Why don’t kids go outside anymore?
“I stopped to ask him if he was okay and he needed help, and he lied, and said that his mother works here at the post office,” the caller said. “And then he just took off away from me.”
Which is exactly that id want my kids to do, if some random person pulled up next to them in a vehicle. When in doubt get the fuck out of there
Yeah. Literally a smart kid. Quick thinking.
Sounds like he was taught about stranger danger. Good parenting.
You lot really hate walking don’t you
I used to walk to my elementary school (roughly ages 5-10) which was a mile away. Lots of kids in my town walked to school.
I drive by a school to go to the gym in the morning. There are tons of kids that STILL walk to school. I think these Karen cases are few and far between.
The elementary and high schools in my neighborhood pay the students if they walk rather than take the bus, as both a costsaving and environmental measure. It’s a pittance sure, but in a country of 350 million people its extremely easy to find singular examples of any behavior to further any narrative. This article would have a point were it an examination of broad trends, but one example of the cops being the cops does hardly a well-founded narrative weave…
Different kid who was killed walking across a difficult-to-cross street resulted in the parents, not the driver, being charged with manslaughter for letting their kid walk outside.
deleted by creator
Crime is at a 50 year low across the entire country.
Crime is now institutionalized.
Source: White House, Congress, Supreme Court, SEC, FTC, Red States, Police, Prisons etc…
Hysteria about crime is at a historical high.
It’s pretty much a nothing burger that before the internet and instant world wide access few karens would know about.
When it comes to “news” these days, the more outrageous and rare the story the better. Got to keep the readership outraged for those eyeballs…
It still has a chilling effect, though. I’m in Georgia and I restrict what my kids would do more than I otherwise would for fear of some Karen cop persecuting me for no fucking reason.
Brit here. It was .5 miles to my primary school and .8 miles to my secondary school, and I walked it every day from age 5 to age 16.
Uphill both ways
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Etan_Patz
This was the case that really changed the way kids were treated in the US.
Before this, it was normal for kids to travel great distances on their own.
Laws are waayy to often based on single cases of something. Same with the whole “dont microwave your cat” stuff. So many have to suffer because some idiots or a random case of crazy or bad luck.
Yeah, I’m still angry that I’m not allowed to microwave my cat, just because some idiot back in the days used the Popcorn program for that instead of the Feline & Furry program.
Any law named after a victim is a shit law.
Any law named after a victim is a shit law.
Ah yes, how dare Kari demand we check notes call 911 without pressing remembering which number is required to dial out.
https://www.911.gov/issues/legislation-and-policy/kari-s-law-and-ray-baum-s-act/
That bitch…
And may have helped launch it, but no one did more to further it than the father of kidnapped child Adam Walsh.
Adam’s father, John Walsh, became an advocate for victims of violent crimes and is the host of the television program America’s Most Wanted. He has also hosted The Hunt with John Walsh and In Pursuit with John Walsh.[3] Convicted serial killer Ottis Toole confessed to Adam’s murder, but was never convicted of the crime because evidence was reportedly lost and Toole later recanted his confession. Toole died in prison of liver failure on September 15, 1996.[4] No new evidence has come to light since then, and police announced in December 2008 that the Walsh case was closed and that they were satisfied that Toole was the killer.
That’s funny.
1 kid goes missing, all of America changes how they act.
100s of kids die in school shootings, America does nothing.
This is very odd for US to not return to normalcy.
Just read this as never heard the name, the guys conviction was overturned, I mean is America turning in the land of the free pedo? Wtf?
A federal appeals court on Monday ordered that a man convicted in the disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz in 1979 should receive a new trial or be released.
That’s not what overturned means. He’s not been released, there was apparently conduct in the trail that a superior court ruled merits revisiting it - if the lower court decides to be snitty about it then he potentially could be released, but that’s extremely rare.
This is the way the court system should work (though it should be a whole lot faster…), reviewing previous convictions repeatedly to ensure that the results were fair and correct.
It’s the technicalities of the legal process. Cops knew he did it, but fucked up and bungled the case by losing the evidence that would have seen him have the judge throw the book at him. It didn’t happen because courts are lenient on murdering chomos, it happened because the PD involved in the case were fucking halfwits. Also, it’s not “turning into” anything, John Walsh started hosting America’s Most Wanted in the early 90’s - his son Adam was murdered before then, these events are decades old.
Once again the rest of the world wonders how a whole country can be so… unreal
Everything about this is insane. Making it illegal to walk, calling cops on kids, arresting people for any fucking reason. People created a hell hole they have to live in now.
Why is this kid walking, he should have a car. This is the USA, we don’t walk here.
By walking, that kid was stealing money from oil and car corporations
I want to laugh at this but it sounds like something US leadership would say with a completely straight face.
Don’t forget about the tricycle industrial complex.
Only if the kid gets a gun too
This is America after all, they’ve got to open carry and drive everywhere otherwise it’s un-American activity. And we can’t have that.
It’s all nuts, but I’m okay with the idea of, hey, there’s a young kid, can we check on him. Cop rolls up, you okay kid? Yes. Cool, have a day. The idea that this would escalate beyond there is insanity.
Suburban trash culture
This isn’t even suburban; it’s rural small-town bullshit. Atlanta has a lot of sprawl, but nobody’s commuting there from Blue Ridge (yet).
They got some over lap but I do stand corrected
When did country folk become infected by karen police calling lol
Yeah, this sounds a LOT like “cops didn’t have anything better to do and decided to create some excitement for themselves to make them feel like heroes.”
I am currently babysitting a 13 year old boy almost every day. Why? Because CPS says he can’t be alone.
He’s mature. He’s smart. He’s quiet. He is COMPLETELY capable of taking care of himself. His dad works 6 hour shifts at most.
The issue is, his dad went to jail for drugs. He’s been sober, he’s been working, he’s been fighting like hell to provide a decent life for his kids.
He’s not allowed to have his girlfriend around them, so he’s paying for two apartments and they can only spend time together coming up when the boy is in school.
I mean, sure, the dad hasn’t been a saint. But man oh man, they’re doing everything the can to make sure he fails.
He was taking suboxone, got the shot instead, realized he wasn’t experiencing withdrawal and dropped that. Well, now he has to prove that he will have detectable amounts in his system for up to a year, and then they’re going to MAKE him go back on suboxone to keep his son.
It’s madness the hoops some people have to jump through, meanwhile a childhood friend was starved and beaten regularly and they wouldn’t remove him from the home until his parents burned down a neighbor’s house and went to prison for arson.
When we were kids and we’d discuss what we wanted to be when we grew up, his answer was, “my mom’s murderer.”
When she did pass, he cried his eyes out for never reaching out to her and was one of the pallbearers.
I don’t get why things have to be such a mess.
The War on Drugs isn’t about helping people stop using. It’s about feeding the prison industry and all the parasites that bleed parolees dry.
What bullshit. I was told by CPS in Oklahoma after my boys had to move in with me after their mom had a mental health crisis and couldn’t stay with her anymore. The guy had to check out our house make sure it was suitable. He told me that if kid can make food in the microwave that at 10 they can be home alone.
Also, say what you want about Oklahoma, but my kids been walking to the store by themselves since they were 8 and 6. I am sick of the fucking nanny state motherfuckers. Like that mother years ago in Florida her kids playing in THEIR front yard. She goes to jail because she wasn’t watching them. By the way that woman was white so its not all a race thing. This has been a slow build for the fascist police state.
We need to fucking change the fucking laws and make cities and small towns safe for our kids to walk in. Not to mention that kids are safer now then when I was a child. At least my kids have phones. I have Life 360 on all their devices. Hell when I was a kid they had to run ads at 10pm asking “Do you know where your kids are?” Because parents didn’t pay attention to what we were doing. Shit I roam the whole town of Sulphur Springs Texas and not once did anyone stop and ask what we were doing. And trust me their were times that I was up to no good. Plus you were more likely to be snatched up then compared to now.
My kids walk the streets and sometimes might be outside past dark. And we have shit for sidewalks. They don’t even have sidewalks leading to the schools. But every school year tons of little kids are walking to school. It’s up to the drivers to pay attention. Example there is a Daylight Donuts right across the street from the school. Also a red light. You have to be careful because these kids are dumb and will just start crossing the road not looking at all. I at least told my kids. The cemetery is full of people who had the right away.
I am sick of nosey people that won’t let kids be kids. I like to blame boomers but they’re Genxers that have that mentality to.
I’m an older millennial. My gen x mom let me go wherever I wanted. If I wasn’t back when she said to be, she’d come find me and beat my ass.
I fortunately grew up in a neighborhood with sidewalks, but we went well beyond our neighborhood.
Shit, I walked 10 miles to a gas station along the railroad tracks to meet girls and steal beer when I was 12 years old. Eventually one was built right in front of my house and I didn’t have to go that far anymore, thank goodness.
I wouldn’t have learned to navigate people if I hadn’t had such freedom. I can see trouble coming from a mile away. I would imagine inexperience will make for some naive people when it comes to knowing danger.
We would follow railroad tracks for miles, and explore the woods. I didn’t get into alcohol, but I did sneak smokes. I had a habit of breaking into abandoned homes and exploring them. I quit that when we once broke into a home that had looked abandoned but clearly was lived in. Scared me straight for awhile. But we did rob an old warehouse that had left behind nails used for nailguns. We took those and built a tree house using them and wood we found outback. I still remember doing that as I imagined tbat maybe we would discover a warehouse that had every Nintendo game ever made. Of course never found such a place. But did love the hunt.
Man, I got into smoking too. Still have the habit.
We robbed a delivery truck and took several boxes of camel cigarettes. Our little clubhouse was amazing. We built it from old chicken pens and an old chicken coop. The walls were made from an old above ground swimming pool. The backside had a floor, the front was just dirt. We had a couch, a tv, an N64, and an extension cord we ran across the creek and hung from a tree to power it all.
We hid the cigarettes under the floorboards, along with a poorly dried pot plant we stole from the best grower in town (who eventually started putting signs in front of them, “don’t steal this one, don’t steal this one, steal this one”).
My god I’d love to go back for a little while.
I quit smoking almost 10 years ago. My club house was bad ass. We had an elevator and one part had this huge heavy duty fishing neat thar we “found” and made it a four person hammock. We play our own versions on D&D, since some older kids we knew wouldn’t let us play. But one of them was kind enough to teach us just enough so we could create our own. I had lot of fun in the early 90’s. One good thing is there wasn’t all the social media around and camera either. You just lived in the moment. Riding our bikes and just living for the day. I too miss those times. Even my kids didn’t get to experience life the way we did.
Man, the cameras and the constantly being connected to everyone has flipped the world upside down.
I get it. I just put cameras up because a neighbor came over to tell me that some man was peaking into my 16 year old daughter’s window.
I just wish we had done all of this differently.
I don’t know. Just getting old I guess. It’s hard to see this as better.
I’ve always thought about this comment that Kurt Cobain made, he was talking about going into thrift stores and finding little treasures, and after he became wealthy that was over for him. He was bored with getting whatever he wanted.
We now live in a time where even the rarest shit is just a click away. Nothing about the world seems special anymore.
I don’t know. I remember my grandparents talking about this kind of thing. Maybe I’m just getting old. I just wish my kids could have the freedom that I had, completely and totally.
i dont get why
Because control. It’s all about control.
If i do t know it it must be bad. Ic i dont control it it must ve dangerous. Its like an elemental kernel level xenophobia.
realized he wasn’t experiencing withdrawal and dropped that. Well, now he has to prove that he will have detectable amounts in his system for up to a year, and then they’re going to MAKE him go back on suboxone to keep his son.
If they’re going to do tests, why not just check for the presence of illegal drugs?
Some people do abuse it. I didn’t get how for a long time. I’ve been taking it for a decade or better now and I swear I get nothing from it but avoiding withdrawal.
An old friend shot it up though and died from a heart infection because of it.
But then thry woukd just be observing, not coercing.
We need to allow children to immediately and easily emancipate themselves from their parents and go live in their own apartment w caregivers via assisted living.
?
Do say more please. If nothing else, this is an interesting idea.
Children are legally a type of slave in the US, usually of their parents or guardians but sometimes of their spouse or the state. Of course this isn’t explicitly called slavery like the 13th amendment, but when we look at their rights, we can see it’s indeed how the legal process works for them. Addressing and reversing this would go a long way for abolitionism. Kids are almost never granted more power for themselves or more freedoms. Most “for the children” rhetoric tends to advocate for removing even more of their freedoms and power. It’s really really sad.
You are legally allowed to physically harm your child “within reason” (aka stopping short of whatever the law defines as child abuse in a jurisdiction). You are allowed to starve them a little, “within reason.” You can deny them any privileges you want and lock them in your house - “within reason.”
If the kid calls the police and it’s not obvious child abuse that could result in death, the police inform the kid that parents can do as they please with their children for discipline and they leave the kids with those parents.
You can deny medical care (including abortions and birth control) - “within reason.” You can force them to go to institutions and educational facilities.
Kids work and guess who legally can access their paychecks and all their money? Their parents/owners (see: Honey Boo Boo’s finances, Aaron Carter’s finances with his parents). Parents can and do withhold capital and money from their children to coerce behaviors from them. Kids work and pay income tax, yet cannot vote or run for office.
Parents can allow them to be married in MANY US states. An adult having sexual relations with their spouse who is a minor is EXEMPT from statutory rape laws (and let’s acknowledge the human trafficking element of this). A child in a marriage contract often then belongs to their spouse instead of their parent and must similarly ask their spouse for help and permission. Because marriage contracts are contracts, kids have a hard time divorcing as minors due to this, let alone accessing legal representation itself.
Kids have almost no capital or power by design. Until kids can get rights, this country will be fucked up. We cannot raise humans in a slave environment and then expect them to not have learned helplessness and issues. Kids should be able to emancipate themselves immediately and easily to live in their own apartment with social workers (wearing bodycams, subject to randim audit or audit based on reports) who check on them as appropriate for their age. Parents should have VERY limited rights to their children compared to present day, and CHILDREN instead should be granted rights to their parents which they can waive, or be compensated for if the parent is unable to fulfill their obligations. Obviously child marriage should be illegal.
Children should NOT be their parent’s property. Children should belong to themselves.
This would also help with fostering/“adoption”, which is kinda human trafficking (and I’ve had family be adopted, so I am familiar that the adoptive parents don’t see it like this) and which trades the child around like they have no rights at all and like they are property. If a child had rights to their birth parents (or to emancipate themselves), they can then leave bad adoptive parents.
The entire adoption system is actually wild if you think about it - eg antiabortion clinics convince poor women to adopt out through a sister agency which explicitly is also Christian and adopts these kids into Christian homes (a requirement by the agency). The adoptive parents pay the agency, which takes a cut of that money and then gives a little to the birth mom for medical expenses. It’s just converting children to Christianity (often white Christians taking Native American/Latino indigenous American’s babies) via making everyone poor, not giving the bio parents or child charity directly, and denying medical access unless they sell their kid.
Give children rights.
Also, giving kids the right to vote would be a start in the right direction. No taxation without representation, and we have child actors and performers paying millions in taxes. They deserve representation. Maybe they’d vote to change the laws so their parents (owners) weren’t legally entitled to their money or bodies.
Bonus policy idea regarding education: https://lemmy.world/post/19553029/12277181
Ok, alright. This is one of the most interesting things I’ve ever read in my life.
I don’t know that I agree with you 100%, and even though some of what you said gave me pause, A lot of what you said made me think.
I mean, kids are easily manipulated. The wrong kind of people could take advantage of things, and even if you think you have all of your bases covered, people will surprise you.
I mean, this is definitely worth thinking about. I knew abused kids when I was growing up that had no power. The friend that I mentioned in one of the comments above, he lived In constant hell, had no one seriously advocating for him, and would have been trapped in that situation if his parents hadn’t been put in prison.
I don’t know that I agree that children should be able to vote. When I was a child, if I had been able to vote, I didn’t know a damn thing about politics, and I didn’t fucking care, but my parents sure as shit did. I believed that I was a little warrior for Jesus and I’m an atheist now. I would seriously regret any votes that I would’ve made as a child.
I don’t know, I wish that the person who downvoted you hadn’t downvoted you, I wish they had shared their views on the matter.
This is a very interesting subject
Thank you! I have thought about this topic a lot because of many homeless people, former foster kids, former adopted kids, and former abused kids I have spoken with.
Most kids are fine being around even shitty caregivers. It takes a LOT for a kid to even desire to want to leave, and when we factor in legal consequences for their parents and the legal process, they are not able to leave, and their parents have reasons to block it. If we just had apartments for them that they could go to, no judgement, no hassle, no worries that they will send their mom and dad to jail for 10 years, it would prevent a lot of pain. And ofc they can always deal with the legal stuff later if they want to. Asking an abused kid actively being abused to make these huge legal decisions to escape abuse is too much, they should be able to just leave safely - and return safely per their own judgement.
Could I get a free apartment as well?
Everyone deserves housing. This is something ants and bees have mastered. I am as good as an ant - ofc I think you can have free housing
He’s not allowed to have his girlfriend around them
Wait what? That’s a thing?
When we were kids and we’d discuss what we wanted to be when we grew up, his answer was, “my mom’s murderer.”
😨
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’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
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!
Maybe it would be safer for kids to walk places if you didn’t have pedos embedded in your whole infrastructure
Wow people are just seeing pedophiles everywhere and missing the places they actually are.
I got raped by my mom and people in my group when i did therapy were mostly raped at home or with family.
The walk outside is the safest part of growing up for people at actual risk.Find another thing to latch onto.
Eh idk, I was nearly snatched off the street by a stranger, very similar to the Morgan Nick case, back in 1998. Virtually every park in the US has creeps patrolling it looking for homeless, especially kids. See Emily Perez case - she ran away to a local park and was taken from there by an unknown person who likely monitors the park for such things.
World isn’t as safe as you’d think.
I am not denying that outliers exist. I had a coworker get kidnapped 3 times. She said one time a car just drove up against her and then the guy shoved her in the trunk. Apparently A homeless person freaked out seeing it and helped her out of the trunk. Horrifying and also i dont hear stories like that with the frequency of family rapes.
The world is not safe and thats my point. We can have people helping but people seeing predators everywhere doesnt help other than help legitimize authoritarian behavior meant to “fix” the issues that arent helped by ignoring where the actual bulk of predatory behavior on children occurs.
We can help both groups but we should be honest about it.Side conversation but the homeless’s societal role as witnesses and helpers is a major part of why fascists want to get rid of them. I literally feel safer walking by myself if there’s visible campers nearby than if the street is totally empty. Many really do see a lot and help a lot.
The world isn’t safe, and acknowledging that reality (including frequency, ie if it really isn’t often) means we can thoughtfully address it. Yeah for a kid being SA’d at home, being outside is indeed safer for the most part, but it isn’t completely safe. I often still get harassed as an adult woman by random men - idk how they would treat a lone little girl if they are approaching my mean ass like that. Further, I was groped by thousands, literally thousands, of strangers as a kid, particularly in lines and crowds. It’s a LOT of people who molest kids.
Fascists will use ANY excuse to enact fascism though, it’s not the fault of people identifying and describing danger. Fascists are narcissists working together, and their type of fascism is what gives them narcissistic supply. Narcissistic supply is essentially a drug addiction, something they compulsively seek out.
Honestly no one knows and maintains the streets like the people that live on them.
But having been homeless and hung out with those people they are usually good people but I’d love a system that helps provide them housing as they need it if they want and people that live and work in an area taking some responsibility to maintaining it as well.
But yeah i dont think the world can ever be truly safe, and the idea of powering your way to it is an addictive falsehood. Overstating the danger and being afraid enough to give that power to others is dangerous though.
Let’s not overblown the issue… The kid is more likely to be murdered by a car and driver getting away than molested.
It seems a lot of times kids are molested parents are in on it or too stupid to see it. Randos molesting kids seems to be rare. It is people in positions of authority who do it most of the time.
As disgusting as that is.
You need plausible deniability and proximity to get away with abuse of kids, and parents have the most of both.
However, I was groped thousands of times as a kid in lines by strangers. And I mean THOUSANDS. To this day I do not like strangers standing behind me.
I was almost nearly abducted off the street as a kid.
So yes, strangers can still be an issue, even if parents and other people with more proximity are more often the bigger issue.
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.
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
By this logic, the movie “Stand By Me” should be rated X.
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.
Swede here, the day before I started school my mom and I walked the route she wanted me to go to get to school.
This route lead across a railroad crossing and several road crossings.
I was 6.
At 10 we were allowed to bike to and from the school.
Sixty-year-old American here. Same for me, but I only remember walking with the other kids. There was a group of us, and we picked up other kids on the way to school. I didn’t ask questions, that’s just how we did it.
Almost 50 years ago I started riding my bike to school, 1.4 miles away, at 7 years old. I had a cross a relatively busy road but there was a light and crosswalk. I was a little younger than probably most parents would allow that much freedom but it certainly wasn’t anything people would consider criminal. The fact that the mother in this article got arrested and charged is crazy to me.
47 year old American. When I was 10-11 I would ride my bike multiple miles to a friend’s house and back, including a section along a busy highway. As a parent, I had my kids walk a little over a mile to their elementary school starting at ages 6 and 8.
43 year old American who at 10 would ride a bike over a mile to school and spent my summers pretty much going wherever I wanted on my bike or walking. But things have definitely changed.
People have forgotten their own childhood and see kids on their own as troublemakers. Or like in this case, they feel they know better than parents.
We’ve also given up what little walkability we had to wider streets with higher speed limits. The small town where I grew up has significantly more people and more and larger intersections. Many of the roads have also been widened.
Finality, policing has changed. At least where I grew up officers were members of the community. They were there to uphold the law and would rather take you home or talk to your parents than charge or detain you. It would have been national news for a cop to handcuff and detain a 10-14 year old, now it is expected and celebrated. IMO policing is a profession that has lost its humanity. They are enforcers, not peace officers.
I’m with you on this one, the situation would be almost comical, if it weren’t so pathetic. When I was really young (Grades 1-3), busybodies in my neighbourhood petitioned for buses to be started because of ‘hazardous traffic’ caused by the expansion of a nearby arterial route. The irony being that the road which was being rebuilt (widened) was not in between the neighbourhood and school, but on the the very far bordering edge, and would not be crossed by any students on their way to school.
So it was that I, and dozens of others, started getting bussed 5 blocks to school ‘for safety reasons’. I now know people whose houses border the field adjacent to the school at which their children attend, who drive them to the front doors every single day.
