There ARE irrational helicopter parents out there for sure. My sister-in-law is one.
Earlier this summer, my wife(8.5 months pregnant at the time) and I were planning on having our niece and nephew up for a long weekend like we’ve done for the past 4-5 years, before our baby showed up.
Part of the plan was to go to the local Babies 'R Us / Toys 'R Us megastore (one half is babies, the other is toys), and return a bunch of baby shower stuff/get stuff we actually wanted., and set the niece/nephew loose to roam the toy store part to find some combination of toys under about 15-20 bucks each for presents.
Their mother flipped the hell out that they wouldn’t be supervised, or that one of us wouldn’t be on the same aisle as them.
Mind you, these kids are about 10.5 and 7.5, and are unusually well behaved and obedient kids. It’s not like they’re feral hellions who would have snuck out the fire doors when we weren’t looking, or who’d have destroyed displays, beat up other kids, etc…
The SIL was worried about molesters or kidnappers, or other patently stupid stuff. She’s also the one who got terribly bent out of shape when I let the 10 year old play Call of Duty, and explained that yeah, it’s a violent game, but he’s so wretched at video games, that he just ran around looking at the floor and got shot by people he couldn’t see. Hardly a character-warping experience, but he sure loved trying to play the game.
Yeah, I’m not saying these people don’t exist, but I don’t think it’s nearly as common or prevalent as media reports would have you believe. (I also blame the media for the whole “OMG my child might be kidnapped if I look away for two seconds!!!” thing in the first place.)
For me, at least, a big part of that childhood freedom was knowing that you had a caring parent back at home and, if things went wrong, there was someplace to go to. So you could go explore the woods and climb rocks and pick through vacant lots because you could always hobble home with a piece of glass in your foot or a skinned knee and your mom would pour peroxide on it and give you a sandwich to eat as you recovered for an hour or two. She just didn’t forbid you from going into the woods in the first place on the basis of “you might get hurt and who’s going to watch you?”
My kid is 12 and I’ve spent much of the summer telling him to go do stuff. It’s funny because kids these days seem programmed to look for exact instructions and I’d really rather tell him “Go out, don’t get kidnapped, be back sometime before bed”. Not because I don’t care about him but because this is the age to learn how to make some decisions (“Hey, it’s getting dark, I should get back” rather than “I was told to be back exactly at 8:15pm”) and take some chances while the risks are still pretty minimal. At some point you need to learn to figure this stuff out and even learn to game the rules a little because that’s just life. But I can’t tell him “Hey, try to get away with stuff” so I try to give him the freedom to figure this stuff out on his own.
The worst - and biggest group - are actually the potential parents - those that are starting to plan their families or have babies still in the “portable because they haven’t been born and therefore they do exactly what you want most of the time” state. They have ALL the time in the world to read parenting books. By the time the babies are a few months old, many of them have started to grasp that children aren’t programmable robots and your intention to speak to them only in French has failed because you, yourself, don’t speak French. The ones that survive past then are often broken by potty training. You get a few hangers onto “I know BEST” who don’t manage to have their innocence shatter until the teenage years. The rest become politicians trying to legislate “family values.”
The difference that I notice is that in my playing in the woods days I could/would have hobbled to the nearest house, not necessarily MY house and would have gotten peroxide and a sandwich or some cookies and Hawaiian Punch, and the neighbor would call my mom. We don’t know our neighbors the way my family did growing up.
My son spent 2 weeks at a sleep away camp (pricey, yes but it’s a church camp and we got a “campership”). He just turned 14 which our state’s minimum age for “working papers”. He works 2 days a week as a bag boy at a neighborhood store. He rides his skateboard to the mall or to a park. I like to know vaguely where he is, but try to allow for independence.
I don’t let him have friends in the house when I’m not there. I wasn’t allowed to have friends over when noone else was home in the 70s either. I don’t think they’ll be kidnapped, or burn my house down, but it’ll for damned sure be a disgusting pig mess when I get home.
A conedian (Jim Hefron) talks a little along the same lines about kids’ summers and mentions coming in at 9:00 and his dad asking if he was in for the night. “Nope. Just came to get a flashlight.”
A “raw material” playground is a lot different from a bunch of old tires piled up in a vacant lot. I followed the links to the Berkeley Adventure Playground (which looks awesome, I should point out) and they have the following notice:
“Please do not leave any materials that you would not want a young child to handle with bare hands- no metal, sharp, splintery wood or house paint. No old or thin wood please, The dumpster fees for hauling away the materials are very high.”
I’m guessing that “vacant lot full of dumped materials down the street” doesn’t have any such rules. Also, the idea of old tires collecting mosquitoes was mentioned and mocked up-thread, but as someone who attracts mosquitoes like it’s my job and who also swells up like a balloon with every bite, the idea of a giant mosquito breeding area in my neighborhood is not really that thrilling to me.
jophiel is right—the issue isn’t where the kids are allowed to roam when not at home. .The important issue is what they come home to.
The roamers who today are called 'feral young" were not called feral in the 1970’s. Because, back in the 70’s ,they only roamed untill 6:00 p.m , and then ran back to a home with a mother, a meal , and a stable family.A family that ate together, every evening.
I don’t think so, well, maybe they weren’t called feral, but I don’t really think that the population was that different.
We didn’t wear watches, we didn’t know what time to be home. Most summer dinners were “something Mom could feed you as you showed up - and maybe feed whatever friends you brought with you.” The 1970s were the “great divorce era” - my husband was a feral child of the 1970s with divorced parents - and I knew a ton of kids being raised by their moms post divorce. It was the great “women getting careers” era - even women who weren’t career driven thought maybe they should give the working world a chance.
I grew up in a two parent family - but my dad travelled and my extended family all lived far away. We also moved every two to three years when I was a kid. My husband had divorced parents, and no extended family in the area. My mother worked much of my childhood, my mother in law worked after the divorce during my husbands.
Shockingly, I’ve managed to live to 50. I survived catching crawdads in the creek, bouncing on the trampoline down the street, riding my bike in the street, all sorts of dangerous activities.
The lot was behind a gas station, and it was just tires. I say tires and you expand that to “piles of trash”.
I didn’t say word one about catching crawdads in the creek, biking blithely down the boulevard, or anything else, except that I’d prefer not to have a giant tire pile on a vacant lot in my neighborhood. I never had any doubts that you’d managed to survive to whatever age you currently are.
When I was young, my brother and I used to take extended walks. As I recall one of our main activities was to find high objects - trees, bridges, buildings - so we could play “stuntman” by jumping off of them. (We would usually be accompanied by our dog, who had no interest in joining us in our jumping. In retrospect, this probably is good evidence of the superior intelligence of a dog compared to a twelve-year-old boy.)
But at least I know the answer to the age-old question, “Would you jump off a cliff if all your friends were doing it?” In my case, the answer was “Sure, in fact, I’d probably be the first one over the cliff.”
Well, I think that particular example maybe has a few too many rules, a little too much supervision (though it is great, and better than most communities have). But my point is that the good aspects of the vacant lot strewn with junk can be created deliberately in a way that’s both safer for the kids and nicer for the neighborhood. It doesn’t have to be done “officially” by municipalities, either.
I don’t know, the more I think about this, the more I have sort of an issue with people deliberately creating big piles of junk so that kids can play in it. I mean, that playground in Berkeley does look really cool and if I lived nearby I’d probably take my kids there, but isn’t the whole reason that people like this idea at least partially because it replicates the experience of just going out into the neighborhood and having fun with whatever you find there? It seems to me that going into a neighborhood and deliberately creating a giant junk pile is sort of anathema to this philosophy somehow.
I realize we are fairly far from the main point of the thread at this point.
Whoever was guest hosting today on Limbaugh today was grousing about this same thing and how it would lead to the downfall of America. When you have a conservative AM talk radio host and a Canadian from The Daily Show agreeing, you know it’s an “End Times” level emergency.
Of course, Ms. Bee didn’t blame it all on liberals
Are there many two-income families in your neighborhood? Because mine is a ghost town (which I know only because I sometimes come home for lunch - my kids are at daycare/camp all day in the summer, just like they’re in daycare/school all day the rest of the year).
The people across the street are retired but raising their grandson because their daughter died at an early age. The people up the street, I honestly have no idea, but their kids are always running around in the summertime. I know there is at least one teacher on our block with kids, and she takes her summers off and stays home.
There aren’t a lot of elementary school age kids free ranging it in our predominantly dual income neighborhood. But around the age of eleven or twelve - they start running in packs as they age out of daycare programs.
Honestly, there aren’t a lot of kids under the age of ten free ranging it on weekends. Eight to ten seems to be the border from “You need to be accompanied by an adult to go up to the park” to “yeah, yeah…come home before it gets dark.”
