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This is a serious worry of mine. I often let my elementary kids walk home from school by themselves because we live close enough and they have good sense aroun
by kentm 4y ago
This is a serious worry of mine. I often let my elementary kids walk home from school by themselves because we live close enough and they have good sense around what little traffic there is. But I always worry that someone will throw a fit about it. I worry about that a LOT more than kidnappers.
- ajford 4y agoSame. I let my kids walk about 0.5mi to the park and I'm more afraid of some nosey busy-body calling CPS on them than I am about traffic or kidnappers. When I was growing up in the 90s, I'd routinely bike many miles away from home and disappear for hours before I came home. Nowadays letting your kids do that is liable to get CPS called on you. How the heck did we end up here?!
- midoridensha 4y ago>How the heck did we end up here?! In my view, America as a society became paranoid after 9/11. What you're seeing is a symptom of this. It isn't like this in other countries: kids walk around by themselves all the time.
- orwin 4y agoI think it's the suburbs effect. I've been in one of the most rural county of West Virginia, i saw kids outside each time i left the "house".
- midoridensha 4y agoIf it's the suburbs effect, then it's been very slow to come to this point, because America has had subdivisions since the 1950s. Back in the 80s and 90s, what we're reading about here never happened.
- TheHappyOddish 4y agoAlso, most other western countries have been suburbanised just as long and don't have this madness.
- BeefWellington 4y ago> In my view, America as a society became paranoid after 9/11. Oh, it was on this track well before 9/11. Satanic Panic and Stranger Danger as concepts were there long before terrorist attacks on American soil, for a lot longer duration, and were largely explicitly about the dangers to children. I don't know how accurate it is, but an FBI investigator by the name of Ken Lanning links Satanic Panic to the development of X-Rays and the discovery by doctors of evidence of rampant child abuse.[1] The idea being that people just couldn't accept that kids were being abused at such high rates at home, therefore there must be this secretive "other" harming the children. People have been primed by the media to be this paranoid for a long time, because it gets attention. [1]: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/satanic-panic https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/satanic-panic