Don't make your kids walk to or from school

[britchard]

Christ. I walked a kilometre there and a kilometre back each day, for year on year. Even at 6,7,8,13 years old I preferred walking to school. I wonder if it's the over protective parents or lazy kids.

 

[Nalka]

I wonder if it's the over protective parents or lazy kids.

The one is the product of the other.

 

[SteveMcMahon]

Are the incidents that provoke these panics real? Yes. But they're one in a million. Still, the media makes the exception seem like the rule, creates "trend" stories which get picked up nationally, and all hell breaks loose.

And the media's eager complicity in propagating these moral panics is only going to get worse.

When I was a boy, there were only three or four channels on TV, and newspapers were a viable business. The media wasn't necessarily less prone to sensationalism - the satanic child abuse scares were a particular low point, with lots of gullible journalists hoodwinked by "experts" - but there was a lot less media, and the people employed in it were actual journalists and editors with experience in corroborating facts and making sure a story would "stand up" before they published it.

It didn't stop them from being biased, or mendacious, or just plain wrong. But it did provide some degree of quality control that has almost evaporated from today's media.

Take the satanic panic, for example: though a lot of journalists disgraced themselves by jumping on that bandwagon, it was also partly due to the efforts of proper journalists willing and able to do old-fashioned stuff like check facts and follow up on stories that the thing was, belatedly, exposed as a malicious hoax cooked up by a bizarre coalition of Christian fundamentalists eager to expose the Devil, feminist social workers eager to expose the patriarchal nuclear family as devilish, and psychiatrists enamoured of the latest pseudoscientific "recovered memories" fad which swept through their profession like a nasty case of explosive diarrhoea.

The average Dad as described by feminists

There are many more television channels screaming for your attention now, the newspaper business is dying on its arse, and journalism is going the way of Gawker-style clickbait.

That means the media in general has less time and inclination and ability to check facts and possibly put a brake on new moral panics. If trained, experienced journalists could fall for incredible stories about satanic ritual child abuse in 1984, how much less likely are unpaid Huffington Post bloggers in 2014 to uncover the truth? Especially when the truth is boring or complicated and your audience can find a more dramatic take that confirms their prejudices and stokes their righteous rage, just one mouse click away?

We see this in action today: the media would have you believe that American university campuses are in the midst of a rape crisis far worse than anything seen in Soweto or Somalia. One in five female college students is being raped right now, people!. And probably by snooty 1% lacrosse players or Biff from Back To The Future.

50's game.

A child with a 12-year-old's understanding of statistics would suspect this is, in fact, bollocks. But stopping to think for a moment doesn't help get eyeballs on your TV show, or clicks on your website. So people like George Will who express scepticism about Rapeageddon are shouted down and the media continues to direct its narrative to the limbic system of our brains. In today's news, fear! Rage!

 

[R Smoov]

I see this like this, the media is a group of shepherds trying to create a new flock of sheep.

Create things to scare them, and cause them to bleat really loudly even though there's nothing actually in harms way.

"Poor little Sarah got ice cream and she was never seen again. Don't let your child get ice cream".

Now the sheep are scared and now feel they need a shepherd to protect them. Now the media has them locked, sending ads like.

"Trillions of kids get bullied each second. Dont cry, it's okay to be a pussy."

The sheep (average pussy citizen) now feeling protected will continuously follow the shepherd (media) despite the fact they are getting their wool cut off for profit.

 

[HawkWrites]

Time the fuck out. Don't let your kids walk to school? When I was little I walked without issue.

There's an entire site dedicated to letting kids be kids and going through life in responsible ways: http://www.freerangekids.com

 

[Deuce Anna Half]

There's a little neighborhood not even a quarter mile away from my kid's school, and there's a bus stop so kids don't have to walk. I thought that was weird as fuck then, but now it makes sense.