7 ms·

A large component here is simply risk tolerance. Society's risk tolerance, especially for kids, has fallen pretty dramatically. This is probably related to ju

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.
  - rackjack 5y ago
    It's funny because you'd think this watchfulness + technology like Nextdoor would let kids be more independent, e.g. if anybody tried to snatch your kid they'd be reported by half a dozen busybodies watching through their windows.
    - greedo 5y ago
      This assumes that most users of Nextdoor or have video cameras dotting their house are interested in protecting kids. Nextdoor is a cesspool of racism, and everyone I know who has "security" cameras is afraid of people stealing their stuff. Despite crime in our area being at an all time low and property theft very uncommon.
      - bombcar 5y ago
        I suspect more has been spent on anti-theft for houses than total thefts. Places where theft really IS common don’t put up cameras (they’d get stolen), they put up bars.
  - earthboundkid 5y ago
    Nextdoor is very revealing. I had no idea how racist my neighbors were until I read the Nextdoor post about a suspicious cherrypicker truck driver in the neighborhood, who suspiciously claimed to work for the power company.
    - chomp 5y ago
      Nextdoor post in my neighborhood complained about a "suspicious car" that "scouts the area" around 11pm at night. Whipped enough people into a frenzy to where someone decided to block the car and confront the driver one night. They wound up being a neighbor who gets off late every night, driving straight to their house. The driver made a post chastising the community for targeting them, but it got removed because it was too "political".
- robonerd 5y ago
  I think it has much less to do with any particular murder, and is actually related to the rise of cable news that needed to find some way to fill an entire day, every day of the week, with national news. There just isn't that much national news, not the sort that keeps people tuning in. So instead they started taking local news stories that had some sensational elements and presenting them as national news stories. Stories about serial killers, kids getting hurt, etc.
  - xeromal 5y ago
    I think their point is that Adam Walsh's murder kickstarted the fear mongering on the news you're talking about. It might be the columbine to school shooters. Everything else is derived from it.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      I’ve seen three names so far in response to “when it started” and they’re all different.
  - AniseAbyss 5y ago
- newaccount2021 5y ago
  "stranger danger" isn't just a delusion of over-protective parents...my own daughter has told me numerous times over the years of being followed and approached by males she did not know (a car following her slowly, a middle-aged man "asking her out" repeatedly in a park, etc) we didn't respond to these instances by locking her up, but I'm not going to dismiss parents who are protective
  - AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
    I don't doubt for a moment that your daughter encountered creeps in public spaces. I'm just not sure that the solution that was impressed upon my generation (I was born at the tail-end of the 80s) really helped. The default behavior shifted from "View some people with suspicion" to "View everyone you are likely to encounter as a potential serial rapist-pedophile-murderer." And don't think just avoiding contact is enough, because you could just be walking down an empty street by yourself when Mr. Serial Killer pulls up beside you in his car, jumps out, pulls you into the vehicle, and we won't hear from you again until your severed head is found in a well. Could it happen? Sure. Is it likely to happen? Probably not. Is it worth keeping your children unable to leave the house without an escort until they're 18?
- yu-carm-kror 5y ago
  We know for a fact that pedophiles, kidnappers, and murders exist. I think we just always thought we could sniff them out by knowing our community. That was probably a false sense of security all along. Now we mostly live in communities too plentiful to know everyone so our fear is unchecked.
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    I grew up in a small community, and while a few people were usually thought of as not to be trusted, they didn't turn out to be the dangerous ones. So I agree that there is a false sense of security in small communities. At the same time, I'm sure that overall, like shark attacks, we very much overestimate the danger.
    - greedo 5y ago
      Read about the BTK serial killer. Dude was a "pillar" of his community. Look at all the priests the Catholic Church continually protects when they commit abuse. Besides, most abuse (like most murders) is committed by someone the victim knew.
- Aloha 5y ago
  I mean - I grew up in the 90's and had this level of freedom.
jimmyjazz14 5y ago
Its not just personal risk tolerance that plays into it either. I would let my kids largely run free but I know I would probably have to deal with CPS if I did so.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  This seems like a bit of an urban myth? Or at least hugely overblown. How often does this really happen?
  - iso1631 5y ago
    437,283 American children were removed from their parents last year. Meanwhile fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year between 2010–2017 Now of course CPS handle actual cases of child neglect in that 430k, but it certainly seems that the most likely people to take a child are either 1) The other parent 2) CPS 3) Death from Road traffic, Firearms, Suffocation/Drowning, Drug overdoses And way down the list is abduction
  - monocasa 5y ago
    It was a several months long ordeal when a neighbor reported me and my siblings playing "unsupervised" in our own front lawn when I was a kid. Looking back on it, the caseworker was very obviously trying to seperate us from our parents. The kicker: I was old enough to be a babysitter at the time.
jancsika 5y ago
> A large component here is simply risk tolerance. Cheap, hand-held TVs delivering custom-tailored traumatic word-salad clickbait videos to kids would have created so much paranoia among suburban moms in the 80s they would have forgotten to be terrified about crack/cocaine.
flakiness 5y ago
It's also about some collective trust/fantasy, in addition to the tolerance. For example, I don't think Tokyo is particularly safer than a (walkable) US city. But since people there collectively believe Japan is a safe country and are proud of it, they let their child go out. But I agree that the risk tolerance points too. I have talked to a handful of Japanese parents and none of them let their small kids go out without the supervision anymore. So the lower risk tolerance isn't a US-only problem. I guess it's a symptom of modernized society in general (although would love to be proven wrong.)
- jerkstate 5y ago
  > For example, I don't think Tokyo is particularly safer than a (walkable) US city on what do you base this opinion? I looked up a couple of crime stats sites and the assault and murder rates per capita in the US are like, 10x higher in the US than in Japan.
  - seabird 5y ago
    Average assault and murder rates are massively inflated by a handful of exceptional cities. St. Louis (usually highest murder rate in the US or close to it) is pushing 70 murders per 100k. That is roughly double the rate of Cleveland (rank 5). Cleveland has a murder rate over 10 times higher than a city of around ~40k people that I live fairly close to. However, another city (population ~45k) that is about a 20 minute drive away from the one I'm near has a murder rate over 15 times higher than the city I live near. Crime is experienced incredibly unevenly in the US. I won't say much more past that because it's where the politics starts to kick in and I don't think that will add anything to the conversation.
    - jerkstate 5y ago
      based on rough calculation, your 40k city has a murder rate of 3.5 per 100,000; Tokyo has a murder rate of 0.26 per 100,000. In Miyazaki prefecture, the most violent in Japan according to [1], the murder rate is 0.9 per 100,000 [1] https://nbakki.hatenablog.com/entry/Murder_Rate_Number_of_Actual_Victims_by_Prefecture_in_Japan_2018 https://nbakki.hatenablog.com/entry/Murder_Rate_Number_of_Ac...
lostmsu 5y ago
That makes sense. What does not is that there's no data available to make an informed decision.
gkop 5y ago
+1 for the playground merry-go-round (a small manual carousel) as a “litmus test” here. It’s exactly the right level of danger that kids should encounter.
ars 5y ago
It's explained with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory - people have fewer kids now, and are more careful with each.

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.
- rackjack 5y ago
  It's funny because you'd think this watchfulness + technology like Nextdoor would let kids be more independent, e.g. if anybody tried to snatch your kid they'd be reported by half a dozen busybodies watching through their windows.
  - greedo 5y ago
    This assumes that most users of Nextdoor or have video cameras dotting their house are interested in protecting kids. Nextdoor is a cesspool of racism, and everyone I know who has "security" cameras is afraid of people stealing their stuff. Despite crime in our area being at an all time low and property theft very uncommon.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      I suspect more has been spent on anti-theft for houses than total thefts. Places where theft really IS common don’t put up cameras (they’d get stolen), they put up bars.
- earthboundkid 5y ago
  Nextdoor is very revealing. I had no idea how racist my neighbors were until I read the Nextdoor post about a suspicious cherrypicker truck driver in the neighborhood, who suspiciously claimed to work for the power company.
  - chomp 5y ago
    Nextdoor post in my neighborhood complained about a "suspicious car" that "scouts the area" around 11pm at night. Whipped enough people into a frenzy to where someone decided to block the car and confront the driver one night. They wound up being a neighbor who gets off late every night, driving straight to their house. The driver made a post chastising the community for targeting them, but it got removed because it was too "political".
robonerd 5y ago
I think it has much less to do with any particular murder, and is actually related to the rise of cable news that needed to find some way to fill an entire day, every day of the week, with national news. There just isn't that much national news, not the sort that keeps people tuning in. So instead they started taking local news stories that had some sensational elements and presenting them as national news stories. Stories about serial killers, kids getting hurt, etc.
- xeromal 5y ago
  I think their point is that Adam Walsh's murder kickstarted the fear mongering on the news you're talking about. It might be the columbine to school shooters. Everything else is derived from it.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    I’ve seen three names so far in response to “when it started” and they’re all different.
- AniseAbyss 5y ago
newaccount2021 5y ago
"stranger danger" isn't just a delusion of over-protective parents...my own daughter has told me numerous times over the years of being followed and approached by males she did not know (a car following her slowly, a middle-aged man "asking her out" repeatedly in a park, etc) we didn't respond to these instances by locking her up, but I'm not going to dismiss parents who are protective
- AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
  I don't doubt for a moment that your daughter encountered creeps in public spaces. I'm just not sure that the solution that was impressed upon my generation (I was born at the tail-end of the 80s) really helped. The default behavior shifted from "View some people with suspicion" to "View everyone you are likely to encounter as a potential serial rapist-pedophile-murderer." And don't think just avoiding contact is enough, because you could just be walking down an empty street by yourself when Mr. Serial Killer pulls up beside you in his car, jumps out, pulls you into the vehicle, and we won't hear from you again until your severed head is found in a well. Could it happen? Sure. Is it likely to happen? Probably not. Is it worth keeping your children unable to leave the house without an escort until they're 18?
yu-carm-kror 5y ago
We know for a fact that pedophiles, kidnappers, and murders exist. I think we just always thought we could sniff them out by knowing our community. That was probably a false sense of security all along. Now we mostly live in communities too plentiful to know everyone so our fear is unchecked.
- jjeaff 5y ago
  I grew up in a small community, and while a few people were usually thought of as not to be trusted, they didn't turn out to be the dangerous ones. So I agree that there is a false sense of security in small communities. At the same time, I'm sure that overall, like shark attacks, we very much overestimate the danger.
  - greedo 5y ago
    Read about the BTK serial killer. Dude was a "pillar" of his community. Look at all the priests the Catholic Church continually protects when they commit abuse. Besides, most abuse (like most murders) is committed by someone the victim knew.
Aloha 5y ago
I mean - I grew up in the 90's and had this level of freedom.

jimmyjazz14 5y ago

Its not just personal risk tolerance that plays into it either. I would let my kids largely run free but I know I would probably have to deal with CPS if I did so.

elliekelly 5y ago
This seems like a bit of an urban myth? Or at least hugely overblown. How often does this really happen?
- iso1631 5y ago
  437,283 American children were removed from their parents last year. Meanwhile fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year between 2010–2017 Now of course CPS handle actual cases of child neglect in that 430k, but it certainly seems that the most likely people to take a child are either 1) The other parent 2) CPS 3) Death from Road traffic, Firearms, Suffocation/Drowning, Drug overdoses And way down the list is abduction
- monocasa 5y ago
  It was a several months long ordeal when a neighbor reported me and my siblings playing "unsupervised" in our own front lawn when I was a kid. Looking back on it, the caseworker was very obviously trying to seperate us from our parents. The kicker: I was old enough to be a babysitter at the time.

jancsika 5y ago

> A large component here is simply risk tolerance. Cheap, hand-held TVs delivering custom-tailored traumatic word-salad clickbait videos to kids would have created so much paranoia among suburban moms in the 80s they would have forgotten to be terrified about crack/cocaine.

flakiness 5y ago

It's also about some collective trust/fantasy, in addition to the tolerance. For example, I don't think Tokyo is particularly safer than a (walkable) US city. But since people there collectively believe Japan is a safe country and are proud of it, they let their child go out. But I agree that the risk tolerance points too. I have talked to a handful of Japanese parents and none of them let their small kids go out without the supervision anymore. So the lower risk tolerance isn't a US-only problem. I guess it's a symptom of modernized society in general (although would love to be proven wrong.)

jerkstate 5y ago
> For example, I don't think Tokyo is particularly safer than a (walkable) US city on what do you base this opinion? I looked up a couple of crime stats sites and the assault and murder rates per capita in the US are like, 10x higher in the US than in Japan.
- seabird 5y ago
  Average assault and murder rates are massively inflated by a handful of exceptional cities. St. Louis (usually highest murder rate in the US or close to it) is pushing 70 murders per 100k. That is roughly double the rate of Cleveland (rank 5). Cleveland has a murder rate over 10 times higher than a city of around ~40k people that I live fairly close to. However, another city (population ~45k) that is about a 20 minute drive away from the one I'm near has a murder rate over 15 times higher than the city I live near. Crime is experienced incredibly unevenly in the US. I won't say much more past that because it's where the politics starts to kick in and I don't think that will add anything to the conversation.
  - jerkstate 5y ago
    based on rough calculation, your 40k city has a murder rate of 3.5 per 100,000; Tokyo has a murder rate of 0.26 per 100,000. In Miyazaki prefecture, the most violent in Japan according to [1], the murder rate is 0.9 per 100,000 [1] https://nbakki.hatenablog.com/entry/Murder_Rate_Number_of_Actual_Victims_by_Prefecture_in_Japan_2018 https://nbakki.hatenablog.com/entry/Murder_Rate_Number_of_Ac...

lostmsu 5y ago

That makes sense. What does not is that there's no data available to make an informed decision.

gkop 5y ago

+1 for the playground merry-go-round (a small manual carousel) as a “litmus test” here. It’s exactly the right level of danger that kids should encounter.

ars 5y ago

It's explained with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory - people have fewer kids now, and are more careful with each.