I wouldn't let my kid do it here in US. Not because I wouldn't trust them or think it is dangerous. But because I am afraid what neighbors, school, CPS would do.

In grade school, my sister and I and our friend would sometimes spend the entire day in the woods in the dead of winter. The real danger in this country isn't the criminal and the bogeyman. The real danger in this country is the evaporation of real community and a broken pseudo-society of mutual disdain suspicion. Who is your real community? If you had a pet, who could you ask to watch your pet for a week? Who would you ask to watch your kids for an afternoon for no payment? That's your real community. Large numbers of Americans have no real community at all.

But apparently you are never safe from neighbors with an agenda.

Because they are "neighbors" and you are not in real community with them.

it kind of harkens to reeducation camps, etc. It means diverging their thought process from their parents' way of thinking. This applies to Appalachia, Detroit, Volgograd or Lagos.

It's clearly not just the parents. It's the community in which people find themselves living in. Look at the examples of people who manage to raise their class standing. They usually do it by making contacts outside of their community.

I think 99pi did a story on this about green lawns. They commented that a green lawn wasn't really a status symbol for yourself, but rather your neighbors. If you let your yard grow unruly, neighbors would come and tend it for you.

The idea is that owning a home and land was the american dream, this land was where you could do what you will. The ultimate self determination. However, the reality is, that your neighbors and the HOA just want to tell you how you will manicure your home. So in reality, people who proclaim self determination are enacting a socialist policy.

When I was young, we moved into a house my dad built new on an odd shaped lot. A triangular section of what had been our lot had been purchased by the neighbor, in hopes that no one would move in and conflict with the landscaping. This neighbor came over and told my dad how the landscaping should be done, so as not to conflict with his.

My dad proceeded to do everything the opposite of what this neighbor said.

Actually, it's that they want to enforce some basic standards to ensure property values aren't diminished because of the negligence of a home owner.

There are plenty of neighborhoods in the US that don't have neighborhood Associations nor HOA's.

It does, indirectly. It is perceived that a pattern of packages being left outside attracts thieves to the neighborhood, increasing neighborhood crime rate, decreasing property values.

(That's not to say that individual HOA actions in this area are reasonable or proportional, just that there is a nexus with property values.)

One thinks of Homeowner Associations and the way they place fines and pseudo-legal orders on people, a concept which is utterly anathema to the english. The two cultures have very different ideas of privacy.

On the other hand, this protectiveness of our personal standard of parenting means that in order to enforce our standards, we must see the kids and people must defer to the parents for discipline. It almost means that because we don't allow others to impose their judgements on our kids, that they then impose their judgements on the parents.

The challenge is that, if someone sees behavior that isn't the norm in their experience, and that they personally consider (rightly or wrongly) to be insanely dangerous, what are they really to do? OK, they probably shouldn't raise a stink if some kid is riding a bike without a helmet. What if they're playing with firecrackers?

Unlike other places I've lived in, here there is a real fear that someone will dislike the way you raise your children and report you, creating much more serious problems for you than they might do elsewhere, at least not with the same ease.

I think it has a lot to do with what @stinkytaco said in his reply. It's a breakdown in communication and the same thing happens in other aspects of our lives, not just the child-rearing. I believe that this is what happens when there's so much emphasis on personal, individual freedom at the expense of larger communities those individuals form part of, all the way to the largest community -- the society itself.

It is {thing} the parent would never in a million years let their kids do (generally due to a perceived risk) and therefore other parents are actively endangering their kids if they let their kid do {thing}. Whether or not the risk exists and whether or not some small amount of risk is "better for the development of the child" (eg: independence/navigational skills developed by being able to walk to/from school unattended)

My own mother is one of those overprotective judging types. She'd never report to CPS unless it was clear-cut endangering the child (eg: physically beating them/doing hard drugs). But she still looks down on the neighbors for letting their kids play in the front lawn. The street being dangerous - kids should only play in the back yard! And only under adult supervision. My mother refuses to use a babysitter (even family) lest they let her children do something she would consider "too dangerous" or "stupid". I've gotten into a few arguments with her how I think that is doing more harm than good but they're not my kids so I don't have a say in it.

E:

And what CodeMage said. 100% agree there as well.

1. Mothers 2. Childless women 3. Fathers 4. Childless men

In other words, the ones who know the most about child rearing (in our culture, that is mothers), are the worst at assessing risk.

Leaving aside the dubious connection to knowledge about child rearing, including the suggestion that childless women have more knowledge than fathers on that point, "most prone to overestimate risks in low-risk situations" is not the same as "worst at assessing risk".

I suspect if a ranking was produced of those most likely to underestimate risk in high-risk situations, you'd get exactly the reverse ordering.

1) Mothers 2) Fathers 3) Childless women 4) Childless men

(Childless woman here, defending our honor)

IRL, anecdotally, I've found the opposite to be the case. It is almost always parents who feel something is wrong with the other person's parenting style.

I've also found it depends to be a culture desire to passive aggressively impose your will/lifestyle on other people.

Yes, the English idea of privacy is that you, the commoner, should leave well enough alone while the State surveils you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politeness_theory#Negative_pol...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbu-eMcEF3s

I suspect that -- like the reports of crimes against children that spur them -- the frequency of such excessive, busybody complaints is far less than it appears from the frequency with which one hears about them.

And yes, there may be the crazy one that will still call them, but the neighbourhood will agree _he_ is the crazy one.

> "Well I was worried for the children!". Unless they openly confessed it was because you cut the lawn wrong or they don't like the color of your house, there is nothing you can do to them

My initial thought is that I'd rather have the asshole who hates the way I cut my lawn. I can turn him into a friend. Hell, I can just start cutting my lawn the way he wants.

But the person who is convinced that rapists lurk behind every parked car will be incredibly difficult to convert. They might never agree with me that my kid is as safe riding their bike home from school as they are riding in a car with me.

I don't have kids but if I did, this is exactly the kind of nasty thing that would make me think twice about moving to the suburbs, extra space and yards be damned.

Dense cities give me the creeps.

Pardon potential classist/racial undertones of this, but seems that it could be the beginning of H.G. Wells Eloi and Morlocks. Where the Eloi are fragile and afraid and the Morlocks have freedom of movement.

Suburban children get so protected that they actually become a danger to their own progression.

Go up a few blocks to Park Slope, an extremely safe and cleaned up place, and there's no kids in sight.

Or maybe just because they've always lived there - more and more folks are living near (or with) family these days.

Which isn't the only reason to live in the suburbs, but it's a major reason for a rather significant number of people. I mean, a suburban town not far from me got started to get away from the blacks (the way the honest locals phrased it, not proudly), and that was just 50 years ago. Fear drives a lot of suburban movement.

I do however have some level of knowledge here. I have spoken with people involved in child protection about questions like this. I have been told that if this person saw a parent allowing their 11-year-old child to cross the street to play on a playground unsupervised that they would have to write it up. They backed this up with citations of specific laws (Maryland - which does, indeed, have absurd laws on this subject). So while statistics might convince me that this is an anomaly, I do have personal experience that suggests the CPS risk is real.

The society is sick. It has the moral equivalent of cancer, or some auto-immune disease, eating it from inside.

Children growing up in many neighborhoods in NYC seem more autonomous. Of course, that's technology too -- they have access to public transit and a dense bikable/walkable environment, while suburban kids are stuck living with outdated misplanned car-centric infrastructure and basically live like prisoners reliant on their parents to ferry them everywhere until they turn 16, or even much later depending on their access to driver's education.

Just one example, I'm sure there's suburbs in the US where CPS would be called if someone was biking around with their child in the back of the bike [1] but that's perfectly commonplace and OK in NYC.

[1] Here's an example of something just as bad if not worse (and doubly tragic) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radley-balko/raquel-nelson-jai...

Also in Bushwick my neighbors were very vigilant over their children, but they also knew all their neighbors as well. It's nice when the community is actually a community.

Speaking of "perceived but unreal risk"....

Then all of a sudden the teenage boy (about 15-16 years old) runs out of the house over to her and starts talking to her. The mother runs out soon after. I walk over there and they are talking to her and looking concerned at me. I walk up and the mom is yelling at me about letting my daughter outside alone. I explain to her that I was here the whole time watching. She then says that some stranger could have come up to her in which I reply, "I know. It's a good thing I was here."

My daughter said she was afraid to go in the front yard after that because she said the creepy neighbors are probably watching her. Thank goodness they moved away a few months ago.

Now maybe I had a charmed childhood, but I'm in my mid twenties, so it's not like I'm talking about growing up in the 50's here. My parents are older though, they did grow up in the 50s, and I I know they view independence as an important individual trait. I'm sure overprotective parents are not a recent phenomenon. One of my (younger) brother's friends was accompanied to and from school by his mother well in to High School. Walk, drive, riding a bike, you name it, she was there.

My mom asked her about this once, and she was like "Oh, [Declanomous's Mother], you have [Declanomous] and [Son #2]. I just have [her son]. I don't know what I'd do if anything happened to him." My mom thought this point was kind of ridiculous, because it's not as if one child is a backup for another child. She just let my brother and I run around because she wanted us to learn to do things on our own.

Personally I think the current environment vis-a-vis child rearing reflects a larger trend towards fear in overall society. Part of this is a result of a larger focus on danger in childhood development, but I feel like a whole culture around existential fear really developed after 9/11. It seems like we started viewing the entire world as dangerous, rather than being ripe for exploration. I feel like this is really noticeable when watching media from different eras. Popular TV shows before 9/11 were Seinfeld, Friends, and Fraiser. After 9/11 shows like CSI, 24, etc. became very popular.

I could be completely wrong. I know shows like Law and Order and ER were very popular before 9/11. I recall them being less existentially terrifying though. This could just be because I was very young at the time though.

Paranoia has risen because so few people have full-sized families these days. Losing one kid has become a tragedy.

It makes people uncomfortable to think about people in economic terms(1) but that doesn't mean those uncomfortable people are right.

1. We see this in many areas of society from health care funding to liability laws.

Imagine having to sit through a serious conversation in which every aspect of your home life is inspected. For example, a (former) family friend reported that in our 100-year-old house, there were some ants in our kitchen. Not thousands of ants, but a handful. Imagine having to defend this as if it was a serious threat to your children's safety by someone who could legally remove them.

Strictly speaking, AFAIK, in most jurisdictions they actually don't have the power to do so, even temporarily, on their own judgement -- they either need a warrant issued by a judge on a finding of probable cause, or law enforcement action in an emergency situation where a warrant isn't practical. So, really, the police and/or courts have the power to take your children away.

> One afternoon this past April, a Florida mom and dad I'll call Cindy and Fred could not get home in time to let their 11-year-old son into the house. The boy didn't have a key, so he played basketball in the yard. He was alone for 90 minutes. A neighbor called the cops, and when the parents arrived—having been delayed by traffic and rain—they were arrested for negligence.

> "My older one was the so-called 'victim,'" she said during a phone interview. But since she and her husband were charged with felony neglect, the younger boy had to be removed from the home, too.

If you are not liked by your neighbors, it seems like a very real risk.

That's pretty much what you just did.

There are two claims someone might make. "X is common, and it poses a meaningful risk", or "X exists, and it poses a non-zero risk". Anecdotes do not help much with the first claim, but they do help with the second.

So perhaps we can agree that child abductions CAN happen, and that CPS overreach DOES occur. Then we can review the real risks of both.

I've seen data on the real risk of child abductions. I have never seen data on the real risks of CPS overreach. (And it would be difficult to define "overreach".) Does anyone know of any such data?

(Because also, in the complete absence of actual data, anecdotes are better than nothing.)

Seriously, once you see the parallels between how parents afraid of criminals and parents afraid of CPS talk about the risks you can't un-see them.

Number of kids investigated by the CPS 3.2 million.

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/196467.pdf

Are you telling me that even though you, like me, don't know the exact percentage of the time that CPS is mistaken, you expect it to be less that 0.0036%?

First we see from the data that CPS declared 2.5 million of those 3.2 as "non-victims" so we can eliminate type 1 errors from almost 80% of the population right there.

Of the remaining 700k it's not inconceivable at all that in a big percentage of cases there were actually significant parental problems. Frankly I bet that type 2 errors are much more common that type 1 for this population.

> 2.5 million of those kids were declared 'non-victims.' Another 686,000 were 'abused' or 'neglected.' And an estimated 1,640 kids died as a result.

Their error rate on non-victims is a helluva alot higher than that.

I don't have faith their error rate for victims is much better given we don't have data for that.

That is what I responded to.

> You know how if you talk to an overprotective parent about how it's really ok to let their kids wander around outside on their own a little they're always at the ready with a link to a news story about something horrible happening? And you know how that news story is always anecdote and not data?

You implied the extent of the risk was a couple uncomfortable conversations based on an anecdote. Hypocrisy much?

Based on personal experience, I don't have much faith in the quality of CPS investigations.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/in-a-yea...

> One statistic that stood out in the report: since 2008, the number of referrals to child protective service agencies (hereafter CPS) has increased by 8.3 percent, even as overall rates of actual child victimization declined by 3.3 percent during the same period. There is no system that can totally avoid putting parents who don't deserve it through investigations, despite the fact that even the best moms and dads would regard the ordeal as nightmarish. Over time, however, the number of undeserving parents so burdened seems to be increasing–and the number is large (note that "screened out" referrals are the ones deemed not even worth investigating):

The numbers are clearly moving in the wrong direction for the rate of reporting.

> He goes on to explain that while taking kids from parents in this fashion is only permitted in emergencies as a matter of law, the way things play out in practice is very different. "According to statistics published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, more than 100,000 children who were removed in 2001–more than one in three–were later found not to have been maltreated at all,"

Given CPS investigates gets ~3.4 million complaints a year and there are ~74 million kids, a substantial number of these complaints are screened out because they are basically random/irrelevant.

I'm not in the habit of ignoring 1 in 20 odds, especially if I've got a 1 in 5 shot at it being something serious.

That is alot higher than the risk of terrorism, for instance, affecting me personally.

But when it comes to your own individual life, you can either live your life in fear of the boogeyman or you can live your life the way you want to live it. Let your kids live their lives the way you think they should.

And if CPS shows up one day when they shouldn't, you lawyer up and fight.

That's what a grownup does.

> That's what a grownup does.

The sheer condescension and lack of empathy you packed into a single comment is quite sad, tbh.

I tell you I have personal experience with CPS...and your response is I am terrified of a monster under my bed that isn't real.

K.

> And if CPS shows up one day when they shouldn't, you lawyer up and fight.

Most people can't afford $50k legal bills to fight the government. Are you really this isolated and ignorant that this doesn't even occur to you?

Look, Harry, you say things like this:

> Yes, I do think it's less than 0.0036%.

I show you the false negative rate is a helluva alot higher than that and you still spout when you clearly have no clue what you are talking about.

Just walk away before you continue to embarrass yourself.

In order to fix this we've gotta be a little defiant. If one person acts differently they're gonna be the oddball and the system is going to knock them down. Maybe it's CPS. Maybe it's a nosey neighbor. Who knows. This gets better when A LOT of people start acting differently.

Sure. If you're poor or otherwise not in a position to fight the system I don't expect you to be first in line. But I've got a dollar that says that doesn't apply to you or DanBC or some of the others in this thread. The median Hacker News reader is a white engineer with a good salary and is, more that almost anyone, in a position to stand up to the system if it causes them problems. I'm in that group too. It's our responsibility to make things better, not just for ourselves but also for the people that aren't in a position to do so on their own.

That's what I think.

Making blanket statements with numbers that in no way reflect reality doesn't embarrass you? Making statements about other people's life experiences from a position of clear ignorance of how the system works doesn't embarrass you?

I'm honestly concerned for you at that point because you remind me of that family friend my parents had that lived out in the desert and believed in conspiracy theories because he "felt" they were real.

> There is a lot of research literature that makes me pretty convinced that the way Americans raise their kids has gotten worse. We are, as a society, overprotective.

I'm waiting for your evidence that the risk is less than 0.0036% as you previously stated you "felt" it was.

> That's what I think.

I care about facts that can be reinforced by actual evidence on some level. You clearly do not have any in regards to the topic at hand.

---

The rest of it is a tangent about your opinion on "solutions" that are, ultimately, irrelevant, unless you have evidence you've succeeded with these tactics on some level politically. Do you have such evidence?

Are you even aware the burden of proof is a preponderance of evidence in many states (for instance NY?) Or that they allow hearsay which is little more than gossip?

http://www.jdbar.com/Articles/Child-Neglect/child-neglect.ht...

> For a disposition hearing, evidence need only be material and relevant, meaning that hearsay is permitted. In addition, any new facts occurring up to the date of the dispositional hearing may be considered by the court at a dispositional hearing.

---

Look, if you can't back up BOTH of your opinions with clear citations showing it is true you need to stop.

And that's ignoring the huge cost involved.

> The suspect then held the boy as the mom took a phone call, according to investigators. The suspect then walked out of the mall cradling the boy in her arms, police said.

If you ever answer your phone, it seems like a very real risk somebody will snatch up your baby.

I'm also curious if calls to CPS, etc. are more common today because suburban dwellers know their neighbors less than in the past?

This story doesn't add up. 1 hour playing in front of their house resulted in a thorough investigation conducted by the police? I'm sorry, but I don't buy it.