We are raising a generation of frightened, neurotic children incapable of fending for themselves and this does not bode well for our nation.
This poll is either a load of BS, or the story is an indictment of our failed society.
OTOH, maybe it’s possible a cross-section of the US could be polled resulting in that grossly-inflated figure.
Seriously: If you consider all the Libs/Rhinos that believe more government is the answer to everything, coupled.with the fact that stupid people are now encouraged by the State to breed...then yeah...
...the poll numbers jive and it reinforces my view of the country in general.
I’m confused now: Was my comment sarcastic, racist or simply pejorative?
(THAT’s /s)
‘A whopping 68 percent of Americans think there should be a law that prohibits kids 9 and under from playing at the park unsupervised, despite the fact that most of them no doubt grew up doing just that.’
In related news, new reports show that Americans have fewer than two children and those with one or none, 68%, believe that they know what is best for children because of their extensive experience.
Damn! We got allot of wimps and maladjusted adults in the near future.
Maybe this has more to do with behavior than protection.
We are raising a generation of frightened, neurotic children incapable of fending for themselves and this does not bode well for our nation.
Amen.
I’m astonished.
If the poll is correct (and sadly, I suspect it is), it’s just another testament to how pathetically weak and wussified that America has become in this current age. It’s indeed cringe-inducing, seeing our country devolve in all these directions.
In explaining it, I’m not sure it’s specifically based on fear of crime, but just an overall psychological retrenchment from the increased unsavoriness of the culture and its surroundings. We (with valid reasons) no longer have the trust in our fellow citizens or the institutions to maintain safety in our communities. Both the social fabric and the moral order is now dead and gone.
If this poll is accurate, we are no longer a people capable of preserving and defending our liberties.
Because we no longer understand what those things are and why they are fundamentally vital and important.
I am 67 and now live in a different world from when I grew up. All the guys I grew up with all had the same incredible degree of freedom that I had.
For some reason, I have changed too. I just can’t see my grandchildren just running around the neighborhood like we did. As I said, it is a different world and that goes both ways.
By the age of 8 I could go anywhere in our neighborhood (about a 3 or 4 block radius) unsupervised.
At the age of 10 or 11 I could ride my bike with my friends to a park 17 miles away, as long as I was home before dark.
At the age of 16-1/2 I got both my parents to sign the consent forms and I joined the Navy. I’ve been I my own ever since.
The following year, they changed the law and the requirement changed to 17.
When I was 9 I would take my BB gun and my dog Sam and go miles up Barbour Creek in a flat bottom boat with an outboard engine.
I had great parents. They trusted me, even at that age, to be smart enough and aware enough to play in the “backyard”, which was several hundred acres of wilderness and a brown water creek 50 feet from shore to shore ...
Unless, of course, they just want to have sex.
In the 50’s, I and all the other kids played unsupervised. We were let out Summer mornings, and we returned (usually) for lunch and dinner.
The USA is completely different now. We don’t know our neighbors. We don’t trust people we see. The USA has become a very low trust society, meaning that it is no longer part of civilization.
People rush to their cars, rush to their destination, rush home and lock themselves in their homes.
Instead of arresting parents, how about eliminating the element that lives among us which is solely responsible for the breakdown of trust? That would solve the problem. Not putting parents in jail and putting the kids in a foster home.
This is why anyone who says who public schools are failing are 100% wrong. This is EXACTLY what imprisoning kids is supposed to produce.
I walked, most of the time by myself, from school on busy city streets to an empty house for most all my school years and lived to tell about it. No one thought a thing about it. However, by the time our kids came around, they could barely walk a quarter mile down a quiet country dirt lane to grandma’s house without the neighbors getting hyper.
With all the child abductions, the crime stats, the local hooligans, life just isn’t what it was decades ago.
Decades ago a college age woman didn’t have to be in fear of her life being out late at night with friends. Today, she better be.
The interesting thing about this topic, is what a bell-weather road marker it is. We are told crime stats are falling all over. None the less, you can’t convince me our streets are safer than they used to be.
How many people think our streets are safer? How come folks think it’s abuse to day, when kids used to be able to play dawn to dusk outside in safety.
That’s the question we should be asking, and the answer is what we should truly be confronting head on.
People aren’t happy about clamping down on their kid’s freedoms. They would like to see those kids grow up without being abducted, molested or raped. They would like to see them live.
Those are the issues I would like to see confronted.
How do we return safety to our neighborhoods? How do we get the sick people off our streets and out of our neighborhoods?
i don’t. i didn’t want my parents hovering over me. they didn’t want to either, they were working at home or at work. they actually did work around the house, cleaning, cooking, fixing stuff, maintaining things. they didn’t sit on their asses all day watching or on the internet.
Oops ... DH and I should be in jail.
Not only did we let the kids out unsupervised we also expected them to engage in stoop labor (farming, baling hay,milking cows) and even let the oldest boy drive tractors and equipment down the road starting when he was about 8.
OK ... I did get a little worried when DD was driving tractor (disking) with me for the first time, each on a different tractor. I kept track of when I should see her again coming over the hill ... when I did not I hauled @$$ over the hill to check on her.
She had parked her tractor and disk and was picking up pretty rocks. :)
That’s a good memory.
Another bad thing we do — allow the kids to shoot rifles and shotguns unsupervised. We had rabbit stew on Thanksgiving from rabbits our oldest boy shot and dressed.
I’m glad we have been able to raise them like this. A lot of parents are not so blessed.
This is a contributing factor to many people having fewer children. Forget the hype of the “it costs 250K to raise a child” argument - “it takes 24 hour supervision until they are 20” that makes people say more than one kid is impossible to handle along with work and life.
I blame it on 24/7 Cable News channels.
Last year my Grandchildren were staying with me. Several times they told me they didn’t have anything to do. I shudder to think what would have happened if I had said that to my parents.
One thing you can be certain of, they would have made sure I was not bored with nothing to do.