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Parents Investigated For Neglect For Letting Kids Walk Home Alone
HughPickens.com writes The WaPo reports that Danielle and Alexander Meitiv in Montgomery County Maryland say they are being investigated for neglect after letting their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter make a one-mile walk home from a Silver Spring park on Georgia Avenue on a Saturday afternoon. "We wouldn't have let them do it if we didn't think they were ready for it," says Danielle. The Meitivs say they believe in "free-range" parenting, a movement that has been a counterpoint to the hyper-vigilance of "helicopter" parenting, with the idea that children learn self-reliance by being allowed to progressively test limits, make choices and venture out in the world. "The world is actually even safer than when I was a child, and I just want to give them the same freedom and independence that I had — basically an old-fashioned childhood," says Danielle. "I think it's absolutely critical for their development — to learn responsibility, to experience the world, to gain confidence and competency."
On December 20, Alexander agreed to let the children walk from Woodside Park to their home, a mile south, in an area the family says the children know well. Police picked up the children near the Discovery building, the family said, after someone reported seeing them. Alexander said he had a tense time with police when officers returned his children, asked for his identification and told him about the dangers of the world. The more lasting issue has been with Montgomery County Child Protective Services which showed up a couple of hours later. Although Child Protective Services could not address this specific case they did point to Maryland law, which defines child neglect as failure to provide proper care and supervision of a child. "I think what CPS considered neglect, we felt was an essential part of growing up and maturing," says Alexander. "We feel we're being bullied into a point of view about child-rearing that we strongly disagree with."
On December 20, Alexander agreed to let the children walk from Woodside Park to their home, a mile south, in an area the family says the children know well. Police picked up the children near the Discovery building, the family said, after someone reported seeing them. Alexander said he had a tense time with police when officers returned his children, asked for his identification and told him about the dangers of the world. The more lasting issue has been with Montgomery County Child Protective Services which showed up a couple of hours later. Although Child Protective Services could not address this specific case they did point to Maryland law, which defines child neglect as failure to provide proper care and supervision of a child. "I think what CPS considered neglect, we felt was an essential part of growing up and maturing," says Alexander. "We feel we're being bullied into a point of view about child-rearing that we strongly disagree with."
Not who or what you think they are.
All power to the Meitivs.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
The "child protection" services have all the apparent responsibilities of caring, without having to pay the price for the efforts they demand. That's why they are intrinsically biased in favor of perpertually inflating the needs of childs and the duties of caretakers... to the point of ridiculous extremes.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Think of the children! There could have been terrorists and socialists on that road, or even the big bad wolf. Any sensible parent would chip their kids and give them a phone with tracking apps hidden within...it's the only way to be safe.
... to the long list of reasons i don't consider the US a good place to live in.
With rules like this, no wonder you have 40 year old virgins living in their parents' basements.
1.6
I remember back in the day playing miles from home in the hills up past the artillery range.
I also remember breaking my arm on such a trip, and having to push my bike home one-handed.
Not something I think Maryland CPS would have approved of, I suspect.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I don't know if letting kids this age walk home is the right thing, but I respect the right of the parents to make that decision. The world over child services staff are self-righteous twerps, who give all the signs of knowing very little about the range of problems parents face, and know even less about helping, rather than punishing parents trying to do the right thing.
A mile? That's still 1760 yards right? Geez, my walk to grade school was longer than that. The local grade school here in Massachusetts doesn't require the school to provide bus service if the kid lives within two miles of the school. Maybe Maryland should come up here and arrest the school board.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
this chart might have some value:
http://www.latchkey-kids.com/l...
it's about being left home alone, but the idea is the same: the age at which a child can be left to fend for themselves for a few hours, legally
the age of 8 for maryland listed here doesn't take into account the concept of a babysitter, which the 10 year old could qualify as
this suggests the parents should be fine, by legal precedent, rather than philosophical inspection, which of course immediately suggests the asshole busybody that called the police needs to get a fucking life, and the cops should have just given the kids a ride or asked how they were and then told to have a nice day and drove off
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Your parents have been ready for long time, now.
It kinda is.
I attribute my total nerdiness to being raised "free range". I was mixing farm chemicals, putting together mechanical graders for fruit classification, architect and building water piping to get water from A to B (trenches go deep when dug by hand), etc. Parents were not around for large periods on time.
Mind you, this was a thousand kilometres from the nearest capital city in Australia. Right out in the bush. Shit was pretty wild there.
I'm a mathematician now. Well, with a good helping of computer science. Did ten years of supercomputing before starting my own tech company.
Yeah, lock those parents up for neglect.
.
It's been broken and invalid for at least 13 years. No one gives a shit, at least those that can fix it.
Alexander said he had a tense time with police when officers returned his children, asked for his identification and told him about the dangers of the world.
Yeah, there are cops out there who shoot children. They might think the kid's backpack is a thermal nuclear device or assault rifle and shoot him on site.
Matters to me.
I read this site for news about technology and my rights.
When society imposes upon me the way in which I choose to raise my children, especially when that imposition results in a legal liability, I think that sort of thing matters.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
So... we've managed to replace helicopter parenting with helicopter government.
This is the kind of story I think of when I hear that these agencies need more money. It seems to me they are overstaffed and overfunded if they have time for activities like this.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Fear is the mind killer. The fear of some vague threat is motivating CPS and the cops to do real harm to this family.
I grew up in a small town near a woods on the Illinois river. I was roaming through those woods and walking 1.5 mi to school when I was 7. At 14, I often toted a gun with me or went fishing by myself with dangerous knives and sharp hooks. I cleaned the fish I caught and ate them, too. If only CPS had been there to put me in a risk-free bubble, what a great childhood I would have had.
A: Because it's programming. Duh.
I was walking to school roughly that distance when I was nine. :-p
Ezekiel 23:20
When I was a child, you had to live at least a mile and a quarter from the school to qualify for the bus. Everyone else walked. This was considered absolutely normal. When I was in first grade, I went with some of the neighbor kids. I was six, and this was elementary school, so the oldest kid in the group was probably 10? Crime rates in the US are much lower today than they were then. Just dumb.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
Slashdot has posted stories like this for more than a decade.
It's been broken and invalid for at least 13 years. No one gives a shit, at least those that can fix it.
Well someone fucked it up good and proper in the last 2 days. The layout is now totally borked on Safari 6.1, whereas at the start of the week it was perfectly fine.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
More important to know is that how many football fields is it? It seems that at least in US the distances are measured in football fields and weights in cars or elephants.
I think a lot of us walked that distance to the school bus stop.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Per the NYC Department of Education children 5 and above are expected to walk up to 0.5 miles to school. Children between 5 and 11 are expected to walk up to 1 mile, and children 12 and above up are expected to walk or bike up to 1.5 miles to school.
Being run over by a car is by far the most likely tragety to occur to a child walking home from school so I looked up ped/bike fatalities in Maryland, and it is 1.88 per 100,000. This is actually lower than NYC, which had 2.00 such deaths per 100,000.
When I was a kid we all walked to and from school every single day. On the very first day, my parents walked with me. From 4th grade we were allowed to use bicycles. Those who lived more than 30 kilometers away from the nearest school were entitled to use public transport for free.
Time flies when you don't know what you're doing
Works great in Internet Explorer!
football
You mean handegg.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Works great in Internet Explorer!
That's not really a compliment.
Local police, looking for things to do, kidnap 2 kids mind their own business, and have parent investigated. More on this story later!
Once again, I see CPS doing it's damnedest to interrupt a probably normal family. Well done local gov!
to raise your kids, is powerful enough to take them away.
But what if it was the systemd which threatens the poor children on their walk?
I went to school alone since I was 7. OK, not alone per se, I went with one of my classmates (later lifelong friend), who lived close to us. And in a much worse city, in a much worse country. That doesn't mean bad things can't happen. But saying these parents are bad parents for doing this is crazy a** stupid. A lot of US people - even some I know - can be really weird when it comes to parenting issues...
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
From Jared Diamond's book The World Until Yesterday
How much freedom or encouragement do children have to explore their environment? Are children permitted to do dangerous things, with the expectation that they must learn from their mistakes? Or are parents protective of their children’s safety, and do parents curtail exploration and pull kids away if they start to do something that could be dangerous?
The answer to this question varies among societies. However, a tentative generalization is that individual autonomy, even of children, is a more cherished ideal in hunter-gatherer bands than in state societies, where the state considers that it has an interest in its children, does not want children to get hurt by doing as they please, and forbids parents to let a child harm itself.
That theme of autonomy has been emphasized by observers of many hunter-gatherer societies. For example, Aka Pygmy children have access to the same resources as do adults, whereas in the U.S. there are many adults-only resources that are off-limits to kids, such as weapons, alcohol, and breakable objects. Among the Martu people of the Western Australian desert, the worst offense is to impose on a child’s will, even if the child is only 3 years old. The Piraha Indians consider children just as human beings, not in need of coddling or special protection. In Everett’s words, “They [Piraha children] are treated fairly and allowance is made for their size and relative physical weakness, but by and large they are not considered qualitatively different from adults ... This style of parenting has the result of producing very tough and resilient adults who do not believe that anyone owes them anything. Citizens of the Piraha nation know that each day’s survival depends on their individual skills and hardiness ... Eventually they learn that it is in their best interests to listen to their parents a bit.”
Some hunter-gatherer and small-scale farming societies don’t intervene when children or even infants are doing dangerous things that may in fact harm them, and that could expose a Western parent to criminal prosecution. I mentioned earlier my surprise, in the New Guinea Highlands, to learn that the fire scars borne by so many adults of Enu’s adoptive tribe were often acquired in infancy, when an infant was playing next to a fire, and its parents considered that child autonomy extended to a baby’s having the right to touch or get close to the fire and to suffer the consequences. Hadza infants are permitted to grasp and suck on sharp knives. Nevertheless, not all small-scale societies permit children to explore freely and do dangerous things.
On the American frontier, where population was sparse, the one-room schoolhouse was a common phenomenon. With so few children living within daily travel distance, schools could afford only a single room and a single teacher, and all children of different ages had to be educated together in that one room. But the one-room schoolhouse in the U.S. today is a romantic memory of the past, except in rural areas of low population density. Instead, in all cities, and in rural areas of moderate population density, children learn and play in age cohorts.
School classrooms are age-graded, such that most classmates are within a year of each other in age. While neighborhood playgroups are not so strictly age-segregated, in densely populated areas of large societies there are enough children living within walking distance of each other that 12-year-olds don’t routinely play with 3-year-olds.
But demographic realities produce a different result in small-scale societies, which resemble one-room schoolhouses. A typical hunter-gatherer band numbering around 30 people will on the average contain only about a dozen preadolescent kids, of both sexes and various ages. Hence it is impossible to assemble separate age-cohort playgroups, each with many children, as is characte
So Child Protection Agencies have nothing better to do than go after kids walking home at the age of 10???? I mean I could see at 5-6 but 10 is old enough to be trusted alone. I mean it's not like there are lots of other cases for the Child Protection should actually be doing stuff about...
Guess your one of those smarter than the rest of the world techs, nerds etc. A colleague confining with others on his life matters and you want to bust balls about how tech Davy you are. 15 maybe? Damn man grow up.
The irony is strong with this one.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
By the time I was 10, not only did I have a paper route that took me a few miles from home, I had a bike that gave me greater range. This was the late 70's to early 80's. Was normal. Today we have cellphones, gps and people are tripping because a 6 & 10 year old was walking home together?
I don't believe the USA is more violent then it was before, I believe that people are just more aware of bad shit that happens because you have a non stop stream of information, pictures and videos coming from various sources. Bad shit happens, yes, but it doesn't mean you need to lock your kids in your house and never let them out of your sight.
Be seeing you...
well our bus stop was 7km away. And there was a lot of broken glass, and of course bare feet and snow and stuff.
On a more seruous note. The city must be very safe if the police don't have anything better to do than be a Chief Wiggum level dumb arse.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Yeah, but it's different in Australia. By they time you're ten, you've survived dingoes, death adders, recluse spiders, great white sharks, and deadly post-apoc race-cars covered in spikes. To the average pedo, you're not low-hanging fruit.
So we can give these kids expensive cell phones and yet they cannot walk home? The media fear mongers have totally messed up people. You become paranoid of seeing these school shooting, and constant news coverage. I don't know the kind of area these kids walk in? But to me it does not sound like its rampant with gang warfare and rapists and pedophiles. Also, ever kid is different, thinking about the girl in the Kentucky plane crash that had killed her parents and family and at 7 she was able to survive and get help. I agree, its wrong to coddle kids in a bubble because it does not allow their natural defenses to develop.
Teach your kids what to look for, how to react, and have a phone to call for help. I myself was one block from qualifying for the bus so I rode my bike through all seasons of weather. No cell phone, no parent following me. Its sad that the media and massive coverage of isolated incidents creates such panics in America.
Its just like some parents suing the Sandy Hook district for not protecting their children?? Really, who can plan for a crazed kid to pick a school and go in and shoot people? Are they suing the school because they have nobody else to blame? because the shooter is dead? Its a tragic event but so are traffic deaths and
I don't see people suing the alcohol companies. Life is not perfect and yet our best way to live is to live and not cater to fear of what might happen.
The is this really cool invention we had way back before it wasn't cool to let kids play on your lawn. It is called don't fucking click the link.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
In the absence of obvious abuse, the simple test should be: is the child fed, clothed, sheltered, and schooled?
The sadder state of affairs is that a child justifiably separated from his/her parents by the State is unlikely to do much better in the foster parent system.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I want the nanny state for everyone else except me.....
I lived in Las Vegas for a while, my kids' bus stop was 1.1 miles from our house. Somehow a 3rd grader and 1st grader managed to make the journey for most of a year without being abducted, accosted, or otherwise traumatized by the journey! Apparently the ninja training must have paid off so the kids managed to stay under the radar of the authorities.
Politicians are like diapers - they should be changed frequently and for the same reasons.
guess it's implicit that nerds care about freedoms, given all the blathering about DMCA, and wiretapping, and wikileaks and what's his name in russia and all. Just another 'stuff that matters' , which, IMO, belongs on huffpo, not here.
My first thought was, "were the kids at least using a Smart Phone?"
Recluse spiders can be found in the area where these kids live - Brown Recluse. Just sayin' ;-)
Go in any of those "evil socialist" countries that have all those things, and see if parents get in trouble for letting a kid walk a mile. It has nothing to do with it.
This is a state of black/white strong opinion. Thats where the problem lies and why shit like this happens.
I walked around NYC by myself all the goddamn time in the late 70s and early 80s. I walked from my parents' apartment at 102nd and Riverside all the way to my private school at 112th and Amsterdam every goddamn morning.
I was never kidnapped once during that time.
We need look no further than this incident to understand why we have an entire generation of completely helpless, incapable 20-something year old children.
So when do you think pedophiles came into being and made modern society too dangerous for children? It seems to have been some time in the '80s from what I've gathered, I'm trying to narrow down their origin.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
... this is not
I'm not sure about that. It seems to me that the curiosity that led me to "explore" my neighborhood as a child also led me to explore tech later on.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Between the Stranger Danger and NIMBY and Snoops in the neighborhood a kid can't develop outside infantilism.
Which explains society today. Me - I was a latch key kid. Both parents worked so daily I'd do a sixth of a mile trek to and from school. Or school to my grandparents house which was also a sixth of a mile from the school. By age 7 I had my own key to the house.
I used to work with my dad starting at age 3 (not every day, but 2 days a week or so, just to spend time with him). I would wire up electric outlets (he would inspect before I'd push them in and plate them) By age 5, I was using a circular saw to repair a fence. By age 8 I was using heavy equipment (bulldozer and backhoes), and I was driving trucks at age 11. When I was 5, he would send me with $20 bill to the convenience store or to McDonalds to buy lunch for us and his worker. ($20 sure did go a lot farther in 1982, lol, i'd even bring back change) This was usually a few blocks away. Also at age five, i'd ride bikes on a 5 mile circuit of back roads with my two cousins age 6 and 10. Of course, we'd also ride in the back of a station wagon with faces pressed against the back glass, or in the backs of pickups, with no seatbelts. Sigh, kids today.
the simple test should be: is the child fed, clothed, sheltered, and schooled?
Nothing in law is as simple as that. You must first define each of those four factors. Let me give you an example related to "schooled": Some countries are known to haul homeschooling parents off to prison unless one parent has an accredited education degree and a valid teaching license. In fact, most political debates can be rephrased as debates over defining words.
Because nerds have kids, too.
No, we will mock them for not keeping their site in the manner they promise and advertise: news for nerds -- stuff that matters.
So, with mockery in mind, I will say I, too, am upset Microsoft is abandoning regular support for Windows 7 before the next major OS release.
Oops, wrong thread.
No, wait. Right thread.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I walked to school all the time. It was probably less than 1/2 mile, but I started at 5 or 6. I don't remember how old I was when roaming the neighborhood alone, but it was younger than 12, and I probably did a lot of it younger than 10. I went a lot of places I probably shouldn't have, did things that could have gotten me hurt but didn't, and I'm glad I got the chance to do such things. In the modern era, my mom would have been jailed for neglect, and I would have been a ward of CPS.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
If this isn't stuff that matters, then please stop populating the earth.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
When I was 11, my friend and I rode the bus downtown 15 miles each way, missed the start of "Star Wars", hung around for an hour and a half for the next showing, watched the movie, and rode the bus home.
30 mile round trip, 6 hours unsupervised, and we had no trouble at all. And as many have pointed out, the world is even safer now.
Yes, I know that "Anecdote is not Data". However, it is clear that:
* The Meitivs did NOT break current law, which does not cover outdoors (Why? The ones who made the law wanted to let their kids go to the park, that's what I'm thinking...);
* The police will not accept the word of a child that they do not need any help and are on their way home;
* The government will interrogate our children without our permission or presence because they are in school.
I'm on the Meitiv's side here, obviously.
I had my daughter brought home in a police cruiser no less than 3 times when she was between the ages of 6 and 8, simply for playing outside unsupervised in broad daylight. (Admittedly, she was small for her age). After the third time we got a visit from child protective services, which basically ended with us being instructed to buy a key operated deadbolt to lock her in the house so she couldn't escape.
...advice that was promptly ignored. That's a serious safety issue in a fire, which is frankly far more likely of a disaster. When I was a kid we were told we should have household fire escape drills, and now I'm being told to lock em in so they can't "escape" to play outside? What a f'ed up time we live in.
Dont' forget drop bears.
To contact Chief Manger:
By e-mail: MCPDChief@montgomerycountymd.gov
By mail: Chief Manger
Montgomery County Police Department
100 Edison Park Drive, 3rd floor
Gaithersburg, MD 20878
Montgomery County Child Protective Services's hands were tied: Once there was a complaint, they had to go through the motions of an investigation.
Now, here's where I find fault with CPS: They should've realized very quickly this was a case of a well-meaning citizen who was over-reacting and put the case on a "close as unfounded ASAP" track.
I also fault the state legislators and/or whatever state agency made the rules for not realizing that well-meaning citizens will see possible neglect where none exists and failing to write the rules with that in mind. A well-written rule will give CPS or for that matter any investigative body the authority to "quickly close" a case when it's obvious to both the initial investigator and at least one supervisor that there is nothing worth investigating.
But to the extend that their hands were tied, I can't fault the front-line investigators in Montgomery County Child Protective Services - their only choice was to do their job, not do their job and risk disciplinary action, or to resign in protest for being made to do something that they knew was harmful to the family involved.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Stuff that matters". Just because it doesn't matter to you, we should all capitulate to your demands? FFS, don't click the link and downvote the story. No more issue. See, there are little sliders up in the top right of the story section. Move those back and forth and stories that get downvoted disappear.
If that doesn't work, go find stories that you think meet the criteria and post them. Apparently, the /. mods give less than a fuck and any kind of story can make it to the main page (at least that seems to be what you are implying).
Disliking the fact that a story is posted that you don't want to read, reading the synopsis, commenting on the need to eleminate these types of stories and doing so as AC? sheesh, the hubris.
Charter Member of The Committee Group For The Elimination And Eradication Of Repetitive Redundancy
You must be new here (Yeah, I see your number)
1) This type of thing has been going on for a long time
2) People apparently like it, because there are the same amount ofcomments on this then on older subjects like Silk Road Trial Defense: Mt. Gox CEO Was the Real Dread Pirate Roberts
If people would not like it, these things would starve. However the crowd seems to like it. If you don't, move along.
It is as if you are going to a pub for years and suddenly you don't fit in anymore. Not only has the pub changed, the people who come there have changed and YOU have changed as well. Time to visit the Golf Club instead. (Where DO old people hang out online?)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
To be fair, we can't really lump net neutrality, a consumer protection issue, in with those others. But things like telling adults between 18 and 21 they can't drink alcohol and making single parents pay child support until their adult children are 25 are stupidly extending childhood and ultimately giving governments unreasonable power over the people.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
When the news figured out sensationalism and fear sold better than good journalism.
No sir I dont like it.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that notices this. If you know how long a football field is, then you know how long 100 yards is. Or is it 120 yards- do you include the end zones?
100 yards is the metric field... following the easy to multiply tens standard.
I think you know 120 yards is only used popularly in the USian scale
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I use "overrated" when a post has been modded up and I think it shouldn't be or modded up higher than I think it should be and there's no more specific reason to down-rate the post. I generally leave 0's and 1's alone. I'm also a bit careful about using overrated if the post is marked funny, because "+1 funny/-1 overrated/lather-rinse-repeat" will hurt the poster's karma.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The police in the DC area appear to have very strong beliefs that children should be accompanied very closely by parents at all times. About a year ago, my wife and I were walking to the air and space museum with our 8 year old daughter and her 8 year old cousin in DC. We walked by a park and the children thought it would be fun to walk through the park and meet us on the other side. They were stopped in the middle of the park by a police officer who demanded to know where their parents were. They pointed at us, about 50 feet away. The police officer first demanded that we come meet him in the middle of the park to pick up the children and, after we refused, settled for escorting them the 50 feet to meet us.
We felt like the officer was acting ludicrously and a royal jerk. It's discomforting to see that this problem is more wide spread, so I hope these parents are able to get the police and CPS to back down. I completely agree that children do not magically become grownups on their 18th birthday, they need to slowly expand their boundaries and comfort zone over time as they grow into adults.
I lived in northern Canada and walked about 2km to school each day (the school was on the other side of town) from when I was 8 and up. While there was only ever one confirmed pedo in town I had to walk through a forest trail to get there. Going north and south on the trail got you to each part of the town, east and west and you could find yourself lost pretty quickly. The dangers you ask, the occasional bear/wolf/moose sighting in the area.
My primary school was twice that distance and I walked it alone back and forth every day since the age of six.
Granted, a large city is more dangerous, but this over-protection is becoming ridiculous.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
1. Net neutrality, yes
2. Health care, no
3. Educational Standards, no
4. Minimum Wage, maybe, sometimes
5. Who to hire, no (unless not a legal resident)
See, it's possible to have a nuanced opinion about social, economical and other issues without being an ideological opinion bot. People (read you) that appear to only be able to see in black and white are often wrong a great deal of the time. Those (read me :D) that see each issue both in conjunction with unrelated issues and as stand alone and are able to evaluate and reach conclusion regarding that issue tend to be right more often.
If you respond, I'll be more interested in how you parse my reply in order to understand what I'm saying than I probably will be with your short FU.
Charter Member of The Committee Group For The Elimination And Eradication Of Repetitive Redundancy
I'm a little sad that Free Range parenting is a "thing" now. When I grew up (in the 70s), almost every kid was raised free range. From a very young age we walked or cycled to school. If we wanted to go swim, play soccer or see a movie, our parents wouldn't take us; we'd cycle there instead. The notion of "play dates" didn't exist except perhaps for toddlers; most of our after school time was unstructured and if you wanted to play with friends, you just went. Our parents taught us early on how to take the train to see our grandparents. The one rule our parents imposed was "home before dark". And all of this was the norm; parents didn't drive their kids anywhere unless the route was very long or dangerous.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I'll jump in here for no reason.
I rode my bike 3 miles to school from 2nd and 3rd grade until we moved closer to the school and then walked after that. Sometimes I would come home, realize I had forgotten my jacket or homework, and ride back up to the school to retrieve it.
Nothing special about that, lots of kids did the same thing at the same distances.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
In Japan they have something called "first errand". Young school children, say 5 or 6, are given a simple task to do such as go to the local shop and buy a specific item, then bring it home. The school organizes this [emphasis added]
We shouldn't need the school's help to do this. This is the kind of thing every parent should do at a time when they feel their kids are ready for it.
My mom with through a fairly "big deal" plan for me to walk to school for the first time. She drew maps and I think we walked it together at least once before the 1st day of school. I have no idea if she followed me "from a distance" that first day but in retrospect I would expect most mothers to do so for emotional reasons if not just for safety reasons.
I have heard of other parents who let their kids walk to school but they follow at a discreet distance.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Guess your one of those smarter than the rest of the world techs, nerds etc. A colleague confining with others on his life matters and you want to bust balls about how tech Davy you are. 15 maybe? Damn man grow up.
The irony is strong with this one.
Good sir, I would like to resurrect an old online tradition by awarding you one million internets.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Good thing you didn't read the whole thing and only brushed past the synopsis. Glad you came to give your boring opinion. Sorry, I should have phrased that better. Thanks for telling us you are bored.
Charter Member of The Committee Group For The Elimination And Eradication Of Repetitive Redundancy
I think this is more suited for Facebook than Slashdot
When I was 7 years old, i:
1. Walked 1 km to the bus.
2. Took the bus to the boat (10 mins).
3. Took the boat to the harbor in the capital of my country.
4. Walked through the city center to the underground (15 minutes, 1km).
5. Took the underground for 20 minutes.
6. Walked another km to school.
Then did the reverse after school.
Every day. I was transporting myself through the city center for a total 3 hours every day. With no supervision whatsoever, and I cannot ever remember being afraid.
Agreed. I walked to school and it was about 1 mile. I also rode my bike to the baseball fields and that was about 3 miles. Its sad to see things change like this.
The response seems a little extreme. When I was that age I was in the woods all day, getting banged up and dirty. Somehow I survived it without CPS taking an interest. And pretty much all the kids on our road did the same. CPS and government are getting just a little too involved in things they are better left out of. Letting a kid walk a mile is just not an issue that needs government busybody concern. Beats the hell out of keeping them cooped up or under mommy and daddy's thumb all day.
I was biking triple that distance when I was 11 in 1997 (obviously without a cell phone). The world is not so dangerous that all minors need continuous monitoring.
At 12 I was allowed to take the train to London for a day out with school friends. We had all been walking home from school alone since about 7 or 8.
well our bus stop was 7km away. And there was a lot of broken glass, and of course bare feet and snow and stuff. .
You forgot, "uphill both ways."
Well, a pedo and a bear, that's a dangerous combination...
Ezekiel 23:20
Maybe I'm old, but when I was in grade school kindergarteners on up had to walk to and from school if they lived less than a mile away unless there was some major road in between or they had a parent or babysitter ready to drive them.
... this is not
Really? I think "nerd" parents are more likely to be like these parents and allow their kids to explore the world and do things that the average over protective parent would have a seizure over.
Wow, in my home town, if you lived a mile or less away from the school, you had to walk to have parents transport you. I walked to school each day, as did my brother who was 7 through 10, while we lived there. Four years he walked half a mile each way. Parents now a days are going over board, as are police and CPS.
When I was 12 my parents a couple of times put me on a NJ Transit train in Central NJ. I would ride it alone to Penn Station in New York, where my grandfather would pick me up and take me back to my grandparent's apartment in Brooklyn where I'd spend the night, and travel back home the next day. I guess today that could be child abuse too. Having to walk up the stairs from the platform and meet me Grandfather in the middle of one of the busiest train stations in a city (NYC) that wasn't really quite as safe back then (80s) as it is today.
Oh yeah, I walked to school too for awhile, and used to wander the woods behind our neighborhood with friends.
I'm not sure I'd let me kids (currently a touch younger than the kids in the article) have quite as much free range, but that's just my own paranoid parenting self. I don't want to see other people who believe otherwise lose that freedom.
It seems like >95% of the posts here are in support of the parents. The next logical question should be "what can we do about this"? Sure, there are political avenues, but those are slow.
I think there might be a much faster way - we already have a special class of people who can mistreat their children by most of societies standards and get away with it - I'm thinking here of the Christian Scientists who deny almost all medial treatment to their children, and the Jehovah's witnesses who deny a smaller but still measurable subset (anything requiring blood transfusions).
If you can use religious freedom to justify clearly life-threatening decisions for your children, then I suspect so called "free-range parenting" could also gain protection given the right scripture. Perhaps the religion that offers this already exists; if not it shouldn't be so hard to create....
Down with presidents. Long live the queen!
Yeah, I had to walk a mile-and-a-quarter to school everyday, by myself! During Summer vacation, my mother would force me to go outside, and stay outside, until suppertime! With no supervision! Wow, I'm only realizing now, I really was neglected as a child. Of course, all the other kids were neglected in exactly the same way. It's a miracle we weren't all abducted!
In all seriousness, I can only pity the way kids grow up today. And everyone wonders why they're so fat.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
My wife and I and our kids were just talking about TFA this morning. The reaction that I got from my kids (8 and 10) was something like "huh?". We live just a few doors from a park where all the neighborhood kids play together, unsupervised, when the weather is nice. I love being able to give them unsupervised play time! That's time when then can just be themselves and interact with their peers without adults there interfering. They get to explore and do all kinds of stuff.
My wife and I are even considering allowing our older child to take the Metro (public transit) to ballet by herself next year when she's in middle school.
It frustrates me that our parenting style is probably considered illegal and/or immoral by the county's standards. I'd say that obesity from spending too much time indoors in front of a screen instead of getting out there and mixing it up are greater dangers to our children.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
No, we mean American football, which originally had play started by kicking (or "snapping") the ball with the foot, the field goals and tries were worth more than the touchdown, and the forward pass was illegal so the ball was rounder. Perhaps if Walter Camp had anticipated that ignoramuses would make stupid jokes, he would have proposed renaming the game.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The term for this is soft despotism.
It was coined by Alexis de Tocqueville and first described by him in the second volume of De la démocratie en Amérique, first published in 1840.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
A) I support the parents, I was allowed to walk home from school as a kid, it's ridiculous to think that every kid is dumb enough to get into a stranger's van.
B) The older is 10, not 4. It's fine. If you raise your kid right, they should be trusted home alone, maybe not overnight, but for at least a couple of hours at least, by age 10.
C) Why is this on Slashdot? How is this a tech story?
I hope those parents are teaching their kids how to be a huge pain in the ass for the government.
You joke, but I remember working in Dublin - there was a pretty steep hill I used to cycle down on the way to work - one day it was so windy I had to pedal hard to get down the hill. Was the wind the same direction that evening - like hell it was. So, does that count?
How do you figure? Isn't it helicopter parenting which produces nerds?
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
I don't personally have kids, but I've heard that kids are required to walk to school (distance permitting), so that they get used to the traffic.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
I grew up 30 miles from here, in N.VA, Fairfax.
In kindergarten, I walked over a mile to/from the school every day unaccompanied. So did all the other kids in the neighborhood. There wasn't bus service and at the time, we would probably have still walked unless it was raining.
Oh - and it was downhill to the school, uphill back home.
CPS is out of control, IMHO. When a 7yr old cannot walk themselves to/from school that isn't across town, that is going too far.
Or it would be like going to a sports bar on superbowl sunday and they are showing I Love Lucy.
Slashdot is a community It may be possible that others feel exactly the same way I do but are wondering if anyone else does.
Frankly Slashdot does a terrible job covering anything outside of tech/nerd news. The comments are full of venom and bad manners.
If Dice wants to turn Slashdot into a mainstream site good luck with that but unless you are going to get some real editors that have some training in mainstream news it will just be trollpool.
Big mistake because true "Nerds" are a really good market to serve.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The irony here is that the police are now one of those dangers of the world.
When did the police become so adversarial where they threaten use of firearm when interacting with citizens? I think that should be investigated as well.
My son is 30. He was raised by a very protective Dad. That said, he was allowed lots of latitude, including walking home from school.
He also trained at our dojo with mostly law enforcement and military folks from age 9. When he was 12, he got his arm broken at Black Belt class...by me. It was an accident in a close combat drill.
Based on the knee jerk BS from CPS and the police in the article, I'd be in jail and even worse, separated from my boy.
At this point, I'm looking for the exit....
I am my own gestalt.
No, Tackle Football, not to be confused with Futbal as in Association Football, nor Rugby, nor Australian Rules Football, the man;'s game.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
apparently nothing, or did anything bad happen to you? as violent crimes have about halved since then, it should be okay to do this more than ever.
Dear Nanny-State,
Butt out.
You're mistreating your dogs. They are not human children.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I know its horrible. I stopped driving with my kids after a child in my city was killed in a car accident. Then I read that some kids were killed by a gunman at a school and decided to pull them out. Sports was next when I heard that some kid was hit in the chest by a soccer ball and died from cardiac arrest. I am currently thinking about covering my kids with bubble wrap and locking them in their rooms, but then again there was a house fire last week and I saw that someone choked on bubble wrap. I'm not sure what approach I should take to guarantee my children a 100% risk free life. You do realize, that by every measure "Modern Society" is safer for children (and adults) than at any other time in human history. A child has a greater chance of being struck by lightning than being kidnapped. We're creating a whole generation of children that are so fragile, they will crumple at the first sign of adversity.
ANd the deadliest threat in Austrailia....AUSTRAILIANS!!!! (just kidding, I love you aussies, you're good folk, but your government is as messed up as ours)
It's been broken and invalid for at least 13 years. No one gives a shit, at least those that can fix it.
Well someone fucked it up good and proper in the last 2 days. The layout is now totally borked on Safari 6.1, whereas at the start of the week it was perfectly fine.
Chrome user here - it's FUBAR'd here, too. Obnoxious grey background strip along the right side. Looks like arse.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
You, Sir, are a fucking moron. Adult women get abducted, raped and killed, too. I refuse to live in fear. I refuse to let my child live in fear. Montgomery County CPS can go fuck themselves for thinking they are entitled to take children out of a home simply because they disagree with parents who have done nothing against the law. Fuck off, commie.
Age 9 I had a walk back from school that was either 1.5 miles along the road or 1 mile shortcut through the woods. Never did me any harm.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Their ass off" did not fit into the subject.
I mean: for the 6 year old that might be a bit "tough" if he was alone, but he had his 10 year old sibling with him.
I walked to the kindergarden and back home as soon as I was like 4 years old, that was not a mile but roughly 1000 yards.
Of course that was:
o in Germany
o the early 1970s
o in a small village
On the other hand, judging form the news the USA are really dangerous for children alone on the streets ... so who am I to have an opinion?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Letting kids go outside is cruel and stupid when it can be so easily avoided in our modern society. Have you people not heard of lightening? This is not paranoia, it's verifiable fact. On average 50 people are killed each year in the USA from lightning. Thankfully the average is going down, and we less now... thanks probably to more people staying inside. But it's still more than are killed in the average terrorist attack or school shooting, or pedophile rampage, which people seem to be very concerned about. Since irresponsible parents historically have not seen fit to make sure their children are properly shielded from lightning each and every time they leave home, it would seem there is no choice but for a society who cares about children to make sure the children are secured indoors.
I would mention the actually astronomically greater threat posed by automobiles, directly and indirectly, but I understand that our society has made the conscious decision to holds cars sacred. So that's fine.
Fork.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I'm not a US citizen, but it seems like a few hundred specific FOI requests will ensure that the officers will have enough to do to stop doing stuff like that...
I was in elementary school (K-6) from 1987 - 1994. I lived in non-rural Southern California for all that time. I lived in high crime areas. From 3rd grade (age 8) all the way through graduating highschool, I found my own way to school. It was walking, taking the bus, or riding a bike. The shortest "commute" I had was in walking in 3rd grade-- 1.0 miles as Google Maps reads it now.
For 4th grade (age 9), I bused half the year until it was too expensive. Then I walked and biked for half of 4th grade and the rest of 5th and 6th (ages 10 and 11). That distance was 1.9 miles each way. There was never a problem. I knew how to cross a major intersection and a 2-way stop. I knew my way home and I knew how to ask old people which way a particular street was if I ever got lost trying to find a short cut.
I'm sure most of us know that crime in California was at a relative high in the late '80s to early '90s. Crime is very low today. Moreover, the risk of kidnapping by strangers (what everyone is actually afraid of), has never really been a genuine risk.
"Only a tiny minority of kidnapped children are taken by strangers. Between 1990 and 1995 the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children handled only 515 stranger abductions, 3.1 percent of its caseload. A 2000 report by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Programs reported that more than 3/4 of kidnappings were committed by family members or acquaintances of the child. The study also found that children abducted by strangers were harmed less frequently than those taken by acquaintances." (http://news.discovery.com/human/psychology/stranger-child-abductions-actually-very-rare-130514.htm)
Now let's contrast this with a genuine danger: automobiles.
In 2003, the 0-14 age group accounted for 2,136 of traffic fatalities. In addition, children under 15 years old accounted for 1,591 of all vehicle occupant fatalities, 253,000 of all the people injured in motor vehicle crashes, and 220,000 of all the vehicle occupants injured in crashes. (http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/809762.pdf)
Before we put irrationally short leashes on children thus stunting their maturation, let's put speed limiters and automatic breaking on automobiles so they actually reach maturity.
From the ripe old age of 7-11 I hopped on my bike everyday and rode it 2.3 miles to school in the morning and back home in the afternoon. In the summers I rode 5-6 miles out to the municipal airport to hang around planes and generally goof-off. From age 6 on, my friends and I trick-or-treated alone, camped out alone, etc...
I can't imagine the trouble my parents would be in now for allowing such behavior.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
On fear, talking specifically about how children's worlds are shrinking.
It's a new podcast, seeing how it turns out.
How insightful. Greetings from the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Maryland (DPRM), and welcome to our highly advanced Nanny State. We are indeed programming future generations to utterly depend on the One Party for their wellbeing, cradle to grave, in joyful and obedient service to our elite maternal benefactors. statism |sttizm| noun a political system in which the state has substantial centralized control over social and economic affairs: the rise of authoritarian statism.
Why do self proclaimed nerds read so bad? /. is not about science, sci-fi, or anything else in the nerd category. /. is about stuff that matters!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"parents ... help by watching the children from a distance." Why doesn't CPS do that if they're so worried? I mean, it's good that people are looking out for kids. That's fine. So when two smallish kids are reported out by themselves and the cop spots them, why doesn't he or she just watch from a distance to make sure they're okay? Or if cops don't have the time for that, call in CPS who just watches from a distance.
That way they don't have to fix anything that's not broken, AND the kids are definitely safe. Win-win. What am I missing?
Back in the 1960s, my 6 year old brother and my ten year old self walked almost a mile every school day to our bus stop. Rain or snow or high winds or freezing cold we walked it. Two other families on our bus route had to walk just as far.
An older gentleman I knew liked to tell the story of the day in the 1930s (when he was ten years old) he was allowed to walk by himself for the first time cross country through woods and farm fields, 5 miles to the Southwick General Store and Post Office. And back. All in the same day. He would end the story by saying: "I felt like a man that day."
He was still proud of it, 30 years later.
Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.
anyone who is here should know that wapo is short for washington post. Its been used for years now
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Yeah, sort of. Programming (or socially engineering) children to be subservient and accepting of constant surveillance. Surveillance of course, is basically 99.9999% tech.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
If your rich you don't have to raise kids. You hire undocumented workers to do that for you. By the time they are 18, you wonder who the strangers are in the house. And all I can say fuck CPS. No one knows how to raise her children better than their own parents. I would certainly not want anyone to instill values into my children other than me.
So I guess if the kids had been black the polic had not bothered?
Err? You meant something different with black/white?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
About 100 children get "truly" abducted in the US per year: http://www.pollyklaas.org/abou...
Sadly half of them get killed or vanish.
http://www.pollyklaas.org/abou... Not sure how accurate that is, but I saw similar numbers during my googleing.
Regarding lightening the we sites are not as conclusive here it is 400 hits per year: http://news.nationalgeographic...
On others it is about 300. Likelihood of survival is between 70% and 90%.
However: I'm surprised that you are right. People get more often hit by lightening than children get kidnapped (per year).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
As a parent, I think this story is lackin a lot of critical context before I can pass judgement on anything. The route the kids followed is critical to understanding if this was responsible parenting or not. 1 mile is pretty far for a six year old, especially if it's in a high traffic area. Seems more prudent for the parents to tail the kids from a disttance, at least the first time (and it sounds like this was the first time), when they do something like this.
I wonder how far their school district makes children walk when they live close to the school. In my district, any child in 1st-12th grade who lives within 1.5 miles of their school does not get a bus. it is quite normal for a 10 and 6 year old brother+sister to walk to school in that range. I live in a normal suburb outside Philadelphia.
However, I fear that this will be used as an excuse to seize far-reaching authority that will quickly be abused in ways we have yet to anticipate.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
When I was ten years old I traveled many miles by bicycle and on foot both night and day. The simple truth is that we needed to have no fear of sexual preditors or sadists. In Ft. Lauderdale we had quite a population and it was not a tiny town by a long shot. But crime was simply pretty darned rare. In the 1950s and sixties we only locked the house doors if we were going on vacation. Nobody felt at risk of a burgler in the night. These days one needs to be right on top of their kids and that goes up to an age of about twenty when one simply can not be present at almost all times. We do have psychopaths stalking and nightmares walking. And if akid goes fishing in remote places there is way too high a probablity of them being molested or murdered. The question is why. Just why do we have so many depraved people about? We certainly have way too many people in prisons. Then as now we had no real mental health help for most of the population. And back then prison was easy to go to and very hard to survive including forced labor on chain gangs. The one single change that is so striking is the publics acceptance of getting high. Drugs were absolutely absent in our schools and getting caught with a pinch of any drug including pot pretty much was a life ender. Florida had a reform school that murdered many young boys. They are still recovering bodies from that closed facility. One little bit of pot was enough to send you there until you were 21 and you would be unemployable for life. Even at 11 years old we knew not to get sent to Marianna. Getting stoned was simply not an issue. A few teens tried getting drunk in high school. I wonder if the anti-social molesters and creeps are showing some sort of dope related, long term behaviours due to brain injuries from youthful drug use.
Ditto. You weren't eligible for the bus if you lived within a mile, so you walked. Or biked. School yard had a tonne of bike racks filled, even in winter. Not a bike helmet to be seen (what do you think you're riding, a motorbike?). To think, all this time we were neglected abused children.
When we build a society in which government is the solution to every single problem, what else did we expect?
If smoking bothers us, instead of simply going somewhere else, we campaign for a massive national ban on smoking enforced by the government.
If eating too much makes us fat, we elect politicians who cheerfully try to ban large sodas and contemplate legislation against restaurants that serve food that doesn't meet "our" healthy standards.
If we're upset that people have made such crappy life choices that they cannot afford fundamental expenses to support their life & kids, we insist that the government take wealth from everyone to pay them.
I'd say the idea that police swoop in to intervene when we decide to parent in a way not narrowly defined as "ok" by the bureaucrats is *precisely* in line with this trend.
-Styopa
Every Wednesday evening, my friends 10 yr old son does a paper route that is just under 2 Km long. At this time of the year, that means working mostly in the dark and along streets that are pretty bare. It's supposed to be his older brothers route, but the elder got sick of it and was going to quit. The younger lad campaigned heavily for parental permission to sub-contract the job. (Since the newspaper company wouldn't hire anyone younger than 12) He's been doing it for a little over two years now with no problems except for one jerk who usually has a hostile and aggressive acting dog. The man tells the boy to just ignore the dog, to tell it to shut up and go on with his delivery. Both my friend and I have told the lad that controlling this dog is NOT his job. If there is any doubt, any cause for concern *whatsoever* he is to skip the delivery and let the jerk complain to the newspaper.
When I was a child in the major city of Toronto, two of my friends and I routinely made bicycle trips that were well over 3 Km in round trip length so we could explore a ravine city park/conservation area. Plenty of opportunity to get into an accident, get lost or encounter a person of bad intent. Lots of adventures, some minor accidents scrambling around in the ravine, but NO tragedies.
we moved when I was 11 and for the remainder of the school year (about 4 mths IIRC) I escorted my 5 yr old brother on the TTC to our old neighbourhood, dropped him off at the day care and then proceeded to my school around the corner. Our mother went with us for the first trip, just to reassure herself that I knew the route as well as I claimed. (a short bus ride to the station, several stops on the subway and then a 4 block walk above ground) But after that, it was all on me. The following year, it was a 1 Km streetcar ride, followed by a two block walk for my brother and I to attend school. His afternoon day care picked him up at lunch time, but after school I picked him up from daycare and took him home. We usually walked because there was a bakery we would mooch day old goodies from. I took care of my brother until our mom got home at around 5:30.
TL'DR version. Both my own extensive experiences at that age and my daily observation of kids that age today suggest that a 1 mile walk from a park IS NO BIG DEAL. It really does depend on the competence of the child(ren) involved and the character of the route being taken.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Good lord. I was riding busses all over Detroit at that age...
EVERYBODY walked to/from school alone or with their friends. There was a crossing guard at the major street closest to the schools, and "safety boys" and "safety girls" at other corners. (For street crossing.)
EVERYBODY just walked to the playground to hang out.
EVERYBODY just rode their bikes around the neighborhood, alone or with their friends.
Yea, I was bike-jacked, once. That's the only thing that ever happened. Period. My friend George's mother drove around until she found them, and made them give it back.
Today any of the above would get a call to the cops and a visit from Child Protective Services? And I suppose George's mother would be in jail...
Times have changed? Yes they have. We had riots back then (1967). Hasn't been a good riot in the U.S. since Rodney King. Maybe back then cops had more important things to worry about than imagining a pedo behind every tree. Like provoking riots... (before you make assumptions, I am caucasian.)
The commercial strip a block from our apartment burned. I was at my grandparents outside of the city, as I was every summer, so I did not experience it directly. When I returned that fall, we had moved to a different part of the city. Nothing changed about my freedom. I still walked to school, to the playground, rode my bike, rode the busses around the city. Thank God, my mother had a rational bone in her head.
Might bad things happen to unsupervised kids? They might. At statistically-small numbers. I think something more damaging happens when kids are arbitrarily restricted, at statistically-higher numbers.
Something bad might happen to a few kids left unsupervised. Something bad happens to ALL kids when they are taught, from an early age, that they are not allowed to be free, and taught that the world is a dangerous place that you should be overly afraid of.
...participate in any childhood activities if a**holes like these cops and bureaucrats had been around when I was that age. Our Little League practices were over a mile away and we rode to/from the field -- sometimes as a group but often alone -- without anyone calling the cops. We rode bikes to the public pool -- well over a mile a way -- all summer long, crossing all kinds of busy streets along the way. Even at night. Again nobody called the cops.
Of course, this was a time before pins started showing up in Halloween candy and the kindly old lady down the block could still hand out homemade popcorn balls in your trick/treat bag without risking spending the rest of her life in the big house or on some predator list. I can't quite pin down the time frame when it began but, apparently, some disease began afflicting adults that caused them to hate children. And the unafflicted adults began overreacting to the sight of a child unaccompanied by a cordon of security guards by calling the police whenever they catch a glimpse of one.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I regularly used to take the shortcut through the cemetery, even after sundown. That scared me worse than the thought of bears.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
The kids are probably less safe in CPS care.
About 15 years ago there was a case where a professor at the local university had her son taken by CPS because she tied her son's hands behind his back to prevent him from continuing to hit himself intentionally. He had some kind of condition that caused him to inflict harm on himself and she was trying to help protect him. Anyways, while under CPS care, the kid died because essentially CPS didn't take care of him properly. Whether or not you think that the mother took care of the child properly, you can't dismiss the fact that CPS didn't know any better.
Wow, what a fantastic response! Thanks for that.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I think that "confining" was also intended to be "confiding".
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Then there is Canadian Football which has two "50-yard" lines resulting in a 110 yard playing field + two 20 yard end zones being 150 yards.
This, of course, is a result of Canada being a metric nation ;^)
But when you say football field, many folks think of a 100-110m FIFA compliant field which is just about matches American football field + endzones which seems to make some sense. On the other hand, I don't have any idea what the Canadians were thinking, except that nobody is going to play their sport except in stadiums in Canada.
It's been broken and invalid for at least 13 years. No one gives a shit, at least those that can fix it.
Well someone fucked it up good and proper in the last 2 days. The layout is now totally borked on Safari 6.1, whereas at the start of the week it was perfectly fine.
Which part of the comment are you guys referring to?
This?
It took me all of 5 seconds to run a slashdot story through an HTML5 validator and see where you fucked up
or this?
Oh, and BTW .. News, Nerds, Technology with this story? Obviously the glory days are over.
Alexander said he had a tense time with police when officers returned his children, asked for his identification and told him about the dangers of the world.
#1 on that list: Overreaching government and law enforcement.
Helicopter parenting does not produce nerds. Nerds are people who love something so much they learn all about it and are totally engrossed by it (defnition by Wil Wheaton at some convention). Parents can push you, but they can't push you into true nerd-dom. My personal corollary: to be a true nerd, there has to be a large element of inutility in the subject. Klingon translator does not land you jobs. I'm a little bit of a weather nerd; the weather in Montgomery County on December 20th was high 35, low of 19, sunset at 4:48. I wouldn't want them walking home in the dark, without winter jackets, and unable to describe which way home was. Assuming the kids had jackets on and it was daylight, and they knew the route, somebody needs to take a chill pill.
Might as well face it I'm addicted to data.
If both the police and the child protective services both think that the town is too dangerous for children, then the family(and every other family) should definitely move somewhere else.
Children's Aid Society or Child Protection Services or whatever TLA is the style where you live, believe in guilty until proven innocent.
Fundamentally, all their abuses stem from that flawed assumption.
They are the best example of why presumption of innocence is so important. The fact so many people take it for granted changes nothing.
It's kind of fascinating to read all the comment flow on posts like these (which Slashdot has had a number of in the last few days)... Where the argument between the commenters eventually boils down to two sides:
1. There is a non-zero chance of badthing happening, and badthing is terrible, so it is my personal choice to give up freedomthing in order to reduce or remove the chance of badthing happening.
2. While badthing can happen, and is indeed terrible when it does, the chances are low enough and I find the benefits gained from freedomthing to be worth the risk, and it is my personal decision to continue doing freedomthing.
The meta discussion then becomes
3. I think person 1 and person 2 should be able to make their own choices
4. I think person 2 is irresponsible and should be forced to relinquish freedomthing because badthing
It's interesting but regardless of the issues it does seem like people who make choices based on their fears, seem to do so again and again. I'm not sure what would be required for person 2 to convince person 1 it is "Okay" and to embrace the freedom and forget the fear... Maybe a better understanding of risk analysis? I was lucky to have reasoning parents, who allowed me to take reasonable risk in search of the rewards of freedom, and taught me through example on how to judge those balances... but it wasn't until joining the Navy and being introduced to one of the few pieces of remarkably sane bureaucracy that they have -- The risk matrix http://imgur.com/kboHrxK
Basic concept here is:
1. Every risk is given a category based on two factors:
a. What are the chances of something going wrong
b. What is the severity of the thing that goes wrong
2. Once the the category is determined, then it is weighed against the value of the reward...
Basically, if the risk isn't worth the reward... Either mitigate the risk until it is within the reward value, or don't do it.
The case here, is Improbable chance of catastrophic result... Category 12... or medium risk. Medium risks are taken often, you mitigate whenever possible (short distance, they were together, familiar territory) and the reward here is children that are more independent and strong.
The world would be a worse place if people weren't allowed to make these kinds of choices for themselves...
But the world would be a better place if people were better able to find ways to understand and cope with their fear. All too often we are manipulated by it.
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.
This is too far, way too far. Attempting to charge parents for neglect when they absolutely did the right thing! If it were my kids, they'd be walking too. This world is becoming more retarded by the day.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
My mother let me stay home from school because I was always sick (i.e., overweight, high blood pressure, and ulcers) and I spent three years on probabtion for truancy. After I got off probation, the probation officer discovered that my family rented the really nice two-story house that we lived in. He told my mother he would have taken me away if he had known we were renters. Since we didn't directly pay his salary through county property taxes, we had less rights as renters than owners in his eyes. I doubt that would hold up in a court of law.
I think you know 120 yards is only used popularly in the USian scale
Or in Canada it would be 150 yards (110 yards for the playing surface, and 20 yards for each end zone). I still don't understand how the damned yanks can play on such a postage stamp of a field...
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
I had to walk to elementary school, also in Maryland. The rule was if you lived less than a mile away, you had to walk. I lived .98. Never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever once had an issue. What's up with these pussies?
So I used to walk about 2 miles to school and back most days when I was between 8-10 years old. Never a problem. Sure, one person's anecdote is no preponderance of evidence, but I'm with the Meitiv's on this one.
At heart of this issue is that most people's *first response* is to fucking call the police. The "mandatory reporter" couldn't have, oh maybe, gone and talked to the children _first_, and THEN talked to the parents, instead of cowardly calling the police from the secrecy of their home & making it a legal issue.
THIS is was Soviet Russia was like, everyone snitching on everyone until no one had friends they could trust, and everybody went neurotic from the isolation.
The cops/CPS assumption that the caller is right and the parents are automatically at fault is *definitely* a problem too. Shades of the police state.
According to the Montgomery County school website, having the kids walk a mile with a sibling is within normal community standards, and in line with guidelines set forth by the county itself.
(See www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/parents/basics/transportation/ )
In Montgomery County where this occurred, school bus transportation is only provided for elementary school children who live further than 1mi from school, and for middle schoolers (11yo+) further than 1.5mi. The county's guidance for elementary school kids walking 1 mile or less is "Younger walkers are encouraged to walk to and from school with siblings, older children from their neighborhood, or parents. At many schools, Montgomery County crossing guards help walkers cross at busy intersections near the school. In most elementary schools, student safety patrols guide younger children in crossing smaller neighborhood streets."
I don't see how CPS has a leg to stand on here; the children were simply practicing what they are expected to do by the county school system itself.
I think not...(*poof*)
for some reason almost every other country in the world has a government that can help control the inefficiencies in the health care market, set educational standards, have minimum wages (and laws about time off), non-discrimination hiring standards, and ISP regulations, all far more strictly than the US, and all of which provide far higher quality for far less money than the US. And yet, in every country, a 10 year old getting on the train to go to school miles from home is considered par for the course.
don't conflate the stupidity that goes on in the US with a functioning government.
Wondered how long it would take for someone to play the Rape Card. Appeal to Emotion is a logical fallacy. Claiming the poster said that it was "no big deal" is a straw man and bordering on ad hominem. You cite examples of non-stereotypical kidnappings without actually citing them ("Read the examples of so-called "non-stereotypical" kidnappings."). There's a name for that too but I don't recall it. Statistics are statistics. 58,000 out of 72M children is an exceedingly small amount and is statistically unlikely. One could argue even statistically insignificant. Statistics are cold since they are devoid of emotion and this is why you try to derail the conversation by appealing to emotion since that is what humans operate on. Also, stating "but 58,000 is a very large number of crimes" & "That is a disturbing statistic in a so-called western, civilized society" is implying to the audience that "even if one life is saved by $whatever it'll be worth it" which has been proven time and time again to never be worth it.
Does that explains Flutie's success as a Stamp(eder)!
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Reread the coward's message, he was talking about friendly fire, not killing the enemy's leader.
This is fucking disgusting. We make a big stink about "letting parents be able to raise their kids".
Except when a handful of parents do the right thing. Helicopter parenting is borderline abuse.
My father, a Captain in the Air Force, was stationed at Sidi Slimane Air Base, Morocco, Africa, in 1953/1954. A Strategic Air Command base, the rules should have been much more strict, but...I rode my bicycle all over the Atlantic coast, at Media Plage, (French for White Beach). the French Algerian War was in full swing, the French Moroccan War was in the terror pre-war phase, with French Foreign Legion unitscamped in small tents, near our home. I rode for miles, gone much of the day on Saturdays, Sundays, playing with kids who were Arabs, Beduin, French. None of us spoke the languages of the others... When the two USAF MPs were 'accidently' murdered by the rebels, all the US military families were ordered to move into base housing, 30 miles away. New territoty for this 7 year old to explore, as I rode off base, right through the gates! One Saturday, I was met an hour away from home, by a Sirocco, aka, Hurricane! Cat 3 winds gusting to Cat 4, made me walk my bicycle, for about 15 miles, to arrive home very wet, but, happy! Never stopped my adventures, and did a 20 year USAF career, serving in 15 nations, and, with millions of others, caused extreme anxiety for all America's enemies. Now, I am olderthan most of you, and consider all the sissy rules as stupid paranoia, but, do have my many firearms locked and loaded, because rapid response, and calm resolve, from making a call, to taking out a perp or thug with one shot, one kill accuracy, is my forte. Not paranoid, just prepared. MOLON LABE! Now, back to fixing up computers with the install of Linux Mint, for all the kids, FreeNAS, PC BSD, and more, for all the newbies. FLOSS ONLY, since 1997!
what bothers me most is that often times the workers themselves are not married, much less parents themselves. they are full of 'book' knowledge on how things should be, but have never dealt with these situations in the 'real' world.
better known as Pudsey.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
American football fields are regulation 120 yards long including the end zones. Canadian football fields are 130 yards. Soccer fields are 100-120 yards (yes, the FIFA regulations have that miuch latitude). You could actually chalk a soccer pitch on an American football field without marking down the length of the pitch and be FIFA legal.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
don't, I still have flashbacks.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
yeah got that here as well - on both sides.
FIX THIS SHIT, DICE!
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
If this is justified the police department needs to
be sacked.
Just living in a neighborhood where a ten year old and younger sibling
cannot take a 20 min walk is scary to the extreme and tells me that
"protective" services are in order and that these parents qualify for
a concealed carry permit to supplement an open carry of a 12-Gauge
shotgun.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Nanny State
http://petergraceonline.com/20...
We are all humans. We grow within our Mothers and are born and begin our development over time outside our mothers. Independence grows over time.
As a young person near Boston, I used to take myself into the Boston Science Museum on Saturdays each weekend. I was not accompanied by another family member. I used the Mattapan High Speed Trolley and Red Line and then the Green Line to get to Science Park. I did this almost every weekend between the ages of 7 and 13.
My Route.
At age 7, I once took my younger siblings with me to see Woody Allenâ(TM)s âTake the Money and Runâ. It was rated âMâ(TM).
I used to ride my bicycle around Milton, MA until the street lights came on during the summer. At Age 13 I rode my bicycle from Milton MA to North Falmouth MA. Later I participated in Centuries.
The likelihood of violence being inflicted upon any child is very low, but increases when the violence is being inflicted by another child. Bad stuff does happen, and the media does a terrific job of giving us the sordid details, but Iâ(TM)ve never seen them provide an analysis of the likelihood of the event happening to any individual. Itâ(TM)s sad certainly, but do we want to be total helicopter parents and restrict the development of the independence of our youth?
My kids are young people and growing older. They have their issues, sometimes not paying attention to their personal grooming. We had to visit DHS once when my youngest was reported for not changing his clothes and cleaning his nails. We have to pick our battles. Just getting him to bed can be a challenge.
Young people make mistakes. Thatâ(TM)s one way that they grow and learn. Kids even do criminal acts. Rather than imprison them or take them away from their parents, how about educating all parties involved. Itâ(TM)s now known that a young personâ(TM)s brain isnâ(TM)t fully developed till about 24 years old. Some consideration should be given to young persons and educating them about good behavior rather then reinforcing bad behavior by placing the in Prison .
Recent news show people calling police about a solitary child at the park or taking the subway by themselves. Donâ(TM)t they remember being children themselves? I do.
Please be Good, not Evil.
God Bless America, Please.
Adam Selene
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Nanny State by Adam Selene is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Peter AI6PG