As kids, we used to roam the land all the time, all over my neighborhood…
Also, anyone ever read Ramona Quimby - she was walking home from school at like 5!
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Fear seems to be at the heart of a lot of problems in the United States today. From gun culture to the TSA, from police brutality to religious extremism, from helicopter parents treating their kids as though they’re made of glass to teachers expelling students for writing a story about shooting dinosaurs- it’s wailing, quivering, pants-wetting, abject cowardice everywhere you look.
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Most Americans are stupid, or cowards, or stupid cowards. I’ve known that for years. It explains EVERYTHING about American politics.
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Which is exactly how the government wants. They want a population of mewling babies that are willing to give up their rights in exchange for the lie that Uncle Big Brother will make them safe.
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“What would the world be like if Johnny Knoxville had helicopter parents?”
It would be better by being less one stupid, annoying shithead.
Although most of the men I know are actively afraid to interact with children who they don’t know because they are perceived as dangerous when they do so.
I was out geocaching last week near a small park that’s nestled between two housing developments. This particular cache was along a planned bike path that has been marked for use, but not constructed yet. (It’s very much public use property, in other words.)
I was out perhaps 20 minutes total, in which the only kid I was even remotely near was a child with her mother in the park. I went no where near them, walking around the perimeter of the park, in no small part for exactly the reason you noted. By the time I was walking through the park back to my car, there were two police officers in the park since a neighbor had called in a report of a “suspicious looking man near the park with a camera.”
We had a nice conversation while they ran my ID. They both knew about geocaching and it was pretty obvious that they thought the report was ridiculous. I also wonder how differently that conversation would have gone had I just been out for a walk on the paths … or if I wasn’t white.
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My ex is one of those people. She flipped out I let me kid lag 30 feet behind me at Target.
I think that there is a time-honored practice that can help this situation – open range rules…
Perhaps all children should be branded – branding can be used to identify children belonging to different parents. Unbranded children - known as “mavericks” - can become the property of anyone able to capture and brand the unmarked child (or perhaps turned over to John McCain).
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I think there’s a distinction between that case and the general case of a kid going to the park unsupervised. When I was a kid, I could go to the nearby park either by myself, with my sister, or with friends. But there was an adult who was reasonably nearby who was responsible for me. In the case of the mother who was arrested, she was at work. The idea being that if you’re at work, you need to have someone else be responsible for your kid. On the other hand, the kid actually had something I didn’t as a kid. A cell phone. Which realistically means she was probably in less danger than me.
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I can’t help thinking that it is the dark side of the American belief in meritocracy, self-improvement and the individual’s ability to shape their own destiny.
In a culture where you are taught that if you just try hard enough you can always improve your lot and it is never to late to make your first billion there seems to be a risk that have to answer for every bad thing happening in your life, too. Every chance you missed, every bad thing could have prevented becomes a personal moral failure.
Nowadays the times are tougher in America than they used to be and that only increases the pressure.
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A couple or so years ago there was an article (I might even have seen it on boingboing) interviewing a family, I think in England.
When a child, the grandfather had a range of about 25 miles he would roam on his own. Grab a fishing pole, hop on his bike, go with some friends and head out to the river in the morning, fish, swim, play; back by supper time…that sort of thing.
The father had a 5 mile range. Bike or walk to the park, play with his friends…home by suppertime…
The young man being interviewed had a 1 mile range. Play with known friends in his neighborhood. Parents would phone his friend’s parents when it was time to come home.
His son can’t leave the yard without adult supervision.
As a kid, my range was a couple miles on foot (parks, walking to school…) and maybe 10 miles on bicycle. We knew to plan on getting home for supper. We could take the city busses on our own. This was at age 7 or 8.
The further park we would go to had summer activities for kids, all supervised by nothing more than high school students. Oh, and it bordered railroad tracks where the hobos hung out. We’d talk to them, filch sandwiches from home for them and listen to their stories. No big deal.
I also carried a pocket knife with me pretty much every day since first grade, when my father gave it to me and taught me how to use it, maintain it and sharpen the blade. Even to school where it was handy for sharpening pencils and such. Again, no big deal…
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When I was a kid, those older kids were the problem.
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It takes kid-horror to call the police on a white dude.
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We’ve been told for so long that ‘they’ are out there, and ‘they’ want to do terrible things to your kids, so you better keep those kids on a short leash. If you hear the same shit long enough the ‘sheep’ will begin to believe anything. Unfortunately, this article is, sadly, probably true.
It takes kid-horror to call the police on a white dude.
Well, yeah, but I have long hair, I drive an older model car (i.e., it’s more than 5 years old), and I’m obviously not from their neighborhood. I mean really it was so obvious that I was there to steal their children or murder the entire subdivision in their sleep or something worse – just observe the way I was stealthily skulking around in broad daylight like that and everything.
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Yes well, young-ish adults are panicky idiots. What they SHOULD do is the obvious stuff - lock up the fire-arms and poisonous things, teach the kids to stay away from sharp objects, and animals and people they don’t know and let them figure out the rest.
but they won’t because little Jasmine/Tyrese/Aryana/Babette/Kefer are special and delicate and clearly mummy and daddy believe they are stupid and can’t take care of themselves.
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Christ what assholes. Just give 'em some wrist rockets or something, throw them out of the house, and tell 'em to come back by dark. It worked fine in my day.
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I grew up in a small town (cc 5,000) and – after a few weeks at least – walked to kindergarten and back. It was about 10 blocks away. 1/4 mile? 1/2 mile? The worst problem I had was the big kid* who knocked my bean-sprout-in-a-cup out of my hands and made me lick the water off the sidewalk, once.
* she was in 2nd grade.
Later, when we moved outside of town, we’d have to walk through a couple of alfalfa fields to get to the bus-stop, or take a longer route to get to the bus. BY OURSELVES. Seeing all these parents waiting AT THE BOTTOM OF THE DRIVEWAY with their kids drives me crazy. In so many ways. What has changed? Do they care more than my parents? Are they just nuts? Are the kids that irresponsible? Is this neighborhood really that dangerous? Should I put bars on my windows? I thought the worst that could happen is the wild turkeys taking a sh*t on my driveway…
As the voice of reason, I point out that it would be a bit more humane to use RFID chips.
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I was a stay at home dad for year with our youngest boy, my job allows for me to do a lot more of the routine parenting. It was convenient to be able to say “yep… boys are like that. I did the same thing at that age” It also enabled me to shrug off that judgmentalism and peer pressure a lot easier by saying “yeah… dad’s sure do things differently, amirite!”
This is also a very serious issue. I’m sure that there have been children who have, as a consequence of non-involvement, been hurt. It hasn’t happened that anyone has flipped out on me in that situation, but I’m mentally prepared for it.
Yep. We have neighbors who drive 1 house down to the intersection to the bus stop and wait in an SUV for 15 min at least. Mind you, its been light out, we live in a safe development, and it’s been 70 and dry. I’ve also seen the bus stop, pick up a kid (in football gear), go 100 ft down the road, and turn into the Middle School.
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Here are a couple of relevant links…
