Just to swim against the tide, ISTM that a certain amount of helicoptering is appropriate in this situation. Your son is seven, the jerky kid is nine and (to a degree) exploiting your son a little (with the trade).
And your style is correct for your children, in your house. And when this kid comes to visit, it is correct for him as well. “My house, my rules”.
With enough persistent consistency, kids will pick up “the rules are different at Jimmy’s house” - eventually. It is probably going to take longer with this kid, because of a tumultuous background and (possibly) lax standards where he is living now. But with a kid at that age and that maturity level, it is rather like training a dog. You don’t get the treat (playing with your son) until you do the trick (knock on the door and ask, and be prepared to take No for an answer).
I don’t think you need to shut off contact between your son and him (not that you were suggesting it, necessarily) but I think all would benefit from the untroubled assumption on your part that you get to tell the kid what to do, as long as he is at your house. If he gets mouthy and tries to say, “You better hurry back” when you leave, you just respond, “No, that’s not how it works - go home until my son is done - he will come and get you when he is ready” and leave it at that.
As long as it isn’t hurting your son, it would be nice of you if you could offer this kid some kind of decent example of how normal people behave.
My youngest brother has three quasi-brothers; the four boys were born in the same apartment building in the same year; baby clothes were handed down again and again; they were in and out of each other’s house all the time (when they were younger, this would be arranged by the parents, but later it would be a matter of “I’m going over to Nacho’s” “OK”, followed either by his coming back at dinnertime, by me being sent over to remind him it was dinnertime, or by him coming back a bit later saying “they’re not in” or “Merche said Nacho can’t play, oh well” - notice that this didn’t involve going outside). All of them understood that some rules were common to all four households, some varied by location or even by which “grown up” was involved (hey, when you’re ten, you count as a grown-up to a three-year-old).
My nephew is now 4, his sister isn’t 2 yet; he has known for over a year that rules at Grandma’s aren’t exactly the same as rules in his house, that each grownup has slightly different rules (we try to get on the same page as much as possible, but for example if he asks for a snack close to dinnertime, some of us will point out the time and ask “would you rather go have dinner?” - he usually does- while others will buy the snack). I agree with PunditLisa and Shodan that this kid needs to learn that your house has your rules; it takes a village and all that.
I don’t know, I think that’s probably another thing that varies by location or how you were raised. My parents were really lenient, but they insisted on knowing where I would be and I had to ask to play outside. Now, once I got permission and they knew I’d just be out front, I could come and go as I pleased unless I was going to go anywhere else. I don’t get how she’s being controlling if that’s the ONE strict thing she’s doing (and we have no evidence of her doing anything else) and she’s just otherwise annoyed by her son’s friend.
Actually, that’s pretty much how it works here. If he is at a location (say Jimmy’s house), he can run back and forth between our house and Jimmy’s house all day long and the assumption is if he leaves here, he is going back to Jimmy’s. If he’s done at Jimmy’s and wants to go to Jon’s, I want to know about it. If he wants to move from our yard to a neighbor’s yard, I want to know about it.
He’s outside right now (has been since right after breakfast; I’ll ask him around noon if he’s hungry, he’ll say no, and I might see him in time for a late dinner) and I have no idea what he’s doing. He better be within the confines of our yard until he comes back in and says otherwise.
This is not helicoptering, this is laziness on my part. I’ve only gotten strict about this this summer because I got sick of searching neighbor yards and knocking on doors because I wanted to go to Subway for lunch and couldn’t find him.
Invite the little tyke over for a ‘Trade Day’ and you, and Alex and he can all trade stuff so that you can show them what’s a fair deal, and what’s really not.
Considering neither will want to trade any of your ‘mum stuff’ you could either commandeer some of Alex’s trucks, get some from the local charity store, or cook up some kick-arse cakes and biscuits to trade.
Who knows? Something might be learned, and you may find that the kid’s okay. His behaviour could be due to a number of things - notwithstanding that he may actually be shy, and uncomfortable around adults.
As the only adult in this scenario, it’s probably more useful to try to help him than hinder him. Who really knows what his life might be like at home?
My daughter had, thank god, a few neighborhood buddies while growing up. I can’t recall ever having much conversation with the girls, I was just that lumbering presence known as ‘The Mom’ lurking about in the background. Fine by me! But I thought it was funny when one of them wanted something, didn’t quite have the…nerve?..to ask me directly, and used my daughter as a translation device. The little friend would be looking me directly in the eye while whispering her request in my daughter’s ear. “Mom, Suzie wants to know if we can A) order a pizza, B) go to the park, C) drive her home an hour ago…”
Go with your gut. Just from reading the way the kid acts it sounds to me as if he’s, at the very least, got an attitude problem. “Better not be long” sounds like something of a threat, especially if he were sooooortof directing it at you, whereas a kid whining “awww, come on, don’t be long” (or something like that) sounds more normal.
All the sneaky behaviour strikes me as very unusual for a boy, they’re usually pretty rambunctious. Heck, kids that age PERIOD are pretty rampbunctious.
That is so wrong! He’s 7! You really shouldn’t accuse her of being “Controlling” because she wants to make sure her son is safe. Good parenting is caring about and knowing where your kid is at all times. How on earth is that odd?
I think it’s odd and sad that so many people don’t seem to care or see the dangers nowadays with allowing kids to just go off without checking in with anybody. It was called love and concern in my household, not control. There are several stories on the news right now about little boys being snatched up and supposedly someone knew where they were at the time. Why make it easy for some pervert by letting your child wander about without supervision. If we can imagine it, it’s happened, unfortunately.
So, no, that isn’t being controlling to want know if your son is inside or outside at 7 years old.
Your child is more likely to be struck by lightning outside than he is to be “snatched up by a pervert” outside. It is so incredibly rare for that sort of thing to happen that people should really not waste their time worrying about it. Worry about whether your kid has the safety skills to be able to cross the street without getting hit by a car, and worry about whether your kid is being polite to the neighbors when he’s out and about, but for God’s sake don’t worry about roaming perverts who are snatching random children off of streets.
That said, yes, there is nothing helicoptery about wanting to generally know where your 7-year-old child is at when he’s playing, for crying out loud. I love the Internet. Either you are helicoptering over your child and denying him the chance to have a normal childhood, or you are abandoning him to roaming packs of perverts. There is no in-between in Internet-land.
And once they start wandering, then it IS hard. We’ve spent our time running through the neighborhood yelling for our kid because he’s “disappeared.” A kid who was going to play with Max ends up back in the woods with Andy.
At ten our kids got cell phones to solve this problem. But between about seven - where Silver Fire’s son is - and ten - our free range son had similar rules - and we still often sat down for dinner without him.
Honey, the point is that it does happen everyday. That’s exactly the kind of situation child abductors love. One of my best friends was in this area of law enforcement for 40 years and he said that the majority of the cases never make it to the news so we never hear about it. Maybe that’s what feeds the notion that it’s so RARE. I’d rather take simple steps and establish simple rules than run the risk of my child being abducted or molested by the neighbors creepy uncle.
Also, if you establish the habit with your kids of checking in with your family early on in childhood, then hopefully they’ll be more likely to keep it up later on in teenage years. And there is NOTHING wrong with that.
Does it happen every day? Can you provide a cite for that, please? I’d like a cite showing exactly how many children are abducted from public streets by strangers every year in the US. Please make sure that any statistics you find don’t include abductions by friends/relatives, as that is not the type of situation we are talking about here.
The spectre of “creepy child molesters” lurking on every public street, waiting, just waiting for that golden moment when your child is innocently playing outside so that they can move in and snatch them away is something that certainly gets played up quite a bit in the media. It is also something that keeps a lot of people from allowing their children the freedom to play on their own. It is also something that is unbelievably unlikely to happen.
Now, you just shush your babbling of reason and common sense! Can’t you see that IaMoDiNaRy has addressed you as ‘Honey’? That means, no lip back. Also, can’t you see that she has used caps in her post? Those caps ARE HER CITE.
I agree with you. If you look at the numbers of children that are abducted by strangers (not family/friends, and not just reported missing since most of those are runaways or have overreacting parents that freak when they can’t find their 9 year old right away), it’s a vanishing small number and the statistics have pretty much stayed the same over the last 30 years… so there really aren’t any more kids being kidnapped by strangers in 2010 than in 1980. Just more hyper-protective parents.
On the topic of helicopter vs free range kids, one book I recommend every parent read is Protecting the Gift, it’s by Gavin De Becker, and in a similar vein to The Gift of Fear.
He talks a lot about the excessive lengths we go to protect our kids against unlikely threats and the strategies to make those threats even less likely while spending your time and energy teaching your kids to protect themselves. Gavin strikes me as a man who has dedicated his life to not only protecting people but also, particularly in his field, fighting ignorance.
Meh, as a former kid who traded stuff, getting ripped off by a mealy-mouthed faster-talker is one of those life lessons you get when you end up going home with all the really crappy baseball cards no one wants, when you started out with cool ones. Or wonder how it is that you were talked into melting the face off your Han Solo action figure with a magnifying glass. That’s the kind of stuff you’ve gotta sort out on your own. And yeah, older kids took advantage of me a couple of times, but it made me learn to evaluate my trades better.
Both 2 and 3 suggest to me that the kid has either been told “Don’t bug the grown-ups and play quietly” too often or is intimidated by you. Or he’s “sneaky” but not necessarily malicious. He may have simply figured out in kid logic that if you ask “Can Johnny come out and play?” an adult can say “yes” or “no”.
Getting a “yes” is the best case scenario, but by asking permission you risk getting a “no”. If you bypass the adult altogether, you there’s no risk of a “no”. That kind of sneaky isn’t necessarily full of bad intentions, it’s a way of testing boundaries and rules. We pulled all sorts of shit like that in school at that age, trying to find loopholes so we could be masters of our own fun.
Yeah, he’s being an asshole who needs to learn to take disappointment with more grace. He probably doesn’t intend to sound threatening, as in he probably hasn’t thought through the ramifications of his tone, he just has a lousy way of voicing his disappointment and hasn’t learned how to suck it up when things don’t go his way.
If it gets really ugly or pushy, then it should be off to the woodchipper with him.
I did when I was a kid (mid-west U.S. mostly). It would be stuff Like “Hi, Mrs. Smith, can Johnny come out and play?” and if she answered something like “Sorry, Cell. He’s getting ready for soccer practice.” I quite possibly would have answered: “Oh, . Can he come out to play after he gets home?” Not unusual at all to ask the person in charge.
To answer your question, YES it does happen every day. As I stated in my earlier post, a good friend of mine who worked in law enforcement worked with Missing Children cases. He was familiar with the statistics in our country and used to visit the schools in our area in order to educate parents and teachers about the dangers of abduction.
To me, even one missing child is one too many no matter what the time line. Why not do what you can to make it more difficult for that one child to be abducted or molested? I’m sure the parents of kidnapped children were thinking the same thing before it happened to them. “That’s so unbelievable! It will never happen to my kid.” :smack:
Here are a few “cites” to check out for some statistics in the USA:
Not on french fries specifically, but yes, more children die from choking than are abducted by strangers. The latest available stats were that 160 children under 14 per year die from choking either on food or a foreign object (espeicially coins); choking was also the cause of 17,000+ emergency room visits, of those about 1700 were admitted to the hospital or sent to a facility with a higher level of care. http://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/Choking/default.html
I am particularly curious about the claim that “many stranger abductions go unreported.” I find that extremely unlikely. In fact, the only way it seems like it can be true, is if the parents are very often complicit in these “unreported stranger abductions” in other words, they are standard issue family abductions.
. Can he come out to play after he gets home?” Not unusual at all to ask the person in charge.