Helicopter Moms vs. Free Range Kids

L

Left Hand Black

25+ Posts
I saw this article and it really hit home for me:

newsweek



When I was a child (I'm 34 now) I was able to walk to school, the local park, or nearby stores without my parents around. Not that my folks didn't care about my safety, but they let me do things on my own.

My ex-wife thinks our kids can't be out of sight unless they're in the backyard. At age 6.5, I don't think they should be several blocks away, but going to the playground that's 150 yards from my house doesn't seem too bad to me.

I LOVED to be able to have some independence as a kid. I want my kids to be able to be themselves, and not feel like I'm breathing down their necks.

How much freedom is too much for a child? At what age do you feel comfortable with this sort of thing?
 
wife and I have the same debate all the time. She won't let the kids out of her sight unless they are in the backyard. I'd like to give them more neighborhood flexibility since others their age hang out all the time. She doesn't want anything to do with it. Unfortunately, for every article or news story of a child abduction, she adds that to her "defense" file and uses it for justification.

I wish I could find a happy medium. But then again, I like doing stuff with my kids outside. I like riding my bike with my 9 yo son or shooting hoops out front with my 6 yo daughter. I see that the other kids that do roam around don't have parents around because their parents prefer not be be so involved. Its still a sticky issue at my crib.
 
It seems that nowadays there is a widespread idea that "safety" is paramount, and that everything else should be sacrificed in favor of "safety". Some believe that it's actually more likely for a child to be abducted on the way to the park around the corner than it was 30 years ago. Unfortunately, I don't know if this is true or not. Anybody have statistics?

I would guess that corporate liability disclaimers are at least partly to blame for this epidemic of "safety mania". All sorts of containers, toys, appliances, vehicles, pretty much anything you can buy, comes with big orange signs showing how your child could strangulate himself or die an otherwise gruesome death with said product. And I'm guessing that all of these warning signs (which are literally everywhere) help get people overly anxious about dangerous situations.
 
Excellent article. I couldn't agree more with the lady. I was at work a couple of weeks ago and this lady was talking about how she lives about two blocks from her kids elementary school but they are not allowed to walk home alone. I'm 28 years old and I road my bike a good mile or so to school every single day from kindergarten on.

I think the best point the article makes is that we are not less safe today than 25 years ago. Wall to wall internet/cable news promotes nonstop sensationalism and hysteria and effectively leads us to beleive that we are less safe than we were 25 years ago.
 
There's a common-sense balance out there. Our kids wander freely among the neighbor houses (I'm talking doors being open all day long, with kids wandering in and out, running around out front for hours at a time, etc.), but we live on a cul-de-sac.

When they are old enough -- 9 or so, I think -- we'll let them ride their bikes through the neighborhood, presuming that they demonstrate their proficiency at following basic traffic rules, looking both ways, etc. Shoal Creek runs right through our hood -- I absolutely expect that they will ride down there, clamber down the banks, and spend afternoons catching tadpoles, etc. That's part of being a kid.

I also was taught to scream like hell if a stranger approached me, accosted me, etc. "Stranger danger" was around in the 70s, too. The solution wasn't to hermetically seal ourselves. It was to use our common sense and yell/fightback if the worst happened.

And yeah, if htey're out messing around, they'll get hurt. They'll fall out of a tree and break an arm, or trip on a sharp rock and get a gash that needs stitches. I remember limping several blocks back to my house with blood gushing from my shoe -- I had stepped on something sharp underwater. It was ugly, but I survived. And I also learned that I had the piss and vinegar to walk several blocks in spectacular pain, bleeding like a stuck pig. It was a good lesson about my ability to soldier on through adversity, and built some independence in one fell swoop.

As a parent, the hardest thing to accept is that there is a statistical chance -- .5%, 1%, whatever it is -- that your child will meet a horrible fate. That fate could just as easily come (in fact, is MORE likely to come) as our family all drives down Mopac than it is to come from riding their bikes a few blocks.

I let my kids swim in the Gulf. A shark could take one of them. It absolutely could. So I teach them some common sense -- don't swim when it's dark, and if you're bleeding, get out of the water (or at least sit at the edge of the water and wash out the wound till it stops bleeding). We walk around outside -- there are rattlesnakes. So, I've taught them snake safety. And stingray safety. Etc. etc. I knew to freeze if I heard a rattle, or someone told me to, by the time I was 2 years old (and actually had to do so while hunting with my old man at age 4 -- I still have the diamondback skin and rattle somewhere).

No matter what happens to you, whether you live to be 10 or 100, life is short. So it should be lived.
 
And these are typically the same parents who then log on to internet message boards to ***** on West Mall about what weenies Americans have become.
 
Actually, if we were to investigate correlations to the overall decrease in death rate, we would look at the two leading causes of accidental death of children ages 1-19 -- auto accidents (far and away the leading cause) and drowning.

Stranger abduction, falling out of a tree, choking on a dangerous toy, etc., are a VERY small portion of the overall deaths. You could eliminate ALL such deaths and have a minimal impact on the overall death rate.

On the other hands, dramatic improvements in vehicle safety and crash resistant, child safety seats (and child safety seat laws), etc. have likely had a significant effect in reducing the auto accident death rate for kids. As have laws and retrofits of pools, both public and private helped with the drowning rate.

That said, it kind of goes to prove my point. We taught our kids the basics of swimming at a young age, and they both know how to get out of water, even if they fall in while fully dressed. We are religious about car seats, booster seats, seatbelts, etc. Those things alone probably reduce my kids' risk level 10X more than any "stranger danger" lecture I give them.
 
Good article, thanks for the post. Disclaimer- I have no children yet so this might change when I do.

My thougths are that parents are ridiculous in their coddling of children today. It is kinda like the country song about how when we were babies our mom's drank and smoke, we laid in lead paint covered cribs and drank out of the garden hose and yet we survived. The hysteria (especially amongst expectant mothers) is bizarre to me what people will find to worry about.

When I was 9 years old I rode a city bus to school (I went to a magnet school) that had a transfer half way through my route and a 2 or 3 block walk on each side. I got to leave school like 10 minutes early to catch the bus. Every now and again I'd miss the transfer (and the next bus didn't come for like an hour) and I'd walk to the pay phone (way before cell phones) call my dad and play video games and drink slurpies while I watied for him to come get me.

I remember mom and dad going back and forth about how much freedom we had. Dad was inclined to give us a a lot, but he was constantly checking up on us to make sure we didn't get in torouble. You knew not to lie to him b/c he mgiht follow us from a distance or drive to the park where we said we were going to be to make sure we were there. And we always told the truth about where we had been. I don't really think that this was b/c he was worried about stanger danger, more likely he didn't want us doing anything stupid with drugs or alchohol or whatever with our freedom.

I thought it worked pretty well. My mom made us wear helmets to protect ourselves on our bikes when we were kids before cumpulory helmet laws. They didn't really protect us b/c the older kids would knock us off our bikes or throw rocks at us and call us ET 1 and ET 2. Once I came home with a bloody nose b/c i had punched a kid that knocked my brother off the bike mom relented and didn't make us wear helmets anymore. When they passed the compuslory helmet law a year later on the helmets went again. They were really dorky looking too.
 
When i was 5 on up we would be all over the neighborhood on our own playing without parent supervision. when we would go to the beach during the summers i would go off with my brother who was only 10 and we would take ferry's by ourselves across the bay. we had our scrapes and such but we were allowed our freedom, even at a young age we had a lot of commen sense. i think kids are so sheltered today they do not develop certain sociological skills until a much later age...not only do kids have poor sociological skills, they are not being taught proper manners either so they misbehave more and then are given ridilin to calm down...i can't wait to see these kids when they reach young adult hood, should be a scary sight.
 
We used to hang out in the cornfields and eventually ousted all adults except for the couple of Outlanders who arrived later.
 
I totally agree that we did just fine with the freedom and that kids today should enjoy the same freedom but with a four year old daughter i'm scared to let her walk the two blocks to school. I know the chances are very low that anything happens to her but I don't want to take any chances. I might change my mind in a couple years when she's older and I see how independent she is. Right now I'm just trying to come to terms with her stating kinder. I also have a three month old son and I can totally see letting him walk/ride his bike to school.
 
My house is exactly one mile (by street) from my exes house and my sons school is exactly half way in between. Since he was 8 (currently 10) we have let him ride his bike from one house to another and to and from school. We rode with him for a year just to make sure he knew the way and knew the safety rules. But once he proved that, there was no reason to hold him back.

With that said, we live in a nice, statistically safe, neighborhood (78759) and our son is very mature for his age,

You have to let them grow up. I typically use my own childhood as a benchmark for what I allow with my son. I may even be more lenient than my own parents when they raised me in a rice farming town of 3000.
 
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