Where’s dad?
During summer, we had one rule: Come home when the street lights come on.
It would be okay if they are illegals and the kid walked a thousand in the company of strangers and criminals though.
When I was young, perversion was neither tolerated nor accepted. Today it is. All three of mine are under six and they won’t go out back without me for a long time. The guy two doors down is gay. He always comments on how cute my son is. All three of my kids are very good looking. I’m not trying to brag, honestly, but they’re commented on wherever we go. Random strangers walk up to us and tell us this. Our neighbor has never commented on my daughters. Not once. It’s always my son, who he has also tried to call out of our yard into his when he dog sits for somebody. I told the neighbor our son wasn’t allowed out of the yard when he called. The guy hasn’t dog sat since then. We actually think he was dog sitting to have an excuse to call our son over. Paranoid? You betcha.
In a couple of years, someone will complain that she became obese and it was the parent's fault for not making her play outside.
The world has changed. When we were little, in the Summer we just played around the house, went exploring etc. Mother would call us for Dinner and Supper. We would take a bath before going to bed and start all over the next day.
Now when Mother was 6 she was on a huge farm, over 1000 acres. Her 12 Brothers and Sisters worked on the farm except the older girls helped their Mother in the kitchen, taking care of the little ones etc.
One day when she was in her 80s Mother asked me to drive her around where she grew up. She showed me the field where her daddy kept cows. As a 6 year old she had to walk several miles, gather the cows and walk them home. Her 8 year old Sister took them back to the field the next morning.
Despite the fact that we gained tremendous independence by the way we, and every other kid in the area grew up, I would never let mine do the same thing. The world is now full of perverts, criminals and various and sundry undesirable elements.
I’d be in jail on a life sentence for letting my kids
1. Walk a mile to school and another mile back
2. Go to the beach with their friends with no adult present.
3. And for trusting them to follow the rules of safety and decorum.
Of course, we lived less than a block from the beach, they were good, smart kids, and that WAS the ‘70s. Plus, the neighborhood was comprised of actual neighbors who always watched out for one another’s kids.
I was thinking of that SoCal beach this morning…a lovely senior apartment there with an ocean view was my planned retirement residence. Forget it! Crime ridden neighborhood, nasty Hispanics literally push white ladies off the sidewalk into the oncoming traffic. White men too.
I wasn’t too much older than this when my siblings and I would pack a lunch, ride the base shuttle bus 30 miles (one way) from the town we lived in to the AF base, swim all day at the base pool, and keep an eye on the time to catch the bus back home at the end of the day. No parental or any adult supervision. And we were in a foreign country. Never once missed the bus.
I disagree with the conclusion of the article that the bureaucracy wentvafter this woman because her kid was independent.
The bureacracy went after this woman because it needs to provide a reason for it’s own existance. An idle bureaucracy is an endangered bureaucracy; when bureaucrats run out of legitimate cases to pursue they find ways of manufacturing some.
Repeatedly sledding down a steep hill, with the only way to stop at the bottom was hitting a chain link fence (and sometimes the pole...ouch)
Playing chicken with a piece of rebar... did that at dusk once and wound up with some stitches in the head
Playing with bows and arrows... shoot the arrow straight up in the air and see how close to your foot you could get it when it hit the ground
Shooting an arrow at a bamboo pole stuck in the ground... deflected off once and went through a neighbor's bathroom window (which was closed)
Making flame-throwers out of spray paint cans
All sorts of things on a Pogo stick
Etc., etc., etc.
during my childhood we could leave in the morning on our bikes and had to be home by the time the street lights were on....40’s and 50’s were much safer for kids...its a shame that kids now a days don’t have a safe harbor to play in...
I remember when parents said, “Get out of my hair, go out and play.” And we went out and played all day, doing whatever we wanted and going wherever we wanted, as long as we looked both ways before crossing the street and avoided talking to strangers. At suppertime we came home. I guess all our mothers deserved to be arrested.
Hell, when I was a boy in the 1950s, cars didn’t even have seat belts. And at 7 we all carried pocket knives to whittle and play mumblety-peg.
My gosh, when I was growing up I first played in the park, then became a park employee for my town at 15. We had arts and crafts and swimming lessons. Some of the kids were there EVERYDAY from 8 to 6.
Goodbye, America.
Glad I knew you when you were good, healthy and sane.
And what should be done to parents who let their children travel through a drug -infested country, led by “coyotes” intent upon doing the bidding of a marxist president while they are occasionally raped?
She was the only child in the park. I would not leave my 9 you child alone all day. You should get all the facts before lambasting. Hurray for all you folks that went to the moon, biked cross country, etc, while you were left unattended for days. At least you knew how to get home unlike this child.
When I was four and I had two siblings just one and two years older, my mother would shove us out the door and tell us to go play. There was a mob of kids in the neighborhood of similar ages. We all played together with NO!!! parents around. And we stayed out late at night in the summer as well with no parents around. Insanity has taken over
The Overprotected Kid
A preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery—without making it safer. A new kind of playground points to a better solution.
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/03/hey-parents-leave-those-kids-alone/358631/