Hi, I appreciate the article. I think this persepctive is helpful for urban planning; We say iphone's are well designed because toddlers can use them, so the same can be said of a city. It's well designed if a toddler can navigate alone.
However, I think your general stance that childhood freedom is ideal, and people who call CPS on children outside are 'ridiculous' is wrong.
You argue that the abduction rate in America (350 children/year kidnapped by strangers) is too low to justify our extreme caution, and the American and Japanese rates are close enough to not account for the difference in parent behavior.
I'll just bite the bullet here. 350 children/year is a very large number considering how high the stakes are. Go to the "list of kidnappings' wikipage and sort by age. Kids are abducted, raped, tortured and murdered often enough. From an EV perspective, getting kidnapped is so terrible that the small proablilty is dominiated by the huge negative value.
It more plausible that the Japanese system actually is worse wrt child safety (the abduction rate is higher after all) because they are not accoutning for the tail risk properly and letting their kids roam.
We should focus on teaching kids independence whilst having full supervision, not opine for the good ol' days when kids were 'free'.
Child abduction rates are tricky. Only a minority of cases involve strangers, with a large portion being family or partner disputes. Not knowing the ratio of the two between US and Japan makes it hard to make a case that more free range childhoods actually play a role. The key part of Japanese free-ranging is that neighbors watch out for kids, essentially being proxy eyes and ears for the parents. So, are they really unsupervised?
But let's assume that it is the case that Japaenese culture leads to more abductions. That doesn't actually put it in a different class from other risks to kids we already tolerate. We might say a kid being disabled by being hit by a car is so horrible to be intolerable, to outweigh the conveniences of car-centric neighborhoods. Or consider the heightened risk of death from driving our kids around in general. Or from having backyard pools. Or... Nearly every small probability risk to kids is catastrophic to parents. I have two kids myself, so I'm plenty familiar with thinking about them.
But since we can't feasibly eliminate all of these, we end up prioritizing based on our values and ideas about what makes for a good life. There's no objective answer. I would accept the tiny risk of abduction (assuming we can cut down the risk from cars), if my kids got to enjoy half the freedoms that I enjoyed as a kid. That's not mere nostalgia, but my view that minimally supervised time is important for growth. I'm sure you might disagree, but I bet I could find things you like that also poses risks to children. The grounds for some of these getting considered normal and others a matter for CPS can often be pretty arbitrary.
I agree, my argument was predicated on that the kids are indeed unsupervised, so if we had a culture where we trusted others to be proxy guardians, not to be threats, it would reduce risk for sure, perhaps to a collectively realized threshold of acceptibility. I think the japanese system falls under the rubric of "focus on teaching kids independence whilst having full supervision", so were on the same page I think.
The dynamic we face is analogous to a "pascals mugging' [1], which is the thought experiment where if a crazy guy walks up to you and says he's a God and controls a whole parallel universe with millions of people, and if you don't give him a dollar he will torture all those people for eternity. The probablity of that being true is vanishingly small, but the magnitude of the harm is so large that it could dominate that small probablity. Should we give him the dollar?
You would argue against giving the dollar since he can arbitrarily increase the magnitude of the harm, so it commits you to giving him anything he wants. In our case, that style of argument commits me to bubble wrapping children.
However, this doesnt apply because the probabilty and magnitude of risk are finite and knowable for all scenarios where a child could be in danger. I agree that there is no objective best answer here, all we can do is appraise the risk and probabilities, and make a value judgement based on our risk tolerance.
The difference in our opinons is I think you're underestimating the harm and overestimating the benefits. The worst kidnappings _are_ a different class of harm than accidents from cars or pools. People generally believe that kidnapping, raping, and murdering children is not worse in a linear sense wrt other crimes, its completely off the chart. Maybe thats irrational.
Moreover, Im also skeptical of the benefits. As Gen Z, I was highly supervised growing up and I dont think it was that big a deal. I'll have to think through that more carefully.
And as you said, child abduction rates are very tricky so the probabilty is hard to peg down.
We opearting in the same framework, so changes in those variables could change my mind.
Fair points, Adrian. Deciding which risks are worthwhile and what freedoms are most important is what is to be a parent. And certainly it's more than just risk x magnitude of harm. There's a certain almost unquantifiable "dread" to kidnapping, no matter how rare.
I tend to push back against philosophical thought experiments for these issues, because I think we mostly feel our way through them. My desires for my kids can't be a totally rational decision, because most of the numbers are unknown, and even if I did know them, statistical averages don't necessarily translate to the complexity of an individual's life. I could think my kid would be the lucky one, or I'd teach them some self-defense, or I might give them a GPS device to turn on in an emergency, or... But for someone else, the "What if's?" will keep them awake at night, even if to me it seems like an unreasonable worry. We see the same problem for issues like nuclear power, climate change, or the pandemic.
So, we're inevitably stuck at trying to reconcile people's diverse risk perceptions within a single society. My main beef is that the more "bubble wrap-y" thinking tends to result in social or legal sanctions against more free range parenting. In contrast, free range philosophy don't necessarily impinge on parents who do want to more closely supervise their kids. No one gets CPS called on them for driving their kid to school rather than letting them walk. So, there's an asymmetry at play on top of the philosophical dispute.
Hi, I appreciate the article. I think this persepctive is helpful for urban planning; We say iphone's are well designed because toddlers can use them, so the same can be said of a city. It's well designed if a toddler can navigate alone.
However, I think your general stance that childhood freedom is ideal, and people who call CPS on children outside are 'ridiculous' is wrong.
You argue that the abduction rate in America (350 children/year kidnapped by strangers) is too low to justify our extreme caution, and the American and Japanese rates are close enough to not account for the difference in parent behavior.
I'll just bite the bullet here. 350 children/year is a very large number considering how high the stakes are. Go to the "list of kidnappings' wikipage and sort by age. Kids are abducted, raped, tortured and murdered often enough. From an EV perspective, getting kidnapped is so terrible that the small proablilty is dominiated by the huge negative value.
It more plausible that the Japanese system actually is worse wrt child safety (the abduction rate is higher after all) because they are not accoutning for the tail risk properly and letting their kids roam.
We should focus on teaching kids independence whilst having full supervision, not opine for the good ol' days when kids were 'free'.
Child abduction rates are tricky. Only a minority of cases involve strangers, with a large portion being family or partner disputes. Not knowing the ratio of the two between US and Japan makes it hard to make a case that more free range childhoods actually play a role. The key part of Japanese free-ranging is that neighbors watch out for kids, essentially being proxy eyes and ears for the parents. So, are they really unsupervised?
But let's assume that it is the case that Japaenese culture leads to more abductions. That doesn't actually put it in a different class from other risks to kids we already tolerate. We might say a kid being disabled by being hit by a car is so horrible to be intolerable, to outweigh the conveniences of car-centric neighborhoods. Or consider the heightened risk of death from driving our kids around in general. Or from having backyard pools. Or... Nearly every small probability risk to kids is catastrophic to parents. I have two kids myself, so I'm plenty familiar with thinking about them.
But since we can't feasibly eliminate all of these, we end up prioritizing based on our values and ideas about what makes for a good life. There's no objective answer. I would accept the tiny risk of abduction (assuming we can cut down the risk from cars), if my kids got to enjoy half the freedoms that I enjoyed as a kid. That's not mere nostalgia, but my view that minimally supervised time is important for growth. I'm sure you might disagree, but I bet I could find things you like that also poses risks to children. The grounds for some of these getting considered normal and others a matter for CPS can often be pretty arbitrary.
I agree, my argument was predicated on that the kids are indeed unsupervised, so if we had a culture where we trusted others to be proxy guardians, not to be threats, it would reduce risk for sure, perhaps to a collectively realized threshold of acceptibility. I think the japanese system falls under the rubric of "focus on teaching kids independence whilst having full supervision", so were on the same page I think.
The dynamic we face is analogous to a "pascals mugging' [1], which is the thought experiment where if a crazy guy walks up to you and says he's a God and controls a whole parallel universe with millions of people, and if you don't give him a dollar he will torture all those people for eternity. The probablity of that being true is vanishingly small, but the magnitude of the harm is so large that it could dominate that small probablity. Should we give him the dollar?
You would argue against giving the dollar since he can arbitrarily increase the magnitude of the harm, so it commits you to giving him anything he wants. In our case, that style of argument commits me to bubble wrapping children.
However, this doesnt apply because the probabilty and magnitude of risk are finite and knowable for all scenarios where a child could be in danger. I agree that there is no objective best answer here, all we can do is appraise the risk and probabilities, and make a value judgement based on our risk tolerance.
The difference in our opinons is I think you're underestimating the harm and overestimating the benefits. The worst kidnappings _are_ a different class of harm than accidents from cars or pools. People generally believe that kidnapping, raping, and murdering children is not worse in a linear sense wrt other crimes, its completely off the chart. Maybe thats irrational.
Moreover, Im also skeptical of the benefits. As Gen Z, I was highly supervised growing up and I dont think it was that big a deal. I'll have to think through that more carefully.
And as you said, child abduction rates are very tricky so the probabilty is hard to peg down.
We opearting in the same framework, so changes in those variables could change my mind.
Thanks for the reply!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging
Fair points, Adrian. Deciding which risks are worthwhile and what freedoms are most important is what is to be a parent. And certainly it's more than just risk x magnitude of harm. There's a certain almost unquantifiable "dread" to kidnapping, no matter how rare.
I tend to push back against philosophical thought experiments for these issues, because I think we mostly feel our way through them. My desires for my kids can't be a totally rational decision, because most of the numbers are unknown, and even if I did know them, statistical averages don't necessarily translate to the complexity of an individual's life. I could think my kid would be the lucky one, or I'd teach them some self-defense, or I might give them a GPS device to turn on in an emergency, or... But for someone else, the "What if's?" will keep them awake at night, even if to me it seems like an unreasonable worry. We see the same problem for issues like nuclear power, climate change, or the pandemic.
So, we're inevitably stuck at trying to reconcile people's diverse risk perceptions within a single society. My main beef is that the more "bubble wrap-y" thinking tends to result in social or legal sanctions against more free range parenting. In contrast, free range philosophy don't necessarily impinge on parents who do want to more closely supervise their kids. No one gets CPS called on them for driving their kid to school rather than letting them walk. So, there's an asymmetry at play on top of the philosophical dispute.