I agree. I was born in 1972, and I remember mostly being told not to talk to strangers or get into cars with anyone I didn’t know.
But… in about 1980 or so, with the Adam Walsh and Etan Patz abductions, and the subsequent TV movie about Adam Walsh. That, along with the practice of putting abducted kids’ faces on milk cartons, ramped the paranoia up to crazy levels. That still didn’t prevent our parents from letting us play outside, walk to school, etc…
I think what happened next was that people who had been children or teenagers during all this started having kids in the early-mid 1990s, and this paranoia was ingrained into their heads as a clear and present danger to their kids (even though it wasn’t and never has been) due to the paranoia while they were younger and less able to rationally process it, so they took steps to “protect” their kids that parents of children my age never did- no walking to school, no roaming the neighborhood, etc…
As a kid growing up in a middle class U.S. neighborhood in the 50s, I’m sure I was smart enough not to take candy from a stranger or accept much more than a very casual interaction with one without suspicion.
What strikes me, though, is the general degree of freedom I had…not just in the neighborhood but in other situations. Mom and I would ride the bus downtown so she could shop in the two department stores. I can recall more than one occasion when I was no more than five or six getting separated from her.
I’m sure she was concerned, but there was no out-and-out panic. A clerk would see me wandering around on my own and corral me, an announcement would be made that a little boy had lost his mother and was waiting at the ______ counter, she would reclaim me, and all was well.
I also remember being allowed to go on my own to one or more of the downtown theaters to watch a movie no more than a couple of years later. She would either come by at the end of the show, or I would walk and meet her at a pre-agreed upon spot.
This was not a small hamlet, by the way, but a pretty bustling downtown in a city whose population was over 165,000 at that time.
Mom developed a unique whistle and taught us to home in on that when we got lost in a large department store. Or, we were supposed to present ourselves to the lost and found department and they’d announce “lost kid” over the loudspeaker.
In a recent podcast Sandra Tsing Loh touched on this in a recent podcast. (I think I have linked the right one, but if not it’s the one from the following week.) Essentially, a big factor in the expectation that children’s “leisure” time be scheduled, programmed, and supervised is that parents want their children to get in to the right schools at whatever level. I’ve mentioned this before, but I still cringe when I recall hearing something on NPR, a few years ago, about pre-school “curricula” intended to prepare the tots for the “rigors of kindergarten”. I kid you not, they actually said rigors of kindergarten.
That thing about the kid riding the subway by himself? That was Lenore Skenazy’s 9-year-old son. And she started her blog, Free Range Kids, in response to the outrage directed at her when she talked about it on the Today Show (or one of those morning shows – I forget which one).
I was born in 1960, so I grew up, in New York City, in the 60s and 70s. We all walked to grade school by ourselves. The littlest kids (first and second graders) were sort of shepherded along by older girls, maybe big sisters or neighbors. But parents didn’t take their kids to school or pick them up. Those who did were considered odd and overprotective.
And after school, after a quick trip home to get out of uniform, the neighborhood kids would re-group at the local park or schoolyard. We’d walk, or ride bikes, and, as many other have said in this thread, we’d be told to be home for dinner.
When I started high school (ninth grade – the Catholic school system in NYC doesn’t have middle school), I took the subway there. By myself, every day. I’d taken the subway plenty of times by myself, or with friends, in the couple of years before high school. It wasn’t considered unusual.
And this was back in the days when New York was actually dangerous.
Yes, we’ve changed. One poster upthread did point out that having a lot of stay-at-home moms in the neighborhood made a big difference. Kids were coming home from school to an adult at home. That’s largely gone these days. But all in all, we don’t trust children the way we used to.
Did no one look at the graph I pointed to? I can’t believe people just keep on with the warm and fuzzy strolls down memory lane, totally ignoring or shrugging off this data. That “trust” we used to extend to children got large numbers of them killed!
Fah! Data has no place in the fight against ignorance! Anecdotes are the true facts!
… But seriously, you’re essentially right. Parents are doing a better job at keeping their kids safe than they did in the 60’s, 70s, and 80s.
And there’s confirmation bias too. In another thread about this topic, I mentioned that I had all the freedom I wanted and nothing happened to me. Except for the two broken arms, the time I needed 130 stitches in my right arm, the time my brother got caught up in a tree to a point where the fire department had to get him down, the times we accidentally locked ourselves out of the house, etc.
But, really - we had more freedom and nothing bad ever happened! :rolleyes:
(BTW, when did this place get so old? All these threads whining about the kids of today - “culture references they won’t get”, “I pit helicopter parents”, this thread, and others over the past year or two. Might as well bring out the shuffleboard set.)
That graph says nothing about today’s lack of “trust” making kids safer. Stranger danger is bunk. It always has been. That’s not what this thread is about. It’s about what went wrong to make people like you happen.
To add to the discussion, the “stranger danger” largely began when we realized that the kids weren’t safe with people who weren’t strangers - the Church molestation scandals, the McMartin pre-school scandal*, more.
*Yes, there were no convictions and this isn’t the thread to debate the guilt or lack thereof, but this case was in the news for over 1/2 a decade - it had an effect on parents regardless of how it ended, and this effect was international: Day-care sex-abuse hysteria - Wikipedia
Fair enough that my stats don’t relate to “stranger danger” per se. I can move it to a new “pro-helicopter parenting” thread if necessary.
But your vitriolic characterization of “what went wrong to make people like you happen” illustrates my point well: people like me (a new societal consensus) have saved hundreds of thousands of kids’ lives, along with nurturing them more in emotional and intellectual terms, and people like you say this great modern advance was something that “went wrong”. Madness.
Yeah, well, we also have kids (and I mean tweens and teens) with little concern or consideration for strangers, because they have been taught that everyone is out to get them. When I was a kid, I got up on the bus and gave my seat to anyone who looked older than my parents, man or woman, any woman who was pregnant or anyone who had a baby or small child, and anyone with a lot of packages, or who had a cane, a leg in a cast, etc. Kids don’t do this anymore. Kids run past you to get on the elevator when it opens, and sometimes don’t even wait for people to get off first.
The other day, I was in line behind a young woman, maybe 19, who was buying a soda at a convenience store, and she was 5 cents short. She started to get her wallet out (I guess to get an debit card), and I said “Here, I have a nickel.” She looked so stunned. She didn’t even say thank you right away. She took the soda and started to walk out, then she said “Oh, thank you!” People used to do stuff like that all the time.
I’m not whining about how rude kids are today. We (well, the generation before me) made them that way. If all strangers are out to get you, why should you have any concern for them? That middle-aged guy with the aircast, and the woman with all the bags are probably child molesters, so why should you give them your seat on the bus?
I was raised to give up my seat to those old bitties but I realized those old bitties would put me in an anti-gay reeducation concentration camp. Stand, bitch.
I meant that my complaint is that we’ve raised a generation who is contemptuous of strangers. It’s not their fault.
And not all old bitties (spellcheck says “biddies,” but maybe they are different words) want to put you in a gay re-education camp. My 97-year-old-grandmother doesn’t, and thinks politicians have better things to worry about than who is marrying who. My 74-year-old mother doesn’t either. Back in the 1970s, I had a babysitter who was gay and out to my parents (or, to my father, and he thought he was out to my mother, but my mother was a little clueless; she figured it out later, though).
