And yet, this is where things are headed: https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/60624/young-adults-are-strugg...

Beyond whether parents have a right to do this or not, is whether or not children can grow into resilient, confident, independently-thinking citizens. And what we have is a whole generation ill-adapted to the uncertainty of life, much less becoming the leaders, voters, and parents tomorrow when we’re no longer there.

Maybe I don’t understand the distinction you made then. If you can’t distinguish them legally, then what is the difference you’re talking about? Are you saying that well-being is safety, and police can and should be able to arrest people & parents for failing to be well?

I am most definitely not saying that well-being is safety, but that it seems the way people are talking about it now conflate those. I am not necessarily talking about police enforcement (though I would not be surprised if sometime in the near future, police are using well-being as a criteria for safety). Rather, I am talking about parenting style. That is something the author of that article is talking about in the broader sense; the author of that article also authored a book about "free range parenting", and why it is needed.

Safety is something that is easier to see, though I think is still problematic. There are statutes and precedence that describes levels of safety in different context. For example, from this site (https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-def...)

> An adult caring for a child has a legal responsibility to ensure that child is free from unreasonably dangerous situations. When an adult caregiver fails to adequately protect a child, states often punish this as a crime known as "child endangerment."

> Child endangerment occurs whenever a parent, guardian, or other adult caregiver allows a child to be placed or remain in a dangerous, unhealthy, or inappropriate situation. Some states charge this crime as a type of child abuse.

Note that generally, the legal responsibility here is for the circumstances, that is, the situation external to the child. (With the original article that started all of this, the question is, what circumstances are "unreasonable"?)

But what is well-being? Well-being is not the circumstances, but rather what someone experience.. Because it is not describing a circumstance, it's not something that is as easy to observe, measure, or intervene. People can (and probably will try) to use circumstances as a proxy for someone's well-being, and as such, start using the criteria already in use for "safety" as a (poor) proxy for "well-being". Because we are using safety and circumstances as a proxy for "well-being", that scenario where police starts interpreting things that way is ... not at all surprising to me, if it starts happening. Another scenario is that police enforces child safety, but it does nothing for the child's well-being.

More broadly, our society had been fairly poor about taking "well-being" into account. Setting aside the well-being of children, we also have the well-being of students, employees, livestock, family, community and ecology. Our society is setup to organize resources and means of production. Year after year, people are less and less able to participate in their own well-being, and even more importantly, less able to participate in the well-being of the community they belong to. Despite that, there are greater call for "well-being" popping up in news articles or comments from people.

Well-being is how well a living system is capable of ... well, living. If a living system is unable to live, it enters into a degenerate spiral, and dies. This isn't just the physical or biological, and includes emotional well-being and mental well-being. (There's a lot more to explore from here, such as the mental health epidemic of teenagers and young adults going on right now).

Furthermore, living systems are anti-fragile (up to a point). They grow stronger with a certain level of stress. To put it in a different way, trees grow strong because wind will occasionally shake it. The trees that grew in Biosphere 2, having grown without wind, are all fragile.

I'm not advocating you deliberately go out and shake the tree, or put a child in stressful situations. Life will already do that, naturally. And one of the best ways to do that, is to let a child have the opportunity to be independent, where they have to figure things out for themselves. My view on this is that, my job as a parent is not to remove and erase all risks, but rather, curate the environment of any catastrophic risks. The kind where a child cannot easily recover from. You gradually open up the environment to greater challenges as a child grows into their own ability to handle them.

That is difficult to do when child endangerment laws and the ways interpretation of "safety" has been shifting.

Neither of us were there. There are people who genuinely believe in this kind of safety of children.

I've read other articles like this before, and I happen to agree with this author and what this author advocating for. This goes beyond whether parents have the right to let kids go and walk on their own. It has a lot more to do about raising kids that can gain gain the kind of resiliency, grit, self-confidence, independent-thinking from being able to do stuff on their own. My kids will need to be able to do that when they grow into adults, because I am not always going to be there to be their safety net. One day, I will die, and it is their turn to make choices, to vote, to navigate their own lives, and to help raise the next generation.

So besides just advocating for changes in laws, there is a lot more to this kind of parenting than being protected by law to do so, including methods for parent this way when the laws in ones jurisdiction are not necessarily supporting this kind of parenting.

There is an article that describes what happened, which included the department officially stating the event was over-reach.

Maybe some people do think children shouldn’t be allowed to walk outside, and maybe those people are causing us to raise children ill-prepared for adulthood. I did not question whether such people exist, what I questioned is your conclusion that the existence of such people suggests the police were justified. The police should not be those people, and they do know better institutionally, even if individual officers overstep. The U.S. police force has no legal basis for threatening or arresting parents when kids are unaccompanied, there’s no law requiring parents to accompany kids, whether or not there is concern for their well being. Which is why their department admitted they made a mistake…

Hahah, good one.