I am so happy that I was born when I was, and got to go off on my adventures:
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.
All I can think is how often The Authorities intoned that what people heard on TV was harmless because adults can tell fantasy from reality.
Perhaps. But the first step is to know what the reality actually is, and nobody’s keeping tabs on that step.
In other words: too much TV. And I don’t mean shows. I mean that bullcrap they peddle as “news.”
Absolutely ludicrous idea. And I agree 24/7 media is a contributor. “Be afraid, be very afraid! Something’s going to get you and/or yours.” They don’t know what, but it can strike at any minute. I also blame the 1%’s war on the community. We can’t be bothered to take responsibility for someone else’s kid, fer gawd’s sake!!
I grew up between the baby boom and the baby bust, way back before latch key kids and day care scandals (I don’t think day care was part of the language yet).
And I remember being afraid of going places alone. But mostly I was afraid of other kids (especially big kids, or those wild, nun-hardened kids from the Catholic parochial school), and also mean stray dogs. I would have been afraid to live in a black neighborhood, even if I had been black, because those kids were the roughest, even to each other.
As for perverts, we were told not to take candy from strangers, or else… But nobody would finish the “or else” because telling any child about sex was verboten, much less talk of pedophiles or homosexuals (still interchangeable categories for some people these days, but in the old days both were equally reviled by almost everybody), as if it would give kids ideas about sex and maybe even pervert them if they heard about it too soon. People really thought that if you never let a child see or read or hear about anything sexual, they would stay innocent and never get those urges and just have innocent puppy love crushes on age- and race-appropriate members of the opposite sex.
Never heard of wet dreams until abut 5 years after I was convinced I had regressed to bet wetting (but why was the urine so sticky?)
Definitely I would find the current style of parenthood somewhat suffocating. On the other had, there were a lot of parents (and teachers and coaches…) who were complete shits to kids in the old days, and it was very common to rationalize and extoll that (conservative) style of raising kids. Overall, I’d take a nice set of modern parents over the shitheels I had. On the other hand, if my parents had been around me more than they were, I would definitely have had to kill myself from the stress of it (I almost did a few times, as things were).