Wandering through a bushland reserve today with my kid and grandkids, it occurred to me that when I was a kid it would have been the same trek, but by myself or with a cacophony of other kids…climbing trees, navigating creeks and looking for tadpoles etc.
So my memories of the late 1960’s and all of the 70’s are pretty clear: weekends and school holidays you were banished from the house (except to come home to eat). Same with after school…you’d dump your bag inside the front door, then piss off to get up to mischief somewhere else.
All this has changed now obviously. But I wonder when it all changed and what the catalyst was? I truly believe that the world is not more dangerous now than it was back then, but what was the thing that triggered parents into keeping their kids uber-safe?
Australia must’ve been a fairly safe and quiet place during the late 60s and 70s because I grew up during that same time in the US was frequently warned by parents, teachers, and in-class movies not to trust strangers or even talk to them. And don’t get me started on all the precautions they threw at you for trick-or-treating on Halloween.
In the USA I think it started in the early 80s with some high profile kidnappings like that of Adam Walsh. Some countries still have more lax attitudes to “stranger danger” AKA realistic.
I can remember reading a theory that the cultural anxiety over child kidnappings and the satanic child sex abuse hysteria in the 80s in the USA was really about more mothers entering the workforce and having to trust their children to others. I just mention it because it seemed plausible.
Sure, we had the warnings like you mentioned, but apart from that our freedoms were great. Our parents trusted us to keep (relatively) safe. We’d rock home with skinned knees and smashed foreheads…they’d apply Dettol and Bandaids, kiss our wounds better, then send us out again to conquer the world!
Might it be possible for kids to reclaim their righteous place in the world? That is, exploring, getting into strife, bunging up their knees and noses?
My memories of the 50s are very similar to the OP’s. We lived in a relatively new suburb, with lots of fields and woods and creeks to play in. Also playing in houses in the process of being constructed. We were told not to talk to strangers, but never heard of anyone getting abducted. We were free to build tree houses, forts and dams, and capture insects for our collections. The only reasons to return home were for meals or TV shows.
Decades later, my mother commented that from an early age, I always came home with barely-living critters in my pockets.
One time I came home with a dead snake, found in a paddock (field) nearby. Bloody thing started stinking to high-heavens a day later, but I still insisted on taking it to Show and Tell at school.
I don’t know about that because parents now seem to be even more sensitive than they were when I was growing up in the 1970s–and they were pretty paranoid then. I spent many of my formative years living in the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento. The crimes of the Manson Family and the Zodiac Killer were still recent enough to give nightmares to people like my parents. It was also the middle of a period when the US had a steady increase in violent crime from the 1960s to the early 1990s. Everywhere there seemed to be drugged-up long-haired psychos eager to murder (or do something worse) to some randomly-selected middle-class kids.
Or more to the point, with the rise of cable news, which has to create drama in order to sustain constant coverage, and fear–rational or not–being a sure-fire basis upon which to fabricate drama.
So, given that the chance of any random child being swooped up in some random abduction is about as likely as any one of us winning the lottery…is there any chance of us reverting to the ‘good old days’ when kids had the run of the streets and got to learn a whole shitload of stuff about life?
Probably not for generations, maybe modern tech like GPS or other tracking or always on video and audio/wearable computers might change things?
But this is an irrational fear compounded by culture, even if you are a parent who allows your children more freedom other parents will criticize you or even call police reporting the neglectful monster allowing their children to roam free. Irrational cultural fears don’t usually respond to reason, see example below.
Look up the phrase “free-range kids” or “free-range parenting.” That’s the latest “you need to stop restricting your kids’ freedoms so much” movement out there. I recall an article about someone letting his/her grade-school kid ride the NY subway without an adult and others being aghast at the thought.
I think part of it is that there really are not anymore wide open free places to play like creeks and open areas. When I was growing up we had those undeveloped areas nearby but now everything is fenced off and nobody would dare allow some stranger kids to put up something in their trees for fear of liability. We have public parks but there are so developed and often crowded I cannot see kids going to them spontaneously. Parents are even uncomfortable about having other peoples kids over.
Now not always. I’ve seen homes where the parents could care less what kids are there and what they do and those homes become magnets.
Yeah. Where we used to play back in the late 70s there was a creek where we fished for eels and caught crayfish, and the only way to cross was over a fallen tree. Now it’s a housing subdivision with a big concrete bridge. There are walking paths by the “stream”, but they’re fenced for fear of drownings.
Availability heuristic is basically a mental shortcut that makes you think of immediate examples that come to mind; your brain assumes that if you can think of an example of a given phenomenon (in this case, violence against children), it must be important. The more that phenomenon is discussed in the news cycle, the more important you assume that phenomenon to be, and when it dominates coverage, it must be the most important thing ever.
Mean world syndrome holds that the more the mass media focuses on violence and other negative phenomena, the more hostile you perceive the world to be, whether it is or it isn’t. Both of these phenomena have been magnified by the 24-hour news cycle and the Internet and social media, where information is shared easily and uncritically (“It may be wrong, but if it helps even one person, it’s worth it!!1!!!”)
Therefore, when all a parent sees on TV is violence against children, the parent is going to see molesters and kidnappers behind every tree and they’re going to keep their kids indoors. This, by the way, is far from universal in that many of these parents would likely be child-centered and looking for reasons to be paranoid and overprotective anyway, and most parents I know are actually pretty rational when it comes to “stranger danger”.
But I have a great example. I live in Pennsylvania, where Jerry Sandusky was the focus of most of the state and local news coverage for what seemed like forever. Many social services agencies are having a difficult time finding male volunteers, as well as kids to participate in their programs. Men don’t want to be in a situation where they may be accused of molesting kids, and some parents are terrified that the nice volunteer is going to molest their kids. The constant coverage put this idea in people’s heads, and there is going to be long-lasting collateral damage because of it.
I spent most of my childhood in the 80’s (born in 1974) in a suburb of Chicago, and my memories are essentially the same, except that we couldn’t go too far without letting our (stay-at-home) moms know, and that was defined as a couple of blocks, rather than a couple of miles. This is consistent with research that the radius in which children are allowed to roam has become smaller with each generation in the last century, and has declined by almost 90% since 1970 in Britain (page 7). I suspect the US numbers are about the same.
Yes. That is my fear. Even when we’re camping, there are generally rules that the kids must be supervised by an adult at all times, often with a “line of sight” codicil. Not worth getting kicked out.
It’s also a problem compounded by what other parents are doing, in that it’s not much fun to roam alone. Even if I got over my fear of Children and Family Services being called on me, there’s just no one else for my kid to roam with until they get old enough for gang behavior and police attention to be a concern. Playdates are planned in advance and arranged by parents around the parents’ schedules. The days of going and knocking on doors until one of your friends could “come out to play” seem to be over.
Its probably as well that we don’t tell children he real facts about danger.
Children are orders of magnitude more likely to be harmed, or abused by someone they know, especially their own parents than by strangers.
The problem with media sensationalism and public perception of risk is that it is entirely unrealistic and disproportionate, but that would not make for a good story
I was born in a suburb of Akron, OH, in 1967. I remember being 3 or 4 years old, and my mother having to tell me again and again not to talk to strangers. If I was lost, look for a policeman, don’t go to a stranger. I remember learning that at school, too. At the same time, we were allowed to play outside, anywhere in the neighborhood. The only rule I remember was that we had to come home “when it got dark out.” This was later amended to “when the street lights came on,” because we had a different idea of “dark” than our mother.
I also remember that Mom had a cow bell she would ring when we were to come home for dinner. So around dinner time, we had to be within a couple streets of the house, because if we missed dinner, we were in trouble! :eek:
Slightly off topic, but still related, the hyper-sensitive safety thing is not *just *stranger-danger. Been to a playground lately? Too many of the kids from our generation got hurt on too many things. Merry-go-round, monkey bars, jungle gym… too dangerous, have them removed. Someone broke someone’s nose with a tetherball - that’s gone, too. Sheesh, the swings have seatbelts!
