As a parent of two kids, the leaving children at home unattended while the parent runs a short errand being considered a crime has always caused me anguish.
The leading cause of death in children in the United States is by car accident[0]. So if my youngest son is asleep in his crib and I need to leave to grab groceries from the store a mile away, I have to wake him up, strap him into his placebo seat[1], and put his life into statistically far, far greater danger than the risk of him somehow suffocating in his empty crib or dying in a house fire. Not to mention the added stress on both him and me that arises from waking a toddler prematurely--stresses that result in shaken baby syndrome and the third leading cause of death in his age group.
Upfront, I want to say that I agree with just-about everything that you have written here. I would have upvoted you and move on if it weren't for the lame "placebo seat" comment. It's beyond me as to how anyone could watch that talk and agree with Mr Levitt's conclusions.
He flat out admits that his only sources of his "research" are 1) the DoT NHTSA's FARS [0] and 2) four crash tests that were run by an anonymous test center.
I can't think of a better example of a red herring argument. He's basically saying, "Don't bother second guessing my data because I have these videos from a person who will NOT collaborate the results."
The FARS data is heavily biased as well. First, it only reports _accidents with fatalities_. It's a completely voluntary survey, it's up to state and local governments to enforce their police jurisdictions to comply. At the time of the video it spanned 30 years of data, 1975-2005. There's incredible amounts car safety improvements in that time frame. I'll defer to an expert here, but air bags and crumble zones will top that lists; I'm sure there have been improvements to seat belts and car seats in that time. Point being, most of that data is irrelevant.
And, then his ego shines through when he glorifies economists superiority over "scientists" because economists "look at real world data"; if his opening wasn't awkward wretch inducing already, then that surely should have done it.
If you want to be an advocate for Mr. Levitt's ideas proceeding for actual scientific inquiry, have at it. But, don't spread a cockamamie pejorative, like "placebo seat", because you watched a terrible TED talk.
I can't help, but feel my response was overkill for having taken offense from two words. I attempted to find some follow up studies based on Levitt's TED talk, but as it should be to nobody's surprise, neither side seems to have taken it seriously (to progress nor retort). The only source that I found which I actually liked is called "What If These TED Talks Were Horribly Wrong?" [1]. In which, Levitt gets top billing, and there is link to a study called "Effectiveness of Child Safety Seats vs Seat Belts in Reducing Risk for Death in Children in Passenger Vehicle Crashes" [2]; it's freely available, but I have yet to read it.
[0] U.S. Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Fatality Analysis Report System, http://www.nhtsa.gov/FARS
> and 2) four crash tests that were run by an anonymous test center.
He addresses that criticism directly in the video by saying that there are another 45,000+ incidences of real-world crash data that have been analyzed.
> "Effectiveness of Child Safety Seats vs Seat Belts in Reducing Risk for Death in Children in Passenger Vehicle Crashes" [2]; it's freely available, but I have yet to read it.
Well, if you did read it(you don't even have to read it, just look at the easy-to-read tables), you would see that their data results match exactly with what Levitt is saying -- there is not real difference! However, their conclusion is different, because they have an additional variable, which is that they determine if that car seat was "seriously misused".
I have to admit, I never heard this before and it is hard to believe, given that conventional wisdom says that child seats are safer, however, the data does seem to back up what he is saying.
It really sounds to me like you are the one that is falling victim to exactly what he is claiming, "It must be right, because that is what everyone believes--plus it is kids!"
You do know that instead of knee-jerk criticizing someone for believing what an economist says, you can go through his data, show where his methods, data, or conclusion is wrong and help everyone! (... and be famous in the process)
The paper concludes that there is a 28% reduction in risk of child death when using a restraint system vs just a seat belt (95% CI) and a 21% reduction in risk of death even if the system is misused. How is that "no difference"?
I addressed that in my comment. Their numbers are practically identical, but their conclusion is different, because they make a determination on whether a car seat was "seriously misused".
Further, Table 1 says that seat belts had a non-fatal rate of 99.89% and restraint systems had a non-fatal rate of 99.88%.
Hell, they flat-out say that they had to adjust it to get those numbers:
"Table 2 summarizes little difference in the unadjusted risk for death between users of child restraint systems and users of seat belts (RR, 1.03; 95% confidence interval, 0.72-1.46). After adjusting for seating position, vehicle type, model year, driver and passenger ages, and driver survival status, children in child restraint systems had a 21% reduction in risk for death compared with children in seat belts, although this difference was only marginally significant (RR, 0.79; 95% confidence interval, 0.59-1.05). After excluding the cases of serious child restraint system and seat belt misuse from FARS, children in child restraint systems had a 28% reduction in risk for death compared with children in seat belts (RR, 0.72; 95% confidence interval, 0.54-0.97)."
It seems that they are trying to get to that conclusion.
The result still seems compelling to me. If I can reduce the risk of my child being killed in a car accident by 28% (even if the raw numbers are small) I'm going to do it.
I don't want to change the goal posts here, but death isn't the only thing these booster seats protect against. A properly used booster seat reduces the relative risk of non-fatal injury by more than half[1]. That is also extremely compelling to me.
"Further, Table 1 says that seat belts had a non-fatal rate of 99.89% and restraint systems had a non-fatal rate of 99.88%."
Um, no, I'm afraid.
Table 1 describes the characteristics of the data set. 99.89% of the "seat belt" sample were non-fatal accidents and 0.11% were fatal; that and the row immediately above it sum to 100%. A fatal accident is defined as one in which someone died, including a pedestrian.
"Within FARS, we identified 7813 children aged 2 through 6 years who were vehicle occupants restrained in a child restraint system or a seat belt in a nondrivable passenger car, van, pickup truck, or sport-utility vehicle that was involved in a crash with at least 1 passenger fatality between 1998 and 2003. Of these 7813 children involved in fatal crashes, 1096 children (14%) were killed."
You will then note that in Table 1 for "Overall" the Fatal rate is 1096 (identical to the number of children, the 14% above, that were killed).
You will also note that if you add together the FARS and NASS CDS numbers you will get 9246, which is the total number of children aget 2-6 from both and also the sum of 1096 and 8150 from the "Overall" column on Table 1.
now that I think about it, it doesn't even matter. If the same relative rates are fatal and non-fatal (separately) that still says that they are practically equivalent.
A 4 or 6 point harness for adults and mandatory bolsters would have a major effect on the fatalities too, but would likely result in fewer people wearing them. Hans and helmets would also save us all from airbags.
"Results Compared with seat belts, child restraints, when not seriously misused (eg, unattached restraint, child restraint system harness not used, 2 children restrained with 1 seat belt) were associated with a 28% reduction in risk for death (relative risk, 0.72; 95% confidence interval, 0.54-0.97) in children aged 2 through 6 years after adjusting for seating position, vehicle type, model year, driver and passenger ages, and driver survival status. When including cases of serious misuse, the effectiveness estimate was slightly lower (21%) (relative risk, 0.79; 95% confidence interval, 0.59-1.05)."
That is their conclusion (which I addressed in my comment). Read the table:
Table 1 says that seat belts had a non-fatal rate of 99.89% and restraint systems had a non-fatal rate of 99.88%.
They flat-out say that they had to adjust it to get those numbers:
"Table 2 summarizes little difference in the unadjusted risk for death between users of child restraint systems and users of seat belts (RR, 1.03; 95% confidence interval, 0.72-1.46). After adjusting for seating position, vehicle type, model year, driver and passenger ages, and driver survival status, children in child restraint systems had a 21% reduction in risk for death compared with children in seat belts, although this difference was only marginally significant (RR, 0.79; 95% confidence interval, 0.59-1.05). After excluding the cases of serious child restraint system and seat belt misuse from FARS, children in child restraint systems had a 28% reduction in risk for death compared with children in seat belts (RR, 0.72; 95% confidence interval, 0.54-0.97)."
If you read further down in their conclusions, they seem to have a real hard-on over Levitt. I am not saying that they are wrong, but the data (un-modified) supports Levitt's conclusion.
"In a more recent series of analyses, Levitt4 and Dubner and Levitt11 used FARS data from 1975 to 2003 and, by various methods, directly compared the mortality with child restraint systems vs seat belts in children aged 2 to 6 years and could not demonstrate a difference in effectiveness. Levitt and Porter12 restricted the FARS data set to 2-vehicle crashes in which someone in the other vehicle (ie, the vehicle without the index child occupant) died, under the assumption that the distribution of restraint use among children in potentially fatal crashes is independent of whether someone in the other vehicle dies, after adjusting for various crash-related characteristics.
"The precision of these previous effectiveness estimates and their relevance to today's fleet were limited by their reliance on FARS (the limits of which were presented in the introduction), by the inclusion of older vehicles and restraints, and by failing to control for the severity (potential unsurvivability) of the crashes. Our analysis based on a modern cohort of children involved in crashes in which the car was rendered undrivable addressed many of the limitations of these previous analyses and found effectiveness estimates for child restraint systems to be greater than that for seat belts alone, with estimates greater than those of both Levitt4 and Hertz.6"
Levitt, et al, used only FARS data, which only records fatal accidents. A hypothetical accident where only the child would have died but that was prevented by the restraints would therefore not show up in the data, leading to the value of the restraints being under reported.
Further, failing to control for the severity of the accident (which this work does using the survival of the driver) also undervalues restraints: if the car ends up as a ball the size of a grapefruit, it doesn't matter what restraints were used.
> Levitt, et al, used only FARS data, which only records fatal accidents. A hypothetical accident where only the child would have died but that was prevented by the restraints would therefore not show up in the data, leading to the value of the restraints being under reported.
This is the same regarding any type of restraints, including seat belts, no?
Also, you should realized that all of their extrapolated data is also hypothetical, and relies on spotty reporting from police.
Please note, that I am not convinced that Levitt has it right, just that he is not incorrect regarding the data.
So what about your own seemingly mostly emotion-based blanket one-sentence statement that omits even the attempt of citing prove, or even to actually examine the issue you present?
I got an epiphany moment about that story when I read a story about a medical doctor visiting a "quack" conference. There was one "esoteric" who complained about the others being "esoteric" (he practiced something else than the others, but still something weird), and the doctor looking down on them all. But the crowning part of that story was that the doctor herself held a believe by now proven to be wrong by studies. So they were all laughing about each other, in addition to the original three-philosopher problem this anecdote included a hierarchy (I am better than you), going over several levels, and it turned out the person who thought was at the top looking down on everybody else actually wasn't and should have had a good look in the mirror herself.
The hint should have been seeing that one guy lamenting that all the others were esoteric, but introspection based up on what we see in others isn't many people's string suit. No, (only) they are "stupid".
The philosophers in the little ancient Greek story/riddle managed to get to the truth by including themselves into their logical reasoning and not just think about the others. When you come to a conclusion about other people, always consider if/how it applies to yourself.
The more modern saying is that about throwing stones in a glass house... but it lacks the educational value of the three philosopher problem because it's only the "TL;DT" (too long, didn't think).
So what about your own seemingly mostly emotion-based blanket one-sentence statement that omits even the attempt of citing prove, or even to actually examine the issue you present?
I got an epiphany moment about that story when I read a story about a medical doctor visiting a "quack" conference. There was one "esoteric" who complained about the others being "esoteric" (he practiced something else than the others, but still something weird), and the doctor looking down on them all. But the crowning part of that story was that the doctor herself held a believe by now proven to be wrong by studies. So they were all laughing about each other, in addition to the original three-philosopher problem this anecdote included a hierarchy (I am better than you), going over several levels, and it turned out the person who thought was at the top looking down on everybody else actually wasn't and should have had a good look in the mirror herself.
The hint should have been seeing that one guy lamenting that all the others were esoteric, but introspection based up on what we see in others isn't many people's string suit. No, (only) they are "stupid".
The philosophers in the little ancient Greek story/riddle managed to get to the truth by including themselves into their logical reasoning and not just think about the others. When you come to a conclusion about other people, always consider if/how it applies to yourself.
The more modern saying is that about throwing stones in a glass house... but it lacks the educational value of the three philosopher problem because it's only the "TL;DT" (too long, didn't think).
So what about your own seemingly mostly emotion-based blanket one-sentence statement that omits even the attempt of citing prove, or even to actually examine the issue you present?
I got an epiphany moment about that story when I read a story about a medical doctor visiting a "quack" conference. There was one "esoteric" who complained about the others being "esoteric" (he practiced something else than the others, but still something weird), and the doctor looking down on them all. But the crowning part of that story was that the doctor herself held a believe by now proven to be wrong by studies. So they were all laughing about each other, in addition to the original three-philosopher problem this anecdote included a hierarchy (I am better than you), going over several levels, and it turned out the person who thought was at the top looking down on everybody else actually wasn't and should have had a good look in the mirror herself.
The hint should have been seeing that one guy lamenting that all the others were esoteric, but introspection based up on what we see in others isn't many people's string suit. No, (only) they are "stupid".
The philosophers in the little ancient Greek story/riddle managed to get to the truth by including themselves into their logical reasoning and not just think about the others. When you come to a conclusion about other people, always consider if/how it applies to yourself.
The more modern saying is that about throwing stones in a glass house... but it lacks the educational value of the three philosopher problem because it's only the "TL;DT" (too long, didn't think).
Whether it is reasonable to believe something does not depend on whether it is true (because you can't know that), but on whether it is the currently best-known explanation of the available evidence.
Quacks aren't stupid because what they believe isn't true, but because they believe it without sufficient evidence, or, often enough, despite evidence to the contrary.
I presume the argument was that a doctor who is misinformed about the latest studies in wrong is an entirely different way to a quack (e.g. a vaccine denier) who may be 'not even wrong'.
I didn't watch the Ted talk, I read the chapter in his book. So I don't have the high emotional response.
What I see is that child seats are being DOT approved much as if car crash data only had to exist for one vendor selected model for one configuration of passengers and then cars with similar mass distribution were deemed inherently safe for any configuration. Thus, there is nothing in the approval to indicate that whatever approved car seat you buy achieves a safety purpose.
I don't really care if Levitt can prove that they are on average less safe. The point that they will have a random distribution between better and worse than nothing for their only purpose is why they are a fraudulent industry that can't be mandated by legislation. I would rather parents that don't care to do research buy nothing than buy the cheapest or prettiest or most adjustable fine avoidance mechanism. Forcing uninformed purchases furthers the average level of safety fraud, pushing the market to converge towards less safety.
The chosen system lets DOT look important as they raise that minimum bar to exclude the loopholes used by the very cheapest seats while fighting industry lobbying.. It is like they are looking for a new batch of deaths from encouraging a market for extremely dangerous products to be important again.
You talk about his ego, and say the video is terrible, and the data it's based on is biased, and also criticize him for being awkward. (Hey, I'm awkward. Careful.)
Most of these seem like personal attacks, was that the intent?
On the merits, I leaned far more towards his position when I heard Ray LaHood's response, which boiled down to, "I don't have the luxury of looking at data, because I'm a grandparent."
You said it was egotistical for Levitt to claim he looks at data, but his main opposition literally decries bothering to look at data, that's not a straw man.
If our transportation agency can't be bothered to ascertain whether something is a placebo or not before mandating it, I see no reason to treat it as somehow sacred and beyond pejorative.
> He flat out admits that his only sources of his "research" are 1) the DoT NHTSA's FARS [0] and 2) four crash tests that were run by an anonymous test center.
Nope. You didn't watch it to the end, did ya? From the transcript: "In my data, and in another data set I've looked at for New Jersey crashes, I find very small differences in injury. So in this data, it's statistically insignificant differences in injury between car seats and lap-and-shoulder belts. In the New Jersey data, which is different, because it's not just fatal crashes, but all crashes in New Jersey that are reported, it turns out that there is a 10 percent difference in injuries, but generally they're the minor injuries."
> The FARS data is heavily biased as well. First, it only reports _accidents with fatalities_.
The NJ data reports injuries, too.
> At the time of the video it spanned 30 years of data, 1975-2005. There's incredible amounts car safety improvements in that time frame.
That point was addressed, by analysing more recent subsets of the data. From the transcript: "And the other thing you might argue is, 'Well, car seats have got a lot better over time. And so if we look at recent crashes -- the whole data set is almost 30 years' worth of data -- you won't see it in the recent crashes. The new car seats are far, far better.' But indeed, in recent crashes the lap-and-shoulder seatbelts, actually, are doing even better than the car seats
> The only source that I found which I actually liked is called "What If These TED Talks Were Horribly Wrong?"
Skepticism sells. Hate to be the one who appeals to authority, but I have more faith in a data scientist (with a PhD and published articles and all that jazz) doing analysis, than a meta-analysis by a journalist whose main achievement is writing plays, and whose main aim is create controversy for clicks.
I'd love to see people do some PSAs on this. A campaign for people to back the fuck off.
Mom leaves child at home to shop; evil music plays; kid looks like he might get into trouble; nothing happens and everyone smiles at the end with some statistics on how it's pretty safe.
INT. HOME - DAY
A MOTHER is getting ready to leave the house. Her
TODDLER is sitting in his playpen.
MOTHER
(Warmly)
I’ll just be gone for a few minutes, buddy!
TODDLER
(Pleased, without understanding)
Gah!
The door slams and a nosy NEIGHBOR appears immediately
outside the window. Seeing the unattended TODDLER, the
NEIGHBOR gasps, and calls 911.
NEIGHBOR
Hello? Yes, a woman has just left her baby
unattended!
Two police officers appear. OFFICER #1 arrests the
NEIGHBOR. The MOTHER, returned, holds the TODDLER as
both watch the NEIGHBOR’s arrest. Before getting into
the cruiser, the NEIGHBOR turns to OFFICER #2.
NEIGHBOR
(Weeping)
But...why?
OFFICER #2
(With visible lack of sympathy)
You’ve caused more trouble today than you
could statistically have prevented.
Thanks. I just wanted to highlight the absurdity, as it’s an issue I care about; if I’m ever a parent, I don’t want self-proclaimed do-gooders meddling in my family’s affairs.
Definitely agree with the conclusion that nowadays, "In other words, the only socially acceptable mom has become a mom who never takes her eyes off her kids".
When I was growing up in the 90's and took the bus to school, parents just dropped off the kids on the corner and parents go about the day. Now when I drive by school bus stops, I see a line of cars parked on the side of the road. Both parents and kids sitting in the car till the bus comes.
I'd add the disaster that happened to most US cities in the last 30 or so years to the list of reasons: urban sprawl and the factual abandonment of public transport.
In large swaths of suburbia, people almost never walk anywhere. When they want to "go outside" they take a car to the park. The result is that the concept of "waiting on a sidewalk for the bus" is so foreign they don't even consider it an option. Let alone "walking to the bus stop".
There are a few places where street life still exists – mostly really large cities and really small & old ones.
It's a tragedy how the convenience of taking a car right to the front door of some megastore has gutted city life. Shopping used to mean a walk down Main St. with more, smaller owner-operated stores and a high probability of meeting someone and stopping for some coffee. But that took longer, and you needed to live close by (=smaller houses/properties). And sometimes it rained, and those shop were more expensive, and we decided a worthy human being is in the office 46h/week.
(not that those aren't legitimate reasons. It's more a matter of taste, and most people apparently don't share mine).
I live in a suburb and I have kids. It isn't what you say it is. It is fear about children being unsafe and metafear that if you aren't seen as watching your children someone will call the cops. We all think this is stupid, except for the one or two busybodies who call the cops.
It isn't something stupid about how inconceivable walking is or how foreign the idea of "standing outside" is. That's just you insulting a group of people that I presume you don't like.
I think if we're going to see this end, we need institutional change; we need the police to be able to see a situation and tell off the person calling them for being stupid. As long as there's an extremely good chance CPS will take your kid away because some asshat called the cops for something stupid, we parents can not afford to act otherwise.
Re-reading the article his idea of 're-normalizing' explains what is happening here with our society's view towards unattended children. It's different than the explanation from the parent study, but seems complementary not contradictory.
Just speculating here...but I blame a lot of the social shift on social media and 24/7 news. A one off mother does something bad - therefore everyone might be that one off mother.
Also a lost in sense of community. As the study shows, if you know the reasoning for why the mother left the kid in the car, people are less likely to judge the situation as dangerous.
If you all knew your neighbors, and you see someone's kid running around, you'll know why that kid is by themselves and probably less likely to called Child Services.
One of my coworkers had child services called on him. His son's school let out early. His son forgot his keys that day, so he climbed through an open window through the 2nd floor. Neighbor saw this...called Child Services.
Mom A doesn't just send the kids to the bus stop, she stands there with them. So mom B also begins standing. Then mom A starts meeting them at the bus in the afternoons....
There's no end to it. Parents say and do the "right" things because they are better parents -- or at least the optics looks like they are. So other parents are forced to follow suit. Given enough of this insanity, the next logical step is to start using the criminal justice system to enforce what being a good parent is.
The internet and social media are just making this worse, btw.
That's a very interesting hypothesis. It very much could be that the Western society has developed so powerful (and effective) problem solving "engine" that now it simply doesn't have enough problems to solve (or its focus is not aligned properly). I remember when I moved to Canada from a country with 3 times higher crime rate it struck me how big mindshare crime news occupy in minds of Canadians. Especially women are subject to it for some reason. If a stranger would read a regular news website it might look like criminals now totally dominate and good citizens barely survive.
> The concept has been criticized for ignoring the fact that most child abductions and harm result not from strangers, but rather from someone the child knows.
It's the same reason a new mom won't eat cheese or fish for the entirety of her pregnancy.
For a small price (inconvenience), they avert assuage that fear.
Secondly, social pressure.
While it's entirely unlikely your child will be kidnapped at a playground if left unattended, it's extremely likely someone will call the cops if they see an unattended little kid.
Even before the arrival of social media, the mass media was feeding people stories about the world which made it look far more dangerous than it actually was. So media isn't the reason.
The reason is that the majority political philosophy in the US has shifted from libertarianism/classical liberalism to progressivism. The libertarian point of view is that people generally should be free to go about their own business in the manner they see fit. The progressive point of view is that we have a collective responsibility to police the wrongdoing of other people and fix it, using state power if necessary.
In the video where the guy goes off at the mother for leaving her kid in the car, you can see the progressive power dynamic in play immediately. The guy thinks she's doing something wrong so he gets involved. (Who is he? Doesn't matter. It's everyone's job to right wrongs.) It takes maybe 15 seconds before someone mentions the police, because the only way such intrusive activism works is when a higher power (can be state, law, society, science, God, whatever) is used to identify and enforce a definition of what's right. Even though the activist doesn't explicitly threaten to call the cops, during the confrontation they are mentioned constantly because the threat of state power is the only reason the mother even has to give this guy the time of day.
If you want to go a level deeper and ask why this political shift has occurred, it's likely that one contributing factor is urbanization which been underway in the US for some time--historically densely populated cities tend to be more authoritarian than rural areas because a crazy person can do more damage in a dense city (you don't see mass shootings happening in cornfields).
That would depend on which country you're talking about. I think some countries like Sweden get away with being more progressive because they're more homogeneous. People in these countries have fewer differences of opinion and a higher level of social trust in general.
I agree with most points, except for the urbanization part. I don't know if you refer specifically to the US or a general human behavior. But in Asia, children still go home by themselves, play by themselves and stay at home by themselves. The cities in Asia are much more dense than in the US.
> If you want to go a level deeper and ask why this political shift has occurred, it's likely that one contributing factor is urbanization which been underway in the US for some time
He was saying America has become more progressive because of urbanization, not that urbanization directly caused the intense scrutiny on child rearing.
However I am left in want about what makes the US different than other places with regard to child rearing, even though I largely agree with the points above (though I might include authoritarianism with progressivism).
Getting your picture of the world through media means getting it from examining the extreme outliers? I don't have data, only a suspicion, this is relevant if it can be shown that people get much more information about their world from media than they used to, and/or that the media has turned more global, meaning less local reports but fishing for extreme stories in the wider world. This could explain why (if) the image of the world, including the local world, has become more extreme, which could in turn explain more extreme and less relaxed attitude(s).
In addition though, I think a contributing factor is cars, cars , cars everywhere. Having grown up in East Germany, I would be much more concerned about letting my kids (if I had any) roam around in the exact same area where I grew up in very freely. The roads are much more dangerous now for inattentive playing children. And as a local issue, a vastly increased number of ticks in the forests around my childhood home, but as I said, that's just a local issue.
The state has taken over all of the collective interests in the welfare of children. This leaves the parents and the government as the only beings who have a responsibility and authority over a child's life. This is more pronounced in the suburbs than in urban neighborhoods in my experience, having lived in a variety of both. I think it's a very unhealthy way of thinking about raising children. It takes a village and all that.
When families live in areas where they naturally commingle they tend to be interested in the welfare of others around them. I think that's why it's more of an issue in the physically isolating suburbs.
I think you're equating collectivism with community, and the two aren't inextricably linked.
Collectivism is the philosophy that a central set of practices and behaviors be enforced across a group, placing the group's will (often via force-backed punishment) over individual beliefs and choices. That's quite a bit different that a close-knit community that features voluntary interaction for mutual benefit.
The latter form of true community is great, but in the US we're gravitating more and more toward forcing views about safety, security, and social behavior on others through criminalization of once ordinary personal choices.
I struggling to see where "true community" as you describe it has existed outside of Ayn Rand novels. American and global communities have always ostracized people (which used to mean struggling if not death) who don't agree with the group's will (which traditionally has been based on religion but also other mores). I guess the difference now would be that the group has become bigger (state/national) rather than based on towns/neighborhoods.
FWIW this doesn't happen in more urban neighborhoods as much. I live in Brooklyn and there are (well, "were" since summer ended) kids of all school ages roaming around and playing in the park with little to no supervision.
I live in Long Island City (a neighborhood in NYC for those not from the area - it's in Queens) and I see many children, but few that are unattended, despite the very low crime rate.
Of course, LIC is full of well off yuppies, so perhaps the demographics are the reason.
I don't know much about Queens, but I mentioned Sunset Park because it's a working class, immigrant neighborhood. If LIC's demographics are similar to say, Brooklyn Heights, then I expect paranoid behavior from parents.
Hear! Hear! Let's all join RMS in his anti-natalism pledge, and set a better example by making proud announcements that we don't plan to reproduce ourselves! [1]
"We" should be replaced with Americans. This is just one more of those nutty things which are particular to America but which doesn't really generally happen in the rest of the west.
This is a much broader issue. America is simply developing a very dysfunctional way of dealing with children. America is the only developed country I know of (maybe only country period) where police is routinely used to deal with school discipline issues. Even parents in the US call police to discipline their kids for silly stuff like drinking alcohol. I am actually surprised by how normal this is in the US even among intelligent and seemingly normal families.
With the extensive killing of blacks it is clear that the US has a general police dysfunction. The police is seen as a solution to almost every issue in society.
America needs a serious re-evaluation of what role police and punishment should play in society. Police and the justice system can't become a substitute for parents and teachers.
America wasn't like this when I left in the late 80's. I'm not saying that America had no problems -- clearly it did, but there wasn't so much fear, and things felt more free (at least if you were white) and different parts of the country still were different -- the chain stores hadn't yet homoginized the country -- and turn coffee into a fetish.
It was a shock to see it happen in slow motion from the opposite side of the world over the next three decades, the country just seemed like a frog being slowly boiled without it being aware.
From time to time people ask me why I don't move back and I just smile and say that this is my home now. Few people would understand the sadness I feel for those left behind.
In the late eighties we imprisoned a bunch of daycare workers for satanic ritual sexual abuse, based on tedtimony coerced from children over long periods. No physical evidence was ever found.
> This is just one more of those nutty things which are particular to America but which doesn't really generally happen in the rest of the west.
I'd second this. A while ago there was an interesting television reportage on German Tv about this phenomenon.
They showed things like people who called the police when their neighbors kids played on the street or parents monitoring their kids kindergarten via online webcams.
Quite irritating stuff.
Certainly, not every American is like this but the program was done by a serious public broadcaster so I guess there is something to it.
You may be partly basing those views on anecdata (except the alcohol one; but blame the lawmakers for that, not the police or the parents).
From my own subjective anecdata living on the East Coast, police are rarely involved in school discipline unless someone has been very seriously assaulted. Parents I've seen also tend to be very protective of their children and apologetic for their actions, usually not wanting them to be subject even to basic discipline like detention or suspension, let alone arrest. Overparenting is rampant, but parenting-by-police seems rare.
As for shooting of blacks, there is not currently any conclusive evidence that it is or isn't caused by racist policing or biased officers. A few highly publicized cases of police brutality, mixed with even more heavily publicized cases of ambiguous police response (were they really being attacked? / did they really see what looked like a gun?), don't necessarily indicate a pervasive trend.
You have to consider both sides of the equation, though. You have to consider that the cop is a human being in the heat of the moment, who wants to survive every encounter they have in the course of their career (they're not just playing the odds in this one, they're playing them all), and whom society would also like to survive.
If you overspecify caution and requirements for the cop, you'll end up in a situation we are quite arguably already starting to see in some places, where it becomes impossible to be an effective police force at all, and crime starts going up very quickly [1]. And now even more people are dead, as well as communities, and hope for the future, and all the other things like that. And this almost instantly turns out to be even worse than anything the cops ever did; we go from once-every-few-years news stories about police in a given city shooting a guy in dubious circumstances (that often, a couple of weeks later, turn out to be fairly justified, but that news story doesn't get around anything like the first one did) to "yup, another day of 10 more murders than we had per day last year". Hardly strikes me as a win.
The typical police officer never discharges their weapon in the line of duty.
Here's an example. New York City has 35,000 uniformed officers. In a given year, they have ~100 incidents involving use of firearms. So even over a 30 year period ("a career"), only a smaller portion of the force will have cause to discharge their weapon (multiple 10,000s of officers over 30 years, ballpark 5,000 incidents, so a single 10,000 ballpark of involved officers).
It's not "shoot to kill" but "aim for the centre of visible mass". Yes, that does imply lethality, but it's mostly about minimizing misses (and with that, the chances that a projectile might hit an unintended target). Once the choice to use deadly force has been made, anything other than a centre of mass shot is irresponsible and dangerous.
The US might be more extreme, or ahead of the rest of the west, but it's not limited to the US. The first step in this phenomenon is limiting how far kids can roam along.
This study shows the restriction over four generations in England (very drastic):
Even in European countries that are more liberal about this it's now relatively easy to find individual accounts of parents being harassed for leaving children unattended.
But "we" haven't arrested anyone. "We" should be replaced by "police officers" IMO.
True, but this is the first sentence of the article:
> America is experiencing a bizarre disconnect between real and perceived danger when it comes to kids.
America, not "the West". There is a very specific crazyness in America and kids. Apparently you can now be arrested in Arizona for touching kids genitalia for any reason whatsoever, including parents changing diapers, doctors examining children, etc. etc.
Kids are not fragile angels, they are just little people.
> Even parents in the US call police to discipline their kids for silly stuff like drinking alcohol.
I think you're drastically exaggerating. The opposite is true. In my opinion parents very rarely call the police to discipline their own children, particularly for things like alcohol. The police are also very rarely involved in school discipline, unless it involves higher level violence or weapons. Of the N instances of discipline problems at a school, a sub 1% number of those would involve calls to the police. In an average American high school with 1,000 students, there are going to be at least a dozen instances per day of discipline problems with students, the police are not getting called that often.
I was in high school in the US 2004-2008. We had a police officer on our suburban campus full time. (1600 students, mostly white/asian, high graduation and high college entrance rate).
He rarely did anything, but he was there full time. I got the impression it was mostly drug enforcement. Some kids got busted with dumb amounts of drugs (freshman had a bag of MDMA in his locker he forgot to remove before locker-cleaning day) or for selling drugs on campus (mostly MDMA/weed).
One anecdote: On a weekend, a friend of mine traded or sold his paintball gun to a classmate. They made the mistake of making the exchange in the school parking lot. A concerned parent followed them home and called the police on them. He is arrested because it is a gun-like object on school property, despite the fact that it is not a gun and he has no intention of shooting up a school.
I don't know how common or uncommon it is. I know in my situation growing up in the US it was uncommon. I was simply arguing over the statement made in the comment, that if something has a name, it is common.
Why did you assume he meant "it has a name so it must be common" when he actually said "it's so common it has a name" and provided evidence that it's common?
He didn't make the statement you are claiming he made.
My experience in America is that police very rarely get involved in the discipline of children. Although it definitely would appear otherwise going by TV.
how old are you and did you go through the American public school system? From 7th grade on up our lockers were randomly searched by police and K9 dogs walked through the school parking lot. I'm not saying they have no right to do that, but it was pretty routine for the police to be involved. My high school had less than 200 pupils.
Honestly, I think what you're seeing has more do do with the media than with the truth. You hear about it in the media, so it must be occurring all over. But I believe that for the most part, for most people, these types of things (calling police on children, parents arrested for different parenting techniques, police dealing with children in schools, etc.) are unusual. Which is to say; these things do happen, but it is far from the norm.
I believe very very few people in America would disagree that "Police and the justice system can't become a substitute for parents and teachers."
America might be slightly ahead of the rest of the world because of its car culture (reducing the need for children to walk places independently.) But it's a trend everywhere.
This is really mind-boggling to me as someone who grew up in the 1990s frustrated by having an "overprotective asian mom." When we were 5-6 she'd kick us out of the house in the morning to go play with the neighborhood kids and tell us to come back for dinner. We walked to school alone, waited for the bus stop alone, etc.[1]
Yuppie millennial parents are hands down the worst. It starts with the baby wearing and escalates from there. We've got a rooftop club-house/grill in our apartment building. I was grilling some steaks when my daughter (almost four) said she needed to use the bathroom. I took her inside, left her in the restroom, and went back to check on my steaks. When I got back, some mom was standing there with her in the hallway giving me the eye. Lady, kids don't get stolen from locked-down apartment buildings--relax.
[1] The school even posted 3-6th graders as "patrols" to help the smaller kids cross some of the intersections, with nary an adult in sight.
With you everywhere but the babywearing bit. Especially in an urban environment, strollers are a downright hassle. Unless and until the kid's too heavy to carry comfortably, it way easier to just strap 'em on your back and go about your business virtually unencumbered than it is to spend the whole day wrestling with a glorified shopping cart.
Sure, baby carriers have been used throughout the world long before strollers were invented. But the recent resurgence in the west is driven by the popularity of attachment parenting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babywearing.
Even if you're not fond of attachment parenting, that doesn't imply that everything attachment parents like is a bad idea, or even that things that attachment parents like are primarily only popular with that subculture.
> Yuppie millennial parents are hands down the worst
Did you read the article? If I have to choose between "get arrested and have my kids taken from me" or "have angry old man yell about me on the internet" the choice is clear.
Here in suburban Palo Alto they seem to have gotten rid of the school busses because all the parents drive or walk the kids to school. WTF? We rode with ours a few times on the bike and then let him take himself.
We will look back at the late 20th century/early 21st century and facepalm about all the horrific stuff we've done in the name of 'psychology', 'education' and 'safety'.
I feel like there has never been a more vile and aggressive attack on common sense than these days, in the sense of a regression, rather than a progression of common sense which one would expect with a growing body of science.
The really insane thing is this: we have never in all of human history been safer.
Crime is at a 50 year low, and nearly everyone has health care. Not only that but more than two thirds of the population carries a location aware communication device that can be used to summon help almost anywhere in minutes.
I sometimes wonder if this is in fact the problem. Maybe we are so wired for scarcity and danger that we become neurotic and paranoid in its absence. It's analogous to the 'hygiene hypothesis' for allergies.
I think there's a simpler explanation: observation bias.
30 years ago there was more crime, but if it didn't happen in your town or to someone you knew, you were pretty unlikely to hear about it. Now, there's less crime but we're orders of magnitude more likely to hear about it.
IMO, this is a side-effect of 24-hour news networks and social media needing something to fill the dead air.
Essentially, if it's a problem you read about in the newspaper, it is highly unlikely to affect you. Consider that the newspaper doesn't report car accidents, cancer diagnoses, etc.
Yeah yeah yeah. Everyone is talking big here about how "obviously" these inflated concerns about child safety are absurd and ridiculous.
But how many of you would step up to slap down those morons who berate parents for leaving their kids in the car for 30 seconds?
THAT is what is needed. It is no good to simply THINK that these people are going overboard. We have to actively STOP the stupid busy-bodies from assaulting those poor parents.
I don't know of this is the sort of thing you witness. Usually the asshole doesn't have anyone to berate because the point is that the parent left without their child, so the parent isn't there. They call the police without making a scene.
I think I would if I ever witnessed it. I haven't, so I don't know, but I probably would walk up to them and ask them if they're serious or what their problem is.
Many social factors often external to the economy would negatively change our understanding of our "standard of living" if included. In the USA, if you only look at the nominal median wage and then subtract the inflation tracked by the Consumer Price Index then it seems like the male median wage peaked in 1973 and family income peaked in 1999. But the CPU does not track rent, and the peak year for the ratio of wage to rent was 1958, which was also the peak year of the Baby Boom (and obviously those 2 facts are linked).
If you were to also track the social changes that have increased the scrutiny on mothers (and parents as a unit), the question would arise if real, meaningful family income actually peaked in 1999. Perhaps it was in decline a long time before that?
I was in kindergarten in 1972. I grew up in an affluent, white neighborhood in the suburbs. At that time, it was thought normal that the children should walk to school on their own. The school was exactly 1 mile away. My parents kissed me goodbye at the door of our house, then I joined up with my friends, and we walked to school. Yes, we were 5 years old.
Any parent who does this nowadays will be arrested, but at the time it seemed safe because everyone did it. I never walked to school alone, I always walked with my classmates. I'm told that Japan is still somewhat like this, but obviously the USA has changed.
Can confirm..in my trips to Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, China...Kids take mass transportation by themselves to and from school. Hoards of kids play at the park with few adult supervision.
Up to elementary school (1994) I would walk to the park with some friends after school and play or go to the library (next to the park) for 2.5 hours till my mom picked me up. It's where a lot of kids went.
Generally if there is only one or two kid left at the park, a parent would stay after to ensure everyone is picked up.
My middle school was in a different part of the city so not sure how much longer I would have continued that.
I'm a bit younger but also used to walk to school when I was little, but now with a kid, I probably wouldn't let him do the same trip as I did. Growing up, my town had like 2-3 main roads where people tended to drive slow (roads werent that good, holes, etc). I had to cross just one street to get to school (bit less than a mile). Now, it would have been 6 crossings in roads that idiots speed at 70+km/h easily (limit is 40km/h) because their cars now can get to 100km/h in seconds and for whatever reason, they do it (vs growing up and having a car that could actually get to 100km/h was a feat that took a very long road and a few minutes)
I hate all the internet shaming that goes into this.
Everyone on the internet feels that they get to judge a parent's parenting ability.
Some kids are more responsible than others.
I was handling myself at age 6 in Europe. I was navigating public busses from age 6 on.
I have had police officers tell me I am putting my own kids in danger by leaving them alone in a car.... when they were 8 and 7 years old (and in front of my house).
The police officer couldn't even articulate what the exact danger was.
I remember being left alone in the car at 7 or 8. If it was too hot I would have opened the window, or in extreme cases, stepped outside for some time.
Yeah, it's kind of the whole point of the article.
I think, "What are the odds that I am the guy who sees the car in the description and remembers the license plate number and calls the police and the child is saved." Then I think, "But if it were my child, I'd want every smart phone on the planet turned on." So I leave it on and endure the anxiety, and keep my eyes open, even though I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be that guy.
But why would you? I know of incidents just this year that a child was saved because of amber alerts. It's put out for the same reason that people on here are arguing for "if your surrounding community were more aware or had a personal interest in each other, these situations would not happen"
That's what finally got me to start ignoring them—seeing that practically every one was a child "kidnapped" by their parent. Kidnapping by strangers is much more rare, and conflating the two (the way amber alerts do) is a mistake.
Although, it is statistically much more likely for a child to be killed by a parent or relative than by a stranger... In fact 60-80% of UK murders of under-16s are cases where the victim knew the killer. [1]
As Americans, we are inundated with news that tells us how bad our neighbors are and how they only want to harm our children. This may have started with some high profile kidnappings, etc. in the 80's and 90's. Now, you can't let your child go anywhere alone. Ever.
We're a blame society. If we do something wrong, it's someone else's fault. This thought process has expanded to if we see someone else doing something we think is wrong we blow it out of proportion. We so desperately want to find faults in others. As if that'll make our own faults less significant.
Of the 66 comments here at this moment, almost every comment strongly agrees with the article's premise that the US has a "bizarre disconnect between real and perceived danger when it comes to kids".
There's an obvious contradiction: How do we (Hacker News readers at least) agree that this is crazy but society keeps doing craziness like "arresting a mom for letting her kids, 8 and 9, wait at the condo for an hour".
Because democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. It's very easy to get people worked up and crusading (e.g., wolf-mode) about "think of the children" type causes. Then you get representatives who play on this and keep on passing more and more draconian laws.
The rational part of the population is bigger than people often realize it's just that they don't yell as loudly.
> There's an obvious contradiction: How do we (Hacker News readers at least) agree that this is crazy but society keeps doing craziness like "arresting a mom for letting her kids, 8 and 9, wait at the condo for an hour".
Because HN isn't a statistically representative sample of society as a whole.
> How do we (Hacker News readers at least) agree that this is crazy but society keeps doing craziness
Because HN readers tend to be an extremely small subset of the general population. General population will happily vote for Trump, le Pen, Orban, Petry and other populists, which in my opinion is equally stupid with arresting parents for growing up their kids "range-free"...
More and more, I have the feeling that "Idiocracy" looks more and more like a documentation of now than a satire.
While I detest Trump and authoritarians in general (which Hillary is really just a different flavor of), I don't think you're statement holds water here. California, where I live, is the ultimate nanny state - we've criminalized the everloving shit out of everything. California has 3x as many laws on the books than the next closest state in volume, and it makes many activities, business and personal, very complex.
'Progressive' ideology places the State in greater and greater control over defining most aspects of life, and tends to turn to law and mandates more frequently than other ideological systems. This naturally drives the use of state mechanisms as a means of operation and resolution over non-legal communal resolution between individuals.
This is why I don't want to raise my kids at all in the US. The system at large is doing everything for them to grow into incompetent imbeciles...the kind that live in their parents' basement until they are 40 and are too scared of making a commitment or raising a child until they're fifty...
This is because of cable news reporting on several high profile young-girl abductions over the last 20 years. Statistically the chance is very small, but these horrible stories have been burned into the consciousness of a generation of mothers.
Cable news has severely distorted Americans view of what's dangerous and what's not, in the interest of getting more people hooked on TV.
Even very minor shark attack in Australia is blown out of all proportion until everyone thinks the wildlife in Australia is going to kill you.
It's the same reason everyone thinks Colombia, Mexico and Africa are insanely dangerous. The media/Hollywood told them so, and they believe it.
Never mind the more than 500 people a year that are murdered in NYC and another 500 in Chicago every single year. Nobody would tell a person not to go on vacation to NYC because it's too dangerous, but they'll talk until they're blue in the face about how you're going to be murdered in Senegal, Mauritania or Colombia.
Exactly. And similarly, Iraq only had 150k US soldiers, so it was actually much more dangerous than Chicago. Which is why Kanye West's comparison is nonsensical.
> Which is why Kanye West's comparison is nonsensical.
When you think about it from a media perspective, I think it's actually very insightful.
The American public was up in arms about the death of 314 soldiers on foreign soil, but seemingly oblivious to the >500 killed right at home in just one city in the good 'ol USA.
Surely all lives are equal, and it doesn't matter where a person is killed, but only that they are killed. For every minute of airtime given to the deaths Overseas, more than that should have been given to the deaths in Chicago alone. And NYC, and Baltimore, etc. etc.
It wasn't. The media is not giving an accurate representation of real life, and now people are making life decisions based on that false picture.
A lot of that airtime (discussing US soldiers killed in Iraq) should be charged to politics.
Liberal media and entertainers heavily criticized the war in Iraq, but said much less about the 1600 US soldiers killed in Afghanistan during Obama's term (496 in 2010).
If they could find a way to blame murders in Chicago or Detroit on Republicans, they'd spent a lot of airtime on that too.
> Surely all lives are equal, and it doesn't matter where a person is killed, but only that they are killed.
Why do you think this? There seems to be very little basis for this in fact, and surely certain deaths are more tragic than others (surely and elderly man's passing is less tragic than that of a heroic soldier defending his brothers).
Alright, I should have said "homicide" or "murder". Dying of old age doesn't really count.
Also, homicides on home soil should be MORE publicized, because it has the potential for real-world impact on regular peoples lives (i.e. the people consuming this "news").
i.e. if I hear tons of soldiers are being murdered in Iraq, that really can't hurt me, today, and I don't need to change my life because of it.
In contrast, if I hear more than one person per day is being murdered in the city I live in, then that's possibly real impact to my life and that of my loved ones! I need to know that so I can make decisions based on that data. (i.e. if it went up to 10 per day, I'm getting the hell out)
It turns out that AMBER alerts have actually been described in the same way as TSA procedures ("security theater") - they are "crime control theater" [1] because if a child is going to be killed by an abductor, generally it happens within three hours of the abduction, and there is nothing law enforcement can really do to prevent that, they just cannot move quickly enough.
> In fact, AMBER Alert is arguably an example of what could be called crime control theater. It is a socially constructed “solution” to a socially constructed problem, enabling public officials to symbolically address an essentially intractable threat.
The shift toward more laws, police incidents, and over-regulation of ordinary parental duties isn't isolated, nor is it surprising. The US is a country that has been on the path of abandoning individual liberty in favor of paternalistic, authoritarian statism for decades. The real irony is that people are expressing dismay about issues and outcomes such as this, while in the same breath supporting piles and piles of evermore invasive laws that dictate how others should live their lives. When you replace the state as the primary actor in so many areas that were once the role of parents and community members, you get the state handling things the most common way it knows how: by force and criminalization.
Yeah yeah yeah. Everyone is talking big here about how "obviously" these inflated concerns about child safety are absurd and ridiculous.
But how many of you would step up to slap down those morons who berate parents for leaving their kids in the car for 30 seconds?
THAT is what is needed. It is no good to simply THINK that these people are going overboard. We have to actively STOP the stupid busy-bodies from assaulting those poor parents.
For instance, web forum threads about the necessity of wearing helmets will almost instantly turn into flame wars. Likewise, if you admit to rolling through stop signs, you will get attacked, even though most cyclists and car drivers roll through stop signs.
I am a car enthusiast. Rolling through a stop sign is a serious offense for us, and outright dangerous, and can only happen out of negligence. But cyclists seem to do it routinely, as well as passing on red, and don't think it is a big deal.
I am nervous about cyclists both as driver and as pedestrian. When I walk, they can turn out of nowhere where a car is not expected, and they are silent. I can suddenly turn or stop, and a cyclist can happily bump into me, as it has happened more than once.
On the road, cyclists are much more vulnerable than pedestrians (it takes just a light touch to tip over the bike), and they often ignore the basic safety rules like "never pass on red". I mean, I respect your mode of transportation, but please respect ours! I don't want to go to jail, and most cyclists probably wouldn't want to be dead, so it is better to play it safe.
I think you're proving the point, but I'm not going to fan the cyclist/driver flames.
> Rolling through a stop sign is a serious offense for us, and outright dangerous.
It's not outright dangerous, assuming you're in North America. The US has so many stop signs that the safety message is lost, the vast majority are pointless.
In Europe [1], small junctions in residential areas don't have any signs at all. Where they meet larger roads, they just have yield signs. If there's a lot of traffic, there could be a mini roundabout (painted roundabout), which just changes the way people yield -- to the left, rather than to the larger road. In all these cases, it's not required to stop. The driver/cyclist uses their judgement, based on traffic, visibility, and so on.
Stop signs are used sparingly, and show there's a real danger. For example, in the UK "stop signs may be placed only at sites with severely restricted visibility, and each must be individually approved by the Secretary of State for Transport" [2]. Where I grew up in England, I know of only one stop sign out of all the routes we took to visit places. It was where an overhanging mediæval building obscured the view of traffic at a junction.
[1] the parts with roads at least as safe as the USA
Like you say, stop signs are everywhere in the US. They are the default traffic control. In my view, they provide three functions:
1. Providing a simple, general purpose traffic control. Going through every town and re-thinking every intersection on a case by case basis would be quite costly, and the amount of public controversy might make it prohibitive.
2. Limiting speed. My house is on a stretch of street that has no stop signs for a few blocks, and cars get going pretty fast, typically 10 to 20 mph above the speed limit of 30 mph.
3. Encouraging drivers to use the main roads instead of neighborhood streets.
You can't predict if another driver will drive at full speed right through, while not looking in your direction. If you don't stop, you are screwed. There are other people on the road, and you can neither control nor predict their actions.
You're right about respect. As a car enthusiast, do you ever drive faster than the speed limit? Speeding significantly increases the odds of fatalities in pedestrians and cyclists.
No, not on purpose at least. If I want to drive fast and legal, Germany is not far away from where I live. And if it weren't, there are racing tracks in the area.
Speeding in the city limits is of course nuts. I can understand people who test their cars at night on empty highways, though it is still dangerous (you don't know if another car will attempt to take the in-ramp really slow). But in a the city it is madness, pedestrians and cyclists can jump from everywhere. Lives can be ruined.
> Rolling through a stop sign is a serious offense for us, and outright dangerous, and can only happen out of negligence.
I regularly get frustrated on my (.4 mile) bike commute home when 1-5 cars in a row don't pay attention to 2 of my 3 stop signs. Likely, all in an effort to save 30 seconds on their 50 minute 1 way commute.
So, it seems that negligence is common and it's not so serious of an offense. We can agree on it being dangerous though.
I assume people are freaking out if you take the position that wearing a flimsy Styrofoam and plastic shell over your noggin is about as useful as taking sugar pills, since that challenges the conventional wisdom we we told in all the school PSAs?
I used to be pretty neutral on this subject, I personally wear the helmet and religiously follow signs on the bike, and can't care less if someone wants to kill themselves against my car. Until I witnessed the so-called "gold standard" bay area cyclist, which run the red light against traffic, without a light, in the dark and not wearing a helmet. He ended up in a pretty bad shape, though okay overall. The one who needed help was the lady in the car in front of me who hit this idiot and sent him flying. And then I changed my mind about helmets and stop signs and everything. It's not just your business if you want to commit suicide using somebody's else's car. The person behind the wheel of this car might not be prepared to kill the idiot today. Because even the idiots are human beings, or so these people think.
I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, I wear a helmet myself, most of the time, and using one seems to make sense. I don't bother with a helmet if it's a short trip on tame roads, such as the 1/2 mile from my house to the grocery store. On the other hand, I can't point you to supporting evidence for a benefit to making helmets mandatory.
A few years ago there was a discussion about making bike helmets mandatory in Germany. At least one scientist [1] did a cost-benefit analysis and argued against such a law. For example, while fewer people would die of head injuries, many more people would stop riding bikes (or do it less often), leading to an increase in cardiovascular diseases.
> Bike helmet use increased significantly during the first 4 years of the campaign and again after the helmet law was implemented. The total number of bike-related head injury admissions declined by more than 50%.
And a paper that speaks directly on your topic, the effects of legislation mandating helmet use:
> The rate of helmet use rose dramatically after legislation was enacted, from 36% in 1995 and 38% in 1996, to 75% in 1997, 86% in 1998 and 84% in 1999. The proportion of injured cyclists with head injuries in 1998/99 was half that in 1995/96 (7/443 [1.6%] v. 15/416 [3.6%]) (p = 0.06).
Those numbers are great and all, if you ignore human behaviour. Nobody's saying that wearing a helmet doesn't make you safer if you are in an accident, that's just a strawman.
The real issue is such things as driver behaviour changing around people with helmets making accidents more likely, or mandated helmet usage leading to fewer people choosing the bicycle as their mode of transportation, making things more dangerous in two ways: people choosing other options that are more dangerous than bicycling, and the fact that more bicycles on the road means less danger because 1. people get used to interacting with bicycles in traffic, and 2. there are fewer cars on the road.
You need to look at the broader picture. You can't just look at a fire escape where people gets injured because they trip down the stairs and conclude that the solution should be to remove the fire exit. Sure, it will definitely decrease the number of injuries in that fire exit but that's not really helpful, is it?
I'd bet you could find similar improvements to occupant safety if car drivers and passengers wore helmets, and racing style harnesses. Would it be reasonable to mandate them?
If this is a new topic to you (I don't mean, you, SturgeonsLaw, as you are clearly familiar with it :) -- I mean the reader), you would do well to consider both sides. I personally find the arguments that bike helmets cause more harm than good persuasive, and a good and thorough introduction may be found here:
> I don't bother with a helmet if it's a short trip on tame roads
You have to remember it's not you who will cause a serious crash, it's the other idiots on the road.
I was rolling home from work a few years ago and a car blew a stop sign and T-Boned me and a good rate of speed. I bounced off the front of the car and hit the ground, more or less head (helmet) first.
I'm quit certain it saved my life, and the accident was entirely not my fault.
I think there is. Bike helmets add very little to the overall safety compared to belts in car. They distract from the fact that biker should be treated as pedestrians and cars need to stay away from them (meaning separate bike lanes, etc.). In the end, the cars are the invaders, the endangerers, not the bikers.
Also: This is a tangent discussion and has almost nothing to do anymore with the original topic.
If the bikers are to be treated as pedestrians, they better behave as pedestrians. Like, for example, never crossing three lanes at once at heavy traffic, forgetting to hand-signal the turn.
The worst part of these discussions is that both sides pretend that they've never seen a bad driver do whatever bonkers thing they think all cyclists do. I see drivers do this on the freeway all the time.
Anecdote: when my uncle died in an accident he didn't have a helmet and was with-in a mile of his house.
Cops told us that there are more fatal accidents closer to home/in short runs because people don't pay as much attention and don't have as much gear on.
I think it might be more other bicyclists, some people are extremely vehement that everyone needs to be wearing a helmet, while others consider that a gross infringement on their rights.
Oh yeah come to think of it I've gotten the same. But it's usually people trying to sell "used" helmets. I just assumed it was part of the hard sell and ignored it.
Yet still things like Harambe happen, where the Mom was clearly negligent, not noticing her child climbing a three foot fence into a gorilla cage the entire time she was right there in front of it.
It's a shame, the outcome ended up costing the innocent gorilla's life instead of the Mom's:
And this could have just as easily been your mom (or guardian). You'll argue the point, but I will bet my entire life savings she's had her eyes off you at least 100 times in public for more than 30 seconds while you were growing up.
It's simply called life. It happens. 99.99% of the time nothing bad happens whatsoever, and you never even think twice about it. Actually both parties probably didn't even realize it happened.
Was she negligent? Who really knows. Calling her clearly negligent is just being completely disingenuous to the point of more or less full on dishonesty. Taking 20 seconds to inspect a map or tap out a SMS is not negligence, and is all the time that would have taken.
You're the reason the attitude in this article exists, unfortunately. Even if you think you're being reasonable in this instance. Try living under the constant threat that you can't divide your attention for less than a minute 24 hours a day. It's an absurd thing to demand from anyone, and is not reasonable.
The way "society" expects you to raise children in the US has to be the most unhealthy in the world. It's becoming absolutely absurd how much we coddle children and expect parents to stop having an adult life.
I have 3 kids under 3.5. It only takes seconds to have stuff happen.
The three year old throws his sunglasses on the ground and starts fussing for something and you turn to deal with that and then boom your 2 year old is 15 feet away and running the other direction or making national news headlines.
If you don't have multiple kids you literally have no clue what it's like, especially if you happen to be outnumbered at the time.
Now, I'm not saying she wasn't negligent because I wasn't there- but I also know that you can be on point 99.99999% of the time and still wind up with a serious problem or worse.
And, frankly, why is the gorilla's life worth more than the mom's? Why is his life worth more than the child's? Was Harambe going to cure cancer, lower the world's greenhouse gas emissions, or become an astrophysicist that could help us colonize other planets? Was Harambe going to lead the charge on saving all the other gorillas in the world?
It sucks that he had to get killed because of an accident, but what kind of person actually thinks that in a decision between a fucking kid and a gorilla that the gorilla should win? That kid literally represents the continuation of humanity.
Most people value (some) animal life above human life. Could be because nature is sold as an innocent paradise free from sin, or that every animal is the noblest creature on Earth or just because we all have experience with assholes, while our only experiences with animals are them being majestic on the National Geographic Channel. Try giving people the trolley problem with 5 golden retrievers and one adult human male.
Edit: or as one internet meme put it:
A child has fallen in the gorilla enclosure. You hold a gun with one bullet and you can choose to shoot the gorilla to save the child. If you do so, he will make national headlines and lead to discussions that question our morality. If you don't, the child might will be rescued and the gorilla will live out his days in peace in the gorilla enclosure, completely unknown to the world. He will not be as famous. In the end, what do we value more: Harambe or the idea of Harambe?
> Most people value (some) animal life above human life.
/me puts on flameproof gear
Since this started with a gorilla... From a purely numbers-based point of view, it actually makes sense. Death of a single member of near-extinct species has a negative impact on the viability of that species. A death of a single human (or even few of them) will not make a difference. Not on a planet where human overpopulation is an increasingly pressing problem.
Even if you disagree with the idea of conservation, at least have some sympathy for the future Epicureans. By driving species into extinction, we are depriving those future society members of experiences they might otherwise have.
I get that you're making a sarcastic comic but the funny thing is that I don't even hear people making as eloquent a point as your joke is pretending to make. Most of them are just "because animals and horrible mom".
The child probably didn't have a choice to go the zoo that day. He also probably didn't WANT to fall into the gorilla cage. I'm positive he didn't want the gorilla to be killed either.
If there was a way you could guarantee that the gorilla and child make it out of that cage unscathed I'm absolutely all for doing that. After that, if you're saying there's a chance the child gets hurt, I don't care who's kid it is, I'm okay with pulling the trigger. I'm not being metaphorical, I'm saying I am so okay with the idea that I would be okay if I personally had to pull the trigger.
I love animals, even ones most people don't like. I love the continuation of our species' future more than I love animals though.
The thing that is crazy to me is that people push the idea that animals are pure and free of evil and we are the bad ones in every situation. Can't you push that same image into our children as well? Shouldn't an innocent child be at least equal in the eyes of the public as an innocent animal? And if they start out equally, doesn't the child win because without children we literally cease to exist?
I think this is a case of 'observation bias' (as mentioned elsewhere here). The media hammers such sad events in our brains 24 hours a day, so we overestimate the real danger, since they fail to mention that the extreme low probability.
Maybe there should be a law that flags news with colours of a probability scale so that there is at least a chance to correctly classify bad events.
A) it wasn't an infant, it was a toddler. Toddlers can be pretty quick B) the fence was not substantial, a toddler could easily walk through it (and did); then there was a couple feet of ground until the slope down to the moat. C) the mom had more than one child there. D) it's not socially acceptable to put leashes on children (except for the cutesy backpack ones, but that's not really going to help)
The gorilla enclosure was built to prevent the gorilla from getting out, not to prevent people from getting in.
I totally plan on using a child leash when I take my 2 year old to a massively crowded place like a zoo or amusement park. Is that really frowned upon?
You have obviously never taken a toddler to a public place. Try taking a toddler to a zoo, park, childrens museum, just about any play area...and see how quickly they dash from one area to another. Having 2 toddlers, it's easy to have one child go in a direction and the second in another. Unless you have reasonable cause for neglect, it's easy to be at a zoo, look at an animal for 10 seconds, and then see your child is suddenly 10 feet away from you. Anyone who says "what a horrible parent" does not have children.
I managed to die in about 15 seconds, while my mom bent to fasten the shoe for my little sis. I was standing right in front of her and when she bent down I just made a few steps forward, that was enough.
The leading cause of death in children in the United States is by car accident[0]. So if my youngest son is asleep in his crib and I need to leave to grab groceries from the store a mile away, I have to wake him up, strap him into his placebo seat[1], and put his life into statistically far, far greater danger than the risk of him somehow suffocating in his empty crib or dying in a house fire. Not to mention the added stress on both him and me that arises from waking a toddler prematurely--stresses that result in shaken baby syndrome and the third leading cause of death in his age group.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_inj...
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_on_child_carseats