I apparently live in a free range child preserve. In our neighborhood children still do the same things I did as a kid 30 years ago. They ride bikes and go carts. They run over to each others homes to play soccer and baseball. They build tree houses with salvaged lumber. You can hear them on summer nights playing tag or hide and seek late in the summer nights. Two of the neighborhood boys 9 and 12 cut our grass. I think they do 5 or 10 homes in the neighborhood. A 13 year old girl up the street is our babysitter.
The house across the street is for sale if anyone is interested.
Mine isn’t bad - a little more domesticated than yours. Though we certainly have our “I’m ten and can’t go to the park a block from home with my friends without an adult” kids. But we have a park full of kids. Kids riding their bikes.
This summer my son and an overnight with one of his friends. His friend is ten. His friend has a sister who is eight. As we were arranging it, his mother says to me…
“You have to know, I work and the kids are home during the day. I have an older son who is eighteen, he may or may not be around, he has a job.”
My thoughts were “good for you.” and “I’m not sure I’d have the courage to admit that.”
They’re little birds. Scroll down here for some pictures.
Busch Garden has a fenced-in enclosure, and if you go in the morning, you can buy a little cup of nectar and the birds will feed right out of your hand.
That’s a good idea too. If we’re including trips we took when I was a kid(and we ran around in all these places) the map would look more like this. I know I’m missing some stuff because we visited a LOT of Civil War battlegrounds and little towns that weren’t on the large maps.
I wasn’t sure if it was a joke, bad link, or the truth. My Dad raised us all with a certain sense of self-reliance and an awareness of our abilities or lack thereof. Riding our (pedal) bikes 30 miles or so, taking weekend trips all over the county with friends, wasn’t that unusual from say the age of 8 on. I had to tell him where we were going and when to expect me back. And to follow any other specific rules he set for the occasion.
At age 16 I already had a full-dressed Harley (paid for by my own hard labor) and by 17 a habit of roaming around almost anywhere. From northeastern Pennsylvania I visited Daytona for Bike Week and went out to Sturgis; roughly attached and going along with other bikers (AMA - not outlaw) but sometimes changing from one pack to another along the way. Sturgis turned into an almost 14 day thing for me. My Dad had one rule: every evening at 9pm EST I had to call home and check in. As he always put it “I want to go to bed knowing you are still alive and not stuck somewhere broke down or broke.”
Did I sometimes do things I didn’t tell him about on these trips? Sure! But basically it was the same things I did, and did not necessarily relate to him, right in our home area. Did I ever risk serious “acts of rebellion”? No way - I knew the freedom I had been raised with was a privilege and not a right to be taken lightly.
OK – we’re talking late 60s early 70s and not today. But given the same love and upbringing I had, I could see doing that even today.
Just yesterday my son asked if he could walk home from here. It’s a 2 mile walk through the busy-ish downtown area. He’d never done anything like that completely alone before and I was surprised he asked. It all worked out fine. I’ve never wanted to be a helicopter parent.
My fear - and I’ve posted similar thoughts before- was not so much that something would happen to him but rather that some nosy mother from his school would see him and suddenly I’d be talking to the police about allowing him to walk near the dreaded traffic circle unsupervized.
I recently earned an Amazon gift card for answering a survey. Guess what I’m gonna get!
OK, now I’m even more famous! I was contacted by a New York Times reporter for a story she was doing on letting children walk to school on their own. She interviewed me and here I am, in this article http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/fashion/13kids.html?_r=1