Yes, but that kind of baby sitter usually charges a lot more.
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Hooligans…
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When my daughter was 14, she went alone to visit her grandparents. This involved a round-trip trans-Atlantic flight and a change of planes in Atlanta. It made her feel very mature.
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The interestin thing is that in Italy there is a discounted or subsidise bus pass for students, here (Milan bus/trolleybus/tram/undeground lines) is stated that are elegible students under 26 and are
lementary, middle or secondary schools, public or private, which are authorized by the Italian Education Ministry, students of professional training courses authorized by the Lombardy Region, the Province or City of Milan, and University students.
Elementary schools are for kids aged 6-10.
https://www.atm.it/en/ViaggiaConNoi/Abbonamenti/Pages/Abbonamentiperglistudenti.as
Nothing is said that kids have to use the public transportation supervised, moreover, if supervised, they travel free - so the pass for student is useful for a unsupervised pupil.
We remind you that students aged between 6 and 10, when accompanied by an adult in possession of a valid ticket (either a ticket or travel card), travel free if they have ID as proof of age
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This kind of reaction is deeply ingrained (in me at least)… The other evening, my wife and I saw a kid who was 6 or so walking alone down our block… We both reacted like he was a ferrel child or something… “Where are his parents!?” It just took a minute to remember that there was nothing wrong– it’s a family neighborhood where this shouldn’t be unusual, but somehow it is. That was my reaction, and I was one of those dreaded latchkey kids!
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Give all the children guns so they can protect themselves in public places.
Boom! Problem Solved.
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Same here, only our school district has yellow buses up until 9th grade, and then you get a card for the city bus. Weirdly, yellow school buses would frequently use my daughter’s high school as a dropoff point for OTHER schools, but they didn’t take high school students TO the school.
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I was selling my own girl scout cookies door-to-door before I was 8. I hated it, but I did it.
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These people would have their heads explode if they ever went to Japan and saw what kids there do.
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We need a statement from Ryan Reynolds’ twitter to spearhead this protest
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In Europe unsupervised kids is regularly encouraged. A Swedish friend of mine told me that it’s also part of their schooling, kids are purposefully made to get out into their city on their own to teach them life skills and to be self-sufficient.
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I had the pleasure of experiencing these effects when a group of suburbian American exchange students came to our school (in a large city) at age 16. Unlike everyone of us, they had never been away unsupervised for long and they certainly had not been allowed to legally drink as much beer as they wanted before. Good times were had by all.
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how could parents not want kids like us?
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If i had a kid i would want to make sure they were safe, so i get the helicopter parent line of thought. But yeah, i would also want to make sure they were savvy enough to think for themselves, problem-solve, and more importantly… not go fucking mental and hog wild the second they are unsupervised or independent.
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My kids (who are now teens) walked home form Elementary school (about 1/2-3/4 of a mile) from the age with which they felt comfortable doing so, which was about seven.
It worked well for them. That’s one of the advantages of living in a small town – we don’t have a “Ministry” to take care of the “problem.”
(The situation isn’t perfect, of course. In fact, just yesterday the school released the kids during a torrential downpour (complete with tornado warnings), which in my opinion was probably a mistake.)
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I flew from Dallas to Minneapolis at age 9 without parents. I rode the Greyhound from Minneapolis to south central Wisconsin, round trip, without parents when I was 10 and a few other years after that to get to my grandparents for a couple weeks each summer. I recall the rule in summer time was “get your butt out of the house and don’t come back until the street lights come on.” This was in the 80’s.
It pains me that I can’t let my own son roam the streets as I did because some curtain twitcher will call CPS. As a society, America (and it seems, Canada, too) isn’t raising adults, we’re raising children, and children aren’t self-sufficient. Those of us wanting to raise adults are shouted down by the helicopter parents and are under legal threat for wanting our kids to actually grow up.
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My son – when 13, I’m pretty sure – once took a solo cross-country flight, complete with plane change in Denver. He was really psyched about it. (He was ready; my daughter, at that age, would not have been.)
We were looking at the policies the other day for a potential trip, and they don’t let you do that any more. I believe that is was 16 as the new minimum age to fly solo.
We really are raising a generation of dis-empowered youth. You hear a shit-ton these days of raising “empowered girls,” but that’s ultimately impossible because no child is really empowered any more, on a societal level.
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I let my daughter ride her bike to elementary school starting around 4th or 5th grade. I’d walk her from our house to the main road, and from there it was a straight line of 8 blocks or so down the sidewalk to school. Turns out that was actually illegal; elementary school kids weren’t supposed to walk/bike to school without adult supervision (although I could SEE her most of the way, so that’s supervision, right?) Anyway that explains why the school had only one small bike rack. When I was a kid my elementary school had a whole locked YARD for bikes, because everyone rode to school.
And here’s my kid now at 20, and she hates to ride the bus. It’s “too hard” to figure out the timing and where it stops. I even pay for the dang bus card.
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Bus schedules are lousy in most cities i’ve lived in. Austin being one of the better ones, but it’s not 100% user-friendly but it’s not that hard to figure out either. Still it seems to me that being able to use public transportation unsupervised would be one of the key metrics for self-sufficiency, even if it sucks sometimes.
Other possible metrics for self-sufficiency might be: Make your own money, buy your own things (or manage the money you make responsibly), go on trips with friends on your own and not get into trouble.
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I think their heads would explode if they remembered what they themselves did when they were little. Well, if they’re over 40 or so.
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