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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?
I see quite a few, but 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. 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.
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.
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