> For example, nowadays, parents expect their children to be free to go and do groceries alone or play outside without adult supervision only at around the age of 10 to 12 (if not even higher).
Except, parents nowadays can get arrested for even less. [1]
I grew up in car-centric suburbia. I played outside everyday. Rode around on my bike with my friends. We'd play wall-ball, stick ball, street hockey. Hang out at the neighborhood pool. Make bike jumps out of stuff. Play in the park. The problem is not having the imagination to make something out of not much. And today suburbia has many more parks and resources. Eg. We never had a skatepark. We'd skate in parking lots or on shoddily homebuilt ramps. But now there are 3 in biking distance from me.
Right, stereotypical suburbia is actually pretty good for walking and biking around, hanging out at the park, etc.
What's not so good is "rural" suburbia, where every road is either a stroad or a country through-road with no shoulder and 35+ MPH traffic.
Equally bad is "urban-ish" suburbia where you have high density housing neighborhoods with few parks or other amenities, sliced up by stroads and through-roads.
>> I grew up in car-centric suburbia. I [ed: did things in parks, streets that were safe to play in, places without risk of acquiring an arrest record].
> Right, stereotypical suburbia is actually pretty good for walking and biking around, hanging out at the park, etc...What's not so good is "rural" suburbia [ed: neighborhoods built in recent generations]
My generation had cool places to play. We had streets without heightened risk of dying. We had countless places to go without worrying about life-changing arrest records (when minor transgressions were handled and then fully forgotten).
My kids generation did not have those things.
In the face of this, modern adults seem divided into two camps:
1) Blaming kids for having their development world wiped out and
2) Taking away the few tools kids have - for coping with having their development world wiped out.
I saw your other message in this thread. Life changing arrests? Are we discussing the same topic? My previous statement stands. There are definitely more parks geared towards kids in suburbia today vs. 30-40 years ago.
> There are definitely more parks geared towards kids in suburbia today vs. 30-40 years ago.
And more houses built too far to be within casual walking distance from them.
There's also the thing where one reachable park is a poor replacement for the ~360° of direction I (all of us) could set out in, reaching hundreds of possible destinations. Most of that travel had low risk of adult interference. Most of those options were available to us kids, beginning at a young age.
All of that was unavailable to my kids and their generation.
> Except, parents nowadays can get arrested for even less.
I wonder how many parents read about that one example and then behave in a way that ignores the likely millions of cases every day of kids playing in their front yard alone where that didn't happen.
> Debra Harrell, 46, let her 9-year-old daughter play outside alone at the park. The South Carolina child had a cellphone she could use to call her mother in case of emergency. On the girl’s third day alone at the park, someone asked her where her mother was. The girl said her mom was at work. (Harrell works at McDonald’s and didn’t want her daughter to have to sit inside the restaurant for hours on a beautiful summer day.) The result? Harrell was arrested for “unlawful conduct towards a child” and put in jail; her daughter is now in the custody of the department of social services.
This story has a lot of details left out, and the cops may have very much been over reacting. But it is a pretty different scenario than the one previously cited. In this scenario, the girl was younger, and left at home/the park all day while the mother was away at work, for multiple days. (Rather than just being outside for a couple of hours once). It also is not clear what other conditions may have been present that may have contributed to the outcome.
I very much agree that helicopter parenting and snobby neighbors are a major issue. Just that it is hard to judge individual situations without all the facts.
Debra Harrel made the terrible mistake of being: black, lower income, and living in the South while black and lower income.
Meanwhile you have gangs of roving kids in Philadelphia robbing and beating people up.
And you have elementary schoolers in NYC walking to and from school.
Really it comes down to location. And the people most likely to be roused by news stories are people living in very sheltered locations (e.g. no one in Chicago is taking the "Chiraq" propaganda seriously).
If you don't want to have busy bodies getting involved in your life, don't live in busy body shitholes (most of the south -- coincidentally where much of this stuff happens).
Yea, I was going to say, there's no way the police would have reacted that way if the mother wasn't black and working class. If she was a white professional, she would have been treated with kid gloves by everyone in the justice system. The busybody nosey neighbors would have of course still reported the kid no matter what race she was.
Part of the problem is the faster and wider communication of these kinds of incidents. I think people can intuitively understand, at lowest, 5%* odds. Anything below that is either 5% or impossible unless you're mathing it out.
Hearing about these kinds of tail-case incidents at least once or twice a year is probably enough to bump them up to the 5% category.
*I'm not committed to any specific number here. The relevant threshold is "high enough to consider when making decisions".
An interesting resource is IDC 203, which describes how the US intelligence community discusses probability. The table in paragraph 2a says something similar to what you are saying:
almost no chance / remote := 1%-5%
very unlikely / highly improbable := 5%-20%
etc...
It may really depend on the location. My neighborhood is nice ( with an occasional crazy person driving through either too fast or too loud ) and it does warm my crusty heart to see kids playing in the frontyards. I can absolutely understand that there are locations where that would not be sensible.
No parent wants to take an avoidable, even 1 in a million chance of losing custody of their kids because of doing a reasonable thing that someone could take out of context or make trouble for them about.
Yes because getting your child taken away is a more immediate visceral sort of injustice than (usually unknowingly) damaging their mental health. Most parents would have their kid fucked up than not at all even if the chances of losing your kid are lower. Idk ymmv but that’s what I’ve observed
States need to adopt safe harbor clauses for parents. A particular part of a town / city being unsafe for kids should not be seen as the parents' problem, but an indictment of bad city planning, services, and management.
EDIT: Also this story is insane. Who sees a neighbor kid playing in their yard and calls the police? I'm going to generalize here and speak about my fellow conservatives (because Florida is a solid red state at this point), but I've noticed many have little interest in actually living in a conservative way. In the 'olden days' people would just invite the kid in because -- you know -- you knew your neighbors and thought they were good people (or at least tolerable people). Nowadays, it seems everybody just ignores their neighbors and minds their own business. Not that it's only conservatives who do this (far from it; it seems systemic).
Imagine calling the police on your neighbor's kid!
EDIT 2: From the article: "The authorities claim he had no access to water or shelter". Again... can you imagine being a kid in your own neighborhood and not being fairly certain that, if you needed it, one of your neighbors would give you WATER? I know all the kids on my block and regularly invite them over to play with our kids if we're all outside, and have no compunction giving them water? For goodness' sake, the person phoning the police should have been arrested for not undertaking the most basic neighborly duties to a child.
I’ve spoken about it in other threads, but I believe that a significant factor in the the weakening of neighborhood community is the need for people to move frequently (relative to the past) to have access to opportunity (whether it be education, employment, or something else). Each move means a total reset of social connections for the individual moving and a hole left behind in the community being moved out of. Eventually nobody in a neighborhood other than a handful of longtimers (likely retirees) knows each other and everybody is a stranger.
I think it would do an immense amount of good if employers in particular made greater efforts to allow employees to stay where they are, whether that be through small satellite offices or remote work.
Do we actually know the circumstances here? I have family that work in CPS (in Utah) and it takes A LOT before kids will be removed and placed in foster care. Even then, the end goal of the foster service is to reunite the kids with their families. Right now, we just have an anonymous claim with a pinky promise from the author that this is real.
I'm thinking of the recent Ruby Franke incident. Were Ruby to describe the situation she might say her kids were outside for their health. However, dig in just a little and you find that she was severely abusing them for drinking water to try and force out the devil.
The reporters claim to have reviewed the actual case files in the article. I am always a little skeptical of these types of articles as well. But I do know firsthand (people I know directly and am familiar with the conditions and case) of cases of CPS way overrating, to both deliberately false reports and well intentioned reports that were mistaken.
> I'm going to generalize here and speak about my fellow conservatives
That's not generalizing because you don't know which category the person is from. What you did was fabricate a scapegoat using your imagination. There are plenty of valid reasons to let the police handle a legal dispute involving a child.
In my car centric suburb we played road hockey on our driveway and road our bikes to the park, the high school, and eventually to Tim Hortons or McDonald’s. I loved my childhood.
I don’t really understood how we ended up at the consensus that low-traffic cookie cutter suburbs with big yards are a bad environment for kids to grow up in. The reason kids aren’t being socialized correctly these days has nothing to do with suburbs and everything to do with the dopamine dispensing supercomputers they’re handed at age 0.
Except, parents nowadays can get arrested for even less. [1]
[1] https://reason.com/2015/06/11/11-year-old-boy-played-in-his-...
> The kids are growing up playing with their phones rather than playing outside with other kids, learning the ropes of, well—life.
With suburbia and car centric infrastructure expanding, where are they even supposed to play?