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Psychologists often refer to a phenomenon called the availability heuristic. In its simplest terms, the availability heuristic tells us that people judge the likelihood of something happening not by facts or statistics or rational thought, but by the ease with which we can recall an example of its happening.
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You can’t say to a parent doing something you don’t like, ‘I morally disapprove of your behavior. You’re behaving in a way that offends my core values.’ People would think you were nuts. And so what we do is we use faulty reasoning to fabricate faulty causality to convince people of the wrongness.”
“If you make it a crime to leave a child out of your sight or the sight of a nanny or another paid professional for a second, then you’re basically saying that poor people can’t be parents.”
In a country that provides no subsidized childcare and no mandatory family leave, no assurance of flexibility in the workplace for employees, no universal preschool or early childhood education, and minimal safety nets or state-subsidized support services to parents and families, it is impossible to make it a crime to take your eyes off your children without also making it a crime to be poor. And not only does such a mind-set criminalize poverty and single, working-class parenthood, it also criminalizes Latino parenting cultures, European parenting cultures, African American parenting
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“Your view is that people who have more privilege and more power have an obligation to stand up.” “Yes, for all the people who can’t. If this had happened to anyone of color, they could have been shot in the street for doing what I did. My color is protecting me, so I have to push the envelope so that it gets out in the news that this can happen to white moms too.”
