1986-1992
No, I was just clarifying what Dickerson meant, and why he thought exurban kids still were likely to get more, not less, freedom than city kids in this respect.
I have fond memories of childhood crayfish/frog/tadpole collecting, swinging on ropes into swimming holes, etc. But in retrospect I think there was more risk of drowning involved in all that than I’d feel comfortable with for my kids at that age–I’d prefer they stick to going in water watched over by me or another parent, or a lifeguard.
Same time period! If you went to Cardinal Gibbons High School, that will be really freaky.
Nope, Spanish River.
I’d like to ask, are those places still open and free for kids to roam?
Quite frankly years ago many of us lived near still undeveloped areas - woods, creeks, or in your case whole canyons. But nowadays all that is fenced off and private land. Its darn hard to let your kids just roam around when there is no place left to roam.
I actually remember growing up and a creek we all played in was slowly getting fenced in and the open areas were getting smaller and smaller.
When I was 4 my dog led me into the woods behind our house and then left me there. My grandfather said the dog came home all happy and alone and when he opened the door, the dog just waltzed back in the house, very satisfied with himself. My grandfather asked where I was, and the dog was like, “What, am I his keeper?”
I’ve never been clear on the difference between “exurban” and “suburban” , but woods, creeks ,ponds and undeveloped land sounds more rural than suburban to me. (which probably has a lot to do with where I live). When I said
I would have considered the sort of place Dickerson seems to be talking about as “rural” not 'suburban"
You may not agree with this and I admit that it is pure speculation, but I think this kind of independent, non-parented exploration is key to building interest and curiosity. Parents tend to get in the way. They project their fears onto their children. “Don’t walk in the water like that! You’ll slip and fall!” “Don’t pick up that nasty bug! It might bite you!” “What are you doing with that rock? Put it down!” “You’re all dirty now. How many times do I have to tell you…” By the time the kid is old enough to be permitted to explore on their own, they are no longer interested in playing like this.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if children kept on a tight leash are less likely to be scientists when they grow up.
SlackerInc–in the stranger danger thread, you related an anecdote about getting into a car with an older guy when you were a kid and realizing that it was a bad idea and deciding to get yourself out of the situation. You were saying this was an example of lax parenting. Your parents may have been lax, but it seems like it also shows that you had good instincts even then. As a kid, you figured out that it wasn’t right and you were smart about getting away. Maybe your parents shouldn’t have let you go out alone…not my call to make. But obviously, parents aren’t going to be there forever. And eventually kids are old enough to be on their own, and they may encounter creepy people. It’s a tough line to balance: how to give them enough freedom to figure out how to handle a bad situation and how to protect them.
My impression (again, not having lived in a suburb or exurb) is that exurbs now, and suburbs then, are on the border of suburbia and outlying rural areas. So you drive along the freeway, take your exit, wind your way past the shopping centers and so on, turn off the trunk road into your subdivision, and while the front yard may face suburban cul-de-sacs, the back faces farmland, forest, etc.
Then when developers turn that land into subdivisions or shopping centers as well, and you are hemmed in, you’re no longer really in the exurbs any more: time to pack up and move out to the next “frontier”. Neal Stephenson summed it up well in his novel Snow Crash:
We hear a lot of speculation along these lines, but as I’ve noted upthread, the Millennial generation seems to be the coolest group we’ve seen yet in America.
That’s true, although I was a smart ten year old. Nevertheless, I made a gross error of judgement taking the ride in the first place.
I also remember at age 12 riding my bike to school and having to wait to cross a very busy road to get into the junior high parking lot. I waited and waited and waited, and there was just a steady stream of cars and I was getting really late for school. I’m sure we all know that feeling when we are waiting (usually at a stop sign coming from a side street, trying to make a left turn onto a major road) and as more time passes, we are willing to take a smaller gap than we would have when we first got to the intersection.
In this case I took that to a ridiculous extreme: I looked right and saw a gap, and just refused to look left, because I didn’t want to be discouraged from crossing (madness, I know). **Bam! **Got hit by a car, traumatized some poor driver, and limped off the road dragging my mangled bike, muttering apologies. I tried to just go to class and shrug it all off, but my dad ended up being called to come get me and I ended up with a cast on my leg for a week (my only cast of my lifetime so far). It obviously could have been much worse though.
I was generally not a risk-taking kid or teenager: never fell out of a tree, never had a skateboarding accident, etc. And my personality has always been quite cautious as an older teen and adult. But those two incidents, plus my experience with my own kids, suggest to me that preteens just tend not to have very good judgement, even the ones who are not naturally daredevils.
No, but you learn more from pain and fear than you do from parents telling you stuff.
Allow me to state mine: if you call the cops on me, with all the potential for chaos that that entails, because I judged that my eight year old go to the playground unsupervised, YOU are now a threat to my family, and I will react accordingly.
I will do everything in my power to get you out of my community – call in anonymous reports that you are a pedophile, get you fired from your job, get you arrested … whatever. If I think I can get away with it, I’ll meet you in a dark alley and break your jaw.
When you start enlisting men with guns against me and my family, you’ve crossed the line from annoying busybody to authoritarian scumbag.
Feel free to call me whatever names you like. Just keep it in mind if you find yourself reaching for that phone.
All righty, then: the free rangers have a model citizen speaking for their ranks here! Sounds like borderline terrorism to me, but then I’m just a wacky helicopter parent…
I think this is somewhat related to the “availability” mentioned above. You see this as an incident that happened because you were a 12 year old riding your bike alone. I see it as something that could have happened if your parent was riding a bike right behind you. Maybe you wouldn’t have taken that risk with your parent right behind you- or maybe you would have. But you could have been hit by a car even if you had done nothing risky. You could have been walking down the sidewalk holding your parent’s hand and still been hit by a car.
(and actually your specific incident could never have happened to my son- but only because the traffic is such that only a fool, bike rider or driver, 12 years old or 60 would try to make a left turn onto a busy road from a stop sign. Any sane person would have used the street with the traffic light a couple of blocks over rather than try it at the stop sign. I suspect that wasn’t an option for you.)
Hey, you started the fight.
His ideas and yours are about equally inappropriate.
I got hit while riding my bike once, due to poor judgment on my part. It was so traumatizing that I didn’t ride after that.
I was 28 years old.
Never once was I struck when I was a kid, though. Maybe it was my lack of testosterone or the fact that I was a goody-goody who would walk her bike across all intersections, like I was taught to do in school. So I would have been pissed–PISSED!!–if my parents had forbidden me from riding without an adult. I wouldn’t have been able to ride under this rule since my parents didn’t own bikes and didn’t really dig the outdoorsy/sporty lifestyle.
Which is why I think helicopter-parenting sucks. A child should be free to develop their own interests and hobbies independently from their parents’ preferences and limitations. A hovering parent can shape a kid in a productive way, but they can also block them. My parents were not athletic. They weren’t into exercising, walking or otherwise. I am, though, and my tendencies started when I was a kid. I shudder to think how differently I would have turned out if my parents hadn’t allowed me to wander and explore without their constant supervision.
Is there another mod around? I would like to officially lodge a complaint about this accusation. For you to claim that my honest advocacy of a policy–which is pretty close to the status quo norm in today’s society–to protect children from harm, is equally inappropriate as threats to inflict physical violence, to make false accusations about someone to get them fired from their job, to get them arrested for child molestation…well that is beyond the pale. It is “personally insulting” at the very least, and it looks like slander to me.
Really, the only thing that mitigates it is that it is so obviously absurd on its face. But coming from a mod, “under the color of authority”, it should still not be tolerated. If someone came into the thread late, they might have to conclude that I had made terroristic threats of my own earlier in the thread. After all, the things furt threatens to do would, if carried out, be multiple felonies that all combined would earn him or her years in prison. Even threatening them may be a crime! Whereas I challenge you to point to anything I have advocated that would be so much as a petty misdemeanor. (This isn’t, as far as I know, some kind of antigovernment militia site where you can hide behind the idea that I want to “inflict men with guns upon people”.)
Calling an action inappropriate is not an accusation.
I presume so. The area is called Tecolote Canyon Natural Park.
I thought you were talking about somewhere in the Valley (Balboa, etc.), but now that you mention Tecolote Park that must be San Diego. I’m pretty sure it’s still the same, as it’s a nature preserve.