Is this the same Samantha Bee on The Daily Show, the one who can’t fucking hold still to save her life? Just watch her! She constantly nods her head and moves her hands like some goddamn tweeker on a fix.
Oh yea, looks like it is.
There is a difference between having independence and losing one parent to death and another to alcoholism. My kids get quite a bit of “us” - they just don’t get “us” hovering over them all day. And most of us with free range 1970s childhoods have normal appropriate relationships with our parents. I didn’t bother trying to get pregnant to replace a family bond due to my parents letting me spend my summers feral until my 30s. :rolleyes:
Maybe not “letting him set the canyon on fire with fireworks” but by the time he is 12 or so, don’t be at all surprised when you look at your spouse with “did Junior have a sleepover last night” and are answered with “yeah, he called from Luke’s house and said he was staying over, swung by on his bike for his pajamas and toothbrush (I THINK my son might take a change of clothes, but he may not) and left again.”
What a odd posting this is! This is a completely different problem. We’ve been talking about carefree, unpressured summers back in the olden days. Your cousin’s problem is downright tragic and has nothing to do with summer fun out and about with friends. I had a pair of lemons for parents myself - a father who ignored me completely, a mother with emotional issues who spent ALL DAY bitching on the phone about her bummer life and just wanted us kids out of the house to stop bugging her. She certainly wasn’t making “playdates” and shuttling us around from one activity to the next. So I was out on my bike with my cousins and neighborhood friends finding my own amusements. That was fine with all of us.
I used to go away to sleepaway camp for the whole summer. We felt bad for the kids who didn’t. There were no kids to play with (most were at camp or visiting family) and most of the homes did not have air conditioning. There was no public pool in the neighborhood, in fact we weren’t even wired for cable tv. Little kids generally weren’t allowed to bike around, because of hilly urban streets. Plus there were crackheads around. All there was to do was basically sit around in your house and sweat, unless your parents took you somewhere, which they didn’t because they were working.
The YMCA summer camp I attended for 8 years and later worked at is still going strong. However I can remember when they introduced more 2-week sessions (previously the July session was for 4 weeks straight). Going for 8 weeks, like I did, was rare even back then though.
Teen years when you can get a job is usually pretty short as well. Unless you are in Iowa and start detasselling corn at 14 or have a family business, most places want you to be 16 to work. So that might be one summer, maybe two.
When I was a teen a lot of us that age summer nannied for the elementary school set. I don’t see as much of that, though there is some of that.
In my experience, “kids who have every minute of their summer free time overscheduled by helicopter parents and never get any time to play outside on their own” is limited to certain areas and is generally a bunch of media sensationalism designed to prey on people’s nostalgia and general inclination to think that kids these days have it worse than ever.
In my neighborhood, and in most neighborhoods around here from what I can tell, there are kids on bikes, kids running through yards, kids playing weird kid games in the street, etc., all summer long. My kids have swim lessons for a few weeks in the summer but otherwise they spend most of their time outside messing around or running through the sprinkler or lounging around watching Scooby Doo or whatever. Their summer experiences are in fact shockingly similar to what mine were like in the 80s.
Well, this makes me feel better about completely ignoring my kids this summer and letting them do whatever they want.
That’s just not true.
My daughter and her best friends have spent the last year basically living together on non-schooldays, dividing their time between the houses. (They rank the houses. We do well. :D) It’s an effort to make my daughter understand that I want to know which house she’s staying at. She’s also spent many a summer day running around in the woods playing imaginary games. I once counted the number of different kinds of mud I washed off her in the bath: 13.
We live in the inner city and my daughter is autistic, so this is not something that’s only accessible to a few.
I hate these ‘ah, being allowed to starve from morning till night was great!’ articles. Truth is, you probably weren’t allowed to starve, you were just a growing, active child who is ALWAYS hungry and you discarded the PB&J sandwiches your mom gave you because they were boring.
I think my kids have it way better. We have a CREEK to play in, for one thing. They can spend hours in there catching tadpoles and swimming. Summer in Bakersfield in the 70’s mostly involved trying to find somewhere cool to be, so it was swimming lessons at the public pool every morning followed by hanging out in the library as long as possible. Which was fine, but my kids have a CREEK. And they go to Grandma’s house and play with the CHICKENS and pick corn and tomatoes (OK, I picked corn too). And then they swim at friends’ houses, and we go to Big Al’s (which IS the 70’s) for burgers and milkshakes. And we have Netflix, so they watch endless Pink Panther and Phineas and Ferb cartoons instead of Phil Donahue.
Yesterday we explored caves and saw a baby black bear.
I was just thinking about this.
There are a few parents - but they are the minority - where I wouldn’t even bring this up. But sometimes it surprises you who lets their kids “free range” to the whole “let my eleven year old sleep over at a house when tomorrow morning there will be no adults in the house” and who doesn’t. One of my daughter’s friends comes from a externally VERY conservative family. Church multiple times a week. Stay at home mother. Five kids. But as long as it doesn’t interfere with Sunday School, her friend can stay over - even if they will be alone in the house for some period of time.
The biggest “helicopter mom” in my kid’s circle is actually a Dad. His brother died when he was a kid in an unsupervised farm accident - even his wife knows he’s overprotective. That girl I make sure is supervised when they are in my care. They don’t free range. Still, even he is starting to let go - the girls went to sleep away camp for a whole week together.
The YMCA camp near us is almost $500 per week, so it’s pretty expensive for the whole summer. Others are more expensive.
I do like the flexibility of shorter camp sessions, because we like to visit my parents in Texas, and the sprog spends a week or so with Gramma and Grampa. If we enrolled the sprog in some local day camps, we’d have to pay for the whole summer whether he’s there or not. One or two offer programs that go by the week, so it’s much easier to plan travel and such.
This, word for word. My kids (now teens) spent their summers bouncing from house to house, eating lunch wherever the group landed at noon and sleeping in the backyard, mixed with a few weeks of camp and swimming lessons.
You and I have both mentioned having kids in their teens (though I wasn’t explicit) and I think some of the other posters have teenage kids too. So people might think ah yes, that’s what it’s like for current teenagers, but today’s toddlers are so over-protected!
But I’ve been online since my daughter was a baby and exactly the same nostalgic shite was around then. And I know toddlers and other young kids now who have the same amount of freedom as my daughter did when she was their age.
The press in the UK also complains a lot about ‘feral young’ left to roam alone, sometimes in the same issue as remembering the good old days when they were left to roam alone.
My parents were huge on letting us kids know when something was “not in the budget” but summer camp for my brother and I was a pretty big priority for my parents because they never once said we could not go for want of funds.
The YMCA camp I attended has an endowed “campership” fund, of which I was the beneficiary on occasion. Also the longer sessions were cheaper on a per-week basis. I think the other reality was that, I started going when I was 7, and both my parents worked. A 7 year old needs adult supervision one way or the other. Summer sleepaway camp was probably far cheaper than all day babysitting when you include food and activities, and only slightly more expensive than day camp.
One thing I’ve noticed about “Mommy Boards” is that parents of young kids can’t really conceive of the day when their kids WILL be independent enough to bike up to the park alone. And so they feed the “bad Mommy feeling” - “Oh, I’ll NEVER let my kids do that!” “How old are your kids?” “Two and four.”
Maybe when they are ten and twelve you’ll feel differently. Maybe you won’t. But until your kid IS twelve, it might not be a bad idea to keep your mouth shut on what a bad parent I am - because frankly, you have no concept of how independent they get between four and twelve - if you permit it. But guideance on how much oversight to give a four year old is quite different over how much a thirteen year old should have.
I remember a long Mommy board argument about free range kids - and the kids in question were late tweens, young teens. And when people have a thirteen year old who isn’t permitted to be somewhere relatively safe without adult supervision (I’m not talking about dropping your kids off at a truck stop, letting them hang out with a set of kids you know are bad news, or sending them unaccompanied on vacation to rural Mexico - but sending them to the movies with a friend, or letting them hang out at the local park, or going out to dinner with your husband and leaving them home alone) I wonder how these kids are going to be able to navigate going away to college, getting an apartment, or navigating Ft. Lauderdale over Spring Break. Eventually, they have to learn to protect THEMSELVES from stupid decisions, temptations, and becoming a victim - because not all bad guys are pedophiles.
Yup. The worst people for talking about childcare are those who have babies. They’ve read everything and know the BEST way to do it. Even for teenagers. (Not all of them, obviously).
I remember when the Free Range Kids blogger caused all that controversy by letting her (IIRC) 9-year-old take the NYC subway home on his own. At the time my oldest was maybe 5 or so, and I thought she was crazy.
Now I have a 9-year-old myself and I’m thinking, yeah, with proper instruction beforehand, I could see it.
When I was a kid, my favorite play place was an empty lot down the street filled with abandoned tires. We would pile them up, make forts, whatever. Nothing like that would be allowed in a middle-class white neighborhood today. Tires? Water could gather in them, attracting mosquitoes and we’d have an outbreak of malaria!
Yeah, it’s really tragic that my neighborhood doesn’t have an abandoned lot full of piles of trash in it.