> Except, parents nowadays can get arrested for even less.
I wonder how many parents read about that one example and then behave in a way that ignores the likely millions of cases every day of kids playing in their front yard alone where that didn't happen.
> Debra Harrell, 46, let her 9-year-old daughter play outside alone at the park. The South Carolina child had a cellphone she could use to call her mother in case of emergency. On the girl’s third day alone at the park, someone asked her where her mother was. The girl said her mom was at work. (Harrell works at McDonald’s and didn’t want her daughter to have to sit inside the restaurant for hours on a beautiful summer day.) The result? Harrell was arrested for “unlawful conduct towards a child” and put in jail; her daughter is now in the custody of the department of social services.
This story has a lot of details left out, and the cops may have very much been over reacting. But it is a pretty different scenario than the one previously cited. In this scenario, the girl was younger, and left at home/the park all day while the mother was away at work, for multiple days. (Rather than just being outside for a couple of hours once). It also is not clear what other conditions may have been present that may have contributed to the outcome.
I very much agree that helicopter parenting and snobby neighbors are a major issue. Just that it is hard to judge individual situations without all the facts.
Debra Harrel made the terrible mistake of being: black, lower income, and living in the South while black and lower income.
Meanwhile you have gangs of roving kids in Philadelphia robbing and beating people up.
And you have elementary schoolers in NYC walking to and from school.
Really it comes down to location. And the people most likely to be roused by news stories are people living in very sheltered locations (e.g. no one in Chicago is taking the "Chiraq" propaganda seriously).
If you don't want to have busy bodies getting involved in your life, don't live in busy body shitholes (most of the south -- coincidentally where much of this stuff happens).
Yea, I was going to say, there's no way the police would have reacted that way if the mother wasn't black and working class. If she was a white professional, she would have been treated with kid gloves by everyone in the justice system. The busybody nosey neighbors would have of course still reported the kid no matter what race she was.
Part of the problem is the faster and wider communication of these kinds of incidents. I think people can intuitively understand, at lowest, 5%* odds. Anything below that is either 5% or impossible unless you're mathing it out.
Hearing about these kinds of tail-case incidents at least once or twice a year is probably enough to bump them up to the 5% category.
*I'm not committed to any specific number here. The relevant threshold is "high enough to consider when making decisions".
An interesting resource is IDC 203, which describes how the US intelligence community discusses probability. The table in paragraph 2a says something similar to what you are saying:
almost no chance / remote := 1%-5%
very unlikely / highly improbable := 5%-20%
etc...
It may really depend on the location. My neighborhood is nice ( with an occasional crazy person driving through either too fast or too loud ) and it does warm my crusty heart to see kids playing in the frontyards. I can absolutely understand that there are locations where that would not be sensible.
No parent wants to take an avoidable, even 1 in a million chance of losing custody of their kids because of doing a reasonable thing that someone could take out of context or make trouble for them about.
Yes because getting your child taken away is a more immediate visceral sort of injustice than (usually unknowingly) damaging their mental health. Most parents would have their kid fucked up than not at all even if the chances of losing your kid are lower. Idk ymmv but that’s what I’ve observed
I wonder how many parents read about that one example and then behave in a way that ignores the likely millions of cases every day of kids playing in their front yard alone where that didn't happen.