Its been a genuine problem. I have heard people actually say that if a kid is playing outside by themselves, then the parent should be charged with child neglect because the kid could get hurt. Any time a kid gets hurt on YouTube the comments are filled with people blaming the parent for not being outside with them. Thing is, playing outside by yourself gives you a strong sense of independence. The kid might get hurt, sure, but when the alternative is them never learning to be on their own and do things for themselves, the risk seems well worth it.
It's even in the YouTube algorithm. I've had a couple of videos taken down due to "potential child endangerment". They were videos of me and my kid doing things that are, realistically, safer than riding a bicycle. It's pathetic how fragile kids are being made these days.
The YouTube rules are completely insane. Whoever makes them has totally lost their mind.
For instance, YouTube recently implemented a policy such that they now demonitize videos that contain profanity in the first 15 seconds - AND THIS APPLIES RETROACTIVELY TO VIDEOS RELEASED BEFORE THE POLICY WAS CHANGED.
Between that, the downvote count being removed, random demonetizations, mysterious channel shadowbans, the DMCA travesty, YouTube Rewind, and the "misinformation" rules, YouTube is a complete trash fire.
Nobody sane believes that the YouTube rules are reasonable.
I don't think then problem is entirely YouTube per-se for some of the rules, it is the "people" who demand they do certain things a certain way. And by the "people", I mean (to lesser extent) us, the viewers; but mostly the advertisers, the mega-corps with deep pockets who want to be as far away as possible from everything that's not seen as sanitized humanity.
YouTube, then, like most capitalist entities, is merely incentivized to gravitate towards something, anything really, that will maximize their bottom line.
The most recent was when my kid did a review of two different multitools. Within five minutes of uploading it YouTube had taken it down due to "potential child endangerment."
As long as it's something sterile like playing video games it's fine. But as soon as a kid does something with a bit of substance it becomes child endangerment.
>I have heard people actually say that if a kid is playing outside by themselves, then the parent should be charged with child neglect because the kid could get hurt.
Giving concern trolls the ability to use the State's guns on whatever personally offends them always ends badly.
I’m guessing that OP can’t even comprehend what reasonable person of rational mind would report a child in no immediate danger for being neglected. OP is calling it trolling because it’s hard to believe people are that stupid and therefore must be doing it simply to harass others.
Concern trolling isn't the same as just trolling about being concerned it's a specific type of interaction around delegitimizing the other viewpoint via faking support of the view but raising concerns you don't actually have that may raise doubt about the view to others.
As a general rule, parents seem to be blamed for anything happening to a kid under any specific setting.
Kids playing outside is one of them, kids talking to strangers, kids browsing the internet will also be seen the same...and then kids using voice chat in online games, kids talking to strangers in VR, kids just playing in VR, kids watching youtube etc.
It seem well accepted that pervert/criminal will go after kids at any occasion, the community can't be expected to police itself nor stop other people from hurting kids, and kids need to be locked away or under adult supervision 24/24 until adulthood or the parents are failing their job, and they shouldn't have kids if they're not up to the challenge.
I think there is a real issue on what people perceive as society's role and what parent's role is.
>I think there is a real issue on what people perceive as society's role and what parent's role is.
Not only that, but you a society has become obsessed with risk mitigation over the last several decades. The problem is that people are poorly equipped to estimate risk with very low occurrences against low or unclear cost. You see it in all facets of society with a platitude of better safe than sorry.
It shows up in increased medical licensing to reduce error, which means less accessible and more expensive care. It shows up in new parents who don't introduce their children to family for risk of covid. It shows up San Francisco city policy to reduce traffic death to zero even if it means reducing traffic to a standstill.
At the end of the day, a life with zero risk is not a life worth living but people are scared into the safest option.
It gets better.... they do the drill but then don't even practice the most important and highest priority of the 3 option which is to RUN.
It turns out, running is too inconvenient for the teachers to deal with, because it's a lot of work to round up kids that have run away (and probably not the safest thing to begin with anyway for just a drill). So instead they drill for them to hide, which should be done only if you can't run away. The thing is, watching both the Uvalde and Christchurch massacre videos, it will become crystal clear to you that hiding is the literal worst of the three options as you become a sitting duck.
So they have the drill, then drill into the kids to be sitting ducks because it is more convenient for the administrator than dealing with kids that are running. The advice I have for my kid is to not give a damn what the teacher says, to grab the nearest long durable object and smash out the windows and run away.
> The advice I have for my kid is to not give a damn what the teacher says, to grab the nearest long durable object and smash out the windows and run away.
Meanwhile, here in the UK, the advice I gave my son was to look both ways when crossing the road, not to mess around with plug sockets, and not to run when carrying a pair of scissors.
I honestly don't know how the US has got itself into such a messed up state that such drills are considered necessary and routine, or how it is that the people are ok with this. I'm guessing it's a boiling a frog type scenario as it doesn't make sense otherwise.
I think you've missed the point there, which is that something has become necessary to prepare for the horrifying reality of mass shootings.
Unfortunately, due to the political situation in the country, it's currently impossible to do the one thing that we know might actually stop those shootings (make it harder or impossible for people, especially children, to get their hands on heavy weaponry). So by the "logic" of "we must do something" "this is something" "then we must do this", we have active shooter drills instead.
Assuming the drills are necessary currently, doing "the one thing" isn't going to end them for at least decades. It's not going to be an either or situation.
The best solution I see is worldwide disarmament in some manner that still allows equalization of women, elderly, etc in physical force. That's a pretty tall order honestly not sure that happens anytime in my lifetime. It also has a sort of 'prisoner dilemma' element where the individual would be insane to give up their arms while the criminal still has theirs.
> It also has a sort of 'prisoner dilemma' element where the individual would be insane to give up their arms while the criminal still has theirs.
Advocates of "gun control" in the US don't realize this part, they seem to assume by making guns less available the criminals won't be able to find them.
I'd be wary of putting all of these examples into the same box, though.
If kids can't play outside anymore because of overprotective parents or an overprotective society, that feels to me like a net negative. If newspapers are afraid to publish because they are fearful of libel suits, then we might miss fact-checked stories that are in the public interest, and it's not clear that that's a good trade-off.
On the other hand, zero traffic death policies usually result in fairly cheap and only mildly inconvenient interventions (if inconvenient at all) to improve the legibility of key intersections and dangerous roads. Drives to reduce medical error usually rely on increased training or the introduction of fixed procedures or checklists, quick wins. Safety regulations in construction require proper dust extraction and safety at heights, and really the cost in better ladders, scaffolding, safety harnesses, vacuums and so on is completely negligible compared against the occupational hazards and chronic illnesses often suffered by older construction workers.
(And sometimes it's debatable. I feel like NASA could take a bigger risk on some manned missions if the astronauts agree, but on the other hand there's so much money and effort involved in these missions that it's not so strange that they want to get everything right, and that feels like the right culture and attitude. I feel like you should probably be allowed to swim anywhere you want even in still water or when there's algae, at your own peril, but really it's not that much of an inconvenience to go to a safer spot with a lifeguard.)
My impression is that what really ails Western societies is not necessarily risk averseness but rather gridlock, where a small amount of people can block a lot of progress for the rest of us. Gridlock has made governments averse to big infrastructure projects (e.g. high speed trains) and big changes in regulations that could move the needle (e.g. land value taxation) but they're not really averse to the risk, they're averse to getting swamped by interest groups and influential people with a vested interest in the status quo.
To be clear, my central point is that people cannot differentiate between the exceedingly low risks with cost and real risks that should be addressed.
I'll speak to your points on the medical area because it's the area that I'm most passionate about and think I'm the most informed. I'm not talking about medical checklist s. I'm talking about increased licensure. An example would be pushes to increase the academic training of nurses. Nurses with four-year degrees marginally better outcomes than nurses with two-year degrees. At face value that sounds like people will get better care. What's not discussed is that this means nurses are more expensive so hospitals have less nurses. Another example is mini drugs that are over-the-counter in most countries require a prescription in the US. At face value this sounds safer as it allegedly reduces misuse. However, it adds hundreds of dollars in cost for a doctor's visit to get a $5 pill, and means many people that need it won't get it.
I certainly agree that governmental gridlock and dysfunction exist. However, that alone doesn't explain why large infrastructure projects like rail cost $5 to 10x more in the US when they do make it through the process. Infrastructure projects have vastly higher headcount then even in the EU. You have paid professionals whose job it is to make sure that Builders don't step on endangered animals. This obsession with preventing the risk ignores the fact that it would be both cheaper and better for the animals assume some will die and spend part of the money you would be paying to prevent that on actually helping them.
> If newspapers are afraid to publish because they are fearful of libel suits, then we might miss fact-checked stories that are in the public interest, and it's not clear that that's a good trade-off.
I'd argue the opposite. If they're afraid of libel, they're probably engaging in it and should stop.
If they're sure of what they're saying and have proof of due diligence, they shouldn't be afraid. If they're not sure, they might still want to publish the information but be clear and explicit that they have no proof and state how they got hold of the information.
Saying "I heard but haven't been able to verify that Person X did Thing Y" is very different from saying "Person X did Thing Y". The latter should absolutely be liable to a suit if they don't have proof or very strong evidence that it actually happened. The former shouldn't as much.
Disclaimer, IANAL so I can't tell if libel laws in different countries work that way but I would expect them to do so at least in broad terms.
> If they're afraid of libel, they're probably engaging in it and should stop.
That may depend on the jurisdiction.
My understanding is that libel laws in the UK, for instance, are horribly broad, and, importantly, don't actually take the truth into account. (From what I've read, I would say it would be more apt to call them "defamation laws", but no one put me in charge.)
So if it were as simple as "just don't print verifiable lies", then I'd tend to agree with you, but given that there are places where you can print verifiable truth and still get slapped with a successful libel suit for it...
Even if you think you'll win a case, there's still the distraction and economic cost of being dragged into a lawsuit. Fear of libel suits probably does make the gutter press slightly less trashy, but it also has a chilling effect on dependable sources, and they are regularly employed by malicious actors for precisely that reason. But anyway, if you don't like that particular example, make up another where you feel society is currently too risk averse.
I think this is too broad a subject. Different societies have different risk profiles.
In the US, the OP is probably enough example. If you can't let your kids play outside or walk the streets for fear of being accused of child abuse, endangerment or whatever charges might be made against you, that's the symptom of worrying societal illness.
I grew up in America - in the southern part of the continent though, not in the USA. I now live Europe. Kids roam and play outside and that's a normal thing.
Kids need to be allowed to be kids, otherwise they will grow up to be very limited adults with odd world views. Perhaps everything else stems from this, at least partially? Kids who grow up overprotected might feel they need to overly protect everyone as an adult, and these adults will be the ones behind laws and regulations.
My point was not to debate the seriousness of covid but talk about relative risk. If you think covid is very serious and it's perfectly logical to take some precautions with your child.
To my point, there is a huge difference between taking your child to a sports game and introducing it to one or two people over the course of a year. If you magically knew there is a 1 in 10 chance your child would die, of course don't do it. The question is when would you start to do it. One in a million chance, one in a billion? At some point the logic of better safe than sorry works against you.
Those people should take the subway in, e.g. Munich, when children go to school. A nice mix of people commuting to the office and 6 year olds commuting to school in the same crampted subway cars.
Looking from the outside in, the US are just a wierd country.
Sure, a reasonable risk is tolerable. But, for instance, car-centric infrastructure has *intensely* exacerbated those risks: space is completely surrendered to cars, sidewalks are non-existent, crosswalks go across 8 lanes of 60+mph traffic. All of this, plus terrible public transport, makes it impossible to travel anyway except by car. This leads to lack of independence for children, and sedentarism.
It feels like this infrastructural risk is media driven to the extent of "pedophile kidnappers" or "razor blades in apples". For example I grew up in an Eastern MA "suburb" in the mid 90s - early 2000s, characterized by narrow winding roads, fast drivers, and no streetlights. Everyone too young or unconnected to have car access bicycled or walked everywhere; parents were a bit fearful but ultimately acquiescent ("better dead than dumb, and if you're not dumb you won't die"), and cops only cared about trespassing with intent to vandalize.
Over the intervening years, the town added nice wide sidewalks (previously none), fancy crosswalk infrastructure, lighting, and started enforcing speed limits extremely aggressively. Yet the number of people on foot and bike dwindled to almost nothing and now the only ones are older middle aged folk walking their dogs.
Dunno about that city in particular but in general car deaths have been increasing over the past decades, presumably because cars keep getting bigger and heavier. It’s a lot safer for kids to cross the street when everyone’s driving a Taurus than when everyone’s driving a modern Toyota Tundra
Is it that the percentage of accidents resulting in fatality has increased, or that the raw number of accidents has gone up overall? Is it just a simple function of more cars on the road, and the compounding effects of such?
The example of the Tundra is legit. Trucks keep getting bigger. It's not really because people all want a bigger truck though, it's because the government outlawed the compact trucks with CAFE and any remaining compact truck import options that might have satisfied CAFE had the shit taxed out of them with the chicken tax. It's a major reason for increased death in pedestrian by truck.
No clue whether that source of data is any good, and what the rates outside of the Us are. Just FYI, I don't like car centric places either, and that's part of the reason I probably couldn't live in the US.
The source may be correct, but it’s not useful. To judge the risk you’d need a breakdown of where accidents happen - it may be the case that motorways have become much safer due to safer cars, but pedestrians and cyclists suffered.
Especially modern pickups and SUVs have an increased risk of severe injuries for pedestrians due to the high front area which hits vulnerable body parts where a station wagon would hit legs. You’ll likely find two or more overlapping trends.
Yep, I grew up in the woodsy part of Framingham up by Route 20. A whole bunch of those roads are outright dangerous. My parents groused about how dangerous it was, but mostly trusted me not to be stupid.
Good on your n=1 data, but pedestrian fatalities have been steadily increasing for the last decades.
Also, nothing to do with "being stupid", if there are cars going 60mph right next to where you're walking, it's the luck of the draw whether you get decapitated by a truck or not.
I feel you, but this is clearly a “correlation is not causation” type situation. Infrastructure should be people-centric, and there’s nothing wrong with doing things to reduce car speed and make the built environment safe. It is unlikely that improved infrastructure resulted in people walking and biking less, which is what the wording of your post suggests.
(Also, love your username… I thought I was the only one. ;-) )
I'd actually read it more as asserting the populace has been been so influenced by this media hysteria that even though all this stuff got built, nobody uses it because they've become fundamentally unwilling to let their children walk--and perhaps not very willing to do so themselves.
GP mentioned the safety-related improvements to demonstrate exactly how irrational being scared in their particular community was, and perhaps to lament the wasted effort and money a bit. The before/after was to illustrate the populace was so affected by whatever's happening they actually regressed from previously being very willing to walk in worse conditions.
At least I did until the response you got that didn't say exactly the same. But I still suspect that was the gist, in the original context, and it just got a bit lost in rebuttal.
Presumably the infrastructure development itself was not causative, but, the trend occurred nonetheless over roughly the same time course as the development.
It also depends on where you live. If you are a suburban or rural kid, playing outside all you want is fine. Let them explore the neighborhood. If you live near a highway though, or a high crime area, then you might want to reconsider what you want to allow. You still need common sense.
My main worry is people who live in relatively safe areas, like a suburban neighborhood, but with neighbors that will STILL call CPS on you for allowing them a little freedom. When I was a kid living in a trailer park we had neighbors like that. Never called CPS, but definitely complained about us being unsupervised despite the fact that the speed limit was a mere 15 MPH, and that we made a point not to bother the neighbors because our parents told us not to. They just saw kids playing and having fun, and decided it was a crime against humanity.
There is irony here in that a "high crime" urban area is much more likely to have kids walking around with relative freedom than a "low crime" suburban area.
“High crime” urban areas are still generally safer for kids than car-centric suburban areas because cars aren’t going as fast. Kids are far more likely to die getting hit by a car than from violent crime.
The use of the phrase "high crime area" in this context, when just referencing child safety, is itself problematic. Everyone who is reading that phrase right now is forming a mental picture of what it means, and I guarantee it's not a picture of illegally burning garbage in the yard while drinking raw milk, sitting on an unpermitted deck, listening to an illegally downloaded MP3 while making a trade on their phone based on an insider tip they heard from their brother.
Because people have different opinions? And because college sometimes changes them?
Mind you, I'm not necessarily with the GP. It seems like a question of only marginal relevance. But the parent reads like a low-effort dismissal that doesn't actually address the point.
There is nothing problematic about having a phrase for areas with high risk of crime that negatively impacts the quality of life of local residents and visitors. (And that includes neighbors illegally burning garbage in their yard)
I'm objecting to the parent comment where this originated, where the author juxtaposed the safety of a child growing up in a "suburban or rural" setting with living "near a highway though, or a high crime area."
Crime is not an urban phenomenon, and when we describe it as one, we're flaming stereotypes. I don't think it was intentional and my point was not to denigrate the parent comment, but to encourage us to avoid accidental constructs like this.
Accidental construct of what exactly? Crime might not be an urban phenomenon in other countries but it certainly is more visible and prevalent in US cities.
At least in west coast cities, visible crime is just a fact of life. It borders on gaslighting to suggest that its not.
Cherrypicking violent crime in a discussion about child safety is misleading and fearmongering.
More children die from non-violent crime. The person who drives 10 over the speed limit down a suburban street is a child-endangering criminal, but so many people think the crimes they commit aren't "real" crimes.
If you want to look at data, overall rural child mortality exceeds urban child mortality in the United States; some of these causes are criminal, others are not. Motor vehicle death are the leading cause of child mortality, and for children under 18 exceed deaths from murder 2:1. Within vehicle deaths, for example, seatbelt usage is one of the predominant differentiators between rural and urban outcomes, and guess which areas have the lowest seat belt usage, and a disproportionately high number of deaths as a result? Yep, those "low crime" rural areas. Those parents who don't buckle up their kids are all criminals, too. I'm tired of seeing the label "crime" only applied to people committing certain crimes, in certain areas. It's applied in the most racist possible way in this country.
Mostly kidnapped by the parent that doesn't have custody. Once in a while other aunts or uncles who don't approve of the way their brother/sister is raising kids.
That happens in places, but probably not in the places where people living here are.
But if you are adopting from a foreign country beware that it is easy to kidnap some baby from a remote village. Some of the less ethical adoption agencies have done this in the past.
When China was adopting kids to abroad, I'm sure that happened. These days, I'm not sure if child trafficking is still a problem, I only hear anecdotes, and its all domestic (because China doesn't allow kids to be adopted abroad anymore except in very rare circumstances).
China is not the only country adopting. There are places in Africa to watch out for. Though many have stopped adopting as abuse was too common for the benefits.
The big issue for China is that they needed kids staying in the country not going out of it. Even in the 00s, they were adopting primarily disabled kids, and I think that has almost stopped now.
Eh, the big issue with China (and Russia that did the same thing recently), is that it was embarrassing when someone did an international documentary and it became clear that many domestic orphans no one Chinese wanted.
Most schools have lunch accounts these days, stealing lunch money is no longer possible.
We have a lot of unhoused neighbors in our neighborhood. When they are on bad fent trips, they can get pretty irrationally violent, though I've never heard of a kid being attacked before.
It’s a term for street homeless because the homelessness industrial complex decided to inflate the stats by conflating couchsurfing people with the visibly homeless.
Not to support the “what about the children” arguments, but 1) try thinking a little harder, and 2) probably a good thing that nothing comes to mind for you.
Recently, it seems that every year in Washington, DC, there are a few bystanders shot by groups quarreling with other groups. Some of those bystanders have been very young.
That basically never happens with strangers on the street. If you're worried about that, pay more attention to teachers ("nearly 9.6% of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct") and your partner ("of the girls living with a stepfather, 3.7% reported sexual experiences with him")
What do you think the children of people committing said crimes do? They mimic their parental figures. Child on child violence is a real thing and ignoring it just let's them turn into adult versions of the bullies they are.
Such extreme privilege right here. Kids that young will be pressured into using drugs and committing crimes, mostly vandalism and theft, but sometimes worse.
That’s around the age when kids started dealing drugs where I grew up. I knew kids who threw bricks through windows and huffed paint when left alone.
Why should it be a crime for a parent to allow there child in the same public where criminals operate? Why should the police punish the victims of crimes for the police's failure to do their one job?
I hate to say this, but this is an amazing lack of imagination over what could happen ( based merely on what did happen before and not coming up with wild scenarios ). I am saying this as a likely free range parent ( still internally debating, but a lot will depend on how my kid handles things ).
You are definitely onto something. Humans are horrible at estimating risk, but are forced to do it all the time. In some cases, it is a very clear miscalculation resulting in overdoing it one way or another. Sometimes it is just dumb luck.
<< Terrible things happen. They aren't likely to happen.
I think this is the wrong way of looking at this. Most people believe that lightning does not strike people that often. This does not give one has carte blanche to prance around the backyard with a metal rod.
Or, to use less crazy example, my street is relatively quiet and slow. And yet, I still look both ways crossing the street, because you never really know. Individual disposition and approach affects statistics.
As a kid, I swam in our backyard pool during thunderstorms. I sunbathe. I drink alcohol.
I do these things knowing the risk but knowing the happiness they give me outweighs that risk.
Personally, I feel like the benefits to kids of greater independence (developing social skills, learning to deal with being uncomfortable, learning to see things through on their own) outweigh the risks of that independence (sex trafficking or sexual assault, bullying).
Going back to the context of the thread: Not every risk has to be codified into the law, or enforced by the government. Should we make it illegal to prance around with a metal rod in their own backyard, just in case? Making a risk illegal does not magically improve safety, and there is a non-zero probability of the "enforcement" making things worse.
I am with you and, in a sense, you are preaching to the choir. If system setup was up to me, maybe with few notable exceptions, all new laws would require a sunset provision to force bad laws out of existence. I am certainly not arguing that just making things illegal improves safety ( and even when it does, I am not stoked about it ).
Where was this, and what convinces you this is widespread enough for concern?
This entire article is about rebuffing the "it happened once somewhere so it might happen anywhere" scare tactic that people use to prosecute well-meaning parents for letting their children experience independence.
> My main worry is people who live in relatively safe areas, like a suburban neighborhood, but with neighbors that will STILL call CPS on you for allowing them a little freedom.
I think this is the real problem, a lack of a low stakes mechanism for resolving small issues surrounding children. No matter if these laws pass, society will have standards and sometimes (oftentimes) good people will fall short of them.
Someone who can deal with a kid who gets a little overzealous at hide and seek or who decides to poke around an abandoned building instead of walking straight home from the store. Police and CPS type organizations seem to be too heavy handed for assisting with normal families that have had a dysfunctional moment, at the same time it feels like there is a need some something (neighbors just talking to each other would be nice, but it's apparently too big an ask).
It's similar to the situation with mental health and substance use disorders. A lot of people need help, and it ends up falling to first responders of various kinds and while they want to help they aren't necessarily well equipped to do so.
Do such crosswalks really exist? Seriously. AFAIK, 60+mph speed is allowed usually (if not exclusively) on Controlled-access highways where pedestrians are not allowed at all. I highly doubt such crosswalks exist at all.
Cars are much bigger (easier to accidentally hit stuff with them), taller (harder to see things at street level) and heavier (take longer to stop and hit much harder) and smartphones greatly reduce driver attention.
I went googling to find evidence to disprove your statement about cars, and I found that you are correct. Though the trend slope is pretty shallow in the graphs I found, I can believe small increases have outsized effects.
...and the smartphone part I obviously wouldn't dispute.
No, its mostly news stories and channels like Code Blue Cam where I see people getting overprotective and blaming parents for letting their kids roam. Also sometimes kids will film each other doing stupid stuff and then those videos get added to compilations
Look man, I grew up in a trailer park. Very few people live alongside highways or in places where it is not safe to play outside. Currently, I live in a low income apartment complex, and I still see kids playing outside. three years ago I lived on the most violent street in our town because rent was so cheap there, and I still saw kids riding around on scooters and playing ball. A lot of it is mentality, and what you view as an acceptable risk. Has very little to do with income.
I frequently go to a trailer park to help someone there. Young kids are often running around and playing with other kids. In the summer I’ve seen a group of 8-10 kids grade and middle school age (some very young) sitting in street after dark playing games and talking. It’s a very mixed group age/gender/race.
In my own wealthy neighbourhood I never see kids playing outside.
