No Child Left Alone
The “indoor children” phenomenon substantially stems from the loss of roaming privileges in the US and Britain and maybe elsewhere too. I compare the reduction in free travel for kids to the reluctance of football coaches to go for it on fourth down even when it makes sense statistically. When the conventional wisdom is that “good parenting means keeping your kids under supervision at all times,” woe betide the parent who bucks it on the off chance that anything goes wrong. If your child gets hit by a car or otherwise suffers harm more than a half block from a designated guardian, you’ll have the entire local media, police and social services bureaucracies competing to settle the most sweeping condemnation of your neglect on you. So even parents inclined to give their kids a longer leash will hedge their bets. (The everyday opprobrium of other parents, real and imagined, plays in here too.)
Comment by Kevin B. O'Reilly —
June 19, 2007 @ 7:28 am
Here’s what I, a mere nonparent, don’t understand: The chances of something bad happening (kidnapping, car collision, etc.) are just as good at the end of the block as they are six miles from home. So if parents really believe their children oughtn’t be free to roam six miles from home, shouldn’t they just ban the kids from being unsupervised outside the home — period? Conversely, as the distance really makes little difference to the children’s safety, might as well let them roam free.
The only exception I can think of is if the child does not know how to get back home. It would seem the odds of getting lost might increase with distance from home.
Comment by Thoreau —
June 19, 2007 @ 7:37 am
I think this old article from Salon encapsulates a lot of the problems with parents these days:
http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2004/10/13/sr2s/index.html
Basically, a lot of people think more kids should walk or bike to school rather than get rides. Nothing wrong with that. So, they form committees, seek legal advice, get insurance, schedule events, get sponsors, print t-shirts, map out routes, organize walk leaders, etc.
You know what my mother did? She showed me the way once or twice, and then I walked it.
I hate to be one of those “back in the good old days” types, but that’s honestly how it was. Ah, the 1980’s. There was U2, and Blondie, and music still on MTV…
Comment by Karen —
June 19, 2007 @ 7:42 am
I have two sons, and there is something else to the opprobrium of other parents thing. My assumption, especially with my older son, is that people with kids a bit older than mine were more aware of the hazards in our area than I was. Thus, I adjusted my “leash” to theirs. Also, while I certainly agree that fears of kidnappings are pretty close to delusional, that doesn’t mean that hazards beyond the means of a nine-year-old don’t exist. For example, Texas has fire ants. Those nasty b@$t*&ds swarm on a kid’s feet, stinging badly enough to require a trip to the ER, and rendering walking impossible. Our neighborhood borders a thoroughfare used almost exclusively by dimwits in Hummers yammering on the cell phones and driving 10 miles over the speed limit.
Comment by Dave W. —
June 19, 2007 @ 8:31 am
I think many roads are a lot less safe for children then they used to be. If you walk from the house where my mother grew up to downtown Binghamton, by the most direct route, you will walk a couple of miles along streets where the highest speed limit is 30 mph. If you get tired, there are busses (or at least there used to be).
I grew up in a suburb of Binghamton called Vestal. First of all, there really is no downtown. Second of all, the businesses were and are located along a road called the Vestal Parkway. The speed limit is 45 / 55 mph and there are no sidewalks. The road is not made for walking and people don’t walk it. It is not particularly good for bikes, either. No bus service to speak of.
As I was growing up, I could walk around suburbia, and I could walk/bike to the Vestal Parkway, but I could not walk or bike along it. This really limited my destinations. Fortunately, I still got a lot of walking in because I had a paper route, but the upshot is that I had to be paid to walk. If I had grown up in my mother’s world of low speed roads and sidewalks, I would have been allowed to walk to more interesting places and I would have walked more without being paid.
My point is that this wasn’t my parents’ paranoia — you really can’t let kids walk along the Vestal Parkway. It is a 4-lane highway. I could walk for miles in suburbia, but: (i) not so pleasant without sidewalks; and (ii) what would the point have been?
My sister’s family lives further out along the Vestal Parkway, where it gradually blends into an actual interstate highway, although I think the speed limit may still be 55 mph in her immediate vicinity. Her suburban development is much smaller and less interconnected (other than by highway) to other suburban developments. Consequently, her children are allowed to roam less than I was. This is not paranoia — this is just the simple fact that child pedestrians don’t belong on highway shoulders.
As a final note about the way in which the world is changing — during my teenage years, I was twice threatened with guns. Both times because I was supposedly a trespasser. Once it was by a customer on my paper route who I was coming to collect money from (he apologized when he realized I was the paperboy). Once it was on a trail through some undeveloped land, although the land was not fenced or marked as private property (and I I have no idea if the guy owned the land or not). Something for the gun-nuts here to consider.
Comment by LizardBreath —
June 19, 2007 @ 8:51 am
Literally, I don’t let my 7 year old go unattended either to the park that’s on our block (no street crossings) or the store that’s around the corner but also with no street crossings, because I’m pretty sure that some well-meaning busybody will rescue her and call the cops. I don’t think it would be dangerous for her at all, but from conversations with other parents in the neighborhood, I’m pretty sure that someone would actively intervene.
This annoys the daylights out of me, but I don’t know what to do about it.
Comment by arthur —
June 19, 2007 @ 9:12 am
My son is four, and we recently let him walk to the convenience store without supervision, (three doors down, on a very busy street but there is a sidewalk and no street to cross), choose his own candy bar, thank the cashier, take his change, and walk home. He survived and enjoyed the experience. He will be walking on his own to the playground as soon as he demonstrates proficiency in traffic light analysis.
That said, “If your child gets hit by a car” and severely injured or killed, you won’t give a shit about what the local media, police and social services bureaucracies say about you. Anyway, I wouldn’t. The causative agent is parental fear, not peer or societal pressure.
Comment by Mike Kozlowski —
June 19, 2007 @ 9:26 am
Okay, yeah, there’s the roaming thing, but I think you’re underestimating the effect of increasingly awesome electronic entertainment.
When I was a kid, I could play Joust on the Atari 2600, which (while fun for the time) isn’t something that can keep your interest for hours and hours on end. Or I could play Zork on the computer, which was more interesting — but without an internet to look for hints when I got stuck, quickly became indistinguishable from banging my head against the wall.
The rest of the time, I could watch (on the 19″ TV) any of the five channels we got, pretty much all of which were showing boring-to-a-kid shows most of the time (Saturday morning gloriously excepted). We didn’t have a VCR.
These days, my son can play Call of Duty 3 (an incredibly deep and involving game, compared to Joust) on the 360 or Civ 4 on the PC; plus he can easily download free demos of new games, any of which has more gameplay in the limited demo than Atari 2600 games had in their entirety. Plus he’s got a DS for when he’s not around the TV.
If he wanted to watch TV, there are at least four channels at any time that are just showing cartoons, and a bunch more (of the hundreds available) showing interesting-to-kids programming. (Plus, we have a TiVo, so if he wanted to, he could have us record a show he wanted to watch regularly.) But thanks to DVDs and kids’ amazing ability to rewatch a show a million times (especially when it’s easy to skip the boring parts, which VCRs enabled only imperfectly), he almost never watches actual TV. And, of course, even to a kid a big HDTV is more immersive than one of those old console TVs.
It’s not just that he doesn’t want to go outside and play, it’s that — given his druthers — he wouldn’t really play with ANYTHING non-electronic. We limit him to video games/movies on alternate days, and it’s only with a definite amount of reluctance and uninterest that he’ll condescend to play with his analog toys at all.
Comment by mds —
June 19, 2007 @ 9:42 am
So if parents really believe their children oughtn’t be free to roam six miles from home, shouldn’t they just ban the kids from being unsupervised outside the home — period?
As described in a Washington Post(?) article a while back about McMansion sprawl in northern Virginia, this is the exact reasoning making an appearance. One of the new homeowners interviewed for the story indicated that the cavernous spaces of her house were necessary in part because it’s too dangerous to let kids play outside unattended. (Actually, in her case she might have a point, since no one ever seems to acknowledge the outside in such subdivisions; a child with SUV treads across his torso could lie there for a long time.)
Inevitably, I draw parallels with the fear of terrorists. Perhaps, despite milk cartons, John Walsh, and Yellow Code Emily Alpha or whatever, children aren’t actually disappearing from our porches at the rate of sixty thousand a week.
Comment by Cala —
June 19, 2007 @ 10:09 am
Not a parent, but from my perspective, it seems that some parents aren’t as interested ensuring no harm comes to their child but in ensuring that if something does happen, they will be held blameless. How often do you hear “I’d never forgive myself if I hadn’t done everything I could..”
In the town I grew up in, I walked to school. I’m pretty sure that kids in the same neighborhood now do not walk, and there hasn’t been an outbreak of predators.
Comment by Garth —
June 19, 2007 @ 10:53 am
Another big difference is that *then* there were loads of kids wandering about, playing, going to store, school, woods, etc… Now, there are so few – and the comments above seem to back this up — that the lone child (or maybe a pair) walking about seems not only out of place, but he/she is possibly lonely and a bit bored (meaning the kid probably has little interest in doing it).
When I was a kid in the 70’s there was always other kids about (sometimes a small horde a la the Little Rascals) and roaming all day long with an endlessly mutable group of pals was a great deal of fun.
Comment by Chris Anderson —
June 19, 2007 @ 10:55 am
I grew up in a Cleveland suburb in the 1970’s. In some ways, I don’t think things have changed THAT much. Moms sometimes had to throw their kids out of the house, we all had our favorite TV programs (Batman or the Brady Bunch, anyone?), and there were streets you were forbidden to cross, up to a certain age. We all know the phrase “calling distance,” because that was usually the limit of a younger child’s roaming area.
I do believe that that only works up to a certain age, however…maybe 7, 8 or 9 depending on the kid. After that, the built environment makes all the difference. The Heights area that I grew up in was really well suited to gradual independence. Sidewalks everywhere, only one road that I wouldn’t ride a bike on, and lots of things that kids could get to on their own.
Just one example: when my brother and I were something like 9 and 7, we started to go get our haircuts on our own, either by bike in good weather, or our mother would give us bus fare in bad weather.
Allowing kids to do some roaming and assigning them small errands on their own is good for the kids AND for their parents.
One of the differences I see is the different structure of suburban areas developed since about the 1970’s. If your subdivision has one outlet onto a busy highway, and nothing that you can walk or bike to, the world of the kids is sharply circumscribed in a way that ours never was. It’s a burden on the kids, who are bored and dependent, and on the parents, who become social secretaries and chauffers.
It’s why I find it so ironic that parents bid up houses in areas that are physically so unsuited to raising kids above the age of 8. We know why the do it (the schools!), but the calculation has tipped too far in that direction, in my opinion.
Comment by Xanthippas —
June 19, 2007 @ 11:39 am
Well, that and parents also tend to be pretty hard on themselves when their kids wander off and get hurt/killed. If my kid gets run over, I’m pretty sure the fear of Ch.8 coming down hard on me will be the farthest thing from my mind.
Comment by Dave Allan —
June 19, 2007 @ 11:42 am
Points Mike and Garth make above about fewer other kids and better other alternatives affirm my own experience and that of Bill Bryson as recounted in his recent “Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid”. As parents we have little control over the number of other parents’ progeny but I do find miserliness helps get the kids out of the house. If Dad’s too cheap to get full cable or a PlayBoxCube access requires going over to a friend’s (and traversing the Big Blue Room in the process, if only incidentally).
Comment by Keifus —
June 19, 2007 @ 12:02 pm
What I like about this take on this argument is that when I tell my kids to “go play outside,” then I’m doing a good thing. Yes.
More seriously, I think unsupervised play is both healthy and necessary. I’m less sanguine about letting them roam the neighborhood than my parents were with me, however, for many of the reasons mentioned above. (But calling distance is fine.) I’m happier letting them wander around in what passes for the woods in my parts.
K
Comment by Andromeda —
June 19, 2007 @ 12:05 pm
Thoreau: I know someone who really wanted her kids to bike to school (a school which is both near her and located directly on one of the best bike paths in the country). The principal is vehemently opposed to the idea — presumably because schools are legally responsible for kids on their commutes, or so I have been told, even if the kids are commuting in a non-school-sponsored fashion, such as their bicycles — and, like most people, he doesn’t really know anything about bike safety. So he refuses to install anywhere bikes could conceivably park.
If you’re in a situation like that, you actually *do* need organizing. I mean, once you’re done slapping your forehead repeatedly.
There’s a park a couple blocks from here I certainly expect my daughter to walk herself to one of these days, but I also expect to be constantly looking over my shoulders in fear that the parent nazis will hurt me.
Comment by Xanthippas —
June 19, 2007 @ 12:56 pm
Argh…Arthur already said that. That’s what I get for not reading comments carefully enough. I guess my larger point is, parents are afraid, and they should be. The further your kid is away from you, the less chance you have of doing something about it if something goes wrong. Who wouldn’t be afraid? Anyway, all this glorifying the “good old days” when kids walked eight miles a day to school and played with each other all over the town is annoying. Kids also rode in people’s laps in moving cars and got jobs working in factories at 14 and 15 and nobody seems eager to emulate that.
Comment by BruceR —
June 19, 2007 @ 1:18 pm
I believe child factory labour and children in laps are causally independent of freedom of movement in one’s childhood neighborhood, Xanth. At least they were where I grew up in the 70s, which had lots of the latter and very little of the former.
Comment by Xanthippas —
June 19, 2007 @ 2:15 pm
BruceR,
I don’t. My point was in the not-so-distant past we were inclined to tolerate much more reckless treatment of children than we are today. So, an argument simply that “things were better in the good old days when kids could run around town” fails, at least for me. Things were also worse for children in other ways in the “good old days.” Therefore it’s not inherently unreasonable for parents to be more restrictive about where kids can go on their own now, simply because they were less so in the past.
Comment by arthur —
June 19, 2007 @ 2:19 pm
One other thought.
One of my wife’s elderly relatives recently transferred several hours of 16 mm silent film from family occasions, taken in the 1950’s, to video. As you’d expect, the kids were doing all sorts of things kids don’t do any more, like riding in the front seat of a car, and in the back of a pickup truck; zipping around on a speed boat without life jackets; pretend smoking candy cigarettes; and lighting candles on an indoor Christmas tree. I almost muttered something about how overprotective we are these days, but my wife’s brother was in the film. He had drowned in the same lake at age 6, a few years before my wife was born, when the adults momentarily stepped into a cabin and then lost track of how many cousing they were supposed to be watching. Overprotective may not be so bad.
Comment by Jim Henley —
June 19, 2007 @ 2:22 pm
Bruce, what IS the situation in Canuckistan re child roaming privileges?
Comment by biwah —
June 19, 2007 @ 2:24 pm
Agreed with Garth. There is a critical mass issue there. If the kids across the street are in their yard, my 6 y.o. will go out and they will inevitably end up crossing the street, playing randomly (unprogrammed/undirected), and we parents will let them do it – because of inertia. Our intangible fears will be overcome by tangible evidence that this is what’s best. However, if the block is deserted, those fears will seem much more real.
By extension, I am glad of the near-feral kids who live in my (mostly blue-collar) neighborhood, who are well behaved all things considered (and live in cramped apartments without access to 360s and cable TV, which we, in our relatively more confortable conditions, don’t have either). It helps to create a de facto state of affairs where kids are out and about at any given time.
Comment by BruceR —
June 19, 2007 @ 2:54 pm
Well, Jim, mostly we just let the moose take care of em after the age of 6 or so.
Seriously, my frame of reference on this is probably too skewed to be of much use. I grew up in a town of 5,000, with a forest edging my backyard, miles from any traffic limit over 25mph. I live now in a city of 2.5m. It’s hard for me to separate the “good old days” vs today nostalgia from the simple fact of personal urbanization.
Our parents let us out on the streets in the small town because it *was* safe, most days, anyway, insofar as bears were a more regular threat than pedophiles. The rule when I was in the 5-7 age group was “either stay within shouting distance, or go to a friend’s house whose parents I like,” which still doesn’t seem too bad a parenting formula.
Sometimes I wonder though, whether the moms (all invariably stay-at-home) didn’t just want us out of the house so they could get the places to themselves for a little while. Outdoor play helps a lot for that, too.
Comment by biwah —
June 19, 2007 @ 2:55 pm
Xanthippas -
I think you go a bit far in your blanket statements. There is a lot of good in having kids run around in kid-only groups. They have to negotiate their relationships, watch out for themselves and for each other, and be both free and responsible, which is a prelude for adulthood.
Reality dictates that this ought to happen within a short walking distance of home, with kids who are known to the parents, and in groups as opposed to in solitude. But without these early experiences with freedom and relationships outside of immediate adult supervision, kids grow up fragile and unable to handle peer relationships.
Comment by Keifus —
June 19, 2007 @ 3:23 pm
Another point, touched on by Bruce just now, is that there were a lot more adults around in those days as well, even, um, twenty or thirty years ago. Not only are Mom and Dad both working a lot now, but the neighbors are both at work, etc. There’s not exactly a community of moms hovering on the neighborhood porches anymore, for better and worse.
Comment by Xanthippas —
June 19, 2007 @ 3:54 pm
I didn’t say there wasn’t. I really haven’t made any blanket statement, except to say that nostalgia for the good old days is overrated.
Comment by Matt Weiner —
June 19, 2007 @ 4:25 pm
parents also tend to be pretty hard on themselves when their kids wander off and get hurt/killed.
Naturally, and these are good points. But is it actually safer for a kid to be being driven to the local playground than to be allowed to walk there? I honestly don’t know; I believe that most of the time it’s safer to walk than drive (if you’re not on Vestal Parkway or something similar) but it might not be in car seats.
BUT, if parents are afraid of letting their kids wander alone, should they also be afraid of giving them rides?
(In fourth and fifth grade I walked home alone from enrichment classes which were three blocks from our house. Don’t know the risk analysis.)
Comment by Matt Weiner —
June 19, 2007 @ 4:27 pm
In any case, I doubt that too many people consciously think “If my kid is killed in a car accident I won’t be blamed but if they’re kidnapped I will.” More likely they associate kid alone with DANGER and don’t associate driving with DANGER, regardless of the statistics.
Comment by bill —
June 19, 2007 @ 4:49 pm
Another canuckistan view.
When I was growing up in the sxties in a city of 300 000, we roamed everywhere on foot, on our bicycles, taking the bus to the corner store to the public library to the mall.
Now you rarely see a kid under fifteen on the street unaccompanied by a chaperone.
I am told that in Australia kids still walk to school, and in the Netherlands I saw lots of kids riding their bikes to school. But they have separate bikepaths there, so they aren’t riding in traffic.
Comment by Mona —
June 19, 2007 @ 8:57 pm
When my oldest was 5, he developed a six month period of pyromania. Neither I nor his father smoked, but was had matches in the house for things like the pilot light on the stove and candles. One morning we woke at 6 a.m. to the sound of him and his 3-yr-old brother screaming. The oldest had lit a match and it had dropped on the younger ones pant legs, causing 3rd degree burns and a scar on his knee he will always have.
We got rid of the matches, but that child could sniff them out of thin air. One day, an irate neighbor came to tell me he was behind our garage staring a fire with a leaf pile. By this time I was on Xanax because of the constant stress of wondering when he’d do it next. Eventually, we had the fire marshal show him revolting pictures of seriously burned and dead people.
But people acted as if I should have him in my sights 24/7, which was not possible and the whole situation was turning me into a nervous wreck.
Fast forward and when the same child was 19, he was killed as a passenger in a car driven by a worthless friend who thought doing 80 on a highway and making a left-turn against a red light was so awesomely risky and cool. I experienced a lot of guilt for not having been more…creative and attentive to his finding ways to pick more responsible friends.
Parenting: it ain’t for sissies.
Comment by Derek Copold —
June 19, 2007 @ 10:10 pm
The other posters have alluded to demographic changes, and this is confirmed by a NYT article citing a study:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/magazine/17wwln-idealab-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
This involves more than just the layout of a city and increasing urbanization, but the racial demographics as well. It’s hard for people to extend trust across ethnic lines, and this becomes more so when you throw religious and language differences into the mix.
Comment by Jennifer —
June 19, 2007 @ 11:16 pm
I never knew that, Mona. I’m sorry.
Comment by Thers —
June 20, 2007 @ 2:10 am
Dave W,
Dear Lord, I live in Vestal Center. Among the cows.
We can’t walk anywhere except to more cows. Fortunately, little kids like cows. More so than cows, even, probably.
Comment by John Spragge —
June 20, 2007 @ 11:35 am
Sorry to hear that, Mona.
Personal Canadian story: at the ripe old age of eight, my parents put me on a train for the city (2 hours away) where most of my extended family lived. My grandparents met me at the station at the other end. When I turned 10, they let me make my own way to my grandparents’ house from the train station. They also let me roam from one end of the city where we lived to the other with my friends. I wouldn’t have called myself a feral child, but my parents encouraged independence. I would not want to grow up in today’s world of play dates and indoor children.
Comment by Matt Weiner —
June 20, 2007 @ 6:13 pm
Sorry to hear that, Mona.
Comment by Elizabeth Sanderson —
June 27, 2007 @ 1:37 pm
I happened upon your blog posts while searching for some ideas of guidelines for supervising my own kids. i have a four year old and a one year old. my husband grew up in a very rural area, and i grew up in the suburbs. My husband and I have been having arguments about how much supervision is necessary for our own children. We live in a two flat, and in order to do the laundry I need to leave the house and go into the basement through an outside door. I cannot carry laundry and the baby downstairs together and therefore waitto do it until after everyone has gone to sleep. My husband in return thinks i am being overprotective, and that i should just leave the kids for 15 minutes alone in the house and run downstairs. He uses the argument that he and his brother were left alone all the time and turned out just fine. We have chosen to raise our children in a city with millions of people, however. And i am aware that twice in the last 6 months gunshots have been fired outside my home. Our van has been broken into and among the items the theives stole were my four year olds zebra print umbrella and some copied children’s dvds. We recently atended a nieghborhood meeting in which we were told that two boys about the age of 10 had been knocking on doors in our neighborhood and if no one respond they would break the window and rob the house. These are perhaps in place of the groups of happy kids wandering about alone that people are talking about.
The kindergartener of a friend of mine was in school at the water fountain when she was propositioned by another student, an eighth grade boy.
We do not live in a bad neighborhood, the average house in this area sells for about 350,000 dollars. The police respond when we call and the schools are top notch.
It is comparable in income and stature to the neighborhood I grew up in. In those days, I left school at lunhtime with my sister and got pizza from a local restaurant with a check my mom had made out to the owner. We would then get a candy bar with my mom’s line of credit at the local grocery. We could do this because the store owners knew my mother and they knew who we were. I knew the police by name and face and when there was a fire at our place, we didn’t have to call our insurance agent because he was one of the men who put out the fire.
I am a reasonable person. I want my children to have independence but in my opinion it is sad that there are so many people out there who won’t discipline their kids and allow them to become people who find fun in doing damage to others property and in contributing to them being afraid.
so when my daughter starts kindergarten next year she will not walk alone, her sister and i will walk with her. i will meet her when she is done and walk home with her. And once she is old enough to know her telephone number and address by heart, and understands what a stranger is and knows what to do if she gets lost or hurt, then and only then will she walk by herself.