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.
I raised free range boys. They all grew up to be responsible, smart, hardworking engineers and fathers... I guess I did something wrong. s/
I was a free-range chicken err, child and i grew up Republican!
I have no problem with parents who watch over their children carefully. Even if they over do it. But I have a huge problem if DCFS or other government agency gets involved. Agencies can’t raise children. They can only take a child out of one home and put them in another. There is no guarantee that the home that lost a child was a bad one. Or that the home that got a child is a good one. The government agency does not take ownership of the child’s future. They just criticize without any skin in the game.
Do kids today have to wear helmets to climb trees? Are they even allowed to climb trees I wonder.
Back when all kids wee pretty much free range:
Families had 6 or more children
A ‘dad’ made enuf money (after taxes) that stay at home moms were the norm
The Gove didn’t take 40 50 50% of a families income (and try to control every aspect of a bodies life)
Homes were affordably/MI rates were under 5%
Criminals were locked up and drugs were something that was confined to small areas of major burgs.....
A good many of my neighbors still treat their 30 and young 40 year olds like kids. For example, the parents bought both boys engagement rings. They buy roofs for homes. They run out of state if the kids need a dog sitter. They constantly text their kids. They pay HOA fees. Buy security systems for their homes. And no not just one set of parents but multiple. One of my neighbors said they’d rather help their kids now and not after I’m dead. She’s talking her inheritance of course. It’s crazy!!!!! My kids must think my wife and I are evil. Lol. We let them figure out how to pay for everything. After the weddings, they are on their own. And he’ll no would I buy my sons engagement ring. Nuts!!!!
As a kid I found lots of places to play that were far more interesting than parks and playgrounds. I liked to investigate lumber yards, churches, roofs, attics and unfinished basements and abandoned buildings of any kind. Basically any unsupervised place that I could explore.
My siblings and I were free-range kids in rural central Utah for the the entire decade of the 1950’s. Took the .22 shooting by myself into the mountains at age 12 or so. (Father taught me to shoot around age 10). Barefoot all summer, freckles on my freckles from the perfect climate. I will never forget those days.
I was raised as a free range kid.
We lived in Hampton, Virginia (1956) and I remember my mom giving me a couple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to eat when my buddies and I would bicycle to Yorktown about 15 miles away.
I was ten. We’d play on the battlefield all day, eat our bagged lunches, wash it down with water from the drinking fountain and then bicycle home in time for dinner.
My parents would have gone to prison and we’d have been in CPS if that happened today.
Excellent!
However, there is a more basic problem to solve:
It is dangerous for children to roam freely, stay at home alone, walk home from school, etc. because crime in America has escalated!
Kidnapping and sex trafficking are serious dangers everywhere in America.
So are illegal drugs! Drug pushers prey on American children in their grammar schools!
There is no excuse for this!
American children--the American People--are in danger, and their government does not protect them adequately. In fact, the government is the problem: it de facto enables violent, vicious criminals and makes the safety of its citizens impossible.
Violent criminals continue to pour into America across its porous borders! Government actually enables them! It prevents US citizens from protecting themselves and their children!
This is part of the Decadence of Western Civilization in America.
"Liberalism" ("progressivism," the Democrat Party et al.) IS the Decadence. Liberals--Americans who have drunk the Koolade are sick with the Decadence and are allowing this plague to infect the rest of America and to destroy America.
In typical Decadent ("Liberal") manner, they attack the symptoms but ignore the basic cause of the disease.
They make it a crime for parents to allow their children to roam freely but ignore the crime and its causes which make it dangerous for the children to roam freely.
Fundamental to the Decadence is mendacity. Decadent people cannot be honest. If they were, they would attack the basis of the problem: crime.
But if they were honest, TRUTH would shatter their entire delusional paradigm and everything they believe, and, to them, nothing is worth that, and it is probably impossible for them to think outside the mass groupthink psychosis. They probably lack the intellect to do so.
Basically any unsupervised place that I could explore.
Anyway, I decided to have a little fun, so I put a dollar bill under one of the rocks in his club house. Took him a week to find it and then I noticed a lot of rocks both large and small were moved. I often chuckle , wondering if he is still turn over rocks.
In the summer when I was a 10-12 year old, we would get on our bikes and ride two lane highways 15 miles to Lake Michigan for the day and then ride home “before dark”. The operative phrase was “before dark”. Our parents would always say “be home before dark”. They didn’t have a clue where we were or what we were doing. There were no cell phones, beepers or whatever to trace us. I still remember being blown off the road by big semis. LOL. What glorious freedom! Sometimes, we’d take our .22’s down to the town dump and shoot things, including rats. If our shenanigans happened today in most communities both us and our parent would be in jail, forced to talk to social workers.
We live in Southern UT. I call it Mayberry. Kids play by themselves without adults “monitoring” them, ride their bike around and seem to be developing normally.
In the summer when I was a 10-12 year old, we would get on our bikes and ride two lane highways 15 miles to Lake Michigan for the day and then ride home “before dark”. The operative phrase was “before dark”. Our parents would always say “be home before dark”. They didn’t have a clue where we were or what we were doing. There were no cell phones, beepers or whatever to trace us. I still remember being blown off the road by big semis. LOL. What glorious freedom! Sometimes, we’d take our .22’s down to the town dump and shoot things, including rats. If our shenanigans happened today in most communities both us and our parent would be in jail, forced to talk to social workers.
We live in Southern UT. I call it Mayberry. Kids play by themselves without adults “monitoring” them, ride their bike around and seem to be developing normally.
In the summer when I was a 10-12 year old, we would get on our bikes and ride two lane highways 15 miles to Lake Michigan for the day and then ride home “before dark”. The operative phrase was “before dark”. Our parents would always say “be home before dark”. They didn’t have a clue where we were or what we were doing. There were no cell phones, beepers or whatever to trace us. I still remember being blown off the road by big semis. LOL. What glorious freedom! Sometimes, we’d take our .22’s down to the town dump and shoot things, including rats. If our shenanigans happened today in most communities both us and our parent would be in jail, forced to talk to social workers.
We live in Southern UT. I call it Mayberry. Kids play by themselves without adults “monitoring” them, ride their bike around and seem to be developing normally.
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.
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I live in Utah, raised 4 kids in Utah and raising a Grandson in Utah and when I heard this, I did a ‘Happy Dance’...
It’s about time to let kids find out what life is about...there are rules to live by (set by the parents, not the gov.) and if you break the rules then things happen, that’s how I raised my children and they are fine and so am I and by the looks of it, my grandson is going to be also...
There is a place for Gov. but NOT in the bedroom or raising our children, even if some believe that the Gov. own the children, they didn’t have them, we did, and my husband and I supported them, not the Gov. so thank you Utah for having some brains!!!
while building tree forts at least one of my brothers got hit from a falling hammer.....
now lets talk about stepping on rusty nails...
Wow....didn’t realize that UT was a such a nanny state....that they had to actually pass a law to let kids do....what kids (at least here in TX) do....that is, walk to school, play outside, stay at home, alone, once they’re a responsible age....what we’ve been doing (in TX, anyway) for EVER!!
The problem comes from agencies trying to avoid charges of discrimination.
Ghetto moms might neglect children to the extent of staying out all night, not feeding them, etc. But if DFCS disproportionately goes after black welfare moms, they have big trouble. So they have to adopt a “zero tolerance” policy against white middle-class families, in order to make their numbers work out.
Goonies never say die!
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