I stopped to watch kids playing at recess – security was called
reason.com
reason.com
It's my opinion that a great deal of the blame (if not the outright majority) for this state of affairs can be levied against suburban culture (and, by extension, car culture).
The communities that hand-wring the most about predators and risks to children tend to be middle class, suburban, and white. They drive their children everywhere, and thereby are (somewhat) alienated from the idea of a "local community" beyond the immediate neighborhood (which can only be entered or exited by car.) Things like childcare are purchasable services, not kindnesses that you or your neighbor do for each other when the other's in a pinch. When this is your bubble (or, for the rest of us, the dominant cultural metaphor for responsible parenting), it's hard not to see the world as a foreign and scary place, with unknown levels of unknown danger.
I'm being genuinely serious here. I used to love the concept of relatively high density living. For years I walked or rode my bicycle everywhere in cities. But I got sick of the fights and the filth, got too many concussions, and now I'm out here in the country side where I "see the world as a foreign and scary place".
Make it nicer and we'll come back. If that doesn't happen, don't complain when we make rational decisions for ourselves and our families.
In other words: we're talking about two separate things. You're describing an abstract quality of life concern, which is a valid concern that a lot of people share about major cities. I'm talking about a cultural zeitgeist around treating strangers as predators or latent criminals, which is statistically unborn.
(We can also play the anecdote game: I've lived in NYC my entire life, and I've never dodged human excrement or needles. I've seen needles and human waste, but they're a vanishingly small component of my experiences living here.)
Agreed. Exactly as most of the rest of the world has done. In the developing world (India, China) and the old west (Europe), cities are the place to be. They are safe, easy to get around and much much more happening.
> without having to dodge heroin needles or human excrement or have abuse hurled it us or be assaulted
This is such a west coast experience. I have seen this in SF/Seattle, but Boston/NYC's homeless have seemed pretty innocuous. It is local politics problem. Cities around the world don't have these issues either.
Cities continue to be expected to be havens for every kind of person, while suburbs create their own walled gardens. But if a city every proposes suburb style discriminatory policy, it will immediately be viewed as 'racist'. (Usually Racism of this form is just people looking out for their own socio-economic interests. I won't always call it hatred driven Racism. But, the standard west-coast suburbanite surely would) Because it is, and suburbs have been able to get away with massive unsustainable, economically draining and exclusionary policies for half a century.
> fights and the filth, got too many concussions
Where did you live ? I have spent my entire life in high-density cities and have never come close to anything like this.
I haven't been assaulted. I'm pretty sure the excrement I see is canine, not human. I haven't seen any heroin needles, though I don't live far from a methadone treatment clinic. And a halfway house for recently released prisoners. And am only a mile from the lakefront where we now have year-round tent camps for the first time in anyones' memory (homeless who camp through Chicago's winter are a tough breed).
Maybe the rabbits eat the heroin needles before I see them. Lord knows they eat everything else. Everyone on social media complains about the coyotes and how they're everywhere. But I think that's bullshit - if there were as many coyotes as people claim we'd have way less rabbits.
Surprising how much of what people post on the Internet is bullshit like that, isn't it?
I live in an area where I see people out and walking. The local neighbourhood feels bustling. If I needed someone to watch my kid, I could call outside for someone from a number of faces I have known for years.
This is in a developing country. Houses are smaller, closer together, and without things like a driveway. I guess most people in the US still wouldn't want to give up these things. But I wouldn't want to live in a place where I never see people because they are all either in their house or their cars.
While lots of people in cities live very different lives, either you were very unlucky or this is your own fault. Or do you think the majority of the 8 million people in NYC have gotten a concussion since moving there?
The filth, yeah, it's neighborhood dependent but NYC as a whole (really anywhere other than right on Central Park) has a lot of room to improve. Pretty rare to see needles or human excrement (dog excrement is way too common).
Single-use zoning laws are a big part of why we have this model where everyone living in a house needs to drive just to get to the corner store, and everyone who can walk anywhere is living in a small apartment in an expensive city.
I grew up in two different suburban small towns, where we were each just a couple blocks from the corner store, the laundromat, and the local library. I could walk to my friends' houses to hang out, ride my bike around, and pick up a pizza for $5 to share with my friends.
It wasn't glamorous or fashionable like city life, and it wasn't as sterile as a housing development, but it was a good place to grow up.
+ good public schools
Living in a big house is waaaaaay better than a living in an apartment inside a building. No contest here.
No fights, no filth. There are plenty of places that fit the bill.
Have you been to Japan? High density is not the problem.
Anyhow, some advice from Amsterdam, NL (yes, the country of decriminalized marijuana and legal prostitution): we pay taxes and a significant portion of it — less so as the conservative government tries to shore up waning consensus with spending cuts to sustain windfalls for its constituency — goes to social programs aimed at housing homeless, supporting the addicted (often by addressing the underlying mental illness or trauma), managing dysfunctional families (which in several cases can be a bit paternalistic, but it also helps contain spillover to the previous problem class), helping sustainable employment.
Now, conservatives have systematically eroded all this societal infrastructure, but most of it is still here and it does help avoiding the situations you strawmanned.
Society is not a zero-sum game, it’s a force multiplier.
What a failure of imagination for what civic policy could be.
The idea is to build a social net in society such that you take care of people so that they never need to fall low enough to be shitting in the street or using hard drugs to get through a miserable existence.
This is expensive, requires compassion, and extremely socialist policies. The Hackernews crowd wouldn't love it.
But the money is there in society, it just requires a few less billionaires, and a few less multi-mansion lifestyles.
The people that live there are what make it nicer. You can help and be part of the solution, or you can continue to live in your 1500 sqft kingdom and let Queen Karen out every so often to harass the local teenage serfs, er, service workers.
I see your point, but I think it's broader than something that can be attributed solely to cars.
I've lived in apartments and condos in the hearts of major American cities my entire adult life, and I'm surrounded by the same phenomenon in different form. I know maybe 3 of my neighbors in the hall from walking past them and saying hi once in a while, but besides that, I have basically no contact with them.
My partner grew up in an eastern European country and she tells stories of how, on holidays, people would go out to the hallways of her apartment building to congregate and drink and hang out. This concept seems totally alien to me. I'm pretty sure if a resident tried congregating in the hallways of any of the buildings I've lived in, security would be called to clear them out.
I've only lived in urban well-off-millennial type places. Maybe this is something unique to the upper-middle class and above. But I don't think it's entirely about suburbia.
This is a little bit of what I was trying to get at with the "dominant cultural metaphor": the US has undergone a fundamental cultural shift around strangers for the last 50-70 years. I attribute a decent amount of that to the alienation afforded to us by driving everywhere, but it has lots of other root causes: the steady erosion of local businesses in favor of chains, the professionalization of familial and community responsibilities, and (more recently) social media's affordance of cheap engagement.
And here's the thing: a lot of those root causes are good, or (at the very least) unavoidable! Our society is still pretty unjust, but it's a lot more just than when there was a uniform expectation that women stayed home and raised children. Social media poisons our discourse, but it's also made local organizing and event planning easier than ever.
This is what makes the USA society so impersonal and distant. Everyone is expected, even required, to quickly retire into their home and stay there unless on specific business of going somewhere. The USA has even invented a crime for the concept of being outside for no particular reason, "loitering".
Coming from latin america we joke (although wrapped in much sadness) that every fun social activity that's normal elsewhere, will trigger the riot police to show up in the USA. When I lived in an apartment I knew everyone in the building since we'd gather to drink and play games on the central hallway on Friday nights.
So no wonder it is difficult to get to know any neighbors in the USA, let alone the entire neighborhood. Which in turn makes it easier to not care about them, which I believe is the cause of most of the social and political ills of the USA.
Very little to do with cars. Where I grew up the public transport was between useless to nonexistent, so everyone drives everywhere. But people still have fun and hang out and party on the streets or apartment hallways.
At least here in Ukraine. Well, in some cities they recently started to congregate in basements during air raid alerts, but that's hardly a positive thing. And I've heard that in Belarus, during 2020 protests, when the whole country got disconnected from the Internet for a couple of days, people really hanged out IRL much more.
It’s led me to a theory that density limits interactions by excessive choice. We drive everywhere here (the OP original claim that was the alienator), but the entire county, 18,000 square miles, has 44,000 people in it and I see the same people at the gas station, the grocery store, the coffee shop, every time I go. So I still end up meeting people eventually just by routine.
It’s also weird how you can start to spot outsiders - the gas station I use has developed some weird social pattern that you always enter from the south and thus the cars always face the same way, so visitors don’t know that and you spot them.
The way that we have structured the mix of movement-for-career and rental precarity (at the lower end) suggests that we disincentivize "putting down roots" in the way that normalizes that kind of behavior.
Additionally, large leasing companies set rents to maximize profits, at the cost of turnover. It's hard to feel part of a community when people are constantly leaving and new people arriving. Residents can't feel like they belong when they expect to be priced out and forced to move in a year or two.
Capitalism produces efficient allocation of capital, but not maximum citizen quality of life.
USA needs housing coops like there are in Denmark: https://stories.coop/stories/kab-how-cooperative-housing-wor...
I lived in Seattle for a while. Mentally ill, drunk, or intoxicated homeless are pretty common on the street. I witnessed shoplifting pretty often, threats and screaming people often, and people smoking crack pipes and injecting themselves pretty often. My wife was harassed or threatened multiple times by homeless people.
We moved out to the suburbs. Here, we see crowds of kids in the afternoons. They are playing in the park, roller blading, scootering around, running to one another's houses. Most of the kids are unattended and running about their own business. It seems much more natural and healthy than the environment of the city, where, not incidentally, kids were rare.
The "foreign scary place" was the city. The small community of neighbors who know one another is a friendly safe place. I would not want my kids running around the city by themselves - I don't mind it here. I don't think the reason is because of "hand wringing" or baseless worries over safety. I think the reason is that the city is overrun with mentally ill drug addicts who make a dangerous environment for unattended children.
It’s relevant because it is a real medical problem that the US fails to deal with, as opposed to a less well defined cultural issue.
$60K/year tent, anyone?
We've had "car culture" and modern suburbs for many many many years, including a very large time period where none of this was an issue. Blaming it on "car culture" is completely off.
* It's a complex of things. I identify suburban culture (and car culture as a constituent element) as one member of that complex, but there's plenty of identifiable factors: increased passive awareness of our areas (24 hour news that chiefly spotlights crimes), passive surveillance of children (always available via cell phone, locatable via GPS), and so forth. It wouldn't be polemical if I didn't start with the controversial ones, though!
* Car culture and suburban culture are not things we've had for "many many many years." They're shockingly new, even by American cultural standards: modern suburbs are a postwar invention, and the cultural lodestone of being stuck in traffic on an interstate beltway somewhere outside of a major city is only a generation or two old. There are, similarly, external factors that have historically masked some of the more deleterious effects of car culture: redlining kept suburbs racially homogeneous for the first half of their history, and over half of women didn't enter the workforce until the late 1970s.
We don’t want to violently oppress people over bourgeois norms of behavior but we do want to live in communities that adhere to such norms. That is the real social function of car dependent geography.
Yes exactly. So we segregate them, creating a non-bourgeois underclass that plagues our cities and suburbs. Then we create more elaborate car centric human geography that causes us to pollute more and generate all sorts of externalities such as huge traffic jams and high house prices. Then because the above underclass is disregarded, they become a larger, more present part of our urban fabric who we've consigned to a segregated life of misery.
It's a lose-lose race to the bottom. All because we can't do the right thing, spending money on mental health care and assistance out of poverty. Eventually the (monetary but also human, social, and environmental) costs of maintaining the hacks ends up being higher than fixing the problem in the first place. That's what happens when you try to paper over problems without fixing them.
Racist much? Have any receipts to back that up? I live in a predominantly Asian neighborhood and it turns out they like living in a safe area too. Weird, huh?
And you're reading too much into the white part: the history of middle class suburbia is the history of America's white middle class, which is in turn more or less the history of America's race politics. It's not a particularly searing or piecing observation on my part.
Stay in your suburbs, and don't use urban tax dollars to fund your lifestyle choices. And while you're at it, when you visit an urban center, learn to drive and parallel park, or does that scare you too?
Yet we (me, my parents, my educators) wouldn’t have dreamed of behaving like these school workers.
I don’t think it’s the suburban white folks, though it might be. I think it’s people who buy into an everything is too dangerous mindset. That they go to suburbs is effect, not cause.
Figured the author was a dude from the title, totally surprised it wasn’t. I too suffer from the fear that if I’m around anyone’s kids other than my own, especially at a park, I’m at risk.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187704281...
Okay, their perception of crime is higher than it should be. What about the level of crime inside vs outside of the gated community?
It really doesn't matter if someone thinks that there are 4 rapes per second outside of their bubble, if the rate inside the bubble is significantly lower than the rate outside the bubble.
Thinking that it is 4 rapes per second when the actual number is 4 rapes per month is irrelevant when there are 4 rapes per decade inside the bubble.
IOW, you are not making any point worth discussing. I don't care whether my perception of crime outside of my bubble is higher than the actual crime outside of my bubble, I care whether it is more dangerous outside of my bubble than inside.
The later in USA is not hard to see even as a foreigner.
The thing is, I like this article. I agree with it. There just isn't a correlation with helicopter parenting and statistically-average suburbs. If anything, NIMBYism/helicopter bullshit is most prevalent in wealthy urban areas.
Is it a problem? Yes. It's a problem for them; they were very clearly unwell. Was it a problem for me? I didn't really know how to react as a kid, and more than anything else I remember being sobered rather than traumatized by what I saw. If anything has maladjusted me, I don't think that was it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_Quik_meth_myth
[1] Who unfortunately then proceeded to lock others out of also having this kind of quality of life by becoming a NIMBY...
There’s a panicky streak kind of person. You see them on the Internet more, I think, telling you how random things are DANGEROUS and stuff like that.
It’s not an urban/rural divide. It’s a risk tolerance thing. And since it is so common among Democrat voters (who are massively urban) it doesn’t strike me that dense urban environments relieve someone of the curse of constant fear.
It's got nothing to do with race. Anyone who has the ability move out of a dangerous space does so, regardless of their race.
Getting them to move back in when they are perfectly fine where they are is the problem - they have no control over when and how the city may deteriorate again, and they don't want to have to take the chance of a large financial risk to move again.
It doesn't matter if cities are safe now; the suburban folk who move back in realise that they have no control over how safe it will remain.
We were working-class/poor though and this was the 70's.
Maybe it's socio-economic and recent. Sure smells like fear though, probably too much cable news spooking the parents.
How else would disconnected suburban communities be getting the same message that their kids are in danger from something as specific as trench-coated deviants or razor blade apples?
We know it started before social media but as it often does, social media has amplified the problem. I'm not sure how much blame Hollywood shares in spreading this fear.
> I've lived in NYC my entire life. > hEre's mY taKe on what's wrong with more peaceful, orderly places.
Very cool, thank you!
This is a people with no real exposure to "real crime" problem.
Those are the culprits.
They live about 1.5 miles from the eatery. She would let her 9 year old walk home sometimes in good weather - low crime with actual tree-lined suburban streets. Police apparently threatened her over that as well - that's somehow endangering the child too much, and she might be charged with some misdemeanor.
I don't get it. Really. As someone who grew up in the 70s/80s... I can't say 'nothing bad ever happened'. Obviously it did. But the pendulum has swung far too much the other way now.
My counterintuitive mildly-offensive party conversation starter is that I think that the ideal number for childhood deaths by misadventure or accident is a balance between protecting children from stupid accidents and making children stupid and timid by restricting them from doing anything that could result in an accident. If kids are getting into too few fatal accidents, protections for children should be reduced until we get the numbers back up.
"During its initial committee hearing, sponsoring state Rep. Mary Young, D-Greeley, said allegations of neglect or lack of supervision have been on the rise in Colorado, even as the number of substantiated cases are dropping. In 2019, there were 3,854 allegations of lack of supervision; 82%, or 3,169, were unfounded, she said."
[0] https://www.denverpost.com/2022/03/31/colorado-reasonable-in...
edit: more context to quote
https://reason.com/2021/04/29/reasonable-childhood-independe...
But it just goes back to the same question: has the world gotten more dangerous or are we just more aware of dangers that were always there?
Like sending your kid to the shop. There's also the fact that we don't need to do that anymore. Very often there's a late (or all) night shop open not too far away. So the urgency is just not there.
The next year we moved and my walk home was a bit longer, my grandfather was home which was nice since I didn't come home to an empty house. I'm not sure if it was that year, or a year or two later, but I was allowed to basically bike wherever I wanted in town as long as I didn't go past some pre-defined boundaries. Just doing some math on that now it's roughly 1.5 miles in any direction and I mostly followed that restriction. The only rule was that I had to be home before the streetlights came on.
I didn't have a cell phone. I didn't have any way to call the police if someone tried to abduct me.
By all statistical crime measures children are safer today than they were when I was a kid.
Today you're able to give your child a device which you can use to constantly GPS track them, they can call/text you or the police at any time.
And, yet, somehow we've infantilized children and removed their agency and I don't know why but I really fear for the consequences of it.
Once a red Volvo 240 stopped and tried getting my brother to approach for some candy. I pulled him away and we went inside, because I'd heard rumours about some dude in the area trying to nab kids. I was about eight and he was six.
Because we had learned to not talk to strangers that weren't our parents or relatives or public officials like police, medics and fire crew in uniform or in uniformed vehicles. If someone stops while we're waiting for the school bus and offers to drive us home it's not OK to get in the car unless our parents had asked our teacher to tell us that one specific family member would pick us up.
Basic good upbringing, really...
There was one time where a guy in a truck slowed down and was lagging behind us a bit. We turned down a side street and he kept following us. We were on sidewalks, so we just turned around quicker than he did and raced away. In retrospect that was legitimately scary.
In middle school, I could ride wherever I wanted. I'd ride to garage sales, buy used puzzles, then spend hours completing them at home. To think that those opportunities wouldn't be available is sad.
>And, yet, somehow we've infantilized children and removed their agency and I don't know why but I really fear for the consequences of it.
In grad school I worked with a fellow from China. At the age of 3, he would go to the nearby market to buy some groceries for the family, cook food, and hang out at home alone all day. He was shocked at the attitudes in the US.
> But also maybe kids just enjoy different things nowadays
I think this may be true, but also I think parents might find it easier to let their kid play video games in their room where they think they are safe compared to letting them roam around unsupervised. I had friends whose parents thought we were bad kids because we wouldn't know where would go that day, so when they asked "where are you going" and we said "idk, to the creek or pizza or wherever we find interesting" they would think we were up to no good since we didn't have a plan.
The funny thing is back then there were no sidewalks or shoulders at all, and kids biked everywhere until old and lucky enough to drive. Now, there are extensive sidewalks on all the main roads, but the only people using them are middle aged dog walkers.
Sadly never crossed my mind to figure out what time the lights turned on, and expand my radius further.
Osama may be dead, but the erosion of rights that US has seen because of 9/11 did strike a big blow to US democracy and he partly achieved his goals.
One counter point is cities have started adding 'danger' back into playgrounds (not actually that dangerous, more like risk in the mind of the child). So hopefully we'll see some progress.
Kids are pretty capable and most people are pretty supportive/helpful.
Our kid bikes to and from school each way, a little over a mile away. She is always hanging out with other neighborhood kids, going to the pool or park, and nobody has called the cops yet thankfully.
I live in NYC and when my son was a 9-year old I would let him play out at the park and on the sidewalk. I had some anxiety about it at times but never thought there would be any legal trouble from letting him be a 9-year old.
This is New York's, for example:
> 1. He or she knowingly acts in a manner likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child less than seventeen years old or directs or authorizes such child to engage in an occupation involving a substantial risk of danger to his or her life or health; or
Whether something is "likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child" is fairly subjective, since it's a balance of odds.
I slept there overnight and walked back the next day...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98
At this point I'm decided that if I have children, I will not raise them in the U.S. Maybe a few cities are amenable to how I would like to raise children, like Cambridge, MA. But I would like for them to grow up in a healthy, independent environment.
second worse thing I was doing my paper route and almost mauled by a dog but a nearby neighbor convinced it to go away
ah, another time when I was 17 I was almost abducted but that's what I get for walking down an industrial road at 2am on new years alone, I was saved by the fact I had a cell phone (seeing it caused the predator to retreat)
I am extremely glad I don't have kids and super disappointed that the world has come to this.
if we're really lucky humans will stop reproducing
it won't hurt me at all
My papers were dropped off really early, and I had to be there for them - alone - around 4am. And my route was about half a mile away from my house.
I got chased by a dog a couple times. One time it bit and punctured my tire.
I flipped my bike with all the papers in it a couple of times.
Some older kids dropped by once - I was afraid they were gonna fuck with me, but instead they just asked me to scream some stuff.
And of course collecting. I got chased off by a couple dogs then too. Come to think of it, maybe I should be more afraid of dogs than people.
Eventually I got a route for the apartments that were across the street from my house. That was a much nicer experience. More money, less distance, less area to cover, and no dogs.
Re 'candy shop' - it was about 400 feet from the restaurant.
Does the store owner have a license for child care? Did she discuss child care with them? Was she expecting her kid to sit at a candy store and do homework for an hour absent an agreement with the owner for child care?
Seems like pawning her kids off on unwilling people who have no responsibility for them.
No, it seems like someone (read: you) making a lot of assumptions and jumping to conclusions.
Edit: Oh man, the absolute irony of you telling someone to "think" further down in this thread...
Read.
I always found her advice extremely reasonable, but then again, I don't have children.
https://www.bvg.de/en/tickets-tariffs/conditions-of-carriage
> Children under four years of age may only use public transportation if they are accompanied by an individual who is at least six years of age.
I used to live across the street from a primary school and the kids (no older than 10) would come out and smoke at recess in front of my building. Nobody batted an eye. Just yesterday I was walking behind some kids who couldn't have been older than 12 drinking and smoking, and that was in a nicer Berlin "suburb". Nobody cared.
As a personal anecdote: I grew up in NYC, and was riding the subway alone by the time I was 8 or 9. I believe there’s also around when my school gave me a free metrocard to travel on my own, and I believe that program is still in place. Most of my NYC friends had similar experiences.
And 14 years later America is now watching "Old Enough!" on Netflix.
It's not the photos that are the problem, it's that people don't really understand or respect others' privacy in the internet age.
February before covid, I was at a college in Manchester and was pleasantly surprised when they asked us to complete consent forms on where the photos that were to be taken were going to be uploaded. I was very happy to check the "I don't consent to photos of me shared on social media", consequently they took some photos with me & some without me. No pressure to be part of the group & not be left out.
There are notorious "Instagram parents" who post their kids doing embarrasing things and getting pranked. When the kids grow up, what if they don't like those pictures and the attention it gives them?
Even if you're not one of those parents, and have perfectly good intentions, you never know what goes viral. Maybe the picture of your kid gets used as a stock photo by some shady company, it gets millions of views, and now random other kids and adults are harassing them.
That being said, the blanket policy "no pictures, ever" is still ridiculous. They should at least mandate that no pictures should be posted publicly online (which may actually be legally mandated in some places). And even then, the days of viral videos like "charlie bit my finger" are over, the odds of your kid's photo posted in some random facebook group actually becoming viral are exceedingly small.
Then there’s a blog where pictures are allowed for kids where the parents pre-approved that they could upload to the blog (available to all parents).
However, yes - parents aren’t allowed to take pictures - of kids other than yours.
But they tell me how she had a boy friend, they would spend all day together, running after one another, call their each other's name, and "talk" a lot
Also a girl friend that sit next to her at lunch, and they spend the entire meal giggling, and trying to feed each other
My guess would be that parents are constantly taking photos and getting in the way of kids playing, or their performance, and it's to encourage parents to just enjoy their kids. This sounds like a pretty good rule to me. I'd have to guess that during their childhood your children will have multiple orders of magnitude more photos taken of them. I'd only worry memories will be lost by an overwhelming amount of media being saved about them.
What are they going to do? Kick your kid out? Call the cops? Unlikely in my part of the world, at least.
I've been verbally assaulted (proper screaming-levels of verbal attacks) for being a pedophile because I'm at a park playing with my own daughter. I've had groups of mums surround me while they call the police, and force me to wait for them to arrive. I've very regularly had people pull their kids away from my kids and not let them play together, while all the other kids with mums there are allowed to play amongst each other. I've been told I'm "assaulting" my wife by "forcing" her to work and miss out on the all-important motherhood experience. Doesn't matter that mum works in ICU/surgical saving lives, and absolutely loves what she does (and works 3 days a week, so gets plenty of mothering time). I've been followed for blocks and blocks by people videoing me on their phone saying they're reporting me for kidnapping. I've been told to leave the park more times than I could ever count, because "it's a place for mums and their kids". I've been rejected from library story time and family centres because I'm not the mum. I've had the police turn up to my door because neighbours saw me tending to a crying kid in the yard (fallen off the bike) and the police were told I had kidnapped them and was assaulting them... I could go on for many more paragraphs.
In all these situations I calmly explain that I'm the father, and just try move away from the people or leave the park to save my kids having to experience this stuff.
People are fucking crazy.
Edit: To clarify, I'm in Australia. I have also run into various other stay-at-home dads who have similar stories. It does seem to be more in the inner city suburbs, as we move a lot and I haven't had it nearly as much in more rural areas (though it does still happen).
A large reason for this is that it's very common for fathers to be on parental leave. For each child born, if you are two parents, you get 480 days of paid parental leave to distribute among yourselves. You get half each, can transfer days between one another, but 90 each of these cannot be transferred.
I can't say I've had your entire experience, but I've seen it at least three times. And considering the amount of time with my nephew (1 weekend in 4-5 at best), that gives you an indication how rife this issue is here.
I spent a year as a stay at home dad (with our son who was 1 yr old at the time). The first few months were spent in Palo Alto, CA, and the rest in London, UK. We would go out to parks all over the place, and I never had any problems like this. Other parents always seemed happy to chat. I did expect problems since my son looks very different to me (fair skinned and blonde, whilst I’m a typical Pakistani Asian guy, brown skin, black hair - this kid inherited a lot of his looks from my wife). Often I’d get questioned by immigration officials when flying alone with him, and I’d have to take a letter from my wife attesting to our trip being known about and approved by her. But that was the only time it was an issue. I don’t think I would have lasted long if I encountered what you have, and I can’t imagine how you’ve dealt with it for as long as you have. If there’s anything I can do to support, please let me know.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2396222/Branded-pae...
For what it is worth, I have never experienced anything similar here in the UK.
If anything, it seems that people like to see the dad doing kid stuff (especially baby/newborn stuff) - I've lost count of the number of times I've been out and about with my son and now also newborn daughter in a baby carrier/wrap and have received either direct positive comments, or indirect admiring looks/cooing/etc. (just yesterday I was at the Zoo with my excited toddler and my daughter in a wrap and there was an audible "gasp-of-cuteness" (for want of a better phrase) from some women standing nearby when I turned around and revealed the baby in the carrier - there was zero negative vibes).
It is very common to see dads in the playground - especially at weekends but also during the week days too. Mums seem very comfortable to stop and chat when we're at the sandpit or just waiting in line at Starbucks or whatever.
I would be interested to hear from other people to understand why this happens in some places and to some people, but not others. I always wonder if I am going to start getting harassed in public, since it's a common complaint, but so far -- nothing.
Please, keep spreading the good energy
THe cops are wise enough to have entries in their journals to know its again a false report against a good man, playing with his legal own children
For what it's worth: also Australian with a relatively fresh human (toddler). My partner and I try to share care relatively evenly so I get a bit of playground/park time in and I'm yet to experience anything like this. I truly hope that continues as that sounds terrifying.
There's a whole set of other societal aspects, particularly support services in the lead up to and after birth, that are completely asymmetric or non-existent for fathers though.
Curious where in Melbourne as I have never encountered this with two under 5.
I work part time and now, since covid, from home and always regularly take my kids to various parks around the inner north. Usually a sprinkle of other dads, grandparents and lots of mums. No one has ever even suggested I am suspicious.
I did get a lot of "a dad at the playground. Wow, so progressive" when the first kid was small, which was pretty amusing/ disappointing for 2010s.
Too many of them blocking your way such that you couldn't leave without physically shoving them?
I can see maybe someone, kind of subconsciously thinking ill, and double a 'double take' ...
... but almost anyone can see whether or not the kid knows the adult they are with.
And what kind of kidnapper steals kids to take them to the park to play with them? My god.
I was discussing that, some time ago, with a female friend (I am a male) who also loves doing street photography. We talked about how difficult it is for a man to do street photography, specially around places with a lot of kids, as you will always receive strange looks or even threats. If you're a woman taking photos? Probably a mother or mother-to-be, if you're a man? Pedophile.
I wonder if there are that many people exposing themselves to kids as the security lady said in the article. Seems like an excuse to justify the action, or something that happened once and they are overreacting to it...
I know a then 14-year-old guy from a game store where I’d played D&D with his mom for two years. I was 30~32 at the time.
Some people I know thought it was creepy as hell I went with his mom to see a high-school play he was in. His acting wasn’t great but we all had fun.
I don’t get it. I really don’t. The people I was with and quite a few of my friends didn’t understand that reaction either.
Plenty of teenagers need a good father figure or mentor.
As a foster and adoptive parent, I have definitely gotten some comments when I play with those of my kids that look very different from me; I could feel the tension evaporate when one of them calls me "dad" and everyone realizes the relationship. Never had the police called on me either.
I did have a 12 year old daughter get stopped by a concerned adult while bicycling through a nearby neighborhood ("where are you going" "where are your parents" &c.). That turned her off from bicycling ever since.
That's... incredibly sad. I'm sorry to hear that.
Most (normal) men also know that they may be seen as a threat, and would move along quickly if asked to. (If they call security over a woman, they may call the police over a man.)
On the other hand, maybe it's better to be safe than sorry.
Just wondering, is it the case for college professors in the US? should they be careful not to be alone in a room with a student or is that a myth?
I’m shocked they’re allowed to be in a room alone with a single child unless they have clear visibility from the hall. My school has that and cameras.
My era? Zero tolerance for mean words. I got suspended 1 day because I told people I got a highlighter. They thought I said lighter and tattled on me. Teachers never found the lighter but I was suspended no less. I got suspended once because a friend of mine was planning to come to my house after school. Asked me to carry his bag. Unbeknowst to me he was running off to try to get into a fight off school premises. Never actually got into a fight. But I was suspended for zero tolerance helping/assisting a fight.
Now we are in the era where schools have metal detectors, police on staff and actively walking around in the schools, and harassing people over literally nothing.
It's interesting to me. Obviously lots of science have determined all of this was bad. https://supportiveschooldiscipline.org/zero-tolerance-policy
But instead of admitting there was a mistake... they just doubled down on bad policies? Idiots.
The problem is that no-one would get away with saying, "maybe we don't need the fence anymore, it separates children from the community". "Maybe we don't need to repair the metal detector when it breaks" etc. Sad really. The idea that somehow ID cards are a proportionate measure for some kind of security at a high school is very worrying.
"Think of the children" is the main weapon politics have to push regulations and more control. It is important that everybody thinks that kids are in danger at all time otherwise it would stop working.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-28/in-japan-...
Personally, I believe there is a compounding net good for society allowing children a decent amount of independence at a young age. Japan is certainly different to many other countries in terms of public safety, but I don't believe the outside world is the awful, scary, dangerous place the media constantly paints it out to be. It breaks my heart that I rarely see children playing outside in the streets anymore in the UK, when my youth in the 80s was basically spent largely outside without adult supervision.
Vladimir Nabokov had a beautifully written description of kids playing:
> What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.
(In the novel the protagonist abused Lolita and was feeling remorseful for robbing her of a proper childhood playing with other kids.)
This story sound either exaggerated, misrepresented, or possibly wholly made up. Not that it is that hard for me to believe in overeager security at a school, but it is just a little bit too convenient an incident for somebody with such a large preexisting interest in the subject. I would suspect that she was looking for a confrontation, even though she claims to not be confrontational.
Even though I live literally next door and standing in my yard, I can see kids playing, I am exceptionally cautious. In particular, I introduced myself to the staff (they park in front of my house every day) so they knew who I was, smiled and made direct eye contact, and acted in a non-aggressive way. This greatly improved my ability to move about my yard without suspicion. They never did unlock the front gate, though. Security through theatre.
You're not allowed to use a playground unless you're with a child (new york): https://c2.staticflickr.com/2/1128/705238326_dd2bad6ea5_b.jp...
There's plenty of stories of men being yelled at for taking pictures of their own kids, e.g. https://www.arlnow.com/2022/04/13/acpd-woman-pepper-sprayed-...
British Airways wont seat an unaccompanied minor next to a man traveling alone: https://www.bbc.com/news/10401416
If you look like a dude, and are relatively near children, you're a suspect.
It’s a very convenient anecdote to have happened to someone who just happens to have a barrow to push in that exact direction.
Tell me more about your mind reading technology
https://dinalitovsky.bulletin.com/590041038798261
> If you are in the United States, what matters is where you photograph from. If you are standing on a public street, then everything and everyone clearly visible from your vantage point is fair game. No distinction is made about WHO is being photographed. Celebrities, tourists, children, senior citizens, Times Square mimes — all are equally permissible. That playground which photographers avoid glancing at lest they be turned to stone? Fair game. Same goes for subways, bridges, airports and any private property visible from a public space (with exceptions for military and nuclear facilities).
America has school shootings regularly. Children have to perform regular active shooter drills in American schools. Like a fire drill.
There are also significant pressures put on a shrinking number of underpaid teachers and staff to care for an increasing number of children. More kids being cared for by fewer adults.
With this mindset why would school staff not err on the side of caution and ask an unknown person to move along?
It's a sad state of affairs, but it is not the fault of the teacher or school staff that America got here.
It really is a problem that is blown up out of all proportion to the actual threat. The threat is there, sure; but a kid in US is more likely to be killed in a car accident on their way to school, than by an armed spree killer in that school. Those active shooter drills, in particular, save some lives, but they traumatize several orders of magnitude more. The notion that you have to be wary of a stranger who isn't even on school grounds for this reason is absurd.
Because instilling this type of paranoia in children is likely to cause more harm to the mental health of their generation (in total), than those very few bad events that this behavior stops?
Also, it seems to me that this has been going on for a generation already, as more and more young adults are now hyper-fragile, calling for authoritarian responses to anything that scares them. The end result may very well be that those children will place a "strong leader" in power when they grow up, someone like Putin or Chavez.
Edit: spelling
Get out of your filter bubble. This isn't true anywhere.
Note well: They were not police. I don't take that kind of line with police, and I don't recommend that anyone else does.
> As I have said since I founded Free-Range Kids in 2008, and since starting Let Grow in 2017, our society is set on overestimating danger and underestimating kids.
Gives real "That Happened" vibes.
I grew up "free range" and looking around where I live this is still the predominant approach to parenting. So I really can't relate to the vibe in this whole thread. (all in Massachusetts and Maine btw)
That being said, the last thing my "free range" friends and I wanted growing up was some weirdo adult observing our "unstructured freeplay". As soon as we determined this lady wasn't a cop we would have created a lot of reasons for her to leave. Kids aren't monkeys in a zoo for you to observe lady, move along or get some feces in your face.
I don’t think it’s healthy to raise children in this environment.
Texas became the third state after Oklahoma and Utah to pass a free-range parenting bill [1] called the Reasonable Childhood Independence act.
So far this movement seems to be led by traditionally "conservative" states, while the most egregious abuses seem to be reported in traditionally "blue" states, like New York and California.
It'll be interesting to see if the trend continues, and how the issue influences politics.
[1] https://www.freerangekids.com/texas-goes-free-range-reasonab...
He talks a lot about meeting friends after school, that the late afternoon is his (not taken up by sports or clubs like in the U.S.).
That everyone rides bikes or public transit, and it doesn't sound like there's much parental oversight (not a judgement, just my observations from our conversations).
Children need to be (controlledly) exposed to the truths of the world instead of being raised like Polyannas. There is good and bad in this world and if we show them only the good, they will have very hard time as grown up adults.
And once I was 10 and went to another school I even took a commuter train all by myself every single day.
That was very normal and everyone in my class did it to some extent.
When I was setting up for the latter portion the vice principal came outside to make sure I wasn’t getting any of the kids on the playground in the shot. She was very stern about it.
I wanted to tell her I could go over to the sidewalk with a big zoom lens and take as many pictures of the kids as I wanted, but instead I just assured her the building was the backdrop and everything behind the teacher would be very out of focus anyways.
I was also hired to secretly photograph an engagement right next to a kids playground, which meant I had to act sneaky with a big zoom lens. I brought my wife along and she had to calm a woman down about what I was doing.
But say, in an unrelated incident, a kid had gone missing, and beforehand there was a suspicious stranger with no attachment to any of the kids watching them from outside the grounds. It later turns out the person was watching them to identify a target to kidnap.
Then say the school did nothing because "they're allowed", on the basis of everything described. But now a child is missing and the school didn't act on an obvious potential red flag. Would the parents find that acceptable? No. Would politicians and their voters find that acceptable? Probably not. Heads would roll.
Ultimately the school is managing its risk level by taking action in that situation.
The school doesn't have that, but in california "loitering near a school" is illegal and you can go to jail. Even so, how you act in the situation determines the outcome. You have several options, including arguing with the school staff (guaranteed police visit), arguing with the police (likely will make the police less likely to sympathize even if you're not doing something illegal), behaving suspiciously (IE, not making eye contact, not following direct orders from cops, slumping, wearing clothes that cover your face, being a member of a minority that cops believe are prone to being criminal) will get you beaten up, arrested, sent to jail, etc.
How you act in public situations makes all the difference. For example, you could set up in front of the school with a protest sign that says ("Fund police and schools"), you're not going to get the police called on you.
What happened to everyone is innocent until proven guilty?
No cop visits yet. Probably only a couple years left before they're old enough that no-one's likely to bother us about it. Hoping we make it out without trouble. So far, so good. We have had neighbors from other streets come over a couple times to "make sure we know" our kids are way off in the neighborhood, but they've not made a thing of it past that, so I think they're chill-enough and really were just wanting to make sure we were aware.
The way I look at it, if the standard you set is to tell everyone to move along, then you are creating the systems and processes necessary to prevent bad actors from doing what they will try and do, and that outcome is infinitely more important than some passer-by's feelings.
Now you can't do that because of the creeps.
I think part of the solution is standing up to these kind of light idiocies.
If she had time, she should have just let them call the cops and been polite about wanting to just watch the kids.
Picking your battles wisely is hardly contributing yo the problem.
Distinguishing good from bad is hard. Ban everyone, problem solved. (by inventing a new problem)
If you want better outcomes, need to make them either low cost, or inject "funds" (which may be effort) to improve
I would have laughed just to see how high the settlement gets. Dollars would have been counting upwards in my head, analysis of how to survive the situation would have been done so that I would ensure enjoying the settlement, I would have scanned for bystandards stuck in bystander syndrome “you in particular, I’ll split the settlement with you if you record this”
New drone assimilated
The woman’s musings would have been muffled in my head, replaced by the narrator in Disco Elysium
“Stay on the public sidewalk as you are, hands clearly viewable, no sudden movements, now the public will have to pay you, or maybe the private sector, stay focused but patient”
I though the article was going to be some self righteous libertarian not liking being told what to do.
Boy was I right.
This is the saddest thing I've heard in a really long time.
It's sad that we have to be like this, but it feels necessary, in a world seemingly full of child molesting creeps.
I slowed down and started looking through the kids, till the proctor(?) woman noticed, at which point I said my friend's kid goes to your daycare and then we found him in the group and introduced ourselves, joked around a bit with her, and I took some pics of his kid to show my friend, said goodbye, and went home.
Yeah, maybe shoo her away from the playground.
> And so I was shooed along, collateral damage in the quest to wrap every child in a bubble of perfect safety. Now I sit at my computer, wondering: What would it take to give every one of them a nice, sharp pin?
Obviously the pin is to pop the confining bubble "every child" has been placed in, thus improving their lives. She follows up:
> (Though some authority would no doubt accuse me of distributing weapons to children)