Its amazing how absolutely adamant America is to refuse to hold parents accountable for all shit they are actually responsible for with their children, but are willing to throw the book at the parents if the kid goes outside and anything happens to them as a victim.
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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"Why don't kids ever play outside anymore?!"
Headlines:
going outside for fresh air also hasn't been a thing in a long time. I went to abandoned farmland in europe before and there were still butterflies and grasshoppers but you dont see that in north america any more, just powdered cancer blowing around the tarmac.
Yeah you definitely do see that in North America. Just because you live in the middle of urban sprawl and suburb hell doesn't mean everyone does.
Can we stop glamorizing Europe? For fuck sake Frankfurt Germany looks like Detriot's heroin addict cousin and there's villages that look like Gary Indiana threw up in a liter box.
where I grew up and some select cities from my childhood throughout canada there were all sorts of flying and jumpy grass critters. These days in the same areas there are rats, flies, and mosquitos, if anything at all. Maybe the odd sickly owl that the outsiders that took over the region dont care about. If you do see any desirable creatures they are sparse and nowhere near the look anywhere see twelve populations of the old days.
and I'm not trying to glamourize europe but when I go visit family it's been the same year after year trying not to step on grasshoppers, bees, and butterflies while my home becomes more and more empty apart from eroded concrete and car bits.
U must be a city boy. Out here in the mountains of New England we have nothing but fresh air (at least since the smoke from Canada has blown away ...) I have butterflies and fireflies and crickets and grasshoppers and frogs singing all the time
You don't even need to be in the mountains of New England. We're right outside one of America's bigger cities and within an hour drive of two more, and we have butterflies, frogs, raccoons, foxes, etc.
What grand jury permitted these charges? This is insane. The driver should be arrested not the parents.
If it goes to trial. The prosecutor will threaten to stack an enormous number of charges unless they agreed to to a plea bargain.
That's awfull,
I am not from America, am from UK.
Currently reeling from the ill-advised amendment to the Online Safety Act.
I could see situations where the "security" theatre of ID based age verification could cause parents to let their guard down too low and get in legal trouble for negligence.
I happen to be a software engineer by trade, i feel no software can protect people from bad decisions they want to make willfully. (Without a strict régime of oppression/surveillance enforced)
You can mitigate accidental exposure with local filters though. (But those are readily available on many routers, even at the technical level(that you don't nessesarily see) its just a list of domain names to block/allow).
The question I always ask people when they have greviences about a political problem is: "What are you going to do about it? 🤔"
There is probably some advocacy group this political issue cited.
Any Americans or others here who care about this a lot, should reach out to them and/or contact their representative directly.
I am sure many people know this, I was busy focusing on recovering from the lockdown's and serious health issues when all this amendment was mentioned in Parliament. (Not that this is an excuse for not utilising my expertize till this when its bit late)
Where I live its pretty quiet when politicians say its to "protects the children" with no reasoning how it does so and amendment involves information technology, which many people understandably find difficult to navigate.
Many of my family still upload their passport or driving licence now despite what I warned.
Guess I just have to keep quiet to them about it unless something bad happens like identity theft or worse. (Then I help if they ask, but it just sucks).
Am glad that our votes in UK are least are paper only votes. (I don't think our democracy could withstand long-term large-scale computerized voting)
Just some food for thought. Goodday, from across the pond to my American folks hot on this story, and to everyone else. 🙂
Our electronic voting still create paper ballots.
Bullshit of the highest order. Why is there no common sense? What the hell is wrong with these people, adding tragedy to tragedy? Why is the answer always to throw somebody in jail, which serves less than no purpose for anything except maybe in the case of serial killers and crazed murderers? And for this... Bloody fuck.
They get kick backs from the prisons. It's really that easy. Everything these people do, they do it for profit. Simple as.
Hold up, let me go check the parents' race real quick
Edit: ooh, mixed race! Quite possibly the only kind of couple the US "justice" system hates more than black couples!
In addition to the other guy mentioning private prisons and kickbacks, you have prosecutors with win quotas and you have police who all too frequently see everything in black-and-white in their application of the law. After reading the article it sounds like the former reason.
Fuck anyone (and there's a lot of them) who think kids shouldn't be allowed to walk and ride bikes or scooters or play outside. That the parents should get anything but condolences from this is absurd.
So if I walked home but on my way got hit and killed by a car, I would've committed suicide?
"North Carolina is about average for national pedestrian deaths. But in the United States, that average is bleak, three times that of the rest of the developed world. The death toll of Americans on foot rose by 58 percent in the decade leading up to 2022..."
"A common response to the death of a jaywalker — whether an adult or a child — is to blame the victim: Why didn’t the boys cross at a traffic light, less than five minutes away?"
23 months ago a unhoused pedestrian was killed in hit-and-run just around the corner from me in a place I walk for exercise multiple times a week. It blew my mind when I fully considered how few people (especially officials) care when a pedestrian is killed. Sure enough when talking about it with family one of the first things I heard was "What was she even doing near the road" I mentioned the bus stop was only a couple yards away.
I was hit at a crosswalk a year before that by a lady pulling out from stop sign in traffic but at least she was coming from a dead-stop. I watched another guy one or two years ago roll off of some college kids hood because he was crossing at a crosswalk and the kid just made a left turn directly into him... -I'm beginning to think pedestrians need better protections from careless drivers, and I reside in what's supposed to be a more pedestrian friendly town already.
(The driver faced no charges.)
🙄
This is America. This is not Trump's America, this is America.
Americans, when Trump is dead or when the civil war ends or how ever you get rid of his orange ass, this is America that needs fixing.
The 76 year old driving an S.U.V. faced no charges.
It doesn't look like they should. If a kid darts out into traffic and you can't stop in time, why would you get charged? The charge against the parents is ridiculous. If anything the rage should be against an environment that makes walking to a place so dangerous for anyone.
Even if I'm trying to tone down the fuckcars rhetoric...
If a kid darts out into traffic and you can't stop in time, why would you get charged?
If you can't stop in time, 90% of the time it means you were either speeding or not paying attention to your surroundings, and your negligence/incompetence caused a death.
It is absolutely absurd that the parents are being brought before the court to determine liability, but the driver is not.
The speed limit was 45 mph (72 km/h) and there was no crosswalk at that location; there are trees in the median obscuring the driver's view. A map is helpful: Google | OSM.
From context, the kids probably lived in the neighborhood to the southeast. The driver would have been eastbound, and would have just passed the Lyon street intersection, which has traffic lights and crosswalks. There is no sidewalk on the south side of Hudson boulevard at this location, so it's reasonable she wouldn't have been expecting pedestrians.
I can't see assigning criminal liability to anybody here. The infrastructure sucks.
People want to be angry at as many people as possible. Thank you for the actual information.
My father is in his mid-70s, and a better driver than many of my friends. And the hatchback he drives is often defined as an SUV.
While I find myself agreeing with the sentiment here most of the time, judging without fact is getting more and more common, unfortunately.
I can't see assigning criminal liability to anybody here. The infrastructure sucks.
The liability should fall on the licensed engineer who negligently approved the design. The street was literally incomplete and should never have been built that way in the first place.
The street was presumably designed to the standards adopted by the city and state. We probably shouldn't update the street design standards by punishing engineers who follow the existing standards; a legislative or regulatory approach is suitable here.
This is also why it's so important for adults to cross safely at crosswalks to set a good example for children in poorly designed suburban hellscapes. I cringe so hard every time I see some random idiot pushing a stroller across three lanes onto a raised median when there is a crosswalk 20m away.
Yes, we should design infrastructure better, but we also need to understand that what we have now is incredibly dangerous, and we need to set an example for children every time we interact with it.
Totally agree, the ignoring of crosswalks is terrible, I've seen this lead to accidents in my luckily very walkable town before. Kids do what they see.
What if they weren't speeding and the surroundings contributed to a line of sight problem for both drivers and pedestrians. As mentioned in the article.
I can think of many places in my own area where a car could be going slower than the speed limit and someone just jumping out from a median would give no time at all to react. It's absolutely a car-dominant infrastructure problem.
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Let's play the colors game.
What color is the child? You guessed correctly!!
What color is the DA? You guessed correctly!!
The same DA did not press felony charges for a man who left his gun out for two kids to play with, one of them ending up dead.
Been shown a lot lately because it's been relevant a lot lately.
Yeah this is some DA bullshit, nothing to do with the story.
Throw all the charges at people and get them to plead to a lesser crime they also didn’t do. If you can make headlines with it, why you’re in line to be a judge or governor or whatever your shriveled evil heart desires.
The father's black, the mother's white, the prosecutor is a Republican, and this is North Carolina. And this is The New York Times, so the parents' race isn't even mentioned. Wouldn't know it's a mixed marriage if the paper hadn't included a photo, but you can bet District Attorney Travis Page knows.
But they did show several photographs of the parents throughout the article.
And the article is written to highlight the ridiculousness of the charges and even highlights another situation where much more leniency was provided, showing a double standard.
I felt pretty strongly the subtext was screaming racism. That can be much more effective then focusing on it.
They would certainly get more people to read it and question the situation than starting out as "Racist DA uses his role to imprison parents, blaming them for gerting hit by SUV."
You and I both know, people would stop caring once they learned the races of the child and parents.
But that way, maybe more people read a bit further, and maybe, just fucking maybe, empathized a bit before using the excuse that empathy is toxic.
Wow. I was still in kindergarden when my mom sent me to the shop to get some milk and stuff. And nobody considered this evil or criminal. Are American kids that unindependent?
The primary issue isn't that American children are less capable but that American neighborhoods are unsafe. In many suburban developments in the United States it isn't safe to walk to anywhere of interest (excepting the neighboring houses). Residential areas are often separated from commercial and recreational areas by high speed automobile traffic lanes with little-to-no pedestrian infrastructure.
They are so much less capable tho.
On top of that, most Americans drove SUV or straight up trucks (disguised as pickup). Those are so high that most people hit cannot roll over it and straight get the blunt force and die
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I really miss when the phrase, "Look both ways before you cross the street," was drilled in every kid's head. Now, I just see so many people (especially teenagers with living next to a high school) completely ignoring where they are walking, ignoring the signs/signals, with all their attention on their phone.
Then we have the new law (at least in California) that says pedestrians don't have to use a crosswalk if they think it's safe to cross. 9 times out of 10, they don't bother looking until maybe thay are halfway across.
Are y'all not telling your kids to look both ways? It's still very much a thing where I live. Maybe people don't cross roads with their kids in more rural areas so they are missing that experience?
I'm pretty sure they covered it in my kids elementary schools too. They have a walk to school day each year and empathize safety.
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jesus christ. what kind of of dystopian times are we living in? I'm only in my 40s and this would never have happened when I was growing up. in fact the opposite was more the norm. kids being monitored 24/7 was just not a thing like it is now.
how could such a dramatic change happen so quickly? and why?
Because your (our) generation has some horrifying groupthink going on. We invented the helicopter parent, even if we personally think it’s stupid.
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"Gaston County’s district attorney, Travis Page, has not explained why he brought such high charges"
North Carolina? I suspect we all know the answer to that one...
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The high bail seems particularly cruel in this case. The purpose of bail is to ensure the defendant comes to court to answer for the charge, which these parents seemed inclined to do given they want to regain custody of their other children.
Community rhetoric aside for a moment, I cannot imagine hearing one of your children tell you over the phone their sibling was struck down in front of them. How traumatizing for them all.
How lovely to deal with your kid being run over and then get charged with a crime. There's no guarantee it would have not happened if they were there, too. Would the driver be at fault then?
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