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Where do the children play?

(unpublishablepapers.substack.com)
409 points casca | 3 comments | 16 Nov 25 13:45 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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pseudonymcoward ◴[17 Nov 25 08:11 UTC] No.45951724[source]▶
As a society we find violence or harm against children to be extremely shocking and tragic. As a society we would do almost anything to prevent it.

Giving children the kinds of freedoms discussed in this article would lead to some harm coming to them. Accidents, violence, kidnap, etc.

Therefore, society won't give them those freedoms.

This tendency has been exagerated by mass media in the modern era. Every single case, every piece of anecdata, makes massive headlines and instills the fear into parents everywhere.

It's impossible for society to reverse course because that would mean acknowledging, implicitly or explicitly, that some level of harm for some children is justified by the developmental benefits to all children of increased freedom.

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johnnyanmac ◴[17 Nov 25 11:03 UTC] No.45952541[source]▶
>As a society we find violence or harm against children to be extremely shocking and tragic. As a society we would do almost anything to prevent it

The moment Sandy Hook happened and US society just shrugged at it, we relinquished our ability to use this dynamic for anything serious.

We can't pretend to care about kids while treating their murders as an inevitability of life and not something to reform over.

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1. pessimizer ◴[17 Nov 25 11:29 UTC] No.45952694[source]▶
There have always been people who went into schools to kill children. In 1927, a guy blew up a school in Bath, Michigan, killing 38 kids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster

The fact that you think heaven and earth have to be moved over a single school shooting (as terrible as it was) is a symptom. School is the safest place where children are. They're more likely to be murdered and abused at home.

I'm 50, but when I was a kid I took the bus by myself: when I was 12, on the South Side of Chicago, which had an order of magnitude more violence than your kids will ever be exposed to. I ran around with my friends within a block or two, we were big into BMX bikes. Kids got hurt periodically, but sometimes kids will get hurt; sometimes kids will die. A few hundred years ago, most kids would die. Now we (not we, but mostly a certain demographic whose aesthetic is imposed on everyone else) find it unacceptable to hear about kids dying on television, nowhere near us.

It was bad when 50% of kids died, but I've had the belief that whatever the number it now is too few. We need the number of kids who die through "death by misadventure" to go up. Raising kids in a box leaves them dumb and unsocialized. Kids need independence, and to be allowed the ability to make some bad decisions with real consequences. They need to be able to fall off the monkey bars.

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2. tptacek ◴[17 Nov 25 19:37 UTC] No.45957317[source]▶
We're close to the same age and I grew up on the south side of Chicago, so I'm cheekily going to ask if by "a bus on the south side" you meant Hyde Park or Beverly. :)
3. johnnyanmac ◴[17 Nov 25 22:15 UTC] No.45958987[source]▶
>The fact that you think heaven and earth have to be moved over a single school shooting (as terrible as it was) is a symptom.

no, the symptom is that kids have to normalize lockdown drills and how to barricade a door to protect from shooters. I had earthquake and fire drills as a kid, but it wasn't culturalized to accept that school shootings are a thing.

Now we can map out mass shootings by year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

Now we can expect 4-5 school shottings a year, documented by year. Trying to make this equivalent to "well kids get hurt" completely misses the point. But I'm not surprised at this point.