ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
Thank you for providing data. This is a good post. I admit that I did not expect the rate to be as high as it is. Duly updated.
Some thoughts. The Tabarrok post is pretty good. He also compares to other sources to try to get a sense for a rate at which one might expect some sort of activity to be at least reasonably warranted. His back-of-the-envelope was that it was broadly correspondent. I also did not expect this to be that high, either. He concludes by suggesting, as you do, that perhaps they could ease off on the neglect-only cases.
This seems broadly plausible. I am perhaps colored by my own experience in the 90s, and my familiarity with a couple cases in which parents did have their parental rights terminated. For one, I could see it being classified as 'neglect-only'. However, this neglect was so severe (e.g., leaving an infant in a car seat literally 24/7) to the point that it caused the child to have physical deformities. Whatever CPS was called at that time/location was actually far too loathe to push for terminating parental rights (they eventually did, after a long time).
In another case, a mother was simply seriously too mentally deficient in whatever way to care for a child. I don't know whether the cases were officially tallied as 'neglect-only', but in any event, this mother just kept having babies. After enough of them were taken, apparently the court just said that they could take any further babies immediately. The story goes that on the n+1th iteration, the social workers showed up at the hospital, only to be asked by the mother, who clearly knew them by name at this point, having had multiple prior children taken at birth by those exact people, "[Name], what are you doing here?" "Uh, we're here to take your child, just like the last time and the time before that." Like, this person was that mentally out there.
Obviously, those are extreme cases, but to me, 'neglect-only' doesn't simply mean, "You let your pre-teen go to the neighborhood park without you." Perhaps that type of thing is generating some reports, but I still don't think we have any data to know how prevalent that sort of thing is.
Concerning observations in the data. I think they're probably noisy enough that I don't think that's much of a trend line. A brief look at other papers that cited this one found this, which presents serious concerns about measurement effects, which contributes to my initial thought that it seems plausible that it's more noise/data problems than genuine trend.
Concerning further observations in the data. Figure 2 is a real trend line. Vastly more plausible that it's capturing a real phenomenon. That phenomenon would be that the likelihood drops rapidly with age. That's concerning termination of parental rights, not investigations or other things, and I can't find a similar chart to see age effects on those things or whether 'neglect-only' cases are relatively distributed across age groups or are concentrated in some areas. Without this data, there are still pretty big questions. At the very least, there seems to be a significant reduction in termination when you get up to your age range of 8-10, but are there still a bunch of neglect-only cases in that range? I don't know. Broadly-categorized 'neglect' concerns seem to be far more likely to be justifiable in the earliest years, when a child needs significantly more care and attention. The closest we get to a claim about the neglect-only case is when Tabarrok says:
64% of substantiated victims are victims of neglect only and most of these neglect cases are specifically about lack of sufficient supervision rather than lack of access to food or clothing.
Perhaps someone else can find another place in the primary source that he's using, but frankly, my best guess is that he actually misreported what the report said. The closest statement, with the same 64% number, is:
In the analysis included in chapter 3, FFY 2023 victims are counted for each investigation that resulted in a substantiation and displays the victims with a single type of maltreatment at the state level. If a victim has two or more substantiated maltreatment types in the same report, the victim is counted in the multiple maltreatment type category. For FFY 2023, 64.1 percent of duplicate victims experience neglect only, and 10.6 percent experience physical abuse only.1
I don't see anything in the report to support the claim that "most of these neglect cases are specifically about lack of sufficient supervision rather than lack of access to food or clothing". Perhaps I'm missing it, but I just don't see that this report (that I thought was his primary source for his post) makes any distinction along these lines. Perhaps this was drawing on a different one of his links, and it just wasn't clear.
I am in violent agreement that cases where the government gets involved just because a pre-teen went to the park alone are extremely bad. I still remain fairly unconvinced that I have any idea how common they are. And my lying eyes still look out the window or around the neighborhood when I'm out and see kids in that age range roaming around unsupervised all the time. Maybe it is worse; it probably is; everything is worse.
1 - Me here: There are other bits about how they treat multiple substantiated claims. It talks about duplicates elsewhere, saying, "A victim with two substantiated reports of neglect is counted twice in neglect only." So it seems like there's some double-counting possibly going on, and it's this category of folks that are two-or-more-counted where 64% are neglect-only.
I don't think you made it up. I have no idea what happened, who told you what, what you saw on a website, or what the code that ran their online reservation system did in the past. But I did just go to the internet archive, since you gave me a date. Maybe things were different! I'm in a 'checking' mood today, I guess. Here is the same page on their website, but from January 2023, the first of the snapshots they have available from 2023. In the spot where they would have had the equivalent phrase, the wording is slightly different:
Passengers 12 years of age and younger must travel with an adult passenger who is at least 18 years old.
Again, I could imagine interpreting this either way. I don't have a way of verifying what the code on their website allowed/disallowed three years ago. However, that archived page also says:
One child ages 2 - 12 is eligible to receive a 50% discount on the lowest available adult rail fare on most Amtrak trains with each fare-paying adult (age 18+). If any additional child per adult will be traveling, reservations must be made for that child as an “Adult” and the full adult fare will be charged.
Infants Ride Free
One child under the age of two, not occupying a seat, may ride free with each fare-paying adult (age 18+). Additional infants can be booked as a “Child” and receive the 50% discount (if available) or as an “Adult” (if the Children's fare is not available).
I don't know how to interpret that in any way other than that you could have had more children than you had adults. It's just the discounts that adjust, depending on details. [EDIT: It is entirely plausible that the code they used to run their online reservation system in 2023 was broken and that resulted in rejects rather than discounting according to the stated rules. I can't check that. But their stated policy appears to allow it.]
Where do you live
I'm in the US. Not looking to give any more information than that.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
Even if only 1%
Honestly, my initial reaction is basically the same as it would be if I had heard, "Even if only 1% of unarmed black men are shot by police..." Which is, I'm pretty sure you're missing some number of zeros. I don't know how many zeros. I don't know how many zeros matter. I'm not sure if there's a particular number of zeros where it goes from concern to not-concern. But I'm pretty sure the number is far from correct.
Amtrak will not let you buy train tickets for kids unless you have one adult per kid.
I was ready to believe you, because I am never surprised that the federal government would screw up literally anything in the most ridiculous way. Right before I hit "comment", I did decide to check. My search for "Amtrak children" brought me here, which says:
Children and infants must be accompanied by at least one adult (18+) in the same reservation.
Ok, I could read that either way. But I guess what was nice about your claim is that it was that they won't even let you buy tickets. It's not some situation where you could buy tickets, get there, and learn that the correct reading of this phrase is that they have a one-adult-per-child policy. So, presumably, it's something I can check.
Sure enough, I just went to the reservations, picked totally random cities, totally random dates, one adult, four children (2-12, not 'youth', which could plausibly have different rules under various readings, though at this stage, it actually says, "Youth, children and infants must travel with at least one adult who is 18 years old."). At the very least, it lets me get to the page where they want me to start putting in traveler information (name, etc.) for each of the five passengers. I can tab over without entering any information, and it clearly has marked four children, with a different amount of information requested for the children than the adult.
I suppose it is possible that at some point after this step, after all the personal info has been put in and whatnot, the system will finally realize and say, "No, we actually had a one-adult-per-child policy all along, and we just tricked you into getting this far," but on first read, I think you're just wrong on this claim.
The culture is different. The rules and expectations are different. You have to admit that much.
I mean, yes? But that's true for any epsilon difference. Presumably you also have to admit that I look out the window or walk around town and see kids out playing unattended all the time, too, right? Like, we're probably somewhere between epsilon and infinity, but it's kinda squishy to really capture it well.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
Stupid? Yes. Annoying? Yes. Should be better? Obviously. But it's not calling CPS. It's not taking your kids away. It's not charging you criminally with child endangerment.
Nor does it seem to contradict my observation of just looking out the window or walking down the street and seeing kids running around unattended all the time. I'm sure plenty of black people can describe some stupid or annoying situation that should have gone differently, and many of them even have a plausible claim that racism was involved. I still sorta think that the concern about unarmed black men being shot by police for no reason is just not an all-consuming problem in the world.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
I've heard these stories on the internet as much as anyone else, but does anyone have any clue as to the actual scale of the problem? It's certainly annoying that this failure mode exists at all, since it's relatively scary. That said, my small observation of the real world, seeing kids running around the neighborhood unattended all the time, seems to clash with it. My mild wonder is whether the problem is akin to "unarmed black men getting shot by police for no reason", which objectively is an extremely small problem that manages to capture an extremely oversized proportion of the fears of a subset of the population. Maybe it's just worse in worse places, where perhaps it might actually be a danger for them to be running around on their own?
ControlsFreak
4d ago
you don't have any authority to make that determination over them
Fair, and at risk of saying not much, I'd say that it's, uh, complicated. For example, I have good friends who were born and raised Canadian citizens and who later acquired US citizenship, too.1 For several of them, (not brushing with any broader of a brush), they're basically understood to be (and would describe themselves as) "Canadian, but also with US citizenship". Are they "American"? Uh... kinda yeah? Also maybe kinda no? If you just asked them if they were "American", I think they'd say, "I'm Canadian, but I have US citizenship." Does that matter? I don't particularly take a position either way.
Different individuals among them may have different senses of it, too. Some, for example, really are effectively Canadian at heart. One guy I know discovered that one of his ancestors also had US citizenship, and found that the paperwork to go the route of attaining citizenship that way was easier for him than going through spousal immigration in order to move here with his wife.2 If it had been just as easy to do it the other way, would he have bothered? I don't know; it's a counterfactual, and lots of things can come into play over time. But he might have been perfectly happy being "Canadian citizen and US Permanent Resident" indefinitely. Does this matter? I don't know. I can vaguely see both sides.
For what it's worth, my best Puerto Rican friend would say, "I'm Puerto Rican, and oh by the way, we have American citizenship." Does that matter? Hell, I don't know.
You're obviously right that the only non-squishy way to draw lines is via citizenship, but my observation is that a lot of folks view the real world as inherently squishy.
1 - I also know at least one guy born/raised in the US. He and his wife moved to Canada for work for several years. He got Canadian citizenship, she didn't. They would explicitly say that the reason he got Canadian citizenship was just because it made dealing with a certain Canadian law regarding his line of work easier. They've lived back in the US for quite a few years now. I don't think either of them would say they're "Canadian". If you just asked them, they'd probably say that he was "American", full stop. If you went on to ask him about his time in Canada, he'd add, "...and yeah, I did get Canadian citizenship."
2 - For this particular couple, they actually moved to Canada first when they got married; she went through whatever process to be able to move up there and be married to him. I don't know if she acquired Canadian citizenship at any point. Later, when they decided they wanted to live in the US (for a particular work reason), they discovered this business about his ancestor. Where they're living and what citizenship he has is just sort of an incidental and paperwork thing to them.
@OracleOutlook
As an addendum, I'd like to go back to my analogy. If someone were telling me that there's such a huge, serious, problem of unarmed black men getting shot to death by police for no reason, I would still want to have some sense of the scale of the problem. If they returned with statistics on how often black men have encounters with police or how often they're incarcerated, or how often there is use of force in police encounters, etc., that might be interesting data. Perhaps some of it would have been unknown to me until it was presented to me, and I would want to update on those items.
...but I sort of don't think that most of those buckets actually capture the phenomenon in question. Certainly, there may be other relevant questions about general allocation of police forces, or people can haggle over how many encounters/arrests/incarcerations/uses of force are ultimately justified/not justified, and those would all be interesting questions that could (and should) be addressed by folks who are interested in them. But none of them really tell me much about the actual scale of the specific problem of unarmed black men being shot to death by police unjustifiably. It could still be huge! It could still be tiny!
Even if they cite a small number of high-profile examples of unarmed black men being shot by police, and even if those small number of examples are bad shoots, I would feel pretty comfortable saying, "Yes, those are bad, but I still don't really know how common it is." And so, I wouldn't really know how reasonable it is to have significant fears on the topic.
The reason I think this is a useful analogy is because I recall seeing that someone did do a bunch of work to figure this out for the case of unarmed black men getting shot to death by police, and the result was that it was quite rare. But I don't think we have anyone who has done this for the question of children being taken away for reasons like a pre-teen going to the park alone. We have a bunch of other statistics that can tell us other things about the system in general, but not this, AFAICT. It could be really common! I don't know!
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