Posted on 08/23/2014 9:08:42 AM PDT by Drew68
A whopping 68 percent of Americans think there should be a law that prohibits kids 9 and under from playing at the park unsupervised, despite the fact that most of them no doubt grew up doing just that.
What's more: 43 percent feel the same way about 12-year-olds. They would like to criminalize all pre-teenagers playing outside on their own (and, I guess, arrest their no-good parents).
Those are the results of a Reason/Rupe poll confirming that we have not only lost all confidence in our kids and our communities—we have lost all touch with reality.
"I doubt there has ever been a human culture, anywhere, anytime, that underestimates children's abilities more than we North Americans do today," says Boston College psychology professor emeritus Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn, a book that advocates for more unsupervised play, not less.
In his book, Gray writes about a group of 13 kids who played several hours a day for four months without supervision, though they were observed by an anthropologist. "They organized activities, settled disputes, avoided danger, dealt with injuries, distributed goods... without adult intervention," he writes.
The kids ranged in age from 3 to 5.
Of course, those kids were allowed to play in the South Pacific, not South Carolina, where Debra Harrell was thrown in jail for having the audacity to believe her 9-year-old would be fine by herself at a popular playground teeming with activity. In another era, it not only would have been normal for a child to say, "Goodbye, mom!" and go off to spend a summer's day there, it would have been odd to consider that child "unsupervised." After all, she was surrounded by other kids, parents, and park personnel. Apparently now only a private security detail is considered safe enough.
Harrell's real crime was that she refused to indulge in inflated fears of abduction and insist her daughter never leave her side. While there are obviously many neighborhoods wrecked by crime where it makes more sense to keep kids close, the country at large is enjoying its lowest crime level in decades.
Too bad most people reject this reality. The Reason/Rupe Poll asked "Do kids today face more threats to their physical safety?" and a majority—62 percent—said yes. Perhaps that's because the majority of respondents also said they don't think the media or political leaders are overhyping the threats to our kids.
But they are. "One culprit is the 24 hour news cycle," said Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, when I asked him why so few kids are outside these days. Turn on cable TV, "and all you have to do is watch how they take a handful of terrible crimes against children and repeat that same handful over and over," he said. "And then they repeat the trial over and over, and so we're conditioned to live in a state of fear."
Rationally understanding that we are living in very safe times is not enough to break the fear, he added.
So what is?
Experience. Through his Children and Nature Network, Louv urges families to gather in groups and go on hikes or even to that park down the street that Americans seem so afraid of. Once kids are outside with a bunch of other kids, they start to play. It just happens. Meanwhile, their parents stop imagining predators behind every bush because they are face to face with reality instead of Criminal Minds. They start to relax. It just happens.
Over time, they can gradually regain the confidence to let their kids go whoop and holler and have as much fun as they themselves did, back in the day.
Richard Florida, the urbanist and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, is one of the many parents today who recalls walking to school solo in first grade. He was in charge of walking his kindergarten brother the next year. The age that the Reason/Rupe respondents think kids should start walking to school without an adult is 12.
That's the seventh grade.
Florida has intensely fond memories of riding his bike "everywhere" by the time he was 10. Me too. You too, I'm guessing. Why would we deny that joy to our own kids? Especially when we're raising them in relatively safer times?
"Let your kids play in the park, for God's sake," Florida pleads. "We'll all be better for it."
Why should South Pacific toddlers have all the fun?
Teaching a kid how to handle situations is a better foundation to a child’s defense than a shotgun in the home.
Love your top photo - there was an apparatus just like that at both of the elementary schools I attended in a medium-sized town in KS. I don’t relate to the stick ball pictures because we mostly played ball at school yards, most of which were never more than 5 blocks from anyone’s house.
I hate to say it this way, but I walked to school about a mile both ways at that age! LOL. All the kids did. And we all walked home too, even took shortcuts over creeks and stopped at the Big & Little store for a 10 cent candy on the way.
The public pool too was just as far away and we’d go there every day early morning swimteam and late afternoon just for fun. Only adults around were the lifeguards and pool director. There was never any trouble.
‘A whopping 68 percent of Americans think there should be a law that prohibits kids 9 and under from playing at the park unsupervised, despite the fact that most of them no doubt grew up doing just that.’
In related news, new reports show that Americans have fewer than two children and those with one or none, 68%, believe that they know what is best for children because of their extensive experience.
Damn! We got allot of wimps and maladjusted adults in the near future.
I find the opposite these days. The perverts were pretty well hidden from view when I grew up (70's) but they would set out lures. Now the same people, if caught, would be on the public list of convicted pedophiles.
The amazing thing is that all these kids today have cell phones so it isn’t like they can’t get ahold of mommy if they need help.
Maybe this has more to do with behavior than protection.
No contradiction there. I consider the 60s on, ‘the liberal era’, even the Reagan revolution was just a brief reprieve.
According to the article, no, it's not. It's your perception of the danger level that has increased.
/johnny
Those were the days. I had a thriving pop bottle deposit trade. My neighborhood was swept clean of soda bottles and I had pockets that jingled with nickles, dimes, and quarters. Was not afraid of my neighbors. Stayed away from strangers and weirdos. You learn on your own what you’re capable of and not capable of. I never had an allergy in my life. That’s how you learn common sense and how to socialize with your peers.
We are raising a generation of frightened, neurotic children incapable of fending for themselves and this does not bode well for our nation.
Amen.
I’m astonished.
It's an indictment.
I know PLENTY of "Conservative" parents who more than agree with such laws, and I am growing more convinced every day that Americans prefer slavery to liberty, because they have convinced themselves that such laws are NOT slavery - but "freedom". "Freedom" to be "safe".
It's continuing evidence that a majority of Americans have traded essential liberty for the promise of safety and security, because they themselves have lost the knowledge of what liberty actually means as intended for us.
"'Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive" - CS Lewis
"Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.
Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.
There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism. - John Stewart Mill
If the poll is correct (and sadly, I suspect it is), it’s just another testament to how pathetically weak and wussified that America has become in this current age. It’s indeed cringe-inducing, seeing our country devolve in all these directions.
In explaining it, I’m not sure it’s specifically based on fear of crime, but just an overall psychological retrenchment from the increased unsavoriness of the culture and its surroundings. We (with valid reasons) no longer have the trust in our fellow citizens or the institutions to maintain safety in our communities. Both the social fabric and the moral order is now dead and gone.
To borrow a phrase...
‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.’
Paging Paul Kersey...paging Paul Kersey...Paul Kersey, please pick up the white courtesy phone...
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
So true, there is so much to do I have no time to watch my kids play outside. We are blessed to live a mile out of a small town on a few acres. Because there is a lake behind our grove of trees I have the big kids go out to keep and eye on the toddler and preschooler, but once they are around 5 and can follow the rules they get to wander on their own.
This morning I was laughing as I was telling my wife how when I was kid, at times we used to walk barefoot through city streets to the municipal pool about two miles one way. And then we’d be mad at ourselves for burning our feet or stubbing our toes. Dumb kids. Had a lot of fun though.
If this poll is accurate, we are no longer a people capable of preserving and defending our liberties.
Because we no longer understand what those things are and why they are fundamentally vital and important.
I am 67 and now live in a different world from when I grew up. All the guys I grew up with all had the same incredible degree of freedom that I had.
For some reason, I have changed too. I just can’t see my grandchildren just running around the neighborhood like we did. As I said, it is a different world and that goes both ways.
It is disgusting so many parents are helicopter parents, always hovering. Yes, times are a bit different, but they are paranoid beyond reason. What ever happened with “be back by dark”.
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