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Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

747 points by jseliger 4y ago

ryanobjc 4y ago
"kids these days aren't independent" Oh look its literally illegal to be independent. If you have kids this is both a relief and the source of the problem isn't exactly a shock.
- neogodless 4y ago
  Independence is not binary. Would you agree that the goal over the period from birth to adulthood should be one marked by a gradual increase in independence? Would you agree that parents should have say in the pace of that increase?
- hosh 4y ago
  There's been an mental health epedemic since about 2013, partially attributed to adolscents not having sufficient opportunities to be independent: https://time.com/6255448/teen-girls-mental-health-epidemic-causes/ https://time.com/6255448/teen-girls-mental-health-epidemic-c...
- itronitron 4y ago
  Instead of defunding the police we should just turn half the police force into traffic cops. Take away their squad cars, give them bicycles, and just have them run speed traps in every neighborhood.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    No need for even speed traps. I think anywhere with a police force should be required to also set up and fund a parallel "Helper Force" of at least equal manpower, whose job is to assist people in trouble rather than shoot or arrest them. Whenever there is a situation where a deadly violent response is not needed, the Helper Force could be deployed instead of the police.
s1artibartfast 4y ago
This seems like a reasonable proposal to protect parents against subjective interpretation of the law. Responsible parents should be able to gauge the capabilities of their children and give them Independence based on that was capabilities opposed to fear of third-party criminalization
- hosh 4y ago
  The Let Grow organization is doing more than just protecting parents. It's advocating for a parenting style that leads to more resilience in the next generation that will be voting, making and enforcing laws, and directing the future of this nation and humanity in general.
- croutonwagon 4y ago
  The problem is that there are busy bodies that will involve third parties, possibly with good intentions, but still. For example > But people have very different ideas of what “proper supervision” entails (as you know if you have, say, a spouse). One parent lets their kids play outside at age 6, another not till 12. My kids play outside on their own now. At 3 and 6. My 6 year old has been doing so since about 3. Once she could follow basic rules (ie: dont go there). At their current age we let them ride bikes in the street even, with the older in charge and both having to get well off the road the minute they see cars. we watch them from the window but the point is to avoid intervening or helicoptering and allowing them to explore and be independent. In fact we have to limit some media/shows that portray the parents as toys (ie: Bluey) because we notice it tends to stunt their independence and skews their overall expectations of a parent child relationship.
  - em-bee 4y ago
    some media/shows that portray the parents as toys (ie: Bluey) because we notice it tends to stunt their independence and skews their overall expectations of a parent child relationship. could you elaborate on that please? bluey seems to promote a healthy parent-child relationship (at least in the few episodes that i saw). how does it stunt their independence and skew their expectations? are you suggesting that showing parents that are always available gives the wrong idea to children about their parents? how would that play out?
kyoob 4y ago
I think it's smart to frame this as an anti-poverty issue. People often imagine "suburban" families falling victim to overreaching child neglect laws and enforcement. In fact poor children are separated from their families for reasons of child welfare far more often than non-poor kids. (Of course, this ends up affecting black families disproportionately.) Families are being broken up in the US for the crime of being poor. Editing to add a link to a study detailing "Drivers of Inequalities among Families Involved with Child Welfare Services: A General Overview" for folks who find the Bar Association's article to be limited in scope. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/childrens-rights/articles/2022/fall2022-racial-discrimination-in-child-welfare-is-a-human-rights-violation/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/chi... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9265799/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9265799/
- ZainRiz 4y ago
  > Over 50 percent of Black children in the U.S. will experience a child welfare investigation before their eighteenth birthday (nearly double the rate of white children). Nearly 10 percent of Black children will be removed from their parents and placed into foster care (double the rate of white children) While the numbers above sound horrendous (and they really are!) I wish they normalized the data to only consider poor households. That would give a much better picture of how much of the existing system is biased against a given race vs being biased against poor people in general.
  - joe_the_user 4y ago
    Your quote isn't from the article but a link in a post by kyoob (currently below this) that you aren't even replying to (were you so eager to beat hn's post throttling you put this on the main thread?). Kyoob's post already acknowledges this is also a poverty issue so your complaint seems a bit off the topic at hand.
    - Robotbeat 4y ago
      It doesn’t sound like complaining. I think it could be a good faith point (and not someone just trying to find a way to downplay modern racism), although kyoob acknowledged it. Obvious confounding factors should also be controlled for (or at least controlled in a side note).
foolswisdom 4y ago
I shudder every time I see a thread related to this topic (child protective services making insane decisions with no oversight, because the law is vague enough to let them do so).
- RajT88 4y ago
  As I understand it, not only is the law vague, but also CPS is underfunded. Which of course, you need funding for program oversight.
  - homonculus1 4y ago
    [dead]
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    Well, no surprise it's underfunded if it has to investigate literally every third kid (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34916782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34916782) - if they tightened up the criteria so that CPS would ignore at least half of this unreasonable number of cases, then they might have enough funding; they seem to be doing so much work that shouldn't be done at all.
    - Tostino 4y ago
      I think we should vocalize the concept of "negative work" more often. That being work with which society as a whole would be better off if left undone.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  I feel that with the burgeoning politicization of this function (consider their role in anti-transgender laws) things can go in a very dark direction very fast.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  It's not just the vagueness of the law, it's a system and culture in which pursuing a bullshit claim draws no punishment, but ignoring a claim that a reasonable person would judge to be bullshit and turning out to be wrong may ruin your life.
jollyllama 4y ago
There's some other fundamental problem if cops and CPS were pulling these stunts anyway. Maybe some better mechanism for recourse against overreach is needed?
- JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  Such as laws that protect parents?
  - lmm 4y ago
    The problem happens further up the funnel than the actual law. The usual pattern is something like: parent gets reported by local busybody, gets investigated and/or arrested, everything is dismissed after a couple of weeks but in the meantime their life has been massively disrupted. Changing the law doesn't necessarily fix that because what the parent was doing was never illegal in the first place.
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      Ideally, the parent should at least be able to sue the busybody for damages in this case. If no evidence of wrongdoing is found, the busybody should be identified so the parent knows who to take legal action against.
      - ichugwindex 4y ago
        Wouldn't that create a bad incentive to not report crime then? Seems like the right response is to have the police/CPS act properly than to try and hold Karen's accountable.
        ryandrake 4y ago
        It would definitely disincentivize false reporting, and make people think twice if they are not sure. Which would be good incentives. We have far too many people calling the police casually for non-emergency reasons and as a bad faith way to bring violence to someone they don't like, like SWATing. Every month another E-911 dispatch center complains they're overloaded. There's a subset of Americans who simply can't mind their own business and feel they have to go out and bully people, and the lack of accountability and consequences just encourages them. Yes, there may be a handful of real crimes that go unreported, but I'm kind of neutral on that. It's not the public's job to tattle on each other by triggering a potentially deadly police response. Having strong accountability for the reporter would mean only the most serious, obvious, violent crimes get reported.
wonderwonder 4y ago
I remember reading a news story about a poor single mom who was renting a room in an extended stay and working in a pizzarea across the street from it. She left her 9? year old alone in the room so she could work. Cops show up and take her kid and arrest her for child endangerment. They made it illegal to be a poor single working mom.
- syrrim 4y ago
  They made it illegal to be a single mom and not provide adequate childcare. Many families have both parents working, so the situation of needing to find someone to look after your child is not unique to single parents. That said, this is one of the reasons raising children on your own is more difficult.
  - swatcoder 4y ago
    There‘s a lot unsaid in any gossiped anecdote like this, but there’s not a single fact in the story as given that suggests inadequate child care. Maybe there were other reasons that justify the police action, but we weren’t given any here.
  - hn_version_0023 4y ago
    What is inadequate about leaving a 9yro child at home in her own home, alone?
  - strken 4y ago
    As a 9 year old (admittedly not in the US), when there was a day without school but my parents still had to work, I was allowed to stay home on my own and ride my bicycle to a town 5km away to buy lunch. My 7 year old brother wasn't allowed to stay home, but came on similar trips with me. The adequate childcare for a responsible 9 year old might be "tell them to call 911 if there's a serious emergency, or text you if anything comes up".
    - Tostino 4y ago
      This is how I grew up in the US (central FL) in the 90's. I was 6-7 when I was riding my bike down to the corner store ~0.5mi away, and ~10 I was staying home and watching my sisters when necessary. I was perfectly capable of cooking and looking after things. I just don't get this hysteria that seems to have gripped so many people. We are living in one of the safest times to be alive.
kwhitefoot 4y ago
The US seems to be the only country that has this problem. Children here (Norway) walk to school on their own at the age of five or six, some of them take buses. "Ashley Smith, a foster dad, testified about being investigated for neglect because one afternoon his daughter, 8, was doing her homework on the front lawn. A passerby reported an “unsupervised” child (not knowing Ashley was actually inside). The upshot: “We went through a period of eight weeks of not knowing if we would continue being able to keep our children,” said Ashley." That's just astonishing!
- pilarphosol 4y ago
  The US is a low trust society, because of all the poverty. You really notice the difference if you travel to Europe. It turns out that having half of the population be economically unsafe makes everyone and everything unsafe.
  - popcalc 4y ago
    Hungary is extremely low trust and extremely poor, yet no one fears public transit nor letting their kids wander about.
    - em-bee 4y ago
      that's not a contradiction. if society in hungary is low trust (which i doubt btw, unless something changed since i was there last more than a decade ago) then this low trust does not extend to the safety of their children. letting kids wander about shows high trust in their kids not getting into danger. in the US people don't even trust that.
      - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
        So let me get this straight, trust is measured on multiple axis except for the axis of children which sets the maximum?
        4y ago
vuln 4y ago
This law will not give "poor kids more independence", it absolves the parent or guardian of legal responsibility for their children being unsupervised. I can't be the only one that's seen the hundreds if not THOUSANDS of children (under 18) fighting, causing mayhem, attacking innocent people, and property destruction videos that circulate all over the internet. Will this help edge cases? The mom working at the pizza shop across the parking lot of a hotel where her child is staying? Sure.
- 1123581321 4y ago
  Everything you listed is already a crime or will swiftly involve child services for due to obvious behavior problems in the children. These laws are entirely about protecting responsible parents who want to let their children learn to peacefully navigate the outdoors in a city.
- em-bee 4y ago
  that's a different problem. or are you seriously suggesting that even teenagers not be allowed to be unsupervised until they are 18? that's ridiculous.
- advisedwang 4y ago
  Parent's aren't being investigated for negligance because of 15-18 year olds. This is about 8 year olds. They're not the ones being reckless. Also perhaps if young kids get a bit more freedom, they'd make more reasonable decisions when they're older? This could even help the "mayhem" you're worried about.
- lolinder 4y ago
  You haven't read the text of any of the bills, have you? > A CHILD IS NOT NEGLECTED WHEN ALLOWED TO PARTICIPATE IN INDEPENDENT ACTIVITIES THAT A REASONABLE AND PRUDENT PARENT, GUARDIAN, OR LEGAL CUSTODIAN WOULD CONSIDER SAFE GIVEN THE CHILD'S MATURITY, CONDITION, AND ABILITIES Which part of this language triggers your apocalyptic fears? https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb22-1090 https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb22-1090
  - 4y ago
raydiatian 4y ago
Part of the issue is that roads and American autophilia make the world unsafe and inaccessible without transportation. Conspiracy theorists want to say that the “push for 15 minute spheres is the state trying to control us” but that is just so braindead it hurts to look at.
yieldcrv 4y ago
In my own lobbying efforts I’ve found it very easy to get bipartisan support and things passed It comes down to psychology and understanding people A decade ago I would have thought getting any legislative body’s attention would be difficult, but all the special interests moved to far extremes of their parties for … reasons … to pursue things that will never get passed. They just left the center unguarded and forgot how to communicate, it seems. I understand this phenomenon is a reflection of broader society, just am surprised that it has affected “shadow organizations” or professional lobbying groups that have navigated so many political environments over time. Anyway, seize opportunity when you see it. It is kind of addicting to alter reality in places you cant even register to vote in.
Connor_Creegan 4y ago
This is neat and all, but the problem is very much downstream of the children-out-of-wedlock problem, which is downstream of so-called "sexual liberation" (a misuse of both the term "sexual" and the term "liberation"), which is downstream of an inconsistent sexual education, which is downstream of an inconsistent ethics of sex, which is downstream of the Fall (save for a few unmentioned steps).
- acuozzo 4y ago
  > but the problem is very much downstream of the children-out-of-wedlock problem If this were the case then there would be similar issues with children of single parents in e.g. European countries, no?
  - Connor_Creegan 4y ago
    https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/12/u-s-children-more-likely-than-children-in-other-countries-to-live-with-just-one-parent/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/12/u-s-childre... The problem is very-much downstream, not wholly-determined. Obviously this issue criss-crosses with other issues, such as race, infrastructure, compulsory education, et cetera. But I would rank doctrine of sex as the brightest star in this constellation. It isn't a coincidence that the UK is second behind us. Its founding event was the invention of divorce.
    - mvc 4y ago
      Yeah, everything was so much better when women just had to put up with their abusive husbands
      - Connor_Creegan 4y ago
        Not sure what constitutes "abuse" in your book, since it is an extremely vague charge and men and women tend to exercise their malevolence in ways befitting their own aptitudes (men typically with more brawn, women typically with more subtlety). But in any case, I hate to break it to you but divorce was not created for the purpose of "womens' liberation", it was created to justify serial monogamy.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
America just seems like the weirdest fucking place. You're all going on about being the only truly free country in the world, but you can be jailed for letting your child play in your garden. What the fuck, guys?
- acuozzo 4y ago
  America is home to over 21M individuals with a net worth of $1M or more. For them, America is free; perhaps more free than <insert EU country here>. The remaining 310M exist to create freedom for the 21M. They are pacified with the propaganda of class: the "middle class"; the "working class"; the poor; the prisoners. Each person below the peak of the pyramid is taught from a young age to fear becoming part of the level below. Each person below the peak of the pyramid is taught from a young age that every level is rigged with a series of doors which lead directly to the basement in which they will find the good old 13thAmendmentLoophole™. Additionally, each person below the peak of the pyramid is taught from a young age that there exist a few hidden doors on each level which lead to a secret route that goes directly to the top. These doors were initially installed by Horatio Alger Jr, but have been maintained by countless persons since. Rumors exist that John Steinbeck scrawled expletives on a few. Since 1971 or so the the pyramid has evolved into an incredibly-slippery cone. It keeps growing and growing, but getting thinner and more slippery as time goes on. Rumors exist that it is stretching itself to Mars, but I imagine it will likely fall short of that since the cone is made from plastic.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Our relationship to actual, in-practice freedom has always been kind of... weird, considering how obsessed with freedom we seem to be. We seem more concerned with high-level theoretical freedom than with actual liberty we experience in the day-to-day, which is indeed sub-par compared to many of our peer states. And we didn't credibly try to even extend that much freedom to ~every US adult until the last quarter or 30% of our country's existence.
- RandomTisk 4y ago
  America is an extremely peaceful place for many millions of families. There are thousands of smaller communities throughout the vast country where crime is background noise and kids can and do run around outside if they want, even today. Some places are running untested, never before seen dev code in production trying to improve the justice system, and they virtually always make things much worse, like California is doing and certain metros around the country.
deleted 4y ago
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tristor 4y ago
I recently moved from a very low average income city to a very high average income city. In my former city it was nearly unheard of for children to unsupervised, despite most people having large families, because there was a very real concern about kidnapping/human trafficking and other issues (and this concern wasn't unfounded, this city made national news for masked men in a van grabbing multiple children while their parents were holding their hands in a Walmart parking lot and bailing). In my new city, I see 7-8 year old kids outdoors playing without any significant supervision in the neighborhood and allowed to walk to school on their own or walk/scooter to a friends house. It's a stark difference. There are complex issues here, and a lot of nuance, but on its face this made a statistical truth really obvious to me, which is that socioeconomic status nearly directly correlates to physical safety and crime rates. The simple truth is that the high average income city is just a much much much safer place for anyone to exist in, to walk in, and this includes children. I feel like every time this issue gets discussed, there's always people ignoring the socioeconomic factor, and worse, pointing it out is taken as a blanket attack on poor people.
- standardUser 4y ago
  This is interesting to me because growing up poor and with a single parent, I was allowed to run wild at a very young age. There was a whole crew of young kids in our apartment complex that would hang out and wander around unsupervised during daylight hours. Our parents were busy working and they probably needed some occasional time alone in those tiny apartments (my mother and I shared a 1 bedroom). As for "high income cities" it doesn't get much higher income than Manhattan and I would be shocked if I saw some under-10 kids wandering around here on their lonesome!
- q1w2 4y ago
  It's not socio-economics - it's Crime. They are correlated, but where they are not, children walk to school despite the poor neighborhood. When I grew up in India, we were dirt poor and we literally hitchhiked to and from school each day from the age of maybe 7. Students would get out of school, walk to the nearest busy intersection, and ask people to let us ride on the back of their motorbikes to get home. No helmets, no traffic lights, no sidewalks, no cell phones. This wasn't in some rural area - this was in central Mumbai decades ago where people were poorer than the poorest US neighborhoods. ...yet the danger of being kidnapped or assaulted was effectively zero. It was far more common to be attacked by a stray dog than by any of the millions of dirt poor people in the city. One factor (my guess - I observe anecdotally) is the high rate of drug use in the US. Drug use among the poor in India was extremely uncommon. However in the US (at least these days), it seems to be common among most people arrested (just my observation).
geoelectric 4y ago
IMO, three things need to happen to make this go. First, the media needs a sea change towards not making parents hysterical. We've seen this happen in waves ever since there was mass media (D&D, satanism, metal, gangs, etc., in my personal lifetime) but this is the first time I think it's actually caught on as a cultural standard for something like 2 decades straight. Second, social media needs a sea change towards not making parents hysterical. I think that's where the 2 decades straight came from. Since neither media nor social media will change anything that lowers their viewership, that means the audience needs to reject the hysteria. That leads me to the third thing. Third, California needs to explicitly adopt play outside laws, and free range parenting needs to become the normal standard in Hollywood movies that -don't- involve kids falling into drugs or other trouble, and -don't- portray the parents in question as overwhelmed or neglectful. As a country, we seem to take a lot of our impression as to what's "right" from California, particularly for parenting and other age-related things, irrespective of local laws. I think CA adopting the laws may happen eventually. They don't conflict with our normal legal standards for parenting. I think it'd just have to be an explicit and well-publicized adoption to spark much of a landslide elsewhere, much like with CO and recreational cannabis.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  The media and social media hysteria is very real and highly elevated. My friends with kids will frequently say “Well things aren’t like they were back in our day”. “Our day” being the 80s and 90s. Yes, things aren’t like they were back in our day - crime has been on a steady downward trend (absent a tiny rise relative to prior years in 2020). By all available data regarding violent crime this is one of the safest periods to have ever lived in human history. When I talk to my mom about her youth (into her 20s) in the 1950s - 1970s (and into my childhood) there were at least a few known active serial killers roaming the country (Ted Bundy, Green River, John Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, etc, etc) at any given time. Anonymous drifters would roll into small towns and randomly kill entire families (In Cold Blood). People were disappearing left and right. Muggings and random violence in cities like New York was completely out of control (compared to today’s standards). Sexual assault especially was on a completely different level. In my lifetime alone from 1993 to 2019 violent crime has fallen 49% [0]. The chances of me or anyone in my family being victims of violent crime today is HALF what it was “back in our day when things were different”. Yes, things are very different. Better. Safer. Turn off 24hr news, get off social media, and go outside and enjoy it. [0] - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about...
SwetDrems 4y ago
A big perpetrator of this is the designed environment surrounding car culture. I moved somewhere where there's plenty of foot traffic, specifically so my kid will walk/bike to school and that is seen as completely normal. Most Americans do not understand how horrible car dependence is for personal independence, yet defend it to the end for some reason. It's really a shame.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  That doesn't really explain the changes over time in US behavior and child Independence. The US had a very strong car culture in the '50s to '80s as well, but children would still roam the streets on bicycle and on foot
  - zhdc1 4y ago
    It’s one thing to accomodate cars, it’s another for the entire landscape to optimize against them. The average suburban family in the 1980s had a car. They also had well maintained sidewalks, civic organisations, and - in many cases - stores within walking or biking distance.
- duxup 4y ago
  I have trouble buying into this connection to car culture idea. I grew up in places with just cars, no transit options and kids roaming free, walking and biking to school was just normal.
  - zhdc1 4y ago
    Population density. Post WW2 suburban communities had small roads (road width is a major factor in, i.e., how fast people feel safe driving), sidewalks, and - in general - were designed for a higher population density because this is what people wanted and were used to. Over time, development optimised for housing and garage space with lower population densities. No one wants to go outside and walk or play if there’s no where to go.
- alar44 4y ago
angarg12 4y ago
I'm a recent immigrant to the US, and when talking to locals I need to bite my tongue to not say "for the land of the free, you sure have an awful lot of rules". As much as America prides itself on their freedoms, they have rules that would baffle most developed countries. And at the same time they are incredibly loose in other contexts, such as safety and quality control e.g. substances that are banned in the EU are legal here.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - logicchains 4y ago
    It's not the corporations, it's the rich people. Corporations are (rich) people too.
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      Corporations are only free if they are associated with rich people. Small businesses often get screwed for one reason or another pretty much everywhere (the exact reasons vary from place to place).
- Taniwha 4y ago
  After living in the US for 20 years we moved our family home to New Zealand as the kids were starting high/middle schools (11/13) - largely so that the kids could be independent - take the bus to school, hang around down town with their friends after school, learn how to use a map, navigate a city space in their heads etc etc we now have (20 years later) smart independent adults making their way in the world, some of their primary school friends back in the US are still living at home
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
For some deep history on this particular cultural expression, I highly recommend reading Albion's Seed. This cultural folkway of extreme supervision traces its roots all the way back to the Puritans' child-rearing folkway: "breaking the will." It's no coincidence that the most egregious of these family harassment cases take place in Puritan colonies. I emphasize once more, for a very interesting and useful background on this and many other American cultural habits, read Albion's Seed. You will gain a very rich and deep understanding of modern American politics and regional-cultural values.
- granshaw 4y ago
  But it wasn't like this before tho... ~20-30 years ago it was perfectly normal for American kids to be all over outdoors playing by themselves... what caused the regression?
  - civilized 4y ago
    Yeah, I'm willing to believe that New England always has the highest level of busybodies, but the problem is that the overall level of busybodies has increased nationwide.
legitster 4y ago
It's important to point out that while these laws are showing up on the books, it can do little when the community or police department get involved: https://reason.com/2022/11/16/suburban-mom-jailed-handcuffed-cps-son-walk-home/ https://reason.com/2022/11/16/suburban-mom-jailed-handcuffed... In this case, Texas had protections for "free range parenting", but that only applied to CPS. The local police department still threw the book at the parents as retaliation. I think people need to realize that police departments themselves have a hand in propagating these myths. Terms like "sex trafficking" are loosely defined and used freely to convey a danger that is almost completely fabricated - that children are abducted off of their own lawn by complete strangers. The reality is that the vast, vast majority of both child abductions and sex trafficking are done by people the children know, and completely unrelated from each other. And few of the these cases are actually solved by police! And yet we are all victims of a kind of PR ruse intended to steer resources to a specific set of government agencies tilting after hypothetical problems.
angmarsbane 4y ago
Could it also be that in general, Americans are having fewer children so there are that many more out of touch adults out there? How many of the people reporting solo kids have children of their own?
- notch898a 4y ago
  This has got to be a big component of it. There was a thread I watched on reddit that showed a kid jumping on the trays on an airplane, it did look bad but it was like a 15 second video. Literally anyone's kid might do this if god forbid you doze off for 5 minutes on the airplane where it is more or less impossible for the kid to escape. There were thousands of comments almost all stating how awful the parents are for not maintaining constant concentration every single second for their kids entire lives such that they weren't able to stop a kid from god forbid jumping up and down for a few seconds while mom fell asleep. It made it clear to me especially the common 20 something feels a deep sense of power to control other's children while simultaneously having no practical understanding of the situation.
gnicholas 4y ago
A friend was going to drop off a package at UPS, when his kid fell asleep in the car on the way. Although there are parking spaces 10 feet from the UPS store (which has huge glass windows, so he could have seen the kid the whole time), he chose not to go inside. He had googled and discovered that it is illegal to leave a child unattended in a car in CA for any period of time. It would have taken 30 seconds in the store to drop off the package. But my buddy wanted to be law-abiding, so he waited until the kid woke up before going in to drop off the package. When I looked it up I saw that it's an infraction (not a misdemeanor or felony), and the penalty is only $100. [1] But it could lead to CPS being called, which is a much, much bigger deal. 1: https://www.wklaw.com/charges-for-leaving-your-child-in-a-car/ https://www.wklaw.com/charges-for-leaving-your-child-in-a-ca...
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  As plenty of people will take 30 seconds to drop off the package and 15 minutes chatting with someone they run into or grabbing stuff of shelvea. The law is there because children cook for parents thinking “I’ll just be 30 seconds”
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    So why not make the law something reasonable, related to how long the child is actually left in the vehicle, and whether the parent is creating a risk to the life of the child (based on temperature, for example)? It seems like the people who are likely to be influenced by this law are those who are sensitive/compliant enough to even know it exists, and people who would consider leaving their kids in the car and forgetting for 15 minutes would be completely unaffected.
  - nullc 4y ago
    and sometimes in spite of all reasonable and unreasonable efforts a child will stack up chairs on a banister and jump over to their death. Unless you like... encase them in epoxy. We can't make the world safe, it's inherently unsafe. Efforts to make it safe beyond some threshold will cause harm. Think of all the children that don't get a chance to exist because unreasonable standards made it foolish to have one.
analog31 4y ago
Something that I've noticed, though I can't say whether it's a cause or an effect (or neither) is that today's kids (including my own to some extent) are much more busy than I ever was. I never had homework in grade school, and if I was doing organized activities, they were pretty minimal (one afternoon per week of cello lessons, and a half hour a day of practicing). Today, kids have homework starting in the early grades, and multiple extracurriculars that involve being driven somewhere. There's no time to go outside. Also, we're not in a baby boom, so the houses with kids are more scattered. When I was a kid, there were a couple dozen other kids up and down the street, so we weren't ever playing outside alone. And we were looking out for one another, even if not precisely in the way that our parents hoped. It's also exhausting for the parents.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
How is the situation in Canada, compared to the US?
- grecy 4y ago
  I live in a small town in Canada, it's extremely common to see 5 to 10 year olds riding toboggans downhill to school every day. The ones who live downhill from school walk up in the morning carrying their tobaggans, and then ride them home at the end of the day. Also at our local ski hill, once kids are old enough to ski, it's perfectly normal for them to ski "alone" - they just ask any random adult to help them onto the chairlift. Getting off is no problem. The parents ski where they want, or have a coffee in the main building while the kids are out doing that. It's extremely common to see packs of 5 to 10 year olds skiing around without any adults. Everyone loves it that way, and nobody wants it to change.
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
    Lovely! What about big cities? (Vancouver, Toronto) I "recently" moved here and had 2 children and haven't figured out the norm yet (children are still too young)
pengaru 4y ago
I am so glad I chose not to have kids, the US has become such a shit show.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
Mostly a U.S. problem, where it's also totally fine to put your child's life in danger by driving them everywhere.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mikewarot 4y ago
I blame Ottis Toole for the kidnapping and murder of Adam Walsh, and Adam's dad for terrorizing Americans into this. The difference between my childhood and those a generation later can not be more stark. We were free to roam far and wide, they were never let outside. The generation after that had phones and internet, and never wanted to go outside. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Adam_Walsh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Adam_Walsh
garfieldnate 4y ago
Is this problem not a result of the mass psychosis about pedophiles and child-eating devil-worshippers that went on in the late 80's? As far as I understand it, kids were more independent prior to that period. There was a time where the news bites would have you think you couldn't walk a few feet without there being the remains of a victim buried somewhere near you.
ravagat 4y ago
Very worrying to see this here. The fact that the population has resorted to using the government to create such a bill goes to show the problem is not being looked at in the right perspective. A silly solution to a serious problem
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
civilized 4y ago
How did the land of the free become the safetyist capital of the world? What other country struggles with letting kids grow up?
31337Logic 4y ago
Thank you, LetGrow, for all the good you do in this world.
rocket_surgeron 4y ago
If you believe a handful of cases of overzealous cops/social workers questioning the decisions of parents occuring sporadically over decades spread wide and far across the land in a country of 332,000,000 is indicative of a widespread problem, you have fallen for the social media outrage-generation agitprop trick. Golf clap. Articles about this rehash the same three cases endlessly and wikipedia articles about media and organizations related to childhood independence are so devoid of citations and examples that if they were about any other subject they would be deleted.
beeforpork 4y ago
Aha! I think it is a glimpse into the future of the country here (Germany). When I was young, I walked to school starting at age 6, and I walked to kindergarten even earlier. (And I played naked in the garden, in a small swimming pool with neighbour's kids (all genders).) It was also no problem to be sent to buy cigarettes, which in hindsight, I find less OK... Today, parents drive their children to school by car, in walking distance. I don't know how they have time for that, but they cause traffic jams they then complain about. From here, I am sure we will get a situation like in the US where parents may get into trouble if they give their children some independence. And from there, the US now gets laws that make it reasonable again to give some independence. Which will follow here, too, I am sure. It is very interesting!
- activitypea 4y ago
  > It was also no problem to be sent to buy cigarettes Man what a nostalgia hit. Never smoked in my life, but I could never get the cashiers to let me buy cigs for my parents :')
  - beeforpork 4y ago
    > but I could never get the cashiers to let me buy cigs for my parents Absolutely no problem. I was even sent by the school janitor during breaks to buy him cigarettes (i.e., off school campus -- I am sure that wasn't legal even back then). Different times...
HeavyStorm 4y ago
Sometimes the US astonishes me... In the worst possible way.
HeavyStorm 4y ago
Let's sue parents to let kids go to school since hey are in danger of being shot.
stolsvik 4y ago
I am becoming more and more happy that I don’t live in that country. Everything seems insane. It has turned insane, it seems to totally have lost its way the latter decades.
egberts1 4y ago
All one has to do is evoke the Meyers vs. Nebraska 1923 SCOTUS ruling and your parental rights get restored. Seeing this more often nowadays. IANAL.

747 points by jseliger 4y ago

"kids these days aren't independent" Oh look its literally illegal to be independent. If you have kids this is both a relief and the source of the problem isn't exactly a shock.

neogodless 4y ago
Independence is not binary. Would you agree that the goal over the period from birth to adulthood should be one marked by a gradual increase in independence? Would you agree that parents should have say in the pace of that increase?
hosh 4y ago
There's been an mental health epedemic since about 2013, partially attributed to adolscents not having sufficient opportunities to be independent: https://time.com/6255448/teen-girls-mental-health-epidemic-causes/ https://time.com/6255448/teen-girls-mental-health-epidemic-c...
itronitron 4y ago
Instead of defunding the police we should just turn half the police force into traffic cops. Take away their squad cars, give them bicycles, and just have them run speed traps in every neighborhood.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  No need for even speed traps. I think anywhere with a police force should be required to also set up and fund a parallel "Helper Force" of at least equal manpower, whose job is to assist people in trouble rather than shoot or arrest them. Whenever there is a situation where a deadly violent response is not needed, the Helper Force could be deployed instead of the police.

s1artibartfast 4y ago

This seems like a reasonable proposal to protect parents against subjective interpretation of the law. Responsible parents should be able to gauge the capabilities of their children and give them Independence based on that was capabilities opposed to fear of third-party criminalization

hosh 4y ago
The Let Grow organization is doing more than just protecting parents. It's advocating for a parenting style that leads to more resilience in the next generation that will be voting, making and enforcing laws, and directing the future of this nation and humanity in general.
croutonwagon 4y ago
The problem is that there are busy bodies that will involve third parties, possibly with good intentions, but still. For example > But people have very different ideas of what “proper supervision” entails (as you know if you have, say, a spouse). One parent lets their kids play outside at age 6, another not till 12. My kids play outside on their own now. At 3 and 6. My 6 year old has been doing so since about 3. Once she could follow basic rules (ie: dont go there). At their current age we let them ride bikes in the street even, with the older in charge and both having to get well off the road the minute they see cars. we watch them from the window but the point is to avoid intervening or helicoptering and allowing them to explore and be independent. In fact we have to limit some media/shows that portray the parents as toys (ie: Bluey) because we notice it tends to stunt their independence and skews their overall expectations of a parent child relationship.
- em-bee 4y ago
  some media/shows that portray the parents as toys (ie: Bluey) because we notice it tends to stunt their independence and skews their overall expectations of a parent child relationship. could you elaborate on that please? bluey seems to promote a healthy parent-child relationship (at least in the few episodes that i saw). how does it stunt their independence and skew their expectations? are you suggesting that showing parents that are always available gives the wrong idea to children about their parents? how would that play out?

kyoob 4y ago

I think it's smart to frame this as an anti-poverty issue. People often imagine "suburban" families falling victim to overreaching child neglect laws and enforcement. In fact poor children are separated from their families for reasons of child welfare far more often than non-poor kids. (Of course, this ends up affecting black families disproportionately.) Families are being broken up in the US for the crime of being poor. Editing to add a link to a study detailing "Drivers of Inequalities among Families Involved with Child Welfare Services: A General Overview" for folks who find the Bar Association's article to be limited in scope. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/childrens-rights/articles/2022/fall2022-racial-discrimination-in-child-welfare-is-a-human-rights-violation/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/chi... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9265799/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9265799/

ZainRiz 4y ago
> Over 50 percent of Black children in the U.S. will experience a child welfare investigation before their eighteenth birthday (nearly double the rate of white children). Nearly 10 percent of Black children will be removed from their parents and placed into foster care (double the rate of white children) While the numbers above sound horrendous (and they really are!) I wish they normalized the data to only consider poor households. That would give a much better picture of how much of the existing system is biased against a given race vs being biased against poor people in general.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  Your quote isn't from the article but a link in a post by kyoob (currently below this) that you aren't even replying to (were you so eager to beat hn's post throttling you put this on the main thread?). Kyoob's post already acknowledges this is also a poverty issue so your complaint seems a bit off the topic at hand.
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    It doesn’t sound like complaining. I think it could be a good faith point (and not someone just trying to find a way to downplay modern racism), although kyoob acknowledged it. Obvious confounding factors should also be controlled for (or at least controlled in a side note).

foolswisdom 4y ago

I shudder every time I see a thread related to this topic (child protective services making insane decisions with no oversight, because the law is vague enough to let them do so).

RajT88 4y ago
As I understand it, not only is the law vague, but also CPS is underfunded. Which of course, you need funding for program oversight.
- homonculus1 4y ago
  [dead]
- PeterisP 4y ago
  Well, no surprise it's underfunded if it has to investigate literally every third kid (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34916782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34916782) - if they tightened up the criteria so that CPS would ignore at least half of this unreasonable number of cases, then they might have enough funding; they seem to be doing so much work that shouldn't be done at all.
  - Tostino 4y ago
    I think we should vocalize the concept of "negative work" more often. That being work with which society as a whole would be better off if left undone.
emodendroket 4y ago
I feel that with the burgeoning politicization of this function (consider their role in anti-transgender laws) things can go in a very dark direction very fast.
yamtaddle 4y ago
It's not just the vagueness of the law, it's a system and culture in which pursuing a bullshit claim draws no punishment, but ignoring a claim that a reasonable person would judge to be bullshit and turning out to be wrong may ruin your life.

jollyllama 4y ago

There's some other fundamental problem if cops and CPS were pulling these stunts anyway. Maybe some better mechanism for recourse against overreach is needed?

JustSomeNobody 4y ago
Such as laws that protect parents?
- lmm 4y ago
  The problem happens further up the funnel than the actual law. The usual pattern is something like: parent gets reported by local busybody, gets investigated and/or arrested, everything is dismissed after a couple of weeks but in the meantime their life has been massively disrupted. Changing the law doesn't necessarily fix that because what the parent was doing was never illegal in the first place.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    Ideally, the parent should at least be able to sue the busybody for damages in this case. If no evidence of wrongdoing is found, the busybody should be identified so the parent knows who to take legal action against.
    - ichugwindex 4y ago
      Wouldn't that create a bad incentive to not report crime then? Seems like the right response is to have the police/CPS act properly than to try and hold Karen's accountable.
      - ryandrake 4y ago
        It would definitely disincentivize false reporting, and make people think twice if they are not sure. Which would be good incentives. We have far too many people calling the police casually for non-emergency reasons and as a bad faith way to bring violence to someone they don't like, like SWATing. Every month another E-911 dispatch center complains they're overloaded. There's a subset of Americans who simply can't mind their own business and feel they have to go out and bully people, and the lack of accountability and consequences just encourages them. Yes, there may be a handful of real crimes that go unreported, but I'm kind of neutral on that. It's not the public's job to tattle on each other by triggering a potentially deadly police response. Having strong accountability for the reporter would mean only the most serious, obvious, violent crimes get reported.

wonderwonder 4y ago

I remember reading a news story about a poor single mom who was renting a room in an extended stay and working in a pizzarea across the street from it. She left her 9? year old alone in the room so she could work. Cops show up and take her kid and arrest her for child endangerment. They made it illegal to be a poor single working mom.

syrrim 4y ago
They made it illegal to be a single mom and not provide adequate childcare. Many families have both parents working, so the situation of needing to find someone to look after your child is not unique to single parents. That said, this is one of the reasons raising children on your own is more difficult.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  There‘s a lot unsaid in any gossiped anecdote like this, but there’s not a single fact in the story as given that suggests inadequate child care. Maybe there were other reasons that justify the police action, but we weren’t given any here.
- hn_version_0023 4y ago
  What is inadequate about leaving a 9yro child at home in her own home, alone?
- strken 4y ago
  As a 9 year old (admittedly not in the US), when there was a day without school but my parents still had to work, I was allowed to stay home on my own and ride my bicycle to a town 5km away to buy lunch. My 7 year old brother wasn't allowed to stay home, but came on similar trips with me. The adequate childcare for a responsible 9 year old might be "tell them to call 911 if there's a serious emergency, or text you if anything comes up".
  - Tostino 4y ago
    This is how I grew up in the US (central FL) in the 90's. I was 6-7 when I was riding my bike down to the corner store ~0.5mi away, and ~10 I was staying home and watching my sisters when necessary. I was perfectly capable of cooking and looking after things. I just don't get this hysteria that seems to have gripped so many people. We are living in one of the safest times to be alive.

kwhitefoot 4y ago

The US seems to be the only country that has this problem. Children here (Norway) walk to school on their own at the age of five or six, some of them take buses. "Ashley Smith, a foster dad, testified about being investigated for neglect because one afternoon his daughter, 8, was doing her homework on the front lawn. A passerby reported an “unsupervised” child (not knowing Ashley was actually inside). The upshot: “We went through a period of eight weeks of not knowing if we would continue being able to keep our children,” said Ashley." That's just astonishing!

pilarphosol 4y ago
The US is a low trust society, because of all the poverty. You really notice the difference if you travel to Europe. It turns out that having half of the population be economically unsafe makes everyone and everything unsafe.
- popcalc 4y ago
  Hungary is extremely low trust and extremely poor, yet no one fears public transit nor letting their kids wander about.
  - em-bee 4y ago
    that's not a contradiction. if society in hungary is low trust (which i doubt btw, unless something changed since i was there last more than a decade ago) then this low trust does not extend to the safety of their children. letting kids wander about shows high trust in their kids not getting into danger. in the US people don't even trust that.
    - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      So let me get this straight, trust is measured on multiple axis except for the axis of children which sets the maximum?
      - 4y ago

vuln 4y ago

This law will not give "poor kids more independence", it absolves the parent or guardian of legal responsibility for their children being unsupervised. I can't be the only one that's seen the hundreds if not THOUSANDS of children (under 18) fighting, causing mayhem, attacking innocent people, and property destruction videos that circulate all over the internet. Will this help edge cases? The mom working at the pizza shop across the parking lot of a hotel where her child is staying? Sure.

1123581321 4y ago
Everything you listed is already a crime or will swiftly involve child services for due to obvious behavior problems in the children. These laws are entirely about protecting responsible parents who want to let their children learn to peacefully navigate the outdoors in a city.
em-bee 4y ago
that's a different problem. or are you seriously suggesting that even teenagers not be allowed to be unsupervised until they are 18? that's ridiculous.
advisedwang 4y ago
Parent's aren't being investigated for negligance because of 15-18 year olds. This is about 8 year olds. They're not the ones being reckless. Also perhaps if young kids get a bit more freedom, they'd make more reasonable decisions when they're older? This could even help the "mayhem" you're worried about.
lolinder 4y ago
You haven't read the text of any of the bills, have you? > A CHILD IS NOT NEGLECTED WHEN ALLOWED TO PARTICIPATE IN INDEPENDENT ACTIVITIES THAT A REASONABLE AND PRUDENT PARENT, GUARDIAN, OR LEGAL CUSTODIAN WOULD CONSIDER SAFE GIVEN THE CHILD'S MATURITY, CONDITION, AND ABILITIES Which part of this language triggers your apocalyptic fears? https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb22-1090 https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb22-1090
- 4y ago

raydiatian 4y ago

Part of the issue is that roads and American autophilia make the world unsafe and inaccessible without transportation. Conspiracy theorists want to say that the “push for 15 minute spheres is the state trying to control us” but that is just so braindead it hurts to look at.

yieldcrv 4y ago

In my own lobbying efforts I’ve found it very easy to get bipartisan support and things passed It comes down to psychology and understanding people A decade ago I would have thought getting any legislative body’s attention would be difficult, but all the special interests moved to far extremes of their parties for … reasons … to pursue things that will never get passed. They just left the center unguarded and forgot how to communicate, it seems. I understand this phenomenon is a reflection of broader society, just am surprised that it has affected “shadow organizations” or professional lobbying groups that have navigated so many political environments over time. Anyway, seize opportunity when you see it. It is kind of addicting to alter reality in places you cant even register to vote in.

Connor_Creegan 4y ago

This is neat and all, but the problem is very much downstream of the children-out-of-wedlock problem, which is downstream of so-called "sexual liberation" (a misuse of both the term "sexual" and the term "liberation"), which is downstream of an inconsistent sexual education, which is downstream of an inconsistent ethics of sex, which is downstream of the Fall (save for a few unmentioned steps).

acuozzo 4y ago
> but the problem is very much downstream of the children-out-of-wedlock problem If this were the case then there would be similar issues with children of single parents in e.g. European countries, no?
- Connor_Creegan 4y ago
  https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/12/u-s-children-more-likely-than-children-in-other-countries-to-live-with-just-one-parent/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/12/u-s-childre... The problem is very-much downstream, not wholly-determined. Obviously this issue criss-crosses with other issues, such as race, infrastructure, compulsory education, et cetera. But I would rank doctrine of sex as the brightest star in this constellation. It isn't a coincidence that the UK is second behind us. Its founding event was the invention of divorce.
  - mvc 4y ago
    Yeah, everything was so much better when women just had to put up with their abusive husbands
    - Connor_Creegan 4y ago
      Not sure what constitutes "abuse" in your book, since it is an extremely vague charge and men and women tend to exercise their malevolence in ways befitting their own aptitudes (men typically with more brawn, women typically with more subtlety). But in any case, I hate to break it to you but divorce was not created for the purpose of "womens' liberation", it was created to justify serial monogamy.

Gordonjcp 4y ago

America just seems like the weirdest fucking place. You're all going on about being the only truly free country in the world, but you can be jailed for letting your child play in your garden. What the fuck, guys?

acuozzo 4y ago
America is home to over 21M individuals with a net worth of $1M or more. For them, America is free; perhaps more free than <insert EU country here>. The remaining 310M exist to create freedom for the 21M. They are pacified with the propaganda of class: the "middle class"; the "working class"; the poor; the prisoners. Each person below the peak of the pyramid is taught from a young age to fear becoming part of the level below. Each person below the peak of the pyramid is taught from a young age that every level is rigged with a series of doors which lead directly to the basement in which they will find the good old 13thAmendmentLoophole™. Additionally, each person below the peak of the pyramid is taught from a young age that there exist a few hidden doors on each level which lead to a secret route that goes directly to the top. These doors were initially installed by Horatio Alger Jr, but have been maintained by countless persons since. Rumors exist that John Steinbeck scrawled expletives on a few. Since 1971 or so the the pyramid has evolved into an incredibly-slippery cone. It keeps growing and growing, but getting thinner and more slippery as time goes on. Rumors exist that it is stretching itself to Mars, but I imagine it will likely fall short of that since the cone is made from plastic.
yamtaddle 4y ago
Our relationship to actual, in-practice freedom has always been kind of... weird, considering how obsessed with freedom we seem to be. We seem more concerned with high-level theoretical freedom than with actual liberty we experience in the day-to-day, which is indeed sub-par compared to many of our peer states. And we didn't credibly try to even extend that much freedom to ~every US adult until the last quarter or 30% of our country's existence.
RandomTisk 4y ago
America is an extremely peaceful place for many millions of families. There are thousands of smaller communities throughout the vast country where crime is background noise and kids can and do run around outside if they want, even today. Some places are running untested, never before seen dev code in production trying to improve the justice system, and they virtually always make things much worse, like California is doing and certain metros around the country.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tristor 4y ago

I recently moved from a very low average income city to a very high average income city. In my former city it was nearly unheard of for children to unsupervised, despite most people having large families, because there was a very real concern about kidnapping/human trafficking and other issues (and this concern wasn't unfounded, this city made national news for masked men in a van grabbing multiple children while their parents were holding their hands in a Walmart parking lot and bailing). In my new city, I see 7-8 year old kids outdoors playing without any significant supervision in the neighborhood and allowed to walk to school on their own or walk/scooter to a friends house. It's a stark difference. There are complex issues here, and a lot of nuance, but on its face this made a statistical truth really obvious to me, which is that socioeconomic status nearly directly correlates to physical safety and crime rates. The simple truth is that the high average income city is just a much much much safer place for anyone to exist in, to walk in, and this includes children. I feel like every time this issue gets discussed, there's always people ignoring the socioeconomic factor, and worse, pointing it out is taken as a blanket attack on poor people.

standardUser 4y ago
This is interesting to me because growing up poor and with a single parent, I was allowed to run wild at a very young age. There was a whole crew of young kids in our apartment complex that would hang out and wander around unsupervised during daylight hours. Our parents were busy working and they probably needed some occasional time alone in those tiny apartments (my mother and I shared a 1 bedroom). As for "high income cities" it doesn't get much higher income than Manhattan and I would be shocked if I saw some under-10 kids wandering around here on their lonesome!
q1w2 4y ago
It's not socio-economics - it's Crime. They are correlated, but where they are not, children walk to school despite the poor neighborhood. When I grew up in India, we were dirt poor and we literally hitchhiked to and from school each day from the age of maybe 7. Students would get out of school, walk to the nearest busy intersection, and ask people to let us ride on the back of their motorbikes to get home. No helmets, no traffic lights, no sidewalks, no cell phones. This wasn't in some rural area - this was in central Mumbai decades ago where people were poorer than the poorest US neighborhoods. ...yet the danger of being kidnapped or assaulted was effectively zero. It was far more common to be attacked by a stray dog than by any of the millions of dirt poor people in the city. One factor (my guess - I observe anecdotally) is the high rate of drug use in the US. Drug use among the poor in India was extremely uncommon. However in the US (at least these days), it seems to be common among most people arrested (just my observation).

geoelectric 4y ago

IMO, three things need to happen to make this go. First, the media needs a sea change towards not making parents hysterical. We've seen this happen in waves ever since there was mass media (D&D, satanism, metal, gangs, etc., in my personal lifetime) but this is the first time I think it's actually caught on as a cultural standard for something like 2 decades straight. Second, social media needs a sea change towards not making parents hysterical. I think that's where the 2 decades straight came from. Since neither media nor social media will change anything that lowers their viewership, that means the audience needs to reject the hysteria. That leads me to the third thing. Third, California needs to explicitly adopt play outside laws, and free range parenting needs to become the normal standard in Hollywood movies that -don't- involve kids falling into drugs or other trouble, and -don't- portray the parents in question as overwhelmed or neglectful. As a country, we seem to take a lot of our impression as to what's "right" from California, particularly for parenting and other age-related things, irrespective of local laws. I think CA adopting the laws may happen eventually. They don't conflict with our normal legal standards for parenting. I think it'd just have to be an explicit and well-publicized adoption to spark much of a landslide elsewhere, much like with CO and recreational cannabis.

kkielhofner 4y ago
The media and social media hysteria is very real and highly elevated. My friends with kids will frequently say “Well things aren’t like they were back in our day”. “Our day” being the 80s and 90s. Yes, things aren’t like they were back in our day - crime has been on a steady downward trend (absent a tiny rise relative to prior years in 2020). By all available data regarding violent crime this is one of the safest periods to have ever lived in human history. When I talk to my mom about her youth (into her 20s) in the 1950s - 1970s (and into my childhood) there were at least a few known active serial killers roaming the country (Ted Bundy, Green River, John Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, etc, etc) at any given time. Anonymous drifters would roll into small towns and randomly kill entire families (In Cold Blood). People were disappearing left and right. Muggings and random violence in cities like New York was completely out of control (compared to today’s standards). Sexual assault especially was on a completely different level. In my lifetime alone from 1993 to 2019 violent crime has fallen 49% [0]. The chances of me or anyone in my family being victims of violent crime today is HALF what it was “back in our day when things were different”. Yes, things are very different. Better. Safer. Turn off 24hr news, get off social media, and go outside and enjoy it. [0] - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about...

SwetDrems 4y ago

A big perpetrator of this is the designed environment surrounding car culture. I moved somewhere where there's plenty of foot traffic, specifically so my kid will walk/bike to school and that is seen as completely normal. Most Americans do not understand how horrible car dependence is for personal independence, yet defend it to the end for some reason. It's really a shame.

s1artibartfast 4y ago
That doesn't really explain the changes over time in US behavior and child Independence. The US had a very strong car culture in the '50s to '80s as well, but children would still roam the streets on bicycle and on foot
- zhdc1 4y ago
  It’s one thing to accomodate cars, it’s another for the entire landscape to optimize against them. The average suburban family in the 1980s had a car. They also had well maintained sidewalks, civic organisations, and - in many cases - stores within walking or biking distance.
duxup 4y ago
I have trouble buying into this connection to car culture idea. I grew up in places with just cars, no transit options and kids roaming free, walking and biking to school was just normal.
- zhdc1 4y ago
  Population density. Post WW2 suburban communities had small roads (road width is a major factor in, i.e., how fast people feel safe driving), sidewalks, and - in general - were designed for a higher population density because this is what people wanted and were used to. Over time, development optimised for housing and garage space with lower population densities. No one wants to go outside and walk or play if there’s no where to go.
alar44 4y ago

angarg12 4y ago

I'm a recent immigrant to the US, and when talking to locals I need to bite my tongue to not say "for the land of the free, you sure have an awful lot of rules". As much as America prides itself on their freedoms, they have rules that would baffle most developed countries. And at the same time they are incredibly loose in other contexts, such as safety and quality control e.g. substances that are banned in the EU are legal here.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
[flagged]
- logicchains 4y ago
  It's not the corporations, it's the rich people. Corporations are (rich) people too.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Corporations are only free if they are associated with rich people. Small businesses often get screwed for one reason or another pretty much everywhere (the exact reasons vary from place to place).
Taniwha 4y ago
After living in the US for 20 years we moved our family home to New Zealand as the kids were starting high/middle schools (11/13) - largely so that the kids could be independent - take the bus to school, hang around down town with their friends after school, learn how to use a map, navigate a city space in their heads etc etc we now have (20 years later) smart independent adults making their way in the world, some of their primary school friends back in the US are still living at home

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

For some deep history on this particular cultural expression, I highly recommend reading Albion's Seed. This cultural folkway of extreme supervision traces its roots all the way back to the Puritans' child-rearing folkway: "breaking the will." It's no coincidence that the most egregious of these family harassment cases take place in Puritan colonies. I emphasize once more, for a very interesting and useful background on this and many other American cultural habits, read Albion's Seed. You will gain a very rich and deep understanding of modern American politics and regional-cultural values.

granshaw 4y ago
But it wasn't like this before tho... ~20-30 years ago it was perfectly normal for American kids to be all over outdoors playing by themselves... what caused the regression?
- civilized 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm willing to believe that New England always has the highest level of busybodies, but the problem is that the overall level of busybodies has increased nationwide.

legitster 4y ago

It's important to point out that while these laws are showing up on the books, it can do little when the community or police department get involved: https://reason.com/2022/11/16/suburban-mom-jailed-handcuffed-cps-son-walk-home/ https://reason.com/2022/11/16/suburban-mom-jailed-handcuffed... In this case, Texas had protections for "free range parenting", but that only applied to CPS. The local police department still threw the book at the parents as retaliation. I think people need to realize that police departments themselves have a hand in propagating these myths. Terms like "sex trafficking" are loosely defined and used freely to convey a danger that is almost completely fabricated - that children are abducted off of their own lawn by complete strangers. The reality is that the vast, vast majority of both child abductions and sex trafficking are done by people the children know, and completely unrelated from each other. And few of the these cases are actually solved by police! And yet we are all victims of a kind of PR ruse intended to steer resources to a specific set of government agencies tilting after hypothetical problems.

angmarsbane 4y ago

Could it also be that in general, Americans are having fewer children so there are that many more out of touch adults out there? How many of the people reporting solo kids have children of their own?

notch898a 4y ago
This has got to be a big component of it. There was a thread I watched on reddit that showed a kid jumping on the trays on an airplane, it did look bad but it was like a 15 second video. Literally anyone's kid might do this if god forbid you doze off for 5 minutes on the airplane where it is more or less impossible for the kid to escape. There were thousands of comments almost all stating how awful the parents are for not maintaining constant concentration every single second for their kids entire lives such that they weren't able to stop a kid from god forbid jumping up and down for a few seconds while mom fell asleep. It made it clear to me especially the common 20 something feels a deep sense of power to control other's children while simultaneously having no practical understanding of the situation.

gnicholas 4y ago

A friend was going to drop off a package at UPS, when his kid fell asleep in the car on the way. Although there are parking spaces 10 feet from the UPS store (which has huge glass windows, so he could have seen the kid the whole time), he chose not to go inside. He had googled and discovered that it is illegal to leave a child unattended in a car in CA for any period of time. It would have taken 30 seconds in the store to drop off the package. But my buddy wanted to be law-abiding, so he waited until the kid woke up before going in to drop off the package. When I looked it up I saw that it's an infraction (not a misdemeanor or felony), and the penalty is only $100. [1] But it could lead to CPS being called, which is a much, much bigger deal. 1: https://www.wklaw.com/charges-for-leaving-your-child-in-a-car/ https://www.wklaw.com/charges-for-leaving-your-child-in-a-ca...

throwawaysleep 4y ago
As plenty of people will take 30 seconds to drop off the package and 15 minutes chatting with someone they run into or grabbing stuff of shelvea. The law is there because children cook for parents thinking “I’ll just be 30 seconds”
- gnicholas 4y ago
  So why not make the law something reasonable, related to how long the child is actually left in the vehicle, and whether the parent is creating a risk to the life of the child (based on temperature, for example)? It seems like the people who are likely to be influenced by this law are those who are sensitive/compliant enough to even know it exists, and people who would consider leaving their kids in the car and forgetting for 15 minutes would be completely unaffected.
- nullc 4y ago
  and sometimes in spite of all reasonable and unreasonable efforts a child will stack up chairs on a banister and jump over to their death. Unless you like... encase them in epoxy. We can't make the world safe, it's inherently unsafe. Efforts to make it safe beyond some threshold will cause harm. Think of all the children that don't get a chance to exist because unreasonable standards made it foolish to have one.

analog31 4y ago

Something that I've noticed, though I can't say whether it's a cause or an effect (or neither) is that today's kids (including my own to some extent) are much more busy than I ever was. I never had homework in grade school, and if I was doing organized activities, they were pretty minimal (one afternoon per week of cello lessons, and a half hour a day of practicing). Today, kids have homework starting in the early grades, and multiple extracurriculars that involve being driven somewhere. There's no time to go outside. Also, we're not in a baby boom, so the houses with kids are more scattered. When I was a kid, there were a couple dozen other kids up and down the street, so we weren't ever playing outside alone. And we were looking out for one another, even if not precisely in the way that our parents hoped. It's also exhausting for the parents.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago

How is the situation in Canada, compared to the US?

grecy 4y ago
I live in a small town in Canada, it's extremely common to see 5 to 10 year olds riding toboggans downhill to school every day. The ones who live downhill from school walk up in the morning carrying their tobaggans, and then ride them home at the end of the day. Also at our local ski hill, once kids are old enough to ski, it's perfectly normal for them to ski "alone" - they just ask any random adult to help them onto the chairlift. Getting off is no problem. The parents ski where they want, or have a coffee in the main building while the kids are out doing that. It's extremely common to see packs of 5 to 10 year olds skiing around without any adults. Everyone loves it that way, and nobody wants it to change.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
  Lovely! What about big cities? (Vancouver, Toronto) I "recently" moved here and had 2 children and haven't figured out the norm yet (children are still too young)

pengaru 4y ago

I am so glad I chose not to have kids, the US has become such a shit show.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

Mostly a U.S. problem, where it's also totally fine to put your child's life in danger by driving them everywhere.

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mikewarot 4y ago

I blame Ottis Toole for the kidnapping and murder of Adam Walsh, and Adam's dad for terrorizing Americans into this. The difference between my childhood and those a generation later can not be more stark. We were free to roam far and wide, they were never let outside. The generation after that had phones and internet, and never wanted to go outside. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Adam_Walsh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Adam_Walsh

garfieldnate 4y ago

Is this problem not a result of the mass psychosis about pedophiles and child-eating devil-worshippers that went on in the late 80's? As far as I understand it, kids were more independent prior to that period. There was a time where the news bites would have you think you couldn't walk a few feet without there being the remains of a victim buried somewhere near you.

ravagat 4y ago

Very worrying to see this here. The fact that the population has resorted to using the government to create such a bill goes to show the problem is not being looked at in the right perspective. A silly solution to a serious problem

deleted 4y ago
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civilized 4y ago

How did the land of the free become the safetyist capital of the world? What other country struggles with letting kids grow up?

31337Logic 4y ago

Thank you, LetGrow, for all the good you do in this world.

rocket_surgeron 4y ago

If you believe a handful of cases of overzealous cops/social workers questioning the decisions of parents occuring sporadically over decades spread wide and far across the land in a country of 332,000,000 is indicative of a widespread problem, you have fallen for the social media outrage-generation agitprop trick. Golf clap. Articles about this rehash the same three cases endlessly and wikipedia articles about media and organizations related to childhood independence are so devoid of citations and examples that if they were about any other subject they would be deleted.

beeforpork 4y ago

Aha! I think it is a glimpse into the future of the country here (Germany). When I was young, I walked to school starting at age 6, and I walked to kindergarten even earlier. (And I played naked in the garden, in a small swimming pool with neighbour's kids (all genders).) It was also no problem to be sent to buy cigarettes, which in hindsight, I find less OK... Today, parents drive their children to school by car, in walking distance. I don't know how they have time for that, but they cause traffic jams they then complain about. From here, I am sure we will get a situation like in the US where parents may get into trouble if they give their children some independence. And from there, the US now gets laws that make it reasonable again to give some independence. Which will follow here, too, I am sure. It is very interesting!

activitypea 4y ago
> It was also no problem to be sent to buy cigarettes Man what a nostalgia hit. Never smoked in my life, but I could never get the cashiers to let me buy cigs for my parents :')
- beeforpork 4y ago
  > but I could never get the cashiers to let me buy cigs for my parents Absolutely no problem. I was even sent by the school janitor during breaks to buy him cigarettes (i.e., off school campus -- I am sure that wasn't legal even back then). Different times...

HeavyStorm 4y ago

Sometimes the US astonishes me... In the worst possible way.

HeavyStorm 4y ago

Let's sue parents to let kids go to school since hey are in danger of being shot.

stolsvik 4y ago

I am becoming more and more happy that I don’t live in that country. Everything seems insane. It has turned insane, it seems to totally have lost its way the latter decades.

egberts1 4y ago

All one has to do is evoke the Meyers vs. Nebraska 1923 SCOTUS ruling and your parental rights get restored. Seeing this more often nowadays. IANAL.