America: “We will arrest you if you let a child out unsupervised”
Also America “kids sit in front of the screen at home all day.”
Also also America " if somebody accidentally runs over your child with a car they will get a 6 month license suspension"
Also also also America “We think crime is way up even though its at record lows and a leading cause of death here is automobile accidents”
Also also also America “We think crime is way up even though its at record lows and a leading cause of death here is automobile accidents”
Shhh don’t tell them, they need to cling to the notion that guns are the leading cause of death for kids age 0-19 even though that covid era study took place only in 5 cities known for their HUGE gang problems while less people were driving because of lockdowns. Their way they can scream about guns online for easy virtual treats, if they knew the truth they’d have to scream about cars which (outside of here) is a harder sell and they’ll get less internet treats, nobody will even call them a good boy for having the correct opinion!
Lol, I was literally discussing this in another thread.
The child death rate from guns has gone down since the 90s but the death rate of kids to cars has gone way way down since the 90s to the point its dropped below gun deaths. Probably due to anything from increased work from home to increased traffic safety project funding since the late 2000s. Increased biking may even play a role.
Well all violent crime in the US has been getting lower since '93, except a small uptick around 2016-2023ish (going back down now), and of course that does include children, and yes safety has helped there as well, but the specific study that I was referencing took place during covid in NYC, Philidelphia, LA, Chicago, and iirc Baltimore, and it included 18-19 yo “kids” who are legally adults, and actual kids that are sadly involved in gang activity surprisingly young but gets more violent around 13-16 (know/knew a good number of them, but never got involved myself.) It was never actually true that guns killed more kids than cars, if you take out the 18-19yos and do that same study in the same cities now without the lockdowns (which still gives guns the advantage because many of those cities actually have good public transportation thus decreasing car use in general, and those cities still have the aforementioned gang problems) you’d likely find that cars are in fact still the leading cause of death amongst actual kids.
Tbh if the opioid epidemic couldn’t unseat cars, nothing will without statistical manipulation.
I wonder if children walking home from school are now a problem? That was like my main source of exercise.
My theory is that it’s paranoia born out of how the media handles crime, and how isolating suburbia is.
There’s a town near me where the school is technically on a state highway. Any student who walks to school gets instantly suspended for the day for walking on a highway. In the last few years they started building a nice big sidewalk connecting to the actual town streets so that kids can legally walk to school, but it is pretty bonkers that that school is so far from where kids should be walking or biking
Was there a light to cross at least?
The town is too small to have any traffic lights at all. The new sidewalk in front of the school directly connects to the sidewalks of the nearest streets that intersection with the state highway that the school is on, but ideally the houses on the other side of the state highway would have a walking path to reach the school as well (they don’t)
The school is also the school, it’s shared between two neighboring towns and contains all of the elementary, middle and highschool classes. My wife graduated in a class of about a dozen from this school
It’s not. My 10 year old did it for some of last year. His teachers and principal supported it.
Arrest the passerby for wasting police time and resources
The onlooker called the police because they observed a child walking alone along a rural highway with no shoulder or sidewalk. There’s plenty of very reportable reasons for a child to be walking alone along the highway and plenty of perfectly normal reasons for that to happen
Honestly the police and prosecutor are the only ones who are in the wrong. The police should have simply stopped by the boy to make sure all was well, give them a ride home if possible, and notify the parents so they can take it from there. Charging the parent with Reckless Conduct for this incident is absolutely bonkers
@Trainguyrom @firewyre Better idea for people who observe a child walking where there’s no sidewalk and think it’s a problem: call the damned transportation department and demand proper infrastructure!
Then whip him on the public square.
Two things. One : that is ridiculous overreach.
Two : we shouldn’t accept a society so dangerous our kids can’t explore and have fun…
It’s not dangerous, as long as you manage to evade the police.
Your second point is really difficult for me as a parent with a new kid. Feels like we “know” so much more about serial killers / bad things that happen to kids that we’re terrified of letting them do anything.
Of course in this case it would have been trivially solved by the city just adding sidewalks, but that feels like another point here.
Of course in this case it would have been trivially solved by the city just adding sidewalks, but that feels like another point here
It sounds like the family lives just outside of city limits of a small town, so a sidewalk or trail would involve significant investment for the benefit of very few people. I think in this instance its not actually an infrastructure problem but simply a challenge of where some people choose to live.
When you choose to live outside of town you’re specifically choosing to always drive everywhere, and to receive no city services at all, and you’re subjecting your kids who lack the same freedoms that you do to the same choices. Plenty of people choose the individualism of not receiving city services in exchange for being alone in the woods
As much as I’d love a world where everyone has a sidewalk, once you’re out in the sticks it just becomes really hard to make sense to put a trail or sidewalk there. Especially because even if you imagine a world where every town is connected together by a dedicated cycle trail, said trail would ideally not run directly parallel to the noisy highway
heard someone say “these kids will never have a summer like ‘85” and that frustrates me. I remember as a kid exploring the whole town with my friends. Predators or dangerous people was not so common. We should work towards getting that high trust society back. The type where we can leave our doors unlocked at night…
Probably unrealistic in cities!
@zululove @bignate31 Not at all. Kids in cities typically have a lot more freedom than kids in suburbs and crime rates are far lower now than they were in the 80s. The only differences are the car-dominance of the urban form and the climate of fear which is constantly stoked by politicians, tv, and social media.
That’s good parenting, most definitely a good instinct to have.
They do. This story is just because backward ass red state. In my neighborhood there are kids playing around all the time.
Holy smokes, that was 10 years ago. I need to look up the outcome of that case. Absolutely ridiculous. No one under 18 unsupervised? We have lost our goddamn minds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meitiv_incidents
Tldr: Officials clarified that it’s fine and they shouldn’t have been bothered beyond police asking the kids if they were okay in response to a call.
The police and CPS responded because someone called the cops, who are required to respond in some way and then to document the case. The reporting code for “report of unsupervised child” is intended to be “neighbors haven’t seen the parents in several days, but they noticed the kid moving around the house and were concerned”. Sometimes it’s not okay for kids to be alone.
So the police responded because someone called, and then gave them a ride home and filled their report. CPS got the report because the only category it fit in was one they are supposed to investigate. They did their investigation because the law says if you’re under eight you must be supervised by someone at least 13, and because they were in violation they had to do their follow-ups, which are invasive because they’re geared towards actual issues and there’s no way to delicately inspect someone’s home and interview their children.
When it happened again at the park, there was now a report on file for a CPS investigation that was still in progress, so now it’s “parents being investigated for neglect getting another report of the same behavior”, which means that now the presumption is that the parents aren’t capable of following a directive to not do the behavior that started the investigation , so instead of sending them home and then sending an officer to see what’s up they’re going to hold them until they can determine safety. Which they were, but all the people see is “they were instructed and agreed to not leave them unsupervised until we finished and we got a concerned report about them being left unsupervised”.
Eventually officials clarified that CPS was incorrect, and that the laws wording and intent was to prevent young children from being unsupervised in vehicles and structures, not parks, sidewalks or in public. No leaving your 7 year old home alone or in the car.First incident is on the busybody who called the cops and the CPS people who didn’t just leave and drop it when they learned they weren’t left behind at home or in a car, and that the sidewalk and park weren’t like, a highway median and an industrial park.
Second incident is a little more on them. Preposterous or not, they were explicitly and legally informed they needed to not do that until CPS got back to them, and they agreed to do so. It was still more of an ordeal than it should have been, but you should generally not be surprised when they respond poorly to you doing what they just told you not to do.
You can be entirely in the right and end up in more trouble for not following instructions during the process of figuring that out.Thank you sooo much for writing that out and citing the source!
Instead of building sidewalks, they arrest working moms, amazing.
Makes me angry that removing the ability for self-sufficiency – even just walking alone for errands – only furthers dystopia.
Why most American GenXers thump their chests about being turn-key kids… yet they should be opposing such overreach.
I’m 42. I fucking walked for miles all over the place when I was a kid. This being a “problem” is straight up retarded. Shit was actually a lot more dangerous back in the 80s and 90s than it is now. Kids are safer today than 30 years ago.
This being a “problem” is straight up retarded.
It’s the criminalization of any sort of poverty.
The problem is that we’ll spend an extra billion on police to save a grand on social services.
No it’s a nanny state overreacting to a non issue, parents were convinced there is a rapist/pedophile on every corner so they shouldn’t let their kids be kids
Isn’t the highest rate of abuse from family members?
Time to hand over your kids karen… for the greater good.
My mother in law was upset we put our sons crib by the window, you know, because people just walk by windows looking for newborns to snatch.
My wife has had about a dozen stranger danger talks with our oldest so now hes trying to figure out what anyone would want to abduct him for.
Its hard to counter that stuff sometimes for sure.
We literally roamed the neighborhoods in feral packs on bikes
Granted I was 100% almost kidnapped once but still
We raised our kids feral in the late 90s/early 2000s. They’re all resilient, self-supporting adults now. We had neighbors who bitched at us, and were overprotective of their little darlings. Both of their kids are now dealing with opiod addictions.
I was walking to school since grade 1, I was 6. We checked it out with my parents beforehand, did some test walks iirc, and none of it was along American style stroads. But it was more than a mile. Twice every day.
Many years ago (I’m old), a friend and I biked 20 miles from Orange County into Los Angeles, to East L.A. Had a hell of a time, visited my friend’s cousins, got tacos de lengua, got a guy to buy a 6-pack for us, chugged down the Modelo then rode back home.
We were 12.
Independence is good but idk if Id want my kids chugging booze
Lots of kids still do that here in the US. We have crossing volunteers at any street crossing near the school to shepherd the kids across.
By the time I was 13 or so my mom didn’t know where I was more than 50% of the time. And I think at 13 my hormones probably made me do dumber shit than when I was 10.
I should definitely have not been left unsupervised as a teenager either lol. And yet, my mom wasn’t even in the same state some of the time lmao
When I was a kid people still described things as removed
/s
Dumbest country on earth. You cannot change my mind.
I’m in my 40s and now I realize that my Parents would have likely been arrested several times over if I were a kid today. Hell I Imagine most of us would be in the same boat.
I mean on weekends or during the summer I was told to get out of the house, be with friends, have fun and told to be home either for dinner or by the time the street lights came on and if I wasn’t going to be home in time then to find a phone and call my parents and let them know. Hell I could be like miles/Kilometers from home at any given moment. I could be in a friends house and their parents offered me dinner.
I was like any kid, I got up to no good. I stole candy sometimes. I once opened a Captain Planet action figure in a store cause I wanted the power ring that was inside. I got in trouble at school cause one time during recess me and my friends just decided to start cussing at the top of our lungs.
I’d hate to be a kid today. hell, I’d hate to be a parent today.
I mean on weekends or during the summer I was told to get out of the house, be with friends, have fun and told to be home either for dinner or by the time the street lights came on and if I wasn’t going to be home in time then to find a phone and call my parents and let them know. Hell I could be like miles/Kilometers from home at any given moment. I could be in a friends house and their parents offered me dinner.
Sounds like what most kids were doing from 300BC up to 1980AD
Why did you stop at 1980? It wasn’t until cellphones became so common with kids that things changed. Even the in early 2000s pagers were still more common with kids/teenagers in my experience.
I didn’t get my first cell phone until I was in college in like 2002 or 3. Miss that flip phone. In high school no one had a phone and maybe a hand full of kids had pagers.
When I was in primary school in the early 90s we used to get offered a lift by the local milkman who often used to be on the way past when we were walking home.
There’d be at least 4 of us. We’d throw our school bags in to the gap between his insulated box on the tray (full of milk) and the head board of the cab, then jump up and hold on the headboard so our legs would hold the bags in place. Off we’d go down the main road - heads sticking over the cab, wind in our hair - hitting 60kph with nothing between us and falling out but the fact we were holding on to the headboard.
I see front page news blasting parents for their kid sticking their head out a sunroof in a carpark and I’m like… man, our folks would have been arrested back in the day.
I hate today, I hate yesterday, I hate tomorrow.
Of course in the US
This is what suburban carbrain disease does to a mfker.
Having grown up in Eastern Europe, walking to the kindergarten since 4, walking to the primary school since 7, walking / pubtransiting to mid/high school since 11, the North American suburban carbrain disease is just shocking, even after living alongside it for two decades.
America wasn’t like this until 2000s that’s when it started
2001 actually, the ball went downhill some time in September of that year
Ol boy Osama deff achieved his strategic objectives too with hind sight.
I remember when Obama was jerking killing him on tv as some sort of W in early 2010s…
It looks even more pathetic with 2025 context at where the country ended up
That’s if you believe he even existed, they threw like 20 different dudes on screen over the years as Osama
I’ve heard 90s but yeah. Prolly different depending on the local disease level. In Ontario Canada it’s illegal to leave a child alone till the age of 12.
Same. Walked and took buses to school from around 6-7 years of age in the late 90s. My parents were divorced, so I also commuted a lot between their places as a child.
Perfectly normal thing that all the other kids were also doing. I remember one mom being a bit afraid for her daughter, so I was asked to take the bus and walk together with her, but that’s it.
I walked to middle and high school cuz it started too early for my folks. People getting in the car to drive a block will never cease to amaze me
It was very early 1980s and I was maybe 10 or 11. I went on a 10 mile bike ride from my house to a friend’s house in another town. According to Google maps it was an hour bike ride. Pretty sure it took me much longer. And I’d guess my parents had no clue I did it.
Seriously, I regularly did 12 miles round-trip on my bike down roads with no sidewalk or bike lane at 12 to see my friend who lived in the bad part of town. I guess my parents would be felons by today’s standards.
Edit: hi again! I’m not stalking you, I promise!
When I was a kid in the 60s, during the school year, I walked a mile to and from school, starting at age 5.
On weekends or summers, I would eat breakfast, jump on my bike, and not be back until dinner at 5 (The Rule). I had no ID, no money, no phone, no watch, no water, no food, nothing. And my mom had no idea where I was, either.
If I got thirsty, I’d knock on a door, and ask for a glass of water, and always got one. If I needed to know what time it was, I’d ask someone. I got pretty good at judging the time of day by the setting sun, and could always get home before 5. I never felt unsafe, as long as I could avoid the Robolotto brothers.
Pathetic. My sister and I used to explore around the whole city when we were that age. We’d walk streets and roads, explore parks and trails, visit malls across town, get into mischief like sneaking into people’s backyards, exploring abandoned properties, and building forts in the woods. Some of my strongest memories are of the adventures we went on.
You know what the worst thing that happened to us was? The occasional scrape or bruise from falls when climbing on shit. We both remembered all the phone numbers we needed to know and my sister, being a bit older than me, was very streetwise and knew the layout of the city like the back of her hand. We did our own purchasing, bought our own food, tended our own wounds, and so on.
My sister grew up into one of the smartest and most independent people I’ve ever met.
