I'm a free range parent and I have had no success in getting any other parents in my neighborhood let their kids ride bicycles to school (school is grades 3-6, it's about a mile, including a short section on a busy street with no sidewalk but a wide shoulder). There are about 400 kids in the school, at least half live within bicycling distance, and there are never more than five bikes in the rack. My evangelicism for bicycling took a hit when one of those spectacular child murders involved a preteen bicyclist in this county.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/10/autumn_pasquale_death_2_teen_b.html

(in fact, although the victim had a bicycle , the murder apparently occurred inside the home of some kids she knew).

Rational or semi-rational arguments:

(1) The vast majority of the 59,000 crimes reported in that study involved acquaintances, not strangers, so the precautions agasint stranger abduction wouldn't have made much difference.

(2) Many of the incidents given as examples in that report aren't really all that traumatic for the kids involved (no more traumatic than say, an overnight hospital stay). You'd rather protect them, but if something bad happens they will recover. And short duration events may be less traumatic for a kid who'se used to being out in the world.

(3) A kid who is used to acting independently is better able to avoid trouble when trouble happens. E.g. if your daughter is used to walking around your community, she'll be more inclined to walk away from a boy or a boyfriend who's starting to act threatening-- and usually, but not always, that's all that is needed.

I'm not that worried about abductions, but I'm terrified of traffic. Possibly this is because my son's habit of telling me that he can outrun cars.

I thought it strange to include stereotypical date rape in the non-family abduction stats. It meets the criteria. so not improper. Maybe just a category error in my head. In any event, awful as rape of a 17 year old by a date most certainly is, I don't think you'd factor that in when considering how dangerous it is to let pre-teens go to the store.

The busdriver who went for a joyride with the kid -- that's just a certain background craziness risk, that can't be avoided. The babysitter who won't return the kids until she gets paid: not an equal and independent risk event.

I suppose Jimmy and Rosalyn are going to have to decide, when the girls are in high school, whether to let them go on dates with people they know. Yes is risky, but no is madness.

but I'm terrified of traffic

ME TOO.

The babysitter who won't return the kids until she gets paid

That's obviously wrong. The babysitter should return the kids but with a Denver boot.

Anyway, there is a very busy road with no "walk" signal between my house and the bus route. I've almost been hit by a car crossing there. They are installing new lights now, so I assume we'll have a signal soonish, but that road is still bad news.

Why are you paying all that fucking money to live in a suburb (especially if this is who I think it is) if you won't let your kids have some marginal time outside? I mean there was a gang murder of a high school kid two blocks away from where I am and I'm still pretty sure that I'm going to let my kid take the bus at age 13. Also what everyone else said about acquaintances, date rape, etc.

I have two kids. We go on bike rides. They ride at different speeds. I tell them to try to stay close together. But they don't often listen. We're in a park, so it's safe. I ride with one, then with the other. I go back and forth. We stop and wait for the slower one to catch up, but then as soon as we start going, we're separated again. A lot of people freak the fuck out when they see a 6-year-old riding a bike in the park with no one around. I've never more than about a quarter mile away, but with turns, I'm often out of direct sight of one or the other (or both). There's very often a group of people half-panicking and looking for me when I catch up. "Did you know he was out here alone? We were so worried." He wasn't alone, I'm right here, I was just a quarter-mile back, with his brother.

The babysitter who won't return the kids until she gets paid

In China it's apparently common practice for maternity hospitals not to let mother and baby leave until their bills are paid in full. I read an article about this which had a picture of impounded mothers holding their impounded babies up to the ward window so their fathers (waiting outside) could see them.

Now that I think of it, an adult got killed by the school bus about two blocks from my house on a different road. I should be more paranoid about traffic.

8 has a kind of Raymond Carver thing going on.

I lean toward being a free-range parent, but with the knowledge I've parented kids with increased risks of sexual abuse and in one case with a familial kidnapping history (that the child in question recognized as kidnapping) already.

I don't like the answer in the the Messy Matters link Jimmy thought was along his lines that says you should teach kids that strangers are good, though. I'm not raising the girls to be afraid of strangers, but we're teaching them to have boundaries too, and that's going to have to involve not yelling to and trying to hold a conversation with every person who goes past our house. I don't want them to make assumptions in either direction, but when in doubt you leave adults alone to do adult stuff not because you are afraid of them but because you respect their boundaries and your own.

Lee doesn't like having the girls on our front lawn, which is open to the street but where they reliably stay up above the little hill to the sidewalk, unless they have supervision, but they're allowed in the fenced back yard. I don't have a problem with them out front as long as I'm in and out of earshot at least. At 5 or 6, I was allowed into the woods by myself at least a little, and they can't play outside???

I'll make the same PSA I always make to talk to your young young kids about ownership of their bodies and who is allowed to touch genitals (mom/dad/babysitter/teacher when wiping, a doctor with mom/dad in the room) and so on. Lee and I argue because I'm a stickler about a child never owing anyone hugs or trading something for a kiss even with parents, but I think it's an important principle to stress and I stand by my position.

I left my purse in the locker room at the local activity center. It involves 3 swinging doors to get to my purse, so I left Ace in the hallway, in her carseat/stroller contraption. As I went in, a woman held the door for us, so I explained "Leaving the baby here, I'll be back in two seconds - just grabbing my purse."

When I came out, the woman was waiting with Ace and said "I just felt like I should wait with her." I said "Oh, that's very sweet of you!" but I was thinking "What on earth was going to happen to her?"

I second the point that most crimes, including these, are between people who know each other, at least peripherally. Also, table 2 suggests that there's geographical and racial skew-- more crimes in the south, victims are disproportionally nonwhite.

I honestly don't know how to discuss this with people who are afraid for their kids. Giving what amounts to a lecture about statistics and fears formed from rare events is asinine, also ineffectual. The best that I can come up with (my wife is also a little panicky) is to say that there's a shared goal (keeping our kid safe, living to old age).

Things haven't actually gotten worse over the past decades as far as public safety is concerned, so attitudes shouldn't be changing much either; that's maybe a nonconfrontational way to say that new fears do not have a basis in actual danger. Less abstractly, all the times that I've been robbed or beaten up, I was either in a place where that happened pretty often, or someone who knew who I was decided to act. The downside of thinking this way is avoiding any slightly sketchy neighborhood always, which is a shitty way to live. I'm not sure how to reason with fear either, finding shared ground and saying so is a better start than a lecture though.

13: Could get swooped up by a large bird.

I honestly don't know how to discuss this with people who are afraid for their kids. Giving what amounts to a lecture about statistics and fears formed from rare events is asinine, also ineffectual. The best that I can come up with (my wife is also a little panicky) is to say that there's a shared goal (keeping our kid safe, living to old age).

The answer is not "Statistically, you're immune!" The answer is "we're all vulnerable to tragedy and loss in our lives, and it's hella scary to admit that, but there's a cost if we try to control and prevent it through excess vigilance."

The underlying fear is all emotional, and statistics don't address emotions. Furthermore, the emotion is totally valid - horrible things really might happen to your kid. Therefore the answer really has to deal with your vulnerability as a parent - how do you get through life when something awful could happen to your kid? You just do. You can't prevent awful things, and there's a cost of pretending you can.

One other thing I do a lot of (again, realizing my kids are not coming from the same places as most of the other kids here) is talk about how it's a parent's job to keep children safe. So that's why the law says we have to wear seat belts and parents are supposed to enforce that rule in the car. It also lets you explain whatever restrictions you put on where the kids can go to play, that I need you in earshot so if you get hurt I can hear you or I need you to not go past the corner because you're not good enough at crossing the street yet or whatever. I don't know if this is helpful in kids who aren't mentally reminding themselves of the ways their parents couldn't keep them safe before, but the girls find a lot of value in having that context.

I think 3 has it -- that what looks like a high rate of abducted children is, under this definition:

An episode in which a nonfamily perpetrator takes a child by the use of physical force or threat of bodily harm or detains the child for a substantial period of time (at least 1 hour) in an isolated place by the use of physical force or threat of bodily harm without lawful authority or parental permission.

much more likely to be acquaintance bullying/sexual abuse directed at teens. The questioner's pre-teen daughters are probably as safe now as they're going to be for quite a while, and they'll be in more danger once they're no longer prepubescent-looking. And even then, they'll be in much more danger from acquaintances than from the stereotypical stranger in a van.

It's not a safe world out there, but the asker's wife's caution is tactically misdirected.

(I'm driving myself nuts with this right now, because Sally's thirteen looking twenty, and she's very free-range. Trying to talk her through keeping herself safe without hovering or making her the wrong kind of frightened is really maddening.)

Giving what amounts to a lecture about statistics and fears formed from rare events is asinine, also ineffectual.

You have a gift for understatement.

Train your daughters to recognize risky situations . . . check in with their spidy sense about situations

I'm firmly in this camp and would add that they should be encouraged to trust their spidey sense about situations that are uncomfortable even if not risky. I was far too worried about being nice and not making other people (men, mostly) uncomfortable.

My parents wouldn't have thought so -- as far as they knew, they had raised me to be independent and confident, but I wish they had explicitly told me it was ok to tell someone to piss off even if they weren't doing anything "wrong."

It's interesting that the only places where this paranoia does not obtain are very sparsely populated rural areas or here in the inner-city, arguably both spots where there's a higher potential for stranger violence against children. Kids here are fighting back though: A couple of weeks ago some pre-teens threw a molotov at a bicyclist just a few blox from my house.

parent's job

I say this a lot also. It's my job to explain and enforce a bunch of rules-- effective with kids, not with adults.

per 16, emotions don't respond to reason. Explaining my own emotional outlook, not that different from 16.last, gains zero traction with any of the deeply stubborn people I might be discussing this topic with. Bringing up my point of view is basically never helpful, my thoughts are not soothing, not reassuring, and people want at least a nudge of reassurance when they are afraid. Like the Carters, basic emotional outlook between a pair of people often has only a narrow overlap. Also possible is that I'm an intractable jerk, but I do not know how to distinguish between these possibilities.

Was the bicyclist doing anything to them or were they just assholes? Kids throwing stuff an people on bikes seems to be a growing crime around here.

20: That is absolutely right - the date-rape or close to it stories I know largely have a component of the victim's politeness or unwillingness to make a fuss (in the limited sense of firmly extricating themselves from the situation) at an early stage where nothing unmistakably aggressive had happened yet. Come to think, I don't know if I've said that exactly to Sally; I should.

You could sit her down and have her watch Heathers for the same effect.

20: That's what we did with both kids, male and female, then we turned them loose. They've made it into their forties with no abductions so far.

I think 16 is totally right, and to 22, we talk about Mom Jobs pretty much constantly.

I'm sure everyone has read this, but Elizabeth Smart's comments on the hazards of "purity" concepts for children who are later or have already been sexually abused seem to have had an impact on parents who wouldn't otherwise be open to them just because of the source. I know it hit home for me because even at 17 I was afraid to tell my parents I'd been raped because I was afraid of what their response would be to knowing I'd had sex, even non-consensually. I've often wondered whether my mom ever felt guilty she hadn't let me finish the hepatitis vaccine sequence the year before because she thought it encouraged promiscuity.

Giving what amounts to a lecture about statistics and fears formed from rare events is asinine, also ineffectual

I don't know that it is asinine: it is natural to wildly overestimate the odds of dramatic things happening, and to reason against this isn't inappropriate. I usually limit my lecturing to "You take a risk getting up in the morning, crossing the street, or sticking your face in a fan...", but people are scared of dumb things and they deserve to hear about how dumb they are.

but people are scared of dumb things and they deserve to hear about how dumb they are.

That's really not a thing you can do very often in a setting like a marriage.

I don't like people getting the Hepatitis A vaccine because it discourages them from washing their hands after using the bathroom.

but people are scared of dumb things and they deserve to hear about how dumb they are.

People are usually not responsive to a subtext that their fears and emotions are stupid.

I thought Sifu explained to us in the other thread that people who object to being called dumb are dumb.

Something I've said to calm down fears (actually, I just said literally this to Newt, who was freaked out over the Cleveland abductions) is to run through a list of the horrible stories: Elizabeth Smart, the Cleveland thing, so on and so forth. And then point out that they were all national news, the population of the US is over 300M, and there are literally dozens of cases this scary over the past couple of decades, which is way way less than shark attacks.

When you put it like that even to adults (bringing up Ethan Patz is good, because most people remember the case, and then you can say that "You remember it because it's on a very short list of horrors, but it's from the late seventies. There haven't been enough similar cases to replace it in your memory.), I think it's pretty effective in calming fears about the literal stereotypical kidnappings.

And then you can go into how all the sorts of not-going-to-the-store-alone paranoia is only effective against stereotypical kidnappings -- it doesn't do a thing to keep the kids safer from family friends and acquaintances.

If you are making a list of people you want to call dumb, you should also make a list of people who could kill you in your sleep without any special planning. Then cross-reference the lists.

(This is still telling people they're wrong, which has a risk of making them feel as if you're telling them they're dumb. But I don't think there's any way to correct misconceptions at all without skirting around that problem.)

It's interesting that the only places where this paranoia does not obtain are very sparsely populated rural areas or here in the inner-city, arguably both spots where there's a higher potential for stranger violence against children.

This is not entirely my experience of the inner city, though I haven't actually lived there myself. Our visit with Nia's grandmother this weekend was at a park party in memory of a teen who was shot in the neighborhood a year before and parents were talking about how they wouldn't let their kids go into the park alone even for this event and certainly not on a normal Saturday. Mara's relatives are leaving the hidden-away housing project where they've been living family by family as they can find better options because they're not comfortable with the risks to their children, and twice I've been there when there was paranoia over a child who couldn't be located in a way you'd never see in our neighborhood. The kids we mentored couldn't play outside because of their downstairs neighbors' unruly pitbulls and couldn't go out on the sidewalk because there were prostitutes there. I've seen a lot of paranoia in the parents I've talked to, but also at some point they realize that keeping six kids in a one-bedroom apartment at all times is not feasible either, or whatever. They work within the options they have, but I don't think they like it or do it without worrying.

Now, I know I've also said that in the projects the girls come from, kids play outside with less direct supervision than suburban kids these days, but everyone knows everyone and there's always some mom with her eye on the playground, someone else sitting on a stoop, not neccesarily directly intervening but someone around if any problems arise. In our neighborhood, I don't see a clear economic gap in who is actively involved in playing with their little kids at the park, and both wealthy and poor

... parents tend to play with little little ones and sit back and watch older ones, with the exception to some degree that men seem more likely to play actively than women.

May I also rant a bit about parents refusing to let their kids play in the yards or homes of other kids when they don't know the parents? My son wanted to throw a baseball in the back yard with another kid on his baseball team, and I ended up talking with ALL FOUR of his parents and step-parents before he could come over (partly a logistical problem of joint custody, but still).

According to a pamphlet I read, you're supposed to ask the parents if they have guns in the house before you let your kid come over to play. That way, if there are no guns in the house, you can lend them one.

23: It was more of a random kids-being-stupid type of deal. Some class and racial markers though, in that the bicyclist was a white guy on the 29th St. greenway, which runs through a lot of poor, minority neighborhoods and carries a lot of middle-class white people. I don't know what the race(s) of the kids were, but there are very, very few white kids in this neighborhood. This led to a huge kerfuffle (before it was clear that it had been little kids doing the molotov-throwing) where all the white middle-class bicyclists were calling for vigilante justice and stuff. Pretty ugly all around.

Natilo, dude. Racial and class politics to one side for a moment (and obviously you can't blame little kids for anything in the same way you would older kids or adults), don't you think that throwing a Molotov cocktail at a bicyclist justifies a seriously intense reaction if anything does? I mean, I don't know what you're talking about as "Pretty ugly", but I'd think a whole lot of anger and fear was appropriate.

36: Well, certainly it depends on the specific neighborhood and city. But I see little kids out and about by themselves -- going to the corner store, riding bikes, etc. -- every time I go outside in the summer. I don't know how big they have to be before their parents would be happy with them going to the really big park that you have to cross a major commercial thoroughfare to get to, but when we lived across from a small park, which sits in the shadow of some housing projects which have a bad reputation, at least amongst lots of white people, there were little kids playing there unsupervised pretty constantly.

41: Unless they made really shitty Molotov cocktails, that's assault with a deadly weapon

41: I was pretty amazed at it myself. It's not the kind of thing we see a lot of around here. But we're talking about white, middle-class adults from wealthy neighborhoods far away from where I live seriously suggesting getting posses of white bicyclists together to hunt down people in my neighborhood who might be attacking bikers. I'm not unsympathetic to people having a very emotional response, especially given what bicyclists have to put up with from drivers, but given that people in my neighborhood are by and large happy to have our streets and paths used as a throughput for people who are scared to walk the streets here (even in broad daylight), there was a very creepy air about the whole thing.

According to a pamphlet I read, you're supposed to ask the parents if they have guns in the house before you let your kid come over to play.

This seemed theoretical before I lived in Texas.

(Pools are statisically a bigger problem, apparently, but my nieces & nephew know how to swim while they don't know how to outrun a bullet.)

42: I'm not disagreeing there are big class differences in how it plays out. I suspect mixed-class cities like ours see more freedom for children at all income levels than the MC-and-up more rural suburbs where a lot of my classmates live, but a lot also has to do with street layout and so on and not just parental attitudes. Here, it's still the norm for kids running in mixed-age packs to be allowed to do some things that individual kids wouldn't be. I wonder if isolation is playing into some of what's going on with the Carter girls in the OP.

Again, I can't speak to exactly what was said that you're reacting to. But still, for me to think of a reaction to having Molotov cocktails thrown at someone in a similar situation to the speaker as creepy, it'd have to be pretty over-the-top sadistic or misdirected. "Let's get a bunch of cyclists together and find the bomb throwers and get them arrested!" possibly silly and misguided, but not creepy. "Let's find the bombthrowers and flay them slowly!" creepy. "Let's scare all those damn kids who hang around near the bikepath to keep bombthrowers away" creepy.

If the reaction didn't fall into one of my two latter categories, though, I think you're being overly hard on the reactors.

Natillo's right that it's a complete over-reaction. Imagine if it was the other way round: if a white, middle-class guy on a bike threw a molotov cocktail at some kids in that area, I'm sure everyone who lived there would be just "eh, these things happen".

I'm still not sure how I'll deal with this issue. I think kids should have more freedom, that it's good for them, that the dangers are overestimated. At the same time I am viscerally protective and would probably behead anyone who came near my child without the best intentions.

And I loved this:

given that people in my neighborhood are by and large happy to have our streets and paths used as a throughput

It's like "hey, they're being incredibly generous by allowing people from somewhere else to cycle down the street. It's only fair that they get to throw the occasional molotov cocktail at them."

I myself clear the bikepath ahead of my commute by chucking grenades at anyone who looks as though they might get in my way. The bandolier is a little heavy starting out, but by the time I'm through Washington Heights, it's not a burden at all.

Wait. Are cyclists flammable?

I see this as a two part problem. Part 1 is that people overestimate the risk of bad things happening to kids. Part 2 is that people consistently undervalue daily lived experience. They don't mind if their kids are denied some fun in the cause of safety, because they don't value daily enjoyment very much.

I imagine LB as Fred Savage in The Boy Who Could Fly.

The one link I know about is buried in several weeks of FB posts from a very active FB friend. But it was basically "All bicyclists should arm themselves. Then we should go into the neighborhood and track people down." It was not something along the lines of "Make sure to call the police" or "take precautions for your safety" it was very much "[Natilo's neighborhood] has declared war on bicyclists, we need to fight back!" People of color in my neighborhood were *very* clear on the fact that it was all white people, none of whom live around here, who were saying this stuff.

Imagine if some black kids biking in a rich white neighborhood had been attacked by some old white guy with a baseball bat, and the response of responsible members of the black community had been "Let's get guns and go into that neighborhood and mess up that guy and anyone who gives us any shit." That wouldn't be something you would learn about in an Unfogged comment, it would have been all over the news for a week. If you yourself lived in the affected neighborhood, you'd be pretty freaked out.

yes, imagine a race war, wouldn't that get your blood pumping? the whole thing sounds rather trumped up and artificial, natilo.

55: there's a slight difference between "the response of responsible members of the black community" and "a facebook post from one dude".

47: But LB, we established in the Sixties that any violence against anyone by the oppressed is justified, any reaction by an oppressor is ... um ... reactionary oppression.

I'm imagining her as the biker from Raising Arizona.

I think the emerging consensus in this thread is that Carter should provide his daughters with Molotov cocktails when they leave the house.

53.Part 2 is a great point.

Well, the issue is 'responsible members of the [relevant] community'. Something like that said by someone who was in a social position to plausibly orchestrate it happening? Scary. Something like that said by some random jerk? Kind of an asshole thing to say, depending on wording, but in the absence of any actual organizing effort, not enough that I'd call it an ugly reaction from anyone but that guy.

I'm imagining her as the biker from Raising Arizona.

Yeah, me too. Pedalling slowly and menacingly down the road, shotgun over her back, the smouldering remains of unlucky rabbits littering the road behind her.

50: Remember how Castock was walking through a white area a few months ago, and a passing police patrol very helpfully stopped to make sure he wasn't lost and that he knew exactly where he was going? Did you think that was some bizarre, isolated incident? That's the kind of shit that happens to kids from my neighborhood all the time when they leave the boundaries of where they're allowed to go.

Also, I don't know what local politics are like where you're from, but everywhere I've ever lived, rich white people take MAJOR exception to anything that will increase traffic in their neighborhoods. People in my neighborhood are very much live-and-let-live about that kind of thing.

57: Quit typing faster than I do.

61: It really is -- I consciously try to choose a little more, reasonable, risk for my kids in the interests of their having an interesting, enjoyable life.

57: Sorry to be unclear: The FB post from my friend, a Vietnamese immigrant who grew up a block from my house, was a screen cap of a bunch of people on a local bicyclists forum who were advocating vigilante measures.

rich white people take MAJOR exception to anything that will increase traffic in their neighborhoods. People in my neighborhood are very much live-and-let-live about that kind of thing.

Well, so you say, but remember that the people who are supposedly very live-and-let-live are the ones who are throwing molotov cocktails at passing cyclists.

So there's just the one link? I know a lot of Minneapolis bicyclists and their reaction was basically, "that's scary, it was probably a bunch of teenagers being dumb." I'm sure the Minneapolis bike community has some dumb teenagers of its own but I've heard nothing about retaliation from any of its adults.

53 is indeed wise. Megan!

The point is: White middle-class folx can threaten anyone in the ghetto with anything, and there are no repercussions and it is completely ignored by the media. Turn the tables, and people would be flipping the fuck out.

67.2: Again, it was found to be a couple of pre-teens. The reaction was all from responsible adults.

68: Yeah, as I'm saying, if the roles were reversed, you'd have seen that link a million times on Fox news. As it was, the vigilante stuff got hushed up quickly.

People saying ugly things is ugly. And the whole vengeance fantasy thing is especially ugly.

Oh, man, I never thought about how convenient it will be to be a multiracial family in the case of apocalyptic race war. Marauders from outside the neighborhood shouldn't know our family makeup and we can just put whatever person needs to be seen in the front window at the appropriate time.

Also, if it had been some white guy in a white neighborhood, it would have been cast as "there's this one crazy dude attacking bicyclists", vs. the reaction here which was "OMG they're all trying to kill us!"

70: steady on. No one has threatened anyone with anything. And when was the last time that Fox News made a big story out of some nobody - someone with no political connections - saying something silly on an internet forum?

I think I'm always the one to bring this up but, other considerations aside, you are doing your kids some harm if your care for them is palpably fear-driven. It seems to me (oh, no reason!) fear will turn into one of their unshakable motivators and their lives will be diminished by it.

73: Huh, funny what jokes I get squeamish about. I was about to say something about 'race traitors', and then couldn't actually type it. (Have I ever mentioned randomly pulling a copy of The Turner Diaries off the shelf at the U of C library -- I used to take out novels I'd never heard of from the 20th century fiction shelves, on the grounds that someone must have acquired them for some reason. Really disturbing to run into that shit unexpectedly.)

70, 75: Well, this isn't actually an argument we can have, because no one except Natilio knows what the precise content of the offensive reaction was. There are possible reactions that would actually be disturbingly over-the-top, and maybe the bicyclists' forum he's talking about fell into that category.

Here are some of the comments:

"I'm buying a sniper rifle like NOW"

"I'm sure the police would look the other way if they found them U-locked to a sign post with a few bruises"

"We should really try to plan a mass patrol of the neighborhood if we can"

"Can I borrow Ben's AR?"
"He'll be using it, I assume, but we have enough firepower to go around"

77: I almost didn't post mine because it seemed to be asking for that sort of response, but oh well!

76 is very wise. I try to parent to help the girls learn to trust themselves (and that we'll do the parent jobs and keep them safe) as a way to get past their (often understandable, reality-based) fears and putting it in those terms helps me.

76: This is something that turns into a marital issue for me. I really don't want the kids to be disproportionately afraid, and my husband is much more toward the Roslyn Carter end of the spectrum. While on nine issues out of ten, I'm very conscious of working to present a unified front and not undercutting each other, when I think he's being overcautious I do communicate to the kids that "Your father gets overexcited about these things, it's really nothing to worry about."

I feel bad about appearing to belittle him, but I can't figure out how to avoid it without letting him make the kids scared of things they shouldn't be afraid of.

People are usually not responsive to a subtext that their fears and emotions are stupid.

Me and a bunch of airplanes endorse this statement, going so far as to use folksy tonic pronouns.

79: You win, I give. Those are, in fact, a creepy response even to the Molotov cocktail tossing. I didn't understand that people were making direct threats of poorly targeted violence. Still a bunch of assholes on a website rather than anything where I'd worry about it leading to action, but creepy.

I mean, okay, you can say it's just people "saying something silly on an internet forum," but very sober, responsible, serious people were not sure that this was in jest or just blowhards being blowhards. This is what happens in a pro-torture society -- you can't really tell what's over-the-top anymore.

when I think he's being overcautious I do communicate to the kids that "Your father gets overexcited about these things, it's really nothing to worry about."

I would be perfectly happy for Jammies to communicate this to the kids about cars and heights. "We're indulging your mother, here. No need to get her pulse up." In fact, I try to say things like this when I know I'm being irrational - "just humor me, I'd feel better if you stepped back from that ledge."

"We're indulging your mother, here. No need to get her pulse up."

That was basically my dad's view when I asked why I couldn't just pee in the yard.

But cars are genuinely dangerous. That's where the real risk lies.

Most 'pro-torture' being about vengeance fantasy anyway.

Anyway, I kinda derailed myself there. The only reason I brought that all up was that crazy random shit happens. Sometimes it's something like this, which is racially/class marked, sometimes it's more gender-based, sometimes it's just whatever craziness. People I know were pretty freaked out by the molotov thing too, of course, especially because if you live here, you don't necessarily get the idea that there's much random violence going down. Some, sure, but this can be a very bucolic, peaceful area a lot of the time. I walked by the spot where the molotov had landed later that day, and you couldn't even see any burn marks or whatever from the bridge above. Scary for the guy it happened to, for sure, but in the grand scheme of things, pretty small potatoes.

I'm not really sure how I would deal with this all if I had a kid. Frankly, I'd be much more scared of all those CPS-took-my-kid scenarios than white slavers or whatever.

And of course, crime is at a historic low compared to any of our lifetimes. If we're talking about the kind of risk/violence that goes into the criminal justice system, kids now are much safer than any of us were growing up.

But cars are genuinely dangerous. That's where the real risk lies.

The problem is that I have a panic reaction about things like cars and pools. That's why I keep identifying with Rosalynn and saying that you have to address the underlying fear and go on living your life, instead of turning to statistical arguments.

Frankly, I'd be much more scared of all those CPS-took-my-kid scenarios

Word. This is one that I worry about a lot, though I don't think I've let the kids know that it's what's driving some of what I do.

I did have to have a conversation with Nia about how the reason she has to let me do her hair and not pull it out of styles herself because she loves to play with hair during school is that there are people who will think I can't take care of her properly because I'm white and she's black if they see her hair not done right. She was appalled but got it, and still pulls out and twists her hair at the temples, probably without even thinking about it, but no longer undoes and plays with the hair where her bangs would be.

Frankly the vigilante posse of white middle aged UMC bike commuters doesn't sound like a very scary vigilante posse. "We'll get those kids with our weak spandex-clad bodies and Whole Foods reusable shopping bags full of Kombucha!" If your tough neighborhood can't handle those guys, you don't live in a very tough neighborhood.

39, 45: I'll be asking here. I'm starting to believe that "responsible gun owner" is like "no true Scotsman"; whenever something bad happens, it's because someone wasn't responsible.

91: Are your kids in swimming lessons? They're a little young yet to think of it as functional drownproofing, but if you get them to a point where you know they can swim/tread indefinitely in water over their heads, then that's one less thing to be afraid of, and it's a fear you can avoid by increasing their capabilities rather than restricting them.

(We did a lot of swimming lessons because Sally's half seal, and you couldn't keep her out of the water. But Newt's never loved it the same way, and I'm still very glad that he's a solidly adequate swimmer. Drowning really is a sensible thing to be afraid of.)

Yeah swimming lessons are great for removing that particular fear.

Re worrying...I had a hilarious discussion with my Mom on mother's day. She was asking me about l'il Delightful, and we had the following discussion:

PGD: M. [my partner] thinks he might be autistic

Mom: What?! He's the furthest thing from autistic, he's incredibly interactive!

PGD: Well, she understands that, but she still worries he's autistic.

Mom: Oh, she *worries*! Well, OK. I'm still worried that you might be autistic. Evidence doesn't really matter.

PGD: What?

Mom: Whatever a mother thinks the worst thing in the world is, she'll worry that will happen to her child. It comes from inside you. I still worry about you every day. You just have to get used to it.

Yes, gendered I know, but it was mother's day...

Swimming lessons are great for removing that particular fear if the child is willing to learn to swim. Otherwise, not so much.

They are, and I did overstate my panic reaction to pools. They've fallen in them before, fully clothed, and someone has hopped in and plopped them back out, no harm no foul. I do find it tiring to watch them around pools, though.

My in-laws live on a lake, and from the dock you could fall into 10-15 feet of murky water, and that makes me much more nervous - but with the "life jackets must be worn on the dock!" rule I'm not actually particularly nervous. You still have to watch pretty vigilantly, though, because they do topple in and need to be fished out.

94: If you wanna talk REALLY creepy, the sentiment one occasionally hears expressed* along the lines of "that could never happen with my kids, because they know I would beat the crap out of them if they touched my guns without permission" is simultaneously (a) seriously fucked up on its own merits and (b) not even close to an effective prophylaxis against accidental shooting deaths.

*In contexts where there are lots of gun owners of a conservative mindset

This is something that turns into a marital issue for me. I really don't want the kids to be disproportionately afraid, and my husband is much more toward the Roslyn Carter end of the spectrum.

Of the two of us, the Missus is the one who is more risk-tolerant. This isn't a source of conflict, though, because I know that I'm too paranoid.

My nephews have been surfing their whole lives and it is just amazing to watch them duck under waves and be comfortable in the ocean. I didn't notice on my own, but my sister pointed out that they never turn their backs on the ocean (as they were taught). It is scary to see them out there, but they are visibly capable.

(We absolutely hate the 'family swept out to sea' stories, of which we had a few in a row this winter. She hammers on them, "Do NOT go in after the dog. The dog will make it out." Which was true in most of the stories (the other stories didn't have a dog). Much of the family died and the dog swam out down-current. Do NOT go in after the dog.)

have to address the underlying fear

Excellent, now reading the newspaper or crossing the street will smoothly segue into cognitive-behavioral therapy aimed at altering a lifetime of personality formation.

Additional interpersonal honesty and openness is not always an improvement.

Why "never turn your back on the ocean"?

Never turn your back on the Mineshaft.

When I was in high school, a bunch of us were wading in a river and decided to cross to the other side. The river got too deep to stand and those of us in front switched to swim/tread conversation that allowed us to keep talking among ourselves. A girl behind us couldn't swim (which we didn't know) and was assuming that we would be able to walk the whole way across the river. It was only briefly unpleasant for her.

That wasn't my best grammar ever.

Or don't address the underlying fear, whatever you want. But you won't get anyone to change their mind if their fear isn't acknowledged.

Well, they're in the breakers and a larger wave could come over them unaware if their backs were turned. If you're in the ocean, face the ocean (is what I understand to be good surfing practice).

You won't get anyone to change their mind, period.
The whole idea that communication can alter behavior is pretty weakly supported as far as I can see.

That makes sense. I was trying to think of how it would keep you from getting slowly swept out, and couldn't figure it out.

111: That's Gulf of Mexico thinking.

110: Well, if you're stuck co-parenting with someone, you might as well communicate effectively.

106.last: I'm assuming the outcome wasn't as bad as this makes it sound.

111: It's all I've ever known. Well, that and the Atlantic. I do know about rip tides. Don't fight them.

Oh, yeah. I can't see how facing the ocean would help in a riptide or anything. I presume my sister and their babydaddy are teaching them different ways to handle that. Mostly, let the dog swim out on its own.

The whole idea that communication can alter behavior is pretty weakly supported as far as I can see.

I hadn't thought of it this way before, but I see that you're right. I'm going to stop trying to convince people to change their behavior.

It was only briefly unpleasant for her.
Because drowning only takes 20-60 seconds?

Hey there! It so happens that I am a white bicyclist who regularly rides the bike path where the molotov cocktail thing happened. I believe I've met the guy it was tossed at. I probably live pretty close to the kids who tossed it, for that matter.

Here is my thinking:

1. It was pretty scary to contemplate. The thing was thrown off of a bridge over the (below grade) greenway where rocks and miscellany have been thrown at cyclists before. It's still a bit scary to contemplate, because I find myself thinking of other kids who might decide it was a neat idea. I have actually slightly changed my bike habits (I used to go under that bridge every day) to take the exit from the path before the one I used to take.

2. There's racial tension in this neighborhood which comes out in some unpleasant ways. The structural/high-powered kind - people calling the cops on kids, cops just generally harassing kids, just weird white people anxious behavior in stores and on the street - tends to seem less grave to white people (duh) and the occasional violence that happens stands out in sharp relief. Three years ago, for instance, there was something going on with some young guys where it was the fashion to try to push bicyclists off their bikes and into traffic. It almost happened to me - I saw the kids coming at me and sort of steered with the push and thus did not fall or get pushed into the path of a car, but it was definitely intentional and I felt that it was about the fact that I was a white person on a bike. That sucked! It was really scary, mostly because I figured that the young guys just weren't thinking - they wanted to look tough and scare me, they had justified dislike of middle class-ish white folks but they could easily have killed me, which was probably not their intent. My point is, to those of us who are not on the receiving end of structural violence (school to prison pipeline, police harassment, work discrimination, pervasive sense that Society and the Law think you're inferior and suspect) tend to over-emphasize the immediate, scary things that may happen to us. Like, yes, what happened to me was scary and bad and those guys should not have done it, but it was not worse than growing up a marginalized young black kid getting harassed by the cops and abused by the school system. I was not some kind of Unique! victim.

3. There's a lot of unconsciously racist fantasy/anxiety by white people about being the victim of violence. I recognize this in myself, sadly. I recognize that I sometimes experience really stupid, racist fear - the usual kind, groups of young poor children of color aren't just, like, hanging out being kids but are actively Up To Something, probably something that involves Killing Whitey for pin money. This, even though I know young kids in the neighborhood, even though I know that this is dumb, racist fear.

4. Because people have these dumb, racist fears waiting in the wings, as it were, when something does happen no one says to themselves "yes, this was a freak instance of young kids doing something dumb without really understanding how badly they could have hurt someone, as kids occasionally do". Everyone leaped to "This is an assault on cyclists! An assault on white cyclists! Because we get blamed for being white in a racist society! We always knew it would come to this!" Instead of saying "hey, this was a weird but obviously rare situation, scary but luckily no one was hurt, I bet those little kids got really freaked out when they saw it explode like that", everyone cut to "we must protect ourselves!!!!"

I think the issue is that [mostly white, almost exclusively middle class] cyclists did not think about the situation something between regular people who have complex regular-person ways of being, but treated it as an interaction between Real People Who Have Values and Scary Inner City Beings Who Have No Comprehensible Interiority.

The question isn't "if you're oppressed enough by structural violence, does that entitle you to toss molotov cocktails at random passers-by?" It's much more "how can white/relatively privileged cyclists in South Minneapolis stop thinking about non-cyclist people of color as if they were mysterious dangerous Others?"

114: I hadn't noticed it could be read that way. Oops. She screamed "help" and somebody grabbed her and helped her across. Then she yelled at us for a few minutes.

All the books on Kauai were full of warnings about how you *don't even need to be in the ocean* for a big wave to knock you over pull you out to see and kill you. So even when you're on the beach you need to watch the ocean! But I think Kauai is an extreme in that direction. (Also extreme in the free-range tiny children canooing into the open ocean direction.)

The problem is that I have a panic reaction about things like cars and pools.

You must be very nervous indeed in a carpool.

||
Only in Minnesota would the owner of a business called "Prem/er Latin0 Events" be named "Jim Carlson."
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94: You can ask, or you might just see the guns on display on the wall, but if you don't let your kids play at homes where guns are present then you won't let them play at more than half of the homes. At least that's my experience, and that's in suburban/exurban New Jersey. I assume the display pieces are not loaded, and the hunting stuff is properly locked.

They don't even have a dog.

124: I assume the display pieces are not loaded

That's kinda breaking gun safety rule #1, isn't it?

I was a little freaked out the time I was helping my dad move one of his work buddies', and the guy grabbed this big clutch of long guns -- at least 10, maybe 15 -- which he had been transporting loose in a blanket. Yeah, the risk of one being accidentally left loaded, and having it discharge accidentally, is probably pretty small, but it still didn't seem very responsible.

123: Sayeth Bill Richardson to the bishop.

You always assume the gun is loaded unless the guy holding it seems too drunk to load a gun.

You're out of bullets.

124: That's true. But it's a lot of trust to put in the impulsiveness of small boys who are likely to think guns are cool, etc. I'm fine with secured guns in a gun safe but if someone is of the sort that has the loaded guns in every room because Obama might get them, their kids can play over here instead.

126: I'm trying to imagine myself bringing my son to a playdate, saying hello to the parents, and taking their gun off of the wall wall to check whether it's loaded. Aside from my not knowing how to check whether a gun's loaded, what could possibly go wrong?

Actually, all of the display pieces I've seen have been very high up on a wall, very difficult for anyone to access.

I hate it when other kids' parents try to surreptitiously audit the safety of our home, and I love it when my son can go somewhere where a different adult is responsible for an afternoon, so I'd rather trust than verify.

And I have a pool myself, which is objectively more dangerous than a gun. The pool is always covered, and the key to the cover is always inaccessible, except on those occasions when someone forgets.

128: Nyet. It's not unloaded until you've checked it yourself. I enforced that rule on each kid even if they'd just seen me and the other kid check one.

Only in Minnesota would the owner of a business called "Prem/er Latin0 Events" be named "Jim Carlson."

Only in Austin would a Latino Music Festival feature an uncannily mimetic Smiths' tribute band.

I see this as a two part problem. Part 1 is that people overestimate the risk of bad things happening to kids. Part 2 is that people consistently undervalue daily lived experience. They don't mind if their kids are denied some fun in the cause of safety, because they don't value daily enjoyment very much.

I've thought about this, since I noticed introspectively when I thought about my kid doing things in the future my cost/benefit was completely different than when I thought about how I did them myself at the same age. Basically I valued his fun at zero but my own fun quite highly. I don't think this is some mysterious thing. I will not personally experience the fun he may someday have from, say, taking drugs, having unsafe sex, or traveling alone to an exotic slightly risky location. But I will experience all the negative fallout if things go wrong.

119: I guess my thinking is that part of not treating people as the mysterious dangerous other involves reacting to bad behavior from them as you would react to bad behavior from someone you thought of as an equal. The incident where you got shoved by a kid -- you're probably right that the kid didn't actually mean you any harm, and just wasn't thinking. But that's still really importantly bad behavior, because he could have killed you without meaning to, and someone should have chewed him out in a way he never forgot for it: you, if you were in a position where you felt safe to do so, but anyone else in a position of authority over him as well.

Same with the Molotov cocktail kids: it's not clear from the news coverage how young they were, but figure if they were clearly not prosecutable they were no older than ten or eleven, but if they were capable of putting together a Molotov cocktail they were probably at least seven or so. In a perfect world, where there weren't any class/race issues in play, while a kid that age obviously doesn't belong in the criminal justice system, even at seven they should have been punished at the maximum developmentally appropriate level: while a seven-year-old might not viscerally understand that dropping a glass container full of burning fuel on someone from a bridge is an evil thing to do, they're ready to learn it.

In both cases, respectfully dealing with the people committing violence as regular, complex, individuals seems to me to require understanding their actions as seriously wrong things to do.

" I recognize this in myself, sadly. I recognize that I sometimes experience really stupid, racist fear - the usual kind, groups of young poor children of color aren't just, like, hanging out being kids but are actively Up To Something, probably something that involves Killing Whitey for pin money. This, even though I know young kids in the neighborhood, even though I know that this is dumb, racist fear."

That isn't a stupid fear. It technically may be racist, but some kids tried to push you into traffic.

"You got your racism in my legitimate fear."

"You got your legitimate fear in my racism."

Well, the fear is dumb and racist if it's not well targeted -- that is, if your heuristic for 'people to be afraid of' turns into 'all non-white teenagers' rather than 'bunches of teenagers standing at the edge of the bikelane and watching me and snickering at each other as I approach.' The fact that something real did happen doesn't mean that any fear based on it is justified.

When we were in CA last summer, we spent an afternoon at the beach in Santa Monica. Colder water than I expected, and plenty big waves. While the kids took a break from the water, I went out a little beyond chest deep to frolic. I'm not a great swimmer or anything, but I'm capable, and there were people all about. A couple waves gave me a good tumble, but I was fine. Anyway, I got back to shore to find Iris in tears - she was terrified on my behalf, but of course there was no way to communicate this to me. AB was telling her there was no need to worry, which of course made Iris yell, "I'm not dumb!"

That last part didn't happen.

129: One plus two plus ONE plus one...

But I will experience all the negative fallout if things go wrong.

No you won't. You might get some attenuated hassle and also feel bad. But the fun-haver will get the first-order bad outcomes, if there are any. You aren't having the fun or the potential STDs, bad drug experiences, misery of a yucky overnight without shelter in a foreign country.

139: I remember being terrified when my parents went to Italy. I was maybe six or seven and could not stop looking at the globe to see if their plane was going to take them through the Bermuda Triangle.

That isn't a stupid fear. It technically may be racist, but some kids tried to push you into traffic.

Yeah, but as LB says, it would only make sense to worry about kids who looked plausibly likely to push me into traffic, not just random groups of kids. (I do emphasize that this isn't some kind of anxiety that I have all the time around all groups of young people of color in my neighborhood - it's just a flash of stupid, racist socialization that I experience from time to time, but that doesn't make it okay.)

The issue with punishing kids appropriately for trying to push people into traffic or whatever is simply that there isn't a legitimate social body to do this. (Often, of course, a kid's parent/guardian will totally be the legitimate social body if they find out that their kid is experimentally dropping incendiaries on cyclists...but not always! Sometimes parents/guardians are messed up or absent; sometimes they are rightly skeptical about complaints about their kid from richer/more powerful/white folks.) I mean really, what moral authority do the courts or the cops have in this instance? These are the same courts and cops that I know only too well are racist - often gleefully racist! - unjust, class-biased, ignorant, violent. Who are the cops to punish a kid for violence? The cops commit violence, and many kids are well aware of this because their friends, neighbors, parents and siblings are the victims of it.

All that the cops/court system teaches kids is that you can be violent, unfair, ignorant and racist if you have enough power and money to get away with it, but if you're weak, then you'll get punished....or just harassed even if you didn't do anything. "Take care not to be weak" is the moral of that story, not "act with kindness and justice toward your fellow humans".

See, I'd be totally into having some social body that had some moral standing and could yell at those kids (either group of kids) and set up whatever kind of socially appropriate consequences there might be. But there is no such animal, and I don't think pretending that the cops and the courts are capable of that stuff in their current incarnation does anything but reinscribe racism.

"You got your racism in my legitimate fear."

"You got your legitimate fear in my racism."

I have linked to this before, but I found (the somewhat poorly named book) Negrophobia to be genuinely interesting on that precise topic.

You won't get anyone to change their mind, period.

The whole idea that communication can alter behavior is pretty weakly supported as far as I can see.

I actually disagree with this pretty strongly. It's almost certainly true that a single statement/discussion is unlikely to create much change and nobody's NRA-sourced infographic will make me a 2nd Amendment absolutist. BUT. I've changed my behavior many times in my life, and it's often been driven by communication. For all the bad BOGF did, she more or less single-handedly turned me from being quite conservative* to quite liberal, and a lot of it hinged on a single conversation about abortion. Conversations here have certainly made me a better feminist (laydeez). Hell, I never wore a bike helmet until a female friend chided me for not doing so in a way that seemed concerned, not judgmental.

I also think that, since we all tend to have multiple strands of thought about any given aspect of life, a well-timed bit of advice can go a long way in strengthening one of those strands. In the present conversation, that means something like, Rosalyn would like to surf, but fears waves sweeping her away; Megan tells her that, as long as she never turns her back on the ocean, she'll be OK, and Ros is able to deal with her fear enough to surf some.

On the same note, BOGF obviously didn't turn my worldview 180° in one evening; she helped me see that conservatism didn't match up with my pragmatic worldview as I thought it had. And maybe Megan's formulation about daily pleasure is an ideal one to help Rosalyn recalibrate her fears.

*this was back in the 80s, when you could be a conservative without believing a lot of patently stupid and/or reprehensible things

See, I'd be totally into having some social body that had some moral standing and could yell at those kids (either group of kids) and set up whatever kind of socially appropriate consequences there might be.

This is where we get into the difference between squishy liberals and radical/anarchists. I don't disagree with the broad strokes of what you're saying, but my head goes straight to "Fix the police/courts so they have the standing to maintain order" rather than "Give up on the conventional justice system and try to figure out some alternative."

Megan tells her that, as long as she never turns her back on the ocean, she'll be OK

I generally add some sort of hedging.

What kind of hedging grows successfully in sand and salt water? That doesn't sound practical at all.

We agree. Shrubbery is great.

Megan tells her that, as long as she never turns her back on the ocean, she'll be OK

I think this is the clip I'm looking for (I'm at work, I don't have video).

That's twice today, basically.

151 to 148, 149.

The facing the water thing is a bigger deal for waders or small kids walking along the shore. Surfers face the ocean naturally because they are waiting for the waves.

Ocean Beach San Francisco is super dangerous for swimmers. Considering how few people actually go swimming, it kills a lot of people.

I have a Minn friend who's had good experiences working with offender reconciliation circles through some of the tribes she's affiliated with and works with. There are a lot of inner-city programs trying to get elders and pastors involved with young people whose caretakers might not be doing the job. I mentally cracked up to hear Nia's grandma getting after grown men about pulling up their pants, but that's her issue and she got zero traction with them but a bit with kids young enough to know they should listen to their elders.

143: One thing I've witnessed is that it seems that a lot of lower class parents (white & black, can't speak to other groups) are first and foremost concerned with not being "judged", and anyone - of any SES - telling them their kids have done something wrong will get a cold reception. Now a lot of that is human nature, and you certainly see it in all SES, but IME American Middle Class Values say that, if someone tells you your kid did something dangerous/stupid/illegal, that someone gets politely thanked, and the kid gets what for. Overzealous someones might get yelled at (e.g., making a big deal about a kid doing something only mildly out of bounds), but if it's presented as, "Ma'am, I found your son keying cars along the street," the kid's in trouble. Whereas, again, I've seen firsthand a tendency to blindly defend the kid and get mad at the other adult, even when the other adult is of the same SES and community.

I don't even think it's dependent on the pathologies you mention; lower class whites don't have it great, but nor do they have the judiciary system stacked against them. Presumably it's in part to do with not having the social capital (or whatever) to withstand the shame, and so the messenger gets the blame.

I should add that I get the sense that rich folks don't care to hear about their kids' wrongdoings either, but I honestly have no firsthand experience of that.

145. Right, I'm trying both to play for laughs there and simultaneously to say that "fix the feelings" is a suggestion embedded in a pretty optimistic view of human interaction.

Probably everyone can find an influential conversation or series of interactions after which they feel changed. Missing are the conversations that were heartfelt or on-target from the other side but which gained no traction. Most people also think of themsleves as compassionate and fair, for instance. I write all of this as someone who is not that self-aware and is pretty slow to change my mind, YMMV.

155: Yes, and I also think (and this is part of what Natilo is saying) that addressing it directly with the kid at least from within the same or similar SES is much more socially acceptable. I had almost no qualms about telling a little boy that there was no punching in the bouncy house this weekend at the party with Nia's grandma, but if we'd been at an all-white UMC park that might not have gone over as well.

138: Personally I thought that living in a black neighborhood for a few years was really nice on that front. You can't use race as a heuristic in any significant way, because everyone's black.

154.last: AB's mom has serious old lady cred with the knuckleheads who used to come by the drug dealer's house and honk and/or sit with stereo blasting. Sometimes she'd offer to ring the doorbell for them, sometimes she'd just give 'em hell.

Have I mentioned that they moved away? Crazy screaming blind guy is still there, and we're kind of dreading open window season, but we know that it's been worse.

Maybe he's teaching himself to echo-locate.

This is where we get into the difference between squishy liberals and radical/anarchists. I don't disagree with the broad strokes of what you're saying, but my head goes straight to "Fix the police/courts so they have the standing to maintain order" rather than "Give up on the conventional justice system and try to figure out some alternative."

Yeah, I tend to believe that while there are some really great lawyers (and of course I'm especially thinking of the 'foggers who have provided advice or money so kindly for RNC8 legal defense and other stuff) and while certainly if you need to deal with the court system now in the real world you should give it all you've got even if the court system is corrupt, ultimately a system which gives some people violent power over others and then dresses that up in morality just isn't going to work very well, ever. Would I call the cops? Under certain extreme circumstances, sure. Would I like to have some form of "cops" who were reliable and just, some group that I could trust to help me when I needed it? Sure, I'd love that. I just don't think that it is possible in the society we have.

Now a lot of that is human nature, and you certainly see it in all SES, but IME American Middle Class Values say that, if someone tells you your kid did something dangerous/stupid/illegal, that someone gets politely thanked, and the kid gets what for. Overzealous someones might get yelled at (e.g., making a big deal about a kid doing something only mildly out of bounds), but if it's presented as, "Ma'am, I found your son keying cars along the street," the kid's in trouble.

Huh. This would be my values -- that is, any reasonably phrased complaint would get a polite response, and then if it sounded like my kid had actually behaved badly I'd chew them out, if I thought the grownup was unreasonable I'd give the kid a talking to about trying not to attract attention from touchy people. But I wouldn't think of them as Middle Class Values enough to expect someone else to react to a complaint from me like that: regardless of class, I'd be pleasantly surprised by a polite response to a complaint about someone else's kids, and unsurprised by hostility.

(Come to think, I just chewed out a French tourist kid (ten-ish?) walking on the bike path with his family: he was horsing around with his sister, and flung himself in front of me in a way that made me lock up my brakes to not hit him. I got off my bike and gave him a very intense "Kid, you can't do that. I managed not to hit you because I'm slow, but you do that in front of someone going fast, they're going to wreck and both of you could get very badly hurt." His father was, in fact, very politely apologetic, and I managed to convey that I wasn't angry, just frightened for his son's safety.)

156: Oh sure, assholes try to tell me what to think all the time. Screw those jerks.

157: No doubt. Our kids are more or less the only white UMC ones in our neighborhood park*, and it's always a bit ginger to handle misbehavior by another kid that risks someone getting hurt or is otherwise something that an adult should deal with. I don't think we've ever had other parents take issue, but (getting way back to the OP) the other kids are often unsupervised.

On which topic, AB & I fit the Jimmy/Rosalyn mold, but AB's not so squeamish. I keep pushing for more freedom for Iris (now 9), AB is hesitant. Iris is also hesitant, so it's a different dynamic. One boundary I've been expanding is her freedom when we're shopping in the Strip*. She's gone most Saturdays of her life - probably 300+ times - and so she knows it well, and I'll send her to get something from a store if I'm stuck in line at another store (or whatever). Pretty awesome (and ever so slightly anxious-making).

*overall it's a fairly diverse group, but among, say, 3-12 y.o.s, they stand out

*sidewalk vendors & ethnic markets, more or less the best thing about Pittsburgh

It's nice enough, but just too far from anywhere.

But I wouldn't think of them as Middle Class Values enough to expect someone else to react to a complaint from me like that: regardless of class, I'd be pleasantly surprised by a polite response to a complaint about someone else's kids, and unsurprised by hostility.

But isn't this the whole basis of "Everybody looked out for each other's kid" nostalgia? That this used to be (more or less) universal? In fact, I think it's associated most with working class neighborhoods (back when moms were mostly home). But my point is that it's definitely not (generally) operative in the lower class communities I've lived in/spent time in, but I get the sense that my SES peers do still think of it as the norm, or at least how things should be.

"UMC" may have been too narrow, I don't know. And since I don't live in a MC neighborhood (U or otherwise), I don't know how operative it is in such places anymore. My good friends who live in such a neighborhood, I get the sense would expect it, but we've never discussed it in those terms.

164: That's what I thought until I moved to Bloomfield (and now East Liberty). You have to drive (or lug 30# of groceries on the bus), which is a drag, but in terms of travel time, it's a scant 10 minutes away from me, so not a big deal.

I'm really getting into the Pittsburgh hyper-local attitude. Moving around is just a pain.

Except for exercise. I've been eating better and not drinking as much. I'm at an awkward stage where I either need to gain back five pounds or lose five pounds or buy a belt where the holes run on the half inch instead of the inch.

A cobbler could punch an extra hole in your belt for you. Or you could do it yourself with a hammer and nail. Or you could pretend there was a snake on the other side of the belt and shoot a hole through it.

You've dismissed the obvious solution of mutilating your current belt by driving an intermediate hole in it with some inappropriate implement.

I'll show you shrubbery, LB.

Wouldn't that look odd, with one hole added between two other holes? Maybe I'll just try to eat more fiber. The small hole does fit in the morning.

If you read the thread backwards, it sounds like moby is talking about a vagina. Now let me keep reading to find out otherwise.

171 doesn't help.

174 to 173

I think that was her intended point.

IME American Middle Class Values say that, if someone tells you your kid did something dangerous/stupid/illegal, that someone gets politely thanked, and the kid gets what for

I would have said chilly adumbrations of lawsuits were now the norm, but I might be hanging out with people with too much money. Grad student parents are mostly exhaustedly grateful that someone noticed Amy on the ledge.

Back to the molotov cocktail -- have we done the black schoolgirl and the Drano explosion? Big difference, in my mind, between explosions that might hurt the maker, and explosions aimed at other people.

I often think that either I'm too hypersensitive about offending people, or T. isn't sensitive enough about it.

Two examples. First, she jokes about it when she sees teens or men wearing their pants really noticeably low, à la 154. Saying she wants to pull them down or something. I think that kind of thing looks stupid myself, but white people making fun of people for dressing in a style relatively popular in black culture seems like it could piss people off. Second, using "ghetto" to describe it when people on the street are acting crude, like by littering or drinking out of a flask on the corner. Again, not terrible by itself, but could easily be misinterpreted.

Then again, maybe I just worry over nothing. I tend to both avoid confrontation and be nonjudgmental, so put them together and there's lots of things she'd say that I wouldn't.

Thanks, Mineshaft. I haven't been able to completely read through the thread because things have been really busy today at work (battling the Guinea worm and building houses for Habitat for Humanity). I was planning on directing Rosalynn's attention to this thread, but it turns out she is furious at me today for completely unrelated reasons, so I don't want to provoke her any further. Maybe later this week.

If I were going to boil down the bits of the thread responsive to the post to one takeaway point, it's that even though non-family abduction is commoner than you'd thought, the kinds of precautions you're in conflict over (i.e., not sending the kids to the store alone) aren't really protective against that sort of thing generally. They're really only applicable to fullscale stereotypical kidnapping by a stranger, and that's just as vanishingly rare as you thought it was.

If she wants to be careful, she should be thoughtfully watchful around trusted adults like teachers and coaches, and when they're older around their peers. But no one's going to snatch your kids off the street.

179/180: In addition to emphasizing that the risk of strangers doing something really isn't that high, I'd also emphasize that excessive caution has disadvantages too. Heebie's 16 put it well, among others.

And foregone fun, and training your kids to be fearful.

Not training your kids to be fearful could be foregone fun for you, depending on how you interpret that.

177.2: I think I put it up in the bad teachers thread (speaking of which, whoa, long comment about Polish racist) but it didn't get a lot of uptake. Any news?

With a small toddler I don't feel like I've made any particularly conscious decisions about being under- or overcautious: I just start from a position of reasonable hovering and make little recalculations hour by hour. I am a brazen and reckless person in general, so I'm more worried about not teaching her my bad habits than about swarthy lurking threats. (It took me a minute or so to realize that we shouldn't really go rock climbing together in the Sierras, even if she and I both independently feel sure of foot. Fun while it momentarily lasted, though!) I suspect my default will be allowing a huge amount of autonomy, but that's easier to do when you know your area well and have a good sense of the risks, and a good network of informants. So far so good on that stuff.

I've mentioned that my mom was a CPS worker for most of her career, and we grew up with a very elevated risk of threats to children from bad people (including familiar people), but were also allowed to do things like going ice skating in a local park at night without supervision. So once, when I was putting on my boots at the snowy park after taking my skates off, a strange guy wandered up to me and said something menacing and incomprehensible. I'm sure he was just being a harmless jerk, but I flipped my shit and ran all the way back from the park in my socks, thereby frostbiting my feet badly enough to put myself on crutches. I have resolved to make sure little kayaki knows that it's okay to take a minute to put your boots on, at least once you make it across the street.

Sorry, should be "we grew up with a very elevated perception of risks/threats to children from bad people" -- or something. Should be rewritten. I think a vengeful ex-client did once threaten my mom while she was pregnant, but actual risks from anything but the internal hair trigger I describe above were minimal.

If you don't have at least one good food, crutches don't help much.

178.2: "Ghetto" from well-off white people is common but strongly deprecated. (Black people of many SES have moved on to "ratchet" anyway as far as I can tell, so she's not even being hip!) Similarly, a lot of people think that the visible-underwear look is pretty stupid, but most of us not enough to keep commenting on it once the point has been made. Nia's grandma was shouting "I see drawers!" every time someone passed to try to go for some public shaming, but there actually weren't many instances and so maybe that look is fading too.

I would probably say something in those contexts you mention if I heard it more than once, but I'd guess someone saying those things is not likely to care that they're potentially offensive.

Not good typing. My boss came in and I was able to close this after hitting Post and before he saw the screen. I opened my email and at the top was "Jobs you may be interested in." Thanks LinkedIn. Next time I'm just searching pr0n.

184.1: Well, my corner of G+ has more scientists posting tales of youthful explosions than people Missing the Point by saying it wasn't science if not done under complete supervision. Also she has a (summer science camp?) scholarship. But I don't know if the charges have been dropped.

If you're rich enough, you can not only avoid exposing your kid to risk, but you CAN hire disabled people to be fake family members so you can move straight to the head of the line at Disneyworld.

I guess that wasn't really on topic, but still: How awesome is it to hire someone with a disability to pretend to be in your family so your little kid can get onto Mr. Toad's Wild Ride without waiting?

Or to hire someone with a disability to terrorize your kids so that you can say "AND THAT'S WHY YOU ALWAYS LEAVE A NOTE!"

Black people of many SES have moved on to "ratchet" anyway . . .

Huh, that clears up a minor mystery for me. I had been been confused by a comment about Houston Rocket Chandler Parsons that he is, "A self-described 6-foot-10 forward 'with a ratchet' (i.e., 3-point jumper)"

Based on the parenthetic I had been thinking that maybe when players hold up three fingers to celebrate a 3-pointer, that it looks like teeth on a gear, and from that people had gotten to calling the shot a ratchet (insert mental noise of gears going "tick tick tick" in a vaguely steampunk way). But now I think the person writing the story was confused and Parson was probably using "ratchet" in the way you describe.

Also she has a (summer science camp?) scholarship.

Good deal, although I hope she isn't getting the message that college-level original research is the only path to redemption for her. Plenty of mediocre chem-major I-bankers blew stuff up in high school too.

I would say that I can't remember the last time a news story made me so angry, but boy is that ever not true these days.

190/191: This might actually be a positive development. It has long been possible for rich people to buy their way out of waiting in the lines by booking a Disney VIP package. But even if you are rich enough that the cost doesn't deter you, you still have to endure the hate-filled stares of the common people you are escorted past. Adding a handicapped person to the relieves you of the moral opprobrium. If that's the motivation, I think we can call it progress.

Also, since I am professionally acquainted with people abusing the handicapped service to evade airport lines, I am not in the least surprised.

Why can't a perfectly healthy person fake needing a wheelchair, like my friend did when we were in high school? Kids these days.

Wouldn't muscle tone give away the game? Even if they don't feel you up, they should be able to guess.

Sigh. I miss the days when I still managed to comment in real time. Anyway. I find that free-range kids issues get an extra dimension of self-doubt when you are divorced. Like, if I let her ride her bike to the store, will I be accused of neglect? (The answer, of course, is "you'll be accused of sucking no matter what you do! So who cares?")

Sigh. I miss the days when I still managed to comment in real time. Anyway. I find that free-range kids issues get an extra dimension of self-doubt when you are divorced. Like, if I let her ride her bike to the store, will I be accused of neglect? (The answer, of course, is "you'll be accused of sucking no matter what you do! So who cares?")

Sigh. I miss the days when I still managed to comment in real time. Anyway. I find that free-range kids issues get an extra dimension of self-doubt when you are divorced. Like, if I let her ride her bike to the store, will I be accused of neglect? (The answer, of course, is "you'll be accused of sucking no matter what you do! So who cares?")

Sigh. I miss the days when I still managed to comment in real time. Anyway. I find that free-range kids issues get an extra dimension of self-doubt when you are divorced. Like, if I let her ride her bike to the store, will I be accused of neglect? (The answer, of course, is "you'll be accused of sucking no matter what you do! So who cares?")

Sigh. I miss the days when I still managed to comment in real time. Anyway. I find that free-range kids issues get an extra dimension of self-doubt when you are divorced. Like, if I let her ride her bike to the store, will I be accused of neglect? (The answer, of course, is "you'll be accused of sucking no matter what you do! So who cares?")

Sigh. I miss the days when I still managed to comment in real time. Anyway. I find that free-range kids issues get an extra dimension of self-doubt when you are divorced. Like, if I let her ride her bike to the store, will I be accused of neglect? (The answer, of course, is "you'll be accused of sucking no matter what you do! So who cares?")

Sigh. I miss the days when I still managed to comment in real time. Anyway. I find that free-range kids issues get an extra dimension of self-doubt when you are divorced. Like, if I let her ride her bike to the store, will I be accused of neglect? (The answer, of course, is "you'll be accused of sucking no matter what you do! So who cares?")

Sigh. I miss the days when I still managed to comment in real time. Anyway. I find that free-range kids issues get an extra dimension of self-doubt when you are divorced. Like, if I let her ride her bike to the store, will I be accused of neglect? (The answer, of course, is "you'll be accused of sucking no matter what you do! So who cares?")

Sigh. I miss the days when I still managed to comment in real time. Anyway. I find that free-range kids issues get an extra dimension of self-doubt when you are divorced. Like, if I let her ride her bike to the store, will I be accused of neglect? (The answer, of course, is "you'll be accused of sucking no matter what you do! So who cares?")

Sigh. I miss the days when I still managed to comment in real time. Anyway. I find that free-range kids issues get an extra dimension of self-doubt when you are divorced. Like, if I let her ride her bike to the store, will I be accused of neglect? (The answer, of course, is "you'll be accused of sucking no matter what you do! So who cares?")

Sigh. I miss the days when I still managed to comment in real time. Anyway. I find that free-range kids issues get an extra dimension of self-doubt when you are divorced. Like, if I let her ride her bike to the store, will I be accused of neglect? (The answer, of course, is "you'll be accused of sucking no matter what you do! So who cares?")

Sigh. I miss the days when I still managed to comment in real time. Anyway. I find that free-range kids issues get an extra dimension of self-doubt when you are divorced. Like, if I let her ride her bike to the store, will I be accused of neglect? (The answer, of course, is "you'll be accused of sucking no matter what you do! So who cares?")

Sigh. I miss the days when I still managed to comment in real time. Anyway. I find that free-range kids issues get an extra dimension of self-doubt when you are divorced. Like, if I let her ride her bike to the store, will I be accused of neglect? (The answer, of course, is "you'll be accused of sucking no matter what you do! So who cares?")

Sigh. I miss the days when I still managed to comment in real time. Anyway. I find that free-range kids issues get an extra dimension of self-doubt when you are divorced. Like, if I let her ride her bike to the store, will I be accused of neglect? (The answer, of course, is "you'll be accused of sucking no matter what you do! So who cares?")

Sigh. I miss the days when I still managed to comment in real time. Anyway. I find that free-range kids issues get an extra dimension of self-doubt when you are divorced. Like, if I let her ride her bike to the store, will I be accused of neglect? (The answer, of course, is "you'll be accused of sucking no matter what you do! So who cares?")

Sigh. I miss the days when I still managed to comment in real time. Anyway. I find that free-range kids issues get an extra dimension of self-doubt when you are divorced. Like, if I let her ride her bike to the store, will I be accused of neglect? (The answer, of course, is "you'll be accused of sucking no matter what you do! So who cares?")

Sigh. I miss the days when I still managed to comment in real time. Anyway. I find that free-range kids issues get an extra dimension of self-doubt when you are divorced. Like, if I let her ride her bike to the store, will I be accused of neglect? (The answer, of course, is "you'll be accused of sucking no matter what you do! So who cares?")

That is a record, I think.

That is a record, I think.

So do we.

Hoo boy. Um, I blame the new phone/service provider? Going back to lurkyy non-commenting. [Sad Face]

Only a divorced person could have created not only the double post, but the dodecapost. Divorcee solidarity fist bump. Also I agree with the substantive point, kid raising looks different once there's even a semi-reasonable possibility of a judge evaluating your decisions.

215, 216: In solidarity.

This is a new Unfogged record, isn't it?

Di, stick around. That was funny and I don't think it was your doing. After I snarked and clicked Post, I got an interesting error message (but my post did go through).

For the powers that be:

Rebuild failed: Renaming tempfile '/var/www/unfogged/html/archives/comments_12966.html.new' failed: Renaming '/var/www/unfogged/html/archives/comments_12966.html.new' to '/var/www/unfogged/html/archives/comments_12966.html' failed: No such file or directory

219: Must be hard to have children with a judge.

Also, don't go back to lurking DK.

223: My ultimate fantasy would be to become a judge and make some nice boy a miserable coparent...

I'm pretty sure the record-setting serial post was my fault since, when nothing seemed to be happening, I kept impatiently hitting post...

Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

Very dark day when this was closed in Florida's Magic Kingdom.

83

79: You win, I give. Those are, in fact, a creepy response even to the Molotov cocktail tossing. I didn't understand that people were making direct threats of poorly targeted violence. Still a bunch of assholes on a website rather than anything where I'd worry about it leading to action, but creepy.

I was reminded of the Central Park Jogger case. It is possible to overreact to even a serious crime.

14

Things haven't actually gotten worse over the past decades as far as public safety is concerned, so attitudes shouldn't be changing much either; that's maybe a nonconfrontational way to say that new fears do not have a basis in actual danger. ...

The fact that we have a different attitude towards the same facts as people several decades ago does not mean we are wrong and they were right.

226 -- still rolling proud and wild at the original and best.

I'm pretty sure the record-setting serial post was my fault since, when nothing seemed to be happening, I kept impatiently hitting post...

I maintain that nothing happening is all the server's fault. (I have it in for servers today. I had to do some User Acceptance Testing. I found myself wondering whether the QA people had even looked at parts of this iteration, let alone tested them.)

kid raising looks different once there's even a semi-reasonable possibility of a judge evaluating your decisions.

It really does. It sucks to know that you might be second guessed by a guardian ad litem, judge, opposing lawyer, and/or the other spouse.

With some frequency, a judge gets pissed about something that neither parent cared about and neither lawyer thought mattered.

Speaking of divorced parents, I had another day off mostly due to my ex not caring her share. ug.

Solidarity, divorced people! Dealing with judges is not fun. I am waiting to hear whether I'll be held in contempt of court or sime shit for texting Nia's mom a happy mother's day message. I waited until well past bedtime to make it clear it wasn't from Nia, who's not allowed contact while her mom is non-compliant with the caseplan even though there is no anymore since the reunification/criminal portion of the case is done and they're just working to terminate parental rights. Grr.

I've always figured that if I had kids I would let them wander around as they liked while I followed at a discreet distance, festooned with weapons and first-aid supplies.

233: That worked for me and the ex. Now the kids walk around festooned with weapons and first-aid supplies.

Doom taught me that weapons and instantly-acting first-aid supplies were everywhere on the ground, bastard liars.

To be fair, Doom also taught me that shooting into barrels is often useful and that's been helpful.

I just let my overprotective mother out to play by giving one of Sally's rugby coaches friendly shit about stuff that happened at practice last week. Nothing against him, or any of the coaches, who all seem like darling young people, but she's spending a lot of time with them all and I like them being clear that she tells us everything.

197: Some people in wheelchairs have fine muscle tone. I work with a guy who uses a wheelchair because of his neuropathy, but can stand just fine for short intervals. (A lot of people do double takes when they first see him standing in front of his wheelchair at the urinal.) He swims for exercise, so his body is probably not all that different from the body of anyone else with a sedentary lifestyle.

190/191. As a person who needs a wheelchair to get through airports, I find myself in a dilemma over this. I'm totally sympathetic to the people hiring themselves out, as they're probably grossly underpaid even if they're lucky enough to have a job and have thought of a creative way to make the rent. On the other hand, the people who hire them are completely despicable and should have their heads nailed to a coffee table.

I slightly know a guy who uses a wheelchair, who is a former Paralympic athlete. His upper body muscle tone is awesome, but his legs give it away, always assuming you have the time or inclination to stare at his legs.

Black people of many SES have moved on to "ratchet" anyway as far as I can tell,

That's interesting, because something that's gone completely wrong has been described as "going to rat shit" for some time now.

OT: I have been informed that the library has a book I ordered ready for pick-up. I have not ordered a book. From the Amazon description of the book:

With his rugged good looks, vast wealth and family name, hell-raiser Hutch Carmody is still the golden boy of Parable, Montana. But he's done some growing up--making peace with his illegitimate half brother and inheriting half of Whisper Creek Ranch, which should have been all his. These days, Hutch knows there are some things money can't buy: like the heart of loving, ladylike divorcée Kendra Shepherd.

Maybe '1234' isn't a good PIN even for a library card.

Somebody put holds on four books using my account. Or the librarian screwed up entering the other persons number.

242: Unfortunately, the second option sounds more likely. Which is disappointing, because I was starting to imagine a really bizarre crime. One of those Florida Man things. Maybe the first slip-up by someone starting to take over your whole identity, not just using your name for credit card fraud but getting into all your personal accounts, and for some reason this is the first one you noticed. Or maybe something less individually harmful but part of a broader trend, the tip of the iceberg of an epidemic of library card fraud.

The librarian I talked to didn't seem to give much of a fuck and just cancelled the holds. Somebody is going to be without their old-people pr0n and not know why.

hell-raiser Hutch Carmody is still the golden boy of Parable, Montana

As there is a bar called Carmody's in the Pittsburgh suburbs, this undoubtedly is a thinly-disguised roman à clef with "Parable, Montana" standing in for "Franklin Park, PA."

244: Or they'll come looking for you to extract vengeance.

Coming this fall... To a theater near you... The Late Fee.

"What is best in life?"

"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, retrieve and re-shelve their books punctually, and use their interlibrary call slips to warm your bed."
--Conan the Librarian