Why do you think they might not have been doing this capriciously in this specific case? The department admitted the stop was over-reach, even before the parents found out the officers had called child proctective services on the parents over walking outside. Is that demonstrating a reasonable concern for well-being? I surely want to have the right to let my kids walk around outside, and I believe that there is no U.S. law that limit this right, nor should there be one.
And yet, this is where things are headed: https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/60624/young-adults-are-strugg...
Beyond whether parents have a right to do this or not is whether or not children can grow into resilient, confident, independently-thinking citizens. And what we have is not.
Maybe I don’t understand the distinction you made then. If you can’t distinguish them legally, then what is the difference you’re talking about? Are you saying that well-being is safety, and police can and should be able to arrest people & parents for failing to be well?
I am most definitely not saying that well-being is safety, but that it seems the way people are talking about it now conflate those. I am not necessarily talking about police enforcement (though I would not be surprised if sometime in the near future, police are using well-being as a criteria for safety). Rather, I am talking about parenting style. That is something the author of that article is talking about in the broader sense; the author of that article also authored a book about "free range parenting", and why it is needed.
Safety is something that is easier to see, though I think is still problematic. There are statutes and precedence that describes levels of safety in different context. For example, from this site (https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-def...)
> An adult caring for a child has a legal responsibility to ensure that child is free from unreasonably dangerous situations. When an adult caregiver fails to adequately protect a child, states often punish this as a crime known as "child endangerment."
> Child endangerment occurs whenever a parent, guardian, or other adult caregiver allows a child to be placed or remain in a dangerous, unhealthy, or inappropriate situation. Some states charge this crime as a type of child abuse.
Note that generally, the legal responsibility here is for the circumstances, that is, the situation external to the child. (With the original article that started all of this, the question is, what circumstances are "unreasonable"?)
But what is well-being? Well-being is not the circumstances, but rather what someone experience.. Because it is not describing a circumstance, it's not something that is as easy to observe, measure, or intervene. People can (and probably will try) to use circumstances as a proxy for someone's well-being, and as such, start using the criteria already in use for "safety" as a (poor) proxy for "well-being". Because we are using safety and circumstances as a proxy for "well-being", that scenario where police starts interpreting things that way is ... not at all surprising to me, if it starts happening. Another scenario is that police enforces child safety, but it does nothing for the child's well-being.
More broadly, our society had been fairly poor about taking "well-being" into account. Setting aside the well-being of children, we also have the well-being of students, employees, livestock, family, community and ecology. Our society is setup to organize resources and means of production. Year after year, people are less and less able to participate in their own well-being, and even more importantly, less able to participate in the well-being of the community they belong to. Despite that, there are greater call for "well-being" popping up in news articles or comments from people.
Well-being is how well a living system is capable of ... well, living. If a living system is unable to live, it enters into a degenerate spiral, and dies. This isn't just the physical or biological, and includes emotional well-being and mental well-being. (There's a lot more to explore from here, such as the mental health epidemic of teenagers and young adults going on right now).
Furthermore, living systems are anti-fragile (up to a point). They grow stronger with a certain level of stress. To put it in a different way, trees grow strong because wind will occasionally shake it. The trees that grew in Biosphere 2, having grown without wind, are all fragile.
I'm not advocating you deliberately go out and shake the tree, or put a child in stressful situations. Life will already do that, naturally. And one of the best ways to do that, is to let a child have the opportunity to be independent, where they have to figure things out for themselves. My view on this is that, my job as a parent is not to remove and erase all risks, but rather, curate the environment of any catastrophic risks. The kind where a child cannot easily recover from. You gradually open up the environment to greater challenges as a child grows into their own ability to handle them.
That is difficult to do when child endangerment laws and the ways interpretation of "safety" has been shifting.
Hahah, good one.
Neither of us were there. There are people who genuinely believe in this kind of safety of children.
I've read other articles like this before, and I happen to agree with this author and what this author advocating for. This goes beyond whether parents have the right to let kids go and walk on their own. It has a lot more to do about raising kids that can gain gain the kind of resiliency, grit, self-confidence, independent-thinking from being able to do stuff on their own. My kids will need to be able to do that when they grow into adults, because I am not always going to be there to be their safety net. One day, I will die, and it is their turn to make choices, to vote, to navigate their own lives, and to help raise the next generation.
So besides just advocating for changes in laws, there is a lot more to this kind of parenting than being protected by law to do so, including methods for parent this way when the laws in ones jurisdiction are not necessarily supporting this kind of parenting.
There is an article that describes what happened, which included the department officially stating the event was over-reach.
Maybe some people do think children shouldn’t be allowed to walk outside, and maybe those people are causing us to raise children ill-prepared for adulthood. I did not question whether such people exist, what I questioned is your conclusion that the existence of such people suggests the police were justified. The police should not be those people, and they do know better institutionally, even if individual officers overstep. The U.S. police force has no legal basis for threatening or arresting parents when kids are unaccompanied, there’s no law requiring parents to accompany kids, whether or not there is concern for their well being. Which is why their department admitted they made a mistake…
Instead, the cops left the children who were supposedly in mortal peril to go harass the parents.
These parents are rewarding their kids to go to Dunkin Donut on their own. In their judgement, it was safe enough to do so. If they wanted to be sure, they could have snuck behind them (but they would have to make sure they are not caught doing so, otherwise it would shatter the emerging confidence of the kids).
The one where the cop straight up told the husband 'If she talks to me again, I'm going to arrest you both and take away your kids.'
Yeah, totally not on a power trip. Definitely. Just doing it for the public good.
While police overreach is an issue, I think that misses the deeper problems that gave rise to this. I have linked a different article in other comments here and elsewhere about the current epidemic of mental health issues teenagers and young adults, and the possible link to not being able to have some kind of childhood independence. Such young adults are not well adapted to the uncertainties of life.
Whatever his intentions behind that statement, that’s what someone on a power trip would say. Not in any way caring about the content, just the utterance of another word would have caused her arrest and the kids taken away.
Forgetting the fact that someone was already arrested as is. For this.
This is prime epitome of a power trip and it amazes me to see someone try to defend it as anything but.
In my view, that is the smaller issue of the bigger issues at play. The author of the article, and what he is advocating for, is broader than that, but hey, if people are motivated to act and speak out because of this, sure, why not?
There are lots of things you can’t tell just by text.
Who said anything about defending this? I happen to agree with the author of that article, including things she did not elaborate on in the article as an advocate of free range parenting.
It boggles my mind that people seem to read things that are not said.
If one person misreads something, maybe they just misread it. If multiple people misread something, then maybe it wasn't expressed well in the first place.
I say, "there are deeper issues at play", yet people are so attached to the idea that this is about police overreach.
Go to the end of the article to the author's link to her foundation, Let Grow, and see what other kind of articles the author has written about. Look at the front page, and the language. What is that foundation advocating for? Are they framing it in terms of police overreach? Is that the most important thing they are advocating for? Did they even talk about police overreach in the front-page text, above the fold?
You minimized the thing others care about because it doesn’t suit your needs. Just because you don’t give a shit about police brutality does not mean everyone thinks the same. By you trying to minimize discussion of it and paint both sides, you actively look like you are defending cops.
Once again, one person, maybe they misread. Multiple people, it’s on you to communicate your thoughts. If everyone is misinterpreting it in the same way, then it was just written that way; don’t blame others for reading the things you wrote.
Life is uncertain, and adults are called to choices weigh risk and opportunities. And there is an epidemic of teenagers and young adults right now, cycling in and out of mental health facilities. There are otherwise healthy kids who are afraid of doing normal things by themselves. They go to learn to “adult” in college, but really, they never have the opportunity to make their own choices and learn from their own successes and failures. And that comes about from a society and legal framework that values “safety” to beyond a reasonable point that is healthy for people.
These laws and the way they are interpreted has shifted dramatically over the past decade or so. And it has a lot to do with how our society views this. Seeing this as only about parental rights misses the point, and in my view, short-sighted.
Yes, I've witnessed this first-hand. My wife and I had our then-nine-year-old niece for the afternoon; we took her out to do a few things, played in the pool, ate dinner, and then took her back to her mother's house. At one point, she wanted some ice cream. Well, sure, why not. We happened to be very close to a grocery store and handed her some money and told her to go inside and get whatever flavor she wanted.
She kept saying we had to go with her, that there might be someone waiting to snatch her. It took a surprisingly long time to convince her that a small grocery store with one customer entrance/exit that we were immediately in front of represented the lowest imaginable risk for something like that. But, in the end, she went in and selected and bought her own ice cream.
By her age, both of us were riding our bikes without adult supervision (but usually with friends) to places a mile or so from the house to get - you guessed it - ice cream (or milkshakes, or whatever). I have read Ms. Skenazy's stories before, and knew how bad this was intellectually, but that was the first time I actually saw just how damaging it is to children to be raised as complete dependents on adults. If you're afraid to walk into a 1960s-size grocery to buy ice cream at age nine, how in the world are you going to be prepared for the maelstrom of your teenage years, let alone being an 18-year-old college student on their own?
You mean there are people who genuinely feel that it should be an arrrestable offence to let an 8-year-old out on their own?
Well, sure; that doesn't surprise me. But what some cop "feels" bears no relation to what the law is.
I think there has been a confusion in our society between well-being and safety. There are definitely circumstances where one is unsafe, but this is for their well-being (letting the teenager drive by themselves for an errand), and there are circumstances where one is safe, but someone’s well-being is degrading (helicopter parenting).