The grieving parents of a 7-year-old child who died hours after being hit by a car were charged with involuntary manslaughter after allowing him and his brother, 10, to walk home unaccompanied by an adult from a nearby grocery store.

  • OfCourseNot@fedia.io
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    3 days ago

    Yeah when I was seven my sister and I would travel laying in the backseat of the car, no seatbelts, with four adults in a car legally limited to five occupants, and they would smoke inside (rolled down the windows at least). I’m alive, and so is my sister. That doesn’t mean it was alright and we should keep on doing it.

    Parents are supposed to teach their kids to navigate the world and be sure they’ve learned before letting them loose into traffic, which these people didn’t do. Also unloading the responsibility on the older sibling(s) is something that have to stop, a ten years old shouldn’t have to carry that burden, imagine the guilt and trauma of that poor child.

    • django@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 days ago

      Yeah sure, blame the victims of horrible infrastructure. I walked myself to kindergarden, when I was around 4 or 5 years old, when I was 7, I would walk home from school.

      There wasn’t some busy four-lane-road on my way in my rural town. Four fucking lanes? What the hell?

      • OfCourseNot@fedia.io
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        2 days ago

        Living in a city, I wasn’t allowed to cross roads by myself when I was seven (some thirty years ago) much less four lane ones. The horrible American infrastructure make it even worse for the parents to let their kids go alone. Was the mother not aware of that road being there?

          • 5too@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            He’s cooperating with the cops apparently, but it sounds like it was a bystander who was checking on the other kid until their parents could get there.

    • psivchaz@reddthat.com
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      2 days ago

      Experts pretty much all agree that kids need some level of autonomy and freedom to grow up healthy. The exact level is under constant debate, and at what age things are appropriate is under constant debate. With freedom and autonomy though will come accidents. It’s an unavoidable consequence. There’s no way to be absolutely certain that a particular kid won’t make a terrible lapse in judgement, no matter how much you’ve drilled something into them. Hell, even adults make those kinds of mistakes all the time.

      Put another way, I could keep my kids very safe by keeping them in the house, tethered to an iPad all the time, unable to leave my earshot, like so many parents seem to do now. They’d be super safe. And they’d grow into the kind of inept, stunted kids that people are constantly complaining about.