My son turned 10 on Oct. 12th. He got a new bicycle for his birthday.
When I was his age I had the run of my whole square city block. As long as we (my brother and I) didn’t cross any of the four major roads that surrounded our neighborhood (approx 2 square miles) then we were fine. We had scheduled times to return home to check in and then we were out the door again, to have some fun.
I would like to give my son the freedom I had when I was his age, but I am kind of afraid that it may be too much freedom. The world may have actually been as scary back then as it is now, but since I was a child I didn’t recognize the dangers. We live in a very quiet neighborhood. It actually reminds me of the neighborhood I used to run around when I was growing up.
So, I actually have a 2 part question (not that any of this will sway my judgement on the issue, I just wanna get some other people’s perspectives).
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For people old enough to remember: Was the world really so much safer 20 years ago, or was it just as bad as it is now?
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How much run room do you guys think a 10 year old should have/need?
I don’t think the world has changed that much. I think that the media has blown things way out of proportion from what is really necessary. Yeah, we should be careful, but way too many people are wrapping their kids in cotton to protect them from things that have an incredibly low chance of occurring.
As for how much space you should give a 10-year-old, I’d say that depends on where you live and how mature the kids are. When my kids were that age I would probably have given them the equivalent of a block, but they weren’t allowed across the busy road, and I checked to see where they were regularly. We live in a fairly quiet suburban neighborhood.
Thanks for the feedback. I feel I live in a nice, quite neighborhood. His old boundry was just not to cross any stop signs so he could basically go up and down our street. For the past couple of weeks I have been riding my bike with him all around the neighborhood so that he can learn his way around.
I may give him a little more room this weekend and see how he does with it.
I struggle with this too. When I was a kid, I could go out on my bike for hours with no one knowing where I was. (This was Ft. Lauderdale in the 70s.) I don’t recall that I had “boundaries”, though I usually stayed within a few blocks of home. I do remember that Mom put a halt to our Trick-or-Treating after Adam Walsh was kidnapped.
I think Mom tended toward overprotection, but even knowing that, I can’t help but "over"protect my own. We have a fenced back yard, and they occasionally go out to play in it. Not in the front, not in some other kid’s yard, not out of sight of the kitchen window. Not surprisingly, they spend a lot of time indoors. Their bikes are kept at Grandma’s house (she lives on a farm with plenty of land, a long driveway, and a fence.)
I’m sorry they’re missing out on the freedom I had as a kid, but I just can’t see waving as they blithely pedal away. I hope things are different where you are.
Another incident I remember from my childhood:
My brother had apparently made friends with an adult male in the neighborhood. One day, he asked me if I’d like to come along because his friend would like to meet me. As we were hopping onto our bikes, my grandfather happened to ask us where we were going, and my brother told him Mr. Scott wanted to meet his sister. Grandpa totally blew his cool, and hollered something about people in hell wanting ice water. Nobody was allowed to go to Mr. Scott’s house that day, or ever again.
Now, I don’t know if Mr. Scott was really an okay guy or not, my point is that just because we had freedom back then didn’t necessarily mean we were really safe.
Oh, you don’t have to have much freedom to run into trouble. I had the world’s most overprotective mother (as a kid I was basically confined to the two dead-end streets that bracketed my house, with exceptions for visiting a couple of friends who lived three houses up and the open field next door) but I still managed (naive little only child that I was) to spend a lot of time hanging out with the “nice man across the street” who I later found out was the neighborhood perv. I used to spend lots of time in his (open) garage talking about cars or whatever. Yeah, I noticed that he liked to get close and that bugged me a bit, but I just thought he was friendly. And my mom (who’s usually pretty perceptive about that sort of thing) managed to miss it completely. Fortunately nothing happened, but I still shudder when I think about what could have happened.
My understanding is that by any objective measure of violent crimes or crimes against children, the world is considerably safer than it was 20 years ago. It’s natural to be cautious, but I think that the boundaries you have suggested are very reasonable.