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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27798 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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The Long Arm of the State and Parenting

@ControlsFreak challenged me on my assumption that society has changed to the extent that the average parent faced real consequences if they treated their children the way every child was treated even 40 years ago, in the dark days of the 1980s.

Immediately I fell into personal anecdote, “I’ve been pressured by other women to supervise my children doing tasks I was able to do alone at the same age.” “All the parks have signs that children under 12 need to be supervised.” I even gave a personal anecdote about an Amtrak train that made it seem like I am disturbingly misremembering things or a short-lived policy was walked back. This gave me pause. So I did the more rational thing and asked, what kind of data can I find on this?

Looking around, I found a study that analyzed how many kids had parental rights terminated in the year 2000 compared to now. Their data only goes to 2016, but it does present a trend:

The cumulative prevalence of having parental rights terminated for both parents was 0.7% in 2000. It then increased to just under 1.0% in 2007 before decreasing between 2007 and 2012, ultimately falling to 0.9%. Starting in around 2012, the rate of the termination of parental rights started to accelerate, reaching a high of around 1.1% by the end of the study period in 2016. This 0.4% increase is equivalent to a 60% increase from 2010 to 2016.

There is a trend of more children being taken away from their parents, which is what I expect.

For every parent that has a child removed, there will be more that are investigated. What does that number look like?

Now, the claim in the title: Does CPS investigate one out of every three American children? The answer to this one is not available directly in the primary source reports and the underlying data is only available after an application for research use, so we’ll have to trust a group of researchers at the Washington University school of public health. They download and de-duplicate the master data files from 2003-2014 and confirm that 37% of American children are the subject of at least one screened-in referral to CPS from ages 0-18. We can sanity check this against the numbers we saw above: Around 2.5% of children are the subject of a screened-in referral each year. If about 2 percentage points of those are first-time subjects each year, then in 18 years you’ve investigated 36% of American children. There are extra complications when considering the children entering and leaving the cohort each year, but the 37% number estimated by these researchers makes sense given what we know from the CPS reports.

1/3 of American children are investigated by the time they are 18. That sounds like a ridiculous number. Are American parents just becoming disturbingly vicious and attacking their kids more than in the past?

Additionally, the most common type of maltreatment found by CPS is neglect. 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.

No. Basically my intuition - the intuition of most parents - is correct. Insufficiently supervising your child will get you a visit from CPS and your child potentially removed. The data bears that out.

Now I am curious. Denizens of the Motte: How many of you see children between the ages of 8-12 out and about without a parent in your day-to-day life? How does that compare with the freedom you or your parents had when they were children (if they were born before 1990?)

How many of you were allowed to do simple things, like run to grab an item at the grocery store by yourself, before you were 10? How old were you when you first got to buddy up with a similar age child and split off from your family at an county fair or water park? If you are a parent now, what age would you consider this safe to allow your child to do?

Personal anecdote on the topic. TL;DR-- there are "careful" people everywhere who like to tattle (or who are just very worried about everything), but our local authorities seem reasonable about parenting choices.

During COVID, my son was 6, my husband was working every day, and we lived in a small town. I had to make a Walmart run, so I went first thing in the morning, very early, before it got busy. Instead of masking up my sleepy 6 y.o. and making him follow me through the store for an hour or more, I left him in the car with his tablet. I didn't think this would be a problem because he wasn't an infant locked in a car seat; he was just a kid playing on his tablet. The tablet had wifi and he could message me on my phone--we texted some while I was shopping. The morning was neither hot nor cold; the car had manual windows and locks, so he could roll down a window or unlock the door without a problem. He understood that he was not to get out of the car except in an emergency, and that he was not to open the door to anyone at all. If anything questionable happened, he was to text me a single, specific letter and I would come out immediately.

I was scanning my groceries and checking out when I heard a policeman speaking with a Walmart supervisor. Apparently someone had seen my boy in the car and had called the police; the policeman was discussing the situation with the supervisor. He was saying, "The kid was fine--playing on his tablet. Said his mom was shopping. I don't know--I don't see anything wrong. I wouldn't bring a kid inside if I didn't have to." I interrupted and identified myself, explaining that I was in contact with him via messenger, etc. The policeman was very kind and positive, relieved to have confirmation that everything was good.

When I got to the car, I waved to another policeman who seemed to be watching at a distance and he gave me a thumbs-up. My son said they had knocked on the window and he had rolled it down enough to speak to them, and everything was fine. He wasn't worried at all. It's concerning that someone felt they should call the police when they saw a kid sitting in a car in a parking lot, but it's encouraging that our police had good sense.

How many of you were allowed to do simple things, like run to grab an item at the grocery store by yourself, before you were 10?

I believe my parents were letting me roam the immediate neighborhood on a kid's bicycle (<1km), alone, at around age 6? And in any case I was completely unsupervised during the entire afternoon and early evening, I could have gone anywhere. I was allowed to go swimming in a lake with another kid at age 8 or so. Wasn't prevented from buying fireworks either, though I didn't have much cash unfortunately and due to stupid legislation, you could only work over age 15. Don't really see why children aged 8-12 can't stock shelves or work in warehouses etc. Given how much free time they have..

Pretty sure I was allowed to go anywhere around the city of ~300k by the time I was 9 or 10. Eastern Europe in early 90s.

like run to grab an item at the grocery store by yourself,

I got caught shoplifting sweets at age 7. My parents weren't there, mind you. The shopkeeper told my dad and I got slapped so hard I hit the wall. It did work, I haven't shoplifted since though I did 'steal' food that was destined for trash for whatever reason when I worked in grocery stores later. Not sure if that counts, I never damaged anything so it could be thrown out.

Tbh, I believe when it comes to child-rearing, the communist era was much better than the present one. Maybe kids of really aggressive people got physically abused more, as it was rather common for small children getting hit with the belt when they deserved it, but I'm not sure that outweighed the salutary effects on the rest of the children. I got corporal punishment a few times, maybe less than a dozen, but it was always justified as far as I can remember.

I think in large degree the ability of random people being able to take incriminating video is making this stuff more likely. In 1980, you couldn’t call CPS on a kid playing alone, you could not film a kid playing unsafely and send it to CPS. If you were going to report something you had to go home to do it. And I think like a lot of other things, removing barriers makes that stuff happen more often.

My husband was a latchkey kid. By the time he was 6 he was talking care of his baby sisters while his parents worked. Everyone knew that this was happening. His teachers knew he was home alone with three younger kids after school got out. No one raised an eyebrow at it. It was normal. Having a cell phone wouldn't have changed it as long as everyone agreed that this was just part of life.

I've always felt that the entire term "latchkey kid" was super weird. In the 80s in Finland that was simply considered the norm. Some families were well off enough that only one parent worked (or the other only worked part time) but those were exceptions. Our immediate neighborhood had a bunch of kids of similar ages and one mother worked only part time so we knew where to go if we needed help.

Yeah but the existence of a cellphone video means that one annoying busybody can badger whoever is in a position of authority with proof of 'malfeasance', whilst otherwise it's just he says, she says.

I don't think it's valid to assume that the 64% that are only about 'lack of sufficient supervision' are because the parents let their kids walk outside alone. The bottom 1% of parents are very bad parents, where lack of supervision probably means 'not parenting them at all, letting them do drugs' than 'letting kids walk around unsupervised'. Even in a world where CPS is terrorizing parents who let their kids walk to the grocery store by themselves, the good or even meh parents will stop doing that after the first or second CPS visit, so that statistic wouldn't be evidence.

But why do we as society punish parents for letting their kid walk to the grocery store? Why does something that benign require a visit from CPS in the first place?

But one third of kids are investigated by CPS- thé bottom 1% of parents are not having 33 kids apiece, just mathematically CPS is investigating not bottom-1% parents. And the same logic holds for 5 or even 10 percent, as well.

I got investigated for leaving my kids unsupervised in the same room as my husband and I, in a school, with cameras on. And for having a child with eczema.

?!?! Seriously???? That's absolutely nuts. Gah this is making me nervous about having kids. I hope everything went well for y'all.

It wasn't that bad, just irritating to have to do. The social worker was an older veteran, who had gone into the field to give back to his community, but seemed to agree that some of the cases are stupid, especially while reading the transcript of a "mandatory reporter" just literally insulting how my baby looked, things like how fast his hair was growing.

If you are agreeable and follow along with the inane suggestions, it's unlikely your kids will be taken away. You may waste time and money on it, but the worst will likely not happen.

This ignores a confounding variable- the overwhelming majority of CPS reports come from state mandated reporters(mostly teachers), and there's probably cycles in how sensitive those state mandated reporters are. An increasing reportage percent in the early two thousands has an obvious explanation- with the Catholic Church and BSA sex abuse scandals in the news, reporting requirements got stricter and continuing ed for those reporters got more intense. That probably explains the increase in 2000's investigation rates by itself.

Answering your questions-

  1. I see preteen children out and about by themselves, on bicycles or walking, pretty regularly in the summer, usually traveling in groups. I see kids playing in front yards a lot too.

  2. I was allowed to walk to the library or the convenience store at an early age, perhaps ten is fair. I didn't get sent to the grocery store until I could drive, possibly for cargo-related reasons, but I did get sent into the grocery store while my mom sat on her phone in the parking lot.

How many of you see children between the ages of 8-12 out and about without a parent in your day-to-day life

I see quite a few, but I live in a very quiet suburban community and seeing kids out and about the community is not weird. In fact, they often leave their stuff (like bikes, etc.) on the street, and then could pick it up next day (or their parents do). Nothing happens to them or their stuff. When I lived in CA, however, I don't think I ever did see kids just roaming around - given how many homeless camps I had in immediate vicinity, it's no wonder.

It's not comparable to my childhood, but that was different times in different country, and having 8 year old walk 15-20 mins to school through the neighborhood was normal (how would one get to the school otherwise anyway? nobody owned a car and public transport didn't exist within the neighborhoods, and there was no such thing as a "school bus") and leaving the teen like 12 yo for a whole day to care for oneself was also completely normal (and inevitable - the parents are working, grandparents live far away, there's no such thing as a babysitter for teens, and nobody has the money to pay anyway if it were a thing). Sometimes it led to kids doing extremely stupid things, which occasionally (quite rarely, fortunately, on my experience) led to bad long-term consequences, but mostly everybody survived fine.

How many of you were allowed to do simple things, like run to grab an item at the grocery store by yourself, before you were 10?

That was one of my chores for a long time. You couldn't just go to the store and buy what you want. You had to stand in line (not always, but a lot of times). And adults have work. So who stands in lines a lot? Kids and retirees. I'm not sure at what age exactly it started, but likely sometime around 10.

I also spent a lot of my time outside with friends (without any adult supervision) - though not as much as others, I was an introverted nerd (still am) so I preferred my books to the company of other stupid kids, but occasionally my parents kicked me out, or my friends convinced me to come with them to play or do something stupid. So a lot of time without any adult supervision, whether family or not. That was the standard.

I live in a very quiet suburban community and seeing kinds out and about the community is not weird. In fact, they often leave their stuff (like bikes, etc.) on the street, and then could pick it up next day (or their parents do). Nothing happens to them or their stuff.

Where can you live with so few undesirables around? They've been transplanted pretty much everywhere. I'm talking about good schools, you know?

I've found my own little pocket which is mostly this way but still not enough. And the leftist government is constantly scheming to tax us more to build additional 'low-income' housing blocks and destroy what's left of how this place was when I was a child.

Certainly lack of a "village" plays into this as well. There are countless thinkpieces about how people don't know or trust their neighbors as much as they used to (frustratingly though, I can't seem to locate studies that go back more than a decade so this is just anecdotal). But in environments where families know each other, they know each other's kids, they are more likely to watch out for them and be more tolerant of them. Some kid walking alone, "oh, that's just Jimmy from the Latta house, hey Jimmy!" Where in a neighborhood surrounded by strangers, no one knows each other, either by face or by where they live. That 10 year old isn't little Jimmy Latta, he's a vulnerable child on his own without adult supervision. Call the police!

And it turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. Children outside on their own has become so de-normalized that seeing one is an aberration and immediately suspicious just because it is so rare.

It's also as if people are "de-maturing" kids, for lack of a better term - they're not as trusted, not expected to care for themselves, not expected to have important life skills. Without the time alone to fend for themselves and navigate the world without an adult in tow, some of that "life skills" maturing I think takes longer to emerge.

Worth noting the "free range parenting" trend seems to have peaked around 2009-2010 but it's been ages since I heard anything from those people. I get the sense they've given up against the tide. Parents want to do the safe thing and follow the herd, either because they genuinely believe it's best or as a CYA measure.

There are countless thinkpieces about how people don't know or trust their neighbors as much as they used to

Yeah, I wouldn't trust any random neighbor empowered with a catastrophically powerful State-backed heckler's veto over my family unit either!

the "free range parenting" trend seems to have peaked around 2009-2010

A few states have taken steps to decriminalize or legalize young people existing in a public place since then, and the people who want freedom for their kids have had time to self-sort into those areas. A good chunk of the "free range" is on the Internet, by the way- the Karens have gradually been coming for that too by banning them from the spaces they visit and restricting what they can freely do there.

I was born in the early 90's, grew up in a semi rural area. I had about a 1-2 mile range where I'd explore and play.

I have young kids now. My oldest is 7, I'd be fine with her walking to a store a half mile away and buying something, but she doesn't seem comfortable with that. I have neighbors with homeschooled kids. I see their 9 year old outside all the time playing alone. They are my 'canary' family. I'm seeing how much they get away with to know the local limits of acceptable free range parenting.

Homeschooling families can get away with a lot more because almost all stupid, frivolous, or borderline CPS reports are made by large institutions, particularly schools.

Is the main mode here busybody teacher makes a report because she doesn't like some way a child is being raised, or hyper-cautious institutional representative makes a report because they don't want to be caught up in a lawsuit or turn up on the local news?

Probably a little of column a, a little of column b, but schools do seem to push teachers to report cases they aren’t really sure about(I mean, teachers have told me this).

What did you think "mandatory reporter" meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?

Sarcasm, obviously, but the vibe of such laws is distinctly "better some arbitrary number of questionably-founded investigations than a few children actually get abused". For some value of arbitrary there, I'd even agree with the statement (disclosure: am mandatory reporter of some things), but of course the state considers false investigations as roughly harmless.

But I'm also not strictly opposed to the state investigating whether a kid in the hospital fell down a flight of stairs or "fell down a flight of stairs".

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.

@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!

Elsewhere in the thread I wrote:

If you are agreeable and follow along with the inane suggestions, it's unlikely your kids will be taken away. You may waste time and money on it, but the worst will likely not happen.

I think we probably agree on more than you think, in the sense that most parents just get a warning, deal with it, and move on.

My issue is more that we have to follow the inane suggestions in the first place. Because if you stand your ground and say, "No, my six year old can play in my fenced backyard on his own while I stay in the house, I will not follow along with your weird brand new rule that you just made up that this is somehow neglect," then you do face more and more push back in the form of lawyer fees, repeated visits, and eventually your kids being taken away.

In the case of a black person being stopped for shoplifting by a jerk cop, you can look at that and say, "yeah, shoplifting is bad. I hate having to ask an attendant to unlock the deodorant." The person who is shoplifting should stop. If they complain about it I have little sympathy.

In the case where a parent is just treating their kid normally, I can't look at that as a reasonable request to stop. Just asking that the parents change their behavior here is wrong. Even if most parents will cow under the pressure, and most kids wont get taken away, it's wrong.

And this is especially relevant in the discussion of whether it is harder to have kids these days. While we have made everything else more convenient, we have made having kids less convenient. That hurts society as a whole.

I imagine some number of cops will make what seem like unreasonable requests of some number of individuals. Even if the underlying concern is something like shoplifting. A regular reading of Short Circuit and some of the many cases in which cops get qualified immunity for whatever would certainly give a person that impression. And sure, I'm sympathetic that there can be problems in particular cases there. But how often are people actually getting required to follow some inane suggestion? By your own phrasing, the example is a "weird brand new rule that you just made up", not some clear, broadly-applicable rule that the system is applying all over the place in a high percentage of cases. And how often do these inane suggestions actually lead to things like termination of parental rights? Plausibly not very often. Perhaps the inane suggestions happen more often (I don't know), and if we had data, we could discuss that, but the original claim was:

Insufficiently supervising your child will get you a visit from CPS and your child potentially removed. The data bears that out.

I still don't think the data bears that out. Redirecting the claim to saying that maybe sometimes some social workers make inane suggestions (without data here either) doesn't provide data to bear out that claim.

The problem is you're arguing against a real-life Pascal's Wager, or at least Pascal's Mugging. If you're the kind of parent who wants to buck CPS so your kids can have a better life, the cost of having your kids taken away from you is extremely high. The cost of having to stop doing it (that is, comply with "reasonable requests to stop") under (individual, not general) threat of having the kids taken away is also high. If you want good parents to find it reasonable to parent their own kids less strictly, then the chance of that has to be infinitesimal, not merely a few percent or tenths of a percent.

If you're the kind of black man who wants to do whatever, the cost of getting shot dead by police while unarmed is extremely high.

...stiiiilllll kinda think that I can care a little bit about the rate at which unarmed black men actually get shot dead by police. I don't particularly care whether someone labels the discussion after an old French philosopher. It doesn't really map onto that topic all that well.

If you're the kind of black man who wants to do whatever, the cost of getting shot dead by police while unarmed is extremely high.

The chance of a black man getting shot dead by police is higher than that of a white man or black woman, but it is still extremely small -- certainly smaller than the chance of having your kids taken away by CPS.

the chance of having your kids taken away by CPS

...for something like letting your pre-teen walk to the neighborhood park alone. This is the key qualifier. How often is that? How do you know?

Are American parents just becoming disturbingly vicious and attacking their kids more than in the past?

No, but

Are American adults just becoming disturbingly vicious and attacking kids more than in the past?

is true, trivially. Where else do you think the CPS reports are coming from? They don't just magically appear out of thin air, a concerned citizen hysterical, typically middle-aged, woman has to call them in.

Hysterical middle-aged women have more power now than they did in the '50s and '60s, so when they call and complain about unattended children the State listens unless it has been expressly prohibited from doing so, and this is more likely to be the case in states when this type of woman has less power, Utah being the best example.

1/3 of American children are threatened by State abduction by the time they are 18. That sounds like a ridiculous number.

Considering the rate women claim to be abused/assaulted by men, I actually don't think it's that out of left field for women to abuse/assault children at the same rate, and the premium on top of that is because (despite the feminist claims about the former) we actively encourage that abuse.

Uh, most CPS reports are generated by large institutions with expansive reporting policies as a form of ass-covering, particularly schools and hospitals. Not neighborhood busybodies.

I wonder if there's data that breaks this down by cumulative risk of a family unit being investigated rather than individual child. I expect there to be very high correlation between a child having their siblings investigated and being investigated themselves. If it's very common for all the kids in a four child household to be investigated once one of them is reported then the odds might be much higher than 37% for a four child household and lower than that for a single or two parent household.

Warren Buffet had a paper route when he was 13. A little older but not much. That involves picking up a heavy stack of papers, walking around your neighborhood for like an hour alone, an about once a month you were the collection arm of the newspaper company. I too had a paper route around the same age. There’s actually a lot of billies whose first job was a paper route.

Around the same age (late elementary school) my memories were watching Independence Day on HBO every morning, then walking to the local ballpark to meet friends and play baseball everyday during the summer. Like Sandlot though often without a full 9.

The interesting thing about Buffet is his dad was a congressmen so he had to have some money but he still had a paper route. The family I guess wanted to instill work ethic and values. I also think there is a bit of wanting independence as a kid and getting to walk around the neighborhood for an hour and have your own money. Potentially we were also extremely bored back then. No phone to doomscroll on for an hour so you needed to find things to do.

My gut says the nanny state on children takes more than one generation to establish. I did things independently as a kid therefore I will never think a 10 year old doing things is child abuse. But my kids may raise children in a nanny state because they will only have my stories doing things as a kid and not personal experience.

This is one reason to consider living in a lower-middle class immigrant community. I think Miami still has some areas like this where you can be in that culture but still 15 minutes to civilization. And the immigrants tended to be higher quality ones than ones who walked across a border in S Florida.

Now I am curious. Denizens of the Motte: How many of you see children between the ages of 8-12 out and about without a parent in your day-to-day life?

Europe is kinda split on the issue. There are countries that are extremely paranoid about it and people will literally call the cops on you, and countries where it's perfectly normal, and roving gangs of schoolkids are a common sight to see. I lived in both kinds.

I would also like to know where you see countries in Europe falling on the spectrum. Growing up in the UK in the 90s it was pretty free range, but my impression is that modern parents here are much more paranoid (although not to the insane degree I read about in America).

I heard Germans will call the cops on you, though I haven't confirmed it. However, I literally never seen an unaccompanied child when I was there. The Mediterranean, by contrast still seems pretty chill, and you get to see kids hanging out on the streets. Even on the eastern side, when I went to visit my family recently, I saw a few unaccompanied young kids dragging a sleigh in the direction of the local hill.

Tell us more about which countries are which. As a burgerstani I cannot begin to guess.

I imagine it’s basically just the hajnal line with some minor updates / adjustments.

Now I am curious. Denizens of the Motte: How many of you see children between the ages of 8-12 out and about without a parent in your day-to-day life?

Rarely, but I'm not sure whether it's because kids are not trusted to be on their own or because his schedule is kept full by his parents. Comparing my nephew at any age to myself at that age I certainly had way less structured activities scheduled to keep myself busy. All my free time would basically be either me playing on the computer/watching TV on my own or playing outside unsupervised (or very loosely supervised) with friends. Sometimes I guess I was also being an annoying little brother watching whatever my brother was doing. By contrast, my nephew is driven from sports training to playdates every weekend.

How does that compare with the freedom you or your parents had when they were children (if they were born before 1990?)

I was born before the 90s, and went on my own walking to and from my elementary school every day, at 6 years old. It was considered a normal thing back then.

I like to think I turned out fine, but I'm conflicted as to how I will want to raise kids if I have them, because my own upbringing goes against both "old" and "new" rules. I was allowed to be on my own and wasn't really "kept busy" by my parents the way kids nowaday are, but also I was an early "screen junkie". My parents had barely any control over the time I would spend on the computer, and I certainly could go on full-day binges.

I was born before the 90s, and went on my own walking to and from my elementary school every day, at 6 years old. It was considered a normal thing back then.

Same, in the 80's, I walked about a mile home from school in first grade (though I got a ride to school). That year, we moved to only about a half mile from the school, and I never got another ride to or from school until my friends were old enough to drive.

What came first, the chicken or the egg? Were structured activities a way to occupy a child who could no longer legally be left to his own devices?

We assume it's college-track related, but college admissions don't ask about elementary-age activities and most reasonably healthy kids can start a sport in the sixth grade and make Varsity in High School, there's not much advantage to most sports to start at age 4. Music lessons and certain sports on the edges are the outlier here (ballet and gymnastics for example.) But then again, my brother started band as a teenager, taught himself the piano, and away he went. Not every pianist needs to start at the age of 2.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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