Across the road from our house, there is a popular little kids park with a few bits of equipment and a sandpit. Especially at these times, it has become a meeting point for the locals so that there is a bit of outdoor social distancing, but still the ability for parents and grandparents to have a chat while the kids play. Yesterday however, it started to get weird.
My daughter and I took our dog for a morning walk and I noticed a guy sitting swinging there and when we walked past again, he was still there swinging away. He looks to be in his late 50s or early 60s. At lunch, he was still there and in the afternoon, still swinging away - this was about 8 hours of some guy without kids swinging alone in the park. This morning, he was back again.
In all likelihood, it is someone with some mental health issues who is trying to perhaps get some social contact, but I have come to be very wary of these kinds of people and this particular one makes me uncomfortable. While I am all for people minding their own business, I also prefer to err on the side of caution, especially when there are children involved. As this is a quiet area of predominantly houses and neighbors who know each other, it is common for slightly older kids to go to the park by themselves unattended by an adult, as they should be able.
We do however live in a strange world and when it comes to mental health issues, a lot of the support just isn't there and there has been some terrible cases that have highlighted the problems. I just asked my wife to make a call to the police to do a drive-by and perhaps ask some questions and she was like "No, he hasn't done anything" - but should we wait until he does?
So, my wife called and the police said, "Maybe he just wants to sit outside" and won't send a car to have a word. Yeah, maybe he does - but considering this is a place of houses, he would likely have plenty of other places to get a little fresh air, rather than a children's playground. Yes, I understand that he is in all likelihood harmless, but complacency when it comes to this kind of thing is ill-advised in my experience.
I think that the reason why most people choose to mind their own business isn't because they aren't concerned, it is more that they feel that there is a social cost for being wrong - it is politically incorrect to "accuse" people just based on their appearance or how they make you feel. But, the social cost can be much lower than the real cost if something does happen.
In my opinion, children need to learn a lot about human behavior when they are young, but most parents either fail to teach or protect their kids so heavily that they don't learn for themselves. The cost of learning about outlier behavior shouldn't be through getting kidnapped or stabbed to death - but we have created a world where we do not teach our kids about how to identify strangeness and how to behave once they have. We tell them "don't talk to strangers" when strangers can be their source of protection under various circumstances, as long as they choose their stranger well - in general, if kids are in trouble they are better off approaching a woman than a man.
"How sexist!"
But, it is this kind of political correctness that gets people into trouble, as they don't want to appear rude and judgmental. Yet, this is the way we have to be and when it comes to our own safety or more importantly, that of our children, I believe that we should be willing to accept offending people and accept being offended. I personally would rather parents be cautious and risk offending me, if they think that they are doing what is right by their children's safety.
Not everyone feels this way of course, because they want to be treated as individuals, not lumped into a stereotype - which I understand - but when decisions need to be made quickly when the potential cost is child safety, heuristics are the way to go. Having the habit of "do nothing until something is done" will work out just fine, *until it doesn't.
Since our daughter was born, we have given her a massive amount of freedom to explore her surroundings as she chooses, but it has been in areas where the costs of her errors are very small. This has given her a lot of independence, confidence and I believe, has aided her skill development greatly. Exposing her to risk for her to negotiate allows her to build strategies for both the approach and the failure, strategies that she can then build upon as time and her experiences progress.
Even though she is young, one of the games we play and she really enjoys is watching people and observing what they do. She is better at this game than me and far more observant of outlier conditions, things that are out of place or have changed. In time, this will be supplemented with interactions and observations so that she can develop an understanding of how people behave in the real world.
I think that when we and our children spend so much time online and in front of screens, we lose a lot of the learning surrounding nuanced behavior, micro-expressions and physical timing cues that can indicate when something is off. This means that in the real world, we are less attuned to knowing when someone is telling the truth or, they have something they are hiding.
The screens that we watch caricature life, give us exaggerated theater poses and expressions and close ups of individual body language indicators, not the clusters of them that we would need to make a good judgement in real life. And they definitely don't support us in being able to group indicators and make split-second judgments to get a good feel of a situation. When we live life through an engineered lens, the randomness of life is hard to negotiate, even if we feel we are good judges of character and circumstances.
Many say, " I am a good judge of character" yet fail to recognize all of the times they were wrong. One indicator might be all of those who were in relationships that turned sour, but people will justify it through "they changed" without realizing that it is much more likely, that is the way they always were - they just failed to see the truth.
This is part of the learning experience of life, but do we ever learn to see clearly, do we see what we want to see or, do we see what we are conditioned to see?
Taraz
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