Broncobilly: Children's Safety and Liberty Lenore Skenazy

lunedì 15 febbraio 2016

Children's Safety and Liberty Lenore Skenazy

Children's Safety and Liberty Lenore Skenazy

Lenore Skenazy: l'ossessione sulla sicurezza dei piccoli si è spinta troppo in là, nella cultura come nella politica (dai prodotti alle resp. famigliari). Insegnare a prendere dei rischi fa parte del processo educativo...
Anthony Green: con la sicurezza dei bimbi nn si scherza: abbiamo fatto grandi progressi e tornare indietro sarebbe deleterio...
James Swartz: le multinazionali dei giocattoli tendono a trascurare la sicurezza se non incalzate. Appena si molla il punto un malefico trend s'innesta...
Joel Best: due fatti hanno modificato il ns atteggiamento sulla sicurezza dei bimbi: 1) i media con le loro storie allarmanti e 2) la bassa natalità che rende ogni bambino più prezioso
...........lead essay**************
Smothered by Safety By Lenore Skenazy

politician, principal, or bureaucrat wants to score points, he or she lets us know that kids are even more precious—and endangered—than we thought.
explosion of new laws, products, and policies to protect them from, well, everything: Creeps, kidnappers, germs, grades, flashers, frustration, baby snatchers, bugs, bullies, men—all men are pedophiles until proven otherwise—sleepovers, toys from China, and/ or the perils of a non-organic grape.
Which of the following did NOT happen this past year?
(A.) Local licensing authorities outlawed soap in pre-school bathrooms for fear that children might suddenly start drinking it.
(B.) Unaccompanied children under age 12 were banned from the Boulder, CO, library, lest they encounter “hazards such as stairs, elevators, doors,
(C.) The Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a recall of certain fleece hoodies sold at Target because of lead paint on the zipper,
(D.) Children under age 18 were prohibited from gathering on the streets of Tucson, AZ, for fear they might “talk, play or laugh”in groups, which could lead to bullying.
(E.) A New Canaan, CT, mom was charged with “risk of injury to a minor,”for letting her 13-year-old babysit the three younger children at home for an hour while the mom went to church.
(F.) A Tennessee mother was thrown in jail for letting her kids, aged 8 and 5, go to the park without her, a
(G.) A Hazmat crew was summoned to Seminole High School in Florida after a science student brought in a mercury thermometer.
Il libro. Gever Tulley, author of 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Kids Do).... objects and activities can be reclassified as dangerous when seen through the worst-case-scenario lens.
federal playground safety guidelines propose removing “tripping hazards, like tree stumps and rocks.”
If to a hammer everything looks like a nail, to a government agency charged with protecting children, everything looks like a health threat, death trap, or predator.
Michigan mom had to come fetch her children—12 and 15—from the police station, after she’d expected them to walk home from the library. The library staff decided it was too cold to make the kids do this (the kids had walked there without coats).
charged with “risk of injury to a minor... she allowed her seven-year and 11-year old children to walk down to Spruce Street to buy pizza
The message to parents? The government is better at raising your kids than you are. The message to kids? You are weak little babies.
onlookers now routinely call 911 when they see kids waiting in cars, usually because they are convinced that one of two extraordinarily rare tragedies are happening all the time. The first is children dying from hyperthermia, which DOES happen—but mostly when a parent literally forgets the child...
Onlookers also worry that any children on their own will be instantly kidnapped,
in the “real world,”stranger abductions are so rare that if for some reason you actually WANTED your child to be kidnapped by a stranger, do you know how long you’d have to keep your child outside, unattended, so that statistically the abduction would be likely to happen? The answer is about 750,000 years, according to author Warwick Cairns. And after the first 100,000 years or so, your kid isn’t even cute anymore.
In its Zero Tolerance intolerance, it criminalizes any parent who refuses to engage in what I call “worst-first thinking”—
When rational parenting decisions become criminalized, parents are forced to think irrationally.
As law professor David Pimentel explains in his Utah Law Review article “ Criminal Child Neglect and the ‘Free Range Kid ,’” this is the way over-parenting becomes the law of the land:
Law professors Gaia Bernstein and Zvi Triger noticed something similar: In several divorce proceedings they reviewed, the parents who could prove they were the most over-involved were the ones awarded custody.... The authors even found lawyers instructing their clients to obsessively text their kids all day, in order to leave a digital trail to document their pestering. Thus helicopter parenting
The problem seems to be that because nothing is 100% safe, almost anything the commission sets its eye on is fair game for censure.
In 2010 the government warned consumers to stop using—and stores to stop selling, and manufacturers to stop making—all cribs where the side drops down to make it easier to get the baby out. The reason given was that over the course of the nine preceding years, thirty-two children died in such cribs.... Those odds do not mean that the product is inherently unsafe. It means that drop side cribs are vastly safer than stairs (1,300 deaths per year), much safer than eating (about 70 kids younger than 10 choke to death on food each year), and waaay safer than driving your kid in a car (over 200 baby and toddler deaths per year).
a world with zero risk is also a world with zero anything,
***********riassunto***************
LEAD ESSAY Smothered by Safety by Lenore Skenazy
Tesi: we have gone too far in the pursuit of safety at all costs.... it’s time to start learning to relax... allowing kids to take controlled risks
Ambiti. Cultura. consumer product regulations... criminal law.
Safety: More than Tree Stumps and Toe Mold by Anthony Green
It is not an overreach to call the police if you see a child alone in a locked car;
Child Safety: The First Priority by James A. Swartz
multibillion dollar corporations that make children’s products have a responsibility
Corporations are often indifferent to children’s safety.
The Roots of Concern about Kids by Joel Best
Perchè tanta paura?
mass media, which excels at spreading alarming stories,
declining birthrate, coupled with increased safety itself:
As a result, smaller problems appear more alarming.
CONVERSATION
Skenazy...
La regola è la nuova religione: prima dopo la disgrazia scattavano le preghiere, ora scatta la leggina. Cosa sia più razionale lascio a voi decidere. L'esempio del bimbo dimenticato in auto e morto...
Incidenti. Se vuoi spaventare usa i numeri se vuoi capire usa la percentuali. I proibizionisti fanno un grande uso dei numeri. Esempio: nell'ultimo anno 10 bimbi morti dimenticati in auto negli USA (orrore). Ma si può davvero regolmentare con un rischio del 0,000000146%?...
Quanto vi fidate di voi e dei vostri figli? E quanto vi fidate del regolatore?…
Green...
Non sembra vero che i rischi per un bambino sono così diminuiti. Gli incidenti stradali che feriscono o uccidono un minore sono ancora troppi. Non si può stare con le mani in mano...
Quanti bimbi bisogna sacrificare prima che sia lecito intervenire con una legge? Ebbene, il buon genitore è sempre informato e sempre al lavoro x la sicurezza dei suoi bimbi...
Swartz...
La vita dei bimbi trascende le percentuali. Non dobbiamo evitare i numeri anche se ci fanno paura...
La nozione di rischio accettabile ha poco senso. Accettabile x chi?…
IMO: "accettabile"x la comunità esercitando il buon senso. Poi ogni genitore può e deve lavorare sul suo specifico rischio accettabile...
La libertà ha un valore conoscitivo? Ma i nostri ragazzi nn sono cavie!...
IMO: tutti noi siamo cavie: la vita è un'esperienza (esperimento) la libertà la rende sensata sia per noi che per gli altri...
IMO: la prevenzione comprime sia la libertà che la conoscenza...
Best...
Green e Swartz mi confermano che l'anelito alla sicurezza nn è una finzione creata ad arte da un regolatore avido di potere...
Gli incidenti automobilistici sono ancora un grave problema? No, sono clamorosamente calati, anche se restano la prima causa di morte. Non si può far finta di nulla. Certo potremmo portare i rischi vicino allo zero istituendo un limite di velocità di 30 all'ora...
L'analisi costi/benefici non è mai neutrale sui valori. Il valore della vita e quello della libertà si confrontano di continuo...
Green
......
In Regulation We Trust By Lenore Skenazy
But how do we leap from “don’t forget to lock”to “never leave a child alone in a car”? Especially when we all know that we spent at least a smidgen of our own childhoods waiting in the car while mom ran into pick up the prescription, or dad paid for the gas?
Regulation is the new religion.... the struggling heart makes a leap of faith not to God’s great, unknowable plan, but to a more modern belief: The belief that if we just pass enough laws, we can prevent anything
As a nation we went on the hunt for hidden dangers, found them all around, and demanded change.
the safer our society becomes, the more we obsess
Come spaventate? ... cites 31 children dying in cars last year (the majority of whom were forgotten there, not simply waiting out a short errand). That’s heartbreaking.... that’s 0.000000149% of them... Should we really be regulating parental choice based on percentages like these?
you want to scare someone, use numbers. If you want to put things in perspective, use percentages.
Laws exist to make society reasonably safe. They cannot make us completely safe without making us completely unreasonable.
Halloween Myths Vanish with Facts By Anthony Green
kid is on average twice as likely to be hit and killed by a car on Halloween than any other day
real child safety efforts are based on research and facts and data, and not myths
It’s not right to say that auto crashes (resolved by seat belts and booster seats) is a smaller problem.... Car crashes have been and remain the number one cause of unintentional death
Children’s Lives Are More Than “Percentages”By James A. Swartz
For me, as well as parents of children who have been maimed or killed and countless other concerned citizens, holding accountable those who manufacture and sell defective playthings for our nation’s children is no laughing matter.
in Ms. Skenazy’s view, speaking about individual children, or numbers of children... is not appropriate because it might “scare”
acceptable risk. Acceptable to whom?... Certainly not to those of us who believe we can and must do better... lab rats.
focus must be on prevention,
The Importance of Proportion By Joel Best
the primary impetus for child safety does not come from meddling officials, but rather from private advocates, like Swartz and Green,
everyone involved in this conversation approves of improving the milk supply, promoting vaccinations and antibiotics,
“It is not right to say that auto crashes …[are] a smaller problem.... false. In 1966, there were 50,894 traffic fatalities; in 2010, there were 32,788.... U.S. population grew by 55 percent,.... The number of deaths per million miles driven dropped from 5.5 to 1.1.... I suppose we could cut traffic fatalities to nearly zero—establishing a national 5 mph speed limit... we have progressed enough
Swartz questions whether it is “acceptable to lose just one precious child”; on the other, Lenore Skenazy argues that saving that last life may involve costs that outweigh the benefits. Such a debate is not between facts and “myths”—it concerns values.
Applying Cost-Benefit Engineering to a Kid’s Life Is Just Wrong By Anthony Green
The Audacity of Seeking to Prevent the Preventable By Anthony Green
Trying to Outlaw Fate By Lenore Skenazy
Values and Consistency By Joel Best
This Is How a Concerned Citizen Thinks By James A. Swartz

Eccetera