Pointer 5: Child safety
May. 15th, 2015 12:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI posted yesterday about hosting a friend with two very young children, and the ensuing discussion reminded me about the broader issue of how adults can keep children safe without over-protecting them. I say adults; on some level I feel I shouldn't really have any opinions on this topic at all as a non-parent. Goodness knows that parents get enough nagging from smug self-declared experts who at best know what worked for their own children or even worse just read a couple of articles on the internet and never had to deal with the reality of parenting!
On the other hand, I am politically committed to the idea that children are the responsibility of all of society, not just of the person who gives birth to them. Partly on the fairly abstract grounds that the point of having society at all is to take care of people who aren't fully able to look after themselves, but also because the great majority of birth-giving parents are women and there's massive amounts of indirect sexism resulting from assuming that mothers are responsible for absolutely every aspect of their children's welfare at all times, at best with support from their partners.
So I'm trying to step up to the plate and at least be a non-negative influence when I'm interacting with parents and children. I know I'm not great with young children (though reasonably confident with 8-12s, and teenagers generally have fewer direct needs I might be asked to supply). Also for various reasons I never did babysitting, so I've never had the experience of being the only person responsible for a child. Still, I reckon I can at least do things like take care to avoid treating children as an inconvenience getting in the way of my adult plans and preferences. Where friends have made it clear that this sort of support is welcome, I'm also trying to learn the skills of doing things like helping to keep an eye on their children. Which is mostly watching out for their safety, of course, which is why my head is in this kind of issue at the moment. I'm not very good at it, I don't have the parental trait of eyes in the back of my head and I really don't have the experience to cope effectively with more than one small child running in different directions. But like I said, I'm hoping to be non-negative, even if I can only manage 5% of the attention needed, that frees up the parents a little bit, and I'm learning.
Of course I'm not trying to make the big in principle decisions about what level of risk is acceptable for a particular child, in that I would be entirely guided by that child's parents. But in trying to implement my friends' decisions on a micro-scale I've started thinking more about what goes into the decisions. I mean, I broadly agree with the idea that children should be able to climb all over everything, and most likely what will happen is that they will experience a few falls and a few scrapes and bruises, and the benefit of fun and confidence massively outweighs that downside. Of course, there is a small risk of serious injury, and another meta-skill I'm learning is separating my intellectual assessment of risk from the emotional situation of seeing a tiny person I'm trying to help take responsibility for balanced precariously way up high.
And there's all the questions of balancing supervision with independence. At some point children have to be able to do things with no specific adult keeping an eye on them at all (though I hope that any random passer-by would intervene and help someone in imminent serious danger, but that goes for adults as well as kids.) That's less personally relevant to me, because by default I'm not supervising any random child out in public, I rarely have to make an active choice not to watch someone and check they're ok.
So this is links to stuff I think is interesting, I'm trying to avoid pontificating too much because this is lots of people's lives and I'm childfree and I really don't claim to know the answers. Another reason why I'm thinking about the question is that I have second-degree connections to the people involved in the free-range kids imbroglio, so it's being directly discussed in some of my circles. Of course there are a ton of class and race issues here, the Free-range kids business is about white-presenting middle-class people choosing to expose their children to controlled risk somewhat beyond what's the norm for that milieu. The debate looks very different when it's about single parents whose jobs mean they can't possibly "helicopter" or watch the children at every moment of every day, and who can't afford to live in neighbourhoods where it's safe to let young children wander about without an adult. Let alone parents of children of colour who are in serious danger of being killed by racists for no reason, rather than white children who are realistically at very low risk of being harmed by strangers.
There was an infamous Daily Mail article a few years back, I've come up totally blank trying to figure out what research they sourced this from, but they reported how the distances children can roam unsupervised have reduced to almost nothing over a couple of generations. And everybody seems to take this as factually true, though again, there's a glaringly missing class and regional analysis in how the roaming distance stuff plays out.
I also read a really interesting article about playground safety, which I can't now find at all, unfortunately. The gist was that kids used to play in whatever scrap of wasteground they could find, play with rubbish, set things on fire, etc, and now there are clearly delineated play areas with really really strict health and safety regulations around play equipment built to high standards, soft surfaces and so on. I wish I could find it again, because it was really balanced in thinking about actually protecting children from the risk of serious injury as well as giving them a chance to explore.
Whereas most stuff on the topic that I turned up when I was trying to retrieve that article meaningless hand-wringing about how it's terrible that children's independence has become restricted. Here's an example, by Michael Chabon, so it's at least well-written, if you skip the random gender-essentialism of the title, when in fact the body of the article has almost nothing to do with gender: The wilderness of childhood.
A much more nuanced approach comes from the wonderful danah boyd. She acknowledges that parents genuinely fear for their children, they're not just being over-protective because they're stupid and fooled by scare-mongering advertising. Because this is her field of expertise, boyd focuses somewhat on internet safety, which is again a difficult area, and one beset with un-evidenced hand-wringing. Yes, there are huge downsides to parents to be monitoring their children's internet use, and yes, the political classes use the threat of "internet paedophiles" as a way to introduce draconian censorship laws, and that's wrong. But there are also real dangers online, not just to children, but children are less well equipped to understand the dangers. Reputational stuff, making mistakes which might stick around forever and spoil their career prospects in years to come. Malicious sites which are trying to scam money out of people or take over computers for cybercrime, of course; plenty of adults fall for those, let alone children. If it were only those I'd probably be mostly on the side of letting the children explore the virtual world without anyone looking over their shoulder, but there's a real danger of being targeted by actually violent hate groups like #gamergate; I don't at all think they're averse to going after children.
I have other thoughts about protecting children from adults who actually mean them harm, now that as a society we've finally woken up and noticed that child abuse is a real problem. But I think I will set those aside, cos I have run out of time for what was meant to be a brief linkspammy post...
On the other hand, I am politically committed to the idea that children are the responsibility of all of society, not just of the person who gives birth to them. Partly on the fairly abstract grounds that the point of having society at all is to take care of people who aren't fully able to look after themselves, but also because the great majority of birth-giving parents are women and there's massive amounts of indirect sexism resulting from assuming that mothers are responsible for absolutely every aspect of their children's welfare at all times, at best with support from their partners.
So I'm trying to step up to the plate and at least be a non-negative influence when I'm interacting with parents and children. I know I'm not great with young children (though reasonably confident with 8-12s, and teenagers generally have fewer direct needs I might be asked to supply). Also for various reasons I never did babysitting, so I've never had the experience of being the only person responsible for a child. Still, I reckon I can at least do things like take care to avoid treating children as an inconvenience getting in the way of my adult plans and preferences. Where friends have made it clear that this sort of support is welcome, I'm also trying to learn the skills of doing things like helping to keep an eye on their children. Which is mostly watching out for their safety, of course, which is why my head is in this kind of issue at the moment. I'm not very good at it, I don't have the parental trait of eyes in the back of my head and I really don't have the experience to cope effectively with more than one small child running in different directions. But like I said, I'm hoping to be non-negative, even if I can only manage 5% of the attention needed, that frees up the parents a little bit, and I'm learning.
Of course I'm not trying to make the big in principle decisions about what level of risk is acceptable for a particular child, in that I would be entirely guided by that child's parents. But in trying to implement my friends' decisions on a micro-scale I've started thinking more about what goes into the decisions. I mean, I broadly agree with the idea that children should be able to climb all over everything, and most likely what will happen is that they will experience a few falls and a few scrapes and bruises, and the benefit of fun and confidence massively outweighs that downside. Of course, there is a small risk of serious injury, and another meta-skill I'm learning is separating my intellectual assessment of risk from the emotional situation of seeing a tiny person I'm trying to help take responsibility for balanced precariously way up high.
And there's all the questions of balancing supervision with independence. At some point children have to be able to do things with no specific adult keeping an eye on them at all (though I hope that any random passer-by would intervene and help someone in imminent serious danger, but that goes for adults as well as kids.) That's less personally relevant to me, because by default I'm not supervising any random child out in public, I rarely have to make an active choice not to watch someone and check they're ok.
So this is links to stuff I think is interesting, I'm trying to avoid pontificating too much because this is lots of people's lives and I'm childfree and I really don't claim to know the answers. Another reason why I'm thinking about the question is that I have second-degree connections to the people involved in the free-range kids imbroglio, so it's being directly discussed in some of my circles. Of course there are a ton of class and race issues here, the Free-range kids business is about white-presenting middle-class people choosing to expose their children to controlled risk somewhat beyond what's the norm for that milieu. The debate looks very different when it's about single parents whose jobs mean they can't possibly "helicopter" or watch the children at every moment of every day, and who can't afford to live in neighbourhoods where it's safe to let young children wander about without an adult. Let alone parents of children of colour who are in serious danger of being killed by racists for no reason, rather than white children who are realistically at very low risk of being harmed by strangers.
There was an infamous Daily Mail article a few years back, I've come up totally blank trying to figure out what research they sourced this from, but they reported how the distances children can roam unsupervised have reduced to almost nothing over a couple of generations. And everybody seems to take this as factually true, though again, there's a glaringly missing class and regional analysis in how the roaming distance stuff plays out.
I also read a really interesting article about playground safety, which I can't now find at all, unfortunately. The gist was that kids used to play in whatever scrap of wasteground they could find, play with rubbish, set things on fire, etc, and now there are clearly delineated play areas with really really strict health and safety regulations around play equipment built to high standards, soft surfaces and so on. I wish I could find it again, because it was really balanced in thinking about actually protecting children from the risk of serious injury as well as giving them a chance to explore.
ETA: thanks,
Whereas most stuff on the topic that I turned up when I was trying to retrieve that article meaningless hand-wringing about how it's terrible that children's independence has become restricted. Here's an example, by Michael Chabon, so it's at least well-written, if you skip the random gender-essentialism of the title, when in fact the body of the article has almost nothing to do with gender: The wilderness of childhood.
A much more nuanced approach comes from the wonderful danah boyd. She acknowledges that parents genuinely fear for their children, they're not just being over-protective because they're stupid and fooled by scare-mongering advertising. Because this is her field of expertise, boyd focuses somewhat on internet safety, which is again a difficult area, and one beset with un-evidenced hand-wringing. Yes, there are huge downsides to parents to be monitoring their children's internet use, and yes, the political classes use the threat of "internet paedophiles" as a way to introduce draconian censorship laws, and that's wrong. But there are also real dangers online, not just to children, but children are less well equipped to understand the dangers. Reputational stuff, making mistakes which might stick around forever and spoil their career prospects in years to come. Malicious sites which are trying to scam money out of people or take over computers for cybercrime, of course; plenty of adults fall for those, let alone children. If it were only those I'd probably be mostly on the side of letting the children explore the virtual world without anyone looking over their shoulder, but there's a real danger of being targeted by actually violent hate groups like #gamergate; I don't at all think they're averse to going after children.
I have other thoughts about protecting children from adults who actually mean them harm, now that as a society we've finally woken up and noticed that child abuse is a real problem. But I think I will set those aside, cos I have run out of time for what was meant to be a brief linkspammy post...
(no subject)
Date: 2015-06-13 09:14 pm (UTC)I tend to end up arguing with just about everybody on this topic. Background: I've worked in childcare for ten years, due to siblings with special needs and being quite a bit older than they are and thus expected to take on a more parent-like role as we grew up I have a really solid background in child psychology/neurology plus what more or less amounts to an informal ECE degree. (Which, you know: as it's informal, there's only my word I've done the actual background and work, but, well. I have.) And finally, my dad's a crown counsel, my mom's a GP and my uncle's with the RCMP child exploitation task-forces. (Which always sounds so funny to me - no, they're FIGHTING the exploitation!)
And the biggest thing that I've always taken away is, most people's assessment of both risk and their kid's developmental stage is wrong. In all kinds of directions.
Risk is the first one: my parents actually got a lot of accusations of being "helicopter parents" back in the late 90s when this was juuuust starting to be a Thing. This is because they wouldn't let me walk five blocks to go to a friend's house in the dark even when I was a teenager. (I lived in a relatively small town.) The same people who tut tutted them about this were always baffled and confused about why me and my best friend were ABSOLUTELY free to wander around together all over downtown Vancouver as late as we wanted and then to take the bus back to the ferry to go to her house on Bowen Island, at 13/14 respectively.
I myself didn't realize the context until I was older, and the context was this: my father has prosecuted an astonishing number of rape cases that happened in parking lots, in school-fields, in vacant lots, in various little bits of suburban/small-town-urban space (including in someone's back yard and that person never knew) and these were ALL features of any walk around my hometown after dark. And this was because after dark in my hometown nobody is outside. It's all Nice Residential Neighbourhoods where people stay inside and watch TV and you can actually scream and might not be heard or, if they come to the door and they can't see you, be dismissed.
Whereas downtown Van at night is full of lights, people EVERYWHERE, and a LOT of cops. You have a semi-loud argument at a bus-stop and you're going to get a whole bunch of people rubbernecking. Similarly, the bus has the bus-driver and everyone ELSE going home, and the ferry likewise and is also full of CCTV systems. There is no such thing as perfect safety, but the blunt fact is we were as safe just us two as we would have been with an adult (possibly even slightly more, because people like yourself see "two young girls alone" and pay a little bit of attention to whether or not we're okay.)
Similarly, child molesters: the stats are, your kid is in most danger from someone they know. Teacher, family member, family friend, coach, instructor, even just Someone They Know around the neighbourhood. Both my parents and obviously my uncle were well aware of this, which means I got very specifically coached: when I got the "people shouldn't touch you anywhere you don't want them to" talk (which definitely included accurate terms for genitals etc) all of those people were explicitly included.
Similarly too, my "stranger" talk was modified and focused: stay out of arm's reach; don't get into a car with anyone you don't know/trust and actually in specific cases (like if you're getting picked up and expecting Mom but someone else comes instead) don't get in a car with anyone who doesn't have the right safety word; if you're lost or scared find a mom who has other kids with her first, a lady who's alone if there's no mom, a dad with kids, and then an employee of somewhere nearby if there's no one else. Still stay out of arm's reach. If you need turn to a police officer, make them show you their badge, and don't get in a car with just one police officer (and if you explain that this is about safety your dad the crown counsel taught you, real police officers will understand). Etc.
It wasn't "be afraid of all strangers ever". And in fact the older I got, the more specific it got (we talked about how to best guess if someone was REALLY, say, a park ranger or if they weren't, what the signs of someone trying to lure you somewhere were, etc). And all of them were based on actual case precedent dad and uncle worked with.
And in a more every-day-risk sense: cuts, bruises, even broken limbs, fine - head or neck injuries? NOT fine. Most people don't realize how even minor head injuries can have lasting effects, or how little it takes at the neck to wreck the spine. Which again had an impact on what I was allowed to do, and how I was taught to assess risk myself.
And on the developmental stage assessment side, while ages in general are a good broad guide, five year old A and five year old B are NOT necessarily going to be ready to handle the same kinds of things. And you may have a brilliant five year old when it comes to reading books, but who nonetheless is still seriously crap at evaluating cause-and-effect and consequences, and being able to conceptualise the future longer than about five seconds.
And as an example, I'm way, way more firm on "no you will not climb on the things" with 2-3 year olds than I am with 4 year olds (by and large, adjusted for child). This is for a very specific reason: 2-3 year olds are much, much worse at connecting "when I did X thing last time, I fell and hurt myself, so if I do X thing this time, I will probably fall and hurt myself again, so I shouldn't do X thing". They are also utter crap at "so I should avoid X thing, and this bit over here is really SIMILAR looking to X thing, so I'll probably also fall and hurt myself if I do this thing that is very SIMILAR to X thing, so instead I will do Y thing."
Which can be as simple as where to put their foot on a climbing web. Etc. Where a kid is on those real, neurologically grounded cognitive development lines - how well they can conceptualize the future, how well they can project cause and effect, is a huge factor in figuring out where any activity is on the risk scale.
And then, finally: yes, kids used to be a lot more free to run around and do crap. On the other hand, childhood injury, death and abduction really did used to be quite a bit more common. Almost every single person I know who's my dad's age broke an arm or a leg when they were a kid; maybe a handful of my age-peers did, and even fewer of my much-younger-sister's age-peers. Another factor that tends not to get talked about in these cases is, you know: broken limbs cost MONEY, and then they tend to cost extra effort for caretaking adults. Etc.
Which, tl;dr version, in a lot of cases from my pov both sides are wrong, because they're having an argument of emotional ideology, rather than one of concrete risk and capability assessment, and because a significant amount of the risk assessment is done with the nostalgia of the past from the survivors (ie the people who were NOT abducted/suffered traumatic brain injury/etc), rather than clear analysis.
/babble