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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.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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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