There is a wonderful book called “Free Range Kids: Giving our Children the Freedom we had without gong Nuts with Worry”
It’s the anti-helicopter parenting bible and it’s actually funny and a great read (no I’m not the author).
The author advocates things that were perfectly normal a generation ago, but are considered crazy today. Things like letting your kids walk to school, letting them ride the bus by themselves, eat candy after Halloween without worrying that it is poisoned, and just explore the neighborhood.
Before she had a book, when she only had a blog, I e-mailed her an incident that happened to me, and she put it in her book.
Hard cover version, p. 51-52. “I let my eight- and ten- year-old sons bike the three blocks to a friend’s house,” a mom named Amy wrote to the Free-Range Kids blog. “But when they returned, their friend’s mom insisted on accompanying them back home through our very safe neighborhood, ‘just in case.’” The lady was sending Amy a message: your mothering leaves something to be desired."
I’m famous!!!
I just got back from vacation - a farm on a busy road in Lancaster County. And knowing our kids could cross the street by themselves saved us a lot of worry - we could just set them free in the morning with a minimum of supervision.
If we had to hover over them constantly, it wouldn’t have been a vacation at all.
Close supervision was exercised when we were by the creek and at the amusement park - and we had the older kids help the youngest across the road. Otherwise we listened for yelling.
I think I heard about this in Reader’s Digest…didn’t the mother drop the son off at Macy’s in New York and let him ride the subway to her work, 45 minutes away?
When we went to Busch Gardens with the kids a few years ago they did their thing and Ivylad and I did our thing. We had cell phones, so we met up for lunch, discussed if there was anything we wanted to do together, okay, go ride the roller coaster for the umpteenth time, your father and I are going to feed the lorries.
She let her son ride the subway home from Bloomingdales (he had a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.) Here’s her article about it. Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone | FreeRangeKids
You know, it’s funny, I remember reading this story when it came out, and my oldest had just turned 6, and I thought that she was maybe a bit misguided and that I probably wouldn’t let any 9-year-old of MINE do anything like that. Now my oldest is about to turn 8, and I’m thinking, yeah, he could handle riding the subway on his own, with proper preparation.
We did this pre-cell-phones at amusement parks and malls. We were supposed to be back at a specific location at a specified time. It was so much better than going around the mall or amusement park with Mom or Dad, and having to do the boring stuff that they liked to do, when I could have been doing cool stuff that I wanted to do.
No kids yet, but I plan to do this when I do and they are old enough (probably somewhere in the 10-12 range, I think that’s when we started doing this). I don’t like helicopter parenting, and I don’t think it has good effects on the kids.
My wife and I come at this from completely different places. I was totally a free range kid, and she was one of those who wasn’t allowed to cross her(residential) street without a parent. Here’s a rough map of my stomping grounds when I was a kid. I probably visited all those places each week or two when I was a kid, some of them multiple times a week, and when I reached the teen years the lake on the left was a frequent destination as well. That last leg, where it doesn’t follow the street surface? That was our route through the storm sewers. Yes, we traveled through the storm sewers when I was a kid. If you kept your bike really steady you wouldn’t hit your handlebars on the sides and wipe out into the green slime on the bottom. We did have our mishaps. I have two scars on my right palm, one about an inch and a half, the other about half an inch, which came from a broken bottle I fell on while riding through an open top storm sewer. I walked home(cause I couldn’t put the chain back on my bike with one hand) with the fragment of a bottle still stuck in my hand. Mom took it out when I got home that was pretty much that.
All my brothers and sisters are grown now and we were talking about this the other day and marveling at how independent most of us are and how we’ve done pretty well for ourselves, all things considered. We all have fond memories of being the roving kids that we were and aren’t quite sure what to do with ourselves in a world which seems unfriendly to the kind of life we lived and loved.
Sorry, looks like I had an extra quote mark in the URL. See if this is any better. Zooming out a bit you’ll see that I covered a good portion of Northeast Dallas, and I was the homebody in my family. My brothers, and a couple of my sisters, ranged much further afield than I did.
At my kids’ school they take the 4th graders on a 3 day field trip every year to San Diego. They’ve been doing it for 27 years (the same teacher always leads it).
When my friend’s son was in Kindergarten she was horrified that they do this and said she would never allow any child of her to go off on such a dangerous trip without her!
Of course, that child is now in 4th grade and they are happily planning for his trip to San Diego with his class mates.
I was on a school trip to Europe 20 years ago. Most of it wasn’t supervised so much as guided, but they cut us loose for an afternoon in Paris and an afternoon in Amsterdam, and everybody made it back.
An awful lot of places in Paris sell Heineken, turns out.
I am boggled by the overprotectiveness of some parents. One of my co-workers lets her 12 year old bike to school – but only when she drives along behind him.
I too was a free range kid – mostly because my parents both worked and couldn’t afford childcare. I grew up in a pretty tough south suburb of Chicago - Harvey - and I used to go up to Wrigley Field by myself for Cubs games while I was still in grade school. I was walking to and from school alone, about a mile – uphill both ways – by the third grade, and I learned early to dodge the school thugs who would steal lunch money.
Everybody’s a pussy now. I took some beatings as a kid, and I think it made me tougher and smarter and far better able to cope than I would otherwise have been. Then again, maybe if I’d had supportive parents with the means to give me a more enriched childhood, I would think that a description of my actual childhood would be nightmarish.
– by the third grade, and I learned early to dodge the school thugs who would steal lunch money.