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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18935 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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Teens babysitting is now illegal in Florida. Well, not technically, but practically so. A mother has been charged for leaving her 14 year old to watch her other kids (9, 11, 12) for a few days while she was on a work trip. She hired an adult babysitter to check on them twice a day too.

The youngest accidentally dropped a weight while working out, the type of accudent that can easily occur under adult supervision, they called 911 to get him medical help, and the cops proceeded to arrest the mom upon arriving back home. For the children's safety, they have now been placed with the father who is facing domestic abuse charges and has a restraining order against him, a very safe place indeed.

Here's another summary real quick of the important parts https://x.com/niah_x03/status/2115452369043652617

For those who refuse to read the articles about this case. She had a babysitter coming in the mornings to check in, make lunches, get them off to school, and prep dinner for them. All the 14 year old had to do was help them get inside after school. Microwave dinner. Get kids in bed and text mom updates. This was a work trip and they threatened to fire her if she did not go. The father has abuse charges and the police handed him their kids on top of arresting her.

I've talked about this topic before here on themotte, how children and teens are now treated as completely incapable babies and this will be enforced not just socially but through the law. If it's not immediately clear I think this is ridiculous. When I was a teen, my older sister (15) was babysitting other people's kids. There's even a popular book story from the 80s about young teens and tweens (yes, some were 12!) in middle school babysitting children as part of the babysitters club. And it's not just fiction, people did that in real life. For the younger folk here, this hysteria about leaving a teenager to watch over younger children as neglect is very new and very modern.

I've talked before about how my parents and grandparents would play all around the neighborhood in their own childhood, and yet now even walking in a gated community is deemed too dangerous. At this point I can't even let my own children have independence even if I wanted to (which I do), they literally are not allowed to grow as normal human beings used to because the cops might show up cause they're out on the front yard!

It is just another part of the helicopter parent hysteria as I've talked about before as well. There are young adults now in college who need their parents to walk them through basic life, come visit to do the laundry, and clean for them! We need less "parenting" and more freedom so kids can actually be mature instead of still crying for their mommies in college! Tweens now aren't even allowed to go to another aisle in the grocery store

I once had a great 25-26 year old intern recent graduate who still had her mother trying to butt in once when something happened at my work. She's lucky I'm very forgiving and understanding of her situation and I know that she was embarrassed about it too (I even helped her find a better living situation) but it's another example of how a lot of parents are so crazy nowadays like that!

And again, it's legally enforced now. It's so legally enforced that they'll take your kids away and give them to an abuser with a restraining order! Is this really the society we're stuck with now, where our children are increasingly coddled in their teens, sometimes into their 20s and 30s, never expected to grow up or learn responsibility?

Teens babysitting is now illegal in Florida. Well, not technically, but practically so. A mother has been charged for leaving her 14 year old to watch her other kids (9, 11, 12) for a few days while she was on a work trip.

Holy motte and bailey. "Teen babysitting" sure. But a few days while on a trip???

I'd happily leave our kids for an afternoon or an evening with a teenager.

I've spitballed a modest proposal around national mandatory summer camp from about age 12 to 16 (with exemptions for the employed). Being someplace away from home and family even for a couple of weeks builds a huge amount of independence, IMO. Even more so if some basic life skills (cleaning, scheduling, meal prep) are imparted. Punishment details, administered far away from where mommy and daddy can bully staff on your behalf, can teach lessons about actions and consequences, and counselors can be real about a lot of facts of life that family and schools won't, and have enough age proximity to have credibility.

Which we used to have, but now we can't.

It was destroyed by a legal mechanism permitting mommy and daddy (and you) to bully staff on your behalf to an unlimited degree ex post facto. And I'm not saying all of the BSA rape cases weren't false (nor were the rape cases at other child concentration camps, famously boarding schools, by both administrators and pupils [Eton was famous for this and... to a degree still is, and this is permitted mainly because everyone with the authority to destroy it went there]).

But "accepting that some participants are going to get fucked" is the direct cost of "being real about a lot of facts of life that family and schools can't" (including that some people are out to fuck you), much as it is the direct cost of families and schools more generally.

Indeed, mid-20th century progressive projects were generally heavily focused on abolishing these things as well for that exact reason, and have enjoyed significant success in both; in addition to the destruction above, it's why schools have very few male teachers and why you will be arrested if you let your kids out to play. I explained the mechanism for that in a separate comment.

If you are unwilling, or physically unable, to stare down those consequences, you can't do this.

children and teens are now treated as completely incapable babies and this will be enforced not just socially but through the law.

I don’t have the time right now to make a proper post on this (funny enough I’ve been thinking of doing a top-level on the topic recently, can’t remember what sparked that), but I strongly agree that this a problem. I actually think the infantilization of adolescents and children (and I do mean children, this treatment is most noticeable and severe with teenagers but it starts much earlier) is THE principal problem facing American society today. We are destroying the emotional development, mental stability, and general life trajectories of our new generations. It is nothing short of a socio-cultural catastrophe.

This article has been falsified. The child fell and from what I can tell legitimately needed to go to the hospital. The police called the mother with the children present. The mother yelled at the children for calling 911.

This is 100% child abuse. Yes if your 14 should call 911 if while babysitting one of the kids get a serious head injury.

I haven’t looked into it enough to verify that the head injury was this serious but I’m also fine with a 14 year old immediately calling 911 in that situation because it could be serious. I think there were head lacerations so serious enough for a 14 year old to immediately seek medical attention.

This article is bait like all the “murdered for walking as black”. There was in fact abuse in this case.

The mom was not right to yell at her daughter for calling 911, but is the father better? Are foster parents better? It’s possible and cheaper to reprimand the mom and even monitor her parenting without taking her kids away.

Sure I don’t necessary agree with the solution but this also isn’t a nothing happened situation. The cops had a legitimate reason to investigate. I will pass on making a decision on whether their judgement on a solution was correct.

I just know from reports “teen babysitting is now illegal in Florida” is false.

The mother yelling at the child for calling 911 does not constitute "abuse" under the statute given.

I think there's a good chance that the mom had a fear that the system could punish her for leaving a 14 year old as caregiver and so had instructed her kid to escalate to some trusted adult first unless absolutely necessary.

I would probably yell in this situation as well.

You are making a self-defense style claim, but the other guy needs to be pointing the gun at you for it to work. In this case the state perhaps has a gun but it’s still holstered and you pre-emptively shot which is murder.

I can’t predict if the state would have brought charges if she didn’t yell at the kid and tell them not to call 911, but I do think once she did that it is child endangerment etc. and interfering with your child getting necessary medical care is bad.

For this case it looks like she did the bad thing.

I've talked about this topic before here on themotte, how children and teens are now treated as completely incapable babies

Yes, there was hysteria in the 1980s about children getting randomly kidnapped and raped to death or whatever. The problem here is the same problem as it is for mass shootings, in that the perpetrators were white and suburban- it's one of the only crimes that can actually challenge the Real Housewives of Whereverthefuck.

The people complaining about "diversity" or "lack of social cohesion" are missing the point; it is precisely because these crimes are white-on-white that the hysteria is generated. Even progressives blame [destructive outgroup doing destructive outgroup things] for drugs and random murder (the rate goes up when they're in charge, therefore their claims they care are lies).

You can't blame the outgroup for this. Now, you could just set your outgroup to "men", which has been the definition of progressivism for the last 40 years as a consequence (and... arguably the root cause of it in large degree: "men will come abduct your toddler, set them on fire, and rape the corpse because they are men" is something even the more liberal women won't directly defend). In fact, there's such a demand for "men raping flaming toddlers" that there are arguably more fabrications of this than there are actual cases (when we abduct children ourselves, we do so with the justification explicitly being "we're saving you from raping flaming toddler men- they could have got to you first, you know", even if we literally deliver them to a man who is more likely than baseline to be the kind of man who rapes flaming toddlers, as happened in this case!)

But the sacrifice that outgrouping cost- hundreds of millions of child life-years- has not only failed to reduce the base rate of these crimes, it has only made them worse. Hysteria is at an all-time high, the cost of hysteria is at an all-time high, and yet, flaming toddler rape continues.

Every day, a new case- usually a mass shooting (abduction is more a serial thing and the targets know better; and humorously, "every tweenaged boy is issued a gun" is something I'd honestly consider, and not actually that radical given this was basically normal even in urban areas 40 years ago... started to become less normal coincident with the Abduction Panic, interestingly enough).

It's actually shocking to me how similar the two are; abductors tend to admit to themselves they're 'really bad people', just like mass shooters do, and follow a very stereotypical script because that is how they think it looks like. Mass shooters obsess over how they're going to be Just Like Columbine, and would-be abductors obsess over how they're going to be Just Like the Pedophile Stereotype, complete with 'lost dog'/'want some candy'/'want a ride', even though every human being (once they're old enough to understand the meme, so 6-7) will never let that happen to them for the same reason no passenger aircraft will ever be hijacked from the cabin again.

Which is all you actually needed to deal with the problem. Men and women together, if they were in any condition to co-operate, should have co-ordinated that; and in areas where child protection laws prioritize children over hysterical Karens, they do. There's something uniquely wrong with New World Western white men, and it has to be an HBD thing. Their drive when it gets tough is to just leave, but they can't leave any more, and they must evolve.

I strongly suspect a common cause. The same was true of Satanists more generally, which flaming toddler rapists in the '80s tended to be really into for... some reason (which is why it was such a big joke in the '90s/early '00s); mass shootings are now more common simply because that's the standard "my mind tells me that I am bad, and so now I must do a bad thing" script. Serial killers in the '70s and before were like that too, if you recall- psychologists were absolutely obsessed with why they work that way, they were standard stock antagonists for cop movies (as an extension of the western, itself a symbol of the quest for capital-j Justice- might have prolonged the trend for a while until CSI killed it dead), it was a whole thing.

but it's another example of how a lot of parents are so crazy nowadays like that!

Something's wrong with the kids, too. No child should tolerate that, and yet, something they should have grown out of in their teens persists into their twenties and beyond.

Part of that is that, being completely dominated by women, they naturally inherit that hysteria (even the men) and take some time in the real world to grow out of that, but conveniently, the real world has become less real and more out of reach for anyone under 40 or so (partially as a result of that outlook- you cannot develop as a human being if you're stuck hiding under the bed fearing flaming toddler rape). Depression is a valid response to this lack of stimulus; where stimulus doesn't exist, it must be manufactured or the attention dial turned up so hard that you need stimulants to calm you the fuck down. (I believe widespread nicotine use in the 20th century eased this transition; replaced by dextroamphetamine- smoking is a symbol of being cool, calm, and collected, and considering what stimulants do to an ADHD sufferer...)

At this point I can't even let my own children have independence even if I wanted to (which I do), they literally are not allowed to grow as normal human beings used to because the cops might show up cause they're out on the front yard!

You can run, but you can't hide. Your wife needs to fight that law (and if she isn't, she's in the wrong), and you need to back her up (and if you don't, you're in the wrong). That's it.

And yes, one of the ways that you can fight is to run to a place where protections are stronger, but if the war comes to them you're going to have to help them fight it, or you're just freeloading. But you already know that.

The people complaining about "diversity" or "lack of social cohesion" are missing the point; it is precisely because these crimes are white-on-white that the hysteria is generated.

Yeah as I pointed out in another comment race and immigration are irrational explanations for one simple reason, almost every crime against a child is by someone the child is related to or already knows well and therefore is almost always someone of the same race.

There are just not hordes of minority men prowling the streets kidnapping children. Mostly it's the parents! 60% of amber alerts are for a parent. And that's not counting other family members like siblings/aunts/uncles or things like a pastor/family friend/etc.

If we want to be paranoid of someone, we need to be paranoid of ourselves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Abduction_Is_Not_Funny

Something's wrong with the kids, too. No child should tolerate that, and yet, something they should have grown out of in their teens persists into their twenties and beyond.

I agree, but we've socially set this up for them to think they are and act like they are children. We even have people trying to claim the age of 25 now as maturity! It's insane, and children raised into this society with empowered helicopter parents never get the chance to learn it can be different.

You can run, but you can't hide. Your wife needs to fight that law (and if she isn't, she's in the wrong), and you need to back her up (and if you don't, you're in the wrong). That's it.

No, the worst thing we could do to our kids is to be in jail trying to fight stupid laws. We find ways to help teach them accountability and such, we can tell by the fact that our eldest is way more mature than most of the other kids at their daycare as is. We set our standards high but fair and we get results. I just wish we could give our kids more freedom too, like playing outside in the yard without parents watching like I used to growing up.

It’s most step-parents, surely?

Almost always a disgruntled biological dad (occasionally mother) who's lost custody in a separation dispute -- way more than 60% from the alerts I've seen (which go out province-wide for some reason); pretty much 100% of them are like "be on the lookout for a scruffy dude in a red Camry with a six and ten y.o. kid 1000 miles away from where you live" and come out at 1:00 am.

So they come on your telescreen (by law), are intentionally loud enough to wake everyone up, and 99.99% of the messages translate to "Emmanuel Goldstein is personally raping a child right now, and you can't do anything about it, have a nice day".

I don't think it's confusing as to why a State would prefer that approach at all.

99.99% of the messages translate to "Emmanuel Goldstein is personally raping a child right now, and you can't do anything about it, have a nice day".

No, I'm pretty sure most people know what is up -- in case "scruffy dude" wasn't clear enough, it's more like "Jimmy MacTrailerpark lost custody of his kids and is taking matters into his own hands", and everyone is well aware. (very occasionally Trish MacTrailerpark, but this probably reflects the way the cookie crumbles in family court more than any gender bias in poor decisionmaking.)

Apparently Canada has chosen to lock all alerts at "Presidential" level, so I also get tidal wave warnings when there's an earthquake in Alaska -- the name might be helpful actually, possibly TDS can be leveraged to alter the situation...

Perhaps, but you and I are both at least literate and capable of noticing patterns.

But I will remind you that, specifically in a nation that uses the word "femicide", that such a State inherently has a non-negative and non-zero incentive to remind you, in one of the more disruptive ways available to it, to imply that a man (perhaps happenstance they're mostly men, but convenient) is abducting random children to set on fire.

The alarm fatigue serves to reinforce "this is the new normal, here's yet another abduction or 'climate emergency' [even though the tidal waves have even less to do with that]" for those citizens who are so inclined to see them that way.

Probably non-custodial parents.

Yeah as I pointed out in another comment race and immigration are irrational explanations for one simple reason, almost every crime against a child is by someone the child is related to or already knows well and therefore is almost always someone of the same race.

Not quite. Random abductions (and mass shootings, to a point- same class of crime) are, in popular consciousness, always same-race strangers. And as I described, that has some unique consequences that wouldn't apply if it was strangers of a different race (and the solution to that is generally increased segregationism in some form).

White women can't get away from white men, though, would that they could. They want a divorce they can't get.

If we want to be paranoid of someone, we need to be paranoid of ourselves

No. This one is 100% on the female parent, and it's actively destructive for men to think they could have seen it coming. That's not their job.

And that's something women do not want to talk about. Because sure, you can blame men for the existence of child abduction. But what you can't fully erase is that blaming men for intentionally letting them molest your kid as the price of sticking around is, at the end of the day, the ultimate fault of women (though they have tried very hard to confuse the issue- men are largely too stupid to figure that out, and I blame men for that).

The same is true of mass shooters, to a degree, for reasons women again do not want to talk about. I wouldn't want to take accountability for failing to perform my gender role because I was a selfish piece of garbage either. But outside of "someone kills my ass because I deserved it", there's really no way to force them to account for that misbehavior in any current legal system (much as there is no way to force them to account for the above).

We find ways to help teach them accountability

And yet "being even-handed when it was exclusively the responsibility of one side" teaches them the opposite.

There are just not hordes of minority men prowling the streets kidnapping children.

Perhaps not as true for many Western countries. UK comes to mind.
Strangely, modern progressive/feminist norms of behaviors have adapted to that situation, in a parallel way that the American gun control advocates have managed to navigate the nuances of gun crime. American media loves talking about mass shooting, to blame on young white men, and close its eyes to uh, 'gang-related gun crime?'.
British media will address the obvious street or school sexual harassment problem by using white actors as stand-in for the perpetrators.

British media will address the obvious street or school sexual harassment problem by using white actors as stand-in for the perpetrators.

No, this is wrong. Progressive women cast white male perpetrators because they mean white male perpetrators.

They aren't trying to solve the foreigner street or school harassment problem- they don't give a damn about it, and you can tell because they intentionally make it worse! They're trying to solve the existential problem they have with white men.

Progressives are constantly telling you this, and yet you don't listen. Why?
Progressives are constantly telling you they hate you, specifically, and you think they're still trying to solve the street crime they themselves created. Why?

Strangely, modern progressive/feminist norms of behaviors have adapted to that situation

What grounds do you have to believe this is an adaptation and not just how they naturally function?

Talked to a bright guy once who said something like: “100 years ago, an 18-year-old was a man. When you’re talking to an 18-year-old now, are you talking to a man?” That stuck with me.

My dad brought knew drinking before I was 15. It was a celebration more than a drinking session but fact stands. Most adults now below ~45 are fully grown infants. It can’t be all their fault.

Im fully convinced that maturity comes from having responsibilities in life. If you read stuff from the past, say 1800 or so, it’s common for kids of 14-16 to not only be able to run their own lives, but living as fairly functioning adults. The difference is that from very young ages they were — often by necessity — helping out at home, on the farm, or in the business. They learn how to handle things independently, how to plan and accomplish those things, and understanding the consequences of not doing them.

We do the opposite. Most kids are responsible only for maybe homework and perhaps keeping their own bedrooms clean. They don’t have to cook, or clean the house, or take care of a garden, or care for a pet. They are responsible for almost nothing, and therefore do not mature into adulthood, they might be able to mature to maybe adolescence but beyond that, not really. So we now have adults who are only functioning on the maturity level of a teenager.

In 1926 male life expectancy was around 54 years old according to google. An 18 year old back then is already nearing middle aged, he damn well better be a man.

That's mostly due to childhood mortality, if you made it to 18 your life expectancy was now 64 or there abouts. Still a lot worse than today, but not bad enough to call someone in their 20's middle aged.

I'll presume this to be another 'I'm white and imagining my white norms and priors unto this very non-white family in a very non-white predicament'.

I remember as a progressive being fed all the statistics of how horrible and backwards America was socially. Not understanding that most if not all of those statistics were being inflated by a large black and brown underclass that was, back then at least, not present in most of the 'civilized world' in Europe. But me, being completely incapable of even conceiving of such a world view consistently imagined all the stats applying to white people. It really helped cement the idea that Americans were a sort of different breed of human.

The mother and father are both white.

'I'm white and imagining my white norms and priors unto this very non-white family in a very non-white predicament'.

The mother is Ukrainian, the father is Russian. The only thing whiter than this coupling is flying over the apls in the winter.

Russians are not white.

The mother is Ukrainian, the father is Russian.

I wonder if they have read The Drummer's Fate as kids. In the novel the 14-yo protagonist is also left home alone by his (adoptive) parents when they go on vacation. Doesn't go well and ultimately leads to him getting shot in the throat by a capitalist spy.

A rare L for racism.

The mother is Ukrainian, the father is Russian.

Wow. Their last four holiday seasons must have been awkward....

Next you'll be telling me Sicilians, or the Irish, are white too.

"White" has only recently been understood to refer to skin color rather than certain ancestral clusters and the psychological traits associated with them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_pattern

Slavs definitely would not qualify.

"White" has only recently been understood to refer to skin color rather than certain ancestral clusters and the psychological traits associated with them.

"White" as a political category in the United States has always been understood to refer to all people of 100% European ancestry - the edge cases were and are Middle Eastern/North African. Nobody suggested that guineas, polacks or micks were anything other than white when applying the Founding-era laws restricting citizenship to free whites, or Jim Crow laws segregating "Whites" and "Blacks". What changed was that the ethnic group American nativists considered ingroup changed from "WASPs" to "Whites" (and now to "Heritage-Americans", which is at least supposed to include ADOS blacks and American Indians). The 2nd Klan and the popular nativist movement it was the pointy end of used anti-Catholicism and not racism as their prejudice of choice, and the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act was explicitly targetted at reducing immigration of undesirable white subgroups.

Reading the article I am overjoyed to learn that St. Petersburg is not a slavic city.

"White" referred to certain ancestral clusters, but the Irish were definitely always included. And the Sicilians, at least in the US (the other Italians might disagree). Certainly Slavs are included. Unless you take Ben Franklin's definition, and honestly I can't tell if he was trolling.

The Hajnal line is not about whiteness.

And the Sicilians, at least in the US (the other Italians might disagree).

I think that is why forms have the ethnicity category for white latins vs non-white latins. /sarcasm

One of my favorite scenes from the show community: https://youtube.com/watch?v=15QFAppht5o

"sweedish dogs! your blood is tainted by generations of race mixing with lap-landers. you're basically finns."

There was an original American conception of the importance of Englishmen. But I feel that quickly changed. When the Hessian soldiers were captured there was a specific and intentional decision to treat them as victims of their over-bearing monarchs/princes, and give them the opportunity of a free life in America. The religious divide was considered far more important at the time than any racial divide, and Americans were fully willing to make concessions on religious tolerance. They even let Maryland in.

I don't see how this is a problem caused by the family's race rather than state policy.

State policy doesn't fall from the sky.

Which race do you think supports helicopter parenting and infantilization the most and which the least?

Do you think CPS and other related institutions having ridiculous protocols for how to deal with certain things is downstream from helicopter parents or parents who leave their infants in the bathtub unattended?

I think the protocols are set by using helicopter parents as the baseline (and probably the opinion makers) and the bathtub parents as scaremongering. In practice, that means a plurality of less-than-helicopter parents get raked by CPS because of a few bathtub parents, who are outliers and should not be counted.

If the nonwhite underclass is used by the state as an example to set the policies for regular people, it is a problem with the state.

I'd assume that to be completely inaccurate, and that the protocols are designed around both the worst and most common cases that land on the institutions desk. And the internal pressure on the decision makers mostly comes from how to prevent the 'big bad' cases that make the headlines from ever happening again. The parenting styles of those who work in those institutions, if they even have children, isn't a factor at all. It's a separate world to them. One to be managed, one to be lived in.

If the state decides to house a hundred odd million non-whites then yeah, that's a 'state issue'. But it's not possible to maintain first world institutions that are saddled with a third world population to manage. Especially whilst not being allowed to differentiate between folks despite how obviously different they are.

Which demographic are the ones reading the sordid headlines and demanding that the state Does Something About It?

More comments

Let me sidetrack a bit - this is a total breakdown of the social fabric. The fact that you could have 3 children and yet not have grandparents, neighbors, friends, extended family to which you could leave the kids for a couple of days is telling of how thin and meager our social circles have become. When I grew up it was - take your pajamas you will be sleeping at X (one family one floor under us, with kid my age). Or for 48 hours or less when I was above 15 - it was - you are on your own buddy, here is some cash, you know where the grocery store is.

This may be police overreaction (although a week is probably a bit too much), but is overreaction to a problem that shouldn't exist at all.

They're immigrants so that explains that part. Deport?

Text of law (rearranged for intelligibility):

“Neglect of a child” means:

A caregiver’s willful failure or omission to provide a child with the care, supervision, and services necessary to maintain the child’s physical and mental health, including, but not limited to, food, nutrition, clothing, shelter, supervision, medicine, and medical services that a prudent person would consider essential for the well-being of the child⁎; or

A caregiver’s failure to make a reasonable effort to protect a child from abuse, neglect, or exploitation by another person.

⁎The term does not include a caregiver allowing a child to engage in independent and unsupervised activities unless allowing such activities constitutes willful and wanton conduct that endangers the health or safety of the child. Such independent and unsupervised activities include, but are not limited to, traveling to or from school or nearby locations by bicycle or on foot, playing outdoors, or remaining at home or any other location for a reasonable period of time.

A person who willfully or by culpable negligence neglects a child without causing great bodily harm, permanent disability, or permanent disfigurement to the child commits a felony of the third degree, punishable [with a fine not exceeding 5 k$ or a term of imprisonment not exceeding 5 years].

Jury instructions:

I will now define what is meant by the term “culpable negligence”. Each of us has a duty to act reasonably toward others. If there is a violation of that duty, without any conscious intention to harm, that violation is negligence. But culpable negligence is more than a failure to use ordinary care for others. For negligence to be culpable, it must be gross and flagrant. Culpable negligence is a course of conduct showing reckless disregard of human life or a grossly careless disregard for the safety and welfare of the public. The negligent act or omission must have been committed with an utter disregard for the safety of another. Culpable negligence is consciously doing an act or following a course of conduct that the defendant knew or reasonably should have known was likely to cause death or great bodily injury.

Example rulings:

  • 2023: Sleeping in the same bed as an infant while you are high on methamphetamine is culpable negligence.

  • 2022: Walking a four-year-old down the middle of a low-speed residential street while you are fall-down drunk is not culpable negligence.

  • 2019-06: Picking up a one-year-old by its feet and plopping it onto a couch head-first is culpable negligence.

  • 2019-02: Failing to seek medical attention for three weeks after an infant incurs obvious severe injuries in falling from a bed is culpable negligence.

  • 2017: Allowing a four-year-old to descend stairs alone when it has previously done so safely is not culpable negligence.

or remaining at home or any other location for a reasonable period of time.

This leaves the path to conviction wide open. The "reasonable period of time" could be anything. And the typical person will reason from "the child got hurt" to "therefore the parent's absence was negligent and the period of time unreasonable". And similarly from "the child got hurt" to "allowing such activities constitutes willful and wanton conduct that endangers the health or safety of the child"

Failing to seek medical attention for three weeks after an infant incurs obvious severe injuries in falling from a bed is culpable negligence.

This case is horrifying to read about. It's complicated by the fact that the parents obviously abused the child, but the prosecutors must have downgraded the charges because they didn't have enough airtight evidence. I'd imagine that the parents miiight be able to get out of charges if they failed to seek medical attention for an actual accidental injury.

The mom got off lightly with a plea bargain, the dad never should have went to trial, he got the book thrown at him, obviously.

This article has an alternative take: https://nypost.com/2026/10/28/us-news/irene-miller-who-left-kids-for-vegas-trip-raged-at-them-for-calling-911-cops/

except for a babysitter who drove two hours from Tampa to check on them in the mornings and after school each day.

The mom hired a babysitter who lives in a totally different city? And the babysitter is driving 2 roundtrips each day, 2 hours each way? That adds up to 8 hours of driving per day. This doesn't really add up.

“She’s very dismissive to the deputy saying that she’s working right now…then says she is going to have to go and hangs up on the deputy,”

“Then she proceeds to call the 14-year-old on his cell phone, and I don’t want to use the word yell…but basically tells the 14-year-old, ‘Why are you calling 911? You’re going to get me in trouble,’”

Power tripping cops are a bad thing but they're a fact of life in any society. Spit in their face and expect consequences.

Mark Miller, 53, was hit with a criminal battery charge and restraining order after his wife of 15 years accused him of slapping her phone out of her hand during a heated confrontation outside of their kids’ school in August, according to court documents reviewed by The Post.

He has pleaded not guilty to the charge.

Allegedly

“The kids were ecstatic to see [their father]…like hugging him, happy to go with him, very ecstatic to see him,” Montes said, adding that the court-ordered no contact order between the parents did not mean the kids could not stay with their dad.

In the end the pending charges don't affect his custody, he's still the parent and nothing has been decided. Irregardless of the mom being investigated, it seems generally sane that the cops dumped the kids on him.

My own 2c is that leaving kids alone for a full 5 days is pushing it. And if you're sending a babysitter or something as an alternative caregiver, as the amount of time the parents are away increases, the amount of care required by the alternative caregivers increases as well. It's probably fine to leave the kids for 1 night and just have a babysitter check in. But for a whole week, the babysitter better be there all day every day.

And that applies even when the kids can take care of smaller kids. A young teen may be able to watch a younger kid for a couple hours alone. But he himself may not be able to take care of himself for a full week alone.

I'd imagine if the babysitter story checks out, and the kids were really being checked on twice a day every day, the charges are probably gonna get dropped. But if it was a lie or something, then she'll be punished for it.

Will be interesting to see if it turns out to be a lie, cause if she is lying about the babysitter bit then it would stand to reason other lies may be happening.

“The kids were ecstatic to see [their father]…like hugging him, happy to go with him, very ecstatic to see him,”

That clears up one of my questions, namely: How do you actually force children to follow a child custody agreement? If he was clearly abusive, then I'd think (or at least hope) that a teenager would just defy the law and go to the other parent. Keeping them there against their will would require either prison-like restrictions of their movements or serious psychological control, both of which should be apparent with minimal investigation.

Of course, that ignores that fact that abuse can hurt the victims and cause them to make persistently poor decisions, so I'm not sure what to think.

Jail them. Of course, that decision may redound to your detriment some seven years later.

Per a post above, the alleged abuse was slapping a phone at of the wife’s hands. Doesn’t strike me as particularly abusive.

A young teen may be able to watch a younger kid for a couple hours alone.

A young teen is capable of giving birth, and in many places and times this is what they actually did.

The time she should be able to watch a younger kid is, logically, "infinite". (The fact I need to explicitly point that out is part of the problem.)

Right, but for obvious biological reasons, caring for a nine and eleven year old for extended periods of time was not the usual task for premodern teen mothers, and is very different from caring for children under five.

It's well understood that humans reach sexual maturity before mental and physical. The fact that a social reaches sexual maturity does not imply its ability to survive independently

It's well understood that humans reach sexual maturity before mental and physical.

This isn't true for literally every other animal on the planet, even highly social creatures born helpless.

So please, go on, explain to me the mechanism for why it's magically different for humans (we'll leave out certain hormonal defects as those exist in every creature too).

Because I have a simpler explanation: the reason they're not reaching mental maturity is simply because you are unable or unwilling to provide an environment where they may mature properly. There are a few perfectly adequate reasons for this statement- if you're a parent or institution, it's easier to control a child than an adult, maybe you fear being an empty-nester so you keep them around far longer than they should, or maybe modern technology has bamboozled you into believing that younger human beings are less capable than they actually are.

But since most of those problems are those you have created for yourself, there's no reason to expect, and certainly not with force of law, that this is or should be universal.

Its fair to say that a human mother in the environment that humans evolved in is capable of taking care of a child once she reaches puberty.

But that doesn't mean that a human mother that has just reached puberty in our environment is capable of taking care of a child.

Is that a failure of our society and environment? Eh, I'd say its a tradeoff. We live in a much more complex environment, but that complexity generally allows for the support of more human lives. If we had only hunter gatherer tribes throughout the entire planet, would we be capable of supporting 1 billion people? It doesn't seem like it.

I think we're also just allowed to have higher standards of motherhood than existed at the pre-historic level. A 14 year old cannot drive a kid to the emergency room, but failing to take the kid to an emergency room is certainly neglect. We can maintain more lives and lose fewer to accidents.... at the cost of the expectation that you maintain more lives and save children from dying in accidents.

that complexity generally allows for the support of more human lives.

It allows a larger number of human beings to exist.

It does not allow for the support of more full human lives.

in our environment

Of course, the thing we're debating is whether it's proper for assumptions about your environment to prevent someone else's environment from being suitable for developing such a human being.

I assert that once the physical capacity for this exists, it is incompatible with the dignity of that human being to treat it as if the mental one does not, even if that was the case for most of them.

You can assert what you want. It's not going back to that way. It was a doomed way of life as soon as agriculture developed.

Personally I'm not so enamored with a hunter gatherer lifestyle. Glad we don't have it, even if it means children no longer know enough to navigate the environment.

You can assert what you want. It's not going back to that way.

Many of those who profit handsomely by claiming life was too dangerous for anyone to be permitted to live it said these exact words.

What was the next thing that usually happened to them, and in what measure do you think that reply was deserved?

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As my non-American $.02, I can see it as "pushing it" in the sense that I would probably not do it if I had kids that age (unless I found them unusually mature) and might advice likewise to people in my environment, but on the other hand it seems insane that this would result in police getting involved and the children being taken away. In that sense, I'm a bit taken aback by your comment on a meta level; it comes across to me like someone got arrested for their breakfast choice, and then you chime in that if they really did put honey on peanut butter then this does strike you as quite degenerate. The most important part of the argument, why your beliefs regarding what should be put on bread (or what kids may or may not be competent at) should have any bearing on whether police may use their mandate to punish unrelated people who act at odds with them, is conspicuously missing, as if if only enough representative salt-of-the-earth people thought likewise, jailing PB&J heretics would be the natural course of action. Is there no more liberal principle, that people may by default do whatever they want unless it impinges on one of a handful of predefined competing values like the integrity of the state or there is a compelling sense in which it conflicts with someone else's rights?

Thats how I felt except then I found out it was overnight for multiple days. I think an adult overnight is a hard line with kids that young. If the teenager was alone that might be different.

How do I phrase this in a way that doesn't sound cheeky... I think the retreat from public to private spaces is concomitant with a loss of social cohesion. The largest cause of declining social cohesion is diversity. Diversity, people being different from each other, makes everyone more hostile and more suspicious. It makes public places inherently untrustworthy and erodes trust in the commons. People retreat into larger houses and private spaces. Interfacing with the open world becomes inherently suspicious.

Therefore in order to slowly claw back social cohesion I would deport illegal immigrants, declare an immigration moratorium, impose harsh minimum sentences for felons convicted of violent crimes, promote English proficiency in immigrant populations, eliminate discriminatory DEI workplace requirements, institutionalize the homeless, grow the economy, and promote a strong patriotic vision of America for everyone to assimilate to. The more everyone has in common the more we can start to trust each other again.

Less polemically, there's something also to be said for the American car-centric life and suburbia. But I consider that those partially-or-predominantly developed as a reaction against the original American social unrest, which was the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. (Maybe also the Red Scare, if you prefer.) So we should also encourage some modest public transit and reduce building restrictions in urban cores. And also lock up all the criminals.

There's also something to be said for the transition away from large family networks. You only need a babysitter if grandma and cousins live far away. But this is part cultural (America descends from Anglo social norms where the young have always left home) and part economic (opportunity will always pull many away from wherever they grew up).

I say all of the above seriously. If you wanted to get into goofier ideas, you could ban tattoo parlors, recriminalize marijuana, enforce cell phone and speaker bans in public spaces, enforce dress codes and curfews, and impeach a few prosecutors and judges who let criminals run free. Actually, per William Bratton, I think broken windows policing does work, so you could probably stand also to benefit from cleaning up graffiti and the sidewalks.

Also, finally, I know that the trendline on this has been bad for many generations now. But overreactions usually invite overreactions and I would expect that, if you build social cohesion back up, it would be quite possible for teen spirit to make a comeback in a single generation or less.

I wouldn't blame imported diversity on that one.
Immigrants are more likely to have different generations living under one roof and to be more cavalier in their approach to rules and laws. Not the kind to call the police on other people for some imaginary child abuse.
There is a kind of anarcho-tyranny inherent in the bureaucratic government of developed societies.
Progressive law-people will somehow release extremely violent offenders under some flimsy ideological excuses, but then excessively punish normal people through the process. For example taking away children while the family is getting investigated, without any real chance of a trial. That process is not in itself punitive for the people who are actually bad parents.
I've heard that some people actually abuse foster care, by regularly coming to get their kids back once in a while just often enough to retain parental rights and whatever benefits are associated with the kids, and dropping them off again when they want to go on a bender.

The primary culprit for the dissolution of the American family is children moving away from their parents for better career prospects, and as in the story, a woman feeling compelled to go on a business trip to keep her job.
Perhaps the underlying culprit is the specter of the lack of freedom of association in urban areas, which makes young people anxious to make enough money to afford a 'safe' housing location, but that doesn't seem that strong of an explanation to me.
Perhaps the 'good career anxiety' is also the cause of the primary issue plaguing parents in the 'safe' housing locations (suburbs): the Karen, mandated or voluntary reporter.
The men who would become fathers were driven toward the money-making careers and away from the luxury, culture-making ones and we end up with publishing, teaching, journalism, public communications, marketing... dominated by women or men who think just the same.

Perhaps nerd culture is another aspect of this as well. The transgressive, teenage-like attitude of nerd culture 'you wouldn't download a car' makes it really hard to consolidate culture for creative men.
If the nerds had somehow managed to strong-arm the government as well as the public school unions, the APA, the AMA, Hollywood, etc, and somehow made piracy impossible, or prevented foreign imports, perhaps American culture would be much different.
For example, public education could be infinitely cheaper if we had a few local child-minders and a couple of teachers in a giant Zoom meeting across the entire country.

Imo the only way to solve the current birthrate crisis that some have started to recognize as a problem would be to completely dismantle the child protective services' apparatus.
Who even cares about that, objectively speaking?
Left-wingers clearly don't care about children's well-being when they support abortion. They also do not in general care about child abuse, or they would not demand the mass importation of parents from countries where the standards of child safety are significantly relaxed.
I imagine a lot of right-wingers have started to understand how the government can use them to attack their family if they have alternative stances on healthcare practices or schooling.

Left-wingers clearly don't care about children's well-being when they support abortion. They also do not in general care about child abuse, or they would not demand the mass importation of parents from countries where the standards of child safety are significantly relaxed.

This is going too far into culture-warring and boo-outgrouping. When you are describing your outgroup and what they "clearly" do or don't care about, if you can't describe them in terms they would recognize or agree with, you are not describing, you are projecting. "Left-wingers clearly don't care about child abuse (because they disagree with me politically)" is just a cheap accusation that "My enemies are evil and lie about not being evil."

You may actually believe that-- we've had this conversation many times, with many people, and clearly many people do sincerely believe that left-wingers are uniformly evil and hate children. I'm sure it is not news to you that many left-wingers think similarly vile things about right-wingers. And if a left-winger came here and said "Right-wingers clearly don't care about laws or democracy or child-rape because (insert a random scrape of social media)," I am sure you'd expect us to tell him that such generalizations are not acceptable here. Even if you really believe your enemies are all cartoon villains.

You're already on our radar as a likely troll and/or alt, so if you're testing the waters, consider them tested, and you as well.

When you are describing your outgroup and what they "clearly" do or don't care about, if you can't describe them in terms they would recognize or agree with, you are not describing, you are projecting.

I'm just making inferences from facts.
Saying 'pest-control operators do not care about the well-being of rodents or they wouldn't be laying traps to kill them' is not boo-outgrouping.
In my opinion, killing somebody or supporting their killing is a demonstration that you do not care about their well-being. Maybe I'm wrong, some ecological arguments could be made along the lines of prey/predator balance, maybe we do need to kill [some of] the humans to solve climate change...
This is something that can be debated.

"Left-wingers clearly don't care about child abuse (because they disagree with me politically)" is just a cheap accusation that "My enemies are evil and lie about not being evil."

'Children are precious and should be protected' is actually a political value that is not universal. Even to this day we have people protesting for example Columbus Day, because they disagree that the human sacrifice stopping was good, actually.
Or people supporting an American woman who confessed to killing her own children.
I'm not strawmanning people as evil, this is real beliefs that they tell us about.
Some people do want to kill children in the womb, this is a fact, and my claim is that this means they do not care for their well-being.

"Right-wingers clearly don't care about laws or democracy or child-rape because (insert a random scrape of social media),"

Well if somebody wants to come up and claim that Ramaswamy and his supporters support child-rape because of his recent campaign statements, substantiating the argument with evidence, shouldn't they be able to do so?

How should I present my arguments in a way that is palatable to you?

How should I present my arguments in a way that is palatable to you?

Read the rules. I will not indulge your bad faith justifications.

I have. I don't understand what is bad faith in saying that people who support the killing of children, human offspring, human beings, in at least some circumstances (before birth) are demonstrably not maximally concerned about the well-being of children. What qualifiers do I need to add to that statement not to make it offensive to you?

There is clearly a segment of the population which prioritizes the well-being or perhaps the mental health of a woman over that of her children in the womb for abortion supporters, or outside of the womb for Lindsay Clancy supporters.

Most people who are pro-abortion have a definition of 'child' that does include bouncing three-year-olds and does not include balls of 256 totipotent cells. I feel sure you know this. You can disapprove all you like, but deducing that therefore abortionists are a-ok with the murder or neglect of three-year-olds is logically fallacious (and wrong). Thus, the requirement to be able to state somebody else's beliefs in terms they'd accept, because if you can do that then you won't make fallacious arguments like

completely dismantle the child protective services' apparatus. Who even cares about that, objectively speaking? Left-wingers clearly don't care about children's well-being when they support abortion. They also do not in general care about child abuse, or they would not demand the mass importation of parents from countries where the standards of child safety are significantly relaxed.

because you know that being pro-abortion does not have anything to do with whether you are for brutalising little children, and neither does relaxing 'standards of child safety'. There are the rare mentally ill person who genuinely doesn't give a damn about children, or sadistically wants children to suffer, but they're rare as hell.

demonstrably not maximally concerned about the well-being of children

Who is maximally concerned about the well-being of children? Me? You? There are other things in the world that get traded off against the well-being of children: time, cost, convenience, the richness of life for those over 8 years old, potentially the right of refugees not to be tortured to death in their home countries depending on your immigration views. That doesn't mean you have no concern for child protection.

Most people who are pro-abortion have a definition of 'child' that does include bouncing three-year-olds and does not include balls of 256 totipotent cells.

Many pro-abortion people support abortion way after the 24 weeks limit of viability outside the womb.
There is not much practical difference between some types of abortions and going into a NICU ward and hacking premies with a scalpel.

relaxing 'standards of child safety'

Euphemism for cultures that practice child marriage or sex slavery, genital mutilation, slavery in general... These are the cultures open-borders types love to import into Western countries, therefore casting doubt that they want to improve the well-being of children in the country, as immigrants do not immediately abandon cultural habits upon crossing the border.

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I'm not offended. I just don't believe that you are unable to comprehend that if you asked a pro-choice person if they care about the well-being of children, that they would not say "No, I don't care about the well-being of children." Just as you are aware that people who protest Columbus Day are not doing so because they think Aztec human sacrifices were good.

Arguments can be made (and have been made) about revealed preferences, willful ignorance, mistake theory versus conflict theory, etc. But you aren't making those arguments. You are just asserting a priori that a maximally uncharitable interpretation of your outgroup is in fact what they really believe, regardless of what they say.

Therefore, based on that and your previous posts, I infer that you are making bad faith arguments to smear your outgroup. The rules apply to everyone's outgroup, right or left.

Just as you are aware that people who protest Columbus Day are not doing so because they think Aztec human sacrifices were good.

My understanding is that the underlying belief is that it was wrong to conquer and replace the Aztecs and other Pre-Columbian nations. Why was it wrong to replace the Aztecs? Because they had a culture that was worthy of celebration, which is also why it is important to do land acknowledgments to that culture. Was human sacrifice / child-killing not part of that culture? Is it not implicit that if you celebrate a culture that includes human sacrifice / child-killing that you think these customs are worthy of celebration?

I just don't believe that you are unable to comprehend that if you asked a pro-choice person if they care about the well-being of children, that they would not say "No, I don't care about the well-being of children."

If I asked a pro-choice person if it's acceptable to kill a child in the womb, would they say 'no'? I thought that was the pro-choice position. Therefore pro-choice people find it acceptable to sometimes kill a child. That's a logical interpretation of their belief. Is that compatible with caring about the well-being of that child in the womb?
Perhaps, that's an argument to make. My personal opinion is that the ones supporting the abortion - perhaps out of some eugenics concerns that being born out of wedlock, to an insane or impoverished mother is a fate worse than death- do not care in the same way about the well-being of the child put to death as the ones opposing abortion. It's debatable who 'cares more about well-being' as they drive the knife through the baby's body, but I don't see how that makes my argument 'bad faith'.

My own belief is that America is currently over-policing parents, over-regulating the behavior of being a parent, out of various concerns, some of them 'child safety', and this contributes to a drop in birth rates.
Safety has been co-opted as a concept by progressive movements, and only works in one direction.
Safety demands that children and employees get vaccinated for access to essential services or activities, but it does not demand that high-risk recreational activities be curtailed to suppress different epidemics such as formerly-named monkeypox or GRID.
Safety means responsible teenagers should not cross state lines with a weapon or be able to use a weapon for self-defense, but it does not mean that gang members should be prevented from entering the country for illegal activities.

Another example of this trend is that some corporations now offer to cover the travel of their female employees to states that allow abortion, as it is obviously beneficial to keep their employees sterile out of convenience for the running of their business. It seems to me that profits and employee retention matter more than the well-being of children in the womb. Same reason that led to the woman 'abandoning' her children to a care of a teenager, corporate pressure on working-age people to always be available to perform.

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Race and immigration are irrational explanations for one simple reason, almost every crime against a child is by someone the child is related to or already knows well therefore it's mostly done with the same racial group. For example, 60% of amber alerts are just the parents, yet alone older siblings/aunts/uncles/babysitters/pastors/family friends/etc other groups that are known by the child already and thus very likely to be the same race as them.

Perhaps immigration and diversity erodes trust, but it doesn't hurt children. The people, the often same race people, in the childs life hurt children.

That’s orthogonal to what the other poster actually wrote.

Aren't the vast majority of amber alerts custody disputes of various types? 'Most crimes are committed by people known to the victim' and 'You should do your best to maintain a strong social fabric' aren't mutually exclusive phenomena, either

Aren't the vast majority of amber alerts custody disputes of various types?

Yes, parents kidnapping a child after a separation is the most common form of abduction by far. The main person to fear is not your neighbor, but your ex.

Seems possible that diversity / multiculturalism does create more suspicion and distrust, but strongly suspect that a much bigger driver is the complete collapse of a trusted information ecosystem. Even if the main evening news was half approved propaganda, it was the same for everyone and so a shared narrative was everywhere. Now, with smartphones + social media + AI + everything downstream of all three, we are all exposed to extremely conflicting claims and counter claims every day, and no two people’s info system is the same. It is literally making everyone insane. Distrust and suspicion are just the starting point when that happens.

Less polemically, there's something also to be said for the American car-centric life and suburbia. But I consider that those partially-or-predominantly developed as a reaction against the original American social unrest, which was the rise of the Civil Rights Movement.

It's an interesting turn in thinking among the younger right, that suburbs are in fact bad, like leftists exclusively used to say. But it's from diversity, not greedy acquisitiveness. But at this point many who fled the cities have come to, with enough progeny, genuinely prefer suburban life. It allows one to manifest their property dreams - man cave, tree house, dirt bike racetrack - in a way the city always made difficult.

They'll complain the suburbs are bad and in the same breath complain a house in the suburbs costs way too much.

To the extent that the thing making the youth grumpy is a crisis of meaning (I think it mostly is, in the US at least), it is probably harder to generate meaning in a suburb.

Plenty of people have made rural living, small-town living, or urban living a big part of their identity. I have never met someone who made suburban living a part of their identity in that way - the people who are best able to articulate why they love US-style suburbia are LARPing rural lifestyles while living within (single-occupant pickup or SUV) commuting distance of a major-metro job market

Eh, there is no meaning in that sense, beyond "a zygote is a gamete's way of producing more gametes". Certainly that's what 19th-and-earlier century rural living was about -- you lived to survive and raise the next generation. Works the same in suburbia, it hardly matters that the zygotes make their living in the back area of Walmart or the cubicle farm rather than the back forty of an actual farm.

The tastemakers have made hating suburban living part of their identity, and that's part of the culture -- Little Boxes, Pleasant Valley Sunday, Subdivisions, A Wrinkle In Time, The Stepford Wives, etc. Which is why few will claim that suburban living is part of their identity; it's Just Not Done. Yet nearly every time someone's complaining about the cost of owning housing (as opposed to rent), the benchmark is going to be a single-family detached house, likely in the suburbs. Often enough, one in the town they grew up in, or perhaps the very same house.

I would argue economic and educational diversity are bigger factors than ethnic or racial diversity . America was pretty diverse even before the wave of Hispanic and South-Asian immigration, but more cohesive; e.g. Chinese, African Americans, Eastern Europeans, Germans, Irish, etc. Nowadays, you got people who have high incomes and pay a premium to isolate and afford premium services. 70+ years ago, wages were much lower in real terms accords the board. There was no such thing as the $300+ k/year white collar/UMC job. Car culture part of it it by creating literal physical distances.

I immediately recall the Virginia Mom convicted for letting her 5 year old walk ½ mile in a gated community.

This isn’t a Florida problem; in fact, that it happens in Florida, the State of Parental Freedom™️, is a testament to how bad it is. This is a US problem: it doesn’t happen in Europe and I’m sure it’s not happening in India, South America, China…(maybe it would in Australia if you could walk anywhere there). Yet at least Europe has less child mortality (albeit only measuring up to 5 years).

That the children are sent to a suspected abuser is at worst government incompetence. In fairness, if he’s still husband maybe it was mom’s and children’s choice, and foster care would probably be worse (though maybe other relatives could take them, if they aren’t familiar or are estranged, that would also probably be worse).

Who defends the police in these cases? I think if the child doesn’t seriously complain, there must be a very high bar to take them away, which is certainly not met here. There aren’t enough good parents, so an OK parent who may recklessly get their child killed (and “may” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, kids aren’t made of glass), is probably the best and actually safest option; lest they end with “parents” who don’t really care about them, or have several other foster children to divide their attention.

I think there’s a bit of a false comparison.

Yes, we’re protective of kids in the USA, more so than Europe. But we are also not like Europe in enough ways that the comparison is silly. Europe has very low crime, robust public transport, and walkable public spaces. The USA has almost none of that, and the cities that do have public transport generally have so much crime in the trains or subway that you couldn’t even consider using it especially after dark. The roads in the USA are designed around fast cars and it would be almost impossible to walk to a business from a suburban home without encountering a street that has a speed limit of 40-50 mph. Letting a child walk to a store alone in Europe is not a big deal because the odds of encounters with crime are low and you have trains or subways and wide sidewalks to get around car traffic.

That's true, but there are places in the US with low crime, probably lower than seedier areas of Europe; yet it seems like even (maybe especially) those safe places in the US have nosy neighbors and aggressive CPS, like the 5-year old situation happened in a gated community. Moreover, third-world countries that are more unsafe than the US (at least most areas where these incidents happen) don't have this problem.

That the children are sent to a suspected abuser is at worst government incompetence.

That this type of "suspected abuser" should be denied access to kids (even when it solves a problem for the authorities) is a feminist motte-and-bailey. He was accused of slapping his (ex? - the press coverage is confusing)-wife, not of harming a child.

If we didn't live in a society which believed that a man who slaps his wife once should lose contact with their kids for life, then there wouldn't have been an issue in the first place because there was a functioning parent in town who could look after the kids, at least when he wasn't at work.

Per the above, he slapped a phone out of her hands. That really isn’t abusive.

Canada too https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/09/07/canadian-officials-crack-down-on-single-father-for-letting-his-kids-ride-the-bus

Maybe it's a unique NA thing but car centrism and loss of freedoms for kids seem to be directly related. A society where eyes are everywhere in the local neighborhood from people walking directly results in less crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_surveillance and helps people feel safer too when they actually see and know their neighbors more.

it's out of control . The war on drugs, which is when this began, morphed into a war on freedom.

Awesome, yet another reason never to have kids just dropped.

The youngest accidentally dropped a weight while working out, they called 911 to get him medical help, and the cops proceeded to arrest the mom upon arriving back home. For the children's safety, they have now been placed with the father who is facing domestic abuse charges and has a restraining order against him, a very safe place indeed.

This is pretty much ironically Republicans' fault. they gave police this discretion to do what they want without resistance and now it's basically biting them back by turning America into a micromanaged nanny state. Same during covid too. In the '80s and such police did not get involved with everything.

I’d wager it was women.

The decision to aggressively enforce the laws against child neglect, including in marginal cases, was not partisan. In the UK, it was driven by demands for "never again" following sensationalist media courage of a small number of serious cases ending with a dead child. I suspect the US was the same.

If you believe that someone is to blame every time a kid is hurt, then the person to blame in this case is indeed the "neglectful" mother. I was a small boy and am the father of two of them, so I am perfectly aware that the optimal rate of self-inflicted injuries among small boys is greater than zero.

I still think this was Republicans' fault, but only because Florida is red enough that any misgovernment in Florida is presumptively Republicans' fault.

Same during covid too.

The republicans fought covid restrictions and also largely pressed the yolo button when they were in control. I'm not really blaming the few republicans who lived in California for not an heroing fighting some covid cops

Are the police really at fault here? This seems more like a social thing slowly ramping up helicopter parent expectations. The police could just decline to pursue these sorts of things, but I don't think that's the way society aught to be structured. The police should enforce the laws, the laws shouldn't be stupid, and there should only be a little bit of discretion on the sides to grease the wheels. We shouldn't rely on the police ignoring laws wholesale to create reasonable outcomes.

but we're not talking laws here. we're taking citizens calling cops or police being called for things that do not fall under crimes. so everyone is now paranoid

Laws should just be guidelines; there're more corner cases than archetypal cases, and writing a trillion page legal code to cover every conceivable situation would both fail to cover everything and also be a monstrosity.

The question I have is why the police didn't apply common sense here. If you polled most officers in that department, I would bet a large majority would say this makes no sense. Why did the insane point of view end up deciding the outcome here?

Laws should just be guidelines

I don't think we really disagree here. Like I said I understand the need for a bit of discretion, but there's a big difference between that and the police just ignoring entire laws. If the laws are bad, repeal the laws!

The question I have is why the police didn't apply common sense here.

If I had to guess, it would be something unusual like a female police officer who maybe thought other nefarious things were going on, or maybe they police station was under more scrutiny to crack down on "child abuse" or something.

At 9 years old I'm pretty sure I'd be trusted to stay at home alone for a few days, maybe with a family member on call. I don't recall if it actually happened.

The clear American consensus as long as I can remember has been that 16 is a pretty hard line for staying home alone for more than a day.

I suppose this is only natural when instead of a 5 minute walk to the nearest grocery or drugstore, it takes a driving license. The notion some express that it's the peak form of living (because you get a backyard) continues to baffle me, though.

I don't know anyone who left multiple minors without at least a minor of driving age overnight.

I don't live in a car-mandatory country.

Wonderful! Very glad for that, but the case is in Florida which is quite car centric.

I certainly never did that at 9. But I'd have had a 7 and 3 year old to care for in that case, which is dubious.

The real issue is that, once a kid is responsible enough to run a household for 3 days, they are also clever enough to throw a party while mom is away.

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