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?
I am not so sure it is crime but just the general attitude has changed. I and most of my Brothers and Sisters remember being picked up by the Florida Highway Patrol and given a ride home.
I would bet that is considered against their rules now. My Father’s generation remembers when child killers were grabbed by the men of the area and summarily shot to death.
All of us who are here survived “less than optimal” childhoods. Parents need to lighten-up or all they’ll do is create zillions more pajama boys and girls.
We've become soft. One of these days we will be invaded by an army, and army made up of men who as children were not raised by helicopter parents at supervised, scheduled play-dates in bubble-wrap covered playgrounds
They will be an army of men who as children drew pictures of guns in school, punched each other in the face, bullied each other, fell off their bikes while not wearing helmets and skinned their knees, got up and walked it off. Children who went outside to play in the mornings out in the woods and fields, fended for themselves, solved their own problems and squabbles and didn't come home until nightfall.
And this army, while exerting a bloody price, is going to unite us as a country and remind us of the values we used to hold dear, the values that once made this nation great.
I believe this is what it is going to take.
You were lucky. My parents said’ “get out until it’s dark, or better yet stay gone.”
By the age of 8 I could go anywhere in our neighborhood (about a 3 or 4 block radius) unsupervised.
At the age of 10 or 11 I could ride my bike with my friends to a park 17 miles away, as long as I was home before dark.
At the age of 16-1/2 I got both my parents to sign the consent forms and I joined the Navy. I’ve been I my own ever since.
The following year, they changed the law and the requirement changed to 17.
"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I will reject you from serving as My priest. Since you have forgotten the law of your God, I will also forget your sons". - Hosea 4:6
I’m sorry, but letting 3, 4, or 5 year old kids run around in front of your house, unsupervised, with the street right there is not safe. I do not trust a 3 or a 5 year old not to run out in front of cars passing by. I do not trust my kids lives with the drivers in my neighborhood.
Many times I have narrowly missed an unsupervised toddler(s) who runs out into the street in front of me (and I drive under the speed limit in neighborhoods for this reason). A three year old kid or even a 5 yr old does not think about on coming cars when they are chasing a ball or just chasing each other.
Also, I’ve seen a ten yr old going around and opening up people’s mail boxes. When I’ve said something, I get the “mind your own business” and “how dare you correct my kid” speech.
I know that you are not defending that, but sometimes kids DO need supervision.
If you are talking about your backyard or a neighbor’s backyard (that you know) then fine. Older kids who have been taught how to watch for traffic, fine. If you know your neighbors well enough to trust them - great.
But, I’m not willing to trust everyone to be good drivers or moral and non-perverts.
When I was 9 I would take my BB gun and my dog Sam and go miles up Barbour Creek in a flat bottom boat with an outboard engine.
I had great parents. They trusted me, even at that age, to be smart enough and aware enough to play in the “backyard”, which was several hundred acres of wilderness and a brown water creek 50 feet from shore to shore ...
Unless, of course, they just want to have sex.
Well my parents were ahead of the trend.With my father expecting every waking minute be spent in farm labor, from the time I was big enough to carry a bucket of water , to “keep you out of trouble” and my mother constantly checking on what I was doing because I might get hurt,there is little doubt it hurt or delayed my personal,professional and social development.Both feared “bad” outside influences so much that neither allowance money nor going out to movies or school games ever happened.The irony is that they had both had more independence while teenagers but ABSOLUTELY refused to allow such in their children,and criticized other parents.
Parents don’t do themselves or their children any good by being control freaks.
They don't play in the streets. They play in the many undeveloped lots surrounding our home, where they climb on the sand hills and mountains of dirt, the same things I used to do when I was five and growing up in a developing subdivision.
Yep, I was big on retrieving soda-pop bottles as well. People used to leave them everywhere. Picnickers used to chunk them into a nearby black-water bayou, and I’d wade out into the green muck to get them. Then carry them several blocks home, wash them up with detergent, and carry them a dozen blocks further to the store for the deposits. Several hours work, but it would always fund a candy bar, a drink, some gum-cards, and a few comic books.
I could be wrong, but I just can’t see (and don’t see) kids nowadays going places and doing things that I and my childhood buddies used to do. There just doesn’t seem to be much flavor or adventure to their lives, comparatively speaking.
When I was growing up in the 70’s, that was the rule, not the exception.
Now, thanks to the nanny state, helicopter moms, and the facebook busibody culture, kids can’t do anything, and the parents will be thrown in jail if they let kids try to do anything, or if they let their kids go out of sight for more than two seconds.
In the 50’s, I and all the other kids played unsupervised. We were let out Summer mornings, and we returned (usually) for lunch and dinner.
The USA is completely different now. We don’t know our neighbors. We don’t trust people we see. The USA has become a very low trust society, meaning that it is no longer part of civilization.
People rush to their cars, rush to their destination, rush home and lock themselves in their homes.
Instead of arresting parents, how about eliminating the element that lives among us which is solely responsible for the breakdown of trust? That would solve the problem. Not putting parents in jail and putting the kids in a foster home.
Read the article, please. You are stuck in the 1970s.
This is why anyone who says who public schools are failing are 100% wrong. This is EXACTLY what imprisoning kids is supposed to produce.
That was certainly the case about neighbors and neighborhoods. We knew each family living by us, twelve houses down the street to the left, twelve houses down the street to the right, and ditto across the street. You’d see your neighbors walking up and down the sidewalks constantly, the women heading to the supermarket, the kids out and about playing, teens working on hot-rod cars in their driveways, housewives pinning linens to the clotheslines in their yards. And a milkman delivering milk. This was still even in the 1970s for me!
My mind boggles at how much things have changed. I just don’t recognize this country at all, anymore. Not the people, not the culture, not anything.
I walked, most of the time by myself, from school on busy city streets to an empty house for most all my school years and lived to tell about it. No one thought a thing about it. However, by the time our kids came around, they could barely walk a quarter mile down a quiet country dirt lane to grandma’s house without the neighbors getting hyper.
With all the child abductions, the crime stats, the local hooligans, life just isn’t what it was decades ago.
Decades ago a college age woman didn’t have to be in fear of her life being out late at night with friends. Today, she better be.
The interesting thing about this topic, is what a bell-weather road marker it is. We are told crime stats are falling all over. None the less, you can’t convince me our streets are safer than they used to be.
How many people think our streets are safer? How come folks think it’s abuse to day, when kids used to be able to play dawn to dusk outside in safety.
That’s the question we should be asking, and the answer is what we should truly be confronting head on.
People aren’t happy about clamping down on their kid’s freedoms. They would like to see those kids grow up without being abducted, molested or raped. They would like to see them live.
Those are the issues I would like to see confronted.
How do we return safety to our neighborhoods? How do we get the sick people off our streets and out of our neighborhoods?
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