9 ms·

It’s not ok to let your five year old play with a soccer ball on a busy neighborhood street unsupervised. It’s good to let your thirteen year old play in the ne

by ip26 3y ago

It’s not ok to let your five year old play with a soccer ball on a busy neighborhood street unsupervised. It’s good to let your thirteen year old play in the neighborhood with their friends. But what about everything in between? At what age should you let your kid play in the pool without you even watching? When can they be trusted to use a band saw unsupervised? How young is too young to have unrestricted access to razor sharp eight inch kitchen knives? This is mostly rhetorical; the point is the constant (necessary) risk calculus is draining, and parents are rational to err on the side of caution. It has been observed that most public spaces in America are default adult spaces where children are only tolerated. It follows most public spaces will tend to have adult levels of hazard and risk.

CalRobert 3y ago
The five year old would be ok except for drivers, who are the reason kids can't play in the street.
c22 3y ago
I don't let adults go swimming without a buddy.
- goatlover 3y ago
  How do you stop adults from going swimming alone?
  - c22 3y ago
    I go with them.
    - babyshake 3y ago
      Assuming we're not swimming in a particularly dangerous reef or something, I'd find that annoying if I thought you were tagging along for the sake of my safety.
    - livueta 3y ago
      Now that's a wholesome and productive attitude. I think that's a great example of what I think of as the distinction between safetyism and preparedness: the former is all about no fun allowed in the presence of any level of risk whatsoever, with no rational consideration of likelihood and mitigating factors, while the latter is about doing fun stuff while taking reasonable procautions to mitigate realistic dangers. It's not going backpacking at all vs. taking a first aid class and bringing the ten essentials.
      - watwut 3y ago
        I would find OP massively annoying if I wanted to go to swim and he would force himself on it all the time.
        livueta 3y ago
        Having grown up on the ocean, I'll admit I assumed it meant open-water swimming or some similar context with nontrivial risks that can get you regardless of how good you are, like crazy riptides. If we're talking the pool then yeah, somewhat different.
    - vasco 3y ago
      If you walk by a beach and someone is swimming alone you jump in? This sounds crazy I know multiple people that swim alone in the sea multiple times per week as their sport for many years.
      - c22 3y ago
        I'm not a control freak, if a full grown adult really wants to swim alone of course I can't stop them. But I've seen and heard about enough freak events that I cannot condone it. All it takes is one little stroke, muscle spasm, or unexpected undertow to get you into a really dangerous situation. Humans just aren't built for the water the same way fish are. If I was walking on the beach and I saw someone swimming alone I probably would hang out in the area and keep a passive eye on them until they got out. I wouldn't feel the need to get in the water unless I saw that they needed help. You'd be surprised at how rarely this happens, though. Usually there are lots of people at the beach.
        vasco 3y ago
        In my corner of the world that isn't rare at all. Our whole coast is beaches and if it's winter time all the beaches will be completely empty. My friends swim all year round and a couple of them before work, so almost 100% of the time they swim, there's nobody around. Also having grown-up on the coast, since I was a child I've always been in the water with all the other kids, without parents around, never had any life-threatening cramp, never seen it happen either. Maybe I've just been lucky and you've been unlucky, since it's all anecdata anyway - but it's strange to me how it can both be so jarring for you to do it alone, and jarring for me to be afraid of doing it alone. For me it's like you said it's dangerous to walk in the park by yourself because a tree branch can fall on your head. It's true but I will eyeroll almost unconsciously.
        c22 3y ago
        You might roll your eyes but I think there is a real qualitative difference in risk between walking in the park and swimming in the ocean. People walk through the park all the time, so if a tree branch does fall on your head there is a good chance someone might happen upon you before you are dead. And while you are waiting there, unconscious and hemorrhaging blood into your cranial cavity, at least you will be breathing in air instead of brackish seawater. I have lived 15 minutes from the ocean my entire life and I have never gone swimming in it alone. I'm not an absolutist either, each situation has to be assessed on its own merits. If the kids are all strong swimmers and they want to go to the pool without an adult, that's fine with me. I might even let them go together into the sea depending on which beach they're headed to. But if they're taking the 3-year-old in water wings out to the open ocean I'm going to be tagging along. Likewise, if you want to walk alone in the park I think you'll probably be all right, but if you're hiking 10 miles out into the wilderness I'm going to strongly suggest you bring a buddy, whatever your age.
    - Ma8ee 3y ago
      I did that once with an acquaintance that insisted on swimming across a not that small lake. The problem was that she was a much better swimmer than I was, and I almost exhausted myself trying to keep up.
    - rufus_foreman 3y ago
      >> I go with them. Awesome. We're going to the quarry, and we're going to jump off the cliff over 10 feet of rock into the water. Bring a case of Meister Brau.
abracadaniel 3y ago
It’s probably important that they thoroughly understand that they are taking a risk for it to have an effect. It’s probably very dependent on their developmental state.
- gottoupvote 3y ago
  Maybe not .. if nothing bad ever happens, there was no risk. The appreciation of the concept of risk comes from the experience of failure.
asdff 3y ago
While you have a good point, I wonder where all this erring on the side of caution even emerged or why it even emerged? Rearing young is pretty deep and ancient behavior in our species, yet when we think of examples of prior generations or suppose cases from the historical record, the trend always seemed to be free range parenting. Only within the last generation or two perhaps has childhood changed from one of exploration and freedom to one of restriction and days scheduled to the minute. Do the kids benefit from this unique way of being reared? Maybe, maybe not, we know mental health issues are on the rise among children. But, on the other hand, there is a profit to be made selling tools to monitor and restrict and activities and services to fill up an otherwise idle day, so there is some degree of incentive to keep this behavior around in our culture now that it has emerged for better or worse.
- notanormalnerd 3y ago
  In the last two generations we went from having 3 or more kids to having 1 kid. You just weren't able to supervise 5 kids with that level of caution like you are today. Also biologically your whole legacys survival lies on one kid.
- huytersd 3y ago
  People have fewer kids now. Only five or sex decades ago, losing a kid was relatively normalized. We’re just very risk averse now.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  1. People had way less free time / resources to be able to watch over their kids 2. Children used to die all the time from various causes. I remember e.g. the case of Mozart who had just one surviving sibling and 5 who died early. I can't imagine what the parents had to go through - their first 3 children died early. You have to become desensitized to not go crazy. 2. Social status / value of children grew a lot.
- m_fayer 3y ago
  Having children has become way more exhausting: the need for advanced degrees and career climbing before reproduction means we do it later in life when we have less energy. The same factors plus mobility means grandparents are unavailable or worse, in need of care themselves. When both parents have full time jobs, the crunch is even worse. This all has 2 psychological effects: when parents feel like they’re just barely keeping this teetering lifestyle from falling over, they become very controlling. Tight control becomes the name of the game: it’s how everything’s done and anyway no one has the time or energy for the unexpected. Also, when the child represents a gargantuan investment, people become realty protective over their fragile prize. Like a luxury car that you can barely afford: all protective measures will be taken.
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
I was 5 when I was traveling across my neighborhood on my bike to go visit my friends. I'd tell my parent where I was heading and then I'd go. I was 6 when I received my first Victorinox swiss army knife and learned how to sharpen it to a razor's edge. I was 7 when I started going to a local swim club by myself, saving up a week's allowance for a day at the pool and some candy. I was 8 when my very best friend moved away. I got in fights with multiple friends' older brothers for teasing me about it and gave almost as good as I got given my age disadvantage. I was 9 when I was travelling to the end of the neighborhood, parking my bike by a friends' house, then hiking a quarter mile to go fishing in a river pond. Parents these days aren't rational at all. They worry about protecting the physical nature of the child and leave their development and ability to accurately assess risk on their own as an afterthought. That's how you perpetuate failure: with children who grow up while never possessing the life experience necessary to properly raise kids of their own. The world simply isn't that fucking scary.
- mcv 3y ago
  Same here, and I try to let my kids do the same, but they don't seem to want it. My youngest is 9 and still wants me to bring him to school and pick him up. My oldest has a Swiss army knife, but I don't think he's ever used it. They almost never want to play outside, hang with their friends or anything like that. Maybe I should kick them out of the house, but that gets a lot of resistance and feels like punishment to them. And they're invariably back in 15 minutes. At least they learned how to cross the street safely at a young age. That's the one bit of independence that stuck.
  - trealira 3y ago
    > Maybe I should kick them out of the house, but that gets a lot of resistance and feels like punishment to them. This is what my grandparents did to my mom and aunts and uncles when they were growing up during the 60s and 70s. They weren't allowed back inside before dinner, but they had to return by sunset. They were used to it, and spent their time playing in the woods and playing games with the neighborhood kids. Nowadays, if you kicked them outside the house, they'd probably just have each other to play with, because kids don't play outside as much.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
obscurette 3y ago
It's not about children actually. The problem in general is how patronizing our society have become in last decades.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  That's mostly a factor of lower childbirth rates. Put plain and simple: people used to have 3+ kids (or more, if you counted those who died before age 6), so if one or two died, got severely injured, turned mad, criminal or celibate-religious there would be still at least one or two other kids to inherit whatever wealth the family had (i.e. usually the farm or trade shop) and pass on the family name. Nowadays middle-class people tend to have just one or two children, they literally cannot afford the space or childrearing costs for more - for lower classes eligible for government assistance such as the un(der)employed the situation does look different as society picks up large parts of the tab. Additionally, ever rising requirements in employment criteria make it necessary to invest more and more into their education: up until maybe 2-3 decades ago, even a school dropout could work in construction, a factory, retail, farm or mine and make a relatively decent living. But these jobs have largely gone away to China/India or to automation, so the few employment options for "undereducated" people are highly contested. And so, the kid must turn out perfect: there is no room for the kid to make mistakes, especially not ones that endanger their career prospects, and hence all the helicopter parenting. On top of all of that come decades of media/politician "fear brainwashings" (aka, the "pedo child-snatcher van" myth), as well as the legitimate collapse of a high-trust society (homeless, drunk and mentally ill people literally everywhere in major cities; police simply not enforcing laws any more).
  - hyperthesis 3y ago
    Do upper-class people have more children?
    - sgerenser 3y ago
      I’ve found on average richer people have less children. And not only at the threshold of government benefits.
hackerlight 3y ago
I'd change the framing. Kids need to have the thrill and perception of risk. But actual risk is a silly thing to strive for. You want activities that are high thrill but low actual risk. Like riding a minibike without a helmet is stupidity. You can get 99% of the same thrill with a helmet and reduce your actual risk substantially for no downside.
- gwd 3y ago
  > Like riding a minibike without a helmet is stupidity. It's what kind of risk we're talking about. When I'm supervising my 4-year-old, I definitely want to prevent him from getting life-altering brain trauma. But if he falls and breaks his arm? Certainly worth warning him about, but in the end he'll be fine, and giving him the choice to take that risk is part of his development. I let him use the battery-powered electric drill (under close supervision), because he's shown that he's careful, and the worst that can could happen is he get some skin abrasions. He's not getting anywhere near the circular saw until he's a lot older.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
RoyalHenOil 3y ago
It depends a lot on the activity and the individual. I am almost 40, and I still won't use our bandsaw unsupervised. I don't think there is any age that I will trust myself with that because I am clumsy. When my sister and I were growing up, we were given our independence in different areas at different ages: it was a matter of when we felt confident doing those things unsupervised and when we earned our parents' trust. As a general rule, I got to do responsibility-based tasks (like stay home alone, pick my own bedtime, and set my own homework schedule) at an earlier age than my sister, but she got to do physically risky tasks (like use knives, use the stove, and play high-risk sports) at an earlier age than me. In all cases, it was a gradual process: they guided us, then they let us try while they watched, then they let us try while they were on hand if we called out for help, then they let us do it alone. Each step took as long as they (or we) felt was needed. My parents are both highly anxious/cautious people, so I know it wasn't easy for them to give us these freedoms, but they understood intellectually that it was vital that we practice for adulthood well before we were suddenly on our own. They knew they only had a few short years to teach us how to survive independently of them. It must have been a lot of work for them, but we were planned children (not accidents) and they put a lot of thought into how they wanted to raise us.
josefx 3y ago
> It’s not ok to let your five year old play with a soccer ball on a busy neighborhood street unsupervised. When I grew up the road by my grandparents house was wide and empty and you could see anything coming a mile away and drivers could see the kids playing just as well. Now it has been redesigned to be a cluttered mess to "discourage speeding" even adding parking spots to reduce the width of the road. You could drive through it at walking speed and still wouldn't see a kid trying to cross the road before it popped out from behind a car right in front of you.
- mcv 3y ago
  I suspect the added parking was not "to reduce the width of the road", because it's easy to reduce the width of the road without adding parking. The probably just wanted to add parking and misused the safety argument to sell it, ignoring the fact that visibility is also important for safety.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  Narrower streets are safer and nicer, though. Wide streets really do result in much higher speeds. https://grist.org/cities/heres-why-narrower-streets-are-safer/ https://grist.org/cities/heres-why-narrower-streets-are-safe... among many other sources. Ideally they'd add parking protected bike lanes
makeitdouble 3y ago
This reminds of the "no kids zone" concept in Korea [0]. When first hearing about it sounded just a bit extreme, but the moreI read about it the darker and gloomer it gets, and it's a phenomenon that is having a deep impact on the whole Korean society's future. [0] https://m.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20230609000677 https://m.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20230609000677
- jgilias 3y ago
  What the hell… Thank you for posting this. I was thinking of going for a vacation to Korea _with kids_, and now I don’t think I will. Can’t imagine needing to explain to my well-behaved 8-year old that, no, we can’t go to some place we’d want to go, because other kids can’t behave. This should totally be illegal.
  - shortsunblack 3y ago
    Some people want areas without kids. Why should that be illegal? Kids ruin most things, as as society gets older and childless, those that want to have fun in said society will lobby for changes. Movies in cinema all suck ass because they need to cater ages 13 demographic. Latest Hunger Games movie is prime example. Any time violence is supposed to happen, they cut away from the violence and merely imply violence happening. No-kids zone is what made HBO so successful -- it releases shows with wildly disturbing, no kids allowed, avant garde themes. If you do not allow explicit no kids zones, people will yearn for these zones and the supply will be met. Just with different justifications.
    - jgilias 3y ago
      Some people want areas without black people, the Irish, Muslims, old people, women, men, gay people. It really has nothing to do with having or not having R-rated movies. It’s just discrimination against children, and by extension their parents.
      - shortsunblack 3y ago
mcv 3y ago
Every kid is different, is ready for those things at a different age, and responds differently to risk. The most important thing is to do these things together with your kid and see how it works out. Maybe the real problem is that we don't spend enough time with our kids.
vel0city 3y ago
> At what age should you let your kid play in the pool without you even watching? Nobody swims in my pool without a buddy. Ever.
- mlrtime 3y ago
  Absolutes aren't really helpful, nobody? Phelps himself comes over and he can't swim alone? The point being is that there is no algorithm to sort this out. I would trust a young teen [just an example] to swim alone if they have demonstrated good risk behavior and swimming experience.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    > Phelps himself comes over and he can't swim alone? Nope. No buddy, no swimming. I don't even swim alone, even though I know chances are it would be fine 99% of the time. > The point being is that there is no algorithm to sort this out. Sure there is. if swimmer_cout < 2: throw NoSwimException The risks of something going wrong in an instant are incredibly high with water. A small problem can lead to massive consequences when it comes to easily interrupting your breathing. Someone bumps their head hard in the yard, they'll be out for a few minutes in the yard. Someone bumps their head hard in the pool, they're dead. Someone faints in the living room, they'll be back up in a few minutes. Someone faints in the pool, they're dead.

by ip26 3y ago

CalRobert 3y ago

The five year old would be ok except for drivers, who are the reason kids can't play in the street.

c22 3y ago

I don't let adults go swimming without a buddy.

goatlover 3y ago
How do you stop adults from going swimming alone?
- c22 3y ago
  I go with them.
  - babyshake 3y ago
    Assuming we're not swimming in a particularly dangerous reef or something, I'd find that annoying if I thought you were tagging along for the sake of my safety.
  - livueta 3y ago
    Now that's a wholesome and productive attitude. I think that's a great example of what I think of as the distinction between safetyism and preparedness: the former is all about no fun allowed in the presence of any level of risk whatsoever, with no rational consideration of likelihood and mitigating factors, while the latter is about doing fun stuff while taking reasonable procautions to mitigate realistic dangers. It's not going backpacking at all vs. taking a first aid class and bringing the ten essentials.
    - watwut 3y ago
      I would find OP massively annoying if I wanted to go to swim and he would force himself on it all the time.
      - livueta 3y ago
        Having grown up on the ocean, I'll admit I assumed it meant open-water swimming or some similar context with nontrivial risks that can get you regardless of how good you are, like crazy riptides. If we're talking the pool then yeah, somewhat different.
  - vasco 3y ago
    If you walk by a beach and someone is swimming alone you jump in? This sounds crazy I know multiple people that swim alone in the sea multiple times per week as their sport for many years.
    - c22 3y ago
      I'm not a control freak, if a full grown adult really wants to swim alone of course I can't stop them. But I've seen and heard about enough freak events that I cannot condone it. All it takes is one little stroke, muscle spasm, or unexpected undertow to get you into a really dangerous situation. Humans just aren't built for the water the same way fish are. If I was walking on the beach and I saw someone swimming alone I probably would hang out in the area and keep a passive eye on them until they got out. I wouldn't feel the need to get in the water unless I saw that they needed help. You'd be surprised at how rarely this happens, though. Usually there are lots of people at the beach.
      - vasco 3y ago
        In my corner of the world that isn't rare at all. Our whole coast is beaches and if it's winter time all the beaches will be completely empty. My friends swim all year round and a couple of them before work, so almost 100% of the time they swim, there's nobody around. Also having grown-up on the coast, since I was a child I've always been in the water with all the other kids, without parents around, never had any life-threatening cramp, never seen it happen either. Maybe I've just been lucky and you've been unlucky, since it's all anecdata anyway - but it's strange to me how it can both be so jarring for you to do it alone, and jarring for me to be afraid of doing it alone. For me it's like you said it's dangerous to walk in the park by yourself because a tree branch can fall on your head. It's true but I will eyeroll almost unconsciously.
        c22 3y ago
        You might roll your eyes but I think there is a real qualitative difference in risk between walking in the park and swimming in the ocean. People walk through the park all the time, so if a tree branch does fall on your head there is a good chance someone might happen upon you before you are dead. And while you are waiting there, unconscious and hemorrhaging blood into your cranial cavity, at least you will be breathing in air instead of brackish seawater. I have lived 15 minutes from the ocean my entire life and I have never gone swimming in it alone. I'm not an absolutist either, each situation has to be assessed on its own merits. If the kids are all strong swimmers and they want to go to the pool without an adult, that's fine with me. I might even let them go together into the sea depending on which beach they're headed to. But if they're taking the 3-year-old in water wings out to the open ocean I'm going to be tagging along. Likewise, if you want to walk alone in the park I think you'll probably be all right, but if you're hiking 10 miles out into the wilderness I'm going to strongly suggest you bring a buddy, whatever your age.
  - Ma8ee 3y ago
    I did that once with an acquaintance that insisted on swimming across a not that small lake. The problem was that she was a much better swimmer than I was, and I almost exhausted myself trying to keep up.
  - rufus_foreman 3y ago
    >> I go with them. Awesome. We're going to the quarry, and we're going to jump off the cliff over 10 feet of rock into the water. Bring a case of Meister Brau.

abracadaniel 3y ago

It’s probably important that they thoroughly understand that they are taking a risk for it to have an effect. It’s probably very dependent on their developmental state.

gottoupvote 3y ago
Maybe not .. if nothing bad ever happens, there was no risk. The appreciation of the concept of risk comes from the experience of failure.

asdff 3y ago

While you have a good point, I wonder where all this erring on the side of caution even emerged or why it even emerged? Rearing young is pretty deep and ancient behavior in our species, yet when we think of examples of prior generations or suppose cases from the historical record, the trend always seemed to be free range parenting. Only within the last generation or two perhaps has childhood changed from one of exploration and freedom to one of restriction and days scheduled to the minute. Do the kids benefit from this unique way of being reared? Maybe, maybe not, we know mental health issues are on the rise among children. But, on the other hand, there is a profit to be made selling tools to monitor and restrict and activities and services to fill up an otherwise idle day, so there is some degree of incentive to keep this behavior around in our culture now that it has emerged for better or worse.

notanormalnerd 3y ago
In the last two generations we went from having 3 or more kids to having 1 kid. You just weren't able to supervise 5 kids with that level of caution like you are today. Also biologically your whole legacys survival lies on one kid.
huytersd 3y ago
People have fewer kids now. Only five or sex decades ago, losing a kid was relatively normalized. We’re just very risk averse now.
The_Colonel 3y ago
1. People had way less free time / resources to be able to watch over their kids 2. Children used to die all the time from various causes. I remember e.g. the case of Mozart who had just one surviving sibling and 5 who died early. I can't imagine what the parents had to go through - their first 3 children died early. You have to become desensitized to not go crazy. 2. Social status / value of children grew a lot.
m_fayer 3y ago
Having children has become way more exhausting: the need for advanced degrees and career climbing before reproduction means we do it later in life when we have less energy. The same factors plus mobility means grandparents are unavailable or worse, in need of care themselves. When both parents have full time jobs, the crunch is even worse. This all has 2 psychological effects: when parents feel like they’re just barely keeping this teetering lifestyle from falling over, they become very controlling. Tight control becomes the name of the game: it’s how everything’s done and anyway no one has the time or energy for the unexpected. Also, when the child represents a gargantuan investment, people become realty protective over their fragile prize. Like a luxury car that you can barely afford: all protective measures will be taken.

MisterBastahrd 3y ago

I was 5 when I was traveling across my neighborhood on my bike to go visit my friends. I'd tell my parent where I was heading and then I'd go. I was 6 when I received my first Victorinox swiss army knife and learned how to sharpen it to a razor's edge. I was 7 when I started going to a local swim club by myself, saving up a week's allowance for a day at the pool and some candy. I was 8 when my very best friend moved away. I got in fights with multiple friends' older brothers for teasing me about it and gave almost as good as I got given my age disadvantage. I was 9 when I was travelling to the end of the neighborhood, parking my bike by a friends' house, then hiking a quarter mile to go fishing in a river pond. Parents these days aren't rational at all. They worry about protecting the physical nature of the child and leave their development and ability to accurately assess risk on their own as an afterthought. That's how you perpetuate failure: with children who grow up while never possessing the life experience necessary to properly raise kids of their own. The world simply isn't that fucking scary.

mcv 3y ago
Same here, and I try to let my kids do the same, but they don't seem to want it. My youngest is 9 and still wants me to bring him to school and pick him up. My oldest has a Swiss army knife, but I don't think he's ever used it. They almost never want to play outside, hang with their friends or anything like that. Maybe I should kick them out of the house, but that gets a lot of resistance and feels like punishment to them. And they're invariably back in 15 minutes. At least they learned how to cross the street safely at a young age. That's the one bit of independence that stuck.
- trealira 3y ago
  > Maybe I should kick them out of the house, but that gets a lot of resistance and feels like punishment to them. This is what my grandparents did to my mom and aunts and uncles when they were growing up during the 60s and 70s. They weren't allowed back inside before dinner, but they had to return by sunset. They were used to it, and spent their time playing in the woods and playing games with the neighborhood kids. Nowadays, if you kicked them outside the house, they'd probably just have each other to play with, because kids don't play outside as much.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

obscurette 3y ago

It's not about children actually. The problem in general is how patronizing our society have become in last decades.

mschuster91 3y ago
That's mostly a factor of lower childbirth rates. Put plain and simple: people used to have 3+ kids (or more, if you counted those who died before age 6), so if one or two died, got severely injured, turned mad, criminal or celibate-religious there would be still at least one or two other kids to inherit whatever wealth the family had (i.e. usually the farm or trade shop) and pass on the family name. Nowadays middle-class people tend to have just one or two children, they literally cannot afford the space or childrearing costs for more - for lower classes eligible for government assistance such as the un(der)employed the situation does look different as society picks up large parts of the tab. Additionally, ever rising requirements in employment criteria make it necessary to invest more and more into their education: up until maybe 2-3 decades ago, even a school dropout could work in construction, a factory, retail, farm or mine and make a relatively decent living. But these jobs have largely gone away to China/India or to automation, so the few employment options for "undereducated" people are highly contested. And so, the kid must turn out perfect: there is no room for the kid to make mistakes, especially not ones that endanger their career prospects, and hence all the helicopter parenting. On top of all of that come decades of media/politician "fear brainwashings" (aka, the "pedo child-snatcher van" myth), as well as the legitimate collapse of a high-trust society (homeless, drunk and mentally ill people literally everywhere in major cities; police simply not enforcing laws any more).
- hyperthesis 3y ago
  Do upper-class people have more children?
  - sgerenser 3y ago
    I’ve found on average richer people have less children. And not only at the threshold of government benefits.

hackerlight 3y ago

I'd change the framing. Kids need to have the thrill and perception of risk. But actual risk is a silly thing to strive for. You want activities that are high thrill but low actual risk. Like riding a minibike without a helmet is stupidity. You can get 99% of the same thrill with a helmet and reduce your actual risk substantially for no downside.

gwd 3y ago
> Like riding a minibike without a helmet is stupidity. It's what kind of risk we're talking about. When I'm supervising my 4-year-old, I definitely want to prevent him from getting life-altering brain trauma. But if he falls and breaks his arm? Certainly worth warning him about, but in the end he'll be fine, and giving him the choice to take that risk is part of his development. I let him use the battery-powered electric drill (under close supervision), because he's shown that he's careful, and the worst that can could happen is he get some skin abrasions. He's not getting anywhere near the circular saw until he's a lot older.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

RoyalHenOil 3y ago

It depends a lot on the activity and the individual. I am almost 40, and I still won't use our bandsaw unsupervised. I don't think there is any age that I will trust myself with that because I am clumsy. When my sister and I were growing up, we were given our independence in different areas at different ages: it was a matter of when we felt confident doing those things unsupervised and when we earned our parents' trust. As a general rule, I got to do responsibility-based tasks (like stay home alone, pick my own bedtime, and set my own homework schedule) at an earlier age than my sister, but she got to do physically risky tasks (like use knives, use the stove, and play high-risk sports) at an earlier age than me. In all cases, it was a gradual process: they guided us, then they let us try while they watched, then they let us try while they were on hand if we called out for help, then they let us do it alone. Each step took as long as they (or we) felt was needed. My parents are both highly anxious/cautious people, so I know it wasn't easy for them to give us these freedoms, but they understood intellectually that it was vital that we practice for adulthood well before we were suddenly on our own. They knew they only had a few short years to teach us how to survive independently of them. It must have been a lot of work for them, but we were planned children (not accidents) and they put a lot of thought into how they wanted to raise us.

josefx 3y ago

> It’s not ok to let your five year old play with a soccer ball on a busy neighborhood street unsupervised. When I grew up the road by my grandparents house was wide and empty and you could see anything coming a mile away and drivers could see the kids playing just as well. Now it has been redesigned to be a cluttered mess to "discourage speeding" even adding parking spots to reduce the width of the road. You could drive through it at walking speed and still wouldn't see a kid trying to cross the road before it popped out from behind a car right in front of you.

mcv 3y ago
I suspect the added parking was not "to reduce the width of the road", because it's easy to reduce the width of the road without adding parking. The probably just wanted to add parking and misused the safety argument to sell it, ignoring the fact that visibility is also important for safety.
CalRobert 3y ago
Narrower streets are safer and nicer, though. Wide streets really do result in much higher speeds. https://grist.org/cities/heres-why-narrower-streets-are-safer/ https://grist.org/cities/heres-why-narrower-streets-are-safe... among many other sources. Ideally they'd add parking protected bike lanes

makeitdouble 3y ago

This reminds of the "no kids zone" concept in Korea [0]. When first hearing about it sounded just a bit extreme, but the moreI read about it the darker and gloomer it gets, and it's a phenomenon that is having a deep impact on the whole Korean society's future. [0] https://m.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20230609000677 https://m.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20230609000677

jgilias 3y ago
What the hell… Thank you for posting this. I was thinking of going for a vacation to Korea _with kids_, and now I don’t think I will. Can’t imagine needing to explain to my well-behaved 8-year old that, no, we can’t go to some place we’d want to go, because other kids can’t behave. This should totally be illegal.
- shortsunblack 3y ago
  Some people want areas without kids. Why should that be illegal? Kids ruin most things, as as society gets older and childless, those that want to have fun in said society will lobby for changes. Movies in cinema all suck ass because they need to cater ages 13 demographic. Latest Hunger Games movie is prime example. Any time violence is supposed to happen, they cut away from the violence and merely imply violence happening. No-kids zone is what made HBO so successful -- it releases shows with wildly disturbing, no kids allowed, avant garde themes. If you do not allow explicit no kids zones, people will yearn for these zones and the supply will be met. Just with different justifications.
  - jgilias 3y ago
    Some people want areas without black people, the Irish, Muslims, old people, women, men, gay people. It really has nothing to do with having or not having R-rated movies. It’s just discrimination against children, and by extension their parents.
    - shortsunblack 3y ago

mcv 3y ago

Every kid is different, is ready for those things at a different age, and responds differently to risk. The most important thing is to do these things together with your kid and see how it works out. Maybe the real problem is that we don't spend enough time with our kids.

vel0city 3y ago

> At what age should you let your kid play in the pool without you even watching? Nobody swims in my pool without a buddy. Ever.

mlrtime 3y ago
Absolutes aren't really helpful, nobody? Phelps himself comes over and he can't swim alone? The point being is that there is no algorithm to sort this out. I would trust a young teen [just an example] to swim alone if they have demonstrated good risk behavior and swimming experience.
- vel0city 3y ago
  > Phelps himself comes over and he can't swim alone? Nope. No buddy, no swimming. I don't even swim alone, even though I know chances are it would be fine 99% of the time. > The point being is that there is no algorithm to sort this out. Sure there is. if swimmer_cout < 2: throw NoSwimException The risks of something going wrong in an instant are incredibly high with water. A small problem can lead to massive consequences when it comes to easily interrupting your breathing. Someone bumps their head hard in the yard, they'll be out for a few minutes in the yard. Someone bumps their head hard in the pool, they're dead. Someone faints in the living room, they'll be back up in a few minutes. Someone faints in the pool, they're dead.