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Friend of mine runs a local eatery. She told her 9-year old son to walk across the street - literally to the candy shop where she knows the owner, and told the

• simplehuman 4y ago
  Which city is this?
• skrebbel 4y ago
  Sounds absurd. What country are we talking?
  • mgkimsal 4y ago
    North Carolina, USA. I've heard some similar stories from friends back in Michigan as well, though not quite as severe. Re 'candy shop' - it was about 400 feet from the restaurant.
    • throwaway0a5e 4y ago
      And what kind of neighborhood is this? I take it's not a "daycare is a cash only business and cops know what real crime looks like" type place.
      • mgkimsal 4y ago
        Picturesque small town America. The sort of place with a general store still selling picture postcards of the downtown area. 15th-safest city in the state of around 10 million.
        • jkubicek 4y ago
          I think we need to acknowledge the reason this town is so safe: police are out there rounding up truant 9 year old kids.
          • ordu 4y ago
            This behavior of police seems to me as a lazy way to do their job. Even a way to not do their job. To make place safe for children they need to keep an eye on kids, not to to round them up.
            • dylan604 4y ago
              If you're rounding up pesky 9 year olds, you're not putting yourself in jeopardy of getting hurt chasing the more violent older criminals
• lancesells 4y ago
  There's an actual law for that? Or was this an empty sort of threat? I live in NYC and when my son was a 9-year old I would let him play out at the park and on the sidewalk. I had some anxiety about it at times but never thought there would be any legal trouble from letting him be a 9-year old.
  • everforward 4y ago
    Those kinds of laws are typically very vague. This is New York's, for example: > 1. He or she knowingly acts in a manner likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child less than seventeen years old or directs or authorizes such child to engage in an occupation involving a substantial risk of danger to his or her life or health; or Whether something is "likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child" is fairly subjective, since it's a balance of odds.
    • mindslight 4y ago
      The worst part is such laws as written would be straightforwardly applicable to the police and prosecutors that see fit to harass parents and children, but yet again they're above the law they purport to uphold.
      • hermitdev 4y ago
        > "substantial risk of danger" Such vague and objective measures shouldn't be in law. I started to drive around Montana's unposted "reasonable and prudent" speed limit came back and was later deemed unconstitutional because "reasonable and prudent" was too subjective for an individual to know when or not they are in compliance.
• ozarker 4y ago
  My friends and I rode our bikes in a several mile radius around my suburban home when I was ~10 in the mid 2000’s. I never see kids doing stuff like that anymore. Makes me really sad that they’re missing out on something that I still cherish the memory of today. But also maybe kids just enjoy different things nowadays
  • milkytron 4y ago
    I did the same thing, and we would go miles just to see if other friends were home and increase the size of our bike group before going to Dairy Queen or a local pizza shop and hanging out there. > But also maybe kids just enjoy different things nowadays I think this may be true, but also I think parents might find it easier to let their kid play video games in their room where they think they are safe compared to letting them roam around unsupervised. I had friends whose parents thought we were bad kids because we wouldn't know where would go that day, so when they asked "where are you going" and we said "idk, to the creek or pizza or wherever we find interesting" they would think we were up to no good since we didn't have a plan.
  • xkcd-sucks 4y ago
    Likewise - Similar age, time, and place. My parent were vocally concerned about the danger of cars, as it's a Northeast US town with narrow winding roads, but the only rule was to be back before dark or call them to pick me up. The funny thing is back then there were no sidewalks or shoulders at all, and kids biked everywhere until old and lucky enough to drive. Now, there are extensive sidewalks on all the main roads, but the only people using them are middle aged dog walkers.
  • gregoryl 4y ago
    Our instructed range limit was a couple of km's, but the practical limit was a calculated "when the streetlights come on, can I ride home fast enough that mom won't suspect". Sadly never crossed my mind to figure out what time the lights turned on, and expand my radius further.
• OliverGilan 4y ago
  As someone who grew up in the 2000s I still don’t get it. I grew up in a time when this was totally fine and normal. I cannot imagine being so restricted as a child.
  • webmobdev 4y ago
    America changed after Iraq war and 9/11 - the US administration found it useful to keep their population in fear to achieve their goals in foreign soils without criticism. Fresh immigrants to the US are trained by the media and system to fear the police and never confront them (the police can shoot you) and not deviate from American culture and rules (the system can snatch your kids away from you, the system can deny access to your resources using forfeiture laws). Policing and searching in school (now allowed because of the school shooting) psychologically teaches kids (especially those of immigrants) to fear and listen to the police / authority. Osama may be dead, but the erosion of rights that US has seen because of 9/11 did strike a big blow to US democracy and he partly achieved his goals.
    • joshmarlow 4y ago
      We've had moral panics around Dungeons and Dragons, Satanic cults, the war on drugs, etc going back longer. I could totally see the trend being accelerated by a lot of things. Sure, 9/11, is one possible trigger, but it could also be news sources getting better at optimizing for sensational takes and - more recently - the common person using the internet/social media to amplify troublesome anecdotes to the point where they seem like pervasive trends.
      • tanaros 4y ago
        > […] and - more recently - the common person using the internet/social media to amplify troublesome anecdotes to the point where they seem like pervasive trends Which, of course, describes this entire thread of discussion kicked off on one person’s anecdote…
        • joshmarlow 4y ago
• kelseyfrog 4y ago
  I don't get it either. I've had the police called three times on my 3rd grade son because he has been playing in our front yard. We live in a bland Californian suburban neighborhood built in the 1990s. He doesn't get outside much anymore. The plastic holds we put on the tree in the front go unused - bleached by the 258 beautiful sunny days we have each year. Instead he's learned to occupy his time on screens, but I hear people complain about that too.
  • gedy 4y ago
    I'm guessing you are in a tract home area with HOA? Some folks in these neighborhoods are such control freaks.
    • throw8383833jj 4y ago
      absolutely. HOAs bring out the worst in humanity.
      • kbelder 4y ago
        We were house-hunting. At one house, we were there just a couple minutes when an older man started knocking at the door. The realtor answered, and they guy started talking about how he was some muckety-muck in the local HOA, and we were parked partly off the driveway in the gravel, and had to move our car. We said we were just inspecting the house, and would be gone in ten minutes, but he just kept repeating that we were breaking the rules, and needed to move our car over. The realtor looked at us and said "ok, you're not interested in this place, right?" "Nope".
        • poolboys 4y ago
          I’ve witnessed a neighbor scream bloody murder at a pair of teenage boys for using the pool, because the age limit is 16 and these boys were only 13. Quite the offense. The same man will speed around every speed bump in the neighborhood, swerving into the parking spaces narrowly dodging parked cars and, on occasion, pedestrians and pets. Retired carpetbaggers with nothing to do and no check-and-balance to their behavior. Ever since that fateful day I’ve pondered just how to setup an HOA to counter such behavior.
• sudden_dystopia 4y ago
  I rode my bike all over town as a 8-12 year old in the 80’s and 90’s. My parents would send me to the grocery store and hardware store a mile or two away on my bike for random things they forgot during their main shopping trips. But it just goes back to the same question: has the world gotten more dangerous or are we just more aware of dangers that were always there?
  • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    That's only two options. "Awareness" is important, but so is "assessment". A third option may be that we now regularly over- or under-estimate the risks of things whose actual prevalence hasn't changed much, if at all.
  • plorkyeran 4y ago
    Neither: the world has gotten safer, and for whatever reason that has made us more concerned about the dangers that remain.
    • im3w1l 4y ago
      Devils advocate: The reason statistics is down is that people are taking less risk. If you were to live like before the risk would be the same or higher. Don't know if it's actually true, but it's worth examining.
      • causality0 4y ago
        I suspect the reduced number of malicious acts by adults has been more than balanced out by the increased rate of children killing themselves as we cripple their development more and more over time.
      • ajmurmann 4y ago
        AFAIK at least the stranger danger phenomenon was always blown up by the media. Sexual abuse of children for example typically happens by people who know the children. It's extremely rare for a stranger to do that.
• LegitShady 4y ago
  Sending your kid to a store for babysitting is not good parenting. Does the store owner have a license for child care? Did she discuss child care with them? Was she expecting her kid to sit at a candy store and do homework for an hour absent an agreement with the owner for child care? Seems like pawning her kids off on unwilling people who have no responsibility for them.
  • danachow 4y ago
    >> literally to the candy shop where she knows the owner, Read.
    • mgkimsal 4y ago
      It's a small town. The local business owners know each other fairly well.
    • LegitShady 4y ago
      Just because you know someone doesn't mean they've agreed to wbabysit your kids or have the business licenses to do so. Maybe think along with reading
      • danachow 4y ago
        From the guidelines: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
        • LegitShady 4y ago
          There's a difference between good faith and inventing things the person hasn't said. They said they knew the store owner. They did not say the store owner agreed to care for their child who was too young to be out on their own, legally. Good faith does not require me to make up facts that haven't been said to make their argument stronger. If they had a child care agreement with a store owner, that would be a whole different kettle of fish. But you and I both know that was never the case - they just sent their child who is too young to be out on their own to be someone else's problem, because that person owns a store, and 'they know them'.
• pessimizer 4y ago
  > I can't say 'nothing bad ever happened'. Obviously it did. But the pendulum has swung far too much the other way now. My counterintuitive mildly-offensive party conversation starter is that I think that the ideal number for childhood deaths by misadventure or accident is a balance between protecting children from stupid accidents and making children stupid and timid by restricting them from doing anything that could result in an accident. If kids are getting into too few fatal accidents, protections for children should be reduced until we get the numbers back up.
  • I_dev_outdoors 4y ago
    So, like an error budget that would exist in the SRE world?
  • Robin_Message 4y ago
    I make a similar argument for train travel: since the death rate is ~10% that of other forms of transport, if trains could be made cheaper by compromising safety to say 50% of other modes, that would be a net positive as cheaper trains would move people off other, still more dangerous forms of transport.
    • jonas21 4y ago
      And you could certainly make the same argument about airliners, which have a death rate <10% that of trains (and <1% that of cars). But if you try to make that argument on HN, a bunch of people will yell at you about how Boeing and the FAA are evil for putting cost savings over safety.
      • antisthenes 4y ago
        > And you could certainly make the same argument about airliners, which have a death rate <10% that of trains (and <1% that of cars). You can, but it's not a fair comparison. 99.9% of deaths of railroad transport is people killed while crossing rails - e.g. pedestrians. If you consider rail passengers only, it is far lower than airlines and cars, something on the scale of 2-3 people/year. Airplanes are cheating in the sense that there are no pedestrians in the air to collide with.
• dkersten 4y ago
  Wow when I was ten in the 90’s I cycled two hours on my own to my friends house...
  • kodah 4y ago
    Things changed in the 2000's I think. That's the first time I remember getting rounded up for walking around with my friends too late at night.
    • ethbr0 4y ago
      Ubiquitous cell phones. Things really were better before them. (Said as part of the last generation to experience that world)
      • Sebb767 4y ago
        I think you're actually onto something. Parents were (and are) far more lenient when they are not permanently aware of the potential danger their kids are in and are not used to having them reachable 24/7.
        • ethbr0 4y ago
          It's not just parents, but parents' expectations of other parents. When constantly having your kid reachable was impossible, no one judged parents for not doing it. Now? All the judging.
• jayd16 4y ago
  Cell phones mean busybodies can call from anywhere. Used to be they would have to stay in your business all the way home to make the call.
• donthellbanme 4y ago
• mirceal 4y ago
  Think about the children!!! /s
• metric10 4y ago
  In Colorado a law was recently passed to deal with this. According to [0]: "During its initial committee hearing, sponsoring state Rep. Mary Young, D-Greeley, said allegations of neglect or lack of supervision have been on the rise in Colorado, even as the number of substantiated cases are dropping. In 2019, there were 3,854 allegations of lack of supervision; 82%, or 3,169, were unfounded, she said." [0] https://www.denverpost.com/2022/03/31/colorado-reasonable-independence-for-children-neglect/ https://www.denverpost.com/2022/03/31/colorado-reasonable-in... edit: more context to quote
  • evo_9 4y ago
    Not to toot our Colorado horn too loudly here but I really feel like this state, my home state, is one of the few sane places left in the US (but seriously please don't move here haha).
    • zarzavat 4y ago
      It’s bittersweet, don’t you think? On the one hand, it’s good that such a law was supported at the highest levels. However, in truly sane places, there are no such laws because the police would never think to involve themselves in such a matter in the first place. Some social norms have clearly disintegrated, but now there is a law to patch it up. The reasons why the social norm disintegrated in the first place remain unresolved.
    • test6554 4y ago
      As a Texan, *compulsively scratches neck* "can we get some of that sanity"
  • indecisive_user 4y ago
    A few other states passed similar laws, including Oklahoma and Texas. Seems absurd that we need to pass laws that let children play outside unsupervised. https://reason.com/2021/04/29/reasonable-childhood-independence-texas-oklahoma-parenting/ https://reason.com/2021/04/29/reasonable-childhood-independe...
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• silisili 4y ago
  I think it's highly dependent on the area. Our kid bikes to and from school each way, a little over a mile away. She is always hanging out with other neighborhood kids, going to the pool or park, and nobody has called the cops yet thankfully.
• jacquesm 4y ago
  When I was 6 I walked all over Amsterdam, Ferdinand Bol straat in de Pijp all the way to Amsterdam West, Grieseldestraat where my childhood friend lived that had moved. Parents were a bit surprised but no real problem, strangers on the way there were also a bit surprised because we're talking about quite a distance and yet nobody called the police or panicked they just gave me directions and sent me on my way. I slept there overnight and walked back the next day...
  • seshagiric 4y ago
    Overnight is quite an adventure. My mom would tell us dinner's at 7:00pm and we would play pretty much anywhere in the neighborhood till that time. In summers, a bunch of lake side boulders some 2-3 miles from our house would become our starship. I remember 3 of kids getting struck in another lake on a boat and eventually figuring out how to safely row back to the shore. Such beautiful days are unfortunately gone.
    • jacquesm 4y ago
      Oh that triggers another memory: on a family holiday in the South of France lac Biscarosse+, I finally managed to get the hang of a borrowed wind surfing board and promptly sailed across the lake because I was too afraid to let go. Totally cramped and had to walk back dragging the board because I didn't understand how to tack yet. That was a very long day with lots of people worried because I could barely swim (pretty rare for a Dutch kid to be a bad swimmer). All is well that ends well... +highly recommended, beautiful area and very nice campings.
• whymauri 4y ago
  Not Just Bikes has an excellent video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98 At this point I'm decided that if I have children, I will not raise them in the U.S. Maybe a few cities are amenable to how I would like to raise children, like Cambridge, MA. But I would like for them to grow up in a healthy, independent environment.
• AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
  In 2nd grade, around 1990, I was allowed to walk home alone, just mapped it and it's about half a mile. My mother would have been at work and wouldn't get home for 2-3 hours after me. Very simple rules. Don't stop and talk to anyone who isn't a family member or a police officer. Once home, lock the door (I would literally wear a key around my neck) and don't answer it for anyone but the police or a family member. Never use the stove (probably a special requirement for me since I was already cooking at that age). The next year we moved and my walk home was a bit longer, my grandfather was home which was nice since I didn't come home to an empty house. I'm not sure if it was that year, or a year or two later, but I was allowed to basically bike wherever I wanted in town as long as I didn't go past some pre-defined boundaries. Just doing some math on that now it's roughly 1.5 miles in any direction and I mostly followed that restriction. The only rule was that I had to be home before the streetlights came on. I didn't have a cell phone. I didn't have any way to call the police if someone tried to abduct me. By all statistical crime measures children are safer today than they were when I was a kid. Today you're able to give your child a device which you can use to constantly GPS track them, they can call/text you or the police at any time. And, yet, somehow we've infantilized children and removed their agency and I don't know why but I really fear for the consequences of it.
  • DavidPeiffer 4y ago
    I used to ride my bike to my friends house, 1 mile away. This probably started in about 3rd grade. The compromise I reached with my mom was that I'd call my friend, we would leave at the same time, and ride to one of our houses together (so 1/2 the time riding alone). There was one time where a guy in a truck slowed down and was lagging behind us a bit. We turned down a side street and he kept following us. We were on sidewalks, so we just turned around quicker than he did and raced away. In retrospect that was legitimately scary. In middle school, I could ride wherever I wanted. I'd ride to garage sales, buy used puzzles, then spend hours completing them at home. To think that those opportunities wouldn't be available is sad. >And, yet, somehow we've infantilized children and removed their agency and I don't know why but I really fear for the consequences of it. In grad school I worked with a fellow from China. At the age of 3, he would go to the nearby market to buy some groceries for the family, cook food, and hang out at home alone all day. He was shocked at the attitudes in the US.
• PebblesHD 4y ago
  I cherish my childhood memories roaming around with my friends, either on our bikes or public transport all over the place. My favourite trip was as an 11 year old going from Sydney to Gosford (about 40 miles) with my best friend just because we could, and the trains were free that day. I don’t think we were even stopped once by a train guard or the police.
• readme 4y ago
  the worst thing that happened to me was when I was like 10 once I was walking home from school and a homeless guy asked me where he could take a shit, and I ran away second worse thing I was doing my paper route and almost mauled by a dog but a nearby neighbor convinced it to go away ah, another time when I was 17 I was almost abducted but that's what I get for walking down an industrial road at 2am on new years alone, I was saved by the fact I had a cell phone (seeing it caused the predator to retreat) I am extremely glad I don't have kids and super disappointed that the world has come to this. if we're really lucky humans will stop reproducing it won't hurt me at all
  • bcrosby95 4y ago
    Oh god, paper routes! I had one when I was 10-11. It was great money for that age - about $200 per month, in the early 90s. My papers were dropped off really early, and I had to be there for them - alone - around 4am. And my route was about half a mile away from my house. I got chased by a dog a couple times. One time it bit and punctured my tire. I flipped my bike with all the papers in it a couple of times. Some older kids dropped by once - I was afraid they were gonna fuck with me, but instead they just asked me to scream some stuff. And of course collecting. I got chased off by a couple dogs then too. Come to think of it, maybe I should be more afraid of dogs than people. Eventually I got a route for the apartments that were across the street from my house. That was a much nicer experience. More money, less distance, less area to cover, and no dogs.
    • ajmurmann 4y ago
      Hah, I was terrified of all dogs on a route where I distributed flyers and got bitten by one dog. However, I stopped doing my route because of a magpie. Someone had tamed it enough that it had lost all fear of humans. It would try to attack my head and fly to mailboxes and try to pull the flyers out. The stupid bird would follow me along the entire route. At some point it got stuck in the huge, curly hair of a girl who lived nextdoor. That's all so ridiculous in hindsight. Feels like a different life
    • readme 4y ago
      dude puncturing a tire that's some serious bite force
• dillondoyle 4y ago
  Netflix recently got rights to Old Enough, about very young kids' trips to the store etc. It's cute and wholesome. One counter point is cities have started adding 'danger' back into playgrounds (not actually that dangerous, more like risk in the mind of the child). So hopefully we'll see some progress. Kids are pretty capable and most people are pretty supportive/helpful.
  • asojfdowgh 4y ago
    counter counter point, the kids in Old Enough are escorted by an entire camera crew
    • dillondoyle 4y ago
      For sure. It's kind of funny how the kids are like oblivious or just don't care. Very cute when they get distracted, the oh I forgot the curry!