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Free Range Parenting: How to Say I Don’t Love You

03 Sunday May 2015

Posted by Paul Kiser in Aging, Communication, Crime, Ethics, Generational, Lessons of Life, parenting, Politics, Relationships

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Alexander, Child Development, Danielle, Dvora, free range parents, free-range parenting, Maryland, Meitiv, Rafi

Abandoning a child does teach a lesson: Parent's don't care

Abandoning a child does teach a lesson: Parent’s don’t care

The parent always correct. That is the basis of free-range parenting. The idea that a parent should be allowed to do whatever they want, including nothing, with their children.

I grew up in rural northwestern Colorado. The idea of ‘free-range’ is common in farming communities where it refers to animals. It means the rancher allows his animals to roam on open land, usually federal land and expends minimal personal resources on the care and maintenance of his or her livestock until it’s time to round them up for sale. The expectation is that some of the animals will be lost to predators, but the money saved by not feeding and watering them is worth the risk.

In parenting, ‘free-range’ is applied to the children of the mother and father. The concept is that children of almost any age will mature faster as unsupervised survivalists than under the care and monitoring of an adult. It is as stupid as it sounds.

Rafi and Dvora Meitiv: Children with a lack of parenting

This idea gained national awareness when Rafi, a ten-year-old boy, and Dvora his six-year-old sister were picked up by law enforcement when they were reported to be unsupervised about a mile from home. They are children of Danielle and Alexander Meitiv who believe that their children should be allowed to roam free on streets and in parks in order to learn the lessons that life offers. The parents have been charged with child neglect.

The real issue with free-range parenting is not one of parenting style. Parenting style requires that you actually take the responsibility to be a parent, which free-range parents don’t. Free-range parenting can be compared to having something of infinite value entrusted to someone, for which they go to the back door and throw it as far away has possible.

The critical issue with free-range parenting is assuming that children are born with an automatic sense of right and wrong. They are not. Children learn good behavior and they learn it from the human examples around them. Left on their own, many children experiment with cruelty and seek to satisfy baser desires, especially when one child is older and/or stronger than another child.

Parents have to constantly guide children to understand the concepts of boundaries, respect, kindness, responsibility, and humility. Often children battle against parents when told that certain behaviors and/or actions are not acceptable, but as a child matures they begin to understand that parents are acting out of love in teaching proper social behavior. They understand this, often because they see other people around them who lacked proper parental supervision and who are social failures as an adult.

A free-range parent is also setting themselves up for failure. The child will soon discover that the more they stay away from the parents, the less hassle they will experience, so the detach themselves emotionally from the parent. Once a child has found the parent to be irrelevant the opportunity for the parent to offer advice and guidance is lost forever.

9 Most Violent States In the U.S. of the Past Decade

04 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by Paul Kiser in About Reno, Crime, Government, Travel

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Alaska, California, Colorado, Delaware, FBI, Florida, Hawai'i, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Statistics, Tennessee, Uniform Crime Reports, Violent Crime

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Paul Kiser

South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, New Mexico, Maryland, Nevada, Louisiana, Delaware, and Alaska are America’s most violent States¹ during the last ten years according to FBI statistics². Violent crime is on the decline in most States; however, these nine have averaged over 600 violent crimes per every 100,000 in population in the last decade. There is an 85 point gap between the tenth highest State (Illinois) and ninth ranked Alaska, which is a significant separation considering that there is only a 116 point spread among the top nine (see TABLE 2.0.)

Graph 1.0 - The 10 Most Violent States of the Past 10 Years and other example States

The good news is that five of the of the top nine States have made major progress in decreasing violent crime during the last ten years. Florida dropped almost 255 points from its 2001 rate to its 2010 rate. Maryland and New Mexico dropped 235 and 192 points respectively. South Carolina and Louisiana both dropped over 100 points during the decade.

Four States still had rates in 2010 that were over 600 violent crimes per 100,000. Two of those States (Delaware and Tennessee) have made little progress over the decade and the other two (Nevada and Alaska) have lost ground from where they were in 2001.

Table 2.0 - 10 Year Violent Crime Averages (per 100,000 pop.)

Nevada began the decade with a violent crime rate below California’s, but the rate jumped in 2006, peaked in 2007, and has slowly declined. Despite the decline, the significant drop of other high ranked States has placed Nevada as the most violent State for the last two years.

Graph 1.0 shows the average violent crime rates over the last ten years for the eleven highest ranking States, plus five other States that are representative of borderline, middle, and low ranking States. Two of the eleven highest ranking (Illinois and California) were ranking relatively high in 2001, but dropped rapidly during the first three years of the decade and ended up with violent crime rates that were just over the United States average.

NOTES

¹ The District of Columbia was excluded from this report as it is not a State and is more representative of an urban area.

²The violent crime statistics are from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, Table 4, years 2001-2010. The information can be found at http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr.

This article first published as
Nine Most Violent States of the Past Decade
on Technorati.com

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