in a car. Almost everywhere in the US, it's really not possible to do it any other way because the entire infrastructure is predicated on car ownership. Fears of abduction and worse are real of course but the risks are overstated. I actually think these risks are made worse by the ubiquity of cars. I mean think about it: it becomes a lot more difficult to abduct someone without a private vehicle.
  • pessimizer 5y ago
    > I actually think these risks are made worse by the ubiquity of cars. But this isn't new.
  • usrn 5y ago
    Japan has a far lower crime rate than most US cities.
    • asdff 5y ago
      Even still the crime rates in the US are extremely low.
      • usrn 5y ago
        Not in the city where you can send people to run errands on foot.
        • asdff 5y ago
          It's still extremely low in terms of the odds. Even right in the middle of whatever hood you fear most your odds of anything happening to you are slim to none.
• V__ 5y ago
  A lot of interesting discussions are taking place here, but one thing I wonder the most is this: Why is the U.S. and Canada seemingly the only country where this shift took place? Sure, in Europe nowadays more people drive their children to school than before, for whatever reasons, but I have never heard a child or parent get in trouble for being outside by themselves.
  • Macha 5y ago
    It feels like it's happening here too, just some years behind the US. Certainly kids today have much less freedom than I did 25 years ago, even if we're not at the point of protective services taking custody for playing on the street without adults.
• dqpb 5y ago
  If I let my child go out on his own, he would get hit by a car almost immediately.
  • losvedir 5y ago
    Should probably teach him how to avoid that...
    • trgn 5y ago
      Yes, of course. It's and/and. Should also teach that driver to slow down, and be prepared to come to an emergency stop at any given time. Or have streets that naturally slow down traffic by their design, if that's too hard for the driver. Your comment comes from a value system which I find sociopathic. I think it's much more important that the public realm is safe for all, which includes toddlers running errands alone, than that cars should be able to travel at high speed. And beyond that, when piloting 3-ton heavy machinery, one has more responsibility. It's something drivers seem unwilling to accept, rather let's blame the child on foot instead.
      • jhugo 5y ago
        Didn't sound like blame to me. The reality we live in has too many cars, too fast cars, too large cars. The kid lives in that reality now and probably won't get a chance to be a kid in a different reality. Therefore, it would be a good idea to help them to learn to safely explore their world, with some independence, in the reality that they actually live in.
        • trgn 5y ago
          I 100% agree with you on this But no matter how well you teach that toddler to be careful, there are few places in the US where it would be safe from inattentive drives to send them out on an errand. That's the problem.
    • dqpb 5y ago
      Even I have trouble avoiding it.
• dqpb 5y ago
  Off topic: Are there any countries more hostile to pedestrians than the US?
  • floren 5y ago
    India sure felt like it... no such thing as a sidewalk, and the street is a nightmare of cars, tuktuks dodging around the cars, and motorcycles dodging around the tuktuks and cars. But I was just visiting; maybe if you live there it feels safe, I don't know.
    • jhugo 5y ago
      Although by the numbers the roads in India are certainly much less safe than e.g. the US, it's not as unsafe as it looks for people who are used to it. Along with other countries with 'chaotic' roads, staying safe on the road in India comes more from drivers (and pedestrians) generally having very good situational awareness, rather than from strict adherance to a set of rules.
    • bombcar 5y ago
      Amusingly as the cars approach infinity they become slower and slower and it becomes relatively easier to navigate them.
  • asdff 5y ago
    Plenty of countries just model their suburbs after the U.S.. Canada is just like the U.S. most modern suburbs in europe are built with stroads and highways like modern suburbs in orange county, too. American style suburbs are found all over the world to be honest. You can find pockets of huge homes and stroads from Indonesia to Pakistan.
• dibujante 5y ago
  4-year-olds can't drive, so in most of the United States, this is not true.
• billfor 5y ago
  We used to send 4 year olds to the bar to pick up a pail of beer. https://www.glass-jug.com/growlers https://www.glass-jug.com/growlers
• ukyrgf 5y ago
  Holy cow. I was just thinking about all the crazy people in my neighborhood, drug dealers, etc. and how I probably wouldn't want my kid walking around alone. And then I realized that there is a middle school down the street and there are dozens of kids walking home from it, playing in the field, cussing up a storm. Kids come by and ask if we need yard work done. We just moved there last year and I genuinely teared up when the first trick or treater came to our door, every other place I've lived in the parents drove their kids to rich neighborhoods.
• civilized 5y ago
  I have two young kids and I'm very sympathetic to the philosophy of free range parenting. But jeez, when it comes to actually letting my 6-year old walk to the grocery store alone? It's... really scary... just being honest here. Maybe I can get over that? I don't know.
  • bombcar 5y ago
    The key is you work up to it, and allow it when the time is right. The article talks about the kid learning to not run into the street, learning to safely cross the street, going to the store, etc. Heck, with modern phones and watches it’s even easier to keep track of what’s happening.
• maestroia 5y ago
  I grew up on a farm in the US Midwest. When I was 4 (early 1970s), I was given my chores of watering livestock. I also started bottle feeding my first orphan lambs, and started getting other orphans from neighbors. It became quite an income stream. When I was 5, I started driving an older tractor. When I was 6, we were fixing a pasture fence when my dad told me to go drive the pickup the 50 yards or so to where we were at. He verbally walked me through it, and let me go get it. I remember that moment like it was yesterday. And that was not a unique experience, for farm kids at least. Now, parents would be criminally charged with something.
• Zigurd 5y ago
  I am fortunate to have raised kids in a town where they could bike to friends' houses at an early age and even take boats out on a pond. We gave them mobile phones so they could stay in touch. But they could be miles away on their own.
• adamredwoods 5y ago
  Please keep in mind that the kids who didn't survive because of a horrific accident are not here to convey their stories. I've never been a fan of stories from people who present "anecdotal evidence as ideal solutions". As a parent, I do think children need some level of autonomy, but this doesn't need to be an all-or-nothing issue. Parents can apply various degrees in various situations.
• 14 5y ago
  I would love to let my kids free range and as they got older I did but not my smaller kids. Even though statistically small compared to other risks a child faces I would be too concerned about a kidnapping or possible rape. When I was a kid we free ranged. Then one day a kid named Michael Dunahee, on May 12 1986, was kidnapped to never be seen again. We live on an island and no one felt safe. He was just a little boy. That changes everything. Parents stopped letting their kids go so far and everyone was worried. We still look for Michael to this day. Then in 1996 another little girl by the name of Jessica States went missing. She was later found murdered. It was too much for parents to accept and again kids were not left to roam the way they used to. Again I know the statistics are small but I think it is a very parent emotion to not want to let your kids wander too far. The world just has too many creeps and it’s not a risk a lot of parents could bear to live with.
• everyone 5y ago
  Check out Jared Diamonds book 'The world until yesterday' Looking at how some other non-industrialised societies do stuff and is there anything useful we can take from them. There's a chapter on childrearing
• overgard 5y ago
  It's sad/funny, there are all these reports about the younger generations having increased anxiety and depression. Social media is the boogie man and I'm sure it's not psychologically good for young people, but we all but ignore the fact that kids and teenagers now have essentially zero autonomy and unsupervised time. Should we really be shocked they feel anxious about being able to solve their own problems when we've never given them the practice time to learn on their own? The Karens that call CPS are the worst. If the kids aren't in any danger and aren't neglected it's just nobody else's business how they're raised.
• Johnny555 5y ago
  My wife grew up in Japan and starting when she was 4, her regular errand was walking a few blocks down to the corner store alone to get her dad a beer, she was allowed to buy a small treat for herself with the change. She did say that culture has changed since then and few parents would allow a 4 year old to do an errand like that alone anymore.
  • EE84M3i 4y ago
    Japan is pretty lax about age verification for buying alcohol (you still even see some alcohol vending machines) but I'd be at least a little surprised if a 4 year old could buy a beer in a konbini today - but maybe the staff would make an exception if you're a regular customer.
• deleted 5y ago
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• annoyingnoob 5y ago
  I pretty much forced my kids to doing things unsupervised starting around 5. I'd have them go to the mailbox at the end of the street, around the corner just out of view, and get the mail. 1 out of 3 kids was hesitant but I sent her anyway. Then they branched out to the park a couple blocks away, by then they were asking if they could just go - they had learned to be comfortable alone in the world.
• stychos 5y ago
  Really fun article for those who had chance to grew in one of worst holes of the freshly decayed USSR at nineteens.
• __alias 5y ago
  When I was around 10 years old on Holiday overseas with my parents in Australia, my Mum tasked me with fetching cigarettes and milk from the convenience store one street over. I managed to somehow fuck up the straight line trip home, and returned nearly 2 hours later to my mother in hysterics on the phone to the police. I think that was the end of my independence and parent's faith in me.
• User23 5y ago
  Growing up in Germany my Opa would give me a five Mark coin and send me to fetch him beer. Those were different times.
• lkrubner 5y ago
  This was true in New Jersey in the 1970s. When I was 5 years old, I had to walk to school on my own, just like all the other 5 year olds in my neighborhood. We would walk to school together. The school was not quite a mile away. At the time, it was considered normal that kids would walk to school on their own, starting at age 5. this is still normal in some countries, but it is no longer normal in the USA.
• taneq 5y ago
  It all comes down to the risk you're willing to accept. Back in the 70s when 4-5 kid families were common, population density was much lower and bad things happening to individual kids wasn't as widely reported? Doing this kind of thing in a nice suburban neighbourhood was fine. Nowadays with far more 1- and 2-child families the risk we're willing to accept is far lower. Population density is higher which directly multiplies the chances of your kid encountering someone who will hurt them. Traffic is busier and drivers are more distracted, increasing the risk of accidents. Distances are greater, there's no "5-minute walk down to the corner shop". All of these factors combine to make the expected cost of letting your kid loose unsupervised much higher and the expected benefit much lower. A 10-year-old would be fine. A 4-year old? Hell no.
• mbg721 5y ago
  The US, for all its democratic ideals, has some weird cases of "The vast majority of us all agree that this is a bad outcome, but we aren't ever going to change anything meaningful about it." This is one of them; seemingly nobody can do anything about the overreaching child-protection agents, or the busybody neighbors, or the lousy suburban neighborhood design, or the frenetic activity-planning. Why not??
• viztor 5y ago
  I used to walk to and from school by myself, and after school I'd walk to the bookstore by myself, apparently most other kids aren't interested in reading at all, before heading home for dinner. It was a merely ten minutes walk, but other parents are somehow surprised. Fortunately, I've only encountered nice strangers who gave me free snacks and all that, but now I think about it, I just felt super lucky nothing really happened.
• eterevsky 5y ago
  In Switzerland kids are walking to the kindergarten and school by themselves, starting around the age of 5. The parents will take them there the first few time, but after that they have to go on their own.
  • malteof 5y ago
    Can confirm - our daughter started walking to Kindergarten about 9 months ago and she just turned 5 a few weeks ago. She’s very proud of her independence, you can see it does something good for the kids.
• andai 5y ago
  When I was 5, my mother and I had just moved from Croatia to the Netherlands. She sent me down to the shop to buy her some beers. I came home empty-handed, so she went back to the shop and laughed at the shopkeeper—"what, do you think he's going to drink it?" (The shopkeeper was not amused.) Similarly, she took me to see Kill Bill when I was 11. That was during a trip to Croatia, of course. In the Netherlands such a thing would have been illegal—and worse, immoral! Now that Croatia's in the EU, the country is essentially being financially bribed to pretend to care about such issues.
• wesleywt 5y ago
  Back in the 80s I use to do this. I also had a random guy take a polaroids of me in the park. Still have those photos.
• jefftk 5y ago
  I was somewhat worried about child protective services (CPS) or neighbors in letting my kids have some independence around the neighborhood, but we haven't had any problems with CPS and neighbors have been supportive. Examples of what we've let them do in their own in public and when: * Playing on the sidewalk near our house (4y) * Playing at the playground (5y, walkie talkie for backup) * Crossing small neighborhood streets (7y) * Walking to school (7y) * Going to the corner store (8y)
• int3rlop3r 5y ago
  Yes but you also gotta keep an eye on them if you choose to do so. This article assumes that all shopkeepers are good people. In my experience a lot of them happened to be pedos. Turns out it wasn't just something I experienced. A lot of my friends who grew up in different towns had the same experience. The whole purpose was to teach your child to interact appropriately in public but your child ends up being molested by these monsters, it's just so traumatic. Take care of your kids!
• samizdis 5y ago
  My experience of growing up in the UK in the late 1970s was heavily influenced by road safety drills, which we had in school from age six or even earlier - see [1] The Green Cross Code. We also had to pass a cycling proficiency test in order to ride our bikes to school, and had to pass swimming tests in order to get in the deep end of the local pool. Maybe there're aren't many formal safety campaigns any more? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Cross_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Cross_Code
• 6c737133 5y ago
  Reading a lot of these comment threads makes me extremely thankful that I’m not trying to navigate urban or suburban American life Hats off to anyone that can survive or thrive in such environments
• tamaharbor 4y ago
  In 1967 (when I was 8) my mom sent me on a Queens (NYC) bus to a neighboring commercial area to buy a pair of pants for school. As I recall the worst thing that happened was the pants were actually a little small.