It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
We all have stories like this. I used to get on my bike on Saturday and ride it around all day. Kids would take the city bus or subway to school. Kids would roam around in packs. Kids would play in the street until it got dark. Kids were free.
The contrast between then and now is pretty stark. From the MailOnline:
When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere.
It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision.
Fast forward to 2007 and Mr Thomas's eight-year-old great-grandson Edward enjoys none of that freedom.
He is driven the few minutes to school, is taken by car to a safe place to ride his bike and can roam no more than 300 yards from home.
This can't be a good development, can it? Is the world really that much more dangerous, or are we paranoid and fearful and raising up a generation of terrified children?
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Apr '11
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
I don't think it's more dangerous. I think we've changed our world views. In the past we understood that accidents will happen, kids will get sick, and sadly sometimes the worst will occur. We never liked any of those things to occur, but we knew it was a part of life.
Nowadays, there's this mindset that somehow, we can minimize or even eliminate all possibilities of any bad thing from happening ever. It's reflected in how we treat our children, and it's reflected in our politics as well.
Aug '10
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
I like how that article illustrates that this isn't a new phenomenon, and the way that childhood freedom has been shrinking over time.
Really, if you look at that map, the biggest shrinkage was between 1919 and 1950 (between the great-grandfather and the grandfather), and not between 1979 and 2012 (between the mother and the kid).
Like so many of our "modern-day crises", did this one really had its roots in the first/mid half of the 20th Century?
Edited on February 7, 2012 at 12:15amJan '11
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
I suspect that those born in or after the mid-50's don't have stories like yours. Too bad.
Growing up was a much different adventure before then. In some respects things got better. In many respects, things got a lot worse. But, that's my perspective, and I'm at an age where reminiscences, fond ones anyway, are delightful, and possibly misleading. As a matter of fact, I just bought a pair of Keds Hi-Top sneakers just to see if I could get the feel back. It took a great deal of imagination, but wearing them now I think I can remember how it felt to wear them when I was a kid and, contrary to my conservative impulses, I'm not going to argue with imagination.
Aug '10
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
I'd also like to see a map of this same area in 1919.
What sort of obstacles were between the great-grandfather's home and the fishing hole back then? Was he navigating city streets back then, or was it mostly farmers' fields and walking paths?
Aug '10
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
When I was 14 (in 1990), but mom and I took a trip to England.
She allowed me to wander the streets of London all by myself, and I didn't have any restriction on how far I was allowed to go from the hotel. I didn't leave the area surrounding Victoria Station/Buckingham Palace, but I could have.
So, was my mom being a good parent by allowing me so much freedom?
Now, how about if I told you that a pimp asked me if I wanted to "have some fun" with one of his prostitutes?
No, I did not take him up on the offer.
Aug '10
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
~Paules: Things I did as a child:
* Biked without a helmet.
* Carried a pocketknife to school.
* Went fishing in a rowboat without a life preserver.
* Played in every imaginable attractive nuisance from open manholes to abandoned swimming pools.
* Collected bottles from construction sites to earn pocket change.
* Built tree houses with lumber "borrowed" from construction sites.
* Owned a BB gun.
Things have not changed for the better. · 23 minutes ago
We musta been neighbors or something.
May '10
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
On the one hand, I associate the habit of locking doors while in the house as a sign that the person (or wife) watches too much local news.
On the other hand, I'm reminded of a conversation I recently had about serial killers. We all know the name Jack the Ripper. But how many other serial killers from before the 1960s can you name? Even today, random acts of violence are uncommon, but did previous generations have their own Columbine-like events?
Our culture is certainly different, so it makes sense that the nature and frequency of some crimes is also different. Considering how much more overtly sexualized so much of modern society is, for example, I suspect sexually deviant behavior is much more common now than in my grandpa's time.
Nov '11
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
EJHill:
But when I was a child a neighborhood was really a neighborhood. We all knew each other and we all knew that the guy in the big grey house down the street liked pre-teenaged boys more than he liked women. ...
Nobody had air conditioning so all the windows were open and a good scream would bring a half dozen stay-at-home moms out on their porches in a heartbeat.
Now there are fewer moms at home. The windows are sealed tight and nobody wants to get involved. · 53 minutes ago
I think that this gets to the heart of the matter. Please also know, parents, that being indoors is often more dangerous than being outdoors. One of the most dangerous things you can let your child do is go to a friend's unsupervised home, or to an overnight party. Parents go to sleep, but kids stay up, and they don't always stay in, either. High on my list also is trying to raise a child without a father. Predators are much more likely, in my experience, to go after a child who does not have a strong family, and that usually means a visible dad.
Jan '11
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
Moms are different, of course, but my job as a father is NOT to protect my children from the dangers of the world.
My job is to teach them how to live in that world, dangers and all.
Aug '10
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
I started locking the door to my apartment when I'm home after I accidentally wallked into a stranger's apartment on a different floor.
All the floors in an apartment building look identical, after all, and I'd absent-mindedly gotten off on the wrong floor.
I walked in, threw my coat on the floor, and looked around, puzzled about why my home seemed so different.
I took me a good 10 to 15 seconds to piece together that I was in the wrong apartment.
I'm very lucky that the residents didn't notice me there.
Dec '10
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
Hillary! said it takes a village to raise a child, but it was her and her ilk that destroyed the communities and villages that made life safe for children.
May '10
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
Geez Louise. I 'd disappear after breakfast. My signal to come home was when the street lights came on.
Apr '11
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
~Paules (#18)-You got it. That was life in the '50s in Chevy Chase, Md. We rode our bikes to school, to three libraries, and around Chevy Chase Circle.
Adults were cooler, too:
- When I was about 13, a half-dozen of us were having great dirt-clod battles around a half-built house, using trashcan-lid shields (metal trashcan lids). On the third evening, the developer suddenly pulled up and caught us in flagrante. There was no point in running. Our parents had bought houses from him, so he knew where we lived. He explained about insurance a little, but emphasized that we were costing him time and money because his crew had to clean up each morning. Then he gave us some brooms, told us to sweep up, and left. We cleaned up, voted him a pretty good guy for a grown-up, and learned a lesson in economics. And we treated his houses like private property thereafter, not commons.
Edited on February 7, 2012 at 6:00amApr '11
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
Well my childhood was spent growing up in the 90's. I recall wondering alone through my neighborhood and spending summers essentially unsupervised biking around Lancaster PA to get to the houses of my friends. I recall once after a nasty spill on my bike a rather nice person who was driving by stopped and asked me if I was ok. With blood running down my leg from where I had scraped it I said "Yah I'm fine." I then picked up my bike and limped all the way home (luckily it wasn't that far only maybe 1/2 mile).
I really don't get what people are afraid of most of the time. I think we have just gotten really paranoid.
Aug '10
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
Yes, they did.
Example: St. Pius X High School in Nepean (a suburb of Ottawa) was the scene of one of North America's first school shootings on October 27, 1975. The gunman, Robert Poulin, an 18-year-old St. Pius student, opened fire on his classmates with a shotgun, killing one and wounding five before killing himself. Poulin had raped and stabbed 17-year old Kim Rabot to death prior to the incident. A book entitled Rape of a Normal Mind was written about the incident.
Few people know about the incident these days. It isn't talked about.
Another example: In 1966 a man blew himself up with dynamite in a bathroom of Canada's House of Commons. He meant to blow himself up in the legislative chamber itself, taking as many politicians with him as possible, but the dynamite went off early.
Again, few people know about the incident these days. It isn't talked about.
More examples: Ed Gein committed his murders in the 1950s. The In Cold Blood murders were in 1959. I could go on.
Murder, and serial murder, aren't new.
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
Anon I suspect that those born in or after the mid-50's don't have stories like yours. Too bad.
· 24 minutes ago
Growing up in South Florida in the 60s and 70s, I had a small aluminum boat and would head out on the New River and Intracoastal waterways, letting all six horses rip. At 13-years of age I would often head downtown, chain the skiff to the public docks and shop at the comic book store. My friends and I used to pole our small craft into swamps off the Dania Cutoff Canal, building forts out of driftwood and imagining we were Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In the summer, we would get up at 5 a.m. and fish for tarpon in the cooling canals behind a Florida Power & Light plant until about 8 a.m. or so. Later in the day we would borrow a more powerful runabout from a well-to-do neighbor with a soft spot for us kids to go water-skiing.
No cell phones, no GPS--we were pretty much on our own.
Apr '11
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
Growing up in the 70's and 80's, I remember riding a bike without a helmet to school daily (even in pouring rain -- I hated the bus that much). There were two parks within bike riding distance of my house, both had large, wooden and metal play structures with nary a bit of plastic.
As adolescents, we went to one park which had a rather overgrown section with small paths here and there. We'd take our black plastic toy uzis and play War. It was sorta like hide-and-seek, only we had two teams, and we were trying to eliminate the other team, rather than just find them. Never once did the neighbors call the police on us.
Aug '10
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
I was born in 1975. I lived on a relatively rural street with only five houses on it. The house was on riverfront property.
I was allowed to pretty much roam free around my home, as long as I didn't cross the local 4-lane highway, which separated us from the closest subdivision/neighbourhood. I was not allowed to cross the highway alone until I was 11. However, I could go UNDER the highway where it crossed the river.
I was also allowed to pilot our little 6 hp aluminum boat alone when I was 11. I could have gone all the way to downtown Ottawa via the Rideau Canal, if I wanted (I never felt the urge. It woulda taken a really long time.). When I was 14, I was allowed to pilot our 50 hp runabout alone, which I used to make the trip downtown twice, if my memory is correct.
So, I theoretically had complete freedom of movement at 11. That was 1986.
Nov '11
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
Could another lessor factor be that children today are more likely to keep occupied indoors? If you're deep in imaginary warfare against an electronic foe, you're at least somewhat less likely to pressure your parents to let you explore the great outdoors. The video-game generation have no idea what they're missing.
I remember having very different rules in various neighborhoods growing up -- probably related to traffic. My parents believed in safety in numbers; we could usually go a little further together than alone.
My personal hypothesis is that whether children get outside at all is much more important than how far afield they are allowed to go -- so long as their boundaries are extended as they grow older and more competent.
May '10
Re: It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? (Yes. They're Not Allowed Out.)
I grew up in the 1970s in the idyllic Canal Zone. No teevee until late afternoon except Spanish soaps. Knocking mangoes out of trees, that's what I remember.