I feel like the investment into individual children is much much higher than it used to be (time/resources/emotions). When you have 5 kids it's not that you don't care, but you literally can't be as protective about them as you can when you're only raising one or two. And then as people have less children the norms gradually change.
The same number of kids were probably abused in a variety of ways 50 years ago. Maybe more than today, even. But what most people knew about the news was what was in the local paper and maybe they watched 30 minutes of national news on TV.
They didn't have a device in their pocket alerting them in real-time about a kidnapping story in another state.
People are not good at assessing probability of risk. If they hear about something, they think it's likely. So they get more and more afraid.
And the greatest risk isn't the stranger, it's people you know and trust. The vast, vast majority of people aren't going to harm a kid--you teach kids that if they need help they should go up to an adult and ask. That reduces the risk much further.
2021 missing-person stats:
- 94.5% (231k) runaway
- 1% (2,555) abducted by non-custodial parent
- 0.1% (331) abducted by stranger
- 4.3% (10k) adult
https://www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/kidnappings/etan-p...
What I worry about is CPS and police officers claiming child endangerment. In my state you can be charged with child endangerment just for leaving the kid strapped into the seat on a moderate day while you walk in to pay the gas station attendant. You could potentially be arrested and charged for letting a 7 year old play alone at the park for a bit.
The kidnappers are real. But they're the CPS and police, and they can't wait to put your kids into a brutal kids-for-cash foster care system. They draw their salary under the guise of "safety" while victimizing children and sapping their independence. And busybodies everywhere have a device at the ready in their pocket, that allows them to invite months of scrutiny into your life based on 30 seconds of effort on their own part, after which the law prevents you from finding their identity or facing your accuser.
There were definite benefits to the Boomer outlook at the time: smog was curtailed, health-conscious diet and regular exercise became a popular idea(albeit heavily fad-driven). But it also created a more litigious, low-trust climate, which has only driven in the alienation further. Today's political climate is a sort of crescendo on all those concerns, and I see in the current working-age generations much greater willingness to change the deal.
Our era is just different.
Your time investment is even greater value (to you) since you have less out-of-work time overall.
Why, and is this important and or a problem? BTW, I don't claim to have an answer.
How many times have you seen someone saying they were afraid walking down the sidewalk because... someone else was also walking down the sidewalk?
People fear flying for psychological reasons of control/helplessness, not for logical statistical reasons. Fear of 'scary' death is like the negative version of the inaccurate and over-optimistic math that causes people to buy lottery tickets.
It's OK to feel nervous if you run into someone unexpected outside, everyone gets that way sometimes. It's how you handle that feeling.
Because CPS will come and you'll be charged with child endangerment if you let your kid have "too much" independence. And naturally the kids will ask questions about why they can't do this or that, and many people will know "because CPS would take you away" is a bad answer (or one the kid will ignore) so they lie about the dangers. It's a shit sandwich situation to be in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-range_parenting#Legal_pro...
How often does that actually happen?
If you search for something as simple as "charged for leaving child at park" there's no shortage of anecdata, and many if not most aren't something crazy like abandonment.
The laws in my state are vague enough that parents can and have been criminally charged for merely letting a confident 7 y/o play at the park while they briefly ran an errand. Unfortunately the state doesn't keep statistics like "how often did we frivolously charge parents."
Okay so you don't know and if we look at the numbers this is just fear mongering.
Not OP, I don't think it's fear mongering. The actual numbers are immaterial, all that matters is whether parents are scared that this might happen. If they're scared, they'll avoid leaving their children unattended. As a former educator I can confirm that many parents are scared, and that this fear is likely to continue so long as stories of these laws being enforced hit the news once every few years. We can average 1-2 cases every few years and as long as they get the right broadcast, that's all it takes.
This is the definition of fear mongering.
https://imprintnews.org/child-welfare-2/nearly-half-of-child...
You've made the assertion "if we look at the numbers this is just fear mongering." Now it's time to show your proof, what is the numbers. I'm very curious because my own state keeps no statistics on what percent of their charges are frivelous.
Of the 73M children in america - Of which 7.9 million children went through CPS - Of which 16% were substantiated (1.2M) and received services - 22.9 percent of those (275k) were removed from their home.
Unfortunately, again, you were unable to provide what percent of charges (or in your presentation, removals) are actually frivolous. You counter a very small chance of stranger kidnapping (less than 1k a year) with "legitimate" CPS kidnapping at 275k a year. Orders of magnitude more relevant -- Wow!
So you have really no data to present here, other than a ceiling of roughly 5% chance at the worst, which is absolutely bone-chillingly large. Plenty significant enough to take it seriously when you see people being charged for letting their kid play at the park. People take precautions about pools and guns, etc, both of which have a lower percent chance than our possible CPS ceiling here of unexpectedly removing the child from your arms.
The CDC reports that between 140,000 – 710,000 hospitalizations per year are due to the flu. No one out there is saying that it's "sky high".
> Of course CPS will claim basically all those removals are valid, but we have very little independent third party verification to see if that is actually the case.
This is actually just nonsense.
> "legitimate" CPS kidnapping
This is just a deranged position to take.
> So you have really no data to present here, other than a ceiling of roughly 5% chance at the worst, which is absolutely bone-chillingly large.
While we're here I would also like to talk about how many of those 275k a year are sacrificed to the God of the Deepest Waters, Lord of Whales (and Wales), The Evercrescent. A vast number I'm sure!
Look we know when this stuff happens, they've got records and the CPS has been taken to court (and they've lost!). But unless you're talking about black or native american families, the amount is so minimal as to not warrant this fear mongering.
Hard times create strong people
Strong people create good times
Good times create weak people
Weak people create hard timesCould you share a link or something on that topic? I'm curious.
Certainly, the concept long-predates the internet. A bit like the yin/yang symbol, where there's a little "dot" of one color inside the other, symbolizing a similar cyclical concept of one arising from the other.
Though I suppose I like it this way — kinda like the updated Star Trek "To boldly go..." for TNG (:
And I totally agree with you. Same with the "everyone gets a participation trophy" bullshit - it's not the kids, it is the parents. Kids don't have control over that.
The answer is "the media." There's a saying in media, "If it bleeds, it leads." Meaning horrible stories are the best stories. And so, with the advent of the 1980s and cable, then with internet exploding media channels in 2000, the world is awash with bad stories. And it seeps into society.
People get in actual trouble now if they let their child walk 1 mile to school and if it is elementary school. Police car trouble.
The actual crime rate is way, way declined over time, across the board. However, the perception of crime rate is it is going up.
So parents want to protect their children against all these manufactured bad things.
I marvel at this logic. Who raised the present younger generation?
Children didn't make the rules that they can't buy train tickets. They weren't born afraid. Their resiliency hasn't been molded yet.
The question isn't "why are kids this way?" The question is "why are we raising children this way when we weren't raised this way ourselves?"