This is my second old fart rant of the morning: Let your children walk around your neighborhood by themselves!
This problem might be part of that suburban fantasy (I see kids walking around my urban neighborhood all the time – just yesterday, I saw a kid headed to the local pool and she was at least a mile away), where parents believe by moving to a magical place with a patch of lawn and people Just Like Us, nothing bad will ever happen. Hah! I knew more heroin addicts from the Main Line than the kids I grew up with.
How about the country? My best friend grew up on an Ohio farm and, as she points out, there were only two things for teenagers to do out in the sticks: Get drunk and have sex in a cornfield, or in the back of a pickup.
The city, on the other hand, is a wonderland for children. I took the trolley downtown all the time, starting at age 8 or so, and once my kids were old enough, they took the train from our inner-ring suburb into the city all the time. Philadelphia has a gazillion museums (okay, maybe a couple dozen), fabulous outdoor spaces with fountains, river drives, and a whole bunch of historical sites. (We invented history, you know.)
The sad thing is, I’ve known kids from the suburbs who went away to urban colleges and fell in love with their new city — because after all, they never really got to know a city before! You fall in love with the city you can explore and discover on your own, not the one where your parents or teachers take you on field trips.
Which is why, to this day, I do love the parts of New York I got to explore as a kid. My dad worked for the railroad and I used to, um, borrow my mom’s courtesy pass and go off to the big city. I thought it was quite the exciting adventure, and it was. My parents would have killed me, but whatever.
I’m here to tell the tale.
I grew up in NYC, in Astoria. As a kid, I went my local library (all of 10 blocks away) by myself all the time. As I got older I began going to museums in Manhattan. I learned how to take buses and subways. I was never afraid of going places.
“My parents would have killed me…” Why? Because they knew the dangers of a kid having “exciting adventures” all over the city by themselves with crazy people running amoke around every corner, YOU OLD FART!!!
And yet, nothing ever happened to me. I walked all the way to Harlem and back, but never had a single problem.
As a kid I was constantly exploring. I lived in a moderate sized rural city most of the time and I knew every vacant lot and house, alley, street, old man or old lady, family, dogs and cats in a twenty block radius. At one time we lived next door to a dairy. I’d stay out late at night and talked with the truck drivers filling up their big trucks learning about hygiene and pasteurization. I learned that people could be dicks or kind, fascinating or freakin’ scary, but all in all most everyone was OK. My kids never had that kind of opportunity (see Sexy like mom) and I think they’re the worse for it.
All that was before I was 10 years old.
Ron, my older brother and I grew up in Detroit back in the days when you could (had) to leave all your doors open and unlocked in order to get whatever breeze might flow through at night—-very few folks had anything resembling air conditioning. But we all survived wonderfully; we had no idea we were poor becuase we lived in a neighborhood full of Italians, Jews, Irishmen, Germans, and African Americans—-and all of us were working class, joyful Americans.We all got along as friends and neighbors.
I was never called the “N Word” to my face, and we were taught not to slur or stereotype other races of people. Our parents were the sons and daughters of ex-slaves, but they taught us that there are evil and mean people of all races, but there were more good people on earth than bad ones. We believed what they taught us and have lived to know they were so right: my wife and I have tried to teach our kids the same values and we know now that that trait in parenting has dimenshed somewhat. Sad.