We may never know. It is frustrating as a parent to be held to the social expectations of those at the most extreme ends of normative conviction. It speaks volumes that we mediate these interactions through police rather than through mutual dialogue.

Yeah, that's the part of your story I find most disturbing.

People will disagree on all kinds of issues, but would take a major crime for me to call the police on my neighbor. Imagine living next to someone after you did that?

> It speaks volumes that we mediate these interactions through police rather than through mutual dialogue.

I wouldn't call the police on kids climbing trees.

But I'd attend a 3-hour timeshare pitch meeting at a Red Lobster before I'd have a 5 minute "mutual dialogue" with a parent about their kids' truly problematic behavior. (And I'm allergic to shellfish.)

Parents who can have mutual dialogues typically don't have kids who require them. And for the kids who desperately need them, community members seem to play a game of hot potato until somebody is finally forced to step in and confront the parents (typically after property damage).

The examples in the article are

> In the U.S. though, the police have been called, women arrested, and children taken into custody for finishing out a stroller nap in an enclosed backyard, using an iPad in a car for a few minutes, and playing in a park.

So, which ones of those are property damage to neighbors?

If I were to attribute negative motivations to it, it would probably be one more of resentment or jealousy. There are a lot of folks who are going to be growing older with no children. This often sounds great when you're young to "young", but decidedly less great as one ages. I've always wondered how society, at large, was going to deal with this.

The rise of these sort of things seems to correlate particularly well with the skyrocketing rate of single person households in the US, which increased more than 500% from 1960 to 2021 [1], even though the population in that time didn't even double.

[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/242022/number-of-single-...

Isn't that just a nice way of saying mentally ill?

Healthy and well-adjusted adults don't do these things.

Due to stigma, people will dance around the relationship of mental illness and socially maladjusted behaviors all day