The US seems to be the only country that has this problem. Children here (Norway) walk to school on their own at the age of five or six, some of them take buses.
"Ashley Smith, a foster dad, testified about being investigated for neglect because one afternoon his daughter, 8, was doing her homework on the front lawn. A passerby reported an “unsupervised” child (not knowing Ashley was actually inside). The upshot: “We went through a period of eight weeks of not knowing if we would continue being able to keep our children,” said Ashley."
Its been a genuine problem. I have heard people actually say that if a kid is playing outside by themselves, then the parent should be charged with child neglect because the kid could get hurt. Any time a kid gets hurt on YouTube the comments are filled with people blaming the parent for not being outside with them. Thing is, playing outside by yourself gives you a strong sense of independence. The kid might get hurt, sure, but when the alternative is them never learning to be on their own and do things for themselves, the risk seems well worth it.
The U.S. federal government gives the States' child protection service agencies money grants that are conditional on those agencies actually taking children from their homes. You get what you subsidize, and if you subsidize petty tyranny, you'll get petty tyranny.
In Belgium, we had Dutroux a serial rapist and child kidnapper that traumatised the country ~30 years ago.
As a kid I remember living like you describe in Norway. Not anymore. Parents are still to this day worried letting their kids go outside.
Fast forward to spring 2020.
The country is locked down. The weather is surprisingly excellent.
It took me a lot of effort to leave my 8y old girl go play with her friend to the small wood nearby.
Initially I even asked her to go with the dog.
I could see the disapprovals of other parents I was talking to about this. But little by little other kids joined.
They had a blast. No school for months. Living in the sunny woods all day, just coming back to eat and sleep.
She's 10 now and as you can imagine a very independent girl.
Imo there's two factors at play only one of which seems to get much attention. There's the legality (and burden of compliance even when abiding the law) of leaving your children unsupervised but there's also the complete lack of penalty for being wrong. A person reporting abuse incorrectly is for all intents and purposes, an attacker. Why is attacking someone else with only a brief observation of the situation cost free? Sure there's a balance to be maintained so that people still report actual abuse but why is there no burden upon the attacker to be correct or defensibly confused when the stakes are so high for the defender? If this was a game the imbalance would be an obvious point of dialogue.
I walk my kids to school in the US, but I definitely see kids as young as 6 walking without a parent. I choose to walk with my kids because I enjoy it, and it's easy exercise.
That said, a lot of parents still drive their kids - the vast majority I would say. Even people who live within walking distance. It definitely is faster if you look at it in a vacuum: you save 10 minutes round trip!
And when casually discussing things with them, that's usually the excuse - they just don't have the time! They're always running late! etc. But I get a 20 minute walk out of it, and spend time with the kids talking about stuff. So to that I say: I'm multi-tasking.
Part of me thinks this problem isn't much different from the fear of child abduction: overblown. But there is something especially frustrating about the times this happens because people think they are doing something good when they really aren't.
Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture is making our society to be like this.
Also, most states defund mental health institutions. Finally, the 24/7 news cycle covers a lot of crazy behaviors, encouraging copycats to one-up the crime even more.
Is it a surprise if Americans are more paranoid than ever?
In Japan, one of our buildings was right next to a girls' primary school.
When I took the train from Shinagawa to Nishi-Ohi, I would see these tiny little girls, basically knee-high, on the train, by themselves, on the way to school.
I've talked about growing up in Africa[0], and what kinds of things we had, slithering around.
The whole thing goes back to 80s and 90s daytime TV and people like John Walsh who pushed “stranger danger” unbelievably hard. Two generations of parents have been taught that the streets are crawling with child predators when in reality attacks by people not known to the child are very rare.
For whatever reason this took off in America more than most other places. US culture seems very prone to moral panics and crime scares.
The fact is that the vast majority of child abuse and abduction is committed by a family member or someone known to the child like a teacher, pastor, neighbor, coach, etc.
Stranger abductions are horrific and terrifying but they are nowhere near the top of a list of bad things likely to happen to your kids.
I would say that this is an extreme and somewhat rare example. Kids here do walk themselves to school. But this does seem to be a growing concern, hence the legislation.
In this case, Texas had protections for "free range parenting", but that only applied to CPS. The local police department still threw the book at the parents as retaliation.
I think people need to realize that police departments themselves have a hand in propagating these myths. Terms like "sex trafficking" are loosely defined and used freely to convey a danger that is almost completely fabricated - that children are abducted off of their own lawn by complete strangers.
The reality is that the vast, vast majority of both child abductions and sex trafficking are done by people the children know, and completely unrelated from each other. And few of the these cases are actually solved by police!
And yet we are all victims of a kind of PR ruse intended to steer resources to a specific set of government agencies tilting after hypothetical problems.
First, the media needs a sea change towards not making parents hysterical. We've seen this happen in waves ever since there was mass media (D&D, satanism, metal, gangs, etc., in my personal lifetime) but this is the first time I think it's actually caught on as a cultural standard for something like 2 decades straight.
Second, social media needs a sea change towards not making parents hysterical. I think that's where the 2 decades straight came from.
Since neither media nor social media will change anything that lowers their viewership, that means the audience needs to reject the hysteria. That leads me to the third thing.
Third, California needs to explicitly adopt play outside laws, and free range parenting needs to become the normal standard in Hollywood movies that -don't- involve kids falling into drugs or other trouble, and -don't- portray the parents in question as overwhelmed or neglectful. As a country, we seem to take a lot of our impression as to what's "right" from California, particularly for parenting and other age-related things, irrespective of local laws.
I think CA adopting the laws may happen eventually. They don't conflict with our normal legal standards for parenting. I think it'd just have to be an explicit and well-publicized adoption to spark much of a landslide elsewhere, much like with CO and recreational cannabis.
I think it's smart to frame this as an anti-poverty issue. People often imagine "suburban" families falling victim to overreaching child neglect laws and enforcement. In fact poor children are separated from their families for reasons of child welfare far more often than non-poor kids. (Of course, this ends up affecting black families disproportionately.) Families are being broken up in the US for the crime of being poor.
Editing to add a link to a study detailing "Drivers of Inequalities among Families Involved with Child Welfare Services: A General Overview" for folks who find the Bar Association's article to be limited in scope.
I recently moved from a very low average income city to a very high average income city. In my former city it was nearly unheard of for children to unsupervised, despite most people having large families, because there was a very real concern about kidnapping/human trafficking and other issues (and this concern wasn't unfounded, this city made national news for masked men in a van grabbing multiple children while their parents were holding their hands in a Walmart parking lot and bailing).
In my new city, I see 7-8 year old kids outdoors playing without any significant supervision in the neighborhood and allowed to walk to school on their own or walk/scooter to a friends house. It's a stark difference. There are complex issues here, and a lot of nuance, but on its face this made a statistical truth really obvious to me, which is that socioeconomic status nearly directly correlates to physical safety and crime rates. The simple truth is that the high average income city is just a much much much safer place for anyone to exist in, to walk in, and this includes children.
I feel like every time this issue gets discussed, there's always people ignoring the socioeconomic factor, and worse, pointing it out is taken as a blanket attack on poor people.
I remember reading a news story about a poor single mom who was renting a room in an extended stay and working in a pizzarea across the street from it. She left her 9? year old alone in the room so she could work. Cops show up and take her kid and arrest her for child endangerment. They made it illegal to be a poor single working mom.
They made it illegal to be a single mom and not provide adequate childcare. Many families have both parents working, so the situation of needing to find someone to look after your child is not unique to single parents. That said, this is one of the reasons raising children on your own is more difficult.
I'm a recent immigrant to the US, and when talking to locals I need to bite my tongue to not say "for the land of the free, you sure have an awful lot of rules".
As much as America prides itself on their freedoms, they have rules that would baffle most developed countries. And at the same time they are incredibly loose in other contexts, such as safety and quality control e.g. substances that are banned in the EU are legal here.
After living in the US for 20 years we moved our family home to New Zealand as the kids were starting high/middle schools (11/13) - largely so that the kids could be independent - take the bus to school, hang around down town with their friends after school, learn how to use a map, navigate a city space in their heads etc etc we now have (20 years later) smart independent adults making their way in the world, some of their primary school friends back in the US are still living at home
This seems like a reasonable proposal to protect parents against subjective interpretation of the law. Responsible parents should be able to gauge the capabilities of their children and give them Independence based on that was capabilities opposed to fear of third-party criminalization
The problem is that there are busy bodies that will involve third parties, possibly with good intentions, but still.
For example
> But people have very different ideas of what “proper supervision” entails (as you know if you have, say, a spouse). One parent lets their kids play outside at age 6, another not till 12.
My kids play outside on their own now. At 3 and 6. My 6 year old has been doing so since about 3. Once she could follow basic rules (ie: dont go there).
At their current age we let them ride bikes in the street even, with the older in charge and both having to get well off the road the minute they see cars.
we watch them from the window but the point is to avoid intervening or helicoptering and allowing them to explore and be independent.
In fact we have to limit some media/shows that portray the parents as toys (ie: Bluey) because we notice it tends to stunt their independence and skews their overall expectations of a parent child relationship.
The Let Grow organization is doing more than just protecting parents. It's advocating for a parenting style that leads to more resilience in the next generation that will be voting, making and enforcing laws, and directing the future of this nation and humanity in general.
A big perpetrator of this is the designed environment surrounding car culture.
I moved somewhere where there's plenty of foot traffic, specifically so my kid will walk/bike to school and that is seen as completely normal.
Most Americans do not understand how horrible car dependence is for personal independence, yet defend it to the end for some reason. It's really a shame.
That doesn't really explain the changes over time in US behavior and child Independence. The US had a very strong car culture in the '50s to '80s as well, but children would still roam the streets on bicycle and on foot
A friend was going to drop off a package at UPS, when his kid fell asleep in the car on the way. Although there are parking spaces 10 feet from the UPS store (which has huge glass windows, so he could have seen the kid the whole time), he chose not to go inside.
He had googled and discovered that it is illegal to leave a child unattended in a car in CA for any period of time. It would have taken 30 seconds in the store to drop off the package. But my buddy wanted to be law-abiding, so he waited until the kid woke up before going in to drop off the package.
When I looked it up I saw that it's an infraction (not a misdemeanor or felony), and the penalty is only $100. [1] But it could lead to CPS being called, which is a much, much bigger deal.
I shudder every time I see a thread related to this topic (child protective services making insane decisions with no oversight, because the law is vague enough to let them do so).
There's some other fundamental problem if cops and CPS were pulling these stunts anyway. Maybe some better mechanism for recourse against overreach is needed?
Something that I've noticed, though I can't say whether it's a cause or an effect (or neither) is that today's kids (including my own to some extent) are much more busy than I ever was.
I never had homework in grade school, and if I was doing organized activities, they were pretty minimal (one afternoon per week of cello lessons, and a half hour a day of practicing). Today, kids have homework starting in the early grades, and multiple extracurriculars that involve being driven somewhere. There's no time to go outside.
Also, we're not in a baby boom, so the houses with kids are more scattered. When I was a kid, there were a couple dozen other kids up and down the street, so we weren't ever playing outside alone. And we were looking out for one another, even if not precisely in the way that our parents hoped.
Aha! I think it is a glimpse into the future of the country here (Germany).
When I was young, I walked to school starting at age 6, and I walked to kindergarten even earlier. (And I played naked in the garden, in a small swimming pool with neighbour's kids (all genders).) It was also no problem to be sent to buy cigarettes, which in hindsight, I find less OK...
Today, parents drive their children to school by car, in walking distance. I don't know how they have time for that, but they cause traffic jams they then complain about.
From here, I am sure we will get a situation like in the US where parents may get into trouble if they give their children some independence.
And from there, the US now gets laws that make it reasonable again to give some independence. Which will follow here, too, I am sure.
Is this problem not a result of the mass psychosis about pedophiles and child-eating devil-worshippers that went on in the late 80's? As far as I understand it, kids were more independent prior to that period. There was a time where the news bites would have you think you couldn't walk a few feet without there being the remains of a victim buried somewhere near you.
America is an extremely peaceful place for many millions of families. There are thousands of smaller communities throughout the vast country where crime is background noise and kids can and do run around outside if they want, even today.
Some places are running untested, never before seen dev code in production trying to improve the justice system, and they virtually always make things much worse, like California is doing and certain metros around the country.
America is home to over 21M individuals with a net worth of $1M or more.
For them, America is free; perhaps more free than <insert EU country here>.
The remaining 310M exist to create freedom for the 21M. They are pacified with the propaganda of class: the "middle class"; the "working class"; the poor; the prisoners.
Each person below the peak of the pyramid is taught from a young age to fear becoming part of the level below.
Each person below the peak of the pyramid is taught from a young age that every level is rigged with a series of doors which lead directly to the basement in which they will find the good old 13thAmendmentLoophole™.
Additionally, each person below the peak of the pyramid is taught from a young age that there exist a few hidden doors on each level which lead to a secret route that goes directly to the top. These doors were initially installed by Horatio Alger Jr, but have been maintained by countless persons since. Rumors exist that John Steinbeck scrawled expletives on a few.
Since 1971 or so the the pyramid has evolved into an incredibly-slippery cone. It keeps growing and growing, but getting thinner and more slippery as time goes on. Rumors exist that it is stretching itself to Mars, but I imagine it will likely fall short of that since the cone is made from plastic.
Our relationship to actual, in-practice freedom has always been kind of... weird, considering how obsessed with freedom we seem to be. We seem more concerned with high-level theoretical freedom than with actual liberty we experience in the day-to-day, which is indeed sub-par compared to many of our peer states. And we didn't credibly try to even extend that much freedom to ~every US adult until the last quarter or 30% of our country's existence.
Instead of defunding the police we should just turn half the police force into traffic cops. Take away their squad cars, give them bicycles, and just have them run speed traps in every neighborhood.
Could it also be that in general, Americans are having fewer children so there are that many more out of touch adults out there? How many of the people reporting solo kids have children of their own?
This has got to be a big component of it. There was a thread I watched on reddit that showed a kid jumping on the trays on an airplane, it did look bad but it was like a 15 second video. Literally anyone's kid might do this if god forbid you doze off for 5 minutes on the airplane where it is more or less impossible for the kid to escape.
There were thousands of comments almost all stating how awful the parents are for not maintaining constant concentration every single second for their kids entire lives such that they weren't able to stop a kid from god forbid jumping up and down for a few seconds while mom fell asleep. It made it clear to me especially the common 20 something feels a deep sense of power to control other's children while simultaneously having no practical understanding of the situation.
In my own lobbying efforts I’ve found it very easy to get bipartisan support and things passed
It comes down to psychology and understanding people
A decade ago I would have thought getting any legislative body’s attention would be difficult, but all the special interests moved to far extremes of their parties for … reasons … to pursue things that will never get passed. They just left the center unguarded and forgot how to communicate, it seems. I understand this phenomenon is a reflection of broader society, just am surprised that it has affected “shadow organizations” or professional lobbying groups that have navigated so many political environments over time. Anyway, seize opportunity when you see it.
It is kind of addicting to alter reality in places you cant even register to vote in.
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|3 years ago|reply
"Ashley Smith, a foster dad, testified about being investigated for neglect because one afternoon his daughter, 8, was doing her homework on the front lawn. A passerby reported an “unsupervised” child (not knowing Ashley was actually inside). The upshot: “We went through a period of eight weeks of not knowing if we would continue being able to keep our children,” said Ashley."
That's just astonishing!
[+] [-] danjoredd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptonector|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tchvil|3 years ago|reply
Fast forward to spring 2020. The country is locked down. The weather is surprisingly excellent. It took me a lot of effort to leave my 8y old girl go play with her friend to the small wood nearby. Initially I even asked her to go with the dog. I could see the disapprovals of other parents I was talking to about this. But little by little other kids joined.
They had a blast. No school for months. Living in the sunny woods all day, just coming back to eat and sleep.
She's 10 now and as you can imagine a very independent girl.
[+] [-] 45453836|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bcrosby95|3 years ago|reply
That said, a lot of parents still drive their kids - the vast majority I would say. Even people who live within walking distance. It definitely is faster if you look at it in a vacuum: you save 10 minutes round trip!
And when casually discussing things with them, that's usually the excuse - they just don't have the time! They're always running late! etc. But I get a 20 minute walk out of it, and spend time with the kids talking about stuff. So to that I say: I'm multi-tasking.
Part of me thinks this problem isn't much different from the fear of child abduction: overblown. But there is something especially frustrating about the times this happens because people think they are doing something good when they really aren't.
[+] [-] didip|3 years ago|reply
Also, most states defund mental health institutions. Finally, the 24/7 news cycle covers a lot of crazy behaviors, encouraging copycats to one-up the crime even more.
Is it a surprise if Americans are more paranoid than ever?
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|3 years ago|reply
When I took the train from Shinagawa to Nishi-Ohi, I would see these tiny little girls, basically knee-high, on the train, by themselves, on the way to school.
I've talked about growing up in Africa[0], and what kinds of things we had, slithering around.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34628812
[+] [-] acuozzo|3 years ago|reply
Here's my take on the issue from 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32680201
Summary: We don't have safe roads and in most American suburbs traveling by car is often the only reasonable option available.
[+] [-] api|3 years ago|reply
For whatever reason this took off in America more than most other places. US culture seems very prone to moral panics and crime scares.
The fact is that the vast majority of child abuse and abduction is committed by a family member or someone known to the child like a teacher, pastor, neighbor, coach, etc.
Stranger abductions are horrific and terrifying but they are nowhere near the top of a list of bad things likely to happen to your kids.
[+] [-] certifiedloud|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legitster|3 years ago|reply
In this case, Texas had protections for "free range parenting", but that only applied to CPS. The local police department still threw the book at the parents as retaliation.
I think people need to realize that police departments themselves have a hand in propagating these myths. Terms like "sex trafficking" are loosely defined and used freely to convey a danger that is almost completely fabricated - that children are abducted off of their own lawn by complete strangers.
The reality is that the vast, vast majority of both child abductions and sex trafficking are done by people the children know, and completely unrelated from each other. And few of the these cases are actually solved by police!
And yet we are all victims of a kind of PR ruse intended to steer resources to a specific set of government agencies tilting after hypothetical problems.
[+] [-] geoelectric|3 years ago|reply
First, the media needs a sea change towards not making parents hysterical. We've seen this happen in waves ever since there was mass media (D&D, satanism, metal, gangs, etc., in my personal lifetime) but this is the first time I think it's actually caught on as a cultural standard for something like 2 decades straight.
Second, social media needs a sea change towards not making parents hysterical. I think that's where the 2 decades straight came from.
Since neither media nor social media will change anything that lowers their viewership, that means the audience needs to reject the hysteria. That leads me to the third thing.
Third, California needs to explicitly adopt play outside laws, and free range parenting needs to become the normal standard in Hollywood movies that -don't- involve kids falling into drugs or other trouble, and -don't- portray the parents in question as overwhelmed or neglectful. As a country, we seem to take a lot of our impression as to what's "right" from California, particularly for parenting and other age-related things, irrespective of local laws.
I think CA adopting the laws may happen eventually. They don't conflict with our normal legal standards for parenting. I think it'd just have to be an explicit and well-publicized adoption to spark much of a landslide elsewhere, much like with CO and recreational cannabis.
[+] [-] kyoob|3 years ago|reply
Editing to add a link to a study detailing "Drivers of Inequalities among Families Involved with Child Welfare Services: A General Overview" for folks who find the Bar Association's article to be limited in scope.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/chi...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9265799/
[+] [-] tristor|3 years ago|reply
In my new city, I see 7-8 year old kids outdoors playing without any significant supervision in the neighborhood and allowed to walk to school on their own or walk/scooter to a friends house. It's a stark difference. There are complex issues here, and a lot of nuance, but on its face this made a statistical truth really obvious to me, which is that socioeconomic status nearly directly correlates to physical safety and crime rates. The simple truth is that the high average income city is just a much much much safer place for anyone to exist in, to walk in, and this includes children.
I feel like every time this issue gets discussed, there's always people ignoring the socioeconomic factor, and worse, pointing it out is taken as a blanket attack on poor people.
[+] [-] wonderwonder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syrrim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angarg12|3 years ago|reply
As much as America prides itself on their freedoms, they have rules that would baffle most developed countries. And at the same time they are incredibly loose in other contexts, such as safety and quality control e.g. substances that are banned in the EU are legal here.
[+] [-] Taniwha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __MatrixMan__|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] croutonwagon|3 years ago|reply
For example
> But people have very different ideas of what “proper supervision” entails (as you know if you have, say, a spouse). One parent lets their kids play outside at age 6, another not till 12.
My kids play outside on their own now. At 3 and 6. My 6 year old has been doing so since about 3. Once she could follow basic rules (ie: dont go there).
At their current age we let them ride bikes in the street even, with the older in charge and both having to get well off the road the minute they see cars.
we watch them from the window but the point is to avoid intervening or helicoptering and allowing them to explore and be independent.
In fact we have to limit some media/shows that portray the parents as toys (ie: Bluey) because we notice it tends to stunt their independence and skews their overall expectations of a parent child relationship.
[+] [-] hosh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SwetDrems|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|3 years ago|reply
I grew up in places with just cars, no transit options and kids roaming free, walking and biking to school was just normal.
[+] [-] mtrower|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaysleep|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alar44|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gnicholas|3 years ago|reply
He had googled and discovered that it is illegal to leave a child unattended in a car in CA for any period of time. It would have taken 30 seconds in the store to drop off the package. But my buddy wanted to be law-abiding, so he waited until the kid woke up before going in to drop off the package.
When I looked it up I saw that it's an infraction (not a misdemeanor or felony), and the penalty is only $100. [1] But it could lead to CPS being called, which is a much, much bigger deal.
1: https://www.wklaw.com/charges-for-leaving-your-child-in-a-ca...
[+] [-] throwawaysleep|3 years ago|reply
The law is there because children cook for parents thinking “I’ll just be 30 seconds”
[+] [-] foolswisdom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jollyllama|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] analog31|3 years ago|reply
I never had homework in grade school, and if I was doing organized activities, they were pretty minimal (one afternoon per week of cello lessons, and a half hour a day of practicing). Today, kids have homework starting in the early grades, and multiple extracurriculars that involve being driven somewhere. There's no time to go outside.
Also, we're not in a baby boom, so the houses with kids are more scattered. When I was a kid, there were a couple dozen other kids up and down the street, so we weren't ever playing outside alone. And we were looking out for one another, even if not precisely in the way that our parents hoped.
It's also exhausting for the parents.
[+] [-] beeforpork|3 years ago|reply
When I was young, I walked to school starting at age 6, and I walked to kindergarten even earlier. (And I played naked in the garden, in a small swimming pool with neighbour's kids (all genders).) It was also no problem to be sent to buy cigarettes, which in hindsight, I find less OK...
Today, parents drive their children to school by car, in walking distance. I don't know how they have time for that, but they cause traffic jams they then complain about.
From here, I am sure we will get a situation like in the US where parents may get into trouble if they give their children some independence.
And from there, the US now gets laws that make it reasonable again to give some independence. Which will follow here, too, I am sure.
It is very interesting!
[+] [-] garfieldnate|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gordonjcp|3 years ago|reply
You're all going on about being the only truly free country in the world, but you can be jailed for letting your child play in your garden.
What the fuck, guys?
[+] [-] RandomTisk|3 years ago|reply
Some places are running untested, never before seen dev code in production trying to improve the justice system, and they virtually always make things much worse, like California is doing and certain metros around the country.
[+] [-] acuozzo|3 years ago|reply
For them, America is free; perhaps more free than <insert EU country here>.
The remaining 310M exist to create freedom for the 21M. They are pacified with the propaganda of class: the "middle class"; the "working class"; the poor; the prisoners.
Each person below the peak of the pyramid is taught from a young age to fear becoming part of the level below.
Each person below the peak of the pyramid is taught from a young age that every level is rigged with a series of doors which lead directly to the basement in which they will find the good old 13thAmendmentLoophole™.
Additionally, each person below the peak of the pyramid is taught from a young age that there exist a few hidden doors on each level which lead to a secret route that goes directly to the top. These doors were initially installed by Horatio Alger Jr, but have been maintained by countless persons since. Rumors exist that John Steinbeck scrawled expletives on a few.
Since 1971 or so the the pyramid has evolved into an incredibly-slippery cone. It keeps growing and growing, but getting thinner and more slippery as time goes on. Rumors exist that it is stretching itself to Mars, but I imagine it will likely fall short of that since the cone is made from plastic.
[+] [-] yamtaddle|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] MisterBastahrd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanobjc|3 years ago|reply
Oh look its literally illegal to be independent.
If you have kids this is both a relief and the source of the problem isn't exactly a shock.
[+] [-] hosh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itronitron|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neogodless|3 years ago|reply
Would you agree that the goal over the period from birth to adulthood should be one marked by a gradual increase in independence?
Would you agree that parents should have say in the pace of that increase?
[+] [-] angmarsbane|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notch898a|3 years ago|reply
There were thousands of comments almost all stating how awful the parents are for not maintaining constant concentration every single second for their kids entire lives such that they weren't able to stop a kid from god forbid jumping up and down for a few seconds while mom fell asleep. It made it clear to me especially the common 20 something feels a deep sense of power to control other's children while simultaneously having no practical understanding of the situation.
[+] [-] yieldcrv|3 years ago|reply
It comes down to psychology and understanding people
A decade ago I would have thought getting any legislative body’s attention would be difficult, but all the special interests moved to far extremes of their parties for … reasons … to pursue things that will never get passed. They just left the center unguarded and forgot how to communicate, it seems. I understand this phenomenon is a reflection of broader society, just am surprised that it has affected “shadow organizations” or professional lobbying groups that have navigated so many political environments over time. Anyway, seize opportunity when you see it.
It is kind of addicting to alter reality in places you cant even register to vote in.
[+] [-] insane_dreamer|3 years ago|reply