(note: I am challenging myself to write every day for 30 days. What follows may not necessarily be interesting or even coherent. Parental discretion is advised.)
I once ran away from home when I was four-years old. The memory of it was that my mother was sleeping and I was hungry. Not just hungry, but I wanted potato chips and we didn’t have any.
So whats a four-year old to do? Why, go to the convenience store and get the chips for himself, duh.
Except of course, I didn’t know money was needed to buy things with. How preposterous! Items are supposed to be handed over once you ask for them!
This was around summertime in 1981 and as I craved these chips, I left the house going through the garage on my tricycle to a store four blocks away.
Peddling my little bike on the sidewalk, I stopped in front of a store and barely managed to push the door to get inside. Once there, a Chinese fellow at the counter started shouting at me for some reason. This made me go “huh?!” and I decided to leave because Mr. Grumpy wasn’t likely to be giving me any snacks with that kind of a reaction.
On the way back, a taxi with my very worried looking mother pulled up and I was taken home to be uh, lightly spanked with a wooden spoon. I don’t blame my mom for wanting to play my butt like a Navajo drum for having done this because hey, I was only four. What the heck did I know about the consequences behind wanting to get chips?
What did I do that was so wrong?
I mention this story because I wonder how it would play today if I decided as a four-year old to just leave the house and go out on my own. Police likely would get involved and my mom might have gotten charged. Local media for sure would carry this story and the acrimonious tweets would be rolling right in.
This story makes me think about how much the world has changed since the 1980s. I used to walk a block to school every day as a five-year old up until grade four when I started to take the bus to a school that was further away. Nowadays, you never see five or six or seven-year olds walking around alone by themselves.
You would think that these were more fearful times, being that we didn’t have cell phones or as many surveillance cameras as we do now — and from what I’ve observed, it seems that the fearful times are actually here, right now.
But why? What has changed since?
Back when I grew up without a cell phone or GPS, the world wasn’t this mysterious place to be feared as a kid. I would regularly go to playgrounds on my own without any supervision as long as I told my parents where I was. Now? Forget it. Kids aren’t allowed to have their freedom. Here, take this iPad or stay in the yard where I can see you and don’t think about leaving.
It can be argued that maybe people were more naive, but I’m not seeing it that way. Back then, there was a “it takes a village to raise a child” mentality in place where we knew our neighbors and felt connected to the community.
Not so much anymore, if at all.
And perhaps that is why we keep our kids indoors, coddled and protected and instilled with this sense of fear and excessive caution about the world outside. Is this the correct way to be raising a child?
Years ago, I dated a lady who had two boys, five and six and they lived about a block away from school. When I made the suggestion that they could walk instead of having to drive them each morning, her reaction was instant disbelief. “You can’t let a five-year old walk around by themselves!”
But… that’s what I did, and we all did it back then.
I think about my girlfriend’s daughter who started kindergarten and I try to imagine her walking alone each day to school. Hmm. Yeah, no. I can see why some parents are opposed to the idea of giving such a young child the freedom to go out on their own. The amount of worry that would cause is not worth going through.
There was another incident I remember around when I was eight or nine. My best friend Mark and I decided to go to a park a distance away on our bikes. It took maybe a half hour to get there, so we left without telling anyone and came home hours later to find both our moms and a police officer in the kitchen. Guess we should have said something about where we went.
Still, nothing happened during our little adventure. There weren’t any shady characters or vans that pulled up alongside us with strangers offering candy. Although child abduction was a thing, it seemed inconceivable for us that it could happen. Too rare for anyone to be worried about.
Anyways… Times have changed and I’m not sure hyper-vigilance is the mindset in which we should raise our kids. Although I’m not a parent, I do feel like kids need to be given more freedom than they now have. From my observations, we seem to have created a culture where the world is this confusing place that we have to ask permission for everything we do. Can I park here? Are we allowed to go there? Could we bring outside food and drink to a movie theater? What are the rules that you expect me to abide by other than being courteous and respectful? Is it okay if I do this or that?
I’m not sure I like the idea of creating a childhood where kids need to constantly ask for permission. Can I have this? Can I eat that? Can I go there? Do this?
When you really think about it, we are creating a generation of slaves. A generation dependent on authoritarianism and rules. That does not help in the formation of an independent mind that is able to think outside of the box.
Big brother knows best. Obey or suffer the consequences of not playing by the rules.
I think successfully raising a child with a positive opinion of the outside world has a lot to do with how much freedom you allow them to have in exploring that world for themselves and forming their own perceptions. Not rely upon what figures of authority have to say.
The worst thing I have ever encountered in my childhood while being out alone was when I was chased by a neighborhood bully. That’s it. Never had a problem with an adult, in fact, I remember a time when I made friends with a fellow near a playground. We ended up having a friendly and respectful conversation. Also, I approached him, not the other way around.
Perhaps this is my own naivety showing. Maybe I’m completely in the wrong, but doing a Google search for “the right age to let your child walk around unsupervised” leads to results showing that at age eight they can be left alone inside of a fenced yard.
That’s just for playing around the house unsupervised.
Would you let a child take the subway at age nine? Probably not, but that is what the below parents did and the backlash they suffered was enormous.
It’s called “free-range” parenting.
Free-range parenting comes with all of the controversy you might expect, a lot of it starting with Lanore Skenazy, the founder of FreeRangeKids.com. In 2008, Skenazy and her husband allowed their 9-year-old son to ride the New York subway by himself. Afterward, Skenazy wrote a column about the experience. This lead to a tremendous backlash and Skenazy being dubbed, “America’s Worst Mom.”
America’s Worst Mom. Can you believe that?
From the age of five, I would arrive home having the place to myself for an hour each day after school. My mom came from work at around 4 and I had the routine of watching a game show and/or Video Hits on TV soon as I got in through the door. I loved that. The stillness of the house and being allowed to watch TV on my own.
Nowadays, helicopter parenting is the norm. If your child is doing anything, it has to be supervised at all times. This is good on one level because parents are able to bond more closely, but it’s also bad on another because kids aren’t allowed a real taste of independence and freedom.
And worst of all, there are laws in certain places that punishes parents for allowing kids to have that freedom. Look at this story:
The child came home to a locked house before his parents did and decided to play basketball in the yard for an hour and a half. A neighbor noticed and called the police who arrived and charged his parents with neglect.
He was 11 years old.
That’s crazy to me. Even Fox News has the article tagged as “outrageous”.
And… I don’t know what to think about all this. What do social workers have to say?
A child can be left at home for more than four hours once they are 12 years of age. 50% of the respondents say that 10 years is too young to be left alone unsupervised.
I don’t know how these numbers are arrived at, but there they are.
What is interesting is that this attitude is not nearly as prevalent in Scandinavian countries where infants are routinely left in strollers outside of stores/cafes while their parents head in for a quick bite.
Japan, also, routinely has first-graders going around by themselves taking public transit on their way to school. In fact, they wear yellow hats to make them more visible to adults. Strange, isn’t it?
All this begs the question and the examination of how we wish our children to perceive the world. Is it this oppressive, authoritarian place where they need to be guided and supervised at all times? Or is it a world largely deserving of being trusted?
In Japan of all places, children are taught to rely upon others to guide them where they need to go. If a child is lost, asking an adult for directions is considered normal protocol. If a child needs help, again, there is social-trust enough to be able to ask for that assistance from complete strangers.
I don’t know about you, but I would be more hesitant about having my six-year old run around a crowded subway by themselves in place like Japan than I would to let them roam in the neighborhood, but that is how they are doing it. They don’t impress fear onto children in the same way the West does.
From the article linked above:
By giving them this freedom, parents are placing significant trust not only in their kids, but in the whole community. “Plenty of kids across the world are self-sufficient,” Dixon observes. “But the thing that I suspect Westerners are intrigued by [in Japan] is the sense of trust and cooperation that occurs, often unspoken or unsolicited.”
And that, I think is an attitude worth considering. What does our level of apprehension say about the trust we place in our community? In other people? If we fear letting our children walk around unsupervised, how will this affect their perspective as they get older? How will this affect their ability to trust others, to become independent and develop self-reliance?
I feel that if we teach our kids to have a positive mindset and to look at the world as a place of opportunity and beauty, we then have to be able to back up our beliefs. To allow them the freedom to discover for themselves that no, the world isn’t as scary a place as many claim it to be and that by and large, we can trust others to look out for us. To give help when help is needed.
Otherwise, we’d be raising our children to live within narrow parameters. There is no freedom from inside of a bubble. No sense of adventure cultivated. No demonstration of public trust or community. Little incentive to be creative and optimistic. Social cohesion is more difficult to realize.
And that is not how we should want the world to be.
A place to be feared,
Our kids deserve better.
