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The irony is that it is rare for children to be snatched off the street, yet that is what these helicopter parents are afraid of. Likewise, it is rare for pare
by function_seven 12y ago
The irony is that it is rare for children to be snatched off the street, yet that is what these helicopter parents are afraid of.
Likewise, it is rare for parents to be found neglectful when allowing their children to walk alone, yet that is what we HNers are screeching about.
The linked news story is news because it is a rare event. Hundreds of thousdands of kids walk alone from/to school each day and don't get the cops called on them.
- ggchappell 12y agoYou make a point. However, I suggest that the two situations are not really parallel. Suppose a child is snatched off the street. That's an outrageous thing to do. Say we find out who did it. We would expect charges, a trial, and punishment. In this story we have government employees finding a couple to be a weird sort of semi-guilty for doing nothing wrong. Said government employees made a credible threat that they might, in the future, steal the couple's children. These are also outrageous actions. Have these people been investigated or punished? Have the policies that let them treat the couple this way been changed, or even officially questioned? Both answers are most likely "no". It appears that these -- perhaps rare, but also outrageous -- actions are business as usual for the government. The equivalent for the first situation above, might be a prosecutor failing to bring charges against a child abductor, and, when questioned about it, stating that such abductions were generally things he wanted to encourage. That, I think, would also be worthy of a new article.