Posted on 04/08/2019 7:07:49 AM PDT by NOBO2012
“A preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery—without making it safer.” - Hanna Rosin, The Overprotected Kid
What could go wrong? For one thing kids whose lives are micro-managed by helicopter parents from cradle through their first job interview never learn to manage risks on their own.
Helicopter parents have been around at least since the dawning of the Millennials but I first reported on them 4 years ago. The post discussed pushback in Wales where some concerned parents built a park called “The Land” filled with junk where kids were still allowed to wander freely, build stuff and *gasp!* build fires.
“Today, these playgrounds are so out of sync with affluent and middle-class parenting norms that when I showed fellow parents back home a video of kids crouched in the dark lighting fires, the most common sentence I heard from them was ‘This is insane.’”
As I observed at the time,
Of course, what’s considered “insane” today was part of a normal childhood just a generation or so ago. It was called “play” not “play dates.” It was how kids learned about the world, how to overcome both physical and mental obstacles, stretch their imagination, explore the unknown, solve seemingly impossible problems; and they did it all in the real world where they would reside for the rest of their lives, not the virtual world of video games.
The post was really about the Meitiv kids who were picked up by police in Silver Spring, Maryland at the behest of CPS for walking home from a neighborhood park – alone. Apparently in Maryland walking home without the accompaniment of a parental unit is illegal.
It’s hard to absorb how much childhood norms have shifted in just one generation. Actions that would have been considered paranoid in the ’70s—walking third-graders to school, forbidding your kid to play ball in the street, going down the slide with your child in your lap—are now routine.
No kidding. But this type of overprotection naturally led to the next level, Growing Up By Proxy, in which the helicopter lands and morphs into a bulldozer to clear the landscape of any obstacles in the kids path.
Helicopter parenting, the practice of hovering anxiously near one’s children, monitoring their every activity, is so 20th century. Some affluent mothers and fathers now are more like snowplows: machines chugging ahead, clearing any obstacles in their child’s path to success, so they don’t have to encounter failure, frustration or lost opportunities. – NYT
But take heart: someone is asking the big questions, like:
What kind of society are we when we need laws to protect parents who raise their children the way most of us were raised?
I think we all know the answer to that, the kind where many things that were once taken for granted now have to be authorized by the state. So Utah did just that.
For parents in Utah, it is now legal for their children to walk or bike to and from school without an accompanying adult. They can also let their kids play outside unsupervised, and be allowed to stay at home unattended.
These newfound freedoms are the result of the “Free-Range Parenting Bill,” unanimously passed by the Utah legislature and recently signed into law by Utah governor, Gary R. Herbert. Utah’s law is said to be the first of its kind in the nation.
State officials and lawmakers told the Washington Post that authorities in Utah were “not in the business” of arresting parents who allowed their children to roam freely, but lawmakers felt compelled to pass the legislation after Child Protective Service in other states opened criminal cases against parents who did.
Yes we have come a long way baby; maybe it’s time to take a breath along with a few steps back. Oh, wait, that makes us regressive doesn’t it? And that’s a baaad thing. Because progressive, good; regressive, bad.
Of course the Progs are the ones who are always collapsing and baying at the moon, not us.
It is a sad commentary on American life when we need laws to protect parents from prosecution for letting their kids walk, play, or stay at home unsupervised. But if that’s what it takes, call your legislators. Maybe kids will once again learn how to be independent and discover that they really don’t need Big Government to provide for all their basic needs (and wants). And then they too will want to MAGA.
Posted from: MOTUS A.D.
In the fourth and fifth grade, I attended a two room country school. All the dozen, or so, kids played "Work-up" softball together at recess. Every kid would work-up his way to bat, by everything from shagging dead balls to catching fly balls, so everyone from first through eighth grade would play all positions. We had a very strict gun policy: anyone bringing a gun to school, had to unload it, and leave it in the coat room.
The school bullies, the Romneys, and Lee families could hear you a comin' a quarter-mile away and they scattered like rats.
Would that be about right? :- )
the problem these days is that if you send your kids to walk the half mile to school they would be the only ones. In the fifties there were a ton of kids around.
The only real long-term solution is to stop subsidizing dysfunctional people into creating another generation of dysfunctional people.
By nearly EVERY metric, crime throughout North America is DOWN compared to when we were children, the exceptions being manufactured/process offenses.
You don’t believe the press when it comes to politics or anthropogenic climate change do you?
The church of perpetual panic has its propaganda running constantly, swamping you with horror stories from wherever the worst things happen, with no sense of proportion or distance: if something worrisome happened in L.A. or Bozeman, it’s fed to you 24/7 for at least 3 days, or until the next bad event. This is to keep you frightened and easily controlled.
There are over 300,000,000 people in the USA. Some misbehave. It seems worse because ONLY the baddies make the news!
DON’T BELIEVE THE PRESS!!!
Same here.. We were all ‘freerange’ back in the 60’s. And my parents were actually more strict than anyone else’s. The Left overdo EVERYTHING.
I grew up across the street from the county landfill, it was a great place to play as long as our parents didn’t catch us. We took out rats with our pellet guns, blew up stuff with M-80’s and generally had a good time.
Yep, we walked to and from school when I was growing up. If we were late getting out of the house, mom would tell us to hurry up. No driving kids to school in our household.
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