I think the legal penalties for being negligent towards children stem from rich people making up laws as a response to narratives about rare occurences that take places in environments lawmakers have 0 experience with (low-income neighbourhoods). They feel as though less children would be harmed if they always had an adult present with them, which is feels like a solid assertion if you have the means to provide adult supervision at all times, ignoring the alternative costs of letting children experience independence and completely misunderstanding the every day reality of low-income parents.

> as a response to narratives about rare occurences

I think this is the root of it. Before the advent of mass media, you would hear about crimes if those crimes happened to people you personally know, but probably not otherwise. Rare crimes were rarely heard about and therefore people had an intuitive understanding that those crimes were rare. Mass media changed all of this. The most rare sort of crime is the most newsworthy because novelty sells newspapers. So the media has people fixated, worrying, about very rare sorts of crimes and this has made the general population much more irrational about rare crimes than it ever was before. Journalists may sometimes say that their job is to inform the public, but very often they induce a perception of reality that is less accurate than what people would have formed on their own with no journalist around to make a huge deal out of freak rare occurrences.

Pasting what I wrote above:

>Just to clarify, the analogy I'm drawing is to how beyond reproach authority is to the average citizen, not making any point about whether or not Warsaw Pact children could travel freely.

I am so sorry to hear you have to act as if your kids are babies because of rules that don't recognize human competence! -- Lenore (I wrote Free-Range Kids)