Why not?
You’re going to need to produce a cite for that if you want us to believe it.
I could buy that if you look at where sexual assaults occur, more will occur at home, in school, or in church, than in parks. But that is not at all what you claim. You will have to produce statistics for how many hours all children spend in parks, home, school, and church and then determine the number of assaults per child-hour in each of those locations.
Florida mom arrested after letting 7-year-old walk to the park alone
Kid’s familiar with the (half-mile) route, he rides his bike that way to school, he wears a mobile phone around his neck, he checks in with mom…
:rolleyes:
This is crazy. I have an 8 and a 10-year old and I give them fairly free reign to go to school on their own, go to friends’ houses on their own – anything within a mile is not a concern to me. I could be arrested and jailed for 10 years for this???
Like others have said, when I was 8, I would go out and bike around a 5-mile radius from my house for HOURS on end. “Be home by dinner” was the rule.
I guess this is out of the question:
Sometimes I wonder. I mean sending a twelve year old to war to be a drummer boy is probably too far - but have we swung too far the other direction and raising kids who by nine and ten can’t be trusted to not hurt themselves over the course of an afternoon alone. What are these kids going to do when they head off to college at seventeen and eighteen?
There ARE kids who do need supervision as tweens or teens - there are adults who need daycare too. But the majority of our kids should be able to be home alone for several hours by themselves at nine - if we couldn’t we wouldn’t have survived as long as we have as a species.
My parents used to leave my twin and I alone all day long during the summer when we weren’t scheduled for day camp or grandmother visits. We didn’t die.
However, we weren’t left at a park all day along. For the most part, we stayed in the house behind a locked door. If we got bored, we’d get on our bikes and ride down to the candy store or to the library or to the park, but there would usually be neighborhood kids with us. A bored kid all by herself is a kid at risk. Being stuck in a park all day sounds like a recipe for tragedy, so I don’t blame people for being concerned about this.
Arresting the mother isn’t the solution, though. How about giving her a warning in exchange for enrolling her daughter in a subsidized summer camp? Our judicial system doesn’t have a mind or a heart, it seems.
Up front: I was born in 1961, and grew up in New York City.
When I was 9, there were COUNTLESS days when my Mom would tell me and my brothers “Go play in the park, and come home at dinner time.” Or “Go ride your bikes, and come home when it gets dark.”
Nobody thought my Mom was negligent. ALL the Moms in the neighborhood told their kids the same thing. NOBODY thought twice about it!
I start to wonder now if my Mom would get arrested if she were raising us today, or if Social Services would take us away from our unfit mother.
When I was 9, my school was 2 miles away. I sometimes walked rather than take the bus. I also spent many hours playing in the woods. Or on equipment and partially-constructed houses at building lots. Or reading a book somewhere outside. It’s sad to think that these activities might be considered neglectful today.
Well at least she wasn’t arrested for living where the legislators and enforcement officers are so incredibly stupid.
Change the location, and that matches my life.
Yep. I walked to my elementary school, 1.2 miles away, starting in 1st grade when I was six. It’s what you did.
As for playing… ‘Come home when the street lights come on.’
Good god, my mother would have been shot for what she allowed us to do when we were growing up, without cell phones!
This is crazy.
We didn;t even have a land line at our house until I was in high school.
I think this is the issue. If no other moms are telling their kids to go to the park all day long and she is the lone kid there it is going to stick out as weird and potentially unsafe. If all or even half of the moms in the neighborhood were sending their kids out like this no one would bat an eye.
:eek: My mother would have beat my ass if I played at construction lots or on equipment being used to build houses. If your mom really did allow you to go play at empty construction sites I would call that at least a little negligent. Not badly so and certainly not an arrestable offense, but still very unsafe.
All the kids in my neighborhood growing up played where they were building the new houses. Starting with dirt clod fights when they dug the basement and continued playing there until they added the doors and windows so we couldn’t get in any longer. We also sat on the back hoes and pretended to drive. Nobody ever got hurt more than a minor scrape, bruise, or splinter.
Climbing a tree was unsafe, swinging on the rope swing over the creek was unsafe, riding your bike down a steep hill and over the home made ramp at the bottom was unsafe… it wouldn’t have been much of a childhood without all of these.