My sister and I were roaming the neighborhood all day during the summer holidays from the ages of about 7 and 6 respectively. We met a slightly older kid two blocks up the street who taught us how to ride two-wheeled bicycles!
I know. The world is apparently a safer place these days, it’s heartbreaking to hear that a twelve-year-old has never really been out climbing trees and catching frogs without adult supervision until now. 
Worrying about your kid doesn’t have to come from a rational place. It’s what you do with the worry that can affect your relationship with your child, and your own sanity. If I’m not worrying that the bogeyman will snatch him, or a heroin dealer will ask him to “just hold on to this backpack” I worry that the pack he travels with will pick today for him to be the outcast or that the girl he likes will break his heart. It takes work but I do try and recognize what worry is legitimate and what is crazy.
The other piece of the puzzle is that you should trust that you’ve raised your daughter to use good judgement. Or more realistically that the inevitable lapse in judgement will be along the “what did you do to your hair?” lines rather than the joining a cult lines.
When my son, who turns 13 this week, is heading out I make sure he knows what my expectations are as far as when to call or come home. I try and leave him mostly alone, but like for him to call when there’s a major change in the plan from what I’ve been told.
He’s very anti tobacco, and also very into being law abiding. He says he’s aware of some kids who claim to have used drugs in his middle school, but he’s never seen any drugs in person except when the state trooper came to health class with the drug show and tell presentation.
Me too. Babysitting at 11, in other people’s homes, until late at night, maybe midnight or 1 a.m. Held responsible for other people’s children.
I was told that my parents were too busy to take me to the mall, so the bus stop was pointed out to me. I figured out how to use my babysitting money to pay my own bus fare and then later learned how to transfer buses and go all over town with zero supervision.
My dad would call me (in the summer) on his break at work and ask me to run an errand for him. “Could you ride your bike down to the bike shop on 4th Street and pick up a new inner tube for me in this size?” The bike shop on 4th Street was smack in the middle of the ghetto. My dad sent me, unsupervised, on a ten-speed, through busy city traffic, into the ghetto to buy him an inner tube with my own babysitting money (which he reimbursed). Our dentist was only about 4 blocks from our house, so I used to ride my bike to the dentist by myself, pay the co-pay out of my babysitting money and get dad to reimburse me later.
So, no, I don’t think you should worry. You will, because you are a mom, and that’s pretty normal. I am 41 and my mother still worries about me being out late at night by myself. :rolleyes: But you could also turn around your thinking and pat yourself on the back for helping your child gain independence and self-sufficience so that when she’s fully grown, she will be able to take care of herself and you will be very, very proud of her. Once she comes home so you can get some sleep. 
Wow. Your mom didn’t care at all or want to know the names of the friends or any details? I don’t think I could have gotten away with even a day apart at age 13 without any notice or explanation, and I didn’t even have super helicopter y parents!
They’re probably out hooking. (I keed, I keed!)
To add my voice to the others saying not to worry, I babysat until the wee hours when I was 12 and, in the summer, was pretty much outside from morning to dusk without my mom knowing exactly where I was. Yes, this was quite a while ago, but still.
My nephew was molly-coddled by my sister-in-law and never allowed to do anything without her knowing exactly what and where he was up to. Now that he’s 23, he’s pretty much clueless because he never had the chance to learn common sense stuff on his own. It annoys the never ending crap out of me.
Hell, I don’t even bother with the flimsy pretext. I call, she answers or calls back within 5 minutes or she loses the phone and roaming privileges. Her mother (different household) doesn’t have the consequence. Funny, the girl seems to get better reception when she’s staying with me. And the calls go:
Me: It’s me. Where are you right now and who are you with?
Her: At XYZ with SomeBody
Me: Take a picture of SomeBody flipping you the bird/doing a handstand/crossing her eyes (something that won’t be in her phone inventory) and send it to me.
Her: Compliance.
Busted her the first time though. 
After that, I told her I really just want to know where she is and who she’s with. Not to see if she’s being obedient, but just so I know where she is and who she’s with in case I need to know. I’ve told her that my job is to advise her how to not get hurt and then let her get hurt, but no so hurt she gets dead. If I interfere with her actions I’ve got a good reason and it’s better than, “Because I said so!” I think she respects that.
This method will not work on all kids. I’ve got 3 more right behind her I’ve got to figure out.
Speaking of the roaming freedom my dad allowed me…
They knew there were only so many places I would go and those would include wherever my friends were. At 12-15 or so, the only places we’d be would be: on the roof of the elementary school that was a few blocks from my house, the bank parking lot where we rode bikes and made out in the drive thru (one block from my house), or one of maybe three city parks that were all within 4-6 blocks from the house. My dad had been known to jump on his bike and ride around to see if I was where I said I’d be. After catching me being true to my word and not catching me doing anything I shouldn’t (never caught me making out!), he dialed back the stalking.
If I had permission to be wherever I was, I didn’t see the need to lie. So I was basically a good kid and did what I said I would do. Until about 15 or 16 when my friends and I started driving and we were a lot more difficult to track down. Then I was expected to call in if I wasn’t going to make curfew (which was a very reasonable midnight). Once, I was expected to go to the high school football game and then come straight home. Only my friends wanted to go for ice cream. So I called Dad and asked if I could do that. He said, “Sure, but only if you bring me a quart of Rocky Road on your way home.”
Sometimes freedom has a high price. Sometimes, freedom costs only the price of a quart of ice cream. 
When I was a 12 year old boy I wandered about town on my own. And we didn’t have phones. My parents worried. After one particularly worrisome outing I got yelled at a lot and have since called in to my parents every few hours. 36 years later, my parents in their 80s, they are starting to regret wanting to know what I am up to all the time. But habits are habits. In short, be careful what you wish for.
Times have changed here in the U.S. It’s not as safe as it once was to have kids wandering about. Girls especially do get abducted and killed, even ones older than 12. At the very least, I would want to know exactly where they’re going and when they’re coming back. They should also be well trained on what to do in case of trouble, being wary of strangers, etc. I’m surprised at the nonchalance of the responders here. “But nothing ever happened to me” doesn’t mean it never happened to others.
I know, right? At our old house, there wasn’t anywhere to go and do stuff like that. Just miles of other people’s houses, on steep, curvy roads (not good for bikes). No public transport. All her friends lived at least a couple of miles away. She never went anywhere unless I drove her. She would walk around at our old place, but be back within half an hour, because there wasn’t anything to do. Never saw kids playing in the streets.
This new place is much better. Park and school within walking distance, friends in the same neighbourhood. If we move again, that will be something to look for - is there anything for the kids to do in walking distance.
Times have changed, yes. Parents have gotten more paranoid and overprotective. There is far more, and more sensational, news coverage of rare stranger abductions (of white kids anyway). Meanwhile, actual rates of violent crime have gone down significantly from their peak in the early 1990s, when I was 8 years old and out on my own.
Cite, please.
Indeed. I was checking crime statistics for cites to this very thing. A table of crime rates from 1990 to 2009 shows violent crime rates down approximately 30% (rape) to nearly 50% (murder) since 1990.
That’s not an entirely fair comparison, since 1990 was a peak year for crime, so I took a look at a longer range, found in these charts, which are based on the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. They show that the 2009 murder rate was the lowest since 1965, and actually lower than the rate in 1960. Rape statistics make for a less favorable comparison; the 1990 rate of forcible rate was the lowest since 1976, and substantially higher than the rates in the 1960s. I speculate that changes in the reporting of rape have influenced that, but I don’t have any data to back that up.
The U.S. is a safer place to live than it has been in decades. That doesn’t mean you should throw caution to the winds, of course, but allowing yourself to be misled is bad, too–especially if it results in freedoms, whether of a child or of a nation, to be curtailed in the name of “security”.
I had a mom who liked to interrogate me, and I really resented it.
As a consequence, (provided we adopt) I think I’m liable to go ahead, get the GPS mapping feature for the child’s phone, and then just let them go wherever, advising them to not do anything stupid, and call 911 first, then me, if they get in over their head.
No drugs/alcohol/tobacco, no stealing, no gangbanging, you get good grades, you do your share of the housework, we’re good.
Matters of appearance are best strictly left to the child, until such time as they head out the door for a job interview.
In my day (the 70s) kids wandered all the time. I think part of it was there was nothing really to do around the house. I mean your parents were there so why would you want to be?
There were no video games, TV was at most 7 or 8 channels IF you lived in a big city like NYC or Chicago or LA.
I recall the 60s case about the missing kids in Adelaide Australia and I heard about that in America in the 70s, so it’s not like this kind of thing never happened in the old days either
Given that FBI stats are saying that it pretty much safer now in the u.S. than it was 20 years ago, I’d say NetTrekker’s stats are mostly Snopes fodder.
According to FBI statistics, Florida is enjoying it’s lowest crime rate in 39 years, Phoenix, Brooklyn, and even L.A. is ranked as the safest city that has a population of 1 million or more. Crime rates vary based on location clearly, but overall 2004 America’s crime rate was roughly the same as in 1970 and 2005 was the safest year in three decades, way better than when I was a kid.
ETA: Violent crimes are still going down, but slower than in the 90s, but homicide rates have kind of hit a plateau and are no longer dropping. So I suspect many of the people who think today’s U.S. is more dangerous than when we were kids, are confusing all the violent crimes the see on Law and Order SVU with real life.
See, that’s what I wonder: how are kids getting socialized these days? I guess, being confined to quarters, they’ve learned to dig in with technology (video games, internet). And next thing you know, you have college student who think it’s cool to video a guy having sex and spread it all over the net. But hey, at least they’re physically safe.
NetTrekker, you were asked to provide a cite to prove your assertion that:
Posting a single instance of an assault on a girl does not indicate that it is not as safe as it once was.
At least you know who she’s hanging around with. I’d worry more if she were on the internet talking to god knows who.