6 ms·

Seems like society is constantly pushing to remove all the ways in which kids used to live. Can't just wonder around and play on the sidewalks or the streets an

Seems like society is constantly pushing to remove all the ways in which kids used to live. Can't just wonder around and play on the sidewalks or the streets anymore with your friends, someone will call the police on you. Can't hang out in the woods, as those have mostly been torn down to make way for new neighborhoods, and the woods that do remain are typically private property. Unless you are lucky enough to live in a place that still has a good wooded area where there's no busy bodies, you are out of luck. Can't hang out at the mall, they will kick you out if you aren't accompanied by an adult. Can't hang out at your favorite local joints anymore, they'll kick you out. I was also among the last generations that really got to experience freedom and a playful world as a child, I can't imagine growing up in the world today. The biggest problem are people who can't mind their business and people who have been conditioned to fear the world. The 24/7 fear cycle of news has drilled it into so many peoples minds that if you see someone anywhere on your street outside, they are there to murder, rob, mutilate, or otherwise commit crime.

api 7y ago
> The 24/7 fear cycle of news has drilled it into so many peoples minds that if you see someone anywhere on your street outside, they are there to murder, rob, mutilate, or otherwise commit crime. Join NextDoor.com if you want a dose of how nuts people have gone. I live in Orange County CA and I have checked it from time to time. Apparently this place is a crime infested jungle full of human trafficking gangs that abduct kids and street gangs that will sell your fifth grader fentanyl. There are also gangs of Satan worshippers that will sacrifice your kids to the devil or something. Then there are the sightings of pedestrians... Then look up the actual crime statistics. With the exception of a few spots here and there this is "officer! Have you seen my cat?" territory. The stuff about gangs is the most laughable. The joke is "OC gangstaz be like 'it's not a phase mom!'" As a general rule, the safer the area the crazier NextDoor becomes. Anaheim does have actual crime and the community boards are pretty sane. South County is almost zero crime and the paranoia on the neighborhood boards is off the charts.
- wingspar 7y ago
  Do you think the paranoia leads to lower crime, via vigilance and reporting? And/or does the actual crime lead to ‘acceptance’ as displayed in the Anaheim boards? Perhaps a manifestation of the broken windows theory? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
  - ip26 7y ago
    My suspicion is more like allergy theory, wherein if most of your life has no allergens (e.g. no pets, city life) then when you encounter the tiniest of allergens (a suspicious teenager wearing a hoodie) your system goes on total self paralyzing freakout (anaphylaxis).
  - heymijo 7y ago
    Good question, and my next one would be "at what cost?" What are the externalities of services like NextDoor, local FB groups, etc keeping this in people's conscious all the time? If I had to come up with a hypothesis and test it via the scientific method it would probably be: This is not good as it is a positive reinforcement loop that causes our lizard brains to see danger everywhere/all the time.
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  The citydata.com forums are a laugh riot too
- rjbwork 7y ago
  Haha. Yes, I briefly rented a separated basement apartment in one of the most well-to-do neighborhoods in the city I live in. The NextDoor forums are absolutely absurd. I like checking in every now and then for a laugh and a sigh.
- Balgair 7y ago
  As a sampling for users that are unfamilar, there is a twitter account that posts some of the jewels : https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor?lang=en https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor?lang=en
maire 7y ago
I am not sure how old you are but everything seemed to change when abducted children were put on milk cartons in the mid 1980s. Before that, kids roamed free. I tell my foreign friends that kids used to run the streets in America and they can hardly believe it. The funny thing is that the danger of "stranger abductions" has been over blown. Most abductions are non-custodial parents.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > I am not sure how old you are but everything seemed to change when abducted children were put on milk cartons in the mid 1980s. Before that, kids roamed free. That actually started in the early 1980s, and kids roamed free well into the 1990s.
  - saiya-jin 7y ago
    I don't think there is only 1 reason. I can think of several others - ie Marc Dutroux's case was highly medialised in Europe. People generally have less and less time with kids due to work, and then overcompensate by being over-protective ("I suck at spending enough time with my kids, but look at how I protect them! I must still be a good parent then!"). There are much more cars everywhere, they drive faster too. Especially US problem from my experience, since whole infrastructure is designed around car usage. How are kids supposed to roam freely in urban areas then? I recall having to do 45 min walk to get to my work which was 1km away in LA, and this was including taking forbidden shortcut via highway road. Otherwise a solid 1h walk, to do frakin' 1km distance. Because nobody thought that there are pedestrians. Well kids are pedestrians, even on bikes.
- baddox 7y ago
  Maybe it spread from more urban areas to more rural areas, because growing up in the mid and late 90s in a small midwestern town we were pretty much let loose on the streets with our bicycles with no restrictions other than “don’t get into trouble” and a time we needed to be back.
- aiyodev 7y ago
  Which countries still allow children to grow up free?
Reedx 7y ago
I think this is one of the reasons why Minecraft was so successful, especially with kids. It fulfilled a need they're not able to get in real life: exploring freely with their friends.
- jstarfish 7y ago
  That and the fact that Legos have become absurdly expensive.
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  I keep seeing stories about how kids are talking to their friends more online and less in person, almost always spun as "tech is supplanting face-to-face interactions!" The reverse explanation seems screamingly obvious. Minecraft, Fortnite, Facebook, AIM, pick your program, are all things kids and teens do to talk and interact when they can't be together in person. They'll play videogames at a sleepover, sure, but it's a very different thing than getting on a game every night to chat. If your friends live driving distance away, you don't have anywhere fun to hang out, and you probably can't go out on schoolnights anyway, it's no surprise that socialization moves online. Even beyond exploration, Minecraft is a perfect vector for this. It's collaborative and persistent, the same as building a treehouse would be. It can be closed-access, so your parents don't have to worry about strangers. It's drop-in with no fixed player count, so your friends can all cycle in and out for dinner, bedtime, and so on. And it's varying intensity, so you can do anything from fighting monsters to chatting about the schoolday as you decorate a house. The decline of physical "third places", and the outright death of third places for children, is really depressing to behold. But I think Minecraft is at least a bright spot helping to offset that; it offers practically everything you could want except physicality.
netmonk 7y ago
There was this study published around 10 years ago, showing that in 1850 the average diameter of field of play of children were around 10km close to the house. In 2007 it was mostly 250m away from the house.
- seanhandley 7y ago
  One word: cars.
  - neuronic 7y ago
    Another word: What?
    - aaroninsf 7y ago
      7z unpacks this as: American post-war car-centric urban design transformed public space from one accessible to, and commonly ranged by, all (including children), into one largely accessible by motorized transit. Children without licenses and access to vehicles consequently lost direct autonomous access to the core locations in their lives (home - school - simple shopping - peers - common wild space), and have been discouraged from attempting to navigate these spaces on foot (for fear of injury or unrealistic transit distance/detours required). The author does not state, but one may infer, that car-centric living is coupled to the overscheduling and helicopter parenting at issue in the original article; and that children raised in a car-centric environment experience something akin to learned helplessness. These problems are further compounded by comparatively poor American public transit systems and a contemporary mindset in which fearful parents discourages free-range children from making use of what transit options are present before the last few years of childhood; and by safety concerns around biking and skating in environments which do privilege cars.
      - aaroninsf 7y ago
        As a parent these considerations are omnipresent in my household. My own kids are in the top quintile of "most free range" in our cohort; that feels possible in San Francisco in some ways which do not appear as feasible in many other urban areas. That's one reason we continue to try to raise our kids here. But they do not get anything like the benevolent neglect of my own latchkey neighborhood-wandering local-kid-pack-factions semi-rural/suburban childhood.
parasubvert 7y ago
This is all pretty US-centric. Kids are allowed a fair amount of freedom in Canada and Europe, where I still see a lot of kids around malls, or parks, playing basketball in courts (which still happens in NYC), or wooded areas. Sure, more are on their phones etc. But it’s really not that different from the 90s IMO, in many locations. The biggest change is there aren’t so many clusters of “neighbourhood kids” as there used to be, as people are having fewer children later in life... unless you deliberately seek out a unicorn neighbourhood with similar aged kids. Playgroups and play dates need to be actively organized by parents due to distances between houses. (I raise two children, and the 10 year old is free to ride his bike and wander, so long as he keeps a phone on for location - he’s taken plenty of bike camps to learn to be responsible).
- johnisgood 7y ago
  We have built large parks/playgrounds for kids here in Eastern Europe, and we have upgraded most of our playgrounds. There are many of them. Kids can freely be kids here still. :) What is happening in the US is quite depressing to me. Your kid can be shot for having a toy that the cop perceives to be a gun. It is crazy! Things like that never happen here, even if that toy is a toy gun.
  - 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
    It doesn't happen that often, that's the point. People are afraid everything and everyone. We euros tend to forget how big USA really is. Of course all sort of shit happens.
    - llukas 7y ago
      EU has more citizens than USA and it is unthinkable that such thing would happen in EU.
      - Zak 7y ago
        That may be true, but it illustrates an important point: we shouldn't need tragedies to be unthinkable in order to make reasonable decisions about their probability. We don't do this in every situation. Most American parents transport their kids by car without giving the risk much thought, though car crashes kill significantly more children than homicide in the US (source: CDC). I'm not sure there's a good solution to the cognitive bias of discounting relatively mundane risks.
maxheadroom 7y ago
>...and the woods that do remain are typically private property. I've heard that in the states you can own a piece of property but have "no right" to get to it, as it's surrounded by other pieces of private property and, so, you're at the whims of those properties' owners. Is this true? In Sweden, we have the concept of 'Allemansrätten'[0]; which is to say that 'private property' (in the absolute sense) doesn't exist and you have the freedom to roam, as long as you don't disturb or destroy anything. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#Sweden
- piker 7y ago
  No, that's generally incorrect. If your property is surrounded by others' private property in the US, an "easement by necessity" will generally be automatically granted which allows you access to your property through the surrounding private property.
  - blaser-waffle 7y ago
    Not that easements are easy to get or are free of contention -- a lot of pedantic property law comes out of asshole neighbors making other people's lives miserable. Source: good buddy of mine is a real estate lawyer, and after a couple drinks he'll bitch and moan about it for hours
    - cr0sh 7y ago
      My brother-in-law went through that with a piece of property he bought in California; it was a house on top of a "hill" (or small mountain?). Two "neighbors" colluded to shut off all easements to the property, hoping that in 7 years (or whatever) they'd get the right to the property and could fix it and resell it. It was originally owned by investors, who wanted to offload it because they were fighting the same fight, and one of them had a heart attack and was dying, and they just wanted out. Along comes my BIL and he gets it for a song. And the issues to boot. The neighbors - one was a known "a-hole" in the neighborhood who would sue anyone and everyone; indeed, if you looked up his name in California, he had a record of using the courts almost as if it were his job. The other guy, he owned a large avocado orchard which bordered the property; he had fenced over one of the plat map easements. The other easement was a road which led to the property, which the first guy lived next to, just down below from the house. He blocked it off with a metal gate. He also owned another house he used as a rental, which was just immediately below the house. So he'd leave the gate open sometimes, and would give a key to the renters, but otherwise it was closed off. He'd also let people in for maintenance and inspection of a water tank which served for water in the neighborhood. The story is wild and long - they didn't count on the tenacity of the family I married into. They didn't count on my brother-in-law, who works construction - being willing to run his dump truck for 48 hours straight with little-to-no sleep to make money in any way possible so he could pay his lawyer bill every single month (which ran to insane levels). He didn't count on my sister-in-law being willing to live in the house, to establish residency, while her husband worked a state away. We had to hike up to the house one, using machetes to cut thru the undergrowth. My brother-in-law later ran a bulldozer to cut a path up the side of it, to get past the gate (he came from the avocado side - which the sheriff allowed him to cut past the fence, because of the plat map, and thus had to fight that neighbor in court too) - they then used 4wd vehicles to get up the side to the house. He never counted on any of this and more. My brother-in-law flew a pirate flag from the flagpole, just to give the other guy the finger during all this. Eventually, after several years, my brother-in-law won the lawsuit, and got access to the road. The gate was removed. The entire neighborhood rejoiced, and my BIL became the "hero" of their area, because they had long suffered various indignities by that guy. A few months after my BIL won the case, the guy ended up having a heart attack, and died. The other guy lived a few years longer, but also ended up dying of natural causes. My brother-in-law's house, now that it has access, instantly shot up in value several times over. He and his wife are now thinking of selling it, and moving on to other things.
honzzz 7y ago
>>> someone will call the police on you This may be a naive question but please bear with a non-US person - what would happen in the US if someone actually called police on you? Could you just say "these are my children and I think it is good for them to be unsupervised, good bye"?
- dougmwne 7y ago
  You could be arrested or your children could be taken away from you. http://www.freerangekids.com/category/child-protective-services/ http://www.freerangekids.com/category/child-protective-servi...
  - johnisgood 7y ago
    What the heck? Madness. When I was a kid (not too long ago), we used to throw rocks at other people's windows. Cops has been called out. They came and told us in a polite, friendly manner to not do that, or go elsewhere. Nothing else happened! We were unsupervised, etc. Would have I been taken away from my family in the US for this incident?
    - Broken_Hippo 7y ago
      Possibly: It is just as or more likely that you, as a child, might have had to deal with the juvenile justice system, depending on your age. 4-5, maybe not, but 10-12? Definitely. I'll add that your treatment would likely depend on the color of your skin, how well-to-do your neighborhood was, and how familiar the cop was with you and your family (small town vs large one, really). They may or may not call child services on your family.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - Bartweiss 7y ago
      It varies wildly and unpredictably. We could talk about era (this is largely 90s and more recent), location (small towns are often better, suburbs are overzealous but not viciously policed, cities are less likely to intrude but often more heavy-handed when they do), income, and race (the predictable biases). There are definitely places where children have been systematically taken away (mostly poor, minority communities). But for most people, this comes down to "99.5% of the time, no, but there's no way to be sure you're safe." It just takes a run of bad luck: an invasive bystander, followed by an overzealous cop or social worker, perhaps followed by a judge without much common sense. Which means that it has an extremely widespread chilling effect. I've heard several people say that they know the crime stats and aren't scared of their kid being attacked if they go out alone - but still won't allow it because they're scared of the police and child protective services.
teddyuk 7y ago
I live in a village and there is a village face book group, literally an un-marked amazon delivery van needs to go through and someone will post "suspicious looking vehicle seen driving slowly and looking at each house" <-- roads with no house numbers, what else can delivery drivers do? ha ha
mlrtime 7y ago
The problem is that statistically there will be a non 0 chance that a kid will be abducted over a certain timeline if all kids are let free. No parent wants their child to be the 1/1000000. It seems as if it is a good trade off.
flyinghamster 7y ago
I'm in the SW Chicago suburbs, and things aren't quite so bad here - I see kids on bikes out and about, and even saw one with a fishing pole sticking out of his bike bag the other day. Maybe parents here are wising up about giving the kids some room to breathe. But the mall/hangout issue still stands, and that's assuming the malls themselves are still standing. A lot of malls have shot themselves in the foot by banishing the kids; when they grow up, the last place they'll even think about shopping is at a mall.

api 7y ago

> The 24/7 fear cycle of news has drilled it into so many peoples minds that if you see someone anywhere on your street outside, they are there to murder, rob, mutilate, or otherwise commit crime. Join NextDoor.com if you want a dose of how nuts people have gone. I live in Orange County CA and I have checked it from time to time. Apparently this place is a crime infested jungle full of human trafficking gangs that abduct kids and street gangs that will sell your fifth grader fentanyl. There are also gangs of Satan worshippers that will sacrifice your kids to the devil or something. Then there are the sightings of pedestrians... Then look up the actual crime statistics. With the exception of a few spots here and there this is "officer! Have you seen my cat?" territory. The stuff about gangs is the most laughable. The joke is "OC gangstaz be like 'it's not a phase mom!'" As a general rule, the safer the area the crazier NextDoor becomes. Anaheim does have actual crime and the community boards are pretty sane. South County is almost zero crime and the paranoia on the neighborhood boards is off the charts.

wingspar 7y ago
Do you think the paranoia leads to lower crime, via vigilance and reporting? And/or does the actual crime lead to ‘acceptance’ as displayed in the Anaheim boards? Perhaps a manifestation of the broken windows theory? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
- ip26 7y ago
  My suspicion is more like allergy theory, wherein if most of your life has no allergens (e.g. no pets, city life) then when you encounter the tiniest of allergens (a suspicious teenager wearing a hoodie) your system goes on total self paralyzing freakout (anaphylaxis).
- heymijo 7y ago
  Good question, and my next one would be "at what cost?" What are the externalities of services like NextDoor, local FB groups, etc keeping this in people's conscious all the time? If I had to come up with a hypothesis and test it via the scientific method it would probably be: This is not good as it is a positive reinforcement loop that causes our lizard brains to see danger everywhere/all the time.
selimthegrim 7y ago
The citydata.com forums are a laugh riot too
rjbwork 7y ago
Haha. Yes, I briefly rented a separated basement apartment in one of the most well-to-do neighborhoods in the city I live in. The NextDoor forums are absolutely absurd. I like checking in every now and then for a laugh and a sigh.
Balgair 7y ago
As a sampling for users that are unfamilar, there is a twitter account that posts some of the jewels : https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor?lang=en https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor?lang=en

maire 7y ago

I am not sure how old you are but everything seemed to change when abducted children were put on milk cartons in the mid 1980s. Before that, kids roamed free. I tell my foreign friends that kids used to run the streets in America and they can hardly believe it. The funny thing is that the danger of "stranger abductions" has been over blown. Most abductions are non-custodial parents.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> I am not sure how old you are but everything seemed to change when abducted children were put on milk cartons in the mid 1980s. Before that, kids roamed free. That actually started in the early 1980s, and kids roamed free well into the 1990s.
- saiya-jin 7y ago
  I don't think there is only 1 reason. I can think of several others - ie Marc Dutroux's case was highly medialised in Europe. People generally have less and less time with kids due to work, and then overcompensate by being over-protective ("I suck at spending enough time with my kids, but look at how I protect them! I must still be a good parent then!"). There are much more cars everywhere, they drive faster too. Especially US problem from my experience, since whole infrastructure is designed around car usage. How are kids supposed to roam freely in urban areas then? I recall having to do 45 min walk to get to my work which was 1km away in LA, and this was including taking forbidden shortcut via highway road. Otherwise a solid 1h walk, to do frakin' 1km distance. Because nobody thought that there are pedestrians. Well kids are pedestrians, even on bikes.
baddox 7y ago
Maybe it spread from more urban areas to more rural areas, because growing up in the mid and late 90s in a small midwestern town we were pretty much let loose on the streets with our bicycles with no restrictions other than “don’t get into trouble” and a time we needed to be back.
aiyodev 7y ago
Which countries still allow children to grow up free?

Reedx 7y ago

I think this is one of the reasons why Minecraft was so successful, especially with kids. It fulfilled a need they're not able to get in real life: exploring freely with their friends.

jstarfish 7y ago
That and the fact that Legos have become absurdly expensive.
Bartweiss 7y ago
I keep seeing stories about how kids are talking to their friends more online and less in person, almost always spun as "tech is supplanting face-to-face interactions!" The reverse explanation seems screamingly obvious. Minecraft, Fortnite, Facebook, AIM, pick your program, are all things kids and teens do to talk and interact when they can't be together in person. They'll play videogames at a sleepover, sure, but it's a very different thing than getting on a game every night to chat. If your friends live driving distance away, you don't have anywhere fun to hang out, and you probably can't go out on schoolnights anyway, it's no surprise that socialization moves online. Even beyond exploration, Minecraft is a perfect vector for this. It's collaborative and persistent, the same as building a treehouse would be. It can be closed-access, so your parents don't have to worry about strangers. It's drop-in with no fixed player count, so your friends can all cycle in and out for dinner, bedtime, and so on. And it's varying intensity, so you can do anything from fighting monsters to chatting about the schoolday as you decorate a house. The decline of physical "third places", and the outright death of third places for children, is really depressing to behold. But I think Minecraft is at least a bright spot helping to offset that; it offers practically everything you could want except physicality.

netmonk 7y ago

There was this study published around 10 years ago, showing that in 1850 the average diameter of field of play of children were around 10km close to the house. In 2007 it was mostly 250m away from the house.

seanhandley 7y ago
One word: cars.
- neuronic 7y ago
  Another word: What?
  - aaroninsf 7y ago
    7z unpacks this as: American post-war car-centric urban design transformed public space from one accessible to, and commonly ranged by, all (including children), into one largely accessible by motorized transit. Children without licenses and access to vehicles consequently lost direct autonomous access to the core locations in their lives (home - school - simple shopping - peers - common wild space), and have been discouraged from attempting to navigate these spaces on foot (for fear of injury or unrealistic transit distance/detours required). The author does not state, but one may infer, that car-centric living is coupled to the overscheduling and helicopter parenting at issue in the original article; and that children raised in a car-centric environment experience something akin to learned helplessness. These problems are further compounded by comparatively poor American public transit systems and a contemporary mindset in which fearful parents discourages free-range children from making use of what transit options are present before the last few years of childhood; and by safety concerns around biking and skating in environments which do privilege cars.
    - aaroninsf 7y ago
      As a parent these considerations are omnipresent in my household. My own kids are in the top quintile of "most free range" in our cohort; that feels possible in San Francisco in some ways which do not appear as feasible in many other urban areas. That's one reason we continue to try to raise our kids here. But they do not get anything like the benevolent neglect of my own latchkey neighborhood-wandering local-kid-pack-factions semi-rural/suburban childhood.

parasubvert 7y ago

This is all pretty US-centric. Kids are allowed a fair amount of freedom in Canada and Europe, where I still see a lot of kids around malls, or parks, playing basketball in courts (which still happens in NYC), or wooded areas. Sure, more are on their phones etc. But it’s really not that different from the 90s IMO, in many locations. The biggest change is there aren’t so many clusters of “neighbourhood kids” as there used to be, as people are having fewer children later in life... unless you deliberately seek out a unicorn neighbourhood with similar aged kids. Playgroups and play dates need to be actively organized by parents due to distances between houses. (I raise two children, and the 10 year old is free to ride his bike and wander, so long as he keeps a phone on for location - he’s taken plenty of bike camps to learn to be responsible).

johnisgood 7y ago
We have built large parks/playgrounds for kids here in Eastern Europe, and we have upgraded most of our playgrounds. There are many of them. Kids can freely be kids here still. :) What is happening in the US is quite depressing to me. Your kid can be shot for having a toy that the cop perceives to be a gun. It is crazy! Things like that never happen here, even if that toy is a toy gun.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
  It doesn't happen that often, that's the point. People are afraid everything and everyone. We euros tend to forget how big USA really is. Of course all sort of shit happens.
  - llukas 7y ago
    EU has more citizens than USA and it is unthinkable that such thing would happen in EU.
    - Zak 7y ago
      That may be true, but it illustrates an important point: we shouldn't need tragedies to be unthinkable in order to make reasonable decisions about their probability. We don't do this in every situation. Most American parents transport their kids by car without giving the risk much thought, though car crashes kill significantly more children than homicide in the US (source: CDC). I'm not sure there's a good solution to the cognitive bias of discounting relatively mundane risks.

maxheadroom 7y ago

>...and the woods that do remain are typically private property. I've heard that in the states you can own a piece of property but have "no right" to get to it, as it's surrounded by other pieces of private property and, so, you're at the whims of those properties' owners. Is this true? In Sweden, we have the concept of 'Allemansrätten'[0]; which is to say that 'private property' (in the absolute sense) doesn't exist and you have the freedom to roam, as long as you don't disturb or destroy anything. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#Sweden

piker 7y ago
No, that's generally incorrect. If your property is surrounded by others' private property in the US, an "easement by necessity" will generally be automatically granted which allows you access to your property through the surrounding private property.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  Not that easements are easy to get or are free of contention -- a lot of pedantic property law comes out of asshole neighbors making other people's lives miserable. Source: good buddy of mine is a real estate lawyer, and after a couple drinks he'll bitch and moan about it for hours
  - cr0sh 7y ago
    My brother-in-law went through that with a piece of property he bought in California; it was a house on top of a "hill" (or small mountain?). Two "neighbors" colluded to shut off all easements to the property, hoping that in 7 years (or whatever) they'd get the right to the property and could fix it and resell it. It was originally owned by investors, who wanted to offload it because they were fighting the same fight, and one of them had a heart attack and was dying, and they just wanted out. Along comes my BIL and he gets it for a song. And the issues to boot. The neighbors - one was a known "a-hole" in the neighborhood who would sue anyone and everyone; indeed, if you looked up his name in California, he had a record of using the courts almost as if it were his job. The other guy, he owned a large avocado orchard which bordered the property; he had fenced over one of the plat map easements. The other easement was a road which led to the property, which the first guy lived next to, just down below from the house. He blocked it off with a metal gate. He also owned another house he used as a rental, which was just immediately below the house. So he'd leave the gate open sometimes, and would give a key to the renters, but otherwise it was closed off. He'd also let people in for maintenance and inspection of a water tank which served for water in the neighborhood. The story is wild and long - they didn't count on the tenacity of the family I married into. They didn't count on my brother-in-law, who works construction - being willing to run his dump truck for 48 hours straight with little-to-no sleep to make money in any way possible so he could pay his lawyer bill every single month (which ran to insane levels). He didn't count on my sister-in-law being willing to live in the house, to establish residency, while her husband worked a state away. We had to hike up to the house one, using machetes to cut thru the undergrowth. My brother-in-law later ran a bulldozer to cut a path up the side of it, to get past the gate (he came from the avocado side - which the sheriff allowed him to cut past the fence, because of the plat map, and thus had to fight that neighbor in court too) - they then used 4wd vehicles to get up the side to the house. He never counted on any of this and more. My brother-in-law flew a pirate flag from the flagpole, just to give the other guy the finger during all this. Eventually, after several years, my brother-in-law won the lawsuit, and got access to the road. The gate was removed. The entire neighborhood rejoiced, and my BIL became the "hero" of their area, because they had long suffered various indignities by that guy. A few months after my BIL won the case, the guy ended up having a heart attack, and died. The other guy lived a few years longer, but also ended up dying of natural causes. My brother-in-law's house, now that it has access, instantly shot up in value several times over. He and his wife are now thinking of selling it, and moving on to other things.

honzzz 7y ago

>>> someone will call the police on you This may be a naive question but please bear with a non-US person - what would happen in the US if someone actually called police on you? Could you just say "these are my children and I think it is good for them to be unsupervised, good bye"?

dougmwne 7y ago
You could be arrested or your children could be taken away from you. http://www.freerangekids.com/category/child-protective-services/ http://www.freerangekids.com/category/child-protective-servi...
- johnisgood 7y ago
  What the heck? Madness. When I was a kid (not too long ago), we used to throw rocks at other people's windows. Cops has been called out. They came and told us in a polite, friendly manner to not do that, or go elsewhere. Nothing else happened! We were unsupervised, etc. Would have I been taken away from my family in the US for this incident?
  - Broken_Hippo 7y ago
    Possibly: It is just as or more likely that you, as a child, might have had to deal with the juvenile justice system, depending on your age. 4-5, maybe not, but 10-12? Definitely. I'll add that your treatment would likely depend on the color of your skin, how well-to-do your neighborhood was, and how familiar the cop was with you and your family (small town vs large one, really). They may or may not call child services on your family.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - Bartweiss 7y ago
    It varies wildly and unpredictably. We could talk about era (this is largely 90s and more recent), location (small towns are often better, suburbs are overzealous but not viciously policed, cities are less likely to intrude but often more heavy-handed when they do), income, and race (the predictable biases). There are definitely places where children have been systematically taken away (mostly poor, minority communities). But for most people, this comes down to "99.5% of the time, no, but there's no way to be sure you're safe." It just takes a run of bad luck: an invasive bystander, followed by an overzealous cop or social worker, perhaps followed by a judge without much common sense. Which means that it has an extremely widespread chilling effect. I've heard several people say that they know the crime stats and aren't scared of their kid being attacked if they go out alone - but still won't allow it because they're scared of the police and child protective services.

teddyuk 7y ago

I live in a village and there is a village face book group, literally an un-marked amazon delivery van needs to go through and someone will post "suspicious looking vehicle seen driving slowly and looking at each house" <-- roads with no house numbers, what else can delivery drivers do? ha ha

mlrtime 7y ago

The problem is that statistically there will be a non 0 chance that a kid will be abducted over a certain timeline if all kids are let free. No parent wants their child to be the 1/1000000. It seems as if it is a good trade off.

flyinghamster 7y ago

I'm in the SW Chicago suburbs, and things aren't quite so bad here - I see kids on bikes out and about, and even saw one with a fishing pole sticking out of his bike bag the other day. Maybe parents here are wising up about giving the kids some room to breathe. But the mall/hangout issue still stands, and that's assuming the malls themselves are still standing. A lot of malls have shot themselves in the foot by banishing the kids; when they grow up, the last place they'll even think about shopping is at a mall.