“I stopped to ask him if he was okay and he needed help, and he lied, and said that his mother works here at the post office,” the caller said. “And then he just took off away from me.”
Which is exactly that id want my kids to do, if some random person pulled up next to them in a vehicle. When in doubt get the fuck out of there
Yeah. Literally a smart kid. Quick thinking.
Sounds like he was taught about stranger danger. Good parenting.
America: “We will arrest you if you let a child out unsupervised”
Also America “kids sit in front of the screen at home all day.”
Also also America " if somebody accidentally runs over your child with a car they will get a 6 month license suspension"
Also also also America “We think crime is way up even though its at record lows and a leading cause of death here is automobile accidents”
Arrest the passerby for wasting police time and resources
Then whip him on the public square.
Two things. One : that is ridiculous overreach.
Two : we shouldn’t accept a society so dangerous our kids can’t explore and have fun…
It’s not dangerous, as long as you manage to evade the police.
Your second point is really difficult for me as a parent with a new kid. Feels like we “know” so much more about serial killers / bad things that happen to kids that we’re terrified of letting them do anything.
Of course in this case it would have been trivially solved by the city just adding sidewalks, but that feels like another point here.
heard someone say “these kids will never have a summer like ‘85” and that frustrates me. I remember as a kid exploring the whole town with my friends. Predators or dangerous people was not so common. We should work towards getting that high trust society back. The type where we can leave our doors unlocked at night…
Probably unrealistic in cities!
@zululove @bignate31 Not at all. Kids in cities typically have a lot more freedom than kids in suburbs and crime rates are far lower now than they were in the 80s. The only differences are the car-dominance of the urban form and the climate of fear which is constantly stoked by politicians, tv, and social media.
That’s good parenting, most definitely a good instinct to have.
Makes me angry that removing the ability for self-sufficiency – even just walking alone for errands – only furthers dystopia.
Why most American GenXers thump their chests about being turn-key kids… yet they should be opposing such overreach.
Instead of building sidewalks, they arrest working moms, amazing.
They do. This story is just because backward ass red state. In my neighborhood there are kids playing around all the time.
Holy smokes, that was 10 years ago. I need to look up the outcome of that case. Absolutely ridiculous. No one under 18 unsupervised? We have lost our goddamn minds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meitiv_incidents
Tldr: Officials clarified that it’s fine and they shouldn’t have been bothered beyond police asking the kids if they were okay in response to a call.
The police and CPS responded because someone called the cops, who are required to respond in some way and then to document the case. The reporting code for “report of unsupervised child” is intended to be “neighbors haven’t seen the parents in several days, but they noticed the kid moving around the house and were concerned”. Sometimes it’s not okay for kids to be alone.
So the police responded because someone called, and then gave them a ride home and filled their report. CPS got the report because the only category it fit in was one they are supposed to investigate. They did their investigation because the law says if you’re under eight you must be supervised by someone at least 13, and because they were in violation they had to do their follow-ups, which are invasive because they’re geared towards actual issues and there’s no way to delicately inspect someone’s home and interview their children.
When it happened again at the park, there was now a report on file for a CPS investigation that was still in progress, so now it’s “parents being investigated for neglect getting another report of the same behavior”, which means that now the presumption is that the parents aren’t capable of following a directive to not do the behavior that started the investigation , so instead of sending them home and then sending an officer to see what’s up they’re going to hold them until they can determine safety. Which they were, but all the people see is “they were instructed and agreed to not leave them unsupervised until we finished and we got a concerned report about them being left unsupervised”.
Eventually officials clarified that CPS was incorrect, and that the laws wording and intent was to prevent young children from being unsupervised in vehicles and structures, not parks, sidewalks or in public. No leaving your 7 year old home alone or in the car.First incident is on the busybody who called the cops and the CPS people who didn’t just leave and drop it when they learned they weren’t left behind at home or in a car, and that the sidewalk and park weren’t like, a highway median and an industrial park.
Second incident is a little more on them. Preposterous or not, they were explicitly and legally informed they needed to not do that until CPS got back to them, and they agreed to do so. It was still more of an ordeal than it should have been, but you should generally not be surprised when they respond poorly to you doing what they just told you not to do.
You can be entirely in the right and end up in more trouble for not following instructions during the process of figuring that out.Thank you sooo much for writing that out and citing the source!
Everything about this is insane. Making it illegal to walk, calling cops on kids, arresting people for any fucking reason. People created a hell hole they have to live in now.
Why is this kid walking, he should have a car. This is the USA, we don’t walk here.
By walking, that kid was stealing money from oil and car corporations
I want to laugh at this but it sounds like something US leadership would say with a completely straight face.
Don’t forget about the tricycle industrial complex.
Only if the kid gets a gun too
This is America after all, they’ve got to open carry and drive everywhere otherwise it’s un-American activity. And we can’t have that.
It’s all nuts, but I’m okay with the idea of, hey, there’s a young kid, can we check on him. Cop rolls up, you okay kid? Yes. Cool, have a day. The idea that this would escalate beyond there is insanity.
Suburban trash culture
This isn’t even suburban; it’s rural small-town bullshit. Atlanta has a lot of sprawl, but nobody’s commuting there from Blue Ridge (yet).
They got some over lap but I do stand corrected
When did country folk become infected by karen police calling lol
Yeah, this sounds a LOT like “cops didn’t have anything better to do and decided to create some excitement for themselves to make them feel like heroes.”
I am currently babysitting a 13 year old boy almost every day. Why? Because CPS says he can’t be alone.
He’s mature. He’s smart. He’s quiet. He is COMPLETELY capable of taking care of himself. His dad works 6 hour shifts at most.
The issue is, his dad went to jail for drugs. He’s been sober, he’s been working, he’s been fighting like hell to provide a decent life for his kids.
He’s not allowed to have his girlfriend around them, so he’s paying for two apartments and they can only spend time together coming up when the boy is in school.
I mean, sure, the dad hasn’t been a saint. But man oh man, they’re doing everything the can to make sure he fails.
He was taking suboxone, got the shot instead, realized he wasn’t experiencing withdrawal and dropped that. Well, now he has to prove that he will have detectable amounts in his system for up to a year, and then they’re going to MAKE him go back on suboxone to keep his son.
It’s madness the hoops some people have to jump through, meanwhile a childhood friend was starved and beaten regularly and they wouldn’t remove him from the home until his parents burned down a neighbor’s house and went to prison for arson.
When we were kids and we’d discuss what we wanted to be when we grew up, his answer was, “my mom’s murderer.”
When she did pass, he cried his eyes out for never reaching out to her and was one of the pallbearers.
I don’t get why things have to be such a mess.
The War on Drugs isn’t about helping people stop using. It’s about feeding the prison industry and all the parasites that bleed parolees dry.
What bullshit. I was told by CPS in Oklahoma after my boys had to move in with me after their mom had a mental health crisis and couldn’t stay with her anymore. The guy had to check out our house make sure it was suitable. He told me that if kid can make food in the microwave that at 10 they can be home alone.
Also, say what you want about Oklahoma, but my kids been walking to the store by themselves since they were 8 and 6. I am sick of the fucking nanny state motherfuckers. Like that mother years ago in Florida her kids playing in THEIR front yard. She goes to jail because she wasn’t watching them. By the way that woman was white so its not all a race thing. This has been a slow build for the fascist police state.
We need to fucking change the fucking laws and make cities and small towns safe for our kids to walk in. Not to mention that kids are safer now then when I was a child. At least my kids have phones. I have Life 360 on all their devices. Hell when I was a kid they had to run ads at 10pm asking “Do you know where your kids are?” Because parents didn’t pay attention to what we were doing. Shit I roam the whole town of Sulphur Springs Texas and not once did anyone stop and ask what we were doing. And trust me their were times that I was up to no good. Plus you were more likely to be snatched up then compared to now.
My kids walk the streets and sometimes might be outside past dark. And we have shit for sidewalks. They don’t even have sidewalks leading to the schools. But every school year tons of little kids are walking to school. It’s up to the drivers to pay attention. Example there is a Daylight Donuts right across the street from the school. Also a red light. You have to be careful because these kids are dumb and will just start crossing the road not looking at all. I at least told my kids. The cemetery is full of people who had the right away.
I am sick of nosey people that won’t let kids be kids. I like to blame boomers but they’re Genxers that have that mentality to.
I’m an older millennial. My gen x mom let me go wherever I wanted. If I wasn’t back when she said to be, she’d come find me and beat my ass.
I fortunately grew up in a neighborhood with sidewalks, but we went well beyond our neighborhood.
Shit, I walked 10 miles to a gas station along the railroad tracks to meet girls and steal beer when I was 12 years old. Eventually one was built right in front of my house and I didn’t have to go that far anymore, thank goodness.
I wouldn’t have learned to navigate people if I hadn’t had such freedom. I can see trouble coming from a mile away. I would imagine inexperience will make for some naive people when it comes to knowing danger.
We would follow railroad tracks for miles, and explore the woods. I didn’t get into alcohol, but I did sneak smokes. I had a habit of breaking into abandoned homes and exploring them. I quit that when we once broke into a home that had looked abandoned but clearly was lived in. Scared me straight for awhile. But we did rob an old warehouse that had left behind nails used for nailguns. We took those and built a tree house using them and wood we found outback. I still remember doing that as I imagined tbat maybe we would discover a warehouse that had every Nintendo game ever made. Of course never found such a place. But did love the hunt.
Man, I got into smoking too. Still have the habit.
We robbed a delivery truck and took several boxes of camel cigarettes. Our little clubhouse was amazing. We built it from old chicken pens and an old chicken coop. The walls were made from an old above ground swimming pool. The backside had a floor, the front was just dirt. We had a couch, a tv, an N64, and an extension cord we ran across the creek and hung from a tree to power it all.
We hid the cigarettes under the floorboards, along with a poorly dried pot plant we stole from the best grower in town (who eventually started putting signs in front of them, “don’t steal this one, don’t steal this one, steal this one”).
My god I’d love to go back for a little while.
I quit smoking almost 10 years ago. My club house was bad ass. We had an elevator and one part had this huge heavy duty fishing neat thar we “found” and made it a four person hammock. We play our own versions on D&D, since some older kids we knew wouldn’t let us play. But one of them was kind enough to teach us just enough so we could create our own. I had lot of fun in the early 90’s. One good thing is there wasn’t all the social media around and camera either. You just lived in the moment. Riding our bikes and just living for the day. I too miss those times. Even my kids didn’t get to experience life the way we did.
Man, the cameras and the constantly being connected to everyone has flipped the world upside down.
I get it. I just put cameras up because a neighbor came over to tell me that some man was peaking into my 16 year old daughter’s window.
I just wish we had done all of this differently.
I don’t know. Just getting old I guess. It’s hard to see this as better.
I’ve always thought about this comment that Kurt Cobain made, he was talking about going into thrift stores and finding little treasures, and after he became wealthy that was over for him. He was bored with getting whatever he wanted.
We now live in a time where even the rarest shit is just a click away. Nothing about the world seems special anymore.
I don’t know. I remember my grandparents talking about this kind of thing. Maybe I’m just getting old. I just wish my kids could have the freedom that I had, completely and totally.
realized he wasn’t experiencing withdrawal and dropped that. Well, now he has to prove that he will have detectable amounts in his system for up to a year, and then they’re going to MAKE him go back on suboxone to keep his son.
If they’re going to do tests, why not just check for the presence of illegal drugs?
Some people do abuse it. I didn’t get how for a long time. I’ve been taking it for a decade or better now and I swear I get nothing from it but avoiding withdrawal.
An old friend shot it up though and died from a heart infection because of it.
We need to allow children to immediately and easily emancipate themselves from their parents and go live in their own apartment w caregivers via assisted living.
Could I get a free apartment as well?
Everyone deserves housing. This is something ants and bees have mastered. I am as good as an ant - ofc I think you can have free housing
?
Do say more please. If nothing else, this is an interesting idea.
Children are legally a type of slave in the US, usually of their parents or guardians but sometimes of their spouse or the state. Of course this isn’t explicitly called slavery like the 13th amendment, but when we look at their rights, we can see it’s indeed how the legal process works for them. Addressing and reversing this would go a long way for abolitionism. Kids are almost never granted more power for themselves or more freedoms. Most “for the children” rhetoric tends to advocate for removing even more of their freedoms and power. It’s really really sad.
You are legally allowed to physically harm your child “within reason” (aka stopping short of whatever the law defines as child abuse in a jurisdiction). You are allowed to starve them a little, “within reason.” You can deny them any privileges you want and lock them in your house - “within reason.”
If the kid calls the police and it’s not obvious child abuse that could result in death, the police inform the kid that parents can do as they please with their children for discipline and they leave the kids with those parents.
You can deny medical care (including abortions and birth control) - “within reason.” You can force them to go to institutions and educational facilities.
Kids work and guess who legally can access their paychecks and all their money? Their parents/owners (see: Honey Boo Boo’s finances, Aaron Carter’s finances with his parents). Parents can and do withhold capital and money from their children to coerce behaviors from them. Kids work and pay income tax, yet cannot vote or run for office.
Parents can allow them to be married in MANY US states. An adult having sexual relations with their spouse who is a minor is EXEMPT from statutory rape laws (and let’s acknowledge the human trafficking element of this). A child in a marriage contract often then belongs to their spouse instead of their parent and must similarly ask their spouse for help and permission. Because marriage contracts are contracts, kids have a hard time divorcing as minors due to this, let alone accessing legal representation itself.
Kids have almost no capital or power by design. Until kids can get rights, this country will be fucked up. We cannot raise humans in a slave environment and then expect them to not have learned helplessness and issues. Kids should be able to emancipate themselves immediately and easily to live in their own apartment with social workers (wearing bodycams, subject to randim audit or audit based on reports) who check on them as appropriate for their age. Parents should have VERY limited rights to their children compared to present day, and CHILDREN instead should be granted rights to their parents which they can waive, or be compensated for if the parent is unable to fulfill their obligations. Obviously child marriage should be illegal.
Children should NOT be their parent’s property. Children should belong to themselves.
This would also help with fostering/“adoption”, which is kinda human trafficking (and I’ve had family be adopted, so I am familiar that the adoptive parents don’t see it like this) and which trades the child around like they have no rights at all and like they are property. If a child had rights to their birth parents (or to emancipate themselves), they can then leave bad adoptive parents.
The entire adoption system is actually wild if you think about it - eg antiabortion clinics convince poor women to adopt out through a sister agency which explicitly is also Christian and adopts these kids into Christian homes (a requirement by the agency). The adoptive parents pay the agency, which takes a cut of that money and then gives a little to the birth mom for medical expenses. It’s just converting children to Christianity (often white Christians taking Native American/Latino indigenous American’s babies) via making everyone poor, not giving the bio parents or child charity directly, and denying medical access unless they sell their kid.
Give children rights.
Also, giving kids the right to vote would be a start in the right direction. No taxation without representation, and we have child actors and performers paying millions in taxes. They deserve representation. Maybe they’d vote to change the laws so their parents (owners) weren’t legally entitled to their money or bodies.
Bonus policy idea regarding education: https://lemmy.world/post/19553029/12277181
Ok, alright. This is one of the most interesting things I’ve ever read in my life.
I don’t know that I agree with you 100%, and even though some of what you said gave me pause, A lot of what you said made me think.
I mean, kids are easily manipulated. The wrong kind of people could take advantage of things, and even if you think you have all of your bases covered, people will surprise you.
I mean, this is definitely worth thinking about. I knew abused kids when I was growing up that had no power. The friend that I mentioned in one of the comments above, he lived In constant hell, had no one seriously advocating for him, and would have been trapped in that situation if his parents hadn’t been put in prison.
I don’t know that I agree that children should be able to vote. When I was a child, if I had been able to vote, I didn’t know a damn thing about politics, and I didn’t fucking care, but my parents sure as shit did. I believed that I was a little warrior for Jesus and I’m an atheist now. I would seriously regret any votes that I would’ve made as a child.
I don’t know, I wish that the person who downvoted you hadn’t downvoted you, I wish they had shared their views on the matter.
This is a very interesting subject
Thank you! I have thought about this topic a lot because of many homeless people, former foster kids, former adopted kids, and former abused kids I have spoken with.
Most kids are fine being around even shitty caregivers. It takes a LOT for a kid to even desire to want to leave, and when we factor in legal consequences for their parents and the legal process, they are not able to leave, and their parents have reasons to block it. If we just had apartments for them that they could go to, no judgement, no hassle, no worries that they will send their mom and dad to jail for 10 years, it would prevent a lot of pain. And ofc they can always deal with the legal stuff later if they want to. Asking an abused kid actively being abused to make these huge legal decisions to escape abuse is too much, they should be able to just leave safely - and return safely per their own judgement.
He’s not allowed to have his girlfriend around them
Wait what? That’s a thing?
When we were kids and we’d discuss what we wanted to be when we grew up, his answer was, “my mom’s murderer.”
😨
I’m 42. I fucking walked for miles all over the place when I was a kid. This being a “problem” is straight up retarded. Shit was actually a lot more dangerous back in the 80s and 90s than it is now. Kids are safer today than 30 years ago.
This being a “problem” is straight up retarded.
It’s the criminalization of any sort of poverty.
The problem is that we’ll spend an extra billion on police to save a grand on social services.
No it’s a nanny state overreacting to a non issue, parents were convinced there is a rapist/pedophile on every corner so they shouldn’t let their kids be kids
Isn’t the highest rate of abuse from family members?
Time to hand over your kids karen… for the greater good.
My mother in law was upset we put our sons crib by the window, you know, because people just walk by windows looking for newborns to snatch.
My wife has had about a dozen stranger danger talks with our oldest so now hes trying to figure out what anyone would want to abduct him for.
Its hard to counter that stuff sometimes for sure.
We literally roamed the neighborhoods in feral packs on bikes
Granted I was 100% almost kidnapped once but still
We raised our kids feral in the late 90s/early 2000s. They’re all resilient, self-supporting adults now. We had neighbors who bitched at us, and were overprotective of their little darlings. Both of their kids are now dealing with opiod addictions.
By the time I was 13 or so my mom didn’t know where I was more than 50% of the time. And I think at 13 my hormones probably made me do dumber shit than when I was 10.
When I was a kid people still described things as removed
/s
Why don’t kids go outside anymore?
I’m in my 40s and now I realize that my Parents would have likely been arrested several times over if I were a kid today. Hell I Imagine most of us would be in the same boat.
I mean on weekends or during the summer I was told to get out of the house, be with friends, have fun and told to be home either for dinner or by the time the street lights came on and if I wasn’t going to be home in time then to find a phone and call my parents and let them know. Hell I could be like miles/Kilometers from home at any given moment. I could be in a friends house and their parents offered me dinner.
I was like any kid, I got up to no good. I stole candy sometimes. I once opened a Captain Planet action figure in a store cause I wanted the power ring that was inside. I got in trouble at school cause one time during recess me and my friends just decided to start cussing at the top of our lungs.
I’d hate to be a kid today. hell, I’d hate to be a parent today.
I mean on weekends or during the summer I was told to get out of the house, be with friends, have fun and told to be home either for dinner or by the time the street lights came on and if I wasn’t going to be home in time then to find a phone and call my parents and let them know. Hell I could be like miles/Kilometers from home at any given moment. I could be in a friends house and their parents offered me dinner.
Sounds like what most kids were doing from 300BC up to 1980AD
Why did you stop at 1980? It wasn’t until cellphones became so common with kids that things changed. Even the in early 2000s pagers were still more common with kids/teenagers in my experience.
I didn’t get my first cell phone until I was in college in like 2002 or 3. Miss that flip phone. In high school no one had a phone and maybe a hand full of kids had pagers.
When I was in primary school in the early 90s we used to get offered a lift by the local milkman who often used to be on the way past when we were walking home.
There’d be at least 4 of us. We’d throw our school bags in to the gap between his insulated box on the tray (full of milk) and the head board of the cab, then jump up and hold on the headboard so our legs would hold the bags in place. Off we’d go down the main road - heads sticking over the cab, wind in our hair - hitting 60kph with nothing between us and falling out but the fact we were holding on to the headboard.
I see front page news blasting parents for their kid sticking their head out a sunroof in a carpark and I’m like… man, our folks would have been arrested back in the day.
I hate today, I hate yesterday, I hate tomorrow.
When I was a kid in the 60s, during the school year, I walked a mile to and from school, starting at age 5.
On weekends or summers, I would eat breakfast, jump on my bike, and not be back until dinner at 5 (The Rule). I had no ID, no money, no phone, no watch, no water, no food, nothing. And my mom had no idea where I was, either.
If I got thirsty, I’d knock on a door, and ask for a glass of water, and always got one. If I needed to know what time it was, I’d ask someone. I got pretty good at judging the time of day by the setting sun, and could always get home before 5. I never felt unsafe, as long as I could avoid the Robolotto brothers.
I never thought rural Georgia would be so car-brained about it but I guess I’m not surprised
Was it a dangerous walk? This, too, was subjective. The prosecutor, Emma Harper, certainly thought so. Later, in a phone call to Patterson’s attorney, David DeLugas, which DeLugas legally recorded and shared with CNN, the prosecutor called it “a busy highway with no sidewalk” and said, “It’s not walkable. It’s not safe … That’s not a thing that you do here. Because you’re gonna get hit by a car.”
Cars are dangerous - I know, let’s arrest people who don’t use them!
This is what suburban carbrain disease does to a mfker.
Having grown up in Eastern Europe, walking to the kindergarten since 4, walking to the primary school since 7, walking / pubtransiting to mid/high school since 11, the North American suburban carbrain disease is just shocking, even after living alongside it for two decades.
America wasn’t like this until 2000s that’s when it started
2001 actually, the ball went downhill some time in September of that year
Ol boy Osama deff achieved his strategic objectives too with hind sight.
I remember when Obama was jerking killing him on tv as some sort of W in early 2010s…
It looks even more pathetic with 2025 context at where the country ended up
That’s if you believe he even existed, they threw like 20 different dudes on screen over the years as Osama
I’ve heard 90s but yeah. Prolly different depending on the local disease level. In Ontario Canada it’s illegal to leave a child alone till the age of 12.
Same. Walked and took buses to school from around 6-7 years of age in the late 90s. My parents were divorced, so I also commuted a lot between their places as a child.
Perfectly normal thing that all the other kids were also doing. I remember one mom being a bit afraid for her daughter, so I was asked to take the bus and walk together with her, but that’s it.
I walked to middle and high school cuz it started too early for my folks. People getting in the car to drive a block will never cease to amaze me
