My son is only 2 so I haven’t had to face a lot of these issues yet, but in general I tend to let him do as much as he can for himself. He can play in different rooms and in our basement by himself, and in the fenced backyard. I know to check on him when it gets “too quiet”
Now I am just starting to teach him safety things like walking to the car and putting his hand on it in a parking lot so I know he isn’t running out into traffic, and how to stay out of the road and such. Some things that weren’t around when I was a kid are just obvious now, like helmets on bikes and car seats and I don’t question stuff like that. But I don’t worry about stranger abduction too much, I am more worried about what he is going to do to himself than what others will do to him.
He is starting to have more fun playing with his friends, and I try to let them sort out issues amongst themselves - that is another thing I notice parents doing a lot more. They step in and interfere as soon as a slight disturbance comes up whereas I like to let them work it out or even fight it out a little. I don’t let them beat each other or anything, but I think kids can come up with their own solutions even if it’s not how we would solve it. At least I will let them try first or give them a few minutes before stepping in but I know some parents who run interference for their kids all the time.
I’m a fan of preemptively beating the crap out of every boy who looks at my niece. Also their fathers and older brothers. Once you do this a couple of time, people give the kid space.
Overall, I’m with y’all on allowing kids their freedom in independance. I think kids are way to smothered these days.
But I was just involved in an altercation that really chaps my hide, and I need to vent.
I’m sick, WhyKid is sick. We ran out of cough medicine. So I put the baby down for a nap, told WhyKid if the building catches on fire, he should grab his li’l sis (he’s 13, and has babysat before, but I wouldn’t usually ask him to do it while sick) and I ran half a block away to the Walgreens.
While there, four young boys - the oldest not older than 8 or so - were running around the store. Literally running, full tilt, running into customers and knocking things off shelves. There were a few token “This isn’t a playground!” calls from the employees, but once I was run into, I grabbed the nearest boy by the upper arm and put on the Mom Face and said, “WHERE IS YOUR PARENT?!” All four stopped in their tracks and said they were there alone. “Where do you live?” I asked. “Lunt and Ridge” they said, naming an intersection a mile away, from which it’s impossible to get here without crossing majorly busy Chicago streets - Western Avenue, specifically.
So here are my problems with the lack of parental supervision in this case:
Kids running in a store
Knocking into people
Unsupervised
On a school day
A mile from home
Across very busy urban streets with no crossing guards
I mean, WTF? I marched them out to the cop who walks back and forth in the strip mall and told him they needed a ride home, after I chewed them out for a bit. For which, of course, I got called a “stupid fat honky bitch” by a 5 year old.
So what’s this thread about? Do you want a list of the ways we parents keep our kids safe, as the title implies? Do you want a straight answer to the four questions in the OP? Or do you want to discuss the changes that have occured since your own childhood, and whether you think they are warranted?
The list I things I do to protect my son are long, maybe not long enough, probably shorter than other people’s. We’ve always used a car seats, but I never really babyproofed the cabinets.
He plays outside unsupervised. Some of this depends on our neighborhood–I may have started this earlier if we’d had a different yard, or I might have started this later if we lived on a busier street.
He doesn’t ride a bike.
I think he started going into men’s bathrooms alone when he was 6.
I don’t think the world is more dangerous, generally. I believe we are smarter (as a society) about some risks, and overly paranoid about others. I do what I have to feel comfortable and reasonably secure in my mind about his well-being, while still letting him be a kid.
I’ve had to call poison control twice in his life, but we’ve never been to the ER for an injury, so I am not sure what my scoresheet looks like in the “overprotective or neglectful” parenting spectrum.
One of the main reasons I accompany my first grader to the bus stop is that there are a lot of bigger kids there who are kids with behavior problems, whose parents aren’t there. When they are not at the bus stop, they seem content to try and kick the crap out of one another, ride their skateboards down the middle of the street, and lay down in the middle of the street, trying to get cars to hit them (I swear to God I’m not making this up); at the bus stop, however, they get their jollies by trying to kill the younger kids. Plus, the bus stop time is time that mudgirl and I both enjoy spending together.
My daughter’s elementary/middle school was 6 blocks away. From 6th through 8th grade, she walked on her own, or with other friends. There were many walkers out going to school at the same time, and two crossing guard points on the way.
Her (former) friend lives 3 blocks closer. She was escorted to and from school up through 8th grade. Another former friend (1 block closer to school) could not attend our volleyball practices or gamees (11-12 y.o. team) when we couldn’t get the gym before 8:00pm on a school night. 8:30 was bedtime, no matter the reason.
I live on a corner of a street that comes off a major thoroughfare, and cars often go by much faster than they should. So my kids (6 and 3) are not allowed out alone as much as they would be if we lived 3 doors down the culdesac. I let them out together to run down the street, and sort of hang out near the corner to keep an eye on them–the oldest can go by herself, pretty much. But I wouldn’t let them out to play for a long time alone unless my neighbor agreed to keep an eye on them.
They can’t ride bikes yet–we’re working on that one. Probably when she’s 8? My main worry would be that my oldest would get lost and panic; she really has no sense of direction yet at all, and our white-bread suburban streets all look alike. It took me months to figure them out, so it’s no wonder she hasn’t yet. She really does not know the way to the neighborhood park, just because it’s got a lot of turns and it all looks the same.
I still go into a public bathroom with my oldest out of habit and because she hates the loud flushing noise and wants me to do it for her. But I wouldn’t be afraid to let her go in alone–it just never occurred to me not to.
I agree that kids are, on the whole, now much safer than they used to be, but OTOH suburbs are much emptier, and people are nervous about helping/approaching kids that are not their own. So while driving in a car is much safer, wandering around alone may not be, I don’t know–and my kids are too young for it anyway.
I wouldn’t let my kids walk to school, for example, just because of the way that the school is far down a major road with no sidewalks, and always congested with harried parents who aren’t being careful enough (because we effectively have no school bus system, so everyone has to drive). But if it wasn’t like that, I would probably feel differently. Walking to school–fine. Walking to our school–not so much.
We decided early on that while we would take what we considered reasonable precautions, we would not adopt the parenting style that “the absolute worst thing possible would occur in every conceivable situation.” And the primary “precaution” was to instill in our kids some modicum of common sense. Added to that was the considerable precaution of simply living in a relatively safe community.
From kindergarten on they walked 4-5 blocks to grade school (including lunch) - I think my wife generally walked the oldest in kindergarten, but after that there were 2 kids to walk together. I remember one time eldest kid was at school for a girl scout meeting and they wouldn’t let her walk home alone - so we sent her younger brother to escort her home.
Maybe this is a factoid I imagined, but I understood that the vast majority of child abduction cases involved disputed custody issues. It used to bug us when our kids would walk/bike to a friend’s house to play, and the parent would drive them home. We wanted our kid to get the exercise, develop some independence, learn how to navigate short trips, and the like.
Growing up in Chicago in the 60s, Office Friendly warned us about Stranger Danger. A couple of months ago the local rag reported some guy in a car was offering candy to little girls - the first such instance I can recall. So in that respect, some things haven’t changed all that much. But I do feel that parents today are far more fearful of boogeymen than when I was young.
Oh, the school bus - yeah, we go over with our kid. Its directly across the street from our house and we go because the other parents go. We’ve driven there - yes, driven across the street - in the rain because WE didn’t want to get soaking.
We know it’s stupid not to let him go to the bus stop alone. He’ll be fine.
My parents used to let me roam around Cambridge & Boston by myself or with my sister by the time I was 13. All we had to do was give them a neighbourhood (which 9 times out of 10 was either Harvard or Kendall Square).
I also grew up being thrown out of the house by about 8:30 a.m., at which point I would only come back for feedings and at night. Most of the time I was out on my bike, several miles away from home…with the neighbourhood gaggle of children. This was back when we lived in remote Northern Quebec. Winter was the only exception-my parents only let us ski around the neighbourhood or would take us somewhere like a park. Getting stuck in a snowbank and freezing to death was a real fear there.
When we moved to Boston (age 12 for me) I was surprised at how no one seemed to just hang out and play in my neighbourhood, and I searched in vain for the gaggle of children I was used to…until I learned that suburban children have different hangouts than kids who grow up in BFE (the library, town centre, town pool). We didn’t have those amenities centralised and easily accessible when I was a kid.
When I tell people how loose my parents used to be with us (down to dropping us off at Alewife to roam Cambridge on the T) they look at me like I should have been taken by CPS after exiting the womb.
It’s mama-drama.net, a group of moms who beckoned me because I was posting on mothering.com, where I kept getting into fracases. I’d always thought they were fairly open-minded, so this caught me off-guard. My girlfriends in Chicago are more cautious than I am, too, but not as hyper-vigilant as this group.
Hmm. My now wife and I used to live in sin in the Park Castles condos, on the western boundary of Indian Boundary Park, Greenleaf and Western. I miss that area.
Wasn’t the same after Barnaby’s (best pizza evah!) turned into a temple.
Fantastic park. I was rather bummed that most of the animals weren’t there this year, though. Budget cuts is my guess. We took the baby there, all excited to show her the goats and llamas…we saw a rather bedraggled looking swan, instead. She much prefers the windows of the cat shelter on Lunt on our walk home!
Alright, I’m calm enough now to actually answer the questions in the OP.
I think a whole lot of it depends on the environment. When we’re camping, especially at a site we’ve been to dozens of times and know well, then WhyKid is pretty much on his own and has been since about 7. He comes back to the tent when he’s hungry, and the rest of the time he’s off exploring, building “forts” and whacking trees with sticks. When we’re at a “children must be supervised” campsite or festival, he and I carry walkie-talkies to stay in touch. My theory is that if he doesn’t cause trouble, no one will tell him to go “home”, and so far I’ve been right. There was one episode this past summer where he wasn’t drinking enough water, and they used his walkie-talkie to summon me to the First Aid shack, but no one threatened to kick us out because he was unsupervised or anything.
So if I was a country mom, I’d definitely be in the “go outside and don’t bug me until dinner” school of parenting. There’s nothing like it for teaching exercise, self-reliance, frist aid and physics.
Being in the city, I’m more wary, a little of Stranger Danger, quite a bit of traffic, but mostly of nosy busybodies thinking they know how to parent my kids better than I do. (Ironic, given my rant above, I know.) The last thing I want is a visit with DCFS or an argument with a judge because someone thinks I’m neglecting my kids. So I’m always aware of “what will the neighbors think” from that standpoint.
As he gets older, I have a new worry: gangs. Whether it’s recruitment or jumping, I live in quite a bit of fear for his skinny white ass in the gangsta neighborhood half a block to the north of us. So he’s not allowed out on Howard after dark (but neither am I, also for safety reasons.) He’s got a good head on his shoulders, and I don’t see him likely to join a gang, but I do worry that he might unintentionally trigger something and get hurt.
He started walking to school on his own in third grade, though, and now rides his bike to school. He has permission to ride his bike within about a 2 mile radius at this point (13 years), although it’s recently grown because we moved and many of his friends are 2 miles away - he’s allowed to bike into Evanston to go hang out with them. Before we moved, it was a few block radius. He always has his cell phone on and charged, and I do make check-up calls on it to make sure he’s answering.
He started going to the men’s room alone when he was about 5, because that’s when he protested going into the ladies’ room with me, and there was no man to take him to the men’s room. I was freaked out worried the first few times, but nothing ever happened, and I started to relax pretty quickly.
He was allowed to play in the fenced in yard alone as soon as he was past the early years of trying to kill himself. Once I felt secure that he wouldn’t fall on the stairs or crack his head on the rocks or strangle himself with the garden hose, he was good to go. I don’t remember, exactly, maybe 3 or 4? I’d still peek out the window occasionally to make sure he was OK.
The unfenced front yard was probably about 6 or so, after showing me his boundaries a few times (“driveway, driveway, sidewalk, stairs”). In this neighborhood, because of the aforementioned busybody worry, I don’t see that happening for WhyBaby until she’s closer to 8.
I tried very hard NOT to make my kids paranoid and fearful - because the world they were growing up in has gone so overboard with this stuff.
So they could play, wait for a school bus, go to the bathroom, etc. etc. as soon as they were ready from a developmental standpoint. I never prevented them from doing so due to fears of strangers.
Semi-on topic cute story: When my oldest was 2-3 I tried to instill in her the idea that one should approach and get into conversations with strangers. She had some trouble with the concept of “stranger” so we finally arrived at the point that she understood that a stranger was a person whose name she did not know.
The next time we went to the store, she walked up to a man and the first thing she asked him was his name. When I rounded her up and tried to impress upon her that this was the kind of situation we should avoid - i.e. walking up to strange men - she informed me that because she now knew his name he wasn’t a stranger any more.
