US boy, 11, held for shooting dead eight-year-old neighbour

[crazy canuck]

At 7 I was spending all day long outside with no adult supervision. The rule was to come home when the streetlights came on.

The most important rule.  Don't be late for supper.  That is what would really get one in trouble.

[Barrister]

At 11, there is a chance that they can be taught compassion and consequences, if he doesn't yet have them. He's not going to learn either in jail. There's hope that he will grow up and make himself a fully functioning contributing adult. This is not a hardened criminal. This is a boy who made a horrible mistake.

The youth justice system has a lot more options than merely sending a kid to jail.

[Malthus]

I even played hookey for the first time in Kindergarten (the evils of giving a child freedom).  And I certainly knew what I was doing was wrong.  I just didn't fully appreciate how easy it would be to get caught.    Good learning experience.

I read that as "hockey". 

But yes, I too walked to school from a young age in the early '70s. Everyone did, pretty much. There has been a general social change away from that, which is unfortunate; but it isn't happening in isolation - one of the things we used to do as kids was ride our bikes everywhere after school (until dinner) without supervision - and without helmets. No-one wore a helmet, people would have thought that an unbelieveable affectation (and would certainly have got you called a "fag" - another thing that has changed).

[dps]

I never know whether to laugh or cry about the way most people view children nowdays.

I think it's the culture of fear.  The media is much more interested in reporting about the kidnapping of one child by a stranger than about millions of children that went home alone safe and a little bit more independent.

Oh, there's no doubt that a lot of the changes in attitude in the past 25-30 years have been driven by the media.

I think it is being driven by a bunch of factors. A major one I think is a lower birth rate. When you have 4 kids, you simply can't schedule them the same way as you can if you have 1. People are on average having children later in life, and so have more cash - again, leading to more scheduling. With more scheduling comes less free time and more supervision. Then, people are more concerned about safety *generally* - not just about kids. Helmets, seat-belts, cigarettes - attitudes towards all of these have changed.

Our communities have changed, too.  It's not so much that they're more dangerous, but that there's simply not as much community as there used to be.  For one thing, there were a lot more stay-at-home mothers when I was a little kid.  So we might have been playing outside without any direct adult supervision--in my neighborhood, once you learned to walk, you pretty much had the run of the neighborhood--but what I didn't realize then was that someone was watching us from just about every house.  A house where there wasn't a stay-at-home mom there probably had a grandparent or neighborhood busybody that was watching us.  And they communicated with each other.  My mom and I lived with her parents;  when I had been out playing and came in for supper, they knew exactly where I'd been, even though my mom had been at work and my grandparents might not have actually seen me personally since lunchtime.

And the bigger families you mentioned helped with that, too.  The 12 year olds helped watch the 10 year olds; the 10 year olds helped watch the 8 year olds, etc.  And since it was a community, that applied across family lines, so even though I was an only child until I was 7, I had older kids watching me--and I was expected to help keep an eye on the younger kids.  This wasn't formal--I wasn't assigned to babysit a particular child or group of children, or told that an older kid was going to be babysitting me (I'm talking about when we were playing outside during the day here;  we did have babysitters at night if our parents were going out, but that wasn't a situation where at 6 I was being babysat by an 8 year old--the babysitters were usually in their late teen/early twenties);  it was just generally understood that we all looked out for each other.

We had more freedom, but we were sort of given more responsibility, too, which probably made us be more responsible.

[MadImmortalMan]

Our communities have changed, too.  It's not so much that they're more dangerous, but that there's simply not as much community as there used to be. 

Sort of. The neighbors are a lot less likely now to look out for the kids and lend a hand. But they're a lot more likely to snitch to the authorities about everything they see.

[dps]

I am more terrified about having CPS called on my ass than the 0.00001% chance of anything happening to my kids.

Mrs. Kravitz has ruined more lives than you realize.

Dang, everybody's posting fast here.

See, though, when I was little, the Mrs. Kravitzes of the world didn't rat your parents out to CPS, they ratted you out to your parent.

And yeah, nobody had bicycle helmets.  I don't know if we would have called him a fag when I was little, but if some kid had worn a bicycle helmet, we would have probably beaten him up and taken his helmet and thrown it in the creek.

[Maximus]

Ah the good old days.

[Barrister]

Fuck.  You all sound like a bunch of nattering old men.

[crazy canuck]

Our communities have changed, too.  It's not so much that they're more dangerous, but that there's simply not as much community as there used to be. 

Sort of. The neighbors are a lot less likely now to look out for the kids and lend a hand. But they're a lot more likely to snitch to the authorities about everything they see.

Thankfully that hasn't been my experience and we have always had old school neighbours who have also believed it is perfectly fine to have kids playing outside without supervision.  We even had a complaint from someone further down the road that there were too many kids playing on the street. 

[Eddie Teach]

I didn't wear a bicycle helmet, but I'm sure I would have been tolerant and respectful of those who did. Ok, make that blase or oblivious.

[Savonarola]

Fuck.  You all sound like a bunch of nattering old men.

[Valmy]

Fuck.  You all sound like a bunch of nattering old men.

Child Protective Services today, where did it all go wrong?

[Admiral Yi]

I didn't wear a bicycle helmet, but I'm sure I would have been tolerant and respectful of those who did. Ok, make that blase or oblivious.

Are you slightly younger then the 2nd tier oldsters on the board?  That could explain the different attitude.

When I was a kid I didn't know what a helmet was.

[Eddie Teach]

DPS and Malthus? I'm pretty sure they have at least a decade on me.

[crazy canuck]

I didn't wear a bicycle helmet, but I'm sure I would have been tolerant and respectful of those who did. Ok, make that blase or oblivious.

Its funny, only the cool rich kids had helmets when we were kids.  They looked cool and we all wanted them.  But what parents with limited means would buy that kind of thing just so their kid could feel cool. 

Probably the best evidence for Malthus' point.