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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?
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.
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.
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