"It’s crazy to give up the power of the screen entirely, the cost of doing that is crazy stupid high."
I'm not disagreeing with this, but would love to see an elaboration of the point. In what ways does it carry such a high cost? What are the most heavily-weighted factors in this opportunity cost equation?
You have some task to accomplish that your toddler finds extremely interesting and wants to be in the middle of, but letting them do so makes the task impossible. For example, folding clothes.
It’s more interesting than any of their toys or books, but not more interesting than Paw Patrol Christmas.
in the past the solution was to get the kids to play outside; if that has been made no longer an option, indoors distractions become much more valuable
Today I had to take a blood pressure reading and my toddler was climbing all over me so much that I couldn't get an accurate reading. I locked my phone to spotify playing imogen heap and let her scroll through indie pop for a few minutes so I could take the reading. Solved the problem I had at hand (and, I think does make her like the phone a bit more, but still not more than basics like 'going outside!' 'reading!' or going to the playground.
Well the real policy they want is "no sketchy-looking young males" but you can't do that, so realistically the highest possible threshold they can choose is 18 (clearly a 19 year old cannot be banned from target) so my guess is that's where it's coming from.
Thirded. It's one of those statistical correlations we're supposed to not-notice as a polite fiction, but a huge portion of the shoplifting at my store is committed by older kids between 14-19 or so. And we're actually nextdoor to a Target, which seems to have a similar perp profile, although not that exact policy that I'm aware of. Somewhere in the early 20s kids finally start getting their own money in meaningful quantities, and it's just not as cool or impressive to peers to shoplift - particularly with alcohol, which let's be honest is one of the biggest such "thrills". (Plus they can finally be charged as adults, which still doesn't happen often, but it's way more difficult to do anything if it's minors and the parents don't give a shit. Many Such Cases, sadly.)
In my free-range youth many stores banned unaccompanied kids. It was a particular issue for the businesses near the middle school.
But we just went someplace else.
The real policy was "groups of unaccompanied kids" so if I really needed to buy something I walked in with a sense of purpose and bought the thing and no one gave me any problem.
Heh, you reminded me that there actually was - past tense emphasis - a popular independent coffeeshop/cafe in the town I went to middle school in...and it used to get terrorized every lunch period by groups of unaccompanied middle and highschoolers going off campus, because we were free-range enough back then to be allowed that privilege. Eventually got so bad that all students were banned permanently from the premises, school hours or not. Which unfortunately also killed off a lot of the patronage, so the whole place ended up going under, and later reopened as a non-fastfood restaurant. (Non-fastfood because we also raised hell at McDonald's and Burger King. But chains are a bit better positioned to deal with such disruptions.) Still think to this day they had the best hot chocolate I've ever experienced, alas...
On my first day in kindergarten, age 5, 1955, my paternal grandfather took off a few hours of work to walk me to school. He could not read or write his name, in any language, and was so proud that he now had a grandson who was going to school. It was about 1/4 mile to school, in a residential neighborhood in Pgh. I walked home by myself.
I walked to that school for 2 years, by myself, until they replaced the old chool with a new one about 1/2 mile away. I walked there, by myself, until I started Jr. High School, age 12, about 1 mile away. Sometimes I took the bus if it was particularly bad weather, but that cost 0.30, so it was not a regular thing. I walked to that school till I was 18, when I started university, and rode a bicycle to school about 2 miles, each way, up and down the hills, in all sorts of weather.
My grandfather also used to give me a quarter, when I was about 6-8, and asked me to go to the neighborhood bodega/grocery, about 2 blocks away, to buy him some small wizened Italian cigars that he loved, but my grandmother hated. He told me to buy some ice cream with the change from the quarter. I did this, not realizing that he had throat cancer, and I was probably helping it develop by buying him these cigars. Imagine a 7 year old child buying cigars in a grocery store, by themself, these days. Everyone would end up in jail, for all sorts of crimes against humanity.
I think it's just a silly dance number. I don't know what Zvi 's referring to. Unless somehow VCRs put you at risk of your kids being trapped in a mansion with Tim Curry
I think the really valuable investigation to this statement:
---------------------------------
Child Abduction Is Either Custody Disputes Or Government Intervention
What are the odds on child abduction by a stranger who isn’t with the government and isn’t involved in a custody dispute?
There are 72 million kids in America and about 100 non-governmental kidnappings by strangers a year.
----------------------------------
Is: how often does the government wrongfully "kidnap" (or, to use less-inflammatory language: "wrongfully-remove") a child from their parents. Of course, there don't appear to be publicly-available statistics for, "hey, we messed up and wrongfully took a kid away from her parents."
A few minutes of AI research gets me estimates in the 10,000 - 20,000 per year of, "kids who are removed from parents and then returned within 1 month," which is a kept statistic and is a good proxy for, "I guess the parents were okay to keep this kid after all." However, some amount (and I'm willing to believe even a majority) of those cases must be situations where you might sympathize with the government taking action: a single mom with an abusive boyfriend that she promises never to let around the kids, drug-using parents who get the kid back after agreeing to enter treatment, etc.
Even if the vast majority of those 10,000 - 20,000 cases are "legitimate" government interventions, it sure seems likely that the government is more likely to wrongfully take your child away from you than a stranger. It would just be nice to put some more clear evidence on that, and to estimate the order of magnitude.
Re: boredom, I seem to recall that being told, "if you're bored, I have plenty of chores for you to do" was effective at helping me figure out which toys suddenly seemed fun.
I constantly remember Kevin Arnold accidentally saying "I'm bored, there's nothing to do" on The Wonder Years. He instantly recognized what dumb move he had made when his dad said "What?!" There was no need for any explanation to the audience, either.
At summer camp, aged about 10, first task was to assemble the tents we were going to be sleeping in. I will confess that I left most of this to the older kids /the adults running it.
It would be interesting to look at this from a European perspective, where (at least in Germany and Denmark) kids still can walk around unsupervised without CPS getting involved, yet also helicoptering is (somewhat) up, screen usage is up, birth rates are down.
And this is all in an age where actually getting away with child abduction would be much more difficult. You can hide cheap gps trackers on your kid and video surveillance is ubiquitous.
I'm in Japan right now and it's incredible the level of independence and freedom that the children here have. Most of the time they are alone on the streets, even 5-year-olds. They also do many things on their own, like shopping and complex tasks. An incredible example of a high-trust society.
Regarding TV: in the mid-late 90s, I learned to see „having the TV on all the time” as a lower-class-coded signal.
Entering high school, I moved from a working/ middle class suburb to an upper/ middle class suburb and noticed how fewer of my cohorts had cable TV despite higher incomes, and I wasn’t as frequently visiting houses where the tube was always on.
Once the smartphone became a thing, it seemed like the „always on” behavior and the relentless „channel flipping” saturated more segments of society.
The ultra-personalization of the smartphone age have us 24/7 entertainment with "high class" content too, not just the lowest common denominator of cable TV.
I'm childfree myself (chosen because I don't like time sinks or hassles), and am happy about it, personally. I hadn't known about:
" around 35% of American families get investigated by CPS."
but, if I had, that would have been _more_ than enough to motivate the same decision that I made for the other reasons. Having The State second-guess one's child rearing choices with a probability of 0.35 is somewhere between Orwellian and Kafkaesque...
It's something like 50% of black kids and something like 20% of white kids, with hispanic kids somewhere in between, from memory from the last paper I read on the subject
Man, I did every single one of those things by the time I was 12...
I think one related aspect behind this (causative or consequence?) is anti-child attitudes becoming dominant in public places. So like at my grocery store, obviously I sometimes get a bit annoyed at ankle-biters who have no compunctions about dashing in front of me when I'm hauling hundreds of pounds of product or whatever. Or they scream, or they make a mess of displays, or they drop food everywhere (parents, if you're going to feed your kids in a store, please pick up after them). But that's just kids being kids! What saddens me is seeing coworkers get annoyed not just at the acts themselves, but at the very idea of children being present in public at all, without being zombified by a screen or otherwise neutralized. That children are a burden, and at best should be only seen, not heard. That they'd never have kids, just look how annoying and inconvenient they are. (Buddy, why did you sign up for a customer service job in the first place...?) That parents are irresponsible for not intensely monitoring their kids at all times. Or the insidious inverse, that well-trained kids shouldn't *want* to run free. Really makes me wonder what *they* were like as children, you know? Did the adults in their life constantly sneer down at them, too? Were they always perfect little angels? It's just a fundamentally anti-human attitude. You can give all the government financial incentives you want, subsidize daycare, mandate maternity and paternity leave...but if havings kids makes one a pariah in public, that's still a huge barrier.
Also, seeing Abigail Shrier cited positively in this context makes me...sad about strange bedfellows coalitions. I'm not depressed, pretty happy in fact, yet she'd still think I'm quite "sick" by default nonetheless. And I strongly suspect that's her True Objection to "the mental health funnel". Careful what you wish for, Icarus.
Thinking back to 70’s and 80’s TV, the one silver lining was that it was passive, low-quality, limited, and ultimately boring. A kid could only watch so much before needing to move on. Sure, kids spent too much time in front of the boob tube, but a sugar-fed generation ultimately needed to burn those calories.
"It’s crazy to give up the power of the screen entirely, the cost of doing that is crazy stupid high."
I'm not disagreeing with this, but would love to see an elaboration of the point. In what ways does it carry such a high cost? What are the most heavily-weighted factors in this opportunity cost equation?
You have some task to accomplish that your toddler finds extremely interesting and wants to be in the middle of, but letting them do so makes the task impossible. For example, folding clothes.
It’s more interesting than any of their toys or books, but not more interesting than Paw Patrol Christmas.
Skill issue
Somehow people got this stuff done before screens? We don’t give our toddler any screen time btw.
in the past the solution was to get the kids to play outside; if that has been made no longer an option, indoors distractions become much more valuable
Today I had to take a blood pressure reading and my toddler was climbing all over me so much that I couldn't get an accurate reading. I locked my phone to spotify playing imogen heap and let her scroll through indie pop for a few minutes so I could take the reading. Solved the problem I had at hand (and, I think does make her like the phone a bit more, but still not more than basics like 'going outside!' 'reading!' or going to the playground.
Target saying 'no unaccompanied minors' might be because of shoplifting. Still crazy, but not necessarily the same type of broken society.
Yeah, that was my assumption. 18 still seems like an awfully high threshold.
Well the real policy they want is "no sketchy-looking young males" but you can't do that, so realistically the highest possible threshold they can choose is 18 (clearly a 19 year old cannot be banned from target) so my guess is that's where it's coming from.
Thirded. It's one of those statistical correlations we're supposed to not-notice as a polite fiction, but a huge portion of the shoplifting at my store is committed by older kids between 14-19 or so. And we're actually nextdoor to a Target, which seems to have a similar perp profile, although not that exact policy that I'm aware of. Somewhere in the early 20s kids finally start getting their own money in meaningful quantities, and it's just not as cool or impressive to peers to shoplift - particularly with alcohol, which let's be honest is one of the biggest such "thrills". (Plus they can finally be charged as adults, which still doesn't happen often, but it's way more difficult to do anything if it's minors and the parents don't give a shit. Many Such Cases, sadly.)
In my free-range youth many stores banned unaccompanied kids. It was a particular issue for the businesses near the middle school.
But we just went someplace else.
The real policy was "groups of unaccompanied kids" so if I really needed to buy something I walked in with a sense of purpose and bought the thing and no one gave me any problem.
Heh, you reminded me that there actually was - past tense emphasis - a popular independent coffeeshop/cafe in the town I went to middle school in...and it used to get terrorized every lunch period by groups of unaccompanied middle and highschoolers going off campus, because we were free-range enough back then to be allowed that privilege. Eventually got so bad that all students were banned permanently from the premises, school hours or not. Which unfortunately also killed off a lot of the patronage, so the whole place ended up going under, and later reopened as a non-fastfood restaurant. (Non-fastfood because we also raised hell at McDonald's and Burger King. But chains are a bit better positioned to deal with such disruptions.) Still think to this day they had the best hot chocolate I've ever experienced, alas...
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/childhood-and-education-16-letting
On my first day in kindergarten, age 5, 1955, my paternal grandfather took off a few hours of work to walk me to school. He could not read or write his name, in any language, and was so proud that he now had a grandson who was going to school. It was about 1/4 mile to school, in a residential neighborhood in Pgh. I walked home by myself.
I walked to that school for 2 years, by myself, until they replaced the old chool with a new one about 1/2 mile away. I walked there, by myself, until I started Jr. High School, age 12, about 1 mile away. Sometimes I took the bus if it was particularly bad weather, but that cost 0.30, so it was not a regular thing. I walked to that school till I was 18, when I started university, and rode a bicycle to school about 2 miles, each way, up and down the hills, in all sorts of weather.
My grandfather also used to give me a quarter, when I was about 6-8, and asked me to go to the neighborhood bodega/grocery, about 2 blocks away, to buy him some small wizened Italian cigars that he loved, but my grandmother hated. He told me to buy some ice cream with the change from the quarter. I did this, not realizing that he had throat cancer, and I was probably helping it develop by buying him these cigars. Imagine a 7 year old child buying cigars in a grocery store, by themself, these days. Everyone would end up in jail, for all sorts of crimes against humanity.
I do not know what the song "Time Warp" is about. What's it about? (I saw Rocky Horror decades ago).
I think it's just a silly dance number. I don't know what Zvi 's referring to. Unless somehow VCRs put you at risk of your kids being trapped in a mansion with Tim Curry
Maybe the line "But it's the pelvic thrust that really drives you insaaaane" is the issue? Otherwise, I'm stumped too.
Oh I thought the chorus was literally the only words to the song. How come the lyrics section of the Wikipedia article doesn't have the lyrics?
I dunno. I'm sure the full lyrics are out there somewhere.
The lyrics are copyrighted.
I think the really valuable investigation to this statement:
---------------------------------
Child Abduction Is Either Custody Disputes Or Government Intervention
What are the odds on child abduction by a stranger who isn’t with the government and isn’t involved in a custody dispute?
There are 72 million kids in America and about 100 non-governmental kidnappings by strangers a year.
----------------------------------
Is: how often does the government wrongfully "kidnap" (or, to use less-inflammatory language: "wrongfully-remove") a child from their parents. Of course, there don't appear to be publicly-available statistics for, "hey, we messed up and wrongfully took a kid away from her parents."
A few minutes of AI research gets me estimates in the 10,000 - 20,000 per year of, "kids who are removed from parents and then returned within 1 month," which is a kept statistic and is a good proxy for, "I guess the parents were okay to keep this kid after all." However, some amount (and I'm willing to believe even a majority) of those cases must be situations where you might sympathize with the government taking action: a single mom with an abusive boyfriend that she promises never to let around the kids, drug-using parents who get the kid back after agreeing to enter treatment, etc.
Even if the vast majority of those 10,000 - 20,000 cases are "legitimate" government interventions, it sure seems likely that the government is more likely to wrongfully take your child away from you than a stranger. It would just be nice to put some more clear evidence on that, and to estimate the order of magnitude.
Re: boredom, I seem to recall that being told, "if you're bored, I have plenty of chores for you to do" was effective at helping me figure out which toys suddenly seemed fun.
I constantly remember Kevin Arnold accidentally saying "I'm bored, there's nothing to do" on The Wonder Years. He instantly recognized what dumb move he had made when his dad said "What?!" There was no need for any explanation to the audience, either.
It seems I missed out on getting to build a fort/treehouse when I was a kid…
(I did have a wigwam, which maybe counts … it’s a very simple form of tent to assemble)
At summer camp, aged about 10, first task was to assemble the tents we were going to be sleeping in. I will confess that I left most of this to the older kids /the adults running it.
It would be interesting to look at this from a European perspective, where (at least in Germany and Denmark) kids still can walk around unsupervised without CPS getting involved, yet also helicoptering is (somewhat) up, screen usage is up, birth rates are down.
Possible these countries are on the same curve, but further behind?
And this is all in an age where actually getting away with child abduction would be much more difficult. You can hide cheap gps trackers on your kid and video surveillance is ubiquitous.
Track your kids shoes at all times!
I'm in Japan right now and it's incredible the level of independence and freedom that the children here have. Most of the time they are alone on the streets, even 5-year-olds. They also do many things on their own, like shopping and complex tasks. An incredible example of a high-trust society.
Regarding TV: in the mid-late 90s, I learned to see „having the TV on all the time” as a lower-class-coded signal.
Entering high school, I moved from a working/ middle class suburb to an upper/ middle class suburb and noticed how fewer of my cohorts had cable TV despite higher incomes, and I wasn’t as frequently visiting houses where the tube was always on.
Once the smartphone became a thing, it seemed like the „always on” behavior and the relentless „channel flipping” saturated more segments of society.
The ultra-personalization of the smartphone age have us 24/7 entertainment with "high class" content too, not just the lowest common denominator of cable TV.
Didn't have kids and sometimes feel bad about that, but reading these posts makes me feel less bad about it.
I'm childfree myself (chosen because I don't like time sinks or hassles), and am happy about it, personally. I hadn't known about:
" around 35% of American families get investigated by CPS."
but, if I had, that would have been _more_ than enough to motivate the same decision that I made for the other reasons. Having The State second-guess one's child rearing choices with a probability of 0.35 is somewhere between Orwellian and Kafkaesque...
35% is not adjusted for race of socioeconomic class, which likely has correlations. I don't know anyone who has had CPS involved in their lives
Many Thanks! That's reasonable. I don't know what the risk would be with those correlations taken into account.
It's something like 50% of black kids and something like 20% of white kids, with hispanic kids somewhere in between, from memory from the last paper I read on the subject
Many Thanks!
Man, I did every single one of those things by the time I was 12...
I think one related aspect behind this (causative or consequence?) is anti-child attitudes becoming dominant in public places. So like at my grocery store, obviously I sometimes get a bit annoyed at ankle-biters who have no compunctions about dashing in front of me when I'm hauling hundreds of pounds of product or whatever. Or they scream, or they make a mess of displays, or they drop food everywhere (parents, if you're going to feed your kids in a store, please pick up after them). But that's just kids being kids! What saddens me is seeing coworkers get annoyed not just at the acts themselves, but at the very idea of children being present in public at all, without being zombified by a screen or otherwise neutralized. That children are a burden, and at best should be only seen, not heard. That they'd never have kids, just look how annoying and inconvenient they are. (Buddy, why did you sign up for a customer service job in the first place...?) That parents are irresponsible for not intensely monitoring their kids at all times. Or the insidious inverse, that well-trained kids shouldn't *want* to run free. Really makes me wonder what *they* were like as children, you know? Did the adults in their life constantly sneer down at them, too? Were they always perfect little angels? It's just a fundamentally anti-human attitude. You can give all the government financial incentives you want, subsidize daycare, mandate maternity and paternity leave...but if havings kids makes one a pariah in public, that's still a huge barrier.
Also, seeing Abigail Shrier cited positively in this context makes me...sad about strange bedfellows coalitions. I'm not depressed, pretty happy in fact, yet she'd still think I'm quite "sick" by default nonetheless. And I strongly suspect that's her True Objection to "the mental health funnel". Careful what you wish for, Icarus.
My daughter has done 6 of those 7 things listed near the top; failing only on the structure one. My daughter is 5.
Thinking back to 70’s and 80’s TV, the one silver lining was that it was passive, low-quality, limited, and ultimately boring. A kid could only watch so much before needing to move on. Sure, kids spent too much time in front of the boob tube, but a sugar-fed generation ultimately needed to burn those calories.