What has led you to believe that we call the cops in the United States when we see 10 year old kids out having fun? What a strange belief.
It’s not uncommon. Here’s just a few stories I was able to pull up, though my google-fu isn’t what it used to be and theres a lot of noise from all the headlines made for the first one.
The Washington Post reported last week that last month, a 10-year-old boy and his 6-year-old sister were walking one mile home from a park in Silver Spring. Someone called the cops, who picked them up about halfway and took them the rest of the way home. Their parents, Alexander and Danielle Meitiv, faced no criminal charges, but a few hours later Montgomery County Children’s Protective Services (CPS) showed up. According to the Meitivs, a CPS worker required Alexander to sign a safety plan promising not to leave his children unsupervised until the following Monday, when CPS would follow up. If he refused, the worker said his children would be removed. CPS has since interviewed both children at school and returned to the Meitivs’ house. - grist.com, USA Today, The Washington Post
8 and 10-Year-0ld Escorted Home by Firefighters After Neighbors Report Unsupervised Kids - reason.com
Mom Sues Cops Who Arrested Her for Leaving 14-Year-Old Daughter Home Alone - reason.com
a cop came knocking after someone reported two of Hershberger’s children, ages five and almost seven, walking a few blocks from her home in Reading—a Boston suburb—and picking up litter. - reason.com
A Mom Let Her 7-Year-Old Play in the Park. Arizona Arrested Her and Banned Her From Working With Kids. - reason.com
I’m glad you came with receipts. I (probably very obviously) both grew up and currently live in the US and this is wild to me. When I was a kid we ran around in the woods on the weekends and when I visited my grandparents we walked to the arcade, corner store, or the grocery store without being hassled.
I see a bunch of kids in my neighborhood playing ball, having Nerf wars, and generally just being kids from the time the spring rain stops until it starts back up again next year. The oldest I’ve seen this year probably isn’t quite old enough to drive yet and the youngest is probably somewhere in the 5-7 range. They’re just out being mild nuisances and having the time of their lives. No one has said a thing.
It’s a symptom of our increasingly car-dependent infrastructure imo. You feel much more exposed in the middle of parking lots or walking along neighborhood roads without sidewalks, or trees and buildings providing cover, and god forbid you end up footing the main arterial roads we have to take to access any commerce. More of our lives are being lived in these “in-between” areas, making us feel less safe in general. Houses being further apart and less people going out on foot means there are less eyes incidentally looking out if anything were to go wrong, and kids have to go further to get anywhere safe.
All of this makes adults feel less comfortable letting kids go out on their own, and cast judgement (and sometimes call the police, who sometimes take legal action!) upon anyone that does. Plus the monoculture of suburbia makes people much more susceptible to fear mongering by mainstream media, not to mention the unprecedented access to that media provided by the internet.
Anyways, here’s a great video from Not Just Bikes on the topic, Why We Wont Raise Our Kids in Suburbia
Those stories made the news because of how outrageous they are, not because they’re common occurrences. There are still plenty of kids running around outside and having fun in the rest of the non-wacko towns across the country.
For further reading, see Lenore Skenazy’s blog Free-Range Kids.
These stories make the news because they’re so outlandish. This is far from common behavior.
The fact that it happens at all is far too much. The US has become a country of essentially helicopter parents. I blame this largely on suburbs. They are built for cars and there’s not really a good way for children to travel alone. This has caused a situation where parents are involved in whatever the child is doing anytime they aren’t at school. This leads to ethe expectation that a parent will always be a with their child, so this not being the case becomes suspicious.
I’m exaggerating slightly to be funny. That said, I’m the type of parent that sends my kids out to play unsupervised, and that’s really not as common as it was when I was a kid. I’ve dealt with:
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When my daughter was 6, she did a loop around our block alone. About a quarter of a mile, most of it visible from the front or back yard. A neighbor came to tell me she saw my daughter walking alone, and I told her I knew. She insisted that my daughter was too young, and it was too cold for her to be out alone (I think around 40 degrees? My daughter was wearing a coat, anyway). I said she’d be fine. This lady then went and convinced my daughter to walk home with her. She brought her up to the door and I was completely blown away that this woman basically took it upon herself to decide what my kid can and cannot do.
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A different neighbor posted a picture of my son on Facebook, at 8 years old, asking where the parents were because he was too old to be out playing alone.
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One of my daughter’s friends isn’t allowed out of the house without a parent (now 9 years old) so my daughter always goes to her house. It’s weird.
That’s not a lot. It’s not even that serious. But it’s fucking weird that we’ve arrived here, as a society.
Some commenter mentioned people on Lemmy being scared of everything. Yeah, I combine my experiences with those stories of people being arrested for neglect or abuse because they let their kid out of their sight for a minute and it terrifies me. This is a nation of nosy busybodies, convinced by around-the-clock news that there’s a pedophile kidnapper lurking in every neighborhood waiting for the chance to strike.
How unfortunate. My friends and I basically roamed the streets until the street lights came on when I was that age. I still see little kids walking down to the park a block from my house, or riding their bikes around the neighborhood. But I’m not in a big metro city any more. It’s probably much different in the hearts of major metropolitan cities.
Yous are fuckin terrified of your own shadows
Never seen such an entire nation of quivering shitebags
😂
I don’t think they’re allowed to sell those in Scotland, they’re classed as candy, not cereal
It’s not like we drive our kids to the bus stop and then sit in the car until they get on the bus.
When I was a kid living at home, there was a father who would walk with his two daughters to the bus stop and wait with them there until they got on the bus.
One day a woman came along in her car, slipped into a diabetic coma, and veered towards them.
The father managed to throw one daughter to safety before he and his other daughter were hit.
He survived, but he was left with a limp. You’d still see him walking his surviving daughter to the bus stop in the morning.
