How feral are/were your kids?

[The Atheist]

I gather that a lot of places around the world have a far less relaxed attitude to their children's freedom than we do in NZ & Australia and I'd like to get some info from parents here.

Our youngest is 10, and has had the same rules as his older siblings: from age 8 he's been allowed to go out and play on his own, within a radius of 3 km from our house.

He's given a time to be home, in the knowledge that he will face extreme consequences if he's late, so he's always home by the time given. He normally has 1-2 hours of free time to do what the hell and where the hell he likes.

Home time is always before dark.

How do/did you set rules for your children? What are the local customs?

 

[Meadmaker]

My kid was a lot less feral. Up until age 12, we knew where he was at pretty much all times, or at least what responsible adult he was with.

This was his mother's idea. Mine would have been a lot like yours. As for local customs, I think we were slightly more "helicopterish/non-feral" than our peers with their kids, but only slightly. My wife's tendencies toward non-freedom for the young-un were definitely reinforced and affirmed by many peers.

After age 12, the rules relaxed a lot, though in my opinion not as much as they ought to have.

Now, he's 21, and barely leaves the house while he's living at home. Go figure.

It's hard to say what he does when living at school, but as best we can tell, it involves a lot of sitting in the dorm room.

I would definitely not advocate our approach, but a kid has two parents, and sometimes, one of them gives in.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Either the world has changed or people's perception of the world has changed. It is now too scary to let children roam free. At four I used to walk half a mile to nursery school and back by myself. My parents would be arrested today.

 

[Venom]

Pretty sure perception has changed with mass media and missing people campaigns in the modern age.

Amber alert was just barely a thing when I was walking home from school by myself a half mile as a small child. My sister insists it was a "different time" which is frankly nonsense. We just lived in the right place.

I stopped going out to the park alone at night after hearing about Nathaniel Bar-Jonah at school one day.

 

[MoeFaux]

Not a parent (sorry, OP), but this made me remember the troubles some parents here in the States had for allowing their children to have personal freedom to roam the neighborhood. They were called "Free Range" parents; there certainly must have been a thread here about them and the trouble they got into.

 

[Thermal]

My ThermalSpawn had free run to more or less do as they pleased, with one caveat: we needed to know exactly where they were. Not what they were doing or with whom, just where to physically find them in case of emergency. We also had a standing deal to text an "x" to dad, meaning they needed a no-questions-asked extraction from their location, if things were turning bad.

In high school, other kids were dumbfounded that the ThermalSpawn had no curfew or had to ask permission for much. We trusted them to be smart and have self-respect, as we raised them. Despite their varying appetites for fun, they have yet to disappoint us.

 

[arthwollipot]

By the time they were old enough, our kids grew up on a 200-acre property, the run of which they had. We did educate them on how to recognise spiders and snakes and where they were to be found. I don't think they ever strayed too far from the house.

 

[chrispy]

Growing up in NYC and later in New Jersey, my bro and I were always out. From first grade we were riding our bikes to school and a few years after that all around, every day and often out of town.

Living where I do now-Guatemala- the folks here are very strict. Kids obey or else. Even in my small town, where everyone knows everyone, one never sees kids out by themselves before 13 or so. If they are, half the town is acting as spies anyway.

 

[cullennz]

It is quite funny here law wise.

We used to walk by our selves to primary school.

Kind of 6 to 12ish and high school etc.

But it is actually against the law to leave a kid alone in your house under 14 here.

I have no kids and my mum just left us at home to go shopping etc earlier than this so is a bit of an odd one.

Guessing it was created after a kid got killed or something that no one enforces

 

[Minoosh]

At age 5 I was hurling myself into ocean waves on Coronado Island. I'd then be spun around like I was in a washing machine. I thought I was surfing, maybe. But the point is there was no one else around. I can pretty much guarantee I was out of my mom's sight. Starting when I was 13 my parents left home virtually every weekend to work on a vacation house. They weren't so much permissive as oblivious.

 

[Meadmaker]

We read bedtime stories to our son for quite a long time, and around age 6 or 7 we started reading Encyclopedia Brown stories as one of the staples. For those unfamiliar they were stories about a 9 year old "detective" who would solve neighborhood mysteries. Each was a few pages long and involved spotting some interesting wording or novelty to "solve the mystery, e.g. a person was trying to pawn off some scam that involved the arctic ocean, and he mentioned penguins. Encyclopedia Brown exposed the scam by pointing out, in the solution section, that Penguins didn't live in the Arctic. The stories were written starting in the early 1960s.

Anyway, his partner in crime solving was another 9 year old, Sally Kimball. My mom and I laughed one night when Encyclopedia Brown and Sally Kimball needed to gather evidence at the beach, so they went out, caught a city bus, and went to the beach.

I don't imagine a story about 9 year olds today would involve cross town bus trips unaccompanied by adults.

 

[arthwollipot]

The only Encyclopedia Brown story I recall is the one where the cipher was decoded by Encyclopedia realising that the person had their hands on the wrong home row of the typewriter.

 

[Lukraak_Sisser]

I guess it also depends on where you live.
When I was a kid I was allowed to walk to my friends houses and play in the neighborhood, but the dangers we had to watch out for were cars, not snakes.
And that was in a small and quiet part of a village in the Netherlands.

When I lived in big cities children often had to be taken by their parents to somewhere safe to play as traffic is just too hectic for small children. Once parents are sure their children won't just run out into the street a lot seem to be free to roam about.

 

[The Atheist]

Either the world has changed or people's perception of the world has changed. It is now too scary to let children roam free. At four I used to walk half a mile to nursery school and back by myself. My parents would be arrested today.

And probably get life!

Not a parent (sorry, OP), but this made me remember the troubles some parents here in the States had for allowing their children to have personal freedom to roam the neighborhood. They were called "Free Range" parents; there certainly must have been a thread here about them and the trouble they got into.

Yeah, I've read several articles about people calling the cops when they see a kid alone in the big, bad world.

Guessing it was created after a kid got killed or something that no one enforces

Nope. It's more about kids burning the house down and always was.

 

[Loss Leader]

Since we moved to a gated condo development, my children have had much more freedom to leave the house without supervision. It doesn't hurt that the climate here in FL allows for it more than NY did.

Unfortunately, a certain pandemic has basically destroyed all of that. There's nobody to hang out with, no pool to go to*, no park, and it was 100 degrees today.

They're 12 and 15 now. 10 and 12 when we moved here.


*They were never allowed in the pool area unsupervised, but walked back and forth without accompaniment.

 

[cullennz]

Since we moved to a gated condo development, my children have had much more freedom to leave the house without supervision. It doesn't hurt that the climate here in FL allows for it more than NY did.

Unfortunately, a certain pandemic has basically destroyed all of that. There's nobody to hang out with, no pool to go to*, no park, and it was 100 degrees today.

They're 12 and 15 now. 10 and 12 when we moved here.


*They were never allowed in the pool area unsupervised, but walked back and forth without accompaniment.

Can see the reasoning behind it depending on environment/place, but it would personally drive me nuts living in what I understand is a gated community.

 

[DallasDad]

If my kids had been like me, they'd have had a lot of freedom, starting around 9 or 10, and increasing gradually as they matured. Alas, both of my kids are special needs, so, aside from walking to/from school, or the occasional self-guided trip to the local park (about 5 blocks away), we needed to know where they were, and with whom, almost all of the time. One has grown and moved out (doing mostly okay), and the other will likely live with us until whenever.

 

[Thabiguy]

I think I was allowed to roam outside unsupervised since roughly age 6. The only deal was that my parents needed to "know" where I am, which in practice consisted of me announcing where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do there, and when I would be back, and if that sounded at all reasonable and didn't interfere with anything, I was free to go.

Of course, there were no cellphones back then, so there was literally no way for my parents to check on me or verify if I really was where I said I would be or doing what I said I would be doing, so it was not rare that what I told my parents and what I really ended up doing had little in common. - By the age of 9, I had my own traffic pass, so I could, in principle, move freely all over the city (but I normally didn't; I wasn't very comfortable being in places I didn't know).

The only thing I had to stick with was the return time; I had to be back by the time I said I would be, or there would be major repercussions (and usually no further roaming for a while).

You might think that this was quite dangerous, but in practice, I very rarely felt compelled to go somewhere entirely alone; practically always I would hang out with a friend or several, and we would go places together. It just felt safer in a group, even if just a group of kids; the general assumption was that if some kind of peril befell us, at least one of us would probably be able to escape and get some help. Which, I guess, was not entirely unreasonable.

To this day, I commonly encounter kids travelling on their own in city buses, so I would think that things haven't changed too radically here since then.

 

[Darat]

I was amazed when my generation started having kids how controlling they were with their kids. They were brought up the same as I was, walking across town to school from say around 7, "latch door kids", roam where and as far as wanted, turn up at different people's houses for dinner, tea, you name it, using local trains to visit places like Southport and Blackpool from about the age of 11 or 12. Yet all of a sudden this changed, suddenly a need to know where the kids where every single minute, everything timetabled, no time for boredom or to do things on their own.

Really don't know what created such fear in my generation when they became parents.

 

[The Don]

Really don't know what created such fear in my generation when they became parents.

Mrs Don and I have no kids, so this is from a position of ignorance....

Perhaps a relative lack of real danger ?

Fear of crime seems to rise when actual crime falls. If there are clear and present dangers then parents can educate their children about them (don't play on the railway tracks, try not to die horribly in the woods, don't go into the disused mill and so on), but if the dangers are more nebulous or even absent then the children cannot be educated and the parents simply become paranoid.

It then becomes a vicious circle as parents try to outdo each other about how protective they are over their children. We have friends with children 14 and 13. The children are well-behaved (rather too well behaved IMO) but the parents still think they are too young to leave in the house unsupervised. They are certainly not allowed out without the parents being aware of exactly where they are and what they're doing.