How feral are/were your kids?

[Thabiguy]

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

My hypothesis is that it's not so much fear as it is obsession, brought about and encouraged by wide availability and convenience of tracking devices.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

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.

I'd have thought that the world has changed in a way to make it safer. These days your kids can have phones on them so that they can call if they get in trouble, and you can track where they are with GPS - either with a phone, or with a dedicated tracking GPS device. You can even get relatively cheap devices that work as phone and tracker without the complexity of potential problematic nature of an actual phone.

 

[Darat]

My hypothesis is that it's not so much fear as it is obsession, brought about and encouraged by wide availability and convenience of tracking devices.

No this change happened before the widespread availability of all the various telecom stuff.

I experienced it happening with my own relatives. A generation that had been left to fend for themselves became zoo-keepers, it switched in probably as little as 10 years.

It has unfortunately got worse.

 

[Meadmaker]

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.

In the US at least, I don't think that's the case. Crime really was rising steadily from the '60s to the early '90s.

An awful lot of people haven't gotten the memo that crime rates have fallen dramatically since them, but during our formative years it really was steadily rising.

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.

This is what I saw a lot of, this "outdoing". There's a certain "holier than thou" attitude among suburban moms trying to keep their kids safe.

 

[pgwenthold]

When it comes to roaming, my kids don't have a lot of places to go. Our subdivision is rural and sometimes they go to the neighbors and sometimes they hike the woods behind the house, but that depends on the season and they don't do it a lot. They couldn't "hop a bus and go across town" if they wanted

 

[wasapi]

When I was a kid, I rode my bike - no helmet - until it got dark. I walked alone a half mile to school and back. My mother liked it when I wasn't home and encouraged me to stay out until dark.

When I was the single mother of two young sons, I was living deep in the country, in the midst of several acres of Redwood forest. There was a shallow creek right behind the house. The boys loved growing up there. And, I was lucky. They were responsible kids who understood I worried about them, and always let me know where they were.

 

[Pterodactyl]

My boys are 6 and 9.
We live in a quiet, middle class neighborhood and several of their peers live within easy bicycling distance. I generally know whose house they're at and the other parents and I will text each other to coordinate where the kids are likely to be hanging out.
"Send my kids home" or "Hey ____ is over here, should we just feed him?" works out pretty well.

This is why being social and part of a community has value.

Recent Covid spikes have complicated things a bit as some families are more cautious than others, understandably.


By the time they're 9 and 12, I highly doubt I'll be able to keep up with their whereabouts entirely, and I'm perfectly ok with that.

 

[Trebuchet]

Our girls aren't allowed to leave the house. There are dangers outside, like cars and coyotes. Then again, they are cats.
I was pretty free-range when I was a kid 60-odd years ago. Walked by myself or with my friend to school, perhaps half a mile, from the second day of first grade on. Rode all over on my bike. That doesn't seem to work any more.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

That doesn't seem to work any more.

Since this is a sceptic's board it's probably worth asking the question that hasn't yet been asked in this thread, including by me: is this actually true?

There's been lots of "when I was a kid" and "that's not how it is with the adults I know today", but anybody posting here should know that these are very bad metrics by which to accurately gauge reality. So is there any evidence that parents these days don't allow their children as much freedom to roam as previous generations did? And has anyone factored in things like kids being better able to communicate with each other and entertain themselves while still in the house?

 

[Meadmaker]

Since this is a sceptic's board it's probably worth asking the question that hasn't yet been asked in this thread, including by me: is this actually true?

There's been lots of "when I was a kid" and "that's not how it is with the adults I know today", but anybody posting here should know that these are very bad metrics by which to accurately gauge reality. So is there any evidence that parents these days don't allow their children as much freedom to roam as previous generations did? And has anyone factored in things like kids being better able to communicate with each other and entertain themselves while still in the house?

I and some other parents have communicated that we didn't allow our kids the same degree of freedom that we had when we were kids.

It might be an apples to oranges comparison, because I grew up in a small town and I live in a suburb, but I don't think so. The point of that Encyclopedia Brown anecdote was to provide a pop culture reference to what was considered "normal" back in those days, compared to what would be considered normal today.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

Yes but, to coin a phrase, anecdotes aren't data.

I also question using fiction to determine what is or is not considered "normal" in any given culture. The Famous Five used to go off on months-long holidays on the other side of the country all by themselves with no adult supervision whatsoever,* but I don't think from that we can assume that that would have been considered normal in the 50s and 60s.

* No ages are given in the books, but fan sites seem to agree that the oldest was 12 at the start of the series.

 

[Tony99]

Just listened to a fascinating in depth discussion on this exact topic on the Unregistered podcast.
Guest was Lenore Skenazy
"...founder of the Free-Range Kids movement, joined me to examine why the Gen-X generation became the Helicopter Parent generation and whether I was neglected or liberated as a child."

Lots of interesting factors. Seems to be mostly media interest shift, technology and perception.

 

[Trebuchet]

Since this is a sceptic's board it's probably worth asking the question that hasn't yet been asked in this thread, including by me: is this actually true?

There's been lots of "when I was a kid" and "that's not how it is with the adults I know today", but anybody posting here should know that these are very bad metrics by which to accurately gauge reality. So is there any evidence that parents these days don't allow their children as much freedom to roam as previous generations did? And has anyone factored in things like kids being better able to communicate with each other and entertain themselves while still in the house?

We previously lived a couple of blocks from an elementary school, which was on our usual route to the store. You almost never saw kids walking to school on their own, they were driven there by parents. Traffic would be a mess when school got out. That's very different from when I was an elementary student.

 

[The Atheist]

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

Media sensationalist reporting is often held up as a driving factor, but it seems to have started around the 1970s.

My family provides a useful metric - I'm much younger than my siblings, who started to have kids when I was only six. At that age, we lived at a beach and I was free to go and play on it alone, while only a few years after, my nieces and nephews had to have their hands held to walk to the neighbour's.

Walked by myself or with my friend to school, perhaps half a mile, from the second day of first grade on.

I can beat that.

On my first day of school I was pushed onto a school bus, alone, to travel to the school, which was 10 km away.

 

[Meadmaker]

We previously lived a couple of blocks from an elementary school, which was on our usual route to the store. You almost never saw kids walking to school on their own, they were driven there by parents. Traffic would be a mess when school got out. That's very different from when I was an elementary student.

That's the big thing I notice. i simply don't see kids under about age 10, and rarely older kids, walking through the neighborhood, by themselves, ever. We live about four blocks from the elementary school.

By the time they are 12-16 we see some groups of kids walking or riding bikes or skateboard (there is a nearby skate park) together. Occasionally the older ones are alone.

ETA: One thing I hear people talk about so often it's basically a meme is bicycle helmets. We never, ever, wore bicycle helmets. Today, I never ride without a bicycle helmet. Some of the changes are for the better.

 

[abaddon]

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 ate coal for supper, probably. Dang, this is getting Pythonesque.

When I was a kid, during the summer break we would arise, eat breakfast and then vanish for the day. Around lunchtime we would not go home, we would simply land on the nearest mom's kitchen and whichever mom it was would hurl food at us. Then it was off again out in the wild. Dinner rolled up and everyone went to their own home, monstered the grub and promptly left again. No cell phones or anything. The parents had no clue where we were or what we were doing. This is probably just as well.

These days, helicopter parents seem to be obsessed with organising activities to entirely fill their childrens every waking moment. No idea why, we happily organised ourselves.

 

[Meadmaker]

These days, helicopter parents seem to be obsessed with organising activities to entirely fill their childrens every waking moment. No idea why, we happily organised ourselves.

Part of it is not "helicopter parents". Part of it is just simply population statistics. There aren't as many kids. If I took all the kids in a one block radius of my house, I'll bet that would have been about 25 of us. In the same neighborhood today, I'll bet there aren't 10.

 

[Loss Leader]

Media sensationalist reporting is often held up as a driving factor, but it seems to have started around the 1970s.

July 27, 1981 - the day Adam Walsh was abducted in Hollywood, Florida.

 

[arthwollipot]

Driving around town on weekends (I love driving so I often go on long drives just for the sake of it) I see a lot of kids of early teen age and older out by themselves. Their parents certainly aren't keeping them home. Canberra has a relatively low crime rate in most areas.

 

[abaddon]

Part of it is not "helicopter parents". Part of it is just simply population statistics. There aren't as many kids. If I took all the kids in a one block radius of my house, I'll bet that would have been about 25 of us. In the same neighborhood today, I'll bet there aren't 10.

You are likely correct. Birthrates in the west have nosedived. It is irrelevant to the point at hand, though.