Some girlfriends were complaining about neighbors who don’t keep a terribly close eye on children. One family hadn’t seen their six-yr-old in 90 minutes and everyone online thought the police should have been called and serious freaking out was in order (instead of just asking around the neighborhood and searching for a while).
The kid was found asleep at home.
I think my friends are extremely over-protective. Keeping a constant eye on the kids? Knowing precisely where they are every single minute? Why? Does that actually reduce risk, or does it just feel like good mothering? Because the ironic thing is, children die from car accidents! That’s the menace. Being in a car with their parent.
Obviously it depends on your environment and your kid, but jeez - city kids learn to ride buses and such at an early age. When I was 8 and living in the suburbs, I used to ride my bike all around the neighborhood. Leave in the morning, come back at lunch, stay out of Mom’s hair. It was great! It gave me a chance to find myself, as opposed to my parents’ notions of who I was.
Based on the headlines, it seems to me that teenagers and college students are MUCH more likely to come to harm from some malicious act.
And, when I watch Intervention, it seems like the people who develop addiction problems generally failed to learn appropriate coping skills. Keeping them in the nest isn’t going to address that, is it?
Aren’t we all aiming to raise healthy, functional adults who can survive long-term?
I don’t want to be naive about this, but I think some mothers are going too far.
I always felt it was important that my daughter learn to be independent, within bounds according to her age. As long as I knew who she was with, where she was, and when she’d be back, I was fine. We mostly lived in the boonies, so chances are, if she wasn’t home, I had driven her to a friend’s home. But even when she was able to ride her bike to a friend’s house, she knew I needed to know what was going on.
Once she was a teen with a license, she had a cell phone and strict orders to call when she’d be late or changing where she was. She’s now 22 and away at college, and I still like her to call periodically, just so I know she’s alive, and I worry. But I feel like I taught her to be a responsible adult - largely because I’ve never gotten a call asking for bail money.
Where were the people with the missing 6 year old? Were they also home? Or had the kid taken a walk from somewhere and gone home?
I cannot actually imagine being in the house and not knowing where my 6 year old was for ninety minutes, no. Possibly there are 6 year olds who are that quiet but I didn’t get any of those. Hell, Youngest (who is six) even talks in his sleep.
Late six and early seven seem to be primo age for boys walking off somewhere; they are old enough to know their way around if they are inclined to notice but young enough that they don’t really get that 1)people worry about them and 2)sometimes things happen. Eldest walked off from a friend’s house at that age – happily his friend went and got his mother who called my kid back – and the same year one of his friends walked home from school when his mother not there to pick him up.
I had some guilt about the latter as I saw him walk off and stopped him – his mom did not strike me as the kind to let him walk home alone – but he assured me it was okay with mom so I let him go. She called me later to ask if he was with me – he was supposed to go to an afterschool class that day, which my son also attended – so I went to help search. Turned out he forgot about the afterschool class and somehow his teacher missed that he was supposed to go. So he went home and nobody was there, and he just wandered around until a neighbor called him inside.
But no, I think six is too young to be wandering around alone. Six hasn’t got the resources to deal with things happening.
Eldest is eight and he can play in the neighborhood by himself. I have recently allowed him and Youngest to play on the surrounding couple of streets within earshot, up to the church yard at the end of the street (urban living in Holland = no yard to speak of). If I holler and they do not present front and center post haste this is taken as evidence that they are not responsible enough for this privilege and they can’t go out alone for (usually) a week. It hasn’t happened yet, but my best guess is that Youngest will decide it’s time for “You’re not the boss of me” pretty soon and will refuse to come just to upset his brother and to see what will happen.
I could in theory put Eldest on the city bus to school in the winter or let him bike to school in spring by himself but it’s academic because there is Youngest who also has to go to school. I think Youngest will be about, oh, 47 before I let him take a bus/ride a bike by himself. But that’s a whole different issue.
Sometime this year I expect to send Eldest to the store for me on his bike, just to see how it goes. You don’t raise resourceful adults by throwing them in over their heads to see if they can swim, you do it by showing them what to do when things go wrong.
Being childless, I often wonder about this. Parents seem so overly paranoid about things that rarely happen, like stranger abductions and such, but they seem to not even think twice about strapping their children into a metal box and going 70 mph down the freeway, when thousands of children are killed and severely injured in car accidents every year.
I know, some car trips are necessary, but freaking out and worrying endlessly about things that will probably never happen to your children while doing something on purpose that has been proven to cause the deaths of thousands of children seems a bit…odd to me.
Kids seem to have a lot less unsupervised time now than when I was a kid. My summer days consisted of breakfast at home, mom saying “be back before supper” and then roaming the neighborhood on foot or bikes, climbing trees, playing in puddles, collecting golf balls on the course across the street until we were run off. We’d pass through someone’s house and they’d give us a can of Hi-C and some dixie cups (with riddles if they were cool)and a bag of chips ahoy or potato chips.
Kids swarm around my back door and all I give them is water because these days you don’t know who has allergies, or other dietary restrictions and all I need is some angry mom calling me up to read the riot act because her daughter’s not allowed sugar.
I live in an apartment complex and the here the kids do just “go out and play” without pre-arranged play-dates. But most of the moms have eachothers’ phone numbers and we get calls to please send So-and-so back up the hill.
That was not the case when we lived on a suburban street of single family homes. I think the fact of families with all the parents working makes knocking on doors to see if someone’s home less practical. After my mom started working I’d go home, do my homework (or often not) and then walk up the hill to a friend’s house and we’d play records or do mad-libs or watch TV, but her mom was home, and knew my mom, and would call my mom at work and ask what time to send me home.
90 minutes seems like a long time not to have any idea where a 6 year old is. At that age I’d make my son check in once or twice over a period that long. He’s 10 now and he knows the boundaries and he has a watch. I tell him what time to come back, but he has to tell me that he’s going outside. Or rather, he has to ask fo r permission to go outside.
What were the girlfriends doing and what were the neighbors doing?
Because this sounds like the girlfriends were snooping on the neighbors, saw they were doing something without the kid and started shrieking "Won’t someone please think of the children!" to each other.
We have a decent amount of open land which is much bigger when you consider the neighbors on both sides have land that runs into ours. We started letting our daughter go outside by herself and play when she was about 3 1/2. We watched from the window or checked every 5 - 10 minutes. Nothing ever happened although I had to crack down a few times when she migrated too close to our very quiet street. That was the one thing I was scared of so I told her she couldn’t go past a large tree that was about 75 feet from the road. A large stone wall was another barrier before she ever got to the street.
She is 5 1/2 now and I don’t have a problem going to the back of our property for 30 minutes or so as long as she answers when called. I would never go 90 minutes right now but maybe when she is 7. I grew up on tons of land and I got to stay at home by myself in the afternoon when I was that age. I also loved the woods like an indigenous person and sometimes disappeared for half a day just hiking by myself. We had lots of roads on our land and I had a nice go-kart. I would just drive it around for hours.
It seems to me that parents are much more in their children’s faces than mine were in my life. When I was six or seven, I was preparing my own lunch box and breakfast. I’d come home to an empty house, make my own snack, and be unsupervised for a good two hours. When I’d get locked out of the house, which happened fairly often, there was no discussion of getting a babysitter. It was, “You better keep up with your key!” This was during Atlant’s murdered and missing children horrors. Weekends were often spent riding my bike all over the neighborhood. As a pre-teen, I was riding the bus and train to the mall. If my parents were worried, they hid it well.
People really think times are worse today than they were when they were growing up. They’re wrong, but it doesn’t matter because CNN makes it seem that way. I also think because people are having fewer children, they are more emotionally invested in their children’s lives. My parents had four kids. If one of us had gotten snatched by a kidnapper, they would have been relieved.
Developmentally, there is a HUGE difference between six and eight. Your average eight year old can react intelligently to the unexpected–if he gets hit by a car, even scared and in pain he can probably tell people his mom’s name and phone number: if he falls off his bike and into a ditch and breaks a leg, he can probably realize that if he stays in the ditch, it will be really hard for anyone to find him, so even though it hurts, he ought to haul himself out as best he can. If he goes further than he realizes and gets lost, he can probably make a fairly intelligent choice about who to ask for help. I would be considerably less sanguine about a six year old reliably dealing with these situations.
Furthermore, kids vary tremendously. Some kids are born sober and responsible with a healthy sense of fear and a deep respect for rules and order. Some kids have tremendously bad judgement or a complete lack of fear or are incredibly creative. The occasional kid shows all of those. Kids like that you keep as close as you can. So when it comes to individual kids, I always withhold judgement.
I can remember sitting alone in the car reading while my mom went in to do the grocery shopping. I would have been 5 or 6 (basing that on the car I’m remembering). 30 some odd years later, I wouldn’t dream of leaving my son alone in the car even for as long as it takes to drop off a video.
Now, I’m perfectly aware that although there’s a culture of fear and that the actual number of stranger abductions of children in this country is pretty low. My fear is not that someone will snatch my precious darling and sell him into slavery. My fear is that some well meaning person will see him alone in a car and involve the police, the sheriff, and Child Protective Services all because I thought it would be kinder to let him rest in the car than to drag him through Giant when he’s tired.
For that reason my son has never been left to sit alone in the car unless it’s parked in a private driveway, and even then it would only be for a few moments and I’d take the keys with me. My mom used to leave me the keys so I could play the radio.
And there is the other factor. People are a damn sight more neurotic and nosy then they used to be. Kid in a car alone? OMGelventy!!! Someone call the cops that precious snowflake is obviously abducted! or abused!
As far as leaving a kid alone in a car, it depends on the kid. A baby or toddler, never. What are the odds that a child alone in a car will tangle him/herself in a seatbelt, be abducted, whatever? Pretty unlikely. Compare, however, to the odds of any of these if he’s with his mom or dad. Nil. Would you leave $1000 unattended on the seat of your car in plain view? No? Is your child not worth more than $1000?
We had a neighbor decades ago whose several children were all pretty much left alone to do as they wished all the time. The mother literally had no idea at all where they were most of the time. Her attitude was that they’d come home when they were hungry. Or when they were ready. One morning the parents noticed that their 16-year-old daughter had not come home at all. When the police came, the parents could not say who she was with, who her usual friends and companions were, or where she might have gone. Absolutely no idea. All they knew was that sometime during the previous evening she had gone out and that a car had been heard outside. She was found a couple of days later, dead, in a wooded area about a quarter of a mile from home. Could it have happened even if the kids were well supervised? Sure. But perhaps a bit less likely. Perhaps the parents would have known (as the buzz was among the neighborhood youngsters) that the older children were into the nastier of the narcotics. Perhaps they would have guessed that some of the girl’s regular companions were not the nicest sort of people. The murder was never solved.
Though I agree that people seem a lot more (needlessly) worried about things that rarely happen, 90 minutes is an awful long time not to know where your six-year-old is. Six-eight is the perfect age to get yourself into a lot of trouble.
When he was seven little brother was very bright and very willful. Not to mention furious that I was allowed to do things he wasn’t because I was older. We lived in a wooded area, and there was a acre and a half of woods our family owned right behind the house, but that of course was adjecent to woods on all our nearest neighbors’ properties. I was allowed to go out there alone since I was thirteen, not seven. He was repeatedly told not to go out there by himself.
One winter afternoon I got home from school and went to my room to do my homework. Dad was taking a nap, and my brother was watching TV. About an hour later Dad woke up and asked me where he was. Wasn’t he still watching TV? Nope.
We looked all over the house before my dad remembered how mad my brother had been just days earlier when he was more recently told not to play in the woods. Playing this hunch, we went out to look for him. By this time it was twilight and it had begun to snow.
At first we were able to follow my brother’s footprints in the snow, but the snow picked up pretty quickly, and his footprints soon began to fill in. By the time we’d lost his prints, he’d gotten incredibly far for a little kid, and was at least two properties away from home. We called and called for him, and just before dark we heard him crying.
Fortunately, something he’d been taught about getting lost kicked in, so he planted himself on a tree stump. He said he was crying because not only did he have no idea how to get home or know how much trouble he was going to be in for sneaking out, he wasn’t even sure if we knew he was out there. He was too cold to walk, so my dad ended up carrying him home.
So… yeah. Like with my brother’s misadventure, it’s winter. The kid is six. I can totally believe that kid’s folks flipped out.
I think I’d be more worried about the kid causing trouble. (My sister was the type who’d probably manage to release the parking brake. And my cousins and I would always end up doing something like setting off the car alarms, just for shits and giggles, or climbing out of the windows.)
With public opinion you’re sort of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If I always know what my children are doing, then I’m overbearing and get to hear a lot of “back in my day…” and accusations that I’m exactly what is wrong with modern society.
If I leave a small child alone for significant periods of time, and something tragic happens, I can look forward to being called an incompetent moron and a rash of “you should have to pass a test to be a parent” threads on the internet.
Sometimes it’s just not worth worrying about the recreational outrage, and do what you feel is right.
I kind of like the child-rearing strategies around here. By the time you are old enough to walk, you are old enough to go as far as you can walk. I regularly see tiny two year olds wandering around distant streets. By three, you are old enough to be sent to the market. By four, you are old enough to strap your baby brother and take care of him as you play. By five, you join a roving pack of kids terrorizing the neighborhood.
The flip-side, of course, is that everyone in the village knows everybody and everybody watched out for each other’s kids. A kid can find a friend, a meal or a place to sleep anywhere in town, and nothing anyone does anywhere stays a secret for more than five minutes.
Ha! My folks had four kids, too. They used to laugh and tell us we were the reason they stayed married: they had an agreement that the one to ask for a divorce HAD to take all the kids. I don’t know if you could do it today, but I liked the way they handled supervision. I got to do my first solo bus ride when I was five. I had to phone them when I got to my destination, but the trip took a couple hours…I had to transfer to a second bus and walk a half-mile from where I got off the second bus. (This was just the Bi-State transit system in St. Louis, not Greyhound or anything.)
They let us wander pretty much, but we had to let them know if we weren’t going to be close enough to hear them when they yelled for us. In those cases, we had to return at the agreed time.
No-no-no-- See, that’s the part I screwed up in the telling.
My girlfriend was outraged that the missing child’s parents weren’t flipping out. When they knocked on her door, they were calmly inquiring - they realized that it had been 90 minutes since they’d seen her (my girlfriend had seen the child an hour earlier, when she was over playing with her daughter) and were out looking for her.
And then the thread turned into a giant pissing match over who got how hysterical when child of X years disappeared for Y minutes (apparently it happens to everyone) (shoot, it’s happened to me).
It’s a nice illusion to think that demonstrating your passion for your kids is somehow going to keep them safer, that having a Huge Fit at small incidents will ward off greater dangers. Like sacrifices on the altar.
That’s the part I really meant to dispute.
Not a particular parent’s rules - hell, I’m not in their neighborhood, I don’t know their kid. But I read up on child safety and the things we’re conditioned to fear, the perv grabbing kids off the street, is NOT the hazard we’ve been led to believe.
