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Notes -
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:
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?
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?
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?
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.
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