Babylon Bee Comes to Reason: "Confused TikTok Mom Asks for Help When Random Child Comes Over To Play With Her Kid"

See Lenore Skenazy's Reason article with that title:

A mom took to TikTok, begging for advice: "My kid was outside, another kid was walking outside somewhere, and then they stopped and started playing together."

She was baffled.

The mom went on to explain that the unknown kid was 8 years old. He was polite and seemed well cared for. He came into the house with her son, and they proceeded to play video games all afternoon. The polite, nameless boy didn't leave for six and a half hours.

That was the issue.

Comments

[Magister]

Clueless mom consults TikTok rather than ask the kid anything, and there's little enough information that we can each conclude that whatever is bad is due to the political leaning we most dislike. Brilliant post!

[Roger S]

Maybe the boy carried a cell phone with a location tracker. Maybe Amazon cameras with face recognition were reporting his activities on a regular basis. In the future, electronic surveillance will be so good that the possibility that a child might have some unsupervised play will no longer be a problem.

[Nige]

1. Before social media, if she was puzzled by the appearance of a child she didn't recgonise playing with her kid, she'd just have picked up a phone - people getting snotty because social media exists.

2. Like most half-decent parents wouldn't want to know who their kids are playing with - people getting snotty about fairly normal parenting that is most definitely not new, being one of those things every parent has to learn how to navigate.

3. Also normal to worry about the fact that you are suddenly responsible for a kid you don't know while they're playing in your garden. Some people wouldn't worry very much about it, some people would. So what? Most of that evaporates once you know where they live and have said hello to the parents. Claiming any of this is new and different is ridiculous. There's greater awareness of how vulnerable kids can be, especially out on their own, but that's unavoidable.

4. Singling out someone for ridicule for doing something that really isn't that noteworthy - you think you're better, smarter, cooler and more clued-in than this woman for using a social media platform that you are also using, albeit in a much nastier, toxic, more cynical way. What blowback is being directed at this woman for doing something innocuous beyond being mocked by complete strangers on political websites?

5. Yes, also, why the FUCK is it news? The answer has nothing to do with modern parenting or even the fact that journalism has been utterly degraded by cost-cutting, layoffs and reliance on clickbait. Stories like this would have made it into tabloids and been used as filler in broadsheets and provided fodder for dumb opinion pieces even back in the heyday. Anyway, well done to no less than two Reason by-liners for propogating it that little bit further.

[John Rohan]

It’s an anecdote about how sheltered and isolated people are from real humans these days because they are much more used to social media. And how they excessively worry about their kids so much, they end up harming them more than helping.

When I was a kid, I would often be gone from the house for hours in the summertime, it was no big deal. And no one had cell phones then. Sometimes I would meet new kids and play with them. That was part of the adventure of being a kid.

[TTT]

Like most half-decent parents wouldn’t want to know who their kids are playing with

Or, she could have done what most parents would have done in the pre-internet days. Ask the kid and called his parents.

Lenore Skenazy's thing is "Free Range Kids". People panicking over things that were normal a generation ago.

[Archibald Tuttle]

In the summer, I live in a RV park in Vermont. It is lots of fun to witness the altered relations between parents and kids in the park.

Because the speed limit is only 8 mph, kids roam the park without supervision of parents. They get around on foot, or bicycles, or pedal carts. They meet other kids, usually the same age and gender, and form alliances; one might call them gangs.

We have an antique fire truck that gives kids rides, and it always attracts a posse of 6-8 truck chasers riding bikes.

Anyhow, the part that makes it so fun for the kids is the lifting of adult supervision and worrying. They thrive on it.

One reason most of the parents allow it is that they were once the kids in this same RV park 30-40 years ago, and they remember how it was for them.

I see this as evidence that modern kids would gladly form their own social networks and social norms if only the parents would leave them alone.