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It's funny in the morning. One child walks to another child's home then they walk to another child's home and so on until you have a big group of kids walking to school together. In Austria they call it something like a children train.
Twice a year you see the children practicing crossing streets. The police are out at the intersections and show the children how to do it. It's very cute. Also how to ride bicycles properly.
I think international readers see these headlines and assume the entire US is like this, but the reason the story is a headline is because it’s a dumb sentence. This is going to get appealed.
The US is a big country. The state this happened in has a similar population to the entire country of Switzerland. Laws and cultural norms vary across the country, but this story is unusual even for the location it happened in. That’s why it’s a news story.
That would still be pretty bad though. An absurd sentence like this should not end with the sentence being reverted but in changes that prevent it in the future, e.g. by updating laws or disciplining those that did not apply them correctly. This isn't just one person fucking up this is the security guard fucking up, the police fucking up, CPS fucking up and then the judge fucking up.
This is absolutely untrue. Only 3 states have an age specific standard. Most states set no specific limits by age. The bigger problem is the vagueness of the laws we do have in place around child neglect which allows a cop or neighbor to be the biggest determining factor of whether you get a knock on your door.
I can't imagine living somewhere where that was prohibited.
Can't help but think that this is just swinging things in the opposite direction.
In French cantons you can bring your kids to school, you can drive them there and there are spots for stopping and all respective signage. But there is indeed a lot of very young kids walking to school.
The neighborhood is safe enough and the community is cohesive enough that kids can congregate along their way to school: go to their friend's house, meet at a park, etc.
It's researched enough that you can go and learn about it and challenge your feelings.
And even as a German who already spent a lot of time in Switzerland, I've never heard of anything like that.
To join in on the therapy speak: it is very good to challenge one's feelings, let go, and then, by the merit of reason, realize that police intervention for spending commute time with your children is bonkers.
It is just a very unreasonable extension of a very reasonable position.
I also pulled one of my sons twice from the same pond around that age, so I would not necessarily be super comfortable trusting them around those attractive nuisances, even though I’m on board with the “let them walk to school” policy. It’s a difficult balancing act.
It depends of the town/location and region. In our town, police had to be involved several times due to different issues with creeps targeting 12yo or less.
That's what I did when I was in first grade. Suburban US, late 70s. Lived at the end of a cul-de-sac. Met with the other kid who lived at the end of the cul-de-sac, walked to the house of a kid who lived at the other end of the street. Then the three of us got on the sidewalk of the main road and walked to the school.
When I read the headline, I sided with the mother. But a five-year old having to cross four roads in total to and from (with vehicles going up 25 mph legally, and who knows how fast illegally) is a bit much.
Regardless, there are local laws against this.
I had so much fun going there and going back on foot.
So much that when I was a teenager and my mother drove by my school one day and decided to pick me up, I was super unhappy, because I wanted to walk the 20 or so minutes with my friends to the bus.
When I had 9 hour school, I would need to wait 50 Minutes for a bus... or I walked the 5 kilometers home.
I always choose to walk, even when it rained, because I was faster and I loved it!
I am curious how it will be with my daughter, once she goes to school.
Because today this is totally frowned upon. But I will not play taxi for her all the time. Occasionally, sure. But CERTAINLY not every day.
When I go to the US I'm often surprised that you can't get to things that are only a km away by foot because a road is blocking you, no way to cross it.
We're told we are number ONE in everything but in fact its usually 40 or 20 when you actually go look at things that matter.
We never really notice because we think filling a big house in the suburbs with garbage from Costco is living the dream.
3 people stopped and asked whether they can drive us somewhere... I mean, super friendly people, but... it's just a few hundred meters, come on!
You were the wild west, once!
About a year or so ago I saw on Nextdoor a neighbor posted about that some girl who always walked home from school whom he waves to when he sees her. One day she was walking slower than normal, and she ran to him scared, they didn't actually know each other, on the Ring footage you can see that a car that was following her drove off. Who knows if all these cameras are helping to prevent so many incidents, but the world is still as evil as ever. Just because its rare doesn't mean that you as a parent want to win the misfortune lottery.
If you want total safety from misfortune why have kids at all? Pregnancy and birth is one of the most dangerous things people choose to do voluntarily. 1 in 200 newborns die in the US. You could avoid that by not having kids!
Flippant I know. But at the end of the day to live is to take risks. Extreme risk avoidance will come back to bite you on a later day in the form of declining birth rates, increasing neuroticism and support for building a police state.
As society has weeded out all the things to fear over time, more and more far flung things get put into the bank, and more and more fear is allocated to the dwindling amount of things to be scared of.
There is no real reasons to be scared. Chances something bad happens are very low: almost no deaths, in worst case child gets mimor reconstructive surgery, and a fake trauma!
This is victim blaming bullshit irresponsible dog owners love to spew
When I was a kid in the 80s none of this was an issue and I was free to roam. Starting in the 90s this became an issue and not only will parents not let their kids roam but the kids themselves have less interest because the norm is to stay in or only go out when supervised. You know you are doing something slightly wrong. It only takes occasional reminders like this to reinforce the rule, once established.
If it's not the alligators, it's the careless older kids in e-scooters or e-bikes, if you're rolling your eyes, just note that one of those careless kids drove into my neighbors four year old, who went flying back because some kid was not paying attention, he was also by chance wearing a helmet because he wanted to ride his bike so he did not hurt his head, but he definitely had a bruise on his lower back.
Do I think there needs to be laws around this? No, though, should a child suffer because they have negligent parents? Also no. It hurts me more to think that having these laws is the only way to get some people to pay attention as parents.
The part that really gets to me is that the neighbor was so "concerned" about the child's safety that they called the police, but for some reason, in their urgent concern, they didn't take the simple step of approaching and talking to the child to see where they were going or if a parent knew where they were.
The criminal definition apparently has no such modification.
E: removed a double ‘likely’
And in particular, the conviction here was delinquency of a minor. That's usually used to convict parents of teenagers whose kids do serious crimes.
I caveat to say, we don't know the full details. But it all seems pretty weak sauce.
The boy could have been spotted walking along a highway median, or similar detail that would kind of spoil the outrage effect. Lord knows the pedestrian hostile nature of modern infrastructure.
Though in this case the kid was walking all in a gated community.
Simple. Evolutionarily, the dumber you are, the higher the risks of dying, because you do stupid shit. Inversely, the safer the environment, the dumber people become, because not doing stupid shit stops being evolutionarily advantageous. Nature is pretty brutal so there is evolutionary pressure not to be dumb, but in modern civilization we have pretty much infinite resources dedicated to safety, which means there is a feedback loop "people are dumber -> more safety measures -> people are dumber -> more safety measures".
When you go to poor countries you'll realize just how much knowledge children posses on the topic on how not to die.
Old Enough! is a Japanese reality show that has been aired irregularly since 1991 on Nippon Television. The program depicts, in a documentary manner, the efforts of toddlers going on an errand on their own, buying groceries and delivering packages, accompanied by the camera crew.
The American version - https://youtu.be/VhGTtWsW9F8
It seems like a much healthier way to live than in constant fear.
in germany on the other hand, there was a case where parents demanded a school bus for a 7yr old, but the court said the kids could take the public train to school on their own.
I would say if you're in a neighborhood where there's just like 1-2 kids, it may not be that typical. The kids parents might do more scheduled playdates.
Unfortunately in the US there are people that get annoyed about kids playing. And they are also the same kind of person that escalates things to the authorities / complains a lot about trivial things.
There's a Netflix documentary about one such sad case https://www.netflix.com/title/82018736
You see this in SF, with singles primarily living in the Marina, Russian Hill, or Rincon Hill and then upgrading to Mission Bay once they have kids.
A few months ago I had a heated argument with my father, stepmother and wife because I (half-joking/serious) told my almost 8-year daugher that next year we will start practicing her going to school by herself. You would not believe the stink all of them raised telling me I was irresponsible, yadda, yadda, what about child molesters/ kidnappers, yadda, yadda, too many cars and the usual non-sense you usually hear about this.
Again I went and checked on Google Maps just to be precise and the walk between our house and my daughters school is... 500 meters / 0.31 miles.
In a single generation we went from "your starting school for the first time? time to fend for yourself, you will do fine" to "you are a snowflake that needs to be protected at all times and must not be allowed to alone in any circunstances".
PS: To give more context, I don't live in the US but in a small EU country with a low crime rate, on a town that indeed is busy but very safe.
This particular situation seems ridiculous. I’d be furious if I lived there.
- the child must never be unsupervised
- I/we think the child should never be unsupervised
We have less and less space between an opinion or recommendation and legal requirement. On a wide range of subjects people go straight to “require”, unwilling to simply express their opinion and move on.
The extreme neuroticism toward children having any kind of agency these days is unhealthy for everyone involved. Social media turned being neurotic into a virtue.
Actually the village would probably enjoyed that, I was a real "Swedish Emil" as a kid..
They charged the mom with delinquency of a minor to get around this. Usually reserved for teenagers that commit crimes.
We don't really know all the facts, and we only get one side of the story here. So we all need to keep that in mind too.
Pre cell phones kids of all ages would just disappear for the whole day and show up back home for dinner. Nobody knew where they were. Nobody cared. Could be in the woods somewhere, off at the mall. And it was fine. Kids built bike ramps in the woods and jumped off them, sometimes someone broke an arm. Nobody sued.
The nanny state stuff is out of control.
Which was the real crime. To be fair, many places outside the US not respecting the police is a illegal -- but genuinely not enough that an office would be justified in as much as indicating that the officer is armed (which usually counts as use of force).
I would immediately move from that neighborhood and that city, if they do not have roots with neighbors or kids' friends. These are people who see her as a bad parent for letting their child outside the house.
>The James City County family services specialist assigned to Parkinson's case declined to comment, citing confidentiality requirements. The prosecutor in the Commonwealth Attorney's Office for James City County said the same.
So the state doesn't have to answer to the public about why they interpret their laws to mean a 5 year old can never be alone. Show me the statute where there is an age cutoff.
Feels like these people made enemies, except that too many separate groups came down on her at once. What awful people.
That said, there may be details we don't know here. This particular article is written from one bent, and the officials didn't comment on the case as is common in child-related prosecutions.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and in the neighboring town a child went missing.
Pre internet there was still a lot of worry. We got talked to by my parents who were too busy to change their day to day. Being kids we weren't very concerned (I don't think we thought it could happen to us)
It was a rural/suburban type area (my high-school walk home from the bus was 1 mile). I was given free range, and did a lot of exploring of trails and things unsupervised with my brother and friends. It was probably too far in the other direction with lax supervision. We never ran into big trouble, but cellphoneless us last century, we had to be hard to track. But that was the way things were. Playground games were rough too (I had a dislocated elbow that says maybe too rough sometimes..) but we got through.
https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/hiring-out-of-the-e...
You get what you pay for, I guess.
> David DeLugas, founder and executive director of ParentsUSA, a nonprofit that provides pro bono legal help to parents wrongly accused of neglect, scoffed at the charge.
Sounds pretty cool; do they have a better record of legal wins?
I'm of the generation where one of my responsibilities as a kid was walking to the neighborhood liquor store to buy cigarettes for my dad, so I'm empathetic. But if she was found guilty by a jury, I'm guessing there's more to the story.
"I told [the authorities] that kids need to be able to take reasonable risks," he says, "in order to grow up non-anxious."
I guess the system prefers to breed anxiety.
a happy consumer consumes less than an anxious one :(
I'm a parent of three and strongly believe in letting your kids roam around (indeed, I live on acreage and taught my kids about the venomous snakes and spiders in our area, and then let er rip). But a 5yo who specifically asks to go back to a large body of water unsupervised is a bit too much for me.
Reason always strikes me as an opinionated libertarian media outlet, and this article really feels that way to me, where they keep playing up the "walking on the street" type stuff, the "we're too afraid of kidnappings" part, but not the fact that a 5yo unsupervised at a pond is by far the most dangerous part of this entire story.
Even as a kid of the 80s, I never saw 5yos out and about unsupervised, let alone by a pond. 5yo is possibly preschool.
Religious conservative, likely politically so, whose college degree was in family science at BYU—a degree Mormons steer their daughter into for her Mrs Degree—with experience in conservative politics at the state level who is responsible for passing a law giving parents a lot of freedom to let their little kids run around by basically saying "unless they're in immediate danger, YOLO"? So of course a reasonable judicial system tried to find a way to stop this wild behavior perpetrated by a woman with self-dealing political sway.
Article does not pass the vibe check. Letting your PRESCHOOL age kid go to a pond alone is pretty damn irresponsible, and Reason is trying to gin up anti-gov't feelings when this is probably the best possible outcome. Mom gets slapped on the wrist for fucking up in a way that just barely skirts a law she helped get passed and politicians were too stupid to think about before passing.
Assuming the kid wasn't even planning to enter the water, I see no inherent problem here. We seem to be operating on the assumption that unsupervised children will immediately succumb to sudden and irrational urges to kill themselves in creative ways.
That’s like 90% of parenting until kids age out of it. That being said, my 2.5yo kid can swim well enough today that I’d have no qualms at all about them being at a neighborhood pond by themselves in a few years.
Wow that's a lot of assumptions baked into one sentence.
But in actually safe countries (Japan, Switzerland, Singapore) kids are already taking themselves to school around 5 years old and parents aren't getting criminal records for letting their children explore their independence.
Food for thought...
Surely allowing your children to roam freely would be a major benefit of a gated community?
On the one hand, we tell parents they’re accountable for their kids, which is fair and reasonable. Then we build a society where parents cannot dedicate themselves to being effective parents because they both must work, unless they have enough wealth and privilege to afford (and find) child care services or can have one parent stay at home full-time. Then if said lucky-ass parent decides in their wisdom that their kid is mature enough to roam a secured neighborhood with active security patrols on their own, they get prosecuted criminally for daring to let their child develop confidence and independence.
It’s nauseating, and I’m tired of this “stranger danger” bullshit along with the societal hostility towards adults and children alike. We can - and must - do better than this shit.
that is all there is to say about this fucking bullshit
Research the massively destructive bird feather trade in the 19th century if you want context for why the law is that broad.
I have a 7 year old and a 4 year old. The 7 year old started back at school after the summer holidays and some of her friends had to be taken into class early, showed signs of having anxiety attacks and distress. While I'm slightly hypocritical here, we live on a busy road so it's not really suitable for them to go wandering alone, we do try to give them as much autonomy as we can.
I'm pretty sure the societal pressure to helicopter around children constantly is a net negative to their well-being.
I think this is probably the reason why these cases come up
people age and then they think that a 10 year old is a toddler, and then they enforce that belief upon them