[Sigh]
When I was nine I would disappear for the day and go bike riding and skateboarding and swimming with my friends. Just had to be home by dark.
We didn’t even wear helmets. Somehow most of us lived through it.
Barbarian 9 year olds would disappear to rape, pillage and murder- but they did wear helmets.
Things have changed. When I was twelve, I took the train into NYC by myself, and walked around 14th street looking for pulp SF.
Several years before that, I used to walk home a mile or so from school along a busy highway, usually with a friend. I always played outdoors by myself or with friends, for as long as I can remember.
This is a FELONY? Will they put the parents in jail and send the kids to a state home? That will really fix things, eh? Maybe it wasn’t wise, but I didn’t know that Oregon was that rough a place that kids can’t go out on their own occasionally?
How about Charlie Brown and his friends in Peanuts? Didn’t they always walk home without parental supervision? Was that a criminal comic strip?
At nine, that might have been reasonable (although perhaps not so much so nowadays). I think that the problem here is that the 6-year-old was left with his 9-year-old brother and got seriously injured.
Yep. We were allowed in at lunch and dark. If it rained that’s what the porch was for. At 8 I was roaming all over the place.
That’s what I was thinking. When my brother was nine, mom would tell him to go out and not come back ‘til dinner time — and to take his little sister (me) with him.