In fairness to the current generation of parents in their late 30s to early 50s, violent crime spiked dramatically in the 1990s and has only recently returned to 1960s levels, and people cement their worldviews in their teenage / early 20s and rarely change their minds afterwards. So as faulty of a process as their reasoning is, they did grow up in a generation of the most violent crime our nation has dealt with in recent history; add that to the media frenzy (and that weird obsession / fear of satanism in the late 90s too) and you get a generation of overprotective parents.
[0]: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/dec...
CPS's only reason for existence, and only reason for their funding is "investigating" child abuse. Now you might say, but there's many more serious ones they'll also investigate. Well, yes, but there's serious incentives against doing actual serious cases:
1) they'll fail very often (a sad truth is that nearly all psychiatric treatments fail, and on children, well read on ...)
2) there's a lot of risk (violent children and parents, sometimes families and friends, or the patients may organize against their "carers", read on ...)
3) there's often no solution (e.g. bad living arrangements because parents don't have money. Can't be fixed of course by psychiatric treatment. Bad attitude because teachers are racist. There is a dizzying array of problems that look psychological from a distance but aren't)
And keep in mind they can get out of nearly anything by either not finding a problem or declaring some case done.
So how you solve these problems, as an organisation ? FOR the organisation, of course, not for the children:
("after all if the organisation doesn't exist anymore people are no longer protected. Therefore the organisation's protection must come first" is the excuse used by the smarter bureaucrats)
1) You just don't take actual cases, and use threats to make up the numbers.
When there is no actual problem, it's very easy to treat kids, especially with the threat of incarceration or permanent "placement" to make kids and parents say whatever you want them to say.
Ironically you can recognize this easily. Real psychiatric treatments succeed in something like 10% of cases at most (sucks, but that's the truth. On children, it's even less and the most important factor that determines success is whether the mother is administering or at least assisting treatment). Any organisation that reports 20% effectiveness or more is abusing it's position this way, and making patients lie to escape them.
Any director that demands realistic figures from his organisation would be fired on the spot because of that unfortunate truth, that most people can't be helped.
2) Again you just don't take these cases. How do you do that ? Well, when kids or parents are violent, they are immediately declared cured (as happened in Arnhem just yesterday [2]). Because the organisation can't expect its employees to deal with violence and it never has the means to secure their employees either (besides you can't really protect against violence 24/7. Think about that for a bit, because you'll see it's obviously true and it'll raise many questions you really should be asking). So they pretty much have to.
3) They actually don't want these cases, because nothing will work. So they try to keep these people out. There's the additional problem that too many of these people have nothing to lose, so they will come out and try to expose the problems of CPS.
This has one BIG exception. The other side of CPS is of course people who want children. Foster parents. They can't, or won't, get them the regular way, and of course group 3) is a good source of children, because they're unable to defend themselves legally, and there's DAMN many of them. Problem is, this will go badly wrong with children that are above a certain very young age (because they'll understand what is being done to them and when that happens, of course a significant portion uses violence against foster parents, and anyone and anything around them. Can you blame them ?). Hence the constant effort by CPS organisations to change the laws so they can interfere sooner and sooner in the life of a child. Right into the womb [1]
The truly terrible part of foster parents is that becoming foster parents ... they may do that for criminal reasons (worst case because they're paedophiles that want access to and power over children). CPS of course, is heavily incentivized to cover this up. Unless you think it is good for a government department, whose only useful currency is making politicians look good, to admit they handed children over to paedophiles, sometimes with handcuffs around the childrens' wrists. It is equally obvious to see that this will, inevitably, happen to these services.
And of course there is a group where CPS actually help: parents are human. They may die. They may get ill to the point they can't take care of children. They may run away, for whatever reason. They may be taken away by other parts of the state, like the criminal justice system or adult psychiatry. This of course, can never be a reason to use the violence of CPS institutions against these children (which is done anyway, of course), but this is presumably a good use for foster parents. But this is a tiny minority of children in "protection" everywhere.
In most places CPS is also used as a correctional facility for criminal youth. This may or may not be separate from regular CPS, although it mostly isn't. Also, in many places, for children, acting against CPS decisions is pretty much the only possible crime a child can commit. This, of course, was instituted at the request of CPS in most cases (coincidence ? Hah !).
Obviously at a high level the CPS organisation will maximize incoming money and size of the organisation, while minimizing having it's employees in contact with the disincentives.
So anybody at the top of this organisation has only one option available to them. "Treat" as many innocent kids as possible, and stay as far away as possible from actual problems, with the exception of forms of abandonment, and provide people who want them with a source of children.
Now there's a slight issue with that. Treating those kids (past a certain level) ... means kidnapping them and locking them up against their will. Which, of course, is very traumatic, which is why the threats work. An issue is that this does of course cause long term psychological damage to those children, but ...
If there is a very public case of child abuse, they'll send someone out to "deal" with that one specifically, of course.
Last big problem for any form of CPS is of course that they lock up and take power away from children and parents. Remind you of anyone ? Right: CPS attracts, of course, child abusers and paedophiles, for reasons that are entirely obvious to anyone (they usually pay dismally, so people working there are doing it for other reasons). This goes from their own employees being more than a little bit prone to psychological or outright sexual abuse of interned children, but doesn't stop there: pimps have always found CPS institutions to be a very rich recruiting ground. And as pointed out above, foster parents don't always have good motives, or to put it another way: some portion of them are paedophiles that want to rape kids.
CPS is of course dependent on their public image, and therefore heavily disincentivized to police this, and heavily incentivized to choose the side of the paedophiles and abusers when they do get caught. The alternative is admitting that a LOT of child abuse happens within CPS itself, which of course leads to the question if they're making things better or worse in the total.
Because of the incentives for CPS, there can however be no doubt: child services makes things a LOT worse for kids. It is a necessity for a tiny, tiny minority of kids, which is the excuse used.
That's why you see this, a case combining half the problems: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/norways_hidden_s....
a) important child services director turns out to be ... a paedophile. Has been for decades "enjoying child porn" (his words)
b) has been assigned kids into his care
c) those kids are kept with him, youth services sees no reason to change that despite child porn conviction (needless to say, they have placed kids for far less)
d) child services actually defends the person in court and doesn't extract punishment. He is politely asked to leave the child services council, nothing more
e) child services tries to buy parents' silence by offering them their kids back (a bit of conjecture, of course, but ... does anyone really believe anything else happened there ?)
And this is in Norway. I don't know for sure, but it seems to me the situation in the US is very likely to be worse.
If you look for it but a little bit, you will find that child services organisations everywhere have gotten caught in incredible scandals.
These incentives mean, of course, that you just cannot morally risk having these organisations at all. You just cannot allow non-voluntary psychological aid.
[1] http://rotherhamscb.proceduresonline.com/chapters/p_sg_babie.... (they're having an international conference about what people should call "stealing babies right from the womb")
[2] https://nos.nl/artikel/2265037-arnhemse-vader-die-zoon-ombra.... (in dutch, but ...) TLDR: parent turns violent against youth care and adult psychiatric care, is immediately declared "cured" ("uitbehandeld") and three months later grabs a sword and attempts to murder his family. Son is dead, 2 others escaped.
[2 bis] one of the stories of a kid that has some wrong friends. Mom alerts youth care, eventually the kids gets placed after getting caught stealing more than a few times. Kid organises her "group" and the group attacks the staff with makeshift knives. Declared cured within a week (without, of course, any CPS employee seeing this kid to make such a diagnosis), dumped back with mother.
I'm sorry, I didn't read the rest of your wall. However, I certainly blame TV. Specifically John Walsh in the 1980's[0]. He scared the crap out of a lot of people in the 80's. Every neighbor was a potential pedophile, murderer, rapist and so you saw a shift in the way people parented.
[0] The guy's kid was abducted and murdered, so I get he did what he felt he needed to do.
The mass media and entertainment may play a role. Everyone can probably name several scenes or news events where a parent takes their eyes off a kid for 5 seconds and the kid is missing and it becomes a disaster. Those have major emotional impact and may influence real-life parent and neighbor behavior.
The paranoia has extended so far that Amber Alerts, which are almost always people known to the kid or the kid's family taking the kid (not really forcefully abducting, and not intending harm, many times just custody disputes or relatives who think they know better), are broadcast region-wide. I remember some idiotic website over a decade ago actually emailing their entire national customer list to notify them about an Amber Alert. And this was a long time ago. This paranoia has been creeping up for a long, long time, and it's not doing any favors for today's youth.
For every kid this level of vigilance saves from serious harm, I suspect it emotionally and psychologically cripples many more.
Here's my hypothesis
1. Paradoxically, because life is safer. You're less likely to die of a disease, starvation, birth condition, injury, etc. which makes your safety and health more controllable. So it gets controlled.
2. Fewer people have kids. After having kids, most people get more lax because they realize that children are remarkabley robust and also impossible to control 100% of the time.
3. People that do have kids have fewer of them. There's the cynical "we've got backups" angle, but also the "we can't monitor every single minute for every single kid". My wife is the oldest of 10 children. The dynamics of that family are very different than a 1 or 2 child family. There's a lot more compromise, by necessity.
4. Media exposure has increased the sense of danger. Each seat belt lapse, kidnapping, SIDS incident, etc. has 100 times the reach it used to, while the unexpectional cases are obviously not reported on.
We used to build spears from old broomsticks and shields from rusty trash can lids and ride our bikes down hills at one another jousting each other off the bikes. I remember one hot summer day we actually figured out how to make our own fires by rubbing sticks, sparking rocks and using a lot of very dry pine needles. We then cooked ourselves some random veggies we stole from a neighbors garden. It tasted absolutely disgusting but of course everyone said it was delicious.
I don't get why so many people in our generation turned into complete snowflakes with their kids (don't forget our generation is also responsible for "gender neutral parenting").
You’re ranting about the wrong target. The parent in this story trusted their children with an appropriate amount of independence. An unknown adult was the one who complained.
Also, these days, a parent "watching" their kid(s) means proximity, not awareness. The parent may be within view, but that's useless when they're glued to their phone a good percentage of the time and only glance up now and then.
Article is about a 3 year old. I don’t think any issue would arise if a 7-10 year old did the same today.
I think CPS has too much power here, to intervene in a case where there was no obvious harm.
Where you grew up, when you grew up, what was the population size and density vs. today?
I'm a bit older, and had a similarly free-range childhood. The town I grew up in was on the fringes of farmland, on the edge of suburban sprawl. There wasn't even enough people yet for rush hour traffic to be congested.
Nowadays that same town is overwhelmed with people. The streets I used to bicycle down carelessly are parking lots at rush hour. I still have family in the area, but it's a very different situation. There's more crime in absolute terms, there always will be with a larger population.
Sure the media skews the population's perception of risks, making them even less able to think rationally about the probabilities. But it's not entirely to blame. There's very real change that happens when populations grow, the context becomes entirely different.
Even if you keep crime rates constant during population growth, the absolute amount of crime happening has increased, it's visible.
By the time I moved out in my early 20s, what used to be farms we'd bicycle to and eat raw ears of sweet corn from, had all become dense suburban housing developments interrupted only by busy streets and strip malls.
I believe it's still possible to find suburban/rural fringes to raise a family, in the classical free-range fashion. But it seems like these days much of those opportunities are so economically depressed that it's prone to drugs/crime of a different sort. We don't seem to have many functioning healthy small town economies anymore, not from what I've seen anyways. It's usually a dying town with meth problems and a wal-mart somewhere on the horizon.
Obligatory "When I grew up...": When I grew up (I'm 32), there were still murderers, kidnappers, drug dealers, gangs, etc. My parents and the parents of all my friends let us roam free from the minute we finished our chores until dark. They often let us decide for ourselves how we wanted to get our lunch, dinner, snacks, etc. We could choose our own transportation, our own paths. I treasured that freedom.
What's crazy is that it's my same generation of parents that now seem to be doing the policing. I had "heard" of this happening around me, but I was still dumbfounded when it first happened to me. One Summer, my 6 year old was playing in the front yard. My wife was sitting inside on the couch in front of the window so she could keep an eye on her when suddenly the neighbor walks up to my daughter, grabs her hand and brings her to the front door. "Did you know your daughter was playing outside alone?" in a very accusatory tone. This isn't a call to CPS, but it still made us feel both angry and ashamed.
As a Utah resident, one thing I'm happy to see is the new "Free Range Parenting" law [1]. I still think it's crazy that it was needed, but I think in today's parenting culture it really, really is.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Family/utahs-free-range-parenting...