this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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I'm glad you came with receipts. I (probably very obviously) both grew up and currently live in the US and this is wild to me. When I was a kid we ran around in the woods on the weekends and when I visited my grandparents we walked to the arcade, corner store, or the grocery store without being hassled.
I see a bunch of kids in my neighborhood playing ball, having Nerf wars, and generally just being kids from the time the spring rain stops until it starts back up again next year. The oldest I've seen this year probably isn't quite old enough to drive yet and the youngest is probably somewhere in the 5-7 range. They're just out being mild nuisances and having the time of their lives. No one has said a thing.
It's a symptom of our increasingly car-dependent infrastructure imo. You feel much more exposed in the middle of parking lots or walking along neighborhood roads without sidewalks, or trees and buildings providing cover, and god forbid you end up footing the main arterial roads we have to take to access any commerce. More of our lives are being lived in these "in-between" areas, making us feel less safe in general. Houses being further apart and less people going out on foot means there are less eyes incidentally looking out if anything were to go wrong, and kids have to go further to get anywhere safe.
All of this makes adults feel less comfortable letting kids go out on their own, and cast judgement (and sometimes call the police, who sometimes take legal action!) upon anyone that does. Plus the monoculture of suburbia makes people much more susceptible to fear mongering by mainstream media, not to mention the unprecedented access to that media provided by the internet.
Anyways, here's a great video from Not Just Bikes on the topic, Why We Wont Raise Our Kids in Suburbia
I love his channel but it makes me want to live in the Netherlands so bad.
Those stories made the news because of how outrageous they are, not because they're common occurrences. There are still plenty of kids running around outside and having fun in the rest of the non-wacko towns across the country.
Imo it's not as significant that the cops were called - anyone can do that and the police have to respond - as it is that those police departments had both the will and legal standing to pursue charges, have CPS threaten to remove kids from their homes over it, and put a mother's name on a list which bans her from ever working with children.
I think this is the thing we tend to often forget: what we read in the news, with regards to individual or anecdotal stories, is oftentimes not representative of a general experience but rather edge cases because that’s what makes them newsworthy. It can be easy to feel doom and gloom about an issue because you’re seeing it reported regularly, but countries, and the USA in particular, have massive populations so edge cases have higher absolute incidence rates.
This differs though from news reports that are more focussed on an issue as a whole and present statistics and research; that’s obviously representative as long as the statistics are being used in good faith and the research is solid.
If you want statistics and hard facts I can provide those too, those were just the stories that showed up at the top of google in the 10 minutes I had to search.
None of these are really insignificant numbers. This is a real issue, you can't just handwave it away with platitudes of "edge cases" and "anecdotal stories". This is 85% of surveyed parents saying they would not let their 9-11 year old child go trick-or-treating unsupervised. I understand that your anecdotal experience differs, but people are actually afraid in this country.
The laws are a bit too close for comfort on this as well; according to my state's department of health and human services, "According to the Child Protection Law, these situations are determined on a case-by-case basis, but as a general rule, a child 10 years old and younger is not responsible enough to be left home alone. If the child is between 10 and 12, and someone complains, he or she will be evaluated"
Thank you for so clearly typing out such an important point. This tends to frequently be forgotten, especially in the echo chambers of online communities like Lemmy, and Reddit. It's important we remember this if we're to avoid slipping into despair and doomerism.