I’m pretty sure they were quoted in the novel “Disclosure” in 1994. Try there 
A man. It’s telling in itself that my statement would prompt this question.
Fair enough. And you never learned “keep your hands to yourself”?
I’m dubious at best.
But whatever, maybe it’s only something I learned, that people should not touch other people without permission. If you think it’s okay to just go up to random people and start touching them, or hugging them, or holding hands, or punching them in the shoulder, then good for you. I highly doubt women would appreciate me just coming up and giving them hugs. Or just starting an unwelcome shoulder massage. Did you see the video of Bush giving a should massage to what’s her name? She didn’t seem like it was something people are just supposed to do. Good on you if you can just start randomly shoulder massaging strangers.
I would help a lost, or supposedly lost, or crying and seemingly alone child. And by helping, I mean watching them while trying to track down an employee, or police officer, or someone. If they suddenly started running into danger, then yes, I would grab them, punches in the face not withstanding. Other than that, no, I wouldn’t hold their hand, or pick them up, or try to physically take them somewhere.
Of course it’s telling. I suppose now you are going to say that there are not different rules when it comes to children for men and women? That both men and women are treated the exact same when it comes to children?
If you were a woman, then maybe you didn’t get a copy of the super secret “How men deal with strange children” handbook
They teach kids who get lost to look for women with small children. These are pretty safe adults for lost children.
And you aren’t aware that it’s a relatively novel idea? Both with regard to children (thinks old aunt Martha grabbing and kissing the kids) and to adults (only very recently people began to think that touching someone is somewhat akin to an assault, excluding sexual touching).
Once again, what is acceptable or not is a matter of learned behavior. Going up and hug a random stranger in the street hasn’t been a normal thing to do in my lifetime. But going up and hugging a woman you’ve just met, say a friend of a friend, for instance? Falls in the “normal” range to me.
This example is totally absurd. Starting to massage the shoulder of a random stranger is totally unrelated with holding a toddler hand. You might think it’s exactly the same thing and exactly as bad, but I doubt many people are going to share this opinion. Can you address what I say instead of making up outrageous scenarios and pretending it’s exactly the same thing as what I said?
No, they aren’t at all, and it’s precisely part of the problem.
But, as I said, the current situation in your corner of the woods isn’t some universal truth that people are going to understand just using “common sense”.
Of course, for a long time there has been different expectations for men and women wrt their behavior with children. But : “when a kid is upset, you comfort him” or “when you’re walking around with a toddler you hold his hand” isn’t, or at least wasn’t, an attitude that would have been expected only from women. My learned behavior/common sense is that as a man, you do both these things.
You mean the 2005 or later edition? Or the 1975 edition I was handed when I was growing up?
I can’t tell if you are being facetious or what. Not touching people without their permission is a relatively novel idea? Really? Just so I am clear with what you are saying - Yes or no: do you think it is okay to touch people without their permission? And by people, I mean adults who are not in danger.
What’s acceptable or not is not a matter of learned behavior. Perhaps you just learned the WRONG behavior?
Well, I don’t see it as much of a difference. Punching someone in the arm jokingly, starting to rub someone’s shoulders, grabbing their knee, trying to hold their hand. It’s all touching without permission. I don’t have time to consider every situation on whether or not it’s appropriate touching. Not touching anyone without permission seems the best avenue to take. Especially when it comes to children, where some people who think all men are potential rapists, or child abductors, or whatever, may see and draw the wrong conclusion because they are morons. So, again, not touching seems the best course of action to take.
So, you hug friends of a friend? Knock yourself out. Just realize that not everybody does that, nor is it welcome behavior for everyone.
Well sorry. I guess I was wrong when I thought everyone knew not to touch people without permission from that person. My bad. Continue touching away!
Fair enough, but if a strange guy, or girl for that matter, went up to my child who was crying and started picking them up and “comforting” them, I’d be super pissed and like “What the hell are you doing? Put my kid down” But that’s me. I appreciate that you have concern for crying children though and wouldn’t just leave them alone and crying because they are “not your monkey”, so that’s pretty cool
I’ll have to check when I get home
I literally have no idea what you’re talking about. Are you being facetious when you assert that there’s some commonly-held set of guidelines that recommend that adults should not hold the hand of lost toddlers?
Like, if you said that it is commonly known that people shouldn’t smoke in bed, its easy to find groups that advise against that sort of thing. I’ve never heard that adults shouldn’t ever touch little kids in the way you seem to be talking about, so I’m wondering if this is something that I have totally missed all my life, or if this is a “everyone knows that dogs are all boys and cats are all girls” sort of illusion you’re living under.
I’m not sure what to tell you. I don’t care what you personally do. I’m not holding hands, hugging, or picking up a strange child without the permission of the child’s parent or guardian. You do what you want.
If you think people see a man holding hands with a lost and crying child the same way they see a woman doing the exact same thing, then you must live in a better place than I do.
If you are another person who thinks touching people without their permission is okay, then again I say, good for you. Keep on keeping on.
It’s totally a matter of learned behavior. To take an obvious example : if here, in France, after having a coffee together, I kiss a woman to say good-bye, it’s both perfectly normal and perfectly meaningless. If I do the same thing in the USA, it might be perceived as ignoring personal boundaries and/or as meaning that I fancy this woman.
Might be it seems so to you in your place, time, culture and education. But you can’t assume that touching someone without permission is obviously wrong on the face of it, and will or should be treated as such everywhere. Touching someone’s shoulder, for instance, is innocuous, and often the most convenient way to attract this person attention.
You’ve been socialized to consider it might be offensive, and my guess is that you’ll be unwilling to even consider that it might not be. There’s nothing magical, extraordinarily special or inherently harmful about touching someone else. You need to have learnt that it’s not acceptable to consider it so. Let’s assume you don’t know me and I touch your shoulder. What kind of harm could you objectively complain about? Your potentially negative reaction to it is entirely subjective, and presumably instructed to a very large extent by your education and cultural context.
Maybe, but not because it’s self-evident that someone should never touch a strange kid.
Do you shake hands? It’s not a welcome behavior for ZPG Zealot. But since it falls into your norms, you probably think it’s ridiculous that she would be offended. And since hugging FoF falls at the contrary outside of your norms, you think I’m behaving offensively. Maybe extending your hand towards a woman will be considered offensive in 50 years. Maybe not hugging her will be considered as offensive as not extending your hand would be now, and presumed to be intended as an offense. Maybe parents will be expected to ask for permission before touching their own kids in any way. None of these things are inherently harmful. It’s purely arbitrary social norms that tell you that such or such action will be considered as crossing personal boundaries. The only things that are going to fall under “common sense” and probably universally frowned upon are things that are objectively inherently harmful.
And yes, this concern about being touched is pretty novel. I’m honestly surprised you wouldn’t know that. In any case, you probably consider it as a progress, more respectful, etc…But it’s not obviously so. Interactions that might appear even to me as excessively invasive might be considered as normally warm in another cultural context, and not indulging into it might make you being perceived negatively. You don’t hug him/her? Why? There’s some bad blood between you, maybe?
Not touching anyone without their permission has nothing to do with being attentive to a child in distress.
anyone, and I mean anyone, who considers “all men are potential rapists, or child abductors, or whatever” are worse than morons, and adjusting your “best course of action” to defer to their dangerous belief is not only also moronic, but it’s counterproductive to society.
800,000 children go missing each year - only 115 of those are abducted by strangers. Focus on what’s important here! keep an eye on your children not the man standing next to them.
mc
Oh look, the rule changed. First it was that you don’t touch people, now you added ‘without their permission.’ Do you not understand that a constantly shifting set of rules where terms and conditions keep getting added is very much ‘jumping through hoops’? Also, I’m glad you’ve made it clear that if I see a someone passed out on the ground, I should not check to see if he’s breathing or try to wake him up. If someone has a heart attack, I should not administer CPR. That the person who said you should grab a kid who’s running into traffic is clearly wrong (though I note you haven’t said anything to him).
But maybe your excuse consider the ‘permission’ part super-obvious and I should have known it? But then you’d have to look at what I actually said that prompted the latest rule declaration:
Oh, whoopsie, did you not notice the word in red? Or do you not have any idea what ‘offer’ means? HINT: it doesn’t mean “grab someone against their protests”.
How fucking stupid do you have to be make the ‘logical’ conclusion of “You **offer **people help? Clearly you must walk around punching people”. Seriously, what kind of syphilic thought process leads from ‘offer do something nice’ to ‘must just punch people’.
And the rule changes radically again, as expected. “Gosh why do you talk about jumping through hoops, it’s not like my rule changes WITHIN THE SAME POST, to say nothing of the rule changes between posts, or the fact that different posters list different rules”.
Not according to the very basic procedure I suggested, which simply amounts to:
**1) If you find a lost child in/near a group of people, don’t try to take the child away somewhere by yourself.
- Make a big scene so that everyone in the group of people recognizes there’s a lost child there.**
None of the other complicated hypotheticals that you and k9bfriender have been putting forth alter that simple commonsense procedure to apply in such a situation. You’re just artificially elaborating the scenario to obscure the fact that this initial basic reaction is really not hazardous or complicated.
Sure, if the lost child in such a situation starts to wander out in traffic or choke on a small object or grab the hand of a stranger or get abducted by aliens or whatever, you’re going to have to adapt your behavior to the new situation, hopefully in a commonsense and safety-conscious way. But you can’t expect other people to give you specific and detailed advice to cover every single potential ramification of the situation, especially after you’ve been doing all this whining about incomprehensible complicated protocols that you can’t be expected to know.
I note that “grab the hand of a stranger” is listed in the middle of a list of highly alarming and unlikely hypothetical.
My “complicated” hypothetical was that the child starts to wander or run away from me when I start yelling. I asked what the proper procedure would be there. Should I follow the child, or should I stop the child? I do not know the answer. You did not answer. I don’t consider those to be that “complicated” or “out there”, especially compared to your alien abduction hypothetical. You consider asking about such a simple and probable development to the situation to be “whining about incomprehensible complicated protocols that you can’t be expected to know.”
Most of the hypotheticals were proposed by those on your side of this debate, in asking what I would do in various situations where the child is in immediate and obvious danger. You are correct that those were getting complicated and silly, but you are incorrect about who it was that was proposing them.
You keep talking about “common sense”, as if everyone has the exact same experiences and knowledge as you. You say that we cannot expect others to give advice on how to deal with the situation, but instead, we are just supposed to know what to do.
The protocols are not “incomprehensible”, as you say, they are contradictory and conflicting. In the exact same situation, given the exact same circumstances, different protocols are called for depending on the paranoia vs. “common sense” of the parents, which is something that is impossible to ascertain from just seeing a crying child.
“Common sense” says that if you see stranger with your missing child, they are thousands of times more likely to be assisting your child than harming them. Why are strangers who are involuntarily drafted into taking care of the children that you are not supervising expected to possess the “common sense” required to take care of the child while not appearing to do anything untoward, but the parents are’t required to have the common sense that their paranoia is actually increasing the danger to their child?
Here’s the thing, if you get involved with someone else’s child, you are getting involved with an unknown person, with unknown temperament and common sense. You may very well be dealing with a paranoid asshole like the father in the OP’s story. The reason that the “protocols” for dealing with other people’s children are contradictory, conflicting, and not common sense is that they are determined by the parent of the child, so you have no way of knowing them. Different parents will have different things that will upset them. This is why I suggest that if you wish to have strangers look after your child’s well being while you are diverting your attention to something that is more important to you, you should list the protocols you wish followed in dealing with your child in large writing on his or her back.
Strangers not wanting to get involved in looking out for the welfare of unsupervised children, and children that are afraid to ask strangers for help are both symptoms of this unfounded paranoia. This paranoia is not something that I can do anything about, but it is something that I need to take into account before I consider trying to do a good deed.
I’ve been pondering this and it is frustrating me, because what else CAN you do when you truly don’t know who might be a “bad guy”? Even if you labelled everyone who has done such a thing before (which is creepy), you still never know who might do it in the future.
And say I let my guard down and have optimism that the chances of harm are vanishingly small, and I am hurt anyway? I am then blamed for not knowing better and not taking the proper precautions.
It’s not about letting down or keeping up your guard. It’s about paying attention to what really matters not what is sensational. Approx 115 children were abducted by strangers last year (and any given year) and that is an unimaginable tragedy for those families. but every year around 300 people are struck by lightning. That’s almost 3 times as many, and yet do you worry that you will be struck by lightning?
***Every ******day *** 165 children are brought to the hospital because they’ve gotten into their parent’s medicine; that’s 300 times as many. How many medicine cabinets have been beaten up and shamed on the internet?
every day 112 people die from the effect of SECONDHAND cigarette smoke. so your baby is 300 times more likely to die because you are a smoker than because stranger danger walked off with it.
On most of the surveys I’ve seen kidnapping is at #3 on the things that parents worry about. And it’s not even in the top 100 of things they should worry about.
mc
Yeah, but it’s expected value. The chances are tiny but the outcome is devastating. I get upset thinking about parents who will never know what happened to their child, and I won’t even be having any of my own.