Back around 1960, when I was eight and my little sister was six, we went with our dad to a chess tournament at the Mechanics' Institute in San Francisco. [1]<p>Of course if you're six and eight and not really into chess, nothing could be more boring. So we asked Dad if we could do something else. He gave us a few nickels and quarters and said "sure, how about riding the cable cars and go see the town?"<p>So we did! It was the most awesomest thing ever. We rode every cable car we could find, walked around town and saw the sights. The best part was when we found a street with our last name on it!<p>Everyone was nice. The cable car operators saw that we were a couple of kids riding around on our own, so they showed us how the grip and the brakes worked, pointed out interesting things to see, and made sure we knew how to ride safely - even when we were sitting on the outside of the cable car kicking our feet.<p>We forgot to ask for lunch money, so when we got back to the chess club as Dad was finishing his games, he took us out for a bite to eat and we told him all the stories of our adventure.<p>What a great day!<p>[1] <a href="https://chessclub.org" rel="nofollow">https://chessclub.org</a>
Over-protecting kids is probably not the main point here. Bureaucrats tend to focus on only one goal: not taking any responsibility or risks. Letting kids being independent is a risk for them, even if this is for their own good. And you can carefully explain to them the case, with scientific evidences, but they are not accountable for anything, and won't bother to change their mind. Because there is a second thing bureaucrats hate: admitting they were wrong.
While helicopter parenting is a thing here in Germany, too, it is still possible to use your sane judgement as a parent for a lot of things. My daughter is not yet in school (so I am not into a peer group that talks about such stuff), but I see the 7-year-old neighbour kids walking to school without supervision, just as it has been the custom here in my own childhood. I have to admit there are fewer of those on the street (and more accompanied by parents), but kids still have the same freedoms in law that I had. Heck, in anti-gun Germany they are allowed to shoot at shooting clubs beginning 12, doing their first solo flight in (sail)planes at 14 and have their boat driving license at 16. I often critisize our country for its obese body of law, but life of kids is not too much restricted.
I don't mind the idea of the state protecting children. What I mind is it happening without essential protections such as a right to jury trial, a presumption of innocence, and illegal behavior being limited to what is defined by actual laws written by elected representatives.<p>What we have here is the terror of the police state. Anonymous tips, petty bureaucrats making life changing rulings on a whim with no clear laws to establish legal behavior. I would love to see the whole thing challenged as unconstitutional and abolished and folded into the much more functional justice system.
The "Cover Your Ass" culture which results in mandating helicopter parenting is sadly widespread, and not just in Canada.<p>We need to be ever vigilant to stop petty bureaucrats everywhere from making arbitrary rules and taking away valuable freedoms and discretion. Do what you can at work and in your personal life to maintain freedoms.<p>EDIT: One simple thing we can do is make a donation to the legal fighting fund established by the writer of this article to fight this draconian Canadian regulation. There are links to the legal fund donation page in the linked article.
Also people don't realize this anymore, but when you're a single parent and have FIVE kids, you HAVE to teach your kids independence, cause you can't be behind each and every one of them all the time! When one of them gets sick (which is just about every other week), you're pretty pleased that the others can get to school by themselves.
I walked the whole city I was born in and took whatever busses and trolleys I wanted (I knew all the routes) when I was 7-9 years old (in the 80's) in a city of 300-400k people. This is simply insane and stupid. It's the reason why I will never have kids in the US or Canada. What kind of shitty culture and society allows this kind of degradation of kids? Is it any wonder they grow up not knowing how to live? It's shameful and disgusting to allow children to be policed in this way. I'd blame it on government/bureaucracy, but it only follows the norms of the shitty culture that enables it.
I'm sympathetic. But given the article is against "fact-free" parenting. I didn't find the data presented very compelling.<p>Basically you'd need to know how common crime against children traveling unsupervised on buses in a similar scenario.<p>The closest example presented is kids in New York riding the subway, so presenting stats on that would be useful.<p>I'd also like more details on the Japanese example, it's honestly not uncommon to hear news reports of kids being abducted in Japan. I'd personally be interested in the stats, but as a comparison point it doesn't make sense unless you can normalize for the overall lower crime rate that Japan has.<p>If anyone has good data against "Helicopter parenting", I'd be curious to see it.
This article is depressing as hell.<p>I used to walk to school at the age of what, 8? There was one really quite busy road I had to cross on my own, the rest was residential. But learning to cross the road is something that was dogmatically addressed from a very young age. "Stop. Look. Listen." I remember learning about that aged 5ish? My parents knew I could cross the road, they'd taught me, the schools had taught me. It was tested in the crucible of parental observation and then I was trusted to continue.<p>Of course someone could come along and kidnap me as I blithely wandered along the pavement. But frankly if we're going to spend our lives obsessing about extreme tail risks then we've already lost.
The point of parenting isn't to avoid getting criticized for being a "bad parent", or to do things that make you look like a "good parent". The point is to provide the necessary conditions for children to learn how to be independent and successful adults. This involves taking reasonable levels of risks, and figuring out what amount of risk-taking is reasonable, and learning how to navigate the world in general.
The way blame gets assigned and risk gets assessed by human society is often quite pathological.<p>In a typical setting, there are options A & B. As an example, let A be the option to allow young kids to ride independently on a bus and B the option to legislate against letting young kids ride independently on a bus.<p>The cost of A seems high to human emotions and the lazy thinker, typically involving rare but high-impact events (something really bad happening to the well-trained kid taking a bus) that get cherry-picked as important to consider.<p>The cost of B seems low to human emotions and the lazy thinker, typically involving diverse continual low-impact events (all kids affected by legislation losing out on chance to learn independence, environmental impact of using a car instead of public transport) that get neglected because of their low emotional appeal and more complicated accounting. (It may be hard to prove that lots of low-impact things add up to a big thing -- there are too many things and causal relationships to point to.)<p>In many cases, the cost of A is actually objectively lower than the cost of B, so A is the better option. In such cases, whereas all options and their consequences should be considered together with their probabilities, in reality, option B is often deemed to be the better choice, and A a bad choice, because the cost of A appeals more strongly to emotional. Consequently, someone who picked A (law-maker or bureaucrat) gets blamed but someone who picked B doesn't get blamed and is harder to blame, including in court. To protect themselves, they pick the inferior option.<p>I think this sort of pathological risk assessment is the root of the cover-your-ass culture that permeates society.
I‘m really glad this parent is fighting the decision; no ministry should be able to interfere with personal freedoms when the stakes are so low, basing their decisions on far fetched court cases that have nothing to do with the situation.<p>As a point of comparison, school kids in Austria typically walk to school or use public transit on their own from first grade (6-7 years old).<p>In the beginning of the school year, older students watch zebra crossings and block traffic when kids need to cross.
I find it incredible that these bureaucrats routinely threaten people with taking away their children. Aren't even the most reasonable people going to get dangerous when faced with that kind of a situation? I don't have kids but I can't even imagine.
A friend of mine is father of 7. When they had their fifth kid, children protection started to show their faces on a regular base.<p>Because, you know, having that much children, you are probably a bad parent.<p>Of course, it's not a bad thing that they ensure that there is, in fact, no obvious problem home. It's important to watch for the children, they are the future of your country.<p>But in his case, a wealthy entrepreneur, his wife is a nurse, with the biggest house I've ever been in, and one of the happiest family I know, they still visits every couple of months, seamingly looking for a reason to piss them off.<p>It looks like (and it's just my opinion) they can't accept different form of life standards.
Bureaucrats have little stake in this but see high risk to their careers so they want to play safe. Only way to affect change is to somehow convince them that this is good for their career. Or get lucky enough and find the one person who believes in and cares enough to push the issue through the system.
I think the question the Ministry official asked him about what would happen if the kids start fighting is an important part of the equation.<p>Society has gotten more legalistic. The bus driver or a random adult passenger doesn't have legally defined authority to discipline the author's kids, which means they don't have the authority at all.<p>But basic human decency demands you intervene if you see little kids fighting or doing something dangerous (even if you'd just roll your eyes if it was a couple of drunk guys).<p>This tension propagates through the system until somebody basically rules kids can't ride the bus unsupervised until they're old enough to be unsympathetic.
A more sinister way of looking at this is that the government wants to raise children to be more dependent on an authority figure. So that when they grow up to become adults they will more naturally defer to authority and the state will have an easier time controlling the population and instituting draconian measures.<p>This goes hand in hand with another commenter where no-one wants to take the responsibility for being wrong and always defers to an "authority figure". Because nobody got blamed for buying IBM.
At least in Menlo Park, CA, I'm seeing more kids walking to school. You can now drive down a road that passes three schools around 3 PM without being caught in a traffic jam of SUVs queued up for kid pickup.<p>I wonder if computer use is helping. I used to see kids struggling under enough backpack for a weekend campout. The backpacks seem to be much smaller now. Maybe more content is on tablets and laptops.
Once there are numerous children riding unaccompanied on the bus, the stats may change. Obviously in the current environment (where no children are riding the bus), the number of incidents are small (his stats are from school busses). What happens when people realize that dozens of children are riding public buses all the time without a parent in sight?<p>The current climate of "over-protecting" kids may be the cause of the lower rates of child-related crimes. Check out some graphs of the kidnap rates falling. Maybe the "woefully ignorant" public policy makers actually have the right answer?<p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/14/theres-never-been-a-safer-time-to-be-a-kid-in-america/?utm_term=.3a60649a53b4" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/14/there...</a>
I smell a confidence trick.<p>Nowhere in his article does Crook mention any specific names of government workers he interacted with, specific dates when he met with caseworkers, or specific actions or enforcements the government would take regarding his case.<p>In an article full of links to specific stats and empathy inducing images of his children, he does not show a single government correspondence.<p>I hope my assumption is just misguided cynicism, and that there actually is a concrete reason to give this man money.
What must be the most painful part of this is that he's in a weak position having shared custody. A normal parent could just give the middle finger and they'll never have their kids taken away for a single minor behaviour like that. But someone with tenuous custody has to bend over backwards to look like they're doing it right. It seems he could actually lose his kids quite easily because they have another home ready to go to.
In Finland each child gets a yellow cap when they start school around age 7. They are expected to be making their own way to school, and this cap makes it easier for other road and public transport users to spot them and assist them if necessary.
I wanted to make a small donation but I am not comfortable entering my credit card information on a website I know nothing about. This is the first time when I wanted to make a donation, and there was no PayPal option to do it.
It's seems pretty tough in Norge too. The local Children Protection Service seems powerful.<p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BBWXhrN4AM4" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BBWXhrN4AM4</a>
I had to stop reading when the father of FIVE starts talking about sustainability. He might have some credibility in my eyes if he had a vasectomy after 2 kids. And even more if he snipped them at 1.
>Attorney General, and determined that children under 10 years old could not be unsupervised in or outside the home<p>Good night... glad I live in America.