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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
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?
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.
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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.
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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.
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A rare L for racism.
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Wow. Their last four holiday seasons must have been awkward....
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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" 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.
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Reading the article I am overjoyed to learn that St. Petersburg is not a slavic city.
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"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.
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.
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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?
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