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Notes -
Elsewhere in the thread I wrote:
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:
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.
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