This is going to be a polemical comment, but I feel compelled to share it:
It's my opinion that a great deal of the blame (if not the outright majority) for this state of affairs can be levied against suburban culture (and, by extension, car culture).
The communities that hand-wring the most about predators and risks to children tend to be middle class, suburban, and white. They drive their children everywhere, and thereby are (somewhat) alienated from the idea of a "local community" beyond the immediate neighborhood (which can only be entered or exited by car.) Things like childcare are purchasable services, not kindnesses that you or your neighbor do for each other when the other's in a pinch. When this is your bubble (or, for the rest of us, the dominant cultural metaphor for responsible parenting), it's hard not to see the world as a foreign and scary place, with unknown levels of unknown danger.
Great, just make the city centres safe, clean, friendly places so that people who are "middle class, suburban, and white" want to live there. Then we can all live in four story walkups and ride our bicycles and eat fresh baguettes...without having to dodge heroin needles or human excrement or have abuse hurled it us or be assaulted.
I'm being genuinely serious here. I used to love the concept of relatively high density living. For years I walked or rode my bicycle everywhere in cities. But I got sick of the fights and the filth, got too many concussions, and now I'm out here in the country side where I "see the world as a foreign and scary place".
Make it nicer and we'll come back. If that doesn't happen, don't complain when we make rational decisions for ourselves and our families.
The perception of urban blight is, to the best of my understanding, a mostly separate cultural phenomenon. It doesn't have to be the case for every city in the US to be a shining pillar of civic excellence (many of them aren't!) for it to be the case that suburban living drives alienation that feeds into statistically irrational fears of strangers.
In other words: we're talking about two separate things. You're describing an abstract quality of life concern, which is a valid concern that a lot of people share about major cities. I'm talking about a cultural zeitgeist around treating strangers as predators or latent criminals, which is statistically unborn.
(We can also play the anecdote game: I've lived in NYC my entire life, and I've never dodged human excrement or needles. I've seen needles and human waste, but they're a vanishingly small component of my experiences living here.)
Similarly, I've lived in and around Boston my entire adult life (I'm 34) and I don't think I've ever seen needles on the street. I've seen what was probably human waste two or three times. It seems like San Francisco and Portland in particular are pretty bad, from talking to folks who live there and from visiting both. But most urban areas I've been to in the United States are fine.
(Now, are American cities kind of dirty? Yeah. There's a ton of people who travel through every day. But Americans, as a rule, seem to not like paying that much for other folks. Certainly not enough to pay for the kind of urban cleaning that'd be necessary.)
As a Bostonian myself, I'm getting used to the idea that we're the exception, rather than the rule. I typically _do_ see these things when I travel within the country. But I'm increasingly seeing it as a "Boston success" rather than a "San Francisco problem" or "Austin problem" or "Seattle problem", because it seems more like a default state, given the current way of things.
That said, I'm not sure what to attribute that to. It could be the broad availability of drug rehab and housing services. It could be that the climate is inhospitable to living on the street for the majority of the year. For all I know, it could be an aftershock of the city's love affair with redlining, effectively putting me away from where I would see it.
It's just a mix of climate and policy. In Milwaukee you can see some serious blight but they don't even allow overnight parking on the streets without a permit, let alone overnight pooping.
Personally can't recall ever seeing needles or human feces in or around Austin. Some areas/alleyways around 4th-7th can get pretty urine-y on the weekends.
Generally speaking, one is more likely to run into horse manure around Austin.
Was this down voted because the horse manure comment?
To clarify, I meant that quite literally. Horses are considered a legal vehicle. It is not uncommon to see people riding horses (small groups, solo, & APD mounted patrol) along the shoulder of a road or along the creek and river trails in central/south/southeast/east Austin, especially on the weekends. Probably other places too, but those are the areas I am familiar with.
It is certainly more common to see horse manure in the city than it is to see the human feces or needles that was alluded to in the comment I replied too. At least, in my personal experience spanning decades.
It is sort of shocking that an objectively rich city like San Francisco has considerably worse homelessness problem than, say, Uzhhorod in Ukraine. (With average income perhaps 10 per cent of SF one, if not less.)
It's mostly because the political culture of SF is trying to solve a mental health issue in compromising way, because the real solution set is not a local level thing, but a state and federal level thing. It's same with the current DA, trying to activist create an alternative to arrest vs. using social workers, while such a solution needs more than the power of the DA's office to properly implement. So you get half-assed solutions that don't actually solve anything much.
Also pure corruption. You'll notice there are a bunch of regions where the homeless roam, and bunch where they do not, and there are very good reasons as to why that is the case.
> the homeless in Uzhhorod starve to death or freeze in winter
I doubt it. Housing is one of those problems that is quite easy to solve and the fact that poorer countries can do it while the US can't must be because of nefarious. The same shit is said about developing countries having a lower COVID death rate than the US, "they must be hiding a lot of bodies." In fact, it is quite hard to hide a lot of bodies.
The fact is the US does poorly on a lot of metrics and we have the capability not to.
You can also fairly easily survive winter in the street in Málaga or Madrid, but those cities haven't turned to an Europe-wide haven of homeless people.
If you're trying to call me a liar, it's better to not be oblique.
I've lived in three neighborhoods for my entire life: Bloomingdale (now called "Manhattan Valley"), South Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The only one that I regularly saw needles in was South Harlem, and that was only by one apartment where we had a guy dealing on the corner. That was a pretty unpleasant situation. I only saw needles once or twice in Bloomingdale, and I've yet to see them anywhere in my current parts of Brooklyn.
As for the poop: NYC has a big dog poop problem, which is what that article is about. I don't think anybody has ever contested that.
Where on earth did you get liar? You just have a very different context from many of us. I worked three jobs for 30 years so my kids could live a sheltered life.
That was how I read "it's good to be you." I apologize for the misinterpretation.
I've said this in other threads: there is crime in NYC. It's a big city with a lot of people in it, and I am not pretending that it is a utopia. But it just isn't an overriding (or even pressing) feature of life here.
It is if you’re paying rent for a storefront and junkies are blocking the door so customers can’t get in, the cops won’t do anything, and “nonviolent misdemeanors” aren’t prosecuted.
Then it’s an overriding and pressing feature of your life.
Yes: if you're actually victimized, then it becomes an overriding and pressing feature of your life. But you're sidestepping the claim: it's just not that common here.
I've never seen drug addicts block a storefront here. The closest thing I've seen to that is someone (and I really do mean one individual) try to panhandle in a restaurant. They were kicked out.
Murder and rape are down a few percent each. Almost everything else is skyrocketing. Robbery is up 15.8%. Felonious assault is up 13.8%. Grand larceny is up 18.6%. Grand larceny auto at 14.2%.
Crime overall is up 11.2% in one year. That’s affecting a lot of people other than you. I find your dismissal of so many people’s misery to be callous at best.
Of course, it's useful to keep in mind here that overall crime rates are still around only half what they were in the 70s-90s. Combine that with the obvious aftereffects of a lasting pandemic and lockdown (and pandemic-related stimulus evaporating while outbreaks continue) and it doesn't seem very prudent to adopt a sky-is-falling attitude.
I think you misread your own link. Crime in October 2021 was 11.2% higher than October 2020, but YTD crime (the thing people usually call "crime overall") is only up 1.3%. It's the next sentence in the same graf.
I have not been callous, in any ordinary sense of the word. When people are affected by crime (and indeed, they are in this city), I feel bad for them. What I have no space for is breathless accusations that my city is an unlivable hellhole, when I've seen with my own two eyes how much it's improved over the last two decades.
(If you want real callousness, read about the people who died in last year's flooding[1]. NYC has a flood control system that should have lessened the damage, but it didn't function because the city hasn't done regular street cleanings for the past two years. Why haven't they done street cleanings? Because car owners complained about having to move their cars during the pandemic.)
> What I have no space for is breathless accusations that my city is an unlivable hellhole, when I've seen with my own two eyes how much it's improved over the last two decades.
I assume that is a general statement and not based on something I said, because of course I made no such accusations.
I am however glad that you give your own two eyes credibility for reporting. Each of the articles I posted was a product of someone else’s two eyes and included pictures of what would be considered an alarming situation if one lived in those neighborhoods. Many of them are from a borough called “The Bronx”, which is north of you. It’s a big place with lots of problems, tons of amazing people, and a rich multicultural environment. You might be intrigued to visit it some time.
As far as the statistics I gave you, year over a year is obviously a much better sample then part of the year. It’s smooths out the curves. I could easily have chosen some statistics from the summer of 2020 that would make it look much worse. I did not.
Not sure why you threw in the drainage situation but I like that you did. Offhand the only city I know of that plans properly for this is Phoenix, Arizona. From what I can tell no other major city in the country comes even close to that kind of preparation.
> It’s a big place with lots of problems, tons of amazing people, and a rich multicultural environment. You might be intrigued to visit it some time.
I went to high school in the Bronx, and spent most of my adolescence walking around it (including the "scary" part, which is the South Bronx). It's not a hellhole either, "rich multicultural" dogwhistling aside.
Edit: This is going to be my last comment. I don't think you live here, which makes me think that the back-and-forth of "here's what it's like" versus "here's an eye-popping news story about a crime" isn't accomplishing much.
Duly upvoted because I love a good debate. Thanks for engaging!
Where I live is a little hard to pin down because I own residences on multiple continents. I say Seattle because that’s where my farm is and I spend most of my time there.
New York City was the greatest city in the world until recently, but I’m equally interested in what’s going on in Shanghai, Beijing, and other places. But in my view it’s perfectly acceptable to talk about a place even if you haven’t lived there for a while. Or ever. I listen to lots of wonderful commentary about the USA from people in the United Kingdom, for example.
Then by your logic you are doing the same to me. Quoting easily verifiable crime statistics (along with a link to said statistics) and photographic evidence of obvious degradation was simply an alternate viewpoint from my perspective.
Both “stories”, as you put it, are true. In fact, I congratulated the person for building a sheltered world. I did the same for my wife and children. Nothing wrong with keeping your family out of the muck.
Could you pay for some "security staff" to "clean up" the area around your storefront? As long as the clean up process doesn't involve anything more than misdemeanors it sounds like nobody will be prosecuted.
In theory police enforce the law. In practice, police do what democratically elected officials tell them to do, and there will always be more shoplifters and homeless people than business owners. So buy private security and know that they work for your interests specifically. The cleaned up street will attract more customers and the added security will pay for itself.
> So buy private security and know that they work for your interests specifically. The cleaned up street will attract more customers and the added security will pay for itself.
“Will” pay for itself? Spoken like someone who has never had to pay the bills to run a retail establishment.
Depends on where you are. San Francisco absolutely has a real, extremely-visible problem in a number of places. In a "walk from transit to work, you'll see it quite literally every day for years on end" kind of way.
When it rains, a significant amount of the Market Street area (and surrounding blocks) smells like pee for a day.
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Part of the issue with the "perception vs reality" claim in big cities is that people who live near-ish to places with issues like this avoid those places, either consciously (x area is dangerous so don't park there) or subconsciously (none of your friends go there, so you don't know anything there, and have no reason to go randomly). Visitors and new arrivals are pretty often more likely to encounter it at a more accurate rate.
Perhaps greed is a factor in non-enforcement, but I suspect in LA it's more of a "overly humanitarian" subculture. See Echo Park protests. bodies were turning up in that park, and it was unusable for local residents due to a massive encampment and rampant drug use. When the police showed up to clear it, they met actual protestors from outside the neighborhood who thought it was inhumane to force the campers to move on.
I lived in Studio City for a bit. We had a well-known vagrant who lived under a local bridge who regularly accosted women, including assault, groping, etc. The nice walking paths along the LA river, and the immediate neighborhood around them were completely unsafe even during daylight hours for my wife and daughters to walk along. What could be done?
I lived in mount washington for a bit. There, the citizens would quietly organize, bring lots of shovels, and go "clean up" even the smallest encampments. I suspect if that word got out, they'd meet protestors, or even police.
I'm all for helping those who need and want it.
The trouble is, there's a significant enough population that doesn't want help, and wants to camp and live among drug use wherever they choose. This is the only case where "Not in my backyard" makes absolute sense. Police can and should protect the safety of neighborhoods and parks which are funded and occupied by tax payers.
Go to venice. It looks like a third world country. Last time I went to the beach, none of the shops were open and obviously-mentally-ill people were sitting in their own filth on residential and commercial doorsteps. One obviously intoxicated person was holding a can of gasoline on the sidewalk, and swaying between cars he didn't own. What good can come of this? The rights of the people in that area need to be balanced against each other through the use of local laws and law enforcement. We've gone way too far past "balanced" towards an ideologically-forced tolerance of vagrancy.
It is not the job of the average citizen to come up with solutions, it is normal and fine for citizens to collectively demand change from their government and to weigh the outcomes during the next election cycle. My own lack of ingenious ideas for it does not mean I need to be silent and tolerate the solution.
After regularly getting catcalled directly outside my door and being followed at night, I said “fuck this” and moved to a small walkable town not far outside the city. It’s much easier to not treat strangers as predators here, because they generally don’t act like predators. I still enjoy a day in the city, but at home I can take nighttime walks with no worries. I do feel a little bad that I couldn’t stick it out like other people can.
Today, I walked a couple blocks west of where I work to grab a slice of pizza and while I ate, a dude just hauled forth his member and urinated in the gutter, not 15 feet away from me. I felt bad for the tourists and their kids, but only because the pizza was overpriced and tasted like Digiorno.
Usually I find defecation is easiest - not for me, but for the unfortunate souls without access to privacy - at the far end of a subway platform, away from the glare of publicity.
I don’t feel it’s fair to criticize someone explaining why they live the way they do when you where the first to criticize said group:
>>The communities that hand-wring the most about predators and risks to children tend to be middle class, suburban, and white.
The presence of this comment purposely invites controversy.
If these people are supposed to behave differently (from a cultural standpoint), there are issues that need to be resolved first. These “two different topics” are heavily intertwined.
Also, presumably the issue of needles and human waste can be resolved with further prosocial investments in harm reduction facilities for drug users and housing for the homeless. These problems aren't intractable.
The UK's hardly a haven of social democracy, but I've never seen human excrement on the street and only seen needles off the beaten path. We don't do a very good job helping our homeless population though.
To those unsympathetic to addiction being a medical condition, these facilities are just seen as legalization which goes against everything they've been fed. This isn't even a NIMBY thing as they don't just not want it in their area, they don't want them to exist at all.
Showing how they have worked in Europe, then they will just write it off as socialist policies run amok.
giving people needles and drugs is called harm reduction for a reason - it's to reduce the risk of dirty needles and street drugs, these policies don't solve drug addiction, they just keep drug addicts safe(r). Solving drug addiction is actually a tremendously hard problem but it starts with helping rather than punishing addicts. Portugal is a good example of doing this right: drugs are broadly decriminalised and the government provides help to addicts. Here's an article on drug policies across Europe (and some other countries): https://www.foundationswellness.net/drug-abuse/do-other-coun...
I’m all for providing help to addicts, but giving them the drugs doesn’t seem to help. While I offer no solutions, I don’t think this is working and believe there is a better way. Perhaps rehab centers or synthesized equivalents that decrease potency over time.
> make the city centres safe, clean, friendly places
Agreed. Exactly as most of the rest of the world has done. In the developing world (India, China) and the old west (Europe), cities are the place to be. They are safe, easy to get around and much much more happening.
> without having to dodge heroin needles or human excrement or have abuse hurled it us or be assaulted
This is such a west coast experience. I have seen this in SF/Seattle, but Boston/NYC's homeless have seemed pretty innocuous. It is local politics problem. Cities around the world don't have these issues either.
Cities continue to be expected to be havens for every kind of person, while suburbs create their own walled gardens. But if a city every proposes suburb style discriminatory policy, it will immediately be viewed as 'racist'. (Usually Racism of this form is just people looking out for their own socio-economic interests. I won't always call it hatred driven Racism. But, the standard west-coast suburbanite surely would) Because it is, and suburbs have been able to get away with massive unsustainable, economically draining and exclusionary policies for half a century.
> fights and the filth, got too many concussions
Where did you live ? I have spent my entire life in high-density cities and have never come close to anything like this.
> This is such a west coast experience. I have seen this in SF/Seattle, but Boston/NYC's homeless have seemed pretty innocuous. It is local politics problem.
It's a numbers and climate problem. If you're homeless in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, or New York in the winter, you die. If you come to LA, San Francisco, Seattle, or Vancouver, you survive
Have you ever checked actual crime rates? Cause this does not passes smell test. You are way more likely to be robbed or attacked in Prague or Warsaw then in Vienna or Munich or whatever. And the cops will be harder to deal with in Eastern Europe.
Eastern European cities are safer then they used to be in the nineties, sure. They are safe enough to have kids walk around. They are not safer then wester cities which are even more safer in general.
Big Eastern cities have robberies too. And fights too. They are not some kind of hellholes, most are safe enough. But they are not safer then western cities.
Small Eastern cities do have criminality too, for that matter. Both organized and low level one. As I said, it is all improving in general, but claim that they are oh so safer is not true.
Eastern cities can also be safer for foreigners in general. Cities like Prague depend on being tourist hotspots. If they get a reputation for being dangerous, they'll lose a lot of rich people a lot of money. Serious crime against foreigners may be dealt with harshly enough that criminals learn to stick to the locals and limit to mild scams on the tourists. After all, the tourists bring the money that they can then steal from a local at leisure.
>> Cities like Prague depend on being tourist hotspots.
No, they don't. Prague is the capitol of Czech republic, there is a lot of business there, and tourists are just nuisance. Same for big Polish cities like Warsaw or Cracow.
Crimes against foreigners are not treated any different than crimes against locals, there's simply not much crime to begin with.
The 'Paris experience' famously does not scale to the rest of Western Europe. Getting mugged/fleeced by someone on day 1 in Paris is a ubiquitous experience that I have never heard be replicated anywhere else.
> Eastern European cities are safer then they used to be in the nineties, sure. They are safe enough to have kids walk around.
At age 9 and 10, I was travelling every day alone in a city bus to school through a city in Poland in early nineties. Nothing ever happened to me. I don't think there was particularly that much violent crime even then. Car thefts, OTOH, were pretty common until the mid 2000s when the police and state got the hang of it.
It's common to see arguments of this form, which are essentially "the current state of the affairs is simply the result of what people prefer: they prefer to drive everywhere, live in big houses with big backyards in sprawling suburbs, etc." In other words, just explaining (and excusing!) the state of affairs as being "what the market wants." I do think there is some truth in these arguments. Of course there will always be some people who prefer that and some people who prefer living in more dense communities/cities. But what's missing from this is discussion about how non-market forces affect the state of affairs? What about city planning, zoning, even direct subsidies like paying for freeways and streets?
100% I am in the suburbs because the two cities we love (Portland and San Francisco) have inconvenient busing and/or lottery systems for their public schools. And we would prefer to use public schools over private.
That being said we picked a suburb that is actually quite walkable for our daily needs due a good public trail system and being adjacent to a large community college campus.
With low birth rates, certainly a lot of people may have large backyard suburbia as the ideal but do not want to deal with single family homes for their small family of 2 or 3. A condo or townhome with green space can be a life with much fewer hassles.
Detached homes, especially the lovely ones with mature trees and gardens, require a lot of work. Things like snow removal, leaf pickup, scrubbing mildew off the siding, tree trimming, concrete repair, roofs, hvac maintenance, cleaning and servicing multiple vehicles, and the list goes on. And of course older homes are booby trapped wrecks of lead, asbestos, cloth-insulated wiring, corroded pipe, and shoddy insulation. Naturally, in many desirable locations old is the only affordable type, too.
There's also the observation that indulging everyone's preference doesn't necessarily lead to a global optimum. A straightforward analogy is traffic, or crowd control - if you let everyone follow what they perceive to be the optimum route, the flow becomes dysfunctional as everyone tries to occupy the same space, and occasionally people even get squished.
Subsidies are a big one. All the core aspects of American suburbs have been subsidized for 70 years: oil, autos, highways, single family homes, freight (via highways), service lines. People talk about a free market but there was a great deal of post-war central planning which decided this was the community of the future (Dwight Eisenhower and Robert Moses come to mind but it began as early as Roosevelt). Part of this was the dual-use aspect of oil and auto industries and highways for the military.
strongtowns.org has ongoing research that shows most suburban communities are not self-sustaining as a tax base and rely on nearby cities and outside investment to support their infrastructure.
That's a good point. I think there's also the question of us this really the result of what people prefer? Maybe there are other inefficiencies that are not non-market forces that caused this.
Where did you live? Right now I'm in the middle of Chicago with my elementary aged children sleeping peacefully. I don't live in the wealthiest neighborhood. I don't live in the poorest. It's pretty diverse (by the standards of Chicago).
I haven't been assaulted. I'm pretty sure the excrement I see is canine, not human. I haven't seen any heroin needles, though I don't live far from a methadone treatment clinic. And a halfway house for recently released prisoners. And am only a mile from the lakefront where we now have year-round tent camps for the first time in anyones' memory (homeless who camp through Chicago's winter are a tough breed).
Maybe the rabbits eat the heroin needles before I see them. Lord knows they eat everything else. Everyone on social media complains about the coyotes and how they're everywhere. But I think that's bullshit - if there were as many coyotes as people claim we'd have way less rabbits.
Surprising how much of what people post on the Internet is bullshit like that, isn't it?
I moved to Tokyo a few years back, right before the pandemic. Seeing comments like this makes me feel very lucky that I didn't instead choose a large US city.
I wonder if some of the people commenting here have ever been to a city like Tokyo. It is a great example of what is actually possible when it comes to cleanliness and safety in a massive urban environment.
I think their point was that safe cities are possible, not that we should all move to Japan. Someone who has only experienced a dangerous city or a car centric city, the possibilities might not be obvious to them so there is a very defeatist attitude, as if this is just the way cities are.
I remember cruising through the streets of Tokyo in the middle of the night, still worried that I might get jumped by a meth hear even though it was extremely unlikely. It's a pre-conception that is hard to let go of.
If Pewdiepie, a man worth millions of dollars can do it after four years of Byzantine bureaucracy can do it, anyone can! Seriously though, he documented just how difficult the process is on his YouTube channel. Moving to Japan is insanely difficult.
Assuming you get a job, it's actually not difficult. If you work in tech, you can probably even get a visa that gets you PR in 3 years. I moved mostly on a whim directly prior to the pandemic, and haven't run into any major stumbling blocks.
The language barrier is the biggest issue. Assuming you live in a large city (and really, you should), the town halls have translators. You may need to wait for them to be available, and the translations may not be amazing, but they'll help you solve any tasks you need to do.
The next biggest issues are getting a phone number (you need a residence card first), getting a bank account (you need a residence card and a phone number), and getting a credit card (you need a residence card, a phone number, and will need to deal with them sending your card with your katakana name on the envelope). If you have a job, they'll help you do all of these things.
Getting housing isn't really a problem. At this point there's lots of gaikokujin housing (short-term rentals, month-to-month leases, sharedhouses, etc). It's possible to find it online with no Japanese language skills. Again, if you have a job, they'll help you find housing.
If you're coming in as a student, your school will also help you with all of these things.
Pewdiepie makes money off of making content. Saying "hey, this isn't very hard" isn't entertaining. Don't use him as a real-life example.
I think it's a lot easier for employees than for freelance types. Even the companies hiring language instructors will do most of the paperwork for you.
There are many developed European cities that are totally fine and do not have major cultural barriers. Some of them even speak english as a first language!
Dense living doesn't necessarily have to be a big city.
I live in an area where I see people out and walking. The local neighbourhood feels bustling. If I needed someone to watch my kid, I could call outside for someone from a number of faces I have known for years.
This is in a developing country. Houses are smaller, closer together, and without things like a driveway. I guess most people in the US still wouldn't want to give up these things. But I wouldn't want to live in a place where I never see people because they are all either in their house or their cars.
That's really not my experience with the U.S. I'm from a smaller city (250k) and there are constantly people out in my neighborhood. Kids playing, riding bike, people walking, pets, etc... Just a lot of activity!
We have large windows too so it's fun seeing it all.
> But I got sick of the fights [...] got too many concussions
While lots of people in cities live very different lives, either you were very unlucky or this is your own fault. Or do you think the majority of the 8 million people in NYC have gotten a concussion since moving there?
The filth, yeah, it's neighborhood dependent but NYC as a whole (really anywhere other than right on Central Park) has a lot of room to improve. Pretty rare to see needles or human excrement (dog excrement is way too common).
First big concussion I got was me walking home at night. I was living right in the centre of town, a few minutes from a grocery store. You know, like how people on HN moralise we should all do.
Three people jumped out of a car, beat me up and left. It was a gang initiation thing - beat up a random civilian and get to the first rank, or something. After that concussion I was a lot more susceptible to other concussions.
Can't make an NYC analogue - do people feel safe there walking at all hours of the night by themselves, even in dark areas? If so great, maybe that's a place I'd live too, like Tokyo or Taipei.
I believe the multiple concussions are related to the danger of bicycling in the city, which he also states he did. The appropriate question, then, is "Do you think the majority of the N people in NYC that commute primarily by bicycle have gotten a concussion while living there?"
Yep, and there is a major difference between a casual ride to pick up a sandwich at 2pm on Sundays compared to the morning hustle jockeying for position in the delivery truck avoidance dystopia--surely gamified somewhere on Steam.
There's a big, but disappearing, middle ground between "urban city center" and "suburban housing development."
Single-use zoning laws are a big part of why we have this model where everyone living in a house needs to drive just to get to the corner store, and everyone who can walk anywhere is living in a small apartment in an expensive city.
I grew up in two different suburban small towns, where we were each just a couple blocks from the corner store, the laundromat, and the local library. I could walk to my friends' houses to hang out, ride my bike around, and pick up a pizza for $5 to share with my friends.
It wasn't glamorous or fashionable like city life, and it wasn't as sterile as a housing development, but it was a good place to grow up.
That multi-use zoning “middle-ground” town describes what I live in now and it’s lovely. I wish there was more like it so that everyone could live like this.
Or no public schools. What's even the point? The whole k-12 curriculum needs a revamp. Can they at least compress it to k-9 and leave the rest of those years for actual preparation for adulthood?
Oh dear lord no. Have you ever met a 9th-grader? They still have so much to explore about the world and themselves! It would be a tragedy to stop formally educating the public so soon.
Honestly, I feel the same way. My wife and I left a bigger city for similar reasons. Now we life in the country, and it’s inconvenient, but it’s just nicer out here.
I think we need to stop talking about cities and suburbs as if it's a binary decision. There are a ton of options in the middle which are not as loud or dense as cities while also not being as isolating and unwalkable as suburbs. Building more missing middle housing would help solve the problem significantly but no one (at least no one with the power and means to do so) wants to do that.
I'm already paying an order of magnitude more for the same facilities I'd get in states that are less dense than California.
At least out here, things are so screwy that minor details like cost of materials are rounding error.
Will happily pay for atmospheric carbon recapture, which covers the biggest externality.
Also, like most other commenters from the west coast, I'd live in one of the cities if they weren't littered with human waste, and if they had reasonable public schools.
They are referring to sprawl externalities. Strong Towns delves into this (and they have some points, but are also overly pessimistic about suburban and rural costs).
I live in a walkable community on the US east coast that is clean, safe, and downright affordable compared to SF. Every student in town can walk to school, we walk to stores, restaurants, bars, and a train that takes us into the city center.
No fights, no filth. There are plenty of places that fit the bill.
Pretty much. For some reason people see the suburbs as some forced development decision when in fact it's pretty much housing consumers choosing what they want.
the American style of suburb is quite unusual compared to e.g. Europe though, and AFAIK is driven by zoning laws and car-centric infrastructure more so than by consumer choice. Markets don't necessarily offer people what they want, people's imaginations are often constrained by what's available on the market. Something something, "faster horses".
I don't buy it based on my own experience living around the world. I lived in Asia for a while where an apartment was the norm and public transit meant you didn't need a car (and most didn't have one).
What would the majority do if they had the money? What was their "dream lifestyle"? Buy a single family home, with it's own land and a car.
Sure, not everyone likes that lifestyle, but a hell of a lot of people do like it.
I would totally want to live in a single family home with a garden in a city - all the benefits of city living, with space.
But single family homes set in the suburbs, amongst endless other single family homes? It's nowhere near as good. You have to drive everywhere and there's not enough density to support local shops.
I think it's a mistake to assume that because almost everyone would, with enough money, want their own home and land, that they'd also want it in the suburbs. You just need to look at property values to see that isn't the case - houses and apartments in the city are worth more.
I could trade my terraced house in the city for a much larger one in the distant suburbs. But that would mean driving everywhere, living by busy fast roads, not having a huge range of shops nearby, having to commute further into work, not being able to cycle - all things that make it not worth it. Clearly a lot of my neighbours feel the same way.
I think that biggest killer is kids once they are beyond toddler stage. Kids ability to go independently to sports club, visit friend or go to school ads a lot of comfort to both kid and parent. And kids occasional ability to fetch something from local store is a neat addition too.
I live in a suburban single-family home in the US with a yard and garden in a small town just outside a small city. I use my car once a week at most (but normally not at all), usually just to enjoy a day trip into the city. From home we walk or bike to restaurants, groceries, coffee, library, parks, breweries, boutique stores, etc. I think this is the ideal, and if someone gave me all the money in the world I’d honestly be hard pressed to find a place I’d rather live. But even money isn’t an issue, because cost of living is fairly low here.
I think it’s a mistake to assume that outside the cities it’s all highways and endless suburbs.
I was thinking the infrastructure and amenities state of US suburbs, where they're basically stamped down in blocks off a highway. I live in a single family home and drive a car in the UK, but there are tons of amenities within walking distance (and I can walk anywhere), community events and green spaces, etc. I can drive, get a bus or cycle into the nearest city, which my town is clustered near to, so opportunities are aplenty. I know my neighbours, family are nearby, and so on. The vibe I get from American suburbs is that they're much more like isolated house-units and if you want to do anything you have to drive to somewhere totally different.
I dunno. The most expensive are houses near center of city usually. People pay a lot for that. Then second most are apartments near center of city. The houses further away are cheaper. Some people definitely prefers them, but I dont think buying patterns show them being majority.
The houses with no stores around, with no busses around where you and your kids needs driving everywhere are comparatively cheap. Even people living in houses with yards seem to prefer them if they are either walking distance from forest, walking distance from stores/community centers and ideally both.
The most expensive are houses near center of city usually.
The houses in the suburbs of Bay Area peninsula are more expensive than the houses inside SF city limits. Of course there many factors like schools that influence that, but I wouldn't argue your observation is always correct.
And price is due to supply/demand. If the supply of single family homes in the middle of cities was high enough to keep costs down, sure, plenty of families would choose those. But they aren't, so people trade off living close to a city center with a lower cost single family home.
> But they aren't, so people trade off living close to a city center with a lower cost single family home.
Yes, but I dont see majority of people doing that worldwide. And where they do that, they prefer houses in near villages where there are stores and community centers nearby. And those houses have small businesses in them.
The local stores or walkable infrastructure are not exclusive feature of cities. That is something that does not exists only where it is illegal to open local store near the houses.
What do you mean "worldwide"? When I lived in Asia people lived in small concrete boxes with no windows so they could work in big cities and not pay a lot for rent.
With the exception of wealthy countries, I'd argue most people don't have the choice of living in an apartment in the city or a big house in the country.
I don't see anything that would suggest majority of people anywhere prefers to live in houses in locations with no transport other then car and no stores etc nearby.
In wealthy countries, people live in remote houses like that because it is cheaper. Houses in walkable places are way more expensive. You have to be at the level of "shopping and everything is done by somebody else and kids are driven by nanny" rich to get to demographic where it is opposite.
Whoa, we just went from "single family home" to "single family home...in locations with no transport other than car and no stores etc nearby".
I never said people prefer that.
I said people prefer a single family home, a yard and a car. That's not actually achievable in most city centers (unless wealthy) so many people give up location in exchange for a single family home, a yard and car.
Thus, suburbs aren't forced on anyone. Many people chose a single family home, in the suburbs, over an apartment in the city. The cost of that is not being able to walk everywhere, and people are willing to pay that price.
This is what the thread starts with: the American style of suburb is quite unusual compared to e.g. Europe though, and AFAIK is driven by zoning laws and car-centric infrastructure more so than by consumer choice. Markets don't necessarily offer people what they want, people's imaginations are often constrained by what's available on the market. Something something, "faster horses".
You specifically said "I don't buy it" to the above comment that was about car oriented suburbs specifically.
Nowhere you specified you are changing topic from the above (suburbs) to "house anywhere".
>What would the majority do if they had the money? What was their "dream lifestyle"? Buy a single family home, with it's own land and a car.
> Sure, not everyone likes that lifestyle, but a hell of a lot of people do like it.
Nope, dream ofmost of the people would be to "buy a single family home, with it's own land within the city without doing taxi driver for your kids".
But since this is completely scifi since houses in city are the most expensive people have to settle either for city apartments or house outside city and becoming taxi driver.
To be clear: I don't see them as a forced development decision. It's clear that they're extremely preferable for many people, in a large part because the economic envelope for suburbs includes massive externalities. Unsustainable road and utility networks are the standard example.
Put another way: consumers are choosing the best option for them, because they don't have to pay the true cost of their living environment. If the economic envelope matched the underlying reality, suburban development would be mostly an economic dead end.
“Make it nicer and we'll come back.” Oh boy, there’s so much wrong in that attitude!
Anyhow, some advice from Amsterdam, NL (yes, the country of decriminalized marijuana and legal prostitution): we pay taxes and a significant portion of it — less so as the conservative government tries to shore up waning consensus with spending cuts to sustain windfalls for its constituency — goes to social programs aimed at housing homeless, supporting the addicted (often by addressing the underlying mental illness or trauma), managing dysfunctional families (which in several cases can be a bit paternalistic, but it also helps contain spillover to the previous problem class), helping sustainable employment.
Now, conservatives have systematically eroded all this societal infrastructure, but most of it is still here and it does help avoiding the situations you strawmanned.
Society is not a zero-sum game, it’s a force multiplier.
Maybe if the middle class suburban whites hadn't spent seventy years pushing crack into black neighborhoods, systematically breaking up families, demolishing communities to replace them with highways, extracting tax money and spending it on services for suburban middle class neighborhoods, arresting people for feeding the homeless, guarding discarded food so it doesn't get eaten, undermining education in poor neighborhoods, and straight up killing them when they request help from the authorities, some of those problems would not be as bad.
> without having to dodge heroin needles or human excrement or have abuse hurled it us or be assaulted.
What a failure of imagination for what civic policy could be.
The idea is to build a social net in society such that you take care of people so that they never need to fall low enough to be shitting in the street or using hard drugs to get through a miserable existence.
This is expensive, requires compassion, and extremely socialist policies. The Hackernews crowd wouldn't love it.
But the money is there in society, it just requires a few less billionaires, and a few less multi-mansion lifestyles.
The idea is to build a social net in society such that you take care of people so that they never need to fall low enough to be shitting in the street or using hard drugs to get through a miserable existence.
Where did the meme that this would work originate?
Work backwards from cities that are actually clean & safe. Is Singapore this way because of their "extremely socialist policies"?
Is the goal a clean and safe city at all costs no matter what the cost? Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
The Singapore way is easier, no doubt. But I don't think it's that ludicrous to believe we could have a free AND a socialist society.
There are different attitudes,congestion and interactions for cyclists in different cities. NYC drivers seems particularly antagonistic towards cyclists, I have seen many examples of what seemed like intentional strikes to me by taxis and commercial drivers who are likely to be more time crunched and build up a frustration towards cyclists. But cyclists also seem to be of a more daring rugged stock there too.
Granted, my only personal comparison would be to Buffalo, Albany, Poughkeepsie and San Diego, all which have much less congested city centers.
The only east coast city that matched the "needles and feces" attitudes I have seen was Philadelphia. As soon as you start driving into the city it is impossible to notice how much trash and car debris is in the road. The moment I parked, we saw needles on the ground and as a result I was more likely to notice I imagine. But, it was truly a filthy city.
Buffalo city centers do have a high rate of panhandling and street scams, you just learn coping skills.
Until the pandemic I commuted through London by bike for about 7 years - ranging from 5 to 12 miles a day. I fell off maybe a couple of times, never hitting my head. If the OP is sustaining multiple concussions from bike riding, they're either riding a lot (bike messenger?) or riding very recklessly (or perhaps both).
I don't know why people feel compelled to always inject race or skin color into things as if only some folks of some skin color are concerned with crime and filthiness.
Once people who could not afford living in the suburbs can, they often also escape filthy cities.
In addition, you have unsafe cities like Sao Paulo and you have safe cities like Santiago or Buenos Aires. You have unsafe cities like Davao (although Duterte cleaned up some crime) and you have safe cities like Seoul or Tokyo. It's not due to color. Some cities are safe, others aren't and people who have the means to do so escape them.
LA has many hispanics who have migrated out to the suburbs... are they bad for doing so?
Lots of LatAm cities also have big suburbs and gated communities... are they "bad" for wanting to escape crime?
> I don't know why people feel compelled to always inject race or skin color into things
Was this directed at me? The two comments above me both referenced race. I didn’t inject it into the conversation, I was reacting to it being injected.
I literally quoted them saying this. Here it is again "just make the city centres safe, clean, friendly places so that people who are "middle class, suburban, and white" want to live there".
>This comes off as projection.
I don't understand what you think I am projecting. I'm afraid of poor brown people? I don't want white people in the city? For the record, I am a white person who has lived in the middle of various major American cities most of my life. I'm not going to argue with you if you cite housing costs, having a yard, privacy, calmness, or any of the numerous other advantages suburban life has over city living. But when I see someone complain that cities aren't "safe, clean, [or] friendly" for middle class white folks, I will call out what I see as a recycled dog whistle from the 1950s and 1960s.
>They listed several things.
I questioned those listed things because the implication behind them is not true. White people aren't waiting for cities to become safe because the cities have already gotten safe.
That quote is literally a quote of the parent post- I read it as sarcasm, rather than a genuine belief (that this thread appears to be reading as literal and hence, projecting).
The fact is, this person was clearly also the victim of violence and chose to move out because they, specifically, were not safe. There's nothing dog-whistle about it.
The nearest metro to me just had a city council meeting to discuss snow plow drivers complaining about being shot at while on the job, and their struggles in hiring other city workers who are being harassed. Their response was to recommend trauma counselling to those who were shot at.
Many people who are comfortable not living in a city (even if they would prefer it) move out when they realize they have to raise their kids there. If inner cities were as safe, clean and friendly as my rural community, I too might never have moved out. Instead, I realized that only one of my neighbors ever showed the slightest interest in talking to me, were frequently rude, and few people walked anywhere alone. In the years I've left, carjackings, theft and vandalism have gotten so much worse- to the point that in some formerly "safe" neighborhoods, you couldn't lock your car door when parking on the street because if thieves couldn't open the handle, they'd just smash a window to get in.
Life isn't perfect out in the country, but there is literally nothing about living in a big city that is attractive enough to make me want to go back to that.
Cry "dogwhistle" all you want, but skin color has nothing to do with this story.
> Cry "dogwhistle" all you want, but skin color has nothing to do with this story
Then don’t mention the skin color in the first place. I wouldn’t have replied if the two comments above me didn’t paint this as a racial issue by specifically mentioning this was an issue for middle class white people and not just middle class people.
> I literally quoted them saying this. Here it is again "just make the city centres safe, clean, friendly places so that people who are "middle class, suburban, and white" want to live there".
That commenter was actually quoting part of the comment above him…
> The communities that hand-wring the most about predators and risks to children tend to be middle class, suburban, and white
Middle-class white people aren't blameless for trashing cities. Look at any urban environment where they live in high concentrations (i.e. residential high rises) and observe that the sidewalks are a communal toilet for their dogs.
I've lived in a few urban environments in the US, and it's actually my preferred lifestyle and someday I'll hopefully live like that again.
However, yeah, the neighborhoods in US downtowns where I've lived do not feel safe, despite staying in fairly high end accommodations. Crazy people walking around screaming, fighting, harassing people, banging on cars, using drugs laying in the middle of the sidewalk. I would never recommend that a woman, for instance, live in those locations. It's absolutely ridiculous, and it's even more ridiculous for you to try to cast it as a racial issue.
>and it's even more ridiculous for you to try to cast it as a racial issue.
The number of people responding like this is really telling. The first comment in this chain mentioned this was a problem for white people. The person that responded repeated the comment about white people. Then I respond and say brown people only for multiple to accuse me of unnecessarily injecting race. It just shows the number of people who view white as the default. It is only "a racial issue" once brown people are mentioned.
The comment you were responding to only mentioned race by quoting someone else, and I’m pretty confident that was beside the point they were making. I thought it was silly to bring race into it initially too, but I didn’t have anything substantial to say in response to the other commenter so I didn’t mention it.
The people that live there are what make it nicer. You can help and be part of the solution, or you can continue to live in your 1500 sqft kingdom and let Queen Karen out every so often to harass the local teenage serfs, er, service workers.
For serious though you hit the nail square. Pearl-clutching suburban types are actually moving back into the city where I'm at (to my neighborhood, among others), and it sucks in every way except my house's value is shooting up.
>They drive their children everywhere, and thereby are (somewhat) alienated from the idea of a "local community" beyond the immediate neighborhood (which can only be entered or exited by car.)
I see your point, but I think it's broader than something that can be attributed solely to cars.
I've lived in apartments and condos in the hearts of major American cities my entire adult life, and I'm surrounded by the same phenomenon in different form. I know maybe 3 of my neighbors in the hall from walking past them and saying hi once in a while, but besides that, I have basically no contact with them.
My partner grew up in an eastern European country and she tells stories of how, on holidays, people would go out to the hallways of her apartment building to congregate and drink and hang out. This concept seems totally alien to me. I'm pretty sure if a resident tried congregating in the hallways of any of the buildings I've lived in, security would be called to clear them out.
I've only lived in urban well-off-millennial type places. Maybe this is something unique to the upper-middle class and above. But I don't think it's entirely about suburbia.
I think this is a great observation, and I agree that it can't be attributed solely to cars.
This is a little bit of what I was trying to get at with the "dominant cultural metaphor": the US has undergone a fundamental cultural shift around strangers for the last 50-70 years. I attribute a decent amount of that to the alienation afforded to us by driving everywhere, but it has lots of other root causes: the steady erosion of local businesses in favor of chains, the professionalization of familial and community responsibilities, and (more recently) social media's affordance of cheap engagement.
And here's the thing: a lot of those root causes are good, or (at the very least) unavoidable! Our society is still pretty unjust, but it's a lot more just than when there was a uniform expectation that women stayed home and raised children. Social media poisons our discourse, but it's also made local organizing and event planning easier than ever.
> people would go out to the hallways of her apartment building to congregate and drink and hang out. This concept seems totally alien to me. I'm pretty sure if a resident tried congregating in the hallways of any of the buildings I've lived in, security would be called to clear them out.
This is what makes the USA society so impersonal and distant. Everyone is expected, even required, to quickly retire into their home and stay there unless on specific business of going somewhere. The USA has even invented a crime for the concept of being outside for no particular reason, "loitering".
Coming from latin america we joke (although wrapped in much sadness) that every fun social activity that's normal elsewhere, will trigger the riot police to show up in the USA. When I lived in an apartment I knew everyone in the building since we'd gather to drink and play games on the central hallway on Friday nights.
So no wonder it is difficult to get to know any neighbors in the USA, let alone the entire neighborhood. Which in turn makes it easier to not care about them, which I believe is the cause of most of the social and political ills of the USA.
Very little to do with cars. Where I grew up the public transport was between useless to nonexistent, so everyone drives everywhere. But people still have fun and hang out and party on the streets or apartment hallways.
Nobody does it anymore, because the Internet has messed up human interaction patterns.
At least here in Ukraine. Well, in some cities they recently started to congregate in basements during air raid alerts, but that's hardly a positive thing. And I've heard that in Belarus, during 2020 protests, when the whole country got disconnected from the Internet for a couple of days, people really hanged out IRL much more.
A year ago, my wife and I moved from the Bay Area to rural Nevada. Within a week I found myself in some King of the Hill-esque group and now I stand around with neighbors drinking beers. I know basically everyone within 3 miles; back in the Bay I had that same apartment experience you had as did I when I was in the suburbs.
It’s led me to a theory that density limits interactions by excessive choice. We drive everywhere here (the OP original claim that was the alienator), but the entire county, 18,000 square miles, has 44,000 people in it and I see the same people at the gas station, the grocery store, the coffee shop, every time I go. So I still end up meeting people eventually just by routine.
It’s also weird how you can start to spot outsiders - the gas station I use has developed some weird social pattern that you always enter from the south and thus the cars always face the same way, so visitors don’t know that and you spot them.
My experience is similar to yours, but I wonder how it's different when you aren't "just passing through".
The way that we have structured the mix of movement-for-career and rental precarity (at the lower end) suggests that we disincentivize "putting down roots" in the way that normalizes that kind of behavior.
US apartment buildings are designed to maximize profits (rentable floorspace) and therefore contain no communal spaces, no seating. There are no stairs except dark cramped fire escapes. Some elevators are configured to prevent people from meeting. Many modern buildings are also too big to know most of your neighbors and feel part of a community.
Additionally, large leasing companies set rents to maximize profits, at the cost of turnover. It's hard to feel part of a community when people are constantly leaving and new people arriving. Residents can't feel like they belong when they expect to be priced out and forced to move in a year or two.
Capitalism produces efficient allocation of capital, but not maximum citizen quality of life.
I've toured a bunch of apartment buildings in a major city and the nicer ones often had people using the communal study areas, game rooms, lounges, fitness centers, and roof decks.
Obviously there's a cost to provide that and it's one many are willing to pay.
I've visited many expensive buildings in SF and lived in several. Those buildings do have study areas and lounges. But those places are never cozy and never designed to help people interact. They are often in a separate area or floor, away from the main entrance. The lounge areas are separated for multiple groups to use without interfering with each other. Furniture is heavy, expensive, and hideous. Tables are heavy or unmovable. There are no coffee tables. Music blares.
Architecture & design that fosters community will have a space for eating and socializing near the main entrance. When you enter or or exit the building, you can see who is there and walk over to say hello. The space will be cozy, clean, with warm lighting, good ventilation, movable chairs & tables, and no music or TV. There will be a sink with hand soap & paper towels, a microwave oven, and a hot water kettle. And a clean toilet around the corner.
I would be willing to pay for that, but so far no company has had the imagination to offer it. There's a similar lack of hot-desk co-working spaces that are suitable for coding. I would love to pay for that, too, but it doesn't exist. I've spoken with many co-working space managers and none have shown interest in making it happen.
Supporting your point, in many hotels the bar/restaurant area is visible from the lobby, which naturally invites people it to have a drink or a bite to eat. But its rare to find this architecture in apartment buildings.
This is why I loved an old Victorian-era house I once lived in, which had been converted into four apartment units. We all shared the large, deep wraparound front porch, and thus we'd occasionally gather for drinks. And neighbors would drop by, too. I miss that place.
I lived in Seattle for a while. Mentally ill, drunk, or intoxicated homeless are pretty common on the street. I witnessed shoplifting pretty often, threats and screaming people often, and people smoking crack pipes and injecting themselves pretty often. My wife was harassed or threatened multiple times by homeless people.
We moved out to the suburbs. Here, we see crowds of kids in the afternoons. They are playing in the park, roller blading, scootering around, running to one another's houses. Most of the kids are unattended and running about their own business. It seems much more natural and healthy than the environment of the city, where, not incidentally, kids were rare.
The "foreign scary place" was the city. The small community of neighbors who know one another is a friendly safe place. I would not want my kids running around the city by themselves - I don't mind it here. I don't think the reason is because of "hand wringing" or baseless worries over safety. I think the reason is that the city is overrun with mentally ill drug addicts who make a dangerous environment for unattended children.
More places are really bad now, not only downtown. Chinatown is really bad now, Ballard is bad (the walkable part of it, that is), South Seattle is bad.
There are an excessive number of people with untreated mental illness walking around in the USA. This may not be obvious if you haven’t lived elsewhere or can’t tell the difference between psychosis and alternative lifestyle choices. Untreated psychosis is dangerous, delusional people do harm others and themselves.
It’s relevant because it is a real medical problem that the US fails to deal with, as opposed to a less well defined cultural issue.
We used to deal with it, but it was considered inhumane (forced care). A social worker I know does her best to get homeless people into mental health care, but most refuse either out of fear of being locked up, or fear of having to quit their addictions.
Regan made it illegal to address this in California while he was governor, but the voters keep passing more mandatory spending on it, so we're in this screwed up situation where overfunded programs have stranded resources, and the problem keeps tailspinning, leading to more stranded resources.
We've had "car culture" and modern suburbs for many many many years, including a very large time period where none of this was an issue. Blaming it on "car culture" is completely off.
* It's a complex of things. I identify suburban culture (and car culture as a constituent element) as one member of that complex, but there's plenty of identifiable factors: increased passive awareness of our areas (24 hour news that chiefly spotlights crimes), passive surveillance of children (always available via cell phone, locatable via GPS), and so forth. It wouldn't be polemical if I didn't start with the controversial ones, though!
* Car culture and suburban culture are not things we've had for "many many many years." They're shockingly new, even by American cultural standards: modern suburbs are a postwar invention, and the cultural lodestone of being stuck in traffic on an interstate beltway somewhere outside of a major city is only a generation or two old. There are, similarly, external factors that have historically masked some of the more deleterious effects of car culture: redlining kept suburbs racially homogeneous for the first half of their history, and over half of women didn't enter the workforce until the late 1970s.
I think I covered this: I identify "suburban car culture" with the completion of interstate highways (and beltways) around major cities. The Interstate Highway System wasn't even begun until the late 1950s. And as I mentioned in the previous comment, there are confounding factors that explain why moral panic about childhood safety didn't really emerge until the mid-to-late 1980s (which, note, is about one generation after the first demographic of baby boomers was born in early suburbs).
The Satanic Panic[1] and the McMartin preschool trial[2] were both in the early 1980s, and were key moments in the popular conception of child abuse. Another wave happened in the 1990s with prominent kidnappings/murders of children, which might be the one you remember.
We've had "car culture" and suburban culture for less than ~80 years at most. It's only been increasing and spreading in that time. Likewise, the growth in insular suburban culture has been on the rise over a similar time period. I don't think it's accurate to say either is a brand new problem that's existed without the other for the majority of it's existence.
There is no world where the children of the middle class share a community and public space with untreated mentally ill homeless people who have full and equal rights to that space.
We don’t want to violently oppress people over bourgeois norms of behavior but we do want to live in communities that adhere to such norms. That is the real social function of car dependent geography.
> We don’t want to violently oppress people over bourgeois norms of behavior but we do want to live in communities that adhere to such norms.
Yes exactly. So we segregate them, creating a non-bourgeois underclass that plagues our cities and suburbs. Then we create more elaborate car centric human geography that causes us to pollute more and generate all sorts of externalities such as huge traffic jams and high house prices. Then because the above underclass is disregarded, they become a larger, more present part of our urban fabric who we've consigned to a segregated life of misery.
It's a lose-lose race to the bottom. All because we can't do the right thing, spending money on mental health care and assistance out of poverty. Eventually the (monetary but also human, social, and environmental) costs of maintaining the hacks ends up being higher than fixing the problem in the first place. That's what happens when you try to paper over problems without fixing them.
Being a tolerable neighbor involves skills, habits, and self control that are far from universal. Showing up to appointments and taking your meds every time is hard for yuppies with mild depression, let alone people with much looser holds on life. Inpatient mental health facilities are necesarily more coercive and less fun than the outside world. The mentally ill have civil rights too and can check themselves out unless their situation continues to meet a high bar for imminent risk of serious harm.
People in between “cannot manage own life” and “imminent danger to self and others” are a tricky proposition for the mental health system. It only takes a handful of such people wandering around your city center continuously (seriously, it’s the same dozen faces over and over in SF) to completely change the kind of place it is.
> Inpatient mental health facilities are necesarily more coercive and less fun than the outside world. The mentally ill have civil rights too and can check themselves out unless their situation continues to meet a high bar for imminent risk of serious harm.
I didn't say kidnap and torture them like we did in the 70s. I said give them mental healthcare and housing.
People don't become junkies overnight, and a building full of single bed sized lockable (from the inside) rooms available to anyone without stable housing (without fear of the salvation army taking them off of HRT or abusing them) with a few social workers and mediators to teach those skills, a doctor, a vocational educator, and a therapist on staff 24/7 is both cheaper than policing and jail, and would go a long, long, long way towards preventing these problems in the first place.
There's absolutely no reason not to do this. It's cheaper up front than policing. It saves the same amount again on cleanup and maintenance of public spaces. It saves many times the amount of money again on reduction of crime and insurance. And it provides a portion again in people that become productive tax payers
For the ones that have already fallen to the bottom of the hole you need something more, but surely if it's doing so much damage to the entire city that out of the 300 billion gdp, the inhabitants can afford four dozen social workers and an apartment block to do nothing but try to find a way to help them.
The idea that this is even a question in the wealthiest place on earth is mindbogglingly callous and evil, and a sign of a very very sick and antisocial society that has nothing to do with the people that fell through the cracks.
Offering support to people who want it is important and necessary. I am willing to bet however that a decent sized city contains at least one and probably several people who do not very much like having their lives managed by teams of social workers (I wouldn’t!) and will instead avail themselves of their right to shit on the floor of the train station.
> do not very much like having their lives managed by teams of social workers
Then don't manage. Serve and support. Start by bringing a sandwich, a coffee and a smoke and listening for an hour every day, not by shoving them in a cell.
Yes, it's expensive, but if it is -- as people here and elsewhere say over and over again -- making an entire area of a city uninhabitable and causing millions in damage and enforcement costs then surely it's worth the cost? Why do people seem to constantly favour being callous and cruel over even being selfish, let alone humane?
Large dense cities in certain parts of Europe and east Asia don’t face these issues (and even then, there isn’t really the same concept of large and dense in most of Europe), but I would say chaotic unfriendly cities are the default in most of the world. In a sense, many American cities act as a bridge between these two worlds. It also doesn’t help that you can fall much farther in the US than other places before anyone even begins to notice.
> The communities that hand-wring the most about predators and risks to children tend to be middle class, suburban, and white.
Racist much? Have any receipts to back that up? I live in a predominantly Asian neighborhood and it turns out they like living in a safe area too. Weird, huh?
And you're reading too much into the white part: the history of middle class suburbia is the history of America's white middle class, which is in turn more or less the history of America's race politics. It's not a particularly searing or piecing observation on my part.
It does, I believe they believe in reverse racism too. HN crowd isn't the best place for intelligent discussion beyond the weekly jq/sql/crypto/mobile apps as a business. And even then, most of the riff raff makes really stupid comments.
Exactly this. I agree 100%. A lot of responses are triggered folks who highlight exactly what you're saying. How dare you call suburbs sheltered, boring, and fake. A lot of responses cry about urban places being dangerous hell holes, when in fact it highlights exactly what woodruffw was saying. No one in the suburbs gives a shit about each other, because there is no sense of community. Karen in the HOA cares more about what color your door knob is, and the kids sneak to the basement when the parents are out to try out exotic drugs. Let's not kid ourselves and compare urban centers "as omg, I can't even walk my kid to school without a homeless person that molests them". Hyperbole at the best.
Stay in your suburbs, and don't use urban tax dollars to fund your lifestyle choices. And while you're at it, when you visit an urban center, learn to drive and parallel park, or does that scare you too?
I grew up in a major city and was only mugged four times and assaulted (like hit or abused) four times by randos on the street before graduating high school, starting in second grade. All with racial overtones, very explicitly so on the assaults.
Yet we (me, my parents, my educators) wouldn’t have dreamed of behaving like these school workers.
I don’t think it’s the suburban white folks, though it might be. I think it’s people who buy into an everything is too dangerous mindset. That they go to suburbs is effect, not cause.
Figured the author was a dude from the title, totally surprised it wasn’t. I too suffer from the fear that if I’m around anyone’s kids other than my own, especially at a park, I’m at risk.
People living in gated communities have a higher perceived level of crime [1] than those who don't so it's not that surprising that the more isolated you are, the more you see the rest of world as dangerous
> People living in gated communities have a higher perceived level of crime [1] than those who don't so it's not that surprising that the more isolated you are, the more you see the rest of world as dangerous
Okay, their perception of crime is higher than it should be. What about the level of crime inside vs outside of the gated community?
It really doesn't matter if someone thinks that there are 4 rapes per second outside of their bubble, if the rate inside the bubble is significantly lower than the rate outside the bubble.
Thinking that it is 4 rapes per second when the actual number is 4 rapes per month is irrelevant when there are 4 rapes per decade inside the bubble.
IOW, you are not making any point worth discussing. I don't care whether my perception of crime outside of my bubble is higher than the actual crime outside of my bubble, I care whether it is more dangerous outside of my bubble than inside.
> In this study [1] in California, they've found no difference in actual crime but the gated community believed they were safer than the outside.
Not quite; they found that the crime rate as reported by the respondents to the survey did not differ. They did not look at the actual crimes reported to the law enforcement agencies.
We already know that people perceive the crime rate inaccurately; asking respondents what the crime rate is, is pointless.
> They did not look at the actual crimes reported to the law enforcement agencies.
Where are you reading this?
Page 8 of the study says they got their actual crime data from the Newport Beach Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department. They compared this to their comparative perceived safety "by asking how safe the respondents felt their community was as compared to other communities."
Page 10: "The gated community showed a significantly higher rating of comparative community safety as compared with the nongated community" whereas "there was no significant difference in the per capita crime rate for the gated community as compared with the nongated community."
That was just the first paper I found when I searched for gated communities and perceived crime
It's a widely studied phenomenon. Here's a paper back in 2000 [1] about "a high-income gated community and a public housing gated community in Orange and Los Angeles counties, California" and the conclusion is basically the same.
Maybe absolute number of cases but I highly doubt crime per capita is higher in denser locations. If anything, dense population should deter crime. I suspect it's harder to break into a home or kidnap someone when there are more people around to see or hear.
This is a bizarre view. Even if you go 100% reactionary and treat every 2020 protest as a "riot," the entire year pales in comparison to a single riot in a single neighborhood during the 1960s[1]. Our modern protests (including the "violent" ones) are downright bucolic.
This reads like the opinion of the wealthy white urbanite who has never experienced anything resembling the average lifestyle of a resident in the very city they claim to know so much about.
The thing is, I like this article. I agree with it. There just isn't a correlation with helicopter parenting and statistically-average suburbs. If anything, NIMBYism/helicopter bullshit is most prevalent in wealthy urban areas.
I grew up in NYC, and saw lots of things as a kid, including very mentally unwell people running around naked.
Is it a problem? Yes. It's a problem for them; they were very clearly unwell. Was it a problem for me? I didn't really know how to react as a kid, and more than anything else I remember being sobered rather than traumatized by what I saw. If anything has maladjusted me, I don't think that was it.
No, it isn’t. We aren’t all guilty of perversions because a few guys can’t keep their dicks in their pants. The solution isn’t treating us all like criminals, it’s to get those few perverts psychiatric help.
I was much more traumatized being forced to attend Sunday school against my will than I was that one day we found a book about sex at the public library. It even had illustrations. That was much more joy than I ever got from Jesus brainwashing school with JOY written all over the walls.
It's like claiming that something from 0 to 100 should be treated as 100. Maybe, but maybe it's more correct to treat it as 0, or as 50. But in this case it's a way to to shut down discussion.
Yes, you're correct. Jane Jacobs[1] in "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" wrote about how dense, walkable environments with storefronts, residents on porches contribute to the concept of friendly strangers that make areas safer. The isolation of the suburbs creates danger.
[1] Who unfortunately then proceeded to lock others out of also having this kind of quality of life by becoming a NIMBY...
This doesn’t really match my experience. The axis is different. Grover Beach is suburban and has kids flying down the sidewalks doing jumps without helmets and it’s suburban. Marin is suburban and is full of those loony racist over-concerned mums. SF has hyper-concerned people all the time and it’s dense.
There’s a panicky streak kind of person. You see them on the Internet more, I think, telling you how random things are DANGEROUS and stuff like that.
It’s not an urban/rural divide. It’s a risk tolerance thing. And since it is so common among Democrat voters (who are massively urban) it doesn’t strike me that dense urban environments relieve someone of the curse of constant fear.
> The communities that hand-wring the most about predators and risks to children tend to be middle class, suburban, and white.
It's got nothing to do with race. Anyone who has the ability move out of a dangerous space does so, regardless of their race.
Getting them to move back in when they are perfectly fine where they are is the problem - they have no control over when and how the city may deteriorate again, and they don't want to have to take the chance of a large financial risk to move again.
It doesn't matter if cities are safe now; the suburban folk who move back in realise that they have no control over how safe it will remain.
No, it's news media's sensationalization of exceedingly rare yet awful events (for profit! More at 11). Consuming that poison turns neighbors into strangers and strangers into criminals.
How else would disconnected suburban communities be getting the same message that their kids are in danger from something as specific as trench-coated deviants or razor blade apples?
We know it started before social media but as it often does, social media has amplified the problem. I'm not sure how much blame Hollywood shares in spreading this fear.
Queens is one of the five boroughs of NYC - so it's officially a part of the city, not a suburb. It's a very large and heterogeneous place though, with housing ranging from multi-million dollar mansions to high-rise public housing projects, and neighborhoods ranging from luxury to poverty (and everything in between). Parts of it do look fairly suburban, with big areas of private houses that can be a fairly long walk from the nearest store, where everyone owns a car.
It's my opinion that you live in a bubble and see the rest of the world as a foreign and scary place, with unknown levels of unknown danger (a polemical comment, but I felt compelled to share it)
> I've lived in NYC my entire life.
> hEre's mY taKe on what's wrong with more peaceful, orderly places.
For a long time I didn't understand what is wrong with suburbanites and why I just can't fit in there ever. I love living in the city and raising kids in the city is not easy thing, quite the opposite. I think you summarize and highlighted what I was not able to understand. Thank you!
A trend I've noticed in the suburbs is the paranoia and suspicion of others, and the amount of people who fantasize about society collapsing so that they finally have a reason to shoot their neighbors, should they come knocking for help. One suburban prepper told me that they stockpile weapons for exactly that reason, because when society collapses, they know they'll be ready, and they're willing to shoot anyone who wasn't prepared, even their hungry neighbors. I've heard the same and similar from others with the same inclination to lust for collapse.
I grew up in the suburbs and your diatribe is utterly foreign to me. As kids we were expected to get out of the house and not return until it was dark. I spent many days fishing in a river pond that was almost 2 miles from my house, secluded in the woods. Maybe you need to get out more. The City(tm) is not a panacea. There's no place that people are strangers with each other more than apartment complexes.
I'm glad it's not your experience. It wasn't meant to be a blanket claim about the quality of peoples' lives in the suburbs; it was a general sociological claim about how suburban construction (and car-driven socialization) in the US fosters alienation (and how that alienation turns into latent hostility to strangers).
You haven't thought about the possibility that it's not the suburbs but instead 24/7 news media combined with social media that might be a tad bit more to blame? Cars didn't make parents afraid for their kids. Lots didn't either.
With the exception of the media, I don't think you could draw a consistent chronology for any of these things across the last 30-40 years of moral panic over children's safety. US crime rates, for example, are markedly lower than they were in the 1990s, and we probably spend more on the police now as well.
The last decade statistics disagree. Country wide there is a reduction but within the some big cities it has increased significantly.
"On average, violent crime has climbed by 12 percent in U.S. cities, while property crime has declined by 33 percent since 2010. Robbery rates fell in the average U.S. city by 23 percent, while murder, rape, and aggravated assault all climbed by 25 percent or more."
Scroll down on that link and check out the crime change over the last decade "2010-2020 change".
It does look like a handful of cities are really really bad and may be skewing things.
Friend of mine runs a local eatery. She told her 9-year old son to walk across the street - literally to the candy shop where she knows the owner, and told the kid to do some homework for an hour. Police brought her son back and threatened to charge her with endangerment or abandonment or something similar. This was... 2018 IIRC.
They live about 1.5 miles from the eatery. She would let her 9 year old walk home sometimes in good weather - low crime with actual tree-lined suburban streets. Police apparently threatened her over that as well - that's somehow endangering the child too much, and she might be charged with some misdemeanor.
I don't get it. Really. As someone who grew up in the 70s/80s... I can't say 'nothing bad ever happened'. Obviously it did. But the pendulum has swung far too much the other way now.
> I can't say 'nothing bad ever happened'. Obviously it did. But the pendulum has swung far too much the other way now.
My counterintuitive mildly-offensive party conversation starter is that I think that the ideal number for childhood deaths by misadventure or accident is a balance between protecting children from stupid accidents and making children stupid and timid by restricting them from doing anything that could result in an accident. If kids are getting into too few fatal accidents, protections for children should be reduced until we get the numbers back up.
I make a similar argument for train travel: since the death rate is ~10% that of other forms of transport, if trains could be made cheaper by compromising safety to say 50% of other modes, that would be a net positive as cheaper trains would move people off other, still more dangerous forms of transport.
Safety Assurance is a big part of rail transit design but I wouldn't say it is a significant cost. Building and operating rail wouldn't cost half as much if we stripped some of the safety assurance process out of it. Maybe a couple of percentage points of cost for orders of magnitude more fatal accidents. The systems would mostly all still be there, unless you wanted to do something as drastic as removing all interlocking/train protection and rely entirely on drivers and timed signals - basically treat it like a road network - but that would have huge operational impacts - train headways have to be much larger if you can't know what sections have trains in them - as well as being extremely unsafe.
Frankly, these precautions exist for a reason, and it is because many many people died in the early days of rail. Many people who work in rail, particularly in ops/sigs/assurance are proud of how safe rail transport now is.
(I work in Engineering Assurance on rail infrastructure projects).
Fair enough, thanks for sharing. It's not really serious proposal but interesting to learn it wouldn't work. I guess the ongoing cost of rails and rolling stock are killer.
Much of the infrastructure cost is boring stuff like earthworks and retaining walls and moving existing services that are in the way. The shift to in-cab signalling saves/will save a bunch of money on lineside equipment maintenance (because you don't need it).
I was thinking about your comment and one way to save considerable infrastructure costs is more level crossing and less overpasses/bridges, but train vs pedestrian or train vs car are common and messy. Plus level crossings wreck traffic flow on the surrounding road network.
And you could certainly make the same argument about airliners, which have a death rate <10% that of trains (and <1% that of cars).
But if you try to make that argument on HN, a bunch of people will yell at you about how Boeing and the FAA are evil for putting cost savings over safety.
The Safety cost and even the hull cost is simply not a major contributor to the cost of your ticket. It’s mostly fuel gate fees maintenance and overhead
Keep in mind, if you compromise maintenance for costs, you'll make up the costs in crew wages as they obviously have 1-2 orders of magnitude more risk exposure than the average passenger and won't be willing to fly for anything less than massive hazard pay.
Scheduled maintenance is done with semi slave labor in the 3rd world. Routine is more expense local labor but the routine stuff can’t be deferred anyway
Airliners are much safer than other modes of transportation per mile traveled. The difference vanishes (mostly, or reverses) when interpreted per mile on the vehicle or per trip.
If airliners were only as safe as walking, nobody would use them, because you'd expect to have at least a minor accident (like a sprained ankle) when walking 2000 miles. A similar argument can be made for cars and trains (just a magnitude less distance per trip and consequently a smaller chance of injury).
It's a novel idea in terms of emissions avoidance, though: couple the externalities to personal risk.
People who currently are forced to commute daily with cars could be much safer doing so on a more robust train system. You wouldn’t get the same benefit from cheaper flights.
Did we both interpret the MCAS incident with Boeing differently? Because I saw this as regulatory capture putting it's metaphorical testicles where it felt comfortable.
On the contrary, I’d love to talk about a spicy topic. Only if the person isn’t too invested/serious about it though. E.g they can disagree gracefully and can entertain all angles
>Only if the person isn’t too invested/serious about it though
. Wow, I'm the opposite. I don't mind discussing a spicy topic, but only if the person actually gives a shit about it. I have no desire to be trolled IRL by someone wanting to be edgy. If someone is serious and polite about it, I'll discuss any topic.
I agree that talking to people who don’t give a shit at all aren’t fun talking to.
I wanted to say I don’t like discussing spicy topics with people who give too much shit and are inflexible because at that point discussion can turn personal or can feel like them venting.
It very much does. I have actually offensive party conversation starters that work even better. You don't have to enjoy talking with everyone.
edit: shouldn't party conversation be a little spicy? At least I'm not talking about party politics, sports events, or television shows. Or the weather, or how we all individually got to the party.
To each their own of course, but given the binary choice between a boring topic and a topic that will inevitably cause me to think about my own kids dying in an accident, bring on the boredom.
But anyone who knows the topic well will explain to you that bike helmets and seat belts are the only things that really move the needle. The rest are on the order of measurement error.
(And I assume you’re not advocating dropping either of those.)
I don't think there is a correlation between being allowed to run around without supervision and deaths of children. For example, if you build dangerous roads everywhere and lots of kids die in car accidents, maybe something could be done about the roads, not the free roaming kids.
> if you build dangerous roads everywhere and lots of kids die in car accidents, maybe something could be done about the roads, not the free roaming kids.
That is accepted that pedestrians need to behave so that cars can drive around at relatively high speeds in very public and shared spaces is an unbelievable accomplishment by the automobile industry.
Just yesterday, we were standing 30m downwind of somebody idling their mangy Vespa, and we could smell the stink from their partial combustion. As you do. At the same time, it's totally unacceptable for somebody themselves to stink like that.
I guess it's similar with car noise. People would go nuts if everybody was, I don't know, humming all the time outside. But car noises are normal.
Same goes for bullying. If you get a generation that is so different from the previous generation that they are unable to live/work with one another, then not enough was done to reinforce some shared cultural values. Change can and should happen, but it should be gradual enough that one generation recognizes, respects, and can empathize with the other.
In Colorado a law was recently passed to deal with this. According to [0]:
"During its initial committee hearing, sponsoring state Rep. Mary Young, D-Greeley, said allegations of neglect or lack of supervision have been on the rise in Colorado, even as the number of substantiated cases are dropping. In 2019, there were 3,854 allegations of lack of supervision; 82%, or 3,169, were unfounded, she said."
Not to toot our Colorado horn too loudly here but I really feel like this state, my home state, is one of the few sane places left in the US (but seriously please don't move here haha).
It’s bittersweet, don’t you think? On the one hand, it’s good that such a law was supported at the highest levels. However, in truly sane places, there are no such laws because the police would never think to involve themselves in such a matter in the first place.
Some social norms have clearly disintegrated, but now there is a law to patch it up.
The reasons why the social norm disintegrated in the first place remain unresolved.
A few other states passed similar laws, including Oklahoma and Texas. Seems absurd that we need to pass laws that let children play outside unsupervised.
I don't get it either. I've had the police called three times on my 3rd grade son because he has been playing in our front yard. We live in a bland Californian suburban neighborhood built in the 1990s. He doesn't get outside much anymore. The plastic holds we put on the tree in the front go unused - bleached by the 258 beautiful sunny days we have each year. Instead he's learned to occupy his time on screens, but I hear people complain about that too.
I want to know what happened to the people calling the police. There needs to be consequences for people who call the cops on someone to falsely report a crime. Start holding people accountable for their nosiness and people will start minding their own business. An encounter gone wrong with our militarized police can end an innocent life, result in significant injury, cause them to lose their job, and needlessly involve them in the expensive legal system. People ought to err on the side of not inflicting this on each other unless it's obvious that urgent violent intervention is necessary.
Brah you're not even allowed to know who called CPS on you. It's anonymous and it's illegal for them to tell you the identity of the caller.
Not only are there no consequences, but the system is set up to ensure that one can make any accusation they like, that CPS will be administratively required to investigate it, and that the pain will always be asymmetric. Also CPS investigations typically aren't 'criminal' investigations so it's doubtful you could argue that any false accusations as 'falsely reporting a crime.' You may be told that it's not a criminal but child welfare case.
It's practically the perfect system for a vindictive neighbor / ex-spouse / whatever.
And why is "child alone outside" something that needs to be reported to the police? People calling 911 with such bullshit should be fined for unnecessarily blocking the line for those with real emergencies.
There's a pair of kids that roam around our neighborhood looking for bugs and lizards and just generally having an adventure.
It's a safe neighborhood and my first instinct was, "Why don't those parents monitor their children" but then I thought for a minute and remembered my own childhood where me and my brothers would walk to the park, look for worms, ride our bikes, go on adventures.
Those kids are welcome to look for bugs and lizards now, everyone keeps an eye out for them, one fell and scrapped his knee and was crying outside our house so I went to check on him and carried him back to his house to get cleaned up. My wife is worried we will get sued at some point if they get injured on our property, but I guess that's the risk I'll have to take so that 2 kids can just play outside and have fun.
I hate to say this, but having lived in a place with a lot of cultural diversity:
1) If a little black boy or girl came along I felt fine fixing their bicycle or whatever.
2) If a poor looking white kid I felt fine that their parents wouldn't accuse me of some bullshit if they were on my property or whatever.
3) Middle class or better seeming white kids. No fucking chance in hell. Won't talk to them. Won't willingly let them on my property. Won't engage or look at them. Scared to hell parents will accuse me of something or sue.
Lets assume poors/minorities are equally as likely as anyone else to accuse you of something improperly (although that's probably a poor assumption, as those of higher social class tend to have better access or confidence to access formal government systems, especially when you consider things like illegal immigrants probably won't approach police under any conditions).
Now imagine thye go to police, or to the court. Which parents do you think garners the best odds and rapport with the legal and enforcement systems in the US:
1) The black factory workers
2) White single mom in the trailer park.
3) White business owner of the local dentist office.
The legal system discriminates. Then I pick to minimize my chances of being the victim of a discriminating legal system. Sadly there's not much chance the cops are going to believe the black factory worker or trailer park mom in the place I lived, false accusation or no. Hell in that same city they shoot black guys just for having a CCW and telling the cops they're legally carrying. I simply had nothing to worry about.
The axiom that the rich tend to get away with more in the US is sadly a true one. The other end of that is that the rich also tend to be able to garner much more social capital to pursue claims against you, whether they are true or not. My fear is not so much the false claims alone (which can come from anyone of any race/class), but people who may make a false claim and also be on the upper end of the spectrum of holder of social capital to actually execute that claim.
My risk tolerance being what it is, I could choose to ignore ALL children and thus not discriminate. Instead I choose to discriminate and will engage children if I think that someone who makes some bogus claim won't be taken seriously by the justice system. If the justice system / police treated poor blacks as well as affluent whites, I would choose to not engage children at all ever. If this makes me a bad person, so be it, but it's a measured response to the sad realities we live in.
Discriminations original meaning is to tell the difference between things. Op is recognising the difference between things that are unlikely to cause them a problem, and things that are going to cause them a problem. This is just common sense actually, though in the world of wokeness plain common sense is not common enough.
Engaging children can be nourishing to the soul of those who enjoy it. But the calculus is definitely different from adults.
From a cold calculating standpoint, engaging an affluent adult can come with significant upsides: jobs, access to political power, commerce, international interface, mobility. An affluent adult can fuck you in a lot of ways, but you can also trade with them in ways that can really help you.
On the other hand, the relationship with children is asymmetric. A poor / minority child isn't going to offer you anything (from a selfish viewpoint), but neither is an affluent one. However an affluent family can absolutely crush you if they misinterpret some engagement with their children. The poor / minority family may be less likely to have the power to make a misunderstanding turn into a significant legal hassle for you. Therefore the calculus for engaging an affluent child look pretty bad, while that of engaging a poor child look more like neutral.
For adults I find it more of a wash, with the upsides typically higher than the downsides for engaging most any sane adult.
We were house-hunting. At one house, we were there just a couple minutes when an older man started knocking at the door. The realtor answered, and they guy started talking about how he was some muckety-muck in the local HOA, and we were parked partly off the driveway in the gravel, and had to move our car.
We said we were just inspecting the house, and would be gone in ten minutes, but he just kept repeating that we were breaking the rules, and needed to move our car over.
The realtor looked at us and said "ok, you're not interested in this place, right?" "Nope".
I’ve witnessed a neighbor scream bloody murder at a pair of teenage boys for using the pool, because the age limit is 16 and these boys were only 13. Quite the offense. The same man will speed around every speed bump in the neighborhood, swerving into the parking spaces narrowly dodging parked cars and, on occasion, pedestrians and pets.
Retired carpetbaggers with nothing to do and no check-and-balance to their behavior. Ever since that fateful day I’ve pondered just how to setup an HOA to counter such behavior.
There is likely a bylaws provision for amending the bylaws. It may take a bit of politicking and organizing, but if everyone indeed dislikes this person, there's a chance someone could succeed in amending them to counter this behavior, and that person could be you.
That's just grumpy old man syndrome. My dad had it. My neighbor has it too - our neighborhood doesn't have an HOA, but he still loves to do all sorts of goofy stuff, including put traffic cones on the street parking infront of his house.
I guess the problem with HOAs is they empower these sorts of people with authority.
I rode my bike all over town as a 8-12 year old in the 80’s and 90’s. My parents would send me to the grocery store and hardware store a mile or two away on my bike for random things they forgot during their main shopping trips.
But it just goes back to the same question: has the world gotten more dangerous or are we just more aware of dangers that were always there?
Devils advocate: The reason statistics is down is that people are taking less risk. If you were to live like before the risk would be the same or higher.
Don't know if it's actually true, but it's worth examining.
I suspect the reduced number of malicious acts by adults has been more than balanced out by the increased rate of children killing themselves as we cripple their development more and more over time.
AFAIK at least the stranger danger phenomenon was always blown up by the media. Sexual abuse of children for example typically happens by people who know the children. It's extremely rare for a stranger to do that.
Safer in which way ? I was playing football on the street as a kid with a lot of kids from my neighborhoud. Now you see rarely kids on the streets because they risk being hit by cars or kidnapped.
> Now you see rarely kids on the streets because they risk being hit by cars or kidnapped.
"Stranger" kidnappings are exceedingly rare. The majority of Amber Alerts occur due to custodial disputes between divorced parents when one parent takes the kid when they are not supposed to[1].
> Children (and parents) are often conditioned to be wary of strangers. However, in reality, only a small fraction of child abduction cases – around 0.1 percent – involve kidnappings by strangers or slight acquaintances.
They’re less rare in certain communities. Something like 20% of abductions in the US are hispanic girls despite that demo being roughly 10% of the US population of children.
There is something to said about the risks of being run over especially given the popularity of SUVs which are so high up, but kidnapping is and has always been an incredibly rare crime for at least the past century. People are freaked out these days because of "Amber alerts" but these are nearly always cases of disputed custody between divorced/separated partners taking the kid against the wishes of the other parent, not strangers.
Conflating two wildly different things seems like it should be a formal fallacy. “I don’t go out without an umbrella because of the risk of it raining or an asteroid wiping out my town.” for example.
Car drivers kill thousands of people walking on the street every year. Kidnappers don’t.
Well, probably not, no. There's about 286 thousand years of anatomically modern humans running around pre-historically (unless you're meaning very literal history), and numerous illiterate societies which left us mundane archaeological records. Your conclusion is invariably cherry picked. Not to mention the goalposts for the concept of criminal have shifted drastically as has the means to enforce law.
Much of that 286 thousand years (or whatever) was spent in band-level hunter-gather societies. These societies have a number of nice features: People tend to be healthy, and in good times they may only work 20 hours per week.
But according to my anthropology professors, these societies tend to have very high death rates. For men, the lifetime risk of being murdered or killed in intergroup fighting runs about 10 to 20%.
So there's a real possibility that the modern era is very safe by historical standards.
Why should crimes of passion be exempted from the general murder rates? A society where it's more acceptable or common to kill someone who upsets you is a more dangerous society.
Because they're decontextualized. I'd posit that in the context of small organizations most of those murders are a product of deliberate and known risk. Given that, one could liken it to mutual combat at the ethical and social levels. That isn't the whole scope of the matter but the aggregate data would, I suspect, reflect a considerably different picture if it was investigated at such a resolution. Of particular interest would be infidelity and how that fits into the context of a given social order.
The idea of stranger danger is largely a myth, as most almost all crimes committed towards children are by those closest to them: parent, relatives and people in positions of trust.
So did I, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1970s, when the murder rate was 1,000/year. Things have gotten less dangerous but people have gotten more fearful.
Even if we stipulate that this article from Quatar state media is accurate, it does not imply that conditions are more dangerous now than in the time frame I was describing. You do understand that, I hope.
As the chance of all-cause premature death goes down, (war, famine, vehicle accident, disease), there is more value in reducing the avoidable risks.
Like sending your kid to the shop. There's also the fact that we don't need to do that anymore. Very often there's a late (or all) night shop open not too far away. So the urgency is just not there.
In the summers of my childhood I would leave the house around 10am with a packed lunch and walk alone everywhere until 8pm or so (before cell phone era). As an adult I’ve driven on some of the sidewalkless rural roads I used to walk and thought “it’s an absolute miracle that I didn’t get hit by a car.” I was a dumb kid with no sense of risk, and it’s sheer luck that I got through it unscathed, tbh.
That's only two options. "Awareness" is important, but so is "assessment". A third option may be that we now regularly over- or under-estimate the risks of things whose actual prevalence hasn't changed much, if at all.
In 2nd grade, around 1990, I was allowed to walk home alone, just mapped it and it's about half a mile. My mother would have been at work and wouldn't get home for 2-3 hours after me. Very simple rules. Don't stop and talk to anyone who isn't a family member or a police officer. Once home, lock the door (I would literally wear a key around my neck) and don't answer it for anyone but the police or a family member. Never use the stove (probably a special requirement for me since I was already cooking at that age).
The next year we moved and my walk home was a bit longer, my grandfather was home which was nice since I didn't come home to an empty house. I'm not sure if it was that year, or a year or two later, but I was allowed to basically bike wherever I wanted in town as long as I didn't go past some pre-defined boundaries. Just doing some math on that now it's roughly 1.5 miles in any direction and I mostly followed that restriction. The only rule was that I had to be home before the streetlights came on.
I didn't have a cell phone. I didn't have any way to call the police if someone tried to abduct me.
By all statistical crime measures children are safer today than they were when I was a kid.
Today you're able to give your child a device which you can use to constantly GPS track them, they can call/text you or the police at any time.
And, yet, somehow we've infantilized children and removed their agency and I don't know why but I really fear for the consequences of it.
My brother and I also played outside until the streetlights turned on, sometimes walking quite a few miles in the general area. Visiting friends from 4th grade, biking three miles to/from school, etc.
Once a red Volvo 240 stopped and tried getting my brother to approach for some candy. I pulled him away and we went inside, because I'd heard rumours about some dude in the area trying to nab kids. I was about eight and he was six.
Because we had learned to not talk to strangers that weren't our parents or relatives or public officials like police, medics and fire crew in uniform or in uniformed vehicles. If someone stops while we're waiting for the school bus and offers to drive us home it's not OK to get in the car unless our parents had asked our teacher to tell us that one specific family member would pick us up.
I used to ride my bike to my friends house, 1 mile away. This probably started in about 3rd grade. The compromise I reached with my mom was that I'd call my friend, we would leave at the same time, and ride to one of our houses together (so 1/2 the time riding alone).
There was one time where a guy in a truck slowed down and was lagging behind us a bit. We turned down a side street and he kept following us. We were on sidewalks, so we just turned around quicker than he did and raced away. In retrospect that was legitimately scary.
In middle school, I could ride wherever I wanted. I'd ride to garage sales, buy used puzzles, then spend hours completing them at home. To think that those opportunities wouldn't be available is sad.
>And, yet, somehow we've infantilized children and removed their agency and I don't know why but I really fear for the consequences of it.
In grad school I worked with a fellow from China. At the age of 3, he would go to the nearby market to buy some groceries for the family, cook food, and hang out at home alone all day. He was shocked at the attitudes in the US.
My friends and I rode our bikes in a several mile radius around my suburban home when I was ~10 in the mid 2000’s. I never see kids doing stuff like that anymore. Makes me really sad that they’re missing out on something that I still cherish the memory of today. But also maybe kids just enjoy different things nowadays
I did the same thing, and we would go miles just to see if other friends were home and increase the size of our bike group before going to Dairy Queen or a local pizza shop and hanging out there.
> But also maybe kids just enjoy different things nowadays
I think this may be true, but also I think parents might find it easier to let their kid play video games in their room where they think they are safe compared to letting them roam around unsupervised. I had friends whose parents thought we were bad kids because we wouldn't know where would go that day, so when they asked "where are you going" and we said "idk, to the creek or pizza or wherever we find interesting" they would think we were up to no good since we didn't have a plan.
Likewise - Similar age, time, and place. My parent were vocally concerned about the danger of cars, as it's a Northeast US town with narrow winding roads, but the only rule was to be back before dark or call them to pick me up.
The funny thing is back then there were no sidewalks or shoulders at all, and kids biked everywhere until old and lucky enough to drive. Now, there are extensive sidewalks on all the main roads, but the only people using them are middle aged dog walkers.
Our instructed range limit was a couple of km's, but the practical limit was a calculated "when the streetlights come on, can I ride home fast enough that mom won't suspect".
Sadly never crossed my mind to figure out what time the lights turned on, and expand my radius further.
As someone who grew up in the 2000s I still don’t get it. I grew up in a time when this was totally fine and normal. I cannot imagine being so restricted as a child.
America changed after Iraq war and 9/11 - the US administration found it useful to keep their population in fear to achieve their goals in foreign soils without criticism. Fresh immigrants to the US are trained by the media and system to fear the police and never confront them (the police can shoot you) and not deviate from American culture and rules (the system can snatch your kids away from you, the system can deny access to your resources using forfeiture laws). Policing and searching in school (now allowed because of the school shooting) psychologically teaches kids (especially those of immigrants) to fear and listen to the police / authority.
Osama may be dead, but the erosion of rights that US has seen because of 9/11 did strike a big blow to US democracy and he partly achieved his goals.
We've had moral panics around Dungeons and Dragons, Satanic cults, the war on drugs, etc going back longer.
I could totally see the trend being accelerated by a lot of things. Sure, 9/11, is one possible trigger, but it could also be news sources getting better at optimizing for sensational takes and - more recently - the common person using the internet/social media to amplify troublesome anecdotes to the point where they seem like pervasive trends.
> […] and - more recently - the common person using the internet/social media to amplify troublesome anecdotes to the point where they seem like pervasive trends
Which, of course, describes this entire thread of discussion kicked off on one person’s anecdote…
The training of fresh immigrants is true. As a Master's student we were trained to be afraid of the cops and that they can shoot you if you make any unwanted movements.
America lives in constant fear of everything and it only seems to be getting worse.
I’m not sure i understand the take here. Are you claiming that the iraq war and 9/11 struck enough fear into parents to prevent them from allowing their children to bike to school?
I would argue that the reaction to 9/11 empowered the state to terrorize parents for just about anything. The risk of a confrontation with police has escalated in the past two decades, such that any report is taken seriously and without any real consequences for making false reports. Couple that with an increase from meddling by busybodies that can report free ranging kids using their now ubiquitous cellphones, and parents quickly realize that it is safer to keep them at home.
No. I am saying it's part of the pattern that points to how American citizen's have given in to anxiety and fear (created by politicians), that they are willing to compromise on their hard won democratic rights. In this case, the pervasive fear for the safety of American kids allows American politicians to manipulate American parents to compromise on their rights for the "safety of our children". (Demand for Apple to scan all iMessages for Child Sexual Abuse Material is an extreme and good example of this).
Netflix recently got rights to Old Enough, about very young kids' trips to the store etc. It's cute and wholesome.
One counter point is cities have started adding 'danger' back into playgrounds (not actually that dangerous, more like risk in the mind of the child). So hopefully we'll see some progress.
Kids are pretty capable and most people are pretty supportive/helpful.
I think you're actually onto something. Parents were (and are) far more lenient when they are not permanently aware of the potential danger their kids are in and are not used to having them reachable 24/7.
Our kid bikes to and from school each way, a little over a mile away. She is always hanging out with other neighborhood kids, going to the pool or park, and nobody has called the cops yet thankfully.
I cherish my childhood memories roaming around with my friends, either on our bikes or public transport all over the place. My favourite trip was as an 11 year old going from Sydney to Gosford (about 40 miles) with my best friend just because we could, and the trains were free that day. I don’t think we were even stopped once by a train guard or the police.
There's an actual law for that? Or was this an empty sort of threat?
I live in NYC and when my son was a 9-year old I would let him play out at the park and on the sidewalk. I had some anxiety about it at times but never thought there would be any legal trouble from letting him be a 9-year old.
> 1. He or she knowingly acts in a manner likely to be injurious to the
physical, mental or moral welfare of a child less than seventeen years
old or directs or authorizes such child to engage in an occupation
involving a substantial risk of danger to his or her life or health; or
Whether something is "likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child" is fairly subjective, since it's a balance of odds.
The worst part is such laws as written would be straightforwardly applicable to the police and prosecutors that see fit to harass parents and children, but yet again they're above the law they purport to uphold.
> "substantial risk of danger"
Such vague and objective measures shouldn't be in law. I started to drive around Montana's unposted "reasonable and prudent" speed limit came back and was later deemed unconstitutional because "reasonable and prudent" was too subjective for an individual to know when or not they are in compliance.
When I was 6 I walked all over Amsterdam, Ferdinand Bol straat in de Pijp all the way to Amsterdam West, Grieseldestraat where my childhood friend lived that had moved. Parents were a bit surprised but no real problem, strangers on the way there were also a bit surprised because we're talking about quite a distance and yet nobody called the police or panicked they just gave me directions and sent me on my way.
I slept there overnight and walked back the next day...
Overnight is quite an adventure. My mom would tell us dinner's at 7:00pm and we would play pretty much anywhere in the neighborhood till that time. In summers, a bunch of lake side boulders some 2-3 miles from our house would become our starship. I remember 3 of kids getting struck in another lake on a boat and eventually figuring out how to safely row back to the shore. Such beautiful days are unfortunately gone.
Oh that triggers another memory: on a family holiday in the South of France lac Biscarosse+, I finally managed to get the hang of a borrowed wind surfing board and promptly sailed across the lake because I was too afraid to let go. Totally cramped and had to walk back dragging the board because I didn't understand how to tack yet. That was a very long day with lots of people worried because I could barely swim (pretty rare for a Dutch kid to be a bad swimmer).
All is well that ends well...
+highly recommended, beautiful area and very nice campings.
At this point I'm decided that if I have children, I will not raise them in the U.S. Maybe a few cities are amenable to how I would like to raise children, like Cambridge, MA. But I would like for them to grow up in a healthy, independent environment.
the worst thing that happened to me was when I was like 10 once I was walking home from school and a homeless guy asked me where he could take a shit, and I ran away
second worse thing I was doing my paper route and almost
mauled by a dog but a nearby neighbor convinced it to go away
ah, another time when I was 17 I was almost abducted but that's what I get for walking down an industrial road at 2am on new years alone, I was saved by the fact I had a cell phone (seeing it caused the predator to retreat)
I am extremely glad I don't have kids and super disappointed that the world has come to this.
if we're really lucky humans will stop reproducing
Oh god, paper routes! I had one when I was 10-11. It was great money for that age - about $200 per month, in the early 90s.
My papers were dropped off really early, and I had to be there for them - alone - around 4am. And my route was about half a mile away from my house.
I got chased by a dog a couple times. One time it bit and punctured my tire.
I flipped my bike with all the papers in it a couple of times.
Some older kids dropped by once - I was afraid they were gonna fuck with me, but instead they just asked me to scream some stuff.
And of course collecting. I got chased off by a couple dogs then too. Come to think of it, maybe I should be more afraid of dogs than people.
Eventually I got a route for the apartments that were across the street from my house. That was a much nicer experience. More money, less distance, less area to cover, and no dogs.
Hah, I was terrified of all dogs on a route where I distributed flyers and got bitten by one dog. However, I stopped doing my route because of a magpie. Someone had tamed it enough that it had lost all fear of humans. It would try to attack my head and fly to mailboxes and try to pull the flyers out. The stupid bird would follow me along the entire route. At some point it got stuck in the huge, curly hair of a girl who lived nextdoor. That's all so ridiculous in hindsight. Feels like a different life
Picturesque small town America. The sort of place with a general store still selling picture postcards of the downtown area. 15th-safest city in the state of around 10 million.
This behavior of police seems to me as a lazy way to do their job. Even a way to not do their job. To make place safe for children they need to keep an eye on kids, not to to round them up.
Sending your kid to a store for babysitting is not good parenting.
Does the store owner have a license for child care? Did she discuss child care with them? Was she expecting her kid to sit at a candy store and do homework for an hour absent an agreement with the owner for child care?
Seems like pawning her kids off on unwilling people who have no responsibility for them.
I guess we need to change the phrase “like a kid in a candy store” to “like a kid in a candy store, with a parent or guardian, and a legal waiver, and a lawyer present”
What we need is an app that mints tokens on the blockchain for anyone who happens to be near your kid. They can claim their tokens by scanning the or code on his/her shirt.
From the guidelines:
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
There's a difference between good faith and inventing things the person hasn't said. They said they knew the store owner. They did not say the store owner agreed to care for their child who was too young to be out on their own, legally. Good faith does not require me to make up facts that haven't been said to make their argument stronger. If they had a child care agreement with a store owner, that would be a whole different kettle of fish. But you and I both know that was never the case - they just sent their child who is too young to be out on their own to be someone else's problem, because that person owns a store, and 'they know them'.
I didn't notice the author until she mentioned founding the "free-range kids" movement. For those who are unfamiliar with her, she was labeled "America's Worst Mom" in 2008 for a column she wrote about letting her son ride the subway alone when he was 9. She has been on a crusade against overprotected children since then [1].
I always found her advice extremely reasonable, but then again, I don't have children.
It appears you can use public transport alone even if you’re just four years old, and six years is merely the minimum age to be a “guardian” for under four year olds.
> Children under four years of age may only use public transportation if they are accompanied by an individual who is at least six years of age.
I've witnessed the opposite problem in Berlin. Parents, and the general public, seem underprotective of youth.
I used to live across the street from a primary school and the kids (no older than 10) would come out and smoke at recess in front of my building. Nobody batted an eye. Just yesterday I was walking behind some kids who couldn't have been older than 12 drinking and smoking, and that was in a nicer Berlin "suburb". Nobody cared.
I do have children, and from that perspective: She is not crazy. What she's describing is what we would call normal life in most of Europe. I'm sure it's also normal in more small town US. The kind of crazy incident she describes sounds like a New York, or other big city kind of thing.
It’s difficult to detect a consistent trend in the US: most of the anecdotes in this thread are about people being accused of endangering their children in small, suburban communities.
As a personal anecdote: I grew up in NYC, and was riding the subway alone by the time I was 8 or 9. I believe there’s also around when my school gave me a free metrocard to travel on my own, and I believe that program is still in place. Most of my NYC friends had similar experiences.
“Old Enough!” is a cute, amusing, and quite surprising show. It follows 3 and 4 year olds as they run their first errand for their parents. The kids are generally clueless about the cameras, and they’re wired with a microphone. They are usually sent on a surprisingly long journey, although along a familiar route, involving several tasks. FWIW, we’re childless & in our fifties, and really enjoyed the season.
The desire to control and to punish those who don't comply is strong. Used to be religious element of society that did this. Now social control doesn't wear the mask of religion anymore.
I was shocked when she revealed who she was. Maybe writing an article will do more than calling the police and making a stand and big stink, but if she, the leader, is easily shoo'd away, what are normal people in this position (and god help us, males) supposed to do? Raise awareness? Share the article? I guess so.
I live in Sweden and it’s forbidden for me (or them) to take pictures of my kid at school, ever. I have all these great pictures of me and my friends in the 80s doing theater plays and christmas singing and whatnot from when I was a kid. My children will get none of that. Actually, they do send me pictures sometimes: of headless bodies, hands or arms in weird angles apparently doing something fun (I can’t really tell). Are people simply too lazy to deal with the responsibility of living in human society?
Our modern societies have decided that the most important thing when dealing with any problem (real or perceived) is assigning blame. If you can't assign blame to the actual perpetrator, then you assign it to whoever "allowed" them to do whatever bad thing they did. And now it became a better-safe-than-sorry game, where absolutely ludicrous decisions - some of which actually hurt the very people we're supposedly trying to protect - are made solely to minimize one's chance of getting blamed and held liable.
What do you think the kings and queens of old did other than assigning blame when a problem came up? Have you not read about the hemming and hawing of royal advisors, trying to avoid stepping into a problem and at best losing their position and at worse being executed?
Enough with characterizing millenia-long human behavior as "our modern societies"!
It may be millennia-long, but as many people in this discussion have remarked, we certainly didn't have this degree of paranoia 40 years ago - and many countries don't have it today.
>I'm not sure that the wives of Henry VIII would really agree with this
And neither would Vicky Weaver.
Henry VIII's wives and Thomas more got murdered for political reasons. We still do that shit today, but in less quantity. We prefer to just ruin people's careers which is basically just a modern equivalent of exile.
What happened to the advisors and commanders of the Spanish Armada who's mistakes lost them a fleet? Pretty much nothing because everyone was like "welp, can't predict the weather".
That is exactly the point: avoid blame in the absolute rare case where something could potentially happen. I won’t rant about Sweden (I could, believe me) but it’s the kind of place where (1) nothing will ever really happen, (2) since nothing ever happens, people will turn even the tiniest thing into a blame war and a nationwide philosophical policy debate. The greatest part is that, when actual pedophiles are caught, they get away with almost nothing.
I do understand where you're coming from, but I was growing up in the 2000s and the (primary & later secondary) school took photos that were shared first on official blogs/sites and then later posted on facebook/twitter without asking for permission.
It's not the photos that are the problem, it's that people don't really understand or respect others' privacy in the internet age.
February before covid, I was at a college in Manchester and was pleasantly surprised when they asked us to complete consent forms on where the photos that were to be taken were going to be uploaded. I was very happy to check the "I don't consent to photos of me shared on social media", consequently they took some photos with me & some without me. No pressure to be part of the group & not be left out.
Is there an actual expectation of privacy when enrolled at a public school? There certainly isn’t when out in truly public places (in the US). And students certainly don’t have any/much right to privacy with their bags and lockers (school employees are allowed to search them, in the US). Between the two, I can’t see there being a compelling legal argument to disallow photos for things that are in full few of tens or hundreds of other people already.
How about "expectation of impermanence"? In the past, people had film, and the farthest any photo got was that person's album. Now every last ass on earth can post their photo in Facebook for all the world to enjoy and it won't ever get taken down. US law needs to catch up.
While I understand the sentiment attached to "expectation of impermanence", as far as I know, that hasn’t been codified federally (or in most/any states) in the US. Administrators don’t get to make rules like this up without a legal basis to do so (well, they can try, but they’ll lose in court). There very may well be some other legal basis for “no photos of kids in public” but I’m not aware of it.
> I can’t see there being a compelling legal argument to disallow photos
> that hasn’t been codified federally
The world is moving faster than law, I'd even go as far as to say that it almost always has been. What gets put into law has to have a common sentiment behind it first.
And not everything that's law means that's how things should be. Even in the US I think some states have the death penalty, others don't. The law does not show some absolute truth.
Your thinking is happening on a plane of law and legal enforcement: "the school can't enforce these rules, they can't stop me from taking photos, it's all legal".
Were it legal to kick a kid and the school had a rule prohibiting it, would you say the same? My thinking isn't about the law at all. It's about what I view as problematic and how I believe things should be; the sentiment that precedes law. I don't have to wait for the law to say that kicking kids shouldn't be happening.
And it's not just the expectation of impermanence. Those photos are forever and for everyone as you say. Reachable by anyone, anytime for whatever reason.
> Is there an actual expectation of privacy when enrolled at a public school?
No. Children in schools don’t have rights, the same way as prisoners don’t have rights. Public and private schools are not different in this respect. As institutions built on dominance and the implied use of force schools could not function in anything resembling a normal fashion if children had rights.
I mean, prisoners also have limited rights to free speech, I guess? Think GP meant "rights" to mean "the full spectrum of civil rights private, adult citizens enjoy"
Recently was biking down a city street and saw a pack of tiny kids supervised by two adults, walking down the sidewalk. All the kids wore identical tiny day-glo safety vests, just like adult safety vests but kindergarten-sized. It was the cutest thing and I wanted a photo for my elderly mother-in-law, who would have absolutely loved it. Was late afternoon and the light was perfect, the day-glo was electric.
Then reality hit: I could get in big trouble and my benign motive would be a useless defense. I biked past, lamenting the loss of a terrific photo.
Sure, publishing is one thing, but not even taking the pictures and/or allowing parents to take them is the problem. It is lazy blame-avoidance backed by some kind of hysteria (if you ask me). Of course they need some consent form if they’re going to post it publicly, but the parent group should not be considered “public” in my opinion.
Thinking of myself as a parent I'd be quite angry if photos of my children ended up on Instagram (private profiles or not) or any company's servers.
So in your place, knowing how brazen everyone is with privacy I'd actually be ok with this measure. It's not like you can't take photos/videos of your children and their friends (with their parents' consent) outside of school & during your time together.
Some 200 years ago photography hadn't even be invented, and only the last ~50 years has it been mainstream. Not every moment has to be recorded, relax, have fun and take a few photos so you can reminisce when older.
I kind of see an argument here: kids can't consent, and once the pic of them doing something stupid gets online, it will never be deleted.
There are notorious "Instagram parents" who post their kids doing embarrasing things and getting pranked. When the kids grow up, what if they don't like those pictures and the attention it gives them?
Even if you're not one of those parents, and have perfectly good intentions, you never know what goes viral. Maybe the picture of your kid gets used as a stock photo by some shady company, it gets millions of views, and now random other kids and adults are harassing them.
That being said, the blanket policy "no pictures, ever" is still ridiculous. They should at least mandate that no pictures should be posted publicly online (which may actually be legally mandated in some places). And even then, the days of viral videos like "charlie bit my finger" are over, the odds of your kid's photo posted in some random facebook group actually becoming viral are exceedingly small.
Not sure if I understood you correctly, but the idea of a policy that protects children from their own parents seems really far-fetched (?). From the other parents, sure; yeah, there is social media and sharing will happen. But when exactly do we go from “a person shared a photo with me in the background in a pose I didn’t like” to “let’s preemptively stop human beings from doing something stupid by prohibiting everything”? Should we really assume that it’s more likely for someone to be shamed by another human being (because of a photo they took) than not? Or, in other words, that the probability of shaming happening is so high it deserves preemptive prohibition? I think we should assume parents are responsible and that the pictures will be a positive memory (then deal with it when it doesn’t happen) than assuming that everyone is a pervert and thus making everyone pay for that.
It would be funny if a social media company had the long term plan to become a legal service for the children of their users. They could sue their parents and the company would get a cut.
Not sure where your kids attend but where we have ours it’s ok for them to take pictures and upload to a private portfolio only available to individual kids parents.
Then there’s a blog where pictures are allowed for kids where the parents pre-approved that they could upload to the blog (available to all parents).
However, yes - parents aren’t allowed to take pictures - of kids other than yours.
He’s in allmänförskola and he’s been in two different schools (Småland) and both were the same. The instagram account is full of headless bodies, arms, and backs.
This annoys me so much. At my 18mo nursery they tell me how she interacts with other children but they can't send picture or video of it, only the random bland picture of her alone doing nothing special or some activity. And after covid is worse, since before we could see them when dropping or picking up, and now have to wait outside... Since I don't know people with children of the same age its hard to see those interactions
But they tell me how she had a boy friend, they would spend all day together, running after one another, call their each other's name, and "talk" a lot
Also a girl friend that sit next to her at lunch, and they spend the entire meal giggling, and trying to feed each other
My dog gets sent to a "doggy day care" occasionally, and they always manage to capture the "nonsense" that the dogs get up to - from speaking to others who live around us they say the same about their dogs there. It's crazy that I have a better window into my dogs social life than you do into your child's.
My guess would be that parents are constantly taking photos and getting in the way of kids playing, or their performance, and it's to encourage parents to just enjoy their kids. This sounds like a pretty good rule to me. I'd have to guess that during their childhood your children will have multiple orders of magnitude more photos taken of them. I'd only worry memories will be lost by an overwhelming amount of media being saved about them.
I think that a general law against posting pictures of kids on the internet could just work. It's not just perverts, kids cannot consent to having their images stored in photographic databases forever and being IDed off facial recognition.
This is Sweden, people are constantly waiting to make a big fuss about anything that’s irrelevant. I would get yelled at and it would be very uncomfortable, at the very least.
I'm a stay-at-home disabled dad to 2 kids (toddler + 2nd grade), and quite literally can't count the number of times over the last 8 years that I've had people at parks threaten to (or actually do) call the police on me, verbally berate me, etc.
I've been verbally assaulted (proper screaming-levels of verbal attacks) for being a pedophile because I'm at a park playing with my own daughter. I've had groups of mums surround me while they call the police, and force me to wait for them to arrive. I've very regularly had people pull their kids away from my kids and not let them play together, while all the other kids with mums there are allowed to play amongst each other. I've been told I'm "assaulting" my wife by "forcing" her to work and miss out on the all-important motherhood experience. Doesn't matter that mum works in ICU/surgical saving lives, and absolutely loves what she does (and works 3 days a week, so gets plenty of mothering time). I've been followed for blocks and blocks by people videoing me on their phone saying they're reporting me for kidnapping. I've been told to leave the park more times than I could ever count, because "it's a place for mums and their kids". I've been rejected from library story time and family centres because I'm not the mum. I've had the police turn up to my door because neighbours saw me tending to a crying kid in the yard (fallen off the bike) and the police were told I had kidnapped them and was assaulting them... I could go on for many more paragraphs.
In all these situations I calmly explain that I'm the father, and just try move away from the people or leave the park to save my kids having to experience this stuff.
People are fucking crazy.
Edit: To clarify, I'm in Australia. I have also run into various other stay-at-home dads who have similar stories. It does seem to be more in the inner city suburbs, as we move a lot and I haven't had it nearly as much in more rural areas (though it does still happen).
I live in Sweden and this experience is alien to me. I often see other fathers playing with their kids at the playgrounds. When I'm with my kids I've only ever been met by smiles and comments about how adorable kids are.
A large reason for this is that it's very common for fathers to be on parental leave. For each child born, if you are two parents, you get 480 days of paid parental leave to distribute among yourselves. You get half each, can transfer days between one another, but 90 each of these cannot be transferred.
And yet! Even in Sweden, when the daycare, healthcare, or some other institution calls the phone number they have registered for the parent, they fully expect to reach the mother. Sometimes when greeted with a male voice claiming to be a parent, they even put up a fight, claiming they must have dialed it wrong and that they definitely have a mother on file.
My wife is a manager and sits in meetings all day long. I'm still half individual contributor and I'm the one who can easily take calls most of the day. I don't have to explain this very often, but it still feels like once too many.
I haven't had this experience at all. We have my number registered everywhere because my wife works at a lab and often can't pick up. I've never had anyone calling about the kids seem surprised or ask to talk to the mother.
Edit: actually, those places usually ask for a list of name and number of the parents/guardians. Maybe the number you pick up on was registered as being that of the mother?
Here in Finland I've been treated largely well by other people, when taking our son out to play. Though I think the times when things have gone badly I suspect language barrier was to blame as much as gender.
That said I remember when I took the child to an annual health-checkup, and the first question I received from the doctor was "Where's his mother?"
This has never happened to me. My wife hates talking on the phone so we always register my number. Always been treated 100% well. (Also dad from sweden if that isn't clear).
Yeah I really don't like it, but it's not surprising considering (at least here in Czechia) who are the teachers, it's like 90-95% women, I think I've never seen man working in kindergarten, you can found few in primary school and then it improves from high school and higher, but that's way too late for male role models.
We just had recently sleepover in school which was called "We will sleep in school, we will help mommy" which quite enraged me since I'm doing most of the things around house and can't even think about ocassional case of single parent fathers, why they just can't name it "we will help parents". It's same thing with poems/books (mostly momy tells story, mommy this, mommy that, so when you are reading to them you must replace word by yourself to balance this nonsense), same thing now they done for mother's day pictures, gift (painted mirror) and other crap, do you think they will be doing something for my father's day? Good luck with that.
At least when they contact me they have option between me speaking local language or my wife where they have in brackets (English only), which makes everyone think twice whether they will call father or mother. :-)
Had some American friends visiting me in Sweden. After a few days of being out in the city one of them paused and looked worried at me, asking if the economy here was tanking - because they saw so many 'unemployed' men with kids in the city during daytime.
Yes, it's very much the opposite experience as a Swedish dad. If you go to a playground often the great majority of parents are fathers for the kids between 12 and 18 months. That's usually when fathers take time off. At one point I was at a playground with 8 other dads and an old woman came up to us gushing about how things had changed from when she was young and it was so nice to see.
Point is, it just has to be normalized, but without significant paternity leave, it probably won't.
The fascinating thing is that when we were deciding how to plan our parental leave we hadn't talked to any other parents or asked advice from anyone. We just decided that, based on what we wanted from it and practical concerns about breast-feeding and recuperation it made the most sense for her to be home for a year and then me for half a year.
Turns out most Swedish couples I've talked to since reach the exact same conclusion.
I'm having trouble figuring out what you mean by 480 days. Per year? Per child? Per couple, for the duration of their marriage? What if one parent doesn't work? I guess it doesn't work how I first assumed (per year), because if you transfer all but 90 days, then one parent has 370 days off in a year, which is both far beyond the number of work days in a year and slightly more than the number of days in a year.
Per child to be used before they turn 12, though only 96 days can be saved past their 4th birthday.
Edit: what we have done for both kids is that when a child was born we first took two months off together, then my wife stayed at home for a year, after which I stayed at home for half a year. At 1.5y they started daycare.
The remaining days we use as emergency vacation days because the generous Swedish laws make them impossible to deny if requested a few months in advance.
I am not trying to be annoying here but I always love to explore edge cases. If you had a kid every year for 10 years does that mean one of the parents could essentially be paid to stay home for 10 years in a row?
Where I live, another Northern European country, we also have this, and the answer is yes. Parents can take up to 2 years off work, so only 5 kids needed.
The company doesn't pay anything, but your salary is paid for by the government. However the amount they pay is limited to €2000/mo, and it decreases based upon how long you take off. If you take the full 2 years, you will only be paid €800/mo.
Additionally if you have two kids you get an extra day of PTO each month, and if you have three, it's two days.
Ah, of course. I was assuming the company would pay whatever your last salary was before the paid time off. It’s much easier for me to comprehend when the government is paying a fixed amount.
Pretty sure it's not fixed. It should be dependant on your last salaries with a ceiling (which is probably the mentioned 2k, but I have no clue). Not sure if there was a floor as well, was never relevant to the people telling me about it I guess.
that's how it works in Czechia, except you can stay at home 3-4 years (!), so once one child is old enough to be accepted in kindergarten (age 3), you are usually having the other one, so essentially mothers usually stay at home 5-6 years with two kids
mind the parental leave welfare (literal translation Maternal vacation / materska dovolena) ain't that amazing, although it's also not that low - first 27 weeks it's paid by your employer (if you had one prior giving a birth), that one is pretty high based on your salary (I think only mother can take it, not sure) and then you are eligible to receive parental allowance (rodicovsky prispevek) - 300K CZK (12K EUR) which can be used as fast/slow as you want up to 4yo kid AFAIR, so it will essentially cover 2 years of decent income or 3 years lower welfare
since my wife wasn't employed in EU prior giving birth, we were not eligible for Maternal vacation welfare, only for parental allowance, which we applied since birth for both kids and I was actually the applicant since they don't distinguish between gender of recipients of alowance
after these years then if you don't have high enough income you are also eligible for child allowance (pridavek na dite), but that one is not worth mentioning, it makes like 20-40EUR per kid per month, so makes really difference only for poorest families, since you have to go to bureau 4 times a year to prove your low income to get this joke
edit: updated terminology to better distinguish between welfare kinds
If you had 10 kids a year after year, then you would need stay at home parent and that parent would need significant help. There is literally no way to deal with 10 kids and a job.
But also, the woman's body would likely break with that schedule of being pregnant.
> But also, the woman's body would likely break with that schedule of being pregnant.
Bach’s wife had 20 children. Only 10 of them survived. I literally can’t even imagine having one.
My wife went through several and would have cheerfully had many more but her autoimmune system turned against her. She’s a self-admitted bad mother, but absolutely loved being pregnant.
Which one? Cause he had 13 children with Anna Magdalena Wilcke. If he had 20 more children with another one, it would amount to 33 kids by Bach.
Loving being pregnant or not does not make pregnancy year after year for 10 consecutive years less difficult on body. That schedule means you are constantly pregnant, often pregnant while breastfeeding and sleep deprived from baby. While having two toddlers. It takes toll on the body.
A pregnancy induced condition in which not enough white blood cells are manufactured. By the time our last one was born, she was producing none. She needed a transfusion while the birth was happening. She also has ongoing autoimmune conditions separate from that, and the medicine for them costs $50,000 a year.
My most successful investments were a couple of businesses I started (one with a 129x investment on $100k), Precious metals when they were far far cheaper than they are now (Silver was five dollars an ounce when I bought) and also domain names.
I lost money investing in a local gym, and a whole lot of money trying to compete with craigslist. Never put in more than I could afford to lose. Translation: I never lost so much that my wife complained.
I am theoretically at retirement age so I converted a bunch of cash into real estate without mortgages, I hold a fair amount of cash in case an opportunity arises, and I still invest aggressively in slightly risky tech index funds.
With the looming demographics crisis, it could actually be a great deal for society if parents did this! The problem is that despite all these child friendly policies we are still below replacement rate.
Yes but they will tank their future pension payments, and current pay raises. So there is a cost for those that do. If you're unemployed it doesn't matter much though.
As an Aussie living in Sweden with a toddler I don't think I'll ever move back to Aus if people are going to harass me for the crime of playing with my son.
This might be one of the most appalling and depressing things I've read in a long time. How did we get here as a society? The frequent moral panics, like stranger danger and the satanic panic, whipped up by the media?
With OP being disabled, there might be an element that "movies say the ugly and disabled are the villain, and this guy looks like a movie villain". Gross and disgusting, but it is what it is.
Well, after the Cold War was over, some people needed a new boogeyman. So they chose literally everyone who doesn't think or look exactly like them, and then tried to get their kids to do the same. And now, here we are.
It sounds like there’s a torrent of gossip in your neighborhood about you, and I’m really sorry you have to suffer the consequences. Have any of the parents at the park ever just…chatted with you while the kids play? Its very strange that everyone seems to recognize you and have the same, unhinged opinion of you.
This has happened living in multiple places (in AU), we move lots. Yes I've had some nice people too, usually more curious chats about a stay-at-home dad being odd. I've run into other SAHD's and they've all shared similar stories.
Where are you? I know a few stay at home dads in LA and they didn't have this level of difficulty. Sounds like you might be in a more closed minded region of the world.
Sorry should've said that, I'll edit the comment, but I'm in Australia and these stories happened while living in both Sydney and Melbourne (have sinced moved to a more rural city and doesn't happen "as" much, but still happens).
I was about to question your anecdote, but when I heard you lived in Australia it made a bit more sense. To use the parents comments phrase, “closed mindedness” does seem to fit.
As an Australian stay at home dad who knows many others, I've never heard of or had anything close to these experiences hapoen. And I'm not aware of Australia having a paticularly closed minded reputation?
I've seen a lot of what you've noticed, I don't have my own kids (yet) but I look after my nephew a lot when he's up in Brisbane from the Gold Coast over an entire weekend every month or so.
I can't say I've had your entire experience, but I've seen it at least three times. And considering the amount of time with my nephew (1 weekend in 4-5 at best), that gives you an indication how rife this issue is here.
That’s simply awful, I’m really sorry to hear that!
I spent a year as a stay at home dad (with our son who was 1 yr old at the time). The first few months were spent in Palo Alto, CA, and the rest in London, UK. We would go out to parks all over the place, and I never had any problems like this. Other parents always seemed happy to chat. I did expect problems since my son looks very different to me (fair skinned and blonde, whilst I’m a typical Pakistani Asian guy, brown skin, black hair - this kid inherited a lot of his looks from my wife). Often I’d get questioned by immigration officials when flying alone with him, and I’d have to take a letter from my wife attesting to our trip being known about and approved by her. But that was the only time it was an issue. I don’t think I would have lasted long if I encountered what you have, and I can’t imagine how you’ve dealt with it for as long as you have. If there’s anything I can do to support, please let me know.
Thanks for the kind words. We’ve moved to a more rural city where it doesn’t happen nearly as much anymore (eg less people at the parks in general), and we have a larger property now so the kids play in the yard mostly.
Is this an Australia thing? I live in the US and regularly took our toddlers to the park since I was working from home. Never had a single experience like what you describe. I actually became part of the social circle at the park even though I was the only dad there.
Australia has an extreme nanny state mentality for a lot of things. The image many have of chill surfer bros who don't play by the rules is no longer accurate (if it ever was) the average Australian is extremely uptight about adhering to rules in general.
There are some advantages to this as a level of competence does filter down to the street level (as a small example having lived in multiple AU cities as well as US cities, far far more people litter in US cities than Australian ones) but it does have negative impacts.
A recent example is the appalling treatment of overseas Australians by their government during Covid where the border was closed and many Australians were effectively barred from returning to their country for over 2 years.
As a Brit living in australia for 10 years, I think relating to Covid people generally just see the greater good and accept. There are vocal groups against lockdowns and a decent chunk of people break rules.
I remember the 2 hour queue for my second jab. Chaos in some ways but people acted superbly well, and the marshall was in awe and excited for me that I was getting shot 2 so soon (compared to other people in australia).
From comments by other dads I know, and online (some here when I’ve brought it up, and elsewhere) it does seem to be an Australia-plus-a-few-US-states thing. Mostly in places where people are comfortably middle class and/or live in major cities.
For what it is worth, I have never experienced anything similar here in the UK.
If anything, it seems that people like to see the dad doing kid stuff (especially baby/newborn stuff) - I've lost count of the number of times I've been out and about with my son and now also newborn daughter in a baby carrier/wrap and have received either direct positive comments, or indirect admiring looks/cooing/etc. (just yesterday I was at the Zoo with my excited toddler and my daughter in a wrap and there was an audible "gasp-of-cuteness" (for want of a better phrase) from some women standing nearby when I turned around and revealed the baby in the carrier - there was zero negative vibes).
It is very common to see dads in the playground - especially at weekends but also during the week days too. Mums seem very comfortable to stop and chat when we're at the sandpit or just waiting in line at Starbucks or whatever.
I'm sorry what the actual fuck?? I would've thought this sounded insane if it happened 50 years ago, but today?!? Looking at sibling comments it seems this luckily isn't too common, but still very fucked up. It sucks that this isn't being talked about more.
I am sorry you go through this. I wonder where you are as in suburban Sydney I have never had this issue for 9 years of parenthood. And I have taken the kids all kinds if places even in the centre of Sydney. Had more issues walking dogs than taking kids out.
I believe your experience. I just want to contribute the anecdata that I am a stay-at-home dad to my 2.5 year old, and I have spent most days for the past year and a half talking him out on walks, to parks, downtown, etc. in the Bay Area suburbs, more or less following him around and letting him do whatever he pleases. The only experience I have had where someone bothered me in public was some woman in a car who really wanted me to put a hat on him.
I would be interested to hear from other people to understand why this happens in some places and to some people, but not others. I always wonder if I am going to start getting harassed in public, since it's a common complaint, but so far -- nothing.
Wow. Sorry to hear that you've had to experience that.
For what it's worth: also Australian with a relatively fresh human (toddler). My partner and I try to share care relatively evenly so I get a bit of playground/park time in and I'm yet to experience anything like this. I truly hope that continues as that sounds terrifying.
There's a whole set of other societal aspects, particularly support services in the lead up to and after birth, that are completely asymmetric or non-existent for fathers though.
I suspect GP is exagerating. I've been an Aussie stay at home dad for years and know many others, and I've never seen or heard anything remotely close to this.
There are for sure social gaps and service gaps, but assaults in the street like the GP is describing seem... far fetched.
Curious where in Melbourne as I have never encountered this with two under 5.
I work part time and now, since covid, from home and always regularly take my kids to various parks around the inner north. Usually a sprinkle of other dads, grandparents and lots of mums. No one has ever even suggested I am suspicious.
I did get a lot of "a dad at the playground. Wow, so progressive" when the first kid was small, which was pretty amusing/ disappointing for 2010s.
Mostly St Kilda area, and around Prahran. It was way way worse in Sydney (inner suburbs) but still happened enough in Melbourne that it was a known thing among parents I knew there. Could be some stereotyping based on looks (I’m a big guy with tattoos), who knows. Whatever the reason, it’s common enough I’ve seen articles written about it and met plenty who confirm it’s not just me.
You should probably start reporting these people to the police. I don't know how things work in Australia, but you should file complaints specifically against these individuals. Publicly calling you a pedophile is slander isn't it? I don't see how it's not illegal.
That's a horrible story and I wish you the best. Makes me appreciate my own situation even more (partner and I divide care 50/50, and I enjoy taking my 6 month old for a stroll so much!).
It surprised me that it was a woman. Usually people are more lenient to them than man.
I was discussing that, some time ago, with a female friend (I am a male) who also loves doing street photography. We talked about how difficult it is for a man to do street photography, specially around places with a lot of kids, as you will always receive strange looks or even threats. If you're a woman taking photos? Probably a mother or mother-to-be, if you're a man? Pedophile.
I wonder if there are that many people exposing themselves to kids as the security lady said in the article. Seems like an excuse to justify the action, or something that happened once and they are overreacting to it...
Big surprise. I'm a man, living in the UK, and I would never stop to watch kids playing in a school like this if I was on my own. But I am pretty surprised they would treat a woman in this way. Is that bad of me? Is it bad that I'm slightly glad that they would treat women equally, in this way? I dunno, the whole thing seems ridiculous though.
I didn't notice that author was a woman until I read this comment.
As a foster and adoptive parent, I have definitely gotten some comments when I play with those of my kids that look very different from me; I could feel the tension evaporate when one of them calls me "dad" and everyone realizes the relationship. Never had the police called on me either.
I did have a 12 year old daughter get stopped by a concerned adult while bicycling through a nearby neighborhood ("where are you going" "where are your parents" &c.). That turned her off from bicycling ever since.
Fight fire with fire. Track that person down, write a complaint. You may well be watching her using some tech gadget, none of their business, they are clearly harassing your child. Why are you stopping my child and talking to her, are you a perv or procuring children for such, etc.
A few years ago...maybe "several" now...I was having a rough day at work and decided to take an hour or two off and go for a walk. I ended up near our city's zoo, and I remembered that my company got discounted admission, so I decided to visit. So I got there, and basically every visitor (mid-day on a sunny weekday) was a mother pushing a pram. I had a wife and a kid and a house and a job, so it's not like I wasn't in the demographic range of people that would visit there, but just being the only "unaccompanied male" was enough to make me turn around and walk the other way.
I suspect there is an element of survivorship bias. If a man is treated like she was, it would not be news.
Most (normal) men also know that they may be seen as a threat, and would move along quickly if asked to. (If they call security over a woman, they may call the police over a man.)
I guess it similar for people of color. They know that they may be seen as a threat and thus they normally act accordingly. Otherwise people may call the police.
I agree, especially if the color is "black". Similarly, I suppose you will find that people with traits of low social class or people that are physically large/muscular, especially if they're not good-looking will experience this.
So, a black guy on 190+cm, large and muscular with a hoodie + some gang-related tatoos and a lower-class behaviour may experience it more than a petite female white upper middle class lawyer in an expensive dress suit.
Times have changed. I have a male friend working as a teacher in elementary school. Things that used to be normal 20 years ago are a great taboo now. Younger kids long for human touch, but this is absolutely unthinkable and the teacher needs to get away to avoid any kind of touch. They prefer not to stay in the classroom with individual kids (and ask a female teacher to accompany them if necessary).
On the other hand, maybe it's better to be safe than sorry.
It is the case for any one-on-one interaction, including business meetings, boss/subordinate meetings, etc. It's considered unwise, at best, if not forbidden.
Absolutely unwise. Ask anyone who has been the victim of malicious prosecution after someone made false accusations against them. If it is one person’s word against the other, discrimination wins the day. Every time.
It's not really allowed, it's about the situation when the class ends, all the kids already left but one of them wants to talk. This is still possible when the others are packing up their things, but once everyone else has left, he feels uncomfortable even though the door is wide open and asks the kid to step outside. Younger kids simply don't understand why and of course you can't tell them except "these are school rules."
When I read the headline, there was no doubt in my mind that it was a man. I'm quite surprised, too. I guess the over-protectiveness has just continued advancing. Not a huge surprise.
It seems wierd to me where society has gone. In my dad's high school, they literally brought rifles to school. There was a gun range at the school. Yes, it had to be bagged up and unloaded but you literally brought a 22 with rounds to school.
My era? Zero tolerance for mean words. I got suspended 1 day because I told people I got a highlighter. They thought I said lighter and tattled on me. Teachers never found the lighter but I was suspended no less. I got suspended once because a friend of mine was planning to come to my house after school. Asked me to carry his bag. Unbeknowst to me he was running off to try to get into a fight off school premises. Never actually got into a fight. But I was suspended for zero tolerance helping/assisting a fight.
Now we are in the era where schools have metal detectors, police on staff and actively walking around in the schools, and harassing people over literally nothing.
Isn't it similar to the "Nobody was ever fired for buying IBM". If there is any kind of concern over safety, any incident affecting any school, some well-meaning supplier/council/school admin suggests adding security whether fences, ID badges, maglocks, security guards etc. Why not? Anything is better than nothing?
The problem is that no-one would get away with saying, "maybe we don't need the fence anymore, it separates children from the community". "Maybe we don't need to repair the metal detector when it breaks" etc. Sad really. The idea that somehow ID cards are a proportionate measure for some kind of security at a high school is very worrying.
tattling used to be followed up by a fistfight in the school yard. Snitches get stitches. It was one way that children used to learn good boundaries. I wonder whether kids are better off today, in our anti-bullying world where even a harsh word can be punished with detention or suspension, whereas snitching is encouraged. What kind of adults are we producing? So far, the results don't look too good.
>tattling used to be followed up by a fistfight in the school yard. Snitches get stitches. It was one way that children used to learn good boundaries. I wonder whether kids are better off today, in our anti-bullying world where even a harsh word can be punished with detention or suspension, whereas snitching is encouraged. What kind of adults are we producing? So far, the results don't look too good.
So the context of that kid, he learnt that stuff at home. His parents were famous for calling the police and city on their neighbours. The peak of it was July 1st, people were firing off fireworks. They called the police to say someone was shooting/bombing their house. The police obviously show up in force big time. They closed blocks of the neighbourhood only to later find out they had a history of false police reports. False firefighter stuff saying open pit fires of their neighbours were illegal. etc.
After the tattle involving me. Me and my friend were taken aside and were very explicitly explained to what we should do. This is our fathers and teachers in the same room. They knew we would want to fight but they said no, you simply never talk or be near that kid again. Complete social ostracizing, never touch the kid. Except after we started doing that... we'd be playing foot hockey and if he'd ask to join, we'd immediately stop playing and say we were done and walk away from him. A few times he ran to steal our tennis ball and demand to be included. The whole class got in on it. Literally nobody would talk to him or talk near him.
My brother in a younger grade did the same knowing he might tattle on them. Older grades did the same. After a couple weeks of literally no one talking to him, he would spend recess standing next to the teacher. Then he disappeared for a couple weeks. He ended up in the hospital with what I would expect to be psychiatric issues. Can you imagine being socially isolated in elementary school?
When he got back? We were all evil and should be punished blah blah. His new job was to ensure the teachers knew about every infraction anyone did. He doubled down on it, didn't work out when he went after a 2 grades older bully and got quite injured. Nothing major, serious bruising. The teachers were even hesitant to help him. Then one day he comes up to me like first thing in the morning saying his parents want me and my friend to come to his house. I was like hell to the no.
Then few days later I didnt even do anything wrong and teacher demanded us and our parents be at the school for a meeting. We were expecting suspension but ended up they wanted to make peace. His parents were very concerned but were so angry when I explained what happened. I refused to agree to any peace, that I had done nothing wrong. Which got most of the room chuckling... but after that day he sure stopped his tattling.
I can't tell who's worse in this story. Shame all around.
More on topic, you'd expect false reports of threats to children to be evenly distributed across the population. If so, that's a mass media issue. If the reports come repeatedly from just a few people, it's those people whose behavior needs correction.
Interesting article. I feel this is more a problem in the US. I live in Switzerland and you often see kids walking alone or in pairs going to and from school all by themselves - and yet no kids seem to be kidnapped or exposed to inappropriate behavior.
As mentioned in the article, people don't care about facts. Kidnapping is at an all time low in the US. The only instances are family members during a nasty divorce or things like that.
"Think of the children" is the main weapon politics have to push regulations and more control. It is important that everybody thinks that kids are in danger at all time otherwise it would stop working.
> As mentioned in the article, people don't care about facts. Kidnapping is at an all time low in the US. The only instances are family members during a nasty divorce or things like that.
I agree that kidnapping is probably at an all-time low, but it's an unbelievable claim that it's all "family members during a nasty divorce or things like that." I personally know a family who's kid was kidnapped (briefly) by a non-family member.
> "Think of the children" is the main weapon politics have to push regulations and more control. It is important that everybody thinks that kids are in danger at all time otherwise it would stop working.
That's not what's going on here. It's a cultural issue. You've got a longstanding issue with crime, especially particularly "worst fear"-type crime, getting disproportionate attention in the media, creating false impressions and seeds for fear-fantasies. Now, added to that is new cultural obsession with abuse and victim-hood; and the idea of completely stamping that out is possible, and it should be achieved whatever the cost.
You might have a politicians exploiting this cultural issue to accomplish other things, but they certainly didn't create the phenomenon of hyper-vigalent school paraprofessionals.
> I personally know a family who's kid was kidnapped (briefly) by a non-family member.
Sorry to read that, but it's still a statistically small percent that happens to. One can say "but even one is too much", and I appreciate the sentiment, but optimizing for the .1% isn't always a good path.
> they certainly didn't create the phenomenon of hyper-vigalent school paraprofessionals.
"they" probably contributed to the culture that produced the current school paraprofessionals.
EDIT: Some interesting numbers at https://www.missingkids.org/theissues/nonfamily - of abductions reported to them, 1% are by non-family members, meaning... 99% of reported cases (to their org) are by family members. That may not line up with 'law enforcement' numbers exactly - there's not a clear indication as to what gets reported to them. But the ~1% matches up with other numbers I've seen in the past on missing children. It's almost always a family member or someone known to the child.
>>> "Think of the children" is the main weapon politics have to push regulations and more control.
>> they certainly didn't create the phenomenon of hyper-vigalent school paraprofessionals.
> "they" probably contributed to the culture that produced the current school paraprofessionals.
The point I'm making is that it's not politicians who are driving this. They certainly participate, but they're responding to the incentives and concerns of their constituents. "Think of the children" implies they consciously created this and/or are the main drivers, which is false.
The media has an incentive to produce emotion inducing content and politician will naturally leverage those emotions because American politics are pure pathos.
If you cannot see how that leads to gloom and doom oriented media and politicians that lean on eschatological themes, you aren’t woke.
>> "Think of the children" implies they consciously created this and/or are the main drivers, which is false.
> The media has an incentive to produce emotion inducing content and politician will naturally leverage those emotions because American politics are pure pathos.
Yeah, that's true, but it doesn't contradict my point. This is a hard problem, because there isn't some malevolent agent acting consciously at the center of it. It's a bunch of different people acting naturally and responding to their environment and incentives.
This sibling comment probably has it part right (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31355482). The true cause of this overprotective hypervigilance is probably weakened communities, which itself is most likely an unintended side effect of a bunch of different things.
Maybe the problem is that communities are weak. Imagine saying "We don't need stronger restrictions. I am OK if my kid is kidnapped as a result because the community will be stronger for it overall due to free range kids etc." You really need to care about your community to do that.
> Maybe the problem is that communities are weak. Imagine saying "We don't need stronger restrictions. I am OK if my kid is kidnapped as a result because the community will be stronger for it overall due to free range kids etc." You really need to care about your community to do that.
I think that's partly correct. I think the problem is due to weakened communities, but I don't think anyone, ever will think "I am OK if my kid is kidnapped b/c free range kids are good." If the community was stronger, people with more likely think things like "I am OK with my kind being free range b/c I trust the community not to kidnap and abuse them."
Right, because every case like that is going to be written about in an article that gets shared a ton because it is so shocking, and then covered on the news, and discussed on forums, and turned into a TV movie.
The story is crazy and scary and disturbed, so of COURSE it is going to be shared and people are going to remember it. The details get seared into your memory. It is a nightmare scenario.
The same day that happened, in the US ~90 people were killed in car accidents and ~550 kids were kidnapped by a family member. Those events won't be seared in our mind, though.
That's how it was in the US until fairly recently. It changed in the last decade or two. I'm not sure why. Crime hasn't gotten any worse, as far as I know.
The problem we have in the US is we tend to placate to the vocal minority, rather than realizing that they are in fact just a vocal minority.
Say you have 10 parents that let their kids play outside. No one has a problem with this until an 11th parent shows up and it mortified, think the kids will all get hurt if they are allowed to be outside like this.
That parent makes a stink, take it to the city council, and a rule is put in place that you can't let your kids go outside without supervision. The folks making the rules think to themselves "well we had to act, there was such an outcry". Meanwhile the outcry is really just the outsized screams of one parent, and you've just screwed the other 10 parents.
> The problem we have in the US is we tend to placate to the vocal minority, rather than realizing that they are in fact just a vocal minority.
I think it's related to trauma fetishization combined with child worship.
Trauma fetishization: The person who is most traumatized by a thing should be the one who dictates policy about that thing. People who have lost children qualify, and we literally name the laws after their dead children.
Child worship: Children are without trauma, and therefore without neurosis. When you traumatize them or through inaction allow them to be traumatized, you have created neurosis, which is the source of all problems in society.
There was a post about an abortion rights rally, with the poster saying "Keep our women safe". Someone came in and said, essentially, "I appreciate the message and the support, but can we drop the possessive 'our'"? It was called out that the "our" was itself supportive and indicative of community. The person replied "I came from a small town where men used 'our women' as a signal of ownership and I shudder when I hear it".
My internal response: Okay? You're asking everyone to change a good-faith saying because it triggered a bad memory for you? Get over it.
It’s so true - even for little, unimportant things. A group of friends and myself made a parody video that went a bit viral about 11 years ago (only like 400K views but this was a different time) got on some shows (state-wide) - breakfast, current affairs etc.
It was a comedy music video about council workers (I wish it was still on YouTube, unfortunately I didn’t log into the account for a few years, and the channel seems to have been automatically terminated and I couldn’t find any way to restore it). The current affairs show had obviously tried to create some controversy that workers might be offended, and they interviewed a bunch, literally asking multiple questions to try and get them to say something negative, but they all loved it and thought it was funny. They even got an interview with the mayor and he liked it.
But they were still pushing the line. The piece ended with “but at least this time, no one was offended”. It was hilarious just the extent they were trying to manufacture controversy and drama from literally nothing, and how much they failed but still tried to push it! It was so bizarre, absolutely nothing about our song was mean spirited!
I think it's more subtle than that. If you are the city council member, doing something about it is a lot easier than not. Saying "I don't think we should make our children safer" is politically difficult. So the rules slowly ratchet up.
It started in the 80s, related to the Satanic Panic, particularly the McMartin preschool trials.
Before that, it was expected that even very young children could be outside alone even in urban settings.
This too was a media driven hysteria. You can see how the news amplifying a few rare kidnapping and molestation cases, if it bleeds it leads style, is directly correlated to the public intrigue. A lot of movies and tv shows took on these themes as well. Much like the red scare and more recent mass hysterias driven by an unscrupulous news industry political complex.
The kids who were raised in that era grew up, had kids, and passed the generational trauma down the line. We'll grow past it eventually, but it takes time for people to heal and the trauma to filter out of the population.
Don't take this for granted. I suspect this behavior is actually caused by an inherent anxiety in some subset of the population. When they don't have real (and likely) dangers to worry about, they will find some kind of tiny risk and overamplify it as something to focus their anxiety on.
Removing all things dangerous from the environment will only serve to amplify their tendency to do so. A mum in a high risk high crime neighbourhood is probably more likely to let her kids roam free (and less worried) than mums in upper-middle-class neighbourhoods where there is virtually zero crime.
My hypothesis is that the solution is to let children experience activities that are moderately dangerous (ideally through risk of pain, minor injury or some social stress, with risk of death or permanent injury kept minimal). This helps (I think) callibrate their ability to estimate risk as they grow up.
This would allow them to ignore imaginary risks like the one discussed here, and may help them identify situations that come with real danger.
The people who were the driving force behind all the "Satanic Panic" stuff are still around, too. And some of them still pose as experts on "recovered memories" and other stuff like that.
Because people got super freaked over the risk of pedophiles, though they should worry more about their family members perpetuating sexual abuse than a random stranger.
To some degree perhaps aggravated by people having less kids, therefore the kids they do have are extremely valuable to them, driving demands that the world be nerfed up.
I'm not sure it works that way. It's not like you care less about your first child after having a second. They're all the most loved thing you have in life.
It's all anecdote, but I believe I've witnessed it many times - families with four kids don't love them any less, but they are less attentive to any one, less photos are taken, by kids 3 & 4 things aren't really "new" and scary like they are with kid 1. Couples with a single kid, particularly after trying for a while, have come across as highly protective and hyper-focused. I'm just speculating here - I recognize I don't know nuffin about it, ultimately.
You're right, in that it's not that you care any less about your later kids, but you tend to be more pragmatic about child rearing. Better at recognizing the important events and problems, while shrugging off and ignoring the trivial stuff. You learn that you don't need to worry about a kid eating a crayon, and you recognize that certain pain cries mean "I'm not really hurt." You realize that sometimes the best thing you can do for a kid is ignore them and let them figure stuff out themselves.
Conversely - it'd be interesting to investigate whether other statistics have improved over the past decade with parents being increasingly responsible for their kids after school - reduced shoplifting, reduced graffiti, reduced smoking/drug use, reduced teen pregnancy, etc.
Its quite possible that increased organized sports and after school activities (particularly robotics, math, computer science) could actually improve the capabilities of society as compared to just leaving the kids unattended after school.
I'd suspect quite the opposite; kids who have their time filled with organised activities and have no time to come up with their own may be less likely to develop important skills like creativity, self-reliance, and be more reliant on structure and authority.
Watch the local news or get on your nextdoor group and it is all packed full of crime stories. A lot of people are addicted to feeling scared all the time, and the media is feeding them.
As a parent in the US, here is how it feels. If I let my young kids roam and something happens to them, there is a high likelihood that some goody-goody-holier-than-thou prosecutor will decide to make an example out of my "neglect".
Same for me. I live in Berlin (biggest city in Germany) & have 2 kids of my own and haven't seen anything remotely as paranoid here as what you read about US cities.
I'm not saying there aren't bad things in the US, but the things in the news are not normal everywhere in the US. But for big cities? I think I'll take my chances in Berlin.
I can't find the exact article I was thinking of that was posted here a year or two back about young Japanese children being set free out into the world, almost as a right of passage, to run errands etc., but this Bloomberg captures a lot of what I remembered.
Personally, I believe there is a compounding net good for society allowing children a decent amount of independence at a young age. Japan is certainly different to many other countries in terms of public safety, but I don't believe the outside world is the awful, scary, dangerous place the media constantly paints it out to be. It breaks my heart that I rarely see children playing outside in the streets anymore in the UK, when my youth in the 80s was basically spent largely outside without adult supervision.
Switzerland is so much more heavily controlled than the US, which is part of what leads to that outcome. Most Americans would flip out if anyone told them what weekend to plant their flower box or that they aren't allowed to hoard ammo for their guns at home.
Switzerland banned reservists from storing issued ammo for their assault rifle at home 15 years ago.
However, this only applies to issued ammo (and IIRC the identical govt-subsidized stuff you buy at the range). You can still store your own ammo just fine. Most of those in US who saw that story didn't understand this distinction and believed that it applies to all ammo storage at home. Which is how we got all those memes about Swiss being "heavily regulated" in that regard unlike US.
Watching kids play literally improves my mood and makes me happy. It reminds me of a bygone era without too many responsibilities or too much stress. I live not far away from a public park with a small playground; sometimes when I am tired of coding I take a short walk there, watch the kids for a bit and come back refreshed. Kids are so energetic, but somehow the sight and sound of kids playing can impart energy to me.
Vladimir Nabokov had a beautifully written description of kids playing:
> What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.
(In the novel the protagonist abused Lolita and was feeling remorseful for robbing her of a proper childhood playing with other kids.)
Just last week there was a local news story about police investigating a possible child luring incident near a school. The news story and Facebook posts had a picture of a white van from surveillance video. The teachers saw what was happening and made sure the girl was safe. The story was light on details, and there has been no follow-up, so it makes you wonder if the interaction turns out to be innocuous. The idea of "bad guy with white van" is so ingrained in our culture, that maybe we see danger that is not always present.
This story sound either exaggerated, misrepresented, or possibly wholly made up. Not that it is that hard for me to believe in overeager security at a school, but it is just a little bit too convenient an incident for somebody with such a large preexisting interest in the subject. I would suspect that she was looking for a confrontation, even though she claims to not be confrontational.
I live across the street from a school. I'd walk my kid in through a side door, the only one that was unlocked, early in the morning. I asked if the front door could be opened at that hour- nope, for "security reasons" they could only have one door open (oddly, that door was completely unobserved, while the front door had cameras, and was next to the main office).
Even though I live literally next door and standing in my yard, I can see kids playing, I am exceptionally cautious. In particular, I introduced myself to the staff (they park in front of my house every day) so they knew who I was, smiled and made direct eye contact, and acted in a non-aggressive way. This greatly improved my ability to move about my yard without suspicion. They never did unlock the front gate, though. Security through theatre.
I live immediately next door to a school (~6 foot sub-street walkway between my building and the school building).
I've lived here for >25 years and am often outside my building smoking cigarettes(!). The "play area" for the kids is on the other side of my (and one other, total ~100 feet distance) building and classes are brought in and out most of the day.
No one has ever even looked at me (AFAIK) as a potential threat, and no one (school staff, parents or police) has ever asked me to "move along," or wanted to know why I was hanging around next to a school.
And living in NYC, it's not like folks will recognize me as one of the people who live in one of the 20 apartments in my building either.
In fact, I've only had positive interactions with school-related adults despite the "suspicious" behavior I display as an adult male "hanging around" an elementary/middle school "watching" the kids.
I can't say whether my experience is more common than that of TFA's author.
I do note that many parents (not that it's a bad thing necessarily) drop off/pick up their kids at school (this is NYC, so mostly not in cars, but to walk them home/wherever they need to go) at ages (8+) when I (and most of my classmates) walked to/from school (my elementary school and and this one are less than a mile apart, but 40+ years distance in time) all by ourselves with no issues.
In fact, we'd usually just go straight out to the park and play until dark, then go home.
Back then (mid-late 1970s), NYC was much more dangerous too.
As such, it seems to me that these changes are less about "keeping kids safe" and more about "security theater" to appease helicopter parents.
I could be wrong, but it seems like that's the most likely driver.
How much expereince do you have dealing with the modern educations sytem in America? I graduated from the public school system just over half a decade ago, and even then this wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. I went to a very small, rural school. The "town" consisted of the school, a single gas station, and a few churches. We had multiple armed resource officers, lockdown drills, locked entrances at all times, strict vistitor rules, etc. If someone had stopped to watch the playground I have no doubt they would end up in a discussion with an officer and asked to move along. Whether I agree with that or not is beside the point, but to me, this doesn't seem like an implausible situation for anyone to end up in.
I still blame John Walsh for this. He scared an entire generation of parents and now everyone lives thinking everyone is a murdering pedo. Look, what happened to him and his family, his son, is awful and I can't imagine what that was like, but he fucked America up.
> If you are in the United States, what matters is where you photograph from. If you are standing on a public street, then everything and everyone clearly visible from your vantage point is fair game. No distinction is made about WHO is being photographed. Celebrities, tourists, children, senior citizens, Times Square mimes — all are equally permissible. That playground which photographers avoid glancing at lest they be turned to stone? Fair game. Same goes for subways, bridges, airports and any private property visible from a public space (with exceptions for military and nuclear facilities).
And even if it is fair game, the last thing I want in the middle of the day is some stranger calling the police and me having to spend an hour explaining why it's my right to do so.
No need to explain anything to the cop, and in fact you shouldn't say anything. "Am I free to go?" "No?" "Ok, I invoke my right to silence and I want my lawyer".
The media and propaganda have done an amazing job convincing citizens that we have to explain our totally legal behavior. No. It is up to them to identify a crime that is being committed and if not, then just ignore them. Be prepared to get arrested.
Now, if you aren't absolutely sure that you aren't breaking the law, then stop fantasizing about winning an argument with a cop (GP).
Yeah you see thats _exactly_ what I don't want my morning to turn in to. It doesn't matter if I'm right if it's going to ruin my day/week/relationship with my kids school.
Yeah, btw I am agreeing with you and disagree with GP! (Actually I think I knee jerk reacted to you and by then time I had finished reasoning it out, I agreed with you!)
We live in a society, where sometimes we have to endure a brief peak tension in order to settle a larger issue and prevent it from becoming a psychologically draining hindrance day to day.
Assuming this was an American school this really surprising?
America has school shootings regularly. Children have to perform regular active shooter drills in American schools. Like a fire drill.
There are also significant pressures put on a shrinking number of underpaid teachers and staff to care for an increasing number of children. More kids being cared for by fewer adults.
With this mindset why would school staff not err on the side of caution and ask an unknown person to move along?
It's a sad state of affairs, but it is not the fault of the teacher or school staff that America got here.
I suggest you look up the actual statistics for school shootings. And I mean actual school shootings, not the kind of stuff that's defined as, "somebody fired a gun somewhere on school property at any time, and somebody died as a result" (which famously included a case of a guard suiciding with his duty handgun in a school parking lot at night).
It really is a problem that is blown up out of all proportion to the actual threat. The threat is there, sure; but a kid in US is more likely to be killed in a car accident on their way to school, than by an armed spree killer in that school. Those active shooter drills, in particular, save some lives, but they traumatize several orders of magnitude more. The notion that you have to be wary of a stranger who isn't even on school grounds for this reason is absurd.
> And I mean actual school shootings, not the kind of stuff that's defined as, "somebody fired a gun somewhere on school property at any time, and somebody died as a result"
It'll keep happening so long as this country continues to ignore the well-being its own population.
It also still remains true that it's a very minor threat compared to many others that we face in our day-to-day lives. I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything about it. I'm saying that we should always be aware of the true scope of the problem, and prioritize various measures accordingly.
I suspect that the single biggest policy change that would drastically improve matters is universal healthcare, and particularly prophylactic treatment of mental health. It would also solve a lot of other problems. "Active shooter drills", on the other hand, create mental health problems without solving anything.
> With this mindset why would school staff not err on the side of caution and ask an unknown person to move along?
Because instilling this type of paranoia in children is likely to cause more harm to the mental health of their generation (in total), than those very few bad events that this behavior stops?
Also, it seems to me that this has been going on for a generation already, as more and more young adults are now hyper-fragile, calling for authoritarian responses to anything that scares them. The end result may very well be that those children will place a "strong leader" in power when they grow up, someone like Putin or Chavez.
> Because instilling this type of paranoia in children is likely to cause more harm to the mental health of their generation (in total), than those very few bad events that this behavior stops?
Nobody gets a finger pointed at them for the slow institutionalization of instilling paranoia in children.
But have it come out that you saw the stranger who shot up the school and didn't call security...?
No they’re not. Neither are police officers. Police have no duty to respond to emergency calls. Teachers are not held to a higher legal standard than police officers.
It’s even less the fault of the kids, who bear the brunt of this monumental stupidity— particularly if their parents face consequences that separates them.
United States 288
Mexico 8
South Africa 6
India 5
Nigeria 4
Pakistan 4
Afghanistan 3
Canada 2
France 2
Brazil 2
Estonia 1
Hungary 1
Azerbaijan 1
Greece 1
Kenya 1
Germany 1
Turkey 1
Russia 1
China 1
Your link says 288, in the US, for 2022. A sibling's link to Wikipedia says 14, in the US, for 2022.
(And I'm going to trust Wikipedia more than a site running scam ads for "Liberals Are Furious That Trump Supporters Get This Trump Wrist Watch For Free!"…)
I haven't dug in, but I've looked into this before and you get very different results depending on how you define "school shooting". Everyone thinks of Sandy Hook or Columbine or something like that, but some stats also count "drug dealer shot once at other drug dealer and one of them was standing on the corner of the school parking lot", or (less dubiously, but still not exactly what one thinks when one hears "school shooting") a targeted killing, often of a teacher by another adult (think: bad break-up). Or a suicide with a gun at school (as in Pearl Jam's "Jeremy"). Or one student very specifically targeting one other student with no intent of hurting anyone else (bullying, gang stuff, boyfriend/girlfriend drama gone way too far)
All those other things are bad, but stats that include them can be misleading if you've got the wrong idea about what they're counting as a "school shooting".
That exact trick is used for broader stats about 'gun violence'. More than half of the deaths counted as 'gun violence' are suicides, not murders.
Counting suicides as gun violence is convenient for a narrative, because areas with friendlier gun laws, and thus, more guns per capita, tend to have more suicides by gun. It's a common hack move to plot those two numbers and show a correlation.
Ah yes, the classic "I'm gonna compare the entire US to Europe but I'm gonna exclude the parts of Europe that make the comparison not favorable to the point I'm trying to make" slight of hand."
When it's social attitudes, there is no Europe east of the Oder.
When it's about effective government, half the nations on the Mediterranean don't count.
When it's about nice infrastructure only the rich western and northern bits are "Europe".
Nobody is fooled by these dishonest comparisons anymore than they would be fooled by a definition of the US that excludes the flyover states or the Detroits and Baltimores.
>When it's about effective government, half the nations on the Mediterranean don't count.
I'm from Spain, you don't know shit.
First, Spain it's highly decentralized. The North, the South, the Mediterranean, the Castilles, Madrid and the two archipelagos have NOTHING to do with each other.
Think of Spain as "the United Autonomous Contuies of Spain", something akin to USA-lite.
The rough mountainous surface of Spain makes the provinces VERY diverse from each other, from freezing cold winters, chilly rains with more rain than the UK (no kidding again) to plain deserts, tundras, rough coasts, sunny coasts, wheat fields and so on.
Don't let me start on culture, we still have a working pre-Roman language there. The French in the South-West too.
The Basque Country, Valencia, Catalonia and Madrid have a better life on average than the US by large.
We the Basques have been trading with the UK since... the Industrial Revolution. And before that, we have been casting iron since the fucking ROMANS.
Oh, yes, what a shithole do we live. For sure /s. Ask Mondragón or Zamudio for IT HQs for a LOT of companies on how bad are they doing.
The Castilles are doing ok but these are regions with a HIGHLY sparse and separated population, where you have less people per squared km than Lapland, so they have a good excuse to not being as developed (overall) as Madrid or Barcelona. Yet, they aren't a 3r would country by no means.
Are you gonna to lecture us in which supposed shithole do we live? Because you would be chastened by the experience.
Oh, and on "the Northern European Countries", yes, oh, wow, so developed, so rich, so powerful, yet they fucked around with the Covid like hell by being careless idiots and yet they called us lazy fucks and such when we had one of the most STRICT lockdowns in Europe.
The irony.
Hollywood and the stereotypes did a great damage on the Southern Europe thanks to that Anglo-Saxon malice and inferiority complex against the Roman legacy.
Let me tell you something, you, the so "superior race" against us, the inferior and drunkard South Europeans: at least we don't stay beer-roasted at work like a lot of places in Germany. We did our best, and yes, we have corruption, but they have too and worse, they avoid to shout out their crap publicly as if nothing happened.
One day I'll post what the shithole it's Iceland on some of the energy and industry policies overseas and you'll shit bricks on the so-called "North European Efficiency".
Maybe it is not 'regular' if you find a good criteria so that it cannot be classified as 'regular', but it is shokingly often, also leading case now, and a strong upward trend while all else stagnates or goes down (except overdose and poisoning, which also increases recently)
Gun deaths and deaths by school shooting are separate things. Idiots who don’t store their guns in a gun safe or don’t otherwise follow proper gun safety or suicide from improperly secured guns are not school shootings.
That would be dumb unless all mammals are potentially involved in school shootings. If you think statistics are easy to manipulate, I'm not sure that the smarter alternative is to ignore them entirely and operate through prejudice and fear.
None of those shootings resulted in more than 2 deaths, and half of them resulted in no deaths. They would barely qualify as a large casualty rate if they all happened at the same school.
Just wondering, were there any shootings at your school? Because there was one at my high school, the year before my freshman year. It was extremely disruptive, and many teachers and students carried that trauma for years. Death is just a number, until it's close to you.
I grew up as a black kid on the south side of Chicago in the 80s and 90s. I experienced no shooting incidents within school buildings, more than two on the street outside of school, and a dozen when not in school. There was one kid who went around one morning extending his hand for a handshake, and when they took it, he would slice their wrist open with his knife. He got me. I was not permanently traumatized (although I was upset for the rest of the day.) I also think that arguments should depend on reason and cost-benefits, not appeals to emotion and assumptions about the experiences of the people you're having the discussions with.
Schools are almost the safest place people ever are. People are in far more danger from the commute to and from school than from anything within the school. The odds of getting killed by a school shooting are far lower than the odds of being struck by lightning, and multiple orders of magnitude lower than being murdered by your parents.
We had a student get beaten to death over drug money stuff and another student hang themselves over it shortly thereafter.
Death is still a number when it's close to you. Just because it's close to you doesn't make it common. If nobody got rare forms of cancer we wouldn't have those rare forms of cancer but just because those people have families who (presumably) care doesn't mean those rare cancers should be considered big problems. You might get away with running a village on emotion like that but you need to run a country by the numbers.
Thank you for sharing this story - I feel extremely sad for you but also respect your bravery for sharing something so brutal. I'm so sorry that happened at your school.
Please don’t normalize treating people as if they’re fragile, delicate creatures who may break at any moment. That encourages people to act like they’re broken for attention and reduces their ability to function. It’s harmful to them and to society generally to encourage people to follow such social scripts.
Gotta be honest, it was pretty weird. Thanks for the effort, but totally unnecessary.
If you read closely, you might notice that I wasn't directly impacted by it. I'm an empathetic person, and I noticed how it impacted teachers, students, and school policies. It was awful, for them. The only direct impact on my life was the annoyance of elevated security.
Sorry, what? Terribly sorry to hear about it, but you didn't bring your own trauma into this until just now, so I'm not sure how you'd think I was mocking it. I said that I don't need the consolation.
Please talk to a therapist about your trauma. The internet is not kind.
The way I see it, if they didn't want people to look through the fence, then they should replace the fence with something that can't be looked through. Change it to a solid fence type, put up a wall, or even just put inserts through the chainlink to block the view.
In South Park in San Francisco there's a little playground that has a sign saying adults are not allowed without children, which if anything feels backwards to me. It's a nice place to sit, eat and chat, and I've never seen anybody complain about adults being there, but I imagine there has to be some busybody who thought a rule like that would be a good idea. Maybe they have the rule so they can selectively enforce it against people?
My hobby is watching trains. I was hanging out by a railroad line that has both freight traffic and, on separate tracks, regional commuter trains. I was right by the platform of one of the commuter stations. Commuter rail security came over and asked what I was doing. That was fine. Then they said they'd like me to leave. Well, I'd seen too many articles recently about authorities acting like it was illegal to photograph passenger rail operations (not that I was photographing, but it felt the same to me). So I told them that I was on private property, and it wasn't their private property, so I didn't particularly care what they would like. They looked a little surprised, and left.
Note well: They were not police. I don't take that kind of line with police, and I don't recommend that anyone else does.
I'm immediately suspect of anyone who has an experience that would benefit them politically or financially that they just so happen to mention neatly tucked into the middle of a post on social media.
> As I have said since I founded Free-Range Kids in 2008, and since starting Let Grow in 2017, our society is set on overestimating danger and underestimating kids.
Always is a strong word. I know someone who had a caring family and friend group, yet it was a stranger that tried to assault them. This was during that idealized era before all the modern safety practices. Thankfully they were smart enough to escape to a neighbor's house.
Statistics may indicate greatest risk is people you know, but that's an average. Ultimately it's best to take reasonable precautions and teach kids what behavior to watch for, healthy boundaries, and how to react.
I grew up "free range" and looking around where I live this is still the predominant approach to parenting. So I really can't relate to the vibe in this whole thread. (all in Massachusetts and Maine btw)
That being said, the last thing my "free range" friends and I wanted growing up was some weirdo adult observing our "unstructured freeplay". As soon as we determined this lady wasn't a cop we would have created a lot of reasons for her to leave. Kids aren't monkeys in a zoo for you to observe lady, move along or get some feces in your face.
Possibly a regional thing, but among Massholes it is considered rude to "watch" people you don't know for a sustained period of time. It wouldn't be considered rude or "harassment" to call someone out for doing this.
They could say what they want to you, but at the end of the day if they tried to physically remove you from the sidewalk under these conditions you would be able to sue the shit out of the school and win.
Parts of the U.S. are providing parents protection against this sort of thing.
Texas became the third state after Oklahoma and Utah to pass a free-range parenting bill [1] called the Reasonable Childhood Independence act.
So far this movement seems to be led by traditionally "conservative" states, while the most egregious abuses seem to be reported in traditionally "blue" states, like New York and California.
It'll be interesting to see if the trend continues, and how the issue influences politics.
We host a German foreign exchange student from Hannover.
He talks a lot about meeting friends after school, that the late afternoon is his (not taken up by sports or clubs like in the U.S.).
That everyone rides bikes or public transit, and it doesn't sound like there's much parental oversight (not a judgement, just my observations from our conversations).
I went on exchange to a small town in Thueringen, and can confirm that elementary school aged children got to school on their own, including Gymnasium students (starts at age 10) who had to take public transit to the next town (there was no Gymnasium in this town).
Well at least some people in the world are still allowed to grow up with some measure of independence intact. This sounds a lot like my environment growing up in suburban Indianapolis in the 80s and early 90s (though probably with a lot less public transit); I'm not sure what kind of person I would be today without the freedom to roam unsupervised for much of the day. I wonder what kind of adults we're ultimately producing in the US today...
I've seen so few people be successful who are grown in a safe bubble within perfect control of their families.
Children need to be (controlledly) exposed to the truths of the world instead of being raised like Polyannas. There is good and bad in this world and if we show them only the good, they will have very hard time as grown up adults.
Finland: children are permitted (sometimes even required) to be able to walk/cycle from school to afterschool daycare through city from 1st grade. There are some trainings done for that and also for other life situations though.
I was once hired to photograph a teacher at a school in her classroom and a few headshots outside by some magazine or the like.
When I was setting up for the latter portion the vice principal came outside to make sure I wasn’t getting any of the kids on the playground in the shot. She was very stern about it.
I wanted to tell her I could go over to the sidewalk with a big zoom lens and take as many pictures of the kids as I wanted, but instead I just assured her the building was the backdrop and everything behind the teacher would be very out of focus anyways.
I was also hired to secretly photograph an engagement right next to a kids playground, which meant I had to act sneaky with a big zoom lens. I brought my wife along and she had to calm a woman down about what I was doing.
I suspect the thing is that, sure, there's a reasonable chance you're innocuous enough.
But say, in an unrelated incident, a kid had gone missing, and beforehand there was a suspicious stranger with no attachment to any of the kids watching them from outside the grounds. It later turns out the person was watching them to identify a target to kidnap.
Then say the school did nothing because "they're allowed", on the basis of everything described. But now a child is missing and the school didn't act on an obvious potential red flag. Would the parents find that acceptable? No. Would politicians and their voters find that acceptable? Probably not. Heads would roll.
Ultimately the school is managing its risk level by taking action in that situation.
I don't think this actually happened.. or what happened was exaggerated. I read the book by the author (Free-range kids); it is a good book but these "self-help" books exaggerate things and love telling stories which are hard to verify.
The school doesn't have that, but in california "loitering near a school" is illegal and you can go to jail. Even so, how you act in the situation determines the outcome. You have several options, including arguing with the school staff (guaranteed police visit), arguing with the police (likely will make the police less likely to sympathize even if you're not doing something illegal), behaving suspiciously (IE, not making eye contact, not following direct orders from cops, slumping, wearing clothes that cover your face, being a member of a minority that cops believe are prone to being criminal) will get you beaten up, arrested, sent to jail, etc.
How you act in public situations makes all the difference. For example, you could set up in front of the school with a protest sign that says ("Fund police and schools"), you're not going to get the police called on you.
I found that surprising. According to the first Google result[1], it is true that loitering near a school is illegal, BUT loitering doesn't mean just being there. It means being there with an unlawful purpose; they give an example of someone waiting to abduct a child. Watching kids play isn't otherwise a crime, so wouldn't qualify.
I definitely sympathize with the author. As a male, I would expect an even stronger reaction to hanging around watching kids with no clear intent. As others have pointed out, even if you're not committing a crime you can be in for an unpleasant response. It's sad that there are creeps out there. It's sad that as a result, certain innocent behaviors make others nervous (rationally or irrationally). It also gives me a small taste of what it's like to be judged by my category/appearance.
Do you understand that the interpretation of unlawful purpose is left to the enforcement agency at the moment of possible infraction? Note that many municipalities in the US openly publish the names of people who are arrested, and what for, but then don't publish that people got off because they weren't guilty.
I totally agree that police at the moment would not likely respect the finer points of that law and may well detain you. I would not advise testing them. However, it's not likely that the DA would eventually be able to convict you. I was sharing what I found interesting about the actual law in question, which was a different impression than when I first read the claim that loitering at a school was illegal (which is technically true!) It's not actually illegal to watch kids play (with no other criminal purpose), even if we both agree that in practice you're likely to get a negative response.
Whether or not you will eventually win the case will have little bearing on how your day goes that day. If everyone tried just hanging around a school and asserting their rights to do so the number of folks that would be the rightest person in the morgue would not be 0.
This is very true. There was a period I had to live in a tent on some un-used land that was accessed through a residential neighborhood and I managed to live there for several months without any problems or complaints. I came and went as I wished and whenever I saw anyone whether walking a dog or driving a car I smiled at them, waved, made direct eye contact, and said "hello" or "good morning" if we passed close enough for conversation.
I tried to keep myself clean, but even on my poorly groomed days people just assumed I was some random neighbor taking a walk and moved on without suspicion. Most people don't want to talk to their neighbors so if you look friendly they will avoid you.
The school can't force someone to, but they can call the police who most likely would side with the school and threaten to charge them with loitering if they didn't move.
In New York, where this incident took place, loitering is illegal in certain circumstances including near a school. Section 240.35 of the NY penal code.
"5. Loiters or remains in or about school grounds, a college or
university building or grounds or a children's overnight camp as defined
in section one thousand three hundred ninety-two of the public health
law or a summer day camp as defined in section one thousand three
hundred ninety-two of the public health law, or loiters, remains in or
enters a school bus as defined in section one hundred forty-two of the
vehicle and traffic law, not having any reason or relationship involving
custody of or responsibility for a pupil or student, or any other
specific, legitimate reason for being there, and not having written
permission from anyone authorized to grant the same or loiters or
remains in or about such children's overnight camp or summer day camp in
violation of conspicuously posted rules or regulations governing entry
and use thereof; or"
California takes loitering near a school very seriously.
Loitering at or near a school is a misdemeanor that is punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 court fine. If the defendant is a person who is required to register as a sex offender under California Penal Code Section 290 PC, the maximum fine amount on a first conviction for loitering at or around a school increases to $2,000. If the defendant is required to register as a sex offender and has a previous conviction under California Penal Code Section 653b PC, he or she must serve a minimum of 10 days in jail. And if the defendant is required to register as a sex offender and has two or more prior convictions for loitering in or around a school, that person must serve a minimum of 90 days in jail custody.
Yes. In many municipalities loitering is illegal - and has been for several decades. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. Too be honest I'm not sure why you find that so surprising seeing as how it wasn't all that long ago your skin color affected what parts of town you could be present in (to some extent this still persists, but you're not likely to be jailed for it - unless the police engagement invokes a negative reaction on your part.)
Uh.... realistically, in the real world, where people aren't being obtuse, police exceed their legal authority periodically.
Police have a wide range of latitude to determine that a situation is an emergency and can do a number of things to prevent the emergency from getting worse. Things have changed significantly now that many police are required to wear recording devices- it's now clear that some police abuse their authority.
It’s even worse than that. This stuff can show up in background checks. Just being arrested, regardless of guilt, shows up and possibly prevent you from getting a job.
In many US jurisdictions, police will show up if they get called with a complaint. They'll harrass the person the complaint was about, and if they don't like how the person responds, they'll escalate the situation. The number of people charged for nothing except "resisting arrest" (regardless that the arrest was unreasonable) is astounding.
And there's no "right" way to act in those situations. Charles Kinsey got shot, lying on the ground with his empty hands on the air, because the police were afraid when they responded to a complaint. The shooter kept his job, retired, and got 100 hours of community service and had to write a letter of apology.
Out of curiosity, do you not live in the US? This line of questioning is indicative of a lack of familiarity with US policing.
That being said, there are lots of crimes which could start with loitering outside a school, even if the locality doesn't have a law specifically against loitering in front of schools (which many do), loitering with intent to commit a crime is against the law, and the police only need "probable cause" to arrest you. "Looked suspicious and refused to move on when asked" could very well be enough to establish probable cause.
They walk up to you and ask a bunch of aggressive and threatening questions. You will obviously react in some way, either by getting nervous or upset at their questions. It doesn't matter which reaction you have, they will then say that your reaction made you suspicious, so they detained you.
The police can arrest you and take you to jail for a day. Then they can release you without pressing charges. That's perfectly legal. There's a time limit when they have to press charges or release you. They just release you before that time limit is reached. That's how the police prevent you from doing anything they don't want you doing whether what you're doing is against the law or not.
It's the standard and formulaic contraction for shall not, as well as part of the title of one of my favorite albums by contemporary chap-hop artist, Mr. B. and it's worth a listen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCAVTtDxvC8
My question would be why isn't the fence solid? If you're worried about people peeping on kids during recess, the fence should be solid and quite high. A voyeur won't helpfully sit next to the sidewalk, salivating, with his hand in his trousers, beating his leg on the ground and howling like a wolf. No, he'd be 200m away in a secluded place with a binocular. Have the bathrooms got windows? Do you know how easy it is to just take pictures from a neighbouring building of a child pulling down its pants? In short, I don't think you're taking the security of these children seriously.
In my Eastern European country, I can still watch kids playing and take pictures when I get my kids to the playground without anyone accusing me or looking weird at me.
What happened to everyone is innocent until proven guilty?
I faced this a year back, same thing but this time a cop showed up and not the school teacher :P, I just spoke calmly with the officer, that I was just having lunch while in the car.... she left.
I know there are a ton of examples like this but our kids were free to roam when they were like 8 or 10 and not a single thing happened, ever. There are probably many more cases like mine.
Been letting mine roam the neighborhood, unaccompanied, on foot and on bikes since the oldest was 7, I think. Youngest will be coming up on six, this Summer, when I let 'em join the others and roam (only with their older siblings—next Summer they can go out solo, if they want).
No cop visits yet. Probably only a couple years left before they're old enough that no-one's likely to bother us about it. Hoping we make it out without trouble. So far, so good. We have had neighbors from other streets come over a couple times to "make sure we know" our kids are way off in the neighborhood, but they've not made a thing of it past that, so I think they're chill-enough and really were just wanting to make sure we were aware.
I'm not a parent, but if I was I'd rather have security tell everyone, regardless of their motives to move along and not be anywhere near the children and offend a bunch of innocent bystanders than the alternative.
The way I look at it, if the standard you set is to tell everyone to move along, then you are creating the systems and processes necessary to prevent bad actors from doing what they will try and do, and that outcome is infinitely more important than some passer-by's feelings.
Or, maybe this is the classic 'bad actors don't stop being bad, but everyone gets punished' setup that seems to be more prevalent now than it ever was.
At the risk of sounding arch, the founder of Free-Range Kids relates an experience that perfectly supports the hypothesis of her organization ... ? What a coincidence. I don't think she's necessarily wrong, but the bias has to be factored into judging the content of the article.
I am 53, when I was a child they let me walk to the library, pool, and park alone. Only problem I faced was bullies. My father before me as a child would buy a bucket of beer from a bar for his father. He would be given money to buy things at the butcher or bakery.
The state of the country right now is such that encounters with the police are potentially volatile and can escalate in bizarre and ridiculous ways. IMO it's not worth the risk for something like this and she's much better off going away quietly and writing a blog post on the subject later on.
The author is a long time free ranger kids person and a leader in the movement. That she chose not to fight this particular battle is a perfectly reasonable thing to do she has done far more than most on this score.
Picking your battles wisely is hardly contributing yo the problem.
I’m not sure you read the whole thing but she did go back and talk to “security”. Also, this author specifically is known for her activism. At any rate, I wouldn’t judge her if she didn’t…
I did read that part. She went back and talked to security, they told her to leave, she left.
Had she stuck around and talked with the police, security and the childcare would have learned that the author was allowed to watch the kids.
I’m not judging her as a bad person or anything. But I think she’s part of the reason society has these behaviors. Because she’s not willing to fight stupid policies when the cost is just to wait politely.
If people were more stringent to try to help others learn right and wrong we’d be in a better place.
It’s quite possible that this security guard does think it’s illegal and wrong to watch kids. No one is willing to teach them what’s correct. If not people like the author, then who?
I would have probably made this "security" person call the police if I were on public property that wasn't school property. But, then, I have that option because I'm a normal-looking white dude.
I would have laughed just to see how high the settlement gets. Dollars would have been counting upwards in my head, analysis of how to survive the situation would have been done so that I would ensure enjoying the settlement, I would have scanned for bystandards stuck in bystander syndrome “you in particular, I’ll split the settlement with you if you record this”
New drone assimilated
The woman’s musings would have been muffled in my head, replaced by the narrator in Disco Elysium
“Stay on the public sidewalk as you are, hands clearly viewable, no sudden movements, now the public will have to pay you, or maybe the private sector, stay focused but patient”
The author should have pulled out out their phone and recorded the ridiculous Karen interaction, made it viral and made sure this power-hungry chaperone is dethroned.
I didn't check the name of the author before reading and was surprised when I realized she was a woman and had to deal with that. Had she been a man, I can assume the police would have been called without first approaching her.
You get a creepy feeling when a person might be a threat but you aren't sure yet. Often triggered by noticing something incongruent about the person's demeanor, appearance, or location, which suggests that they may be concealing their intent from you, for possibly malicious ends.
It's a valuable survival behavior but like most pre-crime strategies is easily confused by racism, neuro-discrimination, or other (un)conscious bigotry.
I have kids, 2 boys, the author failed to explain if she has kids or not. I believe the overprotective reason is valid. It's very common to hear about child trafficking, kidnapping and missing kids. The reality is that this exists and we need to accept it first. If there is a probability of something happening to your kid, you want to take all measures possible to avoid it, at the end they are the most vulnerable people in our society which we need to defend & protect at all costs. I agree with security at school that there is no reason to observe kids for joy, i would see them and continue my way, just the thought of it seems creepy.
This kind of insinuation is not a good fit here. You can either explain the pertinent details that would explain the experiences described in a different light, or you can leave it as is.
Insinuating something more sinister without explaining anything does not advance the conversation in any way.
honestly, you are being far too charitable. it comes across as downright creepy, advancing the conversation or no. i wouldn't be comfortable saying any of the things in that comment to someone that i claimed to know to their face under basically any circumstances. it pretty much implies directly that OP is some sort of sexual predator, which makes the whole "lovely wife" thing sound something between creepy and vaguely threatening.
This is not dissimilar from cases where people publicly complain about their Google/PayPal/etc. accounts getting banned: they could well be genuinely innocent, or they could in fact have done something incriminating that provider’s systems became aware of but we aren't. If the latter is true, they are not even lying by simply omitting that information in their complaints (it may have slipped their mind, too), yet it can change the outlook drastically. I find the case in TFA pretty damning, but I try to catch myself before I dole out blame on anonymous complaints with little context.
The possibility that it (account banning, or what OP described) could happen to a completely innocent person makes the status quo pretty dismal already though, and well deserves discussion.
I was jogging on the bike trail and passed by a class of kindergarteners the teacher was taking out into the park from the nearby Waldorf school. A friend of mine's daughter was at that school and I thought she might be amongst the kids. However I knew better than to slow down and scrutinize them, looking for her. I just averted my eyes and ran on by.
It's sad that we have to be like this, but it feels necessary, in a world seemingly full of child molesting creeps.
The world isn't really full of child molesters. And sadly a big majority of molesting happens by people the child knows, like family and friends, not strangers. So this extreme reaction to strangers and people walking on eggs around schools is all for very little benefit.
The other day I was walking my dog and saw a pack of kids on a walk from their daycare, and I thought my friend's kid might be among them.
I slowed down and started looking through the kids, till the proctor(?) woman noticed, at which point I said my friend's kid goes to your daycare and then we found him in the group and introduced ourselves, joked around a bit with her, and I took some pics of his kid to show my friend, said goodbye, and went home.
Lenore paused. She stared wistfully out the window and thought of the third graders she watched earlier in the day, "What would it take to give every one of them a nice, sharp pin?"
> And so I was shooed along, collateral damage in the quest to wrap every child in a bubble of perfect safety. Now I sit at my computer, wondering: What would it take to give every one of them a nice, sharp pin?
Obviously the pin is to pop the confining bubble "every child" has been placed in, thus improving their lives. She follows up:
> (Though some authority would no doubt accuse me of distributing weapons to children)
I got the metaphor; it's a dumb metaphor. Ignoring the r/thathappened premise of the article, what, specifically, is the wall were tearing down here? We should let adults watch children for recreation because society imposes too many restrictions on child development out of an irrational fear of their safety? The dots don't connect.
As a parent, the answer is yes. I have literally, on multiple occasions, had middle-aged women stop their vehicles and ask my children in a panicked voice where their mother is. This, despite me being ~30 feet away in the front year overhearing the whole thing. My neighbor has shoed them off on our behalf. It startles my kids. They're asking to ride their bikes in the neighborhood and my main concern is that someone will call the police to "save" them from whatever fantasy they dream up.
This doesn't comprise 100% of our experience of life, but it definitely impacts my children's freedoms and my friends have conveyed similar experiences. A person wistfully contemplating their own childhood experience is different than "watching children for recreation" and the punishment thereof is a symptom of a greater problem with (U.S.) society.
Following the author's "How many men have exposed themselves this year?" logic, if nobody's called the police on your kids, why are you worried about it?
I know you want to roll your eyes at the middle-aged woman as being a hand-wringing looky-loo, but maybe that's just what the social safety net that makes free range kids a possibility looks like.
My elementary school-age kids walk to school. They know they might get approached by an adult asking where they live; they know how to answer: "I live up the street. No, I don't need help." NBD.
A counter example, I pulled over on my drive home from work to ask a five year old in pajamas wandering the streets near dark what he was doing out. I walked him home. Mom was horrified to realize the little dude had wandered out of the house.
One final thought on the original article, I think the author is willfully ignoring the banal reality of the situation to make their point. I'm sure the school representative wanted to say, "Listen lady, I've got 30 kids I need to monitor at recess and while you're probably a nice person you're another variable I need to keep in the corner of my eye. Take a walk."
Maybe it's that we shouldn't let fear of a bogeyman be used as a justification to weaponize law enforcement and collapse social trust in the name of "think of the children"?
I'm sure that framing your comment as a narrative is due more to pretension, but part of me wants to see it as a brilliant stroke of irony. I mean, sure, you're grossly mischaracterizing her quote, but at least it's presented as fiction.
It's my opinion that a great deal of the blame (if not the outright majority) for this state of affairs can be levied against suburban culture (and, by extension, car culture).
The communities that hand-wring the most about predators and risks to children tend to be middle class, suburban, and white. They drive their children everywhere, and thereby are (somewhat) alienated from the idea of a "local community" beyond the immediate neighborhood (which can only be entered or exited by car.) Things like childcare are purchasable services, not kindnesses that you or your neighbor do for each other when the other's in a pinch. When this is your bubble (or, for the rest of us, the dominant cultural metaphor for responsible parenting), it's hard not to see the world as a foreign and scary place, with unknown levels of unknown danger.