"...children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in their own front yard, 12 years old to stay home alone for an hour, and 14 to be unsupervised at a public park."
By the time I was 10 I was allowed to be unsupervised and to get on a bus to a railway station, purchase a ticket for an intercity train that took me the better part of 100 miles away to another city then alight there at a major railway junction with many platforms and from there catch a suburban train to my final destination where my grandmother lived. However, before I could get to see her I had to walk several miles to her home and this involved crossing a very busy four-lane arterial highway.
I was no exception, as this was the norm for kids of my age. Moreover, such things were never a big deal for us kids, it was just the way things were back then. We gave such concerns little thought if any at all.
This - unlike millions of today's kids - is why my generation were and still are a much more resilient lot and not afraid of the world than is the present younger generation.
In my estimation, overprotecting kids rates on a much higher scale of child abuse than some[1] matters which are normally associated with it.
If you are a modern-day parent and overprotecting your children then you need to think twice about the damage and harm that you are causing them. It is very difficult to acquire resilience if it's not acquired very early on in one's life, and those who don't are often forever handicapped.
_
[1] Of course, that excludes any form of sexual abuse, it's inexcusable and unacceptable under any circumstance.
> This - unlike millions of today's kids - is why my generation were and still are a much more resilient lot and not afraid of the world than is the present younger generation.
I marvel at this logic. Who raised the present younger generation?
Children didn't make the rules that they can't buy train tickets. They weren't born afraid. Their resiliency hasn't been molded yet.
The question isn't "why are kids this way?" The question is "why are we raising children this way when we weren't raised this way ourselves?"
>The question is "why are we raising children this way when we weren't raised this way ourselves?"
I feel like the investment into individual children is much much higher than it used to be (time/resources/emotions). When you have 5 kids it's not that you don't care, but you literally can't be as protective about them as you can when you're only raising one or two. And then as people have less children the norms gradually change.
The same number of kids were probably abused in a variety of ways 50 years ago. Maybe more than today, even. But what most people knew about the news was what was in the local paper and maybe they watched 30 minutes of national news on TV.
They didn't have a device in their pocket alerting them in real-time about a kidnapping story in another state.
People are not good at assessing probability of risk. If they hear about something, they think it's likely. So they get more and more afraid.
You've got it wrong--the actual rate of abuse has gone down considerably, not merely the same as it used to be. You are right that it's being magnified by the news competing for eyeballs.
And the greatest risk isn't the stranger, it's people you know and trust. The vast, vast majority of people aren't going to harm a kid--you teach kids that if they need help they should go up to an adult and ask. That reduces the risk much further.
The real change started with the kidnapping and murder of Eton Patz in 1979. The case was nationally publicized, and was one of the factors leading to putting pictures of missing children on milk cartons. That really scared a lot of parents (I do understand that the fear was mostly irrational).
What I worry about is CPS and police officers claiming child endangerment. In my state you can be charged with child endangerment just for leaving the kid strapped into the seat on a moderate day while you walk in to pay the gas station attendant. You could potentially be arrested and charged for letting a 7 year old play alone at the park for a bit.
The kidnappers are real. But they're the CPS and police, and they can't wait to put your kids into a brutal kids-for-cash foster care system. They draw their salary under the guise of "safety" while victimizing children and sapping their independence. And busybodies everywhere have a device at the ready in their pocket, that allows them to invite months of scrutiny into your life based on 30 seconds of effort on their own part, after which the law prevents you from finding their identity or facing your accuser.
I believe the real shift was generational: by 1979 it was the cusp of the earliest Boomers who were raising young kids. They weren't like their parents, growing up in post-war life: They were scared of urban pollution and crime, and didn't have a popular collective experience like WWII, but a divisive one(the 60's, in sum) which helped produce a variety of bogeyman narratives of dangerous Vietnam veterans roaming the streets, illegal immigrants selling drugs, Satanic cult leaders and so forth. Part of the embracing of Reagan's America was in overlooking the parts of this narrative that were self-inflicted by prior US actions, and moving blame to scapegoats. Thus, "stranger danger", distrust of the city, and a general self-alienation with society in favor of personal safety was normalized at that time.
There were definite benefits to the Boomer outlook at the time: smog was curtailed, health-conscious diet and regular exercise became a popular idea(albeit heavily fad-driven). But it also created a more litigious, low-trust climate, which has only driven in the alienation further. Today's political climate is a sort of crescendo on all those concerns, and I see in the current working-age generations much greater willingness to change the deal.
I am living in Switzerland, in a rather good 20k town, I get out of my building, I see 2 permanent drug dealers. And there is a constant stream of news about murders or tentative ones. Oh and we have judges who are protecting rapists, e.g. saying they were looking for being raped, yes an actual judges, fuck that shit.
Certainly not time since many more families are dual income or have only one involved parent. Also the quality of the time matters. Weekend time and after-work time is not equivalent to morning and midday productive time.
Just yesterday I was listening my grandmother talking me about her life. He told me about a kid about 7 years old who went to the field with some horses so they could eat, and then he was killed by some other kids who were threw rocks at him. My wife asked if the culprits were punished and my grandma told her that was not the case. She told us that the police didn’t cared much, and the parents were too busy with the rest of the kids to try to pressure the authorities.
Not sure if what you’re saying is the norm or if I’m an outlier but I have more than 5 kids and fall into the group that had a relatively relaxed childhood yet restricts activities out of fear (or whatever it should be referred to).
Because literally every form of media today constantly tells people that they need to be afraid of going outside, and most people buy it, even though our society (at least here in the US) is almost certainly safer than when they were growing up.
How many times have you seen someone saying they were afraid walking down the sidewalk because... someone else was also walking down the sidewalk?
You are right, but I don't think it is just the fault of the media, this is how the human brain works. No one is losing their minds with fear at dull but distressingly common causes of death like heart disease and car accidents. It is the rare, dramatic, unexpected kinds of death and violence that govern our thoughts.
People fear flying for psychological reasons of control/helplessness, not for logical statistical reasons. Fear of 'scary' death is like the negative version of the inaccurate and over-optimistic math that causes people to buy lottery tickets.
This is exactly my point. Part of being an adult in the modern world is being discerning in your media consumption and just a pinch of courage (obviously, specific circumstances might require a lot more).
It's OK to feel nervous if you run into someone unexpected outside, everyone gets that way sometimes. It's how you handle that feeling.
>"why are we raising children this way when we weren't raised this way ourselves?"
Because CPS will come and you'll be charged with child endangerment if you let your kid have "too much" independence. And naturally the kids will ask questions about why they can't do this or that, and many people will know "because CPS would take you away" is a bad answer (or one the kid will ignore) so they lie about the dangers. It's a shit sandwich situation to be in.
Free range parenting laws are the answer. Three states have passed legislation that clarifies that "neglect" does not include allowing children to engage in independent activities. In said states, parents can be much more confident that nosy neighbors can't ruin their lives.
How often would it have to happen for you to risk your right to vote, defend your family, get any reasonably well paying job, and retain custody of your children?
If you search for something as simple as "charged for leaving child at park" there's no shortage of anecdata, and many if not most aren't something crazy like abandonment.
The laws in my state are vague enough that parents can and have been criminally charged for merely letting a confident 7 y/o play at the park while they briefly ran an errand. Unfortunately the state doesn't keep statistics like "how often did we frivolously charge parents."
> How often would it have to happen for you to risk your right to vote, defend your family, get any reasonably well paying job, and retain custody of your children?
Okay so you don't know and if we look at the numbers this is just fear mongering.
Not OP, I don't think it's fear mongering. The actual numbers are immaterial, all that matters is whether parents are scared that this might happen. If they're scared, they'll avoid leaving their children unattended. As a former educator I can confirm that many parents are scared, and that this fear is likely to continue so long as stories of these laws being enforced hit the news once every few years. We can average 1-2 cases every few years and as long as they get the right broadcast, that's all it takes.
The implication the parent is that you should be afraid of the thing happening a lot when in reality it doesn't happen with any statistical significance unless you happen to be in a special set like Native Americans (due to historical government actions).
You just proved CPS takes action way more than the kind of fear mongering stuff (stranger kidnapping / stranger commiting murder). For instance, in the largest county in my state up to 60% of black homes may end up investigated by the time the child is 18. [0] Fear mongering?
You've made the assertion "if we look at the numbers this is just fear mongering." Now it's time to show your proof, what is the numbers. I'm very curious because my own state keeps no statistics on what percent of their charges are frivelous.
That's why this is fear mongering, because you're insisting that it's very concerning and thus you should act on it, when in reality it's not that concerning a problem: https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubpdfs/canstats.pdf
Of the 73M children in america - Of which 7.9 million children went through CPS - Of which 16% were substantiated (1.2M) and received services - 22.9 percent of those (275k) were removed from their home.
First of all I appreciate showing the numbers of removals. You've shown the number of removals is sky high -- 0.3% number of removals PER YEAR as there are children. While the same child may be removed multiple times, were it the case it were a unique child each time that would come out to a roughly 5% chance of a removal over the period of custody. Of course CPS will claim basically all those removals are valid, but we have very little independent third party verification to see if that is actually the case.
Unfortunately, again, you were unable to provide what percent of charges (or in your presentation, removals) are actually frivolous. You counter a very small chance of stranger kidnapping (less than 1k a year) with "legitimate" CPS kidnapping at 275k a year. Orders of magnitude more relevant -- Wow!
So you have really no data to present here, other than a ceiling of roughly 5% chance at the worst, which is absolutely bone-chillingly large. Plenty significant enough to take it seriously when you see people being charged for letting their kid play at the park. People take precautions about pools and guns, etc, both of which have a lower percent chance than our possible CPS ceiling here of unexpectedly removing the child from your arms.
> You've shown the number of removals is sky high -- 0.3% number of removals PER YEAR as there are children
The CDC reports that between 140,000 – 710,000 hospitalizations per year are due to the flu. No one out there is saying that it's "sky high".
> Of course CPS will claim basically all those removals are valid, but we have very little independent third party verification to see if that is actually the case.
This is actually just nonsense.
> "legitimate" CPS kidnapping
This is just a deranged position to take.
> So you have really no data to present here, other than a ceiling of roughly 5% chance at the worst, which is absolutely bone-chillingly large.
While we're here I would also like to talk about how many of those 275k a year are sacrificed to the God of the Deepest Waters, Lord of Whales (and Wales), The Evercrescent. A vast number I'm sure!
Look we know when this stuff happens, they've got records and the CPS has been taken to court (and they've lost!). But unless you're talking about black or native american families, the amount is so minimal as to not warrant this fear mongering.
Oh? I had never heard of that association. I just liked the quote (:
Could you share a link or something on that topic? I'm curious.
Certainly, the concept long-predates the internet. A bit like the yin/yang symbol, where there's a little "dot" of one color inside the other, symbolizing a similar cyclical concept of one arising from the other.
I believe that there was much less violence in the past than there is now. Or at least that's the perception, hence, we want to avoid that our kids get into real trouble. Not that it wasn't the case 30 years ago, however, things have changed and I think in most places didn't change for the better. But it clearly depends on where you live.
They were raised on addictive electronic forms of media and TV sitcoms of the 90’s that filled in absentee parents fighting their own demons (substance abuse, divorce, jail, broken homes, sexual abuse, poverty, etc.)
I was raised prior generation (I'm Boomer/Gen X cusp) and pretty much on my own during the day at 4-years-old. Just around the block thing.
And I totally agree with you. Same with the "everyone gets a participation trophy" bullshit - it's not the kids, it is the parents. Kids don't have control over that.
The answer is "the media." There's a saying in media, "If it bleeds, it leads." Meaning horrible stories are the best stories. And so, with the advent of the 1980s and cable, then with internet exploding media channels in 2000, the world is awash with bad stories. And it seeps into society.
People get in actual trouble now if they let their child walk 1 mile to school and if it is elementary school. Police car trouble.
The actual crime rate is way, way declined over time, across the board. However, the perception of crime rate is it is going up.
So parents want to protect their children against all these manufactured bad things.
I'm with you on overprotecting kids being a bad thing, but it's pretty rich for The Atlantic to be telling parents not to teach their kids to fear the world, when their stock in trade, like that of practically all media outlets, is to constantly teach parents to fear the world.
I really don't get this reaction, and it seems very common. I don't really read the Atlantic much any more, haven't for a long time, but that's because I don't read much of any news periodicals. Nonetheless, for a periodical, they have always presented a pretty broad range of views, and the range tends to always be somewhat middle of the road. So no extreme takes on any particular subject, but within the range of what they publish, it's very common for one writer to disagree with another.
This seems to be getting painted by a lot of you as a bad thing. The views presented here don't represent the views of the Atlantic. They represent the views of the writer. And other writers also published by the Atlantic disagree. Some of them think you should be afraid. Some of them think you should not be afraid. That isn't hypocrisy or "rich." It's a publication showing you a range of views from people who disagree on subjects that are far from settled. How is this supposed to be a bad thing? Do you want the editorial board to instead only publish takes that all agree and present only one side of any subject?
Why are we pretending that all published stories are presented equally, forgetting the entire history of media and the internet advertising economy in the process.
It's entirely on brand. They are playing into parent's fear of being too afraid. It's fear inception. Fuck off, I'm keeping my kids in the house until at least 10yo and that white van that has been seen prowling around is a serious threat and they should know about it. Strangers are potentially dangerous, high things are dangerous. The world will mess you up in a moment if you don't use your whole being, your gut and your head, to move intelligently within it. Being carefree and ignorant is not an optimal strategy, nor is it the path to a life lived in truth. And ultimately a life lived beautifully. Vacuous joy is not the goal here.
That's one fucked up way to see the world, and... to fuck up your kids for good. I hope they are stronger than you and overcome whatever you instill(ed) in them, many do. Some would even call social services in such a case (I wouldn't but that's mostly due to general shit quality of those).
Overall, the whole article is so surreal - is this actual reality in US? Where I live, and lived, which means some parts of Europe, kids are much more self-sufficient, its expected from them and they are happy to deliver. I recall the joy and pride I felt when I begged my parents into letting me go alone for the first time on public transport from aunt home, and they let me and it was at the end simple ride with bunch of stops. The idea anybody can protect their kids 100% is completely ridiculous, just let it go. Teach them to be smart when interacting with strangers, not fearful. Are you also afraid by default when stranger approaches you ie with a question? (that would explain a lot).
Whatever inner problem you have, it can be worked on by specialists, just don't close yourself since you drag your closest family down that hole and young ones have no good defenses for messed up parents.
> Overall, the whole article is so surreal - is this actual reality in US?
Within my bubble, I would say yes. Most parents I know seems to not let their kids go unsupervised (by them or some other parent) until around 13-16. I also grew up in this kind of dynamic, but I also didn't ever feel the need/want to be in unsupervised scenarios, so I didn't notice the oddity of it until later in life.
I don't know the underlying cause, but part of it seems to be that people misunderstand and overestimate the the likelyhood of certain bad events happening, while simultaneously ignoring all of the daily risks they take and are completely fine with.
One example I hear within family is the worry about child abductions, and how there are such terrible people out there that would do such things. The misunderstanding that seems to be in play when these things come up is that 90% of child abductions are by a family member, not some random joe/jane on the street. Another non-zero amount are by care-takers, so people that parents trust enough to supervise their children. Finally there is the last few percent that people have some more valid reason to worry about. This seems like an awfully small chance event to spent a lot of time worrying about.
wtf? Keeping kids inside unless accompanied until 10yo is a reason to call social services? It's the average where I live. There is one kid on the block that goes out, he is 7/8 and it's considered unusual and a little dangerous.
You think that we should hide the world from children? You are mistaken. Danger is real, the only safe way to live within it is with due caution, not fear but caution.
If you jump from a cliff you will die. If you fall over backwards on that climbing frame you could well hurt yourself seriously. It is not a parents job to shield children from the world but to teach them the skills to navigate it. In the first years of life we nurture and protect, as they become more capable we release them little by little into the world.
> Overall, the whole article is so surreal - is this actual reality in US?
As with almost everything, it depends on where you are in the US, but there has been a general trend towards overprotection of kids. The GP is an extreme example, but I've definitely met parents with that same attitude.
"The idea anybody can protect their kids 100% is completely ridiculous, just let it go."
You're right. I think one significant difference between my parents generation and those of us who came later, is that they lived through the depression and WWII. They knew this fact if not consciously then subconsciously for the very reason that from an early age they were often confronted with things and circumstances well outside their control. War for instance, being conscripted into the military was just a fact of life and that one had to accept it, everyone was well aware that it was essentially futile to do otherwise.
To a large extent their attitude of resignation and acceptance of fate passed onto way they treated us, their children. Like other aspects of their lives, they accepted the fact that they couldn't control everything we did, even if we were just kids.
That was a great blessing for my generation, the babyboomers. We had almost none of the major restrictions that governed our parents' lives, and it's largely the reason for why we had so much freedom and autonomy as kids.
Nevertheless, we became a bratish generation, we did what we wanted and we got what we wanted. Compared with our parents we were undisciplined and from there we eventually developed into the 'control freak' generation. As babyboomers, we were now getting just about everything denied to our parents, but when something was denied to us we became overly pushy and overbearing until we'd gotten what we wanted. After all, for us, it was a logical extension of what was already happening.
Same with the kids, babyboomers felt the need to control their lives and had no compunction or regret in doing so. Later, that fact was not lost on more recent generations and they've since honed the practice into a fine art.
Clearly, this is a grossly simplified explanation of what is a long and rich set of facts but you'll get the gist.
Nevertheless, we babyboomers should not blame our parents for seemingly the sins they endowed us with, for after the bad times and wars they'd experienced they wanted us kids to have a better life and they only did what they thought best for us.
Where I'm from (Eastern Europe), this is not generally a thing. Is it easier to kidnap a child using a white van? Or do the would-be kidnappers always use white vans so as to be more easily spotted?
Is the plan to kidnap the child and... raise them as a member of one's own family? Try to blackmail the parents? Something worse?
This whole situation is hard for me to understand, your confidence about white vans in particular.
because it's very easy to get someone into a white van and close the doors without much fuss. If you wanted to kidnap someone what would you choose? You've never heard of rape and murder for sexual gratification? I find your innocence unlikely, it makes me think you are intentionally not understanding.
I was latchkey kid, born in the late 70s. I don't remember the exact ages, but I was always alone or with friends from a very young age. My neighborhood had a 4 lane highway on one side and rivers on the other 2. The only rule was don't cross the highway. We spent most days in the rivers fishing, water skiing and generally being idiots, and I'll readily admit that I look back at those times and wonder how no one drowned.
My dad also worked a bunch of jobs, one of which was selling firewood. At a young age I wasn't strong enough to move the logs around, but I could run the hydraulic splitter while he did the heavy lifting. I hated it at the time, but looking back at it fondly now because it was time with my dad teaching me about hard work by example. I ended up helping him with many of his jobs often late into the evening.
Are kids too protected today? IDK. Times are different. For example, using guns other than for hunting wasn't much of a thing. If you had a problem with another kid, you threw a few punches in the soccer field and then were friends again the next day. Zero social media meant when I was teased a school and went home, it didn't follow me. So while maybe kids are too protected now, the dangers have changed.
> Times are different. For example, using guns other than for hunting wasn't much of a thing. If you had a problem with another kid, you threw a few punches in the soccer field and then were friends again the next day.
This is an incredibly romanticized view of the past. Gun violence from 1992-2019 was significantly lower than the previous 30 years.
The vast majority of deaths from firearms are not from mass shootings. This is still true if you look specifically at those under 18 - it's down to about ~2K homicides, most of which are the result of street violence. Mass shootings actually kill less children every year than unlocked guns that they get access to and accidentally shoot themselves or another kid.
Mass shootings aren't even 1% of the gun murders. Furthermore, they are mostly a product of our obsession with them. Mass shootings are for the most part elaborate suicides that include making the person famous. If we didn't make a big issue out of them there would be little incentive to do them.
I'm guessing from the rivers thing you probably didn't live anywhere near a major city. Kids getting shot isn't even remotely a new thing. In fact, it's quite a bit less common now than in the 80s and early 90s. I wasn't exactly inner city, just LA suburbs, but my middle school still experienced three drive-bys while I was there. I knew four kids who were murdered before we graduated and another who shot himself when we were 12. We were banned from wearing red, blue, or Raiders jerseys because the school district was so paranoid we'd get shot. Guns being used for something other than hunting has been around a long time. The 70s were really when it first started to take off, largely because that was when street gangs started taking over domestic drug trade and they suddenly became much better funded and better armed.
You're right, and I should have been more clear with the nuance I was trying to get across. Growing up, guns being used to indiscriminately kill other people was something that happened somewhere else, often associated with drugs/gangs. Even in my smaller city, there were simply some places you didn't go. But, no one considered kids showing up to a school and shooting people. Then Columbine happened which brought it out of the the big/inner city and into everyone's backyard. And around a decade later, Sandy Hook.
And to the original post, there's also an income inequality component. More well off parents probably felt (rightly or wrongly) they could move to a safer place. That feeling has been eroded through school shootings, no matter how statistically insignificant they are.
Related to this, deeply focused on the American experience:
The Coddling of the American Mind
> (...) ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life.
> Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. (...)
Blaming that last one on education seems like a stretch to me. It's hard for kids these days not to default to "good vs evil" when there's a major political party dedicated to actively rolling back what they've grown up with as rights.
People have different value systems, and different beliefs about the role of government. I might not agree with some of those values or beliefs, but it doesn't make one side evil. It's a philosophical difference over how society should work. Humans and societies are much more complex than good and evil. Good and evil, or heroes and villains are for fiction and religious narratives. And the reductive belief in people being good or bad tends to lead to holy wars and radicalization.
There was the same major political party doing the same thing in the '90s and the '00s. In fact, some of those rights weren't even rights yet (e.g. gay marriage). The only difference today is the dramatic reaction to it justifying black-and-white thinking.
Even with more polarized political parties today, the world is a lot more complicated than "Republicans Evil." If the teens of today can't grasp that, it's at least a failure of society to develop their emotional resilience (or cynically - it's the fault of an economy that is breeding & preying on their lack of resilience and nuance).
To add another datapoint: I'm not even that old (born in the mid-80s).
When I was 9 I walked a mile to school with my 6-year old sister, unsupervised (and stayed at home alone for an hour after school until my parents got home).
At 12 I commuted to school on a city bus for an hour (with a transfer downtown).
At 14.. jeez, I'm pretty sure at 14 my parents left me alone in the house for a long weekend.
Born in the late 80s in Austria, we were playing outdoors without supervision since elementary school. Walking around in villages, building tree houses, going to the lake, exploring the forests. Me and my sister would sometimes spend 2 weeks home alone while my parents where on holidays, with only my grandma living across our house and cooking for us. I grew up on the country side, I'm sure my life would have been very different if had been raised in a city.
Funnily enough, I still remember all the very stupid and dangerous thinks we did when we were kids, which makes me afraid when I think about my own daughter... How do you deal with this problem?
Yep, born in 1993, I didn't get to stay home alone or walk to school regularly (til high school), but I certainly spent hours and hours outside unsupervised (especially during summer vacation), pretty much from the time I started school. And so did most of my classmates...
By the time I was 10 I was also completely unsupervised.
I would distract the 7-11 clerk while my accomplice filled his backpack with candy, which he would then sell at elementary school at a 100 to 200 percent markup to the supervised children.
We would also rob the fifth grade school supplies store, which we were supposedly working at, and again, he would sell everything we stole for more than the people we stole from were selling it for. This is a good business tactic if you can make it work! This is not legal advice!
The last time I saw my accomplice would have been 89 or 90, I was in court to support a friend who had a minor criminal charge for some porch theft she had done, he was going down for possession of LSD with intent to sell. I think that's what the charges were, it was a long time ago. This was in the south, and in the early 90's in the south, I'm sure he did some time for that. I don't know what happened to him.
He did have his memories of a completely unsupervised youth to fall back on, as do I.
This. Inter-city trains weren't even an option where I grew up but I went to my grandmother's on my own (city bus, crossing major streets) at I'm sure 8 and perhaps 7. We attempted to use public transit to get me to private school at IIRC 8, it didn't work only because too often the bus didn't stop for me. At 10 I was taking one class off campus--and getting there by public transit.
There's also a secondary issue with overprotecting kids--they don't learn to be wary of the things they do need to be wary of. I'm thinking of a case here many years back, 13 year old only looks one (the wrong) way before walking through the school zone--2 minutes before the lights came on. She stepped out right in front of a truck. And I routinely see it in the wilderness--20's, 30's out there with no thought of what might go wrong. Just Sunday I saved a guy from a very unpleasant night--his phone was dead, he took the wrong fork and didn't realize it. I had talked to him earlier, encountered him again and realized he was on the right trail but going the wrong way. (He was parked at a different trailhead than I was.) No phone = no call for help and almost certainly no light--note that this was the day after a new moon--and even if he realized which branch to take at the next junction it still would have put him back in civilization several miles from his car. And if he took the wrong one--the trail name says "loop" but that will take you over an almost 12k summit, a total of nearly 20 miles.
yeah I was raised in similar manner, but as a father of 2 right now I see - in my personal case - the biggest difference that makes me afraid about my kids:
I don't know around half of my closest neighbours
It's not that I don't want to get to know them, it's that everyone are so busy (me included) that I don't simply have time to align with them to learn more about them better.
Also, tons of people are moving in and moving out all the time.
It wasn't the case in my home village - I knew a lot of people and even more people (my parent friends that I didn't know) knew who I was. I could bet at that time that if something bad was going on for me, there would be someone who will help me without any struggle.
In my current place is different. Even my relatives who stayed in my home town can agree that even there a lot of people are moving in and out and they don't know all of the townspeople anymore.
I remember being 4-years-old and unsupervised a lot. By 6 years old for sure. By 8...."Get out of the house and out from under my feet and don't come back until dinnertime! Now get out!"
A coworker in grad school was from China and talked about at age 3 needing to go to the market to buy some basic groceries, fix his own food, and he was alone in the apartment while his parents worked. It was an eye opening conversation to have just a handful of years ago.
Starting around age 6 or 7 I was going into the woods playing with a friend and by 11 or so my parents had no problem with me riding my bike whwrever I wanted to around town, well before I had a cell phone.
Wow. At age 3 some children cannot fully verbalize what they want or need, and some still are not potty trained. I'm ready to accept some 3 year olds can do this, but I think it's unreasonable to expect most children at age 3 to be able to go to the supermarket to buy groceries and fix their own food...
My 3 year old cannot open the fridge, she doesn't have the strength/dexterity. She cannot open lids either. She cannot fix any kind of meal without making a mess. With play-doh she pretends to make meals and definitely makes a mess (and enjoys herself tremendously in the process).
She absolutely cannot go to the supermarket to buy anything, and she cannot cross the street either.
A 3 year old doing all those things... I'm willing to believe some can, but it's definitely not the norm, and not because we don't let them. They just can't.
I think this is more of a "you have to" thing: I vividly remember many 3 - 4 year olds on the vietnamese side of my family being MUCH more ahead of the ones from the german side... i would think it could be that we in the west put too little challenge up for our kids
It should be noted that rate of accidental deaths in childhood has fallen drastically since then:
> Between 1960 and 1990 the death rate for children aged five to 14 fell 48 percent ... a growing share of the accelerating reduction in child mortality arises from a sharp drop in deaths from unintentional injury or accident.
No doubt that's very true. However, making the world a safer place by assessing the data and then making changes is not the same as nuking kids' autonomy.
The environment can be made safer for kids - and everyone for that matter - and the fact that that it is happening is a very good thing and only to be welcomed. Very, few would ever deny that.
If we were to revert back to attitudes of the 1950s and '60s and give today's kids the same freedoms and autonomy that kids had in that past era (except perhaps for some extreme cases at the margins), then where would that leave us?
No doubt, the mortality rate would rise for the aforementioned age groups but by how much? Those stats of 48% have to be carefully examined and broken down by location then state by state and then country by country (which would require additional data) if we are to gain accurate and meaningful figures. All else being equal, it may be that the actual freedoms and autonomy afforded to kids have to be scaled by location and circumstance - what's applicable in, say, NYC would likely be quite different to those for a town in outback Australia.
I don't know the answer to that question and I've not seen any figures to indicate that anyone else knows them with any level or degree of certainty. Only further research will provide accurate answers.
What I'm about to say next troubles me the most. I have an overactive amygdala and any discussion of metrics concerning kids' lives horrifies me but perhaps we may have to eventually confront the issue no matter how uncomfortable it may be (the death of any kid upsets me terribly and it's something that I'd personally much rather not confront).
As a society, like it or not, we may be confronted with the situation were we have to weigh up the mental health and suicide statistics for kids against the risks and dangers of providing them with additional freedoms to explore the world in ways they see fit - either singly by themselves and or with their mates. That's not saying adults shouldn't provide guidance, of course they should.
As I said, I don't the answers, but what I do know is that eventually we will have to confront the issue head-on.
I think it fitting to finish by saying that in hindsight and after witnessing the increasing rates of psychological problems and distress in kids today, that I've come to realize that the autonomy and freedoms that I had as a kid were near the most important developmental aspects of my childhood.
Frankly, the thought of growing up in today's society with its mixed and conflicting ethics and the strictures placed on kids' freedoms by both parents and society at large simply horrifies me.
>"...children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in their own front yard, 12 years old to stay home alone for an hour, and 14 to be unsupervised at a public park."
interesting.. this is roughly the milestones we've used for our kids. Not because that was told to us or we read it anywhere. Just because thats how we judged the kids capabilities and confidance levels.
My son (the oldest) hit the milestones a bit earlier then my daughter.
And today's kids can easily have a device that communicates with satellites every few seconds to determine their position on the globe, and can update servers with that position instantly, along with communication with nearly anyone on earth.
When I was a teenager, if my parents wanted to find me on weekends, they'd have to resort to calling other parents until they tracked me down.
The issue is the busybodies also have that device and the opportunity cost for them to make false claims about your child's safety that result in weeks to months of harassment by authorities is practically nill for them. And thanks to the way the CPS reporting laws are written, literally illegal to find out who the busybody was or face your accuser.
>By the time I was 10 I was allowed to be unsupervised and to get on a bus to a railway station, purchase a ticket for an intercity train that took me the better part of 100 miles away to another city then alight there at a major railway junction with many platforms and from there catch a suburban train to my final destination where my grandmother lived.
Pfff, when I was 7 or 8 I took the local bus to the intercity bus station and then took that 200km to get to my grandparents. I had to figure out what bus to get on to and when to get off. I remember nobody even asked me for ticket money, just asked me where I was going. I was super happy because I got to pocket the money - but then I lost somewhere on my way there :(
But I was one of 4 children in a poor family (at the time, eventually we got up to 6). I can't see myself risking my son on something as stupid, the amount of near death experiences I've had as a child, it freaks me out when I think about my son doing something like that, and I can't really say I'm better off for it either - I was just bored, poor and didn't have anything better to do.
Depends on where you come from, I guess. I remember that we teased the kid who still got picked up by his parents from school when he was 9. I walked to and from preschool alone when I was 6. Usually took the shortcut through the woods. During the winter it was almost pitch black. It was scary.
What he said is true in large part of world, bith in western countries and non-western ones. In particular, 9 years old being unable to play alone in own back yard is deeeply ridiculous.
Also at 10, my parents put me on a cross-country flight by myself from PDX to Atlanta (to visit family). Note, this was in 1999, not some bygone era. I imagine there would be an Amber Alert nowadays if someone noticed me sitting by myself on an airplane.
Airlines literally have a special thing that costs a ton extra and results in the kid being monitored constantly by an airline employee. (I got to see the jet bridge being "driven" up to the airplane because the guy who was watching me never had his relief show up!) https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/special-assistance/unacc...
My parents divorced when I was very young and my dad ended up getting a job in a different state. So by age 4-5 I was flying alone between parents semi-regularly. This was in the late 80s to early 90s.
When we became parents my wife and I agreed that we wanted to let our kids explore the world with a similar level of freedom we had as a kids.
When my 3yo was about 2, he pushed through a defective locked gate and fell down a flight of stairs, losing a tooth. Then about three weeks ago he got distracted in the bathroom and fell off a stool with a toothbrush in his mouth. I'll spare you the details.
These accidents weren't directly caused by our goal of giving our kids more independence, but they had the effect of making that goal all but impossible, at least for now. I catch myself telling him he can't do things he could before, or saying "<childname> slow down!" about 100 times per day. Seeing him on a playground gives me terrible anxiety.
He's fine. He's not afraid of anything. He's so bloody resilient despite all his trauma. But I'm failing him because the risks feel so real and paralyzing. To love what death can touch...
One difference, I think, is that I am lucky enough to not be affected by the historical taboo of mental health. I'm seeking therapy for this, which I'm also not afraid to admit out loud. And I'm hopeful that it will help me face this.
> Then about three weeks ago he got distracted in the bathroom and fell off a stool with a toothbrush in his mouth. I'll spare you the details. These accidents weren't directly caused by our goal of giving our kids more independence, but they had the effect of making that goal all but impossible, at least for now.
Earlier this summer we had our family holiday in Italy. In week one I had a bike accident which necessitated a visit to the local emergency room and I was wearing a dressing on my arm for the entire holiday. In week two my daughter had an unlucky fall and cut her forehead which necessitated a(nother) visit to the local emergency room, she needed stitches. In week three our eldest was stung by a jellyfish while swimming in the sea. Huge weals all down his body but (fortunately) no trip to ... the emergency room.
We have three kids and you would not believe the number of times I've had to drop everything to take one or other of them to the doctor and/or the hospital.
> the risks feel so real and paralyzing
Seriously: please don't give up on your wish to let your kids explore the world!
> We have three kids and you would not believe the number of times I've had to drop everything to take one or other of them to the doctor and/or the hospital.
This would cost most families (without gold plated healthcare subsidies from being a government employee or other generous employer in the US) $10k to ~$17.5k per year, and those ranges go up every year.
A single doctor visit is usually $200 to $300, and emergency room visit might as well be your annual out of pocket maximum ($10k to $17k).
I grew up before out of pocket maximums were a thing, and I remember my dad distinctly telling me to be careful not to injure myself because it could derail the whole family’s future. This was because my parents were immigrants who were building a small business, so they had equity to lose, but not enough cash flow to purchase healthcare. I also thought about impacts to my sister’s future, who is 6 years younger.
I never did participate in sports and never needed to go to the doctor or dentist.
Today, I earn enough to not have to worry about healthcare expenses, but I would not have had kids if I did not have the ability to pay for two calendar years’ worth of out of pocket expenses (~$34k, in case injury occurs on Dec 31).
> A single doctor visit is usually $200 to $300, and emergency room visit might as well be your annual out of pocket maximum ($10k to $17k).
In the spirit of sharing data from a very different system:
Emergency room visit was €40 for me (checkup/cleaning/dressing), €55 for my daughter (stitches apparently cost extra).
A simple follow-up doctor/clinic visit in Italy was €15 (first time) / €10 (repeat), I paid this a few times each time I had my wounds cleaned and dressed, and again for my daughter when she had her stitches taken out and a check-up a few days later.
> This would cost most families (without gold plated healthcare subsidies from being a government employee or other generous employer in the US) $10k to ~$17.5k per year, and those ranges go up every year.
Maybe the parent poster does not live in the US ;-)
I had similar level of accident prone-ness as a kid and still a lot of freedom,
sped down a giant incline right into a wall of concrete+rebar and had neighborhood kids literally carry me back home, stapled myself burnt myself on soldering irons cuts bruises so on... that kind of stuff I dont think even affects me physically, what sticks with me was the freedom to experiment with anything (I was also a bit of a rule breaker, breaking into unoccupied apartments in our building as a kid)
Sounds like you are self aware and can realize when you might be going overboard. Just sent my son to college. I made tons of mistakes. He overcame them. People are resilient - so is your child.
The thing is why are we more scared these days? Did our parents care less for our health and safety? Or, perhaps they were more ignorant of the world as a whole and blissfully raised a family? Cuts, bruises and maybe broken bones are part of growing up and learning.
These days "media", meaning news and social media, seem to act as more as an anxiety pipeline than an information service. I also feel it forms a violence feedback loop by fueling peoples fears until the mentally unstable among us feel so cornered they lash out violently like a trapped animal. Of course this is on purpose because information is boring and they needs advertising revenue. Anxiety makes more money. Seems coincidentally the perfect time to decriminalize weed.
I don't buy the media blame thing on its own. It feels like there should be epidemiological research into it. For example, how is this generation's coffee intake different to the last one? Use of psychotropic medications? Different air pollution, less lead?
I'm pretty certain you're correct. It seems to me that we won't get to the bottom of this until the study of intergenerational and cultural change becomes a much more established science. And for that to happen we need much more research into the matter. Moreover, the objectives of any such research should be clearly defined and then rigorously carried out.
This subject is a political football and the individual views and biases of researchers often taint the data. We won't make significant progress until we find ways of minimizing this problem.
In Japan there’s a tradition of having kids, at around 3 years old, go out by themselves to run errands. There’s a whole tv show about it.
If you are curious about other cultures as well, there’s a pretty good documentary on Apple tv about the first 5 years of life of kids from all around the world, including kids in rural areas, big cities and even small remote tribes.
Regarding the setting, there are some places (like some resorts or big estates), where young kids can be very safe and that allows them to be on their own a lot and build their independence.
The children on this TV show go along preplanned routes that are vetted by the show and are of course secretly supervised by the tv crews. 3 year olds are not routinely running errands in japan.
Young children do do things at a much younger age independently in japan than america, but it's not like the show.
edit: not to imply the show is fake or anything. It's just a special situation the show is filming.
As carefully supervised as those kids are, it has made me realize how much more capable children that age are than I gave them credit for. I'm still not sure I'd have done as well when I was that little. I was walking myself to/from primary school at least.
The key is finding things that they CAN do that you're pretty certain won't hurt them too much if they somehow fail.
Because otherwise they're going to silently sit and watch and wait, and then one night grab the car keys and put the car in neutral and roll down the driveway into the neighbor's yard.
Yes, that's the trick. And making sure those boundaries are enforced consistently (if mom says no ask dad, &c).
I certainly did my fair share of independent acting out in my teen years (the car example is right on the nose for me) but we've got a lot of groundwork to lay before we get to that point. As far as I can tell the next target is learning how to use a doorknob, which will bring its own set of challenges.
My <2 year old gets frustrated if we try to help too much brushing teeth or putting his pants on! He also hates it when you try and feed him, he'll fight it until you just set the spoon down and let him feed himself.
I've been learning to be okay with a bit more mess and a bit more time to get ready for things. I'm also learning guiding techniques like allowing my child to choose between two acceptable options. Win-win if it works: they get to feel like they're getting their way, and I'm getting mine.
Don't drag your kid into pit hole of your own mental issues. Does he have some permanent damage, or just few teeth that would anyway fell out and maybe some light scars? That's 0 price to pay to have true freedom at most important time of life.
Why do folks have so much issues with letting life just unravel, and desperately trying to control every aspect of it, yet consistently being reminded how they are failing? I don't have any mental issues so its very hard for me to imagine what it causes. What I describe is natural to me, and seems almost impossible to force upon yourself for you.
I suspect that hit TV shows like "America's Most Wanted" did a great deal of damage to the American psyche. The 1990s seemed to be when parental attitudes started to take a turn. When I grew up before then, kids were generally allowed to roam wherever they wanted unsupervised, as long as they were home in time for dinner.
There are probably other factors too. I wonder if there was a kind of overcompensation from "latchkey kids" when they became parents.
> When I grew up before then, kids were generally allowed to roam wherever they wanted unsupervised, as long as they were home in time for dinner.
Me too.
With that being said, as a parent now, the #1 fear I have with my children playing outside unsupervised isn't kidnapping or violence or anything that would appear on Unsolved Mysteries or America's Most Wanted.
It's cars. My fear is cars.
My boys are 7 & 5 years old and they are both very inattentive. No matter how hard I try to put the fear of the road into them, they both have a tendency to mindlessly wander into it without looking. My older one is autistic, so I'm sure that has something to do with it, but my younger one is not and he is even worse.
I live in a suburb in Maryland named Columbia. Its residential areas were thoughtfully planned-out with very few "busy roads" running through them, but I regularly see people (teenagers?) flooring 50+mph down sleepy tree-lined 25mph streets.
I have no doubt in my mind that, if left unattended, both of my boys would be run over by one of these insane drivers within a week.
Edit: Yes, we and others have complained to the city. Yes, there are speed cameras and the like, but this behavior has only gotten worse post-COVID.
It's an interesting point and actually feeds back into the America's Most Wanted issues. As America has gotten more focused on cars for the majority of transportation the neighborhood has broken down, people who never walk in their community never meet their neighbors and it's much easier to cultivate fear about neighbors you've never met along with being harder to trust those mystery neighbors to intervene if they see something wrong.
There was a saying "It takes a village to raise a child" but in modern America each family is closer to being an island to themselves trying to raise their children - there almost certainly are a dozen or so other parents you've met at parks and other things that you trust but those parents might live quite far away from you.
Living in a car oriented culture comes with serious societal issues.
Interestingly, the pandemic altered this briefly in my neighborhood. Seemingly out of nowhere, for a few months in 2020 - our streets were filled regularly with walkers, dogs and children. There were new face-to-face conversations with people who had lived in the same neighborhood for over 7-10 years. There were driveway get togethers, cul-de-sac firepits and a renewed sense of community that went deeper than asking for a contractor recommendation or a cup of sugar. While the pandemic was horrible in numerous ways, this was one side-effect that was truly positive for my small piece of the world and has resulted in stronger, new friendships that I hope to continue.
In retrospect, could we have done this through social events or aggressive reach-outs - sure. But the apathy and distraction provided by using a car to go somewhere was a constant saboteur.
Im not disagreeing about cars but i want to point out you can say the same thing about the invention of AC and the washing machine. Almost any at home technology that replaced communal work has had this affect.
Not really seeing how they're comparable-- vastly different levels of influence in terms of promoting isolation. While true that lower levels of tech/development promote more communal labor, there's much more to social relations than that-- and modes of transportation, along with subsidizing the suburbanization of the country have a much greater impact.
Im sure that sounds odd to you if you are younger but go to any small town and talk to people about how AC changed the swimming hole of the 50s or the washing machine changed the way housewives socialized. The car reformed neighborhoods and commerce for sure, but so did several other private in home technologies. I mean the television fundamentally changed child development. And before it the average person in america went to the theater 1-2 times per week. You likely just live like a fish in water with them now and never knew how it was.
The car was part of a total private technology revolution that fundamentally reduced socialization for work and play.
If you can physically drive 50+ mph down a street signed for 25 mph then whoever built the road may have been thoughtful but they certainly weren't thinking about safety.
Signs and warnings rank very low in the hierachy of engineering controls.
The safest option would be to physically prevent vehicles able to travel at greater than 15mph from being in areas with children.
The next safest would be to redesign the street to prevent high-powered vehicles from being able to travel at greater than 15mph.
> If you can physically drive 50+ mph down a street signed for 25 mph then whoever built the road may have been thoughtful but they certainly weren't thinking about safety.
but sadly most subdivision builders like to make nice straight roads, which means that one of the more effective tools to control speed (having the road turn, or snake) won't work. That leaves having frequent intersections with either stops or roundabouts.
Stop sign planning usually says to avoid 4 way stops and to give give preference to one of the streets (usually the busier), meaning that if those are used one street at any interspection will probably be one with few stops, allowing cars to build up speed.
Roundabouts (preferably with a physical center median) are the right choice for residential streets, but in most of the US they are still considered "weird", so subdivision developers don't make much use of them.
My town, which is pretty lenient on parking in general, has a rule that an RV may not stay in the street for more than 24 hours. An oversize pickup truck would do the job though and not be subject to the same time limits.
In some neighbourhoods in Copenhagen, the streets suddenly narrow to only allow 1 car to pass (in a two way street) with a small bump, which is very effective from my perspective as a driver.
Ironically, I live in the notoriously high-crime city to your north, with kids basically the same age. The older one has free reign of our neighborhood at this point. We live in a walkable neighborhood with streets narrow enough that cars can't pick up any significant speed. Everyone agrees that Columbia is "safer," but I'm way less worried about my kids up here.
I recently moved from Brooklyn to Phoenix. I'd have an easier time of letting my 4-year-old walk on the sidewalks of Brooklyn than anywhere in Phoenix. The driving is so much worse and so much faster here. Cars are also my biggest fear going into her more independent years. People flying out of our condo complex, a 7-lane road adjacent to it, everyone rageful and in a hurry constantly. I'm far more worried about inattentive drivers than playground falls or kidnappers.
I’m not an expert on brain development but I’m pretty sure kids just simply do not have a lot of spatial awareness. I know I tend to watch out for them even just walking around them because they don’t pay attention to where they are going.
We visited family in Europe earlier this summer. So much has changed there compared to only 10-15 years ago. We were never once worried for our kids wandering around alone, because streets were designed so drivers had to drive slow. Also no monster trucks and monster SUVs everywhere. Also lot's of segregated bikelanes. Lots of walkable neighborhoods. A lot fewer casual sociopaths, you know, the sort of people you see here driving on bald tires with their bumper ripped off, jagged pieces of metal sticking out from the front of their car.
Yes, kids brains are underdeveloped, but streets accommodate that there, it's not a death sentence.
It's absolutely unreal how far America seems to have fallen behind, compared to just 10-15 years ago, and how far ahead new traffic calming measures have gotten there in that same timeframe. That's the main thing that strikes us on our return. The absolute complete solipsism on this issue, how trashy and violent the public realm is here.
You obviously don't have kids. Even as 3/4 year olds they have great spatial skills when running, climbing, jumping. Better than most adults. They have less boundaries, that's for sure.
The saddest thing to me that the window is so small to fix it. If my city dawdles another 5-10 years to make our streets safer, my kids will be old enough for it not to matter anymore.
It's a really hard choice. How long are we waiting around until we just pack up and move to somewhere that is safe, to a place where our kids can have independent mobility.
America is so way behind, not only the major centers, even worse in all the 2nd and 3rd tier cities where people still get an aneurysm when somebody dares to suggest to install a bikelane.
It's sad, because America is so large even in each city, it wouldn't be hard to have one suburb or neighborhood dedicated to "family friendly slow streets" and another elsewhere to "walking retirement community", etc.
Instead we get nearly identical developments repeated over and over and over again.
Speedbumps help a bit, but many drivers break down just before the bump and then speed to the next one. Better solution is to design the street for slower traffic. Narrow it down, expand the sidewalks and/or add a bike path, Make speeding uncomfortable and the average speeds will go down.
After cutting the cord when our first daughter was born, we were often surprised to come down from a hotel room to get breakfast in the lobby to find that some horrific things were happening, cities were burning, people being murdered, a world spinning out of control.
Oh yeah, I had to remind myself, cable news was like that. So we grabbed coffee to go and headed out to the National Park to hike with the kids.
Similarly, it's terrible that the default thing on TV at airports and gyms is cable news. It's especially absurd at the gym - going to be healthy and feel some nice endorphins, and then you're subjected to the worst things happening in the world. Comical, really.
Cable news being the choice entertainment of airports is especially funny when all the TVs are showing the plane with stuck landing gear trying to come down just outside the window. A plane with stuck gear is a minor issue that happens periodically and has very little chance of causing problems, but from the news coverage you'd think it was an unthinkable disaster.
I always think the gangs and crack epidemic were major contributors too. This was also the era of drive by shootings and gangster rap/culture infiltrating the middle class and WASP folks homes via their children and popular media of all kinds. I also remember teenage pregnancy seemed like a bigger issue then and a reason parents controlled their daughters more closely. The nightly news was reporting on this stuff and many inner city areas were severely depressed. I think in a lot of those areas that have since been gentrified we probably forget just how bad it was for a time.
My daughters both have their own .22s - they're 8 and 14.
They have .20ga shotguns, too, but don't get nearly as much use out of those.
We currently live in a neighborhood, and my biggest fear in letting them run around is other people calling the police on them for just being unattended. I've already had that happen once, while they were in my own front yard.
We're in the process of looking for a bigger property, further away from other people, where our kids can actually be kids. We'll be able to keep some livestock, and they can ride four-wheelers, gokarts, and dirt bikes. Today they can only do those things when we take them somewhere there's room to do it.
Not just TV shows in the 90s, but netflix documentaries and fictional shows about serial killers today. These seem to be insanely popular.
Serial killers are extremely rare, exceptionally few people will ever know somebody who knows somebody who knew a victim of one. Everybody today knows that serial killers exist, but most people only know it because they heard about it from mass media, not because they have some sort of personal experience with it. I think this surely leads people to overestimate the risk.
I like Arthur Brooks. He seems to be a voice of reason in this crazy world.
Having just read his recent book and both the books he mentions in the article, I actually started to understand what is being said here.
On the first page of the Tao Te Ching (Stephen Mitchell translation), it talks about the true source of understanding is darkness.
> Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
> Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
> Yet mystery and manifestations
> arise from the same source.
> This source is called darkness.
> Darkness within darkness.
> The gateway to all understanding.
We can't teach kids nor ourselves to fear the world. We have to step into the darkness to gain clarity of who we are and what we are here to do. That's the only way to learn. This somewhat adds onto Scott Barry Kaufman's new ideas of self-actualization.
Kaufman uses a sailboat as a metaphor in which the hull is security and the sail is growth.
I think knowing the darkness helps you know the "light" too. when I was a teenager I sought out the unfiltered truth of what humans were capable of, so I could properly understand what humanity "is". I found a lot of disturbing stuff (because I sought it out) and it helped me grow as a person and know how to interface with the world and get a better sense of what the full spectrum is. It didn't cause me to be fearful or anything, just aware. Anyway, maybe not 100% on-topic but what you said reminded me of that.
Arthur Brooks strikes me as a genuinely nice and interesting person. But I wonder, how much did he get paid to run a billionaire funded thinktank (and that tank of thoughts seemed mostly full of "give tax cuts to billionaires")?
I assume it paid pretty well. I also assume it's pretty easy to be nice and easygoing and thoughtful when you don't have to worry about where your kids next meal or health insurance payment is coming from.
I broadly agree with this, but it’s going to be hard if by the time I have kids pedestrian fatalities are still on the rise. The article mentions some statistics that are dropping, but the ones I worry about more are the ones that actually are still increasing, like the chance of my kid getting hit by a car while they’re walking around the neighborhood.
100% as a parent the issue is cars interacting with children.
A suboptimal but creative solution I saw recently was neighbors working together to remove their backyard fences to create a large and safe play area for children in the suburbs.
I don’t know what the solution is but it is frightening how society at large just accepts the deaths and injuries. And in my neighborhood how people drive fast around blind corners knowing there is an elementary school 5 blocks away and kids everywhere on all manner of bike/board/walk.
> suboptimal but creative solution I saw recently was neighbors working together to remove their backyard fences to create a large and safe play area for children in the suburbs.
This is something I would love to do, but still feels so impossible. I see some homes compromise and put gates in the fence. Where I am, I see probably 70%+ of homes with backyards using them as bathrooms for their dogs, and I imagine that many people would have a problem just with the basic social contract of who cleans dog poop.
Particularly due to COVID, I've begun to appreciate just how severely the suburban structure negatively impacts all aspects of our lives. You have HOAs that invest in common playgrounds, cities that have invested in parks, and virtually everyone reports extremely high satisfaction with these things. Yet my own feelings of isolation tells me that we need much much more. I'm at the point that I would seriously seek out and move to a place with a walk-able kid-friendly setup. But it just doesn't exist.
We found a place that was somewhat friendly to being walkable in that school and parks are close. But shopping, library and activities are all a few miles away. But then we added an electric cargo bike (Tern GSD) and it really expanded our sense of connectivity and joy. After almost 400 miles in 5 months it has been great for us.
The solution is to make the streets safer. There are well-documented traffic calming methods that work. On neighborhood streets like the one you may be describing that could include things like chicanes and mini roundabouts.
The rub is that they make driving less convenient, so it’s hard to get people to support them. But between making our streets safer for kids and making driving a little easier I will always choose safety.
Absolutely! Traffic calming can play a role. In fact I have been working with the County on traffic calming here. But their process is silly: paper ballots sent to homeowner’s (but not apartment renters!) along the road and a 67% turnout is required for a vote to pass.
We worked hard canvassing and educating and “only” got a 52% turnout and a 100% yes vote for traffic calming. So the vote failed.
I wrote a 10 page report on all of the ballot design failings, administrative issues, equity issues, etc and they are reforming the program and introducing digital ballots. Still working on that 67% requirement though (a recent 9 figure school bond passed with a 37% turnout).
As someone involved in election systems to some degree it was eye opening seeing something so poorly designed and executed.
That said traffic calming isn’t necessary if the roads are designed to prioritize pedestrians from the beginning. It is a patch to a bad design- or at least a design that prioritizes the wrong thing.
This assumes that maniacs and teenagers won't work their ass off to make those traffic calming methods ineffective.
My neighborhood has regular speedbumps, curvy roads, and a speed limit of 25mph. The local crazies accelerate to 50+mph right after they drive over the speed bump.
Speed bumps and curvy roads aren’t necessarily going to be effective at traffic calming; it depends on the context. For example, are they very wide curvy roads? Because those aren’t actually going to slow down drivers.
Beyond that, yes, even with traffic calming some people will be reckless. That’s when enforcement comes into play, but it only works effectively on neighborhood streets in concert with traffic calming. (Otherwise you’ll waste your resources and make people mad because everyone will be speeding!)
> but the ones I worry about more are the ones that actually are still increasing, like the chance of my kid getting hit by a car while they’re walking around the neighborhood
Yes! This is my issue as well. Drivers on residential streets have gotten so much worse since I was a kid in the '80/90s.
Streets themselves have also gotten much worse! The vast difference in car deaths in the US and other countries is more a question of our infrastructure and what it encourages than anything else.
I read a really great book about this recently -- no vested interest beyond just really liking it. Check it here [1]
Once a road becomes 4+ lanes wide (32ft+), and has a speed limit of 40mph (which means people drive at 50mph), it is basically a boundary that children cannot cross.
And in suburbs across the US, it is very normal to have numerous arterial roads (40mph speed limit) cut through suburbs that are 4, 6, 7, and even 8 lanes wide.
How even a healthy, mobile adult is expected to cross these 60ft+ wide intersections without being scared, I do not know.
There will be 3 lanes going straight through, and a right turn lane and a left turn lane. And half the people will be in SUV/pickup trucks sitting so high they will not see you in front of them, and their giant A pillar will prevent them from seeing you on the side of them.
For those of us who are now parents, think about how easily you could travel to your school, nearest park, grocery store, etc. at the house you grew up in and compare that to where you are living now.
For me:
1> My kindergarten was adjacent to my subdivision. My Catholic elementary school was less that one mile away and very walkable. The public Jr. High and High Schools I went to were a bit over a mile. None of these required crossing busy four lane roads ("Stroads" in Strong Towns parlance). The one exception was my Pre-K that was more like 3 or 4 miles and would involve crossing a busy four lane road.
My kids went to private schools that all required getting on an interstate to get to. Even if they went to public school, the nearest build is 2.8 miles and involve walking along parts without sidewalks.
2> Growing up, I had a big public park adjacent to my subdivision (on the opposite side as the kindergarten) I had most of my soccer and baseball practices there and I walked to them.
Similar parks would be 3-5 miles drive across very busy four lane highways where I live now.
3> Nearest grocery store was 1.2 miles from my childhood home.
Now, it is 4 miles up and across a very busy four lane highway.
Of course a lot of this is just where I happen to be buy my house as an adult and I was fortunate to grow up in a flatter part of town, but it would not be surprising that sprawl has increased the distances on average of these and other basic amenities.
Part of the problem is cars have gotten better/safer/faster and more boring.
I like the idea of not allowing highway vehicles near people. Park your interstate cruiser on the edge of town and then drive a golf cart to your house.
Bonus: driving a golf cart is fun and feels fast at low speeds.
What about the increasing statistics of mental health issues among children and the increase in childhood inactivity and obesity? Don't those encourage you to let your kid to freely walk around the neighbourhood?
Snark aside, the key point is that the statistics that you are worried are still increasing are still nonetheless Black Swan events on an individual scale. Their increase should absolutely be a concern at the political, urban planning, and public health levels, but it should never be a reason to discourage or forbid activities that in all regards are healthier and more formative as a person than their avoidance.
Maybe, but it was the leading cause of death for school-aged children in the US until recently. (Now that’s guns.) That feels like it’s worth worrying about.
You’re right, of course - I would much rather my kid have the same feeling of independence that I did than be stuck at home or tethered to their parents. I’ve just moved to one of the only remaining reasonably walkable/bikeable suburbs in my area for that reason. Doesn’t mean it won’t still be hard though given the rising risks.
(I’ve also been trying to get involved in safe streets advocacy lately for the same reason. Who knows if that’ll ever have an impact but I have to try.)
I think a lot of healthy life choices stem from proper risk management and cost-benefit analysis, which humans can do on their own fairly well for normal life tasks.
For instance, there's a non-zero chance you could lose your life every time you get into a car. However, almost everybody still hops into cars because the chance of a life-altering accident (if the driver not drinking and/or driving like a maniac) is relatively low and the benefits to cars in your life are high.
Where I think this ability for normal people to make sensible choices gets warped is when the media's business model of driving emotional and catchy stories interferes with peoples' actual perceptions of risk. For example, there are healthy young people still utterly scared to death of Covid because their preferred media tells them to be afraid. You can apply this to almost any hot button issue that the media has adopted and find people who have had their sense of the actual risk warped.
Getting into a car isn't the dangerous part where I live, it's being near the road. It's safer to be in a car, near the road, than on foot or on bicycle.
You and the poster you're responding to seem to be using a different definition of the word dangerous: the one above seems to be using more of the connotation of the word (point out that there's an acceptable level of risk involved with cars) and you're using the denotation (pointing out that people do die in cars).
To be clear, virtually every human activity is technically dangerous and there's a non-zero risk in almost any human activity. By the dictionary definition, owning a pool is technically dangerous because people drown and get hurt all of the time. Hell, a bucket causes a non-zero number of drowning deaths. People can die from blender accidents or shitting too hard or swallowing quarters or tripping to death on a power cord. Everything is technically dangerous.
I think it's a stretch to say that humans can do fairly well at risk management and cost-benefit analyses; humans are deeply irrational creatures who can do some math but whose subconscious prefers to conserve calories and work with simple, easy to understand absolutes.
Almost no one is punching in the numbers on their risk profile, checking, hm, 2.5 million injuries per year, 35,000 fatalities per year, 15,000 miles driven, advantages of independent mobility, how much will this trip to hang out with Jim affect my overall quality of life... No, they're assuming "I'm a good driver, I actually have quick reflexes and a safe car, nothing's going to happen". Or they're assuming that the roads are a jungle and you're almost certain to get into a crash eventually, holding negative primals about the safety of car-oriented culture.
Likewise, I suspect that some of the negative outcomes described in the article:
> As much as we hope the dangerous-world belief will help our kids, the evidence indicates that it does exactly the opposite. In the same paper, Clifton and Meindl show that people holding negative primals are less healthy than their peers, more often sad, more likely to be depressed, and less satisfied with their lives. They also tend to dislike their jobs and perform worse than their more positive counterparts.
are more appropriate given the reality of the situation. What if your job - statistically, you're probably pushing data from one silo to another to help add another decimal place to some executive's net worth - is not actually likeable? Would you rather plaster an ignorant smile to your face and be proud of your attention to detail on those TPS reports, and happy that IT brought you a new, slightly larger monitor? Perhaps you'd call yourself depressed or sad when you consider the probable state of the global climate at your eventual retirement date (if you ever get a retirement date, that assumes social security still exists, your company doesn't discharge your pension through bankruptcy, and your investments outperform rabid inflation rates).
> I think it's a stretch to say that humans can do fairly well at risk management and cost-benefit analyses;
My stated caveat is that risk assessment works "fairly well for normal life tasks". People decide to travel in cars and fly and do all sorts of things involving non-zero risk and make fairly reasonable decisions.
It's once media influence arrives (Covid!, climate change!, guns!, etc) that peoples' perceptions about actual risk for hot button issues can be warped.
Part of the evidence this article uses is that child deaths have dropped... since we started bubble wrapping our kids. Unfortunately, I do believe that if we all kicked our kids out of the house and had them roam the neighborhoods, they'd get slaughtered. I remember playing all over my childhood neighborhood, all day, every day. I walked to elementary school. However, I also just don't remember that many cars around. I remember playing hockey in the street, and when a car showed up, it did so at a crawl, then patiently waited for us to move the goals over. Now I go back to that same neighborhood and cars are driving 40+ mph on the same road I played on. My kids bike to school today, but only on a carefully curated route in the most bike-friendly city in the country, and it still scares me a bit, honestly. If I move to Houston, they are getting loaded into the back of an SUV twice daily.
I actually grew up in Houston in the 80s/90s. Playing in the street was exactly like your experience and we roamed on our bikes very far. We also felt pretty safe as kids and had enough street smarts to avoid any issues that we did encounter. But that was mostly due to safety in numbers and why I'd be difficult to go back to those times; your kids would be the only ones outside and the cars might not slow down, they might be target by a pedo, etc.
There's also tribal knowledge within a group of kids. When you're old enough to join the group, you learn from others how to safely cross a busy intersection, how to run when you encounter a deranged homeless person, how to help a friend that fell off their bike 5 miles from home without a phone in your pocket, etc. There's no support group to join so your kids would be figuring all that stuff out on their own.
I very much enjoyed the illustration, and found it to be pretty accurate. If I were to draw another illustration of eliminating vehicles without taking the appropriate long transition to moving to a new supply chain for this urban environment, it would show the valley below the cliff filled in, but with a great deal of the town dead from starvation and the stores and building dilapidated from lack of supplies.
You have to cross roads. You do so with care. I hike--and that means at times I end up walking along roads with no sidewalk and where most drivers are not expecting pedestrians. I take the working assumption that drivers will not see me, safety only comes from getting away from the road when there's a car about.
Kids learn through example. The best way to teach kids not to fear the world is to not fear the world yourself.
The trouble is fear is increasing each year. We have more and more restrictions, security checks, protocols, warning signs & labels, negative news than ever.
You're going to have to take some risks and go against the status quo. You may even be wrong. but it's worth the risk to raise a capable generation.
Why do people insist on endlessly proving that "healthy, happy people do things healthy, happy people do" and the inverse?
I agree with the idea in general I guess, but there's nothing here to convince a parent.
Just my data point, my kids are freaking crazy and are slowly becoming less suicidal as they hit elementary school.
We try to educate them about things that are legitimately unsafe, but they would need to fear consequences to actually do what they're told, and we don't really want them acting out of fear.
Who knows what the real numbers are, but I wouldn't try to claim my kids are safer.
Definitely a problem. We were outliers letting our kids roam the neighborhood at age 8 or so.
I wonder if some of it is because we haven't had wars, famines, etc. in the US recently so not a good reference point for what's truly life threatening.
like others have said, my biggest fear as a parent is traffic. There's a fairly busy street at both ends of my neighborhood. We walk and cross those streets enough that i'm confident in their abilities but i have zero confidence in drivers. There's street racers and drunks constantly, a guy mowing his own yard was killed by street racers crashing into each other and then spilling over into his yard and crushing him. I routinely see people running the red lights at rush hour and the whole intersection reeks of weed between 4 and 6 PM. The list goes on. It's the traffic that scares me as a parent.
I'm from foreign yugoslavia, then slovenia, and we did just the same as you guys did... if you had to take the bus, your parents would go with you the first few days, so you'd remember where to get off the bus, and after that, you'd be on your own. Also, it was not unusual for kids to get home at 12, and parents at 17h (5pm for americans), and we just either watched tv at home, or went out with other kids.
School that has to obey idiotic laws. After couple grades depending on school and teacher will look the other way but grade 1-2 no.
I like teachers in our school I think most know how stupid this is, but do they want to lose their job and career over it..?
Of course there are also idiotic parents but they are minority.
Like the ones that don’t allow their kids to use matches when they are 9.. or use sharp knife at same age poor kid had his eye pop out when he saw my younger daughter(6) cut a steak with a knife. Blows my mind.
Operating in the world means accepting a threshold of risk, sure. You can account for some as best you can without necessarily being overly restrictive, it's just hard to have an intuition of the odds when all you can address are black-and-white scenarios like "could someone be kidnapped right now, and how easily?". The mere cognizance is enough to make people fearful, so it requires some perspective to stay even.
I'd have more fear for kids in teenage and young adult years, as either foolishness or being too trusting can lead to ostracization or even jail time.
This article seems to cherry-pick statistics in favor of its thesis. For example, here's a counter-statisic:
> "In 2020, there were 618,399 victims of child abuse in the United States. This is a decrease from the previous year, when there were 656,251 victims of child abuse, and is the lowest number of victims since 2012." (Statista)
Now there are an estimated 70,000,000 children (age 0-17) in the USA, but it's likely that child abuse is significantly underreported.
So, do you tell kids that child abuse is insignificant, that there aren't dangerous people (actual child abusers) and that they don't need to even think about it? What should they do then, if they learn that one of their friends is a victim of child abuse?
The whole article seems a bit Pollyanish. Kids can handle learning about things like wars, resource exhaustion, economic instability, etc. They can also learn that cars are dangerous and that they shouldn't run into the street without looking, all without going into a state of debilitating fearfulness.
It's just a matter of balance - for example, it's a good idea to tell kids that media outlets tend to cover the worst stories, not the best, so blind faith in media - i.e. the belief that reading the newspaper or watching a news show means you have a broad picture of the world - is unwise.
We absolutely should fear the world. I know a friend who got COVID just because he took his mask off and someone came down the side walk and passed him. Pedos are stalking their prey with apps now. Kids are being abused by apps which they all have easy access to! There is no more important time than ever than now for parents to properly teach their kids how to be safe.
Good old moral panic. Wikipedia has a really nice article about them. Specifically talking about another one that's mentioned in this thread, the (perceived) increase in crime.
As long as most of America remains car dependent and pedestrian-hostile, parents will be afraid of letting their kids out of the house. Unfortunately, that's rarely acknowledged as the problem (even in this article)
I generally agree with this but I have a counter argument. I grew up in the 80/90s generally unsupervised. I played outside from sunrise to sunset. Complete freedom. As a parent now, I reflect back on those days and think about the times I came really close getting badly hurt or doing something completely stupid. My conclusion is that in parenting, it’s either you supervise or you don’t. You can choose to loosen certain boundaries WHILE you’re supervising but don’t ever think allowing your kids to go completely unsupervised is good for them in any shape or form.
> As a parent now, I reflect back on those days and think about the times I came really close getting badly hurt or doing something completely stupid.
I am in the same situation, but I would not come to same conclusion. Although we were in very dangerous situations as kids, surprisingly little happened. None of my friends have died or been badly injured. I think you have to look at the risks and make a realistic assessment. I am horrified to imagine my own daughter in some of the situations I was facing, but still I do not want to supervise her all the time when she gets older.
Actually, I have a slightly different problem: I grew up in a very small village on the country side in Austria, but now I am living in a big city (Vienna). The country side comes with its own kind of risks (free-running dogs, dangerous country roads, forests, mountains, lakes), but they are completely different than the ones you would face in a city. Since I have no experience what it's like to grow up in a city, I'm not sure how I should raise my daughter. I guess I just have to look at what my friends are doing with their kids :-)
I forget if it was this book or somewhere else I heard it, but they had a pretty pithy comment that's stuck with me since - something along the lines of "The objective of parenting isn't to raise good kids, your job as a parent is to raise good adults".
Easy to say but harder to do. A death of one's child is essentially an infinitely negative utility event, so any probability of it has an expected value of negative infinity.
For anyone who hasn’t watched Old Enough, go watch it. It’s a documentary on how in Japanese culture it common to give extremely young kids large responsibilities.
A 2-year old literally walks over a mile alone across busy roads to go grocery shopping for his family.
It is because CPS is an over reaching and lawless organization that can be weaponized against a neighbor that raises their kids in a way you don't agree with. If you don't want your children kidnapped legally by this entity you better raise your kids in the safest possible way or you risk giving them the line item they put in their paperwork to put your kids in foster.
WTF is that Dao De Jing quote? Laozi did not care about love at all, whether romantic or Christian. I reskimmed https://ctext.org/dao-de-jing to see if maybe I just forgot some passage, but nothing popped up. Anyone have any idea where Brooks is getting this quote from?
It looks like a loose translation of chapter 67 in the Wang Bi version that you linked. The character interpreted as love is 慈, with the quote mentioned in the article corresponding to 慈故能勇 in the original passage.
Agreed, and in other passages Laozi does repeatedly use 愛, which corresponds more closely to our general idea of "love" than 慈 does. So one would have to wonder how this translator would distinguish 愛 from 慈, if they insist on translating the latter as "love".
There are a lot of things that you can chalk up to translator's license, but if the message of Laozi is to be interesting and useful, it has to be different than the Western mainstream message. Why bother reading a difficult text if it just says what non-difficult texts also say! Western thought is into "love" because of Christianity, and the meaning of "love" has different aspects at different times in Western history, like romantic love, chivalrous love, love of parents for children (in TFA), etc. Laozi absolutely does not think you should have feelings of affection towards others. He is against having strong attachments generally, and thinks we should evaluate things seen as negative more positively. So the whole thrust of the passage (you can win battles by being gentle and weak) is lost if you erase everything about Laozi and make him into a quasi-Christian nice parent. Ugh!
I'm not necessarily against syncretism or reading e.g. Buddhist 慈悲 compassion as a form of love to make a Christian-Buddhist hybrid thought, but in the specific case of Laozi, I cannot believe that any of what Laozi is saying has gotten through to someone who thinks you can use "love" in this passage.
I live in New Delhi, one of the highest crimes against women here, including kids. No matter how hard I convince myself to help my daughter see the good in the world, I will still get paranoid if she went out unsupervised for a few mins. She's 5
Considering how many times I was robbed walking alone in my early adulthood I must agree that my parents were correct in inciting a sense of danger in me.
there this is song, from Unknown Mortal Orchestra, called Hunnybee; which the composer wrote for his daughter...
btw, i wished my parents were a bit harsh when i was at my early 20s working as a bicycle courier to get money for a bicycle touring trip around South America... maybe if they told me i could got involved in an accident and get f#$%&! or dead i would have this insight 3 years sooner than by my own
The problem of mishandling fear affects not only kids. Most adults seem to be very bad at understanding risk vs reward and responding appropriately. (To wit, how should we compare different kinds of risk/reward, like a very severe risk that's very rare (violent home invasion) as compared to a very minor risk that's an everyday booboo (misplacing your car keys). If we can't recognize where true risk lies and its true cost, and choose a sensible plan of reaction, we will misperceive and overreact to all threats.)
There's no better illustration of this than the widespread confusion about vaccines, not just among "the hesitant". Responding to lopsided risk vs reward ratios, like safe vaccines for dire diseases, should be a slam dunk (polio, smallpox, typhoid). And if you're in a vulnerable subclass (old, immuno-compromised, etc) the same clarity should hold for more modest diseases because they can be mortal for you. SUCH TRADEOFFS SHOULD BE OBVIOUS. It's only the low-reward moderate-risk choices that deserve closer scrutiny (like flu vaccination for kids).
Somehow we all need to learn the two essentials: 1) the basics of probability and how to properly balance risk vs reward, and 2) what are the necessary/sufficient facts -- what do we really know, and how confident should we be in using that knowledge? This really should be taught in every pubic school math class. For 90% of the population, it's much more valuable a skill than typical math courses like geometry, trig, and calculus.
Properly understanding risk is also central to basic reasoning skills. Unlike what's taught in academia, the truths of the world are rarely binary/propositional. When thinking rationally, one needs to be clear in choosing the relevant value proposition (the measure of success/failure) and whether the proposed course of action will achieve it (likelihood of a plan's success/failure). That's a continuous probability, not a binary choice, and we need to develop intuition for how to weigh outcomes against our plans for achieving them.
Minimizing risk should be an engineered response, where we can explain why we believe as we do. The sooner we can all be clear headed about what we know, what we want, and the real risk of success/failure, the better we will be at dealing with all probable worlds.
I was 6 y/o (in the 80s) when I got my first bicycle, after which I got to explore my part of the world as I see fit, unsupervised. Just be back in time for diner.
My parents had no idea where I was, whom I was with and what I was doing. I learned how to use my body and its limits. I learned to make friends as well as enemies. We played creatively with whatever environment we encountered in ways positive and negative (setting small things on fire and such). Play. Experiment. Screw up. Learn.
All of this in an environment far less safe than today, in a pretty dysfunctional neighborhood.
One day I came home crying, as a much larger kid hit me in the face. I found little emotional support as my dad said to just hit him back. As I explained that the kid was much older and larger..."well, get a piece of wood then".
Crude. Today's parents may even find it neglectful or abusive. But it wasn't. It's one of several experiences that have shaped me for the better.
As I did get that piece of wood and walked towards my attacker, he could see me coming. I was scared as hell, this wood would do very little in the hands of a significantly weaker kid. Yet he made a run for it, and as word got around, nobody ever messed with me again. Because I was strong? No. Because I came back.
I solved a seemingly impossible problem all by myself. It's made me a problem solver for life. I learned that negative experiences are inevitably part of life, and thus ordinary. This affords me to take a hit (physically, financially, otherwise) without getting into a state of existential panic. Nor would I waste much time complaining about it. I just calmly accept it and solve it.
Another example were the few years where we were really poor. The family was under regular threat of repossession. Sometimes my dad told me to hide my toys. Half of those toys were fake. My dad's attempts to mimic A-brand toys by replicating them with cardboard and tape.
Traumatic? No. I simply learned to detach myself from objects. As they're just that: objects. I still got fed, had clothes, and with an outdoor play lifestyle, I needed little else to be happy. I carry this with me to this day: I appreciate luxuries, but don't depend on them emotionally.
The point of all this is that this unshielded, unmanaged childhood is life itself. By experiencing its highs and lows, you develop skills and character, useful for your entire life. Plus it's just a whole lot more fun compared to a golden prison.
"A ship is most safe in the harbor, but that's not what ships are for".
Oh, also...stop grinding kids by overloading them with tasks and rules. Fuck "responsibility". They're kids. They can grind for 50 years once they're adults, now is the time for irresponsibility :)
This kind if title is rich coming from the fear mongering media. Particularly as the story right above this in the most popular stories section is "America’s Fall Booster Plan Has a Fatal Paradox"
I find this richly ironic. One of the points of the article is that not everything is black and white, and we need to take a big picture view of things.
This sentiment is... exactly the opposite. It is completely possible for there to be problems in the media, and for there also to be content it produces that is good and makes sense.
Could the media be better? Sure. Does your almost comically negative comment really serve to help anyone? No.
I’d change the link title to “Miserable, childless misanthrope and establishment propagandist chides you for concerns over your childrens’ safety and affirms that to be fashionable you must pretend not to notice the ruling strata has deliberately undermined public safety and social cohesion for decades for cynical personal financial gain and service to the progressive pseudo-religion”
Now it’s comically negative in a “it’s funny because it’s true” kind of way.
"Reading Too Much Political News Is Bad for Your Well-Being"
> For example, Dutch researchers in 2017 conducted a study on how hard news that tends to provide a political perspective affects well-being. They found that on average, well-being falls 6.1 percent for every additional television hard news program watched a week. They explained this by noting the dominance of negative stories on such programs, and the powerlessness viewers might feel in the face of all that bad news. It’s difficult to imagine that stories about political news in America would have any less of a negative impact—especially given how fraught and contentious United States politics is now.
Prescribed remedy is to avoid such media:
> 2. Ration your consumption of politics and limit the time you spend discussing it.
> 3. Turn off ultra-partisan news sources, especially on your own side.
Fear mongering about the fear mongering media boogeyman.
Some people become truly obsessed with flamebait political news but there is more constructive criticism to be made about our free press that, though not perfect, is better than the alternatives. It should be respectfully criticized but cherished.
The shallow drive-by bomb throwing is getting a bit much around here as of late.
> Fear mongering about the fear mongering media boogeyman.
This gave me a good chuckle. I can't rebut it.
Anyway, I don't think this is best considered as a free vs nonfree press issue. The press in America are motivated by profit. If people are taught and encouraged to reduce their consumption of fear mongering media, the free press will adjust to suit the new demand.
Basically everything is motivated by profit but it is not zero-sum. You give me factual, well-written, relevant reporting and I give you money because I value that. We both win. If The Atlantic turns into a fear-mongering, low-quality, rag then they lose my money.
I definitely agree that people need to reduce consumption of fear mongering media but I'm not holding my breath! Is this just established news media trying and failing to compete with social media where the sky is on fire and falling 24/7?
and i want to add that the fear mongering article GP is talking about is the last thing i see on that page. i have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page. didn't see it the first time, and had to go back.
The point has more teeth since it is the same website. The point is that no individual or organization is perfectly good or perfectly bad, and we need to be able to recognize the good without it being treated as an endorsement of the bad.
Except that it does. Life is nuanced. OP is trying to make a point based on a couple of headlines, but the actual content of the articles explain things a bit more clearly and nuanced, and are a lot less "THE SKY IS FALLING!", than OP seems to be insinuating they are based on their titles alone.
There are things that are knowable in this world, a website that claims A but does the opposite is one of those things.
Trust means said website putting their money where their mouth is. The only defense here is that it's an opinion piece and doesn't represent the website as a whole, but the solution is to possibly trust the author but not the website.
Since we're talking about nuance here, a counterexample doesn't invalidate the point being made, especially about media in general.
You're performing a trick here in here of hiding the individual differences between two separate authors by referring to "a website" as a monolith. (And then you semi-walk-it-back, but treat that as somehow... a strange thing to do?)
That's the sort of rhetorical subterfuge that helps promote a black-and-white us-and-them narrative.
I generally don't even agree with Brooks on a lot of things, so I'd go even further and suggest that in many cases one should evaluate separate texts independently (this can lead to some problems at the extreme ends, but again, it's not a black and white rule). It's hard to see anything helpful coming from your sort of blanket dismissal response.
This isn't reddit or HN where the content is purely user driven, this is a website that publishes what they themselves choose to publish, and we're free to judge them for that holistically.
One suspects that if an author submitted an article denying the holocaust, the website in question would refuse to publish it.
They can be judged by what they publish, and they acknowledge this by not publishing everything that's proffered to them.
I mean the website isn't a monolith; some parts are good, some parts aren't. Different writers have different perspectives.
I think TFA is trying to argue that it's possible to see the world as a basically safe place, despite the presence of this kind of inconsistency. The website's not perfect, but it seems like it has some things going for it, and anyway you're smart and can get by just fine in a world with imperfect media :-)
I get that you want to come across a wise and cynical. So why are you pretending "the media" is a single unified hive mind - that doesn't make any sense, and comes across as hyperbolic populism instead.
Using generalizations when characterizing a group or entity can be helpful, even if the generalization is just that (true in most cases, but not every case). In this case, I think we do all agree that "the media" very often overhypes fear -- because they have a financial incentive to do so.
It's not a single unified hive mind, just the incentives are aligned to make the most of fear mongering and make the least of educating the populace on the real meat of the issues at hand.
You're engaging in the same sort of "fearmongering" though, by lumping everything together as if they all have the same incentives and goals.
Depending on which part of "the media" you look at, you'll get very different takes on various issues, some with significantly more substance behind them than others.
The best thing to teach your kid is to clearly show them how the media and politicians lie and manipulate by showing
their contradtory talking vs behaviour vs what they actually do side-by-side meme style.
I would also suggest that we teach our children to read articles and understand the nuances within them, rather than assuming a worldview based on headlines alone.
Critical thinking is something that needs to be taught at home because schools have obviously been failing us for a long time now. Not that it's entirely the fault of schools (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQR2aMGhjuw) but either way it falls on parents to fill in the gaps.
I agree overall, but I can't pretend that every article even has nuance to look out for.
Where was the nuance when almost the entire media was towing the line to cover up the Hunter Biden laptop leak articles as "Russian Disinformation"? It was a complete lie. That's not just one article, it was dozens with no nuance to be found.
Calling it a coverup is quite an accusation; do you have any evidence for that?
I also remember it differently, with that being one theory expressed at the time, and it is certainly in line with what Russia has gotten up to in the past. I wondered how it turned out. From Wikipedia, on what independent analysts hired by the Washington Post found:
"One of the analysts characterized the data as a 'disaster' from a forensics standpoint. The analysts found that people other than Biden had repeatedly accessed and copied data for nearly three years; they also found evidence others had written files to the drive both before and after the October 2020 New York Post reports. In September 2020, someone created six new folders on the drive, including with the names 'Biden Burisma,' 'Salacious Pics Package' and Hunter. Burisma Documents.'"
Sure, chain-of-custody rules would have gotten it thrown out as evidence in a hypothetical criminal trial. That doesn't mean it could not have been discussed on social media.
It was known from the very beginning that the laptop was legit because the Bidens never denied it. There are reasons to deny something that is real, but no reason not to deny something that is fake.
That's definitely too black and white. Does it contain real data from him? Yes. Might it have been hardware he once owned? Also possible, but not proven. Was the data all his? As the text I quoted said, definitely not. Do a lot of people have an interest in making the Bidens look bad without regard to the truth? Definitely.
But none of that addresses my actual question, which is asking for evidence that it's a coverup.
I don't claim that it's 100% guaranteed legit just because they didn't deny it, but it certainly puts the burden of proof on the people who would claim that it is fake.
As for evidence that it was a coverup, Mark Zuckerberg stated publicly that FB algorithmically suppressed the story because the FBI came to them warning that it was Russian disinformation (of course they used the phrase "has all the hallmarks of" so they can deny that they lied about it later). Of course he could be lying, but I don't think he is, and you just asked for evidence, not outright proof.
That's not proof of a coverup. People can be legitimately wrong. And you claiming that they phrased it carefully as part of a coverup is another thing that requires evidence.
Given that you and the other poster seem to be indulging in low-fact speculation, I think I'm done here.
Now how, exactly, would someone provide "evidence" that there was a coverup?
In Watergate, Leon Jaworski went to elaborate lengths to prove it with conversations, statements by collaborators, written documents, etc. Do you expect ordinary people to have that?
So we're left with extremely strict standards from "fact checkers" when Trump says anything, and "hey, what the hell, he meant well" when Biden says something blatantly wrong. For example:
I expect people not to make factual claims when they have no facts. If you want to say, "I have no proof but I believe in my heart it was a coverup", that's fine. If you want, feel free to build your worldview around vibes or whatever. Just don't pretend otherwise.
If someone says "all sheep are white" disproof comes from just one black sheep. So if we say "the establishment media covered up this story" you can disprove it with one, or preferably several references where it was covered fairly and prominently. But you can't, can you?
> Calling it a coverup is quite an accusation; do you have any evidence for that?
The fact that 50 "retired intelligence officers" said it had "all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation" when none of them had examined it -- do you want a citation for that?
How about that Zuckerberg said, and the FBI admitted, that they warned him about a "Russian document dump"?
How if you give us citations? Show us all the NYT and WaPo stories about the laptop before the election, and what page they ran on. Especially highlight the ones that talked about its content, or showed the pictures of Hunter?
I'm not the one making the claim of a coverup. You are, and so the burden of proof is on you.
As to the first point, assuming for the moment that whatever you're quoting is a good source, the easy explanation is that what was disclosed at the time did indeed have the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. That being something that is well studied by intelligence officers, and something that Russia produces quite a lot of.
I did prove it, and all you can manage is to question (and not even question it, really) the source. Weak, weak. And if you assert it's not a coverup, then show us how they covered it. That isn't too much to ask.
You are demanding I prove a negative: that it was deliberately covered up. No, you need to show how it was NOT covered up. That only takes a reference or two.
As is your second paragraph: to only say "other disinformation looks like this, so we're just going to go with that and ignore it, instead of digging deeper into it" is what a press outlet that's in the tank does. It's not what an objective outlet does.
> You are demanding I prove a negative: that it was deliberately covered up.
That is actually a positive. You're saying people did particular things. That's a positive assertion. Asking me to show that there was no conspiracy is the request to prove a negative. Which you are correct to think impossible.
Sophistry. As I said elsewhere: you need to prove that it wasn't covered up, by pointing out the actual coverage. I believe it should all be on the Internet.
I hear this all the time. The joke is that both sides of the political divide think it's the other side that credulously believes everything the media peddles to them. It smells a lot like the usual 'both sides are bad' trope.
Of course, but that’s completely orthogonal. Nobody believes their own side’s media because it’s less easy to debunk; people instead believe that media because it’s the media from their own side, and as such tells people on that side what they want to hear and believe.
Isn't that kind of meta? Calling it the "both-sides-are-bad trope" is a trope used by one side to say they really are superior to the other. Having both sides believe this is kind of our whole problem right now in the US.
The joke is that both sides of the political divide make no difference in their actions.
The only difference is that some things are slowed down, but in the end they are implemented.
Any data to support this? Because I can name quite a few, especially one very recent popular legal action based on political divide that have very different consequences for the populace.
Instead of dismissing the point as unoriginal, why don't you address the substance of the argument and provide evidence refuting the claim both sides are bad?
> This kind if title is rich coming from the fear mongering media. Particularly as the story right above this in the most popular stories section is "America’s Fall Booster Plan Has a Fatal Paradox"
and
> The best thing to teach your kid is to clearly show them how the media and politicians lie and manipulate by showing their contradtory talking vs behaviour vs what they actually do side-by-side meme style.
Don't have much substance at all. One has an anecdote of the form "the same website has another article with a hyperbolic title!" (This is a classic sort of "disagreement implies deceit" argument as is always brought up when scientists disagree on things, or consensus changes.) The other has a claim of "what [the media] says and does is different" in a way that suggests this is distinctive/meaningfully different in that way than in terms of any other human's behavior without any supporting substance, you're just supposed to accept it on faith that "the media" are intentionally manipulative hypocrites. Even if this is correct, it's not actually a substantial argument as presented, it will only possibly work on the already-converted.
Did you read either piece to gain additional context and confirm whether or not your assumptions about them are correct, or are you commenting strictly on titles alone?
Titles, inherently by their nature, are supposed to grab your attention and entice you to read. They're not there to have an answer or tell you what you need to know - their only job is to go, "Look!". I think we should all be less reactionary towards a headline and more insistent upon discussing the actual body of content.
Many people will only ever read the title of a story, they need to entice the reader because nobody has time to read every article. They are a separate body of content, and it's fair to criticize them for being excessive fear mongering.
The actual article about COVID vaccination is nuanced and without scaremongering.
The complaint isn’t about the vaccine, but the “deadly paradox” where vaccines become more effective the more people who take them. Further suggesting the policy to only hand it out to the fully vaccinated is a mistake.
I checked, and it looks like it’s coming from “Arthur C. Brooks”, a 58 year old Harvard professor from Spokane, Washington, who has a spouse and three kids. He’s a real person, with a real life.
Check his article history. He's been pumping out one saccharine article a week about how to be happy, how to cope with not being happy, which pet will make you happy, etc. I don't see any fear mongering though.
I don't know about credibility, but he's not a fear monger.
I think you missed his point. "The media" didn't write this article, a person did.
Other people with the same job, who he doesn't know or control, wrote different opinions, so he's not allowed to have/express his without being called a hypocrite?
I worked at the Daily Illini for part of a semester, and my job was to write headlines. The main concern then was "does it fit in the column head?"
I guess now the length constraints are less, unless there's also a print edition. But in any case, it's still probably the job of someone other than the writer.
I never understood this "you don't have to be afraid" attitude. Children DO get kidnapped. Like, in really life. It's not just on TV. You can argue "but the probably is so small". Yeah sure, but I want to make sure it doesn't happen to MY children.
I'm sorry to put this so bluntly, but if you are trying to get this down to "truly 0 risk of kidnapping", there is a very high chance that you are depriving your kid of developmental opportunities in the pursuit of unrealistic risk analysis.
This is a bizarre comment, and frankly irrational. You don’t know anything about me, and I don’t know anything about you, nor do I claim to, beyond what you shared in your comment regarding this topic precisely. I’m sorry for disagreeing with your untenable position.
And if you know what the elites do at Bohemian Grove (worship an effigy of Molech) it will help you see the truth behind the bullshit system of evil we actual live under.
And if youre new to this ancient concept - then please dont give me "conspiracy theory" bullshit, it will only show that you need to read up on this.
Seriously, this is a fantastic summary of Molech and how it represents capitalism.
America has way more deaths from guns, drugs, and cars than other rich countries. Probably should do something about that rather than lecturing parents.
naive means being surprised by something negative that happened to you. To prepare your children for the world means making sure they're aware of possibilities.
OTOH, being prepared is not the same as being fearful.
I've seen posts by women describing how they were _fearful_ of men until they were 18-20 and realized most men aren't a razors edge away from raping them. And their relationship with men completely changed.
That doesn't mean women should be ignorant of the possibility, but it does mean they shouldn't be _fearful_. Rather they should learn to recognize situations where the possibility is higher and avoid them.
Years ago I read a story about 3 young women who were paid to entertain some men in a boat that sat in international waters. At some point they were asked for sex, refused, got raped, then dropped off at the airport without the money they were promised.
In a perfect world things like this would never happen. But our world isn't perfect and there's a certain level of naivete in the actions of those young women, they could have avoided all of that by recognizing the danger and refusing.
>Should kids be taught that the world is not dangerous to make kids less likely to be tolerant?
If my kids fear that anyone who is not in their group is out to harm them,then they will become less tolerant of anyone not in their group.
Dunno why you put it on the head like that?
Because the question is a really simple one. Is intolerance automatically a bad thing? There is a reason stereotypes exist ( statistically, they tend to pan out ). They do not operate in a vacuum. They are effectively a useful heuristic that just happens to sometimes misfire. The issues tend to start when that heuristic is institutionalized, but as a day to day operator it tends to work.
Second part is more personal, would I be willing to sacrifice my kids safety in the name of tolerance? I know how I answer that question. I am all but certain most people answer it the same way.
To put it simply, as values come: kids > tolerance.
Every racist has used this same logic to explain why they won't let their kids play with the black neighbors.
The problem you're running into is mistaking statistics for personal actions.
you can get tetanus from a rusty nail, the solution is more care around rusty nails, not to refuse to work around them. Or disallow your children from working around them. In fact, disallowing that harms them in the long run as they never learn how to work around them with more care.
At the end of day being alive implies risk, teaching your children how to manage that risk is a part of your job as a parent.
<< Every racist has used this same logic to explain why they won't let their kids play with the black neighbors.
I do want to point out that the moment you call everything racist, nothing is racist. Same applies to most labels used to attempt to shut down discussions based on merits/data/statistics rather than emotions and rallying flag keywords. In the old country, my parents did not let me play with other white kids for reasons other than race. Were their intolerance so different, because it did touch the color of the skin? It is not a bait. It is a real question.
<< At the end of day being alive implies risk, teaching your children how to manage that risk is a part of your job as a parent.
We are in agreement.
<< Or disallow your children from working around them. In fact, disallowing that harms them in the long run as they never learn how to work around them with more care.
Depends on the kid temperament really. I was somewhat obedient. My sister was not.
You did not really answer the question about intolerance. Is racism tolerable? Should you not "not to refuse to work around them" based on your own argument?
> I do want to point out that the moment you call everything racist, nothing is racist.
What was actually said is that if your criteria applies to racist actions there's a problem with your criteria, in the same way that if your behavior results in someones death, there's a problem with your behavior.
statistically speaking, most murders are perpetrated by black men. So statistically speaking, your garden variety racist is right to distrust their black neighbor.
^ that the above is true speaks clearly to the flaw in your thinking.
<<"What was actually said is that if your criteria applies to racist actions there's a problem with your criteria"
Could you elaborate a little bit? I do not want to put words in your mouth.
What is the problem with my criteria? Are the criteria applied inherently racist? Am I racist the moment if I apply them even if they are not inherently racist?
<<statistically speaking, most murders are perpetrated by black men. So statistically speaking, your garden variety racist is right to distrust their black neighbor.
Well, duh. You don't have to convince me. As any city-dweller will tell you, as you approach a stranger on a sidewalk at night, you run an internal calculus of expected danger. You typically develop sharp senses rather fast as a result^ that the above is true speaks clearly to the flaw in your thinking. . I am thinking Chicago/New York ( but I would assume it applies to any bigger city really ).
We can talk about whether it is fair or not, but that is the reality of our current existence. You want to change it, change the proportions and start putting more whities in jail ( I am all for increasing accountability; maybe things will improve in general if the laws are applied across the board ). Alternatively, we can try seeing what can be done to ensure less crimes are committed in urban areas so that whites don't flee to suburbs.
<<^ that the above is true speaks clearly to the flaw in your thinking.
You just rationalized being on alert because a black stranger is walking towards you and not because you're in a bad neighborhood with a propensity for violence.
And you're still asking what the flaw in your thinking is.
Yes, I am asking, because you fail to articulate an argument and avoid answering a single question, while I am being very open and clear. I am starting to think you do not argue in good faith, which is the cornerstone of HN.
<< and not because you're in a bad neighborhood
You just assumed quite a lot about a hypothetical that I purposefully left open-ended. Note that I did not say black or bad neighborhood in it.
<< And you're still asking what the flaw in your thinking is.
What is that flaw ( ideally, please refrain from saying I am evidently racist; it kinda undermines the argument with circular logic )?
Note that this is the 2nd time I am asking that very question. If you won't offer something to work with, I will discontinue this conversation.
Eh, I will admit that I hoped for a little more after the effort I expended on this conversation. Sadly, you decided to not answer to any questions, but resorted to a.. lets call it a visual aid with little to no relevance to the conversation at hand ( which I will not comment on further ).
In short, I no longer believe you engaged in good faith discussion. Fare well.
> [stereotypes] are effectively a useful heuristic that just happens to sometimes misfire
They don't happen to sometimes misfire. They are a very poor predictor of the behavior of individuals within the group you're stereotyping. And in your day-to-day life, you're pretty much always dealing with individuals rather than an entire class of people.
This is significantly complicated when considering that stereotypes weren't created in a vacuum, either. Sometimes they are the result of some statistical phenomenon (which still doesn't mean they are good predictors of individual behavior), but often they are the result of historical prejudice. One easy example is that there are lots of stereotypes about Jewish people, many of which involve money or some sort of secret societal control. Those are categorically false, and have been tied to age-old antisemitic sentiments and humans' natural fear of groups of "others".
Some are also self-fulfilling. If 50 years ago a bunch of the population believed that a certain class of people were more likely to commit crimes, and as a result more of those people tended to be arrested, then looking at those statistics today in isolation seems to "prove" the point that this segment is more dangerous. Whereas in reality the reason the statistics are this way is largely because of the prejudiced belief.
I disagree vis-a-vis stereotypes. I personally subscribe to the idea that in a society constructs do tend to serve a specific evolutionary purpose. That is true for god, society, or stereotypes. They exist in ways that may obscure their purpose, which is ( was? ) tribe survival.
<<This is significantly complicated when considering that stereotypes weren't created in a vacuum, either.
Absolutely correct, they exist as a result of observed facts and carried down as memes throughout society at large. You can question their accuracy, but there is a reason they exist and thrive.
<< which still doesn't mean they are good predictors of individual behavior
They are good enough for an individual predictions, which is all an individual is concerned with. The issue starts when it is being used more broadly.
<< If 50 years ago a bunch of the population believed that a certain class of people were more likely to commit crimes, and as a result more of those people tended to be arrested, then looking at those statistics today in isolation seems to "prove" the point that this segment is more dangerous.
Ok. Lets say we forget history for a moment. There is indeed an argument to be made that data may not be.. accurate ( but that also opens the question of.. is that accuracy zero ?). What about current statistics of shooting incidents in Chicago? Are those also biased, because they happen to show similar pattern ( I think we can agree shooting people is a bad thing and likely dangerous and those involved likely belong in prison -- self defense and similar being excluded )?
Intolerance.. of what? Intolerance of their brother playing with matches under his bed? Intolerance of being bullied?
Intolerance itself is amoral. Intolerance of bad things is good. Intolerance of good things is bad. Part of raising a kid is teaching them which things should be tolerated and which things not to tolerate. Absolute tolerance isn't virtuous, it makes you a wet noodle with no spine.
It is? Do you tolerate child killers, dog rapists, tax evaders, cheaters, habitual liars, nose pickers, people, who can't park in their space.. I am being purposefully specific, because I am sure everyone has a line. And if we agree that there is indeed a line, what people is it ok to be intolerant of?
