2y ago

Which American city is best for raising free children?

With 90s-and-earlier style independence. Could it be Salt Lake City? Inspired by this:

"Utah Free Range Parenting Law [...] says that letting your kids play outside, walk to school, wait briefly in the car (under some circumstances) or come home with a latchkey is not neglect unless something else seriously bad is going on."

https://letgrow.org/state/utah/

urbanism #WalkableCities #SaltLakeCity #SLC #Utah #parenting #childhood

10 comments

I'm sorry, I can't help as I don't live in America, but why would those things constitute neglect in the first place? If it's talking about very young children, yeah, I can understand, but otherwise, I don't.
- @Stoneblackdog overpolicing is a huge problem here, CPS (child protective services) and the police have taken children and put them in foster care for things like this. They target Native, Black and poor families. It didn't used to be like this. 9/11 made some people extremely paranoid and the culture has never recovered unfortunately. Canada has some of these issues too now.
  It sucks that my government thinks "ipad kids" locked inside all day are better off than kids who play outside.
  
  This was a problem long before 9/11. I remember stranger danger being a huge thing throughout the 90s and I know the 80s had that ridiculous satanic panic thing where pedophile satanists were lurking around every corner waiting to do some hoodoo.
  
  @Stoneblackdog The cynic in me also believes the daycare industry may be responsible for this. Some people spend thousands of dollars per month on daycare. That's crazy to me. When I was a kid and my parents were working I just stayed with other family members. But many people are isolated without extended family and the daycare industry exploits that.
- The term free range parenting was coined in response to some parents letting their 6 year old walk home from the park in 2015. And not a park right across the street. So yeah I think that qualifies as really young. And also not even something that was acceptable in the 90's
"I want to raise my kids free. Is this religious theocracy ran by a literal cult with a long history of religious indoctrination, theocratic control, and suppression of thought, as well as institutionalized homophobia and transphobia be the answer?"
Yeah we've got some wildly different ideas of the definition of free.
Few things
1.) This is entirely a problem invented by the paranoid and delusional. People aren't having their kids snatched because they walked home from school or has their kids sit in an air conditioned car or playing at a park by themselves. This is right wing fear mongering at it's fucking finest.
2.) You have the audacity to mask your paranoia with "it happens all the time to blacks and natives". Want to know how I know you aren't black or indigenous? Because no black or indigenous people are fleeing to a theocratic fascist racist ass place like salt lake city. You can just admit you're a white person who reads too many homestead and mommy blogs.
3.) CPS has better things to be doing than snatching kids for being outside. My wife, who is black, was horrifically abused growing up. I mean horrific. Living in squalor when she did have a home and living homeless for most of her life. CPS investigated a few times and never once removed her or her siblings from the hell they were living in. In the other side of the coin my sister is a foster parent who takes in children who have been removed from homes by CPS. And far too many times we've seen kids be returned back to parents who were unwilling and unable to take care of their kids. In talking drug abuse, parents being prostitutes, etc. Not white parents pretending to be a victim because they let their kids play outside.
- To add to your first point, it's actually safer than "back in the day" for kids. They're also much more likely to be abused/abducted by a trusted relative than a stranger. Much like airplane crashes though, abductions make headlines so everyone thinks they're much more prevalent.
  
  Every single person who abused my wife growing up was someone she loved and trusted. It was entirely people who didn't want the government or cps telling them how to raise a kid because they know how to do it because they are old school and have "common sense". Never once was it an abduction
I don’t know, i think this is probably more a ‘do i know my neighbors well and trust them around my kids and trust them to respect my parenting decisions’ thing than a local laws thing. But I’m not sure that the issue is so much with parents getting arrested as it is ‘do my kids have lots of trustworthy adults around them whom they can ask for help if they do need something’ and I’m just not sure that’s always the case with kids in these situations. I had a lot of outdoor and unattended time as a kid, and i had some fun, but I also knew damn well it was because my parents and numerous relatives did not want to have to be around, or look after, or deal with the needs of, I and my sibling and cousins and friends. And this was quite widespread in my social circle, and it was not idyllic at all. A period of “play on your own for a bit but i’ll be in here if you need me” time would have been very different (and great!), but that’s not always what happens. It’s highly situational, and american parents really do need a lot more help and things like free childcare and paid leave and community, etc., but sometimes i think we look back and romanticize an idea of childhood that objectively kind of sucked. I think there’s a middle ground between surveilling kids and just leaving them alone for long periods of time. If there are other circumstances that make a particular community very supportive and affirming for wandering children - which would be great- it might be fine, but I don’t think kids should be unattended without support or help in most cases. Though, I have rarely seen police or schools or other authorities ever intervene in cases of abuse or neglect in my particular life. I’m sure it has a lot to do with the region and the race of the families involved, but the kinds of “freedom for families” areas that people talk about are often just havens for child abuse. Speaking as someone from a rural, religious area- more ‘freedom’ does not actually mean more safety for kids, it just means more risk and fewer resources or safe adults to talk to, if something bad does happen.

10 comments