from the same woman that prolly won't let her kid have a BB gun...
Posted on 04/04/2008 4:55:02 AM PDT by PurpleMan
[Money quote] "The problem with this everything-is-dangerous outlook is that over-protectiveness is a danger in and of itself. A child who thinks he can’t do anything on his own eventually can’t."
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
The quote is good, but in NYC I still won’t let a 9-Year-Old ride the Subway alone.
from the same woman that prolly won't let her kid have a BB gun...
> The quote is good, but in NYC I still won’t let a 9-Year-Old ride the Subway alone.
Do the Guardian Angels still patrol the subways of New York? (I should know this but I don’t!)
If so, the 9 year old will probably be quite safe riding them.
As a parent, tho’, I’d be more concerned about what happens before and after the subway.
I hope that nine year old has a black belt in street fighting and carries a Ka-Bar.
I won’t let a 9-Year-Old ride the Subway alone in any city unarmed.
I saw both the mom and the kid on Fox News. Both seemed level headed and in complete control of their faculties.
The mom looked chic but had confidence in her son who seemed to know exactly what he was doing. Although he was young he seemed to have a lot on the ball and was not cocky and overconfident or overly proud of his ride.
We live in a free society and that included the right to move about.
Agreed. It's all a matter of relative risk. Do you send the kid out at 11 p.m. to ride uptown past 125th St.? No. But at 4 p.m. after school to head to a piano lesson on the upper West Side? Sure.
If a kid gets into a jam and starts to holler there are plenty of folks - yes, even in NYC - who will come to his aid.
----
Send treats to the troops...
Great because you did it!
www.AnySoldier.com
How far we have fallen as a society. I think this parent is insane.
When I was growing in DETROIT in the fifties and early sixties kids could go anywhere. When politicians decided to stop defending property rights it was the beginning of the end of all personal rights including personal safety of children.
Today, Detroit and most other big cities have become criminal enterprises. This is where Lyndon Johnson and the liberals have taken us.
Does this nine year old wear a target on their shirt? When something happens they should and will be prosecuted. Now if we actually kept our sex offenders and other criminals in prisons without releasing them early things might be different. The parent here isn’t living in the real world.
The odds are against the little kid. The subways are a jungle. Sorry in my opinion no sane, conscerned parent would allow a 9 year old to ride the subway alone.
BRAVO! So many parents are raising NANNY-STATE wards who are afraid of their own shadow.
Apparently the writer never heard of Etan Patz.
Granted, Patz was 6, not 9, but he wasn't on a subway, either.
ML/NJ (Friend of the Patz family)
Because you're stupid.
Exactly! Let's all cower down in our bunkers because 'X' might happen to us, regrardless of the fact that the odds of 'X' happening are 1 in 50 million. Geez!
Growing up in Yonkers, if I did my homework, I was expected to be home for dinner. Between 3:30 and 6:30 P.M. my friends and I had free roam of the neighborhood. Never had a problem. (If you don’t count the bicycle damage to the golf course)
Now, as parents, we are constantly trying to balance freedom and safety for our kids. Part of the problem is that middle school aged children are not as innocent as we were. Thirteen year-olds are getting into things that I was clueless about at 16.
A nine year old is generally small enough to pick up and carry off.
My rule about the kids going out on their own is that they had to be too big to easily abscond with.
Live far from NYC, but doubt letting a nine year-old ride the subway alone is anything I’d do for many reasons.
But as some have said, stranger abductions are very rare in the US, only about 100 - 130 per year in a nation of 300 million, and about 4 million kids born each year:
http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/psychology/child_abduction/4.html
But because child abduction cases receive so much news coverage, and the coverage of one case can last for weeks and months, and be updated for years afterward, then child abduction can become many times larger in the public’s mind than it actually is.
I was impressed with him, too. Very mature for ten.
Hi Yonkers!
Yes I’m finding 13 very difficult to deal with. Especially when they want to go to mall and movies with friends. I do allow this. Thank god for cell phones!
What part of Yonkers did you come from!
Growing up in Yonkers I was not allowed to leave the block alone. What a kook this one is. I live in rural PA now and I don't let me 13 year old go anywhere alone. We have a running list of Sexual Offenders in the area.America is now the third world. I won't raise children in the states.Tokyo, Seoul or Singapore are examples of places where you can still let your kids walk on their own. America doesn't have to be this way.
I love my Country and will not leave for another.
In Japan, child safety is every citizen's responsibility.Great call. Why don't we have safety patrols?
thanks for putting some prepective on this subject.
“I live in rural PA now and I don’t let me 13 year old go anywhere alone.”
You gotta let go sometime. We live in a city and my son was going places in the neighborhood (up to a mile or so away) by himself at 13.
I went to grade school with your sister. Lived next to the school.
I am in Putnam now. My daughters’ 13 y.o. friend (the one with the “cool” mom that let her go to the mall unsupervised) just reported being raped by a 17-y.o.
No. An idiot with a weak grasp of a good idea.
Children do need to be taught increasing levels of independence as they grow older.
However, nine years old is not old enough to be left alone on a New York subway.
A nine year old is naive and helpless against a predator, even if they have been taught to be independent.
There are unfortunately a considerable number of children predators that exist in this world, and in a large city with a concentrated population, there are likely to be a few in the area.
You need to teach your children to use good judgment, not just give them independence without the common sense that will keep them from harm.
Teaching your child how the subway works so that they could get home if something drastic happened and they were separated from you isn't a bad idea, but you shouldn't turn them loose on their own.
Guess what, Ms. Garfinkle: I’d have been devastated. But would that just prove that no mom should ever let her child ride the subway alone?
No. It would just be one more awful but extremely rare example of random violence, the kind that hyper parents cite as proof that every day in every way our children are more and more vulnerable.
"Random" acts of violence are almost never completely random. Criminals attack those they think won't be able to fight back. They prey on the helpless.
Pedophiles don't attack healthy middle aged men. They prey on children, because children are helpless and innocent.
Yes this woman could probably allow her nine year old to ride the subway alone again and again, and has a pretty good chance that he would get home safely.
Is having a good chance of getting home safely, good enough when considering the consequences?
You do eventually have to start letting go, but nine is too young. My stepdaughter is 8 1/2, and while she is responsible and mature for her age, she is also naive and trusting of adults, and she's also completely incapable of effectively defending herself from an adult.
No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it.
This woman is worried that her son might lose her cell phone, even on a short trip home where he would obviously be especially careful with it, yet she trusts him to get himself home safely?
This woman is an idiot.
Teach the kid to be more responsible with objects like a cell phone first, and in a few years, give him more personal freedom.
Japan has a homogenous society and everyone has pretty much the same culture,
so you know what to expect from about every person you meet.
It makes for a very strong community and society when you can expect everyone to have the same standards of behavior.
Too bad it would be “intolerant” here to have an expected standard of behavior.
Well I do let her go with friends. I will not let her go for walks or to the mall alone.
It seems all of Yonkers has moved up the line.
Horrible about the rape. I was even hesitant about the mall thing for a 13 year old. I think she is too young but I gave in because she is with a group of friends. I call her every hour on the hour when she goes.
Yeah, what I see in the “theology” that he obviously subscribes to -
it’s OK for “us” to behave in anti-social ways - YOU OWE US!
My wife’s grandfather grew up in NYC.. he passed recently, but tells of routinely riding the subways, busses and streetcars from the age fo about 6 (maybe it was younger) alone.
Yes it was a different time, the wack jobs were locked up and not roaming the streets thanks the the ACLU.
This is how it should be here, but its amazing how few adults will step up and say something to a child that isn’t their own.... I swear my wife and I are the exception to this rule, we have no problem correcting or aiding a child that is not ours... most people we know just sit and do nothing when they see some kid doing something they shouldn’t right in front of them in a public place.
I don’t know why, fear of their parent showing up and yelling at them? I dunno.. way I look at it, if you want to get in my face because I corrected your child because you weren’t there, you should have freaking been there in the first place.
I deal with too many kids in too many situations to not assert adult authority to any child when I feel its needed. That irks you, then too bad.
Uh, no, they prey on children because they are PEDOPHILES... if they were after middle aged men, they'd be called McGreevy.
Try for yourself. The zip code is 10022. There are 1923 sex offenders that live or work in the area.
http://www.familywatchdog.us/Search.asp
The area might be a bit broad, but take a look at the map.
Do you really think that's a reasonable environment to leave a 9 year old boy alone?
If this were a small town where everyone knows everyone else, I would say it's a different story.
I’m always on that site. I found one in our Plant here at work.
Does it give a breakdown of the actual crimes they've committed? You'd be surprised at what will land someone on a sex offender registry these days.
Rarity? You have no clue.
There are nearly 2000 registered sex offenders that work or live in the area where she let her son ride home alone.
Those are the ones that have already been caught before, and that they know where they are.
My fiance works for children's services, and you would be appalled to see the stream of cases they get where children are preyed upon by family and friends of the family. They don't even get the cases where the kids are preyed upon by strangers.
The cases that result in a kid being killed usually make the papers.
The cases where the kid is molested but makes it home usually aren't because the parents don't want to embarrass their child and scar them even more.
You live in Ohio, and you tell me I have no clue? I've lived in the NY Metro area nearly all my life. I made my first trip into NYC on the LIRR and then the subway up to the planetarium without an adult when I was 11. (I had been on my own in Chicago before that.) Once I was in Jr High, the following year, my friends and I were regulars at Madison Sq Garden (then at 50th Street and requiring a subway ride). No one ever had a bad story to tell about a sex offender.
ML/NJ
FR bookmark
I have riden the NYC subway for years. IMHO, this woman is an idiot. Right idea, but taking too far at too young an age. And where is the father when potentially life and death decisions about the child are being made?
er...punctuation. Remind me not to PUI...
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