Hearing that makes me feel a pit in my stomach. 
I am strongly morally opposed to CIO.
You didn’t think this, from 42 posts upthread of yours, was specific?
It really isn’t, because in one post you say :
and in another you say
So it seems that perhaps you aren’t opposed to eight year olds going to the park without a parent as much you are opposed to your eight year olds going to a park without a parent in your particular situation. Which is fine, but you also seem to think that people who allow their kids freedom have lost their minds and would allow their 8 year olds to cross a six lane road to get to a park where they will be hanging out entirely by themselves or not worry about a five year old who was gone when the parents woke up and hasn’t been seen all day. Or perhaps you don’t think that, but you do think I shouldn’t have let my then 8 year old son go to the park that I can see from my front steps to play with a group of his friends. I’m really not sure- but I’m pretty sure that I know my son and the entire situation better than you do and I wouldn’t make blanket statements unless they applied to all situations.
Parents in the sixties generally didn’t allow that and parents who advocate giving children freedom aren’t talking about that. Kids generally weren’t alone- they weren’t always under the immediate supervision of an adult, but a group of eight to ten year olds playing pick-up baseball at the park is not the same thing as one kid shooting baskets by himself just like letting an infant cry for five or ten minutes isn’t the same as letting one cry for two hours. If kids weren’t home by a set time (which varied by kid,parent and age) parents went looking for them and at the very least, that kid’s future freedom was restricted. Freedoms also varied by age- I wouldn’t have been allowed to go to the park by myself at six, but I would have been allowed to cross my dead-end street to ring a playmate’s bell while my mother sat on the stoop.
I don’t know when or where you grew up and I suspect that the amount of freedom kids were allowed in bygone days differed between urban, rural and suburban areas * but I find it odd that 10-12 year old children in my neighborhood are not permitted to walk one block to school where there is a crossing guard at the only intersection. I found it strange when one of my neighbors didn’t allow her children off their own stoop until they were 12 or off the block until they were 15. The situation I found the oddest was one of my daughter’s grade school classmates who was not permitted to be out of her mother or grandmother’s sight even in the 8th grade ( and I mean that literally- no parties or playdates unless one of them was able to stay there, and when the entire 7th and 8th grade walked one block to a pizzeria for lunch on half days, grandma was there too) and then put her on a train to travel alone to Manhattan for ninth grade. Nothing wrong with taking a train to Manhattan in high school, but one would think you’d want the kid to feel comfortable navigating around her own neighborhood first.
Oh, and about the organized sports. I’m pretty sure the rate of injury in organized kid’s tennis is higher than the rate among kids who play tennis just for fun, although not higher than the rate for football. Because organization involves teams and coaches and competition in the standings (not just for an individual game) and lately has led to specialization at an early age- when dinosaurs roamed the earth, athletic kids played multiple sports depending on the time of year. Now it’s common for kids to play a single sport year-round which results in overuse injuries.
- I also suspect , but don’t know ,that kids in suburban areas then and now had the least freedom due to the geography and the traffic patterns
I suspect you’re right.
I remember riding the subway and city bus when I was ten years old. I was always with my twin sis so I wasn’t traveling alone, but my parents never accompanied us. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if my parents have still never taken public transit. Their children, however, practically lived on MARTA.
We lived just a couple of blocks from the West End MARTA station. It was nothing for us to tell our mother we were going to the mall and then hop on the train. Forty minutes later we’d be on the other side of town. It was awesome being able to do something like this as a little kid.
Of course we had some adventures. On our very first foray, we ended up going in the wrong direction on the train. But we figured it out before we went too far. There was one time when we were at the mall and one of us (not saying who!) lost the movie tickets. After a few panicked moments, we found them on the stairs. Then there was the time a creepy man in a pastel polo shirt kept staring at us as we walked to the train station. Was it scary? Yes. Did we get traumatized by the experience? No.
This was before the days of cell phones. Still, never once did we have to call anyone to rescue us because we’d accidentally spent all the train fare (this was my biggest fear). And we never gave our parents a reason to worry. I’m sure if we had, they would have reigned us in.
I am glad I didn’t grow up in an isolated surburban subdivision. Public transit is awesome for teaching children self-reliance. It is also gives parents a break from being a chauffeur.
I’m sure kids today have their own unique peak experiences they will proudly talk about when they are older. But it does make me a bit sad that many of them won’t experience their first taste of physical, non-electronic freedom until they are practically adults.
More data (doi:10.1001/archsurg.2012.1138):
Bolding mine. Caveat: adult patients.
We did not let her cry uncontrollably all the time. This was one specific situation. She had already slept through the night, so she was not hungry. She had no needs that needed to be met, it was just a behavior which she quickly abandoned when it wasn’t reenforced.
Not letting kids go to the park alone until 11 is just absurd. When I was 10 (and my brother 8) we played with two friends the same age amongst the pipes in the construction compound where we had apartments, right across the street from a Congolese Army encampment. No worries.
Do you believe that parents should intervene in arguments between two kids also?
One of my daughter’s friends underwent SlackerInc’s parenting style. He lived around the block from us, a block from school, and was not allowed to walk on her own. Her father was petrified that something would happen to her. In his excuse, he was a cop and even in our very safe city he probably saw bad things happen to kids. But she was not better off for the coddling.
There are a lot of ways to tell kids you love them, and that you have faith in their abilities.
Some people want to keep them at home, in bubble wrap as a proof of their love, so nothing ever bad happens to them.
I choose to show my love, and faith in their abilities by letting them do things that may be outside my comfort zone.
Last week a kid jumped out of a plane for no reason. One just got back from a three day concert and camped. One is going to Vietnam, one is going to Haiti for the third time. The ten year old spent the last five days roaming the county fair, all he had to do was check in every couple of hours. I’m uncomfortable with many of these decisions, but life isn’t about making me comfortable.
My job is to raise fully functional, contributing adults. They can only do that if they are self sufficient and confident. The only way you become self sufficient and confident is by doing stuff out of your comfort zone.
We’re all going to die. Every single one of us. Our kids are going to die, too.
I would rather die living life, than being scared of it. I hope I’ve instilled that into my kids.
Helicoptering gives false hope to parents and cripples children emotionally.
I also found it interesting that the two threads slackerinc has going are very intertwined, whether he realizes it or not. Are poor Americans more helpless than they used to be? - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board
And for the record, I have no problem with GMO, and I let them cry it out.
If you’re lucky, maybe they’ll hire one of your kids when you finally kick them out of your basement.
You guys do realize that letting kids be free-range would mean there wouldn’t be a parent there to stop them from annoying you, right? Free range parenting is exactly what leads to kids being rambunctious and noisy. All the time the Dope goes on about parents not watching their kids in these situations. But here you argue that being left unsupervised doesn’t hurt anyone. Which is it?
Both types of parenting are extremes and aren’t good. There’s no reason that you have to watch your kid 24/7 or let them run over the entire neighborhood, going places and getting into trouble. You can just let them play outside in the yard or at a neighbors yard. You don’t have to let them be alone at the park after midnight (where my cousin’s 14-year-old friend got pregnant by a 24-year-old). You can put reasonable restrictions and not let your kids roam all over creation. You can let them be out for hours while giving them a time they must get home by.
And you can let your kids go play while you are ordering at a restaurant, but also tell them that they have to keep it down and stay where they can be seen.
It takes a village. If there are no parents around, I’d have no problem telling a kid to step it back should he or she step out of line.
I think what annoys most of us Dopers is the fact that the kids you speak of are right there in front of their parents, yet they do nothing. It’s not the kid we’re angry at, it’s the parents.
I’ll admit, I haven’t been following this thread very closely but is anybody here advocating any of this? Go outside and play and come back when it’s dark is one thing. But playing in the park after midnight? Who in this thread is saying that?
When I was a child in the 1960s, I lived on a street full of kids, and we were out playing every day on the street: road hockey, hide-and-seek, cops-and-robbers, spud, you name it, we played it. It was a nice, quiet, residential street where nothing ever happened; and if it did, us kids would holler, and an adult (a parent, a neighbour whom we knew) would be there in an instant.
Our parents were all fine with this informal arrangement–well, all except for Sarah’s. Sarah was the same age as my younger sister, and was not allowed to cross our quiet, residential street to play with the other girls. Any games they played had to be done in Sarah’s front yard. Sarah could not ride her bike anywhere except in sight of her house, and only on the sidewalk on her side of the street. We all walked to school (over a half-mile), but Sarah was bussed to a private school, so she wouldn’t have to cross any street. When my sister invited Sarah to a birthday party, all the other girls on the street walked by themselves to our house. Sarah was escorted by her mother, who insisted on staying for the party.
In those days, our parents agreed that Sarah was “overprotected.” Today, we’d call it “helicopter parenting.” Either way, as I understand things from my sister, Sarah simply couldn’t hack high school (which was only three blocks away). She was terrified of having to cross three quiet streets on foot. She hadn’t learned the lessons we all had from simply playing with each other on our street. In the end, as I understand things, she had to be bussed to a private high school. No idea how she made out afterwards.
I was about 10 when I took my first solo bus-and-subway ride too. Mind, that was to meet my father downtown at his office, and while I knew where Dad’s office was, it was a little confusing when I came out of the subway downtown. Never mind; I eventually found it. Dad was expecting me, so if I hadn’t shown up in a reasonable period of time, phone calls would have been made.
IME, and this is only my experience, if there is a moral to my stories, it would be this: you do your children a great disservice if you hover over them. You have to let them try at reasonable ages. I had a dime from my mother on that first solo subway trip, so I could use a pay phone and call if I got lost (and I had also been instructed in how to use a pay phone)–but I didn’t need it, I met my Dad, and things were fine. It was a risk, but steps were taken to mitigate that risk (the dime, and that Dad was expecting me). From then on, I was on the subway, on my own.
Anecdotes are never data, especially here on the SDMB, but I suspect that I was not the only ten-year-old who rode public transit back in the 1960s.
ETA: (got timed out) Hell, when I was 15, I told my folks that I was going to the library. What I was actually doing was jumping the subway and going downtown. As long as I was home in time, nobody was the wiser. 
When I was 12, I moved from my hometown of Hollywood to Boca Raton, about 30 miles away. My grandfather would take me to see my best friend about once a month. Well, one month, he said he wasn’t taking me, he was busy. So I said, “Well, I’m going to ride my bike then!” “30 miles?” “Yep.” So the weekend came and I said I was leaving to go to Hollywood. He gave me $5 for lunch and a quarter to call him if I needed to be picked up. Four hours later, I called him from my best friend’s house. I’d made it.
Today, that would probably be headline news. I might even be on a talk show!
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The kids that vex Dopers so much tend to be young children. 4-7 year olds who throw tantrums and squeal. Not the demographic anyone would want to set “free”.
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These kids are often annoying because they are not only acting up, but they are acting up in an place where young children shouldn’t be. Like an expensive restaurant or a movie theater.
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As Shakes said, annoying kids are almost always accompanied by parents.
I don’t think anyone is classifying things like helmets and car seats as helicopter parenting (although if the booster requirements progress any further, my poor niece is going to have to take her driver’s license test in a booster.) Those things are reasonable adjuncts to any parenting style, free-range included. There’s no reason, after all, that strapping a helmet and some pads on your kid should preclude letting him ride the two blocks to his friend’s house by himself or vice versa.
The really thorny point with things like bike helmets and playground padding is that it’s a major confounding factor in evaluating the effect increased supervision has on reducing accidental injury and death. Yeah, the overall numbers are better since the 70’s. But how much of that improvement is due to kids free-ranging with better safety gear, and how much is due to kids being supervised all the time? Is there some synergistic effect between the two factors? Does one tend to cancel out the effect of the other? And in terms of deaths, how much is due to increased medical capabilities? You have to control for all of these variables before you can really say anything useful or reliable about the benefits of increased supervision.
My gut feeling is that the safety gear probably has at least as much impact as the supervision–elbow pads probably would have saved my cousin-in-law’s kid a greenstick fracture when she fell roller skating. She still would have been a little banged up, but she wouldn’t have gone to the doctor and the injury wouldn’t have been reported. (And her mom was standing right there when it happened, so increased supervision would not have prevented this injury.) But that’s just me talking out my ass about gut feelings, because I have no hard data to really be able to say one way or the other.
CatLady, those are very good questions. I would love to see some much more granular data to be able to settle some of them, even if they undermined my thesis.
If I acknowledge someone is making a good point when they make a distinction between a park on a side street with no intersections to cross, and a park that requires crossing several intersections, then you say I’m not being consistent. If I instead stood firm and said “my rule is my rule”, I suspect you would (rightly) accuse me of being inflexibly dogmatic.
However, I don’t think this makes sense to criticize as not being specific. You’re picking nits in my specificity, but the specificity is there.
I also think I should be allowed, even encouraged, to evolve in my thinking about the topic as I discuss it with other people. To hold my feet to the fire because–after engaging in a dialectic with others–I may not be exactly in lockstep with a post from earlier in the thread, is to insist on everyone being dogmatic and inflexible.
And I will continue to mull and evolve, even if you don’t like that. To wit: it occurs to me that even though I was sympathetic with the notion that it is unfair to allow police bureaucrats to make a judgment call instead of having hard and fast rules, the difference between parks that are close by with no intersections to cross and those that are further away and have busy intersections to cross, tends to argue for that judgment call. Either that, or a specific law with specific ages would require much more detail in terms of distances and intersections in between.
But the more I think about it, it’s probably best just to go with the hard and fast rules, even if it is unnecessarily restrictive on a few eight- or even seven-year-olds that live very near a park. After all, there are surely 14-year-olds that could drive more safely than the average 16-year-old, not only because of their individual maturity but because they live in a quiet small town in the middle of nowhere. But we set a higher limit that we feel will be safer overall. (Do the “free range” advocates have a problem with 16 for DLs, and 18 to vote and sign contracts?)
If you were watching from your front steps, then he wasn’t unsupervised. If you weren’t watching, then I’m not really sure why it was relevant that you could have in theory seen him from your front steps.
We just can’t decide public policies that way. Again, if there is even one single 14 year old who could safely drive where they live, your philosophy would require that we do away with the 16-year-old minimum for drivers licenses.
That does seem to be going a bit far. But it should be instructive for those who are arguing that the non-free-range approach has not become the societal norm.
Interesting. I have never lived in a suburb; but when this was discussed on the Slate Political Gabfest, John Dickerson argued that in the exurbs, it was likely to still be pretty “free range”, like the suburbs were (he claims) back in the 1950s or '60s.
Yes, but in my experience both as a kid and as a parent, it’s often not just a verbal argument but escalates into physical violence. And I’m not just going to let them sort that out on their own.
Ha, great point. I lived in a low income neighborhood in south Minneapolis where the neighborhood kids were all “free range”. They were a bunch of little devils who were constantly vandalizing our vehicles and generally causing mayhem.
It’s true that this would provide safety in numbers from predators or whatever. But I have already acknowledged that the risk of this is pretty low anyway. And it does not provide protection from kids getting into a Lord of the Flies mode, bullying each other and vandalizing property.
Furthermore, you do not even get the protection of the pack if things are reversed and instead of Sarah’s family being the odd ones out, everyone on the block is like Sarah except for your family. Now you’ve got the only kid out wandering on their own, and if anything does get vandalized your kid will be blamed. If there actually are any predators around, they have only your kids to choose from and no other kids around to protect them.
What time period was this? My ex-wife grew up in Boca Raton in the '80s.
My wife and I tend to be overprotective, though my philosophy leans more toward the “free range” idea.
Until they moved in next door. Maybe it’s just my issue with these particular people, but they moved in next door with a bunch of kids who are never watched at all. They are always wandering off and getting hurt and trying to drag my kids along. Then, after never watching their kids they blame everyone else in the neighborhood for anything that happens.
Personally, I’d like to “free range” mine but I feel like I really need an open range of land somewhere to do it. It’s just not very compatible with my current living situation and society.
I wasn’t meaning to imply that you weren’t consistent. I truly wasn’t sure about what position you held - whether you thought there were no circumstances under which an eight year old could go to the park without a parent or whether you thought there were circumstances under which it could be acceptable or whether you thought that even though the circumstances might be acceptable, parents should be punished/arrested/counseled if they allow it or whether you thought that there were actually normal people who thought that the parents who didn’t report their five year old missing acted appropriately.
Why have police involved at all? In every state , there is a child protective services agency that is specifically charged with investigating abuse and neglect who are accustomed to making just those calls- they do it all the time. Nothing wrong with allowing judgement calls.
I wasn’t doing either, really. The first few times I allowed him to go with his friends , I looked up the block every so often, but I wasn’t constantly watching. Nobody said it couldn’t be done in stages- in fact, the whole point is to give kids freedom in stages, rather than letting them loose at the age of 18 without any experience at all.
You’ll notice however, there is a minimum age for a driver’s license which is required to operate certain vehicles on a public road. Not usually for driving itself- after all, the person who is driving that pink Barbie car or go kart is indeed driving although the car/cart may not qualify as a motor vehicle and many places have no age restrictions regarding driving on private property . We don’t necessarily have a problem with a parent allowing a 14 year old ( or younger) to drive, as long as it’s not an automobile or motorcycle on a public road.
My kids grew up in NYC in the 90s and early '00s and had and used much more freedom than their suburbans cousins just like I had more freedom than my suburban cousins in the 60s and 70s. But in the cases I know of , it mostly had do with being difficult ot get anywhere on your own- my children and I , (city kids) had a park a few low-traffic streets away ( one street for my kids, three for me). A store around the corner and a commercial strip with traffic control signals on nearly every corner ( therefore easy to cross). Movie theatres and malls were a bus ride away when we were a little older. The suburban cousins on the other hand had to walk at least mile or so on busier and busier streets ( because there was no real grid pattern and all the traffic for the subdivision had to exit the main road at the same “collector” street) until they got to the eight lane road which actually had stores and buses. Which meant they had very little experience of traveling independently of their parents until they were driving age. From what I’ve seen, suburbs give really little kids more freedom, as you might allow a five year old to wander fairly freely thorough connected but unfenced backyards on a block, but less freedom once they’ve left the backyard and their friends might live 5 miles away at the other end of the school district instead of 5 houses away.
Dickerson was talking about somewhat older kids going and wandering around forests, catching crayfish in creeks, etc.
Is this supposed to be something horrible? By the time my brother and his friends were 10 and I was 7, we were allowed to play in the woods and creeks and ponds behind our houses without an adult. I wasn’t allowed to go by myself, but with a couple of less clumsy, dreamy friends or older kids, that was fine. We climbed trees and waded in the water (except in the creek that had leeches, ick) and watched minnows and tadpoles swim around and had the occasional mud-fight. Nobody ever got hurt enough to mention-- we had a few scrapes and I slipped on a wet rock and got soaked and bruised my butt once–but if anybody had we were never more than a couple of suburban blocks away from the house, usually quite a bit less.