I remember being in Girl Scouts and watching a cheesy video on “Stranger Danger.” It instructed that, if a stranger came within 10 feet of us, we should yell out “This is not my Mom! This is not my Dad! Help me!” Even at that age (I was probably around 6, as I quit the next year) I found it extraordinarily stupid. At the same time, there are some reasonable boundaries to set - for example, upthread grade school children riding the NYC subway alone was mentioned, which I would find disconcerting.
I also think that the over-supervision of children walks hand in hand with over-scheduling - when you have a soccer game after school, followed by piano lessons and karate, there’s not much room to fit roaming around the forest into. Not to mention the piles of homework.
I grew up in the 60s and was told never to talk to strangers for this reason. We didn’t have the rhyme “stranger danger” but it was clear it was about kidnapping.
A couple weeks ago I was reading a newspaper from a nearby city and apparently a couple teenagers came up to a couple young kids playing:
"The teens approached the children from behind a row of trees, police said.
One suspect touched the boy and yelled “Boo,” police said. Madrid Police Chief Rick Tasler did not describe the extent of the physical contact.
The girl screamed, which caused the suspects to run away.
And the police were cruising the neighborhood trying to find them and the article was talking about “stranger danger”
When I was a kid, something like this wouldn’t have caused such a police and media reaction.
Even when I was growing up (50’s & 60’s) kids in general were warned “Never accept candy from a stranger”, but parents certainly weren’t as paranoid as they are these days. I walked to school alone for most of elementary school (about 5 blocks).
Well, a sense of it existed in the 50s: you were told never to go into a car with a stranger (or accept candy). It, however, was at the level of “Don’t swim until a hour after you eat” advice. People heeded it, but didn’t obsess over it.
But back then, American’s weren’t so terrified all the time like the are today.
I think stranger danger has always been part of human culture for as long as we’ve been living in big groups. It has grown more pronounced now thanks to the rapid dissemination of sensational news stories like child abductions. Also, among the poor and ethnic minorities, teaching children to avoid and even fear outsiders is a survival mechanism because they are the children that are most likely to be victimized.
Of course. I’m currently living in a large suburb of a major US city and my kid’s day isn’t that different from what was described by the OP. My 6 year old son just has to abide by the “Come home when the streetlights come on rule” which he often complains about because his friends are still out running around down by the creek.
I was born in California, which is where I think mom picked up the fear of strangers. The fear I think was long-haired pot smoking hippies. Then we moved to Louisiana and the fear was race violence. I think I was warned to stay away from black houses because they’d pour boiling water on you or something. Then we moved to the UP of Michigan which was really safe and I was allowed to wander the woods alone with the family dog. But always walk along roads against traffic (or was it with traffic?), don’t accept rides (perverts and homosexuals!) and Halloween goodies had to be inspected for razor blades, needles and anything suspicious might be laced with LSD. That was the long-haired hippy fear thing. This was all late 60’s early 70’s.
Besides the warnings, I was still allowed to go pretty much anywhere I wanted by myself.
One thing to remember is that when kids were running around loose in the 50’s and 60’s (and most of the 70’s), there was a parent at home for them to run back to. Most children of an age to roam now are in paid before- and after-school care, and each adult is in charge of ten or fifteen kids. That person is being paid specifically to supervise the children, not to let them go play by themselves.
Even if a child does have a parent at home, there aren’t many other children just hanging around the neighborhood ready to play. I didn’t have a paid job when my kids were school-aged, and they were allowed to pretty much roam free when they reached the age of nine or ten, but unless we went out of our way to invite other children to come over, there wasn’t anyone out there to play with. They were all in scheduled, supervised activities, just as my kids would have been had I been working a 9 to 5 job.
Come to think of it, when my mom was at home, my brother and I were encouraged to get out of the house and “go play.” As soon as she started paid work, we had to go straight home after school and stay there until she got home, and woe to us if we weren’t there when she called.
I think this is true. I’m not a conspiracy-minded person, but I even think there were people who thought of the (non-existent) rise in kidnappings as something young parents deserved for not providing their kids with a stay-at-home mother, and I think some people pretty shamelessly promoted the idea of the guy with the van in the hope that women would go back home “where they belonged”-- or maybe even thought of themselves as doing the country’s children a favor by giving a lot of press to this issue.
He was 11.
I lived in Manhattan until I was eight, and my cousins, along with other kids in my building and my block, roamed around Morningside Heights in the 1970s. Now, there’d be some pretty little kids in the group, but some older kids as well. I didn’t ride the subway by myself at six, or seven, or eight, but sometimes I rode it with my cousin who was just four years older (and some other kids with ages in between). As soon as I could tell time I had a watch, and I was supposed to be home at a certain time. I had a dime to call that I wasn’t supposed to spend on anything else, and if I couldn’t make it home on time, I was supposed to call.
When we moved to Queens, I could ride into the city on the weekend pretty much when I wanted, with the same stipulation that I be home at a certain time, or call. I was never getting into trouble. I was usually doing something geeky like going to see classic movies at revival theaters, then getting a slice of pizza and reading* The Village Voice*, maybe going to a museum, or window shopping, and going home.
I could play unsupervised in my suburban neighborhood, including in the woods behind our house. We’d both walk and ride bikes to the little strip mall a few miles away, too. This was mid- to late 80s.
I don’t really connect “stranger danger” to kids off playing by themselves or not. That was always a fear, but even at its height in the 80s the fear was not forcible kid snatching, it was coercive abduction.
I remember one of the kids I used to babysit being afraid to come over to our house (this was in Indiana, not New York anymore) to show me her new bike, because the people next door had a panel van parked in the driveway. This was when I was in high school, around 1983, so she was about eight years younger than I was, and she had a “Stranger Danger” curriculum in school, while I had not, so the curriculum started right around 1980, or just a little later. Etan Patz (the first milk carton kid) was kidnapped in 1979, and Adam Walsh in 1981.
My Google-fu isn’t finding any references to the first published curriculum for “Stranger Danger,” but the milk carton campaign began in 1984.
The first McMartin preschool arrests were in 1983, which is a good starting point for “Satanic Panic,” something that went hand-in-hand with Stranger Danger in the 80s.
Kam for a local perspective, I can tell you from personal experience that NSW schools had the annual classroom talk from a policeman in the 1970s. In high school, it was drugs, shoplifting, etc, but in primary school, it was inevitably stranger danger.
Now, that said, I think that was about the limit of it. The cop would finish his talk, the teacher would make us do a singsong “THANK you CON-sta-BULL So and SO”, school would let out, and we’d give it no more thought. I was a latchkey kid (and my sister and I, looking back, probably would have let any smooth talking adult into the house), and we used to travel 150km to my dad’s flat in Sydney (a bus, two trains, and another bus) on our own as pre-teens (illegal now). This was not seen as out of the ordinary. We felt safe, the adults assumed we were safe, but there was at least a rudimentary drive to make kids aware of stranger danger.
Sure, I’m a bit older than you, and I too remember the drill of not accepting gifts from strangers, never getting into a car with an unfamiliar man (it was always a man) etc. But as you say, it didn’t filter down to our actual activities, so the streets were always alive with kids. Not so anymore. In fact I currently live in a dead-end street with little traffic…despite this, and knowing that at least five (and most likely more) of the houses have primary school aged kids, it’s strange that they’re never seen except in the back of the Toyota SUV on their way to and from school.
Meh, just nostalgic I guess. And saddened that our environment has become so fucking sanitised (for fear of injury and litigation I guess) that kids don’t get the opportunity to do really cool and dirty stuff anymore.
I share the nostalgia, and a big part of me would love to see kids climbing trees, getting grazed knees, and making forts. However, to be honest, if I had kids, I’d probably be driving them to school too these days (just in case, y’know?), and I also know that a lot of my own time spent outdoors with matchbox cars, dirt, and pushbikes was probably down to the fact that I didn’t have a Playstation3. My sister is always up my nephew for spending too much time on it, but by hell, those things are awesome! Tough gig for parents these days.
Also, I had a pristine surf beach with rock platforms, wonderfully dangerous little cliffs to climb, salt water pools, etc. I was a water rat. Also, there was lots of bush around to explore. No idea how I’d have gone in the suburbs.
Yeah, same. In the 60’s I lived in a coastal town (population 3000) but this number swelled to 15k over the summer holidays. Now it’s commutable to Melbourne, wot with freeways and stuff.
And I hear ya with the technology stuff. The grandkidlet is 4yrs old with his own freakin’ tablet. It too opens the world up (his fave website is the BOM! He knows where Giles is, smartarse kid.) And how can I complain about him using such devices when Nana gets stuck in front of her ancient old desktop for hours a day too?
Hehee. This takes me back! With hindsight, the Sydney summer visitors kept our local economy humming along, but we kids didn’t care a rat’s about that. We called the Sydney tourists “Parras” (for Parramatta).
Big graffito on a cliff (pre-spray can graffiti, so daubed on in white paint with a brush) on a headland, high above a popular beach: FUCK OFF PARRAS!
Graffiti hadn’t been discovered in the '60s. It was you '70’s hoodlums who started it!
But anyway, we moved to Melbourne (tres rough inner-burbs) in the early '70’s and I was still a street urchin. Merri Creek, railway sidings, dodgy back lanes were my haunts, and I guess it’s a miracle that I’m alive at all (being a sheila and stuff) but I really wish my grandsons had the same advantages I had back then.
