Although most of the men I know are actively afraid to interact with children who they don’t know because they are perceived as dangerous when they do so.
This is the big problem. Being a parent is an experience of being constantly judged by everyone. What’s worse is that our society does so little to actually help parents. The choice of 9-years-old for this law is presumably a reference to the woman who was arrested for letting her child play in a park when she went to work. That woman was making a choice between paying rent/buying food on one hand and hovering over her child on the other. That’s the kind of life-and-death decision that parents have always had to make, and a parent shouldn’t be punished for making it. Instead, maybe we should realign our fabulously rich society so that we don’t have people choosing between those two things.
The fact that we aren’t doing that shows that as a society we don’t give a shit about kids. What we care about is oppressing poor people.
@PrestonSturges made this point really well while discussing a kid being arrested for an English assignment:
The gun issue is just one example. There are tons of people out there making the lives of children worse in the name of looking after kids.
